Dan Wang

2023 letter

2024-01-24 04:30:07

(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2022)

I. Walking

The trunk of an elephant might feel cool to the touch. Not what one expects, perhaps, from 200 pounds of writhing muscle, strong enough to uproot a tree, which tapers down to two “fingers,” giving it enough delicacy to detect the ripest berry on a shrub, and pluck it. Feeling an elephant’s trunk draws you to her other great feature: melancholic eyes that are veiled by long and dusty lashes. This combination of might with the suggestion of serene contemplation is surely the reason that elephants seem to embody a special state of grace.

I encountered several of these big beasts on a trek through the mountains of northern Thailand in December. The occasion was a “walk and talk” organized by Kevin Kelly and Craig Mod, who launched a dozen people on a 100 kilometer walk over seven days from Mount Inthanon to the center of Chiang Mai.

Our journey took us through elephant grounds, banana plantations, and coffee shrubs, finishing within Chiang Mai’s old city walls. The landscape shifted marvelously as we descended from the mountain into the city. At higher altitude, Mount Inthanon is home to forests of relict pine, each tree looking like a skinny and very tall piece of broccoli, their foliage wreathed in fog every morning before the sun broke through. At middle attitude, we found teak trees. Deforestation over the past few decades has spurred villagers to protect some of the oldest teaks by wrapping their trunks in saffron monk robes, thus “ordaining” them. At lower altitudes we saw the vegetation typical of rainforest: bamboo groves, lychee orchards, and banana plants. I found the latter unexpectedly beautiful. Bananas grow in bunches on a rough stem, under enormous leaves that are tall enough to allow an elephant to rest in their shade.

Waterfalls dotted the trail, which allowed us sometimes to take a dip in the afternoon heat. It wasn’t just the natural landscape that was so stunning. Terraced farms, carved into hillsides, were attractive too. Local villagers have in recent years started cultivating strawberries, some of which are sold directly at roadside stands. These highland farmers understand cash crops. This region of northern Thailand, after all, was a major grower of the opium poppy until the 1980s. At that point, the Thai government (in a coordinated campaign with neighboring countries) eradicated nearly all opium production, enticing — or more often, compelling — farmers to plant other crops. That didn’t stop, however, one of the villagers from reminiscing about the days when the fields produced “Doctor O.”

One of the ideas of the walk-and-talk, as Craig puts it, is to put adults in situations they may not have experienced since they were kids: “new people, unknown environs, continuous socializing, intense conversations.” Our demographics leaned toward the middle-aged and self-employed: people who could afford to disconnect from family and work obligations for what was really a ten-day commitment in early December. Few of the twelve of us had previously met anyone else on this trip and a long walk is a fast way to get to know someone. Talking happened naturally, as the landscape continuously reconfigured us into knots of two or three. Our conversation weaved into a single strand over the nightly dinner, with Kevin moderating over one topic.

It didn’t take long for people to open up: to talk about how they decided to join the walk, and very quickly onwards to their lives, their work, and their struggles. The central conversation every night featured topics to which everyone can contribute, so our discussions had prompts like “home,” “fears,” and “failures.” These more general topics were extraordinarily effective in prompting people to be vulnerable, which helped to bind the group together. (If I did another walk-and-talk, I might try leaning away from consensus. That is, to treat the dinners more like a workshop, in which everyone comes prepared with a 15-minute talk on something they’re working on, then open up for discussion. I concede, however, that not everyone would find it a thrilling idea to end a strenuous day with a lecture.)

We carried small packs during the day and had a larger bag forwarded to our nightly accommodations. We stayed along waterfalls, in elephant sanctuaries, at a glamping site that looked as if transplanted from California, and terminating in a Chiang Mai hotel shaded by a 200-year-old tamarind tree. There was also the bizarre. One night, we were the only guests at a resort so creepy that we debated whether the whole thing was a front for tax fraud. Its bungalows looked like they were the 3-D printed output of an AI generator that received a detailed description of Antonio Gaudí’s Park Güell. That the hotel staff kept taking photographs of us, as if they were documenting that they had real guests, didn’t allay our unease that our presence could be abetting a fraudulent enterprise. 

I think it would be wonderful if the walk-and-talk could be a commonplace activity. I can imagine doing one every few years, alternating between walking with close friends and entrusting group selection to someone else. The challenge is that this format requires a gargantuan effort of planning. Some off-the-shelf walks are possible, for example along pilgrimage routes, but many will have to be bespoke. Our heroic guide on this trip is an American hotelier who has lived in Chiang Mai and China over the last 30 years, who took it upon himself to hike our route five times before leading the rest of us along. A well-organized walk demands planning not only the route, but also booking accommodations for around ten people, finding a quiet restaurant every night, and a dozen other things. (Craig’s comprehensive guide features all the items to consider.) A 100 kilometer walk is difficult to pull off anywhere in America: the suburban, car-centric reality of this country means that it’s hard to find a walkable route that has accommodations spaced in intervals of approximately 15 km.1

Then again, committing a chunk of time to go abroad may as well be a strength of the format. These walks are not a family weekend activity, a spontaneous trip with friends, or an offsite meant to produce workplace bonding. They’re much more serious than that. It takes special concentration, after all, to reproduce the magic of being a child. One of the things that this walk provoked me to do was to write this year’s letter on what I saw in Thailand.

I stayed for the whole month of December in Chiang Mai. In part, for food. Whole new culinary vistas open up once you’re ready to eat jungle. My favorite Northern Thai meals featured a papaya salad (or Burmese tea leaf salad), with some grilled meats — pork jowl, half a chicken, spare ribs — and a seafood soup in clear broth. For sides, one can order pork with lemongrass and ginger grilled in a banana leaf, crushed young jackfruit mixed with chilies, and sometimes a fried honeycomb. I’ve never eaten honeycomb before. It’s a strange thing to savor, the texture like biting into a pillowy piece of toast, expressing only a hint of honey. For dessert, I can imagine nothing more perfect than to have slices of a ripe mango on the side of sticky rice, the latter plump from being soaked in coconut milk, and coconut cream drizzled on top of the whole thing.

And I stayed, in part, to explore highland Southeast Asia. My 2022 letter was preoccupied with Yunnan, which is on the other side of mountain ranges from Chiang Mai. This is the same vast highland region populated by marginalized folks who have deliberately tried to put themselves beyond the reach of powerful states, the most domineering of which have been Burmese, Tibetan, and especially Han-Chinese. By moving into rugged terrain and practicing mountain agriculture, they’ve managed to maintain an arms-length relationship with valley kingdoms, taking as much “civilization” as they require. In Yunnan I was in land of the Bai and the Dai peoples; the hill tribes in Chiang Mai include the Karen, Akha, Shan, and Hmong.

These Thai highlands absorbed a wave of new people yearning for statelessness this year. In Chiang Mai, I encountered a great mass of young folks who no longer wish to live in China.

II. Running

The most important story of China in 2023 might be that the expected good news of economic recovery didn’t materialize, when the end of zero-Covid should have lifted consumer spirits; and that the unexpected bad news of political uncertainty kept cropping up, though the previous year’s party congress should have consolidated regime stability. China may have hit its GDP growth target of 5 percent this year, but its main stock index has fallen -17% since the start of 2023. More perplexing were the politics. 2023 was a year of disappearing ministers, disappearing generals, disappearing entrepreneurs, disappearing economic data, and disappearing business for the firms that have counted on blistering economic growth.

No wonder that so many Chinese are now talking about rùn. Chinese youths have in recent years appropriated this word in its English meaning to express a desire to flee. For a while, rùn was a way to avoid the work culture of the big cities or the family expectations that are especially hard for Chinese women. Over the three years of zero-Covid, after the state enforced protracted lockdowns, rùn evolved to mean emigrating from China altogether.2

One of the most incredible trends I’ve been watching this year is that rising numbers of Chinese nationals are being apprehended at the US-Mexico border. In January, US officers encountered around 1000 Chinese at the southwest border; the numbers kept rising, and by November they encountered nearly 5000.3 Many Chinese are flying to Ecuador, where they have visa-free access, so that they can take the perilous road through the Darién Gap. It’s hard to know much about this group, but journalists who have spoken to these people report that they come from a mix of backgrounds and motivations.4 I have not expected that so many Chinese people are willing to embark on what is a dangerous, monthslong journey to take a pass on the “China Dream” and the “great rejuvenation” that’s undertaken in their name.

The Chinese who rùn to the American border are still a tiny set of the people who leave. Most emigrés are departing through legal means. People who can find a way to go to Europe or an Anglophone country would do so, but most are going, as best as I can tell, to three Asian countries. Those who have ambition and entrepreneurial energy are going to Singapore. Those who have money and means are going to Japan. And those who have none of these things — the slackers, the free spirits, kids who want to chill — are hanging out in Thailand.

I spent time with these young Chinese in Chiang Mai. Around a quarter of the people I chatted with have been living in Thailand for the last year or two, while the rest were just visiting, sometimes with the intention to figure out a way to stay. Why Thailand? Mostly out of ease. Chinese can go to Thailand without having to apply for a visa, and they can take advantage of an education visa to stay longer. That category is generous, encompassing everything from language training to Muay Thai boxing lessons. Many Chinese sign up for the visa and then blow off class.

Some people had remote jobs. Many of the rest were practicing the intense spirituality possible in Thailand. That comes in part from all the golden-roofed temples and monasteries that make Chiang Mai such a splendid city. One can find a meditation retreat at these temples in the city or in more secluded areas in the mountains. Here, one is supposed to meditate for up to 14 hours a day, speaking only to the head monk every morning to tell him the previous day’s breathing exercises and hear the next set of instructions. After meditating in silence for 20 days, one person told me that he found himself slipping in and out of hallucinogenic experiences from breath exercises alone. 

The other wellspring of spiritual practice comes from the massive use of actual psychedelics, which are so easy to find in Chiang Mai. Thailand was the first country in Asia to decriminalize marijuana, and weed shops are now as common as cafés. It seems like everyone has a story about using mushrooms, ayahuasca, or even stronger magic. The best mushrooms are supposed to grow in the dung of elephants, leading to a story of a legendary group of backpackers who have been hopping from one dung heap to another, going on one long, unbroken trip.

Most of the young Chinese I chatted with are in their 20s. Visitors to Thailand are trying to catch up on the fun they lost under three years of zero-Covid. Those who have made Chiang Mai their new home have complex reasons for staying. They told me that they’ve felt a quiet shattering of their worldview over the past few years. These are youths who grew up in bigger cities and attended good universities, endowing them with certain expectations: that they could pursue meaningful careers, that society would gain greater political freedoms, and that China would become more integrated with the rest of the world. These hopes have curdled. Their jobs are either too stressful or too menial, political restrictions on free expression have ramped up over the last decade, and China’s popularity has plunged in developed countries.

So they’ve rùn. One trigger for departure were the white-paper protests, the multi-city demonstrations at the end of 2022 in which young people not only demanded an end to zero-Covid, but also political reform. Several of the Chiang Mai residents participated in the protests in Shanghai or Beijing or they have friends who had been arrested. Nearly everyone feels alienated by the pressures of modern China. A few lost their jobs in Beijing’s crackdown on online tutoring. Several have worked in domestic Chinese media, seriously disgruntled that the censors make it difficult to publish ambitious stories. People complain of being treated like chess pieces by top leader Xi Jinping, who is exhorting the men to work for national greatness and for the women to bear their children.

Many people still feel ambivalence about moving to Thailand. Not everyone has mustered the courage to tell their Chinese parents where they really are. Mom and dad are under the impression that they’re studying abroad in Europe or something. That sometimes leads to elaborate games to maintain the subterfuge, like drawing curtains to darken the room when they video chat with family, since they’re supposed to be in a totally different time zone; or keeping up with weather conditions in the city they’re supposed to be so that they’re not surprised when parents ask about rain or snow.

There still are some corners in China that are relatively permissive. One of these is Yunnan’s Dali, a city on the northern tip of highland Southeast Asia, where I spent much of 2022. There, one can find the remnants of a drug culture as well as a party scene for an occasional rave. But even Dali is becoming less tenable these days since the central government has cottoned on that the city is a hub for free spirits. The tightening restrictions emanating from Beijing are spreading to every corner of the country. “China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” one person told me. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”

I lingered with a group of Dali folks who moved to Chiang Mai over the past year. These are people in China’s crypto community who’ve found it increasingly more difficult to hang on after Beijing banned miners and exchanges. In 2022, police disrupted a festival they held called Wamotopia, which became a gathering point for crypto people and digital nomads. The idea was to burn a big wooden cat in a field in Dali at the conclusion of the festival, but Chinese police dispersed the event shortly after it began.5 So this year they moved to Thailand. 

Wamotopia consisted of Chinese mostly in their 20s who were exuberant and full of optimism, though their moods were sometimes modulated by a sense of despair. The latter comes from feeling like they can’t return to China, due either to their participation in the 2022 protests, because their crypto interests are no longer safe to pursue, or because they feel alienated from Chinese society. Many are unsure of whether they will stay permanently in Thailand, which means that they are sometimes plagued by existential questions of what home means to them. 

The festival attracted both Chinese residents in Chiang Mai and also visitors who flew here for the occasion. People said it’s becoming increasingly difficult to meet like-minded people in bigger gatherings in China anymore, given that the authorities are leery about large groups congregating to discuss ideas they don’t understand. For them, the festival was first and foremost a way to make new friends. Wamotopia billed itself a self-organized event, with anyone able to propose hosting sessions at a few locations scattered around town, which included a hotel resort, co-working spaces, and a few private homes. Attendees proposed a smorgasbord of events, not just on crypto and digital nomadism, but also dumpling-making sessions and visits to temples. 

None of the headline events were explicitly political. There are enough people who will still return to China that the organizers felt that they didn’t need to invite official scrutiny. But a current of politics electrified side conversations. People bemoaned both how difficult life is in China and how difficult it is to emigrate. A lot of folks wanted to define themselves as “citizens of the world,” as people belonging to “Earth” rather than any nation. But that runs up against the hard fact that they hold Chinese passports, which is more difficult to travel with than many other passports.

I attended one event in a private home billed as a talk on the Chinese diaspora. Around 30 people sat in a living room, listening to the history of Chinese in Southeast Asia. They would spend much of the time talking about themselves as “Jews of the East.” It has apparently become a meme in the Chinese crypto community to use Semitic tropes to describe how they’ve become a beleaguered people driven out of their homeland, trying to make it overseas by plying their talent of being astute middlemen. I find this comparison overdramatic.6 It’s hardly the case that trading crypto constitutes an inalienable identity and has suffered real persecution. But such is the discontent they feel.

I’ve never felt great enthusiasm for crypto. After chatting with these young Chinese, I became more tolerant of their appeal. Digital currencies are solutions looking for problems most everywhere in the Western world, but they have real value for people who suffer from state controls. The crypto community in China has attracted grifters, as it has everywhere else. But it is also creating a community of people trying to envision different paths for the future.

That spirit pervades the young people in Chiang Mai. A bookseller told me that there’s a hunger for new ideas. After the slowdown in economic growth and the tightening of censorship over the past decade, people are looking for new ways to understand the world. One of the things this bookshop did is to translate a compilation of the Whole Earth Catalog, with a big quote of “the map is not the territory” in Chinese characters on the cover. That made me wonder: have we seen this movie before? These kids have embraced the California counterculture of the ‘90s. They’re doing drugs, they’re trying new technologies, and they’re sounding naively idealistic as they do so. I’m not expecting them to found any billion-dollar companies. But give it enough time, and I think they will build something more interesting than coins.

Might this community persist for that long? I don’t worry that Thailand will fail to be welcoming. It has had centuries of experience absorbing Chinese migrants. Every spasm of violence in southern China since the fall of the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century has disgorged vast numbers of people from Guangdong and Fujian into Southeast Asia, with big waves coming after southerners resisted the Manchu conquest of China, during the Taiping Rebellion, and when the Qing drove Hui Muslims out of Yunnan. After a surge of Chinese migration in the early 20th century, up to half of Bangkok’s population was Chinese, which helped to build Thailand’s trading economy and create its bourgeois society. Around 10 to 15 percent of Thailand’s population is of Chinese heritage today. That has produced its share of frictions in Thai history, but it has also been peaceable relative to other Southeast Asian countries.7

Rather, I suspect that Chinese authorities will not forever continue to suffer its citizens to organize so close to home. Thailand already has an extradition treaty with China, but there’s a fear here that Beijing wants more. A recent Chinese blockbuster made Thailand appear to be a dangerous place to visit, and state media has occasionally amplified that sentiment. To Chinese and other foreigners living in Thailand, it’s absurd to think that crime and danger lurk around every corner. Chiang Mai is an amazingly safe place. They fear that state media is trying to create a pretext to justify a presence for Chinese police in Thailand, rather like how they are sometimes reaching into Mongolia.8

III. Drifting

I don’t want to romanticize rùn to excess. I recognize that emigration is a consideration for a miniscule percentage of China’s population. Few people can contemplate abandoning nearly everything they’ve built to start anew in a foreign country. And I recognize that life is not so bad for the overwhelming majority of Chinese. I’ve written that for someone in the middle class, there has never been a better year to live in China, a comment I repeated when I went on the Ezra Klein Show in March.

This middle class, however, is feeling less sure these days, as the economy keeps getting whacked. The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them to default and triggering a collapse in the confidence of homebuyers hasn’t improved matters. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but taking the scalps of entrepreneurs and stomping out their businesses isn’t boosting sentiment. Does the government need to rein in official corruption? Definitely, but terrorizing the bureaucracy has also made the policymaking apparatus more paralyzed and risk averse. It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

As economic growth trends downwards, I’m not expecting most of the Chinese population to rùn or revolt. More likely, I feel, is a deflation of hopes that comes from a passive acceptance that tough times are ahead. Spontaneous protests can happen, as they did in Henan, Shanghai, and Beijing in 2022 over zero-Covid. But it took simultaneous lockdowns across the country before people dared to go on the streets. I expect that China’s aging society isn’t so combustible, given that older people tend not to protest. The biggest trigger for people to go out on the streets are price spikes of essential goods. If anything, China is experiencing deflation as it slows, so I don’t expect that low growth will trigger broad unrest.

In spite of China’s stumbles, I think we are forgetting that it still has a lot of strengths. No, I don’t feel particular optimism about its growth trajectory, and I don’t doubt that it’s facing one of the most startling demographic declines that the world has ever seen. But things aren’t falling quickly enough to unravel China’s still-enormous stock of capabilities. It is still the world’s second-largest economy. Its per capita GDP is only one-sixth the level of America’s, which represents plenty of latent potential for catch-up growth. The glacial pace of demographic decline will not quickly erode Beijing’s ambitions. For all of China’s demographic woes, all projections show that it will still have over 1 billion people by 2050.

While 50 percent of China’s economy might be dysfunctional, the 5 percent that’s going spectacularly well is pretty dangerous to American interests.9 I’m thinking mostly about manufacturing. As I wrote earlier this year, China is going from strength to strength in industrial sectors: clean technologies (especially solar photovoltaics and electric vehicle batteries), electronic components, and automotives. In 2023, it overtook Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter, a barely imaginable achievement even five years ago. And the state retains big ambitions. In May, China’s space agency announced that it will land astronauts on the moon by 2030, making it the second country with that capability. It’s rare for Beijing to lay out formal timelines unless it’s quite confident that it has the task in hand.

The foundations of China’s success in EVs were built a decade ago, when the state decided to bet on batteries, and then bought up a lot of the mines for these metals. Though the present-day economic trajectory is much uncertain, we’re still going to see technology achievements that result from decisions made years ago. The state continues to throw reams of scientists and engineers to work out its strategic deficiencies. Though companies are relocating production to India and Vietnam, China is going to remain the world’s largest manufacturer for many more years to come. That means its manufacturing ecosystems will still produce a technological momentum of their own.

This year, I came across a lot of stories on the state of America’s defense industrial base. Most are linked to Ukraine, which blew through several years’ worth of America’s artillery stockpiles in a matter of weeks.10 I keep reading about ships. China built half of the world’s ships (by gross tonnage) in 2022, while the US had 0.2 percent of capacity: in practice, this meant that while China builds hundreds of new ships a year, the US builds three to five. “Quantity has a quality all its own” is a quip attributed either to Joseph Stalin or the US Navy, when it massively outproduced Japan. I hope that America’s industrial base is better than the preening state of the Imperial Japanese Navy, seeking comfort in the ornateness of ships rather than their number.11

Can America’s headstart in AI make up for its manufacturing deficiencies? Perhaps. I worry however that one of America’s superpowers is to spin up yarns to reduce the urgency for action. The United States can relax either because China will be pulled out to sea by the receding tide of demographic decline, or Silicon Valley will produce superintelligence — and it will be on America’s side. I’m trying to tell a story that preserves American agency. It is that China will not fade away, meaning that America must reform itself for a protracted contest with a peer competitor. It also has to contend with China’s strengths because it’s a lazy exercise to look only at a country’s weaknesses. If we obsessed only over America’s problems, it would be a pretty ugly picture as well.

The main thing in America’s favor is that Xi has been busy eroding China’s strengths. First, China’s political institutions. Though China’s political system may have demonstrated a greater track record for reform over the last 40 years, things appear pretty stuck under Xi. The US, however, doesn’t look too good either. One of the things I hear among American political and business elites is that the country needs to become much more friendly for high-skilled immigrants, but they see no political scope for doing that work. So it feels to me that the US is treating its deficiencies — an inability to build stuff or create a functional system for admitting high-skilled migrants — as mysteries to be endured rather than problems to be solved.

Second, economic growth. Much of China’s present strength rests on manufacturing leadership. If China can’t achieve reasonably high levels of growth, then the manufacturing advantage will dissipate, along with many of its other capabilities. And Xi Jinping has formally de-prioritized economic growth as China’s top task.12 Since he did so in 2017, he has introduced profound confusion into China’s political system, which has for four decades organized itself around spurring growth. Xi may be correct to say that China’s intensive focus on growth is unsustainable — recall that he’s 60 percent correct on everything. The problem is that the vague slogans he prizes like “common prosperity,” “the China Dream,” and “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people” are not a satisfying replacement for the expectation of continued enrichment. 

Xi is talking about national greatness without backing it up with economic growth. The trouble is that when people suffer — as they do through a property collapse, high unemployment, and months-long lockdowns — they start to doubt. When they’re given a cold, hard smack in the face by something that certainly doesn’t feel like national greatness, they start feeling adrift. This sense of alienation has been a big part of rùn.

In other words, Xi is not telling a good national story to help people make sense of economic slowdown. Storytelling really isn’t the party’s strong suit. I’m puzzled that Xi keeps feeling the need to tighten political restrictions around society. Controls on free expression are stronger than they have been in decades. As I’ve written in each of my previous letters, the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products. What are the great Chinese creations of the last 20 years, aside from a science fiction trilogy published before Xi took office, a short-video app that doesn’t display Chinese content overseas, and a video game that looks as if it’s thoroughly Japanese? Even most of the movies released these days are either nationalist blockbusters, sappy romances, or supernatural action flicks.

I wonder why the regime can’t have greater trust in its citizens for free expression. It’s as if the party has so little self confidence that people will be pleased with the goods it has delivered.13 China today is a country where the governance is increasingly more rigid while the people feel deflated. While Xi is intent on hardening society for geopolitical competition, people are questioning whether they want to be pieces of clay that await molding by the party.

It’s easy to be gloomy about China today, given the obvious challenges with economic growth and authoritarian tightening. But I found myself more optimistic about the future while I was in Thailand. Some people are drifting away from China, and many of those who stay are dreaming of better futures. These are creative acts.

In Chiang Mai, I was reminded of the superb creativity of young Chinese. These kids can meme with the best of them. My favorite thing about the Chinese internet is the velocity of new words: rùn (to flee) and tangping (to lie flat) have attained mainstream prominence, but there are many others.14 In Thailand, people are having the sorts of offline fun that are no longer so easy to find in China’s big cities. They’re tripping out, they’re dancing in clubs, and, the most difficult act to pull off, they’re sometimes congregating to discuss how life can be better. Imagine the sorts of music they could make and movies they could produce if they didn’t have to face an overbearing censor that forces their work to be in line with “socialist core values.”

Chiang Mai also reminded me of the pluralism that’s still possible in Chinese culture. My 2021 letter focused on how the control tendencies of Beijing can be balanced by the more freewheeling and outward-looking commercial instincts of Shanghai in the east and Shenzhen/Guangzhou in the south. Beijing now decisively has the upper hand. That means more state management of the economy and a total lack of embarrassment from government officials to scold, nag, and meddle in the private lives of citizens. The commercial spirit of eastern and southern China may have withered, but even Maoist communism couldn’t suppress it totally. I bet that spirit will live on. Chinese have had 40 years to engage more with the rest of the world, and Xi is not a good enough storyteller to convince everyone to fully turn inwards once more.

It’s easy to forget that the Politburo is entirely made up of old men. Spending time with young people, in Chiang Mai or elsewhere, is a good reminder that the Politburo isn’t representative of the country. The China of the future will not look like the China ruled by old men today. Maybe you’re not convinced that Chinese kids blissed out of their minds on psychedelics will be the sharp tip of the spear for change. I’m not sure I am either. But I suspect that they’ll do good things for the China they’ll one day inherit.

***

It’s time to talk about books.

I’m not sure why I was never able to get into Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Perhaps it is because he reeks of a debilitating introversion, and I find something very suspect about a writer who talks about how difficult he finds interacting with other people. But Knausgaard’s The Morning Star worked for me. Rather than being auto-fictional, he has written something more straightforwardly resembling a novel. It combines the good parts of Knausgaard’s trademark — acute social observations that hide under dribbles of detail —  with plot action that is heightened by supernatural tinges of Christian horror. I loved the social commentary. The Norwegian characters in The Morning Star are people who want to be left alone but also feel a tormented desire to correct the behaviors of others. They default to gobsmacking amounts of drinking. Perhaps it’s not surprising that not one child or teenager in the book could be described as happy.

Though there’s plenty of plot in this book, it still affords Knausgaard his indulgences. The novel ends with a 54-page essay titled “Death and the Dead,” written by one of the central characters in the book. The Morning Star is the first of four novels. It’s with some trepidation that I see that the third book (already published in Norwegian) is called Det tredje riket, translating to The Third Kingdom… or perhaps Reich. Is it going to feature a long disquisition on Hitler, as happened in the ultimate book of My Struggle? Poor Karl Ove. His demons, I fear, beset him once more.

There were so many things I didn’t think about Chinese food until I read it in Fuchsia Dunlop. Her new book Invitation to Banquet is organized around 30 dishes to explain every aspect of Chinese cuisine: Cantonese sashimi, for example, to discuss knifework; and Mapo tofu to talk about the intense flavors that comes from fermenting the bean. Fuchsia raises the questions I have: “Where is the creativity, where the delight, in simply roasting a chunk of meat and serving it with bald potatoes and carrots, as the English like to do?” And I feel like she is speaking for me when she is lamenting the poor use of leafy vegetables in western cuisine: “either overcooked or served brutally raw as some strange kind of virtue,” compared to the Chinese greens, which are “more generously portioned than the apologetic little dishes of spinach served on the side… and cooked as carefully as anything else.” I wish that there was a book like this for every cuisine to introduce techniques and traditions through personal stories.

