The paradoxes of China's new era: cultural self-confidence, neijuan, and innovation.
Reflections on Two Months in China
This post is going to be a bit different from the rest in that it is more of a personal reflection/essay format as opposed to a deep dive on a specific topic. I spent two months of summer 2024 in China, in 2024. This was the longest time I had spent in China post-pandemic since the last time I had lived in China in 2017/2018 besides a brief trip in Summer 2023. I received a grant from the China U.S. Scholars Program of International Institute of Education (IIE) to conduct research over the summer. The purpose of the research was severalfold: one to finish up interviews for my dissertation on smart cities and national development, which I am working on adapting into a book manuscript, as well as to do additional work on the geography of China’s digital infrastructure policies, and understand a bit more about the emphasis on cultural self confidence in Xi’s China . I visited Guangzhou for a conference on digital planning, Xiong’an New Area to meet with planners and officials working there in digital and transport sectors, Hangzhou to visit Alibaba and learn about the current status of one of China’s most successful smart city projects the so-called City Brain,1 and Inner Mongolia to see emerging data center clusters in Hohhot and Ulanqaab as part of the East Data West Compute Project. I visited Xi’an to catch up with old friends from my time as a visiting Fulbright Scholar there in 2013, and Shenzhen to see young landscape architects who had started a firm doing community design—I had met them when they were still in school at Peking University when I worked there in 2017/18.
Along the way I also fit in quite a bit of sightseeing of cultural heritage and museums. I visited Datong, the reconstructed historic city, which I wrote about here, and nearby Yungang Grottoes and Yingxian wood pagoda. I also spent some time in “nature”— a “glamping” tent hotel on a volcano in Ulanqaab, wandering around the not-so unspoiled Huitengxile Grasslands that are covered with fake yurt hotels and now a field of wind turbines. I visited new museums to try to get a sense of the renewed push for “cultural self confidence”—the Shan’xi History Museum Qin Han Pavillion in Xi’an, the new Yinxu Museum of Shang culture in Anyang, Henan; Hangzhou’s branch of the National Archive of Publications and Culture. I also spent a fair number of pleasant afternoons biking around the hutongs of Beijing, revisiting old friends I used to work with and meeting new ones.
As an American who speaks Chinese and first lived in China during the “boom years”—2009, 2011-2013, and again in 2017-2018, it was indeed strange to be back in a “new era” that feels a lot different from the past. Beijing is a much quieter place, in some ways less vibrant renao 热闹 than it used to be. In other ways, the city has improved—the air quality was generally much better, the streets are cleaner, new areas of old palaces are open to the public (although top sights like the Forbidden City have been notoriously difficult to book). And there are new cafes making hawthorn Shanzha-flavored lattes.
The mood in China this summer, and probably ongoing since last summer is still one of anxiety and uncertainty. In 2023, the removal of pandemic restrictions had many expecting a return to economic dynamism. A year later, the property downturn and broader economic malaise are more enduring, with the covid recovery never really materializing.
Among artists and intellectuals, the mood is undoubtedly pessimistic. An architect working in Beijing told me, “China is undergoing sulianhua, “Sovietization”—artists and intellectuals rarely ever concern themselves with broader social issues any longer, instead turning inward to themes of spirituality or personal quietude.”
An artist who works at a state-sponsored association in Xi’an echoed these sentiments. “If in the past, the space for expression used to be like this” (he made a giant circle with this arms), “now its more like this.” (as he made a small ball with his palms).
At an artists forum in Xi’an that he took me too, sponsored by the Hong Kong developer Swire who is building a new cultural-heritage themed commercial project in the city next to the historic Small Wild Goose Pagoda—artists from Xi’an presented their work, photographs and contemporary art, all of which touched on the presence of historical memory of Han and Tang Chang’an in and around the contemporary city. There was the lament from some of the artists that the art scene in this city can never leave the past behind. Is the past a source of inspiration, or a burden? This is an apt question for all of Chinese society as the country turns increasingly inward toward the glories of its past—for inspiration, and for security from an ever more unstable and some would say unfriendly world.
