Novelist Ning Ken first saw Beijing’s Zhongguancun neighborhood in 1973 as a 14-year-old on a school trip to the Summer Palace, former imperial gardens looted by European troops during the Opium Wars. “At that time, once you got past the zoo, Beijing was just countryside and farmland,” he says, remembering the bus ride northwest. Out the window and amidst the fields, Ning could see the campuses of China’s most prestigious research institutions, which had spawned China’s nuclear program and hydroelectric dams. They include the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Universities of Peking and Tsinghua.
Today, that stretch of road is the heart of China’s technology industry, a busy district with a subway stop and glass towers that house Chinese and Western technology companies. The neighborhood’s transformation reflects the dramatic changes in China’s economy and culture over the past four decades. Technology companies that emerged from Zhongguancun pushed the boundaries of how businesses could operate — often by staying one step ahead of regulators — shaping China’s power abroad.
In the West, coverage of China’s technology industry often focuses on how it is restricted or controlled by the government. According to Ning, Zhongguancun’s innovators helped “liberate” the Chinese people from the constraints of a fully state-run economy by charting a path for entrepreneurship as the country opened up cautiously.
When the first technology companies were established in Zhongguancun in the early 1980s, every industry was owned by the state and every aspect of a person’s life was dictated by their then, or work unit, from where they lived whom they married. When an entrepreneur named Wang Hongde left his research position at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1982 to start an IT company, taking several colleagues with him, “that tore a crack in the old system,” says Ning.
Two generations later, Zhongguancun and the rest of China are almost unrecognizable. People can pursue fortunes and change careers in ways that would have been unimaginable in the early 1980s. Recent events have shown that change can still happen quickly, with pressure from the bottom up, made possible by some Zhongguancun social media companies. In late November, people in cities across the country staged protests against extreme zero-Covid measures. Restrictions that seemed permanent after three pandemic years were soon overturned and China began to reopen.
Revolution in the red light
Born in Beijing, Ning has published several critically acclaimed novels in China, but his first book to be translated into English is Zhong Guan Village: Stories from the Heart of China’s Silicon Valley, a nonfiction account of the history of Zhongguancun. It introduces the entrepreneurs and academics who built China’s tech industry, from the early days of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up policies in the late 1970s to more recent booms, when Chinese tech companies such as search giant Baidu and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance grew out of the market. the neighbourhood.
Many of the people Ning introduces aren’t household names outside of China, but their stories illustrate how Zhongguancun’s entrepreneurs found clever ways to work within and around the system. Today, many are celebrated for their role in opening up China’s economy and advancing the technology industry. “I want this book not only to show the path of reform and openness over the past 40 years, but also to show readers the spiritual wealth of these individuals,” he writes to WIRED in Chinese. ‘I’m a novelist. The core of my interests has always been people, predicaments, growth, emotions, psychology and the way society and history relate to those things.”
