ALL Chinese Apps Are Better (Not Just Tik Tok)
And yes: surveillance and censorship.
When I was preparing to move to China in 2019, everyone said you have to get WeChat. It was curiously described in American media as “a cross between facebook and paypal.” Over the many years of using WeChat I have never in my life seen an english explanation that did it any justice at all, so please allow me to try. In light of the whole Tik Tok ongoing saga, I think it is important to put aside the politics, surveillance, and censorship for a few moments and just try to understand the unmatched efficiency, brilliance, and seamlessness of the tech that China makes and uses on a daily basis.
Imagine everything your smart phone does: transfers money, checks your bank balance, keeps your contacts, shows you social media, helps you find a business contacts, translates Chinese characters into english, allows you to see available appointment times at your doctor and book them, allows you to make video and voice calls, sends gifs, sends pdfs, gives you access to group chats, and serves as the primary way you message friends or new people. That is We Chat (actually called Weixin in China). Forget any comparison to any American app. It is like your whole phone, and everything it does in just one seamlessly connected app.
The one thing you need to close WeChat and open another app for is Didi. Didi is Uber, but also better. The GPS is unmatched. And it is so easy to use you can have it set in Chinese, not speak any Chinese and still use it. I know because I operated this way for years!
But back to WeChat. In a free market, where the best app wins, it should. It has 1.3 Billion users. But it is not growing outside of China. Because of course, censorship and the ability for the Chinese to invade your privacy. Those are of course real things. And as the Times put it:
Chinese internet companies and investors are increasingly caught between their authoritarian government at home and suspicion, even hostility, abroad.
What I hate about the whole Tik Tok saga and the battle over who gets to control the data is I feel like it misses everything about product. Tik Tok is a well designed product; We Chat might be the best designed tech product I have ever seen in my life. If all America can see in those things is a fight over surveillance, then a lot is being missed. I don’t think those things are irrelevant, but they are not the only thing going on here. America could learn a lot from Chinese Tech if they took a less adversarial and more collaborative approach.
Look at that seamless in app translation! Can you image how annoying it would be to screenshot and translate a text in the US?
I think it would really helpful to think about Why Tik Tok became so popular in the first place. I suspect that when American feels threatened by superior tech from China in the face of their inferior menu of Meta products (which Singapore likes, bleh!) all of a sudden they care about surveillance. I think they should care about it, but what they really care about it competition. It’s not unlike what is going on in Auto. China makes amazing and affordable electric vehicles that are currently banned in the USA. It’s because of competition. US Auto would get beat by BYD, and rightfully so.