One evening a few years ago, my friend Fu Cehui and I had dinner at a Hunan restaurant in Fangzhuang, Beijing, about the huge upheaval of a well-known media company at the time. Companies with two huge rounds of funding have risen rapidly in more than a year, and then fallen vertically, which makes us sigh.

This was a microcosm of the domestic venture capital industry at that time. Because of my deep relationship with the company's top management, I learned a lot of inside information, shock and regret, and my professional habits as a financial reporter in the past, so I had the urge to write at that time. It's just that at that time, I didn't know, see, and think about the entire industry very little, and later joined a start-up company and buried myself in the business with my partners, and gradually forgot this idea.

Over the years, I have gained a deeper understanding of the capital market, and I have been deeply touched by the success of two rounds of financing in two different periods after the capital market frenzy and the outbreak of the international financial crisis. At the same time, I also have deep and shallow contact with that special group, the so-called crony capital. It is rumored in the industry that a big brother-level figure was implicated in a corruption case of a high-ranking official that shocked the whole country, and suffered a prison sentence, and the hundreds of millions of fortunes accumulated before were reduced to zero overnight. After he came out, he made a comeback in a very short period of time, and in the capital market, he gained far more wealth than before, and the relationship between government and business became closer, stronger, and high-end, which stemmed from the "iron will" and "righteous spirit of the rivers and lakes" displayed in the prison cell. These rumors are the epitome of the madness of the crony capital market over the years. In short, what I have heard, seen, and even participated in in this circle in my spare time over the past few years has often made me sigh for a long time.

Last year, I brought up this topic again when chatting with my friend Liu Xin in the publishing industry, and he was very interested in this topic and decided to publish it on the spot. Then he kept urging me to pick up the pen. Unfortunately, he died suddenly and young. After that, I had a drinking game with Li Xin, a veteran of audio-visual art creation, and Liu Ning, a director of the director, and we talked about the current situation, economy and current hot topics in film and television, and then agreed that the capital market has profoundly affected people's work and life, and people are no longer unfamiliar with it;

I decided to pick up the pen. Xue Fang, a reporter and financial writer from Southern People Weekly, is my former colleague and friend, and she recommended Wu Zhi, director of Zhongnan Boji Tianjuan Culture Media Co., Ltd., and his colleague, my editor, Mr. Yu Xiangyong.

Mao Yinpeng, a writer and winner of the Lao She Literary Award, once told me that the most important thing in literary works is to expose the truth of the world and reveal the fundamentals of human nature, rather than playing with fancy tricks. Therefore, in writing, I made a trade-off, "knowledge first, story secondary", pay attention to the sincerity of the text, and the skill second.

Most of my graduate classmates are in the fields of banking, insurance and securities and even guarantees, and only a few are not in the financial system, including myself. The financial knowledge we acquire in school is limited to books and "clear rules", and for the practice of equity investment and financing and the "unspoken rules", we have to absorb a lot of external nutrition, and the so-called practice brings true knowledge. Therefore, I would like to thank Mr. Gui Shuguang, an investor and former well-known financing consultant, for his wonderful series of financing columns in Entrepreneur Bond, from which I learned a lot and quoted many times in the article, and I also have to thank Yiyuntang for his Weibo about VC and PE, and for the interesting conversation about this circle. I have to mention that Mr. Ampruo wrote "Returning to China to Tame the Fire", although it was not officially published, it was all the rage on the Internet, and friends in the circle would always talk about this novel, saying that it was "absolutely unauthored". Although almost a decade has passed since the people and events written in this book, and the environment, policies, and people's mentality may have changed somewhat, the ideas exposed and criticized in the book are not outdated, and even many details are still very similar to those of today. Naturally, this book has also become one of the sources of nourishment for my novels, and I am deeply grateful for it.

I would also like to thank the eldest brother Cheng Zhiyuan, who is far away from his hometown, as a recorder of the folk culture of eastern Hubei Province, he not only writes well, but also has a deep understanding of the current situation. He read the first draft of the novel verbatim and made some pertinent revisions. My friend Lu Yue, who is engaged in fund investment, and Zhu Dishu, a financial professional, discussed some technical details with me. Jiang Yi, a young calligrapher and painter, and my younger sister, Wang Xian, who is already a teacher at a university in Guangdong, and my friend Zheng Lei, who I grew up watching, also made good suggestions for the emotional part of the manuscript. For that, I am deeply grateful.

Finally, thank you to my family. The novel was written in a state of insomnia, and my family was overwhelmed but still understanding and supportive. After the official closing of our Series B financing round in September last year, I suddenly suffered from severe insomnia for no apparent reason, so much so that I woke up in the middle of the night with nothing to do, so I drafted these words. Of course, it has been revised many times since then.

In June this year, for the first time in four years, I took official annual leave, and I traveled to Lijiang, Dali and Kunming, and some days stayed in the mountain villa of my friend Zhang Fuyu, who has transformed from an excellent financial journalist to a business and has a successful career - this is closely related to the good capital market in recent years. Moreover, I unexpectedly met Dr. Xie Shixiang, who has been friends for more than ten years and has not seen him for several years. Four years ago, he went from Beijing to the south alone, judged the situation in the turbulent capital market, made good use of opportunities, and went so far as to set up a financing guarantee company that can be called the largest in Yunnan Province, and also sponsored the Yunnan Provincial Go team and the local football team; what surprised me even more was that he also became a poet, and his poems were published in pure literary journals at all levels across the country from time to time. Poet, entrepreneur and amateur Go player, he is truly a poet.

Everyone is better than before, and the domestic capital market is expected to become rational after three or four years of madness. In the coming golden years, may each of us have a better life.

is for the afterword.

Chen Jibao

August 2012