The Future, Made in China: Evan Osnos on America's Reckoning

Summary

Sinica Podcast: "The Future, Made in China: Evan Osnos on America's Reckoning"

Host: Kaiser Kuo
Guest: Evan Osnos (The New Yorker)
Date: August 10, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Kaiser Kuo welcomes journalist and author Evan Osnos back to Sinica for a deep dive into his recent New Yorker essay, "The Future Made in China." Osnos reflects on his tech-focused trip to Beijing and considers what China’s technological rise means not just for the U.S.—but for society, governance, and the world at large. The conversation moves far beyond breathless reporting on gadgets and infrastructure and instead frames China’s tech revolution as a meditation on ambition, social control, national narratives, and the increasingly intertwined fates of American and Chinese society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Personal Return to Beijing – Then and Now

• Technological Saturation and Atmosphere:
  • Osnos is struck by the feeling of “technological saturation” pervading every aspect of Beijing life, from automation to convenience to surveillance.
  • He recalls the earlier spirit captured in his book "Age of Ambition"—a time of madcap individual aspiration (the “peasant da Vincis”—tinkerers and inventors striving to transcend their circumstances) ([04:55]).
  • Osnos notes the city is quieter, richer, cleaner, but also “more surveilled” and “slightly sterile,” lacking the creative messiness of years past ([08:53]).

“There’s something about [the peasant Da Vincis]...because they represented this slightly madcap sense of ambition...this constant upward thrust of getting out of whatever condition one is in at the time.” — Evan Osnos ([05:58])

The Spectacle vs. The Reality of China’s Tech

• Calibrating Hype vs. Substance:
  • Visits to places like the Xiaomi Hyper Factory are part performance, part demonstration, yet the breakneck speed of real output (a car every 76 seconds) cannot be dismissed ([11:57]).
  • Observers—including Western executives—swing between awe and alarm, unable to decide if China’s tech rise is a Potemkin village or an unstoppable juggernaut.

"When Jim Farley says, this is the most humbling thing I've ever seen, talking about China's automotive progress, you have to be able to accept that those two things are both happening, both the presentation and the actual progress." — Evan Osnos ([15:19])

The Struggle to Make Sense: China as Juggernaut or Joke

• Both Americans and Chinese oscillate between seeing China as “about to collapse” or “ten feet tall and eating our lunch” ([26:18]).
• Western analysis of China is often a projection of Western self-perception.
• Getting real answers is harder than ever due to opacity, vanishing officials, and malleable moods ([27:47], [31:14]).

“China’s sense of what’s possible for China at any moment in history is dependent partly on how it imagines that the West will receive that.” — Evan Osnos ([26:26])

The Geopolitical Stakes and America’s Reckoning

• The American ‘Reckoning’ with China:

  • Osnos hopes his writing brings readers along observation by observation, avoiding bold pronouncements ([19:22]).
  • He argues it's unwise for the U.S. to base strategy on the idea that either side is doomed to fail; both will "coexist" and must continuously recalibrate their expectations.

• The Fragility of the ‘Birdcage’ Economy:

  • Dynamism and control remain in a constantly fragile balance.
  • Success stories like AI company Manus demonstrate both the system’s creative potential and its political limits ([22:29]).

“It’s not really an option to build a strategy on the idea that one or the other is going to fail.” — Evan Osnos ([19:22])

Shifting Narratives among Young Americans

• Gen Z and Infrastructure ‘Porn’:
  • Younger Americans “soak” in glamorous images of China’s Maglevs, drone-delivered lattes, and futuristic infrastructure ([33:45]).
  • Osnos warns that these curated images, while impressive, provide a partial and often party-curated view.

“If your understanding of human relations was refracted entirely through what you saw on the Internet, you would have a fairly impoverished understanding of it. And the same applies for China.” — Evan Osnos ([35:27])

Journalism vs. Party Narrative

• Osnos and Kuo forcefully defend adversarial journalism as necessary to get past both government propaganda and overly glamorous online narratives ([37:45], [38:53]).
• Closing off foreign journalism, Osnos warns, would make China less trusted, not more ([39:44]).

Technology, Policy, and Mutual Catalysts

• How Much is America’s Own Fault?

  • American “disinvestment” in science and basic research has directly fueled China’s tech ambitions ([45:12]).
  • The U.S. obsession with “great power competition” may decide more by its own errors than China’s actions.

• Export Controls (“Sullivan Doctrine”) Debate:

  • Osnos argues that U.S. chip and AI export controls were understandable—but ultimately acknowledge that constraints have acted as a “fire accelerant,” pushing China to innovate independently ([49:56], [53:07]).
  • The full counterfactual is unknowable; the “peasant Da Vinci” spirit persists.

“China’s ability...that there is this persistent capability to make more out of less. And that was not extinguished by export control.” — Evan Osnos ([53:07])

The Philosophical Heart: Humanism vs. Scientism

• Osnos frames the contest less as democracy vs. authoritarianism, more as a race between humanism and scientism worldwide ([54:50]).
• The real struggle is ordinary citizens trying to "claw back a voice in their technological future” from “small groups of powerful men in Beijing and Washington” ([57:41]).

"The rivalry looks less like a clash of systems than a race between exactly such groups...Beijing techno-Mandarins bent on obedience, and Silicon Valley AGI-pilled tech prototypes...waving off these foolish rules and wanting them to accelerate toward this uncertain future." — Kaiser Kuo, paraphrasing Osnos ([53:41])

Convergence and Oligarchic Power

• Both China and the U.S. are, by different historical routes, arriving at similar concentrations of technological and economic power—oligarchic, nearly sovereign elites ([64:53]).
• Differences in public input remain profound, but the “future” is still being wagered by small, powerful circles.

“We are in a country now...where the accumulation of power in the hands of a very small group of people has reached such levels...that these entities are becoming nearly sovereign.” — Evan Osnos ([64:53])

National Narratives and the Challenge of Change

• Both countries face a “meum-verum” gap: a growing mismatch between their self-understanding and observable reality ([68:39]).
• America faces its own crisis of “self-strengthening” and whether it can absorb foreign techniques without losing its essence ([75:29]).
• The world, especially Europe, feels the U.S.-led world order is truly over—the “time of monsters” where no new order has emerged ([84:14]).

“Right now, we are...the time of monsters—the old world will not die, the new one refuses to be born.” — Kaiser Kuo (paraphrasing Gramsci, [85:34])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Beijing now out-Singapores Singapore.” — Evan Osnos quoting a friend, on Beijing’s cleanliness and order ([09:23])
• “You need a certain amount of messiness in order to create human combinations and new ideas and...the unpredictable quality that we call joy.” — Evan Osnos ([11:29])
• “When you saw the Trump second term turn on a dime...that was more a symptom of an absence of policymaking rather than a deliberate [choice].” — Evan Osnos ([52:31])
• “Three cheers for journalism.” — Evan Osnos ([37:45])
• “China is either to be a joke or a juggernaut and nothing else.” — Kaiser Kuo ([26:18])
• “I took that [‘we're not angry, we're just moving on’] as a sign of how some of the world is experiencing America’s...America First period.” — Evan Osnos ([47:44])
• “If you wanted to, I could nudge [a Chinese friend] into exactly the answer that I want. They feel incredibly malleable on the sort of general pessimism, optimism continuum...” — Kaiser Kuo ([31:14])

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Important Timestamps

• 03:32: Evan Osnos appearance and background
• 04:55–11:57: Changes in Beijing, nostalgia, and street-level experiences
• 13:18–17:35: Tech spectacle vs. reality, BYD/Tesla, the pace of change
• 19:22–24:17: Core message to Americans, inevitability of U.S.-China coexistence, the “birdcage” model
• 26:18–32:26: “Schrödinger’s China”—Western oscillation on China, access problems, malleability of Chinese opinion
• 33:45–38:53: Gen Z’s perceptions of China, limits of social media as a window, defense of adversarial journalism
• 45:12–48:00: U.S. policy self-inflicted wounds, the “abdication” question
• 49:56–53:41: Export controls, strategic constraints, innovation under pressure
• 53:41–59:07: Humanism vs. scientism, publics vying for agency, AI optimism/pessimism, social and class anxieties
• 64:53: Convergence on oligarchy and the American “have yachts”
• 68:39–75:29: Meum vs. verum—national narratives, American crisis, lessons from China’s self-strengthening era
• 77:32–81:07: Sputnik moments, American capacity for renewal, tech as a new populist friction
• 84:14–87:24: Are we in a true interregnum? Who will defend a shared vision of the future?
• 88:02–91:39: Paying it forward: recommendations for up-and-coming writers and books

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Book and Journalist Recommendations

Evan Osnos Recommends:

• Yi-Ling Liu (“The Wall Dancers”) — Engages with the competition between humanism and scientism across borders ([88:11])
• Chang Che (The New Yorker, The Guardian) — “Up against the coal face... creating history in real time” ([89:06])
• Theo Baker – How to Rule the World; student journalist uncovering high-level academic fraud at Stanford, reflecting on generational obligations to society ([90:23])

Kaiser Kuo Recommends:

• Stoner (John Williams) and Butcher’s Crossing (John Williams) — For their sentence-level craft and insightful narrative ([91:46–93:53])
• True Grit (Charles Portis) — “Splendid...impossible not to savor the way it puts dialogue on the page” ([92:16])

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Tone and Spirit

The dialogue combines intellectual candor, humility, wit, and critical reflection. Both Kuo and Osnos resist reductionism, continually returning to nuance, skepticism of narratives, and the need for on-the-ground observation. The tone is both cosmopolitan and gently self-deprecating—typical of high-level China-watching—and repeatedly asserts the essential, if uncomfortable, unpredictability of the future.