Fuchsia is a superb writer. The miracle of her books is that she combines extraordinary research with pleasurable writing. The latter comes from her appreciation for the physicality of eating. Her sentences ooze with sensuality on the ravishments of the cuisine, reminding us that food produces physical pleasure.

In November, I was delighted to join Fuchsia at a banquet table to record an episode of Conversations with Tyler. I made a joke at the table about how English people have sex. And I asked several questions, including: why is Indian food so much more preoccupied with long-simmering stews, while Chinese food is made up more of quick fries? How well do we understand the cooking traditions of pre-Cultural Revolution China? And given that Chinese cuisine has an elitist focus on Cantonese and Jiangnan cuisine, what might a people’s history look like?

Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth. Everyone warned me how filthy Philip Roth can be, but no one prepared me for how riotously funny he is. Through tormented monologues, the narrator pierced various mysteries of Jewish life for me. First and foremost: their famous affinity for Chinese food. Second, their notion of guilt. Roth was especially fine on the ambivalence of the Portnoy family to assimilate: on the one hand, they celebrate their Jewish differences while trying to prevent their kids from dating shikses, and on the other hand would so like to be treated like WASPs. 

At one point I found myself feeling more sympathetic to some of my Jewish friends. These poor boys. They might be the only people who have it worse than those of us with Asian parents.

The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by R. Crumb. One of the great American cartoonists spent five years drawing the first book of the Bible, without skipping any parts. I loved it. R. Crumb tackled this task with a straight face, not indulging his usual appetite for the grotesque, weird and pornographic. A book this strange, after all, doesn’t require any more spice to be interesting. No need to gussy up the story when you’ve got tales like Lot and his daughters.

I want to say that this is a good way to read the Torah. Genesis and Exodus in particular need to be read with care, and having illustrations with every other sentence forces the reader to slow down. When I previously read Genesis, I had too quickly passed over, for example, Noah’s covenant. Crumb draws God as an old man with a mighty beard, his brows locked in a permanent scowl. He doesn’t expressed regret for destroying humanity with a great flood, but he also vows to Noah never to do it again. Rather like the Communist Party, I couldn’t help thinking, which has never apologized for the great disasters it unleashed in the 20th century, but would afterwards vow never to drown the people in another Cultural Revolution.

I was delighted to find that Crumb used Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible. That golden-backed translation has been sitting on my shelf for too long without a serious reading. One of my goals for 2025 is to read at least the Five Books of Moses, as well as some of the Writings. I welcome tips on how to engage with this text, including the best way to organize an effective reading group… do please send me a note if you’ve done this.

I spent a lot of this year in the Midwest, and found myself wondering why Chicago grew to gigantic size in the 19th century, remaining America’s second-largest city until as late as circa 1980. Somehow I stumbled on Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon, which tackles exactly this question.

Cronon’s history of Chicago focuses not on its neighborhoods, its architecture, or its political machine. He mentions not a single mayor of the city. Instead he uses economic geography to explain how Chicago became the hinge of different zones. Chicago was the great inland connector of New York with New Orleans, (through canals, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi); it connected the western prairie to eastern oak-hickory forests; and it was a city that connected the hinterlands with the market, the farm with the factory. Railroads changed everything, including Chicago’s economic orientation: rather than gravitating towards the South, pulled along by the drift of the Mississippi, railroads forcefully integrated Chicago with the eastern markets. 

Chicago’s early growth was driven entirely by trade in commodities. Wheat, for example, spurred the invention of the futures contract. Railroad time demanded a loading tempo that could no longer be matched by men carrying sacks of wheat on their backs. Along came one of the most underrated inventions in American history: the steam-powered grain elevator, which allowed storage and rapid unloading of huge quantities of wheat. The elevators encouraged the commingling of wheat from different farmers, which stimulated the creation of wheat standards. These were defined by a private body, the Chicago Board of Trade, from the top grade of “Milwaukee Club” down to “No. 2 spring wheat.” When farmers deposited their grain into elevators, they would receive a receipt of the quantity and their grade, which could be redeemed for actual grain. Soon enough, these receipts would be bought and sold. Voilà. Grain had turned into a financial abstraction and the futures market was born.

Or consider meat. The “disassembly” line for reducing live animals into salable parts may have been invented in Cincinnati, but it grew monstrous only after it traveled into Chicago. This process enabled meatpackers to sell their wares as far away as New York and Pennsylvania, sometimes outcompeting the local butchers. Chicago’s power projection rested on three things. First, an efficient process that utilized even the marginal bits of the animal — everything except the squeal, the saying went — that local butchers tended to discard. Second, refrigerated railcars and storehouses that were kept cool by blocks of ice carved from nearby rivers and lakes. Third, a ruthless salesforce that cut their prices to the bone to break the reluctance of customers from buying refrigerated beef. This business worked because the Chicago stockyards (as cruel and as awful they looked to the casual observer) produced far less waste of the animal they butchered than their local counterparts.

We like to imagine the Midwest as having been populated by earnest farmers and dour machine tool makers. Yes, it was that. Cronon’s book is a nice reminder that they couldn’t have plied their trade without also depending upon the bloody-minded hucksterism of the big city. 

***

I moved back to the United States in 2023 after being away for six years. Here are some of the things I’m surprised have changed.

The two cities where I used to spend the most time — New York and San Francisco — are quite different, mostly for the worse. The bulk of my friends in San Francisco have moved away, in large part to New York. There’s some chatter that SF is “back,” but I don’t sense that everyone is enthusiastic to return to one of the most dysfunctional cities in the country. But New York has changed as well: I feel that city services (like the subway) have become 5 percent worse, while the price of everything has doubled. It’s dizzying to imagine that quite a few people are now paying rents that are close to $10k a month, and some are even over that threshold. I totally appreciate though why people with the means are staying in New York. The cultural amenities are great and people are having enormous fun there.

I spent my year in two smaller towns: New Haven and Ann Arbor. There’s a greater sense of sanity in these places. Most everywhere in America, I feel that businesses have seen broad-based improvements. Calling customer service to resolve an issue used to be a dreadful, hours-long ordeal, and it’s been a pleasant surprise that they no longer have to be. Even my interactions with the American healthcare system are not too bad. There’s definitely an issue with labor shortages across different industries, but that appears to be improving too. 

The disappointment I feel mostly concerns food. You can find pretty good food in America at fairly high prices, but you will never be able to find revelation for the cost of a few dollars — which is the default in Asia. Americans who have never been to Asia will never appreciate how one never needs to cook, because right outside will be a mom-and-pop shop that is preparing a meal that is one order of magnitude tastier and cheaper than one could make at home. A significant (though not unpleasant) culture shock for me is to have to cook most of my meals. On this topic, I’m sad that many people I meet have never been to Asia. I tell them: please try at least to visit Japan or Singapore.

The main tension I see in America is that while the real world is getting better, the Internet is getting much weirder. That is, mainstream activities (like selling goods to people) are improving, but the online fringes are becoming incomprehensible. One of the questions I ask my SF friends is what the entrepreneurial 20-year-olds are doing these days. Are they starting a billion-dollar company, or are they more interested in becoming a memelord who is trying to incite a movement on the Internet? I’m not sure we’re seeing a surge of exciting startup creation, but we sure are seeing a lot more online craziness.

The Internet is a very big place. I suspect we’re still under-rating its importance in society. So I wonder how this tension will resolve… will the mainstream integrate the Internet fringes, or will the fringes engulf the American mainstream? Americans today already are able to be polarized around any issue, no matter how picayune, so I’m nervous about how much more strangeness the online world is able to produce. 

For better or for worse, I’ve left Twitter. The platform was my reading aggregator for the last ten years to find information-dense articles. In 2023, that function completely broke down. Elon’s algorithm changes have deprecated tweets that include links, which drive perfectly sane people not to share their source, writing instead “link in bio” or “link at bottom of thread.” And after Twitter removed headlines from articles, it became much more difficult to figure out what I could be reading. What is Twitter anymore? Not the platform for surfacing information-dense articles, but rather mostly shouting and videos.

On this topic, I’m surprised at how Elon Musk has become so central to the culture. Elon is one half a manufacturing visionary, able to do things with rockets, automobiles, and satellites that no one previously imagined; his other half is a pure gremlin on the public consciousness, who uses his Internet following to drive the rest of society towards madness. It’s not just the Internet that pays attention to his doings: Elon more reliably generates mainstream news headlines than perhaps even the two presidential candidates this year. Who else has become a fixture on every pillar of American imperium: tech in San Francisco, finance in New York, movies in LA, energy in Texas, and government in DC. At an academic symposium I recently attended, I was surprised that Elon’s name was mentioned more often by US national security folks than any government official.

Elon has been a major figure for the past decade, and it’s likely that he’ll be important for still another. I feel like we have to grapple with him as a world-historical figure, but rather than reading Hegel to understand him, I reach for Philip K. Dick. He knows a thing or two about derangement. I think of Elon as the eponymous figure in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Both Eldritch and Elon are visionary entrepreneurs with enigmatic ambitions, whose every move provokes nervousness in the existing corporate and political order.  We don’t know what is going to happen to Elon, but in PKD’s novel, Eldritch launches half the population into a shared hallucination and subsequently acquires what may be God-like powers. 

(One of my favorite essays in recent years is by Caitrin Keiper: Do elephants have souls? Photo credit: Craig Mod)

I’m taking a pause on letter-writing. In 2024, I’m pouring myself into a book I’m writing on China for W. W. Norton. I’m thrilled to be working with Norton, which has published not only great storytellers like Michael Lewis, but also some of the best China authors like Jonathan Spence and Fuchsia Dunlop. I see this book as something like producing ten of these letters. I won’t preclude picking these back up again, but only after a break.

2017 was my first annual letter. I still believe in the admonition I wrote there: “Knowledge can compound. I’d like for us to think more about how to accelerate the growth of learning. The traditional method of reading more books and trying to improve professionally are good starts, but it’s not enough to stop there. One can learn more by traveling to new places, being social in different ways, reading new types of books, changing jobs or professions, moving to a new place, by doing better and by doing more.”

I’ve written seven annual letters. Every year, a few weeks after I’ve published a letter, I would open up a new notepad for the following year’s. That’s where I put in data, observations, and book recommendations that should go into the next year’s letter. These notes are not organized. In the last two weeks of the year, I sort through everything, try to coax out a structure, and then write the damn thing. I’ve complained about how much work it demands, but I also want to say that it has been great fun. I don’t understand why more people aren’t writing them. It’s not just about sharing your thoughts and recommendations with the rest of the world. Having this vessel that you’re motivated to fill encourages being more observant and analytical in daily life too.

The good thing about the format of these letters is that they are supple. It took me a few years to figure them out, but I did quickly enough start playing with them, like adding in my obsessions with Philip K. Dick, Italian comic opera, and making fun of Britain for specializing in sound-smart industries. 

Maybe my two best letters are 2020, when I described what it was like to read every issue of Qiushi (Seeking Truth, the party’s main theory magazine); and 2022, in which I entered the mountains and became a barbarian. I’ve tended to find that these letters work best when they’re centered around a location (like China’s big cities or the mountains of Thailand), which one can describe at various angles and altitudes. 

Anyway, I’m hardly taking a break by shifting gears into bookwriting. I’ll share more about the book once I’m closer to completion.

For the record, my favorite part of these letters is the section that everyone tells me they ignored. “Great letter, Dan, I skipped everything you wrote about opera.” Let me remind people again why I’m a partisan for Italian comic opera. “The Italian musical argument is the product of a warmer sun and more splendid skies than the gloomy forests in which Germans dwell. Italians emphasize a tight sense of pace. Momentum is an antidote to Wagner, who too often pins down the listener with chords that barely move. And Italians prize the centrality of the voice. That should not sound like a remarkable act in the genre; but consider the Germans, who too often lose themselves in complex orchestration, forgetting that they are composing operas instead of symphonies. The Italian literary mood is playful: Mozart and Rossini never miss a chance to joke about the sublime. I’m less comfortable around the po-faced Wagner, who plainly craves worship. Italian lyricism accommodates greater emotional range; not just soaring declamation, but also comic grumbling and trembling yearning. That is once more a contrast to Wagner, whose temperament wavers between plunging the singers into a trance and agitating them into erotic screaming.”

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China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum

2023-07-18 23:19:45

My 2022 letter will probably be my last. Now I have to devise another use for this site. Since I’ve just spent a few days in Singapore, joining various roundtables to discuss China, I thought I would write up the notes I presented on.

Most of my remarks focus on technology. But with China, one must usually start with politics to set the scene. More than half a year has passed since the 20th Party Congress, when top leader Xi Jinping unveiled a new Politburo that overflows with his apostles. That sets up five more years of more forceful political centralization, as well as making it more than probable that Xi will be in office until 2032. Among other things, the congress would deliver the finishing blow to the formerly-thriving political entertainment business, which had spun so many beguiling and delightful tales of which elites will leap at last to oppose him.

There’s a hope that the new premier Li Qiang would make a fine truth-teller to Xi. This pro-business former party secretary of Shanghai, the thinking goes, would leverage his long relationship with Xi to change his mind. It’s hard to bury this idea. But I believe that Li did not get to where he is by vigorously speaking truth to power. In his first remarks to the media, he stated that he saw his role as a faithful implementor of the decisions of the Central Committee. 1 That does not make it sound like he has much of his own mind.

Now we contend with a Chinese leadership that has even less tolerance for elite disagreement, which probably isn’t augmenting the space for policy debates. The dangers of political centralization are easy to identify. What are the upsides? I’m finding it harder to see them. Xi has consolidated power, not apparently because he sees long-standing policy logjams he wishes to break — but for its own sake. Unlike Deng, he is not driven by an urgent desire for economic reform. Instead, he seems to view his main task as notching up the national-security consciousness of the nation. Xi achieved the impossible task of disciplining the party and silencing political opposition; there isn’t much sign that he is pursuing a policy goal commensurate with such immense political weight.

Politics didn’t need to take center stage so long as the economy could deliver its ravishing spectacles. But growth now resembles an aging star, whose act keeps being stolen by the ghastly presence of the communist state. China’s long-term economic challenges are obvious: demographic drags, a peak in property demand, debt overhangs, and a western world intent on some degree of decoupling. The surprise is that the economy hit the skids only six months after the abandonment of zero-Covid.

At the beginning of 2023, people looked forward to the economic growth that would accompany re-opening. Beijing’s overly-modest growth target of “around 5%” was going to be easy. Today, it’s surprising that the property market has better not recovered and that consumers are not spending more. Neither the service sector not the industrial sector is picking up enough steam, exacerbating a problem of youth unemployment.2 So far this year, the CSI300 is about flat. That means that China’s main stock index is at roughly the level of three other points in time: December 2022, before the economic momentum of re-opening; April 2022, when Shanghai (China’s largest city and main manufacturing hub) succumbed to full lockdown; and March 2020, when the novel coronavirus began to spread around the world. Not a lot of corporate optimism, in other words, for the outlook on profits. On the bond front, China has seen six consecutive months of outflows this year.

Can rapid growth resume? Sure. One can count up to a half-dozen times since Reform and Opening that China’s leadership decisively restarted the economic engine. There is far less latent potential that Beijing can tap into than in earlier periods (say, before its accession to the WTO), but there is still plenty of underlying demand. At the moment, however, the growth story isn’t in great shape. And one of the trends I point out in my 2022 letter is that faltering economic growth is going to feed into a domineering political agenda, and vice versa. Though it is impossible to measure, I expect that political tightening is going to constitute a meaningful drag to long-term growth.

The momentum in tech

China’s tech sector is being weighed down by slower economic growth and blows from both the US and Chinese governments. But these are not the whole story, for technology can be carried by a momentum of its own. I see China’s tech development to be, as usual, a mixed bag: some parts going poorly, other parts quite splendidly.

Start with the most thrilling new development of the past year: on generative AI, there’s not much we can use from Chinese firms. The starting point of any discussion of AI in China must be that domestic firms have failed to broadly release their reply to ChatGPT half a year since Americans have started to play with it. Yes, Chinese tech companies are developing their own generative AI tools, often scoring impressively on technical benchmarks. But they have released them in controlled settings, not to the general public.

I think the reason they haven’t given everyone access to AI chatbots is straightforward: regulators in Beijing would rather not let them run in the wild. Chinese tech companies may be hobbled by lack of access to the most advanced chips; and they’re probably hurt by the lack of training data, since most of the trainable texts are in English rather than Chinese.3 But Chinese companies rarely hesitate to release substandard products into the market in order to claim early-mover advantages, so a greater force must be holding them back.

That great force is the will of the hard men of Beijing. I suspect the Chinese leadership views large language models as something akin to social media platforms: technologies with little economic upside and significant political risk. Social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok are not increasing TFP. (Personally speaking, these platforms are horribly detracting my productivity.) Instead, they are freewheeling platforms for expression, with the potential to create political unrest. Xi and the rest of the Politburo have little reason to put AI chatbots — which only sometimes follow their guardrails — into the hands of every citizen.

At the moment, it might not be an absurd belief to treat generative AI as a toy whose value is somewhere between economically useless to socially destabilizing. But that belief may not stay reasonable for long. Americans are now integrating these tools into their lives. And they will start showing up in productivity statistics, perhaps even soon. The longer that most Chinese are unable to work with them, the greater the risk that China will be left behind in some way.

AI of course means more than chatbots and image generators. And Beijing is certainly employing a great deal of AI — but for the purposes of censorship, facial recognition, and other means for control. Rather than letting the people tinker with these technologies, the state is guarding them for itself. A question on my mind is whether this present prohibition on the broad consumer uses of AI will slow down more strategic deployments. In any case, I propose a minimum benchmark: if by the end of 2023, Chinese consumers are still mostly unable to access homegrown alternatives to ChatGPT, then at least we can revise Kai-Fu Lee’s case that while America leads on the innovation of AI, China is better positioned to lead on its implementation.

Though China is without reply to novel AI technologies, the US should stay vigilant in a protracted technological contest with a peer competitor. That is the premise of an op-ed I’ve just written for the New York Times. Summary: “If there is ever a serious disruption to trade, it’s far from obvious that American prowess in AI will overcome China’s strength of a large and adaptive manufacturing base.”

It is the weight of this large and adaptive manufacturing base that buttresses my constructive view on China’s technology development. China continues to suffer weaknesses in semiconductors, aviation, and a few other strategic technologies. But it is gaining strength in so many other sectors. My favorite examples to cite are three. Due to its prowess in electric vehicles, China is on track to surpass Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter in 2023, after edging out Germany last year. For the iPhone, China moved from a ~3% contribution to value-added in 2008 to ~25% in recent years. And where it comes to clean technologies, China has built a commanding lead. It dominates most of the supply chain in solar — from upstream polysilicon refining to downstream photovoltaic assembly — as well as much of the electric vehicle battery supply chain. 

China retains considerable strengths, one which doesn’t depend so much on slowing economic growth or demographic drags. The main one is its entrenched workforce that continues to advance manufacturing complexity. I think about the humming engine that is outlined by Kevin Kelly’s concept of the “technium.” 4 That describes an ecosystem of intertwined, co-dependent, and complex technologies with a mind of its own. Though China’s leadership has grown so sour, the country’s manufacturing ecosystems continue to gain complexity, as well as global market share in many products.

Even relatively-low levels of economic growth permits considerable technological catch-up. One must always keep in mind that the Chinese task is to follow a technological ladder that western firms have laid down. They do not need to make theoretical breakthroughs to re-invent existing technologies. And neither does demographic decline guarantee a breakdown to technological momentum. Every year, nearly twice as many PhDs in STEM fields graduate from Chinese universities than American universities. It is a relatively small percentage of the population that counts for technological competition.

So I continue to hold the view that China will mostly patch up its strategic deficiencies, including in chips and aviation. That does not mean however that its firms will become the full innovative peers of the likes of ASML and TSMC. Chinese competitors are almost certainly going to be less organized and less profitable. But they will produce good enough products, lagging behind global leaders by a few years, leaving China at not too serious of a disadvantage. Chips not powerful enough to fit into the latest iPhone, perhaps, but good enough for most electric vehicles; planes not as efficient as the latest from Airbus, but good enough to fly between Shanghai and Shenzhen.

That means the US should not slacken its focus on technological competition. For America needs to figure out so much more than advanced chips. It’s on the right path after passage of the Chips Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. But they are still only starts, meaning little if the US fails to build a more rich industrial ecosystem.

A brief note on clean tech: the US is in the strange position of trying to engage in technological catch-up with a lower-wage competitor. My base case is that the IRA will mostly succeed. The amount of tax credits are so generous that America will at least be able to meet domestic demand with domestic production. (A higher threshold of success — to challenge Chinese firms in global markets — would probably be too tall an order.) Even so, there are going to be bumps on this road. One risk is that America will build lots of factories, but most are stuck at low scales of production. Apple’s Mac Pro facility in Texas, for example, didn’t really manage to scale. Another risk is that the US will lose the political will to fund these technologies for many years. Plenty of solar and battery startups are going to fail; it would be a shame if folks in Congress respond then by mocking these efforts and withdrawing the funds.

Halting technological momentum

Back to China. A gradual slowdown in economic growth won’t break technological momentum. But politics might.

Start with the external environment: fewer large markets are open to Chinese technology exports than ten years ago. For any Chinese product that might rise to the attention of a Congressperson, the US is fairly hostile. Europe remains open, but it too is grumbling about protection. A huge blow to Chinese tech firms in recent years was the loss of the Indian market. One of the many surprises 2020 was the deadly skirmish between Chinese and Indian troops that erupted after decades of relative calm. In the aftermath of the brawl, India’s government locked Chinese companies out of a market many staked growth plans on. India is not fully closed, and Chinese firms still have a lot of markets to export to. But that set has shrunk, and who can be sure that Beijing’s diplomatic and military posture won’t hurt markets for other entrepreneurs?

The west is starting to replace talk of “decoupling” with “de-risking.” I find the latter to be a marvelously Chinese word: full of ambiguity, allowing western countries to cross the river by feeling for the stones. Paul Gewirtz points out that de-risking could mean both reducing risks or eliminating them5. Which suggests, ultimately, that decoupling and de-risking could be distinctions without a difference, the latter a polite rebranding of the former.

Internal political changes are at work too. The party congress unveiled a new body, the Central Commission for Science and Technology, to be the top coordinator on tech development. The state has thus decisively shifted to a top-down approach to solve its technology problems, treating chips as the development of spaceflight or the bomb. On balance, this state-driven shift is fairly negative for overall tech development. Beijing is fundamentally misunderstanding the chip industry if it can believe that semiconductors can be run as a national space project. 

Comparing which technology is “harder” is a brittle sort of game. Nonetheless, I think that chips are much more challenging than rockets. Chipmakers have to work together with both upstream suppliers and downstream customers in an R&D-intensive commercial ecosystem; the fundamental task of space agencies is to boost a heavy object skywards (without always caring where they fall down6), while controlling every aspect of the supply chain. Chips are thus commercially and technologically more sophisticated than rocket science. And it’s hard to see how it would gain from being run as the latter.

The best case for this top-down approach is that the state’s scientists can successfully identify all the crucial technologies that China must master, and that they can apply skillful policy coordination to push these developments further than they could have gone otherwise. The history of central planning does not encourage this sort of confidence. But perhaps it can work out. Even in that case, however, these scientists are likely to miss the next big thing. Beijing’s present approach to science is to lavishly fund areas critical to the state, while leaving scraps to the rest. One gap that approach missed? The mRNA vaccine. Such a technology was not really on the radar of the bureaucrats in Beijing. Instead, the mRNA is much more a validation of the American system, in which scientists play on many different fringes, prepared to scale up novel technologies during a crisis.

The general political environment poses perhaps the greatest threat to technological momentum. It’s not that autocratic regimes cannot push forward the technological frontier: late-19th century Prussia, mid-20th century USSR, and plenty of others have. But I grow less certain that a third-Xi term China will sustain an innovative drive. 

A lot of entrepreneurial Chinese are unsure too. The most startling news story I read this year is that rising numbers of Chinese nationals are being apprehended at the Mexican border, trying to make the crossing into the United States7. I had not imagined that some Chinese would find such a harrowing trip to be worthwhile. That comes on top of the well-reported trend that many Chinese entrepreneurs have decamped to other markets. In the last few months, I’ve chatted with a good number of Chinese undergrads in the US, who almost to a person tell me that their parents are urging them not to return to the mainland. These groups make up a miniscule percentage of China’s population. But tech development depends on them too.

The national security attitude has prompted the creation of new laws around espionage and greater restrictiveness on data transfers. Foreigners dealing with China are feeling spooked that state secrets now encompass data on economic development, science and technology, and “other matters” designated by administrative departments8. I still wonder why Beijing has decided that now was the time to formalize these things. A foreign spy in China is hardly going to be deterred from their activities now that the state declared them illegal. 

This legislation, various exit bans, and questioning of multinational businesses serve only to make the rest of the world less enthused to deal with China. Foreign investors and businesspeople are reporting that it’s harder to hear frank views even when they visit. Unless it’s with friends they’ve known for many years, they’re liable to hear the party line even from their own local employees. Sometimes, the local staff refuse even to share data with headquarters, citing domestic laws. Perhaps no wonder that investor interest in China is now a rare thing, and that outflows might surpass investment inflows this year.9

The hopeful story on Xi is that he will relax his stranglehold on society once he realizes that economic growth is important, either for his mandate or China’s prestige. The problem is that I’ve been hearing that story for years without a substantial course correction. Sometimes Xi makes tactical adjustments. But between more growth and more control, he chooses the latter nine times out of ten. For those who believe that he will wake up to the importance of growth, keep in mind that he has spent much of the past ten years talking down the pursuit of GDP.10

A fatigued people and an overbearing state aren’t best for achieving economic miracles. But they are not yet pulling the plug on technological momentum. The trouble is that Xi has given a few good tugs on that cord. And his third term is only still just getting started, with the policymaking apparatus even more intensely dependent on his whims that before.

China’s first Dongfeng missile, from a design licensed from the Soviets. We like to use “rocket science” as if it’s the hardest of the disciplines. But its sophistication is less than the semiconductor industry’s, in which companies push forward technological frontiers in a competitive commercial ecosystem. Rockets however look so much more glamorous than chips; magazine editors bemoan that they can’t do much with square circuits the size of a thumb, or technicians wearing bunny suits in oddly-lit rooms. And so we see a lot more images of rockets instead. (Photo credit from Wikipedia via Flickr)

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2022 letter

2023-03-04 23:45:24

(This piece is my year in review, this year a bit late; here’s my letter from 2021)

Mountains offer the best hiding places from the state.

