Asst Professor urban studies SMU SG. MIT DUSP, @HarvardGSD; lived in PEK, ICN, XIY, SIN, BOS, BKK. Bad at social media!
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Joined November 2009
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How is Xi remaking China's "urban ideology"? Find out in this new article on Xiong'an 雄安新区 for Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society
doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsaf00…
Andrew Stokols retweeted
I have been a fan of @ezraklein's for so many years — a master of conversation. In this conversation, we got to the heart of our current dilemma: Chatbots offer the feeling of companionship without the demand for reciprocity, the illusion of empathy while deskilling our ability to deal with one another. I loved how Ezra pushed back on where companionate AI might actually offer relief — it sparked a sharp, necessary debate about the future of human community. nytimes.com/2026/10/14/opini…
Did the leader of AFD forget that Russian soldiers rode into Ukraine with signs reading "next stop, Berlin." I guess they can't even be properly nationalist. I mean, say what you will about national socialism, at least it was an ethos..
Ukraine has “already lost” the war against Russia, says @Alice_Weidel, co-leader of the Alternative for Germany party, which is leading German opinion polls. She told @zannymb, that Germany should pull the plug on support for Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
Watch the full interview at 6pm London time (1pm in New York): bit.ly/4yrcX9s
China’s digital ecosystem can be convenient but is also over designed. And this is not just for foreigners. Many Chinese I talk to also express exhaustion with the omnipresence of digital life. Now- spam QR codes 💆♂️
As they say, every time you go back to China, you have to relearn everything. In less than two years, my experience using Alipay (no-cash society) has flipped, and this time it was a TOTAL NIGHTMARE. Multiple problems:
1. "Just walk up and scan the QR code" is not so simple. Now places have QR codes all over the counter! Which one? It’s a trap. Over and over again, we scanned the large-sized, prominently displayed code, which was spam! The real code was small and tucked away. This happened just now at M-Stand coffee, and the foreigner next to us did the same intuitive but wrong thing.
2. Popups. The next problem is the biggest, which is the barrage of spam popups. The worst was at Luckin, where there were literally TWENTY click-through barriers to ordering an Americano. The girl was frantically clicking through on my phone, she knew each spam screen from muscle memory and anticipated them, often clicking before they arrived, but as fast as she was, the other customers were annoyed. I told the wife, and she confirmed the same thing had happened to her earlier: literally 20 clicks, and only a local would know the answers to all those trick questions.
3. Translation. Just use the Alipay translate feature, you say? No, this has got to be the WORST translation software in existence. Claude is essentially flawless; even DeepSeek would be fine, but this is actually translating as the opposite of the meaning many times, which, as you can imagine, spins up serious confusion and wrong orders. For example, it translated "matcha latte no caffeine" (wtf?) and options like "with jelly or yes jelly” (no!).
4. Optionality. This is insane and adds to the above burdens. In the example of Luckin, the girl who works there could not even find the Orange Americano! She menu-dived three times, getting frustrated and coming up for air, before she dived into the right one. Then, of course, came corn syrup, iced, size, etc. Well, combined with misleading translation and constant spam, you are now spending up to 20 minutes ordering a coffee (this was the actual time it took in Starbucks when I did it myself).
5. When is the order ready? You would think this digital system would have that advantage, but again, it is totally unclear. It is written in some small print among dozens of other numbers and is different for each restaurant you go! We never knew when it was ready to pick up.
The effect of all this is that every single time you get a drink, or food, or do anything, it becomes an uninvited adventure, like solving a video game puzzle. It was vastly easier to just say "iced Americano, please" and let them do their job.
This seems to be a big change, or am I just imagining it? Two years ago, it took some getting used to, but I do not remember hitting this brick wall. Is this like how Facebook became 100% spam, but the product cycle is just moving faster in China? On the positive side, ordering a taxi with Alipay (DiDi Taxi) remains great!
Now, of course, we are tourists, true, and my Putonghua and comfort with simplified characters are very low, but typically when you set up systems like this, your own elder population cannot navigate them, like how elders in Korea cannot navigate the crappy banking apps and always get locked out of their own accounts.
