Two Generations of Financial Writers on Writing, Wealth and Values
Summary
吴晓波’s core view is that writing will not disappear because of short video, livestreaming or AI: text still has a power no other medium can replace, and books are the “anchor” that keeps him from being blown apart by opportunity and crisis. He accepts video, audio, livestreaming and machine-generated content entering the industry, and even concedes that these formats are more efficient at distribution and monetization. What must be protected is not the old medium but the reason for writing. “Either live in the present or return to the past,” but so long as no new form of written Chinese has replaced the expressive system formed over nearly 100 years, “we will still be here.”
His view of wealth is not consumption worship, but money as a wall protecting writing independence, career security and resistance to being bought. When he earned only 200-300 yuan a month around 1993-1994, he publicly set a target of RMB10K in annual writing fees; before writing The Great Game, he first confirmed that a defamation lawsuit could cost as much as RMB300K and that his family could cover it, then hired a lawyer to backstop the risk. The logic behind “even if you’re poor, you must stand among the rich” is straightforward: a reporter arriving by bicycle, earning a few hundred yuan a month, will struggle to write about entrepreneurs making RMB20M a year and driving Mercedes without anger contaminating the work.
The sustainable strategy for a content business is not to chase traffic across the entire internet, but to “wait for the rabbits” in a community where long-term trust can be built. The 吴晓波 Channel has long had roughly 2M-3M users—not a large audience by today’s standards. He compares breaking into the mass market to “shooting rabbits with a gun,” while his own strategy is that of a farmer staying put and waiting for people genuinely interested in business to come to him. Self-media is the strongest monetization model he has seen for a cultural product, but it also expanded Blue Lion from a team of more than 10 into a company of as many as 200, bringing more than 90 business trips in a year, IPO ambitions and enormous organizational costs.
The moat in nonfiction writing is first-hand material, a willingness to ask questions and the discipline to stay in the game for the long haul; time ultimately decides whether a work can be bypassed. The Tencent Story drew on interviews with more than 260 people, while he made 27 visits to Moutai before and during The Moutai Story; he questioned the foreign-exchange logic behind the 1958 claim that “Moutai must reach 10,000 tons,” and saw for himself that the supposedly century-old cellars were actually rubble pits just before the Wang family’s old cellars were demolished. Whether a book can still be bypassed 10 or 20 years later matters more than its sales at publication or arguments with peers.
In 吴晓波’s view, the Vanke case is not the collapse of the “good company” narrative, but a bet on the cycle that the decision-makers lost: Vanke called for “staying alive” in 2018, yet acquired more than RMB670B of land from 2018 to 2022, the most among property developers. Real-estate tightening historically rarely lasted more than 3 years; this cycle lasted roughly 6, with the first policy language about “stopping the decline and stabilizing the recovery” not appearing until the 2024 National People’s Congress and CPPCC sessions. Another possibility is that headquarters lost sufficient control over regional units, while the co-investment system encouraged land purchases. The conclusion points to failures in technical judgment, incentive design and control—not a collapse of principles such as decency, avoiding bribes or professional management.
A fast-growing industry and a dominant founder can temporarily conceal organizational problems, but they cannot permanently eliminate the need for management. Tesla has both Elon Musk’s personal momentum and the growth momentum of its industry, allowing executive departures, internal friction and cultural gaps to remain hidden behind speed. 吴晓波’s view is that as the company continues forward, it will eventually have to repair its management, organization and culture. That is why industry cycles and a founder’s will to win can determine short-term outcomes more decisively than a static management score.
He sees AI and humanoid robots as a productivity shift that must be verified on the ground, not an abstract source of anxiety. Around 2025, he visited roughly 14 robotics companies in 2 months. In April, he saw a then-large humanoid-robotics workshop in Shanghai that still had no production line and relied mainly on manual assembly, with annual output of about 1,000 units—something like “before Ford’s 1908 production line.” Ningbo later claimed that a flexible line could produce 50K units a year; he explicitly retained the question of whether that was real or “just blowing smoke.” 豆包 and 文心一言 can improve the speed of research, search and synthesis, but he will not let AI replace his writing.
His final answer on values is that democracy, freedom and the foundational elements of modern society are still worth defending, but understanding the world requires concrete plans, costs, dosage and time horizons—not moral self-discipline alone. 吴晓波 admired Hayek when he was young and now prefers Keynes, because Hayek was better at identifying problems while Keynes was willing to offer methods. Business also taught him that both time and money have limits. After an aborted IPO, regulatory intervention, a depleted business model and layoffs, he abandoned the target of writing one book a year—but not the obligation to do the writing well.
Deep dive
1. Li Xiang’s Problem Is Not Content Anxiety but a Loss of Faith in Civilization’s Coordinates
Beginning in late 2025, 李翔 became disoriented under the cumulative shock of AI and international and domestic news. The values formed through his education, his beliefs about content shaped by his career, and his faith in commercial civilization were all coming loose. “Put more dramatically, even my confidence in civilization has been shaken.”
