That’s a daunting task for any start-up, but one made easier by the background of Mobvoi’s founders and the geopolitics of tech today. Résumés for Mobvoi’s top brass read like a cross-section of the best in U.S. education and innovation: Google, Harvard Business School, Microsoft, Stanford research labs. The waves of Chinese students filing into American universities have generated an equally important undertow: ambitious Chinese engineers who are returning home with a U.S. diploma, work experience in Silicon Valley, and the desire to make a mark in China’s emerging start-up scene.
Giving another boost to Ticwear’s prospects is the fact that the operating system’s main competitor, Google’s Android Wear, remains effectively blocked in China.
The Communist Party treats Chinese cyberspace like the country’s physical turf—something to be policed, cultivated, and controlled. The Great Wall of China was constructed and maintained over millennia to repel invading “barbarians”—Mongols and a variety of steppe people who raided and invaded the Chinese heartland. To deal with twenty-first-century “barbarians,” the country has created the digital “Great Firewall,” a complex system of controls that blocks access to many U.S. tech juggernauts: Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and many media outlets.
Like its brick-and-mortar predecessor, the Great Firewall is far from impenetrable. Internet users in China can circumvent most controls by using a VPN (virtual private network), a tool that routes their traffic through servers overseas and grants access to the global internet. Chinese people call this fanqiang—scaling the wall. But VPNs are slow, unreliable, and frankly an all-around pain in the ass. Slim minorities of Chinese people use them, and your average internet user here inhabits a distinctly Chinese version of cyberspace, one devoid of the companies and apps that Silicon Valley churns out.
The initial goal in building the Firewall was information control: maintaining a Leninist grip on the channels of information and communication, thus protecting the Communist Party’s grasp on power. But one of the side effects of that desire for information control has been the nurturing of China’s own thriving digital economy.
By keeping out global technology leaders, the government also created breathing room for homegrown Chinese tech brands to blossom and eventually dominate their country’s markets. Google’s 2010 exit from mainland China cleared the way for Baidu to own the Chinese search market. Twitter’s absence (and inspiration) made possible Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform that eventually overtook Twitter in number of global users. The ban on Facebook opened up the social media space for WeChat, the omnipresent social app on the mainland. And, crucially for Mobvoi, the block on Android Wear means the market for Android operating systems on wearables is wide open. Mobvoi intends to fill that void.
Towering technological walls may insulate the Chinese internet, but you’d never know that from the chatter here on the bus. Conversations flow seamlessly between new Facebook features, Chinese smartphone brands, and one programmer’s favorite food: stinky tofu. Coders wear Google hoodies while typing out WeChat messages. They’ve got opinions on the algorithms in Chinese shopping apps and the best Hunan food in the Bay Area. Whenever the topic turns to technology or business, Chinese sentences are suddenly peppered with English phrases: “actionable path,” “back end,” and “why not?”
These are the twenty- and thirtysomethings driving China’s tech renaissance. Apps and algorithms conceived by these types of coders are fueling a rash of billion-dollar valuations and business-model innovations that have caught the world’s attention. Many on this bus studied at top-notch American universities and worked for the same companies that the Firewall blocks. They move fluidly across borders, languages, and cultures, mixing Silicon Valley idealism with a dose of Chinese reality. Having honed their chops in the global epicenter of technological innovation, they’re now putting those skills to use in the rough-and-tumble world of Chinese tech.
These returnees are the haigui—“sea turtles”—who make up a good chunk of the audience for Tim Lin’s College Daily, and they’ve been a driving force in China’s tech scene for over two decades. In the mid-1990s, a batch of returnees founded the first wave of Chinese internet companies to get listed on global stock markets. Today, sea turtles from places like Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard are founding and funding the companies vaulting China’s tech scene to the top of global rankings.
Up at the front of the bus, dressed in an Android-branded jacket, sits Mobvoi’s founder and CEO Li Zhifei (surname Li, given name Zhifei; pronounced “Jur-fay”). Li embodies this game of transpacific technological ping-pong. Born and raised in central China, he did stints at Beijing start-ups in the late nineties, earned a PhD in computer science at Johns Hopkins University, and spent two years as a researcher for Google Translate at the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters. But when Li wanted to found his own company, he picked up stakes and headed back to China, splicing what he calls the “Google DNA” into his own start-up’s culture.
Ensconced behind China’s Firewall, Li’s company now produces apps, operating systems, and smartwatches, many of them filling the vacuum created by China’s decision to block Li’s former employer, Google. You might think that Li’s decision to ditch Google and found a competitor in a protected market would have engendered some bad blood between the parent company and the start-up, but the opposite is true. In 2015, Google decided to invest in Li’s company, and in subsequent years Mobvoi has served as a trusted partner and potential back door for Google’s long-anticipated return to Chinese markets.
TRANSPACIFIC FLOWS AND GREAT FIREWALLS
Li and Mobvoi’s story takes us to the heart of the fundamental paradox that long bound together Silicon Valley and China: while the transpacific flows of people, money, and ideas reached new heights, technology companies and the internet itself have never been more divided by national boundaries.
Chinese companies have set up research labs in Silicon Valley. American executives have taken the helm at their Chinese competitors. Venture capitalists from both countries began splashing around cash on both sides of the Pacific. Product managers in Silicon Valley are studying WeChat, and Chinese AI scientists are looking to Google for inspiration. And ultimately, a dose of the cultural zeitgeist of Silicon Valley has seeped into China’s tech scene. As entrepreneurs and engineers bounce between the two places, they cross-pollinate the philosophical underpinnings and the management practices of the two technology ecosystems.
But that’s where the exchange stops. Apart from Apple, virtually every major consumer-facing Silicon Valley company that’s entered China has either been outcompeted or outright blocked. Chinese companies attempting to pierce U.S. markets have faced fewer legal obstacles, but their business ventures on U.S. soil have largely fallen flat.
China may have begun blocking foreign websites as a practical quest for information control, but an increasingly robust Chinese technology sector and the revelations of Edward Snowden helped turn those efforts into an ideology: cyber sovereignty, the right of a nation to absolute control over its domestic “cyber sphere.” The result is a global internet that increasingly mirrors traditional economic and political systems, with governments asserting control at home and vying for influence abroad.
THE ETHICS OF ENGAGEMENT AND THE NEW TECH TENSIONS
Stakes are high for all the key players in this environment. But for the Chinese Communist Party, they verge on existential. That’s because the rise of the internet touches on two of the key pillars of the Party’s legitimacy: information control and economic growth.
Since its founding in 1921, the CCP has seen “ideological work” as core to its ability to gain and maintain power. Controls on information and speech have never been absolute, but they have always remained strong enough to shape the contours of a national narrative, one that casts the Party as the protagonist in a tale of national rejuvenation. Brave Chinese journalists or academics can be pesky in undercutting parts of that narrative, but the distribution sources and perpetrators all remain within striking distance of Party authority. Newspapers can be shut down and professors can be jailed.
When they emerged, the internet and social media posed the greatest test yet because they challenged both