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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Time Traveler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Northern Wasteland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Soviet Prophecy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At The Kunming Institute of Botany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huawei Station

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese Style Modernization?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– TWO –

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

China was disintegrating, or so it seemed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– THREE –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– FOUR –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– 2 – 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This will change. Demographic reality gets heavier every year.

– 3 –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– 4 –

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

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

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

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

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

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

A friend wrote to me:

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

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

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

As Xiang Biao wrote to me: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coal Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Shenshan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China After Growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Why is there an America?”
— Wang Huning

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. America Against Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. A Universal Institution 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. American Chamber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. Anfu Road 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. At The Wudaokou Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Rise And Fall Of Chimerica appeared first on NOEMA.

On the outskirts of Zhongshan, one of the nine cities that make up southern China’s megalopolitan Greater Bay Area, is a leafy, quiet village called Qixi. The Greater Bay Area is home to 86 million people, more than the entire United Kingdom but less than a quarter the size, which makes Qixi a rare pocket of green in an ocean of grey and neon.

In recent years, Qixi has sprouted a cluster of organic farms, an alternative school and a loosely knit community of ecologically minded youths. On a trip there recently, I sat in the backyard of a rambling house where a woman named Wu Juan lived with her family. We drank tea as her 11-year-old son bashfully watered bonsai plants and played with a pet dog, aware of our presence but too shy to step in. Just past the doorway, shelves and shelves of books gathered dust.

Wu told me that she and her husband had come here because they wanted to anchor their son’s value system in China’s rural traditions. They are not alone. In Qixi and elsewhere across China, a new internal migration is underway. As the middle class has grown rapidly over recent decades, access to top-tier urban real estate, spots in elite universities and other scarce goods have not. The result is the creation of incentives for alternative lifestyles, and the cities, full to the brim, have started to spill over into the countryside. As Wu put it, she and people like her are looking for new ways of life amid old traditions.

The countryside, in its apparent emptiness, is a good place to imagine new ways of life, and China’s government envisions the country’s future leading straight through it. The last couple years of closed borders have put globalization on hold, and the national government has refocused efforts on the undeveloped parts of the nation, where millions of people have never bought a washing machine or car or been on a plane. Those efforts emerge from the eternal conflict within the upper echelons of the Communist Party over what the heartland and the peasantry mean to the nation’s psyche and security. For many of these leaders — and for the educated, alienated young people fleeing the cities for places like Qixi — a rich, urban, coastal China that is culturally deracinated and dependent on the global economy is no longer even China at all.

When I mentioned to friends that I was on my way to Qixi, they warned me that the new villagers’ pastoral existence must still rely on China’s nearby urban resources. Indeed, despite Qixi’s bucolic atmosphere and aspirational self-sufficiency, Zhongshan, the center of which is just a 20-minute drive away, provides the infrastructure of modernity — the schools, hospitals, larger stores and shops, a train station. Wu’s husband still works for the government there, and takes their son to school in the city every day on his way to the office.

Among the Qixi villagers, I realized that, far from being a rejection of Chinese urban modernity, this was an alternative version, one entirely dependent on the smooth flow of human and financial capital between city and country, lubricated by an extensive new highway system. While Wu idealized the pre-Song Dynasty past in many ways, she recognized that she had many options that the ancient Chinese did not. Her lifestyle was produced by the dialectical interlocking of modernity — highways, cars, a cellphone — and the ancient literature she loved, the birds and mountains that she found in old poetry as well as outside her window. 

And yet, she said wistfully, the processes of industrialization and urbanization had been more destructive to Chinese values than the Cultural Revolution ever was. China’s rapid, rampant developmentalism over the past decades had destroyed a connection between humans and nature that had previously defined what it meant to be Chinese. That connection — the past and future of Chinese identity — was now only to be found in the countryside. 

China’s leaders used to boast that they had done in 20 years what took the West 200. Right on schedule, they’ve arrived at an exaggerated late capitalist malaise: inequality, low birth rates, “躺平” (“lying flat,” the movement against overwork) and “内卷” or “involution,” which denotes the economic equivalent of an ingrown toenail — a surfeit of resources and human capital that have no productive place to go. 

Concerned about what sort of future China might have, I began to read the works of Liang Shuming, Mao’s intellectual sparring partner, who warned against the monstrousness of an industrial China. As I traveled up and down China’s coast, his vision stayed with me as a baleful prophecy. In 1929, he warned that “China should not take the part of the Western nations because it would lead to imperialism, class war, economic inequality and grotesque overdevelopment of industrialized cities.” China’s GDP is set to become the world’s largest sometime between 2028 and 2033, depending on who you ask, but in the villages, alienated youth inspired by Liang’s defiant vision of a rural, simple life wonder if it’s been worth it.

China has a long history of intellectuals going to villages as administrators, teachers or sages retreating from the world. From the misty legends of Confucius’ rural school to poets like Du Fu and Li Bai, there has always been something appealing about stepping back from the world (which tends to mean bureaucratic supervision of economic activity) and into cultural pursuits in serene natural backdrops. 

Such retreat traditionally has a moralistic backbone, one based on the age-old discrepancy between urban elites and rural peasants. In a poem commonly attributed to the Tang poet Du Fu, “悯 农” (“Pity the Peasant”), literate elites are admonished to remember the hard work of the peasants. Parents in China still reference this poem to get their kids to eat vegetables. 

The most recent iteration of this movement was the government’s “down to the countryside” effort in the 1960s and 70s, which sent millions of urban youth to remote rural villages to melt the class barriers between rich and poor with the sweat of shared toil. As the scholar Qin Hui has noted, the experience shaped a generation of intellectuals of the Maoist era. For them, Qin wrote, “ideology itself was playing the role of a drug, and from a certain perspective, people need drugs, particularly when they find themselves in hopeless or desperate situations.” 

The built environment of Chinese villages and the cities of the interior, particularly of the former “third front,” are marked with the signs of this movement to this day. Wandering around the Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum in Jiangxi, for example, I noticed how the main propaganda slogans from the Maoist period have been recuperated into a sort of heritage chic for today’s youths who are heading to the country.

But in contrast to the goal of abandoning the self, which was common among the 1970s socialist martyrs, today’s young rural transplants have gone to find the self — to escape the commodification of digitally-driven cities. In discovering an organic ecosystem, they find their own physicality, their sentimentality, and they make choices much more individual and meaningful than picking between KFC and McDonald’s. 

I had come to Qixi via Guangzhou, the provincial capital and a two-and-a-half-hour flight south from Shanghai. Guangzhou feels like another louche tropical metropolis: Caracas or Jakarta, with pink and red flowers drowsily hanging over the expressway. If Shanghai is China’s answer to New York, this area is China’s version of Southern California — here dense, here rural, all connected by highways, with good weather and a middle-class prosperity often mocked as a cultural wasteland, with nothing but corporate theme parks and fancy shopping malls to visit. 

At the Institute for Public Policy, a think tank affiliated with the South China University of Technology, I met with a researcher named Lin Huihuang who told me about China’s “urban villages.” As cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen grew, Lin explained, they attracted rural migrants who constructed or adapted old buildings into micro-communities, united by allegiance to some shared hometown — something akin to the Chinatowns in American cities, except these are little pockets of culture from elsewhere within the nation, not outside it. 

