Are we cooked? We’re going to be revisiting this question quarterly now, it seems. To discuss, we have Peter Harrell, former Biden official and host of the excellent new Security Economics podcast, Kevin Xu, who writes the Interconnected newsletter, and Matt Klein, author of Trade Wars Are Class Wars and The Overshoot substack.

We discuss…

• Short-term positive indicators, including the stock market rebound, the continued independence of the Federal Reserve, and the administration’s compliance with court rulings,

• Why talent is the ultimate bottleneck to AI progress, and how the attacks on foreign students, universities, and scientific research will impact America long term,

• Whether Trump’s policies will cause mass divestment from dollar-denominated assets,

• The state of U.S. alliances, from the apparent thawing of relations with NATO and Zelenskyy, to signs of friction with Japan,

• Next steps for Trump’s industrial policy.

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Dollar Depreciation and Self-Inflicted Brain Drain

Jordan Schneider: Peter, kick us off.

Peter Harrell: We did this last quarter in late April, and looking around the short term over the last three months, the indicators are decent. We’re looking less cooked. Trump TACO’d out on a lot of the tariff wars, so the stock market rebounded. He can post memes about bombing Iran and get away with it — the short-term indicators actually suggest the last couple of months have gone decently well for the United States from a big picture perspective.

However, I’m pretty concerned about the long-term trajectories. Looking at some of the core things that have made the US what it is today — substantial investment in scientific R&D, attracting talent from around the world to do science and innovation, business leadership here in the United States, and the social fabric we have — I remain worried about whether we’re cooked long term, even though I have to give some credit to the last three months.

Kevin Xu: To add onto what you just said, Peter, in preparation for this podcast, I looked at the value of the dollar chart because I remember we brought it up the last time we talked about this. It went down by another 5 to 6 percent from our last recording to today. That was one of the biggest conundrums at the time. Right after Liberation Day, everyone who thinks about tariffs in perhaps the most conventional way would expect the dollar to go up, everything else being equal.

But the erosion of the dollar, no matter how you want to slice it, continues slowly but surely going down. It’s no longer a big story because there have been so many other attention-grabbing geopolitical and economic stories since then. But for me, that’s something I’m going to watch from time to time as this collective “how does the world vote with their feet” question regarding how much credibility they place in the United States government and leadership through how they treat the dollar.

Matt Klein: The overall level of “cookedness” has not actually changed much one way or another. Partly because I discounted the damage from the tariffs. Not that the tariffs announced on April 2nd were good, but that was never the main issue. The attacks on scientific research, the attacks on foreigners coming into the country — and we’re not just talking about changes in Southern border policy, but the way European tourists are treated — across the board restrictions on foreign students coming into universities, the attacks on the rule of law — these things have not abated in any way.

There has been ongoing pushback from courts, but many things remain problematic. The changes to scientific research policy, the changes to approaches on medical research funding in particular and vaccinations — that has not improved in the past few months. If anything, it’s been entrenched.

If I wanted to be more pessimistic, I would say the fact that immediate concerns about things such as tariffs have subsided and the stock market has recovered might actually reduce the pressure to unwind those longer-term, more damaging policy changes that have occurred over the past six months, making them more likely to persist. Even if the immediate impact is not necessarily substantial, it could be a very long-term drag, not just on GDP growth, but on the quality of life, power, and well-being in this country.

The analogy is Brexit. When the UK was voting about whether to leave or remain in the European Union, there were concerns — people called this “project fear” — about an immediate catastrophe if they voted to leave. That didn’t happen, so people said the case was overstated. But the more realistic and correct argument was that everything would be worse — not catastrophically worse, but persistently worse over time. That has been borne out. I fear we’re ending up in a similar, if not worse, situation as a result of all this.

Jordan Schneider: I’m going to take the other side of this argument. Many of the worst-case scenarios we were contemplating in April are much less likely to manifest now. I’m taking Brexit as a win, if that is our analogy, as opposed to something even more dramatic.

Elon is done. DOGE’s energy is abating for the most part, which I think is positive for governance and civil service. We have Congress — maybe they’ll pass a bill — it doesn’t look great, but it’s also not republic-wrecking. There’s going to be an election not that long from now.

On the immigration side, yes, the direction of travel is not great, but we have not banned all foreign students. The country bans that we’ve seen and will continue to see are directionally problematic, but we could have had much more aggressive paths that would have presaged an even more aggressive four years, which have not happened. You’ve even seen Trump at one point tweeting about protecting the farmers, saying we can’t kick out all of our undocumented immigrants.

It’s not just on trade where this administration has blinked. It seems there are other topics — science accepted, we’re in a pretty poor timeline on that front — but at least on the immigration front, it seems we could be in a worse place than where we are now.

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Peter Harrell: I’ll add two points, one on each side of the ledger, building on what you’ve both said.

On the positive side, Trump appears to be stepping back from the brink, at least somewhat, on whether he’s going to outright defy the courts. That felt more real to me a couple of months ago. He did bring home the individual who was sent to El Salvador and charged with crimes — a complicated issue. But he does seem to be stepping back from his showdown with the judiciary, though time will tell. I’d put that in the positive ledger.

On the other side are things that are eroding U.S. centrality in the international economic system, at least long term. I want to pick up where Kevin left off on the decline in the dollar’s value. We’re seeing several other data points where foreign governments and private parties have quadrupled or quintupled their efforts to create financial networks substantially outside U.S. jurisdiction.

You see this in the drop in the dollar’s value — investors are clearly beginning to pull back from the United States. You also see it in the large run-up in gold prices. This 3,000-year-old store of value has had an explosive couple of months, building on a strong year or two, driven very much by central bank purchases of gold as a way of hedging and reducing their exposure to the dollar.

But perhaps moving to gold isn’t even enough. There’s now a debate in Europe, in Germany and Italy, about whether they need to repatriate their gold reserves — which are currently stored deep in the rock underneath Manhattan, in the custody of the New York Fed — because they don’t even trust us as custodians of their gold anymore.

This is a significant data point. Now, it’s not easy to develop large-scale financial networks outside the U.S. — it’s very hard and doesn’t happen overnight. We’re still seeing foreign investment here, and we’ll still attract the capital levels we need. But this foreign government distrust about the long-term stability of the United States, whether right or wrong, is driving something that you’re beginning to see in the numbers.

Matt Klein: I might push back on that a little because while that intuitively makes sense, the numbers aren’t necessarily showing something as extreme as one might have expected.

The dollar depreciation was sharp around April 2nd, but if we zoom out, the dollar is still quite expensive on a trade-weighted basis relative to the rest of the world. It’s still up something like 20 percent compared to early 2021, up 30 percent compared to 2014. It’s still quite expensive — maybe not quite as expensive as before.

Foreign investors had been massively overweight in U.S. assets. On a market cap basis, they were equally weighted, but 70 percent of stock market capitalization being American feels odd given that the U.S. economy is a quarter of the world economy. Yes, American companies may be more profitable, but still, there were plenty of reasons why, with more benign catalysts, you would have seen some of these market moves, particularly on exchange rates or foreign allocations.

In some ways, the story is that there hasn’t been as much of a move yet. I agree that if the Germans and Italians move their gold, that’s symbolically interesting, although what that means in practice is debatable. But it’s striking what hasn’t happened, which is honestly surprising.

The same thing applies on the U.S. side — have Americans been moving a lot of money out of the U.S. into foreign assets? Maybe some, but it’s not super clear in the data that it’s been enormous volumes of the kind you would have expected.

We have other examples of countries with sharp moves in response to political instability — Turkey in March, for example, after the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul. There was a very sharp move, actually a similar-sized move in the exchange rate for the Turkish lira as for the dollar. But in terms of the quantities of what was actually happening, it was on a much different scale. Turkey’s central bank only has $40 billion in reserves to keep the currency stable. We didn’t see that here.

As much as it would be logical to say that’s what’s happening, I don’t think we’ve seen it yet. Maybe we will; maybe it’ll be more gradual. The gold price move is certainly interesting, although that really dates back to the sanctions on Russia’s central bank when that trend began. Otherwise, it’s hard to see it as a dollar-specific story.

Jordan Schneider: Matt, we’re doing better on the Fed, right? That was a news story that completely burned itself out. I think we’ll have a Fed come 2028.

Matt Klein: Maybe. This is the other thing — I talk about the independent Fed, the independent judiciary, but these are Senate-confirmed positions. It’s not clear to me what kind of pushback the Senate would provide if you have a Trump-supporting majority there.

The judiciary we have now is not necessarily the judiciary we’ll have four years from now. That could change. The Fed situation could change. If I remember correctly, there’s a passage in the big, beautiful bill they’re putting through that basically says administration officials would be immune from contempt of Congress. I’ll defer to the lawyers on the exact terminology, but there are things being done by the other branch of government to support the potential for further executive overreach, which should be concerning even if it’s not necessarily generating the same kind of headlines and market responses as tariffs.

Peter Harrell: In fairness, I said a couple of minutes ago that Trump is stepping back from his confrontation with the judiciary in a noticeable way, though the long-term impact remains to be determined. Part of that is because he’s winning. He’s making the assessment that he can win at least a large enough percentage of his cases in front of the judiciary.

We saw that today, at least temporarily, with what the Supreme Court did on nationwide injunctions and birthright citizenship. He’s essentially saying, “If I’m winning two-thirds of my big cases in the courts, maybe I don’t need to outright confront or defy them over the third that I’m losing."

As a lawyer, I’ll take compliance with judicial rulings. That’s all I’m saying.

Jordan Schneider: Peter, give us the “tariffs are actually illegal” update.

Peter Harrell: This is one near and dear to my heart. Most of Trump’s tariffs — certainly all of the Liberation Day tariffs from April that caused significant market turmoil — weren’t imposed under a trade law statute. He imposed these tariffs under a 1977 emergency powers statute that previous presidents had used for sanctions on Iran and Russia. It had never previously been used for tariffs.

This is progressing through the court system. There’s a specialty district court in New York called the Court of International Trade. Plaintiffs challenging these tariffs won at the specialty district court, but that victory is on hold while the government and plaintiffs deal with an appeal before the Federal Circuit, one of the federal appellate courts.

The Federal Circuit will have its hearings on this case on July 31st. We’ll likely get an opinion from the Federal Circuit by the end of August, and then this will go up to the Supreme Court in the fall.

If I were betting, I would bet Trump loses on the merits here. At the end of the day, these tariffs are going to be found unlawful. That doesn’t mean the end of all tariffs — it means a mad scramble across the U.S. government to see what tariffs they can recreate under other legal authorities.

Matt Klein: They’ve been doing that with Section 232. The 50 percent tariff on steel isn’t being challenged. The pharma tariffs in the pipeline are now separate.

Kevin Xu: There’s your alpha for the episode.

Peter Harrell: For those thinking about this from a market perspective, one thing that’s going to happen is that companies paying the tariffs this year will get a rebate. They’ll be entitled to a rebate of paid unlawful tariffs, which would probably happen next year. From a market perspective, you’ll see an earnings shift from this year to next year as they get rebates of tariffs paid this year, which they’ll then have to pay going forward again. Retroactively, 2025 might look better on earnings than it does right now.

Matt Klein: Are the tariffs tax-deductible? Are tariff payments deductible against income tax? Is the rebate going to be taxed?

Peter Harrell: I’m not a tax lawyer — that’s a good question. It’s certainly a business expense, so you can claim it as such.

Kevin Xu: They’re not going to tax tips.

Peter Harrell: How to tax this is full employment for lawyers. That’s Trump trade policy 101 — full employment for lawyers.

Talent > Transistors

Jordan Schneider: Kevin, how about an AI update?

Kevin Xu: One thing in the AI world — whether it’s investment or technological progress — speaks to how equipped the U.S. is. I’m not necessarily saying China will lead or run the table — I’m analyzing our country specifically.

CapEx is growing for at least another one or two years. The AI trade is on. But everyone’s realizing that GPUs are no longer scarce. That was more of a temporary thing. If you have the money, you can get whatever latest NVIDIA GPU you want for a data center.

The pace of energy coming online in the U.S. is still relatively slow compared to other places. That’s why the Middle East swing by the president and all the AI executives is so consequential. There’s an executive order coming from the White House to make that easier in the U.S. — we’ll see what happens in real life.

All of this really comes down to people. I’m talking about both the supply of general contractors to build and dig data centers and wire all the power sources to make data centers come online as quickly as possible, as well as the top-end research talent that’s becoming more of a bottleneck — not just for which country could advance, but which company within which country will advance.

The most interesting position right now is probably Mark Zuckerberg’s spending spree to hire whoever from OpenAI is willing to jump ship. He’s willing to pay whatever he needs to pay. It’s like a classic “buy the free agent market” way to win the championship.

It’s an interesting comparison, keeping the sports analogy going, to how DeepSeek got to where it is — a pure scouting and drafting way of building their team. Their team got built within China (maybe they got some secret offer from Meta too, we don’t know), but these are very different ways of accumulating AI talent, which we know is in real scarcity — not the hardware anymore.

How do we extrapolate that to which country or company will be first to reach the promised land? This makes me think about the immigration issues we discussed at the beginning. Our country never had a great immigration policy for any kind of immigrant, to be perfectly honest. We had enough prestige and resources to attract the brightest in the world. But when that chilling effect sets in, it could be a problem for the long haul, while the scouting ecosystem or drafting source on the China side seems sufficient to put together a DeepSeek, if nothing else.

Peter Harrell: Can I ask you a question, Kevin? It’s not an area I know much about. Is Europe anywhere on the map with AI these days, or is this really remaining a U.S.-China competition?

Kevin Xu: This is very much a U.S.-China competition, particularly because of the talent question — not so much about the money. Jensen went through a Europe swing just a couple of weeks ago and announced a bunch of sovereign AI projects in the UK, France, Germany, Slovenia, and some smaller countries. The governments are generally pretty good at building hard infrastructure from the ground up and signing really big checks when everyone comes together politically. That’s what governments are good at.

But when it comes to organic talent development, most European top-end talent either moves to the U.S. if they can — because they find the European system generally stifling if you want to move fast — or they work locally at the labs of American companies that are building locally to recruit there. The three most recent successful Zuckerberg recruits from OpenAI were from the Sora Lab of OpenAI. Is that European talent or American talent? You tell me.

Matt Klein: DeepMind is UK, right? They’re owned by Google, but —

Kevin Xu: That’s the one shiny example.

Jordan Schneider: Does it count anymore? They were a subsidiary as of 10 years ago. It’s an interesting question, all this sovereign AI buildout. It almost reminds me of Chinese provinces that spin up their own data centers and proudly buy some hardware chips. What are we doing here?

Another aspect I wanted your take on, Kevin: there are rumors that Meta was going to bow out of the open source game. In that case, we’d have no 10-figure companies in the U.S. really pushing on open source, basically seeding the entire ground to Alibaba and DeepSeek. What does that mean from a 10-year perspective?

Kevin Xu: First, Meta’s version of open source — LLaMA — since we do have a lawyer in the room here, is actually from a legal perspective less open than all the Chinese open source models currently, from a legal licensing perspective. Meta came up with its own version of an open source license that was hotly debated within the tiny community of open source licensing lawyers that I’m part of.

Part of those restrictions is that once you use LLaMA’s model up to, I believe, 700 or 750 million monthly active users, then you need to engage with LLaMA’s parent company to have a commercial licensing agreement. That’s an important nuance to start with.

From that perspective, and I’ve heard this from other sources too, there was at least an expectation from LLaMA at some point to still make money directly from its open source models. If it gets competitive enough — whether it embeds into another coding agent like OpenAI and Anthropic, or some other B2B or enterprise product — they had some expectation of that. They weren’t just going to throw a ton of money and talent into this theoretical financial dark hole and do something good for the world, even though they were falling behind.

The fact that this was even leaked as an internal discussion point — I don’t know if they’re really going to do it — but the fact that serious people inside Meta have considered abandoning the open source part of LLaMA and actually abandoning LLaMA entirely in favor of just the best model in the market has so many layers of irony. We have the open society here in America, the open this and that, freedom and whatnot, but we chose this most singularly transformative technology direction to be as closed as possible among the companies.

You can imagine a lot of siloing going on. A lot of things that probably could have been shared but aren’t shared for one reason or another. That actually blunts progress on the long-term horizon, as well as the diffusion pace of certain technology, where open source is just the best way to diffuse a lot of technology — even if it’s the worst way to make money off that technology. That might be the reason why a lot of U.S. companies are choosing the closed source path, while the Chinese side is right now leading in all the open source model benchmarks.

Peter Harrell: Jordan, it’s a question for you. When we think about “Is America cooked,” we often think about this in the U.S.-China context.

Peter Harrell: Has China done anything right over the last three months?

Kevin Xu: I’ll jump in here real quick. This is actually related to the dollar again — speculative because it’s very recent. They did have a recent high-level finance summit in Shanghai, the Lujiazui Forum 陆家嘴论坛, where the governor of the People’s Bank of China and all the relevant high-level financial regulators came and gave speeches.

What came out of this specific forum this year is a concerted willingness to really promote the RMB in ways and places where the dollar is falling short for one reason or another — not to necessarily replace the dollar as the global reserve currency, because that’s a whole other can of worms that I don’t think anybody in China really wants to be. But in countries or trade directions where having the RMB be the settlement currency in lieu of the dollar, or being able to buy global commodities in large chunks using the RMB versus the dollar, is advantageous, there is now a policy appetite.

This is very much a reaction to Liberation Day, to the way that the U.S. instigated global trade war has unfolded. That prompted this. How far will this particular policy direction go? Nobody knows at this point — it’s way too early. But the appetite is there now to be a little more proactive about making whatever reforms necessary to make the RMB more attractive in certain situational settings when the dollar is becoming a little less appealing.

On Allies and Immigration

Jordan Schneider: How bad is Trump going to end up being to the allies? Q1 was probably pretty close to a worst-case scenario with those really obnoxious speeches in Munich. But since then, we had Haley do a trip to Asia where she basically said things that a Nikki Haley administration would have said.

What does the Iran bombing mean for America’s commitment to Asian allies? On one hand, it shows that Trump’s willing to bomb stuff, but on the other, it’s bringing us back to the Middle East. Maybe that’s a bit of a wash.

There was also talk of some crazy DOGE cuts to the Pentagon, but there are basically going to be no defense funding cuts. Whether they’re actually going to reform defense acquisitions and buy stuff we need to buy is an open question.

Even though we’ve had some serious U.S.-Japan weirdness — with Japan being sick enough of the Americans to cancel a two-plus-two dialogue — I still think we could be on a worse timeline than the one we’re on now with the way Trump has treated Asian allies.

Matt Klein: If you really want to be optimistic, you just say the way that the administration is now treating European allies — that’s where you’re seeing the biggest shift, maybe. We’re friends with Zelenskyy all of a sudden. Who knows how long that will last, but that is notable. The European NATO countries seem to have managed to figure out how — with the exception of Spain — to put together a deal that looks like it’s getting everyone on the same page. Who knows how that will play out longer term, but if you want to be encouraged, that’s definitely somewhere to look.

Kevin Xu: Isn’t that just giving Trump what he wanted?

Peter Harrell: That is part of it.

Matt Klein: You reframe it. He said he wanted five percent, and they said three and a half percent plus one and a half percent other, which is fine. Everyone agreed on it. Arguably, it’s good for them too. But the shift with Zelenskyy is interesting, as Jordan said. Trump met him at the NATO summit and said they had a great conversation. Now he’s saying, “Supposedly, Putin called and I need help with mediating with Israel, and I need help with you.” Who knows?

Jordan Schneider: It’s hard to know what’s really going on there. But if you want to be optimistic, the thing with this stuff is that it was unclear if Trump was going to be doctrinaire about these things or just vibrate to weirder places than any American president had gone to, then vibrate back to a more mainstream place and keep swinging. But him staying at “No, we’re leaving NATO, this is a terrible thing" — that’s not something that’s happened. He has shown the capability to get pissed off and fed up by people like Putin, which is something you may not have entirely priced in April of this year. I consider that positive.

Although I’m the Trump optimist here.

Matt Klein: To be fair, it’s also not as if we’ve actually adjusted our Russia policy in a way to imply that he’s actually gotten upset with them. So far, it’s just words. But we’ll see.

Jordan Schneider: I’ll take words.

Matt Klein: Better than the other words.

Jordan Schneider: They’re a start.

Peter Harrell: I very much agree with the point Matt made. Obviously, the words coming out of the NATO summit and the words around Zelenskyy are much better. The lived experience over the last six months is that words change. The thing I’d note in the other direction: two or three weeks ago, Trump was saying nice things about Canadian Prime Minister Carney. Right before we got on this call, he’s now back to saying Canada’s the worst and we’re going to tariff them all over again. Nothing really stays stuck with our current president.

Jordan Schneider: But if things don’t stay stuck on the dumbest timeline, then that is — again, it’s more the Brexit arc, less the actual America self-owned catastrophe one, which is okay.

Peter Harrell: Maybe I should be worried here. The other thing I’m watching to see how it plays out — conceptually related to immigration but also distinct — is where we’re going with our universities. To pick up on a point Kevin made earlier, it’s not that we always had the best immigration policies. American immigration policy has been totally dysfunctional for my entire life — I’m 45 — but we have had, against a backdrop of dysfunctional immigration policy, some very important bright spots. The ability to attract truly great talent to some of the world’s best universities who then stay here and found and run businesses and contribute to scientific innovation.

Trump’s war on the universities has now spread, at least with Harvard, beyond just cutting off funding to trying to cut off their ability to enroll foreign students. It appears that he may be trying to get the University of Virginia to fire its president. I’m not going to defend all kinds of crazy things universities have done over the last five to eight years — there have been plenty of challenges with American universities — but they are a huge source of long-term American strength from a scientific innovation perspective, from a talent attraction perspective, from educating people who then go out and do great things.

It’s looking like a fairly full-out war and not just something that he’s looking for a détente on. There’s a ton of institutional strength in American higher education. I have bias here because both my parents were full-time academics all my life growing up, so I’m biased toward American educational institutions. I worry that if we structurally harm our higher education system, that would be another thing — cutting scientific R&D — that helps us be cooked longer term.

Matt Klein: That’s part of how we’re hurting it. They get a lot of that scientific R&D funding, and if that’s cut off — and also, this is not just a Trump obsession — in the bill that currently passed was this punitive tax on endowment income for universities. For universities that have enough endowment income for that to matter, that pays a very large chunk of their operating expenses. Most of the rest comes from things like government grants for research.

If you cut those things at the same time, they’re going to go out of business or they’ll have to drastically change what they do. Again, this is not something that’s really getting a lot of pushback because people pay a lot more attention to other things — the tariff on this is going up by this amount or whatever — but these other things are still steadily going on despite the fact that people’s attention isn’t focused on that. As you said, it could be a relatively benign Brexit outcome, but it adds up and would be very harmful.

Kevin Xu: That will never show up in these more short-term twitchy indicators, whether it’s the market, the dollar, or any of that stuff. Two points I want to add to what Peter said — which probably makes the best case for long-term cookedness if there’s no really forceful reversal of what’s happening right now, but hopefully some actual tangible improvement on immigration — not just keeping together whatever we had left prior to this presidency.

First, the way in which a lot of these scientific research grants are cut isn’t just a problem because they’re cut from an absolute value perspective, but they’re cut from a “Control-F” perspective. You go through the grants, you Control-F for words that the administration doesn’t like for entirely ideological reasons, and you cut them. That is the reason a lot of the top academics and researchers who came to the United States from other countries specifically came to escape from.

Matt Klein: Right, like “neurotransmitters” because it has “trans” in there. Now you’re saying you’re not looking at Alzheimer’s research.

Kevin Xu: Exactly. The word “diversity” just trips up a bunch of alerts from this Control-F way of thinking about scientific research when the word “variance” could have replaced “diversity” and that grant could have been safe. All these very blunt instrument ways defeat not just the fact that we get to have this innovation happen in our country, but that the people who come to this country to do the research and want to stay — they didn’t just come for the money. Nobody in academia, even at Harvard or Princeton, really celebrates the amount of salary they get to make, even at the highest level. They came here because they don’t have to be worried about being Control-F’d in their own country of origin.

The second point that builds off of that — which is really the long-term cook scenario — every time we have this American declinism conversation (this is not the first time we’ve had this conversation as broader public discourse) the most common way that we patted ourselves on the back or were able to go back to sleep after the conversation was immigration. We still had immigration. All the smartest people in the world are going to save our ass by coming here. That may not be an answer we can just default to anymore. That’s probably the one thing that would put you on the cook ledger in the 10-year timeframe — certainly not a quarter-by-quarter timeframe, because who knows what the market is going to do.

To come back to immigration today — we’re actually selling Trump cards. We’re selling a spot in the best country in the world, quote-unquote, to the highest bidder, not the smartest people. What kind of people do you attract from that? I’ll let the listeners have their own imagination over what those people could be.

Matt Klein: It’s worth noting that the U.S. university system has been so dominant and so good for so long that we assume it has always been that way. But that’s not actually true. Before 1933 — which is a significant date to think about — the U.S. university system was not particularly competitive globally. After that, it was. English wasn’t even the dominant language among academics — it was German. It’s not inherent that it has to always be this way. You’d have to work hard at it, but if you’re committed enough to self-harm for ideological reasons, then you can get rid of these long-term advantages.

Peter Harrell: Another topic that the Trump administration needs to prove it can handle — and it’s an open question — is supporting U.S. manufacturing and some of these strategic industries and products it talks about. There’s also a lot of bipartisan support for the idea that we should have at least some onshore or ally-shored critical minerals production, shipbuilding, and these strategic lower-tech industries.

The administration has certainly talked a good game about some of this. They’ve put out executive orders, they’ve said they want to reduce permitting hurdles to make it easier. It seems entirely up in the air whether they’re actually going to be able to achieve any of this manufacturing renaissance that they’re talking about.

This is going to require a more integrated approach than what we’ve seen from them to date. That’s a big X factor for me: Are they going to be able to actually put this together or not? Will it be in the industries that actually matter to us? All due respect to Howard Lutnick, I’m not sure “screwing tiny, tiny screws into iPhones” is really the industry we want to be focusing on in terms of our manufacturing.

Jordan Schneider: Are there any data points that are encouraging on this line? We’ve seen various efforts to gut the DOE loans program. The CHIPS Act has been exploded.

Peter Harrell: If you look at what they’ve actually done with the money, the DOE loans program was focused on clean energy, and they don’t want clean energy. That seems to be fizzling. There’s anecdotal evidence — Matt, you may have plugged into the data more — that some of the big announced manufacturing investments in those sectors have been put on pause. There’s a slowdown there.

While Trump’s talking about things like shipbuilding, we’re not actually seeing shipbuilding. Let’s put aside the climate impacts of oil and gas and current energy prices — I’m not sure you’re going to see a huge oil and gas boom.

Matt Klein: We haven’t. The joke about “now we’re going to unleash drilling” — you should talk to the shale drillers. They don’t want to do that. Briefly, when Brent went close to $80 because of fears of Iranian activity in the Strait of Hormuz, if it had stayed there long enough, maybe you would have seen more shale. But between the fact that their costs have gone up tremendously because of tariffs on steel — what do you think the pipes are made of? — and the fact that the price of the product they sell has gone down, plus labor costs are still going up over time, it’s not super compelling.

Investment in manufacturing peaked in the middle of 2024. A lot of the growth in investment and manufacturing capacity in this country had been directly attributable to CHIPS and IRA — semiconductors, batteries, things like that. If that’s what the incremental investment is coming from, and then those sources of incentives are being gutted as quickly as possible, it’s not surprising that you’re going to see that move in reverse.

Some of the money may already be out the door enough that it won’t be pulled back on projects that have already started. But it’s not super encouraging. The Loan Programs Office was talking about clean energy, but they were also talking about doing it for critical minerals. Those minerals have green energy-related uses, so you could say, “Oh, we’re going to get rid of it.” But to the extent that they say those things are strategic — whether it’s magnets or whatnot — if you cut the funding, it doesn’t matter whether you call it green energy or not. You still are not going to have the resources.

It’s going to be very difficult to have a domestic industry in those sectors be competitive without some kind of government support because they’re so cyclically volatile on price and because the main producers right now are in China, where market-based constraints are not as severe. Because the capacity is there, they can basically flood the market when they want to. If any seemingly viable competitor shows up — which is why you’ve had such problems with lithium in the U.S. in the past — you need some kind of government backstop to prevent that. That was being done out of DOE.

It could change, but it’s not clear to me there’s strong interest in doing that. I don’t know why a manufacturing renaissance would occur. On top of which, if part of the rationale for a manufacturing renaissance is that these tariffs are going to make U.S. production for the U.S. market more competitive, but then no one knows what the tariffs are going to be — either because they’re illegal or because they’re going to get negotiated away for unclear gains — why would you make a commitment now? It doesn’t pencil out. You want to use a pencil, not a pen, because you can just change.

I don’t see it. It’s not showing up in the data that we’re having any kind of manufacturing renaissance. Far, it’s the opposite. It’s not like it crashed or anything, but it’s not clear to me why we would see a big change given what we know so far.

Kevin Xu: This is a question for Matt, but obviously anybody can jump in. What are the things that got some play but did not get nearly enough play during the DOGE stuff? The cutting of staffing or investment in places like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and BEA. Basically the only neutral arbiter of actually accounting for how cooked we are or not as a country — hard data, not soft data, not live data, not sentiment data.

That’s another thing that just confounds me. If we were to actually answer this question from a statistics perspective or in a rigorous way a year from now, two years from now, whatever — I don’t even know if I could really trust any of the GDP numbers going forward, any of the non-farm payrolls going forward. The government pumps out so much good data and it takes so much time to build up that infrastructure, but you need one bad cut to completely get rid of that discipline.

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Matt Klein: One thing I would say is some of that actually precedes even the election. It had to do with some of the budget deals that were being done in 2023-24. I don’t know why these were agreed to, but basically — I’ve talked to the BEA people and seen they announced tables have been discontinued because they’re not in the budget for it. This was over a year ago. That’s unfortunately been an ongoing problem.

The BLS, which compiles things on inflation and labor market, has been having issues for a while — not necessarily because of underfunding, though that’s probably related to it, but just because people don’t respond to surveys the way they used to, for who knows why. You take a survey of employers every month, figure out how many people are working, and then aggregate it up to give an estimate. But if the employers are not answering your call for whatever reason, or fewer of them are proportionally, that creates potential problems. That was already an issue.

It’s compounded by cutting people arbitrarily. There was an announcement in the past few months — the Commerce Department, which runs the BEA and the census (not BLS, that’s in the Labor Department), had this outside body of advisors, mostly academics, to judge the quality of federal statistics. They just decided to cancel the meetings. Who knows? Maybe they just decided we don’t need the meeting. But it’s the kind of thing where if you were to say, “Okay, this would be the first step if you wanted to fudge the numbers."

I don’t see any evidence that’s what’s going on so far. I don’t want to impugn any of the numbers or any of the work that’s being done now. I don’t see any evidence of that yet. I don’t even know what it would look like, but I agree it’s something to be worried about. Just the fact that we’re talking about it is indicative of the kinds of people who are in charge and what they’ve generally shown in their attitude toward things — that this is a possibility, that it could be happening, even if it hasn’t actually happened yet.

Jordan Schneider: It would be pretty remarkable if we’re in a world where we start treating American numbers like Chinese numbers. There’s the intel community stuff of fudging judgments and people leaking out what the real numbers are. I can imagine that happening also in BLS pretty quickly, where there’s enough of an institutional allergy to this that you hear pretty fast within that org of any of these types of shenanigans happening.

Matt Klein: I had two things. One is that far there are independent ways of verifying inflation stuff. The Billion Prices Project was invented by an Argentine working in the United States as an academic economist — very appropriately — to figure out alternative measures of tracking inflation. They just look at online listings. Far for the U.S., you say, “Okay, what are the prices of a basket of goods that matches the CPI basket of goods based on online listings?” And it’s tracked perfectly so far. That’s encouraging.

On the Chinese side, I guess you might know more than I do. My understanding is the headline GDP numbers may or may not be massaged. The underlying stuff is probably the good faith best estimate. But if they don’t like something, they just stop publishing it. It’s not even that they make it up — they just stop publishing the number. That seems like that actually could be an issue, especially given you have budget cuts anyway.

Jordan Schneider: There’s enough money in getting good numbers on U.S. employment that people will just invest in getting this right.

Matt Klein: It might not be public. There’s value in it being publicly available.

Kevin Xu: It’s locked up in Jane Street’s data center somewhere.

Peter Harrell: Bloomberg will add it to the terminal for an extra $500 a month.

Jordan Schneider: Does anyone have recommendations? Anything you’re reading or enjoying?

Peter Harrell: I just finished reading a book from 15 to 20 years ago by a Wall Street Journal reporter about the rise of the Texas oil families from the 1930s to the 1950s — the wildcatters like the Hunt family and similar figures. It’s fascinating because there are so many parallels, both culturally and psychologically, to the people who have made fortunes in tech over the last 20 years.

These were individuals doing innovative things with new technology who made tremendous amounts of money and then started converting that wealth into political influence. They began buying up media — literally purchasing radio stations at the time. It was quite striking to see how these people started out drilling oil wells in the 1920s and eventually came to build or at least fund the modern conservative political movement in the 1950s. It’s a very interesting piece of history.

Kevin Xu: I started reading Inside the House of Money, which is a collection of interviews with macro hedge fund managers, conducted by another macro hedge fund professional. The interviews are very intimate and revealing.

One of the interviews features our current Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, from when he was running his own fund right after leaving Soros. Apparently, going into this interview, he was extremely sleep-deprived — he hadn’t slept for days — and was worried about something that might happen in China. He didn’t specify what, but that was the context for his interview.

This book was written between 2004 and 2005, and I still haven’t figured out what was happening in China at that time that kept our future Treasury Secretary awake at night. If anyone can help me solve that mystery, I’d appreciate it. Regardless, the book is a really engaging read if you enjoy understanding the mindset of global macro traders.

Matt Klein: I don’t have anything quite as sophisticated, but I recently started watching Your Friends & Neighbors, and I’ve been enjoying it tremendously. I also bought The Party’s Interests Come First on your recommendation, though I haven’t started reading it yet. It sounds excellent.

Jordan Schneider: I have another recommendation that will preview a future China Talk episode — To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. It just won the Pulitzer Prize.

It was actually amusing because I booked the author before he won the Pulitzer, and then we had to postpone our interview because he suddenly had major media obligations to attend to. The book is beautiful and literary, with incredible sources. You have all these transcripts from court cases where these dissidents are essentially mocking the prosecutors and judges, taking them to task at every turn.

While it doesn’t necessarily tell you much about this moment in American politics, it provides a fascinating window into the world of these very brave and frankly eccentric people who made remarkable choices in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the Soviet Union. This was after the Stalin era, so they weren’t going to be executed, but they were still putting an enormous amount on the line to confront the regime.

Our “cooked level” remains undetermined. See you all in September.

Mood Music

How does Russia prevent uprisings, and what can other authoritarians learn from Moscow’s methods of coup control?

For the second anniversary of the Wagner uprising, ChinaTalk interviewed London-based historian Kamil Galeev, who was also a classmate of Jordan’s at Peking University.

We discuss…

• Why the Wagner Group rebelled in 2023, and why the coup attempt ultimately failed,

• How Wagner shifted the Kremlin’s assessment of internal political challengers,

• Similarities between post-Soviet doomerism and the American right,

• Historical examples of foreign policy influenced by a victimhood mentality,

• Barriers to Chinese hegemony.

Listen on your favorite podcast app.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit that helps people find fulfilling careers that do good. 80,000 Hours — named for the average length of a career — has been doing in-depth research on AI issues for over a decade, producing reports on existential risk, scenarios for potential AI catastrophe, and examining the concrete steps you can take to help ensure AI development goes well.

Their research suggests that working to reduce risks from advanced AI could be one of the most impactful ways to make a positive difference in the world.

They provide free resources to help you contribute, including:

• Detailed career reviews for paths like AI safety technical research, AI governance, information security, and AI hardware,

• A job board with hundreds of high-impact opportunities,

• A podcast featuring deep conversations with experts like Carl Shulman, Ajeya Cotra, and Tom Davidson,

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Why Russians Don’t Rebel

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, can you explain the Wagner insurrection that happened two years ago in Russia?

Kamil Galeev: The Wagner coup attempt in summer 2023 was perhaps the lowest point for Russia during the course of this war — the biggest moment of internal instability. It made a profound impression internally and changed the priorities and policies of the ruling regime.

How did the coup attempt become possible in the first place? Before discussing that, we need to examine why coups haven’t been more common in Russian history prior to the Wagner insurrection.

The primary reason is that since 1917, the modern Russian state has carried direct, uninterrupted institutional continuity. Since the October Revolution, the Russian Armed Forces have been heavily co-opted, which is easy to explain.

Imagine you’re Lenin, Trotsky, and others taking power in 1917. You’re constantly comparing yourselves with revolutionaries of the past, most importantly the French Revolution, but also the English Revolution. What pattern do you see?

You see English parliamentarians taking power from the King and waging war. As they wage war, they create an army, a military force that eventually overthrows them. The same happens with the French Revolution — National Assembly deputies take power and wage war, but the powerful armed force they create ultimately overthrows them.

The pattern they observed from history is that the English Revolution ends with Cromwell and the French Revolution ends with Bonaparte. This became their primary fear for their own revolution.

They took massive, systematic precautions against this outcome. In Trotsky’s memoirs, My Life, he describes discussing an officer of the Red Army called Blagonravov, who performed admirably. Lenin had a strong reaction when Trotsky remarked that Blagonravov, if translated into Italian, sounds like “Buonaparte.” This may seem paranoid, but it demonstrates their deep concerns.

“‘Out of such a lieutenant,’ I had once said jokingly to Lenin, ‘even a Napoleon may come some day. He even has the right name for it: Blago-nravov, [In Russian this means “good-natured” or “good-mannered.” - Trans.] almost like Bona-parte.’ Lenin laughed at this unexpected comparison, then he grew thoughtful, and, with his cheek-bones bulging even more, said very seriously, almost threateningly, ‘Well, I think we’ll manage the Bonapartes, don’t you?’”

~ Leon Trotsky, My Life p. 317

When building the Red Army, they were constantly obsessed with the possibility of Bonapartism, scanning for potential Bonapartes and weeding them out. From the beginning, the Red Forces, from which the Russian army naturally inherits, were extremely optimized to prevent any coup attempt.

This explains what the KGB was all about. You don’t build an enormous, all-permeating, all-powerful state security apparatus merely to fight dissidents — that would be overkill. You don’t even build it just to suppress rebellions. You build the KGB to infiltrate the army, control it, and if necessary, suppress armed insurrections. It’s essentially a second internal army to control the first.

Since 1917, Russian military development has been heavily optimized for this specific purpose. All armed forces, either in the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, were heavily infiltrated by state security agents with double and triple layers of control. The system was designed so that, first, you cannot prepare an insurrection in secrecy, and second, you cannot execute one because these layers of control would be activated.

State security agents were embedded in every unit, regiment, and army. They would simply eliminate a general who attempted anything subversive. This system worked effectively in preventing military coups, which may explain why the Russian state remained internally stable through the 1990s, despite poverty, lack of resources, and extreme discontent within the military. Many officers were upset, but taking action was impossible.

The interesting thing about Wagner is that it may have been the first military unit since 1917 that avoided this state security infiltration, escaping these double and triple layers of control.

Wagner famously recruited people with various backgrounds — former military officers, police officers, customs officials, drug control agents, and prison guards. Interestingly, they even recruited ethnic Russians from the French Foreign Legion. However, they didn’t recruit state security personnel for obvious reasons — if you start recruiting former state security officers, you’ll quickly be completely infiltrated by current state security officers.

Why was this allowed to happen? It seems like a completely irrational decision for the political leadership. To answer this question, we need to view it not as a single decision but as a sequence of consecutive decisions.

The creation of this large, non-infiltrated force without checks or control layers didn’t happen instantly. It evolved over time, iteratively. Originally, Wagner was a small unit of mercenaries, primarily for special operations far from Russia’s borders — in Syria, Libya, and eastern Ukraine.

A member of the French Foreign Legion displays Wagner-affiliated patches, December 2022. Source.

Early Wagner was small — dozens, then hundreds of fighters who were usually far away, sometimes thousands of miles from Russian borders, with some veterans in reserve at home. These reservists lived normal lives in Russia until called upon. At any given moment, the force was small and mostly distant, which allowed it to largely bypass direct control, partially because it wasn’t considered important.

The enormous expansion occurred only in 2022. Before the Ukraine war, Wagner was essentially an assassin group or hit squad. When the initial invasion failed massively, the political leadership tried to improvise new tools, mobilizing whatever resources they had. At this point, Wagner was authorized for massive expansion.

This wasn’t part of the original plan. When Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border, Wagner wasn’t there. After the initial invasion failed, they mobilized whatever they could — they called reservists, recruited other people, and soon began mobilizing prisoners.

Before long, they went from having a few hundred fighters mostly in Africa or Syria to tens of thousands relatively close to Russian borders. As this happened rapidly, normal control mechanisms weren’t established. The most basic control would have been oversight by state security officers and possibly the Federal Protective Service, who are essentially Putin’s bodyguards.

When the political leadership eventually tried to impose stricter control by integrating Wagner into the normal military structure, the uprising began.

My point is that although creating a large, uncontrollable structure seems irrational for the leadership, that’s not how it happened historically. First, they created a small structure where additional control layers seemed unnecessary. Then, when the situation deteriorated dramatically, they had to improvise with tactical responses to tactical problems, dealing with consequences later. This happened through many iterations, not just one.

Wagner’s rebellion represents perhaps the greatest internal threat to the regime in decades. Not only during Putin’s rule, but including through Yeltsin’s era as well. There hasn’t been a military rebellion of this scale probably since the October Revolution. It was the most serious internal political threat. The question is, why did it evaporate and turn into nothing?

There could be several valid answers to that question. One possibility is that the Wagner group never actually intended to take power. It was most probably a negotiation attempt rather than an effort to overthrow the political leadership and replace them. It appears to have been an attempt to renegotiate their position, perhaps as a reaction to being taken over. They tried to avoid the imposition of additional control through a show of force. It didn’t work out, but they likely never aimed to overthrow the leadership from the beginning.

This may actually be a common occurrence. Many rebellions and revolts don’t initially aim to overthrow leadership but rather to make specific demands. However, in many cases, these still bring disastrous consequences. Why didn’t this one?

Another valid explanation is that they were positioned too far away. Were there any Wagner garrisons in the Moscow region? Had there been, events might have unfolded differently.

The main reason, however, is that the dirtiest secret about military coups is that successful ones are typically invited. In most cases, it’s extraordinarily difficult to execute one without invitation. The creation of Wagner as an independent and uncontrollable armed force didn’t happen overnight but resulted from an accumulation of many tactical decisions over time.

The common image of military officers secretly preparing and then executing a lightning strike to seize power is largely fictional. In most functional regimes, this approach simply wouldn’t work. For the military to successfully take power, they typically need to be invited or solicited.

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, would you apply a Nazi Operation Valkyrie analogy here? How would you classify that within the solicited versus unsolicited framework?

Kamil Galeev: Consider the Eighteenth Brumaire — probably the most famous and iconic military coup in history, when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power. The important understanding here is that it didn’t happen in a vacuum but culminated a long process.

Since at least the Thermidorian Reaction, the political leadership in France had been using the military to control political processes. They deployed troops to deal with armed rebellions in Paris or popular mutinies. When afraid of losing elections, they used troops to “correct” electoral procedures and break the opposition. When wanting to purge political opponents from parliament and the National Convention, they used troops.

This happened repeatedly. Early in the French Revolution, the use of force was disguised as popular rebellion. Eventually, it became undisguised military force. With each passing year, the government ruled increasingly through explicit military force.

The problem was that as this progressed, the leadership became more dependent on the military. When Bonaparte took power, the coup wasn’t even his idea. It originated with Abbé Sieyès, a political leader who wanted to achieve personal political goals using the military — just as the political leadership had done many times before. This last time, however, it backfired.

What we see isn’t a single coup but many “mini-coups” where political leadership repeatedly corrected political outcomes through military means. In doing so, they gradually invited the military to take power. Examining history, we could find many more examples of this pattern.

Jordan Schneider: The Nazi analogy might be more appropriate than the 18th century Brumaire comparison. There was a war going poorly, with generals realizing their leader was unstable and deciding action was necessary. Many senior Nazi leaders supported the plan, but it failed simply because the bomb exploded on the wrong side of the table.

Kamil Galeev: That’s an interesting comparison with Wagner, noteworthy for both similarities and differences. One key distinction is that the officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler were pursuing what they perceived as a common interest, not personal gain. Many of these officers actually owed their careers to Hitler, so they weren’t motivated by professional setbacks.

The Wagner coup attempt, however, clearly pursued particularist interests. They were essentially protesting against being taken over and demonstrating their force. The first case involved belief in a common good — the second lacked this motivation.

Another obvious difference is that the Nazi coup plotters actively tried to eliminate Hitler and arrest Goebbels, attempting to seize political leadership directly. This wasn’t really Wagner’s approach. Their action resembled a negotiation more than a takeover. The officers who tried to kill Hitler weren’t seeking concessions or privileges, while Wagner was.

The third difference is that Nazi officers were part of the regular military structure, while Wagner operated as an irregular mercenary force. Many Wehrmacht officers could be seen as part of established elites predating Hitler, whereas Prigozhin and his organization were entirely Putin’s creation.

This last point is particularly important because, unlike the Nazi officers within the normal military hierarchy, the Wagner phenomenon only became possible through Yevgeny Prigozhin’s personal connections. Though a junior member, he belonged to the same network as Putin. The creation of this force didn’t happen overnight but through several iterations, succeeding because Prigozhin was integrated into the same contract network.

In Russia, there exists an informal personal network of Putin’s longstanding friends from St. Petersburg, including oligarchs who rose to prominence under his rule, such as the Rotenbergs. Prigozhin appears to have been a subordinate of the Rotenbergs, placing him just one step removed from Putin — a trusted man of Putin’s trusted man. This position gave him access to the sovereign’s ear and allowed him to be entrusted with matters outside normal processes.

One thesis I want to develop later is that power is often misunderstood. Power largely represents one’s social metric status within the contract network. In highly centralized systems, politics revolves around gaining the ruler’s ear at any cost. I believe we’ll increasingly see elements of this in the United States as well, where informal contact with the supreme ruler will matter more and cost more.

Infected by Victimhood

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, how did this experience change Putin and the regime’s calculus going forward?

Kamil Galeev: Somewhat paradoxically, the regime appears to have become relatively more relaxed about civilian threats. After the coup, there seems to have been a recalibration of what constitutes a threat. Dissident groups were effectively downgraded in threat assessment, while state security and intelligence services focused on dealing with Wagner’s aftermath and monitoring potential opposition from armed entities, including those within the regular military.

Essentially, following the coup, significantly greater emphasis was placed on monitoring potential threats from individuals with weapons, regardless of their agency affiliation.

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, what impressions do you have of what’s happening in America right now?

Kamil Galeev: One impression — and this is not so much an analysis as a genuine observation — is that it feels oddly familiar. I grew up in Russia, born in 1992, and much of the Russian atmosphere of the 1990s and 2000s was characterized by a pervasive feeling of resentment. There was a widespread belief that we had been screwed over, ripped off, and victimized. This mentality fueled a desire for revenge in some form.

This feeling of resentment and victimhood has been the major cause of what outsiders might perceive as irrationality in Russian foreign policy. When you feel like a victim, when you believe you’ve been abused and treated unfairly, you often declare a crusade against a cruel world that has mistreated you. This is a common occurrence both among individuals who feel victimized and start attacking everyone around them, and among nations.

The deep resentment and sense of defeat in Russia and post-Soviet countries made them behave in counterproductive ways. This was somewhat explainable because Russia lost the Cold War and consequently acted as a sore loser, which typically means acting irrationally.

Now I sense the same feeling of resentment and a similar atmosphere in America. There’s this notion that “we have been mistreated, we have been ripped off, and now we’ll take revenge.” This is much less comprehensible to me because America didn’t lose — it actually won. I can understand how this sentiment emerged in Russia, but it’s much more difficult for me to construct a functional model of how it developed in the United States.

Consider the trade war, for example. You could argue that decoupling from China serves American interests, which may indeed be the case. However, it doesn’t appear that America is simply decoupling from China — it seems to be attempting to decouple from the entire world simultaneously. This doesn’t resemble a reasonable or rational plan; it looks more like an emotional reaction, an attack against everyone at once.

The only explanation I have is that this behavior stems from a sense of victimhood, which leads to attacking indiscriminately. Within the American conservative movement particularly, I observe an incredible feeling of resentment. Yet it remains puzzling to me how this emerged as a mass phenomenon in the first place. America is the richest large country in the world, yet a big portion of the population sees themselves as victims, abused by everyone.

Jordan Schneider: That’s the world we get to live in now.

Kamil Galeev: Yes, but again, it’s a puzzle I don’t quite understand. In the UK, where I live now, there’s a sense of decline in the standard of living — not necessarily in absolute terms, but in relative terms. Not so long ago, the UK was much wealthier than almost any continental European country, particularly before World War I or even World War II. That’s no longer the case.

But the American situation feels especially puzzling. Perhaps one takeaway is that it’s very difficult to monitor the sense of victimhood within yourself, because once you become infected by it, you begin undermining yourself through your own actions.

Jordan Schneider: Are there any historical examples of victimhood mentality unwinding itself and a new conception or national purpose taking its place?

Kamil Galeev: I’ll avoid modern examples as they would generate too much controversy. Instead, I can offer some more distant historical ones.

We often discuss the problems and madness of Nazism and Nazi decisions, but it’s difficult to ignore that much of German foreign policy was established long before the Nazis rose to power. Consider how hostilities with the United States developed during World War I with the Zimmermann Telegram. Germany sent a telegram offering Mexico a portion of the United States. Even though the British intercepted and published it, few believed it because it seemed so absurd. Then the German ambassador confirmed it and repeated the threats, which led to hostilities with America and ultimately contributed to Germany’s defeat.

This may be the most illustrative example, but when examining German foreign policy before and during World War I, it appears they were actively collecting enemies worldwide. Finding a rational explanation for this behavior is challenging, but this pattern was evident in early 20th century Germany long before the Nazis came to power. This mentality certainly made their policies, particularly foreign policy, much less effective.

To condense it into one formula, if you perceive yourself as a victim, ripped off by a cruel world, then the entire world becomes your tormentor. Launching a crusade against the whole world might sound like a perfect plan, but it inevitably leads to conflicts you cannot possibly win.

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, would you like to share your reflections on China?

Kamil Galeev: If we were living in a conventional world, comparable to 100 or 200 years ago, I would say China appears to be the next world hegemon. This is partly because China has taken over much of global material production and is rapidly improving and expanding into other sectors. In almost every sphere of the material economy, and increasingly the digital economy, Chinese companies are outperforming nearly all competition. Typically, this is how a future global hegemon behaves.

However, we now live in a fundamentally different world from the past, most notably because it is aging and will soon be shrinking quantitatively. When the Netherlands became the economic hegemon of Western Europe, they were booming and expanding. It was a young, rapidly growing country. England during the Industrial Revolution and throughout its 19th-century hegemony was also young and quickly growing. The small manufacturing cities of England were booming with people, particularly young people. The same applies to America in the 20th century.

Now we’re entering an interesting phase where most industrial countries will be shrinking quantitatively and, more importantly, aging. How this will unfold in this new era is unclear. Perhaps the most serious problem facing China is that it appears to be aging faster than other nations.

The most logical solution for them would be to ease their stance on immigration, bringing in more people — and to be cynical and candid — particularly facilitating the inflow of women. The fact that they haven’t taken steps in this direction leads us into unknown territory. I don’t fully understand what will happen when the number of young people falls below a certain minimum threshold.

Jordan Schneider: To close, what are you researching right now?

Kamil Galeev: Currently, I’m primarily interested in coups and power dynamics — how political power is gained and lost. My main topics of interest are the October Revolution and its consequences, as well as the French Revolution and its aftermath. In the coming months, I’ll be writing about Lenin, Stalin, and the Bolshevik rise to power, as well as revolutionary Napoleonic France. Both these historical periods significantly shaped the world we live in today.

