Doug Young

In the last two months alone, at least three wealth management shops have opened up in my neighborhood, often in spaces that were vacant for years or inhabited by struggling businesses. And my neighborhood in Hongkou District is quite ordinary, which means Shanghai’s trendier areas have undoubtedly been hit by the same scourge of wealth management shops. More broadly, this sudden explosion looks a lot like the kind of boom-bust pattern you often see in China, be it in our stock markets or the latest business trends. On the retail scene, I’ve written about similar booms in convenience stores and coffee shops, which both occurred quite rapidly and created huge supply gluts.

Media are fixated on a new report showing China’s smartphone sales fell for the first time in this year’s first quarter, in a development that shouldn’t surprise anyone due to the market’s supersaturation. But equally impressive in the report is the ongoing surge of Apple, which managed to hold onto its title as the nation’s leading smartphone brand for a second quarter after stealing the crown from the high-flying Xiaomi. Some may say Apple’s surge is due to timing, since it released its latest iPhones in October, fueling a fourth-quarter sales boom that lingered into the first quarter. That may be partly true, though I personally have to applaud CEO Tim Cook for mounting a very focused campaign to woo both Beijing and average Chinese consumers.

It seems like I write about the latest Internet crackdown far too often these days, as Beijing focuses on a wide range of industries where it wants to clean up what it sees as unhealthy business practices. Another two such crackdowns are in the headlines as we head into spring, one in the scandal-wracked e-commerce space and the other in online video. Both crackdowns actually began earlier, and these latest moves just show the regulators don’t feel that their job is finished yet.

China is quickly living up to its copycat reputation in the smart car space, with the latest word that Tencent will enter the business in a tie-up with Taiwanese contract manufacturing giant Foxconn. That pair are following Google into the area, but they certainly aren’t the first Chinese to mimic the world’s largest Internet company. That distinction would probably go to Chinese Internet search leader Baidu, which last year announced its own smart car initiative that was also back in the headlines this week as CEO Robin Li discussed the plan. Yet another similar initiative is also in the headlines today, as online video sensation LeTV discussed its own plans to show off its first smart car at the Shanghai auto show next month. This kind of copycatting and bandwagon mentality has become all too common among China’s Internet companies, who all worry about getting left behind by the competition.

Just a day after I wrote that online gaming giant Tencent may be planning a major new drive into the U.S., we’re hearing that its top rival NetEase is also moving into the neighborhood with plans for a new California R&D center. NetEase’s move comes after search leader Baidu and Tencent both set up U.S. offices last year, though only Baidu actually announced a major new product development center. All of these moves represent the Chinese companies’ efforts to tap into the Silicon Valley ethos, which has far more of the skills they will need in their quest to enter global markets outside of China.

I remember a time not long ago when we China tech reporters used to write annual stories about the number of people who sent billions of simple Lunar New Year text greetings over their mobile phones. Those days now seem like a distant memory, and new data from Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Alipay are showing just how small those earlier figures were, even though they seemed impressive at the time. But the real story in this new tide of “red envelope grabbing wars” is the huge victory for Tencent over Alibaba.

After roaring into China last year on a wave of hugely positive publicity, electric car superstar Tesla has rapidly lost momentum and now appears on the cusp of a major overhaul in a bid to jump-start its prospects. This kind of development isn’t hard to understand, as Tesla’s charismatic CEO Elon Musk set the bar incredibly high when he sold his company’s first electric vehicle (EV) in China last April.

After reaching a fever pitch last week, rhetoric in the high-profile spat over piracy between e-commerce giant Alibaba and one of China’s main business regulators appears to be softening as the two sides move towards a compromise. The latest headlines say Alibaba and the State Administration For Industry And Commerce (SAIC) have joined hands to fight piracy, marking a sharp toning down of the angry rhetoric that was flying for much of last week.

Apple is deepening its uneasy embrace of Beijing security officials, with word that it has agreed to allow security audits for products that it sells in China. This latest development comes less than a year after Apple took the unusual step of moving some of the user information it collects to China-based servers, which was also aimed at placating security-conscious regulators in Beijing.

I have to commend Mark Zuckerberg for his tenacity, after the Facebook founder once again made headlines for receiving a visit from a top Chinese Internet official visiting the U.S. There are several interesting things about this latest development involving Zuckerberg’s endless quest to bring Facebook to China, beginning with the source of this latest news.

The headlines are buzzing today with news about newly listed Alibaba, led by word that the e-commerce giant may explore an electronic payments tie-up with global gadget leader Apple. I’ll be quite frank and say that such a tie-up would seem destined for disaster, based on the previous experience between Alibaba and Yahoo, its only other major partner in a similar past tie-up.

