Evan Osnos on China's Technological Ascent, Chinamaxxing, and Humanism versus Scientism

Evan Osnos

Thank you very much, Kaiser. It's always great to be with you.

Evan Osnos

This is certainly not the first time I've been back — I tend to come back every couple of years and try to get my arms around what the latest mood is like. One of the things you are really struck by right now is a feeling of technological saturation. It just is everywhere.

You'll remember in Age of Ambition, one of the tiny themes that a lot of readers probably read right by, but which China people often brought up, was this pattern of people out in the countryside building things, sometimes wild things. They were known as the peasant da Vincis. The submarine guy, the flying machines guy. It'd be somebody in a village far from the sea who decided his life's destiny was to build the world's most perfect wooden submarine. There's a reason these became iconic objects: they represented a slightly madcap sense of ambition, to use the relevant word. What it really seemed to capture was this constant upward thrust of getting out of whatever condition one is in.

I've always been interested in the traces of that instinct, because it comes and goes — it can get choked off or extinguished when the mood gets more restrictive. What felt different on this trip was the sense that these innovative instincts are operating at a systemic level. That can be quite astonishing to see. But it's unnerving also, because the power of really extraordinary technology in the hands of any government is very different from it being in the hands of an individual. If I've come to know one thing about technology, having lived in the US during the last twelve years when technology became this enormous political fact, it's that a piece of technology reflects the values of the person at the controls. You have to understand what those values are. What is the moral vision?

Evan Osnos

For one thing, it's a much quieter place now, on multiple levels — literally, because of electric vehicles. I'd been doing a series of interviews, going to factories, sitting in front of computers with people. Finally I was desperate for fresh air, the weather broke, and I got on a rideshare bike and was having the time of my life pedalling in the bike lane. And sure enough, nearly shuffled off this mortal coil colliding with a guy on a delivery bike — he was going the right way and I was going the wrong way. If there was a way to go out, that might be it.

To quote a friend from Singapore who was in Beijing recently: Beijing now out-Singapores Singapore. He means that in all senses. It's obviously cleaner and more organised and more systematised, and at the same time it has that slightly sterile feeling, and that feels like a loss at some moments. I don't want to generalise, because you've also got enormous new excitement — I sat inside a car and wondered whether I should buy one that would project a drive-in movie on the wall in front of me, which I can't buy in the United States. On the other hand, I feel a little phantom limb pain, the loss of that hutong cacophony.

Evan Osnos

Exactly, one should not nostalgise poverty. But it is also true that you need a certain amount of messiness in order to create human combinations and new ideas, and the unpredictable quality that we call joy.

Evan Osnos

You're right to zero in on that quote. Rush Doshi's observation that China's message is 'we are inevitable and don't worry' struck me partly because that's also, in a way, the message Silicon Valley presents: we are inevitable and don't worry. That begins to give you a sense of how I saw it. Part of what this article is about is as much about humanism and scientism, which exist in both places, as it is about China and the US — the proportions of how much we put faith in our machines and how much we put faith in our minds. Each country is contending with this.

On the observational level, yes, my humble mission was to try to sort out how much is hype from what's real. What I concluded is that these are both present. The big mistake is when people declare China clearly the superpower of the technological future, or say it's all bunk, a Potemkin village. You can't go to the United States and come up with a simple one-liner either. This is why I'm so lucky to have ten thousand words — I can include the twists and turns.

When I go to a place like the Xiaomi Hyperfactory, you have the feeling of being walked through a kind of industrial Epcot Center. And at the same time, it is churning out a car, according to the company, every seventy-six seconds. So when Jim Farley says this is the most humbling thing I've ever seen, you have to accept that both things are happening — the presentation and the actual progress.

It's worth putting in context with that immortal clip of Elon Musk around 2011, asked about BYD. He laughed and said, have you seen their car? I went back and looked at the car they made in 2011, and it really was a sad little boxy sedan. What you have to keep in mind is that the slow, steady boring of holes does ultimately produce things. BYD was not holding back; they continued to build and grow. So the big mistake is to look at China at any moment in time and say, that's China. No — it's a dynamic condition, and it will never be the same place. The one thing that never changes is that it changes a lot, and very, very fast.

