Chinese innovators taking cues from Silicon Valley
WHEN Zhao Haoyu, a Chinese tourist, and his wife arrived in the US in September, they spent their first day wandering the humdrum suburban office parks that Facebook and Google call home.
Joining a guided bus tour with a dozen other Chinese visitors, the two became part of the steady flow of Chinese tourists to Silicon Valley that represents – despite pervasive censorship and outright hostility from the Chinese government – the tremendous influence Silicon Valley wields in China.
“You hear so much about these companies in China,” said Zhao, a native of the southern Chinese city of Kunming who is in his 30s. “We just wanted to experience it.”
China in recent years has given rise to a vibrant and innovative tech industry that in some ways surpasses what Americans can do online. But it has done so despite a culture dictated by Confucian con- formity and, more recently, the strict rules of the Chinese Communist Party.
Neither prizes rebellion or disruption, so China’s young entrepreneurs and investors have looked for guidance and inspiration in a place that does: Silicon Valley.
China’s tech world has copied the valley’s innovator-meetinvestor network of incubators, accelerators and venture capitalists. Startup employees and leaders actively seek to question authority and think outside the box – two attributes widely discouraged in corporate China.
Silicon Valley’s soft power in China is unlikely to help Facebook or Google get back into China. But it demonstrates the sort of influence China seeks for itself. Despite its innovations, China’s online renaissance has taken place largely within its own borders, and the country’s ambitions to create companies with global influence so far have been largely unsuccessful.
It also provides a model for a new type of Chinese business guru, politician and thought leader, in the vein of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Already the Chinese tech world has created figures like Jack Ma, the founder of the e-commerce giant the Alibaba Group, and Lei Jun, a founder of the budget smartphone maker Xiaomi, who derive their influence from channels outside the Chinese Communist Party. The party in turn courts them even as it seeks to contain them, often holding them up as examples of Chinese innovation.
Baidu, one of China’s largest tech companies and often called the Google of China, owes a heavy debt to the valley. One founder, Eric Xu, made a documentary about Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and helped model the company around an unstructured, meritocratic – and thoroughly nonChinese – organisational style its founders admired.
Employees receive copies of a book called the Baidu Analects, said Kaiser Kuo, a former spokesman for Baidu and the host of the China podcast Sinica. “It’s anecdote af ter anecdote of these borderline insubordinate employees who stuck to their ideas in spite of pushback, a nd t he en l ig htened manager who let them do it, and ultimately they triumph,” Kuo said.
A prominent techie cafe in Beijing has a large wall with a timeline charting the initial public stock offerings of US tech companies alongside those in China. Some companies have created Apple-style product unveilings that are ticketed, cultural events. A developer in China is planning to start work on “tech towns” – planned communities where the innovative-minded can live and work together. Startup offices often have open seating plans with office pets, foosball tables and a boss sitting with the employees.
Even so, most Chinese companies have not fully absorbed the culture. Many are still highly top-down and bureaucratic, and open office plans often mask more deeply conservative customs. In place of California’s sunny suburbs, China’s innovation hub sits in the traffic and smog-choked northwester n par t of Beij i ng, crammed into office towers above malls that sell all manner of electronics.
The trend is nonetheless driving young people to take more risks and demand more from employers, even as it brings with it a problem familiar to Silicon Valley: hangers-on more interested in being a part of the scene than anything else.