In our defence :) What are you comparing Shenzhen to?

Europe is a continent, Shenzhen is a city. Type `size of europe'[0] into Google and you get:

Europe
Continent
Population: 743.1 million (2015)
Area: 10.18 million km²

(By way of comparison, China is ~ 9.6 million km²)

You have to compare a specific place in Europe to Shenzhen. Norway has the highest penetration on EVs in the world, for instance[1] so what if you compared Shenzhen with Oslo? The famous London black cab is going electric[2]. Here in Ireland we have been using contactless debit transactions for years in practically every place–when a retail spot doesn't support it you kind of look at them as if they're from the past[3]. By way of example, at a recent intimate book launch I went to by a boutique publisher they used a portable handheld card swiper because people don't necessarily carry cash and it would be too inconvenient to ask them to go to an ATM.

Yes, I think the pace of innovation in Europe could be quicker but both the LHC[4] and ITER[5] are based in Europe (France) which is kind of amazing because there are 43 other countries in the world _bigger_ than France and France is only the second largest[6] country in Europe (taking into account European Russia[7] which dwarfs it).

I sometimes think people forget both how small Europe is and how varied both culturally and developmentally–from the Arctic Circle in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, from the Atlantic in the West to the Urals and Black Sea in the East. When people say Europe sometimes they mean the EU which is not the same thing at all! There are 47 states that make up the Council of Europe[8], there are 28 in the EU give or take a Brexit. When (if?) the UK leaves the EU it'll still be bound by the European Court for Human Rights[9]! Sometimes when people say Europe they might actually be referring to Western Europe which is historically inaccurate and a bit culturally myopic to put it kindly.

TL;DR–comparing the whole of Europe to a city is bonkers.

edit: added links to the LHC and ITER :)

[0] https://www.google.ie/search?q=size+of+europe

[1] https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/03/ev-hybrid-car-sales-norw...

“Pure electric cars and hybrids accounted for 52 percent of all new car sales in 2017 in Norway against 40 percent in 2016, the independent Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.”

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16704060/london-zero-emis...

[3] http://www.moneyguideireland.com/contactless-payments-in-ire...

[4] https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider

[5] https://www.iter.org/factsfigures

[6] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia

“Russia is not proportionately populated between its larger Asian portion, which contains about 23% of the country's population, and its smaller European portion, which contains about 77%. The European portion contains about 110 million people out of Russia's total population of about 144 million in an area covering nearly 4,000,000 km2 (1,500,000 sq mi); (making it by far the largest European country) an average of 27.5 persons per km2 (70 per sq mi).”

[8] https://www.coe.int/en/web/about-us/structure

[9] http://www.e-ir.info/2017/07/27/implications-of-brexit-for-t...