Money Talks: What tech does China want?
Money Talks from The Economist
The Economist
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2021
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The contours of Xi Jinping’s grand plan for the Chinese technology industry are emerging. But with so much damage done to the country’s star firms, host Henry Tricks asks what is driving the crackdown. Can the Communist Party pull off an ambitious overhaul of the data economy without crippling it? And what could the West learn from watching the fallout?
With Don Weinland, The Economist’s China business and finance correspondent; Simon Cox, our China economics editor; Kendra Schaefer, head of tech at Trivium China; and Dr Keyu Jin of the London School of Economics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | China's star tech companies are under assault. They've been hammered with fines, bans and threats. |
| 0:14.5 | Plans to go public have been demolished, share prices squashed and their profits flattened. |
| 0:22.2 | As the smoke clears, the contours of the Communist Party's master plan for its technology industry |
| 0:29.3 | are emerging. |
| 0:39.2 | You're listening to Money Talks from the Economist, our weekly podcast on the markets, |
| 0:45.1 | the economy and the world of business. I'm Henry Tricks, I write The Shumpertor Business |
| 0:51.0 | column and in today's episode, what sort of tech industry does China want? |
| 0:58.5 | What they're doing is laying the foundation of the digital economy over the next 20, |
| 1:04.2 | 30, 40, 50 years. And so, you know, they're breaking some eggs to make an omelet here, |
| 1:10.8 | at least that's Beijing's view. I think this does bring about a great deal of uncertainty. |
| 1:16.7 | However, this is nothing new. This kind of risk is embedded in the Chinese economy, |
| 1:22.8 | but there's also these huge returns. |
| 1:35.2 | The rise of China's $4 trillion tech sector has been one of the country's most dazzling |
| 1:41.8 | achievements of the past two decades. 20 years ago, only 2% of people in China even had access |
| 1:49.6 | to the internet. Its first digital pioneers were dismissed as Silicon Valley copycats. |
| 1:57.2 | Yet today, Alibaba hosts twice as much e-commerce activity as Amazon. With 1.2 billion users, |
| 2:07.1 | WeChat, which is run by 10cent, is the world's most popular super app. And across Europe and |
| 2:14.1 | America, Generation Z is glued to bite dance's TikTok. China's success in fields as diverse |
| 2:23.6 | as digital healthcare, education technology and AI promised that rapid growth would continue |
| 2:31.9 | and even perhaps challenge American supremacy. Which is why President Xi Jinping's ongoing assault |
| 2:40.1 | on many of China's most glittering stars is so striking. The country's hottest tech groups |
| 2:48.0 | have lost at least $1 trillion in combined market capitalization since February. |
... |
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