A foreigner's China dream

The story I’m about to tell is a foreigner’s China dream.

The foreigner’s name is Taylor Ogan, but he also goes by his Chinese name, Lin Taile. He’s an American investor and what people here call an 'old Shenzhener.'

In the early 1990s his parents came to Shekou in Shenzhen looking for investment opportunities and witnessed the city’s rise. To Taylor, Shenzhen has always been a place “strewn with opportunity.”

If you look through Taylor’s social media, you can find his posts from 10 years ago in which he was already sharing his analysis and forecasts about China and Shenzhen’s prospects.

A few years after his first visit he became even more convinced that he should bet on Shenzhen. Eventually he moved the headquarters of Snow Bull Capital, a hedge fund investment company he’d co-founded six years ago, from Boston to Nanshan, the most tech-dense district in Shenzhen, and made the city his home. He sold his largest U.S. tech holding and put heavy weight behind China’s domestic new-energy vehicle industry.

To many Americans this seemed baffling. Boston has Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and countless tech companies. The investment opportunities there are plentiful. On top of that, those years saw increasingly aggressive U.S. measures against Chinese tech. To Taylor’s friends back home, his move looked reckless. When asked why he would come to China under such circumstances, Taylor replied calmly: “If you understand us and you understand China, you’ll get it. If you don’t, wait and see — you will understand.”

History and the present overlapped in that moment. I couldn’t help but think of the summer of 1936, when American journalist Edgar Snow braved restrictions to travel to Shaanbei and recorded for the world the rise of a red star. It made me even more curious about Taylor.

We met on a sunny morning in a park where we tried out drone food delivery and other tech demos, mostly to capture his impressions for video materials. Surprisingly, he knew China better than I expected. He could talk, in detail, about the technology paths and niche markets behind drone delivery, autonomous driving, drone light shows and new-energy vehicles. His appreciation for Chinese products felt genuine—he even carried a Huawei phone and praised it enthusiastically.

I wondered what vision Taylor had seen that led him from Boston to Shenzhen. The answer was perhaps on his office desk: a bronze statuette of a pioneering bull, head down and muscles coiled as if about to charge. Taylor admired it and I understood why. That bull’s unwillingness to admit defeat is, to him, the most touching essence of Shenzhen. It’s rooted in the heart of this “old Shenzhen” and it’s what drew him to the innovation-rich soil of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

Two months ago, Taylor posted that Shenzhen is only one step away from becoming world-class. I think that “one step” is exactly where his opportunity lies.

Soon after settling in, he posted: “I still can’t believe it’s almost 2024 and some people don’t know life in China can be this good.” The post went viral — 1.5 million views — and the comments ranged from praise to skepticism to nasty smears alleging he’d been paid to do propaganda for China. He replied lightly: if that were true, he joked, he could write a book about it.

Taylor was not alone. Two close friends, Jack and Bridget, moved from Boston with him. Over dinner they told me how they never expected to live in Shenzhen. They did a lot of research beforehand, but what they encountered here exceeded their imagination; Shenzhen has become a second home.

What truly drove them to this land was the future Taylor had seen — a dream of technological innovation, of opportunity and wealth. It is, in the simplest terms, a foreigner’s China dream.

Remember that announcement post he made when he moved to Shenzhen? It’s still pinned at the top of his social media. It’s a declaration, a resolve, a kind of courage — and above all, confidence. Some people resonated with it, some were inspired by the new things he shared, some followed his investment moves, and some came to China because of him.

The connection their parents made with Shenzhen has blossomed in this generation, something neither generation could have fully imagined. Taylor recently told me his mother will come to China in a few months — her first trip to Shenzhen in more than thirty years. “This story,” he said, “may be even bigger than you think.”

Taylor’s story is also Shenzhen’s story of technological innovation and internationalization. It’s another way of telling China’s modernization. Taylor intends to continue living in Shenzhen, and we will continue to tell his story.