(This piece is my year in review; I skipped a letter last year)

One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.

It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive. The Communist Party speaks in the same two registers as the tech titans. The po-faced men on the Politburo tend to make extraordinarily bland speeches, laced occasionally with a murderous warning against those who cross the party’s interests. How funny is the big guy? We can take a look at an official list of Xi Jinping’s jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. These wisecracks include the following: “On an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Xi quipped that the true measure of water cleanliness is whether the mayor would dare to swim in the water.” Or try this reminiscence that Xi offered on bad air quality: “The PM2.5 back then was even worse than it is now; I used to joke that it was PM250.” Yes, such a humorous fellow is the general secretary.1

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee. People who are dead serious tend not to embody sparkling irony. Yet the Communist Party and Silicon Valley are two of the most powerful forces shaping our world today. Their initiatives increase their own centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation states. Perhaps they are successful because they are remorseless.

Earlier this year, I moved from Yale to Stanford. The sun and the dynamism of the west coast have drawn me back. I found a Bay Area that has grown a lot weirder since I lived there a decade ago. In 2015, people were mostly working on consumer apps, cryptocurrencies, and some business software. Though it felt exciting, it looks in retrospect like a more innocent, even a more sedate, time. Today, AI dictates everything in San Francisco while the tech scene plays a much larger political role in the United States. I can’t get over how strange it all feels. In the midst of California’s natural beauty, nerds are trying to build God in a Box; meanwhile, Peter Thiel hovers in the background presenting lectures on the nature of the Antichrist. This eldritch setting feels more appropriate for a Gothic horror novel than for real life.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I want to say that I am rooting for San Francisco. It’s tempting to gawk at the craziness of the culture, as much of the east coast media tends to do. Yes, one can quickly find people who speak with the conviction of a cultist; no, I will not inject the peptides proffered by strangers. But there’s more to the Bay Area than unusual health practices. It is, after all, a place that creates not only new products, but also new modes of living. I’m struck that some east coast folks insist to me that driverless cars can’t work and won’t be accepted, even as these vehicles populate the streets of the Bay Area. Coverage of Silicon Valley increasingly reminds me of coverage of China, where a legacy media reporter might parachute in, write a dispatch on something that looks deranged, and leave without moving past caricature.

I enjoy San Francisco more than when I was younger because I now better appreciate what makes it work. I believe that Silicon Valley possesses plenty of virtues. To start, it is the most meritocratic part of America. Tech is so open towards immigrants that it has driven populists into a froth of rage. It remains male-heavy and practices plenty of gatekeeping. But San Francisco better embodies an ethos of openness relative to the rest of the country. Industries on the east coast — finance, media, universities, policy — tend to more carefully weigh name and pedigree. Young scientists aren’t told they ought to keep their innovations incremental and their attitude to hierarchy duly deferential, as they might hear in Boston. A smart young person could achieve much more over a few years in SF than in DC. People aren’t reminiscing over some lost golden age that took place decades ago, as New Yorkers in media might do. 

San Francisco is forward looking and eager to try new ideas. Without this curiosity, it wouldn’t be able to create whole new product categories: iPhones, social media, large language models, and all sorts of digital services. For the most part, it’s positive that tech values speed: quick product cycles, quick replies to email. Past success creates an expectation that the next technological wave will be even more exciting. It’s good to keep building the future, though it’s sometimes absurd to hear someone pivot, mid-breath, from declaring that salvation lies in the blockchain to announcing that AI will solve everything.

People like to make fun of San Francisco for not drinking; well, that works pretty well for me. I enjoy board games and appreciate that it’s easier to find other players. I like SF house parties, where people take off their shoes at the entrance and enter a space in which speech can be heard over music, which feels so much more civilized than descending into a loud bar in New York. It’s easy to fall into a nerdy conversation almost immediately with someone young and earnest. The Bay Area has converged on Asian-American modes of socializing (though it lacks the emphasis on food). I find it charming that a San Francisco home that is poorly furnished and strewn with pizza boxes could be owned by a billionaire who can’t get around to setting up a bed for his mattress. 

There’s still no better place for a smart, young person to go in the world than Silicon Valley. It adores the youth, especially those with technical skill and the ability to grind. Venture capitalists are chasing younger and younger founders: the median age of the latest Y Combinator cohort is only 24, down from 30 just three years ago. My favorite part of Silicon Valley is the cultivation of community. Tech founders are a close-knit group, always offering help to each other, but they circulate actively amidst the broader community too. (The finance industry in New York by contrast practices far greater secrecy.) Tech has organizations I think of as internal civic institutions that try to build community. They bring people together in San Francisco or retreats north of the city, bringing together young people to learn from older folks.

Silicon Valley also embodies a cultural tension. It is playing with new ideas while being open to newcomers; at the same time, it is a self-absorbed place that doesn’t think so much about the broader world. Young people who move to San Francisco already tend to be very online. They know what they’re signing up for. If they don’t fit in after a few years, they probably won’t stick around. San Francisco is a city that absorbs a lot of people with similar ethics, which reinforces its existing strengths and weaknesses.

Narrowness of mind is something that makes me uneasy about the tech world. Effective altruists, for example, began with sound ideas like concern for animal welfare as well as cost-benefit analyses for charitable giving. But these solid premises have launched some of its members towards intellectual worlds very distant from moral intuitions that most people hold; they’ve also sent a few into jail. The well-rounded type might struggle to stand out relative to people who are exceptionally talented in a technical domain. Hedge fund managers have views about the price of oil, interest rates, a reliably obscure historical episode, and a thousand other things. Tech titans more obsessively pursue a few ideas — as Elon Musk has on electric vehicles and space launches — rather than developing a robust model of the world.

So the 20-year-olds who accompanied Mr. Musk into the Department of Government Efficiency did not, I would say, distinguish themselves with their judiciousness. The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things. It is not surprising that hardcore contingents on both the left and the right have developed hostility to most everything that emerges from Silicon Valley. 

There’s a general lack of cultural awareness in the Bay Area. It’s easy to hear at these parties that a person’s favorite nonfiction book is Seeing Like a State while their aspirationally favorite novel is Middlemarch. Silicon Valley often speaks in strange tongues, starting podcasts and shows that are popular within the tech world but do not travel far beyond the Bay Area. Though San Francisco has produced so much wealth, it is a relative underperformer in the national culture. Indie movie theaters keep closing down while all sorts of retail and art institutions suffer from the crumminess of downtown. The symphony and the opera keep cutting back on performances — after Esa-Pekka Salonen quit the directorship of the symphony, it hasn’t been able to name a successor. Wealthy folks in New York and LA have, for generations, pumped money into civic institutions. Tech elites mostly scorn traditional cultural venues and prefer to fund the next wave of technology instead.

One of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging diverse opinions. Portfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast. So they relentlessly seek new information sources; consensus is rare, since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market. Tech cares less for dissent. Its movements are more herdlike, in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time. Startups don’t need dissent; they want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don’t like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley’s soft Leninism. When political winds shift, people fall in line, most prominently this year as many tech voices embraced the right. 

The two most insular cities I’ve lived in are San Francisco and Beijing. They are places where people are willing to risk apocalypse every day in order to reach utopia. Though Beijing is open only to a narrow slice of newcomers — the young, smart, and Han — its elites must think about the rest of the country and the rest of the world. San Francisco is more open, but when people move there, they stop thinking about the world at large. Tech folks may be the worst-traveled segment of American elites. People stop themselves from leaving in part because they can correctly claim to live in one of the most naturally beautiful corners of the world, in part because they feel they should not tear themselves away from inventing the future. More than any other topic, I’m bewildered by the way that Silicon Valley talks about AI.

