The Blue Sky in Zhong Guan Cun, Beijing

If there is a potential candidate which can pose as an alternative to the Silicon Valley in California, Zhong Guan Cun in Beijing is possibly the only candidate in the present. The best benchmarks are perhaps the amount of talent, the vast market size, the successful tech companies (Baidu, Lenovo and the Founder Group) that rose from China and the amount of venture capital that has turned up in Beijing from US, for e.g. Sequoia China. While traveling to Beijing, I took a nice walk around the technology cluster under a clear blue sky during the 60th National Day Celebrations in China.

Envisioned to be China’s version of Silicon Valley or Route 128 by Chen Chunxian, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) during the early 1980s, the technology cluster sits right in an area sperated between the top two universities of China: Peking University and Tsinghua University. The technology park is located in Beijing city, in an area between the north west direction of 3rd Ring Road and 4th Ring Road (Note that the best way to navigate around Beijing city is to think of concentric rings roads, for example, the famous Tiananmen where the central government is located is in the first ring road).

For business travelers, instead of paying for expensive Western run hotels, you can check out the local hotels in Zhong Guan Cun area. Near the main expressway from the Beijing airport towards the Hai Dian District, you will find Furama XPress Hotel (which has free Internet access, reasonable access to shops where you can get a GSM card, food and groceries and costs about S$80++ a day depending on when you booked the hotel). The hotel is located very close to the east gate of Peking University by 20 minutes walk, or you can walk about 10 minutes to the new mass transit line (Zhong Guan Cun station) which is fully operational now, given two months ago, when I was there, it was still under construction.

Within the Hai Dian area close to Peking University, you will find the famous Sina and Youku (the video sharing clone to YouTube in China) with a shopping area that resembles a bit like Sim Lim Square in Singapore. In the same area, you will find the usual restaurants and electronic shopping places where you might want to find some handy electronic accessories. However, construction is an ongoing thing within the area, given old buildings are slowly being torn down and new ones will rise. Even as a technology area, you will see many people flooding the streets like a town area, and very likely most of them are students from Peking and Tsinghua university.

From Hai Dian district, the road leads to the east gate of Peking University, heading towards the north, and at the junction close to The Founder Group (Fang Zhen) building, you will find Cheng Fu road that leads towards the Tsinghua technology park. The Tsinghua technology park (TUSPark) is the other area where most of the high technology start-ups reside. Within the area, you will find some of the well-known companies such as Microsoft and Google which is seperated by a difference of one building.

In fact, I met most Beijing entrepreneurs in the Starbucks Cafe in TUS Park, including Wang Xing, the co-founder of Xiaonei (or RenRen) and Fanfou (China’s twitter clone and it is still down until further notice) for an interview. In fact, most of the local entrepreneurs are confident that they can take on the foreign competition coming from tech companies coming from abroad. From the Tsinghua technology park, you will find the road leading towards the east gate of Tsinghua University. The surrounding area around the Tsinghua technology park is also vibrant and packed with waves of people passing thru the concrete buildings which housed most of the tech start-ups and at the same time, you will see a lot of people in the Starbucks Cafe doing their work and talking about business there. Of course, even Lee Kai-Fu’s new incubator and venture fund “Innovation Works” is also located in this area. We will soon see whether the Y-Combinator model will work in China.

One thing you might need to know about meeting Chinese business people is the following and I call it, the rule of association. As I meet different entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, I find that they aggregated closely by their hometown (like province, town or city) or their alma mater (with Tsinghua and Peking University) particularly in Beijing. In fact, you will find that a lot of times, in Beijing, you are just going thru a round of introductions to get to the final destination. While walking around Zhong Guan Cun, another thing I notice is the vast amount of bookstores in Hai Dian district, which are opened till late for the students. You can find most books in both English and Chinese, and the vast amount of literature for various academic subjects. While science and technology remains the main focus, you also find the traditional chinese texts and calligraphy along the street with the book stores. In fact, I can compare this to the Barnes and Noble stores I see in Boston.

There is definitely one thing which Zhong Guan Cun differs from Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley went thru various revolutions starting from the days of Intel. The valley witnessed revolutions of different technology eras: the silicon chips in the 1970s, the personal computer in the 1980s, the Internet companies in the 1990s, the web 2.0 companies from social networks to content sharing sitess in early 2000s and now the renewable energy companies. However, Zhong Guan Cun is facing a different kind of challenge. The challenge is that all sectors I mentioned about different industries in Silicon Valley, whether high tech or not, are all aggregating now at the same space and time in Beijing. In fact, so many things are happening at one go that it is hard to know which one will take off and which will not. The blue sky for Zhong Guan Cun may be opening up and expanding at the same time but it remains whether foreign tech companies can ever make a mark in China.