Transcript | Jasmine Sun on Silicon Valley through a Chinese Mirror

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Oana Grigor and Natalia Polom for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll 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 Beijing, where it is just great to be back. Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain, as always, free. But if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing, and, boy, do I need you to work for an organization that believes in what I am doing, lend your support. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com. I’ve lost my Title VI grant funding from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that will dry up by the end of the year. So, I’m really in the market for new institutional support. Reach out. Listeners, you, meanwhile, can support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. You will enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators. And, of course, the knowledge that you are helping me do what I still honestly believe is important work. So, do check out the page to see all that’s on offer and consider helping out. I’ve been thinking a lot about what my friend and Sinica co-founder, Jeremy Goldkorn, and I called back in February on the show — a vibe shift in how America talks about China. The steady drumbeat of DeepSeek moments, the exodus of TikTok creators finding a new home on RedNote, and that endless stream of China infrastructure and EV porn on social feeds. All that is reshaping the conversation on parts of the American left. You hear a renewed, sometimes giddy talk of abundance, of course, looking very favorably at China. Dan Wang’s book Breakneck, and Dan’s been interviewed now, and every damn podcast, including this one. I mean, the book feels super zeitgeisty right now, how you will feel about it, especially for the left, And regrettably, of course, on parts of the American right, you see some similar technocratic fetishism among not just the Silicon Valley tech bros, but surprisingly, maybe not surprisingly, you also see it in the MAGA crowd, where China’s successes are misread as proof of the virtues of ethnic or cultural homogeneity and closed borders. So, you add to that the kind of notable change in tone from the White House bully pulpit. And you can kind of feel it, maybe sometimes in the national mood. It feels like things are changing. Obviously, it’s not just perception of China’s successes either, but also of America’s deepening crisis, however you want to read that. anyway all this is by way of explaining why I have been eager to hear from Americans in different corners of our society who are connecting or reconnecting with China right now, people thinking hard about the country as it actually is and what that means for where America or the West more broadly is actually headed. One of those voices is Jasmine Sun. She’s a Stanford grad who worked at Substack and now writes an excellent Substack of her own. She recently traveled to China with a group of friends whose experience with the country ranged from deep to totally first time, some with ethnic Chinese backgrounds, others who actually raised their… Full disclosure before we go further — I made a couple of introductions to a company I consult for, Tencent, so we’re going to actually avoid talking about that specifically. You can read the piece she wrote about. That piece, you know, a vivid, thoughtful essay called America Against China Against America, an allusion to a famous short book written, like 35 years ago now, by the guy who’s now the gray eminence, the Politburo Standing Committee member, chief party ideologue, Wang Huning. Jasmine’s essay, which I highly highly recommend, you might even actually want to hit pause and click the link in the show notes and read the thing before we go on. Anyway, Jasmine’s essay isn’t just what I saw in China Chronicle, but actually a really profound meditation on how she thought about things and what she talked about with her companions. And it’s a really beautiful piece of writing to boot. So, Jasmine Sun, welcome to Sinica.

Jasmine Sun: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here. I did another trip to China with friends one year ago. That was the first time I had really gone as a thinking adult, not just hanging out with my grandparents and stuffing myself with food. And last year, one of the things I tried to do when I was there was really listen to a lot of the voices of modern China. And Sinica was a podcast I found during that time, and I’ve continued keeping up with since.

Kaiser: Wow. Hey, awesome. I’m glad to hear it. So, today, I’m really thrilled because I’m joined by a co-host that I’d really like everyone to meet — Tianyu Fang. Tianyu has just embarked on a history PhD at Harvard after finishing his undergraduate studies at Stanford. And actually, he and Jasmine know one another. Many of you may remember his byline from the days when The China Project was actually the so-called SupChina, embarrassingly. He started writing for us at the tender age of 16. You’ll be hearing, actually, a lot more from him and from occasional other co-hosts, and even substitute hosts, as I take on more commitments with my band in the coming years. I got to do this before I keel over. Folks like Iza Ding, she’s going to be joining me in this chair from time to time. And Tianyu, if he’s able to manage, will actually hopefully be taking on an even bigger role once you finish up.

Jasmine: No pressure, Tian.

Kaiser: Tianyu, man, greet the people.

Tianyu Fang: You know, Kaiser, I’ve been a listener to Sinica since I was in middle school. And I remember in 2016, I even went to a talk that you and Jeremy did back then before you both went to the U.S. So what an honor to be here. And I should also mention that, at one point, I was Jasmine’s intern at Substack. So, also that is part of my disclosure.

Kaiser: The man is moving up in the world, moving up the world. So, I think actually listeners who are meeting you for the first time before we get into it with Jasmine, give us a little quick sketch. I mean, what do they need to know about you? What’s the thing that fascinates you? What makes you tick?

Tianyu: Well, so I’ve just started my PhD at Harvard here in the department of the History of Science, and my project is very much on the computing history in China during the economic reform period when Chinese policymakers and intellectuals were very much interested in a scientific approach or understanding and also managing society as many crises in the 1980s. So, I sort of wanted to trace a history of what we now understand as the Chinese technocracy. Or you might say what, in Dai Wang’s book, he calls the engineering state. Where does that even come from? But before that, I was living in San Francisco. I did my undergrad at Stanford. I was very much interested in the relationship of technology and how we produce it. So, Jasmine and I knew each other from those days. So, it’s great to have this crossover here on Sinica today.

Kaiser: Fantastic, fantastic.

Tianyu: So, Jasmine, maybe a quick intro from you as well. What should our listeners know about you that Kaiser didn’t get to?

Jasmine: Yeah. So, these days, I’m mostly an independent writer and emerging beginning podcaster. Still trying to learn from y’all. Tian was actually on my podcast in February, where he mentioned that meeting you and Jeremy Goldkornn at that faded 2015 or whatever event. But I mostly cover what I call the “anthropology of disruption.” What I’m super interested in is sort of the cultural elements of tech, how technology is built, tech industries. I mostly focus on Silicon Valley, since that’s where I live in San Francisco. I went to school at Stanford in Silicon Valley. I’ve worked in the tech industry. But, increasingly, I’ve become interested in understanding what cultures of technology look like beyond, which is one of the reasons that my friends and I decided to take this trip to China and to meet with a bunch of Chinese technologists to understand how their culture and approach differs. I’m basically very interested in how emerging technologies interface with preexisting cultures, communities, institutions, what those frictions look like, what that adaptation looks like. And that’s part of why, in addition to simply just being a Chinese American, I’ve become much more interested in understanding China over the past couple of years is because I think like China’s modernization is one of the greatest, fastest technological projects of our time. And it’s really fascinating to me to get another lens that isn’t just the San Francisco one on how tech is built and what it can look like.