Meet China’s ‘Six Little Dragons’
Move over Alibaba and Tencent, China has a new set of tech champions. Often referred to as the “six little dragons,” they’re DeepSeek, the Black Myth developer Game Science, robotics firms Unitree and DeepRobotics, Neuralink challenger BrainCo, and spatial intelligence firm ManyCore. And while they may still pale in size relative to their more established peers, they’ve breathed new life into China’s tech sector over the past month.
The best-known of the dragons is DeepSeek, which launched its large language model, DeepSeek-R1, on Jan. 20. Praised for its cost effect performance, the model has already gained global traction. Within a week, major cloud providers — including Microsoft, Nvidia, Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, and Baidu — all integrated DeepSeek’s LLM into their platforms, offering “zero-code” deployment and slashing prices to attract users.
Then there’s Game Science, the studio behind Black Myth: Wukong, whose origin story reads like an update to Silicon Valley’s infamous “traitorous eight.” When Tencent restructured its gaming division in June 2014, seven employees, including now-Game Science CEO Feng Ji, left to form their own upstart. A decade later, they produced China’s first true AAA game — a Steam hit with over 25 million copies sold to date.
The other four dragons are less well-known outside of China. There’s Unitree, started by 26-year-old engineer Wang Xingxing in 2016, which furnished the dancing robots for this year’s Spring Festival Gala. A year later came DeepRobotics, targeting a different market segment: Instead of consumer-friendly robots, it’s integrating AI and courting major buyers like Singapore’s Eastern Green Power utility.
Then there is BrainCo, which focuses on neural interfaces. Alone among the dragons, BrainCo was founded in the United States in 2015 by Han Bicheng, who at the time was pursuing his Ph.D. at Harvard University’s Center for Brain Science. In 2018, Han opened an office in Hangzhou, and BrainCo has since become one of the world’s best-funded neurotech companies, producing more than 100,000 high-precision brain-computer devices.
The least known of the dragons is Manycore Technology. Founded in 2011, the company offers spatial intelligence solutions based on AI technology, with a focus on spatial design and visualization. That may seem niche relative to the other dragons, but on Feb. 14, Manycore became the first of the six to file for an initial public offering.
All that said, the specific businesses of the six dragons are less important than what they represent: the kind of high-tech industrial clustering China has spent the past decade chasing.
That this cluster would take shape in Hangzhou is no accident. Startups, especially in tech, tend to be located in the most economically developed, talent-rich, and densely populated regions of a country. Hangzhou is located in the Yangtze River Delta, not far from Shanghai. It boasts one of China’s top universities, Zhejiang University, and it’s surrounded by a region known for its entrepreneurial spirit, as well as strong norms around things like contracts. It’s also a hub for Chinese tech, home to firms like Alibaba that attract talent from across China.
Equally important is the city’s business environment. Hangzhou — and the surrounding province of Zhejiang more broadly — are known in China for their business-friendly policies and officials, an approach summed up by the catchphrase “non-interference when unnecessary, fast response when needed.” Hangzhou has also set up a number of funds to attract and incubate new tech firms. For example, its Yichuang Town neighborhood, where Game Science is based, offers full rent subsidies or exemptions for promising digital content enterprises, including gaming companies, which helped Feng Ji’s firm survive its first few years.
While subsidies are common nationwide, the rise of Hangzhou’s six little dragons has sparked a nationwide conversation on how cities can better attract and support their own business clusters.
For example, Xinhua Daily, a state-backed newspaper in the neighboring and economically prosperous province of Jiangsu, recently ran a number of articles asking why DeepSeek and its peers emerged in Zhejiang, rather than its province. And local media in the eastern city of Jinan — the capital of Shandong province — recently published an article titled “What Can Jinan Learn from Hangzhou’s ‘Six Little Dragons?’”
Officials have also taken note. On Feb. 5, the Secretary of the CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee mentioned three technology companies in his New Year’s speech: Huawei, DeepSeek, and Unitree.
More provinces are likely to follow. In China, inter-provincial competition isn’t just encouraged — it’s institutionalized. Bolstered by a GDP-based evaluation and promotion system for local officials, this competition has always been one of the key driving forces behind China’s rapid economic expansion. If it sticks, and this newfound awareness of the need to improve local business environments leads to real policy changes, we could be looking at the birth of a new economic growth engine.
Editor: Wu Haiyun.
(Header image: Visuals from VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)
