2026-02-08 11:06:00
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Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.
Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Seneca Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the show and with the newsletter, please do consider lending your support.
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Today, my guest is Afra Wong. I suspect many of you will already have come across her work through her podcast, through appearances on other China-focused shows, or through the many provocative, beautifully written, and fascinating essays she’s published.
Afra is a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov.ai, and previously with the Roots of Progress Institute. Before going full-time as an independent writer last year, she spent six years in Silicon Valley covering AI and crypto, running newsrooms, building developer communities, and absorbing the Valley’s growth logic from the inside.
She writes about China and about Silicon Valley — the latter sometimes metaphorically — but about neither of these places ever as mere abstractions.
She writes about them as overlapping systems, how China’s technological interiority shows up in Western debates about AI, industrial policy, and even progress itself.
She’s also the host of the Chinese language podcast Pipei Jiao Wah, Cyber Pink, and part of the Baihua podcasting community.
We’re talking today about her recent Wired piece on what might be China’s most influential science fiction project that you’ve never heard of: the Morning Star of Ling Gao, or Ling Gao Qi Ming, and the worldview behind it, something known as the Industrial Party or the Gung Yedang.
If you haven’t read that yet, click the link, read the piece. It’s one of actually several China-focused pieces in this issue of the magazine — some really good stuff. Come back when you’ve finished. We will still be here.
This isn’t just going to be a conversation about time travel sci-fi — though that would be a lot of fun — but actually about:
About how a country explains to itself why it fell behind. and what it thinks salvation looks like.
Afra Wang, a very, very warm welcome to Seneca.
Oh, wow. Thank you so much, Kaiser.
When you were describing my work experiences, it’s almost like I’m reliving my past life, especially my time doing a lot of growth stuff for tech companies and crypto. And actually, I discovered the Morning Star of Ling Gao, or Ling Gao Qi Ming, as a collective science fiction novel writing project from my crypto phase.
Really?
Yeah. I was told by a lot of nerdy technologists, people who are Chinese cypherpunks, saying there is the greatest DAO experiment ever, which is a sci-fi story collectively written by many people, like hundreds of thousands of people. I was like, “wow, what do you mean?”
Because DAO in crypto represents decentralized, autonomous organization. Referring to this science fiction writing as a DAO experimentation is really fascinating. It also sort of reflects on the demographic — the people who are reading this story, right? Who are reading the Morning Star of Lingao? Who are reading Lingao Qiming? And it turns out to be:
Yeah, not surprising at all. A lot of overlap with sci-fi.
But before we get into sci-fi and about that essay, this is your first time on the show, so I’d like to give listeners a chance to get to know you a bit better.
You describe yourself as a kind of cultural in-betweener, and that really resonates obviously with me. For people who move between China and the West, especially when writing about technology and about power, translation isn’t just a linguistic exercise. It’s actually epistemic, but it’s also moral and maybe even aesthetic. I mean, it covers pretty much all of philosophy.
One thing that struck me reading your essay is how effortlessly you seem to do this, just to kind of code switch, not just in language, but also in your moral and emotional register, especially when you’re writing about something as charged as the industrial party. Is that something you experience as deliberate, or does it feel almost second nature to you at this point?
I think probably I am a somewhat open-minded and perceiving person, so I don’t know, people have been telling me that I tend to kind of like be able to make friends with all kinds of people. I think that’s, in a sense, like a good trade for me to be a more discerning writer because I think I’m really sensitive to vibes.
Also, I like to use the vibe because this is how I feel. I’m really sensitive to the aesthetic, the sensations when I encounter something, for example, the Silicon Valley mental model versus the Hangzhou-Shenzhen-Beijing mental model, right? I was really fascinated by the sort of the cognitive infrastructure, like the intellectual backbone of the Chinese version.
So I, you know, last year I wrote something called the China Tech Canon, which is a response.
Yeah, that was great. Thank you so much.
Yeah, I think it’s like, it’s all come to the sense that I want to like deeply, contextually translate certain, you can say:
I want to translate something to the Western discourse, but in a much more like humanistic and personal way because I think I am somehow constantly digesting cultures from both sides. I am native in Chinese, but I feel really native in English as well, in the Silicon Valley discourse as well. So I think that I’m just kind of like naturally juggled in between.
Do you go the other direction as well? Do you translate the Silicon Valley kind of tech canon into Chinese as well? Or do you find yourself doing more sort of the explanation in the direction of explaining China to the West?
Yeah, so not about technology, but I’ve been doing this Chinese language podcast for many years with my amazing co-host. I think all of us are cultural in-betweeners and we actually translate the Western popular culture and then talk about those Western popular culture in Chinese language. You know, for example, the popular movie Hamnet is a golden global hit. And we recorded a podcast about Hamnet in Chinese language, but the whole context, the theme, and the reaction, the catharsis we experienced — we were basically discussing this movie in Chinese language, although it’s a quintessential English movie.
Yeah, I read the novel. I have not seen the movie yet. Is it good?
Oh, it’s absolutely good. It’s so moving. It’s very touching, and you do experience this Greek tragedy style catharsis at the very end because it’s like a movie to Force you to confront a lot of eternal questions like death, like loss. Like, yeah, it’s such a layered movie, I can’t really explain it. It’s beautiful. It absolutely changes some part, like, deepest part of you.
So do you ever find yourself judging things differently depending on which context you’re inhabiting? I mean, because, I mean, not because you think one side is right, but because, you know, different histories seem to demand different weights, different priorities. You know, I mean, this is something I’m constantly wrestling with.
How conscious is that process for you when you’re writing? So, you know, you might have one view of the industrial party, say, as a Chinese person living in China and another entirely looking at them from the outside and talking about that to Americans. So, do you find yourself sort of having different standards?
I think I do. I think I’ve been having double consciousness since I grew up as a kid in China. I have double consciousness in a sense that a lot of stuff can coexist although they look like contradict to each other but they could both be true.
Like, you know, in a sense I went through the whole Chinese education, right? I finished high school in China and then I only went to U.S. for college. And I think, I guess, like, accepting a lot of contradictory views and philosophies, as you said, abstemious knowledge systems is part of reality to me, I would say.
But I still think the Chinese Chinese me and English me or the sensible me and anxious immigrant me, when they’re coexisting, I think there is a converging aesthetic standards or sensibility that I uphold. For example,
I think there is certain sensibilities and aesthetics that’s always true and always, I could always try to stay true to that.
Wow, that sounds so healthy and grounded. That’s fantastic. It seems like you experience this kind of ability to code switch and to experience sort of two whole different moral and epistemic systems as more of a freedom than a burden, then.
I would say so. Like, for example, this piece for Wired, it’s about Industrial Party, it’s about this poorly written, crowdsourced science fiction writing. I do not like reading this piece. I do not like reading this story at all because it’s so poorly written.
But at the same time, it gives this energy and spirit of what people are actually craving for in the rapidly developing, urbanizing China and why people feel so strongly about this developmentalism. And in a sense, maybe U.S. needs more poorly written collective science fiction like Lingao because U.S. right now kind of needs some industrial party people.
I mean, I hate the story. I hate the, you know, like the greatest Chinese science fiction as the title of this Wired piece is actually an irony, right? It’s not actually greatest because it’s like honestly really bad, but it speaks to so many things that I, yeah.
We’re going to get really deep into Ling Gao in just a second here, but there are a couple other things I still want to ask you about because there’s another divide that I see you moving across really fluently and that’s the one between STEM and the humanities, between, you know, the engineering ways of seeing the world and the more humanistic or cultural ways of seeing the world.
So reading your work, I get the sense that you’re genuinely at home in both of these registers. You’re able to translate between them without, you know, romanticizing the one or condescending to the other. Is that, again, something that you’re conscious of when you’re writing or does it feel like a natural part of, you know, how you make sense of tech and society?
I’m not sure if I’m really fluent in the STEM language. First, I am not a technologist. I don’t code except, you know, like right now, live coding makes everything easier. Everyone’s doing that.
Yeah, everyone’s doing it. Not me.
Yeah, I honestly don’t think I speak the KPI coded language, like optimizing everything, improve everything, because I do have a lot of friends that are like that, but I do think working in tech company gives me a sense that an entire corporation, like hundreds of people could just like grind really hard, iterate the product really hard just to like improve
- 2% of user retention or
- 1% of daily active user
because I’ve been there and… I was one of the people who were trying really hard to retain users, study the users, or try to improve the recommendation algorithm, so our app has more revenue that day. You can see this is all correlated, right? I was a content manager, a growth manager during my first job. When you put out a certain content or adjust the algorithm a little bit, there’s an instant bump in your revenue that day. It’s almost like it’s extremely correlated.
If you spend more money on Facebook’s advertisement, you will just get more new users. It is so direct in the tech world, and I do think I understand that eagerness or straightforwardness in the tech landscape.
This divide, though, between the STEM view and the humanities view, do you feel like that divide is even more acutely felt in Chinese life than in the Western context? I mean, the gap between the engineering dude and the artsy fartsy literati type—do you think that’s an outdated caricature by this point, or is that still something very much a dividing line in Chinese life?
I think China’s society logic was dictated by the STEM optimization logic, or like industrialization logic for a long time until the young people are so tired, people are so tired, and then this sort of optimizing bubble bursted.
So back then, maybe 10 years ago, optimizing everything — trying hard. There was an internet slang for people trying too hard, trying to get promoted, make a lot of money during the economic boom — during the Chinese economic boom and internet attack boom. This was admirable.
But right now, this bubble bursted, so people proactively do not want to participate, such as Nuli lore, Nuli fairy tales. Instead, you see China’s today’s mainstream sentiment is:
This is the current mainstream. I would say China is a post-industrial party society now.
Oh, good, good. I’ll feel more at home there because I’m a good old Gen X slacker, so I know all about avoiding work.
I mean, it’s interesting to me because I feel like I agree. There used to be a period where one side of that divide was absolutely treated as:
and the other was just written off. But yeah, I’m glad to see this swinging back.
Before we get into what Lingao represents, I think it’s worth situating it a bit. For listeners outside China, it’s almost completely unknown, as you said. How widely known is it inside China, especially among communities that care about:
Is this like a cult classic or is it something closer to shared cultural infrastructure?
I don’t think it’s widely known as a popular cultural product like a movie or Journey to the West. This is basically the most common vernacular day-to-day language.
But I think Lingao is very popular, very influential in a niche community. This community itself is what I would say the elite class of technologists, the STEM people who see themselves as pillars of China’s urbanization and industrialization, and predominantly male.
So Lingao, to be completely honest, strikes me as a semi-misogynist, misogynist novel because a lot of plots imply many things towards women.
But Lingao is a cult fetish. It is a Bible for the industrial party, this loosely connected intellectual group in China.
Yeah, I definitely want to ask you about the gendered nature of this book and about science fiction more broadly. I remember reading Senti, Three Body Problem and just being shocked. There’s stuff you could not get away with in America today, just the level of misogyny that was in there.
But how did you come across it yourself? You told me that you heard about it from Crypto Bros in the Valley, right?
Yes. Chinese Crypto Bros. I heard it from Chinese Crypto Bros.
Yeah, that’s hysterical.
What finally got you to read the thing? I mean, what did it just keep coming? And before you actually surfed over to it, what did you think it was? What kind of reputation did it have in your mind before you actually read a page?
I actually didn’t know anything except it is like a DAO experiment. It is a crowdsourced sci-fi lore. And like, to be honest, when I read anything that’s Chinese internet native, I tend to have lower expectations because I know some of the products, some of, especially those fiction writing stuff, is almost like Harry Potter fanfic, right?
It’s not written by J.K. Rowling herself, but written by the fans who just spend an afternoon, put a lot of scrappy plots together, and then you have a fanfic. So I tend to treat Ling Gao as an interesting phenomenon, like a part of the deeper corner of the Chinese intellect as a lore instead of as a serious science fiction. So I kind of had a lower expectation entering this novel.
And it turned out to be, yes, it is very scrappy. It was written by so many people to the point they started collectively writing it since 2006. And then people just keep writing and piling up and piling up.
A few years later, people were like:
“Okay, now we have too many things. Like the plots are going to multiple directions. We need to sort of come up with a kinetical plot together.”
So someone came up and compiled the storylines together, which creates the sort of, quote-unquote, kinetical Ling Gao timeline as we see today. But you can guess the nature of collaboration is:
There are thousands and thousands of different branches. When I was reading it, I couldn’t really tell which part is the kinetical story and which part is the fanfic back then. But because it’s well written, it’s sort of merged into the kinetical.
Is it because they’re all very put together and scrappy? It doesn’t read a thoughtful thing but reads like a collective stream of consciousness. There are these people who did the actual organizing, who actually decided what is canon and what is sort of peripheral.
What do we know about these people, about these principal writers? Who are they? What kinds of backgrounds do they come from?
They all use pseudonyms online, but we know some phenomenon writers sort of emerged out of the Ling Gao scene, later became the influencers or the writers for Guancha Zhe Wang (观察者网). And Guan Cha Zheu Wang is inseparable from Ling Gao’s collective writing.
Give us a sense of what Guan Cha Zheu Wang is. I mean, they have a certain political slant, a certain reputation. Why don’t you explain what Guan Cha Zheu is?
Okay, so in the Wired piece, I told the readers that Guan Cha Zheu Wang is almost like Chinese breadboard, but I think it’s less like breadboard because it doesn’t punch up. It kind of only punches west.
So Guancha isn’t that up though?
Yeah, so it is, I would argue, a more thoughtful patriotic or nationalistic collective online magazine delivering a lot of pro-industrial policy, pro-state opinion pieces, and some of the pieces are quite persuasive.
You know, I used to be a reader of Guancha when I was in college. Guancha reached its peak in the early 2010s. The founder himself, Eric Lee, I think he studied at UC Berkeley.
Yeah, I think he was the same year as me, in fact.
I see, I see. Yeah, he studied at UC Berkeley. It seems like he made a lot of money and he sort of diverted his money into this collective intellectual body building and started Guan Cha Zheu Wang.
It’s like a think tank and online publication, but it really represents a cohort of writers who, just like Ling Gao, have a strong stamp background, very pro-China, very pro-industrialization, and very anti-West.
And early on, a lot of their pieces are similar to a little bit like today’s narrative on how to establish a strong national, industrial national identity, and unapologetically loving China and being patriotic.
Yeah, so it’s very, how to say, very rad, very internet native. I would argue they’re very internet native because all of them know how to talk. They’re actually… Really good writers. You know, I mean, Eric X. Lee, the person who’s really sort of at the heart of it, as you say, you see Berkeley graduate and a venture capitalist of some success, very, very wealthy guy. He, in fact, is very well-spoken and quite persuasive in some quarters. You know, he has this famous TED talk in English. I agree. You know, he gets this gigantic standing ovation from him. I’ve described him before as sort of the first sword of China apology. He’s very gifted, I mean, in that sense. Yeah.
Let’s get back to the 共业党. Yeah. You know, it’s often spoken of in juxtaposition to the so-called 秦华党, which I’ve seen translated variously as the sentiment or the sentimental party. Does this 秦华党 actually have a representative online novel or a body of literature associated with it, you know, like we see with Lin Gao or is this just a straw man? Is it a real thing even?
I think 秦华党, if I understand correctly, is like the basically the civic space existed once on Chinese internet and I would say they no longer exist. I can say Chai Jing would be seen as a 秦华党 by industrial party standard because Chai Jing is this Chinese journalist who would make a documentary about air pollution, you know, she would Under the Dome. Yeah, Under the Dome. Like she would make a lot of influential documentary or journalistic pieces to remind people that the human cost of China’s rapid development load, you know, she would care about the migrant workers’ rights. She would care about the people who are dislocated because of the deformation of the city, because of the reconstruction of the city. Xi would, you know, care about air quality, right? Yeah.
So anything that’s been negatively affected or left behind by China’s headlong rush toward industrialization, right? Yeah, I would say that both the party and industrial party, I mean, industrial party doesn’t have the power to purge the sentimental party or, you know, the humanistic, the free journalist, the China’s civil civic space, but industrial party justifies for the state to marginalize and purge what they call sentimental party.
But I think sentimental party is actually a core part of my formative experience because I was growing up in China where the internet was a place to discuss real things from political reform to rule of laws to freedom expression to many things. I remember reading a lot of absolutely brilliant investigative reports about
I remember reading so many great stories about the one-child policy, about how this one town in China has forged some ties to systematically trade female babies to have them adopt in the U.S. A lot of the stories like this couldn’t exist in today’s China because of the demise of a sentimental party, because of the state’s effort of eradicating them.
So the industrial party in a sense doesn’t have any real political power, but I think they are a collective unconsciousness of the regime, of what CCP really prioritized or really think about.
Just to be clear, when you eradicated them, it’s not like they were rounded up and locked up. You’re talking about censorship, you’re talking about all sorts of different lawfare efforts, pressures to, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, when I was in high school, when I was in middle school, I could go on Weibo and read about Han Han’s pro-democracy essays, and those are really bold, quite fundamentally radical essays, if you see them now. I would be reading Chatter 08, written by Liu Xiaobo. I would be reading a lot about Arab Spring. I mean, a lot of the content sort of existed inside of the Great Firewall. It’s a beautifully diverse, chaotic, steaming, intellectual space. I kind of grew up in this internet.
People in those internet forums seriously talk about civic stuff, seriously talking about can China have a political reformation in the future? Because those possibilities were so real back then.
I think when you talk about the industrial party, you need to sort of dial your clock back to the 2000s and 2010s, it was because the tension between sentiment party versus industrial party were really real. I wrote in the piece, I think the signature event was the Wenzhou high-speed rail crash, the train wreck. I still remember vividly where I was that day and how I felt because I was about to board the high-speed rail from Beijing because the high-speed rail finally because I grew up in Shanxi.
Shanxi is an economically backward… Province, so I was really excited to see Taiyuan finally had a high-speed rail connecting to Beijing.
Instead of staying in the old train to take an overnight train to go to Beijing, you can actually spend only three hours to go to Beijing now.
Beijing as a cosmopolitan city, in my mind back then as a high schooler, it’s so close by to me, I can just go there. I was so excited and then the story burst out about the terrible train wreck in Wenzhou.
I remember there was a huge debate online about who was guilty, right? Like, where is the weakest link in this? If you dig way back in the Seneca archive to July or maybe August of 2011, you’ll find the show that we did about that.
Yeah, so I remember back then, all the public intellectuals were still active, their other accounts are still not banned. So a lot of people online writing lengthy articles or posting online about the liability of the authority that didn’t have a proper monitoring system.
And so basically, the thing is because a certain signal was missed, two high-speed rail trains basically crashed face-to-face. It was basically a pure human mistake. It was because a certain message didn’t send to the other side, so the tragedy happened. It was pure human mistake.
But anyways, I remember so many people writing about it online and there’s this one piece basically crying for China to slow down. And it was like,
“slow down China, wait for people.”
Implies don’t let such bloody train crashes happen again because this is a price we cannot afford just to aimlessly progress.
And this is a moment when industrial party people came and then they took the stage. They organized a systematic rebuttal against the humanistic sort of pro-slowdown discussion.
Because the industrial party intellectuals have a lot of advantages for knowing so much industrial knowledge because they are the ones building a lot of Chinese infrastructure. For example, I featured this one intellectual, his name is Ma Qianzu, one of the authors.
So the industrial party people organized a big rebuttal and they systematically published many articles to not justify this accident but saying we should take this accident seriously, but this shouldn’t be the reason for China to slow down its building on the high-speed railway infrastructure.
And yes, I think the industrial party and the development logic won in the debate and so the result is China didn’t slow down.
I mean, like I think retrospectively if it slowed down maybe China wouldn’t have such a convenient, vast, amazing network of high-speed rail today. But I think back then if China should develop was a real and very visceral and painful question to confront.
A lot of people’s idea is no, we really shouldn’t progress like this:
Like, are we, like, why are we allowing ourselves to be the colony for development?
But I think right now we’re basically sitting in the future to meditate on the dispute and one could say of course development is China’s thing, is what China always wanted.
But no, like, you know, there are people strongly against a lot of things the government proposed. There are people interesting to ponder that alternative.
Yeah, but that’s what this itself is — it’s a, you know, Lingao itself is pondering an alternative.
Now I haven’t read it myself, not one bit of it, I’m probably not going to, but I’m hoping you can give us kind of a controlled spoiler.
So a wormhole opens to 1628 from our present, or from the present of the time you know, 10 years ago when they were writing this.
So how does the alternate timeline then unfold? What kind of society do these guys end up building in Hainan? How different does it end up looking from our own history? How much do they change history in this project, in the book?
Yes, so okay. So reading this book is very interesting because the plot evolves as the people who write the story evolve. So like, and also a lot of the writers would write themselves in. The story features a captain—like a captain of the ship that would transport the 500 time travelers back to the Ming dynasty. The captain himself, his real name and real-life nickname, became known as Captain as well. At a certain point, the boundaries between past and present, fictional and reality, kind of blurred.
The same happens with Ma Qian Zu himself. He is one of the main people in the novel. So, it’s Qian Zu and Qian Zu—they almost spell the same in Pinyin, but one is Ma Qian Zu and the other implies humbleness. Ma Qianzu means you stand next to the horse to serve, but fictional Ma Qianzu is arrogant. You are Qianzu: you can see a thousand miles away. Zu means seeing.
I think things like this are very interesting. The basic premise starts from a simple thought experiment: what if you can travel back to the Ming dynasty with modern knowledge and equipment? People started writing about it without character building or discussion. The first 30 chapters are all about people getting together to think about what equipment they should bring to the Ming dynasty.
You will see this laborious preparation list, almost like the list a very organized person writes when packing for a long trip. People spend 30 chapters to prepare for this list.
Then, around chapter 37, people finally get together to board the ship that will take them to Ling Gao. You also see this immense obsession with details:
They conduct serious, detailed risk assessments. It’s really first principles thinking—almost like an action manual. If you really had a wormhole to travel to the Ming dynasty, you could simply follow it.
This is because a lot of the knowledge is factual. Professional people research and fact-check it themselves and each other in a peer review process ensuring scientific accuracy. People are thinking about how to bootstrap an industrial revolution on this island—what do we need?
But, let’s get to my question: how far do they take it? Are we talking decades of institutional development, or does it mostly stay in an early building and consolidation phase? Do they change history profoundly? Do we even know what history looks like now as a result of the changes they make?
The story kind of progresses as the current time progresses, I would say. Everything stays in the Ming Dynasty—there is no fast forward to the Qing Dynasty or the Republic period. The time flow of the Ming Dynasty basically matches today’s pace.
Because the story has been written for about 20 years, a lot has changed:
There are also plots, like some fanfic, which are not part of the main story:
There is also a story plot that diverges from the main story that… people ended up colonizing Australia, and they formed a huge sort of empire, almost like a British empire. In the 19th century, they forged a huge Linggao Australian empire across Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. The north part would be like Linggao county, like Hainan and Taiwan. Yeah, so like crazy stuff, really crazy stuff.
But what really strikes me about this, as you’ve described it, is this is an alternate history that doesn’t imagine salvation through new ideas, or a moral awakening, or the scientific revolution necessarily, but actually just through kind of competence, and very specifically through technological, technical competence.
There’s this like obsessive attention to getting the tech tree right, like:
It’s just like precise accumulation step by step, as you’ve described. But alongside that, there’s also, I guess, as you talked about in your piece, this kind of unglamorous work of building institutions that can sustain these capabilities over time.
They’ve thought through a lot it seems, seen that way. Linggao feels less like escape fiction and more like a thought experiment about governance and about why technocratic instincts have such appeal to China.
Let me ask about this because there’s this framework explicitly in academic terms. We usually talk about the Needham question and about things like Ken Pomerantz in his book The Great Divergence. These are ways of explaining why industrialization took off in Europe rather than in China when China seemed quite ready for it in some measures, by the Song dynasty.
We had the capability to do mass mechanized production in some ways. But again, I haven’t read it, but reading your essay and the broader discourse around the industrial party, it feels like this community has its own implicit theory of history.
How would you characterize the industrial party’s answer to the Needham question? What do they seem to think actually mattered in producing the divergence that we saw, that Pomerantz describes?
I think, I got educated in China. I think the sort of national scar, the hundred years of humiliation that China left behind, didn’t modernize until the European powers kicked your ass. Then China started industrialization.
This part of history has always been a sort of a collective scar, a wound, a true wound basically, among everyone that I know who received primary education in China.
Alternatively envisioning a China that started to modernize, started to industrialize at the pace of the European counterparts has always been, I think, a psychological comforting thought experiment.
I also noticed that sometimes the national consciousness in Linggao’s plot is really weak. Of course, it is a big part of almost like a salvation porn or like salvation.
“That’s a good way to talk about it: salvation porn.”
Part of it is salvation porn, but I realized a big part of it is the joy of meticulously planning everything itself. To the engineers, building itself is very joyful; it is beautiful, it is satisfying.
Because I observed this among not just Chinese engineers but among a lot of the western engineers that I’m friends with. They love YouTube channels like Primitive Technology. It is literally an Australian man using mud to build all sorts of tools from zero.
It seems like engineers really enjoy this sheer ability to transform the surroundings with the scientific knowledge they possess in their mind. It seems like totally my dad.
Like homo sapiens seems to us like we’re homo sapiens. We seem to really enjoy thinking about our ability to transform our surroundings.
I mentioned Robinson Crusoe. I think Robinson Crusoe is like the 18th-century Primitive Technology YouTube channel.
“For sure, for sure.”
When I was a kid, I obsessed with this book because I constantly imagined myself being this all-powerful human being, like going into a savage island and humanizing and civilized a place by my sheer intelligence, by the modern advanced knowledge I possess. And I think, thinking about this, it’s not just Li Gong Dan; it’s also Western engineers. I know, it’s also you, it’s also me. Very interesting, right? It’s like reading this makes you happy.
Seeing the primitive technology YouTube videos makes me calm. Like, I think as a hunter-gatherer, like offspring of a hunter-gatherer society, human being, I found this psychologically safe.
So I think a big part of Ling Gao’s dopamine hit comes from writing about technology and planning itself, writing about building the civilization itself, other than national, yeah, right, for sure.
I get that. I get that for sure. There’s something about—I mean, it’s a flex, you know? They get to show, look how I understand the very fundaments of the technologies that I deal with. But there’s also something like this kind of inherited historical vulnerability at work here.
You know what you talked about, this century of humiliation thing. I mean, not a grievance in a narrow sense, but just kind of a memory of how badly things can go, you know, when state capacity falters.
So I wonder, in addition to this satisfying kind of, you know, tech just tech qua tech, there is—I wonder if there’s this kind of implicit never again embedded in the discourse, you know? Not just about foreign domination but also about chaos, about fragmentation, about, you know, loss of national agency, right? I mean, that’s in there too. I wonder if that appeals to you as well.
I agree. I agree. I think this, we should memorize that engineering and industrialization and urbanization are the true things that truly gave the Chinese nation power. Like we shall engrave this in our bowl.
I think this is part of the message the Ling Gao Qiming Morning Star of Ling Gao has been sort of projecting. And it reminds me of—so there’s a scholar whose name is Wang Xiaodong, you’re probably familiar with, yeah, of course, who wrote, I think in 2009, China is Unhappy. I remember it was a big intellectual sensation.
Like he is the one who coined the term industrial party. So in this article that he coined the term industrial party, he stated very clearly that—I actually want to read this—he stated really clearly that:
“We must never envy the finance Hollywood, the Grammys, and NBA of the West. We would rather forge iron and smelt copper and let the Americans sing and dance for us because forging iron and smelting copper is the true—this is where true power lies.”
And I think this is a big—this basically crystallizes industrial party’s salvation arc, which is it is the industrial capability that made China powerful so other people couldn’t kick our ass again.
The true power, the true international strength that European countries wouldn’t bully us, like America and Japan wouldn’t bully us, is because now we can forge iron and melt copper. It is not because we can sing or dance, it’s not because we care about social welfare, it’s because we can build stuff.
I think industrial party has such a clarity about the importance of engineering and industrial knowledge.
I want to quickly shout out Fred Gall, who actually wrote another essay right after yours came out, and it happened that the very day that I read yours right away suddenly in my inbox there was Fred’s Substack. And he had actually written about it as well, and you know he definitely helped me to get oriented with this.
But what you’ve just described, it’s engineering then becomes an act of patriotism, right? It becomes synonymous with patriotism. Building is loving your country, and that connection seems to be quite explicit in the whole industrial party discourse.
I mean, building itself becomes a moral act. It takes on moral weight, which is a really interesting worldview.
Fred also frames this though in his writing as a generational revolt, especially against earlier, maybe more literary or humanistic modes of thinking about China, the China that you maybe described when we worried about the cost, we worried about the human cost.
I mean, it doesn’t describe this hostility exactly, but a sense of that those ways of talking had become just kind of unmoored from material reality.
So there is this tension between the When Yi Ching Nian phase and the Li Gong Nan dominance phase.
And, but I want to get to this gendered layer here that feels really important for me to acknowledge—that this industrial party worldview, this whole emphasis on engineering on… Discipline on technical mastery that to me feels very gendered in terms of who speaks with authority, what kinds of traits are valorized.
You’re somebody who identifies as a feminist and you work very fluently across technical and cultural domains. How do you read that gendered dimension to that, who gets to imagine the future in these narratives?
I think first of all Ling Gao Qiming itself is a piece of historical record because I think the collective writing process peaked maybe during 2011 to 2015, and this is the internet before China’s feministic awakening. So I would say certain feministic consciousness hasn’t arrived in China yet.
So Ling Gao Qiming is in a sense a product of its time — a pre-feminist cultural product — and people just really don’t have a lot of tools or instruments or frameworks to criticize it.
Just like a lot of women writers would participate in writing, they would probably feel extremely uncomfortable but they couldn’t name why they feel uncomfortable. But now, retrospectively looking at this text, looking at these primary sources, it is very much misogynistic.
It’s just like how much Liu Zixing’s Three-Body Problem feels extremely misogynistic when you’re reading in Chinese.
I mean Ken Liu did a great job in removing a lot of the poorly written female parts, it’s still in there, yeah, yeah. But you know like there’s definitely some plots in Liu Zixing’s work that would be like:
“Oh, you’re a woman but how can you listen to Bach, this German composer, like because Bach is such a representation of rationality, a rational music. How can women appreciate this beautiful, high class, high broad rational music?”
You know, such plots permit Lin Gao and the first 500 pioneers — like a very small group of them are women, predominantly men. And I think the made revolution is the part which is really fascinating because Lin Gao basically operates in the semi-military structure where the resource needs to be centrally planned and allocated to people.
It is a techno-authoritarian society where it’s also a little bit like plutocracy. I would say people who possess the most engineering knowledge have a better social status.
So at the time, there is this distribution of:
These people are very unhappy. I mean, they’re all fictional plots by the way, and those plots are the incels of Linggao — the single people from Linggao.
In the sense of domestic servants are also, you know, sex slaves, which is not being explicitly said but later you will see this Linggao society operating as a semi-feudal but techno-authoritarian style political structure.
Later, they recognize that:
This is all part of the modernization process.
China’s modernization success depends on female workers in the factory, so Linggao is like:
“Okay, if we’re rational enough to truly industrialize Hainan, to truly industrialize Ming dynasty, we shall truly give the female servants proper treatment, so we can properly…”
So it’s basically all rational, not like:
It’s not moral—it’s rational.
So it’s rational for the Linggao community to progress to a female-male equality scenario, and then this is basically a historical fatalistic direction instead of out of, you know, humanitarian concern or out of cuteness or moral goodness.
Wow, there’s just so much to plumb here, and it’s sort of the theory of history that underpins this that I’m particularly interested in. Maybe I will at some point take a crack at this thing. I’ll be good for my Chinese anyway.
So let me shift a little way away from Linggao here.
I do want to bring it back in frame but this book Breakneck, by Dan Wong, which is one of the most talked about books of 2025. Dan, of course, as you know, describes China as an engineering state.
I mean, listening to you talk about Linggao and the industrial party, that phrase starts to feel less like an abstraction and more like an actual lived… Worldview, right? Does that framing resonate with how you understand what Linggao is imagining, or does it miss something important?
You have this book club where you have been talking about, reflecting on Chinese language discussions of Breakneck. You know, it’s called What? Reading Breakneck in China.
Yeah, reading Breakneck from China.
Right, right.
One thing that struck me in your book club reflections—I’ll link to that because you’ve written about it on your Substack—is that Chinese language discussions about that book seemed less surprised by that framing than English language ones.
So, I mean, did the idea of an engineering state feel like any kind of a revelation to Chinese readers, or more like seeing something familiar finally given a name?
I really appreciate Dan’s framing. I think Dan’s framing is at least to better capture certain reality in China. I honestly think the democratic versus autocratic binary is not helpful anymore. Like, if you look at the US, what’s democratic about the US, right?
I know a few Chinese, China-focused scholars who used to study the authoritarian regime of China and now all sort of pivot to study the US authoritarian term.
You know, I honestly think Dan’s framework can somehow better explain the reality and better get to the point. It’s really helpful, it’s really instrumentally helpful.
