This week on Sinica, I’m joined again by Afra Wang, the Bay Area-based writer behind the AI newsletter Concurrent, who was last on the show in January to talk about her Wired piece on The Morning Star of Lingao and China’s “Industrial Party.” She’s back with two new pieces of on-the-ground reportage that get beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism: her New Yorker Lede piece on Liangzhu, the town outside Hangzhou where laid-off and burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe code in each other’s living rooms (and where AI and BaZi fortune-telling have become strangely intimate), and a forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s sprawling, lucrative, and largely unregulated “learn AI, get rich” education industry. We talk about why 93% of Chinese respondents tell Gallup that AI will mostly help their country, what that number conceals, and whether what looks like optimism is sometimes closer to acceptance.
Afra’s pieces discussed in this episode:
What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom — The New Yorker, September 23, 2026
[Her forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s AI education industry — [LINK TK, expected after October 12]]
You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel — Wired, January 2026, and our January 2026 Sinica conversation about it
Subscribe to Afra’s newsletter, Concurrent
Also mentioned:
Optimism About AI Globally Widespread Despite Uneven Adoption — the Microsoft-Gallup survey
China’s OpenClaw gold rush — MIT Technology Review
Damien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade
Evan Osnos, Crazy English — The New Yorker, April 2008
Lian Si 廉思, Journey Without a Map 无图之旅：一代青年的自我寻路
Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction — Sinica, 2016
06:51 – Walking into Liangzhu’s living rooms: the San Francisco déjà vu, and the grimness beneath the techno-optimist story the West wants to hear
10:14 – Setting the scene: a real-estate developer’s utopian village, Neolithic ruins, Xi Jinping’s intervention, and a “road-to-food ratio” low enough to build real community
17:30 – Child of the layoffs or child of DeepSeek? The post-COVID “ego death” of Chinese tech — and a quibble about the word “crackdown”
21:42 – Master Qi and the living room as a social form: what Liangzhu offers that a Beijing office or a WeChat group can’t
24:11 – What the 93% really tells us: optimism, acceptance, or FOMO when you can’t protest a data center
29:26 – “Westerners get restless when they can’t protest; Chinese people get restless when they haven’t found a teacher”: qiúzhī 求知, meritocracy as religion, and the company called Shēngcái Yǒudào 生财有道
32:48 – Inside Shengcai Youdao: the “prosperity evangelist” conference room, the ladder from ordinary member to CEO class, Mr. Tree’s Hilton seminars, and who’s actually paying 3,000 yuan a year
37:44 – Scam or ladder? The state’s war on the “paid knowledge” mess, Dragon Ball referral credits, and the security guard running Claude Code on his phone during his shift
41:03 – How it compares to the Valley’s course-sellers; selling hope and upward mobility, echoes of Crazy English, and “the prosperity gospel with Chinese characteristics”
45:30 – “Take us to Silicon Valley!”: what the West means to a room of one-person companies building apps for the U.S. App Store
47:18 – Xiao Kai, the 25-year-old AI filmmaker from Heilongjiang: murder mysteries as model-friendly plots, government commissions, WaytoAGI, and the local-government AIGC fever
55:28 – Lian Si’s Journey Without a Map: a Party insider tells young people to “make peace with the ordinary” while everyone else says learn AI or be left behind
59:59 – FateTell and the gray zone of AI fortune-telling: tarot slot machines in Shenzhen, crystal shops, and Liangzhu as “China’s Sedona”
1:04:13 – Levy, the BaZi cosmology, Sam Altman’s chart, and Kaiser plays the skeptic: the Yijing as “humanity’s first statistical decision model,” the Whole Earth Catalog, and New Age re-imported from the West
1:12:27 – Do they actually believe it? Speech fasting, BaZi compatibility in hiring, and Chinese syncretism at work
1:14:45 – When the local government falls in love with the scene: Crazy Thursday, incubators, “new quality productive forces,” and why Liangzhu’s peak may already be over
1:19:42 – Are Chinese people really cavalier about AI safety? Pragmatism, scarce compute, trust in state capacity, the blind spots of EA — and a preview of Afra’s third piece on China’s “industrial AI slop”
Paying It Forward:
Zilan Qian, a GovAI fellow researching AI governance in China who writes the Substack Until Zilan Finds a Better Name and is a must-read on how AI-safety concepts like “loss of control” translate (or don’t) into the Chinese context. Her most widely shared piece: Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends.
Recommendations:
Afra: Ken Liu’s new collection, The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, whose title borrows a metaphor from Ursula K. Le Guin.
Kaiser: Marilynne Robinson’s Home, the second of the four Gilead novels — set in the same few weeks of 1956 as Gilead but seen from inside the Boughton household, as Glory and her prodigal brother Jack circle a secret the book doesn’t name until nearly the end.
Transcript
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Kuo coming to you this week from my home in Beijing.
Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. I get how all these Substack subscriptions can really add up. I mean, they do for me for sure. So, I try to offer a lot. You get not only Sinica Podcast, but you get the Sinica Chinese Phrase of the Week from Andrew Methven. You get podcasts and roundups from the terrific folks at Trivium. You get my very favorite podcast, the indispensable China Global South Podcast. And you get the historian Jay Carter’s This Week in China’s History, an outstanding column, now publishing much more frequently. So please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations and a lot more.
Over the past year and a half or so, and especially just these past several months, I’ve had the odd experience of watching a technological fever take hold in China in a way that I haven’t really seen since the arrival of the mobile Internet, maybe even the Internet itself back in the mid-late ‘90s. Back in March, on a Friday afternoon, close to 1,000 people were lined up outside Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen. They had their laptops in hand so that Tencent cloud engineers could install OpenClaw for them. The open-source AI agent harness with the little red lobster logo. Baidu did the same thing in Beijing a few days later.
Raising a lobster became the phrase of the season. All these retirees were supposedly doing it. Grade schoolers were doing it. AI engineers, of course, were doing brisk business installing this stuff. A Beijing software engineer actually told MIT Technology Review that his 77-year-old father had asked him to set up a lobster. A cottage industry just sprang up of guys who’d come to your apartment and install one for like 500 kuai. And a few months later, by early summer, according to some people, those same guys were fielding even more requests to uninstall them than to install them. But hey, so it goes. AI agents got a mention in the Government Work Report. Hefei was handing out compute vouchers to one-person companies.
It was a really giddy, a little unhinged time, and I confess it was a great deal of fun to watch. The same basic Chinese techno-optimism that seems to underlie this AI fever seems to show up in all the available polling data. The Microsoft-Gallup AI adoption survey this year asked people whether AI would mostly help or mostly harm people in their country. And in China, I guess this shouldn’t surprise too many people: 93% said ‘help.’ First in the world. In the United States, it was only 36% that put the U.S. in the bottom five. It was sandwiched between Afghanistan and Malawi.
So, these numbers have fed a lot of chatter in the West about whether Chinese people are simply cavalier about AI, wondering whether they’re just blind to the risks or naive or worse. But honestly, there’s not a lot of data behind that chatter. And what there is tends to be sort of secondhand anecdotes. What’s really been missing is on-the-ground reportage, reporting with real color, with real texture by someone who knows the tech worlds of both sides of the Pacific, who can read a co-working space or a living room hangout in Hangzhou and their counterparts in San Francisco with equal fluency and who happens also to write really compellingly, really beautifully.
So, thank God we have Afra Wang, who is easily among the most exciting of the crop of younger writers tackling China and technology. Someone whose voice and judgment I’ve come to really implicitly trust and to rely on. Afra is a Bay Area-based journalist who writes the AI-focused newsletter Concurrent. Definitely subscribe to that one. She was last on the show in January, I think it was, to talk about her Wired piece, where she was writing for Wired magazine for their big China issue. She wrote a great piece on the Morning Star of Lingao, the sprawling crowdsourced time travel novel that serves as the kind of urtext, as we said on the show, of China’s industrial party, the gōngyè dǎng, the loose online ideological current, I guess, movement, I don’t know, that treats engineering capability and manufacturing-led growth not just as the true source of national wealth and power, but as something close to a creed.
They make a fetish of getting the tech tree completely right. That was one of my favorite conversations of the year so far, and it made her the obvious person to bring back for this. So, she’s here today with two pieces actually to talk about; the first ran in The New Yorker on September 23rd. It was titled “What China’s Vibe Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the AI Boom.” And it takes us to a place called Liangzhu, a town on the northwest outskirts of Hangzhou, where burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe code really on their own terms. And where it turns out the AI and BaZi fortune-telling thing have become strangely intimate. The second piece is actually forthcoming.
Maybe around the time that this podcast drops, you guys will have access to it. It’s in New York Magazine, and it’s on China’s AI education industry, the paid make-money-with-AI courses, the self-organized vibe-coding tutorials that you find all over the place, AI filmmakers, a guy from Dongbei who we’re going to meet, and what she finds when she looks beneath the surface of all that apparent techno-optimism, which, as you will hear, isn’t always simple optimism. Afra Wang, welcome back to Seneca. Thank you so much.
Afra Wang: Thank you for this generous introduction, Kaiser. I’m really flattered, really happy to be back to share my new pieces.
Kaiser: It’s wonderful to have you. And as always, hit pause and check, if it’s after October 12th that you’re listening to this, you should be able to get the New York Magazine piece. It doesn’t have a title yet, but you’ll find it. Just look for Afra’s name. And then the New Yorker piece, definitely hit pause, read that, come back, and we’ll jump right in. So Afra, the last time you were on, we spent a good while on what it’s like for you to be kind of a cultural in-betweener. Actually, not just cultural, but kind of a tech culture in-betweener.
