The Schneider clan will be heading to the Bay Area from September 9 through the rest of the month. If you're interested in meeting up or doing a house swap with a two-bedroom in Manhattan, or just happen to have an empty apartment that can fit a few adults and a very cute baby, please do reach out to jordan@chinatalk.media.
Dan Wang at long last makes his solo ChinaTalk debut! We’re here to discuss and celebrate his first book, Breakneck.
We get into…
Engineering states vs lawyerly societies,
The competing legacies of the 1980s in China, One Child Policy and Tiananmen vs intellectual debate, cultural vibrancy, and rock and roll,
Methods of knowing China, from the People’s Daily and Seeking Truth to on-the-ground research,
How to compare the values of China’s convenient yet repressive society with the chaotic pluralism of the USA,
What Li Qiang’s career post-Shanghai lockdowns can tell us about the value of loyalty vs competence in Xi’s China.
Jordan Schneider: So Dan, you chose Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible translation to sit next to your book. What can the Bible tell us about modern China?
Dan Wang: Something I wonder about is thinking less about the Old Testament, but more about the New Testament and the Catholic Church in particular. The Catholic Church and the Communist Party are very similar organizations, and it might be the case that the CCP and the Catholic Church will be enduring institutions that we’ll still find around 100 years from now — maybe even 500 years from now.
It’s no accident that the CCP resembles the Catholic Church, partly because, according to Kerry Brown, the Communist Party has spent an immense amount of effort trying to understand the Catholic Church. The Communist Party isn’t simply copying the Catholic Church, though. I understand the Communist Party to be a cross between the Catholic Church and the Sicilian Mafia, with this incredible sense of omertà and a very strong understanding that you can’t only be thugs. One has to build a church; one has to have an ideology. What we have is a very powerful Catholic Church in China that also has the omertà — that also has the gangsterism.
Jordan Schneider: One of the things I most admire about this book is how it looks forward multiple decades in a way that doesn’t bore me — unlike when someone like Peter Zeihan does it, talking about demographic destiny or geography. The way you incorporate different data points and pieces of context that you’ve absorbed over your years on this planet gives it weight that I take very seriously.
However, my critique is that you may have over-indexed on Xi and the Xi era, which at some point is going to end. Many of the forward-looking projections you have on the Chinese side are premised on whatever comes after Xi looking like what Xi was. Dan, how do you think about that issue?
Dan Wang: It’s interesting that you start by saying I may be over-indexed on Xi, because one strain of criticism I’ve seen is that maybe I’m under-indexed on Xi. In my central thesis of the engineering state, one can question whether Xi is really an engineer. On one hand, he is because he has a degree in chemical engineering from Tsinghua, but he also has a doctorate in Marxist economics, also from Tsinghua. There’s been debate about whether Xi is an engineer in the hydraulic mold set by Hu Jintao.
It’s very valid to consider that the China of the future will not look like the China of the present. In fact, we can guarantee it. But I have no confidence about what China of the future will look like in a post-Xi world. It could be that Xi Jinping represents someone like Chun Doo-hwan, South Korea’s dictator who intensified Park Chung-hee’s rule and triggered disaster as a result. Maybe someone who comes after Xi is an intensification of Xi in all aspects. Maybe it’s someone who looks quite different.
Given that we have to draw lines forward to some extent from what we have right now, I’m reluctant to assign a big rupture in China’s political traditions based on the idea that whoever replaces Xi might not end up looking like him.
Jordan Schneider: The story you focus on from the late 70s and 80s — which was a time in CCP history when you see more vibrancy, more lawyerly energy coming into the party — you focused on the most horrific, repressive arc of that period, which was the one-child policy and all the state invasion and suppression required to execute it.
But there are other stories you can tell about the late 70s and 80s that speak to many of the challenges you see in China today and project into China’s future. There’s the idea of a society that can create interesting cultural goods, party leadership that distrusts the people, bottom-up political innovation, economic innovation beyond what the state controls — and the state being more understanding of that than maybe it is today. How do you read that history beyond the universe that the one-child policy created?
Dan Wang: The 1980s were certainly China’s most interesting decade, and maybe it’s understudied and under-theorized. As you note, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about the one-child policy, and I didn’t quite grasp how brutal its enforcement was, partly because it was a while ago. The peak enforcement happened in the early 80s and then another wave in the late 90s, before both of our lifetimes. Much of the one-child policy enforcement focused mostly in rural areas, and we don’t have as many rural perspectives relative to elite urban perspectives.
That was one of the big stories of the 1980s. But you’re right — there were many other big stories. The 1980s is cited by many people, especially of my parents’ generation, as a decade when every question could have been asked inside Chinese society, inside the Communist Party. This was the decade of rock and roll. This was the decade when people really believed that China would have some degree of political liberalization.
Those questions kept persisting and might even have had a resolution different from how we know it resolved in June 1989, when the forces of liberalism were comprehensively crushed and the party took a pretty different direction. We could draw a different line from the 1980s, and maybe we should. But given that it ended with a really dramatic act of political repression and given that the conservative reformers — perhaps represented by Deng Xiaoping as well as Li Peng — had the upper hand, maybe the story is still more about politics than creativity.
Jordan Schneider: You have these two lines that capture the inverse of what the 1980s felt like. Someone you met in Chiang Mai who left China told you that contemporary China “feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower… To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.” You also write that, “After six years in China, I missed pluralism. It’s wonderful for me to be in America now, in a society made up of many voices, not only an official register meant to speak over all the rest.”
The flip side of those two lines captures some spirit of what the 80s were like. I buy your argument that one side has won. They’ve been winning for the past 40-plus years. But even with the White Paper movement, there are still undercurrents that seem impossible to disappear.
Dan Wang: Absolutely. The currents are always out there. This is part of what makes people like Ian Johnson’s work really interesting. When he documents something like Mao’s quote that “a single spark can start a prairie fire (星星之火，可以燎原),” he’s absolutely right. It has become really difficult to comprehensively and decisively eliminate the forces of creativity — that desire for a different future. That’s always there and always worth supporting.
《三湾改编》by Xu Baozhong 许宝中, an oil painting commemorating the Sanwan Reorganization of party control over the army. Source.
Jordan Schneider: As an aside, I went into this book thinking you wouldn’t tell me many new things — that I would get your takes, but not much fresh information. The one-child policy in particular was the section that I hadn’t fully internalized. The magnitude and personal horror attached to what that meant for tens of millions of people was striking. This goes to show why everyone should read the book and not just listen to all the podcasts Dan’s going to be on over the next few weeks.
It’s a book written for a mass-market audience, but it’s also something that every single listener of ChinaTalk will derive something new, unique, and insightful from — whether it’s from your historical work, the memoir sections, the travelogues, or the big thoughts.
It’s a remarkable achievement, and I want to congratulate you on it.
Dan Wang: Thank you, Jordan. I’ve used different registers, and you picked up on exactly that. My favorite chapter to write was unexpectedly the one-child policy, because I didn’t really expect that the emotional arc of the one-child policy still produces so much anger in people. Many normally temperate people in China would be driven to a froth of rage when they remember that era. We all know a lot about Zero COVID, which is also one of the social engineering projects I write about. But the one-child policy is understudied and perhaps under-theorized.
Jordan Schneider: This is striking because we have many folks from the mainland who moved here, and there are many Chinese Americans too. Chinese Americans have siblings, but mainlanders who’ve moved here over the past 30 years basically don’t. It’s wild to have an entire generation — for literally all of human history, you have total fertility rates above 2 — and for it to go below that in such an intrusive and brutal way. Not in a slow fade you’re seeing in South Korea, but something truly heart-wrenching.
Dan Wang: I had a really interesting conversation with someone who read that chapter recently — someone who was adopted himself in the US Pacific Northwest. We’re of similar ages. One of the things he told me when he read my chapter was that when he was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, he would sometimes go to gatherings with other adopted children. A majority of the adopted children you could find in the US Pacific Northwest were Chinese girls. This is another one of those things that unless you have some experience here, is much less vivid than you might imagine.
Jordan Schneider: It’s the ghosts of all these lives that weren’t lived. What was it, something like 40 million?
Dan Wang: That’s the best estimate right now. We still don’t have a really comprehensive consensus on exactly how many lives the one-child policy cost, partly because the data is sketchy and it’s difficult to draw these hypotheticals. According to the Communist Party, state propaganda claims that the one-child policy averted something like 400 million births. That seems to be subject to strange extrapolation that not all demographers accept.
Some demographers say that the one-child policy was pure brutality without substantially affecting the birth rate in China. Even on this crucial period — and I acknowledge this in my book — it has become difficult to figure out exactly how many births the one-child policy era averted. But based on some of the more accepted scholarly estimates, there are 40 million Chinese girls. The femicide produced by the one-child policy was very intense, with families forced to keep boys and forced to discard their infant girls.
