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maxglute
This just PRC finally applying their version of US export controls, i.e. PRC gets to control PRC originated algos, same argument as TikTok. The founders aren't held "hostage", they're under investigation for violating export control and national security laws. PRC hinted signalled pretty clearly they would use art12 (catch all clause) of export control laws and offshore affiliate rules (to address Singapore loophole) before Manus deal closed - Manus ignored loud hints. The difference is PRC wasn't super judicious in enforcing AI related export controls (especially since agent development new hence art12), US would have ensured this control list tech wouldn't leave US territory via foreign product rule / CFIUS / BIS. PRC gave pretty clear signals to Manus what was going to happen hoping they'd unwind on their own, but they didn't so now they're going to eat shit.
PRC still haven't gone the step up to ban PRC strategic talent from working in US like US has for PRC semi. Don't be surprised in 5-10 years US has to hire PRC workers with obfuscated identities like PRC dealing with US/TW talent in PRC EUV. Plenty more room how these things can escalate depending on how serious PRC starts to treat dual use AI.
JPKab
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3401876
How much is Xi paying the Washington Post, which reports:
"In January, Beijing began investigating Manus for compliance with export controls [...]"
You could make way more money as an AI shill.
maxglute
all the epetroyuan pandabond credits.
andsoitis
[flagged]
ekropotin
Not that I fan of CCP, nor I know details of this situation, but isn’t barring people under investigation from leaving the country a pretty normal legal practice?
culi
Down with all nation-states!
Not the rallying call I expected but I'm here for it
wangjie000
But they are not suspected of any crime.
drbscl
Marking someone as a flight risk for committing a crime is common practice in all countries.
I guarantee the same would've happened in the US if this was the reverse situation.
andsoitis
> for committing a crime
What’s the crime?
camillomiller
The double standards applied between China and Western democracies could work maybe a decade ago, before the US dropped the veil of hypocrisy that shrouded the imperialistic monster.
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maxglute
Oh no taking passport for flight risks during investigation for basically treason... down with... every government in the world.
Anyway that said, with respect to PRC export controls "barring people" is also not wrong conclusion persay. For those down in the thread wondering what PRC can do about it. PRC doesn't have US 80+ years tier of extraterritorial instrument, i.e. banking. But PRC does have fuckload of talent, i.e. 50+ of global AI, soon 50%+ of global semi.
Seems like talent is going to get controlled according to new rules on countering foreign states unlawful extraterrestrial jurisdiction measures from state council a couple weeks ago. IIRC decree 834/5. There's a reason it was front loaded before Manus announcement. TLDR make it illegal for Chinese nationals to work in any US/foreign company that PRC puts on malicious entity list.
In theory, this cuts off huge % of PRC talent willing to work for targeted companies, unless companies spend $$$ guaranteeing green cards, because PRC nationals working in these companies or affiliating with individuals (including Manus founders if their scheme worked out), i.e. Facebook, would basically be committing treason. A fuckload of greencards because need to buy out all stakeholders, i.e. it kills poaching entire PRC teams / companies, any PRC talent funnel dead for affected companies. Nevermind coercing families, many competent PRC talent has millions in RE/assets, if not personally then via inheritance, all gone. Ask where US AI or tech would be without tons of tier1 PRC talent. Of course some will argue this good thing (derisking etc).
nsoonhui
I don't think this has much to do with export control-- note that Manus, as impressive as it is, is still a wrapper around fundamental western models--, rather it has more to do with capital controls.
China has been trying to stop large scale outflow of businesses and individuals for quite some time, due to local politics concern. What Manus was doing, achieving successes first in China then setup a nominal shell company in Singapore, seems like a textbook case of flight (润）, which China is trying to prevent.
bluegatty
This is a good answer. The export controls have a strategic purpose - and Manus fits squarely within the spirit of the controls and maybe not the technicality of the rules.
Consider that if this were a much smaller project, they'd run afoul of the same technicalities but would they be sanctioned? Probably not.
It's very fair to make comparisons as to the arbitrary application of these rules in various regimes, lord knows 'TikTok' has been treated like a Pinata, but still, it'd be naive to think that this is about 'some rule'. It's about the 'Grand Game'.