And this time you really put that to the test. You walked into these spaces in Liangzhu, into a living room with shoes lined up at the door, this being an Asian household, laptops all over the carpet, everybody is half-knowing everybody else. And you say your first reaction was deja vu. It could have been a house party in San Francisco. I’ve had that exact same experience where I’ve been in tech spaces in China and it’s felt exactly like the Valley or the city. Then there’s the differences that started to register almost immediately as well. So maybe let’s begin there. What did feel the same and what turned out to be different? And what was illuminating about those differences especially?
Afra: Yeah, the reason why I discovered this Chinese vibe coding capital, Liangzhu, was really because some really contrarian, interesting programmers I know by going to these open-source meetups. And one of those strange people says Liangzhu is a place you need to check out. So, that’s why I trusted their judgment because they’re weird enough to tell me, like, where the actual tech periphery is. So, I went to Liangzhu, and I hung out with a lot of Vibe coders for many days, went to their living rooms, listened to the open sharings, participated in their crazy Thursdays, as well as just visiting different companies.
And like each one of them are all, in a sense, very different from Alibaba or Tencent — not building super apps, but really building like whimsical, interesting little things. And I think in a sense, like sentiment bias and, on ground, there is a lot of grimness. I think simply because China’s economy is doing terribly bad. So, that’s why you have this contradictory phenomenon where all the Western media, the Western discourse, want to hear about these awesome stories of the technological optimist story from China. But all the journalists who are in China understand that the texture of the society just want to report about the youth unemployment and the grimness, the darkness, the desperation.
So, this is like the huge contrast I observed in those living rooms where young people, first and foremost, they are teaching each other about AI. And second, a lot of them are unemployed or call themselves OPC, one-person company, call themselves influencers, call themselves vibe coders, which in nature is also true. There’s some core that’s genuine. I don’t want to be cynical about that. But at the same time, many of them are in a situation where they don’t have stable income.
They constantly worry about being left out. So that’s why I discovered this vibe coding town as well as this really interesting phenomenon about this lucrative and unregulated, and sprawling AI education industry. Because the vibe coders I met, when I was asking them about their financial source, a lot of them said, “I sell class.” 我买课。 And then when I asked follow-up questions, I realized a lot of their income source are not actually from Vibe coding or not actually from selling software to other people, to the Westerners, but sell classes to other Chinese people and then themselves also register classes.
Kaiser: I mean, before we get too much further, I want to talk a little about this place, Liangzhu. I’ve never been there. Like I said, it’s on the northwest suburbs of Hangzhou. Help us set the scene there. There are Neolithic ruins there. I know that there was this Liangzhu culture there. I don’t know if people have been out to Banpo Village. I imagine it’s that, but there’s also like this Tadao Ando designed building of a very famous Japanese architect, still living. It’s called the Village Cultural Arts Center. I looked at it. I encourage you to check it out online. It’s quite a stunning building. The big roof, I guess, you say. What’s the Chinese, what do people call it in…?
Afra: They just call it that “da wuding” and then another one is “dà gǔcāng,” the big barn.
Kaiser: Yeah, the big barn. But there are like people sipping oat milk lattes and people actually lying on the grass, which is not something you typically do in Chinese cities because there’s all these little signs that say don’t trample on the grass. And then there’s this backstory involving apparently how Xi Jinping actually went there back in 2003. But anyway, how did this place, I mean, it seems like sort of an unlikely place to become the vibe-coding capital, as you call it, of China. How much of that was planned and how much it was just sort of spontaneous?
Afra: I want to break down a few components about the creation of Liangzhu or how this vibe-coding capital became what it is today. There are a few factors. The one factor is it was essentially a real estate project. Liangzhu Wenhuacun, the Liangzhu Cultural Village, was a part of this infrastructure build out in the real estate boom. So, I think back then, certain real estate developers like Hengda, the one that built Liangzhu, had this vision of this post-urban village, this utopia village. So, they pretty much have this concept of Xianjian building the country in their mind. So the way they built Liangzhu was not building 12-floor high-rise buildings to house people. Rather, in Liangzhu, you don’t see any high-rise buildings.
The living condition really much resembles the Bay Area or Orange County, if you know the American suburb.
Kaiser: Like detached housing?
Afra: Yeah, detached housing.
Kaiser: Wow.
Afra: Yeah, a lot of single-family houses. A lot of the buildings that you don’t need an elevator because they’re four floors tall, five floors tall. And the houses in Liangzhu are also spacious, right? With 3,000 yuan, 4,000 yuan a month, you can rent a 2B2B. You can rent a 3B2B even. You can have an actual living room that you can house people. So in Beijing, people are joking about this lu/fan bi, road food ratio. It means if you eat your food for two hours, but if you spend two hours on the road as well, so your Lu/fan bi, your road food ratio would be one.
But in Liangzhu, this road food ratio is actually incredibly low. It’s because you only need to like walk five minutes to go to your friend’s place to eat with them and then
