A Canon of Control: Silicon Valleys' China Mirror

China's tech elite quotes Mao and Silicon Valley alike while excluding the writers who refused power's flattery. What emerges is a perfected machinery of control, not cultural hybridity. When the Chinese edition of James Gleick's The Information appeared in 2011, it carried four forewords. One from Xiaomi's Lei Jun, one from WeChat's Zhang Xiaolong, one from the tech writer Wu Jun, and one from a philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Four separate men queued to write a preface to somebody else's book, each essentially making the same argument in different words — I too belong to this conversation. The multiplied foreword is a small, almost comic institution, and it says more about what China's tech elite actually reads for than any single title on the list.

Afra Wang has traced that list with real care. Her essay for Asterisk maps the terrain in detail: the "Silicon Valley canon" that Chinese founders absorb with, as one podcast host put it to her, "nauseating" thoroughness — Fire in the Valley, Zero to One, The Lean Startup, the Ashlee Vance Musk biography that turned Beijing's subway ads into a shrine to a crossed-arm strongman pose. Alongside it she finds a "red canon," Maoist texts repurposed as operational doctrine rather than nostalgia, and a "grey canon" of Confucius, Laozi and the Legalists that she treats, rightly, as China's genuine deep infrastructure rather than local colour.

Meituan's Wang Xing puts the red canon's appeal more bluntly than Wang herself does. "After several years of entrepreneurship, I increasingly admire the Communists before 1949," he has said. "Politics aside, I find it simply incredible that they could survive and grow stronger under such harsh conditions."

This is not a founder borrowing Mao's slogans for atmosphere. On Protracted War's doctrine of encircling cities from the countryside became, nearly without translation, the actual expansion strategy behind Pinduoduo's rise through China's lower-tier markets before it took the coastal cities. Wang Xing is also, by his own account, one of the tech elite's most devoted readers of Peter Thiel, regularly quoting Zero to One and posing Thiel's signature question — what important truth do very few people agree with you on? — to his own staff.

Anyone who has read Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine, or Kang Zhengguo's Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, might struggle to hear "I increasingly admire the Communists before 1949" as a compliment. Wang Xing's admiration and Dikötter's famine statistics describe the same decade. Only one of the two men writing about it gets invited to keynote a conference.

Wang notices, and states plainly, that Silicon Valley does exactly the same thing with its own mythologies. Musk's ambitions are inseparable from Heinlein; Bezos borrowed the Culture novels' vision of post-scarcity space habitats; Thiel named companies after Tolkien's palantíri, and funds called Valar and Mithril besides. She is not naïve about this convergence. What she does not ask is the harder question underneath it — not which myths founders on both sides borrow, but what those myths license once borrowed.

Alibaba supplies the clearest case, and it is Wang's own best piece of evidence, though she does not quite draw out its implication. Employees at the company take huaming, literary names borrowed from Jin Yong's wuxia novels; meeting rooms are named after locations from the same books, Guangmingding among them; Jack Ma's own office was named after a reclusive martial-arts utopia. Internal value systems carry names like the Nine Swords of Dugu. To work at Alibaba is to move through a company that has built its entire symbolic architecture out of the jianghu, the fictional world of outcast martial artists that Jin Yong spent fifteen novels and roughly ten million words elaborating, a world Wang herself describes as teaching "how to navigate power without fixed rules, how to build reputation in opaque hierarchies."

That description is the argument in miniature. Jianghu ethics are not a philosophy of withdrawal from power. They are a philosophy of survival inside it, prized precisely because formal rules cannot be trusted to protect you and informal loyalty — guanxi, renqing — can. A company that names its meeting rooms after that world is not signalling literary taste but declaring which kind of authority it expects to operate under, and how to prosper within it without ever openly contesting it.

