A year into China’s tech crackdown, the sky is no longer the limit for China’s Big Tech


By Tracy QuJane Zhang

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This year will go down as a tough period for Chinese technology firms, as Beijing moved to exert control over the once-freewheeling sector. In the second of a four-part series, the South China Morning Post looks at how 2021 became the watershed moment in the development of China’s Big Tech companies. The first part is here.

In early July, the head of ByteDance’s gaming studio outlined an ambitious plan to rival Nintendo and Activision Blizzard, after hiring 3,000 programmers and artists to work for his Nuverse unit, in a display of the company’s mantra to “take initiative and push boundaries”.

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