China

Chinese nationalists have a new target: Lenovo

The PC giant’s low-key success abroad has influencers asking whether it’s betrayed its home country.

 Lenovo Group's CEO Yang Yuanqing.

Lenovo has been engulfed in a renewed controversy in its home country.

Photo: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images

As a new generation of Chinese tech companies go global, often courting controversy in the process, it’s easy to forget Lenovo, the Chinese computer maker that acquired ThinkPad from IBM in 2005 and remains the world’s largest PC company. But Chinese nationalists haven’t; and now, they are sharpening their knives to go after a company that, for so long, seemed to have it comfortably both ways.

For the past month, Lenovo has been engulfed in a renewed controversy in its home country about whether the Beijing-headquartered company is “unpatriotic” and kowtowing to international markets. Sima Nan, an influencer with millions of online followers who made his name by heralding nationalist narratives, has posted 19 videos related to Lenovo since early November in what looks like a crusade against the company.

It’s a position Lenovo has repeatedly found itself in for the past few years. It has been accused of prioritizing international markets over its home market, not supporting fellow Chinese companies like Huawei and forgetting its roots as a state-owned enterprise. With all its resources and influence, Lenovo has never figured out how to pass the never-ending loyalty test administered by online nationalists.

As Chinese tech companies have become multinational giants, Lenovo’s story has become a cautionary tale for latecomers like DiDi, Tencent and ByteDance. The lesson: Success abroad can brew resentment at home.

In many ways, Lenovo paved the way for the next generation of Chinese tech companies. Born in 1984 as a firm wholly controlled by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lenovo underwent several rounds of transformation to become what it is today: a $12 billion, publicly traded company that sells in over 180 countries and employs 52,000 people. Its ambition has never been limited by its Chinese borders. As early as in 2001, CEO Yang Yuanqing had incorporated “an internationalized Lenovo” into the company’s motto. Within 12 years, it had become the top PC company by market share in the world.

But in recent years, Lenovo’s global success has increasingly turned from an asset into a liability.

Following Lenovo’s withdrawal of its application to list on Shanghai’s STAR stock market in October due to “market conditions,” on Nov. 7 the nationalist influencer Sima started posting videos about Lenovo — and hasn’t stopped since. Sima, whose real name is Yu Li but is better known by his alias, boasts millions of followers on popular social media platforms including Weibo, Douyin and Bilibili. His videos accuse the company of stealing state assets, paying its executives too much, having too much debt, posing a national security threat and more.

Some of Sima’s arguments inveigh against practices common among multinationals. He made a 20-minute video about how 14 of Lenovo’s 27 executives aren’t Chinese nationals and argued that this constitutes a security risk for the Chinese government. He also questioned why Lenovo executives, including Yang, are taking home millions of dollars in salary every year.

Sima, while the most vocal, isn’t the first to question Lenovo’s patriotism. In 2018, Lenovo was grilled on social because, two years earlier, it had sided with Qualcomm over Huawei in a telecom technical standards meeting. Yang responded on his personal WeChat timeline: “It was just a vote on technical standards, but two years later, it was hyped as a topic about patriotism.” Later in 2018, Yang received flack for saying, “We are not a Chinese company” in an interview that year with British publication The Inquirer. The company had to issue a statement saying that the quote was misconstrued.

All the controversy has culminated in a domestic distrust of Lenovo. Lenovo has the meme name as "nice to the American imperialists" (美帝良心) for pricing its products lower in the American markets than in China. Changing the company’s Chinese name from “Lenovo” to “Lenovo China” in 2019 was interpreted as a move to bill itself as only a local branch of a global company. The fact that Lenovo wasn’t hit with sanctions like TikTok or Huawei? Proof it’s sucking up to U.S. regulators.

Perhaps Lenovo didn’t anticipate that in addition to fending off international skepticism of it as a Chinese company, it needs to weather attacks at home as a company that has gone “too global.” Lenovo has been largely silent so far.

As the nationalist narrative in China continues to grow, it may damage the global ambitions of China’s homegrown tech companies. Increasingly, a global footprint, once a badge of honor, looks like a liability at home.

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 ReadingShow 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 ReadingShow 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 ReadingShow 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 ReadingShow 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 ReadingShow 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