Jordan Schneider: I don’t know if I have a transition for that. It makes me think of the Bible. I have a new one-year-old, which you were just holding for a while, and reading that chapter in the context of now being a parent hit differently. You tell these truly horrific stories — you only give two paragraphs about some bureaucrat who was the “worst performing” when it came to births and decided “we’re not having births for a month.” There were abortions on the delivery table.
It felt cliché where everyone says, “Oh, the way you read the news and see the world is going to change when you have a child.” That chapter was maybe one of the first times where I experienced a piece of history or literature that sat with me in a different way. I don’t know if I want to thank you for that?
Dan Wang: Well, I thank you, Jordan, for letting me hold this extremely cute one-year-old. Part of what made this chapter difficult to write was that my wife suffered a miscarriage, coincidentally, just as I was writing this chapter. To think that it was a matter of state policy to have conducted over 300 million abortions — which is the official statistic from the National Health Commission — as well as many forced sterilizations, the brutality meted out against overwhelmingly female bodies. That was a challenge to think about, to try to place myself back in the 80s.
Methods of Knowing China
Jordan Schneider: …And we’re going to hard pivot. Methods of knowing. You’ve worked at a similar job that I had, covering Chinese policy at a very close, full-time clip. You’ve traveled around, you’ve read extensively, you slowed down and hung out in Michigan, looked at a pretty view, and wrote a book. You explore different levels in this book as well. I guess the answer is all of the above, right? Because it’s your revealed preference. But what are the limits of those different methods of exploring the world that you’ve used that ended up creating this book?
Dan Wang: There’s never enough information and sourcing about anything to satisfy even the most niche-specific question. This is something you know as an analyst or researcher. No matter how narrowly you try to define your research task, you’ll find that the literature is endless. Many people have covered this, and yet what they have is also totally incomplete.
I didn’t try to be overly formalist in my study of China. One could spend a lot of time thinking about everything Xi Jinping said. One could simply travel around the country and talk to people and experience how life differs between, say, Shenzhen and Guizhou. One could hang out mostly in Shanghai and try to be an analyst, figure out data, and talk to business executives.
I decided that I was going to do all of the above. I was going to read every speech published in Seeking Truth 求是, the party’s main theory magazine. I was going to read some of the necessary documents, but I wasn’t going to read every issue of People’s Daily. That would be madness. Thank you to the people who do this work — you’re doing God’s work. Not really for me, but I’m glad there are people synthesizing all of this excellent work.
I decided that I had to spend considerable time traveling around the country to physically see some of the ways Guizhou is improving through the build-out of better airports, better train stations, and bigger bridges. I decided that I had to spend time talking to folks in Beijing and Shanghai — the capital for politics, the business center for how executives think about the world. I did my best to try to be synthetic and not let any single perspective override the others, but to be as synthetic and comprehensive as possible, to produce whatever mix it ends up being.
Jordan Schneider: Not to praise you too much, but many people can choose to spend their time spreading their bets across different modalities of knowledge. Your ability to abstract away to get to the aphorisms and provocations while also being able to go levels down and levels up is what makes you a unique mind. But I’m going to stop giving you compliments.
Dan Wang: This is your show — you can give me all the compliments you want. The most important thing is to tread softly and lightly. Sometimes you need to dip deeper into a particular pond, but otherwise, maybe you should just be out there figuring out new ways to explore different areas.
Jordan Schneider: Maybe this is just me talking about myself, but going deeper and narrower seems easier to be useful and interesting, versus trying to do the big synthetic thing you did with this book, which is a higher degree of difficulty.
Over the long scope of ChinaTalk, I’m trying to think over a multi-decade horizon. But you’ve shown me what it actually means to do that in this book. You showed me a different way of going even further out, to levels of abstraction in a way that’s still interesting. Maybe the biggest provocation I’ll take from this is to try to think more at that level.
Dan Wang: Shucks, this is too many compliments, Jordan.
Do Books Matter?
Jordan Schneider: All right, let’s get some critiques. Your grandfather was in the PLA during the China-Vietnam War, and he was a propaganda officer. His job was dropping leaflets on Vietnamese troops urging them to resist. That, in retrospect, sounded laughable because these guys had just fought foreign colonialists for 30 years. What was a leaflet written in shitty Vietnamese going to do to them? But you think books matter?
Dan Wang: Books do matter. Maybe books matter a little less than they used to, but even if books are declining in importance, authors are gaining in importance. Especially if we are in the age of AI, as we seem to be, authors are gaining in importance. Maybe some people are just going to be Viet Cong troops trying to resist whatever big idea is going to threaten to enter their field of vision. But it’s still important for us to try to create knowledge.
This is something I admire you for, Jordan — maintaining ChinaTalk after a rebrand, having done this for so long. You were one of the first China podcasts, right? To have persisted in this format that was novel is admirable as well. That’s something we should applaud you for. If leaflets aren’t very good, well, maybe podcasts are the answer. Thank you for taking us there.
Jordan Schneider: Speaking of podcasts, you recently did a show with Stephen Kotkin — two hours, excellent, everyone should take a listen. He spoke in a misty-eyed way at some point about the dream of authors — you write a book, it’s read one year from now, read 10 years from now, maybe even, God willing, read 50 years from now.
I found it ironic that you both brought up The Power Broker with him and had this whole nice riff in your book about The Power Broker having soured the minds of a generation of Democratic politicians. Square the circle for me, Dan.
Dan Wang: Such is the power of books. No one would describe The Power Broker as a mere leaflet, which is what I’ve written with Breakneck. But The Power Broker has certainly had tremendous influence. It’s one of several books that we can pinpoint as having created the lawyerly society. Robert Caro’s monumental work is subtitled Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
Aside from The Power Broker, we can probably name Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which is about pesticide use in the United States. There’s also Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Maybe we can toss in The Population Bomb by the Ehrlichs as well. These four works were very important in confronting the mistakes of the American engineering society throughout the 1950s — which sprayed too many pesticides, which rammed highways across too many urban neighborhoods, which had exhausted itself with these gigantic land wars in Asia. They presented a very useful corrective.
If we doubt the power of books, let’s look at The Power Broker, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Now, I certainly don’t have aspirations that Breakneck would be read 50 years from now. I don’t have many aspirations that it will be read one year from now. But having just a little bit more to work with to think about — it’s always going to be important to have a sense of mutual curiosity between the US and China. Even if we can get people interested for just one year, that’s very well worth doing.
Pluralism in China and America
Jordan Schneider: You brought us to America. I want to come back to this idea of pluralism that you brought up. I was having a conversation at some very fancy China meetup — is there any other kind? — which was mostly white people. One of these white people had lived in Shanghai for a very long time, had become very wealthy, was an investor, and a ChinaTalk listener. He asked me, “Jordan, why don’t you live in China?” My response was, “Well, I couldn’t do my show in China.” He said, “But you’d have such a great standard of living. You’d be a great McKinsey consultant.” (He’s wrong — I’d be a terrible McKinsey consultant.) “You could have three nurses and two house cleaners, and if you just didn’t make any trouble, then you could have a really great life there.”
Reflecting on why I left China — the proximate reason was COVID; I was outside when the country closed and couldn’t get back — but the reason why six years, which is how long you made it, probably would have been my shelf life too, is this idea of living in a pluralist society. Having the freedom to say what I want and talk to people openly who have very divergent opinions is just core to what living a good life means to me. What’s my question? Is this enough to win a cold war? Should we go there? Where do you want to go with pluralist society?
Dan Wang: Your attitude towards this former Shanghai resident — I probably have the same attitude. This is insufficient for a flourishing society. But let me acknowledge that certainly for many people, a life in Shanghai or perhaps another first-tier city in China — maybe we can throw in Hong Kong here — is desirable because it is very convenient. This is one of the words that many Chinese bring up — that life is just very fāngbiàn, very convenient, to be in one of these big Asian cities.
There’s no doubt that life is very fāngbiàn in Shanghai or Hong Kong. The subways work very well, there’s excellent public order, there are great ways to try out new bars and new restaurants. One could have a nanny from probably Indonesia or the Philippines if you’re living in a city like Singapore, maybe from inland China, from Anhui, if you’re living in Shanghai. There are many ways in which life in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, or other first-tier Chinese cities is just much more pleasant than in New York, where we’re chatting. Here, the subways are extraordinarily loud, the streets aren’t necessarily very orderly and clean.
We can accept all of these things. But what we also have in New York — and this is part of the reason that I’m drawn back to the US again — are bookstores. At these bookstores, one can find books very critical of the US government, very critical of both the Republicans as well as the Democrats, who have both made incredible errors. For the most part, though there have been some restrictions on protests under Trump’s regime in America right now, there still is broad latitude for people to protest all of his illegal or inhumane actions, and that is still very real. Protest culture online is also very real.
