Afra Wang on Liangzhu, China’s Vibe-Coding Capital, and the Anxious Optimism of the AI Boom

This week on Sinica, I’m joined again by Afra Wang, the Bay Area-based writer behind the AI newsletter *Concurrent*, who was last on the show in January to talk about her Wired piece on *The Morning Star of Lingao* and China’s “Industrial Party.” She’s back with two new pieces of on-the-ground reportage that get beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism: her New Yorker Lede piece on Liangzhu, the town outside Hangzhou where laid-off and burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe code in each other’s living rooms (and where AI and BaZi fortune-telling have become strangely intimate), and a forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s sprawling, lucrative, and largely unregulated “learn AI, get rich” education industry. We talk about why 93% of Chinese respondents tell Gallup that AI will mostly help their country, what that number conceals, and whether what looks like optimism is sometimes closer to acceptance. **Afra’s pieces discussed in this episode:** - What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom — *The New Yorker*, September 23, 2026 - \[Her forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s AI education industry — \[LINK TK, expected after October 12]] - You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel — *Wired*, January 2026, and our January 2026 Sinica conversation about it - Subscribe to Afra’s newsletter, Concurrent **Also mentioned:** - Optimism About AI Globally Widespread Despite Uneven Adoption — the Microsoft-Gallup survey - China’s OpenClaw gold rush — *MIT Technology Review* - Damien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade - Evan Osnos, Crazy English — *The New Yorker*, April 2008 - Lian Si 廉思, Journey Without a Map 无图之旅：一代青年的自我寻路 - Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction — Sinica, 2016 **06:51** – Walking into Liangzhu’s living rooms: the San Francisco déjà vu, and the grimness beneath the techno-optimist story the West wants to hear **10:14** – Setting the scene: a real-estate developer’s utopian village, Neolithic ruins, Xi Jinping’s intervention, and a “road-to-food ratio” low enough to build real community **17:30** – Child of the layoffs or child of DeepSeek? The post-COVID “ego death” of Chinese tech — and a quibble about the word “crackdown” **21:42** – Master Qi and the living room as a social form: what Liangzhu offers that a Beijing office or a WeChat group can’t **24:11** – What the 93% really tells us: optimism, acceptance, or FOMO when you can’t protest a data center **29:26** – “Westerners get restless when they can’t protest; Chinese people get restless when they haven’t found a teacher”: qiúzhī 求知, meritocracy as religion, and the company called Shēngcái Yǒudào 生财有道 **32:48** – Inside Shengcai Youdao: the “prosperity evangelist” conference room, the ladder from ordinary member to CEO class, Mr. Tree’s Hilton seminars, and who’s actually paying 3,000 yuan a year **37:44** – Scam or ladder? The state’s war on the “paid knowledge” mess, Dragon Ball referral credits, and the security guard running Claude Code on his phone during his shift **41:03** – How it compares to the Valley’s course-sellers; selling hope and upward mobility, echoes of Crazy English, and “the prosperity gospel with Chinese characteristics” **45:30** – “Take us to Silicon Valley!”: what the West means to a room of one-person companies building apps for the U.S. App Store **47:18** – Xiao Kai, the 25-year-old AI filmmaker from Heilongjiang: murder mysteries as model-friendly plots, government commissions, WaytoAGI, and the local-government AIGC fever **55:28** – Lian Si’s *Journey Without a Map*: a Party insider tells young people to “make peace with the ordinary” while everyone else says learn AI or be left behind **59:59** – FateTell and the gray zone of AI fortune-telling: tarot slot machines in Shenzhen, crystal shops, and Liangzhu as “China’s Sedona” **1:04:13** – Levy, the BaZi cosmology, Sam Altman’s chart, and Kaiser plays the skeptic: the Yijing as “humanity’s first statistical decision model,” the Whole Earth Catalog, and New Age re-imported from the West **1:12:27** – Do they actually believe it? Speech fasting, BaZi compatibility in hiring, and Chinese syncretism at work **1:14:45** – When the local government falls in love with the scene: Crazy Thursday, incubators, “new quality productive forces,” and why Liangzhu’s peak may already be over **1:19:42** – Are Chinese people really cavalier about AI safety? Pragmatism, scarce compute, trust in state capacity, the blind spots of EA — and a preview of Afra’s third piece on China’s “industrial AI slop” **Paying It Forward:** Zilan Qian, a GovAI fellow researching AI governance in China who writes the Substack Until Zilan Finds a Better Name and is a must-read on how AI-safety concepts like “loss of control” translate (or don’t) into the Chinese context. Her most widely shared piece: Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends. **Recommendations:** **Afra:** Ken Liu’s new collection, The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, whose title borrows a metaphor from Ursula K. Le Guin. **Kaiser:** Marilynne Robinson’s Home, the second of the four Gilead novels — set in the same few weeks of 1956 as *Gilead* but seen from inside the Boughton household, as Glory and her prodigal brother Jack circle a secret the book doesn’t name until nearly the end. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.