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Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.
Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Seneca Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the show and with the newsletter, please do consider lending your support.
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- The complete transcript of the show
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Today, my guest is Afra Wong. I suspect many of you will already have come across her work through her podcast, through appearances on other China-focused shows, or through the many provocative, beautifully written, and fascinating essays she’s published.
Afra is a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov.ai, and previously with the Roots of Progress Institute. Before going full-time as an independent writer last year, she spent six years in Silicon Valley covering AI and crypto, running newsrooms, building developer communities, and absorbing the Valley’s growth logic from the inside.
She writes about China and about Silicon Valley — the latter sometimes metaphorically — but about neither of these places ever as mere abstractions.
She writes about them as overlapping systems, how China’s technological interiority shows up in Western debates about AI, industrial policy, and even progress itself.
She’s also the host of the Chinese language podcast Pipei Jiao Wah, Cyber Pink, and part of the Baihua podcasting community.
We’re talking today about her recent Wired piece on what might be China’s most influential science fiction project that you’ve never heard of: the Morning Star of Ling Gao, or Ling Gao Qi Ming, and the worldview behind it, something known as the Industrial Party or the Gung Yedang.
If you haven’t read that yet, click the link, read the piece. It’s one of actually several China-focused pieces in this issue of the magazine — some really good stuff. Come back when you’ve finished. We will still be here.
This isn’t just going to be a conversation about time travel sci-fi — though that would be a lot of fun — but actually about:
- Interpretations of history
- Emotion
- The national story
- Power
About how a country explains to itself why it fell behind. and what it thinks salvation looks like.
Afra Wang, a very, very warm welcome to Seneca.
Oh, wow. Thank you so much, Kaiser.
When you were describing my work experiences, it’s almost like I’m reliving my past life, especially my time doing a lot of growth stuff for tech companies and crypto. And actually, I discovered the Morning Star of Ling Gao, or Ling Gao Qi Ming, as a collective science fiction novel writing project from my crypto phase.
Really?
Yeah. I was told by a lot of nerdy technologists, people who are Chinese cypherpunks, saying there is the greatest DAO experiment ever, which is a sci-fi story collectively written by many people, like hundreds of thousands of people. I was like, “wow, what do you mean?”
Because DAO in crypto represents decentralized, autonomous organization. Referring to this science fiction writing as a DAO experimentation is really fascinating. It also sort of reflects on the demographic — the people who are reading this story, right? Who are reading the Morning Star of Lingao? Who are reading Lingao Qiming? And it turns out to be:
- STEM people
- Technologists
- Developers
- Programmers
Yeah, not surprising at all. A lot of overlap with sci-fi.
But before we get into sci-fi and about that essay, this is your first time on the show, so I’d like to give listeners a chance to get to know you a bit better.
You describe yourself as a kind of cultural in-betweener, and that really resonates obviously with me. For people who move between China and the West, especially when writing about technology and about power, translation isn’t just a linguistic exercise. It’s actually epistemic, but it’s also moral and maybe even aesthetic. I mean, it covers pretty much all of philosophy.
One thing that struck me reading your essay is how effortlessly you seem to do this, just to kind of code switch, not just in language, but also in your moral and emotional register, especially when you’re writing about something as charged as the industrial party. Is that something you experience as deliberate, or does it feel almost second nature to you at this point?
I think probably I am a somewhat open-minded and perceiving person, so I don’t know, people have been telling me that I tend to kind of like be able to make friends with all kinds of people. I think that’s, in a sense, like a good trade for me to be a more discerning writer because I think I’m really sensitive to vibes.
Also, I like to use the vibe because this is how I feel. I’m really sensitive to the aesthetic, the sensations when I encounter something, for example, the Silicon Valley mental model versus the Hangzhou-Shenzhen-Beijing mental model, right? I was really fascinated by the sort of the cognitive infrastructure, like the intellectual backbone of the Chinese version.
So I, you know, last year I wrote something called the China Tech Canon, which is a response.
Yeah, that was great. Thank you so much.
Yeah, I think it’s like, it’s all come to the sense that I want to like deeply, contextually translate certain, you can say:
- lore
- myths
- mental frameworks
- cultural influences.
I want to translate something to the Western discourse, but in a much more like humanistic and personal way because I think I am somehow constantly digesting cultures from both sides. I am native in Chinese, but I feel really native in English as well, in the Silicon Valley discourse as well. So I think that I’m just kind of like naturally juggled in between.
Do you go the other direction as well? Do you translate the Silicon Valley kind of tech canon into Chinese as well? Or do you find yourself doing more sort of the explanation in the direction of explaining China to the West?
Yeah, so not about technology, but I’ve been doing this Chinese language podcast for many years with my amazing co-host. I think all of us are cultural in-betweeners and we actually translate the Western popular culture and then talk about those Western popular culture in Chinese language. You know, for example, the popular movie Hamnet is a golden global hit. And we recorded a podcast about Hamnet in Chinese language, but the whole context, the theme, and the reaction, the catharsis we experienced — we were basically discussing this movie in Chinese language, although it’s a quintessential English movie.
Yeah, I read the novel. I have not seen the movie yet. Is it good?
Oh, it’s absolutely good. It’s so moving. It’s very touching, and you do experience this Greek tragedy style catharsis at the very end because it’s like a movie to Force you to confront a lot of eternal questions like death, like loss. Like, yeah, it’s such a layered movie, I can’t really explain it. It’s beautiful. It absolutely changes some part, like, deepest part of you.
So do you ever find yourself judging things differently depending on which context you’re inhabiting? I mean, because, I mean, not because you think one side is right, but because, you know, different histories seem to demand different weights, different priorities. You know, I mean, this is something I’m constantly wrestling with.
How conscious is that process for you when you’re writing? So, you know, you might have one view of the industrial party, say, as a Chinese person living in China and another entirely looking at them from the outside and talking about that to Americans. So, do you find yourself sort of having different standards?
I think I do. I think I’ve been having double consciousness since I grew up as a kid in China. I have double consciousness in a sense that a lot of stuff can coexist although they look like contradict to each other but they could both be true.
Like, you know, in a sense I went through the whole Chinese education, right? I finished high school in China and then I only went to U.S. for college. And I think, I guess, like, accepting a lot of contradictory views and philosophies, as you said, abstemious knowledge systems is part of reality to me, I would say.
But I still think the Chinese Chinese me and English me or the sensible me and anxious immigrant me, when they’re coexisting, I think there is a converging aesthetic standards or sensibility that I uphold. For example,
- like, you know, when something is well-written, it is well-written, right?
