China's Tech Crackdown
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is China's behavior towards its innovators separating the country further from the world? That's the question on everybody's mind, as the Chinese authorities continue to exert their political power over the country's rising tech companies. George Magnus, associate at the China Centre at Oxford University warns that despite increasing western interest in the Chinese market, foreign investors should be wary about political clampdowns on companies. But Angela Zhang at the University of Hong Kong, argues some of the government's actions could be seen simply as prudent regulatory moves against the power of Big Tech. And Ker Gibbs, Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, explains how businesses are navigating this intersection between politics and commerce.
Producer: Frey Lindsay.
(Picture: Logo of Didi Chuxing, China's largest ride-hailing company. Picture credit: Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, the Chinese |
| 0:06.2 | crackdown that's sending investors scurrying. The clabdown that's been quite blatantly going on |
| 0:13.1 | reminds us really about the random and almost rogue nature of initiatives which the Chinese |
| 0:19.8 | government are prone to make. |
| 0:21.7 | What investors don't know is which firms may be next in line. |
| 0:26.2 | Tencent, Didi, Alibaba, the biggest names in Chinese tech, are under regulatory fire. |
| 0:32.2 | But is this all brutal state control by China, or is it just good governance? |
| 0:37.0 | China is following an international trend of ringing in big tech, |
| 0:41.6 | where you are also seeing in Europe and the United States, |
| 0:44.1 | because these companies do pose a lot of regulatory problems for a society. |
| 0:49.7 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:55.8 | It has been a tough few weeks for China's tech firms. |
| 0:59.8 | Online gaming is spiritual opium. That at least is the view of one Chinese state media outlet. |
| 1:07.0 | And the comment has invested. Chinese regulators telling an entire for-profit industry that it needs to start operating like a non-profit. |
| 1:15.5 | The Chinese government crackdown is causing so much pain for its own companies. |
| 1:19.7 | Why are they doing it? |
| 1:21.1 | Yes, in the last couple of weeks, we've had rumors of regulatory clampdowns on the firm Tencent. |
| 1:26.6 | That was after Chinese state media branded online |
| 1:29.4 | video games spiritual opium. A pretty scary indication, some thought. The state council has also banned |
| 1:36.5 | all private tutoring firms. It's a massive sector in China. And before that, China's internet |
| 1:42.1 | regulator has ordered online stores to block sales by its leading ride-hailing firm, Didi, saying it was illegally collecting users' personal data. |
| 1:51.8 | As the Hong Kong law professor Angela Zhang explains, this came just two days after Didi Global launched a $68 billion listing on the New York Stock Exchange. |
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