Most discussions that I see about China these days are about U.S.-China competition, or the question of whether China’s economy will reign supreme (my answer: Probably, yes, because it’s really big). But there’s another strain of discourse that’s kind of interesting, which is whether China is the Country of the Future, in terms of technology and urbanism.
In my experience, these discussions are usually pretty vague and confused, jumping back and forth between architecture, transportation, consumer technology, production technology, art, pop culture, soft power, urban design, and a bunch of other topics. That doesn’t mean I think the topic is worthless; vague and confused discussions can be fun! But I thought I’d try to think about Sinofuturism a little more systematically.
As far as I can tell, the recent burst of Sinofuturism seems to come from four main sources:
China’s new high-tech industrial model
The legacy of China’s real estate boom
A charm offensive by China
The election of Donald Trump
In the early 2020s, the economic model that had sustained Chinese economic growth since 2008 basically collapsed. This model was based on massive real estate investment — the biggest development boom in the history of the world. Real estate sales funded local governments, so local governments basically approved and supported any and all development that would increase the value of land. Meanwhile the Chinese central government encouraged banks to lend to developers as a way of sustaining the macroeconomy through a series of shocks. This predictably led to an eventual financial bubble and crash when the loans used to finance this incredible development boom outran the ability of real estate to generate economic returns. There was a big bust in 2021-23, and growth slowed down:
China’s leadership responded to this slowdown by going all-in on high-tech manufacturing. At Xi Jinping’s behest, the country’s banks poured untold amounts of money into sectors like autos, semiconductors, machine tools, robots, electronics, batteries, aircraft, and all kinds of other stuff. The government supported the boom with subsidies as well, though I think we often tend to overemphasize its role relative to the private initiative of companies like BYD, Xiaomi, and DJI.
That lending boom has since cooled off a bit, but it was enormous during 2021-23, and industrial loans continue to grow at a fairly rapid clip:
All that lending fueled a wave of investment in the “technologies of the future”. Many of those were production technologies — the machine tools and robots in the highly automated Chinese factories that you can see in videos like this one:
And some are consumption technologies, like the high-speed rail network that’s bigger than all the networks in the rest of the world combined:
China’s lax regulatory climate — partly a result of cozy relations between local government and corporations, partly an intentional result of the central government’s high-tech push — has made the rollouts of these technologies faster and more widespread than in developed countries, where things like noise complaints and safety concerns predominate.
The electronics manufacturing boom (which actually predates the more recent high-tech push) has also resulted in a glut of cheap LEDs, which many Chinese developers have plastered all over their high-rise buildings and malls. This might be partly cultural and aesthetic, but it’s largely an attempt by cities and companies to advertise themselves to businesses and consumers both at home and overseas. Videos of these “cyberpunk” nighttime cityscapes have proliferated across the internet:
The second big reason for the boom in Sinofuturism is a government charm offensive. A number of aggressive Chinese actions in the late 2010s and early 2020s — the claiming of the South China Sea and pieces of Indian territory, the crushing of Hong Kong, the rise of “wolf warrior” diplomats, China’s soft support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine — led to a rise in negative perceptions of China throughout the world, in both developed and developing countries. This probably contributed to a massive exodus of foreign capital from the country, as multinational corporations scrambled to diversify and de-risk themselves.
China’s government has responded with a series of “charm offensives” to increase the country’s “soft power” around the world. Part of the message is that China is a positive force in the global economy, promoting free trade, fighting climate change, spreading high technology, and offering infrastructure investment to developing nations. And part of the message is that China is the country of the future — a technological and economic powerhouse whose rise is inevitable and should be admired rather than resisted.
