China's venture fall shows up differently in every provider's units

The record

CB Insights published its State of Venture 2023 Report on 4 January 2024, stating that quarterly funding to China-based companies, and deal volume alongside it, reached their lowest levels since 2014 in the fourth quarter of 2023. Six days earlier, on 10 January 2024, Crunchbase News had published its own year-end Asia recap, recording a full-year 2023 Asia total of $78.1 billion, down 38 percent from $125.2 billion in 2022, and noting that China-based company funding fell from $14.1 billion in the third quarter of 2023 to $7.7 billion in the fourth. A year later, CB Insights' State of Venture 2024 Report, published 7 January 2025, states that global deal activity fell 19 percent year over year in 2024 to its lowest level since 2016, with the drop most pronounced in China, down 33 percent.

What the sources establish

The two providers track different metrics. CB Insights reports China's decline as a percentage change in deal count between annual editions. Crunchbase reports a dollar level at the quarterly grain, without publishing a full-year China dollar total in the retrieved article. Both describe the same direction of travel across 2022 through 2024, but neither figure converts into the other, and no single document here gives a clean annual China dollar series.

Scope and revision

Crunchbase's report attributes part of the fourth-quarter 2023 China pullback to some US-based venture firms pulling back from the region amid US-China tensions, naming GGV Capital and Sequoia Capital as firms that separated their Chinese operations from their US divisions. CB Insights' 2023 report separately describes China's tech market as squeezed by domestic regulation, geopolitical tension and a pessimistic economic outlook. These are the providers' own stated context, not this desk's inference, and neither document quantifies how much of the decline each factor caused.

The decision in front of you

An analyst comparing China venture data across years should keep CB Insights' deal-count series and Crunchbase's dollar-level series separate rather than blending them into one narrative percentage. Editorially, treat each provider's own metric as the unit of comparison across its own editions, and treat cross-provider comparison as directional only.

• Is the cited China figure a deal count, a dollar amount, or a percentage change, and against what base period?
• Does the source state a driver as its own analysis, or as a documented regulatory or corporate action?
• Is a quarterly figure being read as if it were an annual total?

Three reports from two providers agree that China's venture market pulled back sharply between 2022 and 2024, but each measures a different slice of that pullback, and stitching their numbers into one series would manufacture precision neither provider claims.