How China built its own internet to challenge the US' in ambition and reach

If people in the West didn't see this coming, it was because they mistook China's authoritarianism for hostility toward technology

Today, China has the world’s only internet companies that can match America’s in ambition and reach.

It is years ahead of the United States in replacing paper money with smartphone payments, turning tech giants into vital gatekeepers of the consumer economy.

And it is host to a supernova of creative expression — in short videos, podcasts, blogs and streaming TV — that ought to dispel any notions of Chinese culture as drearily conformist.

All this, on a patch of cyberspace that is walled off from Facebook and Google, policed by tens of thousands of censors and