Do Your Own Research: Secrets of the Chinese Internet w/ Tianyu Fang

Aaron Bastani (0:08)

Welcome to the second series of Do Your Own Research, the show that maps everything in the world that has ever mattered than everything that ever will.

This series is entirely about China, the most interesting place in the world. It's the place where the left has invested many of its hopes for the future. It's a place that makes the rulers of US empires' heads spin. And it's where a sixth of everyone actually alive currently lives. If you want to understand everything, you've got to understand China until the end of the year. We'll be exploring its politics, its culture, the new phenomena of China maxing, its complex, fascinating and often bloody history, its new geopolitical role in the world as the savior of the green transition, and as the new villain of the anti-communists. We'll be looking at its alleged crimes against humanity, its successes in poverty reduction, and the idea of the new Cold War. When I went to China in April of this year, to Shanghai, I felt like I was being trapped in what I thought of as the gorp zone, the zone in which you could only just like look around at the city above you and feel amazement. But is that the real China? And Xi Jinping himself warned foreign diplomats who would come to the country, yes, you'll be amazed by Shanghai, but you have to leave it to understand the real China.

The tier one city skyline is an Instagram edit. The real poor rural China is where almost everyone actually lives. And that's what we have to understand as well. So here's what I want to know. How did China become not just a place from which lots of cheap stuff came, but actually the real side of innovation, and in a sense, an ideal of the future? Is our China maxing really more of a projection of our disappointment in our own political systems than it is about China itself? My guest this week is Tianyu Fang, one of the writers behind Chaoyang Trap, the excellent substack for exploring both Chinese internet culture and the mechanics and economics that sit behind it.

He's now also a PhD student at Harvard, working on cybernetics and the Cold War and the dream of a fully governable world. And so this conversation has enormous zoom length. We're still building a map of everything that's ever mattered, but we've got a new one for this series, because a lot of what now matters is going to be Chinese.

Tianyu Fang, welcome to Do Your Own Research.

Tianyu Fang (2:48)

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It was great to be here.

Aaron Bastani (2:51)

You used to write a newsletter called the Chaoyang Trap. I presume a reference to Chapo Trap House, which is the famous leftist podcast in the US.

Chapo of El Chapo fame, famous Colombian drug lord. Who or what is Chaoyang?

Tianyu Fang (3:12)

Well, so it all started as, well, Chaoyang for those who don't know it is a district, a neighborhood of sorts in Beijing. And it used to be kind of a suburb, but now it's sort of where the commercial downtown of the city. And it started as a side project in 2021, when a lot of several friends and I were stuck in Beijing because of COVID. And it was hard to travel out of the country, but Beijing itself was relatively safe. There were very few COVID cases at the time because of China's, I think, at the time, zero COVID policy. And we were all just hanging out in the city, in Chaoyang, where most of us lived. And most of us were freelance writers for publications. And we all had these stashes of drafts that we wanted to write that were about sort of internet subcultures in China that most major media outlets, news organizations, would simply not be so interested in, because they don't have a direct, immediate geopolitical or business or commercial angle to them at the time. So we were like, okay, why don't we just compile some of these things and turn it into a newsletter? And this is when I think Substack just got started. Well, Substack got started in 2017, but there were slightly more Substack newsletters on the market in the first two years of COVID.

So we started working on this...

In many ways, I don't write the newsletter as a collaborative project. It is in the format of what you would imagine as a podcast.

It really is just a giant Google doc, and we wanted to resemble a WeChat group chat where people are just chiming in, talking about the things that they're interested in. And each episode had a theme of sorts. It's usually about one phenomenon or trend. And we were very much into the idea of, this is a cultural publication that covers China, as opposed to a China publication that covers culture. We wanted to get to the idea that these are not unique phenomenon in China. These are things that are happening in transnational settings. But China somehow gave us a window into the interactions with labor, technology, and various types of subcultures.