I previously wrote that Apple’s plain-spoken CEO Tim Cook should consider buying a second home in China due to his frequent visits to the country, and the same could be said for Facebook’s more brash founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While Cook’s frequent visits are quite official and include many stops at government and company offices, Zuckerberg has been far more low-key in his equally regular visits due to Facebook’s lack of official presence in the country where its website is formally blocked.

Publicity savvy smartphone maker Xiaomi was making awkward noises in the blogosphere this past week, as it found itself stinging from critical remarks made by a top executive at Apple, the company’s role model. At the same time, the company got an unexpected show of support from another source, as controversial Qihoo 360 CEO Zhou Hongyi defended the smartphone maker over a different brouhaha involving involving an embarrassing data security investigation in Taiwan.

The headlines are buzzing about the latest Hurun Report listing the richest people in China, which has a decidedly tech flavor this year that hints at trouble ahead for the overcharged Internet sector. The report has become a gold standard for gauging the latest business trends in China, but is also famous for focusing on industries that have become overheated. That’s not too surprising, since it’s often such overheating that leads to huge surges in company share prices, which are most often the main foundation for calculating individuals’ wealth. This year half of the top 10 richest men in China come from the tech sector.

It’s become a sort of rite of passage for CEOs of major tech firms to visit China after moving into their job, which looks set to happen again with a September trip to Beijing set for Microsoft’s new top executive Satya Nadella. Tim Cook traveled to China just 6 months after taking the reins from Steve Jobs as Apple’s CEO in 2011, and has visited the country several times since then. Even Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo visited Shanghai earlier this year, just months after the social networking giant’s New York IPO, despite saying earlier that China wasn’t a market where his company could do business.

Cost-cutting pressure is putting a squeeze on China’s three big telcos, creating an unusual set of conditions that could claim smartphone giants Samsung and Apple as victims. The latest signs of trouble for the world’s two largest smartphone makers comes in the form of an article in the English language China Daily newspaper, calling on China’s big three mobile carriers to stop offering packages with Samsung and Apple smartphones and instead only offer models from domestic manufacturers like Lenovo, ZTE, and Huawei.

Smartphone makers Xiaomi and Huawei are learning tough new lessons this week, reflecting intense competition in the overheated market where a feisty field of Chinese players are vying for a place alongside global leaders Apple and Samsung. News in the smartphone space has been coming nonstop over the past year, as a crop of larger players including Xiaomi, Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo compete with smaller but equally aggressive names like Coolpad and Oppo in their home market.

Earlier reports of e-commerce leader Alibaba’s strong political ties appear to be overstated, following word that archrival Tencent has become the first of China’s major Internet firms to win a highly sought banking license. Both companies had been aggressively expanding into financial services over the past year, though each was reliant on partnerships with other companies that already had licenses to offer services in the highly regulated sector dominated by big state-run companies. But now Tencent will be able to offer many of those services on its own, following this ground-breaking award of a license from the nation’s banking regulator.

This week’s Street View takes us to Shanghai’s rapidly aging Maglev train, which was once the city’s pride and joy when it first opened in 2004 offering the world’s fastest speeds in a commercial rail service. The Maglev celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, even as debate grows about a technology that has been overtaken by slower but less costly high speed rail trains in the last few years. More broadly speaking, the sputtering Maglev also shines a spotlight on Shanghai’s inability to become a leading center for technology development.

Two of the world’s biggest social networking service (SNS) operators are in the headlines as the new week begins, starting with word that Facebook is moving ahead with its plans to open in China. Meantime, separate reports are saying Japanese-based mobile instant messaging service Line has been disrupted in China, perhaps for carrying sensitive content. These news bits may look different on the surface, but they’re really quite similar in broader terms. China is extremely wary of offshore-based SNS like Facebook, Line, and Twitter, because they are not subject to the country’s strict self-censorship laws.

It’s been two weeks since I’ve written a post exclusively about leading e-commerce company Alibaba, so I thought I’d end the week with a round-up of a few company news bits including its selection of the New York Stock Exchange for its highly-anticipated IPO. In related news, the company’s major shareholder Yahoo is reportedly in talks to reduce its planned sale of Alibaba shares in the offering. Last but not least, Alibaba has formally added its name to one of its latest acquisitions, a stake in one of China’s leading soccer clubs.

The embattled telecoms pair of Huawei and ZTE are embarking on major hiring sprees outside their home market, seeking to not only import foreign expertise but also foreign faces as they try to look more global and less Chinese. That’s my major takeaway on reading separate reports that ZTE is launching a drive to recruit workers from two struggling western cellphone giants, while Huawei is also hiring thousands of new employees in Europe to cater to its largest market outside of China.