Should note: the 'nominal shell' stuff I think is fair game for all nations to be scrutinizing. All of this 'Caribbean Island Incorporation' I think violates 'the spirit' of commercial laws and practices anyhow. It'd be one thing if Manus was 'really' a Singapore company but that it's truly just 'some paperwork' gives legitimacy to the 'onshore rules' being applied.
xbmcuser
Tiktok was about only one thing and that was Israel losing the narrative war as unlike most of western social media which was deranking and censoring showing of Israeli atrocities to the world Tiktok was not.
bluegatty
That was the straw that broke the camels back but it was always a big concern.
ethbr1
TikTok was about capital realizing that feed algorithms are cheaper and more subtle to buy than advertising or a newspaper.
Same reason Elon bought Twitter.
Money is money, but convincing people is power.
mensetmanusman
Anyone who says it’s about one thing is probably under-informed, we also saw how tiktok was pressured into showing people different realities in Russia and Ukraine.
HappyPanacea
No, there were efforts to ban TikTok well before Oct 7th 2023 in 2020-2021 by the first Trump Admin, and there was ongoing effort in 2022-2023 during Biden Admin.
TikTok Agrees to Sell U.s. Operations, https://www.tiktok.com/en/trending/detail/tiktok-agrees-to-s... , 25 Dec 2022
Biden approves banning TikTok from federal government phones, https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1144519602/congress-is-about-... , 20 Dec 2022
U.S. is 'looking at' banning TikTok and Chinese social media apps, Pompeo says, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/07/us-looking-at-banning-tiktok... , 7 July 2020
culi
China is citing national security as AI is becoming a key industry. It's no different from all the times the US intervened to stop China from buying out US companies. E.g.
https://hvmilner.scholar.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf2...
> President Trump issued an order blocking the $1.3 billion sale of a Portland, Ore.-based company called Lattice Semiconductor to private equity firm Canyon Bridge Capital Partners. The stated rationale for Trump’s order was national security.
wxw
> After a $75 million fundraising round led by U.S. venture firm Benchmark in May 2025, Manus shut its China offices in July, laying off dozens of employees. It then moved its operations to Singapore.
> It was not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound.
> Manus' two co-founders, CEO Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao, were summoned to Beijing for talks with regulators in March and later barred from leaving the country, five sources familiar with the matter said.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
kelnos
The third quote seems to invalidate the second, no? Under the "grounds" that key people are currently physically in China, and as such, the Chinese government can coerce them to do whatever it wants.
Though I suppose if those two did not have majority ownership of the company, the actual (former) majority owners can refuse to unwind the sale regardless of their wishes. Company might be worth quite a bit less to Meta without those key people, though. Either way, I assume the two people stuck in China won't be seeing a dime of that sale price, which is not cool.
(This is regardless of my feelings about Meta owning more AI capability...)
skeledrew
The co-founders have roots in China. As such it's already a done deal that China will get its way.
dchftcs
The two cofounders will not be able to work for Meta. Probably it will be complicated to distribute Manus in Hong Kong, possibly Singapore too.
But Manus's IP was already transferred and in any case Meta is not legally doing business in China, so Manus will still live on, possibly get rebranded.
mc32
Their mistake was not reading the tea-leaves. Just as Youxia Zhang, Weidong He, etc. Although to be fair the party elders and generals were in a no-win situation. They could not just "leave."
They were likely baited to come in with some pretense and once they had them, they would not and will not let them get away.
throw03172019
Dealt with is the founders / team / investors losing out of the $2B. That’s the punishment from China.
giwook
Somehow I think there is a real possibility more will happen.
Barring them from leaving the country feels a bit sinister for people who haven't been accused of committing any crimes.
I don't claim to know what's going on outside of what's being reported, but I'm reminded of other individuals who have "stepped out of line" (as determined by Beijing) and were also either barred from the country or mysteriously disappeared for weeks or months at a time only to randomly reappear at some point singing a different tune.
observationist
>>> Barring them from leaving the country feels a bit sinister for people who haven't been accused of committing any crimes.
