00:00:02
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.

00:00:18
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast.

00:00:21
Speaker 3: I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Wisenthal.

00:00:24
Speaker 2: Joe, I heard, I might have heard, you know, just a little bit, that you went to China for the first time.

00:00:29
Speaker 3: I haven't been that obnoxious about it. I no, Okay, Can I just say one thing I didn't like do a I've posted about it, I've talked about it. I have. I did not come home and do like a twenty tweet thread about like China's like future in the world, which I considered myself to be a heroic heroic active restraint.

00:00:51
Speaker 2: So you're not a China expert after one day.

00:00:54
Speaker 3: I fully admit that I'm not a China hand after one day. And I will also say I can't do that anyway because I got over the border on a tourist visa.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: So I'm not even you know, you know the China the China expert pipeline.

00:01:06
Speaker 3: Right, How does it work?

00:01:07
Speaker 2: So you got to first of all, you have to go to China and be an English teacher for a few months, and then you have to move there and become a China consultant, and then you have to start a YouTube channel and start start calling yourself Joe Why or Lao Wisenhall.

00:01:25
Speaker 3: Someone said Joe Chandao would be a good China signification of my name, which I thought was decent. You know that actually almost happened to me. Well, there's a different version of my life. So when I was in college at University of Texas, I saw a poster on the campus. Now this was Taiwan, but I would have learned the language. It said, come be an English speaker in Taiwan. So it's like I didn't have any plan for my life or anything like that. And I called the number and I didn't have a cell phone at the time because we just so we just shared a house phone. And I called the number and I left it and then the person on the other side called back. But one of my roommates answered the call and ended up getting the job and going to Taiwan. And I always think about that version of my life where I wouldn't be doing odd laws because I was home and answered that call. And would I be one of those people that, like you know, helped American businesses source parts in southern China.

00:02:18
Speaker 2: What a segue Joe.

00:02:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that's it. You know, you show. You reminded me that there is this one of the various versions of my life that that was actually kind of one of them.

00:02:26
Speaker 2: All Right, Well, I'm sure you have your own impressions of China for the.

00:02:30
Speaker 3: First time based on twenty four hours.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: Based on twenty four hours. I know you do, because you did tweet about it a lot. But there's someone else we talked to when we want to get general China impressions. Take the temperature on the Vibes in China, I guess, and that is the one and only Dan Wong. He's been on the show a number of times before. He is, of course the author of Breakneck China's Quest to Engineer the Future, also a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. So Dan, thank you so much for coming back on all the Tracy.

00:03:00
Speaker 4: It's great to be back home.

00:03:02
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you.

00:03:03
Speaker 2: So Vibes in China, Well, first of all, was this her first time going back in a couple of years.

00:03:09
Speaker 4: It's sort of been my first time going back.

00:03:12
Speaker 2: So give us the timeline of when you left and I left.

00:03:15
Speaker 4: At the start of twenty twenty three, right after the total collapse of zero COVID, and then I was back in Yun nine just finishing my book writing in the mountains in the south of the province, so nice. And then this time I spent about a month in China, between Shanghai for two weeks and then Yun nine for two more weeks. And I think the big news when I was in China was there were two big things happening in New York. One was that the Nicks want some sort of sports ball and.

00:03:45
Speaker 2: Then Joe a little bit about just a little yeah.

00:03:48
Speaker 4: And then Joe Wison thought I went to Shinjin. That was big news on Twitter that day.

00:03:52
Speaker 3: I watched the Knicks game from a rooftop bar in Shenzhen. One the game where they clinched it Game five, which is watch just to give us your back. I mean, we've talkedalked about your book and stuff like that. You're Canadian, right, yes, so that's why the red and the red shirt. Today you're wearing maple leaf colors to sort of represent your Canadian heritage on the podcast.

00:04:10
Speaker 4: Absolutely, okay, I.

00:04:11
Speaker 3: Just wanted to establish that where did you go on? You know, I'm not no expert because I only spent twenty four hours in one of the world the country's most advanced cities. But where were you?

00:04:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I've lived in the three major big zones of China. It's spent two years living in Hong Kong, where I played board games with this new entrant to Hong Kong, namely Tracy Alloway. Remember all of these board games that we used to play.

00:04:40
Speaker 2: That was so much fun.

00:04:41
Speaker 4: We were in all of these cafes. And I spent two years living in Hong Kong, and I thought, well, this really isn't enough real China, and so then I moved to Beijing for two years. Then I decided that was way too much real China, and then I decided I should have moved to Shanghai.

00:05:00
Speaker 3: Can I just ask a quick question, I don't know anything about how like Chinese immigration policy or visa policy works. As someone who is ethnically Chinese but a Canadian passport holder, what is required to establish semi residency either on like a part full time or sort of part time work or whatever. How do you what are there any restrictions? How easy is that process?

