I recently put on my smart glasses and flew across the planet to Shenzhen China. I don't speak Chinese, but using live language translation on my smart glasses, I thought I'd be able to communicate with the people around me. 20 minutes after landing, I learned how wrong I was. While I could see, in English, overlaid on my vision, exactly what my taxi driver was saying, he couldn't understand what I was saying. I realised that communication augmentation technology doesn't work unless everyone is augmented. I'm now working on a completely new kind of wearable device to solve this problem (stay tuned).
This was just one of many lessons and new ways of thinking that my visit to China slammed into my face.
Why Go to China?
I've wanted to visit China for years. Ever since I first heard of Shenzhen, the "Silicon Valley of Hardware", I was in. I'm a hardware hacker, and doing hardware hacking in Canada in the US is a costlier and slower process than in Shenzhen. In North America, if you want chips or parts, you wait weeks or months to get them from China, or you pay up to 10x the cost to get the faster locally. But in Shenzhen, it's the opposite experience. PCBs show up at your door, fully populated, the same of the next day. 3D printing, laser cutting, specialized parts, ODM deals, reverse engineering, mechanical fittings, anything you need, you can get faster and cheaper in Shenzhen than anywhere else. If you're building hardware, Shenzhen is the place to go.
The Shenzhen documentary that got me hooked:
"How I Made My Own iPhone - in China" is a classic Shenzhen video:
So, I was excited to get to China, to learn how the markets work, to hack in cyberpunk paradise, but school and COVID-19 got in the way... until now. In November 2023 I visited Hong Kong and Shenzhen for an amazing two week trip.
My Trip
What did I do in China?
Well, one week of November in 2023, everything aligned, which was:
Paul Hamilton, friend and collaborator from TeamOpenSmartGlasses, was leading a "Hackers Trip to China" in the spirit of the one's he used to attend with Mitch Altman and Noisebridge
Kicon Asia, the world's first Kicad conference in Asia, was happening
- China High-Tech Fair, the CES of China, was going downMakerfaire Shenzhen, the global meeting of the maker movement, was happening
I had already started my Masters at the MIT Media Lab and gotten into the swing of things, so it was a good time for a trip, and I had secure some funding
So if I was ever gonna go, it was now.
I flew out the 8th of November from NYC. Yes, being a broke grad student, I got the cheapest flight possible (<$1000 USD round trip, NYC to Hong Kong). So I bussed from Boston to NYC, then flew. Oh, and since that trip was so cheap, it was long haul to Helsinki, 11 hour layover, then long haul to Hong Kong. I tried to make the best of it with some good books on my e-reader, a day out walking 13KM in Helsinki, and an unreasonably large helping of sleeping pills, when needed.
I dropped into Hong Kong and immediately saw how hard it would be to get around. It took me so long to figure out how to get on the bus to West Kowloon, where I'd then leave to take the high speed rail to Shenzhen, that I missed my high speed rail ticket. I then couldn't buy another ticket because my Wechat and Alipay just... didn't work. This was just a taste. One quickly learns that things are very different in China. The first few days were hard to do many basic things until I got the hang of it.
After railing to Shenzhen and getting a taxi there, I couldn't pay the driver. He was getting more and more annoyed as I fished out my phone for google translate. When I finally started translating, he was mid-soliloquy, and what came out was something along the lines of "...you are lost little boy, get out my taxi, where is your mother?!", which was pretty fun. Ended up paying him cash, which is a rare thing to do in China (everything is digital, no one carries or uses cassh) and it was fine.
I went to the events I mentioned, and they were cool. It was just great to meet up with other people, many of them foreigners, and absorb everything they know about how the electronics prototyping and production happens in Shenzhen, the ecosystem, the connections, the culture, etc.
A highlight was the Seeed Studio Hi-Tech Tour. In one day, we saw PCB manufacturing, PCB assembly, injection molding cast making, injection molding assembly line, and a distribution center. It was a super fast paced look at how all the elements of a product get made, put together, and sold to real customers.
Another day, we met up with Sam, Paul's friend, who runs a full-service electronics manufacturing shop in Shenzhen. There are many of these, and one quickly realises that, if one can make a product and sell them, the support for manufacturing, logistics, etc. is there and all of that can be completely offloaded.
