Dan WangModify

2025-07-25 21:51:37

我去年没有写信。相反，我写了七封信，都是全新的内容。 这些信构成了我的书《Breakneck：中国探索构建未来》。这本书源于几个简单的想法：美国人和中国人本质上是相似的，他们都充满活力，渴望捷径，最终推动了世界大部分重大变革；他们的竞争不应使用过去一个世纪的陈旧术语，如社会主义、民主或新自由主义来解释；两国都是充满不完美之处的复杂体，经常以竞争的名义对自身进行过度苛责，远超对方最疯狂的想象。 我提出的最简单的观点是，中国是一个工程国家，它用铁锤解决物理和社会问题，而美国则是一个法律社会，用法槌阻止几乎所有事情，无论好坏。 《Breakneck》始于2021年我从贵阳到重庆的一次骑行。我发现，作为中国最贫困的省份之一，贵州的基础设施比财富远超其上的加州或纽约还要好。五天的艰难攀登，让我看到了中国特色社会主义的真实面貌。但工程国家远不止高耸入云的桥梁。本书的核心在于探讨北京在进行社会工程时如何偏离轨道。我对共产党的一种简明概括是：它是一个带有宏大歌剧特征的列宁主义技术官僚体系——实用主义直到它陷入荒谬。 “法律社会”的概念在我2023年返回美国后变得清晰起来。保罗·Tsai中国中心（正如我在致谢中提到的）是撰写这本书的最佳地点，不仅因为它充满支持，还因为它让我置身于耶鲁法学院之中。精英法学院，无论是现在还是过去，都为有志于进入美国政府高层的人提供了最容易的路径。美国精英中法律从业者占据主导地位，这使得美国逐渐演变为一个诉讼主导的政权。我认为，如果美国如此执着于一个主要服务于富人和有关系的人的体系，它将无法维持作为超级大国的地位。 工程国家与法律社会之间的对比并不是一个解释美国和中国一切的宏大理论。这本书源于我2017年至2023年在中国生活期间的个人经历。我提供这个框架是为了理解最近的历史，并思考未来可能的发展。 这个框架有助于解释许多事情。例如，贸易战和科技对抗。美国依靠法律主义手段——征收关税、设计越来越复杂的制裁体系，而中国则专注于通过实际建设更好的汽车、更美丽的城市和更大的发电站来创造未来。尽管中国在国外修建了道路和桥梁，但它难以激发全球文化吸引力，因为工程师们不擅长社交辞令，而且倾向于审查他们无法理解的东西。中国国家有时过于理性，沿着看似完美的逻辑路径前进，直到该国最大城市突然陷入数月的封锁状态。 《Breakneck》将于8月26日出版。我希望你能订购这本书。如果你希望获得书评副本，或者想安排我进行演讲，也可以发邮件给我。 仅仅写一本书的宣传文案有点无聊。这也是我反思写作过程的空间。 写作最难的部分是开始、中间和结尾。每个阶段都需要不同的技能。初期阶段包括寻找代理人、将想法打磨成提案（通常超过50页），以及联系出版社。漫长的中期是实际写作。结尾则是修订、制作和推广等任务的混乱集合。幸运的是，我有一个出色的代理人和一位忠诚的编辑，帮助我度过了第一阶段和第三阶段。整体而言，这个过程比我预期的要有趣得多，以至于我现在积极鼓励朋友去追求自己的写作想法。 写作本质上是一项孤独的任务。我通常会闲逛到深夜，直到再也无法逃避写作，才会花大量时间挑选合适的音乐，然后开始写作。我知道，这种做法对于更长的写作项目来说不再可行（其实从一开始就不适合）。每天我重复着“做一个冷静、理智、沉稳的加拿大人”的座右铭，从而达到了一定程度的自律。我按时完成了写作任务。 在写作过程中，我成为了一个更好的作家。正如我所说，《Breakneck》是七封年度书信。我以为自己已经理解这种格式，但仍然看到自己有所提升，以至于最后一章比第一篇更容易写作。随着章节的推进，我感到自己的文字更加流畅，信心也逐渐增强。写作就像攀登一座山：刚开始时不要抬头看太远，以免被前方的任务吓倒。当我完成了书的三分之二时，开始为已经写下的内容感到欣喜，这推动我走向了终点。 写作就是思考。在撰写最后一章时，我发现自己开始反思我的云南背景。在我看来，云南是中国最自由的省份之一：位于西南部的群山之中，它大多避开了帝国中心的持续关注，因为帝国中心更关注财富增长或不安分的少数民族问题。我的父母都深深扎根于云南。他们本可以成为中国的中产阶级，但在我七岁时移民加拿大时，这个概念还并不存在。我很高兴在这样一个经济落后地区长大，这在一定程度上是因为云南的人民对国家怀有某种普遍的怀疑，这种怀疑在山区人民中很常见。在边缘地区成长让我对北京所推崇的国家荣耀更加持怀疑态度，也让我对上海或深圳常见的竞争文化更加不情愿参与。 我写这本书部分是为了理清自己对中国的一些想法。在书中，我详细描述了中国在过去四十年中修建了多少公里的道路、新建了多少核电站、生产了多少钢铁。这些数字令人震惊。中国是一个实现丰裕的优秀运作模式。我在书中明确指出，美国不需要成为中国才能建设基础设施；只要达到法国、日本或西班牙的建设成本水平就足够了。然而，美国仍应研究中国方法的一些方面：他们是如何做到的？有哪些权衡？我们如何学习？中国在大众交通、充足住房和功能城市方面取得了许多成功。 问题在于，中国的领导层无法止步于物理工程。迟早，他们会把人口当作另一种建筑材料，根据需要进行塑造或摧毁。这就是为什么美国不应该以中国为榜样。我最喜欢的章节是关于独生子女政策的。我完全没有预料到要研究其执行的残酷性，这种残酷性只能通过大规模绝育和强制流产来实现。在1980年代的高峰期，独生子女政策演变为一场针对女性身体的农村恐怖运动，特别是母亲和被无情抛弃的女儿。 几乎所有的信件都聚焦于中国。最后一封则涉及美国。我以写我父母移民的经历作为书的结尾。他们失去了成为中国最幸运一代的一部分的机会：那些在1960年后出生的城市居民，能够在2000年后获得房产或创业机会。但他们也不愿交换，以换取在费城郊区生活的便利，尽管我对此感到无聊，但他们的朋友却觉得令人羡慕。我还反思了美国自身作为工程国家的遗产，聚焦于两位工程师：罗伯特·莫西斯和哈曼·里科弗。美国的许多地方都像是曾经辉煌文明的保存下来的遗迹。美国人应该更加关注那些通常被忽视且经常被贬低的工业成就。 在写作过程中，我也变得更加善于辨别书籍。 我学会了如何识别作者是否尝试挑战困难，还是屈服于懒惰。每本书中都有部分话题作者并不感兴趣（出于某种义务），这时我会思考需要翻多少页才能找到他们真正关心的内容。我也学会了更加关注那些作者在致谢中表达真实想法的书籍。这并不意味着我喜欢夸张的致谢，相反，这通常是一个负面信号。一本好的致谢表明作者对书籍投入了一定的心思。 我尤其对中国的书籍更加挑剔。这是一个棘手的类型。我认为，一个好的中国作家必须能够避免各种极端。一些作家认为，共产党被过度妖魔化，需要庆祝其减贫成就；另一些则认为中国是“反基督”。一些作家使用陈旧的刻板印象和老套的故事来对国家做出最广泛的判断；另一些则局限于研究狭窄的话题，而不是读者真正关心的更广泛问题。一些作家过于关注法律或党的声明，仿佛国家只由正式制度构成；另一些则仿佛这些声明都不值得认真对待，更倾向于记录日常生活的细节。 我渴望阅读那些尝试在这些极端之间找到平衡的书籍。一个好的中国作家应该认识到，经济增长令人惊叹，但同时也伴随着新的压制形式；党的言论大多可以忽略，但有时需要谨慎对待；穿透复杂性的最佳方式是将分析判断与人们实际生活的方式结合起来。在我的书中，我向那些深入报道中国的作家致敬。 与出版行业合作也让我更加善于辨别哪些书值得阅读。 在我对一本书做任何事情之前，我会先看看它是否来自学术出版社（如耶鲁或牛津）或大众出版社（如诺顿或企鹅）。这并不能决定一切，但让我更加警惕潜在的陷阱。粗略而言，学术书籍是为作者本身而写的，而大众书籍是为读者而写的。在两者之间，也存在一个需要平衡的点：前者的问题在于过于专注于证明小点，而后者的问题在于用夸张的文笔包装小想法，通常以简短章节的形式出现。我寻找那些能够超越这些类别的书籍。 如今，我重新回到小说。我计划在接下来的几个月里重新阅读我最喜欢的四部小说：《红与黑》因为司汤达对欲望导致的愚蠢的生动描绘；《荒屋》因为狄更斯密集的表达和建筑奇迹；《追忆似水年华》因为普鲁斯特对令人陶醉之爱的描述；以及麦尔维尔的《白鲸》，因为其中数百页令人着迷的鲸鱼知识。 最后，我在写作过程中学会了如何成为一个更好的食客。 我在写作期间大量烹饪鱼类，采用粤式做法：将整条黄鳍鱼或海鳟鱼蒸煮十分钟，然后淋上姜、葱、酱油和爆香的橄榄油。我和妻子还计划了几次写作静修，我们会在新地方安顿下来，专注于饮食、锻炼和写作。经过六年对中国美食的深入探索，我也很高兴进入新的美食世界。 我在墨西哥城完成修订。墨西哥城拥有出色的高端美食，但我的注意力大多集中在街头小吃上。我认为一盘“奇拉奎莱斯”是完美的早餐。那里的玉米饼味道绝佳，而且我喜欢能用猪耳、猪鼻或猪肝等不常见于美国的食材来填充它们。我们通常在午餐时享用一顿丰盛的餐食，然后带回家一些水果作为晚餐。没有什么比将一些热带水果——如木棉果、芒果和可可果——混合在一起，再挤上一点青柠汁，撒上火龙果的果肉更令人愉悦的了。 我在岘港提交了书稿。越南中部的这个地区是我见过的最富创造力的稻米产品使用地：粘稠的米饭、面条形式的米饭，或是做成小蛋糕的米饭。我最喜欢的餐食是烤肉或海鲜，搭配辣椒和新鲜香草，配以大量蔬菜和一碗美味的汤。你可以在岘港以及我最喜欢的云南地区西双版纳轻松找到这些美食。越南复杂的炖菜也值得一试。 我在巴塞罗那完成了书稿的提案。西班牙人，像日本人一样，擅长在牛肉和海鲜上创造奇迹。巴塞罗那的厨师通过干式熟成来呈现非常浓郁的牛肉风味，他们不会像美国那样愚蠢地在上桌前把肋眼牛排上的脂肪全部去除。我在巴黎度过了最棒的综合用餐体验。我总是感到惊讶，巴黎的餐馆里总有热情的食客在各个时间点充满活力地聚集。哥本哈根不仅拥有创新的现代美食，还有可能是世界上最好的面包店。 美国最具创新性的美食城市是奥斯汀吗？我在那里度过了一周，享受了很棒的美食体验，但远不及亚洲或欧洲的水平。英语国家永远不会产生最好的美食；他们的超级优势在于他们能够引进带来更好美食的移民。这在美国与中国的关键美食竞赛中是一个有利因素。 当我最后一次访问上海，是在2024年底时，我惊讶地发现普通人的饮食可能比以前更差了。消费降级的趋势是真实的。智能餐厅不再难以预订。四川和湖南餐馆正在接管市场。许多餐厅的食物是在中央厨房集中制作的。越来越多的餐厅更关注外卖而非堂食体验。还有一种趋势是三线城市的连锁餐厅向一线城市扩张，提供价格更低但质量略逊的餐食。 最糟糕的是网红文化。中国的网红文化比美国的要强烈得多。在公共场所，很容易看到很多人盯着手机。任何有魅力的地方，无论是咖啡馆还是山顶，都充满了专注拍照的人群。经常可以看到中国情侣或朋友群体在用餐时几乎不交流，而是低头看手机。我记得有一次在上海的丽思卡尔顿咖啡馆，有一群女孩坐在我旁边，花了将近一个小时拍摄彼此在蛋糕上的照片。网红文化推动餐厅将菜品设计得更容易拍照而不是更美味。 这并不意味着中国会在美食方面落后于美国。绝不可能。中国仍然保持领先地位，而且在小城市和乡村中拥有巨大的活力。但我不禁思考，中国是否能维持其美食高峰，还是会被消费驱动的同质化和便利性优先于美味性所腐蚀。根据目前的趋势，美国正在变得更好，而中国则略微更差。 大型语言模型帮助我规划旅行。我用它们来寻找餐厅、寻找可以工作的咖啡馆，以及了解我所在地区、城市或国家的背景。我对人工智能的热情相对较晚，随着o3的发布和我书的完成才逐渐产生。我特意确保不使用人工智能来撰写《Breakneck》的任何部分。泰勒曾写道，他过半辈子都没有互联网，这让他在互联网出现后更能体会到其价值。我突然想到，三十年后，我或许也会回顾自己在人工智能出现前度过半生的时光，然后才学会使用它。 人工智能可以成为思想游牧者绝佳的伙伴。它能够就任何问题进行讨论，尤其是文化问题。背景信息不再稀缺。我可以参观一个艺术展览后，向人工智能询问我所看到的内容；或者参加一个弦乐四重奏后，与人工智能进行一场精彩的对话。我能够快速得到关于我思考的问题的答案（例如“为什么西班牙发展出了如此激烈的宗教裁判所，而奥地利的天主教却显得相对轻松？”）。在经历了翻阅图书馆书籍、进行长时间谷歌搜索以及在数据集中寻找合适数据系列的挫败感后，我更加珍惜人工智能的价值。也许，对于如今在大学里的人而言，他们从未经历过这些过程，直到人工智能突然出现在他们面前，这确实是一种遗憾。
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I didn’t write a letter last year. Rather, I wrote seven, all of which is new material.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024-01-24 04:30:07