This is standard operating procedure for the CCP. They are a truly ruthless, sinister group who have no scruples about ensuring compliance and using leverage on behalf of Chinese interests. Just look at what happened to Jack Ma.
conradev
Jack Ma comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma#During_tech_crackdown
Ma's voting rights were reduced from 50% to 6%.cineticdaffodil
Usually they just threaten the family that stayed in china to enforce compliance. As in visit by police and do a video call. Good old socialist playbook. Guess the CEOs were to workaholic ti be threatened with the mafia methods.
cermicelli
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ahmadyan
> Barring them from leaving the country feels a bit sinister for people who haven't been accused of committing any crimes.
Pure speculation on my part, but i would be surprised if China didn't have our equivalent of export control laws, not difficult to fabricate a crime and pin it on founders.
soperj
> Barring them from leaving the country feels a bit sinister for people who haven't been accused of committing any crimes.
Feels like Guantanamo Bay all over again.
guywithahat
> Barring them from leaving the country feels a bit sinister for people who haven't been accused of committing any crimes
I don't think it's actually that uncommon in China, especially with high profile people. To China's credit, we often bar people from leaving the country if they're charged with a crime but not convicted of anything. While it's certainly scary and authoritarian, I think it's par for the course in China. Most companies have some amount of CCP representation in them, either on the board or some level of management.
paulsutter
It's easy to see how this will play out. The entrepreneurs will get nothing. Most likely everyone else that has been paid (investors, etc) will keep what they received. Whether Meta or the CCP ends up with the proceeds of the entrepreneurs, that's anyone's guess.
itopaloglu83
Looks like the issue will be “dealt with” though we don’t know how exactly.
stego-tech
I suspect this is more of a warning shot to others attempting the same playbook ("Singapore-washing", as I've heard folks call it): the state is watching, and shifting geopolitics means it's in their interest to retain successful talent and entities at home rather than let opposition have them.
If anything, I'm genuinely surprised it took them this long. America's been doing this for decades without much in the way of pushback, so China must feel very confident in its position to use such tactics.
aesch
I don't know if America has done anything quite like this. The example I'm looking for is where a company starts in the US but leaves and incorporates outside the US and then the US attempts to block acquisition by a foreign company. Also, the enforcement mechanism while vague seems un-American. America might tax the company upon exit but it wouldn't hold the founders hostage in America. If you have examples I'd be curious.
vkou
The US doesn't need to do 'something like this', they can just bar you from the global financial system if they don't like you. [1]
Or just order another country to snatch you up.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Wanzhou
She was arrested, and was being extradited from Canada into the United States... Because her Chinese company was doing business with Iran.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Bout
This chap was arrested in Thailand, extradited, and did a decade in a US prison because he had the audacity of selling weapons from Russia to Colombia. I'm not sure how exactly US law is of any relevance to such transactions...
---
[1] Or, since 2025, just shoot a missile at your boat, with an option for a follow-up salvo if there any survivors. Strangely enough, everyone who has managed to survive both the initial attack, and the double-tap has so far been repatriated to their countries of origin, with no charges filed by the US.
DontBreakAlex
You don't need to incorporate in the US for this to happen to you. You should look up what happened to Marc Lasus after he founded Gemplus (spoiler, he's on social security while the company the CIA stole from him has $3b revenue) or how Frédéric Pierucci was taken hostage to force the sale of France's nuclear reactors to General Electric. I assume the US does this to all the other countries too.
capitalhilbilly
Being stopped that late is a bit different than the US AFAIK, but there is certainly the possibility of being stopped from work and (depending how you react) prevented from leaving the US for purely economic inventions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act
I find it notable that the US' actual checks on government have worked against expanding the secrecy act further into economic protectionism for favored industries, etc.
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cermicelli
US has blocked merges of companies especially with Chinese and other non western companies. Including Japan, India etc.
For instance US Steel acquisition by Nippon Steel(japanese) is one such example. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2vz83pg9eo
More examples,
Ant Group(chinese) tried to buy MoneyGram (blocked in 2018) https://www.reuters.com/article/business/us-blocks-moneygram...
Xiamen Sanan Optoelectronics tried buying Lumileds, blocked again by US. Also Chinese ofc.
Broadcom and Qualcomm deal was also blocked, Broadcom was then Singapore based in process of moving to US I believe... (very sus happened in 2018 too, someone didn't pay Donald enough)
https://thediplomat.com/2014/02/india-inc-and-the-cfius-nati... Indian company forced to divest from US tech firm... (2013)
I am certain there must be European examples as well but smaller ofc, AI companies are over valued these days, most acquisitions were never this big in the olden days of pre 2020s...
