Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin - make making them all submit to political priorities:

Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring

Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba

Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting

Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring.

Tencent gaming: restricted youth gaming froze approvals

NetEase and gaming companies: licence freeze stopped game companies from shipping games.

Meituan: fined Meituan and forced changes to its labour and platform model.

Huya/DouYu: blocked Tencent’s game-streaming merger, stopping commercial consolidation in a major entertainment market.

Boss Zhipin / Full Truck Alliance: froze new users after listging in the US

Crypto companbies: banned crypto trading and mining, forcing exchanges offshore.

Think it's not happening to the US?

tourism - people afraid to visit

tariffs - wrecking ball to all businesses

defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

internet clouds - Greenland made Europe decide that the US clouds can't be trusted, now sovereign computing matters and MS/AWS/Google are feeling it

finance - no one trusts the US not to turn people into "non members of global society" by banning them from visa and credit card and banking systems

It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin". Is it from a newsletter or something?

Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.

> It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin".

They're different things. Just like you can be the most famous actor or singer and still be poor. Being popular, having good products and actually making money is not the same.

And it's all relative. Today if NASDAQ dropped 20% the world would declare it in ruins. Are the companies still "alive"? Yes.

> Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.

Not true. A lot of them e.g. the public listed 1s have reported increased competition and reduced margins.

> if NASDAQ dropped 20%

If NASDAQ dropped 20%, it would have returned to the level last seen three months ago, in March 2026. Calling that "in ruins" would be a pretty big stretch.

Yet that is how it would be described if it dropped 20%

To pick one example, OP talked about meituan like they haven't seen multiple meituan delivery riders per block every time they take a walk. It strains credibility. Why do they even know the name if they don't see that? Its not like they operate in America.

> Why do they even know the name if they don't see that?

We're in the age of the Internet. You don't have to be physically there to see anything. They could have just read it on the news, saw social media videos, etc?

Ok, but it's still weird to know one thing about all of these companies and all of those single things add up to a narrative. I would be questioning my media sources if that was the knowledge I was fed.

From my perspective curtailing Ant's plans was positive regulatory action.

Political priorities and good governance is why we have government.

Seems like a pretty terrible idea in hindsight, destroying private lending, given how desperately the government is trying and failing to raise domestic consumption now.

The private lending held back involved a) high interest rates b) unconventional methods of governance/collections which would be somewhat decoupled from Ant's lending platform down to the local level of collections.

An example of the ugly side of China private lending is what is termed "flesh loans". A young girl is forced to have nude pictures taken of her to secure her high interest loan repayment. Ant was going to put hundreds of billions in capital backing loans that had loosely controlled and often unethical/violent collections system.

Yes, curtailing loads of easy capital can be at odds with pressing domestic consumption growth. In this case, I think the government made a tough but decent decision.

Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin

Not really, no. What planet is this on?

China tech industry is smoking ruin? On what planet are you living?

Tech crackdowns rid China of entrepreneurial capitalism https://eastasiaforum.org/2023/09/12/tech-crackdowns-rid-chi...

Why China crushed its tech giants https://www.wired.com/story/china-tech-giants-policy/

Why Big Tech May Never Recover in China https://time.com/6973119/china-big-tech-crackdown-backfiring...

Beijing can’t afford another crackdown on its tech companies https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/china-cant-afford-another-cr...

That is about investor confidence, not company performance. The companies are for the most part still making boatloads of money, just not as much as investors naively expected to get from taking over a market with 1.4B people.

And even if foreign investors are more cautious now, there is plenty of money trapped by capital controls, so that it doesn't look like new tech companies have trouble raising capital anyway.

At some point, we should kinda accept that "China's X, Y, Z industries are about to collapse" headlines are just bad at predicting the future. They've proven again and again how they can pivot fast. Applies to tech as well.

I'm assuming you don't have any working relations with any Chinese companies, because on-the-ground shows something much different than what these headlines promise.

I suppose we should bookmark this for the next time that HN claims that the rise of China's tech industry is inevitable.

Some of these were very good decisions imho, from someone who spent two months in Chineese rural area around ~2019.

- Tutoring platforms were a plague on Chineese youth that increased the weight of their already _very_ heavy load (tbh, i think and education reform might have been preferable, this is a stopgap, but at least it is something).

- Ant group was offering predatory consumption loans to rural China, which to me felt a lot like the "revolver credits" that plagued my country in the 80s and 90s and pushed to many to suicide (the surname cam from their english name, "revolving credit", and because my countryside had a lot of hunting rifle available to whomever). Considering how rural china is mistreaded by Chineese state and general government (and imho this is a real weakness in China politics), having this group by a huge fine for their practice and a general debt forgivness was great. Curtailing Ant's power is also good.

- Stopping consolidation is a great way to keep a market free.

- Crypto companies: mining diverted power from villages who couldn't compete on purchasing power to mining wharehouses in some state. The ban is great for the rural population at least. Also, if that can curtail the birth of Chineese cryptobros, great for the mental health of the country.

This was generated by AI and slightly re-written or end capped by a human. Anyone that knows who Meituan and Boss Zhipin are wouldn't make the claims this post makes. It's not reasonable that someone who could list off these companies and incidents would believe China's tech industry is in ruin. There's no way. This poster clearly promoted for the list, and wrote his commentary around it. Sad.

The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)

Seems like a structural problem that the U.S. elected who they did twice.

Electing a bunch of spineless hacks to Congress removed the guardrails. They had one job.

Orange and apples... China has very intentional policy behind those decisions. The US... Not so much. I don't buy that Trump and his whole cabinet are as dumb as they look, but they are only motivated by profit. And ignorance.

80% of these are thriving in reality.

> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs

"Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)"

[https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-arms-f...]

Aren't a lot of these purchases (a) locked in from contracts made pre-admin; and (b) otherwise largely related to anxiety over Russia? There are too many confounding variables here.

The admin has also said that many of those arm shipments may be delayed by years because the US first needs to restock after blowing their inventory in Iran. So, sign a deal for US weapons which may not be delivered as agreed or may be denied the latest required software patches. I expect many countries to look elsewhere for future armaments.

Yep, American tourism is in shambles. Everyone's terrified

...because the USA made it into the knockout stage. really scary stuff

> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

It's the ONLY one (almost) that are actively tested and verified in real battles.

I guess by ensuring there are wars to test them with.

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