Evan Osnos

What I want to do is bring people along observation by observation, rather than making a simple declarative announcement.

Evan Osnos

Yes, that one place is beating the other. That doesn't suit my way of telling stories. Here's the heart of the matter. I have believed for a long time that the US and China are, in a sense, doomed to coexist — it's not really an option to build a strategy on the idea that one or the other is going to fail. There are people in the United States who have said for a long time that China is doomed to collapse, and people in Beijing who say the United States is doomed to collapse and significantly withdraw. I find each of those patterns self-punishing, because you overreach, you underestimate the other side, and then you have to recalibrate.

There's a New Yorker style to this too, which is that we tend to tell a story right up to the point of telling the reader where these points should lead. I won't often write that, because I don't feel it's satisfying. I want the reader to come to their own view. That's part of the reason people come to diametrically different perspectives on a long piece in The New Yorker.

If I had to pick a single line containing the closest thing to a takeaway, it's this. China's enormous gains over the 80s and 90s and beyond came largely on the basis of what Deng Xiaoping and his peers called the birdcage economy — can you have the bird thrive with enough ventilation and oxygen without losing control of it? That is a very fragile balance, and the party is struggling to figure out how to make that combination of dynamism and control.

So you have Manus, the AI company. That Manus was even possible was a sign of China's capabilities. And then at a certain point it hit the limits of what the government would accept, and Manus was prevented from leaving China. What message does that send to young AI researchers coming up? Do they say, I need to leave the country pre-idea? Or do they plan to spend the rest of their career in China if they come up with something big enough?

Evan Osnos

I think it is always refracted through how we are seeing ourselves. And that applies both ways. China's sense of what's possible for China at any moment in history depends partly on how it imagines the West will receive it. If the United States is in decline, as some in Beijing would have it, then that creates an opportunity, a moment unseen in centuries. These two are both prone to misreadings.

But part of the challenge in analysing China has become more acute over the last few years: it has got more difficult to access, more difficult to get reliable numbers. As one diplomat in the piece puts it, somebody vanishes into thin air — you get used to a contact, a senior business figure who could help you understand something in the economy, and then that person disappears into an investigation without any public description of what happened. That contributes to the Schrödinger's black hole problem. It forces us to acknowledge the limits of what we can see, meaning we may be shocked at any moment.

This gets to an underlying contrast. The United States is a fairly let-it-all-hang-out view of what a political inferno we're sitting on, and we see it playing out constantly, to the agony of so many of us. On the Chinese side, it's much harder to know what the political volcanic energy below the surface is. We get little indicators. I mention the survey of public attitudes done by Scott Rozelle and colleagues — an important piece of work, because it's not often you get a large, sophisticated survey that can understand public attitudes. One of the judgments it helped illuminate was, as the title put it, a shift from optimism to pessimism.

Evan Osnos

Exactly. This is where it's hard to compare the two systems, because on the American side every piece of evidence is in flamboyant evidence, God knows, and on the Chinese side there is a level of concealment. That makes it hard to conduct a granular understanding of both public mood and how things move within the government. This is where one can end up getting shocked, and where declarative, single-plane statements about China are risky, because you may prove wrong on account of what you don't know.

Evan Osnos

Your observation resonates with me. If you go into a conversation in Beijing and you're down on something, people respond by being sunnier about it. If you come in too sunny, people say, well, actually, here's the downside.

Evan Osnos

Part of what's happening is the decline in American soft capital. That's a reality, and these two giant systems are often put side by side whether they want to be or not. China's gains in these measures have partly been a measure of the US decline in its standing.

The term infrastructure porn is right. If your understanding of human relations were refracted entirely through what you saw on the internet, you would have a fairly impoverished understanding of it. The same applies to China. If you go to China and only visit the places that are open to you, if you can only push on the doors that are unlocked, if you can only have the encounters that are accessible, then you're not getting the full picture.

