It is perhaps Beijing’s greatest tool for surveillance and control — WeChat. The widely popular “everything app” boasts over a billion users who use it to scroll through social posts, pay for food or scan the pandemic-related healthcodes required to enter restaurants or parks.
WeChat’s success has turned its owner, the internet platform Tencent, into China’s most important private company with a market value of $360bn and the biggest challenger to the tech giants of Silicon Valley. But it has also pitched Tencent into a perilous world where technology and business run up against the demands of authoritarian politics. This was recently made clear when Tencent shut down thousands of user accounts for sharing images of a rare Beijing protest attacking President Xi Jinping as a “dictator and traitor”.
Maybe that is why Tencent has done little to open up to the outside world. The Shenzhen-based company rarely divulges information about itself. Its founder Pony Ma remains mostly an enigma. Lulu Chen seeks to change that with her book Influence Empire, the first English-language deep dive into the company’s origins, expansion and its media-averse founder.
What emerges is the story of a nerdy kid in love with astronomy who moved on to programming just as the information age dawned on China. Starting out with pagers, Ma moved on to instant messaging, eventually striking gold by copying and adapting a foreign instant messenger service, writes Chen, a reporter for Bloomberg.
Pony’s ability to pivot and encourage competition has made him arguably China’s greatest entrepreneur. Unlike his nearest rival for that crown, Jack Ma, he is reticent and thoughtful. Those traits have helped him remain at the helm of Tencent. While Jack has been forcibly silenced by Beijing, Pony “has made a career of hiding behind the scenes,” writes Chen.
Tencent has two core competencies: capital and traffic volume, the company’s president Martin Lau told Chen. This has helped it to become one of the world’s largest tech investors, particularly in Chinese start-ups. But, while that may please shareholders — who now own a portfolio of shares worth over $150bn — it has also become a bit of a liability as Beijing becomes wary of Tencent’s empire building.
Yet, as Chen makes clear, Tencent executives had already spent years adapting to shifting political winds. Unable to get approval for a video game in 2018, Tencent remade it entirely with input from China’s military recruitment arm. The more nationalist result was approved by the censors and went on to be a money-spinner.
Tencent’s most damaging concession to the government is the escalating censorship and surveillance of WeChat. For journalists working in China, it’s increasingly clear that everything written in WeChat is monitored. The app has also become central to the government’s zero-Covid policies, allowing authorities to circumscribe citizens’ movement.
The challenge for Tencent is that the closer it gets to Beijing, the more wary the outside world becomes of the company, jeopardising its global expansion. If the company becomes a symbol of Beijing-guided techno-authoritarianism, some may start to think twice about accepting its money.
As Chen notes, “Pony’s conundrum is how to propel Tencent into the future while appeasing his political masters — a delicate manoeuvre with unimaginable stakes.” She suggests its future may lie with drawing closer to Beijing by becoming “one mighty all-knowing yet obedient company” so officials don’t have to play whack-a-mole keeping hordes of other companies in line.
Influence Empire: The Story of Tencent and China’s Tech Ambition by Lulu Chen, Hodder & Stoughton, £25, 256 pages
Ryan McMorrow is the FT’s China corporate tech correspondent
