View: India is losing the artificial intelligence battle to China, one app at a time

By Pankaj Mishra

A year ago, there were only 18 Chinese mobile apps among the top 100 apps on Google Playstore in India, and only two of them among the top ten. The number, as my Factor-Daily colleague Shadma Shaikh wrote earlier this month, has now doubled.

TikTok, a short video-hosting social platform, already counts India as its biggest market with 39% of its 500 million global users based here. And it’s not the only app being touted as a potential YouTube killer in India. LIKE and Kwai, apart from other live-streaming apps such as LiveMe and BigoLive, are other contenders for the position of the top video app in India.


Quietly and steadily, China’s app factory has been conquering India, far away from the mainstream noise about ecommerce and telecom. And very soon, these Chinese apps will have more data and insights about the next billion Indian internet users than any other platform, including Facebook and Google.

Why does that matter? China wants to dominate the AI world and fast-pace its transition from being a factory of the world to becoming a high-value destination for smart machines that mimic the human brain. Acquiring more data and throwing it all at the machines so they learn faster and deeper, is the holy grail for AI dominance.

Consumer apps such as TikTok and BigoLive that have massive engagement with their users and capture hundreds of millions of data sets everyday feed into China’s big data arsenal. And while India will retain its status as the world’s battlefield for acquiring the next billion users, it will be about the American and Chinese internet companies looking to conquer the final frontier. Already, two of India’s biggest ecommerce companies — Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart — are US enterprises.

Let’s look at how China’s app factories carefully put together their own playbook. It is all about pushing the boundaries, focusing obsessively on the vernacular market and doing whatever it takes to go viral (including soft porn). Kwai, for instance, is a breeding ground for child pornography. The app encourages users, especially underage girls to perform vulgar gestures and lip sync to suggestive songs, among other acts.

Chinese platforms are beginning to realise the dangers of pushing soft porn content for achieving virality. LiveMe, for instance, had to delete 600,000 accounts of children under 13 after Fox11 news channel in Los Angeles talked of the dangers of paedophiles exploiting children.

To be sure, these apps are well-designed products in terms of technology sophistication and user interfaces. ByteDance, for instance, has designed and launched Helo, a regional entertainment content platform specifically for India. If you haven’t heard of Helo yet, it’s only because the app only targets small-town, first-time, vernacular users. Helo is not even available in English. It is available in 14 regional languages including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Bhojpuri.

The strategy is already paying off. In fact, for some of these Chinese apps, India is the only market of focus. SHAREit, a social content platform, believes it will have to shut down if there’s no India market for the app. They have watched the India market closely for years and learned from the failures too. WeChat, which failed to make any dent, is a case study for any new Chinese app entrant to learn what not to do.

And then, there’s India’s homegrown Sharechat, which was launched in 2015 and has over 50 million downloads. Sharechat demonstrated how savvy and first-time internet users in India’s tier 2 and tier 3 towns can be tapped with vernacular content. Chinese apps such as ByteDance’s Helo have been really quick to learn from Sharechat’s playbook.

For its part, the US is already planning to clamp down on China’s investments in Silicon Valley with the Congress passing the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (Firrma) last August.

Several startup founders and investors have been talking in hushed tones about the need for India to look at similar tactics. The stakes are high. Already, Chinese companies have invested more than $2 billion in Indian startups in 2017 alone.

Meanwhile, India’s classic love-hate affair with China is already catching up with the country’s fledgling startup ecosystem. Startup founders and investors in India are beginning to feel increased government scrutiny, often caught in the middle of “Doklam-like” confrontations.

A board member at one of the top Indian startups backed by a Chinese fund decided to quit, sensing upcoming “complexities”. “This year is going to be about economic nationalism,” he told me. “And I would rather not be seen as being on the other side.”

(Pankaj Mishra writes on technology’s intersection with society)