And then, according to Dan, he tends to be playful with this framework. He’s like not 100% serious about it, doesn’t want to challenge the status quo of democracy versus autocracy. But yeah, I’m going to borrow that cop-out from him.
I’m just being playful here, I’m not really—it’s a way to not commit completely, right? I mean, that playful is—it doesn’t have like, you know, we have generations of scholars studying authoritarian systems, right? But like in a sense, I don’t think Dan wants to challenge that.
I think he comes up with this framework just to better explain today’s China and today’s US.
Yeah, I think I do appreciate this framework, and I think the engineering state captures a lot of the developmental, the knee-jerking intuition for the Chinese society as well as the party’s industrial policy.
I think the industrial party ideology is reflected by the CCP itself as well, and I would argue this industrial development is the priority spirit, is a collective unconsciousness among so many powerful people, so many decision makers in China.
For example, Xi Jinping mentioned the new productivity force. I think new quality forces of production is very industrial party coded—it’s because this implies that China’s economy is stagnating; the growth is that as we don’t have the prosperity like the growth like before, how do we solve this problem?
Okay, let’s shift to this magical new productivity, new quality productivity force. Let’s do more engineering, let’s upgrade our engineering so problems could be solved.
I think there is this industrial party-coded naivety or innocence in it, and then I think a big part of the CCP’s decision makers still think they can engineer a lot of problems away. But in reality, it’s not true anymore because the industrial party itself has a lot of intellectuals start to have their own reckoning on a lot of China’s problems, and then they realize that a lot of problems couldn’t be engineered away.
So, Dan Wong’s book, do you feel like it hits differently between English and Chinese audiences when it comes down to their different lived experiences? How would you, if you had to sum up the difference between how your Chinese friends—many of them have maybe not spent time in the West—how that hits differently?
A lot of people are overly obsessed with if China is a real engineering state. For example, they would argue:
So a lot of the Chinese language readers who are living in China would be dissatisfied with Dan’s engineering state verdict, because they would argue like, you know:
I tend to think it’s very useful to accept it in a sort of provisional and playful sense. But there’s this irony I keep coming back to: it feels like it’s only just in the last year or so that many Americans have really fully become aware of the scale of China’s industrial might or industrial power in China.
Yet, in our conversation, it sounds like the industrial party worldview—the whole framework that helped articulate and legitimize this push from within China, this crazy breakneck, engineering-driven mentality—is already losing some of its explanatory force in China. It’s weird that Americans are only starting to believe this is the case at the moment when the industrial party logic has lost or is losing its grip.
I don’t think the industrial party logic has lost its grip in China. I’m pretty sure a lot of the industrial policy decision makers still very much adhere to the industrial party logic:
But the intellectuals who were part of the industrial party movement in the early 2010s, I think they’re starting to suffer from China’s declining economy and, say, COVID. For example, Ma Qianzhu himself, an influencer in China with two million followers on Bilibili, is a very articulate writer. But his account was banned because he voiced certain issues during COVID. Ma Qianzhu himself got cancelled by the state even though he used to support everything for the state.
This brings us to the irony where the industrial party people, the engineers themselves, are very smart and aware of certain societal issues like:
These issues don’t necessarily yield to the logic of industrialism.
I’m curious about Fred Gao—I don’t know if you know him personally, but I’ve met him in Beijing. He’s a really nice guy and has been explicit about moving away from the industrial party orbit over time.
I wonder if this is a personal evolution or symptomatic of a broader shift in discourse. I think for many industrial party intellectuals, it feels like a personal evolution. They have kind of grown out of the industrial party phase. I would say they lost their innocence in believing engineering could solve everything. It’s not a magic potion.
Mai Tienzo himself definitely took some hits in life to realize that his youth was starry-eyed and innocent about many things. It’s called growing up. A lot of people I know had that kind of super faith in technology early on, and anything that didn’t surrender to the hard logic of mathematics and engineering was just worthless. They’d ask, “Why bother reading novels? You should be reading that kind of thing.”
People grow up, right?
It’s really funny because within the crypto community, I also met a lot of rational engineers—people who hang out in the rationalist forum community. I see them growing up as well, starting to learn that:
I see them also sort of grow out of this obsessive, almost purity phase.
It’s funny like my tensile right now, he speaks out. A lot about the child supply, and he speaks out about local government debts and certain central-local relations. He also has an absolutely descending voice during COVID. Well, I mean, it’s comforting to know that it’s still possible for people to change.
Yeah, let’s go for one final question just to wrap this all up about what Lingao tells us about China today. If someone wants to understand contemporary China—not the politics necessarily, or the policies, or the political imagination—what should they take away from the Lingao phenomenon? What does it tell us about how China thinks about:
What’s your big bottom line takeaway?
A big thing that tells us is maybe stories like Lingao are worth more attention. In a sense, it’s a more grassroots Senti—a Three Body Problem that’s more widely accessible. In a sense, it’s an egalitarian Liu Cixin collective building process. Like, you know, Three Body Problem’s Liu Cixin is representative, but I think Senti maybe speaks more to the unpolished, the authentic, the grassroots, the organic aspect of these things.
For me, reading Lingao is such a journey. It introduced me to knowledge I never really thought about. Part of the Industrial Party I constantly laughed about during the peak of their debate in the early 2010s: they constantly laugh at this humanistic journalist who would complain about the suffocating urban life and want to escape to the forest. As long as this journalist can take a hot shower and have access to the internet, the Industrial Party would laugh at this fantasy.
This escapist imagination ignored the infrastructure it needs to have a hot shower and wifi connection. The Industrial Party deeply advocates for the invisible wires buried in the ground. They advocate for the pipes that transmute the hot water to this escapist little Eden garden. This humanistic journalist would imagine oneself to be like this, but Industrial Party people are really making a lot of the invisible stuff visible to me.
In the process of US re-industrialization, such knowledge is revealing because I used to take hot water and electricity for granted. Then I learned that’s not true. China’s electricity supply is top of the world right now—the high voltage grids, convenient industrial basis—everything to fuel China’s innovation.
Yeah, I think Industrial Party really gives me certain knowledge that humbles me because I could be that ignorant humanistic journalist complaining about urban life. I want to take a hot shower in the forest and don’t reply emails, but I still want wifi. I could completely ignore the infrastructures—that’s like the iceberg under the ocean.
Yeah, I think, in a sense, Lingao is a textbook for me to learn about the industrial process at its very first principle. It’s not fun to read but also fun to read. That’s really an interesting take. I gotta wonder what these guys today would think of Li Ziqi.
I mean, you know, for those of you who know, Li Ziqi is a very, very popular video blogger, huge on YouTube and stuff like that. This woman is very attractive, who left her life in the city to go home and take care of her aging parents or grandmother in the countryside in Sichuan, and has made this enormous following because she’s so good. On the one hand, she sounds so far like that kind of journalist who wanted to flee as long as there were hot showers and internet.
But this woman also has mad skills. I mean, she crafts, she does, she’s a good asset on, you know, Hainan Island in 1628 for these guys because she knows how to build stuff, how to make stuff, and all these traditional crafts. I wonder what they would make of somebody like her.
She embodies, on the one hand, both what they don’t like and what they very desperately need.
Oh yeah, I think if I were a Lingao writer, if I were part of the Engineering Party, I would salute Li Ziqi because if I were them, I would meticulously break down the amount of planning for her to do in order to create. A seamlessly beautiful video like that—if I were an industrial party member, I would appreciate the engineering part of her production. I would be like,
“Oh my god, it’s because you did so much invisible infrastructural production work.”
So the 20 minutes—the visible time of you showing up on the screen—can look so effortless and seamless. I think, yeah, I generally think the Ling Gao people would appreciate her engineering skills in a sense—like production engineering and resource management skills for sure. Fantastic!
What a fun conversation this has been, and the time has just flown by. Afra, let’s move on now.
First of all, thank you for spending so much time speaking with me, and again, everyone’s got to go and read your piece if you haven’t done it already. It’s just a wonderful piece of writing. For me, I think it’s one of those things where this little slice, as you say, just this artifact of Chinese culture, made me think so much about the contemporary Chinese condition. It made me think so much about, you know, the mindset that really does—in so many ways—just sort of inform and shape the world that we inhabit today.
It’s become—it’s not just ideology, it’s more like infrastructure, right? The whole mentality, in many ways, has come to define the modern polity.
But let’s move on and talk about this segment that I call paying it forward. If you’ve got a young colleague or a friend or somebody whose work you want to call attention to, now is the time to do.
I think one thing I need to shout out is—I mentioned in a piece that there’s no English translation for Lingo, which is not true. So, two months ago, obviously a group of people took it as a passion project and translated the canonical version into English and made it a website.
They also basically have a GitHub commit about the tools they use to translate the piece. They use the GMLI 2.5 to translate everything.
Yeah, I’m just really glad that people are spending effort systematically translating Lingo into English, so I would recommend reading that. I think that’s the first recommendation.
Second is, unfortunately, if you’re not a Chinese language speaker or don’t listen to Chinese, you won’t get the great content. Baihua is this podcast incubator actually started by my friend Izzy. We’re all like sort of the founding members of Baihua, and we’re trying to incubate more Chinese language podcasts.
One of the podcasts I really like and really appreciate is called Xin Xin Renlei. I can also send the link.
“Please do.”
Xin Xin Renlei is a podcast hosted by three tech journalists who are also, like me, really bilingual and understand the tech world on both sides. They find some very interesting niche topics to discuss. For example, they would talk about:
Yeah, so highly recommend Xin Xin Renlei. The English name is Pixels Perfect.
Pixels Perfect, Xin Xin, Xin Xin, Xin Xin.
Okay, well excellent, excellent—that’s fantastic. Now, I don’t know whether that was your paying it forward recommendation or your actual recommendation recommendation. I distinguish between them, but did you have a book or something that you wanted to recommend?
Yes, I actually read voraciously. I do have a lot of books I would recommend. One would be, I think, it’s edited and written by Carrie Brown. It’s called
China from European's Eyes: 100 Years of History
I think that book, to me, is—
You know, like we always talk about how China is the foil and mural for the West’s imagination, and people’s obsession about China—the way people project China as a beacon for technological advancement today—is actually a sense of otherness, right? Like other in China.
So this book illustrated that this phenomenon is not new. It has been existing for 800 years. You know, many European intellectuals have been portraying China as the otherness projection—like it’s elderly, alien, different—but it… It could be either really beautiful or really ugly. It could be elderly powerful or elderly powerless. The reason why China couldn’t develop modern technology and modern systems, Hegel would argue, was because the Chinese language, the characters, are so laid back.
Basically, Cary Brown, as a historian, compiled 16 or 18 permanent European intellectuals on their takes of China. So the people from like Voltaire to Hegel. Yeah, so I think it’s a fascinating intellectual genealogy. I would recommend it.
Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, I have all the time in the world for Cary Brown. I think he’s wonderful, brilliant, and a fantastic writer. I don’t understand how he writes so much—like he’s gotten a new book every six months.
Oh, I have another one I really must say is Ilin Liu’s upcoming new book. It’s called The War Dancers. It’s coming out, I think, at the end of February, and this is a book about the history of the Chinese internet in the past 30 years. I think you’re going to be interviewing her.
Yeah, I read it. It’s absolutely such a craft—it’s a beautiful craft, so well written. She’s a great writer. Oh, she’s such a great writer. Honestly, as her friend, I really admire her craft. Such a role model.
Yeah, we know each other socially as well, and I am going to have her on the show to talk about the book. So yeah, I mean, it’s great because the book is really well written. I read that book—it’s called The War Dancers. I couldn’t remember the full title, but I have it. So I’ll make sure to put the title in there, and it’s an excellent recommendation.
Related to your recommendation of Cary Brown, just to remind people, I recommended this book ages ago. But it’s a very similar approach, although it’s not just China; it’s all of Asia. It’s Jürgen Osterhammel’s book Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, which is something that I haven’t recommended before, and yeah, it’s absolutely great.
My recommendation for this week actually has something in common with that. It’s Tami Mansari, who I’ve recommended another of his books before. He’s an Afghan American writer and journalist, and he wrote a book called Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.
It’s a real deep dive into the history of Islam as understood by Muslims themselves, from the time of the prophet in the 7th century all the way up to September 11th, viewed through the eyes of Muslims themselves. I think it’s a very useful exercise in building cognitive empathy and understanding the Islamic worldview—not that there’s one single monolithic worldview, but it’s a great book.
It also reminds me of another book written by Kim Stanley Robinson, who also likes to write about hard science like Liu Cixin and the Industrial Party. He has a book called The Years of Rice and Salt. I was just talking about that book the other day with a friend of mine. It’s a great book.
I have recommended that one on the show years and years ago. It’s an alternative history, which I really like. Even since we’re talking about alternative histories here, not a time travel one, but the premise is that the Black Plague actually ends up killing 99% of people in Europe. It starts with Tamerlane’s troops coming up to the Bosporus and then deciding, “Nope, we’re not going over there,” because they were planning on conquering Europe. But no need—the plague has already killed everyone.
Fascinating, yeah, fascinating book. It also has a lot of Buddhist touches, like reincarnation. The interstitial chapters are like the Bardo chapters.
Yeah, I really hope China has someone like Kim Stanley Robinson. I think he could be both spiritual and insanely technical, like Red Mars and Gray Mars, which are very detail-oriented in terms of Mars terraforming.
But a lot of his work is also deeply humanistic. Of course, there’s this cli-fi classic Ministry for the Future as well. So yeah. I would love to meet him one day. He seems like such a wonderfully interesting man. I know, I know, I love his recent preservation of Sierra, it is almost like he’s the embodiment of California spirit—both technologically aware but also deeply drawn to the mountains.
I don’t know, I think something fascinating about this guy, I really like him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, hey, well thank you so much, what an enjoyable conversation. I think we could go on recommending books to one another for several more hours, but we will call a stop to it.
I look forward to meeting you in person one day. I’m going to be in England at the end of the month of February, but I don’t know if you’ll be around. I think so.
If it’s London, yeah, I’ll be around. Yeah, it’s such a fun recording of a podcast with you.
Okay sir, thank you for inviting me. Yeah, yeah, what a great time.
You’ve been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through Substack at www.synicapodcast.com, where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio.
Email me at [email protected] if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show or if you just want to say hi. Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show. Huge thanks to my guest Afro Wong. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
I earned my degree online at Arizona State University. I chose to get my degree at ASU because I knew that I’d get a quality education. They were recognized for excellence and I would be prepared for the workforce upon graduating.
To be associated with ASU both as a student and alum makes me extremely proud. Having experienced the program, I know now that I’m set up for success.
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2026-02-08 11:06:00
⚡️ Prism: OpenAI’s LaTeX “Cursor for Scientists” — Kevin Weil & Victor Powell, OpenAI for Science
Okay, we’re here at OpenAI with some exciting news from the AI for Science team. With us is Kevin Weil, from, I guess, your VP of AI for Science.
VP of OpenAI for Science, yeah. OpenAI for Science, and Victor Powell, who is the product lead on the new product that we’re talking about today. And with me is our new AI for Science host, RJ. Welcome.
“Thanks for having us.”
“Thanks for having us. Yeah, it’s very good to be here.”
“Thanks for hosting us as well. It’s always nice to come over to the office.”
What are we announcing today?
So we’re launching Prism, which is a free AI-native LaTeX editor.
What does all that mean? Because probably a lot of people on the pod haven’t worked with LaTeX in the past. LaTeX is a language, effectively, for typesetting mathematics, physics, and science in general.
So if you’re a scientist writing a paper, you’re probably not using Google Docs because you need to — you have diagrams, you have equations, et cetera. But it’s — and it’s been the standard for decades. But the tools that people use to actually write LaTeX, write their papers, haven’t changed in a long time.
And in particular, AI can help with a lot of the tasks, right? Because you spend your time doing the science, you need to write it up. That’s an important part of communicating your work. But you want that to be fast, and you want that to be accelerated, and AI can help in a ton of ways. And we’ll talk about some of those.
But if you step back, right, it is OpenAI for Science. Our goal is to accelerate science. And the surface area of science is very large. So we’re trying to build tools and products that help every scientist move faster with AI.
Some of that is obviously the work that we can do with the model, making the model able to solve really hard scientific frontier kind of problems, allowing it to think for a long time. But it’s not only that, right?
If there was a lesson from what happened over the last year with software engineering, it’s that part of the acceleration in software engineering came from better models. But part of it also came from the fact that you now have AI embedded into the workflows, into the products that you use as a software engineer, right?
And so that’s what we’re doing here. So OpenAI for Science, it’s both building great models for scientists and also speeding them up by bringing AI into the workflow. That’s what we’re doing with Prism.
I often say like every million copy and paste done in ChatGPT, there’s probably some product to be built.
“Right, exactly.”
That’s a good analogy.
“Yeah.”
That’s a good way to look at it. Especially with LaTeX, having written a lot of LaTeX papers.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, me too.”
The number of hours as a grad student I spent trying to get some diagram to line up exactly.
“Exactly.”
“Oh, man.”
Yeah. Cool. And Victor, this is your sort of baby.
“Yeah, I guess it started off as just a project. I left Meta about three years ago trying to look for various different projects to start. And this was one that like when I sort of presented it to people, they’re like, oh, I get it. That’s, I see what you’re doing.”
And so I’ve just been focused on that, building it for about a year and a half. And, you know, it has now become part of OpenAI and that’s been very exciting.
“Congrats.”
“Thank you.”
Yeah. So it’s kind of a fun story, right? I mean, we, as we were thinking, we had this thesis around, it’s not just models. It’s also building models into the workflow and accelerating scientists in that way.
And this is, there are obviously a lot of different ways that you can do that, but the scientific collaboration and publishing thing is definitely one of them. And I was looking around like, what is there in this space? And there hadn’t been a lot of innovation for a long time.
Like it wasn’t that different from when I was writing up my assignments and papers in tech and grad school. And then I found on this Reddit forum, maybe it was /r/LaTeX. I don’t remember, but somewhere on this Reddit forum, I found this thing about a company called Cricket.
And I was looking around, I couldn’t find who the founder was. It took me a little while. And then I think I found you on Twitter and DM’d you out of the blue and just said,
“Hey, I don’t know if you want to talk about this, but I would love to talk about this if you’re open to it,”
and gave you my number. And we talked on the phone and then jumped on a Zoom and eventually met in San Francisco and made it happen.
“That’s right.”
It’s awesome to have you guys here, but it’s just, yeah, I have a ton of respect. For what you, what you started to build. I actually never heard that full story from you until now. You gotta find that Reddit user and thank them because, you know, it might have been me.
I thought you were totally in stealth because it was the hardest thing to actually figure out who the founder of this thing was. And then I was like, “Oh, for sure. He’s not going to respond to my random DM.”
I mean, I guess that’s a part of, part of our focus has always just been entirely on product, and to the point where it’s almost embarrassing how little we focus on anything else.
Yeah. It worked out for you.
Also full circle for a moment for you using Twitter to do your business development.
Yeah, that’s right. So that’s kind of interesting.
Like I actually, yeah, probably one of the most important social network innovations, I guess, is those, that stuff. And I’m sure you know a lot about that.
Shall we go right into a demo or talk about it?
Yeah, always fun to show it.
I’m a fan of show, don’t tell. Push people to the video.
All right. I’ll try and arrange this so you guys can see a little bit.
Yes.
So what you have here, so this is, this is Prism. And what you can see is on the left here, this is actual LaTeX. You can see why you might want AI to help you write it because it’s a little bit, it’s a language. It’s a little bit messy.
And then on the right, this is my colleague’s paper. Alex Lipsoske is a physicist. This is a paper that he wrote on black holes. And so you see it over here, all the, all the, you know, you can imagine trying to write this in Google Docs or something — it’d be impossible.
This is why LaTeX is super powerful.
And then, you’ve got kind of your files here that make up the project:
You can go through and change it and then you compile that into the PDF itself. But here I can say, at the bottom, you can use the AI using GPT 5.2. And I could say, you know, this introduction, maybe I want a little help writing the introduction.
So,
“Help me proofread the introduction section paragraph by paragraph, suggest places where I can simplify.”
There’s a lot of demo and we’re working on it pretty heavily. So just, you can’t be nervous.
Spoken like a true founder.
One of the nice things is you could do this in ChatGPT, but you’d have to go upload your files into a chat, right? And you’re going back and forth here because the AI is built into the product. It has all of the files that are part of your project. It automatically puts them in context. It works the way you think it would work.
So here it’s looking at the files.
And it’s given us kind of a diff here. So it’s suggesting changes. You’ve got:
You can see the different places where it is suggesting that we change things.
So, okay, we can, we’ll just keep all of them, right? YOLO.
Here’s the thing — we’re changing Alex’s paper. What’s the big deal?
So here’s another thing we were talking about: diagrams in LaTeX.
So, I’ve got a, say, I wanted to input a commutative diagram, right? It’s really easy to draw a commutative diagram like this. Yeah, it is an absolute nightmare to put these things into LaTeX.
So I will upload this photo and I’ll say here, whoops.
Is there a tech bench for this kind of stuff? Like a set of evals?
So here’s a commutative diagram that I drew on the whiteboard:
“Can you make it into a LaTeX diagram and put it right after the, I don’t know, right after, right before, right at the top of the introduction section? Make sure you get the details right.”
So, I didn’t want to interrupt you while you were typing, but why don’t you use voice?
Oh, actually I should. I totally could.
Yeah.
No, but isn’t it interesting that we all have these voice buttons and we don’t use it?
Yeah, it’s not second nature yet. Like it’s interesting.
And that one I totally should have. I was going to also show something. So here I am in the LaTeX and it’s working.
You also can create new parallel chats. So you can have whole sessions with ChatGPT that can be going in parallel.
So here I’ll ask it, there are all these equations. We’re talking about symmetries of this black hole wave equation. And in particular, there’s this complex symmetry here. I like how it. Notice how, yeah. Yeah. Notice how it sinks when I highlight it, but I’ll say like, why don’t you, I’ll go to my chat so I can start doing this in parallel.
I’ll say, please make sure, or please verify that the H plus operator in the new symmetries section is indeed a symmetry of the stationary axisymmetric black hole. Do you understand those questions? You lost me. Are there a whole wave of equations? I have, but after that. I don’t know if Brandon is actually a natural physics person.
Yeah. I’ll say, don’t do it in the paper. Show it here. I don’t want it to actually edit the paper. I just wanted to prove it here. Right. Yeah. Okay. So I’ll get that going.
Now, while we’re waiting for the diagram to finish, we can also get another thing going in parallel. So I’ll say, I need to write up a set of lecture notes on general relativity. You know, say I’m a professor, right? I’ve got, I’m teaching a class or something, put together a 30-minute set of lecture notes on a Riemannian curvature.
Wow. That’s a very different task. Put it into the file. I made this gr_lecture.tex. Okay. And so I’ve got this going.
All right. Well, it came back on my earlier one — H plus symmetry. Is it really here? You got ChatGPT doing a whole bunch of work to verify that this is indeed a symmetry of the equation. Okay. It does. It confirms it.
Right. So you’ve got the full power of a reasoning model that can think deeply about frontier science. And now we can go back while it works on the other thing.
Okay. So this was where I was making the diagram, right? It put it right below the introduction. I’ll compile it again. So this is an auto compile. You can turn that on.
Yeah. Okay. And it nailed it. So it looks like it got it pretty much exactly. Just a small check. Check the details.
Oh yeah. Good enough for me. Yeah. It’s pretty good, but all right, we can see if it’ll get it right. Let’s say, the C vertex should be directly…
To your point about voice though, I do think maybe over time the code might recede into the background more as you’re really interacting with the paper.
When you started this product, how were you envisioning it would be used? Or were there other design choices you were considering that you didn’t take?
By the way, before you answer it, we have our general relativity lecture notes here, but that was quick. So 30 minutes, this is a — yeah — so 30 pages there, 30-minute section.
Okay. So we got curvature, covariant derivatives. This looks like a reasonable set of notes if you were going to go teach a class, right? It just did it for you.
Or you can think like, you know, generate the problem set for this week.
So it’s got some examples here. We could tell it to work out solutions to the examples. That’s sort of a hidden feature of LightTeX too, that it actually makes it pretty easy to generate problem sets with answer sheets and things like this.
There’s so many cool features of LightTeX that I think are underutilized.
So anyways, you could see we:
And that’s just basically all in parallel.
And you can imagine lots of other things you can do.
For example, if you have a proof and maybe just have the bullet points on a proof, you can say, “Here are the bullet points. Now flesh it out for me.”
You can imagine checking all of your references before you publish, making sure all of them are real and up to date. You can imagine having it generate your references based on the topic.
There are just so many areas where AI can help. That’s a big problem when you’re trying to put together a paper: get all the references right.
This is time that used to go to typing a paper, not science. And now it can go back to science.
And that’s just one of the ways that we look at accelerating scientists all over the world.
I would say definitely be careful about including references you haven’t read.
Like that’s the point: you can put a hundred references, but if you didn’t read them, you might as well not have them.
But yeah, I think that web connection is very important.
And like, is this stock GPT five or is this like a fine tune?
It’s GPT 5.2.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, and by the way, when you’re looking at references, you can also ask ChatGPT to help you understand the reference, you know, read this paper, tell me the relevance. So all of the things that you might want to do to accelerate your work, you can just do from within this interface.
You still have to do your work, but it should make it faster, especially like even linking to the references. So you can go and verify like, okay, this is this one. So this might also make it easier to write the paper as you do the work, right? Rather than, rather than, oh, okay. Now I got to spend two days in LaTeX land, like trying to get my paper.
Right. Like a tool for thought rather than just a publishing tool.
Yeah.
What about collaboration?
It’s great.
Yeah.
So it’s built for, I mean, you can speak to this. Well, it’s built for collaboration. So you can bring on as many collaborators as you want, which is nice. I think most other tools in the space have hard limits and charge you money and other things. In Prism, it’s as many collaborators as you want for free.
Commenting.
Yeah. So you’ve got commenting, you’ve got all the kind of collaboration tools that you would want.
Yeah.
Good.
And then any of the like engineering choices, like, you know, what might engineers not appreciate when just looking at a tool like this?
Often it would be like multi-line diff generation that you need to do because you’re editing a pretty complex document. It does get pretty complicated. I mean, we’re using, let me know if I’m getting too technical into the weeds, but, you know, we’re relying heavily on the Monaco JavaScript framework.
So that I’m very familiar with the lack of documentation of Monaco. That’s actually interesting you say that because it’s very true that it’s an extremely powerful library that is almost entirely undocumented.
Yeah. It’s just types. But you can use codecs now to generate the documentation for you.
Yeah. You think Microsoft should get on that.
But yeah, yeah.
You know, like just stuff like that. Like I like to hear about the behind the scenes of like building something like this.
I think initially one of the, one interesting challenges was that we really pushed on it being WebAssembly and fully just running in the browser at first, the whole entire LaTeX compilation. That did help us in the sense that we were able to flesh out the design and the AI capabilities early on without having to invest heavily in the backend infrastructure.
But eventually we did hit a wall with that approach. Once we switched it to a backend PDF rendering, that’s when we really started to hit an inflection point with usage.
Now fast.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think we also, the AI in here benefits a lot from everything that we’ve learned building codecs. And as we go forward, I think we’ll likely just integrate the full codecs harness into the application here.
So you get all the benefits of the tools and the skills and all the things that codecs can do today, and you just sort of automatically can bring that into your environment here.
Yeah.
Are they just the same app?
Maybe. I think potentially it depends on…
I mean, here’s the reason I’m hesitating: I think the interesting thing with this and with codecs is we’re still mostly in a world today where:
But the more that AI improves, people trust it and they’re just YOLOing it, right? You’re generating code and you’re looking at the code sort of secondary to instructing the AI and driving from that.
The UI probably changes for all of these things, right? You don’t need your document front and center because you’re actually not looking at your document as much. That’s sort of your backup and your interaction with your AI is primary.
And as that happens, I think you might see these UIs kind of converge over time. So we’ll see.
But I definitely would love to see a world where people needed to spend less time thinking about the actual syntax and much more about what they’re trying to create.
Yeah.
I feel like this plus a notebook would be amazing.
Yeah.
Because, because, and something that AI can run quite, run a analysis, generate plots. So stick that in the paper here. Like, “Oh, read, you know, like this paper, like this part of the paper, like take that equation and like, you know, do something with it.” That would be a really amazing integration.
Yeah. Like think through the different corollaries of this thing from this paper and produce some alternatives. And then like, yeah, I completely agree. Yeah. Yeah.
I do think that’s sort of the progression where it’s like doing, doing maybe work for a few seconds versus maybe we’re already at a point where it’s doing work for a few minutes, eventually doing work for hours, days, coming back with very complicated analysis.
Yeah. I mean, that, that’s actually maybe a good segue into some of the other questions that I had about your initiative.
I mean, so stepping back to AI for science in general, can you talk a little bit? I have a million questions, but maybe start with what I… okay. I feel that validation of AI for science is critical to its success, right? You have to have some sort of real world validation of the results that you produce with your AI, right?
So what are the, I know that there’s been some publicity in the past. What are the latest and greatest hits of the things that big labs or any lab is doing with open AIs?
I mean, when you step back and look at the trend, I think that’s the biggest thing. Because we can debate exactly – like you’ve probably seen in the last few weeks, even – there’ve been a bunch of different examples of like GPT 5.2 contributing to open research problems and things like that.
And then you get into this debate of:
And you know, that’s a legitimate discussion. But when you step back two years ago, we were like, you know, this thing can pass the SAT. That’s amazing. And then you progress to like, it can do a little bit of contest math and it can start to solve harder problems. Wow.
And then you keep going and it’s starting to solve graduate level problems. And then you have a model that gets a gold medal at the IMO. And now we’re sitting here talking about, you know, it solving open problems at the frontier of math and physics and biology and other fields.
So it’s just, I mean, the progression is incredible. And if you think about where we are today, then you fast forward six months, 12 months. I am very optimistic about what the models are going to be able to do to accelerate science.
Yeah. It’s like, it’s already happening. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from my like two-ish years at OpenAI, it’s:
“You go very quickly from this thing is just impossible for AI to do. Like it’s too hard. I can’t do it” to “Hey, I can just barely do it. And it kind of doesn’t work. Only early adopters are doing it because it’s not particularly reliable yet, but it sort of works,” to “Oh my God, AI does this thing really well. And I could never imagine not using AI for this in the future.”
It’s like, once you start to get to, you know, five, 10% on some particular eval, you very quickly go to like 60, 70, 80. And we’re just at the phase where AI can help in some — not all, but in some elements of frontier science, math, biology, chemistry, et cetera. And it just means we’re like right at the cusp and it’s super exciting.
So, I mean, fast forward a year or, you know, the end of the year, and we have AIs that can do a lot of this discovery process. Then the bottleneck becomes the wet lab or the lab, right?
Yeah. So what are you seeing in that domain?
Yeah. By the way, I totally — we were talking a little bit about software engineering before and the analogies. I think 2026 for AI and science is going to look a lot like what 2025 looked like for AI and software engineering.
Where if you go back to the beginning of 2025, if you were using AI heavily to write your code, you were sort of an early adopter and it kind of worked, but it certainly wasn’t like everybody was doing it. And then you fast forward 12 months and at the end of 2025, if you were not using AI to write a lot of your code, you’re probably falling behind. I think we’re going to see that same kind of progression in AI and science where, today it’s early adopters, but you’re really starting to see some proof points and solving open problems, developing new kinds of proteins and things like that.
But you’re right, as it really starts to work. I think this is the year that it’s really going to start to work. It shifts the bottleneck.
And I think we’re going to be starting to talk a lot more about robotic labs and other things. Like, do you need to have a grad student pipetting things? No, probably not. Right now you do, but why shouldn’t we have robotic labs where you have AI models doing what they do best—reasoning over a huge amount of different information.
They have read substantially every paper in every field and can bring a lot of information to bear to help prune the search tree on, for example, a new material that you’re trying to create. Then you have a robotic lab that can roll out a bunch of experiments in parallel, do them while we sleep, and feed the results back into the AI, let it learn from them, design the next set of experiments, and go.
So, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t even have to be yellow science, right? To your point, you’re verifying it as you go because you have an actual lab building it in real life. But you can just do so much more in parallel. You can think harder upfront with AI to design the experiments, prune the search tree, search over a smaller number of higher-value targets, then automate the experimentation and turn it around faster.
And again, like this is acceleration: if we’re successful, you end up doing maybe the next 25 years of science in five years instead. So in 2030, we could be doing 2050 level science, and that would be an awesome outcome. The world is a better place if that happens.
Absolutely. I guess we spoke recently with Heather Kulik at MIT, and one of the things she pointed out was that there’s an element of serendipity to working in a lab that you lose. She was of the opinion that there’s
So again, you’re at a bottleneck, but humans need something to do.
Well, what she said sounds totally reasonable to me. There are probably places where humans are adding no value because they’re literally just trying to pipette a certain amount of a thing and do another thing, or do some repeated motion in a bunch of different ways.
And then there are places where it’s less well understood. You want the full flexibility of a really smart human thinking about the work they’re doing.
