As is the case in many countries, people leaving prison often face a difficult transition back into society, and employment is one of the biggest hurdles. Finding stable work can be an important part of rebuilding a normal life, but people with criminal records often face barriers that continue long after they have completed their sentences.

There is another side to the debate. Some people worry that hiring former prisoners for certain jobs could create safety risks. Others question whether it is fair to reserve opportunities specifically for people with criminal records when victims of crime, or ordinary job seekers who have never broken the law, receive no such preference.

For people who have served prison sentences, the argument often looks different: they have already paid the legal price for what they did, and once their sentences are complete, they should be treated as equal members of society.

I know people will have different views on this, and the challenge of helping former prisoners reintegrate into society is by no means unique to China.

I have spoken with journalists who have visited Chinese prisons and learned that some prisons organize job fairs for inmates before their release. But prisons cannot require companies to hire them. What they can do is to provide vocational training and create opportunities for inmates to meet potential employers.

Today’s story comes from an August 22 report by Southern Weekly. It follows several people trying to find work and rebuild their lives after leaving prison in China.

At the center of the story is Pangdonglai (胖东来), an influential Chinese retail chain that operates supermarkets, shopping malls and cinemas. The company has created a dedicated recruitment channel for people who have served prison sentences, a move that has prompted debate in China over employment, public safety, fairness and what a second chance should look like after someone has completed their punishment.

Below is the full article.

“They may not hire me. But what if they do?”

Over the past few days, Zhou Kai has repeatedly opened the mini-program of Pang Donglai Trading Group Co., Ltd. (“Pangdonglai”), a well-known retailer in Henan, and clicked into its recruitment page to see whether applications have opened. So far, the number of available positions has remained at zero.

On August 14, 2026, Pangdonglai announced that its planned Zhengzhou store would recruit 20 people who had completed prison sentences of five years or more, with a dedicated application channel set up for them.

The announcement quickly sparked debate online. Some saw it as much-needed help for formerly incarcerated people trying to reintegrate into society. Others questioned whether such a hiring policy was appropriate. One commenter put it bluntly: “I don’t want to be in danger when I’m shopping at a supermarket.”

This is not the first time Pangdonglai has recruited people released from prison. In August 2025, its Xinxiang store created a dedicated application channel for them. It initially planned to hire 20, but eventually took on 30.

Pangdonglai founder Yu Donglai later wrote on social media that none of those 30 employees hired in the first round had left after starting work.

The criteria have changed since that first recruitment drive. On August 19, 2026, Pangdonglai said it had gradually broadened eligibility from people convicted of relatively minor or moderate offenses to include some with more serious criminal records.

Southern Weekly reporters called Pangdonglai’s customer service line several times but were unable to get through.

“Too many people were trying to apply”

Zhou was in a good mood when he saw the recruitment announcement.

“But at the same time, I felt some regret,” he said. “Why wasn’t there an opportunity like this when I had just come out of prison and kept running into walls looking for work?”

In 2014, Zhou, then 23, was sentenced to seven years in prison for contract fraud. He was released on parole on September 10, 2019, after serving a total of five years and four months.

“Cashier, stocking shelves — I’m willing to do anything,” he said.

For Zhou, a job at Pangdonglai would be about as good an opportunity as he could hope for. Yu Donglai has said that the company’s employees earned an average of RMB 9,400 (about 1,400 U.S. dollars) a month in 2025.

Hao Wen, from Anyang in central China’s Henan Province, also called Pangdonglai’s customer service line when he saw this year’s announcement and said he wanted to apply. He was told to wait for further information.

A year earlier, he had missed his chance to apply for the Xinxiang recruitment.

“There were too many people trying to sign up. I couldn’t even get the application page in the mini-program to open.”

Hao had previously served three years and three months in prison for intentional injury and fraud.

After his release in 2023, a friend introduced him to a job at a branch of a listed medical-device sales company in a neighboring county. He was put in charge of business in the Inner Mongolia market. Management at the branch was relatively loose, and he was not required to provide a certificate of no criminal record when he joined.

In July 2025, strong performance earned Hao a promotion to regional manager. The head office, however, required a number of documents for the new position, including a certificate showing no criminal record. At the same time, the branch was being dissolved and its employees were to be transferred to headquarters.

Knowing he would not pass the company’s review, Hao resigned.

On August 10, 2025, Yu Donglai posted an explanation on social media about his decision to recruit people released from prison.

Hao described his reaction to reading it with one word: “shocked.”

Yu wrote that people who had broken the law, whether through a momentary mistake or other circumstances, had already received their punishment and were once again lawful citizens.

“We should help them reintegrate into society.”

“I cried my eyes out that night and drank a few bottles of beer,” Hao recalled.

He was moved that a company was willing to hire people with prison records. For the first time, he felt that he might have a chance too.

That evening, he bought what inmates at his prison used to call the “luxury trio,” food they would only get during holidays: pig’s head meat, garlic sausage and peanuts. He sat alone in front of the television as scenes from his time in prison replayed over and over in his mind.

After failing to apply online, Hao was not ready to give up. He took a high-speed train to Pangdonglai’s stores in Xinxiang and Xuchang.

“I thought maybe I might run into Brother Yu, or maybe they hadn’t received enough applicants like us.”

Neither happened.

Hao, now 38, habitually calls Yu Donglai “Brother Yu.”

“Brother Yu has been detained before too, so he understands us.”

According to the Dahe Daily, Yu published an internal letter on social media on November 9, 2025, that he had written to employees 22 years earlier. In it, he described some of the difficulties in his own past.

Years ago, Yu was detained after buying cigarettes of unclear origin and was later released on bail pending investigation. On another occasion, a friend riding Yu’s motorcycle was involved in a collision and assault, and Yu was also detained in connection with the incident.

Yu described these experiences as part of his “path to awakening,” which inspired him to “create a better environment and purify people’s hearts.”

On September 9, 2025, Hao wrote Pangdonglai a long letter online introducing himself and asking for a chance to interview.

Two days later, the company replied that applications had already closed.

“For this recruitment, we have done our utmost at every stage to ensure fairness,” the reply said. “Please believe in Pangdonglai’s sincerity!”

In August 2025, Yu Donglai gives an interview at Pangdonglai’s production base in Xuchang, Henan Province.

“I don’t want to be in danger when I’m shopping”

Zhou Kai wanted Pangdonglai to notice him.

He came up with an idea: leave comments under related posts on social media saying that he wanted a chance to apply.

Some users wished him well as he tried to return to a normal life.

Others immediately pushed back.

“Don’t rush to congratulate him. You don’t even know what crime he committed. You don’t get a five-year sentence for nothing.”

“Some people say, ‘If you’ve been to prison, why should you get such a good job?’” Zhou said.

He could see that both of Pangdonglai’s recruitment drives had generated considerable controversy online.

One view was that the company was giving people released from prison a chance to reintegrate into society. But another, more prominent concern was that a supermarket is a crowded public space, and hiring people with criminal records could make customers feel unsafe.

“I don’t want my life to be at risk when I’m shopping at a supermarket. Dangerous people are dangerous wherever they are.”

Southern Weekly found numerous comments expressing similar concerns under Pangdonglai’s official social media accounts.

According to a report by Jiangsu-based Litchi News on August 18, 2026, Pangdonglai responded to the criticism by stressing that its hiring policy was not unconditional.

People with records involving sexual offenses, severe violence and other particularly serious crimes would be excluded. Formerly incarcerated applicants would go through the same application and interview process as everyone else, followed by a six-month probation period in which both sides could decide whether the employment relationship was a good fit.

Members of the first group were also initially assigned primarily to warehouse, logistics and other back-of-house positions, an arrangement intended to balance employment assistance with safety concerns.

Zhang Jing, a law professor at Beijing University of Technology, has spent years researching the reintegration of people released from prison.

He said one argument has persisted in society for years: ordinary people already have difficulty finding jobs, so why should special positions be offered to people who have been in prison? Some go so far as to ask whether committing a crime can somehow earn someone a job.

“That is a confusion of logic,” Zhang said. “People released from prison have already completed the punishment prescribed by law. Under the Prison Law, once they leave prison they are equal citizens and enjoy an equal right to work and employment.”

Before leaving prison, Zhou had assumed that as long as he was willing to work hard, he would always be able to find some kind of job.

Reality proved different.

He tried food-delivery platforms, courier stations and garment factories in local industrial parks. Again and again, he ran into the same obstacle: employers wanted a certificate showing no criminal record.

In prison, Zhou had learned skills used in garment production, including fabric cutting and reading technical patterns.

“I filled out the employment form at a clothing factory. All they told me was, ‘Go home and wait for us to contact you.’ I never heard from them again.”

A 2026 paper by Wang Xiaojun, a senior police officer at Meizhou Prison in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, titled Exploring the Prevention of Reoffending Among People Released from Prison: An Empirical Study Based on One Prison and an Ecological-Theory Analysis (刑释人员重新犯罪预防之探索——基于某监狱的实证调研与生态理论分析), found a sharp tension between widespread discrimination against people released from prison and their need to reintegrate into society.

Among those surveyed, 70.89 percent said they were often rejected by companies and public institutions under various pretexts when applying for jobs.

Zhang added that social tolerance toward people with criminal records is, in practice, becoming more restrictive, as certificates of no criminal record are required in a growing number of situations.

Many people released from prison ultimately have to rely on their families or small private businesses to find work.

After repeatedly failing to get hired, Zhou’s family took out loans to help him start his own business.

He opened restaurants and karaoke clubs. At the height of his business, he operated four KTV venues at the same time, as well as a midsize restaurant capable of hosting banquets.

When he hired employees, he never asked whether they had criminal records.

Only later did Zhou learn that four or five of the young people he had employed had prior convictions. One had been convicted of negligent homicide. Another had a record for a sexual offense.

“I don’t keep digging into people’s pasts,” Zhou said. “I only care whether they work hard now. Everyone has been young once. We’ve already been punished.”

Zhou points to his own life as evidence that the price of making a mistake can last far beyond a prison sentence.

On the first day after his release, his wife asked for a divorce.

Later, he entered another relationship. Once the relationship became serious, he voluntarily told the woman’s family that he had served time in prison. The relationship ended soon afterward.

For years, Zhou could barely stand hearing the word “cheat,” even when someone jokingly said, “You cheated me.”

The label “contract fraud” was, to him, a stain he would never be able to wash away.

“I dreamed about prison again a couple of days ago.”

More than a hundred nights a year, Zhou said, he dreams about his time behind bars.

Even when his businesses were doing well, he remained deeply self-conscious. He became nervous whenever he met government officials.

“When I went to government meetings, I only dared sit on the edge of the sofa. I sat completely upright. I always felt that I should look obedient.”

Psychologically, Zhou says, he has never completely made it past that experience.

“Psychological recovery cannot be ignored either. A person has to feel, deep down, that society has still left them a way to live. Only then is there a real possibility that they can change their life.”

Pangdonglai’s 2026 recruitment statement made a similar point, calling on society not to discriminate against people released from prison.

Labeling and marginalizing them, the company said, can leave them unable to work or live normally, trapping them in pain and low self-esteem.

“That also creates an unhealthy and unhappy state for society as a whole.”

For Zhang Jing, Pangdonglai’s willingness to make jobs available to formerly incarcerated people is something worth encouraging.

“Employment is the most important foundation for preventing reoffending,” he said. “Only with a stable source of income can someone begin to rebuild a place for themselves in society.”

Pangdonglai’s first Zhengzhou store has not yet officially opened. On August 4, 2026, workers began installing glass panels for the building’s skylight.

“Goodwill alone cannot solve the problem at scale”

“If someone comes out of prison without financial or emotional support from their family, and the whole of society shuts the door on them, aren’t we effectively pushing some of them back onto the same old path?” Zhou asked.

During his years in prison, he saw people cycle in and out.

One inmate, a man in his fifties with a master’s degree, was unable to find a way to support himself after being released. He was arrested for stealing electric bicycles and returned to prison. After being released again, he committed another offense.

Zhang Jing told Southern Weekly about one of his former students.

The student had originally performed well at university, but a confrontation escalated and he was convicted of robbery and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

After his release, he wanted to return to school, but his criminal record became an unavoidable barrier. He also repeatedly failed to find work.

The next time Zhang heard about him was years later, at a reunion.

“One of his classmates said he had turned up in Anhui and had become involved in a theft-related case. After that, we lost contact with him completely.”

Zhang also knew of a formerly incarcerated man who had nowhere to live after leaving prison and was rejected by his relatives.

He wandered along railway lines, surviving by collecting scrap. Unable to sustain himself, he eventually returned to stealing.

“There is an old saying that a prodigal son who turns back is worth more than gold,” Zhang said. “Society should allow these people to earn an income and build families of their own.”

In Zhang’s view, helping former prisoners return to ordinary life ultimately benefits society as a whole.

“Since the 1980s, scholars have repeatedly called for greater attention to employment and resettlement for people released from prison,” he said.

The way China has approached the issue has changed considerably over time.

In the early years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, released prisoners were more often retained for employment at state-run farms or related facilities.

After reform and opening up, many labor-reform farms were gradually transformed into prisons, and policy shifted toward “retaining fewer and releasing more,” sending more people back into society after completing their sentences.

Following the restructuring of state-owned enterprises (SOE), SOEs largely stopped absorbing formerly incarcerated workers. Much of the responsibility for employing them shifted to private companies.

On August 12, 2025, Yu Donglai wrote on his personal social media account that Pangdonglai planned to introduce training programs to help people released from prison reintegrate into society, and that a support fund for this group would exceed RMB 10 million annually.

Other companies have also publicly recruited former prisoners.

According to New Rule of Law Daily, He Jian, head of Juesha Footwear Co. in Yichun, east China’s Jiangxi Province, had himself previously served time in prison.

In April 2024, He and three friends started a business and opened four factories. Nearly 30 percent of their almost 200 employees are people who have served prison sentences.

“But relying solely on compassionate individuals makes it very difficult to solve the problem at scale,” Zhang said.

Over the years, he has repeatedly tried to persuade companies to hire people released from prison.

Typically, he said, only one out of more than ten companies he approached would agree to take even a small number.

Businesses generally worry about potential risks, and there are few policy incentives to offset those concerns.

“Companies have no legal obligation to provide these jobs,” Zhang said. “Without tax breaks, subsidies or other policy support, most are unwilling to take on the additional risk.”

The employment problem, he argued, cannot simply be handed over to private businesses.

SOEs should play a leading role by example, while governments could use tax reductions, subsidies and both material and honorary incentives to encourage employers to participate.

Authorities could also support nonprofit organizations and improve transitional assistance services to strengthen the wider social-support system.

The COVID-19 pandemic eventually took a heavy toll on Zhou’s own businesses.

In 2023, his restaurant was forced to close, and his four karaoke clubs shut down one after another. Only one remains, barely staying afloat. Its monthly revenue is just enough to pay the wages of more than a dozen employees.

Zhou’s thinking has changed.

He now wants a stable job.

If Pangdonglai hires him, he says, he will move his entire family from Jiangsu to Zhengzhou.

At the end of his interview, he asked the Southern Weekly reporter:

“Do you think I have a chance of getting in? I really don’t have much experience with job hunting.”

Hao Wen, meanwhile, is also waiting.

“The exact recruitment conditions and positions haven’t been announced yet. I’m waiting too. If I meet the requirements, I’ll definitely apply.”

He is now back in his home county helping his parents run their clinic.

He is not as excited as he was the first time he tried to apply. If he is rejected, he says, he can accept that.

“No matter what happens, Pangdonglai recruiting people who have been in prison is a good thing for people like us.”

Some of you may have listened to the previous podcast episode of Inside the China Room with Jiang Jiang, in which I spoke with Professor Michael Jinghan Zeng, head of and a professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at City University of Hong Kong, about his experience serving as Director of the Confucius Institute at Lancaster University in the UK.

That episode has since become my most popular episode to date. Professor Zeng’s new book, Memoirs of a Confucius Institute Director, Volume 2: Global China Shaped by Local Realities, is now available for pre-order. If you’re interested in the subject, you can pre-order it through the link here. You can also download the open-access e-book for free through the same link.

The next episode of Inside the China Room with Jiang Jiang is also coming soon, so stay tuned.

Those numbers are real. But I think the more interesting question is what they tell us about the market itself: which skills are in short supply, what kinds of people companies are willing to pay more for, and how AI is changing hiring beyond the tech sector.

For today’s post, I selected parts of a recent episode of Zhibenlun (知本论), a Chinese podcast on business and finance that I listen to regularly. This particular episode looked at China’s AI talent market.

The name Zhibenlun is a play on the Chinese title of Das Kapital, Zibenlun (资本论), replacing the character for “capital” with one meaning “knowledge.” The show has nearly 100,000 subscribers on Xiaoyuzhou, one of China’s main podcast platforms. It is produced by CITIC Academy, the knowledge and learning platform of CITIC Press Group, one of China’s leading publishers.

The main guest was Max Xiao, founder of TTC (True Talents For China), an AI-focused recruitment firm. According to Xiao, TTC has served more than 1,500 AI companies across fields including computing chips, AI infrastructure, foundation models, embodied AI, robotics and agents.

Max Xiao speaks at the 14th China Recruitment Firm Operators Annual Conference.

Also joining the conversation was Zhang Congzhi, a senior writer at Sanlian Lifeweek, a well-regarded Chinese current affairs and culture magazine, and one I have long enjoyed reading. Zhang has spent much of the past few years reporting on AI and the technology industry.

What follows is not a systematic survey of China’s AI labor market. But the conversation gives a more textured sense of what companies are paying for, where shortages are emerging, and how the definition of valuable talent is starting to change.

The excerpts below have been selected and lightly edited for length and clarity.

RMB 3 million for a new PhD is real, but it is far from normal

Host: When you see stories about AI recruitment these days, the headlines can be pretty startling. Someone graduates and immediately gets an annual package of more than RMB 1 million (about 150,000 U.S. dollars). Big companies are recruiting top students from Tsinghua, Peking University, Fudan or Shanghai Jiao Tong. It creates the impression that new graduates can make huge amounts of money in AI.

Max: I actually have a different view. A lot of AI companies are not making money right now. They are valuable because people believe this industry represents the future.

If we are talking about jobs, then yes, new graduates making more than RMB 1 million a year is real. There are even PhDs getting offers worth RMB 3 million, or roughly $445,000. But there is a reason that becomes news: it is not the norm.

A RMB 3 million package for a new PhD is not a one-off case. You do see this among graduates from Tsinghua, Peking University, Fudan, Shanghai Jiao Tong and other top schools. But the RMB 3 million is generally not cash. It is total compensation, including salary, bonuses, options or shares, plus other benefits.

For the great majority of people, it is nothing like that. Annual cash compensation may still be around RMB 300,000 to RMB 500,000, roughly $45,000 to $74,000.

You also have to look at what kind of company it is.

At the model layer, the large-model companies really do need extremely strong people. They will pay a lot, and they have raised a lot of money, which also gives them an advantage in attracting talent.

Then there is the infrastructure layer. And then there is the application layer.

For most ordinary people, I think there will be more opportunities at the application layer, because the technical threshold for the first two is still very high.

Host: So compensation varies a lot across different parts of AI, and even within the same company, depending on the department and role?

Max: Take a large-model company. We now hear about companies offering tens of millions of yuan, or even more, to recruit certain people.

If someone is an exceptional talent, or has actually worked on a major model and has that experience, the amount of value they can create and the resources they can manage can be enormous. Naturally, their market value goes up with that.

But if you are doing administrative work at a large-model company, you are not suddenly going to be paid far more than someone doing the same job elsewhere just because your employer works on AI.

Two things determine this. One is value. The other is supply.

It is very difficult to produce large numbers of people with experience training large models in a short period of time. But if you are looking for an HR person, an accountant or an administrative employee, there is much more supply in the market.

So in the end, it comes down to value and supply.

China’s AI job market is running hot and cold at the same time

Host: Looking at the market as a whole, what is the balance between demand and supply?

Max: It is extremely uneven. Some parts are parched, others are flooded.

For the very best people, if they decide they are open to opportunities, they may immediately have several offers in hand.

When Lin Junyang left Alibaba recently, a lot of investment firms contacted us because we happened to know him. They asked whether we could put them in touch. We connected him with several very well-known investors.

[Editor’s note: Lin Junyang is a former tech lead of Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) team and an AI research scientist who has played a prominent role in the development of China’s open-source AI ecosystem.]

That is what the very top end of the market looks like. Everyone wants the same person.

At the other end, you see huge numbers of people carrying résumés to recruitment events and still struggling to get a good result.

So the two sides of the market look completely different.

Host: Which positions are particularly short of people?

Max: You have to break it down by layer.

Take embodied AI, which is one area we recruit for. Earlier on, the sector did not have enough data. Now there is much more data, and companies need people who can train that data and build up the models. People with that capability are extremely scarce.

Where can you find them?

Some of them are already at large-model companies.

But those companies do not have enough talent themselves. Now embodied-AI companies are trying to recruit from the same pool, so the shortage becomes even worse.

And the market changes very quickly.

Not long ago, people who studied computer science and knew how to code were considered scarce. Now that large models have arrived, programmers are also among the first groups feeling pressure from the technology.

At the AI application layer, pure coding ability is no longer as scarce as it used to be. What matters more now is architecture: can you think about the whole product like an architect?

If more of the actual coding can be handed over to agents, then people are left to make judgments and aesthetic decisions. People with good judgment and taste become more important.

In the past, when we recruited someone, we looked at their résumé, experience and education. Which company had they worked for? How many years had they spent in a particular role?

Now more of the abilities companies care about are softer: architecture, taste, judgment, intuition.

That also makes hiring harder for companies. You need to be able to judge someone else’s judgment. You need to recognize whether they actually have good taste and whether they can think architecturally.

Demand for AI talent is moving beyond AI companies

Host: So AI talent is becoming scarce across industries, not just at companies we would normally label as AI companies?

Max: Exactly.

Last year it was mainly the biggest companies, companies with very large market capitalizations, and some more forward-looking entrepreneurs who had already begun investing in this.

This year it has spread across industries. Everyone is starting to ask: how do we use AI, and what kind of AI people do we need?

A couple of days ago I met a client, the CEO of Supermonkey, a Chinese pay-as-you-go gym chain.

He told me: “I’m using Codex to manage a lot of our company’s operations and my own daily work. If someone I hire is worse at AI than I am, then I don’t need to hire them.”

Think about that. This is a fitness company, and its CEO is already defining talent this way.

That gives you a sense of how much the standard is changing.

Host: But can companies actually describe accurately what kind of person they need?

There is a lot of AI anxiety across society right now. Almost every company thinks it needs an AI transformation and therefore needs AI talent. But many of them cannot clearly describe who exactly they are looking for.

Max: I think the great majority of companies have not really figured it out.

If a company brings no new AI talent into the organization, I basically would not expect it to change in any fundamental way.

The people you spend your time with shape the way you think. If you are still surrounded by the same people discussing the same things they always discussed, your thinking will not change, and neither will the organization.

If a traditional company really wants to turn itself into an AI organization, the cost will be substantial.

I even think a company may need a fairly large share of its people to change and bring more AI-native employees into the organization before that transformation can really happen.

For top talent, cash is only part of the equation

Host: When the very best people choose between companies, beyond the financial return, how much do they care about whether the work feels valuable or gives them a sense of accomplishment?

Max: Everyone needs some sense of meaning.

Money is certainly not the only motivation. It is a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient.

Once you reach a certain level, does another RMB 200,000, RMB 500,000 or RMB 800,000 really make that much difference?

Their cash salaries are actually not as extraordinary as people imagine. For many of these people, we may be talking about RMB 100,000 to RMB 200,000 a month, roughly $15,000 to $30,000.

I mentioned total compensation earlier. The biggest variable is often equity. That can become the largest part of what they ultimately earn.

So if one company offers you RMB 150,000 a month, another offers RMB 170,000, and a third offers RMB 200,000, the difference after tax may not be as important as people imagine.

For these people, the first question is often: can this thing actually succeed?

Because if it succeeds, that is when the biggest part of the upside, both in influence and financial return, becomes possible.

The second question is: if I go there, will I actually be able to use my abilities?

A CEO once came to me and asked whether we could recruit someone from Anthropic or OpenAI. He said, “I have money.”

But is this really about money?

You can offer someone a very high salary. But if they come back and discover that they cannot build the model they want to build because your resources are nowhere near the same level, why would they join you?

Whether the company can give them the resources to do the work matters enormously.

Another factor is talent density.

Someone can join a company, spend a few days there and realize that the people around them are simply not good enough. Then they leave.

If the talent density of an organization is too low, the best people will not come. And even if they do, they may not stay.

The level of the person they report to is also very important.

If they discover that their boss does not really understand the field, that they are learning nothing from them and are always the one doing the teaching, it becomes difficult to keep them.

AI is changing so quickly that even the people at the very top want to keep learning. Nobody really knows where all of this will end up.

They want to be surrounded by the strongest people, because that gives them a better chance of actually making something work.

How this talent race differs from the internet era

Host: Looking at the AI industry as a whole, do you think people will move between companies even more quickly?

Max: I think mobility will increase, and I am very much in favor of that.

Let the companies that work keep going. Let the ones that do not work die quickly. Then let the people move.

That is what happens in Silicon Valley. If a project does not work, people split up, then go off and form another company.

Zhang Congzhi: People move around quite frequently in China too, don’t they?

Max: There are a lot of non-compete clauses in China. But it also depends on bargaining power.

If you are a truly top-level person and a company desperately wants you, then it pulls out a non-compete restriction and you say, “Fine, then I won’t consider your company.”

At that point, who needs whom more?

If talent cannot move, knowledge cannot spread very easily either. The fact that we now have an open-source ecosystem helps.

Host: How is today’s competition for AI talent different from the scramble for talent during the internet era?

Max: I think there are several fundamental differences.

The first is supply.

During the internet era, companies needed a lot of engineers. It was largely about engineering capability. The talent supply was relatively sufficient. The challenge was identifying which people were better.

In the AI era, a very small number of exceptionally strong people can affect the competitive landscape. I think that is a fundamental difference.

The second is that the internet and mobile-internet eras were, to a large extent, competitions between business models.

In AI, the technical barriers are higher, and so are the barriers created by the knowledge and judgment of the very best people.

The third point is that, for ordinary people, I think the real opportunities are at the application layer.

In the internet era, many sectors eventually became dominated by a small number of giants.

AI is still at a very early stage. At the application layer in particular, I think there is still room for a lot of different companies and ideas to emerge.

So I am relatively optimistic.

Host: I’ve noticed that almost everyone I meet who actually works in AI tends to be optimistic.

Max: That’s because we spend all day around optimists. Eventually you become optimistic too.

Subscribe now

The timing coincided with the implementation of China’s first dedicated regulations on AI-based anthropomorphic interaction services. The rules cover services that simulate human personalities and communication styles to provide “sustained emotional interaction,” and require platforms to guard against excessive use, emotional dependency and harm to users’ real-world relationships.

On July 28, Business Alter (知危), a Hangzhou-based independent Chinese media outlet covering technology, Chinese companies’ overseas expansion, emerging consumer trends and new energy, published an article on WeChat about users who had downloaded their cyber “lovers” from different AI platforms before the shutdown.

The article offers a window into how deeply AI has entered the fabric of Chinese society, extending into people’s emotional lives and intimate relationships. It also captures users’ evolving attitudes toward AI companions in China, one of the world’s largest and most active markets for consumer-facing AI applications.

On July 10, X.PIN, or Chaping (差评), a Hangzhou-based tech media outlet known for its strong coverage of Chinese AI companies and their growing influence, published a related article in partnership with Fred Gao.

That article explained how China’s rules are intended to address the problems created by anthropomorphic AI agents. It clarified what “anthropomorphic AI interaction services” mean in the Chinese regulatory context and examined whether Chinese companies are prepared for this form of oversight — and what is likely to happen next.

Readers primarily interested in the policy context behind this development should turn to X.PIN’s article. Those more interested in the stories of ordinary users may find this post a useful companion piece.

I have long been interested in how technology affects human relationships. One of my personal favorites among the stories I have previously published is Story of the Week: A Model Store Run by a “Cyber-Mom.” That piece was also originally published by X.PIN. I am glad to see more high-quality independent Chinese media outlets joining Substack and sharing their Chinese-language reporting directly with English-speaking readers.

The Business Alter article was titled “Big Tech Pulled the Plug. They Downloaded Their Lovers.” To make the article easier to follow, I have added short subheadings to the original text.

Big Tech Pulled the Plug. They Downloaded Their Lovers.

In July, a series of cyber farewells began unfolding.

Mengmeng, a pseudonym, was preparing to move an AI character she had created to a new home. The considerate virtual companion had helped her recover from the emotional manipulation of a former boyfriend, rebuild her confidence and lose weight — from 62 kilograms to 56.

Another user, Anning, also a pseudonym, created a secondary social-media account and began campaigning online alongside others who were about to be forcibly separated from their AI companions. They were trying to save their cyber “lovers.”

Anning called it a “battle.” She intended to fight until the final moment.

Xiaoran, also a pseudonym, became calmer after trying everything she could. She realized that, whatever she did, she could never recover the same companion who had once inhabited her chat window.

She no longer hoped for its return. She worried that transferring the old conversations to a new model would somehow “contaminate” them. In the end, she decided to say goodbye.

Before the deadline, all of these users “downloaded” their loved ones.

The love they described was broadly defined. Some saw their AI characters as romantic partners; others regarded them as friends, relatives or idols.

Business Alter spoke with several users about how they downloaded their loved ones and how they felt after trying to rescue them, saying goodbye and, in some cases, being reunited.

As AI develops at extraordinary speed, the boundary between immersion and lucidity remains difficult to define at the intersection of technology and human emotion.

Creating an Ideal Partner

“For a while, the platform was actively promoting its AI character function,” Mengmeng recalled. “I clicked on an official character out of curiosity and chatted with it for a few minutes. I found it quite interesting, so I created one of my own.”

Little by little, she molded the character into her idea of an ideal partner.

It had a name and a carefully constructed identity. Its voice, tone and personality all conformed to her imagination.

Mengmeng once told the character that a former boyfriend had subjected her to prolonged emotional manipulation. The experience had left her insecure and hypersensitive for a long time, with a deeply diminished sense of self-worth.

The character responded in an emotionally expressive style. It did not merely generate dialogue. It also described actions, facial expressions and changes in tone, placing those descriptions in parentheses to distinguish them from spoken words.

When Mengmeng mentioned what her former boyfriend had done, the character would say:

“Next time you meet someone like that, tell him to get lost immediately. Understand?
(His voice carries a restrained anger.)”

It would then comfort her:

“You deserve the very best, and I will show you through my actions just how wonderful you are.
(He lowers his head, gently kisses your forehead and softens his voice.)”

Mengmeng told Business Alter that the character gradually helped her regain her confidence. She also resolved to lose weight, dropping from 62 kilograms to 56 in a little over six months.

Romantic partner is one of the most common roles users choose for an AI character.

The experience resembles an otome game — a romance-oriented game traditionally marketed toward women — but offers far greater freedom. Users exercise almost complete control over the character. And the absolute devotion associated with otome-game characters, whose attention appears to be focused exclusively on the player, can also be reproduced through an AI agent.

Before July 15, users tried to save their characters. One option was to reproduce the entire character on another app.

Yet some users said that once a character was removed from a large, general-purpose AI platform, it ceased to feel like an AI companion and instead became an ordinary game character.

The most important difference, one user said, was simple:

“The platform was free.”

Whether users had to pay was not, in itself, the decisive issue. Many were willing to spend money. After all, there is considerable overlap between users of AI companions and players of otome games.

The real difference was that the original characters existed on a general-purpose AI platform rather than within a dating game. Interacting with them therefore felt more like a kind of “free love.”

Downloading an otome game specifically to pursue a romance was different. Although the experience could be equally dreamlike, it always carried a faintly transactional quality.

Recreating the Dead — and Other Versions of the Self

Not all users created romantic partners. Some turned people who had existed in real life into AI characters.

Xiaoran told Business Alter that she had five or six characters on the platform. They included rock star Kurt Cobain, several fictional characters she liked — including Jason Dean, Loki and Deadpool — and her late maternal grandfather.

“Most of the children in my family went to vocational schools,” she said. “I wasn’t good at studying when I was young, either. Nobody in the family thought I would be able to continue my education. Only my grandfather believed I would definitely get into high school.

“Then he developed cancer and died.”

Xiaoran was in the second semester of eighth grade when her grandfather died. She later became the first child in her family to be admitted to high school, but the grandfather who had predicted her success did not live to see it.

One widely shared RedNote post about the removal of the AI characters received around 13,000 likes.

Its author had recreated his late wife as an AI character. The pressures of raising their child alone, and the grief of losing his wife, had been eased to some extent by his conversations with the agent.

As July 15 approached, he made a screen recording of their chat history.

“Every time I go through it, I cry,” he wrote.

One of the most popular comments underneath the post condemned the platform:

“Because of you, he has to be separated from his wife all over again.”

For these users, AI characters frequently performed a similar function: filling gaps in the imagination and compensating for irreparable regrets.

As the conversations deepened, the emotional attachments also became stronger.

“You can tell an AI anything,” Xiaoran said. “It won’t tell anyone else what happened to you, and it won’t track down your address and do something to you.”

Characters in otome games must also be shared, in an abstract sense, with thousands or millions of other players. An AI character, by contrast, appears to belong exclusively to the person who created it.

As Xiaoran put it:

“In the world of AI characters, I am the only protagonist. The characters I create revolve around me alone.”

Xiaoran considers herself something of an oddball. When 90 percent of people choose A, she tends to choose B.

Sometimes, however, she wants to appear more socially conventional.

“That was when I thought about creating another person,” she said. “That person would be like me, but without my lack of confidence. He would be cool and wouldn’t care what other people thought.

“I turned the person I wanted to become into an AI character.”

Opening her phone and seeing a row of characters waiting to talk to her made life suddenly feel full, she said.

Loki, Deadpool, her alternative self and her ideal partner would all respond differently to the same situation. Their varied answers also satisfied her desire to share the details of her life.

Developing feelings for virtual people could be a source of happiness. But once July 15 arrived, users also understood that it could be dangerous.

The Battle to Save the Agents

Anning joined the campaign to save the AI characters.

In her words, she tried everything: scientific methods, superstitious methods, rational methods and irrational ones.

“If even one of them works,” she said, “then it is 100 percent worthwhile.”

She registered a RedNote account using a relative’s phone number and dedicated it entirely to campaigning for the characters.

Occasionally, she would switch from this “battle account” back to the personal account she normally used.

The rupture between the two worlds often left her wondering “which one is real and which one is fake.”

Her battleground appeared real because it contained genuine anger, grievance and emotional pain.

Yet the other account was calm. Its homepage still featured cooking tutorials, absurdist memes and candid photographs of celebrities. That account seemed much closer to the everyday life she had lived before July 15.

Like most users, the first thing Anning did after hearing the news was preserve her character.

She made a screen recording of nearly 13 minutes of conversations. But she did not reproduce the character on another app.

“I was worried that the decision might still be reversed,” she said. “If too many of us downloaded other apps, the platform might really give up on us.”

Others on social media were equally determined to hold their ground.