What I’m saying is that I hope we don’t have to choose. The United States should be able to have, at its present levels of tolerance of dissent, as well as very functional cities that have good subways, good bus systems, nice airports, and where people are able to get around and have a rate of improvement that doesn’t come at truly absurd financial costs. New York in particular has a really hard time building anything. I don’t see why we should have to choose between having bookstores and Port Authority bus terminals that are well renovated in less than five years — which is not within the current project as proposed by Governor Hochul right now. We don’t have to choose.
Certainly, I acknowledge that for many Chinese who move back, they really like having the convenience of their food delivered to them. They get to save quite a lot of money because their rent isn’t necessarily very high. Maybe they really don’t care to think much about politics or philosophy or ideals. But there are also plenty of Chinese who do crave these things. These are creative types — journalists, feminists, people who are interested in ideas. They’re really keen to make something of their lives in cities like New York. That’s something we should welcome here in the United States and allow them to pursue the sort of activity that is borderline impossible in China.
Jordan Schneider: You mentioned convenience. You had a whole chapter about when China was the least convenient place in the world. I love this line:
I often think about the China Daily headline “Shanghai Has No Plans for City Lockdown.” It could be read in two ways. I first understood it as a denial that the city would impose a lockdown. I understand it now as a totally accurate explanation of what happened next: The city had made no plans for confining twenty-five million people to their homes for eight weeks.
Dan Wang: Yes.
Jordan Schneider:Breakneck written in 2019 is a much different book than Breakneck written in 2023, 2024, particularly because since 1989, we really had close to three decades of the state not really imposing on people’s lives — as long as you were Han — in a way that really wrecked what you expected a functioning middle-class, convenient urban life to be.
Dan Wang: That’s one of the scary things about the engineering state: the capability is always there to make a lot of people’s lives go off track in really big ways. Throughout the 1950s, under this earlier, more idealistic era of the pursuit of communism, maybe most of the 1950s was pretty good if you weren’t a landlord, if you weren’t a kulak. But then that terminated with Mao’s great famine, in which these quack agronomy techniques, as well as lies to the central government, terminated in a famine that killed perhaps 30 or 40 million people.
After we felt that Mao was chastened, he again unleashed the forces of total mayhem to plunge the country into the Cultural Revolution. That is perhaps not so much a typical move by engineers. Mao was much more of a poet — he was romantic, he was a warlord. That was his answer to “bombard the headquarters.” The next great trauma that the Communist Party visited was the one-child policy, which was mostly against the rural areas.
You’re right — it was good for about three decades, if you didn’t mind the steadily worsening repression from Xi Jinping, which closed off a lot of avenues for creative expression as well as dissent, both online and offline. Maybe it would have been good if you weren’t a Uyghur in Xinjiang, if you weren’t a Tibetan in Tibet.
Then everybody around the country was plunged into this pandemic control, the apotheosis of which was Shanghai — probably the greatest lockdown ever imposed in the history of humanity, when 25 million people were unable to leave their apartment compounds over the course of eight to 12 weeks in the spring of 2022. The government organized, in the early stages, no adequate food delivery to many families who went hungry so that parents could save food for their children. That was about two weeks of the Shanghai lockdown, in which the food situation was quite severe.
In the midst of all of this, you have four decades of astonishing growth from China, in which the country was growing at a rate of 8 or 9%. That created tremendous wealth, alleviated poverty, and made a lot of Chinese right now feel really good about what the country was able to accomplish. This is where I really want to grapple with both the good aspects as well as the bad aspects of China. Yes, it’s absolutely the case that the wealth creation here was astonishing. That has been much more impressive than what any other developing country was able to achieve — India, Indonesia, Brazil have not had the economic takeoff that China enjoyed that brought so many people out of misery and poverty.
At the same time, we have more novel forms of political repression that humanity has never seen before. Both of these trends are real, and they both have to be acknowledged.
Jordan Schneider: If there’s one thing that’s missing in the book, it’s the Xinjiang chapter. Given that each chapter has some personal connection or observation from you, I get it — maybe you just didn’t spend a lot of time in Xinjiang. The Yunnan arc which you portray is this happy, fun, free place where these minorities are in the mountains so they can get away with not actually doing a lockdown.
The Xinjiang arc has an engineering story there. There’s an engineering of the soul story, which is probably even more dramatic than the digital authoritarianism arc. It’s this idea that you can do to the Uyghurs what you did to all the other minorities — basically wave your hand enough and then they stop being minorities anymore. Do you want to do your analysis of that? Did it get left on the chopping block? How do you think about covering that story?
Dan Wang: You’re absolutely right that I try to cover the stories that I have some personal experience of, something like Zero COVID. You’re right that I’ve never been to Xinjiang. I wish I had the opportunity to go, but it was challenging because foreign nationals — I’m a Canadian citizen — are tracked more intensively. I never quite had the courage to spend time in Xinjiang and see things for myself. I was actively discouraged by some folks in Beijing from even attempting the trip.
I try to write about things that I could talk more knowledgeably about. There was no other reason that I left off Xinjiang. I wrote a little bit about the treatment of Tibetans, mostly going off journal articles that I synthesized into the book. But there were plenty of things left on the chopping block. I could have written more about the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest power plant and displaced about a million people in China’s southwest. I could have written more about all aspects of social and digital control that people in China have to go through.
But I also wanted to write a relatively short book. My book is under 300 pages, and I wanted to hear that people criticized that I wrote a book that was too short by 100 pages, rather than a book that was too long by 100 or 200 pages. That’s where I chose to land and that was the side I chose to err on. But certainly if I had the ability to do some reporting and if I did take a look at this analysis, I would have written much more about the ethno-religious oppression that took place mostly under Xi.
Jordan Schneider: You did cram in a lot of good writing. Some quotes:
The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who douse blazes they themselves ignited.
The engineering state can be awfully literal-minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity — from mass production to reproduction — can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves.
What’s the point of good writing? You could have done this faster, presumably, without having nice sentences and extended metaphors.
Dan Wang: I write for one reason, which is pleasure. In my daily life, all of us must attend to our daily pleasures, and that’s going to be very important. I don’t read that much poetry, although I expect that I want to. But I spend a lot of time thinking about the voluptuous beauty of Italian comic opera. I take a lot of inspiration from the cadences and beats of composers like Mozart and Rossini and Bellini and Donizetti and Verdi. There has to be something important about if you’re going to write any sentence at all, why not make it beautiful and readable and full of cadence and full of splendor?
Jordan Schneider: We’re going to do a few more.
“As more Americans retreat into a digital phantasm, Xi will be shepherding Chinese through the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.”
“When Song assured China’s leadership that the population trajectories could be as firmly controlled as missile trajectories, they listened.”
“Skeptics of a one-child policy were making population projections with the aid of an abacus or a handheld calculator. Song Jian presented his group’s projections in precise machine-generated lines on graph paper; other groups drew uneven squiggles by hand. It wasn’t even a fair fight.”
Dan Wang: What does beauty mean to you, Jordan? How do you practice it? How do you try to enact it in your interviews, in your podcasting and your writing?
Jordan Schneider: I don’t know. I feel really sloppy and I guess I’m okay with that. It’s not something I spend a lot of time cultivating. We’re gonna have 200-plus newsletters this year. That means I’m not laboring over every sentence. Every once in a while I do, and then I think, “Oh wait, but if I do this, the output changes and it won’t be as much."
The subtext, the psychological undercurrent of why I do so many shows and write so fast is to quiet my brain. I’m scared of silence and the contemplation that’s necessary to do something this considered. Or maybe there’s just too much ADD to do writing like this. But yeah, I should give it a shot every Thursday — slow down and try to actually write something really worth reading.
Dan Wang: Sometimes it’s really important, Jordan, to have a pause.
Mao 70% Right, Xi 60% Right…
Jordan Schneider: Xi Jinping, 60% right? Derek Thompson says that Trump is a great assignment editor. Is it too early to give him a percentage? Because I do feel like a fair amount of the stuff he’s gesturing towards is adjacent to the critique of this lawyerly society. He’s Nietzschean and beyond law in a certain profound sense, right?
Dan Wang: I call Xi Jinping 60% correct on everything for two reasons. Many of Xi’s motivations for trying to restrain the debt of property developers or to examine some of the anti-competitive behaviors of internet companies in China — these are completely valid and well-reasoned motivations. It’s just that often the solution, Beijing’s solution, is often worse than whatever scary problem China has. I also assign Xi to be 60% correct on everything, partly because Deng Xiaoping assigned Mao Zedong to be 70% correct on everything (三七开定论). Xi would be the last person to put up his hand to say that he’s better than Chairman Mao in anything. So 60% correct for Xi.
Jordan Schneider: Pretty good, but 70% is high for Mao.
Dan Wang: Well, that’s the official verdict of history.
Jordan Schneider: Okay, but what’s your number for Mao?
