When Leo Wen wrote his first ever business plan in the spring of 2017, he believed that his social media app, called Pokke, would soon be profitable. Having recently graduated from Hofstra University a year earlier with a master’s degree in accounting, the then 26-year-old Wen had experienced firsthand the isolation that Chinese international students studying in the United States can face. He hoped Pokke, a map-based app that allowed users to post their activities and share relevant information based on their locations, could better connect them.
Wen assembled a team of 18 people, all Chinese students or fresh graduates, to design the app. He needed to raise $500,000 to launch it and expected to reach 100,000 users by the end of 2018.
It didn’t happen. After winning that year’s Chunhui Cup, an entrepreneurship competition held jointly by China’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology for overseas Chinese students around the world, Wen was offered a paid trip to China to tour government-run start-up incubators, some of which were interested in hosting his project. But he decided to return to the United States, as that was his initial target market.
Back in the United States after the trip, his rosy prospects began to fall apart. Soon, half of Wen’s team had gone back to China for good, thanks to Washington’s tighter immigration policies and the increasingly tense U.S.-Chinese relationship. Pokke is postponed indefinitely. Wen is considering following his team back to his home country, too. “Lately, I have been asking myself, why do I want to stay in a country that doesn’t even trust us?” Wen said.
The relationship between the United States and China has swung from cooperation to mistrust and competition in the past two years. Those involved in innovation and technology may have felt the change most. While China is stepping on the accelerator of its Made in China 2025 strategy, a plan aimed at upgrading the country from a manufacturing center to an innovation center, the United States is ratcheting up its guard over its intellectual property. In part, that involves essentially placing all scholars and students from China under a watchful eye.
Stuck in the middle are young U.S.-educated Chinese nationals like Wen. Students from China have been coming to the United States in increasing numbers since the two countries resumed their diplomatic relationship in 1979. In the 2018-2019 school year, for example, 370,000 Chinese were studying in the United States, making China the country’s No. 1 source for international students for 10 successive years.
What’s more important than the headline numbers is the newly awakening entrepreneurship drive among the young Chinese students.
What’s more important than the headline numbers is the newly awakening entrepreneurship drive among the young Chinese students.
A couple of factors are pushing them along. For one, the current generation of Chinese students is much wealthier than previous ones. Many have grown up in relatively affluent families and have witnessed their own parents building up family businesses from scratch. In addition, they also have entrepreneurial role models such as Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.
There isn’t one formal study that shows the increasing proportion of entrepreneurs among Chinese students, but enough disparate data points make the trend very clear.
Yuanyuan Zhou, a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, (UCSD) and a serial entrepreneur herself has witnessed from the front lines how much more entrepreneurial young Chinese students in the United States have become.
When Zhou started her first company in 1999 as a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, she was unusual among her peers. So far, she says, only two of the 20 or so Chinese Ph.D. students at Princeton she got to know while she was a student there have created their own companies. By contrast, Zhou says, seven of the 19 Chinese Ph.D. students who have graduated since she became a professor have done so. Last year, Zhou even offered a seminar in entrepreneurship at UCSD. About half of the 25 students who took the class were Chinese.
For more information contact us at:
No comments:
Post a Comment