我唯一一双运动鞋去年在游荡世界中穿坏了，这双鞋买于2015年。当时我大学刚刚毕业，月薪到手三千多，住在北京的望京西园小区月租1500的一间房子里，小区里到处是韩国餐厅，街上都是小摊贩，卖水果卖炒饼也有卖鞋子的。我当时就在其中摊贩之一，买了一双轻便无比的运动鞋，每次穿上它我都更愿意出门了。

（在世界尽头的乌斯怀亚还穿着它）

然后就是这样一双买了快10年的鞋子在游荡世界跋山涉水之后坏了，为了买一双鞋继承它的“大统”，我常常在出门的时候看别人脚上的鞋子。有一天就在欧洲最便宜的大巴车flixbus上走下来了一群露营徒步回来的年轻人，我立刻定睛来看，想着她们的鞋子肯定又轻便又舒服。结果一看，鞋子还非常好看。我偷偷拍了一下鞋子的脚后跟，上网搜图，知道了这个鞋子品牌keen.看了这个品牌好几双鞋，我还发给一位朋友说好适合她，结果她说她已经拥有了两双这个品牌的鞋子，出门徒步爬山溯溪都非常方便。

于是我就知道了原来世界上有一种鞋子叫做溯溪鞋，还因此去看了好多溯溪的视频，看视频的时候就觉得溯溪也太好了！

我小时候在乡村就经常夏天和伙伴在河里趟水，我们皖北的河真的相当浑浊，河水是土黄色，穿的鞋湿了回家可能还会被骂，可是那也让我们快乐！

要是穿着不会湿滑的溯溪鞋夏日去山间清澈沁凉的的溪水里趟一趟呢？那不是人间顶级乐事吗？我在家里畅想了很久。尽管溯溪鞋太贵，我还是没有舍得买。但是有了有朝一日能去溯溪的希望，在荷兰猛然热起来的夏日，就能让我感受到快意和清凉。

也是在这突如其来的热到升腾夏日傍晚，我突然想起来另一个最近10年中文世界频频出现的词汇：上岸。

找工作，考研，考公，考编，甚至任何一场考试，都可以被冠名为“上岸”。

仿佛绝大多数人都生活在河流当中。

上了岸有什么呢：确定性。哪怕是短暂的确定性。甚至哪怕是痛苦的确定性。

我常常看到大家说，上岸前因为不确定性迷茫痛苦焦虑地想死。上岸后则因为确定的痛苦而生不如死。毕竟上岸后就要读研或者上班。

哪一天最开心呢？知道自己会成功上岸的那一天。

在知道可以上岸的那一天，和真正上岸的那一天，这中间的时间，充满了快乐，希望和平静。

而在这个区间之外，几乎都是痛苦。在河里趟着的时候的痛苦，走上岸在陆地上行走同样痛苦。无论是大地还是河流都弥漫着痛苦。

我一直是一个无法抑制的solution-seeker：一看到广泛存在的存在的痛苦，我就忍不住想为消弭这些痛苦找一个解决方案。

于是我有一个突发奇想：倘若已经身在河流了，要不我们把它当做是来溯溪呢？

这样在河流当中的时候，就不必如此痛苦了。你的唯一目标就不是那个上了之后也还会痛苦的岸了。你在河流当中也有溯溪的乐趣。

几乎每个人的人生都要在河流中行走一段时间，从来只在岸上行走的人寥寥无几。而且你仔细想那些一生都只在岸上（确定性）中的行走的人，那种人生就更是恐怖非常了。这意味着它们的人生也从未有过期盼和希望。

不确定性的河流，每个人的人生都需要趟一趟。

而且早趟比晚趟好，越晚趟越不敢趟，就只能死守一个让自己痛苦的岸了。以及把趟河当做来溯溪，比盯着岸把趟河当劫难折磨好。

我发现我的这个突发奇想，对我自己相当有效用。就在我想完的当下，我对当下不确定生活的焦虑，得到了巨大的缓释：我此刻正在我人生的溪流中溯溪冒险呢！这不就是我小时候最想过的生活吗！

（在全世界最宽的河流拉普拉塔河前）

这就是我经常胡思乱想会得到aha moment（啊哈时刻）和mini enlightenment（迷你开悟）.而且我发现，好多事情，我一旦可以视觉化地想明白（溯溪和趟河的视觉化效果可太强了），我的烦恼就不再能如此困扰我了，我的行为也会随之放松，选择也会变得流畅。

恰巧我在乱想关于岸和河流时，打开了一本书，书里开头正在讲一个关于“开悟”（enlightenment)的故事。

一个乞丐在路边坐了30年，向路人乞讨。一个路人经过说：“我没有什么可以给你的。你屁股下面坐着的是什么呢？” 乞丐说：“只是一个旧箱子，过去30年我一直坐在上面。”

路人问：“那你有打开过箱子吗？”

乞丐说：“没有，打开有什么用，里面什么都没有。”

路人坚持劝乞丐打开箱子看看。

结果令人意想不到的事情发生，乞丐充满了惊奇和狂喜：箱子里装满了金子。

我理解这个故事的隐喻是：当你觉得自己贫乏，困窘，一穷二白，身无长物，只能向上天祈祷时诉诸于玄学时，要先看看自己是否遮蔽了自己已经拥有的东西。比如上天给每个人的礼物：gift，也是你的天赋之所在。很多人穷尽一生，都没有愿意去探索自己的箱子，看看自己真的擅长什么，热爱什么。而是和所有人一起向外祈求一份微薄的，仅能让自己生存下去的口粮。

我知道很多正处在焦虑和生存危机中的人，看到这样的故事可能会火冒三丈：真实的人生不是这些想教你些什么的寓言故事，打开自己所有的箱子也没有金子，问自己有没有掉斧子的绝对是诈骗。人不会因为打开箱子或者诚实就得到报偿。活着已经够累了，上岸已经够难了，就别拿狗屁虚假故事来试图教我一些什么了！

的确，在一个争相上岸的社会环境当中，试图想让大家问问自己脚下究竟踩着怎样的土地，自己喜不喜欢这条溪流的水质，温度，河流中的水草，溪水冲刷脚趾的感受，更喜爱河流两岸哪一处的风光，可能都会因为“不接地气”而招致反感和谩骂。

从在河中挣扎着上岸，和溯溪，好像中间也隔着阶级。前者是无产者的痛苦挣扎，后者是中产阶级的休闲娱乐。

但是这世界的河流始终存在，它不会因为我们是痛苦还是欢愉，是无产者还是中产抑或权贵，就能消失。我们对河流的消费方式（这么说实在是有些不太尊重河流）当然取决于我们的阶级，我们能否买得起溯溪鞋，买得起房车帐篷，也会影响我们和河流的关系。无论是真实的河流还是隐喻的河流：因为大家也认为更有钱的人对不确定性的风险承受等级更高。

但是倘若不和任何它者比较，因为无论怎么比，每个人都必须面对自己眼前的河流。

现在情况是：你就是眼睁睁面对着眼前的河流了，你的心中有自己真的想去的岸吗？你现在挣扎着要去的岸是为了逃避在河流中不确定的痛苦吗？

倘若没有想去的岸，目前挣扎着要去的岸也只是逃避不确定性的痛苦，除了满怀焦虑地辗转腾挪并向上天祈求早日上岸成功，还有其它的活法吗？有能真正减轻痛苦的方法吗？

当我还是一个乡村小孩时，我不知道这个世界有岸必须要抵达。我只想在河流里趟水，让虽然浑浊但清凉的河水流淌过我的小腿和脚趾，和伙伴们一起手牵着手拿着树枝往前探去：尽量别让自己滑到，也别误入深坑。

当我长大了，这世界确定性的岸就零星几个，倘若不想在河里趟，就要“千军万马过独木桥”。我已经过了好几个独木桥，然后桥通往的几个岸我要么自己试了要么采访了去了别的岸的人，最后我发现这些岸真是每一个都苦不堪言，而且更可怕的是：越确定的岸越苦海无涯。越走上最确定岸的人，越泥足深陷无力自拔。

于是我积攒了勇气重新朝河里走去，在河流中的日子坦诚地讲有时候不确定性齐发，再冷静的人也难不焦虑，生活在某一段河流，简直像按了葫芦起了瓢。我之前和自己说的是：焦虑是精神自由必须付出的代价。这是我想要自由必须进行的trade off(交换）。

可是在最近这两个月不确定性井喷时（后面会发一篇文章讲有多惊人），在这个夏日从灼热到清凉的傍晚，我突然意识到自己转变了思路：我是来人生的河流溯溪的。

就在我趟河的这几年，我真是发现了自己这个“小乞丐”箱子里一个又一个的财宝，这是我一直在岸上绝无可能发现的东西，人在岸上忙着用忙碌生活逃避和遮蔽自己，很难去想自己是否有箱子，箱子里有什么。趟河时候真是不得不想。

而今天我决定对面前的河流，以一种溯溪的态度来面对，不确定性不再是自由的代价，焦虑不再是不确定性必然的副产品。它们也可以是溯溪的乐趣本身。

李小龙有一句话：be water，my friend.它被非常多艺术家和哲学家引用。老子的也有一句话“上善若水”，也总被很多故作高深的男的引用。我坦白说，我一直不太真正理解这两句话，当然“适应变化，无我无执，柔中带刚”这些字面的引申义我可以理解，但是它们这个“水”不是我的真知识，更不是那些引用它的男性们的真知识。

但是我今天想到溯溪和上岸时，我突然从感官上理解了它一点点。拥抱不确定性这个口号，说800遍也很难有人能真正做到。但今天这条河，我是来穿河上岸的，还是来溯溪探索的，我今天就可以决定。

我光是想象溯溪的河水和我的脚，我就有了答案和决断。

所以离be water和上善若水的顶级开悟（enlightenment)怕还是很遥远，但是我今天感觉到自己一只脚已经踏入了水边。

这是我今天打开箱子寻到的宝藏。

Open your box now, my friend.

is the author of the Concurrent Substack and host of the CyberPink podcast. Concurrent explores the parallel and colliding tech and cultural currents shaping Silicon Valley, China, and beyond. Her show 疲惫娇娃 CyberPink is a Chinese-language podcast about popular culture. From screens to the cosmos, it explores culture in its broadest sense—using women’s voices to expand the ways we engage with and imagine the world. It is very good I highly recommend!

I recently hosted a 2-session reading club for Abundance, bringing together paid subscribers of my Chinese-language podcast CyberPink and those of our sibling podcast American Roulette. Ours was conducted entirely in Mandarin Chinese, which meant that the participants, by default, were like me: born and raised in China, educated in the West, and now navigating the cultural and ideological fault lines between the two. Among the attendees were academics, lawyers, consultants, AI investors in Silicon Valley, and engineers in big tech.

When you discuss American politics in a group like this, perspectives shift constantly. As we dissected Abundance, we toggled between the imagined readers in Brooklyn, the Bay Area, and D.C., and a more distant, more foreign vantage point — one grounded in the trajectories of China itself. In short, we examine the U.S. as foreigners, as immigrants, as Chinese.

Somewhere along the way, our Signal group of book club organizers — my podcast co-hosts and friends — jokingly named the group *Ezra Thought Study Group* (Ezra思想学习小组), a parody of Maoist-era “Marxism Study Group” or more recent “Xi Jinping Thought Study Group.” It was tongue-in-cheek, of course, but it also captured something real: we all sensed that this book was both a techno-optimistic manifesto from central-left, and a piece of strong political persuasion to the reconfiguring Democratic Party.

In this article, I’ve selected fragments from the 100-page (!) transcript of two book clubs, each lasting 1.5 hours — but not the ones you’ve probably heard before. I’ve deliberately cut the standard U.S.-centric book analysis and policy talks; this article is some curated moments that I believe offer some fresh takes. Consider this: Reading Abundance from China.

Note:

The book club followed the Chatham House Rule: participants may use information from the meeting but cannot reveal speakers' identities or information sources. However, I received permission to include some speakers' names and occupations. I've tried to maintain the conversational rawness and haven't done extensive editing, so the transcript may contain factual mistakes. If you find any, please leave a comment. The transcript has been translated and made readable by Claude.

The poverty of American imagination:

Lokin (Lawyer, lives in NYC): I think there's this incredibly limited imagination about what the "good life" looks like in American culture—both among ordinary people and political elites. And this limitation becomes a huge obstacle to building a more abundant, more public, more sustainable future.

There's this perfect example: a Democratic delegation visited Japan recently, and several congresspeople toured the Shinkansen—which, by the way, was built in the 1960s with American funding.1 What's almost laughable is that even today, this public transportation system—which isn't exactly cutting-edge anymore—still managed to "shock" American congresspeople. This tells you that even the highest-ranking political elites don't really have opportunities to experience or understand the kinds of lifestyles other countries have built.

More broadly, American society's vision of lifestyle is still heavily dependent on this outdated American Dream: everyone should own a detached house with a front and back yard, white picket fence, and one or even multiple cars of their own. This individualized, anti-public understanding of the "good life" makes it hard for people to imagine, let alone accept, lifestyles based on public transit, shared spaces, and urban density. So we can understand why American rail infrastructure always struggles to move forward—it's not just technical and budget issues, it's cultural and imaginative barriers.

I was talking to a professor at Columbia—one who’s knowledgeable, well-traveled, worldly person. He told me how impressed he was by Beijing's public safety: at 1 AM, he saw a woman in fur and jewelry walking alone on the street, eventually taking the subway home without any worry. He cited this as positive evidence of modern urban life.

I politely reminded him: if you want to use an example to illustrate good urban safety, you should really mention Tokyo or Seoul instead. Because these cities are equally safe, but they're less likely to be misunderstood as depending on "authoritarian order" for maintenance. When you use Beijing as an example, in the American context, it easily activates this "authoritarian scratch"— people who are culturally inclined to believe order can only be achieved through strongman rule will instinctively equate urban safety with authoritarian governance. They'll think only highly centralized power systems can achieve clean, safe, orderly urban life. This imagination further reinforces their pessimism about democratic countries' inability to govern cities well, providing psychological support for rationalizing some kind of authoritarian governance logic.

But this is actually a very dangerous misreading. We have to dismantle this binary thinking: cities can be both safe and free; public life can be both efficient and democratic. This kind of life exists not only in Tokyo, Seoul, Amsterdam, Zurich, but could absolutely be realized in America, provided we first culturally change our assumptions about what "ideal life" looks like.

What's even more concerning is that even these elite intellectuals still lack basic concepts of what "modern urban life" should look like. They may have never truly internalized the daily experience of "stepping out and taking clean, safe subway, walking freely in dense urban neighborhoods." They still view "cities" as dirty, dangerous, anxiety-inducing places, while treating "suburbs" as safe, clean, ideal residential areas.

This deeply rooted cultural cognitive structure is the biggest resistance we face when promoting public lifestyle transformation. Under this cultural logic, even with sufficient resources and mature technology, it's hard to push for truly progressive infrastructure transformation.

Afra: The poverty of American elite imagination about "happy life" is a key factor preventing visions like Abundance from being realized. Even if we set aside structural obstacles like racial discrimination and economic interests, just looking at popular culture, America’s deeply influential soft power, the society has already fallen into a kind of imaginative local optimization.

As the world's most powerful popular culture exporter, Hollywood has long been continuously and repeatedly producing a specific kind of life picture, and this picture's singularity is actually quietly limiting public understanding and imagination of the possibilities for abundance and "good life."

For example, when Hollywood wants to show a big city's bustling scene, the template is almost always New York: broken-down subways full of rats, Manhattan's towering skyscrapers, a city that's vibrant yet dirty and chaotic. This "city equals anxiety" narrative has almost become American culture's default setting.

And when film and TV want to imagine "ideal life," the camera often turns to suburbs: spacious detached houses, white fences around front yards, two cars, a few dogs, quiet tree-lined neighborhoods, and a typical nuclear family. This repeatedly reinforced template creates a ceiling for cultural imagination, making it hard for people to conceive of a lifestyle that's both urban and livable, both public and high-quality.

It's precisely this imaginative pathway that's been constantly reproduced by the cultural industry for years that makes "abundance" futures largely misunderstood as extensions of consumerism or "upgraded versions of suburban dreams," rather than optimization of public spaces, infrastructure innovation, or reorganization of human relationships.

On environmental assessment in China and the US

T, (Economist): I'm an economist, and my main research area is causal inference. Right now, most of our policy evaluations are built on causal inference methods. The most common example would be A/B testing or randomized controlled experiments. Many policy evaluation paradigms, including things like environmental assessment, basically follow this same logic and process—they're all built on this scientific framework about what makes policy "rational."

But the problem is, this approach might be missing a crucial point: when we do A/B testing, we often can't capture general equilibrium effects. We don't have the ability to properly measure the chain reactions that policies create at the system level. What we get is often just a local impact—a primary feedback observed under specific settings. But this local effect might not be the most important first-order effect; the deeper structural impacts might be exactly what gets excluded because our evaluation methods are too reductive.

I think environmental assessment is a perfect example of being shaped by this paradigm. Many countries do environmental assessments—China has similar systems too. But China's environmental assessment often feels more like formalistic copying: seeing that the U.S. and other countries have environmental assessment mechanisms, so we "should" have them too. But for a long time, China's environmental assessment wasn't treated as a serious, scientific problem, so it didn't adopt the kind of rigorous processes based on scientific methods like America does.

The result is that in China, environmental assessment plays a very limited actual role in infrastructure development. And in America, while the environmental assessment system itself is more influential, the methods it relies on still tend to only capture partial effects while ignoring broader general effects. For example, opportunity cost might be a crucial variable in policy choices, but it's not something that's easily captured in our current mainstream operational inference frameworks.

So I think there's this really interesting, even ironic paradox here: our methodology is indeed getting more and more advanced, allowing us to make increasingly "scientific" policy evaluations. But at the same time, it's precisely these methods themselves that are making our understanding of the complex, multi-layered impacts after policy implementation more narrow. Maybe in trying to make policy evaluation more "falsifiable" and more "rigorous," we're also losing our sense of its holistic and long-term dimensions.

The "tech OS gap" between China and the US

Du Lei (tech investor, lives in the Bay Area): From my background—I originally did AI research and now I'm in tech investing—so I instinctively tend to look at problems from a "system design" perspective. My very intuitive feeling right now is: America is using an outdated institutional framework, this old governance "software," to deal with a real-world social system that has higher bandwidth, more complexity, and faster change. The result is—the whole system is starting to fall behind.

The deregulation that Abundance mentions frequently, in the short term, might indeed be an emergency measure to improve efficiency. But if it's just deregulation without actually rebuilding this institutional infrastructure, it's probably just "treating the head when the head hurts, treating the foot when the foot hurts."

It's like a programmer who just joined a company that's been using a ten-year-old system, saying: "This legacy code is too messy, just delete it." Deletion might feel good, but three months later the whole system could just crash.

Let me talk about the differences between China and America. I think China's execution advantage in certain areas doesn't necessarily come from so-called systemic superiority, but is more like a manifestation of a technological generation gap.

At the end of the day, China's bureaucratic system is more updated than America's. So even if both countries are equally bureaucratic, Chinese government departments use WeChat to communicate directives and share spreadsheets—at least at the tool level, it's faster and more efficient than America's approach which still relies on email and paper processes.

Of course, China has its own systemic problems too. Like this "layer-by-layer responsibility implementation" approach we've seen since SARS, all these "red line" administrative mechanisms often cause inefficiency and even suppress genuine local feedback. But from an operating system perspective, China is indeed faster at "hardware updates," even if the "software logic" still has plenty of problems.

I also want to respond to this topic about "industrial planning vs. basic research." My personal view is: I don't really believe the government can actually push forward much substantive breakthrough in "basic scientific research."

In another book our CyberPink listener’s community is co-reading, Nexus, it talks about how many real scientific breakthroughs actually come from a broad peer network—they need free, open exchange and sufficient resources. So a lot of times, the technological explosions we see are actually the result of long-term, multi-path, slow accumulation.

For example, America's AI explosion didn't just appear one day with a "lightbulb moment," but is the result of twenty years of big data accumulation, gamers pushing GPU performance, miners driving computational power—all these things stacking up over a long time.

It's the same on China's side. A lot of the technological progress we see isn't some policy suddenly deciding something, but the entire manufacturing system, craftsmanship system accumulating through massive iteration processes.

This is a kind of compound advantage. I think we can't misread this compound progress as achievements brought by "government systems." It's more the result of an ecosystem.

The economic-political split: ground-level contradictions in the U.S.

Amber (Consultant, lives in New York): Hi everyone, I'm Amber. When Afra mentioned America "wanting to catch up" or "wanting to lead" in areas like batteries and solar energy, I really resonated with that—there's this complex emotion behind it, both envy and a deep sense of being torn apart.

Let me give you some background. My day-to-day work involves directly dealing with local governments across America, investment promotion departments, including some global investment projects landing in the U.S. Many of the projects I handle involve building factories, offices, job creation, and so on. And in this process, I've observed a very obvious contradiction:

On one hand, local governments desperately want these investment projects to land because they bring tax revenue, jobs, can revitalize their communities and drive regional development. But on the other hand, they're extremely cautious, especially when facing investments from China—political agenda almost always gets put first.

Here's a simple example: it's not just Texas or those Southern states everyone's familiar with—even states like Southern conservative states and Midwest states that seem like swing states are now very sensitive about "Chinese property ownership." Many local governments explicitly write in their RFP documents that they won't accept investments from China—they just completely won't entertain it. For many of the projects we're working on, this is like a blow to the head.

What's more ironic is that many local officials are actually very conflicted privately: they really do want these projects to land, they know these projects are good for the local economy, but they can't help it because the governor, state legislature, and voter pressure require them to "stay aligned with Trump" politically, they have to put on a tough stance. So the whole system is full of internal tension.

And it's the same on China's side. Many Chinese investors really want to enter the American market, they see opportunities, but they just can't get in.

So what we're seeing now is this bidirectional tear: America and China are mutually wary at the policy level, mutually hostile in public opinion, but economically, they both want to get a piece of the pie from each other. America is worried about leaks on one side and unwilling to give benefits, but on the other side wants to take China's money; China is the same—worried about technology blockades on one side, but hoping to get American subsidies and market access on the other.

So on the surface, both sides seem "calm," but privately, the ground-level exchanges are full of struggle and distrust, like a relationship being pulled in two different directions.

This is also the most real state I've experienced when dealing with American local governments, especially some small-town industrial parks: they really are desperate for development on one hand, but on the other hand they're completely constrained by the upper-level political environment, stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The US and China spend too much time doomscrolling on each other’s social feeds

Yiting (tech worker, lives in London): I think China and America right now are exactly like two doomscrollers brainrotting on each other's social media feeds.

It's like America suddenly scrolls through China's feed, sees some superficially shiny stuff, and goes: "Oh? I want that too!" But they don't really understand what this "person" China is actually like—what reality they're facing, what their situation is, what their resources and challenges are. They don't care, and they don't understand. They just see a filtered photo and start envying, imitating, even getting anxious.

Then America's own actions start getting distorted, wanting to "become another person," without figuring out why that other person is the way they are.

Actually, China does the same thing to America.

Many Chinese people, maybe even including some people at the policy level, don't really understand America's political ecology, social structure, or how their institutions actually work. But they scroll through America's social feed—like some very free, very advanced, very prosperous moments—and think: "I want to be like that too."

So the end result is: both sides are looking at each other's highlight reels while ignoring each other's complex realities, and they both fall into this illusion of "everyone else is living better than me."

At the end of the day, I think both China and America should probably spend less time brainrot.

The blind spot of China envy

Luke (tech worker, lives in NYC): I want to ask a direct question—have you guys listened to the latest episode of Bumingbai podcast?2 They mentioned some huge problems behind China's prosperity. I'm particularly curious: if it's people like Derek Thompson or those centrist liberals, in their process of "rediscovering China," after learning about these problems, what kind of reaction would they have? How do they view these realities?

H (media professional, lives in NYC): Personally, I feel like they don't really understand China—many of them haven't even been to China. When they mention China in articles or podcasts, it's not because they really care about China's history, policies, or the situation of its people. They're using China as a mirror or reference point—not exactly a cautionary tale, and not a positive example either, but a contrast that can inspire Americans' imagination, fighting spirit, and policy action.

What you just mentioned, like solar panels—I'm not an expert in this field, but from some reporting and observations, China's rise in this industry did go through a complex process: from early government subsidies and factory expansion to gradually establishing a globally leading position. But in this process, many Western observers ignored the real costs behind it, like compressed labor rights, serious resource waste, and even corruption and benefit transfers. These realities, as people with Chinese backgrounds, we should of course pay attention to, but in the discourse of people like Ezra Klein or Derek Thompson, these are hardly mentioned. What they care more about is how to use "China's success" to inspire competitive consciousness within America.

When they talk about China-U.S. relations, they easily apply the Cold War framework, like comparing it to the Soviet Union's Sputnik moment: the Soviets launched the first satellite, which inspired America's systematic investment in space, education, research, and other fields. This kind of "being inspired" is the process they hope to replicate from China again. But whether this path is correct is itself a controversial political judgment.

Afra: I agree. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are, after all, American political commentators working within that context. When Ezra Klein mentioned in his podcast that he went to China once about a decade ago, he mentioned that he was talking about having a lot of meetings with officials, with economists, with some business people. So naturally, his China experience draws from that particular slice of the country.

When H mentioned the lithium battery industry earlier, I also remembered chatting with a British scholar a few days ago. She said she attended an academic conference where a young female scholar shared her research on the environmental impact of a lithium battery factory in Sichuan or Anhui (I couldn’t recall). After this young scholar finished speaking, she told all the attendees: "I really hope this paper can be published in China, but I know it's almost impossible." This exposes a core problem: many environmental and industrial costs in China cannot be openly discussed.

A few months ago, I also read an article in Rest of World by Viola Zhou about Chinese lithium battery company Gotion wanting to invest in building a factory in a small Michigan town, bringing huge funding and job opportunities. But the project was ultimately blocked by small-town politics and strong opposition from local residents, where the main resistance was exactly concerns about environmental pollution. In contrast, in China we can hardly truly see these local costs of EV manufacturing or lithium battery factories—exactly how much wastewater was discharged, how much land was occupied, how many people's lives were affected. Much of this data is unknowable because of media lack of transparency and the absence of civil society, meaning these voices have no channels to be heard at all.

H (media professional, lives in NYC): Right, these American "China-envy" people only see the results, like Chinese electric car companies like BYD rising in the global market. But they often ignore the real problems behind these companies, like product quality issues, defaulting on supplier payments, and so on. These more detailed, more complex layers—they don't really care about them.

Debate about the secret sauce and manufacturing mobility

Afra: Ezra Klein mentioned, “the re-emergence of industrial policy in America is 100% about China. Take China out of the equation, and there is no re-emergence of American industrial policy.” Actually, going back to this American reindustrialization thing. Manufacturing: When you really interrogate what technology in manufacturing actually is, of course, you can say part of it is about patents, about things that can be written down, about hard knowledge in manufacturing.

But there's actually another huge part that's tacit knowledge.3 How do you manufacture an iPhone? You need many skilled workers going through many complete assembly lines to put this iPhone together. It's not like you can write the iPhone assembly steps in a piece of paper, and then have new American workers read that paper and immediately go into the factory and start working.

If America needs to reindustrialize, you might really still need to bring Chinese workers back to continue training American workers before you'd have a relatively effective production process. Is America's imagination about reindustrializing very arrogant? Massively ignoring this kind of tacit knowledge in manufacturing and China's accumulated experienced workforce.

X (ML engineer, lives in NY): I have a pretty different, pretty opposite view, because manufacturing itself has extremely high mobility. The reason it exists, the biggest reason it can scale, is that it can reproduce very quickly—the entire factory, the entire process, assembly lines can reproduce very quickly following a template. This is the essence of manufacturing.

At least we might see individual cases like Huawei in the news being a bit less common, or things like that Cao Dewang factory in America having trouble getting started being less common, but including—I don't know if that CyberPink listener is here today, he works in chip industry landing in America—this stuff being able to flow back is the norm.

Manufacturing being able to flow between countries, building a factory and being able to make stuff—this being possible in most cases is actually the norm. If this wasn't the norm, globalization wouldn't have happened. Shenzhen, I think, does have a very unique ecosystem, including its concentration of talent and concentration of knowledge and the existence of the entire ecosystem. I think Shenzhen is a unicorn, just like Silicon Valley itself is a unicorn. But I don't really agree with what you just said about treating manufacturing as something that needs secret sauce, because the essence of manufacturing itself is that it can land anywhere and you can follow the recipe to make it, because if this wasn't possible, this industry wouldn't exist.

So including why everyone in manufacturing, all people in the manufacturing industry, always have this strong sense of crisis about manufacturing mobility—it's still because its mobility is too strong. Including that article I posted before about India, about that piece Viola wrote about India, I found that article very familiar because all the problems they were discussing—Indians feeling like our Indian manufacturing will never get off the ground—but the problems they cited are exactly the same as what I think Chinese people said 20 years ago about how our Chinese high-end manufacturing will never get off the ground.

So I think many things aren't inevitable—it's the current state produced by globalization at this moment. And including my overall view—because I might have followed a few cases at work where a chip factory was moved over from start to finish—I think everyone's degree of exaggerating the secret sauce of many industries is still a bit much.

Afra: What I actually want to say isn't that China now has high-end manufacturing secret sauce that other countries don't have, but that I think this secret sauce cultivation is a very long process. And the reason China was able to cultivate this secret sauce is because China was in a situation at that time—early 2000s, late 90s—where everyone was sharing secret sauce without reservation in a very radical and idealistic state of globalization. But now in 2025, it's no longer that kind of state. Of course, I feel like secret sauce is a very inappropriate term—I'd rather use the term tacit knowledge.

Back in the early 2000s, if China's Foxconn built factories in China, Apple could send large teams of technical bureaucrats to help China build factories and educate the workers. But now if India builds factories saying they want to replace China in manufacturing iPhones, if they want to ask China for some high-end manufacturing help, China definitely say no, because globalization now is not the same as globalization back then. Everyone knows this tacit knowledge is very precious, everyone thinks this is to some degree a huge asset.

X (ML engineer, lives in NY): I think whether they give it or not depends on who's paying—that's also part of the... Back then I think Koreans weren't that willing to give us (China) technology either, but this thing... I think we're all old enough to remember China's manufacturing going from nothing to something, so I'm also very worried that it going from something to nothing is also something we could witness in our not-very-long lifetimes.

Afra: I'm not saying this transition won't happen, but what I quite agree with in Abundance is "America forgot how to build." I think that's a very precise statement, because in manufacturing, knowing how to build and deploy is a "practice makes perfect" technical skill. It's a state that needs more than a lab, more than a book. Just like if you don't exercise for a long time, your muscles gradually atrophy—America's manufacturing muscle has atrophied for decades.

The Deploy chapter in Abundance talks about the lithium battery case, which is really exactly about Americans inventing lithium battery technology and then forgetting how to deploy and scale. Now Chinese lithium battery manufacturers can compress prices in every single link to the lowest, optimize every aspect and every raw material of lithium batteries to the optimal state—this deployment optimization has gone through twenty years. If suddenly tomorrow a Silicon Valley company appeared saying: we're going to build a lithium battery factory from scratch without relying on Shenzhen to teach us, I don't believe it would immediately succeed.

Bay Area’s military-industrial startup renaissance, and China’s "crossing the river by feeling the American stones" innovation style

Du Lei (tech investor, lives in the Bay Area): When we think about San Francisco startups, we traditionally picture a software-dominated entrepreneurial ecosystem. But if you head down to the South Bay, there's still this atmosphere tied to traditional industry—especially over the past decade, we've seen the emergence of a whole batch of defense-related startups in America.

Companies like Anduril represent this trend. People are starting to realize that in this new phase of industrialization, defense startups can actually attract venture capital funding, and their returns and growth potential look pretty damn good. So we're seeing that in America, entrepreneurship isn't just limited to crypto or AI—even defense is becoming a new direction that VCs are paying attention to.

I just shared an image in our Zoom chat, it's the business card of a CEO from a startup that makes anti-drone defense systems. You can see a perfect example here: Reddit-style geek culture meeting the defense industry. This seemingly awkward fusion actually shows that America isn't completely hopeless when it comes to rebuilding its manufacturing and industrial base.

At the same time, fields like blockchain and robotics are gradually recovering too.

This highlights a fundamental difference between the innovation ecosystems on both sides. In America, the entire industrial structure and institutional environment is more encouraging of disruptive innovation. Entrepreneurs are more inclined to do things that are completely different, trying to solve old problems with entirely new approaches. Once this kind of innovation gets market validation, it can quickly attract massive capital, and America's institutional and capital mechanisms can give successful players decent returns.

In contrast, truly disruptive innovation is relatively more difficult in China. The path dependency is stronger—a lot of times it's still "crossing the river by feeling America"4, so incremental innovation is more common. This incremental approach actually has strong advantages, especially in large-scale industrial production industries. As mentioned in Abundance, much of real technological progress often doesn't come from some genius's "eureka moment," but from countless small iterations on the production floor, on the assembly line.

America definitely has advantages in excavating "innovation points" that have clear commercial value and market acceptance, but when it comes to those "1.1 improvements"—the continuous polishing and optimization—the gap compared to China is obvious. This actually reflects deep institutional design differences between the two countries: America's system encourages high-risk, high-reward winner-takes-all, while China's structure tends more toward stable returns and inclusive distribution. These institutional and cultural differences in risk appetite ultimately show up in the industrial realities and innovation models we see today.

X (ML engineer, lives in NY): I've been thinking about the past few years, and maybe as someone in the healthcare industry—at least from my own perspective—I actually feel like the reasons why these two countries can't achieve disruptive innovation in certain areas are quite similar: whoever's figuring out how to make money off the government, whoever's trying to optimize the bureaucracy, they can't do disruptive innovation.

The ones who can leapfrog across barriers, especially recently I've been reading Careless People. I've found that whoever can cleverly circumvent regulation, taking action before regulators even react, they're more likely to succeed. This viewpoint might sound a bit cliché, but that's really the situation now.

I think many industries in both China and the US are the same—they're all trying to figure out how to capture more government funding. These industries, as we just touched on, have fallen into a state of false innovation. Just like we discussed in our last book club, they're addicted to surface-level innovation, with all costs going into the bureaucracy. The people who can actually focus on innovation, focus on coding, are really few and far between, and these programmers spend every day in meetings.

The hidden costs of re-industrialization: the Factory Girls nobody talks about;

Afra: Before the book club ends, let me add one more thing about American re-industrialization. Remember during that period when Trump and J.D. Vance were heavily promoting "American re-industrialization"—there were tons of memes on X. Professor Huang Yasheng from MIT posted a trolling tweet.

Huang Yasheng was basically suggesting that this book tells you some reality about manufacturing and re-industrialization. that you wouldn’t learn in the schools in the U.S. I found that tweet fascinating, so I tracked down the book, which I had heard about for many years, and read it. Many scenes in the book are shocking. Not just because they made me remember that institutionally chaotic China from over 20 years ago, but because they made me rethink the lived reality of ordinary workers under the factory system. The book spends extensive pages describing the real conditions of young female workers on assembly lines.

For instance, in the factories, many female workers (almost all come from rural areas) wouldn't tell their coworkers their real names. Because once you reveal your name, if you happen to run into someone from your hometown, information might get back home, and relatives—even parents—might find out about their income, leading to economic exploitation, with wages being demanded and controlled. These female workers were doing shift work day after day on assembly lines, twelve hours a day, while also facing "exploitation" from their families of origin. The book also describes how they struggled to establish their own identity in extremely compressed living spaces—in factory dormitories with no privacy, living in rooms with six or eight other female workers, where even just trying to make yourself "different from others" was difficult. There was no mobility, no prosperity. It was this state of people struggling to survive within the system, under the assembly line, within silent norms.

After reading this book, I went online to look up what Foxconn factories look like today. I was surprised to find that photos, videos, and even content shared by workers on platforms like Xiaohongshu that circulate on the Chinese internet really aren't that different from the lives of that generation of Shenzhen female workers that Leslie Chang wrote about in the early 2000s.

During my doomscrolling, and some of them really saddened me. If you just search keywords like "Foxconn," "assembly line," "factory girls", "factory boys" (厂妹，厂弟）on Xiaohongshu, you can see tons of real documentation: what workers eat, where they sleep, their shift conditions, what they do after work. There are also many factory veterans"giving advice to vocational school students and high school graduates preparing to enter factories.

Behind this content is actually a complete factory culture and factory logic; a grim way of organizing people, controlling time, and stripping away identity.

This made me think—if US wantS to replicate a massive, complex, comprehensive manufacturing ecosystem like Shenzhen, then the social costs and structural prices behind it are far beyond what American politicians are actually thinking about when they're currently discussing "re-industrialization."

Another related example: director Yu Xinyan made a documentary called Made in Ethiopia, about Chinese companies setting up textile factories in Ethiopia. They established what's called the "Eastern Industrial Park"—just the name alone carries this heavy self-orientalist flavor, plus some Belt and Road style developmentalism logic.

The first part of the documentary tells the success story—thousands of Ethiopian female workers employed, smooth cooperation with the local government. But the focus of the documentary is on how to expand the factory to the second phase, they had to requisition villagers' farmland and promote village-scale migration. It was about trying to "system-switch" an agricultural society into one that accepts factory labor logic.

The film is full of conflict and tension: farmers' resistance, government buck-passing, cultural misalignment, and how Chinese-style production logic, such as progress determinism, gets forcibly transplanted into a completely different social soil. These scenes are extremely similar to the pain points in China's early manufacturing development.

Speaking of transnational factory landing, there's another example really worth paying attention to (which was previously mentioned): NPR's Planet Money recently did a follow-up episode about the Gotion story with more details, including how several consecutive town hall meetings in this small town gradually evolved into strong opposition to "Chinese capital entry." The whole thing essentially became a collision between American grassroots democratic politics and global industrial expansion.

Through these reports, I really saw the complexity of "industrial projects" in the American local context: how small-town political culture operates, how the public expresses opposition, how policymakers struggle to compromise.

Subscribe to Afra’s great substack and check out her podcast!

Concurrent

Understand the parallel and colliding tech and cultural currents shaping Silicon Valley, China, and beyond.

By afra

这十来年，美国和中国都经历了不小的变化，尤其是在政治领域。很多人不适应这种变化，产生政治焦虑，有人说自己得了政治抑郁。

在互联网时代，每天一睁眼，社交媒体、网络平台各种新闻推送，铺天盖地，几乎全是坏消息：战争、腐败、独裁、暴力、恐怖活动、极端政策、政治丑闻……你原本想好好度过这一天，却被这些坏消息制造的情绪感染，变得愤怒、无力、焦虑、抑郁，心境灰暗。你明明什么也没做错，却觉得自己活在一个被裹挟的世界里，苦苦挣扎，看不到希望。这，就是政治焦虑，或者说政治抑郁。

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is a Professor of Urban Studies at Singapore Management University, and research fellow at MIT. His research examines the political economy of digital infrastructure in China and Southeast Asia, and maintains the excellent substack Sinocities.

U.S.-China competition in AI is seen as the defining technological rivalry of our time. Much of the analysis in this competition is premised on a zero-sum logic — we cannot let China get ahead of us in AI, so the logic goes, as this will inevitably mean the forfeiture of American technological and military primacy.

There is another possibility–China and the U.S. may develop different “varieties” of AI. For example, the U.S. advantages in cloud computing, software development, and openness to talent (tbd…) give it an edge in development of enterprise software and large language models (LLMs). However, China has clear advantages in manufacturing and infrastructure, which could offer an edge in what experts term “embodied AI”, or in Chinese jù shēn réngōng zhìnéng, 具身人工智能. Embodied AI systems interact with the physical environment through sensors (like cameras, microphones, touch sensors) and actuators (motors, limbs, wheels, etc.). Embodied Intelligence is shaped by a real-time, physical engagement with the world.

The central government recently included “embodied intelligence” in its work report, indicating the area as a key priority. Zhongguancun, Beijing’s hi-tech area, recently released its plan for embodied intelligence. A recent report by Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) focused on efforts in the city of Wuhan to embody “AI algorithms in real environments. Imbued with the Chinese Communist Party’s predefined values, the AI interacts with its natural surroundings, learning as it proceeds.” In this post, I explore some of the origins and implications of China’s interest in “embodied AI”, and then present a few examples of this approach in sectors such as autonomous vehicles, personal mobility, robotics, and the“brain-style” AI models being used for smart city operations. While the current push for embodied AI is part of a prevailing fever for AI globally, China’s priorities reflect long-standing beliefs in the use of technology for solving governance problems, and the need for physical infrastructure and manufacturing as key priorities for the country’s development.

Internet+, the Fourth IR: the Party’s Embrace of Embedded AI

In 2015, China’s Made in 2025 Plan drew the ire of many in the West for its ambitious goals of replacing foreign companies in China and dominating frontier industries like aerospace, biotech, and smart manufacturing. In the same year, Vice President Li Keqiang unveiled a vision for Internet Plus (互联网+), which called for applying data and AI to manufacturing, smart homes, intelligent vehicles, robotics, wearable devices, and more. The Internet+ Vision is seen as one of China’s earliest national strategies on the application of AI to industry, and underscored the degree to which policymakers in China saw digital data not merely as a sector in itself, but as an input for many other sectors. Li Keqiang’s Internet Plus was also inspired by Industry 4.0, a concept initially proposed in Germany in 2011 (Huda 2023), and which influenced World Economic Forum founder Schwab’s idea of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (Schwab 2017). Schwab popularized the idea of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but the term itself emerged around 2011 at the Hanover Fair as part of Germany’s strategy to use digital technologies to maintain and deepen its edge in manufacturing. The 4^th IR predicted the application of computing technology and the internet to a wider range of everyday life and objects. This encompassed “artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.” The concept found resonance in China, a country that, like Germany, was arriving on the world stage as a major manufacturing power.

The idea of the fourth industrial revolution was embraced by top party leaders, including Xi, who saw the coming technological revolution as part of a critical period of changes in world history that China had the opportunity to lead. In 2017, Xi used the term “profound changes unseen in a century”, or bǎinián wèi yǒu zhī dà biànjú 百年未有之大变局, encompassing technological transformations but also a shift away from a U.S.-led global order. As Jin Canrong 金灿荣, Dean of the School of International Relations at Renmin University, put it in 2019, “After the fourth industrial revolution, the productivity of the East is likely to be ahead of the West, or at least a balance between East and the West will be achieved. This is the most important change among the three changes unseen in a century.” Jin goes on to note that, “If the 4th industrial revolution is, as Schwab described, ‘5G + the internet of things,’ then China is already leading this revolution, but I tend to be in the camp seeing this as more of a deepening of the 3rd (internet) revolution.” Nevertheless, Jin still saw China as having an advantage over the U.S. due to its production capacity. “The U.S. still has the best innovation capabilities, but the hollowing out of industry is a big problem. If you cannot turn innovation into products, it’s the same as a piece of waste paper.” Thus, Jin viewed manufacturing as a crucial component of China’s strength that would allow it to outcompete the U.S. Recently, Tsinghua Professor Tang Jie 唐 杰 repeated a view on China’s advantages as comprising “super-large population, rich application scenarios, and rapid iteration of the end-side ecosystem provide fertile soil for the rapid development of AI big models.”

Of course, the “4th industrial revolution” hasn’t played out entirely as Schwab or China’s leadership assumed. Around 2015, 5G and the “internet of things” were predicted to revolutionize everything. So far, 5G and the Internet of Things have proven less transformational than originally anticipated, but we are still early innings of what could be a longer story in the application of AI to other areas.

Governance: City Brains and other Brain-inspired AI

In addition to being home to Alibaba, the city of Hangzhou helped spawn the so-called “six little dragons”, 六小龙 which include DeepSeek. Hangzhou is also the site of one of China’s first successful “City Brains,” 城市大脑 — a smart city platform developed by a partnership of the city government with Alibaba’s Ali Cloud back in 2016. The platform was first deployed to help reduce traffic jams. A network of AI-enabled cameras, produced mostly by local firms Hikvision and Dahua, feeds information into a cloud system that gathers real-time information on traffic flows and accidents, and processes this information to adjust and optimize traffic lights across the city. The City Brain 3.0 integrates data from traffic lights, surveillance cameras, vehicle GPS, municipal records, public services, and IoT sensors. Alibaba has gone on to market its City Brain platform to cities around China and the world, and China has promoted the construction of City Brains around the country as a core component of the 2023 Digital China Plan. China’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) calls for using “digitalization to boost urban and rural development and governance model innovation, build an urban data resource system, and promote the construction of urban data brains" (14th Five-Year Plan). Subsequent policies have followed the 14th Plan, including the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Informatization, which includes plans for a “ubiquitous, intelligent, connected digital infrastructure system”, comprising 5G, big data centers, and smart networks, for example.

The “city brain” concept dovetails with the established interest in using AI to improve governance. The PKU-Wuhan AI institute has apparently been developing a “large-scale social simulator” (大型社会模拟器). While the focus of these initiatives is on AI, they follow from a longstanding faith in systems thinking and technology to solve government administration problems. In the 1980s, the concept of cybernetics was embraced across a wide swath of scientists and leaders as the country turned away from the fervent ideology of the Cultural Revolution towards science and technology. The crux of cybernetics as developed by Norbert Wiener in the 1950s is information processing: “Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of any system engaged in communication or control must be analyzed in terms of the transfer and processing of information, whether the system be an electronic brain, a living organism, or a social institution.” Qian Xuesen 钱学森, a Chinese student of Wiener’s, helped build the PRC’s rocket force and other technologies in the 1950s after being forced to leave his professor position at Caltech in the wake of the Red Scare. In a 1978 article, Qian described cybernetics as a “technology of organizational management” (zǔzhī guǎnlǐ de jìshù 组织管理的技术). One of his protegees in cybernetic thinking, Song Jian 宋健, would go on to become a leading advocate for the one-child policy.

There are a number of research centers and projects working on various dimensions of “brain-inspired AI.” (类脑 Lèi nǎo AI) which aim to develop artificial systems based on models of human cognition and learning. Launched in 2016, the China Brain project focuses on the neural basis of cognitive function, brain-inspired AI, and the development of intelligent technologies that mimic the brain’s architecture and processes. The project is supported by the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) Centre for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence, a consortium of laboratories at over twenty CAS institutes and universities, focusing on understanding neural mechanisms of cognition, developing brain-inspired intelligence technologies, and advancing brain disorder diagnostics and treatments. Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence” (北京通用人工智能 研究院, BIGAI) was set up in 2020 in a joint effort of the city government, MIIT, and Peking and Tsinghua Universities. Peking University also helped launch the PKU-Wuhan Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2022.

Training the Terrain: Autonomous Vehicles

After an hour-long subway journey southeast from Beijing’s city center, I arrive at a new gleaming glass-walled mall in the Yizhuang district. On first glance, the area is unremarkable and virtually identical to the myriad other “new areas” and new districts that have sprouted up on the edge of Chinese cities over the past few decades. But Yizhuang is not merely a typical new area, it’s also home to one of China’s most advanced autonomous vehicle testbeds, Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone (BJHAD). In 2020, China’s NDRC released its ’ “Intelligent Vehicle Innovation and Development Strategy, which called for “building a big data cloud control infrastructure platform for intelligent networked vehicles.” This oriented China’s approach to AV development around a principle of “vehicle-road-cloud integration” or 车路云一体化 chē lù yún yītǐ huà. In this model, pilot projects have been developed to deploy intelligent sensing and camera equipment on intersections within testing zones. The approach has been championed by an influential Tsinghua engineer, Li Keqiang 李克强 (same name as the former Premier), and endorsed by several of the country’s ministries and vehicle engineering associations. The idea has been around for a while — Andrew Ng, the Stanford-trained AI expert and former head of Baidu’s AI division, had championed what he called “training the terrain” back in 2016, just before he left Baidu in 2017 to found his own autonomous vehicle startup.

The crux of this approach is that, in addition to vehicles having onboard cameras and other equipment to navigate, intersections are outfitted with smart devices to communicate with vehicles in the area. As an autonomous car outfitted with sensing equipment approaches within 200 meters of such an intersection, the millimeter wave radio (MWR) detects incoming vehicles. Now, say there is a long truck in the left-hand lane. As the car approaches, the MWR and the low-latency cameras on the traffic pole detect the incoming car. Feeding the information rapidly into the mobile edge computing unit, the computer system processes the information. The latency, a measure of the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another, is within 200 milliseconds — around 70 milliseconds is how fast a human can react, so it’s not much slower than a human. Another car approaching the intersection from the perpendicular direction is also detected by the MWR and cameras on the other traffic pole, which also feed into the system. Using the information of incoming traffic, the mobile edge computing unit then communicates with the incoming car, which automatically begins to apply braking, slowing the car down before it reaches the intersection and averting a collision in the intersection.

There are problems with this approach. Intelligent intersections are costly to build and expensive to maintain. The safety benefits are relatively marginal for these “edge cases” that don’t occur often. Autonomous vehicle companies want their systems to work anywhere, not just where intelligent intersections are constructed. So why has China continued to pursue this infrastructure-centric approach? In the view of a former planner who worked for Baidu in Yizhuang, it's more of a political arrangement. “Think of it this way,” he said. “It’s a win-win for the government and Baidu. The local district government wants to attract automakers to invest here. They need to figure out how to provide a subsidy to Baidu. But they can’t buy the cars from them. So they purchase the software and computing infrastructure. Baidu has built an autonomous car factory nearby, so that counts for the local government’s economic development numbers.” The data collected in these “pilot zones” can also be used by the local government, whereas in infrastructure-independent scenarios, most of the data on autonomous vehicle operations remains with the company, such as Tesla or Waymo in the U.S. Foreign companies operating in China, such as Tesla, have been required by regulators to store all data from their operations in China, and refrain exporting sensitive data out of the country to comply with China’s strict cybersecurity laws.

A former Vice President of Baidu’s AV division, Wu Shulin 吴书林, recently founded a startup called Freego (正奇智能技术公司), focused on autonomous personal micro mobility. When bikeshare startups arose in China, they scaled quickly but also led to problems such as piles of misplaced or broken bikes cluttering city sidewalks. These systems also have problems in matching supply and demand, for example, how to get bikes to areas when they are needed most. If personal mobility devices were equipped with autonomous driving features, they could automatically return themselves to areas of higher demand after a user finishes a trip. The company is starting with automated wheelchairs, which are regulated as health devices in China and therefore require less permitting than vehicles. But they also have a larger ambition of expanding into a range of personal micro mobility devices such as scooters, e-bikes, or micro vehicles.

In their office in a startup park on the southwestern outskirts of Beijing, the founder animatedly showed me a diagram of an iterative loop in which devices are trained in real environments, continuously collecting new data on a variety of terrains, environments, and situations they encounter. Each type of device would collect different sorts of data, but collectively, this helps train a general model for navigating a variety of environments, such as climbing up staircases, navigating on sidewalks, or through crowded interior spaces.When I asked what the greatest obstacle to implementing their vision is, the founder replied, “It’s not a lack of government support or policy, but it's really the lack of high-quality AI software engineers.” (Interview, Beijing, 2024).

Robotics

Robots are seemingly everywhere in China today — running marathons, boxing each other. Unitree (宇树科技), China’s leading humanoid robotics company, released robotic dogs that became a social media sensation. Robotics is one of the most promising areas for deployment of “embodied AI” and one in which China already has a commanding position. China operates the world’s largest stock of industrial robots, accounting for over 50% of the global total. Robotic cooking machines have been seen in China for some time, tossing bowls of noodles. So what’s different now? According to Grace Shao, “embodied AI robots are trained on real-world data that uses reinforcement learning and they have developed the ability to “think. Recently, the Huisi Kaiwu platform was unveiled in Beijing as the world’s “first general embodied intelligence platform” for interfacing with robotics and other devices. The idea is that robots could be programmed and customized through this platform to handle specific tasks. The project is overseen at the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robots, jointly funded by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the Beijing municipal government, and other private firms and research institutions. In Shenzhen, Huawei (Shenzhen) Global Embodied Intelligence Industry Innovation Center began operation in 2024 and has cooperation with Shenzhen-based robotics firms Leju Robotics, Zhaowei Electromechanical, and Daju Robotics. Leju’s humanoid robot Kuafu (夸父) apparently offers 5G compatibility, which would facilitate data collection and training of robots for industrial applications.

Implications of Embodied AI with Chinese Characteristics

1. Diverging Models of AI Development, and bifurcation in global AI trajectories: The U.S. centers on abstract, cloud-based intelligence (e.g., LLMs), while China develops AI tightly integrated with physical systems and infrastructure. This divergence has implications for technological standards, ethics, and the global diffusion of AI technologies.

2. Infrastructure as an Advantage/Differentiator: China's infrastructural focus enables deployment of AI in real-world contexts at scale, especially in mobility, urban governance/management, and robotics. This presents a comparative advantage not often captured in typical U.S.-China tech rivalry narratives.

3. Legacy of Cybernetics and Systems Thinking: The enduring influence of cybernetic thought — from Qian Xuesen to current smart city projects—reveals a unique continuity in how China views technology as a tool for social coordination and governance.

4. Human Capital Bottlenecks: Despite policy support, China faces challenges in high-end software and algorithmic talent. The article notes concerns about the availability of top-tier AI engineers, which may limit scalability of embodied AI initiatives.

What can the U.S. learn from China’s approach to AI? So far, U.S. application of AI has focused largely on LLMs and application of AI in enterprise software. This means AI could be monopolized by tech platforms like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and OpenAI. AI is being embraced across a wide array of sectors. Diffusion of embodied AI could even make efforts to reshore manufacturing more feasible, with the caveat that it would employ fewer workers and offer fewer well-paying jobs. Conversely, a failure to incorporate embodied intelligence could mean American manufacturing becomes even less competitive with China’s increasingly advanced factories.

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Cities, China, Geopolitics, Technology, and everything in between. By: Andrew Stokols ; Phd, MIT Department of Urban Studies & Planning, Masters in Urban Planning, Harvard.

