A Letter from Beijing

Four whirlwind weeks back in China after a long, long absence

Listen to my narration in the embedded player above!

A confession: for years now, I suffered from imposter syndrome that worsened with each passing month away from China. As someone who’s always preached the need for that full immersive sensory experience and the importance of “country feel” to any meaningful understanding of China, my prolonged absence had been gnawing away at any confidence I once had that I knew anything about the place. Despite efforts to speak frequently with people in country, and regular interrogations of friends and acquaintances who’d experienced China during or since COVID, the years away were starting to tell.

Finally, last month, I headed back for a four-week trip — first to Dalian, to work my regular side hustle at the World Economic Forum event there, and then, at last, to Beijing, that ancient and sprawling object of my longing and loathing, the city where I lived for two full decades and which still ranks as the place I’ve spent more years than in any other.

I’d heard so many different things from so many people that I had little idea what to expect. Beijing had transformed so much that it was unrecognizable, some insisted. Others told me it was basically as it was pre-COVID with only cosmetic changes: more electric vehicles, sure, and more orderly bike-sharing, ritzier malls, but new buildings were coming up at a markedly lower rate than they did when I lived there, and the food was as great as I remember. Some told me that the surveillance had become intolerably intrusive; others dismissed it as a minor inconvenience. Beijing had been stripped of anything fun, and of most of its charm — the wit, the irony, the salty political diatribes — or, as others told me just as emphatically,  the intellectual life of the city was still flourishing, nourished as it always had been on grand matters of state and history’s fascinating, unending vicissitudes. 

The biggest debate was over China’s overall macroeconomic health, and with the much-anticipated Third Plenum of the 20th Party Central Committee coming up, this was debated unceasingly before and during my trip. China was in the throes of collective burnout, compounded by the trauma of the lockdowns: its ailing property market would have catastrophic knock-on effects, its overcapacity would make China a global pariah, its flaccid consumer confidence would consign it to middle-income mediocrity, say the bears — while the bulls counter that China has moved on from COVID, is fired up by the challenge of U.S.-imposed tech export restrictions, and is busily creating the foundations for a high-tech, decarbonized economy that will stun — and perhaps save — the world.

I don’t think the naysayers were entirely wrong. But there’s no denying that my experience was overwhelmingly positive — so much so that I was not only reluctant to leave but eager to get back, and to arrange my life so I can spend half the year from now on in Beijing and the other half Stateside. 

Let me get some caveats out of the way. Major life decisions like “where should I live?” inevitably involve comparison — in my case, between China and the U.S. at the multiple levels of family and friends, individual and household livelihood, respective levels of cultural and intellectual stimulation, and of course politics. We all assign weights to such things differently, I imagine, at different stages of our lives. Quiet years in the genteel idyll of a Southern college town can feel like just the thing after the hyper-urban over-stimulus of two decades in Beijing. Then life circumstances change — the kids fly the nest, for instance —  and suddenly the city’s siren song becomes irresistible. For me, on this trip, it wasn’t just the pull of Beijing but also the push of the American political plight that undeniably disposed me toward optimism. The debate debacle of June 27 coincided with my first full day in Beijing; the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision was handed down on the 28th, sapping the strength of important regulatory agencies like the EPA; and on July 1, SCOTUS ruled on presidential immunity. Practically bookending my stay was the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. 

Envy, as the late Harold Coffin once said, is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own. As an American reacquainting myself with Beijing during what happened to be one of the most dispiriting three-week stretches in political memory, I saw few blessings of my own to count and felt more than a tinge of envy for many aspects of national life in China. For years already, friends of mine in China who were once very admiring of the American political system were having real doubts, and my efforts to shore up their flagging faith rang increasingly hollow even in my own ears. For me to have tried, under these circumstances, to put a positive spin on American electoral democracy would have been risible. Perhaps if Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, and the astonishing consolidation we’re now seeing among Democrats around Kamala Harris, had happened while I was still in China some of my conversations would have gone differently. As it was, those conversations were challenging. While still openly admiring of American liberties, my Chinese interlocutors tended to be all but contemptuous of our political institutions. What remains of my own political faith, I was often reminded, is just that: faith, an irrational commitment no longer supportable by reason, no longer paying out in the hard currency of results. 

Of course, few of my friends in China are high-falutin intellectuals. American colleagues and friends whose main contacts in China are intellectuals, and especially those whose contacts work in areas like law and human rights, correctly remind me that my core sample is hardly representative. Neither, they freely own, is theirs. Besides, Beijing is hardly a microcosm of the country at large. Various demands on my time — including I should confess the sheer pleasure of evenings at the Golden Weasel, a tiny, untidy, and altogether unprepossessing hutong bar which has against all odds acquired the status of a cultural and intellectual salon (more on this later) — prevented me from going anywhere else. Even if I’d done so, a few weeks would have been far from adequate to take the pulse of the country.

