Tencent is a success story bedevilled by the splinternet

Earlier this year it suddenly became clear what a subversive force WeChat could become. It happened on April 22nd, when Shanghai was in lockdown. A black-and-white video swiftly went viral among the 1bn-plus Chinese users of the social-media platform owned by Tencent, China’s biggest internet firm. For six minutes, as a camera panned over Shanghai’s skyline, it carried an audio montage of babies crying after being separated from their quarantined parents, residents complaining of hunger, apartment dwellers banging bins, a mother desperately seeking medicine for her child. “The virus is not killing people, starvation is,” a person cries out. It was a haunting, dystopian scene.

As Lulu Yilun Chen recounts in her book, “Influence Empire: The Story of Tencent and China’s Tech Ambition”, China’s web censors swiftly blocked the video, though some netizens sought to defy them by posting it upside down. It was a rare moment when WeChat (Weixin within China) was used to express people’s anger and pain, rather than the blander stuff—swanky dinners, clouds at dusk—that people usually post. WeChat is Tencent’s flagship product, a “Swiss Army Knife” of a super app, offering messages, search, ride-hailing, food delivery and other applications on a single platform. But in a paranoid regime, its power is also a threat.