By the way, the same is true in the more theoretical fields as well, where it’s not about automating all humans out of their jobs. This is about accelerating scientists. It’s scientists plus AI together being better than scientists alone or AI alone.
I think the same is true whether you’re talking about:
- something happening in silico proving a theoretical problem
- something happening in the real world with a lab
Find the parts that you don’t need a human to do and try to automate them as much as possible so the humans can spend their time on the most valuable things.
I’m very pro the in silico acceleration, because you have more control over that and you can parallelize, repeat, and do all those things.
I think there will be huge value because a lot of fields are heavily simulatable. For example, nuclear fusion runs a lot of simulations before experiments because experiments are very time-consuming and expensive.
But I’m excited to see what you can do when you have a loop between a very intelligent reasoning model that understands fusion and a simulation: the model thinks about what parameters to set, runs a bunch of simulations in parallel, feeds that back, and you have the same sort of lab loop—except it’s all in silico, running on a giant GPU cluster.
Then, when you’ve really gotten to the end of that calculation, you go run it IRL.
This is bringing it back to prism. This is sort of a nice aspect that you’re getting a more sophisticated view of your result, right? Instead of just, you know, like a chat output in it, I would hope as it develops, it’s a way for a scientist to be able to interact with the information before you kick off your nuclear fusion experiment for, you know, $10 million or whatever.
And the human can learn from more things, right? You just get more data that you can look at and evaluate. So, yeah.
So this, by the way, this fusion discussion makes me think like, you know, if one day opening after science, you know, it gets serious enough and starts to self-accelerate, you should solve cold fusion and, you know, be your own power source.
Well, I mean, this is why we’re so excited about this, right? I mean, imagine our mission is to bring AGI to the world in a way that’s beneficial to all of humanity.
It’s right there at the lobby. Yeah. It’s amazing. You see it every day you walk in, you see it. Yeah, absolutely.
And imagine, I mean, if we had GPT-9 inside of ChatGPT today, it would be awesome. You could do lots of things. But if you had GPT-9, which I’m using as a stand-in for AGI, and it could:
Like, that’s the real benefit of AGI. That’s, I think, maybe the most tangible way that we’re all going to feel AGI as it starts to be real.
Yeah. And that’s why this work is so mission-driven for us.
So, that brings up two questions in my mind:
Because this is how—though you laugh, it’s a little bit serious—all the AI for drug discovery companies ended up being drug companies because they couldn’t sell the drug, so far, with some exceptions now like Noetic, for example.
But they end up being drug companies because they can’t sell the drug. In any event, there’s a lot of precedence for using AI to basically build your own portfolio.
So, are you thinking about that angle or this is right now just about enabling scientists outside of OpenAI?
Yeah, I mean, my personal belief as we drive towards AGI is not that we’re going to create AGI and then all sit back and enjoy our universal basic income and write poetry. The future will involve, especially advanced science, experts helping to drive these models.
I don’t believe any one company is going to do everything. That’s why we’re focusing, first and foremost, on accelerating scientists outside of these walls. Our goal is not to win a Nobel Prize ourselves, it is for a hundred scientists to win Nobel Prizes using our technology.
Yeah.
At the same time, I think there are places where sometimes, when you’re building for other people, you learn best if you actually go end to end on something.
Yeah.
Because then you’re your own customer and you understand it in a tighter loop than you would if you were purely building for people outside the walls.
So, I think it makes sense for us to take a handful of bets like that, but by and large, we’re going to partner because the surface area of science is massive.
Yeah.
And we want to accelerate all of science.
Yeah.
We’re covering all sorts of disciplines from chemistry to structural biology to material science. It’s all over the place. There’s a lot to do.
One thing I did want to bring across also was that AI for Science sits within the broader research org at OpenAI. One of the more interesting things is like self-acceleration, let’s call it.
Where Jakub has very publicly declared that we’ll have an automated researcher by September 2026.
Yeah. The beginnings of one, I think you said, right? Like the intern version this year?
Right.
First product.
Yep.
And I’m sure you have more cooking internally, but why so soon? That’s eight months away. What’s the goal there? Anything you can share?
Yeah, I mean, eight months feels like forever in this industry. AGI by then? Basically infinite time.
I mean, no, it’s exactly what you said, right? It’s if we can create a a model, an AI researcher that can actually do novel AI research, then we can move way faster, right? We will self-accelerate. We can discover more things quickly. We can apply GPUs and compute to moving our own research faster. And that just means that we can improve our models at a faster rate.
And every bit that we improve our models means that we are a step closer to bringing AGI and all the things that we were talking about with personalized medicine and new materials. And, like, we can bring these amazing things into the world faster. So it is about self-acceleration.
Yeah.
I think one thing I’m most trying to figure out is how closely is machine learning research, which is a science, or high-performance compute, which is also something that you guys are doing a lot of, close to the traditional hard sciences, let’s call it, like physics and chemistry.
I think in a lot of ways it’s sort of a parallel effort to this. Like, it is the work that we’re trying to do with AI, OpenAI for Science, and accelerating other scientists. The parallel internally is they’re trying to build products and models for AI researchers to accelerate them.
So there’s a lot of sort of parallelism to these two work streams. They’re similar in goal, just for a different set of users.
Yeah.
Okay.
Any parting thoughts, questions, anything we should have asked?
Well, I hope everybody tries Prism. It’s available today at prism.openai.com. It’s totally free. You log in with your ChatGPT account, and you can go build anything you would like. We’re really excited to see what people use it for, and if you run into issues or have any feedback, let us know.
I have a paper I’m going to write really soon on that.
Amazing.
We’ll just show notes on this thing. I don’t know. Let’s see what it does in LaTeX.
Yeah. Totally.
Yeah.
Congrats on your first OpenAI launch.
There you go. Congratulations.
Congrats.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah.
Thank you.
2026-02-08 11:06:00
The Engineering State and the Lawyerly Society: Dan Wang on his new book “Breakneck”
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Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China.
In this program, we’ll look at:
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Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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Dan Wang has been on the Sinica Podcast a couple of times before, and I am delighted to have him back today.
He is one of the sharpest and most original observers of China’s technology sector and manufacturing landscape, having won a certain level of fame for his annual letters and other essays — writings that somehow managed to combine on-the-ground insights with big picture perspectives.
Dan has worked for Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing since 2017. After a stint with the Paul Tsai China Law Center at Yale, he’s now at the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
If you’ve seen the PBS Nova documentary “Inside China’s Tech Boom,” which I had the pleasure of narrating — it’s a film by David Borenstein — you’ve already encountered Dan. He was a featured voice helping to explain the deeper drivers behind China’s technological rise and talked eloquently, I thought, about the importance of process knowledge, of what the Greeks called metis, which is an important idea that’s really stayed with me and has become quite foundational to my understanding of China and the importance of manufacturing.
Today, we’re going to be talking about his new book, which comes out just about the time you’ll be listening to this. It’s called:
“Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”
It’s a book that posits — and here I’m greatly oversimplifying — that China is ruled by engineers and they do what engineers like to do: they build. America, on the other hand, is ruled by lawyers. It’s an engineering state on the one hand and a lawyerly society on the other.
Dan’s book is full of memorable witticisms and pithy, trenchant observations. Perhaps most importantly, it explores what each side might ideally learn from the other. They obviously each have their strengths and their weaknesses, so I’m really anxious to ask Dan about whether he thinks Americans are actually learning the right lessons or just burying their heads in the sand and inhaling big plumes of copium.
Before we jump in, I want to point out that this book was especially interesting for me as somebody whose abortive doctoral dissertation was specifically about the rise of this engineering state, about the… The emergence of technocrats in post-Mao China. So things might get a little in the weeds. I ask your forgiveness in advance and will do my best to keep it reasonably accessible.
Dan Wang, welcome back to Sinica and happy birthday, man.
Dan Wang: Thank you very much, Kaiser. And what better birthday present than to speak to old friends like this?
Dan Wang: Yeah, it’s great to have you.
We have to start with what, for me, was clearly the most important part of your entire book, which is that magical and totally improbable guitar-making hub in Guizhou that you stumbled upon as you and Christian Shepard from the Washington Post and another friend rode your bikes through that mountainous province toward Chongqing.
As a card-carrying guitar nerd, this totally blew my mind. I got to find this place. How does a little inland town end up just cranking out guitars for the whole world? I mean, is this just one of those serendipitous quirks of China’s industrial sprawl? Or is there something systematic in how the state, local governments, and entrepreneurial networks operate so that these clusters take root in the unlikeliest places?
And I guess more importantly, were there any of you guys who were guitar players? And if so, did you guys try out some of the local handiwork while you were there?
Kaiser, you’re much cooler than me. You are a guitar player. I am a clarinet player. And I think by coolness, that just really outranks me.
How indeed did kind of a third or fourth tier city in Guizhou become one of the great hubs of guitar making?
Well, in 2021, when I was stuck in China during the summer due to the success of the zero COVID strategy at the time, I asked two friends of mine,
“Hey, why don’t we go on a really long bike ride somewhere in the southwest, which I find the most beautiful part of China?”
Oh, for sure.
And so over five days, we cycled from Guiyang to Chongqing. It was four days in Guizhou, the province of Guizhou, and then until the fifth day when we reached Chongqing.
It was on our second or third day when we came across these giant guitar cymbals on the side of the road. So there were these guitars that were hanging off streetlights. There’s this giant guitar that was on a hill that was kind of this ornamental thing. And off in the distance, there was another big guitar that you could see on the town square.
And so we were very puzzled by this. We unfortunately didn’t stop to try out the handicraft. I’m pretty sure that neither Chris, Zheng, Tung, nor I are anything of real guitar players ourselves.
And afterwards, I went to find that Zhengan County in Guizhou is indeed the largest guitar-making hub in the world. I think it’s something like 30% of guitars in China is produced there. I have to get the exact figure right in my book.
And that happened due to a great accident in which a lot of folks in Guizhou were moving to Guangdong. In the 90s, Guangdong was making absolutely everything and anything. Some people were making guitars for export. And so a lot of people from Guizhou just happened to move to a particular guitar factory.
One of the things that we really found on our bike ride was when you’re going through China’s countryside, Tristan made this very astute observation that there are hardly any middle-aged or people in their 20s or 30s that you could find in Guizhou. It’s a lot of children being led with the grandparents. And that’s because anyone who is able to work has been moving over to the coastal areas where you could have a much better job producing guitars or whatever it is for export.
And something that the local government in Zhengan did was that it found that, well, there’s a lot of people making guitars here. Guitars are not really endemic to the local culture of people playing guitar. That’s not really a Guizhou thing. That’s not really necessarily a Chinese thing.
I’m working to change that, but yeah.
Well, you’re a big force, Kaiser. Maybe we can change that. But it just attracted a lot of people to try to say,
“Hey, why don’t you move back home to Guizhou? You can make a lot of guitars here.”
And somehow that strategy worked. And so a lot of people moved back to Guizhou from Guangdong, and now they’re producing guitars mostly on the lower end.
So this is not the sort of things that will be sold in, I think, the high-end guitar shops that you would probably frequent, Kaiser. But there is some innovation here, and I expect that they will get better and better.
Yeah. I mean, it’s amazing how good quality the Chinese guitars have. I mean, it’s astonishing. And all of the major brands are actually making a lot of their guitars in China now.
Yeah. No, that’d be great. You can pedal there. Right. Yeah. No, I’m not going to do that.
But yeah, was the enticements just the usual package of tax incentives, of steeply discounted infrastructure promises of raw materials? What do they do to entice people to a place like that? What do they typically do?
I think the typical enticement is:
A lot of folks in Guizhou, folks in the Southwest can’t necessarily love the Southeast and Guangdong where they were working. It’s too humid. They might say, “we don’t love the Cantonese food. Where’s all the spices? Where’s all the pickles? Where is the really pungent flavors that folks in Guizhou are used to?”
And so this coincided with sort of this rural revitalization program that Beijing has emphasized for quite a while now. And so I think it is just this big happy accident that I would say a pretty random place in Guizhou is just making so many guitars now.
Awesome. Dan, I know you’re going to end up on every major podcast talking about this book, so I want to avoid just asking you about the main themes or going through chapter by chapter. Instead, I was hoping that we could use the main themes of the book as kind of a jumping-off point to explore a lot of the questions that popped into my head as I read it, questions I’m sure you’ve thought about as well. Not necessarily things that made their way into the pages of the book itself, but let me start here.
I mean, we can all rattle off the obvious differences between an engineering state and a lawyerly society. You got speed versus procedure, certain social orderliness versus the chaos of pure market forces. But what are some of the more subtle trade-offs, the ones that most people don’t even know that they’re making that maybe shape daily life in each system? I’m thinking predictability, dignity, moral legitimacy. I mean, which of these things matters to people who live inside each system?
Yeah. Well, I want to push you a little bit on this, Kaiser. I wonder which is the system that delivers legitimacy. I could posit that the lawyerly society has some degree of legitimacy because there are some procedures in place that people expect that rules have to be followed, and maybe the lawyers are better at following the rules.
On the other hand, the Communist Party, I think, would say, well, we have much greater legitimacy. We have this, what is that term, whole process, substantive democracy, in which we are delivering much better things for the people. So I think legitimacy is a concept here that we can play around a little bit with.
What I’ll say is that the engineering state, I think I came onto this framework in part due to these excellent articles I found in 2001, I believe, that was written by an interesting analyst at the time called Kaiser Kuo, who pointed out that there were quite a lot of engineers that were being promoted into the Central Committee and the Politburo.
And I think there has been quite a lot of discussion since 2002, which is the really striking year when every member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, notably Hu Jintao, as well as Wen Jiabao, had degrees in engineering.
Of course this was a really striking fact for a lot of people.
I think there has also been this kind of view and understanding that America is very lawyerly and that the government is of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers.
And so what I wanted to add onto this kind of general understanding that was in the air, so to speak, was that I felt like I really experienced the merits and the madness of the engineering state by living there from 2017 to 2023.
I was in China at a time when a lot of things were getting a lot better. The high-speed rail system had really come into fruition at that time. People were no longer shoving each other around to get in line. The system felt quite rational and well-organized.
Shanghai is a marvelously functional city where one is never really more than 15 or 20 minutes away from a subway stop. Shanghai was building all sorts of parks. It built about 500 parks by the year 2020. By the end of this year, the city targets that it will have a thousand parks. Shanghai is just this remarkably well-functional, livable place.
And so that was something that I really experienced by living there. But Shanghai is also infamously the city that suffered perhaps the worst lockdown ever. In the history of humanity, in which 25 million people were unable to leave their apartment compounds for about eight to ten weeks over the course of the spring in 2022. And so that was something that I felt very ethically myself.
When I moved to the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, really being embedded in one of these most elite, elite-making institutions in the United States, really seeing that the US is run by lawyers, seeing how the Biden administration at that time had been really, really lawyerly. About 11 out of 15 cabinet members in Joe Biden’s administration had gone to law school. Many prominent folks went to Yale Law in particular.
That was sort of what I wanted to add, that this was something I lived and felt in both places.
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll talk a little bit about this idea of performance legitimacy down the road here. But so I want to dig into sort of maybe philosophical underpinnings of this contrast that you highlight.
In the West, we often reach for the trolley problem as a kind of shorthand for thinking about moral tradeoffs.
I mean, do you pull that lever to sacrifice one life in order to save five? I’ve often wondered how this dilemma looks different through the lens, you know, like the one that you’ve drawn, whether it looks different between an engineering state and a lawyerly society.
I would imagine an engineering-oriented society be more inclined to treat this as kind of a technical optimization problem. You just kind of minimize total loss, while a maybe more lawyerly society would insist on:
Kind of, you know, a utilitarian versus a deontological philosophical orientation.
Maybe that points to a deeper distinction. I mean, do these orientations that you’ve described, do they line up with the classic contrast between communitarian or group-oriented values on the one hand and on individualistic ones on the other?
Yeah. I think that’s actually a pretty fascinating question. I wonder if there is a systematically different way that Chinese tackle the trolley problem in a way that is pretty distinct from the way that Westerners think about the trolley problem.
I think the level that I was thinking a little bit more about was that I think part of the reason I wanted to come up with this framework of engineers and lawyers is that I think we’ve been reasoning about the US-China conflict in these 20th century terms like:
And all of these terms have some use, but I’m not really sure that they still really apply in very nice ways now.
You know, are we going to say that something like, is China fundamentally left-wing or right-wing? Well, I can make arguments on both sides. Is the US fundamentally more left-wing or right-wing? Again, this is something that we can debate and I’m not sure how far exactly we get up to these sort of frameworks.
And so the framework that I came up with of the engineering state and the lawyerly society, I would submit is just no worse than trying to figure out exactly to what extent China is Marxist today.
You know, I don’t think that Marxism is quite the right lens to try to understand the people’s republic. Maybe it is, but I think this is what we need to do is to have a plurality of frameworks here.
Maybe we should have something like the discussion of:
We just need to have more than one framework really to think about the great conflict of the moment.
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And that’s what I really like about this particular framework is it takes us beyond these sort of binaries of ideology, you know, China being just such an incredibly syncretic society that blends so many aspects.
But the one thing that I think it all circles around is this technocratic policy, and I think it feels like, to me, a very, very good explanatory lens. So I applaud that.
I’ve often used a concept I kind of borrow from economics when I think about what a society values. And that’s, you know, the concept of elasticity.
You know, I imagine that in every society, individuals have kind of an intuitive sense. I don’t think they have it mapped out really explicitly, but, you know, how much of one thing that they value, they’d be willing to give up to gain some amount of something else that they value.
You can, you know, kind of almost put numbers to it.
I'll trade you three points of administrative efficiency to get one point of procedural fairness, right?
Or I'll trade you two points of transparency for one point of speed.
I mean, it seems to me like for decades, Americans’ coefficient of elasticity has been really, really rigid. They’ve been very unwilling to trade down in civil and political rights for even for, you know, pretty markedly… Improved economic outcomes. But I mean, it’s my sense, Dan, I’m wondering if you agree that lately, because of China’s example in manufacturing strength, in infrastructure, in its energy build-out, in the energy transition, in education, in STEM education especially, I feel like there’s a shift happening and this is happening. And I think you note this, it’s both on the right and the left, in America, like within MAGA and among also, say the abundance bros, right? You know, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein and those guys, more Americans seem willing to accept some erosion in rights or process in exchange for what they believe are better material outcomes.
Do you think that that coefficient is changing? And if it is, does it change the way that you think about the lawyerly versus engineering states, especially if we start seeing each side borrowing from the other’s value hierarchy?
Well, there’s certainly a lot of borrowing between the U.S. and China at the moment. But I’m not sure that they’re borrowing all the right things.
Yeah. That’s the big issue. Are they?
Well, I think what we are seeing with the Trump administration is a lot of authoritarianism without the good stuff—good stuff like functional subways, better transport infrastructure, and better infrastructure generally. I think you’re very right to point out that there is a sense of deep dissatisfaction in the U.S. I mean, that is always true everywhere at all times, but I think there is an especially big sense at the moment that the U.S. has not been very functional for quite a long while.
The U.S. has not been very functional because especially in the bigger cities, where things are just far too expensive. If we’re thinking about cities like New York, Boston, or San Francisco, housing prices are really unaffordable for too many people. These are cities that try to build new infrastructure—mass transit—and basically don’t do a very good job of it.
You know, I was really struck that it’s not just that New York is unable to build new subway stations and new subway lines with any sort of efficiency; it costs about $2 billion per mile to build a new mile of subway in New York City. They’re not even doing simpler stuff very well.
And so this is the sort of thing that looks kind of ridiculous. Why does it take several years to upgrade a bus station? I realize that’s kind of a complex structure. There are all sorts of intricacies with the tunnels, but still this is fundamentally a bus station that shouldn’t take more than five years to build out.
So, you know, we have broken mass transit. We have unaffordable housing. The pandemic revealed that the U.S. isn’t able to manufacture a lot of pretty basic goods. There were shortages of masks and cotton swabs. There were shortages of furniture, all sorts of simple consumer goods that weren’t easily exportable from China at the time.
And so there is a pretty big sense that nothing is working when we have to face this critical transition to decarbonize the economy and to build a lot more solar, wind, transmission lines, which all demand quite a lot of land.
And so I think I wonder if there is the case that the U.S. has even made a conscious decision to try to erode some of the elasticity of the proceduralism. Because I think one of my arguments in the book is that the proceduralism has encrusted itself throughout a long period of time without anyone’s real intention to create a lot of processes everywhere throughout the American government.
This is sort of a force that kind of took a life of its own. And this was something that a lot of homeowners and especially the NIMBY set exploited, I would say, to block new housing in Berkeley for students, to block a solar or a wind project as well as their transmission grids. This became something that richer people were able to access and exploit to block projects that they didn’t like.
And that isn’t even really a majoritarian demand for greater proceduralism. This was kind of an independent life force that grew upon itself and has a very vested interest of minoritarians that are really vested in trying to keep that system so they are able to block a new apartment building if it takes them with their light away, for example.
You know, you work to be very fair in the book and that’s something I really like about it. I mean, you don’t just heap praise though on the engineering state. You make a point of calling out the downsides. And they’re very real. Can we talk about some of those? What the problems are of the engineering state? What does it get wrong? You sort of channel the James Scott scene like a state thing and a lot of the excesses of that thinking.
There’s two chapters in particular of your book that really dwell on this. And they are about, of course, the one-child policy, which is a conspicuous failure of the engineering state mentality and also the zero COVID policy, which starts off as sort of a triumph, not right away, right? It, I guess, displays some of the pathologies of it, but by the spring of 2020 you see this V-shaped recovery. You see China really use its state capacity to wrangle the COVID epidemic.
But then of course, you talk quite a bit about the lockdown. So, talk a little bit about what some of the major downsides are. I think the engineering state has major upsides.
Um, so to be clear, I really want to articulate that the speed of construction of new housing in China, new roads, tall bridges, subway systems, nuclear, all sorts of construction in China, I would say is net positive. You could go to Guizhou as I did, look at these really tall bridges. It is pretty easy to say, well, this is a bridge to nowhere, but I think it is also true that a bridge to nowhere quickly turns nowhere into two somewheres at the ends of these bridges.
If you take a look at China’s major infrastructure, I would say that on net, it’s been extremely positive, that the benefits have way, way, way exceeded the costs.
Now, I would say that there have certainly been some costs:
But in spite of these costs — human, environmental, financial — I would still say that the benefits of infrastructure way exceeded the downsides of so much frenetic construction.
When I say that you talk about downsides, I don’t mean to suggest that you present a kind of moral equivalence between the systems. It’s pretty clear that you believe one side needs to learn more from the other right now.
It’s pretty clear where you think the osmotic gradient should flow.
The problem, I think, is that the Chinese leadership is not only physical engineers. They’re also fundamentally social engineers, and they cannot stop themselves from treating the population as just another building material to be remolded or torn down as the circumstances demand.
And so I think we can point to a lot of social engineering projects in China and we can point to the repression of ethno-religious minorities in Tibet as well as Xinjiang. Even with the Han majority, people have lived for a long while with the hukou system, which is not even fully abolished yet, in which it becomes really difficult for a migrant worker to move to Beijing or Shanghai and access educational facilities for her child.
What I really decided to focus on were these two big projects that you mentioned:
And I think you’re really right to point out that zero COVID follows an arc that isn’t very straightforward.
I think the first act of this big dramatic arc of zero COVID was the spring of 2020, or even earlier in the winter of 2020, when I was living in Beijing and we heard about this new pneumonia that was spreading through Wuhan.
And when we saw the Wuhan lockdown, which was in January, I believe January 23rd, you have these sort of dates that are emblazoned in your mind if you lived through the pandemic in China.
Wuhan lockdown, hearing the stories of the ophthalmologist, Dr. Li Wenliang, who raised valid concerns and was disciplined by the state for raising these sort of concerns, created a lot of anger among pretty much everyone I knew that there was yet another respiratory virus that was spreading from China.
This is the second one after 20 years with the first SARS crisis.
There had been some political suppression of bad news up until the state really tried to react and try to tamp it down. A big way. And so that was the great first act when a lot of commentators from the U.S. and parts of the West were sometimes even gleefully saying that this might be China’s Chernobyl moment in which a disaster triggers the political downfall of the entire regime. And so that was the first act.
And then the second act proved a lot of that wrong. So the second act of China’s COVID experience was the much longer time period when Beijing, Shanghai, central government, local governments proved that China was able to control the virus much more effectively than the U.S. can or much of the West could. And so the second act was people in China feeling relatively glad that they were living in China and able to be free of transmissions, able to carry on life relatively normally.
There were some costs. I wasn’t able to see my parents who were in Pennsylvania. My parents were telling me this very un-Chinese thing, which is to say,
“Stay there. Don’t come to visit us. Trump’s America in 2020 is a terrible mess. So, you should just stay in China where life is a lot better.”
They weren’t wrong. They weren’t wrong at the time.
But then there was the third act of China’s COVID experience. That third act was triggered by the much more transmissible Omicron variant of the virus, which overcame a lot of vaccines and was just extraordinarily transmissible. That was really the variant of the virus that forced Shanghai to go into lockdown for about eight weeks in the spring of 2022 when people could only go downstairs to their apartment compounds to have their noses and their throats swabbed. Otherwise, you couldn’t really go outside even for any sort of fresh air.
And so this was a time that drove a lot of people crazy. This was a time when a lot of families were suffering some degree of food insecurity because the Shanghai government had no logistical capacity to really try to deliver food to a lot of families. I knew a lot of families where the parents really tried to reduce their food intake so that they could save some food for their kids.
The food shortages resolved after, I believe, something like the second week of April. But, you know, this was something that was pretty extraordinary—that people were feeling food insecure in China’s largest city in the year 2022. That was really surprising.
And then the great denouement of the great dramatic act of China’s COVID experience was when in 2022’s December, Beijing decided to drop all COVID restrictions in the coldest month of the year, when people had very few fever reducers in stock to meet this great ending of the pandemic when zero COVID kind of became total COVID.
And so in Shanghai, I caught COVID around December 22nd, when I think everybody else was catching COVID at around the same time. So luckily, I had quite a fine experience with all of these things. But there were a lot of folks in Shanghai who didn’t have a very good time getting COVID at that point.
And so, you know, this is where the engineering state is pretty ambiguous, I think, in terms of its effect. So sometimes it looks pretty good that it was able to follow WHO recommendations and control the virus until it then collapsed under its own weight.
So the evidence here is pretty ambiguous, I would say.
Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, at the same time, I worry that there’s a certain type of American copium smoker who is taking these failures of the engineering state, assuming them to be inevitable consequences of adopting the sorts of things that you would like them to say. And, you know, they’re telling themselves these sort of self-soothing daily affirmations, like:
So, you know, actually, America is doing great. Thank you very much.
Yeah, I wonder.
I think I absolutely agree with you that the mood in the U.S. especially fluctuates way too wildly for what the situation actually is.
I remember at the end of 2022, there was just excessive triumphalism in the U.S. because China ended its zero COVID program in this horrible collapse in which a lot of people died and the state suppressed all of this data.
Russia then wasn’t doing very well in its fight against Ukraine. And so it looked like Ukraine was also winning against autocracy.
And the end of 2022 was also the years when it seemed like the U.S. had these great technological breakthroughs,
and the autocracies simply didn’t have these technologies in place.
And so the views have shifted quite a lot. And these views go up and down, I think, a little bit too wildly given the state of… The evidence. And one of the things that I’m always trying to say, you know, when I was at China, now when I’m at the Hoover Institution is always that this is going to be a really long struggle between the U.S. and China. This conflict, these tensions will go on for a very long time. I don’t think that it is anything like a static picture in which one country is winning and they will have any sort of a decisive advantage. I think that the struggle will take place over a very long time.
And there’s not going to be any scenario in which one country simply disappears off the face of the earth. That is a fantasy. And I think it is also a fantasy to imagine that either country will collapse and never get back on its feet. I think that both countries are going to be winning and losing. And when they’re winning, they’re going to be making a lot of mistakes. When they’re losing, they’re going to try to catch up. And that’s just going to be a dynamic process over the next few decades.
Do you agree?
I do agree. I think the language of existential threat and the framing of zero sum is foolish when you see it on either side. Let me get to the things that we ought to be, we as Americans ought to be learning from China. One of the things that you really emphasize is process knowledge. I mentioned that in the introduction. For you, is that primarily a cultural asset? That is the status of engineers, the kind of tolerance for iteration. Is it a firm level capability, having long patient capital, kind of shop floor autonomy? Or for you, is it kind of a policy environment with permitting and procurement and standards at the fore?
Where would you intervene first, in other words, to sort of rebuild process knowledge in the United States where it’s so sorely lacking?
I think it is all of the above, Kaiser, that it is cultural, it is policy driven, it is a matter of economics. So I think the most important thing to grasp about technology is not the actual physical instruments or tools that we can see, anything like a robotic arm. It’s also not a recipe or a blueprint or a patent, any sort of knowledge that’s really easy to write down.
I think the most important part of technology has to be the process knowledge, which is all of this meta and tacit knowledge that exists more on a population level. And so this is something that various hubs of knowledge production have been able to recreate in the past.
You know, at the start of the industrial revolution in the UK, there was just a lot of knowledge about how to build textiles in order and how to build engines.
Right.
When that moved from Britain to Germany, Germany had a lot of process knowledge about how to do interesting new fields like electrical engineering, as well as chemistry. And that has moved from country to country. The US has been a major industrial leader on something like automotives, on something like semiconductors in the past.
And right now, a lot of process knowledge with manufacturing is being built and activated and grown in China, where you could be a worker in Shenzhen, making iPhones in the first year, being poached to make Huawei phones the second year, then making a DJI drone the third year, and then making a CATL electric vehicle battery the fourth year.
And so there’s just so much knowledge that can’t be written down with technology that is necessary for the production of a lot of different goods.
So I think this is one of these things that the US didn’t sufficiently appreciate when a lot of corporates did offshore a lot of jobs to China. I want to be clear that a lot of the manufacturing job losses in the US have been triggered by automation and technological change, not so much by offshoring, but something like 10% of the manufacturing change is created by offshoring.
And one of these things that I wonder about is if Apple didn’t build all of its iPhones in Shenzhen, and rather built it in, let’s say:
What if all of that knowledge involved in building hardware was actually in the industrial Midwest in the US as well? Could it be that Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio are actually major producers of:
that is present in Shenzhen as well?
And so this is one of these things that I think has been critically understated in the US that has been driven by an excessively financial profit-driven model that didn’t account for all of the most important things with process knowledge.
Right. I mean, this possibility, this hypothetical that you float of an Apple producing in Cleveland, that seems to place a little too much of the onus on Apple. It’s not as though that decision could have been undertaken in a vacuum. There were other factors that it had to consider rather than just simply the cost of labor. It was, as you say, you know, there was a policy… Environment. You know, there are other reasons they chose not to do that. And surely you would agree that it’s not just on Apple.
Absolutely. I think that the infrastructure wasn’t in place. The costs were much, much lower in the past. And so these are all real.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you, when you talk about, when I asked you about process knowledge and, you know, whether it’s a cultural asset or a firm-level capability or policy environment thing, you said all of the above. I mean, that reminds you of something that you wrote recently. You just published in Foreign Affairs with your former boss, Arthur Kroeber, who is, by the way, one of the people in the China space who I just admire the most.
You guys wrote that, you know, China has taken in all of the above technology strategy. What would you include as the pieces of that strategy that perhaps people are less aware of?
I think that people know, you know, big pieces of it, but some of it, I think there is still a gap in our understanding of how China did this. What would you identify?
Arthur and I wrote that piece in Foreign Affairs called The Real China Model, in part to try to rebut the sense that China has succeeded technologically simply because it has stolen all the IP from the US. And so, you know, I, one of my favorite boogeymen is this tweet by Senator Tom Cotton, which he tweeted on World IP Day,
“China doesn’t innovate, it only steals.”
I think that is a flagrantly wrong presumption that I think we just need to discard because it is not helping us understand China any better.
There’s also this view out there that China succeeded simply by subsidizing its way into technological leadership. I think that’s not wrong, but I think it is woefully incomplete to say that the Chinese have been able to make central planning work and been able to select winners. I think they haven’t had a terrific track record on that.
What we point out in this piece is that China has actually built a lot of what we call deep infrastructure to be able to have its success.
Now, deep infrastructure goes beyond traditional infrastructure where China is superb — of trains and ports and highways to move goods around. What we point out are three big things:
Yeah, you noted, I mean, I think just to throw one stat, that China’s total electricity output is greater than the United States and the EU combined, and every year it adds another Britain’s worth of electrical production.
That’s right. Chinese people are on smartphones constantly, maybe even a little bit too much. And the Communist Party is very much in charge.
And so when you marry these three pieces of deep infrastructure —
- power
- connectivity
- process knowledge
— to the fierce dynamism among Chinese entrepreneurs who are really competitive in trying to build interesting new projects, build more cheaply than the other guy, not necessarily achieving a lot of profit, but creating new and worthwhile products, when you marry all of these things together, I think it is no surprise that China has become the technological superpower that it is today.
There are some elements of technology theft from the West. There is an obvious element of the state trying to pick winners, subsidizing all of these things.