（这篇文章是我的年度回顾；这里是2022年的信件） 一、行走 大象的鼻子可能触感凉爽。这或许与人们预期的200磅的扭动肌肉不同，这种肌肉足以连根拔起树木，却细长如两根手指，足以察觉灌木丛中最成熟的浆果，并将其摘下。触摸大象的鼻子会引导你注意到它另一个显著特征：被长而尘土飞扬的睫毛遮盖的忧郁眼神。这种力量与宁静沉思的结合，无疑让大象显得具有某种特殊的优雅。 我在2022年12月参加了一次穿越泰国北部山区的徒步旅行，这次活动由Kevin Kelly和Craig Mod组织，带领十二人从Inthanon山徒步100公里，抵达清迈市中心。我们的旅程穿越了大象栖息地、香蕉种植园和咖啡灌木丛，最终在清迈古城墙内结束。随着从山地向城市下降，风景令人惊叹地变化。在较高海拔地区，Inthanon山拥有残余松树森林，每棵树都像一根瘦长而高耸的西兰花，清晨被雾气笼罩，直到阳光穿透。在中等海拔地区，我们发现了柚木树。过去几十年的森林砍伐促使村民保护一些最古老的柚木树，用僧袍包裹它们的树干，以此“封圣”它们。在较低海拔地区，我们看到了热带雨林的典型植被：竹林、荔枝园和香蕉种植园。我意外地发现香蕉种植园非常美丽。香蕉以粗壮的茎干成簇生长，巨大的叶片高耸，足以让大象在树荫下休息。 瀑布点缀着我们的路线，有时让我们在午后炎热中跳入水中。不仅仅是自然景观令人惊叹，梯田农场也极具吸引力。近年来，当地村民开始种植草莓，部分直接在路边摊销售。这些高原农民深知经济作物的价值。毕竟，泰国北部这一地区在20世纪80年代之前曾是鸦片罂粟的主要种植区。当时，泰国政府（与邻国协调）几乎清除了所有鸦片生产，诱使或迫使农民种植其他作物。然而，一位村民却回忆起过去种植“Doctor O.”（鸦片）的日子。 正如Craig所说，这次“行走与对话”活动的一个核心理念是将成年人置于他们自童年起便未曾经历的情境中：“新面孔、未知环境、持续社交、激烈交谈。”我们的参与者多为中年和自雇人士，他们能够负担得起在12月初进行为期十天的旅行，脱离家庭和工作的束缚。我们十二人中，很少有人在旅途中认识其他人，而长途跋涉是快速了解他人的绝佳方式。交谈自然而然地发生，随着风景不断将我们聚合成两人或三人的小团体。我们的对话在每晚的晚餐中汇聚成一条主线，由Kevin主持讨论一个主题。 人们很快敞开心扉：谈论他们为何加入这次徒步旅行，迅速延伸到他们的生活、工作和困境。每晚的核心话题是所有人都能参与的，因此我们的讨论有诸如“家”、“恐惧”和“失败”等引导性主题。这些较为宽泛的话题极其有效地促使人们展现脆弱，从而将我们紧密联系在一起。（如果我再次组织“行走与对话”，我可能会尝试偏离共识。也就是说，将晚餐更像一个研讨会，每个人提前准备一个15分钟的演讲，讲述他们正在从事的项目，然后开放讨论。不过，我承认并非每个人都会觉得在疲惫的一天后听一场讲座是令人兴奋的想法。） 我们白天携带小背包，每晚则有一个更大的袋子被送至住宿地点。我们在瀑布旁、大象保护区、一个看起来像从加州移植过来的露营胜地，以及最终抵达的清迈酒店中停留，酒店被一棵200岁的木棉树遮荫。还有些奇特之处。有一晚，我们是唯一入住一家如此阴森的度假村的客人，以至于我们争论这是否是税务欺诈的幌子。那里的木屋看起来像是AI生成器根据对安东尼奥·高迪的Park Güell的详细描述3D打印出来的产物。酒店员工不断拍照，仿佛在记录他们确实有真实客人，这并未缓解我们对自身存在可能助长欺诈活动的不安。 我认为“行走与对话”活动若能成为常态会很棒。我想象自己每隔几年就进行一次，有时与亲密朋友同行，有时则将团体选择交给他人。然而，这种形式需要巨大的计划努力。例如，沿着朝圣路线进行的现成徒步旅行是可能的，但许多其他徒步旅行必须量身定制。这次旅行的英雄向导是一位在清迈和中国生活了30年的美国酒店业者，他亲自徒步了五次我们的路线，才带领其余人同行。组织一次良好的徒步旅行不仅需要规划路线，还需要预订十人左右的住宿，寻找每晚安静的餐厅，以及处理其他十二项事务。（Craig的全面指南涵盖了所有需要考虑的事项。）在美国，100公里的徒步旅行很难实现，因为这个国家的郊区化和以车为中心的现实，使得很难找到一个可步行的路线，且住宿间隔大约15公里。 然而，投入一段时间出国旅行也许正是这种形式的优势所在。这些徒步旅行不是家庭周末活动，也不是朋友间即兴的旅行，更不是旨在促进职场团结的外派活动。它们比这些更为严肃。毕竟，要重现孩童般的魔力，需要特殊的专注力。这次徒步旅行促使我写下今年的信件，描述我在泰国所见。 我在清迈度过了整个12月。部分原因是为了美食。一旦准备好品尝丛林，全新的美食视野便会展开。我最喜欢的北部泰国菜肴包括木瓜沙拉（或缅甸茶叶沙拉），搭配烤肉——猪脸、半只鸡、排骨，以及清汤海鲜汤。配菜可以选择用香茅和姜烤制的猪肉，混入辣椒的年轻木菠萝，有时还有炸蜂巢。我从未吃过蜂巢，它是一种奇特的食物，口感像咬进一块蓬松的吐司，仅透露出一点蜂蜜的香气。至于甜点，我想象不出比将熟芒果片放在椰奶糯米饭旁更完美的了，后者因浸泡在椰奶中而饱满，再撒上椰奶霜。 我之所以留在那里，部分原因也是为了探索东南亚高原。我的2022年信件主要关注云南，而云南位于清迈对面的山地。这一广阔的高原地区居住着被边缘化的人群，他们有意远离强大的国家，尤其是缅甸、西藏和汉族。通过迁入崎岖地形并实践山地农业，他们得以与山谷王国保持一种若即若离的关系，只取所需程度的“文明”。然而，云南的现状也引发了泰国历史上的摩擦，但与其他东南亚国家相比，它相对和平。云南曾是鸦片罂粟的主要种植区，直到20世纪80年代，泰国政府（与邻国协调）几乎清除了所有鸦片生产，诱使或迫使农民种植其他作物。然而，一位村民却回忆起过去种植“Doctor O.”的日子。 二、奔跑 2023年中国最重要的故事之一可能是，经济复苏的预期好消息并未实现，尽管零新冠政策本应提振消费信心；而政治不确定性带来的意外坏消息却不断涌现，尽管上一年的党代会本应巩固政权的稳定性。中国今年可能达到了5%的GDP增长目标，但其主要股指自2023年初以来已下跌了17%。更令人困惑的是政治方面。2023年，一位部长、一位将军、一位企业家、一位经济数据，以及依赖经济快速增长的企业纷纷消失。 难怪许多中国人现在谈论“rùn”（逃离）。近年来，中国年轻人已将这个词借用其英文含义，表达逃离的渴望。起初，rùn是逃避大城市的职场文化或尤其对女性而言难以承受的家庭期望的一种方式。在三年的零新冠政策下，rùn演变为彻底离开中国。2023年，中国有大量人员在美墨边境被拦截。1月，美国官员在西南边境遇到了约1000名中国人；人数不断上升，到11月时已接近5000人。许多中国人飞往厄瓜多尔，因为那里可以免签入境，从而踏上穿越Darién Gap的危险之路。很难了解这群人，但记者与他们的交谈显示，他们来自各种背景和动机。我没想到会有如此多的中国人愿意踏上一个耗时数月的旅程，以放弃“中国梦”和“中华民族伟大复兴”。 那些奔向美国边境的中国人只是离开中国的少数群体。大多数移民是通过合法途径离开的。那些能找到方法前往欧洲或英语国家的人会这么做，但大多数人似乎都去了三个亚洲国家。有抱负和创业精神的人去了新加坡；有财力和资源的人去了日本；而那些既没有这些条件的人——懒散者、自由灵魂、想放松的年轻人——则聚集在泰国。毕竟，泰国北部这一地区，曾是鸦片罂粟的主要种植区，直到20世纪80年代，泰国政府（与邻国协调）几乎清除了所有鸦片生产，诱使或迫使农民种植其他作物。然而，一位村民却回忆起过去种植“Doctor O.”的日子。 这次“行走与对话”活动的一个核心理念，正如Craig所说，是将成年人置于他们自童年起便未曾经历的情境中：“新面孔、未知环境、持续社交、激烈交谈。”我们的参与者多为中年和自雇人士，他们能够负担得起在12月初进行为期十天的旅行，脱离家庭和工作的束缚。我们十二人中，很少有人在旅途中认识其他人，而长途跋涉是快速了解他人的绝佳方式。交谈自然而然地发生，随着风景不断将我们聚合成两人或三人的小团体。我们的对话在每晚的晚餐中汇聚成一条主线，由Kevin主持讨论一个主题。 人们很快敞开心扉：谈论他们为何加入这次徒步旅行，迅速延伸到他们的生活、工作和困境。每晚的核心话题是所有人都能参与的，因此我们的讨论有诸如“家”、“恐惧”和“失败”等引导性主题。这些较为宽泛的话题极其有效地促使人们展现脆弱，从而将我们紧密联系在一起。（如果我再次组织“行走与对话”，我可能会尝试偏离共识。也就是说，将晚餐更像一个研讨会，每个人提前准备一个15分钟的演讲，讲述他们正在从事的项目，然后开放讨论。不过，我承认并非每个人都会觉得在疲惫的一天后听一场讲座是令人兴奋的想法。） 我们白天携带小背包，每晚则有一个更大的袋子被送至住宿地点。我们在瀑布旁、大象保护区、一个看起来像从加州移植过来的露营胜地，以及最终抵达的清迈酒店中停留，酒店被一棵200岁的木棉树遮荫。还有些奇特之处。有一晚，我们是唯一入住一家如此阴森的度假村的客人，以至于我们争论这是否是税务欺诈的幌子。那里的木屋看起来像是AI生成器根据对安东尼奥·高迪的Park Güell的详细描述3D打印出来的产物。酒店员工不断拍照，仿佛在记录他们确实有真实客人，这并未缓解我们对自身存在可能助长欺诈活动的不安。 三、漂泊 我不希望过度浪漫化“rùn”（逃离）。我意识到，移民只是中国极小部分人口的考虑。很少有人会考虑放弃他们所建立的一切，重新开始于一个外国。我也意识到，对于绝大多数中国人来说，生活并不糟糕。我曾写道，对于中产阶级的人来说，从未有比现在更好的年份在中国生活，我在今年三月的Ezra Klein Show上重复了这一观点。 然而，这个中产阶级如今感到不太确定，因为经济持续下滑。习近平的麻烦在于，他对于所看到的所有问题的正确率是60%，但他的政府的强硬解决方案却往往使情况恶化。房地产开发商是否承担了过多债务？是的，但驱使他们违约并引发购房者信心崩溃的做法并未改善状况。科技巨头是否拥有过多权力？当然，但打压企业家和摧毁他们的企业并未提升士气。政府是否需要遏制腐败？肯定，但恐吓官僚体系也使政策制定机构更加瘫痪和风险规避。毕竟，要重现孩童般的魔力，需要特殊的专注力。这次徒步旅行促使我写下今年的信件，描述我在泰国所见。 我在清迈度过了整个12月。部分原因是为了美食。一旦准备好品尝丛林，全新的美食视野便会展开。我最喜欢的北部泰国菜肴包括木瓜沙拉（或缅甸茶叶沙拉），搭配烤肉——猪脸、半只鸡、排骨，以及清汤海鲜汤。配菜可以选择用香茅和姜烤制的猪肉，混入辣椒的年轻木菠萝，有时还有炸蜂巢。我从未吃过蜂巢，它是一种奇特的食物，口感像咬进一块蓬松的吐司，仅透露出一点蜂蜜的香气。至于甜点，我想象不出比将熟芒果片放在椰奶糯米饭旁更完美的了，后者因浸泡在椰奶中而饱满，再撒上椰奶霜。 