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.
Without the ability for China to export it's good to the US (an estimated 30-40% of it's exports when factoring in routing trade through other countries), and it's own domestic demand lacking from a deflationary spiral caused by a deflating real estate bubble, where's the future of China headed?
A consumption-oriented service economy? That is one (remote) possibility, though no mercantilist economy focused on industry has ever achieved that (S Korea getting closer, maybe France - though really it is becoming more a public sector with a country attached. Germany and Japan don’t really like competition and creative destruction domestically and are naturally high savers).
I think China sees itself a bit like the US did on the 50’s and 60’s in Latam and elsewhere. Investing and helping to develop emerging countries, bringing “American know how”.
It is using its money and influence and investment to buy friends and Build relationships all across Africa, Midde East, Asia and now Latam. These countries like the money and their leaders like the bribes, but a major difference is that the US set up local subsidiaries to sell (and eventually manufacture) US products in these countries - they became effectively local businesses with local employees (and eventually local management).
The Chinese have taken more the colonialist/exploitative approach- oriented around exports from China plus imports of natural resources, but are also building infrastructure (on credit) and maybe with tariffs they will start actually manufacturing locally rather than just exporting (it has started, but small scale - more content washing than something like Ford Brazil or Coca Cola/Femsa.)
The major concern is that democratic societies become permanent second-class citizens, and China uses both its military and economic power to ensure that they never rise again. China does not have to convince everyone to adopt Chinese-style government in order to refashion the world, they just need to keep everyone else weak and divided enough that we turn in on ourselves.
This could be accomplished through political disruption, economic disruption of successful democracies, and even direct military intervention. The US has certainly managed to dominate the political environment of Latin America and the Middle East with only a modest amount of actual kinetic intervention, so that’s the model I’m thinking of.
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.
Yes, I realize this is a blog where climate denial runs free and wild like it's 1998. But let's pretend just for a moment that it's 2025 and we're just crossing 1.5 degrees C, well on our way to 3 degrees C and possibly much higher if there are tipping points.
This is one of the reasons I worry the most about China owning the 21st century: they are actually building nuclear and low-carbon power like they're a country that pays attention to the science, while Americans argue uselessly about lab leaks and birthrate decline (while addressing neither.)
PS I'm a professional cryptographer so thanks for the chuckle about quantum computing.
Latest data I've seen indicates that China's emissions are plateauing, and some were predicting a reduction in 2024 [1,2]. China's deployment of new low-carbon power exceeds new energy demand significantly. Nobody seems really sure whether the future is a plateau or a sustained reduction, but I don't think anyone is predicting 5% yearly increases anymore. Do you have recent sources for that?
I'm not able to parse the paragraph about Al Gore. If you're trying to sound like a time traveler from 1998, you're doing a good job.
Re: quantum cryptography and encryption: we have plenty of post-quantum authentication options that can be swapped into Bitcoin quickly in the event that Shor-capable quantum computers arrive (I doubt they're going to creep up on us.) Public-key encryption is the riskier part, but we also have PQC algorithms that seem to be just fine. Worst case we'll switch back to symmetric encryption and Kerberos. The world won't collapse.
Noah, your description of the how the xiaoqu work remind me of the structure of ancient Chinese cities. If you do an image search for old (and I mean really old, like Han dynasty old) Chinese city layouts, you'll see they were always structured much the same way, with residential/commercial/industrial areas cordoned off each within walls, all set within larger city walls. The gates in the walls (even the interior district ones) were closed at night. And yes it appears to have always been for purposes of controlling the populace, prevent crime, etc. This is the first time I've read about their modern equivalents & it's fascinating to me to see the cultural through-put of 2,000 years still asserting itself.
As to it being due to central planning rather than organically arising from the culture, if you look at them & see the same resemblance I do, I might suggest that given this has gone on this way for millennia, central planning of urban districts may be considered innately cultural at this point, at least on the mainland.
I don't have specific knowledge, so take this as a spitballing best-guess based on what I know of Chinese history & culture (more than most Americans, but only through a lot of reading as a layperson, nothing academic):
The two cities I've seen with the layouts I was describing were Chang'an & Luoyang, which were capitals at various times, and the layout is prescribed by official court zoning. Maybe it's something they see as "proper" cities having, to differentiate it from what Twu explicitly refers to as low-end construction (think how the walls of medieval cities often run through the middle of their modern incarnations because of all the villages that sprung up around the city proper). Again that's just me hazarding a semi-educated guess & I wouldn't actually bet a thin dime on it.
