leaf

The data tells us that among the 20 most active apps globally, 19, except for Telegram, are from China and the United States. Not only are domestic markets firmly occupied by local applications like WeChat, Douyin, and Taobao, but overseas markets have also seen the emergence of Chinese-backed apps like TikTok, Temu, SHIEN, and Shopee, breaking the skepticism that Chinese mobile internet "only fights internal battles."

Starting from the desktop internet and thriving in the mobile internet era, Chinese companies have achieved remarkable results in the wave of the internet — but none of this is taken for granted.

In fact, before the internet wave, the global information revolution had already gone through five waves: integrated circuits, mainframes, PCs, enterprise software, and digital communications. China only seized the opportunity of digital communications, with minimal achievements in the commercialization of the other four fields, and the gap in core areas such as operating systems, commercial software, and semiconductor processes has only widened.

Looking back to around 2000, when the Chinese internet industry was just budding, the domestic tech business environment was far from ideal: the VC/PE industry was still in its infancy, and overseas venture capital had not yet entered China on a large scale; large tech companies were few and far between, and industrial capital was weak; there were few wealthy individuals, even fewer willing to invest, and private capital was scarcer than unicorns; the country had just experienced the pain of 1998, and fiscal support was quite limited.

In contrast, Japan, South Korea, and Europe had far better conditions around 2000: Japan's electronics industry was still at its peak, and private capital was more abundant; South Korea rose with national strength, with tech conglomerates like Samsung and SK hitting their targets; Europe had seized the opportunities of integrated circuits, enterprise software, and digital communications, with tech giants emerging in succession — they seemed better positioned to dominate in the internet wave.

However, in terms of results, Japan, South Korea, and Europe have had achievements but not standout ones: Japan's contributions include companies like Line and Rakuten, which have far less global influence than Sony and Panasonic in the electronic era; South Korea has companies like Naver, Coupang, and Kakao, but their businesses are limited to the domestic market; Europe has only a few companies like Spotify that can stand on the global stage, far from the dominance of Nokia, Siemens, and Ericsson in their heyday.

How did China manage to seize the internet wave amidst such a challenging backdrop? This year marks the 30th anniversary of China's internet access, and this article will attempt to answer this question from the perspective of industrial logic.

Pony Ma recalls those years and comments: "In those years of entrepreneurship, we never thought about the future; we were always troubled about surviving until tomorrow."

The entire year of 2001 was spent in bloodletting, chaos, and anxiety for all Chinese internet companies: the three major portals suffered massive losses, with NetEase facing a delisting crisis, Sohu encountering a hostile takeover, and Sina's Wang Zhidong being ousted from the company; meanwhile, Tencent, with its user base growing like a rocket, faced increasing pressure to sustain QQ, at one point seeking sellers for 3 million; even Alibaba, with its exceptional financing capabilities, had cash on hand that could only last six months at its lowest point.

In a series of articles, we discussed:

• Before the internet, China only seized the wave of digital communications, making the telecom industry the fastest-growing emerging sector in China. In this industry, besides the increasingly prominent equipment vendors like Huawei and ZTE, there was another financially strong but often overlooked player: telecom operators — it was they who provided a lifeline to internet companies on the brink of death.

The operators' model is simple: collect user fees with one hand and purchase equipment and services with the other. As telecom services like landlines, wireless, and data gradually became a "basic need" for the public, the money received by operators increased day by day, and naturally, the money spent also rose, supporting the income of equipment vendors like Huawei and ZTE while providing new business opportunities for internet companies struggling to make money — SMS.

At the end of 2000, China Mobile launched the "Mobile Dream Network" service, recruiting internet companies as value-added service providers (SPs) to attract mobile users to consume SMS, images, and ringtones, with operators sharing 85% of the fees with internet companies. Chinese users' acceptance of mobile fees was far higher than other payment models, with extremely high monetization efficiency, and this new model almost instantly saved the entire industry.

By 2002, most Chinese internet companies had emerged from financial turmoil and were rethinking their core businesses — Sina continued to operate its portal, Tencent planned to deepen its IM services, Shanda found a sweet spot in "Legend," NetEase focused on gaming, and the latest Baidu concentrated on search, while Alibaba, having cut 75% of its costs, began to seriously refine its "China Supplier" product.

The good news was that the crisis for Chinese internet companies had ended, but the bad news was that overseas internet giants had also emerged from their crises and ramped up their pace of entering China, with Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft MSN, and even Li Ka-shing's TOM all preparing to establish localized teams. Just as Chinese internet companies had returned from the brink of death, they now had to prepare to face off against these giants.

Except for a few areas, most domestic companies had no magical "assist," and they needed to fight hard against their overseas counterparts.

II. Product Breakthrough#

First is the technological advantage.

• The internet is ultimately a high-tech industry based on computer science, and gaining a crushing advantage through leading underlying technology is the most direct competitive strategy. For example, ChatGPT, backed by OpenAI's significant lead in foundational model technology, makes it difficult for competitors to achieve the same user experience, no matter how fancy they make their chat interfaces.

Next is the model advantage.

• Changes in cyberspace happen rapidly, and a new model is often challenged or even overturned by a newer one before it even settles in. For instance, in the e-commerce industry, after Alibaba and JD.com delivered a crushing blow to traditional retail, they soon faced a completely different competitor, Pinduoduo. The battle among the three has yet to end, and live-streaming e-commerce has emerged from the corners, making it seem endless.

Finally, there is the product advantage.

• One interesting aspect of internet products is that they are mostly developed by tech geeks, while users are ordinary people. The former can explore the cyber world using command lines, while the latter may uninstall an app due to a two-second lag. Therefore, user experience is prioritized in internet products, and product developers who think from the user's perspective often end up winning.

The existence of these three methods essentially means that an internet company is the sum of its "technology + model + product." For example, Google's early core technology was the PageRank algorithm, its model was keywords + the AdWords advertising platform, and its product was a simple search box — it is the combination of these three that constitutes Google; any one of them alone cannot represent the company.

So, with these three weapons in hand, which one will Chinese internet bosses pick up, or "can pick up," to deal with the elephants coming from across the ocean?

The technological advantage is the most fanciful. In all the tech fields that China is chasing, public opinion often harbors a kind of yearning: that the old scientists who ride bicycles to work are like the "sweeping monk," biding their time, ultimately breaking through to surpass the West. This yearning overlooks one point: establishing a technological advantage requires substantial financial investment, especially when chasing Western companies with first-mover advantages, and the numbers involved are astronomical.

