Advertisement
Inside China Tech | Should we stop calling Didi Chuxing ‘China’s Uber’?
- China is executing new ideas in the broader digital economy, which in turn are being ‘translated’ westwards
- One of the biggest trends in 2019 is the rise of the ‘copy-from-China’ approach by western firms
Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
I stood on stage on Wednesday at the RISE conference in Hong Kong with Abacus editor Ravi Hiranand and Proof of Capital managing partner Edith Yeung to present the 2019 China Internet Report, a comprehensive 100-plus-page document painstakingly put together by a crack team at the South China Morning Post.
Advertisement
During the course of the presentation, I observed that in writing headlines for our stories, we sometimes fall back to describing a Chinese start-up as “China’s (something)”, that “something” usually being a globally known US company.
So it was popular to refer to the raft of Chinese electric-vehicle start-ups that sprouted in the past few years as “China’s Tesla challenger”. We were not alone. Many newsrooms justify this as the only way that global audiences would understand or care to read the story. And in this age of SEO analytics, there are numbers to actually prove this.
In that same vein, there was the use of “China’s Uber” to describe Didi Chuxing. That became increasingly problematic after the latter forced the former to retreat after a subsidy-fuelled bare-knuckle fight. How can you justify this is China’s version of a US business when the American company lost, albeit in a foreign market?
There is also “China’s Airbnb”, “China’s Twitter” and “China’s Twitch”, so the list goes on. There are primarily two reasons for this.
Advertisement
Advertisement