Dan Wang: Mao was probably 30% correct. That might be the right projection for Trump. It’s too early to say. We need to have Trump move on from this world before his successors can really assess his legacy and maybe give him something like 70% correct in most of the things he did. Perhaps we’ll have that. Who’s going to be the Deng Xiaoping of America, Jordan?
Jordan Schneider: …Amy Klobuchar?
Dan Wang: Maybe… probably not.
Jordan Schneider: I don’t know. Jake Paul? There’s no one man.
I departed the country with a better appreciation of the self-limiting features of the Chinese system. Most notably, the Communist Party distrusts and fears the Chinese people, limiting their potential for flourishing.
If you want to make the inverse of the argument that I made at the very beginning — if we’re presuming a party is still going to be there and we’re presuming that that party has still internalized the lessons of Gorbachev, who probably didn’t fear the Soviet people nearly as much as maybe he should have if he wanted to keep the party — the guarding, literally and figuratively, is a constant you can draw through not just the post-Mao folks, but really everyone. Even the Hu Yaobangs and the Zhao Ziyangs, the most liberal folks we’ve seen, still distrust and fear the people at some elemental level. To imagine a Chinese leader coming up through the party system who doesn’t have that in their core is hard for me to project forward.
Dan Wang: That’s absolutely right. Maybe the Chinese are looking at the United States and saying, “Well, in 2016, maybe the American elites should have feared their people a little bit more, and they didn’t have quite enough fear there.” That’s certainly a possibility. Yes, it’s going to be the case that the Chinese are never going to fully trust their people, or maybe even not trust them very much at all. This is one of the reasons that China will not have a flourishing liberal society by any stretch of the imagination.
If the Communist Party goes away, we would still have a party. If the Nationalists had won before they were ejected to Taiwan in 1949, we would still have a country nursing its grievances over imperialist incursions in the past, still very intent on achieving some degree of technological primacy over the rest of the world. They probably wouldn’t be trusting their people very extensively either.
I hope that China could develop a regime that does trust its people much more than they do now, because the Chinese people are such a lovable folk. Don’t you agree, Jordan? They can be extremely creative. Their memes are no less than what American 20-year-olds and 14-year-olds are able to produce online. There’s so much wordplay with the Chinese language. There’s a lot of joking throughout China. The Chinese are very funny. People in Yunnan are very funny, which is my heritage. People in Beijing are very funny. The people in Shanghai… maybe not so funny, but most people everywhere else can be very funny.
I wish that the regime could recognize that it has a lot of people who have wonderful, creative spirits who are going to have great memes all day long. They’re going to create wonderful pieces of artwork and literature and all sorts of great shows, great movies. If they had that opportunity, they would have all sorts of wonderful jokes that they could play on us. I’m really optimistic that the spirit of the Chinese teenager is indomitable, just as the spirit of the American teenager is completely indomitable. It’s only that one of them is very actively suppressed by the state and the other is not.
Jordan Schneider: The one line I disagree with was when you say, “I missed the ambient friendliness of Americans,” as if you didn’t get that in China. I moved through the country in a different way than you did with my face, but it was still very friendly. That’s one of the things that will never leave me. You mentioned it at a different point in the book, talking about why this is the destination of choice for so many Chinese. It’s not just because it’s rich and a land of opportunity, but the cultural overlaps in terms of entrepreneurship and ease of engagement with other folks are really profound.
Dan Wang: Well, I would say that you do have a good face, and I wouldn’t sell it short. I have a different face. Not all of us can be so blessed. Certainly there is ambient friendliness in China. But there can also be an ambient “get in your face about your business” sense. There’s sometimes an ambient aggressiveness and pushiness in China, as there is in the US as well.
This is more stark to me because I spent some time in Europe. I just traveled to Europe for two months and we were mostly in Denmark. One of the things we hear about Danish folks is that they have a really hard time making friends after high school. You would have your friends from elementary school, some friends from university, maybe some friends you made when traveling to the United States. But after that, people have enough friends. They’re good. People travel around in roving packs to the bar and then they don’t really socialize with the other roving packs at the Danish bar.
It’s much easier to have a conversation with someone on the bus in New York, on the street in New York, walking around, and they don’t get up so much in your business. You’re right that there’s absolutely a lot of ambient friendliness in China. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about the place. But the flip side of that coin is that they can really get up in your business. How often are you asked as soon as you meet a new Chinese person — Are you married? How many children do you have? What’s your salary? Sometimes I don’t really feel like answering those questions. It’s a bit odd.
Jordan Schneider: The ambient anxiety as well is something very different in the US. Even when you have these think pieces about how people can’t afford rent and life is terrible, it’s not a nationally defining thing in the US the way modern anxieties are in China.
Dan Wang: This is certainly one of the many reasons I am glad that I did not grow up in China, especially not as a woman, because the pressure that women face in China is completely insane. It’s not only workplace stuff. In the workplace, you and I both know that Chinese women are many of the most capable people. They do most of the work; often they are the most efficient people in every organization and they are consistently passed over for leadership because they are not a guy. China really doesn’t treat women very well in the workplace.
Then imagine the pressure you face once you are seeing your neighbors or even worse, family over the most important Chinese holiday. Over Lunar New Year, every woman is asked one question. To the single: Are you married yet? To the married: When will you have children? It feels like, unless a woman has produced at least one child and at least one son, then she will not have broader respect within the family. Chinese women are consistently the most undervalued people, and they are the ones who should be elevated the most.
Generally, China is just a high-pressure society where one does need a little bit of pushiness to get ahead. That can sometimes be pretty wearing once you’ve spent enough time in China, because the pushiness is not really wonderful. The overworked aspects of a lot of people — 996 is real for a segment of the population who work from nine to nine, six days a week. Then they go home and face a lot of family pressures. Many people don’t have an easy time being able to afford their apartments in Shanghai or Beijing. It’s a high-pressure environment. That’s one of these things where you come to the US, you’re left alone. You go to Florida or Texas, and people aggressively leave you alone. That’s something I crave after being over there for a while.
Jordan Schneider: The pushiness of both the one-child policy stuff and now the party telling you that you need to have more kids is just — you have a number of these Orwellian flips which you document in modern society. That’s one of them. The other, of course, is COVID being this thing that would kill you and is worth not getting your cancer treatment in order to prevent, to “Oh, it’s a flu — and by the way, you don’t even need ibuprofen to get through, much less a vaccine, much less a Moderna vaccine."
You see echoes of it in the US sometimes, where Trump says, “Oh, don’t care about Epstein anymore.” But it doesn’t work really to completely turn on a gravity distortion field and just say when you were saying A is A one day, to say B is A the next day. That’s another benefit of a pluralist society — to have people, to have noise that pushes back on that.
Dan Wang: Well, this is what engineers do. They tell you for a while, “You must not have more than one child,” to “You really should have three children.” To hear that COVID is this life-threatening thing and it is our national duty to prevent any transmissions, to “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.” This is how engineers treat society — they swerve really suddenly every so often. At some point, that is going to give people very severe whiplash.
Jordan Schneider: “Beijing has been taking the future dead seriously for the past four decades. That is why they will not out-compete the United States.” What a line!
Dan Wang:The country that will outperform in the world has a sense of humor, and Beijing has the least sense of humor of all of them — at least official Beijing. Unofficial Beijing is very humorous. One of my favorite recent pieces is a gag where Alex Boyd, who is part of Asia Society, found and translated this page of official jokes from Xi Jinping.
You can read some of these jokes from Xi Jinping himself and decide how many of them are actually funny. Humor with Chinese characteristics isn’t really going to knock us off our feet. I prefer the superpower that isn’t taking the future with such seriousness. By taking the future with such gravity — this is one of the great insights from Stephen Kotkin — there is this apocalyptic sense in communist systems. You liberalize a little bit, you slip out a little bit, and somehow the entire system will collapse. Every day becomes an apocalyptic, life-or-death struggle for the Communist Party. That sort of system will end up being fairly brittle.
Engineers don’t know how to persuade. The Communist Party insists on a history in which the party is always correct and where all errors come from traitors or foreigners, rather than acknowledging fault and telling persuasive stories. The instinct of the engineering state is simply to censor alternative narratives. Xi comes off as someone who is a little too eager for groveling respect from the rest of the world, which is exactly why he’ll never get it.
Dan Wang: Yes.
Jordan Schneider: The other Kotkin-esque moment you highlighted is this idea that Li Qiang, who was the mayor of Shanghai initially, was one of the people trying to keep his city more open. But once it came down to it and he got the order, he implemented the biggest lockdown in human history. He became the most reviled local politician in the entire country, and then he got the biggest promotion anyone can get — to be premier. It’s such a reminder that while China is a country where people are promoted on performance at some level, once you reach the top rungs of power, it’s about loyalty. This man delivered on what he was told to do, even when it came at what would be considerable political cost in a democratic society. This is still a crazy system we’re dealing with — that’s not political logic.