Is the past a source of inspiration, or a burden? This is an apt question for all of Chinese society as the country turns increasingly inward toward the glories of its past—for inspiration, and for security from an ever more unstable and some would say unfriendly world.
Such an inward turn is well described by the term Neijuan 内卷—a phrase that I heard mentioned by almost everyone I had a serious conversation with. China is too “neijuan”, or abbreviated form, just too “juan.” The internet slang is a translation of the word “involution”, which was allegedly adapted from anthropologist Geertz’s analysis of rural underdevelopment in Indonesia. In contemporary China the term has been adopted to describe a general overcompetition and overwork. At the individual level this is the feeling of the 996 rat race, of society simply being too competitive. At a broader level there is simply a pessimism that China has passed the years of rapid development when everyone’s fortunes were increasing, to a period in which growth will be much slower.
As the Beijing architect noted to me, “neijuan (内卷)–is not describing productive competition that leads to progress [as in the free market sense], rather its a kind of anxiety and pressure, in the end leading to an unhealthy change in society; in the international environment is becoming more tense for China, in international exchanges China is becoming more tense. For example in international exhibitions we might not invite American artists anymore, this is my sense.”
In Shanghai I caught up with friends of mine who had studied with me at Harvard GSD. They are both young, worldly, and well-traveled. They are now architects and researchers in China, working within the “system” 体制内, but also openly critical and anxious about the current situation.
“We go into meetings with a government client,” the landscape architect told me—he has been working on large projects with local governments—”everything is last minute and unorganized. All of a sudden we will get a call from someone that the boss wants to meet, and we rush to prepare everything. This is how things are working in China. It’s just a command comes down from the top and everyone flutters around like bees trying to get it done. There has got to be a better way.”
They noted how this atmosphere of fear and paranoia infects every level of governance and corporate life in China—from the top down. The paranoid control-freak style of governance under the current leadership has removed incentives for innovation for local officials, and instead creates an atmosphere of fear where people are more afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing, than in taking risks and innovating.
But of course, talk of neijuan doesn’t mean there is no forward progress in China. Far from it. The vastness of China means it contains many paradoxes. And in the “new era”, there is surely a paradox of advancing technological prowess in many sectors—China is now world leading in electric vehicles, solar panels, and infrastructure. But the gains in these sectors have not yet (or perhaps never will) fully radiate prosperity outward to lift everyone’s boats. That’s the hope of party leaders overseeing a techno-industrial policy to promote indigenous innovation and research aimed at making China and indispensable global leader in key technologies. But the payoff of such innovations for individuals may be a long way off, if they ever come.
In Beijing, I met with a former employee of Baidu’s autonomous vehicle project in the district of Yizhuang. He had left Baidu for a startup working on autonomous personal mobility, and the company was now looking for skilled AI engineers to help them build a better model to power their autonomous technologies—starting with the vision for an autonomous motorized wheelchair. I had an image of an old granny in pajamas flying in an autonomous wheelchair down a dusty hutong in Beijing.
In Xi’an I visited a few cultural-heritage related technology companies. One of these—October Cultural Heritage uses advanced tools for cultural preservation: LIDAR scanning to preserve ancient stone steles, creates Augmented Reality AR experiences for museums, and virtual reality recreations of history temples and other archeological sites. This sort of company seemed to be just the sort of innovation Xi and the Party State are promoting—a fusion of advanced tech and the ideal of “cultural self confidence” or wenhua zixin.
The friend who had introduced us, who had himself long worked in the cultural industry in Xi’an—for both the provincial cultural investment group, and who now runs his own cultural heritage company—put it this way, “we don’t investigate the past so we can live in the past or avoid the reality of the present, we research the past so we can move forward.”
The aims of the founder were a bit more modest, though. “I just want to be able to say after my life, I’ve done good work, I’ve contributed something to preserving history and creating new innovations,” he tells me as we look over the skyline of Xi’an from his office on the top floor of a high rise, his shelves lined with copies of the archival works he has produced. Before I depart, I give him a gift of Moutai-filled Dove Chocolates.