00:05:27
Speaker 4: If you're a Chinese of Chinese heritage, it's somewhat easier to visit China. There are these specific visa categories, namely family visit, which gets you multiple entry, probably for ten years. That makes it really easy for someone like me to visit Grandma. But I don't think for any other Chinese heritage people becomes much easier. They're not necessarily favored to actually live in China. And when I was living, when I was visiting China at this time, what was really striking was how many more Russians and Russian you hear in the streets of Shanghai. You see more Arab folks walking around presumably doing business deals, and how few Americans you hear on the streets as well. And so you know, this has been like a really start shift in the composition of the foreign people there. And then there's also just been a stunning collapse in immigration to China. And so this Irish guy, Sam en Wright, came up with this figure to establish that China and Ireland. China has slightly fewer immigrants than Ireland does. So Ireland, a country of six million people, has about one million immigrants. China, one point four billion, has about one million immigrants. And so these are the sort of stunning things where it takes a few more Joe Wisenthal's for visiting to prop up the foreign market there.

00:06:47
Speaker 2: Lou Wisenthal, we're calling him.

00:06:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, sounds good.

00:06:51
Speaker 2: Why did you decide to go to Shanghai and not Beijing? And how much should I read into that as like a shift in the center of power within China or like more focus on tech and finance.

00:07:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love Shanghai. Shanghai is I think one of the great cities of the world, and Beijing is not. Beijing is not I really like Beijing.

00:07:13
Speaker 2: It has that sort of like northern frontier feel. I really enjoy it. But I've been to Shanghai too, and it is very impressive.

00:07:20
Speaker 4: Well, Beijing is this desert step city with stalinist characteristics, and you know, there's kind of this thread of apocalypse that hangs over there.

00:07:28
Speaker 2: Roads.

00:07:29
Speaker 4: I don't love the ring roads. These streets are way too long and so and they're way too wide. And you know, I was in Beijing once this dust storm swept through the city where everything turned yellow. I thought I woke up sick that day, but because everything was yellow that day. So there's some charm definitely to Beijing. But when we were living in Shanghai, we were calling ourselves the Paris of the East, and we were calling Paris the Shanghai of the West, and then we were calling Beijing western kunye. You know, why would you visit West Korea? So you know, these are the sort of things where you know, we are happily dismissive of the Beijing life. There's definitely parts of the Beijing life which feels much more intellectual. You know, the Communist Party really is much more centered there. That great universities are much more centered there. Shanghai is much prizes, much more convenience and comfort, and that's in part because the French literally built a major section of the city, these leafy boulevards. You have these cafes everywhere. It's super walkable. You're never that far from a subway st Shanghai, and then Beijing was essentially designed by Stalin, so it can't be all that pleasant.

00:08:38
Speaker 2: I will say Beijing is the only place in the entire world where I ever developed eczema. I had it for like three months just in Beijing. Never had it ever again.

00:08:49
Speaker 4: I have these I don't know about headaches that kind of random times. When I was living in Beijing. That was the only city where I actually had to experience that.

00:08:56
Speaker 2: It's so strange.

00:08:56
Speaker 3: If we ever do a live episode of the podcast in China, I guess we don't have to do Beijing. I don't know, you kind of I would be.

00:09:03
Speaker 2: Beijing to Shanghai. Shanghai might actually be the smarter choice because our audience is probably bigger there. Yeah, but I really like Beijing. I don't know.

00:09:11
Speaker 4: I like the food.

00:09:12
Speaker 3: In my twenty four hours, and you've you've talked about this, but in my twenty four hours or many things that stood out, but the one thing that's and you know, here I'm going to commit an active, modest journalism. The one thing that stood out that I can't get out of my head from visiting China that you know, I saw kind of had great food. I saw the electronics smart et cetera us a little bit more than anything else. Me Like, it's okay, so we're sitting here, the three of us are talking. I'm physically in pain right now, like that I haven't checked my phone five times, like that, I in this conversation, like it's very difficult for me to like go We've been talking for nine minutes so far. So normally I would have checked my phone five minutes, but I could do it, but like, I have never been in a culture, in a city, et cetera, in which there was more just like on some phone use like that is the one that I still just cannot get out of my head. And to a nice dinner everyone with their screen up, you know, which would be very I think like if I if you did that in New York, that would be considered really rude. I think to have your phone and yet Joe, no, I like to have your phone face up off the table. I was like really stunned. And you've talked about this too, and I'm sort of like, I kind of want to talk about phone culture.

00:10:21
Speaker 4: Okay, let's talk about phone culture. Joe. What is the right number of times to check your phone in ten minutes? Is a five? Is a five hundred? Unless that, yeah, this is real, this is I might.

00:10:31
Speaker 3: I'm totally you know, because the thing was and I just like I was like, oh, I don't want to be rude, but I want to take some pictures. Maybe I want to tweet something, but like, but you know, I don't want to be rude. And then I would like look around and like everyone was on their phone. So I was like, I guess it's not rude, right, I felt great. I loved it.

00:10:46
Speaker 4: I I am much more New York culture. Stop looking at your phone, man, let's have a debate about this, Joe, great, So you know, where do we need to check? What's what's so important on the phone that we can't talk to each other about face to face right now?

