Mi Lei: 12 Years as a "Wallfacer" — the contrarian playbook that seeded Zhipu AI (智谱AI)

Contrarian bets that paid off

Mi Lei (米磊), co‑founder of Zhongke Chuangxing (中科创星), says his firm built its reputation by doing the opposite of the market. It has been reported that at Zhipu AI’s (智谱AI) 2026 listing banquet founder Tang Jie reportedly singled out Zhongke Chuangxing for seeding the company with a 40 million RMB angel round back in 2018 — a time when few investors paid attention to natural language processing. Why bet on unloved fields? Because, Mi argues, the real value is created in the troughs, not at the peak.

A twelve‑year "Wallfacer" strategy

Since 2013 Zhongke Chuangxing has quietly assembled a hard‑tech portfolio that reads like a roadmap of China’s industrial policy: more than 570 startups incubated, fund management scale reportedly exceeding RMB 160 billion yuan, and a focus the firm summarizes as matter, energy, information, space and life. Mi borrows the "Wallfacer" (面壁者) metaphor from Liu Cixin’s Three‑Body Problem to describe long‑term, secretive strategy — offices and meeting rooms at its Shanghai incubator even carry names like “Chaos Edge” and “Entropy Reduction.” The firm’s long bets include early support for firms such as Qixin Optoelectronics (奇芯光电) and Yuanjie Technology (源杰科技), and it reportedly stepped in to rescue a cash‑strapped Qixin during the 2018 US–China trade storm that crippled others.

Why this matters to Western readers

Hard‑tech investing in China is not just venture‑finance theater. It is increasingly a strategic response to supply‑chain pressure, export controls and an AI compute arms race catalysed by models such as ChatGPT. Mi’s playbook — double down in downturns, sit with young scientists, and map five industrial axes — is tailored to a market where Beijing’s industrial priorities and Western trade policy now intersect. It has been reported that Zhongke Chuangxing closed a new RMB 4.08 billion fund vehicle late in 2025 and completed 88 investments in 2025 alone, underscoring both the appetite for and the capital available to hard‑tech in China.

The question ahead

Mi says the approach is simple and stubborn: back scientist‑founders and imagine technologies far beyond current headlines. Does that guarantee another Zhipu? Of course not. But in an era when geopolitical friction and technology sovereignty reshape which bets are rational, Zhongke Chuangxing’s Wallfacer playbook offers a clear, if contrarian, template for how Chinese hard‑tech winners are being hatched.