Hallucinating the end of history

While critics of AI cite the spread of slop and rising power bills, AI’s architects are more focused on its potential to produce surging job losses. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei takes pains to point out that AI could push the unemployment rate to 20 percent by eviscerating white-collar work.2 I wonder whether this message is helping to endear his product to the public.

The most-read essay from Silicon Valley this year was AI 2027. The five authors, who come from the AI safety world, outline a scenario in which superintelligence wakes up in 2027; a decade later, it decides to annihilate humanity with biological weapons. My favorite detail in the report is that humanity would persist in a genetically modified form, after the AI reconstructs creatures that are “to humans what corgis are to wolves.” It’s hard to know what to make of this document, because the authors keep tucking important context into footnotes, repeatedly saying they do not endorse a prediction. Six months after publication, they stated that their timelines were lengthening, but even at the start their median forecast for the arrival of superintelligence was later than 2027. Why they put that year in their title remains beyond me.

It’s easy for conversations in San Francisco to collapse into AI. At a party, someone told me that we no longer have to worry about the future of manufacturing. Why not? “Because AI will solve it for us.” At another, I heard someone say the same thing about climate change. One of the questions I receive most frequently anywhere is when Beijing intends to seize Taiwan. But only in San Francisco do people insist that Beijing wants Taiwan for its production of AI chips. In vain do I protest that there are historical and geopolitical reasons motivating the desire, that chip fabs cannot be violently seized, and anyway that Beijing has coveted Taiwan for approximately seven decades before people were talking about AI.

Silicon Valley’s views on AI made more sense to me after I learned the term “decisive strategic advantage.” It was first used by Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence, which defined it as a technology sufficient to achieve “complete world domination.” How might anyone gain a DSA? A superintelligence might develop cyber advantages that cripple the adversary’s command-and-control capabilities. Or the superintelligence could self-recursively improve such that the lab or state that controls it gains an insurmountable scientific advantage. Once an AI reaches a certain capability threshold, it might need only weeks or hours to evolve into a superintelligence.3 And if an American lab builds it, it might help to lock in the dominance of another American century.

If you buy the potential of AI, then you might worry about the corgi-fication of humanity by way of biological weapons. This hope also helps to explain the semiconductor controls unveiled by the Biden administration in 2022. If the policymakers believe that DSA is within reach, then it makes sense to throw almost everything into grasping it while blocking the adversary from the same. And it barely matters if these controls stimulate Chinese companies to invent alternatives to American technologies, because the competition will be won in years, not decades.

The trouble with these calculations is that they mire us in epistemically tricky terrain. I’m bothered by how quickly the discussions of AI become utopian or apocalyptic. As Sam Altman once said (and again this is fairly humorous): “AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.” It’s a Pascal’s Wager, in which we’re sure that the values are infinite, but we don’t know in which direction. It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything. The big political and technological questions we need to discuss are only those that matter to the speed of AI development. Furthermore, we must sprint towards a post-superintelligence world even though we have no real idea what it will bring.

Effective altruists used to be known for their insistence on thinking about the very long run; much more of the movement now is concerned about the development of AI in the next year. Call me a romantic, but I believe that there will be a future, and indeed a long future, beyond 2027. History will not end. We need to cultivate the skill of exact thinking in demented times.

I am skeptical of the decisive strategic advantage when I filter it through my main preoccupation: understanding China’s technology trajectories. On AI, China is behind the US, but not by years. There’s no question that American reasoning models are more sophisticated than the likes of DeepSeek and Qwen. But the Chinese efforts are doggedly in pursuit, sometimes a bit closer to US models, sometimes a bit further. By virtue of being open-source (or at least open-weight), the Chinese models have found receptive customers overseas, sometimes with American tech companies.4 If US labs achieve superintelligence, the Chinese labs are probably on a good footing to follow closely. Unless the DSA is decisive immediately, it’s not obvious that the US will have a monopoly on this technology, just as it could not keep it over the bomb.

One advantage for Beijing is that much of the global AI talent is Chinese. We can tell from the CVs of researchers as well as occasional disclosures from top labs (for example from Meta) that a large percentage of AI researchers earned their degrees from Chinese universities. American labs may be able to declare that “our Chinese are better than their Chinese.” But some of these Chinese researchers may decide to repatriate. I know that many of them prefer to stay in the US: their compensation might be higher by an order of magnitude, they have access to compute, and they can work with top peers.5But they may also tire of the uncertainty created by Trump’s immigration policy. It’s never worth forgetting that at the dawn of the Cold War, the US deported Qian Xuesen, the CalTech professor who then built missile delivery systems for Beijing. Or these Chinese researchers expect life in Shanghai to be safer or more fun than in San Francisco. Or they miss mom. People move for all sorts of reasons, so I’m reluctant to believe that the US has a durable talent advantage.

China has other advantages in building AI. Superintelligence will demand a superload of power. By now everyone has seen the chart with two curves: US electrical generation capacity, which has barely budged upwards since the year 2000; and China’s capacity, which was one-third US levels in 2000 and more than two-and-a-half times US levels in 2024. Beijing is building so much solar, coal, and nuclear to make sure that no data center shall be in want. Though the US has done a superb job building data centers, it hasn’t prepared enough for other bottlenecks. Especially not as Trump’s dislike of wind turbines has removed this source of growth. Speaking of Trump’s whimsy, he has also been generous with selling close-to-leading chips to Beijing. That’s another reason that data centers might not represent a US advantage for long.

Silicon Valley has not demonstrated joined-up thinking for deploying AI. It would help if they learned from the central planners. The AI labs have not shown that they’re thinking seriously about how to diffuse the technology throughout society, which will require extensive regulatory and legal reform. How else will AI be able to fold doctors and lawyers into its tender mercies? Doing politics will also mean reaching out to more of the electorate, who are often uneasy with Silicon Valley’s promises while they see rising electrical bills. Silicon Valley has done a marvelous job in building data centers. But tech titans don’t look ready to plan for later steps in leading the whole-of-society effort into deploying AI everywhere. 

The Communist Party lives for whole-of-society efforts. That’s what Leninist systems are built for. Beijing has set targets for deploying AI across society, though as usual with planning announcements, these numerical targets should be taken seriously and not literally. Chinese founders talk about AI mostly as a technology to be harnessed rather than a fickle power that might threaten all.6 Rather than building superintelligence, Chinese companies have been more interested in embedding AI into robots and manufacturing lines. Some researchers believe that this sort of embodied AI might present the real path towards superintelligence.7We might furthermore wonder how the US and China will use AI. Since the US is much more services-driven, Americans may be using AI to produce more powerpoints and lawsuits; China, by virtue of being the global manufacturer, has the option to scale up production of more electronics, more drones, and more munitions.

Dean Ball, who helped craft the White House’s action plan on AI, has written a perceptive post on how the US is playing to its strengths — software, chips, cloud computing, financing — while China is also focused on leaning on manufacturing excellence. In his view, “the US economy is increasingly a highly leveraged bet on deep learning.” Certainly there’s a lot of money invested here, but it looks risky to be so concentrated. I believe it’s unbecoming for the world’s largest economy to be so levered on one technology. That’s a more appropriate strategy for a small country. Why shouldn’t the US be better positioned across the entirety of the supply chain, from electron production to electronics production?

I am not a skeptic of AI. I am a skeptic only of the decisive strategic advantage, which treats awakening the superintelligence as the final goal. Rather than “winning the AI race,” I prefer to say that the US and China need to “win the AI future.” There is no race with a clear end point or a shiny medal for first place. Winning the future is the more appropriately capacious term that incorporates the agenda to build good reasoning models as well as the effort to diffuse it across society. For the US to come ahead on AI, it should build more power, revive its manufacturing base, and figure out how to make companies and workers make use of this technology. Otherwise China might do better when compute is no longer the main bottleneck.

