一个梦想诞生的地方

Beijing's Zhongguancun high-tech zone is a place where dreams are born. Lots of China's present-day titans made the journey from rags to riches there. Their successes encourage numerous young ambitious people to follow their dreams. These entrepreneurs are now learning to carving a route for themselves between opportunities and challenges, hopes and realities.

The Garage Café is an institution in Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech zone. It caters to budding entrepreneurs. For the price of a cup of coffee, a customer can spend the whole day here, making use of all its facilities for free – work space, charging stations, and Wi-Fi. The café is also a venue for promoting projects.

Xu Fulang graduated from university last year. He arrived in Beijing a week ago, with a plan to set up an internet-based company selling a brand of noodles developed by his father. In his search for investment and potential partners, his first stop has been the Garage Café.

In June 2014, Haidian Book Street underwent redevelopment, and was transformed into Zhongguancun Business Start-up Street. Now, along with the Garage Café, this 200-metre-long thoroughfare houses the offices of more than 40 organizations servicing business start-ups. The street is lined with posters advertising investment opportunities. These, along with the giant photographs, handprints left by successful businesspeople and motivational slogans, foment a climate of thriving entrepreneurship.

Xu Qingsong and Xu Fulang are both 45. They share an apartment with two other budding entrepreneurs. The rent is cheap – 50 yuan a day for each bed. But the apartment’s chief attraction is that it’s less than a kilometre from the Business Start-up Street.

Xu Qingsong has been here since October. As a partner in a Hangzhou-based fund company, he was a high earner enjoying a comfortable standard of living. In Beijing, he hopes to establish a national PPP network platform promoting cooperation between non-governmental capital and the government.

It was a spate of highly lucrative public listings by Chinese internet companies beginning in mid-2014 that finally inspired Xu Qingsong to act. In May, internet-based cosmetics retailer Jumei Youpin’s IPO earned US$7.6 billion overnight for its 31-year-old founder Chen Ou. Within days, online retail giant Jingdong’s 40-year-old founder Liu Qiangdong saw his net worth leap to over US$6 billion as a result of the company’s public sale. And in the biggest deal of all, in September 2015, Alibaba’s record-breaking US$25 billion IPO earned founder Jack Ma the title of China's richest man.

The Business Start-up Street is a stage on which many rags-to-riches stories have been played out. Data from the street’s management show that on any given day, on average, somewhere on the street someone wins 5 million yuan worth of investment.

Liu Xiaoyang, a former newspaper reporter from Zhengzhou in Henan Province, is part of a team of four working on a start-up project called "Xiaobai Pet Care" – an internet platform for selling pet dogs and providing services for dog owners. However, getting the project off the ground involved a lot of sacrifice.

After surviving from the harsh conditions for three months, the group hard work finally paid off.

Xu Qingsong spends most of his time in the café, working on building the PPP network platform. He also keeps in regular touch with other budding entrepreneurs.

Xu Qingsong often gives Xu Fulang advice on his beef noodle project. However, after a week on the Business Start-up Street, progress in the noodle venture is disappointing.

Still, the Business Start-up Street’s reputation continues to grow, and more and more hopeful entrepreneurs are arriving from all over the country, bringing with them fresh ideas and visions.

This public promotional tour for start-ups is a rare opportunity for the aspiring entrepreneurs to present their ideas directly to investors. Making his pitch is Wang Xuguo, who has developed an automated package storage service, for when people are not at home to accept deliveries in person.

Ultimately, Wang Xuguo’s IEBOX project fails to gain support from the investors, who see it as difficult to market and without great profit potential.

IEBOX is the second start-up launched by Wang Xuguo. Using his savings and borrowed money, he has invested almost 200 000 renminbi in the initial phase of the business. With the funds having virtually dried up, many of his colleagues have moved on to other companies.

A few days later, Wang Xuguo is back at the Garage Café. He’s the only one left of the four original team members. And now, having failed to secure any investment, he’s preparing to abandon the IEBOX project.

Wang's trouble in finding an investor is not an individual case, but rather a larger trend.