Wednesday 19 November 2014

Goodbye to shanzhai: China’s web has kicked its copycat habit

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At a recent meeting about copyrights in China, State Internet Information Office VP Peng Bo made a statement that would have sounded ridiculous even a few years ago: “China is moving towards saying goodbye to shanzhai and becoming a fast-lane innovative nation.” Then he doubled-down: “This nation that once bore the stain of a shanzhai reputation is becoming a globally-renowned innovator.”

Shanzhai is the Chinese term for “knock-off” or “copycat.” And while Peng may be speaking a bit soon to accurately describe China as a whole, when it comes to the internet, he’s actually right.

[​IMG]Just a few years ago, shanzhai was a common term that anyone following the Chinese tech scene would have been familiar with. Cheap knock-off shanzhai phones dominated China’s mobile market, and the recipe for success on China’s web was still primarily C2C: copy to China. In fact, most of China’s major internet companies today can trace their lineage back to a time when their sites were pretty obvious clones of popular foreign sites. Baidu was aping Google’s clean search aesthetic. Renren looked pretty much identical to Facebook. Tencent got its start copying early chat apps like AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ (in fact, QQ’s original name was the more obviously-shanzhai OICQ). You get the picture.

See: Scammers in China Exploit Apple to Turn Fake iPhones into Real Ones

But these days, the term shanzhai just doesn’t apply to China’s web as much. All of the companies listed above have grown into innovators, with products and services deeply different from (and sometimes superior to) those offered by the companies they once copied. And even outside of the major players, obvious copies and weak knockoffs seem to be far less common in the Chinese market than they were a few years ago.

That’s a claim that’s tough to back up with ironclad data, of course, but Tech in Asia‘s own site archives do offer at least a little evidence to that end. Out of curiosity, I went back to look at our shanzhai tag to see if there were any interesting patterns. I found one:
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