By Andrew Stokols

由于篇幅限制，本文为第五十二封来信的第二部分。前一部分参见：我的女权主义十要、十不要（一）

2. 要鼓励女性自立自强、尽己所能过上更好的生活，但反对以「弱女/强女」制造新的等级和对立。

我们支持女性积极参与社会竞争，但坚决反对“慕强恐弱”的社会达尔文主义。换言之，女权主义者当然乐见女性在现有的社会结构内努力变强、争取更多利益，而不是任人宰割、郁郁而终。可是，这种希望并不等于崇拜“强女”、嘲讽“弱女”，更不代表要赞同“弱肉强食”、拥护等级制度。

这就好像我们可以鼓励一个人多赚钱，或者传授赚钱的经验，但是不应该辱骂对方“你赚不到钱就是你不努力。你穷你活该，你弱你没理”。前者是鼓励女性在结构内往上走，后者则是跟着父权一起霸凌受害者。而且，我们更应该去叩问不公平的分配制度：为什么很多女性已经如此努力，却依然如此贫穷？为什么有些人不用付出一丝汗水，就能坐享其成、荣华一生？

然而这种对结构的质疑可以说寥寥无几。在当下的互联网女权运动中，「强迫女性强身健体、不允许女性脆弱」等颇为流行的话语其实都是父权的翻版、会导致因为各种原因身体不好/心理状况不佳/经济处于弱势地位的女性被排除在女性主义运动以外。于是，更加弱势的女性不仅要在现实中饱尝失权之苦，还要在网络空间里遭受精神欺侮。

我猜测很多人指责受害者是“弱女”，其实是出于本能地和她们割席、由此获得一点微薄的安全感。“她这么惨是因为懦弱胆小，我是强女，自然不会受害”——但现实真是这样吗？俗话说覆巢之下无完卵。在制度性的迫害中，再坚硬的蛋壳也难逃破碎的结局。况且，你又怎知在更强的“强女”眼里，我们不会是活该被欺压的“弱女”呢？

对男性的愤怒不应该转化成对女性的伤害，也不能成为一个人“挥刀向弱者、甚至更弱者”的理由”。弱女/强女的划分是又一个符合父权逻辑的二元论，从诞生之初就注定了要变成用于审判几乎所有女人的武器。

所以，请不要再居高临下地将她人定义为“弱女”！我们不应让女权沦为“随意伤害她人”的挡箭牌，也不要让自己的「被剥夺感」变成理直气壮「剥夺其她女性人格尊严」的原动力。

P.s. 我们在第十一封封信里分别论述过“自强”和“构建一个不厌弱的社会”的意义，详见《成为女权主义者，究竟有什么用？》。

3. 要注意避免粉饰“向下的自由”，但反对忽视结构性压迫、将责任归咎于女性个体。

我们大体认同“向下的自由不是自由”，这是因为很多看似自由的选择其实都是制度刻意引导的结果，且这些选项也并不像上位者鼓吹的那样美好。例如家庭主妇的比例远高于家庭主夫是由于女性就业困难、女男同工不同酬等，因此不能说女性成为家庭主妇是完全自由自主的选择。而且，由于法律对家庭主妇没有保障、社会不认可家务劳动的价值等原因，这就是一条付出远高于回报的高风险道路。我们也曾在《彩礼是物化女性吗？》中提出“不应将家庭主妇称为全职太太”。

再比如，很多女性成为性工作者也并不是完全自主的选择，而是受资源分配不平等、女性职业发展受限等多重因素影响。而且性工作虽然短期报酬较高，但毕竟是青春饭，没有法律保障，且无法预料客人的行为。很多女性会被男人殴打、逃单、还可能会染病。在这种情况下，很多人却对性工作者的生活极尽美化之能事，当然也不是为了女性好。所以，我们的确应该揭开被社会有意隐藏的真相，提醒涉世未深的女孩很多看似轻松的选择都有着沉重的代价。

但是，诚实揭示真相的残酷并不代表要去指责做出了这些选择的女性。我不止一次看到有人批判家庭主妇、性工作者，甚至（还在工作的）孕妇是主动堕落、“挤压女性生存空间”、会“拖拽全体女性一起向下”，或是说她们在“给男权社会交投名状”，很多侮辱性的字眼更是不堪入目。

这类审判对女性权益可以说是有百害而无一利，前不久大众对吴柳芳拍擦边视频的批判就是一例。一方面，它忽视了结构性压迫的力量，将责任归咎于女性个体。吴柳芳会选择这种不稳定且易受歧视的方式谋生，和疫情带来的破产潮有关，也是因为运动员退役后的生计没能得到充分的保障。她看似“自由”的选择其实在很大程度上是无数双大手共同作用的结果。

然而，我们会发现在无数事件中，无论问题多么复杂，最终人们总是能通过“骂女人”解决问题。从前女性因为不够“女人”（男人婆），或是太过“女人”（红颜祸水）被骂；如今还要因为不够独立、不够女权被骂。其实女人在结构内总是举步维艰，做决定往往无非是牺牲这个还是牺牲那个的区别。很多时候女性并非不清醒，而只是没那么多选择罢了。所以，将矛头对准女性就是与权力合谋，会让制度性的暴力得以隐身。

另一方面，辱骂女性堕落不仅忽视了社会结构对个体行为的深刻影响，还容易将女性单一化为受害者，从而抹杀她们的主观能动性。把女性定死在“受害者”的位置上，无异于否认其力量、潜能与主体性，最终只会让女性形象变得扁平、被动，甚至“去人格化”。

例如，认为性工作者是自甘堕落、其生活必定暗无天日就是一种典型的Victimization。我们曾在第二十五封信中讨论过女性性工作者的的挣扎、迷茫和快乐。学者丁瑜发现，出于对都市生活的向往，性产业从业者更喜欢被称为“小姐”而不是“性工作者”。她们知道性工作的弊端却依然选择走这条路而不是进厂，多是因为不想成为现代化过程中一枚廉价的螺丝钉。因此，这些女性具有很强的主观能动性。她们在条件有限的情况下做出了自己的选择，绝非单纯地任父权宰割。

总而言之，我们还是要在「结构」和「个体」之间找到平衡：既不能用「结构」来为所有「个体选择」开脱，也不应该通过指责个人为结构免责。换言之，女人是受结构影响的渺小个体，却也是有着无限潜能的伟大主体。我们当然不是受人摆布的提线木偶、不是任人宰割的温顺羔羊，但也确实做不到以卵击石，以一己之力击碎万钧之压迫。说到底，我们都只是在结构中努力生活的普通人，有主体性、自然也有局限性。我们会为了更好的生活努力争取，却也实在不必将“全体女性的命运”背于己身。

由于篇幅限制，我在这封信中只阐述了《十要十不要》的第二、三条，余下内容及结语会在下封信里和大家分享。感谢姐妹们的关注！☺️

陌生女人1号 兔姐

二〇二五年六月二十三日

为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台：游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com）
这世界的辽阔和美好，游荡者知道。使用过程中遇到问题，欢迎联系客服邮箱wanderservice2024@outlook.com.

【和放学以后永不失联】订阅放学以后Newsletter，每周三收到我们发出的信号：afterschool2021.substack.com 点击链接输入自己的邮箱即可（订阅后如果收不到注意查看垃圾邮箱）。如需查看往期内容，打开任一期你收到的邮件，选择右上角open online，就可以回溯放学以后之前发的所有邮件，或谷歌搜索afterschool2021substack查看。

截至目前，放学以后Newsletter专题系列如下：“在世界游荡的女性”系列、“女性解放指南”系列、“女性浪漫，往复信笺”系列、莫不谷游荡口袋书《做一个蓄意的游荡者》系列、“莫胡说”系列”《创作者手册：从播客开始说起》,播客系列和日常更新等。

大家好，本期Newsletter由西班牙的霸王花木兰轮值。

昨天是西班牙的圣胡安节，这既是一个基督教的节日，也是一个庆祝夏至的狂欢节。海边篝火，沙滩烧烤，午夜跳海，音乐舞蹈，还有满天繁星，人们在火焰和海浪交织的盛大Party里一起庆祝夏天的到来，度过热闹的仲夏夜之梦。

大理的朋友梅朵一个多月欧洲游荡行程的终点站是西班牙，刚好赶上了6月23日的圣胡安之夜，于是我和梅朵还有我的室友一起体验了西班牙这个特色节日狂欢。我们从家里带上烧烤托盘，沙滩布，装上阿根廷大虾、调味鸡翅、新鲜腌制的香菜牛肉、西班牙帕德龙小辣椒，西班牙火腿，时令新鲜水果车厘子、哈密瓜、冰镇西瓜、蟠桃、脆柿子，再加上西班牙葡萄酒、西班牙好喝的芬达汽水，还有西班牙本地零食（这么详细的列举，是因为每个食物都很好吃，是想倾情安利的程度），满满当当拉了一个行李小车，到海边领取政府免费发放的木材后，就在沙滩一起挖洞搭灶台，一边吹着海风一边开启美味烧烤，一切都令人很是愉悦，除了时不时会被滚滚浓烟熏得双目紧闭泪流满面。昨天是我人生第一次体验沙滩烧烤，美妙有趣，而已经参加过一次的室友也止不住高兴，她说，平时沙滩是不允许点火的，这是一年之间难得在海边合法放火的机会。

另外值得一提的是，为了防范性骚扰和性别暴力，西班牙特地在海滨大道设置了紫色安全点，便于随时求助，让女性可以尽情享受狂欢。看到活动通知里特别说明的安全保障，是会让女性倍感安心。

而就在度过这个狂欢节的前段时间，我还因为心情不好情绪不佳一度觉得生活很难继续下去。现在想到要回溯当时心情不好的状态，也因为大脑一片混乱，下意识躲避和本能抗拒，转而去吃零食，刷手机，摆动身边物件也不想继续写。

不想写和不愿写的心情，和我前两天在游荡者平台看到小鱼儿写的“小鱼儿的抑郁治疗日记--为什么断更”心理剖白有些相像，特别是她坦诚自己陷入深深的自我否定之中，觉得自己是没有价值的，觉得自己做的东西也没有价值的部分。我不想写和不愿写，是因为在通过写作记录治疗自己之前，我快要淹溺在自己的负面情绪和思考方式里了。我不想展现自己日常生活常常崩塌的时刻，也不想暴露自己尚未自我接纳的脆弱，如果我的生活还会重复类似的折磨和痛苦，我不仅会因为痛苦的重复感到崩塌无望，而且会因为自己的生活毫无改进更加痛恨自己。我既不想承认自己情况很糟，又无法承认自己一切还好。我既不想被看扁同情，又不想被高看和过度赞誉。我有很多混乱的情绪和想法在同时打结缠绕。

（小鱼儿在游荡者平台更新的抑郁治疗日记）

前两天我感受到自己状态很差，也认识到自己认知偏颇，不能这样继续下去时，便立刻打开电脑文档梳理思绪，想要帮助自己扭转认知。关于状态糟糕的部分，我写下：

1、没有动力。没有积极做事情的动力。

2、缺乏意义感。觉得做什么都没有意义。

3、脑子里总是有负面思想，对自己有很多批评。有时候强烈的情绪上头会在做饭时忍不住冒出用刀捅自己的念头，随后因为怕痛立刻抑制住自己疯狂的想法。有时候又因为强烈的自我攻击导致身体不适在网上对照确诊为“肋间神经炎”，继而会担忧自我攻击是否会导致身体猛烈自我攻击，早早晚晚命不久矣。又因为自己冒出的这些想法不够积极正面而讨厌自己，觉得自己真是没救了。

4、逃避行为严重，不想出门，不想见人，不想看手机消息，不想回复手机消息。为了不出门，我可以一整天不上厕所不出门吃饭。为了不见人，我可以闷在房间不出声音假装人不在家。为了不看手机消息，我会关闭社交软件关闭手机提示，即便心里知道可能会有未读消息也不想打开手机。

我还列出了一些积极的客观情况，试图削弱一下负面情绪的极端峰值：

1、身体健康，除了精神状态外，没有明显影响生活的病痛。

2、经济良好：既没有欠债也没有迫在眉睫的生存危机。

3、不用上班：不用吃苦。

4、独立单间：《空洞的心》加拿大心理学教授介绍加拿大对于成瘾者救助的有效方式是先帮助提供免费住房，因为住在大街上的流浪汉是不可能戒除毒瘾的，想到自己有个可以遮风挡雨的单间小房，觉得也是个正面的好消息。

然而梳理完我的感受并没有明显好转，缓和一点点的情绪也还是无法驱动行动解决问题，比如，不敢看手机，不敢打开手机信息。这时候我又尝试了另外一个方法，看看在线网友们都是如何解决这些问题的，它山之石，可以攻玉。小红书也“贴心”地给我定向推送了很多参考案例：

“分享一下我自己如何对抗动力崩溃”

“原来暴食熬夜是因为自己想抛弃自己啊”

“抑郁症又发作了，7天没洗头洗澡，谁来讲点笑话嘲笑一下，说不定笑着笑着就去洗了”

这里面让我最拍手叫绝的精彩内容是在评论区看到的一个有关抑郁症的地狱笑话：

“我多希望我家草坪的草得抑郁症，这样它们就能自己割自己了。”

这个笑话因为太过精准和地狱被我立马收藏备用，看到时还想到了脱口秀演员Kid讲述自己患有双相情感障碍的经历，不禁感慨把痛苦转化成创作素材可真是厉害，让人想拍掌叫好。话是这么说，理也是这个理，但我可没有这个力气去创作，我连面对都面对不了。

看笑话乐了一会后，问题还是没解决。于是我又去找ChatGPT当我的心理咨询师，帮我调整下心情，但因为ChatGPT总是鼓励我肯定我理解我，让我在情绪低落的时候觉得ChatGPT因为太主观简直完全缺乏真实性，叫我如何相信它对我的鼓励、肯定、理解是真实的呢？于是我尝试用“我有一个朋友”句式来提问，ChatGPT是客观不少，但给的分析我知道我也做不到。

ChatGPT没有解决我的问题，但因为我的情绪已经累积到无法负荷的程度，为了让自己有勇气打开手机查看信息，我又给时常吵架battle甚至价值观也不和的姐姐拨打电话，因为已经无法托住自己的我需要找一个我认为不会抛弃我，放弃我，责怪我，且不会有心理负担的真人聊两句（这是我单方面的感受和想法，我也不知道姐姐的真实想法如何，生活工作忙碌的她听到妹妹又一次崩溃的消息是否会有心理和情绪负担）。为了避免看到手机消息，我以迅雷不及掩耳之势火速打开通讯录火速搜索姐姐的电话，让手机只停留在和姐姐的通话页面，避免摄入其它信息（如果有逃避和自欺欺人大赛，我可以一战）。电话接通后姐姐了解了我的情况，便开始帮我分析解决，虽然整个通话内容没怎么有我同意的观点和方法，但我即将决堤的情绪在接通电话后得到了慢慢放闸泄洪的机会。过了两天，姐姐又给我发来了信息，没想到她还在想如何帮我卸下精神包袱。

（通话后过两天姐姐给我发来的消息）

在采取了以上种种方法后，我坐在桌前，决定提振精神面对一下，尝试打开手机消息。我还想了一些方法鼓励自己，比如，如果有勇气打开手机消息，就立刻奖励自己吃水果，或者吃牛肉，或者出门散步，但在做了许多心理建设还是无法行动后，我在纸上潦草写下“心魔”二字，为什么明明很简单的事情，就是做不到，就能这么难？就能这么被自己难死？

写完之后我决定再鼓励自己一下，再次尝试打开手机消息，与外界联络。正巧室友找我聊天，和我吐槽她被华人老板胁迫坑骗3000欧的事情，我听得又震惊又无语，还帮忙出谋划策想想办法，完全看不出就在上一秒我还在苦恼困惑内心挣扎痛苦。也是在线下与真实的人聊天结束后，突然一瞬我好像看到躲在房间里自己的画面，认识到不是房间困住了我，是我把自己困在了我的大脑里。也因为室友遭遇的事件更冲击更现实，以至于觉得不敢打开手机，总想逃避并不是件多大多难的事，心理包袱轻松了一些。于是我回到桌前把手机打开，消息点开，

一则消息是，朋友要把她做的美食分享给我。

另一则消息是，朋友邀请我去巴塞罗那游玩，看到消息时我已经错过了。

无事发生。

后来我劝心情不佳的室友出门走走，一起出门散散心，也因此我的情绪好了不少，仿佛很快从地狱回到了地面，还在昨天和室友以及梅朵一起去海边沙滩烧烤过节。

圣胡安节很梦幻，我前段时间的状况也像梦一场。经历这一段情绪低潮期之后的我，写下这句话：

生活是怎么过下去的？

同时写下答案：

面对。

但我也不知道，该怎么鼓气勇气面对，知道了又能不能做到，这次做到了下次还能做到吗？而且事实上，我常常做不到面对。

写的过程中，我也止不住地想，写下来有什么意义，有什么用，会不会因为自己写了出来，后续再次重复发生而对自己更加厌恶（突然想到一句歌词：这时好那时坏）。

我也知道，或许这对同样面临抑郁崩溃情况的人有帮助，然而我同时也觉得，读到这篇文章的人可能并不需要，而需要的人不一定会读，因为抑郁崩溃的人常常很难有力气阅读和寻求解救之法的。

推荐播客：

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《莫路狂花今夜不设防：人如何不糊弄和痛恨自己，并找到自己的渴望呢？》

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网易云链接：http://163cn.tv/Gswws5v

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解锁莫不谷《做一个“蓄意”的游荡者》口袋书：
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Patrick McGee is the author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. Our discussion led us through a detailed history of Apple’s relationship with China, where iPhone manufacturing became a project of nation-building.

Cohosting today is Kyle Chan of the High Capacity Substack.

Today, our conversation covers:

• Why Apple moved production to China in the 1990s, and why it struggles to leave,

• How Apple’s obsession with perfection catalyzed China’s industrial upgrading and why it bought every CNC machine in the world

• The political side of production in China, including how Apple’s relationship with the Chinese authorities has evolved over time,

• The rise of Foxconn and other partners in Apple’s network,

• A peer into Apple’s management style, including the “Divorce Avoidance Program.”

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

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“Real Men Own Fabs”

Jordan Schneider: I want to start with the near-bankruptcy moment and the challenges of manufacturing in America in the 1990s.

As you write, Patrick, there was very much a “real men own fabs” energy to hardware manufacturing, where most companies, Apple included, decided that if they wanted to compete, they had to build all the stuff themselves. But as you write in your book, that line of thinking reached its limits in the mid to late 1990s. Why don’t you start our narrative there and tell us that story?

Patrick McGee: I talked to the earliest employees at Apple, and it was part of the ethos that you built your own computers. This is how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met at the Homebrew Computer Club. They’d be taking apart computers, presenting to other people, and Steve Wozniak’s genius was to take apart a computer, improve some of the circuitry himself, and then put it back together in a faster way.

Apple wasn’t doing anything different by assembling computers themselves. That’s what you had to do. I don’t think the electronics manufacturing supply chain existed, certainly not in a globalized sense of taking things from Taiwan or elsewhere. That’s all later.

The computer I give credit to for changing everything was the IBM PC in 1981. Steve Jobs largely misunderstood it because when he disassembled it, he looked inside and said, “There’s nothing special here.” He’s not wrong about that. But what he missed was that IBM had launched a whole new battleground that Apple wasn’t prepared to fight against.

The IBM PC wasn’t about the graphical user interface. It wasn’t about user design or UX. It was about making these things and building them at a massive scale. To do that, they relied on third-party assembly giants. One that I highlight is called SCI Systems, which you could think of as the Foxconn of its day. It was founded in Alabama and played a role in satellites and rockets — it played a role in the Saturn V rocket that went to the moon.

Once they had that military precision, IBM scouted them out and they ended up doing the circuit board for the first PC and then assembling computers writ large. Then they played this massive role, doing that for HP and Dell and all these other companies, along with the rise of a whole new industry of Solectron, Celestica, and Jabil— all these North American companies who outsourced on behalf of the PC giants.

They gave birth to electronics globalization because once you have standardized parts in this booming industry, then the likes of Taiwan can outmaneuver everybody else and start building them in great quality and at great scale. Then they vertically integrated. They went back upstream and did more of the computer until by the mid-1990s, you had Taiwanese companies that were putting together everything and badging it with different names, and then they were even badging it with their own names.

There’s this fascinating 20-year history where Steve Jobs in particular has this DNA that he leaves to the company, which is something like, “We will build it ourselves because we’re going to design it ourselves. That’s how we distinguish ourselves, even as the PC companies go to this outsourcing boom.” When he goes to NeXT Computer — the other company he founded after he’s ousted from Apple in 1985 — he says of the computer, “My favorite thing about it is that it wasn’t built in Osaka.” Obviously Japan was playing the role that China plays now.

There’s something fascinating about that. Even when the narrative after 1997, when he came back, was that Apple had to outsource, it took Tim Cook years to convince Steve Jobs to give up manufacturing. I write about how in 2000, he handed out t-shirts to everybody that said “Mac-tories” on them. He wanted these Mac factories to play a role.

Without the dot-com crisis, you would have had Apple trying to make a push in building things themselves, which would have included building in America. But Apple stock, as people sometimes forget, lost 50% in a single day in September 2000.

They’re almost purchased — well, maybe I shouldn’t say they’re almost purchased, but Gateway thought they were such a contender that they could purchase them. That’s how bad things were at Apple — that Gateway of all companies was going to acquire them.

Anyway, my point is I have this manufacturing-focused history of Apple, that’s a new angle to report on the company, and yet I think it shouldn’t be a new angle. This is a company that manufactures — now they orchestrate the manufacturing — but their DNA was doing it all themselves. This shouldn’t be an obscure angle to have brought a new lens to, but somehow it is. I’m uncovering more than I should have been able to because I think we should have been reporting on this the last 25 years.

Jordan Schneider: It’s fascinating, Patrick, because when people think of Apple’s moat and what distinguishes them from the competition, a lot of folks first go to iOS. We have this America arc, and then we have this “go abroad to lots of different countries and try to find one or more that works” arc. What were some of the starts and stops in that arc in the 1990s and early 2000s before they ended up going to China?

Patrick McGee: This will sound less strange if the listener understands that Apple had a tri-continental strategy for building locally but at the continental level. Apple built its own computers in California and Colorado — that’s obviously for North America. For Europe, they built them out of Ireland and for Asia, they built them out of Singapore.

When they get involved with contractors in the late 1990s, they have them replicate this strategy. LG makes the translucent computer — the Bondi blue color that then becomes Life Savers colors — and LG does it in Korea. But when they expand to meet demand, they do so in Wales and in Mexico.

When Foxconn comes on as a second supplier, this is the meeting of the minds of Foxconn founder Terry Gou and Tim Cook, who’s a pretty new person at the time but is running operations. Foxconn does it in China, which is significant because Foxconn’s Taiwanese and some of the other Taiwanese companies are not in China at that point. I’m thinking of Inventec, for instance, which made the iPod in 2001, and that’s out of Taiwan.

But then Foxconn expands, and they expand to the Czech Republic for Europe and California for America. Once you are comparing costs and efficiency between these three regions, China is winning out time and time again for multiple years, such that by 2003, Apple has effectively given up everywhere else and consolidated into China.

I suppose technically the Czech operations are in effect until 2010 or so, but everything is moving to China because China is tailor-making policies for someone like Apple. Industrial clusters are forming. They’re putting up factories, not in great quality, but at an amazing scale.

I have this funny anecdote with this engineer from Apple in the early 2000s, and he’s literally counting the stairs between floors because it’s so obvious to him that it’s not the same distance between each floor. He’s even measuring the stairs and he’s finding that this is so slap-dash — everything’s put together so quickly. This does, if we’re jumping ahead, have implications for us, because of course, we would never build something that quickly because we would emphasize the quality, the safety, and everything else that we should emphasize.

We would still be doing the environmental paperwork by the time an entire factory in Shenzhen would be built.

John Rubinstein’s anecdote for the iPod is that it’s steel girders when he goes there and sees the iPod factory actually up and running because you get to the second floor and it’s all finished, but the rest of the building is not, and yet they’re still churning out iPods.

There’s this amazing sense that when Apple went to China in the early 2000s, it was very early days. China was not known for quality at the time. They are known as a manufacturer, of course, but they’re not building quality electronics. That was something that Apple played an instrumental role in.

Kyle Chan: One reason I found this book so fascinating — it’s the story of global electronics manufacturing told through one company across a number of different countries. You chart the movement of Apple’s efforts to figure out the best place to manufacture — the one place, the company, the country — that might suit their quality needs. They’re extremely demanding with rapidly changing specifications.

The way I think of it, they’re dating a bunch of countries over time, and you know that they’re going to marry China in the end. They’re going to marry Foxconn. It’s like a rom-com — “When Harry Met Sally” — and you’re going to follow the dating along the way.

Could you tell the story of searching for the right partner? In the background I have in my head the whole “flying geese” model of development in East Asia, conceived by a Japanese theorist in the 1930s about how Japan would take the lead technologically. Then, over time, different sectors would move on to South Korea, Taiwan, and then eventually to China.

The Apple story, the Apple manufacturing story, matches that so well in terms of the search. By the time you go through the process, you’re like, “Okay, come on. I know you’re going to end up in China.” But what were some of the steps along the way? Why did they end up settling on China as the place to be?

Patrick McGee: A saying I love about journalism is that you should always show, never tell. When I was submitting the book, my biggest black swan worry was that my editor would say, “I don’t understand why this book begins in 1996. China’s not in the book for the first 90 or 95 pages. Let’s get there.” But the whole point was, I needed to tell you without actually ever explicitly saying so that Apple had this totally obsessive, maniacal, perfection-oriented, no-tolerance-for-defects attitude.

You need to understand that when they were building something like the iMac G4 — the thing that people might remember because it’s anthropomorphic and looks a little bit like a Pixar lamp — I joke that it looks like it’s ready to break dance. That’s actually the first commercial that Apple used for it, grooving to the beat, nodding its head.

Nobody knew how to build that thing. Apple upended tools and machine makers all across Taiwan to get it done. Without me explicitly saying so, the reader begins to understand that Taiwan is too small to get this done. They’re literally having to get people from the Philippines to fill the factory lines, and they’re using a VCR machine maker in Malaysia. They’re relying on Singapore Airlines for a blade fabrication facility.

You realize that for them to have a meeting about various supply chain conundrums that they’re having, you’re having to get on flights and hand-carry things from one country to the next, which by the way is illegal. They’re doing so with five or six countries as far apart as Singapore and Japan.

When China begins to offer all of this in one industrial cluster around Shenzhen, it is mind-bogglingly good for anyone involved. One thing that I say in interviews — I don’t think I explicitly say so in the book — is that Tim Cook is often credited as the architect of the China strategy. He’s not the architect, and there is no architect. It was the suppliers themselves — and there are hundreds, if not thousands of them — are all choosing China because if they’re comparing Singapore versus China, the labor rates, the abundance of labor, the flexibility of that labor, the hardworking determination of that labor is all off the charts in China versus any other place.

The suppliers themselves are all moving there and Apple is able to take advantage of that movement more than anybody else. If you still want to give Tim Cook a title, I would say he was more like an admiral navigating the macroeconomic seas of supply chains. But he’s not the architect because he didn’t have to strategize anything. Terry Gou was strategizing. Tim Cook was following, but then doing more with what Terry Gou and others were coming up with than anybody else.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, you have this line: “Nobody architected the move to China, but in one opportunity after another, Apple operations were lured into the country.” I think having a tri-continental strategy sounds ridiculous sitting here in 2025. But it’s also the case that you were scaling hardware manufacturing at an exponential rate for 20 years. If you’re making 10,000, 50,000 computers, it’s not insane.

But as you write about in your book, the number of actual items you’re making is increasing by a factor of 10 or by 50 or even by 100 on a year-on-year basis. It is getting more difficult and complex and the labor required is also rising at an exponential curve. You’re not going to find that many people in Wales and Singapore to do all this stuff.

Patrick McGee: I would emphasize another thing, which is that Moore’s law is decreasing the size of the products. Apple was not a big volume player in anything until 2003. I think in 2003, they made more iPods in a year than they made iMacs in the prior five years.

If you’re shipping things either by air or by sea, the fact that it’s the size of an iPod rather than a desktop computer is a major distinction. When SCI was building stuff in Huntsville, Alabama, it wouldn’t have made sense for them to move over to China and be early on this trend. That would make no sense at all. The computers were too big and bulky. Especially if you went back 10 years when it was a mainframe computer the size of a garage.

Once you’re into laptops, which is where Taiwan first makes its mark, it begins to make a lot of sense. Especially when you get into iPods and then dumb phones and especially smartphones, which then scale — that becomes a dramatic increase in efficiency. The cost per item — the logistics becomes de minimis once you’re doing it in the millions and let alone the tens and hundreds of millions.

Kyle Chan: Speaking of the logistics, I love the parts about United Airlines and the Boeing 747 playing a role in both directions. You’re talking about the product getting smaller and smaller to the point where you can have a Boeing full of iPhones that’s totally worth a flight, more than worth a flight. They’re helping to export this product around the world. At the same time, they’re providing the inputs in terms of the Apple engineers and the managers flying in.

It’s ridiculous — entire flights, I think you had documented, were for Apple staff to go back and forth between Cupertino and Zhengzhou or Shenzhen or other parts of China. It was astounding.

Patrick McGee: You’re finding this poetic symmetry that I didn’t make myself. Well done, Kyle. But to give that anecdote, because that’s pretty funny. I forget which cities it was and in what order, but in 2014 it’s probably Zhengzhou and in 2016 it’s probably Hangzhou, where the same thing happens where Apple convinces United Airlines: “Look, we need you flying nonstop to this place three times a week. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the plane is empty, we will pre-purchase so many of the first-class tickets that you will still make money.”

I think that’s hilarious. People who went to Shanghai and then took the bullet train to Hangzhou beforehand said it wasn’t exactly a schlep — it was pretty easy. But if you were an American engineer who had to go there regularly and you didn’t want to have to deal with the Chinese signs and all this kind of stuff, it was a nice comfort.. Because Apple had so many people going, it was worth them doing it. That was amazing.

The thing that was already out, but maybe people don’t know it, is in 2019, United accidentally leaked that 50 engineers from Apple were flying first class from San Francisco every day. They were the largest corporate client on the planet. When you talk about Apple’s size, there are many things you can point to that show they upend entire industries. But who knew that the airline industry was one of them?

Manufacturing the “Un-manufacturable”

Jordan Schneider: I want to talk about the design of the items themselves. You have this refrain over and over again where people say the contractors who don’t see the future ask, “Are you crazy? We can’t do this.” Then Apple comes up with a new manufacturing methodology that’s both labor-intensive and requires a level of sophistication that they have to teach to their contract manufacturers in order to execute.

Let’s do a case study. Pick your favorite item — which one haven’t you talked about on the other podcast that you want to discuss?

Patrick McGee: The translucent iMac is the one where the chapter is called “Unmanufacturable,” and that’s where I devote most attention. It’s also a computer. Everybody knows there’s one thing I hadn’t banked on — people say there’s a sense of nostalgia when they’re reading the early chapters because they’re going through some of the products they loved as high school or university students.

Jordan Schneider: Totally. I felt the same way. It was very tangible. I remember being 12 years old, going to my uncle’s house, seeing his candy-colored iMac and thinking, “What the hell?” It’s this object from space — but it’s not from space, it’s from these crazy engineers who were battling with Steve Jobs and the manufacturing people. Thank you for that.

These things are in design museums now and in your older cousins’ closets if they were smart enough to keep them.

Anyway, please continue, Patrick.

Patrick McGee: The computer was considered un-manufacturable by the product design team at Apple. The tooling engineers at Apple looked at what Jony Ive had come up with and said, “This can’t be built. I’m not saying it can’t be built at scale — we can’t build one of these in the lab.”

It’s interesting because they had created this thing that’s impossible, yet this is where you get the Apple mentality of “even though it’s impossible, we’re going to figure it out.” In the end, they don’t figure it out and the design has to be changed. But nevertheless, in hindsight, it looks like Jony Ive had tasked them with something that was impossible just for the sake of seeing who would stay on the project to get it done.

I’m not saying that was actually intentional — Jony Ive had to go back to the drawing board and make major changes to the product. But by the time they have a product that can be built, the only people left on the team are those who are willing to try and experiment with all these new things.

If people remember the computer, it has these translucent pinstripes on the front. Those used to be horizontal. What the engineers told me is that they couldn’t be horizontal because of how plastic injection molding works — the mold has to be parallel with the lines. Jony Ive had done something where they were perpendicular to the lines, and that couldn’t work.

They experimented for months. They had specialists come in from the outside to work on the product. What’s fascinating is that Steve Jobs had just come back. This was the product that, in my telling — because I’ve got all these Steve Jobs notes from the summer of 1997 — this is an interesting period where he’s given the role of CEO if he wants it, but he won’t take it. What his notes reveal is that he thinks Apple’s about to die, and he doesn’t want to oversee its demise. He is trying to help and see if it’s possible.

It’s a meeting of the minds with Jony Ive. Steve Jobs goes to the meeting expecting to fire him. Jony Ive goes to the meeting with his resignation letter in his pocket. Instead, they hit it off. What they come up with is the translucent iMac.

If you’ve seen the eMate 300, this translucent product they’d already made — it was a Newton and laptop mixed together — that was the first translucent product they made. You can see how Steve Jobs would’ve gotten excited by that and began to envision what he thought at the time was a network computer. That was their big idea.

They came up with this design. Steve Jobs got all excited about the idea of Apple making a comeback and redefining the aesthetics of the computer. But the first thing that Jony Ive comes up with literally couldn’t be made. The product design team goes through multiple iterations of who the leader is because nobody can do this, but Steve Jobs had inherited this team. He honestly didn’t know if they’re any good.

When they told him it was unmanufacturable and he goes on this tirade where he threatens to sell his “one last fucking remaining share of Apple stock,” he goes to his favorite design consultancy called Lunar. These two guys had actually designed the NeXT computer — that black magnesium cube, if you’re familiar with it. They go through all the blueprints and they agree with Apple’s team: “This cannot be built. This is not a quality design.”

I found this interesting because when I’ve read biographies of Jony Ive, even in grade seven, 12-year-old Jony is all about minimalist designs and elegant sketches.

For me, this was a real turning point where Jony Ive realized, “I need to know more about manufacturing to actually be able to give something that can truly be built.” He does have to change the lines. They do have to make the computer foggier than they wanted it to be because the inside was kind of ugly — the circuit boards were sticking out. That’s something they eventually changed by 1999 or 2000.

He had idealized this computer that couldn’t be built. But the changes that they made — I quote somebody else saying — they’re not major changes. The essence of the idea still lived. It’s still this egg-shaped thing rather than this angular square.

But it is the product that absolutely saves Apple. If they couldn’t figure out how to build it and how to change the design so that it was manufacturable — the term is DFA, designed for manufacturing — Apple wouldn’t exist. It was absolutely clear — the company was going to be bankrupt if this product wasn’t a hit, and it became America’s bestselling computer. It’s quite the dramatic narrative.

Jordan Schneider: I want to tie this to Ren Zhengfei 任正非. We’re running this episode after our series on Huawei, and this story is another one of these “leadership matters” anecdotes. The other thing that struck me about that is how far Steve Jobs was willing to go with the gimmick of, “Okay, this impossible thing — figure it out, figure it out, figure it out.”

There’s a lot of human pressure when all these people are saying, “No, you can’t do this.” Kyle, is there a Ren Zhengfei angle here?

Kyle Chan: Yeah, I think there is. Ren Zhengfei is famous for pushing his team to the limit and then some. There are all sorts of issues related to the work culture — people being driven too hard — but then that culture is carried with those personnel later on when they leave Huawei and go out to other parts of the Chinese ecosystem.

I see this parallel with a maniacal focus on realizing this concept, whatever it is — whether it’s going to be a cutting-edge Ascend AI chip or whether it’s going to be this candy-colored, perfect device that everyone wants to buy immediately when they see it in the store. That kind of drive is very reminiscent.

Terry Gou also plays a huge role in this story, and I see a similar parallel with his personality, although complementary in some ways, he’s so cheap, for lack of a better term. He’s focused on efficiency — he eschews the glitzy corporate HQ of Apple. But they share ultimately the same goal of producing at scale with ruthless efficiency these goods that will make all of them together a lot of money.

Patrick McGee: I’ve got to throw in the DAP here — the Divorce Avoidance Program — because so many marriages are broken up in the first five years of Steve Jobs’s comeback that the engineers are given these different policies to save their marriages. One of them is an understanding that, for example, there might be days when Jordan and Kyle aren’t going to be in to work because their marriages are on the line, and we have to give them a break.

That works well for a time, but we need Jordan and Kyle on the factory line. Instead, it becomes, “If we need to send them to Korea on a random Sunday even though they only got back two days earlier and their spouse is going to be upset, let’s give her $10,000. We need to assuage her because we don’t want to be losing engineers through attrition.”

That was happening to such a degree that all these policies needed to come out. It’s funny — well, I say it’s funny, it’s tragic as well. I’m getting the stories 20 years after the fact. People talk about the dollars being called “Danny Bucks” or “Dan Bucks” in reference to VP of Product Design Dan Riccio, because he was the person who fought for these things.

Sometimes our narrative is overly emphasizing how difficult the Foxconn workers worked, and that’s necessary. Obviously it gets to the point of suicides and suicide nets to prevent that from happening. But the Apple engineers were doing a similar number of hours while also having to fly back and forth all the time. It was causing so much strain that Apple had to institute these policies that engineers talked about. If you talk to anyone on the iMac project in the late 1990s and you mention the DAP, they haven’t thought about it for 20 years, but they immediately know what you’re talking about. Then they start telling stories.

I should say that one guy said, “Never mind the divorces, you need to look at the deaths.” That shook me. I was finding the DAP funny at times, and this person was saying there was nothing funny about it. He could rattle off names of people who had died on the production line or come back and died. I didn’t want to overemphasize that because as a journalist, I can’t determine, when someone died 15 years ago or 20 years ago, that overwork was the cause of death.

Steve Jobs himself says that the reason he thinks he got cancer is he was working so hard as CEO of both Pixar and Apple in 1997 that his immune system was weak and it allowed cancer to creep into his system. Whether that’s the medical diagnosis, I don’t know, but Steve Jobs understood that about himself or believed that about himself.

Jordan Schneider: Another interesting parallel is that the exit opportunities for these people existed. The compensation they were getting was not so different from what they could find at other firms from the Apple side that they couldn’t find other jobs. But there was something to this work that, similar to early Huawei, was not just the money. There is an aspect of team and mission and excitement that was around in this era of Apple that drove the Apple employees to give themselves and give all they had and more to this company and these products.

Patrick McGee: Jordan, let me agree on one part. I do think there’s a band of brothers, bunker mentality that would happen among the Apple engineers putting in the 18-hour days.

On the other hand, Apple later gets sued for collusion because there was an agreement among Silicon Valley giants not to hire from each other’s firms. One of the engineers I spoke with is someone who sued Apple later on because he didn’t understand at the time how being such a high-profile product design engineer at Apple wasn’t getting him job offers. He said, “I’m doing such good work. Why aren’t I being hired by Motorola or Google or whoever?”

Much later, he found out that was taboo. Steve Jobs had yelled at people and the emails came out later. I forget exactly what happened — I’m pretty sure they settled. The evidence was pretty good that there was collusion among the tech giants.

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Kyle Chan: Let’s talk about the example of the CNC machines. One of the parts that struck me — I had heard a little bit of this before, but reading it in the book, I’ve got to read this short snippet:

“Apple dumbfounded the industry when it purchased more than 10,000 CNC machines in a single year, enabling a form of mass production that Steve Jobs called ‘a whole new way of building notebooks.’ Apple even made a deal with Fanuc Automation Group from Japan to purchase its entire pipeline of CNC machines for years to come, shutting out all of its competitors from access, and then scoured the globe for more. ‘There were not enough CNC machines in the world to do the machining that we needed to do,’ one person said.”

I was struck by the scale and also by the — again, this is reminiscent of Elon Musk — “We need this part now. Whatever it takes, fly it out personally, make it happen.” For this Apple story, for the aluminum single-body MacBooks, it’s what it’s going to be. If it takes 10,000 CNC machines, then so be it. We’ll fly them over. Those stories capture the “whatever it takes” mentality.

Patrick McGee: We’ve jumped ahead to 2008 here. This was an achievement of imagination. There’s nothing novel about a CNC machine — I forget how many decades they go back. But the thing is, they build prototypes. Apple had the wherewithal and the imagination to say, “Well, wait a minute. If these things are so good, why don’t we build all of our products using these things?”

My focus is on the MacBook — they got the unibody MacBook — but they’re used in all sorts of products, including the iPhone, and have been ever since. These are machines that individually cost between $500,000 and a million dollars. Who knows what Apple is paying when they’re able to buy them at scale and they have someone like Tony Blevins negotiating for them.

This is so successful that this is the first time that MD (manufacturing design) is put on the map. In other words, it’s the first time Steve Jobs, in a keynote presentation, talks about their manufacturing prowess. This is probably the time — I don’t know this for a fact — that MD becomes MD. Before then, they were a part of product design, and it’s called Supply Base Engineering. Now they’re a part of ops.

It’s interesting that MD doesn’t have their own senior vice president. I don’t know exactly why it’s a part of ops — they should be their own thing — but it’s possible that Apple doesn’t love the narrative of more people knowing about this division because they are the ones where, when my book talks about the geopolitical influence that Apple has, it’s because they’re flying MD engineers who are brilliant, usually based in California, over to Asia to train and audit and supervise and equip these third-party manufacturers with what becomes billions upon billions of dollars of machinery.

This is where I get into the argument that Apple’s influence is like that of a nation-building program.

iPhones and Nation Building

Jordan Schneider: I have a smaller question — more on the design stuff. As the design process is being incredibly creative with the CNC machines, one of the questions I have is to what extent they could have optimized for design features which would have given them more geographic flexibility?

The degrees of freedom that Jony Ive and company were able to operate under are unique in the industry. As we've discussed with the CNC Apple Unibody story and the translucent iMac, they were willing and excited to push the physical design features of their products to the point where the answer at the end of the equation had to be China and Chinese suppliers.

I'm curious whether there were other pathways where they could have introduced different constraints at the design phase. This approach might have allowed them to manufacture more products in different places around the world without losing as much capability. The alternative would be trying to manufacture something like the unibody MacBook—as it was designed to be constructed in 2008—somewhere else outside of China, which would result in significant compromises.

Patrick McGee: That’s a great question. One question that you get now is: why doesn’t Apple automate these processes so that it’s not dependent on China, where you’ve got 400,000 people building an iPhone? That sounds like a rational thing to do.

But what you would be doing is upending how Apple designs its products, which is to say that Jony Ive’s team — and I’m aware that Jony Ive has left, but we’re talking about the golden era here — they could operate with a “no constraints” mentality. In other words, other companies will say from the get-go, “This is going to be automated, so we’re going to design for automation.”

The degrees of freedom under which Jony Ive and company were able to operate is unique in the industry. As we’ve talked through with the CNC Apple unibody story, as we’ve talked through with the translucent iMac, they were willing and excited to push the physical design features of their products such that the answer at the end of the equation had to be China and Chinese suppliers.

But I’m curious if there were other pathways where they could have introduced more or different constraints at the design phase such that you could have at the end of the equation been able to manufacture more stuff in different places around the world without losing as much — without losing as much as you would if you were trying to manufacture the unibody MacBook as it was designed to be constructed in 2008 somewhere else outside of China.

I like to ask people what their favorite Dell computer from the early 2000s was. Of course, none of us has a favorite Dell computer from the early 2000s. It’s not only the money that Apple’s making and investing in China that distinguishes them from others, because they were a small player in the early 2000s.

What distinguishes Apple is what they are doing and the fact that nobody knows how to build it. It’s not a knock against China to say that Apple taught them a lot. When you think of Apple products — whether it’s multi-touch glass or the anthropomorphic metal tubing between the base and the computer for the Sunflower iMac — nobody knows how to build that stuff. I’m not saying the Chinese didn’t know how; nobody knew. The marriage of Apple and China is skill and scale coming together.

The line I use is that Jony Ive and Steve Jobs made Apple products unique. Terry Gou and Tim Cook made them ubiquitous.

Now, if you had a different mentality where you said, “Let’s make these things easier to manufacture, more automation-friendly, to give us geopolitical safety,” that absolutely could have happened. You could have had more boring products, fewer design changes year to year, and you would’ve been able to have a more resilient supply chain based on production in Mexico, for example.

In that world, the first iPhone, if it were built at all, absolutely would have a plastic screen rather than a glass screen. It was only by working with the Chinese factories at their scale and industriousness that Steve Jobs was able to make dramatic changes. Literally after he has presented the iPhone — when he famously announced the iPhone in January 2007 — he was holding a phone that has a plastic screen. It was in the period between him announcing it and it going on sale that Apple upended the entire thing.

They work with a Taiwanese supplier called TPK, which builds the invisible circuitry within the glass so that your finger actually causes an effect. You’ll notice that if you do that on your window, it doesn’t do anything. You need to have a bunch of technology in there. Then they worked with Lens Technology to shape and temper the Corning glass that everyone’s familiar with.

The glass is American-made, but then it has to be shaped, tempered and cut. There are tens of thousands of people working at Shenzhen Lens to do that. You have people like Steve Zadesky, who’s on a whole bunch of iPod and iPhone patents, literally sleeping on the factory floor to get that all done.

China offered something that nobody else has offered. The reason why the epigraph to the book is a “Made in China 2025” document from 2015 that says:

“Without manufacturing there is no country and there is no nation.” Find me another country that has that as their motto, their mantra. You don’t get that just anywhere.

Sometimes I find it amusing that I have a 90-second sound bite on X and someone will say, “This guy’s saying China couldn’t be anything without Apple.” It’s the total opposite. I’m saying Apple is screwed without China because nobody will offer the things that they offer. They were a once-in-a-century partner to respond to the demands of Jony Ive.

If I’m fast-forwarding a bit, the only thing I would say is that Apple thought they were wearing the pants in this relationship for the first two decades — from 2000 to 2020. It’s only afterwards that there’s this realization that, “Wait a minute, we were lured in by the siren call of an emerging superpower who had all their companies willing to do all these things so that they would learn all the technology transfer and put America in a position, and all other industrialized nations in a position, where none of them can compete.” Everything has gone into China.

Kyle Chan: Can we talk about learning and this process of learning and technology transfer? To me, this is such a big deal — not only for Apple, but Apple exemplifies a lot. All these foreign firms that China in many cases very deliberately tried to bring into the country, tried to attract — maybe it’s by the central government, maybe it’s by local government, maybe it’s certain incentives, maybe it’s a whole concerted effort.

The point was to bring in these foreign firms, have them manufacture in China, share know-how, and train a whole generation of not only workers, but engineers and managers. The story of Apple and China captures that fantastically.

To give you a contrast, I love the quote: When Apple was working with Sony in Japan, you had an operations executive from Apple leaving Tokyo saying, “I was in Japan about five minutes, and Apple can teach the Japanese nothing.” This was earlier in the story, and this was a difficult product, but not as difficult maybe as some of the later ones. That story was not one of technology transfer.

Whereas later on, especially for the case of China and Foxconn, there was a very deliberate effort to use Apple as a source of upgrading your entire industrial ecosystem — upgrading your suppliers, upgrading your machinery, your equipment, all of the tacit knowledge, not only the blueprints and stuff that you can license and patent. Some of this stuff was not anywhere in existence. It was pioneered — they were all operating at the forefront.

Can you say more about this process of learning? I read a lot and talk a lot about, from the Chinese side, their very active process of trying to get as much as possible from every kind of foreign firm in high-tech industries. This process of technology transfer and learning.

Patrick McGee: In the late 1990s, Apple actually struggled to find contract manufacturers for its products because they were not seen as worth the effort. We have to remember that Apple was creating things in pretty small volumes, and they were very demanding. The workers at these Chinese factories often did not like working with Apple because you’ve got these overbearing engineers who are dictating all these things. Usually they’re dictating it through translators because these are American engineers who don’t speak the language.

I have these funny anecdotes that aren’t in the book where some engineers have a free weekend, so they decide to go to this factory that they’ve been training up. They cause such hell that when they’re trying to leave the following day, there’s a problem with the car — the wheel is flat or something. As the car drove, it was causing sparks to fly. They’re thinking, “I guess we’ll have to stay here another day.” Then they get a call from the leader of the factory who demands that the taxi driver drive even with the sparks flying and everything, because God forbid these Apple engineers come back because they’re such a pain in the neck.

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This is the sort of level of training that Apple is providing — the sort of stuff that makes you go mad. Yet obviously they’re very, very effective.

My narrative about Terry Gou is that he is the first person to understand: “This is not about making big volumes necessarily, and this is certainly not about making margins, but we’re getting tuition-free, on-the-ground training from these overbearing engineers who are willing to teach our cohorts all sorts of stuff.”

Apple’s orderly meets its match in Terry Gou and vice versa. This on-the-record anecdote from Tony Fadell is that he and his team would come in to train the engineers they’ve been working with and find not a face that they recognize because Terry has taken these graduates and put them on the Dell line or whatever, where they can use their newfound skill sets to actual money-making effect. He’s, in a sense, without Apple’s permission, started a new semester for these other engineers.

I don’t think the Chinese understood that until 2016. That is a key reason why you’ve had Foxconn being squeezed out the last couple of years and they’re having to go to India because Apple’s essentially telling them, “If you want to keep your market share, you need to go to India for us.”

The learning is absolutely fundamental to the relationship between Foxconn and Apple and to why all the Chinese factories are able to do so much. If you want, we can go into the wonky differences between ODM and OEM and why Foxconn does so much better than Quanta or Inventec or anybody else.

Jordan Schneider: Sure, let’s tell that story.

Patrick McGee: In the late 1990s, none of the Taiwanese wanted to be doing assembly. Assembly is how you get the orders, but it’s very low margin, it’s totally cutthroat. The likes of Inventec and Quanta and the predecessors to Pegatron are doing something called ODM work. “D” is for design, and design means more margin, and it also means more investment. It’s an investment that typically pays off.

What it means is that if you’re a Western manufacturer of a computer, you’re already offloading your manufacturing to a third party in Taiwan. But what this will allow you, if you work with an ODM, is that they’ll also do the research and development, and they’ll also do the design. You have less and less to do. It gets to the point where the Taiwanese can literally show a catalog of computer designs, and you choose one. Imagine how much that takes off your balance sheet.

It works very well. The problem, of course, is that the Taiwanese begin branding their own computers and competing against you. If there are times of scarcity of a certain product, they’re going to source it to their own companies rather than to you as the third party.

Apple never falls for this trap, in part because they’re wanting to do so much design themselves. It’s never appealing for someone to say, “We’ll do the design for you.” Foxconn maintains itself as an OEM, a manufacturer — the manufacturing-as-a-service model. They were condescended to because it’s not sexy, high-margin work. Yet Terry Gou has an understanding of Chinese politics that nobody else seems to have.

Kyle mentioned that this is what we get wrong about Chinese communism: it’s not only about the relationships with the federal officials, it’s the provincial officials because the cadres in various districts are incentivized for factory growth. They will offer tax exemptions and bonded zones and tailor-made policies and all sorts of stuff — getting in the labor from the hinterlands or whatever — so that your investment goes to that district and not some other cadre’s.

It’s worth knowing that that is one of the key distinctions between Soviet and Chinese communism. The Soviet system was top-down.

I don’t know that you’d call Chinese capitalism grassroots per se, but I compare it to federalism on steroids. It’s something that we miss all the time.

The reason why being an OEM is important is the labor intensity and the vertical integration that Foxconn introduces. Instead of doing design and R&D, they are just building. What makes them so good at building is having many clients and then allocating those resources. That allows Terry Gou to expand — literally in a real estate sense — building dormitories, building entertainment venues, and having these migrants set up shop in Shenzhen all the time. If you’re doing that, you are making the local cadres in Shenzhen look good.

He’s able to parlay his brilliant investment strategy, his labor intensity, into free machinery, free tools, more labor migrants, etc., in a way that nobody else is able to take advantage of. Apple didn’t understand Chinese politics until 2013 when they were made to, but Foxconn is their biggest partner and Foxconn understands it very, very well.

What’s tragic is Foxconn was never rewarded very much for this. Their margins fell the closer they get with Apple, but the political connections that Foxconn made were instrumental to Apple’s rise.

Made in China 2025

Jordan Schneider: I want to talk about that — the getting rewarded thing. I asked ChatGPT for the market cap of Apple and all of its near-ish competitors. We’ve got Apple at $3.25 trillion. We have Samsung at $300 billion, Xiaomi at $175 billion. Huawei, no one knows, but maybe $100-200 billion. Oppo and Vivo are rounding errors.

We have this big argument. The central thesis of your book is that this was a dangerous trade for America, but we did get a $3 trillion company out of it, even though there was all of this industrial upgrading that Apple helped China do. Setting aside the getting Chinese people out of poverty angle to this, there’s got to be something to be said for the fact that America is now home to one of the largest companies that the world has ever seen.

Patrick McGee: I’ve tried to answer this. If for whatever reason we were living in a simulation and the game ended now, then obviously Apple got more out of this relationship and it was a great deal for everybody, and we lived through a golden age of Silicon Valley focusing on software and China doing the hardware.

The problem is it’s probably not a simulation. The world continues and we’re now at a point where Apple has no Plan B. China for whatever reason has become more belligerent and wants to be self-sufficient. “Made in China 2025 中国制造2025” is a grand master plan to sever itself from the West in terms of automation, robotics, electronics, and other things including pharmaceuticals.

It seems pretty crazy to me that the world’s most valuable company doesn’t have any sort of Plan B. The Tim Cook doctrine, named in 2010, maybe 2011, was to own and control as much as possible and only enter markets where they could be number one or number two. As Ben Thompson from Stratechery constantly points out, the fact that everything’s manufactured in a fairly hostile country is the biggest violation of the Tim Cook strategy that could possibly exist.

Kyle Chan: Another parallel is the way that all of these U.S. chip designers depend on TSMC. I tweeted earlier — and it’s funny, the numbers still hold a year later — but Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have a combined market cap of $15 trillion, give or take some trillions. Yet they all rely on TSMC for advanced semiconductors, for AI chips, for smartphones.

It’s incredible that there’s this amount of value that’s created on the American side from these companies, purely from design. All those companies I’m talking about, maybe with the exception of Tesla, outsource all the manufacturing. For the high-end chips, that goes to TSMC. TSMC itself is probably one of the most valuable companies in Asia, but itself is an order of magnitude less.

There are two big questions. One is, how did we get to this point where we were allowing global risk to be concentrated so much on a single firm or a single country? Same thing with Apple and China. But then on the other side too, do you lose something from separating design and manufacturing?

Your stories about Apple engineers flying back and forth, deeply embedding themselves with Chinese suppliers, bringing the machinery, doing this — you have this phrase, “man-on-mirror” structure that I love. That was very interesting. That was actually for Korea, but a similar model later on for China, maybe 10x. How much can the two be separated and how much can you still be innovating at the cutting edge when you know your manufacturers are somewhere else, maybe in a different country altogether, maybe 6,000 miles away?

Jordan Schneider: I want to push back on that characterization. It’s a misnomer to say NVIDIA is a design firm. They’re constantly flying back and forth to TSMC. The innovation required to create not only the chips but these entire racks is incredibly manufacturing and hard tech intensive. It’s not only sitting with EDA tools and rearranging where circuits go. A similar story can be told from their perspective.

Patrick McGee: Andy Grove, Intel’s co-founder, gave a great interview to Bloomberg Businessweek in 2010, where he lamented that everything had left America’s shores. He said we’re going to miss out on shop floor innovation — that if you’re not in the factory working on the next product, you’re going to lose out. He was concerned about the shortsightedness of it, and that was quite a profound lesson.

