Thăng trầm của Didi

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The Rise and Fall of the World’s Ride-Hailing Giant (gã khổng lồ gọi xe)

China’s leading (hàng đầu) ride-hailing company, Didi, was an operation of dubious (lờ mờ, mơ hồ, thiếu minh bạch, không rõ ràng) legality when it raised its first big bucket of money nearly a decade ago. And in one way or another, it has been testing the authorities ever since.

When a venture capital firm (hãng đầu tư mạo hiểm) invested $3 million in the company in 2012, Didi lacked several of the state-issued licenses (giấy phép do nhà nước cấp) it needed to do business, two people familiar with the matter said. When Beijing, Shanghai and other big cities began requiring that drivers for ride-hailing platforms (nền tảng) be local residents (cư dân địa phương), Didi protested (phản đối, biểu tình). Today, the company acknowledges (thừa nhận, ghi nhận) that many rides are still being provided by drivers and vehicles that don’t meet local requirements.

And when China’s government demanded that ride-hailing services share real-time trip data (dữ liệu chuyến đi thời gian thực) for safety purposes (mục tiêu an toàn), Didi dragged its feet (làm việc chậm chạp, uể oải, không muốn), citing privacy (bảo mật thông tin concerns — until the rapes (hiếp dâm) and murders (sát hại) of two female passengers finally pushed the company to relent (mủi lòng, động lòng thương).

Didi and other Chinese internet giants grew big and powerful by learning to thrive in regulatory gray zones (vùng xám pháp lý). And by and large, Beijing was fine with that. The companies were making China richer, more productive and better entertained. They moved fast, and they might have broken a few rules. But so long as online conversations were filtered, search results were sanitized and videos were censored (kiểm duyệt), internet companies’ success was the nation’s.

Didi, after all, was the homegrown hero that stopped Uber’s global expansion in its tracks. Didi showed that Chinese entrepreneurs could go head to head with Silicon Valley’s brashest and most cunning (sự xảo quyệt, sự xảo trá, sự gian giảo, sự láu cá, sự ranh vặt, sự khôn vặt) upstarts, and come out on top.

Those days are over. Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party’s most powerful leader since Mao, China has taken a hard ideological (ý thức hệ) turn against unfettered private enterprise. It has set out a series of strictures (phê phán, chỉ trích) against “disorderly” corporate expansion. No longer will titans of industry be permitted to march out of step with the party’s priorities and dictates (mệnh lệnh).

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