I should emphasize that I'm no economist, so by no means should you take my musings on economics to be remotely authoritative. That said, I did my best to get a read on economic sentiment among the people I spoke to. Their answers were all over the map, and I soon found that in the course of a single conversation I could, depending on how I phrased questions or even the expression I wore on my face, coax what seemed to me to be completely contradictory answers out of just about anyone I talked to: The Chinese people are pulling together to resist American technological containment, and are willing to make great sacrifices to meet the challenge — or the Chinese people are near the end of their patience and sick of the campaigns, the slogans, the ideological bullshit. The Chinese economy is truly entering a new phase and the evidence, silly American, is all around you: Do you have smartphones like these? Apps like these? EVs that can compare to these? STEM graduates in these numbers? And five minutes later: Oh, but we know it’s all a facade, and the property market is going to hell and yeah all the young people are hiding out in graduate programs because there aren’t good jobs.

The bit about the EVs, at least, couldn’t be denied: after landing at Terminal 3 far to the northeast of Beijing, I had to hurry to the new Daxing International Airport south of town to fly to Dalian — an easy mistake for the harried folks at the World Economic Forum’s travel desk to make, easily forgiven in this case as it afforded me a chance to count cars on the Sixth Ring Road. By my estimate, nearly 40% of the vehicles on that crowded road sported the telltale green license plates of EVs. I recognized only a handful of brands: BYD, XPeng, and even the venerable Hongqi (Red Flag) alongside the many Teslas. The other brands and logos were utterly unfamiliar, though over the next few weeks, I’d see most of them displayed prominently in malls across the city.

The transformation of the taxi fleet was particularly notable — almost entirely electric now. In all my time in Beijing, I only rode in one of the old internal combustion engine taxis — a Hyundai Sonata of the sort that was the norm back in 2016. Save for that I would have repeated what most of the cabbies told me: that the entire fleet had gone electric. The Beijing cabs, all from the state-owned BAIC, have swappable batteries that only take five or ten minutes to change: they pull into a bay in what looks like a Jiffy-Lube to be raised by a hydraulic jack before robotic arms remove and replace their depleted battery for a fresh one with a nominal range of over 400 kilometers. This shift was less pronounced in Dalian, where EVs constituted perhaps a quarter of the vehicles I saw, but the change was unmistakable nonetheless.

This explosion of EVs is more than just a curiosity; it's a tangible manifestation of China's commitment to its energy transition. During my stay, new figures were released showing that in June, renewables accounted for 44% of China's energy mix, with coal dropping to 53% — a record low. Large public spaces were set at a balmy 26°C, a stark contrast to the frigid air-conditioning one might expect in other developed nations. Buildings proudly display their "green" ratings and the “ecological civilization” messaging is incredibly pervasive. It’s either much more than rhetoric, or the rhetoric is translating into reality. I marvel at the level of cynicism required to disparage China’s advances — to answer any evidence of progress toward decarbonization with “But what about all those new coal-fired power plants?” and reflexive alarm over overcapacity in EVs or photovoltaics. 

The greening of Beijing has another tangible manifestation: the trees. When I left in 2016, newish developments like Sun City, where my in-laws live, had been planted everywhere with scrawny saplings, looking very unimpressive and giving the terrain a desultory, half-finished look. I recall how my children, driving through North Carolina in 2016 shortly after we moved from Beijing, exclaimed that at any given moment, their field of vision contained more trees than they’d seen in the entire city of Beijing. This time, they commented on all the tree cover and the ubiquity of trees even in dense urban areas. This time, out in Sun City, the roads were all lined with shade trees of impressive girth and lushness of foliage, unnaturally uniform but undeniably lovely. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

At the World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos” in Dalian, Premier Li Qiang had made it clear that major stimulus wasn't in the cards — and now that the Plenum is over and the preliminary documents out, it’s evident that it never was. Using a metaphor from Chinese medicine, he suggested that China, recovering from the COVID shock, shouldn't be given strong medicine right away but should instead focus on recovering its fundamental health. The leadership's focus has been, of course, on shifting towards "high-quality productive forces" — industrial upgrades, supply chain efficiency improvements, basic research, a massive push in artificial intelligence, aviation and aerospace, new materials, advanced robotics, biomedicine, quantum computing, and the green energy transition. Those of us who work on China can be excused if this rhetoric has lost some of its power to inspire.

