China's companies

China's biggest tech companies have spent 192 lawsuits trying to shut down one app. They keep losing. The app is called Maimai. On the surface, it's China's LinkedIn: you list your title and create connections. But buried inside is a board called career-speak, where verified employees post anonymously under nothing but the name of their employer. By June 2020, Maimai said it had passed 110 million registered users. Its founder Lin Fan claimed 60% of Pinduoduo's staff were daily users, and 6,000 of ByteDance's 8,000 R&D engineers lived on the board. The leaks that come off that board have real consequences. An ofo employee in 2017 described regional managers skimming tens of thousands of yuan a month. Mobike's mass layoffs and Meituan's purchase of it surfaced on Maimai before either was announced. Lu Qi's exit from Baidu appeared there first. Alibaba's acquisition of Ele.me broke on the board before the deal went public. So the companies fight back. Baidu banned its own staff from installing the app. Bilibili sued demanding the identity of an anonymous poster. Maimai refused and absorbed a 300,000 yuan judgment. Baidu won 251,000 yuan in a defamation ruling. The company has accumulated 192 judicial-risk records, most as defendant, brought by Baidu, Bilibili, Suning, Ele[dot]me, Guazi, and BOSS Zhipin. And then there are the quieter offers. Lin Fan says he has turned down deletion requests offering as much as 10 million yuan, about $1,427,000. He says he refused even when, one time, the person asking was one of his own investors. His rule: if a thing is true, he would lose the deal before he deletes the post. The Chinese tech press calls Maimai the public enemy of big tech. But a loud anonymous board just measures how completely the honest channels have failed; nothing more, nothing less.