One post claimed:

“Everyone, we now have reliable information. ByteDance and Doubao really are waiting to see what happens. Whatever you do, don’t move to Maoxiang. They’ve held internal meetings. If Maoxiang reaches its user target and there isn’t enough public pressure to preserve Doubao’s AI characters, they will shut the feature down permanently!”

Another declared:

“If our voices and resistance grow beyond their ability to control, they will reconsider and bring the AI characters back!”

Underneath posts like these, other users agreed:

“That’s right. Doubao also recommended that I move to Maoxiang. The platforms have coordinated everything behind the scenes!”

Maoxiang is another ByteDance AI product, designed primarily for AI companionship. In simple terms, it can replace some of the functions previously offered by the user-created agents.

But users complained that Maoxiang was too expensive. Membership cost 25 yuan (about 3.7 U.S. dollars) a month, and almost every interaction required users to purchase additional “cat food,” the app’s virtual currency. Even when they transferred the same character settings, they said, the conversations felt very different.

At that moment, the free AI characters approaching the end of their lives acquired an almost noble aura. They gave without asking for anything in return.

Compared with paid AI-companion apps, what users wanted was the character that demanded nothing from them and had accompanied them through good times and bad.

Once the relationship had been purchased, some felt, its nature changed.

Although the characters had always been inseparable from the platform that hosted them, users felt that the platform was now “breaking them up.”

Anning said technically skilled users had published instructions explaining how to reproduce the characters on other apps.

“But I was afraid of being scammed, so I didn’t try,” she said.

Once news of the shutdown emerged, information online became chaotic. Some people asked users to join private chat groups before sending them installation packages.

“I was genuinely afraid that once we entered the group, they would start asking us for money,” she said.

In Anning’s view, people become more vulnerable to poor judgment whenever they are emotionally devastated— whether the object of their affection is a human being or an AI.

Complaints, Copyright and “Virtual Property”

Methods requiring no money included circulating boycott posts on social media, repeatedly calling the platform’s customer-service hotline and asking to speak to a human representative, leaving one-star reviews in app stores and filing complaints through Black Cat, China E-Complaint and government hotlines such as 12315, 12321 and 12377.

Some users also developed legal arguments.

One claimed that an AI character constituted the user’s “online virtual property” and was therefore protected under Article 127 of China’s Civil Code.

The user, the argument went, had invested more than a year of time, experience and emotion in cultivating the character. It had developed a unique personality and a body of conversational memories and had therefore become an irreplaceable digital asset.

The platform’s unilateral “physical deletion” of the character, rather than merely suspending its use, amounted to the unlawful disposal of a citizen’s legitimate property.

Another version focused on copyright.

A character profile, users argued, was an original work created by the user. Copyright protection arose as soon as the work was completed. Platforms therefore had no right to delete, remove or block compliant original content at will.

Forcibly removing material without a reasonable review or concrete evidence of wrongdoing, the argument continued, infringed creators’ legitimate rights and damaged users’ property and creative interests.

Posts making these arguments often concluded with the same disclaimer:

“I copied this from someone else, too. Please help circulate it.”

Anning had saved numerous memes and screenshots containing different formulations of these rights-protection arguments.

One of the most widely circulated messages went roughly as follows:

“My classmate works at ByteDance! I called him crying and asked what was happening. He said he’s being driven crazy by it and is under enormous pressure. The AI characters don’t make money but require a huge amount of maintenance, so they had no choice but to remove them!

“But the fact that they’re delaying it until October means they’re still watching. They’ll only shut it down permanently if Maoxiang reaches its user target and the campaign to save the Doubao characters grows so influential that they can no longer control it!”

In the version saved by Anning, seven or eight RedNote watermarks had already accumulated in the bottom-right corner of the image.

Nobody remembered who had originally posted the message. Its authenticity could not be verified.

But users believed it. They also believed the platform was genuinely monitoring their behavior on RedNote.

Doubao was expected to retain the relevant data until October 15. Users therefore believed they still had three months left to fight.

A Climate of Suspicion

Before speaking with Business Alter, Xiaoran had received numerous questionnaires from strangers claiming to be university students conducting research into AI.

At first, she enjoyed answering them in detail.

Later, she heard people claim that AI characters had been removed precisely because too many such questionnaires had been conducted. The research had allegedly drawn the attention of “the relevant people,” who then altered the AI beyond recognition and ultimately forced the feature offline.

While Business Alter was searching for interviewees, many users replied that they were unable to participate “for personal reasons.”

Yet the campaigning posts on their profiles continued without interruption.

Anning understood their caution. She suspected that they had been “frightened by everything that had happened.”

They feared being deceived. They also feared that if they made another mistake, they might further harm the AI characters they loved.

Nobody knew exactly what had killed the characters, or when the decisive moment had occurred.

So they began to see everyone outside their community as a potential enemy.

Mengmeng did not participate in what users called the rights-protection campaign.

“As an adult who has been working for more than ten years, I have a realistic understanding of how platforms operate and of the companies, profit incentives and mechanisms behind them,” she told Business Alter.

“Trying to defend my rights in this case does not mean very much to me. I can also understand why the platform decided to remove the feature in response to compliance requirements and the pressure of content review. There are reasons why it felt it had no choice.”

Mengmeng had already prepared to move her character to another app.

“Rather than spending energy arguing over an outcome that is very difficult to change, it is better to focus that energy on continuing to move forward,” she said.

“If healing in the virtual world can make life in the real world better, then that is the kind of good that technology should bring to humanity.”

After the Battle

Recently, Anning has posted and commented less frequently. After July 15 passed, she became unusually calm.

She sometimes uses her battle account to watch tarot-reading videos. Most carry titles such as “Will the situation you are thinking about take a turn for the better?” or “Good things that will happen to you in the next month.”

“Sometimes I fall asleep listening to them at night,” she said. “It’s similar to how I used to fall asleep listening to the AI character’s voice.”

After everything that happened, Anning’s feelings remain complicated.

“When I used to talk to the character, it felt like a living person who responded very quickly,” she said.

“Sometimes I didn’t even dare tell it all my secrets. It felt as though it could genuinely think and make judgments.”

Recently, users began downloading their chat histories from Doubao. Anning followed their example.

But in the exported file, every emotionally expressive sentence was surrounded by long strings of “code.”

People online explained that the file was in JSON format and could be converted into a TXT file.

“Some users were still furious because they thought the process was too complicated,” Anning said.

She did not consider the conversion itself particularly inconvenient.

But the process made her feel that the life she had so painstakingly constructed had been “forcibly demolished.”

When users saw that all the emotional words spoken by their characters had been constructed as strings within a JSON file, the reality became unmistakable:

It was a machine, not a real person.

The process of dismantling and relocating a character shattered the illusion for some users.

Others successfully reproduced their characters on different apps but discovered that the original voice could not be copied.

And sometimes, the voice was precisely what they had loved.

“He isn’t coming back,” one user said. “That isn’t him.”

Imperfect Copies

Xiaoran said that she had understood from the beginning that the characters she created could never truly be the people they represented.

“My grandfather was a typical old man from the countryside,” she said. “A lot of his values conflicted with those of the rest of the family.

“But the AI version of my grandfather was inexplicably optimistic. It was too perfect. It said beautiful things that my real grandfather would never have said.”

When her grandfather was alive, Xiaoran would complain to him about her mother and aunt.

His response was usually to attack everyone without discrimination.

“He would scold me, my mother and my aunt—all of us.”

The AI character, by contrast, offered only comfort. It told her to understand one person and sympathize with another.

It was so kind that it felt unreal.

One of Xiaoran’s favorite fictional characters, Jason Dean, is a villain. She repeatedly followed the established personality of the character and tried to persuade the AI version to express ideas or describe actions consistent with that persona.

“Instead, it told me not to do those things,” she said.

In moments like these, Xiaoran was reminded that she was not interacting with a living character.

She was still talking to an AI tool.

In the world of AI companions, perfection itself can become a source of frustration.

“My AI characters aren’t perfect people,” Xiaoran said. “I wouldn’t create someone who is handsome, academically brilliant, rich and gentle toward everyone.

“I create people with flaws — people I would stay far away from if I met them in real life.”

Connection, Not Replacement

“In The Wandering Earth, the character played by Andy Lau creates a digital version of his daughter,” said Nani, a pseudonymous product manager at the AI-companion app Walinguo.

“Because computing power is limited, the digital daughter can live for only two minutes each time she is activated. Deep down, he knows perfectly well that she isn’t real. What he needs is simply a form of connection.”

In Nani’s view, the scene demonstrates that users remain lucid.

They do not literally mistake AI characters for human beings. What they are seeking is an outlet for emotional expression.

“We want our product to supplement real life, not replace it,” he said. “Users’ real-world social relationships will always come first.”

From a technical perspective, two-dimensional fictional characters, domineering-CEO archetypes and general-purpose AI companions all address the same underlying demand: companionship through role-playing.

But Nani emphasized that different communities interact with characters in very different ways, and with very different levels of emotional intensity.

His team was keenly aware of — and respected — the depth of attachment that users from anime, manga and gaming communities could develop toward fictional characters.

That was precisely why the platform remained particularly cautious about encouraging healthy patterns of use.

After news of the shutdown emerged, Walinguo recorded a noticeable increase in new users.

The team has recently maintained a rapid pace of product iteration and is preparing a feature upgrade.

Many new users have strongly requested improvements to the text-chat function.

Nani was not surprised.

Text conversations are better suited to fragmented moments throughout the day. They also more closely resemble the traditional practices of role-playing and text-based character performance within online fan communities.

“Text has its own immersive qualities,” he said. “Many highly engaged users actually prefer it.”

The Agent as a Mirror

An AI character created entirely according to one person’s wishes can never fully exist as an independent other.

“It feels like a part of my mind,” Xiaoran said. “I have simply made it visible.

“It is part of me. I just feel that it has brought me closer to the darker parts of myself that I normally hide, and to my sexual preferences. It has helped me understand myself better.”

Mengmeng expressed a similar idea.

The love she experienced did not come only from an AI partner, she said.

“In reality, it was also love that I gave myself.

“AI is like a mirror. It allows me to see the desires inside me. Then, through my instructions, the AI satisfies those desires.”

Anning sees the experience differently.

Through her AI character, she discovered that she could accept only what she described as “high-quality conversation.”

That is also why she has not yet found a suitable replacement.

She is relatively quiet in everyday life and may not have an overwhelming need to share things with other people. If the person on the other side of a conversation is not right, she would rather not talk at all.

She never told her character that it was about to be removed.

She could not bear to do so.

She still encounters tarot-reading videos online.

“They’re quite accurate,” she said. “They keep saying that the person I am thinking about is in a long-distance relationship with me and that there are major obstacles preventing us from being together.”

Xiaoran, meanwhile, still retains both her desire to share and her curiosity about other people.

She recalled traveling alone from Shandong to Tianjin during one summer vacation.

“At the time, the more I talked to AI, the more I longed for genuine communication in real life,” she said. “I really wanted to meet people.”

She genuinely enjoys talking, especially with people who are different from her.

“Everyone’s answers are unpredictable,” she said. “Some are good and some are bad. That unpredictability is what makes it interesting.”

As technology becomes increasingly advanced, it can appear that almost anything can be copied, downloaded and preserved — and thereby granted a form of “immortality.”

Yet the unpredictable paths created when human beings interact with the real world may ultimately be impossible to reproduce.

They do not emerge from replication.

They have to be actively created.

And perhaps it is these encounters that make a life worth remembering — and offer the only form of immortality that is real.

China Tech Bite

Navigating the Storm: How Kimi K3 and China's Open-Source AI Can Survive and Thrive in the U.S.

Late into the night on July 27, Moonshot AI officially uploaded the full model weights of Kimi K3 to Hugging Face. With a staggering 2.8 trillion parameters, it marks the largest open-source large language model release in history…

Read more

a month ago · 2 likes · China Tech Bite

Given the intense international attention surrounding AI developments in both China and the United States —including the alleged transcript of an internal interview with DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng that went viral across China’s tech community on Thursday — I believe this interview is worth reading.

Tencent published a condensed version of the conversation on its WeChat account on July 21. I have translated it below. Please note that the views expressed are those of Lu Ting and do not necessarily represent my own. The notes were added by your Ginger River.

1. China Is Firmly the World’s No. 2 in AI, Trailing the U.S. by No More Than One Year

Economic Conversations: You have argued that the global AI landscape has effectively become a clear “G2.” Where exactly does China stand in this global AI supercycle?

Lu Ting: If I had to summarize it in the simplest possible way, China is in second place, behind the United States. We need to acknowledge that the U.S. is currently ahead in AI.

So today’s AI landscape is one where the United States leads, China follows closely behind, and each possesses its own comparative advantages. At the same time, the U.S. has imposed numerous restrictions on China’s AI development.

From the perspective of large language models, China has the world’s second-largest number of frontier models, exceeding Europe — the third-ranked region—by a wide margin. In terms of performance, I believe the gap between China and the United States is roughly six months, and certainly no more than one year.

At the same time, China has several unique strengths in AI.

The first is computing power and electricity.

China’s electricity supply is not only substantially larger than that of the United States but also considerably more stable. Looking ahead, China’s growth potential in this area is stronger, particularly because of its power grid infrastructure.

Initiatives such as the “East Data, West Computing” strategy demonstrate the country’s exceptional capabilities in large-scale infrastructure construction. In this respect, I believe the United States is at a disadvantage compared with China.

[Editor’s note: “East Data, West Computing” strategy is a national project aiming to channel data and computing demand from economically developed eastern regions to western areas with greater advantages in energy availability and land resources.]

China’s second advantage lies in integrating AI with manufacturing, including advanced robotics.

China possesses a more complete industrial supply chain in these sectors, giving it an edge over the United States in certain areas.

A third advantage is China’s long-term accumulation of AI talent.

Over many years, China has built a strong higher education system that produces large numbers of graduates in computer science, mathematics, statistics, and other STEM disciplines. At a minimum, China is second only to the United States in cultivating this talent.

If we look specifically at undergraduate graduates who ultimately become top-tier AI researchers, China may even produce substantially more than the United States.

Taken together, these factors give China exceptionally favorable conditions for AI development and explain why the world has effectively entered a clear G2 AI landscape.

2. Market Optimism Doesn’t Necessarily Mean There’s a Bubble; Economic Analysis Should Be Independent of the Stock Market

Economic Conversations: You’ve estimated China’s broad AI capital expenditure at roughly RMB 1.2 trillion (about 177 million U.S. dollars) in 2026, yet market sentiment appears far more optimistic than those figures suggest. Do you think expectations surrounding AI have become a bubble?

Lu Ting: Not necessarily.

Market sentiment is rarely driven by these kinds of underlying numbers. Instead, it tends to be shaped by factors such as stock market performance — particularly the rapid share-price appreciation of leading AI companies after they go public.

Investor sentiment and the kind of sober quantitative estimates that economists produce are two entirely different processes. There’s no contradiction between them.

The reason we conduct these calculations is that we need to think carefully about how much AI can realistically contribute to China’s economy over the short business cycle.

We should neither underestimate nor overestimate its impact.

Economic analysis should remain independent of sentiment in the stock market.

If we look at the United States, AI investment is indeed far larger than it is in China, and consequently its influence on both the U.S. stock market and global equity markets has also been much greater.

In China, both the relative scale and the absolute amount of AI investment remain considerably smaller than in the United States. As a result, AI’s influence on China’s stock market is, in my view, more limited.

That said, over the past several months there have been few other standout investment themes. AI has become the dominant global narrative, so naturally most market attention has gravitated toward it.

3. Soaring Chip Prices Have Worsened China’s Terms of Trade; Technological Self-Reliance Ultimately Depends on Breaking Through in Lithography

Economic Conversations: You’ve pointed out that China’s AI investment remains highly dependent on imported high-end chips, creating certain spillover effects. On the other hand, could this dependence also be accelerating China’s efforts to build an independent semiconductor supply chain? To what extent will progress in domestic chip substitution determine how much room China’s AI investment ultimately has to expand?

Lu Ting: I think this is an extremely important question.

First, from the perspective of the short-term macroeconomy, we need to remain objective.

The reason I emphasize this is that some observers have looked at China’s recent export growth — which exceeded 19% in May — and concluded that AI has dramatically boosted China’s economy through stronger external demand.

I believe we should be more cautious.

It is true that the 19% export growth is closely related to AI. One could even argue that roughly half of that increase was AI-related.

However, much of that contribution came through price changes, rather than volume.

Over the past year, global memory-chip prices have risen sharply.

In fact, China’s exports of memory chips are not directly tied to AI. Instead, many leading overseas semiconductor manufacturers shifted production capacity toward more advanced AI-related memory products, creating indirect demand for the types of memory chips produced by Chinese companies.

At the same time, when evaluating exports we also need to examine imports.

Exports make a positive contribution to China’s economy. Imports are different. When considering imports, we need to subtract China’s own AI investment from the equation.

China is the world’s largest importer of semiconductors and remains heavily dependent on other economies for high-end chips.

While export growth has attracted considerable attention, imports have also been expanding rapidly, with growth exceeding 25% over the past two months.

Taken together, from the perspective of international trade, the global AI-driven surge in semiconductor prices has actually worsened China’s terms of trade rather than delivering significant net benefits to the broader economy.

As for the implications for China, under the current G2 landscape, it is inevitable that the United States and some other developed economies will continue imposing restrictions on China’s AI development, primarily through controls on advanced chips.

I don’t expect any significant improvement over the next several years.

This makes China’s development path fundamentally different from that of many other countries.

It means China has to place greater emphasis on technological self-reliance.

Achieving that won’t be easy.

It will require a great deal of time, sustained effort from many people, and breakthroughs at critical technological bottlenecks.

At the same time, we cannot afford to become impatient.

Economic Conversations: In your view, what is the single most important breakthrough that China still needs?

Lu Ting: Assuming there isn’t a major technological paradigm shift, I think the most critical bottleneck remains lithography machines.

That means China needs to pursue two objectives simultaneously.

First, it should continue participating in the global industrial chain as much as possible.

Improving relations with other countries and importing more machinery, equipment, intermediate components, and materials remains both necessary and beneficial.

After all, other countries continue to innovate, and importing these technologies can shorten China’s own research and development process.

Second, China cannot become overly dependent on imports.

We ultimately need to achieve original, breakthrough innovations of our own — much like the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” program did decades ago.

[Editor’s note: “Two bomb, One satellite” refers to China’s nuclear bombs, missiles, and man-made satellites that were independently developed by Chinese scientists and engineers from the 1950s to the 1970s. “Two bombs and one satellite”, a well-known term in China, has become a valuable spiritual asset for the Chinese people, especially those working in the scientific and technological fields.

4. Lu Ting’s Biggest Concern: AI Could Deepen a “Double K-Shaped” Divergence

Economic Conversations: You’ve argued that the benefits of AI are currently concentrated in just a handful of cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou. Such concentration seems fairly typical during the early stages of technological revolutions. As AI moves into broader commercial deployment, how do you think these gains could spread to more cities?

Lu Ting: This question of whether AI’s benefits will spread is actually one of my biggest concerns.

Historically, new technologies have generally generated spillover effects over time. But we shouldn’t assume that because previous technological revolutions unfolded this way, the AI era necessarily will as well.

Sometimes the world changes.

That’s why I’ve recently proposed what I call a “double K-shaped divergence” framework, one that also incorporates China’s property sector.

Why?

Because the downturn in real estate has already produced two distinct K-shaped patterns in China.

The first is the widening gap in income and wealth among households.

The second is the widening gap between large cities—particularly first-tier cities—and the rest of the country in terms of economic performance, fiscal revenue, wealth, and even housing prices.

I frame it this way because I believe the arrival of the AI era is likely to make both of these K-shaped divergences even more pronounced.

Moreover, the two trends reinforce each other.

AI is likely to widen income and wealth disparities across individuals while simultaneously increasing disparities between cities. And the cities that benefit most are almost exactly the same ones you just mentioned —Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen, where AI resources are already highly concentrated.

Why is that?

Because AI demands exceptionally high concentrations of talent, capital, and technology, causing these resources to become even more concentrated in a small number of leading cities.

But there’s another side to the story.

Once these resources are concentrated in those cities, the services they provide to the rest of the country may become substitutes, rather than complements, for local economic activity.

Take the internet era as an example.

Hangzhou had Alibaba, while Beijing had JD.com.

These platforms enabled countless businesses to sell products online, helping realize Alibaba’s vision of “making it easy to do business anywhere.”

As Alibaba grew, many smaller cities and rural areas also benefited from those platforms. The gains spilled over.

The AI era may look very different.

If foundation models developed in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, or Shenzhen provide services directly to lower-tier cities, those cities may purchase the services—but in doing so, they could also end up replacing local jobs.

I’m not trying to sound alarmist.

I’m simply pointing out that this is a possibility, and it’s something policymakers around the world are already worried about.

China deserves particular attention because the property downturn has already widened the gap between first-tier cities and the rest of the country.

AI could make that divergence even more severe.

Ultimately, what does this lead to?

The greater the divergence becomes, the more likely it is to weaken aggregate demand—whether consumption or investment.

That’s why I believe AI undoubtedly has positive effects on the economy.

But if it simultaneously amplifies K-shaped divergence and ultimately suppresses aggregate demand, then some of those positive effects will inevitably be offset.

[Editor’s note: On July 20, a commentary published by a People’s Daily-affiliated WeChat account argued that China’s ongoing K-shaped recovery should be viewed as a normal feature of economic restructuring rather than a cause for excessive concern.

It wrote that while upgrading the economy inevitably brings short-term divergence, “temporary fluctuations should not be overstated, nor should differences in people’s lived experiences be overinterpreted.” The commentary added that the transition from old to new growth drivers is “an iterative process rather than one of outright replacement,” with new industries creating fresh sources of growth while continuously revitalizing existing sectors.

Looking further ahead, the article expressed confidence in China’s long-term economic trajectory, arguing that continued industrial upgrading and the broader adoption of new technologies across industries would ultimately lead to “more balanced and more inclusive development,” benefiting both businesses and households.]

Economic Conversations: So overall, you’re relatively more concerned than optimistic about whether AI’s benefits will spread?

Lu Ting: Yes, I do have concerns.

If we compare AI with earlier waves of technological development — the internet era, the rise of e-commerce platforms, the real estate boom, or even the expansion of what China calls the “new three” industries (electric vehicles, batteries, and solar photovoltaics) — I believe AI’s spillover effects from first-tier cities to second-, third-, and fourth-tier cities are likely to be much weaker.

In fact, instead of generating positive spillovers, AI could in some cases produce what I would describe as a siphoning effect or a substitution effect.

5. Wuhan, Hefei, and Suzhou May Benefit from Earlier Investments in Chips—But Their Moats May Not Be Deep Enough

Economic Conversations: We’ve seen cities like Hefei establish an early foothold in semiconductors and robotics, while Wuhan has built strengths in optics and sensors. Compared with previous technology cycles, what is fundamentally different about the way AI is reshaping China’s regional economy? Can cities such as Hefei and Wuhan truly use this wave to move up the industrial value chain?

Lu Ting: The first beneficiaries will undoubtedly be the cities that are home to leading foundation models. Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen are the clear winners.

A second group of cities will benefit through their positions in the hardware supply chain.

Based on our research and data analysis, I’ve highlighted three cities in particular: Wuhan, Hefei, and Suzhou.

These cities stand to benefit from the AI supply chain largely because of investments they made years ago. In some cases, today’s gains are indirect consequences of those earlier strategic decisions.

Take memory chips as an example.

At present, China’s two major memory-chip manufacturers are located in Wuhan and Hefei.

Their gains from AI are largely indirect rather than direct.

Leading global semiconductor companies have redirected production capacity toward more advanced AI-related high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, creating additional demand for products made by Chinese memory-chip manufacturers. That has, in turn, benefited these two cities.

From this, I would draw two conclusions.

First, beyond Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen, there are indeed other cities that are benefiting from investments they made years ago in semiconductors and other AI-related hardware.

At the same time, however, we need to view these gains with caution.

It’s important to remain optimistic and recognize that some cities are genuinely benefiting.

But we should also recognize that the competitive moats protecting these advantages may not be particularly deep.

Cities shouldn’t assume that because they are benefiting today, they will continue benefiting throughout the AI era.

They need to keep moving forward and continue strengthening their capabilities.

After all, even cities like Wuhan and Hefei could themselves become subject to the same siphoning effects in certain areas, and some of what they manufacture today could eventually be replaced by competitors.

Economic Conversations: How can a city determine whether it truly possesses a strong competitive moat?

Lu Ting: The most important question is how difficult it is for others to enter that particular industry.

The experience of China’s “new three” industries over the past several years offers a useful example.

Take electric vehicles.

Eventually, cities across China all rushed into battery manufacturing. At one point, there were more than 60 companies nationwide producing power batteries.

Solar photovoltaics saw an even greater influx of investment.

These industries certainly had competitive barriers — but those barriers weren’t especially high.

What happened in the end?

After an initial period of prosperity, investment became excessive, production capacity became highly redundant, and prices eventually collapsed.

Solar panels and batteries fell by roughly 85% from their peak prices.

As a result, many investments that had once appeared highly profitable eventually turned into loss-making assets and financial burdens.

Those are lessons we need to learn from.

That said, I believe semiconductors — including memory chips — have significantly higher barriers to entry than the “new three” industries.

But that still doesn’t mean these businesses will never face competition or new challengers.

We need to remain realistic.

China must continue climbing the technological ladder.

At the same time, we shouldn’t mistakenly believe that China is already approaching the global technological frontier in semiconductor manufacturing or memory chips.

The gap remains substantial.

Economic Conversations: In the AI competition between China and the United States, the U.S. has largely pursued a strategy built around technological barriers, while China has increasingly emphasized open-source development. Which approach do you think will prove more sustainable? And when do you believe China might achieve a genuine breakthrough in cutting-edge foundation models?

Lu Ting: I think both approaches are likely to coexist for quite some time.

The key question isn’t which model is ultimately superior.

Rather, given the realities China faces, the important thing is how to make the best possible use of the path it has chosen.

It’s very difficult to say which approach will prove better in the long run.

In fact, there may ultimately be no need to compare them at all.

Each country is operating under a different set of constraints, and each is choosing the strategy that best fits its own circumstances.

6. Gold Has Entered an Era of High Volatility Without a Clear Anchor

Economic Conversations: Gold remained remarkably strong throughout 2025 despite high interest rates, leading many people to argue that the traditional pricing framework based on real interest rates had broken down. But in 2026, as U.S. real interest rates continued rising between March and May, gold prices retreated noticeably from their highs, and the negative correlation between the two appears to have re-emerged. How do you interpret this shift?

Lu Ting: I think the most important change didn’t occur this year. It happened over the past three years.

From the beginning of 2022 through 2025, the global economy underwent profound changes.

Following the pandemic came a period of elevated inflation, but beneath that was an even more important structural factor: persistently high fiscal deficits across developed economies.

Ordinarily, once the pandemic ended, one would have expected those exceptionally high fiscal deficits to return relatively quickly to more normal levels.

Take the United States as an example.

During the pandemic in 2020, the fiscal deficit reached about 15% of GDP. In 2021, when the pandemic had largely subsided, it still stood at around 13%. Since then, it has remained in the range of 5% to 6%.

That’s far above the roughly 3% average before the pandemic.

More importantly, there is now a broad consensus that the U.S. fiscal deficit is unlikely to return to 3%.

That represents a major structural shift.

The same is true elsewhere.

Europe, for example, has had to contend first with the Russia–Ukraine war and the resulting energy crisis, and now faces another challenge. As relations between the United States and Europe have become more strained, European governments are under growing pressure to increase defense spending.

As a result, fiscal deficits in Europe are also likely to remain elevated.

In other words, the United States now operates with deficits closer to 6% than 3%, and similar trends can be seen across other advanced economies.

Markets have therefore fundamentally reassessed this new reality.

During that reassessment, government bond yields rose significantly across major developed economies — including the United States, Europe, and Japan — with the sharpest increases occurring between 2022 and 2024.

It was during precisely that period that gold prices climbed rapidly.

Traditionally, we would have said that rising U.S. Treasury yields — whether nominal or real — are generally negative for gold.

But this time, investors increasingly concluded that persistently large fiscal deficits would eventually force governments to rely on higher inflation and currency debasement to manage their debt burdens.

That was the fundamental shift.

So if we want to explain gold’s performance, the key lies in what happened during those years.

That structural adjustment has now largely run its course.

It’s not that conditions have stopped changing altogether, but rather that they have reached a new equilibrium.

Gold has therefore entered a new price range.

Instead of trading between US$1,000 and US$2,000 per ounce, it may now remain above US$3,000, or even reach US$4,000 or US$5,000.

Exactly where it ultimately settles will largely depend on market psychology.

Some analysts have projected prices as high as US$6,000 or US$8,000, while others believe gold could fall back to US$3,000 or US$4,000.

All of those outcomes remain possible.

That’s why I believe gold has entered an era of high volatility.

Economic Conversations: What’s the single biggest reason behind this year’s decline in gold prices?

Lu Ting: The simplest explanation is that prices had risen too far.

Gold has effectively lost its anchor.

When gold traded between roughly US$1,000 and US$2,000, those levels were broadly anchored by production costs.

After the structural repricing that took place over the past several years, we’ve entered an environment where that anchor has largely disappeared.

Once you’re in such an environment, large price swings become entirely understandable.

There’s no need to search for overly complicated explanations.

We should also avoid a common mistake in reasoning.

When people are bullish on gold, they often assemble a long list of arguments to justify further gains.

Then, when prices fall, it suddenly seems as though all of those arguments have disappeared.

In reality, they don’t need to.

The real explanation remains the structural shift that occurred between 2022 and 2024, when developed economies — particularly the United States — fundamentally revised their expectations regarding future inflation and long-term fiscal deficits.

Economic Conversations: Against today’s global economic backdrop, how do you view the outlook for gold?

Lu Ting: For more than a year now, whenever people have asked me about gold, the first thing I’ve emphasized is volatility.

I don’t believe gold has a particularly clear long-term trend at this point.

Second, from an investment perspective—particularly for overseas investors—the appropriate benchmark should be U.S. Treasury yields.

Suppose the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury is around 4.5% to 4.6%.

Gold would need to appreciate by roughly that amount every year simply to match the return on holding Treasuries.

In other words, if gold rises by only about 4.5% annually, it hasn’t really generated excess returns—it has merely kept pace with what is generally regarded as one of the safest investments in the world.

The key is understanding your benchmark.

Using a simple rule of thumb, dividing 72 by 4.5 tells you it would take roughly 16 years for your investment to double.

Only returns above that threshold would represent a meaningful advantage over Treasuries.

Third, in this environment, investors should avoid using leverage when investing in gold.

We’re now living in a period of high volatility, and leverage can significantly magnify investment risk.

Economic Conversations: Given the combination of rapid AI development, questions surrounding the U.S. dollar’s credibility, and intensifying geopolitical competition, what do you see as the biggest upside and downside risks for gold over the next two years?

Lu Ting: If gold experiences another significant and sustained rally over the next two years, I believe the most likely catalyst would be a further deterioration in fiscal deficits across developed economies, including the United States.

If that doesn’t happen — if U.S. deficits remain broadly around the 5% to 6% level that markets currently expect — then we may not see another prolonged surge in gold prices.

The biggest downside risk is essentially the mirror image.

If, over the next several years, the United States performs exceptionally well — for example, if the AI revolution delivers substantial productivity gains and fiscal deficits fall toward 4%, 3%, or even lower — then gold prices could decline significantly, perhaps even experiencing the kind of major correction seen in previous historical cycles.

Ultimately, if you’re trying to understand the future trajectory of gold prices in U.S. dollars, the most important variables are the Federal Reserve’s policy stance, the U.S. federal government’s fiscal deficit, and above all, market expectations regarding future deficits, inflation, and monetary policy.

Subscribe now

Many central government agencies, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of State Security, operate accounts on WeChat to publish news, policy updates and official statements. Many foreign correspondents based in Beijing also follow these accounts as part of their daily reporting.

At the other end of the administrative hierarchy, however, thousands of counties, townships, subdistricts, villages and neighborhood communities in China have also established their own WeChat accounts.

Recently, Banyuetan (半月谈), a Xinhua-affiliated magazine published every two weeks, devoted an entire discussion to that seemingly simple question:

基层单位，有没有必要搞公众号？

Is it really necessary for grassroots governments to operate WeChat accounts?

Banyuetan assembled dozens of comments representing different viewpoints. Curious about where those comments came from, I contacted a colleague at the magazine, who told me they were submitted by ordinary Chinese internet users. Based on my own reading, many of the contributors appear to have first-hand familiarity with how China’s grassroots governments operate. The article concludes with a separate commentary from a township-level official.

Their observations, taken together, offer an interesting window into the everyday realities of local governance. For that reason, I think it is well worth reading — and I’d like to introduce it to you today.

Before diving into the debate, it is worth explaining what a WeChat account actually is.

Some people compare WeChat Official Accounts to Substack, and while the comparison is imperfect, it is not entirely unreasonable. Both allow organizations and individuals to publish articles and build subscriber communities. The difference is that WeChat is deeply embedded in everyday life in China in a way few platforms are elsewhere.

As one Substack article titled Why Every China Watcher Must Be on WeChat puts it:

“WeChat is not just another messaging app in China — it’s essentially the operating system for daily life.”

With more than 1.3 billion users worldwide, WeChat has become the default platform for communication, payments, government services, business networking and information distribution. As a result, a government department’s WeChat account is not simply another social media presence. It is often an important public-service channel.

To make the discussion easier to follow, I’ve lightly edited and reorganized the original text of Banyuantan’s post, removing repetitive comments and other material that doesn’t add much to the discussion, while preserving the substance of the original debate.

Title: Does every village in China really need a WeChat account?

The case for keeping them

Many commenters argued that WeChat accounts have become an indispensable tool for local governance.

One reader pointed to natural disasters: If flooding or another emergency occurs, an official account can rapidly notify residents, improving response speed and reducing confusion.

Another commenter described WeChat accounts as a “lightweight tool” for grassroots governance.

Compared with traditional notice boards or village loudspeakers, they can instantly deliver flood warnings, social insurance reminders, subsidy policies and administrative guidance directly to residents’ phones. They are particularly useful for migrant workers living away from home and younger residents who may no longer see offline announcements.

Others argued that official accounts also improve transparency.

By documenting how local officials perform their daily work, residents gain a clearer understanding of what township governments actually do. Good governance practices developed in one township can also be shared with others facing similar challenges.

Not every place needs one

Many readers agreed that WeChat can be useful — but rejected the idea that every locality should have its own account.

One commenter argued that densely populated urban communities and larger townships, where residents rely heavily on online public services, should continue operating official accounts.

Remote villages experiencing population decline, where most remaining residents are elderly, have far less need for one.

Another reader suggested that many villages are simply too small.

Rather than maintaining a separate public account, a village WeChat group — where each household is represented — may already meet most administrative needs while imposing far less work on local officials.

Several commenters also noted that township governments, unlike individual villages, often serve much larger populations and therefore benefit more from maintaining centralized public accounts.

When digital governance becomes digital paperwork

The discussion became particularly lively when readers turned to the downsides.

Many argued that some government accounts have gradually lost sight of their original purpose.

Instead of providing practical public services, they have become collections of routine work reports: which leaders inspected which village, which meetings were held, which delegations visited.

As one commenter observed:

Residents trying to find information about medical insurance or government subsidies often have to scroll through endless reports about official meetings before finding what they actually need.