The humming tech engine

I’ve had Silicon Valley friends tell me that they are planning a trip to China nearly every month this year. Silicon Valley respects and fears companies from only one other country. Game recognizes game, so to speak. Tech founders may begrudge China’s restrictions; and some companies have suffered directly from IP theft. But they also recognize that Chinese companies can move even faster than they do with their teams of motivated workers; and Chinese manufacturers are far ahead of US capabilities on anything involving physical production. Some founders and VCs are impressed with the fact that Chinese AI companies have gotten this far while suffering American tech restrictions, while leading in open-source to boot. VCs are wondering whether they may still invest in Chinese startups or Chinese founders who have moved abroad. 

2025 is the year that Chinese tech successes have really blossomed into the wider American consciousness. There’s no need to retread the coverage around DeepSeek, the surge of electric vehicle exports, or new developments in robotics. When I first moved from Silicon Valley to China in 2017, I felt some degree of skepticism from my friends that I was taking myself out of the beating heart of the technological universe and into the unknown. But it was clear to me that Chinese firms were improving on quality and taking global market share. I wrote in my 2019 letter: “Chinese workers are working with the latest tools to produce most of the world’s goods; over the longer term, my hypothesis is that they’ll be able to replicate the tooling and make just as good final products.” 

I think that has become closer to consensus views. I believe that Chinese technological success is now the rule rather than the exception. There are two fields in which China is substantially behind the west: semiconductors and aviation. The chip sector is gingerly attempting to expand under the weight of US restrictions; meanwhile, China’s answer to Airbus and Boeing is on a very long runway. I grant that these are two critical technologies, but China has attained technological leadership almost everywhere else. And I believe its technological momentum will continue rolling onwards to engulf more of their western competitors over the next decade.

The electric vehicle industry is the sharp tip of the spear of China’s global success. Chinese EVs have greater functionalities than western models while selling at lower price points. A rule of thumb is that it takes five years from an American, German, or Japanese automaker to dream up a new car design and launch that model on the roads; in China, it’s closer to 18 months. The Chinese market is full of demanding customers as well as fast-iterating automotive suppliers. It also has a more productive workforce. According to Tesla’s corporate disclosures, a worker at a Gigafactory in China produces an average of 47 vehicles a year; a worker at a Gigafactory in California produces an average of 20.8

China’s automotive success is biting into Germany more than anywhere else. I keep a scrapbook filled with mournful remarks that German executives offer to newspapers. “Most of what German Mittelstand firms do these days, Chinese companies can do just as well,” said a consultant to the Financial Times. “In my sector they look at the price-point of the market leader and sell for roughly half of that,” the boss of a medical devicemaker told the Economist. It’s never hard to find parades of gloomy Germans. Now more than ever it looks like their core competences are threatened by Chinese firms.

I often think of the case of Xiaomi. In 2021, Lei Jun vowed that the company he founded would break into the EV business. Four years later, Xiaomi started shipping cars to customers. Not only that, a Xiaomi EV set a speed record at the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany. Compare Xiaomi to Apple, which spent 10 years and $10 billion studying whether to enter the EV market before it pulled the plug. The world’s most advanced consumer product company could not match Xiaomi’s feat. It’s cases like these that make me skeptical of reasoning about China’s tech successes through financial measures or productivity ratios. As of this writing, Xiaomi’s market value is $130 billion. That is only around half of the market value of AppLovin, the mobile advertisement company. Rather than being an indictment of Xiaomi, I view this imbalance as an indictment of financial valuations. Isn’t it better, from a national power perspective, to develop firms like Xiaomi, which calls its shots and then makes them?

This comparison between Xiaomi and Apple motivated an essay I wrote with Dragonomics founder Arthur Kroeber in an issue of Foreign Affairs. Our view is that China’s industrial success has roots in deep infrastructure. That includes not only ports and rail, it also includes data connectivity, electrification, and process knowledge. China’s strength lies in a robust manufacturing ecosystem full of self-reinforcing parts.

Chinese tech achievements that were apparent in 2025 were the fruits of investments made a decade ago. Given that China continues to invest massively in technology, I expect we’ll see yet more tech successes for another decade to come. Alexander Grothendieck used an analogy of a walnut to describe different approaches to mathematics, which might also apply to technology development. Some mathematicians crack their problems by finding the right spot to insert a chisel before making a clean strike. Grothendieck described his own approach as coming up with general solutions, as if he were immersing the walnut in a bath for such a long time that mere hand pressure would be enough to open it. The US comes up with exquisite and expensive solutions to its technology problems. China’s industrial ecosystem is more like a rising sea, softening many nuts at once.9

When these nuts open, it looks like China is producing a big wave of new products. These are its breakthroughs in drones, electric vehicles, and robotics. Years from now we may see greater success in biotech as well. I am keen to follow along China’s progress in electromagnetism over the next decade. China’s industrial ecosystem is leading the way in replacing combustion with electromagnetic processes. Everything is now drone, as the combination of cheaper batteries and better permanent magnets displaces the engine.10

One of the startling geopolitical moves of the year was how quickly Donald Trump withdrew his ~150 percent tariffs on China. Trump folded not out of beneficence, but because Xi Jinping denied rare earth magnets to most of the world, threatening many types of manufacturing operations. And yet I’m struck by Beijing’s relative restraint. Chinese producers are close to being monopolists not only in rare earths, but also electronics products, batteries, and many types of active pharmaceutical ingredients. In case China denies, say, cardiovascular drugs to the elderly, how long could a state hold out?

One might have expected the US to have roused itself after this bout of the trade war. But there have been too many declarations of Sputnik Moments without commensurate action. Barack Obama declared a Sputnik with China’s high-speed rail; Mark Warner repeated with Huawei’s 5G; Marc Andreessen called it with DeepSeek. The more that people use the term, the less likely that society spurs itself into taking it seriously.

I think the US continues to systematically underrate China’s industrial progress for several reasons.

First, too many western elites retain hope that China’s efforts will run out of fuel by its own accord. Industrial progress will be weighed down by demographic drag, the growing debt load, maybe even a political collapse. I won’t rule these out, but I don’t think they are likely to break China’s humming tech engine. Demographics in particular don’t matter for advanced technology — you don’t need a workforce of many millions to have robust production of semiconductors or EVs. South Korea, for example, has one of the world’s fastest shrinking populations while retaining its success in electronics production. And though China suffers broader economic headwinds, technology firms like Xiaomi continue to develop new products and enjoy rising revenues. Technology breakthroughs can occur even in a suffering society. Especially if the state continues to lavish resources on chips or anything that could represent an American chokepoint. 

Second, western elites keep citing the wrong reasons for China’s success. When members of Congress get around to acknowledging China’s tech advancements, they do not fail to attribute causes to either industrial subsidies (also known as cheating) or IP theft (that is, stealing). These are legitimate claims, but China’s advantages extend far beyond them. That’s the creation of deep infrastructure as well as extensive industrial ecosystems that I describe above.

Probably the most underrated part of the Chinese system is the ferocity of market competition. It’s excusable not to see that, given that the party espouses so much Marxism. I would argue that China embodies both greater capitalist competition and greater capitalist excess than America does today. Part of the reason that China’s stock market trends sideways is that everyone’s profits are competed away. Big Tech might enjoy the monopolistic success smiled upon by Peter Thiel, coming almost to genteel agreements not to tread too hard upon each other’s business lines. Chinese firms have to fight it out in a rough-and-tumble environment, expanding all the time into each other’s core businesses, taking Jeff “your margin is my opportunity” Bezos with seriousness.