00:11:00
Speaker 3: But no, I mean, look, I'm glad that we have this conversation where the expectation is that we have our phones down. But like was my when you went back to China recently, did you have the same sense that I did?

00:11:14
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally that. I think that a lot of good friends would be around the table and then they would start pulling their phone and what are they doing on their phone? It's actually totally trivial stuff. They're kind of just checking the progress of their jd dot com or Ali Baba deliveries. They're kind of scrolling through some photos that they've just taken and deleting a few, selecting a few, and it's like, yeah, not everyone is able to get together all the time, So you know, is that the most important thing right now? Definitely phone culture has broken Joe Weisenthal Lauwei's brain. Yeah, but hasn't it broken like hundreds of millions of people's brains across the world. And there is something I think not to be a boomer about this. No, it's fine, it's great, important about But what do you think.

00:12:01
Speaker 3: As much as I'm guilty of it, I don't think that the always checking of phones it's a healthy part of New York society or American society. Like, I think I am participating in something that is unhelpful and not an anti not pro social every time I check my phone in a group environment or even when I'm alone, I should be reading a book instead. And so like, I was just stunned by the degree of like. And then you walk into a store and every store in the mall has a girl live streaming on whatever the equivalent of TikTok is of like what's happening in the store?

00:12:34
Speaker 4: Like?

00:12:34
Speaker 3: The degree of like phoneness was wild.

00:12:37
Speaker 2: To me, As someone who is often the victim of Joe's phone addiction, I will say it does make me sad when I'm talking to you and you literally like leave the conversation mid sentence to go take a photo of someone's T shirt and tweet it, which happened last week?

00:12:54
Speaker 4: Yeah, Tracy, you and I are going to have dinner and Joe can be off on the side like tweeting like a toddler, and then you and actually have like a much more serious conversation. What do you think?

00:13:05
Speaker 3: This is why I'm actually glad I have this job, because it's an hour at the time, throughout various times of the week in which I don't look at my phone.

00:13:12
Speaker 2: Let's get back on chat. Let's do China. Okay, how much of the Chinese phone obsession I'm thinking how to phrase this, but how much of it is just because your entire life is basically oriented on your phone?

00:13:23
Speaker 1: Now?

00:13:23
Speaker 2: And I know we could say something similar about the US, but I feel like, you know, payment systems, online shopping are even more endemic in China than they are here.

00:13:35
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, so this is where we should praise, you know, what enables the phone culture. First of all, let's say you have this amazing mobile infrastructure where five G is truly everywhere, and you know, it is kind of odd to me that you head into pockets of New York, namely the subway as well as many other places, like you know, kind of remote parts and you just kind of drop out of cell access, and I kind of wish that we had mobile access everywhere. And there is kind of this broader phenomenon in East Asia where people have super long commutes on the subway. Let's say like an hour to get into tokyoil, you know, an hour to get into a central Shanghai Rishinjin, and you know, having mobile games and having phones is kind of just a great way to pass the time in your cool, well connected subway. So there's some good things here, and you have basically a lot more apps that are highly functional. You're able to order absolutely anything you want into your door. You know, fifteen minutes you can get an amazing froissant. And so there are some good parts here, but let's also get into the bad parts. So the bad parts are when you're when you're in China, you're kind of constantly expected to be on for your boss all the time. And so you know, if we were in China, we have like three producers sitting behind us, We're going to have Joe Weisenthal Allawi texting them all the time about you know, pick up this or that, and so I I think that is less pleasant.

00:15:02
Speaker 3: Sorry, just a It does seem self reinforcing, which is that if everyone is on their phone, everyone then becomes expected to text back within the minute, which means you can't opt out of always looking your phone. Anyway, keep going.

00:15:13
Speaker 2: This is the other thing. So I know you're always on your phone, and so when I whatsap you and you don't immediately reply, I get insulted.

00:15:20
Speaker 3: DM me, just Twitter, DM me anyway, keep going. But yes, Tracy is She's like, I know you're looking at your phone. Whyever you responded?

00:15:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, he has a very limited bandwidth in which to reply.

00:15:30
Speaker 3: I know, go on, just keep talking about it.

00:15:32
Speaker 4: I can text. Why is in thal like in thirty seconds? I know he ought to reply, So why isn't you replying within three minutes? But so, I mean, the good thing is that you can always use for friends, and that's always good too. But myself, I think I'm much more of an American whatever European about this. I just silenced all of my notifications. My friends can't really reach me. I think it's better that way, and I think I prefer it not to be reached whenever at anyone else's pleasure. But you know, if you need to like call someone, you know, you know that almost always pay.

00:15:59
Speaker 3: Cutty talk about influencers because this is like this is when I when we were in Shenzhen at one point, the guy who I was going around with is like, Oh, there's a really nice apartments, like all the influencers live there, talk about like influencer culture there.

