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A year into China’s tech crackdown, the sky is no longer the limit for China’s Big Tech
- Under a forceful clampdown by Beijing, China’s tech giants fell in line with new national priorities that emphasised hard technologies and common prosperity
- As Big Tech companies came under pressure to reform their business models, an era of exceptional growth drew to a close
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This year will go down as a tough period for Chinese technology firms, as Beijing moved to exert control over the once-freewheeling sector. In the second of a four-part series, the South China Morning Post looks at how 2021 became the watershed moment in the development of China’s Big Tech companies. The first part is here.
In early July, the head of ByteDance’s gaming studio outlined an ambitious plan to rival Nintendo and Activision Blizzard, after hiring 3,000 programmers and artists to work for his Nuverse unit, in a display of the company’s mantra to “take initiative and push boundaries”.
Outside Shanghai on the midsummer day that Yan Shou spoke, a chill was already blowing through China’s technology industry, as regulators across multiple disciplines from cybersecurity to taxation were stepping in to cool the feverish growth of the world’s largest internet-related ecosystem, ring-fencing how data collected from internet shoppers, readers, and vloggers could be used to nourish other businesses.
Within four months, ByteDance would reorganise its sprawling operations serving 1.9 billion monthly active users into six business units, including Nuverse in the game division. Founder Zhang Yiming exited the company’s board after handing over the daily running of the world’s most valuable start-up – and only hectocorn – to his co-founder.
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