love afra’s new essay on Unitree robots at Chinese new year and China’s climate of AI optimism. two excerpts that stood out to me:

1. “Decades of lived experience have taught Chinese society an empirical lesson: technology makes life tangibly better. I once wrote about my Shandong grandmother, now in her eighties, once walked five hours to buy a clock so her children could get to school on time. Today her Xiaomi phone has given her an online shopping addiction, and delivery drones fly above her apartment. For many in China, industrialization compressed and bent time itself—and AI simply looks like the next turn of a wheel that has only ever spun forward.”

2. “In the state narrative of a “century of humiliation,” technology is redemption: the means by which China avoids falling behind, being beaten, being suppressed again. And crucially, China has not experienced the trauma of deindustrialization—the hollowed-out factory towns, the displaced blue-collar workers—that haunts the American Rust Belt and shapes Western ambivalence toward automation.”