He chose 吴晓波 not only because both men have spent years interviewing and observing business, but because they have known each other for more than 20 years and 吴晓波 has moved across the roles of reporter, financial writer, publishing entrepreneur and self-media operator. The conversation therefore asks, at the same time, what writing, wealth, temptation, business cycles and a stable footing in life are for.
2. Multimodal Media Will Rewrite the Content Industry, but It Will Not Automatically Eliminate Writing
吴晓波 entered self-media in 2014, starting with video at iQiyi, moving into audio in 2016 and trying livestreaming after 2020. None of these shifts necessarily followed a complete plan; each new format simply appeared to offer better distribution efficiency and a stronger monetization model at the time.
He acknowledges that giving up writing would actually be easy, and might even produce more intellectual output. But it would also mean “more garbage, more forms, and more diverse garbage being presented.” The real question is whether the original state of writing survives after multimodal media and AI enter the picture.
李翔 is more pessimistic. Long-form features were a form shaped by magazines, and may be difficult to sustain once magazines disappear; film likewise depends on the cinema’s enclosed 2-hour window, which a smartphone environment may not accommodate. Their disagreement is therefore not about whether language can remain beautiful, but whether the disappearance of a medium takes the genre with it.
3. Whether Writing Survives Depends on Whether Written Chinese Evolves Again
吴晓波 sends the question back through linguistic history. 苏轼’s essays and letters, vernacular Chinese in the Ming dynasty, and the writing of 鲁迅 and 徐志摩 each corresponded to a different phase of written Chinese. 张爱玲 and 沈从文 still read close to spoken language today; 林语堂 remains separated from it by another layer.
His view is that modern Chinese underwent a crucial evolution in the 20 years between the 1920s and 1940s. Unless a future language model emerges that is capable of replacing today’s written expression, writers will not disappear because of short video. “That genius has not appeared yet.”
李翔 remains skeptical: the power of reading may hold only for generations that received a similar education. 吴晓波 is more certain that writing has a beauty, force and capacity to move that video, audio and multimodal media cannot reproduce. “If it does not replace writing, I believe we will still be here.”
4. “One Book a Year” Is Over, but Writing Remains His Basis for Standing
吴晓波 maintained a roughly one-book-a-year pace from 1997 onward, producing about 24 books in total, and continued the rhythm while writing The Moutai Story. He later abandoned the rigid target partly because “there aren’t that many good subjects,” while subjects worth “killing” may require 3 or 5 years.
He also dropped his goal of buying one home every year, because continuing to do so in China today would look absurd. But the 2 goals were fundamentally different. “I only gave up the idea of writing one book a year. I did not give up the idea of writing books.” Writing remains his “basis for standing.”
5. The Melancholy After Finishing 2 Books Came from Knowing He Could Never Return to the Subjects
After completing The Gains and Losses of Economic Reform Through the Dynasties in 2013, he was unhappy for several days. The subject was so large that he may have handled it too early and too thinly; he should have spent several more years adding chapters. He later concluded that a book on that subject might now be impossible to publish.
When he wrote Hangzhou, This Human World 2 years ago, he finished it in just 2 months. Yet completing it felt “like having an affair”: he had fulfilled an obligation, but also knew he could never return.
Compressed historical writing carries an irreversible cost. To cover Han-dynasty taxation, or Tang-dynasty currency and trade, in 10K-20K characters, he had to assemble large quantities of material in a short period. Once the book was done, he might never look at those papers again in his lifetime; any omissions would have to wait for later authors to repair.
6. The Liberal Underpinning of the 1980s Came from Philosophy and the Newsroom Classroom
After entering Fudan University in 1986, 吴晓波 encountered existentialism, Nietzsche, Freud and other ideas through the Five-Corner Series, the Toward the Future Series and translated academic classics. “From the first day, God was dead.” The idea that a person must still “live toward death” in a collapsing world became part of his early spiritual background.
A group of veteran journalism professors had lived through war, the takeover of the media after 1949 and the traumas of the Cultural Revolution. After returning to the classroom, they continued debating the relationship among newsworthiness, the people and the Party. Western philosophy outside campus and debates over journalism inside the classroom combined to shape the liberal undertone of a generation.
Asked what he still believes in today, his answer remains democracy, freedom and the most basic elements of modern society. Experience may push his methods in a more conservative direction, but “this underlying color is still very difficult to change.”
7. The Problem with Journalism Education Has Shifted from Skills to the Disappearance of a Career Destination
Journalism-writing classes in his day were intensely methodical. Pulitzer Prize winners, China News Award winners and Xinhua News Agency pieces were dissected line by line; every story might get 3 to 5 rewritten headlines, like “dissecting a cadaver” in medical school. Professors would first say that “journalism has no academic discipline,” then teach editing, headlines and case analysis.
More important, students had clear career coordinates. 李普曼 was an imaginable model, while People’s Daily, Xinhua, provincial and municipal Party newspapers, television stations and Xinhua offices were foreseeable destinations. Grades and professional ability could broadly be exchanged for a corresponding position.
