Young Chinese innovators took the spotlight at this year's Inclusion·Conference on the Bund in Shanghai, highlighting breakthroughs from AI to clean energy.
Photo from Inclusion·Conference on the Bund.
At this year's Inclusion·Conference on the Bund in Shanghai, a group of Chinese young innovators – most under 30 – took center stage. With code and lab experiments as their tools, they are reshaping the country's innovation landscape and showcasing breakthroughs in AI, robotics, clean energy and digital medicine. Their work reflects a spirit of boldness and refusal to settle for mediocrity, pointing to both technological promise and industrial potential.
When DeepSeek shook the global AI battlefield and Unitree robots performed at the Spring Festival Gala, the spotlight also turned to the young minds behind these feats. They are not seasoned tycoons but a cohort of innovators, mostly still in their twenties, working in code and laboratories to redraw the map of Chinese technology.
The 2025 Inclusion·Conference on the Bund brought together this new generation of researchers, developers and entrepreneurs. Through an AI innovation contest, start-up showcases, technology exhibitions and venture meetups, the event created a multi-layered stage for their ideas. Organisers said more than 100 guest speakers were born in the 1990s or 2000s. Nearly 20,000 participants registered for the AI contest, with those born after 2000 making up more than half. The youngest contestant was a middle-school student.
At the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, LIAN Hui is part of the team behind China's "artificial sun." Presenting at the Conference at the Bund, he recalled the thrill of achieving a 403-second plasma discharge in the EAST superconducting tokamak. His team is working on field-reversed configuration fusion, with the goal of turning it into a clean energy source that could one day power AI computing and industry.
ZHANG Fan, a professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, is ranked among the world's top 1 per cent in diffusion MRI research. By combining AI with neuroimaging, he developed platforms such as SlicerDMRI and the ORG brain atlas, which have been adopted in multiple countries. Clinically validated, the technology could cut MRI scans from 90 minutes to eight, earning him the 2025 Ant Intech Technology Award.
At the Communication University of China, a researcher in her late twenties, CHENG Haonan, leads the Baiyang Zhijian platform for detecting audio-video deepfakes. Nicknamed a "rumour crusher," it won third place in the AI security track at this year's innovation contest.
The main forum featured Unitree Robotics founder and CEO WANG Xingxing, DeepWisdom founder and CEO WU Chenglin, UC San Diego professor and Hillbot founder SU Hao, and Tsinghua University assistant professor WU Yi. All born in the 1990s, they discussed how AI innovation is reshaping industry.
Wang has pushed quadruped robotics from the lab to real-world use. Wu Chenglin focuses on decision-making algorithms, while Su Hao – an early contributor to Fei-Fei Li's ImageNet project – co-created the ShapeNet dataset and was cited nearly 80,000 times. Wu Yi, a protégé of Stuart Russell, co-developed AReaL, an open-source reinforcement learning system for large reasoning models.
For these young scientists and entrepreneurs, genuine progress comes not from flashy launches but from tackling complexity and digging into fundamental mechanisms.
For FAN Wendong, born in 1996, open source is more than free code – it is a collaborative mindset. A core contributor to CAMEL-AI, he helped launch the CAMEL and OWL projects, both with more than 10,000 GitHub stars.
XIANG Jinyu, a graduate born after 2000, shifted from applied physics into AI through self-study. He co-developed the OpenManus project, a workflow automation framework based on intelligent agents, which quickly attracted industry attention. "From technology to product to user value, the process is full of hurdles," he said. "My biggest motivation is curiosity – to explore intelligence and its limits."
ZHU Hailin, an engineer at IDEA Research Institute, created the open-source auto-coder series, one of GitCode's top projects of 2024. He believes large models will first disrupt programming itself.
Since DeepSeek open-sourced its R1 model, China has drawn new global attention to open collaboration. Fan, Xiang and Zhu embody that shift, extending the culture of sharing to a new generation of innovators.
Entrepreneurship was another theme. Wu Chenglin gave up stock options worth hundreds of millions of yuan to launch DeepWisdom, which builds multimodal AI platforms spanning text, images, audio, video and tables.
Former Meta engineer ZHU Zheqing left after seven years to found Pokee.ai, aiming to create a reinforcement learning-based agent platform that lets companies "run workflows with a single command."
Meanwhile, ZHAO Hanqing, once an art student, pivoted into generative AI after years in the internet sector. His studio created the virtual singer Yuri, whose single Surreal has been streamed more than seven million times. "AI won't kill creativity, but it will kill mediocrity," he said, arguing that generative tools democratize art by enabling everyone to create.
From fusion energy and AI medicine to robotics, open-source projects and digital art, these innovators born between 1985 and 2000 share common traits: native intuition for new technologies, cross-disciplinary thinking, urgency in commercialization, and a global outlook.
When Lian Hui said, "Our generation must blaze the trail," he captured the spirit of an entire generation: standing at the forefront of a technological revolution, they are not just coding a new world but shaping a new technological culture driven by a broader geek spirit. It is more than individual breakthroughs – it is a collective declaration at the intersection of technology and humanity.
Across 40 forums, three competitions and a venture meet-up, the Inclusion·Conference on the Bund shone a spotlight on this rising generation. As one expert put it, supporting young innovators is not simply about helping newcomers, but about "rational expectations for the future."
The story of China's "AI dragonlings" continues – but for now, its "tiger cubs" are gathering in Shanghai, showing how courage and ingenuity can make the vision of technology transforming the world tangible.
