Afra Wang at Asterisk:
In 1987, Lei Jun 雷军 was a 21-year-old student in Wuhan University’s computer science program. The book that had set his imagination alight was Fire in the Valley 硅谷之火, which chronicles the evolution of 1970s homebrew hacker culture into global titans like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM. The heroes of that story, of course, were visionaries like Steve Jobs. Lei Jun’s trajectory — he founded Joyo.com (later acquired by Amazon), built Xiaomi into a smartphone colossus, then wagered billions on electric vehicles — would unfold directly from that initial act of reading. His nickname became “L-obs,” a portmanteau fusing “Lei Jun” with “Jobs.”
Last August, the writer Tanner Greer published an influential post on the “Silicon Valley canon.” Tech luminaries like Patrick Collison and Nils Gilman followed up with their own contributions. Lei Jun’s story compels me to ask: What is the Chinese tech canon? What intellectual works fuel Chinese entrepreneurs’ ambitions, running continuously in their cognitive background?
More here.
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