There were a lot of state controls to escape from in 2022. Two days before Shanghai locked down in April, I was on the final flight from the city to Yunnan, the province in China’s farthest southwest. Yunnan’s landmass — slightly smaller than that of California’s — features greater geographic variation than most countries. Its north is historic Tibet, while the south feels much like Thailand. People visit the province for its spectacular nature views: rainforest, rice terraces, fast rivers, and snowy mountains. Otherwise tourists are drawn to its ethnic exoticism. As many as half of the country’s officially-recognized ethnic groups have a substantial presence there, including many of those that have historically resisted Han rule.

As Shanghai’s lockdown became protracted, a trip planned to last days grew into one that lasted months. Wandering through Yunnan gave me a chance to contemplate the culture of the mountains.

They are towering in the north. These are Tibetan areas home to a meaningful chunk of the Himalayas: Yunnan’s highest peak is Kawarkapo, one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most sacred mountains. This region is unbeatable for snowy beauty. The roads around them are strewn with fluttering prayer flags and studded with impassive yaks. Something in the thinness of the air produces more vivid light, which fires up white peaks in brilliant red when the sun is low. I went on several hikes around Kawarkapo and Tiger Leaping Gorge, which offer gorgeous treks through tough terrain.1

Northern Yunnan is a site of improbable mixings. Missionaries made headway into these lands in the 19th century, establishing not just a Christian population but also vineyards that continue to produce wine grapes. In a remote valley, I passed by a vineyard owned by LVMH to produce Cabernet, which retail for US$300 per bottle.2 The most stimulating parts of this region are not the cities of Lijiang or Shangri-La, but the more remote Tibetan areas. Tibetans have been subject to decades of forced assimilation to Han culture, but they still find room to practice small acts of subversion. One guide told me, for example, that monks have slipped a portrait of the Dalai Lama behind the portrait of the Panchen Lama in their monastery, allowing them to pray in good conscience. These rounds of control and evasion continue to grind on.

The mountains are gentler in the south. Tea hills are set amidst rainforest and rubber plantations in Xishuangbanna, the prefecture that sits above Laos and Burma. The weather there is sweltering. To cool down, one can take a dip in the Mekong River, which carries remarkably cold water that has flowed from the Tibetan highlands, or eat its tropical fruits: mango, papaya, durian, or so many melons. Xishuangbanna is one of China’s most biodiverse regions, home to thousands of species of trees, as well as wild elephants, peafowl, bears, and birds galore.

In southern Yunnan, most of the people have Southeast Asian features. Xishuangbanna hosts around a dozen of China’s official ethnic groups, some of which consist of only a few tens of thousands of people clustered around certain mountains. The most prominent group there is the Dai, while the smaller groups include the Aini, Bulang, and Hani peoples.3 Most make their living off of mountain agriculture, which means planting cash crops like tea, rubber, or bananas (unless they’ve chosen to put on their ethnic dress to cater to tourists). That cultivation intermixes with the foraging of wild herbs, mushrooms, and flowers, along with occasional illicit hunting of game. A more perilous venture would be to traffic narcotics, since the area is right along the Golden Triangle.

I ended up spending most time in the north-central city of Dali. It is located in the most temperate part of Yunnan: cooler than Xishuangbanna and sunnier than Shangri-La, bounded by a mountain range to the west and a large lake to the east. The local people are the Bai, whose cultural practices are proximate to the Han’s. My home was a wooden farmhouse in a Bai village at the foot of the mountains. If I stayed closer to the lake, the houses would be made of attractive stone, ornamented with wooden carvings and ink paintings on white wall. The Bai have a long culture of craftmaking, producing marbleware or tie-dye linens for trade.

Up until the early 2000s, a different Bai product attracted foreign travelers: cannabis, which grew freely around Dali. Foreigners in Beijing or Shanghai would reminisce about the good old days in Dali, where one could be beckoned by a smiling lady into an alley to purchase a baggie. The cannabis trade has been stamped out.4 Nowadays, it is not foreigners who travel to Dali to toke a joint, but Chinese who visit for a harder drug: cryptocurrency, NFTs, and other web3 paraphernalia. A great deal of China’s crypto community has relocated in recent years to Dali. It is not that the city has wanted to attract them; rather, its appeal is more general.

Dali has sunny weather, nice hikes, and a big lake. I reminisce about its open-air markets, where every morning one can go to pick up fresh vegetables, fruits, rice noodles, and all sorts of pickles. Dali offers fertile farmland, attracting China’s burgeoning young organic farmers. It has a significant foreign population that has set up sourdough bakeries, cafés with excellent croissant, and clubs playing techno. The first outdoor rave I came across in China was at an orchard in Dali. It attracts urban families as well: parents of young children would bring kids to nature-focused school programs over summers or full-time before starting primary school back in Shenzhen or Shanghai. Visitors enjoying the sun referred to the city as “Dalifornia.”

Yunnan has many other interesting places besides. Kunming, its capital, is not one. That is a city like any other in the PRC, perhaps best analogized to Mexico City: an administrative center of many interesting people and places, but relatively boring compared to them. Tengchong, in Yunnan’s furthest west, is made up of Dai peoples living among volcanic springs; history buffs might visit it for its centrality along the Burma Road. More interesting is Lugu Lake on Yunnan’s northern border with Sichuan, a difficult-to-access place home to the Mosuo people, who form a matriarchal society. In the mountains one can find the Wa people, who are supposed to maintain a tradition of animal sacrifices and human headhunting.

Climbing out of civilization

Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains. By contrast, it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome suction of the tax collector. It’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations — epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. As a consequence, people who dwell in the mountains tend to be seen as unruly folks, be they Appalachian Americans or Highland Scots.

Yunnan has been a distinguished refuge for peoples tired of the state. It is the heart of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia described by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed — the best book I read this year (and which I will be drawing on throughout this piece). Scott writes about the innumerable hill peoples who have repaired to these mountains over the last several millennia, escaping oppression from the Burmese state, the Tibetan state, or most often, the Han-Chinese state.

In Scott’s telling, early states (of several millennia up to a few centuries ago) did not grow because people were drawn towards “civilization” or a luminous court center. They grew because the domineering temper of a rice- or wheat-addicted despot demanded ever greater populations to produce grain surpluses for the glory of his court. The process was dialectical, as wars made the state, and the state made war. Thus most of the people in a population core consisted of captives seized in a military victory or purchased from raiders. Scott goes so far to claim that where one can find an early state, there one will find a population core sustained by coerced labor.

His case is that the civilization that arose from sedentary farming made people worse — in terms of health, safety, and liberty — before they made society better. Before mass cultivation of grains, most people were foragers of some sort. And they have tended to be more robust and healthy than farmers tied to a single plot of land, who faced constant danger of state appropriation, epidemic diseases, and losing everything in an environmental disaster. It’s easier to understand that there has been intense resistance by peoples everywhere to state efforts to make them sedentary, whether in Central Asia or North America — accepting that fate only after a military defeat.

In mountains they tend to be more safe.5 And that, Yunnan has in abundance. The peoples who escape into the rugged highlands of Southeast Asia tend to have, in Scott’s telling, state-repellent practices. That includes cultivating diverse and shifting root crops, which are less assessable by the tax collector; adopting relatively egalitarian social structures; and practicing an oral culture, which helps to make histories and ethnic identities more malleable. These ethnic tribes have thus become “barbarians by design.” Still today, Yunnan remains one of the poorest provinces in China. The mountainous geography makes its economy more ideal for agriculture and tourism than technologically-intensive industries.

It became a quietly thrilling experience to read about this highland zone while I wandered around in Yunnan. Scott writes that state administration learned to climb into the mountains by the end of the Second World War, after the deployment of railroads, telephone, helicopters, and later, information technology. But I certainly feel that the culture of Yunnan remains different from the imperial cores of Beijing and Shanghai.

Official initiatives often run out of breath before these rugged hills. These mountains protected various retreating armies, including Nationalist troops, which were not fully rooted out from the region until the early 1960s. They protected people during the Great Leap Forward, when people climbed up to forage for food. They protected villagers even during the Cultural Revolution: “When Red Guards climbed into the highlands, they found few people, no one obviously wealthy to direct their attacks upon, and little to eat. They would then just harangue the villagers for a while, stage a noisy demonstration, and then go back down the mountain, not very eager to return.”6

Yunnan is a province that resists efficient administration even today. In general, rules in Yunnan are not consistently enforced. Is that because the officials are lazy or incompetent? Who cares, probably both. I saw how villagers circumvented regulations that threatened their way of life. The most important event to happen over the past decade in Dali was a visit from Xi Jinping in 2015, when the top leader admonished local officials to clean up the nearby lake. Officials then jumped to implement the order. Among their measures was to direct all water from the mountains to flow into the lake. Villagers who were used to spring water from the mountains for their drinking and food production now had to drink treated water.

Locals spoke of that water diversion as one of the most upsetting things in village history. It was not that they objected to cleaning up the lake. It was that a word from the top leader prompted local officials to deny them the best water in China, while making an at-best-minimal contribution to the cleanup. Their response was to climb further up the mountains and lay new pipes to send water to the village temple. They taught me to bring my own jugs to fill up there.

Local officials came to the village temple not with hammers to smash these pipes, but with their own jugs for filling up. Here, it is still possible to navigate around senseless directives from the central government. Dali’s culture of open drug use may have dissipated, but the region retains an ineffectualness. Distance from the party center is one reason that Yunnan has drawn a growing number of emigrés tired of the city life. That emigration accelerated this year, as the oppressiveness in big cities grew intense.

Lockdowns

Throughout the three years of the pandemic, China developed a weightier state apparatus, one better able to impress itself against its subjects. The government at all levels, especially local, has gained new authorities to be more intrusive into people’s lives.7 Shanghai experienced the brunt of these measures in the spring.

Anxiety levels grew steadily over March. Shanghai became hushed as entire residential compounds (some of which have thousands of people) were told that they were not allowed to exit from their homes for up to a fortnight due to their proximity to a positive case; as restaurants were told they must close; and as officials made multiple demands that everyone in certain districts must take a PCR test. By the end of March, it was apparent that these measures could not stop omicron. So Shanghai announced that the city would lock down, in two phases: the eastern half (Pudong) on March 27th for four days, and the western half (Puxi, where I lived) on April 1st for four days. What did lockdown mean? The ability to step foot outside one’s doorway. A fortunate few might be permitted to venture outside their apartment building, but not the residential compound.

Shanghai’s lockdown would last more than four days: it ended after eight weeks. 25 million people were unable to leave their home or residential compounds between April and May. (Some even longer, as their compounds started locking down in March.) The main exception was the ability to go out for rounds of PCR tests conducted daily or every few days.

The March 27th announcement came after city officials repeatedly denied that they would impose a full lockdown. That robbed a sense of urgency among most of my friends to stockpile essential supplies. I didn’t stockpile either, but I did decide to leave. Within an hour of the announcement, I had booked a plane ticket to Yunnan. Most people in Shanghai would suffer a bleak April.

Food became the overwhelming concern. Fresh vegetables and fruits ran out after a week or so. The government promised to deliver food, but that proved a logistical impossibility for a city of 25 million people: truck drivers couldn’t deliver their freight into the city, and the produce either was not enough to go around or spoiled by ultimate delivery. Nearly all my friends told me that there were a few days in mid-April when they dealt with serious food insecurity. Some with children fasted to save food for the kids. Many friends spent most of their waking hours trying to procure food, often getting up at the crack of dawn to place orders. The situation took about three weeks to improve, as people managed to set up inefficient group-buying networks, or the government-run food logistics system worked out its issues.8

There were other problems. Anyone with a health condition was gripped by fear that their medications would run out. Everyone hoped that they wouldn’t need to access hospital treatment. One friend broke an ankle shortly before the lockdown, spending two months bedbound as she awaited surgery. Another developed a hernia. A third friend’s uncle died because he had diabetes and could not go for dialysis treatments.

The situation worsened if one tested positive. A trip to a centralized quarantine facility (often a bed in a convention center) would await. That was sometimes the least concern. The city’s policy was to separate children from their parents if either tested positive; fear of separation drove parents mad with worry, until an outcry prompted the city to drop the policy.9 Dog-owners who couldn’t find another household willing to host their pet had to decide whether to leave it alone at home for the duration of their illness; or let it loose outside and hope for the best. (A viral video of a health worker beating a corgi to death with a shovel did not help to make the decision easier.)10 A positive test would summon cleaning staff into one’s home, who could soak everything — clothes, books, furniture — in disinfectant.

For some people, these two months were not too dreadful. The elderly would say that the lockdown wasn’t the worst thing to happen to their lives, pointing to the Cultural Revolution. A feeble joke circulated that Shanghai achieved “common prosperity,” one of Xi’s signature initiatives, in China’s most capitalist city a decade ahead of schedule because everyone was reduced to the same standard of living. Some people built camaraderie with neighbors that they otherwise would never have gotten to know, ties which endured long after lockdown. Other people of privilege might find steadier access to food or were able to wrangle a permit to go outside.

But the situation grew desperate for a broader mass of folks. Banging pots and pans outside one’s window became a common form of protest; occasionally someone would be caught on camera screaming denunciations of the regime.11 For young people in particular, the lockdown came as an immense shock. They tried to speak up on social media.12 And the state responded with staggering levels of censorship. Weibo censored the first line of the national anthem: “Arise, you who refuse to be slaves.”13 It stopped reposts of a National People’s Congress spokesperson’s remark that hard quarantines may be unlawful.14 At one point, social media platforms blocked the word “Shanghai” from search results.

Psychologically, the most difficult thing was that no one knew how long the lockdown would last: a few days or a few weeks more. Every so often a video would circulate that purported to show someone who jumped from a balcony. Friends spoke about three types of shock. First, the raw novelty of extended physical confinement. Second, the wonder of feeling food insecure in this age and in this city. Third, a disenchantment with government pronouncements. Many people kicked themselves for trusting officials who said that Shanghai would impose no lockdown. They saw how positive cases in their own neighborhoods would be absent from the city’s data releases. And they shared a recording of a health official who said that these controls were unscientific.15

Case numbers peaked in Shanghai by late-April. In June, the city lifted the lockdown. At that point, many foreigners had departed the country (after an arduous negotiation with neighborhood officials to be allowed to go to the airport), some for good. Many Shanghainese who didn’t go abroad would come to Yunnan. China then enjoyed around three months of relative calm in terms of Covid controls.

By the time I went back to Shanghai in the summer, the city looked like it had substantially returned to normal. Two of my favorite restaurants had shut down, but otherwise the city was back to life. There was one substantial change to routine. The government demanded that every resident take a PCR test every 72 hours to enter any public venue. They enforced this requirement through contact-tracing apps: health workers would scan one’s QR code before a test; and every store or restaurant would demand a scan of the site’s QR code, both to establish location tracking and also to see evidence of a recent test. The process didn’t end up being too cumbersome since tests were free and sites were abundant. But one faced the risk of being unable to enter a space if it slipped one’s mind to test in time.

The system kept caseloads low in Shanghai. But through the fall, other regions failed to tame omicron. The situation was bad in several areas: Chongqing, Xinjiang, Henan, and other regions were dealing with rising caseloads that would not drop after a lockdown. People had also grown weary of extraordinary controls. Two incidents had already drawn broad outrage: after a pregnant woman in Xi’an miscarried because the hospital would not admit her without a negative test16; and after a bus carrying people late at night to a quarantine facility derailed in Guizhou, killing 27.17 These incidents made people publicly say that measures to control the virus were hurting people more than the virus itself.

Cases started to rise after the party congress in mid-October, this time in the crucial city of Beijing. The capital had kept cases low throughout the year with tight social controls. By November, it looked like Beijing might lock down as Shanghai did.

Protests

The government announced measures in November to “optimize” controls, citing the need to reduce their economic impact. These measures gave several local governments the opportunity essentially to abandon restrictions. Beijing and Shanghai weren’t ready to do that. They started to tighten restrictions. That’s when protests began.

The protests were dispersed across several cities within a short span of time. Two attracted the most attention: those in Shanghai and those at Foxconn facilities in Henan. I was in Shanghai then. WeChat posts had started to circulate on a Saturday evening calling for people to attend a vigil on Urumqi Road in the old French Concession. They were commemorating victims of an apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, where ten people died the week before.18 Details were hazy, but people speculated that pandemic controls blocked firefighters from reaching the site. By then, everyone had expressed fears of fire hazards after they saw how authorities would block people from leaving home.

I had gone to bed by the time the vigil started in earnest at midnight that Saturday. The next morning I saw the videos on social media: rows of police facing off against youths, who at some points started to chant “down with the Communist Party” and “Xi Jinping step down.” 19 I lived near Urumqi Road, which is a bar and café district containing a lot of the city’s foreign population. Of course I had to go and see. When I went to the intersection on Sunday afternoon, people and police milled around, but there wasn’t much by way of big demonstrations. They would start again later in the evening, by which time police made a more systematic effort to clear the zone. They put up barricades, made people disperse, arrested some, thus halting the protests. Afterwards I was surprised that the police moved so slowly, waiting only until the second night to erect barricades.

In area and duration, the Shanghai protests were small: a single city block over the course of two nights. But they stunned many of us in China who never expected to witness open demonstrations. Protests took place in a few other cities, but they were overwhelmingly around pandemic restrictions per se. I believe that it’s no accident that protests turned political in Shanghai, after the city’s trauma of an eight-week lockdown.

From Zero Covid to Total Covid

The state abandoned zero-Covid in December. Was that due to the protests? I expect that protests dealt the coup de grace, but they were not the main force. Local governments and the population had already been on the brink of exhaustion: severe lockdowns in various places could not bring down omicron after several weeks. Beijing looked at that situation and wondered whether the central government would be able to enforce a Shanghai-style lockdown on the population of the capital, which is meant to enjoy the greatest political pampering. On December 7, the central government abandoned most pandemic control measures. And so the virus came.

I caught Covid on December 23. Most people I knew in Beijing and Yunnan had fallen sick a week or two earlier, but Shanghai had managed to delay its wave. The city was on course to tighten controls before the central government let loose: Shanghai demanded that people have a 48 hour test result (shortened from 72) to enter public venues. Then, in what I think will be a footnote lost in history, it barred people who traveled to Shanghai from going to most public venues for five days.20 The local government did not seem ready to abandon its fine-tuned system for stopping the spread of omicron.

No one else seemed prepared either. It certainly didn’t make sense to me that the state would drop all controls before the coldest month of the winter and before allowing households to prepare. Doctors and nurses had no special warning, leaving them to face a surge in patients. The propaganda authorities had no special warning, as they shifted from declaring that the virus must be stomped out in one week to declaring that health outcomes are ultimately the responsibility of the individual in the next. The Shanghai government did not appear to have special warning, since it was tightening its controls.

For me, the most astonishing part of the abrupt abandonment of zero-Covid has to do with fever medications (like ibuprofen and paracetamol). The government had over the last three years put up obstacles for people to purchase fever meds. Health authorities feared that people might self-medicate at home rather than submit to the quarantines. So pharmacies would be ordered to remove fever meds from their shelves during an outbreak, or they would demand customers to furnish their national ID for contact tracing. That deterred purchases, and, I suspect, greater production by manufacturers. Therefore much of the Chinese population met their Covid wave without fever meds on hand. As best as I can tell, China is the only country that followed a twisted logic to deny people fever medications during a fever-producing pandemic.

As Covid descended, the government tried to assure everyone that the virus is not so deadly. But whom did the propaganda authorities wheel out to deliver that comforting message? The same experts who weeks ago were saying that it would be extraordinarily irresponsible to abandon controls.21 One person who stayed silent was top leader Xi Jinping. He has obliquely acknowledged the abandonment of zero-Covid, referencing hard times in generic terms. He did not explain the reversal of a policy he has personally insisted on, or give comfort to a people who would face a disease that propaganda authorities spent three years terrifying them about. Neither did anyone else in the central leadership.

The government’s strategy to comfort the population was to suppress data on death. I can sympathize with the intent to prevent mass panic. But I feel it’s unfair for Beijing to spend over two years mocking the west for high death counts and then improperly report its mortality data. (As of March 4th, the official number of Covid deaths in China was 87,468.) I suspect that China really did manage to avoid many millions dead: because omicron was really less severe, or Chinese vaccines work better than expected, or something else. But we’ll likely never know for sure.

Already by mid-January, Shanghai would once more be hopping. Bars and restaurants were full with people excited to return to normal life. I’m glad that I’ve lived through the entire Covid pandemic in China, from February 2020 (when I was in Beijing) through its end by January 2023. Everyone is glad that the controls are at last over and that the death count felt relatively low rather than obviously high. But I believe that re-opening didn’t need to be so abrupt.

I wonder how other Shanghainese are thinking. My local friends say that they were taken twice to the cleaners: first when they couldn’t stockpile essentials in April, second when they couldn’t stockpile medicine in December. They wonder why Beijing would impose such a hard lockdown in the spring if it was going to drop everything in the winter: was it only because the central government held pandemic controls hostage to a political event, namely the party congress in October? I suspect that there would be no obvious sign of Shanghainese discontent. But I think there will be a residue of resentment, manifesting unpredictably.

Revelry or growth?

How should we reflect on 2022 in China? The starting point must be the three most important events of the year. First, zero-Covid: extraordinarily tight controls that were all abandoned in December. Second, the greater centralization of political power under Xi Jinping after the 20th Party Congress. Third, a declaration of a “limitless friendship” with Russia that had “no forbidden zones” three weeks before its invasion of Ukraine.

In the short term, I expect that most of the suffering under three years of zero-Covid will be forgotten. People are already exuberant in the streets of Shanghai, happy to enjoy life in one of Asia’s most splendid cities. And just as people in Europe and the US put the pandemic behind them, so I believe that Chinese will too.22 This is unlikely, but there’s some chance that in a few years, we’ll look back on zero-Covid in the same way that we look back today on China’s 2015 stock market crash: a puzzling and painful event to live through — generating many headlines on the failures of the Chinese government — but in retrospect not really a defining crisis it seemed to be at the time.

Over the longer term, I believe that the events in 2022 confirm that the Chinese Communist Party, under Xi’s leadership, would rather frolic in ideological revelry than focus on pursuing economic growth. Utopianism has seduced the party before. Over the last seven decades, China has experienced lengthy periods of stability punctuated by government-triggered chaos. The Chinese state is usually levelheaded; but every so often it succumbs to a manic episode, in which it grips the population, not relenting until it has shaken them out of their pots for backyard steel furnaces, out of their schools for class struggle, or out of their minds for dynamic zero clearing. It then comes to its senses and sets down a battered people, as the rest of the world looks on aghast. The state is then sane and sober once more, though the people feel the occasional nervous tremor.

Sometimes commentators will launch a tendentious debate on whether China is capitalist or socialist, state-driven or market-driven. It is never one or the other, of course. Contradictory slogans like “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics” allow the party wide scope for ideological maneuver. Beijing’s habit is to announce several mutually-incompatible policies to simultaneously pursue, tweaking priorities as it goes along. In my view, contesting China’s system in binary terms will always be vain. But we can describe its tendencies. And on balance I believe we should think of the Chinese state today as an autocratic regime that is occasionally capable of economic pragmatism rather than a technocratic regime that slips occasionally into Marxist faults.

Over the last five years, Xi stepped up admonitions for the party to remember its Marxist-Leninist roots and to adopt a comprehensive view of national security, thus elevating the importance of ideology. China’s pursuit of zero-Covid subsequently allowed the party’s worst impulses to run riot. The state’s commitment to releasing credible data, long the target of skepticism, weakened further as the government simply halted reporting inconvenient data.23 It expelled the bulk of American journalists in March 2020 (blaming the Wall Street Journal for carrying an insensitive headline on an editorial), while allowing little replenishment in their ranks. Its censorship of domestic voices and reproaches of foreign governments have gone into overdrive. And the pandemic has given it enormous practice in tracking individuals and detaining them.

The Chinese state remains enormously capable. But that statement demands refinements. First, it increasingly resembles a crew of firefighters who bring extraordinary skill to dousing fires that they themselves ignited. Like in 2020, after local authorities in Wuhan censored reports of a new viral infection, requiring a mammoth national effort to contain the spread of the virus later. Or as it tried to stamp out a financial crisis in the property sector this year by triggering a different kind of crisis, as housing demand and construction collapsed. Second, China’s problem is usually not too little state capacity, but too much. Beijing shows that it’s utterly possible to fail when it succeeds, for example by bringing too much state capacity to bear on solutions like zero-Covid or a one-child policy.

2022 is thus the year that China’s long-term growth prospects became more uncertain as its political risks grow more salient. It’s not just the domestic trends of zero-Covid and greater centralization of power. Beijing decided to partner with Russia, an imperial aggressor, when it is the US and Europe that have markets and technology. Beijing views Russia as an ally that can help sustain legitimacy for authoritarian regimes.

These have led two groups of people to express changes of heart on China. First, much of the foreign business community. In public survey results, many more American and European companies are reporting that they’re pausing investments in China. (See Bloomberg: “For the first time in about 25 years, China is not a top three investment priority for a majority of US firms.”24) Over conversations, they tend to be more frank. Companies are no longer viewing China as the most reliable place to manufacture in the aftermath of the Shanghai lockdown; and European executives in particular find it difficult to advocate for greater investment after Beijing embraced Russia. The party’s lectures on Marxism, common prosperity, and “great changes unseen in a century” are bewildering to businesses. Multinationals want the infrastructure, in other words, without the drama.

Executives may not be interested in Marxism-Leninism, but Marxists-Leninists are deeply interested in businesses. Companies are thus starting to think of China as a weird creature: one-third the China of old, which showers riches on the savvy; one-third Japan, an enormous market that won’t deliver booming growth; and one third Russia, a country one must potentially depart from in a hurry. Several embassies are treating China as a hardship posting. Fine, those people are wimps. But capitalists too are hesitating. For executives, a posting to China used to pave the way to the highest corporate ranks. That’s starting to feel less the case, since China is so different a market — given political complexities and data controls — that a posting there is now viewed as often a quagmire as an essential rung on the corporate ladder. The strategy of multinationals has become to maintain production for the domestic market while moving export-bound production to other countries (chiefly Vietnam and India).

The second group of alienated individuals consists of young, educated Chinese. The November protests, brief though they were, consisted of Shanghai youths frequenting the bar district, workers in Henan assembling electronics, and folks in Beijing who lived around the embassy district. It wasn’t the elderly who were in the streets. My friends despaired at two events in particular in 2022. First, when the government made it more difficult to obtain or renew passports in the spring, citing pandemic controls.25 That really made people feel stuck. Second, after the party congress, when they saw that the country was intensifying its tightening course. It is perhaps not surprising that there has been a stream of articles throughout the year reporting that many Chinese entrepreneurs decided to decamp to Singapore.

