She’s studying Hindi in China with an eye to the future of tech

Tian Siwei in the campus of Peking University where she opted to learn Hindi. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

The tree-lined streets were peaceful and quiet at dusk inside the Peking University campus. It was the start of spring, so the trees had no leaves – only sticks as branches. It blended well with the grey stone buildings.

It was only when Tian Siwei pointed to the ornate, colorful roofs that I became aware of its century-old history. She prefers to live on campus and study, even though her home is in Beijing. That gives her more time with fellow students as well as the chance to soak in the college environment.

We met earlier on Beijing’s “startup street” called Inno Way, which has co-working spaces and offices of startups, incubators, and investors. Dotcoffee, Garage Cafe, and 3W Cafe are cheek by jowl and humming. It adjoins Peking University, so it’s also a hang-out for students seeking inspiration. I was there with a group of visitors from India, and Tian surprised me with her Hindi. Then she took me across to the campus.

She’s doing her B.A. in Peking University, majoring in Hindi.

The VPN generation

Beijing’s startup street Inno Way near Peking University is lined with incubators and co-working spaces. Photo credit: Tech in Asia

The 22-year-old feels a deceleration in China’s growth is inevitable at some point, and the next biggest land of opportunity is neighboring India. Fluency in Hindi will help her to understand the local culture better. She has already traveled in northern India and loves the color and vibrancy of the country.

Her mother is an accountant and father a networking engineer. She belongs to a new outward-looking generation of Chinese born in an era of successive reforms that catapulted the country’s economy to be the second largest in the world. Positive vibes of this are everywhere you look – from the shiny, tall buildings of Beijing to the cheery optimism of its students.

I ask the inevitable question about how she’s affected by China’s curbs on internet access. Tian Siwei is candid about it: most of the students around her have a fear of missing out on the access to knowledge that their counterparts have around the world, and hope the internet will be opened up. At the same time, like other young Chinese I met on the trip, she appreciates the need to maintain order for the government to focus on economic growth.

The fruits of that growth are evident not only in the way the Chinese live, work, and commute, but also in the waves of private enterprise it has unleashed. Tian and students like her are riding the newest wave as China gives a push to innovation in an effort to rebalance its economy which has become too dependent on low-value manufacture and exports.

Mobile internet boom

A young woman in Shanghai uses an app in her smartphone to unlock an Ofo bicycle parked on a Shanghai street. Photo credit: Steven Millward.

Earnings from manufacturing and exports, coupled with state investments in infrastructure, fueled China’s rocketing GDP over the last three decades. The resultant purchasing power of over 730 million Chinese online has spawned giant internet companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent – the so-called BAT trio. But they’re only the more visible ones abroad.

When it comes to the mobile consumer internet, you’re more likely to find the newest innovation in China than in Silicon Valley today. What’s more eye-popping is the scorching pace at which these innovations take off in a land where mobile tech adoption has become second nature.

Tian points out to me a set of yellow bicycles parked on a pavement in the Peking University campus. Users can unlock the bikes by scanning a QR code with a smartphone app called Ofo – and leave them wherever they want when they’re done. This began as a campus project by PhD student Dai Wei and two others in 2014. Earlier this month, Ofo raised US$450 million in funding to become the world’s first bicycle-sharing unicorn.

Ofo’s not the only one. There’s also Tencent-backed Mobike. You see these brightly colored bikes everywhere now in China’s major cities and they’re also making a foray into Singapore and the US. Their business models are hazy, regulations are unclear about bikes with no docking stations, misuse is rampant – but their possibilities are immense in clogged, polluted cities.

Catalysts of innovation

Dotgeek Cafe is among several co-working spaces lining Beijing’s startup street. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

Ofo’s birth in Peking University in 2014 coincided with the launch of the nearby Inno Way, where I met Tian. They are two sides of the same coin. One is an entrepreneurial spirit rising from the ground while the other is a top-down stimulation. The early tech entrepreneurs in China were teachers, bureaucrats, and corporate employees who opted to xia hai (jump into the sea) following pragmatic reforms and the state’s retreat from large parts of the economy. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder and now China’s richest tech boss, is a former English teacher.

Tian’s generation is better educated, financially more secure, and confident enough to start up on their own as student entrepreneurs or straight out of college. A large domestic market gives them ample opportunity to test and develop their ideas. City councils, on their part, are investing in catalysts of innovation, such as Beijing’s startup street which also has participation from private property developers. China’s leaders made public statements that entrepreneurship held the key to sustaining China’s growth and employment – and not just cheap labor for factories.

There’s a psychological distance than only inter-personal links can bridge.