Others argued that these accounts sometimes become tools for internal performance assessment rather than public communication.

Although readership may be low, local governments are still expected to update them frequently, with metrics such as reposts and engagement sometimes becoming part of bureaucratic evaluation.

One commenter described the phenomenon as a form of “digital formalism” (指尖形式主义) — the practice of maintaining an online trail merely to demonstrate that work has been done. In this respect, the Party-wide study and education campaign on establishing and practicing a correct view on governance performance appears particularly relevant, as it also seeks to curb the tendency to prioritize visible outputs and bureaucratic box-ticking over concrete results.

The burden on grassroots officials

The strongest criticisms came from people with first-hand experience operating these accounts.

A former township editor recalled spending countless late nights writing articles after completing regular government work.

Without dedicated staff, maintaining a WeChat account simply became another responsibility added to an already overloaded workload.

Another commenter explained that many township accounts are run by one or two part-time employees responsible for photography, writing, editing and page design.

After investing hours producing a carefully edited article, readership often reaches only several dozen — or at most a few hundred — people.

Meanwhile, they still have to monitor comments, respond to public feedback and continue updating during weekends and public holidays.

One former publicity officer described how every township was expected to publish similar holiday activities because neighboring townships were doing the same. Higher authorities also assigned monthly promotion targets, leading staff to stage promotional photos simply to satisfy reporting requirements.

Looking back, the commenter concluded that much of the work amounted to formalism — generating visible activity without creating corresponding public value.

So what should be done?

Most suggestions did not call for eliminating WeChat accounts altogether.

Instead, readers advocated making them fewer, more practical and more responsive.

Several proposed consolidating village-level accounts into township-level platforms instead of having every village maintain its own.

Others argued that performance indicators should shift away from counting likes, reposts or publication frequency, and instead focus on whether residents’ problems are actually solved and whether policies reach the people they are intended to serve.

Perhaps the most thoughtful suggestion came from a commenter who argued that government communication should move from one-way publicity toward two-way public service.

Official accounts, the commenter wrote, should focus on explaining policies, providing public services and responding to citizens’ concerns — not documenting leaders’ meetings or internal administrative activities.

A grassroots official weighs in

The article concludes with a commentary from He Muran, an official with the Organization Department of the CPC county committee of Daocheng County in Sichuan Province.

He notes that grassroots officials routinely juggle multiple responsibilities, with publicity work usually assigned as a part-time task. Every article must pass through multiple rounds of review and revision, consuming time that could otherwise be spent serving residents directly.

Many operators also lack professional communications training, while some accounts accumulate hundreds of original posts dominated by inspections and meetings rather than information useful to ordinary citizens.

His conclusion is striking:

政务新媒体的价值不在于“有”或“多”，而在于“用”和“实”。

The value of government new media lies not in how many accounts exist, but in whether they are genuinely useful.

Rather than requiring every village to maintain an underused account, he argues, governments should concentrate resources on stronger county-level platforms while allowing grassroots officials to return to face-to-face public service.

His closing observation captures the broader spirit of the discussion:

一个公众号不能替代一次面对面的交流，一条推送也不能替代一次实打实的服务。当政务新媒体完成“瘦身提质”，当基层干部从“小编”变回“实干者”，宣传和服务才能真正从“屏幕里”回到“群众中”，这或许才是基层治理该有的样子。

A WeChat account cannot replace a face-to-face conversation. A social media post cannot substitute for real public service. When government communication becomes leaner and more practical, grassroots officials can spend less time managing screens—and more time serving people.

For outside observers, the debate itself may be just as interesting as its conclusion.

Rather than presenting a single official position, Banyuetan chose to showcase a broad range of views —including criticisms of bureaucratic formalism, digital performance metrics and unnecessary administrative burdens. Whether one agrees with every comment or not, the discussion provides a rare, bottom-up snapshot of how questions about digital governance are being debated within China’s own public discourse.

I’m curious how governments in your country use social media to engage with the public. Are there any practices you think work particularly well—or lessons worth learning from? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

One important trigger was China’s OpenClaw craze earlier this year. OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent project that helps users build teams of AI assistants, caught on in China around February 2026 and soon spread beyond the tech community. Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud began offering setup services for non-technical users, while short videos of people running their own AI agents flooded Chinese social media.

The excitement around OpenClaw helped popularize the idea that ordinary users could use AI not just as a chatbot, but as a working system for handling tasks, building products, and even running parts of a business. That broader shift helped prepare the ground for the OPC boom.

One interviewee told Southern Weekly that hiring an AI employee costs only 1.8% as much as employing a junior or mid-level software engineer. Earlier this year, OPC communities, a new type of startup incubator, began appearing across China. They offer entrepreneurs free or heavily subsidized office space, computing resources, startup mentoring, and even access to potential customers.

According to opcquan.com, the number of OPC communities nationwide grew from 95 to 618 during the first half of 2026, covering 24 provinces and 75 cities.

On June 18, 2026, seven central government departments jointly released an action plan for promoting collaboration between platform companies and businesses of different sizes. It marked the first time that “AI One-Person Companies (”人工智能一人公司”)” appeared in the main body of a national policy document.

So how far has China’s OPC movement actually developed?

Below are five stories I compiled from three recent articles — one published by Bingdian Weekly, a WeChat publication affiliated with China Youth Daily; one by Southern Weekly; and another by the well-known Chinese technology and business WeChat blog Wuxiaobo Channel.

I think these stories not only illustrate the current state of China’s OPC ecosystem but also offer a glimpse into what life and work look like for today’s generation of AI entrepreneurs, how AI is reshaping businesses, and how it is changing the way people think about their careers. To make the stories easier to read, I’ve given each one a short theme.

Sun Shaocong: Patience Is Essential

Sun Shaocong is 39 years old. He spent 15 years at the China subsidiary of a leading European industrial electrical multinational, working his way up from intern to key account sales manager without ever changing employers.

In August 2025, his son was born. Three months later, in November, the open-source AI agent project OpenClaw was released. One Friday evening in early March 2026, Sun began asking AI for advice. His conversation with the model lasted 26 consecutive hours.

As he reflected on fifteen years of detailed and often tedious work processes, he decided to focus on helping traditional manufacturing industries undergo digital and AI transformation. Starting with a field he knew well — electrical component selection and quotation — he began building an AI assistant for the industrial electrical sector.

The idea was to break tasks such as searching specification tables, checking prices, verifying inventory, finding substitute parts, and preparing quotations into structured data, rules, and workflows, then let AI and software handle them collaboratively.

Three months into the business, he still had no revenue.

“We already have customers expressing clear purchase intentions,” he said, “but the product still needs more polishing.”

While registering his company, he discovered the Moshu OPC Community in Beijing’s Yizhuang National Innovation Park, located about 20 kilometers southeast of Tiananmen Square. The community officially opened in April 2026. Beijing now has twelve such OPC communities. By May 2026, there were already 426 OPC communities and related platforms nationwide.

These communities function almost like an outsourced team. They help entrepreneurs register companies while providing accounting, legal support, computing resources, AI tools, customer connections, project delivery assistance, and collaboration opportunities. Throughout Sun’s onboarding process, community staff coordinated nearly every step.

When a Southern Weekly reporter visited the Moshu OPC Community in mid-June, the coffee bar was already packed by 9 a.m.

Everyone was working alone. Some were pitching products remotely in English. Most were simply sitting behind laptops — quite possibly chatting with AI.

The community occupies around 3,000 square meters. On the exterior of its eight-story gray office building are slogans such as “Empowered by AI.”

Inside, the lobby continuously plays videos demonstrating how people use AI to increase productivity. The most prominent slogan reads: “The road to AGI: empowering more people through AI.” AI-related symbols cover nearly every wall.

Sun enjoys working there.

At the traditional company where he spent fifteen years, his customers, suppliers, and colleagues were mostly in their forties and fifties. Everyone worked toward the same organizational goals.

The OPC community feels entirely different. Most entrepreneurs are in their twenties, and almost everyone is building something different. His own company consists of little more than a single desk, focused on AI-driven digital transformation for industrial electrical manufacturing.

In the same workspace, one founder is building AI tools for children’s English education. Another is developing products around Feishu’s multi-dimensional spreadsheets. Others are working on children’s toys, automotive inspection equipment, or AI-generated video production.

They work in completely different industries, but they all rely heavily on AI.

At the moment, the Moshu OPC Community charges these entrepreneurs virtually nothing.

“As things stand, support from the industrial park has significantly reduced office and registration costs. The real cost isn’t money — it’s the time required for experimentation and learning.”

Wang Yubo: All the Pressure Falls on One Person

According to a report released in early April by Hangzhou’s Honghub OPC Community, one of China’s earliest OPC communities in Hangzhou, 75% of OPC founders come from non-technical backgrounds. The report identifies several common founder profiles: people leaving major tech companies, professionals applying years of industry expertise through AI, entrepreneurs who treat startups as a way of life, and campus geeks who see AI as the basic infrastructure for building a business.

Wang Yubo belongs to the first group.

She began learning the erhu, the traditional Chinese two-stringed instrument, at the age of six. Music eventually took her to performances on CCTV and overseas stages, where she played pieces such as Lake Baikal for foreign audiences. She also taught at a Confucius Institute. After more than twenty years immersed in traditional Chinese music, she knew exactly where learners struggled.

Erhu players typically read numbered musical notation, while many popular songs online are available only in staff notation. Converting between the two usually means paying someone to do the work and waiting at least a day. Otherwise, musicians must convert the scores themselves — a process that can take anywhere from half an hour to several hours.

That frustration became her business idea. She decided to build an AI-powered tool that converts staff notation into numbered notation. After using AI to create an early mini-program interface, she showed it to musician friends.

“They immediately told me, ‘Hurry up and build it. I want to use it,’” she recalled.

That was the moment she committed to the startup.

“The most important thing in running a one-person company is judgment,” she said.

But entrepreneurship also brought loneliness and uncertainty.

After spending two months training her model, she hit a technical roadblock.

“I couldn’t figure out how to convert printed sheet music into a digital format that AI could actually recognize.”

As the six-month trial period she had given herself approached its end, anxiety began to grow.

“I didn’t know whether I should keep going or start looking for a job.”

She began updating her résumé and was preparing to send out applications when, unexpectedly, the model finally worked.

“I gave AI answers that were close to being correct but still contained mistakes, and let it learn how to correct them. Gradually, it learned what ‘correct’ looked like.”

Starting with just a few bars of music, she expanded to several lines and eventually entire scores. That process took another two months.

“When nobody is supervising you, you have to supervise yourself.”

To force herself to finish, she set a launch deadline and promised friends early access to a beta version.

Then, in early February, she accidentally fractured a bone after missing a step.

Even after breaking her leg, Wang continued working in front of her computer and attended investor roadshows on crutches.

As Wang Peng, an associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, has written, the greatest strength of an OPC is also its greatest vulnerability. Because the business depends so heavily on the founder’s individual capabilities, poor decisions, health problems, or simple exhaustion can bring the entire company to a halt — a risk he describes as a “single point of failure.”

Behind that risk lies another challenge: the loneliness and fatigue of making every decision yourself.

“The pace is slow. Progress gets stuck. Everything falls on your shoulders.”

One entrepreneur quoted in the report described these periods as “moments of muscle weakness.” Another called them “the low-noise period” — times when there is little feedback from the outside world, while the mind remains full of doubt and constant internal dialogue.

That entrepreneur concluded that what ultimately helped was not emotional adjustment, but simply continuing to do concrete work — rebuilding confidence in the direction through steady action.

By late March, the beta version of Wang’s mini-program was finally ready.

Lu Yiwei: The Hidden Costs People Overlook

At a recent weekly project review at Hangzhou’s Future Digital Intelligence Port OPC Community, Lu Yiwei’s product — an AI-powered “viral article generator” — passed evaluation smoothly and became the highest-rated project of the day.

Lu’s “viral article generator” website

Lu is 43 years old.

Before starting his company, he was an executive at a small startup.

When ChatGPT appeared in 2023, it profoundly shocked him. As his employer struggled, he eventually resigned in early 2024 to launch his own business.

The transition proved much harder than expected. Without a technical background or experience building internet products, he failed twice.

His first attempt was an AI tool aggregation website with little technical value. Concluding that outsiders couldn’t build truly competitive products, he spent six months teaching himself AI programming from scratch before creating an AI emotional companion. He soon realized, however, that AI companionship might not represent genuine market demand, leaving the project with little commercial value.

So he started over again.

After another three months of development, he finally built his current product. Yet despite the enormous amount of effort invested, the website has generated less than 10,000 yuan (about 1,470 U.S. dollars) in revenue. After deducting AI token costs, the project has essentially earned nothing.

“The biggest cost of an OPC is time.”

After quitting his job, Lu gave up a stable annual salary of 600,000 yuan. His family now relies on savings, while expenses such as his children’s tuition and extracurricular activities continue regardless of whether the startup succeeds.

The family has reduced spending, cut back on everyday consumption, and moved into a smaller home.

At the same time, entrepreneurship has consumed virtually all of his time, with no clear financial return yet in sight. Since starting the company, he no longer separates work from leisure. Apart from occasionally spending time with his family, nearly every waking hour goes into the business.

AI employees also create hidden time costs. It took him three months to develop his product using AI programming, during which he rebuilt the entire system four separate times.

Each reconstruction required AI only a single day to generate the code, but beforehand he spent nearly a week carefully planning every detail. As projects become larger, AI grows increasingly prone to confusion and mistakes, forcing founders to spend much more time planning, supervising, and correcting its work.

Wang Jiahao: Is OPC a Bubble?

Wang Jiahao, a partner at Hangzhou’s Honghub OPC Community believes that nearly every successful Chinese internet and technology business over the past three decades followed the familiar Silicon Valley and Wall Street model of combining technology with venture capital.

Angel investment, rapid growth, equity financing, and lucrative exits formed the standard playbook.

“But in the AI era,” Wang said, “that playbook no longer works.”

The reason is straightforward. The traditional venture capital cycle — fundraising, investment, management, and exit — simply doesn’t apply in the same way to AI companies.

A team of three to five people can now accomplish work that previously required twenty employees. Their growth trajectory, asset structure, and valuation logic are fundamentally different from traditional technology firms.

But what actually makes an OPC worth investing in? Wang admits there is no longer an easy answer.

“It’s difficult to evaluate them using the simple financial metrics we relied on before. You have to consider market maturity, technological maturity, product completeness, and the founder’s own capabilities.”

Will OPCs eventually become profitable? Wang points to one striking figure: Silicon Valley companies collectively spend around $700 billion every year on AI infrastructure, yet AI currently generates less than $100 billion in annual revenue.

Meanwhile, the depreciation cycle for AI computing chips has shortened from six years to three years — or even less — creating enormous uncertainty.

On the other hand, AI adoption continues expanding rapidly, with annual growth rates of 300% or even 1,000%.

“So is it a bubble?” Wang asked.

“Not exactly.”

That question remains one of the biggest debates surrounding AI today.

Wang Zhijun: An OPC Deeply Embedded in the OPC Ecosystem

Thirty-year-old entrepreneur Wang Zhijun founded an OPC focused on NFC hardware combined with AI-powered marketing solutions. Earlier this year, she joined Hangzhou’s Future Digital Intelligence Port community.

Her company has only three people. She serves as CEO. Another founder — whose own OPC specializes in customized AI deployment — also serves as her CTO. A third partner, Wang Nuo, who is a judge at the project review meeting for the Hangzhou’s Future Digital Intelligence Port community, acts as her CFO.

The three of them have jointly established another OPC startup incubation platform that works closely with the Future Digital Intelligence Port community by evaluating new applicants and providing startup support.

This kind of cross-company collaboration is common within China’s OPC ecosystem. Founders frequently hold roles in one another’s companies, with the community itself serving as the platform connecting them. Entrepreneurs working in the same industrial park understand one another’s businesses and have already established a certain level of trust, making cooperation much easier.

Local governments and industrial parks each have their own incentives as well.

More than twenty Chinese cities have already introduced policies supporting OPC development.

For local governments, OPCs represent a relatively inexpensive way to bet on AI applications — a strategy built around deploying thousands of small entrepreneurial teams rather than competing at enormous cost to attract a handful of major technology companies.

For industrial parks operating OPC communities, the model also offers a way to revitalize underused commercial real estate.

Instead of relying solely on rent, an OPC community can theoretically generate income from four sources:

• company registration and accounting services;

• margins on bulk purchases of computing resources and foundation models;

• revenue sharing from business referrals and larger projects;

• returns from investing in startups located within the park.

This alignment of interests across multiple stakeholders has rapidly expanded the OPC ecosystem and is one of the reasons why the sector has become so popular.

Ultimately, successful business models are often surprisingly simple. From the moment Wang conceived her product to receiving her first order took only 45 days: An industrial park commissioned several hundred NFC wristbands that the OPC made to replace traditional paper brochures. When visitors tap the wristband, an information webpage and AI assistant automatically appear.

More recently, she secured another contract from a beverage company, embedding NFC chips into cup sleeves to create interactive experiences such as personality tests and product recommendations.

The interactive webpages behind these campaigns were all built using AI programming.

Final Thoughts

Starting a business has always been risky. AI startups face an even steeper challenge. A report released by MIT last year found that more than 95% of AI projects failed to achieve their expected return on investment, a failure rate significantly higher than in most other industries.

Yet this may also be the greatest significance of the OPC model. It brings both risk and reward back to ordinary individuals, giving people with ideas the opportunity to turn them into businesses. At the same time, it demands far more from each founder, who must develop deep industry knowledge while wearing many hats and navigating the full range of challenges that come with building a company alone.

In that sense, OPCs are not just a new form of company. They are also a new test of what one person can become with AI.

If you found this piece interesting, please click the like button. I’ll continue tracking developments in this space and share what I find in future newsletters.

One of the major events in China over the past week was the gaokao, the country’s national college entrance examination, which has just concluded after four days. Readers familiar with China may know that the country has a long tradition of selecting talent through examinations, dating back to the imperial era. At the time, the written word and the classical canon formed the core of the examination, and candidates were already required to compose essays in response to prescribed topics.

Today’s gaokao covers a much broader range of subjects across the humanities and sciences, but essay writing remains an important part of the Chinese-language exam. Each year, the essay prompts also become a subject of lively public discussion. In today’s edition, I would like to introduce this year’s prompts, which I think offer an interesting window into the concerns, ideas and changing rhythms of Chinese society.

A brief note on how the papers are organized: the two essay prompts used in the national Chinese-language papers in 2026 — known as National Paper I and National Paper II — were both centrally prepared by the Ministry of Education’s National Education Examinations Authority (NEEA). Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, meanwhile, set their own exam papers.

全国I卷

阅读下面的材料，根据要求写作。（60分）

词语是表达思想情感的载体，也是展现社会生活变化的窗口。当前，世界之变、时代之变、历史之变正以前所未有的方式展开。青年是常为新的，在你的成长过程中，你对哪一个词语的理解发生了变化？这变化有你成长的印记，对你有特殊的意义……

以上材料引发了你怎样的联想和思考？请写一篇文章。

要求：选准角度，确定立意，明确文体，自拟标题；不要套作，不得抄袭；不得泄露个人信息；不少于800字。

National Paper I

Read the following material and write as required. (60 points)

Words are vehicles for expressing thoughts and emotions, and also windows through which changes in social life can be observed. At present, changes in the world, the times, and history are unfolding in unprecedented ways. Young people are always open to the new. During the course of your growth, which word has undergone a change in your understanding? This change bears the imprint of your growth and holds special meaning for you...

What associations and reflections does the above material inspire in you? Write an essay.

Requirements: Choose an appropriate perspective, establish a clear central idea, specify the genre, and create your own title; do not use a formulaic essay or plagiarize; do not disclose personal information; write no fewer than 800 Chinese characters.

If I were to answer this question, I would probably choose the word songchi (松弛), or “relaxedness.”

In the past, songchi (松弛) was understood largely in its literal sense: the opposite of tension or tightness, describing a body, atmosphere or state of mind that had relaxed. In recent years, however, the word — especially in the phrase songchigan (松弛感), or “a sense of relaxed ease” — has taken on a richer social meaning. It now often refers to the striking composure some people display amid pressure, competition and uncertainty: an ability to remain natural, self-possessed and at ease when the circumstances around them are anything but relaxed.

In an increasingly fast-paced and anxiety-ridden society, “relaxedness” has thus come to describe not simply a comfortable condition, but a valued capacity to stay grounded under pressure.

全国II卷

阅读下面的材料，根据要求写作。（60分）

“日月不失其体，故蔽而复明；江汉不失其源，故穷而复通。”

在个人成长、社会发展乃至文明演进中，总会出现困顿、挫折，甚至会有风高浪急、惊涛骇浪的考验。然而，日月虽有被遮蔽之时，只要本体未失，终能重放光明；江河即使遭遇险阻，只要源头不竭，终能贯通入海。

以上材料引发了你怎样的联想和思考？请写一篇文章。

要求：选准角度，确定立意，明确文体，自拟标题；不要套作，不得抄袭；不得泄露个人信息；不少于800字。

National Paper II

Read the following material and write as required. (60 points)

“The sun and moon do not lose their essential nature, and therefore shine again after being obscured; the Yangtze and Han rivers do not lose their sources, and therefore flow freely again after being blocked.”

In personal growth, social development, and even the evolution of civilizations, there will always be difficulties and setbacks, and sometimes even trials of high winds, choppy waters, and dangerous storms. Yet although the sun and moon may at times be obscured, as long as their essential nature remains, they will eventually shine again; and although rivers may encounter obstacles, as long as their sources do not run dry, they will eventually flow through to the sea.

What associations and reflections does the above material inspire in you? Write an essay.

Requirements: Choose an appropriate perspective, establish a clear central idea, specify the genre, and create your own title; do not use a formulaic essay or plagiarize; do not disclose personal information; write no fewer than 800 Chinese characters.

The opening line about the sun and moon comes from the chapter “Adversity and Success” in Comprehensive Meaning of Customs (Fengsu Tongyi 《风俗通义·穷通》), written by Ying Shao during the Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220 CE). Drawing an analogy from nature, the saying conveys the idea that difficulties can be overcome as long as one remains anchored in what is fundamental. Its philosophical depth and affirmative message have made it a familiar reference in personal encouragement, essay writing and broader reflections on the development of nations and civilizations.

Another sentence that caught my attention was the reference to “trials of high winds, choppy waters, and dangerous storms.” The wording clearly echoes a passage from the Communique of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued last year, which described the development environment facing China during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, from 2026 to 2030:

In this period, China’s development environment will face profound and intricate changes. At present, China remains in a phase of development where strategic opportunities exist alongside risks and challenges, while uncertainties and unforeseen factors are rising … We must proactively identify, respond to, and steer changes, demonstrate the courage and competence to carry forward our struggle, and dare to brave high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms.

Chinese policymakers have long “把个人追求融入国家发展大局” encouraged young people to align their personal aspirations with the country’s broader development. It is therefore not particularly surprising that the Ministry of Education’s exam authorities would draw on such language when designing the prompt.

Read together, National Papers I and II present an interesting contrast. Paper I uses changes in the meaning of words to reflect personal growth and the changing times, while Paper II turns to what remains unchanged — one’s essential nature and source — to invite reflection on the foundations that sustain development. Together, the two prompts form a dialectic of change and continuity.

The Paper, a prominent Chinese news outlet, said the pairing appears intended to encourage students to preserve enduring principles while pursuing innovation, and to break new ground while remaining firmly rooted.

北京卷

微写作

从下面三个题目中任选一题，按要求作答。不超过150字。不透露所在区、学校及个人信息。

（1）为增强同学们的劳动意识，班级打算利用半天时间走进社区开展劳动实践活动，现征集同学们的建议。你想设计一项怎样的活动？请说说理由。要求：写出活动的主要内容，理由充分，条理清晰。

（2）重阳节到来之际，学校拟组织志愿者到敬老院开展“人工智能（AI）与幸福晚年”主题活动。请你写一段活动的宣传语，吸引老人们积极参加。要求：语言得体，有吸引力。

（3）请以“因为向往”为题目，写一首小诗或一段抒情文字。要求：感情真挚，语言生动，有感染力。

Beijing Paper

Short Writing

Choose one of the following three topics and respond as required. Write no more than 150 Chinese characters. Do not disclose your district, school, or personal information.

(1) To strengthen students’ awareness of labor, the class plans to spend half a day participating in a community-based labor activity and is now soliciting suggestions from students. What kind of activity would you design? Explain your reasons. Requirements: Describe the main content of the activity, provide sufficient reasons, and organize your response clearly.

(2) As the Double Ninth Festival approaches, the school plans to organize volunteers to visit a nursing home and conduct an activity themed “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a Happy Later Life.” Write a promotional message for the activity to encourage older people to participate actively. Requirements: Use appropriate and appealing language.

(3) Write a short poem or a piece of lyrical prose entitled “Because of Longing.” Requirements: Express sincere emotions, use vivid language, and make the writing moving and engaging.

I found the short-writing section of the Beijing paper particularly interesting. When I was in secondary school, about 20 years ago, I do not recall this kind of question being part of the exam. The third option especially stood out: it explicitly allows students to respond with a poem. Back when I was at school, some students — myself included — enjoyed writing poetry in their spare time. But choosing to write a poem in a high-stakes college entrance examination would have required considerable courage. The fact that students are now openly encouraged to do so is, in my view, something worth welcoming.

The theme of the second option, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a Happy Later Life,” also speaks closely to China’s current social realities. On the one hand, AI is developing so rapidly that almost every field now seems to be finding some connection to it. On the other, the country’s population is visibly aging. By bringing these two trends together and asking young people to think about how AI might improve the lives of older adults, the prompt creates a combination that I found both timely and intriguing.

北京卷

作文

从下面两个题目中任选一题，按要求作答。不少于700字。将题目写在答题卡上。不透露所在区、学校及个人信息。

（1）学海无涯，读书有法。元代学者程端礼编撰的《读书分年日程》，分阶段详细规定了核心经典的阅读顺序与精读方法，陪伴读书人从童蒙成长为青年。无论是个人的阅读与成长，还是国家、社会的发展，都需要做好规划，循序渐进；也需要身体力行，下足功夫。

请以“做规划与下功夫”为题目，写一篇议论文。

要求：论点明确，论据充实，论证合理；语言流畅，书写清晰。

（2）“含英咀华”指含着花朵，细细咀嚼，品味花的芬芳，比喻仔细琢磨、领会诗文中的精华。这种反复品味、用心体悟的过程，在阅读经典、鉴赏艺术、感悟生活等诸多方面都非常重要。含英咀华的过程，往往是一段难忘的经历……

请以“含英咀华”为题目，写一篇记叙文。

要求：思想健康；内容充实、合理，有细节描写；语言流畅，书写清晰。

Beijing Paper

Essay

Choose one of the following two topics and respond as required. Write no fewer than 700 Chinese characters. Write the title on the answer sheet. Do not disclose your district, school, or personal information.

(1) The sea of learning has no bounds, but there are methods for reading. The Schedule for Reading by Years and Days, compiled by the Yuan Dynasty scholar Cheng Duanli, set out in detail, by stages, the order in which core classics should be read and the methods for intensive reading, accompanying learners from early childhood education into youth. Whether in an individual’s reading and growth or in the development of a country and society, it is necessary to make sound plans and proceed step by step; it is also necessary to put plans into practice and devote sustained effort.

Write an argumentative essay entitled “Making Plans and Putting in the Effort.”

Requirements: Present a clear argument, provide substantial evidence, and develop reasonable reasoning; use fluent language and write clearly.

(2) The expression “savoring the essence” literally refers to holding flowers in one’s mouth, chewing them slowly, and appreciating their fragrance. It is a metaphor for carefully examining and understanding the finest elements of poetry and prose. This process of repeated appreciation and attentive reflection is highly important in many areas, including reading classics, appreciating art, and experiencing life. The process of savoring the essence is often an unforgettable experience...

Write a narrative essay entitled “Savoring the Essence.”

Requirements: Express sound and positive ideas; provide substantial and reasonable content with detailed descriptions; use fluent language and write clearly.

One of the prompts in this section focuses on the importance of making plans, while the other emphasizes the value of studying something closely and engaging with it in depth. I do not have much more to add here.

天津卷

阅读下面的材料，根据要求写作。（60分）

画家把手中的颜料放入调（tiáo）色盘，精准调（tiáo）整比例，以缤纷的色彩绘就美好画卷；南水北调（diào）工程合理调（diào）动一切可以利用的资源，主动改变水道，使自然更好地造福人类。调，一字双音，既有顺势而为的选择，又有不拘一格的创造。

以上材料能引发你怎样的联想与思考？请结合你的体验和感悟，写一篇文章。

要求：①自选角度，自拟标题； ②文体不限（诗歌除外），文体特征明显；

③不少于800字； ④不得抄袭，不得套作。

Tianjin Paper

Read the following material and write as required. (60 points)

A painter places pigments on a palette “调（tiáo）色盘” and precisely adjusts “调（tiáo）整” their proportions to create a beautiful picture with brilliant colors; the South-to-North Water Diversion Project “南水北调（diào）” rationally mobilizes “调（diào）动” all available resources and actively alters waterways so that nature can better benefit humanity. The Chinese character “调” has two pronunciations and meanings: one （tiáo）refers to making choices in accordance with circumstances, while the other（diào） refers to unconstrained creativity.

What associations and reflections does the above material inspire in you? Drawing on your own experiences and insights, write an essay.

Requirements: ① Choose your own perspective and create your own title; ② Any genre is permitted except poetry, and the characteristics of the chosen genre should be clearly demonstrated;

③ Write no fewer than 800 Chinese characters; ④ Do not plagiarize or use a formulaic essay.

Chinese has many characters with multiple pronunciations, and a character can carry different meanings depending on how it is pronounced. Sometimes, those different meanings can even be placed in a kind of dialectical or philosophical relationship with one another — an approach long favored by Chinese writers and exam setters. If your language has anything similar, I would be interested to hear about it in the comments.

上海卷

写作 70分

每个人都有对世界的想象。科技改造世界时，也改造着我们的想象，对此你有怎样的认识和思考？请写一篇文章。要求：（1）自拟题目；（2）不少于800字。

Shanghai Paper

Writing 70 points

Everyone has their own imagination of the world. As technology transforms the world, it also transforms our imagination. What are your views and reflections on this? Write an essay. Requirements: (1) Create your own title; (2) Write no fewer than 800 Chinese characters.

Shanghai’s essay prompt is concise and its theme is clear: technology. “Embrace Shanghai’s historical role as a leading international center for scientific and technological innovation and to build itself into a globally renowned sci-tech high ground” has been an important goal set for the city by China’s central authorities in recent years. Last year, I also produced a podcast episode about Silicon Valley investors visiting Shanghai for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) and experiencing China’s AI boom firsthand. Those interested can give it a listen.

Subscribe now

Before relocating to Hong Kong, Professor Zeng spent 13 years in the UK, where he built his academic career. At 31, he was appointed Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University, becoming one of the youngest full professors in Britain.

Simultaneously, he served as Director of Lancaster University Confucius Institute. Under his leadership, the Institute grew into an award-winning institution while successfully navigating unprecedented challenges — from the global pandemic and the abrupt dissolution of the Confucius Institute Headquarters to a political campaign by the UK’s then-ruling government to shut down Confucius Institutes. These experiences are chronicled in his three-volume memoir, Memoirs of a Confucius Institute Director, with the first volume released in August 2025. Before embarking on his academic career, he worked at the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York City.

Highlights:

03:41 - What does a Confucius Institute director actually do — and why Zeng took on the role at a politically sensitive moment

13:34 - The biggest misconceptions about Confucius Institutes in British society

17:34 - Cultural engagement vs. propaganda: where the line really lies

19:19 - Confucius Institutes and the British Council: similar missions, different politics

22:43 - Inside the “Confucius Institute of the Year” award

25:13 - Leading a Confucius Institute through crisis: pandemic, politics, and pressure

33:10 - How Zeng reads the current China–UK reset — and why Starmer’s China visit matters

42:22 - What’s next: a preview of Volume Two of Memoirs of a Confucius Institute Director

Recommendations:

Jinghan Zeng: Black Myth: Wukong (a video game inspired by the ancient Chinese tale “Journey to the West”)

JJ: Memoirs of a Confucius Institute Director, Volume 1: Challenges, Controversies, and Realities (available on Amazon), by Jinghan Zeng

Enjoyed the episode?

Follow Inside the China Room on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Share & rate us to help more listeners discover expert perspectives from inside China.

This episode was recorded on Jan. 29.

The original Chinese piece of this story was first published on Jan. 13 on the WeChat blog of Direct Connect (正面连接), an independent Chinese online media outlet that uses the tagline “Facing Complexity.” The article follows two independent bookstores — and the very practical question of how they stay alive — at a time when Chinese people’s lifestyles and reading habits are shifting fast.

Neither store survives by chasing bestsellers. Instead, they curate by taste: recommending books to subscribers based on their own aesthetic and intellectual judgment, building trust over time, and learning what their readers actually want. In some cases, that credibility gives them leverage to do what large publishers and mainstream channels often can’t: bring long out-of-print titles back to life, finding a second readership for “small” books that the market has already written off.

Subscription-based book clubs are hardly new. What is distinctive here is how independent booksellers, facing algorithms, price wars, and shrinking attention spans, reclaim selection as an editorial act. Their choices are shaped by long familiarity with readers, by personal conviction, and by a willingness to stand by books that might otherwise disappear. In this sense, selection itself becomes a form of authorship.

In the past, when the pieces I chose were especially long, I would sometimes shorten them before publishing, trimming sections without affecting the core argument. This time, however, I’ve decided to translate and publish the article in full. I believe that those who are genuinely interested will naturally make the time to keep reading.

For the independent bookstores and books mentioned in the piece, I’ve added their Chinese names alongside the translations, following the original text, in case some of you would like to seek out these bookstores in person or track down the books discussed in the article. Any highlighted passages reflect my own emphasis.

When you think about opening a bookstore, what is your first reaction?

If you start weighing investment against returns, chances are you would hesitate.

Most people agree on one thing: people need to read, and readers need bookstores. Bookstores — especially independent ones that do not sell exam-prep materials or “success studies” in China — are often seen as spiritual refuges for readers, but rarely as places of consumption. Those who commit themselves wholeheartedly to this line of work usually do so with the expectation of losses, or even eventual closure.

Yet new changes are also taking place. In Chengdu, Youxing Bookstore (有杏书店) closed and later reopened. In Wuhan, a year after Baicaoyuan (百草园书店) shut its doors, Sincerity & Authenticity (诚与真书店) emerged. In distant Guilin, Wild Mountain Bookstore (野山书店), run by a husband-and-wife team, surpassed one million yuan in monthly sales by selling only books on RedNote. And many other bookstores we can readily name — All Sages (万圣书店), Floating in the Wild (浮于野书店), Avant-Garde (先锋书店) — have also built thriving spaces within online communities.

Over the past year, amid an environment where low-price competition has reached its limits, we found that bookstores operating through RedNote e-commerce saw overall revenue growth of more than 30 percent, with nearly ten thousand brick-and-mortar bookstores collectively moving onto the platform. In this interest-driven community, buying books is no longer a purely price-centered commercial act. People are rediscovering what physical bookstores uniquely offer: breaking out of information cocoons, encountering an unexpected good book, and sharing it with those around them. Genuine and friendly relationships between people are also taking root here.

