How China's Tech Revolution Threatens Silicon Valley

“The spring of investment has come,” declares a banner hanging over Zhongguancun Inno Way, a pedestrian walkway tucked behind the high-rise superstores of Beijing’s high-tech electronics zone in the city’s northwest. Twenty-somethings bustle by clutching coffee and take-out KFC, only the tops of their heads visible as they bury their attention in Chinese-made smartphones. Now the alley—whose Chinese name translates roughly as “Entrepreneurship Street”—is saturated with co-working spaces, cafés, and start-up accelerators.

Inside Garage Café, a dark space on Inno Way filled with bleary-eyed entrepreneurs hunched over laptops, I meet 27-year-old Tian Yang. Tian studied at Sydney University, then worked for two years at the Chinese computer company Lenovo. But he found the job “dry and dull, all the same, everyone—and a consulting service for Chinese people looking to settle abroad, called “Ten Thousand Countries.” At lunchtime there’s a show-and-tell session for new arrivals, and the café organizses meetups with investors. A floor-to-ceiling bulletin board is covered with advertisements for coders.