But even as the population moved from villages to cities, the cities themselves sucked up rural land, sprawling endlessly. Guangdong today is nothing but city, stretching on seemingly forever through nine distinct urban hubs — like the “No-Stop City” that the Italian modernist architecture firm Archizoom imagined back in the 1960s. 

From Guangzhou I headed further south to Jiangmen. The high-speed train shot through a place that was neither city nor country but a landscape of peaks and waves: endless industrial zones, intense factory farms, massive mounds of earth and piles of shattered glass and wood, towers stretching on and on and on. They had to be empty, I thought to myself. Some of them were missing windows. Then I saw wet laundry hanging on the balconies. 

It almost resembled a war zone — what Liang called “splintered dead things.” In some ways it is a war zone: Guangdong is the battlefield of China’s war to dominate the global economy’s commanding heights. The province’s GDP is bigger than Russia’s. And with a population of 126 million, it has roughly the equivalent of half of America’s cities combined. If Russia exports oil and gas to the world, China exports what Marx called “frozen labor,” the captured work that adds value to manufactured products. China’s exports are not commodities, but the life force and time of its working-class population. And this is where they live.

I stopped by a Jiangmen research lab where my friend Li Jia is working on technologies that can bring China to carbon neutrality. Li took me up to the top floor and pointed out the tower where Liang Qichao, the famous Chinese reformer of yore, was born. As Liang famously wrote in “Impressions from Travels in Europe,” “We human beings have not secured happiness; on the contrary, science gives us catastrophes.” 

The urban-rural divide has been a political one in China for generations. If the fundamental goal of Chinese modernity is to be both modern and Chinese, Chinese politics is the struggle over which of the two receives more emphasis. 

The right or pro-development side tends to argue that only economic growth can save China, and policies aligned with capital and hence the cities can drive that. The left or populist side, with sentimental and material connections to the rural population, predominantly believes that the heartland is the life of Chinese people. Or as Lin Chun of the London School of Economics put it to me, “The Chinese land remembers the struggles of her people, and sighs” — in other words, the official histories will never remember the work of the common people, but the land itself will. The left’s position — that China and Chinese culture is simply the collective life of the people — can make leftists seem jarringly “conservative” to outsiders.

After seizing power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party immediately set upon a program of rural reform, redistributing land controlled by landlords to approximately 300 million peasant farmers, resulting in a brief uptick in prosperity. But then a wave of central consolidation and the construction of agricultural collectives led to discrepancies between supply and demand — or in layman’s terms, famine. It was China’s worst ever, and as the government became increasingly desperate to purchase grain from the international market to feed its starving population, the United States imposed an embargo, giving the Party an early and unforgettable lesson in food security. 

Decentralization followed in fits and starts, but it wasn’t until Du Runsheng, who reversed agricultural collectivism and returned to the decentralized model, that farmers were really empowered to decide for themselves once more. A civil war hero, Du worked on land reform in central China and Beijing in the 1950s, but like Deng Xiaoping, was deposed during the Cultural Revolution years, which he spent marinating over the issues of rural poverty. He was rehabilitated in 1978 and rose to become the director of the State Council’s Rural Development Research Center, eventually earning himself the unofficial title of “China’s father of rural reform.” 

Du, whose students include the World Bank’s former chief economist Justin Yifu Lin and China’s current vice president Wang Qishan, started the tradition of putting out a “number one central document” every year around the time of China’s spring festival. This document starts every year by advocating for rural reforms and farm issues, symbolically placing farmers at the top of the national agenda. The government has continued to issue these policy briefs annually — this year’s, the 19th, focused on rural well-being — but in recent years, the goal of rural reform has started to seem like the obvious direction for further Chinese growth. 

Over the past decades of “reform and opening,” globally-minded Chinese advocated building the economy by engaging with the outside world, even at the risk of losing cultural particularity, a process that has disproportionally benefited the new urban middle class and rich. This form of politics has often been practiced through entrepreneurship, outside of the government or political processes. Back in the 1980s, those leaving the earthy state sector, associated with the north, for the markets of the south, with their fluid flows of capital and population, were said to be “下海” — “jumping into the ocean.” The changes that resulted, even if they didn’t emerge from politics as such, have fundamentally altered the nature of Chinese life. 

The map of China’s GDP per capita skews heavily to the south, with Beijing the sole exception; China’s agricultural production, on the other hand, is almost precisely the opposite, with Dongbei, Henan and Shandong in the north the top producers. Far from being dead space, these sites of production are viewed as critical national security assets; the only alternative to growing food at home is importing it from potentially hostile countries like the U.S., Australia and Canada, and thus being at the mercy of sanctions. 

The CCP knows intellectually as well as emotionally that allowing foreigners to control the Chinese food supply is akin to giving up on China’s sovereignty. Food security in China is legally mandated, not only nationally but even regionally, with mayors of cities officially required to produce most of the vegetables consumed in their cities — a policy dating to Du’s heyday in the 1980s. 

As Even Rogers Pay, an agriculture analyst in Beijing, told me, China’s leaders have long known they would eventually need to modernize rural agricultural systems and land rights. “But sorting out how to advance these complex and mostly thankless reforms without horrible unintended consequences posed a challenge,” Pay said. As Xi Jinping put it shortly after taking office: “The easy reforms that everyone is happy about have been done, the delicious meat has been eaten, and what’s left is hard bones that are difficult to gnaw.” 

The government has been gnawing those bones over recent years, with poverty eradication campaigns and rural revitalization strategies, which aim to remove barriers between investors and the agriculture sector, as well as incentivize people who want to return to the countryside and start a business. 

“Top leadership realized that rising inequality between rural and urban residents posed an existential threat to China’s political stability and to support for the Party,” Pay said. “Deng Xiaoping had famously called to ‘let some people get rich first,’ but with first-tier cities at or near developed world standards of living, and rural areas lacking toilets and running water, it was only a matter of time before rural people would start wondering if they were ever going to be on the ‘get rich’ list.”

Under Xi, the left is arguing for lower GDP targets, “ecological civilization” and “common prosperity” — policies that Yuen Yuen Ang, a scholar at the University of Michigan, compares to America’s Progressive Movement. From this point of view, China isn’t closing to the West so much as pivoting its attention to the hundreds of millions of Chinese who don’t have adequate education or nutrition, and haven’t yet been integrated into the economy. China’s closure during the COVID years has allowed the country to somehow become more itself, like pickles fermenting and maturing in a jar buried in the garden.

To some extent, as Chinese parents found Montessori, Waldorf and Schumacher schools, we can say we’ve seen this before: in the West in the early 1960s, when prosperity engendered alienation from the new materialistic mass society. In distinction to the West, however, China is under the unified control of an avowedly Marxist organization, one structured as a meritocratic one-party state of philosopher kings. For them, China is a math problem: population times territory. Solve for utopia. 

Around eight years ago, newcomers started arriving in Qixi. One was Lin Jie, whose husband is the chairman of a publically listed company in Zhongshan, who signed a decade-long lease from the original villagers and started building up an ecological agriculture business. 

Wu Juan and her family arrived during the pandemic, subleasing from Lin the farmstead where her family lives in now. Like many of these new migrants, Wu is a graduate of one of urban China’s elite universities — in her case, Fudan University in Shanghai. She had been a journalist for one of Zhongshan’s newspapers for years, covering lifestyle in the prosperous provincial city. But she felt restless in the city, stuck in a life that didn’t allow for variation or exploration. And then the pandemic hit. 