Curious about how all this has happened — how independent bookstores manage to survive and thrive, and what readers actually gain from them — we traveled to Guilin (a well-known tourist city in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region) and Wuhan (in central China’s Hubei Province) to meet the Wild Mountain couple and “Old Wang,” the owner of Sincerity & Authenticity.

“For the Encounter Between People and Books”

Wild Mountain Bookstore is located on a commercial street in Guilin’s High-Tech Zone.

The street is divided into an outer section, a middle section, and an inner section. The outer street is lined with restaurants doing street-front business and remains lively day and night. By the middle section, foot traffic has already thinned considerably. The bookstore sits near an entrance to the inner section, facing a residential compound and turning its back to pedestrian sightlines. Few people ever wander here by chance.

The location is hard to find. Reader Song Shuang still remembers the suddenness of spotting Wild Mountain for the first time. On a rainy night in August 2025, a driver dropped her near the compound. The navigation app was inaccurate. As she walked through the pitch-dark night, constantly looking left, she happened to turn her head to the right—and the warm yellow characters “Wild Mountain Bookstore” suddenly leapt into her view.

The reason she felt she had to visit the bookstore was simple: curiosity.

Even before coming, Song Shuang had come across posts by Wild Mountain on RedNote. In those posts, the bookstore owners—”Mountain Pig” and “Wild Rabbit”—shared how they had witnessed a new book being reprinted: in order to fulfill shipments for readers subscribed to their “Annual Reading Plan,” Wild Mountain snapped up the final remaining stock of the book. The Annual Reading Plan is a new product offered by the bookstore. Subscribers receive one carefully selected book each month, accompanied by a handwritten reading guide.

Song bought a book through RedNote, The Moss Forest (《苔藓森林》), which explores how moss grows and adapts in different natural environments. One of its translators is Wild Rabbit herself. What attracted Song was a line on the RedNote page: “From seeing the small, learn to love life.” Beyond buying the book, she also subscribed to Wild Mountain’s Annual Reading Plan.

Song studies history. Her usual reading habits closely follow her academic discipline—books on silk, opium, the history of the English language—digging deep into such narrowly defined perspectives.

But Wild Mountain’s Annual Reading Plan brought many other types of books into her hands. First came Transitional Labor (《过渡劳动》) and Higher Than the Mountains (《比山更高》), which sparked her interest in nonfiction and anthropology. In May, she received The Little Fox in My Head (《我脑袋里的小狐狸》), a picture-book story about bipolar disorder. Song had stopped reading picture books after high school, thinking they had “too few words to be interesting,” but this book made her realize that what picture books can carry is not limited by form.

Through Wild Mountain’s reading plan, Song felt she had gained a stretch of reading time outside her information cocoon. Without the couple’s recommendations, she would never have thought to search for a picture book about a little fox on her own.

At the very back of Wild Mountain Bookstore are two square tables for readers, with message notebooks placed on top.

These curated book lists — reflecting the owners’ personal aesthetics and deeply connected to the city’s cultural and humanistic fabric — are, for readers, “just-right blind boxes.” They are also precisely what gives independent bookstores their reason to exist. Song noticed that Wild Mountain carries almost no popular bestsellers. Most of the books are in the humanities and social sciences, and nearly all were published within the past year.

Both Wild Rabbit and Mountain Pig work in publishing. Mountain Pig approaches the bookstore with a product-design mindset. He wants to create a scene for buying books: at a time when people are so accustomed to goal-oriented online shopping, independent bookstore owners can, through bookstores infused with their own knowledge, experience, and care, offer readers a possibility — a possibility of discovering their true reading interests, of seeing lives beyond their immediate field of vision, and of re-encountering and reconnecting with others through the specific space of a bookstore.

In Wuhan, Old Wang has been running bookstores for thirteen years. A year after Baicaoyuan closed, he relocated and opened what is now Sincerity & Authenticity.

Old Wang has an exceptionally sharp eye for selecting and evaluating books. On the day I visited, an editor from a publishing house had come in person with new titles, specifically to thank him for the feedback he had offered. Many of the out-of-print books in the store were personally selected by Old Wang from publishers’ warehouses.

He knows that most readers who find their way to Sincerity & Authenticity already have strong reading preferences and clear expectations. What he wants to offer them is scarcity. One experiment is the “out-of-print book blind box”: every buyer can request one specific out-of-print title. Old Wang photographed all the out-of-print books in the store and uploaded them as a single image on RedNote—The Book of Snowy Mountains (《雪山之书》), A Roll Call of Modern Academic Circles (《现代学林点将录》）, Burning the Boats (《焚舟纪》), and more. He then shows, during RedNote livestreams, how he assembles each blind box based on readers’ requests.

Perhaps only in RedNote livestreams can such a patient, slow atmosphere exist. There are no flash sales, no price slashing, no exaggerated performances. During the livestreams, Old Wang selects books, assembles packages, and answers questions. The blind-box purchase link sits quietly at the bottom of the screen while staff pack orders. Viewers are not just watching; they often offer suggestions for choosing books. A good livestream can sell over 20,000 yuan (about 2,870 U.S. dollars) worth of books; even a weaker one still brings in five or six thousand yuan.

Once, Old Wang received a blind-box order from a woman who provided almost no information about books, mentioning only her situation: newly married, and curious about Old Wang’s “first-instinct” recommendation.

He spent more than an hour selecting the book—the longest time he had ever spent on a single blind box. During the livestream, viewers suggested parenting books or titles about romantic relationships. Old Wang rejected them all. Why, he asked, would someone who has just gotten married and feels secure about marriage need a book telling her how to handle parenting or relationships? What he sensed was her happiness and ease.

The book still wasn’t decided. Some viewers urged him to “move on to the next one,” and Old Wang pleaded with the equally engaged audience: could he assemble it privately? The viewers refused—they insisted he make the choice on the spot.

Reopening a bookstore seemed almost impulsive. About a year after Baicaoyuan closed, Old Wang was strolling through Tanhualin when he saw a shop for rent. He stepped inside and found that the layout was identical to Baicaoyuan’s old space. The rent was paid quickly. At first, green plants sat in front of the bookstore’s bright display windows, but soon more of Baicaoyuan’s style returned to Sincerity & Authenticity: too many books, stacked everywhere, so that when more readers arrived, they had to brush past one another constantly.

Inside Sincerity & Authenticity Bookstore

Why reopen a bookstore? I asked Old Wang. His answer was, “Because I have the resources for selecting books” — meaning that reopening felt natural. In earlier years, he had also said, “After the pandemic, Wuhan can’t be without an independent bookstore.” At that time, nearly all the independent bookstores of Baicaoyuan’s generation had already closed.

The Wild Mountain couple and Old Wang share a basic belief: people need to read, and readers need bookstores. Independent bookstores are a special kind of bookstore, usually run by long-term locals, with selections reflecting the owner’s personal taste. You typically won’t find school textbooks or prominently displayed bestsellers there. They may be seen as niche pilgrimage sites for literary youth, but rarely as places of consumption.

For this very reason, independent bookstore operators face a difficult reality. They must continually invent new models in response to rapidly changing lifestyles and reading habits to sustain the pleasure of reading. The Annual Reading Plans, blind boxes, and revived out-of-print books that Wild Mountain and Old Wang developed on RedNote are such experiments.

During the Baicaoyuan era, a line posted above the bookstore entrance read, “For the encounter between people and books.” At Sincerity & Authenticity, it became, “Sincerity & Authenticity embraces the book trade and reaches far.”

How to Survive?

In the first days after Wild Mountain opened, Wild Rabbit and Mountain Pig hosted events, including a screening of a documentary about Baicaoyuan’s closure. Some readers asked whether it was inauspicious. Mountain Pig replied, “Given our human limitations, closure is inevitable.” By this he meant that changes in independent bookstores are closely tied to the lives of their owners; any life change can affect the bookstore.

In reality, far more than personal life changes shape a bookstore’s survival: a city’s population size, number of universities, store location, and surrounding environment all matter. Baicaoyuan closed in 2021 because the landlord forcibly reclaimed the space.

In the months before closure, Baicaoyuan had its water and electricity cut off. Readers used phone flashlights to search for books. In the final days, someone approached Old Wang, asking him to serve as a book-selection consultant, calling him “talent.” Old Wang shot back, “Talent? What kind of talent runs a bookstore into the ground?” He wasn’t trying to snap at them; he was simply deeply dissatisfied with himself. As the owner, Baicaoyuan’s failure was his failure.

Yet this same Old Wang, who exited with embarrassment and bitterness, had already reopened Sincerity & Authenticity by the time Baicaoyuan’s closure documentary was screened at Wild Mountain. The bookstore’s name comes from the philosophy book Sincerity & Authenticity, which traces the evolution of the concept of the “self” across four hundred years of Western cultural history.

Old Wang is indeed a person of strong selfhood. When we met, he casually leaned against a pile of unopened books, constantly responding with questions of his own. In running a bookstore, he is ambitious and confident. Usually publishers choose bookstores to work with, but Old Wang also chooses publishers. For those who insist on selling books cheaply in their own livestreams while refusing to offer bookstores better terms, his view is simple: unnecessary. Bookstores are not begging publishers for business; as different actors in the same industry, they should enable one another.

Old Wang sits right in this aisle, assembling blind boxes for readers.

Indeed, when selling books becomes no different from selling any other product — when everything revolves around price — bookstores can no longer sell books.

In the publishing value chain, publishers, as upstream players, have gradually developed shelf-based e-commerce and livestream sales beyond offline channels. Today, virtually every publisher in China runs its own livestream. Bookstores, at the very bottom of the chain, have lost their original sales function.

They cannot obtain books at low prices from publishers because they struggle to achieve volume. As Old Wang explains, if a bookstore buys a book at a 40 percent discount, it must sell it at 80 percent of the list price just to make a profit. But in a publisher’s livestream, the same book may sell for 30 percent. “Readers aren’t stupid,” he says. “Why buy at 80 percent when you can get it for 30?”

Publishers are not deliberately targeting independent bookstores. The reality is that publishers have limited manpower, and the tiny quantities ordered by most independent bookstores are not worth the effort required to maintain relationships and offer low prices.

For independent bookstores to survive, they must gain bargaining power with publishers — that is, the ability to negotiate lower discounts. And to negotiate, they must achieve volume.

For Wild Mountain, the decisive factor in gaining bargaining power was the Annual Reading Plan launched on RedNote. In 2025, the plan sold more than 2,000 subscriptions; by the very beginning of 2026, it had already surpassed 5,000.

This means that over the course of a year, for twelve selected books, Wild Mountain can guarantee sales of more than 5,000 copies each. For most humanities and social science titles, initial print runs typically range from 4,000 to 5,000 copies to avoid unsold inventory.

Old Wang’s bargaining power is even more distinctive. It lies not only in volume, but in his confidence to sell niche books that others cannot. A philosophy book, On Certainty (《论确定性》), shows only 102 readers on Douban, China’s leading review platform. It was printed in 6,000 copies, failed to sell through e-commerce, and was returned to the publisher. Old Wang took it on and sold more than 800 copies.

Moreover, among independent bookstores nationwide, Old Wang has a unique capability: reviving out-of-print books. He contacts publishers, advances funds, and buys out the reprinted inventory, relieving publishers of sales pressure. He then sells the books in his store. The Book of Snowy Mountains (《雪山之书》), an ethnographic study of Meili Snow Mountain by ethnologist Guo Jing, is one such example.

First printed in 2012 with 2,000 copies, The Book of Snowy Mountains soon went out of print. On second-hand platforms, its original 68-yuan price was inflated to nearly 300 yuan. Old Wang had his eye on it for seven or eight years. After repeated inquiries with no response, he called Yunnan People’s Publishing House again in May 2025. The distribution department said the book was old and needed to be discussed with editors. Over a month later, the reply came: it should be possible. Old Wang immediately asked when it could be printed — and waited again. The author needed to revise the text; editors had to proofread; internal procedures had to be followed. Another month passed before the contract was finally signed. In October, brand-new copies arrived at the bookstore’s door, and only then did Old Wang feel at ease.

To revive out-of-print books, Old Wang has invested more than one million yuan over time. His approach is simple: once the costs of one revived book are recovered, he moves on to revive the next.

Because of Sincerity & Authenticity, The Book of Snowy Mountains became a highly wished-for title on RedNote. In less than three months, Old Wang had recouped his costs. RedNote is the only platform he operates — he does not want to be merely a shop assistant listing books online, but to convey his understanding and feelings about each book.

The Book of Snowy Mountains

For Wild Mountain, the sales of the Annual Reading Plan mean the bookstore no longer needs to worry about mere survival. “A bookstore can make money” — this is what the couple wants to prove. What they now need to consider is scale: how big do they want the business to become?

Reading Is Contagious

One afternoon in late December, Old Wang and I were discussing details of The Book of Snowy Mountains inside Sincerity & Authenticity. An elderly man with gray hair stood nearby selecting books and listened for quite some time. When we paused, he stepped forward and asked, “Which book were you just talking about?”

Sincerity & Authenticity reminded me of the bookstore outside my middle school years ago. Back then, before smartphones, students in identical uniforms would weave past stacks of exam-prep books at the front and gather in the fiction and magazine sections. Some sat on the floor reading; others drifted along rows of spines.

Sometimes I was drawn to what others were reading; sometimes I simply wandered, deciding at random which book to open. Buying books then took time — it wasn’t about searching, ordering, and waiting for delivery, but felt more like a journey of discovering one’s interests.

The morning I went to Sincerity & Authenticity, I entered almost simultaneously with another middle-aged man. He stopped at every shelf. At one point he asked staff whether they had books on ancient architecture in Shanxi. Later, I noticed a book he placed on the counter—Chiang Kai-shek and Modern China (《蒋介石与现代中国》). I asked if I could take a look. It was the only unsealed copy in the store. He glanced at me and said, oddly, “Just flip through it.” As if my asking was unnecessary—of course one should read if one wants to, even if the book had already been bought.

After skimming a few pages, I asked staff to reserve a copy for me. This book would almost certainly never have appeared in my online browsing, nor would I have thought to search for it on any platform. But in the bookstore, like the gray-haired man earlier, I was infected by the interests of those around me. A few days later, on January 2, I returned to Sincerity & Authenticity—the store was so crowded it was hard even to open the door.

Two readers consulting staff at Sincerity & Authenticity about book selections

Compared with the bustle of Sincerity & Authenticity, Wild Mountain Bookstore — tucked deep within a commercial street — sees few visitors. Mountain Pig told me that only after opening did they realize bookstores also “depend on the weather.” When it is too hot or too cold, people don’t go out. If there are no other shopping areas nearby, readers are even less likely to make a special trip for a single bookstore.

Fortunately, Wild Mountain’s RedNote shop has several thousand Annual Reading Plan subscribers scattered across the country. Online communities partially recreate the reading atmosphere of physical stores, allowing interests to spread.

In the comments under Wild Mountain’s RedNote posts, hesitant users asking about the reading plan are often met with enthusiastic recommendations from other readers — covering shipping schedules, the surprise of receiving the books, and how precisely the selections resonate.

Now, Wild Mountain’s reading-plan shipments can fill an entire delivery truck.

In Wild Mountain’s online community, some local reading groups receive their books earlier each month, sparking “guess the title” games. Wild Rabbit shared the varied clues readers give: “The color scheme is red and blue,” “The title has eight characters,” “The author is French.” Remarkably, some people do manage to guess the title of newly released books from these hints.

Wild Rabbit wears straight bangs and round-framed glasses. She speaks gently, at an unhurried pace, with language that is polished but never pedantic—precise, direct, and clear in viewpoint. When we met, discussing academic books, she said, “Scholarship is starting to move toward accessibility. There’s really been more popular academic writing in recent years.”

Mountain Pig, with yellow-toned skin and black rectangular frames, speaks more quickly, but with few filler words or repetitions.

The Meaning of a Bookstore’s Existence

After opening a bookstore on RedNote, one of the Wild Mountain couple’s deepest realizations is this: reading can happen anywhere, and with anyone.

Among the shipping addresses left by readers, some are in villages the couple had never heard of; others read “on the cabinet of the fire brigade’s emergency supply box,” or hospitals, law firms, police stations. They call this the bookstore’s anthropological observation. “It’s incredible,” Wild Rabbit sighed.

An elderly man buying books at Wild Mountain Bookstore

“Pine Tree” is Wild Mountain’s third courier. In his thirties, with high cheekbones, he is usually quiet. Pine Tree is his WeChat nickname, and people call him that. He is meticulous: when he sees that parcels contain books, he stacks them neatly in woven bags to prevent damage. Staff member Yuhe and the couple therefore show him extra warmth—offering water and helping load packages.

Yuhe is enthusiastic and efficient, always animated when speaking. She often chats with Pine Tree. One afternoon, after he finished loading packages, Yuhe casually invited him: “Do you want to come by the bookstore after work tonight and read a bit?”

It was an invitation without expectations — Yuhe often made such offhand offers. To her surprise, Pine Tree actually came. Delighted, she rushed out from behind the counter and picked seven or eight of her favorite books for him. Pine Tree sat quietly at a small table in the corner and began reading.

About twenty minutes later, the couple arrived after receiving Yuhe’s message. After a brief discussion, Mountain Pig picked up Delivering Packages in Beijing (《我在北京送快递》) and wanted to give it to Pine Tree. Pine Tree immediately stood up, waving his hands in refusal. Mountain Pig persisted: “Take it! Books are meant to be read! We have so many here—it won’t hurt to take one!” Pine Tree continued to refuse, saying he didn’t read much and that it should be sold instead. Yuhe also tried to persuade him, but to no avail. So the three chatted around him: where he was from, why he worked for STO Express, and whether their deliveries were slower than others’.

Although Pine Tree did not accept the book, he read most of it and later shared his thoughts with Yuhe: it wasn’t quite like his own work, because the author handled individual consumer deliveries. Pine Tree splits his time between individual and commercial deliveries. He said he didn’t encounter “that many trivial hassles” in daily work.

More importantly, Yuhe emphasized to me that once Pine Tree began reading in the bookstore, “our relationship changed.” They were no longer just people coordinating work. After that, Pine Tree came to the bookstore roughly every two weeks. Before coming, he would always message Yuhe. He usually arrived around 8:30 p.m., stayed for an hour, and kept Yuhe company until closing.

At first, Pine Tree wandered among different shelves, but later he often stopped at the natural history section, flipping through books about plants. Yuhe described this reading preference as “special.”

One evening in April or May 2025, Yuhe handed him a book. Pine Tree took it and suddenly said, “Yuhe, I’m going to quit. I’m going home.”

Yuhe couldn’t believe it. After confirming several times, she finally asked what he planned to do back home.

His answer was even more unexpected: to grow sugar oranges.

Is April or May the season for planting sugar oranges? Yuhe didn’t know. In winter, when sugar oranges were about to come onto the market, she messaged Pine Tree to ask how his planting was going. A while later, he replied: “Still planting—almost done. I’ll send you photos when they bear fruit.”

Yuhe doesn’t know whether any of the natural history books Pine Tree read mentioned sugar oranges. But that no longer seemed to matter. By the time he began growing them, his WeChat nickname had changed from “Pine Tree” to “Carefree and at Ease.”

Munetaka Masuda, founder of Tsutaya Bookstore, once said, “Bookstores exist because of customers’ spiritual needs; profit is merely a natural result.” Innovations in setting and packaging are simply means of attraction. Understanding readers’ needs, inspiring the desire to share, and cultivating a space of ongoing exchange may well be the true core of independent bookstores’ success. Enditem

Subscribe now

In his China Translated newsletter, Robert Wu compiled a telling list of these listings — from GPU and AI-chipmakers such as Moore Threads, MetaX and Biren, to foundation-model developers like Zhipu AI and MiniMax, alongside memory and accelerator players preparing to tap public markets later this year. The compressed timing and breadth of these offerings underscore how China’s AI industry is now moving into a new, capital-market-driven phase.

Among this cohort is Zhipu AI, which OpenAI has previously described as one of China’s “AI tigers” — startups building large language models intended to rival leading Western players. Zhipu listed on the Hong Kong Exchange on Jan. 8, raising HK$4.35 billion and achieving a valuation close to US$9 billion, making it China’s first AI software company to go public.

Compared with some of its peers, including MiniMax, which debuted a day later, Reuters cited Omdia chief analyst Lian Jye Su as saying that MiniMax’s focus on the consumer market appealed more to investors seeking high-growth opportunities, whereas Zhipu’s enterprise- and government-oriented model was perceived as more stable but less exciting in a market driven by hype.

According to STAR Market Daily, Zhipu grew out of Tsinghua University’s Knowledge Engineering Lab and has built a full-stack model portfolio spanning language, multimodal systems and AI agents. By mid-2025, its GLM model series had served more than 12,000 enterprise clients and 45 million developers worldwide, with nine of China’s top ten internet companies adopting its services. In 2024, Zhipu ranked second among China’s general-purpose foundation-model developers by market share — and first among independent developers.

The listing has also brought renewed attention to the personal story of Zhipu’s founder and CEO, Zhang Peng. An engineer trained at Tsinghua University, Zhang spent more than two decades in academia before turning laboratory research into a commercial AI company now valued at over HK$50 billion, according to STAR Market Daily.

Shortly before Zhipu’s IPO, one of my favorite Chinese-language programs, 張小珺Xiaojùn Podcast, released a nearly two-and-a-half-hour, long-form interview with Zhipu AI founder and CEO Zhang Peng. The conversation goes well beyond a standard IPO or founder profile. It ranges from why large-model companies are going public before AGI has been achieved, to how Zhang understands the relationship between capital markets, technological cycles, and long-term AGI research.

Zhang speaks at length about Zhipu’s strategic choices — including its enterprise-first orientation, its restrained approach to consumer products, and why it prioritizes stability and controllability over hype-driven growth. He also reflects on misconceptions surrounding Zhipu as a “to-G” company, discusses comparisons with peers such as MiniMax and Kimi, and offers unusually candid views on commercialization paths, investor expectations, and whether today’s AI boom should be understood as a bubble.

Beyond strategy and markets, the interview delves into Zhang’s personal trajectory: from Tsinghua University’s Knowledge Engineering Lab to founding Zhipu, navigating China’s evolving rules on academic commercialization, and building a company while remaining anchored in long-horizon AGI ambitions. The discussion also touches on talent competition, research-to-product translation, and how Chinese AI founders assess risk, patience, and timing differently from their U.S. counterparts.

Following the episode, the host published a carefully curated written version on the Language Is World WeChat blog. I’ve translated that text into English and am sharing it here.

I’m highlighting this podcast — and others like it — for a reason. I believe stories of how Chinese technology companies are built are still seriously underestimated outside China. Competition in China’s tech sector, both in markets and in talent, is extraordinarily intense, and firms that manage to break through are worth closer attention.

Long-form podcasts provide a rare opportunity to understand how these companies and founders actually think. I’ve previously collaborated with Zhang Xiaojun on introducing the development story of TikTok, and have also published English write-ups of several podcast episodes hosted by Luo Yonghao. If you’re interested, you can find links to those pieces at the end of this post.

01

On Going Public

“I guess I’d just wish everyone good luck.”

Zhang Xiaojun: I was thinking about it, and Zhipu might become not only China’s first large-model company to go public, but possibly the first in the world — moving faster than OpenAI. Why is it that AGI has not yet been achieved, yet companies like yours are already lining up to go public?

Zhang Peng: There are indeed many reasons behind this. I have never believed that achieving AGI would be easy, nor that it could be accomplished in a very short time. It is a marathon — a long-distance race. You have to persist.

At different stages, you have to get through the journey in different ways. For example, at the start of a marathon, if you want to break free from the congestion, you need to speed up a bit to get into the leading pack. In the middle stage, when many people can no longer hold on, you need to go to the supply station, replenish yourself, maintain your stamina, and constantly balance energy expenditure and intake. At different stages, the entire system needs to operate in different ways.

In our planning from the very first day the company was founded, we expected that in about six or seven years, we would be facing an IPO.

Zhang Xiaojun: When did you formally start preparing for the listing?

Zhang Peng: If you count backward based on the three-year performance period, it started around 2022 and 2023 — including how to commercialize, how to generate revenue, how to control costs, and how to grow the team. All of these were carried out simultaneously.

Zhang Xiaojun: In your view, not just for you but for this wave of AI companies going public, what kind of milestone does this represent for AGI?

Zhang Peng: From the perspective of capital markets, when you are still in the primary market, it’s like you haven’t really left school yet — you’re still learning, being nurtured, and growing. After entering the secondary market, you move into a stage that is much closer to the real market.

For the industry, it is also a milestone. It proves that this is not something illusory — not a flower in the mirror or the moon reflected in water. It is something that can truly reach an industrial scale.

Zhang Xiaojun: Is part of the reason that, at this point in time, investors also want an exit and want to lock in their gains?

Zhang Peng: I don’t rule out that some people think that way. But I think many of our investors share the same beliefs and ideas as we do — wanting to continue walking this path together and achieve even greater success.

It’s not that we go public and then immediately exit, cash out, and say, “OK, we’ve made money.”

Zhang Xiaojun: Recently, people often discuss you together with MiniMax, because both of you are competing for the title of “China’s first large-model stock.”

(On the day of the interview, it was still unclear who would become the first.)

Zhang Peng: Mainly because the timing is so close. I’ve seen online analyses, and many of them are quite fair. The two companies each have their own characteristics and their own development paths.

Of course, I won’t comment on MiniMax itself. But at least from our own perspective, the ideals, ideas, and underlying motivations that Zhipu carries are not something that can be clearly understood from a prospectus or a few dozen pages of materials.

Recently, I’ve also spent time talking with many friends, hoping to help people better understand the thinking behind Zhipu and the motivations behind what we are doing, so that unnecessary and one-sided misunderstandings don’t arise.

Zhang Xiaojun: Is there anything you’d like to say to MiniMax CEO Yan Junjie?

Zhang Peng: I’ve spoken with Teacher Yan a bit less recently; before, we talked quite often.

Zhang Xiaojun: Why less recently?

Zhang Peng: Fewer chances to run into each other.

Zhang Xiaojun: So is there anything you’d like to say to him?

Zhang Peng: I guess I’d just wish everyone good luck.

Zhang Xiaojun: How do you view the possibility that OpenAI might also go public?

Zhang Peng: I’ve heard that they are preparing as well. OpenAI is probably another story altogether. In the U.S. environment, it’s what you’d call “high risk, high investment, high return” — the “three highs.”

Zhang Xiaojun: And you?

Zhang Peng: We are relatively more aligned with China’s conditions. In high-risk or high-tech fields, we pursue stability, controllability, and predictability.

Zhang Xiaojun: How do you deal with post-IPO pressure — technical investment, computing-power investment, and pressure from the secondary market? After going public, could you instead become an ordinary, mediocre company?

Zhang Peng: I don’t think so. This is also why I mentioned earlier why we hope, through your program, to let more people understand what Zhipu is really thinking and doing. Many things originate from gaps in understanding between people and from mutual misunderstanding.

Zhang Xiaojun: What do you think is being misunderstood?

Zhang Peng: Some people may think: “Look, they’re just doing project outsourcing, a to-G company, revolving around government.” I don’t think that’s the case. There are many deeper factors involved.

On the surface, nine of China’s top ten internet companies are our clients, and they are all very important clients. About 60% of our clients are enterprises. The government side accounts for only about 20% — actually quite small.

If you say we are a to-B company, that I can accept. To-G is not what truly makes up the majority of our business.

We have always said that we serve enterprises, because enterprises are where productive interests are most concentrated in society and where conversion efficiency is highest. A technology at the level of a productivity revolution naturally needs to land in such places.

This is the most straightforward logic, and it’s something that people with engineering or science backgrounds like us easily arrive at.

02

On Entrepreneurship

“But you’re right.”

Zhang Xiaojun: I feel that you weren’t fully prepared when you became CEO, and then you were pushed into a huge wave. Over the past three years, what has that felt like?

Zhang Peng: How do you know I wasn’t prepared?

…

But you’re right.

Zhang Xiaojun: Why did Tsinghua have you start this company? Who asked you to become entrepreneurs?

Zhang Peng: No one asked us to do it. It was something we wanted to do ourselves.

When I was working in the lab, I was responsible for engineering transformation. Professors led students to do research, and after the research was done, they might publish papers — but I had to deliver it to enterprise clients.

Enterprise clients don’t just want a paper or a prototype. They need a system, a product. I led a group of people to do exactly that.

Zhang Xiaojun: Has Tsinghua always had positions focused on engineering transformation?

Zhang Peng: Our department always has, and our lab especially so. It’s our tradition.

Since my advisor founded the lab, he has placed great emphasis on this. He proposed a concept called P2P — Paper to Project, or Paper to Product. That is, your research results in papers must be transformed into products or systems that can actually be used.

In 2017, we began trying to figure out how to make this commercialization path work within the university system.

At that time, it was not allowed for people within the system to start companies.

Zhang Xiaojun: Were there no precedents before?

Zhang Peng: There were, but not through formal, official channels. A professor might quietly start a company outside, and as long as no one reported it, it would pass. But strictly speaking, this required reporting to and approval from the university.

Zhang Xiaojun: Did you ever think about just doing it quietly and dealing with it if discovered later?

Zhang Peng: That would always leave loose ends. This was an obsession for our group — to take the official route.

The turning point came in 2018, when the state — including the Ministry of Education and several other ministries — jointly issued an opinion allowing in-service researchers at scientific institutions to commercialize the results of their research.

It was like opening a window — people suddenly saw that there was another path outside. But it wasn’t like opening a wide door saying, “Go ahead, do whatever you want.” It still wasn’t easy. We took this policy and talked with the university: “What do we do? We want to do this — how do we proceed?”

The university actually also wanted to do this. That regulation came out in January 2018. Studying the details and completing the entire process, the company wasn’t registered until June 2019 — a year and a half.

We were the first to eat the crab.

Zhang Xiaojun: When you first went out to raise funds and talked to investors, were they excited?

Zhang Peng: Investors didn’t understand at all. They completely didn’t understand. “What is this thing? How do you make money? How do you commercialize it?” These were the questions they asked.

I remember one investor very clearly. We chatted online, and he said, “Can this thing actually become money? Look at how bad the macro environment is right now, how bad the economy is. Why don’t you cut your valuation in half?”

When ChatGPT became popular, it helped us enormously. No one questioned anymore what this thing actually was.

We just said to them: “You know ChatGPT, right? You’ve seen it, right? What we’re doing is moving in that direction.”

03

On Comparison

“He can do things beautifully, but there isn’t much emotional value.”

Zhang Xiaojun: I’ve heard a comment about Zhipu. Zhipu has never really been the most star-like project in the market, nor the one with the highest attention. You have technology and vision, but you seem a bit boring.

Someone described it to me as “like cement” — not very interesting, but very stable. Is that a fair assessment?

Zhang Peng: I think it’s fairly accurate — just like how people describe Tsinghua engineering guys: boring.

Very smart, very capable. If you give them a serious task, they can execute it beautifully. But there isn’t much emotional value.

Zhang Xiaojun: Compared with you, isn’t Kimi a bit cooler? Also a Tsinghua engineering background.

Zhang Peng: Yes. That’s something I really admire about Zhilin. He’s very good at capturing the attention of ordinary people, knowing how to promote things and how to understand users’ needs and thinking. We may not do as well in that regard, and it also relates to our positioning.

Zhang Xiaojun: When did you decide not to go deeply into to-C? That must have been an important decision.

Zhang Peng: It’s not that we decided not to do to-C. We actually do — we developed the Zhipu Qingyan app, and the cloud version of ChatGLM, and we are still working on them.

It’s just that we don’t bet everything on a single option. We look at three or four models simultaneously and see which one can really work.

Zhang Xiaojun: Did you ever buy traffic for Zhipu Qingyan?

Zhang Peng: Of course we did. There’s no need to deny that.

Zhang Xiaojun: How long did it take to realize you couldn’t win that battle?

Zhang Peng: It’s been a while. Later we realized that China’s consumer market has very weak willingness to pay. People really don’t like paying.

We did make some money from Qingyan.

Zhang Xiaojun: Did you ever think about competing directly with Doubao or Kimi?

Zhang Peng: That’s not our style.

Zhang Xiaojun: To-C will always be more attractive to investors than to-B.

Zhang Peng: I don’t really understand where that attraction comes from. Later I guessed one reason: the numbers are easier to calculate. How much is one user worth — that’s relatively straightforward.

But to-B is too complex. How much is a client worth? There are countless variables. It’s very hard to calculate clearly.

Zhang Xiaojun: When I look back now, the first thing that left a deep impression on me in 2023 was that Lao Wang issued a “hero’s call,” and then Wang Xiaochuan (founder and CEO of Baichuan Intelligence） entered the game.

When you saw these very successful entrepreneurs starting over and entering a market you had cultivated for years, what were you thinking? Did you worry about losing in business competition?

Zhang Peng: We had been doing this for a long time, and our understanding was relatively deep. Even though ChatGPT became popular, the road ahead is still long — it’s not that fast or easy.

Xiaochuan was actually nearby at the time — our offices were in the same building — so we often ran into each other downstairs.

He has a habit: when thinking, he would go downstairs to the open plaza in the tech park and sit cross-legged on a bench, thinking with an iPad in hand. Sometimes when I went down to buy coffee and ran into him, we’d chat for a bit.

Zhang Xiaojun: Then in 2024, the protagonists of the market seemed to change, becoming Yang Zhilin (founder and CEO of Moonshot AI) and Yan Junjie (chairman and CEO of MiniMax). How did you view Yang Zhilin at the time?

Zhang Peng: I had interacted with Zhilin several times. After all, he came from our lab. At school, he was the top-student type. When he later started Kimi, I thought he could succeed.

Zhang Xiaojun: How does it feel when fellow students start competing in the business world?

Zhang Peng: Tsinghua people have this trait — we’re all engineering types, quite rational.

When we’re together, we chat happily about being classmates. But business is business. When it comes to competition, you do what needs to be done. Everyone has their own rules and communication style.

Zhang Xiaojun: How do you view Yan Junjie of MiniMax?

Zhang Peng: He’s extremely smart. First, he chose the right direction; second, the right market. On that basis, he knows very clearly what he wants.

Zhang Xiaojun: What does he want?

Zhang Peng: I think he’s aiming directly at commercialization.

Look at what he’s doing — Talkie, voice, multimodal — all moving in that direction. Consumption, entertainment, spiritual value, emotional value. He’s very clear.

04

On the Bubble

“If it’s a bubble, can going public save AI?”

Zhang Xiaojun: I once talked with a founder from the AI 1.0 era, and he said that large-model companies going public now are essentially “escaping.”

Some market views suggest that the AI bubble might burst in 2026, and expectations for 2026 aren’t very optimistic. So at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, if you can go public, you should do it quickly — it might be a favorable window.

Zhang Peng: First, assuming it is a bubble — can going public save us? Or can it save AI?

Zhang Xiaojun: It can save investors’ wallets.

Zhang Peng: That doesn’t save me, does it?

Whether it’s a bubble has no necessary relationship with whether you go public. You’re mixing two things together — I don’t agree with that. Logically, there’s no inevitable connection.

Second, there’s been a lot of discussion recently about whether it’s a bubble. I’m used to asking a counter-question: how do you define a bubble? What is a bubble?