This charm offensive is now getting a boost from a flood of pro-China content by Western influencers. Fewer foreigners are living in China, and the number of tourists visiting the country has returned to near its pre-pandemic level. Yet there has been a massive proliferation of videos, mostly by foreigners, saying “I visited China, and it wasn’t what I expected at all!”, or “I visited China, and America is COOKED!” Here are a couple of examples:
The most famous of these, by far, is the recent series of videos by the popular internet personality Darren Watkins, better known as iShowSpeed:
An obvious question is whether these folks are getting paid by the Chinese government to make videos that support a Sinofuturist narrative. In fact, some are, especially the ones made by Western expats living in China. The New York Times reported on this phenomenon back in 2021:
The videos have a casual, homespun feel. But on the other side of the camera often stands a large apparatus of government organizers, state-controlled news media and other official amplifiers…State-run news outlets and local governments have organized and funded pro-Beijing influencers’ travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook…With official media outlets’ backing, the creators can visit and film in parts of China where the authorities have obstructed foreign journalists’ reporting.
In addition, it’s possible that China is using its control of the TikTok algorithm to promote videos like this — or, more likely, that would-be influencers hoping to go viral simply think TikTok will promote them if they spout a bunch of wide-eyed Sinofuturism.
But government propaganda is highly unlikely to explain all, or even most, of the boom in Sinofuturist videos.2 It’s likely that these videos are just a meme, much like travel to Japan became a meme in the 2010s.
China’s big tech push helps the meme, since all those futuristic cars and robots and drones give foreigners more to fawn over. But the sudden perception of China as the “country of the future” probably owes even more to the property and infrastructure booms that just ended. Neither the forests of LED-covered skyscrapers, nor the endless miles of high-speed rail, nor the vast shiny new malls that dot China’s city centers would exist if China’s banks hadn’t gone on the mother of all lending binges after 2008. Robots and drones are cool, but the built environment is what dominates travelers’ impressions of any country:
In other words, China’s real estate era may have ended in tears for some developers and local governments, but it left behind the physical edifice of a very futuristic-looking country. When people go to China and see the future, what they’re really seeing is the country’s recent past.
The final tailwind for Sinofuturism is the election of Trump, and the geopolitical ructions that have resulted. Trump has very loudly and flamboyantly turned America against Europe — bashing European countries in his rhetoric, hitting them with tariffs and tariff threats, threatening to pull out of NATO, supporting right-wing opposition parties, cozying up to Russia, and so on.
A few European leaders have responded by trying to get closer to China instead, but most are still too wary of the CCP. But European intellectuals are a different story. Some European thinkers resent the smug American superiority that resulted from decades of Cold War patronage, and are overjoyed to see America eclipsed. That geopolitical backdrop can easily color perceptions of a country, making even the pedestrian seem sublime.
In turbulent and troubling times, people instinctively grasp for some sort of future to believe in — some positive vision to hold on to. The U.S. and Europe right now don’t have much of a futuristic vision to offer; America continues to inflict wound after wound on itself due to its intractable cultural and partisan divides, while Europe is mired in economic stagnation and is struggling to defend itself against a much smaller, poorer Russia. Sinofuturism might not have been Western intellectuals’ first choice for an alternative, but if it’s a choice between Sinofuturism and bleak nihilism/pessimism, some will choose the former.
But what will this Chinese future actually look like, two decades or four decades from now? Here, I think there’s less than meets the eye.
First, let’s talk about Chinese urbanism. Westerners who go to Asia and see a lot of high-rises and electric signs often simply assume that all Asian cities are basically the same. But the way China builds its cities is very different from how Japan does it. Japan’s cities are hyper-agglomerations of dense mixed-use neighborhoods packed with small businesses. China’s cities sprawl much more. Here’s what Peter Calthorpe wrote in 2016, when China was still in the middle of its massive building spree:
One thinks of the high-rise, high-density buildings in many Chinese cities as inherently urban, but they are not. Smart growth and urbanism is more about connections, human scale, walkability, and mixed uses than it is about gross density. China’s pattern of gated superblocks (often over 40 acres, or 16 hectares, each) and isolated uses is actually a high-rise version of the American suburb…
In China, single-use residential blocks of largely identical units are clustered in superblocks surrounded by major arterial roads. Vast distances separate everyday destinations and create environments hostile to pedestrians. Sidewalks rarely are lined with useful services, and crossing the street is death-defying. Job centers are distant and commutes are long, especially for lower-income groups. In major Chinese cities, the gridlock expands to all hours of the day…
In the last five years, China has built more than 30,000 kilometers of expressways…China’s love affair with the car has blossomed into a torrid romance…[L]ike the U.S. cities of the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese cities are working to accommodate the explosive growth of automobile travel by building more highways, ring roads, and parking lots.
Outside of Beijing and Shanghai (and sometimes even within), you can tell that these skyscrapers were put up by a country with a GDP per capita of $10,000…These endless rows of skyscrapers, put up in the construction frenzy of the last few decades, are ugly - boxes of mostly concrete with visible blight and discoloration all over them. If the great construction binge is indeed over, it'll be a shame that China's infrastructure was built out during a period of particularly uninspired architecture…The city is dominated by these enormous apartment complexes - blocks of 10 adjacent 30-story buildings demarcated by 8-lane roads…This layout seems designed partly for social control.
A recent article by the ever-excellent Alfred Twu explains China’s urban layout in more detail:
Despite their strong visual dissimilarities, new construction in China and the US share one basic feature: they each support roughly the same population density, as their floor area ratio is similar.
…In contrast to the mid-rises that abound in US cities today, Chinese cities favor what is known as the 小区 (xiaoqu) or microdistrict. These tower-in-the-park-style residential developments comprise several high-rises on roughly 15 to 20 acres, surrounded by wide arterial roads…[X]iaoqus are built as gated communities. While primarily residential, the microdistricts also provide stores and services for residents, including schools…However, they do not contain offices or industry, and retail is limited to neighborhood-serving services, such as convenience stores and restaurants…
The sunlight requirement results in large spaces between buildings, limiting the floor area ratio to around 2.0 to 4.0, even for high-rises…closer to 2.0 than to 4.0 once internal roads are factored in…[T]hese buildings are unique to the People’s Republic.
Twu points out that since this urban form is the result of regulation rather than culture,3 China could theoretically revamp its cities into something denser, more mixed-use, and more walkable, like Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Singapore. But since the big real estate boom is over, the financing or political will for such redevelopment is unlikely to appear. China has already built itself. And even more than the U.S., China has built itself into a highly suboptimal configuration.
America’s sprawling suburbs are the target of much derision from urbanists worldwide, but they have a charm that’s all their own — huge luxurious houses serve as social gathering places, cars provide mobility, lawns and parks provide the illusion of living close to nature. That lifestyle exerts a magnetic pull; Americans of all races and social classes still want to move (and are actually moving) out to the ‘burbs. And this pull is worldwide — newly developed outlying areas of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and everywhere else look a lot more like American suburbs than they look like Tokyo or Paris. Like it or not, 20th-century America invented an urban future that came to dominate the world.
But China will not do the same. Who wants to live in a xiaoqu? You live in a smallish apartment, like you would in NYC or Tokyo, but instead of being within walking distance of some of the world’s most vibrant shopping and entertainment districts, you’re in a gated community. The only things close to you are a sanitized communal lawn and a couple of boring stores for basic necessities. To get to anything remotely interesting — which in China generally just means a shopping mall — requires walking long distances over huge arterial roads to a train station, or taking your car. You get all of the isolation of the American suburbs with none of the luxury. You’re basically in Cabrini-Green but without the crime.
I suspect that very few people around the world are going to want to live in Chinese-style microdistricts. And I suspect that in twenty years or so, the children of the current Chinese generation will see this urban form as sterile, cramped, and confining. Except it will be very hard to rebuild Chinese cities into either the American or the Japanese model.