I know for a fact that most folks don't want to invest in US for this reason other than in public equities or bonds ofc. Private foreign investment in US has been high only due to European pensions and Middle-eastern money going into it.
I don't know about how fair, far, or right it was compared to these were, detaining founders is also not confirmed, but sure let's assume it's true still...
Only difference in US is perhaps foreign folks can sue over it. Sometimes, if they are lucky and if the deal is worth it.
I find it strange people of HN being based in US can be so ill informed of what their country, does to foreign companies but be mad about things foreign companies do to them?
I mean sure rest(96%) of the world doesn't really exist, it's but a myth or a land the better folks of US only want to take value when needed?
Unsure what this comment meant, this has happened before as well btw, these are just post 2010s examples because they are relevant. Russians and US used to do this too, India and US were worse of pre-2000s, Japan and US were at their throats in 1980s, in terms of trade and acquisition...
cma
We maintained control of EUV tech after selling key parts to the Dutch, but that came out of US public-private partnerships and not pure private.
rzerowan
Famously back in the day Grindr , which had a plot point in the Silicon Valley series . Probably more obscure ones that havent been heard of outside software in the Hard tech space like MotorSich (Ukranian) was being courted by Chinese investment got blocked due to US pressure. And very recently the whole TikTok fiasco.
strangegecko
What examples do you have of the US government doing to CEOs what has happened to people like Jack Ma and many other public figures?
For China, there are so many examples of people doing 180s and being full of contrition after those interventions, it's hard to imagine anything but severe intimidation or worse happening behind closed doors.
axus
I'm totally fine with what-about-ism here; making China a better place to live and do business is out of my jurisdiction and doesn't help me, encouraging the USA to do better will.
reissbaker
You've been all over this this thread responding with the same whataboutist comments claiming America does the same thing. And yet, I'm pretty sure America hasn't held American citizens hostage in order to force them to unwind a sale of a foreign company they founded to a different foreign company.
maxglute
US absolutely has exit bans on people who break/is being investigated for national security and export control laws, which is what Manus did. Except Americans don't call it hostage taking when they do it.
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stego-tech
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orange_joe
interesting. Manus is nominally a Singapore based company and should be immune to these actions. Tiktok argued that it was headquartered in Singapore with a Singaporean CEO. breaking singapore’s fig leaf might prove problematic in the long run.
nerdsniper
The founders are Chinese citizens, and pressure was applied to the founders personally. Thus Singapore was given room to save face re: sovereignty.
rtpg
> After a $75 million fundraising round led by U.S. venture firm Benchmark in May 2025, Manus shut its China offices in July, laying off dozens of employees. It then moved its operations to Singapore.
The company itself was based in mainland China less than 12 months ago.
culi
Yeah if an American tech firm had been working in the US for 5 years and then tried to close all US offices down and move its IPs and tech to a different country so that it can sell out to Alibaba or Bytedance, I'm sure the US would react in the same exact way.
The sinophobia in this thread is ridiculous. Whether you agree or disagree with what China is doing, nothing is happening that wouldn't also happen in the US.
raven12345
interesting. US also blocked exports by a Dutch company to China.
pear01
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR):
So you said today, as you often say that you live in Singapore. Of what nation are you a citizen?
Shou Chew:
Singapore.
Cotton:
Are you a citizen of any other nation?
Chew:
No, Senator.
Cotton:
Have you ever applied for Chinese citizenship?
Chew:
Senator? I served my nation in Singapore. No, I did not.
Cotton:
Do you have a Singaporean passport?
Chew:
Yes, and I served my military for two and a half years in Singapore.
Cotton:
Do you have any other passports from any other nations?
Chew:
No, Senator.
Cotton:
Your wife is an American citizen. Your children are American citizens?
Chew:
That's correct.
Cotton:
Have you ever applied for American citizenship?
Chew:
No, not yet.
Cotton:
Okay. Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?
Chew:
Senator? I'm Singaporean, no.
Cotton:
Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?
Chew:
No. Senator, again, I'm Singaporean.