- when a movie, when there’s a John E. Moe movie from the 1990s, when the international acclaim, it is good to me, right?
- Like, I wouldn’t denounce it because John E. Moe later turned into a state spectacle propagandist.
I think there is certain sensibilities and aesthetics that’s always true and always, I could always try to stay true to that.
Wow, that sounds so healthy and grounded. That’s fantastic. It seems like you experience this kind of ability to code switch and to experience sort of two whole different moral and epistemic systems as more of a freedom than a burden, then.
I would say so. Like, for example, this piece for Wired, it’s about Industrial Party, it’s about this poorly written, crowdsourced science fiction writing. I do not like reading this piece. I do not like reading this story at all because it’s so poorly written.
But at the same time, it gives this energy and spirit of what people are actually craving for in the rapidly developing, urbanizing China and why people feel so strongly about this developmentalism. And in a sense, maybe U.S. needs more poorly written collective science fiction like Lingao because U.S. right now kind of needs some industrial party people.
I mean, I hate the story. I hate the, you know, like the greatest Chinese science fiction as the title of this Wired piece is actually an irony, right? It’s not actually greatest because it’s like honestly really bad, but it speaks to so many things that I, yeah.
We’re going to get really deep into Ling Gao in just a second here, but there are a couple other things I still want to ask you about because there’s another divide that I see you moving across really fluently and that’s the one between STEM and the humanities, between, you know, the engineering ways of seeing the world and the more humanistic or cultural ways of seeing the world.
So reading your work, I get the sense that you’re genuinely at home in both of these registers. You’re able to translate between them without, you know, romanticizing the one or condescending to the other. Is that, again, something that you’re conscious of when you’re writing or does it feel like a natural part of, you know, how you make sense of tech and society?
I’m not sure if I’m really fluent in the STEM language. First, I am not a technologist. I don’t code except, you know, like right now, live coding makes everything easier. Everyone’s doing that.
Yeah, everyone’s doing it. Not me.
Yeah, I honestly don’t think I speak the KPI coded language, like optimizing everything, improve everything, because I do have a lot of friends that are like that, but I do think working in tech company gives me a sense that an entire corporation, like hundreds of people could just like grind really hard, iterate the product really hard just to like improve
- 2% of user retention or
- 1% of daily active user
because I’ve been there and… I was one of the people who were trying really hard to retain users, study the users, or try to improve the recommendation algorithm, so our app has more revenue that day. You can see this is all correlated, right? I was a content manager, a growth manager during my first job. When you put out a certain content or adjust the algorithm a little bit, there’s an instant bump in your revenue that day. It’s almost like it’s extremely correlated.
If you spend more money on Facebook’s advertisement, you will just get more new users. It is so direct in the tech world, and I do think I understand that eagerness or straightforwardness in the tech landscape.
This divide, though, between the STEM view and the humanities view, do you feel like that divide is even more acutely felt in Chinese life than in the Western context? I mean, the gap between the engineering dude and the artsy fartsy literati type—do you think that’s an outdated caricature by this point, or is that still something very much a dividing line in Chinese life?
I think China’s society logic was dictated by the STEM optimization logic, or like industrialization logic for a long time until the young people are so tired, people are so tired, and then this sort of optimizing bubble bursted.
So back then, maybe 10 years ago, optimizing everything — trying hard. There was an internet slang for people trying too hard, trying to get promoted, make a lot of money during the economic boom — during the Chinese economic boom and internet attack boom. This was admirable.
But right now, this bubble bursted, so people proactively do not want to participate, such as Nuli lore, Nuli fairy tales. Instead, you see China’s today’s mainstream sentiment is:
- How to lay flat
- How to dodge more work
- How to interact with your demanding boss without being fired
- How to still get paid but do less job
This is the current mainstream. I would say China is a post-industrial party society now.
Oh, good, good. I’ll feel more at home there because I’m a good old Gen X slacker, so I know all about avoiding work.
I mean, it’s interesting to me because I feel like I agree. There used to be a period where one side of that divide was absolutely treated as:
- more legitimate
- more serious
- more responsible
- naturally the steward of China’s future
and the other was just written off. But yeah, I’m glad to see this swinging back.
Before we get into what Lingao represents, I think it’s worth situating it a bit. For listeners outside China, it’s almost completely unknown, as you said. How widely known is it inside China, especially among communities that care about:
- technology
- history
- national development?
Is this like a cult classic or is it something closer to shared cultural infrastructure?
I don’t think it’s widely known as a popular cultural product like a movie or Journey to the West. This is basically the most common vernacular day-to-day language.
But I think Lingao is very popular, very influential in a niche community. This community itself is what I would say the elite class of technologists, the STEM people who see themselves as pillars of China’s urbanization and industrialization, and predominantly male.
So Lingao, to be completely honest, strikes me as a semi-misogynist, misogynist novel because a lot of plots imply many things towards women.
But Lingao is a cult fetish. It is a Bible for the industrial party, this loosely connected intellectual group in China.
Yeah, I definitely want to ask you about the gendered nature of this book and about science fiction more broadly. I remember reading Senti, Three Body Problem and just being shocked. There’s stuff you could not get away with in America today, just the level of misogyny that was in there.
But how did you come across it yourself? You told me that you heard about it from Crypto Bros in the Valley, right?
Yes. Chinese Crypto Bros. I heard it from Chinese Crypto Bros.
Yeah, that’s hysterical.
What finally got you to read the thing? I mean, what did it just keep coming? And before you actually surfed over to it, what did you think it was? What kind of reputation did it have in your mind before you actually read a page?
I actually didn’t know anything except it is like a DAO experiment. It is a crowdsourced sci-fi lore. And like, to be honest, when I read anything that’s Chinese internet native, I tend to have lower expectations because I know some of the products, some of, especially those fiction writing stuff, is almost like Harry Potter fanfic, right?
It’s not written by J.K. Rowling herself, but written by the fans who just spend an afternoon, put a lot of scrappy plots together, and then you have a fanfic. So I tend to treat Ling Gao as an interesting phenomenon, like a part of the deeper corner of the Chinese intellect as a lore instead of as a serious science fiction. So I kind of had a lower expectation entering this novel.
And it turned out to be, yes, it is very scrappy. It was written by so many people to the point they started collectively writing it since 2006. And then people just keep writing and piling up and piling up.
A few years later, people were like:
“Okay, now we have too many things. Like the plots are going to multiple directions. We need to sort of come up with a kinetical plot together.”
