This post asks “What is the Chinese tech canon? What intellectual works fuel Chinese entrepreneurs’ ambitions, running continuously in their cognitive background?” A timely question to ask and a well written article. It includes number of interesting cultural refereneces for the studious too. 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. 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. Within the operational context between founders and middle management, The Selected Works of Mao Zedong circulates more like a tactical manual than political doctrine. On Protracted War’s strategy of “encircling cities from the countryside” translates directly into capturing third and fourth-tier markets before ascending to first-tier cities — the essential playbook behind the rise of PDD (the parent company of Temu). “Serve the People” ( 为人民服务) becomes “Customer First” for consumer applications; “self-reliance” merges seamlessly with “avoiding technological bottlenecks” — vocabulary drawn directly from Mao’s conceptual universe. Jin Yong and Liu Cixin: the Tolkien and Asimov for China’s Tech “Every man must read Jin Yong,” according to Jack Ma. Yong’s sprawling martial-arts saga offered a distinctly Chinese romantic cosmos — the jianghu, a world of outcast martial artists which is at once archaic and modern, saturated with obligations, betrayals, quests for transcendence, and the stubborn pull of human sentiment. Across fifteen novels, over a thousand characters, and nearly ten million words, he provided millions of Chinese readers with their first encounter with a hero’s journey, idealism, and the bittersweet compromises between loyalty and ambition. If Silicon Valley’s celebration of reading has blended uncomfortably with the worship of power […] then China’s tech canon reveals a more complex entanglement: reading intertwined with fear and reverence of state authority, the perpetual tension between individualism and collectivism, and the ancient Confucian dilemma of chushi 出世 (withdrawing from the world) versus rushi 入世 (engaging with worldly affairs). Jin Yong’s work is a moral laboratory for modern Chinese identity — teaching readers how to navigate power without fixed rules, how to build reputation in opaque hierarchies, and how individual mastery coexists with collective belonging.