Zhao Bowen strides across the linoleum floors of the Beijing office of QuantiHealth, a biotech start-up, one day in late June. He’s wearing an untucked, short-sleeved button-down shirt and brown leather sandals. As he walks, Zhao, the company’s CEO, gestures to paintings on a wall—cartoons illustrating the origins of gut bacteria, QuantiHealth’s primary focus. The business, which is just a year old, is using genomics to map these microbes and hopefully unlock the secrets of how they help regulate human health. The air in the office, which QuantiHealth has only occupied for a month, smells of new furniture—and of sweat. Zhao says he works about 14 hours each day, supervising a team of researchers, talking to potential investors, headhunting, reviewing budgets, and, in his spare time, reading books about management.

But all that hard work isn't what exhausts him. Rather, he's tired of talking about his age: Zhao is just 23. The international media have dubbed him a "boy genius" and "wunderkind." Zhao complains in English, "When you're running a company, nobody gives a fucking care about your age. If you're 18 or 80, you're equal parts in the market. It actually does not matter."

Whether Zhao likes it or not, however, in China's storied science system, age does matter. Seniority has been perhaps the most significant factor for promotion and professional success in the sector over the past 50 years. Zhao is defying the odds: In 2009, he was a high school dropout. Six years later, after stints with groundbreaking genome research projects, he's running his own company.

QuantiHealth's office, in a nondescript office park in southern Beijing, has an interior layout that at once reveals Zhao's obsessive attention to creative detail and his youthfulness. An area behind the main rows of desks for staffers, of which there are 10, contains small tables with seating sunken into the floor; they exist to encourage people to gather for brainstorming. A large bookshelf against one wall holds a smattering of computer and science books. Zhao has begun to stock it with his own collection, but he also urges colleagues to bring in their favorites, giving it the feel of an eclectic lending library. Meanwhile, QuantiHealth's labs sit behind large windows that allow people to peer inside, like at restaurants where diners can watch chefs at work.

Much as Zhao is eager to revamp China's traditional work culture, he hopes his company can shift the country's approach to medicine. As its name suggests, Quanti-Health is interested in finding clear measures of what makes people healthy and what doesn't—for instance, too much or too little of certain types of gut bacteria—and then applying that knowledge to real-life solutions. "You simply cannot do yoga, tai chi, and Chinese medicine," Zhao says, "trying to cure something you don't really understand."

Zhao's vision and ambition are nothing short of vast. And it seems he's coming of age at just the right moment.

Despite such high-profile successes as achieving manned spaceflight and building the world’s fastest supercomputer, China’s science sector has for the past two decades been burdened by fraud, theft, and top-down priorities set by bureaucrats in Beijing, as well as by the demands of its strict system of rank and hierarchy. These problems recently exploded into public view: In 2013, the Chinese Communist Party launched an anti-corruption campaign that has since toppled dozens of prominent scientists, academics, and officials for stealing government funds, and international investigations have exposed hundreds of instances of fraudulent data and plagiarism in research journals, as well as a cottage industry of publication rights for sale.

Slowly but surely, China’s young scientists are finding ways to prove that the old way of doing things might no longer be the only way.

The result is a new space that’s opening in Chinese science, one in which some of the best and the brightest are moving out of the traditional system in favor of private or semiprivate research. There, success is driven more by merit, not state approval. It’s reminiscent, in some ways, of the idealism that built Silicon Valley, and it reflects the energy already propelling tech start-ups that are changing how Chinese society conducts business, entertains, and interacts— including with the rest of the world. For instance, WeChat, created by private Internet giant Tencent, today has more than 100 million users outside China, and in 2014, e-commerce company Alibaba had one of the largest initial public offerings in history, at $21.8 billion on the New York Stock Exchange. These companies haven’t just flourished; they’ve also inspired other Chinese entrepreneurs and investors looking to park their aspirations and money somewhere other than the Chinese stock market or real estate. In 2014, China’s private- equity market for new investments reached $73 billion, nearly doubling from its 2013 size, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

New streams of capital are helping to create novel avenues for scientists to try out their ideas. No longer is chasing government-sanctioned research goals inevitable. Slowly but surely, China’s young scientists are finding ways to prove that the old way of doing things might no longer be the only way.

