by Xiaowei Wang
During the stirrings of the Chinese economic boom in the 1990s, my uncle helped run an import-export business that sold millions of small birds like these. My uncle would frequently fly from the Pearl River Delta to the United States for trade shows, bringing sample boxes of fake birds, fake flowers, small baskets, little Styrofoam mushrooms and gnomes. He’d stay with my family for a few days, enjoying my mother’s cooking instead of the American fast food available on the road. Sometimes he would leave extra boxes of these trade show samples with us, no longer useful once deals were made. Stuck to them were always the words Made in China. These three words held a strong gravity, cast a magical spell. I would marvel at these items, sensing the strange, enchanting edges of materialism.
A few of these small birds ended up at a street stall in Boston that another aunt of mine ran on the weekends. On a low table with a white tablecloth she laid out her wares: jade pendants, wooden fans, all kinds of chinoiserie you’d find at stores with names like Eastern Trading Co. I brought her these trade show leftovers, on a weekend when I was helping her. I had schemes to help my aunt sell more of her goods. As a recent immigrant, she knew very little English, so I wrote several signs to put in front of the items, in flowery language: BEAUTIFUL, EXOTIC, HANDMADE, JADE PENDANT …
Later in the day, an older couple briefly stopped. I beamed. They smiled back and after examining our table, they left, the husband pushing his wife along. “Don’t fall for that stuff, it’s cheap, made in China,” I heard him say. For a moment, I didn’t know if he meant the objects on the table or me.
As a ten-year-old kid, I found his reaction perplexing and nonsensical. In the 1990s, what was seen as Chinese culture was still a product of the American imagination. I was made fun of every day for the “weird food” I’d bring for lunch. Chinese restaurants were still serving General Tso’s chicken and chop suey, without the elevation of San Francisco’s Mister Jiu’s. People who stopped at our stand didn’t even know what jade was, and often asked me if it was glass. Even if our stall sold the highest-quality jade and we demanded more money for it, customers would be unable to judge the quality themselves, and would become convinced that we were trying to swindle them. A lot of people already thought we were trying to swindle them, by virtue of being Chinese. So of course we sold the lowest-quality jade, hoping at least someone, maybe entranced by the green-blue swirl of color, would find the low price a little easier to entertain and make a harmless impulse purchase.
Made in China became seared into my psyche as a symbol of corruptness. The phrase meant something shoddily crafted, made by people who were mindless drones in a factory bent on gaining profit by cheating foreigners out of an extra cent or two. I could imagine these people at one of the factories my uncle worked with, eyes glazed over, mindlessly gluing pine-cone pieces onto a Styrofoam bird. It reflected the laziness of the Chinese, who were unwilling to consider the notion of perfection and craft, people who were culturally unable to be diligent about work and always wanted to cut corners. It was made by people who looked like me, people who could be related to me—distant cousins and aunts from my family’s ancestral home. My childhood optimism pitted against the man’s proclamation transformed Made in China into the three most shameful words I could think of.
For millions of people across rural China, from places like Anhui, where Sun Wei the drone operator is from, Made in China changed lives. It allowed young women to move to cities and experience freedom from overbearing, patriarchal elders for the first time, as Leslie T. Chang and Ching Kwan Lee document in their work on factory girls—young women who moved to cities by themselves, working in factories, living in factory dorms. It restructured families, labor, and political power. It was innovation in the purest sense of the word: an economic and technological shift that reshaped the social fabric of the country, for better and worse. And now, Made in China is being redefined again, this time by the countryside.
2.
The sprawling Tianjin Museum is new, a striking building in the middle of a concrete plaza. It reflects Tianjin’s cosmopolitan ambitions as part of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jingjinji) economic zone. An exhibit on the third floor documents more than three hundred years of history, from the 1600s to modern-day China. Tianjin was formerly a treaty port, and this exhibition has special significance, showing the geography of Tianjin divided under Western powers.
