25 min.
Endless Talking, Brutal Honesty, and Uncontrolled Sobbing at a Chinese Self-Breakthrough 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. ¶ 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…
