Minghe Hu

TikTok, the Chinese-owned short video platform popular among American teens, and Douyin, the domestic version of the service, became the world’s second-most downloaded app last year, according to market analyst Sensor Tower. TikTok and Douyin amassed a combined 740 million downloads last year, overtaking Facebook and Messenger, trailing only WhatsApp (which, like the Messenger app, is also owned by Facebook). As one of the rare Chinese-owned services that took off overseas, TikTok’s rise in the US has been met with pressure from lawmakers over national security concerns and alleged censorship.  The scrutiny has come at a time of mounting skepticism in Washington over China’s rising global in

When finance industry employee Ringo Li relocated back to Beijing from Tokyo in 2010, he brought along his first smartphone – an iPhone 3G. Although one of the most advanced handsets available at the time, it was mainly used for text messages and phone calls, and occasional internet-surfing where Wi-fi was available. Life was mostly offline back then. Li would go to restaurants to order food, pay bills with cash and hail a taxi with an outstretched arm standing on the roadside. Fast forward 10 years and Li’s life has completely changed. No longer in finance, he communicates via WeChat and uses apps on his iPhone XS to order food, hail taxis, pay bills and shop. Most of the apps that permeate

As TikTok faces mounting pressure from US lawmakers concerned over national security issues and alleged censorship, its parent company, Bytedance, is encountering a different sort of challenge.  Tencent, China’s largest gaming and social media company, is set to invest $2 billion into Kuaishou, a rival short-video platform that competes with ByteDance-owned Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) in China, according to a report by The Information. Tencent and Kuaishou did not immediately respond to requests for comment. ByteDance declined to comment. Tencent is betting that Kuaishou can outcompete Douyin, which is increasingly challenging Tencent’s social media platforms in terms of user atte

Engineer Kuang Kaiming was assigned to a team developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology for a Shanghai start-up. The company went with two leading open-source software libraries, Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s Pytorch. The decision to adopt US core technology over Chinese alternatives was telling of China’s weakness in basic AI infrastructure.  Despite the country’s success in producing commercially successful AI companies, the open-source coding repositories used to build the technology tend to be American.  Kuang’s company, whose AI product detects abnormalities in X-rays, is by no means alone.  Nearly all small- to medium-sized Chinese AI companies rely on the US-originated o

When Yu Jianjun was looking to name his podcast start-up back in 2012, he looked at how Jeff Bezos chose Amazon after the great South American river and Jack Ma picked Alibaba after a character in the Middle Eastern folk tale collection One Thousand and One Nights. Both Amazon and Alibaba had universal recognition and appeal. So Yu decided to name his company, now China’s most popular podcasting platform, after the great Asian mountain range, the Himalayas, that is home to the highest peak in the world. Ximalaya FM now has about 500 million users, according to a company spokeswoman. That number easily makes it China’s top podcast platform compared with rivals Lizhi FM and Dragonfly FM, with