Ten days in Shenzhen

I just came from 14 day trip to Shanghai-Beijing-Shenzhen. Here&#x27;s a couple of more pointers:<p>- DiDi is the Uber of China. Wonderful UX, English language UI with automatic two-way translation of messages and support for western credit cards.<p>- AliPay &amp; WeChat wallet are the primary methods of payment in China. You can enable a WeChat Wallet using a western credit card, but in most cases that card cannot be used for payments. You can have easily exchange cash for WeChat RMB, as other users can transfer RMB to your account free of charge. AliPay requires a local phone number &amp; bank account (and no, the one you use for AliExpress does not work for mobile payments.)<p>- The subway system in Shenzhen, Shanghai &amp; Beijing is really well maintained. You can use cash or Alipay&#x2F;Wechat to pay.<p>- All foreign cell contracts pipe traffic through their local servers, so they automatically VPN through the Great Firewall.<p>- ProjectFI recently lost 99% of LTE coverage in China. T-Mobile cancelled their contract with China Unicom, and Nexus phones do not support the LTE bandwith China Mobile uses. You&#x27;re stuck on the EDGE network 99% of the time.<p>- China Construction Bank opens up accounts for foreigners without Visa.<p>- One thing that was not mentioned in Karim&#x27;s post: advanced manufacturing facilities. Try booking a tour: they can significantly alter what you think is possible.

&quot;I went to Google Translate to write my question and show him. Seeing what I was doing he said: “no, no, no, WeChat, WeChat”. I didn&#x27;t get what he was saying at first. But he quickly showed me that he could type in Chinese on his phone, I would get the text in Chinese, long-press on it and get a menu that allowed me to translate it in English. And when I sent a message in English, he&#x27;d be able to translate it to Chinese.&quot;<p>That quote is buried deep in the article, but should be emphasised for anyone travelling in a Chinese-speaking country: WeChat is easier to use than Google Translate!<p>It also is worth emphasising for people developing iMessage, Skype, LINE, KakaoTalk, and other platforms, who seem to want to avoid &quot;feature creep&quot; by denying people this kind of functionality. Users like features.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in learning Chinese, I wrote a program to do that, but I recommend chat-based translation tools like WeChat for temporary visitors.

I sat next to a guy who is &quot;kenny&quot; (the film about the portaloo entrepreneur) and he was flying into Shenzhen to have some new plastic portaloo parts made. By coincidence I met him coming back too. Dream run: they provided concierge, translation and hosting services and were really keen to prove quality and appropriate certification marks. They want to deliver top product.<p>I had another friend doing brew-tanks. Same story. The real deal, if you can find it, will invest time and energy to get you to the product you want at world-class level.<p>I don&#x27;t doubt its a sick sad world out there, and scary at times but with some basic human decency and a realistic budget, manufacturing in China wants to talk to you.<p>If you want to cut corners, or shave price to the bone, I am sure you will find people who are going to shave quality and compliance to match. If you can price ahead of the floor, you can find really good, entrepreneurial people to deal with.<p>The brewtank guy wound up in delay because of new Chinese pollution compliance checks. Don&#x27;t assume everything coming out of china is toxic lead, they are also trying to get on top of bad supply chain behaviour.

Very interesting. Maybe stumbling onto such a piece before 2015 would have saved us quite a bit of trouble and time. We ended up doing most of our development from Shenzhen, with out primary electronic Engineer spending time in there, months at a time. Being a hardware startup in Kenya working on a custom Android device meant that a lot of what we needed to do had to be done outside the country.<p>Our first foray in Shenzhen was made once we found a small company that had a Mediatek based 3G SOM and was willing to help us develop our hardware from there; they suggested that it was the best option. Two years, several stays and a final prototype later, we have learnt why it would have been almost impossible for us to successfully get to a functioning prototype from Nairobi; especially with our budget. For one, the we had direct help from manufacturers, who our hosts had to speak to in Mandarin. With drivers for out custom touch panel, we still needed a visit to the IC manufacturer for some configurations to be fixed. We also had such great help on mechanical design; here, I must admit, we had been completely clueless.<p>The one thing I can say for sure, in China relationships help; greatly!! We were worried about changing our LCD because the one we&#x27;re using has come to it&#x27;s End Of Life. We were then introduced to a factory that was to make us a replacement. Turns out they can make the new LCD use the same exact connections as the one we had before. So no change in our circuit, and support for any change in our code. For us, it was less having a plan and more serendipity though.

