A letter from China
What's our hedge against authoritarianism?
Dan Wang writes a letter every year. They’re bloody good. Elsewhere, never have I learnt more about China.
“I’ve by now lived in each of China’s main megaregions. It is time to make assessments”, in 2021 he drew a detailed map of the dominating cultural characteristic of each province.
In 2022, he focused on Yunnan: “Mountains offer the best hiding places from the state”.
Now, his latest 2023 is just out, in it you’ll find:
The marvellous concept of a walk-and-talk (10 people go on a comfortable 100 km walking week together, sharing a scenic journey and deep one-on-one conversations with a different guest every day).
The secret location where the young Chinese idlers (quite the oxymoron imho!) congregate:
Those who have ambition and entrepreneurial energy are going to Singapore. Those who have money and means are going to Japan. And those who have none of these things — the slackers, the free spirits, kids who want to chill — are hanging out in Thailand.
A reluctant argument about Bitcoin worth. Even the skeptics recognise its value as an authoritarianism hedge. Some say that in a world of increasingly centralising states the demand for such a hedge would plummet. I beg to differ.
Above all, Dan is a fierce Italian opera advocate (the Germans drool and dribble) and a ferocious good reader!
Meanwhile elsewhere, The Economist reported that researchers are onto “the optimal range of speeds within which the brain can process information" (Daily Chart, 28/09/2019). Different tongues, regardless of their speed, have similar “information encoding efficiency”.
Speak faster, you’ll have more words to say (Japanese); speak slower, you’ll say more with less (Thai)…
Stay sharp with tongue twisters. Until the next one!