Trade war and censors blow chill wind through China's giant tech scene

Wang Miaoyi’s small one-bedroom flat, which doubles as her design studio, is overflowing with game magazines, figurines and boxes of science-fiction novels.

The 30-year old game developer is a child of the county’s technology boom: she studied at one of China’s top universities and her company hit it big with an award-winning game that was published on Nintendo’s Switch console and the personal computer gaming platform Steam, with plans for roll-out on other game platforms.

Now her ambitions – and those of many others across China’s giant technology industry – are facing a reckoning, amid rising state control over the sector, tightening regulation and a biting trade war with the United States stymieing growth.

“(In 2015) doing a start-up was popular. So many young people set up small businesses, like developing games, and dreamed of making big money as well as being free,” she said. “But they found out now it’s really unrealistic.”

Wang said she has had to abandon for now hopes of releasing the game on new platforms in China, closing the original studio that developed it and working instead on updates with a skeleton crew of freelancers. She has moved from the Beijing hi-tech hub of Zhongguancun to the city’s cheaper far-west outskirts to cut costs.

She is not alone. Reuters interviewed a dozen technology industry insiders, from gig economy workers to investors, who said that the boom days of easy returns looked to be over.