I’ve pointed out in each of my previous letters that Beijing strangles the country’s cultural creativity. So I’m not going to stop now. Visual arts have done okay, but it’s hard to name much else that was vibrant in 2022: most films released this year were either nationalist blockbusters or sappy romances; video games received few licenses; and book publishing slowed due to the party congress. Creative friends of mine knew that it was impossible to publish anything given the political calendar, so some of them went abroad as a kind of sabbatical this year.26

The censors came for me too: in February, I discovered that the Great Firewall blocked this site. I had to take a bit personally since my name makes up the URL. I haven’t managed to find any censors to be able to explain why, and there’s no reason for me to believe that I will ever be unblocked again. If I’m allowed to offer guesses, my preferred interpretation would be that the party is made up of Wagnerians upset at the strident partisanship for Italian comic opera in my 2021 letter. It fits the evidence, perhaps. The hard men who govern in Beijing have a sense of the grand, treating a party congress as a Wagner opera by other means — featuring less noise but greater downfalls.

Could the state win back broad confidence? That’s certainly possible. By early 2023, Beijing had significantly changed its rhetoric. It dropped not just zero-Covid, but many restrictions on the property sector and hostility towards internet platforms companies. I’m skeptical however that the friendliness will last forever. The party-state is able to say the most tender words of encouragement for entrepreneurs — after it strangled their businesses — and the sweetest words on the importance of growth, after it has delivered a beating to the economy. If growth picks up once more, who can be sure that the party will not return to its ideological revelries?

The authoritarian impulse

It’s time to level set. China’s growth prospects are off track, but the country retains huge strengths. How do we balance everything? I think that a fair assessment should acknowledge these five propositions. First, business can still be exciting as China continues broad catch-up growth that creates flourishing in particular sectors, even if economic headwinds are stronger too. Second, China’s cities continue to be nicer places to live in (especially Shanghai — Beijingers can ignore this part), offering better provision of parks, healthcare, and retail. Third, doomers have wrongly predicted the collapse of China for 30 years. Fourth, Xi has centralized considerable power, and over the past decade has tightened limits not just on freedom of speech, but increasingly on freedom of thought. And fifth, though cities are more pleasant, a small risk of catastrophe threatens to overturn one’s life.

China still has room for economic growth. That’s of course what we should expect given that China’s per capita GDP is one-sixth the level of America’s. I would discount the view that its demography guarantees calamity: a gently shrinking population will create a persistent drag to growth, yes, but it won’t be immediately hefty. At the same time, there are more serious headwinds: the property sector (which has so much economic weight) is at a structural peak, the western world is trying to decouple from China, and Xi’s re-prioritization of the state sector probably won’t do miracles for productivity growth.

Tailwinds are obvious in particular sectors. In 2022, China became a slightly larger auto exporter than Germany. A lot of that growth came from Tesla’s facility in Shanghai, but I still consider that a marker of Chinese prowess in manufacturing. I suspect that Chinese automakers won’t capture a large share in western markets, but they are in pole position to supply the developing countries that are in the early stages of electrifying their fleets. Chinese firms continue to dominate renewables, especially solar and batteries, with a chance to repeat that success in green hydrogen. There’s so much excitement among investors in biotech and life sciences (though I find these areas hard to judge).

China remains relatively weak in scientific research. But it is making up for that with a sound strategy, which I wrote about in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs. Whereas the US has a track record of doing great science, China’s technology competitiveness is grounded in manufacturing capabilities. And sometimes China’s strategy beats America’s. Consider the solar industry, for which the US laid the scientific groundwork, only for Chinese firms to make all the photovoltaic cells. The US is undeniably more serious about manufacturing in the aftermath of the IRA and Chips Act. But I think that American policymakers are still not serious enough to pursue commoditized manufacturing for its own sake so that it can rebuild communities of engineering practice.

It’s fair to call out my previous letter as mostly focused on China’s strengths, especially the system’s capacity for reform. And I’m still sympathetic to Beijing’s effort to prioritize certain types of growth over others. Its animosity towards cryptocurrencies, for example, does not feel invalidated by the various blowups in that sector in 2022; and I share the government’s hostility towards video games and social media. I continue to believe that Beijing has an easier time with reforming its institutions relative to the US. And that its pathologies produce a better class of problems than US tendencies: Chinese structural overcapacity due to its supply side focus, for example, is superior to American structural undercapacity due to an impotence to build.

What I did not sufficiently appreciate is that a state that would so casually decapitate a sector like online tutoring would also have the will to visit catastrophe upon whole cities. And fear of those moves is wearing on people. I perceive a fading sense of enthusiasm among businesspeople and youths. The residue of resentment won’t wear on their faces; and I expect that the state will keep a lid on wide-scale protests. But there will be more foot-dragging and less self-initiative in response to Beijing’s centralized campaigns of inspiration.

I acknowledge that my views may be too colored by the resentments of Shanghainese around me; and that I might be wrongfooted in my assessments. 2022 was an annus horribilis for China and a year in which the US gained self-confidence. But the reverse was true at the end of 2021, when the Biden Administration looked beset by crises and Beijing decided to smash its most profitable companies while undertaking structural reform. The tables had reversed and could again. China after all combines lengthy periods of stasis with episodes of extreme movement.

The picture I see for the next few years however is that growth will slow further. The economy won’t return to the 2019 mid-single digit levels of growth, but something closer to US levels. I believe that China is likely to succeed on many technological endeavors, but these bright spots can’t compensate for broad deceleration. The major source of risk is that the political system is more likely to squash growth in the longer run.

Aging autocrats easily turn cranky. It’s especially bad since factional struggle is built into the Leninist system: Xi will never stop feeling paranoid even if he has surrounded himself with sycophants. So I think the party-state will continue to make unforced errors. It has, after all, upset many countries with gratuitous insults. And it has managed to pull off the impossible: blowing away China’s enormous stock of human capital. China has superb entrepreneurs and artists who could bring the national glory that Xi craves only if they were allowed to do their creative work. And even any high schooler could be a more persuasive propagandist than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs if they were allowed a platform to speak. But there is so much ruination among Marxist-Leninists, who cannot suffer that there are areas outside of the party’s control. The party in recent years have sequentially alienated people inclined to be more friendly: foreign businesses, European governments, domestic artists and entrepreneurs. I bet these unforced errors will continue.

I find it astonishing that the Shanghai government succeeded in keeping the population indoors for two months without even having to truck the People’s Armed Police out of their barracks. Given the enormous investment into tracking people over the last few years, I think that the leadership will give into its worst impulses as growth continues to fall. That means harsher tightening rather than permitting people a chance to be more free.

To the mountains

Is there room to maneuver in an era of political tightening? Perhaps so. It’s time to follow the wisdom of the ancients and head into the mountains.

The mountains are still high, though the emperor may no longer be so far away. As Scott wrote, the state has mostly learned to climb the hills. Mostly. There are still some ways to avoid central directives in the mountains. Otherwise, a more subtle form of escape is possible in population cores. One of Scott’s earlier works, Weapons of the Weak, documents everyday forms of peasant resistance that falls short of collective rebellion: foot dragging, petty noncompliance, feigned ignorance, or the strategic use of rude nicknames for officers of the state. Chinese are already good at this stuff. We should be sympathetic to their larger “efforts to hold one’s own against overwhelming odds — a spirit and practice that prevents the worst and promises something better.”

There is something about the Han-Chinese gaze that is transfixed by glories of the state, whether these take the form of big walls, big ships, or big numbers. China’s intellectual tradition is to celebrate state power. It’s perhaps not much of an exaggeration to say that imperial China monopolized the entirety of intellectuals, through its administration of the imperial examination system, which induced the country’s most ambitious to spend their lives studying texts aimed at increasing the power of the state. Thus it’s unsurprising that China failed to develop much of a liberal tradition: court philosophers tend not to be enthusiastic advocates for constraints on the court.

Meanwhile, it’s not a hidden fact that imperial China had its most splendid cultural flourishing when the polity was most fragmented — during times that carry faintly apocalyptic names like the Warring States period, when Confucianism and Daoism came into shape — and that it experienced its worst political decay after continuous centralization, whether Ming or Qing. Perhaps these historical patterns will repeat again.

I’m uncomfortable with the Han-centric view that has so many gradations of barbarians, whether these are mountain folks, horse folks, or just foreign folks.27 I wish we can celebrate the rebellious, marginal peoples that have practiced ways to stay at arms-length from the state. It might be a hard ask for the hard men of Beijing to admire the unruly mountain peoples, many of whom have loose ethnic commitments and no written language. But life in Yunnan was much better than being in the big cities last year. “Far from being seen as a regrettable backsliding and privation,” Scott writes: “becoming a barbarian may have produced a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order.”

I advocate for departing from the court center too. So it’s time to say: it’s a barbarian’s life for me.

I thank a number of people for reading a draft of this section or discussing the core ideas with me.

***

It’s time to talk about books.

2022 was one of my worst reading years. Covid was the cause. No regrets, of course. Travel is usually a greater source of learning than the page.

James C. Scott wrote most of the books I took with me on my trips through Asian highlands. The least interesting of his works is Seeing Like A State: like the ministries he describes, it uses a top-down perspective to view matters more interesting from the bottom-up. Far more engaging is The Art of Not Being Governed, which describes state-repellent practices among mountain folks in Asia. Against the Grain is superb in a similar way: the careful marshaling of extensive details, written as usual in his appealing prose, to arrive at conclusion with quixotic undertones — favoring something between the gradual elimination of grains in the human diet to the total expulsion of governments in human society. I also enjoyed one of Scott’s earlier works: Weapons of the Weak, an ethnographic account of his fieldwork in a Malaysian village.

My favorite magazine is the London Review of Books, and my favorite series there are the portraits of delightful animals by Katherine Rundell. (See, for example, Consider the Golden Mole.) Her new book, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, works so well because she wrote Donne as a delightful animal. Just as some animals can be talented in many things, whether digging or hunting, so too Donne: an erotic poet turned Protestant preacher, a former Catholic turned anti-Jesuit propagandist. The book also works because Rundell adores her subject: “His poetry will not hold still. It tussles and shifts, the way desire does.” She is so earnest. After reading her on Donne, I picked up an earlier work: Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise: “I believe in the wild and immeasurable value of pouring everything you think good or important into a text, that another might draw it out again.“

Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World is a book on math, markets, female labor, science, and industrial production. Textiles stimulated many things: development of bills of exchange (started by clothiers in London), the creation of the global chemicals industry (the A in BASF stood for Anilin, a synthetic indigo dye), and the first rung on the ladder of industrialization (since so many countries have their manufacturing start by producing textiles). It is another book of fascinating details. I did not know, for example, that a Viking sail of 100 square meters would require 60 miles of yarn, such that it took less time to build a wooden ship than to spin its woolen sail.

China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism by Hill Gates feels remarkably fresh and true for a book published in 1997. Her argument is that China has been locked between the “tributary” mode of production, or trade meant for the pleasure of the emperor, and the “petty capitalist” mode of production, which is the trade between cunning businesspeople. Gates is a committed Marxist, and her book is weakened by this insistence to examine imperial China through an Marxist framework. But it makes up for that with several brilliant insights.

The most valuable is her view that there has always been duality in China: court and traders, self-professed Marxists and rough-and-tumble entrepreneurs. Somewhat opposing tendencies are often simultaneously true in China, and that dialectic can resolve unpredictably: “In individuals and collectivities, vigorous support of some grand moral program was abruptly succeeded by equally vigorous support of something entirely different.” And: “A sophisticated bureaucracy in which poets were also expected to be engineers have been locked in an endless, cruel, but also fertile embrace with the world’s best businesspeople.” Some things really haven’t changed from imperial times. “Officials, in the name of the emperor, had many times in the past entirely restructured the agrarian economy… and always claimed the right to determine the relationships between people and land.”

Highly stimulating was The Jesuits, by Markus Friedrich. The Society of Jesus has been impressive for several reasons. First, its enormous capacity for feuding; it doesn’t matter how powerful the opponent was — Jansenists, the Inquisition, the Propagation for the Faith — Jesuits were willing to fight anyone, over grounds doctrinal or jurisdictional. (Their enemies paid them back in 1773, when Clement XIV suppressed the order.) Second, its robust tradition of scholarship: the Society built a network for exchanging objects and scholarship across its research centers all over the world. Also: “The fact that books by Jesuits kept landing on the papal Index of Forbidden Books was extremely embarrassing to the order’s superiors.” Third, their focus on cultivating the political, commercial, and religious elites in cities. That strategy helped the order gain political access to the Qing court in Beijing, but from a missionary point of view it was unsuccessful: the orders that focused on the Chinese countryside, like the Lazarists, won far greater numbers of converts.

I had not known that Jesuit entertainment drew large crowds: “Burning props were as much a part of the repertoire of Jesuit drama as scenes of war and nature. In light of such sensational multimedia spectacles, it was no wonder that Jesuit plays were often extremely well attended.”

I couldn’t help, as I read about this Catholic order, to compare the Vatican with the Communist Party. It is not only that China is moving towards life terms for the top leader. Both the Holy See and the CCP must dedicate an immense amount of thought to make doctrine fit into a practical philosophy of governance. Sometimes they fail, producing cadres willing only to mouth Marxist or Christian pieties without believing in all the tenets of the faith. A tendency to invoke philosophy sometimes allow scholarly corners to become centers of reaction: just as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was viewed as holding back reform in recent decades, so too was the Theory Bureau of the Propaganda Department a thorn in Deng’s side during Reform and Opening. Meanwhile, every so often the leader must enforce a message for everyone to get in line, as the Jesuits did with their Thirteenth Rule: “We ought always to hold that the white which I see, I shall believe to be black, if the hierarchical church so stipulates.” That sounds quite in line with a party that would produce something like Two Establishes and Two Safeguards.28

***

I wrote that Yunnan has greater geographic variation than most countries. Its cuisine does too.

“Yunnan cuisine” may be an unsound category as such. Sichuan, just north of Yunnan, has a cuisine that yields easier summary, given the centrality of peppercorn and spice in a set number of cooking styles. That standardization helps to explain why Sichuan restaurants have successfully expanded throughout the country and also overseas.

Yunnan resists any underlying unity in its cuisine. It’s a land of jungle food and mountain food, in which cooking methods that make sense for the northern snowlands don’t bear any resemblance to those in the southern rainforests. It’s not just that culinary trends tend to splinter when they enter the mountains. Border cities take inspiration from nearby regions: Tibetan, Burmese, Laotian, and Thai traditions in the west, and Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi and Vietnamese traditions in the east. There are many dishes particular to a mountain and its tribe. Consider the Yi people of Chuxiong, who “occasionally host a grand banquet in which they cook an entire ram. The first set of dishes comprises of up to 30 cold cuts, prepared from the hooves, face, and head, dipped in soybeans with mint.”29

I can describe Yunnan cuisine only through dishes special to me. I think of pickled bamboo shoots, gently fried, lending their funky sourness to fish soups. I think of ham, sometimes steamed on its own, sometimes sautéd with some chili peppers, sometimes dropped in the pot to enliven a broth. I think of whole stems of flowers, tossed with vinegar in salad. I think of various types of rice noodles, in thick strings like Udon or as thumb-sized slices, which are more supple-bodied and offer greater chewiness than noodles made of wheat. I think of simple farm cheeses — a rare find in Chinese culinary traditions — steamed with slices of ham. I think of spicy pickles, indiscriminately sharpening the flavors of noodle soups or a vegetable dish, say a quick fry of lotus root. I think of yellow strips of pea pudding, tossed in chili oil, vinegar, and some bean sprouts. I think of a simple lunch of rice cakes fried with ham, eggs, and chives. I think of stewed beef garnished with handfuls of fresh mint, of mashed potatoes that do not drown in butter but are suffused with salty pickles, and of simple pans of soup that have up to a half-dozen types of dark, leafy greens.

I think most of all about mushrooms, which are the pride and glory of Yunnan. Mushrooms are still too smart for us to tame in greenhouses, so the best are foraged in the wild during the rainy months of the summer. The best types offer mesmerizing combinations of flavor and mouthfeel. Their flavors tend to be best with a light sauté, combined with chili peppers for a jaunty kick, and ham slices if need be. My favorite is the Ganba, found only under pine trees, which release so much gorgeous savoriness that it can suffuse a whole plate of rice with its musk when fried. Hot butter awakens the flavors of the matsutake, a delicate and savory mushroom. (Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World is a fascinating account of this commodity trade, especially how Yunnan satisfies a large portion of Japan’s appetite for the matsutake.) Various types of porcinos taste best when fried with chilis, releasing their rich and meaty taste into the peppers. I remember an excellent meal of morels stewed in fresh cream served over a yak steak.

There are two ways that one can go wrong with mushrooms. The first is to eat them in hotpot, where their textures dissolve and flavors die over a boil. Unfortunately I have had to endure this waste before. The second is to be poisoned. Unfortunately that has happened to me too. The first time wasn’t too bad, only some vomiting. The second time was worse, involving hallucinations over the course of several days. That has not put me off from putting on boots on my feet and a basket on my back to continue my foraging adventures. Of course one has to be more careful, since every year people die of such poisonings. But one also can’t allows a fear of misfortune to develop into an impediment to culinary pleasure in the mushroom paradise of Yunnan.

For my money, the food of Yunnan’s northern snowlands tend to be relatively less interesting. Tibetan dishes are simple and doughy affairs, enjoyable mostly because they offer warmth from the cold. A hotpot of yak meat accompanied by yak butter tea can be delightful; but it remains a treat only if it’s enjoyed infrequently. The food of the Naxi people in Lijiang is mostly unremarkable, which is another reason to minimize time in the city. I found a lot more to eat in Dali. It has a liberal use of pickles to enhance its dishes, and the nearby lake also offers nice assortments of fish. I never managed to find time however to enjoy one of the local Bai traditions, which is to eat the skin and raw meat of pork in the morning.

When I miss the food of Yunnan, it is the dishes from Xishuangbanna that make me most dreamy. The city’s lifestyle is nocturnal since the people are dependent on rubber production: rubber trees are best tapped at night when temperatures are cool. Therefore the streets are fairly empty in the midday sun, coming alive in the evening. That is when people crack open beers and enjoy grilled meats before they enter the forests.

I’ve had meat skewers in night markets all over China. The best I’ve had is in Xishuangbanna. The Dai people tend to wrap meats with sweetgrass or banana leafs when they grill using charcoal: the result is that the meat is charred on the outside with the moisture still sealed in on the inside. They use a wide variety of meats: pork cheeks that offer wonderful chewiness, long lengths of spare ribs, and tilapia fish stuffed with herbs and chiles. These meats are garnished with piles of ginger, chilies, garlic, and lemongrass, or served more simply with a dip of chili powder.

Charcoal grilling is not the only way to cook meat in Xishuangbanna. The Dai would also throw certain meats like tripe and beef arteries into a fry, then lace the plate with ginger, chilies, garlic, and lemongrass — sharpening the fatty meat with a dazzling edge of flavor. Another way to cook, more common with the Jinuo people, is to wrap mushrooms or chicken in banana leaf with spice mixtures over a low flame. Chicken is common either over the grill or in a soup. Some of the best noodles I’ve had in China are in Xishuangbanna: tangy rice noodles in chicken broth, garnished with a few pieces of liver and an assortment of pickles.

The rice is sometimes cooked inside bamboo tubes turned over a fire. A more photogenic dish is sticky rice baked inside a pineapple, in which chunks of the fruit would lend their tangy sweetness to the starch. The vegetables in Xishuangbanna are special as well. Locals prepare salads made with young papaya or green mangoes, dressed in chilies and lime juice. Whenever I have grilled meats, I take care to order both a salad or a soup made up of bitter greens (like squash leafs and mustard greens) sometimes made more sour with tomato or pickled bamboo.

At one corner of northwest Yunnan, three rivers have their headwaters, at one stretch running parallel with each other at close distance: a raindrop in that area might be blown into the Mekong and be carried off towards Vietnam, into the Yangtze and go towards Shanghai, or into the Salween and end up in the Indian Ocean. I’m a fan of this nice little painting from painter Zhou Rui, depicting the course of the Mekong. Image credit to the Xishuangbanna International Art Exhibition. Elsewhere, there is something called the Yunnan School of Painting.

Open questions:

1. Why did the minority groups in the flat plains of China’s north (be they Mongolians, Jurchens, or Manchus) tend to model themselves after the Han state, adopting its language and court customs, while the minority groups in the southwest have tended to focus on running away from Han civilizing efforts? The northern peoples were both able to quickly assume imperial rule when they conquered Han forces, but they also lost their distinctiveness after a few generations. Does geography explain this difference?
2. I wonder how other writers are integrating ChatGPT in their work. I still haven’t quite found it to be a necessary tool. I want it to be a research assistant, but that’s a non-starter given that it can’t provide research citations. And I want to use it to brainstorm, but so far I’m not good enough at prompting it to be helpful yet.
3. What are other people’s favorite things to read about mountains?

The post 2022 letter appeared first on Dan Wang.

2021 letter

2022-01-01 23:32:01

(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2020)

I’ve by now lived in each of China’s main megaregions. It is time to make assessments.

Everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing. The climate is arid and prone to northerly sandstorms. Its streets are unwalkable, but a stroll would reveal that its imperial heritage, made up of alley houses called hutongs, is slowly being taken over by its socialist heritage, made up of gray Soviet blocks that tower over all. Beijing is therefore a desert steppe city with Stalinist characteristics. A decade ago, the city was a lively place. One can find no shortage of people reminiscing about visiting art shows and fun bars in hutongs, then grabbing roadside barbecue just outside. Today, it is a concrete no-fun zone and the most restrictive city in the country. But Beijing is redeemed by its intellectual life. It is the center not just of state power, but also universities and the biggest-dreaming startups. For those who can work up the courage to confront the mess of its urban city, a sparkling dinner awaits.

A hundred years ago, Shanghai (where I currently reside) was the city in Asia where the ambitious could live comfortably while making a great deal of money. A rough few decades later, that fact is true once more. Shanghai is by far the most westernized city in China, attracting perhaps the majority of foreign nationals as well as Chinese who have spent time abroad. One can live in the tree-lined former French Concession, which today hosts the greatest concentration of coffee shops in the world, and work in office settings little different from those in Singapore and Hong Kong. It’s easy to make day trips to the canal cities of east China that enchanted poets and emperors alike. Shanghai today is culturally on par with Beijing, offering no fewer selections of visual and performance art. A more valid contrast is that Shanghaiers are more concerned with practical affairs. Its people are focused on producing the sorts of food and fashion businesses that make the city still more livable.

The Greater Bay Area is a bit more of a mystery to me, given that I lived in the failing part—Hong Kong—rather than the growing part: Shenzhen. At the start of reform and opening, Shenzhen absorbed the shock troops of Chinese entrepreneurialism. The southeastern region has long focused more on commerce than culture, having produced relatively fewer objects of historical resonance. When the British seized Hong Kong, the port was a mostly-barren rock, while Shenzhen was barely a settlement at all. Even Guangzhou, a major mercantile hub, has never quite been a center of culture, only cuisine. The southeast is pursuing a strategy similar to Shanghai’s: the development of service sectors around a vibrant manufacturing base. But it is doing so with less taste. Although Shenzhen is less fun than Shanghai, its region is probably the most dynamic and forward-looking part of the country today.

The central government has delineated around a hundred million people to each of these megaregions and charged them to drive future growth.1 Beijing, the political center of the country for most of the time since Mongol rule in the 13th century, anchors the northern hub, which also includes Tianjin and relatively smaller cities. Shanghai leads east China, a manufacturing and cultural center since the 10th-century Song dynasty, which counts the nearby cities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and other medium-large cities. And there’s no obvious leader in the southeast, but it is between Shenzhen, the richest city in the region, and Guangzhou, the political capital of the province and a hub of international commerce since the 18th century.

Each region has a different personality. The north is economically dysfunctional. Large parts of it suffer from resource dependency, environmental problems, and the population loss that results from these trends. Cities near Beijing showcase overcapacity in steel and coal, while Tianjin is well-known for having falsified its economic data. The northeast provinces nearby have seen a population decline of around 10% over the last decade, while the north as a whole has seen its share of the country’s GDP shrink from half in 1960 to a third today.2

Beijing however has bucked the region and seen strong growth. It is the political center of the country and reaps every economic advantage from that status. That means retaining the bulk of the state sector as well as the industries most dependent on political rents. Thus it’s not so different from Washington, DC, with its mix of embassies, think tanks, and industries that need lobbying. Not every sector in Beijing though is dependent on the beneficence of government. Although Alibaba is in Hangzhou and Tencent is in Shenzhen, Beijing hosts the preponderance of consumer internet firms, like ByteDance, Meituan, and JD. Beijing is a good place to find talent because it has led for so long and because many of the country’s best universities are there. Whereas a lot of the entrepreneurs in Shenzhen are dreaming of building billion-dollar businesses, those in Beijing are at work building the kind that reach hundreds of billions of dollars.

Shanghai is more commercially oriented. Around a thousand years ago, the region of east China started to transform into the fiscal center of the country, as people moved from the millet-growing north into the more productive rice-growing east. The area received another boost with the influx of New World silver, propelling Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou into the first cities in the world that made luxury goods for global markets. Dotted around these metropolises were market towns producing rice, ceramics, silk, and other goods. Shanghai came into its own through the slow collapse of the Qing. By the turn of the 20th century, it attracted the most dynamic Chinese entrepreneurs and became the center of the country’s industrial works. At the same time, Shanghai was the gambling and brothel capital of the world, the center of the country’s opium trafficking, and the extraterritorial playground for British, French, and American businessmen.3

Today, Shanghai’s seedy past is mostly out of view. But the economic dynamism has not quite faded away. The city hosts the preponderance of the Chinese headquarters of multinationals. And it attracts Chinese entrepreneurs who appreciate its business environment: they tell me that local government districts compete against each other to host companies, and are constantly asking how they can help. While the area around Beijing is failing, the cities around Shanghai are many of China’s best economic successes. Simon Rabinovitch describes it best: “Beijing, a showcase for political power, is blotted by the hulking headquarters of state-owned enterprises. Day trips take reporters to China’s greatest economic calamities, from overbuilt Tianjin to coal-mine carnage in Inner Mongolia. In Shanghai, which functions remarkably well for a city of 25m, reporters instead hop over to see high-tech innovators in Hangzhou, nimble exporters in Wuxi and ambitious entrepreneurs in Wenzhou.”4

The fact I appreciate best is that Shanghai is highly livable. Among cities in Asia, Tokyo is a singular miracle, but I think that Shanghai is not lesser than Singapore, Hong Kong, or Seoul. Business executive types tell me that New York is the only city that rivals its dynamism. I agree that both cities have a special energy: both are on major waterways, invest a great deal in greenery, and have a thriving business environment to support excellent leisure activities. A huge number of people moved from Beijing to Shanghai after the start of the pandemic, including me. Whereas Beijing is hit hard by every domestic outbreak, Shanghai hasn’t had many cases while being the least restrictive city in the country. It’s hard for us fresh arrivals not to smirk at our friends in the north each time we read about new restrictions in Beijing.

The Shenzhen region is harder to write about given its patchwork nature. Shenzhen surpassed Hong Kong to be the region’s richest city in 2018. But it hasn’t been able to wrest leadership away from Guangzhou, which jealously guards its political power. Dongguan, Zhuhai, and Huizhou each pursue their own strategies, while Macau fits into the constellation as well (although it is less interesting given that it’s a single-industry town). Hong Kong, meanwhile, is a world unto itself. Since the political problems there over the last three years, the central government has made it obvious that it can think of the city only with exasperation. Rather than expect it to lead, Beijing is treating Hong Kong as something like an ulcer: a problem to manage away with hopefully not much more pain.

