Dan WangModify

2026-01-01 22:29:42

(This piece is my year in review; I skipped a letter last year)

One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.

It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive. The Communist Party speaks in the same two registers as the tech titans. The po-faced men on the Politburo tend to make extraordinarily bland speeches, laced occasionally with a murderous warning against those who cross the party’s interests. How funny is the big guy? We can take a look at an official list of Xi Jinping’s jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. These wisecracks include the following: “On an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Xi quipped that the true measure of water cleanliness is whether the mayor would dare to swim in the water.” Or try this reminiscence that Xi offered on bad air quality: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Yes, such a humorous fellow is the general secretary.1

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee. People who are dead serious tend not to embody sparkling irony. Yet the Communist Party and Silicon Valley are two of the most powerful forces shaping our world today. Their initiatives increase their own centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation states. Perhaps they are successful because they are remorseless.

Earlier this year, I moved from Yale to Stanford. The sun and the dynamism of the west coast have drawn me back. I found a Bay Area that has grown a lot weirder since I lived there a decade ago. In 2015, people were mostly working on consumer apps, cryptocurrencies, and some business software. Though it felt exciting, it looks in retrospect like a more innocent, even a more sedate, time. Today, AI dictates everything in San Francisco while the tech scene plays a much larger political role in the United States. I can’t get over how strange it all feels. In the midst of California’s natural beauty, nerds are trying to build God in a Box; meanwhile, Peter Thiel hovers in the background presenting lectures on the nature of the Antichrist. This eldritch setting feels more appropriate for a Gothic horror novel than for real life.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I want to say that I am rooting for San Francisco. It’s tempting to gawk at the craziness of the culture, as much of the east coast media tends to do. Yes, one can quickly find people who speak with the conviction of a cultist; no, I will not inject the peptides proffered by strangers. But there’s more to the Bay Area than unusual health practices. It is, after all, a place that creates not only new products, but also new modes of living. I’m struck that some east coast folks insist to me that driverless cars can’t work and won’t be accepted, even as these vehicles populate the streets of the Bay Area. Coverage of Silicon Valley increasingly reminds me of coverage of China, where a legacy media reporter might parachute in, write a dispatch on something that looks deranged, and leave without moving past caricature.

I enjoy San Francisco more than when I was younger because I now better appreciate what makes it work. I believe that Silicon Valley possesses plenty of virtues. To start, it is the most meritocratic part of America. Tech is so open towards immigrants that it has driven populists into a froth of rage. It remains male-heavy and practices plenty of gatekeeping. But San Francisco better embodies an ethos of openness relative to the rest of the country. Industries on the east coast — finance, media, universities, policy — tend to more carefully weigh name and pedigree. Young scientists aren’t told they ought to keep their innovations incremental and their attitude to hierarchy duly deferential, as they might hear in Boston. A smart young person could achieve much more over a few years in SF than in DC. People aren’t reminiscing over some lost golden age that took place decades ago, as New Yorkers in media might do. 

San Francisco is forward looking and eager to try new ideas. Without this curiosity, it wouldn’t be able to create whole new product categories: iPhones, social media, large language models, and all sorts of digital services. For the most part, it’s positive that tech values speed: quick product cycles, quick replies to email. Past success creates an expectation that the next technological wave will be even more exciting. It’s good to keep building the future, though it’s sometimes absurd to hear someone pivot, mid-breath, from declaring that salvation lies in the blockchain to announcing that AI will solve everything.

People like to make fun of San Francisco for not drinking; well, that works pretty well for me. I enjoy board games and appreciate that it’s easier to find other players. I like SF house parties, where people take off their shoes at the entrance and enter a space in which speech can be heard over music, which feels so much more civilized than descending into a loud bar in New York. It’s easy to fall into a nerdy conversation almost immediately with someone young and earnest. The Bay Area has converged on Asian-American modes of socializing (though it lacks the emphasis on food). I find it charming that a San Francisco home that is poorly furnished and strewn with pizza boxes could be owned by a billionaire who can’t get around to setting up a bed for his mattress. 

There’s still no better place for a smart, young person to go in the world than Silicon Valley. It adores the youth, especially those with technical skill and the ability to grind. Venture capitalists are chasing younger and younger founders: the median age of the latest Y Combinator cohort is only 24, down from 30 just three years ago. My favorite part of Silicon Valley is the cultivation of community. Tech founders are a close-knit group, always offering help to each other, but they circulate actively amidst the broader community too. (The finance industry in New York by contrast practices far greater secrecy.) Tech has organizations I think of as internal civic institutions that try to build community. They bring people together in San Francisco or retreats north of the city, bringing together young people to learn from older folks.

Silicon Valley also embodies a cultural tension. It is playing with new ideas while being open to newcomers; at the same time, it is a self-absorbed place that doesn’t think so much about the broader world. Young people who move to San Francisco already tend to be very online. They know what they’re signing up for. If they don’t fit in after a few years, they probably won’t stick around. San Francisco is a city that absorbs a lot of people with similar ethics, which reinforces its existing strengths and weaknesses.

Narrowness of mind is something that makes me uneasy about the tech world. Effective altruists, for example, began with sound ideas like concern for animal welfare as well as cost-benefit analyses for charitable giving. But these solid premises have launched some of its members towards intellectual worlds very distant from moral intuitions that most people hold; they’ve also sent a few into jail. The well-rounded type might struggle to stand out relative to people who are exceptionally talented in a technical domain. Hedge fund managers have views about the price of oil, interest rates, a reliably obscure historical episode, and a thousand other things. Tech titans more obsessively pursue a few ideas — as Elon Musk has on electric vehicles and space launches — rather than developing a robust model of the world.

So the 20-year-olds who accompanied Mr. Musk into the Department of Government Efficiency did not, I would say, distinguish themselves with their judiciousness. The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things. It is not surprising that hardcore contingents on both the left and the right have developed hostility to most everything that emerges from Silicon Valley. 

There’s a general lack of cultural awareness in the Bay Area. It’s easy to hear at these parties that a person’s favorite nonfiction book is Seeing Like a State while their aspirationally favorite novel is Middlemarch. Silicon Valley often speaks in strange tongues, starting podcasts and shows that are popular within the tech world but do not travel far beyond the Bay Area. Though San Francisco has produced so much wealth, it is a relative underperformer in the national culture. Indie movie theaters keep closing down while all sorts of retail and art institutions suffer from the crumminess of downtown. The symphony and the opera keep cutting back on performances — after Esa-Pekka Salonen quit the directorship of the symphony, it hasn’t been able to name a successor. Wealthy folks in New York and LA have, for generations, pumped money into civic institutions. Tech elites mostly scorn traditional cultural venues and prefer to fund the next wave of technology instead.

One of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging diverse opinions. Portfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast. So they relentlessly seek new information sources; consensus is rare, since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market. Tech cares less for dissent. Its movements are more herdlike, in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time. Startups don’t need dissent; they want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don’t like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley’s soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line, most prominently this year as many tech voices embraced the right. 

The two most insular cities I’ve lived in are San Francisco and Beijing. They are places where people are willing to risk apocalypse every day in order to reach utopia. Though Beijing is open only to a narrow slice of newcomers — the young, smart, and Han — its elites must think about the rest of the country and the rest of the world. San Francisco is more open, but when people move there, they stop thinking about the world at large. Tech folks may be the worst-traveled segment of American elites. People stop themselves from leaving in part because they can correctly claim to live in one of the most naturally beautiful corners of the world, in part because they feel they should not tear themselves away from inventing the future. More than any other topic, I’m bewildered by the way that Silicon Valley talks about AI.

Hallucinating the end of history

While critics of AI cite the spread of slop and rising power bills, AI’s architects are more focused on its potential to produce surging job losses. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei takes pains to point out that AI could push the unemployment rate to 20 percent by eviscerating white-collar work.2 I wonder whether this message is helping to endear his product to the public.

The most-read essay from Silicon Valley this year was AI 2027. The five authors, who come from the AI safety world, outline a scenario in which superintelligence wakes up in 2027; a decade later, it decides to annihilate humanity with biological weapons. My favorite detail in the report is that humanity would persist in a genetically modified form, after the AI reconstructs creatures that are “to humans what corgis are to wolves.” It’s hard to know what to make of this document, because the authors keep tucking important context into footnotes, repeatedly saying they do not endorse a prediction. Six months after publication, they stated that their timelines were lengthening, but even at the start their median forecast for the arrival of superintelligence was later than 2027. Why they put that year in their title remains beyond me.

It’s easy for conversations in San Francisco to collapse into AI. At a party, someone told me that we no longer have to worry about the future of manufacturing. Why not? “Because AI will solve it for us.” At another, I heard someone say the same thing about climate change. One of the questions I receive most frequently anywhere is when Beijing intends to seize Taiwan. But only in San Francisco do people insist that Beijing wants Taiwan for its production of AI chips. In vain do I protest that there are historical and geopolitical reasons motivating the desire, that chip fabs cannot be violently seized, and anyway that Beijing has coveted Taiwan for approximately seven decades before people were talking about AI.

Silicon Valley’s views on AI made more sense to me after I learned the term “decisive strategic advantage.” It was first used by Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence, which defined it as a technology sufficient to achieve “complete world domination.” How might anyone gain a DSA? A superintelligence might develop cyber advantages that cripple the adversary’s command-and-control capabilities. Or the superintelligence could self-recursively improve such that the lab or state that controls it gains an insurmountable scientific advantage. Once an AI reaches a certain capability threshold, it might need only weeks or hours to evolve into a superintelligence.3 And if an American lab builds it, it might help to lock in the dominance of another American century.