An old map of the city sits in the large atrium, along with images of Tianjin in rubble. On one wall a prominently displayed list lays out the ways native Tianjiners were treated as second-class citizens in their own country. One glass exhibition case emphasizes something even more humiliating: the weapons used by Chinese armies in fighting against Western forces. On one side of the display is an elegant rifle that belonged to a British general. On the other side are a few machetes, some arrows, and a crude gun with a short barrel that belonged to Chinese troops. For a country that invented gunpowder, the set of arrows is laughable.
In the 1960s, the historian Joseph Needham proposed a question: “Why did China never develop modern science?” Despite forward-thinking achievements such as complex geometry as early as 100 B.C.E., China failed to develop science and technology any further after the sixteenth century C.E. Needham’s question continues to haunt discussions in the United States on Chinese innovation.
Try searching “China” and “innovation” online, and instead of finding articles about innovations from China, you’ll see articles that examine “Why China can’t innovate.” The answers ultimately all converge on what Needham saw as a key barrier to Chinese innovation: its culture. Needham saw the ancient Taoism that haunted China as the problem—the sleepy Eastern belief that the universe is already perfect: we simply have to maintain the balance. This type of thinking was antithetical to the project of innovation.
The word “innovation” is laden with baggage. It gives rise to a whole industry built on conferences, media, and thought leadership. It’s not clear what exactly innovation is, but whatever it is, there is apparently a paucity of this golden resource everywhere except Silicon Valley.
In English, “innovation” was not always regarded as positively as it is now. Its original form in Latin means “to renew, to introduce something as new,” perhaps subliminally acknowledging that the category “entirely new” is difficult to define. The word “innovation” was derogatory in the age of monarchs, as it referred to political and economic change that could bring down empires, threatening the status of kings and elites. But slowly, throughout the Industrial Revolution, the phrase began to be seen as more positive when engineering culture took shape. In the early 1900s, Thorstien Veblen advocated the idea that technology was the output, the product of a group of male workers he termed “engineers.”1 And while engineers worked to create technology, it was the company owners, the grand industrialists, who reaped the profits of innovation.
Contemporary innovation in the United States and China appears to strengthen rather than threaten the political and economic order of the world. Riffling through recent coverage on innovation shows the most innovative products appear to be varying forms of management through technology—managing people, cars, take-out orders, or goods. Our modern-day monarchs, corporations and CEOs, are unthreatened by innovation. It begs the question: If innovation is so disruptive, why would it be embraced by people with so much to lose?
3.
In an attempt to find out what “innovation” really means, I meet up with an analyst from one of the largest trans-Pacific VC firms, with a portfolio of companies and products that you’ve definitely used. It’s a hybrid Chinese-U.S. firm and reflects the changing geographies of a trans-Pacific elite. This analyst is young, fresh-faced, and has an intimidating confidence that makes me feel ten years her junior. We know each other through a shared alma mater, but we otherwise have little in common. Her worldview has a ruthless clarity while I am still waffling on the definition of the word “innovation.”
I meet her at a yogurt place in Palo Alto. We sit,
and I pick at my sad cup of handmade, oddly chunky yogurt. We end up talking about food. She gleefully tells me about her habit of buying ice cream from Taobao.com. For her, the information asymmetry of not knowing, as a consumer, the quality of the goods you’ll receive feels resolved by the purchasing of food on the internet. Justice is dealt to sellers through bad reviews.
One hindrance to Chinese innovation has been the accusation that any technological advancement boils down to a government conspiracy to surveil its citizens. The analyst shakes her head, perplexed by the American obsession with the Chinese surveillance state, while Americans seem to care so little about the surveillance in their own lives. We talk about the Silicon Valley hubris that keeps people from digging too deeply into Chinese technology with an honest look: Silicon Valley is the peak of innovation, so how could another place surpass it? On the other side of hubris is a rhetorical trap: China as a constructed enemy for the American government, in order for it to catalyze domestic support for a range of policies by inciting old-fashioned, U.S.A.-brand nationalism. It’s not surprising that tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg use China as a straw man, arguing that stringent government regulation will prevent American companies from moving fast. Even in narratives of Chinese economic might, China is not innovative; rather, it steals, it cheats, it oppresses.
