[Canada]

I'm not saying Tencent, Baidu, and Weibo are unsuccessful. I'm saying that they are successful because Facebook(+WhatsApp), Google, and Twitter are blocked by all 3 of China's ISPs. If that were not the case I strongly believe those Chinese companies would be niche players if they even survived at all.

To address the sibling comment by kuwze, the reason why Tencent is successful in payments is because the Chinese government blocked everyone competing with it, and also because the Chinese market lacked credit cards. Same thing for Alibaba. It's similar to how African countries went straight to mobile before more developed places did, and nobody holds those carriers up as examples of innovation. If we didn't already have complete acceptance of credit cards we would probably be using wallets from Microsoft or Amazon or some other tech giant.

I have to respect Alibaba on the e-commerce though. In my opinion they're better than Amazon. Their software is dismal compared to Amazon, but when you measure them by the range of products you can get delivered, how fast and inexpensively, it's clearly superior, and they enjoy no protection from competition by Amazon. Alibaba is really great, the best perk of living in China hands down. Didi is cool too, though like all the copy cats it's just crap as a software company compared to Uber or Lyft.

So anyway, no disrespect to the business savvy of China's big tech. And I also see that there's some awesome units in them. For example, Tencent has some absolutely fantastic security groups. All I'm saying is that China's tech giants didn't get here by technical innovation, whereas America's did. And not only that, China's internet policy has the side effect of crushing innovation so we're not likely to see anything interesting spring from there.

[hatergonnahate]

OMG, you are so disconnected... Chinese big tech (BAT) is much younger with tons of senior engineers coming back from FAANG. Their tech stack is very cutting edge and arguably better, e.g:

- (this is handling double 11 traffic! if you don't know what that means, a few X prime day traffic) https://medium.com/@alitech_2017/open-source-pouch-alibabas-...

- from BAIDU http://apollo.auto/

Wechat is a killer mobile app, no web red herring. look at FB's app, so awkward.

Disclaimer: I worked for one of FAANG and it's not that easy to adopt new things.

[dang]

> OMG, you are so disconnected

This breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to call names in arguments. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here. Your comment would be fine without that first sentence.

[Canada]

I'm vouching this comment. Obviously you created this throwaway for this.

I know what singles day is about. I'm unconvinced by your arguments, but will concede that it's not a good idea to for the US to drive good talent away with shitty immigration policy.

Have you used Alibaba's cloud service? Why is it as clunky as a second rate shared hosting service from 15 years ago? Can you explain that to me?

Also, given the fact that I have to go through insane bureaucracy just to get an account on it, what do the tech kids of China have the option to do except publish miniprograms on WeChat? Is China really going to be a leader based on returning engineers from the US?

Apollo's code looks pretty interesting. Will keep an eye on that. Funny though, I'm having trouble browsing the site. Requests fail half the time. Oh look, it's hosted by Baidu.. no wonder.