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Chinese startups are being starved of venture capital — which should worry the West


Through the centuries, China’s entrepreneurs accessed finance from family and friends through social networks known as guanxi. Even after the communist revolution, these networks helped to propagate a thriving small business sector that invested in local services and basic manufactured goods. In the late 1970s and 1980s, when President Deng Xiaoping started to open up the economy, it didn’t take long to rekindle the innate entrepreneurial spirit that saw China’s traders conquer the old Silk Road. Following the ascendance of tech juggernauts Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, coupled with later market liberalizations, there has been an explosion of both local and…

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