China Briefing: Young China and the AI Moment | Zak Dychtwald

So when when was it that you sort of discovered kind of the aha moment of Western culture and Chinese culture are just so different? What was what? What were some of the observations when you first were here versus maybe now that maybe it's changed a little bit?

So it actually.

What got me interested in coming here was the recognition they were so different.

And I've actually never told this particular story.

I was in a Chinese modern literature class back at Columbia.

Super random, honestly.

This was before

you even came to Hong Kong.

This was

before I even came.

And this was part of a requirement.

And one of the things when you read books or you look at the stories that sort of define a nation's psyche, you learn a lot about all of the stories that happened before it.

And so most of Western literature is sort of based around the hero's journey idea, right? A lot of it can be sourced back to either Greek or Roman stories.

China had an entirely different constellation of stories and references in all of their modern literature from anything I'd ever encountered.

So like what makes someone heroic? What makes them brave? What makes them masculine, feminine? What is honorable? When you look at modern Chinese literature, it was just totally different than anything I encountered.

I decided to go to Hong Kong, not based on the not based on the modern literature, but actually based on science fiction.

I was a big science fiction reader.

And if you look at the pamphlets of particularly Europe versus the pamphlets for the University of Hong Kong of where to study abroad, one looked like a history book.

The other one specifically looked like the book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which would become the movie Blade Runner.

I had never been to Asia.

And so the idea that the future could be happening here was what brought me here.

And then when I started to go from Hong Kong to Shenzhen on the weekends, the recognition that the China that was being described to me back home, what I was hearing from my professors even, certainly what I was hearing from my parents, the people around me, that it was so different than what I was seeing and experiencing on the ground.

So what are a

few of those examples?

The easy and obvious one is I expected sort of a big brother person to be following me around the moment I passed through the station from Hong Kong to Shenzhen.