Little Rice,Smartphones,XiaoMi and the Chinese Dream

Little Rice

一开始我以为这是一本讲述小米这个公司的书，但是最后却发现，这是一本政治类的书。

以小米为代表的一些互联网公司，都有一个共同点，他们给了人们更多的自由去获取信息，传播信息。

但是，作为一个国家，它需要做的就是对民众信息的管制。

互联网的开放与自由是与国家的管制相矛盾的。

所以说在中国做互联网企业是一件很不容易的时，很多事情都是模糊的，你不知道它的界限在哪里，你不知道你该做什么不该做什么，你很容易就会碰到壁垒，就像马云说的“打败你的有时并不是技术，而是一张纸”。

为什么中国对待VPN的态度模棱两可？

It’s harder to understand their actual attitude toward VPN providers;

since all VPNs route traffic to well-known destinations outside the country,

China could cut off VPN traffic at a moment’s notice.

They don’t, because despite being forbidden, China needs VPNs, or, put more specifically, the government needs some classes of employees to have access to theuncensored internet.

For forty years now, the profitable exchange of ideas and deals with the rest of the world has been essential to the Chinese

economy, and the government can’t afford to cut off that air hose.

However,it also can’t afford to let everyone have access to it either. 

They treat open access to the internet like oxygen, necessary in small amounts, but fatal ifeither too prevalent or absent.

VPNs are ubiquitous in rich, educated China, and will never go away as long as the firewall exists. 

Business people use them to get access to services like Gmail and Facebook; kids use them to get access to games and porn.

完全的封锁就成了闭关锁国，完全的开放就会失控。中国希望人们有机会用它，又不希望所有人都用它。氧气太少人们会窒息，但是氧气太多也不是什么好事。

为什么Facebook在中国成了人人网。

This ease of adoption is one of the principal advantages U.S. internet companies have as they expand. 

The Facebook of India is Facebook. 

TheFacebook of Australia is also Facebook. 

The Facebook of China, however, is Renren, launched in 2005. (The Google of China is Baidu, and the Twitter ofChina is Sina Weibo.)

易适应性一直是美国互联网企业的有个优势，所以在印度Facebook是Facebook，在澳大利亚Facebook是Facebook，它很容易适应这些国家。但是在中国Facebook就是人人网，谷歌就是百度，推特就成了微博。

Their original competitiveedge was language—at a time when U.S. internet firms were not asaggressive about international expansion, and when translating sites into multiple languages (“localization”) was more expensive and time consuming,a native Chinese-language site had a cultural advantage.

为什么Twitter在中国无法存在？

After observing the use of social media during the Iranian uprising of June 2009, and during riots in Ürümqi, in their own Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region the following month, they began blocking such sites from the West, especially Facebook and Twitter.

They also decided that any user-generated content—words and imagesand, increasingly, video—should be hosted in the country, by Chinese firms,to minimize outside influence and maximize Beijing’s oversight.

这本书虽然黑了我们很多，但是同样也让我感到在一个这样的时代，治国真是一个不容易的事。