The latest reports that Beijing is pressuring Chinese banks to stop using high-end servers from computing giant IBM don’t come as a huge surprise, amid escalating tensions between China and the U.S. over cyber spying. This particular development is just the latest in a series of similar moves that dates back to last year, when Beijing began quietly pressuring many big state-run firms to stop using U.S. tech products following revelations from the Edward Snowden cyber-spying scandal. The ironic element of Beijing’s anti-foreign tech campaign is that it could actually make the nation’s technology networks and systems even more vulnerable to spying, since most domestic products are far less sophisticated than their foreign counterparts.

When it comes to the risks and rewards of doing business in China, software giant Microsoft can write a lengthy book on the subject after years of ups and downs in the market. Just months after the company marked a modest advance with Beijing’s lifting of a decade-old ban on gaming consoles, the central government has now formally banned the installation of Microsoft’s flagship Windows 8 operating system (OS) on all government computers. It’s clear from the media reports that this ban was unexpected, though Microsoft has certainly learned to expect this kind of sudden and unexplained move after two decades in the market.

Chinese search leader Baidu is trumpeting its opening of a new R&D center in Silicon Valley, becoming the latest Chinese Internet company to make such a move in the tech capital of the world. The announcement is obviously full of symbolism, since Silicon Valley is home to global search leader Google, which once tried to purchase Baidu but was rebuffed by company founder Robin Li. Company watchers will also be asking if the move could auger a major new step for Baidu, which could see it challenge Google in lucrative but highly competitive western markets.

Tencent’s WeChat has grown so quickly over the last two years that it was almost inevitable that the popular mobile messaging service would come under fire from China’s state-run media or Beijing regulators. The service briefly clashed with the telecoms regulator last year during a high-profile spat with leading telco China Mobile, and now WeChat is coming under fire from leading broadcaster CCTV for becoming a hotbed for rumor mongering and fraudulent advertisements.

Tesla has created the kind of buzz and excitement this week that only names like Apple and smartphone sensation Xiaomi have typically been able to muster. In the last two days, the company and its charismatic founder Elon Musk were all over the Chinese headlines as Tesla delivered its first electric vehicles (EVs) in China on the sidelines of the nation’s biggest annual auto show happening this week in Beijing. Tesla has done an incredible job of launching its first vehicle sales in China. This kind of media frenzy and hype surrounding a product launch hasn't been seen for at least a year or two, back when Apple was still at the height of coolness in China.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s worries about the rapid rise of mobile instant messaging service WeChat appear to be well founded, with word that Tencent’s wildly popular platform will create an exclusive shopping channel for Alibaba’s chief rival JD.com. This kind of deal must certainly be Ma’s biggest nightmare, as it will instantly link JD, China’s second largest e-commerce company, with the hundreds of millions of young Chinese who regularly use WeChat to communicate. What’s more, WeChat has shown itself quite capable of converting its users into shoppers who could easily become JD customers.

Telecoms giants Huawei and ZTE are in the headlines for their newer product initiatives, as each tries to offset slowing growth in their core telecoms equipment business. Of the pair, Huawei’s news looks the most bullish, with the company targeting a sharp rise in smartphone sales as it sets its sights on overtaking Apple as the world’s second largest seller. Meanwhile, ZTE has formally rolled out its new gaming console, the FunBox, which looks a bit more exciting that I’d originally imagined and carries an extremely low price tag.

Two of China’s leading Internet companies are taking their first baby steps outside their home market, with word that online game maker NetEase is moving into the U.S. and fast-rising discount e-commerce firm Vipshop is tying up with a Russian partner. The pair are joining China’s “big 3″ Internet firms, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, in making recent moves outside their home market, as each looks for new growth opportunities. All of these companies also want to convince the world that they can compete in the real world outside their own highly protected and heavily restricted home market.

All my previous predictions that e-commerce leader Alibaba would ultimately make its mega IPO in Hong Kong were wrong, with word that the company is now firmly fixed on New York for its highly anticipated share sale. In my defense, I should say that a huge surge in positive sentiment over the last 5 months towards China Internet stocks on Wall Street undoubtedly helped change Alibaba’s mind. The company had previously stated on numerous occasions that Hong Kong was the preferred venue for its blockbuster IPO, which reports are now saying could raise up to $15 billion, making it the world’s biggest Internet offering since Facebook raised $16 billion in 2012.

The new week is just beginning, but it could well go down as a pivotal moment in Chinese Internet history with Tencent’s new announcement of an e-commerce alliance with JD.com that could threaten the dominance of sector leader Alibaba. The tie-up, which was first rumored last month, will see Tencent pay $215 million for 15 percent of JD.com, which will also receive some of Tencent’s e-commerce assets including a minority stake of its flagship Yixun.com B2C service. The companies will merge their e-commerce businesses, creating a new player with nearly a quarter of China’s B2C e-commerce market.

