A Star IT Journalist and the IT Community He Founded in 2000 | 1999 Memoirs ⑥

He is now an angel investor

Liu Ren's internet memories stop dead in 2008.

Until then he was "China's number-one IT journalist," author of Heroes of Knowledge 《知识英雄》, The Zhongguancun Problem 《中关村问题》 and The Enterprise Method 《企业方法》, known together as the "Zhongguancun Trilogy." The sharpest pen in the IT business? Liu Ren was second, and nobody dared claim first.

By 1998 the "knowledge economy" was already the country's dominant theme. The Chinese Academy of Sciences had submitted a research report titled Embracing the Age of the Knowledge Economy, Building a National Innovation System 《迎接知识经济时代，建设国家创新体系》. On February 4 that year, Jiang Zemin wrote in an official comment that the knowledge economy and a spirit of innovation were crucial to the country's development in the twenty-first century. Published later that year on the same wave, Heroes of Knowledge was Liu Ren's breakout book, a collection of the reports he had run in China Computer News. The book made "knowledge hero" a common phrase. It stood for a new idea: knowledge and technology could drive success. Zhongguancun produced stories like that in bulk.

In 2001 Liu Ren became editor-in-chief of Knowledge Economy 《知识经济》, a new monthly the Computer News group had just launched. The magazine did not last long.

DoNews, the IT community Liu Ren started in 2000, turned out — to his own surprise — to matter.

At first it was just a place for Liu Ren to post his own latest articles. Then it gathered the IT writers and entrepreneurs who counted, most of them his friends: Hong Bo, the well-known commentator who wrote under the handle Keso; Wang Juntao, the "Lao Rong" who founded 8848, China's first e-commerce site; Cai Wensheng, who made his money speculating on domain names; Zhou Hongyi, who put out the "rogue software" 3721 and still made the covers of IT magazines; Chen Nian, newly appointed vice president of Joyo.com (he also moderated the forum); Qiu Bojun, founder of Kingsoft; and Chen Yizhou, the Stanford returnee who founded ChinaRen and sold it to Sohu. By 2005, Sina Technology reported that DoNews had more than 70,000 users.

The columnists updated their columns out of interest and a hunger for exposure. None of them were actually paid.

Robin Li founded Baidu in 2000, and in 2001 he too posted three articles on DoNews. In one, Li described Baidu's "bid ranking system" as a platform where hundreds of thousands of website owners could "show their confidence, attract potential customers, and find sales leads."

Before it was sold in 2005 to Oak Pacific Interactive — owner of Mop.com and later the parent of Renren — DoNews threw a loud anniversary party every year, attended by nearly every first-generation internet entrepreneur and most of the country managers of the multinational internet companies. Google China once hired DoNews to write it a report on how to run an online community. Liu Ren knew perfectly well that they had no advice worth taking to give a multinational giant like that.

DoNews made its money charging companies advertising and PR fees. By 2005 that came to 2 million yuan.

Then came 2008, and a case every internet insider knew about, with Zhou Hongyi and Liu Ren at the center. It ended with Liu Ren in prison for three years for extortion.

It started with a run of negative stories about 360's antivirus software on DoNews. Zhou Hongyi had founded Qihoo 360 in 2005 and released the free "360 Antivirus" in 2008. He offered DoNews a "paid PR" arrangement, and DoNews editor Xu Xinshi was caught when the money changed hands. Liu Ren had written a piece called Look, Look at Zhou Hongyi's Face 《你看，你看，周鸿祎的脸》 under someone else's name. The man whose name was on it went to prison too.

Liu Ren came out in 2011, by which time the mobile internet ruled. He says he never caught up, that he lacks experience in it: "What I've actually done in mobile internet is far too little."

Liu Ren hopes to make something of himself in investing; he is now an angel investor. He is sore about the capital he let slip when he got out — he never set up a fund, and invests only his own money.

In 2005 he planned to write A History of Zhongguancun 《中关村史》 and finish it by 2007. The book has still not appeared. His last few articles came out around 2006; one of them, on Jack Ma, was based on an interview he had done back in 2002.

We met Liu Ren in Beijing this March. People say he reached financial freedom when he sold DoNews in 2005, but he still lives in the apartment he moved into in 1999. There are two treadmills in it. Liu Ren talked about diet, fitness and stem cells, and said he hopes to keep working a few more years. "High tech is still the best industry there is. If you can't make money at it in China, you certainly can't make money anywhere else."

He also brought up Cui Jian, whom he had interviewed in 1999 with Li Rong, an editor at Southern Weekly. "Like Cui Jian said — he said the B-side of life is only just starting. But he also said nobody listens to him anymore, that it's lonely. He said: back then, whatever I said, you all thought it mattered; now whatever I say, none of you even hears it."

