Source: New York Times
Huang Jieli, who ran a Chinese ride-sharing business called Hitch, was invited to a wedding in March. One of her drivers was getting married to a woman who had once been his passenger. Thanks, the invitation said, for getting them hitched.
Didi Chuxing, Hitch’s corporate parent and one of the world’s most successful and valuable start-ups, once cheered these stories of young love.
Like so many other Chinese internet companies, Didi explored all kinds of ways to bring in new users, including social networking.So through suggestive ads hinting at hookups through driving, Didi pushed Hitch’s romantic possibilities. In a 2015 interview with the Chinese online portal NetEase, Ms. Huang compared Hitch cars to cafes and bars.
“It’s a very futuristic and very sexy scenario,” she told NetEase.
Today, that attitude looks careless and incompetent. Two female Hitch passengers in the past three months have been raped and killed by their Hitch drivers, according to the police. Now Ms. Huang is out of a job, Didi is pledging to overhaul its business, Chinese consumers are calling for a boycott and the internet industry is getting a much-needed reminder of the consequences of its actions.
It’s a rare moment of self-reflection in China’s internet industry, which has grown to rival Silicon Valley in both size and influence. Two Chinese companies, Tencent and Alibaba, rank among the top 10 publicly listed companies in the world in valuation. Four of the 10 most valuable start-ups are from China, according to CBInsights. One of them is Didi, which ranks second only to Uber.
The problems aren’t unique to China. Uber has grappled with its own safety issues, while Facebook has belatedly come to terms with how its reach can be misused and abused.
But the potential for abuse in China is severe. Corporations are subject to little scrutiny from state-controlled media until problems spin out of control. Spotty enforcement and slow lawmaking leave the public less protected from exploitation. Chinese people are fixated on their phones, spending four more hours on average a week online than Americans. The industry’s extreme growth — the number of internet users has doubled, to 800 million, in eight short years — has created a culture in which companies prize money over users’ well-being.
Didi itself admitted this week that it had lost its way. In a statement on Tuesday, it said it would stop using scale and growth to measure its success.
“In the past few years we forged ahead wildly, riding on aggressive business strategies and the power of capital,” the company said in the statement from Cheng…
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