Ten years ago, I published my book, China’s Disruptors. It was one of the first books in English that addressed China’s innovation and entrepreneurship. While some people were interested in what I had to say, many were suspicious. At around the same time, Harvard Business Review published an article titled Why China Can’t Innovate.

Other similar narratives would come along the way. These would allege that Chinese “obedient” culture is not conducive to innovation, its education is rote learning, its political system suffocates innovation and so on.

However, as I worked across China interacting with numerous entrepreneurs, especially younger ones, I saw something different. I saw the incredible talent and drive of many. This was already evident even during the 1990s.

Of course, most Chinese entrepreneurs at that time were quite inexperienced and their businesses were nascent; however, many of them were curious about how to build their businesses better, faster and ultimately to become a “lasting company”.

Of course, these people were a minority of Chinese entrepreneurs at that time, many of whom only wanted to make a quick buck. However, for those who truly wanted to build a successful business, I could see the sparks in their eyes.

Many of them expressed a desire to know more about innovation. This phenomenon took a major upturn during the mobile internet era in the late 2000s as technology enabled many Chinese entrepreneurs to come up with innovative ideas to address “pain points” in Chinese society.

With the government proactively leading China into a “hard tech” era around the mid-2010s, China’s entrepreneurs made a corresponding shift. Within 10 years, China was doing well in new energy vehicles, battery technology, robotics, solar technology, biotech, and artificial intelligence. The fintech revolution is imminent. So is low-altitude aviation.

This happened despite the sanctions imposed on China over two US presidential terms.

The biggest news recently is of course the rapid rise of China’s AI. By offering performance at par with leading AI incumbent players such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama, China’s AI app DeepSeek offers a much lower-cost alternative. Unlike the US models, DeepSeek is open source, thereby enabling quick diffusion of this service across the world. This is a game changer.

Within a matter of weeks, other Chinese AI apps were also launched. Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5-Max, launched on the first day of Chinese New Year, is a multimodal AI handling text, images, videos and software control, enhancing Alibaba’s global AI strategy.

ByteDance’s OmniHuman-1, a diffusion transformer-based model, generates realistic human videos from a single image and motion signals, advancing gesture realism and body movement. They are reshaping the global AI landscape fast.

Action role-playing game Black Myth: Wukong, which is based on the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West, has become globally popular. And Chinese social media apps like TikTok and RedNote are shaping how people from all over the world interact with each other.

While many people have said China lacks soft power, I have never agreed with that view. Today, both China’s hard power and soft power are evident.

But why and how has all this happened?

Many people say China has more STEM students and more tech researchers, and so it has an edge. That’s certainly true, but does quantity alone explain this phenomenon fully?

China’s entrepreneurs have reemerged since the country’s reform and opening up back in the early 1980s. Since then, various generations of entrepreneurs have emerged. During tech era, the ones who stood out left their mark on history. Of course, in each generation, China’s entrepreneurs have exercised their attempts in accordance with what’s prevalent for their respective generations.

Today, we are seeing a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs. Unlike their immediate predecessors — many of whom based their entrepreneurial attempts on the wireless internet — this generation of Chinese entrepreneurs are riding on hard tech.

DeepSeek’s founder Liang Wenfeng, robotics manufacturer Unitree’s founder Wang Xingxing, video game development and publishing company Game Science’s CEO Feng Ji, AI chips designer Cambricon Technologies’ chairman and CEO Chen Tianshi, among others, epitomize the best of them. The same can be said for DJI’s founder and CEO Wang Tao, Bytedance’s founder Zhang Yiming, and similar pioneers who came slightly before them.

These people are young (in their late 30s to early 40s), first-generation entrepreneurs from humble backgrounds and with no endowment from others. They are curious, willing to learn and low-key.

While most of them gravitated to major Chinese tech hubs like Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing, many are from lower-tier cities in China, and have made their way up through various rounds of entrepreneurial pursuits. For them, an overseas education was no longer a requirement for success. Local university education was just as good, if not better. 

They built their business on developing or applying technology. The common thread is AI, algorithms, semiconductor chips, robotics, automation and multi-modal media.

Most importantly to my mind, many of them have embraced the notion of idealism. They transcend technical notions of what they do and embrace the implications of what they do for humanity. DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng decided to make the company’s AI models open-source because he wants to make AI more available to all humanity.

In my view, this kind of thinking is only natural for Chinese elites like these young entrepreneurs. After all, in the Chinese elites’ mind, the notion of Chinese history, culture and civilization is built in, but they also absorb what’s available from the rest of the world, in particular from the West.

Chinese elites have been reflecting upon how to rejuvenate the Chinese nation for 200 years. This reflection process has seen plenty of ups and downs. With the collective efforts of generations of Chinese people, China has been able to generate substantial economic growth over the last several decades. This search for modernity with Chinese characteristics contains both a desire to rejuvenate the Chinese nation as well as a mission to create a global community with a shared destiny.

In the last decade or more, China has generated an environment of reasonable stability that enables the very best Chinese elites to focus on what they do best. This is particularly valuable, as the world is going through a tumultuous period with trade disputes, sanctions, regional wars, and the recent global pandemic.

History has proven time and again that once China enters a period of stability, it becomes one of the world’s most important economic powers, if not the most important one. 

What we are now witnessing in China is a step-change in China’s entrepreneurship and innovation, which will have significant implications for the rest of the world.

The author is founder and CEO of Gao Feng Advisory Company, a strategy and management consulting firm with roots in China.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.