I haven’t written about Facebook in a while, mostly because the company hasn’t made any concrete moves into China lately despite previous assertions that it would like to enter the market. But the company’s purchase of the popular WhatsApp mobile messaging service for up to $19 billion looks like a good opportunity to revisit the topic, and what this deal might mean for Facebook in China. Facebook’s own site has been blocked in China since 2009, making it inaccessible to the vast majority of more than 600 million Chinese Web surfers. But WhatsApp is widely available, even though it competes with the wildly popular rival WeChat service from local Internet giant Tencent.

Much has been written about the meteoric rise of Tencent’s WeChat mobile instant messaging service, with many drawing parallels to the equally rapid ascent of Sina’s Weibo microblogging service starting in 2010. But while Sina has struggled to wring money out of Weibo, Tencent is having much more success with WeChat, as evidenced by news of its latest commercial tie-ups with retailer Wangfujing Department Store and mobile carrier China Unicom. I have a lot of respect for Sina, which has emerged as a leading information provider in China since it first went public in 2000. But the company has shown itself less adept at earning money, unlike Tencent, which has proven much more skillful at milking cash from its innovative core social networking service (SNS) products.

Two of China’s biggest Internet names are making interesting new moves into the tough U.S. market, with word that Alibaba has launched an American e-commerce website and Baidu founder Robin Li is helming a major new Hollywood animation studio. Both moves look cautious but relatively well conceived, even though each carries a degree of risk due to intense competition in the U.S. e-commerce and animation sectors. Still, I have to admire both companies for at least trying, even if their chances of success could be around 50-50.

Online professional networking leader LinkedIn took a big step towards entering the lucrative but tricky China market last week when it created a new China chief position and filled it with an industry veteran as it explores a formal service launch. The move was just the latest in the company’s slow and careful approach to China, and could boost its chances of success in a market that has proven difficult for other global giants like Google, Yahoo, and eBay.

New data is highlighting an online trend that I wrote about last year, namely that microblogs have peaked in popularity and are starting to decline, in a bad sign for leading Web portal Sina as it rushes to monetize and list its popular Weibo service. Frankly speaking, I’m not too optimistic anymore about the prospects for Sina Weibo, which is really just a copy of U.S. social media pioneer Twitter and hasn’t shown much ability to innovate in the rapidly changing social networking space.

A slew of year-end news about China’s auto industry is shining a spotlight on the tough times that domestic car makers are facing not only at home but also abroad as they grapple with tough competition and other market factors. Domestic nameplates like Geely, Chery, and BYD have steadily lost share in their home market over the last few years to big foreign names like GM and Volkswagen, but posted strong export gains as they looked to overseas markets to partly offset the declines at home. But now even the export picture is looking bleak, with the latest word that no Chinese car makers will attend the industry-leading North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week.

The start of a new year is seeing two of China’s top smartphone and telecoms equipment makers lay out their new goals for 2014, with fast-rising Xiaomi aiming to continue its explosive growth as the more mature Huawei targets more modest gains. Meanwhile, another leading telecoms player, ZTE, is also detailing a major reorganization aimed at rekindling growth as it tries to diversify beyond its core business of building networks for big telcos. All of these plans are consistent with previous signals from each of the three companies, and in that regard aren’t very surprising. But they do provide a hint of where priorities will lie in the new year.

And now for a lighter look at an emerging trend in the China corporate world, which has seen some of the nation’s biggest tech personalities make high-profile bets with their equally successful peers from more traditional sectors. The latest in these high-tech wagers has seen Lei Jun, the charismatic founder of fast-growing smartphone maker Xiaomi, make a bet with Dong Mingzhu, often considered China’s most successful businesswoman as the chairman of appliance giant Gree. These bets are mostly for entertainment and publicity on the one hand; but they do also represent the very real challenge that traditional industries are feeling from e-commerce and other emerging high-tech business models.

Last week will go down in the history books as the week when China finally entered the high-speed telecoms era with its granting of 4G licenses after years of waiting. But China still has the dubious distinction as one of the world’s few markets where Apple’s wildly popular iPhone isn’t available to more than half of the country’s 1 billion mobile subscribers. That looks set to finally change soon, with media reporting that China’s dominant carrier China Mobile has finally signed an iPhone deal with Apple.

