The parallel world of Chinese tech, with Lillian Li
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2021
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with ex-venture capitalist Lillian Li, who moved to China from the U.K. last year and has been looking at China’s tech ecosystem from a unique perspective — combining an investor’s eye, an academic background studying development, a grounding in Chinese language and culture, and a comparative instinct. Lillian shares her views on how technology platforms have become institutions, how the U.S. and China have responded to this development in starkly different ways, and the major features that distinguish the technology ecosystems of the West and China.
10:19: Waiting on the next era of technology
25:06: The challenges faced by institutions
34:48: The future of the tech-government relationship
39:44: Two parallel worlds, China and the U.S.
47:10: Scale is no longer guaranteed
Recommendations:
Lillian: But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, by Chuck Klosterman.
Kaiser: Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SUPChina. |
| 0:14.6 | SubChina is the best way to keep on top of all the news out of China, especially if you subscribe to our daily email newsletter, SUPChina Access. |
| 0:22.5 | Or check out SUPChina.com for all the original reported stories, op-eds, great regular columns, |
| 0:28.0 | and our growing range of videos and podcasts. |
| 0:31.0 | It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping |
| 0:36.0 | the world. |
| 0:37.1 | I'm Kaiser Guo. come to you from my home |
| 0:38.9 | in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. China's tech ecosystem is neither ahead nor behind that of the West. |
| 0:46.2 | It is a parallel world. So writes my guest today, Lillian Lee, a former venture investor now living in |
| 0:52.5 | Shanghai, recently in Beijing. It's a claim I am sure |
| 0:56.2 | would resonate with many people who've spent time in both ecosystems. And it's something that I'm |
| 1:01.3 | sure people in the U.S. or other Western countries who have even a glancing familiarity with |
| 1:06.1 | China's tech world recognize, at least at the superficial level of the Chinese version of, you know, |
| 1:12.0 | fill in the blank, Google, the Chinese version of Twitter, the Chinese version of Amazon or YouTube |
| 1:16.3 | or what have you. |
| 1:17.6 | Anyway, I have asked Lillian to join me today to chat about some of her big picture thinking |
| 1:22.6 | about the tech ecosystem in China, the U.S. and more. |
| 1:26.9 | Lillian, as I said, is an ex-Venture investor who's been with Eight Roads Ventures and |
| 1:32.8 | Salesforce ventures. |
| 1:34.6 | She was also a co-founder of the nonprofit diversity VC. |
| 1:38.5 | She's currently in China refactoring, in her own words. |
| 1:42.1 | Meanwhile, she's been publishing an always very thought-provoking |
... |
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