For the past five years, schools all over China’s middle-class belt — the southern coast from Guangdong up to Beijing — have been trying to adjust to the central government’s shift in educational priorities toward a new focus on turning China into an “ecological civilization.” Wu, a passionate birdwatcher, took advantage of that development to create a small business that takes local schoolchildren on trips into the mountains. Wu calls it “自然教育” (“nature education”) and she infuses her classes with ancient Chinese idioms like “天人合一” — “the Earth and humanity are one.”

“What I understand by nature education is not just taking children into nature to know birds and bugs, but to use nature to pass on the connotation of Chinese culture to children and nourish them,” she told me. Her students practice calligraphy on their field trips, so that they can travel back to the days of oracle bone inscriptions and notice how Chinese characters are really pictograms of natural objects. They learn to identify animals, like the red-billed blue magpie, which appear in the poetry that all Chinese students memorize in school. They chant poems from the “Book of Songs,” many of the animals from which can still be seen — and, since it’s Guangdong, eaten. During winter and summer vacations, she takes them to nature reserves all over China to tell them the stories of China’s mountains, rivers and rare animals and plants. 

For the Wu family and others, Qixi’s nature and scenery were a necessary aspect of the way they wanted to live, but not everything. Ultimately, the vibrant community of like-minded people made the difference. People here aren’t looking for Thoreauvian isolation — they are more interested in a shared project. He Xuan, one of the new villagers, quoted the Confucian sage Mencius:  “天时地利人和” — “A combination of good timing, good place and talent.”

She went on: “They are designers, architects, educators, farm owners, entrepreneurs, a carpenter, an independent illustrator, a baker and community organizers.” To me, they seemed focused on practical goals grounded in daily life, community and the success of their small businesses; they were familiar with the history of Chinese radical thought, but they wouldn’t have been out of place in an American college town.

Over the years, as organic farms morphed into experimental schools and carpentry workshops and cafes appeared, the new villagers began to feel more confident in their new identity — and capable of including the older villagers in their plans. Most of the original villagers seem to appreciate the resources that the new villagers have brought to the table, and many even volunteer to help. “We are not here to conquer land and resources,” He said. “We are here as villagers ourselves, wanting to share and co-create a good life together.” In April this year, village residents both new and old came together to formalize a new administrative structure for the town, one based on ecologically minded agriculture, small businesses and tourism. 

Another of the new villagers, Xiao Hao, was born in a village in Henan, got an education with the radical agronomist Wen Tiejun and helped launch two local farms and a “learning garden” that hosts an experimental holistic educational program for adults. His humble, entrepreneurial attitude to village life differs qualitatively from the sages and radical intellectuals in Chinese history, the traditional wise men who’ve gone down to educate the provincials.

By doing business in the village, Hao related to the villagers in an equal way. (That may be wishful thinking on his part — the locals are likely millionaires due to the value of their inherited homes, with Zhongshan so close.) He explained that this sort of village only makes sense in China’s industrialized core. The inland (内地) of his home region Henan is different: a site of intensive agricultural production. The Cantonese, he told me, have already been through industrialization, so now some aspire to return to nature. The Henanese, on the other hand, have not fully industrialized and — with factories like the big new Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou increasingly automated — they may never. The values of economic sustainability, environmental sustainability and spiritual sustainability, Hao concluded, wouldn’t make sense in a poor region. 

Driving back into the sprawl after leaving Qixi, I recalled a trip during Chinese New Year of 2014 to interview Ou Ning at his experimental village at Bishan, in Anhui Province. Ou, a curator and artist who was friendly with Rem Koolhaas and Hou Hanru, had tried to create a cultural economy capable of supporting the local village. It was a truly beautiful place: Old buildings had been restored, hosting bookstores, teashops and classrooms. In front of a wood stove surrounded by books, he explained to me the need to give a dignified way of life to rural Chinese, and to preserve architectural heritage. Fundamentally, though, Ou was too far ahead of his time. His project seemed like an individual dream, and in the end, the government dismantled it. 

Earlier that holiday season, a friend and I decided to visit the hometown of a construction foreman named Xiao Jing who had a landscape architecture business. A short drive from Bishan, Jing’s village was everything Ou was fighting against. It was largely abandoned, with huge, flashy homes built with remittances from Shanghai. And it was cold — Jing never bothered to connect it to the electrical grid, since he spent no more than a week or two a year there, and so we had to sleep with sweaters and puffy coats on. 

In China, country cooking is called “土菜” — “dirt food” — which hints at the earthy element of rural life. During my visit, everybody was constantly drunk, barely washing dirt off vegetables pulled from the ground, throwing leaves and roots into the wok before staggering off to light illegal fireworks. Cut off from traditions except for quasi-tribal family reunions and superstitions, environmentally destructive and part of a de facto economic caste system, Jing’s way of life is one that the government is trying to change by dampening urban real estate markets — the source of easy money for decades — and encouraging village-scale regeneration. I haven’t seen Jing for a while, but he still regularly posts videos on WeChat of his team renovating villas and shopping malls in Shanghai’s endless suburbs. 

From these somewhat useless activities, GDP growth is created, along with endless waste and dilapidation. The pursuit of empty growth by local government officials, driven by short-term incentives and no real connection to local places, has created a generic Chinese urbanism that is undoubtedly much wealthier than what came before, on paper at least, but at the cost of having deformed the population. In 1942, Eileen Zhang wrote that “Shanghai people are distilled from traditional Chinese people under the pressure of modern life; they are the product of a deformed mix of old and new culture.” While the unprecedented condition of material abundance for the masses in China can feel like the end of history — a history defined by shortage, hard work, folk medicine and humble cuisine — during the droning tedium of pandemic-era China, the entire country started asking: Is that all there is?

Villages are to China what stem cells are to the human body: a latent source of strength that enables China to regenerate itself when it is injured. In this sense, nearly 40% of China’s population are like America’s “preppers,” with real skills to support themselves in times of crisis. As the saying goes, Japan and Korea create technology, while China is a technology: a vast social factory whose commodity is a population unified by a core set of values, yet spread out across a continent and self-reliant. 

Today, as China attempts to build an economic autarky, free from sanctions and foreign interference, it is trying to catalyze another decade or two of growth from the still undeveloped rural interior, the consistent focus of national policy document number one. Chinese leaders may complain about Western hegemony — but to paraphrase the Belgian writer Raoul Vaneigem: It’s not the cops, it’s the geometry. It’s the 540 million rural peasants who are the ones increasingly the subject of economic hopes for the future as the country seeks to build a “小康社会” — a “society of moderate prosperity.”

When a venture capitalist recently commented that “the next China is China,” he was referring to this inward turn — a literal turn inward, from cities to villages. And when Alibaba announced that it was “donating” 100 billion RMB ($15.5 billion) to charity, China’s rural hinterland featured prominently. Unlocking rural China’s potential using capital outlays and technological silver bullets is the game plan for China’s next 10 years. Local governments today see their task as solving China’s math problem for equality between classes as well as regions, material abundance and cultural harmony. In 2001, the former premier Zhu Rongji claimed that for “the first time in Chinese history, the CCP succeeded in solving China’s food problem, once and for all.” The end to endemic famine in China, a signal pre-WTO economic achievement, laid the groundwork for the “society of moderate prosperity” that has followed.