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Conclusion

Rather than offering easy predictions, Osnos and Kuo encourage listeners to sit with the ambiguity and dynamism at the heart of U.S.-China relations and the fate of technological modernity. As the world transitions out of one historical order and searches for the next, the contest—more than a battle of states—is a drama over who gets to determine the terms of the future for everyone.

“Predictions are a mug’s game. It is always folly to try to say, here's where things are definitively going. But that doesn't make it any less tempting to want to do it.” — Evan Osnos ([87:24])

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[Read Evan Osnos’s essay “The Future Made in China” in The New Yorker for the full text behind this conversation.]

Transcript

[A]

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[C]

Welcome to the Cynical Podcast where we discussion of current affairs in China. In this program we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from my home in Beijing. Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying [e-mail] I know there are a lot of substacks out there and they start to add up because there's so many good ones, but this one really does deliver value for money with great content from wonderful partners like Trivium and the China Global South Project. So please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations and lots more today on cneca. I am delighted to welcome back Evan Osnos of the New Yorker. Evan, as many of you know, was in Beijing for a good stretch during that oft nostalgized golden age in the capital as a correspondent first for the Chicago Tribune from 2005 and then after 2008 for the New Yorker until he headed back to the States in 2013, I believe. He is the author of the outstanding Age of Ambition, which won the national book Award in 2014 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist the following year. He's since written a couple of books, Wildland, the Making of America's Fury, which is just a fantastic one, and the Haves and the have Yachts, which I have yet to read, but I'm really looking forward to in addition, of course, to dozens and dozens of widely read profiles on important American political figures, mostly named Joe Joe Machin, Joe Biden. Earlier this month, Evan published a marvelous essay chronicling a recent tech focused trip back to China, his old stomping ground, where he spoke with people ranging from grandees of the Chinese tech scene like Lee Kai Fu to Delivery drivers visited all manner of tech companies and of course, just sort of pounded the pavement and checked out his old digs. The essay is called the Future Made in China, and if you've not had a chance to read it yet, do hit pause and take 40, 45 minutes to do so and then come back. Anyway, this was, as I hope you'll know now, far more than just another breathless account of China's mind blowing advances in robotics and electric vehicles and yada yada of the sort that we're so used to seeing these days. It's actually a meditation, I think, on what China's technological ascent means for the United States, for the way both societies are organized, and really for the rest of us whose futures increasingly seem to be wagered by two small circles of powerful men in Beijing and Washington. It's reported with the I and written with a grace that made Age of Ambition so indispensable. He joins us from D.C. and Evan, welcome back to Sinica.

[B]

Thank you very much, Kaiser. It's always great to be with you.

[C]

Evan, you lived in Beijing. I think I had Those dates right. 2005 to 2013. Yeah. And age of Ambition was, I think, in many ways a book about individual aspiration, about people hurdling themselves at the future with an optimism that kind of bordered on recklessness. I think it captured the zeitgeist of that time. We were both living in China, the good and the bad of those years, which again, I mean, we both experienced that very much at firsthand. And it was just such a true account of now you return and you find a city that's quieter, it's richer, certainly it's more convenient and more automated. I'm always sort of impressed at how seamless the whole kind of digital experience is, but it's also more surveilled. Yeah, in some sense. Sadder. I would hesitate to generalize on that sadder bit. But before we get into any of the geopolitics or too much of the tech stuff, I just really want to get a sense from you how it felt just at a personal level, you know, to walk those streets again. Where did your old instincts as a resident really serve you well? And where do they maybe even mislead you or set up false expectations?

[B]

Well, it is. This is not, you know, certainly not the first time I've been back. And I tend to come back every couple of years and try to get my arms around what the latest mood is like. And I think you captured it well in the sense that one of the things that you are really struck by right now is the fact that there is a feeling of kind of technological saturation. It just is everywhere. And. Yeah, yeah, you know, you kind of remember Age of Ambition. It's in that book, one of the little tiny themes that I think probably a lot of readers read right by. But if you were a China person, if you'd spent a lot of time in China, people often would bring this up, which was this pattern of people out in the countryside building things, sometimes wild things. And they were known as the peasant da Vincis. That's what.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

An artist.

[C]

The submarine guy. The flying machines guys.

[B]

Yeah, the guy, you know. So, yeah, I'd be somebody in a village far from the sea who decided that really his life's destiny was to build the world's most perfect wooden submarine or something like that. And there was something about them that I. You know, there's a reason why these. Why these became kind of these iconic objects because they represented this slightly madcap sense of ambition, to use the relevant word. But what it really, for me at least seemed to capture was this idea of this constant upward thrust of getting out of whatever condition one is in at the time. And that was interesting on a microscopic level with individual lives. And then you could also scope that outward and say, okay, there's something meaningful there for the country at large. And so I've always been kind of interested in. In the traces of that instinct because it. It comes and goes and it can get choked off or extinguished at times when the mood gets more restrictive and. And constrictive. And then there are times when it also. You can start to see, okay, well, it feels like that instinct is now. Is now awakened again. I think now the thing that felt different to me on this trip particularly was the sense that these innovative instincts are operating on this kind of systemic level. And, yeah, that's both. That's, you know, kind of. It can be quite astonishing to see, and we'll talk about some of the kind of ways that I saw it and then. But it's also a little bit. It's. It's unnerving also, because the power of really extraordinary technology in the hands of any government is very different than in the hands of an individual. And if I've come to know one thing about technology, having sort of now lived in the US during the last 12 years, when technology has become this enormous political fact, is that a piece of technology reflects the values of the person at the controls. And so you have to understand what those values are what is the moral vision? And so that's where it becomes interesting on a, on a geopolitical level too.

[C]

Yeah. So let's, let's leave aside the sort of technology. I mean, you're certainly correct in your observation, it certainly accords with mine. But what about just sort of at the street level, tech aside, you were again in the familiar old hutongs and seeing the old sites just more personally, how did things strike you?

[B]

Well, for one thing, it's a much quieter place now on multiple levels, meaning both literally because of electric vehicles.

[C]

Right, right.

[B]

And I keep waiting for that change to also become visible in places like Ho Chi Minh City, but it hasn't yet, I think.

[C]

Yeah, I really, really hope they replace all those damn motorcycles with scooters. Although they present their own dangers. I mean, how often have you been hit by one now just because you don't hear it totally?

[B]

Well, I had this moment, I mean, so I'd been, just to give you another kind of street level moment, I'd been having a series of, lot of interviews, kind of, you know, going to factories and, you know, sitting in front of computers with people and that kind of thing. And so finally I was just like desperate for fresh air and the weather broke after, after a kind of overcast few days and I, I got on a ride share bike and just was like having the time of my life, just like pedaling in the bike lane and sure enough, like nearly shuffled off this mortal coil by colliding with a guy going, you know, he was going probably the right way on a delivery bike and I was going probably the wrong way. But in any event, I decided if there was a way to go out, that might be it. But I think, look, I'm being also kind of elliptical. Here's my, my, my feeling was that to actually, to quote a friend from Singapore who was in Beijing recently and, and he said, you know, Beijing now out, Singapore's Singapore. And he means that in all senses of the word in many ways. It's obviously cleaner and more organized and more kind of systematized and at the same time it has that slightly sterile feeling and that feels like a loss at some moments. And it's so hard to, I don't want to generalize because in a city you've got, you know, enormous new excitement when you go into a place. And I mean, I had the same experience that a lot of people had. I went and, you know, sat inside a car and wondered if I should buy a car that would project a drive in movie on the wall in front of me. And I can't buy that in the United States. On the other hand, I do feel that a little bit like phantom limb pain, feeling the loss of that hutong cacophony and all that came with that. And look, you and I have known each other a very long time and we can go through the reasons why one should not nostalgize.

[C]

The grimy.

[B]

Exactly. Nostalgia, poverty, or the grimy. But it is also true that you need a certain amount of messiness in order to create human combinations and new ideas and. And sort of the unpredictable quality that we call joy. And so that's my rough attempt to try to fashion this big giant piece of clay into one or two observations.

