One of those individuals is nuclear physics professor Chen Chunxian, widely credited as the father of today’s Zhongguancun. In 1978, Chen traveled to the US and visited Silicon Valley in California and Route 128, the tech corridor near Boston that grew out of MIT and Harvard. He came back inspired to build China’s own university-adjacent tech zone along the route Ning took to the Summer Palace, which has since been renamed Zhongguancun Street.

Private businesses weren’t strictly legal at the time, but in 1980 Chen devised a workaround. He started a “service department” inside the academic Beijing Plasma Physics Association, providing a way for professors to work outside of their regular hours providing consulting and IT services, and later manufacturing electronic components. 

“You can’t drive forward a revolution without going through a few red lights; revolution is all about breaking the old rules,” Ning quotes Zhao Qiqui, the lead manager of the service department, telling Chen. The department drew government scrutiny for profiteering off public academic research—some professors resigned and Chen feared prosecution—but was eventually hailed by officials as a model for innovation in science and technology.

That cycle of tech entrepreneurs pushing legal boundaries and authorities later embracing and then regulating their new way of doing business has regularly repeated itself in China ever since. Lenovo was founded in a bungalow that was formerly a janitor’s office at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and, like other early Zhonguancun tech companies, operated in a legal gray area. Each existed under the umbrella of a state-owned company but operated like a private business, until 1990s reforms made fully private enterprises legal. More recently, in 2004, Jack Ma, founder of ecommerce giant Alibaba, launched a digital payments system called Alipay that was flat-out illegal in China, reassuring employees that if anyone went to prison, it would be him. Ma did not go to jail, and Alipay helped Chinese ecommerce to flourish, outpacing US tech companies in developing a widely used mobile payment system.

Ning’s own career has been shaped by the transformative power of technology. In the book he describes signing up for Yinghaiwei, China’s first ISP, in 1995. “I remember it very clearly,” he writes, “how I dialed the number and heard the swift rhythm of the connecting tone given off by the connection icon on the Windows 95 interface display.” Ning joined an online literature chatroom and began uploading his work. In 2000, after literary magazines rejected his novel City of Masks, it was serialized on Sina, a successor to Yinghaiwei, garnering half a million hits in a month.

That book—about a high school graduate obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Sherlock Holmes who rambles across China trying to unravel his own family mysteries—was eventually published in hardcover, and Ning became known for his experimental, ambitious prose. “He writes for himself,” says Thomas Moran, a professor at Middlebury College who is translating Ning’s novel The Tibetan Sky into English. “He doesn’t seem interested in writing for any assumed audience, whether inside China or in translation. He doesn’t seem to care what the critics think or what the censors might think.”