After the People’s Republic of China was founded, science and technology research did take a slow start. According to Barry Naughton and Chen Ling, the state held tight institutional control over research and development. But in the 2000s, R&D shifted, spilling out into the private realm—highlighted by the success of early internet startups with private investment in China, such as Sohu and Baidu. At the same time, the economic success of Town and Village Enterprises showed how new institutional structures could catalyze innovation. And for many companies in China at the time, innovation wasn’t about creating entirely new products—“disruptive innovation”—but also about the ways existing processes could be optimized and streamlined, a form of “continuous innovation.”
By the 2000s, foreign companies had entered China. These companies still dominate the majority of certain sectors in China, despite purportedly extensive intellectual property theft. They are typically not tech companies—examples are Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and KFC.
Foreign tech firms, however, failed to take off in China, for the same reason China itself is unable to innovate: culture. Companies like eBay floundered in China, straining under the local advantage that Taobao had in understanding the Chinese market. Key details were missed, including the fact that eBay brokers secondhand goods, but in China, buying secondhand goods, especially clothing, is frowned upon. Even when Google left China, it had only 33 percent of market share. The great innovators of the United States found that innovation was culturally constructed. Technology and innovation were far less universal than they had thought.
“I think China is innovating,” the VC analyst tells me. “I have American apps that I open once a month and eventually delete. But there are Chinese apps that I open multiple times a day. You’re so dependent on apps for daily life. There’s a saying about ‘China speed’—that tech in China is moving so fast that America can barely keep up.” For this analyst, these apps, their convenience, indicate that disruptive innovation is happening in China.
A friend of mine, a VC who spends ample time traveling between the United States and China, remarks that the Silicon Valley hubris is real. He tells me that most of the time, you hear people say they’re starting the new Silicon Valley of somewhere, and it never happens, it fails. As a result, Silicon Valley’s mythological standing only gets greater and greater. But what lies at the heart of Silicon Valley’s greatness, for him, is actually the embrace of failure. This embrace of failure is very much cultural. And in China, he’s observed an increased tolerance for risk, for failure, alongside an increased set of innovations. This increased tolerance for risk is pervasive: from young students willing to forgo a steady job in order to start their own companies, against the traditional grain of Chinese society’s expectations, to risky leaps in product development, investment, and lending practices.
For both this young analyst and my VC friend, innovation still seems to carry a lot of assumptions. Why does the new, the novel, always require a certain amount of addiction to an app? If failure is so important for innovation, why are we only confronted with stories of technology’s successes, rather than stories of its spectacular technical failures? If embracing failure is the prerequisite for innovation, who has the privilege of failing? In Mao’s ill-guided experiment in the Great Leap Forward, failure meant famine and death. For students in contemporary rural China, failure means the difference between a life of difficult manual labor, and a vague shot at being able to escape poverty. As China’s P2P (peer-to-peer) lending scandals unfold, they show that investing and failure are markedly different when it’s a VC firm taking the risk versus a seventy-year-old retiree. And for investment firms, failure can still be lucrative. Failure in the land of contemporary VC-driven innovation seems like a cocktail hour, albeit a grueling one.
There are also the technical realities of innovation. One AI engineer I met, based in Zhongguancun, the “Silicon Valley of China,” scoffs at the idea of indigenous Chinese innovation. In a deadpan tone, she points out that China still relies on American chip manufacturers, while American chip manufacturers rely on Chinese rare earth mines. Even the chip engineers are an international community and chip factories are all across the globe. Indigenous innovation is just a nationalist parlor trick.