I come back to this later in the book to highlight how any number of Western companies completely outsource without knowing how to build things anymore. It’s not clear to me that Facebook has any idea how to build the Portal. The Portal isn’t a device that’s out there anymore, but as I understand it, it was a product that was completely outsourced to Asian companies who knew how to do it.

Apple is in a different boat — they do know how to build things. They have the experiential know-how built on proprietary processes. We know about them doing iOS, but they also do software and operating systems for machines. We don’t know about that because we’re not on the factory lines.

The problem, as I quote from engineer Michael Hillman who has 16 years of experience, is that to execute any of those plans, they need China. The line I often use is that an iPhone has roughly 1,000 components. If you’re building a million iPhones a day, that means you’re managing the logistics, manufacturing, and production of one billion components daily. There’s one country on earth that’s able to execute that. Anyone else will take at least 10 to 15 years to reach that stage. Because China is an increasingly belligerent country, they won’t let that happen.

If you follow high-quality engineering on a map, America had total dominance at the end of World War II. They began teaching the Japanese to build radar and electronics industries. When they hit supply constraints and the yen rose in value, Japanese entrepreneurs went to their former colonies — Taiwan and South Korea — to do the same thing. When Taiwan hit its own constraints and had better relations with mainland China, the Taiwanese entrepreneurs 台商 went to China and built immense manufacturing capacity over the last four decades.

The next natural place to go would be India. Vietnam to some degree, but Vietnam doesn’t have the size. India is the next logical place if you play this game. But no one knows that better than Beijing, and they want technology transfer to be a one-way gate. The information comes in, but it certainly doesn’t go to Karnataka.

That’s where Apple has this big predicament right now. It makes perfect sense to set up production lines in India, but the machinery is now produced in India and blocked by Beijing. The experiential know-how is in the minds of Chinese engineers — from low-skilled workers to PhDs — and they can’t get visas to India. That’s why Apple is captured. I’m not using that as a line to sell books. I don’t know what strategic decision Apple can make that would untie the knot with China. The more plausible scenario is that they retie another knot and end up with a bifurcated supply chain. But that’s not in China’s interest, and if it’s not in China’s interest, then good luck to Cupertino — I don’t know how they’re going to execute that.

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Kyle Chan: This is a very big topic in the scholarly and development world about whether this whole “flying geese” model — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China’s moment — whether that ends with China. Apple is perhaps one of the best examples, but there are many other areas where maybe the auto industry will end up in China and there’s no next flying geese destination. Maybe a little bit to Vietnam and Thailand for transshipment to get around tariffs.

India is always the question. India wants to be next and has been waiting for a long time, watching China’s rise in anguish, thinking “that should be us.” They’re making a big push with manufacturing and have their own major industrial policy, especially targeting iPhone and consumer electronics manufacturing. To some extent, there seems to be success on paper — the oft-quoted statistic that 20% of iPhones are now assembled in India.

But there are big questions about how much of the real supply chain can be brought into the country the way China had done, whether that’s bringing in foreign firms to invest in manufacturing or cultivating domestic suppliers.

Jordan Schneider: The case study I’m looking forward to seeing play out over the next few years is wearables. Meta made all of the Oculus devices in China, and a few months ago, they said they’re going to try to get GoerTek, their Chinese contract manufacturer, to do half of it in Vietnam. Good luck with that.

Google’s now getting into the game. They had a big announcement a few months ago and did a big talent acquisition of HTC, which was a Taiwanese-based VR company, and are obviously trying to price all this in and diversify.

But you have six or seven Chinese manufacturers who are ahead of the game when it comes to what’s currently on the market in the West — when you look at Meta Ray-Bans as the main thing people have been exposed to. There’s that dynamic, but beyond creating redundancies around the world, it’s clear that doubling down on China will get you to the frontier of technology faster than trying to be cute in different countries.

The Apple Vision Pro — not a huge commercial success, but an incredible technical accomplishment — give me a break if you think you can try to make that at scale or with anywhere near the level of policy and precision that Chinese contract manufacturers were able to deliver.

Patrick McGee: It’s worth noting that’s Luxshare, not Foxconn — the rise of the red supply chain in action. The other example I’d point out is Sam Altman and Jony Ive coming up with their next device. Where’s that going to be built? If you’re Jony Ive, you might demand the best, and the easy thing would be to say, “Of course we’re going to work with the Chinese partners that he knows from three decades at Apple.”

On the other hand, he must be more awake to the issues I point to in the book than anybody. He might very well know the political agenda of Trump and all the ways that could be used in his favor to build out a nascent supply chain here.

It’s much easier to do when you’re beginning to build units literally in the tens because you’re doing prototypes, rather than in the quarter billion that Apple deals with — Apple’s scale is so big that sometimes you get off by an order of magnitude.

Apple in China, Future Edition 養虎為患

Kyle Chan: The phrase I kept thinking about was “training your replacement.” Apple is different, but there’s this pattern we notice repeatedly where China brings in foreign firms attracted by China’s efficient, nimble manufacturing base. They set up shop, and then — maybe it takes decades — you end up with a whole crop of Chinese competitors that first nibble away at your market share within China, then start expanding and going global.

You see this happening right now with the EV industry and Tesla. There’s a whole debate about how much Tesla turbocharged China’s EV industry or how much was already there, with Tesla playing a catfish role.

Reading your book, Apple had some of this problem. Samsung is the most famous long-term global competitor, but also Huawei and then a whole fleet of Chinese smartphone competitors — Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo. You talk about how Apple kept trying to innovate on both design and manufacturing to stay a step ahead of the competition, at least up until recently. They were able to maintain their position in the global market, even within China, even with all the pressures of domestic competitors, in the high-end smartphone market.

Could you talk about this problem and how Apple dealt with this feeling of potentially creating the very competitors that become existential threats in other industries?

Patrick McGee: This is a great segue into one of my favorite chapters, Chapter 36, called “Five Alarm Fire”, because this is what happens when Apple realizes the competitors in China have caught up with them.

What’s amazing about the chapter is that it’s exclusively based on court documents that were made public but were never found by another journalist. I found them 16 months ago, but I’m the only person who’s written about them, even since I published the book nobody has gone to do their own deep dive. We’re talking about more than a thousand pages — depositions of Tim Cook and others, internal emails between Tim Cook and the board of directors at Apple, between him and production staff and his underlings.

The entire issue is about how the iPhone XR (pronounced “ten R”) is a dud, and they know it’s a dud. It’s geared toward the Chinese market, yet the Chinese are all deciding to buy a competitor from Huawei. Apple knew this for several weeks and then told investors that everything was fine.

The chapter is called “Five Alarm Fire” because that’s what a VP of Sales or Finance described the situation as — fire department jargon for when at least a hundred people are needed on the scene. The quote from Tim Cook, at least a week before he talks to investors, is: “This is a disaster. We need all hands on deck now.” There are people within Apple who are panicking about this.

What happened is that the tenth-anniversary iPhone is the first one with that infinity pool design — you get rid of the thumbprint and have Face ID. That didn’t ship until November 2017. Then, by April 2018, four or five months later, all four of the major Chinese brands have an infinity pool-like rival. Cupertino was expecting to bask in the glow of this amazing device, and literally everybody caught up.

You realize the Chinese went from mimicry to — maybe they’re still in the stage of mimicry there — but they’re surprising Apple with how quickly they’re able to keep up. Now, fast-forwarding, they’re in a stage where they’re doing things that Apple isn’t doing. The example I always point to is the Mate XT from Huawei, which unfolds twice. There are also silicon carbide batteries in the latest Vivo phones that have better density, faster recharge time, and longer duration.

Apple is no longer the company to pay attention to if you’re looking for the most cutting-edge phone. There’s something disquieting about that, especially because not only are the Chinese manufacturing them, but they’re doing the industrial design and product design. They’ve taken that pyramid structure I described in the book, put it organically in their own companies, and are now outmaneuvering Apple on multiple levels of the pyramid.

Kyle Chan: Now we’re seeing this especially with AI features coming out. Huawei is doing a lot with its Harmony operating system, trying to have AI everywhere you want it — and maybe in many places where you don’t, like summaries where you don’t want summaries, maybe mimicking what iPhone users are getting used to now with Apple Intelligence.

There’s this big question mark about whether Apple will be able to catch up and be on the cutting edge in that space. There are recent issues with linking up with Alibaba, for example, for an AI partner in China. If you don’t have that kind of partnership, whether as Apple, you can still be competitive in the Chinese domestic market.

Patrick McGee: You brought this up because this is mostly post-manuscript for me — it’s not in the book, yet it’s current and dynamic as a discussion. First, Apple has done poorly with Siri. Siri might have been amazing 14 years ago, but it hasn’t kept up. It’s not even a large language model, so it’s not doing the most basic stuff.

Because of Siri’s failure, Apple has to work with a partner. Because ChatGPT or anyone else, such as Perplexity AI isn’t available in China, they have to work with a Chinese partner. In a sense, that’s the closest thing we’re going to see on the product side to Apple having a joint venture — maybe it’s not technically a joint venture, but my book is about how Apple consolidated all hardware engineering into China over the last 25 years.

Are you telling me that, over the next 25 years, they’re going to work hand-in-glove with Baidu or Alibaba and essentially do the same thing with AI?

This is already the stuff of movies regarding existential risk to humanity. We’re talking about the most complex, consequential thing in tech, if not in business or anything writ large. This is up there with fire and the computer. I don’t know how much sense it makes for Apple to be training one of these companies to make their product better, which they would inevitably have to do. They’re not going to use an off-the-shelf AI tool.

Jordan Schneider: I don’t know if they can train themselves to make their product better when it comes to AI.

Patrick McGee: That’s a great point. We are at the stage where you’ll buy your next phone based on the AI features it has, and Apple is very much failing there. We are recording this during WWDC, so who knows? Maybe we’re way wrong by the time this comes out, but I feel like that’s not going to be the case. They’re behind in AI in an embarrassing way.

Jordan Schneider: One more detailed question before we do a closing one or two. The $55 billion annual investment in China — can you deconstruct that number? Where did it come from and what is included?

Patrick McGee: Apple was on the back foot in 2013 when Xi Jinping 习近平 came to power. They’re worried that either their products are going to be blacklisted or they’re going to have to form joint ventures to continue operating in the country. This is total anathema to Cupertino — not what they want to happen.

This team of people that came into the company, either hired or appointed, called themselves “the gang of eight.” They’re the first people who are senior, living and working in the country. This is where you pass the baton from Foxconn to Apple. Apple realized: we can outsource our manufacturing to Foxconn, but we cannot outsource our political relationships.

They take ownership of this and do their own supply chain study effectively in tandem with the government affairs team. What they realized is that they’re investing $55 billion into Chinese factories — into factories operating in the country.

China has this concept called “registered capital.” Apple, in any given year, doesn’t make as much money as Walmart, and Walmart gets 60 to 70% of their products from China. But Walmart’s not making investments in the country. If you’re importing kitchenware and action toys from China, that doesn’t count as registered capital or investment — that’s just spend. You’re buying that stuff, putting it on a ship, and selling it in Arkansas.

If you were Volkswagen or GM, you’re training workers to run a production line. For a certain period — 18 to 24 months — it counts as an investment into the country. The training costs of setting up a production line count as fixed assets, the same way that putting machinery on the production line is counted.

Apple realizes their investment is more like Volkswagen or GM’s than Walmart’s. They’re not sitting in Hong Kong ordering parts from Shenzhen. They’re going into the factory and training them how to do all this stuff. Their training costs, which are effectively wages, should be counted as fixed assets, as registered capital.

But they go further. Unlike Volkswagen or GM, who set up a production line and have it running for seven years because the lifecycle of a car is about seven years, the iPhone never gets to that stage where it’s running. They’re always upending the design of every product in the portfolio. They’re able to count a whole lot of training costs and wages, in addition to billions in machinery that’s put on the production line, as registered capital.

Someone could debate whether all that spending should actually be counted as investment, but it’s not an argument with me — it’s an argument with Apple and with Beijing, which accepted the argument. That’s where the money comes from, why it’s counted as registered capital, and what distinguishes them from other companies that don’t do the training. Other companies are buying off-the-shelf parts, whereas Apple is working hand-in-glove with hundreds of factories.

That’s why they’re able to operate without a joint venture — because they can say, “You have no idea what influence we’re having on hundreds of factories across the country.”

Jordan Schneider: For Kyle and Patrick, the contract manufacturers that Apple shepherded — do you have a sense of how their relationship with Chinese handset manufacturers is similar or different?

Kyle Chan: There’s a lot of overlap. You can break it down — Lens Technology is a supplier not only to other Chinese smartphone manufacturers but to others as well. GoerTek and some of these suppliers supply across the board.

The order of operations depends, but some of them were brought up by Apple and then helped the rest of the Chinese supply chain. Some of them were already serving what were, for them, lower-tier customers like Oppo and Vivo before they got their Apple contract. It’s a mixed bag.

I also love the part where you mention Apple trying to navigate Chinese politics, because good luck to anyone trying to navigate that.

They tried to cozy up to Sun Zhengcai 孙政才, who was the party secretary of Chongqing. Apple tried to invest in data centers there, which at a local government politics level is great — you want to show that you’re bringing in investment, generating economic activity, especially when it comes to anything high-tech. That’s a bunch of gold stars.

That turned out to be a mistake because Sun didn’t end up becoming the successor to Xi — it turned out Xi was the successor to Xi. Sun didn’t even end up in the very top echelon of party leadership.

There are other ways where Apple has been incredibly adept, especially Tim Cook, at navigating Chinese politics and American politics at the same time. It’s not a job I would envy, although he’s probably pretty well compensated.

Mood Music:

有一种国家病，叫“文明古国综合症”。中国是这种病患者，但并不是独此一家，难兄难弟还有伊朗、印度、埃及这些国家。

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This is a repost of an article by Jon Sine of the Cogitations substack.

And Suffering Will Be Your Teacher

Xi Zhongxun was born into a fallen world. That, at least, is something the father and the son, whose youth was forged in the Cultural Revolution, have in common. But if we speak literally rather than metaphorically, the world of the elder Xi was not fallen, but falling apart. He was born in 1913, in the desolate northwest of China, as a scourge of European guns, germs, and steel was unleashing forces that would sweep the world’s great agrarian empires—Ottoman Turkey, Romanov Russia, and of course Qing China—into the dustbin of history. These same forces would pull Zhongxun, like so many young radicals of his time, into the dark vortex from which modernity would crawl. The birth of modernity in China was a bloody and terrifying upheaval. Anything, Mao quipped, but a dinner party.

Modern minds may struggle to comprehend the youthful Zhongxun. One could begin, as The Party’s Interests Come First does, with the shocking story of how he tried to murder his teacher at the tender age of 14. One could describe how famine stalked Zhongxun’s family, distending his belly and those of his orphaned siblings, claiming several of them. One could note that Zhongxun’s first wife was only eligible because her first husband had his head severed from his body by one of the various warlords and militias—and it was she, an eighteen year old girl, who had to find and bury the carcass.

Images of death and suffering have burst on to our social media feeds in the 21^st century. For most of us they disappear as quickly as they arrive, a flash on the screen sent away by the next swipe of the finger. Inhabiting the mindscape of Xi Zhongxun is hard, perhaps impossible—it would require experiencing things we never have, lingering on them for more time than we are comfortable or perhaps capable. Terrible and turbulent days of unceasing insecurity, death, and suffering are mercifully, for most of us, foreign.

But Zhongxun and his revolutionary kin came to know suffering like a first language. It spawned in them a zeal for purpose and meaning; a drive to find something that could not only bring order to a chaotic present, but something that could redeem a fallen world, that could make sense of seemingly senseless suffering. Suffering shaped and inexorably drew people toward causes bigger than themselves. Toward things that, as Viktor Frankl would have understood, transformed the very meaning of suffering. For some, like Zhongxun, suffering became the crucible in which the meaning of their lives was forged.

There was nothing inevitable about Xi’s trajectory, however. Subjected to similar suffering, any number of men or women might have chosen a different path. For Xi, the road he walked was shaped as much by happenstance as by conviction—introduced to the basic concepts of communism, almost by accident, first by a teacher and then by an educated prison mate. As Torigian reveals in his prodigious excavation of Zhongxun’s life, Xi would later recall that he knew nothing of communism when he first joined the cause. It was not the Communist Manifesto, Lenin’s Imperialism, or any other Marxist-Leninist tract that first kindled his passion. It was his own suffering, reflected back to him in the pages of a novel: The Young Wanderer. “If other poets,” the author, Jiang Guangci, would write, “pride themselves on being artists ahead of their time—creators of beauty—then I pride myself on being a true son of the age, a singer of the storm.” Much as Stalin drew strength from Georgian heroic tales (from which he also took a nickname, Koba), Xi, too, found inspiration in literature. By chance and circumstance, his creed became the communist one, and his devotion was given to the Communist Party.

If Zhongxun’s conversion to the communist cause was shaped by chance and far from foreordained, it was also part of a larger pattern. Like the old Bolsheviks profiled in Slezkine’s House of Government, Xi was one of many youths who gave themselves wholly to a cause. And once he made that choice, he never wavered. The many bloody trials and tribulations he endured in service of the Party—the only force he genuinely came to believe that could save China—hardened a commitment that would prove unshakable. Part of this devotion was deeply personal. With both parents dead and little family to call his own, the Party became his surrogate kin. The “forging” he underwent in those early revolutionary years—from infiltrating the Nationalists in his teens and twenties, surviving multiple assassination attempts, to becoming one of the youngest pioneers of the northwest base where the Communists would eventually settle in Yan’an, a place where he would both purge and be purged—took on a fetishistic significance in later memory.

For many Chinese Communists, and revolutionaries the world over, suffering was their teacher. And it taught them that only total devotion to the cause, of which the Party was the sacred embodiment, could deliver salvation. A close reading of Torigian’s biography enables the modern mind to feel this.

Do Not Wait Until The Evening to See How Splendid the Day Has Been

As Torigian reminds us, Zhongxun is often remembered in popular conception as one of the most humane figures the Party ever produced—held up as a symbol of reform at its most principled, a legacy now sometimes invoked to cast Xi Jinping as an unfilial son who has betrayed his father’s path. But as Torigian painstakingly shows, Zhongxun defies easy categorization. The elder Xi’s life, Torigian writes, is “a powerful statement about the misleading nature of grand narratives” (page 535).

Xi the “reformer” initially opposed the household responsibility system. He despised materialism. He railed against the corrosive threat of individualism. As Torigian writes, quoting him intermittently:

“Individualism was a ‘germ.’ Even if small, this germ ‘does not fear the heavens, does not fear the earth, and it is extraordinarily daring.’ He continued, ‘Even if you weigh eighty kilograms, even if today you have only a tiny, tiny bit of individualism in your body, once it develops, it will devour you whole.’” (p. 194)

Zhongxun, for his part, routinely and enthusiastically affirmed his commitment to Deng’s Four Cardinal Principles. The tension between the “Three” and the “Four”—as Torigian frames it, the economically reformist spirit of the 1978 3rd Plenum versus the enduring imperative of the Four Cardinal Principles to uphold the Party’s authoritarian core—runs through the Party as well as Xi.

A Lighter Side to Xi Zhongxun: At Disney Land (1980)

Underlying it all is the deeper tension at the core of Zhongxun’s life—the conflict between humaneness (人性) and Partyness (党性)—between what one thinks is right and what the party demands or deems acceptable. Despite his difficult youth, Zhongxun somehow sustained a gentler, more conciliatory side. It was further honed through years working in the United Front, where he often favored dialogue and co-optation of local power brokers over coercion in dealings with ethnic minorities, religious groups, and other non-Party actors. One striking example comes from policy in Xinjiang, where, as head of the Northwest Bureau, Xi intervened all the way to the top to overturn a hardline approach pushed by Deng Liqun and Wang Zhen, figures typically cast as staunch conservatives. In doing so, he was willing to bear the enmity of Deng and Wang (which would surface in due time) so as to forestall a more repressive campaign against religious believers and nomads there, favoring instead a more peaceful strategy of co-opting and courting local power brokers.

And yet, as the aptly named book reflects, when the Party’s interests were on the line, they always came first. If the Party needed someone eliminated, Zhongxun would—and did—comply. As he did in Xi’an in the early 1950s, fulfilling Mao’s mandated execution quotas, and earlier still during the Shaanxi base area purges of the 1940s, when Xi was county secretary of Suide. Zhongxun also remained conspicuously silent during the Tiananmen crisis, despite holding the prominent, and at the time very relevant, post of NPC Vice Chair—perhaps shrewdly foreseeing Deng’s violent verdict and not wanting, once more, to end up on the wrong side of Party history.

A Tougher Side of Xi Zhongxun: His Portrayal In Hagiographic New 39 Episode Miniseries (2024)

The prodigious depth of Torigian’s research invites comparison with Robert Caro. In Working, Caro recounts a formative piece of advice from his early days: “Turn every page.” Across roughly 2,000 endnotes and an extraordinary range of Chinese-language sources, Torigian shows the same tireless commitment. His book is not only a biography, but a repository of primary sources and a work of translation, with many materials rendered into English in full or in part for the first time.

Amid the mosaic of sources, three stood out to me. First is Xi’s official Chinese biographer, Jia Juchuan, whose three-volume life of Zhongxun is thoroughly mined. Torigian describes Jia as “more likely to omit than mislead,” and his account is triangulated with other key works like The Chronicle of Xi Zhongxun (习仲勋年谱) and Biography of Xi Zhongxun (习仲勋传). Second is Li Rui—former Mao secretary and high-level Party insider—whose private diaries, now archived at Stanford, offer invaluable glimpses into elite politics. Torigian draws on them carefully to add texture and insight. Third is Warren Sun, a towering figure in Australian China studies. Alongside Fred Teiwes, Sun has long set the standard for rigorous political analysis, and has done more than most to recalibrate Deng’s legacy—as both architect of reform and calculating autocrat, including his role in sidelining the more consensus-minded Hua Guofeng.

But if Torigian’s research ethic recalls Caro, his narrative style diverges sharply. There is no luminous epigraph urging readers to “wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been,” as in The Power Broker. Instead, contradictions are foregrounded, ambiguities embraced, and tidy storylines deliberately refused. This is a book that resists resolution. Considering how often—and for how long—both internal participants and outside observers have misunderstood Chinese politics, such caution is not only reasonable but necessary. So many statements must remain provisional, with multiple streams of evidence pointing in suggestive directions but rarely converging into certainty. Such are the realities of writing about a man operating at the center of a system that is built around secrecy.

One of the central lessons of The Party’s Interests Come First is that the familiar labels used in China-watching—reformer versus conservative, or more morally charged binaries like good versus bad—often collapse under scrutiny. Torigian dismantles these categories, showing how supposed heroes were less heroic than assumed, and villains less villainous. At the top of the regime, everyone was, at one time or another, sometimes simultaneously, a victim and a perpetrator. That is the nature of the Party system. No one’s hands are clean, though some are more stained than others.

Inside the Leninist Machine

A focus on the characteristics and pathologies of Leninist systems, central to Torigian’s excellent first book on succession in China and the USSR, remains at the forefront of The Party’s Interests Come First. This new work, however, offers a more intimate portrait of how easily one can misplay their hand in the murky world of Leninist power politics—a setting in which prestige, manipulation, and coercion prevail. The intentionally hierarchical design of these regimes makes them especially leader-friendly: the top leader reliably stands above the rules and norms, able to reshape them at will. As a result, institutionalization at the apex is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Even among the highest ranks, elites operate in an environment of profound opacity, often unsure of the core leader’s true intentions, the current alignment of political forces, or what must be said or done to maintain their position.

Twice in his career, Xi Zhongxun served as a chief implementer to the regime’s chief implementers: first under Zhou Enlai in the State Council of the 1950s, and later under Hu Yaobang in the Secretariat of the 1980s. In both roles, Xi witnessed firsthand how precarious elite politics could be. In early 1958, Mao turned sharply against Zhou for trying to moderate the Great Leap Forward (“Oppose Rash Advance”), stripping the State Council of its economic authority, creating five new small groups to oversee government work, and handing control over the economy to Deng Xiaoping and the Secretariat (who then presided over the most unrestrained phase of the disastrous campaign). Decades later, as a member of the Secretariat, Xi again observed how the Secretariat and the State Council, now under Zhao Ziyang, vied for influence, and how Hu Yaobang—often described as the conscience of the Party—was ultimately purged by Deng. Ironically, as Torigian determines, Deng repeated a pattern he had twice suffered himself under Mao: purging a deputy not for disloyalty or policy differences, but simply because his confidence in him had mercurially wavered (pp. 472–3).

The Old Revolutionaries, Before Their Scattering, On Their Way to Physical Labor

The much-touted “institutionalization” of Chinese politics under Deng Xiaoping is revealed as largely illusory. Torigian’s detailed reconstruction of events surrounding Deng’s autocratic and often arbitrary purges—of Hua Guofeng, Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang (and, as an aside, nearly Jiang Zemin)—paints a far less orderly picture. Deng emerges, in the words of Li Rui, as “half a Mao”: a leader who deliberately preserved a two-line system that concentrated immense discretionary power in his own hands while leaving others to operate in a state of calculated uncertainty. When he did intervene, as in the decision to use force at Tiananmen, it was often abrupt, unconsultative, and final. In this light, elite politics under Xi Jinping appears less an aberration than return to form.

Throughout the book, Torigian revisits key inflection points in Party history: the fall of Gao Gang, the Great Leap Forward, the purge of Peng Dehuai, the emergence of the Special Economic Zones (SEZs), and the ouster of Hu Yaobang, among others. In each case, he draws on an extensive array of sources, often supplemented by anonymous interviews with insiders, to show just how easily both outsiders and insiders have misunderstood events. One striking example is the birth of the SEZs, where Hua Guofeng—alongside Xi Zhongxun in Guangdong—emerges as a central architect. Deng Xiaoping, contrary to the prevailing view, did not formally endorse the zones until relatively late in 1984, after their early success had become evident. “By then,” Torigian notes, “Deng was taking credit for everything. “I proposed setting up special economic zones,” he said. “It appears that the correct path was taken” (page 285). Western textbooks have since gone along with Deng and Party historiography in doing Hua a lasting disservice, reducing him to a caricature as the Maoist ideologue clinging to the “Two Whatevers,” remembered if at all through a dismissive throwaway line.

Factions play a surprisingly minor role in this account, in contrast to works like Victor Shih’s Coalitions of the Weak or Cheng Li’s earlier scholarship, which emphasize the role of patronage networks and elite affiliations. Patronage networks, often assumed to be relatively coherent, emerge here as more fluid and contingent. While factional analysis remains appealing—particularly because ties can be quantified through shared hometowns, schools, or bureaucratic overlap—Torigian shows that many presumed alignments, such as Xi Zhongxun’s with Gao Gang or Peng Dehuai, were overstated, misunderstood, even among Party insiders. Old networks did matter, but they were also often unreliable. Just as typical, power and alignment shifted through opportunism or convenience, as in the case of Ye Jianying’s unexpected role in restoring Xi Zhongxun and landing him in charge of Guangdong, and in the case of Wang Zhen who, despite the seeming historical enmity regarding Xinjiang policy, became the first person to speak up for Zhongxun’s rehabilitation in 1977 (page 251).

Ideology, too, comes in for scrutiny. The arbitrariness of ideological labels often obscures more than it reveals. Party leaders, like the institution itself, frequently held contradictory positions simultaneously. As today, this does not tend to produce dialectical synthesis so much as oscillation and confusion on the part of internal participants and external observers. Torigian is especially pointed in one aside: “Guessing about whether Jinping cares more about ‘ideology/security’ or ‘development’ is a distraction from the basic point that the Party has always cared about both, even though the pursuit of two such goals simultaneously inevitably creates tensions” (p. 543).

What It Is, And What It Isn’t

This is not a book about Xi Jinping—though, if judging by much of the popular media coverage thus far, one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. There are, to be sure, sections that probe deeply into the younger Xi, most notably Chapter 21, Princeling Politics, which unearths fascinating details about his early rise through the Party in the 1980s. Torigian draws on sources affiliated with the Organization Department and the Young Cadre Bureau (a bureau responsible for identifying and fast tracking promising cadres) to reconstruct how Xi was perceived by contemporaries at the time, including revealing diary entries from Li Rui, who was then working in the OrgDep.

There are also moments of striking personal detail I had never encountered before—such as a scene near the end of the Cultural Revolution, when Xi Jinping visits his father in exile. In a sweltering apartment in Luoyang, where the elder Xi had been sent to labor in a tractor factory, father and son sit smoking cigarettes in their underwear as the younger Xi recites Mao’s speeches from memory, with Qi Xin watching.

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The book does not examine Xi Jinping’s policies today, but it offers a window into how he has internalized his commitment to the Party. Jinping once spoke of confronting profound doubt during his years as a sent-down youth in Liangjiahe. But as with his father, it ultimately appears to not have shaken but deepened commitment to the party. Suffering, for him, became meaningful when understood as a sacrifice. His father never abandoned his loyalty to the Party, despite being purged over a novel, spending sixteen years (1962-1978) in the political wilderness, and suffering greatly during the Cultural Revolution. Torigian counsels: “While some may wonder why Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his own father, perhaps the better question is, How could Jinping betray the Party for which his father sacrificed so much?” (p. 539).

Xi Zhongxun and Xi Jinping in Luoyang (1975)

Finally, beyond Xi Jinping, the book is not even best understood as a biography of Xi Zhongxun. Its deeper purpose is in using Zhongxun as a lens through which to examine the history and internal contradictions of the Chinese Communist Party itself. What the book delivers is not just a portrait of the man who fathered China’s current leader, but a window into the moral and political structure of the Party that shaped them both.

Forging Red Genes

If there is a single throughline in Xi Zhongxun’s life, it is this: devotion to the Party above all else. The forging of loyalty through suffering did not remain his legacy alone. It reverberates in Xi Jinping’s own mythology as well. For both father and son, “struggle” and transformation into a loyal cadre take on a near-fetishistic significance, each held up as a model of what a true revolutionary should endure, and ultimately become.

Yet, as Torigian warns, there is no determinism in this process of forging. There is no guarantee that those who “suffer for a cause” emerge more committed. Just as easily, they may come out disillusioned, embittered, or broken. Zhongxun’s own children illustrate this variance: one committed suicide, one became a rule-of-law advocate, several chased money and pleasure, and one pursued power. Xi Jinping may have internalized his father’s legacy—may even have “inherited the red genes”—but the real cliffhanger is whether the next generations can or will.

This remains a central quandary for the Communist Party today: how to cultivate loyalty through struggle in an era defined not by war or revolution, but by peace and development, and how to do so without alienating the very people it seeks to inspire. In China today one frequently encounters the slogan 永远跟党走—“Forever walk with the Party.” But one finds it hard to imagine that China’s increasingly urbane, educated, and independently-minded elite dream of goose-stepping into eternity.

One wonders if Xi Jinping sees the germ of individualism spreading, as his father once did, threatening to devour the party whole. In 2017, a new slogan was popularized: 幸福都是奋斗出来的—“All happiness comes from struggle.” But what kind of meaningful struggle do today’s rising cadres face? What crucible of hardship might shape them into passionately devoted party members, as it once did their leader? And to what lengths might Xi be willing to go to find out?

Coda

Be warned: Torigian’s is not a beginner-friendly book. Readers unfamiliar with the terrain of modern Chinese history or the historiography laid down by earlier giants like Roderick MacFarquhar, Ezra Vogel, and Richard Baum may find themselves overwhelmed by the detail, unsure of the stakes, and unaware of previous interpretations in the field. Likewise, media headline writers and soundbite chasers will find little to grasp onto—and what they do seize upon, as early evidence indicates, may not well reflect the book’s actual content. Torigian refuses sweeping statements, brash generalizations, or seductive narrative arcs. “In many cases,” Torigian writes, “the vagaries of evidence and intention simply cannot bear the weight of the big questions we would most like to ask” (page 536). But those willing to forge insight and meaning out of complexity, contradiction, and contingency will likely recognize The Party’s Interests Come First as a major achievement—one of the finest works on China in the past decade, written by one of the greatest American China scholars of his generation.

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Cogitations

Writing that excavates the social scaffolding.

By Jonathon P Sine

今天讲讲美国最高法院大法官吵架的事。《首席大法官：沃伦传》中记载了一起美国最高法院大法官吵架。厄尔·沃伦（Earl Warren）做首席大法官的时候，很多人批评他过于关注社会公正和公平问题，让法院承担了本来应该由国会承担的立法功能。在一次讨论案情的会议上，另一名大法官，菲利克斯·法兰克福特（Felix Frankfurter），忍无可忍，跟沃伦首席大法官吵了一架，吵到骂娘。

法兰克福特大法官资格比较老，是由小罗斯福总统在1938年任命。他的个人经历比较传奇，出生在维也纳，当时维也纳还是奥匈帝国。他跟父母移民到美国的时候，已经12岁，开始上英语学校，学英语。

在法兰克福特大法官之前，美国最高法院有5位大法官是外国出生。但是，在他之后，美国总统再也没有任命过外国出生的最高法院大法官。他是最后一位。

法兰克福特大法官被提名的时候，很多人批评他过于自由派，不过，在今天的自由派看来，他可能已经过于保守。在最高法院，他是第一位雇佣黑人做实习生的大法官。但他对后来最高法院的Ruth Ginsburg大法官并不感冒。当年，Ruth Ginsburg申请做法兰克福特大法官的实习生，被他婉拒。

法兰克福特大法官有句话，对我理解法律有很大帮助。他说：“绝对主义是理性的敌人……法律中的教条主义者，不管多么真诚，都是制造灾害。”教条主义制造灾害，挥舞一个理想，高喊一个口号，打遍天下，不止是在法律领域，在政治、经济、文化领域，也制造了一场又一场的灾害。

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Why China Wants to Steal the Secrets to a Chunky Soviet Hovercraft

Lily Ottinger reports:

Earlier this month, the New York Times obtained an internal document from the Russian Federal Security Service detailing the threat of Chinese espionage. The report specifically outlines a Chinese campaign to snag Soviet aerospace engineers:

China has long lagged behind Russia in its aviation expertise, and the document says that Beijing has made that a priority target. China is targeting military pilots and researchers in aerohydrodynamics, control systems and aeroelasticity. Also being sought out, according to the document, are Russian specialists who worked on the discontinued ekranoplan, a hovercraft-type warship first deployed by the Soviet Union.

“Priority recruitment is given to former employees of aircraft factories and research institutes, as well as current employees who are dissatisfied with the closure of the ekranoplan development program by the Russian Ministry of Defense or who are experiencing financial difficulties,” the report says.

An ekranoplan (literally “screenglider”) is an airplane-esque vehicle designed to fly closely above a body of water, utilizing the ground effect to reduce drag and achieve greater fuel efficiency. From 1966 to 1988, the world’s largest and heaviest aircraft was a classified Soviet ekranoplan dubbed “The Caspian Sea Monster,” which had a maximum takeoff weight of 544,000 kg and a wingspan of 37.6 meters. Since they fly just a few meters above the water, Ekranoplans operate outside the range of detection for many radar systems.

But why is China so interested in acquiring this technology?

Ekranoplans could possibly be used to ferry troops across the Taiwan Strait (the US Navy estimated that some Soviet ekranoplans could carry up to 850 troops or two tanks), although flying over the open ocean can be challenging for ground effect vehicles. The water below the craft must be calm, with waves below 1.25 meters in height; otherwise, the air cushion becomes unstable.1

Regardless, it would technically be possible for Ekranoplan-style warships to fly over the Taiwan Strait on calmer days, and the PLA isn’t considering launching an invasion in the middle of typhoon season anyway.2

With influence from Soviet designs, China has built smaller Ekranoplans like the DXF-100, the Albatross-5 (信天翁5), and the Neptune-1 (海王一号), which can hold 15 to 20 passengers. But it seems that China is more inclined to apply techniques of Ekranoplan design to other technologies. Ekranoplan engineers are intimately familiar with both hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, so perhaps China’s simply believes that these are the most cost-effective engineers to target. But apart from generic overlap with shipbuilding and aircraft design, there is a direct technological crossover between ekranoplans and wing in ground effect drones (WIG UAVs), which are basically like tiny unmanned ekranoplans. The first reports of Chinese military WIG drones surfaced in 2017, and were quickly recirculated by state media rather than being censored. WIG drones are also being developed by Gdańsk University of Technology in Poland and a Danish startup. These drones could be used for naval reconnaissance, transporting goods, or delivering payloads, all while flying outside the range of aircraft detection radar.

While the extent of China’s espionage activities in Russia doesn’t bode well for their partnership (I highly recommend you read the whole NYT article), China appears to have extracted plenty of value from Russian scientists already. Hopefully, Taiwan has a plan to deal with low-altitude amphibious drone swarms. Who knows? Maybe Taiwan has its own team of disillusioned Soviet scientists waiting in the wings.

How China’s Gen Z Is Exporting Chinese Soft Power to the World

Selina Xu is a writer and researcher on technology. She was a former China reporter at Bloomberg News.

Helen Zhang is the co-founder of Intrigue Media and a non-resident fellow in the United States Studies Centre's Emerging Technology Program. She was previously an Australian diplomat.

Since America’s “Liberation Day” tariff blitz, a lot has been said about China’s economic and technological self-reliance, which has given it more leverage in this trade standoff. Under Xi Jinping, China has steadily focused on reducing dependence on Western supply chains and the U.S. dollar, while swamping the world with goods.

Much less has been said about China’s growing cultural self-sufficiency and ability to export soft power. Just a decade ago, Marvel movies topped the Chinese box office while Japanese video games and Taiwanese soap operas occupied the pastimes of youths. In 2025, the highest-grossing movie in China (and in the world) is Ne Zha 2, an animated retelling of a traditional Chinese myth. On Youtube and other streaming platforms, historical costume dramas — often featuring palace intrigue or celestial romance — have gained traction with overseas audiences, especially in Southeast Asia. On phones and PCs, Chinese games like “Genshin Impact” are winning hundreds of millions of players at home and abroad.

The ascendance of domestic content is in part a result of the Chinese government’s push for national rejuvenation through restriction of foreign content—for example, a nearly decade-long unofficial ban on Korean entertainment, including K-pop, when South Korea angered China by agreeing to allow a U.S. missile-defense system on its soil. On April 10, China said it would cut back Hollywood films in retaliation for U.S. tariffs.

But part of this phenomenon is driven by China’s Generation Z, a 270-million-strong cohort born since the mid-1990s, who are more culturally confident and cosmopolitan in their tastes — and willing to pay for good content. Already, Gen Z accounts for 40% of consumption in China, and their influence will only grow, with spending set to surge fourfold to 16 trillion yuan ($2.2 trillion) by 2035.

In recent years, blockbusters like Chang An and Jiang Ziya and popular TV series like Empresses in the Palace and Nirvana in Fire underscore how the youth are gravitating towards traditional Chinese heritage. Some of these draw from epics like Journey to the West, which is one of China’s most-read literary masterpieces, and The Investiture of the Gods, a 16th-century fantasy novel about gods and demons. Others are set in various historical dynasties, but one that comes to the fore is the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907) — dubbed China’s golden age — when its empire was at its most powerful, and when the ancient Silk Road was at its peak. Some have attributed this solely to nationalism, but Gen Z’s love of history is authentic, imbued partly by an education system emphasizing “five thousand years of Chinese civilization.” In 2024, over 62 percent of visitors to China’s national museum were under the age of 35. Wearing hanfu — a style of clothing with flowing robes that dates back more than two millennia — has also ballooned from a niche hobby to a billion-dollar market in China and a global movement on TikTok. When one of us visited Xi’an last year, the ancient capital’s city walls were overflowing with young people dressed in hanfu.

China isn’t alone in indulging in nostalgic, domestic revival — in some ways, this isn’t too different from Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” Britain’s Brexit reminiscence of its pastoral and colonial past, or Putin’s harking back to imperial glory. But Xi Jinping’s ambitions go beyond a mere exercise in nationalism, and should not be construed as isolationism. In his April 16 essay in Qiushi Journal, the flagship magazine of the CCP, Xi wrote, “To build a culturally strong nation, we must more proactively present China’s perspectives, spread Chinese culture, and showcase China’s image — ensuring our soft power matches our hard power, converting our developmental advantages into discourse power.” Beijing is keen on deepening ties with regional neighbors, especially Southeast Asia, which has also been hard-hit by American tariffs but already has a glut of Chinese goods. To bind South-East Asia’s economy more tightly to China’s, soft power can grease the wheels.

One area where Chinese soft power is growing is the gaming industry. By some counts, over 500 million people in China are consumers of anime, comics, and gaming, most of whom grew up watching Japanese anime but are increasingly embracing local content. The rise of the genre can be seen in the trajectory of Bilibili Inc, a Chinese streaming platform that started off as a niche site for anime and gaming fans but has now become a $9 billion public company that dictates mainstream trends — the platform has about 30 million paid subscribers (that’s more than ESPN), who are mostly Gen Z. Young Chinese men are playing “Genshin Impact” and “Honor of Kings” — two of the world’s most lucrative mobile titles and both Chinese-made — while women are playing Chinese otome games that have interactive romance storylines. As local game studios beef up to cater to increasing interest at home, many of these games are also making waves abroad. For instance, the wildly popular “Love and Deepspace” became the most-downloaded and top-grossing interactive story mobile game in Japan last year. Four of the ten top-grossing game publishers in the world last year were from China, according to analytics company AppMagic.

After decades of importing content from abroad, China is now exporting culture to the rest of the world.

China Gen Z’s tastes in apps and brands are also making inroads overseas. Rednote, which has billed itself as a “lifestyle bible” and is especially popular among young women, is China’s fastest-growing social media platform. The company, a surprise winner of America’s early-2025 TikTok ban, has seen global daily active users up 28% in March from last December. On the app, users share lifestyle content featuring a dizzying array of Chinese brands — many of which are now coming to the West. One example is Pop Mart. The maker of Labubu dolls saw its non-mainland revenue grow by 375% in 2024, accounting for about 40% of its total revenue. Another example is Chinese bubble tea — including brands like Molly Tea and HEYTEA — which have popped up on the streets of New York and California, with distinctive aesthetics, lounge-like ambience, and some selling branded tote bags and cups à la Starbucks. In a sign of their growth, at least four Chinese bubble tea brands are preparing to go public in Hong Kong.

To be sure, the government has been a visible hand guiding tastes, though not often successfully. In recent years, alongside a tech clampdown, the Chinese government has tightened its grip on cultural industries, banning “effeminate” men and hip-hop culture on TV, cracking down on idol fangroups, and championing programs that “vigorously promote excellent Chinese traditional culture, revolutionary culture and advanced socialist culture.” More nationalist epics featuring Chinese resistance efforts during the Sino-Japanese War have dominated the silver screens, alongside anti-corruption TV series like In the Name of the People and The Knockout.

As the U.S. turns more isolationist, slashing foreign aid and imposing tariffs on developing countries that depend on export-driven growth, China now has an unprecedented soft-power opportunity to fill the void. While China’s ability to step in could be constrained by the economic challenges it faces at home (the country has scaled back on big infrastructural loans), cultural and technological exports — from games and movies to TikTok and RedNote — will be one way for China to draw closer to the Global South. As Beijing looks to find other outlets for trade, we expect it to wield more soft power, turbocharged by Gen Z consumption, especially in fast-growing markets like Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. After decades of Hollywood and Silicon Valley’s dominance, the world is now standing on the cusp of China Inc.

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Dissecting Taiwan’s Chip Industry

Aqib is a graduate of Harvard University from the Regional Studies—East Asia program. Today, he presents his research on Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.

With waves of export controls from the United States and economic pressure from China, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry — its crown jewel — has been facing the heat from both sides. But headlines often miss the mark by addressing the industry as a monolith. With lengthy supply chains including electronic design automation (EDA) software, equipment, design, manufacturing, and packing, the different sub-industries all have their own economics, and their experiences all vary.

So let’s look at a few examples from the most-discussed sub-industries: advanced manufacturing, mature manufacturing, advanced design, and mature design. Their realities have all been warped in different ways by the recent geopolitical landscape; some have been cruising while others have been collapsing, yet two factors commonly mark their experiences: the tenacity of Chinese companies to get the chips they want, and the AI boom creating profits for anyone who can latch onto it.

Advanced Manufacturing: TSMC

TSMC, has fared remarkably well since BIS export controls. Recent news of the U.S. banning TSMC from all AI chip exports to China in 2024 and a potential billion-dollar fine may seem frightening, but these incidents are overshadowed by TSMC’s continual growth in the Chinese and global market from AI demand. The reason for TSMC’s staying power in the Chinese market (as shown below) is that there is simply no other alternative. If you want to make an advanced chip for AI or other high-performance computing (HPC) applications, TSMC is the only company that can do so. Despite export controls, TSMC’s revenue from China has only increased, and the share of revenue from China has remained relatively steady.

In the face of export controls, how do Chinese designers place orders with TSMC? The answer lies in downgrading and going for so-called efficiency rather than raw power. Chinese AI companies like MetaX (沐曦) and Enflame (燧原科技) reportedly downgrade their chip designs to be just within performance restrictions enforced by BIS export controls. Besides simple downgrading, Chinese companies have begun to focus more on ASICs and FPGAs, less versatile yet still strong chips that can be programmed for specific applications. BITMAIN (比特大陸), which was the cause of TSMC’s recent explosion of sales to China, has been able to buy up leading-edge 3nm chips from TSMC by designing ASICs for Bitcoin mining and AI applications.

How effective these downgraded chips and ASICs are is still an open question. Of course, Chinese companies will say their chips are comparable to GPUs from NVIDIA, and, in theory, Chinese firms can go far with such chips. Basically, instead of asking for a juiced-up GPU that can do everything, they are designing an ASIC that can do a limited set of tasks just as well but flounder at everything else. This strategy could allow China’s AI push to persist despite export controls, especially if they can make up for the weaker semiconductors with better code.

But regardless of whether these chips accomplish their goals, Chinese firms continue to buy them, and thus, TSMC continues to prosper.

Mature Manufacturing: Powerchip

However, the same cannot be said for Taiwan’s mature manufacturing foundries. A perfect storm of COVID-19 and increased Chinese competition has plunged companies like Powerchip into darkness, as the graph below shows.

Mature node manufacturers like SMIC and Hua Hong have been running Taiwanese firms out of business. With subsidies enabling Chinese fabs to cut costs and pressure for Mainland companies to “buy Chinese,” Powerchip is losing the battle for the Chinese market, and Taiwan’s mature chip industry needs to find business elsewhere.

Despite the downturn, Powerchip has found a few growth strategies that serve as a model for Taiwan’s other mature foundries, like UMC. One of these ideas is the Fab IP model. As governments increasingly treat semiconductors as a national security product, Powerchip is attempting to monetize their experience in making and running fabs.

In the Fab IP model, Powerchip signs agreements with other countries and assists in fab planning and operations, while ideally avoiding the construction and operating costs. Powerchip signed such an agreement with India’s Tata Group, which agrees to pay Powerchip royalties for technology transfer while raising the funds for the fab itself. The Indian fab won’t be operational until 2026, but the Fab IP model opens doors for Powerchip’s business. They can no longer compete with Chinese firms on price, but maybe they can compete vicariously through Indian or other foreign fabs. Powerchip is reportedly in talks with Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Poland over similar agreements.

Powerchip’s other method for survival is latching onto the AI boom. For TSMC to make AI chips, they require CoWoS packaging technology, which relies on relatively unsophisticated silicon interposers. With CoWoS demand greatly surpassing supply, Powerchip has been able to insert itself into the AI supply chain. In 2024, PSMC opened a new fab in Tongluo, Taiwan, dedicated partially to manufacturing the silicon interposers required for CoWoS for TSMC. Thus, PSMC can still ride the advanced manufacturing AI wave. Advanced packaging demand has shown no signs of slowing down. With TSMC intending to ramp up CoWoS nearly threefold by 2026, Powerchip’s Tongluo fab will certainly be needed.

Advanced Design: Alchip

Taiwan’s advanced design industry has been able to thrive despite export controls. Let’s take Alchip, Taiwan’s #1 AI company, as an example. Their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they have been able to pivot from the Chinese market to the American one as an engine for its growth. (This pivot accelerated when the U.S. placed their biggest customer, Pythium, on the Entity List in 2021.)

Alchip’s success is partially based on its unique position as an ASIC designer during the AI boom. Chinese customers, particularly automakers, still like to use Alchip, since their products are usually not restricted by export controls. However, although the cost of designing a leading-edge chip can run hundreds of millions of dollars, other Mainland designers exist at the leading edge.

Besides its specialty in ASIC design, Alchip has found success through a partnership with TSMC. As a “pure-play design company,” Alchip maintains a close partnership with TSMC, a pure-play foundry, and the design company has a knack for reserving limited fab capacity at TSMC. In particular, Alchip has often been able to gain “capacity support” for the critical CoWoS packaging mentioned earlier.

As American companies are chomping at the bit for AI chips, Taiwanese design benefit from being right next door to TSMC. Alchip has assisted Amazon and Intel in designing their own AI chips to compete with NVIDIA’s GPUs. For the next two years, Alchip orders are skyrocketing with chips for just these two companies, and these orders enable Alchip to keep pushing to the next node.

Taiwan’s advanced design companies have lost out on Chinese business either from customers getting Entity Listed or from Mainland competitors, but these losses have coincided with explosive growth from AI demand. The growth has greatly outweighed the losses, and advanced designers do not seem to be under fire.

Mature Design: Weltrend

The tragic character in Taiwan’s semiconductor soap opera is the island’s mature design sector. This sub-industry has historically been the most reliant on the Chinese market, and these firms are the ones facing the toughest fallout from Chinese competition.

These companies have limited options for survival. Some are attempting to switch to using Mainland fabs to manufacture their chips, risking unintentional technology transfer for only marginal benefits in cost. Mainland competitors can sell chips at a price that would only cover the production costs of Taiwanese mature firms, thanks to subsidies and government help. Taiwan’s mature companies are not as easily able to pivot to the world market either — in the mature chip market, cost is everything. No one wants their TV or microwaves or other analog products to be more expensive.

So how can these companies survive? Taiwan’s Weltrend puts forth one route for relief: taking advantage of the AI boom. Unable to design leading-edge GPUs or ASICs, though, Weltrend is attempting to cement its niche in server cooling fans.

By offering the best chips for server cooling by combining their design skills with developed algorithms, Weltrend hopes it can raise sales for its products as the rest of AI sales go up. These server cooling chips are needed in every data center. This kind of niche in the AI periphery is what some mature firms call the “garnishes for the steak.” They cannot compete with advanced nodes to be the main show, and they cannot compete with China on price. But by finding an irreplaceable position in the AI ecosystem, perhaps mature companies can survive.

Is This a Problem?

Is the collapse of Taiwan’s mature design companies a crisis that must be averted? Depends on who you ask. When speaking to some representatives of advanced design companies, I’ve heard people say that they “want mature designers to die” so that profitable companies can soak up their valuable talent. If this is the case, then perhaps it’s okay for mature designers to dwindle. Maybe Taiwan is simply moving up the supply chain to advanced nodes and leaving the cheaper mature nodes to China.

Of course, mature design companies don’t see it that way. Many are convinced that mature chips must be afforded the same protections as advanced chips. Perhaps it is a national security risk if all our server cooling chips can only be made in China.

If mature chips are just the garnish, then maybe it’s okay for them to fall, as long as we have the steak. But mature chip companies also tend to liken the industry to cars. The car needs its hood and headlights too, not just the flashy engine.

This plight opens new questions for policymakers in the U.S. and Taiwan. Should we be protecting mature chips? If so, how can we protect mature chips? It’s hard to ban based on performance without banning everything under the sun, so policymakers will need to find creative ways to protect the industry.

Tariff-proof Tea

Bryan Cheong is from Singapore, and lives and works on software in San Francisco. You can follow him on X here.

Most of the overseas tea merchants with sources or warehouses based in China that I love have paused their shipments to the United States after the latest tariffs were imposed and the de minimis exemption was struck. But the US has no shortage of tea collectors who have amassed vast stores of aged tea, who found customers even from across the Pacific. Two such collectors are based in the California Bay Area. Probably the second-largest of these belongs to Roy Fong, the founder of the Imperial Tea Court in San Francisco’s Ferry Building, who counts among his stores a 1980s puerh collectionfrom the Menghai Tea Factory, which crossed the border more than 40 years ago and is safe from additional customs and duties. This does not mean that the tea is cheap — aged puerh tea has been prized particularly by the Cantonese in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Roy Fong had also previously invested heavily in trying to grow tea cultivars in California, but the arid conditions of the state proved a difficult environment for the plants to flourish in. Nevertheless, tea is an adaptable plant, and forcing it to try to grow under new conditions is how we get new cultivars like Taiwan’s high mountain oolong bushes. Fong might have succeeded eventually, but alas, a fire in 2017 destroyed most of his tea plants and a portion of his puerh collection, so California’s aspirations for domestically producing tea will have to wait for another pioneer. Notable among the Imperial Tea Court’s offerings are the Special Reserve Ripe Puerh, available in cake form and loose, which have been collected and stored in California for the last 40 years. Puerh tea is made from the large-leaf variety of the tea plant, and is grown in Yunnan province in China. Yunnan is the ancestral heartland of the wild tea tree, and ripe puerh is an artificially fermented tea that mellows the large and astringent leaves into an earthy plum-coloured brew. The Special Reserve Puerh can be ordered online, but if you are in San Francisco, I invite you to try it in person at the Hong Kong-style teahouse at the Imperial Tea Court. On the nose, it is like dry leaf litter mingled with moss, sprinkled with a dusting of Ceylon cinnamon. On the tongue, it is sweet and clean, its age has mellowed any muddiness or bitterness and turned the tea rich and smooth with mineral undertones, and it does not turn bitter no matter how long you steep it. In the stomach, it is comforting and warming. The leaves will survive many, many steepings.