Going to Huaqiangbei and Seg Electronics Markets was an absolute highlight. Paul gave us a proper tool of the markets, and they're absolutely amazing. You can read about it and see it all over the internet, so I'll spare you, but actually being there and dreaming of having a lab across the street, really learning the ins and outs of these markets and building products in Shenzhen at breakneck speed - that's super exciting, and you can't feel that without going there yourself. I found wearables, batteries, projectors, connectors, etc. that I'd never seen before - so much of the value is in learning that things exist that you never had seen before - each new thing changes how you think and solve problems.
Kicon was very cool too. At the event, I learned, from the Project Lead and a Lead Software Developer, what it takes to technically build a massive open source project like Kicad, and all the awesome new features coming out. At the party afterwards, I got to sit with Wayne, the Project Lead, and I grilled him for 2 hours about every aspect of funding the project, triaging features, running the team, etc. I learned a ton from him that I’m bringing back with me to keep running TeamOpenSmartGlasses and other open source projects and teams.
The High-Tech Fair was very, very similar to CES in many ways. I'll spare you all the gizmos, but one amazing thing I saw was Neuracom. They're an invasive BCI company with a similar approach to Neuralink, but they're using a rigid electrode array of >65,000 electrodes. It's also much thinner than a Neuralink so it doesn't have to replace the skull. It's amazing to find this company, which can't be found on the internet outside of China, that is testing in animals, highly advanced, yet the Western world knows nothing of them. It was more evidence of the massive divide between Asia (China in particular) and the West. It's a gap I hope to bridge.
Language Barrier
I won't beat around the bush - the language barrier is massive.
You can get by mostly with Google Translate, but it's so... transactional. No one gets drinks over Google Translate. In Hong Kong, a lot more people speak english, but in Shenzhen, I was taken aback at how rare english was, and when it was present, ussually it very broken and basic. This really limits one's ability to integrate and adventure though, I think - I felt like I was in a bubble of foreigners and very foreign-facing locals, and to really become ingrained and see form the other side, you need Mandarin.
I'm now actively learning Mandarin and am aiming for spoken fluency for daily conversations and engineering topics.
China is Not Just a Factory
I was a hardware hacker bro, I have to admit it. Many Western entrepreneurs (90% of whom haven't gone to China) seem to have this broken mindset:
"Go to China to develop your product really quickly or get a cheap, fast ODM to develop my product for me. Then mass produce and sell it in the West."
That's a great plan and you should do that... but it's missing a big point. A 1.4 billion person point. Actually, a 4.6 billion person point. Because that's the population of China, and that's the population of Asia. When you get to China and see the development, the cities, the people, you get a good smack in the face - these people are adopting tech faster than the West, have their own giant problems, and there's billions of them - yet we ignore them. All the West knows of China is trade wars, CNN, and whatever else manufactured "news".
There's a whole world there! A 5,000 year old culture! Billions of people with the eye-of-the-tiger wanting to change the world! Top universities! And a million Asia-centric problems that entrepreneurs can solve.
I came face to face with the (now obvious) fact that that China is not a tool in my toolbox - it's a gigantic, beautiful, deep place, and somewhere that's quickly becoming the next world power, and as an english speaking westerner, I realized I've got to get into this.
Culture
I preface by saying: I did not take much time to smell the roses. I didn't see Beijing, Shanghai, the forbidden city, ancient ruins, etc. I was in a cyberpunk mega-city doing transhumanist hacker activities. But I did visit Dafen Village. And wow.
Read the "History" section here for background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dafen_Village
Dafen is mindblowing. "Art is food for the soul", and Dafen is a Roman Empire level feast where you're left barely able to walk. It wreaks of reality, of brush to canvas. So much of the "maker movement" is obsessed with tools - every "maker space" is constantly talking about Arduinos, 3D printers, circuit boards, etc. yet there's often a lack of actual application. Dafen is not like that. Every nook, cranny, corner, attic reveals another artists pouring their soul into whatever work they have in front of them. Walking down the street of shops, one can see every style imaginable, classic, realist, abstract, psychedelic, and copiers of all the greats. I know nothing about visual art (clearly), but this place nearly brought me to my knees.
While other entrepreneurs might buy a watch or supercar when they make that big startup deal, I'll be flying to Dafen to get some wall sized hand painted awe inspiring art... and probably also a supercomputer.
The Greater Bay Area
Nils Pihl told me something: "In NYC, the largest Western city, there are 900 skyscrapers, buildings over 100 meters tall. In Hong Kong, there are over 4,000."
Let that sink in. Again, North American forget the awe inspiring progress that China and Asia has been making. Let's look at something else, the "Greater Bay Area".
