Little Rice
Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
Can the world’s biggest economy actually innovate? Clay Shirky explores China at a crossroads.
Smartphones have to be made someplace, and that place is China. In just five years, a company named Xiaomi (which means “little rice” in Mandarin) has grown into the most valuable startup ever, becoming the third largest vendor of smartphones, behind only Samsung and Apple. China is now both the world’s largest producer and consumer of a little device that brings the entire globe to its user’s fingertips. How has this changed the Chinese people? How did Xiaomi conquer the world’s biggest market? Can the rise of Xiaomi help realize the Chinese Dream, China’s bid to link personal success with national greatness?
Clay Shirky, one of the most influential and original thinkers on the internet’s effects on society, spends a year in Shanghai chronicling China’s attempt to become a tech originator—and what it means for the future course of globalization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this bite-size but substantive case study, Shirky (Cognitive Surplus) explores Xaomi, Chinese company, which has a reputation as "the most valuable startup ever" having grown to be the third largest producer of smart phones worldwide in only five-years. But rather than focus on the business practices or startup culture of the company, Shirky uses Xaomi's story as a "lens that makes the importance and contradictions of modern China easier to see." Most prominently, Xaomi represents China's influential and growing place on the global economic stage. With an increasing middle class, China is now the world's biggest producer and consumer of mobile phones, and Xaomi counters the image of China as only the cheap producer of Western-designed products. However, these networked devices also illuminate the tensions between China's open market and its closed political system. As more and more citizens purchase smartphones, the nominally communist government finds it more difficult "to maintain the desired equilibrium between elites, where access is tolerated, and the general public, where it is feared." The future of China is a difficult one to predict, Shirky readily admits. In many ways, though, Xaomi offers hints of what may come to bear, and its successes and failures are quite significant.