Take Google's Chrome browser project as an example. In 2004, with significant profits from search, Google began to chase the browser market, which had already been divided among IE and Firefox. However, Google invested over $10 billion over ten years, led by future CEO Sundar Pichai, to create the technologically advanced Chromium kernel, ultimately making Chrome the world's number one browser, with a market share of 64%.

Establishing a model advantage is also very difficult. In fact, China has almost copied all overseas models, from portal e-commerce to search social networks, and many locally flavored "innovations" are actually borrowed from abroad, such as the SMS model that saved the industry, which originated in Japan. It wasn't until after the explosion of the mobile internet in 2012 that China truly contributed genuine model innovations to the world.

The only remaining hope is in products, because technology can cross borders, models can be universally applied, but product experience must align with local habits, which is precisely the weakness of overseas giants: they often prioritize meeting the needs of global users, and their product development teams are far removed from the local Chinese market, making it difficult to respond to, or even unwilling to respond to, local demands. This has pointed a clear path for Chinese companies: with the same product form, as long as they can provide a better experience, they can win.

Tencent's QQ fought two battles against ICQ and MSN, with the first battle being the most classic case.

The first battle was short-lived. ICQ was once the world's largest instant messaging software, surpassing 10 million users by the end of 1998, but aside from sending batch lawyer letters to "xICQ" in China, it paid little attention to the Chinese market, and its product had many unreasonable points. For example, at that time, most Chinese internet users accessed the internet via internet cafes, but ICQ stored user information locally, which would be lost if the computer was changed.

Tencent sensitively recognized this and was the first to store QQ user information on backend servers, preventing the loss of friend lists and greatly enhancing user experience. There were many similar product improvements, such as offline messages, personalized avatars, and adding strangers as friends, which earned QQ a good reputation among users. By around 2001, the battle with ICQ had already ended.

The second battle was much more challenging. In August 2004, Microsoft announced the establishment of the MSN China R&D and marketing centers, entering the Chinese IM market with grand ambitions. Compared to the crude ICQ, MSN had a much higher profile, easily capturing 10% of the market share without any localization, and with Microsoft's financial strength and deep government relations in China, Tencent faced immense pressure.

Tencent's response was consistently one strategy: let the product speak for itself. From QQ 2003 to QQ 2007, Tencent continuously improved the product experience, with major application innovations like QQ Show, personal cloud storage, QZone, and QQ Pets, as well as functional improvements like offline files, breakpoint resume, and window shaking. These not only enhanced Tencent's commercial capabilities but also made users feel that QQ was becoming increasingly user-friendly.

For instance, QQ added a "screenshot" feature in the 2004 version, becoming the first IM software to do so. This seemingly insignificant change was widely welcomed by internet users, and Tencent later added features like dynamic screenshots, editing, long screenshots, screen recording, and mosaic, making it more and more user-friendly. To this day, many people (including myself) instinctively think of opening QQ when they need to take a screenshot on their computer.

If we view the period around the millennium as the long march of internet companies struggling and bleeding through trial and error, then after entering 2005, companies like Tencent began to summarize tactics, expand their victories, and focus on a pain point to the extreme, quietly implanting the impression that "this function is only well done by this product" into users' minds, continuously enhancing their products and changing the balance of the war through a series of small victories.

In contrast, MSN China's strategic moves were dazzling, sometimes establishing MSN Chinese websites to recruit partners, sometimes collaborating with Yahoo Messenger for interoperability, and at other times entering the SMS business to try to grab a share. However, at the core product level, MSN's user experience remained significantly inferior to QQ. Ultimately, those strategic maneuvers could not withstand the users' votes with their feet.

Years later, on Zhihu, a highly upvoted answer succinctly summarized the reason for MSN's defeat: "If it's not user-friendly, it's just not user-friendly."

While QQ was battling MSN, Tencent's internet peers were also defeating the attacks of overseas giants on various fronts — Alibaba defeated eBay and its Chinese agent Eachnet, Dangdang withstood Amazon and its acquired Joyo, NetEase prevented Korean online games from monopolizing the Chinese market, and even the later controversial Baidu leveraged innovations like Tieba to surpass Google in market share.

In this process, a subtle change occurred: product managers gained increasing influence in Chinese internet companies, even surpassing programmers in some cases, becoming the core figures determining the success or failure of companies. The public observing the internet preferred to hear their thoughts and methodologies on products, far more than listening to programmers discuss technical solutions or hearing bosses summarize management experiences.

In 2007, Steve Jobs launched the first-generation iPhone, and at that time, the Chinese internet companies that had just won their battles were unaware that a more fertile land was about to appear on the horizon.

III. The Era of Mobile Prosperity#

In the battle of mobile internet, the determination, morale, and offensive of Chinese enterprises are rarely seen in the history of Chinese commerce.

In 2008, Apple and Google opened third-party application permissions, prompting a wave of activity in Silicon Valley, with a slew of star startups like Foursquare, Ngmoco, and Rovio emerging. Although China also saw a batch of mobile application entrepreneurs, many internet companies were unaware of the scale of the mobile wave until 2009, when the consensus in the Chinese tech circle was finally formed, taking about a year.

Whenever something gains consensus among the Chinese, the momentum is bound to be overwhelming. Starting in 2009, Chinese companies split into two paths: one focused on hardware, targeting smartphones, including players like Coolpad and new entrants like Lei Jun; the other focused on mobile applications, including PC internet companies transitioning to wireless and a host of "mobile-native" entrepreneurs.

Large internet companies were anxious to secure their tickets to the mobile internet before the door closed, with Tencent and Alibaba being the most resolute. For Tencent, the outcome of mobile IM was a matter of life and death, and ultimately WeChat emerged victorious, with Liu Chiping leaving behind the famous phrase "Don't resist" during the restructuring; for Alibaba, the failure of Laiwang turned the mobile transformation of Taobao into a fight for survival, with Zhang Yong leading the charge and shouting "All-in," ultimately making it to shore successfully.

Veterans feared being left behind by the train of the times, while new drivers were fervently focused on wealth. The wealth creation effect of the PC internet was evident, coupled with government encouragement for "mass entrepreneurship and innovation," leading to what might be the largest wave of entrepreneurship in Chinese history. At its peak, VCs were reaching out to BAT's product managers, calling them one by one to ask if they wanted to start a business, promising funding for those who did.

Unlike the previous era where the industry collectively resisted foreign powers, the mobile internet battle was primarily a civil war. A particularly telling scene from that era was in 2015 when Yahoo closed its China R&D center, and hundreds of HR representatives flooded the entrance of Tsinghua Tongfang Building, holding banners and advertising boards in a "talent snatching" spectacle, almost all from local internet companies. Some resigned from their official positions to return home, while others rushed to the exam halls overnight.

