booting off Uber? Have you ever used Uber and its local competitor Didi in China? I've used both multiple times. The competition was just too much, both companies were losing money at a pace that's not sustainable. The Uber China business was acquired, and in return Uber received cash and stakes in Didi.
I don’t think you can claim definitively that that is why Uber lost. Uber lost in other markets too, like in Southeast Asia.
I don’t think anyone can win this argument with you since you can always claim that the Chinese government favors local companies, so therefore ____ lost.
But at least I can give some counterpoints: Tesla hasn’t lost in China.
Could you suggest how to use Alipay or WechatPay as a foreigner without a local bank account?
Things like city bikes are great and very convenient. In Kaohsiung it used docking stations and a metro card. From what I hear, in China they are dockless, and use mobile apps (which means an expensive roaming data plan) and Chinese payments. These may be convenient for locals, but very user-unfriendly to foreigners. Locals probably have their routine figured out, whereas foreigners are probably going to visit new places, and will therefore use bicycles more.
I was able to link my foreign amex to wechatpay a year or two ago. I couldn't deposit money into it, but it let me at least open a wechatpay wallet. Then I could use red envelopes from acquaintances and give them the cash equivalent.
This may not work for more than street-food-level expenses though.
Alipay actually has expanded across the world - you can register an account with a normal EU credit card or bank account, and even pay with AliPay at many stores in Europe (even in cash-loving Germany DM is accepting it)
When I was there last year, many vendors outright refused cash. Perhaps it would have been different if I were looking actually serious about buying in quantity.
Huawei have contracts from the govt just like lots of the American tech companies. And speaking of govt sponsorship, Samsung is definitely one of them, if you know the history about memory chips competition and how they become one of the monopolies.
Samsung, a monopoly? I don't know why anyone would say that unless you are a mainlander Chinese/Taiwanese.
And what gov't contracts? Unlike what China is doing today, there was no such overt protectionist gov't policies implemented here. Much of the demand for tech products and R&D were driven by the cold war between the WW2 and the fall of Berlin Wall. The stylized fact that there are now fewer than a few US memory makers, namely Micron and Intel, from two dozens in the 70's and 80's demonstrates how little the gov't contract has done to "protect" the industry.
China's policy of forcing foreign companies to give up their IP for access to domestic market and seeding unlimited gov't subsidy is based on the Japanese model in the 80's. Their model however fell apart as Japan's economy declined and the Japanese companies focused on quality, not on mass manufacturing to compete with emerging South Korean competitors like Samsung.
Unlike Japan's large domestic market, South Korea had very little market of their own and was geared toward purely for export. It didn't coerce foreign companies to drop all their patent lawsuits or future lawsuit like the Chinese gov't reportedly demanded Samsung and SK Hynix last week.
Needlessly to say, equating China's outright IP theft to the industry policy of the US or South Korea is a bit asinine.
>>> More and more Chinese citizens are travelling abroad yet their beliefs in the "Chinese system" only gets re-affirmed by mistakenly thinking that China's success is completely dependent on authoritarianism
Not true, most of the well educated people won't have this simplified view of any political system. It's actually the reverse you see very common in the Western media, that China being a non-democratic nation, is an evil and destined to fail.
