The world belongs to Chinese people who speak English

Author: brother bing / 饼兄
Before the Spring Festival, I was chatting with a post-00s individual. After taking a sip of juice, he suddenly said, "The ones rolling in AI in Silicon Valley are basically Chinese people who can speak English." He added, "If an AI company doesn't have an ABC as CMO, it basically can't survive."

If you casually scroll through Instagram and TikTok, you can see various "chinamaxxing" wellness memes. The new Tang suit jacket from Adidas is completely sold out online (all sold to foreigners).

Foreign media like to attribute this to the "rise of China's soft power," but I tend to believe that it is a result of the contradictory yet integrated nature of Eastern and Western cultures, which is particularly evident in entrepreneurs.

On one side is the pragmatism and structure ingrained in our DNA by our ancestors, and on the other side is the personal form reshaped by Western modern thought after discarding the overly pedantic parts of traditional wisdom. This combination is inherently suitable for entrepreneurship.

Western society allows you to be romantic, allows you to be impulsive, and allows you to bet on long-term, irrational things. Even if you fail, it doesn't immediately negate your worth as a person. This provides a significant margin for error at both institutional and cultural levels.

I studied at an American liberal arts college, majoring in psychology, taking courses like metaphysics and art history, while my parents constantly complained that I was learning a bunch of "useless things." But it is precisely these seemingly useless courses that instilled in me an almost instinctive, even somewhat irrational trust in human agency and the tolerance between people.

I call this state "romantic" because it is completely opposed to the cynical mindset of many Chinese people who believe they have "seen through everything" and can "see to the bottom at a glance."

It is this romanticism that allows a person to dare to give up a stable, high-paying job to start a business, to invest money in a smart contract that hasn't been audited much, and more importantly, it is a way of reconciling with oneself. When you allow yourself to be impulsive, to be excited, and to have expectations for long-term value, you also allow yourself to be happy, to allow others to be happy, and to allow society to improve together.

Of course, if Western romanticism goes to extremes, it can easily become something that floats in the air, not grounded, and not doing practical things. At this time, the pragmatic educational philosophy from Chinese culture becomes particularly important.

Chinese entrepreneurs often like to use the term "做生意 / make business," while in the English-speaking world, entrepreneurship is called "start-up." Chinese entrepreneurship prioritizes the business model (aka, whose money you are earning), while the West focuses on the act of entrepreneurship itself.

In recent years, the crypto space has been harshly educated on the issue of "not doing practical things." A lot of energy has been spent on low-level narratives and conceptual packaging, while real applications are few and far between. In the end, it is the most primitive track of "speculating on coins" that has been firmly controlled by a group of Asian players.

When I first saw the white paper for Mega, I instinctively thought, "This architecture is too reasonable." Centralized sorter + Ethereum security = faster chain, with clear logic and straightforwardness. However, this "East-West hybrid" logic is taboo in the eyes of many foreigners because, in their context, centralization is almost synonymous with original sin.

But in my view, centralization has never been original sin; it is merely a tool. Many Western teams, in a politically correct environment, could never make a choice like Mega, while we can inherit the mindset of "concentrating power to accomplish great things" and use decentralized security as the ultimate endorsement, thereby expanding the entire imaginative space.

However, I also understand that with only a Chinese-style education, I could at most create a small workshop or small business. What truly convinced me that this "centralized trade-off" could lead to new applications and expand the entire circle was the Western education I received. It made me dare to believe in system design, structural choices, and the possibility of scaling.

In the end, there are always people who tell me I am a typical "banana person," yellow on the outside and white on the inside. I cannot agree. The world has never been black and white, nor East and West. The greatest advantage of someone who has genuinely experienced multiple cultures is the ability to absorb the strengths of each and then recombine them.

Take myself as an example: I finished high school in Beijing, went to college in the United States, then directly went to Nigeria in Africa after graduation, and later settled in Dubai in the Middle East. If you ask me whether I am a banana or a sweet date, I don't know. But I do know one thing:

If you are also a Chinese person who can speak English, you must bravely step out and face the clash of Eastern and Western cultures; there will surely be opportunities for you to profit. If you were born in China and don't speak English, you must learn it and then step into the world.

The world is vast, and only playing half of it is truly a loss.

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