WeChat, Tencent’s mobile platform, is now reaching 900 million users in China, and in four year time it has become an indispensable tool for anybody living in the country, says WeChat expert Matthew Brennan at InTheBlack. “WeChat is not a social media. Think of it as an operating system for your life in China’,” says Brennan.Read More →

The US is moving from a trade war on commodities towards tech firms like ZTE and Huawei, trying to get a foothold with for example 5G into the US, says economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® in the Nikkei Asian Review. “I think there probably is a desire to try and do what can be done to retard the progress of the Chinese firms in that.”Read More →

The trade war, triggered off by US president Donald Trump, is about much more than trading commodities. The real struggle is about technical leadership between China and the US, says leading economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® to the Los Angeles Times.Read More →

After local regulations in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing to organize tests with self-driving cars, China’s central government now has issued national rules to streamline those tests, writes Shanghai-based lawyer Mark Schaub at the China Law Insight.Read More →

China has been leapfrogging into the digitization of the consumer industry but is now moving into the established manufacturing too. Economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® looks at the progress, and potential barriers for robotizing China’s factories. Arthur Kroeber is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau.Read More →

Startups are mostly at the mercy of quasi-monopolies like Facebook, Google, Tencent or Alibaba. William Bao Bean, managing director of Shanghai-based SOSV tells in this elevator talk how his no.1 accelerator helps them to avoid spending money on those giants to get access to an audience, creating a win-win situation.Read More →

Shanghai-based lawyer Mark Schaub dives further into the legal consequences of self-driving cars. Big data – generated by cars – are not the same as oil, as some argue, he says. Privacy is a key issue, that did not matter to oil, he writes at the China Law Insight.Read More →

Tencent’s WeChat has been a winner in China in terms of users but might even beat its Western competitors in terms of functionality, writes WeChat analyst Matthew Brennan at the China Channel. The bigger question is will the tech giants outside China ever be able to catch up?Read More →