Zou Shasha [China Youth Daily]

One can hardly imagine that it has been 13 years since Zou Shasha first started a business, but that's what her resume reads.
She has learned music since the age of 5 and was accepted by the Department of Finance at the Renmin University of China. However, she dropped out of university in her junior year, one year  after she set up a company when she was a sophomore.
At the age of 30, she founded Aha Entertainment. This year, Assassin Wu Liuqi, which she produced, was nominated by France's Festival International du Film d'Animation d'Annecy, where it enters into competition with top animation companies such as Netflix (online movie and TV rental producer) and Time Warner.
"I'm more than sure that China's original animation will take strides to the world stage," she said excitedly, "Don't you think this is a very exciting thing? I feel really happy at the mere thought of it."
Good self-study habits are developed during school, which forms her unique way of doing things. She learned from her school education that one is supposed to possess the ability to study at the highest speed whatever line of business he/she is engaged in.
''I experienced two setbacks when I was a student at school, both had to do with my scores. But each time after I got bad grades, I would work terribly hard so that I succeeded in coming to the top ranks the next time, much to the surprise of my teachers and classmates.''
Thanks to her endeavor, she was accepted by a prestigious college in Beijing. When she first arrived in Beijing, she had only 200 yuan in her pocket. But that was the last time she used the money given to her by her family.
From then on, she started to do various part-time jobs, ate instant food and lived in a basement, which finally made it possible for her to start a company on an itinerant exhibition.
"At first, I didn't even know how to register my company. Negotiating with customers was also beyond my knowledge. In order to learn such skills, I went to a large number of similar companies, pretending to be a potential customer."
Fortunately, in her first year she earned 100,000 yuan ($15,533), which was allocated only for travel and product enlargement. With the passage of time, the turning point occurred when she was in her junior year at university.
She was offered the position of deputy general manager of the north China region of a Danish company. However, she had to receive her training in Denmark, hence she chose to drop out of school without hesitation.
Zou Shasha confirmed that she had been very curious about everything before the age of thirty. Her has attempted many different fields, such as finance, retail, online and video technology.
''Looking back on it, I have found that it is in this process that I learn, verify, modify and set new goals, that is, constantly precipitate myself in such a process of reciprocation. But I told myself that when I turned 30, I would have to settle on a field which is well worthy of my decades of effort.''
That career is original animation, which is also the main business of her company. Although original animation is believed to be a hard industry to make a profit in, this was never the case for the animations produced by Aha Entertainment.
Qiang Niang! Fire, an animation based on online game Crossfire, achieved total playbacks of nearly 400 million during the first quarter of August 2017 on Tencent video, and it took only three hours to break the 10 million record since it was released.
Zou is always clear about what she can do and what she wants to do. She states, "I have two principles: firstly, as the content relies on a team and therefore the director should have team awareness in the sense that I respect him and he should be willing to consider my opinion as well. Secondly, it is okay for an originator to have awareness of business, but the main focus should be on what is to present. Those who met for the first time and talked to me about nothing related to the content were hard to produce something that really touches the heart of people."　
Assassin Wu Liuqi is a Chinese style animation. Chinese culture is integrated in the whole animation, with an aim to reflect warmth and hope in a Chinese style via an ordinary person.
When animation was found to be a good business, many game companies as well as film and television companies started to enter the industry, but such company genes still could not change the situation where animation industry is in the downstream of the industry and therefore unable to shake up the upstream resources.
"Only when the animation team becomes the priority, with all funds and resources in the upstream working for the team, can this logic and model be sustainable," said Zou.