ChinaEconTalk

Today, nearly half of the top 100 apps in India's Google Play store are made by Chinese companies. After past failures to enter the Indian tech market, what's driving China tech's sudden success on the subcontinent? How have new Chinese companies like Bytedance and Xiaomi been able to localize more successfully than the likes of Tencent in the early 2010s? And just how seriously do Chinese firms take issues like child porn and fake news in India?

To explore these topics, we spoke with Shadma Shaikh, a writer at Factor Daily. She and Jordan examine the multiple different aspects of China's growing presence in India's technology space. They also discuss the successes and failures of Chinese tech companies in India, the strategies that helped those companies find success, and the unique features of Indian culture (such as multiple languages), which have created difficulties for Western and Chinese tech companies that are eager to gain access to the Indian tech market.

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How did the U.S.-China economic relationship evolve during the Obama administration? Are the economic tensions we see today between the two countries a product of inevitable forces, or more contingent on the choices of the Trump and Xi administrations?

To discuss these topics and more, we have on today's show Caroline Atkinson, who served as President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser for international economics.

How does autocratic repression impact societies? Can the legacy of political repression ripple out across centuries, creating a vicious autocratic cycle? Today, on ChinaEconTalk, we're going back to the Qing dynasty — the time of the Qianlong Emperor, and before — to find out. Our guest is Melanie Meng Xue, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Economics and the Center for Economic History at Northwestern University, whose recent paper on the topic can be found here.

"The U.S.-China equilibrium of the past 20 years has gone," declares Gordon Orr in his recent piece on what to expect in China in 2019.

So what will replace it? What impact will the increasingly activist Chinese government have on the broader economy? And what broader reflections does a 30-year China veteran have about recent changes in China?

Orr is currently a director emeritus at McKinsey, having previously helped open the firm's Beijing office and led its Greater China practice. He is also a board member of Lenovo and Meituan Dianping.

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China's video game market is the world's largest. Over 600 million people play video games in China, and collectively, they spend over $40 billion a year on games. This episode, featuring Abacus reporter Josh Ye and localization expert Frankie Huang, explores the market as well as gaming culture in China.

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Mister Softee, the famed northeastern American ice cream brand, in Suzhou, China? Yes, that was a thing. Turner Sparks, rising from humble beginnings as just another English teacher making his way in the world, achieved fame and fortune thanks to a catchy jingle and some tasty mango-flavored soft serve. Yet his vision of China-wide ice cream domination dissolved amid a deluge of backstabbing regulators, slashed tires, and stolen cones. Listen here to learn about the circumstances that finally melted Turner's ice cream dream.

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