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Comment by zmh | Hacker News Reader

I understand Hugo's marketing effort. But most foreign companies cannot take a bite of their market because you need to accept the Chinese Communist Party's censorship first. Many foreign innovative apps are blocked and then cloned in-house with the censorship enforced. So their apps are not valued high outside of China and beyond Chinese as well.

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Its not even that: China's laws are so unevenly enforced that western companies can't compete in China on content. You can find plenty of porn on Baidu, for example; Sina recently received a slap on the wrist for video content. Being "hen huang hen baoli" is how these companies make money, and the CCP mostly turns a blind eye. These are mostly protectionist moves by the government; censorship is also a big concern but not the primary one (freedom of speech is even enshrined in the Chinese constitution...).

Until China becomes a country that is really ruled by law, there isn't much foreign content companies can do.

Laws are weakly imposed for some companies because these companies recruited some prominent state leaders' relatives as their directors or cofounders. These relatives are greedy, but they are needed to negotiate cases of law enforcement.

If your website/service creates content, your business is dangerous to operate in China.

Otherwise, you can do it fine. AppAnnie for example, is largely Beijing based R&D using Python.

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