AGI/ASI fever hasn't spread through Chinese AI communities in the way it has done so within Silicon Valley. Afra Wang's piece on the China Tech Canon walks us through the way Chinese AI entrepreneurs think about the singularity - or the lack of it.

The canon has a lot of Western influences - includes translated Western business classics such as Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup, and Jim Collins’s Built to Last, which Chinese founders study intensively to absorb Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial spirit. Yet, this Western influence is seamlessly integrated with China’s “Red Canon” of political texts, including The Selected Works of Mao Zedong and On the Governance of China by Xi Jinping. These works provide tactical guidance on organizational mobilization, discipline, and survival in fiercely competitive markets, reflecting a worldview where business is often likened to warfare.

Complementing this is the “Grey Canon” of classical Chinese philosophy, featuring Confucius’s Analects, Laozi’s Dao De Jing, and Han Feizi’s Legalist writings. These ancient texts underpin Chinese notions of hierarchy, authority, and social harmony, shaping how entrepreneurs navigate power structures and balance innovation with tradition.

Literature also plays a vital role. The martial-arts novels of Jin Yong offer a moral and cultural framework, teaching lessons about loyalty, strategy, and identity within a complex social world. I read Jin Yong in translation not too long ago! Liu Cixin’s science fiction, especially The Three-Body Problem (which I loved!), has become a source of metaphors for technology, geopolitics, and strategic thinking, enriching the entrepreneurial lexicon with concepts like “dimensional reduction strike” and “wallfacer.”

Policy documents such as Made in China 2025 further inform the canon, aligning business ambitions with national strategic goals. Together, these diverse texts create a uniquely Chinese intellectual ecosystem where global innovation ideals coexist with local historical consciousness, producing entrepreneurs who are both pragmatic builders and cultural synthesizers. This canon not only fuels ambition but also encodes a complex dialogue between individualism, collectivism, and state power, defining the distinctive character of China’s technological rise.