In 1987, Lei Jun 雷军 was a 21-year-old student in Wuhan University’s computer science program. The book that had set his imagination alight was Fire in the Valley 硅谷之火, which chronicles the evolution of 1970s homebrew hacker culture into global titans like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM. The heroes of that story, of course, were visionaries like Steve Jobs. Lei Jun’s trajectory — he founded Joyo.com (later acquired by Amazon), built Xiaomi into a smartphone colossus, then wagered billions on electric vehicles — would unfold directly from that initial act of reading. His nickname became “L-obs,” a portmanteau fusing “Lei Jun” with “Jobs.”
Last August, the writer Tanner Greer published an influential post on the “Silicon Valley canon.” Tech luminaries like Patrick Collison and Nils Gilman followed up with their own contributions. Lei Jun’s story compels me to ask: What is the Chinese tech canon? What intellectual works fuel Chinese entrepreneurs’ ambitions, running continuously in their cognitive background?
And does a unified “Chinese tech canon” even exist? China’s tech elite spans wider generational and ideological gaps than its Silicon Valley counterpart. A founder who came of age in the 1970s during the heyday of Maoism has a fundamentally different outlook on the world from a 2020s AI entrepreneur who graduated from Stanford and decided to go back to Shanghai. Unlike Silicon Valley’s relatively cohesive aristocratic class identity where everyone shares certain intellectual touchstones — Chinese tech founders remain fragmented by generation and relationship to state power.
Still, there are some things they have in common. Some Chinese tech founders see themselves as Silicon Valley’s progeny. They code, they build, they disrupt, they invent, they conquer — to borrow Greer’s words. Yet they inevitably remain embedded within China’s distinctive historical trajectory, its institutional framework, and its market dynamics.
More recently, China’s unstoppable technological ascent has forced elites in Silicon Valley and Washington to question their assumptions about American exceptionalism. Silicon Valley has been consumed by China curiosity, and in some cases even envy. Yet the communication flows asymmetrically. Silicon Valley, along with its Western knowledge apparatus, has long served as the center of systematic intellectual production, exporting ideas unidirectionally with overwhelming force. By contrast, Chinese tech methodologies, frameworks, and even memes have not been transmitted to the West with equivalent scale or depth.
As the host of the popular tech podcast Bg2 observed: “Every founder and VC in China studies the West to a nauseating degree. They listen to all the podcasts, read everything, study every talk, and comb the financials. The West doesn’t do that for China.”
At times, the attention can look like ritualistic devotion to Silicon Valley texts. After Lei Jun discovered Jobs’s story in Fire in the Valley, he devoured the wave of management classics circulating in translation — Jim Collins’s Built to Last, Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup. Lei embedded their lessons directly into Xiaomi’s innovation DNA: rapid prototyping, obsessive user focus, blitzscaling to capture markets.
Wang Xing 王兴, founder of Meituan, one of China’s super apps, became famous as China’s philosopher-founder. A compulsive blogger during his days on Fanfou (China’s Twitter clone), Wang posted more prolifically than Elon Musk does now. His archived thoughts — over 150,000 posts rescued by devoted fans — wandered from Qing dynasty history to Montesquieu.
Most of all, their thinking shows the influence of Peter Thiel. Wang frequently cites Thiel’s concepts in both public speeches and internal discussions, and regularly recommends Zero to One, Thiel’s 2014 bestseller. He even frequently poses Thiel’s signature question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Thiel argues successful companies should pursue “monopoly profits,” escaping endless price competition to focus on innovation and long-term value creation. Meituan exemplifies this theory applied to Chinese internet markets — achieving dominance through patient market-building rather than direct confrontation.
The pattern extends across generations. When Tencent CEO Pony Ma 马化腾 wrote the foreword for the 2011 Chinese edition of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, a book arguing that the internet helps individuals use their free time to create instead of just consume, he described the regular user’s cognitive surplus as “one of the greatest dividends the internet age has bestowed upon internet practitioners.” In the years following, Tencent’s products — the superapps dominating content, video, and communication, alongside their gaming empire — evolved toward increasingly open platforms that encourage user-generated content and sharing. Baidu’s founder Robin Li’s 李彦宏 regular reading encompasses Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ray Dalio’s Principles, and multiple Malcolm Gladwell works. Reflecting on Horowitz’s memoir, Li said: “Reading it feels like reliving my own experiences.” This intimate identification with Silicon Valley narratives reveals how deeply American entrepreneurial mythology has penetrated Chinese tech consciousness.
Today’s new generation of AI founders also expressed their devotion to the Silicon Valley canon. Moonshot AI’s Yang Zhilin 杨植麟 cites David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity as formative for his thinking on large language models. Horizon Robotics’ Yu Kai 余凯 channels Thiel verbatim: “What's the secret others don't see? Where's the bug in the world?” Li Auto’s Li Xiang 李想 distributes the “Steve Jobs Trilogy” alongside The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
China’s publishing industry has pursued translation with extraordinary aggression. When Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk biography appeared as Iron Man of Silicon Valley in the summer of 2016, I was home from California for break. Beijing’s subway line four was plastered with Musk’s crossed-arm pose — a futuristic strongman image. How many young Chinese engineers read that story and plunged into EVs, creating today’s dominance? The three founders of China’s EV triumvirate “NIO-XPENG-Li Auto” — all cite the biography as an important influence. The cult runs so deep that Musk’s mother Maye became a Xiaohongshu influencer after her memoir topped Chinese bestseller lists.