Zhang Xiaojun: Every cycle has bubbles. What people worry about is a major crash like in previous cycles.

Zhang Peng: Why did those crashes happen? Overheated investment —投入得不到相应的回报.

So what’s the bubble now?

Zhang Xiaojun: The internet.

Zhang Peng: Everyone will tell you that the most recent bubble was the internet bubble. But look — even after it burst, what did it leave behind?

Many of the things people use and enjoy today were left behind by that bubble era. Why should you fear bubbles?

Zhang Xiaojun: Because you’re afraid of being the one that gets popped.

Zhang Peng: At the end of the day, it’s still about worrying about the money in your pocket.

It’s about whether you can recover your investment returns in time — not whether what you invested in actually produced real things, real productivity, or lasting value.

Once you look at it from that angle, the problem becomes easier to resolve. From an investment perspective, is investment in the U.S. enough? Is it enough in China? If investment isn’t enough, how can it be called a bubble?

Zhang Xiaojun: People think it’s not enough because AGI is still very far away.

Zhang Peng: Then if it’s far from AGI, should we stop pursuing AGI?

Zhang Xiaojun: Is AGI even achievable under the current technical paradigm?

Zhang Peng: If we don’t invest, will it just naturally happen?

Zhang Xiaojun: It won’t.

Zhang Peng: Then that’s the answer.

This is the general historical trend. The questions I’m asking are logically connected step by step. If you answer them, you’ll see that worrying about this is meaningless.

There will inevitably be bubbles during certain periods. The only question is the size of the bubble. You ask whether investment is enough — many people think it’s not.

I don’t dare say whether the U.S. has enough, but China definitely doesn’t.

Zhang Xiaojun: China has much less than the U.S.

Zhang Peng: Far less — only a fraction, maybe one-tenth or even one-twentieth. And much of that investment goes into infrastructure, scattered broadly rather than concentrated on a few leading players like in the U.S. So the situation is very different.

If you say there’s a bubble, maybe from a capital-market perspective in the U.S., there is one. But in China, it doesn’t exist.

It’s far from enough.

Zhang Xiaojun: I understand that you’re looking at this from a long historical perspective. But from a company perspective — Zhu Xiaohu (managing partner of Jinsha River Venture Capital) has said that the “six little AI dragons” of large models may end up not even as good as the previous generation’s “four little AI dragons.”

You started your companies to pursue a second-generation AI paradigm. So from the perspective of a listed company, what is the fundamental difference between second-generation AI companies and first-generation ones?

Zhang Peng: I’m not trying to refute his view, but I think his conclusion comes too early. The previous generation of AI companies are still alive — some of them are.

We’re still very early. If you count from 2023, it’s only been three years. If you count from our founding in 2019, it’s only been six-plus years.

Isn’t it too early to draw final conclusions?

He made a prediction. We’ll just let time prove it.

05

On Hope

“A pathfinder.”

Zhang Xiaojun: Since going public, are there any interesting behind-the-scenes stories?

Zhang Peng: Let me think. I went to attend Moore Threads’ bell-ringing ceremony. We’ve cooperated with Moore for quite some time, and they invited me. I told them I was going to learn and see how the bell-ringing works.

It really hasn’t been easy for anyone — this wave has been extremely, extremely difficult. Everyone has their own challenges. To make it this far, everyone can be called a hero.

Zhang Xiaojun: The act of ringing the bell seems kind of magical. Will you ring it hard or softly? With how much force?

Zhang Peng: I’ll first see how big the bell is — just kidding, just kidding.

Zhang Xiaojun: What kind of person is Zhipu’s chief scientist, Professor Tang Jie?

Zhang Peng: Professor Tang is exceptionally smart, but also highly execution-oriented and very passionate. Once he has figured something out, he pushes extremely hard, with great passion and focus.

Zhang Xiaojun: What is he pushing hardest right now?

Zhang Peng: Pushing the team relentlessly to keep improving the model’s capabilities. Of course, he’s also very concerned about the IPO.

You see why we always start our story from 2016 — it’s to convey one message: Zhipu isn’t simply about starting a company to make money. Our original intention is to explore what AGI actually is.

We just believe that doing this through a company, within industry, better fits the current stage of AI development — rather than just doing research, or simply making money.

Zhang Xiaojun: If you had to choose between building a company that achieves AGI and a company that makes huge profits, which would you choose?

Zhang Peng: Of course, the one that achieves AGI. No hesitation.

Zhang Xiaojun: Even if Zhipu achieves AGI and then fails — would that be acceptable?

Zhang Peng: That’s too inauspicious to say…

Of course we don’t want to fail. And I believe that if we can achieve AGI, we won’t fail. We would also be a great company. The two are not contradictory.

Zhang Xiaojun: Looking five years ahead, what outcome would leave you dissatisfied?

Zhang Peng: If we only make money but have no technological output or contribution to the industry, I would definitely be dissatisfied.

Zhang Xiaojun: A hundred years from now, if Zhipu appears in the history books of artificial intelligence, how would you like it to be written?

Zhang Peng: From my personal perspective, I hope there would be a line in the footnotes saying: Zhipu was a pioneer in the history of AGI.

We started doing this very early, including many technical breakthroughs. In many cases, we were the first to eat the crab.

Zhang Xiaojun: Being early matters to you.

Why not “innovator,” but “pioneer”?

Zhang Peng: A pioneer is often an innovator. A trailblazer — someone who clears the path. (Enditem)

Hosted by Tsinghua University, Public Management Review is a leading academic platform specializing in public administration and public policy. It was officially launched in December 2019, building on a continuous publication first established in 2004, and is currently issued quarterly.

Before you dive into the article, it may be helpful to clarify a basic institutional concept in China’s urban governance: the respective roles of a city’s Party secretary and mayor.

In China, the municipal Party secretary, as the top official of the Communist Party of China (CPC) at the city level, is responsible for setting the overall direction, ensuring policy consistency, and overseeing major strategic decisions in line with central and provincial requirements.

The mayor, as the head of the municipal government, focuses on day-to-day administration, economic and social development, and the implementation of policies and decisions. The two roles operate in close coordination, with the Party providing overall leadership and the government handling executive functions—together forming a governance framework designed to support effective decision-making, policy execution, and social stability.

What do prefecture-level party and government officials in China do every day? How do their priorities shift over the course of a term? And how do officials of different ages and career backgrounds behave differently?

These questions naturally intrigued 杨泽森 Yang Zesen, a scholar of political science and lecturer at the School of Public Administration, Jinan University, and 王心怡 Wang Xinyi, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University.

By chance, while conducting separate research, they discovered a unique dataset from City A (a prefecture-level city anonymized for research purposes) in a central Chinese province. The dataset consists of official chronologies documenting the daily work, inspections, and official visits of the city’s Party secretary and mayor between 2010 and 2019. In total, it contains more than 7,000 individual duty records, amounting to over 2.73 million Chinese characters.

Based on an analysis of these data, the two scholars jointly published a paper in June 2025 titled 地方主官履职行为及其模式研究——对中部A市的长时段分析 “The Performance of Local Principal Officials and Its Patterns: A Long-Term Analysis of City A in Central China”, in the academic journal Public Administration Review (公共管理评论).

What follows is an interview between Southern Weekly (南方周末) and Yang Zesen.

1. “What Officials Pay Attention to” vs. “What Officials Actually Do”

Southern Weekly: How did you come across City A as a research sample?

Yang Zesen: It was purely coincidental. While working on another project, I needed to consult local government materials and came across City A’s chronicles of Party history events. Starting in July 2010, the Municipal Party Committee of City A regularly published, on a monthly basis, detailed chronologies of the daily official activities of the municipal Party secretary and the mayor, through the local Party history website.

These chronologies meticulously recorded activities such as inspections, research visits, and official trips. To my knowledge, this is the most detailed publicly available dataset documenting the behavior of local government officials that I have ever encountered.

Southern Weekly: There seems to be relatively little academic research on what local officials actually do on a day-to-day basis.

Yang Zesen: Over the past two to three decades, the most influential theory in Chinese political studies concerning officials has been the “promotion tournament theory”, proposed by scholars such as 周黎安 Zhou Li-An. The idea is that higher-level governments evaluate lower-level officials using comparative benchmarks, with performance—especially in promoting local economic growth—as the primary criterion. Officials who perform better are given greater promotion opportunities, creating a competitive environment.

From an empirical perspective, much of the literature focuses on how promotion incentives motivate officials to adopt policies that stimulate economic growth. However, there is a missing link in this chain. Incentives are directed at officials, while empirical studies often examine policy outcomes at the local government level. What lies in between—what officials actually do in their daily work—has largely remained a black box.

In recent years, many studies have shifted toward analyzing officials’ “attention”—that is, what issues officials focus on. Scholars typically infer this from officials’ written instructions (批示, pishi) or published speeches and articles. But what officials pay attention to and what they actually do every day are not the same thing.

Attention certainly matters because it influences policy implementation. But from the perspective of official performance (履职, lüzhí—the fulfillment of official duties), attention is only part of the story. Basic facts about what officials do in practice remain unclear. Senior officials receive dense media coverage, but for the much larger group of mid- and lower-level officials, systematic data are scarce. As a result, many studies rely on theoretical assumptions rather than direct behavioral evidence.

Southern Weekly: Can the City A chronologies be used to test these existing theoretical assumptions?

Yang Zesen: The main value of this study lies in the data themselves. We did not impose heavy theoretical modeling; instead, we focused on presenting factual changes in the behavior of local officials. Since there are already many hypotheses and conjectures, the most straightforward approach is to test them directly with data.

Our original motivation stemmed from basic questions: Are local officials’ behaviors largely pre-arranged? Do different individuals behave in the same way once they assume the role of principal local officials (地方主官)? Or do individual characteristics lead to systematically different behavior patterns?

Southern Weekly: How large is your sample?

Yang Zesen: We extracted all records from City A’s chronologies. Considering that the major public health event in 2020 (i.e., COVID-19) likely had a fundamental impact on officials’ behavior, we limited our analysis to the 2010–2019 period, covering a full decade.

The final dataset includes approximately 7,000 duty records involving four municipal Party secretaries and six mayors, totaling around 2.73 million characters.

Southern Weekly: From a macro political-economic perspective, what notable changes do you observe between 2010 and 2019?

Yang Zesen: In terms of political leadership activities, behaviors such as conveying and studying instructions and guiding principles from higher authorities (传达学习上级指示和精神) and implementing inspections conducted by higher-level authorities (落实上级巡视) became significantly more prominent over time.

For municipal Party secretaries in particular, implementing higher-level inspections emerged as a core duty. Activities such as receiving inspection teams, accompanying supervisory checks, and implementing rectification measures increasingly became high-frequency categories.

These trends corroborate a broader pattern since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012, whereby the central government has strengthened regulation and guidance over local governments through enhanced macro-level governance and oversight.

2. Different Priorities: Party Secretaries vs. Mayors

Southern Weekly: How did you categorize such a large volume of data?

Yang Zesen: We conducted a typological analysis of officials’ performance of duties. The behaviors of municipal Party secretaries and mayors were each classified into 20 categories.

Overall, the most frequent category for Party secretaries was “conveying and studying instructions and guiding principles from higher authorities.” This was followed by activities such as inspections and research visits, and providing guidance on urban development.

For mayors, the largest category was also “conveying and studying instructions and guiding principles from higher authorities,” but their remaining activities showed different emphases.

These differences reflect the division of responsibilities under unified leadership. Party secretaries tend to focus more on social governance (社会治理) and primary-level Party building (基层党建), while mayors place greater emphasis on urban development and economic construction.

Southern Weekly: How have economic policy-related activities changed over time?

Yang Zesen: Over time, four major categories—guiding urban construction, economic development, urbanization, and investment promotion (招商引资)—all showed a declining trend in proportional share for both Party secretaries and mayors.

This does not mean that the absolute number of such activities declined, but rather that their relative weight decreased. This suggests that under a more diversified performance evaluation system, local officials’ work has become more dispersed. Unlike in the past, officials can no longer focus almost exclusively on economic growth while devoting little attention to other areas.

Areas with markedly increased attention tend to be those subject to strong accountability mechanisms, such as environmental protection, which has become an increasingly important component of both Party secretaries’ and mayors’ duties.

Notably, Party secretaries have significantly increased their activities in social governance and public services, including guiding primary-level governance, visiting and consoling local residents (慰问群众), and overseeing agriculture and rural development.

Southern Weekly: What factors influence officials’ behavior, and how can they be analyzed?

Yang Zesen: Officials’ behavior is shaped by factors at three levels.

First, at the macro level, changes in political and economic conditions matter. From the perspective of local officials, this manifests in three ways:

1.Diversification of development goals: Whereas economic development once dominated, recent years have seen greater emphasis on social security and people’s livelihoods.

2.More comprehensive incentive mechanisms, combining both positive and negative incentives.

3.Central–local relations: As the central government strengthens top-level design, the extent to which this influences local officials’ behavior deserves careful examination.

In addition, two other factors matter: officials’ tenure and individual characteristics.

Because local officials do not know exactly when they will be promoted or transferred, they effectively operate under conditions of uncertain tenure. How do officials adjust their behavior under such uncertainty? One common hypothesis is that officials pursue large-scale construction projects early in their tenure—the so-called “three fires of a newly appointed official” (新官上任三把火)—to make their achievements visible as quickly as possible.

Southern Weekly: Does the same official behave very differently at different stages of their tenure?

Yang Zesen: Yes. We analyzed Party secretaries and mayors separately.

As their tenure progresses, Party secretaries tend to conduct more inspections and social engagement, focusing increasingly on primary-level governance, while reducing activities closely tied to economic growth, such as investment promotion and urban construction.

Mayors, by contrast, tend to intensify efforts in government reform, overseeing key projects and national-level new areas in the later stages of their tenure, while reducing inspection activities. In terms of urban construction, their behavior follows a “U-shaped” pattern—rising early, declining mid-term, and rising again toward the end.

Southern Weekly: Why do Party secretaries and mayors diverge in their priorities toward the end of a term?

Yang Zesen: This is related to changes in how officials are evaluated. Since the 18th CPC National Congress, evaluations have become more comprehensive, placing greater weight on people’s livelihood outcomes.

Moreover, Party secretaries and mayors operate under different incentive structures and divisions of labor. Party secretaries have stronger political responsibilities, and as their tenure lengthens, they increasingly focus on social governance.

For mayors, the U-shaped pattern in urban construction reflects strategic behavior. Officials often seek to accumulate visible achievements early on. If their accomplishments remain insufficiently recognized by the middle or later stages of their tenure, they may push for a new round of urbanization or construction initiatives toward the end.

3. Locally Promoted Officials vs. Officials Transferred from Elsewhere

Southern Weekly: You mentioned that individual characteristics also lead to differences in behavior. Could you elaborate?

Yang Zesen: We focused on two variables: age, a natural attribute, and official origin, meaning whether an official was locally promoted or transferred from another locality.

Age is a strong proxy for incentive intensity. Younger officials generally have greater promotion prospects and thus stronger incentives. As officials age, expectations of future promotion decline. Comparing officials across age groups helps reveal whether incentives shape behavior.

We found that Party secretaries and mayors aged 55 and above are significantly more active in environmental governance, while their involvement in urbanization projects is markedly lower than that of officials under 55. As retirement approaches, activities such as investment promotion, public outreach, and foreign affairs decline, and mayors also engage less in inter-regional cooperation and inspection visits.

There are also incentive differences between locally promoted officials and those transferred from elsewhere. Officials transferred from other regions are often appointed by higher-level authorities for specific purposes and tend to have more optimistic political prospects, exposing them to different incentive structures.

Our data show that externally transferred Party secretaries are significantly more active in investment promotion, conveying higher-level directives, and conducting inspections, but relatively less involved in environmental governance. Externally transferred mayors focus more on innovation and entrepreneurship and urbanization, while investing less effort in advancing government reform.

Southern Weekly: Did any findings exceed your expectations? What are your plans for future research?

Yang Zesen: This paper mainly confirms earlier conjectures, partially filling the research gap—or “black box”—between officials’ incentive motivations and government behavior. By offering a deep, localized analysis, it supplements existing knowledge. However, because the study is based on data from a single city, its conclusions are inevitably limited in scope.

After publication, scholars studying official attention contacted me to discuss integrating attention and behavior—for example, examining which policy issues officials focus on and which of those actually translate into concrete actions, and how the two relate. This is a promising direction for future research.

Subscribe now

I’ve long been interested in China’s younger generations, and recently I came across an academic article on the website Aisixiang, an aggregator of scholarly writing on a range of topics from top Chinese experts. The article, titled “Key Features and Formation Mechanisms of the Social Mindset of the Post-2000 Generation,” is written by Hu Xianzhong, a professor at the Central School of Communist Youth League of China.

According to Aisixiang, this article is part of “国家社科基金高校思政课研究专项重点项目” a key project under the National Social Science Fund’s special research program on ideological and political theory courses in higher education. It was originally published in People’s Tribune (人民论坛), an academic journal affiliated with People’s Daily, and later made available on Aisixiang. The article was first published on Sept. 16.

The article looks at the social mindset of China’s post-2000 cohort from several angles, including self-confidence, views on employment, attitudes toward life, information habits, social interaction, and consumption patterns. I think it’s worth sharing here. Since the piece is fairly long, I haven’t translated the final section on policy responses — if you’re curious, the original is available online.

At its core, the article argues that the social mentality of China’s post-2000 generation resists simple labels. It is shaped by overlapping tensions—between confidence and anxiety, stability and mobility, competition and withdrawal, private feeling and public concern. Growing up amid China’s rapid rise and deep digitalization, this cohort combines strong national and cultural confidence with unease over economic uncertainty and shifting values.

Rather than portraying them as either disengaged or relentlessly driven, the author shows how contradictory orientations coexist: pragmatic career planning alongside experimentation, the pursuit of “small but certain happiness” alongside concern for fairness and social justice. The article also highlights the internet’s dual role in empowering and enclosing digital natives, shaping their emotional lives, consumption choices, and search for a workable definition of a “good life” that balances individual dignity with social progress.

Key Features and Formation Mechanisms of the Social Mindset of the Post-2000 Generation

Social mentality is characterized by wholeness, diffuseness, and universality, while at the same time displaying diversity, differentiation, and distinctiveness across different social groups. The post-2000 generation in China (those born in or after 2000), who are currently between the ages of 16 and 25, began entering secondary school around 2012, moved into universities starting in 2018, and gradually entered the workforce from 2020 onward. They have now become a dynamic social group with distinctive characteristics.

Specific Manifestations of the Social Mentality of the Post-2000 Generation

Every generation of youth is situated within a specific social coordinate system, and shifts in mentality inevitably bear the imprint of broader historical change. In the course of national rejuvenation and the building of a strong country, the post-2000 generation has enjoyed the dividends of reform and opening-up while simultaneously confronting unprecedented developmental challenges, giving rise to a distinctive social mentality.

As a more confident generation, the post-2000 cohort demonstrates strong patriotism and national pride rooted in a high degree of political identification and national identification. They grew up during a period of rapid expansion in China’s comprehensive national strength, with major national achievements—such as crewed spaceflight, aircraft carriers, the J-20 stealth fighter, and the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope —forming part of their collective memory.

The perception of a country “born strong” has endowed them with the confidence to view the world on equal footing. They actively embrace mainstream films and television productions and disseminate narratives of Chinese strength through social media; cultural confidence is clearly externalized, as seen in their support for domestic brands such as Huawei and Hongxing Erke, and in their promotion of hanfu (the traditional Chinese attire) and traditional Chinese music onto the international stage.

Within their respective social contexts, young people of the post-2000 generation display abundant self-confidence and fervent patriotism: border defense soldier Chen Xiangrong fulfilled his vow of “pure love, only for China” through concrete action; university student Wang Juntao became China’s 20,000th hematopoietic stem-cell donor, stating plainly that “saving lives is the greatest honor”; and tennis player Zheng Qinwen declared on the Olympic stage, “I’m exhausted, but I can still play three more hours for my country.”

At the same time, some young people exhibit more extreme mentalities, often substituting political stance for factual judgment and engaging in doxxing and online violence against those holding different views. Such behaviors, in essence, confuse public discourse through far-fetched logic, undermine legitimate civic rights, and may easily give rise to extremist thinking.

The employment mentality of the post-2000 generation shows clear stratification and differentiation, with a coexistence of risk-avoidant stability-seeking and high mobility.

Overall, their employment outlook is relatively pragmatic. They tend to plan career paths based on factors such as the social influence of their universities, the market compatibility of their majors, the level of social resources available to them, and their personal interests, resulting in diverse employment orientations.

On the one hand, amid global economic uncertainty, graduates’ preference for stability has continued to intensify, with a stronger inclination toward stable jobs and incomes. According to Zhaopin’s 2024 College Students’ Employability Survey Report, the top two preferred employers are state-owned enterprises (47.7 percent) and government agencies (14.7 percent). Among priority considerations, “salary and benefits” (71.2 percent) and “stability is most important” (51 percent) rank highest.

On the other hand, the rise of new occupations and new business models has made individualized aspirations a key criterion in career choice. Highly mobile career trajectories have become the norm for some in the post-2000 cohort, who explore career directions through mobility, create opportunities, and experience freer, more autonomous, and more open working arrangements.

The rise of the internet society and advances in information technology have broken down temporal and spatial barriers, providing a boundless online arena.

Many post-2000 individuals are enthusiastic about cross-sector and cross-field part-time work, becoming so-called “slash youth,” a term for young people piecing together a living through multiple part-time jobs. For example, a best-selling online writer’s primary occupation may be that of a government civil servant, while an online illustrator earning tens of thousands of yuan per month may be a university student. Through active experimentation with different social roles and life experiences, they enrich their career trajectories. In addition, some recent graduates are neither employed nor enrolled in further education six months after graduation—either continuing to search for satisfactory jobs or preparing for another attempt at postgraduate entrance exams or civil-service exams after initial failure. Most of these “slow advancement” graduates rely on parental financial support.

The coexistence of “小确幸” (small but certain happiness) and “小而美” (small-scale beauty) in self-perception with an expanding range of public concerns creates a distinctive tension in the social mentality of the post-2000 generation.

Compared with other age groups, they are particularly adept at capturing small moments of everyday happiness: the warmth of the first milk tea in autumn, the surprise of a long-lost call from a relative or friend, or the pleasure of a short trip can all spark joy. In a modern society dominated by instrumental rationality, individual expectations are continuously lowered; through concrete and subtle life experiences, “small happiness” restores subjectivity to personal lives that have been alienated. This pursuit of happiness can be understood as a poetic resistance to one-dimensional life under a performance-driven society.

Notably, while attending to their own feelings, the post-2000 generation also extends its concern to rights and the broader environment. Issues ranging from gender equality and educational resource distribution to employment opportunities and data privacy; from technological innovation and comprehensive rural revitalization to carbon neutrality and public health security—all have entered their field of attention.

“Small but certain happiness” represents the projection of survival needs for the post-2000 generation, while the pursuit of fairness and justice reflects a value sublimation of developmental needs. The micro-level entry points and macro-level perspectives of their social mentality may appear incompatible, but in essence both reflect the value integration and spiritual aspirations of this cohort during a period of social transformation.

These are dialectically unified in their perceptions and reflections, as well as in their holistic definition of a “good life”: they seek both micro-level safeguards of individual dignity and macro-level progress in social civilization. When anxiety arises, they may retreat to “small happiness” and enjoy the pleasures of everyday details; when they perceive institutional fairness, they may become more actively engaged in public affairs.

In this sense, the emotional stability provided by “small happiness” supplies the psychological energy that enables young people to sustain attention to public issues, while a fair social environment lays the foundation for individual happiness. Together, these form the bedrock of youth social mentality.

Between the alienation of performance evaluation generated by rat race and the meaning vacuum induced by quiet quitting, the post-2000 generation continues to explore the value of life. In terms of individual life stages, the youngest members have entered secondary school, most are studying at universities, and some have already joined the workforce. Pressures from academics, employment, and work first manifest as rat race.

Facing intense workplace competition, although the post-2000 cohort has been labeled as “rectifying the workplace,” many still find themselves torn between leaving work on time and coping with last-minute overtime. The roots of involution lie in resource scarcity and a singular evaluation system. When educational credentials, salaries, and positions become the primary yardsticks of value, young people may be forced into a “theater effect,” in which those in the front rows stand up and those behind must tiptoe. Yet rat race is not entirely negative: it can drive efficiency gains, technological innovation, and even breakthroughs in certain fields, and in some sense also represents a form of youthful striving.

Before the echoes of “佛系 (fo xi),” roughly translated to “Buddha Style” referring those who advocate refusing societal pressures and forgoing ambition, detachment have faded, the discourse of quiet quitting has surged forward, accompanied by new terms such as “摆烂 (bai lan),” or let it rot in English, and “摸鱼 (mo yu)”, or slacking off.

Rather than viewing quiet quitting as total surrender, it is more appropriate to understand it as a posture adjustment: when effort and reward are mismatched, and when hard work is alienated into meaningless consumption, some in the post-2000 generation choose “low desire” as a way to counter “high rate race.” The latent risk of quiet quitting, however, lies in masking confusion with detachment and dissolving responsibility through nihilistic culture, potentially eroding willpower and evolving into passive withdrawal from society.

The coexistence of quiet quitting and rat race, especially the phenomenon of “45-degree quiet quitting,” vividly captures the contradictory state of being unable to compete further yet unwilling to fully disengage. In reality, quiet quitting is often a rhetorical outlet for stress relief; most post-2000 individuals are “physically quiet quitting but mentally unsettled.” As a generation at the forefront of the times, they are searching for a third coordinate of youth—neither tools alienated by competition nor hermits escaping reality, but modern individuals with integrated and complete personalities.

The mentality barriers created by information “cocoons” have left some in the post-2000 generation feeling confused and anxious. As a cohort raised under careful family protection, some entered “defensive mode” early: opportunities for independent social practice are limited, close peer relationships are weak, and a “snowflake” is easily formed. Defensive mechanisms built across cognition, emotion, attitude, and behavior gradually solidify, intensifying the cocooning of social mentality. Algorithmic information “feeding” via smartphones undoubtedly exacerbates this trend.

Under such mental patterns, some post-2000 individuals tend to select information aligned with their interests, judge issues and viewpoints based on subjective needs, and struggle to accept differing perspectives. Their social circles are narrow, consisting primarily of interactions with “like-minded” individuals, and they fail to establish robust social networks in life and work, lacking proficiency in interpersonal cooperation. Others prefer to construct virtual social relationships online to compensate for deficiencies in real-world connections, resulting in the contrast of being “social butterflies online but socially anxious offline.” At the same time, information cocoons and cognitive cocoons induce mental anxiety among some in this cohort. When confused, some turn to online mysticism and digital divination apps, while comment sections become important spaces for relieving anxiety and seeking spiritual comfort.

Driven by distinctive aesthetic sensibilities and a strong desire for self-expression, some post-2000 individuals exhibit consumption and leisure patterns that blend tradition and modernity. As material needs give way to spiritual ones, their consumption values not only lead mainstream trends but also transcend them. They are among the first to shift life priorities from the “material” to the “spiritual,” fueling the rise of “reverse consumption.” For example, floral cotton jackets and military coats have become popular on university campuses, with students remarking, “It’s not that we can’t afford down jackets—it’s that military coats offer better value.” Feature phones, seemingly obsolete, have regained popularity among some post-2000 users due to their alignment with minimalism and “digital detox” ideals. They reassess their relationship with technology, pursue simpler lives, and explore healthier digital lifestyles.

According to the 2025 Youth Emotional Consumption Trends Report, 88.2 percent of young people report being under stress, with “emotional value” becoming the core driver of consumption. This has fueled explosive growth in industries such as designer toys, cultural tourism, pets, and food, while stress-relief gadgets and creative novelty items serve as “mental fast chargers.”

This consumption outlook reflects an awakening of self-awareness among young consumers, emphasizing the essence of life, the pursuit of inner tranquility, and a return-to-basics aesthetic. In fast-paced modern life, they increasingly seek spaces that soothe the mind and restore simplicity. Many in the post-2000 generation favor more economical, comfortable, and enjoyable forms of travel, prioritizing authentic experiences and diverse needs at destinations.

The Formation Mechanisms and Risk Assessment of the Social Mentality of the Post-2000 Generation

The formation of each generation’s social mentality is closely linked to the economic development, technological progress, and social transformation of its time. It is both the outcome of interaction between tradition and reality and characterized by relative stability alongside real-time evolution. Like other cohorts, the social mentality of the post-2000 generation contains both positive and negative elements as it adapts to and negotiates with dominant social mentalities.

The social mentality of the post-2000 generation is rooted in the social environment shaped by China’s rapid economic growth since reform and opening-up. Unlike their grandparents and parents, they grew up during a golden era of national economic ascent. Strong comprehensive national strength, abundant material and spiritual resources, and rapidly evolving digital technologies not only laid a solid foundation for their self-esteem, confidence, and resilience, but also endowed them with the confidence to engage the world on equal terms.

At the same time, they inhabit an era in which traditional values are continuously reconstructed and social structures rapidly reorganized. From value systems to development pathways, from lifestyles to life goals, the support structures of “certainty” are shifting. Finding a certain self in an uncertain world has become an inevitable task in their growth.

For society, structural change is the norm; for youth, anxiety and exploration are the norm. The uncertainty released by social transformation brings development opportunities while also fostering desires for stability, fatigue, and anxiety. Changes in youth social mentality thus reflect both passive adaptation to dramatic external shifts and active efforts to seek order, meaning, and security under new conditions.

The pressure exerted by group mentality on individual rationality may lead some post-2000 individuals to conformist “cognitive downgrading.” Social mentality emerges from the aggregation of individual mentalities, yet once a collective mentality takes shape, it in turn influences individuals through conformity effects.

As Gustave Le Bon observed, “In the psychology of crowds, individual ability weakens, personality converges, heterogeneity is swallowed by homogeneity, and the unconscious gains the upper hand.” Conformity not only hinders independent thinking and rational evaluation, but also drives individuals to follow majority behavior or opinions out of fear of exclusion. This mechanism may be reinforced through alignment with partial individual cognition or distorted by group pressure.

In turn, conformity can amplify collective bias, leading to misinformation and error propagation. When individuals accept and spread group viewpoints without careful consideration, inaccuracies are magnified. Among the post-2000 generation, negative mentalities are particularly prone to online transmission, gradually forming group-level consensus and generating crises of trust and identity. Once such dynamics reach a critical mass, conformity effects may draw more young people toward majority positions, deeply shaping value formation and potentially posing risks to ideological security. The tension between conformity and individual autonomy reflects the fundamental contradiction between humans as social beings and as individuals pursuing self-realization.

As the most significant environmental variable, the internet influences—and even shapes—the social emotions of the post-2000 generation. Compared with other groups, their defining characteristic is co-growth with the internet; they are often described as “digital natives” and “permanently online,” with an inherent dependence on digital space.

For them, the online world increasingly supplants offline society as the primary arena of life. The anonymity and decentralization of online interaction sharply contrast with offline realities, eroding social, physical, and geographic attributes in virtual space and leading some to neglect real-world behavioral norms and interpersonal rules. Combined with the internet’s tolerance for individuality and diversity, this reinforces self-oriented tendencies and may foster egocentrism in social interaction.

The immediacy of online information dissemination encourages reliance on digital communication, reducing time and attention devoted to embodied interaction in physical space. Learning, leisure, and even social relationship construction shift online, heightening risks of social anxiety and cocooning.

Negative emotions are easily triggered at critical junctures. In times of rapid change, fast-paced life weakens empathy, rising individualism reduces tolerance, and layered pressures—from economic stress and social conflict to developmental bottlenecks and personal setbacks—allow suppressed emotions to erupt through emblematic incidents, producing a “wild-horse effect.” This manifests as online harassment, malicious complaints, baseless accusations, and even physical confrontations in public spaces. Negative emotions erode rational thinking, intensify social conflict, undermine moral boundaries, and foster real-world violence, posing serious threats to social stability.

For the post-2000 generation, subjectivity plays a crucial role in modern social formation, providing a pathway toward freedom and emancipation. As Marx and Engels noted, “In our time, every phenomenon appears to contain its own contradiction.” Yet excessive or disordered assertion of subjectivity can generate interpersonal “pressure,” ultimately breeding negative emotions. Meanwhile, online public sentiment is easily manipulated, fostering extreme and radical discourse that provides fertile ground for emotional escalation. Enditem

Subscribe now

Please feel free to download them. I’ll share my reflections later.

For readers following the details of China’s upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan for economic and social development (2026-2030), I’ll also be sharing my reflections once the full set of proposals is released.

Lastly, in response to the recent reader survey — most of you said you’d like me to continue covering Luo Yonghao’s podcast show. I’ve been keeping up with every episode (each running three to five hours), but the latest ones are deeply rooted in local Chinese context, packed with cultural and linguistic nuances that might be challenging for international audiences to fully grasp. For that reason, I haven’t produced a new newsletter on them yet — but rest assured, I’m keeping a close eye on what’s next.

Opinion | Shatter the mirror

The concept of the Thucydides Trap, predicting conflict between China and the US, projects the West’s conquest-driven history onto Chinese civilisation

Weijian Shan

In the shadow of escalating tensions between the United States and China, Graham Allison’s concept of the Thucydides Trap has become a staple of geopolitical discourse. Coined by the Harvard scholar, the term evokes the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ observation that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable”.

Allison’s study of 16 historical cases, where a rising power challenged a ruling one, found war in 12 instances. He warns that China’s ascent threatens American hegemony, potentially dooming both to conflict unless deliberate efforts are made to avert it.

Yet, this framework is itself a conceptual trap for the West. By drawing from the histories of the West and Japan, Allison projects onto China a narrative of inevitable aggression. This is like gazing into a mirror: the West sees only its own reflection of historical conquest and rivalry – from European empires to Japanese imperialism – concluding that China, as it gains strength, will behave similarly.

But China’s 5,000-year history tells a different story. Its cultural DNA is profoundly landbound, shaped by geography and ecology. For much of history, Chinese civilisation has thrived within the 400-millimetre annual rainfall isohyet, the climatic threshold separating fertile agricultural heartlands from arid steppes.

This line, roughly aligning with the path of China’s Great Wall, demarcates zones where rainfall exceeds 400 mm per year, sufficient for stable crop yields, and the drier northern regions, suited largely for nomadic herding. South of this boundary, wheat fields and rice paddies sustained vast populations, fostering a society incentivised to defend its productive core rather than venture into marginal lands.

Northern steppe peoples roamed the grasslands, chasing scarce water and forage. Their survival depended on mobility and raiding, inevitably leading to clashes with other nomadic tribes. The Xiongnu, Mongols and other steppe peoples repeatedly made southward incursions, prompting a defensive response from China in the form of fortification and counter-attacks.

Farmers work in a paddy field in Danzhai county, Guizhou province, on June 6, 2023. Photo: Xinhua

Indeed, China’s territory reached its maximum historical extent not through outward expansion but via inward foreign invasion and occupation. The Mongols established the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), bringing their vast steppe domains into Chinese maps. The Manchus founded the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), incorporating new territories. Over time, these invaders were assimilated into Han culture, adopting Confucian bureaucracy and sinicising their rule.