But Premier Li wasn’t the most forceful exponent of the wisdom of this strategy at Summer Davos. That title goes to Adam Tooze, the Columbia historian who is (deservedly, I think) the reigning public intellectual of the hour in the Anglophone world. He was heard to say, “At the aggregate level, the Chinese manufacturing boom just seems to be gathering pace. We ain’t actually seen what it looks like yet when the Chinese manufacturing miracle really hits its stride…. In my heart of hearts, I just don’t believe that any amount of tariffs or politics can stop the flow of high quality, well-priced goods in a global market.” Listen to the podcast that I did with him from Dalian to hear the rest of his bullish case for China — and his scathing indictment of America’s inability to give up the drugs of exceptionalism and primacy.

Tooze is badly out of sync with most of the American punditry, of course. But I’d put my money on Tooze and his sunny prognosis for China’s medium-term prospects over the pessimists who fixate on its present challenges. I don’t dismiss those challenges: there’s no denying that the deflating housing market, weak consumption, and youth unemployment are vexing and need to be addressed. But something Tooze once said, some years back, seeded the idea of a metaphor I’ve kept coming back to in trying to reconcile the short-term difficulties China faces with the muscular, tech-driven economy that I see coming into being. ”It’s possible,” Tooze suggested, “that what we’re hearing is the sound of China shifting into a higher gear.” 

I would add something to this: What we’re hearing may well be the sound of shifting gears, but it doesn’t sound like the driver’s particularly skillful with the clutch, what with all that loud gnashing and clanging, and that sickening grinding noise. Indeed, this driver never has been known for being good with the clutch. It was a jarring process back in the 80s when Deng and Zhao smashed iron rice bowls in the name of liberalization, and so too in the 90s, when Zhu Rongji shuttered inefficient state-owned factories and laid off millions in China’s rustbelt.  

Weak consumption growth has become a familiar refrain, and it’s not just something one hears from foreign bears but from China’s own economists and policymakers. Still, I suspect the picture is more complicated than is commonly understood outside of China. Consumption as a proportion of GDP in the U.S. is 68%, but of that, 65% is in services rather than goods: about 44% of total GDP. In China, according to Zhu Min, former Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, consumption of goods in the last three decades was actually higher as a percentage of GDP than it was in the U.S., but services make up a much smaller percentage. That’s where the real shortfall is in China, and the supply-side push that the Party leadership has been focused on — emphasizing services like leisure travel, healthcare, entertainment, and education while also producing more attractive goods for the domestic market — could help to close that gap. Coupled with ongoing reforms to the hukou system announced at the Third Plenum, which will allow among other things children of migrants, irrespective of hukou status, to access social services including education in cities they move to;  the continuing expansion of China’s national health insurance; and raising mandatory retirement ages, I’m sanguine about prospects for boosting services spending and overall consumption, and unconvinced that this is nearly so dire a situation as is so often presented outside of China.

Again, Beijing is not representative, and the restaurant business is no proxy for consumption or services, but walking down "Ghost Street" on a Friday night, where it's a challenge to navigate through the throngs of diners queued up outside eateries, it doesn’t feel like consumption is doing too badly. One restaurant in particular, Da Hu, had at least a hundred people in line outside it, spilling out far down the sidewalk and even into the street. (I never got to see what the fuss was all about). I don’t pretend to draw any conclusions from my visits to various malls, but the quality of retail outlets has noticeably improved: massive shopping centers like Indigo, a refurbished Guomao, and Fangcaodi near my kids’ primary school are impressive, with quite stunning architecture and tenants that seem to include all the major European luxury brands and a growing number of aspiring Chinese ones. They could well be complete white elephants; I have no idea. The outstanding restaurants that anchor the malls, at least, were all doing a brisk business. Does this translate into robust sales for the luxury brands? Probably not. But superficially at least, the tableau in the major malls, buzzing with stylish and well-heeled young folks, is hard to reconcile with the doom-and-gloom narratives.

Not that here’s no evidence for those gloomier perspectives — especially in sectors like real estate and just about anything touching on cross-border business, especially with the U.S. A lawyer friend in his early 40s, working at a major international firm, painted a bleak picture from the corporate law perspective, though he was quick to add that he only had visibility on a small part of the overall economy. M&A activity has plummeted since U.S.-China relations soured around 2017, he said. There was virtually no cross-border business in that regard. Business from international banks — already struggling since the 2008 financial crisis — had taken another hit, some major real estate clients had gone under, and numerous projects were canceled. What's booming? Bankruptcies, corporate and regional HQ relocations to other countries in the region, and asset disposals for firms leaving China.