“You’ve chosen a good gift,” he said laughing. Dove represents America, and Moutai represents China. So this is Zhong-Mei heyi, “harmony of America and China. Whether or not such a harmony can be expanded from chocolates into the international arena is quite another question.
As I walked through the Datang Buye Cheng (Great Tang 24 hour city), a buzzing pedestrian mall built near the Big Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an’s Qujiang District, I passed virtually unnoticed among crowds of women and girls (mostly) wearing traditional Hanfu, or Han-style clothing (some wearing Tangfu- Tang style— too). The trend of young people dressing up in traditional clothing as surged in recent years. I asked my contact if this was a bottom up phenomenon or something encouraged by policy.
“The government definitely shapes public opinion on this. there was concern over “feminization” nuxinghua with the trend toward Korean/Japanese pop culture, so government did shape media opinion to be more interested in Chinese traditional culture.” I wondered how such a sentiment would seem to find much sympathy from American conservatives and scorn from progressives and advocates of gender non-conformity.
In China (as in most countries) there isn’t such a clear separation between government and society. Rather there is a dynamic interplay between government policy and popular attitude: each shaping each other, rather than a unidirectional model in which the government totally shapes popular opinion (they certainly try), or one in which the groundswell of nationalism is entirely driven by authentic grassroots emotions. The vitriol of online propaganda one sees from afar is not matched by the tenor of talking to people face to face. Perhaps that’s not surprising, but its worth remembering that the hatred and division fomented by our social media platforms (both in China and the U.S.) is not representative of society as a whole, nor of most individuals. Of course, my own sample of contacts in China skews toward the urban, educated, and those who have studied in Western countries, which means the sentiments I’m hearing are likely not entirely representative, either.
That being said, I found public support for current policies in China to be few and far between—many more people expressed open disappointment with the state of China’s economy and the lackluster government response than expressed support. One cab driver in Beijing told me the air was better—I couldn’t disagree. But for most the economic malaise is front and center. “The government lacks money, all local governments are lacking in money,” was a common view I heard almost everywhere.
Throughout my journey, I had almost entirely pleasant and warm experiences. The air of U.S-China tension was often mentioned or alluded to, but it didn’t prevent the hospitality or generosity that is one of the most memorable and enduring qualities of China. Sure, there were the usual annoyances—cab drivers who wouldn’t pick me up in a rainstorm because they wanted to make more money, or pushy passengers on the subway. But overall I was struck by the reservoir of good feeling for Americans and foreigners in general. My friend in Xi’an who had brought me around meeting various companies and heritage parks that day, brought me by his apartment for afternoon tea where I happened to meet his 80-yr old father, a Veteran, who told me he still was thankful for America’s support in World War II when general Claire Lee Chennault (referred to in Chinese 陳納德, or Chen Na De), helped lead air support against invading Japanese forces in China.
More than hostility I was struck by people expressing surprise—surprise that I would want to come back to China, surprise that I was actually trying to do research in China, or that anyone would talk to me. Sure, there were a few instances in which government officials were unable or unwilling to meet with me. Through a contact, I was trying to arrange meetings in Xiong’an New Area—a sensitive project as it is a personal initiative of Xi Jinping. I finally was introduced to a contact who worked at China’s state owned People’s Daily in Xiong’an. He was very nice but kept asking me if I could get an official letter with a chop from my sponsor university in China to provide them to make introductions. After weeks of back and forth, he graciously arranged a stay for me at the nicest hotel in Xiong’an (at a discounted corporate rate—thanks People’s Daily!), but the only meetings he could set up were visits to exhibitions that I could mostly have booked myself. I appreciated his effort but felt like all the hassle hadn’t really paid off. Finally by chance, I happened to meet another contact who had previously worked in Xiong’an and he introduced me to his colleagues and friends still working there. We had informal conversations but not an official visit. This was now the better way to do research in the new China—connections were as important before, and informal conversations were much easier than official visits. People are certainly more wary of doing anything that could attract undue scrutiny from higher ups, particularly those in government institutions—and that includes universities—although many Chinese professors are personally eager to reestablish foreign exchanges. An old friend of mine, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, was unwilling to provide a letter to me as he worried he might be held accountable if anything went wrong. In the old era, he would likely have gone ahead and provided the letter without much concern as a matter of formality. My contact in Xiong’an tried to arrange a meeting with the Chief Planner of Xiong’an, only to be informed at the last minute that, “no, foreigners would not be ok, I’ll have to report it to higher ups.”
