Today’s note is rambling and a little trivial, but the whole thing revolves around one phrase: Narrative Moat. Although the title is a little bullshit, from what I’ve observed, “stories speak louder than products” actually works in the real world. So if you clicked on it, I hope you’ll be patient and read to the end. 🧡
Not long ago, my roommate shared something with me.
When she went out to buy a late-night snack, she ran into an older man from Xinjiang. His Mandarin was a little halting, and he occasionally needed his son beside him to translate or handle a customer’s request.
It reminded me that every person from Xinjiang I’ve known has been my age, without exception, and all of them spoke Mandarin with a very standard accent.
During the National Day holiday, I took a rideshare to the airport. When I walked out of the building, I saw the driver standing by the back of the car with the trunk already open, waiting for me—so polite. My first thought was, Wow, this guy is striking; he doesn’t look like he’s from inland China. When I asked, I learned he was from northern Xinjiang. Of course...
His accent was also very standard, even though he pronounced a few words differently. I couldn’t resist opening up a conversation and trying to talk with him about Mandarin and Uyghur.
On the way, I pieced together a few threads: schools had gone from teaching entirely in Uyghur, to bilingual instruction (Mandarin and Uyghur), to teaching entirely in Mandarin... As someone who knew nothing about the development of education in northwest China, I found this especially fresh.
He also shared that one of his senior schoolmates was currently (I think this is what he said) doing research at Harvard, and that while studying in mainland China, this person had focused on how the children of interethnic marriages between ethnic minorities find a sense of ethnic identity. The senior schoolmate’s father was Hui and mother Uyghur. As the research progressed, he gradually shifted his own ethnic identity toward Uyghur. I regret not asking who this senior schoolmate was; I’m quite curious about what he is researching now.
Speaking of interethnic marriages between minorities, I’m also a child of a minority and Han Chinese: my mother is Zhuang, and people have indeed said that I look a little exotic / give off a minority vibe.
I once thought I could take advantage of the fact that “ethnic-minority status earns extra points in the gaokao.” But when I told my father I wanted to change my ethnic identity to get the extra points, he angrily refused. I didn’t understand at all. Wasn’t it just a change of ethnicity? Why be so angry?
Anyway, after learning all this, I was still curious: why do we all have our own mother tongues, but their pronunciation is so standard?
It turns out that besides “mother-tongue interference,” there’s another reason: in Xinjiang, the language requirements for people applying for teaching positions are relatively higher than in inland China, and the standards are also more unified and strict.
The guy also said that children today basically use Mandarin in everyday life. But after his child was born, he deliberately taught him Uyghur and wanted to take him to learn about the culture of that ethnic group.
I could feel how strongly he identified with his ethnic identity and culture. Once he started talking about writing and books, he went on and on.
I asked whether, if someone asked him “What is your mother tongue?”, his first response would be “Uyghur.” He said it would.
No wonder. During the bilingual-curriculum reform, he was still in middle school, and he must have spent elementary school in an entirely Uyghur-speaking environment.
If someone asked me, my first response would be “Mandarin.” But Mandarin is actually my second language; my mother tongue is my dialect, and Mandarin is what I learned at school.
“Why isn’t my first response the dialect I spoke after I was born, but Mandarin, which I only encountered after starting school?” This was the question that arose when I learned that Indonesian is promoted as a second language even though it is the official language. The older man’s answer made me realize that, besides personal experience, language identity at the macro level is another factor.
As the journey was coming to an end, I told him that it seemed rare to see Uyghur-language bloggers online.
“There are plenty.”
There are circles within the internet, too.
As a Han Chinese person, it’s normal that they don’t show up in my feed.
I once mentioned an article about the inner core of tech entrepreneurs on a public account. It said that the Western—or Silicon Valley—tech world sees only what China has done, not how or why it did it. By the time I reached that part, the color of “mysterious Orientalism” was on full display.
I feel China really does “make full use of everything” from Silicon Valley and the West—almost desperate to dig out and squeeze every last drop from anything advanced and useful, then adapt it to local conditions and make it its own.
While immersing myself in Chinese-language teaching, AI kept nudging me: I had to find the niche that could “only be me”; this market is too competitive. At the same time, I kept asking it to help me locate information related to venture capital... and then “Chinese for Tech and VC” emerged as a theme. It’s not quite the same as Business Chinese. The former is more focused and precise, and it’s not just language teacher; it’s more than coach too. (Of course, I’m nowhere near being able to do this yet, hhh.)
It wasn’t until a friend mentioned “telling China’s tech story to the outside world” that I understood what was going on.
I wonder whether other people have questions like these:
Why do almost all disruptive products that go from 0 to 1 come from the West? (I think the game Black Myth: Wukong is a very good example of taking a product overseas, but it’s still not enough...
Why do we find it so easy to watch Western builders, while mainland Chinese builders have so little public presence?
Why are we so used to learning from the West, yet rarely unconsciously think, “The West is learning from us too”?
