What we learnt from HEFEI wasn't that They had a lot of Government funding.
That's a simplistic view that misses the very core of their success
There were so many provinces with money at that time BUT only them saw the money from the point of View of hard starting a whole industry.
They didn't just fund anyone they looked for Anchors of the future they envisaged.. In the case of BOE they lured them from Beijing because they wanted HEFEI to be the leader tin LCD, industry. To do that they needed an anchor and BOE fit their radar. BUT when BOE came they didn't just sit they created the conditions for it's success, mandates talent and once profits came in Forced Boe to fund R&D in the sector.
That's to me is different from just having money it's more to do with having a lazor sharp focusing on where you are going and how you get there. Money is just the fuel.
This is a fascinating article. As I've watched China's ability to get things done by government mandate that we couldn't get done here, I've wondered what would happen if they could engineer large-scale entrepreneurship with those big local and national government bucks. Your article shows it's happening on a major scale. We've got a real clash of entrepreneurial models now.
The scale is just out of this world and the fact that they are replicating at such a fast pace and just across the country. I think what has been missed is the power of the State Mandate and the 50 year plans being implemented across the country. Its a whole machinery taking advantage of the 1.4B people and cities being used as the drivers of that implementation plan.
I think you’ve really got something here. The stats that you are providing and the scale of them are amazing. It used to be that the US had the advantage in the economic wars because of the power of entrepreneurship and risk-taking. It’s a new ballgame, at least for the biggest scale industries, technology, and products..
Yes i think for now the US will have to coalesce around industries China doesn't want to promote like Crypto because even the consumer Apps that aren't State priorities, smaller cities are in China seem to be moving there too. BUT time shall tell.
Very interesting! Do you think that as other provinces learn these techniques, this may lead to too much competition amongst provinces, and ultimately provinces overpaying for technologies that don't end up being successful?
I don't think so, i believe the Provinces are checking what their core advantages are. They seem to be doubling down on what they have in abundance. As i have done 3 more cities after Hefei i am noting a trend. The Cities seem to focus one area and really zero in and create winners. Wanzhou's example of the Grilled Fish industry is one even though its different from the Deep Tech of Hefei,you see that the City used its resources to Will an industry into existence. This was an industry that didn't even exist. Parallel to Hefei they willed LCD Panels and EV Industries that didn't exist and both looked at their advantage and the crises they faced. Hefei had a problem of 1st class USTC Graduates leaving the City to go work somewhere because they didn't have the industries that could absorb them so they brought these anchors. Wanzhou had a challenge of the Unemployment caused by flooding hence this basic conversion of a Heritage Recipe to a global product through reverse engineering and funding its existence. I am certain this is everywhere and now in Quanzhou you can see the city utilising its Pirate History of its Enterprising Families to Global dominance.
I think Tech will just be a tool for most Provinces after they have decided on who and what they are going to push.
Hi Lile, I'm just trying to get my head around who you are as the "voice of China 5", and what China 5 is exactly. Are you only on Substack? I say this because you come across as a both a curious individual just learning things as you say, and a highly organized PR machine. I lived/worked in China from 2002-19, I'm called "an old friend of China" when I visit. I'm looking for some more transparancy into your account, which is not a big ask considering your quite thorough work here.
Thanks Ghost for this Question, my journey is actually sad and funny BUT that's life. My life took a turn around COVID when the start up i had collapsed as we launched a week before Covid happened. I was set up in debt just to clear all the accruals that went to me the person, BY 2021 i was a wreck and went to the bottom literally. In 2022 BY Chance on Facebook i bumped onto a Chinese Novel, then i went into a rabbit hole of discovering something new that took me out of my misery as i read and read one novel after the other, (these novels are updated every day with two or three chapters they rarely come to an end some with 4000+ chapters).. Early this year i had sort of become normal and wanted to restart my life and i saw many things, until i got to see Youtube channels people posting about them on X, that you can do documentaries online on subjects you love and maybe earn a living. I had many things like the 5 Wealth Giants, Quiz Central, Lile Reads (profiling the novels i had read), and many other stuff like those. Out of all of them what interested me was China.
At first i just called it Village to Beijing as i was very much interested in what i had read in one of the Novels about how a Civil Servant moved from the Village to Beijing. There was so much information such that i felt i could share with the world. Then after 2 videos i felt something was missing and then said why don't we spend 5 min everyday and have people learn about 5 things that happened in the past 24 hours in China, that's how the name came about. Then i realised am not a news channel, and said maybe we sort from City point as a planner i understood cities more. So then it was why don't share 7 things from one City every day.