I left Hong Kong in 2018, before its protests and the ensuing political crackdown. I had hastened to leave then because I already felt the keen disappointment of living in a city in structural decline. I acknowledge that Hong Kong is an urban paradise: a tropical island with a splendid geographic setting, featuring a ring of skyscrapers that hug thickly-forested mountains. There the amenities of the tropics are easy to find: beaches, forests, wild birds and animals galore, all accessible by excellent systems of public transit. Manhattan meets Maui, in other words, at the mouth of the Pearl River. And there is still an interesting cast of characters, many of whom have adventured on the mainland or the rest of Asia, to enliven the city.

But Hong Kong was also the most bureaucratic city I’ve ever lived in. Its business landscape has remained static for decades: the preserve of property developers that has created no noteworthy companies in the last three decades. That is a heritage of British colonial rule, in which administrators controlled economic elites by allocating land—the city’s most scarce resource—to the more docile. Hong Kong bureaucrats enforce the pettiest rules, I felt, out of a sense of pride. On the mainland, enforcers deal often enough with senseless rules that they are sometimes able to look the other way. Thus a stagnant spirit hangs over the city. I’ve written before that Philip K. Dick is useful not for thinking about Hong Kong’s skyline, but its tycoon-dominated polity: “governed by a competent but fundamentally pessimistic elite, which administers a population bent on consumption. Instead of being hooked on drugs and television like in PKD’s novels, people in Hong Kong are addicted to the extraordinary flow of liquidity from the mainland, which raises their asset values and dulls their senses.”

Therefore I think there is little excuse for young people to live in Hong Kong. They should hop over to Shenzhen, which is an hour away by subway and decades younger by spirit. Shenzhen and Guangzhou are still attracting entrepreneurial types, producing an even more commercially-oriented culture than Shanghai. But while Shenzhen is pleasant, it is also a boring city with minimal culture. A friend relates an anecdote from a gallery artist, who said that clients in Shenzhen rarely comment on the art that they plan to buy. Instead they ask only its expected price in five years.

Prophets, not pragmatists

One shouldn’t overdraw the differences between these regions. After all, people and officials rotate between Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen all the time. But I will exaggerate their differences as part of an exercise to decompose the heterogeneity behind Chinese growth.

There’s a little joke that the ideal company is led by a Beijinger, who would provide the vision, leadership, and government-relations savvy; its finances would be led by someone from Shanghai, and its operations managed by someone from Shenzhen (who would hire people from Sichuan and Anhui to do the actual work). Entrepreneurial friends say that doing business is most straightforward in Shenzhen: people there get together over dinner, discuss how to allocate the workload, and then get to work the very next day. Dinner in Beijing features lots of drinking, bluffs about one’s connections in high places, and little follow up.

Beijingers are the way they are due to the imperial and socialist heritage of the city. The currency of Beijing is power. The party-state maintains a formal system of rank, a holdover of imperial times, which denotes the status of every public official. In the imperial era, the powerful enjoyed official rank and connections to the court. In the socialist era—when distribution of goods was meant to be equal—the powerful enjoyed official rank, access to the party farms and best primary schools, and connections to the Central Committee.

I used to live in the embassy district. On any given day the full complement of security services might come into view: army, paramilitary, police, plainclothes police, and so on. The aura of state power is overbearing in Beijing. By power I mean the physical infrastructure, which is meant to intimidate. Beijing’s boulevards are so unwalkable because they are designed less for pedestrians than for army parades. And by power I mean the structure of personal interactions. Beijing locals have adapted to the proliferation of rules not with complete obedience, but discernment of which can be safely ignored. Northerners are thus often unruly. When I’m in Beijing, I find myself sympathizing with the Legalist school of philosophy, which enjoins the ruler to govern with a brutal fist. I speak from the perspective of a cyclist, an aggrieved class everywhere. It’s frustrating to see so many moped drivers going the wrong way or riding on the sidewalk when they see no cops in sight.

But Beijing’s role is grander than mere enforcer of petty restrictions. Its control tendencies demonstrate a commitment to the transformative role of ideology. Shanghai and Shenzhen are creating wealth and leisure; Beijing is trying to lift their gaze towards its banner of utopia. The core of my letter in 2020 concerned centralized campaigns of inspiration, which is the need of the Communist Party to mobilize the population through political campaigns. A distinctive feature of Chinese governance is to continuously fix slogans, like “reform and opening” to move the country away from socialism, and the more recent “common prosperity” to move it back. Beijing isn’t satisfied with national wealth alone. It is also seeking socialist modernization and the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.” That is a messianic drive, complete with sacred texts, elaborate rituals, and the occasional purge.

Shenzhen might stand in for the purest form of the Chinese moneymaking spirit. Many people, including northerners, move to Shenzhen for its relaxed political climate. Shanghai is a bit more of a middle ground between Shenzhen and Beijing. Although there is substantial economic dynamism in Shanghai, the data shows that the state sector makes up around the same share of the city’s economy as Beijing’s. Many of Shanghai’s favorite sons have moved up to Beijing to run the Politburo—including Wang Huning, the present head of ideology. And Shanghai of course was important for two of the most important political events in the Communist Party’s history: its founding in 1921 and being the political base of the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution.

In spite of my physical dislike of Beijing as a city, I find myself sympathetic to its spirit. There is a use for the hard men of the north. I appreciate this line from Amia Srinivasan in Tyler’s interview this year: “One thing history might show us is that it is the prophets, and not the mere pragmatists, who are the most powerful world makers.”5 The apostles who govern in Beijing know that nothing can be more venal than the interests of capitalists, who dominate Shanghai and Shenzhen. That was the view of Chen Yun, a Shanghai native and state leader who was nearly the political equal of Deng Xiaoping. In the early debates around special economic zones, Chen noted that his home region was filled with opportunists who would destroy the social order for a dime.

A summer storm

Beijing’s goal is to channel entrepreneurial spirit towards useful goals. Profit cannot be the final standard of value, and the country’s best and brightest must work towards national salvation. I see that dynamic playing out in the regulatory campaigns this year.

The most important Politburo meeting of the year took place in April. The readout afterwards noted that the leadership identified a “window of opportunity” while growth was good to “concentrate on deepening structural reforms.”6 It had previously signalled its unhappiness with the property and consumer internet sectors, and the leadership announced with this readout that there would be no better time to escalate its crackdowns. The central government subsequently launched campaigns to clean house. The tightening on every front has led the economist Barry Naughton to refer to the regulatory squeeze as a “summer storm” fit for the history books.7 I agree, and will make some remarks on the leadership’s goals as I see them.

When Beijing punished Ant Financial and DiDi, all of us were nervous that these companies were pawns in a game of elite politics whose rules aren’t revealed to anyone who isn’t a player. At this point, however, the punishment of these two firms looks rather small compared to everything that happened afterwards: the decapitation of online tutoring, new restrictions on video games, anti-monopoly actions against internet platforms, and passage of statutes governing data and privacy.

No small number of commentators have pointed out that any individual regulation passes muster on technocratic grounds. The US and Europe after all are debating rules with similar shapes—although they would never implement them with China’s speed and severity. I agree both with the commentators who see a sound technocratic foundation for these rules8 as well as with commentators like Naughton who note that they add up to an unprecedented new program of political control on firms.9 Beijing expects companies to comply not only with formal regulations but also to a broader ideological agenda.

While Beijing has restrained internet companies, it has done nothing to hurt more science-based industries like semiconductors and renewables. In fact, it has offered these industries tax breaks and other forms of political support. The 14th Five-Year Plan, for example, places far greater emphasis on science-based technologies than the internet. Thus one of the effects of Beijing’s squeeze has been prioritization of science-based technologies over the consumer internet industry. Far from being a generalized “tech” crackdown, the leadership continues to talk tirelessly about the value of science and technology.

In nearly all of my letters over the years, I’ve lamented the idea that consumer internet companies have taken over the idea of technological progress: “It’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development.”10 I don’t think that Beijing’s primary goal is to reshuffle technological priorities. Instead, it is mostly a mix of a technocratic belief that reducing the power of platforms would help smaller companies as well as a desire to impose political control on big firms.

But there is also an ideological element that rejects consumer internet as the peak of technology. Beijing recognizes that internet platforms make not only a great deal of money, but also many social problems. Consider online tutoring. The Ministry of Education claims to have surveyed 700,000 parents before it declared that the sector can no longer make profit.11 What was the industry profiting from? In the government’s view, education companies have become adept at monetizing the status anxieties of parents: the Zhang family keeps feeling outspent by the Li family, and vice versa. In a similar theme, the leadership considers the peer-to-peer lending industry as well as Ant Financial to be sources of financial risks; and video games to be a source of social harm. These companies may be profitable, but entrepreneurial dynamism here is not a good thing.

Where does Beijing prefer dynamism? Science-based industries that serve strategic needs. Beijing, in other words, is trying to make semiconductors sexy again. One might reasonably question how dealing pain to users of chips (like consumer internet firms) might help the industry. I think that the focus should instead be on talent and capital allocation. If venture capitalists are mostly funding social networking companies, then they would be able to hire the best talent while denying them to chipmakers. That has arguably been the story in Silicon Valley over the last decade: Intel and Cisco were not quite able to compete for the best engineering talent with Facebook and Google. Beijing wants to change this calculation among domestic investors and students at Peking and Tsinghua.

Internet platforms aren’t the only industries under suspicion. Beijing is also falling out of love with finance. It looks unwilling to let the vagaries of the financial markets dictate the pace of technological investment, which in the US has favored the internet over chips. Beijing has regularly denounced the “disorderly expansion of capital,” and sometimes its “barbaric growth.”12 The attitude of business-school types is to arbitrage everything that can be arbitraged no matter whether it serves social goals. That was directly Chen Yun’s fear that opportunists care only about money. High profits therefore are not the right metric to assess online education, because the industry is preying on anxious parents while immiserating their children.

Beijing’s attitude marks a difference with capitalism as it’s practiced in the US. Over the last two decades, the major American growth stories have been Silicon Valley (consumer internet and software) on one coast and Wall Street (financialization) on the other. For good measure, I’ll throw in a rejection of capitalism as it is practiced in the UK as well. My line last year triggered so many Brits that I’ll use it again: “With its emphasis on manufacturing, (China) cannot be like the UK, which is so successful in the sounding-clever industries—television, journalism, finance, and universities—while seeing a falling share of R&D intensity and a global loss of standing among its largest firms.”

The Chinese leadership looks more longingly at Germany, with its high level of manufacturing backed by industry-leading Mittelstand firms. Thus Beijing prefers that the best talent in the country work in manufacturing sectors rather than consumer internet and finance. Personally, I think it has been a tragedy for the US that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley. The problem is not that these opportunities pay so well, rather it is because manufacturing has offered dismal career prospects. I see the Chinese leadership as being relatively unconcerned with talent flow into consumer internet and finance; instead it is trying to fashion an economy in which the physics PhD can do physics, the marine biology student can do marine biology, and so on.

There are of course risks with a blunt reshuffling of technological priorities. The investment model of venture capital—in which a relatively small amount of funding can trigger explosive growth—fits like a hand in glove with consumer internet business models. VCs don’t tend to offer quite as much patience as semiconductors demand. Furthermore, many technological advances have been driven by consumer uses that Beijing no longer looks upon with favor. Demand for better video game graphics, for example, improved the sophistication of GPUs, which in turn produced better machine-learning algorithms.

But it’s also the case that state-driven technology efforts can work. The CPU, after all, grew out of the barrel of a gun. To be more precise, the beneficence of the Pentagon and NASA (another state-driven effort) gave the chip industry its crucial first customers. And venture capital did after all fund the first chip companies, including Intel. Beijing is trading unfettered exploration for state-directed goals, and it’s possible to argue that both the US and China are pursuing optimal strategies. As the technological leader, the US must encourage active exploration, because it has to blaze a new path. As the technological follower, China can simply follow the roadmap set by the US, while enjoying the easier task of reinventing existing technologies rather than dreaming up new ideas. It can worry about new invention after it has caught up.

A more serious risk with Beijing’s crackdown is its potential to dampen economic dynamism writ large. People working in online education today suffer from PTSD. Jack Ma has been mostly out of the public eye for a year. Meanwhile, many of the most successful Chinese founders have stepped down or into the background. No public figure in China dares to be too visible today. One motivation for dreamers to start companies might be to enjoy the outrageous excesses of being billionaire playboys. While I’m on the subject of Elon Musk, we should note that he did after all make his fortune in consumer internet before he embarked on manufacturing.

It’s too early to tell if in a decade China will have fewer founders of Jack Ma’s daring. So far at least, entrepreneurial types around me have found his example too removed to be worth bother. He remains, after all, one of the wealthiest people in the world, while he spends his time playing golf, doing calligraphy, or examining agricultural technologies in the Netherlands. My view is that it’s going to take more than this regulatory campaign to defeat dynamism in China. We might in retrospect see this summer as China’s high point in reining in the excesses of its own Gilded Age, which has produced ebullience as well as hucksterism. In this best case, Beijing would succeed at taming its robber barons without extinguishing dynamism in the following century.

Strangling the cultural sector

But there’s a serious problem with the regulatory squeeze. The summer storm has battered industries and left people feeling adrift. The trouble is that the party-state looks like the God of the Old Testament: a wrathful entity that demands harrowing displays of fealty to demonstrate commitment to a values-based faith. Disobedience provokes storms and other manifestations of celestial displeasure. Compliance means not just material gifts—honey, manna, and government sponsorship of factory financing—but also the realization of national greatness.

If Beijing were only brutal or unpredictable, then people wouldn’t be so on edge. But it is both. No one is sure how far the state will prosecute its values-based agenda. A lot of things happened this year that remain too bizarre for belief. For example, the end of the summer was the time when everyone’s nerves were most short, as they wondered what “common prosperity” will herald and whether the state will ravage other industries with the ferocity it brought to bear on online tutoring. The organs of state media chose that moment to publicize the ultra-left ravings of an obscure blogger.13 To the author’s own astonishment, he found his celebration of the crackdown splashed onto the homepages of state media and pushed into newsfeeds. The rest of us were left feeling bewildered that the propaganda officials selected such fringe view for a news push.

Government officials subsequently emerged to assure people that common prosperity will not mean egalitarianism. Still, precisely what it will mean is still not scoped out. Beijing reined in its control tendencies only after it had thoroughly terrified people. The essential bet of top leader Xi Jinping is that there will always be a large stock of dynamism in the country, and the job of the party-state is to steer that energy in the right directions. That bet might turn out to be successful, but this push is also demonstrating the odium of never-ending restrictions on personal liberty.

While it’s too soon to say that regulatory actions have snuffed out entrepreneurial dynamism in China, it’s easier to see that a decade of continuous tightening has strangled cultural production. I expect that China will grow rich but remain culturally stunted. By my count, the country has produced two cultural works over the last four decades since reform and opening that have proved attractive to the rest of the world: the Three-Body Problem and TikTok. Even these demand qualifications. Three-Body is a work of genius, but it is still a niche product most confined to science-fiction lovers; and TikTok is in part an American product and doesn’t necessarily convey Chinese content. Even if we wave nuances aside, China’s cultural offering to the world has been meager. Never has any economy grown so much while producing so few cultural exports. Contrast that with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which have made new forms of art, music, movies, and TV shows that the rest of the world loves.

The reason for China’s cultural stunting is simple: the deadening hand of the state has ground down the country’s creative capacity. The tightening has been continuous. Consider that the Three-Body trilogy had been published in Chinese by 2010, which was a completely different era. I think it’s quite impossible to imagine that this work can be published or marketed today. It’s not just the censorship related to direct depictions of the Cultural Revolution. A decade ago, the CEO of Xiaomi went on Weibo to share his thoughts on the book; today, few personalities speak up to say anything except the patriotic or the mundane. Therefore I’m not terribly optimistic about the future of Chinese science fiction, which today has almost as many people studying the field as actual practitioners.

Throughout the last decade, Xi and the rest of the leadership have proved successful at convincing or coercing elites that it’s not worth their while to ponder such abstractions as whether the country is on the right path. These elites should keep their heads down and make money. There are lots of reasons for Chinese not to speak up: fear of the state; pragmatism from a sense that nothing they say can change the situation; as well as resentment against western voices for invalidating some of the positive aspects of the country. At the same time, the propaganda authorities have weaponized the public sphere to wring out dissent. A critical comment posted to Weibo or WeChat might prompt the platform to delete one’s account. If that doesn’t happen, then the internet mob will pounce. In spite of the greater visibility of this internet mob, I think we are still only scratching the surface of Chinese nationalism.

There’s little prospect of loosening in sight. Writer friends say that there’s no way that they can publish interesting work in 2022, given that the 20th party congress will be held at the end of the year. We have to accept that the direction of travel is towards still-more tightening. Just as a house can never be too clean, a city can never be too protected against Covid-19, and the country can never be too free of spiritual pollution. One of Xi’s legacies has been to push officials to err on the side of implementing controls too tightly, such that party officials are now trying to prove themselves to be more Marxist than the general secretary. It’s a safe bet that the government will control too much rather than too little.

The consequence is that there’s little way for Xi to achieve his exhortation this year for China to make its image more “lovable and respectable.”14 Instead, the country is more likely to be seen as a land of censorious commies. In the developed world, China’s unfavorability ratings have reached an average of 60%, according to Pew Research.15 Foreign agitation against the regime used to be contained to Chinese dissidents and niche groups on the political spectrum; today, it is a generalized phenomenon.

Beijing worsens the situation with its need to answer every insult with insult. It unfortunately cannot practice restraint by invoking the proverb: “A decade is not too long for the gentleman to await his revenge.” Like clockwork, every time China decides to push back against claims that it is too brutal, the government can’t help but undertake an act of extraordinary pettiness to bully a critic. Last year, it expelled the cream of the western reporting corps for a reason still hard to believe today—that the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal published an insensitive headline—such that only a handful of reporters remain on the ground between the Journal, the Times, and the Post. This year, Beijing proved that there is no country, company, or individual too unimportant to be the subject of state-media tirades or state-sponsored economic punishment.

Thus China today faces a global surge of dislike. That’s due to the operation of detention camps for ethno-religious minorities, a political crackdown in Hong Kong, abusive threats against other countries, as well as other issues. And it is also because the country has failed to cultivate a “lovable and respectable” image. Sentiment can shift against the country so quickly because there is little curiosity in it. The party-state really seems to believe that the rest of the world must love China because of its economic growth. The joke is on them, because Americans and Europeans do not admire economic growth and have dreamed up a thousand reasons to avoid it for themselves. They care instead more about cultural issues, which is why people have fond views of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which have combined economic growth with cultural creation.

Comprehensively deepening reform

But Beijing’s control tendency isn’t the only story in this country. That spirit is resented by Shanghai and Shenzhen, which mediates it with their commercial tendencies. Pushback from local governments can occasionally mitigate Beijing’s worst ideas. Shanghai and Shenzhen are also sometimes able to help improve the institutional capacity in Beijing. The Chinese growth story is not simply produced by the government or by entrepreneurs. It is a heterogenous entity where different regions dialectically engage to obstruct and improve each other.

One can tell a story of stagnation in cultural production in China. And one is right to worry that the same will happen to the economy writ large. But we’re not quite there yet. The economy did not do well this year, but almost the entirety of the slowdown can be attributed to policy choices: either pandemic controls or regulatory tightening. Economists have said for years that China needs to deleverage its property-driven economy, and this year the leadership decided to do so. The central government embarked on this agenda because it has judged that its program of structural reforms will support growth in the medium to long term. It has certainly made mistakes, especially in the power market, but the campaigns of this year display a willingness by Beijing to actively shape events. Ironically, it is these self-proclaimed Marxists who are especially willing to resist grand forces of history, for example in the cases of globalization or financialization.

The influence of Shanghai and Shenzhen are visible in the trajectory of economic improvement. First and foremost is the continued buildup of wealth, not just in big cities but also rural areas. Air quality has also substantially improved in Beijing and Shanghai over the last decade.16 The government of daily life has also gotten better. One can now obtain business licenses fairly straightforwardly; the intellectual property system has become robust, such that Chinese firms are bringing huge numbers of cases against each other; regulations tend to be relatively transparent and professional; and many types of risks are being squeezed out of the financial system. I submit that Chinese local government functions today would look fairly ordinary in any other advanced country.17 Outside of the security and propaganda apparatuses, government departments work as they would in the US or Europe, only with greater digitization.

In more tangible matters, residents in Shanghai like to talk about improvements to city life that accelerated in only the last few years. The government keeps building new parks, bike trails, and commercial areas to improve the city’s already substantial livability. Chinese firms have not created many global brands, but I have confidence that will change. Entrepreneurs are still full of big dreams, having failed to receive the memo that globalization is dead. Those who sense foreign hostility towards China would keep their identity quiet, with the hope that the product quality will speak for itself. In segment after segment, I find that the quality of Chinese products has become strong. And I expect that good branding will follow good quality.

A metric of general quality improvement I like to use is the standardization of slow-casual chain restaurants. No, I’m not mostly eating out in the likes of Din Tai Fung. But chains featuring Sichuan sauerkraut fish and Shaanxi breads and meat are now plausible and even fun places to go to lunch. Anyone in food management can tell you that it’s hard to achieve a high degree of consistency across stores and across cities. That is something that Chinese managers have in recent years figured out. Although I’m pessimistic about the creation of Chinese cultural products, I acknowledge a possible exception in visual art. There’s energy in the art scene in Shanghai, driven by the buildout of new museums, a lack of established pieces to fill spaces, and curiosity among the public for new things. These are ideal conditions for art experimentation. If anyone can push the art paradigm beyond displaying long-dead masters in a white cube, Chinese spaces are a good bet.

A lot of macro indicators on China are disappointing, like a rise in the amount of credit needed to create growth and a fall in total-factor productivity growth. But we can’t let these poorly-measured data points govern as the gospel truth to understand this economy. Figures must be reconciled with observations on the ground. During my time in Hong Kong, I found it absolutely hilarious to see annual rankings by think tanks giving the city-state the highest marks on economic freedom, while its business landscape has been static for decades. I submit that observers are making a mistake in the opposite direction when they use macro indicators to underrate dynamism in China.

China’s economy is in structural slowdown. But there’s still lots of catch-up growth available to a country with one-seventh the level of GDP per capita of the US. And there’s strong growth momentum in individual sectors, especially the science and technology fields that I spend my days studying. An American friend who sends his kids to school in Shanghai tells me that Chinese schools teach math the way that American schools teach sports: with the expectation that every child is capable. China’s semiconductor industry remains weak, but broader science efforts haven’t done too poorly. China’s space program, for example, might be years or decades behind NASA, but it has shown the capability to learn from past missions and take on increasingly difficult tasks. A steady capacity to execute on bigger and bigger projects also describes China’s energy infrastrastructure buildout. These produce the sort of national confidence to do hard things that the US had in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

For someone in the middle class, there has never been a better year to live in China. That comes down to the entrepreneurs, who are creating businesses to please people. They are not at all different, I submit, from their counterparts in the west. The control tendency of the government would every once in a while assert itself, which annoys entrepreneurs to no end. Their ability to push back has shrunk during Xi’s administration, but it has not completely disappeared. Every so often, they are able to tell Beijing to stuff it, through accepted administrative channels, for example in the case of excessive pandemic controls.

And the central government is itself keen for improvement as well. It has displayed a stronger record of reform than any other developing country, as the leadership keeps pulling off politically-difficult tasks: shrinking the state sector, re-orienting the economy towards export-led growth after WTO accession, and so on. One major question now is whether the central government still has the stamina to reform. After this summer, I think the answer is yes.

We have to avoid the triptych that outside observers perfected through the course of the pandemic. “There’s no way that China can control this problem” at the start of the crisis; “These numbers aren’t real” during the crisis; and “It wasn’t that big of an accomplishment, and anyway authoritarian systems are perfectly suited to managing these situations” by the end of the crisis. China has strong entrepreneurs as well as a strong state, and these two sometimes reinforce each other. An interesting fact I noticed recently is that the party secretary of Zhejiang province, one of the country’s most important, used to be a director of China’s manned space program.18 A skim through the Wikipedia pages of provincial party secretaries would reveal a diverse range of technocratic experiences.

An important factor in China’s reform program includes not only a willingness to reshape the strategic landscape—like promoting manufacturing over the internet—but also a discernment of which foreign trends to resist. These include excessive globalization and financialization. Beijing diagnosed the problems with financialization earlier than the US, where the problem is now endemic. The leadership is targeting a high level of manufacturing output, rejecting the notion of comparative advantage. That static model constructed by economists with the aim of seducing undergrads has leaked out of the lecture hall and morphed into a political justification for only watching as American communities of engineering practice dissolved. And Beijing today looks prescient for having kept out the US social media companies that continuously infuriate their home government.

A willingness to assess foreign imports as well as a commitment to the physical world combine to make me suspect that Beijing will not be friendly towards the Metaverse. Already state media has expressed suspicion of the concept.19 If the Metaverse will exist in China, I expect it will be an lame creation heavily policed by the Propaganda Department. Xi’s speech on common prosperity in October noted that: “The rich and the poor in certain countries have become polarized with the collapse of the middle class. That has led to social disintegration, political polarization, and rampant populism.”20 The Metaverse, which represents yet another escape of American elites from the physical world, can only exacerbate social differences. It is too much of a fun game—rather like cryptocurrencies—that is played by a small segment of the population, while the middle class dwells on more material concerns, like how to pay for energy bills. It might make sense for San Franciscans to retreat even further into a digital phantasm, given how grim it is to go outside there. But Xi will want Chinese to live in the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.

The new peer competitor

When we speak about the growing competition between the US and China, we can’t focus only on the structural headwinds of the latter. Serious analysis demands an assessment of both. One of the major themes in Xi’s speeches over the last few years is that victory is certain, but the struggle will be difficult. That is identical to the rhetorical strategy behind Mao’s essay “On Protracted War,” which told adherents that victory is in reach, but only if they fight for it. Beijing is hunkering down for long-term competition, and I think it’s time for the US to get more serious.

The US, for starters, should get better at reform. The federal government has found itself unable to build simple infrastructure or coordinate an effective pandemic response. Somehow the US has evolved to become a political system in which people can dream up a hundred reasons not to do things like “build housing in growing areas” or “admit people with skills into the country.” If the US wants to win a decades-long challenge against a peer competitor, it needs to be able to improve state capacity. China by contrast has invested a lot more in domestic competitiveness and to make its economy more resilient.

The Chinese state has long placed greater value on resilience over efficiency, which has dragged down its performance on metrics that economists care about, like return on equity. In my view, that is as often an indictment of the economic profession. The US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports. Decades of American deindustrialization as well as an aversion against idle capacity has eroded domestic manufacturing. The US scientific ecosystem, with help from the federal government, has accomplished the spectacular feat of scaling mRNA vaccines. But it’s hard to name many other great things the US government has done since the pandemic. Too much of Washington, DC’s attitude smacks of “Are our people unable to handle a five standard-deviation shock? Well, let them eat black swans!”