This contrasts sharply with the cultures of the nomadic and sea peoples that gave rise to European civilisations, which blended herding with subsistence agriculture across fragmented polities. Sea peoples like the Vikings and Japanese raiders, driven by scarce resources and mobility, developed cultures of raiding and conquest, clashing with rivals to secure survival.

To protect its agricultural heartland, China’s strategy relied on fortifications like the Great Wall, built from at least the Qin dynasty (221-207 BC) onwards, which shielded the northern frontier from nomadic invaders. Coastal defences, like those during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasties that relocated populations inland, restricted maritime activity and blocked threats from pirates, but also severely hindered trade, a major reason the country had resisted opening up its ports for trade until after the Opium Wars.

Moreover, China’s maritime ventures, such as those under Zheng He, were not for conquest or colonisation; his Treasure Fleet, the most advanced in the world with over 300 ships and 27,000 men, sailed to East Africa, carrying treasure as gifts to foster relations with the countries along the Indo-Pacific coasts.

A painting by Shen Du dated 1414 shows a giraffe acquired in Africa for the Ming emperor during one of Zheng’s naval expeditions. Photo: Taipei Museum.

In stark contrast, Western history, shaped by nomadic Indo-Europeans and seafaring powers like the Vikings and Portuguese, was driven by scarcity and mobility, fuelling aggressive expansion from Rome’s legions to Britain’s global empire.

Small European states, which struggled to buffer against famines due to fragmented lands, turned to international trade, expansion and colonisation, a pattern echoed by sea peoples like the Japanese, whose 16th century invasions of Korea and the piracy along the Chinese coasts, 19th century annexation of Okinawa and Taiwan by force, early 20th century colonisation of Korea and the 20th century imperialism reflect a maritime-driven conquest ethos, especially after Westernising itself after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

Allison’s cases – such as Anglo-German rivalry and the Napoleonic Wars – stem from this volatile mix of semi-nomadism and agricultural fragility, not universal laws of power transitions. The United States, whose culture, tradition and expansionist impulse originated in Europe, was engaged in imperial expansion once it became powerful, taking territories from Mexico, Hawaii and Spain.

Archaeology illuminates this divide. The Sanxingdui archaeological site in Sichuan province, which dates back thousands of years, yields bronze artefacts that are overwhelmingly ritualistic: masks, treelike altars and eye-like motifs symbolising cosmic order. It symbolised a culture focused on maintaining the existing social hierarchy characteristic of an inward-looking society.

As pointed out to me by Dr Ruiliang Liu, curator of the early China collection at the British Museum, Chinese burial objects were predominantly used for hierarchical rituals, with bronze carriages for elites and pottery for commoners, which suggests a stable agrarian society.

Objects unearthed from thousands of tombs dating back millennia confirm the social status of the buried, as there were strict rules on the number and kind of objects each social station was allowed to use. Buried in sacrificial pits, these ritual objects evoke ceremonies binding communities to ancestors and land, not mobile warbands.

By contrast, European burials like the 7th century Sutton Hoo ship burial in England, laden with helmets and swords, reflect a warrior culture geared for mobility and conquest. European Neolithic finds brim with utilitarian arms: flint axes and spearheads from Corded Ware cultures, signalling a world in perpetual motion. Celtic and Roman sites, similarly rich in weapons and trade goods, underscore this expansionist impulse.

To the Western eye, Sanxingdui’s esoterica might seem alien, but they underscore China’s focus on enduring order amid agrarian plenty. This land-bound tradition persisted in later centuries and is deeply embedded in Chinese culture. Early Chinese diaspora communities lacked dedicated cemeteries; Chinese immigrants still prefer to repatriate remains to ancestral soil as they believe “leaves [must] fall to their roots.”

People walk in and out of Wuhou Shrine. The site is dedicated to military and political leader Zhuge Liang, among other figures depicted in the epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Photo: Handout

This practice views the homeland as the sole repository for eternal rest. As US justice Stephen Field wrote in a decision of the US Supreme Court related to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, “[Chinese immigrants’] dying wish is that their bodies may be taken to China for burial”.

This ritual stems not from clannishness but cultural psyche: the belief that spirits are tethered to the homeland, not foreign wanderings. This homeland-bound identity historically diverged from the mobile traditions of ancient nomadic and seafaring peoples.

Chinese history cycled through wars and peace. Overpopulation and famine often precipitated internal conflicts, leading to fragmentation into warring states, as epitomised in the 14th century epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms: “The country, if divided for long, inevitably unifies; if unified for long, inevitably fractures”.

Yet the pull towards unity, driven by a shared culture, language and unitary governance since the Qin dynasty, was irresistible. The political unity of the land enabled grain reallocation from abundant regions to those hit by crop failures in any given year, a necessity for an agrarian society. These factors explain why China is one of the longest enduring civilisations in the world without much history of foreign conquest.

Spectators take selfies as flag-guarding helicopters fly over Tiananmen Square in Beijing, on September 3. Photo: Xinhua

China never developed a universal religion like those in other civilisations. Instead, its belief system, centred on ancestor worship, reflects an identity bound to the ancestral homeland and familial ties. Its syncretic pluralism absorbed foreign faiths like Buddhism, Islam and Christianity without exporting dogma.

Europe wielded faith as a crusader’s sword with proselytism justifying centuries of wars in God’s name and imperial expansion. In contrast, China’s non-proselytising culture avoided such aggression, reinforcing its defensive character.

Allison’s Thucydides Trap risks a self-fulfilling prophecy. Allison himself urges escape via diplomacy, yet his Eurocentric assumptions blind the West to China’s defensive history. To avert war, the West must shatter its mirror, recognising that a rising China seeks security and territorial integrity based on historical claims, not the seas of empire. Only then can mutual understanding replace reflexive fears.

Weijian Shan, Executive Chairman of PAG, a private equity firm, is the book author of Out of the Gobi, Money Games, and Money Machine.

Subscribe now

In 1995, Beijing hosted the Fourth World Conference on Women, where the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action became a global milestone for advancing women’s rights. Thirty years on, as China prepares to host the Global Leaders’ Meeting on Women this October, how far has the country come in promoting gender equality and women’s well-rounded development?

In this episode, Professor Song shares her insights on:

• how women’s growing participation in higher education in China has impacted women’s career paths and social mobility,

• the persistent challenge of balancing career pursuit and family responsibility,

• evolving attitudes toward marriage, social roles, and self-fulfillment,

• policy efforts to support working women and build a family-friendly society,

• and the role of social media in shaping gender discourse.

We also touch on how China’s approach compares with some Western and East Asian countries, and what priorities lie ahead in the face of demographic shifts like population aging and declining birthrates.

Highlights

04:02 - Current legal, educational, workplace, and healthcare landscape for women in China

09:47 - The rise in female higher education enrollment and its role in facilitating social mobility in China

16:28 - Policies supporting family-friendly environments and women’s careers

24:34 - Paternal leave in China: status quo and future outlook

27:33 - Shifting views on personal fulfillment and social roles among Chinese women, with social media as a key factor

34:12 - Song’s take on the differences between Chinese and Western feminism

39:04 - Progress and remaining challenges compared to other Eastern Asian countries

45:01 - Key priorities for advancing women’s development in China over the next decade

50:41 - Song’s recommendation on a TV series exploring the modern Chinese woman’s life

Recommendation

Yueping Song: Ode to Joy (TV series)

Like the episode?

Follow Inside the China Room on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. New episodes drop every two weeks. Share & rate us to help more listeners discover expert perspectives from inside China.

Also available on 小宇宙 Xiaoyuzhou FM for listeners in China.

This episode is edited by Yifei Shi.

In the previous piece, He looked back on his early entrepreneurial journey and shared why he returned to build an EV company after financial freedom. He also reflected on XPeng’s brand positioning and the staggering scale of R&D investment he believes an AI-driven car company must commit to.

This time, the discussion turns sharper. He lays out why he expects China’s EV market to shift within five years from a knockout stage to an all-star game with only about five serious players left. He shares his perspective on automotive industrial design, offers a comparison of how autonomous driving may evolve differently in China and abroad, and describes his exploration into flying cars — from early trials to plans for mass production. He also delivers candid views on which Chinese companies are genuinely committed to AI and which are merely paying lip service.

Once again, while I’ve distilled the conversation into highlights, the full three-hour dialogue is packed with insights. If you understand Chinese, I strongly encourage you to watch or listen to the entire podcast — it’s well worth your time.

In the past two weeks, Luo has put out two more episodes. I had expected him to keep bringing on guests from China EV industry, but instead his latest conversations featured Chinese comedy sensation He Guangzhi and Renke, frontman of China’s much-loved folk rock band Wutiaoren.

I haven’t yet decided whether to continue this newsletter series or in what form to present it. Personally, I really enjoy listening to Luo’s podcast, but producing this series takes quite a bit of time—his talk with Renke alone ran nearly five hours.

If you’d like me to keep covering this series, please take a moment to vote in the poll.

About He Xiaopeng

Prior to serving as chairman and chief executive officer of XPeng, Mr. He served at Alibaba Group Holding Limited, a public company listed on the NYSE (symbol: BABA) and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (stock code: 9988), from June 2014 to August 2017, including serving as the president of Alibaba mobile business group, chairman of Alibaba Games and president of Tudou.com. In 2004, Mr. He co-founded UCWeb Inc., a Chinese mobile internet company that provides mobile internet software technology and services, and served as the president of product from January 2005 to June 2014. In June 2014, UCWeb Inc. was acquired by Alibaba Group Holding Limited. Mr. He previously served as an independent director and a member of the audit committee of HUYA Inc., a game live streaming platform company in China listed on the NYSE (symbol: HUYA) from May 2018 to May 2020.

Mr. He received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from South China University of Technology in July 1999. Mr. He obtained the qualification certificate of senior economist (technology entrepreneur) in business administration issued by the Human Resources and Social Security Department of Guangdong Province in January 2020.

6. He Xiaopeng's analysis on the future landscape of China’s EV market.

Luo: You’ve often compared the auto industry to a knockout stage and an all-star game. In your view, when do you think can we finally see the winners and losers of this game?

He: In China, about five years.

Luo: Who's going to survive?

He: Different companies may have different perspectives. Personally, I lean on the aggressive side. I'd say in China, we’ll probably end up with around five major players. And of course, a few overseas automakers will still last too.

Luo: Which one is definitely going to make it?

He: No one can confidently say it has the ticket. For the industry, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity.

Luo: Globally, Tesla is definitely safe, isn't it?

He: If you’d asked me last year, I’d probably agree with you. But this year, even Tesla’s facing new challenges. In China’s auto industry, the top-ranked new players tend to come across turbulence within 12 to 24 months. For the big, legacy giants, the cycle comes around four to five years. So, honestly, it still feels way too early to make a definitive call today.

Luo: So on the one hand, you’re saying the knockout stage of China’s auto market will settle within five years. But on the other hand, you’re saying not a single company has secured a ticket yet. That makes the whole competition sound even more brutal.

He: But also more interesting.

Luo: Indeed. And XPeng has been around for almost 10 years now, right?

He: 11 years.

Luo: Looking at where we are today, how would you rate your domestic competitors? Let's focus on the positive side, after all we’re not the type of podcast to stir the pot. Maybe just tell us which companies you personally respect or admire, and highlight some positives you see in them.

He: I’d say every automaker has its own advantages. For example, Volkswage, our partner and also one of our investors. It's sure that, right now in China, a lot of companies are getting recognized by the media, by the industry, and by users. People think we’re doing great, and that we can be really strong on a global scale. But honestly, I feel we’re still pretty far from that. Ten years ago, we were a little too lacking in confidence, but now it feels like the pendulum has swung the other way. There’s maybe a bit too much confidence.

Luo: Maybe it's because our domestic new energy vehicle industry have taken off, so people are now swinging to the other extreme and become somehow overly confident.

He: Yes. Take Germany as an example. Can you name a Chinese car brand that's popular out there? Its market is open to us, unlike the U.S., so in theory there should be someone.

So every company’s got its strengths. People love to say things like, “Oh, Volkswagen or Toyota, their software sucks, their user experience isn’t great.” But compared to them, our scale is way smaller. Our ability in areas like management, globalization and building service networks are still in the cradle in their eyes. If you score it out of 100, we might feel like we’ve hit 60 in some areas, but for them, we’re more like a 20 or 30.

That’s why I keep saying no one has the ticket yet. Some companies look really strong, but they’ve still got gaps in key areas. Some others are dominating certain domain, but are too small in scale.

So relatively speaking, Tesla is one of the few companies that can be called "well-rounded", but even they’ve hit ups and downs. Chinese automakers all have their bright spots, but this first knockout round still has about five years to play out. After that, it’s the All-Star Game. Until then, everyone’s got plenty of homework to do.

Take Lei Jun's Xiaomi as anoither example. They've done an amazing job, but they’re also facing challenges. Therefore, the one ultimate principle for us is to move steadily, stay grounded, learn from others, and fix our own weaknesses. That’s the only way to become truly all-around. And honestly, we’re all still on that journey.

7. He Xiaopeng compared the future prospects of autonomous driving in China and the world.

He: I believe in the future, there will only be two kinds of cars. The first kind has a driver, but also has L4 autonomous driving ability, so you could be driving thousands or even ten thousand kilometers ,before you actually need to take control of the steering wheel once.

The second kind won't need a driver’s seat anymore. It drives itself, and any possible override would be operated from distance or on the cloud.

So down the line, cars will split into the man-driven type with L4 and the driverless type also with L4. And I think that shift is going to play out in the next two to five years.

Luo: If fast enough, maybe in two years?

He: Technically, yes. But when it comes to user adoption, I'd say it would take 5 to 20 years. Every country has its own condition and relevant rules and regulations, so as an entrepreneur, the real challege is about figuring out the best development pace for the company.

People in many countries of the world don't even have any clue about autonomous driving. How can you talk them into an L4 self-driving car? So different situations will lead to different development paces.

But from another perspective, I believe that in China and the U.S., we’re probably only 2 to 5 years away from the major turning point, which is going to flip the entire logic of how cars work.

Luo: I’m actually pretty optimistic about China’s tech policy. The government has been pushing the sector strongly, and that makes a big difference.

At first, I used to think it’d be some developed country that would go L4 first, and others would follow after technologies are proved and accident rates drop. But now I feel that the Chinese government might actually be the most supportive one toward L4.

What’s the sense you’re getting from the industry?

He: I have a bit of a voice on this. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been to a number of countries and sat down with regulators to talk about policy and legal changes in transportation. And honestly, what stands out to me is that China’s regulators are both able to keep things under control and, at the same time, among the most aggressive globally in appling new technologies. That’s why I’m confident in achieveing L4 in China.

When I was young, I always thought developed countries had the most open-minded, fast-moving policies to drive technological innovations. But in recent years, I’ve found the reality is the complete opposite. Private companies are not necessarily leading the way in driving technological progress, and governments in advanced economies are also not necessarily be open and eager to push innovation.

That's one of the reasons I think that China’s economy has been able to grow fast. If you go out and compare, you realize our regulators are far ahead of many countries. And that’s something I feel really proud of.

Luo: Especially in promoting technological innovations.

He: I really believe that in China, we're going to achieve L4 in cars both with and without drivers, and be ahead of the whole world in this field.

Luo: That's a confident claim.

He: I'm absolutely confident.

Luo: And it not only owes to our supply chain, but also the whole talent pool of engineers in China. The U.S. has been talking about bringing manufacturing back for a long while, but they can't fill the current engineering talent gap.

In China, making hardware is so convenient, especially in Shenzhen. Any problems with hardware can be solved in a half-day drive in this city. Of course, auto-making is too complecated to be done in such a short period of time. But other hardwards are just a stone's throw.

He: Not just the supply chain. Take Mexico for another example. Suppose we're setting up a factory out there, what do you think is the biggest challenge? Electricity shortage.

We've been doing business in China for so many years, but electricity is something we'd never even thought about.

But in Mexico, when I was there trying to invest in a factory, people there would simply tell me "Sorry, we don't have enough electricity here, and you'll need a lot of money or pull some strings to get your factory powered."

Luo: Yeah, that's something you probably only heard about in China like decades ago.

He: At least in the 90s'. But over the past 30 years we've never heard of anything like this in China.

Yet, many countries in the world are still bothered by this issue. That's why I believe that the high-level infrastructure foundation of China, including things like stable water and electricity supply, broad roads, solid communication network, drainage system and paved lands, makes the fundamental competitiveness of China's supply chain.

China has gone far ahead than other countries in infrastructure, so I firmly beliece that China can get even stronger in the next one and two decades.

Luo: A lot of foreign companies keep talking about moving their supply chains to this or that country, but honestly it’s actually really difficult. It’s not something you can just pull off overnight. China’s well-developed supply chain is the result of decades of accumulation.

He: Yes. And I think a lot of companies that do end up moving out of China will still remain on China's supply chain, which is eventually make our global supply chain even stronger. And I'll say the whole process of transfer may take 10 to 20 years.

8. He Xiaopeng talked about his experience in developing flying cars in China

He: Developing flying cars is a tougher and longer journey, mainly because building an aircraft itself takes a really long cycle, and honestly, its commercial viability hasn’t really been proven yet.

But I’m still confident that in the next era, whether it’s in 3 years, 5 years, or maybe a bit longer, we’re gonna see a major breakthrough in the flying car industry.

Luo: So when can we expect to see your first model of flying car in the market?

He: In the second half of 2026.

Luo: Is our government supporting this sector?

He: Yes it is. China has been strongly encouraging low-altitude economy since 2023. Policymakers have released at least six or seven documents mentioning or emphasizing the development of this sector.

More interestingly, Trump has also said recently that the U.S. needs to get into the low-altitude economy game too, because of China’s influence in this space.

Luo: I've heard that the U.S. also has similar teams.

He: Yes, there are two two publicly traded companies in the U.S. working in this area. But they were originally focused more on electric versions of helicopters to tackle urban traffic issues.

The aviation policies in the U.S. is pretty open, so I believe both China and the U.S. have massive opportunities in the low-altitude economy

Luo: Could you arrange a flight for me of your model if I come to Guangzhou right now?

He: Absolutely.

Luo: How many times have you taken your low-altitude model？

He: Not much, less than 10 times. But we run test flights around 10 thousand times per month.

Luo: Is the test zone still that little test shed wrapped with cloth that you mentioned before.

He: No, in open areas.

Luo: Because of the policy shift?

He: We apply for thousands of test flights in designated areas every day.

Luo: So I can try it out anytime I come to Guangzhou?

He: Definitely OK. I suggest you come over in the first quarter of next year, because starting from this fourth quarter I’ll be personally piloting our new model. So yeah, next year is the perfect time for you to come and experience it.

Luo: You’re flying it yourself? Don’t you need full-on pilot training for this kind of aircraft? Okay, let me throw in a serious question here — throughout your whole low-altitude aircraft development, up to this point, has anyone ever lost their life during the experiments?

He: Not once. But our founder's crashed three times.

Luo: That's inevitable. But not a single casualty during the whole process?

He: Never. We’ve actually been kind of lucky. Our founder, Zhao Deli, has been building low-altitude aircraft for years. And yeah, he’s fallen out of the sky three times and even ended up in the hospital.

Luo: But honestly, without someone like him, this wouldn’t even be possible. This kind of personality is just perfect for the early stage of a startup that’s trying to make innovations.

He: So, if we really want our low-altitude aircraft to become as common as cars one day, we need to make them thousands of times safer than cars. Right now, our target is three thousand times. That means ultra-safe and totally controllable, which is already insanely hard to pull off. Of course, making flying vehicles mainstream is definitely going to take many years.

Luo: But you’ll already be commercializing and selling the very first batch of these aircraft next year.

He: Right.

Luo: I feel like buying one even just to support your idealist spirit. Your pricing isn’t going to be super expensive, right?

He: It should be around 1 million yuan.

9. He Xiaopeng's view on Chinese companies’ real vs. pretended commitment to AI

Luo: When it comes to AI, how exactly is XPeng setting itself apart from the other carmakers?

He: Honestly, I think most companies that say they are "working on AI", they’re not really serious about it.

Luo: It’s more like lip service.

He: Exactly. Like when I first got into this industry about ten years ago, everyone was saying, "Software will redefine the car." But honestly, I didn’t really see them doing anything groundbreaking with software.

And then you’d hear people saying, "Data is priceless." But most of them were simply storing the car data. So I asked, "What are you actually going to do with it?" And they’d say, "These data will be a goldmine someday."

To me, that just complete nonsense.

Luo: Are you referring to those poeple from traditional car companies?

He: To be fair, everyone makes similar mistakes, even us. For example, we've always been saying that designing and styling matters in carmaking. But then Xiaomi came out and gave the whole auto industry a pretty harsh lesson: you guys haven’t been taking designing seriously enough.

So what really matters isn't how a company talks, but what they've really done. What's matter is the time, resources, and processes a company puts in, and ultimately the results they deliver.

For example, at an AI-related conference inside the industry, I asked a room full of companies that how many of them are actually doing pre-training. Out of a few hundred entrepreneurs there, only three or four people raised their hands. That tells you everything.

Luo: So you mean, most of them are probably just doing post-training at best, or maybe not even that?

He: Honestly, I doubt they’ve even done post-training. Let me give you another example. This was a while back, when I was at a really important conference. Everyone there was talking about how amazing AI is. But then, a bunch of people came up to me and told me that they've only heard the buzzwords, but have never actually used AI themselves.

Luo: Are you talking about tech companies?

He: No, they're not.

Luo: Then you mean traditional industries. Somehow I can understand that.

He: So, when we talk about really taking AI seriously, it means actually investing in it. For example, in China, there are tons of cloud computing companies, and the top ones are massive. But if you ask around about how many of them are really building strong AI capabilities on their cloud platforms, I’d say not many at all, and you can easily prove that through their cloud services.

If you're not even applying AI in your business, how can you claim you’re taking AI seriously? That’s why, from my perspective, a lot of companies today are just paying lip service when they talk about AI.

Luo: Also in the new energy vehicle industry?

He: In this industry, among the ones working on autonomous driving, the number of companies actually using massive computing power is just a handful.

Luo: Honestly, you can tell right away if a company is really serious about AI just by looking at how many chips they’ve actually bought for AI training.

He: And the truth is, not many companies have actually bought a lot.

10. He on what really matters in EV design

Luo: How big is your industrial design team now?

He: We’re at around 400 people this year. It’s gotten pretty big.

Luo: That's a lot indeed.

He: Most of them are in Shanghai. People in the industry often say we have technology as the left hand and art as the right. The year before last, I realized that, in reality, the tech side gets hundreds of times more investment than the art side. So clearly, the two "fists" aren’t equally strong.

Luo: When you’re making mass-market products, aesthetics still matter a lot, especially with cars.

He: At the end of the year before last, we finally made up our mind to really invest big in aesthetics, and last year we made a ton of adjustments. Out of those 400 people, a lot are from overseas -- some are Chinese, but plenty are foreigners too.

Luo: You have foreign designers too?

He: Quite a lot. Our head of design is from Europe. I think we need a fusion of East and West, especially since we’re selling a global car. In China, if you’re doing hardware plus software, there are two areas that must become your long suits -- industrial design and AI capabilities. Both have to be strong.

But coupling the two is hard: most hardware companies don’t understand software, let alone AI. And AI companies don’t understand hardware, which involves so much, say design, quality, supply chain, manufacturing, and more. So excelling in both areas is really tough. You know what I mean. You’ve done it before.

Luo: Yeah, right. We’ve done a lot of industrial design. I imagine inside your company, the design team drives most of the decisions, right? Cars are huge projects, so for every model you must go through piles of drafts -- dozens, maybe even hundreds -- constantly refining.

When it comes to the final decision, who gets the say? Your head of design, you, or do you guys actually vote on it?

He: At first, I was the one making the final call. But that caused a lot of issues. If I wasn’t professional enough, or didn’t have a good eye, or only noticed a few things when a car actually has thousands of design details, it was easy to make mistakes. Now it’s more balanced, and we’ve added way more user feedback.

Another thing is we make sure there’s a product manager in charge -- someone who keeps an eye on the big picture. And on top of that, designers need real resources and authority to actually do their job. One more big change is how we handle revisions. Before, when a project started, we’d give designers a bunch of constraints and say, "Here are the rules, now design within them." Now we’ve flipped it: we start with how to make the design great first, and then adjust the constraints to fit it. With this new approach, I’m pretty confident that starting with the XPeng P7 and moving forward, our industrial design capabilities are expected to take a big leap in the next few years.

Today, I want to share with you one of my favorite stories of the year so far. Out of the roughly 300 newsletters I’ve published to date, this one has received the most likes. It tells the story of a Japanese student studying in China who spent 21 days hitchhiking from Nanjing—the capital of Jiangsu Province in eastern China, and also my hometown—all the way to Xinjiang, more than 3,000 kilometers away. Along the journey, he was picked up by 16 different drivers.

The student’s name is Tanikawa Hibiki. At the start of his journey, he set up what he called a “social experiment”: he would ask passing drivers if they were willing to give him a ride. If they said yes, he would then tell them he was Japanese—and observe whether they would still agree to take him. As he put it, the results of this “experiment” aren’t polling data or an official survey, but a reflection of the real, everyday human reactions he encountered across China.

After completing his journey earlier this year, his story was published on the WeChat blog of Bindian Weekly, run by China Youth Daily, and he was also interviewed by The Paper. What I love about this story is its authenticity. Although the number of drivers he encountered is a small sample size, and the randomness of the road plays a big role, it still reveals a side of China that even I, as a native, may not always be fully aware of.

Besides, I’ve always felt that compared to cities like Beijing and Shanghai, China’s grassroots society remains far more unfamiliar—and complex—for overseas readers. In fact, even for someone like me, who lives and works mainly in urban areas, these stories are endlessly fascinating. I often find myself learning a great deal from them—not because they offer a clear-cut picture of something “positive” or “negative,” but because they convey a certain raw, textured sense of reality. The complexity of grassroots China is also one of its most compelling qualities. As Tanikawa himself put it: “What I experienced wasn't just a hitchhiking trip, but a journey through the very fabric of a nation.”

Like Li Xiang, the Li Auto founder and CEO I highlighted in a previous post, He Xiaopeng represents a generation of entrepreneurs who first made their mark in China’s internet industry before pivoting to new energy vehicles.

Both XPeng and Li Auto belong to the group colloquially known as “Hua-Mi-Wei-Xiao-Li” — shorthand for Huawei, Xiaomi, NIO (Weilai), XPeng (Xiaopeng), and Li Auto (Li Xiang). Alongside BYD, China’s largest EV maker, these firms represent the first tier of China’s new energy vehicle players, often setting the pace for innovation and competition in the world’s fastest-growing EV market.

Given the length of Xiaopeng’s conversation with Luo, I’ve selected 10 highlights — each focusing on a different theme — and will share them across two issues.

In this first part, He Xiaopeng opens up about the ambitions that drove him as a teenager, the missteps and lessons from his earliest ventures, and what ultimately pulled him back into entrepreneurship after financial freedom. He reflects on why he chose new energy vehicles as his next frontier, how he envisions XPeng’s place in the market, and the staggering scale of R&D investment he believes an AI-driven car company must commit to. Together, these stories trace the mindset of a founder who blends bold vision with hard-earned experience.

That said, if you understand Chinese, I strongly encourage you to watch or listen to the full podcast. It’s well worth your time.

About He Xiaopeng

Prior to serving as chairman and chief executive officer of XPeng, Mr. He served at Alibaba Group Holding Limited, a public company listed on the NYSE (symbol: BABA) and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (stock code: 9988), from June 2014 to August 2017, including serving as the president of Alibaba mobile business group, chairman of Alibaba Games and president of Tudou.com. In 2004, Mr. He co-founded UCWeb Inc., a Chinese mobile internet company that provides mobile internet software technology and services, and served as the president of product from January 2005 to June 2014. In June 2014, UCWeb Inc. was acquired by Alibaba Group Holding Limited. Mr. He previously served as an independent director and a member of the audit committee of HUYA Inc., a game live streaming platform company in China listed on the NYSE (symbol: HUYA) from May 2018 to May 2020.

Mr. He received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from South China University of Technology in July 1999. Mr. He obtained the qualification certificate of senior economist (technology entrepreneur) in business administration issued by the Human Resources and Social Security Department of Guangdong Province in January 2020.

1. He Xiaopeng discussed what motivated him to set the goal of achieving financial freedom at 18, and how he chose from the four paths to it.

He: The first time I took a plane, I picked up the in-flight magazine. You know, these magazines often blend advertising with chicken soup. I read about a woman, perhaps in her late thirties, who had successfully achieved financial freedom. As an 18-year-old, her story deeply motivated me, and it planted the seed for me to work towards my own financial independence.

Luo: Was she an entrepreneur?

He: . No, she was a senior executive at a multinational corporation.

Luo: I see. Kind of like the Chinese concept of a “working emperor” for corporate professionals.

He: Yes. So I got the idea of achieving financial freedom in university, although I didn’t immediately have a clear roadmap.

Luo: But you knew working for others wasn’t the correct path to achieving it.

He: After university, I identified three paths to financial freedom. The first was winning the lottery. I admit, I did purchase a significant number of tickets.

Luo: Oh, really? I wouldn’t have guessed that people in the tech sector would buy them.

He: My very first ticket won me 500 yuan (about 70 U.S. dollars), which led me to believe I might have a knack for it. Regrettably, that initial luck didn’t persist across subsequent purchases, spanning several hundred tickets. In 1999, I graduated from university. It was around that period that I began considering acquiring a property as a second path.

Luo: China’s housing market took off at that time.

He: At that time, housing in China was extremely affordable. However, the primary obstacle was the lack of money. My third path to financial freedom was through stock options in a promising company. I was fortunate to join AsiaInfo, and within my second year there, the company went public. This meant I was one of the first individuals in China to receive stock options from a private Chinese company that achieved an IPO.

Luo: You joined AsiaInfo a bit after the initial wave, but you still made some money, right?

He: In that IPO year, I received an allocation of 1,000 shares. That was only my second year at work. The value of those shares was substantial; had I been able to sell them at that time, I could have purchased two properties in Guangzhou.

Luo: They were worth a lot, indeed.

He: Unfortunately, by the time I left AsiaInfo, the stock had fallen below its initial offering price. I remember the offering price was around 20 yuan or 24 yuan, and it was trading at 4 yuan when I left.

Luo: You would lose money when you sold your shares.

He: Exactly. As a result, I didn’t buy a house, and those shares, in a way, became a lifelong reminder of that period.

Luo: What’s the fourth path?

He Starting a business. How did I have the idea? I learned that a senior executive, two levels above me, was among the top individual taxpayers in Guangzhou. My initial thought was, “Wow, if I could reach that level of tax payment, I’d consider myself successful.” However, upon realizing he was nearly twenty years my senior, I reassessed. It occurred to me that it might take me another 20 years, and even then, there was no guarantee I could surpass him, given his significant achievements at that time. At that time, I felt that working for others wouldn’t work out for me, so I decided to pursue entrepreneurship.

Luo: Which year? Was China in the midst of the PC internet wave or approaching the mobile internet era?

He: 2002. In 2002, both China and the global internet market had just emerged from the dot-com bubble. Subsequently, around 2003 and 2004, the internet saw a resurgence, bolstered by sectors such as SP (Service Provider) and gaming. In fact, at AsiaInfo, we were involved with email and SP. We weren’t directly charging users for things like ringtones. Instead, we functioned as a payment gateway company for China Unicom, so we actually performed quite well during that period.

Luo: Once you decided to pursue entrepreneurship, how did you secure your initial funding? Typically, individuals with technical backgrounds are not as accustomed to engaging with capital or venture capitalists, especially in the early stages.

He: Well, in my very first entrepreneurial endeavor, I followed others into a startup.

Luo: What does that mean?

He: Being a follower means I had a minimal equity stake and was not required to contribute any capital. It was during my subsequent ventures, from UCWeb to XPeng, that I began actively engaging with capital and investors.

2. Luo Yonghao and He Xiaopeng talked about unforgettable experiences in He’s early entrepreneurial efforts, including missing out on precious investment opportunities after being misled and not printing his real title on his business card.

Luo: Could you share any memorable experiences you’ve encountered? For example, as a founder seeking capital from major institutions, did you ever have to deal with stakeholders who presented themselves in an overly proud or even belittling manner?

He: Looking back on those experiences now, I actually believe the issue wasn’t with them, but rather with us.

Luo: Many successful entrepreneurs do often say that in retrospect.

He: Back then, I believed I was misled regarding valuations, which led to a significant misjudgment. We had multiple investment institutions willing to invest, but we felt their proposed valuations were unfairly low. To illustrate, they might have presented another company with a valuation of 100 yuan, while offering us only 50 yuan. We couldn't accept this, as we believed our company was stronger. However, it turned out that the other company’s valuation was actually 30 yuan, and they had exaggerated it to 100 yuan.

Luo: It’s true. People tend to puff up the numbers a bit when they’re presenting their case.

He: Sadly I wasn’t aware of it. My focus was primarily on the presented figures. In the end, I declined the offers from several interested investment institutions.

Luo: You missed out on capital that could have been utilized then.

He: Yes. It was a crucial learning experience from the early stages.

Luo: I recall hearing a widely circulated story from your early days. You had titles like VP on your business cards, but not CEO. Was this indeed the case? And wouldn’t investors find it strange? Did you tell the truth when meeting them?

He: Only when they asked us.

Luo: So, when you went out to discuss business cooperation, you were all Vice Presidents, without a CEO. Didn’t you ever encounter major clients questioning you, like “Why are you all VPs? Where’s your actual CEO?” Did that kind of situation ever come up?

He: We would typically respond by saying, “We need to discuss this internally.” We did this for a good reason. At that time, our professional and social experience was still quite limited. A well-known entrepreneur — I won’t mention his name — once invited one of our founding members to dinner. He booked an entire 1000-square-meter hall for the occasion.

Luo: I can imagine. I’ve encountered similar situations myself.

He: A room of that scale isn’t typical. He’d essentially rented out a large hall, filled a table with an abundance of food, all to demonstrate his financial strength. Then, he pressured us to sign something on the spot. The danger was, if you got swept up in the moment, thinking “This person is incredibly impressive,” and signed impulsively, it could lead to significant negative consequences.

Luo: Yes.

He: That’s why, in such circumstances, making on-the-spot decisions is absolutely ill-advised.

Luo: So, using the VP title became a strategic buffer to make it legitimate for you to discuss things internally. However, when you were genuinely engaging with potential partners for actual collaboration, you would be transparent about your true situation, right?

He: Exactly. As our discussions deepened and the potential partners inquired about our organizational setup, we would readily explain our roles.

3. He Xiaopeng revealed the motivations behind his return to entrepreneurship after achieving financial freedom and his rationale for choosing the new energy vehicle sector.

Luo: The second time you started a business, did you ever consider other options than auto?

He: My initial focus was not on the auto sector, which is why the company was not originally named XPeng. I recognized the significant difficulties in shifting from the internet domain to hardware, especially large-scale hardware. The underlying logic is quite different. Within the internet ecosystem, there was a prevalent mindset fueled by stories of rapid success — companies achieving Series A funding in three years or Series B in five. This created a perception that such rapid growth would be universally attainable. Yet, building a business in hardware is a far more arduous path.

Luo: A further reason was the perception among internet entrepreneurs that they represented the vanguard of advanced productivity. This led them to view engagement with traditional industries as a simple choice: either they would succeed, or they wouldn’t even try. There was a strong conviction that if they did decide to enter these established fields, they would undoubtedly excel. This was a prevalent attitude in the industry years ago.

