"A home-grown venture-capital case in point: Zero2ipo. Established in 1999 by Gavin Ni, a Tsinghua University graduate, and several other Chinese graduates, the company now has 40 professionals with backgrounds in venture capital, investment banking and market research. "Our advisory venture service is the core business of Zero2ipo, including private placement, IPO [initial public offering], M&A [merger and acquisition], and venture-capital training and education," said Ni, an energetic thirtysomething consummate investment-capital salon organizer.

Ni and other young Chinese entrepreneurs have many reasons to be bullish. New reforms and technologies are rocketing Chinese companies into the global markets. Witness a post-bubble brand of entrepreneurship, new venture capitalism and a revived Internet market, especially in those pioneer portals Netease, Sohu and Sina.com, all uniting, brightening and dotting the Middle Kingdom's information-technology (IT) landscape from Xi'an to Shenzhen.

In the past five years, China's home-grown venture funds such as New Margin Ventures and Chengwei Ventures, led by management teams trained in the United States, use their connections, or guanxi, to help Chinese startups navigate the country's tightly regulated economy. It was in the mid-1990s, long before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US and the restrictive student-visa policies in that country, when many of China's brightest students went abroad to graduate school - and never returned.

China is still on a long march to create its own brand of an Intel-inspired culture, but each year in scores of science parks, there is an increasing level of innovation, widely regarded as the marrow of Silicon Valley's brilliant past and promising present. Across that wide blue Pacific Ocean, California still boasts its share of buccaneer capitalists, while China's surplus of state assistance is propped up with talented overseas Chinese spinning out their own variation of venture capitalism."