[C]

Yeah, so, I mean, you were very admirably candid that your visit to the Xiaomi Hyper Factory was in part a performance staged for you. I mean, you do this thing kind of as a business app. The robots were actually installed for adjustments while the guide kept up the whole pattern to kind of keep. You pay no attention to what's going on back there. The whole thing is a kind of tech tourist attraction with kind of a Willy Wonka golden ticket lottery thing even going on. You have to actually put in. You get the golden ticket in your chocolate bar or whatever, and then you get to visit the Xiaomi Hyper Factory. You quote Rush Doshi, who was a Biden era NSC China director. He's very hawkish on China. He's not shy about that, especially when it comes to tech. He's saying China has two messages to the world. One, we are inevitable. And secondly, don't worry. As a reporter, how do you calibrate between the choreography that you see, which is rather obvious, the kind of Potemkin elements of it, and the reality? I mean, you got Jim Farley of Ford. I mean, the guy is not exactly naive, but he goes there and he comes back saying the whole experience was humbling. They're coming for us. We're doomed. How much of the awe and the terror is warranted and how much of it is just sort of we're just hyperventilating?

[B]

Well, that quote, and you're right to zero in on it. Rush Doshi's observation that in his view, China's message is we are inevitable and don't worry, struck me partly because that's also the message in a way that Silicon Valley presents, which is we are inevitable and don't worry. So there's a. That begins to. That begins to give you a sense of how I saw that idea as important. It's, I think that what we're in some ways part of what this article is about. And I will address your direct question, but part of what this article was about for me was about as much about China and the US as it is about humanism and scientism, which exists in both places. And, and the proportions of how much do we put faith in our machines and how much do we put faith in our minds. And each country is contending with this. And then of course, on the observational level, yes, you're absolutely right that I was coming in saying, okay, here is my humble mission is to try to identify and sort out how much is hype from what's real. And what I concluded was these are, are both present. And the big mistake is when people try to go and say, okay, I'm declaring China to be clearly the superpower of the technological future. Or they go and they say, it's all bunk. It's a Potemkin village. It's like nonsense. You can't go to the United States and come up with a simple one liner either. And you have to be able to. In some ways, this is why I'm so lucky to have 10,000 words to be able to tell a story, because I can include a lot of these twists and turns along the way. And so it's harder when you're in a more confined format. But when I go to a place like the Xiaomi Hyper Factory, it is, as you say, and I describe in the piece, you have this feeling of being walked through a kind of industrial Epcot center. And at the same time, it is churning out a car, according to the company, every 76 seconds. So when Jim Farley says, this is the most humbling thing I've ever seen, talking about China's automotive progress, you have to be able to accept that those two things are both happening, both the presentation and the actual progress. And it's worth putting it in context with the fact that there is that immortal clip of Elon Musk back in about 2011, being asked about BYD and they said, you know, an interviewer said, what do you think? And he laughed and he said, you know, have you seen their car? And then.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And I went back and I was looking at the car they made in 2011, and it really was this kind of like sad little boxy sedan. And it's funny, I had written about electric vehicles in China in sort of around that period. It was like 2010, 2011. I'd started to follow an electric vehicle maker and that company never succeeded. But BYD was just coming on the scene and it was easy at the time to say, oh, you know, actually, I think Tesla is really going to dominate because they have this enormous head start, this volcanic ambition. They've got this kind of wild character at the helm and all this other stuff. But what you have to keep in mind is that the slow, steady boring of holes does ultimately produce things. And over time, it's not as if BYD was holding back. They were continuing to build and to grow. And that gets you to the present. So in some ways, the big mistake sometimes that I think people can make is they look at China at any moment in time, whether it was the, you know, the golden age, as you mentioned earlier, or it's now, and say, okay, that's China, and the answer is no. No, it's. It's a dynamic condition and it will never be the same place.

[C]

The one thing that never changes is that it changes a lot and very, very fast. Right, yeah, that. Yeah. You were an early proponent of electric vehicles riding around Beijing on your. Shall we Wong. Back in the day.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[C]

I seem to remember this line. I mean, it stuck in for some reason about how arriving at a meeting on your electric bike with a sort of soup song of sanctimonia having.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Anyway, yeah, I am still. I'm still riding them. Yeah.

[B]

Nice.

[C]

They've gotten so much better now. My God. I mean, mine will go like 200km on a charge now, and it'll haul like 58km an hour, which is very unsafe. And I don't tend to do that, but. Yeah, I mean.

[B]

Well, I mean, when I was doing it, I had these lead acid batteries. These things literally weighed, I remember them, 30 or 40, and I would. And the chances of them blowing up and incinerating me from the groin up was a high probability. I'm not sure why I accepted that risk, but there we are.

[C]

I'm very glad that you got out of it okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

My sense here is that what you've done with this piece represents part of the reckoning with China that Americans, and I think Westerners in general, but especially Americans, are either now starting to grapple with or are frantically in denial of some, you know, with their heads in the sand and some with their lips wrapped pretty tight around the copium pipe. I suspect that there was some deeper intent underlying this piece of yours, some takeaway you were hoping to impart without, you know, being too on the nose. So, no dodges. What was your message? For the American reader here, what were you trying to, to sort of shock them into the recognition of.

[B]

I guess I would say that what I want to do is to try to bring people along with observation by observation, rather than making a sort of simple declarative announcement thundering from the mountaintop. Yeah, yeah, that one place is beating the other. That, that doesn't really suit my way of telling stories. I think. Here's the heart of the matter. I mean, I think I have believed for a long time that the US and China are in a sense doomed to coexist, meaning that it's not really an option to build a strategy on the idea that one or the other is going to fail. And I think, look, right now, and there are people in the United States who have been saying for a long time, oh, we think that China is doomed to collapse. And then there are people in Beijing who say, I think that the United States is now doomed to collapse or to significantly withdraw. And so there is a. And I find each one of those patterns to be self punishing because you end up, you tend to overreach, you tend to underestimate the other side and then you have to recalibrate. And so I've watched over the last decade in the US as we've gone through these swings of saying, okay, China is doomed, and saying, then there's more. Recently, the, the ascendant view is actually, you know, China is doing us better than we do us. And what I kind of want to say is, is, is actually, I'm not usually in favor of saying to one country or another, you need to learn from the other. That really doesn't suit me. And I, I think I, you may, I think you are more comfortable saying, okay, there are lessons here that you might take if you're the United States, the lessons you might take from China. I think my feeling in the US is it's not going to go over well. And so I'd rather say, here's what China is doing, here's what the United States is doing. Put these two things on a ledger and simply ask yourself, follow these lines out. And I, There's a, there's a, there's a New Yorker style to this too, which is that our whole thing is that we tend to tell a story right up to the point of telling the reader, okay, here's where I think these points should lead you to conclude that things are happening. And I won't often write that because I don't feel like it's satisfying. And that's not A game. I'm just saying I want the reader to come to their own view. And honestly, that's part of the reason why sometimes people will come to diametrically different perspectives on a long piece of writing in the New Yorker.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

And so there are some people who will say, oh, this story is about China's technological progress. And there are others who will say it's also about China's underlying constraints. And I would say it's both. I mean, if I had to pick a single line in here, that probably contains the closest thing to a takeaway, it's this, it's that. China's enormous gains over the course of the 80s and 90s and beyond came largely on the basis of the idea of developing what Deng Xiaoping and his peers called the birdcage economy. This idea of, you know, can you have this bird thrive with enough ventilation and oxygen and everything else without losing control of it? And that is a very fragile balance. And the party is struggling to figure out how to make that combination of dynamism and control. So you have, for instance, Manus, the AI company that was purchased by Meta, and the fact that Manus was even possible was a sign of China's capabilities. And then at a certain point it hit the limits of what the government would accept. And. Right, so then Manus was prevented from leaving China. And that. So then you have to say, okay, well, what is the outgrowth of that? What message does that send to young AI researchers who are coming up? Are they going to say, okay, I need to leave the country pre idea? Or do they say, all right, I need to just plan to spend the rest of my career in China if I come up with something that's big enough that it becomes regarded as a, you know, semi national level asset. So those are the kinds of balances I'm trying to work out on the page.

[C]

So when, when I read it, I didn't feel like you were just looking at sort of which system or which, which, you know, was going to yield technological supremacy. I felt like we were almost to read into it something more about, about ways of social or even political organization, about, you know, national spirit, about, you know, that concept that's so familiar to you about ambition, about, you know, about all these, these things. I felt latent in the piece as well, which was good. I mean, you were, you were talking just now about these sort of this pendular swing between ideas of China about to collapse and the 10 foot tall China that's eating our lunch. I mean, I'VE talked a good bit about what. I can't remember who it was who came up with it, but somebody started calling Schrodinger's China, that it is this sort of Western habit of holding these two ideas in their head at the same time, that, you know, it's on the brink of collapse somehow, and. And that it's this unstoppable juggernaut on the other. Your piece documents the American establishment lurching from one pole to the other. Have you seen their car? To these fears of irreversible defeat. What? You just referred to Elon Musk snickering at the byd and now you'd sit in a BYD and snicker at the Tesla driver next to you. I feel like even within the same institution, you have this dyad, you know, between the collapsing China and the ascendant China. I just wonder, are we incapable of making an honest assessment? I mean, I've watched this happen forever. Right. I mean, we've all seen this happen. I mean, you were around in the earlier part of the 2000s when it was just the knock is China's only capable of imitation, not of genuine innovation. And the same people who were chanting that mantra so confidently are now often the ones who are, you know, talking about technological supremacy in China. It's just. It's weird. It's. It is China either to be a joke or a juggernaut and nothing else.