I spent two weeks in May visiting family in Tel Aviv. What follows are some scattered impressions.

A week before my flight the Houthis hit Ben Gurion airport so all flights were cancelled except El Al’s. Half the gates were unused at the airport and there were no non-Jewish tourists.

Houthi missiles were better from a lifestyle perspective than Hezbollah or Hamas ones as you get five minutes’ warning instead of just 60 seconds. It surprised me how diligent most people still are in going into shelters. Waking up at 3am is no fun but at least the baby’s crib was in the shelter already.

I met up with an Israeli-American reporter who covers politics for western media. “When my mom in Maryland calls me up to complain about what she saw Trump doing on MSNBC, I pat her on the head and let her know how much worse it can get.”

The hostages occupy enormous mental headspace in every Israeli. Murals and bumper stickers drape the physical space of the city, parents and relatives are constantly on tv. The hostages and their stories seem like a shared language (like how this book review characterized the Marvel Universe today) where first names hold totemic value.

At a playground one day a helicopter flew over and everyone got concerned as they knew it was a military medical transport flying back from Gaza.

Vibes

Is there a city that does good weather better than TLV on a Thursday night? Restaurants and bars pour out into street after street, you see groups of 20+, often intergenerational, out together. Fridays are much quieter as many go home to see their families. Does Israel have the answer for the loneliness epidemic?

No international djs come anymore. Boiler Room memory holed the shows it put on in Israel, but they’re still getting protested because they got bought out by KKR who is apparently too pro-Israel for their audience.

Tel Aviv needs to get abundance-pilled. Rent and housing costs are both maybe 85% of new york city.

Cigarettes are everywhere. Ten percent of Israeli teens smoke, not France’s 15% but far higher than America’s 1.5%. Fancy restaurants have outdoor smoking and non-smoking sections.

Folks called up from reserve duty go out with their gun in flip flops because they have to report the next day and it’s more convenient to carry around.

Taxis charge a 25% surcharge on shabbat.

I ran into one Chinese guy, maybe 30, who’s in town to sell lightbulbs (“we’re midmarket, can’t compete with Philips in America but too fancy for Africa and LatAm!”). He had no idea about the missile warnings.

Food

I do not like salads in general but immensely enjoyed every one I had in TLV. Dishes were always just on the edge of being over-salted. The country has share plate-maxxed.

The burger culture is extremely strong. The most outlandish attention-getting twist on the formula I saw was one shop sprinkling sugar on the bun.

Many restaurants were short-staffed due to reservist call-ups.

Babies

Secular Israelis have more babies than any other comparably rich country. You feel it in the street with lots of families and young children everywhere with even upscale restaurants all welcome to kids. I wonder just how having such ultra-fertile religious sects pushes these numbers up.

People are far friendlier to my 9-month-old than in new york and they’re also more than happy to tell you how to parent. I got told off three times for having a Doona stroller as apparently it’s bad for babies’ backs?

Seeing my child play with other kids too young to know war when Gaza is a 90 minute drive away redefined cognitive dissonance for me. While I was there, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert published an oped saying that “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians…. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

And speaking of war crimes…

Books I Read

Arendt—Eichmann in Jerusalem

I would have read this years ago if anyone told me how funny it was! As she wrote to a friend, “You are the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted—namely that I wrote Eichimann in Jerusalem in a curious state of euphoria.” It shows and is so much better for it.

World-historically funny.

And now a little darker…

This is in dialogue with what Olmert said on Ezra recently.

You have to change the nature of the dialogue and the appeal to the Israeli people and start to talk in a different way. Instead of warning us all the time that we are on the verge of destruction, which is what this government is doing now for 15 years, not just in the last couple of years.

I remember the days when I was fighting Hezbollah. After my war against them, everyone said how we failed and so on and so forth. But a few years later, I started to hear that they are so powerful, that there is a danger to the very existence of Israel if Hezbollah attacks Israel. And we keep hearing all the time that Iran is threatening the very existence of the state of Israel. And we hear also about Hamas today — these days, when Netanyahu talks, why does he need to explain the war? Because Hamas can become a danger to the very existence of the state of Israel.

This has to change. You have to open a dialogue with Israeli society on a different basis, on the basis of hope — something which will change the lifestyle and the hopes of the younger generations. Then we will not have to fight all the time.

“Look, the guy keeps winning, he must be doing something right!”

On the moral hollowness of the generals who waited until 1944 to turn on Hitler.

Career myopia, Nazi-style

Can’t stop pulling quotes from this book it is just too perfect. Of course, literally no-one who made it to Nuremberg has enough guts to defend Nazi ideology—otherwise they would have stuck it out in the bunker.

She closes chapters better than anyone I’ve come across. “Totalitarian domination tried to establish holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil would disappear, but holes of oblivion do not exist. One man will always be left to tell the story.”

TLV Restaurant Recommendations and some more clown excerpts from Eichmann in Jerusalem

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因为洛杉矶骚乱，这两周美国发生的不少重要事情，没有得到足够的关注。骚乱会结束，秩序会恢复，不会对美国普通人的生活有长远影响，而能够产生长远影响的，往往是那些不吸引眼球的事件。

6月5号，美国最高法院做出6项判决，其中有5项是9:0的一致判决，涉及同性恋、职场歧视、枪支等。因为最高法院9名大法官有保守派，有自由派，在上面这几个问题上充满分歧，争论不休，这类判决大多是5:4或6:3。但这次却是一天中5个9:0判决，出乎大部分人意料。

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为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台：游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com）
这世界的辽阔和美好，游荡者知道。使用过程中遇到问题，欢迎联系客服邮箱wanderservice2024@outlook.com.

【和放学以后永不失联】订阅放学以后Newsletter，每周三收到我们发出的信号：afterschool2021.substack.com 点击链接输入自己的邮箱即可（订阅后如果收不到注意查看垃圾邮箱）。如需查看往期内容，打开任一期你收到的邮件，选择右上角open online，就可以回溯放学以后之前发的所有邮件，或谷歌搜索afterschool2021substack查看。

截至目前，放学以后Newsletter专题系列如下：“在世界游荡的女性”系列、“女性解放指南”系列、“女性浪漫，往复信笺”系列、莫不谷游荡口袋书《做一个蓄意的游荡者》系列、“莫胡说”系列”《创作者手册：从播客开始说起》,播客系列和日常更新等。

大家好，本期Newsletter由芬兰的粽子轮值。粽子是游荡者平台产品经理，也是播客“思前想后”的主播。下面这篇文章是粽子在游荡者【每周一游】栏目更新的文章。

【每周一游】是莫不谷提议在游荡者上发起的活动，从2025年5月30日游荡者新的版本发布上线之日起，游荡者平台线上游轮将每周启航，我们作为“导游区”成员（莫不谷、霸王花木兰，粽子、金钟罩）将每周轮值担任船长，在国内时间每周四更新一篇【每周一游】，分享内容包括但不限于各种花花万物和生命体验的推荐和避雷！在临近周末打工人即将解放的周四，和大家一起驶向一些海域打发时间，度过无聊，对抗虚无！欢迎各位游荡者每周四定期登船！（游荡者网址 www.youdangzhe.com）

现在将粽子在【每周一游】轮值的这篇文章同步分享到本期Newsletter，希望大家能在这趟游轮之旅找到些许对运动的好奇和喜爱，并且愿意去尝试运动，体验其对身体、心灵和大脑的美妙刺激，也通过运动获得真正的有效休息。

（拍摄于芬兰，今年春天发现了一对儿可爱的树）

芬兰在5月下旬终于迎来了春天，万物复苏。进入6月，草地和树木转眼便已郁郁葱葱，而我也像经历了冬眠一样，在冬天只想躺着的身体，在阳光充足、生命力旺盛的初春，不由自主地想要活动一下筋骨。这是我来芬兰的第2年，每年冬天确实感觉身体的活力水平很低，运动的强度和频率都会明显减小，但是一到春天，我就会像是被关了半年多终于自由的小狗，想要放开撒欢式地运动。最近一段时间，规律的运动让我的身体状态和自我感觉都越来越好，所以想在这一期游轮上给各位游荡者安利一下运动。

首先呢，我要推荐一本书：《运动改造大脑》（ [美] 约翰•瑞迪（John Ratey） / 埃里克•哈格曼），这本书在我看完之后，推荐给了身边很多朋友。这本书的书名虽然只强调了运动对大脑的影响，但其中的内容还涉及运动对身体和心理的种种益处。以下是对书中提及运动效果的简单总结：

• 运动可以提高整个大脑的优质营养肥料

• 运动对焦虑和抑郁有治疗效果，有益于心理健康

• 运动对身体和大脑都有抗衰老的效果

另外，运动在提高学习能力方面也有神奇的效果，以下是书中原文：

“运动如何在三个层面提高学习能力：首先，它完善你的思维模式以提高警觉力、注意力和驱动力；其次，它让神经细胞准备就绪，并促使它们相互连接起来，这是连通新信息的细胞基础；最后，运动激发海马体的干细胞分化成新的神经细胞。”

我还因此找到了学习的最佳时刻：“一旦你运动完，血液几乎会立刻回流，这时如果有需要敏锐思维和复杂分析力的事情，就正是注意力集中的最佳时刻。”

今年，我还亲身实践了书中的理论。在2月收集完论文所需的数据之后，3月初我因为家里有事回国了一趟。本来打算在国内的时候开始分析论文数据，甚至背了电脑回去，结果回国两周的时候，电脑都没打开过。我意识到自己在国内是很难静下心写论文，索性彻底搁下论文，好好地玩吧，就这样我在国内放纵了一个月。4月初，我回到芬兰，开始赶论文。刚开始的一两周，我的效率很低，整个人也因此焦虑，压力水平不断上升。为了调整自己的状态和日常写论文的时间规划，我开始尝试实践《运动改造大脑》这本书里的理论。芬兰的4月还是冬天，户外很冷，此时我终于想起了小区免费的健身房，之前只在刚搬来的时候去参观过一次。从4月15号开始，我的daily rountine调整成了：

• 8:00左右起床，简单洗漱，喝杯牛奶

• 8:30左右开始运动1小时，单号日去健身房做力量训练，双号日就在家做跳舞或者骑车去超市采购

• 9:30运动完以后立刻开始写论文1-2个小时

• 11:30左右开始做午饭吃午饭，娱乐休息一会儿

• 14:00左右午睡半小时，醒来继续写论文1-2个小时

• 16:30左右开始准备晚饭吃晚饭，娱乐休息一会儿

• 19:00左右出门遛弯一小时左右，回来继续写论文2-3小时，期间会间隔休息一下

• 22:30左右洗漱，然后上床阅读半小时左右，进入睡乡

在这样的日程安排下，我用了不到两周的时间写完了论文的后半部分，交了论文初稿并且得到了导师很高的评价。由于需要修改的内容也不多，我5月初就完成了论文的最终稿。目前论文已经顺利通过审核，拿到了我很满意的分数，其中数据分析模块，更是拿到了接近满分的评分结果，而这部分内容恰好是我每天早上运动之后集中完成的。虽然我在下午和晚上也有写论文，但早上运动之后的那1-2个小时，是我思维最清晰写论文效率最高的时间段，我的大脑切身感受到了运动之后思维、分析力和注意力都被激活的状态。与此同时，我的焦虑和压力，也随着规律运动的开始慢慢得到缓解。运动真的帮我度过了一段我原以为会无比煎熬的时间，让我在赶论文的过程中，更多感受到的是充实和满满的成就感。

以上是我自身实践书中理论的体验，虽然我罗列了书里的一些理论要点，但在开始实践之前如果有时间，我还是非常推荐你先亲自去看看整本书，花5分钟看要点和花10小时看全书，所得到的认知是不一样的，认知的不同也会影响实际的行为结果。如果你对开始运动还是犹犹豫豫，那更要先去看看这本书，书里大量专业的理论以及实验案例一定会让你对运动产生兴趣的。

此外，这本书里还介绍了不同类型的运动对大脑有着不同的影响，书中指出：“有氧运动和复杂活动对我们大脑产生各自不同的有益影响。好消息是它们之间是互补的。”其中的解释是：“有氧运动能增加神经递质、建立新的血管来输送生长因子，促使新细胞的生成；通过经强化与拓展的神经网络，复杂的活动让所有这些元素都投入使用。活动越复杂，突触的联系也越复杂。”对此，我简单粗暴地理解为：有氧运动能够让大脑产生更多新细胞，而复杂的活动能让细胞的突触更多，彼此相互作用提升大脑的活力和能力。

关于有氧运动和复杂活动，书中给出了一些运动选项，像是跑步、游泳这些就是简单的有氧运动，像是跳舞、攀岩这些就是复杂的活动，而像网球之类的运动兼具两种效果，能同时锻炼心血管系统和大脑。我也简单地理解为：多尝试不同类型的运动能够更有效地锻炼和激活大脑，对身体也是如此。

接下来，我会逐个分享一下我平常会做的运动类型。

跑步

我的comfort food是番茄鸡蛋面，但如果有comfort sports，我会选跑步。

跑步在我看来，是最方便快速且容易上脚的运动。蹬上运动鞋，带上耳机，播放音乐，出门下楼，就能开始。跑步入门几乎没什么技术难度，就算是运动小白，跑步的动作也是有肌肉记忆的，剩下的只需要收紧核心和调整呼吸。当然，对跑步有更专业要求的请咨询专业人士。

跑步对场地要求也很低，只要是平坦的道路，就可以作为跑步的跑道。疫情期间，我在北京居住的小区经常被封控，每天在家远程工作加班，下班都得到晚上九十点钟，这个时间在家运动会影响楼下的邻居，也出不了小区。我就会在小区楼下围着绿化带跑步，一圈可能只有50米左右，就这样一圈一圈地跑着，每次跑个两三公里。现在回想起来，跑步是当时我没有被封控搞疯掉，且还能维持基本正常的身体和心理状态的一剂良药。现在我在芬兰，跑步更是我最爱的运动之一了，尤其是在5月-9月期间，出门到处都是穿梭于森林氧吧的跑道，我住在海边，还可以沿着海岸线边跑步边吹海风看风景，好不惬意。

另外，跑步对于我来说，不止是运动，还像是在冥想，因为跑步时我会集中注意力关注在自己的一呼一吸，耳朵里放着音乐（我跑步时听不了任何有信息含量的东西），大脑会逐渐放空，从而进入一种放松、平静的状态。

（拍摄于夏威夷，当时在直播，我给大家表演跑步）

关于跑步，我还想推荐村上春树的随笔集《当我谈跑步时，我在谈些什么？》，他在长达四分之一个世纪里，日日都坚持跑步。在这本书里，他记录了在世界各地的跑步经历，提及了很多他对跑步的体验和感受。他在书中这样推荐跑步：“跑步有好几个长处。首先是不需要伙伴或对手，也不需要特别的器具和装备，更不必特地赶赴某个特别的场所。只要有一双适合跑步的鞋，有一条马马虎虎的路，就可以在兴之所至时爱跑多久就跑多久。网球可不能这样，每次都得专程赶到网球场去，还得有一个对手。游泳虽然一个人就能游，也得找一个适宜的游泳池才行。” 我个人觉得这本书就是对跑步最好的安利了。

游泳

游泳，作为有氧运动，和跑步有异曲同工之妙。相较于跑步，游泳对场地和装备的要求确实更高，但它也有独特的好处，比如不伤膝盖，对体重基数大的人更友好，能更好地舒缓久坐的腰椎和肩颈等等。在gap的这两年里，我游泳的次数屈指可数，但不妨碍我心里还是很爱这项运动。

（拍摄于夏威夷，我在海里游泳，海水是真咸）

在我边工作边备考雅思再加上政治性抑郁最最最痛苦的那段时间，游泳池就像是我的避难所。趁着工作午休时间，去到公司楼下的健身房，一头扎进游泳池，世界仿佛一下子就安静了，我的烦躁和焦虑也瞬间消散许多。低头沉到水下，我被水温柔地包裹着，呼气，耳边只有水声和我呼出气泡的咕噜声；抬头露出水面，世界会有一瞬间的嘈杂，迅速地吸上一大口气，再次回到静谧的水下世界。游泳也带给我冥想一般的体验，甚至比跑步还要强烈，因为跑步时我还是会听音乐，但没有防水耳机的我，游泳的时候更是全身心地专注在流淌在我周围的水和我自己本身。游泳让我在水下感受过全身每一个毛孔都在微微发热的状态，因为极度专注，我的触觉才会如此敏感，才能感觉到那种微妙而神奇的变化。

跳舞

我没有专业学过任何舞蹈，唯一的舞蹈基础可能是跟我妈一起跳过几次广场舞，也没有什么舞蹈天赋，但这些都不影响我喜欢跳舞。在我看来，跳舞可以是简单纯粹的一种运动，因为跟着音乐舞动起来，人就会感受到快乐。就像微笑一样，即使此刻不开心，但只要做出微笑的动作，人就能感受到幸福。

疫情期间多次被居家隔离时，我开始在家跟着视频跳 Zumba。Zumba 节奏轻快、动作不复杂，最重要的是，带跳的教练脸上总洋溢着快乐的笑容，让我也不自觉地笑起来，心情跟着变好。而且，我一旦跳熟了一个Zumba舞，就会偶尔想要拿出来再跳一跳，还能提升一下对自己跳舞的信心。下面这个链接就是我几年前居家隔离时开始跳、直到最近还在跳的一个 Zumba 舞：

【减脂瘦身操】最爱的youtube尊巴zumba精简版（剪教学休息）

在YouTube或者B站，有非常多的 Zumba 视频，也有其它类型的舞蹈，希望你能找到自己喜欢的舞，也欢迎在评论区分享。

此外，自从买了 Switch 游戏机后，我很爱的一个游戏系列就是Just Dance。我买的Just Dance 2021，好多歌曲都被我刷到了满星。这台游戏机我也带来了芬兰，虽然它大部分时间在吃灰，但最让我有动力打开它的还是Just Dance 2021。如果对这个系列的游戏感兴趣，可以先去B站找一下游戏录屏，跟着视频跳也很有乐趣，只是少了打分的体验。如果试跳以后真的很喜欢，不妨再考虑要不要购买游戏设备。

总之，跳舞时动作是否标准、能不能完全跟上节奏等等都不是跳舞的关键，跟着音乐动起来就足够了，哪怕像是群魔乱舞，但那也只是独自疯癫取悦自己而已。写到这儿，脑袋里开始自动播放陈慧琳的《不如跳舞》：

“

不如跳舞

聊天倒不如跳舞

让自己觉得舒服

是每个人的天赋

继续跳舞

谈恋爱不如跳舞

用这个方式相处

没有人觉得孤独

也没有包袱

”

抗阻训练

一直以来，我的运动方式都是以有氧运动为主。很久以前尝试过撸铁类的训练，但喜欢不起来就放弃了。从今年4月中旬，我开始去小区的健身房。健身房里常常只有我一个人，看到各种器材摆在那儿，实在忍不住想试一试。我会先从网上搜一下对应器材的使用方法，然后再上手操作。

（图片来源网络，甩壶铃的动作以及训练到的肌肉群）

目前我在健身房常用的器材是壶铃、划船机和高位下拉机。其中，甩壶铃是我最爱的动作，因为既简单又能锻炼到全身肌肉。我状态不好又想坚持运动的时候，就会去健身房无脑甩壶铃，一组50个（因为健身房只有一个8kg的壶铃，重量对于我来说偏轻，只能通过增加次数来达到训练效果），甩个5-6组，快速而有效地完成一次全身锻炼。壶铃比哑铃更适合我上手，也非常适合居家训练。网上有很多关于壶铃训练的教学视频，大家可以自行搜索。我是在 YouTube 上找到的视频，这里也附上链接（油管视频需要科学上网）供大家参考：

高效瘦身燃脂！壺鈴居家運動，四動作訓練核心、心肺

划船机和高位下拉机属于固定轨道器材，看看简单的教学视频就能很快学会，这两种器械主要锻炼上半身肌群。我天生臀腿比较壮实，所以目前我抗阻训练只会单独针对上半身肌肉群，至于下半身肌肉群，就靠全身运动时顺带训练。

刚开始我自己训练时，经常是东试试西看看，间隔休息的时间也容易过长，导致训练的效率不怎么高。后来，在找教学视频的过程中，我发现了一个YouTube健身博主growingannanas，她也入驻了B站，账号是：安娜growingannanas。她有很多跟练视频，每个视频都安排了动作和间歇时间。最近我去健身房，就经常会直接选一个她的视频跟着练，省得自己想动作和数数，还能控制好节奏和休息时间。P.S. 她视频的训练强度真的很大，我跟练会减重量，中途实在跟不上也会停下偷懒，大家如果跟她练记得量力而行。

经过一个多月的抗阻训练，我从一开始非常不适应肌肉酸痛的感觉，到现在越来越喜欢这种酸痛，因为我知道它代表着肌肉正在生长。人随着年龄的增长，肌肉会不断流失，而维持足够的肌肉质量和力量，是实现高质量晚年生活的必要条件。我想，今后只要条件允许，我会坚持抗阻训练来增强肌肉，为自己的晚年生活打基础。

以上就是我目前常做或打算常做的运动，如果你也有推荐的运动类型，欢迎在评论区留言分享。

接下来，我想简单聊聊我是如何养成运动习惯的。对我来说，坚持运动最有效的方法，是将运动安排在每天或每周固定的时间段内。久而久之，到了那个时间点，就会自然而然地开始运动。我现在基本是每两天早上去一次健身房，另外一天做有氧运动。坚持一段时间后，我已经不需要刻意提醒自己，早上醒来就知道今天该进行什么锻炼。当然，这是因为我目前处于gap期，时间比较灵活。如果你平时工作繁忙，也可以在每周固定安排2~3个锻炼时段。我更推荐安排在早上：因为我以前上班时经常加班，晚上的时间难以掌控，导致运动计划很难坚持。早上锻炼还有其它好处，比如人少、不用排队抢器材，还能将运动带来的活力贯穿整个白天。如果运动安排在晚上，要注意运动结束时间与睡觉时间间隔至少1-2小时，否则大脑可能会过于兴奋而入睡困难。

最后，如果你看到这里已经跃跃欲试，准备开始运动，我想做一些提醒：

• 一开始运动不要用力过猛，否则可能一次性把自己练废，而且容易受伤，一定要根据自身情况循序渐进；

• 每次运动前，一定要充分热身，不然容易受伤；运动后也要记得拉伸，可以降低肌肉酸痛、提高肌肉和关节的柔韧性，也会降低运动伤害风险；

• 避免运动受伤！避免运动受伤！避免运动受伤！重要的事情说三遍。训练的重量一定要量力而行，哑铃壶铃之类的重物拿放时一定要小心，健身房内注意不要踢到脚、不要撞到头，户外跑的时候看清来往车辆不要闯红灯……

如今，很多人的休息方式是躺着刷手机，这也曾是我的休息方式。但这样的方式真的能让人获得有效休息吗？对我来说，并不能。每次刷完手机，我反而会更焦虑，也会责备自己又浪费了时间，而且大脑甚至因为刷手机变得迟钝。相比之下，虽然运动看起来是耗费体力的活动，但我却能从中获得真正的放松和恢复，身心和大脑都得到有效的“充电”。我想，运动才是我的有效休息方式。

希望大家也能从运动中获得有效休息，恢复活力，充满能量去做更多自己想做的事！

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这世界的辽阔和美好，游荡者知道。使用过程中遇到问题，欢迎联系客服邮箱wanderservice2024@outlook.com.

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解锁莫不谷《做一个“蓄意”的游荡者》口袋书：
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Eva Dou is the author of The House of Huawei, an excellent book covering the personal, economic, and geopolitical arc of Huawei, China’s most important company.

We discuss…

• The life of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, who rose from Cultural Revolution disgrace to become one of China’s richest businessmen,

• How Ren built Huawei, and what makes their corporate culture unique,

• Huawei’s strategic entry into developing and high-risk markets like Libya, Iraq, and Iran, and whether the controversial deal with the UK is a threat to national security,

• How Huawei outcompeted Chinese state-owned telecom companies and eventually achieved national champion status,

• How Ren’s personal interest in foreign art, music, and architecture advances Huawei’s market share.

Co-hosting today is Kyle Chan, a postdoc at Princeton and author of the High Capacity Substack.

Have a listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Forged in Fire 浴火重生

Jordan Schneider: Eva, let’s start with the Cultural Revolution. How did it impact the future founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, in his early years?

Eva Dou: Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, comes from quite a humble background. He grew up in rural Guizhou Province, where both his father and mother worked as schoolteachers. His father eventually became a principal, and they instilled in him the importance of learning and a love of reading that continued throughout his life.

At the same time, that academic background made them a target when the Cultural Revolution came around during Ren Zhengfei’s teenage years. His father had worked briefly for the Nationalists earlier in his career, making him one of the many people targeted during the Cultural Revolution. He was struggled against at his school, criticized by students, and eventually put in a labor camp.

This affected his entire family — Ren Zhengfei and all his siblings. It impacted their work prospects throughout his early career. He would later complain that he was unable to get the promotions that his peers received, no matter how hard he worked. His company Huawei is now considered case number one of a national champion in China, but he really started out on the outside of the system, looking in. That’s part of what makes his story arc so dramatic — how far he came.

Jordan Schneider: There are a number of passages that were really evocative for me. There’s this theme of suicide that runs through the book. Ren Zhengfei is an incredible workaholic with multiple divorces who at one point said he was excited to use Chinese national holidays to travel abroad and get more work done.

This connects back to his father’s experience during the Cultural Revolution. You have this line that said Ren Moxun 任摩逊, his dad, also considered ending his life, but he didn’t want to die before his name was cleared, as it would leave his wife and children with a cloud over them. Ren Zhengfei explained that if his father died, his children would have to carry this political burden. “He endured 100 tortures, but would not kill himself.”

Later, Ren Zhengfei said, “The Cultural Revolution was a disaster for the nation, but for us, it was a baptism. It made me politically mature so that I wasn’t a simple bookworm”

When you look at Huawei from the outside and see the handsets, AI accelerators, and base stations, at its core is this stupendously driven human being who was shattered to his core. There are many business stories in China where people come out of the Cultural Revolution — Xi Jinping as well — forged into these super-driven individuals. But obviously tens of millions of people didn’t turn out that way. Even the ones who did end up succeeding beyond their wildest teenage imaginations carry very deep scars that play out over the subsequent decades of their lives.

Eva Dou: Many people have pointed out that Ren Zhengfei, as an entrepreneur and business person, carries this pessimism with him that some attribute as one reason for Huawei’s success. He’s always looking at the worst-case scenario that could happen to his company. Even in the years when business was flush, he would warn his employees that something bad could always happen — they could go bankrupt at any moment and had to be prepared for anything.

These early experiences of facing life-and-death stakes and seeing how fickle the political environment and business can be really did inform him. In many ways, it helped make Huawei a company that could survive unexpected things, which we’ve seen through two Trump administrations and many unexpected developments.

Jordan Schneider: There’s a bit you have later where you talk about how he painted black swans everywhere once he built this giant campus. The Cultural Revolution was the ultimate black swan. Once you live through that, what’s a couple of sanctions violations?

Another illustration of the psychological jumps you have to make to process and move forward from living through that time comes from this incredible quote from his dad when reflecting about his experience being struggled against in middle school. You write: “One day, one of his old students visited him and recalled the struggle session where a classmate had beaten him with a wooden stick until it broke. Ren’s father smiled grimly. ‘I have to thank that piece of wood. Had it been sturdier, I surely would have been beaten until something was wrong with me.’”

It’s a lot. Kyle, are there other business stories that come to mind — aside from Xi Jinping and Ren Zhengfei, which we’ll be exploring in an upcoming episode with Joseph Torigian — about this kind of dramatic arc for Chinese business people?

Kyle Chan: What’s really interesting is that there’s a strong parallel between Ren Zhengfei’s worldview and the view of many Chinese entrepreneurs during these tougher years, as well as Chinese political leaders in their attitudes towards China’s development. This idea especially that we are operating in a very tough world, that we have to rely on ourselves, that there’s danger at every corner and risk, and what to do about that preemptively.

Jordan Schneider: On the arc towards being a national champion, Ren works for the PLA as an engineer for a few years, finally makes it into the party — which was a dramatic arc in and of itself — and then gets invited to this famous Deng National Science Conference in 1978. There, Deng Xiaoping essentially blessed everyone, saying it’s okay to start businesses and do science — you don’t necessarily have to live inside the system to serve the country. That was a big psychological unlock, almost in the way you describe how he reflects on that. Can you talk about these years? Let’s bring the timeline up through 1978.

Eva Dou: The first part of Ren Zhengfei’s career was as an engineer in the engineering corps for China’s military. During this period, he was largely low-key. Occasionally he would gain kudos from superiors for his work, but he wasn’t anyone famous by any means. He probably thought that’s where he was going to stay for his entire career, his entire life.

This abruptly changed because Deng Xiaoping decided to make this switch to begin the capitalist experiment in China. This was coupled with a dramatic downsizing of the military, and he was laid off from the military and sent to Shenzhen to work in this burgeoning private sector.

He’s talked about feeling very disoriented at the time. This was similar to the experience of many people in China who had been in a system that was only a planned economy and suddenly it was all different. They had new ideas, new fashion styles, and new trends coming in from Hong Kong over the border to Shenzhen. He had this sense that he was really far behind — he was already almost 40 at that time — in trying to adapt to this totally new world.

Jordan Schneider: You have this quote where Ren would later tell his colleagues that he’d wasted time during those years when he was outside the establishment, not as a party member. You can read this quote two ways: “I was a soldier for all those years I didn’t join the party. My life was full of adversity. When I think of all that wasted time, I wonder how could I have been so naive and ridiculous that I didn’t understand it all being about compromise and shades of gray."

On one hand, I see that as maybe this guy’s still kind of pissed that the party ruined his parents’ life. But also, there was no way he was going to be accepted as a party member, even though he was an engineer for the PLA, because of his class background — his nationalist background. What’s the right way to understand that quote, Eva?

Eva Dou: I agree, it’s a bit ambiguous. He does give this kind of counsel to his staff repeatedly through the years, advising them basically that politics is not fair. He’s told them straight out that life isn’t fair and you have to keep in line with the political system that we live in. He said Huawei is a Chinese company and it’s a requirement to be patriotic to be part of the company.

That’s informed partly by his earlier experience with the Cultural Revolution. But there’s another part that isn’t talked about much, which is the Tiananmen democracy protests in the late 1980s. It’s remembered largely as an event in Beijing at Tiananmen Square, but these protests were going on across the country. Some of the largest ones were in Shenzhen, where the young people there were very progressive, international, liberal, and bold. They held some of the largest protests.

That was at the time that Ren’s daughter, Meng Wanzhou, was in high school and about to go to college in Shenzhen. Those protests were quashed in Shenzhen as well as Beijing. That also informs the approach and worldview of Ren Zhengfei and other business people of his generation. They remember these things.

Jordan Schneider: It comes back to the thing that Kyle brought up earlier: to what extent does he really believe the nationalist stuff versus just being a business person who wants to do cool science and compete with Ericsson because that’s cool and will make you money and make you remembered?

You have all these quotes where they’re laying it on too thick at times with how much they’re using the nationalist angle and the national strengthening angle to motivate employees. But for anyone in that generation, there has to be some kind of internal narrative that not all is right in the state of Denmark. I don’t really know where to go with that.

Eva Dou: There is one comparison that I look at in the book. Before Huawei in the 1980s, China’s most promising tech company was this company called Stone Group. The founder of that company was bold and radical in his political beliefs. He actually supported the pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen, and it basically ended up with his company being wiped off the map in China.

He ended up having to flee the country shortly after the Tiananmen crackdown. He was never able to return to China again and has lived as an exile ever since. Ren Zhengfei’s generation of entrepreneurs grew up revering this company and these entrepreneurs, and they saw what happened there. Since then, it’s been taken for granted that you have to bend the knee to the political line to build a successful business in China.

Jordan Schneider: One of the interesting leitmotifs of this book is Huawei’s relationship to the state. The story that you talk about, and that Doug Fuller goes into more deeply in his book, is the fact that Ren actually kept the state at much more of an arm’s length than many of his competitors in the 90s and 2000s. He focused on export discipline and investing in R&D as opposed to the cheap, easy money that you can get from government contracts. That was the way he kept Huawei advancing at the technological frontier.

Let’s give a little sense of what the industrial upgrading arc that Huawei went on in the 80s and 90s looked like, and what decisions they made different from competitors who ultimately weren’t able to achieve the levels of greatness that Huawei did.

Kyle Chan: Just to jump in with some broader context here: with China’s effort to develop its own telecom equipment industry and its broader tech industry, there’s this really interesting connection between the role of the state and the role of these different businesses. At various times you have other companies, other state-owned enterprises like Great Dragon that were the real national champions originally. There’s this idea that some companies were seeking to form connections with the state, while others were actively presented as the spearhead for China’s technological and economic development versus Huawei at this time.

Now we know Huawei as playing that role much more prominently. But back in those early days, Huawei was one of many competitors and was actually the underdog. To build on what Jordan was saying, Eva, you had a great passage about how Ren Zhengfei was even worried about taking loans from state banks, wary about becoming too entwined with state interests and all the strings that are attached. Could you elaborate on some of those early years and eventually reaching that status that we now associate with Huawei of dominating the industry? Really, in those early days, that was a story that was still unfolding.

Eva Dou: Especially in those early days, China’s state sector — these state-owned enterprises — had a reputation of being very sluggish and uncompetitive, basically a place where people knew they would stay employed whether they worked or not. This was something that Ren Zhengfei knew meant the death of his company if they became like that. He was quite wary of being too intertwined with the state, especially in Shenzhen, which is where this capitalist experiment was beginning in China.

They saw themselves as different, as forging a new kind of business system than the rest of China. They would call the rest of China “the inland.” Huawei was very aggressive, very vicious in how they went about doing business and also in their expectations for their own employees. They were notorious for firing people summarily if they didn’t meet expectations.

For a while they were doing joint ventures with state-owned companies across provinces in China to try to expand their footprint. That was a big culture shock for the state-owned employees. You have these stories that they were used to taking their daily naps during the day when they got sleepy. Then the Huawei management would come in and clean house, and things would be totally different.

Jordan Schneider: I love the part where, when they start winning, the state-owned company is like, “Hey, come on, this is a private company. Why are we letting them win these contracts?” Can you tell that story? I really liked it.

Eva Dou: It was one of the local officials in Shenzhen who had written a memoir after he retired with some of his recollections of dealing with Huawei and these other companies. He talked about how the state-owned companies after a while started coming to him and complaining that he couldn’t just be supporting Huawei, that he should be supporting them too. He put them in their place and said, “Well, you guys have been getting these subsidies and all these benefits for so long. If you can’t compete with Huawei, you have to look at yourself and see why that is."

Jordan Schneider: They sell cheaply to get market share. Someone at Great Dragon complained to Shenzhen’s Science and Technology Bureau that the local government shouldn’t just support privately owned enterprises. I mean, sorry man, sucks to suck. You could have been Huawei in the 80s, but instead you let Ren do the thing.

We’re in the 90s now. Huawei is a going concern, on the up and up. There is this fascinating blend of Western culture and PLA culture that Ren tries to inject into the lifeblood of how Huawei operates. Can we talk about the different influences that he tries to incorporate and put into his company and how it does business?

Eva Dou: He and his deputy team really felt that they were forging a new kind of business model in China — one that was not the state-owned enterprise and also not purely the Western style of private enterprise. He was seeking wisdom from all different places in the mid-90s and late 90s when he was working on this.

Famously, IBM was the Western company that they hired as a consultant to teach them how to transform from a startup into a multinational company. There were just many things that Ren Zhengfei knew would take them too long to figure out on their own: How do you meet production schedules year after year? How do you plan product launches to remain on schedule? How do you manage your supply chains? They went to IBM and some other Western companies to try to learn this as quickly as possible. At the same time, he was also meeting with leading Chinese entrepreneurs to try to understand what the relationship to the state should be at that time.

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Jordan Schneider: In 2017, I was at PKU in grad school and they have all these recruiting events. Of course I’m going to go to the Huawei one, and they hand out this book that they put out, “The Huawei Way,” where it’s these chapter-long essays of employees reflecting about their experience in the culture. I’m sure you’ve read it.

It’s funny, Eva, because usually when you see business people and they’re defining a new corporate culture, it’s bullshit and they just want to look back on themselves as intellectuals and business innovators. But in all of my reading about Huawei and diving into this book, I mean it is a weird artifact, right? This company and the way it goes about things.

His openness to Western management practices, the eagerness to go overseas and localize while at the same time the wolf warrior, hardcore zaibatsu energy but also up-and-out and “we’re going to fire you if you don’t deliver" — all of that is not something that you see anywhere else and only comes from Ren personally pushing to synthesize his personal experiences and his drive to synthesize a new way of being from a corporate perspective. That’s one of the most fascinating parts of his story and your book in particular.

Eva Dou: In most countries, there are older businesses, businesses that have been around for many years to look back to. In China, just because of the Cultural Revolution, that was all wiped out and there was a sense they’re starting again and have both the privilege and the responsibility to build a new model. Ren has said many times that he wanted to build a company that could last for 100 years. It’s been very much an open question how you do that. It’s only been a few decades since the end of the Cultural Revolution really, so it’s still an ongoing experiment of building a private enterprise in China that can last for a century.

Jordan Schneider: Kyle, do you want to do the East Asia comparison? I think Samsung is kind of the closest analog from a crazy founder, hardcore founder perspective. What other parallels do you see?

Kyle Chan: There are other ones too, like the founder of Honda and also the founder of Toyota, breaking the rules in the early days, not being allowed actually to have a license to produce cars but defying that and then eventually becoming the star player in the industry. You see this again and again, and actually another strong parallel is just the expectations — these sky-high expectations that you get now in Silicon Valley.

I jokingly have talked to people about this book and said, “Wow, Elon Musk would love this approach to just hard charging, ‘Go to Mars’ mentality that Huawei seems to instill in its work culture.” Some of this is nuts and bolts of how you run an organization, but some of this really seems to be, “We can build, we can defy the EUV lithography export controls” — which we’ll get into later. But all those things are just mere speed bumps along the way to these greater global ambitions.

Jordan Schneider: When you read the early Apple stories of just the intensity and the near-death experiences, you get a bit from Steve Jobs at his most unleashed peak. But I really think Samsung is the closest comparison. They have a similar story in their arc to the one that you wrote about, Eva, where everyone signs their resignations and says, “I will sacrifice.” The importance to the country arc that ends up developing is not quite as present in a Tesla or a Honda as it is in a Samsung, which modernized an entire country for better or for worse.

Eva Dou: That’s interesting, the comparison to Samsung. Huawei’s mission has shifted over the years in that in its early days it was not trying to be a company like Samsung. In fact, Ren was very adamant that they were going to be very narrow in what they did — that they were just going to do telecommunications equipment. They didn’t want to be this sprawling multi-armed conglomerate because they felt they would end up not being good at anything.

It’s been a process where they’ve gradually expanded. During the 2000s they began making mobile phones and then smartphones. That was something that generated a lot of debate inside the company. Ren at the beginning was against it. He thought they were diversifying too much and was eventually won over by some of his deputies that this was the way to go. More recently, because of sanctions, they’ve been forced to make more of the nuts and bolts themselves, especially chips.

By how this worked out, they’re now a much more direct comparison to a company like Samsung — they have so many different lines of business. What’s interesting is they didn’t start out that way, and for many years that’s not what they wanted to become.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting also because this happens over the course of Ren getting older and older. He has this great line where you said he suspected that smartphones were overhyped. “We believe that the Internet has not changed the essence of things,” he told staff. “A car must be a car and tofu must be tofu."

But if he succeeded, which he did, in hiring all of these hard chargers who are going to want to spin up new industry verticals or whatever — just having them all fight for the same three slots running different verticals in telecom — is actually not sustainable. One of the remarkable things is that he was not stubborn enough to shut down these new business lines. His commitment to investing — what’s the number? Like 30% of annual revenue into R&D — some crazy stat which basically no other Chinese company did in the 90s and 2000s and even into the 2010s — is something where if you’re going to end up doing all that, then yeah, you’re going to end up wanting to branch out into new businesses and grow in different directions.

Kyle Chan: Speaking of branching out to new businesses, I was wondering if you could say more about this moment in Huawei’s rise where they’re getting into a whole bunch of different areas. While they began with switches and telecom equipment, they really started to expand into everything from undersea cables, and then eventually EVs, AI, and semiconductors. Actually, your book points out that Huawei was working on semiconductors from a very early stage and was quite important in China’s broader push into semiconductors. Could you say more about that period and what drove some of that expansion? What was that like for a company that began with such humble beginnings? This is part of the arc leading up to a $100 billion per year revenue business.

Eva Dou: One way to look at it is that their customers — their international customers — are often buying all these different things. From that sense, it makes a certain logic. Smartphones and telecom gear seem so different — one’s very specialized, one is for the consumer — but it actually ended up being a savvy way for them to get their foot in the door into markets where it was quite difficult to sell their telecom gear, such as Europe, because smartphones were seen as much less sensitive technology.

In countries where they weren’t able to sell telecom gear directly at first, they were able to sell small, cheap smartphones or mobile phones. Actually, the customer is the same — it’s these telecom operators who run these mobile shops, where, as a consumer, you would go in and buy a phone. That allowed Huawei to develop these relationships with these companies. In some cases, once they were selling phones, they were eventually able to sell the telecom gear.

Chips are a little different. It started out partly for cost reasons. For some cheap chips, they found they were able to save costs significantly if they were able to produce them themselves instead of relying on foreign suppliers. There’s probably a security component to that too. He said from an early time he’s pointed out the national security implications of telecom gear, and it probably helped assure Chinese officials if they were making some of their own chips. In fact, their early chips were often used for surveillance cameras. That was one of the early lines of business for their chips.

They’ve gradually found that one line of business can help the other line of business. They’ve expanded probably beyond what Ren would have been comfortable with back in the 1990s.

Spare Tires and War Zones

Jordan Schneider: I love this line from the head of HiSilicon in 2019, which is Huawei’s chip development arm, who said, “For years, the unit had worked on spare tires 备胎. But now, today is the decision of history. After Trump’s export controls on the company overnight, all the spare tires we built have become the main tires. Our years of blood, sweat, and tears have been cashed in overnight to help the company fulfill its commitment to keep serving customers."

It’s very emotional working at this place. On the one hand, you have these stories of people — one of the executives talks about how his annoying family will never forgive him for missing the birth of his two children. But on the other hand, it’s clear that for these employees this is not just a paycheck. There is a lot of life fulfillment and meaning that these folks derive from this work. Maybe I was a little too dismissive earlier about them laying it on too thick because, look, we’re in a country where religion isn’t really a thing and you’ve got to find it from somewhere to get you motivated enough to work 80, 100-hour weeks past the point where you’ve already met your creature comforts.

Eva, what are your thoughts on Huawei as a spiritual totem for its founder and employees?

Eva Dou: Definitely, part of Huawei’s success has been very much its founder’s charisma and his ability to motivate his employees to work incredibly hard and sometimes take enormous personal risks in working for this company. There is a spiritual component to it where he is telling them they can find meaning in helping their country become technologically sufficient in key technologies. The United States has been this bugaboo throughout its history that’s held up as a country that is hostile to China’s development, that wants to hold the country back and that they at Huawei would have to surmount.

Through the years some of that has sounded melodramatic and overblown. When the sanctions came down during the first Trump presidency, that made people believe that Ren wasn’t just overly scared, that he had indeed been preparing for what was going to happen.

Jordan Schneider: Another Elon parallel, right. The American company that gives the most spiritual energy to its employees to work really, really hard is SpaceX, with this incredible vision of making us an interplanetary species.

My favorite illustration of the truly devoted service to customers — not just the Chinese government — is during the Libya civil war. Literally everyone and their mother was pulling out of the country. The Chinese diplomats pulled out. Same with Bahrain when they were going through their civil disturbances. But Ren Zhengfei and Huawei were like, “No, we’re going to keep our engineers here. We signed some contracts. We’ll just have two businesses, one for the government, one for the rebels."

You have this great interview with the wife of one of these engineers saying, “Yeah, every time we call him, we hear gunshots in the background.” Libya is not this huge growth market, but it is a fascinating illustration of just how committed this company is to expanding and succeeding.

Kyle Chan: This is a really interesting segue because so much of this book is looking at Huawei’s trajectory over time in parallel with China’s. Some of these twists and turns and even geopolitical strategy at the company level mirrors that of China’s approach. Huawei, especially in the early days when it was really trying to establish itself internationally, was entering these markets that were a bit too risky or too volatile perhaps for some of the more established players. It gave Huawei an opportunity to start working outside China.

It parallels China’s efforts to develop relations with different parts of the Global South — Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, Middle East — while gradually seeing ties with the West as being a longer-term project, but one that would be much harder to tap into early on.

Could you talk more about this opportunistic phase in Huawei’s trajectory in terms of its global expansion? Later on, when you see one of these maps of where Huawei ended up, it’s all red Huawei or ZTE 5G equipment all over the world. That’s the later endpoint, but along the way, what was Ren Zhengfei trying to do and how were they trying to make inroads piece by piece into the international market, culminating with the British Telecom contract, which gave them that kind of legitimacy that parallels China’s quest for legitimacy on the international stage?

Eva Dou: Certainly. Huawei’s international expansion can very much be seen as a proxy of China’s broader international relations effort over the decades. The company was founded in 1987, and at the beginning they only focused on the domestic market. Then in the mid-1990s, they started looking overseas.

At the very start, Russia was one of the first countries they looked at. That was partly through diplomatic help — the Chinese Foreign Ministry helped them go over for a trade show and helped smooth the way to their first very small contract there. At the same time, they were looking to countries in the Middle East and Africa in the early days.

There is some history of their eventual run-in with sanctions issues with the United States, which is that some of their earliest customers were countries where the major Western companies were a little more reluctant to go for whatever reason. That included Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea.

Then you get to the point where China is entering the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s. Huawei jumped on this trend of internationalizing. That was when you saw them start to push into developed markets, into Western markets more aggressively. Of course, it took many years for them to be established in Europe. But if you look today, there’s hardly any country in the world that doesn’t use Huawei telecommunications equipment to a greater or lesser extent.

Kyle Chan: In parallel with this rise, what’s really interesting is that as Huawei is expanding globally and as Huawei’s star is rising in China as a symbol, you have growing suspicions from the West, especially from the US, about what Huawei is doing and what its real relationship with the Chinese government is. There are concerns about surveillance technology. You have the rollout of smart cities and safe cities programs from Huawei. This ties into the very markets that Huawei is deciding to enter.

In the early years, as you mentioned, Iran and Iraq were some of the earliest cases of Huawei coming on the map in terms of US concerns about security. How did you see this reaction to Huawei’s expansion, especially from the US? You have congressional hearings later on, which is a high point of the book, a point of high drama, where Huawei and ZTE executives are brought in front of Congress to testify and answer basically a pretty tough interrogation session. Something similar happens with British Parliament to a certain extent.

There are growing suspicions rising almost right alongside Huawei’s growing prominence on the world stage. Could you describe some of that and where it’s coming from? Obviously Huawei’s own activities within China contribute to this. It’s not just what Huawei’s doing abroad, but later on, you were one of the earliest reporters on use of Huawei surveillance equipment in Xinjiang, for example. Could you tie all those different pieces together?

Eva Dou: The first incident where Huawei really got on the map for the US government was in Iraq in the early 2000s. Huawei was helping the local government and military build a fiber optic telecommunications network. If you think about it, these older systems where they’re using radio communications — that’s something that is more easily surveyed or hacked. That’s what the US government had been doing. They’ve been using it to keep track of what Iraq’s military was doing. Suddenly those conversations were going underground. Huawei was helping them build these fiber optic lines that ran underground and that were much more difficult to tap.

That was when George W. Bush gave the order to bomb those installations, which would force Iraq to use radio again. This was later explained by some US officials. That was something Huawei was doing for governments around the world, helping them build these more secure communications networks that were harder to survey for Western governments. That was how they came into conflict with the US at the start as a national security concern for the United States.

Later on this became other things. You mentioned Xinjiang and surveillance. Their surveillance systems became a significant line of business for them, both domestically and in countries around the world. These are the modern surveillance systems for an entire city. There are video cameras, but more importantly, there’s the software on the back — there’s facial recognition, there are AI algorithms to help track trends.

That is a more recent iteration, and what sparked the sanctions was the 5G generation of networks being laid out around the world and Huawei seeming poised to win an enormous chunk of those orders. That set off alarm bells in Washington at the time.

Kyle Chan: This gets to a whole question about the role of technology today and to what extent can we separate some of these core functions of what telecom equipment is supposed to do versus issues of data privacy and national security. I wanted to read a quote from the head of global cybersecurity for Huawei at a UK parliamentary hearing. He’s asked about whether Huawei’s telecom equipment could be used for surveillance and data collection and sending that back to China. His answer is: “It therefore does know where you are because it knows where the information is coming from. In that context, telecommunications networks from all vendors know where you are so as to connect you to those networks. Huawei’s equipment is no different from anyone else’s equipment."

This was just a question about whether Huawei’s telecom equipment can track you. His answer seemed to be, “Well, in order for a cell tower to work, that’s really what it does. It has to triangulate your position and make sure you receive and get the signal."

How much of this seems to become only a bigger issue over time? Now we have a whole bunch of questions about not just telecom equipment, but this has entered into many different domains. Everything from TikTok to connected vehicles, DJI drones. The latest one was TP-Link routers. It’s this growing concern from countries like the US about what will happen with data that’s passed through or collected through these systems.

Is there anything that Huawei could do to reassure the outside world, especially in the West? There was a really great example where Ren Zhengfei or a Huawei executive offered to share source code or do a tech licensing deal to just put it out there and say you can look through our source code and see what’s going on, if that’s any kind of reassurance. There are different ways of trying to deal with this issue. But to what extent is it just something like a Gordian knot that can’t be untied?

Eva Dou: The comparison to how US and UK policymakers have looked at this issue is pretty interesting, because until recently, they’ve taken very different approaches. The UK has taken the approach that these security risks can be mitigated, and we are comfortable with it. The US has taken the approach that this is an intractable problem — these security issues cannot be mitigated.

Cybersecurity experts in both countries receive very similar training. Ultimately, it is kind of a political question and a political answer of what kind of relationship you’re willing to have with China, what level of “risk” you’re willing to take on, and to what degree do you see China’s government as an enemy that needs to be blocked by all means necessary?

Until recently, the UK approach had been that they have this center where Huawei has its source code for its products and where UK officials, including UK intel officers, can go take a look at the back end and comb through it and resolve any cybersecurity concerns that they feel they have with it, and they were okay with it. Actually, today, a number of other countries do use this model, and they feel that mitigates whatever hacking risks that they feel there are.

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The US has been on the extreme end of the spectrum compared to other countries in feeling that these are unmitigatable risks that they cannot — that we just can’t use this equipment. That speaks partly to just how the US and Chinese governments see each other, that they see each other as direct rivals, whereas for other countries, it’s not the case.

Jordan Schneider: It’s funny, because there is kind of this spectrum, right, where you have these African countries and Malaysia being like, “Whatever, spy on me. What do I care? It’s not like I could stop them anyway. Might as well save the money with the Huawei kit.” Then we have the UK kind of in between. You’ve got this great back and forth between John Bolton and a senior UK security official saying, “What I don’t understand is why out of all the things — chips, AI, rare earth minerals, whatever it is — your administration has decided that a modest amount of base stations on hilltops in England is the epicenter of your new declared war on China. Why?"

"You got to pick something,” John Bolton replied, but that feels like a facetious response. The deeper one, which is the one you alluded to earlier, Eva, is that losing this entire industry of telecom broadly and base stations in particular to a Chinese player is something that the US couldn’t really countenance as the country that feels like it has more to lose from being spied on by China than even folks who maybe aren’t all the way at the side of Malaysia, but the UK that feels like they can kind of deal with it. Even if they can’t, how bad is it going to be? It’s not like they’re the ones upholding the industrial base of the liberal democratic order or what have you. Kyle?

Kyle Chan: It does tie into this question from the US side too of what are the motivations for each of these things? I see a lot of parallels for the EV industry. There’s a lot of debate about to what extent were the Biden era tariffs on Chinese EVs and then later on the connected vehicles ban motivated by security issues and to what extent was it motivated by economic competition issues about worrying about what will happen to American automakers and US auto jobs along the way.

That just puts the US in a different position than other countries when it comes to its relationship with China and Huawei and a lot of these other rising Chinese tech firms that seem to be now entering into spaces that US companies were comfortable being dominant in for a long time. There’s also that parallel with Europe too, taking a different approach, again with EVs. They have similar concerns, but there seems to be at least a greater interest in investment and production of Chinese EVs within Europe. All of that is just to say it’s a lot messier than merely “let’s block everything Huawei” or whatever, “anything goes.” There’s a full range of different approaches out there across the world.

Jordan Schneider: I want to talk a little bit about the organizational, senior management structure and how it pattern matches to the way the Communist Party structures itself. Can you talk a little about that, Eva?

Eva Dou: Huawei has for years adopted this kind of collective leadership model, which in many ways is similar to how China’s government is run. There’s a senior group of officials, both explicit and also unofficial, semi-retired officials who all have a role in deciding the direction of this company. On purpose, it is a little vague exactly where those lines are drawn of who’s in charge of what.

For now, Ren Zhengfei is still the top guy. He’s talked for years that he’s going to be retiring one day and now he’s in his 80s, and it’s still unclear when he’s going to be retiring. That’s going to be the big test for Huawei, of course, for any company — that initial, the first handover from the founder to the next generation of leadership and if they can keep the company running to the same degree of success.

Jordan Schneider: I want to close on the human arc a little bit. A lot of Western media makes fun of the Huawei campus. The fact that it’s kind of this Disneyland — it has a Versailles, it has a Kremlin, it has all these international styles. This moment that you write about, about him moving villages in middle school, you write that he was astonished when they moved to the county seat and saw a department store. It was the first time he saw a two-story building.