In Western countries, we understand the world through John Locke’s notion of “rights,” but as John Gray has observed, Chinese politics has filtered through Western thinkers such as Marx and Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. Liang Shuming opposed the materialist orientation of imported Enlightenment thinkers with Buddhist sutras: emptiness is presence, and presence is emptiness (“色即是空，空即是色”). 

It sounds pretty abstract until you find yourself on a highway in a Chinese industrial zone, wondering what the point of it all is, and how it can make anybody happy. In 1979, Guy Alitto cited Liang’s prediction about the spiritual dead-end that development for its own sake could become when he wrote: “The Chinese city had become a model of the Western bourgeois society — an artificially created place of selfish, competitive individualists with ‘no feelings for others’ — it was the enemy.” Two generations later, China has swallowed the world economy, and is struggling to avoid being swallowed by it. Its introspective turn is led by the government, but the need is felt by all sorts of people. 

Not far from Zouping, the village in the Shandong countryside that was the site of Liang’s experimental community-based development policies, is the world’s largest peach orchard. Themed as a tourist attraction, it echoes the Chinese legend of the peach blossom spring, in which a fisherman who almost drowned in a storm wakes up in an idyllic place that he doesn’t recognize. The locals were friendly, and the food plentiful. 

But what about the wars and the foreigners, the fisherman asked? What foreigners, the villagers of the peach blossom spring replied — we’ve never heard of such a thing. When the fisherman left after a week, the villagers told him it would be pointless to try to return, but he marked the way and told others about the utopia he had stumbled across. No one was ever able to find it.

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It’s almost impossible to visit the new astronomy museum here in China’s most populous city. Nearly half a year after it opened, when I visited last October it was so popular that tickets needed to be reserved weeks in advance. A project of the municipal government, the museum is a monument to Chinese middle class cultural optimism — a physical embodiment of the “scientific socialism” enshrined in the constitution, and of the space program propelling the country onward and upward. 

Chinese government-run museums can be hit or miss. Some, like Beijing’s China Watermelon Museum, are ridiculous; others are haunted houses of nationalism, like the Unit 731 Museum in Harbin. The new astronomy museum was surprisingly good, my friend Matjaž Tančič, a photographer, and I agreed — even if we weren’t the target audience. Like Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, with its IMAX screen and cups of blue and green sorbet, it is clearly a pedagogical tool for cheerful crowds of middle-school students, a pretext to get young kids to connect emotionally with the ideals of science and discovery. 

In the Shanghai museum, the diorama of Albert Einstein in a Vienna café, the extensive exhibitions about climate change or axioms of quantum physics and the remarkably positive history of the American space program all seemed only tangentially related to China’s own. Such exhibits, tethered as they are to the past and the present of space exploration, will be obsolete soon enough: By the time the kids visiting the day we were there finish university, China’s space station, which is expected to be completed this year, will have hosted countless international experiments. China may have landed astronauts on the moon, perhaps even Mars. The real lesson for these kids seemed to be that our world is beset by troubling challenges, but idealistic dedication to scientific research can illuminate solutions. 

Our tour through the history of physics and astronomy ended with an exhibition about the space station, complete with a replica rocket. An interactive model of the Earth was foregrounded with a poetic description titled “Homeland”:

What was once thought the center of the world, is only a tiny corner of the universe, 
What was once considered the only Sun in outer space, is just one of the billions.
The blue marble we treasured has long faded to a pale blue dot. 
We travel, we explore, we set off for adventures.
Yet, no matter how far the journey takes us, this tiny corner is always our home.

Much like America’s Apollo program, China’s space infrastructure — the Shenzhou (“Divine Land”) spacecrafts, the Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) space station — are named to flag China’s mythology, conjuring vivid archetypes from the past. “The space dream,” President Xi Jinping said to astronauts aboard a prototype space station in 2013, “is part of the dream to make China stronger.” 

As China becomes a mass middle-class society — McKinsey estimates that there will be 395 million Chinese in the middle class by 2030, up from 225 million today — a diffuse sense of optimism permeates the country, one of entrepreneurial spirit, of new frontiers, of the liberating possibilities of science and technology, of the pursuit of quiet, conformist prosperity. Walking through outer space-themed holiday displays at Xintiandi, Shanghai’s premier shopping district, with shoppers mugging in front of astronaut statues and drinking coffee in spaceship-themed cafes, it was impossible not to notice the way that dreams of outer space overlap that sense of optimism. None of it needs to be detailed — by being vague, the dream allows everybody to imagine space for themselves, in their own way.

Much like NASA’s Cold War-era endeavors, China’s space program is a generalized petri dish for dual-use technology: swords as well as plowshares. Even as China’s space program, funded by the state through military channels, creates hypersonic missiles and rockets emblazoned with Chinese flags, it also has had commercial spinoffs, like the Beidou satellite that powers GPS systems, that are part of a clearly articulated plan for the space program to lead the country to a pole position within the space economy. 

China and its space program are vastly different than the Soviet Union decades ago; in fact, in many ways, China’s society resembles America’s in the early 1960s, with nationalist sentiment driven by a broad middle-class prosperity that keeps rising and rising. But China’s population is no longer growing as rapidly as it was, so a culture of techno-optimism and an obsession with infrastructure, science and technology have become the levers to thrust China into a prosperous future. 

Accordingly, China funds shadowy military technology programs — similar to America’s DARPA, the agency credited with inventing what became the internet and many other influential technologies — which intermittently result in cool rockets taking off on the nightly news. Indeed, most of China’s aerospace breakthroughs aren’t totally new — they recapitulate American achievements from an earlier era.

Many NASA and Chinese scientists dream of collaborating: “Space is a family affair,” Nie Haisheng, the commander of China’s astronaut corps, told CNN in 2015. “China, as a big country, should make our own contributions in this field.” But since 2011, the Wolf Amendment has prevented NASA from collaborating with the Chinese government and researchers. And American security concerns exclude China from joining the 15-nation cooperative effort on the International Space Station. 

Nevertheless, at the heart of China’s space aspirations, and its economy more broadly, are complicated lessons learned from the American dream. Observers like the bloggers at Dongfang Hour, which touts itself as the “go-to information website on the Chinese space industry,” see “regular and long-term support for national space projects, as opposed to the frequent changing of priorities that has sometimes hampered the U.S. space program over the past 20+ years … in part linked to the nature of the Chinese political system.” 

2. TECHNOCRACY (GUIZHOU)

Deep in Guizhou province, the green heart of China, the Chinese government’s dreams of space exploration converge with an older and more terrestrial goal: poverty eradication. In a rural valley ringed by mountains, China’s FAST (“Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope”) is remote by design, since the signals from mobile phones would impair its functioning. Visitors have to turn theirs off a few miles away. 

I visited FAST last April, part of a trip sponsored by a Chinese think tank. The objective seemed to be to lay out the government’s positive assessment of the project, to show off the telescope and how the surrounding area had been developed. Passing misty mountains and idyllic rural villages on our four-hour drive there from the provincial capital, Guiyang, my mind drifted into the past.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in Shanghai, but the action was in the countryside from the start, in the dreamy green mountains of Chinese poetry and painting, where it’s easy to doze away the days, continuously refilling the teapot. In the 1920s and 30s, in provinces far away from Shanghai’s globalized modernity — Hunan, Jiangxi, here in Guizhou — dissatisfied local sons started to make war, moved by violent class-based revolutionary impulses. Not only was this the anger of factory worker against capitalist boss, it was also the powerless feeling of farmers wrestling with bad harvests and poverty. 