...and so on.
It was a16z’s media-ization of VC that made me realize even more clearly how important it is to “tell the story,” and how much more important it is to “smartly” “tell a different story.”
Now that I’ve written this far, I finally understand why having a product isn’t enough; you also need operations. Whether it’s building momentum before launch or retaining users after launch, operations are indispensable.
Somehow I feel that all of this is related to the “Narrative Moat” I mentioned at the beginning. It shows up directly in spoken expression, in writing and books, in “identification”...
To be honest, I don’t feel much attachment to my mother tongue. To me, it’s a tool, and nothing more. Cantonese, by contrast, gives me a stronger sense of identity—including the surprise and familiarity I feel when I hear my father singing Cantonese opera at home. Yes, I understand Cantonese, and I can speak a tiny bit. Besides Cantonese, I also listen to Yi-language songs and Minnan songs. That also pushes my mother tongue further down in my personal hierarchy.
There’s a debate scene in a Thai drama called Political Game. The topic is “How can Thailand’s cultural soft power be taken global?” Speaker A basically says that Thai young people mostly no longer listen to T-pop; they listen to international music and K-pop. So bringing T-pop to the world would be an entry point for exporting cultural soft power. You can hear that A isn’t happy about international music—especially K-pop—coming in. He wants to “use your spear against your shield”: “I’ll compete with you through music too.” But Speaker B’s rebuttal completely won me over. Developing cultural soft power isn’t about copying or following trends; it’s about emphasizing the distinctiveness and diversity of your own culture. This made me think of Thailand as one of the most LGBTQ-friendly countries in Asia. The “why” remains a mystery to me—and an intriguing one.
- If that man from Xinjiang knew Mandarin, he wouldn’t need his son to translate; he could speak directly with customers.
- My father probably refused to let me change my ethnic identity because it would have been a kind of “desertion” from the family’s identity—not only from our ancestors, but from him too.
- If Xinjiang’s languages hadn’t been standardized... Hmm, I won’t say more about this. Standardizing language makes management easier, which is an important reason. But if that were the only reason, would our sense of mother-tongue identity really be this unified?
- I feel no attachment to my own dialect but identify more with other dialects because I’ve encountered their cultural works. It’s similar to how liking K-pop or Thai BL can give you a more vivid imagination of Korea and Thailand and draw you more directly into supporting and building those countries’ cultural soft power...
…
After writing all this, what I actually want to land on is “Tech Narrative.” Technological soft power seems like the kind of “power” that represents national strength more directly. And technological soft power is a unity of institutions, technology, and narrative. China has achieved the first two.
Lulu Cheng Merserey’s “Go Direct” strategy is about having founders face their audiences directly, choose the right channels, and actively build a personal narrative. Put another way, a person is also the face of a company, and personal narrative is part of company narrative.
I’ve listened to quite a few founder interviews. Some founders have charisma at full volume, and even things in their management practices worth learning from or borrowing. But without a podcast invitation, the public would never know. What about small-business owners who might benefit even more? Do they also lack channels for learning how other companies build their internal cultures? And maybe we’re not their customers, but when content related to them spreads online, their market influence increases. That’s an intangible asset.
Perhaps countless reasons can be traced behind all of this, and many explanations would seem reasonable to me, especially the “align with the state” part.
And precisely because “Tech Narrative” needs to “align with the state,” combined with the spiritual core of Confucian culture and so on, people can easily feel constrained when doing things and simply give up. Then the world map is missing a piece, and people outside have no window through which to look in.
Writing this, I’m reminded that whenever some big name visits mainland China and a wave of noise rises after they leave, this is probably part of the reason... It makes me laugh a little. 🤣
Actually, I don’t think “align with the state” has closed off every path to building a mainland “Tech Narrative.” I saw someone in the comments of a Jike post say they thought domestic institutions had already given up on a16z’s media-ization idea, because the social-media and investment ecosystems in mainland China are so different. That’s true: external methods don’t fit internal reality. But, as that Thai drama says, it’s “not copying or following trends.” We need to follow a path that fits us, and “adapting to local conditions” is one of our strengths.
So who can hold up this sky? I’m quite curious.
We’ll wait and see—or it may become a “historical leftover.”
I’ve wanted to write all of this for a long time, and put it off for an absurdly long time. The events span almost two months. It wasn’t until I started typing that I realized everything had drifted away from the original idea. There were too many topics I wanted to expand on, but all I know how to do is ramble, so I poured them all out at once and tried to say what I wanted to say.
Maybe it will be confusing to read, and the connection to the theme may look tenuous, but... for now, let me leave a record. Otherwise, I have no idea when I’ll ever return to sort out these scattered thoughts.
Oh! One last thing. Women friends often say that we should express ourselves more, ask for more, and become builders. I think this isn’t only for ourselves; it’s for the entire landscape of women. Like the historical call to “leave the kitchen and go to work,” it’s about leaving traces of a narrative in the landscape of the sexes, and about a better future for both.