A Week of Uncontrolled Sobbing at a Chinese Business Seminar

It was a balmy week in September, and in gleaming office buildings in Beijing’s Central Business District, startup employees hunched over their computers putting in the long hours customary in Chinese tech culture. Nearby, I was hunkered down with eight Chinese entrepreneurs, also working 12-hour days. But we weren’t working on a startup, we were working on ourselves.

This was Zhen Academy, a seminar loosely based on a Stanford University course and designed to help entrepreneurs examine their own blind spots.

This feature appears in the September 2020 issue. Subscribe to WIRED.

Photograph: Jessica Pettway

My classmates, ranging in age from their twenties to their fifties, occupied a rarefied demographic in Chinese society, and they’d come from all over the country—Beijing, Sichuan, Shanghai, Guangdong. Hu was a pragmatist who grew up poor, literally won the lottery in college, and at 26 was now a health care entrepreneur married to a mogul 20 years her senior. Chen was a fashion designer who had spent years abroad and had her own business. Xiao wrote cheesy soap operas that belied her intellectual prowess. Yang was a tech exec whose expertise in Western astrology made her perhaps the most respected classmate. One woman ran an education nonprofit; another had been a chief of staff at a major investment firm. There were two men in the class. Huang was perpetually sunny, though he’d recently been through a divorce, while Wu was moody for no apparent reason.

Each of us had come to the class seeking something different. Some wanted coaching on how to deal with drama at work; others wanted to change ingrained habits. My reasons were professional and personal. For five years, I’d balanced a job in software engineering in New York with a side gig in freelance journalism. In writing about technology, I’d become aware of a reversal between Silicon Valley and China. After decades of copycat culture, Chinese tech companies like Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, maker of TikTok, were now out-innovating Western ones in mobile payments, ecommerce, and livestreaming. By attending the class, which was sponsored by ZhenFund, one of the most prestigious early-stage venture capital firms in China, I hoped to get insight into the sort of personalities, family backgrounds, and cultural mores that have driven and shaped the Chinese tech industry.

On a more intimate level, the class was also an opportunity to get to know a group of Chinese people who weren’t related to me by blood. I’m a second-generation Chinese American, and I’ve always wondered about the other life I might have lived had my parents never emigrated, first to Canada for graduate school and then, when I was 3, to California. My parents were educated, privileged. Had they stayed in China, my Zhen Academy classmates might have been my peers.

I had initially proposed shadowing the class for a day, but Ji Gu, Zhen Academy’s founder and the class leader, made my full participation a prerequisite for writing about the course. (I also agreed not to use the real names of the participants, to protect their privacy.) So I agreed, assuming I would sit back and let others do the talking. That turned out not to be the case.

That first morning, with Gu at the helm and three teaching assistants helping, was spent establishing ground rules. But in the afternoon, as I settled into a post-lunch slump, one of the teaching assistants stormed back into the room and announced that he would be quitting the class. The morning session, he said, had left a bad taste in his mouth. Certain students had been unreasonably aggressive, and the rest of us had sat there and done nothing.

His announcement electrified the room. It was pretty clear who had been “unreasonably aggressive”: Chen, the designer. A stylish woman in her mid-thirties, she was clearly accustomed to commanding an audience. That morning she had immediately taken charge of a discussion about the penalty for being late to class, proposing fines of more than $100. Though a few people made brief, joking counterarguments, none of us pushed back hard. She spoke in unimpeachable tones, and her reasoning—that a heavy fee would incentivize people to stick to a schedule—made some sense. Eventually everyone, including me, agreed to her plan. It didn’t seem to matter enough to make a fuss, and we were inclined to go along.

Now the teaching assistant asked us if we really agreed. He had been late that morning, despite having left home an hour early. Life always contains unforeseen circumstances.

Wu, who that morning had proposed A/B-testing different penalties, said he’d agreed to the fines because he just wanted the discussion to wrap up. Huang turned the focus back on the teaching assistant, asking if his own lateness had prompted an extreme reaction. Meanwhile, Chen, who had been listening to the thinly veiled criticism with seeming equanimity, defended herself by saying that she’d supported severe punishments because she thought that they would never have to be applied.

