In Germany last fall, I expected to find a Europe in crisis; on my way to Kassel, home to the avant-garde cultural research organization Documenta, my train passed through Wolfsburg, where gigantic Volkswagen logos filled the green countryside. A few days later, I learned that three of VW’s plants were slated for closure — the first time in 87 years that the company would shutter factories. Tens of thousands of workers could be laid off. Fourteen million people work in Europe’s automotive industry, which generates about 7% of the total European GDP. Europe has an ambition to ban the sale of new cars with combustion engines by 2035. Where that leaves German car companies is anybody’s guess, but most are guessing pessimistically. 

All this anxiety about a changing world order is being channeled in different ways across the continent. The likes of Mario Draghi generate technocratic reports about the need to stay competitive. The folk demon Viktor Orbán voices it in more sentimental terms, as when he commented that “there are two suns in the sky.” He meant that Europe is trapped between China and the U.S. and cannot sever ties with either. Why not? What is it about either country that Europe needs so badly?

Silicon Valley venture capitalists and the Chinese government are united in an obsession with technological progress. “The CPC and the Chinese government view tech innovation as the core of national development,” China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian said at a briefing last September; Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and other oligarchs say the same about technology in the U.S. and are increasingly intervening in American politics to remove any guardrails on their quest to beat China in the technology race. Many Europeans worry about being the subject rather than master of the two parallel tech revolutions happening in East (in energy) and West (in computation) today.

Draghi’s September 2024 report on competitiveness recognized this dilemma by calling for a seemingly impossible €750-800-billion investment (at least 4% of the bloc’s 2023 GDP and more than double the investment under the Marshall Plan) in advanced technologies and decarbonization infrastructure to stay relevant as the two suns continue rising in Europe’s sky. The financial and technological relationship of Europeans to America, Draghi wrote in his foreword to the report, is like the relationship of the hinterland to the metropolis: 

If America dominates Europe from above, China is coming from below. Its increasingly adept control of high-end manufacturing has caused German industry — BASF, Volkswagen, hundreds of Mittelstand (small-medium-sized businesses) — that is at the heart of Europe’s economy to totter. (Interestingly, Volkswagen and BASF have both made multi-billion euro investments in China recently, so it seems like the future of Europe is tottering rather than the future of individual German companies, which may continue to thrive — but in a Chinese setting.) So Europe’s hardware is increasingly made in China and its operating software is American, making the continent neither the lord nor the worker in the world that is taking shape. 

What role can Europe play? With American diplomatic relations under Donald Trump in question, the Chinese still hope that Europe will be, if not a swing state, then at any rate neutral, driven to trade with China by a desire to avoid inflation and rebuild an energy infrastructure for a world in which fossil fuels are beginning to have an intolerable cost. Neutrality in a competition for sovereignty amounts to acquiescing to subordination. But the question facing Europe applies beyond its borders — the American middle class, which remains determined to have a meaningful life in an economy reshaped by AI, faces it too. Even though the frontiers of science and technology are every day being pushed into new terrain, the world feels somehow smaller and dingier, prompting many Europeans — indeed, people of many nationalities — to ask whether such “progress” is heading in a direction they want to go. Maybe Europe will be the place where these changes are digested in a democratic way.

On travels through the three economic blocs in the months before the 2024 American election, I noticed how advanced technoscience maps onto the same space and mental archetypes of settler colonialism — artificial intelligence in Xinjiang monitoring and suppressing ethnic minorities, Elon Musk swaggering through the Southwestern desert to gaze upon the border-crossing points used by migrants. Humanity, it seems more and more often, is being divided into the experimenters and the experimented upon. Despite its wealth, Europe’s population seems to be tumbling into the latter category.

Computation needs energy, and energy needs application, but the climate crisis has made it clear that decarbonization is not optional, so powering AI with oil and gas isn’t really a solution to the problems of today and tomorrow. From Nevada to Shenzhen, it feels so obvious that America needs Chinese renewable energy technology, and China needs American computation technology. Together, endless energy fueling ecologically sustainable computation could lead us to a post-scarcity world. But we’re not together, and the world that’s emerging feels more like a kind of oligarchic nouveau feudalism where, at the core of the developed world, a hole is widening under the middle class.

I. USA Parkway

“Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

NEVADA — Our neon green pickup truck sped along State Route 439, better known as the USA Parkway, where Google, Tesla, Apple and others host their cloud in giant data centers. Siri lives in these hills. In the vastness of the American southwest, the military-industrial complex, the nuts and bolts of big tech, huge land artworks and numerous utopian experiments all bump into one another. I was traveling with paleontologist Martin Sander, who digs up ichthyosaur fossils in the Augusta Mountains. It was about places like this that Robert Smithson — the artist known best for Spiral Jetty, the huge work of land art in the Great Salt Lake that is slowly being exposed as the water level there drops — wrote, “The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art.” Smithson asked what the land was trying to tell us about freedom, but here we Americans have rarely been willing to listen, preferring instead to set off explosions, dig for diamonds, gather for hallucinogenic orgies, build casinos and host data centers.

Most of the roads I drove down with Sander were rarely traveled by anybody besides miners. We spoke of “deep time” and the parallels between evolutionary biology and the evolution of our species. Without Deng Xiaoping, he told me, we might not have discovered how dinosaurs became birds. (It was during the economic explosion under Deng that a black market in dinosaur bones in Liaoning became formalized, which led to paleontological breakthroughs.) Sander’s work on the fossil record explores how compounded subtle changes over time can lead a species to evolve into something totally different, which was the feature of a Nevada Museum of Art exhibition called “Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada.” Human history — evolution, agriculture, industrialization, our climate crisis today — is, in planetary terms, just a blink of an eye, he told me, a blip in Earth’s deeper patterns. We came, we saw, we conquered and maybe we’re going somewhere else now, co-evolving with our technology and our planet’s changes, turning our gaze unto the stars.

Sander’s theory of sauropod gigantism suggests that some species naturally evolve to take up all the room available to them. In the case of his beloved ichthyosaurs, the quest for ever more Lebensraum prompted one branch of the species to become giant and warm-blooded. The cold-blooded ichthyosaur had a slow metabolism and didn’t need to eat as much, but it couldn’t survive the coldest depths of the ocean; by becoming warm-blooded, the sea dragons grew and grew, consuming more and more resources. But a warm-blooded beast has a fast metabolism, and it needs constant consumption to survive. At some point, the giant warm-blooded ichthyosaur went extinct, but the smaller cold-blooded one did not. Although this is a parable of how being gigantic doesn’t always work out, the warm-blooded ichthyosaur existed for possibly a hundred million years.

From here in the homeland of the American military-industrial complex, the megastructure of our hot-blooded and carnivorous society seems to be crashing and burning. But even as the climate degrades around us, a new form of sapience is emerging. This sapience thrives in deserts and pulses in mountains devoid of mammalian life. It is hot-blooded, with electricity surging through it. It gave James Lovelock, the originator of the idea that the Earth is a self-sustaining organism, hope at the end of his years that life, in some shape or form, will continue in the long run, perhaps in a more sophisticated form than what we have today.

If America was run by the Chinese Communist Party, Nevada would surely be covered with solar panels, like Xinjiang is quickly becoming. It’s not. Unless America, and particularly Silicon Valley, solves its energy bottleneck, AI development might slow down. Will sclerotic U.S. politics be able to catch up with technology, or have our technological capacities outpaced our cultural capacity to understand and to act?

II. What Makes Chinese AI Chinese?

“For progress, there is no cure.”
— John von Neumann

GUANGZHOU — Artificial intelligence has become a subject of obsessive interest in China, from the government to public intellectuals to ordinary people. The Institute of Public Policy (IPP), a think tank at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, hosted a conference late last September that brought together industry voices, scholars and that peculiar Chinese category of academics who are somehow also, in a hidden and nebulous way, policy advisors. Imagine an academic conference in which the mayor sits in the front row, asking questions. 

Years ago, during the Chimerican period, Shenzhen built what California invented. During the ongoing divorce — or, perhaps, the temporary split before a reunion — both sides, which once worked hand in hand, are left with crippled limbs, only halfway able to realize their goals. If the quest for advanced technologies is a race, the U.S. is in the lead but keeps glancing back over its shoulder, while China maintains the concentration that comes from staring straight ahead at a rival.

Unlike China’s, the American economy is consumer-oriented. America’s sexiest AI applications — ChatGPT, Sora, Midjourney — have gotten a wide uptake from ordinary people who want to play around with the technology. In contrast, China is a production-oriented society, and Chinese AI companies are (mostly) more inclined to seek business providing big-data solutions to large companies and industries like health care, transportation, energy and education. China being China, many of those enterprises are state-owned. 

Here, AI is less about chatbots and more about making trains run on time, irrigating deserts, enhancing agricultural productivity and providing health care to poor regions without adequate numbers of doctors and hospitals. If that sounds pretty Communist, that’s because it is — Chinese AI serves the goals of the Chinese government, which are not about maximizing investor returns so much as improving and perfecting national infrastructure, health care, educational outcomes for deprived regions and fueling what Xi Jinping has talked about as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

Chinese AI, therefore, is funded and directed in a different way than American AI. Whereas in the U.S., barely regulated venture capitalists pour funds into startups, Chinese scientific research and technological development emanates from tightly controlled Chinese universities and research institutions like the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

At the IPP event, both keynote speaker Hwang Kai and conference host Zheng Yongnian highlighted the risks of AI at great length — not just of some superintelligent machine ruling the Earth, but AI displacing human jobs here and now. A figure of 80 million food delivery and taxi drivers was repeatedly cited. What will these people do when autonomous cars and drones can do their jobs for them? (I was not able to confirm the 80 million figure in official data, suggesting that pessimism about AI taking jobs is a narrative that has become engrained deeply enough that people readily accept dubious numbers; there are, however, unquestionably millions of such drivers.) 

Marxist political economy is built on recognizing labor as equal to capital; if the workers of the world unite, they will be strong, as demonstrated by China’s rise on the back of manufacturing to the point that it can challenge the global capitalist order. But what if automation means that capital no longer needs labor? All of a sudden, the majority of the human race will become superfluous to the ongoing movements of capital and technology. Like the stray cats of New York who coexist with financiers without having any real awareness of or influence on finance, so most human beings will simply be irrelevant to what we call the “economy” if AI and automation make labor unnecessary. At that point, the question of what to do with these people is a political one rather than an economic one.

To some extent, as Chinese factories automate and robotize at a rapid pace, this problem is already becoming visible. But some find a silver lining in the fact that as China’s workforce ages and the population of elderly needing care swells, humanoid robots (or “embodied AI”) can both soothe the lonely elderly and also keep the economy pumping even as the number of total workers declines. If there are fewer workers in the future but they’re highly paid white-collar engineers supervising robotic machinery, some speculate that factories will be able to produce just as much with higher productivity.

I got the sense that, left to their own devices, many Chinese would rather halt or tightly control AI development; the risks of social instability, inequality between classes and regions, and environmental destruction were mentioned by speaker after speaker. In China’s tiered class system, memorably described by Hao Jingfang in “Folding Beijing,” the working class is at risk of being subsumed underground forever, replaced above by droids. Will they agree to stay down there? 

At the same time, Zheng said, if the U.S. is the only one at the decision-making table, then China will be unable to protect itself or its population from American capitalists who might not care much about social instability or income inequality. China needs this technology to have a seat at the table, he argued. 

To me, it feels like Chinese AI development is reactive and defensive, searching for useful applications to solve Chinese social needs (like expanding health care and education to rural areas, tracking the adverse impacts of global warming or making factory work safer and more pleasant). The drive for scientific progress to keep up with the U.S., Zheng mentioned, might force institutional reforms that result in, for example, China’s disparate provinces cooperating and coordinating on technological solutions to various social, environmental and health challenges. But ancient prerogatives and rivalries are hard to give up. Perhaps the sense of a challenge from the outside is the only force capable of melting Chinese internal parochialism. It seemed clear to most Chinese speakers that in the AI race, the U.S. and China are the only two protagonists, to the occasional frustration of European attendees.

Yuan Xiaohui of the Tencent Research Institute shared perhaps the most optimistic view (and most aligned with American AI discussions): By eliminating repetitive tasks, she suggested, AI could enable creativity. Tencent, for example, offers AI tools for small businesses making advertisements. Our humanity is our creativity, she argued, and in this way, AI will make us more human by freeing us from mundane tasks. Still, most Chinese today are engaged in mundane tasks, and given the opportunity to pursue alternatives, they might not do anything creative. In any case, a large-scale digital economy and automation isn’t China’s future — it’s China’s present. The future is already here, just unevenly distributed; in China, it is more present in Shenzhen and Shanghai, and some areas of Beijing, than it is in Guizhou, Gansu or Heilongjiang. There is a real fear that AI will exacerbate the trend of economic growth, boosting some at the cost of making social inequalities more visible.

Of course, one central factor in the calculations about AI competition between China and the U.S. is the ban on the sale of advanced semiconductors to China. Although some reports suggest a black market allows Chinese scientists ways to get around this, Keun Lee, a Korean expert on China’s economy, shared his research, which suggests that China is beginning to get an intimidating advantage on less-sophisticated chips. Indeed, many of the massive industrial applications that China is pursuing are less data-intensive than ChatGPT. Running Chinese high-speed trains really is simpler in some ways than creating Instagram memes. 

Lee alluded to the fear among many American companies like Intel that China’s development of its own chips will lead to a huge Chinese price advantage at the lower end of the market. In this world, America would be at the cutting edge of semiconductors (which American companies like Apple could still purchase for installation in China-made devices), but American companies would be, effectively, a luxury segment, dominating the higher end while China made the chips used in a myriad of ways in daily life. 

In this scenario, as Huawei and BYD are doing, Chinese AI companies might be the top players in markets in the Global South with products and services that, having been developed for Chinese provinces, are equally useful in places of similar developmental levels, like Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey and elsewhere. Even if the most sophisticated chips are in short supply, traffic lights, map applications and weather forecasts don’t need them. Chinese technology could both lag the Americans in frontier applications and dominate global markets with efficient, useful systems. So China cedes the frontier to dominate the heartland — although, of course, most Chinese technologists aren’t ready to cede any frontiers just yet.

The conference closed with the rural sociologist Lin Huihuang giving a rousing speech on the social responsibility of technology. We in this room, he said, are in a golden circle of knowledge and technology. Do not forget those who are outside the circle: those whose labor AI seeks to replace. We are human because of our work. Without our work, how can the global and Chinese poor affirm their humanity and have a meaningful place in the world?

The Chinese energy transition is occurring at a breakneck speed of jerks and starts, creating “ghost solar” much like the ghost cities of yesteryear. Scanning WeChat, I found articles from the Xinjiang government advertising its suitability for AI research. Come here, they wrote; we have unlimited supplies of renewable energy and we don’t know what to do with it; we’ll give it out for free to startups. China’s energy transition, which in the short term results in oversupply or overcapacity, might offer cheap and sustainable electricity sources to operators of LLMs in a way that no other region in the world today can replicate. 

What kind of world will it be when automation and free electricity together drive down the cost of, in particular, transportation and agriculture? China might be about to find out. Their semiconductors are good enough for industrial AI applications, and the amount of solar coming online is outpacing the ability of the grid to absorb it.

III. Deutschland im Herbst

“Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.”
— Paul Gauguin

When I brought up the Draghi report to people in Berlin, one venture capitalist sighed. It feels almost like a preemptive I told you so aimed at the history books, she told me, rather than a real program of action. Europe doesn’t lack brilliant and talented people. But if both the U.S. and China are running as fast as they can to keep up with each other, many in Europe were simply living their lives, what the Chinese would call “过小日子” or “passing small days.” 

If Trump’s first term was a big shock to China (but one the CCP has already internalized), Trump’s return will make European Atlanticist elites into orphans. With the dialectical shock of realizing that America is, in the end, a very different sort of place — a rival more than an ally — Europe may finally do what it should have done a long time ago and create a single market “with teeth” (as former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta put it), put together a partnership with China on the energy revolution, and pursue the unifying task of integrating Ukraine and the Ukrainians (some of them anyway) into a European way of life, thereby resolving the historical tensions between Europe’s west and east. 

In the years to come, Europe’s role may be as a grand meeting point for nations, a moderating point for technologies and a proving point for the energy transition. That role is not small; the question is simply whether Europe can rise to the occasion. If, in today’s Europe, some of the most disturbing questions — Why is Germany’s alt-right party led by a former Chinese investment banker? Does the sort of growth that Hungary and Poland are notching offer any useful lessons? — come from the east, its future does as well.

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“You are the soul of all those who died believing in the happiness that would come in the future. And now see, it has come. The future in which people do not live for something else but for themselves.”
—Victor Pelevin, “The Sacred Book of the Werewolf”

Over the past few years, the flimsy states and territories that cover the Eurasian continent as lightly as gauze have been getting pushed and pulled into a new way of being. In response to volatile oil prices, temperatures creeping ever higher, forests burning and deserts growing, China is reordering the internal logic of the supercontinent under the banner of a technological dream of endlessly renewable electricity.

The sources of this electricity, as if in fulfillment of an ancient pagan dream, are the rays of the sun, the breeze across the prairie and the cascades of mountain rivers. While new reservoirs of fossil fuels and seams of ores are being penetrated here too, two-thirds of all wind and solar projects that are currently under construction are located in China, and the country is expected to install more than half of the world’s total solar power in 2024 alone, both within and outside its borders. Across these huge distances and extreme temperatures — what the English geographer Halford Mackinder called the “Heartland” of the “World Island” — new towns are being built, even new capitals, all linked by lengths of glass and plastic wires to vast fields of solar panels and wind turbines and mega-dams.

This monumental industrial transformation is reshaping the internal logic and economic priorities of countries from Mongolia to Pakistan to Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia. It’s reordering political alliances and trade routes across the entire post-Soviet space and the Arab world — or, if you prefer to think in historical terms, most of the Mongol Empire’s territory circa 1259. In seeking to decarbonize, China is upending Eurasia’s and indeed the global economy, whose denomination is the petrodollar, and restructuring the United States-led world. What this post-oil world looks like depends on where you visit. In Mongolia and Saudi Arabia, I discovered that the industry of the global renewable energy transition is very much oriented toward China.

While the Chinese are building a new Eurasia in the form of a totalizing machine, Russian intellectuals have had a different fantasy of Eurasia for at least the past hundred years. From Aleksandr Dugin and Sergey Karaganov, and Lev Gumilev before them, this fantasy has been derived from some romantic vision of communist, pagan, primitive, anti-modern Mongol hordes. Gumilev, the strange and bitter celebrity ethnologist of Russia’s 1990s, prophesied a return to a Mongolic way of life, one infused with the purity of the endless earth and the mysticism of shamans in which the life of the people shines, and shines, and shines. Before him, Fyodor Dostoyevsky decried the Crystal Palace in London as a symbol of Western modernity, alien to the Russian soul.

Russia today revels in playing the innocent victim, just trying to defend itself, gathering the clans to fight modernity. That’s an incoherent position and ironic, because by fleeing from a complicated, decadent, urban, enlightened Europe, Russia is delivering itself into the jaws of a more sophisticated machine than 21st-century Europe could ever hope to be. China is a hyper-organized, rationalist, urban technocracy that forcibly integrates foreign peoples and embraces a generic globalism as much as anywhere on Earth. So if the Russian Eurasianists think that by discarding Europe and allying with China they can turn their backs on the contemporary, they are sadly mistaken.

At the heart of the contemporary Chinese empire is a digital megastructure that might be the true protagonist of our time, reordering energy, land and human life around its need to adjust to a new enviro-political reality. When COP29 opens in November in Baku, a Eurasian city built on oil that is today crisscrossed by infrastructure with Chinese characteristics, a latter-day Pax Mongolica will see itself in the mirror: a Sinified Eurasian continent remaking itself with renewable power.

For those who think in English, this can all feel like the realization of a baleful prophecy about the emergence of a totalitarian empire. But if the Eurasian steppe is the backdrop to human history, it’s a history of human insignificance in the face of natural forces and distances. Preoccupation with emperors misses the deeper truth of people lost in an endless emptiness, searching for meaning and for a way to transform their circumstances.

II. The Third Neighbor

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. … It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. … [M]an is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto”

Last year, hoping to understand what the new Eurasian world looks like to Mongolians, I dropped by the International Conference of the Mongolists in Ulaanbaatar. Mongolia’s two neighbors, Russia and China, both have large populations of ethnic Mongols. As the great game heats up between China and the West over resources for the renewable energy transition, the Mongolian elite is betting on their “third neighbor” — the West — to help them triangulate a shifting balance of power.