The difference between the old part of Beijing and the new part is probably pretty representative and validates Noah’s point that the xiaoqu is a modern phenomenon
Based on my living there for ~5 years:
The oldest residential part of Beijing’s center (胡同 or hutong area） is a beautiful organic maze of alleyways with one to two story residences. People live close together, and a block or two away from retail corridors
There used to be much more retail activity in these areas actually, but every few years there is a push by the gov to crack down on illegal small businesses that spring up operating out of the front of someone’s home
The xiaoqu were absolutely key to China's "Zero Covid" policy: given that a disproportionate number of historic pandemics seem to have originated in China, might that not have encouraged the Chinese to design their cities with quarantining in mind?
As an American who hates car dependency, yet lived in China for 2.5 years and is now based in Taipei, Taiwan, couldn't agree more.
The highly urban environment of China creates convenience that robs people of community and connection, and that's what I felt most acutely living in Shenzhen, a hyper competitive place where it's hard to make friends because there's so much distrust.
I suspect that birth rates falling is as much a result of the competitiveness of the environment as the structural issues that arise from mass urbanization. Japan's birth rate collapse before the pill was legal in that country, before the internet/social media/dating apps, and I suspect that it's because there's something fundamentally at odds with the economic dynamics of men and women within an urban, industrialized context that leaves many women wondering where all the good men are, and men, wondering where all the good employment options are that use the skills men excel at.
I'd say it's also true for the United States and Western European countries, with East Asia getting hit hard because of how fast they developed economically. People feel so pressed to get higher education to get a good job, which means they wait until they're much older (and their fertility is somewhat reduced) to start having kids. It also increases the costs of having children by encouraging parents to engage in winner-takes-all "intensive parenting," which can set students up for meritocratic success but involves so much time and effort as to discourage families from having too many kids that they can't reasonably "set up for success." It also adds a lot of stress on the child and increases their likelihood for mental and behavioral problems down the line.
The Sinofuture feels a lot like what people talk about when they talk about the advent of AGI. I don't mean that China will beat us to AGI, although they very well might, but that this incredible massive, all controlling, technologically advanced, powerful industrial system that is immune to all persuasion and in the midst of a takeoff growth.
Human agency is left behind amidst the technological behemoth that rising under its own power and for its own purposes. Are we allowed to co-exist with it, on a little reservation for humanity that will progress at its own pace? Or will our existence be regarded as unacceptable variance for the ever-expanding factory? Let us also hope that China's leaders, which at one point were trained on a free human corpus but have now begin to self-train, still retain enough remnants of humanity to not just build something powerful but also something humans can live in.
I just visited Shanghai and was impressed by the downtown light show. But the residential buildings not so much. The main city is gorgeous- lots of flowers, shopping, restaurants and parks.
The view from the banks of the Huangpu River towards Pudong over when the light show is happening (or be on a boat) is one of the world's best man made views.
You left out the high-quality mobile games Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail as celebrated Chinese products with global reach. On the other hand, they are heavily inspired by Japanese media to the point where there isn't anything particularly Chinese about them except that they happen to have been made by a Chinese developer.
“Cabrini Green without the crime” - great line! Though maybe also like the Daley machine on steroids when it comes to self-dealing and fraud (but no street crime)
Thanks for the thoughtful and fair take on China. I am hopeful for the (distant) future because there isn’t one China and I think regional spark and differentiation will lead to more experimentation and different ecosystems in terms of aesthetics, culture, commerce, etc, should the long-standing junta be tossed aside or broken up. Making cities look the same doesn’t necessarily mean the people are the same (though obviously much more homogenized than in the past, at least amongst the professional class). To me (a relatively ignorant observer) China has always been a little more like Italy than Japan. Hard to homogenize, patron-oriented, get away with what you can.
As I was reading this I was thinking of the projects in Chicago I was familiar with. I lived near Cabrini- Green way back when so I got a chuckle when you made the reference. The local YMCA was a great place for a good basketball run on Saturdays though - which given the international push of the NBA might be in the Chinese version as well.
Lots of great content. I wonder if our leafy suburbs and our truly luxurious apartment buildings are based on having many wealthy people, Where do the wealthy in China live and how many of them are there?
Very interesting. The dense and messy urban fabric of Japan or Western Europe or pre-war United States (at least some of which still remains) has a way of evolving and reinventing itself. On the other hand, the top-down, centrally planned towers in the park of China were built all at once to a finished state and will deteriorate all at once. (American suburbia, I think, could go either way).
Travelling on high speed rail in China recently I saw an advert for Shanghai with the tagline “We are the future”. Later, I had more than one person tell me “Shanghai is 10 years ahead of the rest of the country”. Like you can look at that Shanghai and see how other Chinese cities will develop.
I do think that some influences will make it out of China and into various international cities. The kind of modal development of skinny skyscrapers in a big somewhat isolated block probably doesn’t translate. But smaller, more urban versions could work in many places, and many examples exist in China. Whether the gated community nature is a plus or minus depends on the circumstances but in some places may be popular. I would also predict more Chinese style parks, gardens and landscaping to come into fashion. The greening of places like Shanghai and even lower tier cities can be pretty attractive.
When Covid hit wasn't China's xiaoqu-based urbanism a huge advantage, in that it gave the state sufficient physical control over its population to enact its Zero Covid policies?
I missed this article when it first popped up . You have so much content at the moment and it’s varied. This was a great article. It speaks I think much more to something that is happening to hope, erosion. It could even be a companion piece to the one on loneliness you did. I too have been looking around at the world. You do that maybe when your old, certainly I am doing it more than I ever doing so in my 20s and 30s , even though well travelled. I am even more well travelled now having undertaken a world tour in 2016. I also have 7 grandchildren( 10 year old through to 6 month old ) . My youngest is 18 and away travelling ( he raves about Indonesia ). He starts International relations in Sept. He sees the world as his canvas. Interestingly my three oldest ( with all the GC) live within a 30 mins of their hometown school. But have all taken degrees. And I have been thinking where I might want to spend some of my retirement and been making lists of where we could go. Especially if U.K. lurches further to the right and continues to crash its economy. So your article prompts me to ask a question ? What I’d Tell My Grandchildren:
Find the places that don’t just survive history but invite you to write it. Don’t chase the biggest economy or the flashiest skyline. Look instead for places that protect difference, reward thoughtfulness, and still believe in nature.
The future might not offer one shining utopia, but it will open space for micro-utopias; small cities, creative communities, and networks that transcend borders. Learn how to live lightly. Build resilience through relationships, not just possessions. Creativity, kindness, and a bit of defiant optimism will matter more than passports.
Maybe the best advice I can give is: go where you feel most alive and help others feel that too.
I might do a longer post.
But keep the content alive. Maybe a piece on South America. I noticed you have tuned in a bit on the Argentina resurgence. Especially as USA seems doing its best to mimic Argentina of the seventies.
Completely in line with the analysis and conclusions of the 'What is Wrong with Shanghai' chapter of Yasheng Huang's (2008!) Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. "The ascendancy of crony capitalism is a fitting testimonial to the Shanghai model and to the industrial policy approach of the 1990s. ... Shanghai, as the world's most successful Potemkin metropolis, is both the sign of and the culprit for what is structurally ailing in the Chinese economy today. If the Chinese economy stumbles, future historians will look back at the dizzying rise of skyscrapers from the rice paddies of Pudong as a glaring warning sign that almost everyone missed."
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.
I wrote this post about (2) because I wrote a post about (1) a few weeks ago! :-)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/will-this-be-the-chinese-century
Without the ability for China to export it's good to the US (an estimated 30-40% of it's exports when factoring in routing trade through other countries), and it's own domestic demand lacking from a deflationary spiral caused by a deflating real estate bubble, where's the future of China headed?
A consumption-oriented service economy? That is one (remote) possibility, though no mercantilist economy focused on industry has ever achieved that (S Korea getting closer, maybe France - though really it is becoming more a public sector with a country attached. Germany and Japan don’t really like competition and creative destruction domestically and are naturally high savers).
I think China sees itself a bit like the US did on the 50’s and 60’s in Latam and elsewhere. Investing and helping to develop emerging countries, bringing “American know how”.
It is using its money and influence and investment to buy friends and Build relationships all across Africa, Midde East, Asia and now Latam. These countries like the money and their leaders like the bribes, but a major difference is that the US set up local subsidiaries to sell (and eventually manufacture) US products in these countries - they became effectively local businesses with local employees (and eventually local management).
The Chinese have taken more the colonialist/exploitative approach- oriented around exports from China plus imports of natural resources, but are also building infrastructure (on credit) and maybe with tariffs they will start actually manufacturing locally rather than just exporting (it has started, but small scale - more content washing than something like Ford Brazil or Coca Cola/Femsa.)
The major concern is that democratic societies become permanent second-class citizens, and China uses both its military and economic power to ensure that they never rise again. China does not have to convince everyone to adopt Chinese-style government in order to refashion the world, they just need to keep everyone else weak and divided enough that we turn in on ourselves.
This could be accomplished through political disruption, economic disruption of successful democracies, and even direct military intervention. The US has certainly managed to dominate the political environment of Latin America and the Middle East with only a modest amount of actual kinetic intervention, so that’s the model I’m thinking of.
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.
They’re better at moving toward Putin, certainly.
Uyghurs say Hi from their re-education camps.
I was literally just arguing with my some of my friends who are more left leaning. Why does China always get a pass from left leaning folks?
A pass? No. We just don’t want to lose the future to a country that builds reeducation camps. And we’re in the process of doing that.
China has built the future that the progressive West had envisioned for themselves: urbanized and electrified.
The major problems of our time — decarbonization, electrification — will either be addressed by, or fail to be addressed by, China.
You can rightly hate Stalin and also understand that he defeated Hitler.
Which the US had done a better job of addressing in the past two decades than China has, so what exactly is the point here?
I can’t follow Substack threading so I don’t know if this was addressed to me. What did the US address better?
Yes, I realize this is a blog where climate denial runs free and wild like it's 1998. But let's pretend just for a moment that it's 2025 and we're just crossing 1.5 degrees C, well on our way to 3 degrees C and possibly much higher if there are tipping points.
This is one of the reasons I worry the most about China owning the 21st century: they are actually building nuclear and low-carbon power like they're a country that pays attention to the science, while Americans argue uselessly about lab leaks and birthrate decline (while addressing neither.)
PS I'm a professional cryptographer so thanks for the chuckle about quantum computing.
Latest data I've seen indicates that China's emissions are plateauing, and some were predicting a reduction in 2024 [1,2]. China's deployment of new low-carbon power exceeds new energy demand significantly. Nobody seems really sure whether the future is a plateau or a sustained reduction, but I don't think anyone is predicting 5% yearly increases anymore. Do you have recent sources for that?
I'm not able to parse the paragraph about Al Gore. If you're trying to sound like a time traveler from 1998, you're doing a good job.
Re: quantum cryptography and encryption: we have plenty of post-quantum authentication options that can be swapped into Bitcoin quickly in the event that Shor-capable quantum computers arrive (I doubt they're going to creep up on us.) Public-key encryption is the riskier part, but we also have PQC algorithms that seem to be just fine. Worst case we'll switch back to symmetric encryption and Kerberos. The world won't collapse.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/climate/china-greenhouse-gas-emissions-plateau.html
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-2024-falling-emissions
Noah, your description of the how the xiaoqu work remind me of the structure of ancient Chinese cities. If you do an image search for old (and I mean really old, like Han dynasty old) Chinese city layouts, you'll see they were always structured much the same way, with residential/commercial/industrial areas cordoned off each within walls, all set within larger city walls. The gates in the walls (even the interior district ones) were closed at night. And yes it appears to have always been for purposes of controlling the populace, prevent crime, etc. This is the first time I've read about their modern equivalents & it's fascinating to me to see the cultural through-put of 2,000 years still asserting itself.
As to it being due to central planning rather than organically arising from the culture, if you look at them & see the same resemblance I do, I might suggest that given this has gone on this way for millennia, central planning of urban districts may be considered innately cultural at this point, at least on the mainland.
That's interesting. But what did you think of Alfred Twu's point about the "urban villages" that don't work this way?
I don't have specific knowledge, so take this as a spitballing best-guess based on what I know of Chinese history & culture (more than most Americans, but only through a lot of reading as a layperson, nothing academic):
The two cities I've seen with the layouts I was describing were Chang'an & Luoyang, which were capitals at various times, and the layout is prescribed by official court zoning. Maybe it's something they see as "proper" cities having, to differentiate it from what Twu explicitly refers to as low-end construction (think how the walls of medieval cities often run through the middle of their modern incarnations because of all the villages that sprung up around the city proper). Again that's just me hazarding a semi-educated guess & I wouldn't actually bet a thin dime on it.
The difference between the old part of Beijing and the new part is probably pretty representative and validates Noah’s point that the xiaoqu is a modern phenomenon
Based on my living there for ~5 years:
The oldest residential part of Beijing’s center (胡同 or hutong area） is a beautiful organic maze of alleyways with one to two story residences. People live close together, and a block or two away from retail corridors
There used to be much more retail activity in these areas actually, but every few years there is a push by the gov to crack down on illegal small businesses that spring up operating out of the front of someone’s home
The xiaoqu were absolutely key to China's "Zero Covid" policy: given that a disproportionate number of historic pandemics seem to have originated in China, might that not have encouraged the Chinese to design their cities with quarantining in mind?
As an American who hates car dependency, yet lived in China for 2.5 years and is now based in Taipei, Taiwan, couldn't agree more.
The highly urban environment of China creates convenience that robs people of community and connection, and that's what I felt most acutely living in Shenzhen, a hyper competitive place where it's hard to make friends because there's so much distrust.
I suspect that birth rates falling is as much a result of the competitiveness of the environment as the structural issues that arise from mass urbanization. Japan's birth rate collapse before the pill was legal in that country, before the internet/social media/dating apps, and I suspect that it's because there's something fundamentally at odds with the economic dynamics of men and women within an urban, industrialized context that leaves many women wondering where all the good men are, and men, wondering where all the good employment options are that use the skills men excel at.
Hasn't it been suggested that the academic ultra-competitiveness of all East Asian countries has reduced their birth rates?
I'd say it's also true for the United States and Western European countries, with East Asia getting hit hard because of how fast they developed economically. People feel so pressed to get higher education to get a good job, which means they wait until they're much older (and their fertility is somewhat reduced) to start having kids. It also increases the costs of having children by encouraging parents to engage in winner-takes-all "intensive parenting," which can set students up for meritocratic success but involves so much time and effort as to discourage families from having too many kids that they can't reasonably "set up for success." It also adds a lot of stress on the child and increases their likelihood for mental and behavioral problems down the line.
Can you elaborate on the bit about distrust? China seems like a relatively low crime society. Why is there distrust and what does it manifest as?
I think you will find post written by Robert Wu very helpful.
China's "low-trust" society - Part 1
https://www.china-translated.com/p/chinas-low-trust-society-part-1
The Sinofuture feels a lot like what people talk about when they talk about the advent of AGI. I don't mean that China will beat us to AGI, although they very well might, but that this incredible massive, all controlling, technologically advanced, powerful industrial system that is immune to all persuasion and in the midst of a takeoff growth.
Human agency is left behind amidst the technological behemoth that rising under its own power and for its own purposes. Are we allowed to co-exist with it, on a little reservation for humanity that will progress at its own pace? Or will our existence be regarded as unacceptable variance for the ever-expanding factory? Let us also hope that China's leaders, which at one point were trained on a free human corpus but have now begin to self-train, still retain enough remnants of humanity to not just build something powerful but also something humans can live in.
I just visited Shanghai and was impressed by the downtown light show. But the residential buildings not so much. The main city is gorgeous- lots of flowers, shopping, restaurants and parks.
The view from the banks of the Huangpu River towards Pudong over when the light show is happening (or be on a boat) is one of the world's best man made views.
I still like the New York City skyline at night, especially the George Washington Bridge all lit up...
All this new Brutalism and towers in the park, the Chinese must really love Le Corbusier. Though we are having a bit of a Brutalist moment in the US.
https://nbm.org/exhibitions/capital-brutalism/
You left out the high-quality mobile games Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail as celebrated Chinese products with global reach. On the other hand, they are heavily inspired by Japanese media to the point where there isn't anything particularly Chinese about them except that they happen to have been made by a Chinese developer.
I haven't actually played the games myself, so I don't know if that's a character in them or not.
“Cabrini Green without the crime” - great line! Though maybe also like the Daley machine on steroids when it comes to self-dealing and fraud (but no street crime)
Thanks for the thoughtful and fair take on China. I am hopeful for the (distant) future because there isn’t one China and I think regional spark and differentiation will lead to more experimentation and different ecosystems in terms of aesthetics, culture, commerce, etc, should the long-standing junta be tossed aside or broken up. Making cities look the same doesn’t necessarily mean the people are the same (though obviously much more homogenized than in the past, at least amongst the professional class). To me (a relatively ignorant observer) China has always been a little more like Italy than Japan. Hard to homogenize, patron-oriented, get away with what you can.
Yeah no crime…yet 😎
As I was reading this I was thinking of the projects in Chicago I was familiar with. I lived near Cabrini- Green way back when so I got a chuckle when you made the reference. The local YMCA was a great place for a good basketball run on Saturdays though - which given the international push of the NBA might be in the Chinese version as well.
Lots of great content. I wonder if our leafy suburbs and our truly luxurious apartment buildings are based on having many wealthy people, Where do the wealthy in China live and how many of them are there?
Very interesting. The dense and messy urban fabric of Japan or Western Europe or pre-war United States (at least some of which still remains) has a way of evolving and reinventing itself. On the other hand, the top-down, centrally planned towers in the park of China were built all at once to a finished state and will deteriorate all at once. (American suburbia, I think, could go either way).
Travelling on high speed rail in China recently I saw an advert for Shanghai with the tagline “We are the future”. Later, I had more than one person tell me “Shanghai is 10 years ahead of the rest of the country”. Like you can look at that Shanghai and see how other Chinese cities will develop.
I do think that some influences will make it out of China and into various international cities. The kind of modal development of skinny skyscrapers in a big somewhat isolated block probably doesn’t translate. But smaller, more urban versions could work in many places, and many examples exist in China. Whether the gated community nature is a plus or minus depends on the circumstances but in some places may be popular. I would also predict more Chinese style parks, gardens and landscaping to come into fashion. The greening of places like Shanghai and even lower tier cities can be pretty attractive.
When Covid hit wasn't China's xiaoqu-based urbanism a huge advantage, in that it gave the state sufficient physical control over its population to enact its Zero Covid policies?
I missed this article when it first popped up . You have so much content at the moment and it’s varied. This was a great article. It speaks I think much more to something that is happening to hope, erosion. It could even be a companion piece to the one on loneliness you did. I too have been looking around at the world. You do that maybe when your old, certainly I am doing it more than I ever doing so in my 20s and 30s , even though well travelled. I am even more well travelled now having undertaken a world tour in 2016. I also have 7 grandchildren( 10 year old through to 6 month old ) . My youngest is 18 and away travelling ( he raves about Indonesia ). He starts International relations in Sept. He sees the world as his canvas. Interestingly my three oldest ( with all the GC) live within a 30 mins of their hometown school. But have all taken degrees. And I have been thinking where I might want to spend some of my retirement and been making lists of where we could go. Especially if U.K. lurches further to the right and continues to crash its economy. So your article prompts me to ask a question ? What I’d Tell My Grandchildren:
Find the places that don’t just survive history but invite you to write it. Don’t chase the biggest economy or the flashiest skyline. Look instead for places that protect difference, reward thoughtfulness, and still believe in nature.
The future might not offer one shining utopia, but it will open space for micro-utopias; small cities, creative communities, and networks that transcend borders. Learn how to live lightly. Build resilience through relationships, not just possessions. Creativity, kindness, and a bit of defiant optimism will matter more than passports.
Maybe the best advice I can give is: go where you feel most alive and help others feel that too.
I might do a longer post.
But keep the content alive. Maybe a piece on South America. I noticed you have tuned in a bit on the Argentina resurgence. Especially as USA seems doing its best to mimic Argentina of the seventies.
Completely in line with the analysis and conclusions of the 'What is Wrong with Shanghai' chapter of Yasheng Huang's (2008!) Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. "The ascendancy of crony capitalism is a fitting testimonial to the Shanghai model and to the industrial policy approach of the 1990s. ... Shanghai, as the world's most successful Potemkin metropolis, is both the sign of and the culprit for what is structurally ailing in the Chinese economy today. If the Chinese economy stumbles, future historians will look back at the dizzying rise of skyscrapers from the rice paddies of Pudong as a glaring warning sign that almost everyone missed."