Meanwhile, the tech companies became gradually aware of another international threat to their future: China’s carefully laid-out plan to become the world’s dominant economic and technological power by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of Mao’s revolution. To accomplish this goal, Beijing developed a new strategy—one in which Chinese investors, rather than the venture capitalists of Sand Hill Road, were quietly becoming a critical source of cash for a range of new start-ups. Suddenly, the valley’s billionaires discovered they needed something that they had never really thought about before: a
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