技术出海，建设全球创作与交流平台（2018 软博会演讲）

Taking Technology Overseas, Building a Global Platform for Creation and Exchange (2018 Software Expo Speech)

> By Zhang Yiming · keynote at the 22nd China International Software Expo · first published by China Entrepreneur magazine's WeChat account (2018-06-30); this text follows a reprint that credits it · 2018-06-30 (speech given 2018-06-29) · [Reprint link](https://www.fensifuwu.com/technology/2018/06/30/282962.html)
> Source not yet confirmed: the original post on China Entrepreneur magazine's WeChat account could not be retrieved; the text follows a same-day repost credited to the magazine.

Distinguished leaders and guests, friends from the media, good morning. I'm honored to take part in our software industry's annual gathering. The topic I'm sharing today is "Taking technology overseas, building a global platform for creation and exchange." In recent years, because of the company's business, I have kept visiting countries around the world, and I have an ever stronger feeling that software and the internet are drawing the whole world ever closer together.

Let me give two examples. I know that on our Toutiao accounts platform there is a creator from Henan who uses Toutiao specifically to share his and his team's agricultural know-how and experience. This account's readers come not only from all over our own country, but also include ethnic Chinese farmers in Africa, Europe, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, who consult him through Toutiao on questions like fertilizing land and preventing pests and diseases. The know-how this Toutiao creator has is genuinely helping farmers in other countries.

On the overseas version of Douyin there is a friend from Austria. While travelling in China, he filmed himself doing front flips at Tiananmen, the Great Wall and the Bund, posted it on the European version of Douyin, and got hundreds of thousands of likes. Many European Douyin users, because of this short video, also expressed their fondness for China in the comments.

These are two small examples I've seen on Toutiao and Douyin. Global communication and exchange is part of globalization, and it is already very broad, deep and frequent, including in technology, capital and talent. We are in a wave of globalization, and the driving force of this wave relies more on the new economy of technologies such as the internet, big data and artificial intelligence. Unlike before, in facing these three major technologies, Chinese companies have basically started at the same time as the rest of the world, rather than these developing in other countries for a while first and China starting afterwards. Chinese companies that start at the same time no longer copy foreign business models into China; they have turned to a model of independent innovation. Now many excellent Chinese companies, like companies elsewhere in the world, are oriented toward globalization from the moment the company is born, the business is born, the product is launched.

While seizing the huge opportunities at home, Chinese companies that make good use of global resource allocation can achieve better results, and this is especially true in the software and internet industries, where marginal costs fall very quickly. ByteDance launched its globalization three years ago, and before that there were already global role models like Huawei. Huawei built telecom infrastructure overseas, constructing the connections of a global network and becoming infrastructure worldwide; now Xiaomi provides customers around the world with phones of high value for money and is gradually building a global IoT network; we hope to achieve the globalization of Chinese software and mobile apps.

In exploring globalization, taking technology overseas is our core approach: through a unified technical solution, we provide users around the world with a consistent product experience. Our main research directions in artificial intelligence include machine learning, natural language understanding, computer vision, human-computer interaction and so on, and all of these technologies are applied in real products. For example, Douyin's 3D sticker feature also needs facial keypoint detection, and can do real-time face detection on the phone. We have done not only face detection but also recognition of human limbs; technology that used to require dual cameras and infrared recognition, we have achieved with a phone camera. We combined this technology with Douyin's dance machine game and launched it in Southeast Asia; the Douyin dance machine was hugely popular and made Douyin an instant hit there. Serving a vast number of users lets us gather vast amounts of data to keep optimizing our algorithms, consolidating our core advantage in artificial intelligence.

For different markets we adopt local strategies that fit local users' needs. Technology, product and operations work in close concert, which has let our globalization make very good progress. Several of our core products are developing in step at home and abroad, and among our global users, users outside China exceed 20%. Take the Japanese market: we have already passed ten million monthly active users, which means one in ten Japanese citizens is a user of a ByteDance product. Take Douyin: according to the latest third-party data, Douyin's global downloads in the first quarter reached 45.8 million, surpassing Facebook, making it a very popular social media platform overseas.

A global platform brings great informational and economic benefits. Here we've given a few examples. The first: a policewoman in Hangzhou used rap, a form young people like, to tell about all the various everyday incidents at a police station and its work on legal education. This material was filmed last year and had never spread very well, but after it was posted on Douyin, tens of millions of people watched it and it got 1.5 million likes, promoting communication between police and the public.

Douyin has also played a big role in promoting cities. The city of Xi'an used Douyin to release short videos promoting Xi'an nationwide. According to figures Xi'an later released, over the first Qingming holiday Xi'an received 3.8 million tourists, up 38% year on year, with total tourism revenue of 1.4 billion yuan, up 49% year on year. In Russia, host of this year's World Cup, we also launched fan celebration activities. Another example is group dancing at Japanese schools: the picture on the far left [Translator's note: a slide shown during the speech; the image was not preserved] shows a Japanese high school cheering before a baseball game, and their moves and background music are the wave dance that is hugely popular with users around the world on Douyin.

The flow of information brings higher efficiency to society and raises social benefit, and we feel that building an information platform based on new technology is very meaningful. After six years of developing from our base in Beijing while exploring the world, ByteDance's business covers 15 countries [Note: "15" as in the text; same-day reports give "more than 150 countries"] and 75 languages. Users in these regions, every day, just like us here in Beijing, create and obtain information through ByteDance's products. We hope to seize the memory of our era [Translator's note: so in the text; the sense is probably "the opportunity of our era"], and through small phone apps take part in building the information infrastructure that connects the whole world, realize our vision, and build a global platform for creation and exchange.

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