The Future, Made in China: Evan Osnos on America's Reckoning

**Kaiser Kuo** (0:09)
Welcome to Sinica Podcast, the 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 from my home in Beijing. Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. I know there are a lot of substacks out there and they start to add up because there's so many good ones. But this one really does deliver value for money with great content from wonderful partners like Trivium and the China Global South Project. So please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations and lots more.
Today on Sinica, I am delighted to welcome back Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. Evan, as many of you know, was in Beijing for a good stretch during that oft-nostalgized golden age in the capital, as a correspondent first for the Chicago Tribune from 2005 and then after 2008 for The New Yorker until he headed back to the States in 2013, I believe. He is the author of the outstanding Age of Ambition, which won the National Book Award in 2014 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist the following year. He's since written a couple of books, Wildland, The Making of America's Fury, which is just a fantastic one, and The Haves and Have-Yachts, which I have yet to read, but I'm really looking forward to, in addition, of course, to dozens and dozens of widely read profiles on important American political figures, mostly named Joe, Joe Manchin, Joe Biden.
Earlier this month, Evan published a marvelous essay chronicling a recent tech-focused trip back to China, his old stomping ground, where he spoke with people ranging from grandees of the Chinese tech scene like Li Kaifu to delivery drivers, visited all manner of tech companies, and of course, just sort of pounded the pavement and checked out his old digs. The essay is called The Future Made in China. And if you've not had a chance to read it yet, do hit pause and take 40, 45 minutes to do so and then come back.
Anyway, this was, as I hope you'll know now, far more than just another breathless account of China's mind-blowing advances in robotics and electric vehicles and yada yada, of the sort that we're so used to seeing these days. It's actually a meditation, I think, on what China's technological ascent means for the United States, for the way both societies are organized, and really for the rest of us whose futures increasingly seem to be wagered by two small circles of powerful men in Beijing and Washington. It's reported with the eye and written with a grace that made Age of Ambition so indispensable. He joins us from DC, and Evan, welcome back to Sinica.

**Evan Osnos** (3:01)
Thank you very much, Kaiser. It's always great to be with you.

**Kaiser Kuo** (3:03)
Evan, you lived in Beijing, I think I had those days, right? 2005 to 2013?

**Evan Osnos** (3:09)
Yeah.

**Kaiser Kuo** (3:09)
And Age of Ambition was, I think, in many ways, a book about individual aspiration, about people hurdling themselves at the future with an optimism that kind of bordered on recklessness. I think it captured the zeitgeist of that time, where we were both living in China, the good and the bad of those years, which again, I mean, we both experienced that very much firsthand and it was just such a true account. Now you return and you find a city that's quieter, it's richer certainly, it's more convenient, more automated, I'm always sort of impressed with how seamless the whole kind of digital experience is. But it's also more surveilled, in some sense sadder. I would hesitate to generalize on that sadder bit, but before we get into any of the geopolitics and too much of the tech stuff, I just really want to get a sense from you how it felt just at a personal level, you know, to walk those streets again.
Where did your old instincts as a resident really serve you well? And where do they maybe even mislead you or set up expectations?

**Evan Osnos** (4:24)
Well, it's, it is, this is not, you know, the certainly not the first time I've been back and I tend to come back every couple of years and try to get my arms around what the latest mood is like. And I think you captured it well in the sense that one of the things that you are really struck by right now is the fact that there is a feeling of kind of technological saturation. It just is everywhere. And you know, you're kind of remember Age of Ambition. It's in that book, one of the little tiny themes that I think probably a lot of readers read right by, but if you were a China person, if you'd spent a lot of time in China, people often would bring this up, which was this pattern of people out in the countryside building things, sometimes wild things. And they were known as the Peasant Da Vinci's. That's what an artist meant.