Later, I wondered whether the teaching assistant’s outburst had been a teaching trick, an exaggerated reaction to get the ball rolling. In real life, you don’t tell a person that they like the sound of their own voice too much or that they are indiscreet or dominate conversations. Those things are whispered behind a person’s back or, more politely, are stowed away for future reference. In transgressing the normal rules of social decorum, the teaching assistant set the tone for the rest of the class: This was a place where we were not only allowed but expected to be fully transparent.

The episode reminded me of a term I’d heard before, in the context of Bridgewater, the asset management firm. Ray Dalio, Bridgewater’s founder, had built his company around the idea of “radical transparency” and frequently evangelized for its adoption in other companies. Yet the notion of constantly giving your coworkers no-holds-barred feedback was considered so outlandish that Bridgewater was sometimes called a cult. For all our pretensions of being straight shooters, Americans don’t really have the stomach for it. At least at the office. But encountering radical transparency in a Chinese setting seemed even more unlikely. In my reporting work, I’d spoken to many old-school Chinese laobans (bosses), where the communication had been ludicrously circuitous and involved numerous concessions to hierarchy and “face.” My classmates disproved my skepticism. They were chameleons, slipping easily between the opaqueness of traditional China and the unvarnished directness of modern China.

That afternoon, Gu pulled the teaching assistant who was so offended aside to talk him down; he was persuaded to stay.

ILLUSTRATION: Richard Chance

I first heard about Ji Gu two years ago when I was interviewing Anna Fang, the CEO of ZhenFund, for an article about the competitive Chinese tech startup scene. I asked her what happened to failed startup entrepreneurs. Did they try again? She mentioned that ZhenFund was sponsoring a class called the Failure Clinic, taught by an entrepreneur named Ji Gu, and that attendance was restricted to founders who had lost half a million dollars of their investors’ money. The purpose of the class was exploratory as well as recuperative: Many of those failed entrepreneurs went on to raise more money and try their hand at business again.

Gu and I had dinner at a seafood restaurant near her house the next time I was in Beijing. She was tall, with boy-short hair and strong features. My first impression was that she was aloof, cool-headed. But as dinner went on, it was apparent that she contained great reserves of empathy and was unusually astute at dissecting the vanities and vicissitudes of human behavior. Gu grew up in China but spent her young adulthood in Singapore, Canada, and the US. She graduated from Cornell University and then went to Stanford Business School. There, she took a class called Interpersonal Dynamics. Nicknamed “Touchy-Feely,” the class aimed to teach would-be captains of industry the soft skills they wouldn’t learn in corporate finance lectures.

After Stanford, Gu returned to China and became the chief operating officer of an AI startup in Beijing. But soon she faced upheavals: a divorce and her departure from the startup. The double whammy of personal and professional setbacks eviscerated her. In her early thirties, without a husband or a job, Gu reevaluated her life. She recalled the Touchy-Feely course and how it had helped her gain confidence and recognize that everyone had blind spots. She’d always loved teaching and had hoped, after proving herself in the tech industry, to become a lecturer at Stanford. Fang and Bob Xu, the founder of ZhenFund and a doyen of the Chinese VC industry, encouraged her to take a more direct path. She began teaching a version of the course, tailored for Chinese entrepreneurs whose ventures had failed. It was premised on the idea that the problems commonly blamed for entrepreneurial failure—cash flow shortages, stiff competition—can be excuses for two deeper issues: breakdowns in human relationships or founders’ inability to see their own strengths and weaknesses.

The Failure Clinic was the first course of its kind in the Chinese tech world, and it came along as Chinese development was hitting an inflection point. After Deng Xiaoping opened up the country economically in 1978, the main concern of most Chinese citizens was making money. For a long time, hunger was barely at bay. But by 2017, when the clinic was launched, China was solidly a middle-income country. The material needs of many more people were satisfied, and they began looking for something more.

Westerners predicted that economic liberalization would lead to political agitation and activism—that Chinese citizens would demand the rights and freedoms available in the West. But that hasn’t really come to pass. Instead, the quest has turned inward. The past few years have seen a growing interest in raising the shui ping, or level of attainment, of the Chinese consumer. DeDao, an educational app funded by ZhenFund, sells audio columns by prominent pundits and academics discussing topics like “Doing things that don’t provide immediate returns, but are still worthwhile” or “What does it mean to tackle challenges?” As of last year, it had 30 million users. “The Chinese have worked hard the last two decades for a better future,” says Sara Jane Ho, who runs a business teaching etiquette to affluent women. “So the natural extension is to improve oneself both inside and out—whether that means improving one’s external appearance, by dressing and beauty, or increasing one’s own culture, self-awareness, and sophistication by learning psychology, interpersonal relations, or philosophy.”