[B]

Yeah. I think it's that it is always refracted through how we are seeing ourselves and.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

And. And that applies both ways. I mean, this is one of the insights, too, is that, you know, China's sense of what's possible for China at any moment in history is dependent partly on how it imagines that the west will receive that meaning. That if the United States is in decline, for instance, as some would have it in Beijing, then that creates this opportunity, a moment unseen in centuries. Or is it that in fact China has crested a hill in the ability to no longer be subject to those controls and to that encirclement from the West? I think that these two are both, in a way, prone to these kind of misreadings. I mean, I will say I think China has a more. These days, it has a feel for the fact that American politics, even up close in Washington, where I live, is. Is utterly unpredictable, is kind of wildly chaotic, all of that. Right.

[C]

And something with which I would not disagree.

[B]

Well, it's, you know, it's a hard thing to hide, but I think. But part of the challenge in analyzing China. And this has actually become more acute over the last few years, and this is an analytical risk, is that it has gotten more difficult to access it. It has gotten more difficult to get reliable numbers. It has gotten more difficult to understand what is really happening. When a senior political figure or a senior economic figure just, you know, as one diplomat in the piece puts it to me, vanishes into thin air. And you get kind of used to your associate, your contact, somebody you were in touch with and you were using that person, let's say a senior business figure who could help you understand something going on in the economy. If that person just disappears into an investigation without any public description of what happened, you know, that contributes to the kind of Schrodinger's black hole problem. And so what that causes, I think, is it forces us to acknowledge the limits of what we can see and meaning that we may be shocked at any moment. And I think this gets to an underlying contrast in the way we understand these two countries, which is that the United States, and you were kind to mention my book Wildland in the beginning of the show, is a fairly let it all hang out view of what a political inferno we're sitting on here. And we see it playing out constantly to the agony of so many of us. On the Chinese side, it's much harder to know what the political volcanic energy is below the surface now. We get these little indicators now. And then I mentioned in the piece, this survey of public attitudes that was done by Scott Rozelle and colleagues, and you'll know it well, and it was an important piece of work because it's not often that you get a large, sophisticated survey that can understand public attitudes. And one of the judgments that that survey helped illuminate was the idea, as the title put it, of a shift from optimism to pessimism. And you mentioned earlier this, you know, this kind of debated question of. Of how sad China is. You know, how should we interpret things like lying flat or. Or the decline in. In. In people getting married, Fertility. Yeah, exactly.

[C]

Heteropessimism and.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. And so this is where it gets. It's a little bit hard to compare the two systems because on one hand, every piece of evidence is in. Flamboyant evidence, God knows, on the American side, and then on the Chinese side, it is there. There is a level of concealment, and that's just what it is. And that makes it hard when you can't conduct the kind of granular understanding of both public mood and then also understand how things are moving within the government. This is where one can end up getting shocked. And this is where. And I think this is where declarative single plane declarations about China are risky. Because if you say it's one thing, you may prove to be wrong because of what you don't know.

[C]

I don't know if it's been your experience, but it's certainly been mine, that it feels like when I talk to somebody, whether they're close to me or somebody who I've just met, I feel like depending on the expression I have on my face or how I word the question, no matter how non leading I want to make it, I feel like if I wanted to, I could nudge them into exactly the answer that I want. They feel incredibly malleable on the sort of general pessimism, optimism continuum. Whether it's just the economy or anything. It feels like it's kind of arbitrary and depends on what side of bed they got out on or how their stock portfolio did last week. And it's kind of strange.

[B]

Your observation resonates with me. I think one of the things I've found is that if you go into a conversation in Beijing and you're, you know, sort of down on something, then, then people will respond by being sunnier about it. If you come in too sunny, people will say, well, actually, here's the downside of it. And that captures the complexity.

[C]

But that's just a Chinese thing, right?

[B]

It is, I think so. There's a certain touch of that.

[C]

Let me throw a damp towel on your enthusiasm, which somehow.

[B]

Let's not get carried away. Yeah, right.

[C]

Exactly. Yeah. But Evan, you move, as I do, between these two American conversations about China. You have the sort of what China likes to call the threat narrative. Talk about munitions stockpiles and shipbuilding ratios and whether China is moving toward mastering EUV lithography and all the export control stuff. But on the other side, like on the social media, these Gen Z kids, they are, as I once put it, soaking in infrastructure porn all day long, courtesy of the steady stream of influencers who are coming to China. All this China maxing content, you know, the awestruck Instagram videos of Maglevs and, you know, drone shows and drone delivered lattes. And it basically says, hey, the future has moved to China. Somehow we're not part of it. Do you get a sense? I mean, because you look at the Pew polling and you see this massive positive shift in attitudes toward China among Gen Z younger millennials. Is there some new synthesis in the making, a kind of conventional wisdom on Where China is, that's coming out of this, or maybe is one narrative prevailing over the other. What do you see here from where you sit in the States?

[B]

Well, I think that part of what's happening is the decline in American soft capital. That's a reality. And so these two giant systems are just often, whether they want to be or not, put as two ends of the seesaw. And so when the United States has suffered the kind of decline in its public standing that it has over the last couple of years, especially, but more broadly over the last 10 years and 10 years is the right chronology, that if we go back to the summer of 2016, it was a fundamentally different world. And, you know, Donald Trump at that point did not appear to be the incoming era that he was there was just, it seemed implausible he would be president. And so for that reason, I think China's whole sense of, of the world was different. And also, if you now step outside of these two countries, it too was different. So I think that in some ways, China's gains in these measures has been partly a measure of the U.S. decline in its standing. And then it is true that it is also part of a. Of a new vision of what China has produced over the last decade. But here's the limits of it. And this is where I've always had a feeling that it's very hard for people to grasp China from far away, because, as you said, I think that term infrastructure porn is right, which is that if your understanding of human relations was refracted entirely through what you saw on the Internet, you would have a fairly impoverished understanding of it. And the same applies for China, that if you go to China and you only visit the places that are open to you, if you can only push on the doors that are unlocked to you, if you can only sort of have the encounters that are accessible, then you're not getting the full picture. And this has been, in the end, this is why journalism is necessary. And I think this is why journalism is always going to grate against what the party wants to tell as a story. And they find it frustrating. The party does that. Journalists say, okay, yes, yes, we see all these advancements, we see these things, but what about this case of somebody who's clearly been abused, whose, you know, rights have been violated even under Chinese law? Like, what about that? And that's not a relativistic observation. I mean, a journalist in Beijing is going to say, A visiting journalist in Beijing is going to say that, and they're also going to say it if they go to Minnesota and they talk about abuses of government power in the United States. And so in some ways, you know, I feel like that the tools of social media have made China more accessible and glamorous to a younger cohort of Americans. But what they're seeing is also a narrow, a narrow aperture. And I know that's an unfashionable view because what they're. They would say, a lot of those young people would say, hold on, I'm doing my own research by, by finding these accounts and reading online.

[C]

Right, right.

[B]

You know, as we all know, like, that's a highly curated, you know, full of influence, full of, you know, censorship, control, yada, yada, yada.

[C]

So, yeah, I mean, as I said during that, that, you know, that moment when everyone jumped onto Red Note and Xiaohongshu, and I said, you know, this isn't a Potemkin village that you're seeing, but it is only the nicer parts of the real village that you're seeing.

[B]

Right, yeah, right. Right.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I think that's a good way to put it. And I, you know, in that way, this is part of the reason why the party has always been assertive in taking control of the powers of social media, because they recognize how it has the satisfying impression of being autonomous on the part of the user, when in fact, there are systems running just out of view that profoundly shape what you see. I mean, sure. So I don't know, I think this sounds like the least shocking observation, but three cheers for journalism. And I just really believe that, that there's a reason why you have to have people walking around asking nettlesome questions. And we'll talk later about some of the young journalists who are doing this very well. And I think there's just as much, if not more than ever, a need for really smart critical thinkers to be rooting around where they can go pressing on the locked doors.

[C]

I mean, this is something I talk about an awful lot and I spend a lot of time and I mean, it's pretty vexing to try to talk to some of these people to defend journalism and to try to make them understand that there isn't some gigantic conspiracy among Western journalistic organizations to try to smear China and make it look bad. This is how the thing works. I mean, it is inherently adversarial, and I'm awfully glad that it was and it should be. Does it necessarily reflect the entirety of truth? Does the accuracy of its adversarial reporting when it travels abroad, does that add up to realism? No, not always. And you need to understand the optical properties of that lens and adjust, just as you need to understand the optical properties of the infrastructure porn lens, I mean, which.