First it was smartphones, then it was Internet TV, and now wireless routers have become the latest flavor of the day for Chinese Web firms, as everyone looks to drive traffic to their sites and services in the fast-evolving market. I previously wrote when security software specialist Qihoo 360 entered the router space in June, and now a new report says smartphone maker Xiaomi, search leader Baidu, and game specialist Shanda are preparing to enter the sector as well. Meanwhile, in a separate but related telecoms move, leading telco China Mobile is making a feeble move into the international market with a relaunch of its Jego service that it suspended shortly after an original roll-out earlier this year.

The microblogging realm has been buzzing these past few days with speculation on a brief China visit late last week by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who checked out counterfeit goods at a gadget market in Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech area. Equally interesting was the inclusion in Schmidt’s group of two former Google executives who now work for Xioami, the fast-rising smartphone maker that hopes to someday become China’s equivalent of Apple.

Alibaba may have lost its affection for Hong Kong’s securities regulator after an impasse over its IPO plans, but it appears to be moving in a happier direction these days with U.S. Internet giant Yahoo. That’s my assessment, following word that Yahoo will hold onto a larger share of China’s e-commerce leader than the two sides had previously agreed to last year when they reached a landmark deal to end their stormy 7-year-old marriage.

I’ve avoided writing about the new Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ) up until now, despite exhaustive coverage in both domestic and international media. But now I’m lifting my informal ban, following new reports saying the FTZ could soon host a proposed but long-stalled international board where foreign companies could list their shares in China. Such a development would be quite exciting, as it could finally allow big names like China Mobile and Lenovo, which are technically based overseas, to finally make their shares accessible to investors in China.

China's unruly markets for emerging sectors are famous for Trojan Horses, which often come as hidden traps in many products and services that ultimately harm consumers. The nation's tourism authority just launched a new law to eliminate such traps in the travel sector, and now we're getting word that the telecoms regulator is preparing a similar move against hidden and sometimes malicious apps that often come pre-installed on many new smartphones.

Social networking apps have become the flavor of the day among Chinese Internet firms, especially in the mobile space, and it’s rare to go more than a week or two without reports of a big new move by a major player in the space. Amid all that chatter, I was intrigued to read the latest report of an interesting new tie-up between leading microblog operator Sina Weibo and appliance maker Hisense into the unlikely field of smart air conditioners.

There’s an interesting report out saying that up-and-coming smartphone maker Xiaomi is developing its own mobile operating system (OS), becoming the latest Chinese player to try to muscle in on a market now dominated by three U.S. companies—Apple, Google, and Microsoft. I’ll admit there have been so many similar initiatives by both Chinese hardware and Internet companies these days that it’s hard to know which of the campaigns are genuinely new systems and which are just variants of Google’s popular and free Android OS.

China reached an important milestone this week when it was included for the first time in the global launch for Apple’s newest smartphone, the iPhone 5S. The move reflects the growing importance of China to Apple, which now counts the market as its second largest. China’s inclusion in the global launch also reflects an effort by Apple to try and win back local consumers, many of whom have recently abandoned the U.S. tech giant due to long waits to get the latest iPhones and a series of negative media reports.

Most of the world is buzzing with speculation about what prompted a top Google executive to defect to Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, but few are giving much credit to one of China’s hottest tech companies for luring Hugo Barra to join its ranks. Most media are focusing instead on an apparent love triangle between Google co-founder Sergey Brin and an unnamed current love interest, who just happens to be an ex-girlfriend of Barra. But instead, I would venture to guess that Barra’s departure has less to do with this titillating love story, and more to do with Xiaomi’s aggressive global aspirations

I’ve been traveling through Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau these last few days, so thought I’d end the week with a look at Tencent’s hugely popular WeChat mobile messaging service and the challenges it faces in its quest to go global and commercialize. I’ve been quite surprised by how widespread WeChat, known in Chinese as Weixin, has become in all three of these Chinese-speaking areas. But at the same time, comments from one of my industry friends also indicate Tencent could face an uphill battle winning acceptance in the US, where it could face heavy competition from rival products and skepticism due to its China connections. New media reports also indicate WeChat’s hyped new relationship with China Merchants Bank may also be running into problems, indicating the road to commercialization may not be as smooth as Tencent had hoped.

A couple of interesting news bits are coming from the new energy vehicle sector, including a potential roadblock into the China market for up-and-coming U.S. player Tesla and new results from struggling domestic electric car maker BYD that look encouraging but not too exciting. The main common theme in this latest news is that new energy vehicle makers continue to hold out hopes for the China market, banking on strong government policies to boost the market, even though progress has been slow so far.

As we get bombarded with a slew of quarterly reports from the likes of NetEase and Tencent about their health in the present, I want to turn my attention to the future with a look at an interesting report on potential Chinese suitors for tumbling smartphone maker BlackBerry. The report that caught my attention mentions PC giant Lenovo and telecoms equipment maker Huawei as two leading candidates to buy BlackBerry, which formally put itself up for sale earlier this week.

