Influence Empire by Lulu Yilun Chen is so much more than the long-awaited story of Tencent and its vital everything app, WeChat, the messaging tool used by 1.3 billion people. It's also the sobering account of an entire generation of high-flying Chinese tech entrepreneurs, whose wings were clipped by the omnipotent hand of their own government.' -- Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound and The Everything StoreORDER NOW: the first definitive look at Tencent, one of the world's largest tech companies.__________In 2017, a company known as Tencent overtook Facebook to become the world's fifth largest company.It was a watershed moment, a wake-up call for those in the West accustomed to regarding the global tech industry through the prism of Silicon Valley: Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft.Yet to many of the two billion-plus people who live just across the Pacific Ocean, it came as no surprise at all.Founded by the enigmatic billionaire Pony Ma, the firm that began life as a simple text-