Generally, dealing with anyone in official government units is increasingly difficult for foreigners-and probably for Chinese too. A Chinese friend of mine doing a PhD at an American university told me she was politely asked to leave from a meeting with a government official in a small city in Hubei after he accused her of being a spy. So the atmosphere of fear and paranoia is not reserved only for foreigners but pervades everywhere, and anyone who has associations abroad could be suspect. Hearing this from my friend was a small comfort for me—maybe I wasn’t being targeted as an American—but it didn’t augur well for the future of field research in China.
At the same time, dealings with people in the private sector and in fields that are less sensitive proved much easier. In Hangzhou I met with the founder of a private think tank providing research and consulting to local governments and companies. He had studied at Columbia University and had a family business in Hangzhou. Many people including this man were eager to connect and to reinstate contacts and exchange with foreigners. Even Xi Jinping himself has put out a goal of having 50,000 Americans studying or doing exchange in China (there are currently only a few hundred, according to some recent reports). Some officials are eager to meet these quotas. But there are still bureaucratic and political obstacles in the way.
I wouldn’t have so much hubris to imagine my small trip would make a difference in the overall tenor of U.S.-China relations. Nor was that my goal. In diplomatic speak, people talk about multi-track diplomacy, with track 1 being official gov to gov exchange, ranging upward to Track 5 being research, training and exchange. My small visit could be considered as “Track 5” but I am not naive about the serious differences and mistrust between the governments of the U.S. and China, the continued human rights challenges and diminished space for political expression of any sort in contemporary China, and the likelihood (no matter who wins the U.S. election) of continued U.S. bipartisan consensus on viewing China as a strategic competitor. But it was heartening to know that there still remains a lot of goodwill in China toward the U.S and Americans overall. U.S. foreign policy shouldn’t lose sight of that fact, no matter how difficult it is to maintain this era, as a means to better relations in the future. An “endgame” to current U.S-China competition seems hard to imagine at the moment. But small restoration of people-to-people diplomacy, such as through reviving the Fulbright Program in China that Trump cancelled, would be low-hanging fruit for reestablishing some normalcy in person to person exchanges, diplomatic efforts that carry little risks and mostly upside for both sides.
Overall, my visit underscored to me the importance of “seeing things for how they are” to paraphrase the Chinese Marxist maxim of 实事求是. Of course, this is easier said than done in an age of fake news, misinformation, and online omnipresence. In my own view, seeing things for how they really are doesn’t mean there is one “correct” interpretation for a “thing” or for “Reality” at large—that is sometimes the implication of “Party speak”. But it also doesn’t mean adopting a Foucauldian or de-constructivist perspective in which there is no objective reality at all, and everything is subjective. For me it means taking in the vast paradoxical multitude and complexity of reality. Contemporary China, like anywhere, is full of that complexity. An era in which Chinese technologies are exported around the world coincides with a feeling of pessimism and anxiety within much of China, of course coupled with aspects of optimism and faith in the country’s progress.
https://www.ehangzhou.gov.cn/2020-10/23/c_275749.htm; https://www.wired.com/story/alibaba-city-brain-artificial-intelligence-china-kuala-lumpur/
Thanks for sharing this. I enjoyed reading. We’ve written quite a bit about neijuan 内卷 in RealTime Mandarin over the years. We translate as “destructive competition”.
Ha, didn’t realize boom times was 2011-13. I was in Shanghai for year during that time teaching English like a lot of foreigners. Although I heard those jobs are longer a thing? In any case I would love to go back.
Thanks for the article. I never dug into the culture of China… always busy surviving ha. (I charged too little for English lessons)