HSO
what part of they are chinese citizens was hard for you to understand?
pear01
i understand that perfectly, which is why i responded sarcastically to a point trying to connect this to TikTok's "argument" re their Singaporean CEO by pasting an infamous digression on that very topic.
seems to have gone over your head... i edited out the crack about your iq, which was done only because you chose to engage that way to begin with. i would respect an apology for misreading me more than trying to sanitize your earlier arrogance, but c'est la vie.
giancarlostoro
Funny when you consider the world owes a lot of AI advancements to both Meta and Google, their open releases really did shift things, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, especially for China, which as far as I know were not releasing as much in AI as they have been beforehand. I remember when Meta released Llama originally people were speculating about it, but it wound up producing a lot of projects that used it, I'm sure some in China. I know that Perplexity has its own custom model on top of Llama that they use for their default model, and its pretty darn good.
henry2023
Wasn’t Llama a leak that got so popular meta decided to change their whole approach?
I was working at Google at the time. Before Llama, releasing weights was not even worth a discussion.
calebkaiser
If I'm remembering right, it was weirder than that, as Llama's originally release strategy was sort of bizarre.
You did have to apply for access, but if you met their criteria (basically if you were the right profile of researcher or in government), you got direct access to the model weights, not just an API for a hosted model. So access was restricted, but the full weights were shared.
I believe that the model was leaked by multiple people, some of which didn't work at Meta but had been granted access to the weights.
cma
I don't think it was much of a leak, there was no significant verification--I think .edu email approved automatically. It was probably just there because copyright law related to it was more uncertain then, but they had stronger fair use case with an academic/research gate on it.
giancarlostoro
Not sure, but open weights have had their effects. For example, look at Wan 2.2 the last open weights Wan release, still the most powerful Video inference out there, to the level of quality it provides, unfortunately, it went closed source, but before they did, the community had built all sorts of tooling and LoRas on top of it. Nothing comes close for video a year later. Back to llama though, look at all the open models people run offline through their Macs. It definitely had a net positive.
inkysigma
I'm curious how this view fits in with BERT or the T5 release which prior to the current LLM craze were the de facto language models for use in pretty much any tasks. Was this a position that would've otherwise grown without the llama release?
overfeed
> Funny when you consider the world owes a lot of AI advancements to both Meta and Google
Funny how ByteDance kicked both their asses so hard at RecSys algos, they had to go back to the drawing board to meet the newly redefined expectations on the quality of short-form video recommendations.
thesmtsolver2
Did they though? That is the lore. You can’t really compare recommender system performance across different populations and products.
Unlike common benchmarks for LLMs.
culi
Also Chinese companies are now single-handedly keeping the future of LLMs open-sourced. DeepSeek being the pinnacle of this. Not only do they publish weights and code, but they publish detailed papers detailing their approach
zonkerdonker
>not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound.
Interesting. I wonder what sorts of threats China could make to back up this demand, or if this is more of a warning for future acquisitions in the space.
some_random
"Your families live here", maybe "We have shadow police stations across the world", the playbook is well established
stego-tech
I mean, they're just cribbing what America did, and what the British Empire did before that.
It's a disgusting playbook, but it's also an effective one if you're a state trying to exert control over important players or entities.
catgary
I think you need to give some concrete examples, considering the US happily let its companies offshore a lot of work to China over the years, and Chinese funds own large chunks of American companies.
some_random
Not even getting into the more dubious part of this claim, just because the British or Americans did it doesn't mean it's right or acceptable. If you disagree with that, you're implicitly pro slavery, pro penal expeditions, etc.
dublinstats
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godelski
I'm really unfamiliar with this playbook and how America has used it. Do you have any examples? I can't seem to find any
Detrytus
That's interesting, because recently China is definitely trying to paint themselves as the reasonable, stable partner, commited to upholding international law (unlike the US, which is ruled by a madman) . Trying to block this aquisition without good legal argument goes directly against that strategy.
strangegecko
They're doing a lot that goes against that strategy, you just don't see it in the headlines except in cases such as these or when you dig into how they conduct international negotiations or business deals involving the Chinese market.
Not to mention how they are openly expansionist in the SCS and obviously wrt Taiwan.