[B]

Anyway, so, yeah, I think from the Chinese government's perspective, it's tempting to say we now have all of these tools to tell our own story, as they like to say. So why don't we close the aperture even more to foreign journalists, to which I would counsel them. I think that's a terrible idea because I think if you do that, the world will not trust China more. You may develop some level of, you know, superficial fascination by young social media users, but when it comes to actually building deep trust and whether people imagine that. That China is going to be a part of the future that they want to participate in, that comes from. From a. A kind of accessibility. You have to make the place knowable. And that allow. That means letting people come around and just accepting that sometimes you may not like the portrait they produce. But if. If they're going about it in a decent way, then that's something that has to be respected. I. I worry that they're taking the lesson that actually we don't need journalism, and I think that would be catastrophic.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. Evan, I don't know if you remember, but years ago there was a New Yorker festival. I think you were on stage, but it was, you know, the whole. Everyone who's ever been a New Yorker correspondent in China or writing about China.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Including Jiang. And I remember David Remnick asked her what it's like as a reporter who had been born and spent her early life in China, to read Western reporting on China. She said something I thought was so brilliant. I'm not sure you remember, but she said it's like looking at a familiar part of my body through an X ray in that it's. I don't think she used the exact words, but it's literally penetrating. Right. It shows me something that's anatomically precise. Reveals to me things that I wouldn't see with the naked eye. For sure, it's very good for diagnosing or whatever, but it, at the same time doesn't feel like the hand or the foot that I know. You know, it doesn't have the. The soft connective tissues, the sinew and the tendons and the. The corpuscles and the flesh and all that stuff that makes it feel like my head. So, again, I feel like that's fascinating. You need both. Yeah, yeah. It's. It's a. Quoted a million times.

[B]

Yeah, it's a great Observation. I mean, I remember that event actually. Jayoung. And also Pete Hessler was there. And you know, Pete once had an observation. It was not at that event, but he said it, he wrote it in a piece. And I think it applies kind of in the other direction, which is he was talking about a very funny little detail which is that he was describing the, the outdoor workout facilities that you saw proliferating around China in the first decade of this century. You'll remember all of a sudden everywhere you, there was a, you know, a kind of a sort of almost like a, an elliptical machine didn't require any electricity. You just moved your feet and so on. And the way he described it, I thought was, has always stayed with me, which is, he says it was as if somebody, an engineer was briefly shown a brochure about American exercise equipment and then the brochure was taken away and you had to build it from memory. And that's what the result was. And what I liked about that description was that too captured a sort of slightly off portrait of the reality. And I think that's also what you get. I mean I, I feel this when I read Wang Huning's writings about the United States. He was of course, you know, Xi Jinping's advisor. He wrote his book America Against America, which is often referenced when we try to understand what senior ranks of the politburo think about, about the United States. And in, in some ways, you know, he was getting the, the call it, the, the bone structure of the United States. But he too was missing some of that, the ligaments and the tendons that make the place hold together in ways that he couldn't entirely.

[C]

That's right. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. So Evan, just before we took a break, you were talking a little bit about how Trump's election in 2016 and November of 2016 really changed things. We entered a very different world from that Renmin University report that you cited called thank Trump to one of your interviewees, Erao, telling you flatly Trump really helped us to the 40 point collapse in America's global approval that you talked about. The peace assembles quite the brutal ledger of self inflicted wounds. You have the China initiative scattering really thousands of scientists, many of whom have gone back to China, many of whom have founded labs there. You have the whole gutting of research funding at NIH and in major research institutions in the States. You know, so here's I guess the uncomfortable question, how much of China's current position in Your thinking is China's own achievement and how much is America's abdication? What's a good way of thinking about that? I mean, we all have thought about that, of course. Does it matter which? Or is the lesson that, you know, this whole great power competition stuff is decided less by what your rival does than by what you do to yourself?

[B]

Yeah, I do think it matters. I think you're onto something important, which is that in the end, we are not being evaluated in a vacuum, and we're not competing in a vacuum. We are. It's all a question of what the alternatives are. And to quote Joe Biden, don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative. And that's as much as countries would like to be assessed on their own terms. That's the nature of geopolitics. And I think that part of the reason why I laid out in such detail the way that America's disinvestment in things like basic science has in fact advanced China's ambitions on that score is because I think from. From most Americans vantage point, that's a hard thing to connect. It seems remote. And they can say, well, you know, we're just going through a political cycle there. You know, there are presidents who invest, and then there are people presidents who say it's time to retract. And my point is simply, no, actually, this is. Not only is it having an impact on how the rest of the world imagines the future. I lay out the question of what will it mean if the cure for cancer comes from China, not the United States. That's good for human flourishing, but it is also a real question about America's standing in the world. So it's not just about that. It's also about the fact that I think the United States is at the moment so absorbed in our own internal political agonies that we're going to wake up in a few years and look around and realize that the world has moved on in some sense. And I had this moment, which I didn't put into the piece, but kind of haunts me a little bit. I was in Germany a few months ago and having a conversation with somebody about this question of, hey, the United States right now is challenging the sanctity of NATO. Donald Trump is threatening to take Greenland. How are you experiencing that? And this guy on the other had this very kind of succinct way of putting it. He said, we're not angry, we're just moving on. Which I thought was like the most withering anybody who's you know, had a breakup in their romantic history, knows that the worst thing you can hear from that other party is I'm not angry, I'm just moving on. And in some ways I took that on as a sign of how some of the world is experiencing America's, the American first period.

[C]

I mean, and it's not just the Trump administration that has inadvertently sort of given China a boost. Many would argue that some of the Biden administration's policies have done the same. Let me hold your feet to the fire and ask you very directly, where do you come down now on the Sullivan doctrine? That whole set of tech export controls that Biden rolled out beginning in October 2022 doubled down on in the fall following year. They've been layered on and haggled over ever since through the Nvidia H20 back and forth and beyond. The theory was always small yard, high fence. Deny China the most advanced chips and you buy some time. You buy maybe a decade. But your own reporting seems to complicate that. You note that these Chinese AI labs that you talk to with much less capital, less compute, owing partly to those, those controls focused on different things. They focused on efficiency, they focused on commercial deployment and out came deep seek. And then, you know, moonshot's Kimik 3 model which came out this July, that you know, on some measures matched the American frontier at a fraction of the cost and you know, deep seek in January 2025 cent American tech stocks tumbling. There have been a lot of knock on effects of this. Meanwhile, you know, this erao logic that Trump really helped us, that has an obvious chip war corollary. That constraint is a catalyst. Right. So where do you now land on this? Did the controls buy America real time as was promised, or did they mostly just light a fire to China's posterior accelerated exactly the same kind of self reliance that Beijing had been struggling to really summon up on its own.

[B]

Well, I think you and I will probably disagree on this, but no, I'm not particularly critical of the export control idea. I think if you put yourself a, it's hard to play out a counterfactual. We don't know where Chinese AI development would be had there not been exposure export controls. I think from an American perspective, and you know, the way the Biden administration was looking at it was partly these are dual use technologies and there is a national security imperative to try to make sure that you're not handing these things quote unquote to your adversary. So that's part of it. I also think that there was a Genuine belief that these pieces of technology are so powerful that making them equivalent to anything else and just making them available on the open market might not be a prudent strategy. And I also, at the same time, am a big believer in the fact that what Trump did over the course of the last 10 years, not to shift the focus away from Biden, we can talk about that again. But it was the beginning of the trade war in the first Trump term that catalyzed the emerging belief in Beijing, something that preceded it, this idea that China would have to become self reliant, that it could no longer depend on the west, that the west was an unreliable set of technologies and ideas, that the Trump trade war kind of crystallized that. And then all of a sudden you fast forward and you see the Biden administration continuing to raise pressure on Chinese technology. And so I do think it empowered people within China who were making the case that you could no longer depend on the West. But I think you have to think about it in the same way that we try to evaluate China's decisions within the context of the pressures and opportunities they were facing. You know, if the Biden administration had not done what it did, I'm not sure I could make a case that the United States would be better off. In fact, I think when you saw the Trump second term, you know, turn on a dime and all of a sudden you have Howard Lutnick talking about getting China addicted to the tech stack and, and on and on, that was more a symptom of an absence of policymaking rather than a deliberate.

[C]

But, you know, time has passed. I mean, I can see your argum from the perspective of October 2022, but in, in the ensuing years, look, I mean, you couldn't of course have played out the counterfactual back then. I, I mean, a lot of us, and I was among them, said, hey, you're, you're really gonna, you're in a lot of fire. It's gonna concentrate their efforts remarkably. And I wouldn't bet against it. You know, we've seen this play out before, but yeah, fair enough, you couldn't have known. But now, seeing what you have seen, you do have a better sense of what's actually happened as a result.

[B]

No, I do think that China's ability, and it goes back to our peasant da Vincis we were talking about before, that there is this persistent capability to make more out of less. And that was not extinguished by export control. But I return to the idea that I do think the counterfactual is tough we don't know where China would be and where the AI race would be had they not introduced those policies. So, yeah, I mean, that would be how I think about the policy choice.