Third, western elites keep holding on to a distinction between “innovation,” which is mostly the remit of the west, and “scaling,” which they accept that China can do. I want to dissolve that distinction. Chinese workers innovate every day on the factory floor. By being the site of production, they have a keen sense of how to make technical improvements all the time. American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas. But American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas. The history books point out that Bell Labs invented the first solar cell in 1957; today, the lab no longer exists while the solar industry moved to Germany and then to China. While Chinese universities have grown more capable at producing new ideas, it’s not clear that the American manufacturing base has grown stronger at commercializing new inventions.

I sometimes hear that the US will save manufacturers through automation. The truth is that Chinese factories tend to be ahead on automation: that’s a big part of the reason that Chinese Tesla workers are more productive than California Tesla workers. China regularly installs as many robots as the rest of the world put together. They are also able to provide greater amounts of training data for AI. We have to be careful not to let automation, like superintelligence, become an excuse for magical thinking rather than doing the hard work of capacity building.

Outlasting the adversary

The China discussions I get into on the east coast tend to focus on the country’s problems. Washington, DC in particular likes to ask questions like: didn’t we think that Japan was going to overrun the world with manufacturing before it fell apart? Isn’t China mostly a mess? These are ultimately variants of the form: how might China fail?

The west coast flavor of the discussion is different. People are more inclined to ask: what happens if China succeeds? That reflects, in part, Silicon Valley’s epistemic bias towards securing upside returns rather than minimizing downside risks. They also tend to make more frequent visits to China than folks in DC. “What if China succeeds?” is certainly the more interesting question to me, not only because my career has been studying China’s technological successes. The east coast questions deserve to be taken seriously. But I fear that dwelling on China’s failure modes will coax elites into complacency, serving a narrative that the US needs to change nothing before the adversary will topple, robbing the country of urgency to reform.

I want to be clear that though I expect China will overrun advanced technology industries, it won’t make the country a broad success. Over the past five years, it has been mired in disinflationary growth, where young people struggle to find a job and find a spouse. The political system is growing even more opaque, terrifying even the insiders. This year, Xi deposed a dozen generals of the People’s Liberation Army, one of whom was also a sitting Politburo member. I wonder how many people inside the Politburo feel confident about where they stand with Xi.

Entrepreneurs are on even worse ground. Earlier this year, investors greeted Xi’s handshake with prominent entrepreneurs (including Jack Ma) as good news. It was so, but who can be sure that Xi will not greet them differently once they revive the economy? Though Xi can cut entrepreneurs some slack, the trend is towards greater party control over business and society. Xi himself doesn’t evince concern that economic growth is lackluster. It’s an acceptable tradeoff for making China’s economy less dependent on foreign powers. None of this is a formula for broad human flourishing. Rather, it is depriving Chinese of contact with the rest of the world.

Beijing has been working relentlessly to build up its resilience. While the US talks itself out of Sputnik Moments, Beijing has dedicated immense resources to patching up its own deficiencies. It’s not a theoretical fear that Chinese companies might lose access to American technologies. So the state is pouring more money than ever before into semiconductor makers and research universities. It is investing in clean technologies not so much because it cares about the climate, but because it wants to be self-sufficient in energy. And it is re-writing the rules of the global order, with caution because it has been a giant beneficiary of it, while the US is still wondering about what it wants from China. Beijing has been preparing for Cold War without eagerness for waging it, while the US wants to wage a Cold War without preparing for it.11

So here’s a potential way that China succeeds. Beijing’s goal is to make nearly every important product in the world, while everyone else supplies its commodities and services. By making the country mostly self-sufficient, and by vigorously policing the outputs of LLMs and social media, Xi might hope to make China resilient. He is building Fortress China stone by stone in order to outlast the adversary. Beijing doesn’t have to replicate American diplomatic, cultural, and financial superpowerdom. It might hope that its prowess in advanced manufacturing might deter the US. And its success in manufacturing might directly destabilize the US: by delivering the coup de grace to the rustbelt, the US might shed a few million more manufacturing jobs over the next decade. The job losses combined with AI psychosis, social media, and all the problems with phones could make national politics meaningfully worse.

I don’t think this scenario is likely to be successful. Authoritarian systems have always hoped for the implosion of liberal democracies, while it is the liberal democracies that have a better track record of endurance. But I also don’t think that authoritarian countries are obviously wrong to bet that western polarization will get worse. So it’s up to the US and Europe to show that they can hold on to their values while absorbing the technological changes coming their way. 

That task is more challenging as Europe and the US grew more apart in 2025. This year, both regions were able to look upon each other with pity. And both were correct to do so. America’s global trust and favorability measures have collapsed in Trump’s second term. Meanwhile, Europe looks as economically stuck as it has ever been, pushing its politics to increasingly chaotic extremes. But I am still more optimistic for the US.

I don’t need to lament the damage done by the Trump administration this year: the erosion of alliances, the cruelty towards the weak, the wasting of time. Manufacturing and re-industrialization, which I spend most of my time thinking of, have been doing worse. The Biden administration tried to fund an ambitious program of industrial policy; but it was so plodding and proceduralist that it built little before voters re-elected Trump. Since Trump imposed tariffs in April, the US has lost around 65,000 manufacturing jobs.12 His administration shows little interest in capturing electromagnetism before China overruns that field. Trump is more interested in protectionism rather than export promotion, which risks turning American industries into fossils like its exquisitely protected and horribly inefficient shipbuilding industry.

One of the Trump administration’s biggest blunders was its decision to raid a battery plant in Georgia, which put 300 Korean engineers in chains before deporting them. I suspect that any Korean, Taiwanese, or European engineer would ponder that episode before accepting a job posting to the United States. What a contrast that looks with China’s approach, which for decades has been to welcome managers from Walmart, Apple, or Tesla to train its workforce.

Will the US solve manufacturing with AI? Well, maybe, because superintelligence is supposed to solve everything. But there’s a risk that AI will destabilize society before it fixes the industrial base. When I walk around the library at Stanford, I see students plugging everything into AI tools; when they need a break, they’re watching short-form videos on their phones. These videos have been marvelously transformed by AI tools. Shortly after OpenAI released Sora 2, I had brunch with a friend who told me that he created an AI video of himself expertly breakdancing that fooled his five-year-old; another friend piped up to say that she created an AI video of herself that fooled her mother. AI chatbots are skilled at providing emotional companionship: Jasmine Sun discussed how they are able to seduce any segment of society, while pointing to a survey that 52 percent of teens regularly interact with AI companions. I’m not advocating for regulation. But I think it’s reasonable for the world to hope that AI labs will exercise some degree of forbearance before they release their shattering tools.

While I feel apprehensive about the US, I am much more gloomy about Europe. I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting. European prices and taxes can be so high while salaries can be so low. For all the American complaints about home affordability, relative housing costs can be even worse in big European cities. London has the house prices of California and the income levels of Mississippi. 

I remember two vivid episodes from Copenhagen. One day I read the news that the share price of Novo Nordisk — unquestionably one of Europe’s technological successes, along with ASML — collapsed as a result of sustained competition from US-based Eli Lilly as well as its misfortunes navigating the US regulatory system. I also watched Ursula von der Leyen visit Trump in the White House to graciously accept his EU tariffs. It’s already been clear that China has begun to maul European industry. What the Novo Nordisk news made me appreciate was that American companies are comprehensively outworking their European counterparts in biotech in addition to software and finance. Europe is losing the two-front battle against the Chinese on manufacturing and the Americans on services.

Perhaps Europe could have recruited some professors from the United States. American academics wouldn’t have needed Trump’s insults to act on their Europhile impulses. And yet European initiatives have not yet been able to brain drain much of this class. That’s mostly because European governments have little funding to offer. European universities have failed to build substantial endowments, so their revenues are dependent on the taxpaying public, which also must support a million other initiatives. An American academic who wants to move to Europe would have to accept more teaching and administrative work, lose tenure, and for the pleasure of all that, probably halve her pay. She would likely also suffer the resentment of European peers, who scoff at the idea that better paid Americans are now refugees. Trump threw a lot against US universities; they are holding up okay, and I think they will remain strong.