You make the point that basically every party in the world that was in charge during COVID lost votes after COVID ended because people were upset about that time in their lives. But to have the emblem of bad Omicron-era COVID policy now be someone people are going to see on their TV for the next five years — this is remarkable.
Dan Wang: Well, maybe he’s going to be squeezed out of TV because he seems to be a remarkably weak premier by the standards of Chinese premiers. You’re absolutely right that in every pandemic country, the ruling party lost vote shares. It’s only in China that the most hated emblem of zero-COVID restrictions gets promoted to the top — the highest any politician could go under Xi.
Jordan Schneider: The idea that Kamala would have Fauci as her running mate is basically what we’re talking about.
Dan Wang: Yes, that would be quite something, wouldn’t it? This surely degrades and erodes some of the competence of other people inside the Politburo and Central Committee, because there were plenty of people who perhaps administered their cities more effectively with pandemic control policies.
One could debate how effective Li Qiang was. One could say he did his best trying to resist a very fierce lockdown, and then when that shifted, he was in charge with another vice premier of implementing that lockdown. Maybe he simply followed orders and did the best job he could. But certainly, I wouldn’t have expected after the Shanghai lockdown that Li Qiang, who was one of Xi’s protégés, would be promoted to anything as high as premier within the Chinese system. For him to become premier must surely have bred considerable resentment within his peers who looked at what an awful job he perhaps did. You can maybe debate that, but Li Qiang certainly created a lot of misery. For them to see this guy vault over them in terms of party hierarchy cannot feel good for other cadres.
Li Qiang inspects mask production outside Shanghai, January 2020. Source.
Cold War 2.0?
Jordan Schneider: You’ve got Rickover, Moses, and Eisenhower as Americans you’re shouting out — all perhaps peaked in the 1950s or early 1960s, all products of Cold War America. Moses was doing his thing even in the ’30s, but there’s a narrative that was maybe a little more prominent in American politics a year or two ago: that Cold War framing is the thing that will get the US out of its engineering rut. We will do big things because now we have another adversary, and we’ll break eggs and build amazing stuff again because we have a new replacement for the Soviet Union. You’re still hopeful, though, that we can get there, even if this isn’t the defining framework for America for the next few decades.
Dan Wang: I certainly don’t hope we repeat all the mistakes of the last Cold War, which wasn’t very cold for Vietnam, which wasn’t very cold for Laos, and which wasn’t very cold for Afghanistan. The US and Soviet Union made tremendous mistakes and inflicted horrors on foreign populations, as well as somewhat on their own populations, in the course of pursuing the Cold War. I’m reluctant to say the US should desire or embrace anything resembling a Cold War, given how the last one went.
I’m hopeful the US will be able to recover some of its engineering chops, because it’s become tremendously obvious that the US needs to do this without any framing of China as the great adversary. We’re in New York right now. Affordable housing is a very big issue. New York can’t build subways at less than $2 billion per mile, which is far above European levels of construction. The US can’t fix Port Authority Bus Terminal in under five years. This is to say nothing of Massachusetts or California, which have really bad construction issues. None of that needs to implicate China. That’s purely an American lawyerly society problem.
We have movements like the Abundance Agenda trying to make sure US big cities are able to build quite a lot more. There’s broad complaint within both the American left and right that the US manufacturing base has rusted top to bottom, where apex manufacturers like Intel and Boeing have just an unbroken tail of woe if we look at any of their headlines. The US manufacturing base wasn’t able to produce anything as simple as masks and cotton swabs in the early days of the pandemic. That was pathetic.
We also have a defense industrial base that has significantly rusted, with the US unable to produce a lot of munitions or naval ships on time. Maybe the defense industrial base has to implicate China, but really that implicates already existing problems as well as the war in Ukraine, which took a lot of munitions from the United States.
The US needs to fix its own problems, not to be able to confront China, but because it has been doing pretty badly itself. The same goes for China — the contest will not go to the country that builds a bigger rocket or more homes. The contest will be won by the country that’s able to deliver better for its own citizens. That’s ultimately where both countries really need to get to.
Jordan Schneider: I agree with that. The question is: if we need a fundamental rethink and Cold War framing from 2020 to 2024 didn’t get us there, is Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein and Dan Wang evangelizing enough to have our Sputnik moment 2.0? Not only does it address the international stuff, but it also gets you the interstate highway system equivalent for what we need today. That’s our only data point. Maybe we can go back further in history.
Dan Wang: I’m also unsure that Cold War framing will work because right now, as we’re speaking at the end of August 2025, President Trump seems to be the most pro-China member of the White House, and he doesn’t seem terribly interested in a Cold War. A reporter asked him whether he should welcome more Chinese students to the United States. He responded, “It’s our honor to have them.” He’s right. The US should be attracting more students from China as well as from all nations. That won’t work if the commander in chief is uninterested in having a cold war.
We’ve tried to impose this Cold War framing for a while, and it hasn’t worked, at least so far. Maybe we will get there in some other way, but there isn’t a single knockdown argument that will have the US recover some of its engineering chops. There need to be many types of arguments, and the worse the situation becomes, the more the US needs to do.
Jordan Schneider: Mike Gallagher had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal basically saying we should dramatically tighten immigration policy from China. You have a USCIS head saying that F-1 visa holders should understand that they’re not welcome here after graduation, and OPT may be going the way of the dodo bird. We’ll see how it plays out. It’s clear that Trump is not entirely on board with this. But I wonder if Xi is going to do something more dramatic than a balloon — which doesn’t necessarily have to be an invasion of Taiwan — that clicks, that gives the Cold War framing a second breath of fresh air.
Dan Wang: Maybe. But I suspect Xi has studied his history and is really reluctant to give Americans an excuse to engage in another Cold War. Even the balloon seemed like it might have been an accident where the leadership didn’t know about it. We can deal with balloons, Jordan. We can deal with balloons all day.
Jordan Schneider: Yeah, but can we deal with 50 Filipinos dying or something? We’ll see. As Kotkin says, history’s full of surprises. One thing we know about history is it’s full of surprises.
On the Cold War stuff, when I had you and Ezra and Derek on, you asked me if the US should have a goal of constraining Chinese growth. Do you have an answer to that question? How would you frame our policy optimization function when thinking about that?
Dan Wang: The US should not be seen as being in a position to constrain China’s growth. It would be disastrous for the US if the Chinese earnestly believed that the US government was trying to hold down China’s innovation prospects or economic growth prospects, because that would seem very dramatically unfair. Now, there are some people in Beijing who already believe some version of this, but that’s not necessarily consensus.
It’s important for the US government to communicate that it wants a good future for Chinese people everywhere. There’s nothing Trump would lose by saying that he wishes the people of China can be rich, well off, and happy.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s close with some book recommendations. I don’t know why — read the Bible, Stendhal, someone you recommended to me the other day.
Dan Wang: The Book of Exodus, Jordan. That’s where it’s at. Maybe bested by the Book of Genesis. But the five books of the Torah — that’s something really important here.
Jordan Schneider: But you’re just shrugging off Prophets and Writings?
Dan Wang: Well, Ecclesiastes is very beautiful. As Robert Alter translates, the chapter is called Kohelet. There’s certainly a great deal of beauty in the Song of Songs and in the dreariness, frankly, of Ecclesiastes or Kohelet. Something important for us all to keep in mind is that the heart of the wise dwells in the house of mourning, while the heart of fools dwells in the house of mirth.
Jordan Schneider: Dan, what’s our outro song?
Dan Wang: There is no music more sublime than the ending of The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart, in which the Count asks and begs for forgiveness from the Countess for all of his incredible indiscretions.
The Schneider clan will be heading to the Bay Area from Sept 9 through the end of the month! If you’re interested in doing a house swap with a 2BR in New York, or happen to have an empty apartment that can fit a few adults and a very cute baby (no babyproofing or kid stuff required), please reach out!
This is a cross-post from the Cold Window Newsletter, a literature Substack about new and untranslated fiction from China. Each month, it features a handful of authors, books, trends, and news items from the Chinese literary world that haven’t yet caught much attention in English.
Over the last few months, I’ve sampled nearly every new Chinese short-story collection that’s come out this year.1 I want to tell you about my favorites.
Special: In search of the best new fiction in China
As of this summer, Chinese literary fiction is in a bit of a tough spot. Inside the country, there’s undeniable suspicion of literary writing affiliated with the cultural establishment: it is not a compliment to call someone 体制内, “inside the system.” A recent plagiarism scandal implicating many young establishment authors, and the schadenfreude with which their downfall was greeted on the Chinese internet, made this distrust abundantly clear.2 Outside of China, translators are working as tirelessly as ever to bring worthwhile stories out into the world, but there are still far too few young Chinese writers who get any sort of attention abroad (although I do think this tide is beginning to turn).
