Global prospects dim for China's tech champions as great powers clash

Shanghai/Beijing – Huawei Technologies founder Ren Zhengfei's global ambitions are marked in bricks and mortar at a new company campus in southern China, where the buildings are replicas from European cities. Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, the operator of short video app TikTok, has plastered his Beijing headquarters with posters including a cover of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's book "How Google Works," and has long said he will build a global firm that can compete with U.S. tech giants. But the two companies that best exemplify China's ambitions to challenge U.S. tech dominance are now stymied by strains in relations between China and countries including the United States, India, Australia and Britain. Chinese companies with world-beating technology -- including drone-maker DJI, artificial intelligence firms Megvii, SenseTime and iFlytek, surveillance camera vendor Hikvision and e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba Group -- are also among those losing access to markets. Smaller companies are being forced to rethink too. "What we are experiencing now is unprecedented," said a Chinese startup founder who has operations in the United States and India but asked not to be identified as he is now considering walking away.