The long-term IoT partnership just announced between Hitachi and Tencent brings together technology giants from Japan and China, with an emphasis initially on smart cities, logistics and manufacturing but with a future eye on autonomous driving. Focused at this stage chiefly on the internal Chinese market, this initiative can be seen through the lens of that country’s trade war and wider tension with the US, which might seem to rule out one of the main alternative IoT partners for Tencent – General Electric (GE), which would also have been seeking such an inlet into China. The same applies to more traditional IT giants such as IBM and Microsoft. Another major contender, Germany’s Bosch, has already made some inroads into China,…