Chinese startups do well in China because they don't get blocked (as they either have "connections", or just know the rules better), and Chinese is hard for most people to work with.
The same could be said about Japan (while government connections are certainly more critical in China, I reckon). But Google has been pretty successful in Japan, for example. They are now market leaders in search here, whereas it used to be Yahoo Japan still a few years ago (note that Yahoo Japan was a different company than the global Yahoo - they operate separately and are purely local).
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Chinese startups do well in China because they don't get blocked (as they either have "connections", or just know the rules better), and Chinese is hard for most people to work with.
The same could be said about Japan (while government connections are certainly more critical in China, I reckon). But Google has been pretty successful in Japan, for example. They are now market leaders in search here, whereas it used to be Yahoo Japan still a few years ago (note that Yahoo Japan was a different company than the global Yahoo - they operate separately and are purely local).