China is right The world doesn’t need Silicon Valley.
Ever since the Chinese Government banned Facebook in 2009, Mark Zuckerberg has been making annual trips there attempting to persuade its leaders to let his company back in. He learned Mandarin and jogged through the smog-filled streets of Beijing to show how much he loved the country. Facebook even created new tools to allow China to do something that goes against Facebook’s founding principles — censor content.
But the Chinese haven’t obliged. They saw no advantages in letting a foreign company dominate their technology industry. China also blocked Google, Twitter, and Netflix and raised enough obstacles to force Uber out.
Chinese technology companies are now amongst the most valuable — and innovative — in the world. Facebook’s Chinese competitor, Tencent, eclipsed it in market capitalization in November, crossing the $500 billion mark. Tencent’s social-media platform, WeChat, enables bill payment, taxi ordering, and hotel booking while chatting with friends; it is so far ahead in innovation that Facebook may be copying its features. Other Chinese companies, such as Alibaba, Baidu, and DJI, are racing ahead in e-commerce, logistics, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and drone technologies. These companies are gearing up to challenge Silicon Valley itself.
The protectionism that economists have long decried, which favors domestic supplies of physical goods and services, limits competition and thereby the incentive to innovate and evolve. It creates monopolies, raises costs, and stifles a country’s competitiveness and productivity. But this is not a problem in the Internet world.
0