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Breakneck— Dan Wang

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Introduction

Drive around America and China, on the other hand, and you’ll see people and places that are utterly deranged. That’s not a reproach. These two countries are messy in part because they are both engines for global change.

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.

As we sipped tea in his office after our tour, we chatted about why the United States was then mired in production difficulties, unable to make much of the personal protective equipment that people wanted. “American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.

6. Fortress China

“China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” Yiju told me one day. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”

Young people in Chiang Mai told me they’ve felt a quiet shattering of their worldviews over the decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. These are people who grew up in bigger cities and attended good universities, some of them overseas, which endowed them with certain expectations: that they could pursue meaningful careers, that society would gain greater freedoms, and that China would continue to be more integrated with the rest of the world. These aspirations have mostly shriveled. Though their lives in big cities can be quite pleasant, with new milk tea shops to try or art space to take selfies around, they work in jobs that are stressful and menial. They feel smothered by political controls. After the lockdowns, many of them grew aware that they had an unwelcome tendency to inflect every future scenario with a sense of catastrophe.

Not everyone has been thrilled with the move to Thailand, where they don’t foresee great job prospects.

There’s no question that Xi has tightened the country’s already limited space for free speech. Free thought is essential for the humanities and the social sciences. But I’m not so sure that it’s a necessary condition for the natural sciences, for very little in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and engineering is innately political.