China had its own “pace technological development” debate in 2011. The frontier technology was high-speed rail. That July, one bullet train rear-ended another near Wenzhou, killing 40 people. The disaster prompted a national reckoning: was China’s obsession with speed outrunning its capacity to keep people safe? A widely circulated essay captured the mood: “China, Slow Down, Wait for Your People.” Its prose read like a prayer: “China, please stop your flying pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience!” Online, a cohort of STEM intellectuals (with some similarities to today’s rationalists and EAs in worldview and temperament) argued for pressing ahead. they agued from first principle that country of China’s size needed an efficient rail network. Technological failures called for better engineering and regulations, not slow it down. Many voices calling for a pause came from liberal and civil-society circles. Crudely speaking, this became an “Industrial Party” versus “Sentimental Party” debate. At the end the industrial party (tech accelerationalists) won. (The Industrial Party also overlapped with the community behind the collectively written sci-fi epic The Morning Star of Lingao, which I wrote about for WIRED in January ykiyk) I keep returning to this episode when thinking about what might make China slow down AI. A few hypotheses: 1. The strongest pressure will probably come from inside China, and that’s the only way to cause china to pause. China has its own arguments about technological progress, even if there is much less public room for them today. In a heavily bounded information ecosystem, where “China’s circumstances are different from the west” is a convicted argument, I suspect international appeals will carry less weight than domestic consequences. 2. A dramatic incident could change the calculus. My current guess is that Beijing is unlikely to deliberately slow frontier AI development without a failure that makes the risks politically concrete. Imagine an AI-enabled intrusion into a major state agency’s systems. Even then, the response might be tighter deployment controls rather than slower development. Those are different things. 3. I’m unsure how frontier-risk situational awareness translates into influence inside Chinese labs. Some kinds of risk become clearer through expensive experiments with highly capable models. If a lab faces tight compute budgets and pressure to commercialize, how much room does it have for open-ended investigations of dangerous capabilities? That doesn’t mean Chinese researchers lack awareness. But awareness, resources to investigate, and political influence are three separate things. 4. Beijing understand AI primarily through systems it already knows how to govern. Industrial production, public services, platforms, infrastructure: these are familiar objects of state intervention. I suspect that encourages confidence that AI’s risks can be managed through existing institutions. if you are active on the Chinese internet you’d know what i mean by such tight control on every level of digital life. if you lived through COVID in china you will know how CCP has control over physical reality. 5. The economic promise makes slowing down costly. AI offers a compelling Marxist story about new-quality productivity force and industrial renewal at a time when China badly needs new sources of growth (the economy is so screwed right now). If officials see it as one of the few technologies capable of changing the economic trajectory, precaution has a formidable political opponent: hope.

My first piece for @NewYorker is out today! As Xi Jinping lands in DC to start his state visit, you'll hear a lot about the US-China AI race. I'd like to tell a complementary AI story. This past May, a few days after Trump visited Beijing, I went to the town people call China's vibe-coding capital, Liangzhu. There, you learn that China's AI scene is not monolithic. It's also full of contrarians, cool vibe coders, spiritual seekers, and people who love AI but refuse to join the 996 grind. Liangzhu is on the edge of Hangzhou. I hung out with a group of anti-mainstream builders who use AI to make whimsical apps for fortune-telling, mental well-being, and creativity. Some of them run their lives entirely by bazi astrology (their founder almost became a Taoist monk). They meet on "Crazy Thursday" to vibe-code together. Rent is cheap, so they can get a bigger place with a living room to have friends over (unthinkable in Beijing or Shenzhen). In Liangzhu, they want to use AI to forge their own future. It’s a ground-level story—less about model capabilities, hyperscalers, or AI policy, and more about how people in China are using AI, and the human stories behind it.