Last week, I spent two weeks in China. I visited Beijing, Chengdu, Emeishan,  

Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. I went because, look, the big  

thing I tried to figure out on this  podcast is what's happening in AI. 

And the biggest unknown variable  there is what's gonna happen in China. 

I don't yet have the answer to this question. This trip was a beginning of my curiosity  

about the country, and not the capstone. But as I learn more about China over the coming  

months, I hope to share what I learn with you. Scale. 

It's funny how China has basically  the inverse problem as America. 

We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand. 

We can't rebuild fallen bridges,  they build bridges to nowhere. 

In the most desirable cities in this country,  every random Victorian house and park bench is  

a historic site that can't be disturbed. There, they'll bulldoze a 500-year-old  

temple to build an endless skyscraper  complex that nobody wants to live in. 

My overwhelming first impression was,  wow, everything is so fucking big. 

The cities themselves, the  train stations, the airports,  

the towering and endless apartment complexes. Travel often teaches you things about a country  

which you honestly should've  intuited even without visiting. 

Obviously, I knew that China is a big  country, with over 1.4 billion people. 

But the stupendous scale of the biggest cities  was impressed upon me only after I visited. 

Even in Emeishan, a city of just half a million  people, which is considered honestly a quaint  

countryside town by Chinese standards, we  found a Buddhist temple of comical scale. 

We'd enter what seemed like an  impressively large compound,  

only to discover that it was merely the entrance  to an even grander structure right behind it. 

This pattern repeated five or six times, each  subsequent building larger and more ornate than  

the last, like some sort of inverse nesting doll. And the place had almost no other visitors,  

by the way. I asked a monk  

at the temple how they funded this massive  site in a city of just half a million people. 

He told us that it was simply through donations. We probed further about how such an enormous  

project could've been financed by  just ordinary people's contributions. 

He responded, "We've got a lot of  supporters, dude," and changed the topic. 

Chongqing is by far the  coolest city I've ever visited. 

It's this insane cyberpunk, multi-level  metropolis with over 20 million people. 

I wouldn't begin to know how to describe  it, but there's a bunch of great YouTube  

videos which will show you what I mean. I got a really nice two-floor hotel room  

that overlooked two rivers and one of the most  insane skylines in the world for 60 bucks. 

I'd highly recommend visiting  Chongqing if you get the chance. 

In 1995, astronomers pointed Hubble at a  seemingly empty patch of sky the size of a  

grain of sand held at arm's length. Instead of emptiness, the 10-day  

exposure revealed over 3,000 galaxies. Every speck of light in the image was an  

entire galaxy containing billions of stars. When I went to the top of the tallest  

building in Chongqing and looked over the  city, I thought about that Hubble image. 

You could zoom in on any direction and  you'd find, behind the fog and the mist,  

beyond even perhaps the horizon, another  skyscraper, each containing hundreds or  

thousands of people living and working. We took a 12-hour train ride from  

Chongqing to Shanghai. I'm embarrassed to say  

that my only experience with the actual  countryside was via the windows of this train. 

Still, the sights were quite interesting. We saw again and again small paddy farms  

surrounding a handful of  5 to 10-story skyscrapers,  

plopped in the seeming middle of nowhere. Even in the countryside, it seems that many  

people prefer to live in large buildings  instead of their own small homes. 

I couldn't hop off the train and confirm, but  I saw many towns that looked quite ghostly,  

with no actually visible people anywhere. 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, and potentially half or quarter  that when many of these buildings went up. 

America and Europe put up a ton of beautiful  buildings in the early 20th century when their  

GDP per capita was similar to China's. One could even argue that those other  

structures are more aesthetic than  anything we're building today in the West. 

Not so in China. 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. 

Beijing's urban design looks like something  straight out of James Scott's Seeing Like a State. 

The city is dominated by these enormous  apartment complexes, blocks of 10 adjacent  

30-story buildings demarcated by eight-lane roads. And the government buildings follow the same  

pattern, huge structures divided  by extremely wide boulevards. 

This layout seems designed  partly for social control. 

