Five 'I's of China's Internet strategy
- By Luo Yu
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E-mail CRI, December 22, 2015
Internet has been revolutionizing and will reshape nearly every aspect of our life. In a sense technology is moving far ahead of the mentality of legislators and regulators, who have now become warier of grave challenges posed by cyber security and global governance as Internet is developing at an unprecedented pace. Hence, stakeholders have to seek out a balance between creating disruptive innovation and warding off perils and even evils of all stripes during the process which requires concerted efforts from governments and tech companies around the world. In the meantime, Internet plays a pivotal role in Chinese economic restructuring and transition. Here, I outline 5Is, namely Innovation, Integration, Intelligence, Integrity and Inclusiveness, as China's future Internet strategy.
Innovation
Innovation is the driving force of the Internet. From my perspective, innovation in Internet economy is mainly driven by two forces, namely well-established Internet companies and hundreds of thousands of 'makers' and start-ups spawned by the 'mass innovation and mass entrepreneurship' strategy. The former will create and optimize functions and products based on humongous amount of data and feedback generated by consumers. No offense, but if you use WeChat, you will highly likely to discard all other social networking apps, be it WhatsApp or LINE. WeChat will amaze you by virtue of its multi-tasking and user-friendliness, trumping ALL its rivals, thanks to the fact that China has the world's biggest online community and Tencent's continuous effort to enrich and upgrade user experience.
On the flipside, countless makers have been incentivized by the drive of 'mass innovation and entrepreneurship'. Innovative ideas and business models have sprung up across industries. 'Mass Maker Spaces' have been created where incubators are established and angel investors and venture capitalists are captivated by smart ideas and are keen on the success of entrepreneurs. The central government has also issued a series of supportive guidelines to cut red tape and streamline the registration procedures for start-ups.
Integration
2015 witnesses the most number of former arch-rivals having at least ostensibly happily got married. The consolidation includes the merger of Ctrip and Qunar in the online travelling market, Didi and Kuaidi in the taxi-hailing industry, and Meituan and Dianping in the group-buying business.
But you would unsurprisingly find out the trigger behind all these gigantic deals are BAT. Yea, the three dominant yet sometimes unscrupulous Chinese Internet goliaths, namely Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.
Is the consolidation good or bad? Well, the move not only ended their nasty cash-burning race and escalating pricing war but also started concerning about shareholder returns.
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