Goodbye to shanzhai: China’s web has kicked its copycat habit

At a recent meeting about copyrights in China, State Internet Information Office VP Peng Bo made a statement that would have sounded ridiculous even a few years ago: “China is moving towards saying goodbye to shanzhai and becoming a fast-lane innovative nation.” Then he doubled-down: “This nation that once bore the stain of a shanzhai reputation is becoming a globally-renowned innovator.”

Shanzhai is the Chinese term for “knock-off” or “copycat.” And while Peng may be speaking a bit soon to accurately describe China as a whole, when it comes to the internet, he’s actually right.

Just a few years ago, shanzhai was a common term that anyone following the Chinese tech scene would have been familiar with. Cheap knock-off shanzhai phones dominated China’s mobile market, and the recipe for success on China’s web was still primarily C2C: copy to China. In fact, most of China’s major internet companies today can trace their lineage back to a time when their sites were pretty obvious clones of popular foreign sites. Baidu was aping Google’s clean search aesthetic. Renren looked pretty much identical to Facebook. Tencent got its start copying early chat apps like AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ (in fact, QQ’s original name was the more obviously-shanzhai OICQ). You get the picture.

See: Scammers in China Exploit Apple to Turn Fake iPhones into Real Ones

But these days, the term shanzhai just doesn’t apply to China’s web as much. All of the companies listed above have grown into innovators, with products and services deeply different from (and sometimes superior to) those offered by the companies they once copied. And even outside of the major players, obvious copies and weak knockoffs seem to be far less common in the Chinese market than they were a few years ago.

That’s a claim that’s tough to back up with ironclad data, of course, but Tech in Asia‘s own site archives do offer at least a little evidence to that end. Out of curiosity, I went back to look at our shanzhai tag to see if there were any interesting patterns. I found one:

Since our 2012 rebrand to Tech in Asia, it seems we’ve been talking about shanzhai less and less each year, despite the fact that our staff and the overall number of articles we write every day has grown significantly during that same period. Granted, there are a lot of reasons why our coverage may have trended away from shanzhai, and not all of them are related to the realities of the Chinese market. But the data certainly seems to support what Peng Bo and many China internet watchers the world over are saying: China’s internet industry is less and less focused on copying, and more focused on creating.

That’s not to say there isn’t still plenty of copying going on, of course. If you’re looking for examples of shanzhai culture persisting on the Chinese web, they’re still there to be found. You won’t even have to look very far. But where they once used to be the norm, these days they’re becoming the exception. If you look at China’s most popular websites and services today, there’s lots of innovation on display.

For example: Baidu’s box computing search tech is way ahead of anything similar Google has to offer. WeChat’s payment and games integration make it stand out compared to similar apps around the globe. Alibaba’s Taobao offers a kind of shopping experience I don’t think you’ll find anywhere else. Xiaomi is making global waves both through its surprisingly-good-for-the-price phones and the innovative ways it is marketing them. The days when a Chinese internet company could be fairly described as “the Facebook of China” or “the Youtube of China” are long gone, even if lazy editors still use comparisons like that all the time to get attention.

And of course, I haven’t even mentioned any of the many innovative Chinese startups we’ve seen pop up over the last few years.