How to do cities i thought everyone knows Shanghai what about the poorest city, First run actually gave me wrong figures i had to do Jinchang as my City one, then Shanghai next. By the time i got to Chongqing, i realised my Data is all wrong. I restarted this time with Golog as the poorest city still swung to Shanghai BUT still something was wrong as i had all Tibet cities lined UP. Also i felt it didn't make sense to swing extremes like that. So by the time i was on City 7 (Nagqu) it was end of May and i said let me take a break and have a proper rethink on what exactly i needed to do and how to do it.
That break was all i needed as i was no longer under pressure to produce and used what i had learnt in my trial runs to think and structure. In the process i realised the best was to set the Cities according to Provinces. It would be easier to look at 34 Cities in 34 Provinces than all 707. Then from there, i set up the website chinain5.org (still work in progress BUT given where i was i found it hardest BUT soon managed). Now the Provinces gave me a break through i then said we will run in seasons of 34, each province giving us a city and then we set off. At first i was still swinging from richest to poorest and i thought that didn't make sense as i look at each of the 707 cities as the same, at that time we had already started research on Hefei, so i said fine BUT for the other cities we will look at what exactly the city is about so i sat and went through each Province and chose what i thought would give us a mix of different insights into China through what each city in each province can give. You can check the Season 1 here: chinain5.org/#season1 from there it became easier as i now had a start date, moved from one day to one week so that we have enough time to research and understand the city. Come 2 July i was ready with the Articles for Hefei and come 8th i published the Hefei Documentary, had to redo next day as there were many issues and then came 9th i started city 2 and here we are about to conclude City 3.
I am not a PR person just an urban planner BUT for now i am updating my work on X, Here on Substack and TikTok as i had been adding long videos there.
I haven't yet been in contact with the Cities coming ahead BUT i will after this week as i will have a history and can show them what to expect for them to give me the images and B rolls, i currently spend more time on the net trying to find images and vvideos to go with the article and documentary for the city in focus.
As for why i chose this, i guess it found me, those novels revealed a China i was curious about and when i needed something to do and focus on China Cities became something i could handle.
Yes the others can't get the insights from China even it struggles to pull the information as the information gets redacted within seconds. It's frustrating BUt still better than Nothing. It works given the timelines I have. I have settled on it
What we learnt from HEFEI wasn't that They had a lot of Government funding.
That's a simplistic view that misses the very core of their success
There were so many provinces with money at that time BUT only them saw the money from the point of View of hard starting a whole industry.
They didn't just fund anyone they looked for Anchors of the future they envisaged.. In the case of BOE they lured them from Beijing because they wanted HEFEI to be the leader tin LCD, industry. To do that they needed an anchor and BOE fit their radar. BUT when BOE came they didn't just sit they created the conditions for it's success, mandates talent and once profits came in Forced Boe to fund R&D in the sector.
That's to me is different from just having money it's more to do with having a lazor sharp focusing on where you are going and how you get there. Money is just the fuel.
This is a fascinating article. As I've watched China's ability to get things done by government mandate that we couldn't get done here, I've wondered what would happen if they could engineer large-scale entrepreneurship with those big local and national government bucks. Your article shows it's happening on a major scale. We've got a real clash of entrepreneurial models now.
The scale is just out of this world and the fact that they are replicating at such a fast pace and just across the country. I think what has been missed is the power of the State Mandate and the 50 year plans being implemented across the country. Its a whole machinery taking advantage of the 1.4B people and cities being used as the drivers of that implementation plan.
I think you’ve really got something here. The stats that you are providing and the scale of them are amazing. It used to be that the US had the advantage in the economic wars because of the power of entrepreneurship and risk-taking. It’s a new ballgame, at least for the biggest scale industries, technology, and products..
Yes i think for now the US will have to coalesce around industries China doesn't want to promote like Crypto because even the consumer Apps that aren't State priorities, smaller cities are in China seem to be moving there too. BUT time shall tell.
Very interesting! Do you think that as other provinces learn these techniques, this may lead to too much competition amongst provinces, and ultimately provinces overpaying for technologies that don't end up being successful?
I don't think so, i believe the Provinces are checking what their core advantages are. They seem to be doubling down on what they have in abundance. As i have done 3 more cities after Hefei i am noting a trend. The Cities seem to focus one area and really zero in and create winners. Wanzhou's example of the Grilled Fish industry is one even though its different from the Deep Tech of Hefei,you see that the City used its resources to Will an industry into existence. This was an industry that didn't even exist. Parallel to Hefei they willed LCD Panels and EV Industries that didn't exist and both looked at their advantage and the crises they faced. Hefei had a problem of 1st class USTC Graduates leaving the City to go work somewhere because they didn't have the industries that could absorb them so they brought these anchors. Wanzhou had a challenge of the Unemployment caused by flooding hence this basic conversion of a Heritage Recipe to a global product through reverse engineering and funding its existence. I am certain this is everywhere and now in Quanzhou you can see the city utilising its Pirate History of its Enterprising Families to Global dominance.