我之所以留在那里，部分原因也是为了探索东南亚高原。我的2022年信件主要关注云南，而云南位于清迈对面的山地。这一广阔的高原地区居住着被边缘化的人群，他们有意远离强大的国家，尤其是缅甸、西藏和汉族。通过迁入崎岖地形并实践山地农业，他们得以与山谷王国保持一种若即若离的关系，只取所需程度的“文明”。然而，云南的现状也引发了泰国历史上的摩擦，但与其他东南亚国家相比，它相对和平。云南曾是鸦片罂粟的主要种植区，直到20世纪80年代，泰国政府（与邻国协调）几乎清除了所有鸦片生产，诱使或迫使农民种植其他作物。然而，一位村民却回忆起过去种植“Doctor O.”的日子。 2023年，我惊讶地发现，越来越多的中国人在美墨边境被捕。1月，美国官员在西南边境遇到了约1000名中国人；人数不断上升，到11月时已接近5000人。许多中国人飞往厄瓜多尔，因为那里可以免签入境，从而踏上穿越Darién Gap的危险之路。很难了解这群人，但记者与他们的交谈显示，他们来自各种背景和动机。我没想到会有如此多的中国人愿意踏上一个耗时数月的旅程，以放弃“中国梦”和“中华民族伟大复兴”。 那些奔向美国边境的中国人只是离开中国的少数群体。大多数移民是通过合法途径离开的。那些能找到方法前往欧洲或英语国家的人会这么做，但大多数人似乎都去了三个亚洲国家。有抱负和创业精神的人去了新加坡；有财力和资源的人去了日本；而那些既没有这些条件的人——懒散者、自由灵魂、想放松的年轻人——则聚集在泰国。毕竟，泰国北部这一地区，曾是鸦片罂粟的主要种植区，直到20世纪80年代，泰国政府（与邻国协调）几乎清除了所有鸦片生产，诱使或迫使农民种植其他作物。然而，一位村民却回忆起过去种植“Doctor O.”的日子。 我在这次“行走与对话”活动中，与这些年轻中国人共度时光。我交谈的人中，四分之一已经居住在泰国一两年，其余人只是来访，有时带着留在这里的意图。为何选择泰国？主要是因为便利。中国人可以免签入境泰国，并利用教育签证延长停留时间。这一类别非常宽泛，涵盖从语言培训到泰拳课程。许多中国人报名了签证，却不去上课。 有些人有远程工作。其余人则在泰国实践着一种强烈的灵性。这在很大程度上源于清迈的金色屋顶寺庙和修道院，使这座城市成为一座辉煌的都市。这些寺庙中，人们可以找到冥想静修，有时在更偏远的山区。在那里，人们每天冥想长达14小时，只在每天早上与住持交谈，汇报前一天的呼吸练习并听取新的指导。在沉默冥想20天后，有人告诉我，他发现自己仅凭呼吸练习就陷入了幻觉体验。 另一个灵性实践的源泉是泰国广泛使用实际的迷幻剂，这些在清迈极易获取。泰国是亚洲第一个合法化大麻的国家，如今大麻店比咖啡馆还常见。似乎每个人都有关于蘑菇、Ayahuasca甚至更强力的迷幻剂的故事。据说最好的蘑菇生长在大象粪便中，这导致了一个传奇故事：一群背包客在大象粪堆间跳跃，进行一场漫长的、不间断的旅程。 我交谈的大多数年轻中国人年龄在20多岁。他们试图弥补三年零新冠政策下失去的欢乐。那些选择清迈作为新家的人则有复杂的原因。他们告诉我，近年来他们对世界观感到一种安静的破碎。这些年轻人成长于更大的城市，上过好大学，赋予他们一定的期望：追求有意义的职业、社会获得更大的政治自由，以及中国更融入世界。这些希望却变得酸腐。他们的工作要么过于紧张，要么过于琐碎；过去十年，对自由表达的政治限制不断加强；而中国在发达国家中的受欢迎程度却骤降。 因此，他们选择rùn（逃离）。其中一个触发因素是2022年底的白纸抗议，年轻人不仅要求结束零新冠政策，还呼吁政治改革。几位清迈居民参与了上海或北京的抗议活动，或他们有朋友被捕。几乎每个人对现代中国的压力都感到疏离。一些人因北京对在线教育的打击而失去了工作；其他人曾在国内媒体工作，对审查制度阻碍发表雄心勃勃的故事感到严重不满。人们抱怨自己被当作棋子，被习近平对待，他要求男性为国家的伟大而努力，女性生育孩子。 许多中国人仍对移居泰国抱有矛盾心理。并非所有人都鼓起勇气告诉他们的中国父母他们的真实处境。父母以为他们正在欧洲留学。有时，这导致了复杂的骗局，比如在视频通话时拉窗帘以遮挡光线，因为他们应该处于完全不同的时区；或关注他们应处城市的天气情况，以免被父母问及雨雪时感到意外。 中国仍有一些相对宽容的角落。其中之一是云南的大理，一个位于东南亚高原北部的城市，我在2022年在那里度过了大部分时间。那里有毒品文化的遗迹，也有偶尔的派对场景。然而，即使大理，由于中央政府意识到这座城市是自由灵魂的中心，如今也变得难以维持。来自北京的收紧限制正蔓延至全国每个角落。“中国感觉像一个天花板不断降低的空间，”有人告诉我，“留在这里意味着我们必须低头弯腰前行。” 我与一群大理人共度时光，他们过去一年迁移到了清迈。这些人来自中国加密货币社区，由于北京禁止矿工和交易所，他们发现越来越难维持。2022年，警方中断了他们举办的Wamotopia节，这成为加密货币人士和数字游民的聚会点。节庆的初衷是在大理的田野中焚烧一只大木猫，但中国警方在活动刚开始时就散场了。因此，他们今年迁移到了泰国。 Wamotopia的参与者主要是20多岁的中国人，他们充满活力和乐观，尽管有时情绪会因对未来的绝望而波动。他们中的一些人因参与2022年的抗议活动而无法返回中国，或因加密货币利益不再安全，或因对中国的社会感到疏离。许多人不确定是否会在泰国永久居住，这意味着他们有时会陷入关于“家”意味着什么的生存问题。 我惊讶于美国互联网如今变得如此奇怪。主流活动（如向人们销售商品）在改善，但网络边缘却变得难以理解。我问我的旧金山朋友，如今20多岁的创业者在做什么。他们是否在创办一家价值十亿美元的公司，还是更倾向于成为网络上的“迷因领主”，试图发起一场运动？我不确定我们是否看到创业热潮的兴起，但确实看到了更多网络疯狂。 互联网是一个非常大的地方。我怀疑我们仍低估了它在社会中的重要性。因此，我好奇这种紧张局势将如何解决……主流是否会整合网络边缘，还是边缘会吞噬美国主流？如今，美国人已经能够围绕任何问题产生极端分化，无论多么微不足道，因此我对网络世界能产生多少更奇怪的现象感到担忧。 无论如何，我已不再使用Twitter。这个平台过去十年是我获取信息密集型文章的阅读聚合器。2023年，这一功能完全崩溃。马斯克的算法更改使包含链接的推文失效，这使得理性的人不再分享来源，而是写“链接在简介中”或“链接在帖子底部”。在Twitter删除文章标题后，更难判断我能阅读什么。如今的Twitter是什么？不再是信息密集型文章的平台，而主要是喊叫和视频。 在这方面，我惊讶于马斯克如何成为文化核心人物。马斯克一半是制造领域的先知，能够以火箭、汽车和卫星的方式实现以前无法想象的事物；另一半则是公众意识中的纯粹捣蛋鬼，利用他的互联网追随者推动社会走向疯狂。不只是互联网关注他的行为，马斯克比今年的两位总统候选人更可靠地制造主流新闻头条。其他谁会成为美国帝国每个支柱的常客：旧金山的科技、纽约的金融、洛杉矶的电影、德克萨斯的能源和华盛顿的政府。在最近参加的一次学术会议上，我惊讶地发现美国国家安全官员提到马斯克的次数比任何政府官员都多。 马斯克在过去十年中是一个主要人物，很可能在未来十年中仍然重要。我认为我们必须将他视为世界历史人物，但与其读黑格尔来理解他，我更倾向于读菲利普·K·迪克。他深知混乱的滋味。我将马斯克视为《帕默尔·埃尔德里奇的三重圣痕》中的同名人物。埃尔德里奇和马斯克都是有神秘抱负的创业先知，他们的每一步都引发现有企业和政治秩序的不安。我们不知道马斯克会如何发展，但在PKD的小说中，埃尔德里奇将半数人口带入共享幻觉，并随后获得可能类似神的力量。 （我最近最喜欢的散文之一是Caitrin Keiper写的：大象有灵魂吗？照片由Craig Mod提供） 我暂停了书信写作。2024年，我将把精力投入到为W. W. Norton出版社撰写的关于中国的一本书中。我非常高兴能与Norton合作，它不仅出版了Michael Lewis这样的伟大讲故事者，还有Jonathan Spence和Fuchsia Dunlop这样的中国作者。我认为这本书类似于撰写这封信件的六分之一。我不会排除再次拾起书信写作，但只会在休息之后。 2017年是我第一次写年度信件。我仍然相信我写下的劝诫：“知识可以复利增长。我希望我们能更多思考如何加速学习的增长。传统的多读书、努力提升职业是良好的开端，但仅此还不够。通过前往新地方、以不同方式社交、阅读新类型的书籍、换工作或职业、搬到新地方、做得更好、做得更多，可以学到更多。” 我写了七封年度信件。每年，几周后我发表一封信，就会打开一个新的笔记本准备下一年的信件。那里我会写下数据、观察和书籍推荐，这些内容应放入下一年的信件中。这些笔记没有组织。在最后两周，我会整理所有内容，尝试找出结构，然后写这封信。我抱怨过这需要多少工作，但我也想说这非常有趣。我不明白为何更多人不写这样的信件。这不仅仅是与世界分享你的想法和推荐。拥有一个你渴望填满的容器，会促使你在日常生活中更加观察和分析。 这些信件格式的优点在于它们的灵活性。我花了几年时间才弄清楚它们，但很快就开始尝试，比如加入我对菲利普·K·迪克、意大利喜歌剧以及嘲笑英国专注于声音智能产业的爱好。 也许我最好的两封信件是2020年，我描述了阅读《求是》（党刊）的体验；以及2022年，我进入山区并成为野蛮人。我发现这些信件在围绕一个地点（如中国的城市或泰国的山区）时效果最佳，可以从不同角度和高度描述这些地点。 无论如何，我并未真正休息，只是转向了书本写作。待我接近完成时，我会分享更多关于这本书的内容。 顺便说一句，我最喜欢的信件部分是所有人都告诉我他们忽略的部分。“丹，这封信很棒，我跳过了你写的关于歌剧的所有内容。”让我再次提醒大家为什么我支持意大利喜歌剧。意大利音乐的节奏源于更温暖的阳光和更壮丽的天空，与德国人居住的阴郁森林形成对比。意大利人强调节奏的紧凑感。动量是瓦格纳的解药，后者常常用几乎不动的和弦困住听众。意大利人重视声音的中心地位。这在该流派中不应显得特别；但考虑德国人，他们常常陷入复杂的管弦乐中，忘记他们是在创作歌剧而非交响乐。意大利文学氛围是轻松的：莫扎特和罗西尼从不放过任何调侃崇高之美的机会。我更不习惯瓦格纳那种严肃的氛围，他明显渴望崇拜。意大利的抒情性容纳了更广泛的情感范围；不仅是高声朗诵，还有喜剧的抱怨和颤抖的渴望。这再次与瓦格纳形成对比，他的气质在让歌手陷入恍惚与激发出情欲尖叫之间摇摆。）
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(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2022)

I. Walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. Running

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. Drifting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to talk about books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023-07-18 23:19:45

我的2022年信函可能也是最后一封。现在我必须为这个网站寻找另一个用途。由于我刚刚在新加坡度过几天，参加了各种关于中国的圆桌会议，我想把我在会上提出的笔记整理成文。 我大部分评论都集中在技术上。但谈到中国，通常必须从政治开始，以设定背景。自2022年10月二十大以来，超过半年时间过去了，习近平主席公布了由他的追随者主导的新政治局。这预示着未来五年政治集权将更加有力，也使得他很可能继续担任至2032年。此外，二十大还对曾经繁荣的政治娱乐产业给予了致命一击，该产业曾编织出许多引人入胜且令人愉悦的精英故事，而这些故事最终都让精英们急于反对他。 人们希望新总理李强能成为习近平的优秀诚实者。这种想法认为，这位上海前党务官员，因其与习近平长期的关系，可能会改变他的想法。很难否认这个想法。但我认为李强并没有因为直言不讳地对权力说真话而达到现在的地位。他在首次对媒体讲话时表示，他的角色是忠实地执行中央委员会的决定。这听起来并不像他拥有自己的想法。 现在我们面对的中国领导层对精英分歧的容忍度甚至更低，这可能并未增加政策辩论的空间。政治集权的危险性很容易识别。但其优势呢？我越来越难以看到。习近平巩固权力，似乎并非因为看到了长期存在的政策瓶颈，而是出于自身的意愿。与邓小平不同，他并非出于迫切的经济改革愿望。相反，他似乎将主要任务视为提升国家的国家安全意识。习近平实现了不可能的任务，即约束党内纪律并压制政治反对声音；但目前没有迹象表明他正在追求与如此巨大政治分量相称的政策目标。 只要经济能够带来令人惊叹的成果，政治就不需要占据中心舞台。但如今的增长却像一颗老化的恒星，其表现被共产主义国家的可怕存在所偷走。中国的长期经济挑战显而易见：人口结构拖累、房地产需求达到顶峰、债务负担过重，以及西方世界有意进行一定程度的脱钩。令人惊讶的是，经济在零新冠政策放弃后仅六个月就陷入困境。 2023年初，人们期待着重新开放带来的经济增长。北京设定的过于保守的“5%”增长目标似乎很容易实现。但如今，令人惊讶的是房地产市场仍未恢复，消费者也没有增加支出。服务业和工业部门也没有足够的复苏迹象，加剧了青年失业问题。截至目前，沪深300指数基本持平。这意味着中国的主要股票指数大致处于四个不同的时间点：2022年12月，重新开放前的经济势头；2022年4月，上海（中国最大城市和主要制造业中心）全面封锁时；以及2020年3月，新冠病毒开始在全球传播的时期。换句话说，对于利润前景，企业界几乎没有乐观情绪。在债券市场方面，中国今年已连续六个月出现资金外流。 快速经济增长能否恢复？当然可以。自改革开放以来，中国领导层曾多次果断重启经济引擎。但与早期时期（比如加入世贸组织之前）相比，北京现在能调动的潜在能力远不如从前，尽管仍有相当大的基础需求。然而，目前的增长故事并不理想。我在2022年信函中指出的一个趋势是，疲软的经济增长将推动主导性的政治议程，反之亦然。尽管无法量化，但我预计政治收紧将构成对长期增长的实质性拖累。 技术领域的势头 中国的科技行业正受到经济增长放缓以及中美两国政府打击的影响。但这些并非全部故事，因为技术本身可以拥有自身的势头。我认为，中国的技术发展一如既往地呈现出混合状态：某些领域进展不顺，而其他领域则相当辉煌。 过去一年最令人振奋的新发展是生成式人工智能。中国公司在这方面几乎没有可用成果。任何关于中国人工智能的讨论都必须以这样一个事实作为起点：中国本土企业未能在半年前美国开始使用ChatGPT时广泛推出自己的回应。是的，中国科技公司正在开发自己的生成式人工智能工具，往往在技术基准测试中表现令人印象深刻。但它们仅在受控环境中发布，而不是面向公众。 我认为他们没有向所有人开放人工智能聊天机器人是出于一个简单的原因：北京的监管者不愿让它们在野外运行。中国科技公司可能因缺乏最先进的芯片而受到阻碍；同时，由于大多数可训练文本都是英文而非中文，他们可能也受到训练数据不足的困扰。但中国公司很少犹豫不决地将次品产品推向市场以获取先发优势，因此，有更大的力量在阻止它们。 这个强大的力量就是北京强硬派的意志。我怀疑中国领导层将大型语言模型视为类似于社交媒体平台的东西：技术上经济回报有限，但政治风险显著。像Twitter和TikTok这样的社交媒体平台并未提高全要素生产率（TFP）。（从个人角度来看，这些平台严重降低了我的工作效率。）相反，它们是自由表达的平台，可能引发政治动荡。习近平和政治局其他成员没有理由让这些有时会违反其监管规则的人工智能聊天机器人进入每个公民的手中。 目前，将生成式人工智能视为一种玩具，其价值介于经济无用和社会动荡之间，可能并不荒谬。但这种信念可能不会持续太久。美国人现在正在将这些工具融入日常生活。它们可能会很快出现在生产力统计数据中，甚至不久之后。中国大多数人无法使用这些工具的时间越长，中国在某些方面被甩在后面的风险就越大。 当然，人工智能不仅仅是聊天机器人和图像生成器。北京当然在大量使用人工智能，但主要是用于审查、人脸识别等控制手段。而不是让人民自由地使用这些技术，国家正在将其牢牢掌握在自己手中。我思考的问题是，目前对人工智能广泛消费用途的禁止是否会减缓更具战略意义的部署。无论如何，我提出一个最低标准：如果到2023年底，中国消费者仍然主要无法接触到ChatGPT的本土替代品，那么至少我们可以重新评估赖志斌（Kai-Fu Lee）的论点，即尽管美国在人工智能创新方面领先，但中国在实施方面更有优势。 尽管中国在新型人工智能技术上没有回应，但美国仍需在与中国的长期技术竞争中保持警惕。这是我在《纽约时报》上刚刚发表的一篇社论的前提。总结：如果有一天贸易出现严重中断，很难确定美国在人工智能上的优势能否克服中国在大规模适应性制造业上的实力。 正是这种大规模适应性制造业的实力支撑了我对中国技术发展的积极看法。中国在半导体、航空和其他一些战略技术方面仍存在弱点。但中国在许多其他领域正在增强实力。我最喜欢举的例子有三个。由于在电动汽车领域的优势，中国有望在2023年超越日本，成为全球最大的汽车出口国，去年已经超过了德国。对于iPhone，中国从2008年的约3%附加值贡献增长到近年来的约25%。在清洁能源技术方面，中国已建立起显著的领先地位。它主导了太阳能供应链的大部分环节，从上游多晶硅提炼到下游光伏组件组装，以及电动汽车电池供应链的大部分环节。 中国仍然保持着相当大的优势，这种优势并不完全依赖于经济增长放缓或人口结构拖累。主要优势是其根深蒂固的劳动力，持续推动制造业复杂性的提升。我想起凯文·凯利（Kevin Kelly）提出的“技术体”（technium）概念。该概念描述了一个相互交织、相互依赖、复杂的技术生态系统，具有自己的“意识”。尽管中国领导层变得越来越严厉，但该国的制造业生态系统仍在持续增强复杂性，并在全球许多产品市场中占据份额。 即使相对较低的经济增长水平也能带来相当大的技术追赶。必须始终记住，中国的目标是跟随西方公司已经铺设的技术阶梯。他们不需要进行理论突破来重新发明现有技术。同样，人口减少并不必然导致技术势头的中断。每年，中国大学在STEM领域的博士毕业生数量几乎是美国大学的两倍。技术竞争主要取决于相对较小的人口比例。 因此，我仍然认为中国将主要弥补其战略上的不足，包括芯片和航空领域。但这并不意味着其公司将成为ASML和TSMC这样的创新竞争对手。中国竞争对手几乎肯定不如这些公司组织得当且盈利。但它们将生产足够好的产品，落后于全球领导者几年，这对中国来说并不是太大的劣势。例如，芯片可能不足以满足最新iPhone的需求，但足以满足大多数电动汽车的需求；飞机可能不如空客最新机型高效，但足以在沪深之间飞行。 这意味着美国不应放松对技术竞争的关注。美国需要解决的问题远不止先进的芯片。在《芯片法案》和《通胀削减法案》通过后，美国走在了正确的道路上。