The Zhen Academy course caters to some of the same impulses. By the time I enrolled, Gu had dropped the business failure requirement and adopted a broader goal of “self-breakthrough.” The name was changed from Failure Clinic to Zhen Academy and billed as a general-purpose course for entrepreneurs to improve their self-awareness and avoid pitfalls in decisionmaking. (The stigma of the word failure, Gu says, proved more of a drawback than an enticement.) To ascertain your level of commitment, Gu required a written application and multiple rounds of phone interviews. She charged $5,000 for the six days—a hefty investment, but one that Chinese professionals were increasingly willing to make. I attended Zhen Academy’s 20th session. Many of my classmates had been referred by their friends.

The drama of the first afternoon had broken the ice, and by the second day we found a comfortable rhythm as a class. Each morning at 9 o’clock we’d array ourselves, meditation-retreat style, on cushions around the perimeter of the conference room; the assistants would order coffee, and then the day would begin. We’d be there for the next 12 hours. Sometimes Gu would give a short lecture, or we’d do exercises like mock conversations between a boss and an employee. But mostly we talked, endlessly, about our jobs, our romantic lives, our parents, our grandparents.

Talking posed a challenge for me. While my Mandarin was strong for someone who had grown up in the US, I wasn’t fluent enough to express myself in the way I wanted. This had some benefits: I had to think before I spoke. I was more measured. I was a better listener. But it was also frustrating, as though I’d turned into a person who was meek and slow on the uptake. It made me think twice about the Chinese speakers at work or school in the US who I’d judged as passive or retiring. Perhaps they were also funny, assertive, flirtatious, and profane in their native tongue, as I am in mine.

We were expected to make “progress” in the class: Gu and the teaching assistants would poke and probe to provoke an emotional breakthrough. At first, this felt forced and contrived, but it was also effective. The “best” student by the breakthrough criterion was Chen. Even on the first day, when she’d been criticized for pushing excessive late fees, it was apparent that her strong exterior was also protective. Over the course of the week, I saw her mellow out as she got to know us better. Extroverted and glamorous, she used her charisma benevolently, complimenting a shy classmate on her makeup and giving each of us fashion tips. Once, Chen began crying after describing her childhood, and Gu embraced her in a warm hug.

One afternoon we were each instructed to choose three classmates to give feedback to. Chen was picked the most, and she looked nervous as she waited for us to speak. She needn’t have worried. The feedback was good. Even the teaching assistant told her that she’d risen in his estimation. He could tell that since the first day she had been curbing her impulses, giving others the floor. She had even changed her earrings after he told her that the ones she was wearing—two large black pearls—swayed back and forth in his line of vision and distracted him. He said he could tell that she was an open and honest person. He encouraged her to take advantage of the rest of the course to continue to improve.

Yet Chen’s so-called improvement in the class left me unsettled. I couldn’t help but think that, had those criticisms been leveled in the US, they would have felt tinged with sexism, and would have been received that way. Why shouldn’t she command a room? Why shouldn’t she wear the earrings she wanted to wear? We were forcing her to get a likability makeover of the sort that stifles women everywhere.

And what did it say about me that I did, indeed, like her more after?

There were many moments like this, when my liberal Western sensibilities ran up against candid, Chinese ones. These moments left me confused. The comments often seemed misogynistic or callous; they also seemed to get at something real.

For all our obsession with self-help books and motivational videos, Americans often emphasize “feeling good” about ourselves; we pull off this delicate act by redefining our flaws as something to be embraced. Self-help exists to uplift. It traffics in empowering messages. It tells us that our only flaw is negativity. We must put positive energy out in the world, or celebrate our inner goddess.

In China, the message is bleaker, but also more bracing: Of course you are flawed, and of course you want to fix those flaws. Suggestions to lose weight, comments on physical appearance, gender stereotypes, discussions of net worth, are not only commonplace, they’re considered motivating exhortations. There’s no expectation that society will change, so the responsibility is on you to get with the program.