Ulaanbaatar’s immediate surroundings are soothing, with rolling hills and blue skies that might remind you of the famous Windows XP wallpaper. But seen from the air on a flight from Beijing, the city appears like an oasis surrounded by the endless and expanding orange of the Gobi Desert. The sandstorms here are so brutal that they impact Beijing, hundreds of miles away; planting trees as a natural barrier against the desert has become one of the principal areas of cooperation between China and Mongolia. Making things worse, Mongolia is drier now than it has been for 260 years, further jeopardizing the way of life of nomadic herders.

Stuck in traffic, I noticed that seemingly everybody was driving a Prius, many with license plates from suburban Osaka or Kanazawa dealerships. Apparently, there’s a brisk resale market of Japanese used cars being distributed via Vladivostok or Tianjin throughout inner Asia.

Mongolia isn’t rich — with a per capita GDP of around $5,000, it is a long way from China, Korea or Russia. But optimistic Mongolians forecast that figure to grow to $10,000 or $20,000 by 2030. (The math is friendly since the population is so small.) Copper, lithium, graphite and some of the other metals found in the Gobi are critical for the batteries, wind turbines and solar panels that will fuel the energy transition; the Oyu Tolgoi mine, far to the south near the border with China, is one of the largest copper mines in the world. As the U.S. and China compete to secure these resources, Mongolia has gained a new allure; entrepreneurial locals, conscious of having squandered opportunities in the years since the socialist period ended, plan to make the most of it.

For countries with minerals relevant to the energy transition, from Chile to Indonesia to Mongolia, the great transition that is just beginning offers an opportunity to become key players in an upturned world. While China has flirted with bans on the export of certain rare earth metals, Mongolia could export what China refuses to. There’s only one catch: Anything going in or out of Mongolia must pass through, or over, Russia or China.

Mongolia has a highly complex relationship with Russia. The architecture of Mongolian modernity was almost entirely imposed by Joseph Stalin. Until the Soviet period, Mongolians were mostly nomads who had to be forcibly and violently dragged into modernity via collective farms and industrial projects, which were run poorly. There’s a lot of resentment about Russia’s past and present role as an autocratic meddler in Mongolian affairs. This lingers even within the Russian Federation and its community of Siberian Buryats, a Mongolic ethnic group from a land that straddles the present-day border between Russia and Mongolia: Why should they put their lives on the line to conquer Kyiv for Moscow, a city in which they would still be treated as second-class citizens? Many would prefer to live in Ulaanbaatar and openly wonder whether Russia, a multiethnic empire ruled by Muscovites, can survive at all.

Russia’s wane in Mongolia means China might wax. China is, of course, a familiar interlocutor for Mongolians; some privately boast that they founded Beijing (during the Yuan Dynasty, when it was called Khanbaliq). But it’s in the interest of the Mongol state to keep a firm distinction between the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia and Mongolia the independent country, lest they fall quietly into Beijing’s warm embrace. This has already happened once, and it didn’t end well: Chinese Inner Mongolia’s GDP per capita is nearly three times that of Mongolia, but the Mongolian language is marginal there, and Han constitute 80% of the population. The Mongolians of Ulaanbaatar view the Inner Mongolians as sleepers in a poisoned dream who may never again wake up to their true selves. 

III. From Shanghai To Riyadh

“We must go out to meet the world. Not only do we want our products to ‘go global,’ we also want our industrialization to go global, and our high-quality talent to go global. We can spread industrialization to every corner of the world. Many of our scientists and technicians will travel around the world to work, bringing with them civilization, a dignified existence, and relief from poverty. This is one thing that Westerners have been unwilling or powerless to accomplish.”
—Wang Xiaodong, “A Study of the ‘Industrial Party’ and the ‘Sentimental Party’”

While the huge industrial transformation China is driving likely benefits Mongolians, it alarms Saudis. They feel that their ability to sell oil to China now has a question mark over it.

But the new direct flight between Shanghai and Riyadh is relatively cheap, under $200 each way sometimes — somebody is clearly subsidizing a new flow of people between China and the Arab world. Chinese companies are building new factories in Egypt, and Arab leaders are gravitating toward Beijing. Whatever you think about U.S. policy in the Middle East, many Arabs dislike it, and this has given China an opportunity.

A lot is changing in Saudi Arabia that might come as a surprise. There are new economic ties with China and a renewable energy boom. In a country that not long ago had religious police telling women how to dress, a luxury hotel on an island off the western coast put on a swimsuit fashion show in May. There are big plans for diversifying the economy and building a utopian mega-city in the desert. At the root of many of these changes is the sense that the country’s fossil-fueled foundation is no longer tenable, partly or mostly because China is decarbonizing. In response, Saudi Arabia is reinventing itself, a real and visible shift behind which is a material compulsion to find some new reason for being.

When I visited Riyadh for the Diriyah Biennale I wondered what it means to look at the future optimistically, and why people in some places have that perspective, while others don’t. Gumilev called it “passionarity,” a kind of momentum he thought caused a group to unite and find power and strength. I remember when America had it. Is it lost for good, or will it come back? And what does the breathtakingly rapid Saudi transformation reveal about how frustratingly stuck societies can suddenly find a new groove?

Driving the changes in Saudi, a Shanghai-based friend who advises the Saudis on their Chinese investments, told me, is the certainty that the world has reached peak oil. China, the world’s biggest oil importer, is taking measures to get energy in different ways. So must Saudi Arabia change, as the world changes around it.

Despite the basis for the Saudi economy likely disappearing within the next 10 years, bitter wars in the region and the sweltering weather (it’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit by April), optimism and plans for a different future pervade much of Saudi Arabia. In this situation, the irrational concept of passionarity began to make sense. The Saudis are getting their act together while Americans, for all of our advantages, are screwing around. It doesn’t seem like something that can be explained by logic. Saudi Arabia is “progressive,” an acquaintance who works on the Saudi government’s investments in China, told me — not in the sense of a set of causes, like in America, but in the literal sense of progressing toward a future that will be different, even perhaps better than today.

“Saudi Arabia is the new China,” I’d heard before I arrived in Riyadh from people who’d spent time in both countries. That sounded a bit ominous, considering the wave of social transformation in China starting around 2008. Back then, it felt like anything could happen, with everybody able to project their own fantasies onto the future. Since then, China has been a society in flux; much hasn’t worked out, and there is a kind of hangover from reality not meeting expectations: abandoned housing complexes, companies in debt, individuals for whom the dream never came true, college grads who never found work, etc. Saudi might feel the same in 15 years, when skeletons of grand ambitions stand empty and forlorn.

And yet, in many concrete ways, Chinese cities are much more livable than they used to be. People who know what they want and have a plan to get it sometimes succeed. If you dream it, you can at least try to do it.

IV. The Green Prison

“Prior to Gumilev, we typically looked at ourselves through the eyes of the West, seeing in our country … only oppressive centuries of barbarism, bloody conflicts, and senseless, stagnant, lifeless existence.”
—Aleksandr Dugin

In the Stalinist 1940s, Lev Gumilev was marooned in what he called the “green prison” of Siberia, so desperate to leave that he volunteered for the Soviet military. For an anthropologist and self-styled aristocrat, preferring to participate in the Red Army’s assault on Berlin to life in Siberia was as if King Kong chose Manhattan over the jungle. Like Dostoyevsky before him, he felt stranded in an endless and uncaring Asia.

Similar to the Nazis, Gumilev built a worldview around ethnicity. But rather than seeing ethnicity as something biological, his view was based on an almost mystical relationship between the group and the landscape around it. He saw humanity as intrinsically defined by ecosystems, like a species of animal or plant. Different ecosystems engender different types of life; for Gumilev, the Eurasian type was the product of Siberia’s green prison. Homo Sovieticus was truly different, on an ethnic level, from the seafarers of Western civilization. But that ethnicity was understood as malleable, the product of moments of mutation and change in reaction to climate or ecological circumstances. In the end, the Soviet-Eurasians were just a group thrown together by contingency and an unwillingness — or inability — to be admitted to the world of capitalism.

In the Norillag gulag — which today is Nornickel, a huge mining conglomerate that recently announced plans to open a facility in China — Gumilev collected folklore of local tribes, in between suffering from diseases and eating herring. In his journal, he wrote:

It was here that his idea of “ethnogenesis” took form: that a group of people would be fused into a People with a capital P by a shared environment and the ways that they lived within its conditions. Norillag broke Gumilev. He reconstituted himself in a search for meaning, trying to conjoin his resentment of being excluded from European civilization with the experience of living in Siberia and its vague, mythic notions of Eurasian steppes.

The most articulate and sophisticated interlocutor of the “Eurasian idea,” Gumilev’s insights came not from archives but from his own life in Siberian resource-extraction slave camps. During the tumult of Russia’s 1980s and 1990s, his ideas became widely popular. Today, Russian pundits write about how “Russia must permanently abandon Europe and turn fully to Asia.” These men advocate the “Siberization” of Russia. But Siberia is a peripheral resource colony of a metropolis. Perhaps this is fitting, seeing as how China is set to make of Russia what Siberia has been to Moscow: wild, brutal, empty of people but full of valuable resources, a place outsiders can project their ideas of spirituality onto.

Gumilev’s Asia was a kind of Mongol purity invented as a psychic coping mechanism. The real Asia that the Russian state is encountering today is China, and China is extremely different from Mongolia. In fact, this might be contemporary Russia’s great tragedy. Making choices that in the short term seem inevitable, Moscow is refiguring what Russia is in the world in the long term; in Western media, we emphasize its new separation from Europe and America, but in Russian cities and industries, the new dominance of China will be felt more strongly. 

V. Harbin: Anti-Capital

“You can start out in Russia with whatever you like — conservatism, socialism, liberalism — but you will always end up with roughly the same thing, that is with the thing that actually exists.”
—Vladislav Surkov

Harbin, a perverse metropolis where northeastern China bumps into Russia, is a city whose mood is one of tragic, lost beauty; a shipwreck of its own contradictions. Walking the streets, it is impossible to recognize it as a capital of a new world order. At most, it is the seawall against which Atlantic modernity crashes and retreats.

Much as the Soviet state rearranged the natural and the psychic world of humans like Gumilev, the digital world that China is constructing is pushing reality around: the foods people eat, their activities, the ways they meet romantic partners.

When Putin visited Harbin in May 2024, Chinese and Russian state railroad companies made agreements to expand cross-border trains. Chinese bloggers, fantasizing about Russia’s potential, speculated about bringing Vladivostok — which Karaganov proposed as a new capital for Russia — within reach, digitally and by road or rail. Russia, after all, has the natural resources for an empire, but not the population. China has people, but not enough resources. It’s a perfect match.

Life desires its own propagation, and the Chinese techno-industrial structure’s expansion seems to follow the logic of expansion for its own sake, or to defend itself against the rival Atlantic structure. The wind that blows through Siberia, the rays of sun beating down on Karakorum and the settlements across the Eurasian steppe will intertwine with each other, for a time. Ultimately, this will serve the goal of feeding more resources into the Chinese economic machine, the inhuman power reshaping this most desolate of landscapes, wrapping more and more lives in its embrace.

The post China Builds A New Eurasia appeared first on NOEMA.

TOKYO — Once upon a time, Japan was as chaotic and fast-paced as boom-era China, the number-one source of foreign students at American universities, polluted, covering its earth with concrete to build infrastructure, with a real estate bubble fueled by debt.

Once upon a time, the Japanese imagined in its future gangs, crime, megacities and villains — just watch the 1988 anime movie “Akira,” a dystopian account of a biker gang set in an imagined 2019 “Neo-Tokyo” plagued by corruption and terrorism.

And then, the boom ended. Tokyo never became neo; instead, it has become one of the most affordable and livable major metropolises in the world.

Boom-era Japanese imagined a future that was the present, but more so. Everyone does this; our imagination of what will come is a mirror of our attitudes about today. But the future that “Akira” imagined didn’t come to pass, and the predictions that people make about America or China’s future today might seem as distant from reality as a post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo does from the actual Tokyo of today.

In the years since Akira’s release, Japan experienced “lost decades” where its economy suffered or “stagnated,” but its culture and environment remained attractive. This suggests, perhaps, that economic growth and well-being are not always linked.

When you go there today, it’s not hard to find certain areas that are positively magical, where artisans and craftsmen follow self-directed trajectories and occupy lush and tranquil spaces, like an American architect who co-directs the Red Dot School on a rural island, population 650. In general, it’s a stable place with nice infrastructure and a low cost of living — a great place for people who want to spend calm years pursuing individual passions that might not make them rich. Indeed, a cottage industry of economists advocating “degrowth” lives in Tokyo. The culture reveres high-quality objects — old hotels and restaurants, vintage shops, nice cars. And creatives coexist with an endless grey sprawl, the legacy of the boom that built the place up.

Economists such as George Magnus and investors like Ray Dalio worry that China might experience “Japanification,” or an end to frantic urbanization that resolves to a more sedate pace. The Chinese economist Justin Yifu Lin told me that Japanification is impossible, saying China’s market size, control over its own currency and technological development will ward off Japanification like a vampire. But Japan is a terrific place. As the joke goes, there are four levels of development: Developed, underdeveloped, Argentina (undevelopable) and Japan (developed to a level unattainable elsewhere). What about Japan’s fate frightens these people so much?

Over several days of travel across Japan earlier this year, I tried to understand why becoming more like Japan would be a bad thing for China. Strolling through Tokyo after 30 years of stagnation, one can only say that China would be lucky to have such misfortune. “By 2035,” Chinese planners say, “China will have basically achieved socialist modernization.” (A lot rides on that “basically.”) Maybe it would be safe to say that Japan has done this already.

The Chinese tourists I met at the train station in Onomichi, a small town on the Seto Inland Sea, loved the quiet, the greenery, the cleanliness. China could never be like this, they laughed. Japan, I realized, is the sort of stasis that many urban Chinese yearn for.

Slowing Down

“… the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”
― Bertolt Brecht, “The Solution,” 1959

During the boom years, people in China and foreign observers assumed that the future would be an extension of the present: a nation in the throes of a transformative passion, growing all the time. Even within the past couple years, economists have been predicting that China’s GDP would exceed America’s in absolute terms by 2030.

Today, it’s become apparent that for better or worse, China’s lightning-fast development has been replaced by government slogans like “high-quality development” powered by “new productive forces” as the country becomes an “olive-shaped economy” — no sharp bottoms or tops — experiencing “common prosperity.” All of these amount to explanations by the government that the fast-paced growth era is over, telegraphing to the population that there are new priorities now — something’s happening, even if your own life feels the same.

Behind this abrupt shift is a calculated decision by the government that the bones of modern China are in place. The plan for the next decade is to build soft infrastructures like education and healthcare, with the invisible guidance of new technologies driven by data to rationalize everything and make life smoother — like muscle tissues enabling structure to gain power.

To the extent that China is a controlled experiment, the government’s intentions are clear. If China’s move from a low-income society to a medium-income one was driven by urbanization and a massive change in human profiles and industries such as housing construction, its move to a high-income country will be driven by science and technology. In the next generation, GDP per capita is supposed to double, with the result that China overall will be equal to an unexceptional European economy, like Portugal or Slovakia today. Some regions, like the ones near Shanghai or Shenzhen, will be level with France or New Zealand. In turn, the poorer regions will be on par with Malaysia or Serbia.

Chinese government plans, far from being mysterious, go into mind-numbing levels of detail on these topics: “Key core technologies will achieve major breakthroughs and China will be among the forefront of innovative countries” by “adhering to innovation-driven development” and “aiming at cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum information, integrated circuits, life and health, brain science, biological breeding, aerospace technology, deep earth and deep sea.” To a certain extent, the proliferation of plans are a symptom of anxiety, like trying to budget spending for groceries.

The first draft of modern China has been written. The cities have been built — home-ownership rates are above 90%. The next decade will apparently be full of well-intentioned tinkering: improving schools and healthcare systems, wind energy here, solar there, crops upstairs, hydropower downstairs.

But just as the cities are “complete,” the population is as well: China’s population may have peaked, as Japan’s did more than a decade ago. Like Japan, China will likely be facing population decline and a top-heavy society. Advances in life expectancy mean that the elderly, who start retiring in their 50s, might live into their 80s. Some won’t retire and will frustrate younger people wanting to climb the career ladder, but others will, supported by pensions paid mostly by the young. It seems to me that the median experience of “Chineseness,” once the vigorous chaos of a society transforming rapidly, will increasingly be the tranquility of an elderly society living in provincial cities, crossing days off the calendar.

Getting Older

“Slowly, human faces passed before me in endless procession … century after century lined up before me, till the features, bit by bit, became more familiar.”
— Gustav Meyrink, “The Golem,” 1914

China’s birthrate has become a national crisis, part of a global phenomenon whereby middle-class urbanites typically have fewer children than rural people do. For China, this is particularly acute because a huge proportion of peasants became urbanites over a very short period.

In Japan today, the total number of humans is millions less than it was in 2008. Last year, China’s population dropped by 2 million and could fall from 1.4 to 1.3 billion by 2050, but before that, a world with more elderly people than young ones will come. In some ways, it is already here.

Societies of the elderly are different than societies of the young. In parts of the Arab world, the “hayateen,” or young men who lean against walls because they have nothing else to do, are cited as a reason for unrest and instability. But a society without many young people can be quiet and boring.

The streets of Shanghai, even today, are quieter than they are in New York; the elderly Shanghainese don’t move to Florida, and due to complicated real estate laws, it’s cost-free for many of them to remain in their downtown homes of this economic capital. Imagine a city where more than a third of the population are retirees, whose activities might involve going to buy vegetables, taking a stroll in the park, watching TV or playing mahjong with their neighbors. Some of them are always confined to their homes, so a service class of nurses have popped up to help them bathe, cook and manage daily life.

Unless something big changes, Chinese cities are likely, in the future, to feel calm and sedate, a haven for people who, if they don’t just stay home all the time, enjoy sitting on park benches, gazing into the distance.

The elderly in any country tend to be conservative and stability-oriented. Not in the sense of being attached to a particular set of politics, just in the sense that they don’t want new things — they want to preserve old things, their possessions and memories. This is true for Japan today — a very conservative society frustrates some young people.

Chinese cities have developed much more rapidly than rural regions, creating a sort of time-warp effect where the elderly might have more in common with their nurse from the countryside than with their own children. In our house, that’s certainly how it works. My mother-in-law likes to eat Chinese comfort food, heavy on carbs and pork, with the nanny; my wife prefers salad. In countries like the U.S. today, where the 65+ age group is 17% of the population, young people complain about the monopoly on political power held by the elderly. But what if retired people were to comprise the single biggest block of the population?

It seems reasonable that they will remain in power. The personality and culture of a society dominated by the elderly will probably be judgmental and persnickety but disinclined to confrontation. More likely to nurse old grudges than to take risks. Some American politicians no matter their party affiliation want us to fear a future in which China’s influence and power grows, a prospect they vow to prevent. “If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell wrote in “1984,” “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” But it seems to me instead that China in 2035 will be more like an aging relative, increasingly lost in memories and fantasies and complaining that you don’t take them as seriously as they take themselves.

Automating

“It is imperative to remember that our citizens are first producers and only second consumers.”
—Robert Lighthizer

Ultimately, we may view China as making an entrance on the historical stage only to emit a great deal of carbon before providing the technologies of the green revolution and then slowly taking a rest in one of the seats off-stage. But that’s not certain. China’s government is planning, and seems to be implementing, a manufacturing-heavy strategy even as the demography that powers Chinese factories slowly evaporates. Automation and industrial applications of AI, leaders hope, will make China’s manufacturing sector increasingly manage itself.

China might not have invented solar panels, electric vehicles or QR codes, but based on the degree of uptake, they might as well have. The innovations that brought the cost of Chinese EVs down to less than $10,000 a piece were born in its endlessly competing factories, which are manipulated by the government’s levers of subsidy and regulation.

China’s high-speed rail system uses AI to keep track of what trains are going where and if there are weather or other delays. Intelligent power grids can work around cloudy or calm weather, shuttling power to places where it is needed. So-called “lights-off factories” where not a single human works, like Foxconn’s plant in Shenzhen, may never be common, but the tendency for Chinese workers to become less numerous and better educated is dovetailing with automation, robotics and straightforward applications of AI.

China may continue to achieve around 5% economic growth in the coming decade without impacting Chinese consumers much. So a high-functioning, AI-driven manufacturing ecosystem could exist in a country that feels like it is stagnating.

