A ghost from China’s tech past has resurfaced, highlighting the deep-seated animosity between the country’s two most powerful digital conglomerates. ByteDance Vice President Li Liang recently took to social media to debunk a viral rumor claiming he had engaged in a public mud-slinging match with Tencent. The rumor suggested that after a Tencent executive compared low-quality short videos to 'pig food,' a ByteDance leader responded by saying, 'We are all selling pig food, so let’s not look down on each other.'
Li Liang clarified on May 24 that neither he nor any other ByteDance vice president had ever made such a statement. He dismissed the reports as fabrications and urged major platforms like Weibo and NetEase to purge the misinformation. This swift denial serves as a defensive maneuver in a corporate rivalry that has long been characterized by both algorithmic competition and sharp rhetorical exchanges.
The 'pig food' controversy is not a new phenomenon but a recycled fragment of a 2021 confrontation. At the 9th China Network Audiovisual Convention, Sun Zhonghuai, a senior vice president at Tencent, used the term to describe the addictive, low-brow content pushed by personalized recommendation engines. He argued that if users were fed nothing but 'pig food' because of their perceived preferences, they would eventually lose the appetite for anything else.
At the time, ByteDance’s Li Liang responded not with an admission of low quality, but with a critique of Tencent’s own regulatory compliance. He pointed out that while Tencent criticized the short-video industry, its own WeChat Channels feature was lagging in implementing mandatory 'minor modes' for underaged users. This historical friction underscores the true nature of the ByteDance-Tencent feud: a battle for the 'eyes and ears' of the Chinese public, wrapped in the language of social responsibility and content standards.