[C]

Well, I appreciate the candid answer. So your piece has sort of what I take to be the philosophical heart of it, and I want to spend some time on this. You invoke Mankind 2000, those European survivors of the fascism, wary both of communist determinism and of American hubris, who warned that man could be absorbed by his machine and insisted the future of Reno should belong to everyone and not just to these small groups of oligarchs. And then you write that spend enough time in Beijing and Washington, and as I said in the beginning, the rivalry looks less like a clash of systems than a race between exactly such groups. These Beijing techno Mandarin bending tech toward obedience on the one hand, and Trump and the Silicon Valley AGI pilled tech prototypes waving off these foolish rules and wanting them to accelerate toward this uncertain future. That strikes me as a very useful reframing. It takes us out of that kind of democracy versus authoritarian story that Americans like to tell themselves. Did you set out to make that argument or did the reporting kind of force it on you?

[B]

Oh, it came to me in the course of the reporting, definitely. I mean, I think. And part of the, you know, I've been doing this kind of work now for, for a long time, meaning, you know, writing long pieces. And one of the judgments I've really held fast to is the sense that you can't go into it with a, with a hypothesis and then do everything you can to fortify that you'll just end up making a different kind of piece. I mean, there's a, there's a place for that. It's, you know, that's an opinion piece. But, like, no, I actually had this moment where I realized that the language and the sensibility that I was feeling in Jung Guan sun, you know, the technology district in Beijing, was, Was similar to how I often felt in Silicon Valley, which was, you know, to, to quote Sam Altman himself some years ago, he said about AI and what was coming. He said, you know, this was in a profile in the New Yorker. Not by me, it was by Tad Friend. And he wrote Sam's line. Sam Altman's line was, you know, if I weren't a part of this, if I weren't in on it, I think was the phrase he used, I would be asking why it is that, that this group of people is going to get to make the decisions for all of us. And that idea is a huge. Is a huge point that transcends borders. And I think it is true in the United States. And I feel it very distinctly. I think when we're all trying to figure out why it is that college graduates are booing commencement speakers who mention AI, or when we try to understand the resistance to data centers, a lot of the answer hinges or should hinge on this question of agency, of control, of the feeling that we have a hand in making our own future. And I think that. That, you know, in the United States, people are not. They don't describe themselves as lying flat, but there is a very similar instinct. And I think in China, when you talk to young people about why they don't feel like they're confident to settle down and have kids, you know, Dan Wong in my piece, used this phrase. He was just back from a recent trip to China, and he said, I see this all over the place. He said. I describe it as a serene discontent. He was talking about, in fact, members of his own extended family who are choosing not to get married and have kids. So there is that. That's where I come to see this as less about the US versus China than it is about humanism and scientism. That's the. From my perspective, these are the two contending systems of thought. And interestingly, it's not just the ideologies,

[C]

but it's the people that wield them. Right. I mean, it's these oligarchs versus, well, everyone. So I would like to see the struggle be that between ordinary citizens of both countries trying to kind of claw back a voice in their technological future. Are you. We see the booing at the commencement speeches in the United States. You don't see that as much in China. There seems still. I mean, look, I don't want to overplay my head here, but it's certainly the case that we're seeing more and more people voicing concerns about AI, but it's still. It's not the levels that you see in the United States. United States, Yeah.

[B]

And I think there's a few things going on. I mean, for one thing, you can't really boo your commencement speaker in China without suffering consequences. That would be, shall we say.

[C]

But even in private conversations, you have

[B]

so much on the line. Yeah, I think that this. Yeah. So then we get into the question of, okay, what is the public mood around AI? And as I put in the piece, I. I think people are generally more open to the idea of advents in new computing technology. Because the computing era of the last 50 years has, has been accompanied by much larger gains in, in life, life in lockstep.

[C]

I mean, the more bandwidth you have access to, the more connectivity, the faster and more powerful the device, the better your life has been. It's.

[B]

But, but then here's where it collides with, with both the constraints on speech in China and then the constraints on knowability, meaning that what can we truly know? This is where I find it to be sort of, I'm being, I mean we're having a, I think like a really useful kind of analytically candid conversation about like, okay, what can we know and not know? What we don't know in China is I, you know, I, I can get these indicators in conversations with people, regular folks on the street. But also eventually, you know, when you start talking to even executives in the AI industries, you know, there is uncertainty about the future. They know that. In the same way that there's uncertainty here, it just, it can't take on the public form that it takes in the United States. And this is, curiously enough, I know this may sound counterintuitive, but you know, part of the political agony in America where everybody is fighting about everything all the time is also the way that you begin to work your way towards some kind of idea of public input. And China has its own tools. The party has its ways of sort of extracting the public mood and trying to understand what it is and meeting it. And it has self preservation instinct, right to do so, but it doesn't always get it right. Part of the reason why I spend part of the piece talking about the one child policy is to capture the ways in which these instruments of detecting the mood and the outcome and the, and the positives and the negatives of a policy. It can go on. A policy will stay in place a lot longer than it naturally should because it has the political momentum behind it.

[C]

I mean there's path dependency in every system and it's not like the will of the people can immediately push you out of a rut you're quite stuck in. But yeah, I caution that, you know, look, yes, sure we may have some preference falsification and stuff like that, but I think that for somebody like me who's been here a very, very long time and talks to a lot of people and every goddamn conversation I have, it's about AI, right. And I just do not feel the same misgiving. I still feel like my old frame from a few years ago of we in the west are in this kind of Black Mirror phase, while China's still in a Star Trek phase, still largely holds. There's a techno optimism in China that still pervades and there's still a kind of buoyancy that it lends to, and it has more to do than just with the economic experience. It has to do with how does one climb the ladder of social success in China. It leads through stem. Right. I mean, the whole political system is so deeply technocratic, as Dan Wong talked about, and that has effects on the way that people view technology and then how they're postured toward the scientism you describe as the sort of pervasive ideology. It's very much there.

[B]

I think that the. I agree with that. But I also think this is where to return to the study by Scott Rozelle and other researchers. That, that feeling of, of, of a closing window of opportunity, and Dan Wong mentioned this in his comments to me for this piece, that there is some feeling that if you're not on the winning side of the AI revolution, where do you fit in? And that's very much the feeling here in the US And I, I, I think it's, you know, we'll see how much it is in China, you know, But I agree, I think fundamentally part of what's overshadowing this conversation here in the US is the very distinct and vivid impression of oligarchic control of these new technologies. I mean, it's as vivid as the inauguration stage scene. So in China, you don't have that feeling, but there is a feeling of oligarchic control of a different kind because you've got a small group of individuals, as I say, who control the dials for many millions and millions of people.

[C]

Yeah. In your piece, you're careful to note that America arrives at its own kind of dystopia by a different route than we're seeing. Maybe in China it's not facial recognition everywhere, although I'd like to see how positive my face is. What were you, 77.67%. That was a great little detail.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[C]

I love the death points. Very good procedure that makes it. But, you know, you got these insurance companies using AI to deny people treatment or deny, you know, payment for treatment, the whole surveillance pricing thing. Waymo, as you talked about in your piece, refusing to answer pretty simple questions to Marquis. Right. Tech focused defense contractors, all of them, who have weirdly Tolkien inspired names. They're kind of fusing national security, law enforcement and immigration into this single very scary apparatus. You make the argument that the distinction is Eroding. So I kept thinking, as I often suspect myself, the deep story of your piece is actually about convergence. It's not about these two very different systems, but it's about how these two systems are arriving at concentration of wealth and power and techno solutionism from maybe opposite directions. But I wonder, is the American critique of China's techno authoritarianism partly a way of not looking squarely in the mirror itself?

[B]

I do think so, yeah. I don't gloss over the differences, profound differences in the level of political input that you can have in a big messy democracy and what you can have in a one party authoritarian state. Like, I think we have to acknowledge those differences. Those are huge. And yet at the same time, we are in a country now in the United States where the accumulation of power in the hands of a very small group of people has reached such levels, really beyond any recognizable precedent in American history, that these entities and these individuals are becoming nearly sovereign. I mean, this is the, the thrust of, of my last book, the Haves and the have Yachts is this idea that Best Name Ever by the way, in Uncharted territory. So it turns out a title is, is useful, but I, I think it really was a case where I was trying to conceptualize a, a, a perversion of American democracy that was most vivid on that inauguration stage in 2025 when you saw many of the world's richest people in strange political communion with the leader of the most powerful military in the world and coming to terms with what that means for individual liberty in a country that is preparing, at that point was preparing to celebrate 250 years of democracy. I mean, that is the, like, that's the heart of the matter. I, but I, I'm, I am, I want to be vigilant about the fact that I, I don't see a simple sameness in the political conditions produced by oligarchy in America and oligarchy in China. I think it's just, it is a fact that, and it can seem hard to squint and see it today, given the frailties in American democracy, but it is a fact that we do have these avenues for the public will to make its way onto the front page. And I'm talking to you in fact, from Michigan, which is where we are as a family this week. And this is like this. Michigan has been ground zero for the political conversation in the US around what the Democratic Party will look like. How far left will it go, how far is there a center of the party? And that kind of conversation to use a very Bland word for it is healthy for a party. It has to happen if you're going to figure out what you stand for and if anybody will support support you. And you can't have that conversation in China, to state the obvious. So I try to avoid coming up with a simple here's who's winning and here's who's losing. And that's because I see a whole lot of strength and weakness on both sides.