In the end, this is why journalism is necessary, and why it's always going to grate against what the party wants to tell as a story. Journalists say, yes, we see all these advancements, but what about this case of somebody who's clearly been abused, whose rights have been violated even under Chinese law? That's not a relativistic observation — a visiting journalist in Beijing is going to say that, and they're also going to say it if they go to Minnesota and talk about abuses of government power in the United States.

Social media has made China more accessible and glamorous to a younger cohort of Americans, but what they're seeing is a narrow aperture. I know that's an unfashionable view, because a lot of those young people would say, hold on, I'm doing my own research by finding these accounts and reading online. As we all know, that's highly curated.

Evan Osnos

That's a good way to put it. The party has always been assertive in taking control of the powers of social media, because it recognises how it has the satisfying impression of being autonomous on the part of the user, when in fact there are systems running just out of view that profoundly shape what you see. So — three cheers for journalism. There's a reason you have to have people walking around asking nettlesome questions.

Evan Osnos

From the Chinese government's perspective it's tempting to say, we now have all these tools to tell our own story, so why don't we close the aperture even more to foreign journalists? I would counsel that this is a terrible idea, because the world will not trust China more. You may develop some superficial fascination among young social media users, but when it comes to building deep trust — whether people imagine China is going to be part of the future they want to participate in — that comes from accessibility. You have to make the place knowable. That means letting people come around and accepting that sometimes you may not like the portrait they produce.

Evan Osnos

It's a great observation, and I remember that event. Peter Hessler was there too. Pete once wrote about the outdoor workout facilities that proliferated around China in the first decade of this century — those elliptical machines that didn't require electricity. The way he described it has always stayed with me: it was as if an engineer had been briefly shown a brochure about American exercise equipment, and then the brochure was taken away and he had to build it from memory. That captured a slightly off portrait of reality.

I feel this when I read Wang Huning's America Against America. He was getting the bone structure of the United States, but he too was missing some of the ligaments and tendons that make the place hold together.

Evan Osnos

I do think it matters. In the end we are not being evaluated in a vacuum and we're not competing in a vacuum. It's all a question of what the alternatives are. To quote Joe Biden: don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. As much as countries would like to be assessed on their own terms, that's the nature of geopolitics.

Part of the reason I laid out in such detail the way America's disinvestment in basic science has advanced China's ambitions is that from most Americans' vantage point that's a hard thing to connect. It seems remote, and they can say, we're just going through a political cycle — there are presidents who invest and presidents who retract. My point is no. I lay out the question of what it will mean if the cure for cancer comes from China rather than the United States. That's good for human flourishing, but it is also a real question about America's standing.

The United States is at the moment so absorbed in our own internal political agonies that we're going to wake up in a few years and realise the world has moved on. I had a moment that didn't go into the piece but haunts me a little. I was in Germany a few months ago, asking somebody: the United States is challenging the sanctity of NATO, Donald Trump is threatening to take Greenland, how are you experiencing that? And he had a succinct way of putting it. He said, we're not angry, we're just moving on. Anybody who's had a breakup knows the worst thing you can hear is, I'm not angry, I'm just moving on.

Evan Osnos

We'll probably disagree on this, but no, I'm not particularly critical of the export control idea. It's hard to play out a counterfactual — we don't know where Chinese capabilities would be. There was also a genuine belief that these pieces of technology are so powerful that making them equivalent to anything else and available on the open market was not sensible.

At the same time, I'm a big believer that it was the beginning of the trade war in the first Trump term that catalysed this. The Trump trade war crystallised it, and then the Biden administration continued to raise pressure. I do think it empowered people within China making the case that you could no longer depend on the West. But you have to think about it the same way we evaluate China's decisions — within the context of the pressures and opportunities they were facing. If the Biden administration had not done what it did, I'm not sure I could make a case that the United States would be better off. When you saw the second Trump term turn on a dime, with Howard Lutnick talking about getting China addicted to the tech stack, that was more a symptom of an absence of policymaking than a deliberate strategy.

Evan Osnos

I do think China's ability — and it goes back to our peasant da Vincis — that persistent capability to make more out of less, was not extinguished by export controls. But I return to the idea that the counterfactual is tough.