Barely a month goes by these days without rumor of a new acquisition target for Baidu, which suddenly seems anxious to buy up major assets in its bid to diversify beyond its core search business. The latest rumors say Baidu is close to a deal to purchase Nuomi, the group buying unit of social networking leader Renren. As one of China’s most profitable Internet companies, Baidu is hoping to take advantage of low valuations of Chinese Internet firms, many of which are running low on cash and have had trouble attracting interest from foreign investors.

We’ve been reading all year about how China is set to overtake the US to become the world’s largest smartphone market in 2013, and now we’re seeing some numbers that tell the story more vividly. The latest figures on China’s smartphone market show Apple’s position slumping in the second quarter, as sales have surged for a field of domestic players cranking out millions of cheap models, many selling for less than 1,000 yuan ($160) each.

As if its China troubles weren’t bad enough following a weak earnings report, global tech giant Apple is now coming under political fire from central bureaucrats in Beijing for failing to deliver promised donations after an earthquake earlier this year. Frankly speaking, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Apple or any of the other firms that get this kind of criticism, since I find their quickness to announce donations after any major disaster somewhat insincere and largely a publicity ploy. But the fact that yet another foreign firm is coming under attack from central government sources this month certainly adds to my previous assertions that Beijing has recently embarked on a drive to discredit foreign firms and divert attention from other domestic problems.

Just days after making its first acquisition in China under a new CEO, faded U.S. search giant Yahoo is reportedly in talks to reacquire the Chinese rights to its brand from former China partner Alibaba. The reports, if true, would be the latest signal that Yahoo is gearing up for a major new attempt to become a player in China’s huge Internet market, following two failed previous attempts. If such a new foray really comes, Yahoo would join other major US Internet giants such as eBay and Google, which also look set to make big new pushes into China following earlier failures.

If Yahoo’s new chief executive Marissa Mayer wanted to confuse the market about her China strategy, she’s doing a good job with the company’s latest move in the market. Just three months after shuttering its China email service, in what looked like the prelude to a withdrawal from the market, Yahoo has announced its purchase of a Chinese R&D startup. In all fairness, Mayer has only been on the job for a year and these kinds of little strategic moves are relatively common for incoming executives. But this kind of mixed signal could also auger a confused strategy in China, similar to Yahoo’s previous strategy that ultimately led to its failure twice in the complex market.

Too much money isn’t always a good thing, as it often pressures companies to put that money to work even when good investment opportunities are limited. Baidu demonstrated that reality earlier this week with its purchase of an online app store that had little relationship with its core online search business, and now Alibaba is showing similar tendencies with its investment in an online travel services website. In Alibaba’s case, the new investment comes as the e-commerce leader posted a record second-quarter profit, and as it prepares for a blockbuster IPO that increasingly looks like it will take place in Hong Kong.

The exodus of Chinese tech firms from New York stock exchanges continues at a steady pace, with cellphone chip maker Spreadtrum announcing a sweetened buyout offer and online entertainment firm Shanda indefinitely delaying its IPO plans. These latest moves reflect not only the chilly U.S. investor climate towards Chinese firms, but also the fact that many of these firms have become attractive buyout targets due to their low valuations. As a result, we could see some interesting bidding wars emerge in the weeks ahead for a few of the companies that have already received buyout offers.

After its first attempt to develop the China e-commerce market failed miserably nearly a decade ago, US Internet giant eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) is making some smarter moves this time around by choosing better partners and also by building up its business more gradually. In the company’s latest China development, media are reporting eBay has formed a new joint venture with Chinese Internet giant Tencent (HKEx: 700). At the same time, separate reports are saying that eBay may fail in its bid to become the first foreign licensee to offer electronic payment services in China.

China’s regulators have never been known for moving fast on anything, and that case seems to apply even more when it comes to allowing foreign players into emerging markets like third-party payment services. More than two years after China began awarding licenses for its domestic companies to offer such, foreign companies are still waiting for equal rights in the lucrative domestic market. But now US e-commerce giant eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) is saying it could soon become the first foreign licensee to enter the market, providing both a big opportunity, but also a major challenge, as it seeks to catch up to Chinese rivals with more than a two-year head-start.

After disappearing from the headlines for a few months, the ongoing search war between industry leader Baidu and challenger Qihoo 360 has jumped back into the news with reports that the former has sued the latter. This new lawsuit is most likely just the first phase in a new stage of the battle between these two companies, and I fully expect Qihoo to file a countersuit within the next few weeks.

