English Startup Scarcity in Chinese Cities | Generated by AI
The main reason those four cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen) have very few English-speaking small startups (as in fully English-inside, founder-to-engineer communication in English) is a combination of market reality, talent pool, and founder incentives. Here’s the breakdown:
1. Domestic market is enormous and still growing fast
- China’s internet/user economy is ~1 billion domestic users who overwhelmingly prefer Chinese-language products.
- A startup that wants to move fast and reach millions of users quickly has to build in Chinese from day one (UI, customer support, sales, marketing, content, etc.).
- Building everything in English first would put you at a massive disadvantage against local competitors.
2. Engineer talent pool is 99% Chinese-speaking
- The best engineers in these cities graduated from Tsinghua, Peking U, Zhejiang U, Shanghai Jiaotong, etc. → they are comfortable in Chinese and usually prefer it day-to-day.
- Very few top-tier Chinese engineers are willing to work full-time in an English-only environment unless the pay is dramatically higher (which small startups can’t afford).
- Result: if you want to hire 20–50 great engineers quickly and cheaply, you have to operate in Mandarin.
3. Founder background
- Most successful Chinese founders are mainland-educated and are optimizing for the China market.
- The few founders who are comfortable running everything in English usually:
- Already made money and moved to Singapore / US, or
- Target the global market from day one → they set up in Singapore, SF, or (recently) Dubai/Abu Dhabi instead of mainland China.
4. What you DO see instead
- Big tech (Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc.) have English-speaking teams when they do international products (TikTok, Shein, Temu, Pinduoduo Global, etc.), but those are still ring-fenced groups inside otherwise Chinese companies.
- Foreign companies’ China offices (Google before it left, Meta, Apple, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, etc.) → these are the places that are fully English-inside, but they are not startups.
- A tiny handful of true English-inside startups exist (usually crypto, some AI/tooling companies), but they are exceptions and often keep a low profile or eventually switch to Chinese when they want to scale locally.
5. Where English-speaking startups actually cluster in the Chinese-speaking world
- Singapore (obvious, English is official language, huge Chinese-engineer pool who studied/worked in English)
- Hong Kong (still some, though declining after 2020)
- Taiwan (growing slowly; many founders studied in the US and are fine with English, but even here most startups switch to Chinese once they want big local traction)
Bottom line
In mainland Tier-1 cities, the gravitational pull of 1 billion Chinese-speaking users + the deepest engineering talent pool on earth being Mandarin-native makes English-only startups almost non-viable unless you are deliberately going global-first (in which case most people just incorporate in Singapore anyway).
So what you see — tons of English-speaking expats at Goldman, Jane Street, Citadel, Two Sigma, ByteDance International, etc. — but zero English-native startups under 200 people — is exactly what the incentives predict.