Speaking of which, of course I got locked out of my WeChat account, sigh, and none of the three recertification options are available to me in China. We went to a beer stall where the beer is paid for with Alipay but the cup is paid for with WeChat!
This is just bad design!
You don’t realize extent of collective brain rot on the American left until you see people literally defending China’s cultural revolution as ordinary people getting to shape culture and pointing to colonialism as an excuse 🤦♂️
People on X “discover” China’s local entrepreneurialism-yes scholars of Chinese PE have been writing about this for decades. But right now local governments are pretty bankrupt, limiting their entrepreneurial abilities.
Nearly everyone in the West focuses on China's Five Year Plans as the reasons for its manufacturing success, concluding that more central economic planning is needed.
This is the exactly WRONG lesson. The country's success comes because its cities all compete with each other intensely, as something akin to vertically integrated corporations that are completely obsessed with local economic growth.
Its incredible manufacturing industry is based on local clusters that local govts nurture and invest in, and collect a lot of the returns from through property fees and taxes. These govts are *much* closer to local needs than Western local govts are, and can focus on speed of building and iteration above all, which are critical for manufacturing.
*This* is why local government matters in Britain and America, where it is almost completely broken and dysfunctional. Where local spillovers matter, as in manufacturing, you need some kind of entity that can internalise the positive externalities of economic activity. China is proof that with the right incentives and tax powers, local governments can become machines for economic growth, intervening and clearing the way for development.
Andrew Stokols retweeted
Something big happened in Chinese elite politics today:
Huang Qifan, the former mayor of Chongqing, was placed under investigation for corruption, and the rumor is that it has something to do with P2P lending though there are a bunch of other rumors. This is pretty momentous because Huang is a legendary technocrat who played a critical role in developing Shanghai's Pudong district. He was best known as one of the main architects of Bo Xilai's Chongqing Model, which he once dubbed "Marx plus Reagan."
Remarkably, Huang survived Bo's downfall in 2012 and remained mayor until 2016, then took an economic policy advisory role in Beijing. At the time, this was views as the result of his previous economic achievements and technocratic personality, which made him not so politically threatening (He had a COO personality, not a founder.)
That's why the charges today are strange. If you spared the COO then, why are you going after him now? From his books and writings, you can tell that Huang doesn't have that instinct for political maneuvering. The guy is an engineer/state planner through and through. As he once described his motto: "follow your heart’s desire without overstepping the line."
Whatever the reason, Huang was one of the highest-profile figures of the Chongqing era, providing a rival economic vision to Xi Jinping. With his downfall, that chapter of Chinese politics has come to a close.
Andrew Stokols retweeted
Great graphics on how the U.S. is very slowly clawing back critical minerals market share from China
wsj.com/politics/national-se…
Andrew Stokols retweeted
Notice what Talarico does. Personal history led to worldview led to motivation behind his politics (and implicit critique of where Dems went wrong). All in 2 minutes. Too often Dems skip right to plans / talking pts / attacking other side.
Joe Rogan: Why are you a Democrat?
@JamesTalarico: My mother met my birth father, who had a drinking problem that sometimes led to being violent. My mom decided right then and there that she was leaving. She found a little apartment in East Austin and worked double duty at a hotel to provide for us. She saw Texas Democrats like Ann Richards, people who fought for the little guy. That was the classic Democratic Party. I asked my mom what we were, and she was like, ‘We're Democrats, because Democrats fight for the people.’ Our historical legacy is the party that fights for the little guy. That's why I'm a Democrat.
This is also not the whole picture. China's open source models appeal for two main reasons:
1. Cost. Chinese companies aren't willing to pay for expensive recurring enterprise software costs (Saas)
2. Lack of trust in data security: firms don't want to put data in clouds.
As a former Fulbrighter in China 2013, I agree with @RushDoshi and Rosie’s piece. Restarting Fulbright is low hanging fruit and has mostly upside with small risks; it’s precisely these longer intensive programs that generate deeper understanding
As President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping prepare to meet tomorrow in Washington, DC, only around 2,000 Americans are studying in China, down from 15,000 a decade ago.
