In China, there’s an unofficial but widely accepted hierarchical classification of cities. This system shapes everything from access to opportunity to social perception.
At the same time, migrant workers, especially those from rural or lower-tier cities, often face systemic discrimination through the hukou (户口) system. Hukou is China’s household registration framework. It acts like an internal passport, directly impacting a person’s legal identity, access to healthcare, education, housing, and the right to settle in different cities.
My mother grew up in Luohe (漯河), a city in Henan province that’s generally considered a tier-4 city. Despite being one of the top students in her school, she had to give up her chance at education. That opportunity was given to her younger brother instead — a choice made simply because he was a boy.
She later made her way to Shenzhen, taking on different jobs to make ends meet. This was in the 1980s and 1990s, when Shenzhen was still developing and widely considered chaotic, gritty, and even dangerous. My grandma, my dad’s mother, actually banned me from visiting Shenzhen during my childhood because she didn’t think it was safe.
Chinese people have always struck me as incredibly entrepreneurial. For many, especially in the earlier years of China’s opening, it was one of the only viable paths for social mobility outside of the national college entrance exam. During the high-growth era of the 2000s, opportunities were everywhere. Even small businesses thrived.
My mother wasn’t an exception. She ran a beauty salon in the 1990s and told me she made 10 times the average salary at the time. “As long as you worked hard, you wouldn’t lose money,” she used to say. Even after moving to Hong Kong, she stayed alert to opportunity. During COVID-19, she started a crystal business on Facebook Live, which didn’t succeed, but showed that her entrepreneurial spirit had never faded.
When I chose to become an entrepreneur myself, she wasn’t supportive. I had walked away from a good job in Shanghai, a tier-1 city, and was pursuing a mission-driven startup. She thought it would be wiser to follow a prestigious and stable path — especially now that I was in London.
At first, I didn’t understand why she kept pushing me to focus on revenue. I believed entrepreneurship was about impact and meaning, not money. Talking about revenue felt like “dirty work,” especially for someone who had worked in public relations with the world’s top names.
But she was right. A business without revenue isn’t a business. I learned that the hard way.
I tried so hard to make something unworkable work. And when I finally accepted that I had done everything I could, and could now clearly see my gaps, she simply said:
“It’s okay to lose when you feel like it’s just not the right time. You’re in a new place, and things aren’t as easy as you thought they’d be.”
Throughout my journey, she kept reminding me of a classical Chinese strategic concept:
天時、地利、人和 — often attributed to Mencius (孟子).
It describes the three essential forces needed for success, whether in war, politics, business, or even love:
天時 (Tiān shí): Timing — The Right Moment
One Chinese entrepreneur I met once said to me, “Twenty years ago in Shanghai, everyone made money.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. In the early 2000s, China was entering a period of explosive growth. The country had just joined the World Trade Organization, real estate was booming, foreign capital was pouring in, and new markets were opening up overnight. It was a time when simply showing up, working hard, and saying yes could change your life.
To truly understand how Shanghai became what it is today, I highly recommend watching Blossoms Shanghai (繁花), directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai. The series is set in the 1990s, a decade that marked Shanghai’s economic and cultural rebirth. The city was transforming, shifting from a planned economy to market capitalism. It was a time of extreme risk and reward. Jobs weren’t guaranteed. State-owned enterprises were laying off workers. It was pure survival entrepreneurship, and yet the city was brimming with promise.
地利 (Dì lì): Positioning — The Right Environment
One founder I deeply admire is Qi Ji (季琦), who co-founded Ctrip.com, Home Inns & Hotels, and Huazhu Group. All three companies were listed on NASDAQ, each reaching a market valuation of over $1 billion.
I learned about him while doing customer discovery and staying in his Huazhu hotels in Beijing, Shanghai, and Qingdao — all clean, affordable, and well-located for early-stage founders attending major expos.
In every room, I found a copy of his book Founder’s Notes (《创始人手记》). One insight that stayed with me was his observation that the Qing Dynasty’s push for linguistic standardization laid the groundwork for China’s modern entrepreneurial scalability.
China today remains the largest single-language market in the world, with 1.4 billion people and over 900 million Mandarin speakers. This linguistic unity enables tech products to scale fast, without the localization friction seen in regions like Europe or India.
人和 (Rén hé): Unity of People — Trust and Shared Direction
In the West, diversity — racial, gender, and cultural — is often prioritized in team building. The idea is that diverse teams generate better ideas and more inclusive products. And while that’s often true, some of the most enduring businesses in the world are family-run.
Think LVMH in Europe, SK Group in South Korea, or Midea Group in China. Many of these companies started from tight-knit relationships — family, shared hometowns, school ties — which created fast decision-making, shared values, and minimal politics.
Across Southeast Asia, overseas Chinese entrepreneurs built empires on this principle. From humble beginnings, using clan associations, family backing, and dialect networks, they created economic powerhouses.
Examples include:
The Kuok Group in Malaysia
PT Djarum in Indonesia
Charoen Pokphand Group in Thailand
SM Group in the Philippines
Even today, 65% of startups fail due to cofounder conflict. Without trust, even the best ideas collapse. Diversity matters, but without alignment, it can become fragmentation.
Throughout my journey, I’ve met highly talented East Asian mentors and young professionals who offered to help or collaborate without asking for anything in return. My previous cofounder was from Romania. Despite our cultural differences, both Hong Kong and Romania score low on “Indulgence” in Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. That shared cultural grounding gave us a surprisingly strong alignment when it came to work ethic.
What Chinese philosophy has taught me is that success isn’t just about working hard or dreaming big. It’s about understanding when to move, where to plant your roots, and who you build with.
And last but not least, I know I still have so much to learn from my mother and I feel incredibly lucky to have her in my life.