If you buy the potential of AI, then you might worry about the corgi-fication of humanity by way of biological weapons. This hope also helps to explain the semiconductor controls unveiled by the Biden administration in 2022. If the policymakers believe that DSA is within reach, then it makes sense to throw almost everything into grasping it while blocking the adversary from the same. And it barely matters if these controls stimulate Chinese companies to invent alternatives to American technologies, because the competition will be won in years, not decades.

The trouble with these calculations is that they mire us in epistemically tricky terrain. I’m bothered by how quickly the discussions of AI become utopian or apocalyptic. As Sam Altman once said (and again this is fairly humorous): “AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.” It’s a Pascal’s Wager, in which we’re sure that the values are infinite, but we don’t know in which direction. It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything. The big political and technological questions we need to discuss are only those that matter to the speed of AI development. Furthermore, we must sprint towards a post-superintelligence world even though we have no real idea what it will bring.

Effective altruists used to be known for their insistence on thinking about the very long run; much more of the movement now is concerned about the development of AI in the next year. Call me a romantic, but I believe that there will be a future, and indeed a long future, beyond 2027. History will not end. We need to cultivate the skill of exact thinking in demented times.

I am skeptical of the decisive strategic advantage when I filter it through my main preoccupation: understanding China’s technology trajectories. On AI, China is behind the US, but not by years. There’s no question that American reasoning models are more sophisticated than the likes of DeepSeek and Qwen. But the Chinese efforts are doggedly in pursuit, sometimes a bit closer to US models, sometimes a bit further. By virtue of being open-source (or at least open-weight), the Chinese models have found receptive customers overseas, sometimes with American tech companies.4 If US labs achieve superintelligence, the Chinese labs are probably on a good footing to follow closely. Unless the DSA is decisive immediately, it’s not obvious that the US will have a monopoly on this technology, just as it could not keep it over the bomb.

One advantage for Beijing is that much of the global AI talent is Chinese. We can tell from the CVs of researchers as well as occasional disclosures from top labs (for example from Meta) that a large percentage of AI researchers earned their degrees from Chinese universities. American labs may be able to declare that “our Chinese are better than their Chinese.” But some of these Chinese researchers may decide to repatriate. I know that many of them prefer to stay in the US: their compensation might be higher by an order of magnitude, they have access to compute, and they can work with top peers.5But they may also tire of the uncertainty created by Trump’s immigration policy. It’s never worth forgetting that at the dawn of the Cold War, the US deported Qian Xuesen, the CalTech professor who then built missile delivery systems for Beijing. Or these Chinese researchers expect life in Shanghai to be safer or more fun than in San Francisco. Or they miss mom. People move for all sorts of reasons, so I’m reluctant to believe that the US has a durable talent advantage.

China has other advantages in building AI. Superintelligence will demand a superload of power. By now everyone has seen the chart with two curves: US electrical generation capacity, which has barely budged upwards since the year 2000; and China’s capacity, which was one-third US levels in 2000 and more than two-and-a-half times US levels in 2024. Beijing is building so much solar, coal, and nuclear to make sure that no data center shall be in want. Though the US has done a superb job building data centers, it hasn’t prepared enough for other bottlenecks. Especially not as Trump’s dislike of wind turbines has removed this source of growth. Speaking of Trump’s whimsy, he has also been generous with selling close-to-leading chips to Beijing. That’s another reason that data centers might not represent a US advantage for long.

Silicon Valley has not demonstrated joined-up thinking for deploying AI. It would help if they learned from the central planners. The AI labs have not shown that they’re thinking seriously about how to diffuse the technology throughout society, which will require extensive regulatory and legal reform. How else will AI be able to fold doctors and lawyers into its tender mercies? Doing politics will also mean reaching out to more of the electorate, who are often uneasy with Silicon Valley’s promises while they see rising electrical bills. Silicon Valley has done a marvelous job in building data centers. But tech titans don’t look ready to plan for later steps in leading the whole-of-society effort into deploying AI everywhere. 

The Communist Party lives for whole-of-society efforts. That’s what Leninist systems are built for. Beijing has set targets for deploying AI across society, though as usual with planning announcements, these numerical targets should be taken seriously and not literally. Chinese founders talk about AI mostly as a technology to be harnessed rather than a fickle power that might threaten all.6 Rather than building superintelligence, Chinese companies have been more interested in embedding AI into robots and manufacturing lines. Some researchers believe that this sort of embodied AI might present the real path towards superintelligence.7We might furthermore wonder how the US and China will use AI. Since the US is much more services-driven, Americans may be using AI to produce more powerpoints and lawsuits; China, by virtue of being the global manufacturer, has the option to scale up production of more electronics, more drones, and more munitions.

Dean Ball, who helped craft the White House’s action plan on AI, has written a perceptive post on how the US is playing to its strengths — software, chips, cloud computing, financing — while China is also focused on leaning on manufacturing excellence. In his view, “the US economy is increasingly a highly leveraged bet on deep learning.” Certainly there’s a lot of money invested here, but it looks risky to be so concentrated. I believe it’s unbecoming for the world’s largest economy to be so levered on one technology. That’s a more appropriate strategy for a small country. Why shouldn’t the US be better positioned across the entirety of the supply chain, from electron production to electronics production?

I am not a skeptic of AI. I am a skeptic only of the decisive strategic advantage, which treats awakening the superintelligence as the final goal. Rather than “winning the AI race,” I prefer to say that the US and China need to “win the AI future.” There is no race with a clear end point or a shiny medal for first place. Winning the future is the more appropriately capacious term that incorporates the agenda to build good reasoning models as well as the effort to diffuse it across society. For the US to come ahead on AI, it should build more power, revive its manufacturing base, and figure out how to make companies and workers make use of this technology. Otherwise China might do better when compute is no longer the main bottleneck.

The humming tech engine

I’ve had Silicon Valley friends tell me that they are planning a trip to China nearly every month this year. Silicon Valley respects and fears companies from only one other country. Game recognizes game, so to speak. Tech founders may begrudge China’s restrictions; and some companies have suffered directly from IP theft. But they also recognize that Chinese companies can move even faster than they do with their teams of motivated workers; and Chinese manufacturers are far ahead of US capabilities on anything involving physical production. Some founders and VCs are impressed with the fact that Chinese AI companies have gotten this far while suffering American tech restrictions, while leading in open-source to boot. VCs are wondering whether they may still invest in Chinese startups or Chinese founders who have moved abroad. 

2025 is the year that Chinese tech successes have really blossomed into the wider American consciousness. There’s no need to retread the coverage around DeepSeek, the surge of electric vehicle exports, or new developments in robotics. When I first moved from Silicon Valley to China in 2017, I felt some degree of skepticism from my friends that I was taking myself out of the beating heart of the technological universe and into the unknown. But it was clear to me that Chinese firms were improving on quality and taking global market share. I wrote in my 2019 letter: “Chinese workers are working with the latest tools to produce most of the world’s goods; over the longer term, my hypothesis is that they’ll be able to replicate the tooling and make just as good final products.” 

I think that has become closer to consensus views. I believe that Chinese technological success is now the rule rather than the exception. There are two fields in which China is substantially behind the west: semiconductors and aviation. The chip sector is gingerly attempting to expand under the weight of US restrictions; meanwhile, China’s answer to Airbus and Boeing is on a very long runway. I grant that these are two critical technologies, but China has attained technological leadership almost everywhere else. And I believe its technological momentum will continue rolling onwards to engulf more of their western competitors over the next decade.

The electric vehicle industry is the sharp tip of the spear of China’s global success. Chinese EVs have greater functionalities than western models while selling at lower price points. A rule of thumb is that it takes five years from an American, German, or Japanese automaker to dream up a new car design and launch that model on the roads; in China, it’s closer to 18 months. The Chinese market is full of demanding customers as well as fast-iterating automotive suppliers. It also has a more productive workforce. According to Tesla’s corporate disclosures, a worker at a Gigafactory in China produces an average of 47 vehicles a year; a worker at a Gigafactory in California produces an average of 20.8

China’s automotive success is biting into Germany more than anywhere else. I keep a scrapbook filled with mournful remarks that German executives offer to newspapers. “Most of what German Mittelstand firms do these days, Chinese companies can do just as well,” said a consultant to the Financial Times. “In my sector they look at the price-point of the market leader and sell for roughly half of that,” the boss of a medical devicemaker told the Economist. It’s never hard to find parades of gloomy Germans. Now more than ever it looks like their core competences are threatened by Chinese firms.

I often think of the case of Xiaomi. In 2021, Lei Jun vowed that the company he founded would break into the EV business. Four years later, Xiaomi started shipping cars to customers. Not only that, a Xiaomi EV set a speed record at the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany. Compare Xiaomi to Apple, which spent 10 years and $10 billion studying whether to enter the EV market before it pulled the plug. The world’s most advanced consumer product company could not match Xiaomi’s feat. It’s cases like these that make me skeptical of reasoning about China’s tech successes through financial measures or productivity ratios. As of this writing, Xiaomi’s market value is $130 billion. That is only around half of the market value of AppLovin, the mobile advertisement company. Rather than being an indictment of Xiaomi, I view this imbalance as an indictment of financial valuations. Isn’t it better, from a national power perspective, to develop firms like Xiaomi, which calls its shots and then makes them?