Think your husband is having an affair with a younger woman? Hire a mistress dispeller to gain the woman’s confidence or bribe her to break up the relationship. Aren’t pretty enough? Get plastic surgery. Your parents are poor migrant workers without a hukou, a residency permit that allows you to access public benefits like school or health care in Beijing or Shanghai? Tough luck. Go out and make some money to buy your way in. There is no reinterpreting these facts. Competition is brutal, and the market is cruel.

One day in class, we were asked to label certain personal characteristics—family background, education, profession, looks, wealth, height, marriage status, geographic location—as either strengths or weaknesses. What happened next was the most matter-of-fact accounting of personal failings and assets I have ever heard. One student explained that she thought she must be pretty, because men had always chased her, and she felt she’d become even prettier after double eyelid surgery. Another acknowledged that her face was crooked. When I gave my self-assessment—I considered my education and family to be strengths, and my looks and wealth to be weaknesses—it was the first time in a very long time I’d said something negative about myself and not been told that I just had low self-esteem. No one said anything. There were no immediate protests or reassurances. And while initially the silence triggered something lonely and insecure in me, I also felt relieved. My insecurities weren’t just in my head. They were real things that I could change or compensate for. In fact, if I lived in China, they were things that market conditions would force me to change and compensate for.

Of course, viewing life as a series of market interactions—the labor market, the education market, the marriage market—and seeking to maximize your value within these markets exacts an emotional toll. I know because, to a certain extent, that was how I was raised. My parents put pressure on me to win music competitions, get into a top-ranked university, get a prestigious job. If I failed to do so, they seemed to believe, the world would look down on me. Early on in the course, one of the teaching assistants pointed out that in an exercise about our identities, I had listed things that I do or had done—gone to Harvard, worked as a Google engineer—and not things that I am. I brushed her off at the time, but she had touched a nerve. I was both a child of America and my parents’ daughter. The American side of me said that my identity is intrinsic, independent of others. The Chinese side of me said that my identity exists as the sum total of others’ perception.

This conflict came to a head one afternoon during class. The previous evening, I’d confided in one of the teaching assistants that because I cared too much about my image, I often refrained from saying things or trying new things that I might not be good at and might make me seem dumb. She had responded by saying that, well, yes, because I’d gone to Harvard, people would indeed perhaps find it disappointing if I seemed dumb.

This was not what I wanted to hear. “I feel like I’ve worked so hard to convince myself that I don’t need to care about others’ expectations,” I told her in front of the class that afternoon. “And now I feel like it was all a delusion.”

By now I was crying, great heaving sobs that seemed to have come out of nowhere. When I looked up, I saw a sea of friendly, albeit slightly baffled faces. One of the teaching assistants gave me a pack of tissues. Hu, the health care entrepreneur, said, “You know, none of us really care that much.” I nodded, sniffling. I knew that intellectually, but deep down, I had bought into the market-based model perhaps even more than the actual Chinese people in the room.

Gu spoke often of finding a happy equilibrium between your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others. I leaned too far in one direction—seeking consensus and being hyperaware of how people perceived me. Chen, Gu said, had leaned too hard in the other. It was a hard balance to strike. Chen’s stated goal for the class was to become less dominant in groups. But then, at moments, when she excitedly tried to interject into the conersation and Gu would shush her, that often felt like an abnegation of herself.

Like many American-born Chinese, I spent my childhood and adolescence holding my Chinese heritage in slight disdain. When I was in elementary and middle school, our trips to see the grandparents in Nanjing and Shanghai meant a number of physical inconveniences—air pollution, mosquitoes, dirty hospitals, squat toilets. Later on, as China developed, we saw its particular combination of gaudy consumerism and political centralization as gauche. My younger sister and I made fun of the fake Louis Vuitton bags, the sun umbrellas, the transactional nature of romantic relationships. We also viewed the government with suspicion. Our schools had taught us that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government, that anything else was evil and doomed to fail. We were haughty in our moral superiority.