但这些只是开始，如果美国未能建立更丰富的工业生态系统，它们的影响力将非常有限。 关于清洁能源技术的简要说明：美国处于一个奇怪的位置，试图与一个低工资竞争对手进行技术追赶。我的基本假设是《通胀削减法案》将取得成功。该法案提供的税收抵免如此慷慨，美国至少能够用国内生产满足国内需求。（更高的成功标准——挑战中国公司在全球市场上的地位——可能过于苛刻。）即便如此，这条路上仍会有波折。一个风险是，美国将建设大量工厂，但大多数仍停留在低产量水平。例如，苹果公司在德克萨斯州的Mac Pro工厂并未真正实现规模扩大。另一个风险是，美国可能在多年内失去推动这些技术的政治意愿。大量太阳能和电池初创企业将失败；如果国会成员在这些企业失败后嘲笑这些努力并撤回资金，那将是令人遗憾的。 遏制技术势头 回到中国。经济增速的逐渐放缓不会打破技术势头，但政治可能会影响这一点。 首先，外部环境：比十年前更少的大型市场对中国技术出口开放。任何可能引起国会议员注意的中国产品，美国都相对敌视。欧洲仍然开放，但也在抱怨保护主义。近年来，中国科技公司遭受的重大打击之一是失去印度市场。2020年的一个意外是，中国和印度军队在几十年相对平静之后爆发了致命的边境冲突。冲突后，印度政府将中国公司排除在许多他们曾寄予增长期望的市场之外。印度并未完全关闭，中国公司仍然有许多市场可以出口。但这一市场范围已缩小，谁又能确定北京的外交和军事姿态不会影响其他企业家的市场呢？ 西方正在将“脱钩”一词逐渐替换为“去风险化”。我认为后者是一个极具中国特色的词汇：充满歧义，使西方国家能够摸着石头过河。保罗·盖维茨（Paul Gewirtz）指出，“去风险化”可能意味着减少风险或消除风险。这表明，最终“脱钩”和“去风险化”可能只是没有实质区别的概念，后者是对前者的礼貌重新包装。 内部政治变化也在发挥作用。党代会成立了新的机构——中央科技委员会，作为科技发展的最高协调者。国家因此决定采取自上而下的方式来解决其技术问题，将芯片产业视为类似航天或核武器的项目。总体而言，这种国家主导的转变对整体科技发展是相当负面的。如果北京认为芯片产业可以像国家航天项目一样运作，那么它从根本上误解了芯片行业。 比较哪种技术“更难”是一种脆弱的游戏。尽管如此，我认为芯片比火箭更具挑战性。芯片制造商必须在一个研发密集的商业生态系统中与上游供应商和下游客户合作；而航天机构的基本任务是将重物送入太空（而不总是关心它是否会掉下来），同时控制整个供应链。因此，芯片在商业和技术上比火箭科学更为复杂。很难看出将其作为后者来运作会带来什么好处。 自上而下方法的最佳案例是国家的科学家能够成功识别出中国必须掌握的所有关键技术，并通过巧妙的政策协调推动这些技术的发展，使其超越原本可能的水平。中央计划的历史并不鼓励这种信心。但也许它会奏效。即便如此，这些科学家很可能错过下一个重大突破。北京目前对科学的态度是慷慨资助国家关键领域，而将剩余部分留给其他领域。这种做法忽略了mRNA疫苗这样的技术。这类技术并未在北京市的官僚体系中引起重视。相反，mRNA疫苗更是一种美国体系的验证，即科学家们在许多不同领域进行探索，准备在危机中扩大新型技术的应用。 总体的政治环境可能是对技术势头的最大威胁。并不是说威权体制无法推动技术前沿：19世纪末的普鲁士、20世纪中期的苏联以及其他许多国家都曾如此。但我不确定一个第三任期的中国是否会持续推动创新。 许多中国企业家也感到困惑。我今年读到的最令人震惊的新闻是，越来越多的中国公民在墨西哥边境被拦截，试图进入美国。我没想到一些中国人会认为这样艰难的旅程值得。这叠加了众所周知的趋势，即许多中国企业家已离开本国市场。在最近几个月里，我与许多在美国的中国本科生交谈，他们几乎每个人都告诉我，他们的父母劝他们不要回国。这些群体仅占中国人口的极小比例，但技术发展同样依赖于他们。 国家安全的态度促使了新的关于间谍活动的法律以及对数据传输更严格的限制。与中国的外国人感到不安，因为国家秘密现在包括经济发展、科技以及行政管理部门指定的“其他事项”的数据。我仍然不明白为什么北京决定现在正式化这些措施。既然国家宣布间谍活动非法，外国间谍在中国几乎不会因此而停止行动。 这些法律、各种出口禁令以及对跨国企业的质疑只会让世界其他国家对中国失去兴趣。外国投资者和商业人士报告称，即使他们访问中国，也很难听到坦率的意见。除非他们与相识多年的朋友交谈，否则他们甚至可能从自己的本地员工那里听到官方立场。有时，本地员工甚至拒绝向总部分享数据，引用国内法律。难怪投资者对中国兴趣如今变得稀少，今年资金外流可能超过流入。 关于习近平的乐观故事是，他一旦意识到经济增长的重要性，无论是为了他的任期还是中国的声誉，他可能会放松对社会的控制。但问题是，我已经听了很多年这样的说法，却没有看到实质性的调整。有时，习近平会做出战术上的调整。但在增长与控制之间，他十次中有九次选择后者。那些相信他会认识到增长重要性的人，请记住，过去十年里，他一直在贬低对GDP的追求。
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My 2022 letter will probably be my last. Now I have to devise another use for this site. Since I’ve just spent a few days in Singapore, joining various roundtables to discuss China, I thought I would write up the notes I presented on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The momentum in tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halting technological momentum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023-03-04 23:45:24

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

Mountains offer the best hiding places from the state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climbing out of civilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lockdowns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protests

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

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

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

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

From Zero Covid to Total Covid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revelry or growth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The authoritarian impulse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the mountains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to talk about books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open questions:

2022-01-01 23:32:01

（这篇文章是我的年度回顾；这是我的2020年书信）

到目前为止，我已居住在中国的主要大区。是时候进行评估了。

在城市设计中，所有可能出错的事情都出错了。北京的气候干旱，容易受到北方沙尘暴的影响。它的街道无法步行，但一次漫步会发现，其帝制遗产——胡同里的四合院——正逐渐被社会主义遗产——灰色的苏维埃式建筑所取代。因此，北京是一个具有斯大林主义特征的沙漠草原城市。十年前，这座城市还充满活力。人们可以找到无数回忆在胡同里参观艺术展览和有趣的酒吧，然后在路边烧烤。如今，北京则是一个混凝土构成的无趣地带，也是全国最严格的限制城市。但北京的学术生活使其得以弥补。它不仅是国家权力的中心，也是大学和最具梦想的初创企业的所在地。对于那些敢于面对其城市混乱的人来说，一顿闪耀的晚餐正等待着他们。

一百年前，上海（我目前居住的地方）是亚洲最具野心的城市，人们可以在那里舒适地生活并赚取大量财富。经过几个动荡的年代后，这一事实再次成立。上海是中国最西方化的大城市，吸引了可能最多的外国公民以及曾在海外生活过的中国人。人们可以在树荫下的前法租界生活，那里是全球咖啡馆最集中的地方，同时在办公室工作，其环境与新加坡和香港几乎无异。很容易在东部运河城市进行一日游，这些城市曾令诗人和皇帝着迷。如今的上海在文化上与北京不相上下，提供了同样丰富的视觉和表演艺术选择。更有效的对比是上海人更关注实际事务。他们专注于生产使城市更加宜居的食品和时尚企业。

粤港澳大湾区对我来说略显神秘，因为我居住在衰退的部分——香港，而非增长的部分：深圳。改革开放初期，深圳吸收了中国企业家的先锋力量。东南地区长期以来更注重商业而非文化，其历史遗产相对较少。当英国占领香港时，港口只是一个荒芜的岩石，而深圳则几乎只是一个定居点。即使广州，一个主要的商业枢纽，也从未真正成为文化中心，只是美食之都。东南地区采取的策略与上海类似：围绕充满活力的制造业发展服务行业。但其执行方式缺乏品味。虽然深圳不如上海有趣，但其地区可能是当今国家最动态和前瞻的部分。

中央政府将约一亿人分配到这些大区，并要求他们推动未来增长。北京作为国家政治中心，自13世纪蒙古统治以来，一直是北方枢纽的核心，该枢纽还包括天津和相对较小的城市。上海领导东部，一个自10世纪宋朝以来的制造业和文化中心，包括附近的杭州、苏州和其他中大型城市。而东南地区没有明显的领导者，但其核心是深圳，该市是该地区最富裕的城市，以及广州，后者是省会和自18世纪以来的国际商业中心。

每个地区都有不同的个性。北方经济功能失调。其大部分地区受资源依赖、环境问题和人口流失的影响。北京周边的城市展示了钢铁和煤炭的过剩产能，而天津则以伪造经济数据而闻名。东北省份的人口在过去十年中下降了约10%，而北方整体的GDP占比从1960年的50%降至今天的30%。

然而，北京却突破了这一地区的局限，实现了强劲增长。它是国家的政治中心，从这一地位中获取了所有经济优势。这意味着保留大部分国家部门以及最依赖政治租金的产业。因此，它与华盛顿特区的混合模式相似，包括大使馆、智库和需要游说的产业。但北京的每个行业并不都依赖政府的恩惠。虽然阿里巴巴在杭州，腾讯在深圳，但北京却拥有大多数消费互联网公司，如字节跳动、美团和京东。北京是一个寻找人才的好地方，因为它长期处于领先地位，且许多国家顶尖大学都在这里。而深圳的许多企业家梦想着建立十亿美元的企业，北京的企业家则致力于建立数百亿美元的企业。

上海更偏向商业。大约一千年前，东部地区开始转型为国家的财政中心，随着人们从北方种植小米的地区迁移到更富产稻米的东部。该地区又因新大陆白银的涌入而获得另一波提升，推动南京、苏州和杭州成为世界上最早为全球市场生产奢侈品的城市。这些大都市周围是生产稻米、陶瓷、丝绸和其他商品的市场城镇。上海在清朝的缓慢衰落中崭露头角。到20世纪初，它吸引了最活跃的中国企业家，并成为国家工业的中心。同时，上海是全球赌博和妓院之都，国家鸦片贸易的中心，以及英、法、美商人享有的海外游乐场。

如今，上海的肮脏过去大多已不为人知。但经济活力并未完全消失。该市是大多数跨国公司在中国总部的所在地。它吸引了那些欣赏其商业环境的中国企业家：他们告诉我，地方政府竞争着为公司提供服务，不断询问如何帮助。而北京周边地区正在衰退，上海周边的城市则是中国最好的经济成功案例之一。Simon Rabinovitch对此描述得最好：“北京，一个展示政治权力的橱窗，却被国有企业的庞大总部所遮蔽。记者们去中国最大的经济灾难进行一日游，从过度建设的天津到内蒙古煤矿的悲剧。在上海，这个拥有2500万人口的城市运作良好，记者们则前往杭州看高科技创新者，无锡看灵活的出口商，温州看雄心勃勃的企业家。”

我最欣赏的事实是上海的高度宜居性。在亚洲城市中，东京是一个奇迹，但我认为上海并不逊色于新加坡、香港或首尔。商业人士告诉我，纽约是唯一能与之媲美的城市。我同意，这两个城市都有特殊的活力：它们都位于主要水道上，大量投资绿化，并拥有支持优质休闲活动的繁荣商业环境。在疫情开始后，大量人群从北京迁移到上海，包括我。而北京受到每一次国内疫情的重创，上海则几乎没有病例，同时是全国最宽松的城市。我们这些新来者很难不嘲笑北的朋友，每次读到北京的新限制时。

深圳的地区因其拼凑式发展而难以描述。深圳在2018年超越香港，成为该地区最富裕的城市。但它未能从广州手中夺取领导权，后者嫉妒地守护着其政治权力。东莞、珠海和惠州各自追求自己的策略，而澳门也融入其中（尽管它因单一产业而不太有趣）。与此同时，香港是一个独立的世界。由于过去三年的政治问题，中央政府显然对这座城市感到不耐烦。北京不再期望它领导，而是将其视为一种需要管理的问题，希望不会带来太多痛苦。

我在2018年离开香港，早于其抗议活动和随后的政治镇压。当时我急于离开，因为我已经感受到居住在一个结构性衰退城市中的深切失望。我承认，香港是一个城市天堂：一个热带岛屿，拥有壮观的地理环境，环绕着厚森林的摩天大楼。那里的热带便利设施很容易找到：海滩、森林、成群的野生动物，所有这些都可通过优秀的公共交通系统轻松到达。换句话说，曼哈顿与毛伊岛的结合，位于珠江口。那里仍然有有趣的居民，许多人冒险到大陆或亚洲其他地区。

但香港也是我生活过的最官僚化的城市。其商业景观在过去几十年里保持不变：由房地产开发商主导，但过去三十年里并未产生任何有影响力的企业。这是英国殖民统治的遗产，其中管理者通过分配土地——城市最稀缺的资源——来控制经济精英。香港的官僚执行最微小的规则，我感受到一种自豪感。而在大陆，执行者经常处理无意义的规则，有时甚至能选择视而不见。因此，一种停滞的精神笼罩着这座城市。我之前曾写道，菲利普·K·迪克对香港的天际线有用，但对其由财团主导的政体： “由一个有能力但根本悲观的精英阶层统治，他们管理着一个渴望消费的人口。人们不像PKD小说中的那样沉迷于毒品和电视，而是沉迷于从大陆流入的巨额流动性，这提升了他们的资产价值并钝化了他们的感官。”

因此，我认为年轻人几乎没有理由继续居住在港。他们应该搬到深圳，那里距离北京仅一小时地铁，精神上则比北京年轻得多。深圳和广州仍然吸引着企业家，创造了一种比上海更商业化的文化。但深圳虽然宜人，却是一个文化匮乏的城市。一位朋友讲述了一个画廊艺术家的轶事，他说深圳的客户很少评论他们打算购买的艺术品，而是只问其五年后的预期价格。

先知，而非实用主义者

人们不应过分夸大这些地区的差异。毕竟，人们和官员一直在北京、上海和深圳之间流动。但我会夸大它们的差异，作为分解中国增长异质性的练习。

有一个小笑话，认为理想的公司应由北京人领导，他们提供愿景、领导力和政府关系的精明；财务由上海人负责，而运营则由深圳人管理（他们雇佣四川和安徽人做实际工作）。企业家朋友说，深圳的商业最直接：人们聚在一起吃晚饭，讨论如何分配工作，然后第二天就投入工作。北京的晚餐则充满饮酒、吹嘘自己与高层的关系，而很少有后续行动。

北京人之所以如此，是因为城市拥有帝制和社会主义的遗产。北京的货币是权力。党国维持着一个正式的等级制度，这是帝制时代的遗留，标志着每个官员的地位。在帝制时代，权势者享有官职和宫廷关系。在社会主义时代——当商品分配应是平等的——权势者享有官职、进入党农场和最好的小学，以及与中央委员会的联系。

我曾住在大使馆区。每天，完整的安全部门可能会出现：军队、准军事部队、警察、便衣警察等。北京的国家权力氛围令人窒息。这里的“权力”指的是物理基础设施，旨在震慑。北京的林荫大道之所以无法步行，是因为它们的设计更偏向于军队阅兵，而非行人。而“权力”也指个人互动的结构。北京本地人适应了规则的泛滥，不是完全服从，而是辨别哪些可以安全忽略。因此，北方人往往显得不守规矩。当我在北京时，我发现自己同情法家学派，该学派要求统治者以残酷的手腕治理。我以一个骑自行车者的视角发言，这在任何地方都是一个受委屈的阶层。看到如此多的摩托司机在没有警察的情况下逆行或在人行道上骑行，令人沮丧。

但北京的角色远不止是执行琐碎限制的执法者。其控制倾向表明了意识形态变革的承诺。上海和深圳创造财富和闲暇；北京则试图将目光投向其乌托邦的旗帜。我在2020年的信中主要关注了中央集权的激励运动，这是共产党动员人民的需要。中国治理的一个显著特点是不断调整口号，如“改革开放”以推动国家远离社会主义，以及最近的“共同富裕”以回归。北京不仅不满足于国家财富，还寻求社会主义现代化和“中华民族的伟大复兴”。这是一种弥赛亚式的驱动力，伴随着神圣的文本、复杂的仪式和偶尔的清洗。

