Hacker News Reader

Comment by heartbeats | Hacker News Reader

> Is any Chinese company just called "the Chinese government" now?

There's no difference. As the country lacks rule of law, companies are direct subsidiaries of the government. As such, the only useful mental model is to treat it as an aggregate. Not "a Chinese citizen/company/organization did X," but "China did X".

View on HN

I think that's a reasonable way of looking at things if you're thinking about how the Chinese government might use its leverage, but it's a an overly simplified way to describe selling some stock to Tencent.

No. Tencent = China, or in proper mathematical terms Tencent => China. Any sentence that has Tencent, you can substitute it for China and it will still be correct.

    He works for Tencent.
    He works for China.

    His company was purchased by Tencent.
    His company was purchased by China.

    Tencent operate the messaging app QQ.
    China operates the messaging app QQ.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com