The technological center of the US is the San Francisco Bay Area - San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose, Berkely, etc., it's almost 8 million people, pretty impressive. However, the "Greater Bay Area" - Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Macao - is over 70 million people.
This place is booming, it's growing, it's vibrant, it's incredibly wealthy, it’s gigantic, and it’s not just a factory - it’s a country, a market, a culture, a people.
Spatial Mapping
The megacities of China are "urborial" environments - they've risen above urban environments and become truly 3D. There are skyscrapers in Hong Kong where every floor is a restaurant. You can't think about these place in the ways we used to.
No one knows this better than Nils Pil, founder and CEO at Auki Labs and memetic engineering mentor + friend of mine. Nils started his company and lives his life in Hong Kong, is working to enable true AR as the next upgrade to the language stack. To do that, we first need spatial positioning so I can manifest my thoughts in your vision, and yours in mind, in the same place. Auki Labs is building a peer-to-peer spatial positioning system to replace GPS to get us there. In the meantime, they need to raise money and have a product.
When Nils pitched their AR positioning systems to VCs in the US, they all jumped up about gaming and entertainment and Pokemon GO. But when he pitched it in Asia, the VCs knew the use case - indoor positioning.
Remember, China is not just a factory. There are more people riding the MTR transit/subway in Hong Kong everyday than there are people living in Los Angeles. The skyscrapers and urborial environment of Hong Kong make it insanely hard to find your way around.
The message here is, yes, that spatial positioning is cool, but it's broader, too: China has its own billion dollar opportunities that we don't even think about here.
Nature
I was in Hong Kong for only a few days at the end of my trip, in that time I did two nature trips.
On my first night in Hong Kong, I met up with Nils Pihl. After checking out his office and stuff, we jumped in an Uber to "Monkey Mountain Public Toilet". At the destination, we skirted around monkeys and wild board as we stood at the entrance to a giant trail system that weaves through the mountains just outside of Kowloon. Yes, a 15 minute Uber starting at the foot of a skyscraper brings you to a jungle mountain with monkeys.
You have to understand, Hong Kong is like a giant nature reserve. Like, look at this:
Park, park, park, park. It's so green everywhere.
Anyway, we climbed the mountain, maybe a 90 minute hike, filled with some fun turns, and walking through a small and very old town on the side of the mountain. We went to the top where we lit a fire and roasted tofu and veggies for dinner while enjoying a view of about 1.5 million people.
I also took a trip out to Sai Kung. 40 minutes on a bus that costs a couple of US dollars and I arrived a tropical paradise - white sand, beaming sun, glowing blue water, and a smattering of islands formed by a volcano many years ago. People line the coast with dinghys - give them the equivalent of $5USD and they'll bring you out to the island and pick you up again in a few hours. It was amazing and beautiful.
I learned on my RV road trip that a city I settle in needs to have a startup scene, good weather, and beautiful nature easy and close to access. Hong Kong is doing pretty well on those count.
Lessons Learned
Some quick takeaways from the trip:
Speed - China is faster to get things, get things made, meet people, make deals, and learn.
Community - there is a super strong maker, hacker, manufacturing, electronics community there that is second to none. They are really fast to offer opportunities it seems - I have a couple offers to work/do research there if I want to.
Culture - there's a massive language barrier. Many companies there have 0 people who speak english. They have all kinds of amazing tech that you would never find if you Google'd for it. The IP is willy-nilly - they care way less about copyright and are less afraid of IP issues, less afraid of people stealing their ideas, etc., they'll show off everything
Life - everything is way cheaper. Like everything is 1/3 to 1/10 the price there if you convert to USD. It's super safe. I didn't see a lot of party life, but people love to get dinner and drinks and talk late into the night. The conversations are more interesting than in most parts of the world (that I've travelled to, which is limited) - kindof more like an MIT dinner party than most of the rest of the US.
Areas - different areas are completely different. Hong Kong is way chiller and much more people speak english. Shenzhen is 10,000 miles a minute and a lot more "foreign" feeling.
Outro
If you're a maker, entrepreneur, scientist, academic, or at all interested in the future of technology and our species, go to Shenzhen, it's amazing.
I believe that China will be fundamental to my life. I am learning Mandarin now, and Hong Kong has skyrocketed to one of the most likely cities for me to one day call home (whenever that time comes). China is an amazing place with so much to offer, don't ignore it because some three-letter acronym on your television tells you it's scary. China is amazing.
Shenzhen the place to be if you love designing smart hardware.. Great share
Very cool article! China is the next US