Long-standing educational programs that built a generation of expertise, such as Fulbright, Boren, and the Critical Language Scholarship are all suspended, but a deal between the leaders could bring them back and protect the students who take part, write experts @RushDoshi and Rosie Levine.
"Improving mutual understanding is inherently valuable. For both Washington and Beijing, it also reduces the risk of miscalculation. If the next generation of policymakers has no China experience, both countries will suffer," they argue.
Read their full analysis in the comments below.
it’s actually the shorter superficial visits that are more likely to serve China’s propaganda interests. I can’t remember a single member of our Fulbright cohort who came back a rabid supporter of the CCP, contrary to what @JacquelineNDeal seems to imagine.
So Xi Jinping purged all his top generals, some said on disagreement per PLA readiness to take Taiwan, in so doing he set China back even further..🤦♂️ well done, sir 👌
Andrew Stokols retweeted
1/2
NYT: "Economists in China — even those closest to the state — have openly warned that the government is pouring too many resources into a technology that creates relatively few jobs, while doing too little to save the broader economy."
nytimes.com/2026/09/20/busin…
Andrew Stokols retweeted
Li Xunlei, Chief Economist at Zhongtai Financial: “The conclusion is clear: the places that built the most expressways were often those where freight demand grew the least.”
The East is Red has translated an article by Li Xunlei on how China’s infrastructure spending may have served the economy poorly, something he seems to have been worrying about even longer than I have.
He attributes local officials’ enthusiasm for infrastructure partly to the belief that “if you want to get rich, build roads first,” and partly to the tendency to measure performance by highly visible projects rather than underlying problems such as population outflows and weak local industries.
The underlying mistake is common, and not just in China. Policymakers too often treat infrastructure spending as a source of growth, so that when an economy faces institutional, demographic or other constraints that keep growth below expectations, their response is to increase infrastructure spending in order to goose economic activity.
But this often has it backwards. If those constraints limit productivity growth, the value of additional infrastructure is likely to be lower, not higher. Infrastructure spending, in other words, is not a source of growth. It is a cost of growth, and it makes an economy richer only when the productivity gains it generates exceed the cost of building and maintaining it.
Otherwise it makes the economy poorer. And the fact that local-government debt has grown so much faster than provincial GDP for nearly two decades suggests how years of overinvestment can leave less productive regions deeply indebted, with spectacular infrastructure but inadequate economic activity to support it.
It is encouraging that more and more Chinese economists and policy advisers are questioning this model. But changing it will be difficult. Infrastructure projects reliably produce a short-term boost to activity, making them especially tempting when growth slows and unemployment rises, until debt constraints finally make further spending impossible.
eastisread.com/p/li-xunlei-o…
WH science and tech advisor Kratsios : we Want America to lead in science and tech.
Also WH: let’s make science a totally partisan affair. Great idea, guys ! 🤦♂️
NEW: Trump asked Russ Vought to draft an EO to create a board to decide on NIH grants, after the NIH Director refused Trump’s request to cut Harvard funding in a heated Oval Office meeting on Friday.
- Vought, Bhattacharya & others would be part of the board, which would have to reach unanimous decisions on grant awards
- “The president called him into the principal’s office,” one person said.
- Linda McMahon was also in the meeting but she did not participate in the fighting
- Others present: Bessent, Stephen Miller, Will Scharf & Mark Paoletta.
w/ the great @Tim_Roehn
politico.com/news/2026/09/19…
I’ve never found Kishore’s essentializing critiques of the West very helpful. Criticize US policy all you want but generalizing about “The West” is about as precise as doing the same about “Asia”.
Absolutely devastating article by Kishore Mahbubani, former President of the UN Security Council.
iai.tv/articles/kishore-mahb…
Andrew Stokols retweeted
“I know all these guys,” a former American official... told me. “They go into these meetings, and they are doing business right alongside their diplomacy. ‘O.K., enough about the ceasefire. We have this hotel we want to build.’ That’s the kind of foreign policy America has now.”