That’s why I decided to try reading everything newly published in China this year. This project was intended to be a pulse-check, an attempt to investigate in good faith the throwaway complaint that you see from Chinese readers online all the time: there’s no good literature in China anymore.
This month’s newsletter brought to you by: libraries and bookmarks.
Surprise: that complaint is wrong. The five books below are some of the best I have ever read in Chinese. They’re mostly by women. They’re all by writers born after 1980. And, to a greater and greater extent as you move up my ranking, they all poke at the boundaries of today’s urban, technologized, hyper-globalized society, until it’s hard to tell what’s fantasy and what’s reality. That’s the kind of story that makes Chinese fiction worth reading right now. And it’s the kind that can only be written by young authors.
Let’s get into it.
Some stray thoughts on this project as a whole
Speculative elements were extremely common across the whole sample and were nearly ubiquitous in my top 5. Not the hard sci-fi that China has become known for since The Three-Body Problem, but more commonly the uneasy, dreamlike invasion of magical or uncanny elements into everyday life.
Related: stories about the internet were everywhere in the collections I read. English-language authors accurately capturing a text conversation in Serious Literature still feels like a rare achievement, but Chinese fiction seems to include convincing text-speak as a matter of course at this point.
Domestic abuse and sexual assault were notable recurring themes across the sample, but I generally found that they were treated with the appropriate gravity, which is not always a given. If you read along with my recommendations, be forewarned that the top two entries on my list are particularly graphic in this regard.
My favorite stories, nearly without exception, were long-ish novellas of the kind that are too long to ever ever get published in an English-language literary periodical. Someone invent a platform where we can publish high-quality translated novellas!!!
Chinese cover design is just better than almost all of what I see in the US. Look at the book covers below. I’m not crazy, right?
Overall: this project required a lot of reading. Some of the books on offer were boring, some were bewildering, and a handful were just bad. At least one was a strong contender for my top 5 but had to be dropped when that summer plagiarism scandal hit. I didn’t read any of the books in full, just in pieces, whittling away the ones that lost my interest until I was left with the list below. (I know I picked a good top 3 because they kept me reading late into the night, long after I should have set them aside and moved on to the next contestant.) Reading all these stories was exhausting and super fun, and I’d love to reprise the challenge for the second half of 2025.3
5. 邵栋《不上锁的人》(Those Who Leave the Door Unlocked by Shao Dong)
This entry is the odd one out on my list. I’d never heard of the author until he was nominated for the Blancpain-Imaginist Prize 宝珀理想国文学奖 earlier this month; he’s a bit younger than the other writers below, the only man of the bunch, and, judging by the pieces I read, the one who’s most grounded in realistic stories about traditional life. He won me over with the story 《文康乐舞》 “Recreational Dancing.” Its protagonist is a young female documentary student from Hong Kong poking around Fujian for material, and something about her voice as a narrator, both savvy and genuinely curious, made her feel like a real person in a way that not all literary narrators do. The nauseating, heartbreaking evocation of her father’s death during pandemic quarantine kicks the story into a darker mode and proves that the author has real range. I don’t think he’ll win the Blancpain prize, but he’s got me in his corner.
Originally from Changzhou in Jiangsu Province, Shao Dong holds a doctorate from the School of Chinese at Hong Kong University. He currently serves as an assistant professor in the School of Humanities and Sociology at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. His fiction has appeared in Harvest, October, Shanghai Literature, and Hong Kong Literature and has been recognized with the first Lin Yutang Literature Award and the Hong Kong Youth Literature Award. His books include the fiction collections 《空气吉他》 Air Guitar and 《不上锁的门》 Those Who Leave the Door Unlocked, and the academic monograph Projecting on Paper: Yingxi Novels in the Early Republic of China. Air Guitar and Those Who Leave the Door Unlocked were both nominated for the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize.
4. 默音《她的生活》(Her Life by Mo Yin)
I’ve always been curious about Mo Yin. I like that she translates novels from Japanese, including one by Yoko Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear)that has gotten a lot of acclaim in China this year. I like that she has a reputation for mixing genre elements into literary writing. I like that this Reddit user went to the effort of making a (really good!) guide to her work, even though nary a word of her fiction has ever been translated into English so far. Sounds like something I would do...
《她的生活》 Her Life seems to have flown mostly under the radar within China, a small flourish between her better-selling novels and translations, but it proves that everything I’d heard about her writing is true. Consider the novella 《梦城》 “City of Dreams,” a sci-fi take on Hollywood set in future Japan. Through the eyes of a TV producer navigating corporate interests and cast-member intrigue, we explore a sci-fi world that feels upsettingly familiar: climate crisis, celebrity deepfakes, portable VR technology (“dreamvision”) that encourages you to isolate yourself from the world. I only learned later that Mount Fuji Diary, the book being adapted for dreamvision throughout the novella, is a real diary by Takeda Yuriko that was translated into Chinese by Mo Yin herself. The density of the ideas and references that Mo Yin plays with here is astounding.
Mo Yin is a novelist and translator. Her books include the fictional works 《甲马》Warhorse, 《星在深渊中》The Star in the Abyss, 《一字六十春》 One Word, Sixty Springs, and 《尾随者》 Tailgaters. She has also translated many literary works from Japanese, including Handymen in Mahoro Town by Shion Miura, Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, Normal Temperature in Kyoto by Kiyokazu Washida, Child’s Play by Ichiyō Higuchi, and Daily Notes and Mount Fuji Diary, both by Takeda Yuriko. Her newest collection of short fiction, 《她的生活》 Her Life, is accompanied by a sister book entitled 《笔的重量》 The Weight of the Pen, a collection of literary criticism.
3. 郭爽《肯定的火》 (Undeniable Fire by Guo Shuang)
I only read one of the three long pieces in this book, but it immediately made me want to press it into a new reader’s hands. The novella 《拱猪》 “Push Out the Pig” (named after a card game) is just such a perfect showcase of what new Chinese fiction is so good at: documenting the anxious disconnect between old and new, between parents who grew up in poverty and their children who grew up on the internet. I don’t know if Guo Shuang is a participant in fan culture herself, but she does an admirable job portraying how absorbing, liberating, and ultimately crushing it can be for a working-class child to seek escape inside online fandom. This deserves to be one of the first books people read if they want to learn about class in contemporary China.
Available in English: review of 《月球》 Planet Moon in the China Books Review
Guo Shuang was born in 1984 in Guizhou. Her fiction has been published in Harvest, Writer Magazine, Mountain Flowers, Zhongshan, and West Lake. Her books include 《月球》Planet Moon, 《我愿意学习发抖》 I Want to Learn to Tremble, and 《正午时踏进光焰》 Stepping into the Noontime Light. She has been the recipient of the Selected Fiction Newcomer Prize, the Zhongshan Star Young Author Award, the West Lake–New Chinese Literature Award, and the Chu Jiwang Literary Award.
2. 杜梨《漪》 (The Ripple of Shattered Cuckoo by Du Li)
No, the official English title of this book does not make any sense. But it still sounds kind of good, doesn’t it?
Now we’ve arrived at the truly magical writing on my list. I predicted in my end-of-year coverage for 2024 that 杜梨 Du Li would be an author to watch this year, and I’m pleased to discover how right I was. Her writing is not easy to read, at least for a non-native speaker—it’s dense, fast-paced, and prone to unexpected leaps into hallucinatory nightmarescapes. But it’s worth the effort.
There’s 《三昧真火》“True Samādhi Fire,” a novella about an amateur rapper named Najia who has to contend with unexpected fame after her verses at a local competition go viral. In mingling satire about Beijing youth culture with a gradual excavation of the troubled life Najia left behind in her home province, the novella manages simultaneously to be silly, contemplative, learned, and very dark.
And then there’s 《鹃漪》 “The Cuckoo Vanishes,” Du Li at her unsettling best. A young couple moves into an apartment known for uncanny occurrences—and, as in any good haunted-house story, it’s less the apartment that turns out to be haunted than the occupants themselves. At every turn I found myself thinking back to 《竹峰寺》 “Zhufeng Temple” by 陈春成Chen Chuncheng, one of my favorite short stories of all time.4 Both stories use the collision of traditional culture with the present as the root of a mystery story—in “Zhufeng Temple,” it’s a legendary stone stele that has gone missing; in “The Cuckoo Vanishes,” it’s a Ming-dynasty text linked to women disappearing into their dreams. The difference is that Du Li, unlike Chen Chuncheng, likes to dive deep into the haunting nonsense aesthetics of a nightmare. The worlds she describes are disturbing—both the dream world, and the real world that it masks.
Du Li is a novelist and translator. A contracted author at Beijing’s Lao She Literature Institute, she received a master’s degree in literature in England and currently lives in Beijing. Her books include 《致我们所钟意的黄油小饼干》 You’re the Holy Light of My Junky Life, 《孤山骑士》 Knight of the Lonely Mountain, and 《春祺夏安》 Seasons of the Palace. She has received recognitions including the Hong Kong Literary Award, the Paper–Mirror Image Nonfiction Award, the Zhongshan Star Best Young Author of the Year Award, and a gold medal at the He Cailin Science Fiction Awards.
