What confuses me is that the Chinese do this in plain sight and yet the American startup ecosystem doesn't seem to give them much mention. I hardly even seen TechCrunch or Pando talking about Chinese startups, while at the same time they are willing to talk about London, Berlin and Tel Aviv startups. I've always wondered if this was because of some latent racism, or because of the foreigness of the Chinese characters.
Either way, it's interesting to think that parts of the forefront of innovation isn't being reported (this story aside), and that there's a whole world of technology culture that's developing independently in China in part because of the totalitarian political regime.
I, for one, think that digital currencies are going to explode in China - the Chinese love to gamble on things like this, and the Yuan is a joke. I believe that it might just be the most opaque currency in the world. (But I don't know much about all the other ones that are in the running. Nor do I know how much the other currencies are lying.)
If you are interested in clones, then China is a fabulous place to look at how everything is copied and adapted locally since Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and so on, aren't even allowed to operate in the country.
The CCP won't tolerate digital currencies; they even just shutdown alipay this weekend.
They need to copy the west for a while yet to become more equal then they can start thinking about innovation.
That said this is pretty far ahead of the west. I'd love to invest in directors I believe in, giving them full freedom and profiting from it if it succeeds.
The space in China is really hotting up.
I am Chinese and I watch Chinese drama with my parents, almost every night. While Chinese drama plots tend to repeat over and over (there is always some love triangle involved), I don't find them boring.
First I enjoy watching drama with my family at the dinner table. Two I feel that there is an urge for me to finish the drama to confirm my "theory" of the plot. The same can be said about the Western drama. Recently Western drama seems to be around apocalypse and new human civilization. What makes a drama boring is the combination of either or both the quality of the actors and the pace of the story.