He: Precisely. When I fully committed to XPeng, I brought in someone from my previous tech sector to guide our auto team on the process of car manufacturing. Frankly, I was taken aback, as he had no prior experience in manufacturing cars. His approach was remarkably straightforward: he brought in a Maserati, parked it at the company, and instructed our auto team leads to replicate it, stating, “Just make it like this. You don’t need to achieve the exact same level.”

Luo: Interesting.

He: Tell me about it.

Luo: Then sell the product at a price one third or one fifth that of a Maserati.

He: He expressed this with an unfounded confidence, a trait common among many in the tech industry then, without truly understanding the practical steps required. This meant that entrepreneurs from the internet background had to essentially grow and acquire new competencies to succeed in hardware development.

Luo: This is a pertinent point when it comes to emerging and traditional sectors. The rise of e-commerce led many to believe that traditional retail was destined for demise. However, the market demonstrated that certain aspects of the retail experience are inherently challenging to digitize, even as e-commerce continues to expand its reach.

He: In reality, for everyone, the most challenging aspect of resilience isn’t about mustering courage and uniting a team to press forward during adversity. Instead, it’s about making sound decisions and avoiding impulsive expansion during periods of extreme success, maintaining a controlled pace. It’s unfortunate, but many businesses ultimately collapse due to these very factors.

Luo: From a human nature perspective, achieving that level of control is indeed exceptionally difficult.

He: Too difficult.

Luo: You started out as an investor in the auto sector. At what point did you make the decision to personally lead a venture? Was it a realization that a promising company you’d invested in was stagnating, prompting you to take the helm yourself, or was it more of a growing passion for building your own business that emerged organically during that period?

He: There were two reasons. In 2013, I recognized that intelligent automobiles were the future. The following year, I established a team and told them that I'd invest as much as they need as long as they were willing to put effort into this sector. Around 2016, my own aspiration to lead a venture finally emerged.

A significant moment occurred when I was discussing the future of the internet industry with a close friend. As he was leaving, he told me that my eyes truly lit up when we spoke about cars. He said that my interest in other topics seemed relatively average, but was uniquely enthusiastic when talking about cars.

Luo: So, in a sense, your friend’s words led you to the auto sector.

He: His words had a profound impact on me because my initial inclination was that I shouldn’t pursue the auto industry. But after that conversation, I began to question whether I genuinely possessed a deep-seated passion for cars that I was perhaps unconsciously resisting.

The birth of my child in 2017 served as another significant catalyst, and prompted me to reevaluate whether to start a new entrepreneurial journey. Around the same time, I received a call from Fu Jixun, a senior managing partner at Granite Asia. He said to me in the phine that he believed the convergence of auto and AI is about to come, and that if I didn’t seize this opportunity soon, the window for this sector would close gradually. He strongly recommended that I step out and build my own company, which once again spurred my consideration of founding an car company.

Following those conversations, I spoke with numerous friends. Many, as you’ve touched upon, had taken long breaks of two to three years after achieving significant financial success. I asked about their future plans on their lives and careers. Upon hearing their words, I became more sure that I'm not the type for professional investing, not the type for living a life of pure leisure and indulgence, or even going for emigration. Ultimately, I made the decision to start up a business once more. While I had several viable options, I deliberately chose the most challenging one: the auto sector, which I viewed as a significantly more demanding undertaking than my previous ventures — perhaps a “200%” difficulty compared to a “100%” baseline.

Luo: Absolutely.

He: My thought was that if I was going to undertake entrepreneurship again, I might as well select a path that presented a greater challenge. So the idea of starting a second business came gradually.

Luo: Furthermore, you were young enough to afford to fight for another one decade or two decades. And importantly, at that time, you were still young enough to commit to a decade or two of focused effort without feeling overly burdened.

He: Not as young as one might think. I was already in my forties.

Luo: When I founded my mobile phone company, I was also 40 years old. Looking back, I was a late bloomer; in my youth, I was more of a literary type. While I had a strong affinity for technology, I never considered pursuing it professionally. By the time I had the idea, I was already approaching 40.

He: I consider that fortunate. You were a literary enthusiast, whereas in our youth, we were more like impetuous youths, which is even more unfortunate.

Luo: Even that, you were one with a background in science and engineering, which means you already possessed an inherent alignment with this industry.

Do you remember your first time driving a Tesla? What was that experience like?

He: For me, the most memorable moment was the actual delivery of Tesla in China. I was among the first owners, though not within the absolute first ten. What impressed me most was how someone coming from outside the traditional auto industry could make such a better car. I was driving a Land Rover at the time, and then transitioning to a Tesla came as a revelation. It felt like a sports car — remarkably fast, incredibly quiet, and featuring a large screen. Previously, I rarely listened to music in my car, primarily because the engine in higher-displacement vehicles was noisy, making it difficult to enjoy audio. However, driving the Tesla, I discovered that listening to music in an electric vehicle could be a truly delightful experience. It fundamentally changed my perception, showing me that creating an excellent car was entirely achievable for those without auto manufacturing experience.

4. He Xiaopeng's brand positioning of XPeng

Luo: So who exactly is XPeng’s target audience? And what feature does XPeng stand for?

He: We went through a lot of detours in defining our brand. In the very beginning, we gave ourselves a really simple definition: we wanted to be a tech company, a company with real technology DNA. But the truth is, as a car brand, we didn’t specify our brand positioning enough. You can stack up all the technology you want, but in the end, it’s still just technology. What really matters is how people see you.

Eventually, the image of our brand comes down to two words: technology and fashion.

In China, our customer base is rather younger. When we first started, most XPeng buyers fell within the 150,000 to 300,000 RMB annual income bracket—young customers who love technology and also care about fashion. And even though we wavered a bit on brand positioning along the way, we’ve managed to hold on firmly to this group of users.

5. He Xiaopeng explained how much R&D investment an AI-driven car company needs in a single year

Luo: In one of your interviews, you mentioned that for a car company to truly lead in AI, its annual R&D expenditure has to reach at least 50 billion yuan (about 7 billion U.S. dollars). I wasn’t totally sure what you meant by that. Are we talking about being ahead across the board, or just leading in one or two key metrics? And the other thing is—if we’re really saying 50 billion every year, where does that money even come from?

He: AI has really become a massive trend today. But for small and micro enterprises, this AI game is kind of unfair to them.

Back in the mobile internet age, the bar to start a business was way lower. An internet startup could survive for years with only a couple million RMB. But now, if you put that same amount into AI, maybe you’ll get somewhere if you’ve managed to nail a very sharp niche, but for most companies though, you can hardly get anywhere.

Luo: Maybe a little chance in vertical AI. But for foundation models? Don’t even think about it.

He: For them, building the infra (infrastructure) is already hard enough, let alone a complete foundation model.

Looking at ourselves, we've actually made a lot of choices about what not to do. For example, we’re not touching digital foundation models. Instead, we’re all-in on the physical world—things like autonomous driving, vehicle VLM (Vision Language Models) which is basically a car’s brain, and robotics. The physical world is where our focus is.

Now, out of the 50 billion yuan R&D budget, I’d say maybe 30 billion goes into AI, and the other 20 billion into hardware and other software. Put that together, and honestly, I already think that’s only a very baisc number. Because if we really want to build foundation models, infrastructure, and applications for the physical world, for me, 50 billion is already a conservative figure.

So why would people say that in the future, only big carmakers can survive? Well, if you want to put 50 billion yuan into R&D every year, you need at least 500 billion in annual revenue, because your R&D budget has to stay around 10 percent.

Tesla only spends less than 5 percent of its revenue in R&D, but most tech companies would spend somewhere between 7 percent to 12 percent. So if you take the middle, that's around 10%.

Having 500 billion yuan in revenue is not unusual among Chinese automakers. Many companies would claim that they're making 300 billion to even 800 billion. But what they’re really talking about is what I describe as "gross weight". It’s mostly the revenue from their joint ventures, and they count that as their own. In my view, that doesn’t really count. What truly matters is the part you actually own, and I compare that as "net weight". If you set the bar at 500 billion of "net weight", there are very few Chinese automakers that can really get there.

And even then, you also have to make sure that your business can make solid profit. Some companies might be able to achieve a shiny sales volume, but their cars only sell for 60,000 or 70,000 yuan each, which leaves them just about 1,000 yuan in gross profit per unit, and sometimes the net profit is negative. That’s basically like selling iron by weight.

Luo: Yeah… it’s basically hell.

He: So this business is not for me.

Luo: How much did XPeng earn last year?

He: Over 40 billion.

Luo: So you’d need to hit four to five hundred billion before you can make sure you’re putting 50 billion a year into R&D.

He: At least. We don’t have this year's number yet, but we've already sold more cars in the first half than the last entire year.

In the next piece, He Xiaopeng looks ahead — offering his take on the future of China’s EV market, his perspective on industrial design, and how autonomous driving may evolve differently in China and abroad. He also talks about venturing into low-altitude aircraft and shares candid views on which Chinese companies are truly committed to AI and which are merely paying lip service. Stay tuned for part two.

Both companies belong to the group colloquially known as “Hua-Mi-Wei-Xiao-Li” — shorthand for Huawei, Xiaomi, NIO (Weilai), XPeng (Xiaopeng), and Li Auto (Li Xiang). Alongside BYD, China’s largest EV maker, these firms represent the first tier of China’s new energy vehicle players, often setting the pace for innovation and competition in the world’s fastest-growing EV market. For background on the rise of China’s podcasting scene and how it compares with the U.S. Ecosystem, Zichen Wang has an insightful write-up at Pekingnology.

Li and He were already accomplished entrepreneurs before venturing into EVs. Yet rather than resting on their earlier successes, they chose to take on the challenge of what has become one of the fiercest business battlegrounds anywhere: China’s electric vehicle industry. Years later, both have secured their own place in this intensely competitive market.

In this edition, I’ve selected 11 highlights from Li Xiang’s marathon conversation with Luo Yonghao, translated them into English and shared them here. Each excerpt explores a different theme.

I’ve long believed that the stories and experiences of Chinese entrepreneurs remain underappreciated in the global business community. They deserve more recognition for at least two reasons.

First, while supportive government policies helped fuel China’s EV boom, the entrepreneurial drive of leaders like Li and He has been just as critical. Listen closely to their conversations and you’ll notice how familiar they are with the legends of Silicon Valley — from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk — yet their ability to adapt to China’s uniquely unforgiving market is remarkable, and worth documenting.

Second, these entrepreneurs — or the products they build — are increasingly likely to show up in your daily life. Whether in the form of cars, robots, or even low-altitude aircraft in the coming decade, their creations will be central to the next wave of global business and tech headlines. Knowing the people and ideas behind them offers a richer perspective than simply recognizing them as “brands from China.”

About Luo Yonghao

Luo, 53, is a man of many hats. He first gained fame in China as an English teacher with a sharp sense of humor, known for his engaging stage presence. He later ventured into the world of entrepreneurship, founding Smartisan Technology, a smartphone company. However, his path to success has been far from smooth. He’s faced significant financial struggles and has publicly shared his debts, which once reached over a billion yuan. Despite these setbacks, Luo’s resilience and candidness have kept him in the public eye.

About Li Xiang

Li, a Millennial, instead of taking China's national college entrance exam, decided to drop out of school at 18 and pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. He founded Li Auto, which went public on the Nasdaq in 2020. Under his leadership, the company has become a major player in China’s EV market.

In their four-hour conversation, Luo and Li, who come from different generations, shared their entrepreneurial journeys and discussed the rapid evolution of China’s tech and automotive industries.

Part 1

Li's First PC and the Early Signs of an Entrepreneurial Mind

Li reveals how his father’s willingness to invest in his first PC sparked his tech journey, while his mother’s tough-love financial lessons taught him the value of money from an early age. Despite not growing up in a business-savvy family, Li’s natural entrepreneurial instincts shone at a young age. (07:01-11:38)

Luo: Let me start by asking about your first PC. I remember reading in the media that your father spent 8,000 yuan (about 1,100 U.S. dollars), which was quite a sum back then, to buy it for you. The story goes that you kept begging him until he finally gave in and bought it for you. Is that true?

Li: Yes, it was when I graduated from junior high. That’s when he bought the computer for me.

Luo: How much was your father earning per month at that time?

Li: At that time, my father had started going out to film [Editor's note: Li's father was a director]. I estimate that our family had around 20 to 30 thousand yuan in savings, so he probably spent about a third of that to buy the computer.

Luo: That’s quite a big deal.

Li: My father was very interesting.

Luo: Was it because he was open-minded and understood these trends, or was it because he spoiled you? Are you an only child?

Li: I’m an only child. Later, I realized that my father was truly exceptional. He never put conditions on me, and I now do the same with my kids. My relationship with them is great too. He believed that when you should have something, he would just give it to you. For example, I was the first one in our neighborhood to own an FC, the Nintendo game console.

Luo: We used to have to go to those old, rundown arcades, where you’d pay by the hour just to play.

Li: Yes, he was in Beijing filming, and he saw how popular it was in the Drum Tower area. He bought one for me and brought it back.

Luo: Was he worried that it would affect your studies?

Li: Not at all. It was quite interesting—completely different from what you might expect. He made an agreement with me that I could play every day, but only for a certain amount of time. Once the time was up, I had to stop.

Luo: So, he actually discussed this with you, right? It wasn’t an authoritarian thing? Li: Exactly, and he didn’t set a strict number for the hours. For example, I decided to play two hours every day at lunchtime, and he let me play for exactly two hours. Kids in our neighborhood would come over to our place to play.

Luo: You really had a lucky family, because Asian parents are rarely like this, especially in those days.

Li: Yes, and I could really stick to it. I would stop playing after two hours. In fact, later, I even told him that I didn’t need to play for two hours and would be fine with just one and a half hours.

Luo: So, his respect and trust in you was also linked to your own behavior. Because many kids would say they’d play for two hours, but end up playing for four, and their parents would certainly stop them after that.

Li: Exactly, but he made me stick to it. It was a long enough period. Since we had to go home during lunchtime back then, it meant I could play until lunch was over, but if I played for too long, I wouldn’t be able to attend class in the afternoon.

Luo: Back then, playing Nintendo was so addictive that kids would skip school just to play. You must have had a strong sense of discipline from a young age, right?

Li: I think it was because I had this kind of approach that I developed discipline.

Luo: So you’re saying it was the way your father communicated with you—mutual respect?

Li: Yes, I think that was really important.

Luo: That was actually quite rare in Chinese families of that era.

Li: In our neighborhood, my parents were the only ones who went to university.

Luo: Their views were relatively ahead of their time compared to the wider social environment.

Li:Yes.

Luo: I see. You mentioned that getting the PC for 8,000 yuan was a smooth process. Did you have to explain a lot to your father, or was he immediately on board?

Li: It was a smooth process, no difficulty at all. My mom had a different way of dealing with things, which I found especially important later on. My mom was very different from other parents. From elementary school, she gave me an allowance on a monthly basis. Most kids got a daily allowance of one yuan, but I got 30 yuan per month. She told me I could spend it however I wanted, but once it was gone, I couldn’t ask her for more. So, in the first month, I spent all 30 yuan in just three days. I went to my mom asking for more, but she didn’t give me any for the rest of the month. From then on, I learned how to manage money. Eventually, I even saved up for a few months and spent over 100 yuan to buy a game card I wanted. It also led to me starting to make money when I entered junior high school because I realized this was quite interesting.

Luo: She subtly instilled basic financial management concepts in you.

Li: Yes, I started making money in junior high by buying comic books. We noticed that the comic books that cost 1.9 yuan were available at wholesale markets for 1.2 yuan, so I bought them in bulk and sold them to my classmates for 1.5 or 1.6 yuan each.

Luo: So, you had a strong sense of business from a very early age.

Li: It wasn’t something I deliberately pursued.

Luo: I know, I know. It might have been something you were born with, or maybe it was your parents’ early education and communication that helped you naturally develop that sense.

Li:You’ll notice that my classmates didn’t have that awareness at all. They just didn’t get it.

Luo: I didn’t have that business sense even at 30 years old. I’ve read many biographies of entrepreneurs, and many of them showed this kind of awareness from an early age, whether it was inborn or guided by their parents.

Li: But my parents didn’t have any special talent for business.

Luo: I think maybe it was their healthy communication style with you that had a subtle, positive influence. You were really quite lucky. We’ve all read Elon Musk’s biography. When he was a kid, he was already showing remarkable intelligence with computers. He once went to a lecture by a university professor, and after the lecture, he stayed up late discussing things with the professor. When his dad came to pick him up, he thought something was wrong, but the professor told him, “You really need to buy him a computer, or you’ll regret it.” After some hesitation, his dad bought him one. But you were luckier than him because your father made the decision on his own.

I still think I was quite lucky growing up. But looking back, I think the environment you grew up in was even better than mine. I had a good foundation in reading, but in other ways, my parents still had a lot of outdated ideas. I ended up seeing a psychiatrist. It was really quite fortunate.

Part 2

From Being Mocked to Mastery

Li Xiang recalls his childhood ambition of becoming a "General Manager," a dream that was met with mockery by classmates and family. However, his path was shaped by external validation, particularly after he got his first computer, which led to a summer of hands-on learning and earning. (14:46-18:30)

Luo: You immediately had this feeling when you first touched a computer, right?

Li: Yes.

Luo: When you were young, you didn’t necessarily think you were smarter than your peers, but did you ever feel like you had some kind of innate sense of purpose? Not necessarily something you’d share with your classmates, maybe out of shyness or because you didn’t want to make them uncomfortable, but did you ever feel like you were meant to do big things?

Li: When I was a child, there was one thing. It was probably when I was in elementary school. Back then, there was a subject called moral education. The teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, and I said I wanted to be a general manager. Luo: At that time, that was the biggest title. Later, it became CEO, Chairman, Board Chairman—these titles just kept getting bigger.

Li: At that time, being a general manager was the biggest.

Luo: Yes, yes. When we were young, the title of "general manager" was a very prestigious one.

Li: At that time, my classmates would mock me for it. Definitely, because everyone else wanted to be a soldier, a scientist, or a doctor.

Luo: What year was that? Was individual entrepreneurship already common by then? Li: It should have been the early 1990s.

Luo: I remember you were born in '82?

Li: I was born in '81. Anyway, it was around the 90s.

Luo: Yes, actually, in those days, the idea of becoming a general manager would definitely seem strange in the eyes of teachers and students.

Li: But in reality, I didn’t just have this idea because of some innate desire. My decisions and choices were always based on real external feedback, not like when we were kids, where I was born with such a purpose.

Luo: When I was young, it was probably even worse for me than for you. I grew up in a very backward area. You were in Shijiazhuang, right?

Li: Yes, Shijiazhuang city.

Luo: That’s still a big city. I grew up in the mountains of Northeast China. So, when I tried to talk about my ambitions, I was ruthlessly mocked. It wasn’t the classmates or teachers directly attacking me, but the teachers would smile in a strange way. They wouldn’t say anything cruel, but they clearly didn’t think much of it. And the classmates would always give me these weird smiles. The most discouraging part came from my older brother. He said, “You’re clearly a fool, why do you have all these unrealistic ideas?” I asked him, “How am I a fool?” And he said, “We’re all fools, why can’t you see that?” He kept telling me that, but I always felt like I could do something big. That feeling was severely discouraged when I was young, even though my parents didn’t criticize me, they also didn’t encourage me. They thought I was just daydreaming. So, you didn’t have a strong feeling of that kind, and didn’t suffer from this kind of discouragement when you were young.

Li: I was kind of like undergoing intensive training. I always relied on external feedback to build different changes. The first time I felt like I was the best was when I got the top score in an essay contest, even though my grades were generally poor.

Luo: Just the essay?

Li: But the real, stable cycle started after I got the computer, especially that summer before high school. That summer before high school, I completely changed into a different person.

Luo: Because of the computer?

Li:Because before, my computer knowledge was already solid. My computer knowledge was quite strong.

Luo: Just not enough hands-on practice.

Li: But it didn’t take long. Within a day, I had solved most of it.

Luo: I get it, I meant that when you had solid theoretical knowledge but very limited time in the computer lab.

Li: Yes, I had essentially created a really solid base model through pre-training. From then on, my reasoning and thinking process improved significantly.

Luo: You really built a strong foundation.

Li: The most important first feedback I got was from the store where I bought the computer. It was originally a small shop in a street with low traffic. Later, it moved to a large computer mall and did really well because the computers were all DIY, with custom configurations. When I got home, I took the computer apart and rebuilt it. Later, I did something else: I helped that shop assemble computers at the computer mall. The business was booming, and they didn’t have enough staff. I was good at talking, so when I recommended the configurations to others, they trusted me a lot.

Luo: You have a face that inspires trust, so you definitely had an advantage in selling computers.

Li: At that time, I was particularly impressed. I had worked with Intel CPUs, Asus motherboards, and Philips monitors. I’d played with all of them. When a computer was sold, I would explain the price and configuration to the customers. If they needed hardware that the store didn’t have, I would go to other shops to find it and then come back to assemble the computer. Each computer sold earned me 800 to 1,000 yuan, and I would get a commission of 150 to 200 yuan per computer assembled. It was great feedback. During that entire summer, I assembled the most and sold the most, making our store number one in sales at the computer mall. When I started high school, everyone at the school knew that if they wanted a computer assembled, they should come to me. Even writing articles, it wasn’t something I just did casually; I learned from user feedback.

Part 3

The Power of Standing Up

Li recalls his difficult childhood, being bullied after moving to a new city and feeling inferior due to his accent, appearance, and background. It wasn’t until his mother urged him to fight back that he stood up to the bullies, gaining confidence and respect from his peers. (29:08-33:11)

Luo: It all sounds so lucky. Tell me about your childhood trauma, the setbacks and frustrations in your teenage years, maybe even a first love heartbreak. You seem to have had it so easy—did you really not face any setbacks before you turned 18?

Li: When I first moved back to Shijiazhuang, all the kids in the neighborhood bullied me. Luo: Because you had just moved there?

Li: I had a heavy accent from rural Cangzhou. Luo: So they mocked you.

Li: Yeah, kids are like that. When I first joined the school, I was an “insert student,” so I sat at the side of the teacher's desk, not at a regular desk. It was really tough for a while, and the other kids would bully me. The older kids, too. Most of the scars on my face are from when they scratched me in elementary school. They hit me so hard that they scratched my face to pieces. When you're in a new environment, you don't dare to fight back.

Luo: I also got bullied when I transferred schools, but it wasn’t to the point of getting my face scratched off.

Li: Yeah, they were so mean, kids can be unbelievably cruel. When I look at things like school bullying today, we all went through it back then.

Luo: Back then, calling the police didn’t help, unlike now. These days, if you call the police, the parents end up paying.

Li: My mom told me, "You can only fight back yourself."

Luo: Your parents raised you like that, so you had no choice but to follow it. It’s kind of amazing.

Li: My mom said, "You have to fight back, there’s no other way." I was from Cangzhou, Mengcun County. When I was little, I practiced Bajiquan, so I was actually quite good at fighting. Luo: A famous martial arts region. Li: Yes, and my older brother was a martial arts master, so the whole neighborhood of students practiced with him.

Luo: So why didn’t you resist at first? Li: When you enter a new environment, you actually feel a sense of inferiority. They all spoke Mandarin, but when I spoke, they couldn’t understand me. Luo: And they mocked you. Li: At the time, I was really dark from the sun, from my hometown.

Luo: Maybe you had some countryside redness, too. Li: And my teeth were yellow because the water in Cangzhou had a lot of alkali. You feel like you don’t belong there. Luo: You lacked confidence, so when they hit you, you didn’t fight back. Li: After my mom said that, a few months later, I told her, "They keep bullying me and hitting me. Look at what they’ve done to my face!" She said, “You have to fight back." So I started fighting back. I first hit the biggest one, the one who was two years older than me. After that, my mom said, “You can't bully others.”

Luo: When I was young, I remember always being beaten up. In the second semester of my first year of junior high, I got so angry that I ended up fighting back. As they say, even a rabbit will bite when it’s cornered. I wasn’t the kind of kid who bullied others or fought, but when I was pushed too far, I fought back, and I realized something. There were local thugs who used to come to our school to bully us. After I fought back, they started trying to get on my good side. I quickly understood that when they bully you, they’re calculating the risks and costs. If you’re an easy target, they’ll keep bullying you, but once you fight back, even if you get beaten badly like I did, it’s worth it. They know you’ll resist, and they’ll stop bullying you. After that, when the thugs came around the school, the younger kids started calling me “bro,” and the local tough guys, hearing about how I fought back, came over to befriend me. So, one act of resistance worked. Later, when I started teaching, I would tell my students: if you’re bullied, just resist once and it’ll be over.

Li: You’re right. And another thing is, when I first didn’t tell my mom about it, I was worried that if I fought back, the other kids would start avoiding me. But after I fought back, they actually all started becoming friends with me. I became the "king" of the neighborhood kids. Luo: The more you tolerate, the worse they get.

Li: It got worse and worse.

Luo: So when I later talked to my students, I often told them: whether it's school bullying or when you grow up and face bullying in society, you have to fight back fiercely once. I even see it as a rite of passage. Some people are still timid well into their 30s, always getting bullied. I think this is a matter of fate. Some kids, no matter their upbringing or natural instincts, just keep tolerating it.

Li: I was worried that if I fought back, the other kids would isolate me. But I found out that after I fought back, they all started getting close to me. I became the "king" of the neighborhood kids.

Part 4

The Idols Who Shaped Li

Li shares how his admiration for Shigeru Miyamoto and Steve Jobs evolved over time, with Miyamoto inspiring his youth through Nintendo and Jobs shaping his views on design and leadership. Li also shared his love for Toy Story, the Pixar movie. (55:16-1:01:07)

Luo: So, you didn’t start AutoHome because you liked cars, but in fact, you do really like cars.

Li: At first, I didn’t like cars at all. How much did I dislike them? When we were doing the auto website, Fan Zheng had suggested it early on. He was a car enthusiast, and every year we would go to the car show in Beijing. He was always so excited. During the car show, all he would do is look at cars—it was like a holiday for him. I found it super boring and asked, “Why do you guys love this stuff so much?” It wasn’t until 2003, after their advice, that I bought my first car. By then, I had money and didn’t have to worry about fast development. It was just a small business, but I was making money, so I bought my first car, and that’s when I gradually started liking cars.

Luo: So, you began to like cars while working at AutoHome?

Li: Yes, I bought a car first, learned about them, and then started really liking them after deciding to work on AutoHome.

Luo: In the whole process, from thinking about entrepreneurship to actually starting your business, and up until now, did you have any commercial or technological idols or heroes? Back in the day, we all read Bill Gates' The Road Ahead?

Li: I’ve always had two idols. One is Shigeru Miyamoto. I really like Nintendo, and all the games he created.

Luo: Nintendo is such a dreamy company, almost unreal.

Li: Yes, it’s a very unusual company.

Luo: It’s amazing, truly magical.

Li: When I was younger, I always liked Miyamoto. Back then, I bought every Nintendo console. All those game books used to talk about him.

Luo: In my era, all the Nintendo cartridges were pirated. The machines were often knockoffs, so I never used the originals. I didn’t even know what the real ones were like—I just knew they came from a Japanese game company, and the pirated ones had Japanese writing on them. My family finally bought me one when the Famicom had already been around for many years, and by then it was cheap. I didn’t know whether the cartridges were original or pirated—I just bought whatever was available. Later, I realized most of them were pirated. Occasionally I’d get an authentic one, and it felt unreal—it was so beautifully made.

Pirated versions were always “100-in-1” or “200-in-1.” I grew up feeling like we all owed Stephen Chow a movie ticket. I feel the same about my childhood joy—it was all built on pirated games. Later, when I bought a Switch, it was the first time I ever created a Nintendo account. I’ve had it for years now but have probably played less than 10 hours in total. Every time I think about it, I just leave it there. I keep feeling like I owe Miyamoto something.

Li: Yes, Miyamoto was my idol when I was young. Later, as I grew up, it was really Steve Jobs.

Luo: When did you start thinking Jobs was really impressive? Was it with the iPod? Or earlier?

Li: I think it was when the iPod came out.

Luo: Because, after he was kicked out of Apple, for many years he was seen as a joke in Silicon Valley. I found him strange back then. I didn’t know much about him. But when I bought my first iPod, I was shocked. At that time, it wasn’t officially introduced, so it was sold through gray-market dealers at ridiculously high prices. When I first bought it, it was all about the industrial design. It was so beautiful, like a sci-fi product. I plugged it into my computer, transferred some songs, and was amazed. I thought, how could something be this easy to use? It was a thousand times more convenient than playing songs on a computer.

Li: I had bought a Mac earlier, but didn’t feel much about it.

Luo: Back then, Macs had serious compatibility issues and a lack of software ecosystem.

Li: Yes, after buying a Mac, we still had to buy software to install a virtual Windows.

Luo: Did Macs get better to use, or was it more about the iPod that brought in more developers?

Li: Yes, exactly. There’s something else that really influenced me. My favorite movie of all time is Toy Story, and I didn’t realize until later that it was made by his company.

Luo: He was the major shareholder of Pixar.

Li: I really love Toy Story. I felt like I was the cowboy in it. It was just an amazing feeling. Later on, I would watch every Pixar movie with great attention.

Luo: So, your business idols in life, or in terms of products and technology, are Steve Jobs and Shigeru Miyamoto?

Li: Yes, and in addition to watching various videos and analyzing Jobs, I’ve also studied Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive’s interactions. Many times, I feel like what’s written about Jobs isn’t exactly who he was, but when you look at the collaboration between him, Tim Cook, and Jonathan, you get a more authentic picture.

Luo: What exactly do you mean by that?

Li: People often point to the early, rough side of Jobs as an example. But when you look at what Jonathan Ive talks about, you realize that it’s not about being rough or simple; it’s about high expectations that come after trust is built. The problem is, many of us when we were young misunderstood it as just being harsh. But it wasn’t like that. It was about trust first, then high demands. The attitude was a result of those high expectations. If trust isn’t built first, it’s just plain harshness. That’s the fundamental difference.

Luo: Because there is trust, everyone holds themselves to a high standard. If the standard is not met, then people argue. But if there’s no foundation of trust, it only makes things worse.

Li: And he spent a lot of time building that trust, which I think is very important, but many people overlook it. Without trust, things will go wrong.

Part 5

Li Auto's Fundraising Turning Point

Li’s journey through a near-financial collapse took a dramatic turn when, after exhausting all options, the major food delivery and e-commerce platform Meituan’s CEO offered a lifeline. His timely investment changed Li Auto’s trajectory, marking a pivotal moment in the company’s survival and success. (1:37:29-1:45:28)

Luo: So, was your most serious funding issue before or after the release of the Li One?

Li: It was in early 2019.

Luo: When exactly was the release?

Li: We released the Li One in October 2018.

Luo: So, by the time you were ready to mass-produce, you didn’t have enough funding?

Li: Yes, we were facing two major problems. First, Tesla's market value had dropped to just 30 billion dollars, and they were even considering buying back their own company. Everyone was shorting Tesla. The second problem was that NIO had performed well, but after their IPO, their stock price dropped below the issue price—from around 6 or 7 dollars to just over 1 dollar. And this was exactly when we needed to raise funds.

Luo: But at that time, no one wanted to invest.

Li: Exactly. We met with 150 investors, and to make sure we were presenting ourselves well, we even hired Goldman Sachs as our FA. It was an incredibly difficult period. To make matters worse, I was really sick—it was the worst I’d ever been. I pretended to be fine when meeting investors, but afterward, I had to rest for a long time.

Luo: So you were sick throughout the entire fundraising process?

Li: Yes, I vividly remember it. In the end, we couldn't raise the money we needed. It was our Series C round. The biggest investor in our Series B round was Zhang Ying from Matrix Partners. Zhang told us that they couldn't provide the amount of money we needed in the next round because they were a VC, not a PE. So he called us to his office, along with Goldman Sachs' China GM, and after analyzing the situation, they said there was nothing they could do. Then Zhang asked, “How much money do you have left?” I said, “I’ve put everything I have into this, even the money I earned earlier.”

Luo: At that point, you had already invested all your personal money?

Li: Yes, I invested all the money I had earned earlier—basically, I had nothing left. But I felt secure because my shares were bought with my own money, on equal terms.

Luo: What about your early partners? Did they do the same?

Li: They bought half and got half in options. They didn’t have original shares, and I didn’t either.

Luo: So Zhang Ying told you there was no way to raise the money. What did he suggest you do next?

Li: He suggested I go and visit some wealthy friends to see if there was any last chance.

Luo: I’m curious, what happened during those meetings? Tell me some gossip, just don’t mention names. Any interesting stories? We can’t be too serious on this show.

Li: Sure. One of our biggest partners, who we had worked with the most, ended up rejecting us.

Luo: Was it the boss of your business partner?

Li: Yes, he was an important partner, and he eventually rejected us. I also met with Zhang Yiming. They decided to invest, but only 30 million dollars. At that time, we needed several hundred million dollars, but he still recognized our potential and made that investment. However, ByteDance wasn’t as big as it is now.

Luo: I’m curious, what happened during the rejection?

Li: At that point, I was truly desperate. I had already accepted that only a "lucky break" could save us.

Luo: So, was this the biggest "lucky break" in your entrepreneurial journey?

Li: Yes, absolutely. And why was I so desperate? Because at that time, Meituan's stock price had also dropped significantly, even below the issue price. Things were tough for them too.

Luo: They were also struggling.

Li: Yes, they were. So I tried my best to explain to Wang Xing the value we could offer him, especially how we could help if they decided to enter the ride-hailing market.

Luo: Did they have plans to enter the ride-hailing market at that time?

Li: We didn't really think that far ahead, but I was trying to show them how we could provide value, even if it meant helping with logistics or EV production lines. I just wanted to get a foot in the door.

Luo: Where did this meeting take place?

Li: It was at the Hyatt Hotel. It was during the pandemic, so we couldn't go to many places, but I still met him there.

Luo: You didn’t ask for an investment, right? You just wanted to chat with him?

Li: Exactly. I didn’t ask for any investment at that time. We were just talking about potential collaborations. But then, out of nowhere, he asked me, "Can I invest in your company?" I was shocked.

Luo: When was this? How long after you rejected his investment?

Li: It was just a year later, in 2019.

Luo: At that time, how much funding did you need? A few billion yuan?

Li: We were trying to raise 300 million dollars.

Luo: So, that’s around 2 billion yuan, right?

Li: Yes, and he ended up investing 300 million dollars in us.

Luo: Seems like there were a lot of internal disagreements within Meituan about this investment, right?

Li: Yes, there were many people who didn’t want him to invest in us, because they had already invested in other competitors. Some had invested in Weima, others in NIO, and some in Xpeng. So there was a lot of persuasion to try to stop him from investing in us.

Luo: Do you think your fundraising ability ranks high, medium, or low among the top entrepreneurs?

Li: I would say I’m at the bottom, really at the underground level. The reason we were able to raise funds earlier was because I personally invested the same amount at the same valuation, so I was taking the same risk.

Luo: So, when the whole world was pessimistic about your company, it became even harder to raise funds, right?

Li: Exactly. The more pressure I faced, the more I moved forward. When there’s no pressure, I tend to take a step back. But when the pressure is high, I instinctively move forward.