[C]

One of the things that I've really noticed is across the political spectrum, there is evidence of sort of envy of certain facets of China's system. You see it on the left in what I would describe as maybe one of the more vital pieces of the Democratic Party, the abundance movement, Right. You see a certain envy for China's ability to continue to manufacture, to provide consumer surplus. You see it on the right with the envy of the sort of techno authoritarianism, its ability to surveil and to consume strain. You've read my great Reckoning piece, right? Hopefully. Maybe you remember some of the tangents in intellectual history.

[B]

No, absolutely.

[C]

Your own piece goes into a bit of it. You quote Li Hung Zhang saying, learn the superior skills of the barbarians in order to control the barbarians. I wrote in that great Reckoning piece about the late Joseph Levinson, the Berkeley intellectual historian that I kind of really, really admire kind of immoderately. He described a stable civilization as one where meum what is ours inherited our self understanding remains somehow in harmony with verum what is observably true, kind of dispassionately. When you look at the outside world, China's crisis after the Opium wars was this agonizing recognition that things are out of whack, that it had split apart. It took a century and a half of upheaval to kind of close that gap. Arguably, I would suggest America is now in the early stages of the same kind of a crisis. It's a nation whose story about itself that it's permanently ahead, that it's forever exceptional. Even things that you've talked about, that this messy plural system somehow can convey the will of the people to the front page. I have my doubts about that sometimes, but the default setting of modernity that we've always assumed is ours, it no longer matches. Well, you know, come on. Anyone with eyes can sort of see. So do you see your piece, whether you intended it or not, as kind of a document of the American meum verum gap widening in real time? I mean, I couldn't help but sort of read it that way. Where do you see Americans doing the really hard work of intellectual reconstruction versus what I might kind of call this kind of desperate defense of comfortable illusions. China is really kind of putting this in a very stark relief is what I would contend.

[B]

So I would answer it this way, which is that it was almost 10 years ago, actually. I wrote a piece again, going back to China to take stock of things. And the bottom line on the story when you got to the end, was that in Washington at the time, there was this ascendant view, this was in the early years of the first Trump term, that you could somehow wrestle China back into the past, that you could say, all right, we're gonna. We're gonna defeat China. And. And I. I was making the case in that piece that that's just not realistic. It was not plausible that these two countries were going to be contending with one another in the century ahead. And I said, and the project for the United States then is to contest China's moral vision of the future. That was the last line of that piece. And now fast forward to today. And I would say that under the Trump administration, we're flunking the test of contesting a moral vision of the future from China because we're not providing one that the world is attracted to right now. But here's the thing, is that this is a dynamic condition in the United States, and nothing stays what it is politically for very long. And this is where I am. You know, I know you're skeptical of the idea that the political debate that makes its way from the street to the front page of the newspaper, where newspapers still exist, that that's meaningful. I'll tell you why I do think it's meaningful, is that at the same moment that we're seeing all of these political institutions losing credibility here, you're also seeing things happen. I mean, I. I'll. From a kind of personal perspective, one of the things that I see is the revival of local culture and local community. My wife, Sarah Beth, who, you know, works for an organization called the American Journalism Project, which is working on rebuilding local news in America. And it's not doing it by saying, okay, we're gonna take the same old newspapers and build them back up. In many cases, it's about seeding or cultivating new nonprofit news organizations. And then they. They. They grow in communities that have lost their newspaper. Now, I'll tell you why I'm going down this. This long. It's not as much of a digression as it might sound. You know, Arthur Miller had this idea of a newspaper. He said it was a nation talking to itself. And that's true in a local community as well. And I think one of the things that is happening in this country is that as the national conversation gets more frozen and polarized, that you do have this desire to rebuild communities from within. And local news organizations are an expression of that. And it's one of the ways that you see it made visible. I have a harder time finding that conversation. It's certainly not playing out in the newspapers of China to be obvious, because those are not domains of genuinely open free expression. You see it much more in the margins of culture. It's playing out in fiction. It's playing out in other areas where people can make more elliptical arguments for what they want. But one of the ways it's also playing out is with this serene discontent, to borrow Dan Wong's phrase. And I think we have to kind of account for that. So the reason why I am always wary of sort of saying, okay, China's pulled into the lead, or United States has pulled into the lead, is because, you know, this is a competition that will go on in, in many forms over a long period of time. And we don't know exactly what China's health is. You know, just in the last few days there's been this recurring conversation about, well, what is the health of the economy? And we can take the measures that I can describe in this piece. All of the advances I feel and see on the ground when I'm there, and then at the same time you can read in many of the same paragraphs will then say, and here's why I also question what I'm seeing. So that is the necessarily multifaceted judgment that you have to reach in a system in which you can't have total fidelity.

[C]

I'm sitting in admiration of your faith in this system. It feels to me like faith. I mean, in that it's not necessarily supported by empirical evidence, but I want it to be. So I want to nudge you back to my discussion about the 19th century a bit. We mentioned Lihongzhang. I was in this conversation with an old China hand friend of mine who half jokingly suggested that we might be in a self strengthening period, you know, the self strengthening reformers of the 1860s, they thought China could adopt Western techniques, you know, the young, the usages of the west, while preserving its Confucian essence, its tea. It failed, my hero, Joseph Levinson argued, because the techniques were not ultimately detachable from the civilization that produced them. Right. I keep looking at America and thinking, look what suddenly industrial policy, state directed AI investment, export controls, a president that's taking government stakes in intel, other chip makers. It feels like Chinese Jung adopted kind of in a rush without really having had a proper national conversation about it, while insisting that it's all done so that this precious American somehow remains intact. I would add that when David Sacks warns that an FDA for artificial intelligence would mean losing to China, one could say that we're not just borrowing Chinese tools in the process, we're shedding precisely the kinds of constraints, law, deliberation, accountability, that we're supposed to be that precious American essence. Right? I mean, that's what I think the essence is. Right. So I feel like the US is running the self strengthening playbook and kind of screwing it up. I wonder if it ends the same way. Have you.

[B]

Well, I think that there's another way to look at the history here and say, well, is it possible that the United States is capable of this? All hands on deck, dedication to a national goal, Right? That's always the dream is, can we rekindle John F. Kennedy setting us out to get to the moon? And there's a reason why that feels kind of sepia toned, because it's been a while since we felt that. But it is also true that in the same way that the United States misjudged China's capacity to light a fire under itself over the course of the last 10 years, I think China sometimes runs the risk of underestimating what happens when you wake the dragon in the United States. But I would also shift the focus to that interesting scientism versus humanism debate, because there's another Sputnik moment going on, which is it's not just, you know, the United States waking up to the Chinese technological challenge, there's also Americans waking up to the challenge posed by overweening control from a small group of technology powerhouses. And what does that mean? What is the populist response to that? I read a fascinating book recently which will come out in the fall from Jill Lepore, my colleague at the New Yorker. And she's brilliant, and she's a historian, of course, of American governance. Also teaches at the Law School at Harvard Law School in addition to the college. And I think one of the insights she brings, this book is called the Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, is that she says there are ways in which technology will be naturally absorbed and adopted by Americans, but there are also ways in which it will run up against some fundamental beliefs that Americans have about control and about about freedom, about liberty. And it's. We're beginning to see that friction, that tension. And so I, I think that that sense of. And for her, her Sputnik moment was chatgpt, as she says. That was when she started to think hard about whether we were going to apply AI wrongly to democratic functions, whether we really do want to have AI crafting every message by every politician. Do we actually really want the profusion of fake imagery and of the gradual hollowing out of any credible political discourse because people will just come to believe everything is fake. And so she's making this case that I think is kind of front running, where the public is moving. And I think this, I've really come to believe that maybe the most interesting political question in the United States is why the kids were booing, why the graduates were booing at the commencements. We've talked a bit about it, but if you could really dig into understanding all the layers of that, I think you'd learn, one would learn not only about where things are happening, where things are going here, but it would also reflect in interesting ways on, on what is being said and unsaid in China and how people are thinking about technology.

