AI Superpowers

Silicon Valley is a region in the Bay Area of California. The name Silicon Valley was coined in the early 1970s in reference to the region’s developing role as hub of technological research and manufacturing. It’s the birthplace of ARPANET, an early predecessor to the internet. A number of major American tech companies—such as Apple Computer, Google Inc., and Adobe Systems—were founded in Silicon Valley. It is considered a global center for tech-based enterprises, which made it an early stomping ground for American venture capitalists. Today, the Valley houses dozens of major tech companies’ headquarters and thousands of tech startups.

In AI Superpowers, Lee uses Silicon Valley’s reputation as a barometer for the modern Chinese tech industry. Having worked in both the American and Chinese tech industries, Lee uses his experience to draw comparisons between the two. In the US, silicon valley tech workers have a reputation for being industrious and passionate about their work. However, Lee describes them as “sluggish” in comparison to their Chinese counterparts. This contrast emphasizes The Importance of Hard Work and Competition. Silicon Valley got an earlier start in tech innovation than its Chinese counterpart, The Avenue of the Entrepreneurs. As a result, the Chinese industry has been forced to play catch-up, and this underdog role has led them to work even harder, such that they may soon surpass the Americans.

Lee frequently treats Silicon Valley as a single, homogeneous entity, sometimes personifying it as if it were a character. For example, phrases like “Silicon Valley prides itself on its aversion to copying” (55) and, “At the time, Silicon Valley saw the Chinese internet as a novelty” (41) present it as an autonomous entity with its own consciousness and capacity to make decisions. Elsewhere, he gestures to the “Silicon Valley elite,” whom he describes in similar terms. Because he presents the Valley and the Chinese tech industry as explicit opposites—“China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang” (37)—this broad personification also casts Chinese entrepreneurs as a homogenous collective.

While he maintains a certain respect for Silicon Valley (perhaps best exemplified in his reverence for Steve Jobs, the Valley’s unofficial posterchild), Lee generally regards it as elitist and lofty, the opposite of China’s scrappy gladiators. While Chinese tech entrepreneurship was born from a “deeply engrained scarcity mentality” (38) that rewards determination, memorization, and aggressive strategy, Silicon Valley’s “environment of abundance […] lends itself to lofty thinking, to envisioning elegant technical solutions to abstract problems” (37).

WeChat (Weixin in Chinese) is a multipurpose app developed by Tencent, a Chinese technology and entertainment conglomerate. WeChat was created by Allen Zhang in 2010 and introduced to the Chinese public in 2011. Originally designed as a messenger app for smartphones, it has since expanded to offer a broad array of functions. At the time of writing, WeChat is the most-used standalone app in existence. Lee describes it as “the world’s most powerful app” (68): a product that far surpasses all other apps by “monopolizing” its users’ lives:

It became a ‘remote control for life’ that dominated not just users’ digital worlds but allowed them to pay at restaurants, hail taxis, unlock shared bikes, manage investments, book doctors’ appointments, and have those doctors’ prescriptions delivered to your door (69).

Lee uses WeChat to exemplify the stark differences between Chinese and American culture, particularly around technology and commerce. While Americans typically use apps with one designated function, WeChat bundles a variety of professional, practical, and recreational tools into one service. According to Lee, its multifunctionality has made it universal in China, and that universality is what has made it so powerful. Lee also uses WeChat to explain differences in the way Americans and Chinese people manage their money. While Americans transitioned from physical cash to credit in the 1960s, Chinese consumers relied primarily on cash until WeChat introduced the WeChat Wallet in the 2010s. This caused the Chinese economy to leap over credit entirely and plunge into digital wallets (a transition which the US has been slower to make).

Wang Xing is a Chinese entrepreneur and computer engineer. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University and a masters in computer engineering from the University of Delaware. Wang is best-known as the founder of the Chinese shopping platform Meituan, although he also created successful social media platforms like Fanfou and Renren in the 2000s. Today, Wang is among the wealthiest people in China.

Xing is a central figure in AI Superpowers. In Chapter 2, “Copycats in the Colosseum,” Lee presents Wang Xing as symbol of Chinese identity, tenacity, and power:

Wang Xing embodied a philosophy of conquest tracing back to the fourteenth-century emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, the leader of a rebel army who outlasted dozens of competing warlords to found the Ming Dynasty: ‘Build high walls, store up grain, and bide your time before claiming the throne’ (57).

For Lee, Wang’s success is a microcosm for the Chinese tech industry at large: though he went through a “copycat” period that critics dismissed as derivative and cheap, he developed his skills as a developer and entrepreneur, eventually becoming a wildly successful “gladiator.”