2018.01.08 CoStone Capital Views:
On January 6 and 7, the sixteenth CoStone Master Forum witnessed informative talks on The Value of Life in Western Culture. Professor Xu Jilin at East China Normal University, Professor He Huaihong at Peking University, Professor Sun Xiangchen at Fudan University and Professor Wang Qingjie at the Chinese University of Hong Kong explored the topic deeply in the forum.
On January 6 and 7, the sixteenth CoStone Master Forum witnessed informative talks on The Value of Life in Western Culture. Professor Xu Jilin at East China Normal University, Professor He Huaihong at Peking University, Professor Sun Xiangchen at Fudan University and Professor Wang Qingjie at the Chinese University of Hong Kong explored the topic deeply in the forum.
He Huaihong on Greek Philosophies of Life
Professor He lectured on the ancient Greeks' political ideas, moral sentiments, and understandings of goodness and obligations from five aspects: pursuing excellence and loving wisdom; knowing yourself; seeking truth and upholding justice; learning human nature and mastering your destiny; and following the mean principle and understanding happiness. He then applied the ancient Greek philosophies to the modern life, which provided an inspirational perspective on life.
Sun Xiangchen on The Life and Death in Christian Culture
Professor Sun also divided his speech into five parts: traditional understandings of the meaning of life; the basic content of Christian doctrine; death in the Old Testament and the New Testament; death in Christian culture; and the way to lead a meaningful life in the modern world.
Wang Qingjie on The Meaning of Life in Modern Western Philosophy
Professor Wang's lecture included three main points. They were the value and meaning of human life, the status of man in western "modernity" and the survival crisis of "humans" and the hope of "being-towards-death" in the post-modern context.
Dialogue: Between Poetry and Cruelty
The last part of the forum was an in-depth dialogue among the four professors moderated by Professor Xu. The first half of the dialogue centered on "life" and the second half on "death". From the perspective of western philosophy, the professors offered answers to the problems related to life people encountered every day.
Speaker
He Huaihong
He Huaihong is a doctor of philosophy and Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Peking University. In the 1980s, he focused on western philosophy, Ethics and translation, having translated A Theory of Justice,Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and The System of Ethics into Chinese. Since the 1990s, he has been devoted to writing articles on principles of ethics and Chinese history and culture. He has started to research on applied ethics and pays close attention to the relationship between spiritual beliefs and modern society. Reflection on Life and Morality·God and Man are his representative works.
Sun Xiangchen
Sun Xiangchen is a doctor of philosophy and professor. His areas of particular interest include modern western philosophy, enlightenment philosophy, political philosophy, Jewish and Christian philosophy, phenomenology, French philosophy and comparative philosophy. He was a visiting scholar at the Department of Philosophy, Peking University, Regent College, Yale University, the Institute of Sino-Christian Studies, the University of Birmingham, the Munich School of Philosophy, the University of Chicago and National Taiwan University.
Wang Qingjie
Wang Qingjie is Professor at the Department of Philosophy, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on contemporary western continental philosophy, the comparative philosophy between the west and the east and moral philosophy. As a representative scholar studying Heidegger, he is the author of Heidegger: Translation, Understanding and Interpretation and Heidegger and the Beginning of Philosophy, and the translator of Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Time.
Xu Jilin
Xu Jilin is Professor and PhD Supervisor at the Department of History, East China Normal University, Vice President and General Secretary of Shanghai History Association, Member of the Board of Directors, Association of Chinese Historians, Member of Shanghai Federation of Social Science Associations, and Member of the Editorial Board of Twenty-First Century. His research has been focusing on the history of Chinese thoughts and the intellectuals in the 20 century, and on the urban culture in Shanghai.
Rewritten by Jiang Xiaomei, Edited by Li Yunzhen, Du Zhixin, Wei Yiyi
Over the past year, the bull market returned, with technology leading the way.
As I said back in October 2024, the rally that began on September 24 was not merely a rebound, but a reversal. Since then, China's capital markets have undergone a broad revaluation, moving from undervaluation toward fair value.
The Shanghai Composite Index reached its highest level in a decade. The "Yi-Zhong-Tian" trio—Eoptolink, Zhongji Innolight and TFC Communication, three prominent Chinese optical communications stocks—saw their share prices multiply severalfold in a single year. Cambricon's market capitalization briefly exceeded RMB 600 billion. Elsewhere in the technology sector, triple-digit price-to-earnings ratios and valuations exceeding RMB 10 billion became commonplace.
Some investors were greedy; others, fearful. Still others asked me: Are technology stocks in a valuation bubble?
My answer is that what we are witnessing is the hunger and anxiety of an era, reflected in the capital markets. Once you understand this, the current fervor for technology investing is no longer difficult to explain.
Investment has nothing to do with macroeconomics, but everything to do with geopolitics.
China-US relations will shape the investment landscape for decades to come. Geopolitics has played a major role in shaping the hunger and anxiety of our times, fundamentally reshaping the way we invest.
What, then, lies at the heart of China's hunger and anxiety?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is already underway, yet China has not fully overcome the technological shortcomings left by the Third. There is no time to lose.
This is why some people wonder: Why do Chinese computing chip companies command such high valuations when their technologies still lag so far behind NVIDIA's? Why does NVIDIA trade at just 50 times earnings, while a company hailed as "China's answer to NVIDIA" commands a multiple of 300?
To me, this gets the logic exactly backward.
It is precisely because these companies cannot catch up with NVIDIA in the near term that they command a higher strategic premium. The wider the technological gap, the greater the strategic value.
The further something lies beyond our reach, the stronger our hunger. The harder it is to catch up, the deeper our anxiety. If China were to achieve a complete breakthrough in computing chips one day, valuations might actually come down.
Where can one find China's most spectacular natural landscapes?
Much of the answer, I believe, lies in and around the Hengduan Mountains: the Meili Snow Mountains, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Mount Gongga, Mount Siguniang, Jiuzhaigou, and many others. Vast differences in elevation and deep fault lines have given rise to landscapes of extraordinary grandeur.
Hard-tech investing follows a similar logic.
Technological gaps, discontinuities in capabilities, and missing links in industrial systems: a leap in difficulty brings a leap in valuation, and a successful breakthrough can, in turn, bring a leap in returns.
This logic extends well beyond computing chips. It is equally evident in memory semiconductors, commercial spaceflight, and other sectors where China still faces substantial technological gaps with other countries.
It was precisely this conviction that led CoStone Capital, starting in 2016, to decisively focus its investments on three areas: hard tech, emerging industries, and life sciences and healthcare. In this context, "hard tech" refers specifically to important industries in which China faces a technological gap with the United States.
Thanks to this forward-looking strategy, CoStone Capital established an early presence across the full value chains of key sectors, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
Looking ahead, the frontiers of technological progress and industrial upgrading are boundless. Nor can the gaps in hard technology be closed overnight. The twin windows of opportunity presented by technological innovation and the development of homegrown alternatives to foreign technologies have only just begun to open.
The road ahead is long, but the future holds immense promise.
As an investment firm, CoStone Capital will continue to invest where the hunger and anxiety of each era run deepest, move forward with the tensions that shape our times, and extend our reach toward the most challenging—and most important—frontiers.
Spring 2026