On the day Twitter Inc named Kathy Chen as its new managing director for Greater China, she turned to the service to introduce herself to its vast and voluble user base.
“Thank you very much for your support,” Chen, a veteran of the Chinese operations of Microsoft Corp and Cisco Systems Inc, said in a short video posted on Twitter late last week by the company’s official Greater China account.
However, for some of Twitter’s Chinese-speaking users, that support will not be arriving any time soon. The reason is her resume: Nearly 30 years before she worked for foreign companies in China, Chen served a stint in the Chinese military. After that, she was involved in a joint venture that was partly owned by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.
Like many foreign-owned Internet services, Twitter has long been blocked in China, but Chen’s appointment — and the stir it has caused — shows the complicated relationship involving Twitter, the technology industry and China.
The country has some of the world’s strictest limits on online expression, and it requires Internet companies to place servers in China.
It has shown little compunction about blocking or banning companies that do not play along.
Even with those limits, China offers a vast and potentially lucrative market. Many sites that are blocked in China, such as Facebook and Google, still do business there, catering to Chinese companies looking to find an audience abroad or to the growing numbers of affluent Chinese travelers.
The contradictions are especially acute for Twitter.
While Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has made a public effort of courting the Chinese leadership, Twitter has shown few indications of any willingness to submit to the restrictions that going to China would require.
Emphasizing that stance, Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser on Monday said that the service was not trying to become unblocked in China.
Twitter has become an online home to a number of Chinese political activists abroad, who use it to communicate with one another and to share their views of current events in China with the world.
Some of them reacted with condemnation over the weekend to Chen’s appointment.
“Chinese tweeps — though not just Chinese tweeps — sneered out of disappointment and concern,” wrote Yaxue Cao (曹雅雪), a writer born in China and based in the US who frequently weighs in on human rights issues in China.
Some were incensed that Chen posted a message on Friday urging cooperation with China Central Television, the state-run broadcaster.
The language resembled Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) call to the Chinese media to “tell the China story well.”
In a statement, Twitter spokesman Dickson Seow said that after college in the late 1980s, Chen was assigned by the Chinese government to become a junior engineer in the People’s Liberation Army. She left in 1994, when the opening of the Chinese economy provided a chance, the statement said.
She was then hired by Computer Associates, a US company, to lead its joint venture in China.
The Ministry of Public Security owned a 20 percent stake in that venture through a local company, the statement said, adding that Chen focused on selling antivirus products and never worked for the ministry itself.
According to her LinkedIn biography, she worked for Microsoft from 2005 to 2009 and for Cisco from 2009 to 2013, before returning to Microsoft.
At Twitter, Chen is to focus on building its advertising business in China and working with developers and others who interact with the platform.
Adding to the complicated relationship between Twitter and China, working with advertisers also includes dealing with Chinese outlets, such as the Xinhua news agency and the People’s Daily, a Chinese Communist Party newspaper, outlets that have increased their presence on Twitter in recent years.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”