Yet China didn’t fail. It thrived. During my childhood and early adulthood, China transformed from a backwater to a global superpower. Per capita GDP grew from less than $400 in the early 1990s to roughly $10,000 today. Poverty (defined as living on $1.90 a day) fell from 30 percent to less than 2 percent, according to the World Bank. In the 1970s, my dad’s family was considered well-to-do, because they had two bicycles and a sewing machine. Today, an upper-middle-class young person owns a late-model mobile phone, enjoys craft cocktails at clubs where international DJs spin tunes, and vacations abroad. It’s clear to me why some Chinese people accept the trade that many in the West consider Faustian—economic prosperity for freedom.

When my parents first came to North America in the late ’80s for graduate school, there was never a doubt that they would try to stay. Going back was considered a shameful failure. Today, while Chinese students paying full tuition still fill seats in master’s programs in the US, their experience suggests something more akin to the grand tours that upper-class Americans undertook in Europe in the 19th century. In 2017, eight in 10 Chinese students studying abroad returned after graduation, according to Quartz, up from just one in 10 in 2002. These repatriates, called “sea turtles,” have made a simple calculus: If they stay in the US, they can get stable but faceless jobs at Ernst & Young or Microsoft. Even if they find exciting positions, they have to contend with hostile immigration policies and a bamboo ceiling. Or they can go home to more dynamic career prospects and apartments and restaurants that are just as nice as those in New York or San Francisco.

One would think that all these sea turtles, educated or at least exposed to the democratic tradition, would chafe under restrictions to speech, press, and assembly. Yet the impression I got at Zhen Academy, where roughly half of the class had spent some time abroad, and from talking to Chinese friends in the US, was the opposite. Some students, particularly from privileged classes, “come to this country and see how democracy works, and they actually become disenchanted,” says Yuhua Wang, a professor of political science at Harvard. “Part of the reason is that they see the problems, the inefficiencies, the gridlock of democracy. Back in China, everything seems to work very smoothly, because there’s a very strong party.”

In their eyes, the Chinese government is absolute but not arbitrary, and its decisions, while often harsh, nevertheless have a kind of logic. If you take economic growth and ideological control as first principles, everything else follows: The government shut down cryptocurrency exchanges because they led to speculative, fraudulent activity. It forcibly quarantined Covid-19 patients in special facilities because transmission was happening in families; it made WeChat moderators criminally liable for content, because what’s a more effective way of monitoring social media than from the bottom up? Putting aside whether you agree with these actions or the principles underlying them, the hyperrational system can resonate with a class of technocratic professionals.

It’s also a system that has largely benefited people like my classmates. Huang spent seven years in Paris getting a master’s and PhD in history. One day over lunch, he told me that Chinese society could be divided into three groups—the top 15 percent, the next 30 percent, and the bottom 55 percent, i.e., the masses. Each of these groups understood their respective role—the top groups were to be the “brain” of the country; the bottom, the “body.” In his opinion, this partitioning of responsibilities meant that, unlike in the US, where we are governed by the majority, China’s decisions reflected the thinking of the smartest people and were made in the country’s long-term interest. When I asked whether this meant the top 15 percent would make decisions that benefited only themselves, he seemed unmoved. After all, further enrichment at the top could only happen if the masses were fed, entertained, and sufficiently wealthy to drive domestic consumption.

My visit to Beijing for Zhen Academy coincided with the lead-up to the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The date was marked with a grand military parade meant, in part, to convey to China’s laobaixing—“regular folks”—that China was rich and strong, and that Chinese people could hold their heads up in the world. It was the sort of thing that was easy to dismiss as bread and circuses, but in all my interactions I was struck by a genuine swagger and pride in China’s ascendance. Several of my classmates at Zhen Academy applauded me on my farsightedness in wanting to better understand China, and one asked when I was planning on moving there, so confident was he that being in China would benefit me.

In the months after I attended Zhen Academy, as Covid-19 swept across the globe—bringing daily life to a standstill and US-China relations to new lows—I was often struck by the gap between how Americans saw China and how Chinese people saw their own country. Wang, the Harvard professor, pointed out the differences in media coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the Chinese media, “a lot of the coverage is focused on how the government responds to the pandemic; it shows you how decisive and determined they were,” he says. “When you watch the media in the US, what you hear about is how the behavior of local officials in Wuhan led to the cover-up of the pandemic early on, which led to all the problems. They’re both saying something true … but the perspectives are totally different.”