A few decades later, Mao Zedong famously proved his strength by swimming in the Yangtze River near Wuhan, then wrote a poem about it:

Great plans are afoot:
A bridge will fly to span the north and south, 
Turning a deep chasm into a thoroughfare; 
Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west 
To hold back Wushan’s clouds and rain  
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.  
The mountain goddess if she is still there 
Will marvel at a world so changed.

Conquering nature — making the landscape suit industrial needs — became the project that animated the country in the early years of CCP rule. It still features in much of the official political history. 

The CCP’s homeland is in these mountain villages, and their dominant emotion — “never forget the struggle,” the propaganda banners remind us — is frustration with poverty, a desire to create material abundance. China’s founding fathers, or so the stories go, were educated in rural schools, debating literature with their teachers while it rained outside. Mao is said to have gone on a tour of Hunan with an older student, begging and writing poems for food. Though his family was relatively well-off compared to his neighbors, Mao was bullied in secondary school by his wealthy urban classmates for his provincial upbringing, and the Shanghai founders of the CCP ridiculed him for his accented Mandarin, his bad teeth and halitosis, his country clothes and manners.

In the summer of 1945, toward the end of the war with Japan, Mao gave a speech in the arid mountains of Yan’an that riffed off a famous fable, in which an old man gets annoyed by two mountains nearby and tries to dig them up. “Today,” Mao said, “two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. … If they [the masses of the Chinese people] stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?” This was a metaphor heard literally by the Red Army, many of whom were uneducated and appreciated Mao’s earthy, agricultural sentimentality. 

After the revolution, Mao and his friends tried to fight the powerful current of social elites moving to metropolitan areas. With repeated social mobilizations — the “down to the countryside” movement, in which urban youths were sent to live with and learn from rural laborers; the “third front,” the Cold War-era construction of massive military and industrial operations deep in the interior to protect them from attack; the establishment of huge inland cities such as Wuhan and Chongqing — they tried to move modernity to the mountains. Today, it is big data centers, radio telescopes and militaristic poverty alleviation campaigns that are sprinkled throughout the green heart of the continent. 

The mountains are locked into the historical memory of the CCP, as well as into the Chinese language itself. “The nation is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain,” wrote the T’ang poet Du Fu in 755. Mao revolted against the classical style of the ancient poets, but he clung on to the idyllic rural imagery. Part of his 1925 poem “Changsha” goes:

Brooding over this immensity,
I ask, on this bondless land
Who rules over man’s destiny?
I was here with a throng of companions,
Vivid yet those crowded months and years.
Young we were, schoolmates,
At life’s full flowering;
Filled with student enthusiasm
Boldly we cast all restraints aside.
Pointing to our mountains and rivers,
Setting people afire with our words,
We counted the mighty no more than muck.
Remember still
How, venturing midstream, we struck the waters
And the waves stayed the speeding boats?

At FAST, we got a perfunctory tour of the grounds, with opportunities for selfies with ordinary cameras (no phones). Di Li, a radio astronomer, the chief scientist at the telescope and an old soul, led the way. He and I chatted about the telescopes he has known and loved, including the Green Bank just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, where I lived when I was younger, and the ways that scientists relate to politics. Any scientist will tell you that they don’t want politicians interfering with their work, and he was no different. But such arguments don’t hold in the case of an expensive telescope in a rural area. Without government funding, there’s no way this valley could have sprouted such a massive piece of advanced technology. 

Just after NASA landed astronauts on the moon in 1969, Gil Scott Heron sang about struggles with poverty back on the ground:

Was all that money I made last year  
for whitey on the moon? 
How come I ain’t got no money here?  
Hm! Whitey’s on the moon.
Y’know I just about had my fill  
of whitey on the moon.
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
airmail special  
to whitey on the moon.

The juxtaposition of hugely expensive scientific research stations with poverty can be jarring, in any time and place. In China, I wondered, what kind of socialism is it that builds telescopes in areas that still have pockets of illiteracy?

Whatever the CCP is today, it started as a movement of people in the shadows, hiding in the hills, trying to make something out of nothing. By some black magic, rituals accompanied by huge sacrifices, they succeeded. In 1949, Mao exclaimed, “The Chinese people have stood up!” Since then, they’ve been walking through the land — soldiers marching through the countryside to build factories and railways, students sent down to clear the forests, workers pouring concrete, tourists at the airport. Here is a man standing in the research console of a massive telescope, asking you if you’d like to have some tea.

As Li and I strolled toward the highway chatting about socialist science, I mentioned a pet theory of mine: China is Solaris. Stanisław Lem’s classic work of science fiction takes place on a planet populated by a single organism, a vast living ocean, the intentions and characteristics of which are inscrutable for the scientists studying it. Solaris and China, both roiling with life, but hidden by a thick veil. 

The tendency of outsiders to project our hopes and fears on the unknown can make it impossible to see beyond the veil. For Martin Jacques, the former editor of Marxism Today, China would be what came after capitalism; for the capitalists of America and the world, China was a billion consumers. Penetrating the atmosphere of this planet has been extraordinary difficult, despite an unprecedented cultural, economic and scientific interchange between China and the United States that lasted decades. Alas, Chinese rocket scientists are hounded and harassed in the U.S. today, and foreign scientists who come into China find themselves on a different political planet, with different rules and gravitational forces than the one they left. 

We left the telescope for the nearby city of Zunyi, an old red revolutionary base. The director of the think tank that sponsored the trip insisted that we stay at a hotel on a golf course outside of town. The hotels around here, he said, are unbearable.

3. SCIENCE FICTIONS (XI’AN)

Brown and yellow leaves blew across the ground as I cycled down Science Avenue, the main street in Xi’an’s Gaoxin district. It had rained the night before and a crisp breeze circulated through the sleepy old city. Vendors cooked chestnuts and yams by the side of the road, and stalls sold raisins, almonds, cashews and apricots, the autumn harvest of the capital of China’s northwest. 

Far away from China’s populated east coast, Xi’an is a place that’s more historically minded than futurist — the terracotta warriors are a short drive away, and the local economy is creaky, industrial and socialist. My friend Alice Wang, an American-Chinese artist who splits her time between Los Angeles and Shanghai, was having her work shown at the Xi’an OCAT museum, and so I had come to try to understand how artists and writers in China imagine what a Chinese future could look like. But first, I had to visit what’s called “aerospace town” on the city’s southern fringe. 

Xi’an’s role as a science capital in China stretches back to the 1950s, when Soviet experts came to visit and help jumpstart Chinese industry. Following the Soviet “science town” model, where employees of a given enterprise were clustered together near the workplace, residential blocks sprang up across the city for the “danwei” work units. So too did companies like Xi’an Aircraft Industrial Corporation, which was founded in 1958 during the first decade of “New China.” Today, the company is on America’s sanctions list, identified as part of China’s military-industrial complex and a military end-user. 

As I biked into aerospace town, surreptitiously taking snapshots of the danwei compounds of various state-owned enterprises, I started to notice that everything from cake shops to grocery stores to breakfast stalls claimed to be somehow related to outer space. The streets are named after China’s Shenzhou (Milky Way) spaceships, even if they look identical to the ones in any other northern Chinese town. Life seems comfortable, but hardly high-tech. And even as China’s spaceships and aircraft are being engineered here, all the little old ladies, schoolkids and people selling raisins and apples in the market identify with the project as well, projecting the civic pride one normally associates with beloved local sports teams. 