Since the US government is incapable of structural reform, companies now employ algorithm geniuses to help people navigate the healthcare system. This sort of seventh-best solution is typical of a vetocracy. I don’t see that the US government is trying hard to reform institutions; its response is usually to make things more complex (like its healthcare legislation) or throw money at the problem. The proposed bill to increase domestic competitiveness against China, for example, doesn’t substantially fix the science funding agencies that are more concerned with style guides than science; and the infrastructure bill doesn’t seem to address root causes that make American infrastructure the most costly in the world. Congress is sending more money through bad channels. That’s better than nothing, but the government should attempt to make some bureaucratic tune-ups.

The US is ahead of China on the sort of mathematical economics that win Nobel Prizes. But China is ahead of the US on the actual practice of political economy. One study I enjoyed this year noted that the Chinese government sends more jobs through state-owned enterprises to counties with greater labor unrest.21 I wonder how different the US would look today if the government did more to help workers. The US critique that “China stole the jobs” looks instead like a critique of its own economic system. China’s main activity was to invest in domestic competitiveness, thus becoming attractive to American firms, which relocated operations there. Meanwhile, the federal government did little to help disaffected workers at home. If there was a problem with this arrangement, fault should be on the US government for failing to restrain its firms or retrain its workers.

In the face of this challenge against a new peer competitor, the US has demonstrated a superb capacity for self-harm. I published a pair of essays this year that can be read in conjunction. In July, I wrote for Foreign Affairs on US technology restrictions. Entrepreneurial firms in China previously had no time for domestic technologies, preferring instead to buy the best, which is usually American. Then the US government designated them to various blacklists, giving them for the first time ever a business case for building up the domestic ecosystem. The result is that the US has turbo-charged Chinese competition by aligning the country’s most dynamic firms more firmly with Beijing’s self-sufficiency agenda. And in December, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic on US prosecutions of scientists. The state has subjected scientists to the tender mercies of the US criminal justice system, usually for charges related to relatively unimportant issues implicating research integrity. The theme of both essays is that the US is right to react to China’s predatory practices; but it has done so with methods that are mostly hurting itself.

One redeeming fact for the US is that there has been significant domestic pushback to some of the government’s actions—especially the prosecutions of scientists—such that it’s within the realm of imagination that the US government will substantially modify bad policies. This sort of correction after public criticism is more difficult in China, where critics might end up jailed. The US though should take more seriously the task of cultivating both strong entrepreneurs and a strong state.

I’m genuinely unsure of the outcome in one of the most crucial fronts of competition: whether there will be very substantial decoupling of businesses. It’s obvious that the US government and American intellectuals have succeeded in creating a climate of moral shame for doing business in China. But they have not won over the hearts and minds of the American business and financial communities. Some businesses and investors are ready to drop China, but I think they are far outnumbered by those who want to invest more. I don’t know how these forces will play out over the next decade.

The US exports on the order of $200bn in goods and services to China each year; but according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, that figure is dwarfed by the $600bn of US sales in China. (The latter counts a sneaker or a phone made and sold by a US company in China.) I spend quite a lot of time engaging with US multinationals. They tend to cite with approval the Five-Year Plans, which make clear targets for say renewable energy deployment, which companies can match to their expansion plans. Policy continuity is less certain in the US, where economic incentives might disappear after the next election. The rule of thumb for US businesses is that China makes up half of global demand for most products, from wind turbines to structural steel; and China will account for a third to a half of expected growth over the next decade. These aren’t the figures of the Chinese government, but company projections. Of course these projections might be wrong, but US businesses feel that it’s mathematically impossible to lead the future without being active in the Chinese market.

None of them are keen to be pieces on a geopolitical chessboard. For the most part, American firms are unwilling to think too hard about the moral issues of doing business in China, choosing instead to say that Beijing’s actions are outside their scope of control. Their strategy is to keep out of the headlines while figuring out how to make more sales. One of the smart things that Beijing has done is not to retaliate against American companies for the actions of the US government; for the most part, Beijing has hugged them even closer by loosening restrictions in manufacturing and finance. Thus American companies are quietly localizing more of their Chinese production to remove their products from the jurisdiction of US controls. The response by Congress to this perverse consequence is to introduce yet more complex restrictions, like a possible national-security review mechanism for US outbound investments. It’s still early days in this big story.

Untangling the jumble

To figure out how far decoupling will go, as well as a hundred other important questions, we’ll need a better understanding of what’s going on in China. I believe that an essential analytical prior is to recognize that things are getting better and things are getting worse. As Chinese businesses and the state are growing more capable, the leadership is becoming more brutal towards many of its own citizens as well as foreign critics. China is, in other words, a place that both moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people.

China is like the thinking ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris: a vast entity that produces observations personalized for every observer. These visions may be a self-defense mechanism, allowing leftists to see socialism and investors to see capitalism; or, as Lem’s ocean might be doing, China is vastly indifferent to foreign observers and generates visions to play with them. Whatever the case, we need a better understanding of this country. Too many commentators have been interested in the story of China’s collapse. When the collapse doesn’t come, they lose interest and move on. It’s a more important and more subtle skill to figure out how this country can succeed, because that is the exercise the Chinese leadership is engaged in.

The modal piece of commentary on China focuses mostly on the country’s mistakes and weaknesses. In my view, much of this type of opinion is both useless and dangerous. It’s useless because it doesn’t make a serious attempt to engage with the country’s strengths; and dangerous because it implies that the west can do nothing since China will fail on its own. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that China will fail. But it’s a mistake to assume that it will happen as a matter of course. Instead we should expect that it will become a major competitor to the US, which should not only do better itself but also make better assessments. That means producing more disinterested analysis. A lot of my work today involves benchmarking China’s capabilities to the US, in fields that include semiconductors, renewables, and manufacturing. Every time I get together with peers to exchange notes, we remark on how small our circle remains. People who do tracking exercises tend to care about China because it’s important in their professions, in say nuclear power deployment or space exploration. I think there should be more systematic efforts.

The good and/or bad thing about China is that everything changes every 18 months. So it’s all the more important to observe reality on the ground. Graham Webster has a good line that the reality of China includes “a mix of brutality and vitality and mundanity.”22 It’s important to recognize the entire medley. For newsrooms, that entails spending time away from Beijing. For the good of readers, papers should deploy journalists in places where politics is not the only concern, instead of devoting still more reporters in the capital to obsess over Xi Jinping Thought.

Leaving Beijing would offer a better appreciation of the heterogeneity of its growth story. I believe that Shanghai and Shenzhen are driving a great deal of economic dynamism, probably in enough quantity to allow the country to figure out its technological deficiencies. Meanwhile, the control tendencies of Beijing will continue to strangle free thought domestically and lash out at critics globally. Not only will China fail to create successful cultural exports, its speech restrictions and detentions of minority groups en masse will invite further global condemnation. But global hostility won’t be quite enough to derail its economic success. Therefore China will not have any sort of a compassionate return to grace; but it might be enough, perhaps, for a hegemonic return to greatness. The rest of the world won’t be able to avoid that through continued condemnation. It demands a more serious effort to compete.

I thank a number of people for reading a draft of this section or discussing the core ideas with me.

***

Of all the online abuse that it is my misfortune to suffer, no ridicule has exceeded the amount directed against my claim that Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte stands above his Don Giovanni and Marriage of Figaro. I resolve no longer to endure criticism without reply. Substantiating my response forced me to engage more deeply with Italian opera in general and Mozart’s music in particular. I spent the year pondering a throwaway remark by Donald Tovey: “Mozart’s whole musical language is, and remains throughout, the language of comic opera.”23 It prompted me to listen to a great deal of Italian opera buffa, as well as the grander musical line that flows from Mozart’s three Da Ponte operas (Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi), through Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and terminating in Verdi.

Enjoyment of opera is today mostly a private madness, and those who cherish Italian works make up a special category of the deranged. The plots of Italian operas concern nobles who are trying to murder and/or seduce each other, attended by accomplices who point out their wickedness. The Italian doctrine is to offer propulsive movement behind a smiling optimism, with a commitment to the ecstatic art of song. All operas are too long, but there are fewer moments of slack in Mozart, Rossini, and Verdi, who are each masters of velocity. Their style is to produce one perfection after another with the promise that a fresh burst of invention is just around the corner.

The Italian musical argument is the product of a warmer sun and more splendid skies than the gloomy forests in which Germans dwell. Italians emphasize a tight sense of pace. Momentum is an antidote to Wagner, who too often pins down the listener with chords that barely move. And Italians prize the centrality of the voice. That should not sound like a remarkable act in the genre; but consider the Germans, who too often lose themselves in complex orchestration, forgetting that they are composing operas instead of symphonies. The Italian literary mood is playful: Mozart and Rossini never miss a chance to joke about the sublime. I’m less comfortable around the po-faced Wagner, who plainly craves worship. Italian lyricism accommodates greater emotional range; not just soaring declamation, but also comic grumbling and trembling yearning. That is once more a contrast to Wagner, whose temperament wavers between plunging the singers into a trance and agitating them into erotic screaming.

Opera buffa (or the Italian tradition of comic opera) is an intense distillation of Italian virtues and flaws. Buffa conventions are easy to summarize. The stock of characters usually consists of a miserly old man, whose propensity for ludicrous bouts of youthful lust tends to move the plot; a pair of young lovers who are brought together by the resourcefulness of a servant who is equal to any task; and a serving maid who exhibits both worldly and innocent charm. The outstanding representatives of buffa are Mozart’s Figaro, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, and Verdi’s Falstaff. These works are seldom weighed down by big choruses, which can rarely be musically remarkable. Their movements instead feature smaller ensemble singing (for example a bass accompanying the tenor in rapid patter song), virtuosic displays by the soprano, and a scene of fast-paced pandemonium to close each act.

I find much to love in the Italian comic tradition, and I’m not quite alone. No less a figure than Rousseau found revelation in buffa, stating that the genre’s vocal lyricism could create the greatest potential for sentimental arousal. Still, one must acknowledge that buffa contributes to the ridiculous aspect of the operatic image. Elevated opinion, which is mostly on the side of the Germans, scorns predictable Italian conventions. Richard Strauss parodied their weaknesses in Capriccio, in which a pair of Italian singers declare love with too much fervor and then take too long to say farewell. Popular opinion, when it needs reason to find opera embarrassing, pokes at the absurdities of Italian plots and the soprano’s flight into clouds of indistinct vowelsong.

Both are reasonable objections. The soprano’s vocal runs at first bothered me as well; but they’ve grown on me, and where I once saw artifice, I now see artfulness. The objection to the implausibility of opera plots is stronger, and here I want to dwell. In my view, it’s a mistake to develop an exaggerated concern with plot, for the literary side of opera tends indeed to be weak. We should think of plot instead as an architectural column: a necessary supportive structure for the production of dramatic effect, rarely something that deserves the preponderance of aesthetic attention. Italian plot settings tend to be especially unimportant. To escape the displeasure of censors, Verdi often moved his settings to a proximate country or a proximate age. As best as I can tell, the setting of Bellini’s Puritans has nothing essentially to do with that English religious sect, for the story could take place among any other people.

We should consider this lack of real engagement with setting to be a feature, not a bug. Instead of being distracted with the actual content of the plot, we should only be concerned with its formal shape. Wagner employed music to heighten his literary sentiments; some of that is effective, but I favor the Italian practice, which locates drama inside the musical structure. As Schopenhauer put it, “adapting music too closely to the words forces it to speak an alien tongue,” adding that Rossini above all freed himself from this error. Be familiar, yes, with the plot direction, especially with Mozart’s relatively complicated stories. But we must let his music reign supreme.

And what sort of music did Mozart create? I think of a few types. Mozart produced a suspended beauty, in which arching melodies float on top of murmuring strings, during, for example, the foundational murder in the opening of Don Giovanni. There, the voices rise and fall over strings that play repeated triplets, creating a sense of shock in stopped time. Mozart also produced an oscillating beauty, such as in the duet between two sopranos in Figaro, their voices encircling and entwining as they plotted an intrigue against the bass. And Mozart produced a propulsive beauty, quickening the pulse during the climactic duet in Cosi Fan Tutte, as the tenor at last conquers the soprano.

Among these three works, Figaro is the most perfect and Don Giovanni the greatest. But I believe that Cosi is the best. Cosi is Mozart’s most strange and subtle opera, as well as his most dreamlike. If the Magic Flute might be considered a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest—given their themes of darkness, enchantment, and salvation—then Cosi ought to be Mozart’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Donald Tovey called Cosi “a miracle of irresponsible beauty.” It needs to be qualified with “irresponsible” because its plot is, by consensus, idiotic. The premise is that two men try—on a dare—to seduce the other’s lover. A few fake poisonings and Albanian disguises later, each succeeds, to mutual distress. Every critic that professes to love the music of Cosi also discusses the story in anguished terms. Bernard Williams, for example, noted how puzzling it has been that Mozart chose to vest such great emotional power with his music into such a weak narrative structure. Joseph Kerman is more scathing, calling it “outrageous, immoral, and unworthy of Mozart.”

I readily concede that the music of Cosi exceeds its dramatic register. But I am uninterested in investigating why. Since I do not believe that plot deserves much attention, I find it thus easy indeed to concentrate instead on the sweep of the musical argument itself. Cosi’s music is indeed the most heartfelt when the actions on stage are the most preposterous. To that I say: whatever. Irony is a wonderful characteristic of the operatic tradition. No one faults Strauss for writing such sweet and triumphant tones as Salomé fondles the head of John the Baptist, which she had just ordered to be separated from the rest of his body.

I believe that the climactic seduction duet in Cosi’s second act is the best piece of vocal drama that Mozart ever wrote. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker describe it thus: “the soprano has attempted to evade her seducer by dressing as a man and becoming a hero. In the great game of seduction, he then vanquished her by the simplest of means: by becoming the essence of female lyricism and beauty.”24 It is musically fascinating, having at least four distinct sections—turning halfway as the tenor invades the soprano’s aria. Bernard Williams is more direct: “he has broken not only into her song, but into her soul.”

Figaro and Don Giovanni also have powerful seduction duets (all three of which are in the joyful key of A Major), but they’re not quite so breathtaking. Figaro, however, offers the greatest number of thrills. Whereas Cosi has a weak first half save for a few moments in the beginning, and Don Giovanni has a weak second half save at the very end, Figaro is miraculous the entire way through. Many conductors have recorded all three operas; in my view Teodor Currentzis is the best starting point. Currentzis shipped a crew of musicians to Siberia and compelled them to produce Mozart. Conductors are ruthless by reputation, but this move blows even me away. The result Currentzis produced is an intimate and charged interpretation of these three works.

Charles Rosen wrote that Mozart’s style is to combine delight with economy of line. I find this statement to belong rather to Mozart’s Italian successors. Mozart used profuse amounts of musical complexity to transform the action into a more dynamic object, and was the subject of quaint criticism for having done so. Economical it is not. I think that the music of his operatic successors—Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti—better fit Rosen’s observation. These three exemplify the Italian commitment to song. While there is a great deal of busyness in Mozart, led by the strings, these composers tended to create orchestrally-light textures that showcase the voice.

Rossini took singing to excess by drenching the vocal line in showers of ornament. In his fast moments, Rossini sounds like the manic sections of Mozart with the energy level dialed up by a factor of five; at peak speeds, Rossini (and Donizetti) would demand comic basses to sing eight syllables a second. Meanwhile, his slow parts can be sensual. The duo as well as the trio in the Count Ory feature elaborate vocal repetitions with subdued orchestral accompaniment. The effect, as Stendhal relates, is that Rossini produced not just emotion but physical excitement.

Rossini’s best work is of course the Barber of Seville. Too many recordings of Italian operas sound sterile even when they feature big names; one must focus on finding the right mix of bass and soprano. My first choice for the Barber is Bruno Bartoletti conducting Renato Capecchi and Gianna D’Angelo; it is a superbly intelligent work, in which the singers shout or whisper as the drama demands. Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims is another work that shows that plot is beside the point. In fact, it has almost no plot at all, but features music so beautiful that Rossini recycled most of it into the Count Ory, a French comedy.

Bellini followed Rossini’s focus on the voice. Norma might be Bellini’s best work, but I’ve spent more time listening to the electrifying first act of his Capulets and Montagues. Donizetti is more spare than both. His greatest number is the buffa Don Pasquale is a trio in which the soprano is supported only by a few strings and the timpani to mark out her syllables. This minimal accompaniment heightens the directness of comical effect. I don’t have a clear favorite recording of Don Pasquale, but Roberto Abbado conducting Eva Mei produced the best sound. The Elixir of Love is Donizetti’s next most fun piece. My favorite recording is John Pritchard’s, featuring Ingvar Wixell, who sings the comic bass with verve, and Ileana Cotrubas, a soprano who affects extraordinary vulnerability.

Rossini and Donizetti both wrote serious works, but with few exceptions (like Rossini’s William Tell), I find them to be dominated assets with respect to Verdi’s works. Their buffa works are more worthwhile. Whereas Rossini gave his singers the space to meander in his glittering realm, Verdi placed his characters in ambitious dramatic settings while asserting his controlling presence at all times.

Verdi doesn’t make great sense on the page. His conventions have better to be heard, like his frequent use of woodwinds to ornament the soprano’s voice. And how can so many oom-pah-pah brass accompaniments create expressive content? Somehow they do, delivering a heightening of expressive conviction. Again and again, Verdi produced a breathtaking song at the most highly-charged point of the drama. His style is to use tight rhythms that build towards an explosion of lyricism. Opera’s strange conceit is that overwhelming emotion can be expressed with perfect lyrical control. The effect Verdi succeeds at creating is that desperate emotion has broken through.

The wonder of Verdi is that one doesn’t need to be too selective for his great works. One can’t go wrong with any of the half dozen of his most popular pieces, and an easy choice is to listen to any recording by Riccardo Muti. I’ll use this space to elevate one of his Shakespearean adaptations over his other. Critics give pride of place to Verdi’s Otello, with some calling it the artistic equal to the Bard’s play. Personally I haven’t found Otello to be so wonderful. Verdi produced his greatest acts of musical urgency with his mixing of two, three, or four voices; Otello is heavy instead with big choruses, long arias, and extended orchestral action. The opera succeeds when Verdi voicemixes. Its most compelling moments are the quartet in which Desdemona sweetly pleads her innocence, and the duet in which Otello viciously ends her life.

And critics can’t resist discussing Verdi’s Macbeth without saying that it’s a “problem opera.” In the same way that I’ve stuck up for Cosi Fan Tutte (another victim of this designation), I’d like to praise Macbeth. The music recreates the atmosphere of suspense in the play, producing fear of the lord’s or lady’s imminent slip back into delirium. Everywhere there is a sense of dread and paranoia. One of my favorite moments in Verdi is the magnitude of musical relief Macbeth expresses upon seeing the disappearance of Banquo’s ghost. After a long suspense, the strings burst into action upon Macbeth’s cry of deliverance. The work certainly has extended weak moments, but for me Macbeth’s peaks surpass Otello’s.

Verdi’s greatest work is his final opera, and his third Shakespearean adaptation: Falstaff, a buffa. I take no small amount of delight that Verdi decided at the end of his life to return to comedy, which had been almost entirely absent from his career. Falstaff is distinguished by its density of lyricism, with sonorities that flow from even the slightest actions by the old knight. The work validates my sense that the opportunities offered by buffa are rich indeed. The serene cheer of the comic style is supple: more fun than the serious works that deliver long arias in the classical tradition; and more occasions for irony than the overdramatic works in the romantic tradition. It is, as Donald Tovey wrote, Mozart’s main style: on the move while never hesitating to make use of an opportunity for lyricism or teasing fun.

***

It’s time to talk about books.

2021 was one of my best reading years. Covid was the cause. Virus controls have made it difficult to travel even inside China, therefore I have been forced to seek adventure on the page. I find that I can’t retain anything when I read on Kindle. So I’m only able to read physical books, which I used to purchase when I was making regular trips to the US. Since that’s no longer an option, my folks have been sending me books by post. Never have I looked forward to deliveries with such eagerness. There’s something about having rate-limited access—in 20 kilogram batches, with the uncertainty of not knowing which might be confiscated by Chinese customs—that heightens the physical ecstasy of holding a book in one’s hands.

My fiction reading this year pivoted on two big works. I loved everything about Bleak House by Dickens. Nearly every sentence sparkles. And the story as a whole is a miracle of construction. It’s not just the centrality of a lawsuit to the plot: the bewildering case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, around which the characters revolve. Also effective were the dual-narrator structure and the acceleration in the final part of the book, which transforms into a detective story. Dickens presents subtle characters; like Lady Dedlock, who is redeemed by suffering, and Lord Dedlock, who is redeemed by love. Villainy is located not in any particular character, but on the level of the Chancery Court. Therefore servants of the law like Mr. Tulkinghorn are villainous even if their motivations are sympathetic.

At one point, I found the pure expressions of goodness by narrator Esther Summerson to be exasperating. It made me consider Bleak House to be an essentially Confucian book, due to its endless sermonizing on the importance of being a grateful and virtuous member of society. That made me wonder which other western texts present very Confucian themes. I suppose one can read Sophocles to appreciate the importance of family rites—through Antigone—and the challenges of being an effective ruler—through Creon. One might also read Mann’s Buddenbrooks to examine how a family’s fortunes can decline with its loss of virtue.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace was more uneven. Seeing the long skeins of passages in French first of all horribly transported me to primary school in Ontario, where I had to work through those dreadful verb conjugation books. Soon enough, Tolstoy gripped me—my sense of place he stole away—in his depiction of Petersburg’s society scenes. Subsequently it became a boring slog once the plot turned to Napoleon’s war. I’m more keen to read Karenina, which I understand features more society scenes than Tolstoy’s long passages made up of score settling against historians.

Brad and Noah constructed a podcast around their advocacy of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep. Their seriousness convinced me to read this book. Half of its plot is darkly concerned with spacefaring civilizations that face a galactic threat to their worlds; unremarkable fare, in other words, for the genre. But comical packs of attention-seeking dogs make up the other half of its plot, which explores their political intrigues. Vinge skillfully connects these two storylines together at the most charged point of the drama. In the background is a peanut gallery with the sophistication of Reddit commenters who write spectacularly wrong and vicious interpretations of the action over email chains. I haven’t read science fiction this zany since Philip K. Dick. But Vinge’s serious moments are good as well: strategic questions characterized by deep uncertainty enliven the tedious stretches of spaceflight, just as they do in Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest.

I did quite a bit of music reading this year, the centerpiece of which was Jan Swafford’s Mozart: The Reign of Love. I think I’ve written enough about Mozart’s music; this biography was good for thinking about his production function. We should learn from Mozart’s boldness: never to shy away from exploring new ideas while staying fundamentally optimistic. “Mozart enjoyed his successes, absorbed his failures, and went about his business.” But it’s also worth dwelling upon his own disappointments. Mozart had been famous throughout Europe by age 7 as a prodigy. But soon enough that novelty wore off, and he was never able to convert his fame into an office (like being court composer for a big royal) that could have sustained a long career. That lesson might still be worth pondering in the present influencer age. Mozart’s professional life shows that it’s not quite enough to have a simmering level of fame; at some point it needs to boil over and create a comfortable position.

In a similar vein, I found The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy by Andrew Krepenivich and Barry Watts to be a professionally-stimulating book. Andrew Marshall ran the Office of Net Assessment in the Department of Defense from its founding in 1973 until 2015. Four decades is an extraordinary tenure for a defense official, and for most of that time he was tasked with making the Pentagon smarter on Soviet capabilities as well as its reaction functions. Acolytes of Marshall’s (which includes the authors) refer to time under him as “St. Andrew’s Prep.” Still quite a bit of Marshall’s work remains classified, and I didn’t leave this biography feeling that he changed the course of the Cold War. What I appreciated is that the book made me think about how to be a better analyst.

Marshall found that US interagency efforts to study the Soviet Union were more about settling bureaucratic scores than to produce good reports. He wanted to do better. Marshall took the view that every research project must resemble an open-ended dissertation rather than something that can be susceptible to cookie-cutter formulas. His assessments were purely diagnostic, and thus not cheapened by policy recommendations. That doesn’t mean that they were equivocal. A good analyst possesses the boldness to offer conclusions. One cannot be confined simply to descriptive analysis and then insist that there are too many unknowns to make predictions. The point of every exercise must be to produce a judgment. These are good lessons for any analyst.

Jürgen Osterhammel’s style in Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia is to dump heaps of wonderful facts on the reader. For example, the merits of different pack animals for travel (“Georg Wilhelm Steller wrote a heartfelt homage to the sled dog”), culminating with demonstration for the superiority of the camel. The relative quiet of Asian cities in the 18th century, where there were few paved roads, and where felt-lined slippers made palaces into hushed spaces. How the Jesuits fought off the other orders for prime access to the Qing court, and how their opponents prosecuted a counter-attack by pointing out that their faith inclined the order to take miracle stories at face value. And when the Jesuits, as a meritocratic elite, found kindred spirits in the exam-created Qing mandarins once they were ensconced in court. Overall I feel that my knowledge is severely lacking on the Jesuits.

Osterhammel’s skill isn’t confined to offering a delightful series of facts. I loved his discussion of the 17th century European effort to learn about China. Scrupulously accurate records circulated with accounts of pure fantasy, leaving the outside reader with little idea of whom to believe. James Mill (father of John Stuart) solved this issue by dismissing personal testimony in toto. Instead he wrote his history of British India without ever setting foot there; for good measure, he denounced people who attempted to contradict him as being guilty of letting personal anecdote obstruct his deduction of general conclusions. Thank goodness, I must say, that in the 21st century we have transcended the epistemic foibles of the 17th.

Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second War by Douglas M. O’Reagan gave me more material on thinking about technology. After Germany surrendered, American scientists with a courtesy rank of Colonel combed through German industrial labs. They were there to seize its technological secrets. They discovered two things: that Germany wasn’t much ahead of the US—not even the mighty IG Farben in the chemical industry. And second, that the vast amounts of data and industrial recipes they microfiched and sent back to the US were mostly useless. Knowledge couldn’t be written down to be transported; it had to move in the form of people like Wernher von Braun. It was wonderful to read this historical case of the theme that technology is people, which has been one of the core ideas discussed in my essays (as well as by many other people before me). I wrote more about this book in my piece on US prosecutions of scientists.

Finally, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin isn’t mostly an operational treatment of the eastern front, of the kind by Glantz and House; nor is it mostly concerned with the domestic war economy, of the kind by Tooze. It is balanced on every topic, with an emphasis on diplomatic history. McMeekin shows how adept Stalin was at getting his way in nearly all his foreign policy goals, from taking over as many small countries as Germany did and then being viewed as a victim after Barbarossa; and acquiring huge amounts of lend-lease from the US. We all know that Soviet soldiers did most of the work to tear apart the Wehrmacht. But it’s also important to appreciate the scale of American help: “By the end of the second quarter of 1943, the US pork industry was sending 13% of its total production to the USSR.” It’s a bit of a minor miracle that after decades of scholarship there are still superb books about this global war. I wonder if that will continue, such that we will always be able to look forward to worthwhile treatments of the greatest struggle of the last century.