深圳可能代表了中国赚钱精神的纯粹形式。许多人，包括北方人，因深圳宽松的政治环境而迁居于此。上海则介于深圳和北京之间。虽然上海有显著的经济活力，但数据显示，国家部门在该市经济中的占比与北京相当。许多上海的“名人”已迁往北京担任政治局职务，包括现任意识形态负责人王沪宁。上海当然在共产党历史上最重要的两个政治事件中扮演了重要角色：1921年党的成立和文化大革命期间“四人帮”的政治基地。

尽管我讨厌北京作为城市，但我发现自己同情其精神。北方强硬派有其用途。我欣赏Amia Srinivasan在今年Tyler采访中的一句话：“历史可能会告诉我们，是先知，而不是单纯的实用主义者，才是最强大的世界塑造者。”广州的陈云，一位上海人，曾是国家领导人，几乎与邓小平政治地位相当。在关于经济特区的早期讨论中，陈云指出，他的家乡充满了投机者，他们为了小钱会破坏社会秩序。

一场夏季风暴

北京的目标是将企业家精神引导至有用的方向。利润不能是价值的最终标准，国家的精英必须致力于民族救赎。我看到这种动态在当年的监管运动中得以体现。

今年最重要的政治局会议在四月举行。会后声明指出，领导层识别了一个“机会窗口”，同时经济增长良好，因此要“深化结构性改革”。此前，领导层已对房地产和消费互联网行业表示不满，此次声明表明，现在是加强打击的最佳时机。中央政府随后发起了清理行动。在所有方面收紧的举措使经济学家Barry Naughton将监管压力称为“历史书中的夏季风暴”。我同意这一观点，并将阐述领导层的目标。

当北京惩罚蚂蚁金服和滴滴时，我们都担心这些公司只是精英政治游戏中的棋子，其规则对非参与者是保密的。然而，现在对这两家公司的惩罚似乎比之后发生的事情要小得多：在线教育的“断头”、对视频游戏的新限制、对互联网平台的反垄断行动，以及关于数据和隐私的法律。

许多评论员指出，任何单个监管措施在技术官僚层面都是合理的。美国和欧洲也在讨论类似的规则，尽管他们不会像中国那样迅速和严厉地实施。我既同意那些认为这些规则有坚实技术官僚基础的评论员，也同意Naughton的观点，即这些措施构成了对企业的前所未有的政治控制。北京期望公司不仅遵守正式法规，还要遵循更广泛的意识形态议程。

尽管北京限制了互联网公司，但它对基于科学的行业如半导体和可再生能源却毫无作为。事实上，它为这些行业提供了税收减免和其他政治支持。例如，第十四次五年计划对基于科学的技术的重视程度远高于互联网。因此，北京的收紧措施之一是优先发展基于科学的技术，而非消费互联网行业。远非对科技的全面打击，领导层仍在不遗余力地谈论科技的价值。

但北京的打击也存在更严重的风险，即可能抑制整体经济活力。如今从事在线教育的人们患有PTSD。马云已经一年未在公众视野中出现。同时，许多最成功的中国创始人已退居幕后。在中国，没有公众人物敢过于显眼。创业者的动机之一可能是享受成为亿万富翁的荒谬奢侈。而谈到埃隆·马斯克，我们应注意到他最初是在消费互联网领域致富，然后才涉足制造业。

在十年内，中国是否会有更少像马云那样的大胆创业者尚不清楚。至少目前，我身边的创业人士认为他的例子过于遥远，不值得效仿。他仍然是世界上最富有的人之一，却花时间打高尔夫、练习书法或在荷兰考察农业技术。我认为，要击败中国创业活力，仅靠这场监管运动是不够的。我们可能会回顾今年夏天，将其视为中国遏制自身镀金时代过度的高点，这一时代既带来了繁荣，也带来了投机行为。在最好的情况下，北京能够驯服其掠夺者，而不灭绝未来的活力。

扼杀文化领域

但监管收紧存在一个严重问题。夏季风暴打击了行业，使人们感到迷茫。问题在于，党国看起来像旧约中的上帝：一个愤怒的实体，要求人们做出令人敬畏的忠诚展示，以证明对价值观信仰的承诺。不服从会引发风暴和其他天谴表现。遵守不仅意味着物质礼物——蜂蜜、曼纳和政府对工厂融资的赞助，还意味着实现国家的伟大。

如果北京只是残酷或不可预测，人们就不会如此紧张。但它是两者兼有。没人知道国家会将价值观议程推进多远。今年发生了很多令人难以置信的事情。例如，夏季结束时，每个人神经都最为紧张，因为他们想知道“共同富裕”将带来什么，以及国家是否会像对待在线教育那样严厉打击其他行业。国家媒体机关选择在那个时刻公布一位不知名博主的极端左翼言论。令作者惊讶的是，他的庆祝被登上了国家媒体主页，并推送到新闻推送中。而我们其他人则感到困惑，为什么宣传官员会选择如此边缘的观点进行新闻宣传。

政府官员随后出来保证人们，共同富裕并不意味着平等主义。但具体意味着什么仍未明确。北京在彻底恐吓人们之后才抑制其控制倾向。最高领导人习近平的核心赌注是，国家始终存在大量活力，而党国的任务是引导这种能量向正确方向发展。这一赌注可能成功，但这一推动也展示了对个人自由的无尽限制的厌恶。

虽然还不能说监管行动已经扼杀了中国的创业活力，但十年的持续收紧已扼杀了文化生产。我预计中国将变得富裕但文化发展停滞。根据我的统计，自改革开放以来的四十年里，中国仅产生了两部吸引全球的作品：《三体》和TikTok。即使这些作品也需资格。《三体》是天才之作，但仍是科幻迷的小众产品；而TikTok部分是美国产品，不一定传达中国内容。即使我们忽略这些细微差别，中国对全球的文化贡献仍然微薄。从未有任何经济体在增长如此多的同时，却产生如此少的文化出口。相比之下，日本、韩国和台湾创造了世界喜爱的新艺术、音乐、电影和电视节目。

中国文化停滞的原因很简单：国家的压制之手磨灭了国家的创造力。收紧是持续不断的。例如，《三体》三部曲在2010年已在中国出版，这完全是一个不同的时代。我认为很难想象今天这部作品能被出版或营销。这不仅涉及对文化大革命的直接描绘的审查。十年前，小米的CEO在微博上分享了他对这本书的想法；而今天，很少有人敢发表任何非爱国或琐碎的言论。因此，我对未来中国科幻小说的发展并不乐观，因为今天研究该领域的人数几乎与实际从业者一样多。

在过去十年中，习近平和领导层成功说服或迫使精英们认为，思考国家是否走在正确道路上并不值得。这些精英应低头赚钱。中国民众不说话有很多原因：对国家的恐惧、实用主义，认为他们的话无法改变现状，以及对西方声音的不满，因为这些声音否定了国家的一些积极方面。同时，宣传机构已将公共领域武器化，以榨取异见。在微博或微信上发表的批评评论可能会导致平台删除账户。如果这没有发生，互联网暴民将扑来。尽管互联网暴民的可见性增加，我认为我们仍然只是触及了中国民族主义的表面。

没有放松的迹象。作家朋友说，2022年他们无法出版有趣的作品，因为年底将召开二十大。我们必须接受，趋势是进一步收紧。就像房子不能太干净，城市不能太保护自己免受新冠感染，国家不能太自由于精神污染。习近平的遗产之一是推动官员过于严格地实施控制，以至于官员们现在试图证明自己比总书记更马克思主义。可以肯定的是，政府将控制得太多，而不是太少。

结果是，习近平无法实现他今年对“让中国更可爱和值得尊敬”的呼吁。相反，中国更可能被视为一个充满审查的共产党国家。根据皮尤研究中心的数据，发达国家对中国的好感率已降至平均60%。对政权的外国敌意过去仅限于中国异议人士和政治光谱中的小众群体；如今，它已成为一种普遍现象。

北京通过其对每种侮辱都以侮辱回应的需要，使情况恶化。不幸的是，它无法通过引用谚语“君子报仇，十年不晚”来克制。像钟表一样，每次中国决定反驳其过于残酷的指控，政府都忍不住采取极端小气的行动来恐吓批评者。去年，它以《华尔街日报》的社论发表了一条不敏感的标题为由，驱逐了西方报道团队的精英，使得只有少数记者仍留在《纽约时报》和《华盛顿邮报》的现场。今年，北京证明了没有一个国家、公司或个人太不重要，不能成为国家媒体的抨击对象或国家支持的经济惩罚目标。

因此，中国今天面临全球的强烈反感。这源于对少数民族的拘留营、香港的政治镇压、对其他国家的虐待威胁以及其他问题。同时，国家未能培养出“可爱和值得尊敬”的形象。这种情绪可以迅速转变，因为国家缺乏好奇心。党国似乎真的相信，世界必须因为中国的经济增长而爱它。但笑话是，美国人和欧洲人并不钦佩经济增长，而是为自己创造了上千个理由来避免它。他们更关注文化问题，因此人们喜欢日本、韩国和台湾，这些国家将经济增长与文化创造结合在一起。

全面深化改革

但北京的控制倾向并不是这个国家的唯一故事。上海和深圳对此感到不满，它们以商业倾向调解这种控制。地方政府的抵制有时可以缓解北京最糟糕的想法。上海和深圳有时也能帮助改善北京的制度能力。中国的增长故事并非仅由政府或企业家产生，而是一个异质实体，不同地区辩证地相互阻碍和改善。

我可以讲述中国文化生产停滞的故事。人们也有理由担心整个经济也会如此。但我们现在还没有到那一步。今年，中国经济表现不佳，但几乎全部的放缓都可以归因于政策选择：要么是疫情控制，要么是监管收紧。经济学家多年来一直说中国需要去杠杆化其房地产驱动的经济，而今年领导层决定这么做。中央政府启动了这一议程，因为它判断结构性改革将在中长期支持增长。它当然犯了错误，尤其是在电力市场方面，但今年的运动显示了北京主动塑造事件的意愿。讽刺的是，这些自称为马克思主义者的人尤其愿意抵制历史上的大趋势，例如全球化或金融化。

上海和深圳的影响在经济改善的轨迹中可见。首先，财富的持续积累，不仅在大城市，也在农村地区。过去十年里，北京和上海的空气质量也显著改善。日常生活管理也有所改善。现在，人们可以相对容易地获得商业执照；知识产权体系变得强大，使得中国公司之间提起大量诉讼；法规相对透明和专业；许多类型的金融风险已从金融体系中挤出。我提交的论点是，中国的地方政府功能在任何其他先进国家都显得相当普通。除了安全和宣传机构，政府部门的工作方式与美国或欧洲类似，只是数字化程度更高。