So someone came up and compiled the storylines together, which creates the sort of, quote-unquote, kinetical Ling Gao timeline as we see today. But you can guess the nature of collaboration is:
- If this person is free, this person can be in charge of this part of the chapter.
- If that person is actually creative, then that person can start a newer plot about building a chemical factory in Ling Gao.
- Some female writers joined later and wrote a lot about gender issues.
- Some history people later joined and wrote about the Ming dynasty bureaucratic system.
There are thousands and thousands of different branches. When I was reading it, I couldn’t really tell which part is the kinetical story and which part is the fanfic back then. But because it’s well written, it’s sort of merged into the kinetical.
Is it because they’re all very put together and scrappy? It doesn’t read a thoughtful thing but reads like a collective stream of consciousness. There are these people who did the actual organizing, who actually decided what is canon and what is sort of peripheral.
What do we know about these people, about these principal writers? Who are they? What kinds of backgrounds do they come from?
They all use pseudonyms online, but we know some phenomenon writers sort of emerged out of the Ling Gao scene, later became the influencers or the writers for Guancha Zhe Wang (观察者网). And Guan Cha Zheu Wang is inseparable from Ling Gao’s collective writing.
Give us a sense of what Guan Cha Zheu Wang is. I mean, they have a certain political slant, a certain reputation. Why don’t you explain what Guan Cha Zheu is?
Okay, so in the Wired piece, I told the readers that Guan Cha Zheu Wang is almost like Chinese breadboard, but I think it’s less like breadboard because it doesn’t punch up. It kind of only punches west.
So Guancha isn’t that up though?
Yeah, so it is, I would argue, a more thoughtful patriotic or nationalistic collective online magazine delivering a lot of pro-industrial policy, pro-state opinion pieces, and some of the pieces are quite persuasive.
You know, I used to be a reader of Guancha when I was in college. Guancha reached its peak in the early 2010s. The founder himself, Eric Lee, I think he studied at UC Berkeley.
Yeah, I think he was the same year as me, in fact.
I see, I see. Yeah, he studied at UC Berkeley. It seems like he made a lot of money and he sort of diverted his money into this collective intellectual body building and started Guan Cha Zheu Wang.
It’s like a think tank and online publication, but it really represents a cohort of writers who, just like Ling Gao, have a strong stamp background, very pro-China, very pro-industrialization, and very anti-West.
And early on, a lot of their pieces are similar to a little bit like today’s narrative on how to establish a strong national, industrial national identity, and unapologetically loving China and being patriotic.
Yeah, so it’s very, how to say, very rad, very internet native. I would argue they’re very internet native because all of them know how to talk. They’re actually… Really good writers. You know, I mean, Eric X. Lee, the person who’s really sort of at the heart of it, as you say, you see Berkeley graduate and a venture capitalist of some success, very, very wealthy guy. He, in fact, is very well-spoken and quite persuasive in some quarters. You know, he has this famous TED talk in English. I agree. You know, he gets this gigantic standing ovation from him. I’ve described him before as sort of the first sword of China apology. He’s very gifted, I mean, in that sense. Yeah.
Let’s get back to the 共业党. Yeah. You know, it’s often spoken of in juxtaposition to the so-called 秦华党, which I’ve seen translated variously as the sentiment or the sentimental party. Does this 秦华党 actually have a representative online novel or a body of literature associated with it, you know, like we see with Lin Gao or is this just a straw man? Is it a real thing even?
I think 秦华党, if I understand correctly, is like the basically the civic space existed once on Chinese internet and I would say they no longer exist. I can say Chai Jing would be seen as a 秦华党 by industrial party standard because Chai Jing is this Chinese journalist who would make a documentary about air pollution, you know, she would Under the Dome. Yeah, Under the Dome. Like she would make a lot of influential documentary or journalistic pieces to remind people that the human cost of China’s rapid development load, you know, she would care about the migrant workers’ rights. She would care about the people who are dislocated because of the deformation of the city, because of the reconstruction of the city. Xi would, you know, care about air quality, right? Yeah.
So anything that’s been negatively affected or left behind by China’s headlong rush toward industrialization, right? Yeah, I would say that both the party and industrial party, I mean, industrial party doesn’t have the power to purge the sentimental party or, you know, the humanistic, the free journalist, the China’s civil civic space, but industrial party justifies for the state to marginalize and purge what they call sentimental party.
But I think sentimental party is actually a core part of my formative experience because I was growing up in China where the internet was a place to discuss real things from political reform to rule of laws to freedom expression to many things. I remember reading a lot of absolutely brilliant investigative reports about
- coal mine abuse
- labor rights
- construction companies not properly paying those illiterate migrant workers.
I remember reading so many great stories about the one-child policy, about how this one town in China has forged some ties to systematically trade female babies to have them adopt in the U.S. A lot of the stories like this couldn’t exist in today’s China because of the demise of a sentimental party, because of the state’s effort of eradicating them.
So the industrial party in a sense doesn’t have any real political power, but I think they are a collective unconsciousness of the regime, of what CCP really prioritized or really think about.
Just to be clear, when you eradicated them, it’s not like they were rounded up and locked up. You’re talking about censorship, you’re talking about all sorts of different lawfare efforts, pressures to, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, when I was in high school, when I was in middle school, I could go on Weibo and read about Han Han’s pro-democracy essays, and those are really bold, quite fundamentally radical essays, if you see them now. I would be reading Chatter 08, written by Liu Xiaobo. I would be reading a lot about Arab Spring. I mean, a lot of the content sort of existed inside of the Great Firewall. It’s a beautifully diverse, chaotic, steaming, intellectual space. I kind of grew up in this internet.
People in those internet forums seriously talk about civic stuff, seriously talking about can China have a political reformation in the future? Because those possibilities were so real back then.
I think when you talk about the industrial party, you need to sort of dial your clock back to the 2000s and 2010s, it was because the tension between sentiment party versus industrial party were really real. I wrote in the piece, I think the signature event was the Wenzhou high-speed rail crash, the train wreck. I still remember vividly where I was that day and how I felt because I was about to board the high-speed rail from Beijing because the high-speed rail finally because I grew up in Shanxi.
Shanxi is an economically backward… Province, so I was really excited to see Taiyuan finally had a high-speed rail connecting to Beijing.
Instead of staying in the old train to take an overnight train to go to Beijing, you can actually spend only three hours to go to Beijing now.
Beijing as a cosmopolitan city, in my mind back then as a high schooler, it’s so close by to me, I can just go there. I was so excited and then the story burst out about the terrible train wreck in Wenzhou.