If innovators like Zhao are successful, their stories could entice foreign talent to China—and keep domestic talent at home, curbing what even the Communist mouthpiece People’s Daily in 2013 called “the world’s worst brain drain.” (According to the U.S. Energy Department, 85 percent of Chinese people who earned their science or engineering doctorates in the United States in 2006 were still there in 2011.) The more freedom and success Chinese scientists have, the more likely it is that committed young geniuses will follow their lead.

Zhao knows the obstacles he faces, but seeing an opportunity, he’s inclined to jump. “It’s possible that we will fail,” he says, “but it’s worth a try.”

Zhao began studying at the High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China, located in the heart of Beijing’s Zhongguancun Science Park, in 2004. The school regularly places near or at the top in national science rankings and funnels 85 percent of students to the prestigious Peking, Renmin, and Tsinghua universities. Zhao was already at the top of his class when, in 2007, he and his parents attended a dinner in Beijing for migrants from Hunan, the family’s home province. There, they met Huang Sanwen, a scientist from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), who would become Zhao’s mentor. Huang set up an internship for Zhao, then 15, on his team, which was sequencing the DNA of a cucumber—a project that earned Zhao a co-author slot on a 2009 paper in Nature Genetics. During his two years at CAAS he learned “the lab skills and the theoretical knowledge about genomics and life sciences,” Zhao says. “I would skip some classes, especially those like politics, and ride on my bicycle to the institute. I wouldn’t go back home until 10 p.m.”

The experience also exposed Zhao to the expansive landscape of state-run science organizations across China. Under the CAAS umbrella alone there are 42 research institutes, a graduate school, and a publishing house. And that’s just a fraction of the state-sponsored science enterprise: The much larger Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) oversees more than 100 institutes, two universities, and 60,000 employees.

Zhao Bowen walks past the library at the QuantiHealth office in Beijing.

This ecosystem has been lavished for decades with generous funding from the government in order to help China compete on a global level. In March 1978, at a national conference in Beijing, leader Deng Xiaoping celebrated science as the key to China’s future growth and prosperity: “Without modern science and technology, it is impossible to build modern agriculture, modern industry, or modern national defense,” he said. Deng’s comments were followed over the years by a series of increasingly ambitious government plans to raise funding and set national research priorities. In January 2006, President Hu Jintao introduced the Medium- to Long-Term Plan (MLP), a document that mapped the country’s 15-year strategy for science and technology. According to the proposal, by 2020 China’s R&D spending should grow to 2.5 percent of GDP, and 60 percent of the country’s economic development should come from scientific and technological achievements. By 2012, R&D spending had quickly approached those expectations, hitting $163 billion, or 1.98 percent of GDP.

Measured in purchasing power parity—as Cong Cao, an expert on Chinese science policy at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, and Yutao Sun of Dalian University of Technology in China have calculated—the United States is still the top science spender globally, at $454 billion in 2012. But China comes in second, and according to a 2014 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, it may surpass the United States in research spending as early as 2019.

Yet “money alone doesn’t buy innovation,” says Denis Simon, an American expert on Chinese science policy and one of the few foreigners whom Beijing has invited to give input on high-level planning, including the MLP. Consider patents and intellectual property (IP): In 2013, China paid $21 billion for use of foreign IP, according to World Bank data, but collected just $887 million for use of its own, meaning its IP has limited value on the global market. In contrast, China’s smaller neighbors reaped far more from their inventions: Singapore earned $3 billion; South Korea, $4 billion; and Japan, $32 billion. And the United States took in $129 billion. According to Cao, “China is spending huge amounts of money on science but not yet getting great returns on its investment.”

China’s leaders now want to “encourage mass entrepreneurship and innovation,” as Premier Li Keqiang told world leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January. But doing so requires more than expanding budgets. It necessitates shifting the norms of Chinese research culture.

The government’s obsession with science as a means of catapulting the economy forward is actually often counterproductive. “The tension is always that Chinese science from the beginning has been an incredibly nationalist and patriotic process, a mission to strengthen the motherland,” says Adam Segal, a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) senior fellow who studies global innovation. Creativity is hard to nurture when the government is fixated on certain priorities—for instance, defense, space, lasers, and supercomputers—and maintaining chains of authority. “This top-down approach stifles innovation and makes clear to everyone that the connections with bureaucrats and a few powerful scientists are paramount,” a pair of respected professors at Tsinghua and Peking universities, both of whom studied in the United States, wrote in a 2010 editorial in Science. “To obtain major grants in China, it is an open secret that doing good research is not as important as schmoozing with powerful bureaucrats and their favorite experts.”

