"Cool stuff is happening in China" Not just cool stuff... I just finished listening to several podcasts with a Czech journalist who covered China for decades.

"Cool stuff is happening in China" Not just cool stuff... I just finished listening to several podcasts with a Czech journalist who covered China for decades. He said that under Xi, the country has become superparanoid. Before Xi's term, people would talk to journalists mostly freely, and even foreign journalists would get a pass in their daily activities unless they touched something really sensitive (Falun Gong, Tibet, Uyghur unrest). After Xi came to power, the situation started to worsen, police started to follow journalists around and harass them for banal reasons, regular Chinese started being afraid of talking even about trivial topics. The former Overton window narrowed to a "compulsory vs. banned" dichotomy. One of his last experiences was that he went to a tomato processing factory to report on tomato harvest and was immediately arrested by the police because how dare you record something about a tomato factory. I don't think this environment is going to be particularly conductive to economic growth, and the latest trends seem to concur. China is strangling its future growth in the name of National Security.