In February, Travis Kalanick, Uber chief executive, met Cheng Wei, chairman of the Chinese ride-hailing app Didi Dache, in Mr Cheng’s Beijing office. But that is just about the only detail of the encounter on which the two companies can agree.
Mr Cheng says Mr Kalanick and his team were dripping with condescension. “We could tell from the way they looked at us — they thought of us as just another local taxi app from Sichuan,” he told an audience at the Yabuli summit, an internet forum, held last weekend.
He says Mr Kalanick ended with an ultimatum: sell us 40 per cent of your company or else face “embarrassing defeat” in a war with Uber.