In foreign battles, the core of competition for Chinese internet companies was products, while in civil wars, the core remained products.

The most classic example of this is the battle of mobile IM. In the crucial months of 2011, Xiaomi's MiTalk, Shanda's YouNi, Talkbox, and Tencent's WeChat engaged in a life-and-death race; later, 360's KouXin, NetEase's YiXin, and Alibaba's Laiwang joined the fray, while operators' Feixin remained watchful from the sidelines. Ultimately, Tencent's product capabilities were once again recognized by the industry.

In addition to the transformation battles among PC internet giants, more "mobile-native" star products emerged, such as Meituan, Toutiao, Momo, Kuaishou, Didi, Zhihu, Ele.me, Gaode, and later established platforms like Douyu, Bilibili, Ximalaya, Pinduoduo, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin... In their victories over competitors, "better product experience" was the common denominator.

Product managers became the hottest positions in the tech circle, with the website "Everyone is a Product Manager" seeing explosive traffic, Liang Ning's "30 Talks on Product Thinking" widely circulated and learned, and Kai-Fu Lee even encouraging graduates: "I suggest those who intend to become CEOs consider starting as product managers if they first want to work," with even women seeking partners on Alibaba's internal network prioritizing product managers over programmers.

Traditional industries also attempted to borrow product thinking, especially after Xiaomi entered the manufacturing sector, with industries like home appliances (Haier, Midea), robotics (Roborock, Dreame, Ecovacs), and imaging equipment (Insta360, DJI) heavily borrowing from internet product methodologies. The new energy vehicle industry (Li Auto, NIO, Xpeng) has also batch-introduced talent and bosses from the internet sector, contributing significantly to the enhancement of Chinese manufacturing.

A noteworthy milestone is that, aside from "products," Chinese internet companies have finally begun to venture into the uncharted territory of "models."

Zhang Yiming, while financing with Haina Asia's Wang Qiong, sketched out the product form and business model of Toutiao on a napkin in a café — it wasn't that Zhang Yiming invented the technology of "personalized algorithm recommendation," but that only ByteDance, based on this technology, successfully ran the model of "mass supply + distribution recommendation," achieving a highly efficient monetization loop and transplanting the core idea to later platforms like Douyin and TikTok.

A similar situation occurred with Meituan. In the food delivery war, Wang Xing was the first to determine that food delivery was a daily order volume industry in the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions — rather than just millions — and then, through offline promotions, encompassed millions of businesses, developing a delivery team of millions, which tested organizational capabilities in an unprecedented manner. Here, the success or failure of the business was no longer purely about "products," but about building and mastering the "model."

By the second half of 2020, the Chinese internet industry reached its peak since its inception, with Alibaba and Tencent nearing a trillion-dollar market value, and Meituan, JD.com, Pinduoduo, and Baidu all exceeding hundreds of billions, while companies with market caps of over a billion were everywhere. Additionally, among the 586 unlisted unicorns globally that year, the U.S. accounted for 233, while China accounted for 227, with the combined share of China and the U.S. approaching 80%.

Although after 2021, the Chinese internet faced tightening regulations and public opinion challenges, it continued to advance after the adjustments. With TikTok, SHEIN, and Temu gaining popularity globally, the doubts were shattered by the industry's actual achievements. China is indeed exporting "products" and "models" to the world, and the question posed by Sam Altman at the beginning occurred against this backdrop.

What lies ahead for the industry seems to be only the "technology" mountain that appears to be unconquered.

IV. The Mountain of Technology#

For commercial companies, whether the mountain of technology can be conquered depends on three things: whether there is funding, whether there are talents, and whether there is commercial feedback.

Funding is the easiest to understand. For example, looking at American tech giants, Microsoft has invested a total of $1.7 trillion in R&D since its establishment, Intel $1.5 trillion, Amazon $890 billion, Google $490 billion, and even Apple, often criticized for its relatively low R&D investment, has invested $650 billion since 2000 — these astronomical figures are the reasons for America's tech strength and also its results.

The importance of talent is often overlooked; having people alone is not enough for tech R&D. One case is why European car manufacturers struggle with in-car systems, with even companies like Volkswagen and Mercedes facing failures. The reason is that the local information industry in Europe has been hollowed out, leading to a severe shortage of programmers. In contrast, weaker Chinese car manufacturers can hire Android developers from phone companies, front-end developers from internet companies, and AI algorithm experts from AI companies, ensuring a sufficient talent supply.

Commercial feedback is the most hidden yet crucial link. For market-oriented companies, money does not come easily; Amazon's cloud computing is globally leading not because Bezos loves technology, but because without it, e-commerce would not survive; similarly, Google's deep accumulation in storage, deep learning, and large-scale computing is not because programmers enjoy publishing papers, but because the costs and efficiency of search determine revenue and profit, necessitating investment in R&D.

Thanks to breakthroughs from products, Chinese internet companies have accumulated substantial funding and talent over the past 20 years: the number of engineers at Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance exceeds 50,000, while Baidu, Meituan, Kuaishou, JD.com, NetEase, and Pinduoduo also exceed 10,000, and they have accumulated at least over 2 trillion in profits over the past decade — while their foundation may not match that of the U.S., it is still quite impressive.

With funding and talent, Chinese internet companies have the strength to tackle hard problems in their familiar fields. For instance, in the case of cloud databases, Alibaba's e-commerce finance and Tencent's social gaming view databases as core infrastructure, and both companies have invested heavily in this area. OceanBase from Alibaba and TDSQL from Tencent have both topped global TPC tests, enhancing China's overall strength in this field.

Beyond these breakthroughs that make headlines, more technology is embedded in products with over a hundred million daily active users. For instance, the instant messaging technology that enables hundreds of millions of people to communicate online is primarily held by Tencent and Meta; the talent capable of solving the massive scale and high concurrency issues in e-commerce can only be found in China apart from Amazon; and globally, over half of the companies that understand personalized recommendation algorithms are Chinese.

Internet products have a deceptive quality that makes it easy to overlook the technical difficulties behind them. For example, Google appears to be just a search box, WeChat seems like a chat window, ChatGPT is a chatbot, and Douyin is a video playback interface... Supporting these UI interfaces are complex underlying architectures and codes. The largest technological investment by internet companies is to ensure that these products can be used billions of times daily while continuously improving their experience.

Take video conferencing as an example. On the surface, it seems no different from video group chats, but business meetings are a very B-end scenario, completely different from chatting with friends, with inherent requirements for stability, capacity, and latency. Especially with the rise of remote work, people's meeting locations are often varied — subways, bedrooms, highways... The noise and internet speed differ greatly in different scenarios, making the underlying technical difficulties and engineering implementations increasingly complex.

