no freedom of speech, the vast majority of Chinese internet users behave online exactly as they would like to. We know: we watch them hourly. It might look like an ordinary office, but it isn’t. Our agency in Shanghai closely monitors real-time dashboards that provide instant metrics on activity across social platforms like WeChat, Weibo and Baidu. Welcome to BAT! BAT is the tri-partite world of the Chinese internet: Baidu, the biggest domestic search platform; Alibaba, China’s number one ecommerce platform; and Tencent, the owner of China’s biggest instant messaging apps. BAT is presided over by the “three kings”, each one brilliant in his own way: Robin Li, the multi-billionaire founder of Baidu, the search engine with a phenomenal 80 per cent share of the Chinese market; Jack Ma, the self-made mogul who launched the ecommerce giant Alibaba in 1999; and Pony Ma, the instant-messaging pioneer who founded Tencent, which created WeChat, the largest instant messaging platform in the world. Following a theme of Chinese history, each king is building his kingdom to be as