Whether China's Digital Society Will Clash With The West's Isn't Really Relevant

China is already its own "digital civilization." Will it clash with the West?

Years ago, I watched a compilation of short films called 10 Minutes Older, which looked at different aspects of time. One film was titled 10,000 Years Older and showed a prehistoric Brazilian tribe meeting modern civilization - effectively jumping through 10,000 years in 10 minutes.

Last month, as I joined the first TechCrunch conference in Shenzhen, it felt like I'd travelled 10,000 miles in 10 meters: entering a vastly developed civilization that has been almost unknown to outsiders.

Seeing China With Fresh Eyes

Working in and with China since 2005, it was interesting to observe how novel China's tech scene was to foreign visitors new to the country. They listened to local industry heavyweights, almost entirely unknown overseas. Who are the Justin Timberlake and Rihanna of China? It’s the same issue in tech. Yet, China is the world’s second largest country for tech unicorns, and the leader for hardware unicorns.

An impressive number of unicorns (private companies valued at $1 billion or more) were on stage, with a hardware slant: Mobike and Ofo (bike sharing), Nio (electric vehicles), Tink Labs (mobile devices for hotel guests) Huami (wearables), Ninebot (the new owner of Segway)...

The odd thing is that while most U.S. unicorn devices and services are used worldwide, most foreigners have likely never used these massively successful Chinese products. Yes, many non-Chinese have heard of WeChat -- Facebook and others diligently study it -- but unless you experience it yourself it suffers from the “Not Used Here” syndrome: why would people care about something they don’t use?

And it's the "Not Used Here" syndrome that prevents the West from learning from Chinese innovations.

The issue isn't just digital civilizations growing a world apart, but also the extreme information asymmetry between China and the rest of the world -- the U.S. in particular.

A Clash Of Civilizations

Will collisions happen? In Samuel Huntington’s view of the world, civilizations are based mostly on religions and clashes happen at frontier states. What we see today is the emergence of a new geography of digital influences. For instance: messaging apps WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, and Kakao dominate different territories. Payment solutions are spreading in the same way, piggybacking sometimes on messaging apps, sometimes on devices.

Some countries, like China and its Great Firewall, have erected trade barriers; some managed to defend themselves with innovation, like South Korea where Naver still rules online search; and others are small markets with enough language or ecosystem differences to evolve their own local champions out of sight, in their own way or like “time machines.”

More on Forbes: South Korea's Newest Browser Is Beautifully Designed, But Will Anyone Use It?

But let’s face it, most countries have turned into digital colonies: their web and mobile dollars leave to support Silicon Valley salaries and profits, or are parked in a tax haven, waiting for a break to be repatriated. Nothing new under the sun of global business, except the goods are often intangible and almost free to distribute.

There Are No Nations

Do those battles actually matter? Are nations the right model? Maybe the right view is the one of the chairman character in the 1976 movie Network: “There are no nations. […] There is no west. […] We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies. The world is a college of corporations.”

True enough: the money that finances all these upstarts, whether it comes from venture capital or stock markets, is an intricate web of pension funds, sovereign funds, family offices and corporations trickling down to the very first stages of startup financing, aiming for financial returns. Tencent and Alibaba are prime examples: South Africa’s Naspers owns 33% of Tencent (it represents most of Naspers’s value), while Japan’s Softbank owns 32.4% and Altaba (fka Yahoo) 15% of Alibaba.

Yet, despite this bird-eye view, the daily reality is made up of entrepreneurs and users. Innovation is not a linear path with some ahead and some behind; it's more like parallel universes, whose paths sometimes intersect. Some companies might expand overseas -- like Mobike and Ofo are doing now -- and export their innovation; some might “converge” (be copied) through “innovation arbitrage,” like Facebook is doing with WeChat. Finally, some innovations might never be experienced beyond their borders like some of Japan’s so-called “Galapagos Syndrome” companies.

Ideas and money do not have a nationality, but entrepreneurs have to select their target users, wherever they are.

Circling back to the event, investors who joined could see the value in finding “proven” models, and the potential of copy-from-China. I felt strongly we were straddling two civilizations, and that the play was already written, just waiting for its actors. Maybe all the world's a stage, and startups and investors merely players.