Over the past six years, I’ve used my own work as a journalist, analyst, consultant, and general hanger-on in California and China to follow these people’s stories and fit together the pieces of this puzzle as best I can. The book you’re now reading is the result of that piecing together. It’s an imperfect, incomplete, and subjective snapshot of these phenomena. In the process of writing, the people, places, and questions dissected here became a part of my life. Much of the writing here reflects that closeness, with both the insight and the bias that closeness brings.
Bridging two distinct countries and cultures is a delicate and often fraught process. If done right, it can open entirely new vistas for the people and the places involved. If done wrong, it can turn minor frictions into a major backlash, fueling mutual suspicion and outright resentment along national, cultural, and personal lines. This book tells the stories of people who have tried, and sometimes failed, to build those bridges between China and California.
But before telling you their stories, I’ll briefly share my own. Over the last five years, the Transpacific Experiment has exerted a similar pull on me: part personal, part professional, and whole lot of dumb luck. That run of luck began with a broken ankle and a visa problem.
ANKLES AND OPPORTUNITIES
I grew up in the Bay Area, but before 2008 had virtually no interest in China. My high school didn’t offer Mandarin courses, and even if it had, I would have stuck with Spanish. In our survey courses on “world history,” we blew through a dozen Chinese dynasties in a couple of weeks. By the time I got to college, I could sum up my knowledge of modern China in three phrases: Mao Zedong, Tiananmen Square, and Factory of the World.
But in the summer after my sophomore year in college, I stumbled into a job as a counselor at an academic summer camp in Beijing. It was June 2008, and the city was ramping up to host the summer Olympics, furiously repaving roads and launching campaigns to discourage spitting in public. Despite those efforts, Beijing was still a city with an untamed heart. I found myself fascinated by the high-functioning chaos that reigned all around me: the lawless fluidity on the roads, the bruising bartering in the markets, and the no-holds-barred competition for every seat on the subway.
Underneath that gruff exterior, there was also real warmth and openness toward Americans. Many working-class Chinese people had never interacted with an American before, and a big smile combined with some creative sign language went a long way in the cause of grassroots diplomacy. I made friends with the security guards at our dormitories, gifting them my Frisbee on my last day there, and receiving one of their Beijing Public Security uniforms in return. Sitting in the airport lounge waiting for my flight to San Francisco, I knew I had to come back to China.
So, after graduating college in 2010, I found a job teaching English in the central Chinese city of Xi’an. As I slowly gained Chinese language skills, that city and the whole country became even more captivating than on my first trip. After a year in Xi’an, I headed back to Beijing to study language full-time at a university. Graduating from that program, I began a job at a local TV station that broadcast English-language pseudopropaganda about China in countries like Iran.
By the spring of 2013, I knew that I wanted to work as a proper journalist. Reading American media coverage of the country, I felt that it wasn’t capturing what I saw in the daily life of my Chinese friends. I wanted to fill that gap with their stories. I gave myself six months and $5,000 in savings to try to string freelance writing gigs into a job as a China correspondent.
I hitchhiked across central China looking for stories, writing about a fight I witnessed at an airport and about the personal evolution of Chinese students who returned from studying in the U.S. When I eventually ran out of time and money, I had collected a handful of publications but no job offers. Resigned to reality, I began interviewing for more mundane careers: selling real estate in central China or working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the country’s northeast.
And then, a miracle happened: I badly mangled my ankle during a game of Ultimate Frisbee in Beijing. By the time I dragged myself into the lobby of a local hospital, my ankle was the size of a cantaloupe, but the doctor who glanced at my X-rays declared it to be “no problem”—if I stayed off it for a week or two, all would be back to normal. A few days later, I flew home to California for a long-scheduled visit of a couple weeks. There, my family doctor saw things differently: the ankle was severely broken in two places, and with an injury like that I absolutely should not fly for at least two months.
I was stranded back in the Bay Area with one working foot and no job. The prospect of two months sitting at home left me worried that I would lose the pulse of what was happening in China. I’d spent the last six months obsessively following—and trying to contribute to—news coverage of the country. Right before coming home, I had completed an intensive Mandarin program in which I vowed to speak no English for three months, a pledge that I broke at the exact same moment as my ankle. Now I was trapped in the leafy suburbs of the Bay Area, 6,000 miles from the action in Beijing.
But then, the action started coming to me. At the time, prospective Chinese home buyers were arriving in my hometown of Palo Alto in droves. They were boarding luxury buses for mobile real estate tours of the city, purchasing million-dollar homes the way my parents might snap up a nice piece of furniture. I called up the real estate agency hosting the tours and talked my way into joining one of them, eventually writing an article about it for the website of The Atlantic.
The home-buying tours were a truly transpacific phenomenon: the rush to move money out of China reflected jitters about that country’s economy, and the sudden influx of rich Chinese buyers was ruffling feathers in California suburbs. It was one of the first signs I saw that the economic, social, and human narratives that I’d been tracing within China were now making their way onto American soil.
When my ankle healed up, I headed back to China and resumed my job search. Soon after arriving back in Beijing, a well-timed introduction and a lucky break landed me my dream job: as the first China correspondent for The WorldPost, a new media collaboration between The Huffington Post and the Berggruen Institute, a think tank. Before I could begin that work, I had to apply for a journalist visa.
That application process is never easy, but my timing was particularly bad. A year earlier, The New York Times and Bloomberg had dropped bombshell investigations into the family wealth of China’s top leadership, reports that led to a freeze on visas for those publications. Chinese leadership had no beef with The WorldPost, but we faced a different hurdle: China had never before granted full journalist credentials to an all-online media platform. The print–online distinction was functionally meaningless but bureaucratically momentous. Tensions with The New York Times hung heavy over the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and no one there was eager to hand out credentials to a new American outlet. I flew back to San Francisco in December of 2013, unsure if the powers that be would see fit to grant me the visa.
But this time around, I was ready to track down some more transpacific narratives. When state labor inspectors raided the Southern California factory of a Chinese electric car company, I interviewed the eccentric mayor who had courted the company and covered the fallout from the investigation. I began visiting and interviewing people in the Hunters Point neighborhood being transformed by a Chinese-funded mega-development. I hung out with Chinese entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and met the Airbnb team planning the company’s China strategy. I even helped organize a delegation of small-town Bay Area mayors making a trip to China to pitch their cities as ideal destinations for investment.
All these stories provided small windows into massive changes within China itself. When I first set foot in Beijing just six years earlier, China was still squarely a developing country. Awe-inspiring Olympic ceremony aside, it was a majority-rural country whose economy ran on low-wage labor. China was considered a technological backwater and an afterthought for the U.S. entertainment industry. Cheap Chinese goods stocked the shelves of our nation’s Walmarts, but that