In China, a policy direction swiftly gets a push from multiple stakeholders – and so it is with student entrepreneurship. All the major universities have started entrepreneur courses and incubator cells which are poles apart from traditional Confucian education with its emphasis on “obedience” and “respect for authority” rather than “disruption” and “thinking out of the box.”

Shameen Prashantham from Chennai, India, who did his PhD in Scotland, is seeing this at first hand in Shanghai where he is an associate professor in the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). “Entrepreneurship is attracting high caliber talent,” he tells me over breakfast in a Shanghai hotel. “During the last 18 months in our business school, more people are expressing an interest in becoming entrepreneurs than in the past,” says Shameen, who has been in China for six years.

The CIEBS opened an e-laboratory for tech innovation right after Chinese premier Le Keqiang’s pledge to support entrepreneurial activity in 2014.

Financial incentives for incubators and accelerators led to the most visible manifestation of this activity in Beijing’s startup street that year. But many others have sprouted in the boom cities of Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen, too, as property developers and others climb the bandwagon.

See: Inside UCWeb’s plan to outwit Google and Facebook in Asia

Chindia connections

Chindia conference in Beijing conducted by ZDream Ventures based in Beijing and Gurgaon. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

“Once the Chinese decide on something, they devote a lot of resources,” explains Shameen. Scale and speed are the imperatives, even if it isn’t the most efficient use of resources to seed the startup ecosystem. Most of the tens of thousands of startups coming up are sub-standard, points out Shameen, but even if a small fraction of them gain traction it will be huge.

It’s not just the subsidizing of support systems. The policy to encourage entrepreneurship reaches deep down into the education system, with new courses as well as regulations. For example, students from abroad who come to China for higher studies struggle to get a work visa after graduation because it requires prior work experience. But this has been waived for those who opt to become entrepreneurs, Shameen tells me.

The startup ferment, and the sheer scale of it, makes China’s entrepreneurs look for greener pastures abroad. And India beckons with its promise of a billion consumers. What’s lacking are means of engagement.

Silicon Valley has found it easy to engage with India’s tech ecosystem and market because of the large numbers of Indians who are entrenched there. Most of India’s VCs trace their roots to the US. Organizations such as TIE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) came up in the Valley to leverage ethnic ties. So even though a collaboration between the large tech ecosystems of China and India seems like the obvious thing to do, few connections exist.

It’s not just the language barrier, there’s a “psychological distance” that only inter-personal links can overcome, feels Shameen. Some of that happens between students from India and China studying in US tech colleges. Indians studying and working in China are also opening up channels. The bigger Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent have made some inroads into India. But it will take more institutionalized mechanisms for these connections to snowball at multiple levels for mutual benefit.

See: Pros and cons for Alibaba in battle with Amazon on neutral ground in India

Indian dream

I was witness to one of the first such initiatives as I traveled with a group of 30 founders and investors from India on a tour of China’s tech hubs. It was set up by Zdream Ventures – a pioneering venture capital firm based in Beijing and Gurgaon, the tech hub near India’s capital, Delhi.

ZDream Ventures co-founder Jason Wang is betting his shirt on the India story.

ZDream has made strategic investments in startup data analytics firm Xeler8, tech media site Iamwire, and grocery delivery startup Milkbasket, mainly to gain insights on the Indian ecosystem. It hopes to help Chinese entrepreneurs and investors understand and access the Indian tech ecosystem and vice versa. A “Chindia” conference in Beijing this month and the Indian startup tour of China are baby steps in that direction.

Co-founder and CEO Jason Wang is no stranger to India where he was the chief correspondent for China Radio. Later, he started the GI Gadgets blog in China. He also ran and exited a company that marketed Chinese textiles in Brazil. Around that time, he got a call from his friend Li Jian, who was the public affairs manager for Huawei in India. That was a couple of years ago. They felt the time was ripe for early birds from China in the Indian market, co-founded ZDream, and set up an outpost in Gurgaon.

See: Chinese investors wary of hyped-up Indian startups, look for hidden gems

The Indian startup scene has seen a correction since then, as the froth of overvalued consumer internet startups subsides in the face of hard truths – that India still has a long way to go before it can emulate China’s online consumer spend and infrastructure. But Jason is betting his shirt on it.

So is co-founder Li Jian, who even has an Indian name, Amit Li. The Chinese often adopt English names, and this has extended to other languages. Like Tian Siwei, Li Jian studied Hindi as part of the same graduate program in Peking University, and took the name Amit Li. For today’s outward-looking Chinese, English and other foreign languages are a passport – and Hindi is as good as it gets for an entrepreneur looking at where the world’s fastest growing large economy will be in five years’ time.

This post She’s studying Hindi in China with an eye to the future of tech appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/why-she-learns-hindi-in-peking-university
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