Dan Wang

They have a sense of optimism, and much more so than the Europeans, who have a sense of optimism only about the past.

Both countries see themselves to be pursuing some sort of a destiny and they're driving really hard towards it.

And something that I'm quite interested in is the path of Chinese futurism.

There's a lot of ways in which Chinese are much more pro-technology than Americans are.

China hasn't experienced this broad tech clash that has come across big tech companies in the US.

There is no sense that tech is partisan.

because nothing in China is allowed to be partisan.

There's no sense of a tech right.

And just if we take a look at technology by technology, whether that is something like e-commerce, the rate of e-commerce purchases in China is something like, I believe last I checked, something like twice as high than in the US.

They have much more of a sense that artificial intelligence could be a friend and something that they don't worry about taking away all of their energy.

And they spend a lot more time on their phones.

And this is not positive.

This is one of the things that most bugs me about Chinese society today.

Last when I went to Shanghai in the end of 2024, you can just see people being on their phones all the time.

You could be with a lot of friends at a restaurant and

People could be just on their phones the entire time.

You could be in a business meeting and people are on their phones.

And on the one hand, that speaks to some sort of social dysfunction among social interactions.

On the other hand, that also speaks to the fact that they are not very concerned about what smartphones may be doing to their life and their brain.

And I would also want to try to write a little bit about how the Communist Party sees itself to be modernizing the country and how it feels about various technologies that include, let's say, space missions going to the moon and then Mars and moons of Saturn as well.