Tag: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd

U.S. Said to Plan New Limits on China’s A.I. and Supercomputing Firms

Chin@Strategy

The Biden administration has faced some criticism that it has moved slowly to curb China’s access to cutting-edge U.S. technology. For many administration officials, China’s recent progress in clearing a key technological hurdle in semiconductor manufacturing underscored the urgent need for more expansive regulation in the industry, people familiar with the discussions said. The export controls are part of a bigger strategy from the Biden administration to starve China of key technologies while pumping money into U.S. chip-making factories. The measures come as Beijing ramps up its aggression toward Taiwan,…

Alibaba Dismisses Employee Who Accused Her Boss of Rape

Chin@Strategy

In the video she posted on the company’s internal website, she accused her boss, identified in media reports by his surname, Wang, of attacking her in a hotel in the city of Jinan after a drunken evening with a company client, whom she also accused of sexual assault. She said that she had reported the assault to the company but no one acted, prompting her to go public. Updated  Dec. 10, 2021, 8:09 p.m. ET Prosecutors in Jinan investigated her accusation but announced in September that they would not file…

A Game Designer in Beijing Bought Toy Guns. China Imprisoned Him.

Chin@Strategy

China’s strong gun controls mean that fatal shootings are rare, and many citizens support the laws to keep it that way. But there has been a growing debate over the legal definition of a firearm. Experts say China’s regulations — which ban buying, selling or owning weapons above a very low threshold of force — are vague and hard for laypeople, even judges, to understand. The result, critics say, is that unsuspecting buyers of compressed-air and spring-powered toys are turned into criminals. China’s gun control law of 1996 states that…

China’s Bullying Is Becoming a Danger to the World and Itself

Chin@Strategy

Indeed, TSMC and its South Korean rival Samsung have the only foundries in the world able to make the most advanced 5-nanometer chips, and TSMC is expected to begin next-generation 3-nanometer chips in 2022. The smaller the chip’s transistors, the more brain power you can pack onto it. China’s biggest chip maker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, is not even close. It is mainly competing at 28 nanometers and just starting to produce some 14-nanometer chips. I recently spent time in Silicon Valley asking U.S. chip designers what is the secret…

China Fines Meituan $530 Million in Second Tech Antitrust Case

Chin@Strategy

China fined the food-delivery giant Meituan $530 million for antitrust violations on Friday, the second major penalty this year in Beijing’s efforts to bring the country’s big internet companies to heel. The government’s campaign has been blessed by the highest levels of the Communist Party leadership. It has involved a wide cast of regulatory agencies and policymaking bodies. And it has wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth for shareholders of some of China’s — and the world’s — most successful tech businesses. Like regulators and politicians in…

The End of a ‘Gilded Age’: China Is Bringing Business to Heel

Chin@Strategy

Chinese tech companies are reeling from regulation. Nervous creditors are hoping for a bailout for China’s largest developer. Growing numbers of executives are going to jail. An entire industry is shutting down. For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, it’s all part of the plan. Under Mr. Xi, China is reshaping how business works and limiting executives’ power. Long in coming, but rapid in execution, the policies are driven by a desire for state control and self-reliance as well as concerns about debt, inequality and influence by foreign countries, including the United…

Clamping Down on ‘Spiritual Opium’

Chin@Strategy

Which he did not (although he did not embarrass himself either). What Clegg claimed in his post, “What The Wall Street Journal Got Wrong,” was hard to argue with: that Facebook’s challenges are complex and that the people at Facebook working on them are trying really hard, so give them a friggin’ break. Who can argue with that? No one, since no one is asserting that Facebook is Thanos. Still, he persisted: “These stories have contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do, and conferred egregiously false motives…

Alibaba Manager Not Charged in China’s Latest #MeToo Moment

Chin@Strategy

The police in China released a former Alibaba manager who had been accused of rape by a co-worker after prosecutors declined to charge him, deepening debate about an episode that has shaken the Chinese technology industry and prompted a reckoning for the fledgling #MeToo movement in the country. In a statement issued late Monday, the authorities in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan said that the behavior of the manager — referred to by his surname, Wang — did not constitute a crime and that his arrest had not been…

Alibaba Faces Reckoning Over Harassment

Chin@Strategy

At an employee dinner, women were told to rank the attractiveness of the men at the table. During a team-building exercise, a woman was pressured to straddle her male co-worker in front of colleagues. Top executives traded lewd comments about male virility at company events and online. The e-commerce giant Alibaba, one of China’s most globalized internet companies, has often celebrated the number of women in its senior ranks. In 2018, the company’s billionaire co-founder, Jack Ma, told a conference in Geneva that one secret to Alibaba’s success was that…