00:16:27
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, this is also one of these things that make China increasingly highly unpleasant to me now, the extent to which everyone is just photographing themselves as kind of that's kind of the main thing. So I usually go visit Shanghai and doing that, which are I think, without a doubt, the two most beautiful parts of China. And another good thing about being in beautiful parts is that you have a wonderful city, you have this wonderful province. But what sort of distresses me is how many cafes in Shanghai are just places where young people, overwhelmingly woman park to take photos of themselves. Perhaps a group of seven might order one or two coffees, to the disappointment of the cafe owners, and then they part themselves there for like an hour or so, taking photographs and so many of these Shanghai city blocks have been almost re architected to be photo spots, whether these are outdoors or whether these are restaurants, and so you know, that's just a lot of photography. Have you noticed something like this, Oh yeah, I mean.

00:17:32
Speaker 3: I would say this is describes the West Village in large part.

00:17:35
Speaker 2: For sure. For sure. I still remember the very first time I went to Dominic Ansel in New York and everyone was taking photos of the food, and I was like, oh, like, food is now performance basically. But okay, so is influencer culture that's standing in the way of cheshin pings drive to increase consumption? Is that what we're saying.

00:17:58
Speaker 4: I think that must be a part of it, because at some point you wonder the extent to which phone culture becomes a substitute for real spending on holiday. So, as I just mentioned, you know, you have cafes, you may have cocktail bars in which a gaggle of people come over and then have buy two drinks, and then they spend the rest of their time photographing themselves. Maybe you can say that the constant photography is a boon for live streaming, and so that promotes some aspect of consumption. But I think overwhelmingly people are substituting away real experiences to you know, let's say, have like a super nice, you know, travel experience, when they could just photograph themselves. Because the other part of being in Yuen nine, which is in the southwest, this is the region where my family is from. You know, this is highly mountainous. It's essentially Tibet in the north, it's part of the Himalayas. Literally in the north and then in the south is basically a giant rainforest. And in between there are basically twenty five of China's nearly sixty official ethnic groups. And so with these rich richer again overwhelmingly girls from Shanghai beaching shin Chin. We do is that they go to Unine, dress in this ethnic garb, pretend that they're Tibetan for a day, take some you know, a snowdrop, you know, snow covered mountains as a backdrop. They're parts of New York, Miami, LA that have been architected. But I think phone culture is much more extreme. But Joe, did you consider tressing up as a Tibetan.

00:19:27
Speaker 3: No, But I know that if Tracy and I ever go to China together. I'm gonna have to take a lot of foot like Tracy is gonna make me do that for sure, absolutely for her Instagram.

00:19:37
Speaker 2: You're a decent photographer, so you know it helps.

00:19:41
Speaker 4: You know, I'm maybe part Tibetan myself. This is part of the family lore. When the Tibetans come up to me, they always say Tasha Delay and so you know, maybe I am. It's just their hello standard greeting, and you know, maybe the three of us can do an awesome photo shoot. This is one time.

00:19:58
Speaker 3: This is now we're going to do a road but we're going to make this happen.

00:20:01
Speaker 2: I would actually do that trip. You described this as mostly girls, and this is also a phenomenon in the West, But why, like, what is the ultimate goal of taking all these photos and sticking them on social media? Is it, you know, dating, is it building a professional brand? Is it just socializing with your online friends?

00:20:23
Speaker 4: You know, Tracy, I don't look at these photos, so it's only speculation for me. But I think it has to be all the same phenomenon where you know, women everywhere feel like they have to perform for the GRAM or, in the case of China, for the sell Holm Show. And I think the added layer in China is just that it's kind of a cheap way to have fun and to establish that you've been there and you know, these are kind of beautiful things, and you do spend a lot of effort on makeup, and so I think it is it could be kind of fun, but so why not? So when I am sometimes upset by the photo culture, I remind myself, you know, these ladies aren't harming me, so when I'm no skin off my nose, they should have a great time.

00:21:04
Speaker 3: They're not harming you no skin off your nose. On the other hands, I don't really know much about like how are you how are your male relatives doing in China? And the only reason I ask is actually because I'm aware that in Korea, which you know, is totally separate country, did people talk about the gender gap in politics here in the US. That the gender gap in politics in Korea specifically is extraordinarily large, and that the you know, the sort of fore chantification of politics in Korea seems like even far more advanced than it is in the West. There's no electoral politics in China, so we don't really get to read articles about how these feelings express themselves at the ballot the same way. But how do how would that? How would you know the Dan Wong's, your cousins or friends, male friends, how are they feeling?

00:21:56
Speaker 4: Yeah? Well, I think you guys have done this a remarkable job of keeping this conversation on track. But I think we need to get this back on track and talk about my male pseudo relative, Joe Wisenthal lauwise slight time in China. And I notice, Joe, you know, for those watching on camera, you have a Chinese ethnic garb yourself. You have an anti shirt on you. So we're going to ask you to talk a little bit more about your impressions twenty four hours though they may be. And I'm just going to offer one more proverb, a well known ancient Chinese proverby here about visiting China. So you know the everyone knows that you know, you visit China for twenty four hours, you feel like you can write a book. Visit China for a week, you start, you know, having some doubts. You live six years in China and you realize you know nothing. So you know, what's the book in you? Joe that you're going to give to us.