- 50 people died.
I remember there was a huge debate online about who was guilty, right? Like, where is the weakest link in this? If you dig way back in the Seneca archive to July or maybe August of 2011, you’ll find the show that we did about that.
Yeah, so I remember back then, all the public intellectuals were still active, their other accounts are still not banned. So a lot of people online writing lengthy articles or posting online about the liability of the authority that didn’t have a proper monitoring system.
And so basically, the thing is because a certain signal was missed, two high-speed rail trains basically crashed face-to-face. It was basically a pure human mistake. It was because a certain message didn’t send to the other side, so the tragedy happened. It was pure human mistake.
But anyways, I remember so many people writing about it online and there’s this one piece basically crying for China to slow down. And it was like,
“slow down China, wait for people.”
Implies don’t let such bloody train crashes happen again because this is a price we cannot afford just to aimlessly progress.
And this is a moment when industrial party people came and then they took the stage. They organized a systematic rebuttal against the humanistic sort of pro-slowdown discussion.
Because the industrial party intellectuals have a lot of advantages for knowing so much industrial knowledge because they are the ones building a lot of Chinese infrastructure. For example, I featured this one intellectual, his name is Ma Qianzu, one of the authors.
- He’s one of the authors of the Lingao story.
- He is a bridge engineer, right?
- So he really knows infrastructure, not just from a witnessing perspective, but he is the engineer, he is the builder.
So the industrial party people organized a big rebuttal and they systematically published many articles to not justify this accident but saying we should take this accident seriously, but this shouldn’t be the reason for China to slow down its building on the high-speed railway infrastructure.
And yes, I think the industrial party and the development logic won in the debate and so the result is China didn’t slow down.
I mean, like I think retrospectively if it slowed down maybe China wouldn’t have such a convenient, vast, amazing network of high-speed rail today. But I think back then if China should develop was a real and very visceral and painful question to confront.
A lot of people’s idea is no, we really shouldn’t progress like this:
- Cities being demolished
- People being forced to relocate
- Factory workers suffering from poor conditions
Like, are we, like, why are we allowing ourselves to be the colony for development?
But I think right now we’re basically sitting in the future to meditate on the dispute and one could say of course development is China’s thing, is what China always wanted.
But no, like, you know, there are people strongly against a lot of things the government proposed. There are people interesting to ponder that alternative.
Yeah, but that’s what this itself is — it’s a, you know, Lingao itself is pondering an alternative.
Now I haven’t read it myself, not one bit of it, I’m probably not going to, but I’m hoping you can give us kind of a controlled spoiler.
So a wormhole opens to 1628 from our present, or from the present of the time you know, 10 years ago when they were writing this.
So how does the alternate timeline then unfold? What kind of society do these guys end up building in Hainan? How different does it end up looking from our own history? How much do they change history in this project, in the book?
Yes, so okay. So reading this book is very interesting because the plot evolves as the people who write the story evolve. So like, and also a lot of the writers would write themselves in. The story features a captain—like a captain of the ship that would transport the 500 time travelers back to the Ming dynasty. The captain himself, his real name and real-life nickname, became known as Captain as well. At a certain point, the boundaries between past and present, fictional and reality, kind of blurred.
The same happens with Ma Qian Zu himself. He is one of the main people in the novel. So, it’s Qian Zu and Qian Zu—they almost spell the same in Pinyin, but one is Ma Qian Zu and the other implies humbleness. Ma Qianzu means you stand next to the horse to serve, but fictional Ma Qianzu is arrogant. You are Qianzu: you can see a thousand miles away. Zu means seeing.
I think things like this are very interesting. The basic premise starts from a simple thought experiment: what if you can travel back to the Ming dynasty with modern knowledge and equipment? People started writing about it without character building or discussion. The first 30 chapters are all about people getting together to think about what equipment they should bring to the Ming dynasty.
You will see this laborious preparation list, almost like the list a very organized person writes when packing for a long trip. People spend 30 chapters to prepare for this list.
Then, around chapter 37, people finally get together to board the ship that will take them to Ling Gao. You also see this immense obsession with details:
- How to keep the ship safe from Ming dynasty coastal guards
- What kind of soil Ling Gao county had 400 years ago
- The geography: was it a deep-water pier, deep-water port, or shallow-water port?
- Transporting heavy materials
- Details about geology and soil chemistry
- Natural resources available in Ling Gao back then
- Ming dynasty guards present in Hainan
- Risks of Japanese pirate attacks
They conduct serious, detailed risk assessments. It’s really first principles thinking—almost like an action manual. If you really had a wormhole to travel to the Ming dynasty, you could simply follow it.
This is because a lot of the knowledge is factual. Professional people research and fact-check it themselves and each other in a peer review process ensuring scientific accuracy. People are thinking about how to bootstrap an industrial revolution on this island—what do we need?
- People
- Resources
But, let’s get to my question: how far do they take it? Are we talking decades of institutional development, or does it mostly stay in an early building and consolidation phase? Do they change history profoundly? Do we even know what history looks like now as a result of the changes they make?
The story kind of progresses as the current time progresses, I would say. Everything stays in the Ming Dynasty—there is no fast forward to the Qing Dynasty or the Republic period. The time flow of the Ming Dynasty basically matches today’s pace.
Because the story has been written for about 20 years, a lot has changed:
- Female servants start earning for their own workers
- Stories about certain political reforms
- People leave the Linggao Island to travel to the mainland and interact with Ming officials
There are also plots, like some fanfic, which are not part of the main story:
- People travel from Linggao County to North America
- They colonize North America, specifically the area of today’s Boston
- They see huge opportunities in the New World and decide to colonize the East Coast
There is also a story plot that diverges from the main story that… people ended up colonizing Australia, and they formed a huge sort of empire, almost like a British empire. In the 19th century, they forged a huge Linggao Australian empire across Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. The north part would be like Linggao county, like Hainan and Taiwan. Yeah, so like crazy stuff, really crazy stuff.
But what really strikes me about this, as you’ve described it, is this is an alternate history that doesn’t imagine salvation through new ideas, or a moral awakening, or the scientific revolution necessarily, but actually just through kind of competence, and very specifically through technological, technical competence.
There’s this like obsessive attention to getting the tech tree right, like:
- What materials come first
- Which tools unlock different forms of production
- How you get the logistics and the energy systems
It’s just like precise accumulation step by step, as you’ve described. But alongside that, there’s also, I guess, as you talked about in your piece, this kind of unglamorous work of building institutions that can sustain these capabilities over time.