Europeans are right to gloat they are not under the rule of Trump. But for all of Trump’s ills, I see him as a sign of the underlying dynamism of the US. Who else would have elected so whimsical a leader to this high office? Trump forces questions that Europeans have no appetite to confront, proud as they are in being superior to both Americans and Chinese. I submit that Europeans ought to be more circumspect in their self-satisfaction. Chaos is only one election away. Right-populist parties are outpolling ruling incumbent parties pretty much everywhere, and it is as likely as not that Trumps with European characteristics will engulf the continent by the end of the decade.

So I am betting that the US and China are more compelling forces for change. Stalin was fond of telling a story from his experience in Leipzig in 1907, when, to his astonishment, 200 German workers failed to turn up to a socialist meeting because no ticket controller was on the platform to punch their train tickets, citing this experience as proof of the hopelessness of Germanic obedience. Could anyone imagine Chinese or Americans being so obedient? One advantage for the US and China is that both countries are at least interested in growth. You don’t have to convince the elites or the populace that growth is good or that entrepreneurs could be celebrated. Meanwhile in Europe, perhaps 15 percent of the electorate actively believes in degrowth. I feel it’s impossible to convince Europeans to act in their self interest. You can’t even convince them to adopt air conditioning in the summer.

The personal is the geopolitical

I’m not a doomer on AI or the broader state of the world. Across the US, China, and Europe, people generally enjoy comfortable lives that are free from fear. The market goes up. AI tools improve. Over the years I lived in China, I knew that life was more mundane than the headlines made out. Now that headlines and tweets are more negative everywhere, I know that things are not so bad in most places.

What I want is for everyone to do better. I opened my book by saying that Chinese and Americans are the most alike people in the world. They both are driven by a yearning for the future. They feel the draw of better times ahead, which is missing for Europeans, those people who have a sense of optimism only about the past.

I believe that modern China is one of the most ahistorical nations in the world. The state and the education system may talk insistently about its thousands of years of continuous history. But no other society has also been so destructive of its own history. The physical past has been disfigured by the attention of the Red Guards and the inattention of urban bulldozers. The social past is contorted by outrageous textbooks, which implement enforced forgetting of major traumas. For tragedies too widely experienced in modern times to be censored — the Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, Zero Covid — the party discourages reflection in the name of protecting the state’s sensitivity.

The United States isn’t so good at celebrating its history either. 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding. Where are the monuments to exalt that history? Most of the planned celebrations look small bore. Why hasn’t the federal government built a technological specimen as sublime as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, or the Apollo missions? Probably because planning for any project should have commenced 10, 20, or 30 years ago. No president would have gotten around to starting a project that has no chance of being completed in his term. Lack of action due to the expectation of long timelines is one of the sins of the lawyerly society.

But American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems. That’s why I live here in the US. I made clear in my book that I am drawn to pluralism as well as a broader conception of human flourishing than one that could be delivered by the Communist Party. The United States still draws many of the most ambitious people in the world, few of whom want to move to China. Even now a significant number of Chinese would jump to emigrate to the US if they felt they could be welcomed. But this enduring American advantage should not excuse the US from patching up its deficiencies.

A light grab-bag of complaints: While the rich have access to concierge doctors and the world’s best healthcare, the United States cannot organize a pandemic response; it is bioprosperity for the individual and measles for the many. I learned recently that the Bay Area has 26 separate transit agencies; is it really a triumph of democracy to have so many unconsolidated efforts? I wonder whether we can accuse the California government of subverting the will of the people by making so little progress on its high-speed rail, which was approved by referendum in 2008; California rail authorities take more pride in creating jobs than doing the job. I am tempted to use the language from American foreign policy at home. Why talk about American credibility only in terms of combat? Why shouldn’t the failure to deliver on big projects, after spending so much money, constitute a more severe blow to the credibility of the American project? Is the state of the US defense industrial base really deterring adversaries?

I won’t belabor issues with American public works or manufacturing. I’ll suggest only that the US ought to be acting with greater curiosity on how to do better. It doesn’t have to become China; but it should better study China’s successes. There is a 21st century playbook for becoming an industrial power and China has written it. This playbook consists of infrastructure development, solicitation of foreign investment, industrial subsidies, and the creation of industrial ecosystems. I hope that the US will stop attributing all of China’s successes to stealing. If such a program would be sufficient for building a world-class industry, then American spooks should dedicate their formidable capabilities to extracting Chinese industrial secrets. The reality is that there is little to be learned from blueprints. By failing to recognize China’s real strengths — the industrial ecosystems pulsating with process knowledge — the US is only cheating itself. 

The future of US-China competition demands a resounding demonstration of the superiority of one country’s system to perform better for its citizens, which no country has thus achieved. Who’s going to come out ahead? I believe the competition is dynamic. It means we should not rely on static and structural features (like geography or demographics) to predict long-term advantage. One feature that unites American, Chinese, and European elites is the tendency to close ranks behind bad ideas and bad leaders. They are all skilled at dreaming up new ways to squander their advantages. Silicon Valley, for example, succeeds in spite of the generations-long governance failures of California. Imagine how much more vibrant Chinese society could be if it could escape the weight of overbearing censors in Beijing.

Competition will be dynamic because people have agency. The country that is ahead at any given moment will commit mistakes driven by overconfidence, while the country that is behind will feel the crack of the whip to reform. Implosion is always an option. In 2021, Xi Jinping was on top of the world, witnessing the omnishambles of the western pandemic response combined with the political disgrace of January 6. So he proceeded to smack around tech founders and initiate a controlled demolition of the property sector, which are two of the policies most responsible for China’s economic sluggishness today. Now, Beijing is trying to get a grip on its weaknesses. If either the US or China falls too far behind the other, the laggard will sweat to catch up. That drive will mean that competition will go on for years and decades.

In the competition for who might grow to be more humorous, I give a slight edge to the Chinese rather than to Silicon Valley.

No, I don’t expect the Communist Party ever to be funny. But there is a growing contrast between the baleful formality of the political system and the bubbly informality of Chinese society. Now that China is bidding farewell to its era of hypergrowth, young people are asking what they want to do with their lives. Fewer of them are interested in doing crazy hours in tech companies or big banks. Some of them are having fun in comedy sketches and stand-up shows. The increasingly gerontocratic Communist Party is not so much hovering over them as existing on a slightly different plane, speaking in strange apocalyptic tongues. Over the long run, I bet that the exuberance and rollicking nature of Chinese society will outlive the lusterless political system.

I wish that the tech world could learn to present broader cultural appeal. I hope that Silicon Valley could learn some of the humorousness of New York (or at least LA.) It’s unfortunate that any show or movie made about Silicon Valley is full of awkward nerds; by contrast, Hollywood reliably finds attractive leads when it makes movies about Wall Street. So long as the tech world is talking about the Machine God and the Antichrist, so long as it declines to read more broadly, so long as it is mostly inward looking, it will continue to alienate big parts of the world. But the longer I’m in California, the more easy I find it to be a sunny optimist. So I’m hopeful that the lovable nerds there will be able to present their own smiling optimism to the rest of the world.

I thank a number of people for reading a draft of this section and discussing the core ideas with me. 