Today’s journalism students may still regard the state sector as an option, but they ask, “Even if I really write that well, so what?” 吴晓波 believes the deepest panic is that “you don’t know the name of the next station.” 李翔 sees an old evaluation system that has collapsed without a new one yet taking its place.
8. One Visit to a Mountain Village Turned “Develop the Economy” into a Real-World Ethical Question
During a university field trip, 吴晓波 met a woman in her 30s who looked much older than her actual age. She had 3 children; her eldest daughter was lying on a bed because her trousers were too torn to appear in public. The family lived on chili peppers and corn and had almost no cash.
After a colleague left RMB50, the woman jumped up and down on the bed with joy. The village head said she knew it was a large sum, but had never seen such a large banknote. The conclusion 吴晓波 formed on the way down the mountain was blunt: “Revolution won’t work here. The only answer is to develop the economy.”
He then taught himself economics from Samuelson, learning to answer questions about GDP, national output and financial statements. That helped him get hired by Xinhua and assigned to cover business. Wealth ceased to be an abstract moral concept; it became a question of whether children had trousers and whether a household had access to cash.
9. “A Thousand Kinds of Nostalgia Cannot Beat One Flush Toilet”
In an early interview, a Hangzhou tycoon living in Hong Kong returned to a restored ancestral home. The moment he walked through the door, his Hangzhou dialect “came back to life,” and he began recalling his father’s punishments, his mother doing her makeup and moonlight falling on the trees.
When a local official invited him to stay in his childhood room, he switched to Cantonese to discuss it with his secretary and ultimately chose the Shangri-La instead, because the ancestral home had no flush toilet. The moment gave 吴晓波 a line he would repeat for years: “A thousand kinds of nostalgia cannot beat one flush toilet.”
The more companies and factories he visited, the more he emphasized data, quantification and tangible improvements. He also became more “conservative”: if everyone could earn money, at minimum families could have a flush toilet and buy their daughters a complete pair of trousers. That view was not mainstream among colleagues who saw themselves as cultural figures.
10. Money Is Both Security and the Infrastructure of Independence in Financial Writing
When his monthly salary was only 200-300 yuan around 1993-1994, he suddenly announced at an annual planning meeting: “Next year I’m going to earn RMB10K in writing fees.” Colleagues teased him about it for years. He pursued income outside his institutional salary through newspaper columns, features and advertising copy, while denying that he had written speeches for entrepreneurs.
Around 1996-1997, he wrote “Even if You’re Poor, You Must Stand Among the Rich.” A reporter who rode a bicycle to interview an entrepreneur earning RMB20M a year and driving a Mercedes would return to a home of only a few dozen square meters. It would be hard not to write with anger, and harder still to sincerely understand the joy of creating wealth.
Before writing The Great Game, he investigated the copyright and defamation risks and learned that the maximum potential liability was RMB300K. He went home, confirmed that he had the cash, and only then hired a lawyer. “If I’m a wealthy man, it’s difficult to buy me off.” Wealth therefore became both psychological and professional security.
11. What the Rich May Really Lack Is Not the Ability to Make Money but the Ability to Spend It
吴晓波 has observed many entrepreneurs in their 50s who had spent the first half of their lives making money but did not know how to spend it in a way that made them happy and served a social purpose. “Ninety-nine out of 100 can’t do it.” He says he cannot either.
A Maybach or a RMB200M villa is still a finite form of consumption; more cars and homes do not increase happiness linearly. In recent years, the biggest “consumption” among the wealthy has instead been investment: RMB20M-30M or RMB30M-50M disappears in a single transaction. The real challenge is turning spending into jobs, tax revenue and personal satisfaction.
李翔 invokes Warren Buffett’s $3.5 hamburger, 4 Cokes a day and one owner-occupied home: Would multiple homes turn a person into a hotel manager, and wouldn’t owning countless company shares turn one into an investment manager? Their conclusion is not that one lifestyle is superior, but that “each person has different gifts and different choices.”
12. An Entrepreneur’s Understanding Emerges from the Long Convergence of Knowledge, Experience and Instinct
吴晓波 has met many veteran entrepreneurs with only primary- or middle-school educations. After 20 or 30 years in business, their insight into people and the world was “no shallower than that of a philosopher or a great monk.” Money is highly quantitative and highly cruel; it can force a person to reflect on his own position.
When military leaders, politicians, writers, entrepreneurs or religious figures reach a sufficiently high level, they eventually confront similar Socratic questions: Why make money? What is the relationship between oneself, money and the company? What has been sacrificed in the process?
He breaks cognition into 3 parts: knowledge, worldly experience and instinct. Relying on only one of them makes it difficult to sustain success over 30 or 40 years. Entrepreneurs who built large businesses despite limited formal education usually possess exceptional abilities to learn, delegate and judge.
李翔 notes that there are indeed highly successful bosses who do not read. 吴晓波’s answer is that “business is not that complicated.” A boss can delegate IT and strategy to specialists, even hire 3 consulting firms to answer the same question at RMB20M each, and then use experience and instinct to decide which answer to trust.