[C]

I would love for you to, to write on this and you know, why all the NIMBYism about data centers and. Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, the cynic in me, what's left of it. I'm trying to. I'm not a stage cynic by nature, but I feel like the reaction to this little bunch of oligarchs is how do I get a hold of the secondary market and buy some anthropic before they list. It's crazy. I want to wrap up here a little bit. Mark Leonard tells you that the. I mean, Mark's a great guy. He's at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Tells you the American order is dead and beyond redemption. This cuts quite against the sort of liberal revival that you seem to be hoping for. But what follows is not a Chinese order in his thinking, but an UN order. And then there are other people who you talk to. Sui Sheng chaos, Hobbesian scramble. Every country is sort of hunting for choke points and hedging against the others. Patty Kim, who's been on the show, she's at Brookings, describes a kind of China first posture, that it's all about influence without responsibility. Which is the thesis of her new book, which I'll be reading as soon as my self imposed summer ban on any nonfiction lifts on Labor Day. But I really look forward to talking to her about that.

[B]

Yeah, I've read that book and it's terrific.

[C]

I can't wait. That's first on my list once the ban lifts. But, you know, look, Americans and Chinese are not the only people in the damn world. There are, you know, 6 billion others out there who are citizens of neither superpower. And, you know, they have a big stake in what this race actually portends. Is there any actor left out there with both the capacity and the inclination to Defend what mankind 2000 called everyone's claim on the future? What's going to do it? Is it what you're hoping for, an American populace that's sick of these tech bro oligarchs? Is it who's out there? Who's got. They all have skin in the game, but, you know, who's got an affirmative vision of what the world ought to be looking like?

[B]

Well, the short answer is I don't see who that is at this point. I think right now we're in this primordial soup period of American politics about what is the Democratic Party going to be? What is the Republican Party going to be after Trump? Is there something else coming? And internationally, and this is partly a reflection of my experiences in Europe earlier this year, that there is this real feeling, as I convey in the piece, that the old world is over and that they have to look out for themselves now. And that's disconcerting. That does not redound to China's benefit, particularly, I think, Mark Carney's rupture.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, it's not an interregnum.

[B]

And I think. Right. It is a new. A new normal. And that should be really a bracing realization for people. I think we haven't fully absorbed what that will look like. There's been, as I quote Bob Kagan in the story saying there was a Mongol world order, there was an Islamic world order, an Egyptian world order, and then there was an American world order. And we have to come to terms with now, what does it look like after that? And I should point out very quickly here, because I really believe this, that does not mean sort of shrugging and giving up on the values that the United States has traditionally aspired to, even when it doesn't achieve them. And of course, we've never fully achieved them. But it's not the same. To say that we're giving up on the idea of them, that's a different thing. And I don't think there is any reason to say we are or should, but I'm quite conscious of the fact that right now, you know, we are, to use one of the sort of obvious references, you know, this is what, Gramsian. What was his line? It was. Gramsci's line, was the time of monsters,

[C]

the old will not.

[B]

Right, right.

[C]

It's time of monsters. The old world will not die, the new one refuses to be born. That kind of thing.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And you can't look at the world and disagree with that framing. But I also, I'm conscious of the fact that these periods don't last particularly long. They tend to give way to something, and that doesn't mean something.

[C]

You know, I can't help but hear, though, in what you're saying still, that the Agency is mainly in the American polity, that it's us sorting our own shit out somehow.

[B]

I'm not sure about that. I'm not. I'm not sure about that. Well, I only say that here's why I think it's, you know, you can't just. Frankly, it's just the United States is too big economically, militarily, strategically, to be sure, rendered just another player on the board right now. And, you know, Trump's tenure is evidence of how much turbulence the United States can make. So I think that. I just don't. I don't think any of us can responsibly predict where this comes out. So that's, you know, part of. And frankly, that's like the perfect place for us to wind around to, because, you know, one of my little ideas in this piece is, you know, I'm writing a piece that is ostensibly about, here's a vision of the future, and I come around to the idea that predictions are a mug's game. It is always folly to try to say, here's where things are definitively going. But that doesn't make it any less tempting to want to do it. And each of our systems, in our own ways, are trying desperately to do that. That's always been the. The imagined Holy Grail.

[C]

Well, Evan, your letter from China, the future Made in China, is absolutely something that I think everyone ought to read. If you haven't already read it, make sure to get out there and read it. It's really a fantastic bit of reporting, written beautifully as one comes to expect from you. So, thanks, man. It's been totally fun. Let's move on to the section of the show I call Paying it Forward. I'm not sure you know this section, but I've been doing this for a couple of years now. I ask guests, name check, somebody who's sure. I think you hinted at young reporters who are doing some excellent work. Yeah. Let's hear it.

[B]

Yeah. Well, one person who I think is doing great work is Yi Ling Liu, the author of the Wall Dancers.

[C]

Yeah. She's been on the show to talk about her excellent book.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And I think one of the things that I like about her, her work is that she is grappling with these questions of. I don't think she uses this sort of terminology, but of, you know, scientism and humanism and how these pieces are competing for resources and support and energy and leadership. And that is something that is beyond national borders. So I find her work really, really interesting. She's done some reviews for the. Or maybe I'm not sure. I've read one in particular in the New York Review of Books. I just think she's a really interesting person to be reading right now.

[C]

She really is a great voice.

[B]

And can I give you another. I think absolutely.

[C]

Please.

[B]

Another writer whose work I appreciate is Chang Che, who writes sometimes for the New Yorker and for the Guardian.

[C]

Also been on the show.

[B]

Yeah. And he's been watching technological developments very closely and has that quality of being up against the coal face, looking at things really closely and creating history in real time. So it's always fun to read his.

[C]

Let me add a little known detail about our. Our friend Chong. He's an excellent singer.

[B]

Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

[C]

Yeah. So Jonathan Chang of the Journal and Chong and I have. We gathered only the one time, but spent an afternoon just sort of playing guitars. And he has a really, really good singing voice. It's. Yeah, it's sort of professional quality.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

So we may hit some open mics at some point when he's back in China, and it'll be fun. We've got a little repertoire we're working up.

[B]

You find them everywhere. You have the ability. That's your. You see the landscape and pull out the good musicians also.

[C]

I do, but. Okay, now on to recommendations. A film, some music, a book that you've read recently. What you got for us, Evan?

[B]

I would recommend a book by a young journalist in the United States, Theo Baker, called How to Rule the World, which is the extraordinary story of his experience at Stanford, where he was a student journalist, a freshman who investigated the president of the university and led to the president's downfall and because of allegations of falsified research. And it then became this even. And he won the Polk Award, the youngest reporter ever to do so. And then Theo Baker went on to write a book that really is about how this rising generation of bright students perceives their opportunities and obligations to society and the world they're coming up in in Palo Alto. And it's, it's just an extraordinarily eye opening book about technology, politics, money, oligarchy, many of the themes we've been talking about. And I think reading it from where you sit would also be a fascinating perspective.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And another case study in the. In the usages of adversarial journalism.

[A]

Three more.

[C]

Cheers.

[B]

Long shall it live.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. Excellent. Theo Baker. I'll definitely check that out.

[B]

Great.

[C]

My summer of fiction reading continues. I recently finished another couple of wonderful novels that I'd recommend without hesitation. The one that I will recommend today is another novel by John Williams, who's the author of Stoner, which I recommended last Episode. This Stoner is just fantastic. If you haven't followed my recommendation and pick that up, just do that. It's just great. This one is a western called Butcher's Crossing and it has that same kind of craft at the sentence level that made me love Stoner so much.

[B]

When you mentioned a western, it just reminded me, okay, I do have one good fiction recommendation, which is that I recently read True Grit by Charles Portis, which I had never read before.

[C]

Oh, really?

[B]

It is splendid. And just as somebody who appreciates sentences, it's impossible not to read that. That and savor the way it puts dialogue on the page.

[C]

Fantastic. It's a really, really great book, this one too. It's not in first person, if you're a fan of Melville, if you've recently reread Moby Dick or anything. And if you like Cormac McCarthy, you're gonna dig this one. The Ishmael, like innocent, who is the kind of novel's main character comes to the from Boston, drops out of Harvard and goes to this little town in the Midwest, this town called Butcher's Crossing, to learn about the trade in Buffalo hide and joins a hunt with an obsessed Ahab like character who. I mean, that's all you need to know for now. It's just some fantastically good writing. I understand. There was actually a film adaptation a few years ago starting Nicolas Cage as the Ahab like character. Miller. I have not seen it yet, but hadn't read good things about that. The, the book though, I would recommend Without Reservation. It's just great. More along that line. I mean, I've just been doing a lot of novels this summer, so lots more recommendations in the pipeline. Evan, what a pleasure, man.

[B]

Likewise. Thanks, Kaiser. Thanks for having me. It's always great to chat.

[C]

Thanks for getting up early on a weekend morning and love, Sarah, Beth and Ollie. And the new one, Rosie, whose name again is Rosie. How old's Rosie now?

[B]

She's eight. Yeah, she's a former God. Lucky number eight.

[C]

Time just flies. Oh my God.

[B]

I know. It's crazy nipping at your heels. All right, be well. Let's see each other.

[C]

All right.

[B]

You too, you know, before too long. All right, we will.

[C]

All right, take care, man. You've been listening to the Sinica Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through [e-mail] where you'll find a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Email [e-mail] if you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show or if you just want to say hi. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Huge thanks to my guest, Evan Osmos. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care.

[B]

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