What China expects from businesses: Total Surrender

When Pony Ma, head of the Chinese internet powerhouse Tencent, attended a group meeting with Premier Li Keqiang in 2014, he complained that many local governments had banned ride-sharing apps installed on smartphones.

Li immediately told a few ministers to investigate the matter and report back to him. He then turned to Ma and said, “Your example vividly demonstrates the need to improve the relationship between the government and the market.

By then, Tencent had invested $45 million in a ride-hailing startup called Didi Chuxing, which later became a model in the government’s push to digitise and modernise traditional industries. When President Xi Jinping met with global tech leaders in Seattle in 2015, Didi’s founder, Cheng Wei, then 32 years old, joined Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Ma at the gathering.