My first piece for is out today!
As Xi Jinping lands in DC to start his state visit, you'll hear a lot about the US-China AI race. I'd like to tell a complementary AI story.
This past May, a few days after Trump visited Beijing, I went to the town people call China's
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My first piece for @NewYorker is out today!
As Xi Jinping lands in DC to start his state visit, you'll hear a lot about the US-China AI race. I'd like to tell a complementary AI story.
This past May, a few days after Trump visited Beijing, I went to the town people call China's vibe-coding capital, Liangzhu. There, you learn that China's AI scene is not monolithic. It's also full of contrarians, cool vibe coders, spiritual seekers, and people who love AI but refuse to join the 996 grind.
Liangzhu is on the edge of Hangzhou. I hung out with a group of anti-mainstream builders who use AI to make whimsical apps for fortune-telling, mental well-being, and creativity. Some of them run their lives entirely by bazi astrology (their founder almost became a Taoist monk). They meet on "Crazy Thursday" to vibe-code together. Rent is cheap, so they can get a bigger place with a living room to have friends over (unthinkable in Beijing or Shenzhen). In Liangzhu, they want to use AI to forge their own future.
It’s a ground-level story—less about model capabilities, hyperscalers, or AI policy, and more about how people in China are using AI, and the human stories behind it.
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