Something different this week. Since I moved back to Beijing, the question I get most often has nothing to do with trade or tech or the 15th Five Year Plan. People want to know what my life here is actually like. So I carried a mic and a portable recorder around for the weekend of October 30 to November 1 and let it roll: a Friday afternoon at Café Zarah with a new friend in from Berlin, Friday night at the Golden Weasel, a Saturday that ran from a China Unicom office to an HKU forum to a very good dinner, and Sunday lunch at Sanyang Cai with an old friend back after eight years. Along the way, conversations with Olumide Abimbola, Michael Cherney, Anthony Tao, Wang Zichen, Wang Feng, Andy Rothman, and Eric Fish, a few words on the word “expat,” and news of a new apartment near Tuanjiehu.
01:19 – Why a weekend edition: what my weekdays in Beijing look like, informal office hours at Café Zarah, and a home full of moving boxes
02:59 – A word about “expats”: why I avoid the word, why I don’t avoid the people, and what a city’s foreign community says about the city
07:16 – Friday at Café Zarah with Olumide Abimbola of Berlin’s Africa Policy Research Institute: building-integrated solar in Baoding, and why Europe needs to say what it wants from China rather than just what it doesn’t
12:40 – Friday night at the Golden Weasel: Michael Cherney on people coming back to Beijing and a creative scene finding its feet again
14:43 – Anthony Tao on the bar as a third space, and why no one can ever paint the complete picture of something like the Mbappé controversy (plus Michael’s Schrödinger’s 猫 pun)
20:42 – Amy on fifteen years in Beijing: the 2012 vibe, COVID, “the brickening,” and how the Weasel became a beacon
23:38 – Saturday: a morning at China Unicom, then the HKU Talent Forum with Wang Zichen and with Wang Feng, the former FT Chinese editor-in-chief now heading up communications at the University of Hong Kong
28:08 – My panel: the Republic of Letters, the CSC-PRC after the Nixon opening, and scientific exchange in an age of weaponized interdependence
30:36 – Andy Rothman on why the government seems less worried than he is about income growth and consumption, the K-shaped economy, and what Foshan tells you about the property slowdown
33:58 – Dinner with economist Zhu Ning and his theory linking the deliberate deflation of the property bubble to China’s push into AI and hard tech; a Halloween-free Saturday at the Weasel and Schwarzman Scholars at Time Keepers
36:15 – Sunday lunch at Sanyang Cai with Eric Fish, back after eight years: what’s changed, what hasn’t, and Chinese students in the U.S. caught between “divorcing parents”
41:21 – Monday-night open mic at Time Keepers
Paying It Forward
Ollie Dieckmann, a former Sinica intern and a very promising young researcher, who was in town last week with Marina Rudyak and her colleague Nadine.
Recommendations
Kaiser: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which I’m reading on the recommendation of Marina Rudyak, who was born in Russia and calls it her favorite Russian novel. Terrifically funny, lurching between big philosophical ideas and slapstick. Quite a contrast from the last Russian doorstop I read, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. And if you’re in Beijing: the Monday-night open mic at Time Keepers (叁更) by the Drum and Bell Towers, hosted by Saso.
Mentioned in this episode
Olumide Abimbola, founder of the Africa Policy Research Institute (APRI), Berlin
Michael Cherney, photographer, calligrapher, and painter
Anthony Tao, poet and co-owner of the Golden Weasel; my earlier conversation with him: Anthony Tao: The Poetry and Soul of Beijing
Wang Feng, former editor-in-chief of FT Chinese, now heading up communications at the University of Hong Kong
Zhu Ning, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SAIF), author of China’s Guaranteed Bubble
Eric Fish, author of China’s Millennials: The Want Generation
Joe Studwell, How Africa Works (Profile Books) — my conversation with Joe is coming in two weeks
Marina Rudyak on Sinica: China, Europe, and the Russo-Ukrainian War
