Are China’s internet titans about to conquer the world? Listen to the talk in Beijing and in some circles in the west and the triumph of Chinese tech is all but certain. At the very least it will compete on an equal footing with the world-beating incumbents headquartered in Silicon Valley.
Take Richard Liu. The founder and chief executive of JD.com, China’s second-largest e-commerce company and the world’s third-largest internet company by revenue, believes his business and competitors such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu will one day pose a serious challenge to the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon — but not for at least another decade.
Instrumental in this is the support of the Chinese state. To a greater or lesser extent, all of China’s big and successful internet companies have benefited from the communist party’s efforts to exclude Silicon Valley’s finest. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are all blocked in China.