在更具体的事务上，上海居民喜欢谈论过去几年加速改善的城市生活。政府不断建设新公园、自行车道和商业区，以提高城市已有的宜居性。中国公司尚未创造许多全球品牌，但我有信心这会改变。企业家们仍然充满大梦想，未能收到全球化已死的通知。那些察觉到外国对中国敌意的人会保持低调，希望产品质量能为自己辩护。在每个细分领域，我发现中国产品的质量变得强大。我预计良好的品牌将跟随良好的质量。

我常用的衡量整体质量改善的指标是慢食连锁餐厅的标准化。不，我并不经常在像鼎泰丰这样的地方吃饭。但以四川酸菜鱼和陕西面食和肉类为特色的连锁餐厅现在变得合理，甚至有趣。任何从事食品管理的人都会告诉你，要在不同门店和城市之间保持高度一致性是困难的。但中国管理者近年来已经解决了这个问题。尽管我对创造中国文化产品持悲观态度，但我承认视觉艺术可能是一个例外。上海的艺术界充满活力，由新博物馆的建设、缺乏现成作品来填充空间，以及公众对新事物的好奇心驱动。这些是艺术实验的理想条件。如果有人想推动艺术范式超越在白色立方空间中展示过时大师，中国空间是一个好选择。

许多关于中国的宏观指标令人失望，如创造增长所需的信贷增加和总要素生产率增长的下降。但我们不能让这些测量不准确的数据点成为理解该经济的福音真理。数据必须与实地观察相结合。在我居住于香港期间，我看到年度排名中，智库将该城市列为经济自由度最高的城市，而其商业景观却几十年来保持不变，这让我觉得非常可笑。我提交的论点是，观察者在使用宏观指标低估中国活力时犯了错误。

中国的经济正处于结构性放缓。但仍有大量追赶增长的空间，因为其人均GDP仅为美国的七分之一。同时，各个行业，尤其是我每天研究的科技领域，表现出强劲的增长势头。一位将孩子送到上海上学的美国朋友告诉我，中国学校教授数学的方式与美国学校教授体育的方式相似：期望每个孩子都有能力。中国的半导体行业仍然薄弱，但更广泛的科学努力并未表现得太差。例如，中国的航天计划可能比NASA落后数年或数十年，但已展现出从过去任务中学习并承担越来越困难任务的能力。中国在能源基础设施建设上的持续执行能力也描述了这一点。这些产生了类似美国50年代和60年代的国家自信，以完成艰难的事情。

对于中产阶级的人来说，从未有一个比今年更好的年份来居住在中国。这归功于企业家，他们创建企业以取悦人们。他们与西方同行并无不同。政府的控制倾向偶尔会显现，这令企业家非常烦恼。他们的能力在习近平的领导下有所削弱，但并未完全消失。偶尔，他们能通过接受的行政渠道告诉北京“闭嘴”，例如在过度的疫情控制情况下。

而中央政府本身也渴望改进。它在改革方面的记录比任何其他发展中国家都更强，因为领导层不断完成政治上困难的任务：缩小国家部门、在加入WTO后将经济转向出口导向型增长等。现在的一个主要问题是，中央政府是否仍有改革的耐力。在经历了今年夏天之后，我认为答案是肯定的。

我们必须避免外部观察者在疫情期间完善的三联画：在危机初期说“中国无法控制这个问题”；在危机期间说“这些数据不真实”；在危机结束时说“这不是什么大成就，而且极权制度完全适合管理这些情况”。中国拥有强大的企业家和强大的国家，这两者有时会相互加强。我最近注意到的一个有趣事实是，浙江省委书记，中国最重要的书记之一，曾是国家载人航天计划的负责人。浏览省级党委书记的维基百科页面会发现他们拥有各种技术官僚经验。

中国改革计划的一个重要因素不仅包括重塑战略景观——例如促进制造业而非互联网，还包括判断哪些外国趋势需要抵制。这些包括过度全球化和金融化。北京比美国更早诊断金融化的弊端，而美国现在已陷入金融化的普遍困境。领导层旨在提高制造业产量，拒绝比较优势的概念。经济学家构建的静态模型，旨在诱惑本科生，已从讲堂中泄露出来，并演变为对美国工程实践社区解体的政治辩护。而今天，北京似乎预见到并阻止了美国社交媒体公司持续激怒其政府。

我愿意评估外国进口以及对物理世界的承诺，这让我怀疑北京不会对元宇宙友好。国家媒体已对这一概念表示怀疑。如果元宇宙在中国存在，我预计它将是一个被宣传部门严密监控的拙劣产物。习近平在10月关于共同富裕的讲话指出：“某些国家的富人和穷人因中产阶级的崩溃而两极分化。这导致了社会解体、政治极化和泛滥的民粹主义。”元宇宙，作为美国精英逃离物理世界的另一种方式，只会加剧社会差异。它太像加密货币——一种只有小部分人口参与的游戏，而中产阶级则专注于如何支付能源账单等实际问题。也许对于在那儿的人来说，退入元宇宙比在户外骑行更明智，但习近平希望中国人生活在物理世界，以生育、制造钢铁和半导体。

新的同行竞争者

当我们谈论中美之间的竞争时，不能只关注后者的结构性逆风。严肃的分析需要评估两者。习近平近年来演讲中的一个主要主题是胜利是确定的，但斗争将很艰难。这与毛泽东的《论持久战》中的修辞策略相同，告诉追随者胜利在望，但只有通过斗争才能实现。北京正在为长期竞争做准备，我认为美国应该更加认真对待。

首先，美国应该更擅长改革。联邦政府发现自己无法建设简单的基础设施或协调有效的疫情应对。不知何故，美国已演变为一个政治体系，人们可以想出一百个理由不去做“在增长地区建住房”或“接纳有技能的人才”之类的事情。如果美国想要在几十年的挑战中战胜同行竞争者，它需要能够提高国家能力。相比之下，中国在增强国内竞争力和使经济更具韧性方面投入了更多。

中国国家长期以来更重视韧性而非效率，这拖累了其在经济学家关心的指标上的表现，如净资产收益率。在我看来，这作为对经济职业的指控。美国对效率的专注揭示了其经济的脆弱性，既没有制造能力来扩大国内生产，也没有物流能力来处理更大的进口。几十年的美国去工业化以及对闲置产能的厌恶已削弱了国内制造业。美国的科学生态系统，在联邦政府的帮助下，完成了惊人的mRNA疫苗规模化生产。但很难列举美国政府在疫情后完成的其他伟大事情。华盛顿特区的态度太多显得“我们的人民是否无法应对五倍标准差的冲击？好吧，让他们吃黑天鹅！”

由于美国政府无法进行结构性改革，公司现在雇佣算法天才来帮助人们在医疗系统中导航。这种第七好的解决方案是典型的官僚体系。我认为美国政府并未努力改革制度，其回应通常是让事情更复杂（如其医疗立法）或向问题投钱。例如，旨在提高国内竞争力以对抗中国的提案法案并未实质性解决更关注风格指南而非科学的科学资助机构；而基础设施法案似乎并未解决使美国基础设施成为世界上最昂贵的原因。国会通过了更多糟糕的渠道资金。这比什么都好，但政府应尝试进行一些官僚调整。

美国在数学经济学方面领先于中国，这些能获得诺贝尔奖。但中国在实际政治经济学实践方面领先于美国。我今年喜欢的一项研究指出，中国政府将更多工作通过国有企业分配给劳动动荡更大的县。我好奇如果美国政府更多地帮助工人，今天的美国会是什么样子。美国批评“中国偷走了工作”更像是对自身经济体系的批评。中国的活动是投资国内竞争力，从而吸引美国公司将其业务迁移到中国。同时，联邦政府对国内不满的工人几乎没有提供帮助。如果存在任何问题，责任应归于美国政府未能限制其公司或再培训其工人。

面对这一新的同行竞争者的挑战，美国展示了其自我伤害的非凡能力。我今年发表的两篇评论可以结合阅读。7月，我在《外交事务》上撰写了关于美国技术限制的文章。中国企业家之前从未重视国内技术，而是更倾向于购买最好的，通常是美国的。然后，美国政府将它们列入各种黑名单，首次为他们提供了发展国内生态系统的商业理由。结果是，美国通过将中国最活跃的公司更紧密地与北京的自给自足议程结合，加速了中国的竞争。12月，我在《大西洋》上发表了一篇关于美国对科学家起诉的文章。国家将科学家置于美国司法体系的温柔照顾下，通常以涉及研究诚信的相对不重要问题为由。这两篇文章的主题是美国有理由回应中国的掠夺行为；但其方法主要是伤害自己。

美国对一些政府行动的国内反弹是显著的，尤其是对科学家的起诉，使得美国政府有可能大幅修改不良政策。在中国，批评者可能会被监禁，因此这种批评后的修正更困难。但美国应更认真地培养强大的企业家和强大的国家。

在2021年最后一天写作时，我们许多人想知道政府将如何应对奥密克戎变种。我担心它如此具有传染性，政府将无法实施其零新冠策略。当然，人们曾认为Delta会击败中国，但该变种除了几次爆发外，已被较好控制。我认为奥密克戎无法被控制。政府不会轻易放弃，这意味着它将实施比以往更严格的封锁措施。因此，我怀疑美国在2022年上半年是否不是一个好的停留地。无论如何，我很高兴在家设置了一辆自行车，如果我不能离开家几天，我仍能进行大量锻炼。

我欣赏上海的《现代速写》杂志，这本杂志以大胆的艺术闻名，从1934年到1937年。它捕捉了爵士时代的精神，以及战争的恐惧。图片由Colgate大学图书馆提供

我不会再写更多这样的信件。在五封之后，结局已近。撰写这些文章需要巨大的注意力。时间安排是痛苦的：我在一年的最后十天努力工作，而其他人则处于最愉快的放松状态。因此，我试图结束这一年度负担。我认为我会再次撰写这些，但不会超过一两封。

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prophets, not pragmatists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A summer storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strangling the cultural sector

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comprehensively deepening reform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new peer competitor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untangling the jumble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to talk about books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2021-01-01 23:44:10

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

I. Inspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. A clear line of advance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to talk about books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greens are usually the glories of the cuisine: order as many vegetables as there are people

If you will have a meat, consider the juiciness that pairs well with the starch: something saucy if you will eat with rice, or less saucy if you will have soup noodles

Order Yunnan mushrooms if they are on the menu

Fill out the rest with cold appetizers, they are never a bad idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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