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.

Engineers are bad at several things. They’re not very good, for example, at producing appealing cultural products.

During the height of the pandemic, Xi declared that China needs to become more “loveable.” The country’s image had suffered as people around the world blamed China for the spread of the virus.

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.

Engineers can't take a joke. It’s hard for art to thrive in an atmosphere of political paranoia plus social control. Today, Chinese artists and writers have to follow socialist core values, which cannot carry a whiff of political criticism.

How is it that science can coexist with autocracy? Mostly, I believe, because the precondition for science is that abundant funds are far more critical to science than free speech, and that is something dictators can deliver.

Perversely, repression might encourage scientists to throw themselves still further into their work rather than paying attention to the rest of the world falling first around them. I don’t believe that autocracy is good for science, only that it doesn’t guarantee its destruction.