They’ve thought through a lot it seems, seen that way. Linggao feels less like escape fiction and more like a thought experiment about governance and about why technocratic instincts have such appeal to China.
Let me ask about this because there’s this framework explicitly in academic terms. We usually talk about the Needham question and about things like Ken Pomerantz in his book The Great Divergence. These are ways of explaining why industrialization took off in Europe rather than in China when China seemed quite ready for it in some measures, by the Song dynasty.
We had the capability to do mass mechanized production in some ways. But again, I haven’t read it, but reading your essay and the broader discourse around the industrial party, it feels like this community has its own implicit theory of history.
How would you characterize the industrial party’s answer to the Needham question? What do they seem to think actually mattered in producing the divergence that we saw, that Pomerantz describes?
I think, I got educated in China. I think the sort of national scar, the hundred years of humiliation that China left behind, didn’t modernize until the European powers kicked your ass. Then China started industrialization.
This part of history has always been a sort of a collective scar, a wound, a true wound basically, among everyone that I know who received primary education in China.
Alternatively envisioning a China that started to modernize, started to industrialize at the pace of the European counterparts has always been, I think, a psychological comforting thought experiment.
I also noticed that sometimes the national consciousness in Linggao’s plot is really weak. Of course, it is a big part of almost like a salvation porn or like salvation.
“That’s a good way to talk about it: salvation porn.”
Part of it is salvation porn, but I realized a big part of it is the joy of meticulously planning everything itself. To the engineers, building itself is very joyful; it is beautiful, it is satisfying.
Because I observed this among not just Chinese engineers but among a lot of the western engineers that I’m friends with. They love YouTube channels like Primitive Technology. It is literally an Australian man using mud to build all sorts of tools from zero.
It seems like engineers really enjoy this sheer ability to transform the surroundings with the scientific knowledge they possess in their mind. It seems like totally my dad.
Like homo sapiens seems to us like we’re homo sapiens. We seem to really enjoy thinking about our ability to transform our surroundings.
I mentioned Robinson Crusoe. I think Robinson Crusoe is like the 18th-century Primitive Technology YouTube channel.
“For sure, for sure.”
When I was a kid, I obsessed with this book because I constantly imagined myself being this all-powerful human being, like going into a savage island and humanizing and civilized a place by my sheer intelligence, by the modern advanced knowledge I possess. And I think, thinking about this, it’s not just Li Gong Dan; it’s also Western engineers. I know, it’s also you, it’s also me. Very interesting, right? It’s like reading this makes you happy.
Seeing the primitive technology YouTube videos makes me calm. Like, I think as a hunter-gatherer, like offspring of a hunter-gatherer society, human being, I found this psychologically safe.
So I think a big part of Ling Gao’s dopamine hit comes from writing about technology and planning itself, writing about building the civilization itself, other than national, yeah, right, for sure.
I get that. I get that for sure. There’s something about—I mean, it’s a flex, you know? They get to show, look how I understand the very fundaments of the technologies that I deal with. But there’s also something like this kind of inherited historical vulnerability at work here.
You know what you talked about, this century of humiliation thing. I mean, not a grievance in a narrow sense, but just kind of a memory of how badly things can go, you know, when state capacity falters.
So I wonder, in addition to this satisfying kind of, you know, tech just tech qua tech, there is—I wonder if there’s this kind of implicit never again embedded in the discourse, you know? Not just about foreign domination but also about chaos, about fragmentation, about, you know, loss of national agency, right? I mean, that’s in there too. I wonder if that appeals to you as well.
I agree. I agree. I think this, we should memorize that engineering and industrialization and urbanization are the true things that truly gave the Chinese nation power. Like we shall engrave this in our bowl.
I think this is part of the message the Ling Gao Qiming Morning Star of Ling Gao has been sort of projecting. And it reminds me of—so there’s a scholar whose name is Wang Xiaodong, you’re probably familiar with, yeah, of course, who wrote, I think in 2009, China is Unhappy. I remember it was a big intellectual sensation.
Like he is the one who coined the term industrial party. So in this article that he coined the term industrial party, he stated very clearly that—I actually want to read this—he stated really clearly that:
“We must never envy the finance Hollywood, the Grammys, and NBA of the West. We would rather forge iron and smelt copper and let the Americans sing and dance for us because forging iron and smelting copper is the true—this is where true power lies.”
And I think this is a big—this basically crystallizes industrial party’s salvation arc, which is it is the industrial capability that made China powerful so other people couldn’t kick our ass again.
The true power, the true international strength that European countries wouldn’t bully us, like America and Japan wouldn’t bully us, is because now we can forge iron and melt copper. It is not because we can sing or dance, it’s not because we care about social welfare, it’s because we can build stuff.
I think industrial party has such a clarity about the importance of engineering and industrial knowledge.
I want to quickly shout out Fred Gall, who actually wrote another essay right after yours came out, and it happened that the very day that I read yours right away suddenly in my inbox there was Fred’s Substack. And he had actually written about it as well, and you know he definitely helped me to get oriented with this.
But what you’ve just described, it’s engineering then becomes an act of patriotism, right? It becomes synonymous with patriotism. Building is loving your country, and that connection seems to be quite explicit in the whole industrial party discourse.
I mean, building itself becomes a moral act. It takes on moral weight, which is a really interesting worldview.
Fred also frames this though in his writing as a generational revolt, especially against earlier, maybe more literary or humanistic modes of thinking about China, the China that you maybe described when we worried about the cost, we worried about the human cost.
I mean, it doesn’t describe this hostility exactly, but a sense of that those ways of talking had become just kind of unmoored from material reality.
So there is this tension between the When Yi Ching Nian phase and the Li Gong Nan dominance phase.
And, but I want to get to this gendered layer here that feels really important for me to acknowledge—that this industrial party worldview, this whole emphasis on engineering on… Discipline on technical mastery that to me feels very gendered in terms of who speaks with authority, what kinds of traits are valorized.
You’re somebody who identifies as a feminist and you work very fluently across technical and cultural domains. How do you read that gendered dimension to that, who gets to imagine the future in these narratives?
I think first of all Ling Gao Qiming itself is a piece of historical record because I think the collective writing process peaked maybe during 2011 to 2015, and this is the internet before China’s feministic awakening. So I would say certain feministic consciousness hasn’t arrived in China yet.
So Ling Gao Qiming is in a sense a product of its time — a pre-feminist cultural product — and people just really don’t have a lot of tools or instruments or frameworks to criticize it.