Not long ago we met his friend Keso. The two are completely different kinds of people. Keso told us in an interview: "I prefer the original ones, the people who charge in before they've found a way out, not the ones who show up only once they can see there are plenty of opportunities and money to be raised." Liu Ren, for his part, thinks anyone who lives by "if the conditions aren't there, create them and go anyway" is a fool. His verdict on his friend: "In a way Keso is more idealistic than I am. He's gentler, nicer too. And he's further from business." Keso offered no verdict on Liu Ren.

Let's start twenty years back.

Q: How did you get into this industry?

I studied Chinese literature. In my era, the 1980s, whoever could write poetry had the highest standing. Nobody talked about how much you earned. Reform and opening-up had already started; my father made industrial power distribution panels — a monopoly business you could only get into through the power bureau, and extremely lucrative — but everyone around us called him a nouveau riche.

Then we graduated and felt society change under us. After 1989, all at once, society lost every bit of its interest in literature. I was a fairly sensitive person back then, and I thought: it's finished. If the whole field was going under, then we who hung off it, writing literary criticism, were in worse shape still. I was extremely pessimistic. It was never going to feed a family. What was closest to literature? Journalism, maybe, had a future.

I was first assigned to the editor-in-chief's office at Fuyang Radio Station in Anhui, editing the Fuyang news. Later I wrote a very famous article and sent it around to every outlet I could: Such a Charity Concert by Xie Xiaodong — What Do Two 200,000-Yuan Sums Tell Us? 《解晓东如此义演——两个 20 万说明了什么》. It caused an enormous stir; it was the first article to publicly question Project Hope. That article made it impossible for me to stay in the area. My plan had been to be a good journalist and then work my way into some government post.

With no way forward in Fuyang, I tried writing about computers to find one. I taught myself computers in 1990, bought my own in 1991, and started writing popular-science pieces for newspapers. In 1992 I sent something to Computerworld China, and they ran a front-page article of mine on piracy and copyright. Once the internet arrived in 1995, I felt it gave computers wings. I thought the internet would raise efficiency, so I wrote more articles cheering it on.

I came to Beijing in 1996. Media outlets required a Beijing hukou then. Computerworld China told me there was no chance at all. My first job was writing PR copy for a company — advertising its products in disguise. Someone went and complained to the paper: Liu Ren is at such-and-such company, there are problems with what he writes. But I still got published almost every week, and Computerworld China still paid me for the pieces.

Later most of the editors at China Computer News left to start another paper. China Computer News badly needed people, so they hired me.

But the industry itself never interested me. What I was digging for was the story. What interested me was human nature. I don't care how much money you made, or whether your company succeeded — what does that have to do with me? All I needed was for the industry to have a future. How it actually developed was nothing I could steer. I honestly didn't care.

Q: You were extremely prolific in those years — five books between 1998 and 2003.

At first I kept writing computer commentary, familiar ground, and did that for another year. But I could write those pieces sitting in Fuyang reading the papers. Back then nobody in our industry did interviews. The computer industry was climbing, and everyone was thinking about going abroad to have fun.

I thought: interview what? The products weren't worth interviewing about, they were all simple. What was valuable were entrepreneurs' stories — the trouble they ran into, or the plain human things they let show. I had one principle at the time: with these big shots, I wanted to write their least successful side, their most ordinary side, their most defeated side. That's what readers most wanted to see. In an interview I'd ask: what was your first meeting like, what was the first time you sold something like. How did you go from not knowing how to knowing how. That's all I asked.

Heroes of Knowledge was my breakout book. I don't think it made my name through writing technique. It was that the era wanted to know what these people were doing. These people also stood for that era.

My subjects cooperated because by then they already considered me the best journalist around. Whatever I asked them to talk about, they basically talked about. They didn't overthink it. The most famous companies cooperated, and so did all the others. That's how we got the earliest stories out.

That era wasn't as competitive as today. There was no competition between outlets; demand for computer coverage far outran supply. I remember publishers paying me up front, saying: hurry up and write it, and I'll rush it into print. As a writer, the positive feedback was enormous. Of course you worked harder at it.

From 1997 I wrote straight through to 2003, about 8,000 words a week, every word of it requiring interviews. At the same time I was running a magazine, Knowledge Economy — a hundred pages a month, of which I wrote fifty, under my juniors' bylines. But the magazine didn't survive. Print magazines were going downhill.

Later I stopped writing articles altogether. Plenty of people told me I had to keep writing. I said the return on the effort was too poor, and that the scarcest thing now is attention, while the least scarce thing of all is articles. I honestly didn't have the confidence that people would still spend that much time reading me.

Q: How did you come to build DoNews? Back then most finance and business journalists read it.

I started DoNews quite early, in 2000 — when the internet was still a very small industry. The reason DoNews became the internet's most important outlet is exactly that nobody was paying attention to these people, so this was the only ground they had. Even Robin Li wrote on it; you can still find three of his articles today.

The reason I started it was simple: I wanted more people to read my articles. I wanted a simple way to put a piece online the moment I finished it, so more people could see it. There really was nothing like that then. So I got a friend, Lin Xinglu, to write me a program and put it on his server, and it ran. When I asked him to build it, I said: I have this need, and I'm sure other journalists and other people who write have the same need — so open it to everyone, give everyone an account, let everyone post their own articles on it. That is DoNews. It was really the idea of a blog, but we had no idea then that blogs already existed abroad.

