ChinAI #380: It’s getting more and more difficult to make money
Greetings from a world where…
perhaps it could still be the Hawkeyes football team’s year
…As always, the searchable archive of all past issues is here. Please please to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay support access for all AND compensation for awesome ChinAI contributors).
Feature Translation: Why is it becoming more and more difficult to make money? The most profound analysis I’ve read
Context: This week’s essay comes from budongjing [不懂经], a platform that often translates English-language books on financial and economic issues (e.g., Naval Ravikant’s HOW TO GET RICH: (without getting lucky). I came across this post after it got aggregated by Huxiu, a popular science and tech news platform, where it accumulated 100k+ views.
Key Takeaways: The vibes of China’s economy summed up in one sentence? “It’s getting more and more difficult to make money.”
The author writes, “Over the past two decades, you didn’t need to be super talented. You just needed courage, a willingness to grind over and over again, and you could take flight by standing at the window of opportunity. Real estate, the internet, and foreign trade—these three great engines of wealth creation took turns driving prosperity. Now, however, these engines have slowed down; we have entered an era of ‘zero-sum’ competition.”
The budongjing essay fleshes out the vibes with these vignettes: “In the ‘This Work Thing [上班这件事]’ Douban group, it is the late-night sigh of a 35-year-old tech-giant employee, laid off and left to grapple with mortgage and car loan payments. On Xiaohongshu, it is the experience of a young professional in Shanghai, earning 8,000 yuan a month, who managed to secure a shred of financial security by practicing extreme fragility. On Weibo, it is the story of a small-business owner, forced to close shop after orders plummeted in the post-pandemic era.”
Budongjing traces the cause of this feeling of economic malaise to a structural shift in the Chinese economy from “arranging atoms” to “arranging bits”, largely adapting the views of Emad Mostaque’s book The Last Economy.
The old paradigm tried to manufacture scarcity; in the digital realm, instead of trying to abuse software patents and guard closed systems, the new paradigm favors open-source networks that achieve exponential scale.
One interesting takeaway (which I disagree with, but it’s notable that this is how some Chinese bloggers are translating these structural changes into self-help advice to individuals): “The old narrative that ‘you can succeed if you just work hard’ is being supplanted by a harsh topology where ‘connections matter more than effort.’”
Highlighting AI as the ultimate shock that will perform nearly all digital tasks by the end of 2027, the author doesn’t really put forward a coherent solution for those ordinary people struggling to make it. The piece ends with a whimper (“start thinking like an independent network node” and “build your own platform”).
This piece stood out to me because this narrative that “it’s becoming more and more difficult to make money” reflects China’s broader economic malaise.
Some of the WeChat post comments were also insightful. Here’s one (60 likes): “In the past, the cake grew ever larger. You could put forth effort and make money. Now the cake grows more slowly. The most lucrative returns are captured by a select few who possess resources and assets that can be monetized repeatedly. Ordinary people have only their time to sell. They must crowd onto the track of endless competition for meager returns, naturally making it more and more difficult to make money.”
Outside of this specific translation, a few data points to consider. As Rhodium Logan Wright highlights, China’s economic growth has slowed. “[A]re you aware that the United States has outgrown China over the last five years? And has a pretty good chance of outgrowing China over your fourth term, and a near certainty of outgrowing China over your fifth term, if you wanted to be around that long.” Mary Gallagher also points out that China’s youth unemployment rate has exceeded 20%, which definitely undercounts rural youth.
FULL TRANSLATION: Why is it becoming more and more difficult to make money? The most profound analysis I’ve read
ChinAI Links (Four to Forward)
Should-read: Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot
Reported by a crack team of NYT reviewers including Jonathan Swan, Ana Swanson and Paul Mozur, the intro to a bombshell, straight-from-TV story:
A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.
But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.
Should-read: Two links on China’s bad economic fundamentals
For some of the background context for this week’s translation, I relied on these two links:
An excellent ChinaTalk conversation with Rhodium Group’s Logan Wright, which included this tidbit: “My further response to Chairman Xi is: are you aware that the United States has outgrown China over the last five years? And has a pretty good chance of outgrowing China over your fourth term, and a near certainty of outgrowing China over your fifth term, if you wanted to be around that long.”
Logan and Mary Gallagher joined The Beijing Brief for a conversation on China’s economic slowdown.
Should-read: Benchma(r)king
James Bridle, in Emergence Magazine, recounts his experience of making a chair with the help of ChatGPT:
“There are two qualities of the chair that ChatGPT and I built that stand out. The first is that it looks flimsier than it is, but it works…The second quality of the chair is that it is unnervingly big. Not too big—it’s actually pretty comfortable for a six-footer like me—but it’s definitely bigger than you’d expect, verging on the uncanny. This I find to be absolutely fascinating. What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one. They know what a chair should look like, what it should do, the mechanics of how one is put together, the physics of holding you up. But they have no embodied experience of the world, no history with chairs or any other object, no physical memory. They don’t know how it feels, not merely to sit in a chair, but to encounter one in the world, to place it among other things in a home, to live with it, to be around it every day as one goes about the mundane business of life. This is the idea of a chair brought to life; but things—objects, beings, relationships—are not mere ideas, and you certainly can’t get every aspect of them from books. The chair is low stakes, but, once again, you wouldn’t want to run a society, or a culture, or a planet this way.”
Thank you for reading and engaging.
These are Jeff Ding’s (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.
Check out the archive of all past issues here & please to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay for a subscription will support access for all).
Any suggestions or feedback? Let me know at [email protected] or on Twitter at @jjding99
© 2026 Jeffrey Ding