Just like a lot of women writers would participate in writing, they would probably feel extremely uncomfortable but they couldn’t name why they feel uncomfortable. But now, retrospectively looking at this text, looking at these primary sources, it is very much misogynistic.
It’s just like how much Liu Zixing’s Three-Body Problem feels extremely misogynistic when you’re reading in Chinese.
I mean Ken Liu did a great job in removing a lot of the poorly written female parts, it’s still in there, yeah, yeah. But you know like there’s definitely some plots in Liu Zixing’s work that would be like:
“Oh, you’re a woman but how can you listen to Bach, this German composer, like because Bach is such a representation of rationality, a rational music. How can women appreciate this beautiful, high class, high broad rational music?”
You know, such plots permit Lin Gao and the first 500 pioneers — like a very small group of them are women, predominantly men. And I think the made revolution is the part which is really fascinating because Lin Gao basically operates in the semi-military structure where the resource needs to be centrally planned and allocated to people.
It is a techno-authoritarian society where it’s also a little bit like plutocracy. I would say people who possess the most engineering knowledge have a better social status.
So at the time, there is this distribution of:
- female domestic servants
- some low status engineers
- some laborers who didn’t get female servants.
These people are very unhappy. I mean, they’re all fictional plots by the way, and those plots are the incels of Linggao — the single people from Linggao.
In the sense of domestic servants are also, you know, sex slaves, which is not being explicitly said but later you will see this Linggao society operating as a semi-feudal but techno-authoritarian style political structure.
Later, they recognize that:
- “Oh, you kind of need to give your female servants better hygiene.”
- “You need to give them better training in different things.”
- “You need to teach them how to read and write.”
- “You give them time discipline.”
This is all part of the modernization process.
China’s modernization success depends on female workers in the factory, so Linggao is like:
“Okay, if we’re rational enough to truly industrialize Hainan, to truly industrialize Ming dynasty, we shall truly give the female servants proper treatment, so we can properly…”
So it’s basically all rational, not like:
- “Oh, we love women.”
- “We want to respect them.”
It’s not moral—it’s rational.
So it’s rational for the Linggao community to progress to a female-male equality scenario, and then this is basically a historical fatalistic direction instead of out of, you know, humanitarian concern or out of cuteness or moral goodness.
Wow, there’s just so much to plumb here, and it’s sort of the theory of history that underpins this that I’m particularly interested in. Maybe I will at some point take a crack at this thing. I’ll be good for my Chinese anyway.
So let me shift a little way away from Linggao here.
I do want to bring it back in frame but this book Breakneck, by Dan Wong, which is one of the most talked about books of 2025. Dan, of course, as you know, describes China as an engineering state.
I mean, listening to you talk about Linggao and the industrial party, that phrase starts to feel less like an abstraction and more like an actual lived… Worldview, right? Does that framing resonate with how you understand what Linggao is imagining, or does it miss something important?
You have this book club where you have been talking about, reflecting on Chinese language discussions of Breakneck. You know, it’s called What? Reading Breakneck in China.
Yeah, reading Breakneck from China.
Right, right.
One thing that struck me in your book club reflections—I’ll link to that because you’ve written about it on your Substack—is that Chinese language discussions about that book seemed less surprised by that framing than English language ones.
So, I mean, did the idea of an engineering state feel like any kind of a revelation to Chinese readers, or more like seeing something familiar finally given a name?
I really appreciate Dan’s framing. I think Dan’s framing is at least to better capture certain reality in China. I honestly think the democratic versus autocratic binary is not helpful anymore. Like, if you look at the US, what’s democratic about the US, right?
I know a few Chinese, China-focused scholars who used to study the authoritarian regime of China and now all sort of pivot to study the US authoritarian term.
You know, I honestly think Dan’s framework can somehow better explain the reality and better get to the point. It’s really helpful, it’s really instrumentally helpful.
And then, according to Dan, he tends to be playful with this framework. He’s like not 100% serious about it, doesn’t want to challenge the status quo of democracy versus autocracy. But yeah, I’m going to borrow that cop-out from him.
I’m just being playful here, I’m not really—it’s a way to not commit completely, right? I mean, that playful is—it doesn’t have like, you know, we have generations of scholars studying authoritarian systems, right? But like in a sense, I don’t think Dan wants to challenge that.
I think he comes up with this framework just to better explain today’s China and today’s US.
Yeah, I think I do appreciate this framework, and I think the engineering state captures a lot of the developmental, the knee-jerking intuition for the Chinese society as well as the party’s industrial policy.
I think the industrial party ideology is reflected by the CCP itself as well, and I would argue this industrial development is the priority spirit, is a collective unconsciousness among so many powerful people, so many decision makers in China.
For example, Xi Jinping mentioned the new productivity force. I think new quality forces of production is very industrial party coded—it’s because this implies that China’s economy is stagnating; the growth is that as we don’t have the prosperity like the growth like before, how do we solve this problem?
Okay, let’s shift to this magical new productivity, new quality productivity force. Let’s do more engineering, let’s upgrade our engineering so problems could be solved.
I think there is this industrial party-coded naivety or innocence in it, and then I think a big part of the CCP’s decision makers still think they can engineer a lot of problems away. But in reality, it’s not true anymore because the industrial party itself has a lot of intellectuals start to have their own reckoning on a lot of China’s problems, and then they realize that a lot of problems couldn’t be engineered away.
So, Dan Wong’s book, do you feel like it hits differently between English and Chinese audiences when it comes down to their different lived experiences? How would you, if you had to sum up the difference between how your Chinese friends—many of them have maybe not spent time in the West—how that hits differently?
A lot of people are overly obsessed with if China is a real engineering state. For example, they would argue:
- If the Chinese authority are engineering minded, why would they do stupid things like zero COVID, right?
- Because zero COVID is essentially a political power test.
- It is an obedience test — it’s really about whether the officials are following the ultimate order from the overlord instead of rationally thinking about what COVID is and how should we deal with it.
So a lot of the Chinese language readers who are living in China would be dissatisfied with Dan’s engineering state verdict, because they would argue like, you know:
- Not a lot of CCP officials are actually stemmed from… Trained background like maybe Ding Shui is the only one who had an engineering degree, but none of the people from the Politburo are serious engineers in their career. So, people were overly obsessed with this, but I think I agree with Dan’s framework because I think engineering states basically summarize China’s logic. A lot of internal logic is like that.
I tend to think it’s very useful to accept it in a sort of provisional and playful sense. But there’s this irony I keep coming back to: it feels like it’s only just in the last year or so that many Americans have really fully become aware of the scale of China’s industrial might or industrial power in China.
Yet, in our conversation, it sounds like the industrial party worldview—the whole framework that helped articulate and legitimize this push from within China, this crazy breakneck, engineering-driven mentality—is already losing some of its explanatory force in China. It’s weird that Americans are only starting to believe this is the case at the moment when the industrial party logic has lost or is losing its grip.
I don’t think the industrial party logic has lost its grip in China. I’m pretty sure a lot of the industrial policy decision makers still very much adhere to the industrial party logic:
- “This development has solved everything, so let’s just keep building, building, building.”
But the intellectuals who were part of the industrial party movement in the early 2010s, I think they’re starting to suffer from China’s declining economy and, say, COVID. For example, Ma Qianzhu himself, an influencer in China with two million followers on Bilibili, is a very articulate writer. But his account was banned because he voiced certain issues during COVID. Ma Qianzhu himself got cancelled by the state even though he used to support everything for the state.
This brings us to the irony where the industrial party people, the engineers themselves, are very smart and aware of certain societal issues like:
- The slow burn of the Chinese real estate collapse
- Demographics
- The 996 work culture
- Care work
- The housing crisis
- Youth unemployment
- Meaning itself
These issues don’t necessarily yield to the logic of industrialism.
I’m curious about Fred Gao—I don’t know if you know him personally, but I’ve met him in Beijing. He’s a really nice guy and has been explicit about moving away from the industrial party orbit over time.
I wonder if this is a personal evolution or symptomatic of a broader shift in discourse. I think for many industrial party intellectuals, it feels like a personal evolution. They have kind of grown out of the industrial party phase. I would say they lost their innocence in believing engineering could solve everything. It’s not a magic potion.
Mai Tienzo himself definitely took some hits in life to realize that his youth was starry-eyed and innocent about many things. It’s called growing up. A lot of people I know had that kind of super faith in technology early on, and anything that didn’t surrender to the hard logic of mathematics and engineering was just worthless. They’d ask, “Why bother reading novels? You should be reading that kind of thing.”
People grow up, right?
It’s really funny because within the crypto community, I also met a lot of rational engineers—people who hang out in the rationalist forum community. I see them growing up as well, starting to learn that:
- Culture is upstream of engineering, product, implementation
- Culture is upstream of institution
- You can only understand culture to actually change society
I see them also sort of grow out of this obsessive, almost purity phase.
It’s funny like my tensile right now, he speaks out. A lot about the child supply, and he speaks out about local government debts and certain central-local relations. He also has an absolutely descending voice during COVID. Well, I mean, it’s comforting to know that it’s still possible for people to change.
Yeah, let’s go for one final question just to wrap this all up about what Lingao tells us about China today. If someone wants to understand contemporary China—not the politics necessarily, or the policies, or the political imagination—what should they take away from the Lingao phenomenon? What does it tell us about how China thinks about:
- time
- failure
- the future
What’s your big bottom line takeaway?
A big thing that tells us is maybe stories like Lingao are worth more attention. In a sense, it’s a more grassroots Senti—a Three Body Problem that’s more widely accessible. In a sense, it’s an egalitarian Liu Cixin collective building process. Like, you know, Three Body Problem’s Liu Cixin is representative, but I think Senti maybe speaks more to the unpolished, the authentic, the grassroots, the organic aspect of these things.
For me, reading Lingao is such a journey. It introduced me to knowledge I never really thought about. Part of the Industrial Party I constantly laughed about during the peak of their debate in the early 2010s: they constantly laugh at this humanistic journalist who would complain about the suffocating urban life and want to escape to the forest. As long as this journalist can take a hot shower and have access to the internet, the Industrial Party would laugh at this fantasy.
This escapist imagination ignored the infrastructure it needs to have a hot shower and wifi connection. The Industrial Party deeply advocates for the invisible wires buried in the ground. They advocate for the pipes that transmute the hot water to this escapist little Eden garden. This humanistic journalist would imagine oneself to be like this, but Industrial Party people are really making a lot of the invisible stuff visible to me.
In the process of US re-industrialization, such knowledge is revealing because I used to take hot water and electricity for granted. Then I learned that’s not true. China’s electricity supply is top of the world right now—the high voltage grids, convenient industrial basis—everything to fuel China’s innovation.
Yeah, I think Industrial Party really gives me certain knowledge that humbles me because I could be that ignorant humanistic journalist complaining about urban life. I want to take a hot shower in the forest and don’t reply emails, but I still want wifi. I could completely ignore the infrastructures—that’s like the iceberg under the ocean.
Yeah, I think, in a sense, Lingao is a textbook for me to learn about the industrial process at its very first principle. It’s not fun to read but also fun to read. That’s really an interesting take. I gotta wonder what these guys today would think of Li Ziqi.
I mean, you know, for those of you who know, Li Ziqi is a very, very popular video blogger, huge on YouTube and stuff like that. This woman is very attractive, who left her life in the city to go home and take care of her aging parents or grandmother in the countryside in Sichuan, and has made this enormous following because she’s so good. On the one hand, she sounds so far like that kind of journalist who wanted to flee as long as there were hot showers and internet.
But this woman also has mad skills. I mean, she crafts, she does, she’s a good asset on, you know, Hainan Island in 1628 for these guys because she knows how to build stuff, how to make stuff, and all these traditional crafts. I wonder what they would make of somebody like her.
She embodies, on the one hand, both what they don’t like and what they very desperately need.
Oh yeah, I think if I were a Lingao writer, if I were part of the Engineering Party, I would salute Li Ziqi because if I were them, I would meticulously break down the amount of planning for her to do in order to create. A seamlessly beautiful video like that—if I were an industrial party member, I would appreciate the engineering part of her production. I would be like,
“Oh my god, it’s because you did so much invisible infrastructural production work.”
So the 20 minutes—the visible time of you showing up on the screen—can look so effortless and seamless. I think, yeah, I generally think the Ling Gao people would appreciate her engineering skills in a sense—like production engineering and resource management skills for sure. Fantastic!
What a fun conversation this has been, and the time has just flown by. Afra, let’s move on now.
First of all, thank you for spending so much time speaking with me, and again, everyone’s got to go and read your piece if you haven’t done it already. It’s just a wonderful piece of writing. For me, I think it’s one of those things where this little slice, as you say, just this artifact of Chinese culture, made me think so much about the contemporary Chinese condition. It made me think so much about, you know, the mindset that really does—in so many ways—just sort of inform and shape the world that we inhabit today.
