In the short but storied history of China’s tech titans, few chapters inspire more renown than a five-year period known as the War of a Thousand Groupons. The conflict began in 2008, with the launch of the American group-discount platform. In Silicon Valley, Groupon created a sensation, soaring to a valuation of more than $1 billion in just 16 months — the quickest pace ever.  Techies were drooling in China too, where a bargain-sensitive consumer market seemed tailor-made for such a platform. Investment capital flooded into the sector, propping up dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of start-ups. By the time of Groupon’s $16 billion IPO in 2011, there were 5,000 group-discount copycats duking it out in the Middle Kingdom.  “For these gladiators, no dirty trick or underhanded maneuver was out of bounds,” wrote former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, in his book, AI Superpowers. “They deployed tactics that would make Uber founder Travis Kalanick blush.”&