March 2022 Tech Buzz China Newsletter

Upcoming Livecasts on China Gaming and the Chinese Gen Z; A New Version of Tech Buzz China Website; Latest episodes on China Markets & Macro and the e-CNY. Subscribe and stay tuned 👍

Tech Buzzers, get ready to March into Spring🎊 As the days get longer and the weather gets warmer, I hope the coming month brings better things for you as well. Busy as usual, we launched two episodes of Livecasts on China Markets & Macro and the e-CNY this month, as well as a new version of the Insider page, click and check it out. Upcoming episodes will be on China Gaming and Chinese Gen Z, so subscribe and stay tuned!

Tech Buzz China Livecasts are recorded live in front of our Tech Buzz China Insider audience, and later edited and made available to the public. If you would like to join us live and to ask questions, subscribe to our Tech Buzz China Insider community, where we have a forum and active Discord channel. Start by taking our Quiz or applying directly.

Livecast #15: Dr. Liqian Ren on China Markets & Macro

Liqian Ren 任丽倩, Ph.D., is the Director of Modern Alpha at WisdomTree Investments where she manages, among other things, an ETF focused on non-state owned companies in China using quantitative strategies.  She was a quantitative portfolio manager at Vanguard for 11 years, worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and has an MBA and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. Hear about:

• Why macro is usually not the main or only factor when it comes to investment research;

• Why investors should be more discernible to headlines and rumors when investing in China;

• How much the demographic slowing down, the decline in birth rates actually affects Chinese equities;

• The risk of the VIE, the variable interest entity, and potential de-listings of Chinese equities from US exchanges; 

• The overall regulatory environment and regulations that were impacting tech in particular;

• Why Liqian believes the Evergrande crisis is not contagious;

• Liqian’s predictions on sectors that will have great opportunities;

• Follow Liqian on Twitter and her company blog at wisdomtree.com/blog

Livecast #14: Richard Turrin on China's Digital Yuan

Richard (Rich) Turrin is the international best-selling author of “Cashless - China’s Digital Currency Revolution” and “Innovation Lab Excellence.” He is an Onalytica Top 100 Fintech Influencer and an award-winning executive previously heading fintech teams at IBM following a twenty-year career in investment banking.  Living in Shanghai for the last decade, Rich experienced China going cashless first-hand. Hear about:

• What is the Chinese digital yuan, and why it is different from cryptocurrencies;

• What are the different levels of anonymity the digital yuan offers;

• Will the Chinese digital yuan help break the duopoly of the Alibaba and Wechat mobile payments in China;

• How will the Chinese digital yuan impact the world;

• Rich's personal experience using the digital yuan in Shanghai;

• How does PBOC enable the digital yuan to be used without internet access?

• Find Rich on LinkedIn, Twitter, and check out his book Cashless - China’s Digital Currency Revolution on apple books, Amazon, and any other digital bookstores across the planet.

Insider has multiple posts per week, and we’ll be sharing with you two LATEST selections every month. If you are hungry for more, join our paid, premium community for serious China tech nerds Tech Buzz China Insider! Designed for investors and operators, we go in depth on China tech analyses that don’t typically make it into English language coverage. Click here to take our Insider Quiz or fill out an Application Form.

• It’s the Real Economy, Stupid

Sorry for the condescending title, but hopefully you recognize that I’m merely referencing the “it’s the economy, stupid” phrase popularized years back in the US during Clinton’s campaign against the elder Bush. This is a first draft of an oped for a news outlet, but I figured I'd share it with the community first!

In recent months, there’s been a lot of noise made about China’s pivot away from “soft tech” (the internet) to “hard tech” (e.g. semiconductors). It’s an intuitive distinction, because unlike in English, where we use the word “tech” as a catchall, Chinese separates “internet” companies from “science & technology” driven ones. I was even taken in by this easy narrative initially myself, not least because it would sometimes show up in joking banter with Chinese tech entrepreneurs and employees. But humor is not reflective of reality, especially when reality has been coming in the form of a steady stream of clarifying government documents and actions in the last year.

In fact, at this point, I’d argue that anyone who insists that China is uniformly suppressing soft tech in favor of hard is simply being anti-factual. There is a division, yes, but it is not between the internet and semiconductors. It is between the real and financial economies. To the Chinese government, any technology that helps the real economy, the part focused on the production of services, rather than financial services, is encouraged. The rest? Not so much. Read the full article here.

• 2/11/22 What Do Chinese Government Research Orgs Think US is Going to Do to China Tech?

I’m not really too fluent in which exact Chinese think tanks / government research organizations to follow, but I’ve done two events now with these orgs on China tech prospects in the US, and I’ve been actually pretty impressed with how knowledgeable they are about US politics and domestic dynamics. At least from my non-DC-insider point of view. So I have been following a few of the speakers’ organizations on WeChat, and today came upon this very relevant piece on China’s predictions for future US-China tech policy. TLDR; it is not an optimistic view. Let’s see just how bad it is:

Before we start, the following came from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations WeChat account. But it is a repost from the China Information Security magazine, also a government organization. The author is Li Zheng. I’m not familiar with the magazine, but the Institute seems fairly well regarded for what it does. I wouldn’t consider this any kind of official government stance though — I’m merely sharing a set of predictions from what I believe to be an informed and thoughtful source.

First, there is no difference between the general direction of Biden’s policy re: China tech and that of Trump. In some areas, restrictions will be even harsher. Read the full article here.

Besides these articles, we also wrote about:

• 2/20/22 "Not Much Time Left for Starbucks ... in China"

• 2/11/22 Why Consumption Upgrade vs Downgrade is a Stupid Distinction

• 2/20/22 Meituan -15% and Tencent -6%: The Power of Rumor in These Jittery Markets

• SES Lithium-Metal Battery IPO

• 2/12/22 AInnovation: Really the first AI + Manufacturing IPO in China?

• 2/20/22 Fenbeitong: China's Corporate Card Unicorn

• 2/5/22 Worth Reading: Jiang Xiaojuan's Thoughts on Digital Platform Policy

• Well-Link: Series B Cloud Gaming Provider in China

• Abogen: China's Leading mRNA Vaccine Company

Want to learn more? Join TBC Insider!

As you know, we are regularly featured in media. Here is a selection of our appearances in the last month! Take a read or listen and let us know what you think!

• NBC, February 5, 2022. TikTok shopping takes off in livestreams: Lucky crystals for $9.99.

• Harvard Business Review, February 24, 2022. How ByteDance Became the World’s Most Valuable Startup.

Thanks for reading this March 2022 issue of our newsletter. Let us know if you have any questions or comments, and we’ll see you in a few weeks!