While a spring thunderstorm in the night revitalized the sleeping world, Qian Yafeng and his team were shivering in the cold, pushing a broken-down motor tricycle full of parcels towards a distant dorm.
It was 18th March, the first day Qian and his team resumed the business of Nan Express, a college entrepreneurship program in Nanjing University, which the team took over from the founders, and an intense storm welcomed them.
Fan Yuqi, another team member, carried a full-length mirror weighing more than 10 kilograms to the dorm, waiting for the buyer to come and fetch it. It is Nan Express’ main business: fetch parcels from express companies and deliver them to customers – it serves as an intermediate and gets profit in this process.
“We finished our first-day business in 11 o’clock in the evening. I literally wanted to cry,” Qian Yafeng recalled later. “But there were complaints.”
Maybe complaints are just appetizers. There would be more ahead, both expected and unexpected, challenging them as young entrepreneurs in China.
Qian Yafeng is one of millions who dive into the new wave of entrepreneurship in China.In 1990s, start-ups like Vanke and Haier grasped the opportunity posed by Deng Xiaoping’s reform of the Chinese market system, while the new millennium has bred Internet giants like Alibaba, which in 2014 made the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the history of New York Stock Exchange.
Here comes the third wave. According to China’s State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC), 12 million new market entities entered the market in 2014, among which were 2.91 million first-time entrepreneurs.
A pair of undergraduate students, Jiang Shanna of Huaqiao University and Yu Jieqiong of Zhejiang University of Technology, started their business as purchasing agents to buy cosmetics from other countries and sell them in China in 2014.
“When I saw this opportunity, I thought I could earn some pocket money from it, so why not have a try,” said Jiang Shanna. She formed a partnership with her friends who were studying in Japan and South Korea and expanded the market among her school fellows by posting advertisements on QQ and Wechat. It immediately drew the attention of school girls who were fans of Japanese and South Korean cosmetics. The business usually booms at the beginning of a new semester and during summer holidays, and Jiang earns around 500 yuan per month on average.
Likewise, Yu Jieqiong started her cosmetic business as well. “A lot of people around me have their own business. I guess I have to try one,” she explained her motivation. Under the light of her table lamp, Yu usually wrote down her business notes of incomes and profits of the day after her roommates were asleep for the night. “It’s exhausting,” she said.
Buying goods – not only cosmetics – from other countries and selling them in China is a common business in China: more than 419,000 online shops on Taobao provide this service. Operating in the gray area of laws, this business indicates what appears special in this new wave of entrepreneurship: low input with high returns, a dependence on the Internet and a niche market.
The entrepreneurial spirit has gotten a boost from the government. In this year’s Report on the Work of the Government delivered by Premier Li Keqiang, the term Entrepreneurship was mentioned for 17 times. The government tries to remove every threshold for people, especially college students and graduates, to start business. Startup costs have been decreased to a large extent since requirements on minimum registered capital was scrapped in 2014. Small and micro businesses pay the minimum of one yuan to register and get tax preferences as well.
“All local governments are ‘catching fish’,” says Gu Hongyu, the president of Student Association of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Nanjing University.
He introduced a program in which governments and enterprises come to the university every year to initiate entrepreneurial project in search of good teams and ideas and invest money to them.
Gu visited a team researching and developing intelligent trash bins several days ago. Those trash bins could call sanitation workers automatically as soon as the bins are full. This entrepreneurial plan attracted a lot of attention in a business plan competition, so the team reached the minimum standards to apply for an office in Zidong Creative Park – a business incubator supported by Nanjing government, charged only a small amount in utility fees.
Like this team, innovation has shown its power in this new wave of entrepreneurship. “China is famous for copycatting, but I believe indigenous innovation will emerge in large numbers,” said Gu Hongyu. Referring to Silicon Valley as a role model which has also seen cases of plagiarism, he believes that with a large number of patents in hand, Chinese entrepreneurs could survive in the competition and finally catch up.
High technology is now the high ground that many Chinese young entrepreneurs compete to seize. “Make ordinary extraordinary.” It is the slogan of CrabxLab companies which were established by a bunch of geeks and design thinkers. Liu Weichao, once a core member of Learning Humanoid Robots Group in the University of Bonn, Germany, founded CrabxLab in March 2014. He shared his experience and ideas with young entrepreneurs in a sharing activity on May 24th 2015.
The core concept of CrabxLab is the Internet of Things (IoT), which means connecting things through the Internet and Artificial Intelligence to make life more convenient. They are currently developing a kind of chip which could send signals stronger and farther than the normal GSM base station. It is the first step for them to create their world.
“We are making cars,” said Liu, using a metaphor indicating that his company is a pioneer like the Ford Motor Company which reformed the way of transportation by making the world first car. Showing a picture of a red small cottage on screen– the Hewlett-Packard Development Company, the origin of Silicon Valley – as well as pictures of garages that have bred Google and Apple, Liu believes his company could make ordinary extraordinary as well.
But there are also some difficulties in starting business. Yuan Rui, a sophomore from Software Institute in Nanjing University, showed both his desire and hesitation in starting his own business.
“Students in our institute have a high employment rate,” said Yuan Rui. “It’s difficult for us to give up jobs with decent salaries to start business which is uncertain.”
He attended a business workshop named “Chuang Ke Dream Factory” sponsored by Youth League Committee of Nanjing University and was encouraged to stay in the workshop, because programmers are desperately needed in many teams in web 2.0 era.
This workshop was set up to help new starters by providing special guidance from experienced entrepreneurs in other fields. Attendants will have opportunities to become interns in creative corporations such as BizArk, a leading E-commerce enterprise, to learn from veterans before they eventually start businesses.
“I was excited when I saw this activity,” said Zhang jie, a graduate student in the School of Social and Behavior Science Nanjing University, who also attended the workshop. She ran a milk tea shop with her friends during her undergraduate years, but it was transferred to other people when she decided to attend the Postgraduate Entrance Exams.
“The desire has long been stored in my body,” she said. “Now it’s time to break out.”
This article was first published in The Nanjinger Magazine, September 2015 Issue. If you would like to read the whole magazine, please follow this link.
