00:00And for almost a decade, Evan Osnos was a Beijing-based reporter.
00:03He's also the author of a book, Age of Ambition,
00:05chasing fortune, truth, and faith in the new China.
00:08These days, he's based in D.C.,
00:10but he recently took a reporting trip to China
00:12in a new piece for The New Yorker.
00:14He writes that many of those changes have taken place since 2013
00:17and saying for a long time, China looked west for visions of the future.
00:21These days, it's favoring its own.
00:23Its approach to AI is one illustration of that.
00:26Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker,
00:28and he joins us now on this Saturday.
00:29Evan, I want to start with AI, if I could,
00:31because I'm going to paraphrase you here.
00:33You'll forgive me for doing that.
00:34But you highlight the distinction between the way that China approaches AI
00:37and the way that the U.S. does.
00:39And I think what you sort of indicate is that in the U.S.,
00:41the debate is about sort of advanced general intelligence,
00:44sort of what that might mean for our society as a whole.
00:47It is a much more kind of commercially focused aspiration in China
00:50than it is here in the U.S.
00:53It is, yeah.
00:54The conversation in China is about how to get it out as fast as possible,
00:58as far as possible.
01:00And they're not just thinking about how do we get it into Chinese factories,
01:03but also how do we get it into Africa, Central Asia, Latin America.
01:06And so you have a very different conversation when you're going around,
01:10as I did, you know, visiting Chinese factories,
01:13you're going to AI consultancies that are looking at ways of bringing this
01:17into very old-fashioned factories.
01:20You know, there's not a whole lot of imaginings about, you know, a sci-fi future,
01:27even though there are elements of that beginning to present themselves in the present.
01:31It's really about, all right, how do we go into a brewery, for instance,
01:34that's a real example, and say, how do we take beer production
01:37and put it into the 21st century?
01:39So it is quite striking, David, when you're on the ground these days
01:42about how AI and other technologies feel like they are already part of life.
01:50And it seems to me that the energy aspect is a huge part of that.
01:53We were talking earlier with Joe Quillen from Bank of America
01:56talking about the spike we saw in solar stocks this week,
01:59and he said part of the reason is what we're seeing in the Gulf
02:01and this energy demand, and China has been really out ahead on energy diversity,
02:05and we're still seeing this, you know, mysterious drop in oil imports from China.
02:10Is this, are they more able to throw their weight behind this
02:13and backbuild the infrastructure because of just the way they are structured
02:17with their government?
02:18They can long-term plan in a way that a democracy doesn't have to
02:21because we change presidents possibly every four years.
02:25Yeah, this is both the blessing and the curse of having a centrally planned system.
02:31You know, the blessing, of course, is when you decide you're all in
02:34on all kinds of energy as they have over the course of the last generation,
02:38they've gone from producing, you know, something like half as much energy
02:41as the United States to producing now much more.
02:43And actually, in many cases, it's cheaper.
02:46This is partly because they've been able to say from the top,
02:50this is what we're doing, and then that filters down through the system,
02:53even down into the localities where you get municipal governments
02:56that are, even on the individual level, you have politicians in the Chinese system
03:00competing for promotions by saying, look, we are investing in solar,
03:04we're investing in nuclear, whatever it is.
03:08The downside, of course, is that when they go off of true north by a few degrees
03:14and end up on an engineering project that turns out to be either out of step
03:18with market demands or, in some cases, like the one-child policy,
03:22which I talk about in this piece,
03:24something that produces a huge range of negative economic consequences,
03:28then it's very hard to shift that battleship before it can cause more damage.
03:35So what we're seeing right now is that this is the moment
03:38when those energy investments have paid off,
03:41and it's been very helpful for them.
03:43Evan, you can count me among those who have been introduced to the new China
03:46through your book and through your writing,
03:48and I just wondered if you could talk a bit about what it was like
03:50to return there on this reporting trip.
03:52I think one of the things you observe is kind of the quiet of Beijing
03:55in a way that it wasn't before because there are so many electric vehicles now.
03:59The means of transportation has changed.
04:01The means of commerce has changed as well.
04:03The storefronts are less crowded because people are buying things
04:06with apps and using delivery services.
04:08How different is the new China today than the one that you wrote about now
04:11more than a decade ago?
04:14It's very interesting to see it up close now.
04:16I mean, having lived there for all these years,
04:19you kind of absorb a certain street-level sense of what China is.
04:24And certainly in the first decade of this century,
04:26Beijing was a kind of cacophonous place.
04:30It was a noisy place.
04:31And I mean that in all senses of the word.
