Novelist Ning Ken first saw Beijing’s Zhongguancun neighborhood in 1973 as a 14-year-old on a school trip to the Summer Palace, former imperial gardens looted by European troops during the Opium Wars. “At that time, once you passed the zoo, Beijing was just countryside and farmland,” he says, recalling the bus ride heading northwest. Out the window and amid the fields, Ning saw the campuses of China’s most prestigious research institutions, which had birthed China’s nuclear program and hydroelectric dams. They included the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking and Tsinghua Universities.
Today that stretch of road is the heart of China’s technology industry, a busy neighborhood with a subway stop
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