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Showing posts with label China. Show all posts
Showing posts with label China. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Silicon Valley of the East

A quiet suburb is the coder ‘village’ at the heart of China’s ai frenzy.

Evening strollers on a wide walking path by West Lake in Hangzhou, China, June 27, 2025. As China vies with Silicon Valley for primacy, Hangzhou, home to DeepSeek and Alibaba, is where the country’s aspiring tech titans mingle and share ideas. — Photos: QILAI SHEN/The New York Times

IT was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and dozens of people sat in the grass around a backyard stage where aspiring founders of tech startups talked about their ideas. People in the crowd slouched over laptops, vaping and drinking strawberry Frappuccinos. A drone buzzed overhead. Inside the house, investors took pitches in the kitchen.


It looked like Silicon Valley, but it was Liangzhu, a quiet suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou, which is a hot spot for entrepreneurs and tech talent lured by low rents and proximity to tech companies like Alibaba and Deepseek.


“People come here to explore their own possibilities,” said Felix Tao, 36, a former Facebook and Alibaba employee who hosted the event.


Virtually all of those possibilities involve artificial intelligence. As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the centre of China’s AI frenzy.


A decade ago, the provincial and local governments started offering subsidies and tax breaks to new companies in Hangzhou, a policy that has helped incubate hundreds of startups. On weekends, people fly in from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen to hire programmers.


Lately, many of them have ended up in Tao’s backyard. He helped found an AI research lab at Alibaba before leaving to start his own company, Mindverse, in 2022. Now Tao’s home is a hub for coders who have settled in Liangzhu, many in their 20s and 30s. They call themselves “villagers”, writing code in coffee shops during the day and gaming together at night, hoping to harness AI to create their own companies.


Hangzhou has already birthed tech powerhouses, not only Alibaba and Deepseek but also Netease and Hikvision.


In January, Deepseek shook the tech world when it released an AI system that it said it had made for a small fraction of the cost that Silicon Valley companies had spent on their own. Since then, systems made by Deepseek and Alibaba have ranked among the top-performing open source AI models in the world, meaning they are available for anyone to build on.


Graduates from Hangzhou’s Zhejiang University, where Deepseek’s founder studied, have become sought-after employees at Chinese tech companies.


Chinese media closely followed the poaching of a core member of Deepseek’s team by the electronics company Xiaomi. In Liangzhu, many engineers said


People come here to explore their own possibilities. Felix Tao


they were killing time until they could create their own startups, waiting out noncompete agreements they had signed at bigger companies like Bytedance.


Deepseek is one of six AI and robotics startups from the city that Chinese media calls the “six tigers of Hangzhou”.


Last year, one of the six, Game Science, released China’s first big-budget video game to become a global hit, Black Myth: Wukong. Another firm, Unitree, grabbed public attention in January when its robots danced onstage during the Chinese state broadcaster’s televised annual spring gala.


This spring, Mingming Zhu, the founder of Rokid, a Hangzhou startup that makes Ai-enabled eyeglasses, invited the six founders to his home for dinner.


It was the first time they had all met in person, Zhu said. Like him, most of the six had studied at Zhejiang University or worked at Alibaba.


“When we started, we were small fish,” Zhu said. “But even then, the government helped out.” He said government officials had helped him connect with Rokid’s earliest investors, including Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.


Too much of a good thing?


But some said the government support for Hangzhou’s tech scene had scared off some investors. Several company founders, who asked not to be named so they could discuss sensitive topics, said it was difficult for them to attract funds from foreign venture capital firms, frustrating their ambitions to grow outside China.


The nightmare situation, they said, would be to end up like Bytedance, the Chinese parent of Tiktok, whose executives have been questioned before US Congress about the company’s ties to the Chinese government.


Founders described choosing between two paths for their companies’ growth: Take government funding and tailor their product to the Chinese market, or raise enough money on their own to set up offices in a country like Singapore to pitch foreign investors. For most, the first was the only feasible option.


Another uncertainty is access to the advanced computer chips that power artificial intelligence systems. Washington has spent years trying to prevent Chinese companies from buying these chips, and Chinese companies like Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp are racing to produce their nd own.


So far, the Chinese-made chips work well enough to help companies like Bytedance provide some of their AI services in China. Many Chinese companies have created stockpiles of Nvidia chips despite Washington’s controls. But it is not clear how long that supply will last, or how quickly China’s chipmakers can catch up to their American counterparts.


Mindverse, the company cofounded by Tao, who hosted the backyard event, is working on a product that would use AI to help people manage their lives. It can send supportive daily emails to colleagues, for example, or regular text messages to parents reminiscing about family vacations.


“I don’t want the AI to just handle tasks, but to actually give you more mental space so you can unplug,” Tao said.


Many in the crowd in Tao’s backyard said the atmosphere in Hangzhou, set on the banks of a lake that was muse to generations of Chinese poets and painters, fuelled their creativity.


Lin Yuanlin started his company, Zeabur, while studying at Zhejiang University. His company provides back-end systems to people who are making apps and websites by “vibecoding”, or using AI tools to program without deep software knowledge.


Liangzhu is the perfect testing ground for his product, Lin said. He can lean over to someone in a coffee shop or wander into a neighbour’s living room and learn what kind of support they need for their startups. Lin found himself going to Liangzhu so often that he moved there. – ©2025 The New York Times Company


Alibaba Innovation Park, a complex the tech giant leases to other tech firms, in Hangzhou, China.



A promenade at Dream Town, a facility for startups and one of the numerous investments in tech made by the country’s government, in Hangzhou, China.


Commuters on one of several subway lines that service Alibaba’s headquarters and other surrounding tech companies, in Hangzhou, China.


Visitors by West Lake in Hangzhou, China. Many in the crowd in Tao’s backyard said the atmosphere in Hangzhou, set on the banks of a lake that was muse to generations of Chinese poets and painters, fueled their creativity.

Silicon Valley of the East

As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the centre of China's AI frenzy. A decade ago, the provincial ...

Monday, August 4, 2025

Rise of the machines in China


   

   

 When Sun Huihai first began working at a factory in the southern manufacturing belt of Guangdong some 13 years ago, his colleagues were all humans.

Now, they are joined by more than 200 robots which can work around the clock, seven days a week, to help produce air-­conditioners for home appliances giant Midea.

Rows of bright orange robot arms whir at all hours of the day, fishing freshly pressed plastic parts out of hot metal moulds and onto a long conveyor belt.

Driverless robots with blinking lights store these parts in a multi-­storey warehouse, and later take them to be assembled into units that are sold in China and around the world. 

The number of robots put to work on the factory floor increases every year, said Sun, 37, who heads the plant’s engineering department.

“Every day, we think about how to upgrade and make manufacturing here more intelligent,” he said.

Scenes like this have become more common across China, as the “factory of the world” turns to robotics to sustain and turbocharge its manufacturing juggernaut.

Over the past decade, the number of industrial robots on China’s factory floors has increased more than six times to over 1.7 million, as companies grappled with ri­­sing wages and a shortage of workers willing to staff production lines.

China now has the world’s third-highest density of robots in its manufacturing industry, trailing South Korea and Singapore in first and second place respectively, according to the International Federation of Robotics’ figures for 2023, the latest available.

Their deployment is poised to increase further as China conti­nues its transition from low-­value, labour-intensive production to advanced manufacturing – a national priority.

Policymakers in China, wary of the hollowing out of industries which can occur when countries get richer, have long pushed for greater automation to keep factories competitive.

Factories in China pumped out nearly 370,000 of industrial robots in the first half of 2025, up 35.6% from the previous year, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics.

But as robot adoption picks up pace, one question that arises is: What will happen to the more than 100 million workers whom China’s manufacturing sector employs?

Academics Nicole Wu and Sun Zhongwei, who interviewed and surveyed factory workers in southern China just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, found that these individuals were not too concerned about robots just yet.

“Contrary to the more pessimistic assessments of automation, most manufacturing workers in Guangdong – who are buffered by steady increases in demand and a chronic labour shortage – appear to be unfazed by technological change at present,” they wrote in a paper published this year.

Back at the Midea factory, Wang Liangcai, 26, an engineer, believes that his job is safe from automation for now.

“Equipment still needs to be maintained, it can’t do so itself,” he said.

“But if you think about the long run ... we also don’t know how things will be.” — The Straits Times/ANN

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