China’s leaders have long believed that technology can help the state overcome the disorder of human affairs.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker

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Many of Beijing’s tech companies are in the Zhongguancun district, a cluster of office complexes set on land that, during the imperial era, served as a burial ground for palace eunuchs. For a generation, Zhongguancun has evolved with each passing fashion in tech. These days, advertisements for A.I. products are rapidly replacing washed-out ads for the metaverse.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker

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Donald Trump is severing ties, imposing tariffs left and right. The Chinese are not moving. So the decision is not ‘Beijing or Washington.’ It is building ties with Jakarta and Delhi, and with other countries.
~ Joerg Wuttke, former head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China via The New Yorker

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In Chinese, the term for “fortune-telling” shares a character with the term for “algorithm.”
~ Patricia Kim, an expert at the Brookings Institution via The New Yorker

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There is an awkward serenity to life in the capital of a high-tech, one-party state.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker

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People who have worked in both China and Silicon Valley tend to comment on the similarities: the belief in rapid change, the power of engineers, the odes to humanity that mask impatience with actual humans.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker

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The United States has a knack of going down in flames and then rejuvenating. China does not.
~ Joerg Wuttke, former head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China via The New Yorker

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For years, China’s rising power has rested on a fragile balance of economic freedom and political control, in what early Party reformers called the “birdcage economy”—airy enough to allow enterprises to thrive, but not capacious enough to sacrifice power. That arrangement has rarely looked more tenuous.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker

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