13. Moving from Hayek to Keynes Meant Moving from Identifying Problems to Demanding Solutions
吴晓波 still treats democracy and freedom as foundational values, but no longer regards the thinkers he read when young as complete answers. He reread Popper because The Open Society and Its Enemies describes social forms that still resemble reality in some respects, though he does not fully accept the book’s final conclusions.
He was fond of Hayek when young and now prefers Keynes, explaining the shift as evidence that he has become more conservative. Hayek was good at identifying problems but often left the repair to the market; China’s reality and the business world frequently demand an executable solution.
李翔 accurately captures the preference: 吴晓波 is not rejecting the market, but placing greater weight on methods, institutions and concrete solutions. He no longer accepts ending the discussion with a single sentence: “Leave it to the market.”
14. Xinhua Offered a Strong Promotion Track, but It Was Not the Road He Wanted
吴晓波 describes Xinhua as a closed institution where most people spend their entire careers, but says its internal-reference business gave professional expertise unusual respect. If a leader did not understand the work, he could not even see where subordinates had dug the holes. People who seriously conducted research and wrote reports were rarely buried for long.
The institution offered both an editorial and reporting track and a management and commercial track. Someone at bureau-director level might manage only 30 people; a deputy bureau director might manage fewer than 20. In terms of conventional security, rank and professional dignity, it was a highly generous employer.
But he is an individualist: “Writing a good book is more important than anything.” Organizational assignments consumed writing time, while devoting his energy outside the system would have been irresponsible to the institution. His departure in 2003 was therefore a more honest settlement for both sides, though he has always acknowledged the value of his 13 years of training at Xinhua.
15. Rejecting a 51:49 Split at a Business Weekly Was an Instinctive Judgment About Control Risk
After The Great Game was published, 吴晓波’s anxiety about money eased. When he left Xinhua, he initially planned to start China’s business weekly with 秦朔. Advertising agency arrangements and distribution were largely settled; the real obstacles were the publication number and equity split.
The final newspaper group insisted on taking 51%, leaving the 2 founders with 49%. 吴晓波’s refusal was blunt: “I can’t hang my head from his belt and have to shake 3 times whenever he goes to pee.” He did not even trust that the 49% recorded on paper would ultimately be honored.
秦朔 later went on to launch First Financial Daily, while 吴晓波 chose to buy Blue Lion’s publishing business from Bertelsmann. Blue Lion was held by several shareholders he personally controlled. It was smaller and more privately owned, and at least gave him control.
16. Nonfiction Gave Ordinary Talent a Chance to Win by Staying on the Ground
吴晓波 recalls ranking roughly 26th in his Fudan class. He could not match his classmates’ memory or ability with mental puzzles. He submitted poetry continuously for all 4 years of university and never had a poem accepted by a magazine; his only publication came when he asked the campus newspaper editor to print 2 poems before graduation.
He concluded early that he was not a genius and that poetry, which depends heavily on talent, was not for him. Nonfiction was fairer: the world would continue producing unpredictable people and events. If he stayed with a subject and remained on the ground long enough, he could outrun people who were smarter but absent from the scene.
He even offers a powerful and controversial personal judgment: over the past several decades, China’s genuinely revolutionary progress came through commercial civilization, high-rises and production lines—not art, film, music or political philosophy. The steady stream of new material created by that transformation became his “production-factor advantage.”
17. After 40, the Most Important Question Is “Whom Are You Going to Kill on the Street?”
After finishing The Tumultuous Thirty Years, 吴晓波 asked 张五常 to write the foreword. At dinner, 张五常 asked his age. When he heard “40,” he said: “When you reach 40, the most important thing is deciding whom you are going to kill on the street.”
This was not encouragement to attack peers. It meant that a subject must be worthy of the knife a person had sharpened for 20 years in the industry. To prove that one is a master, one must choose an important and difficult target, not defeat someone irrelevant.
The line influenced his later choice of The Tumultuous Century, 100 Years; The Vast Tide, 2,000 Years; The Biography of 吴敬琏; and The Gains and Losses of Economic Reform Through the Dynasties. 李翔 sees these as extensions of The Tumultuous Thirty Years; 吴晓波 sees them as ways to reconsider Chinese business within a larger historical frame.
He went to Nantong to research 张謇, Beibei to find 卢作孚, China Merchants Group for material from the 李鸿章 era, and Tianjin to search for traces of 范旭东. In Shanghai, he read confession materials from entrepreneurs during the Three Antis and Five Antis campaigns. The difficulty lay not only in the writing, but in the expanding universe of sources.
18. Putting People Before Institutions Is the Unifying Method in 吴晓波’s Business History
The Great Game handled one company in 20K-30K characters; The Tumultuous Thirty Years extended the same logic across individual years; The Tumultuous Century and The Vast Tide extended it across much longer periods. The scale changed, but the basic method did not: write the person first, then let institutions and business models emerge through the person’s fate.
Traditional fiscal history and business-model research often reduce people to vehicles for proving a theory. 吴晓波 reverses the order: “People are the most vivid.” Once a person’s story is fully written, the author’s argument is usually already contained within it.