00:22:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't mean to brag, Yeah that I actually like do not hit Like I feel like, very viscerally that I only got the tiniest slice. And I maybe just because I've been doing media for a while, Like I really do not feel like I could say anything useful about China from twenty four hours.

00:23:12
Speaker 4: I could be on how you felt, how you felt.

00:23:15
Speaker 3: I mean, I had a great time visically, all the cars are real, that all the cars that we see on social media, they're all real. The food is all great. I spent a night in the Park Hyatt, which was probably one of the top three or four hotels I've ever spent a night in, and it was two hundred and fifty dollars, which would be like the grimest hotel off of Times Square. But there was a twenty four hours.

00:23:36
Speaker 2: Cool like tech stuff as well.

00:23:38
Speaker 3: I went to the tech mall and like I bought for fifteen dollars as I massager. I almost bought a suitcase that could double as a scooter for a grown adult person and right around the airport. But I was worried about like the batteries and like I wish I got that. I know, if my son would have loved it, Like if I told him if I showed him a video, he'd be so upset that I didn't get that fro him. But like, you know, all of this, like basically in the twenty four hours, it's like all the social media stuff that like I'm innated by, Like I was, like, all of it is at least in this one city, incredibly advanced, an entire city as big as in New York where all the offices are about feel like the new JP Morgan headquarters. Like that's extraordinary.

00:24:20
Speaker 4: What did you not like about this experience walking around?

00:24:25
Speaker 3: No, I liked that. I actually didn't like. I found it to be very pleasant. Twenty four hours including I went and bought some cigarettes for friends on smoke but some friends do and currently in New York Chinese cigarette Chinese cigarettes are very highly Yeah, this is the thing.

00:24:42
Speaker 4: What's the brand?

00:24:43
Speaker 3: Well, I got a Chunua. I don't know, but there's I bought a bunch of other brands. I'll show you the box. I mean they don't have the labels on it.

00:24:49
Speaker 4: We're going to go out for a smoke after this.

00:24:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's fine. But like when I went to the cigarette and liquor dealer. Like you walk in and the first thing he just starts pouring tea for everyone and opening packs for you to try, Like this is great, this is this is this is a good life. Yeah, but you're the guest, so you gotta tell you gotta tell us like.

00:25:07
Speaker 2: This is liquor and cigarettes.

00:25:09
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, after this, we're gonna, you know, drink some bites you We're gonna have a huadza, which is kind of how you refer to a cigarette there. And then so my I don't love Shinjin. I really feel like Shinjin is America's answered at San Jose. You know, we kind of talk about Shinjin as the Silicon Valley of China, and I think, yeah, you know, it's kind of the San Jose. It's kind of these big, kind of big midtown buildings. It's a lot of office parks. I mean, the nice thing about it is it's really green, but it's you know, the parts of the city is really centered between the east and the west, and to get between them you have to get on this big highway. So oh yeah, urban design is not great. And so this is why I think, you know, Shanghai is still much much better. And I think that, you know, when people are in China, I think the you know, the the central contradiction as the Marxists like to call it now is what I feel on this trip is that this is kind of people have a bit of a serene discontent with their lives.

00:26:07
Speaker 2: So we sort of sorry, we kind.

00:26:10
Speaker 4: Of maybe everyone does, but I think it is a little bit more extreme in China. So on the one hand, the products are really really amazing. So you have these, you know, amazing you know, suitcase rollers that you can sit and roll around, you know, Paul Blart, Mall Cup, Choe Weisenthal, Laubai Airport roller Guy. And when I was in Shanghai this sum, I was really struck by the amazing food culture there. I mean just in terms of, you know, the coffees now all have these infusions that make them look almost like caffeinated cocktails without the alcohol. So you know, why not have her coffee being infused with some sort of honey, dew, melon and roast water, all these amazing things, and they taste really good, And I'm thinking, oh, why am I getting a standard Americana when it can have something like this. The croissants are really really amazing. I love up baked goods, and so, you know, the Chinese croissants are like approaching Parisian maybe Copenhagen levels of quality, Tokyo levels of quality. I'm you know, I spend a lot of time talking about how China builds a ton of electrical power solar, wind, nuclear, et cetera. And then I learned how much it costs to charge your electric vehicle to the full range of about six hundred kilometers. It's about like twelve dollars to have essentially a full tank of black gas. And that's kind of totally amazing. And so people are able to have a really good life. They have access to cheap noodles. Cities are amazing. And yet, and yet, take a look at how people are, especially young people. Youth on employment according to the official data, is you know, north of fifteen percent training close to twenty percent. The main source of wealth for most people is parked in property. Something like three quarters of the wealth is in property. Property has fallen by twenty five to thirty percent across all these big cities. This is the first time in Shanghai, where you know, friends have told us that there are sort of these homeless people wandering through the outskirts of Shanghai because all of these migrant workers may have nowhere to go based on all this macro data, migrants are kind of returning to the countryside because they can't find great jobs. The college educated young people, mostly men, are doing delivery drivers because they can't find great jobs. Everyone's kind of all these young people are sort of living with their parents, which is kind of a fine lifestyle. And for me, the most amazing fact about China now is that Shanghai is such an amazing city and no one wants to have kids. No one wants to have kids. So the national TFR rate in China, and this is the official data is one point oh high is zero point six, which is on par with Taipei and Soul. And there are aspects the richest parts of Shanghai the TFR official TFR is like zero point four. And so, you know, how can this function when you know in a couple of years and something like I think twenty years, half the population will be north of sixty five. How can the city function when half the people expect to be retired? And how can the country function when you know there's no young people. And this is something that I used to be a little bit more sanguine about the demographic cliff. This is where you know, are we going to see completely different China in fifteen years. That's I'm much less sanguine about it.

