China, every mention
101 scenes · ← back to China
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 251Toni Cowan-Brown 89Jay Goldberg 10Leonard Brody 1Bernadette Kevins 1Benedict Catton 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where China comes up
The AI presentation
- ▶ 22:32 Benedict Evans And that kind of inevitably takes you to, okay, well in that case, like the next hundred billion dollar company, the enterprise software might be using an open source model from China.
A double episode: AI differentiation, and Apple does F1
- ▶ 45:21 Benedict Evans Um, I can't remember the author's name, but there's this book about Apple in China, which everyone should probably read, which is about part of the thesis is, you know, how Apple built its outsourcing business in China. 3 times in the scene
From SAAS software to Formula 1
- ▶ 11:53 Benedict Catton And what do we think about the price arbitrage between the prices in China and the prices in Europe?
Tiktok, Apple and Temu
- ▶ 0:41 Benedict Evans And meanwhile, yeah, there's like four or five different bits and pieces there, but meanwhile, um, um, there's another attempt in the US to either bans, um, TikTok or force some kind of detachment from, from a Chinese company, um,
- ▶ 9:29 Benedict Evans People were looking at it and saying, oh my god, Chinese company has this app that every American is using, all this personal data. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:42 Benedict Evans It's a law that says the president can say that social media apps can be designated as cannot be controlled by a Chinese, North Korean, Syrian, Iranian, etc. company.
- ▶ 15:27 Benedict Evans Now, there is a whole funny kind of slightly entertaining conversation here around is ByteDance really a Chinese company because the CEO is not a Chinese citizen and lives in Singapore. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:50 Benedict Evans Don't correctly say, look, if you're worried about user data going to China, have a data law. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:11 Benedict Evans Um, I think it was 10% of Facebook's revenue last year came from China. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:31 Benedict Evans Like, sort of zooming up several levels here, point around, um, like, you completely disaggregate spectrum ownership, and TV channels, and cable networks, and retail stores, and shopping malls, and you explode all of that, and now you… 2 times in the scene
Breaking and remaking media
- ▶ 28:39 Benedict Evans It's got nothing to do with, you know, what happens to the China, the China market, you know,
- ▶ 38:49 unnamed speaker China. 3 times in the scene
AI and Everything Else
- ▶ 25:08 Benedict Evans Suddenly your supply chains in China, suddenly you don't have to have all this inventory.
- ▶ 34:39 Benedict Evans You know, I've spent a bunch of time this year looking at the Chinese car industry, and there's certainly a, there's a thesis that says that electric means the Chinese car industry is basically going to do what the, in the next 10 years,… 2 times in the scene
The magic customer
- ▶ 41:39 Leonard Brody How do we build audience in China and in South Asia, in Japan, and, and in India?
Working out AI questions
- ▶ 33:21 Benedict Evans And there's a whole narrative that for China, this is a problem deploying this to, for general purpose, consumer ads. 2 times in the scene
The right questions to ask about TikTok
- ▶ 2:47 Benedict Evans Just as like a primal framing point, any company in China is obliged to do whatever the Chinese government wants them to do. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:25 Benedict Evans Well, there's a huge thing for this in China. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:25 Benedict Evans And then another quarter is India and a quarter is China and a quarter is everything else. 3 times in the scene
Amazon's $40B advertising business
- ▶ 17:09 Benedict Evans Well, this is a social selling thing that's been a huge thing, been a huge, it's been a huge thing in China for years, and no one's ever quite managed to get it work, to work.
Why are chips interesting again?
- ▶ 1:22 Benedict Evans Um, China is trying to make its own chips and get something up to sovereignty.
- ▶ 14:04 Toni Cowan-Brown The semiconductors are so complex to make that the supply chain is so vulnerable, and is that why we're seeing more companies trying to figure out how we don't have so much need for what's coming out of China or Taiwan, or is that not the…
- ▶ 22:07 Benedict Evans Well, the other side of this, I mean, and it kind of clearly the other, the other side of the capex thing is we sort of suddenly woke up, um, some point in the last year or two or three and thought, Hey, we're actually kind of worried… 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:21 Jay Goldberg Separate, separate from that, there's, there's China and China has its own semis ambitions. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:33 Benedict Evans And, you know, things like screen technology, um, Japanese, South Koreans moved up the value chain and then Chinese moved up the value chain. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:42 Toni Cowan-Brown Jay, beyond China and the U.S.,
ChatGPT and the Imagenet Moment
- ▶ 14:23 Benedict Evans If you say, describe to me what happened, um, you know, why was it, as a question I plugged in the other night, like, why was Japan so much more successful than China at reacting to Western incursion in the 19th century?
