America surprised China’s tech scene thriving despite controls on internet access
In the 1990s China was a centre for semi-skilled and unskilled labour. Today it is the world leader in e-commerce and internet innovations, and that confuses Americans who haven’t spent time in the country
Silicon Valley may be powered by organic kale, but when Chinese tech gurus gather at 3W, a coffee shop/incubator in Beijing, they want sunflower seeds. And they want them fast.
Ahead of a recent meeting, 3W’s co-founder, Xu Dandan, used WeChat, a Chinese platform with hundreds of millions of users, to place an order with Beequick, a local start-up that delivers supplies from mom-and-pop shops. Thirty minutes later: crunch, crunch.
And if Xu and his friends were craving a different crispy snack like crayfish? A business accelerator at nearby Peking University has a start-up just for that. Grab your China-made phone, open WeChat, and your crustaceous needs are met.
For those who haven’t spent time in China’s thriving cities, it can be hard to imagine how digitally connected they are. Many still think of the China of the 1990s, a nation of shoe factories and fake bags, not cutting-edge apps.
Outsiders tend to know one thing about the country’s internet: it’s blocked – no Facebook, Twitter or Google. They imagine a country languishing behind a digital Iron Curtain, waiting frozen in time for the fall of the web’s Berlin Wall.