Inside China Tech: 2021 starts where 2020 ended – tensions and tiffs
- TikTok owner ByteDance has accused Tencent Holdings of blocking its cloud office suite Feishu on WeChat
- China is planning to realign hundreds of ‘state key laboratories’ with the country’s technology priorities and boost spending on fundamental science research
This week ByteDance and Tencent renewed their rivalry with a clash over the inability of users to access the former’s enterprise software suite Feishu on WeChat, Beijing made another move to strengthen its science research foundations and speculation mounted over the likely outcome of an anti-monopoly probe into Alibaba Group Holding.
Clash of tech clans
TikTok owner ByteDance has accused Tencent Holdings of blocking its cloud office suite Feishu on WeChat as China’s tech giants fight for dominance in the enterprise collaboration market and as Beijing increases scrutiny of monopolistic practices in the tech sector.
Xie Xin, ByteDance’s vice-president overseeing Feishu, said the productivity app’s WeChat mini program for cloud documents has been stuck in review limbo, without any feedback or response from the social media platform. Feishu is the Chinese version of ByteDance’s productivity tool Lark, an app that basically combines features similar to Slack and Google Docs.
“The review of the WeChat open platform has always been an unsolved mystery. Even if the review status becomes ‘passed’, WeChat can block the product for no reason,” Xie said in a post on Jinri Toutiao, the company’s popular news platform, on Thursday. “Our other two WeChat mini programs, ‘Feishu Conference’ and ‘Feishu’, have suffered such treatment as well.”
“We respect Tencent’s absolute market position and influence in the social media field, but … Tencent relies on its monopoly position to block Feishu and harm the enterprise and user experience. We do not agree [with this practice],” she added.