For many sea turtles who grew up primed with Chinese media and with firsthand experience of China’s economic transformation, reports in the Western media about arrests of political activists or the surveillance and detention of minority groups like the Uighurs, or even the US government’s contention that China is forcing the repatriation of dissident Chinese living abroad, served not as a revelation but as further proof that the Western media, threatened by China’s rise and incapable of understanding the situation on the ground, was biased against them.

ILLUSTRATION: Richard Chance

On the last day of the course, we did an exercise that consisted of ranking our personal values. The assistants handed us a set of flash cards, each containing words like love, wealth, power, excellence, friendship, and independence, and told us to select our top five. There was a flash card labeled ai guo, or “patriotism,” which elicited titters.

The exercise was jovial, and after we had laid out the flash cards we walked around and looked at everyone else’s choices, like elementary school students displaying family genealogy projects. Surprisingly, a number named freedom as a top value. Others listed wealth.

My own values were health, love, knowledge, creativity, and pragmatism. I noticed that one of the central themes of my life was that the first four values—idealistic, romantic notions—were often in conflict with the fifth. I wanted to be a free-spirited bohemian, but I also wanted to max out my 401(k). Perhaps that pragmatism is a vestige of my upbringing. Several of my classmates told me that, despite my American accent and Western demeanor, they saw me as a deeply traditional Chinese girl, more traditional, in fact, than people in China today.

It made sense. My parents left China in the 1980s with the values of their time. When they graduated from college in 1985, many people were still assigned a job within a danwei, or work unit. This danwei would then take care of you: It would assign you housing; you might meet your spouse there. All you needed was to acquiesce to the system.

But over the next 35 years, China changed. The private market blossomed. Real estate prices skyrocketed. Danwei were disbanded, leaving university graduates to fend for themselves. Acquiescence was no longer an option.

Today China is 1.4 billion strivers, many of whom juxtapose within themselves tradition and modernity, freedom and duty, obeisance and hustle. The hand of the state is the ever present guiding force. It manages this striving, swaying the direction of industry and prescribing a set of public virtues and narratives. Walk around any major city and you’ll see the slogan “Chinese Dream, My Dream” printed on banners and construction placards, the characters formatted so that the dream character is shared between “China” and “My.” The country’s dream is your dream. For many of China’s migrant and factory workers, the dream is a vicarious one in an unequal society. For people like my classmates, who are fully capable of recognizing propaganda and are best positioned to benefit from this system, the official messaging of working toward a collective goal of economic prosperity and national glory both sanctifies and aligns with their own ambitions.

If there is a difference between what self-breakthrough, or self-actualization—or whatever you call what we were doing at the Zhen Academy—means in the US and China, then perhaps it is in the balance among what Gu calls the four quadrants of integral psychology: “I, you, us, them.” Human beings, she says, are by nature social animals. It’s not as simple as just doing what you want; you have to intersect with what others want, too.

Toward the very end of class, I had a conversation with Hu, the health care entrepreneur. She’d heard me struggle with how to balance my dual career of computer engineering and freelance writing; I’d talked about whether to pursue some of my less lucrative and more unstable interests full-time. She questioned whether they needed to be less lucrative and more unstable: “There are ways to build a business from your writing. There’s sponsorships and affiliate marketing. You can have a subscription service, you can write for TV, for podcasts. You can come up with something new.” She was arguing that the choice was neither to blindly follow my dreams nor to blindly chase financial security. Rather, there was a third path, one that would require creativity but might ultimately reconcile all my contradictory desires.

It was the sort of “monetize your passion” thinking I was accustomed to hearing in Silicon Valley but that I saw everywhere in China: the twentysomething selling marked-up cosmetic sample kits on Taobao; a millennial farmer and chef who amassed more than 30 million followers on Douyin, China’s TikTok, by streaming videos of her life in rural Sichuan; Zhen Academy itself, born of Ji Gu’s disappointments.

The day after the course ended, Gu and I went to dinner at a popular hot-pot place in the city. We ended up brainstorming how she might be able to bring a version of this course online, or to America. “If you have a few friends who are interested,” she said, smiling, “I can handle the rest.”

Yiren Lu (@yirenlu) is a software engineer and writer in New York. This is her first story for WIRED.

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