Opinion | Only America Can Save the Future

Every new year Dan Wang, a technology analyst with an East Asia-based economics research firm and a gifted observer of contemporary China, writes a long, reflective letter about the year just past, mixing analysis with personal experience. In this year’s letter the most memorable element is a single piece of Chinese slang: “rùn.”

The term means exactly what it sounds like: “Chinese youths have in recent years appropriated this word in its English meaning to express a desire to flee.” Initially it could just mean escaping the expectations of parents or the big city grind. But after years of Zero Covid policy, with China’s economy disappointing and its political culture constricting, Wang writes that it’s increasingly “evolved to mean emigrating from China altogether.”

The lucky escapees are the ones who can move legally to Europe or America. The boldest are the ones traveling to Latin America and braving the Darien Gap to reach Mexico and then the United States; the migrant surge at our southern border, Wang notes, now includes thousands of Chinese nationals each month. But mostly, rùn means heading for Singapore, Japan or Thailand — the last of which Wang recently visited, to hang out with a mixture of remote workers, spiritual seekers, crypto enthusiasts and drug users.

He came away from the experience feeling a bit more optimistic about China’s uncertain future. “The China of the future will not look like the China ruled by old men today,” he writes, and some of the creative Chinese kids hanging out in Thailand may “do good things for the China they’ll one day inherit.”

But the overall account in which this hopeful thought is embedded doesn’t seem all that positive. Here you have a would-be superpower facing demographic contraction with an existing youthful talent pool that’s trying to escape, with would-be artists and entrepreneurs preferring the highlands of Thailand to Shanghai or Beijing — while sometimes lying to their parents and pretending to be in America, even “drawing curtains to darken the room when they video chat with family” to fake a time-zone difference.

Elsewhere, in the geopolitical portion of his letter, Wang writes that while “50 percent of China’s economy might be dysfunctional, the 5 percent that’s going spectacularly well is pretty dangerous to American interests.” (Meaning everything from its booming automobile exports to its expanding defense industrial base.)