Meanwhile, technological breakthroughs will proceed. In this sense, China’s population and China’s economy will be decoupled. We could have an elite class of technicians with a higher quality of life than almost anywhere in the world coexisting with crowds of elderly people in public parks doing tai-chi or dancing or singing to themselves.

Those elderly, monitored by a healthcare system that generates endless data about how the aging process works, will be part of history’s largest longitudinal experiment in medicine. In 2023, China exceeded the U.S. in the number of clinical trials for new medicines. With 4.6 million new diagnoses of cancer per year and 3 million deaths, a Chinese society increasingly skewed toward the needs of the elderly will need to allocate more and more of its resources to biomedical research and healthcare.

China’s biotech industry has historically underperformed, most notably during the Covid pandemic. But the sheer quantities of data and patients suffering from diseases like cancer make it increasingly likely that that may not be true much longer. By 2035, China will likely have a Huawei of biotech, if not several. At the Shanghai labs of Insilico Medicine, a U.S.-headquartered medical research startup, American breakthrough technologies are applied to Chinese problems.

Between the new tools offered by AI, the vast resources of Chinese data on aging and health, and the scale of the Chinese market, the table is set for a breakthrough in Chinese healthcare which will, as with Chinese green technologies, be able to go global.

Japan’s Degrowth Metaphor

“Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her — a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight — but alive like a tree.”
—Richard Lovelock

In Japan, I visited islands whose populations had been six times larger as recently as 1990, and in Onomichi, districts where beautiful old houses were there for the taking by anyone who wanted to fix them up. My friend Sam Holden does exactly that. He and a team of friends are experimenting with communal living in a nice place that they got for free right next to a train station.

Across most of the rich world, the need to pay rent and make revenue creates generic cities; a Manhattan given over to Duane Reades, a London of Pret-a-Mangers. If Tokyo is well known for quirky boutiques and restaurants that specialize in complicated labors of love, that’s partly because the people who live there simply aren’t as worried about making rent. And outside of Tokyo, in towns like sun-dappled Onomichi, creative communities can live and work independently of the need to pay a landlord — which is, all by itself, the most substantial way that the system we call “capitalism” guides our activities.

What would you do if money was no object? For Sam and his friends, it isn’t, and their answer is to spend life together cooking, building and learning.

Passing through Hiroshima on my way home to Shanghai, I caught up with the anthropologist Nishi Makoto, who spent years conducting interviews with nurses in a slum area in Osaka once called Kamagasaki. The area is gentrifying but Kamagasaki still exists, inhabited mainly by elderly men living on welfare. Many were construction workers when they were young; orphaned by the war, they joined construction teams in which the rights and privileges that Japanese came to take for granted were nonexistent. Now, they’re alone; never having formed families, they have nobody to tell their stories to except for the nurses that the welfare state provides.

I asked Makoto about Japan’s boom. He didn’t talk about finance much, although he admitted that he had decided not to buy an apartment back in the 80s, which might have been a mistake. There had been a sense that Japan was invincible — until it wasn’t. The Kobe earthquake and the toppled concrete expressways, the Aum Shinrikyo attacks on the Tokyo subway — these things made him understand that times had changed, and not just because of real estate prices.

Summer becomes autumn, first subtly and then suddenly. When Japan’s boom was over, the common mood changed from frantic opportunism and giddiness to inward-looking hesitation. After 30 some years of low growth and declining birthrates, a nation of people have made their everyday lives, relationships and hobbies into one of the most pleasant places on the planet. Japanese cement manufacturers might not think this is a good thing, but here is a nation where economic growth or material gains are not the primary focus.

Of course, Japan is different from China in many ways. One of the most obvious ones is that in Japan, urbanization is more complete. More than 90% of Japanese live in urbanized conditions — not necessarily Tokyo or even Hiroshima, but still places with modern logistics, transportation networks, schools and hospitals. In China, that figure is in the mid-60s.

The parts of China that are “finished,” like Shanghai or Shenzhen, might experience something like Japan’s serenity, but the hundreds of millions of people who still haven’t been plugged in to the global economy will either be urbanized by legal fiat, state-provided housing or digitalized technologies. The number of humans in China who don’t have access to urban incomes (because “hukou,” or residential registration, ties people to certain areas) is significantly larger than the entire population of Japan. The government expects 75% urbanization by 2035: 140 million new urbanites. Most won’t go to “first-tier” cities but to large provincial cities like Dalian, which are newly vibrant and developed.

Springtime In A Small City

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
— Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle,” 1967

Bo Xilai, the one-time rival of President Xi Jinping, is still revered in Dalian, where he used to be the mayor. But in some quarters, people complain that he shut down the old factories during the mid-90s when Liaoning Province went from socialist powerhouse to rustbelt backwater. During that time, reform of the state-owned enterprises led to social malaise, widespread unemployment and conditions not unlike those in the former Soviet Union.

Today, Xi’s government is steering toward an economy that is heavily planned, even if it uses market mechanisms, combining elements of the centralized industrial economy with a marketized consumer one. But it’s difficult to see how consumerism can coexist with socialist collective life.

Bo, for his part, is also remembered for supporting tourism, creating festivals for clothing and beer, and luring the World Economic Forum’s Davos conference. He supported sports and moved the factories out of town; in the newly clean city center, he began the revitalization of historical areas, redeveloped an old Japanese-built factory area near the train station, built Xinghai Square — Asia’s biggest, though rather ugly, urban public space. An old refrigerator factory was renamed and relocated to the free-trade zone and the original became a tourist attraction filled with startup spaces and trendy restaurants.

Dalian, like so many second- and third-tier Chinese cities, is a nice place to visit when the weather is good: You can pick organic cherries, eat fantastic seafood, hike through scrubby coastal pine forests, stroll through a forgotten modernist metropolis. But the community that formed around tension and struggle — industrialization, colonization, socialism — is now slowly drifting into a variety of individual experiences, mostly of consumption.

Above all, it is Dalian’s own identity that is being consumed. Working is something that we tend to do together, that binds us together in a grand project, misguided or not. But consuming is usually something that we do by ourselves, even if we do it in crowded places.

Since the pandemic, Chinese society has become newly inward-looking. Increasingly, Chinese students don’t study overseas and Chinese tourists have been visiting domestic tourist destinations like Harbin in Heilongjiang or Tianshui in Gansu. The conspiracy theorist in me suspected that, in line with the government’s plan to redistribute money from the wealthy coast to poorer areas without building a welfare state, the state was pushing Chinese with money to spend it in the poorer parts of China.

But as poorer and more exotic Chinese regions showcase their particularity and uniqueness for tourists from richer places, the discrepancy between historical progress and what remains of China’s cultural history, whether of rural tradition or urban socialism, becomes commodified. The people from rich, generic cities desire the knotty, complicated country that they left behind. The one they live in now — the anonymous land of the internet, which summons food, images and products of all varieties on demand — is lonely.

During the pandemic years, I had a nightmare vision of lockdown as China’s future, with takeout food delivered by drones or anonymized peons to residents of modernist tower blocks who spent all day on phone apps like Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok). But if the Davos set who’ve made Dalian their Asian home can plausibly be accused of being a bunch of rich guys, the CCP can’t. Rather, they remember the factories and the mines and don’t want their kids to go through that, even if they do hope the kids will value the struggles made on their behalf.

In April, I went down to see a friend in Ningbo, a busy port city in Zhejiang Province, and I was reminded again of Japan. The train sped through green, rain-sodden fields; cement buildings, some topped with cranes, appeared periodically, seeming to have come to a peaceful coexistence with the countryside. Green, grey, quiet; green, grey quiet. The landscape outside for those two hours on the train looked like an undulating green suburb that never ended, like in Xu Cu’s 1947 poem “Jiangnan Whirling”: “火车在雨下飞奔 … 模糊了窗外景色” (“The train speeds underneath the rainstorm … the view outside the windows is blurred”).

Today, China is going on a journey into its own interior, recuperating its past, building out the heartland, aging, reflecting on memories. Train windows, wrote Xu, make the best frames; the landscape is in motion, but we ourselves aren’t, and we can lull ourselves into complacency as we watch the world speeding by.

The post China In 2035 appeared first on NOEMA.

SHANGHAI — For a time, Joseph and I would go to the park at dawn to take in the sights of a Chinese morning: the sun rising over Jing’an Temple, the elderly practicing Tai chi, stray cats gazing maliciously at us. Inevitably, a retired Shanghainese would walk up. How handsome he is, they would say. He looks nothing like you. Our Chinese genes are much stronger than yours.

What qualifies a person to be Chinese, anyway? My son holds a U.S. passport; his hair is brown and his skin looks the same as mine (although he has the bluish mark on his bum that a Mongolian friend told me is a sign of Genghis Khan’s DNA). On the other hand, he certainly has his mother’s deep, dark eyes.

America is paper, one retiree told me; China is blood. What this person meant was that U.S. citizenship is a matter of bureaucracy and paperwork — in theory, open to anybody. In contrast, Chinese citizenship is a closed loop. If you’re in, you can never really escape — and if you’re out, there’s no way of entrance.

It is for this reason that some call China an ethno-state, contradicting the official recognition of 56 ethnicities (sometimes called nationalities) that are equally entitled to citizenship. Of course, many who consider themselves (and are considered by others) to be Chinese are not citizens of China. The borders of China and the limits of Chineseness map onto each other incompletely.

China’s borders encompass individuals who are, like me, impossible to mistakenly identify as Chinese. Meanwhile, most major cities in the world have a Chinatown, and even villages and truck stops in America have Chinese restaurants. These places have nothing much to do with the Communist China that emerged in 1949.

Until he is 18, my son is eligible for the privilege (if it is that) of Chinese citizenship, as long as he chooses to renounce American citizenship (China doesn’t recognize dual nationalities). This is not because he was born here in China, but because his mother is Chinese.

On some days, as we walked past the artificial lake and the tea garden, stopping by the playground to play on the slide, I would mentally review the tasks I’d set for myself to prepare for Joseph’s future. What school? Had I paid the health insurance? Should I get bananas or eggs on the way home? And is my son really one of “the Chinese people,” cossetted and protected as well as abused by a society that takes the patriarchal family as its dominant metaphor?

Recently, the government has been discussing a proposed law that would outlaw “harm[ing] the feelings” of the Chinese people. As a parent, the notion that I could ban any hurt or injury to Joseph’s feelings seems grandiose, but the fathers of the Chinese nation insist upon it. Nothing is too good for you, my children, they say; now sit down and be quiet.

Like any proud parent, the Chinese government insists that the country’s population is the best.  When asked about the prospect of India’s population surpassing China’s in sheer numbers, the government spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, retorted: “When assessing a country’s demographic[s], we need to look at not just its size but also its quality.”

China, the “国家” — “kingdom-family” — is not an ethno-state in the way that Israel is, where any Jewish person can become a citizen. China does not do that. But it is certainly an estranged and complicated family, whose international disputes often seem to revolve around errant children, runaways and the dirty secrets that flare up into argument over the dinner table during holidays.

Zhongyuan

“In the veins of our century there flows the heavy blood of extremely distant, monumental cultures.”
— Osip Mandelstam

In the fairytale version of Chinese history, the people who became the Han found themselves in the Zhongyuan — the central plains of Henan — during a long cooling period of climate change, and the colder weather encouraged nomadism and a struggle for resources. Different tribes kept warring with each other and getting attacked by raiders until the leader of one — Qin Shi Huang — established a forcible, autocratic unity.

In “Crowds and Power” (1960), the Nobel Prize-winning Bulgaria-born writer Elias Canetti sought to explain what makes a group of dissimilar people become a coherent community. Usually, he wrote, it is an external threat: Two tribes with no reason to trust each other end up doing so out of necessity, pooling resources and joining up against rivals that threaten both. Essentially, this is what ancient Chinese history records.

Qin unified different tribes into a community whose borders were defined by a hostile periphery of nomadic raiders. As the historian Sima Qian wrote a century after Qin died: “Qin is a man of scant mercy who has the heart of a wolf. When he is in difficulty he readily humbles himself before others, but when he has got his way, then he thinks nothing of eating others alive. If the Qin should ever get his way with the world, then the whole world will end up his prisoner.” Out of the diverse jumble of territories in continental East Asia, the world that Sima Qian imagined did become that prisoner. Today, we call it China.

From its origins, then, the community of the Han referred to a mix of different people thrown together by exigency, forming a collective for self-defense that ended up becoming one of the longest-lasting human social structures on Earth.

This primeval moment was the beginning of many of China’s political traditions. Mao Zedong once bragged that he outdid Qin by burning books and burying scholars. These are some of the things that outsiders find so unpleasant about China. But since Qin’s time, Chinese leaders have often advocated iron discipline in order to keep such a diverse range of peoples and territories, always under attack from outsiders (or perceived to be), united into a singular group. If they don’t, things will fall apart into chaos. In Chinese history, they repeatedly have done so.

But the collection of peoples we call China is not really a society of citizens in the sense that emerged from the American and French revolutions. Rather, it is an organization — a government — keeping tabs on populations and territories within its domain. 

The population core of China during the Han dynasty was located in roughly the same place as it is today, in the developed coastal provinces and central plains. As it expanded — in Qin’s time but also more recently when the Q’ing dynasty suppressed the Dzungar Khanate — tribes that stood in the way were assimilated. If this wasn’t voluntarily, then by force.

Ganhuyag Chuluun Hutagt, a Mongolian financier, once told me that Chinese assimilationism posed a greater threat than Russia’s war-making. What was once Soviet Mongolia is an independent state with United Nations representation today, whereas in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, which is albeit richer per capita than Mongolia, the education system is mostly in Chinese, the natural resources are exploited by Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs, and ethnic Mongolians are a minority. Sadly (from a Mongolian perspective), people in Inner Mongolia are well on their way to being Sinified in a process that can feel almost inevitable. Consider, also, the Manchus — the last Chinese emperors came from their ranks, and their homeland of Manchuria was protected by the “willow palisade,” from which Han were legally forbidden to enter. Today, it has become the three provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning, where ethnic Manchus, Koreans and others are indistinguishable from Han in the streets.

Today, through China’s tax-sharing system, the coastal provinces and municipalities effectively subsidize the interior and border regions. Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Shandong and Beijing all lie in the historical Han heartland, the area Chinese planners see as the future of China’s economy and population core. To some degree or another, the rest of China is empty space, a buffer against the outside world, a place to grow crops, harvest sunbeams, capture carbon credits, breed armies of workers (and soldiers). (The central plains, where it all started, is today a shadow of the coastal economy, densely populated but suffering from some of China’s worst problems.) Ethnic Han make up at least 80% of the population in 23 of China’s 31 mainland provincial administrative regions. In the other eight, like Inner Mongolia, assimilationist efforts remain incomplete.

In this context, there’s no wonder that China’s neighbors are wary. It seems like a coincidence of 20^th century history that Vietnam and Korea, for example, are not Chinese provinces, but Guangdong and Jilin are. The discontinuity between the borders of China today and the maximalist “Huaxia” concept of the Chinese nation — where all who used Chinese characters in the past are somehow part of the same civilizational unit — is one of the primary flashpoints of Chinese nationalist grievance.

Han seems to be a malleable term that means “civilized” more than it denotes an ethnic phenotype. And yet, modern China, and certainly the China that has existed since 1949, always conceived of itself as a biological entity very different than the “West.”

Sydney

“Even though the white race commands strength and occupies a position of superiority, the yellow race is large in number and possesses wisdom. Thus, it is only logical that the two should join and integrate.”
— Kang Youwei

In December, we fled the impending cold of Shanghai to see friends in Australia, a country/continent that embodies the allure of the “West” to Chinese. In this modern, prosperous society, people are free to be as Chinese as they want — there are about 1.4 million people of Chinese ancestry living in Australia, or over 5% of the population. In cities like Sydney, it’s 17%.

My friend Jenevieve Chang is one of them. Born to a conservative family in Taiwan, “out-of-province people” (“外省人”) who arrived from Hunan after the Communists took power, she grew up in the southern Sydney suburbs. She circled the world, lived in London and then Shanghai, wrote a memoir. Now she’s raising a child in Marrickville, a trendy suburb.

The divisions and splinterings that the 20th century wrought on the concept of Chineseness have been a core issue that Jen has wrestled with for as long as I’ve known her. Families like hers are drawn in a subterranean way to the motherland, even as business and family skeins across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, even Southeast Asia.

Long before James Cook “discovered” Australia for the British, the Chinese valued it, as they did Vladivostok, for its sea cucumbers. But a world organized around access to sea cucumbers is exactly what many seek to flee when they speak and live in English.

The English-speaking world has been an escape, not only for women bored of patriarchal men, but for patriarchal men seeking to avoid Chinese politics and taxes, for those who find a clean grocery store simpler than a wet market, or even for families like my own who find China a bit overwhelming at times. For a while in Australia, we felt inexplicably anxious; anxiety is the constant companion to life in a dense, high-pressure society like Shanghai’s. It buzzed in our ears like a mosquito until the WeChat notifications decreased and we started to enjoy ourselves.

In common parlance, the way we continue to talk about China and the “West” is perhaps a heritage from the Cold War. The reality is that most Chinese emigrants tend to target certain foreign countries — mostly in Southeast Asia, China’s near-abroad, or the English-speaking rich world. On Gavin Newsom’s recent visit to China, he alluded to the 2 million Chinese who live in California, more than in Japan and the Eurozone combined.

Chinese diasporas, for the most part, aren’t that interested in a generic West, especially not the part that seems defined by ethnic particularity, like Europe. That part is difficult to access and find belonging in. It is only in the English-speaking world where Chinese can really enjoy the privilege of an amphibious identity, being entirely Han and entirely Canadian or Californian or Australian at the same time.

In light of the Han tendency to assimilate smaller ethnic groups into “civilization,” it must be said that the English-speaking world has an odd parallel with Huaxia, which came into being in the early days of the idea of Chineseness, when multiple different tribes united in their use of the Han script and ceremonial rites against the “barbarians” who did not. Parts of the West have proven quite capable of assimilating Chinese people into their civilizational orders. And it is the West that is most self-consciously organized in a rivalry with Communist-led China today.

For many Chinese nationalists, English-speaking people have always been damnably slippery, aquatic by nature. In Shanghai, the French called their colony the French Concession; the Americans and English referred to theirs as the International Settlement. Chinese nationalists past and present smirk at this, as they do at the “international community” with “international norms” that, in the final analysis, are mostly the norms of English-speaking people.

This wouldn’t be an issue except for the reality that many Chinese people desire those norms. An average Chinese would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to become a Parisian, but many have become Californians. The former director of the University of Adelaide’s Confucius Institute, Gao Mobo, told me a story of a Chinese-born neighbor in his upscale suburb. I believe in Australian values, this Tsinghua University graduate insisted; I am Australian, not Chinese. When prodded, those values tend to be similar to American, Canadian or British values: property rights, the rule of law, freedom of speech. Universal values.

Zhang Taiyan, the early 20th-century philosopher of Chinese modernity, wrote about how the idea of the individual as separate from a group was created by the concept of universality, which hid a structure of domination within it. Adelaide, Hong Kong, Vancouver and various other places with parks named after Queen Victoria all perceive of themselves as transparent and open. The structures they use to do so — the built environment, laws, banks, zoning codes — are to a greater or lesser degree inherited from the multiethnic British Empire.

Zhang decried universalism as a condition of oppression: “One cannot take the data of one place and treat it as authoritative and applicable everywhere — this much is sure!” As he explained his political project: “Those whom I call revolutionaries do not want revolution, they want to restore greatness. They want to restore the greatness of the Chinese race, to restore the greatness of the China’s prefectures and commandaries, and restore the greatness of China’s political power. What in reality aims to restore greatness has been called revolution.”

For him, the Han was a particular way of doing things; universal values would flatten everything that made China unique, making it just another colony in a global order ruled from the West. The insidious universalism of the English-speaking colonizers, which persistently skimmed the cream off the top of China, is the greatest rival imaginable: The Chinese people cannot be collected and unified into a cohesive consciousness if some of the smart, enterprising or desperate ones periodically move to Australia.

Mao’s Communists, however, saw things slightly differently: Any empire is multiethnic, and as such strains the boundaries of family. It needs ideology and abstraction. A China that was just a family of Han would be a China that decided to limit itself. A China that was an ideology could encompass people all across the world.

Taipei

“A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

Ko Wen Je, Taiwan’s Ross Perot-style third-party candidate, consistently describes Taiwan’s relation with China with the phrase “兩岸一家親” — “We are one family on either side of the Taiwan strait.” It’s a Xi Jinping phrase. The logic of an extended family underpins many such gestures in both countries. Former President Ma Ying-jeou, for example, recently took a trip to his ancestral village in Hunan.

