The first time I encountered Peter Thiel’s name was in China, about a decade ago. He was scheduled to give a talk about his 2014 book, Zero to One, at tech-focused Tsinghua University (known as China’s MIT) where giant banners emblazoned with his face were hard to miss.
I dismissed the fascination with Thiel as another example of the “David Hasselhoff phenomenon”: second-tier American celebrities achieving disproportionate fame abroad. At that time in China, even tenuous connections to some US center of power — Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood — could be leveraged to elevate one’s profile, tapping into the country’s thirst for American-style modernity.
Unlike the Baywatch star, however, Thiel would soon become far more than a cult curiosity abroad. As the ideological architect behind the venture capital powerhouse The Founders Fund, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, early backer of Facebook, and political patron of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, Thiel has become the philosopher-king of a growing techno-authoritarian movement.
Shortly after his talk at Tsinghua, Thiel attributed being “famous in China” to the country’s enthusiasm for technology. But the real reason is likely ideological. Coauthored with twice-failed political candidate Blake Masters, Zero to One — which Thiel says sold more copies in China than everywhere else combined — was less a startup manual than a blueprint for oligarchy, resembling China’s fusion of state power with surveillance infrastructure. Where Beijing builds control through social credit systems, facial recognition networks, and AI-driven censorship, Thiel envisions control through code and capital — only privatized, with tech billionaires, not party officials, as the…
Auteur: Christopher Marquis
