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Foreign Media Look at Zhongguancun: Changing China and Seeking to Change the World

(Former title: China's Silicon Valley is transforming China, but not yet the world)

Figure: Zhongguancun Integrated Circuit Design Park

Netease Technology News on July 15, according to foreign media reports, Beijing Zhongguancun has developed from a cheap electronics market to a gathering place of technology companies. The location of independent innovation is now China's Silicon Valley. Relying on local investment, talents and policy advantages, Zhongguancun's technology companies are changing China and seeking to go global.

The following is the translation:

Wang Hanyang was fascinated by the electronics market in Zhongguancun when he was a teenager. Like a child walking into a zoo, he walked up and down the aisle of a mall full of hard disks and video cards, asking questions while learning. Before 2009, there were several successful technology companies and some start-ups in Zhongguancun, Beijing, which imitated their American counterparts in search and social media. But in general, there is not much that can stimulate the imagination of a 14-year-old child. Zhongguancun is still synonymous with cheap electronic products.

today we are no longer as we have been. Now 25 year old Wang Hanyang is in charge of his second startup, General Aviation, which mainly develops software for UAVs. Fashionable coffee chains and boutique supermarkets dot the streets. The whole Zhongguancun has expanded from the electronic product market to a vast area in the northwest of Beijing, covering two top Chinese universities - Peking University and Tsinghua University. Zhongguancun is now both a concept and a place. It is China's "Silicon Valley".

This is also the biggest hope of China's domestic innovation, namely "independent innovation". As Wang Hanyang said, China must accelerate the transformation from assembling scientific and technological products to manufacturing scientific and technological products. In the world's largest and fastest growing technology commodity market, Zhongguancun is developing new applications, new services and new equipment with unprecedented speed and intelligence.

The elements of success are in place. In the past decade, the capital flowing into Chinese technology companies has grown rapidly, and the total amount of venture capital investment each year has been equal to that of the United States. With funds, a new company can quickly allocate office space and attract technical talents from Beijing's most famous universities.

China has not only produced the Chinese version of Silicon Valley companies. WeChat is an application launched by Tencent, an Internet giant in Shenzhen, China, in 2011. This all embracing chat and payment application also inspired the trend of imitation on Facebook. The business model adopted by Zhongguancun's latest company does not exist in the US market. One company allows doctors in small home clinics to schedule complex tests for patients on their mobile phones. Another company sells mechanical arms to knife factories, which use mechanical arms to automatically sharpen blades. In addition, TikTok, a short video application developed by Beijing Byte Beating Company, is also widely welcomed by users around the world. This shows that Beijing Zhongguancun can compete with Silicon Valley even in areas such as social media, which occupy a dominant position in the world.

Zhongguancun's young company did not start in the garage, but was born in a small office hidden in a low tower. This is the corner of the electronic product market and the core of the old Zhongguancun. Wang Hanyang pointed out the dark corner where China's car hailing giant Didi started. Next door, there is a larger office to rent, with an area of about 66 square meters. The landlord made it clear that he was looking for tenants who "love Apple products". As start-ups grow, they move north to larger office buildings. Tencent, Baidu, Lenovo and Sina all have large parks.

New companies rely on one of the most important geographical features of Zhongguancun: proximity to the best schools in Beijing. This area is not only the location of Tsinghua University, Peking University and other universities, but also the location of many key primary and secondary schools. The headquarters of New Oriental, one of the most important private education companies in China, is located opposite the electronic market. The company mainly provides guidance for English education. Excellent Chinese students will come here for training before going to the United States for college.

Then they often returned home to set up companies, just as Wang Hanyang did after dropping out of the University of Waterloo in Canada. The school in Zhongguancun is earlier than the period of scientific and technological prosperity, and it is also the foundation of scientific and technological prosperity. With the expansion of technology companies, universities provide young talents, and the promise of good education helps attract older employees to join the company. The concentration of intelligence can in turn attract more talents. Wang Hanyang said, "The best thing about Beijing is that you can talk to the smartest people in China within an hour."

Zhou Wei, the boss of Chuangshi Partners Capital, an investment company headquartered in Wangjing District, Beijing, pointed out that most of these smart people were not engaged in basic technology. The real advantage of Zhongguancun is to develop new applications and services for the Chinese market through smart phones. Compared with western consumers, the basic conditions for promoting such services among Chinese consumers are better. In the United States or Europe, digital services must compete with existing infrastructure. China's digital services are often the first of its kind.