What we can acknowledge is that China has both a strong state as well as strong entrepreneurs that have built a lot of these technological achievements.
Dan, I’ve often remarked on how China in the 21st century is a much less technophobic or techno-pessimistic society than America is today. You can see it in survey research on attitudes toward things like AI. But I mean, anyone who’s lived in China and the US, as both you and I have, we know this intuitively, right? Just in the posture that people have toward technology.
I mean, so years ago, I interviewed a philosopher named Anna Greenspan about a book that she wrote.
Called Shanghai Future, one I highly recommend.
Me too.
You’ve read this?
Yes, I’m a big admirer of Anna’s work.
Yeah, she’s great. So you remember, she talked about this big difference in attitudes toward futurity in the US and China. I’ve come to use kind of shorthand that I like. China is still in its Star Trek phase and the US is in its Black Mirror phase, right?
So the question I have for you is, what is the causal direction, if indeed you see any causality at work here, between China’s technocratic engineer-dominated polity and its technophilic society? Does the technocracy create the technophilia or does the technophilia create the technocracy?
I think that the technocracy creates the technophilia. I’m willing to change my mind on this, but I think it is definitely the case that China’s leadership uses mega projects, big prestige projects, really to try to rally the population into doing something better. And I think there are some ways in which this could be a little bit insidious.
One theory that I’ve come across is that one of the reasons that Li Peng, the premier throughout the 1990s, was so heavily invested in the Three Gorges Dam was in part to try to distract from his own image as what the Western media labeled as “the butcher of Beijing” for having ordered the Tiananmen crackdowns.
And so the Chinese government decided that it is going to try to build its way out of this political crisis of 1989 and to really invest in a lot of technology here. There should be a forthcoming book about this. And so once that book is out, maybe we can point to it.
I think it is definitely the case that the Chinese government loves pointing at pictures of great infrastructure. You can’t open an issue of Tioshe, which I was fervently reading when I was living in China, without coming across some amazing new bridge that the government has built, some great new port, which always looks very telegenic, or some speeding high-speed rail going through the countryside.
And so they definitely love to create these sort of images. There is a sense, I think, in which the Chinese government really likes to promote these big novels like Wandering Earth, which has been adapted into a film, and Three-Body Problem, in which there is kind of this emphasis on a world government that is entirely run by engineers working together to overcome a great threat to humanity.
That is, I think, a common theme to Liu Cixin. I think he is one of these progenitors of the engineering state’s mindset.
Right. Of the so-called Industrial Party, the Gongyedang.
That’s right. It’s sort of the Ur text of the Gongyedang.
And I spent a lot of time talking about the Gongyedang in my chapter on tech power.
Right.
And I think the contrast is with the United States, which has had a pretty major tech clash. I think we saw a lot of skepticism of social media, especially after 2017. There right now is still a lot of worries about what smartphones are doing to young people, what social media is doing to young people, what AI might be doing to all of us.
That is all real. And that strain is less present in China, I think, in part because the state loves to create new engineering projects, and in part because I think the Chinese have naturally been more optimistic over the last 40 years than Americans have because they’ve seen their lives improve in such obvious ways.
In lockstep with the improvement of technology. So yeah, it’s reinforcing, right?
And I wonder to what extent the Chinese government might actually be actively censoring some of these views. There has been extensive censorship of opposition to the Three Gorges Dam. And there may even now be some censorship to the big new dam that is being built in Tibet as well.
And so I think there is, on the one hand, the leadership itself is technophilic and trying to engineer their way out of every problem. On the other hand, they may also be censoring some of the perhaps merited, humanistic, critical backlash against what technologies are doing to us.
I want to get into how maybe the technophilia has enabled the technocracy in just a little bit, but because I do think there’s a little bit of bidirectional causality here.
But I want to first ask you whether you think that things like the fact that so many of the leaders are themselves engineers, it sets up a ladder of success, right? I mean, where high status and access to resources and power are kind of enabled by technical, technological prowess, right? So it sets up an incentive system.
So if you are a parent, you’re raising children, you’re going to want to push your children into STEM education. And that itself kind of reinforces that technophilia in society, you know, to your point.
I feel like that’s a big piece of it. Have you given much thought to that as well, to the sort of social forces that work in reinforcing technocratic politics? I think there is definitely a sense that Chinese parents prefer that their kids study STEM degrees. And that is definitely much more obvious that many more Chinese kids are studying math relative to American kids, which I think is a shame. Many more Americans need to be much, much better than the pathetic math capabilities that they presently possess through a lackluster education focused on STEM. I think that should definitely be the case.
So Vivek Ramaswamy was right. Maybe Vivek was right. The issue, I think, is that the slight wrinkle that I would present to you, Kaiser, is I wonder if it is the case that though parents encourage kids to study STEM, they’re not necessarily encouraging the kids to become engineers.
I think the allure of working in tech and consumer internet, especially for one of these big, prestigious firms like
is still much more alluring than working as an engineer. Maybe it is so much more alluring to work in the financial sector rather than in some sort of a technical engineering field, in part because they pay so much better. And so I think the kids are still facing the same tug of incentives that smart kids in the U.S. also feel in being drawn to Silicon Valley as well as Wall Street.
And something else I wonder about, I’m really curious for your take on this, Kaiser. You’ve been spending a little bit more time in China than I have over the last few years. But I was in China in December of 2024. And one of these things that I become really cranky and annoyed by is just how much people are on their phones all the time.
So people are texting other folks over the middle of a dinner. You know, you can see over a hot pot and a hot pot restaurant, many people are just on their phones instead of speaking to their dinner companions. Every trendy cafe shop is better photographed rather than a place to sit and have coffee with other people.
Maybe I’m just getting too old and cranky here, Kaiser. Maybe you can talk me into, you know, being a little bit more sympathetic.
No, you’re only going to hear the same crankiness from me. I mean, it’s something I freaking hate. And I’m also probably guilty of it. I mean, I find myself just having that tug. I mean, I can’t even conceive of taking a subway ride without having my headphones. I’ll walk three blocks back to my apartment if I’ve forgotten my headphones. Yeah, I’m terrible about it. But yeah, this is like the plight of modern homo sapiens. It’s not just a China or America thing. I see it in the States almost just as bad.
But yeah, I mean, I’ve remarked on this before. I used to, you know, you’re standing on the sidelines of a soccer game and you turned another parent of one of your kids’ classmates and you say,
“What are you doing about juniors’ screen time?”
And they’re too busy on their own damn phone to even hear your question. And yeah, it’s a problem.
It’s a problem. I wonder if it might be slightly worse in China because everything has to be turned into a Wang Hong spot and everything has to be photographed as well.
Oh, Christ. Yeah. I mean, I was in Shaxi in Yunnan and it’s becoming that way, you know, because Li Weifei shot a television show called
“Chiou Fung Le Di Phang”
and everyone has to, you know, like have their picture taken where she was and where that scene was shot. Christ.
Maybe let’s check our crankiness and get back to some techno-optimism.
Yeah. You know, actually, I want to dig into history here. I mean, you don’t explore this so much in the book, but I’m sure you’ve given us a lot of thought, which is, you know, the question of what gave rise to the engineering state in China?
I mean, when do we start to see it emerge? Was it a deliberate policy choice or something that just sort of happened? I mean, because this is something I explored quite a bit in my own work as a graduate student I mentioned in the intro and that you so kindly name-checked. I was really inspired to write on this question because by the early nineties, when I was doing this work, it was already, you know, China was already so thoroughly technocratic.
It was already so dominated by engineers. It hadn’t even peaked yet, but already you could see it. I mean, there were already books about this, but like Lee Chung, who’s now at HKU, Lynn White of Princeton, they did a lot of work on, on technocracy. But what struck me was that it had become so technocratic, but somehow it had gone unremarked upon in China itself.
There were foreigners who were looking at this fact and marveling at it, but it was in China itself. It was like, “yeah, of course.”
I wonder if there’s something deeper in China’s history, maybe the imperial civil service examination system, or this, you know, oriental despotism idea of Karl Wittfogel in his hydraulic theory of civilization. You know, he posits that… The technical demands of water management in China created both the opportunity and the necessity for centralized political control. So you have engineers sort of running the state. These were the things that I was exploring and I was wondering what you think about this. What are the historical and maybe cultural roots of the engineering state?
Yeah, I think there are definitely deeper roots in both the engineering state as well as the lawyerly society. That was my next question.
The part of America being very lawyerly, you can read the Declaration of Independence as almost a legal document. So many of the founding fathers were lawyers: first 16 U.S. presidents from Washington to Lincoln—13 of them have been lawyers at some point. And so in the U.S. there is definitely this very obvious legal tradition.
And I think that you can say the same about China as well. I don’t want to take this too literally. I think the work of Karl Wittfogel on oriental hydraulic despotism was a product of the time. He was this strange cold warrior that was trying to discredit the Soviet Union. I don’t refer to Wittfogel at all in my book. But I am definitely a big fan of the work on the clergy system. In particular, Professor Huang Yashun’s book, The Rise and Fall of the East. What is it? Examination.
The Rise and Fall of the East. Examination, autocracy, science and technology. That might be right. We have to fact-check that one. But I think the examination system is very real.
And so I do want to trace a lineage of the engineering state to imperial times. Without being too literal about this, but one might be able to say that imperial China was a proto-engineering state in part because the emperors ordered so many people to build Great Walls or Grand Canals.
So many people died trying to build this canal. The historical records here may be exaggerating some things, but so many people were supposed to have fallen in the course of building this Grand Canal. One might be able to say that the emperors rarely hesitated to almost completely reorder a peasant’s relationship to her land. So there was some social engineering here as well.
Again, I don’t want to be too literal to say that the emperors were straightforwardly engineers, but I think one can trace the sort of lineage because of the state’s management of the imperial exam or the Keji system.
And I think one of these differences I want to trace between the West and China is that I think the Chinese were practicing a source of a sense of absolutism starting from the first Qin dynasty with Qin Shi Huang, in which the state really tried to control quite a lot of things.
This is someone that we label today in China as a despot who buried the scholars and standardized the weights. And so there’s this sense of autocracy stretching back for about 2,000 years now. The Chinese had been practicing absolutism way before the European monarchs ever whiffed this idea in the 17th and 18th centuries.
And so one of my ideas here is that one of the reasons, perhaps, that China did not develop a liberal tradition was that the court administered the exams, which was how one became an intellectual in the first place. And so it becomes really difficult for an intellectual to become a court intellectual by advocating for constraints on the power of the emperor. So mostly all of the mandarins were encouraged to just say,
“How do we govern better? How do we increase the discretion of the sovereign?”
You don’t really get very far by saying,
“Well, what we need is some sort of property rights. What we need is to protect the business people.”
You never really quite had that. And so you didn’t have as vibrant a sense of a liberal intellectual tradition emerging out of China. Rather, that was much more of an absolute sense of trying to increase the power of the sovereign.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you’ve put your finger on it right there. This cooptation of the entire literati class just by making their advancement contingent on their support for a state orthodoxy.
Right. And I think we see parallels to that today in the Communist Party. I actually think that, I mean, I could spend a lot of time talking about this, but that there’s always been this sort of privileging of knowledge elites. And that assumes, of course, that there’s some objective knowledge in the universe against which you can be tested.
So I mean, at all points, there is this sort of a paradigm of what is true. And there is some canonical set of texts. They could be the Confucian classics or they could be, you know, engineering texts. And if you have demonstrable knowledge of that, somehow that qualifies you for office. I mean, that seems to be sort of the common… Thread. Yeah. So something that I, so, you know, the U.S. obsession with process, in its best form, protects the weak, which is really good. But, as we’ve discussed, it can impede the provision of public goods, the building of infrastructure that can really hurt the weak.
So China’s obsession with outcomes often lifts the many, but can screw the few or occasionally, as in the case of the one-child policy and zero COVID, which you talked about, it can screw the many as well.
So I guess the big question is, how do you build or design institutions that kind of somehow bind outcomes to rights? That is, build fast without trampling people. And what are the kinds of small practical reforms that can move either system in that direction?
Maybe we can start with China. What are some ways where these institutions can be bound up more in rights? And then we can move to the U.S. because you’re very hard on U.S. proceduralism. You’re very generous about its civic function, but maybe we could talk a little bit about the reforms that lawyers could champion that would improve build speed without betraying that kind of ethical core.
Yeah. Well, here is where I would give a plug to my friend, Nick Bagley’s work. He is a law professor at the University of Michigan. He has a book that will be coming out that I think is a perfect encapsulation of the problems of the lawyerly society. He doesn’t quite call it that. And he proposes these tangible legal reforms such that:
So that is one of these books that will be coming out sometime next year.
You know, I think there is actually a kind of a simple answer to a lot of construction. It’s not that the U.S. and China are the only countries that are unable to hit the right balance. I think actually a lot of countries have hit the sweet spot in terms of constructing mass transit while protecting the public interest. And so this is most of Europe. This is Japan. And we can just take a look at what these other countries do.
You know, I was just back to the U.S. after spending much of the summer in Europe. My wife and I spent a month in Denmark. Denmark is really highly functional in terms of public transit. You can go down to the subway systems that are completely spotless. They’re cleaner than anything in Shanghai. They’re fully automated and they just work really well. And you don’t even have to buy any tickets or go in any turnstiles. It’s such a high trust society that people know that you will have bought your tickets beforehand.
And so, countries like Denmark, countries like Japan, which has built a lot of high-speed rail, these are not shining exemplars of human rights abuses.
I would say that, you know, we can just take a look at:
They are able to build trains and subways and all sorts of infrastructure at really reasonable costs without having violated a lot of rights. And so it is mostly the Chinese and the Americans that have gotten the balance wrong.
Yeah, that’s a good point. And do you see efforts now on either side to try to learn from these better examples?
I wonder to what extent China is learning better examples of public interest. I think there have been some ways in which China is learning good lessons. I think it is not the case that environmental reviews for high-speed rail, for example, are entirely perfunctory. I think that the builders are actually trying to do their best to mitigate a lot of environmental issues.
What’s just not available in China is endless lawsuits that can delay absolutely everything on purely procedural bases.
And I think the Chinese have also had some examples of protests that achieved the delay or the cancellation of projects. Remember, I think it was in 2020, when folks in some bigger city—may have even been in Shanghai—went onto the streets to protest the construction of a new trash processing site near their home.
Now, maybe that’s nimbyism. Maybe that is misbegotten. But, you know, we do see that there have been some protests of people trying to maintain their neighborhoods and tell what they like. Maybe that’s positive. Maybe that’s negative.
And I think there is definitely this big sense in the U.S., as we mentioned before, that the U.S. has been dysfunctional for the many, and we need to get much better at building housing, mass transit, all sorts of infrastructure to get the country moving again.
Now, for the most part, I would say that the U.S. government now isn’t learning the right lessons from China. Rather, it’s learning most of the bad lessons from China.
Yeah, as you said. So on the topic of learning lessons, you know, the COVID lockdowns… showed the extreme downsides of the engineering state. I mean, a good engineer, a good scientist, presumably learns from mistakes. I think it’s widely accepted that there were a lot of mistakes made during that time.
What lessons do you think China’s leaders themselves drew from the experience?
That’s a great question. And I haven’t given that too much thought. And I wonder whether there is a lot of studies here. Now, how did enforcing these lockdowns really change the leadership’s mind? Now, I wonder whether they have also learned some of the wrong lessons with COVID.
I mean, one of the things that really struck me was that the Shanghai lockdown, locking down 25 million people in 2022 for eight weeks was accomplished through just the normal police systems. You know, you just had the regular police actually enforce COVID lockdowns.
As best as I can tell, no officers of the People’s Armed Police, which is the paramilitary force that wear what looked like army uniforms, were really deployed to try to enforce a lockdown of that magnitude. And they certainly didn’t have to bring out the People’s Liberation Army to try to suppress the desire to be free.
And so I wonder whether the leadership has learned a lesson that actually the coercive internal security apparatus doesn’t have to be so large in order for the people to be pretty obedient about what are really extraordinary controls that no one had expected at that time. That could be a potential lesson there.
Perhaps other lessons have been that the Chinese surveillance state grew very extensively, that people were tracked on their phones all the time for contact tracing purposes. And there were some issues about privacy concerns. But for the most part, people went along with all sorts of these projects.
And I wonder if the Chinese state has just learned that autocracy is actually much more possible. It’s even more possible than they thought. And I’m hopeful that they learn some good lessons out of this as well. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure I can name any, but I’m wondering, what do you think?
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that you touched on something that I wanted to ask you about, because you know, a lot of people who believe that, you know, the COVID era biosecurity state that was coming into being — you know, the controls that the health code apps and the checkpoints created — that this was just never going to be set aside once the pandemic passed, that this was going to be a regular feature of life.
They thought that the leadership was going to get so addicted to this level of control that they just never let go of it. But it seems like they have. I mean, the app is gone. The checkpoints, the screenings, they’re all, you know, a thing of the past.
Indeed.
I think that’s a pretty good example of maybe a lesson, if not a lesson learned, at least that they exercise a little bit of restraint. Touch wood.
Right. The question is whether they have very long memories and built up this muscle such that if they ever need to exercise these muscles again, they’re going to be able to roll these things out.
It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of the checkpoints, a lot of these apps, and a lot of these COVID testing facilities have been torn down because they became these hated symbols of enforcement. So it could be the case that they took away these highly visible symbols of enforcement, but they have the memory and the muscles to try to bring them back really quickly if necessary.
Yeah, that’s a very good point. I think they certainly have that muscle memory now.
Dan, you write about fortress capabilities, the kind of redundancy, the overcapacity that Western analysts often dismiss or disparage as wasteful. But you actually make the argument in your book, I thought that was a really interesting one, how inefficiency can actually be kind of a source of resilience in China’s system.
How should we be thinking about the trade-off between resilience and efficiency when comparing China’s fortress model with America’s maybe leaner, but possibly more fragile system?
I think one of the things that the pandemic revealed was exactly how fragile a lot of America’s supply chains really were. They were poised for perfection, and it didn’t take much for everything to be ruined.
And there has been this…
Depending on just-in-time delivery and…
Exactly. Just-in-time delivery is something that creates a lot of profitability because you’re reducing your flow of inventory. I think this is also really attributed to Tim Cook of Apple that created these hyper-optimized supply chains. Things were moving around all the time, and so they built very little inventory in order to prepare for shocks.
And I think one of the benefits, mostly a benefit of the engineering state, is that they do build a lot of redundancy. It creates a lot of inefficiency. You can find… There is extreme inefficiency in the Chinese state with the state-owned enterprise sector. There’s just so many redundant jobs. You would just have too many people doing the same things. You have dragging down profitability in all sorts of ways. But that turns out to be really useful in a crisis, that you have the capacity to retool your manufacturing lines in order to build not electronics, but cotton masks, as was the case with JD, Jindong, as well as Foxconn as well.
And so China has a lot of redundancy. China is trying to build up its own oil and gas sector, even though it’s much more costly to tap Chinese gas and oil relative to Russian or American gas or oil because Xi Jinping really treasures energy sovereignty. They’re building a lot more farmland in less than optimal places. I think it is also very striking that as soon as you take the high-speed train out of Beijing or Shanghai, you run into farmland really quickly. And that is because they want to set aside a lot of land for provinces and major municipalities to be food self-sufficient.
And so all of the redundancy involved with manufacturing, all of this overcapacity, there’s also a way to maintain process knowledge that they are constantly training their workers to make sure that their skills don’t go rusty. And I think, again, this is where I think for the most part, China’s engineering state in a lot of economics, you can point to a lot of flaws with debt, with environmental destruction, with all sorts of profitability costs. But there are also some benefits, and these are really revealed during a crisis which you can never predict could emerge.
So Dan, I mean, shame on me. I have not yet finished reading Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s Abundance, but I think I get the gist of their argument. It’s interesting to me how little they actually talk about China. But where do your ideas sit in relation to their ideas?
I would want to be a card-carrying member of the Abundance movement. I am slated to speak at the Abundance Conference in Washington, D.C. in the first week of September. So I think I am proximate enough to that.
Now, I think my challenge to Ezra and Derek are to speak a little bit more about China. I think the first parts of the Abundance book, there’s a lot of discussion of how the U.S. isn’t building enough mass transit and infrastructure.
And then the second part of Abundance is talking a little bit more about the scientific failings of the U.S., in which they’re not really taking advantage of being able to scale up and commercialize a lot of American scientific innovations. So China is a good operating model for Abundance. It’s not the best. It is not the most amazing, shining example for the U.S. to follow.
I would love people to ask them whether that was a tactical choice on their part to avoid making the China comparison just to, you know, I mean, because the optics of it aren’t necessarily good. It no longer looks like rah-rah, go America. It erodes some of the, I think, the patriotic oomph that the book otherwise has.
I suspect that what is the case is that, I mean, it’s not only, I mean, it’s not the case that China is avoided entirely. Both Abundance as well as Breakneck talk about California high-speed rail and its awful failings relative to the Beijing-Shanghai line. I suspect what is the case is that Ezra and Derek believe, as I do, that America doesn’t need to become like China in order to build infrastructure. It would be good enough to be like France, Denmark, or Japan.
And so I think we really don’t need to reach the China model. There’s just much better models for the U.S. to reach. And so this is why I say that China is a good operating model of abundance, not the best.
It is good because China has demonstrated that there are virtues to overcapacity, that it is really good to have a hyper-competitive solar sector that is driving prices down, not making a lot of money for investors, but, you know, creating a lot of consumer surplus and building a lot of mass transit for a country that desperately needed it.
There were a lot of costs, but, you know, again, we don’t have to fully copy the Chinese model wholesale in order to get to a better mode of abundance.
You know, you close your book down by emphasizing lived experience, what ordinary citizens feel day to day in terms of dignity, of fairness, of security. I mean, I’ve argued for a long time that Chinese people, like all people, most people at least, anchor their feelings about a given government and its legitimacy, not just in performance, however important that is, but also in whether the state feels to them intuitively morally upright or whether it feels just.
States that emphasize procedural legitimacy obviously tend to foreground this. You know, in China, when you have local corruption, You have arbitrary crackdowns, you have unequal treatment. It can definitely undermine legitimacy, legitimacy on the ground. And when people see the state standing up to bullies or ensuring national dignity, it can bolster this type of legitimacy, which I would love together. You know, it’s this sort of sense of moral uprightness or justice, and that can be domestic or foreign.
How much do you think legitimacy in China actually rests on what I would call the moral dimension, the state, you know, being just or upright and defending dignity? In other words, when you have corruption or arbitrary crackdowns and this stuff eats away at moral standing versus when the state asserts itself against bullies or delivers on fairness, how decisive is that in shaping how people experience the party’s legitimacy day to day?
I ask this because so often there’s this idea that China’s only about performance legitimacy and that somehow an economic downturn or slowdown could deliver a death blow to performance legitimacy. I feel like that’s only a part of the story.
I certainly agree that it has been a persistent fantasy in the U.S. and some parts of the West that China’s political legitimacy depends entirely on economic growth. You’ve seen this narrative come again and again:
I think that is just a silly argument that we see even in 2025. I think that China’s legitimacy is more broadly based than that. I wonder to what extent moral legitimacy, the sort of Confucian virtue, is very much present in China.
I think certainly there is a view that the leadership would try to act as if they are very good Confucians in China. And I wonder to what extent that is actually very effective. Because I think one of the issues I have with China, and it was Professor Huang Yasheng who laid this out very well, is that the state tries to increase a lot of legitimacy in the virtue of the rulers, but they’re not thinking in terms of incentives and constraints and systems that really try to police behavior and induce better governance.
When they reduce things into a matter of morality and virtue, it becomes more about the person rather than about the system. And I think Huang Yasheng has been really good at pointing out how virtue has been a distraction to better governance. What do you think?
Yeah, no, I think that he’s not wrong, that that is a problem. It’s not systematized; that it’s still subject to a lot of kind of patrimonialization. And I think that he’s absolutely right, that if you look at patterns of protest in Chinese history, the way that it is voiced often is in terms of moral failings of leaders rather than particular policies. That is not always a helpful framing when it comes from above or from below. So I tend to agree with him there.
I want to move on though and talk about legitimacy itself. I think there’s this inability among many Americans, and I think you just hinted at it just now, to see beyond procedural legitimacy as the only possible foundation for proper political authority.
I have long believed that this fundamental refusal—it’s not always articulated, but it’s often really present in the American habitus, just in the language that we use—is a big part of the problem when it comes to forming a good understanding of China. It produces a very unhelpful moral framing, and it makes us interpret everything that Beijing does in the most negative possible light.
I think it fuels escalation. It’s not like Beijing is unaware also that there is this kind of assumption of illegitimacy on the American part. I mean, it’s pretty obvious from China’s point of view, and it makes them very defensive. It makes them very anxious. It makes them also assume the worst: that they assume America’s real goal is to destabilize China, which, yeah, they’re not necessarily wrong.
Maybe you’re not.
So my question is, does this appear to you to be changing? Do you think that there is now an appeal to the American public of this idea of performance legitimacy, especially since procedural legitimacy no longer appears in America to deliver the goods when it seems to be so badly eroded? Is there kind of an uptick in appreciation for performance legitimacy?
Because I mean, just to put my cards on the table, I mean, I’ve noticed since January of this year a vibe shift, especially among younger people, in their attitudes toward China. And often it seems to be on the grounds that, hey, look, they deliver the goods.
I think there absolutely is a sense even within the American elite to say, well, we design all of these… Procedures in place in order to ensure some sort of fairness and making sure that the public interest is consulted. And I think there has been a sense even within the Democratic Party that, you know, we take a look at these blue states and blue cities, big cities, which are almost unanimously governed by Democrats. And they don’t seem to be working all that well.
You know, there’s tremendous public disorder in a lot of cities. Mass transit isn’t functioning very well. A lot of politicians are much more interested to govern on social issues rather than delivering economic issues that many families, working-class families care the most about. And I think there is a sense that we can’t just rely on processes in order to deliver the sort of legitimacy that we’re talking about.
I think that that is a very vibrant debate within the left now, that we can’t simply be the lawyerly society anymore. How do we actually deliver the goods? And so this is where, to put my own cards on the table, I am in favor of abundance. I am in favor of Ezra and Derek’s program to create much better cities, show that California and New York are not deeply broken things.
That when voters point to the track record of Democratic mayors as well as governors, there is something real here to be able to say that they’re actually meeting the needs of the people rather than just making sort of statements and performative gestures that don’t actually deliver the goods for anyone.
So in the end, and here, I mean, we’ll kind of wrap up with this, but you know, the engineering mindset can be way too literal, right? And the lawyerly mindset can be way too formal. I guess what I want is some kind of conceptual pluralism. I want like this set of institutional practices that somehow are able to switch frames, you know, to use the right frame in the right moment.
I guess what I’d like to see is somehow that we build the muscle inside China, its one-party state, to build that muscle inside polarized democracies like the one we live in right now, to be able to do that, to be able to be, you know, conceptually plural in that way. And I feel like that’s what your book gets at.
Is that a fair characterization? And what are the ways we can build toward that kind of, you know, conceptual pluralism?
You’re absolutely right, Kaiser. And I’m glad that you picked up on this point, that one of the things I really craved after spending six years in China was some degree of pluralism, that, you know, it wasn’t just one official register speaking above all the rest. That was really eagerly censoring all of these different viewpoints.
And I think I’ve said so many cancelable remarks on this podcast, Kaiser, but let me offer a yet more cancelable remark. I think there is a better profession rather than engineers and lawyers to govern the population, and that is dentists. No, I joke.
I think that the right profession to govern the population, if we had to choose but one, would be something like economists. I think that economists have a sense of procedure, they have a sense of getting things done, and they have a sense of social science, not to engage in really stupid things.
Unfortunately, I think economists are the most reviled academic profession on the planet. They certainly have gotten into a sticky wicket for themselves. But I think one thing that I will always be glad for for economists is that they were the people most actively pushing back against things like policies like the one-child policy.
That was the case in China, in which it was the economist who was the head of Peking University that really pushed back against the one-child policy in earlier formulations in the 1950s. And it was mostly the economic profession in the West that pushed back against the population bomb by Ehrlich.
And so I think that economists are the happy go-between. But I think that economists certainly need to be supplemented by degrees of pluralism on themselves. There should be lawyers in government. Absolutely. There should also be engineers in government rather than the U.S. Senate, which has 47 people who went to law school and one person trained in engineering.
I think there should be some sort of a balance with all of these things. I certainly don’t want to be entirely ruled by humanists. Mao Zedong was many things. He was, I think, primarily a poet. And if you take a look at earlier iterations of the Soviet Union, you had all these fantastic writers around Joseph Stalin. They were such good writers. They were such good literary critics.
And look at what a mess they made. So I don’t want to be governed by poets and literary critics. That sounds like an absolutely terrible paradigm. I think what we need are people who understand social science. And so my nomination is to be ruled by economists.
I’m going to put my vote in for historians. I think they have that sort of… Perspicacity and then that broader frame. And they’re not as paralyzed as economists are. And if we have to go with economists, I’m going to go with the Arthur Krobers over the Michael Pettises to rule us. That’s a better economist, perhaps. I think I, as someone who belongs to an institution called the Hoover History Lab, think that historians would not be so bad either.
Yeah, not so bad at all. Well, Dan, what a fantastically fun and wide-ranging conversation I’ve had. I cannot recommend the book more highly. Make sure that you get out and buy it right away. It comes out on the 26th, on August 26th. I encourage you all to pick up a copy. Above all, it’s a really fun read. It’s full, like I said, of really great turns of phrase. I had a long list of memorable quotes from it that I put together as I was reading it.
Let’s move on now, though, down to the segment I call “Paying It Forward,” where I ask you to name-check a younger colleague, maybe somebody at Hoover. I mean, Hoover was full of villains as far as I can tell, but there’s got to be one person worth name-checking there before we move on to recommendations. So who do you offer “Paying It Forward”?
I will offer two names:
So those are my two names, Afra Wong as well as He Liu. He Liu and I have crossed swords a little bit on Substack. He’s extremely committed to the liberal project when it comes to China, and nothing wrong with that. But like I said, we’ve crossed swords a bit. But great recommendations both. Afra, I’ve seen some of her work as well, and it’s excellent.
What about recommendations, Dan? Do you have a book you’ve read recently that you would like to recommend or anything, film, music, anything at all?
Well, I think over the course of book writing, I really got myself back into the classics, the things that I have really enjoyed. And so I guess I will recommend two sets of things.
The first set are the Mozart’s Italian operas written with Lorenzo da Ponte. These are:
I found myself, over the course of book writing, listening to these highly pleasurable, fun, and inventive operas that I think will stay with me for the rest of my life. So these are the Italian operas by Mozart.
Yeah.
And I think what I will do is also recommend my quartet of favorite novels. I have four novels that I’ve been rereading recently. And so the first one is The Red and the Black by Stendhal, which has these incredible depictions of the mistakes and stupidities that one commits in the act of love. This is a French novel that was published in 1830.
I will also throw in another French novel, the Proust. And so these are really wonderful, intoxicating tales of love that Marcel Proust has created for us. The entire series of In Search of Lost Time.
That’s right. And the Penguin translations are all quite good in English.
A third novel is that everybody is reading Moby Dick this summer.
Yeah. Why is that? Why is everyone reading Moby Dick? I mean, I know that Joe Weisenthal from the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast seems to be leading the charge on this. But I reread Moby Dick about, well, maybe six or seven years ago. Yeah, fantastic novel. But what do you think explains it being such a zeitgeist thing this summer?
It is just like a strange and bizarre marvelous white whale. You never know at which corners of the four seas that Moby Dick will shoot his spout up. And so I think that’s a little bit of a mystery to me. But I am I am a dickhead. And I love the depictions of mesmerizing whale lore.
And my favorite final novel is Bleak House by Charles Dickens. It is just this very fun, inventive, clever book that is a miracle of construction. So I commend it to your listeners.
Operas by Mozart, as well as this quartet of novels. Fantastic. Great, great, great, great.
I have a couple of recommendations. One is by Yun Sun from the Stimson Center. She heads their China practice. It’s in Foreign Affairs. It’s called China is Enjoying Trump 2.0, which I thought did a really good job of sort of channeling Beijing’s perspective on what’s happened in the time since Trump took office now. It’s like seven months now.
It’s really good. She’s always solid. And this is a particularly, I think, Excellent view into the Chinese mind on this. I also want to plug a book I’m reading right now. It’s called Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clarke, who is one of my favorite historians. It’s just an amazing work of history.
Hopefully, you’ve read his earlier book, The Sleepwalkers, which is about the run-up to the First World War, which I also highly recommend. I’ve actually recommended it before on Seneca.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a working historian who has all the things that Clarke brings to the table, which is just an obvious facility in so many languages and this ability to just zoom in. Because the revolutions of 1848, which is what Revolutionary Spring is about, these happen all over Europe and at the same time.
So if you’ve got to write a book on this, you need to be able to:
And the other thing, of course, is that Clarke is just a brilliant, brilliant writer. His prose is just delicious.
I think it’s such a good book. It’s a really hardcore history. I mean, it’s not for the faint of heart. There’s more detail than I think a lot of people are used to, and it’s just great. So that and Sleepwalkers—my recommendations.