Liu Cixin supplies the same lesson at the level of civilisation rather than company. His novels have minted an entire vocabulary now used in Chinese boardrooms and policy documents without irony: jiangwei daji, dimensional reduction strike; mianbizhe, the wallfacer; pobiren, the wallbreaker; the dark forest law, in which every civilisation in the universe hides because contact means annihilation. Wang catalogues these terms as tools — shorthand for competitive strategy, for uncertainty, for the fragility of trust between rivals. What she does not say, however, and what the terms make plain if you read the novels rather than the slide decks, is that Liu wrote none of this as strategy worth admiring.

The dark forest is not a competitive advantage. It is a diagnosis of a universe that has lost every mechanism for trust except silence and pre-emptive strike, and Liu's civilisations survive it the way a hostage survives a siege: intact, and diminished by exactly what the survival cost them. Import the vocabulary and you import the diagnosis, whether or not the boardroom notices it.

Modern China, in this sense, has not diverged from its own tradition so much as mechanised it. From the Legalists onward, order in Chinese political thought has depended on surveillance and calibrated punishment. Han Feizi's doctrines already resurface, as Wang notes, in the incentive systems delivery companies design for their sales staff. Mao supplied the same logic with better distribution. But Western modernity pursued a version of mastery stripped of moral limits too — the algorithm, the market and the Five-Year Plan are cousins in the same family of control, differing mainly in diction. When Pinduoduo's founders speak of encircling cities from the countryside, they are not only quoting Mao but rehearsing the logic that animates every startup chasing scale: survival through mobilisation, dominance through data.

What looks like pluralism here — Mao and Thiel! Confucius and Kevin Kelly! — is actually convergence around a single criterion, which is ultimately compatibility with organised power. Philosophers have tried to locate what makes that convergence more than coincidence. Yuk Hui's concept of cosmotechnics argues that every civilisation historically fused its cosmology and its technē into a single, locally specific way of relating to the world — and that what modernity actually exported, under the name of universal technological progress, was one particular fusion dressed up as the only possible one.

On Hui's account, China's own cosmotechnics was "interrupted" by that export, not replaced by something civilisationally neutral. The interruption he describes was never simply metaphysical, but moral, and it happened everywhere modernity arrived, China included. The key move (of disclosure) is the shift from asking whether a thing should be built to asking only whether it could be.

Ma's own career supplies a data point for how thin the line runs between reading Confucius and reading the room. His disappearance from public view followed his questioning of financial regulators, not his quoting of the Analects. Beijing tolerates the grey canon. It does not tolerate founders who act as though citing it confers the standing to challenge the red one.

The irony is that the West feeds this delusion in its own way. Kevin Kelly wraps technological determinism in Daoist language and presents it as a cultural bridge even though it functions more like a toll booth. Telling Chinese technocrats that history is driven by technology rather than politics does not reconcile two worlds; it monetises a vanity they already shared.

This is why Liu Xiaobo matters, and not only to China. Imprisoned for eleven years for Charter 08, he argued that modernisation required political freedom alongside economic reform — the software of moral life, in his own metaphor, to match the hardware of material progress. He died in custody in 2017. His life exposed what any system pays when it prizes power over principle, whatever language that system wraps itself in: the vocabulary of the Party or 'disruption.' Wang's founders speak the language of harmony and progress. Liu spoke of responsibility — the freedom to be wrong, to dissent, to risk something for an idea rather than optimise around the risk of ever being tested.

Return to the four forewords on the Chinese edition of The Information. What united Lei Jun, Zhang Xiaolong, Wu Jun and the philosopher from the Academy of Social Sciences was not a shared reading of Gleick. It was a shared appetite to be seen standing next to him — the same appetite that names a meeting room after a wuxia utopia, or a fund after Tolkien's Mithril, or an incentive scheme after Han Feizi. Across every canon on Wang's list (red, grey, Silicon Valley, jianghu, cosmic) the search is not for a stance the reader might have to defend. It is for a lineage the reader can stand inside. That is the real convergence, and it is worth noticing because none of these libraries, however different their spines look, has ever produced a bestseller arguing that a founder should refuse the deal.