During zero COVID, authorities would  lock down tens of thousands of people  

by simply guarding a few entrance gates. The wide roads would also make it easy  

to move military forces throughout the city. The only break from this pattern are the hutongs,  

Beijing's old historic neighborhoods. But even these weren't spared completely. 

Only a small fraction survived  Beijing's rapid modernization push. 

Dare I say that Beijing is too YIMBY? Vibes. I got quite mixed messages about the state  

of public opinion in China, and this is  to be expected in a society where you  

can't establish common knowledge. One person told me that the new  

generation is quite nationalistic, unlike the  older reformed generation, which personally  

experienced both the catastrophes of Mao and  also the tangible benefits of liberalization. 

He made the rather insightful point that this  tilt in public opinion in China increasingly  

gives lie to the American talking point that  we're against the CCP but not the Chinese people. 

In fact, he went on to say that the current  regime is way more liberal than what would result  

from an actual election in China. Another person told me that these  

Chinese nationalists were only a vocal minority,  similar to the wokes in America circa 2020. 

While they make up only 10% of the population,  they aggressively shout down others on Weibo,  

which is China's equivalent of Twitter. Most people find them annoying,  

but feel uncomfortable confronting them directly. And this matches what a student who just graduated  

from a top university there told me, that the vast  majority of his classmates are simply apolitical. 

And in our own interactions with  locals, we saw little evidence of  

widespread nationalism or something. And in fact, when my Chinese-speaking  

trip mate would mention that he is from the  UK to our taxi drivers, they would often  

respond quite enthusiastically. They'd say, "We love the UK. 

There were very few foreigners. In Beijing, I might've seen half a dozen  

cumulatively, across entire seas of people. In Chengdu and Chongqing,  

I barely remember seeing any. And this is a real shame,  

of course, because Chongqing is, again, a  truly incredible destination to go visit. 

So rare apparently are tourists that we repeatedly  got asked for selfies in Chengdu and Chongqing. 

Outside of Shanghai, almost nobody spoke English. And if I went again, I would definitely try to  

crash course some basic Chinese beforehand. This language barrier did lead to some  

interesting encounters. At a park in Chengdu,  

we met an old man who was reading a textbook  which said "Medical English" at the top of it,  

and he asked us to join him for some tea. I think he was just trying  

to practice his English. He said he loved foreigners,  

and that his favorite period in life was the '80s  and '90s when, of course, the reforms kicked off. 

And he told me that he loved Deng. My tripmates' friends' grandmother  

was incredibly gracious in hosting us  for a dinner while we were at Emeishan. 

We saw a beautiful Uyghur  rug hanging on their walls. 

The grandfather pointed it out  and explained that we have amazing  

relationships with minorities here in China. And I don't think this was some theatrical  

attempt to contradict Western propaganda. It seemed like he genuinely didn't know what is  

said about the treatment of Uyghurs in the West. He was just trying to show his visitors  

something cool that he had. We kept trying to ask them about  

their own personal experience over the last  seven decades as China has grown and changed,  

but the grandfather kept responding with  lengthy monologues about military history. 

Here is a representative exchange. Me, who doesn't speak Chinese, to  

my tripmate, who does, "Hey, ask them about what  job they had when they first moved near Chengdu. 

The grandfather speaks in Chinese for ten  minutes, and I start getting a bit impatient,  

and I started whispering to my tripmate, "Hey,  what is he saying?" My tripmate, "He's saying  

that the mountains near Chengdu make it a perfect  base of retreat in case of an invasion, which Mao  

was worried about during the Sino-Soviet Split. Me, "Wait, what? Why didn't you ask him about  

the first job he had?" My tripmate, "Dude, I did. Grandpas are the same everywhere. 

People say that Xi is establishing  a cult of personality. 

This may be true within the CCP cadres,  but I saw no evidence of it in public. 

I don't think I saw a single picture of Xi  anywhere, not on billboards, screens, or walls. 

People don't really bring up Xi in conversations. I saw some pictures of Mao, but mostly in museums,  

and in one case, at a tea farm that  he apparently used to frequent. 

