Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Thanks for joining me this week.

Recommendations

China Stories

E. Eduardo Castillo, “A rare glimpse into Tibet, where some hope to preserve language and customs despite China’s new law”

The discovery at Sanxingdui helped force Chinese scholars to revise their understanding of ancient China—that it was never rooted in a single civilization on the banks of the Yellow River, but instead had multiple origin points that coalesced to become what we think of as China. — Jonathan Cheng, “A Lost Civilization Is Baffling Experts and Rewriting China’s Origin Story”

Brian DeMare, “Secretary Wang’s American Friend: William Hinton and the Long History of ‘Fanshen’”

Lily Kuo and Pei-Lin Wu, “How China Keeps Tabs on Foreigners”

On September 1 this year, Kyrgyzstan will assume the chairmanship of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the economic and security alliance formed in 2001 by China and Russia together with several Central Asian countries, and will host a summit marking the SCO’s 25th anniversary. The summit comes amid a deepening relationship between China and Kyrgyzstan. — Dalia Parete, “You Watch But Don’t Absorb”

Vimi Wang, interviewing Yuen Yuen Ang, “Who Gets to Explain Development?”

Wanderings Around the World

How many Substack newsletters does it take to recreate the pleasures of one murdered book section? — Ron Charles, “Six Months After the Fall”

Brian O. Otieno, with photographs by Fredrik Lerneryd, “Cowboys and Cowgirls Light Up a Country Music Festival in Africa”

Amy Qin with graphics by Flávio Pessoa, “Meet the army of amateur archivists racing to save US history in national parks”

Standout Story

People who have worked in both China and Silicon Valley tend to comment on the similarities: the belief in rapid change, the power of engineers, the odes to humanity that mask impatience with actual humans. At a Peet’s Coffee in Zhongguancun, full of twentysomethings wearing AirPods, it would be easy for a visitor from Palo Alto to feel at home. The big difference between the two countries’ A.I. hubs is in how people talk about their intentions. American engineers tend to focus on the transformative potential of reaching artificial general intelligence, and on the utopian (or dystopian) cascade that could follow. Chinese tech firms have more imminent goals; they have less capital and less computing power, owing partly to American export controls on the most advanced chips, so they focus largely on pushing products into everyday commerce. — Evan Osnos, “The Future, Made in China”

Featured photo: Mission of San Juan Capistrano, California, August 2007.