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Inside Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of hardware
Inside Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of hardware
For the first documentary in WIRED's future cities series, we headed to Shenzhen - the frenetic heart of China's tech industry. Originally a quiet agrarian province in southern China, Shenzhen's population exploded in the 80s and 90s as migrant workers came to work in the city's industrial factories.
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This was a fascinating read, especially how they will so easily do specialist jobs. This is one are that American manufacturing was notoriously weak in, demanding large unit orders for any custom product. Add in that you have all the part makers in one town and I can see why a startup would want to operate at least part of their operation there.
With most hardware now being designed in these countries a town like Shenzen was a matter of time. In the states we have Intel and Qualcomm, but that's about it. AMD in Canada, but they just can't seem to get right lately.
There was nothing inevitable about Shenzhen. It was planned from the very beginning. In the 80s, the Chinese government designated a special economic zone (SEZ), relaxing certain economic restrictions in order to encourage foreign investment and private enterprise. Shenzhen's development basically drove China's emergence as a manufacturing powerhouse.
Also, it's a city, not a town. Shenzhen's population is larger than any city in the US.
LOL, Silicon Valley of hardware. Silicon Valley is the Silicon Valley of hardware. That's why there's the word "Silicon" in the name. It's kind of sad that we've forgotten that now.
Shenzhen is maybe the Silicon Valley of manufacturing.
By the way, the word Shanzhai (山寨) literally means "mountain fortress". It refers to how, in the old days, bandits and rebels would hide out in their mountain strongholds to evade the authorities. In a way, it's analogous to how the word "pirate" is used in English to refer to flouting intellectual property laws.