Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream by Shirky Clay

Author:Shirky, Clay [Shirky, Clay]
Language: eng
Format: azw, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780990976332
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2015-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

Maker Movement

China is the world headquarters of making things. Golan Levin, who created a twenty-first century upgrade of the camera lucida drawing tool using Kickstarter, decided to have his product made here. When I asked him what he’d learned bridging the gap between American maker culture and Chinese manufacturing, he replied, “The hardest thing to understand when talking to Chinese manufacturers is that there is no shelf. They’d ask, ‘What sort of screw do you want here?’ And we’d say, ‘Well, let’s see, what do you have off the shelf?’ And they’d ask again, ‘Well, what do you want to use?’”

Levin said it took them a couple of go-rounds before they realized that there wasn’t any shelf to get things off of, that any given screw was going to be as cheap as any other because none of those screws existed in advance of demand. The producers didn’t own screws, they owned machines for making screws, so you might as well design everything from scratch. He had gone so far up the supply chain there were no more supplies.

We rely on our electronic devices to augment almost every activity we undertake, and yet we’ve all become alienated from the way that technology gets made. Despite the promise of Intel Inside™, few of us have ever seen a chip, motherboard, graphics processing unit, or hard drive. Computers come from stores; none of us build our own computers anymore, and none of us know anyone who does. Mike Daisey’s long monologue about Apple and China, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, was iffy journalism but brilliant storytelling, tracing his realization that people have made every bit of electronics he owns. In 2011, an iPhone was sold in the U.S. with test photos still on it, taken by a worker inside Foxconn, the giant electronics manufacturer in southern China, one of the rare public traces of the human effort that goes into making.

In any big Chinese city and most of the medium-sized ones (which is to say any of the hundreds of cities here with a population larger than Seattle’s) there will be a big electronics mall—Cybermart is a common brand, though there are many others. These are multi-story stores, divided up into booths of different sizes, like a trade show, each rented out to a different merchant. To an American eye, the whole thing is a little nuts, but it works, and traveling through one is like taking a core sample of electronics in China, only here you start at the bottom and work your way up.

The economics of retail floor space mean that the showy, high-margin stuff is at street level, and the gritty low-margin goods are at the top. The ground floor of a Cybermart will tend toward the bright, clean, white space of a showroom floor. There will be a few big booths selling premium brands like Samsung, Apple, Sony, and Lenovo. You could be in a Best Buy in Ohio, except for the Chinese signs. This is the least interesting part of the space; the real action is upstairs.

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