Mimi Jiang lives in Shanghai.
In the last two years, my friends in the Chinese artificial intelligence industry have stopped talking about the singularity. No matter how you define it, we are either already in it or about to be there. If Elon Musk is right (though he did predict we’d be living on Mars by now), AI will surpass the sum of all human intelligence in five years and exceed human control within ten....
To try to make sense of the recent US military operation to capture the president and first lady of Venezuela, Chinese netizens have been looking for parallels in Chinese history. Seeing Nicolás Maduro arrive in the New York winter (the temperature in Caracas is twenty degrees warmer), some people were reminded of the war that ended the Northern Song dynasty.
One year the sandstorm was so thick it painted the sky orange. Even if you sealed all the windows, the next day your tables and floors would be covered by sand. The spring wind blows it in from the Gobi Desert. The smog, by contrast, has many culprits: fossil fuels, coal, heavy industry, too many cars. People in Beijing hate the wind for bringing the sand but love it for blowing the smog away.
During the latest lockdown I ate only rice dumplings, wontons and boiled vegetables. After two months of that it’s difficult to remember what your favourite food tastes like. At the end of April, I traded some homegrown flowers for two pieces of homemade cake and gobbled them in tears. Another time I paid an outrageous price for a small basket of strawberries from a neighbourhood profiteer. Most of us don’t want to see potatoes and carrots (the basis of every government ration package) ever again.
In Chinese, positive and negative test results are translated as yang and yin. Yang shares the same sound as the word for sheep, meaning that sheep have become the most disliked animals of all. All sheep sculptures in public spaces have been covered with black plastic bags. Small talk has changed from ‘have you eaten?’ to ‘how many sheep are in your building today?’ The strangest thing about this phase of Covid control has been the discrepancy between the results given by staff at Disease Control and the app that gives you your PCR results. Many people have received calls from Disease Control saying they are positive even though the app results are negative. This has led to verbal and even physical fights as police ask the ‘sheep’ to join the ‘quarantine herd’ and the ‘sheep’ bleats back, citing the app. Finally, the government decided to use another app for mass testing, but it crashed on the first day and had scanning problems on the second.
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