This comparison between Xiaomi and Apple motivated an essay I wrote with Dragonomics founder Arthur Kroeber in an issue of Foreign Affairs. Our view is that China’s industrial success has roots in deep infrastructure. That includes not only ports and rail, it also includes data connectivity, electrification, and process knowledge. China’s strength lies in a robust manufacturing ecosystem full of self-reinforcing parts.

Chinese tech achievements that were apparent in 2025 were the fruits of investments made a decade ago. Given that China continues to invest massively in technology, I expect we’ll see yet more tech successes for another decade to come. Alexander Grothendieck used an analogy of a walnut to describe different approaches to mathematics, which might also apply to technology development. Some mathematicians crack their problems by finding the right spot to insert a chisel before making a clean strike. Grothendieck described his own approach as coming up with general solutions, as if he were immersing the walnut in a bath for such a long time that mere hand pressure would be enough to open it. The US comes up with exquisite and expensive solutions to its technology problems. China’s industrial ecosystem is more like a rising sea, softening many nuts at once.9

When these nuts open, it looks like China is producing a big wave of new products. These are its breakthroughs in drones, electric vehicles, and robotics. Years from now we may see greater success in biotech as well. I am keen to follow along China’s progress in electromagnetism over the next decade. China’s industrial ecosystem is leading the way in replacing combustion with electromagnetic processes. Everything is now drone, as the combination of cheaper batteries and better permanent magnets displaces the engine.10

One of the startling geopolitical moves of the year was how quickly Donald Trump withdrew his ~150 percent tariffs on China. Trump folded not out of beneficence, but because Xi Jinping denied rare earth magnets to most of the world, threatening many types of manufacturing operations. And yet I’m struck by Beijing’s relative restraint. Chinese producers are close to being monopolists not only in rare earths, but also electronics products, batteries, and many types of active pharmaceutical ingredients. In case China denies, say, cardiovascular drugs to the elderly, how long could a state hold out?

One might have expected the US to have roused itself after this bout of the trade war. But there have been too many declarations of Sputnik Moments without commensurate action. Barack Obama declared a Sputnik with China’s high-speed rail; Mark Warner repeated with Huawei’s 5G; Marc Andreessen called it with DeepSeek. The more that people use the term, the less likely that society spurs itself into taking it seriously.

I think the US continues to systematically underrate China’s industrial progress for several reasons.

First, too many western elites retain hope that China’s efforts will run out of fuel by its own accord. Industrial progress will be weighed down by demographic drag, the growing debt load, maybe even a political collapse. I won’t rule these out, but I don’t think they are likely to break China’s humming tech engine. Demographics in particular don’t matter for advanced technology — you don’t need a workforce of many millions to have robust production of semiconductors or EVs. South Korea, for example, has one of the world’s fastest shrinking populations while retaining its success in electronics production. And though China suffers broader economic headwinds, technology firms like Xiaomi continue to develop new products and enjoy rising revenues. Technology breakthroughs can occur even in a suffering society. Especially if the state continues to lavish resources on chips or anything that could represent an American chokepoint. 

Second, western elites keep citing the wrong reasons for China’s success. When members of Congress get around to acknowledging China’s tech advancements, they do not fail to attribute causes to either industrial subsidies (also known as cheating) or IP theft (that is, stealing). These are legitimate claims, but China’s advantages extend far beyond them. That’s the creation of deep infrastructure as well as extensive industrial ecosystems that I describe above.

Probably the most underrated part of the Chinese system is the ferocity of market competition. It’s excusable not to see that, given that the party espouses so much Marxism. I would argue that China embodies both greater capitalist competition and greater capitalist excess than America does today. Part of the reason that China’s stock market trends sideways is that everyone’s profits are competed away. Big Tech might enjoy the monopolistic success smiled upon by Peter Thiel, coming almost to genteel agreements not to tread too hard upon each other’s business lines. Chinese firms have to fight it out in a rough-and-tumble environment, expanding all the time into each other’s core businesses, taking Jeff “your margin is my opportunity” Bezos with seriousness.

Third, western elites keep holding on to a distinction between “innovation,” which is mostly the remit of the west, and “scaling,” which they accept that China can do. I want to dissolve that distinction. Chinese workers innovate every day on the factory floor. By being the site of production, they have a keen sense of how to make technical improvements all the time. American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas. But American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas. The history books point out that Bell Labs invented the first solar cell in 1957; today, the lab no longer exists while the solar industry moved to Germany and then to China. While Chinese universities have grown more capable at producing new ideas, it’s not clear that the American manufacturing base has grown stronger at commercializing new inventions.

I sometimes hear that the US will save manufacturers through automation. The truth is that Chinese factories tend to be ahead on automation: that’s a big part of the reason that Chinese Tesla workers are more productive than California Tesla workers. China regularly installs as many robots as the rest of the world put together. They are also able to provide greater amounts of training data for AI. We have to be careful not to let automation, like superintelligence, become an excuse for magical thinking rather than doing the hard work of capacity building.

Outlasting the adversary

The China discussions I get into on the east coast tend to focus on the country’s problems. Washington, DC in particular likes to ask questions like: didn’t we think that Japan was going to overrun the world with manufacturing before it fell apart? Isn’t China mostly a mess? These are ultimately variants of the form: how might China fail?

The west coast flavor of the discussion is different. People are more inclined to ask: what happens if China succeeds? That reflects, in part, Silicon Valley’s epistemic bias towards securing upside returns rather than minimizing downside risks. They also tend to make more frequent visits to China than folks in DC. “What if China succeeds?” is certainly the more interesting question to me, not only because my career has been studying China’s technological successes. The east coast questions deserve to be taken seriously. But I fear that dwelling on China’s failure modes will coax elites into complacency, serving a narrative that the US needs to change nothing before the adversary will topple, robbing the country of urgency to reform.

I want to be clear that though I expect China will overrun advanced technology industries, it won’t make the country a broad success. Over the past five years, it has been mired in disinflationary growth, where young people struggle to find a job and find a spouse. The political system is growing even more opaque, terrifying even the insiders. This year, Xi deposed a dozen generals of the People’s Liberation Army, one of whom was also a sitting Politburo member. I wonder how many people inside the Politburo feel confident about where they stand with Xi.

Entrepreneurs are on even worse ground. Earlier this year, investors greeted Xi’s handshake with prominent entrepreneurs (including Jack Ma) as good news. It was so, but who can be sure that Xi will not greet them differently once they revive the economy? Though Xi can cut entrepreneurs some slack, the trend is towards greater party control over business and society. Xi himself doesn’t evince concern that economic growth is lackluster. It’s an acceptable tradeoff for making China’s economy less dependent on foreign powers. None of this is a formula for broad human flourishing. Rather, it is depriving Chinese of contact with the rest of the world.

Beijing has been working relentlessly to build up its resilience. While the US talks itself out of Sputnik Moments, Beijing has dedicated immense resources to patching up its own deficiencies. It’s not a theoretical fear that Chinese companies might lose access to American technologies. So the state is pouring more money than ever before into semiconductor makers and research universities. It is investing in clean technologies not so much because it cares about the climate, but because it wants to be self-sufficient in energy. And it is re-writing the rules of the global order, with caution because it has been a giant beneficiary of it, while the US is still wondering about what it wants from China. Beijing has been preparing for Cold War without eagerness for waging it, while the US wants to wage a Cold War without preparing for it.11

So here’s a potential way that China succeeds. Beijing’s goal is to make nearly every important product in the world, while everyone else supplies its commodities and services. By making the country mostly self-sufficient, and by vigorously policing the outputs of LLMs and social media, Xi might hope to make China resilient. He is building Fortress China stone by stone in order to outlast the adversary. Beijing doesn’t have to replicate American diplomatic, cultural, and financial superpowerdom. It might hope that its prowess in advanced manufacturing might deter the US. And its success in manufacturing might directly destabilize the US: by delivering the coup de grace to the rustbelt, the US might shed a few million more manufacturing jobs over the next decade. The job losses combined with AI psychosis, social media, and all the problems with phones could make national politics meaningfully worse.

I don’t think this scenario is likely to be successful. Authoritarian systems have always hoped for the implosion of liberal democracies, while it is the liberal democracies that have a better track record of endurance. But I also don’t think that authoritarian countries are obviously wrong to bet that western polarization will get worse. So it’s up to the US and Europe to show that they can hold on to their values while absorbing the technological changes coming their way. 

That task is more challenging as Europe and the US grew more apart in 2025. This year, both regions were able to look upon each other with pity. And both were correct to do so. America’s global trust and favorability measures have collapsed in Trump’s second term. Meanwhile, Europe looks as economically stuck as it has ever been, pushing its politics to increasingly chaotic extremes. But I am still more optimistic for the US.

I don’t need to lament the damage done by the Trump administration this year: the erosion of alliances, the cruelty towards the weak, the wasting of time. Manufacturing and re-industrialization, which I spend most of my time thinking of, have been doing worse. The Biden administration tried to fund an ambitious program of industrial policy; but it was so plodding and proceduralist that it built little before voters re-elected Trump. Since Trump imposed tariffs in April, the US has lost around 65,000 manufacturing jobs.12 His administration shows little interest in capturing electromagnetism before China overruns that field. Trump is more interested in protectionism rather than export promotion, which risks turning American industries into fossils like its exquisitely protected and horribly inefficient shipbuilding industry.