The hammer and sickle was also a rare sight,  mostly displayed on government buildings. 

There are indeed cameras everywhere,  and I'm gonna ask a question. 

This is gonna sound super naive. But I genuinely don't understand why. 

There's no crime, and I know you'll say it's  to prevent protest, which might make sense for  

major streets, but even random alleyway  corners will have a couple of cameras. 

Are they really trying to prevent somebody  from fomenting an insurrection between two  

garbage cans? Beijing in particular had  police officers at attention at what  

seemed like every single street corner. People were quite willing to chat openly  

in public spaces about the problems  in the country and with the regime. 

And this included people who  seemed to have a lot to lose. 

Almost everyone I talked to would acknowledge  that the economy was bad, and many were willing  

to implicate the government's decisions. Some even casually brought up  

Tiananmen or the Cultural Revolution. One person was even willing to discuss the odds  

of a regime change at a public restaurant, though  he may have been an especially careless fellow. 

Look, to be clear, it's an authoritarian  system, and I certainly wouldn't feel  

comfortable doing what I'm doing there. But it definitely isn't North Korea. 

Youngsters. In a shopping mall in Chongqing, a couple of  

high schoolers came up to us in order to get some  selfies, and this felt like a perfect opportunity  

to learn about young adult life in China. So I whipped out the translate app in my  

WeChat, and we proceeded rather  clumsily to make small talk. 

I asked them what they did in their free  time, and they said that they watched  

two to three hours of TikTok every single day. And I asked them what kind of videos they watched. 

They said it's a whole bunch of sexy girls. I laughed because I thought that they were joking,  

but then I asked one of them to pull out  their phone, and he scrolled past, like,  

ten videos on his feed, and all of  them were indeed just sexy girls. 

We chatted up a lot of young  people in the nightlife streets. 

I was struck by how many young people  expressed feeling stressed or overwhelmed. 

We met a musician in Chengdu who was  writing songs about youth anxiety. 

We chatted up some modeling school  students, even they complained  

about the intense pressure they felt. We met a guy who had studied in Australia,  

but returned to China during COVID. He explained that many of his  

friends who had prestigious degrees are  moving away from Shanghai and Beijing. 

You can get paid twice as high in this first-tier  cities, but the competitiveness is insane. 

And in order to actually land the high school  positions, they have to work truly insane hours. 

9-9-6 is not a myth. He said that many of  

his friends were opting for less ambitious but  lower-paying careers in smaller cities where the  

rent is lower and the pressure's manageable. I'm still puzzled by how China can have both  

a demographic collapse and massive youth  unemployment, because you would think with  

fewer young people being born, the ones  who are around would be in high demand. 

And one explanation I heard while I was there  is that, look, there's plenty of menial jobs  

that are available, but today's educated youth  who've gone through high school and college  

just won't take the low-skilled positions  that their parents and grandparents did. 

So there's a real shortage of the  high-skilled jobs that would actually  

match their education and aspirations. I kept asking young people about the  

public intellectual landscape in China. Who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson  

and Sam Harris? Who are their podcasters like  Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman? The sense I got  

while I was there is that this kind of popular  intellectual ecosystem just doesn't exist there. 

Like, sure, there's a lot of viral Bilibili  videos from professors talking about practical  

matters, like how to manage your finances. But grand takes about what's happening in the  

world and what we should do about it, it doesn't  seem like there's that much of that going on. 

I met a couple of effective altruists in China. They're exceptionally rare. 

When I asked them about why it's so hard to spread  effective altruism or similar worldviews there,  

they told me that people there just  aren't into organizing their decisions  

using some ideological lens. They're much more concerned  

with practical, tangible matters. One talking point I heard again and again  

was that China is still a developing country, and  the implication when people said this seemed to  

be that China can't afford to pursue costly  idealistic programs around climate change or  

social safety nets or international aid. It needs to focus on basic economic  

development first. Tech and AI. 