It’s become—it’s not just ideology, it’s more like infrastructure, right? The whole mentality, in many ways, has come to define the modern polity.
But let’s move on and talk about this segment that I call paying it forward. If you’ve got a young colleague or a friend or somebody whose work you want to call attention to, now is the time to do.
I think one thing I need to shout out is—I mentioned in a piece that there’s no English translation for Lingo, which is not true. So, two months ago, obviously a group of people took it as a passion project and translated the canonical version into English and made it a website.
- I can link the website.
- I can send you the link.
- You can link to the show notes.
They also basically have a GitHub commit about the tools they use to translate the piece. They use the GMLI 2.5 to translate everything.
Yeah, I’m just really glad that people are spending effort systematically translating Lingo into English, so I would recommend reading that. I think that’s the first recommendation.
Second is, unfortunately, if you’re not a Chinese language speaker or don’t listen to Chinese, you won’t get the great content. Baihua is this podcast incubator actually started by my friend Izzy. We’re all like sort of the founding members of Baihua, and we’re trying to incubate more Chinese language podcasts.
One of the podcasts I really like and really appreciate is called Xin Xin Renlei. I can also send the link.
“Please do.”
Xin Xin Renlei is a podcast hosted by three tech journalists who are also, like me, really bilingual and understand the tech world on both sides. They find some very interesting niche topics to discuss. For example, they would talk about:
- Elon Musk’s imagery evolution in China
- Burning Man and Burning Man’s evolution—how Burning Man is perceived by different generations
- Their obsession with web novels
- AI
Yeah, so highly recommend Xin Xin Renlei. The English name is Pixels Perfect.
Pixels Perfect, Xin Xin, Xin Xin, Xin Xin.
Okay, well excellent, excellent—that’s fantastic. Now, I don’t know whether that was your paying it forward recommendation or your actual recommendation recommendation. I distinguish between them, but did you have a book or something that you wanted to recommend?
Yes, I actually read voraciously. I do have a lot of books I would recommend. One would be, I think, it’s edited and written by Carrie Brown. It’s called
China from European's Eyes: 100 Years of History
I think that book, to me, is—
You know, like we always talk about how China is the foil and mural for the West’s imagination, and people’s obsession about China—the way people project China as a beacon for technological advancement today—is actually a sense of otherness, right? Like other in China.
So this book illustrated that this phenomenon is not new. It has been existing for 800 years. You know, many European intellectuals have been portraying China as the otherness projection—like it’s elderly, alien, different—but it… It could be either really beautiful or really ugly. It could be elderly powerful or elderly powerless. The reason why China couldn’t develop modern technology and modern systems, Hegel would argue, was because the Chinese language, the characters, are so laid back.
Basically, Cary Brown, as a historian, compiled 16 or 18 permanent European intellectuals on their takes of China. So the people from like Voltaire to Hegel. Yeah, so I think it’s a fascinating intellectual genealogy. I would recommend it.
Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, I have all the time in the world for Cary Brown. I think he’s wonderful, brilliant, and a fantastic writer. I don’t understand how he writes so much—like he’s gotten a new book every six months.
Oh, I have another one I really must say is Ilin Liu’s upcoming new book. It’s called The War Dancers. It’s coming out, I think, at the end of February, and this is a book about the history of the Chinese internet in the past 30 years. I think you’re going to be interviewing her.
Yeah, I read it. It’s absolutely such a craft—it’s a beautiful craft, so well written. She’s a great writer. Oh, she’s such a great writer. Honestly, as her friend, I really admire her craft. Such a role model.
Yeah, we know each other socially as well, and I am going to have her on the show to talk about the book. So yeah, I mean, it’s great because the book is really well written. I read that book—it’s called The War Dancers. I couldn’t remember the full title, but I have it. So I’ll make sure to put the title in there, and it’s an excellent recommendation.
Related to your recommendation of Cary Brown, just to remind people, I recommended this book ages ago. But it’s a very similar approach, although it’s not just China; it’s all of Asia. It’s Jürgen Osterhammel’s book Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, which is something that I haven’t recommended before, and yeah, it’s absolutely great.
My recommendation for this week actually has something in common with that. It’s Tami Mansari, who I’ve recommended another of his books before. He’s an Afghan American writer and journalist, and he wrote a book called Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.
It’s a real deep dive into the history of Islam as understood by Muslims themselves, from the time of the prophet in the 7th century all the way up to September 11th, viewed through the eyes of Muslims themselves. I think it’s a very useful exercise in building cognitive empathy and understanding the Islamic worldview—not that there’s one single monolithic worldview, but it’s a great book.
It also reminds me of another book written by Kim Stanley Robinson, who also likes to write about hard science like Liu Cixin and the Industrial Party. He has a book called The Years of Rice and Salt. I was just talking about that book the other day with a friend of mine. It’s a great book.
I have recommended that one on the show years and years ago. It’s an alternative history, which I really like. Even since we’re talking about alternative histories here, not a time travel one, but the premise is that the Black Plague actually ends up killing 99% of people in Europe. It starts with Tamerlane’s troops coming up to the Bosporus and then deciding, “Nope, we’re not going over there,” because they were planning on conquering Europe. But no need—the plague has already killed everyone.
Fascinating, yeah, fascinating book. It also has a lot of Buddhist touches, like reincarnation. The interstitial chapters are like the Bardo chapters.
Yeah, I really hope China has someone like Kim Stanley Robinson. I think he could be both spiritual and insanely technical, like Red Mars and Gray Mars, which are very detail-oriented in terms of Mars terraforming.
But a lot of his work is also deeply humanistic. Of course, there’s this cli-fi classic Ministry for the Future as well. So yeah. I would love to meet him one day. He seems like such a wonderfully interesting man. I know, I know, I love his recent preservation of Sierra, it is almost like he’s the embodiment of California spirit—both technologically aware but also deeply drawn to the mountains.
I don’t know, I think something fascinating about this guy, I really like him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, hey, well thank you so much, what an enjoyable conversation. I think we could go on recommending books to one another for several more hours, but we will call a stop to it.
I look forward to meeting you in person one day. I’m going to be in England at the end of the month of February, but I don’t know if you’ll be around. I think so.
If it’s London, yeah, I’ll be around. Yeah, it’s such a fun recording of a podcast with you.
Okay sir, thank you for inviting me. Yeah, yeah, what a great time.
You’ve been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through Substack at www.synicapodcast.com, where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio.
Email me at [email protected] if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show or if you just want to say hi. Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show. Huge thanks to my guest Afro Wong. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
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