One of the Trump administration’s biggest blunders was its decision to raid a battery plant in Georgia, which put 300 Korean engineers in chains before deporting them. I suspect that any Korean, Taiwanese, or European engineer would ponder that episode before accepting a job posting to the United States. What a contrast that looks with China’s approach, which for decades has been to welcome managers from Walmart, Apple, or Tesla to train its workforce.

Will the US solve manufacturing with AI? Well, maybe, because superintelligence is supposed to solve everything. But there’s a risk that AI will destabilize society before it fixes the industrial base. When I walk around the library at Stanford, I see students plugging everything into AI tools; when they need a break, they’re watching short-form videos on their phones. These videos have been marvelously transformed by AI tools. Shortly after OpenAI released Sora 2, I had brunch with a friend who told me that he created an AI video of himself expertly breakdancing that fooled his five-year-old; another friend piped up to say that she created an AI video of herself that fooled her mother. AI chatbots are skilled at providing emotional companionship: Jasmine Sun discussed how they are able to seduce any segment of society, while pointing to a survey that 52 percent of teens regularly interact with AI companions. I’m not advocating for regulation. But I think it’s reasonable for the world to hope that AI labs will exercise some degree of forbearance before they release their shattering tools.

While I feel apprehensive about the US, I am much more gloomy about Europe. I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting. European prices and taxes can be so high while salaries can be so low. For all the American complaints about home affordability, relative housing costs can be even worse in big European cities. London has the house prices of California and the income levels of Mississippi. 

I remember two vivid episodes from Copenhagen. One day I read the news that the share price of Novo Nordisk — unquestionably one of Europe’s technological successes, along with ASML — collapsed as a result of sustained competition from US-based Eli Lilly as well as its misfortunes navigating the US regulatory system. I also watched Ursula von der Leyen visit Trump in the White House to graciously accept his EU tariffs. It’s already been clear that China has begun to maul European industry. What the Novo Nordisk news made me appreciate was that American companies are comprehensively outworking their European counterparts in biotech in addition to software and finance. Europe is losing the two-front battle against the Chinese on manufacturing and the Americans on services.

Perhaps Europe could have recruited some professors from the United States. American academics wouldn’t have needed Trump’s insults to act on their Europhile impulses. And yet European initiatives have not yet been able to brain drain much of this class. That’s mostly because European governments have little funding to offer. European universities have failed to build substantial endowments, so their revenues are dependent on the taxpaying public, which also must support a million other initiatives. An American academic who wants to move to Europe would have to accept more teaching and administrative work, lose tenure, and for the pleasure of all that, probably halve her pay. She would likely also suffer the resentment of European peers, who scoff at the idea that better paid Americans are now refugees. Trump threw a lot against US universities; they are holding up okay, and I think they will remain strong.

Europeans are right to gloat they are not under the rule of Trump. But for all of Trump’s ills, I see him as a sign of the underlying dynamism of the US. Who else would have elected so whimsical a leader to this high office? Trump forces questions that Europeans have no appetite to confront, proud as they are in being superior to both Americans and Chinese. I submit that Europeans ought to be more circumspect in their self-satisfaction. Chaos is only one election away. Right-populist parties are outpolling ruling incumbent parties pretty much everywhere, and it is as likely as not that Trumps with European characteristics will engulf the continent by the end of the decade.

So I am betting that the US and China are more compelling forces for change. Stalin was fond of telling a story from his experience in Leipzig in 1907, when, to his astonishment, 200 German workers failed to turn up to a socialist meeting because no ticket controller was on the platform to punch their train tickets, citing this experience as proof of the hopelessness of Germanic obedience. Could anyone imagine Chinese or Americans being so obedient? One advantage for the US and China is that both countries are at least interested in growth. You don’t have to convince the elites or the populace that growth is good or that entrepreneurs could be celebrated. Meanwhile in Europe, perhaps 15 percent of the electorate actively believes in degrowth. I feel it’s impossible to convince Europeans to act in their self interest. You can’t even convince them to adopt air conditioning in the summer.

The personal is the geopolitical

I’m not a doomer on AI or the broader state of the world. Across the US, China, and Europe, people generally enjoy comfortable lives that are free from fear. The market goes up. AI tools improve. Over the years I lived in China, I knew that life was more mundane than the headlines made out. Now that headlines and tweets are more negative everywhere, I know that things are not so bad in most places.

What I want is for everyone to do better. I opened my book by saying that Chinese and Americans are the most alike people in the world. They both are driven by a yearning for the future. They feel the draw of better times ahead, which is missing for Europeans, those people who have a sense of optimism only about the past.

I believe that modern China is one of the most ahistorical nations in the world. The state and the education system may talk insistently about its thousands of years of continuous history. But no other society has also been so destructive of its own history. The physical past has been disfigured by the attention of the Red Guards and the inattention of urban bulldozers. The social past is contorted by outrageous textbooks, which implement enforced forgetting of major traumas. For tragedies too widely experienced in modern times to be censored — the Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, Zero Covid — the party discourages reflection in the name of protecting the state’s sensitivity.

The United States isn’t so good at celebrating its history either. 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding. Where are the monuments to exalt that history? Most of the planned celebrations look small bore. Why hasn’t the federal government built a technological specimen as sublime as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, or the Apollo missions? Probably because planning for any project should have commenced 10, 20, or 30 years ago. No president would have gotten around to starting a project that has no chance of being completed in his term. Lack of action due to the expectation of long timelines is one of the sins of the lawyerly society.

But American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems. That’s why I live here in the US. I made clear in my book that I am drawn to pluralism as well as a broader conception of human flourishing than one that could be delivered by the Communist Party. The United States still draws many of the most ambitious people in the world, few of whom want to move to China. Even now a significant number of Chinese would jump to emigrate to the US if they felt they could be welcomed. But this enduring American advantage should not excuse the US from patching up its deficiencies.

A light grab-bag of complaints: While the rich have access to concierge doctors and the world’s best healthcare, the United States cannot organize a pandemic response; it is bioprosperity for the individual and measles for the many. I learned recently that the Bay Area has 26 separate transit agencies; is it really a triumph of democracy to have so many unconsolidated efforts? I wonder whether we can accuse the California government of subverting the will of the people by making so little progress on its high-speed rail, which was approved by referendum in 2008; California rail authorities take more pride in creating jobs than doing the job. I am tempted to use the language from American foreign policy at home. Why talk about American credibility only in terms of combat? Why shouldn’t the failure to deliver on big projects, after spending so much money, constitute a more severe blow to the credibility of the American project? Is the state of the US defense industrial base really deterring adversaries?

I won’t belabor issues with American public works or manufacturing. I’ll suggest only that the US ought to be acting with greater curiosity on how to do better. It doesn’t have to become China; but it should better study China’s successes. There is a 21st century playbook for becoming an industrial power and China has written it. This playbook consists of infrastructure development, solicitation of foreign investment, industrial subsidies, and the creation of industrial ecosystems. I hope that the US will stop attributing all of China’s successes to stealing. If such a program would be sufficient for building a world-class industry, then American spooks should dedicate their formidable capabilities to extracting Chinese industrial secrets. The reality is that there is little to be learned from blueprints. By failing to recognize China’s real strengths — the industrial ecosystems pulsating with process knowledge — the US is only cheating itself. 

The future of US-China competition demands a resounding demonstration of the superiority of one country’s system to perform better for its citizens, which no country has thus achieved. Who’s going to come out ahead? I believe the competition is dynamic. It means we should not rely on static and structural features (like geography or demographics) to predict long-term advantage. One feature that unites American, Chinese, and European elites is the tendency to close ranks behind bad ideas and bad leaders. They are all skilled at dreaming up new ways to squander their advantages. Silicon Valley, for example, succeeds in spite of the generations-long governance failures of California. Imagine how much more vibrant Chinese society could be if it could escape the weight of overbearing censors in Beijing.

Competition will be dynamic because people have agency. The country that is ahead at any given moment will commit mistakes driven by overconfidence, while the country that is behind will feel the crack of the whip to reform. Implosion is always an option. In 2021, Xi Jinping was on top of the world, witnessing the omnishambles of the western pandemic response combined with the political disgrace of January 6. So he proceeded to smack around tech founders and initiate a controlled demolition of the property sector, which are two of the policies most responsible for China’s economic sluggishness today. Now, Beijing is trying to get a grip on its weaknesses. If either the US or China falls too far behind the other, the laggard will sweat to catch up. That drive will mean that competition will go on for years and decades.

In the competition for who might grow to be more humorous, I give a slight edge to the Chinese rather than to Silicon Valley.

No, I don’t expect the Communist Party ever to be funny. But there is a growing contrast between the baleful formality of the political system and the inexhaustible informality of Chinese society. Now that China is bidding farewell to its era of hypergrowth, young people are asking what they want to do with their lives. Fewer of them are interested in doing crazy hours in tech companies or big banks. Some of them are having fun in comedy sketches and stand-up shows. The increasingly gerontocratic Communist Party is not so much hovering over them as existing on a slightly different plane, speaking in strange apocalyptic tongues. Over the long run, I bet that the exuberance and rollicking nature of Chinese society will outlive the lusterless political system.