***

Of all the feedback I’ve received for my book, the most devastating came from my mother. After one of my television appearances, she called me to say: “Son, you looked terrible. Are you sick?” I accept that she, a former TV news anchor, has standing to judge. Still I could only reply with a quavering voice: “Mom, you’re so mean.”13

Other readers have been kinder to Breakneck. It reached #3 on the New York Times bestseller list and was also a bestseller on its monthly Business list. I went on podcasts, radio, TV, and spoke at book events. Breakneck was a finalist for the FT/Schroders best business book of the year and it has been a book of the year in several big publications. It’s being translated into 17 languages as of this writing. 

I’ve learned a lot over the past four months.

Why did Breakneck do well? I think four reasons, in descending order of importance. First, timing. It came out in a year of many China headlines — DeepSeek, trade war, 15th Five-Year Plan — and five months after Abundance, which primed readers for the idea that Americans are right to be frustrated by their state. Second, the book had the memetic framing of lawyers and engineers, which also encouraged people to wonder how other countries could be described. (What is India? The UK?) Third, people know my work through these letters. Fourth and least important was the content in the book. An author spends so much time workshopping words and sentences. I accept that a book’s reception is subject to the vagaries of the market and the memelords.

I don’t regret a minute of workshopping. I would have liked to workshop some more. Like every author, I wish I had more time to add a finer polish to the entire manuscript. I was heartened when a writer I admire told me that no author is ever more than 85 percent satisfied with their work; to hope for more would be profligate. In any case, I’m proud of the content. If it weren’t in place, I wouldn’t have had positive reviews in mainstream publications like the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and the Times. I was glad to see praise from both left publications like Jacobin and right publications like American Affairs. 

I tried to write this book to reach a non-coast audience. Ideally I wanted a lawyer in say Indiana or Ohio to read Breakneck, rather than for it to be picked up only by folks in New York, DC, San Francisco, and the terminally online. So I was happy to hear from a broader cross-section of readers who wrote to tell me that they’d never visited China before and are now curious to do so. It’s a shame that book tours are no longer much of a thing for authors. Publishers don’t necessarily bring authors to book readings in Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, or other big cities as a matter of course. I was happy, however, to visit Dallas for the first time this year. After giving a talk in October, I wandered over to the Texas State Fair. Who can resist a place that calls itself “the most Texan place on earth?” I had a fabulous time walking through the fairground, the livestock pens, and the food stalls. The atmosphere made me realize that friendly and pragmatic Texans are what I imagined all Americans to be like, at least in my Canadian mind.

I’ve enjoyed opening my inbox to see reader notes. I love hearing from two groups in particular: engineers and other technical people who feel better appreciated for their work; and Chinese readers who tell me that I’ve captured something authentic. Someone emailed a set of book recommendations for the Spanish Civil War. An investor emailed to enlighten me that Copenhagen’s marvelous subways (which I praise for being clean and driverless) were built by Italian construction companies. An agricultural consultant emailed to tell me about her eye-opening experiences visiting big Chinese farms. These notes are small delights for any author. A stranger but still charming event was to see the Blue Book Club. About 20 people gathered in Brooklyn this November to discuss Breakneck, but not before the hosts issued a light exam to make sure that the participants actually read the book.

Book promotion made me more of a public figure. I did my best to have fun with it. It wasn’t as hard as I imagined: podcast and TV hosts are as bored by self-serious personalities as the rest of us are. Readers have been friendly as they’ve recognized me in public. There was only one instance of a bit too much friendliness, when someone sidled up to the urinal beside mine in a public bathroom to tell me that he liked my book.

I’ve learned it is not possible to value mentors too highly. I am blessed to have good counselors. I mean not only my publishing house, my literary agent, and my writing coach who directly support my work. I am grateful to folks who give me time to reflect on the course of my thinking, especially the ones who have by now mentored me for over a decade. Friends have been generous in all sorts of ways. Eugene, Tina, Maran, Ren, James, Caleb, Alec, and Arthur hosted book parties. Joe Weisenthal wrote in the Odd Lots newsletter: “Total Dan Wang victory” on his view that most of the world is seeing China through the industrial lens I’ve been writing about. Afra hosted a Mandarin-language book discussion in which someone accused me of having a “gentle and vulnerable” voice. Alice, who doesn’t often pick up books on China, told me that my fondness for both the US and China shone through the book. It reconnected me with two friends from Ottawa that I haven’t heard from since high school.

I am grateful that Waterstones Piccadilly and Daunt Books in Marylebone have given my book prominent display. One surprise was that my book sold well in the United Kingdom. I’ve been pretty relentless at telling Brits that they are the PPE society and that they excel in the sounding-clever industries — television, journalism, finance, and universities. Upon reflection, it makes sense that the British are reading Breakneck and Abundance. Every problem in the lawyerly society is worse in the UK. I thought that California’s high-speed rail project was an embarrassment; then I learned about the Leeds tram network. First legislated in 1993, mass transit might not come to West Yorkshire until the late 2030s. It reminds me of the lawsuit in Bleak House: “The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.” At least Californians are struggling over something mighty; I hope that Leeds will one day have a tram.14

Homebuilding in London has collapsed. Heathrow has been making plans to build a third runway for twenty years, which is now expected to cost $20 billion. Britain’s electrical network is in even worse disrepair than America’s. I am not sure if it is a geopolitical asset to be able to stiff-upper-lip one’s way through ineffectual government. Maybe it’s more of a liability. But my experience of criticizing Brits resembles my experience of criticizing lawyers. They tend to nod along to my critiques; many of them take me further than where I’d like to go. It’s all very disarming.

I’ve been lucky to have smart critics. It’s any author’s dream to see people pick up the book and examine the arguments. Jon Sine wanted to have more specific data on engineers and lawyers, then proceeded to supply it while wrapping it in a narrative on a trip to Wushan. Charles Yang noted that I don’t have much by way of policy suggestions, but he also grasped that I’m trying to change the culture of governing elites while suggesting that Breakneck is an incitement to initiate “tractable mimetic competition.” Jen-Kuan Wang argued that China was not quite the right model for the US, but that Taiwan and the rest of Northeast Asia better show how to survive China Shocks. I am grateful to see constructive engagement with my work. I was unimpressed with only one piece of commentary. Law professors Curtis Milhaupt and Angela Zhang wrote in Project Syndicate: “Lawless State Capitalism Is No Answer to China’s Rise,” as if I were advocating for that. Since the authors mention the book only at the start without engaging with any of the content, I suspect they are critics who chose not to read the book.

I learned of Leo Rosten’s quip that it is the weak who are cruel, and gentleness to be expected only from the strong. Every author will hear from online commentators who belligerently misunderstand their work. Saying anything about China tends to rile up the online commentators. Either the hawks will pounce because they believe that the whole country is evil and that its progress is fake; or the tankies will defend the idea that China has achieved socialist utopia. These people live on Twitter and Youtube, offering the stock comment that “this person knows nothing about China.” That’s of course hard to respond to because they offer no analytical content to rebut. Part of what makes the China discourse exasperating is that people have to choose sides all the time, which makes everyone dumber. At least I didn’t have it as bad as Ezra and Derek with Abundance.

I’ve learned more about myself as a writer this year. Namely, I like doing it. Writing a book is sometimes enough to make an author forswear the experience for a long time. Then there are the really perverse, for whom a taste of publishing is enough to tempt one into becoming a serial offender. After writing this book, I most looked forward to writing this long-ass letter, the very one you’re reading now.

Some writers work like sculptors: they produce something fully chiseled that could stand forever. Novelists tend to be like that. Rather than being a sculptor, I see myself as being a musician. After a performance, no matter how it goes, the musician’s task is to start practicing for the next one. It’s hard for US-China books to rest like sculptures. So I am happy to get back to work, writing iteratively to refine the same few themes that animate me: technology production, industrial ecosystems, US-China competition.