They are also in great demand. Zhou Wei takes YunHu Health invested by Chuangshi Partners Capital as an example. The company provides medical tests for patients in primary care clinics, thus eliminating the trouble of patients waiting in long queues in large hospitals. The test samples will be quickly sent to the local medical laboratory by a moped, and the results will be sent back to the patients and doctors in a day or two. The company, which was founded only two years ago, has provided services to about 100000 clinics nationwide.

For Zhou Wei, the application of technology to the situation of demand exceeding supply is a guiding investment argument. He invested in developing a software to help process medical images and reduce waiting time in the hospital; It also invested in an interactive educational application that is said to eliminate the need for teachers. The charge for the automatic English course in Dingdong classroom is equivalent to US $1 per hour. The course uses videos recorded by real teachers tailored for each student.

Zhou Wei said: "China's development speed is so fast that enterprises do not pay much attention to low skilled people." Now in Beijing, it is difficult to get a taxi without using the Didi app on mobile phones.

Robot arm for making knives and bras

Chuangshi Partner Capital focuses on making up the demand gap of China's education and medical market technically, while Shunwei Capital, another venture capital company, focuses on doing the same for China's manufacturing industry. One such investment is Rokae, which operates a research and development center in a warehouse in Zhongguancun. The first floor is full of white robot arms, and there are various attachments on the wrist. This robot arm can be used to grind knives. It can pull the blade to be processed from a box and grind the edge of the stone. Rokae said that it had sold hundreds of robots to a large cutter factory in Guangdong Province, and the application of robot arms directly replaced human workers. Rokae is also training robot arms to make bras, and said he is cooperating with Adidas to test whether its products can sew the famous three bar logo of Adidas onto clothes. As the cost of Rokae's robot arm production is lower than that of its western competitors, it can attract enterprises that may not have enough capital to invest in automation.

Shunwei Capital also plans to solve the biggest weakness of Zhongguancun - relying on imported parts and technology. The company has invested in some Chinese companies whose chips can manage charging devices wirelessly or fuse camera data into 3D images. It also invests in companies that design new materials, such as antibiotic materials for fabrics and mattresses, and ceramic materials for mobile phones. If Zhongguancun wants to develop into a global rather than a regional technology center, it needs to cultivate its own suppliers.

Local governments are also doing their best. Haidian District, where Zhongguancun is located, recently opened a business park dedicated to cultivating Chinese chip enterprises. Wu Chunyan, a member of the marketing team of Zhongguancun Integrated Circuit Design Park, said that the concept of Zhongguancun Integrated Circuit Design Park is to pave the way for new chip companies, not just to subsidize rent. It provides software for designing circuits and represents young companies in licensing negotiations with other chip architecture companies such as ARM. BitContinent, which produces chips for Bitcoin, and GigaDevice, the memory chip manufacturer, have promised to settle in the park. Although the park looks very quiet, the canteen is bustling.

Recently, a group of start-ups have set their sights on overseas markets. Rokae is planning to sell its robotic arms to Europe. Wang Hanyang hopes that the Generalized Aviation can flourish in the global market. But to become a global shaping force like Silicon Valley, Zhongguancun must overcome many difficulties. So far, there are not many Chinese technology companies that have successfully gone global, among which Huawei and Byte Jump are the most prominent.

At the same time, even Wang Hanyang himself could not keep up with the pace of changes in Zhongguancun. When he took the elevator to enter the last area of the electronics market, he saw that the whole floor was empty. He exclaimed, "Oh, no, they closed this one?" The old scene that inspired him to join the technology industry is becoming history. He said: "I feel a bit depressed, but it doesn't matter." "Everything is moving forward. We live in the future, not the past." (Chen Chen)

fabulous ( zero )

This article is written by Contributors Author, article address: https://blog.isoyu.com/archives/waimeikanzhongguancunzhengzaigaibianzhongguomouqiugaibianshijie.html
use Knowledge Sharing Attribution 4.0 International License Agreement. Unless the reprint/source is indicated, they are all original or translated by this website. Please sign your name before reprinting. Last editing time: July 17, 2019 at 01:27 am

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