Tencent (the most powerful company in China) Part one.
The most powerful and secret Chinese Company that rules all
of them.
If you look at the world’s most valuable companies, you
won’t be surprised to find the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and Google. But one name does stand out: Tencent.
The company is worth more than the likes of Facebook, MasterCard,
and Samsung, and yet if you asked the majority of people what Tencent does,
you’d be met with a confused look. The truth is that Tencent does everything. Because
whilst Tencent's mascot is a friendly-looking penguin - a more accurate animal to
embody this conglomerate would be a giant octopus, with tentacles reaching into
almost every industry you can think of, all over the world. In most places,
Tencent operates from the shadows, hence why it’s not a household name. But
whether you realize it or not, you almost certainly use products or services
Tencent is involved with.
However, in Tencent's home country of China, it’s a very
different story; everyone is aware that Tencent dominates their lives. And
that’s because, in China, Tencent has achieved the seemingly impossible: one app
to rule them all. Tencent created an app called WeChat that's been dubbed ‘the
everything app’ or ‘the operating system of China’, and that’s because almost
all of China’s 1.4 billion population use this app for an average of 4 hours
every day.
That's more than the average American user spends on
all social media apps combined. And the reason people in China use WeChat so
much is that it’s basically every app you can think of rolled into one. It’s
essentially Facebook, PayPal, Whatsapp, Netflix, Google, Spotify, Uber, Yelp, Tinder, Zoom,
YouTube, Deliveroo, Amazon, and lots more all in one single app. Now there’s no
doubt this is extremely convenient. Everything is connected to one app, and one
profile. You pay your bills through it, call your friends through it, and
essentially live your entire life through it.
However, one single company having access to literally
all your data - every aspect of your life - from your exact location to your
entire bank history to every message and call and search you’ve ever made -
it’s a lot. And then it gets worse when you realize that the line between where
Tencent ends and the China government begins, is blurry. Meaning, the China Communist
Party, known as the CCP, has access to all that information as well, making WeChat
one of the most powerful surveillance tools ever created.
Not just that, but private messages and images that are
sent through Tencent apps like WeChat are scanned to see if they need to be censored
- if you say anything the China government doesn’t want you to, the best case
scenario is your message just doesn’t get delivered. The worst-case scenario is you
end up in jail or simply disappear. For example, one citizen literally just
made a lighthearted joke to some friends about a government official and soon
found himself jailed for a text. And it almost seems like the CCP wants people
to be aware of this in order to prevent them from even trying to say anything they
don’t like in the first place - because the China government has even
openly confirmed that it can access deleted WeChat conversations as well, without
permission from the user or courts.
Now of course, as we know from Snowden’s leaks, countries
surveilling their citizens with technology is certainly not just something that
happens in China. However, China has definitely taken it to new levels. Amnesty
International is an organization focused on human rights and carried out a
report on how messaging apps handle their data. And they concluded the worst
offender by far was Tencent, the only company to literally score 0 out of 100
for its treatment of data. This is because of massive problems about
transparency and what they do with data, where it ends up, and not even denying
that it gives the CCP a backdoor to access all encrypted messages.
Now of course, pretty much all China companies have to
have some ties to the CCP in order to be allowed to succeed. But Tencent is
unique because it has been allowed to monopolize entire industries in China and use brutal tactics to wipe out competitors without any interference from regulators.
But in exchange for that freedom, some would say as a result they’ve been
turned into a weapon for the China government.
It’s estimated the CCP has thousands of members inside
Tencent, including party officials on the Tencent executive board who can
influence decisions. For example, during the initial Covid outbreak, the China
government used WeChat for population control, assigning color codes to
determine whether people were healthy and what they were eligible for, like if
they were allowed to leave their homes or not.
Another example is ordering Tencent to change their
games to conform to communist party values, as well as making Tencent add
facial recognition to their games so kids can only play them for a max of 90
minutes per day. But before you think this doesn’t affect you, think again. You
see, once Tencent built its monopoly in China, it began expanding abroad and essentially went on one of the biggest shopping sprees in history. They’ve
invested heavily in companies like Reddit, Tesla, Discord, Spotify, Snapchat, and Universal Music. And those are just a couple of the many hundreds of
companies outside of China that Tencent is now involved with.
The largest company in the world.
They are also the largest gaming company in the world -
with revenue significantly higher than any competitor. This is particularly
crazy when you consider that gaming is just one of the countless different industries
Tencent operates in, and yet their gaming division alone is bigger than the
entire company of Nintendo or Sony. And the reason Tencent is so dominant
in gaming is that they own 100% of Riot Games, creator of the league of legends,
40% of epic games, creator of Fortnite, not to mention stakes in Ubisoft,
Activision Blizzard, and so many more of the world’s most popular games. The
same is true in other industries - for example, Tencent Payments division is
nearly as big as PayPal’s entire business. And is reported WechatPay generates
over 1 billion payment transactions per day - more than Visa and
Mastercard combined. They’ve also got Tencent Music, they’re huge in
e-sports and are even now involved in making Hollywood movies like Men In
Black. In other words, it’s hard to fully grasp just how large Tencent is.
A monitoring weapon in your pocket.
But it’s only recently that the West has started to realize
the influence Tencent - and thus China - actually has. One small example was
how Blizzard, the World of Warcraft studio partially owned by Tencent, banned
a gamer who endorsed the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. In other words, China
seemed to be using Tencent as a weapon to influence decisions outside of
China. This caused many people to ask: how is this one China company seemingly
now dictating what people in the US are allowed to say?
The same was true with the NBA - you see, Tencent Video
has a deal with the NBA to stream their matches, but in 2019 Daryl Morey, manager of
the Houston Rockets, tweeted: Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong. In
response, Tencent said they would not be streaming any Rockets matches in the future. So soon after this, the manager was forced to delete his support for
Hong Kong, backtrack on his stance, and apologized for his ‘inappropriate
tweet’. Players then came out stating that they love China.
So whilst in recent years some have started to wonder
if China could use Tencent to influence things abroad, the answer seems to be
that they already are. Multiple governments, from the US to India, have now
called WeChat a “security threat.” - and others have suggested it’s a “monitoring weapon in your pocket.”
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