China's major tech players are venturing into a new year with a more optimistic mindset, after weathering a tough period of volatility and doubt in 2019.

However, there is little reason to think that 2020 will be any different given that U.S. attempts to shake down Chinese industry bigwigs - from Huawei Technologies Co. to SenseTime Group Ltd. - will be more complicated than many would think in terms of perceiving these entities as threats to national security.

American lawmakers have been trailing some of last year's biggest tech names to make sure they don't pose any problems to American interest.

Among them were smartphone and networking titan Huawei and ByteDance Inc., the Chinese wunderkind who overturned social media entertainment in the span of a few years and attracted a billion-plus younger U.S. users to their online video app TikTok.

Beijing attempted to remove sensitive content from the WeChat apps of ByteDance and Tencent Holdings Ltd., while the economy grew at its slowest pace in decades, undermining the e-commerce sector of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Investors cooled in the sector with a halving of venture capital activity - raising jitters that the heyday of the industry is over. That in turn demoralized the already overworked tech professionals in the country, who for the first time rebelled against the 70-plus hour workweeks that Alibaba-founder Jack Ma viewed as normal.

Given the increasing animosity in Washington, China is now even more motivated to innovate alternatives to international technology from artificial intelligence chips to blockchain solutions while supporting local champions: bad news for the likes of Qualcomm Inc. and Apple Inc. who depend on China for much of their profits.

A decades-old supply chain based around China has started to change, threatening to break the old world order into two. It's not just in hardware- from Russia to Southeast Asia, several governments have started to co-opt Chinese internet arena characteristics, from strict fake news laws to surveillance and data sovereignty.

According to Shanghai-based consultancy firm AgencyChina research manager Michael Norris, perhaps this year will be the first year we will ever grasp China's tech at its most global level."

Meanwhile, the woes of the industry can best be quantified by a collapse in the flow of capital. Based on research by CB Insights, venture capital funding was down in the U.S. but only moderately, while China produced 15 unicorns, or startups with a  market value of at least $1 billion.