The View | Silicon Valley trying to catch up with China -- not the other way around

When photographs circulated of Mark Zuckerberg proudly holding a copy of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recently published autobiography, most commentators figured the Facebook founder was once again sucking up to Beijing.

After all, it’s election season in the United States, which means candidates will be bashing the Chinese to gain votes, making life harder for those doing business in China or, like Zuckerberg, trying to wangle their way into a market currently protected by various ministries, from propaganda to security. Thus Zuckerberg’s eager diplomacy, which, besides the eyebrow-raising reading list, includes language lessons in Mandarin.

One way politicians have been bashing China this year is to accuse the country of being copiers rather than creators. “They’re not terribly imaginative,” Republican candidate Carly Fiorina has said of the 1.3 billion Chinese. “They don’t innovate—that’s why they’re stealing our intellectual property.”

Moreover, sceptics say companies such as online retailer Alibaba or search engine Baidu simply transferred the business models of Amazon and Google to their own country – where their government makes sure that foreign competitors could not effectively tread.

Some in Silicon Valley vigorously contest this view about China’s Internet sector. The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz recently published a research article on the wonders of the technology behind WeChat, the messaging app that can be used for everything from chatting with friends to hailing a taxi to getting investment advice from a banker. Its parent company is Tencent Holding, which has some co-investments with Andreessen.

“While seemingly just a messaging app, WeChat is actually more of a portal, a platform, and even a mobile operating system depending on how you look at it,” writes Connie Chan, a partner with the Silicon Valley financiers.

Chan argues that US companies like Facebook and Yahoo, among many others, should and likely will adapt WeChat’s “pioneering” technology on mobile commerce. The genius, she says, lies in its functionality – one can perform myriad functions on WeChat because of its “apps within an app” system. “These web-enabled, app-within-an-app official accounts are a breakthrough in messaging.”