Drum Tower from The Economist

“China is more influential today than at any point in modern history. Its economy drives global growth, its technology shapes industries everywhere, and under Xi Jinping, an increasingly confident China is challenging the established world order.”

“But behind that rise lies a country in the throes of social change, with a slowing economy, an aging population, and widening inequality. Understanding the rhythms of life in China has never been as important.”

“I am currently sitting in Yihang's flying taxi, which is about to take off. I am slightly nervous. I'm Sarah Wu, the Economist China correspondent, based in the capital of Beijing after years in Taipei and Hong Kong.”

“From the party's agenda to advances in AI. I've seen what's happened over the past 20 years, and I think China still has the ability to surprise us on this front.”

“How many times in your life have you had a great boss? You're unlikely to need lots of fingers to count them. Your hand may well remain bald into a fist. It doesn't have to be this way. The ingredients of a decent manager are not a secret. They can be learned.”

“I don't think there's any textbook telling you that it's a great idea to reorganize the whole company two months into a pandemic.”

“I would say for every pumpkin spice latte, there were 10 other drinks that are no longer on the menu board.”

“Listen, I am deaf and I'm deaf because I have listened to so many shitty speeches from Silicon Valley tech executives.”

“To a small town in rural Kansas, where $47 million went missing from the local bank. What do you mean something's wrong with the bank? We never have problems. Over several months, the bank's CEO had quietly put most of the bank's money into some sort of cryptocurrency investment, until the board called him in to explain himself.”

“This predatory industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And it's growing fast. It's probably bigger than the illegal drug trade. Behind it is a dystopian criminal underworld, of forced labor, corruption and intrigue.”

“Well, in there, people are sold. You are slaves in there. What really disturbed me was how systematized it was, the brutality.”

“They had these slogans that would always chant before we'd start to work every day, and it was something like cripple the US and the European economy.”

“They're essentially the law enforcement. They're the government.”

“But in the last few years, more and more Chinese people have been taking this route to reach the US too. Last year, there were more than 37,000. That's nearly 10 times more than the year before, and 50 times more than the year before that. And that surprised me. Because China is a superpower.”

“Sister Huang had come a long way. She grew up in a rural village in Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China. Sister Huang had already broken many of the norms and conventions in her hometown. She'd left the village to go work in towns, then cities, and then even abroad as a migrant worker in Singapore. She became financially independent, which gave her the capacity to divorce her gambling husband and raise two children to university age.”

“I then realized that the husband was visually impaired. He wasn't totally blind, but he could only see blurry shapes. They invited me into their room on the hotel's top floor, and they introduced me to their two kids, Angela, who's 12, and Tom, who's 10. But sitting there with the family, beneath a buzzing light, I couldn't imagine how they were going to get across the Darién Gap. They had a smuggler arranged, but Agan couldn't even see clearly, and the kids were so small.”

“And when I asked him how he planned to stay and work in America, he told me outright that he was going to lie and exploit the asylum system. He said, political asylum in America is just a deceptive game. Americans get to feel good about their morals while actually using the system to import cheap labor for the dirty, tiring jobs that Americans don't want to do.”

“Wang Jun is 34 years old. He is originally from Hunan, but he migrated to Shenzhen in the early 2010s. He joined a pro-democracy group there and was arrested and convicted of subverting state power as a result. He spent more than three years in prison. As soon as I left and walked across China's border, I felt this rush of relief. I could breathe again. I had tears in my eyes.”

“One of them was named Sam Lu. He was from Wuhan. He told me he'd been one of the first people to get COVID all the way back in 2019, and he'd gotten so sick, he thought he might die. Sam recovered, but his grandmother caught COVID from him, and she died. Sam was devastated. He wrote about what had happened to his grandmother online. Then the police called him in and rebuked him for what he'd said. Sam had been set on leaving China ever since.”

“I noticed that the whole family was wearing big cross necklaces, but Agan said actually they just bought those so that they could blend in on the trail. They thought wearing crosses might deter bandits from targeting them. I heard there are a lot of Catholics on this route. I don't know the specifics, but maybe if you run into a thug and they think you're someone of faith, you might have a better chance of being spared.”

“And this was a dilemma for many of the Chinese migrants. They could afford to pay double or sometimes even quadruple the smuggling costs that the other migrants paid. Locals joked that they were VIP migrants, but that also made them vulnerable to robbery. And they seemed to just know so little about the countries they were about to go through. At one point, Huang forgot the name of which country she was in, and I had to remind her, this is Columbia.”