Then, a few decades later, he goes to the US for the first time, sees Las Vegas and thinks it’s the most beautiful city he’s ever seen. These giant buildings and the pyramids and whatnot. Then he builds this incredible company and decides that he wants to replicate all of these architectural wonders from the West. Not really from China, but from the West.

Just that arc of this boy whose dad was principal and was beaten to within an inch of committing suicide during the Cultural Revolution to go from having this really complicated, admiring, but also rivalrous relationship with the rest of the world and looking up to so much that the West has brought, but also really wanting to be able to compete and strive to stand at the same level, if not necessarily playing by all the rules that the Western countries and companies would want them to — that’s just a remarkable arc. That is probably the thing that’s going to stick with me most from this book. When Ren, who’s pretty old now, does end up passing from the scene.

Kyle Chan: This image of him from his early childhood days, really the rural boy from out in the provinces to then later on being able to be this savvy political operator at the national and international stage and basically getting on side with multiple Chinese leaders over time. You write about how he is going out doing deals with, from Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and now Xi Jinping.

We recently had that big meeting with the tech executives, Chinese tech executives meeting with Xi Jinping. Who was there, sitting in the very front and center, was Ren Zhengfei himself. Who could have imagined, probably not him from his early days, that he would be at the center of so much of the Chinese leadership’s ambitions, US-China competition tensions, and part of this story of China’s rise over time.

Eva Dou: It is kind of staggering, the distance he’s traveled since his childhood to where he is today, both personally, his company, and also China, that China is now a true technological competitor on the world stage. That’s part of what interested me in this project — just understanding how much has changed and how it changed.

As far as the palaces that you alluded to that Huawei has built on campus, Ren has said — it’s not only the Western media that critiques it, sometimes his own employees do. He’s talked about this and said, “You guys can gripe about these palaces, but we build them for the customers."

It’s not just him himself. This has been China’s experience, broadly, this transformation. When they bring government officials and telecom officials from across the nation to the campus, this is the same transformation that they are experiencing themselves. It is appealing to a certain part of his customer base, all the glitz and glamour. Most of his international base is the developing world. Huawei is famous for bringing foreign officials on these junkets and wowing them with both the campus and the food and the hospitality.

Jordan Schneider: Eva, are there any stories you want to share from the reporting of this book? In particular, I’d be curious about, in reading a lot of these memoirs and Chinese coverage of the company, what are the narratives that get a lot of play in mainland China that you don’t end up seeing written up much in the Washington Post?

Eva Dou: The most fun part of this was doing archival research for me and trying to find sources that even in China are a bit obscure. You do have the easy narratives, both the international ones about Huawei being a national security threat and within China, Huawei being this great company that’s getting better and better. Part of what I try to bring to this is the smaller voices.

I really enjoyed reading some local government officials’ memoirs in China. As Huawei has interacted with so many officials both within China and around the world over the years, I wanted to bring some of their recollections of the experience of meeting with Huawei, both good and bad. In China, as you know, there’s pretty strict censorship. In memoirs, when people are late in their life and no longer worried about keeping their job, they are a little franker sometimes in their recollections. That’s been an enjoyable part of this process.

Kyle Chan: I was astonished looking through the sources that you cite and the amount of material that you had to go through. I’m sure the sources that you cited are just the tip of the iceberg for everything that you were wading through and trying to sift through. You even chased down a Harvard Business School classmate of a Huawei executive and interviewed them. I was astonished by the lengths you went to really get to all the details of this story, including a ton that just has not been talked about before.

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Eva Dou: Thanks so much. The process of digitization of archival material around the world was really helpful in this project. So many times during the process, I thought about how if nothing was digitized and I had to go in person and just read each page one by one, how long would this project take? It would have taken years and years more than it did. It really gave me an appreciation of the earlier generation of researchers who were doing everything in analog, in person, archival research.

Jordan Schneider: But they didn’t have Twitter to distract them. Eva, how long do you think you’d last at Huawei?

Eva Dou: Oh my goodness.

Jordan Schneider: Say your 24-year-old self. We’ll give you a little boost of energy.

Eva Dou: Well then good. I probably could hack it a couple years, but they are ferocious in weeding people out.

Jordan Schneider: They’d catch on to you eventually.

Eva Dou: Yeah, probably.

Jordan Schneider: Is there a moment or a meeting that you wish you could have been a fly on the wall for?

Eva Dou: There are a few points in their early history where they changed the company’s structure or ownership and I’ve always been pretty curious about what exactly those conversations were. They started out as a private startup — it was a pilot program for private startups. No one knew how long that would last. At some point they shifted to where they were almost more state-owned for a few years and then they went back to being a private corporation.

Kyle Chan: One funny thing that stuck out to me is that Eva, you have pointed out the pronunciation of Huawei among Americans. So many people say “Wawei” instead of “Huawei.” Once you pointed that out, I can’t stop hearing that. People do it all the time and I don’t know where it came from.

Eva Dou: Part of it is the company itself. At some point their PR team was going around teaching people to say the company name this way.

Kyle Chan: That’s so interesting.

Eva Dou: Which is a curious thing.

Kyle Chan: Wow. It reminds me of Hyundai trying to be like, “We’re not Honda, we’re not ’Hi-yun-dai,’ it rhymes with Sunday.” It’s tough.

Eva Dou: They thought about changing the name in the early days when they realized it was so hard to pronounce for international audiences and they batted a few different things around. But in the end it seemed too difficult to change, and we’re stuck with Huawei.

Jordan Schneider: One of the daughters is a singer, right? We have to do that as our outro music. But are there — did Ren ever talk about liking music? Did he have any favorite songs or genres or anything?

Eva Dou: Interesting. I don’t know off the top of my head about music, but he’s always been an admirer of the arts and that comes from his parents and this desire to be a cultured renaissance man. That’s something he’s really encouraged with his employees — for them to spend their spare time cultivating themselves, listening to different types of music, looking at fine art, things like that.

Jordan Schneider: Cool. Aside from the architecture thing, which people are clear on, are there painters or writers? Give me a sense of the Ren Zhengfei cultural constellation.

Eva Dou: Well, classical style art is something he quite appreciates. There are stories of him collecting paintings from around the world and having his employees help him bring oil paintings over from abroad. He’s talked about his family quite liking Europe, liking to go to Europe on vacations. His youngest daughter grew up largely between the UK and China. He often talks about these cultural things to make a point, as part of his outreach to different markets. He talks about international culture that he likes probably more often than domestic.

不要复制，而要超越。

——陌生女人1号 兔姐

亲爱的媎妹：

见字如面！

前段时间我写了一封信批判部分互联网“激进”女权是假激进真保守、假解放真极权，发布之后引起了不小的争议。不过除了上来就扣帽子辱骂我们的评论以外，其实还是有一些有益的批评的（见《从还有明天出发，谈谈什么是真正的激进》）。

于是我就在想，到底是什么引起了这种分歧，为什么有些人如此激烈地表示反对？后来想到，可能还是由于我们这里的性别平等状况实在太差了。所以我发文说“不要指责和审判女人”、“女人不是只有变强才配获得自由，自由应该是天赋人权”等等，很多人才会警铃大作。或者说，我们国家的女性真的太容易滑落了，甚至只要踏错一步就可能万劫不复，所以大家才对“尊重女人的决定/相信女性能自主选择”这种话十分警惕、很害怕我是在鼓吹“向下的自由”，因为真的有太多男人以「自由」之名引诱女人走进陷阱，然后敲骨吸髓了。

（我之前在豆瓣发过一个讲《芭比》为什么在国内水土不服的帖子也有讨论到这一点）。

而很多本土女权主义者如此急切地催促女性用个体行动反抗结构性压迫（主要是通过“非暴力不合作”的方式进行消极抵抗），大概也是因为现实确实水深火热，而制度性的改变也实在有点无望。也正因如此，她们可能把我的观点——不要把责任归咎于个体、忽视结构压迫——理解成了“鼓励个体彻底躺平”，所以才这么愤怒？......这样看来，我那篇文章激起的情绪/观点其实也是时代和环境的产物。

不过呢，尽管一定程度上理解了反对我观点的人（可能）的立场，且在批判美役和异性恋方面我们的观点有所重合，但我依然无法认同她们解决问题的方式。我认为，「强迫个体对抗结构」的解法最多只能让女性暂时摆脱部分压迫，却终究无法带来系统性的变革。

而且，在“逼迫”其她女人用自己认为正确的方式反抗时，一些本土女权主义者开始分裂女性群体并实施“多数人”的暴政，而某些看似反叛的路其实是不过对父权的镜像复制。这类做法与其说是Radical（彻底的、根治的），倒不如说是Aggressive（有攻击性的）——判断一个人是否激进的标准应该在于她和权力的关系，而不是骂人（包括骂“婚女”、“弱女”）时言辞激烈的程度。

更重要的是，现实不是非黑即白的，我不认可某些自称“激女”的人的行为，并不代表我就要给男人“接三胎男宝”了。。🚬（这是默认“激女”必然最正确，反对者就一定是男权了？另外，女性应该拥有生育自主权，所以不应该用这种话侮辱女人，不过大家明白我要表达的意思就好...）

换言之，在我看来，在「放任女性滑落并成为彻头彻尾的父权受害者」和「鉴定伥鬼和媚男女、审判女人的行为是否女权，以及通过辱骂“弱女”逼迫女人向上」之外，还有第三条路可选——也就是我的女权主义十要、十不要。

1. 要诚实揭露异性恋父权对女性的剥削，但反对用“婚驴”、“虜”、“伥鬼”等词语分化和羞辱女性。

异性婚恋对女性的制度性剥削是一个不争的事实。我们也曾写过很多文章批判异性恋父权，这里就不赘述了（见《婚礼如何体现性别不平等？》、《彩礼是物化女性吗？》、《恋爱脑根治指南》等）。

的确，恋爱脑的女性更容易对男人抱有不切实际的期待，在受害时依旧自我欺骗、下意识美化异性恋浪漫关系，最终结果则很可能是掉进一个又一个男权陷阱。

可是，常常感到“缺爱”并非女性的错，而是系统性失权的结果——女性自出生起就在家庭和社会遭到全方位的打压、极度缺乏自信和安全感，而浪漫爱在此刻趁虚而入，让女人误以为自己能从男人那里获得自己渴望已久的温情。正是因为长期缺乏支持和尊重，女性才会为了异性恋里的一点点“蜜糖”吞下砒霜。

因此，要想破除异性恋父权对女性的剥削，我们必须从根本上重建女人的支持系统，而不是辱骂由于各种原因顺应了社会主流结构的女性，或是简单粗暴地将她们开除女籍，通过「和受害女性割席」完成自保（这和理性探讨已婚和单身女性之间客观存在的矛盾是两码事）。

例如前段时间发生的小谢被家暴事件，很多女性在网上表示“婚女”的事情与自己无关，认为单女没必要“淌混水”、替“叛徒”争权。更有甚者用“婚驴”、“伥鬼”等字眼辱骂受害者。她们好像认为，只要不沾男➕和已婚朋友绝交➕对婚女权益不管不问，女人就不会受害。可是现实真是如此吗？

在我看来，与「在父权结构中陷得更深的的女性」割席并非女权主义，而是“独善其身主义”。更可悲的是，这还是一条注定失败的“独善其身”之路。

“单女”无法通过和婚女割席保全自己。这是因为女性利益是一个“一荣俱荣、一损俱损”的整体。除非离群索居，否则没有任何一个女人能够逃脱父权社会的伤害。

女人当然有独善其身的权利，但我反对将“独善其身”等同于“女性主义”。女权主义者不应该将任何一个女人开除女籍，剥夺她受到共情和帮助的机会。

对同伴变得宽容，就是从意识到我们命运相连的那一刻开始。无尽的远方，无数的女人，都与我有关。我们是你中有我、我中有你的共同体。

当我看到被家暴的妻子，我看到的不是投敌的“叛徒”，而是和我一样曾遭受过性别暴力的女人。

当我看到被家人“吸血”却不愿断亲的女大学生，我看到的不是活该被欺负的“软柿子”，而是系统性厌女下渴望温情的孩子。

当我看到带年幼的男孩进卫生间的女人，我看到的不是“挤压单女生存空间”的“伥鬼”，而是因丈夫缺位、丧偶式育儿无比疲惫却依然在努力生活的母亲。

还有，我不会和男人结婚，但我和姐姐都是辛苦工作才能赚一点工资的女性劳工；我不想生育，可我和妈妈都是在父系家庭中受过轻视的个体；我不会做家庭主妇应聘“妈妈岗”，但我也一样要面对职业零工化、职场女性边缘化的严峻现实。我们都是在父权的围追堵截中依旧活出了自己人生的战士。我生活里的任何一点不如意，都不是另一个女人的错。

女权从来都是集体的运动，她不应成为个人主义的极致发挥。在为全体女性争取权利的过程中，我们要弥合而非撕裂，尽量求同而非排异。毕竟，女人间的不同不应成为加剧对立的借口，而应该是无尽创造力的来源、是伟大变革的起点。

P.s. 最后想说一点，我理解强调“单女”是为了反抗“单身女性的污名化”，有一定进步意义，但我依然不喜欢这个词。因为无论我们是否已婚/在恋爱，我们怎么可能是“单”的呢？人永远处于各种各样的关系中。脱离了和世界的关系，“我”将不复存在。所以我认为“单女/婚女”的划分依然是在加固异性恋父权以婚姻为中心的社会结构，且再一次贯彻了「分类/分化女性、挑起内部争端，从而让真正的压迫者美美隐身」的父权逻辑。私以为，真正具有颠覆性的行动不是在结构内和压迫者“对打”，而是彻底打碎这个以「婚否」为基础的分类系统。

由于篇幅限制，我在这封信中只阐述了《十要十不要》的第一条，余下内容及结语会在下封信里和大家分享。感谢姐妹们的关注！☺️

陌生女人1号 兔姐

二〇二五年六月十六日

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Renaissance Philanthropy — in my opinion, the most exciting philanthropic venture in the US — is getting a one-year check-in. Kumar Garg first appeared on the show right before I went on paternity leave, and now we’re back for round two. Before founding Renaissance Philanthropy, Kumar worked in the Obama Office of Science and Technology Policy and spent time at Schmidt Futures.

We discuss…

• How Renaissance catalyzed over $200 million in philanthropic funding in its first year,

• The goals of the organization and how it has responded to Trump’s S&T funding cuts,

• What sets Renaissance apart from traditional philanthropic organizations, and lessons for China-focused research foundations,

• AI applications in education, from tutoring to dyslexia screening,

• Donor psychology, “portfolio regret,” and how to build trust within a philanthropic network.

Listen on Spotify, iTunes, or your favorite podcast app.

The Hedge Fund Model of Giving

Kumar Garg: I like that this is becoming an annual tradition.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, we've got to set goals this year, and we can hold you to them in 2026.

Can you start off with the 101 of Renaissance philanthropy, and explain how the thesis has played out over the past year?

Kumar Garg: I’m grading myself here, so this is a biased view, but it’s been a very strong year. When we were launching the organization, we were trying to do something different.

Most philanthropic organizations exist in a single model — they work for a single donor. That donor has resources, whether they sit in a foundation, in their DAF, or as personal wealth. The organization works for them, asking how much money they want to give and on what topics, then runs their philanthropic giving.

There’s another class of organizations that are basically the people spending the money — researchers running labs and doing high-quality research. The philanthropic system has mostly operated with givers and takers — folks operating these organizations and folks doing high-quality work.

The idea behind Renaissance Philanthropy was to sit in the middle and style ourselves more like an investment fund — more like what happens in the world of finance. The folks who are the holders of capital, who have the money, mostly don’t spend their time trying to directly deploy that money.

If you work as an LP for a family office, you might have a team of 10, 20, or 30 people, and you’ve got billions of dollars to deploy. What do you do? You go out there and find intermediaries — private equity funds, hedge funds, venture capital funds, or other experts in particular sectors and areas. You give them the money, and they deploy it on your behalf to help you earn a return.

Philanthropy has mostly operated differently. It’s odd, but it’s historically contingent. The investment world moved toward specialization from the ’70s onward, while philanthropy went in the direction of direct giving. You have really large philanthropic organizations, often well-staffed by experts, that do the giving.

The challenge is that there’s a subset of donors who want to build large organizations, and there’s a large set of donors who don’t. The ones who don’t have been sitting on the sidelines. What ends up happening is maybe when they retire, they build an organization, or when they die, they bequest it to a nonprofit or university. That leaves a lot of value on the table.

The idea of Renaissance was, on various science and tech topics, can we do what an investment fund does? We write down a thesis for three years, five years — we want to achieve this goal. We recruit a field leader to run that fund, then treat the donors almost like LPs in a philanthropic fund. We’re not giving them a return back, but they’re putting money to work against that strategy.

A year ago, when I told this story to people — “I’m going to create an organization that does this” — the operative advice was, “Good luck.” You’re going to cover the waterfront across AI, climate, and economic social mobility. You’re going to take on this massive fundraising goal. That seems like a very hard way to operate. You have no natural advantages — you’re not spending one person’s resources. You have to raise the money and deploy it. It seems doubly hard.

What I was interested in was growing the pie — can we use this model to bring new donors in?

A year in, the early grade is strong. We’ve been able to stand up multiple philanthropic funds. We have a fund using AI to accelerate the pace of math research. We have another fund using AI to deliver public benefits better. We recently launched work on climate emergencies — can we solve for runaway climate risks and increase the technology readiness level of various climate technologies?

We have different funds in various areas. Each has this basic structure — they have a thesis they’re driving against, a field leader running it, and we’re recruiting donor money against that strategy.

What I’m hoping for is that this starts to become — not the only way philanthropic giving happens — but a much more credible path. This allows more donors to be active without necessarily having to take on all the operational load themselves.

Jordan Schneider: You’ve launched this in a particularly precarious time for the future of science and research in America. We’ll get to your takes on the policies in a second. But I’m curious from a donor appetite perspective — what has all the tumult in universities and government funding done for those billionaires sitting on the sidelines, giving just 1.2% of their assets annually to philanthropy?

Kumar Garg: That’s a great question. I don’t have one system-level answer — it’s a frequent question I get about how donors are interacting with the environment. They’re interacting the way most people are — there’s an incredible amount of chaos and news every day, leaving many frozen in place.

It’s relative. Government has pulled back on research funding in the short term, causing significant churn. Industry is also holding back as companies figure out what’s happening with tariffs and everything else. Philanthropy, comparatively, is cross-pressured but hasn’t engaged in the same pullback.

There are donors we interact with who are certainly reformulating their strategies. There are others who, as I mentioned, are interested in compelling ideas and looking for those just like anything else. I haven’t seen an overall pullback — just more of a sense of “Is this idea good in itself, even if government didn’t help at all?"

Jordan Schneider: Can you put in order of magnitude the hope of the new model you’re trying to manifest against, I don’t know, NIH budgets being cut by a third?

Kumar Garg: There’s no world in which philanthropy fills the gap. If you step back and ask how the US built its lead — well, the US spends on the order of $200 billion a year on R&D. Once you include basic and applied research across DoD and civilian agencies, that’s an order of magnitude more than philanthropy spends on research.

The place where these new models will get traction is that how you organize scientific organizations has suddenly become much more of a jump ball. It used to be that the academic bundle — being at a top university — had everything stacked on top of itself. You could get really good talent that way — graduate and post-graduate talent, great students. You build your lab there, do cutting-edge work. Usually, the university gives you flexibility to do many things on top of it. If you’re an academic doing well at cutting-edge research, you could do that within the four walls of a university.

Some researchers have left universities and built what are basically academic research labs outside the university. You’ve got the work that Patrick Collison is supporting around the ARC Institute, the Flatiron Institute that Simons supports. You’ve seen the FROs that Convergent Research proposes. For a long time, that’s been a very alternative path — rare to do, often requiring you to figure out what happens to your university affiliation and how it changes your career path.

If you’re a researcher who’s ambitious and wants to do big projects, whether you’re doing them within the four corners of the university or in your own nonprofit research lab and partnering with universities becomes more of an open question — especially in a world where university funding might fluctuate based on political developments.

I don’t know how that will play out over time, but we’re three months into a deeper shift in how institutional financing will happen. That could have big implications generally. On net, if the federal government doesn’t play its important role in funding research, it’s all a net negative. If federal funding returns to a healthy level, researchers will still take this as a wake-up call to think about structuring their research organizations to be more resilient against systemic shocks.

This episode is brought to you by ElevenLabs. I’ve been on the hunt for years for the perfect reader app that puts AI audio at the center of its design. Over the past few months, the ElevenReader app has earned a spot on my iPhone's home screen and now gets about 30 minutes of use every day. I plow through articles using Eleven Reader’s beautiful voices and love having Richard Feynman read me AI news stories — as well as, you know, Matilda every once in a while, too.

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Jordan Schneider: I observed the EAs being very excited about how many lives they save based on the bed nets they bought. Then you net that out against USAID no longer existing and all the human suffering that’s going to come out of that. The correct calculation may have been to spend all your money lobbying Congress to get people to focus on this.

I think both of us are pretty aligned — we’ve done other shows on immigration policy, university funding, and what’s happening to NSF and NIH budgets going forward. But why do Renaissance philanthropy when Kumar could be spending 100% of his time in D.C. banging on doors and trying to make it 5% more likely that we get an extra $10 billion a year for this stuff?

Kumar Garg: That’s a great question. Being policy-adjacent is generally very high ROI. No matter how you run the numbers, policy advocacy — especially on science and tech topics — punches above its weight, regardless of what you’re doing. It’s probably why I spent time in government as a policy staffer. It’s partly why, no matter what I’m doing, I’m constantly interacting with policymakers and making the case. It’s also why, when funders ask to what extent advocating on behalf of the research community should be part of their work, I’m strongly supportive.

The reason we structured Renaissance this way is that I wanted to specifically think about growing the pie of philanthropic funding because I thought no one was doing it. There are organizations working on policy advocacy. Very few organizations were trying to bring new donors into the mix.

We would be failing as an organization if we weren’t constantly thinking about how our work could impact shaping the debate on the future of R&D funding. We try to be in conversations with both Congress and the administration, as well as policymakers up and down the ladder, to say, “Here’s why this work matters, here’s why the future matters.”

Part of the new models we’re funding — whether it’s things like FROs or AI accelerating science — is to make the case for why investment should happen. Many of the ideas I’ve funded over the years, you can see echoes of in the new Heinrich legislation around accelerating science through AI, where they’re talking about ensuring these AI investments can actually accelerate the pace of science using new models.

Philanthropy, when done well, opens the aperture for what funding could do. Hopefully we’re playing that role. One area I’d like the conversation to reach is moving beyond this dialectic between “science is important” and “science needs to be dismantled because it made mistakes.” I’d like us to reach a place where we recognize there are important things we can do to help reform how we do science. We should bring more discipline to trying out new ideas, bringing in new funding methods and new voices, and reflecting on past mistakes — while also remembering that the investment agenda around science is critical for its utility. Hopefully we can be part of that dialogue.

In some ways, you’re pushing on something I think about all the time — I am a policymaker at heart. The deep utility of that shouldn’t be forgotten in my story.

Jordan Schneider: All right, I think the answer I would give to you is this is the federalist model of policymaking almost — as you said, the inventiveness that you guys can come up with from a form factor and discipline perspective when it comes to doing science and technology research is the type that’s weird enough that it’s not happening in government. But also, two, three, four years down the line, once you guys have some really awesome case studies, these are the sorts of things that can then get 10x or 100x in our gorgeous NSF circa 2027 that has been remade to fully align with the Kumar vision of how change gets made.

With that stance of optimism, let’s talk a little more in detail about some of the projects you guys have stood up. Take us on a little tour, Kumar. Where do you want to start?

Kumar Garg: I’ll go through a couple of the funds and projects we’ve launched. Just to give people a taste of how the model works, let’s start with our work in AI. Our operating theory in AI is that we’re living through a period of huge capability overhang. The idea is that the core technology is rapidly developing, but the number of people, projects, and overall work that actually applies these tools toward actual hard problems in society is really small.

I’ll give an example. We have an AI and education fund specifically focused on how AI can accelerate the pace of learning outcomes. If you follow social media and others, there are many people who write and talk about AI in education. It would give you the sense that a lot of people are working on AI in education. But if you actually dig into the space, the number of actual technical experts who have knowledge of both how education works and how AI works is still shockingly small.

We run something called the Learning Engineering Tools competition — an annual competition that invites tool developers to present cutting-edge ideas that use AI to actually advance learning outcomes. We’ve been running this competition for a couple years. I started it even before Renaissance and then brought it into Renaissance. That competition is the only large-scale ed tech competition in the world. It still blows my mind. No one is out there in a systematic way asking for sets of ideas from people who want to build AI for education.

We have another part of our AI education portfolio that specifically thinks about moonshots — what’s a really hard problem in education that AI could solve? We picked middle school math. It’s really important for advancing to future degrees, and students really struggle with it. We said, can you actually emulate the results of high-dosage tutoring, which the number of studies that J-PAL and others have done show can really double the rate of learning for students in math? Can you do it under $1,000 per kid — bring it under what would make it such that you could offer it to every kid?

We have that running as a program. We have seven teams in the program. We have two teams that are actually on track to potentially accomplish this goal.

Jordan Schneider: Which is wild, right?

Kumar Garg: When those teams are working on it and we ask them who they’re collecting lessons from, there’s not a big field they can go out to. When they go out and interview the AI labs — the ones that get written about every day — those AI labs talk about education, but they don’t have in-house education teams that can actually help these teams.

The biggest piece I would always say to people is that at the coal face, there’s tons of room to do work because when you actually start to work on it, you realize that the number of people who are actually working on it is shockingly small.

We’re now starting to explore our next moonshot area — should there be something that basically looks like the intersection of AI and early learning? Can we actually build a universal screener to best guess if a child is off track when it comes to early language development by having them speak into a device? There’s a bunch of interesting work happening in this area, but we don’t actually have a way to diagnose early learning challenges like dyslexia just by having a student speak into a device. It could vastly increase our ability to help them get to a speech pathologist, get back on track, and be reading by third grade, which is critical to future reading and learning.

That’s just one track — AI and education. That’s just one compelling thesis.

Jordan Schneider: Obviously AI is going to matter for education. Hard to find people to argue about that. Talk a little bit about finding the donors and finding the teams. What was the work that you guys had to do to make and launch this work?

Kumar Garg: What’s been interesting is it has been hard work for us to build out the team because the number of technical experts who actually know both things — AI and education — is small. We have slowly built out a team of ML experts who have educational backgrounds, basically. We call it a hub model. We basically have created an engineering hub and we recruit technical experts into it that specifically have this technical background.

I have somebody on my team, Ralph Abboud. He has a machine learning PhD, and he did his thesis on graph theory. He’s not an education expert, but we brought him onto the team. He has been working with a lot of these educational teams that we brought in. What’s interesting is that his ideas on what kind of language models they should be building are really good. It took him some time to level up on the education side, but now he is one of their highest value contributors, even though he sits on our team and he’s contributing there.

There is this transition where you can build up talent that sits across these two areas. But in AI and education we had to mostly build it. It was hard to immediately find directly. Now we have a constellation of these AI and education experts, some of which sit on our direct staff, some of which sit inside these teams that we’re betting on. It’s been great. Now we have a field team that can really go after more problems.

On the donor side, we’ve really lucked out. We found that our core donor for a lot of this work has been the Walton Family Foundation. They have a long history in funding education. What’s been interesting is that they’ve been interested in investing more in what they call their innovation portfolio, but didn’t know how to necessarily bridge that technical divide — if we’re going to do more in this area, who are going to be the technical experts who will actually do it? That had actually kept them more experimental. But their partnership with us has meant that they have become way more ambitious on how much investment they want to make on this technical AI and education lens.

That’s our core thesis — can we be the permission structure for donors to go much bigger on innovation? We’ve seen that in other areas. Slowly their support is causing other donors to come in as well. That’s basically whether you’ve been a long-standing donor but not active on science and tech topics, or you’re an early donor altogether.

Jordan Schneider: What’s the RenPhil management fee?

Kumar Garg: That’s a good question. We build our cost recovery into each fund. Usually the way that works is if we’re operating multiple funds, each fund has money going out the door for actual deployment grants, but then we’re building in our cost for the actual staff operating the funds, whatever services and technical support services we’re providing, the work we’re doing to partner with various funders, as well as our overall studio support. It varies fund to fund, but donors have found it — compared to having to try to do this themselves — much more actionable. For us, we want to build a thriving organization. We don’t want to cut corners. We want to build an organization that can both operate those funds and also be looking for the next ones.

Jordan Schneider: Does anyone complain about that?

Kumar Garg: The way it comes up is there’s a type of donor who actually has the answer in their mind. They’re thinking, “I think this needs to happen.” Really, what they’re looking for is an operating partner to just do that — “I want a conference, I want a workshop, I want to fund these three organizations.” Our model is we’re the product. You’re actually hiring us to go build out the strategy, recruit the team, deploy. If you actually have the answer in your head, we often tell them we’re way too fussy for that model. You should just — there are much simpler ways you can operate. That’s where the delta comes in. If you already have the answer in your head and you’re just looking for a partner to execute for you, we’re probably not the right fit.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, you said this on another show. You were like, “We are for donors to take off the cognitive load.” The idea of being: yes, if I have $10 billion, maybe I’ll allocate $1 billion investing in stuff I know and think I have some subject matter expertise in, but I still have to put the other $9 billion somewhere — probably not cash. Yes, I am comfortable paying a hedge fund or financial advisor a management fee to do that.

Kumar Garg: A big part of it is opt-in. People don’t know what journey they’re on, but what they worry about is: am I going to feel stuck? A lot of folks end up not getting active philanthropically because the decision feels weighted by getting stuck. “Okay, if I hire somebody, and then six months from now, I decide maybe I want to change direction. Now I’m going to have to let someone go.” People hate that.

Or, “I met a researcher. I liked their research. I gave them one grant. But now they’ve reached out and said, ‘There’s so much happening in the world — I’ve lost funding from the government. Can you double the grant?’ I was just giving them a grant because I met them and I thought they were great. But now they’ve sent me a note that they might have to let go of postdoc students. Now I’m in this uncomfortable situation. If I say no, I feel I’m hurting them. If I say yes…”

People have all these experiences where they feel uncomfortable with the relationship they have around their resourcing. Rather than causing them to work through it, they actually hold back. One of the things we say to them is that our model is one where we’re the ones making the decisions. We’re going out there, finding researchers, finding projects, developing strategies. You can be as involved as you want. You want to be meeting the researchers? That’s great. You want to be learning from the strategy so you can do direct giving down the road? That’s great. But if you also take six months off and decide, “That was great, I learned for a few months, now I’m off doing something else,” — nothing will stop. We’re a fully operational organization that will execute on everything we said we were going to do, whether you’re involved or not.

It just takes the pressure off. You can opt in if you want to learn and be involved, but you can also choose not to. That actually frees them up to want to learn without the “Am I about to get stuck?” That sounds very psychological, but people forget how hard it is to get going on things — “I’m going to start to work out more. I’m going to start to do this.” Starting is hard. We want to make starting easy by saying you can provide a lot of value into the system without necessarily having to own all of that execution.

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Jordan Schneider: There are a lot of pieces of people’s jobs that seem like more and more AI can chip away at or enable or launch or whatever. It’s interesting because some of the things that you guys are doing — you have these seven playbooks, ways you can tackle problems — I would love to upload seven of those to ChatGPT and say, “Here’s my problem in the world,” and the AI can help me pick through which one. But talking someone who’s really rich, who’s feeling uncomfortable about giving money, into starting to donate philanthropically in a serious way for the first time seems like one of the more human things where there’s really going to need to be the friendly Kumar Garg, who now has a nice microphone he can do Zoom calls with to — what did Derek Thompson say? — whisper the dulcet tones of comfort and competence in their ear in order to get them on this path. I don’t know, it just seems like a very human thing that you’re engaging in on the donor engagement side. I’m curious for any reflections you have on that.

Kumar Garg: We are very curious about how much of our own internal processes we can automate. Why not? We sit next to AI, we should be thinking, we should be dogfooding. The place where we’ve seen it already provide some value is just what you would consider baseline automations. There’s a lot of grantee reporting that you should be able to do automations on. We’re definitely interested in: hey, we have a hunch around a thesis in this area. Can you do a research report and tell me what’s the relevant stuff to know? Scoping. We’ve even used it for, “Hey, we might do an RFP on this topic. Who are some researchers who should apply?” Sometimes we found some interesting suggestions for researchers that we should affirmatively reach out to.

I will say that we’re still far away from it actually helping on anything that we would consider high stakes. As you’re saying, a huge amount of what we’re doing is making something that feels like a trust fall. Hey, this is an important decision, but one where people who take their job very seriously and put their own personal legitimacy behind the work is an important part of it. When we screw up, it’s on us. We stand behind all of the work. People appreciate that these are serious people who stand behind the work they’re putting before them. They’re not some faceless intermediary. I don’t think maybe that will change, but that’s an important part. Even on the information you should know about various people and stuff, these current AI models are not that great.

The place where I — we have this intuition that there should be parts of being a program leader that you should be able to have an AI assistant for. Right? You take more and more of the task of being a program leader or fund leader and be able to say, “Okay, I want to do a workshop on this topic. Generate me an agenda for how you would run the day.” It generates based on — it takes a bunch of your past workshop flows and generates a sample workshop design. How much of that can we create so that we really could get to a point where a program leader or fund leader is basically able to operate without that much additional support? Obviously we need to create some cross-cutting support that I’m interested in. But the chance that we’re going to get to an AI advisor — we’ll have to wait.

Jordan Schneider: The trust fall works in multiple directions. You need researchers to give up their PhD programs or leave their current positions to spend half their time with you, while simultaneously needing donors to provide funding. Having a recognizable face with a proven track record and skin in the game on the other side of that equation is something that won’t disappear anytime soon.

Kumar Garg: One thing we debate internally is that much of my workflow relies on tacit knowledge. When I’m talking to somebody about their work, twenty minutes into the conversation, I’ll say, “Tell me more about that. Why is the field stuck on this point?” They start describing it, and I realize that if there were a canonical dataset with specific dimensionality, it might solve the problem. When I ask why that doesn’t exist, they explain it’s locked up somewhere.

Part of me constantly strives to figure out how we can make this process more explicit. When we recruit somebody new to the team, they ask if they can sit in on my calls and watch me work through problems with researchers. There’s something that feels wrong about just saying, “You develop this intuitive feeling for opportunities — just pull on that thread.” The more we can transition from tacit to explicit knowledge, the better. Right now, we operate on an apprenticeship model where people learn by doing and being embedded in these structures, but I don’t think that has to be the endpoint.

Jordan Schneider: Much of what you do involves human matching — putting people in touch with each other. While you could potentially feed all your past calls into an AI system, there’s an emotional and personality matching component that you’re handling. That remains very much a human process that current models aren’t quite ready for yet.

Kumar Garg: The matching capability changes over time, but I think what people really value when I connect them is that I took time out of my day to think the two of them should know each other. That’s the actual signaling value — that my time is precious.

Jordan Schneider: Slight tangent, but if people want to establish trust and rapport, the first thing they should do is spend $150 on a microphone for their Zoom calls. That’s my recommendation for everyone. When I do my calls, I sound the same as I do on my podcast, and people respond positively. You feel like an embodied person rather than a compressed, distant voice through AirPods. It’s advice for anyone who wants to make connections and raise money from billionaires on Zoom.

Kumar Garg: I’ll echo that point, though I haven’t practiced it myself. There’s an old political adage about microphone technology. If you look back at politicians historically, there was a time when microphones couldn’t pick up subtle intonations well — speakers were just projecting loud sound. Once microphones could capture subtle intonations, politicians who excelled at that style of speaking began to dominate.

People point to President Clinton as an example — he was exceptionally skilled at subtle microphone use. I remember reading a paper arguing that this was possible because the technology had improved to support that communication style. Politicians offer good lessons here because ultimately, communication is central to building trust with the electorate. [Here are papers that explore this]

Jordan Schneider: Absolutely. If you listen to old clips of Warren Harding or Teddy Roosevelt speaking, they’re basically screaming into microphones — which was necessary at the time. Teddy Roosevelt was exceptionally good at that style of projection. You needed to be very loud to stand on a soapbox and reach people twenty rows back. Now we have the dulcet tones that modern microphones enable.

Here’s another fun fact, Kumar — the microphone I’m using has been manufactured for sixty years. It’s remarkable that microphone technology for voice pickup has essentially reached its peak — we’ve basically maxed out the capability.

Kumar Garg: I should try to find that paper I mentioned. I wonder if it’s about mobile situations — being in some random union hall where you need to set up a handheld mic in front of a politician. Perhaps that’s why microphone technology improvements became so important. That’s an interesting angle.

Jordan Schneider: I’m curious about that. Alright, shifting topics — Yascha Mounk recently wrote on Substack about attending gatherings, conferences, and dinners where leaders of America’s biggest foundations have been strategizing how to defend democracy. Few were as openly devoted to extreme forms of identitarian ideology as they might have been a few years ago, but the reigning worldview at the top of the philanthropic world assumes little has changed since summer 2020.

The general consensus holds that voters turned to Trump because American democracy failed to deliver for the “historically marginalized,” and the solution supposedly revolves around “mobilizing underrepresented communities.” The most urgent imperative is to “fight for equity” and “listen to the global majority.” I find this perspective fascinating. Kumar, as someone who’s a new entrant to this world, how do you interpret this?

Kumar Garg: Several different dynamics are happening simultaneously. Some philanthropic responses resemble dinner table conversations — people sharing hot takes about why the election unfolded as it did and offering their views on America or the American people. Much of this sounds as random as hosting a dinner party where guests share their political opinions.

There’s also a genuine state of confusion about what’s happening. The first hundred days of the Trump administration have been exceptionally active across a range of unexpected areas. Many people expected it to feel similar to the previous Trump presidency, so they examined their portfolio of issues and anticipated certain outcomes — but that’s not what materialized.

Regarding how much people are actually rethinking their approaches, that’s a valid question. The most immediate reconsideration I’m seeing centers on identifying what we’re missing. This is particularly evident in the science community, which is confronting devastating across-the-board cuts. Researchers are losing funding, university funding is being paused, and graduate students working on topics relevant to competitiveness are having visas revoked.

The community is asking, “We don’t remember this being a major campaign debate topic, so how exactly did we become a political football?” There’s extensive questioning about what we’re missing — whether there was a conversation we weren’t invited to where we were being discussed, and what we’re failing to understand.

While donors with certain political orientations likely won’t change their fundamental positions, the confusion centers less on American domestic politics and more on why certain issues became contentious. Foreign aid is a good example. The extent to which US foreign aid posture and system effectiveness became campaign issues wasn’t apparent during the election cycle. People are asking whether we missed a major debate that suggested the United States should dismantle its leadership on these topics overnight. What policy debate did we miss? That’s where much of the confusion originates — donors being puzzled about the sources of these developments.

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Jordan Schneider: There’s an interesting dichotomy between foundations with living leadership and those with deceased benefactors. Gates recently indicated he would spend down his wealth faster than previously planned, presumably responding to recent events. When foundations have active leadership that engages with current events, they can be more responsive.

However, when you have flagship philanthropists who died seventy-five years ago and organizations that have built programs around worldviews that are no longer relevant or don’t meet current demands, pivoting becomes much more difficult. You encounter institutional blockers, boards, and established structures, whereas a living person with decision-making authority can simply redirect resources.

Kumar Garg: That’s definitely part of it. The piece I’d add, which connects to our Renaissance model, is that people underestimate how much philanthropic organizations become tied to their existing programs. This isn’t necessarily negative, but consider the process: you spend two and a half years scoping a program, conducting field research on topics, then executing a national search for program leadership. You recruit and convince someone to relocate for the position, provide coaching for test grants, and they’re six to twelve months into the grant cycle.

If you then decide the world has changed and want to cut the program — after issuing press releases announcing this as a major new strategic direction — it appears chaotic. People develop what I call “portfolio regret.” If they could start fresh today, they’d create different programs than what currently exists.

One argument we make to donors is structuring themselves more like limited partners, deploying money into funds where all capital remains fresh and available. You avoid the incumbency problem where team members question every pivot attempt because they have specific responsibilities you hired them to fulfill.

Flexibility requires both mindset and structure. Donors sometimes create substantial built-in costs and barriers to pivoting when they could maintain lightweight, flexible operations if they chose to do so.

Jordan Schneider: That’s fascinating because you’d think giving money away would be straightforward — you should be able to distribute funds however you want. But the emotional sunk cost around philanthropy wasn’t something I had necessarily considered.

Kumar Garg: This creates a situation where people spend enormous amounts of time operating like a duck swimming on water — their feet are moving rapidly beneath the surface while they try to keep the strategy looking consistent above water, all while changing the actual content underneath to pivot to current circumstances. This leads to significant conceptual confusion because you claim to have always had this program, but underneath, the program is completely different because the situation changed.

Part of why I favor the philanthropic fund model is transparency — what’s on the cereal box is what you get. It’s a three-year fund with specific objectives that will begin and end. Maybe it’s not perfectly timely, and that’s fine, but your new program can be timely. The alternative — constantly maintaining broad programs that you’re perpetually reworking underneath — makes evaluation nearly impossible. If I ask whether a program has been successful, people respond that the program has been changing constantly. This makes it extremely difficult to evaluate it as a focused initiative that ran for a specific period with defined goals. Did we achieve those goals? People simply don’t engage in these basic evaluations.

For example, I was speaking with a donor and pointed out that in the investment world, people prominently display their successes — putting “first check into [major company]” in their Twitter bios to demonstrate their betting acumen. I asked, “Who are the ten best program officers in America? Who on the philanthropic side has been the most effective check writer?” They responded, “How would we even know that?” Even with qualitative measures, wouldn’t you want to identify the best check writers?

A fund model, even for philanthropic goals, enables more honest assessment. You can say that fund paid out successfully, that one was moderately effective, and another one failed completely. The person who led that fund can then take that track record to their next position as a legitimate career advancement. We deny people this opportunity when we maintain the fiction that we’ve always had these programs run by different people with slightly different strategies. This obscures rather than clarifies outcomes. We could simply be honest: we executed that fund, now we’re doing something new with a clear beginning and end.

Improving China Research + Why Bother?

Jordan Schneider: It’s remarkable. I’ve spent considerable time on foundation websites researching whether organizations like the Ford Foundation might fund ChinaTalk. They have mission statements about “democratizing equity,” which is admirable — I agree we should advance democracy and create more opportunities for people. However, the problem arises when you’re only a passive recipient of pitches. You’re essentially letting grantees define what success means, and the counterfactual becomes very difficult to assess. The organizations you’re funding would probably exist whether you give them $100,000, $500,000, or nothing at all.

The alternative approach would be starting with specific objectives — “We are trying to achieve X by Y timeline,” then working backward from that goal orientation to identify the people and organizations who can take your money and provide the highest probability of achieving that outcome. This approach is far more strategic, and my frustration isn’t about the politics of how they set their goals — it’s that they need to engage more seriously in the process.

Kumar Garg: Let’s work through this together. Imagine you and I were designing a fund model versus a program model for increasing collective intelligence on US-China relations.

There’s a vague way we could structure this — “This is the US-China program. It will have three tracks — funding scholars studying China, engaging policymakers about those insights, and warehousing data and research publications on these topics.” This resembles how most programs operate: they establish a broad framework with several tracks, then people apply under those categories. But if I asked what constitutes winning or how we’d know this program succeeded, you’d probably say, “Well, people applied and we distributed grants."

You could execute the same concept with much sharper focus by asking, “What would success look like in three years?"

Jordan Schneider: Exactly. I want ten books written that are so thoughtful and essential to the future of US-China relations and American policy that Ezra Klein would be compelled to feature these authors as guests because the thinking these grants produced is indispensable. Then we work backward from that goal to determine the budget.

We’d estimate the costs — ten books, assuming a one-in-five success rate for people with strong proposals to execute effectively, calculate the pipeline requirements, and arrive at a number that gives us a 75% confidence interval for producing those ten books by 2029.

Kumar Garg: Exactly. That approach feels like a sound tax strategy built on what resembles a very tight OKR, which you may completely fail to achieve. You might be wrong, but it’s precise. Then you build your strategy around that goal.

You find someone to execute it — let’s call it the Jordan Fund. If you succeed, people ask, “Jordan, how did you pull that off? You wrote down this ambitious goal, built a strategy around it, and executed successfully. You’re clearly skilled at this.” When you pursue your next initiative, you can say, “I ran this fund called the Jordan Fund. We set this audacious goal to produce ten bestsellers on US-China relations, and we achieved it."

This feels much more tangible as an actionable strategy — something that field leaders can point to as real-world impact, even if it fails. Let’s say you only achieve partial success — you still have concrete lessons. Compare that to “the US-China program makes some awards and does some things.” How do I assess whether that’s working?

Jordan Schneider: It’s remarkable because the market is so powerful — you can’t get away with this approach when running and scaling a business, especially when taking other people’s capital and trying to generate positive returns for them.

What’s curious, Kumar, is that very capitalist people become surprisingly touchy-feely when it comes to philanthropy. There’s an emotional layer where they think, “This is giving, so we shouldn’t apply business mindsets and OKRs.” It feels somehow dirty to them.

Kumar Garg: Here’s what’s important — we need to distinguish between current donors and potential donors. People focus extensively on today’s active donors, but if you examine the statistics on potential giving, current donors might represent only 1-2% of the actual addressable universe.

The question becomes, would we attract an entirely new class of donors if we brought this level of rigor, precision, and targeted approach to philanthropy? This would feel much more familiar to their professional experience.

Why don’t existing donors demand this rigor? I believe there’s significant pent-up interest in this approach. People oscillate between thinking, “Since this isn’t about making money, we’ll substitute with having a really complicated theory of action — that’s where we’ll apply our intellectual capacity.” I often say that just because something has numerous boxes and slides doesn’t substitute for having a clear attack vector.

Jordan Schneider: Exactly — rigorous thinking. The median nonprofit worker is about five times more likely to be socialist than the average person, so perhaps people more attracted to touchy-feely logic are simply concentrated in current organizations.

Kumar Garg: Sometimes the nonprofit and philanthropy sectors spend too much time engaging in collective mission statements, as if shared purpose alone is sufficient. But we actually have distinct roles to play, including making high-quality decisions about where to deploy finite resources. Because money is limited, you must make decisions strategically and place informed bets.

This may feel reductive, but it’s actually the responsibility inherent in this work. You must be a responsible steward because high-quality decisions produce more good. People sometimes struggle with that reality.

Jordan Schneider: Without high-quality decisions, you end up with USAID getting canceled. That’s our current reality. Organizations that weren’t evidence-based and couldn’t effectively justify their impact had some good projects and some poor ones. They faced criticism from small but vocal movements — organizations like Unlock Aid, whose founder we featured a few years ago and will have on again — arguing for more rigor because there was substantial waste and inefficiency.

If you let these issues fester too long, consequences follow. I don’t want to say universities, the NIH, or the NSF “had it coming,” but one of the best defenses you can have is a tight, well-justified organization that can stand up for itself.

Kumar Garg: I don’t want to engage in victim blaming, and I don’t want to excuse what I consider sometimes bad-faith behavior. However, your point about systemic advantages is valid — caring deeply about systemic impact and bringing that rigor and constant evaluation is useful for the work itself, but also valuable when those political fights emerge. You can say, “Look, we’re building something substantial."

In some of these cases, who knows what impact rigorous evaluation might have had. We’re living through unusual times, but I believe we’re gaining traction because there’s significant pent-up demand for this approach.

Jordan Schneider: Good. That makes me feel somewhat better, I suppose.

Kumar Garg: What should donors know about China? That’s my question for you.

Jordan Schneider: The original impetus for ChinaTalk was thinking about long-term national strategic competition and competitiveness from an industrial systems and technology perspective — identifying things people could do to nudge outcomes in liberal democracies’ favor. During the Biden era, I observed errors that legislation and executive action could fix with modest improvements — 5% here, 10% there. A sophisticated understanding of what’s happening in China could meaningfully help squeeze that extra 10% out of various decisions.

However, the policy changes we’ve witnessed over recent months regarding long-term strategic competition — how the US relates to allies, approaches to global nuclearization, science and technology funding, and immigration — are much more fundamental. Getting to a better place doesn’t require understanding what made BYD successful, how SMIC is developing its chips, or even China’s new AI policy. These are much more basic issues.

The thesis I operated under during the Biden era was that deeper, more considered understanding of China would lead to smarter policies. That’s now become a sideshow compared to more fundamental questions. If we accept the base case that science is important and immigrants are crucial for better science, then we should pursue those priorities directly. I would choose that approach ten times out of ten.

Returning to the order-of-magnitude questions I asked at the beginning, I would choose a NATO that functions as a genuine alliance ten times out of ten over determining the right tariff level for Chinese electric vehicles or batteries. That’s why I lean toward “be nice to allies” bumper stickers and NSF funding advocacy rather than tightly nuanced “we need to better understand China” approaches when considering ChinaTalk’s decadal competition mission.

Kumar Garg: One thing I’ve been considering, though I don’t have the answer yet, is what new institutions we need. Much of what I care about regarding how science operates in this country has been overturned. The idea that we’ll navigate this period with identical institutions seems unlikely — whether it’s who makes the case for science, who serves as science messengers, or how we conduct science itself.

This raises questions not just about policies, but about institutions themselves. Obviously Renaissance is part of that response, but I have broader concerns. We’ll probably need new institutions because the players on the field will have to change. Systemic change of this magnitude requires that everything else engage in significant adaptive change for us to succeed. That seems unlikely with current structures.

That’s a major meta-question I’ve been asking the team, “We won’t be able to handle everything directly, but what institutions would restore us to better footing? Do we have them? Do we need to create them?”

Jordan Schneider: I’m starting to focus my energy differently because I’m uncertain whether additional ChinaTalk podcasts about the importance of allies will accomplish much. However, one constant you can expect over the next four years is AI development and rapid technological change.

Regardless of controversial Trump policies, the Defense Department will persist, and America will still need to protect itself. America engages in conflicts approximately every three years, so that pattern will likely continue. Perhaps this is just me entering a kind of intellectual monk mode after dynastic change, but I’ve been reading extensive military history and examining periods of rapid technological change — specifically, what it means to deploy these tools more effectively than adversaries.

This doesn’t directly answer your question, but I’m pursuing intellectual journeys rather than policy ones.

Kumar Garg: Here’s what I’d say, which connects to the role you and ChinaTalk are playing. One thing I mentioned to Jordan before we started is that frequently when people reach out to me, they reference hearing a great ChinaTalk episode. You may not have set out to do this, but you’re playing a valuable role in shaping how other people — especially technical professionals — think about problems worth solving and their mental frameworks for our current age.

People are seeking understanding and meaning in this moment. The question isn’t about marginal additional podcasts, but whether you’re providing people with new vectors for their lives and careers. When we first met, you described yourself as a nerd passionate about these topics but uncertain where to channel that energy. You’ve created something quite distinctive.

We might be living in an era of unusually shaped careers, and we need to give people more space for that kind of professional evolution.

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Jordan Schneider: That’s fair. Some of this material feels obvious to me but may not be obvious to people who don’t live and breathe these topics daily. It’s strange because I don’t feel like I’m part of some resistance movement — I’m just a guy with opinions on various issues. Some days I wake up feeling helpless, others I feel genuinely empowered. This isn’t a direct response to your question, but that’s my reality.

Kumar Garg: You’re reasoning in public. You’re expanding people’s understanding of how to think through these complex issues and broadening their sense of who engages in this work. What I consistently observe is that people operate in highly siloed environments. They’ll mention their sources, and I immediately know exactly who they’re reading or listening to.

If you can expand their perspective while providing actionable next steps, that’s valuable. Part of my goal is always emphasizing that there are numerous hard, interesting problems to solve across every arena. No arena is the wrong one. People who dismiss politics are missing a crucial point — we’re all living within political systems whether we acknowledge it or not. Don’t dismiss any arena; simply understand that there are multiple dimensions to engage with. There are challenging problems to solve, and nobody benefits if you just remain a passive observer in the cheap seats.

Jordan Schneider: Perhaps the way I justify all my World War I reading is that no one else is doing this specific work. I’m bringing historical insights to current issues as someone who also reads contemporary news and has the freedom to spend ten hours weekly on intellectual journeys exploring topics I consider relevant to today. That seems like a natural conclusion.

Kumar Garg: We’ll do an update in a year. Hopefully, the republic endures.

Jordan Schneider: Kumar, you need to set ambitious goals for yourself — accomplish so much that I have to bring you back in six months.

Kumar Garg: Absolutely. One of our primary goals is becoming more international. We have a partnership with the British government to develop their R&D ecosystem, and we want to expand that model to additional countries. We’re building an organization that continues to internationalize because science and technology are inherently global.

I’m hoping our fund model will attract new donors who have never engaged in philanthropy before. Beyond discussing our approach, I want the actual work to manifest tangible results in the world.

Jordan Schneider: Contact info@renphil.org if you’re wealthy, have innovative ideas, or simply have a technology-related challenge you need help addressing.

Kumar Garg: I’m also available on LinkedIn — please reach out. We consider ourselves fundamentally a talent network, so I’m always eager to connect with people who have compelling ideas.

Jordan Schneider: We should do a little parent corner. We’ll keep this as part of the annual check-in. We talked about slime last year.

Kumar Garg: We did. Here’s something we discussed before we started recording — I asked you about sleep training, and you mentioned being hesitant to push sleep training advice on others. I’m strongly convinced that sleep training is a gift you give your children. We had twins and committed to sleep training. They’re eleven years old now and remain excellent sleepers today. We attribute this directly to that early sleep training.

For any parent listening who’s on the fence and wants random advice from someone they’re hearing — I can’t offer this to everyone, but I usually tell people I know that I’m always happy to be anyone’s texting buddy, providing extra support to get through those terrible first few days when it feels like you’ve made a horrible mistake. On the other end, you have children who can sleep well, which benefits everyone.