When DoNews first went up it was convenient, everyone used it, and I didn't even have to hire anyone — everyone was willing to work for it. They would come to me asking me to move their articles to a better spot. So it was simply what people needed at that moment. And I could run ads on it and make money. In the end DoNews had three staff, me included: me, and an editor-in-chief, Hong Bo — Keso. Everything else we asked friends to help with. The office was in a residential building. The interns all lived in it.

Money seemed easy to make back then, and DoNews had no competitors. The first year we made something like 200,000 yuan — think about it, the year 2000, and I made 200,000 yuan. The second year maybe 400,000, and it kept climbing. Eventually I worked it out and went with DoNews instead of the magazine. By 2005 the net profit reaching my own hands was 2 million yuan. That's when I sold it to Oak Pacific Interactive.

The real reason I sold, I think, is that it couldn't get bigger in my hands. It could only reach that point, because I can't manage people. There was another reason: I saw the power of capital. I figured that if a company couldn't go public, then by ordinary logic it wasn't worth much. Around then I watched Baidu list, and I didn't think Baidu was anything special, yet suddenly it went public and was worth that much. I wanted to fold into a listed company and take a return from the capital markets. Those were the two reasons.

When I sold, I asked my new boss: can you go public? He said he could. I asked when. He said next year. I said fine, I'll sell to you. So at closing I took two-thirds of the money from the sale and bought more Oak Pacific shares with it.

Q: Tell us about the big names you remember from around 2000.

Early on I wrote an article called Will Yang Yuanqing Fall Behind? 《杨元庆会不会掉队》. I was really hinting to him that this — the internet — had nothing to do with him. Lenovo simply could not make the internet work. It has a sales culture. That kind of culture is results-driven: whoever sells the most, whoever hauls the boxes fastest, is number one. It's a pyramid, the boss decides, everyone listens to the boss. The internet isn't like that. On the internet you try every direction at once, and whatever works, works; everyone's view basically has to be heard, it's very democratic, the structure is flat. The internet is fast — everyone's voice has to be heard, anyone can hold an opinion of their own, and different opinions have to be encouraged. Lenovo's culture allowed only one voice. It was never going to work. Whatever else he tried, it couldn't work; all he could do was sell PCs.

The first time I met Pony Ma was at an event DoNews held. We set out about ten tables in a Zhongguancun restaurant, ten people to a table, roughly a hundred people. Pony Ma arrived late and there was nowhere left to sit. He's an extremely introverted person; I had no idea where he ended up sitting, because I was busy greeting people. After the meal his Beijing manager introduced him: this is Tony. I said, QQ is pretty good. His Beijing manager said, we've just linked QQ up with WeChat, let me install it for you. Pony Ma said, don't install it for him — installing it costs money. My guess is he hadn't eaten that day, and probably didn't have a car of his own either, probably just took a taxi, like any ordinary internet user today.

Robin Li — the first time I met him, he was in a bar teaching us to play "Killer." He really is the one who brought that game to China. He taught us "Killer" in 2001, and I "killed" him straight off. He said, you shouldn't have killed me, I'm someone who knows how to play; you should kill off the people who don't know how as fast as you can. I still remember that scene. Everyone dealt with everyone else like ordinary people. Yes, it was all very real. Which is why I don't put much stock in worshipping stars, or in believing that what they say is how the future will be. It isn't. He couldn't predict the future then, and he still can't now.

They all saw the risks as huge. I remember when I had just joined Renren, Pony Ma said Renren was their competitor. In fact we were nowhere near being his competitor; we were far behind. He reckoned they understood social networking and the risk might come from there. In fact we didn't understand it at all.

Q: Did things not go smoothly for them in the early days?

Smooth enough — they all had it smooth. QQ's user numbers went straight up, bang bang bang; that's smooth enough. NetEase, same thing, bang bang bang straight up — you call that not smooth? How much smoother do you want? Far too smooth. Pony Ma and his crew had it far too smooth. They started as kids with nothing, and suddenly people from South Africa handed them all that money — not smooth enough for you? Tens of millions of dollars, not smooth enough? Jack Ma, not smooth enough? The bubble burst and he got tens of millions more — still not smooth enough? Nonsense. Don't tell me about their perseverance. They didn't persevere at anything. I don't believe he succeeded by persevering either; there's no way that's how he succeeded. It went smoothly. All these people had it smooth.

Robin Li came back with a pile of money, tried more than twenty directions, saying if this one doesn't work try that one, put together a stack of business plans, raised a lot of money — all pretty smooth. Not one of them succeeded by persevering. It's like this: once a train is running it's bound to get somewhere, but if you can never get it onto the tracks, of course it won't. And whether you're on the tracks or not, don't you know that yourself?

Cover image from the film Barton Fink, photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash