In recent years, the Chinese government has tried to encourage young people to launch their own tech start-ups. Speculators say this is seen as necessary to create jobs and revenue. However, starting one's own business is a difficult path and success can be elusive.
To Alex Hu, Beijing's Inno Way looked glorious at its peak.
During that warm summer, in every coffeehouse one entered, one was bound to walk into some young entrepreneurs selling their ideas to investors. Everywhere one looked, one could see the bare legs of young women in miniskirts, passing out flyers with QR codes, enticing you to look hither and scan.
The street is situated near an old library building in Zhongguancun, Beijing's Haidian district, dubbed China's "Silicon Valley." Every morning, hundreds of thousands of programmers, entrepreneurs and consultants flood out of the subway into skyscrapers and street stalls alike. The street prospered with a nudge from the central government, which made several calls for young people to launch their own start-ups.
Hu remembers looking down on the street from his rented flat in the area and seeing people hovering here and there like worker bees. There was even a wooden box with a microphone next to it that acted as a podium. Every now and then, he could see somebody hopping onto the box and going off about their projects, a scene resembling the revolutionaries of last century. Soon, a thick crowd of admirers would gather.
But the scenery quickly changed. Only a few months later, as the weather grew cold, Zhang saw fewer people and projects out on the streets. On social media and the gossip grapevine, he heard whispers about start-ups shutting down. Once-flourishing "offline-to-online (O2O)" businesses died one after another like waves on a beach. It felt like a battlefield.
According to data recently published by GPLG, a grass-roots investment media outlet, just in the first half of 2016, more than 2,000 start-ups have shut up shop, 10 percent of the total.
In the beginning, the Chinese government called for mass entrepreneurship and innovation to maintain sustainable growth and create jobs. However, as the Chinese economy slows, investment is being withdrawn, and those whose start-ups are dead or struggling find themselves wondering whether they should go on or go back to everyday jobs.
"The street of start-ups at that time looked like a sandstorm had swept through the area," Zhang said.
Pigs in the wind
Hu dove into the tech ocean in 2014 just before the national craze for start-ups kicked in. He had been working at a university publishing house and grew tired of the stale and unchanging way their business was conducted.
With an idea in mind, he quickly familiarized himself with the start-up process, how to develop an idea, how to do presentations and convince investors. He found the trade had quickly matured. There are incubators, many in coffeehouses, and they provide cheap work spaces as well as cheat sheets to budding entrepreneurs.
The year he joined was also when the Chinese government started spurring a wave of start-ups. Premier Li Keqiang brought up start-ups and innovation for the public first in 2014 at a summer Davos economic forum. In the following months, there was repeated emphasis and policy support for mass entrepreneurship.
The Ministry of Education even sent out a notice in 2014 requesting universities to have flexible hours and allow students to drop out or take leave in order to launch start-ups.
There are several successful examples of companies that lasted through the period and are now hailed as role models for all young entrepreneurs. The Huangtaiji fastfood chain has gone from a small shop to raising 180 million yuan ($26.7 million) of funds.
Lei Jun, founder of cell phone brand Xiaomi, once said when reflecting on his own entrepreneurship experience, "As long as you are standing in a windy place, even a pig can fly." These words are now written across many young entrepreneurs' desks.
It has become an all-society movement, and people with ideas and specific planning dove in, as well as people with little experience, and the start-up street flourished.
Jiang Fangzhou, a young writer, wrote during that time that "Beijing has gone mad. It seems like anyone with more than five years of Internet experience, who's under 30, knows Chinese and minimal English, and has been to Internet or advertisement agencies is starting up their own company and drinking coffee with angel investors."