Jordan Schneider: I’m with you. I outsourced this decision to my mother — maybe one of the best decisions of my life.

What’s a cute development we’ve observed recently? I bought a ukulele two years ago, thinking it would be nice to play with my kid. What’s been charming is that my daughter is nine months old now, and there was a period where her manual dexterity only allowed her to grab the strings and pull them. But one day she figured out plucking, and now she’s actually plucking the strings. It’s such a cool activation moment for her — realizing “I make the sound now” instead of just dragging this thing around the room.

Kumar Garg: The period from nine months to eighteen months is truly remarkable. You’re approaching walking and first words, then vocabulary takes off exponentially. It’s incredible developmental progress, so I’m very excited for you.

Jordan Schneider: Perfect. Let’s wrap it up there. Kumar, thank you so much for being part of ChinaTalk.

Kumar Garg: Thank you for everything you’re doing. I’m excited to have participated and look forward to future conversations.

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Today we’re running an interview of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei that made it to the front page of yesterday’s People’s Daily, the premier Party outlet.

What struck out to me in the Q&A was just how hard he hit on the importance of basic research to long term competitiveness. “Without basic research,” Ren says, “there are no breakthroughs, and we’ll never catch up with the U.S.” The People’s Daily giving Ren Zhengfei the airtime to promote this view underscores just how central China’s leadership today sees this work.

We’ve covered the US side of how the Trump administration may be killing our golden goose in this regard with its treatment of the NSF, NIH, university ecosystem and immigration system in recent episodes on America’s R&D Reckoning, our interview with Josh Wolfe of Lux, and a recent op-ed on the war on S&T talent.

This translation also serves as a reminder to subscribe to ’s excellent and meditative daily People’s Daily recaps in his substack Tracking People’s Daily.

"The more open a country is, the more it drives us to progress" — A Dialogue with Ren Zhengfei

By reporters Hu Jian and Chen Jiaxing People's Daily (June 10, 2025, Page 1)

Recently, at Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, focusing on some hot topics of public concern, a group of People's Daily reporters had an in-person interview with Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei.

Q: Facing external blockades and pressure, encountering many difficulties, what are your thoughts?

A: I haven't thought about it—thinking about it is useless. Don't think about difficulties—just get on and do it [干就完了] and move forward step by step.

Q: Ascend chips have been "warned on" about usage risks [BIS . What impact does this have on Huawei?

[BIS in mid-May warned firms anywhere in the world that using Huawei Ascends, which were almost certainly fabbed by TSMC under false pretenses, would be considered a violation of export controls. The Information recently reported that “The fallout [from this BIS action] was swift: one Chinese data center firm promptly halted even the small order of Huawei chips it had planned to make, while its legal team scrambled to understand how it could comply with the regulations, according to one person with direct knowledge of the change. Meanwhile, executives at ByteDance and Tencent, both of which have significant business footprints outside China, worry adopting Huawei chips would invite scrutiny from the U.S. government, according to people familiar with their thinking.”]

A: There are many chip companies in China, and many of them are doing quite well—Huawei is just one of them. The US has exaggerated Huawei's achievements; Huawei isn't that formidable yet. We need to work hard to live up to their assessment. Our single chips are still one generation behind the US.

[The incentives are interesting here. On the one hand you have Jensen Huang going around saying Huawei is an enormously powerful competitor who dropped Nvidia’s China market share from 95% to 50%—even though, as the Information very generously put it, “Market share data to confirm Huang’s statement is hard to find.” Jensen, of course, wants the US government to lift export controls not on semiconductor manufacturing equipment but his ability to sell AI chips and racks into China.

The Chinese government and Huawei have every incentive to sandbag Huawei and SMIC’s capacity to compete. They’ve deeply internalized the backlash from Made in China 2025 and want the Trump administration to think that easing export controls on inputs to semiconductors and not investing in the state capacity to enforce the current ones is less of a give than it appears.]

We use mathematics to compensate for physics, non-Moore's to compensate for Moore's [用数学补物理、非摩尔补摩尔], and cluster computing to compensate for single chips. In terms of results, we can still achieve practical applications.

[For more color here, see SemiAnalysis’ coverage of the CloudMatrix 384, Huawei’s answer to Nvidia’s rack solutions]

Q: If there are difficulties, what are the main ones?

A: Difficulties are just difficulties—when hasn’t humanity faced them? Wasn't slash-and-burn agriculture difficult? Wasn't the Stone Age difficult? When humans used stone tools, how could they have imagined high-speed rail? China has opportunities in mid-to-low-end chips, with dozens or hundreds of chip companies all working very hard. Especially in compound semiconductors, the opportunities are even greater. For silicon-based chips, we use mathematics to compensate for physics, non-Moore's to compensate for Moore's, utilizing cluster computing principles to meet our current needs. Software cannot be strangled [卡不住脖子]—it's mathematical graphical symbols, code, and advanced operators and algorithms stacked together, with no barriers blocking it. The real bottlenecks lie in education and talent pipelines. China will eventually have hundreds or thousands of operating systems supporting progress in Chinese industry, agriculture, healthcare, and more.

Q: Huawei is getting a lot of praise and public recognition these days.

A: Praise brings pressure. A bit of scolding keeps us clear‑headed. We make products; once people use them they will criticize—that’s normal. We allow criticism. As long as people tell the truth—even if it’s negative—we welcome it. Praise or blame shouldn’t matter; what matters is whether we can do our job well. If we do, there’s no problem.

Q: From your attitude toward difficulties and criticism, we sense you have a strong inner core—not caring whether it's praise or criticism, but firmly doing your own work well. This should be an important reason why Huawei has come this far.

A: There's still too much praise for us. People should pay more attention to understanding those engaged in basic research. They are highbrow and solitary [曲高和寡—literally ‘difficult songs find few singers’], ordinary people don't understand them, and it takes decades or centuries to see their contributions. Groundless accusations against them are detrimental to the country's long-term development. We need to understand and support those doing theoretical work. We need to understand their broad-mindedness—their great anonymity is our country's hope. Don't elevate one while suppressing another; those engaged in theoretical research are the hope of our nation's future.

"Basic research scientists are lonely—we must have strategic patience and understand them"

Q: How do you view basic research?

A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.

Q: Regarding basic research, people might not understand the point of it.

A: Scientific breakthroughs—there are inherently few people in the world who understand them, so those who don't understand shouldn't evaluate them. Einstein's discovery that light bends was only proven a hundred years later. In Guizhou, there's an agricultural scientist named Luo Dengyi. In the 1940s, when analyzing the nutritional components of fruits and vegetables, he discovered a wild fruit called cili [刺梨] with very high vitamin content. China was still in the Anti-Japanese War period, education levels were low, and few understood. Later he wrote a paper saying cili was the "King of Vitamin C." After nearly a century, Guizhou has made it into a natural vitamin-rich cili beverage, a luxury item among vitamin drinks at nearly 100 yuan per bottle, highly sought after. The cili industry has become a channel for farmers to escape poverty and become prosperous. Only then did people truly recognize Luo Dengyi, who worked at a broken table during the flames of the anti-Japanese war.

[A deep cut by Ren Zhengfei here but this does look incredibly tasty!]

Q: Many results that look irrelevant at first yet turn out to be hugely useful.

A: Theoretical scientists are lonely; we must have strategic patience and empathize with them. Tu Youyou’s discovery of artemisinin is one case; So was Huang Danian, who embodied "exploring innovation and serving the country with utmost sincerity." The symbols, formulas, and thinking in their minds can only be communicated with by a few people in the world. We must respect theoretical scientists because we don't understand their culture. Society must be tolerant, and the nation must be supportive.

Q: Basic research takes a long time, but companies must deliver returns.

A: We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed. Without basic research, there are no breakthroughs, and we’ll never catch up with the U.S. [没有理论就没有突破，我们就赶不上美国].

Q: That’s true long‑termism. We heard Huawei even has a “Huang Danian Tea‑Thinking Room.”

A: Professor Huang was a great scientist. China noticed him during the Gulf War: the U.S. used a pod under helicopters to detect Saddam’s buried weapons and destroy them instantly—that pod had been developed by Huang at a UK university. He later resigned from his UK university position and taught at Jilin University. He spent his own money to get a 40 m² room, offering free coffee so students could “absorb cosmic energy over a cup of coffee.”

[Honestly this looks pretty lame, Huawei didn’t do the guy justice with this underwhelming study hall]

We have his family’s authorization to use his name for a non‑profit online platform—the Huang Danian Tea‑Thinking Room—where anyone can freely access global scientific information.

We also keep the “mouth of the funnel” wide open for basic research, partnering with universities. These are strategic investments with no performance metrics. Internally, we accept that we don’t know when theoretical work will bear fruit and impose no demands on the scientists.

“One purpose of socialism is to advance society”

Q: [A cringe leading question here…] Economist Richard Wolff and others argue that the U.S. lacks a high‑speed rail system because capitalism demands profit, while China’s socialist approach values social benefit: high‑speed rail, heavy‑haul lines, advanced power grids, expressways, rural cement roads, irrigation works, power plants… none make money directly, yet they underpin modernization. Competitive goods, meanwhile, are market‑regulated. What’s your view?

A: Why is it that only socialism tackles unprofitable tasks? One goal of socialism is precisely to develop society. China’s socialist market‑economy model is a magnificent undertaking. In infrastructure we had to follow this path—otherwise high‑speed rail, expressways, dams and so on would never have been built.

Q: What’s your outlook on AI?

A: AI might be humanity’s last technological revolution—barring perhaps fusion power. It will take decades or centuries to unfold. No need to worry; China has many advantages. [This line made leadlines in non-Party media]

Q: What advantages?

A: Hundreds of millions of young people—they’re the nation’s future. The General Secretary has said a nation’s strength rests on cultural flourishing. Technically, AI hinges on ample electricity and advanced networks. China’s power generation and grids are excellent; its communications network is the world’s most developed. The “Eastern Data, Western Computing” vision can become reality. [For more, see ChinaTalk’s past coverage of EDWC.]

Q: Anything else?

A: Chip worries are unnecessary: with stacking and clustering, our computing outcomes match the state of the art. As for software, open‑source ecosystems numbering in the thousands will meet society’s needs. [Wait, earlier in this interview I thought we were stressed about how behind Chinese chips were…?]

Q: How do you see China’s future?

A: After leaving our company, Tom Friedman bought a second‑class high‑speed‑rail ticket on his own to experience China. He later wrote, “I’ve seen the future, and it’s not in America.” [See ChinaTalk’s interview with Ezra Klein where I discuss this Tom Friedman piece with him. I, for one, would not take cues on analyzing China from Tom, who said in his Ezra interview that “Whether I’m writing about China from Washington, or whether I’m writing about China from China, I’m always just writing about America. My goal is to use China as my permanent Sputnik.”]

Q: Friedman said in that piece: “What makes China’s manufacturing juggernaut so powerful today is not that it just makes things cheaper; it makes them cheaper, faster, better, smarter and increasingly infused with A.I.”

A: Fundamentally, algorithms aren't in the hands of IT people, but in the hands of electrical experts, infrastructure experts, coal experts, pharmaceutical experts, and experts from various industries. At the practical level, Chinese manufacturing's application of artificial intelligence is very rapid, and many Chinese models will emerge.

Q: What support do private enterprises need from the state for their development?

A: Rule of law and marketization, with government administration according to law and regulations. Enterprises should focus mainly on value creation, technological breakthroughs, law compliance, and legal taxation. This harmonious development model will gradually release economic vitality.

Q: How do you view openness and development?

A: The country is becoming increasingly open, and openness will drive us to greater progress. Under Party leadership, the nation is administratively unified with smooth policy implementation. The gradual formation of a unified large market is possible and will certainly break through all blockades to achieve great rejuvenation.

[Ren Zhengfei of course got the seat of honor during the the Feb 17 Symposium featuring Xi which doubled as the Party’s olive branch to its leading S&T firms. We covered this meeting here on Xi’s Hard Tech Avengers.]

For more, see other core Ren Zhengfei speeches we’ve translated.

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为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台：游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com）
这世界的辽阔和美好，游荡者知道。使用过程中遇到问题，欢迎联系客服邮箱wanderservice2024@outlook.com.

【和放学以后永不失联】订阅放学以后Newsletter，每周三收到我们发出的信号：afterschool2021.substack.com 点击链接输入自己的邮箱即可（订阅后如果收不到注意查看垃圾邮箱）。如需查看往期内容，打开任一期你收到的邮件，选择右上角open online，就可以回溯放学以后之前发的所有邮件，或谷歌搜索afterschool2021substack查看。

截至目前，放学以后Newsletter专题系列如下：“在世界游荡的女性”系列、“女性解放指南”系列、“女性浪漫，往复信笺”系列、莫不谷游荡口袋书《做一个蓄意的游荡者》系列、“莫胡说”系列”《创作者手册：从播客开始说起》,播客系列和日常更新等。

本期放学以后信号塔由莫不谷轮值！

我之前在放学以后播客《我不要只做世界的承受者，我要对这个世界一顿发起！》设置了一场思想实验，其中就一个问题（是否支持世界其它生物也能和人类一样轮流主宰世界）我们battle了好几个小时。我们在这期播客合作的“不朽真龙”在它们的播客首页也有很多关于人类根本性问题的思想实验甚至实际实验的讨论，感兴趣的朋友们可以去不朽真龙的播客首页查看。比如这一期关于人可以活到1000岁的思想实验乃至“真实预言”，可能会对大家当下的焦虑和执念有很多启发。

为什么要对假设的问题，思想实验的问题这么投入呢？

因为恰恰是每一个假设的问题，最能引发人最真实的反应，继而这反应又会暴露人在这个社会生存所持有的立场，站位和根本性的观点。你问一个真实存在的问题，所有人因为利益相关和名誉脸面遮遮掩掩。你问一个假设的问题，大家会毫无意识地袒露无疑。

我非常喜欢此类的思想实验，甚至觉得它应该做成桌游用于一些新朋友或者老朋友的聚会，不然能火速破冰，从small talk进入deep talk，还有可能引发非常激烈的交锋和亲密，能把平淡的聚会和交谈搞得热火朝天，即使产生了争论也会尽兴而归。

最近我又看到了更惊人且更好的思想实验，我自己在家看的过程中激动不已，且已经在脑中想象了好几个朋友和我共处一室，我把这个思想实验分享给大家，正等待大家的反应，房间里落针可闻。

这个思想实验来自于格雷格·伊根的科幻小说集《祈祷之海》中《恰如其分的爱》这一篇，当然其它篇《学习成为我》《植入的公理》《水晶之夜》也都是精彩且伟大的思想实验，但是《恰如其分的爱》非常值得用来分享给所有的华人女性或者全体女性。因为它对在父权社会中长大的女性，用最精妙的实验设计，问出了那个最核心的问题：为了爱，你的自我究竟可以让渡多少？

(图源自Pinterest)

在介绍这个精妙至极的思想实验前，我想先热烈地赞美一下这本书，献上我的爱意和敬意。同时也向在游荡者平台向我推荐这本书的朋友致谢，当时这位朋友听完了我的单口播客《美妙人生的关键：让我们一起来扭一扭它》后发现我对数学感兴趣给我留言推荐了这本书，而里面关于数学的那一篇实话实说我没有全部看懂，但是其它篇却把我从地面抛上了云端。

现在这本书的作者格雷格·伊根，她已经（对的我认为作者是女性）是成为我心目中最好的科幻作家，没有之一！除了数学那一篇外，其余几乎每一个讨论和思想实验都写出了我的心声，倘若我能写出来这些我感觉自己可以明天死去也能含笑九泉的程度。这部作品是我理想中的我自己的顶格上限：就是我足够有激情，活力，努力，充分探索了我的才华，我最好最好能写出来的作品。

在阅读的过程中，我发现了她堪称伟大和神性的创作秘诀：她让我的情绪，身体反应，精神活动，处在不同的海拔。读者能在同一时间同一地点看到海平面和高山，思维的起伏落差带来精神蹦极的感受。热爱思维活动的人会体验一波又一波的精神高潮，不热爱思维活动的人会觉得身心疲倦。

庆幸的是，这里只有一个实验，因此无论你疲累还是振奋，它都足够能让你沉浸。

现在，实验来了：

你最挚爱的人A（书中是该女性的丈夫，你可以代入此刻你最挚爱的任何人，我们此处称它为A）出了车祸，身体被撞得一片稀烂，无法修复，大脑未死亡。A想要像车祸之前一样正常活着，就需要一副新的身体。

现在是一个科学更发达的时代，可以让其它女性用子宫孕育一个A的克隆身体（仅身体，无大脑），等这个无脑身体孕育并生产出来，会通过2年的时间加速生长A如今年岁的身体状态。这部分费用保险公司全部报销。

而在等待克隆人身体长大的时间，A原本的大脑需要被保存，而保存的方式有2种： 1.价格极其高昂的医学保存手段，这部分的高昂费用保险公司不报，你也完全支付不起。

2.伤者的女性家属可以用自己的子宫来怀着伤者的脑子，怀2年，等克隆身体在2年内发育好了，就可以从你的子宫取出A的大脑完成移植，A恢复成车祸之前的样子。对此保险公司不会支付你任何费用。

此时此刻，你肯定有诸多疑问：

1.为什么科学已经发达到可以克隆人类身体并2年内加速生产到成年人的地步，还需要女性来孕育克隆体和子宫保存大脑？

答：因为父权社会从来如此，无论技术多发达，能免费使用女性，那还费尽心思发明什么其它方法呢？

2.为什么保存大脑的费用保险公司不报呢？

答：因为保单条款里写着伤者的直系家属需要承担护理义务，保险公司不为家属的护理义务付费。倘若家属不愿意承担相应的护理义务，要把这部分义务外包，那保险公司不报销外包费用。用女性家属的子宫保存伤者的大脑，属于相应的护理义务。

3.你听到这里可能会更火大，其它女性用子宫花10个月的时间孕育克隆身体起码得到了保险公司支付的费用，你花两年的时间用自己的子宫保存伤者的大脑，什么也没得到？

答：因为你这本质属于家务劳动，女性的家务劳动，在父权社会从来都是无偿的，这一点保险公司很明白，它们不会给家务劳动支付报酬。此刻你肯定很恨保险公司。

4.还有其它选择吗？

答：当然你也可以放弃用自己的子宫来保存，A就此殒命，保险公司正好也不用支付高昂的克隆身体的费用，省了一大笔钱。你们买的保险最后什么也没用上，白白支付了保费，保险公司才是最赚的。你对保险公司的恨意更深。

基于以上所有实验条件和实验解释：你要做出何种选择呢？

“你问我爱你有多深？爱你有几分”

现在这个实验选择代表你的心。

你恰如其分的爱，究竟有几分？

为了爱，为了恨，你究竟能让渡自我几分？

这个实验精妙至极的点是它把一切条件都推到极致，却又设置地精准非凡。每一个都有现实对照，且意味深远。

其中有重大的道德考验：你要用其它女性的身体来代孕自己所爱之人的身体吗？这对其它女性不是一种剥削吗？现实社会正发生着无数这种剥削，而保险公司为这个剥削全部付费？你的道德压力会因此减轻吗？

有对父权社会最深刻的讽刺：女性的身体是最好且廉价的利用工具，科学进步用来解放人类，但不解放女性；女性承担的家务劳动是无偿的，这一点多进步的科学社会也依然要保留；女性是如何自我说服应该去爱去奉献去牺牲去献祭自我的。

还有最可怕的自我拷问：我要为所爱之人（尤其是丈夫，是男性）让渡出自己的身体吗？爱被渲染地如此伟大，我口口声声说爱它，倘若我却放弃用自己的子宫救它，我是真的爱吗？我会被指责自私无情吗？我真的了解一个东西放在我的子宫里2年，我所要经历孕期反应和全部后果吗？女人拥有子宫，究竟是福还是孽的？倘若今天受伤的是我，我期待我的女性家属和男性家属为我做出什么呢？

继而这些问题又会被提出：女性能接受自己被剥削吗？能接受其它女性被自己的丈夫，保险公司乃至隐身的自己剥削吗？只不接受前者，却接受了后者，这样的女性是“自我以上人人平等，自我以下阶级分明”吗？两个女性谁更惨呢？因为代孕科隆身体的女性起码还得到保险公司付的钱吧，代孕自己丈夫脑子的女性获得了什么呢？

书中的这位女性做出了决定：同意用自己的子宫来保存丈夫的脑子（这也意味着同意了保险公司找另一位女性孕育丈夫的克隆身体）。

她做出选择的原因是：“我突然后知后觉地意识到，保险公司那样粗鲁地挑衅我，其背后可能另有深意。毕竟，如果我任由克里斯死去，他们不仅可以省下生物生命维持那微薄的成本（要是我同意提供租费全免的子宫），还可以省下昂贵的替换身体的费用。这不就是蓄意为之的粗鲁行为，再加上一点儿对逆反心理的巧妙利用嘛……

要想保持理智，我唯一能做的就是打破这种狗屁伎俩；无论环球保险公司耍什么阴谋诡计，我都不放在心上；我身怀他的大脑，并不是因为受到胁迫，也不是出于内疚或义务，更不是为了证明自己不会被操纵，而仅仅是因为：我爱他爱得足够深，我想要拯救他的生命”。

对保险公司阴谋诡计的恨意，加上对丈夫“足够深”的爱意，她做出了如上的决定。

而在决定后她饱尝孕育的痛苦，同时在想另一位也在孕育克隆身体的女性：“我从未见过那副新身体的“母亲”，也从未见过那个尚未长大时的克隆人。不过，得知那个东西出生后，我确实在琢磨，她是否觉得自己的“正常怀孕”过程和我的非正常“怀孕”过程一样煎熬。我想知道，哪一个更好受些：是怀上一个由陌生人DNA培育，没有人类思想潜力、大脑受损的婴儿状物体？还是怀上自己爱人的休眠大脑？哪一种状态更易陷入一种出格的、忘乎所以的爱？”

韩炳哲在《爱欲之死》这本书（不推荐这本书）里有定义纯粹之爱的最基本条件：要求一个人有勇气消除自我。

实话实说，古往今来，古今中外，没看到多少男性为了爱消除自我。而女性则被整个社会哄骗着，鼓励着，教育者，激发着为爱消除自我，无论是出借自己的子宫为男性传宗接代，还是奉献金钱，无偿的家务劳动，真挚真诚能滋养男性的绵延爱意，历程堪称“前仆后继，继往开来”，甚至社会主流一度还把这些举动命名为“勇敢”。“勇敢去爱”的口号激励或者说诱惑了起码好几代女性。

而如今庆幸的是：爱欲在全世界范围内呈现出了消退乃至消亡之态。韩炳哲说这是爱死了。我觉得不是。

Nee(荷兰语的no)，不是爱死了，而是：

（接下来是我的暴言，我说是暴言，是为了不冒犯到一些并不想真正讨论这个问题，只想合理化自己选择的人。并不意味着我真心以为自己说的是“暴言”。有时候在中文世界，人必须污名自己，来减少那些主动来看别人的观点，继而宣称自己被观点伤害，四处出动当“受害者”，却对真正的加害者充耳不闻的人出现在这里。-我在这里用了长难句的定语也是为了增加阅读难度的同时劝退那些人出现在这里。

以及对这样的人有最后一句建议：倘若你不愿意找到你人生真正的加害者，不愿意去看自己受害和痛苦的原因，而是去攻击和想要消除指出这些伤害和加害的人。那你所收到的伤害和痛苦注定会长久延续和指数升级。You are doomed.）

因此这是暴言也是更直接的实话分割线,也可以在游荡者平台，放学以后的公众号和爱发电解锁）。除了我的暴言，我提出来的一个直接的问题和我的答案，霸王花在提前看完文章后也给我发来了她的答案，可以说相当荒谬，在她同意放出来警示其它有同样想法的朋友后，我也贴在了下面。

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Has America already lost its dynamism in basic research? Josh Wolfe, co-founder of Lux Capital, joins the podcast today to discuss.

We get into…

• Why the Trump-Elon fallout matters less than you probably think,

• How much payoff corporate leaders are reaping from their campaign to appease Trump,

• The erosion of the U.S. research ecosystem, and how we should think about philanthropic giving amid that chaos,

• Parenting, strategies for emotional resilience, why short videos aren’t terrible, and the history of the machine gun

It’s a good interview. Listen on Spotify, iTunes, or your favorite podcast app.

Dreams of the Tech Right Meet Reality

Jordan Schneider: We have to start with Trump and Elon. I’ll let you pick the frame.

Josh Wolfe: I’m going to take a contrarian position — it’s irrelevant. It’s irrelevant because it dominates front-page news and captures everyone’s attention. I joked yesterday that if you were planning fraud or were a terrible company with bad news, yesterday was the perfect day to release it while everyone focused on this inevitable outcome.

People were making predictions six months ago — over/under bets on whether it would last three months or maybe a year.

Jordan Schneider: There were actual betting markets created for this.

Josh Wolfe: Exactly. You were betting under a year, maybe over three months, but none of this was surprising. This was an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object — kinetic chaos was inevitable. Elon served as a useful foil for Trump and did an excellent job helping him win the election. They were strange and unusual bedfellows.

Trump has historically been a strong China hawk, albeit with nuanced moments regarding Xi Jinping. Meanwhile, Elon depends heavily on China in ways people don’t fully appreciate — particularly Tesla’s production levels and the profit margins China contributes.

Jordan Schneider: Well, the China Talks audience understands this, but perhaps not everyone does.

Josh Wolfe: Right, not the broader ecosystem. This creates a significant vulnerability. You’ll see Elon Musk historically position himself as an outspoken advocate of free speech — though whether Twitter was genuinely about free speech is debatable. I’m more cynical about his true aims.

What you’ll never see him discuss publicly is anything about China. He’ll never criticize Xi for human rights abuses in Xinjiang province or regarding the Uyghurs, and he’ll never mention Tiananmen Square. Nothing. It’s “Free speech for thee, but not for me” when it comes to China.

Inevitable clashes were bound to occur. Was this really about the spending bill, or something deeper? When the leaks started — clearly planted by the White House over the past five days about drug use, and then the Epstein connection — it became salacious and interesting for everyone, but none of it was surprising.

My position is that it doesn’t matter. It’s similar to tariffs — Trump campaigned on tariffs, Democrats attacked him, saying he’d implement tariffs that would be economically troublesome. I don’t understand why these developments are surprising when they shouldn’t be.

Jordan Schneider: Speaking about your profession, many people in the tech ecosystem — particularly with the rise of the tech right throughout 2023 and 2024 — pinned their hopes on this man, similar to how Elon did. They hoped that by being inside the tent, they could influence policy trajectory. From my perspective, benchmarking to June 6, 2025, this has been pretty dramatically disappointing.

What are your reflections on that psychological arc? Are these guys all just patsies?

Josh Wolfe: During November and December of 2024, I remember peak rhetoric around the zeitgeist of America’s golden age. All you could hear was “we’re back, baby” and these ridiculous 1980s Top Gun-infused, Hulk Hogan maverick-style videos celebrating America.

Jordan Schneider: Sure.

Josh Wolfe: I told my wife, who runs an activist public hedge fund and manages our personal money, “We need to buy long, deep out-of-the-money puts” because all I heard was “to the moon” and “American greatness.” It felt like an echo chamber of optimism.

Two to three months ago when the tariffs hit, those positions performed very well in our portfolio. We’ve been relatively unaffected on the venture side.

One area where real change is happening — and it’s always dangerous to say “this time is different” — but it feels very different: defense. We’re seeing a combination of a nearly trillion-dollar budget and a huge shift toward autonomous systems, AI-driven software systems, and space satellites. Remember, Space Force was an absolute joke eight years ago.

Jordan Schneider: Okay, we’re pivoting a little…let’s stay on track.

Josh Wolfe: But this is where the venture world has made noise and impact. There are sympathies, appreciations, and influence, particularly in tech and defense.

Jordan Schneider: Sure.

Josh Wolfe: Regarding everything else: you had everyone pledging fealty, taking a knee, and donating a million dollars to the inauguration campaign. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Satya, Sundar — they were all paying homage to Trump, hoping to escape DOJ, FTC, or antitrust scrutiny. How that plays out remains to be determined.

The Trump-Elon situation was both weird and destined to end inevitably. There will be some strange reconciliation, and they’ll be bros again. But I don’t think this is just about the spending bill — it’s much deeper.

Jordan Schneider: One of the things the tech right didn’t price in is what’s happening around immigration and the basic research ecosystem. Let’s start with basic research. There’s this argument that we don’t need the NSF or NIH because corporate R&D has increased significantly over the past 30 years and can drive innovation forward.

As an investor who focuses on scientifically ambitious investing, what do you think the economy gets from basic fundamental research that happens in labs and universities versus corporate R&D?

Josh Wolfe: Long-term: everything. Short-term: it’s hard to see the value. For policymakers looking at budget cuts — particularly those focused on short-term gains — these programs seem like easy targets. This isn’t just a Trump phenomenon. In 20 of the last 22 years, we’ve had federal cuts to federal science funding.

Jordan Schneider: We had a brief moment with the Endless Frontier Act.

Josh Wolfe: Right, it started with Endless Frontier, which referenced Vannevar Bush’s work from around 1945. Then you had “The Gathering Storm” by Norm Augustine, the former Lockheed executive, warning about America’s talent base and cultural shifts in what people were drawn to and celebrating.

What they didn’t mention in that report — now over 20 years old — was this anathema, this zeitgeist against the military-industrial complex, precisely when China was not only embracing but mandating military-civil fusion.

Over the past two to three months, we’ve witnessed a perfect storm. Now you have the politicization of academia. Harvard sits number one in Trump’s crosshairs — some speculate because Barron applied and didn’t get in, creating some Shakespearean vendetta. Whatever the reason, while anti-Semitism was the stated concern, it was far worse at Columbia, right here in New York City, than at Harvard.

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According to Nature magazine’s rankings — which publish various metrics including H-index measurements — when you look at the most important scientific publications by institution, the top 10 includes Harvard at number one, but positions two through ten are all Chinese universities.

Fifty percent of AI graduates worldwide come from China. Thirty-eight percent of the AI and computer science workforce here comes from China — not native-born Americans. They’re outpacing native American citizens by 35-37%.

We’re losing the talent game. What should we do to win? What we did in World War II and beyond: attract the best and brightest. Create brain drain from other countries because people are repelled from their home nations.

Eastern European Jews in the 1940s established the Institute for Advanced Study and brought Einstein here. Having the atomic bomb developed here rather than Germany was a net positive for the world. Soviet émigrés in the 1980s escaped communism for capitalism during the Cold War.

We should be stapling visas to every Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Israeli — anyone who wants to come here. We should help their parents immigrate too, because often family remaining in authoritarian home countries becomes leverage that governing regimes use to control whether these individuals can leave or return.

The last Republican I remember discussing this was nearly 20 years ago: Newt Gingrich, who called for tripling the NSF budget. He understood that everything from Genentech (which emerged from the UC system) to Google (from Stanford) was premised on long-horizon scientific research.

This isn’t just computer science — it’s chemistry, physics, materials science, and all the breakthroughs that emerge from these fields. If we knew what those breakthroughs would be, we’d fund them today. But we don’t. We rely on this rich ecosystem in our own self-interest to support brilliant people who generate breakthroughs.

These breakthroughs often result from combining insights from one department with research from a different university. More than ever, this cross-pollination is critically important. We’re ceding academic and intellectual leadership to other countries. China will likely be the greatest beneficiary.

International students used to comprise roughly 25% of our student body. Now it’s down to 12-15% and falling. China is actively recruiting with programs like their Thousand Talents initiative.

This represents the greatest self-inflicted wound Americans have created in several generations.

Jordan Schneider: You had this line: “If the Politburo were drafting America’s self-sabotage plan, they would politicize science and freedom of inquiry, starve young and ambitious investigators of funding, and discourage the best immigrant minds."

To recap for everyone: the NSF is spending at half the rate it was in 2024, despite authorized funding. The new budget dramatically cuts science and research spending. Universities have been cut off wholesale from billions in research dollars. Johns Hopkins is laying off 1,000 people because they’re worried grants won’t materialize.

Trump said yesterday that we actually want Chinese students, which creates bizarre mixed messaging when his administration simultaneously tells Harvard they can’t admit Chinese nationals.

Josh Wolfe: Some of these grant cuts are both tragic and absurd. There was a researcher studying neurotransmitters for neuroscience whose grants were cut. They couldn’t understand why until they realized the word “trans” triggered a five-letter string search that flagged anything with “trans,” “DEI,” or similar terms.

Now researchers have to change grant language — writing “neurons firing intracranially” instead of “neurotransmitters."

Jordan Schneider: That’s not funny, though.

Josh Wolfe: You’re right. It’s tragic.

Jordan Schneider: Why don’t you talk about the $100 million pool you launched?

Josh Wolfe: It’s specifically not grants because we’re not trying to substitute the charitable giving of our government — funded by taxpayers — which actually makes America great when we have scientists working on breakthrough research.

Historically, about 10% of our investments are de novo new companies, and most emerge from academic labs. We find a principal investigator — a fancy term for a scientist at an academic institution — whether at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Georgia Tech, Cornell, or elsewhere.

The early 1980s Bayh-Dole Act, sponsored by Senator Evan Bayh and Senator Bob Dole, allowed universities to own intellectual property created with federal taxpayer research funding. When a scientist at these institutions files a patent, the university becomes the assignee while the scientist remains the inventor.

We, as a venture capital firm, can license that technology. There’s a well-established deal structure involving licensing royalties and equity — the scientist typically gets about 25% ownership. This mirrors Google’s “one day a week” policy, allowing employees to spend time on personal projects, but applied to exclusive company work.

This approach for launching companies from academic labs is well-established. Professors often stay at their institutions while postdocs handle translational research and join the company. We’ve created about 25 de novo companies this way, spanning everything from 4D lidar for autonomous vehicles to digital olfaction — essentially “Shazam for smell” — to cancer therapeutics and Nobel Prize-winning work from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that enables real-time cellular imaging.

Historically, this represents about 90% de-risked investment, meaning we take roughly 10% scientific risk. Now, with grant cuts and layoffs at institutions like Johns Hopkins, exceptional research is being abandoned — like proverbial Rembrandts in the attic. Scientists are wondering what to do next. If they wait six months for resolution, they need to find work elsewhere, whether in academia, nonprofits, or the private sector.

Our response is the Lux Science helpline — a bat signal for struggling researchers.

We’re dedicating $100 million from our latest $1.2 billion fund to double down on early-stage science risk. Instead of taking 10% science risk on 90% proven concepts, we’re willing to take 50% science risk on half-baked ideas.

We’ll help license patentable work into our existing companies or arrange sponsored research to continue funding relevant projects. For example, someone contacted us about novel materials for radiation hardening in space. We have 17 companies across the space ecosystem that could sponsor continued research.

Other scientists ready to enter the private sector can work with us to start new companies around their expertise. We’ll license their work, assemble their team, build laboratories, and launch them.

This is just a drop in the bucket — we can’t do this alone. We need dozens, if not hundreds, of other VCs to recognize the value of funding early-stage scientific work. It’s profitable, beneficial for national security, and good for business. Our $100 million allocation, while significant, isn’t sufficient by itself.

Jordan Schneider: I’ve received numerous emails from intelligent people essentially doing backfill work for USAID funding cuts. While it’s admirable that people are donating $10 million or $50 million, tens of millions of people will suffer, and we’re delaying future breakthroughs because we’re not conducting this research. The laboratory animals aren’t being fed, and you need the time, energy, and tacit knowledge built over years of lab work to accomplish meaningful research.

Josh Wolfe: Absolutely. This isn’t purely black and white — there are legitimate concerns about USAID politicization and questionable funding destinations. There are appropriate and inappropriate uses for that money.

My main criticism of the NIH isn’t to strip their funding, but to bias toward young investigators. Too much grant money goes to, frankly, older researchers. Older scientists can be set in their ways and resistant to new approaches.

You need that potent combination of naivety and ambition that drives both entrepreneurial and scientific discovery. Young researchers have the arrogance to say, “I know better than you — why wouldn’t we try this?” while older researchers respond, “Why would you do that? I’ve tried it ten times and it never works."

I would restructure the NIH budget and federal funding to favor younger investigators.

Jordan Schneider: I wonder to what extent the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem that embraced Trump and the DOGE energy — which led to all these cuts — stems from the fact that for the past 20 years, you could make the most money by being 19 and writing software. That’s not something you necessarily need a PhD for. The social returns to that work are very different from what you see when making novel materials and drugs.

Josh Wolfe: Absolutely. Even the term “engineer” shifted from physical engineer to software engineer. For at least 20 years post-internet boom — through the SaaS enterprise boom and cloud boom — that was the dominant paradigm.

Lux was on the periphery of that trend because we don’t really fund software. About a third of our investments focus on healthcare, biotech, robotic surgery, and medical devices. Another third covers aerospace, defense, manufacturing, and industrial applications. The final third is what we call “core tech,” defined more by what we don’t do — very little internet, social media, mobile, or ad tech.

Great fortunes were made and great companies built during the software boom. Interestingly, there’s a China parallel here. Fifteen years ago, Xi Jinping designated software as a domain China would fund heavily. This created incredible companies and ecosystems, and many US investors funded them, believing China was a democratizing, growing market. Knowing what they know now, it would be difficult to justify investing in companies like ByteDance.

Jordan Schneider: Unless you’re Bill Gurley [who recently funded Manus AI].

Josh Wolfe: I love Bill, and he’s not necessarily part of the partnership decision. We’ve discussed this, and he would argue there might be scenarios where teams like Manta are trying to exit China. I think this deserves more study rather than just criticism. However, I personally wouldn’t invest in Chinese companies that are part of CCP military-civil fusion.

The shift also happened within China. At the last Politburo gathering about a year and a half ago, the people close to Xi weren’t software engineers or computer scientists — they were from space, biotech, rockets, and defense. All hard sciences.

This coincided with when Jack Ma went to “spend time with his family” and when entrepreneurs were capped at $9.9 billion. Anyone exceeding that threshold was essentially decapitated — they could start schools or enter education, and either they or their family could leave the country, but not both simultaneously.

The new directive became hard sciences. I used to joke that if you wanted to make money, the greatest capital allocator wasn’t following Warren Buffett or Seth Klarman or other great value investors — it was listening to what Xi Jinping was funding, because that’s where the world was heading.

I agree that for the past 10-15 years, the focus has been software. Many VCs, including Marc Andreessen who said “software is eating the world,” were drawn to Trump partly because they felt rejected by Biden. They were spiting Biden and possibly spiting themselves long-term.

I still believe the greatest entrepreneurs don’t really care about political developments or the 10-year interest rate. They’re building something because they have a chip on their shoulder — and as I always say, chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. They’re driven by private ambitions with timeframes that supersede one, two, or even three presidential cycles.

I remain bullish on great entrepreneurs. There’s simply a shift from software to hardware.

Jordan Schneider: Something worth exploring is the importance of tacit knowledge in hardware versus software and the learning that happens almost entirely in universities during master’s and PhD programs. When you’re doing actual scientific work, you need some sense of navigating the dark forest.

Josh Wolfe: That’s absolutely true. This applies even to semiconductors and manufacturing. TSMC’s Arizona facility is starved of talent — not just union workers doing physical assembly, but specialized expertise. There’s a scarcity of talent because much of that tacit knowledge remains in Taiwan and is difficult to transfer here.

You see this dynamic in companies working on the most sophisticated technologies. My partner Sam Arbesman, who you know or have spent time with, is a brilliant scientist-in-residence here. He has a new book coming out called “The Magic of Code,” and his previous book “Overcomplicated” offered a modern version of “I, Pencil” — the thought experiment about complexity.

If you were to make a semiconductor today, or an Apple iPhone, consider the number of components, the tacit knowledge required, the number of countries and companies involved — it’s extraordinarily complicated. No single person can make a pencil, let alone a semiconductor, chip, GPU, or field-programmable gate array.

Culturally, we get what we celebrate. For 25 years, we at Lux have complained that American culture celebrates celebrities — the Kardashians, the Hiltons, and similar figures. You see this manifested in TikTok and what gets fed to American users versus what’s not even allowed in China and what China celebrates in terms of STEM education.

We’re losing this battle terribly. Looking at the labor pool: we have 300,000 undergraduates in science here. China graduates approximately 1.2 million. Half of our 300,000 are foreign students.

This represents a cultural crisis regarding what we want our children doing and celebrating. We don’t need more people in marketing, advertising, or selling products. We need people inventing things that everybody else in the world wants to buy.

Jordan Schneider: And podcasting.

Josh Wolfe: But you produce intelligence and insight, which is valuable. It’s unique insight because, as you noted, people who follow China Talk understand things that others don’t. That’s an advantage — you produce something intellectually valuable.

Jordan Schneider: Back to the narratives. There was this fascinating Twitter exchange a few days ago. You mentioned the atomic bomb and the Apollo program, and J.D. Vance framed it as “we didn’t need foreigners to do this — we had 600,000 Americans weaving the wires to connect everything together."

Both perspectives are true: his narrative about American workers is accurate, and your narrative about leading lights of both the rocket and nuclear programs coming from Europe is also true. But this narrow-minded “you have to be born here to be part of the circle” mentality — let’s discuss what that means.

Josh Wolfe: This created a significant fissure. People entering the administration who were immigrants from India were being lambasted by these self-described “heritage Americans.” Elon defended them because he’s an immigrant himself — not the classic immigrant from poverty in India or Russia, but an immigrant nonetheless.

He argued there’s a distinction between immigrants crossing the border and taking blue-collar jobs — who may not conform to American society and could include criminals or drug dealers — and brilliant people making extraordinary contributions. For example, the recent genetic medicine breakthrough that cured a baby using one of the first in vivo genetic editing approaches involved two scientists, one whose parents arrived from India 40 years ago. Thank God those individuals came here and had children.

We want this brain drain — from World War II through the Cold War to our current version of Cold War competition. I don’t understand why people consider “immigrant” a dirty word. Immigrants literally are the fabric of this country.

One of my mentors who put us in business, Bill Conway, who founded the Carlyle Group, focuses his philanthropy on addressing one of America’s biggest problems: nursing shortages. He says if you’re anti-immigrant, good luck getting sick, because our entire healthcare system depends on immigrants playing critical roles — from hospital orderlies to doctors to neurosurgeons.

We want the best and brightest coming here. It’s a complete self-inflicted wound to say “America First” means shutting out talent. America First doesn’t mean America Alone, as Scott Bessent has said. Scott is one of the great adults in the room and a friend.

People ask why Scott doesn’t speak out more publicly on these issues. Scott is a student of markets first — he understands currencies and countries — but he’s also a student of human nature. He understands in a Shakespearean way who his boss is, who he works for, and how to manage that relationship. We want him doing exactly that because we don’t want him out of the job.

Jordan Schneider: We discuss immigrants and science frequently on China Talk from a US-China competition perspective, and that’s all valid. But the fact that people want to come here is remarkable. Look, at the margins there are legitimate concerns about completely open borders, but limiting human flourishing by building walls and splitting families is just —

Josh Wolfe: I’m going to be blunt because I come from Brooklyn: this approach is counterproductive and self-defeating. The idea that we’re limiting the immigration of brilliant people who could make this country better is fundamentally wrong.

Our greatest export isn’t our music, Hollywood, fashion, high-tech companies, banking system, or rule of law — it’s the American Dream. The American Dream is arguably our greatest export; it’s what everybody wants. The measure of a great country is whether more people want to enter than want to leave.

Walter Wriston said, “Capital goes where it’s welcome and stays where it’s well-treated.” This applies to both money flows and people flows. I hope the rhetoric will change and that there will be enough great American leaders to counter jingoistic “America First” voices.

There’s a delicate balance: we must remain that shining beacon on the hill, attracting people while distinguishing between good people who genuinely want to build better lives here — who want to embrace the American Dream and become proud Americans — and bad actors who want to undermine the country. Many of the latter are coming through our university system and may be funded by foreign actors, but that’s a separate issue.

There’s virtue in virtuous people coming here and the American Dream being upheld and celebrated. Right now, we’re casting shadows on that dream.

Jordan Schneider: You opened by saying the Elon-Trump fight is noise. But the signal is that people around the world would rather live here than in China.

Josh Wolfe: They still do. My wife mentioned recently that many countries hate us right now — Canada, tourism is down — and there’s probably some schoolyard “arms crossed, I’m not playing with you” attitude.

Jordan Schneider: Sure.

Josh Wolfe: The reality is, I read about how Canada supposedly hates us, then the next headline I see — because I read many papers each morning, including the Globe and Mail — is “Canada wants in on Iron Dome."

The rest of the world, even if they hate us, still wants our superior military technology. The zeitgeist of popular antipathy will fade, but people will still want our materiel — our military materiel.

Jordan Schneider: We’re recording this a few days after the Tiananmen anniversary. The fact that hasn’t happened here — the fact that there is free speech, elections, due process, and habeas corpus — represents incredibly powerful long-term advantages. These aren’t just abstract principles — they’re things that make life worth living and make you excited to get out of bed in the morning.

Josh Wolfe: I remain relatively optimistic personally. I’m always optimistic about technology, science, and ultimately the human condition. I’m always skeptical about people because I’ve read a lot of Shakespeare. Technologies are amazing, science is amazing, and both will continue to progress. People generally disappoint because they’re vainglorious, full of ego, petty, jealous — they connive and deceive.

People ask how I can be optimistic yet cynical. That’s the pairing — I’m optimistic about science and technology, skeptical about people. I love Tom Wolfe’s answer when asked why he writes about space, astronauts, and moneyed Upper East Siders but not politicians. He said politicians are like passengers on a train, and the country is the train. The tracks might go up and down, but it’s generally heading in the right direction over time. Inside the train, there are clowns on one side in red and clowns on the other side in blue, throwing pies at each other nonstop. Every four years, the engineer changes, but the train stays generally on track.

I take that view: the real thrust comes from people, values, that great beacon on the hill, the American Dream that attracts people here. We shouldn’t deter them from building here on that track. Most entrepreneurs couldn’t tell you much about the political system or what’s happening at the Fed or Treasury — they’re focused on building.

Jordan Schneider: But the fact that they have to worry now, that they have to fear their visas getting revoked — look, in other moments that might be manageable. But within our range of expectations, there are definitely scenarios where an executive acting alone can really bend those train tracks.

Choosing Optimism + Parenting

Jordan Schneider: Speaking of Shakespeare, we did a show with Eliot Cohen about his wonderful book The Hollow Crown and another episode as a Biden emergency discussion. The Trump-Elon situation probably deserves its own Shakespeare emergency episode.

told me to ask you this question — does America need a Gen Z Marsha Linehan?

Josh Wolfe: Marsha Linehan is one of the founders of CBT — Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

I love Derek. I got into psychology maybe five or six years ago. My kids are 15, 12, and 9. My oldest daughter is much more like me — emotionally volatile. I’ll have high highs (not bipolar…emotive!) then calm down. My wife and middle daughter have slow burns with grudges lasting three or four days.

We learned CBT and DBT techniques as a family. Derek’s question is whether Gen Z needs this — I think they do. CBT is essentially Stoic philosophy in a clinical psychology setting. I wish I’d learned this 20 years ago as a kid or teenager — I would have had healthier relationships. I wish I’d learned it 15 years ago before my first child was born — I would have been a better parent. We have a better marriage, family relationships, and even professional interactions because of these principles.

First, avoid extremes like “you always do this” or “you never do that.” If I said “Jordan, you’re always late for podcasts,” your first reaction would be defensive because it’s not true — nobody “always” or “never” does anything. People shut down and become defensive. You want to find the dialectic, avoiding black-and-white thinking. “Sometimes I feel frustrated when you’re late” is much more effective.

Second, when someone has an emotional outburst, they’re dysregulated for various reasons — hunger, a bad day, a lack of tools. If my daughter has a fit, she’s not thinking “I really want to have a tantrum and lose my phone for a week.” You appreciate that they’re doing their best with what they have — they just lack the tools.

Third, validate emotions. When someone’s really upset about something, you could say, “That’s ridiculous, it’s just a math test, you’ll get an A.” But explaining away someone’s feelings doesn’t help. People need validation. They become more emotionally frustrated when they don’t get that release valve. Saying “I can see you’re really upset” sincerely can help reduce their emotional burden.

Returning to Derek’s question about Gen Z, many people seem massively oversensitive. I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where people talked trash to each other, were rough around the edges, and the world wasn’t safe. You could say all kinds of things. I’ve raised my kids similarly — I don’t want them so soft that when someone says something offensive, they appeal to authority, running to school or teachers saying “he said this” or “she said that.” Take care of it yourself. Have a conversation. I’m not advocating violence, but handle yourself.

My kids have experienced this and tell us about various scenarios. The younger generation — whether you call them far left or woke — has lost some ability to engage with people. When encountering ideas or comments they disagree with, there’s hysteria.

I was a center-left Democrat my entire life. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I also didn’t vote for Kamala. I voted for Bloomberg-Romney, which was not a ticket, but that’s where my values aligned, in a non-swing state where my vote didn’t matter. I had the luxury of voting with my conscience.

I believe many center-left Democrats didn’t move right because they were attracted to the right. They were repelled by the histrionics, noise, whining, and complaining from the left. Enough was enough.

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Jordan Schneider: Let’s stick with parenting. You mentioned earlier that Steve Jobs accomplished incredible things, but everyone around him in his personal life had a totally different experience.

Josh Wolfe: They hated him. This is a fascinating phenomenon.

Jordan Schneider: This really resonated for me when I was reading a biography of Richard Holbrooke — the most storied American diplomat of the second half of the 20th century, though perhaps not well-known in the Asia-watching community. There was a line where his kid said his father wouldn’t recognize his grandchildren in a toddler lineup.

Growing up, I dreamed of being Secretary of State or a diplomat, but trading family relationships for that achievement gave me pause. Many people choose one path over the other. What are your reflections on this dynamic of accomplishing big things while being awful to the people closest to you?

Josh Wolfe: I used to debate this with one of my best friends, a famous journalist, who talked about how great Jobs or Elon were. My response was that the people around them — their families — hate them. They’re celebrated by strangers, feeling love from millions of people they’ve never met who celebrate a caricature of who they actually are. Meanwhile, their true character is loathed by those closest to them.

I’ve admired something I have to admit I’ll never achieve — I am too rough around the edges, have burned too many bridges, and have been abrasive to too many people. When Warren Buffett gave the eulogy for Coca-Cola CEO Don Keough, he summarized it in three or four words — “Everybody loved him.” I thought that was beautiful.

People will not say that about me, but I can control the decisions I make regarding my children. Will my kids feel that way about me?

I experienced something very salient and memorable involving my grandfather, who raised me. I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn — my mother, grandparents, and I shared a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. We were very poor. My grandfather wasn’t my biological grandfather; he was my grandmother’s second husband, but he treated me like his son. He delivered the Daily News at night and was the most important man in my life.

He passed away the month before September 11th. At his funeral, his biological son was present. During the Jewish ceremony, when family members put dirt on the grave, his biological son approached with such animus. It was like “good riddance” — he took the shovel, threw dirt on the grave, and walked away. That sound still echoes with me.

I’ve always loved this quote from Carl Jacobi, the 18th-century mathematician: “Invert, always invert” — flip it on its head. My father wasn’t present in my life, so I became the father and husband he wasn’t. But watching that funeral moment, I resolved that would never happen to me. I never want my kids to feel that animus and animosity, wanting to dump dirt on my grave and walk away saying “good riddance."

The most important thing to me is what Adam Smith wrote about — not just the invisible hand, but the idea of being lovely and being loved. That second part, being loved, is scarce and valuable.

Scott Galloway recently gave a rant — I believe it was on Piers Morgan — where he talked about our obsession with Elon, innovation, and money while ignoring people who are hurting and suffering, including those losing USAID funding. He asked what it means to be a man. In his view, it wasn’t toxic masculinity — being a man means being able to take care of people.

We’ve lost that. There aren’t great male role models in public life today that young people celebrate for being good men through self-sacrifice. Everything centers on self-aggrandizement.

Regarding how to encourage or discourage people on certain paths: I want my kids to be truly happy. I ultimately don’t care where they go to college — the world has changed significantly. I don’t care what they do professionally. I want them to find purpose and meaning.

This relates to something interesting. Dan Senor works at Elliott Associates but is very active in Jewish and Israeli life. We attended Shabbat dinner at his house. I’m not religious — I’m an atheist but a tribal Jew. He blesses his children, and what struck me was that the blessing wasn’t about success, money, or career achievement. The blessing was “I want you to have a life full of meaning and purpose."

I thought that was beautiful. That’s what I want for my kids.

Philanthropy, Parenting, Short Videos

Jordan Schneider: We have five minutes for five quick questions. Take your pick — future of media advice for China Talk, New York mayoral race hot takes, what you’d do with a $10 billion philanthropic foundation, or something else.

Josh Wolfe: I don’t know.

Jordan Schneider: Where do you want to go?

Josh Wolfe: Mayoral race. I really hope Cuomo wins.

On advice for ChinaTalk, people get the audiences they deserve, and you have a smart, sophisticated, engaged audience looking for signal among the noise. Keep doing what you’re doing — your combination of Substack, podcasts, video content, periodic pieces, and great guests works well. I feel privileged to be here with you and enjoy reading your work.

Just maintain it because it’s a high-signal, no-BS voice. These things aren’t linear — there are step-change functions where suddenly something goes viral and you gain another thousand or ten thousand subscribers.

You should periodically write op-eds in major publications like the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times, sharing insights from your work. There are proxies like Stratfor and others in popular geopolitics, but you own a valuable niche. Over time, whether you do it or someone else does, there will likely be aggregation and acquisition — a China expert, Africa expert, defense expert — building a new media ecosystem where you could benefit from that outcome.

Jordan Schneider: Second and third questions — you’re pretty wealthy and likely to become wealthier. How do you think about big philanthropic investments beyond what you’re doing today?

Josh Wolfe: There are two aspects I really admire. Take what Bill Conway did — he’s not pursuing vainglorious naming opportunities. He literally identified deficits. His late wife was focused on nursing, so they fund nursing schools and programs because we have absolute scarcity there.

