From China's Past: Fifty years of China-US relations [Part 1]

When US President Bill Clinton went to China in 1998, he visited an internet cafe in Shanghai, where he witnessed how the new generation of Chinese youth was using emerging internet technologies to gain new knowledge, establish domestic and international connections, and perhaps even taste the pleasures of online games.

Shanghai was the most advanced city in China at the time, and yet there were only around 30 internet cafes. It was still worth a trip by the US president to see how China was slowly entering the modern world of internet technology.

Back then, the globally recognised Chinese tech giants of today such as Huawei, WeChat, Tencent, Alibaba and TikTok had not yet emerged, while US companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Apple had already penetrated offices globally, and Silicon Valley was attracting many ambitious young tech entrepreneurs who detested the confines of the old ways and were unafraid of failure, and who worked hard to create tech industries in manufacturing, communications and logistics.

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