Dan, once again, thank you so much for taking so much time to talk to me. And happy birthday.
“Thank you.”
What is it? Happy birthday.
“It is my 33rd birthday.”
What is three? Is that an auspicious number?
“I’m not sure.”
Well, it’s half of 66, which is an auspicious number.
“Okay, that’s good.”
Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time. And congrats on the book, which is, again, just so terrific. It’s been a total delight.
“Thank you again, Kaiser.”
Looking forward to seeing you again.
You’ve been listening to The Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Kuo. Support the show through Substack at www.sinecapodcast.com, where there is a terrific offering of original China-related writing and audio.
Email me at [email protected] if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show. Huge thanks to my guest, Dan Wong.
Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.
Bye.
2026-02-03 08:00:01
Why the Belt and Road Is Back in a Big Way
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Hello and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Sinica podcast network. I’m Eric Olander. Today, we’re going to get an update on the state of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Now, for the past several years, we’ve been hearing that the BRI is spent. The Chinese have run out of money and Global South countries that were the destination for so much of that investment simply can’t afford to take on more debt. And even the Chinese themselves have tried to change the narrative to make way for what was supposed to be a new, more austere era. Remember all of that talk about small yet beautiful? In Chinese, it’s called Xiao Er Mei (小而美). That was the line that they told everyone about smaller, more affordable, less risky BRI projects around the world.
Well, the data tells a very different story. BRI engagements last year actually reached an all-time high of more than $200 billion. Construction projects increased by 81% and investments surged by 61% compared to 2024. Energy engagements, especially in the fossil fuel sector, were very, very hot in 2025. And while the U.S. may have soured on Africa, Chinese investors haven’t. The continent was the top destination for BRI engagements anywhere in the world last year.
All of this comes from a new report published by the Green Belt and Road Center at Fudan University in Shanghai and Griffith University in Australia. Our old friend, Christophe Nedepil, is the man in charge of the project and joins us today from his office at Griffith University.
Good morning, Christophe, and welcome back to the show.
“Good morning to you, Eric. Great to be here and good to see you.”
It’s wonderful to see you and to get these surprising numbers because, again, we had heard that the BRI was all but done. Even the Chinese themselves were trying to brace us for a much more austere era. Your data says otherwise. What do you explain for this big surge of construction and investment by Chinese stakeholders?
“Yeah, I think that was a very big surprise already. When we were tracking the data, this level of commitment that we’ve seen in 2025, it’s something that we hadn’t expected and obviously hadn’t seen before.”
We’re at levels of BRI engagement and engagement, again, there’s construction contracts and investments—construction contracts where Chinese construction companies, like particularly state-owned enterprises, take the lead in implementing a large project. And investments are much more where the Chinese are investing their own money through equity investments, so they take ownership.
Now, these levels are more than double from the COVID years. So it is quite impressive. And you mentioned the energy engagement over $90 billion, and that over $90 billion is more than we’ve seen. Just kind of only the energy engagement is higher than we’ve seen during the COVID years. So this level of engagement is really something that is quite surprising to us.
I think there are a couple of explanations, of course. In the COVID years, 2020, 2021, and 2022, there was this whole idea of Xiao Armei, like small, yet beautiful, which was, I think, very logical. There was a lot of global risks. It was difficult to make deals. It was difficult to travel. And so the projects overall, the project volume decreased.
And now, really, this uptake in a still very volatile world, but with massive deals, scales more than $10 billion for single engagements.
So I think the largest one, also outside the BRI, is $37 billion by TikTok in Brazil. But we’re also tracking outside BRI. So we’re not just tracking BRI. We’re reporting on BRI, but in all the massive engagements:
And this $10+ billion engagement, we’ve not seen before. This is a new level of BRI engagement that I think is quite interesting to observe, and we’ll see whether that continues over the years to come.
So a lot of us were surprised, not only because of the size of the numbers but also the timing of it. Coming in 2025, when Donald Trump comes back into power, the international system goes into disarray, is there any connection that you can see in the data between the events that have been happening, say, within the new Trump era—that is the disruptions? Do they see an opportunity to move as the United States is pulling back from the world? Or are these just more coincidental in terms of the timing?
“I think there’s both. These projects take a while, particularly large-scale projects, take a while to negotiate.” This is not something that the Chinese are able to do with their partner countries in months. This is usually maybe a year in the making. So not everything that we have seen in 2025 was agreed to in 2025.
Now, what we know, of course, that over the last years, and this is not just the Trump era, this is also Obama era. And there was supply chain diversification, supply chain de-risking, with manufacturing plants being constructed in countries outside of China in order to reduce the tariff burdens from exporting directly from China, so rather exporting from other countries.
And there, of course, then came Liberation Day in April 2025, and with the massive increase of tariffs around the world to the U.S. And again, some of the Chinese companies have actually reacted quite quickly and also, for example, scrapped investment decisions for manufacturing from Vietnam and brought them to Morocco or other countries that have lower tariffs. So there’s still a lot of movement around in terms of the investment decisions, and that is also driven, of course, by geopolitics.
Let’s go back to energy. You mentioned that that was one of the major investment surges of last year. In fact, it was the highest of any period since the BRI’s inception at $94 billion, more than double what it was the previous year back in 2024. Give us the profile of these energy investments, because we had heard that the surge in Chinese investment overseas was in solar panels and new energy. But it seems to get these numbers at $94 billion, you’re going to have some of the older energy modes in there as well. Tell us a little bit about what happened in the energy sector.
Yeah, so I think kind of one of the quotes that have been picked up, it’s like
“2025 was the dirtiest and the greenest year in terms of energy engagement.”
And that’s true in absolute terms. So the overall engagement, as you said, increased quite a bit. It is particularly driven by oil and gas related engagement. These, for example, in Nigeria, the gas energy industrial park, there are a number of other fossil fuel engagements across the region.
So fossil fuel engagement actually has taken by far the majority, I think 75% of the total engagement is related to fossil fuel. And that’s a very high emitting energy engagement. And this is, so I remember in 2020, we celebrated that green energy or renewable energy has broken the 50% mark of the total energy engagement. And we’ve been backsliding since then in terms of the share. So that’s a worrying trend in some ways, particularly if we want to talk about a green Belt and Road Initiative and China’s green engagement.
Now, at the same time, the green energy engagement also increased to record levels. So that’s why we can also say it’s been the greenest year. And so that’s particularly in solar construction, but also in solar and wind construction, as well as in battery storage. As a broader kind of engagement portfolio that the Chinese have compared to previous years.
What’s important to note here, and I think we’ve also discussed this previously, Eric, is that we’re not looking at exports. So China’s green energy-related exports, solar panels and wind, whatever Pakistan, for example, imports 19 gigawatt of rooftop solar, this is not captured in the data. But because this is just pure export, we’re not capturing export. We’re capturing construction engagement and investment. And again, in the export space, China’s green-related exports, of course, are also increasing. And there’s great other reports out there that look at that.
Do you get a sense that in the fossil fuel sector the Chinese are building infrastructure and connectivity for exports from other countries to China? Or is this building coal, gas and oil infrastructure for these countries to use themselves or a mix of both? How does that break down?
So we don’t know exactly what it is used for each single project. What we see is that a lot of the fossil fuel engagement is indeed through construction contracts. So where Chinese construction companies just have a very strong expertise in
where Chinese companies potentially, either through a government-to-government contract or even through open bidding, have offered the most competitive price and therefore get chosen to lead this implementation.
And it might come with some Chinese financing, but it also might just come with local financing. What’s interesting for the Chinese construction companies is that a lot of these projects are very well-financed because you have the fossil fuel that in the end generates revenue. So you can be pretty sure that you’re going to get paid back for the construction that you do. And that’s different, for example, probably we’re going to talk about it in road infrastructure, which is public infrastructure, where there’s not such a strong revenue model. And therefore, the risks for the Chinese construction companies are much higher.
Again, fossil fuel, very clear. You’re going to sell the fossil fuel. You’re going to make money. And then you can pay back the Chinese construction companies. And so it’s a very lucrative business also for the Chinese.
That seems to be one of the trends that you’ve been following over several years now: the types of infrastructure that the Chinese are financing and building that used to be railroads, roads, things that we would call public goods, are less prominent today as opposed to telecommunications networks, fossil fuels — things that the moment you turn on, revenue starts coming in.
So that debt sustainability issue becomes paramount in what the Chinese are funding because, obviously, a lot of the countries where they’re doing these activities are having debt issues. So they’re looking for projects that are revenue generating right from the start. Is that a fair assessment?
I think that’s a very fair assessment.
So in 2019, the Chinese published the debt sustainability guidelines. That means for companies to evaluate whether they’re going to give a loan or work with a country to build an infrastructure project and look at the country’s profile, whether they are able to pay back the debt and whether they’re actually exacerbating the debt issues of that country.
Since 2019, this debt sustainability framework exists, and so that was before COVID. Then we saw during COVID that a lot of the global South countries were subject to a lot of sovereign debt issues. That impacts Chinese construction companies quite severely because, in the end, it’s the construction companies, if they took out loans for building, let’s say, a coal-fired power plant or a road project, and whatever country — Pakistan, for example — does not pay back the loan or does not pay back the loan in time, who’s going to be paying the loan?
And in the end, it is actually often the construction companies that have to shoulder some of the banks necessarily, but it’s the construction companies that have to shoulder the risk.
So there’s a very clear risk management necessity to understand:
I was surprised that Africa turned out to be the top destination last year for BRI engagement, $61.2 billion, an increase of 283%, largely by this big project in Nigeria that you referenced, $24.6 billion.
Just to be clear, is that project in Nigeria:
Because sometimes it’s not clear.
It is so true, Eric. So we are trying our best in our data to distinguish project-level commitments. I think every database is running into the same issues. We don’t track money. We track announcements of projects by two independent sources where possible, or a stock market announcement. So we try to be as rigorous with our methodology as possible.
There are different levels of commitments that we track. This one is, I think, more than an MOU. It’s agreed. We have the location. We have the amount. We have both sides’ agreement.
In the end, I believe this project will change and will evolve. It’s not kind of… The design phase is definitely not finished from what we can see. So there’s a lot more work that needs to come to make this project actually real. But the commitment is quite explicit from both sides and confirmed. And so that’s why we were willing to include it in the database.
Yeah, the report also said that part of the reason for this surge in Chinese engagement in Africa was because of potentially, again, just a theory, because of the lower U.S. tariffs that African countries received traditionally through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which is now in the process of being renewed through Congress.
By the way, something very interesting on the renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act.
But you said that there might be some connection between lower U.S. tariffs and the surge of Chinese BRI engagement. Tell us a little bit more about that. If a Chinese company wants to export to the U.S. and is in the process of making an investment decision, the logic is, of course, that the Chinese company will look at countries that have a tax regime that is favorable or a tariff regime that is favorable to them to be competitive against other competitors. It might be sitting in a country with a high tariff regime. So these investment decisions are just normal. I don’t think that any country or any company would not make those.
What’s interesting with the Chinese, and I think there’s an upside and a downside to that, is that China’s speed, making quick decisions, being able to build factories very quickly, and to churn out the products very quickly, is an opportunity, I think, also for host countries, for BRI countries, to attract specific types of investment.
The downside is that, and the downside is that, once the regime changes, and maybe there’s some issues, and maybe another opportunity for the same Chinese company, there’s also a risk that the facility will be abandoned very quickly.
Now, early on in the BRI, back in the 2013-2014 era, it was a lot of Chinese state-owned enterprises backed by Chinese policy bank loans that were going out and doing these big deals, these huge projects. We saw that run-up of lending that peaked in 2016, and that’s gone down. And the Chinese private sector back then played a secondary role.
Over the past couple of years, as we’ve talked to you, one of the things that we’ve noticed is that
Are you seeing that in the data for 2025 as well?
Yeah, so definitely for the investment side, it’s mostly private companies that are leading the fray, and it’s interestingly also a lot of these new tech companies that are both in kind of the IT tech, like TikTok and Alibaba, as well as in the green tech space, like Jinko Solar and other green tech companies that are leading the way.
These are private companies that are interested in:
- being closer to their customers
- diversifying their supply chains
- de-risking their supply chains
- going abroad
And that’s also now the capacity, management capacity, and technological leadership to be actually a really, really attractive partner in host countries to set up factories.
And that’s not just in BRI countries, that’s also in a lot of developed countries, and those are trying to attract battery manufacturers from China, because this is state-of-the-art technology, very different from the early phases of the BRI, where such technological leadership just did not exist.
From that perspective, I’m always very, very impressed, and I think the rapid emergence of these technological leaders in China over the past couple of years has very much flipped kind of our logic, what type of investment we want to attract.
It was at the beginning, of course, the Chinese wanted to attract Western technology, and now it is often the case that everybody wants to, particularly in the green space, attract the Chinese technological leaders to set up shop.
In the construction engagement, it’s still a lot of state-owned enterprises that are very engaged abroad. So, these are real leaders in driving these construction engagements.
What’s, I think, also clear is that state-owned enterprises have a different mandate, particularly of spending their own money. Now, construction engagement really brings them in money. That’s just revenue. You’re a service provider.
For investment, you have to, of course, use your own money, and Chinese state-owned enterprises might have a mandate to also invest domestically to create jobs. And it also, kind of, their financing modalities are quite different. Their approval processes are quite different from private companies. And so, their ability to invest abroad has also changed over the last year.
So, that’s, I think, why we’re also seeing less state-owned enterprise investments compared to the previous years.
As we look forward to 2026, which obviously is now underway, some of the trends that we should watch out for are probably:
And mining is something we didn’t talk about, but that was one of the areas that was also showing a lot of activity.
Do you expect Africa to continue to be a main focus, or will the Chinese look elsewhere to spread out some of those investments?
Man, that’s always the golden question, looking into the future. Obviously, we don’t know. I always start with that.
The trends that we’ve seen over the last years, I think, can continue. So, I think we’ll see even more tech-related engagement.
And we’ve seen this tech-related engagement, not just in developed countries, but really in emerging economies. I believe that this will continue. There are a lot of opportunities for the Chinese to set up shop. There is a lot more capacity for the Chinese in the management skills to do so, to manage all the local staff. So, I think this is really a learning. And therefore, I think this trend will continue.
In terms of the mining, there’s a very clear engagement across the world to kind of own more mines, to kind of also use this accelerated need for a lot of the transition minerals to utilize on this trend. And it’s not just the Chinese. It’s also, of course, the Australians and other countries that are trying to get their mines and their processing in order.
In terms of regional engagement, there will be a lot of kind of up and down. So, I always believe that kind of one year does not give a trend. And so, this year, of course, we saw a lot of Africa engagement. In the previous year, we often saw a lot of Southeast Asia engagement.
I think the only one that has been very constant over the last years is actually the Middle East, where there has been just a very strong engagement across a number of different sectors. It includes:
So, I think this Middle East engagement has been very strong. Also, in countries that are often not seeing a lot of Western engagement, it includes Iraq, Afghanistan, where the Chinese had some good engagement.
Again, Africa, Southeast Asia, I think this is always kind of up and down. I’m not able to see a very clear trend where it will go over the next year.
Okay. The report is the China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2025. It is by far the most authoritative report on the trends related to the BRI, where the money is going, what they’re doing with it, and who is actually engaged.
It was prepared by Christoph Nedepil, who is the director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University in Australia, and the acting director of the Green Finance and Development Center that’s part of the School of Finance at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Thank you so much, Christoph, for letting us know about everything that’s going on. We’re looking forward to talking to you later in the year to get an update on how things are going in the first half.
You do these reports every, I think, two or three times a year, correct?
“Every six months.”
“Every six months.”
So we’ll talk to you over the summer to get an update on how the first half of 2026 is going.
Thank you so much for joining us.
“What a pleasure to be here again, Eric.”
“Always a pleasure to see you.”
Thank you, Christoph, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today.
We’ll be back again next week with another edition of the China Global South Podcast on behalf of everyone around the world at the China Global South Project.
Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
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2026-01-29 08:00:01
Industrial Maximalism and Its Discontents: Dan Wang on US-China Competition – # 104
So I think that we have moved on from this idea that the Chinese cannot innovate. I think that idea is now decisively buried, and I am glad that we have buried that idea.
We’ve moved on to another idea, which is that, okay, the Chinese are much better at scaling, going from 1 to 100, whereas the Americans are still good at going from 0 to 1. And I want to suggest, no, let’s bury this idea, too, that the Chinese are able to both innovate as well as scale, that numbers are continuous. And so I think this idea of going from 0 to 1 as just exclusively the remit of the West is not empirical at this point.
And there’s also an idea of, you know, what does it matter if you go from 0 to 1 if you cannot go from 1 to 100?
Welcome to Manifold. It’s my pleasure to be here with Dan Wang at his home institution. We’re here at the Hoover Institution.
Dan, as you know, is the author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. This was a huge success. The book was listed as one of the best books of 2025 by the Financial Times.
I think it will become one of the go-to books for everyone in the United States or in the English-speaking world that wants to learn more about China and the competition between the U.S. and China.
Dan, welcome to the podcast.
Steve, welcome to the Hoover Institution. We are sitting in a seminar room at the library just to showcase our intellectual content. I’ve placed behind me a copy of the U.S. Industrial Outlook from 1991. This is the intellectual caliber you’ve reached, Steve.
A classic, classic. So I want to congratulate you for the success of your book.
Thank you.
Now, for the audience, I’m not going to try to do justice to the book because it’s quite a lengthy book, and Dan has been interviewed something like 70 times about his book.
Is that the right number?
Yes.
So I won’t try to rehash all the details of his book. I’m going to drill down on certain topics that I think my audience, the manifold audience, which is very interested in the U.S.-China competition and the development of China in the last generation — I think that audience already has a fair amount of background on this.
Dan’s book does a great job of introducing someone who isn’t an expert in this topic to the situation. But we’re going to try to drill down on a few topics that I think my audience is, and I myself am, particularly interested in. So I hope that’s okay, Dan.
Sounds great.
Okay, so one of the things, one of the themes in your book is contrasting the so-called engineering state of China versus the lawyerly society of the United States. And I think that’s a brilliant formulation, and it’s gone viral.
So just the other day, I was listening to a keynote talk that Adam Tooze, the historian, was giving for the London Review of Books, and there was a pretty big audience. It was a keynote address, and he spent a fair amount of time discussing — I don’t know if he mentioned you, but he used that exact terminology.
So you’re already affecting some of the leading thinkers in our society.
Affecting or infecting, Steve?
Affecting.
I would like to hear a little about your reflections on the book tour. So what were the things that surprised you? Were there any particular questions where people challenged you or changed your thinking on the topic?
I think the first thing I should acknowledge is that this idea of lawyers and engineers has become a memetic idea, but it hasn’t exactly been original to me. And I want to first acknowledge that this is sort of an idea that’s been more or less in the air for quite a long time.
We’ve had Bill Clinton quip in something like 1996 when he was in China to say,
“Well, we are governed by so many lawyers, you’re governed by so many engineers, we should have a swap.”
So I think what I’ve really tried to do was to take this concept and weaponize it and really try to create a bit of a framework in terms of thinking through China and write it in a way that fits my strengths as a writer, which is to write these very long essays in the form of annual letters, really to try to explain what works and doesn’t work in China.
And I think one of the things I’ve really wanted to do is to try to capture this fact that I would say that China, modern China today, is defined by two central facts, two central trends:
And so I think that is sort of the two facts I really want to get across. And as part of this book tour, I think what surprised me is the extent to which people are now quite curious about China. I think China is in the water, so to speak. Everybody has to have a view about China, whether that is something very social media driven like home prices in Chongqing—that’s been a weird mimetic trend to take off. You know, whatever aspect of weird industrial chemicals, that was a TikTok meme very briefly.
So the youths are on to this China thing. At the same time, the older elites are also very on to this thing. And so I think what I’ve been heartened by is that my book isn’t just being read by folks in the Bay Area where we’re speaking, not just folks in Washington, D.C., not just folks in New York, but also folks in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, the broader Midwest, as well as the rest of the world. Because I think it is really important for all of us to be at least more curious about China.
I think Trump really did you a favor by starting this trade war and ensuring that every day on the front page of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, there was some headline about China or U.S.-China competition. So definitely the timing of your book was exquisite.
Perhaps. And I think that one might have to say, “thank you, President Trump.” And maybe more of us will be compelled to say, thank you, President Trump, more on an ongoing basis now.
But I think there was something about the year 2025 in which we started the year with news about DeepSeek, moved on to news about electric vehicles, and then had more of the trade war, the 14th five-year plan. But I think that, you know, every day now there is going to be more and more China news. And frankly, that’s probably a good thing because
What is more important to the United States now than these two big trends, namely the rise of China in a more adversarial relationship, as well as the rise of technology, which has been something that I’ve been thinking about for the past decade.
One of the things I maybe not everybody in the audience is aware of is that your life really prepared you exquisitely to write this book and even prepared you for that specific formulation of lawyers versus engineers.
So when you were working in China, was it roughly 2017 to 2023?
You were working for Gavekal, which is an investment analysis firm. I mean, you were often analyzing companies in the chip industry, semiconductor industry. So you were very familiar with the engineering state, the technological development of China, the competitiveness of the products and companies.
But then I think when you were writing the book, you were in residence at Yale Law School.
So you were surrounded by the top legal minds in our country. And so you had both juxtaposed right before you, and that must have helped you formulate the ideas in the book.
So I think that that is absolutely right, that I’ve been thinking about China and technology, working for Gavekal Economics, working for my rabbi, Arthur Kroeber, thinking very extensively about China’s developments in
living in Beijing, as well as Hong Kong, as well as Shanghai, throughout the entirety of zero COVID as well.
And after zero COVID fell apart in China, I moved to the Yale Law School where I was a fellow. And that was really the contrast that set everything up, that I lived through zero COVID, in which the numbers are right there in the name, no ambiguity about what zero COVID could possibly mean.
Thinking through the history of the one-child policy, which was in part heavily influenced by a missile engineer who was one of China’s top cybernetics experts, mathematicians at the time.
And then sitting at the Yale Law School among what was, I think, the self-consciously grooming America’s ruling class at a time when this was in 23, 24, when the Biden administration recruited very heavily from the Yale Law School. We had folks like
who were all graduates of Yale Law. These were people who, I think, suborned the economists and tried to really assert their influence as lawyers to run a lot of policy.
And I think all of that came together very, very well to think that, well, you know, actually, the engineers and the lawyers, though it collapses quite a lot, no question, that is actually a pretty decent framework.
No less bad than socialist, capitalist, democratic, authoritarian to have another lens to think about this important relationship. Now, setting aside China entirely, as somebody who spends all his time talking to other scientists and talking to technologists in Silicon Valley, the idea that our nation should be run by lawyers is, to us, a shockingly bad outcome.
And, I mean, it’s something that people decry constantly in the circles that I move in. And, I don’t know, perhaps you disagree with me, but I’m curious how you think about that.
Yeah, well, there’s a brilliant politician who offered this quote that:
“Power isn’t something that is ever given to you. Power is something that you have to seize.”
Now, who said that? Was that Mussolini? No, that was someone far more ruthless. I mean, of course, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
So, I think that, you know, if you are going to want to have power, no one is going to give it to you on a silver platter. And rather than, you know, decrying the lawyers for having seized all that power for themselves, I would say, why don’t we point the finger at the economists, let’s say, who had power tenuously, but then gave it up and they were really, it was really pried out of their fingers by the lawyers, I would say.
Why don’t we say to the engineers and scientists, can you not get better at organizing society? Can you not make a case better to the population and speak in a little bit more of a coherent and appealing manner than you presently do and try to get that power away from them?
So, that’s my challenge to the scientists. We can’t expect the lawyers to let go. You’ve got to seize it from them.
Yeah. It’s very interesting because we may have just entered an age where, if you think about it, so Trump is more of a business person, entrepreneur, although he certainly has had a lot of experience with the legal system. He’s not a legal mind himself.
The other people who are contending for power, like Elon Musk, they often control these huge platforms and can subtly influence the messages that are promulgated on those platforms.
So, we could be entering an era where vast wealth and control over these media platforms is what propels people to power, not Yale Law School.
Yeah. Well, I think the first thing to acknowledge is that Trump is an excellent, splendid product of the Lawyerly Society.
Yeah. He has abducted Maduro from Venezuela using, because this fellow is designated a narco-terrorist, charged by… And a machine gun owner.
And a machine gun owner.
And I saw some tweet about this. I’m not sure if it was actually true, but one of the charges against Maduro now is that he has been dispossessing native peoples, indigenous peoples, from land in the course of oil drilling.
So, you know, there is something, there is a legal pretense, a legal fiction upon a lot of things that Donald Trump tries to do.
I think a lot about some of these quotes. There was someone, there was a Latin American ruler who once said,
“Anything for my friends, for my enemies, the law.”
So, you know, law can be terrifying. And Donald Trump knows what lawfare is. He was schooled by Roy Cohn, who practiced lawfare extensively.
This is a man who, for whom lawsuits are absolutely central to his business career. He has sued totally everyone. He keeps suing people three times a day before breakfast. And he is very intent on, you know, flinging accusations left and right, intimidating people, and trying to establish guilt in the court of public opinion.
So the comment you made about the sort of trumped-up charges against Maduro is illustrative of why people who come from more of a science or techno-entrepreneurial background really hate the ideas, the idea of lawyers running society.
It’s because, for us, the number one thing is uncovering truth, uncovering how the world works.
So in the case of a scientist:
And for an entrepreneur, the truth is discovering:
So for us, it’s mainly that concern, not making things up or making arguments regardless of the true reality of the situation, which is the way that we think about lawyers. And so it just seems very repulsive for me.
The most jarring thing that has occurred to me in dealing with people in positions of high power in our government and other governments who are trained as lawyers is, as a scientist, I see they’re often just not very anchored in the reality of what is true or not true in the world. And they’re just making arguments on whatever side they want to make the argument in favor of.
They’re free to make that argument and often free of the actual kind of scientific or rigorous thinking that we’re used to.
Yeah, I get where you’re coming from. And I think it is a position that is easy to be sympathetic to. But I want to rebut it somewhat with this idea that what is truth? And if we can discover the truth, what follows is not necessarily something that scientists are able to comment on very well. You say that entrepreneurs are trying to figure out what consumers want.
Well, is that a truth of what consumers want? That sort of process of trying to determine all of that does not seem quite as straightforward as measuring gravity or something, right? That is, consumers are fickle. The economy is a web of relations. There’s no commandments dictating what people want to do. And so that process immediately becomes very, very complicated.
Now, what we could have are scientists asserting themselves to say that global warming is true. Okay. And I think that is a statement that we can more or less say is a factual statement now. But what we ought to do with it, I think that doesn’t necessarily follow.
Does that mean that we need to cease all economic activity and lock people up so that no one emits any carbon? That is something that lawyers, as well as economists and many other folks, as well as all sorts of humanists, have to get involved in to figure out how do we resolve these normative questions? How do we handle disputes within society?
Because the Chinese are very capable of following science to its logical conclusion, which in the case of zero COVID was to essentially lock up the residents of its biggest city of about 25 million people, or to say that, well, we have this population crisis. The solution is extremely simple, one child per couple, which ended up being enormously disruptive to everyone.
So I would say that what we want is pluralism. What we need to have are some scientists and the ruling elites. We need to have some economists, lawyers, humanists, et cetera.
Yeah. I think that in navigating a rules-based system, principled system for determining how society should react to some discovered conclusion about reality, I mean, that is where you need a sophisticated legal system, a sophisticated system, civil society.
I think all those things are quite necessary and beneficial. It’s the commitment to our knowledge of how the universe is uncertain and we have to be disciplined in practicing our discovery of what turns out to be true or what doesn’t turn out to be true.
I think good business people are like scientists in this way that they can’t come in and say,
“I am sure people want to buy X. I am not going to give them X.”
They have to sort of look at,
So there’s a process of discovery that they’re committed to, which is an empirical process of observing what’s true in the world and reasoning based on that.
And I just find a lawyer that is practiced in debate and will adopt either position and throw themselves fully into that position without concern about whether the position is actually fundamentally true or false. That to us is very disturbing. That finding of truth is our sort of most sacred activity.
Yeah, well, what you call arguing out of both sides of your mouth, I can call empathy and understanding what the other side thinks. This is something that I think the Communist Party, for example, is not very good at doing. They do not have a good sense of how other people think.
And, you know, the Lawyerly Society has created some astonishing companies. The West Coast is the only region in the world that has created several companies worth trillions of dollars.
And maybe that’s a weird thing. Maybe things are overvalued. In fact, we can be sure that they’re overvalued. But I think that, you know, it doesn’t seem to me that the Lawyerly Society has been awful at creating companies, creating products, even though lawyers can argue any side.
Yeah, I think characterizing the U.S. as the Lawyerly Society makes sense in contrast to China. But as far as the way that the Google founders had to operate or the way that Jensen Huang had to operate, the law is part of the system that they’re in. I don’t know if it’s their primary concern or the thing that made their company valuable and Yahoo not so valuable.
It wasn’t necessarily that,
“Oh, this is a Lawyerly Society and that dictated the outcome.”
But certainly, I think property rights, well-defined rules for how businesses have to operate in society — all those things I think are important and maybe lacking in China at this point.
I think that’s a fair point.
Yeah. So I want to turn to a concept called industrial maximalism, which is promulgated by something sometimes called the Industrial Party in China. And in your book, you spend a little bit of time talking about this, and I think you actually investigated, I think you went and read some of the original documents or essays that started this movement all the way back in the early 2010s and mainly online. It was an online movement. It wasn’t started by the central government. It somehow made its way into the halls of power, but started really as an Internet phenomenon.
Some people who are watching the tech competition with China very closely, both from the Silicon Valley side and from the Chinese side, might say that this industrial maximalism idea has actually won out in the Chinese government. So the Chinese government, some people would argue, is actually behaving as if they’ve now embraced this idea of industrial maximalism. And so I just want to discuss that a little bit with you.
So maybe just say a little bit for the audience about what you wrote in the book about the Industrial Party and its history.
Yeah, the Industrial Party is not a legitimate political party because there are only, aside from the Communist Party, I believe there are eight other tolerated political parties in China, but all of them must be subservient and loyal and obedient to the Communist Party. So the Industrial Party is more of an online meme movement. Maybe this is one of these early memes from the Chinese Internet when it was a relatively free space before the Great Firewall really managed to slam down.
These were people who were essentially advocating for technocratic rule in order to pursue science and technology. These were people who have understood that China’s weaknesses stem almost entirely from backwardness in science and technology, that it was invaded brutally by Japan as well as partially colonized by Western powers. And the solution is to pursue not just the bomb, not just the satellite, but all sorts of important science and technology, and really to organize society, the entirety of society, to pursue these sort of things.
Now, there are some important canonical texts about this. One of them is something like, the title is something like, study or wash dishes. One of the most interesting ones is something called the Morning Star of Linggao, in which there is this online fan fiction community that imagined sending a lot of people from the present into something like the Ming Dynasty to industrialize the island of Hainan. And so, you know, it’s a kind of an interesting little read there.
At various points, the Industrial Party has been censored. And so, some of these people have been quite interesting. They were empowered to be major voices on the Internet. And I think these creative people did not always follow the dictates of the party. And when they spoke up, sometimes the Morning Star of Linggao was interrupted based on that fact.
I think that actually the canonical text of the Industrial Party was The Three-Body Problem, which is one of China’s best-known cultural exports now. And I love The Three-Body Problem. I think that it is a remarkable piece of science fiction. One of the underlying themes was that Liu Cixin said that it created a scenario in which humanity bands together under technocratic rule, builds these enormous spaceships controlled by the Navy in order to confront an extraterrestrial threat. And that feels like the sort of prescription that the industrial maximalists are really interested in.
So, for our non-Chinese listeners, I think it’s important to give some cultural context here, which is that for thousands of years, China regarded itself as at least the preeminent civilization that it knew of on the planet. And the reading of the past couple hundred years is the idea that some barbarians with superior science and technology came and inflicted terrible humiliations on Chinese civilization. And we are now recovering from that period, and China is reassuming its rightful place as one of the leading, perhaps the leading nation in the world. That’s sort of the background to all this.
So, I think if you’re a scientist or engineer in China, it’s natural for you to attach to science and technology as the thing which the barbarians used to beat us a couple hundred years ago, and the thing which we have to perfect now to restore our civilization to its rightful place.
Do you think that’s fair? That’s in the mind of like almost every Chinese person on the planet?
Yes, I think that is a fair reading. And I think that that is instilled into the minds of many. But I would offer two remarks. By the way, I’m not endorsing it. I’m just saying that that is a story that every Chinese person is familiar with.
Yes, that is a story that even before the Communist Party, the Chinese rulers have created this story. And the Communist Party has indeed put it into the heads of everyone. And I would want to offer a little bit of nuance here. First, if these were barbarians, how do they get all this great science and technology? So maybe there is at least a little bit something else here going on that these British, Dutch, red-bearded people were able to invent a lot of great things.
