Rocker and political analyst Kaiser Kuo looks at how China – often wrongly – is perceived in the West in an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC. While the country has gone in less than a generation through a massive upgrade of its hardware, the software is often lagging behind, he says.Read More →

China’s automotive industry has traditionally taken a backseat compared to global competitors, but is planning a major overtake when it comes to pushing startups on self-driving, says China lawyer Mark Schaub in the Asia Nikkei. “In China, if you always wait till the law comes into effect, you are six months to a year behind what the regulators are saying,” Schaub said.Read More →

Douyin – the Chinese name of Tiktok – became a runaway success as a short-video platform in China. Tech watcher Matthew Brennan looks in his book ‘Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance’ at the playbook Bytedance used for their lift-off before they took the platform global. An excerpt from Techcrunch.Read More →

Digital insurance has become one of the post-corona winners in China, says Rupert Hoogewerf, chief researcher of the Hurun China Rich List as his firm published the first list of top-10 digital insurers, according to Asia One.  Health insurance was one of the key winners, he says.Read More →

In a wide-ranging interview with the South China Morning Post, China veteran Kaiser Kuo explains why – unlike many others – he did not become a China-whiner, also not after he returned in 2016 to the US. He is now a leading voice on the relations between China and the US, without taking sides for either country.Read More →

Observers got alerted when internet giant Tencent said it wanted to take search engine Sogou private, even tough Soguo is smaller than market leader Baidu. Marketing specialist Ashley Dudarenok explains to KR-Asia why the move makes sense, “Sogou lacks Baidu’s larger market share but possesses better search technology and algorithms, allowing for better user experience,” she says.Read More →

China is home to four out of five largest unicorns – startups valued over one billion US dollars, second to the US, says the latest report by the Hurun Global Unicorn Index, published on Tuesday.  “The rest of the world needs to wake up to providing an ecosystem that allows unicorns to flourish,” says Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun report to the South China Morning Post.Read More →

Donald Trump’s plan to ban Tiktok from the US is straight-up Sinophobia, says former Baidu communications director Kaiser Kuo to Slate. Most successful apps in China will not make a decent following among consumers in the rest of the world, he argues, just because they are too much adjusted to China’s internet rules and customs, he adds.Read More →