There are several factors at work here. First, China is extremely protectionist. A lot of the Chinese tech companies are reimplementations of American compan

There are several factors at work here. First, China is extremely protectionist. A lot of the Chinese tech companies are reimplementations of American companies where they get to learn from history and their counterpart's IP. This means that even if China was not developing any new products or technologies, they would still be spending a huge amount of money to replicate the US tech companies. Supposedly economists should be lambasting this wasteful protectionism, but that kind of negativity isn't commonly applied to China yet. Secondly, American companies have received enormous pushback when they do attempt expansion overseas. Some of this pushback is valid, and some is not. But often American companies are hit hard for stupid reasons because they don't have the political cover that Chinese companies ostensibly possess. Which leads to the next point which is that Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu (which are the biggest Chinese tech players) are effectively government sponsored entities. Baidu especially was created after the Chinese government ran Google out of the country. This gives them much more political firepower when working out deals with other countries. American anti-corruption laws are some of the strongest in the world, which is a good thing, but this does mean that American companies are operating at a big disadvantage when working in countries and industries where bribery is practically required. Russia, Brazil and Mexico are often problem countries for example. To get away with the backroom shenanigans required for dealing in those countries, you need the kind of political clout that companies like Exxon possess, and nobody in the tech industry wields that kind of power. American companies operate under a number of "disadvantages." Some of these are disadvantages are good and some are not, but it does mean Chinese tech companies have much wider latitude to act and have much closer access to the political levers of their country. The biggest question here (as always with China) is how much do metrics that are developed for a free market actually matter when applied to a country that is not a free market but is pretending to be one when it suits their needs. The west faced a similar problem with the USSR during the cold war. The only news the west had access to was news that made the USSR look good, so we were constantly panicking at how powerful the Soviet Union seemed to be while they ineptly blundered from one error to another.