郑秋阳鄭秋陽Qiuyang Zheng

Preface

On April 25–26 we hosted a hundred-person hackathon — the Douyin AI Changemaker Program 2026 Hackathon League, Ningbo Station — the first city-level hackathon Ningbo has ever had. Over two days we brought together a hundred contestants and several hundred spectators. The program's overall lead ran a seminar in person; we also invited the two co-founders of ZJU's Delta X "Iterate the Future" incubator and ZJU x-lab to talk about the innovation-and-startup ecosystem, and three Tsinghua alumni — the founder of AA Accelerator, the head of TusStar (Hangzhou), and the founder of Hangzhou Zhizhou Yiyue — for an OPC forum.

We saw plenty of bright spots:

• A student on a vocational-to-undergraduate path could build something interesting, excellent, even great;
• A single team of four might come from four different countries;
• Our staff threw themselves into making the hackathon happen;
• Guests rushed in from Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou just to back young people and changemakers;
• Friends we'd met across many fields and stages all pitched in;
• Big-tech folks, incubators, professors, and students all talked as one;
• As students, we genuinely contributed a small "new" thing to the government-industry-academia-research-business world;
• We're genuinely shaping an atmosphere of innovation and change in Ningbo.

But we also noticed things worth sitting with. In the AI era, hackathons in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou are almost overflowing; sci-tech events fill every kind of community daily; students are broadly active in startup circles. Yet in Ningbo — coastal, relatively prosperous, steeped in the Zhejiang-merchant spirit of enterprise — this was the first time young people themselves pulled in a city-level AI hackathon. (Along the way, far too many friends asked us, "What even is a hackathon?")

New emergence

From large models and agents to vibe coding, MCP, RAG, skills, harness engineering, AI-native, super-individuals, OPC… the vocabulary of the AI era turns over fast, and excitement, anxiety, confusion, and FOMO spread just as widely. At the same time, AI startups are multiplying, young founders are multiplying, USD fundraising is warming up, students are more curious about new fields, and AI events keep growing. When new people, new money, new communities, new incubation, new ecosystems, and new content are all emerging — how do we make ourselves happen?

Starting from campus, bottom-up

Last summer (the break between freshman and sophomore year), I did an internship around the venture ecosystem in Zhongguancun, Beijing, researching the people, projects, investors, communities, and student groups in frontier tech. After that I kept going to maker fairs, hackathons, and other community events, and connected with a lot of interesting people. That was my first real contact with this ecosystem.

This wave of AI showed me a great ecosystem. But I also realized college students are simply too far from industry — too far from the market, from real demand, from users, from concrete scenarios. This isn't anyone's fault; it's the product of many forces at once: students with creative potential who lack the "tools to create" that bring imagination to ground, and students who've already shipped real products but can't connect to "commercialization resources."

A startup class, a chance idea, a competition business plan, a toy vibe-coded into being, a result sitting in a lab… for a truly commercializable venture, each might be a 1, a 0, more likely a −1. But methodologically, we really do need bottom-up student communities to drive the building of an atmosphere. In other words: let young people do young things.

So in October last year, after returning to school, I founded NEIC — the UNNC Venture Club — a community linking students with industry across venture and AI; Ningbo's first, and one of the rarer independent, grassroots student groups in the country to come out of a university. We currently have around 800 members, 180 core members, five events run, and over thirty partners. The good part: at least for some, members tell me the community genuinely helped them — find early direction for a project, figure out where to intern, learn which information to seek, and how to find good events.

Pioneering: from −1 to 0

A product going from idea to a public launch; a venture landing its first round — that's the great "0 to 1." But going deep into the campus venture ecosystem, we found very few students even reach "0" correctly; what everyone also needs is how to go "from −1 to 0."

"From −1 to 0" is essentially what NEIC does: through daily layered, varied information (AI frontiers, venture reports, tech reports, curated internship JDs, sci-tech event info), through events, and through −1-to-0 support, we empower our members; we also bring in startups, communities, companies, incubators, and investors to collaborate across the ecosystem on content and events. Maybe it's a small thing, but as recently as half a year ago, 99% of the humanities-and-business students around me told me AI was far, far from them, and that "starting up" basically meant writing a business plan for a competition.

The future — how do we happen?

We think what NEIC does matters, at least to some — so we set out to push this atmosphere deep into every university in Ningbo, launching the first sci-tech community spanning all of them: Emerge·Yongxian. For enthusiasts, we push tech accessibility — high-quality AI information, co-learning, forums, and hands-on workshops; for founders and builders with mature ideas, direction, and teams, we help projects land by linking universities, government, communities, and incubators.

Ningbo university students — come build with us.