So was there something deficient in China that it wasn’t able to do? Maybe, maybe not. And the other part that I would offer is that, yes, China fell behind in what it referred to as the century of humiliation, in which these Western barbarians came over and seized major parts of China.
It made the people and the government suffer various indignities. And much more serious was the Japanese invasion, which was a brutal invasion by a fascist power that really ravaged a lot of the country and pushed the state into these pretty interior remote areas in order to carry on the fight.
And what I would offer is, you know, that was the century of humiliation. Yeah, pretty bad. I agree.
But what about the quarter century of self-humiliation that the Communist Party inflicted right afterwards, after 1949, when tens of millions of people perished after various landlord struggles, after the Great Leap Forward in which a famine ravaged the land? We had the Cultural Revolution.
Afterwards, there was this other spasm of the Wanchau policy. And then there’s some things that we don’t even speak so much about. You know, the strike hard against crime campaign in the 1980s. There were various issues with the Inner Mongolia Separatist Party that we don’t even think about. That created incredible ravages.
And that China was a society, after the Communist Party took over, that suffered these extraordinarily violent convulsions throughout society.
How do we explain something like that? Was that something that the barbarians inflicted upon the Chinese? No, I would say that that was something that emerged organically from them.
And so it is fine and good to think about the century of humiliation. Let’s also consider a little bit about the quarter century of self-humiliation.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the apologists for the current Chinese government, for the Communist Party, you know, they would say,
“We had to break a bunch of eggs and we made a bunch of mistakes to get us to where we are now. But now we finally emerged in our rightful place among the leading nations.”
I think one should not minimize the mistakes that were made, the terrible suffering, all that sort of thing. But I think from a nationalist perspective or even an ethno-nationalist perspective, you know, mistakes made by your own people, which inflict suffering on your own people, somehow—
I’m not justifying this, but I think this is the perspective—are more tolerable than things inflicted on you by some alien group of people. Right? I think that’s the psychology that governs this.
So they’re willing to overlook:
A miracle did happen that in a period of one, between one and two generations, it went from absolute levels of poverty, similar to the poorest countries in the world, to being possibly the most advanced technological civilization on the planet.
And so they’re willing, these people who are nationalists, are willing to forgive all of that based on where the country has now arrived.
Yes, and I think they are able to justify this and self-justify this. And I think that the rest of us don’t have to give in to some of that. And we can question whether self-inflicted harms is somehow morally better than other inflicted harms. And do the ends justify the means, whatever, an ancient philosophical question.
They would say yes, but that is something that we can also be—we can also interrogate and be critical about.
Yeah, I think from—I mean, you and I were both raised in—
And so from our perspective, the idea is that the greater country is one where one can critique what the government has done in the past, criticize it, try to open it up for consideration, even if it is embarrassing for the current regime or current leaders. And that’s a sign of strength of the country that that can happen.
You can have dissidents. The dissidents are allowed to air their views and people consider those views. And the country is internally stronger because of that.
I think one argument that people would make on the other side is that we are rising, speaking as if I were an industrial maximalist or Chinese nationalist or something,
“We are rising from the ashes. These guys came, they fed us opium. Japanese came and killed so many people. MacArthur wanted to use nukes against Chinese cities during the Korean War. We had to overcome all that. And we’re still overcoming.”
The moment we showed some ability to move up the value chain, the Americans tried to completely crush us.
And so when this is all over and we are on top and we’re no longer threatened, Threatened by the West, then we can relax and create this beautiful vision that you have for how society should be.
But right now we’re in the middle of a war and you don’t necessarily see the war. The war is being conducted in a very serious way, not for the average person to perceive, but for people who are watching carefully, this is a war.
This is the third world war, but it’s being conducted in a more subtle way. And I think that is what some of my listeners who belong to this party, the industrial party, that’s how I think they would articulate their position. That is a view that I wonder whether they can allow for any sort of relaxation afterwards.
Do you want to believe that you are in a war and a sort of a silent war in which the West is trying to suppress you? I think that is a reasonable reading of the evidence so far, especially over the past decade when the U.S. government really weaponized China’s dependence on semiconductors.
I was covering all of these twists and turns of U.S. export controls. I’ve been on net fairly critical of U.S. export controls. I’ve written several essays in the New York Times and in Foreign Affairs saying that this will, in fact, over the longer run, stimulate China’s technological self-sufficiency.
But what I would like is for a little bit more self-confidence from the regime. If China is, as you posit, the world’s leading technological civilization, a claim that I would mostly sign on to, they’re just starting to enter that phase. They’re not fully in that phase, but they’re just starting to.
There’s some questions about:
But I think that it is a reasonable claim to say that China is, in many ways, technologically more self-sophisticated.
I just had an op-ed come out in the New York Times saying that China is winning the electrical age while Donald Trump is invading Venezuela for oil that the U.S. doesn’t need.
But, you know, in that case, why can it not gain a little bit more self-confidence and be a little bit more, let’s say, beneficent in a Confucian sense against the rest of the world?
If there is kind of this siege mentality, one of the things I think about as someone who thinks about not just authoritarian systems but Leninist systems in particular, in which I think that the Communist Party and its Leninist heritage—the leaders wake up every day feeling like this is a life-and-death struggle against the Western colonialists, capitalists, whatever it is.
And I wonder if they will ever feel like they can relax. I suspect not.
Let’s say that somehow the West is in disarray and fairly weak, that China can close the gates of the Celestial Empire and just be serenely untroubled. Do you really think that this Leninist regime can ever relax?
No, I think that these people are highly, highly paranoid. They’re trained to be paranoid. And what I want to do is to start relaxing now rather than some mythical end state that they will never feel comfortable with.
Yeah, I think this is the essential point. When China does achieve its full potential as a civilization—I mean, its economy, its technology—will they be able to transition to a different kind of government, a different sort of set of values for what’s allowed in society or not allowed in society?
You could have different views about how likely that is. Will they be so locked into this paranoid worldview that they won’t be able to get out?
And I want to say that this, by the way, this NATSEC (national security) perspective exists on both sides.
In the United States, we had this McCarthyist era, we were very worried about communism, we had the Sputnik scare.
So the question is, at what point do you get confident enough that you can sort of relax and stop locking up your dissidents and not think every visitor from this competing country is a spy?
Can they:
I think nobody really knows the answer to that. I think some people just assume China will fully recover from its bad few hundred years and then it can become just a normal country again, even though it is starting from what is currently a communist authoritarian system.
Other people would think, no. It’s very different. Like I was just listening to Dario Amadei at Davos talking with Demis Hassabis and saying:
“No, we cannot possibly give them NVIDIA chips because these people are so horrible. If they get AI first, it’s game over for the whole planet,” et cetera, et cetera. So I don’t claim to know the answer for which of those two scenarios is more plausible, but I think it’s the one, it’s what people should really be focused on, the future of a world in which China becomes possibly the most powerful country.
Yes. And I would say that, in general, the track record of America is that there have been these paranoid spasms. The Sputnik moment was a stimulus towards science in the US, but there’s been parts of the American berserk, in Philip Roth’s terms, that really deranged this country.
On the other hand, this is also a country that I think tried to build up Europe, tried to be kind or utilitarian towards Japan and Germany after it vanquished them.
That for the most part embraced, what we call the liberal international order by being open to globalization, hoping—now we say foolishly—that China will also grow into its own image, which was a bet that proved wrong.
I think we can say that now, but there, the episodes of paranoia also coexist with episodes of generosity in ways that I think the Trump administration calls “foolish generosity” at this point, given how globalization, in their view, has not worked out very well.
So coming to the current Chinese government and the nature of life in China, you’ve commented on the parity that’s experienced even by the elites.
So I guess the way I would describe it is: I think the average person in China is pretty happy with their government just because of the very strong growth and development that’s happened in the last generation.
I think if you question them carefully, they might say something like,
“Oh, there are certain topics it’s best not to talk about. We could get in trouble. Let’s not talk about that,”
and just change the subject. They have that awareness.
But in general, I think they think of their government as a good government and they have some confidence in it. I think I could be wrong about this, but this is my impression for sort of ordinary people.
I agree with that impression.
But then I think you make this insightful comment, both in some of your interviews and also in the book:
And that’s why you send your kids to Western universities, try to get as much of your capital out, buy a bunch of property in Vancouver and L.A.
So talk a little bit about what you think the world looks like for these relatively successful elites in China.
Do they not feel as comfortable about their future or secure in their future as, say, a wealthy person in San Francisco?
Who are Chinese elites?
Well, I think that in the state party context, these are people who are relatively high up within the Communist Party. These are relatively high up in the People’s Liberation Army.
Let’s check in: How are they feeling?
You know, right now, the Politburo has, I believe, now formally 23 members. The one spot traditionally reserved for a woman has been axed.
One of the two People’s Liberation Army Politburo members has been given the sack.
Potentially another Politburo member who is in charge of the weapons state-owned enterprises may also have fallen.
There’s this journal now that has tracked that the Communist Party has disciplined around a million officials last year, and this keeps going higher.
And, you know, the discipline process for a Communist Party official is extra legal. They have their own party system. It’s like being court-martialed in the military system here.
That’s kind of a grim fate.
And so, you know, that’s a million party officials disciplined out of a population of about 100 million party officials. That feels fairly substantial, both tigers as well as flies.
So, where do Chinese elites work outside of the party state?
Well, much like the U.S., some of them are working in:
How are they doing?
Among my friends who did attend Harvard, some of them knew her. So, if Harvard is not too good for Xi’s daughter, why should anyone else not send their kids to Stanford or Berkeley or Michigan or wherever else?
When people have the ability to acquire an American status, passports, university education, they generally tend to seize it. It is exceedingly rare for Americans to want to feel like they have to do the same thing.
I think it is still relatively rare among people in developing countries, given a choice between spending much more of your time in China or the U.S., that they still, on net, a little bit more, want to spend their lives in the U.S. That sentiment, I think, is easy to find.
If I were talking to some people who grew up in China but are working in the United States and I stated the case you just made, I think all of them would be familiar with it. I’m not sure how many of them would really strongly feel that they are better off, safer, or more secure in the United States than in China.
I know a lot of people who have the opposite view and feel that now is the time actually to go back to China because the companies there really are doing cutting-edge stuff. They wouldn’t sacrifice their intellectual development by being at Tsinghua versus being at Harvard or something like this.
I think it’s quite complicated. I don’t actually know the answer myself, but you could easily find people who don’t necessarily have the psychology you described, but there are many people who do have that psychology. I think that’s a key variable in what’s going to happen to the country.
So I think it’s something to monitor very carefully—the mood of the most able, dynamic, entrepreneurial people in China. Like, are they better off staying there and building that economy, or are they better off trying to get out?
Yeah, I think that’s a great observation. It’s hard to monitor them. We can find plenty of examples of people who’ve decided to move to China over the last few years.
You can also cite that, I believe it was Matt Sheehan who did this work, that 90% of the major AI researchers who published in big papers over the last couple of years are still in the U.S. and have declined to move elsewhere.
We can find numbers for both of these. But maybe, Steve, you should be the sharp tip of the spear in trafficking.
I try to spend a fair amount of time in China. Then inevitably, when I’m at one of the big labs here, I bump into a bunch of people who have China backgrounds but maybe got their PhDs here or something. I’m constantly interrogating this question, trying to see how people feel about things.
It may vary by age. It may vary by the family background of the individual.
A funny story I think I told before on this podcast is that I was visiting DeepMind. My host, who’s actually, I think, a Google fellow or has some pretty fancy title, was showing me around. I was there to talk about the use of AI in physics, using the current best AIs to help physicists do their research.
This guy was showing me around, and we encountered a group of three or four obviously Chinese AI researchers, very young people who were walking through the pavilion down at Google where they’ve put all the AI people in Palo Alto and Mountain View. Everybody’s young, and you hear a lot of Mandarin at all these labs.
My host, who is not Chinese, introduced me to these young people and said,
“Oh, this is Professor Xu. He’s helping us make our AIs more useful for physics.”
I was shocked because, first of all, I’d encountered this in Japan and Korea, but not in China. All of them bowed to me slightly, which I thought, Is that coming back? Like, students bow to teachers? Because I had not experienced that in China in the past when I visited.
But anyway, they all kind of bowed to me, and then one of them said very sincerely and naively, like a young nerd:
“Professor Xu, if you find any problem with our model, we will make it better.”
It was so naive and sincere, the reaction of this kid. So anyway, but it was like a cluster of Chinese. And these guys were involved in the most hardcore model training, pre-training of the models at DeepMind and Google.
So, like, I would love to pull them aside and say,
“Well, why are you here? Why are you not at Tsinghua? Like, what are your classmates doing?”
You know, so I’m trying to monitor that kind of situation as much as I can.
Well, I would love it if more of these, your students at Michigan State bowed to you much more actively, Steve.
What a nice idea.
So give us a sense of the buy check of the moment.
How many of these talented Chinese origin researchers that you’ve been speaking to on your big tour of Silicon Valley, how many of them want to move to Tsinghua?
You know, my best spy when it comes to this is a Chinese-American kid who grew up in California, but unlike me, actually mastered the Chinese language.
So he’s fully bilingual and after doing his undergrad degree in the UC system was asking me where he should do his PhD in AI. And so we were talking about the strengths and weaknesses of various programs, and he ended up going to Tsinghua.
So he’s actually a grad student in Tsinghua now, and he regularly reports to me about what the scene is like for these huge numbers of kids going through Beida and Tsinghua and other universities there and working with the companies.
So here it’s a little funny because the big labs aren’t that well integrated with academia, and academia is a little bit isolated right now from the frontier developments. But I think that’s less true in China.
So a lot of the academic groups are collaborating tightly with ByteDance and some of the other companies that are building frontier models.
So he reports to me that the scene in, partially for this reason, because he’s on the academic side, he’s doing his PhD, the scene in Beijing is more vibrant than the scene here on the Stanford campus.
Because most of the Stanford people are locked out. They’re not actually able to do this frontier-level work at Google or at OpenAI or at Anthropic.
But in Beijing, there’s a very fertile mix between these groups.
And so he keeps thanking me that I didn’t encourage him to go to Tsinghua, but I gave him what I thought was a realistic view of what he would find there. And he’s quite happy there.
So it’s only one data point. It’s a very important thing to just keep your finger on, to understand where is the talent.
Yeah, and the people that you’re speaking to here, how many of them want to keep actively going to China?
Yeah, it’s very interesting. Will they work for ByteDance?
Yeah, so after my stay here in the Bay Area ends, I’m actually going, I will be visiting Tsinghua for a while.
And my host is a young, new assistant professor at Tsinghua, whose prior position was as a postdoc in the U.S. at one of the top universities. And he’s quite happy to go back.
I don’t know. I mean, I think, of course, he’s super nerdy, so he probably doesn’t think at all about precarity or getting on the wrong side of the Communist Party.
He’s just thinking about,
But I don’t think it’s a completely zero-one kind of, you know, one-sided decision. Some people could decide in one way, and some people could decide in other ways, maybe even because of food.
Some people might just be like, “Wow, the food is so much better in Beijing than here,” or something.
So, and the research stuff is kind of comparable.
So, who knows? But I think it’s something we should all keep tabs on.
Let’s switch gears now.
I have a bunch of quotes, which I loved, that came from your, I think the ones I wrote down came from your annual letter.
And so, for my audience, maybe, I’d love to hear a comment on this.
Maybe one of the reasons Dan’s book was so successful is that he already had a huge following among all the people who seriously think about China and U.S.-China competition through the annual letters that he wrote.
And you always write these at the end of the year during the holidays, right?
And how many years were you writing that letter?
“Eight now.”
So, I mean, I’m sure at the beginning, maybe not that many people were reading it.
Only my mother.
Okay, only their mother.
But by the end, I know you skipped 2024, right?
But by, say, 2023 or 2025, like, everybody who is seriously thinking in this space is reading his annual letter.
They’re beautifully written.
They’re not short.
These are long, kind of discursive essays.
And one in 2025 I really enjoyed.
Do you think that helped your book when it came out?
People already knew who you were and already were familiar with your thinking?
I think that it was a slightly higher stakes letter to write because this was a, I have a book audience that is onto me now.
Yeah.
And so I’m speaking to a broader array of people who are not necessarily thinking about China.
And what I really tried to do was, for my book, was to reach the lawyer in Ohio or Indiana.
And so, now that these people, if these people are interested in my work, I wanted to hit them with a really big annual letter.
This is also an annual letter that is more driven by Silicon Valley, where I spend a lot of time now, and not just China.
Yeah.
So let me quote, I think these quotes, I think I got them from you, not from the book, but from the annual letter.
And I just want you, just feel free to riff on, you know, extend what you said in the quote, or make any comment that you think is appropriate.
So here’s a quote:
“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.”
So, beautiful.
Yeah, I think that, you know, there’s a lot of ways in which the tech companies in Silicon Valley feel they are very, it’s like a gentleman’s club of, you know, playing with, against each other.
Where, you know, Google’s got search, and then Amazon’s got e-commerce, and Facebook’s got everything else.
And so, they don’t really tread that hard against each other’s toes, whereas in China, everyone is fighting everyone over everything.
And you have these, I like this chart that Kyle Chan of High Capacity has created.
We got these big interlocking circles that are highly complicated.
And I think that just really shows how everybody is up in each other’s business all the time.
Whereas in the U.S., at least among the tech companies, it is much more gentle.
You know, we’ve got union protections here, where you don’t have unions, really, in China.
They arrest the Marxist organizers.
And so, you know, what sort of socialism is this?
So, you know, Peter Thiel was famous for saying that competition is for suckers, for losers.
“What you should try to do is get a monopoly, and that’s how you really create a trillion-dollar company.”
And one critique of our lawyerly society here, or our political system, is that business can co-opt government to the point where they can actually end up with a monopoly, and government doesn’t do anything about it because they have enough influence in Washington.
And whereas in China, that’s not going to happen, the government likes to see these companies beat each other up and, of course, drive the profit margins to zero, maybe to the benefit of the consumer.
Do you think that’s just a caricature, or do you think that’s a fair picture of what’s going on?
I think that’s pretty fair.
If we take a look at the Chinese equity market, I mean, that’s – this is not the whole reason, but part of the reason that, you know, the Shanghai Composite Index has mostly trended sideways for 20 years.
To my dismay.
To your dismay.
Well, I’m sorry about your losses.
But, you know, maybe it should have been –
Or lack of gains.
Investing in America, Steve.
I do both, but –
You do both.
So, I think that is part of the reason that, you know, profits are just much lower in China because it’s much more competitive and a bunch of losers, maybe.
But I think it’s great to be a consumer there.
Yeah.
That’s my – well, for Americans who’ve never lived in China or spent time there, buying power you have there is just unbelievable.
Yes.
Like, dollar for dollar, what you can buy, not just food, but electronic gadgets, cars, whatever.
Services.
Yeah.
It’s just insane.
It’s insane.
Which is another reason, actually, I won’t say his name, but one very prominent person who is in Beijing, big venture investor now, was a very prominent technologist in the United States for one of the big tech companies.
He just says, like,
“I can’t have this quality of life in the United States, even though I’m a billionaire — he’s a billionaire — even though I’m super wealthy, I can’t have this quality of life in the U.S. because I get on my phone and do this, and some really delicious food appears 20 minutes later delivered to my office.”
And, yeah, he says, I can’t have that.
Yeah.
Lower labor costs is a real thing.
Yeah.
Next quote:
“Beijing has been preparing for Cold War without eagerness for waging it, while the U.S. wants to wage a Cold War without preparing for it.”
Let me reply to your quote, or rather my quote, with another quote.
This is an apocryphal quote attributed to Viennese satirist Karl Krauss:
“In Berlin, the situation is serious but not hopeless. Whereas in Vienna, the situation is hopeless, but it is not serious.” And this is where I think a lot of the U.S. is, where they are just not a serious country in a lot of different ways.
Now, is China eager to wage Cold War?
I can say maybe they are. But I would also say that the balance of evidence has been that China grew very, very rich under an international system in which it became a major trading power without a large navy. That might be unprecedented.
You know, you didn’t, the U.K. was a major trading power within a large navy. So was Portugal. So was the Netherlands. So was the United States. China didn’t have to build a big navy in order to become a big maritime power.
The U.S. gave it to them for free, right? And so it prospered by any measure under the system. And that system has kind of turned against it. And so it is reacting. That’s all fine.
But China has mostly prospered under this system. And so, but it has also been quite cautious and preparing for energy self-sufficiency, food self-sufficiency. I spent some time in my book examining something called the Mayor’s Vegetable Basket Program, in which there’s incredible amounts of farmland around big cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
As soon as you take the high-speed rail out, you get to hit farmland really quickly. And that’s in part because the mayors, not the party secretaries, but the mayors, people responsible for logistics and operations, have to manage grains self-sufficiency, as well as various parts of vegetables and meat self-sufficiency as well.
And there’s obviously now a drive towards technological self-sufficiency.
Yes, the U.S. right now is obviously floundering to escape a system that it has very substantially built, that it is trying to figure out how to subdue China in various ways. Yeah, but it is unwilling to pay a lot of costs in order to get to a much better state.
And so, that’s why I think there’s parts of America that want to wage a Cold War without really doing enough to prepare for it.
Yeah, when I mentioned that a lot of my listeners are, in a way, members of the Industrial Party, I didn’t mean the Industrial Party of China. I meant they’re members of the Industrial Party of America. So, lots of entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley people, are astonished that we can’t seem to get our shit together.
We talk about reshoring manufacturing to the United States. The hard work of really doing it, the government doesn’t seem, or society doesn’t seem serious enough, really, to undertake that heavy lift. And it might take decades for us to get there. It’ll take decades of sustained effort. And I’m not sure, I’m not, as an American, as an American who grew up in the Midwest, I’m not sure that we still have it in us to do that. I hope we do.
Yes. Let me read a few things about innovation and manufacturing in China from you. I’m going to read a few of them and then you comment.
So, I think that we have moved on from this idea that the Chinese cannot innovate. I think that idea is now decisively buried. And I’m glad that we have buried that idea.
We’ve moved on to another idea, which is that, okay, the Chinese are much better at scaling, going from 1 to 100, where the Americans are still good at going from 0 to 1. And I want to suggest, you know, no, let’s bury this idea, too, that the Chinese are able to both innovate as well as scale, that, you know, numbers are continuous.
And so, I think, you know, this idea of going from 0 to 1 as just exclusively the remit of the West, I think, is not empirical at this point.
And there’s also an idea of, you know, what does it matter if you go from 0 to 1 if you cannot go from 1 to 100?
So, I cite the example of, you know, who was it who, you know, which American lab invented solar panels? Bell Labs, 1957 in New Jersey.
Where is Bell Labs today? Nowhere, because this thing is gone.
Who owns the entire solar industry today? It is the Chinese. And they own not only the final assembly of the modules, but also the polysilicon processing, as well as the equipment to produce all of the solar wafers and modules.
So, you know, this is something that I think that, you know, let’s not cheat ourselves out of the idea that Chinese cannot do this or cannot do that, that they’re fundamentally constrained because of the nature of their political system.
You know, the political system has gotten pretty far in terms of producing a lot of technology.
I believe that authoritarian powers can do incredible science and technology. We saw this with the Soviet Union. We saw this with Nazi Germany, in which totalitarian systems produce miracles in, let’s say, spaceflight, as well as many other things.
So, I think that the more that we can get our discourse and our level of competition to the level of sustained capacity building, which is what the Chinese have done, rather than thinking, “oh, well, they can do that, which is not that difficult, and we can do this, which is much harder,” let’s acknowledge that they can do a lot of difficult, important things, and that the United States should also get in this game in a much more active way.
If you take the normie boomer, sort of outdated view on China, okay, we could have different stages:
I think by now, people, even most normie boomers, have kind of set that one aside, and they say, “oh, well, they can do advanced manufacturing.” But the core idea, the zero-to-one, brilliant, genius breakthrough, that still has to come from the West.
And I think you’re saying, okay, even that misconception should be set aside. I’m curious, in your 70-odd interviews that you did, or addresses to big audiences of serious people, what fraction of the population is ready for that step? Are they already there in understanding that, or are they still resisting that step, or clinging to that illusion that the zero-to-one step can’t happen in China?
Maybe half-half. I think that there is still plenty of clinginess among the quote-unquote serious people. But I think that there is also a readiness.
I mean, it starts sounding a little bit absurd. “Oh, well, they can make all the toys and T-shirts, and they can make the large-capacity batteries for the EVs, but they can’t.” You know, these sort of things, statements, don’t really make sense to me.
I think that, you know, 2025 was an important year in terms of the DeepSeek moment. Maybe that scale of success was overstated, you know, there was this big market reaction to deep-seek, and that was a little bit hard to predict based on the release of a paper.
But, you know, EVs are definitely taking over, and, you know, we don’t have to over-index our expectations of the economy based on EVs alone. Transportation equipment is not a giant sector of the American economy, even though the auto sector is politically important.
But I think that people now are ready to hear this, especially given the moment we’re in with Donald Trump eroding a lot of alliances, making the world question American leadership. I think that it is good for there to be a little bit more worry about what is the American position and try to be a little bit more clear-eyed about what are American weaknesses.
This question of whether, in a less free political atmosphere, scientists can’t make big innovative leaps. I still hear that.
Yes. Do you still hear that?
Yes, and I think this is one of the sins of the lawyers, that they think that, “oh, we need so much free speech in order to produce scientific breakthroughs.”
In my book, I spent a bit of time thinking about the example of the Soviet Union, and there’s a particular historian of science from Harvard named Lauren Graham, who studied the Soviet science system. She pointed out that there were two big cataclysmic events for Soviet scientists:
Which event was worse for scientists? Actually, it was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, because that was when the money stopped. A lot of scientists had to close their labs and leave.
Where, yes, very strangely, throughout the 1930s, under Stalin, there are many, many examples of scientists who barely staggered out of gulags and then produced their Nobel Prize winning scientific innovations.
And so, you know, part of this is because Stalin funded science. And when you throw in a lot of money at science, you’re probably going to get a lot of science. At least this was true about 100 years ago. Maybe not so true today.
And there is also this view that, you know, why were the Soviets so good at pure mathematics, as well as chess, as well as a lot of science? Well, potentially, they treat doing science as an intellectual escape when they do not, cannot enjoy broader political freedoms.
So, I don’t think that, you know, authoritarianism is good for science. I definitely will not go that far.
What I will say is that money is good for science, for the most part. And right now, the Trump administration is cutting somewhat some scientific funding. University budgets are on the back foot. But the Chinese are funding a lot of science, and I think they’re going to get the science.
Yeah, I agree with you.
So, I finished my PhD in 1991, which coincided with a huge influx of former Soviet scientists to the West.
Right. The best of the best from the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, came to the United States and competed with young Americans like me for the same jobs. So, it was a very, very vivid experience with me, and I spent many, many hours in so-called Russian seminars.
Our seminars are usually scheduled, oh, it’s an hour, and if a few people want to stay longer and talk to the speaker, they hang out, but everybody else leaves. The Soviet system, they talk for hours, and they fight until they get to the bottom of the matter. So, even the style of Soviet physics and mathematics I was very familiar with. When you talk to those individuals, you get to know those people after they become professors here and collaborate with them. They had very, very fond memories of the Soviet system.
It was a system. There were even cities, if they were adjacent to the weapons program, they would live in a secret city where they didn’t have to worry about food, they didn’t have to worry about salaries, everything was provided, and they could just focus on the science. And they had a chance to have an orchestra and play chess in their free time or write poetry. So, really did not interfere.
They knew there were certain things they were not supposed to do. They should not suddenly write a tract about why the wheat harvest was so terrible in Ukraine last year, right? Okay, avoid that topic, but if you want to learn about electrons in super lattices, no problem. So, they always felt very nostalgic for that system, and then what happened is when that system collapsed, just as you said, they literally couldn’t eat.
They had to grow potatoes in their front yard in order not to starve and just plead with Western colleagues to send them a few dollars. So, they could actually survive, you know, so they could actually survive, you know, in the Soviet Union. Eventually, they all left the Soviet Union.
So, this idea of connecting the political system to the productivity of the scientific effort is a very tenuous connection. I even wonder why that system took place. Like, how did we forget the Soviet Union produced a lot of amazing math and science? How do we forget about Nazi Germany?
I think most people don’t have direct experience with how scientific breakthroughs or technical breakthroughs are produced. So, it’s always a great remove. Like, you read about it in a textbook or you watch a movie about it. But for the people who really see how it’s done, the Aspie genius who’s going to improve your large language model, transformer model, that guy’s not potentially thinking about any political things. He just wants to actually sit in his office and do his own thing. And he could do that just as well in Beijing as in Mountain View.
Yes. But I do want to say that I think that Aspie genius would do even better in a system where he was allowed to criticize the Ukrainian harvest. We can state a minimal case in which authoritarianism does not have to defeat science. But I think we can still embrace a stronger case that freer societies can get better science because the American science ultimately was better in probably most ways, with some exceptions.
Now, there is a more extreme version of this hypothesis, which, for example, people from the French system and people who really experienced the Soviet system will advocate for it. I don’t necessarily hold this to you, but they will advocate for it.
For example, the French really outperformed the Americans in winning Fields Medals. It’s because they don’t have a system that glorifies money and becoming a billionaire. They have values. They have cultural values. Mathematics is one of their things that in their society is highly esteemed.
And a kid here who is really talented at math is thinking to themselves,
“Well, how can I make a lot of money in cryptocurrency when he’s 17 years old?”
That doesn’t happen so much in France and it didn’t happen so much in the Soviet Union. And so they claim that on a pound-for-pound basis, their math and physics was better because they were not corrupted. I’m not talking about intellectual freedom or political freedom. They were not corrupted by capitalism, by materialism. And that is an argument that some people, even French scientists today, will still make.
Well, France is interesting because they’ve had several leaders with mathematics degrees. Yeah. Like even modern senators. And that is interesting. Yeah, the prestige in France from having a mastery of mathematics is quite high still.
Here in the United States, it’s not so high. Although maybe it’s coming back with AI and crypto and stuff like that. I don’t know.
I doubt it, Steve. I don’t think mathematicians will be cool. I can only dream. Let me throw one more quote at you. I think we still have a little bit more time. This is from your letter.
I sometimes hear that the U.S. 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. There’s all these wonderful claims now that AI, AGI, superintelligence, whatever you want to call it, is going to solve all of our problems.
And, you know, I fear that before it cures cancer and rebuilds the industrial base, AI is simply going to derange us all. People are getting fooled quite easily on the Sora 2 with these video generation tools. How can you tell what is an AI video today? Like, are there even actually any watermarks here to say? Hard to say.
There’s teens with their AI companions. I feel like social media is already trolling me to insanity without this super intelligence hamming that up. So, I’m worried about AI. And I think that, you know, there’s all sorts of opportunity, but it seems like there’s also a lot of threats here that I don’t really know how to assess.
What’s your view on AI?
Steve, when you think, when you are in this, you’re doing your tour of Silicon Valley, you’re living in Berkeley this month. When engineers come up to you with these really apocalyptic claims about AI or pure utopia claims, how do you personally react? How do you assess it? How do you maintain epistemic hygiene and sanity? And I want to know your mental toolkit for dealing with these claims.
Yeah, I think this is the question of our era. And I think this is ground zero.
You know, on the one hand, on Saturday, I’ll be at a dinner, I’ll give a talk, and there’ll be a hackathon at AGI House, which is a huge mansion that’s been rented by these AI researchers. It has a view, it’s a twin to the Twin Peaks neighborhood of San Francisco, and has this unbelievable view of the bay looking to the east.
On the other hand, at Lighthaven in Berkeley, where there’s an assembled crew of rationalists who are all doomers and worried about AI killing us, they have a beautifully manicured campus where you can sit outside and discuss things in a philosophical tone.
So here we have both poles of the most optimistic, abundance-focused view of what AI is going to give us and the most doomerish existential risk view. And those two communities are living maybe 10 miles apart from each other. So this is the place to examine those views.
You know, for me, I would say we’re close to spending 2% of GDP now on CapEx investments for data centers and model training and NVIDIA chips and things like this. And back to your quote, the assumption that that will suddenly make us competitive in terms of industrial robots or automation in our ports or assembly lines where cars are made, things that China is way ahead of us on, I don’t see that the AI that we’re currently developing is necessarily going to close that gap automatically in some magical way.
I agree with you. It’s sort of magical thinking on the abundance side to think that these large language models are suddenly going to solve all those problems for us. So I think that’s pretty unrealistic. I think that’s a problem for U.S. strategy. If you’re sort of a hard power person thinking about U.S.-China competition, I don’t think these AI investments are going to, at least for a while, close these gaps. They’re very concerning.
As far as the long-run existential risk from AI, I think the people who are afraid are not wrong. I think in the long run, if we do create things which are more intelligent than us, more powerful thinkers than us, but also eventually have their own desires and wants and maybe even a kind of consciousness, that it will be hard eventually for them to displace us in some way.
I think there is a real long-term existential risk. I don’t think it’s as proximate as some of these people in Berkeley think. I think it’s going to take longer. I think there could actually be a period of human flourishing where we do create these great intelligences, and for a while, they are harnessed to our needs. They are well-designed. They are aligned in some sense.