After more than a year of antagonism, I’m happy to see that the voice of reason finally seems to be coming to the ongoing clash between China and the West in their prolonged dispute over Beijing’s state support for the solar panel sector. Germany seems to be the driving force behind this welcome change in tone, following German Chancellor Angela Merckel’s remarks last week that she opposed anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese solar cells being proposed by the E.U.’s trade office. Merkel correctly realized that a trade war over solar panels wouldn’t benefit anyone, and could potentially deal a crippling blow to a sector that will be critical to the world’s future energy security.

Six months after abruptly shuttering its China-based e-commerce search business, global Internet titan Google is reportedly rethinking that decision with plans to re-enter the market. The decision looks like the latest acknowledgement by Google that China is simply too big to ignore, following its high profile shuttering of its China-based general search business in 2010 after a spat with Beijing over censorship. If this latest story is true, the next logical question might be whether we could see Google return to the general China search market, where competition is suddenly starting to heat up after years of dominance by market leader Baidu.

Say the word “logistics” in any conversation and you’ll almost inevitably put anyone listening to sleep. But the concept is hardly a boring one in China’s hyper-competitive e-commerce space, where industry leader Alibaba has just announced a massive 100 billion yuan ($16.3 billion) plan to build up its logistics network over the next few years. To me this plan looks like a direct response to similar recent moves by e-commerce names like Jingdong, Tencent, and Amazon, which are aggressively building logistics networks with an aim of reducing delivery times to two hours or less.

A sudden rush to form new partnerships on China’s Internet is creating some interesting new tie-ups, including the latest one that is seeing e-commerce leader Alibaba join with security software firm Qihoo 360 in the e-commerce search space. This new pair-up actually seems relatively minor, with Qihoo using Alibaba’s specialized eTao search engine to power e-commerce searches on Qihoo’s own so.com general search site. This kind of tie-up isn’t all that uncommon in search, where portals and other companies that want to include a search function on their home page often license a third party’s engine like Google’s or Baidu’s for the job.

New moves from Internet giant Tencent and global retailer Walmart are turning up the competition in China’s e-commerce wars, which are quickly becoming a contest to see who can outspend whom. Both of these latest initiatives look quite pricey, especially Tencent’s move that will see it roll out an ultra-fast product delivery program. WalMart, meantime, is pouring big money into a campaign to build a new in-house clothing brand for its recently acquired Yihaodian online store. The current trends are a bit worrisome, as they indicate no near-term easing in China’s e-commerce price wars that have raged for about two years now.

Less than two weeks after buying a major stake in leading Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo, e-commerce leader Alibaba is back on the acquisition track with word that it’s on the cusp of another deal to buy a similar strategic stake in mapping services firm AutoNavi. While this newest deal would be a bit smaller than the Weibo tie-up, it marks the latest transaction in a nascent M&A wave among China tech firms that looks set to gain momentum during the rest of the year.

Having let the markets get pumped up with huge expectations for its upcoming mega IPO, e-commerce leader Alibaba now appears to be trying to temper some of those high hopes in the run-up to an offering that is likely to be the biggest ever for a Chinese Internet firm. The reason for the sudden change of tone? Apparently the company wants to avoid following in the footsteps of social networking giant Facebook, whose IPO was so overhyped by the time it finally occurred that it was almost bound to result in failure and major disappointment.

The coming months will be a pivotal time for Beijing to show its commitment to free trade, as China’s three telcoms operators get set to award billions of dollars in new contracts to build 4G mobile networks. The building spree will mark the first batch of big new contracts since both the U.S. and Europe took moves last year that could severely limit or ban the import of Chinese networking equipment for reasons of national security and unfair competition.

We’re seeing some interesting new moves in the smartphone space from e-commerce leader Alibaba and dominant carrier China Mobile, as each makes big new bets in the fast-evolving area. Alibaba is launching its mobile operating system on a new series of smartphones with several Chinese partners, following a similar aborted attempt last year. China Mobile, meanwhile, is planning a major overhaul for its popular but rapidly aging Fetion mobile messaging service, in an attempt to compete with newer, more popular third-party apps like Tencent’s WeChat.

The rapid rise of location-based services (LBS) on the Internet is spawning a new generation of start-up companies, with taxi finders one of the latest to join the trend. Such apps use GPS technology to create services that rely on a person’s location, such as helping that person to find nearby restaurants or shops. Just this week a friend was telling me about one such new LBS to help frustrated consumers find taxis, and now we’re reading about two other companies that are moving onto the investor radar with their own new tie-ups.

A new attack on software giant Microsoft by an English-language Chinese broadcaster looks like a relatively minor affair and would probably not even qualify as news in most Western markets. But this is China, where all media are owned by the state and often support each other by speaking with a single voice. That means this new criticism by China National Radio could be just the opening shot against the world’s largest software maker, similar to an ambush faced by rival Apple just weeks ago.