4.
A monsoon rain moves through Guangzhou, flooding the streets and turning the sky a flat gray with low visibility. The balcony at my uncle and aunt’s house is covered in an inch of water, their pet turtle in a large ceramic tank on the balcony still stoic and unmoving in the downpour. We’ve been cooped up inside, and I’m entertaining my aunt with internet memes and pictures of my life in the United States. She’s especially amused by photos of me camping and hiking, activities that are just starting to become popular in China, where the “pleasures of wild nature” are brazenly acknowledged as a made-up concept that requires marketing.
My typically easygoing aunt is rankled by the murmurings of a Donald Trump–led trade war. For her, the trade war is personal. “Good riddance!” she says. “I say it’s good that we have this trade war. We used to export all the good things to the United States and kept all the defective stuff to sell here! And look at how we’ve damaged our environment, just for you Americans! Crafty people, manufacturing is a dirty job, didn’t want to ruin your own country!”
From the Chinese side, it appears that the Americans were cheating the Chinese—American corporations were asking for unimaginably low costs that made it impossible to manufacture high-quality goods, to not cut corners. Back in the United States, companies went on to sell these products at astronomical markups, making enormous amounts of money.
As my aunt continues on about the trade war, she starts talking about the quality of goods in her house. She makes me guess how much items in her house cost, as I try to hold back a smirk of amusement in watching a version of The Price Is Right unfold before me. “Guess how much I bought this for?” she asks, pointing to a large stuffed animal made out of MCM-patterned leather. She smiles smugly. “It’s not about where things are made, but which country does the factory’s quality control.” She suddenly walks to the kitchen and emerges with a frying pan she purchased in 2012. “Isn’t this such good quality? Back when we were all boycotting Japanese goods because of the Diaoyu Islands incident, it was on sale for 80 percent off! It’s made in China by a Japanese brand. I had to hide it on the bus, in case anyone noticed that the box had Japanese on it. Someone could have accused me of being a traitor!”
5.
Naomi Wu is a cyborg. On a rainy day, I am scheduled to meet her at the Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab. I am extremely nervous because I want Naomi Wu to like me.
There are As
ian women in STEM, and then there’s Naomi Wu—she’s brilliant, but even more remarkable is her fearlessness in letting her brilliance be admired. Naomi was born human, but she is a self-proclaimed cyborg, a definition made obvious when you watch her videos. She’s forthcoming about her cyborg body modifications, including breast implants that light up when she dons a special corset she’s designed and built.
Her videos are energetic and witty. Some cover her projects and are instructional, showcasing her engineering prowess to an international audience: a Wi-Fi mini drone inspired by Neuromancer; a DIY retro Game Boy kit. Other videos show real-life Shenzhen on the ground, as she visits makerspaces and electronics markets.
While Asian women make up a huge portion of engineering professions in the United States, they are often left out of management and leadership roles. In fact, being Asian creates a disadvantage to becoming a leader in tech—Asians are the group least likely to be promoted from individual contributor (i.e., an engineer) to management.2 This data point should not be taken as a cry of inequity for Asian Americans—it’s instead reflective of systemic ways that racial categories work under capitalism in the United States. Asians are presented as soft-spoken, hardworking, and quiet, the “model minority,” something that has always sent an alarming message to me: that you can have restricted success if you just comply with the rules, even if the rules are problematic. In a harsher light, these characteristics also signal obedience and acquiescence, characteristics that seem innate to the mindless drone workers I imagined in my uncle’s factory.
In the United States, Asians are rarely seen as innovative. Because, after all, to be innovative is to be bold, daring, and brash. Within popular tech discourse, these qualities are more often ascribed to Western white men—heroic inventors with astonishing capacities, like John Galt from Atlas Shrugged. The more time I spend with Naomi, I realize: How often is it that a person of color is said to be innovating? How often in the United States do we hear about any other country innovating, especially a non-Western country?
