Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I’m joined again by Afra Wang, the Bay Area-based writer behind the AI newsletter Concurrent, who was last on the show in January to talk about her Wired piece on The Morning Star of Lingao and China’s “Industrial Party.” She’s back with two new pieces of on-the-ground reportage that get beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism: her New Yorker Lede piece on Liangzhu, the town outside Hangzhou where laid-off and burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe code in each other’s living rooms (and where AI and BaZi fortune-telling have become strangely intimate), and a forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s sprawling, lucrative, and largely unregulated “learn AI, get rich” education industry. We talk about why 93% of Chinese respondents tell Gallup that AI will mostly help their country, what that number conceals, and whether what looks like optimism is sometimes closer to acceptance.Afra’s pieces discussed in this episode:What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom — The New Yorker, September 23, 2026[Her forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s AI education industry — [LINK TK, expected after October 12]]You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel — Wired, January 2026, and our January 2026 Sinica conversation about itSubscribe to Afra’s newsletter, ConcurrentAlso mentioned:Optimism About AI Globally Widespread Despite Uneven Adoption — the Microsoft-Gallup surveyChina’s OpenClaw gold rush — MIT Technology ReviewDamien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next DecadeEvan Osnos, Crazy English — The New Yorker, April 2008Lian Si 廉思, Journey Without a Map 无图之旅：一代青年的自我寻路Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction — Sinica, 201606:51 – Walking into Liangzhu’s living rooms: the San Francisco déjà vu, and the grimness beneath the techno-optimist story the West wants to hear10:14 – Setting the scene: a real-estate developer’s utopian village, Neolithic ruins, Xi Jinping’s intervention, and a “road-to-food ratio” low enough to build real community17:30 – Child of the layoffs or child of DeepSeek? The post-COVID “ego death” of Chinese tech — and a quibble about the word “crackdown”21:42 – Master Qi and the living room as a social form: what Liangzhu offers that a Beijing office or a WeChat group can’t24:11 – What the 93% really tells us: optimism, acceptance, or FOMO when you can’t protest a data center29:26 – “Westerners get restless when they can’t protest; Chinese people get restless when they haven’t found a teacher”: qiúzhī 求知, meritocracy as religion, and the company called Shēngcái Yǒudào 生财有道32:48 – Inside Shengcai Youdao: the “prosperity evangelist” conference room, the ladder from ordinary member to CEO class, Mr. Tree’s Hilton seminars, and who’s actually paying 3,000 yuan a year37:44 – Scam or ladder? The state’s war on the “paid knowledge” mess, Dragon Ball referral credits, and the security guard running Claude Code on his phone during his shift41:03 – How it compares to the Valley’s course-sellers; selling hope and upward mobility, echoes of Crazy English, and “the prosperity gospel with Chinese characteristics”45:30 – “Take us to Silicon Valley!”: what the West means to a room of one-person companies building apps for the U.S. App Store47:18 – Xiao Kai, the 25-year-old AI filmmaker from Heilongjiang: murder mysteries as model-friendly plots, government commissions, WaytoAGI, and the local-government AIGC fever55:28 – Lian Si’s Journey Without a Map: a Party insider tells young people to “make peace with the ordinary” while everyone else says learn AI or be left behind59:59 – FateTell and the gray zone of AI fortune-telling: tarot slot machines in Shenzhen, crystal shops, and Liangzhu as “China’s Sedona”1:04:13 – Levy, the BaZi cosmology, Sam Altman’s chart, and Kaiser plays the skeptic: the Yijing as “humanity’s first statistical decision model,” the Whole Earth Catalog, and New Age re-imported from the West1:12:27 – Do they actually believe it? Speech fasting, BaZi compatibility in hiring, and Chinese syncretism at work1:14:45 – When the local government falls in love with the scene: Crazy Thursday, incubators, “new quality productive forces,” and why Liangzhu’s peak may already be over1:19:42 – Are Chinese people really cavalier about AI safety? Pragmatism, scarce compute, trust in state capacity, the blind spots of EA — and a preview of Afra’s third piece on China’s “industrial AI slop”Paying It Forward:Zilan Qian, a GovAI fellow researching AI governance in China who writes the Substack Until Zilan Finds a Better Name and is a must-read on how AI-safety concepts like “loss of control” translate (or don’t) into the Chinese context. Her most widely shared piece: Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends.Recommendations:Afra: Ken Liu’s new collection, The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, whose title borrows a metaphor from Ursula K. Le Guin.Kaiser: Marilynne Robinson’s Home, the second of the four Gilead novels — set in the same few weeks of 1956 as Gilead but seen from inside the Boughton household, as Glory and her prodigal brother Jack circle a secret the book doesn’t name until nearly the end.