After Taiwan’s election this month, mainland Chinese media, rationalizing results they weren’t able to control, highlighted the fact that 60% of voters chose candidates perceived as closer to China; if Ko hadn’t spoiled it, many speculated, the Kuomintang would have won. The family reunion could still happen, just give it time. On a certain level, whether this is true or false, it’s good if the mainland Chinese think so, because that allows them space to keep coexisting.

The metaphor of family has proved compelling for many ethnically Han people on both sides of the strait: Mainland conservatives sometimes describe Taiwan as one might a runaway teenager, while many Taiwanese politicians describe the mainland’s leaders as authoritarian and sexist. Every family has misunderstandings and estrangements.

When some young Taiwanese reject the notion that they are Chinese, they are rejecting China as a political construct but still take their Han identity for granted; they probably still consider themselves part of “中华.” Even the Taiwanese government, under the independent-minded Democratic Progressive Party at least, describes Taiwan as a predominantly Han society in which 95% are partially or entirely Han. After all, you can’t pick your family, even if you might disagree with them about politics.

In the U.S., white nationalism is the precinct of those who feel that a country that is “theirs” has been taken away by a “great replacement” by others. Never mind that “white” today encloses groups like the Irish and Italians who were considered ethnic outsiders not that long ago. Those invested in their identity as white perceive themselves as being above, monitoring the border between themselves and the lower orders.

In contrast, “Han” in the modern period has been defined primarily with resentment to those same “whites.” If “Blacks” are needed to make whites truly white, then foreigners are needed to make Chinese truly Chinese.

The foreigners in question tend to be English-speaking people who eat beef and are loud and aggressive. When young people in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan drift away from the family, some Chinese nationalists assume it is because they were bribed by the U.S. state department; there can’t be any other explanation.

Within the logic of Chinese nationalism, for Han to aspire to equality with foreign groups is ludicrous. As China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently explained to his Japanese and Korean counterparts: “No matter how yellow you dye your hair, or how sharp you make your nose, you’ll never turn into a European or American, you’ll never turn into a Westerner.”

Some Chinese conservatives observe Korean plastic surgery trends with horror. On flights from Korea to China, there are many Chinese who have had double eyelid surgery and breast implants, who have dyed their hair blonde or wear contact lenses to make their eyes blue. What a disgrace, the conservatives must think. These lost children need self-confidence. Maybe they need to hear again the story of Chinese identity. They’d be better off joining the Han in the project of creating a Chinese alter-modernity instead of throwing in the towel and moving to Australia or Vancouver or Los Angeles.

Han people have recorded the concept that race is a fiction for millennia. It is encapsulated in a phrase attributed to Confucius: “夷狄入华夏，则华夏之。华夏入夷狄则夷狄之” (“When barbarians come to China, they become Chinese. When Chinese go to the land of barbarians, they become barbaric). Within the worldview of this saying, Han is above all a culture, not an ethnic phenotype. As such, it is endlessly capacious, able to accommodate various barbarians — the Mongolians, the Manchurians, me.

Various foreign groups have been assimilated into the Han via intermarriage, a process called “汉化,” or “Han-ization,” much to the regret of Chinese cultural critics such as Bo Yang, a Cultural Revolution escapee who wrote “The Ugly Chinaman” in exile in Taiwan. The Chinese, he wrote, are like soy sauce; a drop of their flavor overtakes whatever you add it to. New York City, the 13th Arrondissement of Paris, Ghana — wherever Chinese people go, there they are, industriously turning the place into China, with the smells and sounds and cuisine of Chinese life.

In Xinjiang and other ethnic minority regions, students can take an educational track to study partially or entirely in Mandarin Chinese, and later get affirmative action-style preference to enter university. The alternative schools with curriculums taught in the local language, by contrast, are often perfunctory, suffering from funding or political issues and at best teach vocational trades. The pressure to integrate is clear.

If you can become Han by studying for certain exams, then it’s implicitly the case that Han is not a biological category. Whatever other reasons or justifications for the quotas that allow ethnic minorities reserved spaces in China’s best universities, the process of imperial assimilation is at work. Stakeholders are created and the ancient logic of intermarriage and acculturation continues.

Han is the name of the dividing line between in and out. “汉奸,” the commonly used word for traitor, implies a Han person having sex with the enemy — for example, the Japanese occupation forces during the Second World War. As China’s power relative to other groups has waxed and waned over the years, exposure to outsiders has seemed simple — as in they’ll be readily assimilated into civilization — or deeply offensive — as in collaboration with an enemy capable of assimilating China into foreign ways.

A burst of cultural confidence in recent years has seen unprecedented numbers of Chinese studying overseas. China’s leaders, who are increasingly given to populist gestures — eating the breakfast foods of the common people, eschewing expensive watches and brands — believe that being part of China will be attractive enough that most who are allowed to will want to come back home to become part of a unified and confident China. Increasingly, it looks as if they are right.

China is no ethno-state if a person as visibly different from the norm as my son is at risk of becoming Chinese. In fact, an incredible ability to assimilate external groups has long been the historical strength of the culture called China. It is only in modern times that the Chinese have encountered any civilization equally alluring.

And so, the Chinese and the English-speaking world — a civilization that dare not speak its name, but which is achingly recognizable when you see it — dance around each other, both trying to ingest the other, neither quite succeeding. Is Joseph Chinese? I guess that’s up to him.

The post Who Gets To Be Chinese? appeared first on NOEMA.

If China’s government and its critics agree on one thing, it’s that there is an analogy between contemporary China and the Soviet Union, whose collapse continues decades after it formally ended. The Red Empire tried to swallow up the continent of Eurasia until eventually, as late Soviet thinkers like Lev Gumilev would have it, Eurasia swallowed it. Today, Chinese exports and infrastructure are trying to bring order to the Eurasian continent, following in Soviet footsteps.

The U.S.S.R. was many things, but above all, it was an organized project of reconfiguring the resources within a territory to achieve material outcomes under a formal, centralized hierarchy. In that, it was a failure — the machine stopped working. “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains,” Vladimir Putin famously put it. Can it be true that China’s leadership falls into the second category?

But the U.S.S.R. was a bankrupt idealism forced onto colonized nations by military power, and China is a savvy entrepreneurial technocracy that has solved the problem of providing basic necessities to its population and is now exporting that model elsewhere. Maybe your country is next. The gap between reality and the “plan” that was so typical of Soviet life hasn’t been seen in China for a while, though some fear it’s coming back.

From climate infrastructure to agriculture to finance, China is reverting to the structure of a command economy, rather than that of a free market economy — in the Chinese phrase, “国进民退” (“the state advances as the people retreat”). This is dangerous in China’s 60/70/80/90 economy: private sector actors contribute 60% of GDP and are responsible for 70% of innovation, 80% of urban employment and 90% of new jobs. Can the state really replace this?

When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, it was because the multivariable equation of the economy blew a fuse; the supply and demand, capital and labor, stopped working. Oceans dried up. The world stopped behaving in a predictable way. Marxists like Mikhail Gorbachev believed that the system could work if you let air into it; it turned out that it blew away like a handful of dust. The decentralized decision-making structure of the markets in the West triumphed over the planned economy.

Today, scholars of the Soviet Union such as Stephen Kotkin argue that the command economy was one source of Soviet fragility. These historical debates have been lent piquancy by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They certainly have significance in the party schools of the CCP, which has focused on exploring why the Soviet Union collapsed ever since it happened. In China today, statistics (literally the science of the state) are suppressed because they might jeopardize the government’s ability to control flows of capital, data and everything else related to human life.

By its nature, power seeks to perpetuate itself, but China’s meditations on the collapsed U.S.S.R. are contextualized by climate change, whose challenges will make or break the Chinese system and its ability to plan and forecast. Chinese science and technology are brandished by the leadership as the solution to all problems, but there is not just one form of science — nor is science a golden ticket to escape from political contradictions.

As Ben Peters, the historian of Soviet science, told me, “Like a mountain range with many canyons and cliffs, the state of science may appear a single hulking monolith from afar but [is] a labyrinth for those who live it.” In the crises to come, will Xi Jinping’s return to a command economy seem like a sage choice or will it prove as disastrous as Joseph Stalin’s economy of production without consumption, of a “great plan for the transformation of nature”? And what sort of people will dwell in the labyrinths, waiting for a new sort of world to dawn?

The Time Traveler

“Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, sun-parched steppe cannot bring on the depression induced by one man who sits and talks, and gives no sign of ever going.”
— Anton Chekhov

We drove for six hours through a desert that sprayed up white dust in a place with no roads. Once upon a time, visible in filmstrips and paintings, even in preserved cans of tinned fish, Karakalpakstan, the largest province of Uzbekistan, was a marine community of fishermen living on the banks of an inland ocean. The Aral Sea owes its name to a Mongolian root that means “sea of islands.” Today, it is a toxic desert, one which the government of Uzbekistan is trying to heal by planting saxaul trees to hold down the soil.

This ocean was turned into a desert by Soviet irrigation projects intended to grow cotton, or by subterranean bomb blasts, or both. Once the ecological transformation began, there was no stopping it. It was above 120 degrees Fahrenheit when I visited on a trip organized by the Aral Culture Summit, which brought a group of writers and artists to swim in what remains of the sea’s salty waters. I was reminded of nothing so much as H.G. Wells’ time traveler, who voyaged deep into the future and discovered a red sun hanging low in the sky, a salt-encrusted shore by a dull, black ocean, with no signs of life except for crabs the size of human beings.

We saw no crabs, but having taken several commercial flights to arrive and obsessively looking for places to charge my iPhone, I wondered if I was the crab. A ravaged planet was the inevitable future that Wells, one of Victorian England’s most visionary thinkers, foresaw — and here we are.

I found myself trying to explain Lake Mead to our guide Oktyabr, and my fears that Los Angeles would dry up in the near future. He nodded politely. For him, that future happened a long time ago. He grew up in a town called Moynaq, footage of which appeared in an archival film shown at the local museum; it reminded me of working-class Chinese communities of today: a fish-canning factory, a self-contained community, pride in work done for the country. Today, Moynaq is a waystation on what feels like an interminable drive through the desert, where you stop for lunch in one of the remaining buildings on your way across what used to be seabed but is now a dusty wasteland.

The Soviets knew what they were doing; the Aral was collateral damage. After it started to run dry, the Soviets planned to divert Lake Baikal, the spiritual homeland of Buryat Mongols, to refill it, but by then the machine was already breaking down, only slightly faster than the Aral ecosystem itself. Today, both are wrecks. Tying natural flows up in knots, the Soviet project suffocated itself and its corpse continues to rot on the terrain of Eurasia, a graveyard of a socialism that is attempting to return in zombie form.

Back in China, the politics of water are impossible to escape; my flight was delayed by terrible flooding that made the Beijing airport unusable. The Chinese government at its most Ozymandian engages in water-related engineering projects that make the Soviet Aral project look like a child’s sandbox play. The Three Gorges Dam, whose collateral damage was to flood towns like Fengdu, displacing 1.3 million people in the process, looks like the first of an increasingly ambitious list of terraforming projects, with more — the massive dam at Yarlung Tsangpo, the north-south water diversion project — on the horizon. 

The Chinese government’s mentality is that ecological and economic problems can be engineered away and that technology applied at the highest level can solve them. The Soviets thought so too. Is Karakalpakstan a sort of prophecy in miniature, a vision of unintended consequences of interfering with ecologies at scale?

The Great Northern Wasteland

“A thing that has not been understood inevitably reappears; it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken.”
— Sigmund Freud

As we trudged our way through the summer of 2023, I found myself contemplating buying a tract of land in Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost province and the one that has always felt most Soviet to me. Today, it is being deserted by outbound migration. The thing is, Shanghai and Beijing look like they’ll be 100 degrees or hotter for months every year in the foreseeable future. Wasn’t there some way to escape? I browsed property listings in Yichun, a city of 1.3 million that was a base for forestry in the socialist period. As climate change unfolds, maybe being in the middle of a Siberian forest, with pure air and water and pleasant temperatures even at the height of July, would make for a good life.

During the Maoist period, students were sent down from urban areas to camps there, and they made a huge swath of Heilongjiang into agricultural land. Today, many of these collective farms are owned by the Beidahuang Group — the name literally means “the great northern wasteland” — and they produce around 10% of China’s grain crops.

Beidahuang is a state-owned enterprise — really, it is almost a state within a state. In the 1960s, its “employees” skirmished with Soviet troops. It’s not the only Chinese state-owned enterprise to assume these contours. The Xinjiang Bingtuan — which engages in agricultural and industrial projects in Xinjiang Province and provides healthcare, education, police and judiciary services in the communities where it operates, some of which have populations in the hundreds of thousands — has the same Communist ethos.

These organizations have never been oriented primarily to profits, even if they list on stock exchanges in Hong Kong or New York to raise capital. They reflect political needs — food security, political security. Recently, the former deputy commander of the XPCC was expelled from the CCP for “interfering with the implementation of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality strategic goals.”

All this is to say that the Chinese government is not new to collective, militaristic enterprises in terraforming, nor did it ever stop engaging in them. On the surface, Beidahuang, with its proactive uptake of automated agricultural practices, seems pretty modern. But it is an organization with roots in the reddest of China’s red history.

Historically, Chinese troops were sent to border regions to settle and engage in agriculture — “屯田” or “tuntian” literally translates to “military-agricultural colonies” — a policy that had practical outcomes like producing food and securing territory if that was in doubt. Today, China is building large-scale wind and solar plants on the fringes of the nation, state-owned enterprises are taking up a larger and larger role in the economy, and the logic of GDP or profit as such is being discarded in favor of a different logic — a political logic, one more akin to war communism than the Chinese economy that we’re used to.

This doesn’t mean that there are no market practices embedded within the Chinese economy. The government sets the parameters and goals and pits different state-owned entities in competition with each other. Moreover, companies like Beidahuang function very differently than they did in the 1960s: Instead of unskilled labor wasting time in gulag-style encampments, today young engineers are supervising farms that are largely automated, earning high salaries for skilled and technical work.

Nevertheless, this work is done in the service of centralized planning and national reserves of pork or grain, and the market is tightly controlled. It looks like communism from the outside, but on the inside, it increasingly resembles American agriculture.

In 2001, Andrew Solomon wrote of the artists in Beijing, “In the eyes of many Chinese, the Cultural Revolution was like a game; interaction with the West is another version of the same game, perhaps a less interesting one.” Chinese socialism, and more specifically state-owned enterprises like Beidahuang, has integrated practices from the globalized capitalist economy without losing the “Chinese characteristics” (centralized control by the CCP) that it began the journey with.

Eldridge Colby, a leading Republican China hawk, and others have a habit of suggesting that China’s newfound emphasis on food security reflects preparation for war. But Chinese grain yields keep suffering “one-off” climate events, which are increasing in frequency. Last year, China’s agriculture minister told reporters that “crop conditions this year could be the worst in history.”

What if China is simply preparing for a rapid energy transition and food security in case the worst climate eventuality comes true — the “war against heaven and Earth” that Mao talked about? By 2020, China was the largest food importer in the world, a fact that made China’s leadership deeply uneasy. Lodged deep inside of millenarian ideologies like Chinese communism is the idea that everything will change, that some sort of apocalypse is around the corner.

Xi has taken to saying that the world is experiencing changes not seen for a hundred years. The economy that he is directing from Beijing isn’t really following the logic of good times and prosperity anymore. Instead, it’s more like Mao’s slogan: “Dig tunnels deep. Store grain everywhere. Never seek hegemony.”

The Soviet Prophecy

“The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest of control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), and insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.”
— Giorgio Agamben

The basic feature of the Chinese landscape is the Chinese themselves — “人山人海” or “crowds of people.” The state is forever trying to keep up with them, shaping human flows as it guides rivers, terraforms the land and otherwise modifies nature according to some grand plan. Can the flow of people — their desires and fears — be tamed to generate economic growth in the way a river can be dammed to generate electricity? It seems doubtful, but that never stopped anyone from trying.

Visitors to China are often told that Beijing symbolizes China’s traditional culture. Considering that 95% of its population and footprint were built after 1949, that’s a bit of a stretch — unless we take the view that Chinese culture is not about superficial appearances but deeper, more profound social structures. Crawling through traffic on the ring road that used to be a city wall before it was demolished to allow “qi” to flow, observing the various mountainous headquarters of this or that state-owned enterprise, the city can appear to be the realization in urban form of Walter Benjamin’s parable:

The coagulation of different, seemingly incompatible historical experiences into a city has given Beijing an irrational, almost mystical quality. It is exactly that quality, of glancing back into historical catastrophe while being pushed forward almost against one’s will into future challenges — which may yet end in disaster — which makes Beijing a world capital. There are subway stations named “Earth City,” parks named “Temple of the Sun”; under the Qing, the city’s urban plan was intended as a mechanism to control cosmic flows.

The fight against nature is becoming more intense every year; Beijing will suffer from heat more than almost any other Chinese city, and it is being fiercely guarded against climate disruptions as if from a marauding army. It is the capital of China’s technocracy, which is willing to change everything — the courses of rivers, the placement of mountains, the homes of millions — in order for nothing to change.

Economists speculate that if China’s state doesn’t manage to cut emissions, the collapse of the state might do it. As an atmosphere of crisis mounts, the deep memories of the state, which long ago became instinct, recur and re-manifest themselves. For China, the only way out is through.

The post China’s Soviet Shadow appeared first on NOEMA.

Fueled by exports to the first world, China became something different — something not of any of the three worlds. We’re still trying to figure out what that new China is and how it now relates to the world of deprivation — what is now called the Global South, where the majority of human beings alive today reside. But amid that uncertainty, Chinese exports to the Global South now exceed those to the Global North considerably — and they’re growing. 

The International Monetary Fund expects Asian countries to account for 70% of growth globally this year. China must “shape a new international system that is conducive to hedging against the negative impacts of the West’s decoupling,” the scholar and former People’s Liberation Army theorist Cheng Yawen wrote recently. That plan starts with Southeast Asia and extends throughout the Global South, a terrain that many Chinese intellectuals see as being on their side in the widening divide between the West and the rest. 

China isn’t exporting plastic trinkets to these places but rather the infrastructure for telecommunications, transportation and digitally driven “smart cities.” In other words, China is selling the developmental model that raised its people out of obscurity and poverty to developed global superpower status in a few short decades to countries with people who have decided that they want that too. 

The world China is reorienting itself to is a world that, in many respects, looks like China did a generation ago. On offer are the basics of development — education, health care, clean drinking water, housing. But also more than that — technology, communication and transportation.

Back in April, on the eve of a trip to China, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sat down for an interview with Reuters. “I am going to invite Xi Jinping to come to Brazil,” he said, “to get to know Brazil, to show him the projects that we have of interest for Chinese investment. … What we want is for the Chinese to make investments to generate new jobs and generate new productive assets in Brazil.” After Lula and Xi had met, the Brazilian finance minister proclaimed that “President Lula wants a policy of reindustrialization. This visit starts a new challenge for Brazil: bringing direct investments from China.” Three months later, the battery and electric vehicle giant BYD announced a $624 million investment to build a factory in Brazil, its first passenger car manufacturing facility outside Asia.

Across the Global South, fast-growing countries from Bangladesh to Brazil can send raw materials to China and get technological devices in exchange. The idea is that what China is today, they could be tomorrow.

At The Kunming Institute of Botany

In April, I went to Kunming to visit one of China’s most important environmental conservation outfits — the Kunming Institute of Botany. Like the British Museum’s antiquities collected from everywhere that the empire once extended, the seed bank here (China’s largest) aspires to acquire thousands of samples of various plant species and become a regional hub for future biotech research. 

From the Kunming train station, you can travel by Chinese high-speed rail to Vientiane; if all goes according to plan, the line will soon be extended to Bangkok. At Yunnan University across town, the economics department researches “frontier economics” with an eye to Southeast Asian neighboring states, while the international relations department focuses on trade pacts within the region and a community of anthropologists tries to figure out what it all means. 

Kunming is a bland, air-conditioned provincial capital in a province of startling ethnic and geographic diversity. In this respect, it is a template for Chinese development around Southeast Asia. Perhaps in the future, Dhaka, Naypyidaw and Phnom Penh will provide the reassuring boredom of a Kunming afternoon. 

Imagine you work at the consulate of Bangladesh in Kunming. Why are you in Kunming? What does Kunming have that you want?

