Afra Wang on Liangzhu, China’s Vibe-Coding Capital, and the Anxious Optimism of the AI Boom

Kaiser Kuo (0:09)

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.

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, you know, Tencent cloud engineers could install OpenClaw for them. The open-source AI agent Harness with, you know, 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 sprang up of guys who had come to your apartment and install one for 500 kuai. 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 US 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 have 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, which 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 a kind of urtext, as we said on the show, of China's industrial party, the Gongyidang, the loose online ideological current, I guess, movement, I don't know, that treats engineering capability and manufacturing led growth, not just as like 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 by 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.