Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and The Chinese Dream QUOTES

1 " The fateful moment for the Chinese economy, crippled by central planning and collectivized production, was when Deng Xiaoping, China’s long-term leader after Mao’s death, announced that the country would pursue “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is to say a market economy under an authoritarian technocracy. This was in 1977, as good a year as any for marking the birth of modern China. Deng and his associates undertook a job akin to that of a political bomb squad, laboriously dismantling most of the economic ideology installed by Mao without blowing up political continuity at the same time. That they succeeded is in many ways the single most important political fact of contemporary China. "

― Clay Shirky , Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and The Chinese Dream

2 " The simplest answer is that the user had access to reality—every company builds a bubble around itself, where the products get built and tested in a more controlled environment than they get used in. This is especially true of complex software. What the early users enabled Xiaomi to see was how MIUI actually worked when real (albeit unusually technically proficient) people tried to install it on a wide variety of devices. "

― Clay Shirky , Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and The Chinese Dream

3 " GDP per capita is between two and four times higher for China than India, depending on how you measure "

― Clay Shirky , Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and The Chinese Dream

4 " (Micromax just unseated Samsung as India’s number one phone vendor, another page from Xiaomi’s book.) "

― Clay Shirky , Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and The Chinese Dream

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

― Clay Shirky , Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and The Chinese Dream

6 " rule. The first, widely known, was the Great Leap Forward. This was a set of national policies implemented in the 1950s that included collectivization of agriculture, a disaster everywhere it has been tried, but nowhere as much as China. The resulting famine killed between 20 and 40 million people in three years, the deadliest in human history. "

― Clay Shirky , Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and The Chinese Dream

7 " A second, less well-known decision was based on his simple calculation “More people, more power.” Copying a Soviet system of the same name, Mao created policy preferences for Hero Mothers, women who had many children. At a time when much of the rest of the world, including most of the developing world, saw reductions in population growth, China’s average remained at around six children per woman. Over the next two decades, China added the population of South America, even as they’d hampered their agricultural system. "