Avoiding the sentiment of the other comments here (which are not completely confusing, but nonetheless a little over my head), I have a practical question:

How does one relate to and incentivize the Chinese people, then? Where are good places to start learning more?

Context/example:

I'm tentatively interested in approaching China from a "hobbyist with a tiny bit of money" standpoint. I want to do limited runs (3 to 4 zeros, or if circumstances allow, less!) of small handheld electronic devices - PCB, thin removable enclosure, possibly some buttons/keys on the front.

Plastic caps directly over tactile buttons is cheap and compact, but rubber-dome systems seem to have a higher-quality finish. The challenge here is that rubber-dome "mats" are likely expensive to tool for, while sticking the dome under a plastic cap means extra thickness. I'd need to find out what my options are here (if I could achieve making a small keyboard, with full key-click - like the Psion Series 5 or HP palmtops - that would be amazing).

As a separate thing, I'm also really fascinated by the chip-on-board techniques used to manufacture credit-card-thin solar calculators. It would be amazingly fun to be able to play with those manufacturing techniques, but going on the cheapness and sheer numbers of devices like this out in the wild (and the fact that I'm seeing the same designs on eBay as I saw in electronics catalogues from 1999!), it seems reasonable to think that the tooling to make these is probably eye-watering, sadly. But I don't know.

I'm not asking for solutions or answers to these problems/questions here (although if anyone wants to comment...); they're just for context. My point is that I have no idea how or where to start in terms of contacting people and going through all the machinery; I know the volume I can promise is effectively nil, and I read this article from the standpoint of knowing I have an extra job of convincing to do because of that.

I also recently read https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/ (found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138028; replies say the main focus of the (2012) article is outdated; I'm curious if the bits I'm quoting are relevant). It's a transcript of a talk about some teething problems with trying to do runs of hardware to run KDE on. It reads

> ... the manufacturers are "all about volume" ...

and

> Because the volume of devices that [Make Play Live] could promise to sell was fairly low, the manufacturer had little interest in consulting or even notifying the company about the changes.

and

> In the Q&A session, Seigo further explained some of the problems that MPL had run into. Unless it can promise a quarter of a million (or some other six-digit number) of units, MPL won't be able to get any input into the process.

This info will likely be old hat to some. But I begin to wonder that whoever agrees to do small production runs will just be amusedly humoring me - because if the speaker of the transcripted talk linked above said '"Our order is a rounding error"'... what does that make my run? (Would it even need a receipt? :P)

So I'm interested to understand Chinese culture more - particularly with manufacturing, and in terms of learning more about the tech scene - so I know how and where and the best place(s) to jump in.

I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138739 a couple of days ago; to quote:

> ... [T]he most impressive I've seen were some calculators I saw in Shenzhen a few years ago which looked like simple solar-powered 4-function ones, but were actually programmable and had several tens of KB of memory. Trying to use that functionality with a 8-digit 7-segment display, however, was quite challenging.

That's awesome. That's the sort of thing I mean by "scene" and what I want to learn tons more about.