I asked the young lawyer whether he thought Beijingers had gotten past the trauma of COVID: the incessant testing, the lockdowns of 2022, the whiplash of the end of Zero COVID. He thought that Beijing at least had, by and large, moved on. He had, as it turned out, taken part in the White Paper protests of November 2022. Living near Liangmaqiao near the northeastern Third Ring Road, he’d heard the commotion and seen the TV crews, and decided to see what was happening. A line of uniformed police officers, unarmed and without any riot gear, had formed a cordon around the main body of protestors but were letting anyone pass through their line to join the protestors — but not without a warning. “We will not make arrests tonight,” he was told, “but cannot guarantee that there will not be consequences if you decide to pass.” The following night, he received a call from the local police station in the evening just as he was putting his children to bed. No, he couldn’t come in the following day: it had to be tonight. So he went, and was asked predictable questions: How did you learn of the protests? Did you post about them on any social media? Did you shout any slogans or carry any signs? And he was then asked to write a statement to “express his attitude,” to 表态 biaǒtàii, which he dutifully did. He signed his statement, affixed his thumbprint, and left after two hours. His employer hadn’t been informed, and there had been no further follow-up in the 18 months since. 

We've all read a lot about youth unemployment. I’ve mentioned how, anecdotally at least, many college grads are opting to stay in school, pursuing postgraduate degrees because the job market doesn't align with their expectations or training. There's talk of baristas and fast-food managers with good college degrees, though I didn't personally encounter this. It seems to me to be another instance of a structural adjustment problem, exacerbated by the COVID slowdown and the dramatic increase in college enrollment rates over the past two decades. Remember that in the 1990s, only 8% of college-age Chinese were enrolled in a post-secondary institution, where that number is now 53%. It’s like buying clothes for teenagers — something with which I have some experience. Rarely will you look at them and see that their clothes fit properly: They’re likely to be too big or too small. The rate of growth is impossible to predict, so as a parent, you buy them clothes a few sizes bigger than their actual size and assume they’ll grow into them. Elite overproduction may be a problem today, but in a few years it may well be the case that demand for post-secondary education will be greater still, and universities will need to expand enrollments. It’s the same with energy demand, infrastructure, and much else: the clothes will often be overcapcious — until suddenly they aren’t.

The mood among young people I spoke with was mixed. There's certainly less of the buoyant optimism I remember from my days working at Baidu in the early 2010s. Some spoke of a collective sense of exhaustion among their generation: yes, the whole 内卷 neìjuán and 躺平 tǎngpíng discourse was and, to an extent, is still a thing — an expression of the disconnect between hard work and prosperity. One young man in his early 30s candidly described working for a 骗子公司 piànzi gōngsī — a “grifter company" that constantly reinvents its supposed business focus to match whatever seems to be the government's flavor of the month, chasing subsidies and low-interest loans to cover debts. While he didn't think this was the norm, he assured me his company was far from unique.

While I was in China, Big Data China published new findings of survey research conducted between 2004 and 2023 by Stanford economist Scott Rozelle, Harvard sociologist Martin King Whyte, and researcher Michael Alisky showing stark changes in how Chinese people viewed the causes of poverty and wealth. Across this span, reasons for poverty like “lack of ability” and “lack of effort” fell off precipitously, from 1st and 3rd ranking to 5th and 6th, respectively. Meanwhile, “unequal opportunity” and an “unfair economic system” rose from 6th and 8th to supplant ability and effort as 1st and 3rd. (Interestingly, “low education” remained the second-most-cited reason for poverty in the study. This is, after all, China).

In the end, my mood was bound to be set more by my personal experience, and especially by intimate social interactions, than by counting cars, reading statistics, or conducting casual barometric readings with near strangers. The sheer convenience of the digital-to-physical infrastructure — WeChat, Alipay, their integration with all the modes of urban transportation, from ride-hailing to the subway to shared bikes, the ease with which they now work with foreign bank cards — is too banal by now to comment on. What impressed me was the way the chaos of early O2O (“online to offline”) services like food delivery has given way to respectable order. This is most conspicuous in the bike-sharing services that appeared about a decade ago and almost immediately created insane jumbles of carelessly discarded bikes. Now, high-quality bikes — well-maintained, effortless to pedal, with easily adjustable seats — are neatly distributed and parked, a testament to how fierce early competition has shaken out into a handful of winners.

