China is having its techlash moment.
The Internet giants in the country, once celebrated as engines of economic vitality, are now despised for exploiting user data, abusing workers and repressing innovation. Jack Ma, co-founder of e-commerce titan Alibaba, is a fallen idol, with his companies under government scrutiny for the ways in which they secured their control over the world’s second largest economy.
But there is one tech figure who has managed to keep the Chinese public under his control, whose mix of mischievous bomb throwing and industry captain bravado seems to be tailor-made for this era of frustrated dreams and disillusionment: Elon Musk.
“He can fight the system and become the richest man on the planet – and avoid being defeated in the process,” said Jane Zhang, founder and chief executive of ShellPay, a blockchain company in Shanghai. “He is everyone’s hope.”
Whether out of hope, envy or morbid curiosity – like spectators expecting to see one of their rockets fall in a blast of fire – China can’t get enough of Musk. Tesla’s electric cars are big sellers in the country, and the government’s growing space ambitions have spawned a fan community that accompanies all SpaceX launches.
Social platforms are full of videos and articles questioning whether the South African billionaire is a pioneer or a fraud, and examining everything from his creation to his taste for hot pot in Beijing. The founders of startups swear by their belief in “thinking of the first principles”, which seeks solutions by examining problems at their most fundamental level. A pile of books by Chinese authors promises to reveal the secrets of the “Iron Man of Silicon Valley”, a nickname that seems to have stayed in China, not King of Mars or Rocket Man.
In a long topic about Musk on the question and answer site Zhihu, a user named Moonshake wrote that most people start out hopeful, but gradually accept the “mediocrity” that is their destiny.
“Only a superman like Musk can move from endless mediocrity and towards the infinite, to see the magnificence of the universe,” writes Moonshake.
Another user on the same topic says that he called his son Elon to express his admiration. The user did not respond to a message requesting further comments.
Tesla’s giant factory near Shanghai started production in 2019 and helped increase the company’s production capacity. When Tesla’s stock price hit a new high in January, making Musk the richest man on the planet, Chinese fans claimed the credit. (Mr. Musk’s reaction to the news – “Well, back to work …” – was liked 22,000 times on the Chinese social platform Weibo.)
Later that month, when Musk endorsed the rise in GameStop’s stock, many in China were fascinated, drawn to the drama by the same distrust of major financial institutions.
“Occupy Wall Street could never be copied in China,” said Suji Yan, a businessman and investor in Shanghai. To do this, “you would have to go to the streets,” he said. Buying protest shares is safer.
The dismay that many Chinese technology workers feel about their industry is compounded by the feeling that it is no longer actually inventing or innovating. While Musk is building futuristic cars and colonizing the cosmos, they see the best minds of their generation designing games for mobile phones, figuring out how to place more ads on social media and speculating in the real estate market.
“China no longer has Silicon Valley freaks,” said Yan. The technology bosses “have all become cardboard cutouts,” he said, and investors don’t touch on ideas that seem remotely “crazy”.
Mr. Musk’s acolytes are a passionate group everywhere. But in China, its popularity is helped by the adoption of Tesla by the authoritarian government – and vice versa – when the United States and China have never trusted each other’s high-tech companies less.
People in China were amazed at the way Musk dealt with the country’s obstinate authorities. They have been more critical of the way he sometimes treats his own workers. He attacked California health officials last year who demanded that a Tesla plant remain closed there because of concerns about the coronavirus. The company was also investigated for work accidents and racial discrimination.
“He is a true dreamer and creator, but also a selfish and cold-blooded megalomaniac,” said Hong Bo, a former technology commentator in China who writes under the name Keso, about Musk. “I admire your courage in breaking with outdated conventions, but I don’t much like your trampling on humanity’s financial results.”
Mr. Musk and Tesla did not respond to emails requesting comments.
The frustration with Big Tech is part of a broader malaise in China. For many young people, decades of vertiginous economic growth seem to have resulted only in more fierce competition for opportunities, less stability and less active voice on the direction of their lives.
On the Chinese Internet, the term that captured the climate is “involution”, previously used by anthropologists to describe agrarian societies that grew in size or complexity without becoming more advanced or productive.
The feeling among young Chinese people that they are fighting more for a lesser chance of material gain leads them to hope “to reorganize life in a different way,” said Biao Xiang, who studies social change in China and is director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology of Germany.
In addition to criticizing the high-pressure work culture of the technology industry and the labor abuses of the gigantic economy, young Chinese people are more skeptical about the vast influence that internet platforms like Alibaba have on trade and finance. Still, Professor Xiang believes that people in China have not turned against companies that offer technological advances of a more tangible nature, which is why Musk’s industrial optimism is still attractive.
“They are not really against technology,” said Professor Xiang. “They are more against this kind of manipulation of social relations in the platform style.”
China does not lack declared technology tycoons. It turns out that their careers never seem to go very far without having problems.
There is Justin Sun, the cryptocurrency genius who paid $ 4.6 million to dine with Warren E. Buffett, but later apologized for his “excessive self-promotion”. Or Jia Yueting, who set out to be Apple’s best smartphone and sank into debt. Even Ma, from Alibaba, seems to have helped catalyze the government’s crackdown on him by speaking a little too frankly at an event about his irritation with regulators.
Still, Musk’s carefree style would likely attract little attention in China, if he were not seen as someone trying to solve major problems for civilization, such as sustainable energy. In a country where most people have seen new technology bring great improvements to their lives, there is less cynicism about the distant future than in the West.
Chinese youth see Jack Ma and Pony Ma, head of social media giant Tencent, “more like rich men and successful entrepreneurs” than as Musk visionaries, said Flex Yang, co-founder of Babel Finance, a supplier to Hong Kong. Kong of financial services for cryptocurrencies.
The two Mas, who are not related, were just “in the right place at the right time,” said Yang.
Jack Ma and Musk shared a stage at a technology conference in Shanghai in 2019. There may never have been a more incompatible pair. Mr. Ma was serious and committed, at ease in the big role of the conference. Mr. Musk was restless and playful. The two talked a lot after each other. Mr. Ma said that the answer to super-smart machines is better education for humans. With that, Mr. Musk just laughed.
In a compilation of embarrassing moments from the event posted on the Bilibili video site, the comments are brutal, especially for Mr. Ma.
“This is the person who in China was once considered a god,” wrote one person. “In the presence of a true master, he is like a performing monkey.”
Alibaba declined to comment.