Alice was born in Xi’an. Her father was among the first to earn a Ph.D. in China immediately after the Cultural Revolution, but despite a prestigious role at Zhejiang University, with his work published in Nature, he decided to take his family to the U.S., where he did research at MIT for Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. As a foreign national, though, he found his career options limited; the family broke up, time passed and Alice found herself back in Xi’an for her first major art show. 

Scientists’ lives often resemble the lives of artists and writers: years spent pursuing a dream that makes sense in one’s imagination. But how to show it to others? We make our experiments wherever we can find the resources to do them — everything else is secondary. 

Alice’s video art, installation pieces and photographs on display at the OCAT, engage with her father’s scientific career, albeit indirectly. I recognized FAST in her video “Pyramids and Parabolas,” which for her as for me is a potent symbol of human curiosity. In this science-obsessed society, our existential questions about the cosmos took the form of an inquiry into China’s space program, its telescopes and rockets.

Above all, in Xi’an, I felt a strong sense of the audacity of the human desire to explore outer space. What is it that motivates China’s leaders to fund this space program, and the steamed bun vendors and chestnut roasters of southern Xi’an to take such pride in it? 

On this sandy, autumnal plain, people live humble lives, close to the ground; as the academic Xiaoqing Zhang writes of her childhood memories at her grandparent’s home in a village on Xi’an’s outskirts: “The house was old but well-built and preserved, surrounded by cherry and fig trees. Frogs jumped out of the small pond near cherries, singing happily in the rain.” That world is completely gone now, she writes, leaving a bittersweet feeling: “As a Chinese citizen, I feel that the country is somehow moving forward positively.” 

Outside OCAT are muddy fields, unfinished apartment towers and camps of construction workers washing leeks and onions for dinner. Passing by, I wondered: How does it feel to go from caves to towers in a few generations, or to sell raisins to people who might be designing and building spaceships? 

Today, Alice’s father wouldn’t necessarily have needed to leave China to pursue his research; in fact, he has retired to Beihai, a beach town in Guangxi, and become invigorated by the leftist, nationalist, Maoist politics that interrupted the studies of his youth. Alice told me that her mother speculated after the family broke up that if they hadn’t gone to America, things might have turned out differently. Who knows? We build our lives in the slipstream of politics, of macro forces beyond our control. 

The quest for outer space symbolizes the desire to make the cosmos our own. For the literary critic and writer Regina Kanyu Wang, fantasies about outer space can provide opportunities to imagine a different life on the ground; as she told me: “You can see a heated feminist movement going on in China, with lots of online fights and controversies. You can also see the first woman astronaut going to space. Meanwhile, you can see the government encourages men to be more masculine, and women to have three children. All those different narratives take place at the same time. … Science fiction has become a way for those historically marginalized groups to add their voices to this era, not only present, but also future.”

Cheng Li, the Brookings Institute’s Zhongnanhai watcher, told me about the “cosmos club,” a group of technocratic leaders rising through the ranks of China’s space industry; as the 20th CCP congress approaches in the fall, it seems likely that several of these techno-populists will be elected to the Politburo, bringing Xi’s vision of the future to life.

In visits to this part of the country, Xi has spoken of a perverse and contradictory feeling about the past and China’s development similar to Zhang’s nostalgia. During his adolescence, he lived in Liangjiahe, one of the poor villages outside of Yan’an, and had his own personal struggle with the poverty of the countryside. The frustration with the stolid impoverishment of the mountains that characterized the CCP’s first generation filled Xi’s adolescence as well, and the flavors of the countryside that I tasted at the market in aerospace town would be the Proustian madeleines of his days of struggle in the heartland. The complicated sentiment of love and identification for something that you want to change in every way has long been the signal emotion of Chinese governance. 

4. THE TOURIST (HAINAN ISLAND)

Christmas arrived, and I got a strange phone call. Xi’an’s COVID outbreak, with numbers still laughably small by international standards, was leading to a severe national lockdown, and I’d have to spend Christmas Eve in a dingy business hotel. At times, China’s technocracy seems like an invincible sublime, but then I leave Shanghai, and it feels like a Potemkin village put together by well-meaning villagers. Within a day or two and three COVID tests, I got on a flight for Hainan Island, a tourist spot marketed as “China’s Hawaii,” with surfers and sunseekers and the annual Boao Forum, China’s answer to Davos. China’s Cape Canaveral, the Wenchang Space Launch Site, is also on the island, in the rural hinterland on the northeastern coast. 

The launch site isn’t accessible to foreigners, or even those who have Hong Kong or Macau passports. (When it isn’t in use, tourists are allowed to poke around.) But my driver took me to some farm fields just behind it. Winter melons and elegant brown cattle are on the farms around here; the driver told me he’d lived here as a child, until 2001, when his family was evicted and they moved to a dormitory-style apartment compound in a newly developed village. When we come here on launch days, he told me, cops show up within five minutes. 

We kept driving, and he asked me about the conditions in America — he had heard things were chaotic there. I told him everything was great, and he was easily convinced. One hand on the steering wheel, he started showing me videos of enormous crabs, which his sister sold to the Chinese community somewhere in California via her WeChat store. 

The idea of America has touched every single person and place in China. In the 1920s, Soviet peasants who didn’t know about Lenin or Stalin still knew about Henry Ford. Cruising around semitropical farmland in Wenchang, my driver was much more interested in America than inaccessible Shanghai.

That afternoon, we visited the space museum in Wenchang. It conformed to my expectations of a Chinese museum better than the one in Shanghai: three floors of random artifacts, including one devoted to knickknacks from the rocket scientist Qian Xuesen. It even had a replica of the Challenger spaceship out front. The outline of the American flag was still visible under a quick coat of paint, and “Challenger” was spelled wrong. 

For many years, the American version of the story goes, the U.S. traded with China — ideas, objects, commodities, technologies — in the hope that China would become a democracy like ours. But this failed, and so we stopped. But what if China did start to become like the U.S. — the lost world of men in grey flannel suits, suburban expansion and quiet prosperity? The America that the Chinese encountered after the reform and opening period was one of material abundance, technological accomplishment and cultural chauvinism, which has filtered into Chinese society via mimesis fueled by millions of Chinese people who have spent time in the U.S. — a demographic overrepresented in China’s scientific community. Scratch a Chinese rocket scientist and you’ll find a person reminiscent about Trader Joe’s, about the luxurious experience of tasting Häagen-Dazs, about years in a suburb of Boston, San Diego, Chicago. 

The generation of Americans who watched the rockets taking off from Cape Canaveral has grown up and had children now. Over those years, the utopian promise of America’s 1960s scientific development failed to culminate in the egalitarian society many dreamed of. And in China, emulating America’s social and economic model has led to empty consumerism, income inequality and monopoly capitalism. My taxi driver had a simple explanation for all of this. Wealth doesn’t last three generations, he told me; China is now in the second generation, traditionally of consolidating wealth, and America in the dissolute squandering phase, one that lends itself to the sort of talk of revolution that was found in China a century ago.