However, when opening Zoom or Tencent Meeting, one finds that their interfaces and operations are very user-friendly. Behind this is the massive R&D they have done in audio and video, cloud deployment, AI, etc., "shielding" users from the complexities of technology, allowing them to conveniently join cross-platform meetings through a link, making the experience increasingly smooth. These improvements in experience, in turn, have propelled online meetings to become a mainstream office habit, forming a virtuous cycle between R&D investment and commercial feedback.

From this, another common sense can be derived:

• Tech companies are most motivated to tackle hard technological problems in their core businesses.

For example, Apple has often been criticized for its low R&D investment as a percentage of revenue, and even Musk frequently throws out jabs. However, when it comes to core business, Apple's ability to "conquer mountains" is evident. For instance, when Apple realized that chips would greatly impact the experience and iteration of iPhones and Macs, it quickly assembled a large team and spent ten years developing its A-series and M-series processors, particularly surpassing Intel in the desktop CPU field, which shocked Silicon Valley.

Thus, it is the products that choose technology, and one could even say it is business that chooses technology. Why does Google venture into designing NPUs? It is because Google Cloud's insatiable demand for computing power has become a black hole, and self-developing NPUs would significantly reduce costs; similarly, why does Microsoft generously support OpenAI? It is not because Nadella wants to be the next big boss in Silicon Valley, but because AI can genuinely enhance the pricing and renewal rates of Microsoft products. If he doesn't invest in this area, the board won't let him off the hook.

A country's ability to accumulate technology and talent across various fields depends on how many areas it can establish a virtuous commercial cycle. The same applies to Chinese internet companies; their greatest "duty" is to thoroughly understand the technology within their business scope and collectively expand the "reservoir" of national scientific research. As for the "bottleneck" issues outside their commercial radius, their investments are more driven by a sense of mission based on national sentiment.

Therefore, the path for Chinese internet companies to conquer technological mountains is no different from that of overseas giants: under mature business models, they spend money around their core businesses, thoroughly understand underlying technologies, continuously reduce costs and improve experiences, ensure that commercial feedback can "support" talent teams, and "afford" R&D expenses, ultimately investing in the pursuit of more cutting-edge technologies after sufficient accumulation.

This is the correct path that follows industrial rules, but it is also a path that requires patience. In 1998, Gates became the world's richest man, while Lei Jun was still worrying about not being able to pay salaries. Chinese internet companies have crossed the line of life and death for less than a decade, only half that of telecom equipment vendors like Huawei, and the money spent has not been enough for long enough. Thus, the fact that Chinese people have not won the Turing Award is actually the same reason why there are so few Nobel Prize winners from China.

However, over the years, there has indeed been a prevailing view that "internet giants focus more on products and models rather than technology."

This skepticism is understandable. The standard path for Chinese internet companies to break through has been to initially follow the technological directions of overseas giants, borrow mature business models, and establish "product advantages" to gain a foothold in business. Only after accumulating a certain foundation can they afford to venture into model and technological innovation. On this path, the "visibility" of products and models is undoubtedly the highest.

Starting from a per capita GDP that is only 5% of that of Europe, the U.S., and Japan, this was the only path for the Chinese internet industry to break through. In contrast, countries with better conditions have become markets for the one-way "output" of Silicon Valley products, with only a fraction of the industry remaining. Thus, the core contradiction in public opinion regarding the Chinese internet is actually the emotional satisfaction of the people in "breaking through bottlenecks" versus the need for industrial development to follow objective rules.

Another popular viewpoint — "a company is only valuable if it solves bottleneck technological breakthroughs" — falls into a similar misunderstanding, failing to recognize that in a catch-up country like China, the first step is to solve the funding source for R&D to support large teams and tackle hard problems. Even Huawei's success in developing HiSilicon chips was backed by profits from telecom equipment.

Only by shifting our focus away from lithography machines and 2nm processes can we see more heroic industries and industrial heroes.

Festivals#

Before "Double 11" emerged as a shopping festival, the day was more commonly known as "Singles' Day," a subculture native to the internet. Initially, Alibaba's marketing department chose to capitalize on "Singles' Day" traffic due to a lack of resources — they did not have the determination to rally the entire company to create a festival — and after discovering the high cost-effectiveness, they claimed it for themselves.

On the other hand, winter is a natural promotional node for the retail industry; "Black Friday" also falls in winter. This is not coincidental; preparing supplies for the family to survive winter is a historical rule of commercial society. Therefore, whether it is November 11 or not, establishing a tradition of major promotions on this day close to the end of the year is an inevitable result.

According to Uncle Ni, Ma Yun initially hoped for a "Thanksgiving Day," organizing an event each year to give consumers discounts. However, the problem was that "Double 11" became too successful, leading everyone to believe it could serve as an opportunity to showcase dominance in the industry, with every executive and department having their own mission requirements for "Double 11."

Thus, it is not that "Double 11" has become increasingly complex, but rather that from the moment it succeeded, "alienation" had already begun.

Both Pan Luan and I have a deep impression that for a long time, Alibaba internally defined "Double 11" as a training outcome unrelated to business, merely creating a grand narrative, moving army cots into the office, and tirelessly supporting the major promotion, resulting in a wonderful chemical reaction where employees felt that only those who fought for "Double 11" together were true comrades.

Of course, I must emphasize the limitations of the era; nowadays, most people would not buy into such narratives. However, at that time, the large companies still had an environment that valued fortune, and Alibaba did not intend to encourage a culture of relentless striving — the stock price was there, and people had no choice but to strive — primarily because they genuinely believed that "Double 11" had already concluded its business battle, and the only competitor, JD.com, was not enough to worry about. Thus, in the eyes of the bosses, "Double 11" became a ceremony to serve corporate culture and unite company morale.

Arrogance naturally has its price, as we have all seen. Ten years ago, Alibaba and JD's GMV accounted for over 80% of China's e-commerce industry, but today, Alibaba's share has been squeezed to less than one-third, with Pinduoduo, Douyin, and Kuaishou emerging one after another. As the industry matures, concentration has actually decreased, which is an interesting trend.

Dai commented highly on the pressure-testing practice brought by "Double 11," noting that the peak daily sales during major promotions eventually became the norm, equivalent to conducting expansion drills in advance, significantly aiding the technical line. The bosses evaluated the returns of "Double 11" from a management perspective, which posed no major issues. However, it was also foreseeable that "Double 11" would transform from a miraculous creation into a burden on both supply and demand.