Evan Osnos

It came to me in the course of the reporting, definitely. One of the judgments I've held fast to is that you can't go into it with a hypothesis and then do everything you can to fortify it. You'll just end up making a different kind of piece — there's a place for that, it's an opinion piece.

I had this moment where I realised that the language and the sensibility I was feeling in Zhongguancun, the technology district in Beijing, was similar to how I often felt in Silicon Valley. To quote Sam Altman himself some years ago, in a New Yorker profile by Tad Friend, his line was: if I weren't in on it, I would be asking why it is that this group of people is going to get to make the decisions for all of us. That idea transcends borders.

When we're trying to figure out why college graduates are booing commencement speakers who mention AI, or when we try to understand the resistance to data centres, a lot of the answer hinges on this question of agency, of control, of the feeling that we have a hand in making our own future. In the United States people don't describe themselves as lying flat, but there is a very similar instinct when you talk to young people about why they don't feel confident to settle down and have kids. Dan Wang used a phrase in my piece — he'd just been back from a trip to China and said, I describe it as a serene discontent. He was talking about members of his own extended family choosing not to marry and have children.

That's where I come to see this as less about the US versus China than about humanism and scientism.

Evan Osnos

For one thing, you can't really boo your commencement speaker in China without suffering consequences. But even in private conversations you have so much on the line. Then we get to the question of the public mood around AI. People are generally more open to advances in computing technology, because the computing era of the last fifty years has been accompanied by much larger gains in lifestyle. It's been lockstep — the more bandwidth, the more connectivity, the faster the device, the better your life has been.

But here it collides with both the constraints on speech in China and the constraints on knowability. When you start talking to executives in the AI industries, there is uncertainty about the future, in the same way there's uncertainty here. It just can't take on the public form it takes in the United States. And counterintuitively, part of the political agony in America, where everybody is fighting about everything all the time, is also how you begin to work your way toward some kind of resolution. The party has its ways of extracting the public mood, and a self-preservation instinct to do so, but it doesn't always get it right. Part of the reason I spend time on the one-child policy is to capture how a policy will stay in place a lot longer than it naturally should, because it has political momentum behind it.

Evan Osnos

I agree with that. But this is where, to return to the study by Scott Rozelle and others, there's that feeling of a closing. Dan Wang mentioned this too — there is some feeling that if you're not on the winning side of the AI revolution, where do you fit in? That's very much the feeling here in the US.

Part of what's overshadowing this conversation in the US is the vivid impression of oligarchic control of these new technologies. It's as vivid as the inauguration stage scene. In China you don't have that feeling, but there is oligarchic control of a different kind, because you've got a small group of individuals who control the dials for many millions of people.

Evan Osnos

I do think so. I don't gloss over the profound differences in the level of political input you can have in a big, messy democracy and what you can have in a one-party authoritarian state. Those are huge.

And yet at the same time, we are in a country where the accumulation of power in the hands of a very small group has reached levels really beyond any recognisable precedent in American history — these entities and individuals are becoming nearly sovereign. That's the thrust of my last book, The Haves and Have-Yachts: we are in uncharted territory. It was most vivid on that inauguration stage in 2025, when you saw many of the world's richest people in strange political communion with the leader of the most powerful military in the world, in a country preparing to celebrate 250 years of democracy.

But I want to be vigilant about the fact that I don't see a simple sameness in the political conditions produced by oligarchy in America and oligarchy in China. It is a fact that we do have avenues for the public will to make its way onto the front page. I'm talking to you from Michigan, which has been ground zero for the conversation about what the Democratic Party will look like. That kind of conversation is healthy for a party. And you can't have that conversation in China, to state the obvious.

Evan Osnos

There's another way to look at the history and say: is it possible that the United States is capable of this all-hands-on-deck dedication to a national goal? That's always the dream — can we rekindle John F. Kennedy setting us out to get to the moon? There's a reason that feels sepia-toned, because it's been a while. But it is also true that in the same way the United States misjudged China's capacity to light a fire under itself over the last ten years, China sometimes runs the risk of underestimating what happens when you wake the dragon in the United States.

