On trading floors in New York and Hong Kong, the brightening mood toward Chinese technology companies is unmistakable: With stocks like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. surging from multi-year lows, talk of a new bull market is growing louder.
Yet speak to executives, entrepreneurs and venture capital investors intimately involved in China¡¯s tech sector and a more downbeat picture emerges. Interviews with more than a dozen industry players suggest the outlook is still far from rosy, despite signs that the Communist Party¡¯s crackdown on big tech is softening at the edges.
These insiders describe an ongoing sense of paranoia and paralysis, along with an unsettling realization that the sky-high growth rates of the past two decades are likely never coming back.
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