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Comment by philippz | Hacker News Reader

I don't find Beijing to be the best place to start something like that. I'd rather prefer Shanghai which provides a much better ecosystem and access to capital than Beijing.

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Shenzhen is the tech place to be in China. But if you want to make the government happy, you got to be near them in Beijing, so a lot of tech happens there also.

Is true, but Shenzhen is culturally very different from Beijing and so is Shanghai.

Shenzhen is a new city and tech stuff are there because of the influence of Guangzhou as production hub and HK as facilitator for access to the west.

Beijing is more, let me say it, artistic. Is much more vibrant, culturally, than any other city in China. This kind of mix that you can find in New Work, Berlin or London also it brings innovation. So I don't think is meant to make the government "happy". Many Chinese tech company started in Beijing form many reasons: education, capital access, culture and so on. To give you an example: Mobike was founder by an ex journalist

Many tech companies started in Beijing with obvious government boosts. There is also the major research universities (PKU and Qinghua at the top, many more at tiers just under). However, Beijing is also famous for government meddling and Black Audi-style privileged that is lacking in SZ and SH.

Take traffic for example, it is much saner in SH and SZ because the police can actually enforce the rules, whereas in BJ you get a asense they have given up because they feel like everyone is an official or is connected to one. It is a weird city even by Chinese standards.

I don't have nothing to support this thesis. I just shared my pure observation, after living there for a while, I notice it was a way more dynamic compared to the other 'cold' Chinese cities.

Yet I think my message didn't pass through since I got downvoted

I lived in Beijing for 10 years working in tech so know it pretty well. I always surprised how much smoother things were in SH in comparison to BJ. Heck, many second tier cities (like Hangzhou) were much better run than Beijing.

Mobike being founded by an ex-journalist is an argument against your point, not for it. Journalism work in China isn't artistic, rather it revolves around finding things to say that keeps the govt happy.

As a foreigner, Shenzhen is kind of a boring industrial city. That's probably why they chose Beijing which is equally as exciting as Shanghai in my opinion. As for pollution, they might both be pretty bad choices.

If they were going to do it that way, better to pick a nice western city like Chengdu or Kunming. The latter even has clean air sometimes (though definitely not as good as it used to be).

Beijing and Shanghai also have large community of expats.

Doesn't SZ also? The number of expats in all of China is only about what Tokyo has, so I guess it really depends on what you mean by "large."

> The number of expats in all of China is only about what Tokyo has

Do you have a source on that?

SZ didn't seem to have any foreigners when I was there. The expat community of BJ is pretty crazy for having spent a year there.

I spent almost 10 years in Beijing (2007-2016), and it seemed like everyone knew everyone. I was off a bit, there are 500,000 foreigners in Tokyo, compared to around 600,000 foreigners in China:

http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2015/01/08/nali-lai-de-ov...

https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/increase-...

Japan has twice as many foreigners as China does, with many of them concentrated in the Tokyo region.

Wow, that's a long time, I was there during your time so we might have met. It's true that everyone seemed to know everyone :) I guess I was just surrounded by this expat community hence why I felt like it was so big.

Weird question but did you know TUN bar? Last time I was in BJ it was closed and I was really sad about it :(

Bars come and go in Beijing, I stopped keeping up with it once I got married :).

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