Simon Elegant

When I was talking to people down a mine in Shaanxi or wherever it was, the one thing they always talked about, everybody loves their family and wants their kids to do well.

It's a universal thing.

And that's the one point where I thought the Chinese Communist Party might be vulnerable, and they're very, very conscious of it.

You know, when you've got 30% of the population and 120 million people or something like that graduating every year, it's crazy difficult.

That's an enormous thing, and that's the one place they're vulnerable.

You can have all the maglev trains and the highways and all the high-speed trains that you want, but if you don't get jobs for the kids, you're going to be in trouble.

Well, that's the joke normally is that it used to be a stinking mess, but they reclaimed so much land that there's hardly any room left between the island of Hong Kong and the peninsula of Kowloon.

And it used to be so if you fell into it by accident, you'd die of some weird disease.

But so it was very unfragrant.

I think they've cleaned it up a bit now.

Sure.

I was actually born in Hong Kong, and I grew up there partly because my dad was a reporter as well.

He actually, believe it or not, seeing as how it's come full cycle, he opened the Newsweek Bureau there in Hong Kong to cover and covered the Cultural Revolution in China, a big mess, mostly by listening to the radio in those days.

And it kind of comes full cycle when I...

I probably should update you that I am no longer the China bureau chief for the Washington Post, because I, along with many, many of my colleagues, got canned by Mr. Bezos.

But that was a couple of months ago.

It's a different issue.

Another story for another time.

Yeah.

So my dad was based there for Newsweek and then the L.A.