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week I sat down with Gloria Xiong, Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College, and Jessica Chen Weiss, the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, to discuss their new Foreign Affairs essay, "How China Found Its Most Potent Weapon: The Real History of Beijing's Rare Earth Dominance." The story everyone tells is one of foresight — a master plan hatched by Deng Xiaoping and now coming to fruition. Gloria and Jessica argue the reality was far messier: reform-era export mania, environmental catastrophe, defiant local governments, scarcity anxiety, and a lesson in chokepoint weaponization that Beijing learned from Washington. Getting the story wrong, they argue, feeds an action-reaction spiral that neither side started and neither fully controls — and with the Busan truce expiring in November, the stakes could hardly be higher.09:31 — "The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths": what Deng Xiaoping actually said, and how a quote got recruited for a story he wasn't telling12:33 — Why the master plan narrative is so irresistible across the partisan spectrum in Washington15:40 — The cheap and dirty origins: reform-era export mania, thousands of small mines, and rare earths sold "at the price of cabbage and dirt"19:06 — The West as co-author of the chokepoint: offshoring the pollution, and the stockpile that was never built21:53 — Beijing's struggle to control its own industry: quotas, "crime rings," and the partially failed 2002 consolidation25:13 — September 2010: what really happened with the "embargo" against Japan, and why Beijing may have learned about it from Japanese customs28:47 — Fans and fire hoses: how bottom-up nationalism can commit Beijing to coercive postures it didn't choose32:13 — The debate inside China after 2010: protectionists versus Hong Feng's warning against using rare earths as "political chips"35:44 — The 2015 WTO ruling: China complied — was it a rule-taker, or did it simply lack the tools to do anything else?38:06 — Learning from Washington: Huawei, the Export Control Law, the China Rare Earth Group, and what distinguishes learning from planning40:24 — The 2022–2024 ledger: what's the evidence for an action-reaction spiral beyond the timeline?44:25 — April 2025: coercion or bureaucratic pileup? Thirty licensing officials and a 74% collapse in magnet exports47:46 — October 2025: the extraterritorial rule that mirrored the Foreign Direct Product Rule, and the Busan truce52:32 — The countdown to November: hawks in both capitals, "mutually assured disruption," and Xi's coming state visit55:29 — The limits of leverage on both sides: yttrium, Japan's diversification, and China's own resource insecurity58:32 — From crime rings to two national champions: has the Wild West been tamed, and are central-local relations "fractured"?01:02:21 — Prescriptions: positive reciprocity, licensing Chinese technology, and managing interdependence rather than escaping it01:05:51 — Everyone else: Myanmar, Congo, Australia, and how Beijing thinks about third countries that don't want to choosePaying It ForwardGloria name-checked Wendy Leutert of Indiana University, who works on the reform and global expansion of China's state-owned enterprises and, with Isaac Kardon, on Chinese investment in global ports; Ning Leng of Georgetown University, author of the award-winning Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party State in China; and Ketian Zhang, who has written extensively on Chinese coercion and maritime disputes.Jessica first acknowledged the scholars whose research the essay drew on but couldn't cite in Foreign Affairs: Cory Combs of Trivium China, Arthur Kroeber, Henry Farrell, Duleep Singh, and Julie Klinger. She also flagged Jack Zhang, who runs the Trade War Lab at the University of Kansas, and Kyle Jaros and Sara Newland, who are writing a book on subnational economic statecraft — work that has shaped her thinking on disaggregating what the United States wants, not just what China wants.RecommendationsGloria: Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer — a book she first read in a college writing seminar and returned to as she heads back into the classroom.Jessica: The Scientist and the Spy by Mara Hvistendahl, which she uses to close her SAIS seminar on Chinese foreign policy as a reminder about proportionality; and Ann Patchett's new novel Whistler.Kaiser: Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, the 1972 Pulitzer winner — a novel about mining camps in the American West and one of the most fully realized characters in American fiction.Also mentioned: Jessica's recent interview with Daniel Kurtz-Phelan on The Foreign Affairs Interview podcast, and her interview in The Monitor, the newsletter of the Carter Center's U.S.-China Perception Monitor.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.