Richard (Rich) Turrin is the international best-selling author of “Cashless - China’s Digital Currency Revolution” and “Innovation Lab Excellence.” He is an Onalytica Top 100 Fintech Influencer and an award-winning executive previously heading fintech teams at IBM following a twenty-year career in investment banking. Living in Shanghai for the last decade, Rich experienced China going cashless first-hand. Hear about:

What is the Chinese digital yuan, and why it is different from cryptocurrencies; 

What are the different levels of anonymity the digital yuan offers;

Will the Chinese digital yuan help break the duopoly of the Alibaba and WeChat mobile payments in China;

How will the Chinese digital yuan impact the world;

Rich's personal experience using the digital yuan in Shanghai;

How does PBOC enable the digital yuan to be used without internet access?

Find Rich on LinkedIn, Twitter, and check out his book Cashless on apple books, Amazon, and any other digital bookstores across the planet.

Episode 84 of Tech Buzz China features co-host Rui Ma in conversation with Gary Liu, CEO of the South China Morning Post on the hottest five trends shaping the China internet industry in 2021: tightening regulations, bumpy roads for IPOs, overseas expansion plans, shifting demographics, and growing private domain traffic. SCMP is a leading news media company that has reported on China and Asia for more than a century with global impact. 

Also, Tech Buzz China is growing! We have a Livecast series of interviews with entrepreneurs and investors in China tech — TBC Livecast. It's mostly recorded live in front of our new paid community Tech Buzz China Insider. For TBC Insiders, we have an active Discord server, a forum, and regular members-only events. If you're really into China tech, join us starting with the quiz. 

In addition, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, tweet at us at @techbuzzchina, and write to us at [email protected]. As always, our transcripts are available on our website, as well as at pandaily.

Thank you to our teams at SupChina and Pandaily, and especially to Bryce Ye, and Kaiser Kuo. If you enjoy our work, please leave us an iTunes review! They do matter and we appreciate it so much!

Andy Tian is the founder of Asia innovations group, a company that has a suite of live social apps, e.g. Uplive, Lamour, SupreFans with more than 410 million registered users located in over 150 countries and regions worldwide.

Andy has strong opinions about what's the best way to take the most interesting things he has seen in China and throughout Asia, and export them to the rest of the world. Hear about:

How China's uniquely firewalled off environment created a different ecosystem, thus resulted in different revenue models of social apps in China;

What is Operation aka Yunying (运营) in China, and how it works differently in western countries;

The twin trends of globalization & localization in social apps;

Why Andy implemented multi-regional operations from the start;

What he believes are the unique catalysts for the explosion of livestreaming eCommerce in China, and why it hasn't taken off just yet in the U.S. or anywhere else.

Richard is the co-founder of Grandview Capital, a VC fund focused on investing in Chinese entrepreneurs who do business outside of China (AKA go overseas or "chuhai" in Chinese). He's based in Silicon Valley and his co-founder is in China. Hear Richard explain:

Why he started to look at Chinese entrepreneurs who are attacking overseas markets back in 2015;

How the nature of the manufacturing & technology industry makes it easier for these companies to globalize;

How he believes in applying the "time machine" paradigm to his investments

How it's no longer about copying but localizing

Why Chinese companies favor Southeast Asia and Latin American markets

What he's investing in these days.

Find Richard on LinkedIn!

Ray Hu is the founder of Blue Lake Capital, an early stage VC fund in China with about $700mm under management. Blue Lake specializes in SaaS investments. Hear Ray explain:

The current state of Chinese SaaS, enabling factors and requirements for success

Case study: Jushuitan (JST), an ecommerce SaaS and their sales strategy

Enterprises' willingness to pay and other differences in the Chinese market

Internationalizing

Albus Yu works for China Growth Capital, a venture capital fund that manages about 1.4 billion dollars. He specializes in consumer internet, consumer brands, and services investment. Hear Albus explain:

The reason that he  had started to invest in consumer internet and e-commerce marketplaces;

What the growth of DTC brands in China looks like these days;

The differences that the DTC brands are growing between the US versus in China right now, and Why it is a better opportunity from both the consumer side and supply & manufacturing side; and he gave the Chinese "Lululemon" as an example;

The reason that Albus recommend brands to start off online and build offline presence as well;

He perceives the potential for some Chinese new brands to expand internationally as positive.

Recorded March 9, 2021.

Ron Cao has spent 20 years as a venture capitalist in China. He first went there during the 90s when semiconductor investing was a thing, but then found himself investing in consumer internet startups such as ByteDance and Pinduoduo because that sector yielded the greatest return, and is now finding himself investing in semiconductors again. We talk about the impact of the pandemic, if deeptech investing is really taking off, investing in returnees, blockchain, antitrust, & SPACs!

Recorded Thursday 2/10/21.
Kevin, now at Github, is the founder of interconnected.blog, a bilingual newsletter on the intersections of tech, business, money, geopolitics, and US-Asia relations.
We go over:
What is Agora? It's a platform as a service company.
The origin story of Tony Zhao the CEO who was previously at WebEx & then CTO at YY, where he achieved substantial success.
Agora's technology & business model, which is developer facing and self service and usage based
What happens when there are more Chinese companies like Agora building infrastructure technologies? Does innovation have to be something super different / sexy or can it also be arising out of battle-tested scaling-up technologies, like Agora? And finally, Agora's latest acquisition, another Chinese company called Easymob.

Jordan Berke spent fifteen years transforming the world's largest retailer into a truly digital organization by leading strategic alliances with JinDong and Tencent. He's now the founder of Tomorrow Retail, a consulting company. Hear about:

How does Walmart China outstrip the US in four major categories?

What are retailers in the U.S. focusing on right now?

How do retailers turn their business into a platform?

What are the differences in the China and U.S. business ecosystems?

What myths persist in the industry?

And finally, what's the future outlook?

Early on in VC, Boyu Hu was at DCM China and worked on the Kuaishou deal. Now he has his own fund XVC, managing $600mm, focusing on consumer internet. I asked what's changed in the last ten years and: Why's he continuing to invest in consumer internet? Is rural China where it's at? Are the big platforms more important? Are the big funds more important? How's he adjusting his strategy? Our conversation was recorded Feb. 24, 2021 over Clubhouse app and Zoom.