The ongoing tiff between the U.S. and China over the security of Chinese telecoms equipment took a new twist last week when Washington largely forbid several government agencies from buying products from industry giants Huawei and ZTE. While Washington’s previous moves in the dispute have been controversial and often contrary to fair trade principles, this latest act looks more reasonable because it is limited to purchasing by a small number of government agencies. This ongoing clash began last October, when a Washington report said telecoms equipment from Huawei and ZTE, two of China’s most successful high-tech exporters, posed a national security risk.

Finally there are some interesting news bits on e-commerce leader Alibaba that don’t involve its highly anticipated IPO, including a push into developing markets and a new tie-up with global payments giant MasterCard. Of the two bits, the former is more intriguing because it represents a major move for the company outside the Chinese-speaking world for its highly successful consumer-oriented e-commerce services. The latter tie-up is interesting because it involves a big name like MasterCard, even though actual details are scarce and probably won’t get worked out until some point in the future.

China’s economic miracle has captured global headlines for much of the last 30 years, but a much quieter revolution has also taken place in that time at the nation’s toilets. As China’s leading commercial center, Shanghai has been at the edge of this quieter revolution, which has just flushed past another milestone with the announcement of a new mobile app to help people locate the nearest public toilet. The new app uses GPS technology to locate the nearest of 8,000 public toilets now operating in Shanghai for users who feel the call of nature while walking around or driving outside.

The inevitable has finally happened at tanking former solar star Suntech, which has been forced into bankruptcy, ending a months-long battle between the company's founder Shi Zhengrong and just about all the company's other stakeholders. In the meantime, I would be remiss not to mention another solar news tidbit that has panel maker Yingli forming a new strategic tie-up with GLC-Poly Energy, in what could eventually become the first mega-merger in the struggling solar panel sector.

What started as local news of hundreds of dead pigs found floating in Shanghai's Huangpu River has suddenly morphed into a major story, captivating global audiences with its graphic images and air of mystery about where the corpses came from. The news has now traveled to much of the world, including the U.S. city of Denver, prompting even my brother to take notice and send me an email warning not to drink the Shanghai tap water.

The Internet world is buzzing this week with word that Alibaba founder Jack Ma will hand over his CEO title to another company executive, ushering in a new generation of leadership for China's leading e-commerce firm. But this change looks largely superficial to me, and is most likely designed to please investors as the company gets set for its multibillion-dollar IPO that could happen later this year. Instead of chief executive officer, the title of chief administrative officer would probably be more appropriate for the role that Alibaba's incoming number-two man Jonathan Lu will play.

China's unruly e-commerce sector could be set for some big changes in the year ahead, with executives from both inside and outside the industry calling for moves to bring order to an unruly space that has been plagued by cutthroat competition. Perhaps most significantly, a top executive from the traditional retailing sector is calling for e-commerce firms to pay more taxes, a move that could make online purchasing more expensive and less attractive to cost-conscious consumers. Other executives are calling for tighter regulation of the sector, which has evolved into a free-for-all due too much investment and lack of government oversight.

U.S. apparel maker Cherokee made a strategic gamble last week when it largely circumvented China’s traditional retail store network and opened a shop on the Internet, highlighting an emerging new path for mid-sized foreign brands into the lucrative sector. Unlike real-world shops, online stores are much cheaper to set up and also target an e-commerce market set to become the world’s largest over the next decade.

The auto industry is humming over new data that show China car sales soared 45 percent in January, marking their strongest growth since April 2010, when government incentives during the global economic crisis helped to turbocharge the sector. Industry watchers are acknowledging that seasonal factors played a major role in this latest jump, but point out that they still expect to see a return to strong growth in the upcoming Year of the Snake, as China's economy improves and consumers rediscover their love affair with cars.

A couple of news bits from the Chinese auto space are underscoring how competitive the sector has become, with domestic carmaker Dongfeng Motor signing a new tie-up with Swedish truck maker Volvo, as Germany's Volkswagen moves closer to entering the low-end market traditionally shunned by foreign names. Both of these cases show that big-name automakers, both domestic and foreign, will have to look for creative new ways to keep their business growing in the hyper-competitive Chinese market, and that the days where companies could simply construct a new multibillion-dollar factory to fuel additional growth may be in the past.

For a company of its size, Apple has been surprisingly conservative about its investments in China, opening just a few of its trademark stores in a country that is already one of its top global markets but otherwise making few major investments. But that could soon change with talk that the world's biggest tech company is aiming to open a research and development center in China, which has become an unspoken prerequisite for any company that hopes to successfully do big business in the country.