To be sure, some state backing is important. “To create conditions for real innovation, there’s a general sense that you want government support and investment in research and training,” says Segal. “But you don’t want the government involved in choosing between projects and creating incentives for specific projects without a lot of independent input from the research community itself.”

Today, China’s official science system is especially unwelcoming for young researchers, who struggle to scramble up the career ladder and secure adequate funding for projects. “The only way you could achieve … something that really matters would be to spend a lot of time climbing from the bottom to top of that hierarchy,” Zhao says.

That’s why he decided to forge his own path. And he was able to do so thanks to a few pioneers who came before him.

In 2007, well-respected geneticists Wang Jian and Yang Huanming, then in their 50s, began packing up their offices in China’s capital. They were embarking on a new experiment: turning Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), an entity they had co-founded, into an independent research institute. Impossible to know at the time, this move would redefine the relationship between Chinese scientists and their government.

Since BGI’s founding in 1999, it had worked closely with the state: According to Nature, CAS secured financing for BGI’s contribution to the Human Genome Project and offered grants for subsequent work. In 2003, BGI became a part of the CAS structure, which was a “reward” for creating a SARS diagnostic kit that impressed President Hu.

The arrangement with CAS, however, proved limiting. BGI lacked the freedom to set its own research agenda, internal hiring policies—including the ability to recruit budding scientists without advanced degrees—and external collaborations. CAS limits the size of its institutes, which didn’t coincide with BGI’s ambitious plans. (It has since grown to about 5,000 employees.)

Then, in 2007, the city government in Shenzhen, a special economic zone, offered BGI $12.8 million to move there. If BGI became successful, the city would more than recoup the money in tax revenue over time. Eager for independence, Wang and Yang agreed.

They were embarking on a new experiment: turning BGI into an independent research institute. Impossible to know at the time, this move would redefine the relationship between Chinese scientists and their government.

Thanks in part to a $1.58 billion credit line from the China Development Bank, BGI went on a shopping spree in 2010 for state-of-the-art genome sequencers, which run about half a million dollars a pop and allow scientists to turn DNA samples into detailed genetic blueprints for analysis. With this vast technological brigade and BGI’s large staff, most of whom were young, the institute could undertake research projects of enormous scale that other institutes and universities simply didn’t have the firepower to achieve.

That’s why CAAS turned to BGI for help with its 2009 cucumber DNA project. The private company quickly acquired a mystique for Zhao, still a CAAS intern at the time. He recalls that his team would gather a vegetable’s genetic information and ship it “to a thing called BGI,” where “magically it became data.”

Before long, that mystique turned into a career opportunity. During the summer before the teen’s senior year of high school, Zhao’s mentor, Huang, fatefully suggested that his protégé take an internship at BGI. Just two weeks into the gig, Zhao was sold: “I personally believed that preparing for tests [like gaokao, China’s university entrance exam] was a waste of time. After just a few weeks, I had already learned a lot and solved some problems”—such as creating an algorithm for counting gene variations.

Zhao decided to drop out of school and take a full-time job at BGI. To convince his father that dropping out of school and taking a full-time job at BGI was the right choice, Zhao said, “Five years from now, I will be leading my own group or lab. If I continue with my studies, maybe I could go to the best university in China or the U.S.—and then I could go to BGI and work under a high school dropout.” Wang, who once led genome-sequencing projects at the University of Washington, had long idolized Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and had a soft spot for dropouts. This pushed BGI to the forefront of a global conversation about the norms associated with higher-education degrees. In March 2010, Nature published a provocative editorial—“Do scientists really need a PhD?”—that discussed whether BGI’s approach might hold lessons for other countries. “If the BGI can pull it off,” the editorial concluded, “it might find itself a model not only for creative approaches to genomics but also for education and training.”

Within two years of arriving at BGI, Zhao founded its Cognitive Genomics Lab and began managing a mind-bogglingly complex enterprise: searching for patterns among thousands of discreet gene variations that might shed light on the biological basis of human intelligence. It was the largest research project of its kind in the world. “We all believe that intelligence is what makes us human, but it was not studied very well at that time.… So we thought, why shouldn’t we do that?” Zhao says.