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Comment by nerdsniper | Hacker News Reader

The founders are Chinese citizens, and pressure was applied to the founders personally. Thus Singapore was given room to save face re: sovereignty.

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> After a $75 million fundraising round led by U.S. venture firm Benchmark in May 2025, Manus shut its China offices in July, laying off dozens of employees. It then moved its operations to Singapore.

The company itself was based in mainland China less than 12 months ago.

Yeah if an American tech firm had been working in the US for 5 years and then tried to close all US offices down and move its IPs and tech to a different country so that it can sell out to Alibaba or Bytedance, I'm sure the US would react in the same exact way.

The sinophobia in this thread is ridiculous. Whether you agree or disagree with what China is doing, nothing is happening that wouldn't also happen in the US.

What sinophobia? I haven't seen anyone here talking shit about chinese indivuduals. Or are they trashing China (the nation-state)? If we count that as xenophobia, is any unjust criticism of USA "americanphobia"? If so, fine, but I'd rather not anthropomorphize megacorps with monopolies on violence.

You don't think it's possible that Japanophobia could fuel criticisms of Nintendo? Or that Russophobia could fuel criticisms against a Russian company?

You don't need to anthropomorphize anything.

One thing is to say that some of the comments may be motivated by xenophobia (could be true, but I'm no psychic, and you likely aren't either), another is to use the criticisms as proof of xenophobia.

Since you mentioned Nintendo, do you think the many criticisms(fair or otherwise) against Nintendo and their games are due to Japanophobia?

I think its fairly clear that, when talking bad about China, they are focusing on its goverment, not its people nor ethnicities.

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