Alice Han

I know it sucks to be sick.

kind of getting there sorry about this my voice is not great but you still got the voice for radio all right let's get right into it there's been a viral narrative floating around about china running some shadowy all-powerful genius factory but the reality is both less conspiratorial and way more interesting china isn't mass producing prodigies it's running a small brutally selective pipeline that spots extreme talent early and pushes it fast

And a surprising number of the people behind China's biggest tech and AI companies and breakthroughs came through these genius programs.

James, you've lived in China for many years.

I'm sure you've met people who have been in these genius camps that can tell us a little bit about what it was like on the ground.

I love the way that you've described that story.

And to some extent, I think a lot of Western countries could benefit from that.

It seems like we're facing a culture of anti-intellectualism.

I don't think that kind of kid would be given a dumpling in, say, America.

I personally didn't grow up in China and my cousins, none of them got into these genius classes.

But I know friends of friends who did.

And what's interesting to me is that it's not just isolated to STEM students.

So humanities students can also get into these genius programs.

And the reason why I think this is so interesting is because if you look at the founders of the big tech companies, a vast majority of them came from these genius schools.

You know, I was just looking at back of the envelope, the founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, the founders and leaders of Taobao and Pinduoduo, China's biggest e-commerce platforms, the founder of Meituan, the Chinese chip maker, Cambricon, its founders also both went to genius schools, and engineers behind DeepSeek and Alibaba's Quen AI models.

I read a great think piece over the weekend in the FT where you formerly worked, James.

And the author who wrote this piece ends up revealing towards the end of the article that she also went to one of these genius schools.

But she describes how even humanities students worked more recently in AI companies like DeepSeek to help with their models because...

A lot of what these models have to deal with is real human intelligence, and that's just not isolated to STEM.

It goes to humanities and history and literature.