I think Tech will just be a tool for most Provinces after they have decided on who and what they are going to push.
Hi Lile, I'm just trying to get my head around who you are as the "voice of China 5", and what China 5 is exactly. Are you only on Substack? I say this because you come across as a both a curious individual just learning things as you say, and a highly organized PR machine. I lived/worked in China from 2002-19, I'm called "an old friend of China" when I visit. I'm looking for some more transparancy into your account, which is not a big ask considering your quite thorough work here.
Thanks Ghost for this Question, my journey is actually sad and funny BUT that's life. My life took a turn around COVID when the start up i had collapsed as we launched a week before Covid happened. I was set up in debt just to clear all the accruals that went to me the person, BY 2021 i was a wreck and went to the bottom literally. In 2022 BY Chance on Facebook i bumped onto a Chinese Novel, then i went into a rabbit hole of discovering something new that took me out of my misery as i read and read one novel after the other, (these novels are updated every day with two or three chapters they rarely come to an end some with 4000+ chapters).. Early this year i had sort of become normal and wanted to restart my life and i saw many things, until i got to see Youtube channels people posting about them on X, that you can do documentaries online on subjects you love and maybe earn a living. I had many things like the 5 Wealth Giants, Quiz Central, Lile Reads (profiling the novels i had read), and many other stuff like those. Out of all of them what interested me was China.
At first i just called it Village to Beijing as i was very much interested in what i had read in one of the Novels about how a Civil Servant moved from the Village to Beijing. There was so much information such that i felt i could share with the world. Then after 2 videos i felt something was missing and then said why don't we spend 5 min everyday and have people learn about 5 things that happened in the past 24 hours in China, that's how the name came about. Then i realised am not a news channel, and said maybe we sort from City point as a planner i understood cities more. So then it was why don't share 7 things from one City every day.
How to do cities i thought everyone knows Shanghai what about the poorest city, First run actually gave me wrong figures i had to do Jinchang as my City one, then Shanghai next. By the time i got to Chongqing, i realised my Data is all wrong. I restarted this time with Golog as the poorest city still swung to Shanghai BUT still something was wrong as i had all Tibet cities lined UP. Also i felt it didn't make sense to swing extremes like that. So by the time i was on City 7 (Nagqu) it was end of May and i said let me take a break and have a proper rethink on what exactly i needed to do and how to do it.
That break was all i needed as i was no longer under pressure to produce and used what i had learnt in my trial runs to think and structure. In the process i realised the best was to set the Cities according to Provinces. It would be easier to look at 34 Cities in 34 Provinces than all 707. Then from there, i set up the website chinain5.org (still work in progress BUT given where i was i found it hardest BUT soon managed). Now the Provinces gave me a break through i then said we will run in seasons of 34, each province giving us a city and then we set off. At first i was still swinging from richest to poorest and i thought that didn't make sense as i look at each of the 707 cities as the same, at that time we had already started research on Hefei, so i said fine BUT for the other cities we will look at what exactly the city is about so i sat and went through each Province and chose what i thought would give us a mix of different insights into China through what each city in each province can give. You can check the Season 1 here: chinain5.org/#season1 from there it became easier as i now had a start date, moved from one day to one week so that we have enough time to research and understand the city. Come 2 July i was ready with the Articles for Hefei and come 8th i published the Hefei Documentary, had to redo next day as there were many issues and then came 9th i started city 2 and here we are about to conclude City 3.
I am not a PR person just an urban planner BUT for now i am updating my work on X, Here on Substack and TikTok as i had been adding long videos there.
I haven't yet been in contact with the Cities coming ahead BUT i will after this week as i will have a history and can show them what to expect for them to give me the images and B rolls, i currently spend more time on the net trying to find images and vvideos to go with the article and documentary for the city in focus.
As for why i chose this, i guess it found me, those novels revealed a China i was curious about and when i needed something to do and focus on China Cities became something i could handle.
Outstanding indeed! Thank you for your story! I look forward to your work. I lived in Harbin, Yantai, Shanghai, and Taiyuan.
Aaaaw nice. When I reach these Cities I will have you in mind and hopefully my focus resonates with your stay then.
I am excited to go through BUT even though am on City 3 am already finding areas Cities here can implement some of the stuff done in China
I insist you think of me! =)
I do evaluate LLM’s as a side job. You’re using Deep Blue, yeah? I can tell it’s conversation style hehehe.
Yes I will have to think of you but it means you have to stay on Board until I reach those cities
Yes the others can't get the insights from China even it struggles to pull the information as the information gets redacted within seconds. It's frustrating BUt still better than Nothing. It works given the timelines I have. I have settled on it