He considers The Tumultuous Century, 100 Years his most technically accomplished business history. It contained new discoveries in the sources, while historical distance provided greater certainty and depth. When he began The Tumultuous Thirty Years, he was still somewhat unsettled; only later did he find the rhythm.
19. “Financial Writer” Is Not a Lesser Label but His Professional Positioning
The label “financial writer” emerged after The Great Game, when 许知远 chose between “financial writer” and “business writer.” 吴晓波 believes there is no substantive difference. Later, when he returned early from Poland to interview 张近东, 许知远 asked why he had given up seeing the world “to meet a small peddler.” His answer: “He’s a small peddler, but his business is a little large.”
He does not feel inferior around novelists or poets. He likes 余华’s To Live, Cries in the Drizzle and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, but says plainly that he dislikes Brothers because 余华 does not understand business.
20. Of His 3 Writing Templates, the One Still Unfinished Is the Grand Explanation
吴晓波 divides his financial writing into 3 categories: corporate histories represented by The Tumultuous Thirty Years; biographies of people, companies and cases such as The Biography of 吴敬琏, The Tencent Story and The Moutai Story; and thematic arguments such as The Exaggerated Mission and The Gains and Losses of Economic Reform Through the Dynasties.
The first 2 categories rarely pose a technical challenge anymore, unless an unusually compelling subject appears. The third remains difficult because the challenge is not turning words into a book, but providing a satisfying new explanation without substantially repeating his earlier work.
The Entrepreneurs and Chinese Society has been in progress for about 7 years. Its first chapter begins with “The Merchant in the Confucian World,” requiring him to re-enter the texts of the various schools of thought and historical source material. He also believes corporate history could continue through 2018-2028, but there are actually very few Chinese companies worth an entire book.
21. Contemporary Corporate Biographies Can Only Be Period Versions, Never Final Accounts
Writing about living companies and entrepreneurs inevitably runs into omissions and material that cannot be made public. The Tencent Story and The Moutai Story may be relatively good records of particular phases in a company’s development, but they are not necessarily final or complete works for posterity.
李翔 points out that a contemporary author can interview key figures such as 马化腾 in a way later authors cannot replicate. 吴晓波’s response is that continued development will produce new people and new facts. Things that cannot be said or explained today may become speakable 50 years from now.
He distinguishes 2 levels of supersession. Later writers may be able to “kill” an existing corporate biography by adding enough new facts while using the same logic. Replacing The Tumultuous Thirty Years, however, would require a new narrative logic or explanatory system, not simply more material.
22. The Value of The Moutai Story Lies in the Gaps No One Before Him Continued to Question
With more than 20 books already written about Moutai, the question of which liquor was served at the founding ceremony of the People’s Republic still had no clear answer. 吴晓波 saw the gap as evidence that earlier authors stopped collecting sources and asking questions. More material does not mean the question has been solved.
When he encountered the 1958 claim that “Moutai must reach 10,000 tons,” he rejected the standard explanation that the leadership supported the baijiu industry. 毛泽东 did not drink, and there was no reason to assume that the Great Leap Forward would naturally focus on liquor. In 朱敏’s biography of 朱德, he found a clue: exporting 10K tons of Moutai could bring in enough foreign exchange to buy roughly 200K tons of steel, or about 1% of China’s steel output at the time. It was first an arithmetic problem involving foreign exchange and steel.
He also pursued the claim that all “century-old cellars” were stone-block pits. He visited descendants of the Wang family and saw, just before 2 old cellars were demolished, that the pits were actually made of rubble. Later authors will not need to repeat those questions, but they must ask new ones; otherwise there is no reason to write another The Moutai Story.
23. A Book’s Best Reader Is Time, Not Its Peers at Publication
After The Great Game was published, an industry reporter criticized it as “scissors and paste.” The Tencent Story was questioned by technology reporters, and some even said 吴晓波 had not written it himself. He regards these as internal industry “storms in a teacup.”
His response today is direct: “If you say it’s bad, write a book yourself.” The real test is whether researchers examining the same subject 10 or 20 years later can bypass the book—not how many copies it sold or how much praise it received at the time.
The Tencent Story involved interviews with more than 260 people; The Moutai Story required 27 field visits. That work created a factual base later writers must confront. He also admits that every book has flaws and that most of his own work may be overrated: “I did everything I could. My talent only reaches this far.”
24. Merchants Are Forgotten, but Business Writing Can Preserve Human Nature
李翔 cites Nassim Taleb’s idea that artists are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst decisions, and merchants are barely remembered at all. 吴晓波 agrees that wealth itself rarely creates an emotional connection across eras.
The entrances to the former homes of Shanxi and Huizhou merchants do not say “the richest person in the county.” They are more likely to carry phrases such as “cultivation and study handed down through the generations.” Future generations are not moved by how much money someone made. What Rockefeller and Carnegie left behind was not an exact wealth figure, but their relationship with their era.
That does not diminish the value of corporate history, because 吴晓波 believes he is writing about people, not money. “Human nature is immortal.” Vast resources simply magnify a person’s brilliance, greed, fear and ugliness into forms that are easier to observe.