Here, it is necessary to insert some background: according to late reports, Tmall has canceled this year's "Double 11" gala, further elevating the note of "the end of an era." However, perhaps due to differing definitions, Tmall still cooperated with Hunan TV for the "Double 11" gala this year, just on a much smaller scale.

In Uncle Ni's view, although "Double 11" is Zhang Yong's creation, the gala format reflects Ma Yun's will. Ma Yun has a strong desire for closeness to the entertainment industry, and during that spirited period, he mingled within it — inadvertently boosting Alibaba's entertainment sector to new heights, which deserves another discussion — thus, based on Ma Yun's judgment, a single e-commerce platform alone could not create a festive shopping atmosphere on a societal level; it must borrow from the hands of pan-entertainment to add fuel to the fire.

Therefore, the decline of the gala and the pullback of "Double 11" appear to be on the same axis, but the reasons are not entirely the same. The window for the entertainment industry to dominate the social agenda in China has closed. Whether handed over to Zhejiang TV or Hunan TV, there is no way to carve a boat to seek a sword, leading to changes in budget allocation, and there are no specific events to serve as advertising materials. It is better to give users subsidies, tangibly increasing volume, and driving the repurchase of 88VIP, transforming Taobao and Tmall into a large private domain space for Alibaba.

This is also one of the reasons why this year's "Double 11" appears particularly calm. In the process of returning to simple logic, it has turned into a naked exchange of interests between the platform and users. What does this mean? It means that users must continuously invest on the platform to unlock corresponding subsidies. For example, many live broadcast rooms require users to spend a certain amount of time to receive red envelopes, indicating that the platform's policies are in a contraction phase, and there is a need for trade-offs, making prioritization meaningful.

If you are not a heavy user of the e-commerce platform but rather the type who only opens the app when you think of something to buy, your perception of this year's "Double 11" will be even weaker, feeling that you haven't seen any subsidies (except for national subsidies) — many comments in live broadcast rooms have already reflected this — thus personally playing a role in the empirical decline of the festival's impact.

The same goes for the supply side. The forced cessation of the "choose one" rule has actually broken the unspoken rules of "Double 11," meaning that platforms can no longer lock in merchants to offer discounts. Merchants relinquish profits on individual products in exchange for store-wide exposure, while platforms give up advertising inventory in exchange for consumer mindshare, and users give up their choice rights in exchange for low-priced bargains, barely maintaining a temporary impossible triangle.

Once this impossible triangle can no longer be sustained, the value of "Double 11" further collapses. The platform's methods of locking in merchants have shifted from half-price to low-price, then to first releases, and new arrivals, gradually weakening supply advantages, making the platform's limitations evident, leaving them to rely on influencers like Li Jiaqi to distribute red envelopes.

Practitioners should be aware that the friction between Douyin and Taobao has been particularly intense this year. Although I believe that the common enemy should be the quietly lurking Pinduoduo, the frontline confrontation is still between these two platforms with the closest business models. The shelf space has not stirred up much of a storm, and the only impulse consumption mobilized in live broadcast rooms remains the incremental growth.

Unfortunately, this year's "Double 11" coincided with a year of influencer scandals.

Last month, there was bizarre news of a sales influencer seeking a bank loan to distribute red envelopes. This is not about the influencer losing money to subsidize their family, but rather an inability to wait for the payment period, with cash flow running low. The pressure on influencers has overflowed due to the platform's change in attitude.

Uncle Ni believes that the honeymoon period between platforms and influencers has ended. The declining social reputation is certainly an explicit factor, but the more realistic reason is that platforms are resetting their business models during the contraction phase. Influencers can indeed drive volume, but their existence itself is an unavoidable cost. This is also why I say that the common enemy should be Pinduoduo, as only Pinduoduo has not boarded this pirate ship.

So I asked another question: has "Double 11" really completed its historical mission?

The essence of "Double 11" is a large-scale user acquisition activity targeting all internet users in the Chinese e-commerce industry, which had insufficient penetration. Even as late as Alibaba's IPO in 2014, e-commerce penetration had just surpassed 50%. Last year, penetration reached 85%, meaning that aside from a small portion of people without purchasing power (but who can go online), e-commerce platforms have no new users to acquire in the entire Chinese internet.

Dai believes that major promotions need to establish a mindset of absolute low prices, which inevitably leads to a conflict at the level of first principles, so it will increasingly be diluted. However, "Double 11" bears not only a historical mission but also a historical legacy and is part of market value management. Stopping it is a very difficult task, and even if unexpected signs emerge, knowing that the return on investment is unreasonable, they may still double down to maintain appearances. This is the struggle of large companies.

Thus, looking at the battle reports of recent years, it is not difficult to find that the prefixes of various data have increased significantly. On one hand, everyone cannot deviate from the statistical bureau — they must be higher than the market average — this is not forcing the market to say, "Am I going to fall behind?" On the other hand, they cannot admit that growth has stalled, so they must borrow the arithmetic solutions from the new energy vehicle industry, using various conditions to create impressive performance.

Uncle Ni digressed, believing that Lei Jun has taken over the representative status of entrepreneurs in public opinion from Ma Yun. To paraphrase an old editor, the dismissal of Ma Yun has other uses; the organization has already decided to appoint Lei Jun as the new Ma Yun, taking office immediately.

In fact, it is not just Lei Jun; Ye Guofu of Miniso, Yu Donglai of Pang Donglai, Zeng Yuqun of CATL, and Wang Chuanfu of BYD have all become frequent subjects in short video topics during the time when internet entrepreneurs maintained a low profile. Their commonality is that they come from the real economy, possessing tangible businesses that provide certainty in uncertain risk cycles.

Conversely, those engaged in platform economies, if they cannot tie themselves to mainstream narratives, will deliberately maintain distance. For example, Shein is about to go public, yet you can hardly find a few photos of its boss online.

Returning to the theme of "Double 11," you will find that Pinduoduo is still telling the story of white-label alternatives. In fact, it is the least related to "Double 11," yet it cannot be avoided, often concluding with the unanimous sentiment of "Pinduoduo is still impressive," which is why I say Pinduoduo is indeed the industry's succubus, with immense sexual tension.

Comparing Uncle Ni's negative critique of Pinduoduo with Dai's acknowledgment of it is quite interesting.

Uncle Ni believes that Pinduoduo's ultimate form is to reduce the 6 trillion e-commerce transaction value to 1 trillion in factory delivery value. If all e-commerce platforms succumb to such gameplay, disregarding the future and destroying the present just to survive another day, serious consequences will ensue. The military attack system of the Qin Dynasty could sweep through the six states, but it could not escape the fate of the second emperor's demise.

