In May, I sat in a living room on the fringes of Hangzhou, one of the most technologically advanced cities in China and home to Alibaba, Unitree, and DeepSeek. In many ways, the party that was about to start resembled one that you’d find in any coastal metropolis: ten professionals in their 20s padding barefoot across the carpet, snacks on the dining table. Only the laptops scattered across the floor and couch suggested this was a different type of social gathering, one that has grown common in the past three years in China’s towns and cities. Our host, KC, has gathered a small circle of friends to learn AI.

KC’s face is still marked with acne; he is tall and thin, barely past 20, and already a vibe coder of some local fame. Today he’ll teach others how to use Codex and Figma to quickly build websites, Electron desktop apps, install packages — but the first step is teaching everyone to “put up the ladder,” the euphemism for deploying VPNs and relays that bypass OpenAI’s geo-block. Like any self-organized class, it doesn’t really begin until nearly two hours in. Only as the sky darkens do people settle down, grow patient, and start the class.

The demographic of the room is young, hungry, yet refusing to join or be excluded from the rat race of big tech — they self-identify as engineers, designers, influencers, or, to use a more fashionable term, one-person companies (OPCs). They are members of a social species typical of a generation facing 18.9 percent unemployment, astronomical real-estate prices in big cities, and a battered post-COVID economy, which a friend describes as petit bourgeois, overeducated, downwardly mobile young people who can just barely make the rent. A few years ago, low-cost towns like Liangzhu (where KC lives), Dali, and Anji started actively courting digital nomads and vibe coders like them. Amid government campaigns and a stream of social-media posts, young people started washing up there, hoping that learning AI while keeping their expenses low might change something.

During the self-introduction session, one woman mentions, a little shyly, her old life at Tencent — which she had disliked so much that she quit to explore “the many ways of not going to work.” Another, with long black hair, introduces herself as a novelist serializing a long book on Jinjiang Literature City, China’s biggest women-focused web-fiction platform. A third says she used to work in fashion and now runs an “aesthetics and shopping-companion” business with a friend and does self-media and AI projects on the side. They are all convinced that AI could empower their work.

Since ChatGPT, a new consensus has hardened across China’s tech industry: AI is the next mobile internet. On the surface, the country seems to have arrived at a near-universal embrace of new technology. Xi Jinping has described AI as an essential engine for China’s “new quality productive forces.” From a Marxist-Hegelian perspective, AI is on the right side of history, and history must march forward. As Evan Osnos, a staff writer with The New Yorker, recently wrote, the future could be made in China. But beneath the AI frenzy lies a real dread: people’s fear of being thrown overboard by China’s next Darwinian round of industrial upgrading, with little choice but to go along.

At once an old Chinese reflex returned: When history accelerates and people lose their bearings, find a teacher. In a society where meritocracy and education still carry near-religious authority, the proper response to a disruptive technology is to embrace it and to enroll. Decades ago, it was “English fever,” when English-learning-as-self-transformation swept factory floors and university lecture halls alike, everyone convinced that fluency was their ticket out. Now the conviction has simply changed languages. Resisting this technology is futile, unwise — so better to seize the window before it closes. The state claimed AI will empower thousands of industries, with social-media timelines filled with proof that someone, somewhere, has already changed their lives with it. In response, for many people I met across China since the arrival of ChatGPT, one thing that kept surfacing was their hunger for learning about AI, a compulsion to keep upskilling. Lessons, lessons, lessons — I noticed how often the word surfaced during casual conversations.

In the U.S., backlash against data centers has united people across the political spectrum and generations. This “AI populism,” a term coined by the writer Jasmine Sun, reflects a belief that AI is not a neutral technology but an elite project driven by tech billionaires to concentrate power and displace workers. In China, on the other hand, a meme that’s now circulating goes: Westerners get restless when they can’t protest; Chinese people get restless when they haven’t found a teacher. People like KC self-organize classes; for others, the dread of getting left behind by AI has presented a business opportunity.

Hangzhou’s Future Sci-Tech City (未来科技城) is one of those municipal declarations of intent to materialize the future. It is home to Alibaba’s headquarters and to the towers, campuses, incubators, talent apartments, and financial-service complexes through which a local government announces that it, too, belongs to the next technological epoch. For the sheer density of engineers packed into its office parks, people jokingly call the area “the center of the programmer universe.”

The industry of paid knowledge, and its priesthood of “knowledge influencers,” is........

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