I'd also shift the focus to that scientism-versus-humanism debate, because there's another Sputnik moment going on. It's not just the United States waking up to the Chinese technological challenge. There are also Americans waking up to the challenge posed by overweening control from a small group of technology powerhouses. What is the populist response to that?

I read a fascinating book recently, coming out in the fall, from Jill Lepore, my colleague at The New Yorker — a historian of American governance who also teaches at Harvard Law School. The book is called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. One of the insights she brings is that there are ways technology will be naturally absorbed and adopted by Americans, but also ways it will run up against fundamental beliefs Americans have about control and freedom and liberty. We're beginning to see that friction. For her, the Sputnik moment was ChatGPT — that was when she started to think hard about whether we were going to apply AI wrongly to democratic functions, whether we really want AI crafting every message by every politician, the profusion of fake imagery.

I've come to believe that maybe the most interesting political question in the United States is why the kids were booing at the commencements. If you could really dig into all the layers of that, one would learn a great deal.

Evan Osnos

The short answer is I don't see who that is at this point. Right now we're in a primordial soup period of American politics about what the Democratic Party will be, what the Republican Party will be after Trump, whether there's something else coming. And internationally — this is partly a reflection of my experiences in Europe earlier this year — there is a real feeling that the old world is over and that they have to look out for themselves now. That's disconcerting. It does not redound to China's benefit, particularly.

It's not an interregnum. It is a new normal, and that should be a bracing realisation. As I quote Bob Kagan in the story, there was a Mongol world order, an Islamic world order, an Egyptian world order, and then an American world order. We have to come to terms with what it looks like after that. And I should point out, because I really believe this: it does not mean shrugging and giving up on the values the United States has traditionally aspired to, even when it doesn't achieve them. We've never fully achieved them, but it's not the same to say we're giving up on the idea of them.

I'm conscious that we are, to use the obvious reference, in what Gramsci called the time of monsters — the old world is dying and the new cannot be born. You can't look at the world and disagree with that framing. But these periods don't last particularly long. They tend to give way to something.

Evan Osnos

Here's why I think it is: frankly, the United States is just too big economically, militarily and strategically to be rendered just another player on the board right now. And Trump's tenure is evidence of how much turbulence the United States can make. But I don't think any of us can responsibly predict where this comes out. That's the perfect place for us to wind around to, because one of my little ideas in this piece is that I'm writing something ostensibly about a vision of the future, and I come around to the idea that predictions are a mug's game. It is always folly to say here's where things are definitively going — and that doesn't make it any less tempting. Each of our systems, in our own ways, is trying desperately to do it. That's always been the imagined holy grail.

Evan Osnos

Thanks, man. It's been totally fun.

Evan Osnos

One person doing great work is Yi-Ling Liu, the author of The Wall Dancers. One of the things I like about her work is that she is grappling with these questions of scientism and humanism — I don't think she uses that terminology — and how these pieces are competing for resources and support and energy and leadership across national borders. She's a really interesting person to be reading right now.

And can I give you another? Another writer whose work I appreciate is Chang Che, who writes sometimes for The New Yorker and for The Guardian. He's been watching technological developments very closely, up against the coalface, creating history in real time.

Evan Osnos

I'd recommend a book by a young journalist in the United States, Theo Baker, called How to Rule the World. It's the extraordinary story of his experience at Stanford, where as a freshman student journalist he investigated the president of the university, and it led to the president's downfall over allegations of falsified research. He won the Polk Award, the youngest reporter ever to do so. The book is really about how this rising generation of bright students perceives its opportunities and obligations to society, in Palo Alto. It's an eye-opening book about technology, politics, money and oligarchy — many of the themes we've been talking about.

Evan Osnos

When you mentioned a Western, it reminded me — I do have one good fiction recommendation. I recently read True Grit by Charles Portis, which I'd never read before. It is splendid. As somebody who appreciates sentences, it's impossible not to read that and savour the way he puts dialogue on the page.

Evan Osnos

Likewise. Thanks, Kaiser. It's always great to chat.