The Zhongguancun neighborhood of Beijing, in China, is the equivalent of California’s Silicon Valley, as well as being the nerve center of the country’s Artificial Intelligence movement. Not surprisingly, according to a study by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, China has already surpassed the United States in the number of academic papers published on AI.
The Chinese startup culture is very different from the American one for several reasons, some of which make it even more competitive. Underlying all of these lies the culture of memorization, cultural acceptance of copying, and a scarcity mentality.
Make money at all costs
The ultimate goal of Chinese startups is not so much to change the world as to make money. Therefore, in the field of Chinese innovation it does not matter where the idea came from or who came up with it. The important thing is to obtain economic benefits from it . Fame, glory or brand is irrelevant. The grand prize is getting rich.
This trend has deep historical and cultural roots. In the first place, here there is a propensity to imitation, to copying, which is not considered anathema as in the West, as Kai-Fu Lee explains in his book Superpowers of Artificial Intelligence :
“For millennia, memorization has been at the core of Chinese education. Entry into the country’s imperial bureaucracy depended on word-for-word memorization of ancient texts and the ability to write a perfect ‘eight-legged essay’ that followed rigid stylistic rules. While Socrates encouraged his students to seek the truth by questioning everything, ancient Chinese philosophers advised people to follow the rituals of the sages of the ancient past. The rigorous copy of perfection was perceived as the route to true mastery. “
This factual, legal and moral flexibility of copyright has allowed villages to exist with Dafen, who became famous for his absolute dedication to making copies of famous paintings using a work method similar to that of industrial assembly lines .
The other factor that has fueled the mindset of China’s Silicon Valley is the sense of scarcity : Most Chinese tech entrepreneurs are only one generation away from extreme poverty. Their parents never spoke to them of changing the world, but of surviving, of getting out of a precarious situation, of earning money to take care of them when they were older.
This mentality persists despite the fact that China is growing economically at a dizzying rate because not only is poverty only a generation or two away, but because of fierce market competition and lack of regulation, typical of the Wild West, It has allowed industries, companies and individual fortunes to grow at unprecedented speed, but also to be destroyed overnight . Quite simply, growth depends largely on instability and instability, by not being able to guarantee that one will continue to be at the top, fuels the fear of returning to poverty.
These are the wickers that found the underlying psychology of China’s internet ecosystem, and therefore of its Silicon Valley. And they are probably the wickers that will catapult these entrepreneurs, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, to the top positions in the world . If they haven’t already.
