China

Quarantine, WeChat and chicken feet: How the pandemic has changed tech business travel to China

In 2020, visiting China for business can be a bit like playing the lottery.

Quarantine, WeChat and chicken feet: How the pandemic has changed tech business travel to China

After concluding his 14 days in isolation, startup adviser Kevin Yang was free to continue his business trip.

Photo: Kevin Yang

Kevin Yang has traveled to China countless times. As a former Huawei and Oppo executive, he used to visit the country almost every quarter. However, when Yang recently got ready to visit a Chinese startup he is advising, he quickly realized that the pandemic would make this a very different trip.

Yang has been documenting his trip in a series of LinkedIn posts , which offer some fascinating insights into the state of business travel during COVID, the ever-growing importance of WeChat in a country recovering from the pandemic, and shifts in the Chinese tech industry as it adapts to a rapidly changing world.

One of Yang's most striking observations is the omnipresence of WeChat in China, and the way the pandemic has reinforced its importance to the Chinese. To prepare for his trip, Yang joined a number of WeChat groups, which helped him get his documents in order. (To get a special visa, China currently requires an invite, a negative COVID test and more from foreign visitors). He also joined a dedicated WeChat group for passengers of his flight, and one to chat with people who had taken this very flight in recent weeks.

Once Yang landed in China, WeChat became even more important. Instead of filling out a customs form on paper, he prepared his customs declaration in a WeChat mini-app, which then generated a QR code that was scanned by customs officials. At the airport, he was prompted to scan another QR code to prepare for his local travel — all within WeChat. "The Chinese government wanted to make all the processes contactless," Yang told Protocol.

WeChat has long been a daily utility in China for everything from communication to cashless payments. However, the embrace of WeChat as an essential tool for international travel during the pandemic comes at a time when the Trump administration is pushing to ban the app from U.S. app stores . "It would make the process very difficult for foreign travelers," Yang said about a possible WeChat ban.

Once Yang arrived in China, he had to undergo a mandatory 14-day quarantine in a randomly assigned hotel. "Finding out the quarantine hotel is like opening a mystery box in 2020," he wrote on LinkedIn. On one of his WeChat groups, people had crowdsourced a number of hotels used to quarantine international travelers, complete with reports on whether the hotels allowed guests to order outside food. "Some were overjoyed to find that they were assigned to the so-called 'Lottery Hotels,'" he wrote. "Some were disappointed when they got a crappy hotel."

Yang ended up staying in two relatively basic hotels, one of which didn't allow outside food. Instead, hotel staff dropped off meals outside of his room three times a day. Yang was a bit disappointed by the choice of food, but some of his fellow international travelers had a much harder time. One visitor from Spain in particular wasn't exactly familiar with some of the traditional Chinese dishes, including chicken feet. "He complained all the time," Yang said.

One day, an ambulance arrived at the hotel to pick up one of the quarantined guests. On WeChat, other travelers started freaking out, worried that one of the guests had gotten COVID. But soon after, they learned that it was the Spaniard, who was being relocated to a Western-style hotel. He hadn't been ill; he just didn't like chicken feet.

Yang used much of his time in quarantine doing video chats to catch up with friends and colleagues, including some who he got to work with as a procurement director for Huawei. Many of the folks working in the chipset industry were especially upbeat, he noted on LinkedIn: "China is investing heavily […] in replacing American chips with homegrown solutions." Prompted by the escalating trade war, and attempts of the Trump administration to cut off companies like Huawei from the U.S. semiconductor supply chain, the Chinese government has rolled out massive incentives to kickstart homegrown chip production .

These measures include direct financial assistance from the government, as well as easier access to land and real estate to build out manufacturing capabilities. A year ago, it was still challenging to raise money for chip manufacturing in China, Yang said. These days, it has become one of the country's hottest investment areas. "This moment is huge," Yang said. "It's a gold rush."

Yang was able to leave quarantine after 14 days and another negative COVID test. Since then, he has been able to move about in China with few restrictions. He's taken taxis, subways, airplanes and other forms of transportation, noting at one point on LinkedIn that this alone felt like "a luxury in a world terrorized by COVID." "It's a very different feeling," he told Protocol.

In the end, Yang is glad that he traveled to China, even with the hassle of mandatory quarantine. Still, he cautioned that it can be especially challenging for anyone not fluent in Chinese. "Right now, it's difficult to travel to China for foreigners," Yang said. "Be prepared," he advised. "Do some research."

And, one might add, get ready to expand your culinary horizons.

Correction : The caption on the photo for this story misrepresented how many days Kevin Yang spent in quarantine. It was 14, not 11.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep Reading Show less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more .

Keep Reading Show less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep Reading Show less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison ( @dgoodison ) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep Reading Show less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich ) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep Reading Show less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins