And for almost a decade, Evan Osnos was a Beijing based reporter. He's also the author

of a book, age of ambition, chasing fortune, truth, and faith in the new China. These

days, he's based in DC, but he recently took a reporting trip to China in a

new piece for the New Yorker. He writes that many of those changes have taken place

since 2013 and saying for a long time, China looked west for visions of the future.

These days, it's favoring its own.

Its approach to AI is one illustration of that. Evan Osnos is a staff writer for

the New Yorker, and he joins us now on this Saturday. Evan, I wanna start with

AI if I could because you you I'm gonna paraphrase you here. You'll forgive me for

doing that, but you you highlight the distinction between the way that China approaches AI and

the way that The US does. And I think what you sort of indicate is that

in The US, the debate is about sort of advanced general intelligence, sort of what that

might mean for our society as a whole. It it is a much more kind of

commercially focused aspiration in China than it is here in in The US.

It is. Yeah. The the conversation in China is about how to get it out as

fast as possible as far as possible. And they're not just thinking about how do we

get it into Chinese factories, but also how do we get it into Africa, Central Asia,

Latin America. And so you have a very different conversation when you're going around as I

did a you know, visiting Chinese factories or going to AI consultancies that are looking at

ways of bringing this into very old fashioned factories. You know, there's not a whole lot

of imaginings about, you know, a sci fi future even though there are elements of that

beginning to present themselves in the present. It's really about, alright. How do we go into

a brewery, for instance, that's a real example, and say, how do we take beer production

and and put it into the twenty first century? So it is a it is quite

striking, David, when you're on the ground these days about how AI and and other technologies

feel like they are already part of life.

And it seems to me the the energy aspect is a huge part of that. We

were talking, earlier with Joe from Bank of America talking about the spike we saw in

solar stocks this week, and he said part of the reason is what we're seeing in

The Gulf and this energy demand. And China has been really out ahead on energy diversity,

and we're still seeing this, you know, mysterious drop in, oil imports from China. Is this

are they more able to throw their weight behind this and back build the infrastructure because

of just the way they are structured with their government. They can long term plan in

a way that a democracy doesn't have to because we change presidents possibly every four years.

Yeah. This is both the blessing and the curse of having a centrally planned system. You

know, the blessing, of course, is when you decide you're all in on all kinds of

energy as they have over the course of the last generation, they've gone from producing, you

know, something like half as much energy as The United States to producing now much more.

And, actually, in many cases, it's cheaper. This is partly because they've been able to say

from the top, this is what we're doing, and then that filters down through the system,

even down into the localities where you get municipal governments that are even on the individual

level, you have politicians in the Chinese system competing for promotions by saying, look. We are

investing in solar. We're investing in nuclear, whatever it is. The downside, of course, is that

when they go off of true north by a few degrees and end up on an

engineering project that turns out to be either out of step with market demands or in

some cases, like the one child policy, which I talk about in this piece, something that

produces a huge range of negative economic consequences, then it's very hard to shift that battleship

before it can cause, more damage. So what we're seeing right now is that this is

the moment when those energy investments have paid off, and it's been very helpful for them.

Evan, you can count me among those who, have been introduced to the new China through

through your book and through your writing. And I'm I just wondered if you could talk

a bit about what it was like to return there on this this reporting trip. I

think one of the things you observe is kind of the quiet of Beijing in in

a way that it wasn't before because there are so many electric vehicles now. The the

the means of transportation has changed. The means of commerce has changed as well. The the

storefronts are less crowded because people are buying things, with apps and using delivery How different

is the new China today than the one that you wrote about now, you know, more

than a decade ago?

It's very interesting to see it up close now. I mean, having lived there for all

these years, you you kind of absorb a certain street level sense of what China is.

And certainly, in the first decade of this century, Beijing was a a kind of cacophonous

place. It was a noisy place. And I mean that in all sense of the word.

You know, it wasn't just that the cars were noisy, but also there was a real

contest of ideas going on. And you would also just go into the alleys. I lived

in a Hutong house, and so it was you never quite knew what was gonna be

opening up. There were businesses that would open. They'd be gone in a in a few

months or something else would be built in its place. Today, there is a much more

distinct feeling of the place that is run from the top. And so on the one

hand, you get this feeling that it is quite literally quieter because of electric vehicles. But

then you also get the feeling that some of that hive of activity that was happening

in the margins, you know, the smaller communities of artists or ideas that were bubbling up,

those have been silenced in some ways. And and that is a feeling of that feels

like a loss. And it also you do get the feeling, though, as, you know, I

was talking to somebody from Singapore not too long ago, and he said about Beijing. He

said, when I go there, it feels to me like it now outs Singapore's Singapore, meaning

that it has that sense of orderliness. But then there is also that bit of sterility.

And that's a that getting those two ideas into one sentence is part of the reason

why I write a long piece of this kind to try to give people as much

a feel as I can of what it's like on the ground.

You also wrote, which I thought was interesting, Chinese leaders seem to be betting that by

speeding toward the future, they can outrun the mistakes of the recent past. You mentioned the

one child policy. I'm wondering which other ones come to mind and what they're trying to

reverse course on.

One of the things they're trying to address, of course, is the property crash. You know,

since 2021, we've all been living through the effects of that economically. There are now, just

to put a fine point on it, there are now as many vacant homes in China,

apartments and villas, as there would be to house the entire population of Russia. So you

had this enormous, overhang, from that property crash. And and they're saying, look. If we can

more or less catapult ourselves into a new phase of economic history, then perhaps we can,

light a fire again under people, get them feeling like they're no longer, as the saying

goes among young Chinese, no longer, looking to lie flat. Maybe get people to start feeling

more energized about the economy and about their own opportunities. That's really the core of it,

guys. I think is this feeling of can you reignite that feeling of opportunity? That's the

thing that was running through age of ambition when I wrote about the China of of

the twenty tens. And there are moments, there are little glimpses when you go to places

in China these days and you see this dynamic frontier of the new economy, that is

happening. But then when you also talk to people who have felt like those opportunities are

only for a privileged few, and they say, look. I'm not equipped for the AI economy.

I'm not equipped for this new advanced manufacturing generation. Where do I fit in? And the

irony is, of course, it's not a conversation that's all that different from one of the

ones we're beginning to have here in The United States. So there's something to it. How

do you make sure that many people feel a sense of agency, in the new AI

era?

In the minute we have left, I wanna ask you about what I found is kind

of the the most important part of the the piece to my mind.

Just in one minute.

I I I think that, you know, there are a lot of kind of gray beards

talking about political theory and the American order waning and what might rise in its place.

And and you write, spend enough time in Beijing and Washington these days, the rivalry looks

less like a clash of competing systems, than a race between small oligarchic groups, tight circles

of men with immense power over everyone else's future. Talk a bit more about that if

if you would.

Yeah. It is a very noticeable feeling. After I've been working on this for a long

time, I came away with the sense that this is the the dark matter, the piece

that doesn't get described enough and is clearly, which is that there is a feeling both

in The United States and in China that these enormous decisions about what role will these

new technologies play in our economies, in our private lives, in our in our own sense

of how we educate our kids and how to prepare them for the future. It doesn't

feel like we have a hand in those decisions, and that creates an enormous sense of

uncertainty. And I heard this not only from regular people on the street in you know,

you could do that in The US, but even from some AI executives in Beijing who

said, look. I too have these questions. How should I educate my kids to participate in

the future? So, in some ways, there is a a point of of commonality here, which

is about how will these two big important countries engage AI in a way that allows

their regular citizens to feel as if something is happening with their involvement rather than happening

to them.