That alignment, I think, can’t be guaranteed in any rigorous mathematical way, and so in the long run, they could diverge, and we could create godlike things that eventually don’t care about us and accidentally smush us. And I think that’s the argument that the Berkeley crowd would make.
What is the long run? Is that a matter of two decades or two years? Very hard to predict because the problem is that, and this is the key thing everyone’s on the lookout for, is when do the AIs become so good at AI research and software writing that they start improving themselves and at a pace where human engineers can’t quite follow the way in which they’re improving themselves?
I don’t think we’re close to that right now. I think I would guess we’re probably five or ten years away from that inflection point. Other people have much more aggressive timelines than I do. Yeah. It’s hard to know. It’s one of these things. It’s like, oh, what is it? You know, if China does succeed in becoming wealthy and fully developed, what will their government system evolve to? I literally don’t know the answer to that.
And similarly, I do think AI is definitely going to continue to advance rapidly, but I don’t know the timescale over which it will become threatening.
Do you believe that there will be a point in which it starts self-recursively improving?
Yes, I do.
Okay.
I mean, this is one of these hard things where, you know, it is really easy for, you know, once you look at all of these exponential curves and we see them and, oh, it’s like a log scale is a perfectly linear, you know, it becomes really, really difficult to think of anything but, you know, the extent of these curves.
And, you know, I don’t know if the saying to do, saying thing to do is to just rule out the idea of, you know, the idea that this will self-recursively improve because once we’re in that scenario, then all bets are off, right? And how can we predict anything?
It’s like the first order impact of AI is hard enough to understand. And then we have to like think about the 17th order impact. That’s just way too hard, right?
And so this is where I’m wondering whether, you know, this sort of totalizing aspect, it is occluding our view of what is really important. And maybe it is rational because there’s plenty of smart folks who are telling all of us that we’ll get to this point of recursiveness. And I don’t know, it feels like it is just going to be, it’s hard to come up with the epistemic tools really to deal with that argument.
So, I was in a war game held at the Tate Modern, this museum in London, and the war game was sponsored by people who are concerned about AI safety. The British government funded some of it, and some of the big AI companies funded it.
My team was the China team. I was a leader of China in this. It was literally a war game where every turn is like a year and you’re making decisions about:
The head of the U.S. team was a guy called Stanley McChrystal, who was a prominent former general. Very serious simulation.
The outcome was though very optimistic because what happened is that when we, in our respective countries, saw this recursive capability start to appear, we negotiated a slowdown and mutual inspections of our AI labs. So the American side could send AI scientists to see what was going on in the Chinese labs and vice versa. The game ended with us slowing down the development at a place where we might lose control over the AI.
Now, just before I came over here, I was listening to, as I mentioned earlier, an interview of Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei at Davos, which I think is happening right now. They both said, they just kind of mentioned during their conversation, which is mostly not about this stuff, but a little bit about this cataclysmic type development.
They both mentioned that they’re in communication because they’re both on the lookout for this, and they are competing against each other and they’re competing against Chinese labs, but they are watching for this development. They do have in mind that they are going to start talking to each other when they start to see it. And hopefully I think it would just be wise that if we start to see that we slow down.
Now for the doomers, this doesn’t solve the problem because the doomers will say:
So it doesn’t completely solve the problem, but there is a plausible future where we delay the real catastrophe for a long time by being smart about this process.
Well, if we’re sure that the catastrophe is coming, why don’t we slow down now?
Those guys were actually interesting. So very, very interesting remark because both Dario and Demis said in this conversation, they would both be happy if they could slow down. They both said that.
So, but it’s a collective action problem. It’s a little bit like global warming. Like, can people actually put aside their narrow self-interest to cooperate to avert this catastrophe? I don’t know.
Well, global warming is challenging in part because there are so many countries that have to coordinate together who have to trade off against economic benefits, presumably with coal.
But why don’t we send General McChrystal to start inspecting those labs right now? Because we can do a lot of that right now.
When they designed this war game that I was part of, the people who designed it are actual specialists who designed war games for the Pentagon and also for the British defense ministry. They were honest.
So they designed the dynamics of the game to be as realistic as possible. However, the makers of the documentary were hoping that the ending would be an optimistic one where the competing sides could cooperate.
And the view is like, this provides a template because a movie version of it is very real for the ape brain to see humans enacting the story. It’s a narrative, right?
And the hope is that this will plant the seed in the Chinese leadership, the U.S. leadership, and the corporate leadership that yes, we do need to be ready to pause when things start to get dangerous.
So I think it is in everybody’s mind, whether it’ll, it could still be a tragedy. It could still be a runaway arms race, but I’m optimistic.
Actually, narratives matter. We are all ruled by ape brains. And so this is why the lawyers are in charge, and the scientists and engineers need to get better at narrative.
Very good. Well, that’s a good place for us to stop.
So thank you very much, Dan. It’s been a wonderful experience. Hope my audience enjoys this.
We’ll put some useful links in the show notes to some of these things like industrial maximalism and other topics that came up.
Thanks very much for your time.
“Thanks, Steve. This was wonderful.”
2026-01-28 08:00:01
大家好，欢迎大家收听本期的珊瑚湖，我是汉阳，和我在一起的是可达。
大家好，我是可达，欢迎大家收听我们的土耳其系列第一期节目。本系列预计有可能四到五集左右，然后我们会从土耳其的欧洲区开始，带你转一遍之后往土耳其东部去走。
所以如果大家去网上查土耳其的话，会依照土耳其特别火的，比如像伊斯坦布尔，然后爱琴海边上那些城市，还有卡帕多西亚。这些地方，我们一个都不去。
所以你可以基本上理解成，网红打卡地，对，你在小红书上搜的土耳其攻略里的点，我们可能只会有一两个会去的，但大部分我们都不去。我们去的都是那些没什么人去的地方。
但是你听完我们的节目可能会为那些我们去过的城市感到打抱不平，其实我们这一路下来，始终都会有这个感觉，对，这么好地儿怎么没人来啊。而且我相信你都听珊瑚湖了，也应该对这些事感兴趣，要不然干嘛听我们节目。
我们现在在一座美丽的城市录入这期节目，对，我们此刻所在的地方是现代叫贝尔加玛，以前的地方叫佩尔冈姆，对，就是大名鼎鼎的佩尔冈姆。
大家如果朋友们有去过德国柏林，有一座赫赫有名的博物馆，佩尔冈姆博物馆，就是从佩尔冈姆这个遗址中取走的石雕、浮雕就足以撑起一座世界级的著名博物馆了，对。不过这是我们这期最后的话题，所以我们今天第一期节目主要想聊土耳其的欧洲区。
因为我们是在伊斯坦布尔之后，没有去伊斯坦布尔，直接往土耳其的欧洲区开，然后第一天住的是爱迪尔内，第二天住的是加利波利，然后第三天我们来到佩尔冈姆，所以可以理解成，爱迪尔内和加利波利都属于土耳其的欧洲区，而我们今天要聊的这个佩尔冈姆属于亚洲区。
所以我们这期节目主要以土耳其的欧洲区为主。
我给你先说一下我对土耳其欧洲区的印象，因为我前年，前二十五年了，前年十月份来土耳其开会，其实住了一周，但是实在伊斯坦布尔的欧洲区住，然后中间又一次去了亚洲区，所以没出伊斯坦布尔。
当时我对土耳其的印象就特别好，我当时想的是：”我肯定要和可达他们一定要来一次”，然后这过了一年多，果然来了。然后可达当时规划行程的时候，先规划了欧洲区的行程，然后我们是每十五天，我们先规划了亚洲区的行程。
然后规划亚洲区之后，可达说才晚几天到，肯定说那正好咱在欧洲区转一圈，然后再回来接徐管，补上这个缺失的一会儿。对，我其实对土耳其的欧洲区一直有一个特别模糊的印象。
咱们都知道土耳其是很跨亚洲和欧洲大陆，但你看地图，其实土耳其大部分地方都是在亚洲，对，然后我们一查的话，土耳其应该是97%的领土在亚洲，对，但是土耳其的人口数量其实应该是百分之十几在欧洲区。
然后，而且这个区域看起来仿佛是如此重要，以至于土耳其强烈地宣称自己是个欧洲国家，对吧，去参加欧洲的比赛，对，然后要加入欧盟，对。
那你说这区域多大呢？
因为当我们在说土耳其欧洲区的时候，大家可能没什么概念，但是如果想到它在历史上的名称，那就是赫赫有名的色雷斯。
当我们提到色雷斯这个名词的时候，我们会想到的就完全不再是土耳其，而是：
比如说普罗塔格拉斯他说”人是万物的尺度”，对吧，我们会想到赫拉克利特他说”一切万物可分，是原子”。
这些都是色雷斯，而这些就是我们今天所说的土耳其的欧洲区。
另一方面，土耳其的欧洲区，他在土耳其，或者说在奥斯曼的历史上又是如此重要。
它是奥斯曼的龙心之地，对吧，奥斯曼帝国在征服者穆罕默德二世征服军事坦丁堡之前，他已经是一个很跨欧亚的帝国，甚至你可以说他在15世纪中前期的时候，奥斯曼帝国是一个真正意义上的半欧洲半亚洲的帝国。
甚至他在欧洲部分的影响力，可能远远超过他在亚洲部分的影响力。
而且我们可能大家会了解的，奥斯曼帝国的另外两位皇帝，巴耶奇德和塞里姆一世，都在欧洲区中央过很长的时间，甚至塞里姆一世就是出生在土耳其的欧洲区。
而且这还不是说广义上的欧洲区，就是说根本就不是伊斯坦布尔周边，而是真正意义上的土耳其欧洲区，真正意义上的东色雷斯。
所以我觉得我们聊土耳其可以先聊一下土耳其这个国家，就是因为大家如果读中国历史的话；
就咱听众都是中国人，你读完中国历史，再读土耳其历史会觉得非常有意思。
就是因为中国历史，你会依照，比如秦汉、唐宋元明清，这事儿，它都是延续下来的，对吧。
但土耳其这个土地上面它只有几个不同的文明和文化在来回的你方唱罢我登场。
然后一直到我们可能大家比较了解的拜占庭，然后就是东罗马帝国，然后到奥斯曼，然后到现代土耳其。
所以土耳其，我们不管说是我们现在聊到欧洲区，还是之后聊到亚洲区，都不仅仅是关于现代土耳其的，它是关于奥斯曼的、关于拜占庭的、关于亚述的，可能尤其还是关于希腊的。
所以我们现在虽然第一期节目是聊欧洲区，我们确实聊的也不只是奥斯曼，也不只是拜占庭，其实聊的是整个这个地方发生的事情。
或者说土耳其的欧洲区给了我们一个非常有意思的切片。
我们一上来就去思考那个最终极的问题，就是任何一个读土耳其的历史，或者读地中海东部历史的人都要思考的一个问题：
就是我们怎么去描述，一个国家的历史如何能够成立。
就什么是一个国家的历史？如果你翻开今天土耳其官方的历史叙述，或者不只是土耳其内部官方的历史叙述，而是美国、中国、日本，任何一个国家出的官方、半官方性质的、由他们学者出版的土耳其历史，你会发现他们都会从突厥民族的起源讲起。
从Proto-Turkic，从早期讲突厥语的这些在内亚，或者说我们说在欧亚草原（Eurasian Steppe）上游牧的这些民族说起。
从他们和像中国和像中亚这些地方的互动开始说起。
然后突厥民族如何在各种压力下，一路向西迁来到了安纳托利亚地区。
然后从塞尔柱，从隆布苏丹国讲起。
再讲到这其中有一个就是奥斯曼和，有个像爱美尔恒罗，奥斯曼和奥尔汗最终创造了这样的霸业。
这是一种历史叙述，就是土耳其民族的历史。
你相信你去问一个一般受过教育的土耳其人，问他们你们国家的历史是什么样的，他们会从这个方式讲起。
另一方面似乎又存在另一个历史，就是小亚细亚的历史。
如果你讲这片半岛的历史是什么样的，好像你会不由自主地从赫梯人，或者会从这个地方早期的新时期讲起。
会从如果我们看东色雷斯，会从这个地方最早的，在麦西尼影响下的青铜器交换，然后不断的锻炼链技术讲起，从这个地方的赫梯。
然后再讲到他的鲁底亚，讲到著名的那个预言。
正好我们之前我和仲青那期节目讲到：
“当你跨过这条河流，你将摧毁一个庞大的帝国”。
这个就是著名的鲁底亚和波斯战争的故事，就发生在这片地区。
然后我们会想到小亚细亚西海岸，爱琴海的这么多的所谓希腊化的城邦，他们讲希腊语和托洛伊，他们讲一些能够互通的语言。
然后会进行一个繁荣的互相之间存在贸易网络竞争。
他们会派遣队伍参加奥运会，他们会有一些城邦会派出代表，在雅典谈判形成德米安联盟等等。
这是另一个故事。
然后我们会自然而然地想到希波战争，会想到希腊内部的分裂。
然后会想到马其顿的屈辱与复仇，会想到亚历山大帝国，然后会想到希腊化的世界。
进而我们的故事目光似乎又转移到了罗马。
然后想到罗马帝国是如何席卷整个东地中海，想到基督教的早期传播。
然后罗马帝国在三世纪四世纪慢慢进入危机，以至于互相分裂两地四地的共治。
然后最后东罗马帝国我们又会想到君士坦丁堡，想到查士丁尼，最后才会想到奥斯曼。
所以换句话说，可爱这个事总结一下：
咱读中国历史的时候，你读中国任何一个地方的历史，你读的都是中国的历史，或者讲个更好的例子就是日本。
日本是一个更典型的例子，你讲日本任何一个地方的历史，你就是讲日本史。
但是土耳其显然不是。
当你讲土耳其历史的时候，你要定义什么是土耳其历史，比如我们今天所在的佩尔冈姆。
你讲佩尔冈姆历史的时候，它不仅仅指的是当代土耳其国家的历史，而是希腊的历史、罗马的历史，然后才能串到土耳其上述，他们历史观里面奥斯曼的历史。
所以这个事特别有意思。
中国人，尤其我来到这儿，我作为一个正经在中国学历史出身的人，我脑中要转一下回路。
当我想到一个地方的时候，我讲什么历史？
我常讲人，我讲常人历史的时候，那就是那个历史。
但我去爱迪尔内讲历史的时候，可能我讲的是奥斯曼那个爱迪尔内，还是罗马那个哈德良堡，对吧。
所以这特别有意思。
所以咱们进入正题，聊聊我们这次来的地方。
这是属于我们从怪物起政时代开始的老传统，出门给大家讲讲。
我们去了呢，我们一架飞机早上的飞机，所以直接直奔了一座大桥。
我这次下飞机以后，我这个状态非常好，因为汉阳花了1200人民币给我升了舱。
这个南航的超级经济舱还是挺合适的，我在这里推荐，真的。
我觉得南航的这个明珠经济舱，远超过那个美联航（United Airlines）的商务舱。
而且你只要1200人民币，想想看，150美元。
你在美国，150美元能干啥啊？你在美国纽约到芝加哥的机票都买不起。
我一个月前的今天在美国坐飞机从奥斯丁去旧金山，行李收了130美元。
我已经买了行李钱了，所以我那个行李费就够你坐上商务舱般的享受。
南航能不能多干点事？你看它的运营基地在长春，能不能给长春一点广告费？
南航的运营基地在长春，其中一个在长春，所以回长春一般都会坐南航。
然后说第一个点，我们一下飞机到的点，在伊斯坦布尔西边，大概40分钟左右的车程。
路程不长，但不太好看，因为机场就在伊斯坦布尔的西边。
然后我们到的这个城市叫，应该就是类似于”抽屉”或者是”兜”的意思。
在这里我的理解它应该就是一个海湾的意思。
所以你可以想象这里是在东色雷斯半岛东部的一个大海湾，是一个大的切口。
所以说我们去的第一个地方，是一个Caravan Sarai。
什么是Caravan Sarai？
所以这就是大车店。
这个地方名字非常特别，叫Sultan Suleiman Caravan Sarai，就是苏莱曼大帝大车店。
这个名字就有点像拿破仑修车店一样，就是一个很大气魄的title配上了一个大车店。
那这个大车店为什么我们第一站要专程来看呢？
我觉得这个大车店恰恰很大程度概括了我们在整个欧洲区的行程。
因为这个大车店首先它的设计者非常著名，是米马尔·西南（Mimar Sinan）。
这个名字在我们之后欧洲区的旅程中会反复出现。
他是奥斯曼帝国最伟大的建筑师，甚至是人类历史上最伟大的建筑师之一，我认为完全可以这么说。
然后这个大车店的委托者我们刚刚说了，他就是苏莱曼大帝本人。
这个大车店本身就是在他的时代修建运营的。
为什么需要这个大车店呢？
因为这个地点恰恰连接着伊斯坦布尔到整个巴尔干半岛的重要商路。
先跟大家说一下苏莱曼大帝是谁？
如果朋友不知道的话：
所以说非常强悍。
所以说在塞里姆一世时期，奥斯曼就成为了一个横跨欧亚非的强国，一个大帝国。
而他们在这个时期，他们的根据地以伊斯坦布尔为中心。
而且大家知道奥斯曼帝国每次继承王位的时候，兴风作浪。
比如巴耶奇德就和他兄弟杰姆打了好多年，后来杰姆跑去圣殿骑士团，还躲了很久，然后还被送到尼斯，是不是？
被送到法国，还建造了首都教皇在那里，这个是兰斯奥瑞的故事。
之后我单独讲。
以后我们讲到和他相关的遗迹。
我们如果路过和他相关的遗迹，对，再讲讲，但塞里姆很有意思，他爹就他一个儿子，所以就是他继位的时候是贼顺利的继位，没有那么多事。虽然这历史的故事仿佛感觉这个人就像是要，要是得失出来一个闹肿了，对，就感觉是这么顺，没有经历过奥斯曼帝国例行的对你能力的考验，对，那你应该不太行。
但实际上，苏莱曼能力非常强，在位时间非常长，46年，46年，对，应该是在位时间最长的苏莱曼，在奥斯曼帝国时期。然后在他的治下，奥斯曼帝国达到了国立的顶峰，可以说，是最辉煌的时代，也是领土面积的顶峰，对，也是文化、艺术、思想的巅峰。
而且这里面我必须要跟大家讲一点，就是大家一听到这个奥斯曼帝国，总会想到一战那个欧洲并服，然后就是一战的时候，奥斯曼甚至连欧洲并服都当不了了，已经是西亚并服、小亚西亚并服，特别落后，然后欧洲的地方最后都全丢了，对，然后很多人想到这个，这就是一个古代的王朝，也没什么了不起的。
但恰恰说，只要在巴耶济德到苏莱曼这段时间里面，奥斯曼帝国可以说是世界上最强大的帝国。你再照那个年代的奥斯曼帝国的人视角来看，欧洲什么都不是，他们打到贝尔格莱德就不打了，为什么要打呢？
欧洲是一堆凌乱的小军主国，彼此互相打来打去，然后你不知道他们在干嘛，就感觉那边贼黑啊，我们这光明伟大。你真的比一比，塞里姆和苏莱曼的确是有资格瞧不起当时的西欧的。
而且对于当时的欧洲来说，如果你站在一个，就是你把同时代来比较，当时的苏莱曼大帝时期的奥斯曼，在宗教和文化上的自由度，就是在当时的欧洲是一个基督教内部的。
当然这么说有点把他们都拢在一个大帐篷底下，其实已经差别很大，就是把天主教和新教之间，以及新教之间内部不同的，天主教内部不同的，可以仅仅因为宗教信仰的分歧，就互相不把对方当人，就互相展开血腥厮杀几十年之久。
对，但也不能这么说，就是因为苏莱曼他爸，这个塞里姆当年在当上苏丹之前，之所以得到军方的支持，就是因为他对实验派特别强硬，对，也是大家开杀戒，对，所以也不能说奥斯曼帝国是对异端特别宽容的。
但是我们也不得不说，你以古代世界的标准来看，当时的奥斯曼帝国的确是相对来说，比较开明和开放的国家。对，你作为犹太人也好，还是作为少数的小数派也好，你作为东正教徒也好，你在这个国家里面都是可以活得很舒服的，相对来说不受迫害，并且还能得担任很高的职位，甚至你可以得到一些统战价值。
对，如果你混得好，你可以负责你整一个条块，你整一个和你有相同宗教或者相同地区的人，对，然后你很有可能某一个民族的人，可以因为你是这个民族的，所以比较容易获得相应的地位。
对，所以如果我们这些节目希望打破一些大家对于奥斯曼和对于土耳其的一些刻板印象的话，我希望大家可以第一个自己去深入研究一下的事情就是，在奥斯曼帝国的视角中，这个世界是个什么样的世界，你会得到一个完全不同的对于世界的理解。
但其实我们今天看的第一个点就是这个想法的一个绝佳的印证，它是奥斯曼帝国官方为了在欧洲和亚洲之间的商路上驰骋的车队而修建的一系列基础设施。你可以想象这里就像是现在的一个物流园区外加一个服务区。
奥斯曼帝国形成了这么一个高速公路网络以后，高速公路旁边就得拥有它的服务区，对吧？所以我们今天看到就是一个高速旁的服务区，它有住宿的空间，它提供你存放马匹的空间，然后它还有一个官员可以在那里看守的一个空间，就相当于是这个服务区的一个小社区分馆的一个主任，类似这种感觉的。
这个建筑本身也是，它有个特色就是它使用铅皮屋顶，这个我们在现场也可以看到，它现在是这个当地这个Büyükçekmece这个地方的一个文化中心的感觉，对吧，然后咖啡馆饭店什么都有。
对，然后可能就是不知道是不是就那种公司开年会或者是办婚礼的地方，对，然后这个大车店边上就是一座西南修的桥，嗯，就这个太伟大了，这个和那个同样就是以苏莱曼大帝命名，叫苏莱曼大帝桥，但它是完全名副其实。
对，这个桥你今天来看会觉得它就是比较平淡，就是它是四节，每节中间，每节和每节的连接是一个湖心岛，对，所以像一个很长的石桥，然后靠这个湖心岛连接。
然后比较有意思的是它那个拱形不是半圆的，它拱形上面有个尖，是尖拱，是个尖拱，对，然后其实这个是我们来的第二个点，大车店是第一个点。
对，然后可达到这个点就是，它再维修又没开放，但是我们找到一个地儿可以钻进去，也不能说钻我们的口子太大了，口子走大时候就走进去了。
对，然后全是泥，然后可达穿皮鞋，就满鞋全是泥，就跟那个，就跟村里赶大集似的，然后走到那个桥边上，穿过那个沼泽地，对，感叹了至少20分钟那个桥，真的很美，就是当天的天气特别好。
就土耳其给我们的欢迎，非常待我们不薄，蓝天，然后阳光照在那个大理石的桥上，就是满眼睛灿灿的，就像是，真的像是黄金镀的桥，对，非常非常漂亮。
而且你一站在那个桥前面，你就明白它的关键作用，对，因为它是在一个港口，就有点像今天的杭州湾大桥，它对于上海和浙江这样的作用，就是它一下子给你跨过了一个很难跨过的海湾，给你节省了大量的距离。
实际上站到桥上，你是能看着边上的伊斯坦布尔的，对，能看伊斯坦布尔的城区的，因为那天天气太好了，伊斯坦布尔泛着金光，然后边上一个金色的桥，你就一直要走到这个桥，就通往一个黄金版的城市一样。
对，然后这四个拱，每一个拱，应该是七孔，七孔，五孔，九孔，总共二十八个孔，然后它总共大概长六百多米，其实是一个非常长的距离，把这个喇叭口的海湾给填上了。
但这个桥真正伟大的地方，恰恰就在于这四个拱桥之间的湖心岛（沉箱基础）。
这个湖心岛，大家如果看过港珠澳大桥的纪录片，或者是类似这样的桥，你要在桥和桥中间设置一个湖心岛，就是作为两段路之间的一个枢纽节点。
这是一个很重要的事情，是一个很不容易的事情。
当时西南采用的一个技术，就是它先把这个海湾的水，把它给围上，然后用水泵把它抽干，或者把它抽的水位比较低，然后先往里面打入木桩，然后再在木桩围合的这个区域里面打石条，然后在这些石条之间用那个铁活件给它连起来。
这个其实就像是我们现代意义上所说的沉箱（caisson），就是沉下去的沉箱子的箱。
它创造了这些稳定的湖心岛，就可以让每一段桥之间的距离比较短，那么它就可以避免这个港口非常强烈的水流潮汐的冲刷。
这个在当时可以说是解决了一个很重要的工程问题，因为在这之前不是没有过在这个港湾修建大桥的尝试，但因为当时的技术没有办法抵抗潮汐的水流巨大的推力，所以他们很容易就垮塌了。
而苏莱曼大帝的这个桥一直保存到现在。
所以我觉得这个桥给我们带来两个启示：
1. 我们经常想象米玛尔·西南会想象他是一个建筑师，但他就像当时整个文艺复兴时代所有的建筑师一样，他首先是一个同时也是一个数学家，是一个工程师，在建造这座桥的过程中去做了很多的实验，去找了最好的沉重结构，包括这个拱的形状应该怎么设计，而这些数学上和结构力学上的探索，最终都会这些馈赠最后都会反映在他最辉煌的那些作品，那些最伟大的清真寺上，塞里米耶清真寺和苏莱曼尼耶清真寺上。
2. 这座桥和这个大车店，简直就是太完美的写照，他告诉我们奥斯曼帝国是一个什么样的帝国，他首先是一个快速驰骋的帝国，他是一个四通八达，是一个把触角伸向当时整个欧亚中心的角度来说，当时整个已知世界的一个帝国，他是一个通行多种语言的帝国。
所以正是一个如此四通八达的帝国，才会需要这样的高速公路网络，才会需要在高速公路上修高架，就像我们今天最好的高速公路会修高架一样，才会有服务区，就像今天最好的高速公路会有很好的服务区一样。
就是这个帝国在他全盛时期的一个最好的缩影和写照，就是一个自信的商业化的全球性的帝国。
看完这个之后，我们直奔了一个稍微绕了点远路的地方，就是不知道大家知不知道，就是这个当时政府的穆罕默德攻打这个军阵产宁堡的时候，造了一大炮，然后花了三个月才从那个铸造地给拉了过来。
然后当时帮他造这个大炮的人是一个匈牙利人，叫乌尔班，所以这个很好的反映了这个奥斯曼帝国的特点，就是说他不太是一个我们想象中的民族国家，就是一个国家全是一个民族的人，没有就是你什么民族，它是民族国家的反义词。