00:29:34
Speaker 3: That seeing these global stats and being at a place where it's like, Okay, it's not so expensive and transport it's very easy with children, et cetera. And yet still, you know, fertility is collapsing like that. Unfortunately, it definitely makes me more skeptical of a lot of the claims that like hopefully we had like free childcare in the US or whatever, that that would like make people more inclined to have families and stuff like that. Like, it doesn't seem like these physical material affordances actually too much on that front.

00:30:25
Speaker 2: Well, I was going to ask Dan, what's your theory for declining birth rates in China? Because you hear all these different things about you know, like the work culture is too intense, the educational culture is too intense, life in general is too intense.

00:30:40
Speaker 4: What do you think, Yeah, yes, And I mean the first thing to say is that China is not an outlier in YaST Asia.

00:30:49
Speaker 3: So outlier anywhere it's ahead of the curve. But there's not a place in the world, including Africa, including Central and South America, et cetera, where we don't fertility rates basically falling off a cliff.

00:31:02
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I mean the I mean, I think I think there may even be a qualitative difference between TFR of what is US now one point six, one point seven and one point zero, And so the the exponential math here really starts doing their punishing math. So you know, in East Asia, you know, Japan is actually now you know, kind of something like one point two one point three, and they have they're further down the demographic curve, but there have a higher TFR at the moment, and they're much more open to immigrants, and so, you know, should we be more optimistic about Japan or China? You know, the Japan is more open immigrants and has high higher TFR. So maybe can I just.

00:31:46
Speaker 3: Yea on a statistical methodology question, does that tf does the national Japanese TFR include the immigrant population, which presumably which might have a higher TFR than the ethnically Japanese.

00:32:00
Speaker 4: Surely, but I suspect that the immigrants are not that big a part of the population really to affect that. And you know, I think the East Asian problem, if I had to boil this down to one thing, and obviously life is complex, but the one thing has to be the educational culture where you know, people feel like, you know, if they if their kid can't get into the right university, then their life is over. And therefore they need to get into the right kindergarten to get into the right university. And if they can't live in this particular section of Shanghai Rishanjin, then they might as well not have a kid at all. And I think it's also worth acknowledging all of these other pressures that families pile on the kids that you know, your life is so oriented towards education, and then you know, after education, it's so oriented towards getting a great job in finance or tech. And then you know, once you've checked off that box, you know the parents are telling you. Women face only one question in China, when are you going to marry to the unmarried when you're gonna have kids to to those without kids, and just you know, you this all these social pressures that keep reproducing themselves. I think it's like a wonder that anyone has children.

00:33:11
Speaker 3: This actually gets to something that I wanted to that I regret not talking about. And the last time we had you on the podcast, which was last year, and we were talking about your book Breakneck. And around the same time that I read your book, I also read Evado's book about Huawe, and like the culture they had there, and one thing that she really emphasizes in that book and other like about this extraordinary company is like this sort of yes, of course they have like plenty of brilliant engineers, et cetera, but they also have like this, this this culture that probably is a sort of silhouette of CCP culture, maybe it's a way to put it. And how like the company's founder instill a certain like willingness to die within the company's cadres and they would therefore win the contract to build five G in I Rock, or win the contract to build five G in Afghanistan because they would not leave the country while everyone else would. And there are these certain cultures like that strikes me as like a cultural change or a difference in corporate culture that is not simply about say the engineers versus lawyer brain that you discuss in your book. And so when you talk about some of these like intense cultural forces about getting into the right school, et cetera, when you read about this sort of like imbuing of the Huawei ideology within the company, et cetera, is there something else going on that drives these companies to the technological frontier to success beyond just you know, the sort of engineering mindset that you discussed. They're an ideological component.

