Inside Tencent's "Influence Empire," with Bloomberg's Lulu Chen
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2023
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Lulu Chen, who has reported on tech in China for over a decade and is the author of the book Influence Empire: The Inside Story of Tencent and China's Tech Ambition. It's a fascinating look at not only Tencent but at the overall internet sector in China, focusing on the travails and the triumphs of some of the most consequential Chinese internet entrepreneurs.
5:31 – Motivation for and background of Influence Empire
10:15 – Ma Huateng and Martin Lau at Tencent
19:56 – How the Chinese internet sector went from copying to innovating
30:59 – Cutthroat company cultures
33:20 – What made Allen Zhang successful?
37:25 – The Tencent-Meituan food delivery coup
45:21 – Tencent’s position in the online game industry
51:58 – Understanding China’s 2020-2022 tech crackdown
A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Lulu: The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters by Gay Talese
Kaiser: Cunk on Earth on Netflix
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a week of discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. |
| 0:15.7 | Subscribe to access from the China Project to get, well, access. Access to not only our great daily newsletter, |
| 0:21.5 | but to all the original writing on our website at theChinaproject.com. We've got reported stories, |
| 0:27.5 | essays and editorials, create explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing |
| 0:32.9 | library of podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, |
| 0:39.5 | from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China's Xinjiang region, |
| 0:44.0 | to Beijing's ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. |
| 0:50.0 | It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. |
| 0:56.2 | We cover China with neither fear nor favor. |
| 0:59.5 | I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. |
| 1:03.0 | This week on Cineka, I am delighted to welcome Lulu Chen, a Hong Kong-based reporter for Bloomberg, |
| 1:09.1 | who has been covering the tech beat in China for over a decade. |
| 1:12.5 | She is the author of a terrific book about one of China's most important and most successful internet companies, |
| 1:19.2 | Tencent, best known certainly among cynical listeners for its hugely popular, truly indispensable super app, |
| 1:26.0 | WeChat, or Weishin, but also for its massive portfolio |
| 1:30.5 | of game companies and other investments around the internet and around the world, including |
| 1:35.4 | many of China's most popular online to offline services, and for the still very, very popular |
| 1:41.2 | chat messenger QQ, also for its music streaming services and its online |
| 1:45.9 | literature and much else. With a market cap yesterday of 425 billion U.S. dollars, it is easily one of the |
| 1:54.5 | most valuable internet companies in the world. The book is called Influence Empire, the inside |
| 2:00.5 | story of Tencent and China's tech ambition. |
| 2:04.1 | And for me, at least, it's right up there among the very best books that I've read about |
... |
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