Silicon Valley’s soft power in China is unlikely to help Facebook or Google get back into China. But it demonstrates the sort of influence China seeks for itself. Despite its innovations, China’s online renaissance has taken place largely within its own borders, and the country’s ambitions to create companies with global influence so far have been largely unsuccessful.

It also provides a model for a new type of Chinese business guru, politician and thought leader, in the vein of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Already the Chinese tech world has created figures like Jack Ma, the founder of the e-commerce giant the Alibaba Group, and Lei Jun, a founder of the budget smartphone maker Xiaomi, who derive their influence from channels outside the Chinese Communist Party. The party in turn courts them even as it seeks to contain them, often holding them up as examples of Chinese innovation.

Baidu, one of China’s largest tech companies and often called the Google of China, owes a heavy debt to the valley. One founder, Eric Xu, made a documentary about Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and helped model the company around an unstructured, meritocratic — and thoroughly non-Chinese — organizational style its founders admired.

Employees receive copies of a book called the “Baidu Analects,” said Kaiser Kuo, a former spokesman for Baidu and the host of the China podcast Sinica. “It’s anecdote after anecdote of these borderline insubordinate employees who stuck to their ideas in spite of pushback, and the enlightened manager who let them do it, and ultimately they triumph,” Mr. Kuo said. “It’s almost this libertarian, Ayn Rand ethos.”

At times China seems to embrace Silicon Valley clichés more eagerly than Silicon Valley itself.

A prominent techie cafe in Beijing has a large wall with a timeline charting the initial public stock offerings of American tech companies alongside those in China. Some companies have created Apple-style product unveilings that are ticketed, cultural events. A developer in China is planning to start work on “tech towns” — planned communities where the innovative-minded can live and work together. Start-up offices often have open seating plans with office pets, foosball tables and a boss sitting with the employees.

“Silicon Valley has become a kind of beacon of cultural change in China,” said David Chao, a partner at the venture capital firm DCM. “Hollywood could impact what kind of handbag a lady buys in China, but it never impacted corporate culture like Silicon Valley has.”

Even so, most Chinese companies have not fully absorbed the culture. Many are still highly top-down and bureaucratic, and open office plans often mask more deeply conservative customs. In place of California’s sunny suburbs, China’s innovation hub sits in the traffic and smog-choked northwestern part of Beijing, crammed into office towers above malls that sell all manner of electronics.