The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore lyrically described Asia’s communities as organic and spiritual in contrast with the materialism of the West. As Tagore spoke of the liberatory powers of art, his Chinese listeners scoffed. The Chinese poet Wen Yiduo, who moved to Kunming during World War II and is commemorated with a statue at Yunnan Normal University in Kunming, wrote that Tagore’s work had no form: “The greatest fault in Tagore’s art is that he has no grasp of reality. Literature is an expression of life and even metaphysical poetry cannot be an exception. Everyday life is the basic stuff of literature, and the experiences of life are universal things.” 

If Tagore’s Bengali modernism championed a spiritual lens for life rather than the materiality of Western colonialists, Chinese modernists decided that only by being more materialist than Westerners could they regain sovereignty. Mao had said rural deprivation was “一穷二白” — poor and empty; Wen accused Tagore’s poetry of being formless. Hegel sneered that Asia had no history, since the same phenomena simply repeated themselves again and again — the cycle of planting and harvest in agricultural societies. 

For modernists, such societies were devoid of historical meaning in addition to being poor and readily exploited. The amorphous realm of the spirit was for losers, the Chinese May 4th generation decided. Railroads, shipyards and electrification offered salvation.

Today, as Chinese roads, telecoms and entrepreneurs transform Bangladesh and its peers in the developing world, you could say that the argument has been won by the Chinese. Chinese infrastructure creates a new sort of blank generic urban template, one seen first in Shenzhen, then in Kunming and lately in Vientiane, Dhaka or Indonesian mining towns. 

The sleepy backwaters of Southeast Asia have seen previous waves of Chinese pollinators. Low Lan Pak, a tin miner from Guangdong, established a revolutionary state in Indonesia in the 18th century. Li Mi, a Kuomintang general, set up an independent republic in what is now northern Myanmar after World War II. 

New sorts of communities might walk on the new roads and make calls on the new telecom networks and find work in the new factories that have been built with Chinese technology and funded by Chinese money across Southeast Asia. One Bangladeshi investor told me that his government prefers direct investment to aid — aid organizations are incentivized to portray Bangladesh as eternally poor, while Huawei and Chinese investors play up the country’s development prospects and bright future. In the latter, Bangladeshis tend to agree.

The majority of human beings alive today live in a world of not enough: not enough food; not enough security; not enough housing, education, health care; not enough rights for women; not enough potable water. They are desperate to get out of there, as China has. They might or might not like Chinese government policies or the transactional attitudes of Chinese entrepreneurs, but such concerns are usually of little importance to countries struggling to bootstrap their way out of poverty.

The first world tends to see the third as a rebuke and a threat. Most Southeast Asian countries have historically borne abuse in relationship to these American fears. Most American companies don’t tend to see Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sumatra as places they’d like to invest money in. But opportunity beckons for Chinese companies seeking markets outside their nation’s borders and finding countries with rapidly growing populations and GDPs. Imagine a Huawei engineer in a rural Bangladeshi village, eating a bad lunch with the mayor, surrounded by rice paddies — he might remember the Hunan of his childhood.  

Xi Jinping famously said that China doesn’t export revolution. But what else do you call train lines, 5G connectivity and scientific research centers appearing in places that previously had none of these things? 

Across the vastness of a world that most first-worlders would not wish to visit, Chinese entrepreneurs are setting up electric vehicle and battery companies, installing broadband and building trains. The world that is looming into view on Huawei’s 2022 business report is one in which Asia is the center of the global economy and China sits at its core, the hub from which sophisticated and carbon-neutral technologies are distributed. Down the spokes the other way come soybeans, jute and nickel. Lenin’s term for this kind of political economy was imperialism. 

If the Chinese economy is the set of processes that created and create China, then its exports today are China — technologies, knowledge, communication networks, forms of organization. But is China a place, or is it a recipe for social structure that can be implemented generically anywhere?

Huawei Station

Huawei’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party remain unclear, but there is certainly a case of elective affinities. Huawei’s descriptions of selfless, nameless engineers working to bring telecoms to the countryside of Bangladesh is reminiscent of Party propaganda and “socialist realist” art. As a young man, Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s CEO, spent time in the Chongqing of Mao’s “third front,” where resources were redistributed to develop new urban centers; the logic of starting in rural areas and working your way to the center, using infrastructure to rappel your way up, is embedded within the Maoist ideas that he studied at the time. Today, it underpins Huawei’s business development throughout the Global South. 

I stopped by the Huawei Analyst Summit in April to see if I could connect the company’s history to today. The Bildungsroman of Huawei’s corporate development includes battles against entrenched state-owned monopolies in the more developed parts of the country. The story goes that Huawei couldn’t make inroads in established markets against state-owned competitors, so got started in benighted rural areas where the original leaders had to brainstorm what to do if rats ate the cables or rainstorms swept power stations away; this story is mobilized today to explain their work overseas. 

Perhaps at one point, Huawei could have been just another boring corporation selling plastic objects to consumers across the developed world, but that time ended definitively with Western sanctions in 2019, effectively banning the company from doing business in the U.S. The sanctions didn’t kill Huawei, obviously, and they may have made it stronger. They certainly made it weirder, more militant and more focused on the markets largely scorned by the Ericssons and Nokias of the world. Huawei retrenched to its core strength: providing rural and remote areas with access to connectivity across difficult terrain with the intention that these networks will fuel telehealth and digital education and rapidly scale the heights of development.

Huawei used to do this with dial-up modems in China, but now it is building 5G networks across the Global South. The Chinese government is supportive of these efforts; Huawei’s HQ has a subway station named for the company, and in 2022 the government offered the company massive subsidies.

For years, the notion of an ideological struggle between the U.S. and China was dismissed; China is capitalist, they said. Just look at the Louis Vuitton bags. This misses a central truth of the economy of the 21st century. The means of production now are internet servers, which are used for digital communication, for data farms and blockchain, for AI and telehealth. Capitalists control the means of production in the United States, but the state controls the means of production in China. In the U.S. and countries that implicitly accept its tech dominance, private businesspeople dictate the rules of the internet, often to the displeasure of elected politicians who accuse them of rigging elections, fueling inequality or colluding with communists. The difference with China, in which the state has maintained clear regulatory control over the internet since the early days, couldn’t be clearer. 

The capitalist system pursues frontier technologies and profits, but companies like Huawei pursue scalability to the forgotten people of the world. For better or worse, it’s San Francisco or Shenzhen. For many countries in the Global South, the model of development exemplified by Shenzhen seems more plausible and attainable. Nobody thinks they can replicate Silicon Valley, but many seem to think they can replicate Chinese infrastructure-driven middle-class consumerism.

As Deng Xiaoping said, it doesn’t matter if it is a black cat or a white cat, just get a cat that catches mice. Today, leaders of Global South countries complain about the ideological components of American aid; they just want a cat that can catch their mice. Chinese investment is blank — no ideological strings attached. But this begs the question: If China builds the future of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Laos, then is their future Chinese?

Telecommunications and 5G is at the heart of this because connectivity can enable rapid upgrades in health and education via digital technology such as telehealth, whereby people in remote villages are able to consult with doctors and hospitals in more developed regions. For example, Huawei has retrofitted Thailand’s biggest and oldest hospital with 5G to communicate with villages in Thailand’s poor interior — the sort of places a new Chinese high-speed train line could potentially provide links with the outside world — offering Thai villagers without the ability to travel into town the opportunity to get medical treatments and consultations remotely. 

The IMF has proposed that Asia’s developing belt “should prioritize reforms that boost innovation and digitalization while accelerating the green energy transition,” but there is little detail about who exactly ought to be doing all of that building and connecting. In many cases and places, it’s Chinese infrastructure and companies like Huawei that are enabling Thai villagers to live as they do in Guizhou.

Chinese Style Modernization?

The People’s Republic of China is “infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was,” the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, told Politico in April. This prowess “is based on the extraordinary strength of the Chinese economy — its science and technology research base, its innovative capacity and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific to be the dominant power in the future.” This increasingly feels more like the official position of the U.S. government than a random comment.

Ten years ago, Xi Jinping proposed the notion of a “maritime Silk Road” to the Indonesian Parliament. Today, Indonesia is building an entirely new capital — Nusantara — for which China is providing “smart city” technologies. Indonesia has a complex history with ethnic Chinese merchants, who played an intermediary role between Indigenous people and Western colonists in the 19th century and have been seen as CCP proxies for the past half century or so. But the country is nevertheless moving decisively towards China’s pole, adopting Chinese developmental rhythms and using Chinese technology and infrastructure to unlock the door to the future. “The internet, roads, ports, logistics — most of these were built by Chinese companies,” observed a local scholar. 

The months since the 20th Communist Party Congress have seen the introduction of what Chinese diplomats call “Chinese-style modernization,” a clunky slogan that can evoke the worst and most boring agitprop of the Soviet era. But the concept just means exporting Chinese bones to other social bodies around the world. 

If every apartment decorated with IKEA furniture looks the same, prepare for every city in booming Asia to start looking like Shenzhen. If you like clean streets, bullet trains, public safety and fast Wi-Fi, this may not be a bad thing. 

Chinese trade with Southeast Asia is roughly double that between China and the U.S., and Chinese technology infrastructure is spreading out from places like the “Huawei University” at Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology, which plans to train 100,000 telecom engineers in the next five years. We’re about to see a generation of “barefoot doctors” throughout Southeast Asia traveling by moped across landscapes of underdevelopment connected to hubs of medical data built by Chinese companies with Chinese technology. 

In 1955, the year of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, the non-aligned world was almost entirely poor, cut off from the means of production in a world where nearly 50% of GDP globally was in the U.S. Today, the logic of that landmark conference is alive in Chinese informal networks across the Global South, with the key difference that China can now offer these countries the possibility of building their own future without talking to anyone from the Global North. 

Welcome to the Sinosphere, where the tides of Chinese development lap over its borders into the remote forests of tropical Asia, and beyond.

The post The World China Is Building appeared first on NOEMA.

“If wealth doesn’t grow, common prosperity will become … a tree without roots.”
— Liu He

SHANGHAI — As the story goes, when Zeng Liansong set out to design the flag for the brand new People’s Republic of China back in 1949, thoughts of the cosmos dwelled on his mind — in particular the proverb “盼星星盼月亮.” (“Longing for the stars, longing for the glow of the moon.”)

On the eventual flag, the Chinese Communist Party was depicted as the big star. The design brief insisted that the original Maoist coalition of workers and peasants be represented, so they got one star apiece. Recalling an older caste system, Zeng added a star for the scholar class — the class that has become China’s technocracy — and added a fifth and final star for the bourgeois merchants. 

Preciously small in Zeng’s day, it is this fifth star that is today ascendant in China, pulling the others in its wake toward a new sort of nation — toward the moonglow of an imagined future. Under the CCP’s overarching goal of “common prosperity,” all sorts of reformist projects seek to enlarge a consumerist middle class. Maoist ideas of shared struggle are recuperated and joined to market forces to fuel a blended economy that very much includes entrepreneurship and foreign capital. In the process, China is slowly redefining itself from a worker’s state to a consumer’s state — from the factory of the world to the marketplace of the world. 

Building China — in particular, the houses that Chinese people live in — was a generational task. Scholars recently estimated that 88% of all housing in China has been built since 1990, 68% of which since 2000. Now, the government has decided that that’s done and wants to move on to the soft infrastructure of a middle-income society moving up: schools, hospitals, retirement homes. This feint to the left masks the intent of unleashing China’s consumer market, creating the economic equivalent of gravitational forces.

In a way, the back-and-forth between the state and the market — two distinct forms of social organization — is the structure of Chinese history itself. In “Doctrine of the Mean,” one of the central texts of Confucianism, a disciple of Confucius asks his teacher how to be strong. Confucius replies: 

In other words, to put it less elegantly, the idea is that southerners are wily and good with money (somewhat like the stereotype for blue states in the U.S.) and northerners are rough and honest and traditional (like red states). 

In a similar vein, the Chinese word for city, 城市, includes two dissimilar concepts: The first is a military-style fort enclosure, and the second a vibrant marketplace. So which is it? 

Confucius, who came from a place equidistant between contemporary Shanghai and Beijing, advocated a sort of fusion of the two concepts and geographies. Achieving that has been a challenge ever since he was alive back in the 5th century B.C.E. 

Han Fei, a sort of Chinese Machiavelli who penned one of China’s classic legal texts, warned against the chaos that follows attempts to administer a country whose regions are radically different from each other. During moments of chaos, authoritarian leaders like Mao Zedong cited Han to articulate the need for a sovereign above the law who can hold the country together by repression and willpower. That’s the voice of the north speaking — the merchants Mao wanted to integrate mostly lived in the south, then as now. 

Much like today’s exporters of Guangdong and financiers of Shanghai, the southern merchants who would go on to populate diasporas never had much use for being told what to do by northerners. But China integrates or it disintegrates. Historically, when it splinters into sub-polities (like during the warring states period or more recently the 1911-1949 interregnum between the Qing Dynasty and CCP), China becomes an easy victim for colonizers. For scholars of this history, the roadblocks between Shanghai and Zhejiang during the COVID lockdowns made for uneasiness; regional inequalities between east and west and north and south make for a simmering sense of crisis. 

A country divided against itself cannot stand — as Xi’s slogan goes, “East, west, south, north and center; the Party leads everything.” Historically, the rationale for Chinese authoritarians has been that some sort of equality of conditions is the vital prerequisite for a country’s existence. Today, a bonfire of local regulations is unleashing market forces to further centralize the provinces around the capital, and the world around China.

– TWO –

“Less than half of all rulers die of illness.” 
— Han Fei

China was disintegrating, or so it seemed. 

Not so long ago, the hyper-development fueled by debt-driven real estate investment had created a situation in which powerful regional officials didn’t feel that they had to answer the phone when Beijing called. The mountains were high and the emperor was far away for Bo Xilai, the Party secretary of Chongqing from 2007 to 2012. Those were the years when many of the pressing social issues that today we hear discussed under the rubric of “common prosperity” — changes to the hukou (the household registration system that dispenses benefits like access to employment and schools), subsidized housing, a property tax and other reforms — had their trial run. All of it, then as now, was swept up in the “red” language of a bygone era, while political enemies on the business-friendly right were removed.  

Cui Zhiyuan, the Chicago-trained economist who studied land markets in Chongqing during Bo’s reign, wrote that integrating rural people into the city would encourage the development of a highly educated population capable of innovating. Observing the expansion of private-sector GDP in supposedly “red” Chongqing, he wrote: “The Chongqing experiment demonstrates that public ownership of assets and private business are not substitutes for one another. Rather, they can be complementary and mutually reinforcing.” Meanwhile, Niall Ferguson, who visited in 2008, saw it as the antithesis of Chimerica: endless housing estates occupied by villagers who the city had swallowed up. Ferguson thought Chongqing signaled “the coming reality of a huge Chinese domestic market.” 

Like Goldilocks and the three bears, Mao’s economy was overly dominated by the centralizing state, and Deng’s was spinning growth so quickly it almost lost sight of who the growth was meant for. Xi’s updated vision for a common prosperity — of which Bo’s Chongqing was indeed a premonition — is driven by private-sector entrepreneurs and seeks to achieve a fusion of the two. In China, the joke is that the government is run like a business, and businesses are run like the government.

But Bo’s Chongqing was dangerous to the Chinese national system because of the immense popularity that grew in favor of his policies and of the man himself. Consensus rule was being undermined. Layers of bureaucracy and mid-range elites were swept away as Chongqing became Bo and his people, with not much in between. The bureaucratic class, heirs of the Confucian scholarly tradition, were removed during politically selective anti-corruption campaigns, which many speculated were simply a way for Bo to solidify his grasp on power. 

When I visited Chongqing in 2011, it seemed like the city’s contradictions were about to explode. Soon enough, they did: Bo’s Mongolian sidekick Wang Lijun fled to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, pleading for amnesty from his lawless boss. 

As the story unfolded, it became clear that the dreamworld of Chongqing was unimaginably lurid. It turned out that the line between populism and gangsterism was a thin one. Bo is now in prison for life, the first scalp claimed in what would become Xi’s own anti-corruption campaign. 

Today, the system has integrated many of Bo’s policies and attitudes as its own, having seen how popular they were. Huang Qifan, Chongqing’s mayor at the time, is now a major advocate of “common prosperity.” 

But as happened with Bo’s “red culture” movement, invoking the politics and language of Marxist struggle in China is to play with fire. China is a radically unequal society. In internet cafes in the lonely suburbs of provincial capitals, alienated youths talk about life in the “human mine” and the unfairness of being another cog within the machine. If Bo’s Chongqing was unable to balance leftist rhetoric with capitalist reality, will Xi be able to do it with the whole country in 2023?

– THREE –

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
— Honoré de Balzac

The mafias that flourished in China between 1979, when Deng’s reform and opening began, and 2012, when Bo was arrested, had their root, above all, in the real estate industry. 

Take Qiao Si, a Harbin gangster in the 1980s who was immortalized in a novel by Kong Ergou and a spinoff CCTV show. Vaguely based on true events, Kong’s story tells of a man orphaned in the Harbin working-class districts during the Cultural Revolution who falls in with a group of toughs and starts to do petty tasks for corrupt local officials. 

As property was privatized in those years, local governments had to fulfill responsibilities they weren’t legally able to. (The legal system hadn’t yet caught up to the realities of a semi-privatized commonwealth, and wouldn’t for some time.) So if a local government wanted to build new buildings for a new society, but the people and buildings of the old society were in the way, they called Qiao, who beat them up and made them disappear. In the book, demolishing one stubborn “nail house,” Qiao cut off his own finger in front of the tenants to freak them out. The communities he was helping to demolish were being torn apart violently, just like his body. 

In one famous line from the book, Qiao waxes maudlin, saying that the “red society” of the past had been replaced by the “black societies” of mafias, which brought together working-class youths to struggle and live in a different way than socialism had, as the radioactivity of socialism dissolved into a half-life of gangsterism.

In the real Harbin, the real Qiao built a criminal underworld that became necessary for the overworld of the real estate industry to function. It was another case of the central government losing control of a volatile regional economy where, following Deng’s instructions, some were getting (quite) rich first. Due to his connections with the local government, Qiao was untouchable; in the end, well-armed military police were sent to arrest him. A firing squad shot him on a hillside in the suburbs in 1991; his villa was left empty as the 90s continued roaring. By the time the millennium came, Harbin Pharmaceutical Group had created a replica of Versailles as its corporate headquarters.

In the bad old days before the 1949 Communist Party takeover, China was, in the scripture of Party history, divided up by foreign forces into little warlord kingdoms that were easy to exploit. As Sun Yat-sen said back then, “The Chinese people have only family and clan groups; there is no national spirit. Consequently, in spite of 400 million people gathered together in one China, we are, in fact, but a sheet of loose sand.” 

The sociologist Fei Xiaotong saw the same China — one in which every village across the vast land, speaking local dialects and enclosed in an economy of subsistence agriculture, was exactly the same as all the others. Grains of sand on an endless beach, ready for somebody to walk all over. When Mao announced the new China, he said: “The Chinese people have stood up!” He was implicitly claiming that all the people living within the borders of his people’s republic shared a common condition and common aspirations and could be unified toward a particular struggle. 

In the early decades of Mao’s socialism, the unifying forces of a centrally planned state tried to forcibly weld this diverse continent of people together, sending officials from Manchuria to subtropical Sichuan, creating a common discourse of revolution — a shared heritage of experience that accompanied a mass literacy movement. The capitalist economy that gradually took over, however, insists that individuals compete against other individuals. It corrodes collectives by its very nature. 

The reforms in the 1980s and 1990s to property ownership, taxes, state-owned enterprises and other legal matters that led to China’s entrance into the WTO caused the sociologist Qin Hui to write about the process of “dividing up the big family’s assets.” Once, the nation clustered around a shared hearth; now, the process of capitalist accumulation sent the population skittering around new sorts of circuits. Communities, pieces of land and even the hours of the day splintered and created a huge amount of measurable economic activity. But it also destroyed the organic Chinese village community that many considered the eternal form of Chinese life.

The desire for control is in opposition to the adventurous and fateful nature of growth. In those years, the brave and reckless emerged from the old decaying neighborhoods, searched for their fate as individuals, started companies, went to work for the state — or maybe, like Qiao Si, they became mafia folk heroes. The endless new housing estates built once Qiao and his counterparts finished their work tied hundreds of millions of Chinese stakeholders into the system; as the machine kept pumping, prices kept rising, and the tide lifted all boats (although those without boats were left underwater). And here we are today: with new cities and a society that has been shifting like quicksand for as long as anybody can remember, as north and south’s endless argument over control and movement reverberates on a global scale.