The biggest surprise from talking to Chinese  VCs and researchers at their AI labs was how  

capital constrained they felt. For example, Moonshot AI,  

which is one of China's leading AI labs,  raised $1 billion at a $3 billion valuation. 

Meanwhile, just xAI's new cluster in  Memphis alone will cost $3 to $4 billion. 

The tech ecosystem feels quite  shell-shocked from the 2021 crackdown. 

One VC half-jokingly asked if I could  help him get his money out of China. 

That's because if you wanna keep your  money in China, you're basically stuck  

between quite terrible options. You can either accept the measly  

2% yield from state banks. Or throw it into China's  

perpetually struggling stock market. This helps explain why valuations for  

Chinese companies are chronically low. The exit opportunities really suck,  

even if you build or invest in something great. There's no guarantee that your company  

will be able to raise the next round. And even if you do raise again and succeed,  

the government might randomly cancel your IPO. And even if you somehow make it to the public  

markets, Chinese equities have  been performing terribly for years. 

It's a good reminder of how easy it is to  completely wreck an innovation landscape that  

depends on risk-taking investors. Hearts and minds. 

In China, liberal pro-Western voices  are often censored or shouted down. 

If I was a U.S. president and I wanted to win  hearts and minds in China, here's what I'd do. 

In every single speech where I'm talking  about China, I'd make a conspicuous  

effort to compliment Chinese people,  Chinese values, and Chinese culture. 

I'd talk about how my Chinese  staffers are the smartest,  

hardest-working people I've ever worked with. And this honestly is already probably true. 

I'd talk about how my daughter is  obsessed with ancient Chinese dresses. 

I'd talk about how I'm learning  Mandarin in my free time. 

And I'd have these live aw-shucks  conversations in Mandarin. 

These clips would go viral on Bilibili and TikTok. 

And they'd probably stay up because  it's just a weird thing to censor. 

The CCP might even think that these  displays of affection aggrandize them. 

But in reality, showing our admiration for the  Chinese people who genuinely are fucking killing  

it everywhere where they're not held down by  communism undermines the central narrative of the  

regime: That the West is hell-bent on holding the  Chinese people back; that we have no respect or  

understanding of their culture; and that the CCP  is a necessary bulwark against these imperialists. 

On travel Noah Smith has a good  blog post about what travel is  

good for and what it isn't good for. You're not going to learn that much about  

the risk of a war or the state of the AI race by  gazing at skylines and chatting up taxi drivers. 

For the answers to questions like  that, you need to be talking to the  

princelings and the researchers and the CEOs. But if you have access to those people anyways,  

you don't exactly need to go to China. You can just hop on a Zoom call with these people. 

And for what it's worth, that should update you in  favor of doing more Zoom calls, not less travel. 

By the way, I did realize after going to  China that I should have just hopped on Zoom  

calls with all my listeners in China because the  nature of the difficulty of accessing my content  

in China apparently has self-selected  for a really high-quality audience there. 

And by the way, if you are in China,  I would be keen to hear from you. 

My email is hello@dwarkeshpatel.com. And look, I'm keen to learn more  

about AI, but not just AI. I want to better understand how  

the political system works, how exactly does Xi  Jinping make decisions, and especially what we can  

learn from that about how decisions will be made  at the brink of AGI, about tech investments and  

nationalizations and arms races and so on. And I'd also be keen to hear if you have  

suggestions for China guests for  people to interview on my podcast. 

So what is the point of travel? I think for me  the answer is that you start asking questions  

about the places you visit that you wouldn't  even think to ask about the place you live. 

And another thing I noticed was more personal. Two weeks of being AFK and of having the excuse  

of using a burner phone to ignore all my messages  and emails just helped clear the cache of thoughts  

I had about hiring and growth and sponsorships and  logistics and gave me the opportunity to just let  

my shower thoughts drift towards the random rabbit  holes that traveling through China spawned for me. 

And it's a good reminder that  what's lacking in life is not time. 

If you're working on the right thing, you can  advance leaps and bounds in just eight hours. 

But if you're just clearing the slog, you can  spend a whole lifetime staying in the same place.