As for the spectacular beauty of Chinese downtowns, I suspect that Chinese people themselves are going to get tired of the light pollution that wows the tourists. Already, residents of Shanghai, Chongqing, and other cities have begun to express a preference for fewer gratuitous displays of garish illumination.
China’s building boom will certainly leave behind plenty of interesting structures. But because the boom was driven by overabundant capital, many of these designs were created more as advertisements for the developers than as places that are actually nice to walk around in.4
And the buildings themselves won’t always look as nice as they do now, either. I’m no Brian Potter, but even I know that over the course of about thirty or forty years, reinforced concrete tends to weather, crack, and spall. Most of urban China is very humid, and pollution levels are still fairly high; this will damage many of the nice new surfaces of China’s buildings, most of which were built in the last two decades. Buildings that turn out to have been built with substandard materials — and there are some of those out there — will go downhill earlier.
At that point, China will have to choose between A) expensive upkeep and redevelopment to keep cities looking new, or B) patching up and painting over old buildings to save money. Japan actually chooses the former, which is why it still looks nice — but this eternal construction and beautification costs a lot of society’s resources. Hong Kong and Taiwan have chosen the latter, and as a result, people gush a lot less about the built environment when they visit those cities these days.
I know it’s fun to go to a foreign city, look around at the buildings, and make grand sweeping judgements about the relative strength of civilizations over the next thousand years. But next time you find yourself gaping at a sparkling new high-rise in Shenzhen or Chongqing or Dubai, remind yourself: “This too shall spall.”5
As for transforming global culture — a key part of soft power — China has yet to really do this. Their censorship regime — an inescapable part of their authoritarian system — is constantly hamstringing or deterring Chinese creatives. As China gets richer, its people will spend more on entertainment, and entertainment industries will emerge. But I suspect this censoriousness will hamper the emergence not only of truly deep and creative works of art, but also of creative new forms of popular entertainment.
20th century America invented 3D animated children’s movies and third-person action-adventure video games; China’s two most celebrated hit cultural products over the past few years have been a 3D animated children’s movie and a third-person action-adventure video game. And so far, global appeal has been elusive; Sinofuturists who trumpeted the fact that Ne Zha 2 earned more at the box office than any Disney movie failed to mention that over 98% of that revenue was earned inside China.
As for China’s technological futurism, there I have more confidence. China’s mastery of the core technologies of the electrical age — batteries and motors — will continue to produce wonders, especially because America has voluntarily forfeited leadership in these technologies for cultural reasons. Personal air taxis, ultra-fast car chargers, and humanoid robots that can do flips are not the last whiz-bang gadgets you’ll see come out of China. Nor will China’s innovation be limited to the electrical sphere. And China’s massive research spending spree, together with Trump’s deep cuts to American science funding, mean that the future has never looked brighter for Chinese scientific supremacy.
But here, too, I would be cautious about projecting out more than a decade or two. To the degree that scientific progress relies on human capital, China is going to start having a tough time in the late 2040s. After the big “Alpha” generation works its way through the system, population will relentlessly decline:
(Of course, AI researchers may replace human ones, but at that point China’s fundamental advantage — its incredibly huge population of talented engineers and scientists — starts to become less important.)
Also, much of China’s technological leadership has a darker side. All the tourists love the electric cars and the high-speed trains. But China is also the global leader in electronic surveillance, to the point where they’ve basically turned their whole country into a panopticon. China uses the internet to repress dissent, and AI will make that task easier. China’s government has also shown an eagerness to use the internet to spread dissension and stir up hatred in other societies around the world, I expect AI to make that much easier as well.
Is that a future worth putting our hopes in? Would we really trade our right to dissent and our last shreds of privacy for a ride in an air taxi and a delivery robot at our door? Why should we look forward to the march of science and technology if it doesn’t promise to empower the mass of humanity to live their lives as they see fit? Technological contrivances whose purpose is to enslave me, my family, and my friends do admittedly inspire a certain kind of dreadful awe, but I would rather read that science fiction novel than live in it.
