Entrepreneurship will play a key role in fueling and sustaining the Chinese Dream

In her profession, Jian Lili works with dreams. "It's to get people to start talking about their feelings," she was quick to add, careful to note that it has nothing mysterious about it, and is just one of the many tools that she uses to work with her clients.

Jian is a psychotherapist from Beijing. But our meeting took place not in her Beijing office, but in San Mateo, a small city in the heart of Silicon Valley, halfway between San Francisco and Stanford University. And we spent most of our meeting discussing not my dreams, but hers.

Jian's dream is to build a platform to provide affordable mental healthcare services to all Chinese people. Yes, all 1.4 billion of them. Frustrated by the lack of quality information and services in the mental health industry, Jian is thinking of using technology to revolutionize the profession.

An ambitious undertaking, no doubt. But putting it in context, from where we were sitting, it didn't seem as daunting as it otherwise might. Silicon Valley is no stranger to entrepreneurs who dare to dream big. Walk into any random cafe here, and one can't help notice the eager, often overly energized conversations all around. It might well be true that among them are the founders of the next Google. Great wealth and corporate empires appear overnight. Arguably the American Dream is most alive here.

People in the Valley are not the only ones who dream though. Jian's dream is deeply rooted in China, and she is on a trip to the Valley to study how startups are done here, so that she can better succeed in China.

Political observers and public intellectuals love to pit China and the US against each other as rivals. The recently introduced concept of the Chinese Dream, as the obvious Chinese counterpart to the American dream, no doubt gave some of them another opportunity to point out the contrasts between the two.

Of course, both countries are geographically vast and socially complex, and the aspirations of their people are necessarily diverse. But there is still some common ground between the two places in the startup world. Both places are proud homes to vibrant entrepreneurial activities, and the leaders of both countries are promoting entrepreneurship as an engine for innovation, economic growth and job creation.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that two culturally and politically divergent societies could find a shared interest in startups. Even though in absolute numbers entrepreneurs make up a tiny segment of the workforce, their impact is disproportionately big.

Entire industries are created out of the imagination and hard work of entrepreneurs, and with it, new sources of GDP and employment. Small wonder that, from Hollywood's portrayal of Facebook in The Social Network, to the Chinese hit movie Chinese Partners, entrepreneurs are upheld as visionaries and heroes, stopping at nothing on their paths to success.

Indeed, the startup worlds between China and the US are deeply linked. Most of the well-known US venture capital firms have Chinese branches. And many of the most successful Chinese entrepreneurs trace their first dreams back to Silicon Valley. Baidu founder Robin Li worked in Silicon Valley, and later received financial backing from the famed valley investor Tim Draper. Victor Koo, founder of Youku, and Yizhou Chen, founder of Renren, are both graduates of Stanford University.

Of course, Silicon Valley attracts talents from all over the world, as its startup ecosystem is still second to none. On a recent trip to the Bay Area, I had a chance to meet several entrepreneurs from Europe, India and South America who relocated to California. Most of them acknowledged that the decision to move was a no-brainer.

The Valley also has no shortage of examples of immigrants who founded companies there. What made the likes of Robin Li and Yizhou Chen, and most other Chinese entrepreneurs, different is that they all returned to China, and it was in China where their dreams became a reality.

Outside Silicon Valley, there are only a handful of places in the world where entrepreneurs routinely dream big and actually make it happen. Beijing and Shenzhen are both such places. No doubt, Chinese startups make it big in the enormous Chinese market, but the legendary Chinese work ethic and increasingly favorable policies also play vital roles in their success. Combined, these factors created the vibrant Chinese startup scene, fueling waves of entrepreneurs and investors to swing for the fences in their field of dreams.

Talking about dreams tends to drift to the abstract, especially in a country like China, where if it doesn't affect hundreds of millions of people, it hardly moves the needle. Let's not forget that, behind every dream, there is a dreamer: a teenager who is about to become the first in the family to go to college, or someone from the countryside about to start a new life in the cities. Or, as in the case of Jian Lili, someone who dreams about fundamentally changing an industry and offering affordable healthcare services on a massive scale.

After I returned from my trip to the Valley, I went to attend an offline event in Beijing for software engineers, where Jian was scheduled to give a short presentation on her startup. The event was held at the new office of 36kr, a Chinese media site specializing in reporting technology-related news stories. The minimalist office sits in a pedestrian street that is being renovated to become home to a number of co-working spaces, technology media companies and startup-themed cafes. At the moment it is a mess of a construction site, but with just a little bit of imagination, one could easily see this becoming a humming hub of startup activities.

As I found myself sitting among dreamy-eyed engineers and entrepreneurs, I thought, "build it, and they will come".

The author is an independent commentator in Beijing. Contact him at fengwriting@gmail.com.

(China Daily European Weekly 04/18/2014 page11)