But friends make a city, and reconnecting with old ones while making not a few new ones convinced me to accelerate my plans for living half the year in Beijing — more than my horror at the state of American politics, more than the prospect of witnessing the next exciting phase of China’s rise, more even than the mind-blowing excellence of the food. I mentioned the Golden Weasel, a bar in Dongcheng co-owned by two expatriate friends of mine. In several well-lubricated evenings there, I experienced an important part of what it was that made me fall in love with Beijing back when I first moved there: the community of people — Chinese people from all over the country, foreigners from all over the world — coming together for conversations that went deep and ranged wide, embracing literature and film, politics and music, history, and travel, and adventure, all washed down by excellent Sazeracs (my favorite cocktails) and Bruichladdich, my favorite Scotch.

It’s tragic that there are now so few foreigners in residence in Beijing: Few things would do as much to restore some sanity to Western discourse on China than having more people come to the country to live and see how the reality compares with the sensationalistic version we’ve imbibed in this age of moral panic. But selfishly, it’s not hard to see a silver lining to the COVID-era exodus. Those who remain, folks told me one evening at the Weasel, when I turned on the mics and just had people share their thoughts about Beijing today, are the good ones. They felt like the travails of COVID — the long quarantines on entry, the testing, the constant threat of lockdown — as well as the various travel warnings from national governments, the horror stories of ubiquitous surveillance, and all the rest had effectively winnowed out all the ones they wouldn’t have particularly wanted here anyway. Its effect was to wash away those with shallow commitments, who were apt to whine too much, who somehow failed to find fascination in China’s venerable culture and its headlong rush into the unknown. It was a compelling reason to want to come back. I don’t lack for good company where I live, in Chapel Hill, but this — this felt like the white-hot center of something.

The clincher, for me, was an afternoon and evening spent in the company of Kou Zhengyu, my bandmate for 15 years in Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn), and easily the bandmate with whom I formed the closest friendship. Xiao Kou is about the most Beijing-y person I’ve ever known: he embodies dedication to the cultural over the commercial, has that sardonic wit that’s so quintessentially Beijing, and has all the oral fixations of the Beijinger: drinking, smoking, talking up a storm, and above all, eating. When I got back he’d recently finished a motorcycle trip to Lhasa, returning in one piece but to find that his wife, who was sure he’d die and pleaded with him not to go, had left him. In other regards, in the eight years since I last saw him for a decent amount of time, his life has significantly improved. He now has two spacious, modern apartments: one for living in, and one just for his enormous collection of guitars and gear. He was always the shredder in Chunqiu — the guitar pyrotechnician, with all the flash that I’ve never been able to pull off. Over the years he’s been sponsored by all the major guitar brands that run more metal: Jackson, ESP, Ibanez, Charvel. He’s also an impresario on the Beijing metal scene: His annual festival, the 330 Metal Festival (held annually, COVID excepted, for over 20 years and named for his birthday), sold over 900 tickets this year. While his band, Zhixi (Suffocated), isn't getting as many gigs as before, he attributes this to changing market tastes rather than government interference. He's adapted, livestreaming and teaching students, and spends a lot of time fishing. It's not a bad life at all.

He made hotpot, with melt-in-your-mouth slices of lamb, with delicious sesame and garlic chive flower dipping sauce, with all the fixings, which we washed down with ice-cold Harbin beer. And then we went to the gear room to jam. 

It had been a while since I’d played our old repertoire, and at first, Kou laughed at me for being so rusty, boasted (without exaggeration, it turned out) that he remembered every note to every solo, and handed me another beer — to awaken my muscle memory, he said. It seems to have worked. Before long we were playing all the long, complicated harmony lines and counterpoint, and it all came back to me. 

This was all a set-up. On learning that I was planning on coming back soon, and often, and perhaps for as much as six months at a stretch, he had begun scheming on a reunion show, or even a reunion tour. He’d rounded up the guys, estimated how much we might pull down (I said he put culture over commerce, but I didn’t mean to suggest that it was to the complete neglect of the latter), and then presented me with the plan once he was convinced I could still play the material. So that’s going to happen, and it’s been hard to think of anything else since.

One four-week trip to China isn’t enough to have completely cured me of imposter syndrome. I’m still uncertain of what to make of the national mood and the policies announced at the Third Plenum — it was just getting underway as I was heading for the airport. I’ve not fully digested its output yet, or the likely future of U.S.-China relations under (inshallah!) a Harris presidency. But after seeing so many of my American peers in the China field converge on Beijing this summer, and with students coming back to China, and with that fundamental can-do energy still conspicuous and abundant in the capital, there’s enough to cling to — and enough to get me excited about my next trip back in October.