- ▶ 17:56 Benedict Evans So my, why was my Japan versus China, and the whole first paragraph is, um, well, Japan was much more successful at industrializing and modernizing its military, and then it fought a successful war against Russia.
- ▶ 24:43 Benedict Evans I go to Google, and I type in, you know, why did Japan react so much more successfully than China to the Western incursion, and I'll get a bunch of links.
All the other things happening in tech part 1.
- ▶ 1:17 Benedict Evans Um, and so we wrote sort of a list of things, and so we thought, well, there's chips in China, and there's generative ML, and connected TV, and smart TV platforms, and merchant media,
- ▶ 2:03 Benedict Evans And it's kind of an interesting case study here because something like 30 or 40% of the top Amazon marketplace sellers are actually Chinese companies. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:31 Benedict Evans But there's a thread here of, like, here is this company that goes selling direct from China through Amazon, and that's premium, made a premium segment out of cables and charters.
Lighting and tech diffusion
- ▶ 16:38 Benedict Evans And so what's actually happened with IP connected cameras for enterprise is it's all the Chinese manufacturers. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:25 Benedict Evans Now, this is, um, not the best kind of number, because A, it includes, like, 50 or sixty million people in China, in India, who are not paying very much, and it also is apparent, I think they're double counting, um, there's a bunch of…
Three ways to say no
- ▶ 24:16 Benedict Evans Far too often, not so much recently, but particularly, you know, until a few years ago, the argument from technology would not, technology companies would not be, no, this is the only way we can stop China from reading your emails, or the… 3 times in the scene
Shein, TikTok and Netflix - thinking about limits
- ▶ 4:09 Benedict Evans Ask a Chinese person. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 30:37 Benedict Evans Um, because, oh my god, our teenagers are using something from China, and it's also, in America, 2 times in the scene
Metaverse - how to be wrong in the right way
- ▶ 24:59 Benedict Evans And the problem with the content moderation argument, which Elon will sort of slowly realize, just as he sort of slowly realized how the car industry works, is, um, that like, like, the vast majority of the decisions are not, um, the lab…
Stories in the noise
- ▶ 33:55 Benedict Evans And, of course, the Chinese will be looking at all of this and thinking, right, so this semiconductor sovereignty thing, um, we're going to do a try even harder on that. 2 times in the scene
Ukraine
- ▶ 9:15 Benedict Evans Um, the other issue there, it occurred to me is, um, is China. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:18 Benedict Evans Apple, Apple, interestingly, is on the other side of this, in that Apple, of course, has 20, 25% of its revenue in China. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:05 Benedict Evans Um, the Chinese social media thing is interesting. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:40 Benedict Evans It's TikTok, it's Chinese, we should ban it, control it, take it over, something, but there's going to be 20 more of those.
- ▶ 24:49 Benedict Evans Um, so, a narrative that I've sort of, I think, point the narrative, a point that I've made a few times is that, you know, China is this sort of, um, you know, the Chinese consumer internet is its world of itself with its own bunch of… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 38:13 Benedict Evans Chinese get lots of stories about how bad the Japanese were.
The retail reset
- ▶ 18:10 Benedict Evans They're going to a huge number of Chinese manufacturers who didn't necessarily do that kind of short run before, but now they are, they ship direct from China.
Asking the dumb questions
- ▶ 5:39 Benedict Evans Um, but the kind of the point is, you know, what is going to happen in China? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:44 Benedict Evans Um, and the China thing is the obvious one, like, there's, um. 4 times in the scene
What we know about web 3 so far
- ▶ 20:25 Benedict Evans And, you know, indeed, plenty of people in China today who would say that, that, you know, you need to have somebody who's in charge.