As Xi often notes in speeches on the collapse of the U.S.S.R., what the government fears most is socialism dissolving into oligarchy, national wealth expatriated, bitter wars with people who were once brothers in a socialist project. In the Chongqing of Bo’s time, mafias — with their patriarchal structure, their reliance on implicit communal bonds of trust, their antipathy towards the formal economy — were the natural byproduct of a city that was populated by villagers.

For the CCP, unifying China is a Sisyphean goal: The place constantly crumbles into squabbles and local interest groups. But forcing everybody — the orphans and the workers of places like Harbin, the new rich of places like Chongqing — to unify around shared objectives is necessary. If not, Chinese government officials and economic elites will start fleeing to U.S. consulates to spill the dirt, and the Chinese population will be defenseless against the scary world — as they were in the 1930s before the self-appointed heroes of the CCP saved the day. 

When one amateur literary critic considered Kong Ergou’s novel, he wrote:

Breathe in. Breathe out. For the past 10 years, China has been breathing in. It feels like it’s about to start sneezing, scattering capital, infrastructure projects and people around the world. Or it might inhale the world into China, importing an unprecedented amount of goods and services and realigning the orbit of the global economy in the process. There’s nothing to say that both can’t happen at the same time.

– FOUR –

“One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”
— Virginia Woolf

By 2022, the growth mechanism of the Chinese economy — real estate — had come to assume a life of its own. But it was becoming incompatible with new commitments to carbon neutrality and was relentlessly absorbing the population’s wealth, like a steroidal body whose muscles could no longer be controlled by a brain’s commands. 

And so, they shut the engine shut off. While it was not operating, they fundamentally modified it, removing the prerogative for endless growth. Observers noted hopefully that cement and steel production might fall and gigatons of CO2 emissions might disappear.

China in 2023 is predicted to reclaim its pre-COVID share of global growth, dwarfing figures from the U.S. and EU put together. But this time, the economy will be driven by consumers of services, not constructors of houses — by the middle class, not the working class. 

The $21 billion of foreign capital put into Chinese stocks in the first 40 days of 2023 amounts to a bet that this restructuring will succeed. If China’s government really can successfully shift gears from construction to consumption, it will have implications for virtually everything. Multinational companies might be able to move supply chains for manufacturing out of China. But a company that doesn’t operate in China won’t be able to access Chinese consumers. A China that is the marketplace of the world would be even harder to replace than the China that is the factory floor of the world. 

In particular, the Chinese household wealth that today is overwhelmingly clotted in the real estate sector could be harnessed by Western capitalists in collaboration with Chinese SOEs, as in Goldman Sachs’ crossover with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to pour capital into Chinese state-led technological research and development for firms that are technically private, even if their CEOs pledge allegiance to China Inc., like BYD, Huawei and ByteDance. Instead of a huge cash pile buried under the literal floorboards of China, it could be deployed to drive technological upgrades — and, if the economics textbooks are correct, productivity growth. 

Hence China’s new number two, Li Qiang, was deputized to create new stock markets explicitly intended to funnel Chinese household savings into Chinese tech companies, like the Shanghai STAR market (officially: the Science and Technology Innovation Board). Hence Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone showing up to the 2023 China Development Forum in Beijing alongside Tim Cook of Apple and CEOs from German car companies.

China is on the brink of a financial big bang, whereby American finance gurus are tapped to help deploy Chinese household wealth, helping to replace the foreign direct investment that used to come in from overseas. Chinese people are moving from the invested into the investors, from the subjects of global capitalism to its protagonists.

As time goes on, Chinese companies, particularly those in tech and infrastructure, have oriented themselves away from trade with the developed world toward their peers in the developing world. Southeast Asia in particular has become the frontier of the Chinese economy. For hotel operators in Bangkok, utopian urbanists in Borneo and many others, China is no longer a factory that produces products for cheap: It is a source of technology, of middle-class consumers and of investment capital. 

The Chinese government describes this as an effort to dispel the myth that “modernization is equal to Westernization,” that it “presents another picture of modernization, expands the channels for developing countries to achieve modernization and provides a Chinese solution to aid the exploration of a better social system for humanity.”

The theory sounds great, but the truth is that China’s economy is in a moment of transition, not yet on the other shore. What China needs to do is not complicated, but it’s as hard as building housing in California — elites will lose out when benefits are shared more broadly, even if that’s vital to build China’s future. Only time will tell if it all works.

As Xi’s third term commenced, the skies of Beijing turned black with a sudden sandstorm. Nature is rarely compliant with human desires. The fusion of market and state, of control and chaos, is as old as China itself, and it hasn’t stabilized yet. Maybe this time will be different.

The post China’s Fifth Star Rises appeared first on NOEMA.

“We are the last generation, thank you.” 
— Unknown.

SHANGHAI — On the third day of the 2022 COVID lockdown, my wife told me that she was pregnant. Our life in China during that stage of the pandemic was not exactly hellish, but it certainly felt like purgatory. Some days, I was able to leave our apartment building for long walks through the deserted streets downtown. Most days though, she slept or did Zoom calls while I — a compulsive planner with a need to control my reality — rationed coffee, googled recipes for cabbage and did my best to tamp down feelings of claustrophobia.

Thankfully, our son’s gestation gave us practical things to worry about. As I embedded myself into researching hospitals and preschools and diaper brands, whether to apply for him to have U.S. citizenship or Chinese hukou or both, and deciding if we would follow the Chinese 月子 (“yuezi”) customs — the traditional “fourth trimester” after birth, during which a mother rests for 40 or so days — I wondered about the China that was emerging, that he might live in. The China that our friends with toddlers were watching anxiously: the school curriculums and air quality index, the economy, the sense of a society drifting through dangerous waters. 

China these days is no doubt undergoing momentous changes — birthrates are declining, urbanization is increasing, political energy is high, the economic structure is no longer defined solely by exports to the West — but day to day and month to month, it is difficult to determine what is most significant. What would be my son’s future? And where would it be? Should we leave now or try to build a community in the imperfect society that we found ourselves in? What would be the story of our family, the soil in which my son’s life is now taking root?

– 2 – 

“Are we to witness how waves of a new human energy break through the battered walls of Old China? Or is the inner movement congealed — the soul frozen forever?”
— Osvald Sirén

In today’s China, the world of the 1950s generation, to paraphrase Marx, weighs like a nightmare on the lives of the young. The need to pay lavish pensions overhangs the state and large swathes of the economy, the politics of a previous era still dominate, and of course, the all-encompassing zero-COVID policy was explained in part as essential to protect the elderly, many of whom eschewed vaccination. Family values — China’s folk religion — are part of the imagery on government billboards advertising the “China Dream,” which is a bit jarring, since many elders being cared for today were once the youths who tore down the old society during the Cultural Revolution. The explosive tumult of China’s revolution has ossified, leaving the same old hierarchies untouched. 

In a society that is reflexively Confucian, it makes sense that the elders would be in charge. But since different generations have radically different visions of what Chinese society should be, the political monopoly of the old has given a lopsided, strange quality to the decisions that determine everybody’s lives.

China’s life expectancy surpassed that of the U.S. a few years ago, and nowhere is that more apparent than in downtown Shanghai, China’s oldest city, where the average life expectancy is 84 and almost a quarter of its residents are over 60. Due to the complicated legacy of the Cultural Revolution and its impact on housing and real estate, many of these old folks live in the city center with Chinese-style rent control — so-called “use rights” (使用权) — giving them indefinite control over apartments they don’t technically own.  

After the Communist Revolution, the mansions of the French Concession were divvied up among whoever was there to claim them — peasants, workers, soldiers. But nobody worried about title deeds, so the people who live there now just get to stay simply because they’ve been there long enough, even as their neighbors pay thousands of dollars a month for the privilege. Dust collects on chandeliers in the shabby grandeur of a lost world, even as the new world is being constructed across the street. 

In many ways, China today is a society oriented to the value systems and lifestyles of the elderly partly as a consequence of how Confucianism operates at an instinctual level. Young adults go to work, putting in the grueling hours that the economy will need to add productivity. They are expected to be obedient and orderly in the service of a generation that staged an epic revolution. 

Both in big cities and villages, grandparents occupy a key role in childcare largely unknown in the West. Every day at 3 p.m., clusters of them gather at school gates, hands folded behind their backs and clutching snacks, waiting to pick up their grandkids. When our son was born, his grandmother moved in to help us. She has been invaluable, and she is entitled to her opinions and peccadillos. When she cooks dinner, “red” songs come playing from the kitchen, surely to become the music of my son’s childhood, along with “Baby Beluga.” But my wife and I are wary of how traumas like the cultural revolution can be intergenerational. If China’s history is a never-ending cycle of conflict, we hope that our son can escape this karmic wheel.

In the political realm, tensions between generations take on the aspect of a class war. Albert Hirschman, the famed economist, suggested that, when faced with social problems, we resort to exit, voice or loyalty. During lockdown, the solution for many thoughtful friends in their 20s and 30s was a kind of mental or internal escape — a life of reading books, physical fitness, time spent in nature and of course, raising families. Many others around the nation began to talk about emigrating, using the slang term 润 — a homonym for “run,” which conveys a desperate escape. But where to, and how? 

Many younger Chinese vie to join the government, eventually gaining what could be called a voice, but that takes a long time. Loyalty, in this context, can feel like resignation — bow to the status quo because there are no better options. If Chinese cities keep developing the way they are now, they may become like Seoul, Tokyo or Hong Kong, where housing prices, monopoly capital, competition for limited spaces in educational institutions and other manifestations of economic inequality have led to a crushing weight on society’s ability to reproduce itself. 

But what will happen when this generation takes power in the “high-income society” of the near future, which Xi Jinping has suggested will arrive by 2035? 

The book “Self as Method,” an interview of the anthropologist Xiang Biao by the journalist Wu Qi, was a bestseller in China in 2020. Somewhere between memoir and cultural critique, it is akin to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “Tristes Tropiques” (“Sad Tropics”) for China’s post-1989 urbanites. The heirs of Chinese development, Xiang told me, are socially atomized: 

Socialism, the intellectual historian Wang Hui once said, was the door through which China passed into modernity. The builder generation passed through that door, worked at that collective farm, built those cities, incurred those debts, picked up that nasty smoker’s cough. In a sense, they built modern China as a structure, from its cities to its economy and social contract. Imagine their surprise as they discover that some of the kids don’t want to live in the world they built.

At times, the generational gap between Chinese boomers — the 1950s and 1960s generations — and their children can feel wider than the gap between nations. China’s leaders sound increasingly concerned that the kids have drifted away forever. Echoing Mao’s worry that capitalism would take over once he died (a view that had some justification), the builder generation fears that young people, the heirs of reform and opening, won’t care about their struggles and pain, their heroics and favorite songs. Young people are better educated, richer, more individualistic, more alienated and fewer. They don’t feel the history of their elders as their own. Like the influencer who was censored for having a cake that looked like a tank in a live stream, apparently unaware of the Tiananmen incident, many don’t even know the history. It is just there, a fait accompli. 

This generational clash defines China’s politics. The elders have power and the youth are expected to propel the economy forward, innovating but “never forgetting the struggle.” In truth, the younger generations were born into a society profoundly more individualistic than their elders’. Their truth is different than their parents’, even if both are valid. This manifests as a political problem due to China’s “birth strike” — fewer children are being born, which will make China feel older and less energetic, and transform the raw material of economic growth: humanity itself. 

With China building out an ambitious fourth industrial revolution, some factories are hoping to replace the missing workers with robotics, big data-driven efficiencies and AI. From coal mines to ports and factories, repetitive manual labor is being automated. Without the decades-long loyalty of the older working-class generation, younger workers demand higher salaries and are prone to more transient habits. If Chinese planners have their way, it seems increasingly likely that the country’s next generation of industrial workers will be robots. 

Even as the overall working population decreases, the absolute number of urban working-age people is likely to continue rising as the countryside empties out. Seventy percent of China’s population is projected to live in cities in 2030 and 80% in 2050, up from around 63% today. So if there are 100-200 million fewer people in 2050 than today (depending on your source), that decrease will be mostly visible in the countryside. 

In the process, the culture of daily life will change — language, cuisine, family life, sense of self. Politics are downstream of culture, Andrew Breitbart observed. Who are the “real people,” the subject of politics? Currently, to China’s leaders, it’s the older generation, with their iconography of peasant life and struggle, who are “real,” while young influencers, so ignorant of China’s history, are somehow non-real. 

This will change. Demographic reality gets heavier every year.

– 3 –

“This is the vast peripheral territory that includes residents of rural villages, numerous urban-type settlements and small towns. In total, a third of the country’s population lives there, but the population is rapidly declining, which is why the populated territory is shrinking like an ice cube in the sink.” 
— Natalia Zubarevich

When the writer and academic Liang Hong’s bestselling book “China in One Village” was published in 2010, the country was about to pass a critical boundary, with more than half of the population officially urban. Liang saw China’s “median man” living in a village not unlike her hometown in Henan Province. Today, that person is probably a resident of one of China’s so-called “third-tier” cities — the ones with 1-5 million people, which China is littered with. (Perhaps you saw the median man in grainy videos from Zhengzhou’s Foxconn protests, demanding promised pay and better working conditions.)

To make sense of China, it’s better not to think of it as a single nation. More like three. “China One” is made up of the globalized, urban middle classes, with extremely low birth rates. “China Two” is the working classes, perhaps 30% of China’s population, who live in factory towns and third-tier cities. And “China Three” are the rural people whose population is shrinking the fastest not because their birth rates are lower, but because everybody moves to the cities. 

Many people from China Two remember China Three, from which their parents came, wistfully. In the collective imagination, China Three’s denizens are premodern, without a defined sense of self; their identity is submerged within collective experiences and memories, and they relate to the past and future through family members and traditions. (Interestingly, the word for “self” — 自我 — dates back only 100 years, and means different things to different people. Xi Jinping uses it to talk about an expanded sense of shared experience and is referring to the entire Communist Party or country; young people mean “individual” when they use it.)

Much as low birth rates on the Upper East Side don’t pose a threat to the future of New York City, low birth rates for Shanghai don’t threaten its future, since the city inhales rural people and slowly transforms them into urban ones. Urbanization continues relentlessly: By 2050, the population of China One is expected to swell to over 500 million, China Two will be in a loop of upward aspiration and China Three will have fallen from the median condition to a minority — less than 20%. 

At the same time, between 2020 and 2030, the number of people with upper secondary (high school) education and above is projected to increase by almost 100 million. Average urban household income will increase by nearly 50%, and urban households’ share of national income will go from 81% to 84%. 

The Chinese economy is fundamentally a story of China Two moving into China One, with the cheap workers of China Three serving as the raw material for growth. That labor pool is diminishing and Chinese industry is becoming ever more automated, ever more reliant on big data. Busy ports such as Tianjin and Yangshan are now less hubs of working-class life and more like games of Tetris played by white-collar engineers. Even coal mining is being automated, with Huawei engineering new robots that can do the job more productively and safely. 

While we can all recognize by now that GDP is a somewhat silly metric, if China produces a greater amount of goods and services with fewer people working, like in a coal mine that used to have hundreds of workers and now has two engineers and a swarm of robots, then productivity per capita and therefore GDP will go up almost by definition. As big as China’s formal economy is, it doesn’t include the 39% of the population marked as rural in the 2020 census, who don’t have access to services like healthcare and education, who aren’t linked to transportation networks, and don’t consume products made by multinational corporations; as those people move to cities, graduate from school and consume more, the numbers attached to China’s economy will grow.

Memories of the China that was still animate the thoughts of the older generation. Shortly after the 20th Party Congress, Xi visited the Red Flag Canal in northern Henan, which was built by manual laborers during the Great Leap Forward. As the scholar Joseph Torigian recently commented, “Xi Jinping has an older idea about what Leninist systems are — that they are organizational weapons that encompass your entire self and personality, that your meaning in life is sacrifice to this collective.”

In Xi’s imagination, the hardscrabble peasants of the north are the “real people,” the subject of politics. At Hongqi, he said that the younger generation must “abandon the finicky lifestyle and complacent attitude,” adding: “We need to educate people, especially the youths, with the Hongqi canal spirit that China’s socialism is won by hard work, struggles and even sacrifice of lives. This was not only true in the past but also true in the new era.” These kinds of entreaties by elders to youths are recognizable the world over. 

Especially following the traumas of the pandemic, these visions of the past rarely gain purchase among the youth, whose silence doesn’t imply consent or a shared system of values. Incidents regularly go viral where older people in positions of authority are caught abusing their power in a way that signals their ignorance of educated norms, like when a dean at the Hubei Industrial University was talking loudly on the phone in the library, and a student asked her to be quiet. She went crazy, yelling and hitting him. The student and his classmates filmed it on their mobile phones, didn’t hit back, waited it out. The social contract feels under tension as it hasn’t for decades, as the younger generation increasingly feels doubts about the judgements of their parents.

As time passes and more and more young people live life on their own terms, absorbed in social media and globalized brands rather than the collective lifeways of the past, the whole of China could become like Hubei Industrial University: crazy elders flailing around, exhorting this or that, recounting their memories, while the young filter it out and politely go about their business. 

In her book, Liang reflected on what she calls a national sense of “psychological homelessness” — a feeling that change has overwhelmed institutions that for millenniums had been the bedrock of Chinese society, especially the family and the village. In a follow-up interview a decade later, her son said: “I don’t think I really have a hometown to speak of, although it sounds wrong when you say it like that. This place is where I live, I live here in Beijing, but to say it’s my hometown doesn’t really stir up any deep emotion in me.”

– 4 –

“The original goal should have been to ‘protect the country, protect the race and protect the faith.’”  
— Chen Ming

For years, when friends and acquaintances visited Shanghai from abroad, I’d take them on walks around my neighborhood in the old French Concession. Shanghai Library, which was a dairy farm at the edge of town through the 1990s, is part of the urban fabric today. Walking past the Fuxing Road intersection, I’d take them to the hotpot restaurant where butchers slice legs of lamb next to the vegetable market where Prada once did a pop-up. There are gelato shops ($5 a scoop) next to stands selling roast chestnuts ($3 a bag) and sweet potatoes (75 cents) in autumn, hairy crabs and tangerines in spring. Down Wuyuan Road and around the corner was Shelter, the legendary nightclub in a former bomb shelter that was owned by the son of an Army general, whose existence testified to a China that was no longer paranoid and militaristic. 

Walking down Wuyuan in the other direction, you pass the site my friend Yilei used for a fashion pop-up shop, the kind of project that has become omnipresent in Shanghai today. Next door is the Avocado Lady, a shop run by an entrepreneurial family that started selling avocadoes to foreigners sometime before I arrived in 2008, and also has the Greek yogurt that my wife craved during her pregnancy. 

Across the street is the lot oddly left vacant for years that borders my office building. The Italian consulate is in there too, so the ground-floor Starbucks is always peopled with fancy gentlemen wearing nice shoes. A block over is the Huashan Hospital, which once saved my life after a bicycle accident and where Jiang Zemin, the president during China’s WTO-entry golden age, lay dying of blood cancer. 

This is China as Richard Scarry’s neighborhood, where elders living in their rent-controlled “use rights” apartments and eating $3 noodles rub shoulders with young hipsters outside expensive restaurants — dare I say … harmoniously? Here, China One’s rich urbanites meet China Two’s working-class construction workers and China Three’s rural people in food markets. 

Wulumuqi Road’s name was beamed around the world late in November, when some of China One’s bravest members took to the streets to complain about … everything. The mysterious vacant lot revealed its true nature: an immense hive of cops. I went to my office one morning as they roped off the streets, watched by massive crowds of spectators and their smartphones. A few days later, we were told, Jiang had died in the middle of the night. 

A friend wrote to me:

The days of the moonlight garden are over, the party at the cocktail bar is done, Jiang Zemin is dead. Watching cops and protestors overrun Wulumuqi Road was like watching a beautiful child grow into a rebellious adult. Xi’s constant exhortations that young people struggle and find their destiny have finally paid off: He woke up a generation that was happy to accept prosperity, until that was called into question. The young are finally ready to fight for their country. But it’s not the same one that the president grew up in.

As the exhilaration and anxiety of the protest weekend wore off, the government did start to roll back COVID restrictions, and the conversation changed. So now, we figured, China was going to catch COVID. Inevitably, a lot of people got sick. People started stocking Ibuprofen. When the big waves came, nobody wanted to leave their home, self-quarantining even without a lockdown in place. 

But the waves will pass, and we’ll still be here — even the ones who leave cannot forget this place. They are tied to it by sentimentality, resentment or just social media. The young will become old, the rural will become urban, and COVID is just the first act of China’s transition into a healthcare state. 