00:34:48
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, Evado's book is great on Huawei. I blurpd it. I think everyone should read it. And then you know, to read these descriptions of the wolf culture I think is the term on Huawei. You know, they rushed towards Afghanistan, and so I think that there is definitely an element here that is very real. And I would say that this is more kind of a developing country's hustle mindset because you know who else had this culture? New York City of one hundred years ago, Joe, you used to live in the Lower east Side here. There's a lot of people there. Yeah, you know where there's a lot of people, you know, Lower east Side one hundred years ago, when there were like fifteen people living in a single room. You know, so you know, in the US definitely had this and so the US people would rush forward. And so this is where I think this is kind of just you know, capitalism. And my view is that if you want to appreciate capitalism red and tooth and claw, you go to Shanghai, You go to Changing and go to Beijing, you go to all of these places where people just really work their asses off because they believe that there is, you know, something worth pursuing for. And the US used to have this, and I think that you know, the China very very deliberately picked up as much as it could from the United States. You know, the the cities are kind of built more like the US cities, much more of a car culture. You know, my phone charger plugs into the US and China more easily than it plugs into anywhere in Europe. So you know, they copied the US a lot, and they copied everything from the US aside from the political system. And so they've decided that they got to hustle. And so maybe you know, you're a New York custler, Joe, and you know, this is what attracts you about China today.

00:36:33
Speaker 3: In an earlier stage of my life. Maybe I was now sort of just like I'm fine to.

00:36:38
Speaker 2: Since you mentioned the wolf thing. What's what's the nationalist temperature like at the moment in China?

00:36:47
Speaker 4: I think it is fairly study and I think that they're My sense of part of what put or what ails the Chinese economy right now is that Teasing Ping has his wish come true. And I think that top leader Seesing Ping's main goal is to militarize and harden the country for great power competition with the United States. And I have a chapter in my book called Fortress China, and I think this is much more of a fortress mentality, in which everything has to be about pursuing the semiconductors and pursuing the batteries and making sure that social pressures are not blowing off a lid. And I think that, you know, it seems to me like the top levels of the Communist Party is pretty comfortable with where things are in spite of the collapse and property, in spite of youth unemployment being almost twenty percent, because they're getting there, they're having their wishes come true on the chips and the batteries and on all of these high technology pursuits. And you know, when President Trump visited Beijing, you know, the the White House social media was you know, almost treated Trump as a supplicant. You know, there was these photos yeah, yeah, which she was pointing the way and Donald Trump is kind of nodding along, and so you know, there's all of these things where this is much more about great power versus great power, and in great power, the little people don't really matter all that much, and so this is much more about the elite. You know, ten percent, one percent point one percent of the engineers still being able to achieve everything that they want to achieve, and all of these resources are funneled towards them, and power is made really cheaply to them, and so you know they want to pursue it.

00:38:40
Speaker 2: So one thing we've talked about before is the lack of cultural exports from China la boo boos.

00:38:47
Speaker 3: Notwithstanding, I thought this was going to be the one. I just thought this was going to be the one, and that lasted about five minutes.

00:38:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, what do you think is needed to sort of unlock a cultural explosion in China? Because like the impulse must be there, right.

00:39:04
Speaker 4: Yeah, how about some marijuana and I don't think that this is something that.

00:39:09
Speaker 2: I didn't expect you to say that, But go.

00:39:11
Speaker 4: On marijuana and the dropping of censorship, how about that? And I don't think that is going to be real anytime soon. So I was pretty deliberate on my trip to Shanghai this time. I went to go see a lot of stand up comedy in Shanghai, which is something that's really booming. And so they have kind of more of these online specials. Now which comics are you know doing shows? And then offline is actually a real phenomenon as well. And I went to shows, you know, one of which was English speaking. I didn't choose that, but it was just happened to be there that day. And it was kind of these you know, American expats who were English teachers mostly who were giving this show. And for the most part, the audiences were amazing, like, you know, they love to play along, you know, they they give amazing joke answers back. I think the Chinese audience is really really fun. Comics were not as funny as I hoped. I mean, I don't see that much comedy in New York and so it's not really good comparison. But the Chinese comic that I saw was essentially telling a series of skits, and it wasn't It's not stand up as I understand it. You know, he was essentially telling these elaborate jokes which kind of he constructed, which didn't really happen to him, and so it wasn't all that funny to me. But I think like it would be great if there were more Chinese jokes out there. But the fact of Shanghai comedy was that something like three years ago, one of this really big comic in China made a pun of of one of these core military slogans. And what happened. What happened to him? Well, all of these comic clubs in Shanghai were shot for I think something like four months, and they all closed down in Shanghai and across these festivals, across all of these public performances, the comics have to submit their scripts to the censors before they can do their routine. And so how can that possibly be not excellent for creativity?

00:41:09
Speaker 3: You know? This actually gives me to one more question. In addition, the other book that I read last year, the other China book that I read last year was the book about She's dead. Uh yeah, which is great and I guess she's like you Hoover Institution colleague. And one like my reading of that book, which I thought was very interesting and it speaks directly to this, is that one way to think about the sort of post Mao era is how do you keep a hard line while not tipping into true cultural revolution territory? And this fear like because what you describe where it's like and you know, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal recently about Jeshin Ping cracking down on people who are into mysticism and so forth and like, but it's easy to see how these things spill over, right, because if you're my boss and you tell me to stop with the mysticism, then I'm going to bully the ten people who are like a little bit mystical in my arena, and then they'll, you know, and everyone replicates the bullying, and then suddenly you're back in cultural revolution territory. Like that seems how the way these things propagates me. And I'm sort of curious, like when we look at the Fortress China that you talk about, do you think it's inured from a future cultural revolution? At some point in the future by the way these things propagate.