25. Writing Creates Impact Through Probability; Self-Media Fundamentally Changed Earning Power
吴晓波 was an early “RMB1 per character” columnist. Writing roughly 300K characters a year earned him just over RMB300K, still leaving him far from the wealth of the people he interviewed. Even after The Great Game sold several million copies, his next book, The Exaggerated Mission, sold only a little over 10K.
His commercial understanding is that if a writer keeps writing and stays in the game, one book may eventually break out. But if 10 books in a row are poor, the writer loses interest and publishers stop offering opportunities. Writing resembles a film studio: it is a portfolio and a probability model.
To date, self-media remains the most commercially powerful form of cultural monetization he has seen. Before it emerged, writing alone made wealth accumulation difficult, so he supplemented his writing income with real-estate investment at an early stage.
26. One Book a Year and One Home a Year Were Built on Cadence, Not Willpower
吴晓波 once advanced 4 subjects in parallel, using a “parallel-work” system to ensure that one book was published every year. The more foolish and rigid the target, the more likely a person is to build a method around it.
After developing neurasthenia around 1995-1996, he largely stopped working at night from 1997 onward. He watched Korean dramas and played mahjong instead, forcing his daytime productivity higher. The constraint helped him build a stable working structure.
Buying homes also depended on cadence. Down payments rose gradually from 15% and 20% to 30% around 2009; after prices rose, he sold or pledged existing properties and bought another home, retail unit or small office, rather than paying cash for one property every year.
He studied 村上春树’s publication list and found novels, essays, dialogues and film criticism alternating with one another. William H. H. Stueck likewise moved between major works such as The Korean War and a biography of Michael Jordan. “One book a year” was really a portfolio of products with different levels of difficulty and different production cycles.
27. In a High-Growth Era, People Did Not Choose Opportunities So Much as Get Pushed by Them
李翔 asks whether a life devoted to a single book, like the lives of Tedlow or Robert Caro, has its own appeal. 吴晓波 says the 2 generations lived in different environments. During China’s high-growth period, many decisions were not rationally planned; “possibilities rushing at you” forced people to bite into one apple after another.
Some experiments were abandoned halfway, some lost money and some pushed people toward where they are today. Approaching 60, he and his wife remarked while walking that “heaven had treated us well”: just as they were no longer capable of handling an endless stream of choices, an era full of opportunity—and temptation—happened to end.
Writing was his “anchor” in the waves. A ship can drift, collide and spring leaks, but still return to its starting point. Many people his age are not troubled by failure but by losing their anchor and becoming “lost souls” drifting with the environment.
28. Blue Lion’s Comfort and Self-Media’s Scale Represent 2 Completely Different Entrepreneurial Costs
Blue Lion had barely more than 10 people and published dozens of books a year. It did not need to sell advertising, livestream or deliver speeches at high frequency. The team focused on domestic business cases, while 吴晓波 could continue writing. In retrospect, it was a very slow and comfortable period of his life.
When he ran Blue Lion in 2014, the average first print run for financial books was still roughly 17K-18K copies. It later fell to 5K-6K. Had he not entered self-media, he would probably have taught at institutions such as Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University or Jinan University, gradually moving away from the commercial front line.
The 吴晓波 Channel eventually expanded the company to roughly 200 people. Around 2018, he made more than 90 business trips in a year, was in an expansive personal phase, imagined taking the company public and continually invested the capital he had accumulated.
He still cannot say whether those 10 years will prove worthwhile when placed against the next 20. Entrepreneurship increased his feel for business and enriched his life, but it was not the most efficient way to acquire those insights. If the final deliverable remains the work itself, it is still unclear whether the OKRs of entrepreneurship and writing were aligned.
29. The RMB70M Lesson Was That “People Like It” Does Not Mean There Is Real Demand
吴晓波 is not afraid of trial and error. He has failed with a bookstore, a magazine, a Beijing film company and a children’s publishing company. Fortunately, most projects did not carry large amounts of leverage, so the failures remained within what he could personally absorb.
His biggest loss came from developing a gaming wristband with friends, losing roughly RMB70M in total. The product held more than 20 patents and let users play games without touching a tablet. Everyone was happy to receive one as a gift; when asked to pay, nobody bought it.
That experience taught him about “pseudodemand.” Following an existing trend and making the product better or cheaper is comparatively manageable. Trying to create a trend from nothing means taking on R&D costs, market-education costs and the possibility that demand does not exist at all.
30. The Great Game Would Not Be Traded for 1% of Alibaba Because Money Cannot Replace an Anchor
李翔 asks whether 吴晓波 would trade The Great Game for 1% of Alibaba if the company had a market capitalization of $500B—roughly $5B. 吴晓波 still says no. With that money, he would continue writing and running the 吴晓波 Channel; the money itself could neither be spent nor necessarily enjoyed.
The answer has one clear premise: the anchor remains the writer. If the exchange also required him to give up that anchor, it would be a different question. Trading a work for wealth would simply leave him with an asset that created new problems.
He sees the same point in 章子怡’s effort to solicit good scripts and her willingness to invest in films like 古天乐. An actor’s anchor was still in place. As long as a person retains an anchor, the mind does not become too chaotic.