- ▶ 40:52 Benedict Evans And that Android is open source, but except it's not anymore, really, um, outside of China, it's all controlled by Google, and you wouldn't have put Google down.
How to think about tech
- ▶ 2:18 Benedict Evans Or that there's a new fast fashion app from China.
- ▶ 3:14 Benedict Evans Questions of solar and the environment and China and India and regulation and what all the kind of the broader consequences might be. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:26 Benedict Evans What's happening in China? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:07 Benedict Evans Um, what does the China tech crackdown mean?
Regulation - Who will notice?
- ▶ 0:21 Toni Cowan-Brown But it is safe to say that I think never before has more been done across all the different markets, including Europe, Australia, China, USA, to try and limit the power of the tech industry, which is quite interesting. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:23 Benedict Evans Of course, that takes us to China quite neatly, which was, which was this other thing that we were thinking of talking about.
- ▶ 23:30 Benedict Evans Well, yeah, I mean, we've done two podcasts that were basically on the theme, we don't know anything about China, or, and what can you say about China when you don't know anything about it? 19 times in the scene
- ▶ 33:37 Benedict Evans And then there's the, okay, well, how do we reconcile the US and Europe and different ideas of regulatory culture and, you know, rules-based systems and principles-based systems and what's China doing?
Apple's metronome
- ▶ 20:53 Benedict Evans And, of course, China will not come at it like that. 6 times in the scene
Creativity and Optimism
- ▶ 10:55 Benedict Evans Um, but no, the fun thing about looking at China, as we said on an episode a while ago, is, um, like it challenges your, your idea of what's inevitable. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 38:41 Benedict Evans Okay, well, that's fine, but there's 20 Chinese companies that are already making them, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Tech in china, from inside and outside
- ▶ 0:13 Toni Cowan-Brown You moved back to China last year, which we will talk about in a minute, and you did so after working at Salesforce Ventures and Eight Roads Ventures in London. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:02 Toni Cowan-Brown And one of it was about, you know, tech in China. 16 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:23 Toni Cowan-Brown On that point, then, though, I'm slowly starting to educate myself a little bit on Chinese tech and the market, and I often that point of like, oh, but China just copies things, comes up all the time. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:16 Benedict Evans Whereas in China, it's much more of a sort of a horizontal model where most of the successful companies are doing four or five things that compete with each other and overlap in various ways. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:37 Benedict Evans And part of the kind of the question, you know, ironically, having talked about copying, a lot of the narrative for the last five years is what can Facebook copy from China? 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 40:11 Benedict Evans Obviously, China has its own content moderation discussion, which is rather different. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 49:41 Toni Cowan-Brown You started saying like, well, what's the coverage that this is getting in China as well, which is just something that I think is very true in tech is when you're trying to understand what's happening in tech, a lot of what we receive is… 10 times in the scene
Paying attention to Apple again
- ▶ 0:38 Benedict Evans Well, so we have this, um, we've had this running theme of people talking about something they don't know anything about, so we did two people who know nothing about our tech talking about our tech, and the same on China.
- ▶ 13:42 Benedict Evans Um, somehow, except asterisk does not apply to Apple's customers in China. 6 times in the scene
Clubhouse and the endless cycle of social apps
- ▶ 6:51 Benedict Evans Even if it is still good for you, Clubhouse is another way of doing that, and so it's sort of a bit of early Twitter, and quite a lot of podcasts, and also quite a lot of China, which we can come back to.
- ▶ 27:34 Benedict Evans So there's one other thing I thought was interesting, which I, part of the big presentation I published last week, um, sort of talked about China and 6 times in the scene
Bezos and the Amazon machine
- ▶ 36:57 Toni Cowan-Brown And so it's like, the moment, you were buying stuff from China 17 years ago on websites that were in Chinese, and you were very comfortable doing the Google Translate, and you just trusted the system.
Telling stories with charts
- ▶ 6:36 Benedict Evans And so, you know, illustration of this is a chart sort of three quarters of the way through the presentation of Chinese adoption of digital payment, fintech payment, which is basically Alipay.
- ▶ 13:31 Benedict Evans Now imagine you want to do, um, what is China's share of global food exports, food imports.
- ▶ 16:10 Benedict Evans Certainly China.