This excerpt is interesting:<p>&quot;One thing I found problematic with WeChat is that unlike Hangout, for example, it doesn&#x27;t store any of the conversations on the backend. There&#x27;s apparently a “we&#x27;re not spying on you” angle to this with regards to Tencent providing this service to users.&quot;<p>Yeah, but then just a couple of paragraphs before, they were mentioning how WeChat provides translation services inside the app. I highly doubt that this is being handled in the device itself.

Some may be amazed by the scale of the market at Huaqiang Bei intersection today, but it is just a pale afterimage of what it was 10 years ago, when the market was effectively filling 2 to 3 city blocks. It has been gentrified to death since then.<p>And to people thinking of Shenzhen as a manufacturing city teeming with garage entrepreneurs, They fared no better. There are close to no factories remaining within the city centre today, except the special customs zone on the southern tip of Futian.<p>All of this is thanks to the witless mayor Wang Rong that took over the city in 2009. Some oh his first orders were to bulldoze factories and build glossy shopping malls, &quot;weekend rest&quot; hotels, and coffee shops with $10 a pop cappuccinos, so &quot;we can live like in civilised Western countries&quot;

I lived in Shenzhen for 2 years before moving back to Europe. Man, the pace is glacial here… Popped back there for another trip a few months back and suddenly there was no more cash, and the ratio of electric-to-gasoline cabs shifted from 20&#x2F;80 to 80&#x2F;20

Not directly related to this post&#x27;s subject, but I highly recommend this author&#x27;s YouTube talks and books on Android internals and embedded Linux to anybody looking to start doing things like customizing or porting Android, building their own secure or lightweight Android ROMs, or building their own distros for single board computers.

I notice that the author put a lot of emphasis on security and walking off his devices. I understand that he has a background in crypto&#x2F;security and also the when I had learnt that stuff and it was fresh I was &quot;paranoid&quot; too.<p>That having said, is that really an issue in China? Wherever you go you get hacked?

Not much to comment on the other than the technology woes. I made a day trip to Shenzhen from Hong Kong last July. It was my second time in China last year, but first time to Shenzhen. So I was very aware of all of the &quot;GFW&quot; issues. I used my Pixel with VyprVPN installed prior to with no issues. Also I always downloading maps and languages with keyboards anytime I travel in case my connection is not 100%. Though I had a strong signal all around Shenzhen.<p>I did run into some trouble finding an ATM that accepted my card. I did not want to trade a lot of currency since it was only a day trip, and not knowing if I would buy anything at all, or how much. There were many ATM&#x27;s, though it is hard to find anywhere in China banks that are compatible with American cards. Not impossible, just far fewer than other countries.<p>WeChat is a must all over China. They use it for everything! Though I haven&#x27;t figured out how to get money onto it to use the pay feature, which they love to use. I think you have to have a China Bank account to tie it to your WeChat, or have someone with CNY who gives&#x2F;transfer it to you from their account.

I found <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mosh.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mosh.org&#x2F;</a> quite useful to get a working ssh session thru the GFW. The GFW can introduce latency and packet loss to encrypted connections which mosh seems to handle nicely.

Why does China get a Shenzen and the US doesn&#x27;t? What would it take to build a US-based electronics hub to rival Shenzen in, say, one of the Rust Belt states?

&gt; I was immediately reminded of the advice in TEGES that many drivers have bad eyesight.<p>Eek!

I come from Seeed, hope you enjoy the Shenzhen Maker Map :)

We&#x27;re hiring mechanical and mechatronics engineers in Shenzhen! Email in profile.

It&#x27;s sad that techies who champion knowledge, freedom, righteousness, supports a country like China that openly rejects democracy, openly and brashly monitors its people and assign them scores, holds &#x27;re-education&#x2F;concentration camps&#x27; for its minorities the Uighur, threatens democratic countries like Taiwan, house arrests many of its own citizens and nobel prize winners, spews its pollution into the ocean and to other countries airspace, supports a crazy dictator in North Korea who seeks to destroy US and Japan, etc etc etc

I was confused as the article keeps referring to “TEGES” with no clear explanation of what this acronym means. After digging around on the internet (in vain), I re-read the top portion of the article and figured out that it must mean “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”, which is apparently some sort of crowd-sourced&#x2F;crowd-funded book ...