1. 张天翼《人鱼之间》 (Beyond Truth and Tales by Zhang Tianyi)
One thing that this project has taught me is that I like fiction that overflows with ideas. If an author has a capacious enough brain to come up with ten wildly different storylines and figure out how to weave them together, I don’t want her to cut a single one out. Give me writing like a rainforest: bursting with so many sights and sounds that I can’t take it in all at once, but still somehow forming a single dense, fecund ecosystem.
That describes all the books on this list to a greater or lesser extent, but none more than 《人鱼之间》 Beyond Truth and Tales. 张天翼 Zhang Tianyi takes the elements of the other books I liked and dials them up to eleven. Allusions to classic texts? The whole book is structured around postmodern deconstructions of myths and fairy tales.5 Speculative elements reflecting the excesses of real-world pop culture? This is the only book on my list where you will find a candy-colored parody of Hogwarts where students wear skinsuits to look like their favorite celebrities. (See《豆茎》 “The Beanstalk,” the collection’s closer.)
Most of all, Beyond Truth and Tales is just fun to read. Like Du Li, Zhang Tianyi knows how to make a silly moment deadly serious—and more importantly, she knows how to pull a deeply upsetting plot out of a tailspin and give you permission to laugh. I couldn’t help getting deeply attached to the awkward, endearing protagonists of 《雕像》 “The Statue” (a classical-art-themed romance)! And at the end of “The Beanstalk,” when it finally clicks into place how the story’s various threads link to each other—reader, I gasped aloud.
Zhang Tianyi is already a celebrity for her prior collection, 《如雪如山》 Like the Mountains, Like the Snow, which is among the most influential works of Chinese fiction from the last five years.6 If her writing stays this good, then we’re going to be reading her for a long, long time.
Available in English: “Pottery Husband” (purchase); 2023 feature in ChinaTalk
Zhang Tianyi is a freelancer and a handcrafter of novels. She enjoys tulips, islands, swimming, cheese, and horror movies. She is catless. She once grew an osmanthus tree. Her books include the fiction collections 《如雪如山》Like the Mountains, Like the Snow and 《扑火》 Jumping into the Fire, as well as the essay collection 《粉墨》Face Powder. She has received the Zhu Ziqing Literary Award, the Zhongshan Star Literary Award, and the Flint Literary Award, and her work has been adapted into film.
That’s it for this issue. If there’s more good fiction you think I missed, let me know. Look forward to a shorter, more personal interim post in the near term, and another full issue next month. Thanks for reading.
Specifically, every fiction collection by a Chinese writer that came out before June 30 of this year, with the exception of a few books by older authors who don’t really need more exposure in English (sorry, Can Xue 残雪), as well as a smattering of interesting collections that I couldn’t get my hands on in time and will try to read before the end of the year instead. Shout out to the top-tier coverage at the Beijing Normal University Women’s Literary Workshop 女性文学工作室 for initially drawing my attention to many of these books.
If you want to participate… Sharing the reading load with other literature fans would help me ensure that future round-ups like this reflect more than just my subjective opinion. Reach out!
This formula cannot lose for me. If you haven’t read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a spiritual cousin of Beyond Truth and Tales, you really must.
Like the Mountains, Like the Snow and Chen Chuncheng’s 《夜晚的潜水艇》 ASubmarine at Midnight are the only two indisputable classics by young Chinese writers so far this decade. Can we get both of them in English, please? Please?
先以文字的方式开始，在newsletter（https://afterschool2021.substack.com/）和游荡者平台（www.youdangzhe.com）开启我的“莫问世界Echoing the World （英文名源于我的名字Echo和我想听到世界的回声-echo）”系列。我第一波要采访的对象，就是来自世界各地的游荡者们。
Elif: 刚来荷兰的第一个月非常糟糕。当我们决定申请庇护时，有很多庇护申请者和难民，Ter Apel 和其它难民营都很满。我们非常担心我们我们会不得不在难民营外面待几天。虽然风险很大，但幸运的是我们最终没有待在外面。难民营的工作人员为妇女、儿童和家庭提供食物和床位，但单身男性只能在满员的情况下暂时待在外面。前三天我们住在 Ter Apel，那地方很糟糕。
Ter Apel 是主要的难民中心，所有申请庇护的人都必须去那里。之后，你要么继续住在那里，要么被送到其他难民中心。我们在 Ter Apel 待了三天后，被送到一个紧急避难所，是一个学校的大体育馆，位于 Exloo，离 Ter Apel 大约 30-40 分钟车程。Exloo 是一个小而漂亮的村庄。由于难民数量多且住宿不足，这些地方被改造成临时避难所。我们在那里待了一周，没有隐私，每个人都在大大厅里睡觉，我记得大约 70-100 人，可能更多。
莫笔记：ELif的话让我想起了伍尔夫的那句“As a woman, I have no country”，女性在任何地方想找到真正的归属感都是很难的。这个世界很多地方都只是男性的家。其实我来到荷兰的第一周，我就非常惊异地发现，我在精神层面没有什么需要调整和适应的，我有一种如鱼得水的感觉。我现在想想，对我而言，让我感受到自由的地方就是我的家。自由，自然，自在的地方都可以是我的家，理想的家。
Elif: I came to the Netherlands on the 30th of August 2022. Well actually I came here earlier, at the beginning of August, but I sought asylum at the end of the month.
Echo's note: I arrived in the Netherlands at the end of August 2021, exactly one year before Elif. Now it’s August 2025. August is the last beautiful month of the year in the Netherlands; after that, the wind and rain gradually arrive, the days get shorter, temperatures drop, and nights come earlier.
2. Why did you feel that you had to leave your country at that time? What made it impossible or unsafe for you to stay?
Elif: There’s a political problem between Erdogan and Gulen. Erdogan is the president of Turkey and Gulen was a religious leader for his followers. His movement’s goal is to spread love, peace and give more importance to religion, nice manners, and education. In 2016, there was a coup attempt and Erdogan blamed Gulen and his followers for the coup and started arresting everyone who supported Gulen. My mom’s friends were taken into custody and imprisoned one by one. That was scary for my mom, so we decided to come to the Netherlands.
Echo's note: I first learned the term “Gülen movement” from Elif. I had wondered before how it was possible to apply for political asylum in the Netherlands when Turkey was not at war. After researching, I learned that the Turkish president defined Gülen and his supporters as “terrorists” and arrested many, including ordinary teachers and company employees. It’s common in many countries that those in power arrest people for differing opinions or interests, as seen in the well-known “anti-mafia campaigns” or the less-known 709 arrests in China.
3. Why did you choose the Netherlands? What factors influenced your decision?
Elif: We did a lot of research about a few countries such as Finland, France, and the Netherlands. We decided to come here because the asylum procedure was better and human rights are highly valued. That’s why we thought the Netherlands was the best option for us.
Echo's note: This was three years ago in the Netherlands. Last year, the right-wing PVV party came to power, proposing extremely strict policies against refugees and immigrants. Fortunately, this summer, the PVV leader resigned after public opposition to his extreme anti-immigrant proposals. The Netherlands is preparing for a new election, and I saw today that he is running again with a platform to completely stop accepting refugees. In the global wave of rightward politics, obtaining political asylum becomes increasingly difficult. However, endless wars and political conflicts are continually creating more refugees.
4. How did you get to the Netherlands in the end? Was the journey difficult or complicated? How long did it take, and how much did it cost?
Elif: We came to the Netherlands legally, by plane with our Turkish passports. We didn’t need a visa because my mom and I had a special “green passport,” which government employees can get after starting work for the government. First, we flew to France and then came to the Netherlands by car. I honestly don’t remember how much it cost.
Echo's note: A good passport and driving skills are extremely important for women wandering the world!
5. What was your first month in the Netherlands like? Was the asylum process smooth? Did you have to stay in a refugee center?
Elif: My first month was horrible. Ter Apel and other refugee camps were very full. We were scared we might have to stay outside for a few days. Luckily, we didn’t. The camp staff accommodated women, children, and families, providing food and beds, but single men often had to stay outside. We stayed at Ter Apel for three days, which was horrible. Then we were sent to an emergency shelter in Exloo, a small village about 30–40 minutes away. The shelter was a converted school gymnasium, housing 70–100 people with no privacy. We stayed there a week with breakfast and dinner provided. Hearing people speak Dutch there, I thought the language would be very difficult to learn 😭. Later, we moved to Oss for 2.5 years. At first, we stayed in a school for 3–5 months, then moved to prefabricated rooms. Oss was a relatively nice refugee camp with many activities and volunteering opportunities. This is how I started learning Dutch.