***

Twelve months after I learned how to ride a bicycle, I decided to cycle from Guiyang to Chongqing, a distance of 600km over the mountains of the Sichuan Basin. I can no longer recall what I was trying to prove with this journey; I know only that it was not the sole detail that my mind expunged.

Three of us were on the road over five days in June. We put everything we carried into bags we strapped unto the backs of our road bikes. Every day looked similar: a late start in the morning, cycling with frequent water and food breaks, reaching a hotel in the evening, by which point we would wash our clothes in the sink and leave them out to dry. We averaged 120km each day, which is not a very intense pace. The relatively slow speed had to do with the amount of climbing we had to do each day (around 1500m on the toughest day) as well as a series of mishaps. One of us suffered heatstroke on the first day. I crashed going downhill at a speed of ~50km/h on a bumpy road, scraping up four parts on my left side. I landed on my head, thus splitting my helmet; without it I’m sure I would not have survived. I subsequently cycled to the nearest county emergency room, and still did 80km after leaving the hospital that day.

The mountain views and the quiet roads prompted a lot of questions to drift in my mind: How much more sweat, dirt, and bugs can cake onto my skin? What the hell is going on with my knee? And the query which I was never able to resolve: Why am I doing this? Six months after the trip, after one of my fingernails had died from the fall, I find myself able to reflect more philosophically about cycling in general.

It should be said, first of all, that the views were superb. Every day we saw villages around different mountain settings with diverse types of greenery. (For those interested, my friend Christian has strung together our route, with occasional gaps, on Strava.) Cycling demands enormous expenditures of energy. So every three or four hours, we would stop for a bowl of noodles and an ice cream bar. The best part of the trip for me involved seeing the infrastructure. We passed by high and elegant bridges that crisscrossed the mountains in Guizhou. By the time we reached Chongqing, the bridges grew to enormity. The city that has impressed itself into the mountainscape isn’t going small with concrete.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as much relief as I did when we reached our terminal hotel in Chongqing. For a month after I returned to Shanghai, I didn’t touch my bike. Cycling is remarkably unsafe, and if the consumer regulatory regime of today were around at its invention I’m sure none of us would have access to bicycles. There are a hundred ways to hurt oneself pedaling at high speed, such that a rider is frequently only one second away from catastrophe. Still, I’ve managed to make a good habit out of cycling. I tend to do 100km a week, split into three rides, along the river in Shanghai. As the city has gotten cold, I’ve switched to cycling indoors by removing the back wheel and attaching a Garmin trainer. I’m highly suspicious of the Metaverse. But I have to confess my heresy. I enjoy cycling at home, which is a temperature-controlled space with an air filter, as I ride through Italy, Spain, and Switzerland on an iPad. Exercise is now so safe and easy that I’m not sure I want to cycle mostly outside the Metaverse again.

As I’ve cycled more, I realized a linkage with my other hobby: opera. There is no limit to the fanaticism for the devotees of either. Small quality improvements matter enormously for people who sit either on the saddle or in the theater. And I’ve resolved that I will not muster the zeal of the hardcore. I enjoy cycling, but not that much. Too late did I discover Thoreau’s warning: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” The sport demands an endless stream of items to purchase, from apparel to accouterments and from summer to fall. I cannot be one of those cyclists who spend thousands to shave off a few grams of weight, just as I cannot be a fan who can recite a soprano’s every international engagement.

This year I kept up a good pace of doing public speaking. I gave talks in a variety of corporate settings, including to the board of directors of two publicly-listed companies about China’s tech progress. My favorite online chat was a conversation with James Fallows for Stripe’s annual conference in June; we discussed our experiences of China as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the country as we see them. And I enjoyed chatting with Baiqu Gonkar as part of the Browser’s interview series, which gave me a chance to recommend a few things: Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte and Stapledon’s Last and First Men. I published a few bigger-picture pieces, one in Foreign Affairs and another in the Atlantic. It was fun to have gone twice each on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots and Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. I was chuffed when Ben said that I am “one of the deepest thinkers and most careful observers of the world that I know.”

My cycling trip in June was pretty much the final big trip I took all year. I try to visit ten new cities in China each year, but Covid put an end to that. I’ve barely left Shanghai for the last three months, and many of us are suffering from cabin fever. This year, a lot of expats decided that the pandemic was a good reason to call time on China, thus packing their bags.

In 2018, I started to say to people that China would close its doors in 40 years, by the centenary of the country’s founding. At that point, the Celestial Empire would be secluded once more, while its people can be serenely untroubled by the turmoils of barbarians outside. Everyone reacted with disbelief, saying that there’s no way to shut down a country. But it looks like I was off only by the wrong centenary: China has been mostly shut in 2021, a hundred years after the party’s founding. I think that the government has no real exit plan for this pandemic. Any time it looks like it might relax, another variant shows up. The leadership probably has no firm aspiration to open the border at any date, and instead will assess the situation of variants and medical treatments every so often. If things don’t look good, then it won’t open up.

After all, the border closure doesn’t seem to incur significant economic costs. Goods are still flowing in and out, while people keep their spending domestic. The cost is more political, and therefore intangible. What is more easy to observe is that 99% of Chinese have no intention of going overseas. They’re terrified of the virus and think that the rest of the world is a mess. I miss international travel of course. I’m keen to visit the US, but upon return I would have to do two weeks of quarantine in a designated hotel; my friends who have gone through that ordeal report that the experience ranges from unpleasant to traumatic. Still, the prospect of the quarantine does not deter me too much. The problem is that if I catch the virus overseas, the government might not allow me to return for months, which creates too much uncertainty.

Interprovincial travel in China is annoying, but doable. It requires doing a few Covid tests as well as accepting the risk of being turned away at one’s destination, and a possible quarantine if the virus was found afterwards at one’s destination. But staying put in Shanghai is not such a burden. I wrote a piece for New York Magazine in April 2020, when it looked like China had crushed the virus. I haven’t cooked a meal in years, and have been going out for lunch every day since that April. There have been minor outbreaks, but daily life has been basically normal for 18 months. Since summer 2020, the cinemas have re-opened, the restaurants are full, and there have been few restrictions on life. The inconvenience is that one has to produce a contact-tracing app at the entrance of many public spaces and get a test when traveling. The benefit is that city life has been mostly normal for over a year while few people have died of the virus.

As I write on the last day of 2021, many of us wonder how the government will deal with the omicron variant. I worry that it’s so transmissible that the government will no longer be able to implement its zero-covid strategy. Of course, people thought that delta might defeat China, but that variant has been fairly well contained aside from a few flare-ups. I guess I’m more on the side that omicron can’t be contained. The government won’t go down without a fight, I’m sure, which means that it will implement lockdowns far more severe than anything it has done to this point. And so I wonder if the US wouldn’t be a bad place to stay over the first half of 2022. In any case, I’m glad to have set up a bike at home, on which I would be able to have substantial exercise if I can’t leave the house for many days.

I’m a fan of Modern Sketch, a Shanghai magazine known for daring art that ran from 1934 to 1937. It captured Jazz Age excitement as well as the dread of war. Image credit: Colgate University Libraries

I’m not going to write many more of these letters. After five, the end is in sight. Writing these pieces demands an enormous effort of concentration. It’s the timing that hurts: I am working hard in the last ten days of the year, doing my most frenzied thinking when everyone else is in the happiest mood of relaxation. It’s getting annoying that I wish I could take a break from Christmas and New Year’s. Therefore I’m trying to terminate this annual burden. I think I will write these again, but not more than one or two.

The post 2021 letter appeared first on Dan Wang.

2020 letter

2021-01-01 23:44:10

(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2019)

I. Inspiration

It’s difficult to identify a great economic reason to explore space. There are easier ways to extract minerals, doing anything at all is terribly expensive, and Mars is a hard place to make a living. The benefits of space exploration are instead mostly inspirational. Few other human activities are so grand to captivate the imagination, and doing these uneconomic projects have pulled forward technological capabilities that may otherwise have languished.

It’s difficult to identify a great economic reason to practice socialism. Its historical results have ranged from catastrophic misallocation of talent at best to mass deaths at worst. But socialism still retains appeal to broad segments of many populations, which shows that it has considerable inspirational value. For better or for worse, there are still many advocates for the creation of some form of a more equal society.

This year, I read every issue of Qiushi (translation: Seeking Truth), the party’s flagship theory journal, whose core task is to spell out the evolving idea of socialism with Chinese characteristics. For those not familiar, Qiushi reads like a cross between the New Yorker and the Federal Register. Published twice a month, the magazine features lengthy essays, thick pages, and some of the finest writers in the party. Each issue starts in the same way: a reprint of a speech or essay by top leader Xi Jinping—in a font distinct from the rest of the magazine’s—and then commentary and reports from the rest of the party state. Accompanying pictures feature either the country’s leaders making inspections, scenes of the people, or major pieces of infrastructure and heavy industry.

Its audience? People with nothing better to do than read the party center’s commentary, like retired cadres, or those who are keenly interested in Beijing’s priorities, like local officials. Reading party speeches with its various annexes and cross references echoes my main professional activity these days. That is the study of the US sanctions regime—namely Commerce’s Export Administration Regulations and Treasury’s IEEPA-based authorities. Party speeches and US regulations are both made up of arcane, formal language that make references to more obscure texts, which themselves hint at still more distant and terrible truths. US sanctions lawyers, I suspect, can have a splendid time with Qiushi.

Steady engagement with the journal throughout the year has forced me to think more deeply about the Chinese Communist Party. There are many things that Xi wants to do, I believe that his most fundamental goal is to make this Marxist-Leninist party an effective governing force for the present century. His patient work to reshape the bureaucracy is aided by a distinctive feature of the Chinese system: the use of propaganda to create centralized campaigns of inspiration. Some of Xi’s efforts have borne fruit. The country’s governance capabilities have markedly improved, a trend that is apparent in daily life. At the same time, the state has grown much more repressive. A focus on repression shouldn’t neglect the improvement in the country’s institutional and commercial strengths; and appreciation of this improvement ought to be tempered by the party center’s growing mania for control.

When foreign commentators discuss the experience of reading state media, they rarely fail to attach a reference to its “turgid prose.” While some partyspeak is indeed unreadable, I’ve always seen that dismissal as a signal of contempt for the party’s pronouncements, thus deterring people from taking it seriously. But there is reason to treat its content with care. Though propaganda may not matter to you, it matters to the party. Anne-Marie Brady has pointed out that the leadership considers propaganda to be the “lifeblood” of the party state. 1 Propaganda work is considered so powerful that the person in charge must be only a functionary. Brady shows that the head of propaganda always has a seat on the Politburo, but shouldn’t usually be allowed to reach the standing committee. He is not to be too imaginative, or he might dominate the entire political system. Propaganda is key to understanding the party, since it governs not in itself, but in symbiosis with state institutions. For the most part, the party’s role can be boiled down to two items: inspiration, by setting the ideological direction, and control, through its power to select personnel.

Qiushi offers an authoritative articulation of the central government’s priorities at any moment. Its job, like the rest of the state media, consists of repetition and explication of a few phrases. It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at crude sloganeering, like the two centenary goals of achieving a “moderately prosperous society in all respects” by 2021 and “a modern socialist country and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people” by 2049. But the need to fix slogans makes good sense in Chinese governance: the party center has to speak to all local officials as well as the entire population. As Richard Epstein has argued, the greater the complexity in a system, the simpler the rules that govern it must be. One should allow, for example, extensive and nuanced bargaining between buyer and seller at the vegetable stall, but for an online marketplace to manage millions of transactions a day, then its rules must be very simple indeed.

It’s up to the party center to adjust and refine slogans to signal the priorities of the moment. The easiest way to appreciate the importance of that effort is to consider Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to shift the country to pragmatic governance through Reform and Opening—itself a named initiative. He invented or instrumentalized a series of ingenious phrases that include “development is the only hard truth,” “cross the river by feeling the stones,” and “practice is the sole criterion for the determination of truth.” My favorite is his declaration at the 13th party congress that China is in the “primary stage of socialism.” Left unspecified is how long this stage will last and how many more stages there will be before the people can enjoy the full deal. 

Many of the party center’s slogans tend to be deliberately vague, thus permitting lower-level officials to figure out implementation. My one-sentence definition of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era is: “To achieve the two centenary goals—under the leadership of the party—by accomplishing tasks that include but are not limited to eliminating poverty, advancing the socialist rule of law, improving party discipline, etc.” That concept is still an evolving one. Meanwhile, we await better explication of the hot slogans this year: “dual circulation” and “demand-side reform.” Some of it however can be absurd: I’m skeptical that anyone can readily explain the nuances between “rule of law,” “socialist rule of law,” and “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics.”

When it’s not being vague, the party can be trying to have things both ways. Xi declared at the third plenum in 2013 that market forces would have a “decisive” role in allocating resources, while at the same time the state sector would have a “leading” role. It’s not unusual to see a great deal of semantic acrobatics. Deng declared that socialism means the capacity to concentrate resources to accomplish great tasks; under that definition, the Apollo and Manhattan projects were exercises in socialism. In July, Xi reminded us that “socialism with Chinese characteristics has many distinctive features, but its most essential is upholding leadership by the Chinese Communist Party.”2 In other words, socialism with Chinese characteristics means the party is never wrong. Either the market or the state sector can be more important at any moment: it is the party’s pleasure to decide.

Centralized campaigns of inspiration, which usually manifest through fixing slogans, is a distinctive feature of the Chinese political system. In the US, political candidates trot out slogans when they run for election; in China, one is never far from the next big named initiative. At its best, defining major goals is the essence of political leadership, and nowhere is this principle better illustrated than Apollo. John F. Kennedy announced the target in 1961: land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the decade was out. By fixing this clear goal, as well as committing the necessary spending, he accelerated the creation, development, and deployment of technologies that made the lunar landings possible.3

Xi grasps this idea of leadership. He has unleashed a torrent of new initiatives during his tenure. In my view, Xi feels strongly that the practice of governing China under socialism cannot be an exercise in sustained mendacity. The political system can no longer continue to be an unstable structure based on ad hoc compromises; instead it must have a clear organizational structure, with the party at the top. And the ruling party needs to have the political consciousness of an effective governing force.

Consider two of his most important initiatives: the campaign against corruption and the move toward law-based governance. Xi has decided that corruption is not a mystery to be endured, but a problem to be solved. A few years past the peak of the crackdown, it’s fair to say that the campaign hasn’t solely been effective in removing his adversaries, but has also been broad enough to restore some degree of public confidence in government. A few commentators contend that removal of opportunities for graft have prompted talented people to leave government. But the flip side of that coin has been the improvement in morale among the civil servants who found corruption among colleagues to be intolerable, and can finally see themselves doing public work well. 

And for years, Xi has emphasized following clear rules of written procedure, under the rubric of “law-based governance.”4 Since then, the state has improved regulatory systems, for example in setting clear standards for license approvals, as well as creating effective securities and antitrust regulations. The state has removed some of the arbitrary aspects of governance, thus bringing serious enforcement actions following the passage of relatively clear regulations. That has improved facts on the ground. Companies and lawyers tell me that a decade-long effort by the State Council to ease doing business has yielded real results. Obtaining business licenses no longer requires a relentless pace of wining and dining, and has instead become close to a matter of routine. I haven’t been able to verify this fact for myself, but one of my friends told me that the office of the National Development and Reform Commission used to be ringed by some of the fanciest restaurants in Beijing, offering mostly private rooms; many of these restaurants have now closed, following the professionalization of business approvals.

The lived experience of being in Beijing has improved in parallel. I remember what a nightmare it was to buy a high-speed rail ticket for the first time years ago, which involved lots of yelling and multiple people cutting in line. Today, I purchase one on my phone, with no need to obtain a paper ticket, and the lines to board are more or less orderly. Consumer products of all sorts are getting pretty good, and the customer service experience of engaging with any of these companies tends to be not unpleasant. There’s certainly still all sorts of disorderly behavior, but anyone can notice the improvement on all fronts of daily life. In more macro view, some of the breathless stories from years ago on China’s growing capabilities look at last like they’re on good ground today: the country has produced credible companies, have many investable assets (especially in fixed income), and are building globally-competitive brands.

It’s easy to enumerate the grave problems facing the country, but critics tend to under-appreciate its strengths. Chief among them, in my view, has been the party’s surprising adaptability. At any given point, commentators have said that the problems have become too big for the government to handle. Meanwhile, the country has achieved a good record of pulling itself out of sticky situations: in 1992 when it restarted reform, after the financial crisis of 1997, and again in 2008. That record was validated most spectacularly again this year in the aftermath of the Covid-19 outbreak.

This year made me believe that China is the country with the most can-do spirit in the world. Every segment of society mobilized to contain the pandemic. One manufacturer expressed astonishment to me at how slowly western counterparts moved. US companies had to ask whether making masks aligned with the company’s core competence. Chinese companies simply decided that making money is their core competence, and therefore they should be making masks. The State Council reported that between March and May, China exported 70 billion masks and nearly 100,000 ventilators.5 Some of these masks had problems early on, but the manufacturers learned and fixed them or were culled by regulatory action, and China’s exports were able to grow when no one else could restart production. Soon enough, masks were big enough to be seen in the export data.

It’s obvious that the authorities in Wuhan screwed up big, but it’s also the case that the central government organized an effective response to virus containment. It’s not just the manufacturers: the consumer internet companies leapt into action in a way that their US peers did not. 6 Francis Fukuyama states that high-trust societies have “spontaneous sociability,” in which people are able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good. On each of these metrics, I submit that China should receive high marks.

As every discussion on China grows more strident, and as every proposition about it has to be vested with sentiment, I submit that it’s all the more important to be able to see things as they are. That entails having coming to terms not just with a rise of its repression, but also with its growing commercial and institutional strengths. US elites have abandoned the idea that China would liberalize nicely. They should put another idea to bed: that this authoritarian system, riddled with weaknesses, is on the brink of collapse. The country’s strengths are real and improving while the government becomes more nasty towards its critics and the rest of the world.

China is neither a Marxist fundamentalist regime nor a universally-surveilled open-air prison, in which one is free to do nothing but worship the party and carry out its edicts. That is however the impression created by quite a bit of the media. 7 I think that’s not the fault of individual journalists, instead more structural explanations are at work. News bureaus are highly concentrated in Beijing, due in part to natural corporate consolidation, but mostly because the government maintains a strict cap on foreign journalist visas. As a result, the bulk of journalists are based in the part of China that has the most politics and the least sense of growth. Everything here is doom and gloom, a fact well conveyed to the outside world. What’s missing are the facts of more pleasant life and higher growth in other cities. In an ideal world, it should not be crazy to imagine that the papers should have correspondents based in places like Chongqing, Hangzhou, or Xiamen, all of which have interesting stories to tell.

Xi is preparing to face a more challenging international environment with a raft of initiatives. He has consistently said over the last few years that “we must handle our own affairs well.” That has meant building up domestic capabilities while not lashing out against American firms. He has also invoked history to strengthen morale in the party. 2021 is the centenary of the party’s founding, and the major slogan of the past two years has been: “Remember where we started from, pursue our destiny, the struggle is forever.” 8

Given the importance of the slogan, it’s worthwhile to try to come to terms with the fondness and reverence his generation has for the party’s early days. Many of the people tormented by the party center, including Deng and Xi’s father, have ended up being fiercely loyal to the party.9 That shows not just that human nature is complex, but also that the revolutionary heritage of the party instills pride. The CCP started out as a combat party constantly at the mercy of forces grander than itself, achieving its goals after a long struggle that repeatedly brought it to the brink of death. Daniel Koss reminds us that the longer that revolutionary parties have to struggle before consolidating power, the stronger their ideological commitments and the greater their governance durability tend to be.10

Xi is keen to reflect upon the regime’s history. He has decided that the party must believe in itself, and that it is correct to do so: “If our Party members and officials are firm in their ideals and convictions and maintain high morale in their activities and initiatives, and if our people are high-spirited and determined, then we will surely create many miracles.” 11Furthermore, he has stated: “The prospects are bright but the challenges are severe. All comrades must aim high and look far, be alert to dangers even in times of calm, have the courage to pursue reform and break new ground, and never become hardened to change.” 12

Thus I’ve arrived at the idea that a commitment to centralized campaigns of inspiration, represented by the tendency to fix clear goals, is the booster stage required to leave the gravitational pull of decadence and complacency. Ross Douthat laments that “a consistent ineffectuality in American governance is just the way things are.”13 And he references Jacques Barzun, who defines a decadent society as one that is “peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance.” As a society grows rich, its problems become social: an organizational sclerosis, which no technology is sophisticated enough to solve. No great effort is required to identify the comprehensive paralysis in the US. And that is the political and social current that Xi is trying to reverse in China.

One way to do that is to continue to pursue GDP growth, which has mostly become an unfashionable idea today in the west. Xi reminded the state in July that “economic work must be our core task, if we succeed in that, then the rest of our tasks become easy.”14 Barry Naughton has noted that “China’s system of incentives for local bureaucrats to encourage growth is extremely unusual, and seems only to exist in China. It is a blunt and powerful instrument.” 

This emphasis on growth makes it less likely for China to develop into American complacency or decadence. There are other types of paralysis that it stands a good chance of avoiding. With its emphasis on the real economy, it is trying to avoid the fate of Hong Kong, where local elites have reorganized the productive forces completely around sustaining high property prices and managing mainland liquidity flows. With its emphasis on economic growth, it cannot be like Taiwan, whose single bright corporate beacon is surrounded by a mass of firms undergoing genteel decline. With its emphasis on manufacturing, it cannot be like the UK, which is so successful in the sounding-clever industries—television, journalism, finance, and universities—while seeing a falling share of R&D intensity and a global loss of standing among its largest firms.

Douthat’s book does not deal seriously with China, only with a fantasy of a universally-surveilled society under the rubric of a social credit system. If he looked more closely, he might pick up what Frank Pieke has termed “neo-socialism,” which is the attempt to harness market liberalization to strengthen state capacity and this Leninist party.15 In return, the state provides purpose and direction, as well as inspiring the rest of society with a transformative mission. It helps, of course, that Xi is a genuine believer in socialism, which to him is both an instrument as well as an end. He’s leveraging that belief to reject decadence and assert agency to point out new lines of advance.

II. Control

That was quite a lot of theory. Where does it fall apart?

Xi has said: “If we turn a blind eye to challenges, or even dodge or disguise them; if we fear to advance in the face of challenges and sit by and watch the unfolding calamity; then they will grow beyond our control and cause irreparable damage.”16 Instead of heeding this warning, authorities in Wuhan suppressed reporting of a spread of a novel virus. At a time when they should have imposed restrictions, they congregated thousands around a gigantic potluck. That has indeed unfolded into a calamity.

Xi has said: “Some officials are perfunctory in their work, shirking responsibility when troubles come and dodging thorny problems. They like to report every trifle to their superiors for approval or directives. In doing so, they appear to be abiding by the rules but are actually avoiding responsibilities. Some make ill-considered or purely arbitrary decisions. They place themselves above the party organization and allow no dissenting voices.”17 But as economic growth slows down, the country is doubling down on centralized government. Over the last several years, the state is taking more of a leading role in the economy, which means a larger role for bureaucrats.

Xi has said: “Self-criticism needs to be specific about our problems and needs to touch underlying questions… We must be gratified when told of our errors; we must not shy away from our shortcomings. We must accommodate different opinions and sharp criticism.”18 When medical professionals spoke up about a strange new virus circulating in Wuhan, police gave them reprimands. More and more often, the state is simply arresting critics. Even though the government has every reason to be confident about the effectiveness of its virus containment, it has issued a jail sentence to a citizen journalist under the catch-all charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” For all the emphasis on seeking truth from facts, the state still maintains this practice of shooting the messenger or jailing its critics.

On its own terms, the party center’s instruction is unevenly followed. And there are plenty of reasons to doubt the sustainability of Chinese growth that exist beyond the party’s capacity for self-reform. The following have all received extensive treatment: demographics will be a clear and serious drag in only a few years; a buildup of debt is now accompanied by growing investor discomfort with strategic defaults; the environment is bearing greater stresses; and based on the state’s aggression abroad and the operation of detention camps for minority groups at home, the rest of the world has become much less friendly towards China. One can add more items here, I want to consider the problems with centralized campaigns of inspiration.

The creation and repetition of key slogans isn’t just crowding out the room for other ideas. The state has prosecuted a decade-long effort to suppress the views it doesn’t like. Not only has the government ramped up censorship, society as a whole is developing greater intolerance for dissenting ideas.

It’s difficult to draw a clear line from tighter speech restrictions to worse economic outcomes. Greater censorship over the last decade has coincided with still-impressive levels of economic growth as well as the growing competitiveness of many more companies. And I think it’s worth considering that the authoritarianism of the late-Prussian and early-German state coincided with the creation of the modern research university as well as fantastic advances in chemistry, physics, and electrical engineering.

But there’s more on-the-ground evidence that ordinary people are growing nervous. In so many settings, one has to tread on eggshells in a public discussion in China, with organizers taking pains to remind audience members of sensitivities. Sometimes even in private, people beg off with an embarrassed laugh that they can’t discuss a subject due to unspecified difficulties. WeChat blocks sensitive keywords, which today includes “decoupling” and “sanctions.” It’s now inconvenient to use the app for professional conversations, and I’ve been pretty insistent to my contacts to use Signal instead. And since I brought up Germany, I wonder if the right analogy for China today is as a successful East Germany.

It’s hard to imagine that this increasingly censorious environment is conducive to good thinking. Actions from the government seem to be matched by a growing intolerance among the population for dissenting views. That’s due in part to their sense of feeling besieged after international opinion on China turned sharply negative after the virus outbreak. That hasn’t made it any better for Fang Fang, the novelist in Wuhan whose journal entries documenting the pandemic were first widely-read and then widely-criticized after she authorized an English translation. At that point, critics charged her with “blackening China’s name” and “handing a knife to China’s enemies.” The abuse wasn’t confined online: prominent personalities in state media have led criticism campaigns against her. I wonder if this society can be reflective and thus capable of self-improvement if it is so intolerant of criticism.

It might not be clear that censoriousness is hurting the creation of new companies, but it is clear that it’s becoming more difficult to create better cultural products. Over the last decade, China’s most successful cultural exports include TikTok, the Three-Body Problem, a few art house films (mostly directed by Jia Zhangke)… and that might be it. The Three-Body Problem was published in 2008 and translated into English in 2014; today, the series looks more like something that was able to escape the system rather than the vanguard of a great Chinese outpouring of marvelous cultural creations. Not content to allow science fiction movies to develop independently, the film authorities have this year released guidelines on the correct ideological direction of new films.19 Films more broadly are facing censorship. The two blockbusters released this year (Guan Hu’s Eight Hundred and Zhang Yimou’s One Second) were both mysteriously pulled from festivals and released to the public this year after the state demanded edits.

