For regular tourists, Zhongguancun (ZGC), the sprawling innovation hub in northwest Beijing often dubbed "China's Silicon Valley," is hardly a must-see stop. But for those in, or aspiring to enter, the technology world, it offers a valuable vantage point for understanding the forces shaping China's innovation landscape.

Designated as China's first national hi-tech industrial zone in 1988, ZGC is the birthplace of some of China's most influential tech firms, including Lenovo, Xiaomi and ByteDance, the company behind TikTok.

Today, ZGC has grown far beyond Haidian District, its original home, into a network of 16 innovation parks spread across Beijing, with a combined planned area of 488 square km. The latest data show that in 2024, ZGC was home to 20,800 national-level hi-tech enterprises, 532 listed companies and 93 unicorns.

It was therefore little surprise that ZGC featured prominently in a recent tech-themed exchange program hosted by the World Association of Young Scientists (WAYS). From April 11 to 17, a group of young participants from the UK, Austria and the Netherlands traveled through Beijing and Huai'an in east China's Jiangsu Province, touring sci-tech institutions and enterprises while engaging in in-depth discussions on topics ranging from AI to biomedicine.

During the Beijing leg of their tour, the group explored ZGC's dense network of startups and incubators, allowing them to gain a close-up view of the rhythms of work and life in one of China's most competitive innovation clusters.

The startup engine

For Adam Mackay, a London-based venture analyst at Rainmaking, a company that builds and invests in startups, time spent in the area offered him a glimpse of a side of China less often seen from afar: its appetite for entrepreneurship.

"Living in the West, you don't really see what's happening in China. So coming here and seeing it firsthand really opens your eyes," Mackay told Beijing Review.

To outsiders, ZGC may be best known for its long roster of Chinese tech giants. But just as important is its enduring role as a launchpad for new ventures, a role that has taken different forms over the decades.

The visiting group learned about the history of entrepreneurship and innovation in ZGC. In 1980, Chen Chunxian, a physicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, set up the country's first private tech enterprise in ZGC area, setting off a broader wave that saw scientists and tech professionals step beyond academic and government institutions to start their own businesses.

By the 2010s, that entrepreneurial energy had taken a more informal form. In 2011, Garage Café opened in the area as a shared workspace for early-stage startups. For the price of a cup of coffee, young entrepreneurs could spend the day there, with access to office space and high-speed internet.

Two years later, the street where the café stood was reborn as Z-innoway, a complex crowded with incubators, startup services and venture-capital firms. It also became associated with the rise of a new breed of founder, often born in the 1990s or 2000s, who launched companies while still at university or shortly after graduation. The trend soon began to spread from ZGC to other parts of China.

One company to emerge from this wave was Kuaishou. Founded in 2011 by Cheng Yixiao, then a 27-year-old programmer, it began as a company for making animated GIFs before growing into one of China's biggest short-video and live-streaming platforms. By the fourth quarter of 2025, the Kuaishou app had 407.7 million average daily active users.

To the visiting group, Kuaishou offered a vivid example of how quickly a startup born in ZGC could scale. It was the first stop on their Beijing trip, and its size immediately stood out to Mohammed Ali, a student from Vrije University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He was struck in particular by the fact that the company has more than 10,000 employees in Beijing alone. A workforce of that size, he told Economic Daily, would be unusual for an AI company in the Netherlands, where only oil companies might operate on a comparable scale.

For Mackay, however, the most memorable stop was not a tech giant, but a smaller and newer kind of entrepreneurial space: the ZGC AI North Latitude Hub, a community offering low-cost office space and tailored support for one-person companies (OPCs) in the area.

Driven by rapid advances in AI, OPCs are quietly emerging as a new entrepreneurial paradigm in China, one that is characterized by low costs, rapid decision-making and a high degree of flexibility.

At ZGC AI North Latitude Hub, a warmly lit shared space, complete with meeting rooms, a café area and a small dining bar, is lined with glass-partitioned cubicles that serve as compact offices for AI-focused OPC entrepreneurs.

But it is not just the physical setting that stands out. For Zhang Kai, a newcomer to the community and founder of Qingu, an AI-agent OPC, the real draw lies in the support it offers early-stage ventures. "In a time when everyone fears being left behind by the rapid advance of AI, the training programs offered by this community on how to identify opportunities and risks, build a team, test ideas and move toward commercialization are exactly the kind of support we need," he told Beijing Review.

Beyond training, the community also offers rent reductions for eligible OPCs for up to three years, as well as free access to computing resources such as token quotas and GPUs. It is now home to more than 120 AI companies, of which 41 are OPC-scale businesses (teams of one to four people).

"Through spaces like this, you begin to see how China is embracing entrepreneurship and innovation in ways people often associate with the U.S.," Mackay said. "But in reality, China is carving out a strong identity of its own on the tech front and that's genuinely interesting to witness."

Sparks that stay

David Morgan, a student at the University of Amsterdam noted that the environment for young entrepreneurs in China differs markedly from that in the Netherlands, where he is from.

"A main difference between China and the West is that here, a lot of support comes from the government," he told Beijing Review. "In the Netherlands, support mostly comes from private investors, whereas here, the government may provide office space, significant funding, housing and a range of other support to help young startups develop and implement their ideas."

Morgan is one of the founders of Hanga, an Amsterdam-based sustainable startup that transforms non-recyclable textile waste into eco-friendly products such as coat hangers. For him, such support matters not only because it lowers the cost of starting up a company, but because it helps create a sense of community.

"A company may start small. But once you are part of a community and begin talking to people, someone may like your idea and become a partner," he said. "It's about finding connections and building synergy."

That idea of community also ran through the exchange program itself. Beyond offering a closer look at China's innovation landscape, it also gave participants a chance to build networks that could outlast the week-long visit.

Looking ahead, Morgan hopes to expand his startup across the Netherlands before moving into other markets, potentially including China. "We are also here to seek future Chinese partners to source the non-recyclable materials used in production," he said.

"I think being here can help us innovate better, not just by seeing the ecosystem, but by talking to people and making connections," Ali said.

Ali and his team are developing an AI-powered medical triage system that automates appointment scheduling and initial symptom assessment through chat- or voice-based interfaces.

He noted that greater communication is essential to deepening sci-tech exchanges among young talents from Europe, the United States and China. Collaboration, he concluded, would accelerate research and development far more than working in isolation.

(Print edition title: Feel the Beat of Entreneurship) 

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson

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