Partone of this two-part series looks at the rise of China’s digital economy, the champion firms that dominate it, and their relationship with the Chinese state.

The Chinese government’s online censorship and alleged cyber espionage activities have long been a focus for international media. Butwhile Beijing’s heavy hand on the internet deserves attention, it is China’s agile private sector that is generating advances truly felt beyond the country’s borders. Backed by state industrial policy under the rubrics ofInternet Plus,Made in China 2025and theNational IT Development Strategy,China’s internet/tech sector is leveraging the country’s fast-growing markets to build market power and drive innovations with global reach.

The centrepiece of this story is an online ecosystem that hasevolved separatelyfrom the platforms engineered in Silicon Valley. How much this owes to state controls on China’s internet and protectionist support, versus Chinese firms’ home market knowledge and entrepreneurial drive, is open to debate. Inany case, China’s online platforms are now distinct from their US-designed counterparts and in some respects more advanced, specifically in applications formobile devices,‘online to offline’ servicesandfinancial technology(fintech). China now accounts forhalfthe world’s digital payments and three quarters of the global online lending market, and those in China’s expanding middle classconduct much of their personal and professional livesthrough integrated web platforms. This holistic, mobile-oriented digital universe has grown symbiotically with the adoption of smartphones, a product in which China’s home-grown manufacturers arenow catching up with global leaders.

The ferment of China’s internet economy, with 700 million users and climbing, has given rise tothe world’s most dynamic start-up scene. Inthe last three years it has produced34 ‘unicorns’(private companies valued at more than US$1 billion), fuelled by atsunamiof private venture capital investment, a monstrousstate-backed funding complexand aproliferationof state-supported incubators. Overshadowing this frenetic growth are a handful of corporate tech champions that nowrivaltheir US counterparts in size the e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and the social media giant Tencent each have market capitalisations over US$250 billion. Alongside the search engine leader Baidu, these’three kingdoms’of China’s online services sector are funding and buying out start-ups even more aggressively thanthe titans of Silicon Valley.

This dominance of a few huge firms reflects aglobal trendtowards concentration of capital and market power, particularly in the knowledge economy. In the US, the top five companies by market capitalisation are nowall tech firms, which are expanding into other sectors and putting pressure on incumbents. In the car industry, for example,technological trendsare forcing established players to partner with young internet giants in order to stay competitive.

Likewise, China’s tech titans are now themain forcein domestic mergers and acquisitions. They too are expanding into sectors such ashealthcare,robotics, and most notably self-driving cars. The growing role of network connectivity in car usage, and the need forhuge amounts of datato develop artificial intelligence, has made China’s leading internet firms key players in this signature industry of the pre-digital economy. And they aresqueezing outforeign competition in the process, with home-grown ridesharing appDidi’s buyout of Uber’s China businesswidely viewed as the nail in the coffin for US tech firms’ hopes of conquering the China market. Foreignautomakers,battery makersandnavigation system providersmay be next, as China seeks toleverage its unique online ecosysteminto a physical ‘Internet of Vehicles’ based on Chinese technologies and firms.

Theoutsized role of the statein funding this digital business boom does risk creating theovercapacity, inefficiency and outright fraudthat Beijing’s industrial policies have produced elsewhere. China’s cash-flushed venture capital sector not onlybreeds some expensive failures, but also fuels successful firms’ single-minded focus on speed and scale, to theneglect of profitability. Likethe ‘post-nineties’ generation (China’s equivalent of the millennials) from which their workforce is drawn, most Chinese internet businesses have known only a quarter-century of economic growth in which the global financial crisis was a speedbump they have yet to face a chastening experience like the US dotcom bust of 2000-2002.

A reckoning seems to have begun in 2016, with private investorsgoing cold on internet start-upsand changing priorities from picking live unicorns toavoiding dead ones. This again mirrorsthe situation in the US tech sector, where concerns about overvaluation and unsustainable business models have dampened investor enthusiasm. But in China, the imperative to stimulate a slowing economy by promoting services and technological innovation means the state will likely keep pumping money into internet firms, raising the spectre of another asset bubble joining the nation’s inflated stock and real estate markets.

Nonetheless, China’s tech sector should maintain momentum through its sheer entrepreneurial drive and ruthlessness. Firms operate in what Baidu’s chief scientist described as a‘permanent state of war’ Silicon Valley is now being judged astoo well-fed and complacentby comparison, withone observer notingthat the start-up depicted in the eponymous HBO comedy would never survive in China. The general spirit is captured by aleaked Alibaba memoon responding to aninvasion of penguins(referring to Tencent’s moves into e-commerce) by taking the fight to their natural habitat and killing them there. This dog-eat-dog attitude is mirrored in thecompetition between Chinese provincesfor start-up talent and capital, marking the digital economy as the next phase in reform-era China’sDarwinian process of development.