I wish that the tech world could learn to present broader cultural appeal. I hope that Silicon Valley could learn some of the humorousness of New York (or at least LA.) It’s unfortunate that any show or movie made about Silicon Valley is full of awkward nerds; by contrast, Hollywood reliably finds attractive leads when it makes movies about Wall Street. So long as the tech world is talking about the Machine God and the Antichrist, so long as it declines to read more broadly, so long as it is mostly inward looking, it will continue to alienate big parts of the world. But the longer I’m in California, the more easy I find it to be a sunny optimist. So I’m hopeful that the lovable nerds there will be able to present their own smiling optimism to the rest of the world.

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

***

Of all the feedback I’ve received for my book, the most devastating came from my mother. After one of my television appearances, she called me to say: “Son, you looked terrible. Are you sick?” I accept that she, a former TV news anchor, has standing to judge. Still I could only reply with a quavering voice: “Mom, you’re so mean.”13

Other readers have been kinder to Breakneck. It reached #3 on the New York Times bestseller list and was also a bestseller on its monthly Business list. I went on podcasts, radio, TV, and spoke at book events. Breakneck was a finalist for the FT/Schroders best business book of the year and it has been a book of the year in several big publications. It’s being translated into 17 languages as of this writing. 

I’ve learned a lot over the past four months.

Why did Breakneck do well? I think four reasons, in descending order of importance. First, timing. It came out in a year of many China headlines — DeepSeek, trade war, 15th Five-Year Plan — and five months after Abundance, which primed readers for the idea that Americans are right to be frustrated by their state. Second, the book had the memetic framing of lawyers and engineers, which also encouraged people to wonder how other countries could be described. (What is India? The UK?) Third, people know my work through these letters. Fourth and least important was the content in the book. An author spends so much time workshopping words and sentences. I accept that a book’s reception is subject to the vagaries of the market and the memelords.

I don’t regret a minute of workshopping. I would have liked to workshop some more. Like every author, I wish I had more time to add a finer polish to the entire manuscript. I was heartened when a writer I admire told me that no author is ever more than 85 percent satisfied with their work; to hope for more would be profligate. In any case, I’m proud of the content. If it weren’t in place, I wouldn’t have had positive reviews in mainstream publications like the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and the Times. I was glad to see praise from both left publications like Jacobin and right publications like American Affairs. 

I tried to write this book to reach a non-coast audience. Ideally I wanted a lawyer in say Indiana or Ohio to read Breakneck, rather than for it to be picked up only by folks in New York, DC, San Francisco, and the terminally online. So I was happy to hear from a broader cross-section of readers who wrote to tell me that they’d never visited China before and are now curious to do so. It’s a shame that book tours are no longer much of a thing for authors. Publishers don’t necessarily bring authors to book readings in Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, or other big cities as a matter of course. I was happy, however, to visit Dallas for the first time this year. After giving a talk in October, I wandered over to the Texas State Fair. Who can resist a place that calls itself “the most Texan place on earth?” I had a fabulous time walking through the fairground, the livestock pens, and the food stalls. The atmosphere made me realize that friendly and pragmatic Texans are what I imagined all Americans to be like, at least in my Canadian mind.

I’ve enjoyed opening my inbox to see reader notes. I love hearing from two groups in particular: engineers and other technical people who feel better appreciated for their work; and Chinese readers who tell me that I’ve captured something authentic. Someone emailed a set of book recommendations for the Spanish Civil War. An investor emailed to enlighten me that Copenhagen’s marvelous subways (which I praise for being clean and driverless) were built by Italian construction companies. An agricultural consultant emailed to tell me about her eye-opening experiences visiting big Chinese farms. These notes are small delights for any author. A stranger but still charming event was to see the Blue Book Club. About 20 people gathered in Brooklyn this November to discuss Breakneck, but not before the hosts issued a light exam to make sure that the participants actually read the book.

Book promotion made me more of a public figure. I did my best to have fun with it. It wasn’t as hard as I imagined: podcast and TV hosts are as bored by self-serious personalities as the rest of us are. Readers have been friendly as they’ve recognized me in public. There was only one instance of a bit too much friendliness, when someone sidled up to the urinal beside mine in a public bathroom to tell me that he liked my book.

I’ve learned it is not possible to value mentors too highly. I am blessed to have good counselors. I mean not only my publishing house, my literary agent, and my writing coach who directly support my work. I am grateful to folks who give me time to reflect on the course of my thinking, especially the ones who have by now mentored me for over a decade. Friends have been generous in all sorts of ways. Eugene, Tina, Maran, Ren, James, Caleb, Alec, and Arthur hosted book parties. Joe Weisenthal wrote in the Odd Lots newsletter: “Total Dan Wang victory” on his view that most of the world is seeing China through the industrial lens I’ve been writing about. Afra hosted a Mandarin-language book discussion in which someone accused me of having a “gentle and vulnerable” voice. Alice, who doesn’t often pick up books on China, told me that my fondness for both the US and China shone through the book. It reconnected me with two friends from Ottawa that I haven’t heard from since high school.

I am grateful that Waterstones Piccadilly and Daunt Books in Marylebone have given my book prominent display. One surprise was that my book sold well in the United Kingdom. I’ve been pretty relentless at telling Brits that they are the PPE society and that they excel in the sounding-clever industries — television, journalism, finance, and universities. Upon reflection, it makes sense that the British are reading Breakneck and Abundance. Every problem in the lawyerly society is worse in the UK. I thought that California’s high-speed rail project was an embarrassment; then I learned about the Leeds tram network. First legislated in 1993, mass transit might not come to West Yorkshire until the late 2030s. It reminds me of the lawsuit in Bleak House: “The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.” At least Californians are struggling over something mighty; I hope that Leeds will one day have a tram.14

Homebuilding in London has collapsed. Heathrow has been making plans to build a third runway for twenty years, which is now expected to cost $20 billion. Britain’s electrical network is in even worse disrepair than America’s. I am not sure if it is a geopolitical asset to be able to stiff-upper-lip one’s way through ineffectual government. Maybe it’s more of a liability. But my experience of criticizing Brits resembles my experience of criticizing lawyers. They tend to nod along to my critiques; many of them take me further than where I’d like to go. It’s all very disarming.

I’ve been lucky to have smart critics. It’s any author’s dream to see people pick up the book and examine the arguments. Jon Sine wanted to have more specific data on engineers and lawyers, then proceeded to supply it while wrapping it in a narrative on a trip to Wushan. Charles Yang noted that I don’t have much by way of policy suggestions, but he also grasped that I’m trying to change the culture of governing elites while suggesting that Breakneck is an incitement to initiate “tractable mimetic competition.” Jen-Kuan Wang argued that China was not quite the right model for the US, but that Taiwan and the rest of Northeast Asia better show how to survive China Shocks. I am grateful to see constructive engagement with my work. I was unimpressed with only one piece of commentary. Law professors Curtis Milhaupt and Angela Zhang wrote in Project Syndicate: “Lawless State Capitalism Is No Answer to China’s Rise,” as if I were advocating for that. Since the authors mention the book only at the start without engaging with any of the content, I suspect they are critics who chose not to read the book.

I learned of Leo Rosten’s quip that it is the weak who are cruel, and gentleness to be expected only from the strong. Every author will hear from online commentators who belligerently misunderstand their work. Saying anything about China tends to rile up the online commentators. Either the hawks will pounce because they believe that the whole country is evil and that its progress is fake; or the tankies will defend the idea that China has achieved socialist utopia. These people live on Twitter and Youtube, offering the stock comment that “this person knows nothing about China.” That’s of course hard to respond to because they offer no analytical content to rebut. Part of what makes the China discourse exasperating is that people have to choose sides all the time, which makes everyone dumber. At least I didn’t have it as bad as Ezra and Derek with Abundance.

I’ve learned more about myself as a writer this year. Namely, I like doing it. Writing a book is sometimes enough to make an author forswear the experience for a long time. Then there are the really perverse, for whom a taste of publishing is enough to tempt one into becoming a serial offender. After writing this book, I most looked forward to writing this long-ass letter, the very one you’re reading now.

Some writers work like sculptors: they produce something fully chiseled that could stand forever. Novelists tend to be like that. Rather than being a sculptor, I see myself as being a musician. After a performance, no matter how it goes, the musician’s task is to start practicing for the next one. It’s hard for US-China books to rest like sculptures. So I am happy to get back to work, writing iteratively to refine the same few themes that animate me: technology production, industrial ecosystems, US-China competition.

Musicians don’t usually practice by running a whole piece from start to finish. Rather, practice sessions tend to focus on particular passages, with a full run-through only before performance. Before I publish this letter, I retype the whole thing from start to finish. It means I take the draft that lives in my Notes app on the left half of my screen while I retype the whole thing into the Google Docs on the right side of my screen. It’s a final check to catch infelicities. More importantly, by simulating the experience of a reader, it’s another way to see if the whole essay stands together.

I’ve learned that it is better to wear a tie with a blazer. That was part of my training to be a speaker. The book tour forces you to have answers that last 30 seconds for TV, 30 minutes for a talk, and 3 hours for the more bruising podcasts. I’ve learned that delivering a good talk is a rare skill. I don’t think I could ever be satisfied by a talk I’ll give, because there will always be a stumble, or l’esprit de l’escalier kicks in. The piece of speaking advice I’ve remembered for many years came from Tim Harford: good speaking rewards those who are able to prepare extensively and who are also able to improvise. My favorite book talk took place at the Hoover Institution, hosted by Stephen Kotkin (who is himself peerless at giving excellent lectures). In the summer, I spent two hours asking Kotkin how historians work. 