31. Business Taught Him Not Snobbery but Boundaries, Dosage and the Cost of Time
李翔 worries that prolonged exposure to companies and wealth can make a person more calculating, and wonders whether he has become too transactional with friends. 吴晓波 admits that after 45 he became “extremely snobbish” with his time, because time had become the most expensive resource.
If a friend asks whether he is in Hangzhou, he does not lie. If he is there but unavailable, he says so directly. If something can be handled on WeChat, they do not meet; if it concerns company cooperation, he delegates it to colleagues; if the friend’s personal presence is genuinely required, he still goes. Refusal needs boundaries and an explanation.
He uses medicine as an analogy. Whether a drug works depends simultaneously on its efficacy, dosage and duration; none of the 3 can be omitted. Only business forces people with such brutality to quantify the subject, the investment and the time.
李翔 has also noticed that more successful entrepreneurs tend to give better answers when asked for a loan. They may not lend the money, but they help the other person identify and solve the underlying problem. 吴晓波 believes that once the marginal pleasure of acquiring more wealth declines, giving and helping may provide a stronger sense of recognition.
32. “Riding on the Back of the New World” Means Going to the Factory Before Discussing the Technology Wave
While writing The Gains and Losses of Economic Reform Through the Dynasties in 2013, 吴晓波 wrote that “China’s modernization movement may outlast our lives” and at one point began to cry. Once he accepted that he would not see the ending, he made peace with the era: neither lying flat nor giving up, but doing the work properly at the smallest unit.
He continues to participate in content innovation, even though AI and machine production may collide with the ethics of writing that came before. “Riding on the back of the new world” is not a prediction of certain success; it means using the tools and going to the scene to understand them.
At a Baidu event in November 2024, a person responsible for the robotics sector suggested that he follow the industry. Over the next roughly 2 months, Baidu helped arrange visits to 14 robotics companies. He went to Beijing Qianxun Intelligence, Galaxy General, companies in Shanghai and UBTECH, ahead of the concentrated industry excitement in the second half of 2025.
In April 2025, he saw a then-large humanoid-robotics workshop in Shanghai that still had no production line and relied mainly on manual assembly, with annual output of about 1,000 units. It looked like “before Ford’s 1908 production line.” Ningbo later claimed that a flexible line could produce 50K units annually. He decided to inspect it in person, while retaining the question of whether it was real or “just blowing smoke.”
33. Financial Content Should Act Like a Farmer, Not Put on a Suit and Fight for Attention on a Bikini Beach
吴晓波 still visits roughly 60-80 companies a year and follows the most basic reporting principle: “Go to the front line and look.” He considers “reporter” a source of pride, and believes the ability to be on the ground remains the underlying source of a content product.
A television appearance stitched together his refusal to appear on The Roast, where he said he would serve only the several hundred thousand people in the financial circle, with a separate discussion about “99% of people becoming useless classes in the future.” The edit generated a controversy over elitism and arrogance. He explained that the 2 remarks had been made separately, but still insisted that he did not need to change in order to break into the mass market.
The 吴晓波 Channel has long had roughly 2M-3M users. He divides traffic strategies into 2 types: the hunter who takes a gun everywhere to shoot rabbits, and the farmer who stays in one place waiting for rabbits to come. If people genuinely interested in Chinese business do not read The Great Game or The Tumultuous Thirty Years, then “I’m not the one who is unlucky—you are.”
Weak performance on Douyin and Xiaohongshu confirmed a mismatch between medium and message: “Wearing a suit on a beach with bikinis.” No matter how good the suit is, it will not attract attention. Over the past 5 or 6 years, he has gradually pulled back toward a professional audience and has not paid a particularly large marketing cost to acquire massive user numbers.
34. Social Media’s Pulse Effect Can Turn One Bad Corporate Response into a Matter of Survival
吴晓波 admits that he cannot understand today’s online-opinion environment. After rereading 鲁迅’s Wandering and Wild Grass, he began to understand those who “have no way to reconcile themselves with themselves.” They may not be able to change the era, but at least they know clearly what era they are in and what they should do.
During the Zhong Xue Gao crisis, his involvement as an investor gave him knowledge that the company had opportunities to save itself through a sale, merger or outside management, which the founder ultimately abandoned. When he said during a livestream that “no company has ever been destroyed by criticism,” he was trying to encourage the company. Later, 林盛 moved into selling roasted sweet potatoes, and the customer-product connection no longer generated empathy.
His structural judgment is that the pulse generated by modern media is far greater than that of traditional media. The better a person or institution is at using media, the more likely the backlash is to carry a multiplier effect. Society’s existing knowledge may not even be sufficient to tell a company how to survive this intensity of exposure.
李翔 relays that 贾国龙 said revenue and profit had still been strong in the month before the 西贝 incident. He acknowledged making mistakes in his response, but interpreted the crisis as “heaven sending me a major assignment.” Recovery will depend on his personal resilience and ability to regroup resources. Even the detail of taking his hands out of his pockets for a photograph showed how deeply public opinion had affected him.