Musicians don’t usually practice by running a whole piece from start to finish. Rather, practice sessions tend to focus on particular passages, with a full run-through only before performance. Before I publish this letter, I retype the whole thing from start to finish. It means I take the draft that lives in my Notes app on the left half of my screen while I retype the whole thing into the Google Docs on the right side of my screen. It’s a final check to catch infelicities. More importantly, by simulating the experience of a reader, it’s another way to see if the whole essay stands together.

I’ve learned that it is better to wear a tie with a blazer. That was part of my training to be a speaker. The book tour forces you to have answers that last 30 seconds for TV, 30 minutes for a talk, and 3 hours for the more bruising podcasts. I’ve learned that delivering a good talk is a rare skill. I don’t think I could ever be satisfied by a talk I’ll give, because there will always be a stumble, or l’esprit de l’escalier kicks in. The piece of speaking advice I’ve remembered for many years came from Tim Harford: good speaking rewards those who are able to prepare extensively and who are also able to improvise. My favorite book talk took place at the Hoover Institution, hosted by Stephen Kotkin (who is himself peerless at giving excellent lectures). In the summer, I spent two hours asking Kotkin how historians work. 

One day in October, I went on six podcasts. I haven’t counted the number of podcasts I’ve been on, but I think the number is north of 70. There’s a lot I don’t understand. Are so many people really listening to podcasts? What is the appeal of a video featuring two people with giant microphones in their faces? Do we really have to live in an oral culture world?

I’ve noticed the wide range of effort that people put into podcasts. Some hosts edit extensively — Freakonomics Radio stands out for the sheer number of producers and editors. Other hosts release their episodes more or less unedited. Freakonomics was memorable because Stephen Dubner was able to make the conversation so much fun. Going on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times was more appropriately serious. Search Engine was impressive for the amount of narrative that PJ Vogt imbued into our more rambling conversation. It felt like a homecoming to return to Odd Lots, where I could tease Tracy Alloway for her country life and Joe Weisenthal over Moby Dick. David Perell read nearly everything I’d written to discuss the writing process. I went on Francis Fukuyama’s podcast to ask him about his relationship with Wang Qishan as well as why he is now banned from China. Works in Progress, Statecraft, and ChinaTalk were each fun in their own way. 

You don’t really mature into being on podcast mode until you’ve done a lot of them. That’s why I proposed to Tyler to go on his show near the end of the book tour. Conversations with Tyler is the first podcast I regularly started listening to, whose early episodes I still remember well. Before our interview, I told Tyler that he was my final boss. Both of us were playful. I challenged Tyler to enumerate the list of 12th-century popes and teased him about being a New Jersey suburban boy. He told me that America has great infrastructure and healthcare before issuing an intellectual Turing test to see if I could say why he likes Yunnan more than any other place. I had the chance to bring up one of the most sublime pieces of Rossini, the gently entwining trio that concludes Le Comte Ory. Afterwards, commentators wrote that he and I were confrontational. But they should have watched the video, in which Tyler was smiling as much as he ever would.

Again, who is listening to all these podcasts? I don’t much look at my book sales, but it doesn’t feel like podcasts move the needle. And a book might create a lot of social media buzz, with all the right people saying all the right things, but Twitter too doesn’t drive sales. It was two platforms that moved a lot of my books: television and radio. People bought after seeing me on CNN or hearing me on NPR. The straightforward explanation is that older people have the time and the money to buy books. Even a brief appearance on TV could reach an ambient audience of millions, a few of whom purchase afterwards. Social media and podcasts are more valuable for driving conversation among the youths.

It’s stirring to see that people buy books at all. I do not doubt that we are moving towards an oral culture. But the publishing industry is holding up. A lot of excellent books came out this year, including many on China. Revenues at most of the big trade publishers have been rising. Barnes & Noble is opening 60 new stores in 2026. A lot of the growth in the book trade is coming from romantasy and fairy smut, while the genre of nonfiction is in slight decline. That’s all good, I’m no snob. It’s pleasant to believe that a few decades from now, people might still hold physical books in their hands.

I’ve learned that books produce an invitation to all sorts of conversations, both closed and open. A physical book, bound and printed, has a totemic quality. It’s funny that PDFs sometimes circulate better than web-optimized pages; there’s something about strict formatting that establishes authority. Physical books can also last a long time. This letter that you’re reading will no longer be sent around a month from now, while my book can sit unread on shelves for years to gather dust. So I’m still keen to encourage friends to write their books. It’s a great way to sort through one’s ideas and to ease them into the conversation.

If I yearned for commercial success in our new oral culture, I would lend my soft voice to narrate romantasy novels. But I worry the superintelligence will devour that job. So I will stick to longform writing. However strange our new world will become, there will always be a class of people who want to engage with essays and books. Over the long term, writing might enjoy the fate of the opera and the symphony. People have been heralding the death of classical music for a century. Yes, much of its audience is pretty old. But there will always be more old people — especially if Silicon Valley delivers on longevity treatments. The job of authors and opera houses is to keep holding on to people who are maturing into pleasures that technological platforms cannot provide. The demographic trend is on our side: the world is producing more old people than youths. I want to be a sunny Californian optimist about everything, including the fate of the written word.

***

It’s time to talk about (other) books.

I last picked up Stendhal’s The Red and the Black a decade ago. I wasn’t certain that the novel, which I keep calling my favorite, would hold up on re-reading. It did gorgeously. The plot centers on Julien Sorel, the handsome son of a poor sawyer. After Julien dons the black garb of the priesthood, he moves from the periphery of his Alpine village into the luminous center of Parisian society. Along the way, he seduces two extraordinary women, the gentle Mme. de Rênal and the magnificent Mathilde, while he commits, in the name of love, acts of extraordinary stupidity. Julien — who is possessed by galloping ambition and extravagant pride — maneuvers his way towards aristocratic distinction and romantic triumph. Then he loses all.

More than anything else, Stendhal is funny, especially about love. Only Proust surpasses Stendhal at the skill of guiding the reader into the transports of intoxicating love, only to snap them out of it by skewering the foolishness of Julien or Mathilde. Stendhal doesn’t create the cool detachment that Flaubert or Fontane bring to their characters. Rather, he’s eager to envelop the reader into his passionate embrace. The list of writers who have succumbed to Stendhal includes Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Girard, Balzac, and Robert Alter, who, before he translated the Hebrew Bible, wrote an admiring biography of Stendhal titled A Lion for Love.

Why is it that reading Stendhal feels like making a discovery? Stendhal might be just on the cusp of the pantheon because his critics can’t get over the significance of his flaws while his fans cannot forget the delights of his peaks. In that sense, Stendhal is like Rossini. Neither produced a ripe and perfect work; I can’t help but feel some disappointment when I listen to Rossini, who couldn’t achieve the musical perfection of Mozart or the dramatic conviction of Verdi. And yet the peak moments of Stendhal and Rossini produce ecstatic joy. It’s no surprise that Stendhal and Rossini are both renowned for their ravenous appetites, nor that Stendhal wrote his own admiring biography of Rossini, filled with his characteristic amusing falsehoods. Erich Auerbach grasped the point that Stendhal ought to be appreciated for his peaks rather than his average. Stendhal has pride of place in Mimesis, as an author who fluctuated between “realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars,” and between “cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and sentimental vaingloriousness.” In other words, Stendhal embodies the spirit of opera buffa in novel. 

I am often drawn to Ecclesiastes. In Robert Alter’s hands, the gloomy prophet behind the book is named Qohelet, and though I value Alter’s translation, I favor a few of the more iconic lines from King James: “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” and “better to hear the rebuke of the wise than the song of fools.” Melancholy attracts me in any form, and isn’t Ecclesiastes the most melancholic book? The prophet makes small allowances for joy and celebration before hauling the reader back into the house of mourning. There is something deeply satisfying with reading out loud phrases like: “for in mere breath did it come, and into darkness it goes, and in darkness its name is covered.” Though King James is iconic, Robert Alter better conveys overall the literary power of the Hebrew Bible.

Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall is short and engrossing. It was deemed a “Cold War” novel by the German press when it was published in 1963. Little about it comes across as being geopolitical today. Rather, Haushofer has written a book about domesticity that manages to be gripping. The heroine spends her days milking her cow, minding her garden, and caring for her cat and dog while living in total isolation in the Alps. She would not survive if she lacked for any of the above. As Katherine Rundell once wrote, “It’s easier to trust a writer who writes great food: they are a person who has paid attention to the world.” Haushofer pays loving attention to the details of life. It never became boring to read about the narrator churning her butter, tending to her potato field, or chopping wood throughout the year.

After a man turns 30, he has to choose between specializing in the history of the Roman Empire or the World Wars. Within the latter, one tends to focus on the Pacific Theater, the Western Front, or the Eastern Front. For me, the last theater is the most interesting. No human effort approaches the gargantuan scale of Operation Barbarossa or the Soviet reply. The same fields, one world war earlier, produced other shocks. Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front covers the clashes between Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire as well as the Austro-Hungarians against the Italians and the Serbs. Whereas the western front was essentially static throughout the whole war, the east was characterized by the sort of maneuver warfare that most generals had expected to fight. It was the field of legendary confrontations like the Gorlice-Tarnow campaign, the Brusilov offensive, and the 37th Battle of the Isonzo.

One of the revelations of Lloyd’s book is how well the Germans fought and how poorly Austro-Hungary performed, ending the war by self-liquidating. Immediately after the war began, German military attachés had already begun to fret that “the major trouble with the Austro-Hungarian Army is currently its weakness in combat.” It became nearly comical how often the Kaiser had to intervene, in the latter half of the war, to stop Emperor Karl from surrendering to the Entente. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the fighting force of an army where the officers all spoke German and regiments spoke Czech or Croatian could not overwhelm the adversary. The eastern front had diplomatic scheming that was nearly as impressive as the battlefield breakthroughs. It was, after all, the political section of the German general staff that had the imaginative idea to ship Lenin from Switzerland to Russia in order to make revolution.

I’m looking for a book that has a clear focus on bigger questions: How did Hohenzollern Prussia outmaneuver Habsburg Austria? And how did they become such firm allies before the war? John Boyer’s Austria 1867-1955 offers parts of the answer, though not in a conceptually organized way. It’s a work of history written for specialists, which means that the narrative serves the footnotes rather than the other way around. Too much of the book is focused on how politicians grappled with each other. Still it yields many morsels. One difference between Austrian nobles and Prussian nobles was that the former did not view a military life as attractive — part of the reason that Austrians performed so badly in war. Austria’s partner was sometimes rooting for the adversary: “a large, successful Prussia was Hungary’s best guarantee that Austria would not gain a superior position to dominate the Hungarian elites.” And this insight feels like a good explanation of the attractiveness of Austrian Catholicism, which “combines a Jansenist, puritanical strain with exuberant baroque piety.” It’s the sort of exuberance that produced a Mozart, rather than more gloomy and ardent Spanish Catholicism that produced the Inquisition. 

One lesson from the latter years of Austro-Hungary is a good reminder that periods of state decay often correspond with eras of cultural flowering. 1913: The Year Before the Storm presents a whimsical slice of Central Europe. Art historian Florian Illies collates fragments of leading figures month by month, diary-entry style. People were running into each other all the time. Duchamp, d’Annunzio, Debussy at the premiere of the Rite of Spring. Stalin potentially tipping his hat at Hitler, as both residents of Vienna were known to take evening strolls through the gardens of Schönbrunn. Matisse bringing flowers to Picasso while the latter was sick. Rainer Maria Rilke being moody at the seaside with Sidonie Nadherny while she was running off into the arms of Karl Kraus. The celebrated love affairs between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer, Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel, Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler with Walter Gropius, Alma Mahler with anyone, really. 1913 is the year that modernism was born; the continent began to shatter the following year.

Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear also has an experimental form. Da is a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins who emigrated from Hangzhou before she was 7. One half of the book is a literary analysis of Shakespeare; the other half of the book is the story of the chaos of Maoist society and her family’s personal experiences of it. The novelty is the weaving of family history with a classic piece of literature. Sometimes these transitions are jarring, perhaps deliberately so. Da has just barely begun musing about the reign of Goneril and Regan before she launches into an exposition: “A history — I am thirty nine years old. My parents left China for the United States at this age.” But I liked this effort to map Mao’s madness onto Lear’s delirium as well as analogizing Deng’s tenacity to Edgar’s determination to lay low. And it convinced me that Lear is the most Chinese of Shakespeare’s plays. It is the marriage of the eastern emphasis on pro forma ceremonies, excessive flattery, and empty speechifying with the western practice of elder abuse. I’d like to read more experimental books like this one.

Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi is a glittering jewel. The setting is a mysterious, magical house. The narrator is a radiantly earnest explorer who self-identifies as a “Beloved Child of the House.” His warm curiosity makes this book an adventurer’s diary. I liked the fantasy elements of the first half better than the second half of the book, which disenchanted some of the story, so maybe it’s better to stop halfway through. Afterwards, I read Clarke’s earlier book, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It’s enjoyable too, especially for its partisanship of Northern English identity, though the book as a whole is wooly. Susannah Clarke offers a good case study of how authors can think about their work over time: an overlong first book that took decades to craft, followed by a shorter and more glittering second work. I can’t wait to see what her third book will be like.

(The Neue Galerie’s exhibition this year on New Objectivity led me to the work of German painter Carl Grossberg. This 1925 work spoke to me. Credit: Wikimedia.)

I’ve learned that Christmas is a good time to write. Emails stop and all is calm. I submitted my manuscript this time last year in Vietnam. This year, my wife and I are writing from Bali. Tropical Asia makes for great writing retreats. We have lazy mornings that feature a swim and a big breakfast; then we spend the rest of the day writing before going out in the evening for some really spicy food.

A few food questions to wrap up:

1. Is Da Nang the most underrated food city in Asia? Yes, we all know about excellent eating spots in Penang, Tokyo, Yunnan, etc. But I hardly ever hear about Da Nang, which has several Michelin listed places. I am still dreaming about its chewy rice products, the grilled meats, the spice mixes, the seafood soups, the not-too-sweet desserts. It’s well-listed on Michelin guides, but I hardly hear about it. Da Nang is my submission for a food city that ought to be better recognized as a destination.
2. Over the summer in Europe, I found myself wondering why Copenhagen has such amazing baked goods. I think its croissants are even better than in Paris. Then I found myself wondering about the quality distribution of croissants throughout the continent. They are not so good in Spain and Italy. I believe that Italy and Spain have the best overall cuisine in Europe; but they have been less interested in producing excellent baked goods. Is it because they don’t have as good butter? But they still eat a lot of cheese. The US is getting better croissants in big cities, which once more makes me appreciate that America has excellence across many cuisines, though they tend to be scattered.
3. Every winter, I find myself craving vitamin-rich tropical fruits. I mean mostly passionfruit, mango, papaya, eggfruit, and of course durian. American groceries are stocking more rambutan and dragonfruit. I wonder if they could stock even more. It’s always mango season somewhere, for example, so is it possible to find better mangoes throughout the year? Is there a subscription package to receive regular shipments of passionfruit and mango? I realize the durian supply chain is highly complicated (apparently the fruit is pollinated mostly by bats), but still it would be nice to have the fruit occasionally. I realize that tariffs are hurting access to American essentials like coffee and bananas. But I hope that Americans can continue to demand better fruits.

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