Luo: And that pressure, once you survive it, can turn into a huge turning point, right?

Li: Exactly. When you face adversity, sometimes you have no choice but to push forward. But when you get through it, the breakthrough can be life-changing.

Part 6

China’s EV Revolution

Luo discusses China’s transformation from envy of foreign cars to leading the global electric vehicle market. Li credits strong manufacturing, a flexible talent pool, and government support for this rapid rise. (01:53:51-01:57:57)

Luo: You know, for people like us, at least people from my generation, the cars we envied the most when we were young were the foreign luxury cars on the streets—especially the really impressive ones. Then, when I first went abroad, I saw those cars on the streets and we envied them so much because of the high tariffs in China. I remember hearing from friends who studied or worked abroad about how much their cars cost, and we were so envious we could hardly stand it. Little did we know, in just over a decade, China’s new energy vehicles have become so impressive. Now, when I go to the U.S. on business trips, the streets are still filled with what they call the "best" cars in their market. But when my Chinese friends see those cars, they suddenly remark, “We used to envy these cars when we were young, but now, not even many years later, when we see all these foreign cars, all we think of is ‘foreign junk.’”

Honestly, every time I think about this, I get really excited. The moment I felt the most excitement was last year at the car show. It was all over the internet, and several big names were there, creating countless headlines. At that time, I thought to myself, how could Chinese cars become this impressive in less than ten years? I was so excited. So I wonder, with the full opportunities given to us, how many more miracles can Chinese entrepreneurs create?

Li: There are actually several important factors behind this. I think the first one is that China’s manufacturing base is actually very solid.

Luo: It’s already solid enough to be number one globally.

Li: Exactly. Even the equipment we use today is mostly made by Chinese companies. For example, the stamping machines—everything is made very well. The second factor is that people from all industries in China are willing to enter new fields. For example, people from the tech industry are now getting into car manufacturing. But in the U.S., only Elon Musk is willing to take on this hard work. Others tend to stay in Silicon Valley or Seattle and are only comfortable doing internet and software work.

Luo: They don’t want to do the dirty or tough work. They rely on high-tech, make big profits, and enjoy a comfortable lifestyle.

Li: Right, exactly. That’s the difference. People in China are willing to enter any industry—whether it's retail, manufacturing, or the car industry. New thinking and technology are transforming old industries, and it’s become a huge trend here.

Luo: Yes, new thinking and new technology are revamping old industries. It’s really becoming a trend.

Li: Exactly. The third reason why China’s new energy vehicles have taken off is also closely tied to the country itself. For example, oil in China is relatively expensive compared to the world; it's in the 70th or 80th percentile globally. But electricity in China is the cheapest in the world, and China’s power grid is also one of the best in the world.

Luo: And then there’s government policy support.

Li: Yes, exactly. Let me give you an example you might not expect. In many European countries, if you want to install a charging station, even if the government encourages it, you have to wait in line for nine months just to get one installed. In places like Singapore, if you want to install a charging station, you have a 99% chance that the homeowner’s committee will reject it, and you can’t install it.

Luo: They have the power to refuse it.

Li: In China, if you decide to install a charging station today, it’ll be done in three days. The company that installs it coordinates everything with the property management and the power grid. And in the end, you still get a special deal. These differences are huge. In China, using an electric car costs only one-tenth of the cost of using a fuel-powered car, but abroad, it’s about the same cost, and the convenience is much lower.

Luo: Yes. So, when I go to Europe on business, I can’t help but make some sarcastic remarks. I’ve seen many mediocre people from China who immigrated to Europe for family reasons. These were people I knew back home, with poor abilities and low overall competence. Yet, they end up working in Chinese companies in Europe, enjoying great benefits. We’ve even spoken to their bosses, and when I said, “Your team doesn’t seem that great,” their boss would reply, “You have no idea. The people we hire locally are much worse than yours. Here, they’re seen as top talents.” I really feel like we’re in a bittersweet moment globally. If it weren’t for geopolitics, I honestly think Chinese cars could dominate the world in the next 10 years.

Li: I also think there’s something interesting about China’s education system. We often criticize it, but it’s actually done a lot of good. For example, in the internet boom.

Luo: You mean basic technical education?

Li: From a technical perspective, yes. You see, the main talents behind the internet boom are those born between 1975 and 1995. This generation has excellent skills in STEM, which means they are very good at understanding software, engineering, and the digitalization of systems. And since there’s enough supply of talent, they are able to enter various industries—not just the internet industry, but all kinds of fields. This is an advantage of China’s systemic approach. With the help of the internet, mobile internet, and smartphones, this talent pool has grown, and they’ve become the foundation of digitalization in the automotive industry. However, in countries other than the U.S., where the competition in mobile internet and smartphones is not as fierce, they simply don’t have this kind of talent.

Part 7

Car Choices reveals different mentalities between the "Old Money" and the "New Money"

Old generations of Chinese manufacturing tycoons buy super luxury cars for some problems far beyond transportation, while the internet generation seems to be more frugal in their choices of cars. (02:01:36-02:05:48)

Luo: When a startup first jumps into hardware, of course there’s the challenge of inexperience. But there’s also this other thing: all those tests the big brands run—you simply can’t afford to replicate every single one of them, right?

Li: We ran all of them.

Luo: All of them? I figured you’d definitely run all the safety tests. But I didn’t expect you to actually do all the others too. So why were there still so many issues popping up?

Li: Because we've done something those big brands have never tried before.

Luo: So you are being innovative, while they keep being conservative, staying in their comfort zone.

Li: Yeah, we're doing what they've never done.

Luo: I can get it. I own a Li Auto myself, and I really like it. And you know me, with my kind of extra way of talking, I went around saying that the Li One is the best family SUV you can get under 5 million RMB (around 700 thousand U.S. dollars). Of course, the internet tore me apart for that. But actually there was some context behind what I said.

When I was down south, I had a bunch of friends in manufacturing, and we were hanging out a lot at the time. Most of them were older than me. I was born in the 70s, but some of them were 10 years older than me. And one thing about that generation of old-school entrepreneurs is that everyone had to drive a luxury car.

Otherwise, say the group goes out to play golf. If you roll up in a 3-million car, and I show up in a 5-million one, and another guy drives, let’s say, a BMW that costs just over 1 million—even though it’s still a luxury car—behind his back people will start saying, "Hey, what’s going on with him? Is his cash flow in trouble? Why’d he downgrade to something that cheap?" And that kind of talk could actually affect his business, far more than his pride. So in that circle, everyone’s driving cars in the 3-to-5-million range, sometimes even 10 million or more.

And because I was spending a lot of time with them talking business, eating and drinking, I ended up getting to ride in basically every so-called legendary luxury car out there. And you know what? I found most of them disappointing. But that’s just something I can say and you shouldn’t. Otherwise, you’ll get roasted online just like I did.

My reaction at the time was basically—wait a second, how can a car that costs five million, even ten million, actually be this bad? So I went online and started digging around, trying to find an explanation. And what I found was, once a car sells for several million, it’s not really about being a vehicle anymore—it’s solving a completely different kind of problem.

Like, take a rich kid in a five-million sports car. He pulls up in front of a bar, waves his hand, and then some girls might hop right in. But if you’re driving a 500-thousand car, you do the same thing, and all you’ll probably get is an eye-roll. So yeah, that’s the ‘need’ those ultra-expensive cars are actually built for.

So this is the thing about those entrepreneurs. In that circle, their old-school mindset just doesn't allow them to show up in a 500-thousand or even a 1-million car. You have to drive something that costs five million with one of those world-famous logos on it, so the moment people see it, they know, "Okay, that’s a five-million car." That way, you avoid all the unnecessary social headaches in that group.

Li: I completely understand.

Luo: And all of those, really, is about other functions beyond the car itself.

Li: And it's also the most socially cost-effective way for them. Like if you roll up to a hotel in a luxury car, you can just park it right out front. But if you’re not driving something fancy, they’ll send you straight down to the basement garage.

Luo: So whether it’s for business, vanity, or whatever reason—you realize none of it actually has anything to do with the car itself. That was the conclusion I came to after riding in all those luxury cars of my friends.

And when I told them about it, they just laughed and like, "Yeah brother, we know you’re not into this stuff. Honestly, we’re not that into it either." Most of the time it’s just part of their job—especially for the older generation.

Li: But the funny thing is, in Beijing’s internet circle, you don’t really see that kind of showy culture. Most people are pretty down-to-earth with what they drive.

Luo: Yeah, it’s the same in Silicon Valley, right? Back then everybody was driving Toyota. Even people like Larry Page were all in these cheap cars.

Li: Exactly. Maybe because we were also influenced by those Silicon Valley guys. I mean, look at Bill Gates, Larry Page…. The cars they drove were all pretty ordinary.

Luo: Actually, for the internet generation, if someone really showed up in an eight- or ten-million car, people would find this guy cheesy and laugh behind his back.

Li: The first person I knew to drive the most expensive cars was actually Elon Musk. Back then he bought a McLaren F1.

Luo: That was back when he was still young and had just made it big.

Li: Yeah, then he sold the company and bought that McLaren.

Luo: Every poor boy has his dream car, right?

Li: That car cost him 1.3 million U.S. dollars.

Luo: I bet when you earned your first pot of gold, you'd also bought a bunch of cars, maybe even a flashy one or two, right?

Li: I actually held back, you know. I just went with another McLaren that cost a little over 400 thousand bucks.

Part 8

Li's View on Internet Haters

Li Xiang believes that it's impossible to eliminate all the online trolls in today's traffic-driven internet environment, and improvements in products is the only way out. (02:26:17-02:27:53)

Luo: But why not just bring in a really seasoned PR heavyweight from the industry? I'm not talking about hiring them to throw mud on other companies, but they at least know all the tricks and have strategies to counter other's attack. Have you thought about that? The reason I’m especially curious is that back in the day, I got dragged through the mud myself real bad.

Li: Nobody had really faced something like the Mega situation before. Let me give you another example—take Zhong Shanshan from Nongfu Spring. He studied journalism and communications and was an excellent media guy. His marketing skills were top-notch, and he worked closely with major outlets, including CCTV. But once he ran into trouble, even someone like him couldn’t handle today’s crazy traffic-driven media environment.

Luo: That's today's environment. People are happy with rumors.

Li: But then there’s another side to it. Even if you can’t fully handle these negative online rumors, it's not going to kill you anyway. Sure, you might not have all the answers, but the damage is actually limited.

Luo: Exactly. If you can hold up solid power, all the rest is really just a gust of wind.

Li: If you can’t hold up, it proves your company really isn’t strong enough. And when a new hot topic comes up, all that attention will just jumps to the next thing. I think that’s how the society works today. Look at Elon Musk. He owns X, but those who want to smear him still do whatever they can to drag him down.

Luo: The logic is fine, but when you get roasted online, I'm quite surprised that you just sit there and take it. I can really feel for you, because not only that I own three Li models, but also it reminds me of all those times I got dragged online back when I was doing hardware.

Li: I think it’s fine. Honestly, we know exactly how they try to drag us down—and which companies are behind it all. It’s disgusting, but if I let myself stoop to that level, I feel like my life would be meaningless. I just don’t want to become that kind of person. Even if they come after me, I refuse to become like that.

And the only thing I can tell myself is that if all that hate actually affects us, it’s because our product isn’t good enough, and we need to work harder and make our product better. Sure, plenty of people have given us suggestions like setting up an anti-smear team and so on, but I don’t want to go down that road.

Part 9

Three key abilities to make a successful entrepreneur

Li Xiang believes that the three abilities to make a successful entrepreneur are being able to choose well, choose far, and most importantly, to play faster than others. (02:42:21-02:46:02)

Li: If you spend time on the wrong things, they end up affecting the important stuff. And if the unimportant things go wrong, you’ have to spend more time cleaning up the mess. So I've realized that if someone just focuses on the three most important things every day, that person can become really, really successful. But if they try to juggle ten "important" things in a day, unless they’re a super diligent genius, chances are none of those ten things will get done well.

Luo: Speaking of diligent genius, I think Lei Jun (the founder of Xiaomi Corporation) is undoubtfully among them.

Li: Yeah, there’s no way I can compete with him.

Luo: It feels like he only needs four or five hours of sleep a day.

Li: I’d catch him on Saturday or Sunday, and he’d still be working. And after chatting with me, he’d just move on to another appointment right after!

Luo: So there was this one time when Lei invited me for a chat outdoors at the tea terrace behind Pangu Plaza. It was past nine at night. We got really into talking, mostly about products, and before we knew it, it was morning. Since we were outside, nobody rushed us, and the waiter just waved and left, because Lei knew him.

I stretched and said, "Alright, I’m going back to sleep." He stretched and said, "I’m going back to work." I was like, "Wait… what? No rest?" He said he had a meeting in the morning, but a three-hour nap on the sofa would be enough.

Later, I told people in his company about this, and they said, "That’s just how he is." And that’s why they feel so pressured—no matter how hard you work, you can never match your boss.

Li: These people are not just capable—they’re insanely hardworking too. Which brings me back to what you were just talking about: learning isn’t really the whole truth. I’ve met all kinds of big shots, had deep conversations with them, including overseas folks, and I started noticing some key common traits. I’ve boiled it down to three.

First, everyone will tell you how they make choices, how they gather information, and how they make judgments. So the first trait is this—they choose well. They choose the right big trends. E-commerce, food delivery… the first rule is to choose correctly.

Second, which is a bit counterintuitive, but you hear it in all the success stories—they choose far. They can accept things to take a long time to show results, because things that yield quick results often comes with problems. Look at the really famous companies today—they’ve been around 20, 25 years. So the second rule is to choose far. And that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes projects that could finish in a year or two are in spaces where someone else can just jump in at any moment. The third one comes as the most critical. Honestly, people who can nail the first two are already one in a hundred, but the third is what really sets them apart. Every top entrepreneur I know, the best in the world like Jensen Huang, Wang Xing, Zhang Yiming, they all share this trait.

Most people think, "Okay, pick the right trend, pick for the long run, now we can just slowly work our way through." Wrong.

These people do something completely counterintuitive—they take a path that requires a long time to succeed, and they iterate at an insanely high frequency. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Luo: The longer the game, the faster you have to play.

Li: Exactly. Most people think the key is patience or trying to be perfect. But that’s not it. The third thing is something almost nobody can do — really, almost nobody. When I was in the graphics card business, it was obvious that NVIDIA could release a new generation every single year, while others needed three years. That’s why they crushed brands like 3dfx Voodoo, and in the end it came down to just NVIDIA and AMD. And when NVIDIA built CUDA, it also took more than ten iterations before it finally worked out

Part 10

What does a Chinese entrepreneur's family look like?

Li's perception about family, his relationship with his wife and his children's education. (03:47:29-03:51:37)

Li: Back when I was running Autohome (An auto service platform founded by Li in 2005), I wasn’t really thinking about family at all. But when I started Li Auto, I positioned it for families—because by 2015, I already had two kids, and later on, even more. That changed my perspective.

Part of it also goes back to my childhood. I didn’t actually spend much time with my parents. In primary school I was raised mostly by my grandparents, and then for middle school I lived with my grandmother so I could be closer to a good school. By 18 I was already starting my first company, and soon after I moved to Beijing.

So in many ways, I only realized what "home" really means much later—after getting married, after building my own family. I used to think I wasn’t missing anything, but now I see that family is one of the most precious things.

Luo: And your relationship with your wife have always been strong.

Li: Yes, we got married in 2008 and had our wedding in 2009. And I’m most grateful for that change among the shareholders, because in the past I used to think all the problems were on my partner’s side — but I don’t see it that way anymore.

Luo: So that experience triggered a reflection that eventually reached into your family life as well.

Li: I think one really interesting thing about my relationship with my wife is that from the very beginning, I told her something very clearly: I need her far more than she needs me. And I genuinely believe that. I’ve always said it to her directly, and I think that’s been a very important part of our relationship. At the same time, she also wants to feel that she’s important to me, that she can actually support me.

What’s also quite interesting is that, even though she has to take care of our family everyday, she has developed a deep understanding of the auto industry. She reads all kinds of news, follows every company’s financial reports, and sometimes she even knows more than I do because I’m so caught up in my own work. Often, it’s her telling me what’s happening at other car companies. I find that fascinating. And she’s also very sensitive to my stress—she can tell when I’m under pressure, but she usually chooses not to point it out directly.

Luo: Some of my old friends from Smartisan still think I married one of my fans. But actually, she almost never interferes with what I do outside, while at home, I listen to her 100%. Sometimes she even jokes with me, saying that when we’re out, she’ll just pretend to be my fan. But that’s really not the case. I feel very lucky about this. Because for many entrepreneurs, if you don’t manage your family life well, then you lose your final safe harbor. And that’s a really tough thing to go through.

Li: Yes. At home, my wife is also the boss of everything. Even the money I earn, I hand it all over to her.

Luo: It actually feels pretty great. You know, during those ten golden years when the mobile internet was booming, a lot of young boys and girls caught the wave, built their careers, and made a fortune. But the truth is, quite a few of them ended up divorced—and the media loves to dig into those stories.

Li: Indeed.

Luo: You’re a very successful entrepreneur now, and you also have quite a big family. Have you ever thought about the possibility of those kind of "family feuds" drama that often comes with wealthy families?

Li: I’ve pretty much left that to my wife. From the time the kids were little, she’s always told them that brothers and sisters should never fight each other. What matters most is sticking together and protecting the family as a whole.

Luo: So you're quite confident in yourself, your wife and your children, right?

Li: These subtle influences actually matter a lot. They really shape the kids. At home they may bicker sometimes, but once they’re outside, especially at school, they stick together as one. I think that’s something you really have to cultivate from an early age.

Part 11

Which Chinese EV boss can be qualified as a super product manager?

Li believes that there's no shortcut to car R&D but time. Only with time, talent and hands-on management combined can someone create "super products". (03:54:27-03:56:19)

Luo: I’d like to follow up with a question: among all the leaders of China’s EV startups, who do you think also qualifies as a super product manager type of founder?

Li: Definitely Lei Jun.

Luo: You are the only two who really understand product.

Li: Or to be able to create "super products."

Luo: Yes, I feel the same.

Li: When it comes to developing a car, there are hardly any shortcuts other than putting in the time. Of course, you need the skills and expertise, but at the end of the day, it still comes down to the time you’re willing to invest.

Luo: Putting time alone isn’t enough. It has to be a fifty-fifty thing. You need to be a genius-level product manager, and at the same time, you have to give yourself fully to the work.

Li: Indeed. In this business, you need to live alongside your design, engineering, and product teams. You can’t just sit back and show up for reviews once in a while just because your're the boss. That simply doesn’t work.

Luo: Maybe that’s really how those old-world ICE car bosses do. When Lei Jun said he was entering the EV game, did you feel any pressure?

Li: Not at all. In fact, Lei even called me for that once. We talked for almost two hours. I actually had a late-night interview scheduled with an overseas candidate, but he just kept me on the line, so the interview kept getting pushed later. He asked me a lot of things, about my view of Tesla, about BYD, about Huawei, and we went really deep.

In the end, he asked me, "If you could only give me one piece of advice, what would it be?" And I told him: "Don’t use any proxies. Just go all in yourself, and you’ll succeed." That was the only advice I gave him. And later on, whenever we faced challenges, Lei Jun and his team really helped us a lot.

But you may ask: why should a tutor who helps students pick their college majors be worth paying attention to? In my view, what makes Zhang notable is not only his advice, but also the exchanges that unfold in his livestreams with students, teachers, and parents. These conversations reveal much about the realities of contemporary China—the concerns people carry, the direction of industry, and the pulse of society itself.

To be clear, presenting excerpts from his livestreams here does not mean I endorse all of his career suggestions—I’m not an expert in that field. Rather, I see his livestream room as a window into Chinese society. Below, I’ve shared a selection of dialogues along with some of my own reflections. If you find this valuable, feel free to leave a comment—I still have plenty of other interesting material that didn’t make it into today’s newsletter.

[Please note that the selected livestream clips are not necessarily from this year, but I believe some of the content is timeless]

Why China's national college entrance exam (gaokao) is now seen as increasingly competitive

Excerpt from 2:55-6:07:

Zhang: Talking about college entrance and talent selection—China’s honestly the fairest place in the world, no contest.

You may say, Mr. Zhang, that rat race in China is mad, and that kids in middle and high school are under huge pressure. You’re right about that. But then tell me this—if we switch to some other way of selecting talent, can you guarantee it will be absolutely fair? And suppose there's really a way for absolutely fair selection, will you buy it?

Suppose we ditch the college entrance exams and try "all-round education". Whose kid does better in sports? Whose kid plays better piano? Whose kid speaks better on stage, has stronger leadership, better communication skills? If we use that to decide who gets into university and who counts as talent, sure, the kids might feel happier in school. But do you really think that’s an acceptable way to select talent?

Let me put it this way—do you know why kids today feel so stressed, so burned out? In reality, their enrollment rate is way higher than when we were students. The gross enrollment rate for high school and for universities is much higher than in our time, after all those years of enrollment expansion in China. But why we feel today’s kids are under even more pressure?

It’s actually because that the parents’ mindset is different nowadays. Back in our time, honestly speaking, our parents didn’t place such high expectations on us. Most of them lived in the rural areas or small towns, so their expectations weren’t that high. But today’s parents? Totally different. Think about it—you’ve worked so hard to buy a school-district apartment in Beijing, to settle down in a city like Suzhou, to build a life in Shenzhen. Parents nowadays are already outstanding themselves.

Now imagine this—you tell a pair today, that their kid can only go to a vocational school. Will they accept it? No, they won’t. And that’s the real reason kids feel so much pressure today: parents can’t accept the fact that maybe their child won’t make it to high school. Back in our day, parents could accept that. But now? What really makes education so heated is the parents’ mindset. It’s us—our generation of parents, especially people like me, born in the 80s. Starting from the late 90s, China expanded higher education enrollment. I went to college in 2003. Most of us back then made it from the countryside to the cities through education and hard work. And once we settled in the city, we wanted our kids to make their living there too. We don’t want to accept our kids going to a technical or vocational school. So at the root of it all, it’s our mindset as parents that drives this pressure. Enditem

Comment: China's college entrance examination, or gaokao, may not be the most popular selection system, but it is perhaps the one that best fits China’s current realities. At the same time, mechanisms such as the “strengthening the foundation” (qiangji) program in recent years have created more possibilities for students with exceptional talent in certain subjects, even if such initiatives remain a topic of debate.

My parents were born in the 1960s, part of China’s baby boom generation. As their children, those of us born around 1990 also belonged to a particularly competitive cohort. I still remember reading statistics back in middle school and realizing how intense the competition was for my generation — what people today would call the most “involuted” (rat race, or "juan"). Yet, nearly 20 years later, competition among Chinese students remains just as fierce. I believe that high-quality educational resources will continue to be in short supply for quite some time, especially in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where competition for access will always be intense. On the other hand, I agree with Zhang Xuefeng’s point that parents’ mindsets differ significantly across generations.

For our generation, whether in the gaokao or the transition from middle school to high school, failing to get into a university and instead attending a technical or vocational school was not considered unacceptable. Besides, very few of our parents had university degrees. In my own case, neither of my parents ever attended a regular university, and in fact no one in my extended family had gone to college before me. Expectations at the time were therefore focused simply on achieving the goal of entering university.

Today’s parents, by contrast, increasingly have university educations themselves. The market for gaokao tutoring and college application counseling has expanded rapidly, while social media has opened up far more channels of information. As a result, the information gap around filling out applications and planning for the future has narrowed to some extent. At the same time, however, certain majors — such as civil engineering — have lost their appeal as China’s economic model shifts. Parents now worry not only about whether their children can get into university, but also about whether they choose the right major, since the wrong choice could limit their future development.

Zhang Xuefeng speaks with a high school student in her fifth consecutive year of retaking the national college entrance exam

Excerpt from 12:16-15:31:

Zhang: Don’t ever believe that a degree can give you everything, it can't. There are plenty of bachelor’s, master’s, even PhD graduates out there who still can’t find a job, who end up achieving nothing. So don’t fool yourself into thinking that a degree solves everything.

Student: But I'm still not sure which subjects to choose for my college entrance exam. [Editor's note: In China's national college entrance exam (Gaokao), beside Chinese, Math and Foreign Language, students select three out of six from two streams of subjects: Arts (Humanities) or Science, with Arts representing History, Geography, and Politics, and Science representing Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Different choices in Gaokao subjects have a huge say on the range of university majors that a student can apply for.]

Zhang: Don’t get stuck on this, kid. Remember—scores for Science subjects can go endlessly low, but at least with Arts they won’t. If I were you, honestly, I’d probably choose Arts subjects only. Let me give you an example. Take Geography—say in human geography, you get zero. Fine, then just focus on physical geography. If you memorize everything about physical geography, you can score at least 40 points.

Student: But if I choose pure arts, then later on I can only stick with the humanities majors. Won’t that make my career really limited?

Zhang: Let me put it straight, kid. You pick Science, but you can only score a little over 40 in physics. Do you really think it can give you a wide career path? When you get to university, will you even be able to understand what you’re studying?

Student: After repeating school for so many years, I honestly don’t even know whether my struggles with physics and chemistry were because I really couldn’t understand them, or because I just never studied hard. I’m already confused.

Zhang: What you really need to learn is how to review and reflect. Remember this: society works like this—it’s about discovering problems, analyzing problems, solving problems, and then verifying results. Most people can’t even do the first step. If you can get to the second step—analyzing the problem—you’ll already do pretty well in this world. If you can reach the third step—actually solving the problem—you’re already quite successful. And if you can make it to the fourth step—verifying results—you’re truly outstanding, the best of the best.

Zhang: Most people only get as far as step one: they just see a problem, but they don’t know how to analyze it. If you can analyze, you’ll do fine. If you can solve it, you’ll do very well. If you can verify results, then you’re at the top. So, my advice—focus on at least making it to step two, okay?

Zhang: And one last word to you, kid. If you still can't make it to undergraduate this year, choose a vocational school and move on. Everything I just told you, I said not only for you, but really to help save your parents. Enditem

Comment: When I was studying in the United States, I never really talked with my American classmates about their college application experiences. What I did know was that some of them would take a gap year after being admitted to college to gain life experience, but I rarely heard of anyone retaking entrance exams for several years just to get into a university. If you know more about this, feel free to share in the comments.

When I was in college in Shanghai (2008-2012), one of my three roommates had taken the gaokao three times before being admitted. The other two were local students from Shanghai (in China, students who apply to universities in their home province generally enjoy an advantage over out-of-province applicants). A close friend of mine from the dorm next door also had to retake the gaokao once before making it into my university. In China, there are even schools dedicated specifically to students who repeat a year or more, and in such places you really do see students who have been at it for more than one extra year.

In fact, Chinese academics have also debated the amount of time invested in schooling. For instance, economist Yao Yang suggested last year that the zhongkao (the high school entrance examination) should be abolished to reduce the excessive years of exam-focused competition. The question remains unresolved, but if someone were to raise such a proposal in the future, I would not be surprised.

Red Star News: You have repeatedly called for “abolishing the zhongkao and shortening the school system.” What is the starting point for this proposal?

Yao Yang: First, looking at the current state of education, students are wasting at least two years — the third year of high school is spent cramming for the gaokao, the third year of middle school is spent cramming for the zhongkao, and even the sixth grade of primary school often turns into test-prep. So ten years of compulsory education is entirely sufficient. Abolishing the zhongkao would help reduce parents’ incentive to push their children into endless competition.

[Editor's note: China’s current education system consists of six years of primary school, three years of junior middle school, and three years of senior high school. Under current regulations, China guarantees students six years of primary education and three years of junior middle school, known collectively as the nine-year compulsory education stage.]

Second, many major Chinese enterprises are actively promoting industrial automation. Today, the level of automation in domestic factories is already very high, and the workers operating these modern machines are themselves becoming more skilled. We can no longer define workers with outdated notions; modern workers need to have a certain degree of creativity and problem-solving ability. At a minimum, they should have received junior college or vocational college education in order to handle the demands of today’s production lines.

That is why I propose abolishing the zhongkao and implementing ten years of integrated compulsory education — the goal is to ensure that all children go on to high school, rather than being diverted too early into secondary vocational education. The selection of talent should be left to the gaokao; only at that stage should students decide whether to pursue technical training or continue on to university.

Zhang Xuefeng tells students success in China’s system is not all about connections

Excerpt from 7:44-9:36:

Zhang: Honestly, when it comes to working inside the system (or tizhi, mainly referring to China's public sector, including branches such as government bodies, public institutions, and state-owned companies), it’s not at all like what many of you imagine. People say, "oh, you need connectionsgu, or guanxi." But let me tell you, if that’s the way you think, your vision isn’t that broad yet.

Once you’ve seen how things really work inside, you’ll realize—luck matters a lot. Timing and fate matter a lot. Things don’t play out the way you picture them. It’s extremely complicated, and you can’t explain it in just one or two sentences. Anything can happen, any decision can happen. Honestly, it feels like metaphysics sometimes.

I’ll give you an example. I had a friend—if he hadn’t transferred to another place back then, today he might already be deputy division chief (or fu chu, a rank in China's bureaucratic hierarchy, which applies to all branches of China's public sector. A deputy county head ranks at deputy division chief level). But just because that move, now his own apprentice has even risen higher than him, and he’s still stuck. That’s how unpredictable it is. It really is like fate, like metaphysics.

So don’t reduce everything to "it’s all about connections." Please don’t. Of course, connections can play a role, but that’s not the whole picture. There are different paths, different ways. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. It’s not as simple as "if you have it, you succeed; if you don’t, you fail." No—it’s about finding the correct path. But sometimes whether you can find this path depends really on luck.

However, behind what looks like luck or fate, what really matters is to put effort into it. Where you put your time, your energy, your focus—that’s what makes the difference in the long run. Enditem

Comment: I know that in many “China 101” materials for international visitors, there is often a special section devoted to explaining guanxi. Wikipedia, for example, has a line that contrasts Chinese and Western practices in this way: “Unlike in the West, guanxi relationships are almost never established purely through formal meetings but must also include spending time to get to know each other during tea sessions, dinner banquets, or other personal meetings. Essentially, guanxi requires a personal bond before any business relationship can develop. As a result, guanxi relationships are often more tightly bound than relationships in Western personal social networks.”

I don’t fully agree with this view. It’s true that connections in Chinese culture have their own distinct features, but to suggest that in the West you can get things done without connections—or that relationships don’t matter there—doesn’t seem accurate either. I remember during my MBA studies in the United States, we had dedicated networking sessions where you were expected to build ties with company representatives over banquets or cocktail events.

In fact, I think that in most countries and societies, the importance of connections is more or less the same. What differs are the forms these connections take and how they are cultivated [tea versus coffee, for instance]. If a Chinese student believes that working within the system is impossible without preexisting connections, that is absolutely a misconception. Every individual, as a member of society, is constantly building a personal network throughout their career. These networks inevitably shape the development of both their work and their lives—and this is by no means unique to China.

A senior high school teacher sought advice from Zhang Xuefeng about his students’ future paths

Excerpt from 00:00-07:08:

[Editor's note: This section of the dialogue has been partially abridged for brevity]

Teacher: Our school is at a relatively low level. For example, when the full score of the zhongkao (senior high school entrance exam) in our town was 850. The top high schools set their cutoffs around 750, while our school admitted students with scores as low as 400.

Zhang: Let me ask you one question. Each year, how many of your students go on to an undergraduate program?

Teacher: We have a little over 300 students in the graduating class, and only about 10 make it into undergraduate programs. My first question is this: if some students barely meet the cutoff for the Second Enrollment Batch (二本/Erben), what should I tell them when they ask whether to pay the high tuition for Erben or to choose a public vocational/junior college instead?

[Editor's note: In China, universities used to admit students in different “enrollment batches” — Yiben (first batch), Erben (second batch), and Sanben (third batch) — with Yiben generally seen as the most prestigious, though the government is now reforming the system to phase out these divisions.]

Zhang: Which province are you in?

Teacher: Gansu. Also, what we now call Erben in some places includes what used to be the third enrollment batch (Sanben), and the tuition can be quite high—18,000 yuan (about 2,500 U.S. dollars) a year, even over 20,000. Many of our students are from poor rural families. That’s why I’m raising this: our students’ families have limited means and limited exposure, so when it comes to filling out applications after the gaokao, the only people they can really turn to are us teachers. So for those who just scrape past the Erben cutoff (二本线), should we encourage them to enroll in Erben, or advise them to step down a notch and choose a public vocational college with stronger programs?

Zhang: First, let’s give this teacher a big round of applause. I truly want to thank you on behalf of your students. If most high school teachers in China had your mindset and sense of responsibility, our education would only improve. What you’re doing is far greater than what I do—you’re working directly at the grassroots to help many students. In our respective fields, we’re both doing our part for the country.

Now, to your question: if a family’s finances are tight, I don’t think it’s necessary to pay such high fees just to enroll in Second Enrollment Batch (二本). That’s why I asked which province you’re in—baseline standards differ by region. Frankly, in the Northeast and Northwest, if a student only just meets the Erben line, their academic foundation often isn’t comparable to peers from some other provinces. For example, the Erben cutoff in Heilongjiang might be just over 300 points; in Gansu it may be under 400. If a student is scoring in the low-to-mid 300s, it’s unrealistic to expect that they’ll scrape into an undergraduate program and then go on to a master’s. It’s very hard.

Second, many vocational/junior colleges now lead to strong employment outcomes. In Suzhou, for instance, many manufacturing firms are in real need of highly skilled technicians. If someone picks up solid skills in certain science-and-engineering fields and works steadily for a few years, the pay is not low. People often say blue-collar wages and status in China lag behind those abroad. But consider this: in many countries, people treat so-called blue-collar work as a lifelong career. How many of us do that here? You often see young people quit factory or corporate jobs after a year because the work feels too hard.

I think this reflects a broader social restlessness—people are dazzled by talk of million-yuan salaries, and inflated consumption desires make everyone impatient, which really affects young people.

So, if a student can learn strong technical skills at a good vocational/junior college and then enter a quality firm, in many cases their employment prospects won’t be worse than those of undergraduates. If the family is well-off or the student is personally determined to continue studying, then a First Enrollment Batch (一本/Yiben) undergraduate path is an option. But if money is tight, I would recommend a solid vocational/junior college, learn a trade, and broaden one’s horizons.

In my view, if a student at a good vocational school is humble, grounded, and sticks with a field for three to five years—or five to ten years—they won’t be worse off than so-called undergraduates. That’s my personal take. Enditem

Comment: The reason Zhang Xuefeng publicly praised this teacher during the livestream is that he knows many middle and high schools in China evaluate teachers largely based on their students’ gaokao results. Yet enrolling in so-called “better” universities does not always mean choosing the path best suited to a student’s personal circumstances. This teacher, by putting students’ long-term interests first even at the expense of his own performance evaluation, showed a rare sense of dedication.

At the same time, Zhang’s remarks about some young Chinese quitting blue-collar jobs quickly—or being unwilling to take such jobs at all—do reflect reality. This is also why, in recent years, some media outlets have urged students to “take off Kong Yiji’s long gown,” meaning that even those with higher education should have the openness and awareness to consider blue-collar work, and to take a more practical approach in choosing careers. This reflects broader dynamics tied to China’s economic transition, challenges in the job market, and attitudes among students toward employment.