The tech sector will also benefit from the government’s plans for the wider economy. Beijing is seeking to network and digitise not just China’s vehicle fleet, butthe nation’s entire manufacturing sector, to keep it competitive in the face of rising wages, aging demographics and foreign technological advance. If this occurs for even a fraction of Chinese manufacturers, it will open new horizons for firms that provide data management and connectivity services. Therapid prototyping modelalready extant in the electronics hub of Shenzhen shows what can be achieved by marrying digital knowhow with Chinese manufacturing’s agility and scale.

Furthermore, the tech sector is increasingly entwined with the state-owned enterprises that retain a privileged place in China’s political economy. Most of theUS$10 billion of capital raisingsfor Chinese fintech firms during 2016 (more thandouble the figure for North America) came from state-owned investors. For these institutions, integration with internet services firms holds the promise of boosting profits andupgrading technological systemsto internationally competitive levels. For the tech firms, the arrangement provides stable funding and political influence, although they are now wielding this in their own right the influence of Tencent’s chairman inspurringthe central government’s ‘Internet Plus’ industrial policy marks the tech sector’s arrival as a national lobby group.

For their part, China’s leaders haveexpressly enlistedtech entrepreneurs to the national agenda, which to date has mainly meant ‘purifying’ the internet throughcooperationwith censorship directives. But leading tech firms are now exploiting their vast troves of user data to trial credit rating systems, whichif successfully integratedby the Chinese state will give it an unprecedented capacity for individual monitoring and hence social control. In a country where the government asserts near-unrestricted access to personal data and requires internet firms tofacilitate its control of information, the tech sector has no choice but to help the build the tools of adigital totalitarian state. AndChina’s political economy rewards those who actively promote state policy directives.

The Chinese tech sector’s ability to work with the state and its demands (somewhat in contrast toUS tech firms) is embodied by Alibaba’s chairman Jack Ma. Mr Ma, whose stated policy on dealing with the government is’to be in love with but not marry them’, advocatedusing big datafor crime pre-emption, in tune with the extant state-led project todevelopMinority Report-style softwarefor predicting malfeasance, andbranded Alibaba’s new e-commerce hubin Malaysia as part of a new Silk Road , echoing President Xi Jinping’s centrepiece‘One Belt, One Road’ foreign policy concept.

The tech sector is also helping China’s lumbering state-owned enterprises and strategic research projects exploit the benefits of digitisation though the state sector and academia are also suffering from the internet firms’voracious demand for scarce talent. Alibaba, for instance, is partnering withSinopecandChina Mobileto develop cloud computing services and big data analytics, andwith defence giant Norincoto drive commercialisation of China’s Beidou satellite navigation system (at the expense of the US-controlled GPS).

But the key field in which private sector internet firms are aidingChina’s race to the technological frontieris artificial intelligence. As’the greatest business opportunity of our time’,AI development is a natural investment for China’s cashed up and data-rich internet giants. The frontrunner is Baidu, which has beencommissionedto lead China’s new national deep learning laboratory, fulfilling CEO Robin Li’s call for astate-backed ‘Apollo programme’-style driveto make the nation an AI world leader. Artificial intelligence is now anidentified priorityacross China’s science, technology and defence planning architecture givenUS progresstowards employing AI for military use, it will probably not be long before the People’s Liberation Army follows thePentagon’s attemptto enlist the tech sector for defence innovation.

ToquoteBaidu’s former chief scientist Andrew Ng, ‘whoever wins artificial intelligence will win the internet in China and around the world’. Yet as represented by Ng himself (a Stanford professor andformer leaderof the Google Brain project, who ran Baidu’s research lab in Silicon Valleyuntil last month) the rise of China’s tech sector did not occur in isolation, but through exchanges with the outside world. How this happened, and what impact China’s tech sector will have internationally in future, will be addressed in mynext article.

Part two of this two-part series looks at how the outside world shaped China’s internet firms, and how they are now shaping the international economy. For part one, clickhere.

The rise of China’s internet firms was not a result of autarkic industrial policy from Beijing. It was achieved through entrepreneurial initiative to leverage what the outside world could provide in order to tap China’s growing markets. Likeall private firms in reform-era China, tech companies had to survive in an environment of ‘structured uncertainty’, in which government institutions did not provide the protection and predictable support needed to foster novel product innovation that could compete with foreign technologies. Instead, Chinese private firms became competitive by adopting and adapting foreign technologies,supported by local authoritieshappy to ignore Beijing’s ‘indigenous innovation’ directives in the interest of economic growth. Thetech sector’s ruling triumvirate of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) built their success on technologies developed overseas, including the internet itself.