Why do we care about games?
- ▶ 0:03 Benedict Evans And last week we talked about China from the perspective of two people who work in tech, but don't really know that much about it and actually can't read Chinese, but have to pay attention anyway. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:37 Benedict Evans And this is part of also what we talked about last week, which is ideas that come from China.
Two Europeans talk about China
- ▶ 0:09 Toni Cowan-Brown China and Globalization of Tech? 11 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:35 Benedict Evans And in China, in Japan, mobile internet was a big thing. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:47 Benedict Evans But meanwhile, you have these vast companies, um, and the sort of vast user bases, you know, the core of this is there are eight or nine hundred million people with a smartphone in China. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:08 Toni Cowan-Brown Um, but I think you also talk about this as well, that we kind of skipped or not we trying to kind of skip the PC era. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:50 Benedict Evans Well, it's interesting to look at some of the conversation that came out of India around how WeChat failed in India, which was essentially not a digital story or even a China India story. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:07 Benedict Evans It's a combination of the consumer behavior and the idea, and even like three and four years ago, there was still this idea in Silicon Valley that all China does is copy stuff, and again, I wrote a column about, another slightly different… 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:44 Benedict Evans China and India are not, even though they've got vastly bigger populations for all sorts of reasons, like historical reasons that are again rather painful that we all know about. 16 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:13 Toni Cowan-Brown Do people around you, because I honestly, it's not a conversation I've had with a lot of people in my, but do people think as China's the nexus of innovation? 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:08 Toni Cowan-Brown There's a lot of arguments going on or explaining how China is very closed off to foreign tech companies. 14 times in the scene
There's no such thing as data
- ▶ 1:07 Benedict Evans Capturing it or sort of pinning it down in metaphors and intellectual frameworks and things, and so you get these phrases like, you know, the fourth industrial revolution or the 10th industrial revolution or whatever it is, and, you know,… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:19 Benedict Evans And so like China, there was some bizarre piece going around in the Wall Street Journal somewhere saying like Chinese people don't have any friends. 4 times in the scene
The history of doom-scrolling
- ▶ 22:28 Toni Cowan-Brown and I know very little, sorry about China, but China feels massively ahead of the game with their sort of mentality of tipping creators left, right and center and paying for certain things. 3 times in the scene
What comes next?
- ▶ 20:55 Benedict Evans Like, there is no melamine in your milk, which is not necessarily true in China.
Slack, Salesforce and the future of work
- ▶ 23:19 Bernadette Kevins And Facebook is interesting, actually, to flip to the consumer side, to look at, for example, all of the super apps in China, and to look at what the Facebook desktop system is, particularly back when they had a big developer environment,…
The paradox of Apple
- ▶ 15:33 Benedict Evans They're sitting on the Chinese smartphones, the Chinese supply chain.
Is content moderation a dead end?
- ▶ 8:35 Benedict Evans You know, even like between, you know, China and the USA, you know, that isn't, that's actually, there's not a, like, a legal cooperation problem there. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:43 Toni Cowan-Brown And what does it look like when it's Europeans or it's Chinese people or Indian people using the software?
How do you destroy a tech monopoly?
- ▶ 3:28 Benedict Evans You don't have 50 search engines, you have one or two search engines, and those network effects are global, so you don't have one search engine per country, you have one search engine outside of China.
- ▶ 37:30 Benedict Evans Things like, um, speech that get quite a lot more difficult, because different, it's not, you know, China versus everyone else, different liberal democracies have different attitudes to what you should and shouldn't be able to say online,…
Amazon and eCommerce
- ▶ 29:46 Benedict Evans Yeah, so part of the, um, part of the story of the greater marketplace, and I would love to find data on this, is that a meaningful part of marketplace is Chinese manufacturers going direct that previously sold to US retailers. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:34 Benedict Evans So basically you find some product from some warehouse on Amazon, on some, some manufacturer in China, you find the product.
Is Europe a market?
- ▶ 20:57 Benedict Evans Again, there's another sort of aspect to this that I was going to think, think about a lot, which is particularly as I look at Chinese and Indian markets, which is if you think about the sort of the history of the last 20 years, um, what… 6 times in the scene
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