Banning China from space, much like banning China from purchasing U.S. semiconductors, has only led to what the technology analyst Dan Wang calls “China’s Sputnik Moment.” Scientists, space enthusiasts and others were forced to learn that the U.S. didn’t want them — at all — a trend that has only become stronger with controversial FBI investigations over the last couple years into ethnically Chinese scientists like Hu Anming and Gang Chen. By asserting that all Chinese nationals were involved in Chinese government-funded political or military projects, the U.S. security establishment created a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the creative drive of scientists that once took Alice Wang’s father to the U.S. now pushes 80% of U.S.-trained Chinese scientists to return to China to conduct their research. 

The science-fiction writer Chen Qiufan told me that “the space program and China’s explosion of scientific research have been taken as one of the most representative symbols of China’s uprising. By decades of promoting “科学技术是第一生产力” [a government slogan that means “science and technology is the first productive force”], the idea has taken root deep in people’s minds. And it’s something that can be quantifiably compared with U.S. and other developed countries. … People feel patriotic since that is something only Americans could do — launch rockets and spacecraft, build up a space station, land on the moon or even Mars.” 

Students in elite Chinese high schools famously study for the ferociously challenging gaokao examination, the questions on which in recent years have prompted them to imagine a future of carbon neutrality, governance modernization and common prosperity. An AI-led “ecological civilization,” the sort that Qiufan portrays in his children’s book “Carbon Zero China,” is, he says, “quite aligned with the current strategy from the state.” There’s a long list of ways that China’s government is trying to encourage science, from science-fiction writing competitions for students to museums like the one that I saw in Shanghai or conferences featuring sci-fi writers in conversation with rocket scientists. Previous generations of ambitious Chinese moved mountains and emigrated to foreign countries; today, the government is concentrating funding, national pride and creative enterprise on science, technology and space exploration — a task no longer shared with the U.S., its citizens or its academic institutions.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1976 novel “Slapstick,” a future America is beset by a microscopic plague from China. As American politicians advocate togetherness and family values, Chinese science reaches new apogees of success, and then the Chinese ambassador announces that the Chinese are withdrawing from all contact with the U.S. “His farewell was polite and friendly,” Vonnegut writes. “He said his country was severing relations simply because there was no longer anything going on in the United States which was of any interest to the Chinese at all.” 

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DONGBEI, China — During the COVID-19 pandemic, as friends outside China went through lockdowns, restrictions and canceled travels, China’s surveillance state offered me the strange privilege of freely wandering within the confines of its national border. The globalized world as I’d known it shrank, but the countryside of China — from the towering Himalayas to the azure Pacific, the sweeping Manchurian forests, and gemlike villages set among glowing mountains of bamboo — opened itself up to me. 

On my travels, I couldn’t help but wonder if the way governments would respond to climate change would play out in the same way as their responses to the pandemic. What if a democratic society simply can’t change fast enough? If America’s “democratic” structures are less capable than those of the Chinese in protecting citizens’ lives from obvious threats, I wondered: Is “democratic” really such a good word to describe them?  

What if, as America remained mired in indecision, a single individual rose to the apex of an ancient civilization, consolidated power and decided that a radical green transformation is necessary? What if the Chinese Communist Party chairman commandeered the country’s propaganda apparatus to speak of climate change, and his words — repeated by every local official and plastered on every wall — were about ecological conservation? 

In China, I never trust my initial reactions to policy pronouncements. I have vivid memories of the weekend in 2014 when Shanghai’s air quality was off-the-charts bad, and I lay in bed coughing for a weekend; or wandering around in the factory towns of the Pearl River Delta, with pollution in the water and the land. What the government says sounds good, of course, but is it true?

Carbon emissions keep rising in China, and if COVID served as a wake-up call to many in the Western world, it hasn’t really hit China in the same way: The narrative of endless economic growth is just as entrenched here as ever. How could China have it both ways, getting richer and greener at the same time? Wanting to see things with my own eyes, I left the city to explore the new green China that President Xi Jinping is trying to build, hoping to find, as he had promised, that “clear waters and green mountains are as good as gold and silver.”

Political Ecology

In 2020, the northwest province of Qinghai formally opened the country’s first national park, Sanjiangyuan, an area nearly as big as England. It was the first of China’s rapidly growing national park system, which senior political leaders are directing. The park system was first mentioned in the Party’s 12^th five year plan, which covered the years 2011 to 2015 and was released prior to Xi Jinping’s ascension to power. Xi has subsequently made a point of emphasizing his personal interest in national parks, and his aphorism “clear waters and green mountains are as good as gold and silver” (“绿山青水是金山银山”) is written on red propaganda banners in villages, towns and natural preservation areas all around the country.

At present, there are 10 national park pilot projects in China involving 12 provinces, comprising approximately 2.3% of the country’s land area. The government intends to preserve a quarter of its national territory — less than is called for by the “30 by 30 initiative,” an international coalition of countries attempting to preserve 30% of the world’s land and ocean by 2030, but these numbers are scaling up quickly. Xi is personally tied to the vision of carbon neutrality by 2060 and to the new park system, so these ecological initiatives could go a long way toward proving exactly how powerful the Party is in China today.

Ecological politics are also linked to other priorities in Beijing, like anti-corruption politics — or as the state-run news site Xinhua calls it, China’s “political ecology.” Xi intervenes personally when villas are illegally constructed in ecological protection zones, to ensure water supplies are clean or shut down polluting factories. Top officials with close connections to the fossil fuel industry have been deposed, perhaps because of the environmental destruction that follows fossil fuel extraction and the ready flow of cash that resource extraction generates.

Despite the opaque politics of China’s central government, it’s clear that the current trend toward power consolidation has coincided with a stronger emphasis on clean air, water and public resources, whose destruction has created private fortunes in a way that is antithetical to social stability. Following China’s recent crackdown on technology firms, Morgan Stanley advised clients to avoid the coal and fossil fuel industry — such an unpopular category, they warned, looked highly vulnerable to a future crackdown.

The Great Northern Wilderness

I was traveling with my partner, a native of Heilongjiang’s oil city, Daqing, deep in the northeastern region of Dongbei, or Manchuria. Her perspective helped me to stay grounded in the realities of the lives of local people and how exploitation of fossil fuels, forests and other natural resources had driven human settlement here. The first stop on our summer journey into China’s ecological preservation project was the Korean autonomous prefecture of Yanbian. On the plane during our descent, the flight attendants insisted that we close the window shades; the only airport in the capital city, Yanji, is a dual civilian-military one, and we weren’t supposed to see North Korea, even from the sky.

Yanji’s Mount Maoer, just behind the grand Yanbian Hotel, had been a preserved area since the 1980s at the behest of Deng Xiaoping, the country’s leader from 1978 to 1989. In Yanji’s night market, we saw local honey, blueberries and traditional medicinal herbs harvested from the mountains for sale.

As we hiked up the mountain on a muggy July morning, signs told us that Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic, had visited in 1962, right after the Korean War. An article describing the moment noted that Zhou was an advocate of ecological preservation and tree planting, that he believed forests were a vital national resource and useful for preventing environmental destruction. Sometimes, such claims that the Party had always had an ecological bent feel revisionist, but even such revisions are a signal about the future direction of national ideology.

Dongbei has been deeply marked by the Party and the revolutionary terraforming projects it has engaged in during the past seven decades. In the early years after the Party came to power in 1949, Dongbei’s empty space was a tabula rasa for massive human projects, like the exploitation of the Daqing oil fields and the transformation of “the great northern wilderness” (“北大荒”) into “the great northern granary” (“北大仓”).