Like firms across China’s wider information and communications technology (ICT) sector, the success of internet companies was greatly aided by returning Chinese expatriates who had gained knowledge through study and work abroad. Taking Baidu as an example, the firm’s co-founders,chief operating officerandformer Big Data Lab directorall received their postgraduate education and foundational work experience in the US. From 2000-2006, Beijing’s Zhongguancun technology park (the heart of China’s ICT sector) registered an average oftwo firms established eachworkingdayby such returnees.

ManyChinese tech firms also relied in their early phases on funding by foreign investors, ablatant breachof Chinese law connived at by regulators so as to grow private sector champions in the face of inadequate domestic capital markets. Foreign entities are still the largest interest holders inAlibabaandTencent, now China’stwo biggest companiesby market capitalisation. Alibaba’s 2014 float on the NYSE remainsthe largest IPO in history, despite the company’s legal structure giving foreign interest holdersminimal controlover business operations, whichremainsin the hands of the Chinese founders.

The question for China’s tech sector today is how this interdependence with the outside world may change due to arenewed drivefor technological independence. Beijing’s increasinglyexpansive and intrusiveregulatory regime for ICT, and itsreported goalof purging foreign ICT entirely from government agencies and state-owned enterprises, drew claims from the US Chamber of Commerce that these measures would cost China’s economy$US3 trillionby 2025 and anopen letterfrom 40 foreign business associations pleading that China’s ICT market be kept open.

But China’s tech firms are already stepping into the breach. Backed by more robust government policy than in the past, and having accumulated the capabilities to compete technically with foreign industry leaders, China’s internet firms are taking advantage quickly. Alibaba’s proprietary operating systems arestarting to replaceforeign software in state use, while its cloud computing and data analytics services are being adopted by SOEs andprovincial governments.

The internet giants are among a handful of Chinese firms starting to achieve what has long eluded the nation’s private sector:technical innovation. Their ability to combine this with effective business models led MIT’s Technology Review topick five Chinese ICT firms(the BAT triumvirate, Didi and Huawei) for its 2016 global ‘50 Smartest Companies’ list. As competition in China’s domestic markets intensifies, tech titans andstartups alikeare increasingly turning their eyes to overseas expansion. In 2016, Chinese tech firms’ mergers and acquisitions includedUS$17.6 billionof foreign investment, and their proportion of China’s total outbound investment will rise as Beijingcloses the spigoton less profitable sectors.

This outbound investment includes adetermined pushby the BAT firms into US markets, andsubstantial investment in US start-ups Alibaba is again in the lead, with its chairman Jack Mameetingthen-US President-elect Donald Trump to promise a million new American jobs if his company is allowed topursue expansionin the US. But just as US tech firms’ attempts to crack the China market have been stymied, it is unlikely that China’s tech leaders will out-compete US internet giants on their home turf. The decisive battles will be in third party markets, where the intensifying contest for the internet economy raises the prospect of US and Chinese tech titans carving the world intodigital spheres of influence.

Certainly, the distinctiveness of China’s online ecosystem hashinderedapps and business models that evolved within it from capturing market share abroad. But thanks to adaptability and deep pockets, China’s internet champions are starting to gain traction. As the dominant Chinese firm in online messaging and gaming, Tencent is makinginroads into Latin Americaand even into advanced economies such asSouth Korea and Japan. Chinese ICT firms have built a major presence in India through bothdirect operations and investment, and Chinese money ispouringinto European tech start-ups Tencent’sacquisitionof Finland’s Supercell has cemented its lock on the global online gaming industry.

But thekey battlegroundwill be Southeast Asia’s fast growing internet economy, projected to be worthUS$200 billionby 2025. The region’s largestonline retailerandpayments platformare now controlled by Alibaba, itscontent accessandinstant messagingmarkets are seeing inroads by Tencent, and its lead ridesharing platform haspartnered with Diditocompete with Uber. The online services sector is by nature a winner-takes-all game, and Chinese firms could well be planning tosweep the boardin Southeast Asia just as they conquered their own nation’s digital economy. Alibaba’s creation of ane-commerce hubin Malaysia (the first step in Jack Ma’s brainchild ‘World Trading Platform’ conceptendorsed at last year’s G20) and Ma’s new role ase-commerce adviserto the Indonesian government shows howpressureto outflank domestic rivals is driving China’s tech titans abroad todominate emerging markets.

