The stakes for Singapore are apparent the moment you land here.

At Changi Airport, visitors are greeted by giant banners advertising Alibaba’s Qwen open-source AI models. TikTok-owner ByteDance, meanwhile, occupies one of the city’s prime office towers, and ByteDance’s logo looms over a central business district packed with a growing number of BYD electric vehicles.

The reasons for Singapore’s appeal are manifold. For corporate giants that straddle China and the US, such as ByteDance and e-commerce company Shein — which moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2021 — the city-state offers a neutral hub between Washington and Beijing. For others, including many of China’s crypto founders, Singapore became an escape route from crackdowns at home. And for a growing number of Chinese tech startups, it offers access to global capital, speedy visa processes, and a welcoming regulatory environment at a time when competition in China is fierce and profits are harder to find.

The playbook has often been described as “Singapore-washing” — using the city-state to give Chinese-founded companies more of a global identity.

“Singapore-washing is supposed to be an intentional, operational-level strategy, which a lot of companies have done,” said Grace Shao, a China AI analyst and author of the AI Proem newsletter. “It was not really intended to be a last minute step.” In her telling, the manner of Manus’ exit from China was the first red flag that the company might run into trouble.

The company moved to Singapore in the summer of 2025, almost immediately after the US Treasury Department raised questions about a $75 million investment the AI firm received from the American venture capital firm Benchmark.

At the time, Chinese regulators were also likely wary of the move, especially given Manus’s work in AI. Beijing does not want companies built on China’s tech ecosystem and engineering talent to rebrand abroad and take valuable innovations with them. Still, Manus reportedly managed to secure approval for the move from Beijing.

What pushed Manus over the line came later. Less than six months after leaving China, it agreed to sell itself to Meta for $2 billion.

“The deal with Meta was quite bold,” said Kyle Chan, a China tech expert and fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Any normal person in this space would be aware of the risks and of incurring Beijing’s wrath.”

Meta’s role in the deal, meanwhile, raises questions about its own due diligence, and how fully it understood the risk that Beijing might intervene.

Meta did not comment on the due diligence it conducted on Manus prior to the deal, but in a statement to Semafor, a spokesperson said that “the transaction complied fully with applicable law” and that the company anticipates “an appropriate resolution to the inquiry.” Manus did not respond to Semafor’s request for comment.

For now, Meta appears unwilling to challenge Beijing’s decision and is actively preparing to unwind the acquisition, according to The Wall Street Journal. Two Manus co-founders have reportedly been barred from leaving China amid the government inquiry, and Meta may be reluctant to jeopardize the billions of dollars it generates from advertising revenue in China each year.