News on the Internet & Tech Industry in China

Lei’s local launch
Kingsoft spin-off soars in Shanghai trading debut, in another STAR debut
Nov 29, 2019 (WiC 476)

Funny how life doesn’t turn out the way you think it will. Just ask Lei Jun, one of China’s most famous entrepreneurs. When Lei was planning last year to list Xiaomi, a smartphone maker he founded in 2010, he was confident of achieving a ...

Paying up
Kuaishou spends big on CCTV’s Spring Festival gala
Nov 29, 2019 (WiC 476)

Super Bowl Sunday is a day when brands pay millions of dollars for the opportunity to make an impression with consumers. The average cost of a 30-second TV ad spot climbed to $5.2 million in 2018. There is an even more watched televised event ...

Answer this
Baidu faces Magi, a new challenger in search
Nov 29, 2019 (WiC 476)

US scientist Vannevar Bush was the first person to come up with the idea of a search engine. In an article published in The Atlantic magazine in 1945, he envisaged a mechanised device called Memex, on which all books, records and communications ...

Troubled relaunch
Why Didi faced a backlash from female users
Nov 15, 2019 (WiC 474)

A survey in the China Youth Daily found that over 50% of women had experienced some kind of inappropriate touching while using buses and trains. The problem led to experiments with women-only buses and train carriages. And last week Didi ...

Full speed ahead
Huawei the big winner as China celebrates its commercial launch of 5G
Nov 8, 2019 (WiC 473)

Almost 20 years ago, when European governments were selling 3G licences for tens of billions of dollars, China was just beginning to make its way in 2G telecommunications. Its government only gave out a trio of 3G licences a decade later, after ...

Head east, and then go west?
AliExpress targets overseas sales, with big advances into Eastern Europe
Nov 8, 2019 (WiC 473)

This Saturday marks the 30th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. That night, thousands of jubilant East Germans poured into West Berlin in search of the consumer freedoms they had only seen on their TVs. The influx ...

Game not on
More arrests in fresh setback for Kingnet
Nov 8, 2019 (WiC 473)

The online game developer Kingnet has always been a bit creative. For example, in 2015 when there was a freeze on new IPOs, it started trading on the Shenzhen stock exchange by exchanging shares with a shoe company already listed on the bourse ...

Following the fanju
What an annual dinner in Wuzhen says about China’s tech tycoons
Nov 1, 2019 (WiC 472)

In China a business dinner is referred to as a fanju (饭局). The first character fan (饭) means rice and is straight forward enough. But the second, ju (局), has more complex cultural connotations. Breaking down the ...

Very educational
Bytedance seeks Indian image overhaul
Nov 1, 2019 (WiC 472)

The Chinese video sharing app TikTok has been variously accused of broadcasting pornography; spreading propaganda from the terror group ISIS; and also of stealing personal data from its users, many of whom are minors. So it’s not surprising ...

Musical chairs
Tencent sets record with Jay Chou’s single but threat from Alibaba lurks
Sep 27, 2019 (WiC 468)

In the 1990s, the folk song My Old Classmate was so popular in China that it was often compared with the Beatles classic Yesterday. With lyrics detailing a young man’s recollections of a girl he shared a desk with at high ...

Get the Week in China apps
Home|Current Issue|About Us|Contact Us|Data Privacy Policy

©2009-2021 Week in China is published weekly by ChinTell Limited, a company based in Hong Kong. All rights reserved.