As Xiang Biao wrote to me: 

At the start of the pandemic, I argued with friends about which industry was likely to emerge successfully out of the Chinese COVID containment effort, in the way that e-commerce emerged during SARS. COVID has been much bigger for China than SARS, and rather than spawning a few big companies, it introduced China’s youth to their destiny. 

They might lose the battle, just like street protests and Congressional testimony didn’t end the war in Vietnam, but with time, their experience will have overtaken China’s entire national identity. The traumas of the elders have stunted the lives of their children, but also stimulated new sort of ideals, as China One’s bonsai tree generation grows upwards and outwards.

The post China’s Last Generation appeared first on NOEMA.

The main drag downtown feels like a Chinese version of Homer Simpson’s Springfield, with huge power plants lying inactive and boarded-up apartment blocks. Friendly provincial youths were sprawled out with watermelon, liquor and barbecue on a Saturday night. In a local cafe, I met an Englishman who runs a local preschool; everybody in Fuxin wants to go to there, he told me, because they want to find a way out. In my hotel, I passed suites with doors propped open, with men in black t-shirts gazing intently at laptop screens inside. 

Fuxin is the kind of town you’d rather reminisce about than live in. The artist Sun Xun grew up here, and he told me that in high school, studying for the Gaokao exam, he’d memorize T’ang Dynasty poems about verdant green mountains while standing on frozen piles of coal. He remembers feeling that the stories in the texts were fundamentally disconnected from the China he lived in.

But with the wistfulness that long afternoons in a dead-end town provide, Marxist theorists at the Liaoning University of Engineering and Technology dream that as an old industrial base, Fuxin has “advantages [that] can be used to develop wind turbines and units for wind power generation, improve the technology and quality of equipment, and quickly localize.” Leaders have ambitions to transform this lost socialist backwater into a green paradise churning out renewable energy; wind power projects with a generation capacity of 6.8 gigawatts are under development. 

Real estate here is practically worthless; you can buy a place for a few thousand dollars. Vast investment in wind energy seems to be the only way out for a dying coal town, a project for Fuxin’s aging population to fill up the hours with. In a generation, there probably won’t be many people left here, which is fine, because unlike coal mines, wind turbines don’t require armies of workers. 

During the long, hot summer of 2022, it became apparent that the economic system that had been in place in China for decades was becoming unsustainable and unsuitable to people’s lives. Rivers and lakes were drying up during one of those “once in a century” heat waves that seem to happen every other year nowadays, and forest fires swept the mountains around Chongqing. The drought caused power outages in cities like Chengdu for weeks on end, where a brand-new metro system ran with long delays and sometimes with the lights out.

In prioritizing pandemic containment over the economy — so different from Western societies, where leaders have come to accept a certain number of deaths as the price to keep business moving — the Chinese government allowed 40 years of uninterrupted growth to choke and sputter. The real estate industry, a monument to growth for growth’s sake, flatlined. Many suspect that the government deliberately aborted it, since “houses are for living in, not for speculation.”

In China, the unviability of America as an attractive model for how to construct a government and a society has become clear for everybody to see. There is a palpable sense in some parts of Chinese society that the life of the nation needs a spiritual center, one beyond the consumerist economy of late capitalism; as Xi Jinping said at the 20th Communist Party Congress, it is time for “Chinese people of all ethnic groups [to] embark on a new journey to build China into a modern socialist country in all respects.”

Disappointment with political leaders is a sentiment that can be found in many countries around the world, but in China, the Party is advocating an ecologically driven vision of building something new, recognizing that what most human societies are doing in 2022 has no future. In places like Fuxin, people are waiting to be told what they are there for; they can see that the old thing is finished but aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do instead. 

For China’s leadership, the creative destruction of the COVID pandemic provided the spark for a new economy oriented to state-driven technological solutions, primarily internally facing and built for crisis. In their words and deeds, they live in a world where climate crises are coming — in fact, they are already here. And they are crafting a political model that can replace the legitimacy conferred by steady economic growth with an ethos of shared struggle, drawing aesthetically on the legacy of socialist realism even as it is based economically and technologically on an energy transition. 

The forever-receding horizon of this struggle is total carbon neutrality and the mass adoption of electric cars powered by batteries that store renewable energy harvested from deserts and mountains and transported by specialized high-voltage power cables to metropolitan areas many hundreds of miles away. In August, the National Climate Center’s Wang Yang called for the country to be able to generate 95 trillion kilowatt-hours of renewable energy per year by 2060 — a colossal amount (as of 2022, the U.S. generates 4 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy in total per year) that would necessitate a substantial portion of the population continuously building infrastructure for decades. Numbers like this — six times the expected demand by then — aren’t just an energy transition, they are a map for constructing an entirely different social order than the China we know. 

The U.S. may have finally passed breakthrough legislation this summer that promises to invest $369 billion in renewables, but China invested more than that ($380 billion) last year, and there are indications that this figure will be substantially surpassed in 2022. China plans to double its current installed capacity of solar and wind power by 2025, exceeding its commitment for 2030 five years ahead of time. 

Unlike in the U.S., where the Inflation Reduction Act is focused primarily on domestic infrastructure, China is directing state funds to technologies that will be exported globally. Instead of giving yourself a fish, create a model by which everybody else can learn to fish, especially in those places that never had enough fish before. China is shifting from an economic model of exporting consumer goods to the West toward a model of equipping and financing the world’s energy transition. In doing so, it has no competitors.

In this moment, so fraught with uncertainty and disaster — “change unseen for 100 years,” as Xi says — China’s leaders seem to sense a chance to turn carefully nourished technology-driven manufacturers like BYD and CATL into global colossuses, to make diplomatic inroads into the Global South by offering solutions where Western powers couldn’t or wouldn’t, to stitch together China’s post-industrial north and technologically-oriented south, and to craft a post-growth model of political legitimacy. 

For them, solving the problems of climate change — adapting to serious environmental crises while providing adequate carbon-neutral electricity and food to people in the world beyond who currently have neither — can create a new world order that at last definitively breaks with the imperialist powers and their heirs. 

Coal Country

“We must regard science and technology as our primary productive force, talent as our primary resource and innovation as our primary driver of growth.” – Xi Jinping, Oct. 2022.

In 1909, the modernist novelist Natsume Sōseki went on a trip sponsored by Mantetsu, the Japanese railway corporation responsible for modernizing colonial Manchuria. Passing through Fushun, the site of another massive coal mine in Liaoning Province, he called the local laborers “tongueless men”: “Without uttering a word, they kept ascending to the third floor and descending from there, carrying these heavy sacks of beans on their shoulders. Their silence, their regular movements, their patience and their energy are almost like the shadows of fate.” 

As the scholar Eri Hotta noted in her book about Japan in the 1930s and 40s, the conditions at the Fushun mine were atrocious: “Approximately 40,000 miners were working at any given time, and it is thought that about 25,000 of that number had to be replaced yearly, owing to a high rate of deaths, escapes and executions.”

Such was the birth of China’s working class: Subjugated by colonial violence, denied a voice, living lives of misery in fossil-fueled dirty factories. Such was China’s entry into modernity. 

At the end of this year’s Beidaihe summit, where China’s top leadership plots out its next steps, Li Keqiang, the economic captain who is Xi’s second in command, left for a tour of a BYD factory in Shenzhen. Twenty thousand new jobs, he was told, were being created there every month. 

Xi Jinping, on the other hand, went north to the decayed industrial area near Fushun and Fuxin in Liaoning Province. Shenyang, the capital of the province, with its smoky factories and a history of Communist struggles, couldn’t have a more different role in today’s China than Shenzhen. But the message Xi articulated — of “ecological conservation, environmental improvement, production and manufacturing, the development of cities, the people’s lives and other aspects to expedite the building of a beautiful China” — was similar to Li’s down south. 

In the lost socialist heartland of the north, many communities are soaked in generations of resentment and living in landscapes of depletion, where existential questions about why people live there at all have driven massive migration south, as well as China’s most violent labor disputes. But the CCP has good reason not to underestimate or ignore embittered working classes up here — they were them, once.

On tours of war memorials and robotics factories, retirement homes and a newly grown forest, Xi cultivated a mythology of struggle against overwhelming odds, the aesthetic heritage of socialism. It isn’t terribly subtle, but he is appropriating it for new uses, recalling Mao’s comment that “我们说要脱胎换骨” — a Buddhist literary phrase that means something like “We would like to shed our bodies and outgrow our bones.” The bones of a socialist ethos of self-sacrifice and collectivism are back in vogue, but today the hero-workers are told to erect windmills and solar panels, preserve woodlands and plant trees — to build a “beautiful China.” Renewable energy and advanced technologies are proffered as the solution to stagnating communities with low self-esteem.

Whatever it is that Xi saw at Shenyang’s Siasun robotics factory, it wasn’t capitalism in any way that we might understand it, and it wouldn’t be even if Siasun lists on the NASDAQ. Siasun emerged from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and reflects China’s state-led model of investment in technologies that it deems critical to the future. 

“Green development” is a catch-all politically correct basket for all sorts of investments in China today, many of which are taking the place of infrastructure stimulus. If, in 2008, the Chinese government sought to propel the economy by building high-speed trains, today it does so with vast arrays of solar panels in the desert or enormous water transfer programs. The National Strategy for Climate Adaptation might help China to solve ecological problems like resource scarcity, extreme climate events and changing ecosystems — but it also offers the Chinese state a date with destiny.

Today, the CCP takes the so-called “industrial party” — middle class graduates from engineering and STEM programs born in the 80s and 90s — as a core constituency and source of membership. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so if you are a technocratic organization of millions of engineers that sees its purpose as enhancing the lives of Chinese people, climate change is the sort of challenge that inspires big plans. The CCP has an almost structural need for a crisis like this one, as they direct the return of the repressed working classes into a shared fate, creating an engine for their own legitimacy in the process. 

The mythology of China’s state is less one of wars with foreign powers and more an endless conflict with the rhythms of nature: irrigation, flood prevention, the management of resources. Yu the Great, the King Arthur of China, was a mythical engineer-king who gained the throne by successfully irrigating the Yellow River, preventing floods and enabling population growth via agriculture. Whether the story is true or not is beside the point; the notion of what the Chinese state is fundamentally for continues on that track: wise, scholarly individuals whose role is to terraform the land and thereby make cultural continuity possible. 

China is a millennia-old project of how to not get washed away, starved to death, killed by heatstroke; how to turn leaves into dinner and withered roots into medicine. Historical rulers took the preservation and extension of the population as the moral and practical core of their reign, and today’s leaders still see society as configured by a hierarchy whose legitimacy is based on controlling climate disasters. 

In Shenshan

“Quantity is a quality all of its own.” — Joseph Stalin

Shenzhen, the upstart coastal metropolis visited by Li Keqiang, is a world apart from the resentments, Buddhist temples and abandoned coal mines up north in Liaoning. In the megacity’s 11th district, the semi-rural Shenshan, BYD is investing $2.9 billion in a vast new factory that is expected to employ 80,000 workers and generate annual sales of $14 billion. BASF, the largest chemical company in the world, is building one of its own in nearby Zhanjiang at a cost of $10 billion, which the company intends to be entirely powered by renewable energy by 2025. 

Construct enough factory towns like that and you’ll get a region akin to Southern California suburbia fueled by DARPA. China’s secret sauce for cornering the market for solar panels, for dominating the mining and manufacture of the rare earths used in wind turbines, for building electric cars — is simply the economy of scale. Make a lot of something, and the price goes down. 

A combination of subsidies and legal mandates (for example, issuing license plates for EVs immediately while withholding registration for new gasoline-powered cars, or mandating that silicon manufacturers’ profit margins cannot be too high) has created vast domestic markets in China for renewables, which drives the price down globally. Chinese companies benefit — but in a sense so do all human beings who want to live in a world moving toward carbon neutrality. 

The EV supply chain isn’t just about automobiles. Factories in China manufacture three-quarters of the world’s EV batteries, and China has 90% market share for processing the rare earth elements so important to those batteries. BYD is an apex predator in an ecosystem designed to allow it to flourish, from the gleaming minerals in the dirt to the batteries to the cars that silently glide down the highway back to Shenzhen. You can look into any of the numerous energies called renewable, from pumped hydro to experiments with fusion or thorium nuclear reactors, and you’ll discover that the state-funding model has given Chinese companies an imposing lead. 

As DARPA was to Silicon Valley, directing government funding toward basic research that would create national prestige and a strong middle-class economy, Chinese industrial policy seeks to seed strategic industries to thrive in the future — a future, Chinese leaders believe, that will be a time of floods and fires. The companies being created are intended to flourish amid hardship, an aesthetic that blends into the socialist militarism of Manchurian hero-workers, with smokestacks and oil rigs replaced by wind turbines, solar panels and battery manufacturers. 

That socialist aesthetic helps to communicate to China’s population what’s going on and why, and what their role in the process is. At the same time, the big companies have no trouble raising money on international capital markets and attracting investors like Warren Buffett. And why would they? They’re best in class in the crucial technologies of the future. China, according to Forbes, wants to become the Saudi Arabia of renewables.

These companies look like a proof of concept for China’s “actually existing socialism” — not the democratic socialism debated in the West, but full-on centralized planning, mass mobilization and five-year plans. These are companies riding the wave of what the climate theorists Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright call “Climate Mao” — “an anti-capitalist system governed by sovereign power at the level of the nation-state or the planet.”

As Chinese economies of scale continue to drive down the price of solar panels, wind turbines and EV cars, the cost benefit for countries and companies around the world will be irresistible — even if American lawmakers try to make it illegal. As Gregory Nemet, a technology and policy scholar at the University of Wisconsin, wrote to me, “The forces to develop domestic capabilities will be strong in importing countries [in the Global South]. And the production technology, now that it is mature, will be relatively smooth to transfer to new locations, likely with Chinese expertise deeply involved, at least for a while.” Shenshan, with its rural landscape being transformed by the manufacture of green technologies, could be a preview for Zambia, Indonesia or Bahia in the future. Much as America’s security state gained global power through DARPA inventions like the internet, Chinese energy technology will reshape communities around the world in unexpected ways.

China’s diplomats envision a future in which China wins more and more of the Global South into its corner by supplying aid during the inevitable catastrophes that are to come and perhaps finding markets for renewable energy in countries where Chinese state-owned enterprises control significant parts of the power grid, such as Brazil and the Philippines. As Tucker Carlson and Western energy analysts are starting to recognize, the basis of U.S. hegemony will be threatened if China controls global energy markets. This poses a real dilemma for U.S. policymakers (and perhaps an even greater one for Europeans, whose energy supplies are being choked off) who recognize the imperative to transition to carbon neutrality but will have to massively rely on Chinese imports to get there. 

China After Growth

“If human affairs go awry in this world below, there will be corresponding changes in Heaven above. … We have on this account directed Our efforts toward reflecting upon the reformation of Our character, practicing abstinence and devoutly praying for sweet and prolonged rain, Our hope being that Our quintessential single-mindedness will reach upwards, and affect the heart-mind of Heaven.” — Kangxi Emperor, 1678.

According to the historian Mark Elvin, medieval China was trapped in a “high-level equilibrium trap” that prevented the development of an industrial revolution like in northwestern Europe. To make his complex theory simple: Chinese society roughly between 1200 and 1800 adapted itself to a rhythm that was adequate. More or less satisfied with the way things were for centuries, nobody felt incentivized to grow the nation more, to develop more. The Chinese simply mended what was broken, sowed new harvests to replace what was consumed and when that was finished, wrote poetry. It was a timeless land of mountains and rivers. What ultimately broke this equilibrium, of course, were the industrialized Europeans, who came first for Japan and then China. 

Since then, China has been experiencing a regional variety of “anti-modern modernity,” the same as Meiji-era Japan, Soviet Russia and Germany after Hegel. As when Hegel watched Napoleon ride through Germany on horseback, this created a paradoxical sensation: rage at the plunder of one’s home, and envy of the superior strength of the conqueror. 

The population of China and India both started to spike when they encountered the industrialized Western powers and slowly but surely adopted a different position vis-à-vis the world. No longer was the world simply a place that they lived. It became instead a set of objects and commodities they could transform in search of surplus value. 

Many degrowth economists that have emerged in the wake of revelations about our warmer future essentially advocate for something similar to the equilibrium trap that Elvin identified. Rephrasing it to be palatable and applied to the entire globe, “sustainability,” for them, simply means: Let there be another generation and another after that, and let our works be remembered and honored by whatever people there are living in that future time. 

During the pandemic, Jörg Wuttke — China’s BASF chief, an advocate of EU-China collaboration on carbon neutrality and the head of the European Chamber of Commerce in China — commented to me that the mandate for growth to which he was accustomed had been replaced by ideological imperatives. Lockdown-era China was foreshadowing the coming “Climate Mao” model.

The concerns for China in a warmer future are the same as they’ve always been: avoid famine, put down peasant revolutions, dam the rivers to prevent floods, ease the impact of droughts. In climate change, China’s state has found a match for its predilections and a justification for its preferred mode of social hierarchy. In this situation, Xi says, we’ve got no realistic choice — an emperor and his army of engineers are the only answer. 

The post China’s Revolution Turns Green appeared first on NOEMA.

“Why is there an America?”
— Wang Huning

Once upon a time, there was an enchanted kingdom called Chimerica, with a beautiful capital known to residents and visitors alike as “Magic City” (“魔都”). The streets of Magic City were leafy and green, the people beautiful, their minds filled with visions. A city of water, rain and shadows, for some 30 years this Atlantis rose above the waves of the Pacific, the vast ocean on its doorstep. Fantastic wealth poured in from all over the world to the city’s banks and businesses, and skyscrapers were flung into the sky. “The bubble that never pops,” some called it. What once seemed like impossible dreams turned into realities.

魔都 is a slang term for Shanghai. And though it was of course never as perfect and pristine as imagined, over the past three decades, it has been the place where multinational capital met Chinese workers, engendering a chemical reaction that changed the world as we know it. 

For those three decades, planet China revolved around a mysterious sun — the United States. Cunning, baffling and powerful, America as an idea (much more than as an actual place) allowed Chinese to redefine themselves and their expectations of life. This engagement with an abstract America, driven by a desire to enrich China, is quite unique in Chinese history. Chinese elites voluntarily ceded control of their national narrative to a foreign nation, and they internalized the ideas and forms that the other society cherished. 

In fact, the U.S. is a real country, populated by human beings. But for the Chinese Communist Party, it seemed to be, as the 19th-century philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev once wrote of Russia, “one of those nations which do not seem to be an integral part of the human race, but exist only in order to teach some great lesson.” 

This spring, Shanghai suffered siege warfare, under attack by the COVID pandemic, and many Chimericans left, waking up to the sense that the community they had imagined had been a dream. Shanghai is a temperamentally capitalist and modern city in a communist, traditionalist country. Under capitalism, everything that is solid melts into air — family ties, language, nations. In Shanghai’s mist and smoke, these things begin to seem insubstantial, doubtful. 

Mao famously said that over a lifetime of seeking to revolutionize China, he only succeeded in changing anything in the area around Beijing. Capitalism, on the other hand, has changed the country utterly, down to every city, town, village and family. Shanghai has always been the capital of that revolution — the altar where prayers to the power of global wealth and enlightenment were cast off in the direction of distant America. With a certain vision of Shanghai vanishing, what’s next for the country?

II. America Against Itself

“Some people don’t think that Americans are lonely either, or at least they may not all think so themselves. It may not be true that every American is lonely, but there are plenty who feel lonely. … She was alone in America, and America was alone in her.” 
— Wang Huning

Following the calamity of the Cultural Revolution, a professor of politics at Fudan University named Wang Huning — who would later join the Politburo and is today Xi Jinping’s chief ideologist — visited America to “实事求是” (“seek truth from facts”). In the late 1980s, it seemed to Wang that the central reality of global politics was American hegemony, so with an open mind he went to Iowa, Berkeley, Harlem and beyond to discover “American culture, or more precisely, the American way of life (since many people find it difficult to determine what American culture is).” 

In this “least mysterious country,” Wang followed in the footsteps of travelers to countries they perceive as being their own future. His chronicle of his travels, “America Against America,” reads as if Alexis de Tocqueville’s aristocratic curiosity was blended with a dose of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s resentful brooding in “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” and the future shock of H.G. Wells’ Time Traveler. Wang passed through a landscape that seemed extraordinary and contradictory; puzzling it out, he wrote: “On the one hand, it is conservative and on the other hand, it is innovative. There seems to be some contradiction here. … The use of human ability to conquer nature is one of the values of the American tradition, so here innovation and tradition are not contradictory.” 