对，那即使是苏丹，就是特别是到17、18世纪以后，苏丹的血液里面有多少突厥人的血统就很难说了。
对，所以他特别符合帝国的真正定义，就是什么是帝国，就为什么今天说，我们说帝国主义，但没法说美国是帝国，就是美国没有统治多元化的地区。
像米尔斯海默就跟那个Lex Fridman采访里说，你不能说美国是帝国，英国是帝国。
对，因为英国统治了完全不同的地区，它有殖民什么的。
奥斯曼是帝国，是因为它有多种不同的文化交融在一起。
对，它不是一个单一的一个主体。
比如像乌尔班，他作为一个匈牙利人，他可以去替苏丹铸造大炮，然后攻下去产典宝。
或者说苏丹的朝廷，后来的高门和那个哈里发的这个系统，是凌驾在各个民族之上的。
他一方面统辖着所有的民族，他一方面剥削着奴役着所有的民族，他也一方面为所有的民族提供服务和上升空间和生存的环境。
对，然后我们就开车特别远，特别有意思，那路上有一段翻山全是雾，就只能见度可能就十米。
然后但你一旦到从这山上下，当时我开车的时候谁跟我说，是该立言跟我说，还是义宣跟我说，是雾万一不散，怎么见不了模组。
还是仲青说的，但是我说你不用太急，因为你很明显，你能看着那个雾往山上飘，你只要下了山就好了。
果然一下山就阳光明媚，然后我们就到了这个乌尔班造大炮这个兵工厂的遗址。
对，然后我们去一段不让进，后来来了四个土耳其军人，然后他们到这边，他们那几个军人，不知道他们来干嘛的，是不是来进行爱国主义教育，然后来这儿跟我们打个招呼，把我们领进去了。
特别友好，特别友好和我们合影，然后领进去之后，他们就走了，他们来了就走了，他们甚至没有在里面待。
他们来这儿仿佛就是为了把我们领进去，但可能也是因为这个地方就在边境地区，所以他们可能是附近的驻军。
这个我们就不多揣测了，对。
然后进去之后，当然不大，那个遗址现在，然后我们就进去看了一圈，但那个遗址本身很值得讲。
就是那个兵工厂，其实那个兵械厂，准确来说，一直从乌尔班造大炮的时期，用到了一战之前。
它最早的建立是在1367年建立的，是在穆拉德一世。
对，就是在奥斯曼帝国，或者说在当时的奥斯曼国家，刚刚把他的势力扩展到欧洲的时候，刚刚在欧洲建立了他们的统治的时候，就已经开始建立了，因为这个地区是个自古以来就是一个重要的产铁的地方，所以在这里建立一个铸造铁器，铸造兵器的兵工厂是再合适不过的。
然后一直用到啥时候，有一战前还是一战后，它一直用到1947年，那比我想的，它一直用到1947年，被国家地产公司当作废品出售，这个结局真是有点唏嘘。
它是1367年，穆拉德一世建立的，然后1453年的时候，给穆罕默德二世造过乌尔班大炮，然后由此给他赢得了征服者铸造厂，Fatih Foundry这个兵工厂。
然后他在苏莱曼大帝时期，他已经扩展到极限了，结果这个铸造厂竟然成为了一个生产，就是生产军民两用的一个厂。
它不仅是制造了大量的武器，还给奥斯曼帝国带来了大量的税收。
然后他又参加了维也纳的那个围城，维也纳第二次围城，就大家知道这个穆罕默德四世的最后导致这个帕夏不是被处死的，没打下来嘛。
对，就是传统历史上认为是这个奥斯曼帝国盛转衰的分水岭。
然后他在17世纪的时候又是帝国的这个海军船厂的一部分。 他又参与了这个奥斯曼和沙俄帝国之间漫长的争夺，争夺黑海以及整个东欧和中亚地区的控制权。
奥斯曼帝国顶峰时期，黑海基本上相当于奥斯曼的内湖。对。
然后我们知道在这个19世纪的改革时期，他又进行了翻修，引进了现代化的新技术。甚至到1913年，即奥斯曼帝国快完的时候，正如我们所想象的那样，奥斯曼被这个屈辱的不平等条约租赁给了一个英国公司，租期99年。 中国人太懂了。对。
最后，他又苟延残喘一直到20世纪中叶，变成了一个废墟。很快在这个过程中，他不断在垮塌、萎缩，最后成为了一个考古遗址。对，这真是挺唏嘘的。
从这以后，我们马不停蹄地跑到了维泽（Vize），这也是一个欧洲区靠近边境的小城。对，我去那其实是为了拍那里有一个查士丁尼时期建的塔的遗址。是一个城防的碉堡、碉楼或者城楼。
我看当时介绍写的是，这个地方始建其实是公元50到公元70年，其实是2000年前的遗址。对。
多次地震毁坏，现在还剩下一个。大家可以看照片，或者看我们建的那个模型。
顺便跟大家说一下，我们提到所有的建筑，你都可以在shownotes的链接里面看到它的3D模型，这些都是我们自己建的。大家有兴趣可以直接去看它的真实3D版本。
这个用模型展示牛逼多了。每次我发一堆图很麻烦，要么这次直接只放链接，不放图了，大家自己点去看这个链接吧。对。
然后，如果你拿那个iPhone的话，你可以用AR模式，直接把这个建筑放到你眼前去看，可以转动啥的，效果非常好。对。
我建了这个塔，但这个塔没有特别的意思。这个塔就和这个地区所有的城防建筑、这里的100座城市一样，共享同样的历史。对，就是一两千年。真牛逼。
凯末尔光复，基本上所有的欧洲区城市都是这个历史。
所有的这些城墙或者城楼，你可以说它是始建于罗马帝国时期，但可能只有它的那个核心是始建于罗马帝国时期。
有个特别明显的例子，就是我们在这拍完之后，我就去找可达。因为我当时和仲青、大佐一组在拍，丰泽大佐是。
然后看到下面来了一伙人，我说”是啥人呢，不让拍啊”，一看可达走在中间，左右两个土耳其本地人在陪着他走。该是在边上拍视频，后来就发现可达阿大师说土耳其语，跟他们谈笑风生。
他们给我们开门，带我们去了一个我们正在拍的由修道院改成的清真寺的一个清真寺，但门关着。我没进去，我们在外面飞无人机建模。
然后当地人把门打开，带我们进去了。里面真的有一些、应该是奥斯曼时期的一些拜占庭晚期的石构建。对。
里面就是那种典型的中世纪拜占庭帝国的植物形状装饰、柱头，这些仍旧存在。但这不是关键。
关键是可达，他上飞机的时候才开始学土耳其语。当时我跟他说：”你别拿你这个三脚猫（水平）跟人说，万一你说错词呢？”结果他直接跟当地人谈笑风生，拉着人家，我们进去看了清真寺。
到今天，我们在这第三天，他已经能熟练用土耳其语跟当地人聊天了。
例如，我们吃饭时，他说：
“我要羊肚汤，扁豆汤。”
“羊肚汤没有，你有没有牛肉汤？”
“没有牛肉汤，你给我鸡肉汤。”
我点每个菜，他能说，谈笑风生聊了半天。还跟清真寺的管理员说：
“当时五点半关门，我和大佐还没出来，他说’你让他们等等我们’，然后我们俩一会就出来了。”
我都服了，完全用土耳其语说的。
因为我采取了一个只有听说没有读写，只有单词没有语法的策略。
所以，风则说过那句名言：
“你要相信人和人之间，怎么能互相理解。”
对，就算我不会土耳其语，我相信我们也可以传达所有这些意思。
虽然我现在还不会土耳其语，我只掌握了大概五百个土耳其语单词而已。
但是能够会土耳其语确实很重要，特别是现在学习土耳其语的人少。当你会说土耳其语的时候，土耳其人会非常高兴和意外。对，就是当外宾了。
行，我相信一个外国人如果来中国旅行，学五百个汉字，甚至不用知道怎么写，只要学五百个汉语字或词，旅行也会无往不利。
所以，我卡住了那条：
因为我们俩都是强烈依赖AI在干活的人，AI的翻译已经非常非常好了。
学习语言的意义在哪里？
我觉得学语言也是有意义的，因为你随机遇到一个人，你想跟他聊，知道他是怎么回事。你学得语言是好的。
所以我们俩说：
“你要是学精通一门语言（像日本人一样精通日语），还是学十个地方的语言，能够口语日常交流和应付旅游？”
我肯定选后者，要十个能应付交流的语言。
我觉得在我们这个时代，反而口语变得重要起来，因为大部分文字和翻译已经非常好。
我有一个领悟，或者说绝望的感受。
我们经常有人说：
这还是比较积极。
不积极的论调是：
你看杨照在他讲日本文学的书里就说，他的日本老师觉得他无法真正懂日本文学，因为他不是日本人。
甚至你母语都不是英语，你怎么能谈论英语文学？
就算你比大部分美国人的英语都好，很多人还是会认为你没有资格，因为你不是母语。
但我认为，我相信这在一定程度上成立。
直到今年，我才慢慢发生改变，我慢慢能陶醉地欣赏一些英语诗。
我有一个硬标准：
当我能欣赏一首英语诗时，我读一遍就能背出来。
就像中文一样的语感，强烈的触动，过目不忘。
但英语，我觉得我已经非常努力学习这么久，持续投入精力。
我觉得我的英语可能比大部分美国留学生还好，但仍觉得我的英语表达、理解和领悟能力可能连我中文的5%都不到。
换句话说，所谓”必须读懂俄文才能理解托尔斯泰”这事是真的吗？
你真的能像一个完全纯母语且受过高等教育者一样理解吗？
非常难。
如果为了文学学语言，你一辈子能学几个语言呢？
如果只是上俄语课，你也不可能说通。
所以我觉得这是个非常傻逼的论调。
大部分时候，说这话的人既没懂这个语言，也没懂这个语言的文学。甚至他们的母语中文水平可能也没那么高。
我的中文是大学毕业后慢慢练出来的。
很多书翻译不好，很可能是因为翻译者中文水平不好，我强烈觉得是这样。
所以我感觉很多人说”你要会俄语才能了解托尔斯泰的深度”，我觉得有时广度就是深度。
我们经常把广度和深度对立，觉得精不精很重要，其实很大程度上广度就是深度。
当你懂得很多东西，每样都懂个80%，你对事情的理解就是不同。
所以我觉得大家不要陷入”必须完全懂一个地方语言”的陷阱。
没必要，你会日常口语，旅行时比什么都重要。
学一门文学语言和学一门口语完全不一样。
想想玄奘西行，他跨过十几二十种语言区，每一种都能和当地人谈笑风声。
但深入钻研的文学语言可能只有三四种。
他在某些语言上进行哲学、理论性思考和修辞学处理。
但这并不妨碍他用十几种口语语言旅行。
所以，AI和机器翻译的提升，恰恰帮我们解放了语言学习，让它回到了几个世纪前的最初版本：
学语言是为了能去更多地方，与更多人接触，编织更大的网络。
对，这只是题外话，我们回到主线上。
最后那天晚上，我们住在埃迪尔内。
对，它是奥斯曼帝国的旧都，在征服君士坦丁堡前，埃迪尔内是奥斯曼帝国的都城。
埃迪尔内的特产是羊肝。
我们炸羊肝，或者炒羊肝：
挺好吃的。
特别是汉羊，汉羊无师自通琢磨出最正宗的吃法。
拿羊肝配着西红柿，同样薄片的番茄一起吃。
吃起来就像吃蛋糕一样。
不过完全不是蛋糕的味道。
特别有意思，蛋糕的那种纤维感其实有点像棉花糖的那种纤维感。
配上番茄以后…… 完全没有那个膻气的腥味， 对， 就很好吃， 很好吃。
我就不得不说， 但这绝对不是这一集聊的， 咱们最后再聊。
就土耳其吃的真好吃， 所以我觉得土耳其没好吃的东西纯傻屄， 或者他们就是没有离开过伊斯坦布尔的游客区, 对， 或者就是心态没打开。
就土耳其是真的好吃， 我每次来我都觉得好吃， 这次真的有没有给你打开新天地， 就这顿最后再说。
我每天吃的都好吃， 被坑的吃的也不难吃， 对， 然后， 被坑只是贵， 对， 只是贵它不难吃， 对。
然后， 埃迪尔内是一个在， 也应该也是一个在希腊化时代就开始建立的城市， 但是， 它历史上最赫赫有名的城市的名称就是哈德良堡， 对， 哈德良堡， 哈德良堡， 或者叫土耳其话说哈德良堡， 哈德良堡， 对。
所以哈德良堡后来就改名叫， 后来这个名字就转变为那个阿德里安堡， 叫阿德里安堡， 这个是他一直持续到， 甚至一直持续到今天， 就是你看西方出版的一些书， 还是把它称为阿德里安堡， 对。
然后埃迪尔内是土耳其语对它的称呼， 其实是一个词， 阿德里安， 埃迪尔内， 阿德里安堡， 埃迪尔内其实是一个词， 对。
然后我们主要来这儿， 最重要的建筑就是塞利米耶大清真寺， 对。
然后我们到这儿晚上吃完饭先去看， 结果赶上修缮， 所以没开灯， 贼黑， 就是啥都看不见， 就看着远远一大坨东西。
然后第二天起大雾， 特别大的雾， 就是跟那个我们在山上一样， 能见度就十米， 所以导致我没法建模这个东西， 就你看不见它。
然后我们就往里走， 然后你先看到那个宣理， 特别高的宣理塔的一截在天上出现了， 然后你离他越近， 越能看到那个建筑的影子， 大家可以看shown东西的图片， 这个就的确模型降转， 这个大家看图吧。
然后你逐渐看这个， 它逐渐在你眼前展开， 你去说它有种， 这种巨构， 它会有一种类似山一样的崇高感， 尤其它你在你面前慢慢出现， 而且它是它的最顶上的那一段先出现， 然后底下才慢慢在你眼前出现， 太神圣， 太神圣， 对。
就很难说那个体验， 真的是非常非常难忘。
然后后来， 因为我们没法建模， 我们就去边上吃个早饭， 就是在一个， 太好吃了， 141几年， 1418年， 还是1415年， 我才有这么老， 就是永乐年间建立的一个， 与紫禁城同龄， 对， 的一个商场里的餐厅， 那餐厅没这么老， 吃了个饭， 主要就是一些地中海菜系， 餐厅也是一个老店。
然后我跟可达说， 这就是广义的地中海菜， 然后可达纠正我说， 不， 这是狭义的地中海菜， 对， 这就是地中海， 对。
然后， 太好吃了， 特别好吃。
我们， 这个也是我们第一次尝试土耳其的早餐， 就是有那个铸铁锅炖蛋， 对， 炖蛋里面有四五种肉， 对， 加上奶酪腌制， 或者四五种肉炒蛋， 对， 还有那个皮塔饼， 对， 非常好吃。
然后， 虽然之后， 我们其实先去建另外两个清真寺的模型， 然后， 那两个清真寺也极其伟大了， 对， 一个是， 叫啥呢？ 对， 一个是老清真寺， 这个清真寺就叫老清真寺， 不是说他老， 他就是叫老清真寺， 对， 他历史上叫乌鲁卡米清真寺， 他历史上叫大清真寺， 但是有了塞利米耶清真寺以后， 他就只能退位让贤了， 就因为只能靠年代来说这个老清真寺， 他就从大清真寺变成了老清真寺。
然后另外一个是这个， Üç Şerefeli清真寺， 我一直不会， 我没太读清楚这词， 就是他叫这个， 于奇谢雷费利清真寺， 对， Üç就是三的意思， Şerefeli就是那个阳台的意思， 对， 就是三阳台清真寺， 三台四， 三台四不能叫三台四， 三台是台币的意思， 它是其实那个是那个阁楼的那个东西， 就是它那个建筑结构不太一样， 对。
然后我当时照尾溜达进去的， 没人， 然后刚下雨， 那个大理石的地面， 非常的像镜面一样的反光， 然后只能生死一个人没有， 只有我， 特别美丽。
就是伊斯兰教是个美丽的宗教， 我好像在别的节目里说过这事， 但是我再一次认同了， 就伊斯兰教真的是个美丽的宗教，
大家可以看Üç Şerefeli的图片和这个建筑的模型， 非常非常漂亮。
这个彩绘它的配色， 以及我们进到这个， 它这个， 它22个球的每一个球， 穹顶顶上的那个绘画， 都非常美丽， 没有一个头功减料， 而且它在历史上也是非常重要， 只不过因为它的弦太早， 也和那个老清真寺一样， 被那个塞里米耶清真寺盖了帽了， 对。
但是它在建筑的时候， 是在当时是最宏伟的穹顶之一， 我们还进去有幸就是看了一下那个穹顶， 沾扬了一下， 非常非常美， 非常非常美， 就如果你来一定要去看。
然后这看完之后， 我们就走到了这个塞利米耶清真寺， 它终于把它的真容露到了我们面前，
怎么说， 我去过蓝色清真寺， 也去过苏莱曼尼耶清真寺， 但我会评价塞利米耶清真寺是一个更好看的清真寺， 我不知道是不是因为那早上那个雾增加了我对它的感觉， 但即使雾散去之后， 我依然会意识到在这个太阳下面的这个蓝色泛光的这个清真寺， 是个很美的清真寺。
它有种就是你拿这个尺规作图， 拿特别严谨的几何形状， 就是那种画卷那种图形的一个实体版， 这它太合乎理性了， 它太合理， 太均匀， 太协调， 就是不能增一分， 不能减一分。
可是来之前跟我说， 这是文艺复兴顶峰时期的杰作， 是属于只有佛罗伦萨圣母百花大教堂这样的建筑， 才能媲美这个建筑， 以及它是伊斯兰建筑的代表。
我看到那个雾的时候， 我还觉得没看见它的时候觉得抱憾， 看着这个清真寺的时候完全同意， 就是是这样， 但可惜就是不知道为什么没什么人来，
我们整个在那这么大一清真寺， 我们在那待了这么久， 大半天有了， 就只看到我们几个游客， 一个其他游客都没有， 对。
就如果你去过伊斯坦布尔的话， 你可能会想， 这不就是一个边陲边境小城的一个什么， 没听说过清真寺吗， 但不是， 我就随便举几个例子来说明它的重要性。
就你今天如果打开维基百科搜索伊斯兰建筑的话， 伊斯兰建筑的配图就是塞里米耶清真寺，
对于任何一个学习过建筑史的人来说， 想到伊斯兰建筑最最杰出的几个作品之一， 可能脑海中冒出的前三个前五个就会有塞里米耶清真寺。
我在去塞利米耶， 我应该说我在瞻仰塞利米耶清真寺之前， 我心中对它已经很有光环， 因为在这之前读了那个尼基波鲁， 就是很有名的一个奥斯曼时期建筑史的一个学者， 他写过一本书叫西南的世界， 或者叫西南的时代， The Age of Sinan， 然后我从中知道， 在西南自己看来， 这也是他最伟大的作品， 就是西南自己把它称为自己的杰作。
乌斯塔·塞利米耶清真寺， 就是他认为这个是远远超过他所设计的， 比如谢赫扎德， 或者是伊斯坦布尔这个鼎鼎大名的苏莱曼尼耶清真寺， 当然也超过他那些其他杰作， 那他得多爱它， 就是我心中对它是有预期， 但是到了现场， 我还是就是真的是感动了说不出话。
而且他是如此的融会贯通， 就在这个清真寺上， 你看到许多文化最崇高的遗产的影子， 就在这个清真寺中展现出来，
比如呢？ 如果你不看它的宣礼塔的话， 我相信一个拜占庭最好的建筑师也会感叹， 这是一个比例和结构的杰作， 它的穹顶是， 它的穹顶的跨度大， 而它又通过巧妙的削减了它的那个， 它没有那个沉重的凝滞的感觉， 它如此轻盈， 而且如果你能进去的话， 你会看到它顶上是几乎像是透明的， 就像现代的一个穹顶商场一样。
我小时候很喜欢上海的一个透明的商场， 就叫美罗城， 我们很久以前录过一期节目， 讲巴克敏斯特·富勒的。 对， 我相信就是巴克敏斯特·富勒曾经构想过这些透明的球作为建筑， 但是在塞利米耶面前， 就它早在500年前就实现了那种伟大的轻盈， 光明广阔的感觉。
它同时它作为一个伊斯兰教的建筑， 又有如此的合乎尺度， 它如果没有那些宣礼塔， 它对于一个最杰出的拜占庭建筑师来说也是杰作， 可是加上那些宣礼塔， 又一点也不冲突， 反而让它显得更加的崇高。
而且那四个宣礼塔， 即使在城外几十公里， 还是能看得非常清楚， 就是像是它主导了整座城市的天际线。
那今天你看地图， 为什么很少人来着， 是因为它就在这个土耳其的边境线上， 稍微大一点比例尺的地图， 那个底就几乎就标在那个边境线上， 严格标在那个边境线上， 比例尺稍微大点， 这层就没有了， 对， 这就是因为那边就是希腊了， 对。
但是这个很有意思， 就是涉及到我们下一个去的地方， 就是埃迪尔内的旧的火车站， 对， 就是不知道大家知道那个东方列车谋杀案， 东方快车谋杀案， 对， 这个东方快车的终点就在埃迪尔内， 嗯， 是从欧洲到土耳其的这条火车线， 对。
然后为什么没到埃迪尔内城内呢， 就是因为省钱， 对， 因为中间有两条河， 就是东方铁路公司， 没那个钱， 就修到了这个两条河外面， 但那也是土耳其的腹地了， 在当时。
这不就跟你说， 你这火车站到底是修在， 比如说以济南说， 你是修在河的南边还是北边， 这对它好像没有什么区别， 对。
所以就你感觉你就意识到， 就是奥斯曼帝国究竟和土耳其的领土的变化有多大， 就可他做了个比喻， 就类似于， 假设二战时候， 日本把东北割出去了， 你以为割的是东北， 谁让他一步割到了徐州， 对。
按这里就是徐州这个位置， 对于奥斯曼帝国来说， 非常非常靠腹地， 我不是说奥斯曼帝国是正义的， 或者说当时的那个希腊是正义的， 对， 但就是这个夸张的传度， 对。
然后当时是因为这个埃迪尔内车站， 它已经被割到土耳其境外了， 对， 所以后来在洛桑条约的时候， 又把这个给要回来了， 就强行挖出一个眼来， 把这个边境绕了一个小弯， 把这个火车站给兜进来，
那河叫什么来着？ 梅里奇河， 对， 因为原本这个边境是连着梅里奇河嘛， 然后就是因为这个车站在梅里奇河的， 西边， 对， 所以额外挖出一块给了土耳其。
所以今天在埃迪尔内车站的边上， 你还能看到这个洛桑条约的纪念碑， 那就你想想想想想一下， 就如果你是一个南京人， 就你去江北区就出国了， 就这是你的核心城区， 对， 然后你去浦口， 你就你就半天认了。
然后那天我们去的时候阴天， 然后也是冬天嘛， 然后树叶都掉了， 然后就跟他说这个， 玉树婆娑生意尽， 对吧， 真的就是满足了你对边境的一切想象， 那种萧条的感觉。
对， 但它是曾经的腹地， 当天晚上写了一个朋友圈叫腹地边缘， 就它它曾经是腹地， 它它曾经也是边缘， 它现在是腹地， 它现在也是边缘， 这没点文化也读不懂可达的朋友圈， 对。
所以这个如果你都来埃迪尔内， 还是推荐你来看一下， 就是你进去需要花钱， 你现在去那你会发现， 它是一个特别祥和的小镇， 林荫大道， 然后旁边的小房子， 你跟我说一辆车吗， 我们那天说有点让我恍如隔世的感觉， 对， 是有点恍如隔世的感觉， 对。
然后现在它是一个美术学院， 对， 然后在里面仲青还和那个美术学院的教授聊了半天， 对， 中土友好， 对， 现在那里面是一个非常非常安静宁静， 非常宁静的地方。
我就顺便说， 有这这个大学的自然博物馆， 然后这是我见过最奇怪的自然博物馆， 是因为这个自然博物馆， 所有标本全部都是最常见的动物， 什么老鼠， 松鼠， 什么这些东西， 对。
就是一个自然博物馆应该展示一些很奇特的动物， 是觉得可以理解的， 但它的龟， 展示了龟的标本是巴西龟， 这特别特别奇怪。
后来可达解释了我这个为什么这个， 这是我的猜想， 对， 他说这是因为这是给那些美术学生练绘画用的， 对， 是不是这些标本其实是他们的写生道具， 我现在理解了， 对， 这是我的猜测了， 它确实没有什么土耳其本地动物， 对， 都是一些最没有想象力的动物， 对。
就像你去一个野生动物奇争馆， 结果发现里面是一只家鸡， 对， 对， 就这感觉。
但是你走在校园里面， 你本来你觉得它是一个就是有些， 宁静有些灰败的一个， 一个看起来很古老的校园， 但是你往前走看到那个洛桑条约的纪念碑的时候， 就一下子无数的历史向你涌来， 对。
那个洛桑条约纪念碑它就是三根柱子， 分别一根代表色雷斯， 一根代表安纳托利亚， 这个是如今土耳其的两个部分。 一个就是它中间的这个被条约所掰过来的小城，那个最小的一根就代表埃迪尔内的这个小城市。我没注意这个，就是在两个世界之间的桥头。曾经这两个世界之间，是有一条奥斯曼帝国这么一个高速公路连接着的。
它如此广袤又如此残忍。对，你想到那个苏莱曼大帝的大车店，再想到这个埃迪尔内的这个车站，再想到如今你站在埃迪尔内满眼望去，四周全是，直到你的前面全是希腊，你就意识到，我们在校园里都可以看到那个缓冲区的那个铁丝网。对，但是其实离希腊还有点距离，但它是应该是一个就是缓冲区。对，就是你是看不见，我们天下午雾其实没法直接看着希腊，但其实离希腊有点距离不远了，所以就是挺唏嘘的。
所以就是我一直有感觉就是中国人应该更了解奥斯曼历史，因为你看那个奥斯曼的1800年之后的历史，你会觉得这咋跟中国一模一样。需要是中国最后没丢这些东西，它真丢了，或者中国其实也丢了很多，没它那么多吧。
奥斯曼帝国在一战以后，协约国强加给奥斯曼帝国那个色佛尔条约就是太那个，太狠了，就是把奥斯曼帝国比喻成，如果比喻成清朝的话，其实它把清朝割让到只剩下江西和湖南了，类似这种感觉，把所有的历史上最重要的城市全都割出。当然我不是说湖南和江西不重要。对，不过反正咋说呢，就是你也可以说这是一种自作自受或者是轮回，但也不能掩盖这个阿塔图尔克的这个政治智慧，但这不是今天想聊的，就是感叹一句。
然后最后我们看完这之后来到了我们在欧洲区的最后一站，就是加里伯利。
加里伯利你可以，我理解成把它列成了这个土耳其的乳山，找这个旅游城市，就夏天人多，冬天人少。我们去到那儿感觉像鬼城一样。对，因为旅游接过了嘛，纯淡接我们是，淡淡的，然后就没有饭店开门，然后最后吃了个旅游，一看就是一个坑游客的旅店的饭店，然后在海滩边上。
然后你在那个窗边看着海滩和海浪，然后吃海鲜的，但我不都不知道，虽然我很喜欢土耳其饮食，但我感觉土耳其做鱼不太好吃。我希望接下来的行程能改变我的刻板印象，我真的觉得土耳其做鱼不是很好吃，但做其他都非常好吃。然后对。
加里波利有啥可聊呢？我们没拍加里波利，我们其实是直接去的那个，我和大佐在加里波利，那这你说完，然后最后交给我。就加里波利一个是看了那个灯塔，它是在悬崖之上，太美了。
就是我们正好是，因为土耳其时区和纬度原因，它日出其实是比较晚，就基本上八点半才开始日出，然后我们就站在那个悬崖上，看着它日出起来。而且我在去之前，我甚至都很难找到一个照片，因为你在现代年如果要看它，你就必须得要在船上，或者你是得要用无人机，才能看到那个悬崖本身。
因为那个灯塔是站在悬崖上方的，但吸引我，就是让我决定要把这个设成，我们形成中的一个点的原因，就是我当时看了一幅，好像是19世纪的铜版画，我看了那个灯塔在高高的悬崖之上，我就觉得这个地方我太想去了。
然后我们去了以后，迎着日出在那个地方，而且那个灯塔应该还在使用中，然后我们又飞了无人机，看到这个悬崖锁在底下，就是花岗岩，非常美。对。
我没去这个，但我去的是别的地方。我们去了这个，我们刚才说那个1915年8月份这场战役的这个纪念碑，然后他在这个，因为加里伯利是个半岛。对，然后他其实从这边的这个马尔玛拉海峡，是达达尼尔海峡，对，到这个马尔玛拉海，马尔玛拉海和爱琴海之间的达达尼尔海峡。对，然后再到这个爱琴海。
其实就可能你就开车半小时就跨过来了。对，所以站到那个中间那个山坡，二层看着两个海子，一个海峡和一个海子，就站在欧洲，眼看着亚洲。对，太美丽了亚洲，再看看远处的欧洲吧。对，我最爱欧洲当时。
然后我们去看这个纪念碑， 其实这个战役的纪念碑是纪念新西兰人，而不是纪念土耳其人。我觉得这不得不说是阿塔图尔克一个非常了不起的地方。对，他的那种宽博的胸怀。对，但是他有句是有诗嘛，写的就是说
“不管你是Johnny还是Mahmed，不管你是穆罕默德还是小元汉，但你死了，你死了，我们不是，来的就是深圳人。他说你是死了就是土耳其人。”
对，你死了这我们都像土耳其一样纪念你，你来到我们这里，不管你是为了什么，但是你参加了一场悲惨的战争。对，你的鲜血洒在了我们这片土地上，你死在我们这片土地上，我们就把你安葬，我们就仍然尊重你，把你当成我们的儿子，把你当成我们的。
你往这个经验别人走的时候，就是看着下面的海峡，想象一百年前，一百一十年前，这场惨烈的战役，最终打了后一天，然后这个新西兰士兵在离土耳其阵地下25米的地方停止了下来。对，然后你可以想象就是，他们跨越半个地球来打这场战争，到底是为了什么。你为了啥呢？其实直到今天也没有任何人能给出答案。
这就是一场，所以不夸张的时候，加里伯利这个地方是三个现代国家的诞生地：
就是我不知道大家意识上就是跟阿塔托尔克打，跟凯末尔打的人是谁呢？是海米尔顿和丘吉尔，丘吉尔。对，然后他们带着澳洲和新西兰的军团来。然后奥斯曼帝国派出了凯末尔，然后凯末尔只有几千士兵，他们当时就是一个预备队。对，然后打几万的士兵，后来就是一船一船的增援来，然后被这个阿塔托尔克打回去了。
所以就是一战，相对凯末尔一战成名。对，他的坚韧，而且他的那个战略的眼光直觉之毒辣。就他最后，你应该去了那个区努克拜尔，就是那个最著名的那个战役的所在地。
他只，即将在提前几个小时到了那个地方，然后站在这个制高点上，向下把这个向上进攻的奥兴联军，就是打得措手不及，直接就一下子打回海岸线。对，我都在看上战壕了。
如果大家上那个我们网站的话，看那双洞子里面，能看到那个纪念碑和战壕的模型，你可以看到这个战壕在这个山坡之上。
然后奥兴联军输了周一，英国人这么垃圾，我们干嘛还要跟着他们混呢。所以回国又开始闹独立。对，所以可以说这个地方是这个澳大利亚，新西兰和土耳其，三个现代国家的原点之一。
然后盖利是，我朋友在这个新西兰嘛，他就说这个。他当时在现场就问这个朋友，他说新西兰每个村子都有纪念这个市场战役的地方。
然后后来我们去了这个海滩，安扎克河，这是一个宁静的小都不能再小的旅游海滨旅游小镇，可是却是一个任何一个澳大利亚人和新西兰人都知道的城市。对，特别漂亮。
我们去人之后赶上那是修草坪，就是特别漂亮，大家也能看到模型。站到那边山坡之上，这个西边看就是亚洲，然后你在在欧洲的边缘，然后东边看是爱琴海。你听过无数个人爱琴海的故事，但这又是这一场惨烈这样的发生的地方。感慨完全。对，就是你，很难想要在土耳其后这种感觉。
对，但是土耳其有很多地方这种感觉，站在历史的桥头。对。
然后这期节目最后我们就坐船，坐了十几分钟的船，其实没多久，二十分钟嘛。对，然后到了亚洲。开始还比较担心船票的，你就发现那个地方就是一个公交化的船，那个船就和路是一样的。对。
就我们过了和，过了这个海峡之后，到了这个恰当卡莱，就是恰当卡莱城的省会。嗯，然后如果你不知道的话，就是那个特洛伊，就是我们现在认为的特洛伊，就在这个地方。
嗯，所以你一到那儿就能看到一个巨大的木马，就相传是那个2004年，排这个特洛伊战争那个电影的时候，我小时候还小时候，你看没看到那个特洛伊，看我那时候还没有万达呢。就是在那个，没有那种商业化电影院，是在那个公众化宫看的长春。
在那个公众化宫里面，我看了这个特洛伊战争，然后那个里面道具那个木马，先摆到了这个，你坐船过去那个码头上面。对，这个城市是以木马而闻名的，然后挺漂亮的一个小城。
然后我们买的也非常好吃。对，然后买点薯条喂海鸥，那海鸥不知道薯条能吃，没有海鸥来找我们抢，喂鱼，鱼都不理那薯条，后来鱼隔了一分钟才来吃。对。
我本来想说那儿的烤肉非常好吃，但我觉得那个会吃，这句话会成为我们之后几十个城市的主题。对。
所以大家来这儿可以是那个伊斯坦达尔，伊斯坦达尔的那个，说的是日语啊，那没事，伊斯坦达尔烤肉，就是它那个，拿那个pita，就那种类似土耳其披萨。对，那种面，后面包饼，然后上面泼上那个doner，就是那个土耳其烤肉，那种旋转的烤肉，切的那个绵羊肉片，然后撒上番茄沙丝，就土耳其酸奶，然后吃这种东西，铁盘上炖那个。
对，听着很奇怪，它特别好吃。上次来这儿就吃了一次，然后就感觉太好吃了这玩意。对。
然后我们看了特洛伊古城的这个考古遗址。对，我们没有花钱，因为本地人160里拉，我们外地人1000里拉，我们就太贵了没去。2000里拉，1000，1000吗？1000，我跟男方说1000，200欧元怎么可能是1000里拉，1000里拉，一个是200人民币，200人民币。OK。
但你也没进嘛，还让我们飞飞机进去的。对。
但之后做花钱，这个是善良友好的土耳其人民通过价格劝退，价格歧视。对，通过价格歧视，成功的说服我们去了一个，就是在现场可能看不到啥的景点。
对，因为那个土耳，其实那个考古遗址是真正的层层叠结。对，他完美的，完美的展示什么是地层学。对。
在这我们之后可能之后一起会聊，就是土耳其的希腊城市。
对，所以你能想象到很多希腊故事，比如什么希罗多德，然后就是在土耳其树上，斯特拉波，斯特拉波，然后以及盖伦。对吧，这个医学的几个鼻祖之一。对。
然后亚里说得得，他在人生的最春风得意的黄金石刻，就是在土耳其的，少年德，不能说少年德，壮年德制的时代。对吧，娶了那个帮主的女儿。对，而不是娶了帮主的那个侄女，侄女对。
就在现代的这个，现代的意义上的土耳其发生的故事。对，人生的大起大落。对，对。
所以你能想象到就是，土耳其跟希腊的关系是紧密。对，你能想象到那个古希腊的故事，脱了衣就这边。对吧，但是这是我们之后的事。
我们今天最后一个点，就是一个桥，就是原本其实不太抱希望的一个，奥斯曼时期的一个旧的桥。
这桥叫啥来着，这个桥叫Camerry，其实酥是水，它其实是一个水稻桥，但是现在没有水了，所以现在就是人走的一个桥。
然后我们来这之后，它应该是始建于，据说是始建于罗马时期的营水区，但是现在看来的应该是奥斯曼时期，而且是后来可能是做了比较大的改建。
你看是最近，这个应该是最近，我们可以看到很多现在的材料。对。
而这桥特别的意思，你导航去的话就没路了，你要自己走特别深的地方，下到那个桥，下完山谷。对。
那桥非常美，这个桥那感觉是一个奥斯曼时期的桥非常美，在你前面在一个山谷中横跨过去，然后没有人，什么都没有，然后你一个人在那。
我和仲青去的吗，仲青在边上排，我到桥另外一边，就我自己站在那，感觉非常好。对。
桥很高，然后跨度很大，很薄，像个纸片一样，因为它是银水的吗。对，然后因为它不是为了走人设计，然后它两层的拱，下面是一个大框的拱，上面是小拱。
在一个山村，一个连信号都没有的，一点信号都没有的一个山村里面。然后底下有涓涓溪流流过去，然后如果你站在一个桥头远望，就发现这个涓涓溪流涌出这个山谷，然后就变成一个巨大的河流。
对，然后我们在那还一起到桥上拍了河影，然后盯住所有人，不要骑步走往里走，慢慢分布时的走进去。
对，然后这时候我们这个，就是土耳其欧洲区和跨国欧洲，亚洲这一块，广义上的欧洲区。对的形成了。
那是我们这期节目，然后大家可以一直持续观众山谷虎，在各个平台，苹果啊，消息之后都能关注到我们，然后你就可以听我们接下来的土耳其旅程。对。 土耳其非常值得你来。希望我们，你听完我们这期节目之后，对土耳其产生兴趣。
然后还是刚才说的，所有的建筑都在我们的这个 shownotes的连接里面，能看到它的三维模型，然后以及相关的东西都能看到照片。如果你看不到的话，可以到山谷虎的官网，山谷虎.xyz，看这个连接。
因为苹果会隐藏一些shownotes，你可以直接到我们连接里面去看这个相关的内容。
对，那本系到这，我再说一句，行，就我，我真的觉得超出我想象的好。
以及另一个超出我想象的地方是真的，竟然完全没有游客，就是，真正的遗珠。就那个桥，我觉得是–就是国家地理级别，太美了。
我甚至怀疑这个桥在咱们之前，在我踏到那个桥，我第一个过去的，在我去之前，有没有中国人踏上。
我们这次看到很多地方，在中文世界里，几乎都找不到关于它任何信息。即使是埃迪尔，这个是我真没想到。
就埃迪尔内这么伟大的城市，从哈德良城时期一直到现在，任何一本历史地图集上，都会有埃迪尔的城市，但没什么中文资料。
你如果打开小红书，你会发现，就没什么信息。
对，然后，我们说的只是，我们觉得就是那种能”回引起大家兴趣的，特别有意思的点”。但我们还去了其他很多点，我们只说了一半，对，一半都不到。
剩下一半我们也都放在这个连接里面，就我们去的，但没提到的点。因为我们这次确实是苦行僧式，这个激行军式的。
所以我们就只能几天录一起，因为还是太累了，不能每天都录。
但我们大部分去的地方其实也没聊到，但这些地方就更没有资料了。
所以大家可以去看一看，我们这个shownotes里的这些连接。
对，包括我们随之模型，也会附上一些关于它的核心信息。
这里面很多都是我自己写的，然后大家可以，如果感兴趣的话，可以通过它去看到更多的考古资料，或者是更多的文献资料。
建模这事很简单，大家在这个网站里面也能看到建模的相关技巧，如果你觉得感兴趣的话，也可以自己试试，拍一拍你喜欢的建筑。
那好，那我们这期就到这。
各位拜拜，再见，拜拜。
