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Vietnam, with about 92 million people, is smaller in population than China’s most populous province, Guangdong, with its 104 million. The allegory in Vietnam is catch up and adapt. There isn’t a global agenda. That has allowed Vietnamese users to reap the rewards of the two tech giants – both Silicon Valley and China’s web companies – but that’s at the cost of not building giants of its own. Vietnamese social media and search startups struggle to compete with Facebook and Google with no government protection, financing, or encouragement. There are two sides to this coin. In China, the result is a lot of space for startups and mega-tech companies like Baidu to build for the local population. But they sacrifice a connection to the world. In Vietnam, startups have to compete with outsiders while also getting a little more globally connected – although many would argue people here are still very isolated. The end result may be that some Chinese tech successes are inflated because they have no “real” competitors beyond their borders; and Vietnamese startups are stunted because they can’t out-execute the big guys or regional startups who expand into the country. But the truth is, it’s a very hard comparison. Although they’re run under relatively similar governments, the scale alone puts everything out of proportion. Chinese companies immediately have access to a huge population while also competing with a host of other fellow Chinese companies. How they triumph over these odds is what really fascinates me.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, comment below at your leisure.

1. It’s debatable if the Great Firewall has helped those sites, or if better localization would’ve been enough for them to win. For example, Renren was beating Facebook in China before Facebook was even blocked.