Afra Wang on Liangzhu, China’s Vibe-Coding Capital, and the Anxious Optimism of the AI Boom

This week on Sinica, I’m joined again by Afra Wang, the Bay Area-based writer behind the AI newsletter Concurrent, who was last on the show in January to talk about her Wired piece on The Morning Star of Lingao and China’s “Industrial Party.” She’s back with two new pieces of on-the-ground reportage that get beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism: her New Yorker Lede piece on Liangzhu, the town outside Hangzhou where laid-off and burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe code in each other’s living rooms (and where AI and BaZi fortune-telling have become strangely intimate), and a forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s sprawling, lucrative, and largely unregulated “learn AI, get rich” education industry. We talk about why 93% of Chinese respondents tell Gallup that AI will mostly help their country, what that number conceals, and whether what looks like optimism is sometimes closer to acceptance.Afra’s pieces discussed in this episode:What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom — The New Yorker, September 23, 2026[Her forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s AI education industry — [LINK TK, expected after October 12]]You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel — Wired, January 2026, and our January 2026 Sinica conversation about itSubscribe to Afra’s newsletter, ConcurrentAlso mentioned:Optimism About AI Globally Widespread Despite Uneven Adoption — the Microsoft-Gallup surveyChina’s OpenClaw gold rush — MIT Technology ReviewDamien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next DecadeEvan Osnos, Crazy English — The New Yorker, April 2008Lian Si 廉思, Journey Without a Map 无图之旅：一代青年的自我寻路Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction — Sinica, 201606:51 – Walking into Liangzhu’s living rooms: the San Francisco déjà vu, and the grimness beneath the techno-optimist story the West wants to hear10:14 – Setting the scene: a real-estate developer’s utopian village, Neolithic ruins, Xi Jinping’s intervention, and a “road-to-food ratio” low enough to build real community17:30 – Child of the layoffs or child of DeepSeek? The post-COVID “ego death” of Chinese tech — and a quibble about the word “crackdown”21:42 – Master Qi and the living room as a social form: what Liangzhu offers that a Beijing office or a WeChat group can’t24:11 – What the 93% really tells us: optimism, acceptance, or FOMO when you can’t protest a data center29:26 – “Westerners get restless w