Pinduoduo made it big with rural users before wealthy Chinese urbanites had even heard of the app. Other companies and investors could follow in its footsteps. Credit: Pinduoduo
A little less than a year ago, when the reality of the pandemic had yet to hit California, I caught up with my friend, Ron Cao, on one of his regular trips to Silicon Valley. Ron is a seasoned venture capitalist who has spent two decades in China, invested in many of the biggest hits of the last decade — Meituan, ByteDance, etc. — and eventually opened up his own fund called Sky9 Capital. Our favorite topics whenever we get together are, of course, cross-border learnings and future opportunities. With China’s growth decelerating, I wanted to know, where was he going to invest? Was he, perhaps, going to try his luck in Southeast Asia like so many other managers we knew? Or how about India — wasn’t that one of the places touted as the next China? “No, Rui,” he replied earnestly, “the next China is China.”
What Ron is referring to is the exponential rise of what I like to call “developing China,” the vast inland area in the central and western parts of the country
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On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
