Photo: gpsbbs.zol.com.cn
As someone whose news reading is primarily wrapped up in the technology here in Asia, I don’t really spend as much time as I should keeping up on regional politics. But recently there were a few examples that came to my attention which reminded me that, when it comes to China in particular, politics and business are often far more intertwined than we might realize.
We recently wrote about Baidu’s new social service which (though it’s just a ‘coming soon’ page) looks poised to launch in Vietnam soon. One of our Vietnamese readers noted that, even though it hasn’t even launched yet, there is a backlash among some Vietnamese people about Baidu. She noted that due to the Paracel Islands dispute, “Vietnamese netizens don’t respond so kindly to anything originating from China.” I was aware of the dispute, but I had not anticipated that netizens in Vietnam would extrapolate that issue onto Baidu. That’s unfortunate.
Similarly, at a Rakuten press conference last Friday, that company’s president Hiroshi Mikitani cited some political issues between Japan and China as a reason why they could not market their Lekutian (or Rakuten.cn) service very heavily [1]. That service, a joint venture between Rakuten and the afore-mentioned Baidu [2], subsequently closed by the two companies, with “intensified competition” in China’s e-commerce space cited as the main problem.
I wonder though, if Rakuten had not been hampered by those political issues, might it have made a difference? Possibly not. China’s e-commerce space is a fierce battleground as Mikitani himself acknowledged this past Friday. And recent price wars are making it increasingly difficult for any new player to compete.
So what can we learn from these two examples of web services getting tangled up in political shrubbery? Well aside from the fact that I need to get my head out of my butt and read more politics, I think it’s not a stretch to say that China’s ‘kindergarden sandbox,’ ram-tastic diplomacy has spawned emotional land mines that are not just a danger for international companies operating in China, but also for China’s own companies abroad.
Over to you, Joseph Nye.
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The exact quote is not included in my notes from the press conference, as I failed to write down Mikitani’s quote on that particular issue, referring to the Senkaku Islands dispute of 2010. But it was an very interesting point which, as someone who watches both China and Japan, left an impression. ↩
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Seriously, Baidu can’t catch a break. They should just buy up some islands and hand them over to the government. ↩
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