Dai's point is that the retail industry's demand for supply-demand matching is certainly more significant than the sudden imposition of the "responsibility for the industry" label. The issue of counterfeit goods was also pursued against Alibaba before its IPO. Later, Alibaba made significant efforts to combat counterfeiting, but it cannot change the demand for selling Nike sneakers for 80 yuan. Even without Pinduoduo, such businesses would still exist, even if not online; people would return to the market, and white-label products would still sell best.

So, can you understand why I say Pinduoduo is a succubus?

Finally, let me add some value to this live discussion as a conclusion. I saw a comment that immediately reminded me: in 2016, Trump's personal biography was published in Chinese, and that same year he was elected President of the United States. The preface of that Chinese biography was written by Ma Yun...

In the preface, Ma Yun stated that he believed the readers of this book were those young people who could accept failure and start from scratch. Eight years later, "Double 11" continues but struggles to hide its decline, Trump has made a comeback to the White House, and Ma Yun is no longer in the limelight.

Seeking Compound Interest#

Compound interest is a magic that needs to be sought; exponential curves are key to creating wealth.

If a medium-sized enterprise can maintain a 50% growth rate each year, it will become a giant in a very short time. In fact, very few companies in the world can simultaneously possess true network effects and extreme scalability. However, with the development of technology, more and more people will do so — finding and creating them is a very worthwhile endeavor.

The same goes for individuals. If you want your life trajectory to be an exponential curve, your goal should be to align your life with a continuously growing trajectory that moves in the right direction. Therefore, choosing a career with a compound interest effect is crucial — although most career paths are linear.

If the efficiency of someone who has worked for two years is the same as that of someone who has worked for twenty years, this may not be the career you want to pursue. For anyone with ambition, you need to maintain extremely high learning efficiency at all times. As your career progresses, each segment of your work should ideally bring increasing "compound interest." Ways to gain these levers include capital, brand, network effects, and management.

Exceptional success is about adding more "0s" after having "1." Therefore, you need to focus on increasing more success factors, which may include money, social status, influencing the world... or something else. Personally, I am very willing to spend time finding my "next thing," and I look forward to this endeavor overshadowing my other life achievements.

Too many people get stuck in linear opportunities and hesitate. I believe that whether for a company or an individual's career, the greatest competitive advantage lies in long-term thinking, viewing how different systems in the world will interact from a broad perspective. It is worth noting that finding opportunities for compound growth is crucial; the earlier you discover them, the more valuable they are.

In a world where almost no one truly focuses on the long term, the market will reward those who do with generous returns. Focus on the long term, maintain patience, and be open to "accepting surprises."

Unwavering Self-Belief
Self-confidence is a powerful force. The most successful people I know are almost all filled with self-confidence, even to the point of delusion. Cultivating this ability early on is essential.

As more and more data proves your judgments correct, and you can consistently deliver results, be more confident in yourself. If you lack confidence, it is hard to believe that your thoughts about the future will create value, especially when your ideas differ from others.

Many years ago, Elon Musk took me on a tour of SpaceX's factory, where he detailed the manufacturing process of every component of the rocket. But I still vividly remember the absolute certainty on his face when he spoke about launching large rockets to Mars. When I left, I thought, "Ha, this is the standard of confidence."

Managing your own morale, as well as your team's morale, is one of the most challenging parts of a founder's efforts. Without confidence, entrepreneurship is unlikely to succeed. Unfortunately, the more ambitious you are, the more the world wants to bring you down.

Most successful people have correct judgments about the future. Often, at least once, their "correctness" is based on the fact that others thought they were "wrong." Without this external misjudgment and the subsequent opportunity window, successful individuals would inevitably become mired in the red ocean of competition.

• Of course, confidence also needs to be balanced with self-reflection. I used to hate any form of criticism and did everything I could to avoid it. Now, I choose to truly listen, assuming that these criticisms are valid, and then consider whether I should take action based on that foundation. The path to seeking truth is often difficult and painful, but only in this way can we distinguish between "confidence" and "self-deception."

This balance can also help you avoid leaving an impression of being self-righteous and unrealistic.

Learn to Think Independently#

Entrepreneurial spirit is difficult to achieve through education. Schools do not teach you how to think independently, so you must cultivate original thinking on your own.

Starting with basic principles and attempting to generate new ideas is a very interesting endeavor. Communicating with "like-minded" individuals who possess such attributes is a good way to enhance this ability. Once you have new ideas, you need to find a simple and quick way to test whether these ideas hold up in the real world.

"I will fail many times, but I will always have one that is correct." This is the essence of entrepreneurship. You need to give yourself many opportunities to try and reap your luck.

One of the most valuable lessons is that you can figure out "what you can do when there are no solutions." The more often you do this, the more you will believe — courage comes from knowing that you can stand up again after being knocked down.

Good at "Sales"#

Confidence alone is not enough — you must also be able to persuade others to believe in your vision.

All great careers, to some extent, involve "sales." You must communicate your plans to customers, potential employees, media, investors, and other stakeholders. You need to paint an inspiring vision and possess strong communication skills, personal charisma, and robust execution capabilities.

Finding ways to become a better communicator (especially in written communication) is worth investing in. My advice for communication is to first ensure that you have a clear thought process, then express it in concise and clear language.

The necessary prerequisite for becoming a good salesperson is that you sincerely believe in what you are "selling." If you truly believe in it, selling is a pleasure; but if you don't believe in it yourself, selling becomes a torment.

In fact, anyone can improve their "sales skills" through continuous practice. But for some reason, perhaps because it often makes people feel awkward, many believe that sales is something that cannot be learned.

Regarding sales, I have another suggestion: show up in person at important moments. In the early days, I was even very willing to fly specifically to sales sites, although this was not always necessary. However, in my life, there have been three instances of such "unnecessary on-site sales" that brought extremely important turning points to my career.

Willing to Take Risks#

Too many people overestimate risks while underestimating returns. Taking risks is important because no one can be right forever — you must try many things and adapt quickly.

In the early stages of your career, taking risks is usually easier: you have little to lose, but you could gain a lot. You should try to make taking risks easier. Look for small "bets": if you are wrong, you might lose a little; if you are right, you could gain 100 times.

Place more bets in the "right direction."
However, do not accumulate bets for too long. I have found that founders who work too long in large companies tend to have some issues. When people become accustomed to a comfortable life, a steadily rising career path, and the unassailable reputation of a large platform, they find it hard to decide to leave it all behind. Many people have a strange ability to equate their quality of life with next year's salary.

