Redcore

~ the last words ~

The funding announcement went out on 15 August 2018. Redcore Times (Beijing) Technology had closed a Series C of 250 million yuan, around 36 million dollars, from a group that included IDG Capital, and the WeChat post that carried the news described the company's browser as China's first fully homegrown one, with an engine built in house. The client list attached to that claim was not small. It reached the State Council and the National Bureau of Statistics, with PetroChina on the corporate side.

The following day a verified web developer on Weibo pulled the installer apart. Fully decompressed, it held the same directory layout as a Chrome installer, including a chrome.exe and Chrome's own icon files. Redcore was Chromium with the Blink engine underneath and a different interface bolted on top, which is a completely normal way to build a browser and the precise opposite of what the company had spent the previous day claiming.

The download links were gone from the site before the technology press had finished writing the story up. Chen Benfeng, the chief executive, told Chinese media on 17 August that they did not deny building on Chrome's engine and that writing one from scratch takes many years. Both statements are true, and either one was available to him on the 14th. The company issued a statement apologizing for overemphasizing the nationalist framing and for exaggerating how original the work was.

~ the record ~

~ what was actually in the installer ~

There is no clever forensics in this story. Somebody downloaded the setup file, unpacked it, and read the names of the files. That was the entire investigation. Whoever assembled the build had not bothered to rename the Chrome binary or strip the Chrome artwork out of the resources, which tells you something about how much scrutiny anyone involved expected.

The strange part is that the underlying work may have been real enough. AllMobilize, the company Redcore was before it changed its name in 2018, had been around since 2012 doing mobile web adaptation, and selling a hardened enterprise browser to Chinese state buyers is a legitimate business that several firms run. A Chromium fork with enterprise policy controls will happily take money from a ministry. The company had one of those and told everyone it had built the layer underneath.

~ what it was really selling ~

The claim was aimed at a specific buyer in a specific year. In 2018 the trade argument between Washington and Beijing had made domestic substitution a procurement priority, and ZTE had spent that spring nearly dying because a US export ban cut off its chip supply. A company able to say that its core technology was entirely Chinese was selling insurance, and the people writing the checks were state agencies.

That is why the reaction inside China was so harsh. The mockery on Weibo ran for days, and the sharper comments were not about a startup padding a pitch deck. They were about who had done the diligence on a 250 million yuan round, and about a domestic-technology push that a person with an unzip tool could embarrass in an afternoon.

~ twenty-four hours ~

I have never run Redcore and neither has anybody reading this outside mainland enterprise IT. It was sold into state agencies and large firms rather than downloaded by people, it carried a Chinese-language interface for a Chinese procurement market, and the window in which you could have obtained it under that name closed roughly a day after most of the world heard the name at all.

What keeps it interesting from here is how ordinary the underlying sin was. Nearly every browser shipping in 2018 was Chromium with a coat of paint. Edge switched to it four months later. Redcore's mistake was to describe the paint as the engine in a market where saying so was worth 250 million yuan. Checking took ninety seconds and a file manager.

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