35. Vanke Did Not Lose on Corporate Culture; It Lost on Cycle Judgment and Control
Vanke had long been seen as a management benchmark in China. Its reversal led 李翔 to wonder whether organization, culture and the professional-manager system could ultimately withstand a radical industry shift. 吴晓波 is incorporating the company into his case studies after 2018 and offers an answer that is more technical.
郁亮’s “stay alive” call in July 2018 showed that management had already seen the winter following “housing is for living in, not speculation.” Yet between 2018 and 2022, Vanke acquired more than RMB670B of land, the most of any Chinese developer during the period. Its slogan and asset behavior clearly diverged.
Historically, real-estate tightening usually lasted no more than 3 years. Developers were accustomed to buying land during the trough and selling homes once policy eased. In 2019, land-sale revenue and floor prices still rose roughly 17%, further encouraging countercyclical bets. This time, however, the cycle ran from 2018 to 2024—roughly twice as long as before.
吴晓波 also retains another possibility: Vanke was highly decentralized, regional “warlords” had autonomy over land purchases, and the co-investment system allowed them to share the upside while the company bore most of the risk. Headquarters’ understanding may not have translated into action. Either way, the failure looks more like a problem of decisions, incentives and control than the bankruptcy of the “good company” model.
36. Founder and Industry Momentum Can Hide Management Problems, and Failure Is Not the Same as Fraud
Discussing Tesla, 吴晓波 identifies 2 forces that can conceal organizational problems. Elon Musk can dissolve a large amount of internal negative emotion, while the industry itself is growing rapidly. Executive turnover, internal friction and a missing culture may not prevent the company from moving forward—for now.
But he does not believe that makes management irrelevant. As the company expands and the industry slows, it will still need to build its own cultural system and repair its organization and governance. A founder’s will can delay the appearance of problems; it cannot eliminate them forever.
In distinguishing failed innovators from fraudsters, he emphasizes that few entrepreneurs in public discussion set out to commit fraud from day one. He does not consider 贾跃亭 a fraudster: he was extremely hardworking, holding more than 20 meetings a day, but had an excessively grand vision, delusions about the business model, bad judgment and ultimately a collapse in financial credibility.
He likes documenting figures such as 孙宏斌, whose character barely changed from 顺驰 to 融创. After suffering a major lesson, 戴国芳 would still bite into an apple if one appeared in front of him. The moments worth entering corporate history must be both “important enough” and “dramatic enough.”
37. Technology on the Front Line Is Breaking Down the Old Division Between Entrepreneurs and Intellectuals
李翔 asks why China lacks business-intellectual figures in the mold of Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Anderson and Horowitz. 吴晓波 sees the silence of the past decade-plus as a phase, not evidence that entrepreneurs lack ideas. Between 2003 and 2014, many Chinese entrepreneurs actively published books and articulated their views.
Today’s entrepreneurs have stronger educational training, international capabilities and the ability to mobilize society globally. The bigger change is that technology itself has become an engine of thought. Steve Jobs, 马云 and Elon Musk created products on the front line while also thinking, building frameworks and communicating ideas themselves; they no longer waited for scholars to summarize them.
In the old model, entrepreneurs created wealth and intellectuals created ideas. Today, ideas increasingly emerge at the frontier where investors and founders operate. University professors may need 5 to 10 years to organize the material into a textbook, by which time the cases have already changed. Tencent, Alibaba, Haier, Midea, Taikang and Ping An have all innovated; they simply express themselves less publicly.
He also rejects a rigid hierarchy between “merchants” and “entrepreneurs.” The 2 cannot be cleanly separated. Traditional society already looked down on commerce, while intellectuals naturally took on the role of supervising government and commercial power. Anti-consumerist writing such as The Exaggerated Mission produced little social effect, and historical writing cannot mistake the few voices that were preserved for the true views of the majority.
38. AI Did Not Create His Midlife Crisis; Organizational Responsibility and Unfinished Obligations Did
Because the anchor remains book writing, 吴晓波 is not worried that AI will eliminate him. 豆包 and 文心一言 can accelerate research, search, synthesis and question-answering, improving efficiency. Whether they can replace his textual production is “meaningless” to him because he will not surrender the writing itself.
The real ordeal began after 2021: an aborted IPO, regulatory intervention, a depleted business model, falling business, layoffs and contraction across surrounding companies arrived one after another. He had to answer both to investors and to employees, with each obligation bringing anxiety and shame.
After years of taking hits and getting back up, he is grateful that the crisis forced him to stop maintaining scale and experimenting continuously. Today, in his Hangzhou space, he teaches entrepreneur students and encourages them to keep running forward. When they tire, they can return, eat in the cafeteria and attend classes. “I’m not running. I can’t run anymore.”
He has abandoned every target of one book a year or one book every 2 years, saying, “I don’t have that much to say to the world.” But he has not given up writing. 李翔 closes the conversation by saying that even an awkward writer must do his duty; 吴晓波 accepts not an exit, but a return to fundamentals and the task of doing the remaining worthwhile work properly.