04:32It wasn't just that the cars were noisy,
04:34but also there was a real contest of ideas going on.
04:37And you would also just go into the alleys.
04:39I lived in a Hutong house,
04:41and so you never quite knew what was going to be opening up.
04:44There were businesses that would open.
04:45They'd be gone in a few months or something else would be built in its place.
04:50Today, there is a much more distinct feeling of the place that is run from the top.
04:56And so on the one hand,
04:58you get this feeling that it is quite literally quieter because of electric vehicles.
05:02But then you also get the feeling that some of that hive of activity
05:07that was happening in the margins,
05:09you know, the smaller communities of artists or ideas that were bubbling up,
05:14those have been silenced in some ways.
05:17And that is a feeling of that feels like a loss.
05:21And it also, you do get the feeling, though, as you know,
05:24I was talking to somebody from Singapore not too long ago,
05:26and he said about Beijing, he said,
05:27when I go there, it feels to me like it now out Singapore's Singapore,
05:32meaning that it has that sense of orderliness.
05:34But then there is also that bit of sterility.
05:36And getting those two ideas into one sentence
05:40is part of the reason why I write a long piece of this kind,
05:43to try to give people as much a feel as I can of what it's like on the ground.
05:46You also wrote, which I thought was interesting,
05:49Chinese leaders seem to be betting that by speeding toward the future,
05:52they can outrun the mistakes of the recent past.
05:55You mentioned the one-child policy.
05:56I'm wondering which other ones come to mind
05:59and what they're trying to reverse course on.
06:02One of the things they're trying to address, of course, is the property crash.
06:05Since 2021, we've all been living through the effects of that economically.
06:09There are now, just to put a fine point on it,
06:12there are now as many vacant homes in China,
06:15apartments and villas, as there would be to house the entire population of Russia.
06:20So you have this enormous overhang from that property crash.
06:27And they're saying, look, if we can more or less catapult ourselves
06:32into a new phase of economic history,
06:35then perhaps we can light a fire again under people,
06:39get them feeling like they're no longer, as the saying goes among young Chinese,
06:43no longer looking to lie flat,
06:46maybe get people to start feeling more energized about the economy
06:50and about their own opportunities.
06:51That's really the core of it, guys.
06:53I think is this feeling of can you reignite that feeling of opportunity?
07:00That's the thing that was running through Age of Ambition
07:02when I wrote about the China of the 2010s.
07:07And there are moments, there are little glimpses
07:09when you go to places in China these days
07:10and you see this dynamic frontier of the new economy, that is happening.
07:14But then when you also talk to people who have felt like
07:17those opportunities are only for a privileged few,
07:20and they say, look, I'm not equipped for the AI economy.
07:22I'm not equipped for this new advanced manufacturing generation.
07:26Where do I fit in?
07:27And the irony is, of course, it's not a conversation
07:29that's all that different from one of the ones
07:31we're beginning to have here in the United States.
07:34So there's something to it.
07:36How do you make sure that many people feel a sense of agency
07:39in the new AI era?
07:42In the minute we have left,
07:43I want to ask you about what I found
07:44is kind of the most important part of the piece to my mind.
07:47Just in one minute.
07:48I think that there are a lot of kind of graybeards
07:50talking about political theory
07:52and the American order waning
07:54and what might rise in its place.
07:55And you write,
07:56spend enough time in Beijing and Washington these days
07:58and the rivalry looks less like a clash of competing systems
08:01than a race between small oligarchic groups,
08:03tight circles of men
08:04with immense power over everyone else's future.
08:07Talk a bit more about that if you would.
08:10Yeah, it is a very noticeable feeling.
08:12After I've been working on this for a long time,
08:14I came away with the sense that this is the dark matter,
08:18the piece that doesn't get described enough and as clearly,
08:21which is that there is a feeling both in the United States
08:23and in China that these enormous decisions
08:26about what role will these new technologies play
08:29in our economies, in our private lives,
08:31in our own sense of how we educate our kids
08:35and how to prepare them for the future,
08:36it doesn't feel like we have a hand in those decisions.
08:40And that creates an enormous sense of uncertainty.
08:44And I heard this not only from regular people on the street
08:47in, you know, you could do that in the US,
08:49but even from some AI executives in Beijing who said,
08:52look, I too have these questions.
08:55How should I educate my kids to participate in the future?
08:58So in some ways, there is a point of commonality here,
09:03which is about how will these two big important countries
09:05engage AI in a way that allows their regular citizens
09:10to feel as if something is happening with their involvement
09:13rather than happening to them.
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