Intellectuals, or “文艺青年,” were sent down to the countryside to learn from the peasants and, in the process, radically transform the physical environment of Dongbei. The intent of this movement was to dramatically flatten the differences between cities and rural areas, as well as between the middle and working classes. The thinking was that these different social classes, geographically and materially separate, would not find common purpose until they were forced to share a common task. Ding Ling, one of modern China’s most famous writers, remembered “lumbering in the snow, drilling wells, melting cooking water from ice and building barracks. The vast wilderness and the undulating mountain ranges of the great northern wilderness were captivating. … [We were] actually waging a war against heaven and earth.”

The landscape that we saw — natural, architectural and, more importantly, social — was constructed at that time. Work units, collective teams and Party initiatives transformed Dongbei’s “wilderness” into a central driver of the Chinese economy and of socialist Chinese identity. The history was all around: in the aging residential tower blocks in cities like Yanji and Mudanjiang, in the comments by locals that North Korea’s society still had collective unity and purpose, in the fields of corn, potatoes and wheat that we saw stretching across the sunny, warm countryside.

But in recent decades, that Dongbei identity has broken down. In one popular television show, a character based on a real-life mafioso in the area said that he only joined the mafia because society around him was decomposing. The social structures created in the massive project of building a new China have been rotting as talented people emigrate, particularly to Shanghai and America. Slowly but surely, Dongbei has become a problem for China: a patriotic and beautiful region that never found its place as the country became capitalist.

The sociologist Manuel Castells might have had China in mind when he wrote in 1997:

Dongbei’s economy has always had three legs: industry, agriculture and forestry. Industry has decayed, agriculture is slowly being mechanized and automated, and forestry is more restricted these days. Dongbei once made sense as a society; it makes less sense as a place of floating, atomized individuals. As the state retreated, life lost meaning. And every year, it’s gotten hotter and hotter. When we were there, it was nearly 99 degrees Fahrenheit. How, we wondered, could China’s embrace of state-driven ecological policies give this region a new reason for being?

Driving through sunny forests reminiscent of northern Europe, with signposts for the tiger and leopard park next to the highway, we stopped at Ning’an County, the site of a gigantic inland lake. The feeling of this place is a world away from Shanghai or Beijing, with rich, green hills and deep-rooted communities of friends who have known each other since childhood.

At the lake itself, we negotiated discounted boat tickets via our driver and cruised the crystal blue expanse. Tour group tickets were entirely sold out, and one rural dock was almost uncomfortably crowded at 9 a.m.

There’s a hunger for nature among ordinary Chinese people that can’t always find an outlet; a whole micro-economy here is sustained by preserving this lake and ecosystem, and the lakeshore is dotted by dachas and fishing huts. As we hiked through a forest at the northern tip of the lake, different tree, animal and flower species were signposted. Away from the bigger groups of tourists, I was reminded of the serenity of Glacier National Park in Montana.

China has long had a patchwork of parks, ecological protection zones and tourist attractions, and the government has been reconstructing forestlands since the “grain to green” policy (“退耕还林”) began in 1999. But it wasn’t until 10 or so years ago that the population began demanding a clean and beautiful environment. A rising middle class, a new emphasis on ecology and nature, and forceful initiatives from the government have helped China to scale up a national parks program very quickly.

The parks are as high-tech as Chinese cities. In the Siberian Tiger Park on the border with Russia and North Korea, heat-sensor technology prevents poachers from trespassing. Poverty alleviation can be folded into these efforts. In Sanjiangyuan, herders receive 1,800 yuan (almost $300) a month in income from the park, and they participate in its protection and management, including establishing thousands of ecological public welfare jobs: forest rangers, tourist infrastructure maintenance workers, wetlands and water resources managers and more. Pudacuo National Park, in Yunnan Province, invests more than 15 million yuan ($2.3 million) from tourism revenues in local communities each year. Ultimately, if these efforts work well, they would function almost like a universal basic income program for locals, where they’d get paid to preserve the environment.

The national park system is expected to be fully complete by 2030. Even with high-level support, the mission to preserve China’s ecological civilization is challenging. The Heihe-Tengchong Line, an imaginary border that divides China into two areas that are roughly equal geographically but vastly different in population, shows how stark the country’s regional disparities are: 94% of the population lives on the east side of the line, 6% on the other. The western side, in addition to being sparsely populated, is plagued by poverty. And yet, some of the most beautiful landscapes are on the western side: the deserts of Xinjiang, inner Mongolian grasslands, the Himalayas in Tibet.

In short, poverty goes hand in hand with the natural beauty and low population of many of the areas that are most obviously suited to parks. Western village and provincial leaders have an imperative to champion economic development, hoping it will boost enthusiasm for the Chinese dream among some ethnic minorities and impoverished areas. But in the process, they risk destroying the traditional folkways, village cultures and pristine ecologies that are of such iconic value to China and to the world.

The problem, then, is simple: In development, local leaders must balance concrete economic benefits with the costs of pursuing abstract environmental goals and the pressures of tourism when destinations become popular. Little wonder that they often pursue development. But in trying to do what they think is best for their local constituents, they may end up destroying what 94% of the Chinese population from the urbanized coast finds to be of greatest value.

The New Long March

In Marxist theory, the state withers away at a certain point — after achieving what some might call “moderate prosperity” (which is indeed the Party’s official goal). If the state doesn’t want to wither, it must find an external struggle to unify society under a single banner, papering over differences of region, ethnicity and ideology.

The local history museum in Mudanjiang is filled with extremely chauvinistic exhibitions about Communist martyrs, but when we visited, we found a special area to commemorate eight soldiers who died fighting forest fires in 1996. It struck me as a first run of what might come in the country’s fight against climate change: patriotism wrapped in ecological preservation.

The COVID-19 pandemic similarly offered a script for how the Party might internalize and broadcast the challenges of climate change: bold scientists, humble but patriotic common people who sometimes give up their lives for society, scientific solutions enabled by patriotic national unity under the guidance of the Party — what Wang Yi, a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, called a “new long march,” mobilizing the nostalgic and much-revised memories of the Party to commence an all-of-society transformation.

A government that specializes in dramatic announcements, militarized campaigns and massive infrastructural feats is limbering up for a new challenge, one in which Chinese nationalism explicitly revolves around natural landscapes and the ways that people live in and around them. The new Chinese passports, like American passports, have various landscapes from around the country on each page. The final page of the U.S. passport is the moon. One of the final pages of the Chinese passport is Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan.

Climate change is bringing hard times to the world, but all that most people in Dongbei and across China have ever known are hard times, with a brief intermission of affluent consumerism for a small segment of the population. In fact, many in Dongbei are nostalgic for the era of shared, common purpose that they associate with high socialism, even if they are materially better off today. These emotions are sometimes vulgarized as “nationalism,” since they flow into support for China, the Party and propagandized scenes of Xi benevolently interacting with poor villagers in the countryside.

As the parks grow, industries shift toward greener processes and climate diplomacy becomes a signal gesture at global climate conferences (like the one China is hosting in the fall), the Party is aiming to align around a new purpose even more compelling than a Cold War rerun. China has transformed its built environment in a single lifetime. Now, they’re getting ready to do it again.

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