china has the worlds only internet companies that can match americas in ambition and reach it was 2000 and bill clinton was upbeat the internet he said was opening up the world theres no question china has been trying to crack down on the internet he said good luck thats sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall the internet would inevitably push china toward democracy he said how could any country control something so freeflowing and still hope to be technologically vibrant something would surely have to give he was wrong today china has the worlds only internet companies that can match americas in ambition and reach it is years ahead of the united states in replacing paper money with smartphone payments turning tech giants into vital gatekeepers of the consumer economy and it is host to a supernova of creative expression in short videos podcasts blogs and streaming tv that ought to dispel any notions of chinese culture as drearily conformist karmas a bitch a meme all this on a patch of cyberspace that is walled off from facebook and google policed by tens of thousands of censors and subject to strict controls on how data is collected stored and shared chinas leaders like the internet they have created and now they want to direct the nations talent and tech acumen toward an even loftier end building an innovationdriven economy one that produces worldleading companies not long ago chinese tech firms were best known for copying silicon valley google baidu youtube youku uber didi but the flow of inspiration now runs both ways american social media executives look to tencent and bytedance for the latest tricks for keeping users glued to their phones tencents wechat app an allinone hub for socializing playing games paying bills booking train tickets and more paved the way for the increasingly featurestuffed chat apps made by facebook and apple facebook recently took a page from tiktok a chinese service that is a sensation among western tweens by releasing its own highly similar app for creating goofy short videos if people in the west didnt see this coming it was because they mistook chinas authoritarianism for hostility toward technology but in some ways chinese tech firms are less fettered than american ones witness the backlash against big data in the united states the calls to break up giants like facebook and the anxiety about digital addiction none of those are big problems for chinese companies in china there is pretty much only one rule and it is simple dont undermine the state so titans like weibo and baidu heed censorship orders unwanted beliefs and ideologies are kept out beyond that everything is fair game startups can achieve mammoth scale with astonishing speed they can also crash brutally thanks to weak intellectual property protections they can rip one another off with abandon not great for rewarding innovation but ok for consumers who get lots of choices and the money just keeps flowing in