nehene

I still haven't seen a suggestion engine (including the image search verity) nor chat system (in terms of utility) that could compete with what Taobao had a couple of years ago. (It does probably exist in China though). I think people confuse Taobao with AliExpress. The latter being about as useless as eBay. Once you build some history on Taobao, you can spend days just browsing.

I am not sure which part of my comment you are addressing. As far as I know the official story from Google was that gmail users were being targeted by the Chinese government. Google deliberately stopped complying with Chinese law by no longer censoring search result and therefor became blocked. Yahoo and Microsoft didn't and are still in China.

> That, plus the fact that China will just pull the plug on any American business gaining too much traction.

So did they? We all know why Google and Facebook isn't in China, but as far as I can tell I don't find similar conflicts regarding companies like Amazon and eBay. The consensus online seems to be that they have been failing in the Chinese market by their own hand. Which does sound pretty plausible considering they aren't even that good in Europe.

I think people are being lazy. Of course it is harder to operate in China than in e.g. Europe were US companies were able to avoid local regulation, make sweet heart deals to pay a lot less tax and engage in anti-competitive behavior. Still essentially all mayor tech companies, except Google and Facebook, are there.

The large reason for Chinas success is that for every segment that FAANG casts its shadow in the west there is at least half a dozen companies in China. Europe doesn't lack e.g. map providers that even today could compete with Google if it wasn't for the Google's dominance in the overall market.

Taobao is also a lot better than eBay. (And I don't see that in itself being a factor of anti-competitive behavior like in some other cases).