Following the Opium Wars during the late Qing Dynasty (1636-1912), China had an official policy of “中体西用” (“Chinese learning as substance, Western learning for application”) — Western technology and Chinese essence. But what if technology becomes a way of life and thus a culture all its own? What if the spirit of St. Louis, when imported to China, transformed China in its most profound essence? 

As a scion of China’s Cultural Revolution, Wang would have been familiar with the Maoist idea that “all contradictory things are interconnected; not only do they coexist in a single entity in given conditions, but in other given conditions, they also transform themselves into each other.” With that in mind, he ruminated in Atlanta that “Coca-Cola directs [an] army of one million people around the world. When you think about it, does it make political sense? Or have a broader meaning?” 

I am an American, and Wang’s question about why America exists is one that I have never been able to answer. In fact, it may not exist in any meaningful sense — certainly not in the emphatic sense that Wang’s question suggested. 

Accustomed to hierarchically ordered, planned societies, Chinese observers of America are forever searching for the conspiracy, the real leaders. They cannot believe that a society can keep rolling along as chaotically as America seems to do. For them, America has always been an idea first and foremost: an organizing principle that subsumes an incredible diversity of human experiences and types. The actual America contains both form and content, both capital and labor, but the Chinese only sought to learn from capital. In much of the Chinese intellectual universe, the American model has transformed from being a subject to emulate into a father who must be argued with in order for China to realize its own true identity. 

After Donald Trump’s election, the historian David Runciman wrote that if the U.S. is suffering a crisis of democracy, it is a midlife crisis. While ostensibly ancient, a China recovering from what Chinese political scientist Gan Yang calls the “creative destruction” of the Cultural Revolution is an adolescent society that now must emerge from its American shadow. Thirty years after Wang’s trip, the America that inspired China to change in its own image has become a baneful indication of what not to do, a monument to aristocratic liberalism’s propensity to overtake democracy. To many Chinese, too often these days, America smells like gun smoke: a country whose leaders and population are united by a tendency to random outbursts of violence.

Chinese intellectuals such as Eric X. Li argue that today’s China, with leaders whose domestic approval purportedly tops 90%, is far more democratic than the U.S., at least in the sense that leaders relate to the masses on shared values. Judging by the more than a hundred million subscribers of Li’s media project, Guancha — a Chinese digital media outlet known for a nationalist slant on current affairs, the only privately-owned media in China that functions in this way — these views are widely shared. 

Is the entire population of China experiencing some kind of fake reality, or did the country’s leaders really create a modern, technologically advanced nation with a political structure built on “Chinese essence” rather than American-style democracy? And when can China define itself on its own terms without the crutch of the American other to revere or despise?

III. A Universal Institution 

“The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.”
— Bill Clinton

Philip Tinari, a son of suburban Philadelphia, arrived in Beijing in late August 2001, a golden month at the end of history. His language program at Tsinghua University began on September 10. He told me about his experience of the next day: Something seemed to be happening, and he rushed to the television, hearing a crash that was surprisingly loud. The TV was on mute. He watched the twin towers go down in flames while next to him — in the neighborhood that became Zhongguancun, sometimes called “China’s Silicon Valley” — massive skyscrapers were going up into the sky, creating construction noise that felt like China’s national anthem in those years, the omnipresent rhythms of GDP growth. 

China’s entry into the World Trade Organization followed two months later, and its bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics had been announced a few months previously. September 11 notwithstanding, China was heavily invested in recreating the world of 1980s and 90s America, implementing what leaders like Wang had seen on trips abroad. 

American leaders thought the U.S. would succeed at remaking China in its own image, a process bankrolled by Chinese industrialization and factories. Eventually, American globalists believed, much as Marx once did, that the people would no longer need a state — the Chinese Communist Party’s political alterity would simply melt away when confronted by “Friends” and McDonald’s. Just like how the U.S.S.R., in the words of the novelist Victor Pelevin, “improved so much that it ceased to exist.” 

Having today passed through the hallucinogenic white heat of capitalism, China remains recognizably itself, but there is one class that voluntarily Americanized. They are the middle class, and they are the audience for Tinari’s blockbuster shows at the Beijing and Shanghai museums he directs.

Much as I did, Tinari found China at the time of his arrival to be a space of radical freedom, a society in flux lending itself to individual experimentation. His new life was inspired by the radical choices made by the first Chinese artists he got to know — the generation that had come up in the 80s and 90s who saw art as a space for freedom and expression, and maybe for the betterment of the wider world. 

For a decade, he led a bohemian lifestyle that shaded into prosperity, writing for Artforum, founding the bilingual magazine LEAP (where I was a contributing editor for a while), curating shows here and there, exploring the new world that was emerging. In 2011, he became the head curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), China’s premier contemporary art institution. Reflecting the country’s tentative steps into globalization, the UCCA started with foreign art collectors amid a Beijing art world whose patrons were often diplomats and ambassadors. 

At a certain point, the balance shifted to the point that the market for Chinese contemporary art became dominated by locals seeking to curate their own world, rather than foreigners seeking to enter Chinese history. In June 2016, the UCCA was put up for sale by its Belgian owners. A long period of restructuring began. The worldview that the UCCA embodied was a relic of its founding nine months before the 2008 Olympics — which was a “special moment of China’s maximal openness,” as Tinari put it. “We had a responsibility to keep on going,” he said. “And I felt like there was a space for us to do that.”

In the vast and lumbering historical structure that is China, people like Tinari construct their own ideal communities within preset boundaries. “I believe that the ultimate error of the idea that economic liberalization would inevitably bring about political reform should not discount the gains in individual possibility that it empowered during the decades while it was operative,” Tinari told me. “There was a very deep transfer not just of technology but of self-conception that has influenced so much of what has followed. Despite it all, people in China today are more free to imagine and create a life for themselves than they were 20 or even 10 years ago. I didn’t think it would be possible to open the largest Warhol show China has ever seen just after the Party celebrated its hundredth birthday, but it was. And the fact that it was should tell us something.”

In his speech welcoming China into the W.T.O., Bill Clinton envisioned the ensuing economic changes would propel a generation of Americans (like Tinari and myself) into China to pass on the blueprints of a universal human society structured by liberalism: The museum, the university, the corporation. But even then, something was rotten in the state of Chimerica.

The percentage of the U.S. population that can access the middle-class way of life that Wang observed in the late 80s has been shrinking, in part due to the breakdown of the Chimerican economic model. As the economist Li Xunlei pointed out recently, China’s share of global GDP growth went from 3% 60 years ago to 15% today, while America’s decreased from 39% to 24%. The figures vary depending on the source, but the share lost by the U.S. was more or less the share gained by China.  

Sufficient wealth has been transferred from the U.S. to China that the Chinese now insist on managing themselves, and America has a glut of educated globalists — the would-be colonial administrators of ideology — that NYU Shanghai, the UCCA and the Shanghai branch of the American Chamber of Commerce are too small to absorb. Anticipating a global empire, America trained a significant percentage of its population to be aristocrats. Upon reaching adulthood, these scribes discovered that instead of a world to manage, they have a rebellious and unmanageable American interior that does not accept their ideological dominance. 

Ask not whether Tinari or I have considered returning to New York; we probably considered this idea every other day, especially during the closed border years. But when you do the math, being an observer free to move and act on a continent in the process of radical transformation is irresistible — even or perhaps especially now that we know that Beijing isn’t going to become New York anytime soon, that UCCA will never become a Chinese MoMA. Maybe our dreams now stretch beyond the boundaries of New York and MoMA anyway. 

Even as many of our friends and neighbors back in America are experiencing downward social and economic mobility, Tinari has, like the Jesuits of the late Qing Dynasty, hosted foreign dignitaries like Emmanuel Macron at the UCCA. He has transformed from an emissary of American soft power into a representative of Chinese soft power. In recent years, the UCCA has hosted monumental shows by Xu Bing, Cao Fei, Liu Xiaodong, Huang Rui and others. It has created a contemporary Chinese canon in a meaningful way, entering into the realm of the Chinese imaginary. 

IV. American Chamber

“The West’s universality was in truth no more than a moment (keiki) in Asia’s own ‘formation as subject.’” 
— Yoshimi Takeuchi

In late June 2022, the director of the China Institute at Fudan University, Zhang Weiwei, led a Politburo study session that was later reproduced and broadcast on TV to warn against the “spiritual Americans” who have internalized American aesthetic modes of thought:

Zhang was essentially warning against the ideological apparatuses of American soft power: television, news media, art. Western technology, including its vision of a society in which citizens are consumers, is fine. But a Chinese political essence — the CCP as a sort of social backbone — must combat spiritual Americanism, even its banal clichés, which are arguably what made America a “universal” culture. 

Zhang is a figure in Eric Li’s Guancha intellectual network. Li was educated at Berkeley and Stanford and is friendly with all sorts of American elite insiders. When I asked Li why he didn’t think China should follow the American social model, he scoffed. Not even Americans like what’s happening in their country, he said. Why should we copy their failures in ours?

In the U.S., the conflict with China that has emerged over the past five years is often narrated as one of values — democracy versus autocracy. The Chimerican economists Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein argued in their 2020 book “Trade Wars Are Class Wars” that it is better understood as a conflict in which workers and the means of production (primarily in China) haggle over terms and capital with executives at multinational corporations (primarily in the U.S.). “A conflict … between the very rich and everyone else,” as the authors put it.

For years, Chinese elites welcomed foreign capitalists and regulations intended to accelerate the smooth flow of capital — that was what the W.T.O. was all about. But the constant mandatory Marxist study sessions must have woken Chinese government officials up to the fact that the Sino-U.S. relationship has a class component — one side operates the machines, the other prints the banknotes. 

This tended to marginalize Chinese economic captains, like the bosses of state-owned enterprises and local monopolies, as well as American workers. The cuckolded parties, however, objected, and this transformed American and Chinese politics. Xi Jinping’s marquee “anti-corruption” campaign was a partly way of taking back control on behalf of CCP party bosses and directors of state-owned enterprises; as he recently commented, “By its nature, capital pursues profits, and if it is not regulated and restrained, it will bring immeasurable harm to economic and social development.” Meanwhile in America, the rise of anti-China politics accelerated by Trump is now mostly bipartisan, centering around the negative impact of trade with China on American workers — even though, way back when, the decision-makers who created this system were mostly American.

In the coming decades, Chinese leaders will have to figure out how to compel American capital to come to China on terms that the CCP finds acceptable. American financiers goggle at the size of the market when the millions of Chinese who haven’t yet bought cars, sneakers or hamburgers start to. 

Chinese economists like Justin Yifu Lin believe that the transnational capital that uses Manhattan as its headquarters won’t be able to reject a consumer class bigger than the one at home, even if liberal values — an independent civil society, elections that outside finance can influence, a freely floating currency — don’t exist there. Chinese working people, meanwhile, like Andrei Platonov’s railway worker, “understand that a paradise has been built and exists all around him, but he is himself unable to see or sense it.” 

V. Anfu Road 

“[In my dream I was] closed up in a kind of Oriental folly. I could see the gleaming of treasures, shawls and tapestries. A landscape illuminated by the moon appeared to me through the grille of the door, and I thought I could see the outlines of tree trunks and rocks. … Gradually, a bluish light penetrated the folly and brought forth bizarre images. Then I thought that I found myself in a huge charnel-house where universal history was written in strokes of blood.”
— Gérard de Nerval

On a humid evening recently, I went to visit Eric Li; an on-the-spot COVID test was required to enter his compound, and I found him out in the garden, a bottle of wine from his friends in Napa Valley on the table, peacocks angrily cawing in the night. Peacock owners, he explained, need a minimum of three birds for it to make sense — only the males have dramatic plumage, but for them to show it, both a female and a male rival must be around. Without rivalry, there’s no need to show off, and males will take a lone female for granted. 

While the views expressed in Guancha may be extreme, Li seemed mild in person. China must resist cultural Americanization, he said, because China’s system offers both material and spiritual sustenance to the Chinese population — a fact, he added, that is confirmed by independent surveys and by anybody who’s been to the country. For the most part, Chinese people, complacently enough, like China, in the way that characters in a John Updike novel like America. 

But America today is no longer what Updike envisioned. “America,” he wrote in 1979, “is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.” Forty years later, only the first part is still true. 

Li’s China, which is hiding just around the corner (of the upcoming Communist Party Congress), is one of solid families, of small businesses that are flourishing, of citizens who have bank accounts, use computers, work as engineers and support a growing family of sons who enjoy gym class and daughters who excel at Chinese. Structurally, it looks a lot more like an idealized American suburban past than any moment in Chinese history — like Utah, with low crime rates, great (though racially homogenous) demographics and a shared belief in something that, even if outsiders think it’s crazy, provides social unity. 

If this sounds conservative, it is, although it’s not clear that the traditions conserved are specifically Chinese; rather, they pertain to the vision of a middle-class life pioneered in America shortly after the Second World War, before the rupture of 1968. After January 6, 2021, a Chinese banker I know asked me about the difference between blue states and red states. As I tried to explain, not really knowing what to say, he laughed. All of China is a red state, he said. The collectivist impulse that American populists point to as a paradise lost is a paradise present in China today.

During Shanghai’s lockdown, Li managed to secure the right to take long walks every day. Twice he walked to the Bund and back; other times to Fudan University or the Hongqiao railway station or to obscure and forgotten neighborhoods. He was looking at the face of his lover while she was sleeping. 

Despite the oppressive restrictions for most people, China this summer simmered with hopes for the future, a sense that certain things needed to change. But unlike previous times like this, America didn’t seem like the answer to any of the questions. Increasingly, China is not following in the footsteps of others, but charting its own path.

I asked Li to explain what China’s plan was. In his view, U.S. hegemony is rooted in the dollar’s reserve currency status, the innovations of Silicon Valley and the American military. Of the three, the dollar is the most easily displaced. Some say that’s unlikely, which might be true. But being irreplaceable doesn’t mean something is robust — not if it is managed by irresponsible idiots. I didn’t ask about the composition of Li’s portfolio. 

Guancha recently ran an article about how China cannot become a second America, that it would be a betrayal. I challenged Li: So let’s say China builds a few aircraft carriers, convinces a few foreign countries to use the digital RMB, gets a few tech champions. It’s plausible enough, I said to Li, but what’s it for? Isn’t it an inferior version of America, which was not good enough in its original format?

Guancha author and University of Chicago-trained intellectual Gan Yang has sought to reconcile Chinese traditions like the elitist or meritocratic element of Confucianism and the Maoist tradition of equality and justice with the Dengist (American) tradition of markets and competition. China doesn’t have to choose between modernization and Chinese-ness, Gan has argued. It needn’t accept Western modernity in order to gain the technological and financial benefits that coincided with it. 

Gan was sent down to Daqing, the Siberian oil city, when he was 18 years old. There, as the historians William Sima and Tang Xiaobing have written, he had an experience that left him with a lasting suspicion of the ways that “liberal discourse in China evinces a pervading concern, born of a kind of intellectual conservatism (保守主义), for promoting freedom for intellectual elites and the upper classes at the expense of democracy and equality for the masses.” 

The “democracy” that Li or Gan talk about isn’t votes for candidates, who in any case represent the interests of capital, but some sort of syncretic vision of an organized society structured around the Confucian values of the family and indexed to material prosperity, whose aspiration to sovereignty is defined as not being told what to do by the usual out-of-touch global elites, the scourge of populists from Ohio to Moscow. 

“In fact,” Gan wrote in 1999, “many of the intellectuals who pontificate about liberalism today are talking about liberty for the bosses and liberty for the intellectuals; that is, liberty for the wealthy, liberty for the strong and liberty for the capable. At the same time, they neglect even to mention that the starting point for the liberal theory of rights is the rights of all, and on this point it must be emphasized that this means particularly those who are unable to protect their own rights: the weak, the unfortunate, the poor, the hired hands and the uneducated.” 

Hegelianism without Daqing, Gan concluded, is meaningless — in other words, a democracy needs the full participation of the entire population. Democracy must be a vehicle that everybody can travel in, perhaps especially those who cannot walk by themselves. The model whereby Hyde Park, the University of Chicago’s picturesque neighborhood, coexists with Cottage Grove, the rougher neighborhood just south of there, doesn’t offer much for a China searching for radical social equality, the prerequisite to the collective life that Li sees as the antidote to the alienation of modernity. 

For Gan, as for Li, democracy and liberalism are fundamentally in opposition, with an eternal conflict between the masses and the aristocrats. A lesson extracted from Tocqueville, this has obvious implications for Chimerica, the aristocratic class of which traverses the two continents. (Pre-COVID, Apple would book 50 business class seats from San Francisco to Shanghai every day as a general policy.) 

The aristocrats for whom liberalism was an affect — John Locke’s “society of property owners” — opposed the party-state and the revolution. Of course they did, Li reasoned. As he writes in a forthcoming book (that I am editing and publishing through Palgrave Macmillan): “Most modern liberal political institutions in the rest of the West were designed as much to check the will of the people as to enable it.” The revolution was intended for Chinese people to stand up against landlords, not for the landlords to take Thomas Jefferson-style gentleman farmer attitudes to the world, with grand tours of the old continent supported by slave labor. 

In truth, the Anglo-Saxon moment of individualism — an edifice built, above all, on slave labor, the subjection of women and certain media and built environments that privilege a form of solitude and reflection called “romantic” — may be passing, replaced by the social form that China is creating. The individual is, in one sense, an aristocrat like Tocqueville or Joseph de Maistre, perhaps Wang Huning. But an individual also harvests an aristocrat’s coffee beans, prints his paper, cleans the tangerine peels off his floor, irons his crisp white shirts and polishes his dirty wine glasses. 

For every individual enabled to realize his true identity under liberalism as it is construed today, there are 10 ghostly individuals constrained to do the lord’s bidding by economic structures that are apparently immutable and impersonal. During the high tide of Chimerica, American lives were served by distant and unknown armies of Chinese workers. No more, insist Chinese nationalists — now is the time to live for ourselves.

VI. At The Wudaokou Forum

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
— Milton Friedman

The real test of any system of thought is to provide an alternative. China isn’t that. Not yet. With the property bubble slowly bursting, China needs to find a new direction, whether by elevating more of its population into the wider economy or through technological innovations that can be exported to the Global South. 

At the height of Shanghai’s lockdown, with bad news for China’s export-driven economy coming every day, a colloquium of Chinese economists assembled in Beijing to discuss what to do next. Ray Dalio joined by Zoom. Yu Yongding, the influential economist, fretted about Chinese vulnerability to American financial warfare. Liu Shijin of the Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) asked: “How can the pressure to address climate change be transformed into a global engine of innovation and growth?” 

Others, like David Daokui Li, advocated the creation of a unified national market to stimulate the growth of the middle class. The hard line toward America expressed on Zhang Weiwei’s TV show is not taken very seriously in these quarters. As the political scientist Zheng Yongnian (who didn’t attend the forum) told me: “The Chinese view on the U.S. is not unified. The view of the East rising and West declining is popular among nationalistic groups (from the leadership to the masses), but many people (including me) continue to be positive on the U.S.”

What these Chinese economists have been realizing is that a global government already exists, and it is called capitalism. Ultimately, China’s sovereignty is only realized within this system, whose market logic assesses every person, place and thing in the cold light of use and value, far away from banalities about “collective” and “spirit” and “soul” and entirely within the realm anchored by the U.S. dollar. 

China’s techno-authoritarianism mixes various elements from America’s past 70 years to try to create a universal society capable of providing a basic floor to the standard of living of over a billion people. Implicitly (or visibly in the plans of Chinese brands like Huawei, Haier or Geely) this is possible to extend to the Global South. Ethiopians, Indonesians and Mexicans can stop trying to migrate to the U.S.; they can live well and earn a good income in their home countries.

Dominated by capital, the U.S. political system gravitates towards oligarchic liberty. Dominated by working classes, China’s system tends toward a chauvinistic egalitarianism. 

Amid Russia’s war on Ukraine, the real estate theorist Zhao Yanjing wrote:

For Chinese thinkers like him, America stands against itself, in 2022 just as surely as when Wang visited in the 80s. But if it is difficult for them to explore China’s own internal class contradictions, it is because, by definition, all of the male Party members are in the ruling structure, the 体制. 

Today, an adolescent critical attitude of America — the “primary contradiction” of socialism with Chinese characteristics — is a reassuring source of comfort for Chinese intellectuals. But sooner or later, they will have to build a Chinese-style democracy, Chinese-style rule of law and a Chinese-style middle class, instead of decrying the collapse of their American antecedents. Reform in China will take an unexpected form — certainly, it will not reiterate the American ancien régime in Asia — but come it will. The hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens who are waiting for their dreams to come true will insist upon it.

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