It used to be “easy” to tell the American and Chinese economies apart. One was innovative, one made clones. One was a free market while the other demanded payments to a political party and its leadership, a corrupt wealth generating scam that
by some estimates has netted top leaders billions of dollars. One kept the talent borders porous acting as a magnet for the world’s top brains while the other interviewed you in a backroom at the airport before imprisoning you on sedition charges (okay, that might have been both).
The comparison was always facile yes, but it was easy and at least directionally accurate if failing on the specifics.
Now though, the country that
exported exploding batteries is pioneering quantum computing, while the country that pioneered the internet
now builds planes that fall out of the sky (and good news,
we’ve identified even more planes that might fall out of the sky at an airport near you!)
TikTok’s success is many things, but it is quite frankly just an embarrassment for the United States. There are thousands of entrepreneurs and hundreds of venture capitalists swarming Silicon Valley and the other American innovation hubs looking for the next great social app or building it themselves. But the power law of user growth and investor returns happens to reside in Haidian, Beijing.
ByteDance through its local apps in China and overseas apps like TikTok
is the consumer investor return of the past decade (there’s a reason why all the IPOs this seasons are enterprise SaaS).