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The Chinese government is buying shares in Alibaba, Tencent and other tech companies to be more deeply involved in their businesses, sources told the Financial Times. The stakes usually involve a 1% holding in a key segment and are known as "special management shares," which give Beijing rights over certain decisions at the companies. That allows the Communist Party to gain greater influence...

Philip Perry is a partner at Latham & Watkins, which works on behalf of foreign entities, including some flagged as threats to U.S. national security. ==================================================================== Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) called on the U.S. to stand up to the "generational threat" posed by China while unveiling a major report on Beijing's "malign behavior" at the same time her husband's law firm was working on behalf of companies linked to China's military, intelligence, and security services. As Cheney stood at the podium, her husband Philip Perry’s law firm was cashing in on legal and lobbying work that his employer — Latham...

Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. has mainly been unscathed in Beijing's sweeping crackdown on big technology companies that began in late 2020 -- until just recently. According to Wall Street Journal, the People's Bank of China is preparing to slap a potential record fine on Tencent's WeChat Pay mobile network for violating anti-money laundering regulations. Financial regulators found that WeChat Pay had lapses in compliance with "know your customer" and "know your business" regulations. They also discovered the mobile payments network had evidence of money laundering. An investigation into money laundering would be a new chapter in Beijing's tech...

Former IGN journalist Alana Pierce, during an interview with The Serfs, shared her experience in the entertainment industry, in which she criticized the Chinese company Tencent, which is an investor in such well-known titles as League of Legends, Path of Exile, Black Desert, as well as Epic Games and even Ubisoft. Alana said she had a friend who suggested Tencent make the film, but the company agreed to do so on the condition that there were “no blacks” and “big boobs”. Alana added that Tencent demanded the same when developing games, for example, they say to increase the chest of...

Although Chinese laws forbid kids to play video games at night, minors have been using different tricks to bypass these restrictions. However, they probably won’t be able to do it anymore with the deployment of Tencent’s new facial recognition system. According to the Chinese website Sixth Tone, Tencent has officially launched its controversial facial recognition system on July 6. The initiative, which was previously dubbed “Midnight Patrol,” uses AI and big data to detect kids who try to bypass the restrictions. “We will conduct a face screening for accounts registered with real names and that have played for a certain...

The Chinese regime fined Alibaba $2.8 billion in April under anti-monopoly law, highlighting the regime’s comprehensive review of Chinese internet companies.However, Tencent was only fined $310,000 despite its comparable monopolistic influence in China. For a mega-corporation like Tencent, a fine of this size is equivalent to pennies.The CCP’s biggest grievance with Alibaba is its very large share of the CCP’s precious authority over Chinese banking and finance. However, this alone doesn’t justify the disparity in fines. Tencent’s monopolistic actions in many leading industries are in no way smaller than Alibaba’s.China’s three main technology companies are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, forming...

China's unprecedented crackdown on billionaire businessman and Alibaba founder Jack Ma had raised quite a few eyebrows last year and made headlines all over the globe. Now, a news report suggests that the Chinese government may not be done with its crackdown on major tech firms in the country. It has come to light that another Chinese businessman is facing scrutiny for not complying with the country's anti-trust rules. Ma Huateng (also known as Pony Ma), the founder of Tencent Holdings, met with China's anti-trust watchdog officials earlier this month to discuss compliance at his group. Two people with direct...

After crippling Huawei and throwing cold water on ByteDance’s global business, the Trump Administration has turned its sights on a third Chinese technology giant, Tencent (TCEHY).Tencent was the only Chinese company to feature in the world’s ten largest providers of both apps and games by download volumes last year, according to the mobile platform tracker App Annie.Banning Tencent’s WeChat, an app that is central to the lives of over a billion Chinese users, would have a major impact not just on China’s second most valuable tech company, but also on a large number of large U.S. corporations.A strict interpretation...

The annual conference is hosted by Great Wall Club (GWC), a group comprised of executives from Chinese companies such as Tencent and their Silicon Valley counterparts. This collaboration, however, poses a national security threat and runs the risk of intellectual property theft and espionage per the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Tencent, for example, has been characterized by the U.S. State Department as a “tool of the Chinese government” with “no meaningful ability to tell the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ‘no’ if officials decide to ask for their assistance,”and is among the bevy of Chinese companies banned or on track...

Documents and images shared by users outside China on WeChat, the country’s most popular social media platform, are being monitored and cataloged for use in political censorship in China, a new report says. Citizen Lab, the University of Toronto online watchdog, says in Thursday’s report that WeChat users outside of China are thus unwittingly contributing to censorship. Content they share that censors deem inappropriate is thus barred from being seen by users inside China. Tencent is a major investor in Cary-based Epic Games, which is publisher of the globally popular Fortnite. Documents and images transmitted entirely among non-China-registered accounts undergo...

Despite having around 70 million average daily active users in the mobile version, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in China is no more. Instead, we’ve got Game for Peace now, which, while almost identical to PUBG in many ways — it’s Tencent’s replacement for the battle royale sensation — the finer details are a little absurd. Take, for instance, Game For Peace’s new dying animation, where your enemies wave goodbye at you after you slaughter them. Tencent has now resorted to outright taking PUBG down in China, and replaced it with a more government-friendly socialist game. As they describe it, Game For Peace...

It was a marquee title on its newly refreshed WeGame platform, soon to be a global online storefront and potential Steam competitor. But, days after launch, the Chinese government elected to halt the sale of Monster Hunter: World citing non-specific customer complaints. The Chinese government regularly requires games to be modified for its citizens. Most recently, when PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was picked up by Tencent, it was noted that the game would need to be retooled to align with “socialist core values.” Neither the developers at PUBG Corp. nor Tencent would elaborate on what that would entail. The Financial Times, citing...