Chinese video game platform founder Chen Shaojie reportedly held incommunicado

Chen Shaojie, founder and CEO of Chinese gaming platform DouYu, which is backed by the tech conglomerate Tencent, has been held incommunicado by authorities for weeks, according to reports.

The 39-year-old reportedly went missing after online censors allegedly found pornographic material on the popular video game livestreaming platform, said the South China Morning Post, citing local Chinese media reports. Colleagues have been unable to reach him and it is suspected that Chen has been taken by authorities for an inquiry.

There is so far a lack of concrete information about the tech founder’s absence. “In Chen’s case, no Chinese authority has provided any information about his disappearance,” the paper said. Chen was last seen publicly in August, during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.

DouYu has said that its operations remain normal.

Earlier this year, Alibaba founder Jack Ma was spotted at a school in eastern China following a near three-year absence from the public eye. Ma, a behemoth in China’s tech sector, has kept a low profile since he openly criticized the country’s financial regulators in 2020. It was rumored that he had been placed under detention when he first disappeared from public view but overseas sightings of him were later reported and last year the Financial Times said that he had been living in Japan. “Ma’s fall came at a moment when China’s Big Tech companies were losing luster in the eyes of the public and the government,” Lavender Au wrote in Wired.

In February, China Renaissance Holdings CEO Bao Fan disappeared, and employees said they had been unable to reach him. The fintech executive has been held by authorities in China since, but in August was said to be “cooperating” with an investigation. The disappearance prompted speculation that some of the deals conducted by China Renaissance — which boasts a huge portfolio of some of China’s highest-performing tech companies — drew government scrutiny.

Tech billionaires often go missing in China, a phenomenon that analysts say reflects leader Xi Jinping’s tightening grip on the country. The growing power of big business, in particular, has come under his and the Chinese Communist Party’s scrutiny. “Sometimes, these incidents are orchestrated in a way to send a wider message, particularly to a specific industry or interest group,” Nick Marro, of The Economist Intelligence Unit, told the BBC in March. “At the end of the day, it does reflect an attempt at centralising control and authority over a certain part of the economy,” he said.