The Chinese state builds gleaming public works and doesn’t flinch from locking up ethnic minorities or locking down whole cities. Too many outsiders see only the enrichment or the repression. Living there puts you face to face with both a sustained rise in living standards and authoritarian pulses emanating out of Beijing. It became no contradiction for me to appreciate the things that are getting better and getting worse. I saw how China is made up of both strong entrepreneurs and a strong government, with a state that both moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people.

Writers in particular have had a hard time dealing with the shock of working for months on a story only for censors to delete it hours after publication. The first time that happens you’re enraged, the second time you’re embittered, the third time you rùn.

Xi has talked about achieving national greatness without backing it up with economic growth. The trouble is that when people suffer— as they do through a property collapse, high unemployment, or lockdowns— they start to wonder what they are really getting. It’s certainly not enrichment. When they’re given a cold, hard smack in the face by something that certainly doesn’t feel like greatness, they become unmoored. This sense of alienation has been a big reason to rùn.

Xi’s question had produced fresh worry among businesses. Authoritarian systems aren’t good at disseminating bad news. The coronavirus had spread, after all, because local officials in Wuhan refused to let the news of a virus disturb their political serenity as they arrested medical whistleblowers. Companies and investors therefore wondered whether Xi was genuinely unaware of how much his policies had destroyed major segments of the economy. Perhaps nobody had told Xi that he was the most feared unicorn hunter of all.

Four decades after China liberalized, its contributions to global cultures are mostly confined to artistic fringes. It is because engineers didn’t know how to persuade. The Communist Party insists on a history in which the party is always correct and where all errors come from traitors or foreigners. Rather than acknowledge fault and tell persuasive stories, the instinct of the engineering state is simply to censor alternative narratives. Xi comes across as someone who is a little bit too eager for groveling respect from the rest of the world, which is exactly why he’ll never get it.