00:42:23
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean this is quite a chain of dominoes you've constructed, Choe. You know, first you take away everyone's tarot cards, and then the cultural revolution erapts a little bit later.

00:42:32
Speaker 3: Well, everyone, you know, you take away my tarot cards. Then I'm like going to prove that I'm even harsh around the people I know who, like, you know, look at astrology website.

00:42:41
Speaker 4: Perhaps perhaps now I think that, you know, I think that one. And I'm spending more time in Silicon Valley. And you know, the opening line of my letter this year is that one thing that Silicon Valley shares with a Communist Party is that both are serious, self serious, and indeed completely humorless. You know, the Central Committee is not a bunch of yaks. And I think it is our misfortune, our global misfortune, that we are ruled right now by Silicon Valley on the one hand and the Communist Party on the other. And these are completely humorless people that are determining, that are kind of reshaping a lot of what we buy and what we think, and that is kind of kind of nuts to me. And I think this is also why, you know, how great are Silicon Valleys cultural exports. I don't know. I don't think it's great products, and just like the Chinese and there's some great products, I think there's going to be. You know, Chinese marketing has not really kept up. You know, we don't really have amazing associations with Chinese brands as such. But I think that will change because the quality is going to improve. But I think if you're looking for any sort of a bottom up culture, it is still remarkable how stunted Chinese cultural exports are relative to let's say, the Koreans, with you know, all of this k Pops, squid game, all of that. You have Americans who are much more eager to study the Korean life language at college now. I think that is actually out pacing people studying Chinese in college now. So you know, China might do much better, but I would say by any measure, it is an underperformer relative to its population and its economic growth.

00:44:13
Speaker 2: All right, Dan Wong, thank you so much for coming back on odd Lots and giving us the vibes the vibes in China.

00:44:21
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Dan, that was fantastic.

00:44:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's let's have some photo shoots in China, that we'll get on some yaks, we'll look like Tibetans, and then we'll have a we'll have a great time.

00:44:30
Speaker 2: While drinking live Chief flavored coffee.

00:44:32
Speaker 3: Right, and the three of us are going to do a road trip one day. Absolutely, we're going to make this happen. I can't wait. Thanks so much. That was great.

00:44:54
Speaker 2: Always fun to catch up with Dan, Joe.

00:44:56
Speaker 3: I love talking to Dan. And there was a different one. You know, we didn't talk too much, like what is the secret recipe of like batteries?

00:45:03
Speaker 2: I like talking about projects.

00:45:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like to talk about influencer culture. And then that last anecdote about stand up comedy was really interesting as well.

00:45:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, so stand up comedy obviously very different in China versus the US, although maybe the US is heading in that trajectory in some ways. But what stood out to me in that conversation is actually, like, there are a lot of similarities I think between like some of the cultural or not cultural social on we that we have we seem to have in the US and the what did Dan call it silent discontent or quiet discontent in China?

00:45:40
Speaker 3: You know, I'm just sorry before going on to that, I don't follow. I happen to follow a I think she's Kyrgystani stand up comic on Instagram, and it's really funny because she like makes these jokes about like other like distinct ethnic pockets with a you know, it's like so some men do this and stuff like that. Anyway, I like seeing like these these patterns like replicated all around the world. But I do think this is very interesting that there are certainly like i'd say, the collapse of fertility. They say that's a pathology in some way or something like that, or everyone like these are like these are global phenomenons, and maybe the East Asian countries are just sort of like the most further along down this trajectory for one reason or another. The phone stuff, the influencer it doesn't And then also you know, and I remember we we did that episode earlier this year about like the Chinese Internet and like people, oh, there's like this more nationalist flavor that's the same here. I know, So it does I think to your point, like the Virgins, Yeah, there's sort of like cultural global cultural convergence that everyone is sort of regarding in I guess what I would say is even in very different economic conditions. There's this sort of cultural convergence happening, and you say, it's like, Okay, the Chinese economy is like clearly done so well from a standpoint of lifting people out of poverty and material abundance, so so well over the last ten twenty thirty years, obviously better than any other country in the world. And the fact that it's still roughly replicating the same moods, et cetera as anywhere else. I just think it's a very like Claude would say, a point to sit with for a moment.

00:47:25
Speaker 2: All right, shall we leave it there?

00:47:26
Speaker 3: Let's leave it there.

00:47:27
Speaker 2: This has been another episode at the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and I'm.

00:47:33
Speaker 3: Joe Wise and thought you could follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Dan Wong, He's at Dan w Wong. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carman armand dash, El Bennett at Dashbot, cal Brooks at Kelbrooks, and Kevin Losano at Kevin Lloyd Losano and form our odd Laws content at Boomberg dot com, slash odd Lots or the daily newsletter, and all of our episodes and you can set about all of these topics twenty four seven in our discord Discord dot gig slash Oddlines And.

00:47:58
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