The blocked $1.2 billion takeover by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial of MoneyGram shows the friction that is increasing over U.S.-China M&A deals as China's tech titans increasingly seek to acquire U.S. companies and expand globally.
Just a few months earlier, the U.S. government stopped an attempt by a China-backed private equity firm Canyon Bridge Partners to acquire U.S. chip maker Lattice Semiconductor.
In both cases, the deal cancellations were over security concerns by U.S. government regulators. Deals also have been blocked by the Chinese side, for different reasons -- largely concerns over Chinese over-extending into foreign turf and paying too much.
China acquisition fever in the U.S. had already cooled before these two latest deal cancellations by the U.S. side. 
Read Forbes: Frictions
Comment: a consultant in Silicon Dragon's network has suggested that Alibaba buy supermarket chain Kroger and set up MoneyGram outlets there! 

Just a month before the Ant Financial-MoneyGram deal was stopped, Jack Ma went out of this way to warn Trump on launching a trade war against China, noting "it's easy to launch a war, but it's so difficult to stop a war." 

Chinese social media network Renren is back at it again, this time raising money through cyrptocurrency and an initial coin offering (ICO). Stock for Renren, which had plummeted after the site lost users to Weibo and Wechat and was late to make the switch to mobile, rose 47% on the news.  
A deal to buy U.S. trucking logistics startup TruckPath also led to the boost. 

Power VC Jenny Lee of GGV Capital gives an inside look at US/China investing & how she gets to know entrepreneurs    http://po.st/ksCru3  via ChannelNewsAsia and its list of PowerAsia players. 
I don't agree that she has a tough exterior but she does do the tough, frontier deals!


Chinese are demanding better data privacy protection even as the government collects more data. Ant Financial ran into trouble and had to apologize to users after automatically enrolling them in a social credit program that tracks their spending habits and personal relationships to help determine lending decisions, via NYTimes.   

Chinese news aggregator Toutiao faces a shakier future after encountering troubles in China with the Beijing government over pornographic content. The news app, which feeds on AI to spin articles to readers, was suspended for 24 hours. If the app is censored, it could destory Toutiao's business, writes SupChina. 
ByteDance (Toutiao's parent) has been branching out and buying up U.S. businesses: short form video app Musical.ly and video editing and display app Flipagram. 
GGV's Hans Tung, a backer of Musical.ly, has noted that a merger of ByteDance and Toutiao could user in a new era for all content companies. But will it? 

In a wilderness of frozen desert, China and Kazakhstan are reviving a Silk Road land bridge between Asia and Europe. Fascinating read in the NYTimes about a landlocked port on the route in the ambitious, huge One Belt, One Road project.