Global prospects dim for China’s tech champions as great powers clash
SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) – Huawei Technologies’ founder Ren Zhengfei’s global ambitions are marked in bricks and mortar at a new company campus in southern China, where the buildings are replicas from European cities.
Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, the operator of short video app TikTok, has plastered his Beijing headquarters with posters including a cover of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s book “How Google Works”, and has long said he will build a global firm that can compete with U.S. tech giants.
But the two companies which best exemplify China’s ambitions to challenge U.S. tech dominance are now stymied by strains in relations between China and countries including the United States, India, Australia and Britain.
Chinese companies with world-beating technology — including drone-maker DJI, artificial intelligence firms Megvii, SenseTime and iFlytek <002230.SZ>, surveillance camera vendor Hikvision <002415.SZ> and e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba Group <BABA.N> — are also among those losing access to