One day in October, I went on six podcasts. I haven’t counted the number of podcasts I’ve been on, but I think the number is north of 70. There’s a lot I don’t understand. Are so many people really listening to podcasts? What is the appeal of a video featuring two people with giant microphones in their faces? Do we really have to live in an oral culture world?

I’ve noticed the wide range of effort that people put into podcasts. Some hosts edit extensively — Freakonomics Radio stands out for the sheer number of producers and editors. Other hosts release their episodes more or less unedited. Freakonomics stood out to me because Stephen Dubner was able to make the conversation so much fun. Going on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times was more appropriately serious. Search Engine was impressive for the amount of narrative that PJ Vogt imbued into our more rambling conversation. It felt like a homecoming to return to Odd Lots, where I could tease Tracy Alloway for her country life and Joe Weisenthal over Moby Dick. David Perell read nearly everything I’d written to discuss the writing process. I went on Francis Fukuyama’s podcast to ask him about his relationship with Wang Qishan as well as why he is now banned from China. Works in Progress, Statecraft, and ChinaTalk were each fun in their own way. 

You don’t really mature into being on podcast mode until you’ve done a lot of them. That’s why I proposed to Tyler to go on his show near the end of the book tour. Conversations with Tyler is the first podcast I regularly started listening to, whose early episodes I still remember well. Before our interview, I told Tyler that he was my final boss. Both of us were playful. I challenged Tyler to enumerate the list of 12th-century popes and teased him about being a New Jersey suburban boy. He told me that America has great infrastructure and healthcare before issuing an intellectual Turing test to see if I could say why he likes Yunnan more than any other place. I had the chance to bring up one of the most sublime pieces of Rossini, the gently entwining trio that concludes Le Comte Ory. Afterwards, commentators wrote that he and I were confrontational. But they should have watched the video, in which Tyler was smiling as much as he ever would.

Again, who is listening to all these podcasts? I don’t much look at my book sales, but it doesn’t feel like podcasts move the needle. And a book might create a lot of social media buzz, with all the right people saying all the right things, but Twitter too doesn’t drive sales. It was two platforms that moved a lot of my books: television and radio. People bought after seeing me on CNN or hearing me on NPR. The straightforward explanation is that older people have the time and the money to buy books. Even a brief appearance on TV could reach an ambient audience of millions, a few of whom purchase afterwards. Social media and podcasts are more valuable for driving conversation among the youths.

It’s stirring to see that people buy books at all. I do not doubt that we are moving towards an oral culture. But the publishing industry is holding up. A lot of excellent books came out this year, including many on China. Revenues at most of the big trade publishers have been rising. Barnes & Noble is opening 60 new stores in 2026. A lot of the growth in the book trade is coming from romantasy and fairy smut, while the genre of nonfiction is in slight decline. That’s all good, I’m no snob. It’s pleasant to believe that a few decades from now, people might still hold physical books in their hands.

I’ve learned that books produce an invitation to all sorts of conversations, both closed and open. A physical book, bound and printed, has a totemic quality. It’s funny that PDFs sometimes circulate better than web-optimized pages; there’s something about strict formatting that establishes authority. Physical books can also last a long time. This letter that you’re reading will no longer be sent around a month from now, while my book can sit unread on shelves for years to gather dust. So I’m still keen to encourage friends to write their books. It’s a great way to sort through one’s ideas and to ease them into the conversation.

If I yearned for commercial success in our new oral culture, I would lend my soft voice to narrate romantasy novels. But I worry the superintelligence will devour that job. So I will stick to longform writing. However strange our new world will become, there will always be a class of people who want to engage with essays and books. Over the long term, writing might enjoy the fate of the opera and the symphony. People have been heralding the death of classical music for a century. Yes, much of its audience is pretty old. But there will always be more old people — especially if Silicon Valley delivers on longevity treatments. The job of authors and opera houses is to keep holding on to people who are maturing into pleasures that technological platforms cannot provide. The demographic trend is on our side: the world is producing more old people than youths. I want to be a sunny Californian optimist about everything, including the fate of the written word.

***

It’s time to talk about (other) books.

I last picked up Stendhal’s The Red and the Black a decade ago. I wasn’t certain that the novel, which I keep calling my favorite, would hold up on re-reading. It did gorgeously. The plot centers on Julien Sorel, the handsome son of a poor sawyer. After Julien dons the black garb of the priesthood, he moves from the periphery of his Alpine village into the luminous center of Parisian society. Along the way, he seduces two extraordinary women, the gentle Mme. de Rênal and the magnificent Mathilde, while he commits, in the name of love, acts of extraordinary stupidity. Julien — who is possessed by galloping ambition and extravagant pride — maneuvers his way towards aristocratic distinction and romantic triumph. Then he loses all.

More than anything else, Stendhal is funny, especially about love. Only Proust surpasses Stendhal at the skill of guiding the reader into the transports of intoxicating love, only to snap them out of it by skewering the foolishness of Julien or Mathilde. Stendhal doesn’t create the cool detachment that Flaubert or Fontane bring to their characters. Rather, he’s eager to envelop the reader into his passionate embrace. The list of writers who have succumbed to Stendhal includes Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Girard, Balzac, and Robert Alter, who, before he translated the Hebrew Bible, wrote an admiring biography of Stendhal titled A Lion for Love.

Why is it that reading Stendhal feels like making a discovery? Stendhal might be just on the cusp of the pantheon because his critics can’t get over the significance of his flaws while his fans cannot forget the delights of his peaks. In that sense, Stendhal is like Rossini. Neither produced a ripe and perfect work; I can’t help but feel some disappointment when I listen to Rossini, who couldn’t achieve the musical perfection of Mozart or the dramatic conviction of Verdi. And yet the peak moments of Stendhal and Rossini produce ecstatic joy. It’s no surprise that Stendhal and Rossini are both renowned for their ravenous appetites, nor that Stendhal wrote his own admiring biography of Rossini, filled with his characteristic amusing falsehoods. Erich Auerbach grasped the point that Stendhal ought to be appreciated for his peaks rather than his average. Stendhal has pride of place in Mimesis, as an author who fluctuated between “realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars,” and between “cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and sentimental vaingloriousness.” In other words, Stendhal embodies the spirit of opera buffa in novel. 

I am often drawn to Ecclesiastes. In Robert Alter’s hands, the gloomy prophet behind the book is named Qohelet, and though I value Alter’s translation, I favor a few of the more iconic lines from King James: “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” and “better to hear the rebuke of the wise than the song of fools.” Melancholy attracts me in any form, and isn’t Ecclesiastes the most melancholic book? The prophet makes small allowances for joy and celebration before hauling the reader back into the house of mourning. There is something deeply satisfying with reading out loud phrases like: “for in mere breath did it come, and into darkness it goes, and in darkness its name is covered.” Though King James is iconic, Robert Alter better conveys overall the literary power of the Hebrew Bible.

Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall is short and engrossing. It was deemed a “Cold War” novel by the German press when it was published in 1963. Little about it comes across as being geopolitical today. Rather, Haushofer has written a book about domesticity that manages to be gripping. The heroine spends her days milking her cow, minding her garden, and caring for her cat and dog while living in total isolation in the Alps. She would not survive if she lacked for any of the above. As Katherine Rundell once wrote, “It’s easier to trust a writer who writes great food: they are a person who has paid attention to the world.” Haushofer pays loving attention to the details of life. It never became boring to read about the narrator churning her butter, tending to her potato field, or chopping wood throughout the year.

After a man turns 30, he has to choose between specializing in the history of the Roman Empire or the World Wars. Within the latter, one tends to focus on the Pacific Theater, the Western Front, or the Eastern Front. For me, the last theater is the most interesting. No human effort approaches the gargantuan scale of Operation Barbarossa or the Soviet reply. The same fields, one world war earlier, produced other shocks. Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front covers the clashes between Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire as well as the Austro-Hungarians against the Italians and the Serbs. Whereas the western front was essentially static throughout the whole war, the east was characterized by the sort of maneuver warfare that most generals had expected to fight. It was the field of legendary confrontations like the Gorlice-Tarnow campaign, the Brusilov offensive, and the 37th Battle of the Isonzo.

One of the revelations of Lloyd’s book is how well the Germans fought and how poorly Austro-Hungary performed, ending the war by self-liquidating. Immediately after the war began, German military attachés had already begun to fret that “the major trouble with the Austro-Hungarian Army is currently its weakness in combat.” It became nearly comical how often the Kaiser had to intervene, in the latter half of the war, to stop Emperor Karl from surrendering to the Entente. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the fighting force of an army where the officers all spoke German and regiments spoke Czech or Croatian could not overwhelm the adversary. The eastern front had diplomatic scheming that was nearly as impressive as the battlefield breakthroughs. It was, after all, the political section of the German general staff that had the imaginative idea to ship Lenin from Switzerland to Russia in order to make revolution.

I’m looking for a book that has a clear focus on bigger questions: How did Hohenzollern Prussia outmaneuver Habsburg Austria? And how did they become such firm allies before the war? John Boyer’s Austria 1867-1955 offers parts of the answer, though not in a conceptually organized way. It’s a work of history written for specialists, which means that the narrative serves the footnotes rather than the other way around. Too much of the book is focused on how politicians grappled with each other. Still it yields many morsels. One difference between Austrian nobles and Prussian nobles was that the former did not view a military life as attractive — part of the reason that Austrians performed so badly in war. Austria’s partner was sometimes rooting for the adversary: “a large, successful Prussia was Hungary’s best guarantee that Austria would not gain a superior position to dominate the Hungarian elites.” And this insight feels like a good explanation of the attractiveness of Austrian Catholicism, which “combines a Jansenist, puritanical strain with exuberant baroque piety.” It’s the sort of exuberance that produced a Mozart, rather than more gloomy and ardent Spanish Catholicism that produced the Inquisition. 

