Think of it as an open-source movement for building better devices. The Chinese firms tend to swap information about what they make and often credit each other with improvements. “They are doing to hardware what the web did for rip/mix/burn or mashup compilations,” according to Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, a hardware engineer who famously was first to hack the Xbox. If the model were extended to cheap laptops, Huang says, “the shanzhai would easily accomplish what the One Laptop Per Child project failed to do” – produce decent educational laptops for under $100