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Budget 2019 : Anticipation has long been building about the impending takeover of the tech world by Chinese digital giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and JD. Efforts so far, however, have been largely disappointing. The most popular messaging app in the West is WhatsApp, not WeChat; people use PayPal, not Alipay, for digital payments; Google dominates the search market, not Baidu. Indeed, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Spotify, and Amazon, have barely noticed the competitive impact of their Chinese equivalents. While China has found great success in global hardware markets, they have had much less success with software. That is, until now. You may not have heard of it, but TikTok became one of 2018’s most downloaded mobile apps for Apple and Android devices in the US and Europe, unseating the likes of YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat. TikTok has already been downloaded more than 80m times in the US, logging 4m downloads from the App Store in October alone. It is also...

China enacted sweeping changes to a business competition law to address fraud in the e-commerce industry, which is plagued by malfeasance ranging from fake positive reviews to merchants goosing sales numbers. The National People’s Congress adopted revisions Saturday to the Anti-Unfair Competition Law intended to address online retailers, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The changes take effect January 1 but were announced days before Alibaba Group Holding’s November 11 Singles’ Day bargain extravaganza, which dwarfs Black Friday in the US in terms of revenue. The Chinese law initially took effect in 1993 as a way to protect consumers and businesses from unfair market practices. At that time, none of China’s biggest online companies — including Alibaba, Tencent Holdings, Baidu and JD.com — even existed. As e-commerce developed and prospered, attendant problems grew with it. These latest revisions stipulate that operators shouldn’t deceive consumers by faking sa...