One lesson from the latter years of Austro-Hungary is a good reminder that periods of state decay often correspond with eras of cultural flowering. 1913: The Year Before the Storm presents a whimsical slice of Central Europe. Art historian Florian Illies collates fragments of leading figures month by month, diary-entry style. People were running into each other all the time. Duchamp, d’Annunzio, Debussy at the premiere of the Rite of Spring. Stalin potentially tipping his hat at Hitler, as both residents of Vienna were known to take evening strolls through the gardens of Schönbrunn. Matisse bringing flowers to Picasso while the latter was sick. Rainer Maria Rilke being moody at the seaside with Sidonie Nadherny while she was running off into the arms of Karl Kraus. The celebrated love affairs between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer, Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel, Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler with Walter Gropius, Alma Mahler with anyone, really. 1913 is the year that modernism was born; the continent began to shatter the following year.

Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear also has an experimental form. Da is a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins who emigrated from Hangzhou before she was 7. One half of the book is a literary analysis of Shakespeare; the other half of the book is the story of the chaos of Maoist society and her family’s personal experiences of it. The novelty is the weaving of family history with a classic piece of literature. Sometimes these transitions are jarring, perhaps deliberately so. Da has just barely begun musing about the reign of Goneril and Regan before she launches into an exposition: “A history — I am thirty nine years old. My parents left China for the United States at this age.” But I liked this effort to map Mao’s madness onto Lear’s delirium as well as analogizing Deng’s tenacity to Edgar’s determination to lay low. And it convinced me that Lear is the most Chinese of Shakespeare’s plays. It is the marriage of the eastern emphasis on pro forma ceremonies, excessive flattery, and empty speechifying with the western practice of elder abuse. I’d like to read more experimental books like this one.

Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi is a glittering jewel. The setting is a mysterious, magical house. The narrator is a radiantly earnest explorer who self-identifies as a “Beloved Child of the House.” His warm curiosity makes this book an adventurer’s diary. I liked the fantasy elements of the first half better than the second half of the book, which disenchanted some of the story, so maybe it’s better to stop halfway through. Afterwards, I read Clarke’s earlier book, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It’s enjoyable too, especially for its partisanship of Northern English identity, though the book as a whole is wooly. Susannah Clarke offers a good case study of how authors can think about their work over time: an overlong first book that took decades to craft, followed by a shorter and more glittering second work. I can’t wait to see what her third book will be like.

(The Neue Galerie’s exhibition this year on New Objectivity led me to the work of German painter Carl Grossberg. This 1925 work spoke to me. Credit: Wikimedia.)

I’ve learned that Christmas is a good time to write. Emails stop and all is calm. I submitted my manuscript this time last year in Vietnam. This year, my wife and I are writing from Bali. Tropical Asia makes for great writing retreats. We have lazy mornings that feature a swim and a big breakfast; then we spend the rest of the day writing before going out in the evening for some really spicy food.

A few food questions to wrap up:

1. Is Da Nang the most underrated food city in Asia? Yes, we all know about excellent eating spots in Penang, Tokyo, Yunnan, etc. But I hardly ever hear about Da Nang, which has several Michelin listed places. I am still dreaming about its chewy rice products, the grilled meats, the spice mixes, the seafood soups, the not-too-sweet desserts. It’s well-listed on Michelin guides, but I hardly hear about it. Da Nang is my submission for a food city that ought to be better recognized as a destination.
2. Over the summer in Europe, I found myself wondering why Copenhagen has such amazing baked goods. I think its croissants are even better than in Paris. Then I found myself wondering about the quality distribution of croissants throughout the continent. They are not so good in Spain and Italy. I believe that Italy and Spain have the best overall cuisine in Europe; but they have been less interested in producing excellent baked goods. Is it because they don’t have as good butter? But they still eat a lot of cheese. The US is getting better croissants in big cities, which once more makes me appreciate that America has excellence across many cuisines, though they tend to be scattered.
3. Every winter, I find myself craving vitamin-rich tropical fruits. I mean mostly passionfruit, mango, papaya, eggfruit, and of course durian. American groceries are stocking more rambutan and dragonfruit. I wonder if they could stock even more. It’s always mango season somewhere, for example, so is it possible to find better mangoes throughout the year? Is there a subscription package to receive regular shipments of passionfruit and mango? I realize the durian supply chain is highly complicated (apparently the fruit is pollinated mostly by bats), but still it would be nice to have the fruit occasionally. I realize that tariffs are hurting access to American essentials like coffee and bananas. But I hope that Americans can continue to demand better fruits.

The post 2025 letter appeared first on Dan Wang.

2025-07-25 21:51:37

(This piece is my book announcement; here’s my letter from 2023)

I didn’t write a letter last year. Rather, I wrote seven, all of which is new material.

They make up my book BREAKNECK: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It’s driven by a few simple ideas. That Americans and Chinese are fundamentally alike: restless, eager for shortcuts, ultimately driving most of the world’s big changes. That their rivalry should not be reasoned through with worn-out terms from the past century like socialist, democratic, or neoliberal. And that both countries are tangles of imperfection, regularly delivering — in the name of competition — self-beatings that go beyond the wildest dreams of the other.

The simplest idea I present is that China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America’s lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad.

Breakneck begins with a bike ride I took from Guiyang to Chongqing in 2021. China’s fourth-poorest province, I was delighted to find, has much better infrastructure than California or New York, both wealthier by orders of magnitude. Five days of grueling climbs on stunning green mountains gave me glimpses of what socialism with Chinese characteristics really looks like. But there is more to the engineering state than tall bridges. The heart of the book concerns how badly Beijing goes off track when it engages in social engineering. My handy formulation of the Communist Party is that it is a Leninist Technocracy with Grand Opera Characteristics — practical until it collapses into the preposterous.

The idea of the lawyerly society became obvious when I returned to the U.S. in 2023. The Paul Tsai China Center (as I say in my acknowledgments) was the best possible place to write this book, not only because it’s so supportive, but also because it set me inside the Yale Law School. Elite law schools, now and in the past, fashion the easiest path for the ambitions to step into the top ranks of the American government. The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy. I believe that America cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected.

The engineering state versus the lawyerly society is not a grand theory to explain absolutely everything about the U.S. and China. Rather, the book is rooted in my own experiences of living in China from 2017 to 2023. I offer this framework to make sense of the recent past and think about what might come next.

It helps to explain a number of things. For example, the trade war and the tech showdown. The U.S. has relied on legalisms — levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime — while China has focused on creating the future by physically building better cars, more beautiful cities, and bigger power plants. Though China has constructed roads and bridges abroad, it struggles to inspire global cultural appeal, because engineers aren’t smooth talkers and tend to censor whatever they can’t understand. The Chinese state is sometimes too rational, proceeding down a path that feels perfectly logical, until the country’s largest city is suddenly in a state of lockdown for months. 

Breakneck will be published on August 26. I hope you’ll order this book. You can also send me an email if you would like a review copy for your publication or Substack, or to book me for speaking.

***

It’s a bit boring to write only a book announcement. This is also a space for me to reflect on the bookwriting process.

The hard part of bookwriting is the beginning, the middle, and the end. Each stage demands unrelated skills. The opening phases involve engaging an agent, beating ideas into the shape of a proposal (which typically stretch over 50 pages), and approaching a publisher. The long middle is the writing. The end is the mishmash of tasks related to revision, production, and promotion. Fortunately I had a superb agent and a faithful editor to navigate the first and third stages. Overall the process was more fun than I expected, such that I now actively encourage friends to pursue their own book ideas.

Writing is necessarily a solitary task. My usual process is to putter around until late evening, until I finally cannot bear to avoid the page any longer, at which point I spend a lot of time picking out appropriate music, and finally get to the task. I knew that could no longer be a sane approach for a lengthier writing project (not that it ever was). Every day I repeated my mantra to be a cool, calm, collected Canadian, through which I achieved a modest degree of discipline. I met my deadline.

I became a better writer over the course of the book. Breakneck, as I said, is seven annual letters. I thought I understood this format, but I still saw myself improving, such that the final chapter was much easier to write than the first. I felt my prose loosening and my confidence rising as I moved from chapter to chapter. Bookwriting is a bit like climbing a mountain: best not to look up too much at the beginning and feel daunted by the task ahead. When I had completed two-thirds of the book, I started feeling elated about how much I’ve written, which propelled me towards the end.

Writing is thinking. As I worked on my final chapter, I found myself reflecting on my Yunnan heritage. Yunnan is, in my estimation, China’s freest province: far away amid southwestern mountains, it has mostly escaped sustained attention from the imperial center, which would be attracted to greater wealth or restive minority issues. My parents both have deep Yunnan roots. They would have been in China’s middle class, only the concept did not really exist when they emigrated to Canada when I was seven. I’m glad to have had an upbringing in this economic backwater, which is undeveloped in part because it’s inflected by a bit of the suspicion of the state that is common to mountain peoples everywhere. Growing up in the periphery endowed me with greater skepticism of the state glories that Beijing chooses to celebrate and greater reluctance to participate in the competitive culture common in Shanghai or Shenzhen.