Even if they decide to leave, the temptation to "return to the comfort zone" is immense. Focusing more on short-term gains rather than long-term returns is human nature.

When you find yourself entangled in a low point, follow your intuition and spend time on things that could become very interesting. If you are strong enough, you can remain simple and flexible.

Focus
Focus is the engine of work.

From my observation, those who spend more time thinking about what to focus on usually receive good returns. Doing the right thing is far more important than working long hours; too many people waste time on trivial matters.

Once you know what to do, quickly execute those few extremely important tasks. From my personal experience, I have never seen a lack of execution lead to success.

Work Hard
Being smart or hardworking, either one can make you part of the top 10%, which is already a remarkable achievement. But to become part of the top 1%, you need to be both smart and hardworking — your competitors are also top-tier, and they are also smart and hardworking.

Only those who pursue excellence can reap excellence. Extreme work means making trade-offs regarding the rest, such as balancing life. If you are unwilling to make trade-offs, that is a completely reasonable choice. However, pursuing excellence also has many advantages; in most cases, quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes, and success will continue to bring more success.

Finding your goals is one of life's greatest joys. I don't quite understand why some Americans think working hard is a bad thing. But outside of America, it is clear that people still value the importance of hard work — non-American entrepreneurs display extraordinary energy and drive, rapidly becoming the new benchmark.

I don't quite understand why, in some places in America, working hard has become a bad thing. But it is certainly not the case in other parts of the world — the energy and drive displayed by entrepreneurs outside of America are quickly becoming the new benchmark.

You must figure out how to give your all without exhausting yourself. Everyone has their own strategy in this regard. An effective method is to find what you love and work on it with people you enjoy being around.

Do not believe in those who say "you can succeed without hard work." In fact, endurance in work is one of the most important factors for long-term success.

Additionally, the earlier you work hard, the more returns you will gain, just like the interest from savings. Generally speaking, young people tend to have fewer burdens, so the younger you are, the more capital you have to give your all.

Ambition
I firmly believe that successful startups always choose to tackle difficult tasks. People want to engage in truly exciting endeavors and feel that their work can create value on the path to their goals.

When you make progress on an important issue, many people will want to help you achieve a larger vision. Be a bit more ambitious and do not be afraid to pursue what you truly want to do. When you discover that you are "different," that may be your opportunity — do not hesitate, go for it.

Follow your curiosity. What excites you is often exciting for others as well.

A Little Bit of Willfulness
You can make the world bend to your will; it is not as difficult as you think. Too many people do not even try and accept conventional solutions.

In pursuing dreams, people have immense potential to tap into. Self-doubt, giving up too early, and not putting in enough effort combine to prevent most people from approaching their potential limits.

Always pursue what you truly want. Failure is natural, and rejection can be painful. But once an attempt works, your gains will be astonishing.

Those who say, "No matter how many times I fail, I will achieve my goals," will always succeed if they are serious and diligent. Their long-term persistence is the true reason for "good luck." Airbnb is an example of this.

The premise of willfulness is optimism — I hope this is a character trait that can be improved through practice. I have never seen a naturally pessimistic success story.

Increasing Competitive Barriers
The harder it is to compete with you, the more valuable your company becomes. This is a truth understood by everyone.

The same applies to individuals; the higher your replacement cost, the less likely you are to be replaced.

The best way to enhance competitiveness is to "increase leverage." For example, building a strong brand or a cross-disciplinary knowledge system... There are many ways to increase leverage; find what suits you.

Do not imitate others; taking the conventional path leads to a dead end because people can easily compete with you.

Building Networks
Great work requires a team — establish a network of talented individuals to work with (this network can be tight or loose at times). The scale of an effective talent network is one of the factors influencing how far you can go.

An effective way to build interpersonal networks is to help others as much as possible. For a long time, this has been one of my best personal investments. I am often surprised to find that the good returns I receive sometimes come from connections made ten years ago.

Value your reputation, such as treating those you work with kindly; this will greatly benefit your future. As a manager, it is also important to understand people's strengths and effectively motivate them to accomplish more important work rather than draining them. All of this comes from my practice rather than management textbooks.

Everyone excels at something. Define yourself by your strengths rather than your weaknesses. Acknowledge your weaknesses and find ways to overcome them, but do not let them stop you from doing what you want to do.

I often hear many entrepreneurs say, "I can't do X because I'm not good at Y." This actually reflects a lack of creativity. The best way to compensate for your shortcomings is to hire complementary team members rather than just hiring people who excel at the same things you do.

Another particularly valuable aspect of interpersonal networks is discovering undiscovered talent. How to achieve this? The simplest way is to meet many people and note who impresses you and who does not. Through practice, you can become more adept at identifying the intelligence, motivation, and creativity of these "unappreciated individuals." Remember, when looking for talent, you should focus on their growth rate rather than just their experience or current achievements.

Every time I meet someone new, I always ask myself, "Does this person have the potential to become great?" This is a great prompting question that can help you identify those who may accomplish great things.

There is also a special situation: getting outstanding individuals to see your potential and be willing to bet on you. This "talent scouting" can be done once a year. The best way to achieve this is to make yourself useful. (Remember, at some point in the future, you should also pass on this generosity.)

Finally, spend more time with positive and supportive people who encourage your ambitions.

What You Have Determines Your Wealth Ceiling
In understanding wealth, one of my biggest misconceptions in childhood was that people are wealthy because of high salaries. Although I did notice some exceptions at that time, such as the billionaires on the Forbes list, almost none of them made it there through salary alone.

The truth is that the way to become truly wealthy is to own things that appreciate rapidly in value. For example, if you start a business or own real estate, intellectual property, or similar assets. You need to have equity in something rather than just selling your time. Time only grows linearly.

The best way to make products appreciate quickly is to scale "products that people want."

Intrinsic Motivation
Most people are "externally driven," wanting to impress others with what they do. This external drive has two negative effects:

First, you will only work based on consensus, whether that consensus is a certain idea or a career growth path. This leads to you caring more about whether others recognize you than whether what you are doing is genuinely interesting and valuable. At the same time, this "consensus" causes you to lose your unique value.

Second, you will misjudge risks. You focus more on keeping up with others; you may also struggle to accept that sometimes "fast is slow," missing out on what is truly important in the long term.

Smart people seem particularly susceptible to these external driving factors. Realizing this cognitive trap can help you, but you still need to work very hard to avoid falling into the imitation trap.

The most successful people I know are primarily driven by internal factors: they do what they believe is truly important, they create what they think the world needs, and they do so to avoid regretting their choices. Especially after achieving a certain level of fame and wealth, this intrinsic motivation is the only force that drives them to continuously pursue "higher, faster, stronger."