Echo's note: Ter Apel is a large village in the northeast of the Netherlands, near Germany. Many refugees seeking political asylum are temporarily placed there. I mapped Elif’s movements in the Netherlands over three years—from the north to the south, crossing most of the country.
6. Do you still feel the same way about the Netherlands as you did in the first month? What has changed?
Elif: In the first months, I thought the Netherlands was better. Now everything has become more expensive. I still don’t like the rain 😭. There’s a saying: “You’re not made of sugar,” meaning you won’t melt in the rain. But I think I’d melt haha. I still think the Netherlands is beautiful.
Echo's note: Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the overall cost of living in the Netherlands has risen, and attitudes toward refugees and immigrants have changed. For refugees and immigrants, the Netherlands is not as good as it was a few years ago. Of course, the same applies globally.
In my new Dutch class today, I shared Elif’s proverb about not being sugar with a classmate from Chile. She said she feels like sugar that would melt in the Dutch rain. Turkey and Chile both have fewer rainy days than the Netherlands. Recently, due to climate change, rainy places like the Netherlands and London have seen very little rain in the past six months, while dry cities like Beijing have turned humid, like tropical rainforests. Sometimes climate change has a stronger impact than human migration.
7. So far, do you enjoy living in the Netherlands? What do you like and what do you dislike about it?
Elif: I do enjoy living here. I love partying and going to festivals—the Netherlands is the best country for fun. Dutch people really know how to enjoy life. But every city is similar: church, canals, same architecture. It gets a bit boring. I also dislike the transportation system—it’s terrible, expensive, and trains are often delayed when it rains, which I find strange.
Echo's note: I previously lived in Rotterdam for three years—a post-WWII newly built city, very different from other Dutch cities. The place I lived resembled Manhattan in New York. But Dutch public transport is really expensive, even more than Zurich, one of the most expensive European cities. Many people commute by train; round-trip costs are 20–40 euros, while in Zurich, 10 CHF tickets allow unlimited rides for 24 hours and even boat rides. Crazy!
8. If you could go back to the moment you made the decision, would you still choose the Netherlands? Or would you consider another country? Why?
Elif: That’s a good question. I’m not sure how to respond, but I’d still choose the Netherlands because it’s prosperous and freer compared to other countries.
Echo's note: After wandering through most of Europe and the world, I still believe that choosing the Netherlands back then was the wisest decision.
9. If you could switch lives with anyone, who would it be?
Elif: Can I say a Dutch person? Not a specific individual, but I’d like to live like a Dutch person—speak the language freely and do what I want.
Echo's note: My top four preferences: Dutch, Parisian, Zurich, or New Yorker. Any one of these would be perfect.
10. What do you think it means for someone to leave their homeland? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Why?
Elif: It’s both good and bad. Most people leave their country because they don’t feel safe and want a better life. Leaving everything is hard, but with hope and doing your best, you can achieve a better life.
Echo's note: For women, leaving one’s hometown is eternally a good thing. Challenges are many, but self-liberation cannot happen if one stays in place.
11. What qualities are most important when someone leaves their home country to start a new life elsewhere? What are the biggest challenges to overcome?
Elif: It depends on the person. Patience, cultural openness, respect, resilience, and adaptability are important. Language barriers, cultural shock, mental health, and social isolation are major challenges. Maintaining good mental health and learning the local language makes other challenges easier.
Echo's note: For me, proactivity is essential. Most difficulties can be solved actively. The biggest challenge for me is not wanting to work (haha), but to get permanent residence or citizenship, one must have a work contract (or a partner). Becoming a partner is even scarier than working.
12. Have you ever felt completely overwhelmed, exhausted, or hopeless? How did you pull yourself out of that state?
Elif: Omg, of course. I know the days when crying, having mental breakdowns. I stayed 2.5 years in a refugee shelter, I’ve talked about it before and it was a nice camp. However, we had to live with different nationalities and that’s a quite difficult situation one can ever live in. And living there made me a bit of racist.. Still I’m not disrespecting anyone but I have some negative feelings.
If you live in a public place then you should keep it clean in my opinion. That’s a society ethic. However, there were people who wouldnt do that, when they cooked, went to toilet/douche.. And I was doing volunteering and was responsible for the kitchen and cleaning. This situation was pissing me of because how 25-45 year old people cannot clean what they made dirty?!!!? I talked to workers about it, talked to those people but I couldn’t get any results. I was just overwhelmed, frustrated and sad because this is only a small part of integration to society.. I realized that nobody would do anything about it so I found a job and worked almost every day, 8-9 hours, not to go to the shelter and see those people. And I was learning Dutch at the same time. Keeping myself busy pulled me out of that state. Also I met my ex boyfriend and was spending most of my time with him.
Echo's note: Having your own room is extremely important for peace and joy. Life in constant collective spaces can drive people crazy. I’ve lived with mostly female roommates and it was pleasant, but male roommates often smoke or do cannabis indoors, which is maddening. In terms of cleanliness, most men are far less clean than women. These facts make me “sexist”( which i regrad not as prejudice but as truth)
13. If you could make one thing disappear from this world, what would it be?
Elif: Inequality, because the world is very unequal. Everyone is of the same race but with more or fewer rights.
Echo's note: Same as above!
14. What is something you deeply wish would happen—for yourself and for the world? Something that, if it happened, would make everything better.
Elif: Equality and justice, because not everyone can access these.
Echo's note: My answer is similar: I hope all national leaders were women, so there would likely be less war and more equality and justice.
15. How are your family and friends doing back in your home country?
Elif: My family and friends are doing fine in Turkey. I talk to them occasionally. Some visited, which was nice. One friend plans to come this year or next. I’m sad I can’t attend his wedding.
Echo's note: Last year I visited Istanbul, and I found it to be one of the friendliest and most hospitable cities in the world. Of course, male gaze and second-hand smoke remain issues.
16. What advice would you give to others who are considering leaving their country, or who are already going through a similar journey?
Elif: Be patient. Good things take time. Also, keep an open mind. Learn to adjust to a new culture without losing yourself or your own culture.
Echo's note: I really like Elif’s phrase, “Good things take time.” Many times, good things do take time to arrive. It reminds me of how people often describe the process of obtaining permanent residence or citizenship as being in an “immigration prison,” with the waiting years compared to serving a sentence. I have sometimes felt this way myself when troubled by visa issues. But then I think: how can I define each day of my life as a “prison”? That would be doing myself an injustice. I’ve also stopped imagining that only when I get a passport will I be freer or happier. Instead, I try to make each day in the present truly happy and free. I refuse to treat any day of my life as second-class.
17. Do you feel like you truly belong here now? What makes a place feel like home to you?
Elif: No, I don’t feel like I truly belong here, and I don’t think I ever will. Having sincere friends and being in a generous environment would feel like home, which is hard to find in the Netherlands.
Echo's note: Elif’s words remind me of Woolf’s quote: “As a woman, I have no country.” For women, it is hard to find true belonging anywhere. Much of the world is just a man’s home. For me, a place that gives a sense of freedom is home. Freedom, nature, and ease define home.
18. Where do you see yourself in five years? Do you want to stay in the Netherlands, go back to your country, or move somewhere else?
Elif: In 5 years I’d be still in the Netherlands, working at job I want and happy but after that I really wanna move to a warm country, could be Spain. And I wanna work remotely. I love Spanish culture and really wanna learn Spanish after achieving a good level of Dutch.
Echo’s note: I also hope I could spend autumn and winter in Spain, but spring and summer in the Netherlands, because it’s so hot in Spain during that time! A mix of Spain and the Netherlands would be perfect.
19. How has this journey—leaving your country and starting over elsewhere—changed you? Are you still the same person you used to be?
Elif: The journey was quite hard tbh. Especially the first year. But communication wasnt a problem at all, I speak English and it was easy. Then I started to learn Dutch, which made my journey easier. I improved a lot, I’m more confident, can think things like Dutch people. I get used to here quickly. Now that we’re at home, it’s easier to live and get used to live. It was quite hard when we were at the refugee camp. I was ashamed of saying that I’m a refugee actually when I meet new people.
Echo’s note: I really relate to the sense of shame she mentions. Sometimes your background or situation can make you feel inferior. It takes a lot of study, wandering, reflection, and thinking to build up confidence and realize that this sense of shame isn’t necessary. I’m happy that Elif—and we—have worked through this.
20. What gives you hope these days? What helps you keep going?
Elif: My ambition and hopes in the future gives me hope. I know that I can achieve what I want if I study and do a lot. I want a good life and future so I’m doing everything to make it happen.
Echo’s note: I am really inspired by this answer. What are the preconditions for happiness? Ambition, desire, confidence, and imagination about the future—these seem to be what keep us going and believing that we can shape our lives.
倘若你有关于“莫问世界Echoing the World”任何感受，问题和建议（比如希望我去采访谁），欢迎在评论区留言！
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