From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 12:
How does the paideía of the Chinese tech elite differ from their counterparts in Silicon Valley?
“That was a book from the 1980s — crudely printed, roughly translated by today's
standards — but I was absolutely electrified. I stayed awake for days and nights in
university reading it, dreaming even then of building a world-class company.”
In 1987, Lei Jun 雷军 was a 21-year-old student in Wuhan University’s computer science program. The book that had set his imagination alight was Fire in the Valley 硅谷之火, which chronicles the evolution of 1970s homebrew hacker culture into global titans like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM. The heroes of that story, of course, were visionaries like Steve Jobs. Lei Jun’s trajectory — he founded Joyo.com (later acquired by Amazon), built Xiaomi into a smartphone colossus, then wagered billions on electric vehicles — would unfold directly from that initial act of reading. His nickname became “L-obs,” a portmanteau fusing “Lei Jun” with “Jobs.”
Last August, the writer Tanner Greer published an influential post on the “Silicon Valley canon.” Tech luminaries like Patrick Collison and Nils Gilman followed up with their own contributions. Lei Jun’s story compels me to ask: What is the Chinese tech canon? What intellectual works fuel Chinese entrepreneurs’ ambitions, running continuously in their cognitive background?
And does a unified “Chinese tech canon” even exist? China’s tech elite spans wider generational and ideological gaps than its Silicon Valley counterpart. A founder who came of age in the 1970s during the heyday of Maoism has a fundamentally different outlook on the world from a 2020s AI entrepreneur who graduated from Stanford and decided to go back to Shanghai. Unlike Silicon Valley’s relatively cohesive aristocratic class identity where everyone shares certain intellectual touchstones — Chinese tech founders remain fragmented by generation and relationship to state power.
Still, there are some things they have in common. Some Chinese tech founders see themselves as Silicon Valley’s progeny. They code, they build, they disrupt, they invent, they conquer — to borrow Greer’s words. Yet they inevitably remain embedded within China’s distinctive historical trajectory, its institutional framework, and its market dynamics.
More recently, China’s unstoppable technological ascent has forced elites in Silicon Valley and Washington to question their assumptions about American exceptionalism. Silicon Valley has been consumed by China curiosity, and in some cases even envy. Yet the communication flows asymmetrically. Silicon Valley, along with its Western knowledge apparatus, has long served as the center of systematic intellectual production, exporting ideas unidirectionally with overwhelming force. By contrast, Chinese tech methodologies, frameworks, and even memes have not been transmitted to the West with equivalent scale or depth....
....MUCH MORE