Of course they want to be seen as reasonable, their ideal is to control the international narrative just how they can do it internally in China.
burnerRhodov2
The United States is appearing "More Stable" on the international stage with recent events. Normal people might see it as ruled by a "madman", but on the international stage they know what it is... Projecting dominance and forcing the will of America. People seem to forget Iran murdered thousands of innocent civilians with automatic weapons being fired into crowds... and then you call our president a "madman" for destroying their ability to build nuclear weapons?
refurb
Ask Vietnam, Philippines and other SE Asian country if they feel China is adhering to “international norms” when it comes to the 9 dash line.
efields
The… hands of fate?
LarsDu88
Chinese government blocks stupid American from overpaying for Chinese technology thereby missing out on free taxable revenue....
_fat_santa
Besides the fact that the founders are in China and are barred from leaving, is there anything that prevents Manus/Meta from just telling the CCP to kick rocks?
Sure they can object to it or claim they are "blocking" the sale, but is there really anything they can do considering that Manus is no longer within their jurisdiction?
reissbaker
I think it's precisely the fact that the founders live in China. The CCP can make them... kick rocks... for the rest of their lives.
Generally speaking this seems bad for Chinese companies, though. They were able to raise capital from the West by running out of "Singapore"; I think basically every investor will have significant pause investing in Chinese-national-owned startups after this, "Singapore-based" or not.
kccqzy
The CCP is known to be very aggressive. Even if the founders acquired Singaporean citizenship (which is way easier for ethnic Chinese people than for other races), the CCP would have taken them hostage if they just set foot in China like for a business trip. They can invent a crime and subject them to a trial with Chinese rules. What can Singapore do? It’s a tiny country that tries to walk a tightrope by simultaneously maintaining good relations with both China and the U.S.
r14c
They wouldn't have to "invent a crime", circumventing state interests in strategic technology is likely already illegal.
pelorat
> which is way easier for ethnic Chinese people than for other races
Nationals. The word you are looking for is nationals.
baq
> Generally speaking this seems bad for Chinese companies, though.
Anyone who has ever thought otherwise was just naive. This is anything but news. If you’ve had an impression that China capital market is free and western-like, you were right - it was an impression. Always has been.
reissbaker
Naive or not, plenty of investors believed that running a company out of Singapore would shield them from the aggressively un-free Chinese market controls. Manus is proving them wrong, which will hurt Chinese companies that try to run out of Singapore for access to Western capital markets.
deepfriedbits
Not only that, but they can make life inconvenient for your family. Nobody reasonable would accuse the CCP of outright violence, but there are a million bureaucracy-related tricks the state can pull to leverage you and/or your family.
meisterbrendan
"Nobody reasonable"??
dmix
Just look at the Jack Ma case https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/04/business/china-jack-ma-rumor-...
They kept him under house arrest for years and now he complies
pishpash
Are you really asking whether business deals can be unwound for whatever reason, like how ASML is "forbidden" to sell to certain customers after contracts are signed?
timothyshen123
I really wonder what the employee status gonna be like. It has been quite some time now, I think Meta and Manus are deeply binded lol. As a Manus user, I am liking the product. Sad to see social criticism of them and to see this news.
mullingitover
> The Chinese government’s intervention in the transaction drew alarm among tech founders and venture capitalists in the country who were hoping to take advantage of the so-called Singapore-washing model, where companies relocate from China to the city-state to avoid scrutiny from Beijing and Washington.
If the US is going to treat AI technology as a strategic issue upon which it's going to play the national security card, it's not really valid to start the pearl-clutching when China does the same.
Seems like Manus and Meta thought they were going to be clever, and that China wasn't going to play any any of the cards they were holding. Even GPT-2 could've told them that was a dumb idea.
culi
Finally some sense. I am quite confident that the US would be reacting the exact same way if the situation was flipped.
some_random
Can we finally acknowledge the obvious Singapore-washing that Chinese companies have been doing for years or are we going to keep pretending?
arjvik
elaborate on the problem, for those of us that this is not obvious to?
some_random
Chinese company has an issue being a Chinese company for international legal or optics reasons, relocates to Singapore while still being controlled by Chinese nationals or all-but-Chinese-Nationals. Bytedance is a great example. Russian companies do the same thing with Switzerland, see Kaspersky.
dublinstats
They could just as well relocate to California for that matter.
The question is are they still controlled by the PRC. China doesn't allow dual citizenship (like other Asian countries), so people might legitimately want to work abroad while keeping their native passport.
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https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-blocks-fore...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0v0gr2yz7o