I wrote this book partly to sort out my own thoughts about China. It really was staggering to write about how many miles of roadways, how many new nuclear power plants, how much steel China has produced over the past four decades. China is a good operating model of abundance. I state clearly in the book that America doesn’t have to become China to build infrastructure; it would be sufficient to reach the construction cost levels of France, Japan, or Spain. Still, the U.S. should still study some aspects of China’s method: how do they build it? What are the tradeoffs? How do we learn? China has gotten a lot of things right with mass transit, plentiful housing, and functional cities.

The problem is that China’s leadership just can’t stop at physical engineering. Sooner or later, they treat the population as if it were another building material, to be moulded or torn apart as the circumstances demand. That’s why America shouldn’t look to China as the model. My favorite chapter concerned the one-child policy. I had been completely unprepared to study the brutality of its enforcement, which was only possible through mass sterilizations and forced abortions. At its peak in the 1980s, the one-child policy morphed into a campaign of rural terror meted out against female bodies, namely the mother and the cruelly discarded daughter.

Nearly all the letters are focused on China. The final one is about the United States. I concluded my book by writing about what my parents gained and lost with their emigration. They lost the chance to build wealth as part of China’s luckiest generation: urban residents born after 1960 who were able to acquire property or build businesses after the 2000s. But they would not trade that for their gain of living in the suburbs of Philly, which I find boring, but their friends find enviable. I also reflected on America’s own legacy as an engineering state, focused on two engineers: Robert Moses and Hyman Rickover. Too many parts of America feel like the well-preserved ruins of a once-great civilization. Americans should take a clearer look at the industrial achievements that are usually ignored and frequently scorned.

***

I became a better reader, too, over the course of bookwriting.

I’ve learned to detect when writers attempt the difficult and when they succumb to laziness. There are parts of every book where writers cover a topic they have little interest in (out of some obligation), at which point I try to figure out how many pages I need to flip before getting to the parts they care about. I’ve learned to pay more attention to books in which authors say something in their acknowledgments. That doesn’t mean I like gushiness — rather, that tends to be a negative signal. A good acknowledgment is a sign that an author has put some care into their book.

I’ve learned to be more discerning about China books in particular. It’s a tricky genre. A good China writer, I believe, has to be able to avoid various extremes. Some writers believe that the Communist Party has been excessively demonized and needs to be celebrated for its anti-poverty achievements; others believe that China is the Antichrist. Some writers invoke tired tropes and the same old stories to make the most sweeping judgments about the country; others constrain themselves to investigating the narrowest topics rather than broader questions that readers also care about. Some writers focus too much on law or party pronouncements, as if the country consisted of only formal systems; others act as if none of these statements should be treated with seriousness, preferring to document only their day-to-day lives.

I’m keen to read books that make an attempt to thread these needles. A good China writer should recognize that economic growth has been astounding, while it has coincided with new forms of repression; that Party-speak can be mostly ignored but sometimes requires being treated with care; and that the best way to pierce through the complexity is to combine analytic judgments with a sense of how people actually live. In my book, I pay homage to the writers who have covered China well.

Working with the publishing industry has also made me more discerning about which books to read generally. Before I do anything to a book, I take a look to see if it’s from an academic press (like Yale or Oxford) or a trade press (like Norton or Penguin). It doesn’t determine anything. Rather, I am more alert to pitfalls. At a first approximation, academic books are written for the benefit of their authors, while trade books are written for the benefit of readers. There’s also a needle to be threaded between the former, whose failure mode is to deliver narrow arguments while bogged down with proving small points, and the latter, whose failure mode is to deliver small ideas in flamboyant prose, often packaged in bite-sized chapters. I look for books that manage to transcend the limitations of these categories.

These days, I’m drawn back to novels. I am thinking of spending the next few months re-reading my quartet of favorites: The Red and the Black, for Stendhal’s very funny depictions of the rampant stupidity produced by desire; Bleak House for Dickens’ density of clever expressions and its miracle of construction; Proust for his accounts of intoxicating love; and Melville’s Moby-Dick for hundreds of pages of mesmerizing whalelore. 

***

Finally, I learned how to be a better eater over the course of bookwriting.

I cooked a lot of fish as I wrote, in the Cantonese style: steaming a whole bronzino or a filet of sea trout for ten minutes, then drizzled with ginger, spring onion, soy sauce, and sizzling olive oil. My wife and I also planned a few writing retreats, in which we would park ourselves in new places to focus on food, exercise, and writing. After six years of intensively eating Chinese cuisines, I was also pleased to move into new culinary worlds.

I completed revisions in Mexico City. CDMX has excellent high-end cuisine, but of course my focus was mostly on street food. I believe that a plate of chilaquiles is a perfect breakfast. The masa there tastes amazing, and I love being able to fill them with oreja, trompa, or buche cuts of the pig which are not easy to find in America. We typically had a big meal for lunch and brought home fruits for the evening. There’s nothing better than mixing together some tropical fruits — mamey, mango, canistel — and squeezing a bit of lime with scoops of passionfruit all over them.

I submitted my manuscript in Da Nang. This part of central Vietnam has the most creative use of rice products I’ve seen anywhere: sticky, in noodle form, or fashioned into little cakes. My favorite meals feature grilled meats or seafood, laced with chillies and fresh herbs, alongside a lot of vegetables and a nice soup. You can find that easily in Da Nang as well as Xishuangbanna, my favorite part of Yunnan. The more complex Vietnamese stews are also very worthwhile.

I finished my proposal in Barcelona. The Spanish, like the Japanese, know how to work miracles on beef as well as seafood. The chefs in Barcelona produce very intense beef flavors through dry-aging, and they don’t do anything silly like trimming away all the fat off of a ribeye before they serve it to you. I had the best all-around meals in Paris. I kept feeling struck that Parisian restaurants were filled to the brim with enthusiastic eaters at all hours. And Copenhagen has not only inventive modern cuisine, but also maybe the best bakeries in the world.

What is the most innovative food city in America? Perhaps it is Austin. I had great eating over a week there, though it’s not anywhere near Asian or European levels. Anglophone countries are never going to produce the best food; their superpower is that they import the immigrants who bring better food. That’s something in America’s favor in the crucial culinary race against China.

When I last visited Shanghai, at the end of 2024, I was surprised to feel that the average person might be eating worse than before. The trend of consumption downgrading has been real. Smart restaurants are no longer difficult to book. Sichuan and Hunan restaurants are taking over. A lot of the restaurant foods are prepared in centralized commissaries. Many more places focus more on deliveries than the sit-down experience. And there seems to be a trend of chain restaurants from third-tier cities moving to first-tier cities, offering slightly worse food at much cheaper prices. 

The worst part is the influencer culture. China’s influencer culture is much more intense than America’s. It’s easy to see, in public spaces, how many people are glued to their phones. Anywhere charming, whether a café or a mountaintop, is full of people intently taking photos. It’s common to see Chinese couples or groups of friends barely interacting with each other over a meal, leaning over their phones. I remember having coffee once at the Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai, where a group of girls sat near me photographing each other over cakes for over an hour. Influencer culture has pushed restaurants to make dishes better photographed than tasted.

It doesn’t mean that China will fall behind America in food. No way. China retains a commanding lead, and it has so much vitality in smaller cities and the countryside. But I wonder whether China will maintain its culinary peaks, or if they will be corroded by consumer-driven homogenization and the priority of convenience over tastiness. On present trendlines, America is learning to get better, while China is slightly worse.

Large language models have helped me plan my travel. I use them to find restaurants, cafés to work in, and context for the neighborhood, city, or country I’m in. My enthusiasm for AI is relatively recent, coming with the release of o3 and the conclusion of my book. I’ve made it a point not to use AI for any part of Breakneck. Tyler once wrote that he lived around half his life without the Internet, which made him better able to appreciate its value once it arrived. It occurs to me that, thirty years from now, I too can look back at having lived half my life without AI before learning to use it.

AI can be an amazing companion for the intellectually peripatetic. It is able to engage on any issue, especially cultural matters. Context is no longer scarce. I can go to an art exhibit and then interrogate AI on what I’ve seen, or to a string quartet and have a great conversation on what I’ve heard. I get quick answers to questions I wonder about (“Why did the Spanish develop such a virulent Inquisition while Austrian Catholicism feels relatively cheerful?”). I much better appreciate its value after having suffered the frustrations of flipping through library books for information, doing long Google searches, and rifling through data sets to find the right series. Maybe it’s a shame that people in college now never had to go through these experiences before AI dropped into their laps.

And it was to be closer to AI that I’ve recently shifted my institutional home. I had been happily based at Yale until Stephen Kotkin recruited me to the Hoover History Lab, where I am now a research fellow. You can listen to a two-hour conversation we had on how historians work. I had thought that I wanted to be tied up with New York City. But the Bay Area is so stimulating that I’ve decided to restart my letter this year. It feels wholly appropriate to say, after all, that Silicon Valley is as bizarre and compelling as China can be.

Breakneck (突破：中国探索构建未来) will be released on August 26. order it on Amazon or your favorite platform by clicking through to Norton in the U.S. and Penguin in the U.K. 

The post Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future appeared first on Dan Wang.

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 a half-dozen 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.”

The post 2023 letter appeared first on Dan Wang.

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)

The post China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum appeared first on Dan Wang.

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. So 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.

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.

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