NewPut off by Trump? Baidu’s Li urges Silicon Valley talent to call China home
Founder of the dominant Chinese search engine urges Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs and coders to set up shop in China
Software coders, engineers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are welcomed in China if they are put off by the anti-immigration comments espoused by the president-elect of the United States, said Baidu Inc’s founder and chairman Robin Li.
Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News and strategy adviser to Donald Trump, noted during a November 2015 interview with Trump on the website’s Sirius XM radio talk show that two-thirds or three-quarters of Silicon Valley’s CEOs are from South Asia or from Asia, according to a Washington Post report this week.
“I hope these migrants would come to China, so that the country can play a bigger role in the world’s innovations,” Li said on Friday during the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen. “Many entrepreneurs have said that they are worried that Trump’s victory will hurt creativity in the US.”
China, home to the world’s largest Internet-using population and biggest number of smartphone users, is throwing its doors open to attract talent and capital to help give the country a leg up in technology.
Interested technologists and entrepreneurs will have to contend with China’s “cyberspace sovereignty,” espoused by president Xi Jinping last year in Wuzhen and reiterated this year by the Communist Party’s propaganda chief Liu Yunshan, an unambiguous affirmation of Beijing’s tight grip on censorship and control of the Internet.
Still, the country’s size and growth pace offer rewards for entrepreneurs who are willing to live without accessing Facebook, Twitter, Google, or websites including The New York Times, and the South China Morning Post. Baidu, operator of the dominant Internet search engine in China, owes almost all its revenue to the country’s advertisers and users.