My best cultural experience this year was to see the Met’s production of Porgy and Bess. It is one of America’s greatest dramas: the story of the marginalized community of Catfish Row, written by an outsider whose works defy easy categorization, and featuring music of surpassing beauty. As I watched a production with superb voices and exuberant dancers, in one of the most lavish theaters in the world, I wondered whether China might one day produce a story of such power. Or if instead every new work must encapsulate core socialist values and the spirit of the 19th party congress. 

This lack of compelling cultural creations matters for many reasons. One of them is that people who’ve never been able to make a visit cannot really visualize the life of an ordinary Chinese person, only the dystopia that has become the way that most foreigners think about the country. The propaganda department has not only failed to directly create globally-appealing culture, it has regulated private creative efforts out of existence. For all of Xi’s insistence to “tell China’s story well,” the Chinese regime seems congenitally incapable of allowing good stories about itself to be told, because of its obsession with exercising total control.

For most of the last few decades, the state has not been so repressive as to smother the most dynamic elements of the economy and society. And I think it is still intent on controlling a limited number of areas it has determined to be political threats—and that it will do very strictly. But every few months brings greater risk that dynamism decays from the shrinking space for acceptable speech and thought. The direction of travel has not been a happy one. As recently as five years into Xi’s term, there were still optimists who believed that his regime might turn out to be more kind. The removal of term limits routed that camp, and few recent events can re-instill confidence that the state sees a limit to greater repression. Detention camps have not gone away, and I wonder if they will be expanded to more than a few sites in western provinces. Surveillance capabilities have significantly scaled up. And everyone knows that the regime is serious about instilling discipline and control.

There has been a more obvious way that the state has set back leading companies this year: through greater assertiveness abroad. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has peddled inflammatory and sometimes false claims, angering other countries. These acts are contributing to the steady closure of developed markets to Chinese firms. Local ambassadors and official spokespeople have sometimes threatened to halt key projects or cut off the Chinese market to major companies. After economic threats against countries like Australia, the foreign ministry is strengthening arguments among national security hawks in the west that countries should be less dependent on China. In some ways, Chinese diplomats have become the greatest threats to Chinese exporters.

III. A clear line of advance

Meanwhile, the state is growing more deeply involved in the economy, especially in technology. This has been a pivotal year for China and tech, which will be a good area for observing the party’s tactics on inspiration at work. A relentless pace of US actions targeting Chinese companies has delivered unmistakable setbacks to their operations. That has triggered a whole-of-society response to build up domestic technology capabilities, an effort that will be guided at the highest political level.

I wrote last year: “The US responded to the rise of the USSR and Japan by focusing on innovation; it’s early days, but so far the US is responding to the technological rise of China by kneecapping its leading firms. So instead of realizing its own Sputnik moment, it is triggering one in China.”

This year, the US doubled down. It produced two rounds of novel restrictions on Huawei, threatened wider restrictions on Tencent and ByteDance, forced the sale of TikTok to a US consortium, and limited technology exports on SMIC, DJI, and dozens of other companies. Aside from Alibaba, it’s hard to name many big Chinese tech firms that have not faced sanctions or the threat of one from the US.

The actual effects of these regulatory actions have been uneven. Designation to the entity list hasn’t always had a major impact on every company’s operations. Federal courts have tied up the bans on Tencent’s WeChat and ByteDance’s TikTok. At the same time, Huawei is trying to work through major difficulties, especially in its smartphone business. TikTok, China’s most successful tech export, still might be sold off. And more generally, Chinese firms are starting to be locked out of developed markets. Lack of access to the richest and most discerning consumers makes it more difficult to make the best products in the world.

The US can revel in Huawei’s pain. But its actions have not been costless to itself. By withholding components that Chinese companies have relied upon, the US government has turned American firms into unreliable suppliers. These restrictions can sometimes block non-American firms from making sales too. In an extraordinary assertion of extraterritoriality, the US declared in August that any company, anywhere in the world, needs to apply for a license to sell a product to Huawei if it is produced on the basis of US technologies.

Nothing can be easier to destroy than trust. Chinese companies have responded by de-Americanizing their supply chains because they have no choice. US politicians can observe the sometimes-devastating impacts of sanctions. What they don’t seem to realize—or want to believe—is that they’re simultaneously pummeling the American brand writ large. I’ve documented for Dragonomics the uncomfortable questions American companies tell me they’re starting to face on whether they can credibly be long-term suppliers. Elsewhere, the Economist has reported that even poultry farmers in China are wondering if they’ll be able to import baby chicks from the US. 20 And there are now multiple reported instances of Japanese companies marketing themselves as more reliable than their American competitors.21 Moreover, I hear growing unease from companies in the rest of Asia and Europe on buying American. Can everyone really be sure that this denial campaign will be limited to a handful of bad Chinese actors? Or is a better model of the US government that once it has found a fun new toy, it will keep playing with it until it is no longer fun?

With these regulations, the US has initiated one of the greatest and strangest antitrust actions ever, against potentially all American exporters. The US Treasury has for years expressed worry about the potential decline of the dollar’s dominance following excessive use of blocking sanctions. This fear is turning into reality for the real economy. One might expect alarm bells to be going off in DC, but it doesn’t appear that there’s much pushback against these regulations, except for murmurs from trade associations. It’s possible to defend these moves as correct—for example by justifying that the costs on American firms are worth it for the chance to slow Huawei down right now—but the government does not appear to have had a vigorous debate about the tradeoffs. Instead, the strategy seems to be a result of bureaucratic kludges, pushed forward by whichever faction has the upper hand, made mostly because the financial sanctions office has resisted dealing a serious blow to Huawei in a single stroke.

For the most part, the control hawks faction of the government has had a run of the table, shown by the fact that US agencies have been more focused on taking down Chinese firms than extending US strengths. At a time when it’s more important than ever to advance its semiconductor companies, the government is crippling their sales to their largest or fastest-growing market. When research capabilities at US universities need to grow, the government is denying them students. And when the US should be attracting more talent to its shores, the government has made it more difficult for people to immigrate. Thus the US looks committed to a strategy of destroying the scientific and industrial establishment in order to save it.

Meanwhile in China, these actions have triggered a surge of interest in mastering technology. For the first time arguably since the industrial rise of Japan in the 1950s, a major country is committed to thinking deeply about the invention of its own tooling. A whole generation of scientists and engineers must examine foundational problems like to build leading tools (like lithography machines) and create the best materials (like wafers and chemicals). And the state is fully behind that effort. After steady calls from Xi throughout the year to master technology, the Central Economic Work Conference announced in December that science and technology work will be the top priority in 2021; the conference has never broken science and technology out as an independent item, never mind give it top spot.

I wrote a column on what a gamechanger these actions can be for Chinese industrial policy. Hardly any of China’s largest technology companies have escaped some form or threat of US sanctions, and many more are wondering if they will end up on some poorly-understood blacklist. Thus the US government has aligned the interests of China’s leading tech companies with the state’s interest in self-sufficiency and technological greatness. Huawei, the greatest victim of US actions, is now in the position of NASA in the 1960s when it comes to chips: a cash-rich entity willing to purchase on the basis of performance, not cost. Access to leading and demanding customers can give a chance to local suppliers who never would have had a shot competing against well-established American firms.

US restrictions are setting back Chinese companies in the short term, but I think it’s unlikely they can crush the broader effort to catch up. No country has monopolized a key technology forever: instead, the history of technology has mostly been a history of diffusion. And Chinese firms are hardly starting from a base of zero. The country has demonstrated a growing ability to master most industrial products and is doing well enough in digital technologies. It remains a dynamic market with a good and improving base of human talent. And perhaps most importantly, it is where most manufacturing is done today, which means its workers have the greatest exposure to technological learning. These advantages don’t guarantee success, especially not on a short timeline. But there’s a chance that things improve rather quickly. The development trajectories for many technologies were pulled forward with unexpected speed after Kennedy announced his moon target.

Is it a drag that the state is so involved in this effort? Well, yes, and China might well repeat the industrial policy mistakes that have stymied projects in the past. But the state doesn’t feel like it can afford to be hands off. Commentators who criticize China’s efforts as doubling down on a state-led approach seem not to realize that the world has fundamentally changed in the last few years. First, the US cannot credibly guarantee to sell goods that Chinese firms need. And second, US actions have removed the political room that Chinese companies have had to push back against state demands that companies buy domestic. Apart from the processor, a Huawei phone is using comparable amounts of Chinese hardware as the iPhone. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have been using the best-in-class software and hardware, which are usually American. The state will have an easier time now enlisting these companies to use alternatives.

While promoting the status of science and technology with one hand, the Chinese government has with its other hand reined in the activities of consumer internet companies. I’ve never stopped lamenting the marketing trick that California pulled off to situate consumer internet as the highest form of technology, as if Tencent and Facebook are the surest signs that we live a technologically-accelerating civilization. The “tech” giants are highly-capable companies that print cash. But they’re barely engaged in the creation of intellectual property, excelling instead on business-model innovation and the exploitation of network effects. It’s become apparent in the last few months that the Chinese leadership has moved towards the view that hard tech is more valuable than products that take us more deeply into the digital world. Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.”22 This expression preceded the passage of securities and antitrust regulations, thus also pummeling finance, which along with tech make up the most glamorous sectors today. The optimistic scenario is that these actions compress the wage and status premia of the internet and finance sectors, such that we’ll see fewer CVs that read: “BS Microelectronics, Peking; software engineer, Airbnb” or “PhD Applied Mathematics, Princeton; VP, Citibank.”

While China is ahead on this attitude shift, I think the US is starting to undergo the same conversion. On this theme, I think it’s worth reflecting on the Chinese actions that drove out Google and Facebook a decade ago. That move blocked a major market to these companies, potentially depriving them of significant revenues, and effectively split the world into two internets. And it has since become part of the justification for US actions against China’s technology champions. But US actions have been an order of magnitude more severe: by attacking Huawei’s supply chain, it can terminate the operations of the entire company, and thus represents a massive escalation. In any case, the Chinese ban of Facebook today looks like a prescient action, given how much the company’s activities have enraged western governments, who complain about the circulation of conspiracy theories and other misinformation on social media platforms. It’s harder to argue that China was foolish to ban products so wondrous that their CEOs need to be hauled on a regular basis before political leaders to endure demands to fix the social problems their platforms are allegedly amplifying.

Instead of coddling the internet companies, Xi has declared that China must never deindustrialize or lose its manufacturing capabilities. There’s some chance that Chinese scientists and engineers never make the breakthroughs that free them from dependence on foreign supply. But I think it’s unlikely that they completely fail: they only need to re-invent certain wheels, which does not mean dreaming up unheard-of new technologies. In the worst case, Chinese scientists engage in pure re-invention, making up for the technologies that they can no longer buy. The more optimistic scenario is that they’ll find new ways of doing things after re-examining established ideas. The retreading of old paths might reveal vistas that were passed over too quickly, and which might offer new rewards once properly explored.

Whatever its other worries, the party leadership doesn’t have to fret about becoming a decadent society. Given that its per-capita GDP is still around a sixth of US levels, it still has substantial room for catch-up growth. And it won’t lack for identifying clear lines of advance. On top of eliminating poverty and saving the environment, the party can now add the goal to master technology. The leadership has already held collective study sessions on topics that include artificial intelligence and quantum computing. But it’s going to need to come up with some new tricks to inspire people in science and the industrial world.

There’s nothing like a good space project to captivate the imagination. I find it remarkable how little we discuss the fact that there are almost certainly warm oceans on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn which presents the possibility that we find extraterrestrial life within our very own solar system. Imagine the inspirational value that can flow from fixing a target, say the year of the 2049 centenary, to land a probe on these moons to explore for life.

I thank a number of people for reading a draft of this section or discussing the core ideas with me.

***

It’s time to talk about books.

This year, I re-read Proust. The first time I did so was during college, this second time was more rewarding. I learned to skip the most tedious parts: the endless descriptions of the French countryside, our narrator’s torment over his love of Albertine (and Gilberte, and Mme. de Guermantes), and how much he’s looking forward to seeing Venice. Instead, I focused on the descriptions of the personalities, for every shade of human vanity is depicted in these pages.

The novel describes the most intense lovesuffering, caused by suspicion, made worse by the most stupid mistakes, caused by pride. Much of the story is taken up by the effects of mad jealousies, which grip every major character in turn, with the same destructive effects on each. On this reading, I was struck by how much the novel is useful as a book of ethics. Many scenes easily resonate today, like how fiercely Mme. Verdurin or Mme. de Villeparisis must beg and threaten for people to show up for their little parties. It’s not just our narrator who is exposed to be acting ridiculously. Outrageous behavior from every character (driven by pride, vanity, or ambition) receives careful treatment and then a comprehensive skewering.

The key to reading Proust is not to pay too much attention to the plot. It’s of no great import, and one has to get used to abrupt shifts. In this way the novel is like Moby-Dick, which can shift from the politics of dining at Ahab’s table to a loving tour of the literal interior of a sperm whale’s head. Couldn’t find the transition? No matter, that detracts not at all from the wonderfulness of the scenes. Focus instead on the humor. There are many funny things that take place in the aristocratic set pieces, such as the constant misunderstandings of M. de Charlus at the dinner of the Verdurins, or his suspicion at the violinist who professes to enjoy solving algebra equations until late into the evenings, or his interactions with the Duc de Guermantes. Really anything with Charlus portends comedy.

Not everyone loves Proust’s sentences. I thought that Penguin’s translation made them enchanting. In between the humor and the yearning, an air of melancholy is never distant, which gives the books extra depth. The ending is especially sad. Our narrator, whom we knew as a boy and then a young man, suddenly becomes quite old in the second half of the final volume. The novel reaches its climax with a lengthy and beautiful epiphany, like in Mann’s Magic Mountain, in which our narrator realizes a fierce urgency to write this book.

This was a good year for reading long books. In the early months of the pandemic, I went through Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World, a history of the nineteenth century. It’s chock full of facts and too difficult to summarize. In science fiction, I enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. Stephenson has an amazing ability to locate all the nerd pleasure centers in one’s brain and then jam his fingers hard on them. Anathem is a bit of a twist on Stephenson’s usual trick: instead of presenting loving rewrites of his favorite Wikipedia articles, he serves us instead loving rewrites from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, all wrapped up as usual in a delicious plot. (I want to thank my friend Thijs not only for insisting that I read the book but for mailing me his copy from Amsterdam.)

I continued my Christmas tradition of reading about the second world war. This year: Britain’s War by Daniel Todman. The British perspective is interesting for its focus on the empire: having to think about the colonies was a distraction to the British leadership, but the ability to draw upon disparate resources and produce goods from multiple base areas was a major factor in victory. I never find scenes of battle to be so interesting. Instead, the pleasure I draw from war books is to think through the logistical efforts involved in producing goods and delivering them to the front. The best war books treat these as mathematical problems.

Todman is good on this bureaucratic side of war: “In 1942, there were 1,850 admissions to hospital per 1,000 troops on the Burmese front.” And he allows one to get inside the planning effort: “The average round trip from the UK to North America took two months and twenty days; that from the UK to the Indian Ocean area, seven and a half months. These rhythms dominated planning and the pace of the war.” Logistics has always been an underrated discipline, especially now in the time of vaccine distribution. And pacing in personal life is something we should all be more actively thinking about. It’s not enough to have a big goal far out in the future, success requires identifying milestones and achieving them at a steady pace.

Mao’s Third Front by Covell Meyskens is an account of the effort to make China undefeatable in the ‘60s. How? By relocating heavy industry from the coast into mountainous Sichuan. During the worst years of the Sino-Soviet split, Mao imagined that he might have to fend off an invasion from the revisionist Soviets as well as from the imperialist Americans, who had started to deploy troops in Vietnam. The Third Front was a colossal undertaking that wasn’t even meant as a deterrent, since the state didn’t publicize the effort. Instead, Mao was committed to doing the equivalent of moving industry to Siberia during peacetime, ready to retreat into the mountains (again), to be able to re-emerge victorious. The party’s history is still worth dwelling upon. Its big initiatives since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 include not just the Third Front, but also the Great Leap, transforming the written script, the Cultural Revolution, Reform and Opening, and the one-child policy. Any one of these would be a once-in-a-generation trauma, the party managed to pull them off at a rate of once a decade.

Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style is a useful compendium of different types of sentences. It’s good to keep around as a reference work. Essays One, by Lydia Davis, and Tufte are the best writing references that I’ve recently read. Reading Davis prompts reflection, for example when she points to Flaubert’s description of style as “the rhythm of poetry, the precision of the language of science, capable of sustained melody like a cello; a style that would enter the mind like a stiletto and on which our thought could travel like a boat over calm water on a breeze.”

It’s a happy development that many more people are writing, especially in newsletter form. For now, I find quite a lot of internet writing to be difficult to read: no real sense of pacing, an inability to turn a phrase or sustain a metaphor, the excessive use of italics. Picking up Tufte and Davis would help. Starting internet essays feels too often like going to battle inside a trench, which produces the same sense of trepidation. Writers should prosecute instead a war of movement, conducted through bold and decisive strokes, concluding with an unmistakable impression upon the victim. The feeling that I strive for is to create tightly-controlled expressions of exuberance, like the dancepieces of Philip Glass, which propel a lot of my writing process.

***

I may not have accomplished much in life, but I’m proud at least to have eaten thalis in Chennai, pizza in Naples, and mie goreng in Singapore.

I know that Beijing is not the world’s best food city, but it might be the best food city for me. One can grab expensive sushi at the restaurant favored by the Japanese embassy or walk a few blocks and order five plates of dumplings for $20. One can find decent dosas, lots of Thai food, and even a bagel store whose breads would be out of place on the Upper West Side but would not be in San Francisco. Best of all, every region of China is represented in this city. To deal with the various challenges of a pandemic year, I found solace in stuffing my face.

I managed to sample dishes from all the provinces this year, including the relatively obscure cuisines from places like Anhui, Guangxi, and Jiangxi. My favorites are: Shanghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan.

Many people dislike Shanghai food—which I’m defining as the broader region that encompasses Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, etc.—for being too sweet. In my mind, it’s unquestionably the finest cuisine. Not only is it the best at the high end, its noodles, soups, and soup dumplings make up some of the tastiest casual food as well. It’s the cuisine that varies most by season, e.g. bamboo shoots in spring and mitten crabs in fall, which showcases the bountiness of the region and its emphasis on freshness. (That’s quite unlike the tradition of the north, which celebrates every and any occasion with plates of dumplings.) The mixing of vinegar and hot fat produces a slight, magical sweetness, and that is something that the Shanghainese understand well, along with many other secrets.

I expect that everyone is familiar with the glories of Sichuan food, there’s little that I need to add here. I’ve eaten plenty in Chengdu and Chongqing, I hope that I can explore some of the villages in the countryside that feature local specialties.

And I hesitate to say that Yunnan is next best because it has become so trendy. Some people question whether Yunnan food is coherent enough to be a cuisine, or whether it’s a useless label for dishes that vary over a huge and mountainous province. I think of it as Chinese cooking styles with Southeast Asian ingredients, featuring dishes like rice noodles, which can be more soft or more chewy than wheat noodles, served in a mutton broth and topped with a generous fistful of fresh mint. There are many things one can find there that are uncommon in the rest of the country, like cheeses. My favorites are the mushrooms: there’s nothing more appealing than some freshly-picked mushrooms stir fried with bits of Yunnan ham.

Any of these three regions are worth traveling to for a food tour. My candidate for an underrated cuisine is the food of the northeast, which features breads and stews of huge portions. I haven’t had enough exposure to foods of all the interior provinces, but I’m happy to suggest that the cuisines of Jiangxi and Anhui are worth exploring. And the category of highly-rated and correctly-rated cuisines should include the foods of the northwest (breads and noodles), Hunan (spicy, though often too oily for me), and Taiwan (my favorite use of seafood). The following are overrated:

Cantonese: surely the most overrated cuisine in China, perhaps the most overrated cuisine in the world. I concede that dim sum is often a delight; and no lunch can be more simple or more satisfying than a few cuts of roast duck or pork layered on a bed of rice, accompanied by sprigs of greens and some gravy. But we’ve too long allowed Cantonese food to dominate the world’s conception of Chinese cuisine. The high-end dishes don’t come close to the refinement of Shanghai: chefs reveal contempt for themselves and their craft when they deep fry a lobster, as if it were a carnival food, and I’ve never understood the emphasis on shark fins and sea cucumbers. Please let’s not continue allowing Cantonese to be a default choice for business lunches. Shanghai is more fine.

Beijing’s imperial cuisine is the only Chinese cuisine that I consider to be dumb. It wasn’t until I moved to Beijing that I realized how many of the unfortunate associations with Chinese cooking are the creation of local traditions: the dreadful “brown sauce,” the excessive use of starch, and the compulsive need to fry. Peking duck is fine every once in a while, but it’s far too much fuss and expense for something of medium tastiness. There are so few redeeming dishes in imperial cuisine that I wonder if it has been yet another cruel trick pulled by the eunuchs to hoodwink the emperor, depriving him of culinary pleasures for sport.

Hotpot transcends regions now, so let’s treat it as its own category. Hotpot is a fun social activity to do with friends. It’s a way to display skill at the table, through the management of cooking a variety of foods. But it can never be any sort of culinary revelation. My worst nightmare is for hotpot restaurants to take over every retail restaurant space, so that our only choice is to line up to eat at them inside malls, forever.

Here is my four-step process for ordering success in China:

1. Greens are usually the glories of the cuisine: order as many vegetables as there are people
2. If you will have a meat, consider the juiciness that pairs well with the starch: something saucy if you will eat with rice, or less saucy if you will have soup noodles
3. Order Yunnan mushrooms if they are on the menu
4. Fill out the rest with cold appetizers, they are never a bad idea

***

Personal matters for last. 2020 was mostly a fine year, I didn’t have too many issues with it.

After a quick Italian holiday over lunar new year, I returned to Beijing on February 1st. At first I hesitated to fly back, today it looks like the best decision I made this year. It gave me the chance not only to observe the country as it faced its greatest challenge in decades, but also to enjoy normal life more quickly than most other places in the world. One can question the ultimate number of cases in China. But even if the totals were an order of magnitude higher, the reported trend that the country mostly stomped out the virus by April feels correct to all of us living here. Ever since that point, various cities have had to deal with flare ups (including Beijing again in June), but life has been a series of loosening restrictions. The last big milestone was the re-opening of cinemas in August. But well before then, the malls had been once again full and the smart restaurants difficult to book. 

In early April, I wrote a feature for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer on life in Beijing during the worst of the pandemic. There isn’t too much more I’d add, since life had already started to return to normal by then. I haven’t been able to visit the US at all this year, and as bad as things look now, I wonder if the virus will have a long-term impact to extend American strengths. There’s no question that the scientific establishment did a fantastic job, though from afar it doesn’t look like many other segments of society really distinguished themselves. But I wonder if this prolonged experience with the virus will shake loose a lot of the self-imposed paralysis in the US, thus inducing greater domestic change than in China, which dispatched the virus relatively quickly.

In 2019, I spent around two weeks a month out of the country on work travel. This year, my travel was domestic, and I’m glad to have been to visit six new cities: Qingdao, Suzhou, Hefei, Nanjing, Xi’an, and Changchun. Over the summer, everyone went to a handful of places: Hainan’s beaches, Yunnan’s villages, or the Sichuan mountainside. I didn’t go to these places, but had a memorable trip to Mount Changbai in the northeast, which offers stark and frigid alpine scenery. All things considered, Beijing has been one of the best places to be in the world this year, but its lack of nature made me dream of the big forests and wide rivers I grew up with in Ontario and the US northeast. I don’t think that there’s anything quite like that in China, but I hope next to be able to see the mountains in Sichuan or the plains of Inner Mongolia.

The combination of less travel and more news events raised my productivity this year. I came close to doubling my work output, from already-high levels, because of a relentless pace of White House actions against Huawei, Tencent, ByteDance, SMIC, and other firms. I wanted to write more for Bloomberg this year, but managed only two columns: discussing the state of US manufacturing in May and why this time is different for Chinese industrial policy in December. In terms of public writing, I’m happy to have contributed the piece to New York Magazine, and would like to try my hand at more feature writing in the future.

Like everyone else, I did a lot of Zoom meetings. I gave a presentation roughly at a rate of once a week, mostly to private audiences. My favorite public event was a keynote I gave for Asia Society Northern California, in which I presented on semiconductors and then moderated a panel that consisted of two technology and two policy experts. And I went on a series of podcasts: I think my best discussion was with the Economist’s Money Talks on China’s institutional strengths. One of the unexpected delights of this year, created by the norm of doing Zoom calls, was to hear from old friends, many of whom I haven’t seen in years or decades. I’m glad that this was a year that created this possibility for reconnection.

In the early months of the pandemic, I picked up a new skill: riding a bike. I’ve always been mortified to admit that I never properly knew how. With the encouragement of kind and patient friends, I’ve enjoyed cycling so much that it has become the primary way I get around Beijing. The city is good for cyclists, with its wide bicycle paths and flat roads. (Given the behavior of most drivers though, Beijing demands taking seriously the principle of safety first.) My favorite activity has become to cycle to the Forbidden City and back home, a nice hour-long ride that I would do after lunch. I’m still enjoying the feeling of gliding down a road on my own propulsion, which gives me a sense of slight unreality. That’s been good for thinking: I wrote significant chunks of this letter while riding down Beijing’s second and fourth ring roads.

This year marks my seventh of not drinking. I expect that I’m in the best shape of my life, given that, regular bike rides, occasional badminton sessions, and working out with my personal trainer three times a week. Still, I’m exhausted. That doesn’t mean it’s time to slow down. There are too many interesting things left to do.

Titan, a planet-sized moon of Saturn, has a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans. It and Europa—one of the moons of Jupiter, which might have warm liquid oceans—offer the best chances of discovering extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Credit: JPL

Here are a few questions on which I think we should all have a view:

Is the successful export of TikTok the start of a new trend or a one-off? The app has been an innovative Chinese creation that became a global success. Is it just the first example of many more successful products to come, or something that looks more like Three-Body Problem today: an exception, not the start of a trend.

Are there enduring advantages to being a producer-friendly economy? The west this year made a political decision to direct stimulus to consumers, while China offered minimal support to households and concentrated on helping production. Its implicit view is that production is more valuable and more difficult to stimulate than consumption. More generally, Chinese officials tend to be incredulous of US complaints of excessive subsidies to manufacturers; they tend to ask what the problem is, as if they’ve been accused of the sin of loving a child too much. 

Will we recognize what broader Chinese success or failure will look like? Since reform and opening, the country has always looked like it was on the brink of some disaster, either economic, political, or financial. Meanwhile, it has avoided big crises as it improves various capabilities. If that’s still the story at the end of the next decade—a decent rate of growth, avoiding the worst crises, while facing tough challenges—should we deem that a success or a failure?

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