This is why, when I meet someone, I most want to understand their motivations. The right motivation is difficult to quantify, but when you see it, you will know, "That's it."

Ultimately, your success must be rooted in what you value most and what you have accomplished. The earlier you start, the further you are likely to go. Remember, if what you are doing is not something you are passionate about and willing to fight for throughout your life, it will be hard to achieve great success.

I once shared my views on wealth: one of the main reasons I am excited about basic income is that it will encourage more people to take risks, thereby unleashing human potential. Before that, if you were not born lucky, you had to climb hard to reach the top before you could start to swagger. If you were born into extreme poverty, this is very difficult. :(

However, many people with "poor innate conditions" continue to achieve success, and I see infinite possibilities in them. It is also because of them as a reference that I realize how lucky I am.

Once again, I wish everyone continuous progress and good luck in more endeavors. Thank you!

OpenAI CEO: How to Improve Work Efficiency

1. Seek Compound Interest
2. Unwavering Self-Belief
3. Learn to Think Independently
4. Good at "Sales"
5. Willing to Take Risks
6. Place More Bets in the "Right Direction."
7. Focus
8. Work Hard
9. Ambition
10. A Little Bit of Willfulness
11. Increase Competitive Barriers
12. Build Networks
13. What You Have Determines Your Wealth Ceiling
14. Intrinsic Motivation

In summary, the business model of the content industry is:

• Free content is used to build an audience, and then profit is made through advertising or paid content.

Content creators follow this formula:#

You spend most of your time expanding your audience.
You continuously cultivate this audience as a market for selling content.
You create profitable content products to target this market.
Repeat the first step.
The key to making this formula work is that you must regularly produce genuinely interesting or genuinely useful content to cultivate an audience, spark their interest, and make them willing to follow you, waiting for the next content. This is the only way to survive long-term in the content industry.

However, doing so means you cannot stop, and it will be very exhausting. If you stop producing new content, you will not find new audiences, and the old audience will also dissipate.

That foreign programmer encountered this problem. By 2023, he was utterly exhausted from creating content and wanted to take a break. He said, "Every day, I think about what to write next? It's too tiring; these things no longer bring me joy like before."

He stopped, wanting to rest for a while and regain his energy before returning.

However, he soon discovered that once he stopped working, not updating or promoting his content, his course sales immediately slowed down. After a month or two, they had almost stopped profiting.

This is the biggest problem content creators face: you cannot stop working, nor can you reuse previous content; you must keep updating and promoting, keeping up with market trends, or else no one will consume your content, and everything will return to square one.

The root of this problem is that the content industry is fast-food culture; trends switch at any time, and people are only interested in new content, quickly discarding old content. Moreover, the speed of trend switching is accelerating; the internet's hot topics from this week will be forgotten by next week. You must speed up production to keep up.

This is the downside of the content industry: produced content is only consumed once; once previous content has been consumed, it no longer provides new stimulation in the future. You must produce new content to provide new stimulation to the audience to generate new consumption.

This inevitably leads content creators to a vicious cycle of exhausting themselves, unable to break free from the repetitive grind.

The programmer concluded:

• He is a one-time consumable in this industry; once he is exhausted and can no longer produce new things, that is when the market abandons him.

Understanding this, he realized he could not return to his previous life, grew weary of the life of churning out content, and thus decided to abandon his current paid courses and exit the content industry. This article is his farewell voice as he leaves.

I hope that those who join the content industry can understand the fast-food nature of this industry; there is no accumulation, only depletion. When joining, it is best to prepare mentally for being consumed.

Finally, I want to mention "knowledge payment."

Knowledge payment faces the same problem. The paid courses you produce are not true accumulations; once you stop promoting and updating, they will become irrelevant.

Additionally, it is threatened by AI. Courses aimed at beginners used to earn some money. Now, with ChatGPT, the beginner course business may be dead because AI can answer all novice questions, and often better than you.

What AI cannot provide are probably those hard-won deep insights and realizations, but they are difficult to package into sellable courses and can only be obtained through practice with guidance from experts and personal exploration.

Therefore, knowledge payment in the AI era has a difficult outlook; its peak may have already passed.

At the end of 2022, a new round of technological revolution erupted, and China's tech industry's ability to "keep up" has undergone a dramatic transformation compared to the domestic internet industry around 2000.

More than twenty years ago, few large tech companies in China were willing to invest in the internet, while today, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu, Meituan, and others are all investing in the race for large models; twenty years ago, startups like BAT faced immense difficulties in financing, while today, MiniMax, Baichuan, and Zero One are all highly sought after by hot money; twenty years ago, those who could write code could only scrape by in the struggling software industry; today, China's AI talent pool ranks second globally, only behind the U.S.

China may not feel much of this itself, and many believe that the external environment, financing market, and entrepreneurial enthusiasm for Chinese tech in recent years have not been satisfactory. However, looking internationally, one can find that Japan and South Korea have almost gone silent on AGI, and Europe has only one Silicon Valley returnee, Mistral, standing on the central stage — in horizontal comparison, China's ability to "keep up" is already quite remarkable.

Facing the ocean, Chinese internet companies can generously borrow the title of a viral article: I worked hard for 18 years to have the opportunity to drink coffee with you.

The path of Chinese internet companies to the table can be summarized and distilled as follows: using products as a breakthrough point to accumulate users, learning from overseas experiences to achieve a commercial closed loop, climbing the ladder from product to model to technology, closely following and biting down during the desktop internet era, and catching up during the mobile internet era, cultivating a large number of market entities, collectively enlarging China's "reservoir" of computer science, and accumulating valuable strategic assets for China in preparation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This "product - model - technology" path is the greatest common divisor of the rise trajectory of China's internet industry, akin to the "introduction - digestion - absorption - innovation" path taken by high-speed rail, the "agency - imitation - R&D - surpass" path taken by communication equipment, the "leveraging supply chains" path taken by the smartphone industry, and the "bending road + catfish" path taken by the automotive industry. All are splendid methodologies demonstrated by a lagging country in the process of catching up, destined to leave a name in the annals of Chinese industrial history.

The AGI revolution that erupted in 2022 is essentially another innovation in computer science; it marks the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution while also continuing the Third Industrial Revolution (the information revolution). The internet industry is a core asset that China has gained in the information revolution, one that many countries envy, and it will undoubtedly once again bear the historical task of "keeping up with the trend."

From this perspective, the adjustments and contractions in the internet industry over the past few years are merely signals that the first half has ended; the real second half for China's internet has only just begun.