This, ultimately, is what Sinofuturism is lacking — the promise of ennoblement. People now make fun of the American suburbs of the 1950s, or use them as an object of misplaced nostalgia. But if you were to look at that lifestyle — the house, the car, the TV, the telephone — you could see the seed of a way of life so appealing and so free that it would eventually become the global standard. Right now, China is a beautiful place to visit, but the Sinofuturists who gush about its neon cities and its magnificent technology demonstrate a notable reluctance to move there.
Interestingly, Japan did something a bit similar when its growth slowed after the oil shocks of the 1970s and again after the real estate bust of the 1990s. MITI, the industrial policy ministry, decided that the country needed to shift from heavy and chemical industries to knowledge-intensive industries, which included electronics, computers, and so on. This was somewhat successful — a decent amount of the futuristic Japanese stuff that wowed us in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s was the result of this push, or was the result of parallel efforts in the private sector. It probably led to William Gibson’s visions of a Japan-led cyberpunk future. But although the high-tech manufacturing push was enough to keep Japan at the global technological frontier for a long time, and may have given Japanese growth a minor boost, Japan never returned to the rates of growth seen during its catch-up phase.
We know it’s not culture because China’s unregulated “urban villages” and Chinese-descended places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore all build much higher density and much more mixed-use spaces, while relying less on cars.
The art exhibition that the Sinofuturist VC David Galbraith described as “sublime” is a bare gray concrete rotunda situated beneath a bare white concrete tunnel pointed at an empty sky. It’s the kind of brutalism that hipsters and culture snobs love to sneer at in the West, but suddenly admire when it’s a foreign country. Then again, Galbraith is British, so this exhibit might simply conform to British tastes more than to American ones.
China’s massive high-speed rail network will also be an incredible challenge to maintain (read this Casey Handmer blog post to understand the details). Unless ridership stays very very high even on the secondary lines, China’s HSR will probably end up being a significant fiscal drag.
I think the main attraction of China right now is the counter balance it provides against Trump. As Trump moves towards Putinism, it’s at least worth the effort to consider whether China is really as bad as we always thought it was.
For China to "be" the future isn't in itself meaningful. China has a future, as do other countries.
More meaningful is to say:
1. The future world will have a more predominating influence by China; or
2. The future world will look like China.
The post provides a persuasive and welcome argument against (2). (1) may still hold, But as a fear, it's somewhat overblown, since a more powerful China won't necessarily try to export, or succeed in exporting, the things that are most concerning about China as a country.
Technological leadership by China isn't problematic, except in so far as it enables China to engaging and win aggressive wars. Inventions are by nature public goods. If China perfect drone delivery, and then America adopts it, we still get delivery drones. Other than national pride, what's wrong with that? I'd like America to lead in technological progress because I think we have the resources to benefit all mankind that way. But if China invents great new technologies that we can use, I'll thank them!
There's a lot of gratuitous fight picking in this space.
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Nice and balanced story!
I think the main attraction of China right now is the counter balance it provides against Trump. As Trump moves towards Putinism, it’s at least worth the effort to consider whether China is really as bad as we always thought it was.
For China to "be" the future isn't in itself meaningful. China has a future, as do other countries.
More meaningful is to say:
1. The future world will have a more predominating influence by China; or
2. The future world will look like China.
The post provides a persuasive and welcome argument against (2). (1) may still hold, But as a fear, it's somewhat overblown, since a more powerful China won't necessarily try to export, or succeed in exporting, the things that are most concerning about China as a country.
Technological leadership by China isn't problematic, except in so far as it enables China to engaging and win aggressive wars. Inventions are by nature public goods. If China perfect drone delivery, and then America adopts it, we still get delivery drones. Other than national pride, what's wrong with that? I'd like America to lead in technological progress because I think we have the resources to benefit all mankind that way. But if China invents great new technologies that we can use, I'll thank them!
There's a lot of gratuitous fight picking in this space.