Considering the arc of AI, I believe in abundance and scarcity dynamics. What’s abundant will be machines helping with intellectual tasks — white-collar jobs will be hit while blue-collar jobs will surprisingly be safer than people think. The care aspect of healthcare will be critical.

If you ask what I want my kids doing: I grew up playing extensive video games and watching tons of TV, and I allow them that — not Monday through Thursday, but weekends they can play games, watch TV, engage in pop culture, watch sophisticated content like Fareed Zakaria and Jeopardy.

But I want them fully versed in AI. My 9-year-old is better than my wife at ChatGPT queries and Midjourney prompts for images. It’s creative expression.

Jordan Schneider: That’s a great age for it, right?

Josh Wolfe: Absolutely. My oldest daughter had to do an evolution project in seventh grade by hand — organisms with sharp teeth survive candy rain while weak-toothed ones die. She drew it manually. My current seventh-grader in that same class is using one of our companies, RunwayML, for AI video generation, creating full videos of different organisms in her scenario.

I want them totally versed in AI because ultimately — and you discussed this recently, maybe with Wang — the power isn’t in who has the chips, but who’s using them. Similarly, power isn’t in who has the applications, but who’s using them.

There’s a significant push for the world to use US-driven open-source or closed models rather than China-driven models that approach an asymptote of truth but never discuss Tiananmen Square, Xinjiang, or Uyghurs. We want the Global South influenced by American ideals of truth, Popperian hypothesis, conjecture, and criticism rather than Chinese systems.

But I want my kids using all these tools and understanding them. What will be scarce against all that abundance is human connection. They need to understand people, make eye contact — you’d be amazed how many kids, because of screens, have awkward, almost autistic interactions.

Being able to connect with people, understand them, read Shakespeare — that’s timeless. People change, costumes change, stages change, but human nature hasn’t changed since the Pleistocene African savannah.

That’s what I’d fund philanthropically. Derek mentioned CBT programs for young people earlier. I started a charter school 17 years ago in my native Coney Island, Brooklyn. We began with 90 fifth-graders in the projects. Now we have 1,000 scholars, 200-plus faculty, 100% college acceptance rate for first-generation college students. Eighty percent of families qualify for free and reduced lunch — a euphemism meaning a family of four makes less than $30,000, which is insane.

These families lost the ovarian lottery — the classic John Rawlsian veil of ignorance. These kids are no less intelligent than those born in Greenwich, Connecticut. But there’s no Army recruiting station on Greenwich’s Main Street — there is one on Cropsey and Stillwell in Coney Island. That’s not fair.

Those are worthy targets for philanthropic dollars.

Jordan Schneider: Okay, but let’s start from a $10 billion bucket. What are we talking about here?

Josh Wolfe: Where would I give? I would fund universal CBT for everybody in the country. I don’t know that it needs that much money — it just needs celebration in the country that helps people become more emotionally regulated and be their best version of themselves. It will reduce problems in our criminal justice system. It’ll reduce problems in corporate America. It’ll reduce a lot of problems across the board.

Jordan Schneider: Not to rag on you too much — you give very sophisticated answers to how to invest in the future of science and technology. That was a fine answer. But a lot of people, at a certain point in their life, switch from the sort of answers we discussed in the first 80 minutes to the question I just asked you. I’m curious: do you see the future differently when it comes to philanthropy?

Josh Wolfe: Where we give philanthropically right now reflects things that we prioritize. For me, complexity science through the Santa Fe Institute — brilliant people. I love it. I believe that’s a source of tremendous value. I’ve been part of that for 10 years as a trustee and believe deeply in it.

The charter school movement — I believe deeply in that because it’s a form of civil rights for people. My mom was a public school teacher, so this hits close to home.

Jordan Schneider: Let me try one more time. This is more of a meta question. The sort of investigation that you need to understand how to use philanthropic dollars efficiently and effectively — I’m curious how similar or different you think that is from investing?

Josh Wolfe: The only similarity is finding an amazing social entrepreneur. It’s like when we started the charter school — we basically backed this guy Jacob Newkin, who was starting the school. It’s the same thing. I used to talk publicly about Jacob: he’s the greatest social entrepreneur that I’ve backed by spending my time and money with him.

But we weren’t doing analysis on the market and the unmet need and that kind of thing. It tends to be something personal. For my wife, it’s the Center for Reproductive Rights. She’s on the board there, making sure that women have access to contraception and abortion and autonomy over their bodies. That’s a really important thing to her.

She’s not doing an analysis of where’s the best place to give or whether we should give more. It’s just: Roe v. Wade got overturned. There are women who are going to die in certain states because they can’t get abortions. What can we do about that? She gives a lot of money.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe we’ll close on this topic. If we’re entering a world where science receives less funding — Danny Crichton, who works for Lux Capital, wrote a really interesting piece about this — when the total amount of science that the US funds decreases, there’ll be a little spillover to China and the EU, but we’ll just have less science overall. Beyond CBT, what encouraging developments do you see for science and technology’s future? What basic research do you think people should be funding — the stuff that’s too risky for any venture capitalist to invest in?

Josh Wolfe: This might be controversial, but people should be spending far less money on climate philanthropy. The answer lies in what I call elemental energy and nuclear power. All that money should be redirected toward early-stage science and psychological and behavioral health research, because that will make society better.

The Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Ford Foundation — these organizations were captured by the climate movement over the past 15 years. Honestly, I don’t know what it’s accomplished. It’s been a colossal waste of money.

Jordan Schneider: Speaking to the culture issue you raised earlier — it’s striking to me. I worked at an organization that was half nonprofit, half research fund, focusing on China and climate. On the climate side, they could get money to fund literally anything.

Josh Wolfe: It’s popular and makes you feel good. You go to a cocktail party and say, “Oh, I’m funding climate research.” Great, you’re doing wonderful work — Al Gore would be really proud. But the money is misplaced.

Jordan Schneider: It’s almost downstream of the culture. Who are the funders and trustees, and what’s popular with them? They’re not scientists conducting expected value calculations on human flourishing or whatever. Not to disparage anyone, but it’s something that resonates with them personally.

Josh Wolfe: Look, Sam Bankman-Fried was the emblematic figure of this, but the effective altruism movement was rational in trying to determine where we can do the most good. They approached it economically, looking at low-probability, high-magnitude events and identifying opportunities where small amounts of money could have significant leverage.

Going back to Conway’s nursing initiative — that’s not popular. People don’t get excited about addressing the massive nursing shortage. But he identified this as crucial, and they’re putting several billion dollars behind it. That’s noble work.

Bloomberg’s urban initiatives and charter school funding are excellent. People funding the arts because of personal passion — that’s great too. But we have massive problems with criminal justice reform and behavioral health domestically.

I’m not talking about everyone needing mental health days, but implementing cognitive behavioral therapy in schools at a young age. Before children’s prefrontal cortex develops at 25, we could help them develop better self-regulation. The world would be a much better place.

It would be tremendous to see philanthropists return to funding institutions like the old Cavendish Laboratory — putting billions of dollars into institutes that enable knowledge discovery.

Jordan Schneider: Rockefeller University — that’s incredible work. People need to get with the program.

Josh Wolfe: Carnegie Mellon, exactly. These institutions started with robber barons who decided to redirect money into academic institutions. This will happen again.

If you examine philanthropic funding historically, it began with private individuals, then government labs like Los Alamos, followed by Bell Labs (born from monopoly), then IBM Research. IBM centralized initially, then distributed with locations in Zurich and Almaden. Then came Google, Intel, and Microsoft Research.

Some of these corporate labs are under pressure now because they haven’t yielded significant results. But we’ll see the rise of private labs. You can see this already with the ARC Institute.

Jordan Schneider: Absolutely.

Josh Wolfe: The Collison brothers are major supporters there. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative represents major scientific initiatives comparable to Howard Hughes — himself a former defense contractor who invested enormous amounts into what became the Janelia campus, now one of the great sources of Nobel Prize winners.

Jordan Schneider: That’s a nice place to close. 50% of Howard Hughes researchers came to the US on visas! Joshua, thanks so much for being part of this.

Josh Wolfe: Great to be with you, man.

Jordan Schneider: Awesome. We’ll do this again in 10 years, and then you’ll be saying, “Here’s this philanthropic vision — look at all these molecules I found."

Josh Wolfe: I believe mostly in free enterprise, science, and technology. Early-stage ventures will handle a lot of that, but not the basic science research. There’s no market for that.

Bonus Riffs on Books

Cool. What are you reading? Anything good? Binge-watching anything inspiring or fun?

Jordan Schneider: Two books. I’m a new parent — I have a 10-month-old at home.

Josh Wolfe: Boy or girl?

Jordan Schneider: Girl. First child.

Josh Wolfe: Wow.

Jordan Schneider: I read all these books on paternity leave about “How I Raised My Child in X Country.” They were not good. But one was excellent: Italian Education. It’s by a cranky British guy who married an Italian woman and raised his kids in late 1980s-90s Verona. All these other books are basically backhanded critiques of American parents from whatever direction. But he’s just observing this really interesting, weird society where you have very tight connections between parents and kids — for better and worse, from my perspective, across many dimensions.

It was engaging, funny, smart, with nice vignettes. Each chapter stands on its own, which is good for 3 AM reading.

Book number two — A Social History of the Machine Gun by John Ellis.

The book tells the story of the machine gun through different lenses. He’s a military historian who wrote about World War I and World War II tactics. But in this book, he explored the technological evolution from the Maxim gun all the way through World War II — who invented it, why, and where it came from.

There’s a fascinating acquisition story too, because people didn’t think it was real and didn’t want to buy it. There were prototypes but no factory yet, so you had these hucksters trying to —

Josh Wolfe: What years was this?

Jordan Schneider: At the start of World War I, the British had one gun for every 2,000 people. You had to get to 1916-1917 for them to actually be making and buying enough machine guns.

Josh Wolfe: That’s amazing.

Jordan Schneider: It took an enormous amount of time. The technology was already there in the 1880s and 1890s. There were examples from wars in different countries — the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, the Crimean War. You could see it if you were looking at the right things.

Ellis gives examples of smart colonels saying, “Guys, we need to buy these guns — they’re a big deal.” But people said no, and they all said no way too late.

The other story he tells is about the psychology of not just the people buying the guns, but the officers themselves who had to abandon their mindset about what made a successful officer. Being a sharpshooter wasn’t considered honorable. What won wars throughout the 19th century was discipline, standing in line without fear, marching together to bring maximum power. That’s what the technological paradigm demanded — willingness to maintain rank.

It took over 100 years for people to change their mindsets and understand that you actually need to be distributed, use natural cover on the ground, and get away from the Napoleonic mindset of gallant charges. Those charges were the correct evolutionary answer in a different time period, but not by the US Civil War, definitely not by the end of the 19th century, and absolutely not by World War I.

Josh Wolfe: It’s interesting — the juxtaposition of the two books. One is arguably about technology of life (all parenting is a form of life technology), and the other is about technology of death. It’s a nice contrast in what you’re reading.

Quick parenting observations — First, if you walk into a bookstore like Barnes & Noble — which really don’t exist anymore —

Jordan Schneider: There’s one three blocks away!

Josh Wolfe: The mere existence of a handful doesn’t change that they’ve largely disappeared. There used to be 20 in New York City; now there are one, two, or three.

My point is, when you go into any section — investing, relationships, or parenting — and see 200 books, it means nobody has any idea what they’re doing. If they did, there would be one book with all the answers.

What I learned, especially with our first child, is that you develop a whole bunch of lessons, then you have a second child and they’re all wrong. Once you have more than one child, the nature versus nurture debate is settled. They are genetically different from day one — their predispositions, attitudes, sleep patterns, crying patterns, wants and needs. Their personalities persist from birth. The one who’s more reactive, the one who’s more smiley — it’s absolutely fascinating.

Second point on parenting, which relates to China — when I was growing up, my mother said, “You need to learn golf and Japanese because that’s the lingua franca of business in the ’80s.” Then it became, “You need to learn Mandarin and coding because that’s the lingua franca."

Neither of those things really matter today. The pace of AI development means coding can now be done by AI agents. Computer scientists who thought they were in a valued position are suddenly thinking, “Oh my God, I’m being replaced by agents."

Translation is pretty incredible now too. I don’t know what the next parental trope will be, but it’s usually wrong.

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Jordan Schneider: We can take it back to the machine guns, right? What was successful for you as you were coming up in the world and in the institutions that shaped you isn’t necessarily going to be the thing for the next era. The humility to understand that — both from a defense acquisitions perspective and a parenting perspective — is really hard.

Josh Wolfe: I’ll give you an investing version of that. First, the most dangerous words everyone always says are “this time is different” — because it never is. If you know Shakespeare, then of course it’s never different. Human nature is constant.

But when parents utter certain words, it’s predictive — similar to the defense acquisitions issue or for investing. Want to know what will be the next $10 billion industry? Here it is: “It will rot your brain.” Every time a parent says “it will rot your brain” about something they don’t want their kids doing, that thing becomes the next massive industry.

Rock and roll in the ’50s, TV in the ’60s and ’70s, chat rooms in the ’80s and ’90s, video games in the ’90s and 2000s — every one of those things that was the target of parental ire became the next $10 billion industry. Tipper Gore with parental advisory lyrics and rap music — rap became the biggest genre of music in the following decade.

Just listen to what parents are terrified about right now. The gamers became our modern robotic surgeons and drone pilots. Whatever they’re freaking out about now — maybe TikTok (though I have problems with that for different reasons) — it could be movie-making on social media or whatever.

Josh tries to defend short video

Jordan Schneider: This is the hardest question of the day — give me the optimistic short video take.

Josh Wolfe: We’ve democratized the ability to have creative expression with special effects that used to cost $50 million. Filmmakers used to be siloed in studios with hierarchies, casting couches, and Harvey Weinsteins — awful people. Now there’s freedom of expression where people can create tragedy, drama, comedy, and surrealist content with these tools at their fingertips.

My 9- and 12-year-olds are better filmmakers than I was at 25. They have tools today that Hollywood executives used for Terminator or The Abyss — remember James Cameron’s special effects that seemed amazing back then? That’s from a creator perspective.

Jordan Schneider: What about from a consumption perspective? Having culture delivered in 30-second chunks?

Josh Wolfe: Again, look at it from abundance and scarcity perspectives. I 100% agree that if you’re constantly being trained for short attention spans, that’s problematic. We literally practice patience as a family because I know there are so many competing things offering fast dopamine hits and quick responses. We do long periods of quiet reading from physical books as a family. We watch long movies instead of 30-minute segments.

Jordan Schneider: No, but you’re telling me the things parents are scared of are actually going to be the future. What’s positive about consuming content in 30 seconds?

Josh Wolfe: I’d argue that your ability to process multimodal information is far better. Look at the average older person right now — they’re focused on one thing, they’re slow. You’re probably able to switch between a WhatsApp chat group, Twitter, watching a short video, and checking emails. Your ability to multitask while retaining the ability to function is super valuable.

Jordan Schneider: Your heart’s not in this one…

Josh Wolfe: It’s okay, but here’s what I know: it’s not as bad as people think. The TikTok stuff is concerning, but short-form video generally isn’t bad.

Jordan Schneider: Okay.

Josh Wolfe: I’m optimistic on the science and technology piece. I’ll still be skeptical about the human nature piece, but optimistic about science and technology.

Jordan Schneider: All right, let’s call it there then. This was really fun. Do you have a book to shout out?

Josh Wolfe: Let’s close on fiction and nonfiction. For nonfiction: The biggest debate my wife and I have had was over a book by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford primatologist and neuroscientist who’s written a series of books. His first one was Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. The punchline was that zebras run for their lives in their ancestral environment, then they’re calm. We have constant stressors all day long that didn’t exist in our ancestral environment.

But his more recent book is called Determined. Either you’ll want to throw it across the room, or you’ll want to send copies to everybody. It depends on whether you agree — as I do — that we do not have free will, or disagree — as my wife does — that we are filled with agency and of course have free will.

Danny Kahneman was a friend. His belief before he died was that neither free will nor consciousness exist — that they are both useful illusions. I very much subscribe to that view.

For fiction, Amor Towles has a short story collection called Table for Two. He wrote Rules of Civility, which is great. There’s a character from the second half of that book who gets extended treatment in a few more chapters in this collection.

But there’s one story that deeply touched me called “The Bootlegger.” It’s a short story that takes place in New York. The beauty of this, for me personally, was that I happened to post on Twitter about my love for this particular story. Amor Towles replies, which was very meaningful, and he says, “This is probably the most autobiographical story I ever wrote."

It’s a relatively short story set here in New York. A young couple, something happens, they go to Carnegie Hall, and this story unfolds. There’s a particular classical musician referenced in this fictional piece, and he replies to the story because he’s actually in it. It was this surreal fictional story that was a slight roman à clef of Towles’s life. He replies to me on Twitter, then the classical musician does too. I was like, “This is amazing."

Jordan Schneider: That’s really fun.

Josh Wolfe: I highly recommend Table for Two by Amor Towles. It’s a set of vignettes around two characters — probably 10 or 12 short stories. But “The Bootlegger” is awesome.

Jordan Schneider: Thanks so much.

Josh Wolfe: Great to be with you.

亲爱的读者周二好，六月的新书讯推荐五本 抗日战争/日中戦争/Second Sino-Japanese War 相关新书。

重探抗戰史

郭岱君主編，《重探抗戰史（一）：從抗日大戰略的形成到武漢會戰（1931-1938）》，台北：聯經出版公司，2015年。

郭岱君主編，《重探抗戰史（二）：抗日戰爭與世界大戰合流1938.11-1945.08》，台北：聯經出版公司，2022年。

郭岱君主編，《重探抗戰史（三）：抗戰與中國之命運》，台北：聯經出版公司，2022年。

斯坦福大学胡佛研究所的郭岱君教授召集迄今为止最豪华的多国历史学家团队，历时十年，以胡佛研究所馆藏的蒋介石日记、蒋经国日记、宋子文档案和孔祥熙档案等为基础，参照日文、英文多国档案，重新探索抗日战争中的一些核心问题：

日本侵占满洲（中国东北）之后，并无在中国大规模用兵的计划，为何 1937 年七月华北一次地方小冲突却迅速上升为两国之间的全面战争？

日本为何放弃北进，转而南进，最终走向珍珠港？

中国的抗战和第二次世界大战是什么关系？

汪精卫为何离开国民政府？

中共如何在抗战中坐大？

美国为何厌弃蒋政府？

三卷本读完，相信聪明的读者能找到一些初步答案。

被遗忘的盟友

芮纳·米特（Rana Mitter）著，林添贵译，《被遗忘的盟友：揭开你所不知道的八年抗战》，台北：远见天下文化出版股份有限公司，2014。

Mitter, Rana. China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival. London: Allen Lane, 2013.

牛津大学/哈佛大学历史学家 Mitter 的代表作，一卷本的抗日战争史。

请记住一定要读台版或英文版，不要读新世界出版社的简中删改版。

Racing the enemy

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.

这本书已经出版 20 年，算不得新书。但鉴于如此重要的书依然没有中文版，还是要介绍一下。

日本为何无条件投降？传统观点归因于美国扔了两颗原子弹。而长谷川毅充分利用苏联和日本档案，提出了挑战性的修正观点：相比原子弹，苏军参战起得作用更大, the Soviet entry into the war played a greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender.

日本曾将希望寄托于《日苏互不侵犯条约》和苏联调停来获得有条件的停战，而苏联参战导致所有希望破灭。

大棋局中的国共关系

吕迅著，《大棋局中的国共关系》，北京：社会科学文献出版社，2015年。

1945 年八月风暴刮起，苏军出兵满洲（中国东北）一举击垮关东军，不仅导致了日本投降，更是获得了战后中国命运的决定权。

吕迅这本将视野拉宽，从抗战后期写到韩战爆发，充分展示了抗战如何改变中国命运：冷战是“内战”的延续，内战是二战的延续。

戰火中國 1937–1952

方萬德著，何啟仁譯，《戰火中國 1937–1952：流轉的勝利與悲劇，近代新中國的內爆與崛起》，台北：聯經出版公司 2020。

van de Ven, Hans. China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China, 1937–1952. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

与吕迅思路相似，剑桥大学的方德万教授也把抗战、内战和韩战视为一个连续之整体，审视其中的关键节点，比如是日军 1944 年发起的一号作战（豫湘桂战役）导致了国共实力对比彻底失衡。

以本书压轴，因为《戰火中國》叙事极为流畅，雅俗共赏，适合新手读者入门。如果你只有时间读一本书，选它没错。

以上就是六月的新书讯，感谢您的阅读。如果喜欢这个专栏，请推荐给家人朋友订阅，谢谢：

In 2011, China’s drug regulator cleared the nation’s first home-grown targeted cancer pill. Fourteen years later, a Chinese bispecific antibody is aiming to knock the world’s top-selling oncology drug off its perch.

Those two bookends frame twin contests now running in parallel. One is humanity’s decades-long fight against cancer, a disease that still claims one in six lives worldwide. The other is China’s effort to move from importing medicines to inventing them. This article seeks to follow these battles in real time by tracing the stories of four milestone therapies and their makers.

Founded in 2003 in Hangzhou by a team of returnee talent, Betta Pharmaceuticals launched the first targeted anticancer drug developed in China to reach the market. The success of its drug Conmana1 in China dovetailed with sweeping policy reforms aimed at making home-grown medicines more trusted, innovative, and affordable. The drug did not, however, make it outside China, despite Betta Pharma’s best efforts. Conmana is an example of “me too” innovation: a variation on an existing drug that performs just as well but not quite better enough to make it globally competitive.

Created through a rigorous internal drug development program in 2012, BeiGene’s Brukinsa did what Betta’s Conmana could not – it went global, becoming the first Chinese cancer therapy approved by the US FDA. A “me better” innovation targeting blood cancer, Brukinsa now reaches people in over 65 countries, bringing in over US$2 billion in sales annually.

Betta’s Conmana and BeiGene’s Brukinsa are both small-molecule drugs, meaning they are created through chemical synthesis. The real frontier of innovation that excites biotechnologists is biologic drugs, biomolecules such as engineered proteins or RNAs that act with greater power and precision inside the body.

Carvykti is one of the first innovative biologic drugs created in China. Initially discovered and tested in Xi’an Jiaotong Hospital by Nanjing Legend Biotech, the drug reached global markets with the help of Johnson & Johnson. First gaining US FDA approval in 2022, Carvykti now has regulatory approval across over 36 countries and has treated over 5,000 patients, with more to come.

The last story is unfinished. It’s about Akeso’s ivonescimab, an icon of Chinese biotech innovation in mainstream media. A biologic drug with a novel method of targeting cancer, ivonescimab received approval by the Chinese NMPA in April 2025. In countries like the US, where Akeso has passed the baton to US-based Summit Therapeutics to develop the drug, ivonescimab is still in the clinical trial phase, meaning it has yet to pass through the regulatory gauntlet. What’s exciting and undecided about ivonescimab is its potential to go head-to-head with the world’s best-selling drug, Keytruda. Whatever happens to ivonescimab over the next few months in trials outside of China will send a signal of exactly how successful Chinese biotech innovation has become. The world of biotech will be watching closely.

But let’s start from the beginning. Betta Pharma’s milestone achievement of Chinese regulatory approval for a new innovative drug (2011) happened only 11 years before Akeso’s ivonescimab earned a US$5 billion deal with Summit Therapeutics (2022). How did we get here?

Betta Pharma: The “Me-too” Era

In the 1990s, biopharmaceuticals — specifically oncology, the study and treatment of cancer — entered a new era of innovation. Up until the early 2000s, doctors primarily combated cancer with broad-stroke methods like surgery and chemotherapy. Now, new and improved methods were emerging: targeted therapies that zeroed in on cancer cells while minimizing damage to healthy cells and immunotherapies that helped the body’s immune system recognize and attack cancer cells.2

This revolutionary effect of molecular biology captured the attention of many bright scientists and doctors in China, including Dr. Wang Yinxiang 王印祥. Born in rural Hubei, he spent three years working in public health and three years completing a Master’s degree at the Chinese Academy of Medicine before he could truly follow his passion for oncology to the United States, where he earned a doctorate from the University of Arkansas.

Dr. Wang got his wish to do cutting-edge research as a postdoc at Yale, where he dove into one of the first targeted cancer therapies, Novartis’ Gleevec. Sharing his apartment was Ding Lieming 丁列明 – another Chinese transplant with a University of Arkansas MD. On strolls through New Haven’s Science Park, the two friends along with medical chemist and entrepreneur Zhang Xiaodong 张晓东 bonded over more than just science. They shared a bigger dream: to bring the newest in biotech to China.

Dr. Wang and Dr. Ding would ultimately join forces in 2003, when they founded Betta Pharmaceuticals to develop targeted cancer therapies in China. Betta opened its doors with a shoestring team – just 13 people, many of them what Dr. Wang affectionately called “kids,” fresh from bachelor’s or master’s program and learning on the fly. Nevertheless, they managed to develop icotinib (later sold as Conmana), a drug engineered to target EGFR proteins as a way to inhibit cancer cell growth.

In those years, China’s pharmaceutical industry hadn’t left the nest. Manufacturing of cheap, generic drugs dominated. To domestic investors, companies, and physicians, a business model built on new drug development was unthinkable: the costs and risks were too high, the regulatory process was a mess, quality and safety were still iffy, and previous such attempts had failed. Winning a clinical-trial slot for Conmana (a prerequisite for proving the drug could outshine current care) was nothing short of herculean. When the Peking Union Hospital director declared the study too risky and tried to dismiss him, Dr. Wang stood firm for ninety minutes, knocking down every objection until the approval stamp finally came down in his favor.

In 2009, Conmana made it to Phase III clinical trials, the make-or-break test of wide-scale efficacy. In Phase III, the team pushed the envelope again: rather than testing against a placebo, they pitted their molecule against AstraZeneca’s gefitinib (the world’s first targeted anti-cancer therapy) in the first Chinese study to challenge an imported standard head-to-head.

The study’s results, announced by leading academic Sun Yan at the 2011 World Lung Cancer Conference – also the first time a China-developed drug headlined an international academic forum – showed that icotinib could match the cancer-fighting power of the imported benchmark while causing fewer side -effects. Conmana, in other words, was a successful “me-too” drug, an incremental improvement on an existing pharmaceutical innovation.

After six grueling years, Conmana earned its first regulatory approval from China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA; although at that time it was still the CFDA).

Betta’s success as a fast follower of a next-generation cancer therapy was a triumph for Beijing’s returnee talent and national innovation programs. Conmana’s success had been fueled by funds from the Yuhang District Government of Hangzhou, the “863” Program, and the “11th Five-Year Plan” National Science and Technology Major New Drug Special Project.

The government showered Betta with accolades: the China Overseas Chinese Contribution Award, the gold prize for patents, first prize for the National Science and Technology Progress Award, and more. Chen Zhu, then Minister of Health, praised their achievement as “an emblem of ‘Two Bombs and One Satellite 两弹一星’ in the field of public health,” referencing a techno-nationalist ideal of a whole-nation project for science and technology development.3

However, for all its homegrown glory, Betta’s blockbuster never crossed the border.

In 2014, with the help of Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Betta filed to run a clinical trial for Conmana in the US, the first step towards seeking US FDA approval. However, the trial was shortly withdrawn. Newer, later-generation EGFR inhibitors were eclipsing Conmana’s performance, and there was no sense investing in trials when the product was unlikely to sell.

Though just a “me-too” innovation, Conmana was a landmark accomplishment for China. On the domestic market, the drug was meaningfully cheaper than its imported alternatives. Given the rapidly growing incidence of lung cancer in China, Conmana’s improved affordability made a real difference in patients’ lives. Still, it would take almost another decade before a China-developed cancer drug would make a global impact.

BeiGene: A “Me-Better” Drug Goes Global

China’s mix of capital, talent, and policy reforms was turning its budding biopharma sector into a global magnet.

Among the first drawn in was Pittsburgh native John Oyler. Familiar with China through his work at McKinsey in the 1990s, Oyler was stunned by the country’s science and technology progress when he returned the next decade. By the mid-2000s, regulatory harmonization, returning talent, and improved manufacturing infrastructure enabled China to meet the needs of global pharmaceutical companies, leading to the growth of contract research organizations (CROs), which provide outsourced medicinal science services. Oyler co-founded one such Chinese CRO, BioDuro, in 2005.

But serving foreign pharma clients wasn’t enough. As China moved toward deeper healthcare reform, Oyler saw an opening for homegrown innovation: “[China] had the capability to pour tens of billions of dollars back into the global industry to help pay for more research, which would not only make drugs more affordable in China, but across the globe.” Rather than repeat the trajectory of BioDuro, which was eventually sold, he wanted to create something enduring. “I wanted to build something here — in China — that is lasting, impactful, involved in great science, and can really help people,” he said. He aspired to create a company capable of developing world-class cancer therapies from a country many still underestimated.

To bring his vision to reality, Oyler needed scientists. He connected with Dr. Xiaodong Wang 王晓东, a top Chinese American academic biologist who recently returned to China to lead the new Beijing Institute of Life Sciences. The chance to work with Dr. Wang — a superstar scientist admired widely enough to impress parents at Chinese New Year — proved an effective tool for attracting talent. Together, they founded BeiGene in Beijing in 2010 to become the “Genentech of China.”

Early on, BeiGene focused on BTK inhibitors, a targeted cancer therapy that works by blocking cancerous B-cells’ ability to grow. The first BTK inhibitor, synthesized in 2007, showed promise but caused significant side effects. In 2012, BeiGene initiated a discovery program in San Mateo and Shanghai to develop a better BTK inhibitor. After screening over 3,000 compounds, the team identified the highest-potential molecule that would eventually become Brukinsa (zanubrutinib).

BeiGene aimed to take Brukinsa global from day one. To support worldwide approvals, the company built a 25-country trial program in which approximately 90% of patients were enrolled outside of China. The numbers delivered: Brukinsa consistently beat first-generation BTK inhibitors on safety and efficacy, turning a presumed “me-too” into a clear “me-better” that is now the standard of care for B-cell cancers.

Momentum snowballed. In 2019, Brukinsa set a precedent as the first Chinese-developed cancer therapy to win FDA approval, months before China’s own NMPA signed off. It has since secured clearances in 65-plus markets spanning the US, EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, and China, and now supplies more than half of BeiGene’s revenue with US$2.6 billion in 2024 sales. The company (rebranding as BeOne) has likewise gone global, conducting trials in over 45 countries.

Legend: A True Chinese Biologic

Witnessing the breakthrough of firms like BeiGene, Beijing set its sights on higher-value innovation. The State Council’s 2016 13th Five-Year Plan therefore called for “leapfrog development in the biopharmaceutical industry,” spotlighting cell and gene therapies, antibodies, and vaccines.

These platforms fall under biologics — large molecules derived from biological processes such as insulin and hormones — rather than small-molecule drugs such as Betta’s Conmana and BeiGene’s Brukinsa. Because biologics are bigger and more structurally complex, their effects are harder to predict and their manufacture far costlier, but they open therapeutic doors that chemistry alone cannot.

Founded in 2014 as a subsidiary of GenScript, Legend Biotech embodied the kind of biologics leadership the state now prioritized.4 After losing his father to cancer, co-founder Frank Zhang 章方良 united with Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Frank Fan to create the firm with the goal of advancing oncology.5

At that time, influential scientific journals, Big Pharma deals, and first-in-human successes had converged to position cell and gene therapies as the vanguard of biopharmaceutical innovation. Early successes led by the University of Pennsylvania highlighted the potential of CAR-T therapy,6 a type of treatment in which a patient’s disease-fighting T-cells are genetically engineered to seek and destroy cancerous cells.

Driven by the promise of next-gen cancer therapy, Legend’s 19-person team, working in “a room the size of a freight elevator,” crafted a second-generation CAR-T treatment targeting multiple-myeloma tumor cells (later sold as Carvykti). Leading the research was Dr. Frank Fan, who had studied at Xi’an Jiaotong University and worked at the Xi’an Jiaotong Hospital. Leveraging those ties, Dr. Fan was quickly able to initiate Legend’s first CAR-T clinical trial at Xi’an Jiaotong Hospital, turning the startup into a “dark horse” contender in the CAR-T space.

At the 2017 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), Legend presented early-phase data from its trials in China: durable remissions in multiple-myeloma patients with only mild side effects. The first of its kind accepted for review by China’s NMPA, this CAR-T candidate signaled that the country could innovate well beyond small-molecule chemistry.

Such promising results drew members of the global life sciences community. J&J’s Janssen signed a partnership with Legend Biotech in 2017. This was a case of an outlicensing deal: when a company (such as Legend) sells or grants rights to a drug candidate, passing the baton to a different company (such as Janssen), which who takes on the responsibility to bring the drug through testing, approval, manufacturing, and commercialization. Such transactions are the lifeblood of the industry. However, the high-potential molecules worth such high-profile deals didn’t historically come from China.

With the combined efforts of Legend and Janssen, Carvykti won FDA approval in 2022, soon followed by clearances in the EU, UK, Japan, and Canada. Though not first-to-market, Carvykti’s superior clinical value crowned it best-in-class. This then completed China’s rapid climb from “me-too” copies, through Brukinsa’s “me-better” gains, to a world-leading biologic breakthrough.

Akeso: a top challenger emerges

Now, Akeso Biopharma’s new molecule is drawing notice as a likely first- and best-in-class therapy from China.

Akeso started as the dream of Dr. Michelle Xia, a Gansu native. While working for California-based Crown Bioscience and in other roles in the US and UK, Dr. Xia grew frustrated with the eight-to-ten-year delay it took for innovative overseas therapies to reach Chinese patients. So she and three partners founded Akeso in 2012, naming it after the Greek goddess of healing, with a mission to develop home-grown therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Akeso’s edge is bispecific antibodies (BsAb), a type of next-generation cancer treatment involving engineered proteins that strike two targets at once, such as igniting immune cells while starving tumors. The first proof arrived in 2022 when China’s NMPA cleared Akeso’s Kaitani (PD-1/CTLA-4), the world’s first commercialized BsAb.

Next came ivonescimab, a PD-1/VEGF bispecific now pushing Akeso onto the global stage. By jointly blocking an immune checkpoint and tumor blood-vessel growth, it qualifies as first-in-class – an industry term for a drug that introduces a truly novel therapeutic approach.

In June 2022, Akeso unveiled the Phase II results of ivonescimab at the annual ASCO conference, showing strong responses in non-small cell lung cancer. Just months later China’s NMPA granted the drug Breakthrough Therapy status for three medical use cases, enabling closer guidance and fast-tracking its review.

Sensing ivonescimab’s scientific and commercial potential, US-based Summit Therapeutics inked a massive deal in December, licensing Akeso’s innovation for up to US$5 billion.7 The corresponding press release hailed Akeso’s innovation as “the PD-1 / VEGF bispecific antibody that is most advanced in the clinic,” noting that neither the FDA nor EMA had yet approved any PD-1-based bispecific therapy.

The size and significance of this agreement marked a bellwether moment in Chinese biotech innovation. Blue-chip investors and multinationals began scouting the country for genuinely novel assets rather than low-cost manufacturing plays.

China’s slice of global out-licensing has since tripled to 12%, with deal value leaping from US$35 billion in 2023 to more than US$46 billion in 2024. This trend seems set to continue through 2025 and beyond.

The fate of ivonescimab and most other compounds covered by these recent deals is uncertain. Many drug candidates are purchased in the preclinical or Phase I stage of development, requiring another 5+ years and US$300+ million dollars before they pass the clinical and regulatory hurdles necessary to make it to market – or, they will fail, like roughly 90% of compounds that enter human trials. Only five China-originated drugs have ever cleared the US FDA (BeiGene’s Brukinsa and Legend’s Carvykti are two of them).

Ivonescimab could be next. Akeso’s molecule has already completed Phase I and Phase II, and is in the midst of several high-stakes Phase III trials. Its Phase III trials with Chinese patients have already demonstrated success, leading to two recent NMPA approvals in the spring of 2025. The defining test comes next: a Summit Therapeutics-run Phase III study spanning 108 locations in 12 nations, where the drug candidate must outshine oncology’s gold standard, Keytruda.

Keytruda (drug name pembrolizumab) has been described as “era-defining,” the “800-pound gorilla” of the class of drugs to which ivonescimab also belongs. Developed and commercialized by American multinational Merck, the drug has been approved for 41 indications8 across 18 types of cancer. It’s the world’s best-selling drug, raking in about $29.5B in 2024 – nearly half of Merck’s total revenue. Its upcoming 2028 patent expiry opens the field for new challengers.

Akeso’s ivonescimab could be one such challenger. If its global Phase III trial confirms that the drug’s positive risk-reward results can extend beyond China’s borders, Akeso’s first-in-class molecule may eventually also prove to be best-in-class, making it one of the biggest biotech stories of the decade.

On the horizon

Together, Conmana, Brukinsa, Carvykti, and ivonescimab trace a clear, but incomplete, arc: China’s pharma sector has evolved from reverse-engineering proven ideas to originating drugs that can contend for global standards. Each milestone marks a step from “good enough at home” to “competitive abroad,” showing how policy shifts, capital inflows, and returning talent have reshaped the industry’s ambitions and capabilities.

Those four successes are only a sliver of the story. Dozens of other firms have logged incremental wins, and many more have stumbled in clinical trials or overseas filings. With financing tightening, patent cliffs approaching, and regulatory expectations rising, the next crop of candidates will test whether China’s momentum is structural or situational. The outlook could range from steady gains in select niches to a broader slowdown if capital or policy tailwinds fade.

Whatever the trajectory, one fact persists: cancer is indifferent to where a molecule is conceived. Progress depends on tapping every credible lab and idea, whether in Boston, Basel, or Beijing. If Chinese innovators add new options to the world’s oncology toolkit, patients everywhere stand to benefit — and that, ultimately, is the benchmark that matters.

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Once hailed as the “Apple of China,” Xiaomi has evolved into the world’s No. 3 smartphone brand. The Beijing giant wires millions of homes with its TVs, wearables, and appliances while pitching itself as a seamless “Human × Car × Home” platform.

Founder Lei Jun now wants to turn that consumer-electronics prowess into hard-tech dominance. In 2025 alone, Xiaomi debuted its first in-house chip (the XRING O1) and showed off its sleek SU7 electric sedan. Yet the scorecard is mixed: the Robotics Lab has been folded into the auto unit, the SU7’s shine dimmed after a fatal crash, and new U.S. export curbs threaten the flagship chip program just as it launches. Can a smartphone playbook built on rapid iterations and razor-thin margins really scale to cars, robots, and semiconductors?

In this piece, we let you hear Lei Jun in his own words, through two translated excerpts. One brims with sky-high ambition, while the other is steeped in damage control. Read them back-to-back and watch how Xiaomi’s grand vision collides with hard truths of physics, finance, and public accountability.

From budget phones to bold hardware

Chinese media celebrate Lei Jun as one of the country’s signature tech entrepreneurs. After graduating from Wuhan University and weathering several early start-up misfires, he assembled seven co-founders in 2010 around a crowdsourced Android ROM that grew into Xiaomi. The early strategy was straightforward: sell affordable, capable smartphones. That formula made Xiaomi a household name in phones and Internet of Things gadgets, but the 2016 debut of the bezel-less Mi MIX concept signaled a pivot from “internet hardware” to true hard tech. In the translated excerpts below, Lei Jun traces that evolution and lays out why he believes Xiaomi’s future rests on chips, cars, and robots.

The following excerpt is an original ChinaTalk translation of a December 2023 interview between Lei Jun and reporter Wang Ning, broadcast on CCTV.

Original link | archived

Lei Jun: Let me start with some Wuhan University memories. Thirty-six years ago, in 1987, I was admitted to its Computer Science department. Back then I lived almost entirely on scholarships and professors’ projects; those funds literally carried me through four years of college. At one award ceremony I received a sizable scholarship; standing on that stage I vowed that if I ever could, I would repay the university a hundred, a thousand — ten-thousand — fold.

Lei Jun: My life-long dream was sparked in the Wuhan University library when I read Fire in the Valley, the story of Steve Jobs and early Silicon Valley. In the late ’80s, Jobs was my very first role model. But the more I understood Jobs, the clearer it became that I’m not him. Still, that doesn’t stop us from charting our own path and creating products that are different in their own right.

Angela: After graduating in 1991, Lei joined Kingsoft, a Chinese software company, where he progressed from software engineer to executive. Competing with Microsoft, Kingsoft faced countless problems including product flops and near bankruptcy. He then went on to found an online bookstore, Joyo.com, which was sold to Amazon in 2004.

Lei’s experiences with such missteps and missed timing during the early era of the internet led to his coining of the phrase, “Catch the right tail-wind and even a pig will fly” 站在风口上，猪也能飞起来, which he proceeds to explain in the interview.

Reporter Wang Ning: Your famous tail-wind principle is still quoted all the time.

Lei Jun: Back in my engineer-founder days we green-lit projects simply because they interested me or a few users asked for them; we rarely stopped to ask whether the timing offered explosive growth, so the companies survived but seldom scaled. That sort of company is hard to kill, but pushing it to greatness is equally hard.

That’s why I formulated the tail-wind principle. Don’t just keep your head down pulling the cart; look up and see where the wind is blowing. It was a major course-correction in my own playbook.

Reporter Wang Ning: What was the real test for you during that period?

Lei Jun: We had clearly missed the web’s prime window, so we kept asking when the next breakout would come; four or five years early we bet on mobile internet, but didn’t know when it would ignite—once the iPhone and Android hit, I knew the fuse was lit.

On Xiaomi’s “hard tech” pivot:

Lei Jun: Hard tech means chips, smart manufacturing, robotics, operating systems — those core layers.

Reporter Wang Ning: You keep hammering on hard tech.

Lei Jun: I do.

Reporter Wang Ning: Why is your drive to battle it out on hard tech so intense?

Lei Jun: We’re top-three worldwide, but we face giants: Apple, Samsung, Huawei. Without breakthroughs in core tech you’ll never build a moat or stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those titans. If Xiaomi dreams of being world-class, hard tech is non-negotiable.

Narrator: In 2020, Xiaomi’s tenth anniversary, it set a ten-year goal to become a next-generation hard-tech leader and deliver premium products.

Lei Jun: Every flagship product applies the newest, most advanced tech. Three years ago, I told the team we would benchmark against the iPhone across the board. This statement caused controversy. Were we just piggy-backing off of Apple’s fame to grab attention? But we must unsheathe the sword: set our own targets, dare to compare. Even if we lose all 100 metrics, daring to measure is step one. Can our phones really win? I had to persuade people over one-by-one that going premium takes patience, since earning user trust is a process.

Lei Jun: We started exploring operating systems from the very first days of the company. Seven years ago we resolved to create Xiaomi HyperOS, building the entire stack from the kernel up. Over 5,000 engineers have contributed, and we’ve just released the first version. Our goal is a human-centred, closed-loop platform that connects personal devices, the smart home, and the car.

Reporter Wang Ning: You’re working down at the OS layer — deep, technical stuff — yet you keep calling it ‘human-centred.’ What exactly does that mean in practice?

Lei Jun: AI is moving fast, so we’re baking the most advanced AI into HyperOS to give it a clear edge in intelligence over any rival platform. More importantly, that same intelligence has to knit together the entire “Human × Car × Home” ecosystem: people as in personal devices, cars as in a mobile smart space, and home as in smart appliances.

On electric vehicle strategy:

Reporter Wang Ning: Elon Musk called Xiaomi’s entry into the automotive industry “interesting competition.” Your response?

Lei Jun: Smart EVs merge auto and consumer electronics. One car CEO joked, “A smart EV is just an oversized smartphone on four wheels.” Not strictly true, but that shows the convergence. So yes, it’s challenging, but the difficulty is controllable.

Reporter Wang Ning: What do you mean by “difficulty is controllable”?

Lei Jun: Three years ago I still thought building a car was daunting, so I approached it with real humility. Our user research showed that when people hear ‘Xiaomi car’ they expect technology and an ecosystem. That led me to a guiding principle I call “nail the fundamentals, then amaze 守正出奇.” In practice it means: respect the hard rules of the auto business — quality, safety, manufacturing discipline, make sure the very first model is rock-solid, and only then layer on top the Xiaomi-style innovation that surprises the market.

Our second rule is ‘10-X investment.’ A typical automaker puts three to four hundred engineers and maybe one or two billion yuan into a new model; many cars you see are built on that. For our first car we assigned 3,400 engineers and spent more than ten billion yuan — over ten times the norm. With that level of commitment, I’m aiming to win.

Still, cars are complex. I worry about two opposite risks: the launch flops and nobody buys, or demand goes crazy and people wait a year and flame us for delays. Either way, there’s plenty of reasons for anxiety.

On Xiaomi's future amidst geopolitical uncertainty:

Reporter Wang Ning: With global turbulence and domestic headwinds, why double down on hard tech and stay confident?

Lei Jun: The tougher the climate, the more we should invest in technology. When others pull back, breakthroughs actually come easier, and we’re ready the moment the market rebounds. In fact, Xiaomi already returned to positive growth last quarter.

Why do we have the nerve to keep spending? Because in every field we play in there is still plenty of unmet demand; I believe Xiaomi is only at the starting line. Our approach is two-pronged: deepen our roots in China’s domestic market while pushing ahead with globalization. That’s the road we’ve chosen, and it’s still rich with opportunity.

Reporter Wang Ning: People say you don’t need to change since things are great. Yet you keep leaving your comfort zone. Why?

Lei Jun: At the core is the very high bar we’ve set for ourselves: to become a great technology company that lets everyone on the planet enjoy the benefits of innovation. The goal is so lofty that no matter how hard we jump, we still can’t quite reach it — yet that stretch is exactly what pulls the whole company forward. Xiaomi’s relentless evolution is powered by that dream.

Hard Tech, Hard Lessons

[Angela writing] 2021 marked Xiaomi’s leap into one dimension of hard tech, robotics, with the release of CyberDog, an open-source robot companion. A year later came CyberOne, a full-sized humanoid, and in 2023 the sleeker CyberDog 2. Commercially and technically, none hit the mark: CyberOne never reached mass production, and CyberDog 2 sales ran at a loss as buyers complained about its limited abilities. Attrition was another problem: high-profile engineers departed, with Liu Fang 刘方 (former autonomous-driving head) leaving to start his own robot firm and humanoid specialist Ren Zeyu 任赜宇 moving to ByteDance. By mid-2024 the Robotics Lab had been folded into Xiaomi’s auto division, its once-lofty ambitions reduced to building robots that service the company’s own factory lines.

The automotive story began the same year the robots debuted. In early 2021, Lei Jun learned that U.S. sanctions might hit Xiaomi and decided the firm had to diversify beyond phones. Xiaomi poured RMB 10 billion (US $1.5 billion) into an EV program, broke ground on a plant in Beijing’s Economic-Tech Zone, and — true to form — Lei personally test-drove more than 170 cars and earned a racing license, convinced that a top driver should helm a top car company. The gamble paid off fast: the SU7 electric sedan launched in 2024 to a rapturous market reception.

Yet momentum met reality on March 29th, 2025, when a Xiaomi SU7 electric sedan running in Navigate-on-Autopilot mode veered off the Dezhou–Shangrao Expressway in Anhui and slammed into a cement pole, killing three college students. The first fatality involving Xiaomi’s year-old EV led to nationwide uproar. The hashtag #SU7事故 raced onto Weibo’s hot-search list within hours, while Hong Kong–listed Xiaomi shares fell 5.5% the next trading day. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology banned marketing phrases like “smart driving” or “autonomous driving” and now requires pre-approval for any OTA updates that touch driver-assistance features. The event sparked debate over assisted-driving safety, wiped out new-car orders, and forced the company to publish detailed log data and promise a top-to-bottom safety overhaul.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun gave the following speech on May 22nd, 2025, for the company’s 15th anniversary. His address walks a tightrope between contrition and confidence, as he admits to the company’s past mistakes while promising to embrace the societal responsibility that comes with being a major automaker. The crisis shows the high degree of pressure on flagship Chinese tech companies, and how quickly the public, investors, and policymakers can converge when such a firm stumbles.

At the same time, Lei Jun widens the narrative by announcing Xiaomi’s newest chip, the XRING O1. On June 3rd, he predicted Xiaomi’s auto arm would turn a profit in Q2 2025. But will the company be able to live up to its bold ambitions?

The following excerpt is an original ChinaTalk translation of a speech given by Lei Jun on May 22, 2025. Transcript from Zhihu.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of Xiaomi’s founding. Today is a momentous day, and we prepared a series of celebratory events for it. However, at the end of March, a sudden traffic accident shattered all of that. We were hit by a storm of doubts, criticism, and blame. My colleagues and I were stunned.

A veteran of the auto industry told me, “In this business, accidents are bound to happen.” But no one expected the impact of this accident to be so massive, nor the blow to Xiaomi so heavy.

Thinking back to four years ago when we decided to build cars, I was especially worried about safety, so we placed enormous emphasis on vehicle quality and safety. After more than three years of relentless work by our automotive team, the SU7 has been on the road for just over a year — and its build quality has been our pride. In every independent test by the leading authorities, it has received top marks. Yet we never could have foreseen how this traffic accident would make us realize the public’s expectations and demands of us.

To be honest, only now do I recognize that we have always thought of ourselves as newcomers to the auto industry. This incident drove home a simple truth: Xiaomi’s scale, influence, and visibility have grown so much that society now expects us to act like a fully fledged industry leader. We understand, deeply, that after fifteen years this is a vital responsibility we cannot avoid.

So today, what I want to share with you is that 15-year-old Xiaomi is no longer a rookie. In all industries, we don’t have the grace period of true novices. We must hold ourselves to higher standards and goals.

On automotive safety, I want to announce to everyone that we aim to make our car the safest in its class. We will not just comply, nor merely meet the industry level; as a leader in the auto industry, we will guarantee safety that surpasses the industry standard.

This year on April 1st, I said publicly on Weibo that Xiaomi will never shy away from any issue. “Never shy away” means confronting problems head-on, examining ourselves critically, fixing what’s wrong, and committing to continuous improvement. I know accomplishing this is extremely difficult; it requires us to unite in heart and mind and take it with the utmost seriousness.

Over the past few months, I have held countless meetings with the automotive department’s management and team. All of these meetings have centered around one core theme: how do we solve these problems systematically? How do we convincingly show, through stronger operations and governance, that we’re living up to the public’s higher expectations?

This year is Xiaomi’s 15th anniversary. We have canceled many of the celebrations, summaries, and planning activities we had planned. In any case, I believe this is an opportunity for us to seriously review the wins and losses of the past five years.

In my view, the most important thing Xiaomi has done in the past five years is maintaining a strong technology foundation. Five years ago we set a new goal: to become a global leader in next-generation hard tech. Five years ago we made a clear commitment to invest more than 100 billion yuan in R&D over five years and to increase core technology research; to date we have invested about 105 billion. This year alone we expect to invest over 30 billion.

Today, here, I want to share an extremely important piece of news with you: our self-developed smartphone SoC chip, the Xuanjie 玄戒 O1, is expected to be released at the end of the month

After 10 years of making chips, this is Xiaomi’s milestone achievement. It also represents a new starting point for Xiaomi to break through in hard tech. Chipmaking is something the public and Xiaomi fans ardently expect from us; it is also the only path for Xiaomi to move toward becoming a hard-core tech leader. Xiaomi will forge ahead fearlessly.

2019 was a challenging period for us. We faced all kinds of internal and external pressures. At the suppliers’ conference at the end of that year, I told our supply-chain partners this line: “A gale reveals the toughest grass; a long road proves a horse’s strength.” “疾风知劲草，路遥知马力。[Editor’s note: The metaphorical meaning is along the lines of “true resilience is exposed only under pressure and over time.”]. I believe that from then till now, all our partners can clearly see that Xiaomi is much stronger than it was five years ago. As of today, Xiaomi has existed for 15 years. Years of highs, lows, and hard times have already proved just how resilient we are.

When we started, I remember thinking that people would need 15 years to understand and recognize Xiaomi. Today, it seems we were too optimistic — 15 years is not enough. But that’s all right; we will just keep moving forward until the day we have fully proven ourselves.

Xiaomi still has a long way to go before it becomes the strongest, but no one can match the persistence, resilience, and patience that keeps us getting back up every single time.

Xiaomi’s future

[Angela writing again] Will Lei Jun’s everywhere-everything strategy work?

Xiaomi’s smartphone success hinged on a strategy tailored to consumer electronics: rapid iteration, razor-thin margins. Hard tech plays by stricter rules. Robots, cars, and advanced chips demand flawless safety engineering, deep benches of specialist talent, and sustained capital infusions.

Xiaomi has already brushed up against each of these constraints. In the Robotics Lab, key engineers were stretched thin, while the first SU7 sedan shipped with a leaner, lidar-free sensor suite, a cost-saving choice that came under scrutiny after a fatal crash raised questions about perception margins. Complicating matters is the sheer sweep of the company’s ambition: pursuing cars, robots, and advanced chips threatens to disperse capital and engineering bandwidth, potentially leaving every moonshot a little short of the sustained focus that hard tech demands.

Even Apple doesn’t juggle cars, robots, and semiconductors all at once. The Silicon Valley behemoth shelved its car project after billions of R&D and keeps its robotics work firmly behind the curtain. For Xiaomi’s robotics and autos work, leaning into splashy launches and viral publicity for its hard tech projects has proven to be as much a liability as a strength.

Chips might be the exception, if Xiaomi can leverage its vast smartphone footprint into volume for its in-house silicon. The company’s newly announced Xring O1 and US$28 billion R&D pledge hints at genuine momentum. Yet geopolitics looms large: fresh US export curbs on electronic design automation software threaten to inflate costs, stretch design cycles, and slow the very updates those next-generation chips will depend on. Whether Lei Jun can temper showmanship with staying power will decide if Xiaomi’s hard-tech dream becomes a cornerstone of its ecosystem or just another chapter in China’s moonshot boom-and-bust cycle.

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