Yet despite the increasingly adverse climate for foreign ICT firms in China, and the global competition presented by the rise of Chinese companies, China’s tech sector will likely keep growing in symbiosis with foreign counterparts. Forall its obstacles, the Chinese market’s allure has kept US ICT giants knocking at its door. Mark Zuckerbergis still courting Beijingto allow Facebook’s re-launch behind the Great Firewall, andMicrosoft has developed(in partnership with a Chinese state-owned firm) a modified Windows 10 version for Chinese government use, with Intel and Qualcommreportedlyhaving reached similar deals. Apple haspoureda billion dollars into Didi, Nvidia haspartneredwith Baidu to build a computing platform for self-driving cars, and Tesla, which is racing Baidu to putautonomous vehicleson the roads, has received abig investmentfrom Tencent. Google and Facebook are partnering with a Chinese investor tofinancea new high capacity trans-Pacific internet link.

All this raises questions about how far the US ICT sector will be willing to assist the US government in itsemerging digital arms racewith Being, let alone support the technological embargo of Chinaadvocated by somein Washington. As highlighted by Jack Ma’s meeting with Trump, blocking Chinese access to the US economy would entail large opportunity costs in export markets for US products and in foregone investment. Chinese FDI into Silicon Valley alonetopped US$6 billion (excluding real estate) by mid-2016, and Chinese venture funding and skilled labour has become deeply embedded in the local tech sector. Non-US citizens make uphalf the core workforcein the Valley, where Mandarin is now the most spoken foreign language after Spanish.

Even if Washington could strong-arm US firms into cutting off China for strategic reasons, their advanced-economy competitors are unlikely to follow. German industry is pushing ahead in China, despitegrowing European concernsabout the lack of a level playing field for foreign businesses. China’s role as both indispensable market and technological collaborator is especially salient for German automakers and their push towards driverless cars Audi has signed agreements withall three BATfirms to develop digital connectivity, while last year Daimler held itsfirst hackathon in Beijing.

Foreign firms can be expected to increasingly seek access to Chinese technologies and skilled labour, given the nation’sgrowing research spending and pipeline of qualified personnel, particularly in artificial intelligence. Rising state and private funding in China for AI has created a virtuous cycle oftalent recruitment and technical advance, which is starting to manifest inacademic research,industry recognitionandmarketable applications. Conversely, Chinese tech firms still need to go abroad for cutting-edge technologies and scarce talent. They areaggressively hiringin Silicon Valley and atleading US universities, while Baidu, Didi and nowTencentall run AI research labs in the US.

At home, China’s tech sector is also developing an increasingly international character. There is agrowing presenceof foreign start-ups, which isactively promotedby local government and is nowspreading beyondthe expatriate hubs of Beijing and Shanghai to smaller cities. Conversely, theparlous stateof US immigration policy, now aggravated byantipathytowards foreign tech workers and students that goes to the top of the Trump Administration, raises questions about whether the US can keep attracting the foreign talenton which its tech sector depends. Hefty sign-on bonuses offered by internet firms for relocation to China, andencouragementof skilled immigration by Chinese industry leaders, may further erode the US advantage in catchingthe ’new argonauts’of the transnational digital economy.

For smaller advanced countries, the speed and scale of China’s tech expansion has still greater implications, given their own increasing dependence on ICT-oriented sectors that demand foreign capital, labour and markets. Forexample, a quarter of Australia’s GDP growth in the last financial year came fromthree districts in inner Sydneywith a concentration of knowledge-intensive industries. Located in this area is the firstcross-border fintech incubatorconnecting Australia and Asia, intended to be a bridgehead for Australian startups into the Chinese market.

China’s own transition towards an internet-enabled, service-oriented economy still has far to run. Onestudy estimatesthat from 2004-2009, the internet contributed over 20% of GDP growth for the US, but only 3% for China. Internet penetration across China’s population is still barely 50%, and while the tech-savvy urban consumer market is approaching saturation, other huge segments (the rural population, older people and enterprises) are still largely untapped; the nation’s online retail market is projected todouble in sizeto US$1.7 trillion by 2020. And despite Beijing’s plans for technological autarky, the Chinese economy in general remains at a lower level of sophistication than the advanced countries. All this holds much promise for foreign tech firms that can navigate an increasingly complex and demanding Chinese market, and work effectively with the home-grown champions that now dominate it.

John Lee was previously a visiting fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, where he worked on economy and technology, foreign policy and security issues. He is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University with majors in economics, history, political science and international law. Previously he worked and published at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra

This article first appeared on the Lowy Institute, The Interpreter, on 4 May 2017