The world belongs to Chinese people who speak English

Author: Brother Bing / Bing Brother

Before the Spring Festival, I was chatting with a post-2000s generation. He took a sip of juice and suddenly said, “Now in Silicon Valley, the AI scene is basically dominated by Chinese people who speak English.” He also added, “If an AI company doesn’t have ABC as CMO, it’s basically doomed.”

Just scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, you can see all kinds of “chinamaxxing” health memes. Adidas’s new Tang suit jacket is completely sold out online (all bought by foreigners).

Foreign media like to attribute these trends to the “rise of China’s soft power,” but I tend to think it’s more about a result of both conflict and fusion between Eastern and Western cultures. This outcome is especially evident among entrepreneurs.

On one side, there’s the pragmatism and structural sense embedded in our DNA from our ancestors. On the other, Western modern thought has stripped away the overly conservative parts of traditional wisdom and reshaped it into a new personal form. This combination is inherently very suitable for entrepreneurship.

Western society allows you to be romantic, impulsive, and to bet on long-term, irrational things. Even if you fail, it doesn’t immediately define you as a person. This is a huge tolerance space granted by the system and culture.

I studied at an American liberal arts college, majoring in psychology, taking courses in metaphysics and art history. My parents always complained I was studying “useless stuff.” But it was these seemingly useless courses that gave me an almost instinctive, even slightly irrational, trust in human agency and mutual tolerance.

I call this state “romanticism” because it’s completely opposite to many Chinese people’s innate cynicism of “seeing through everything” and “knowing the end from the beginning.”

It’s this romanticism that makes someone dare to give up a stable high salary to start a business, dare to invest money in an untested smart contract, and more importantly, it’s a way of reconciling with oneself. When you allow yourself to be impulsive, excited, and hopeful about long-term value, you also allow yourself to be happy, let others be happy, and let society improve together.

Of course, if Western romanticism goes to extremes, it can easily turn into floating in the air, disconnected from reality, and not doing practical work. At this point, the pragmatic educational philosophy in Chinese culture becomes especially important.

Many Chinese entrepreneurs like to use the term “doing business,” while in the English-speaking world, entrepreneurship is called “start-up.” Chinese entrepreneurship often prioritizes the business model first (who’s money you’re making), whereas Western entrepreneurship emphasizes the act itself.

In recent years, the crypto world has been painfully educated by the “not doing practical work” problem. A lot of effort is spent on superficial narratives and concept packaging, with very few real applications. In the end, the most primitive track—“speculating on coins”—is firmly controlled by a group of Asian players.

The first time I saw Mega’s white paper, I almost instinctively thought, “This architecture is too reasonable.” Centralized orderers + Ethereum security = faster chains, clear and straightforward logic. But this “East-West hybrid” logic is taboo in many foreigners’ eyes because, in their context, centralization is almost equivalent to original sin.

But in my view, centralization is never a sin; it’s just a tool. Many Western teams, in politically correct environments, simply can’t make choices like Mega. Meanwhile, we can inherit the mindset of “concentrating power to do big things,” and use decentralized security as the ultimate backing, expanding the entire space of imagination.

However, if I only had Chinese-style education, I know I could only build small workshops or small businesses. What truly convinced me that this “trade-off of centralization” could lead to new applications and grow the entire circle was the Western education I received. It made me believe in system design, structural choices, and the possibility of scale.

Finally, someone always calls me a “banana person,” yellow outside, white inside. I disagree. The world is never black and white, nor East or West. Someone who has experienced multiple cultures has the greatest advantage: they can absorb the strengths of each and recombine them.

Take me as an example: I finished high school in Beijing, went to college in the US, then directly moved to Nigeria in Africa, and later settled in Dubai in the Middle East. You ask if I’m a banana or a sweet date—I don’t know. But I do know one thing:

If you’re a Chinese person who can speak English, you must be brave enough to step out, face the clash of cultures, because there will be opportunities for you to profit; if you were born in China and don’t speak English, you must learn it and then go to the world.

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