About Concurrent

Concurrent

Concurrent is a newsletter by Afra Wang exploring the parallel and colliding technology and cultural currents shaping Silicon Valley, China and beyond, with a strong focus on China’s artificial intelligence industry. Wang, who was born and raised in China and worked across AI and media in Silicon Valley, is based between London and the California Bay Area. She is a fellow of the Roots of Progress Institute and has written on China and technology for Wired, The New Yorker and New York Magazine. The Sinica podcast describes her as among the most exciting younger writers tackling China and technology, and her Concurrent essays include on-the-ground reportage from China’s AI hubs, such as Liangzhu outside Hangzhou.

The Writer: Between Three Tech Worlds

Afra Wang’s biography, as given by Big Think, is compact and exact: a writer based between London and the California Bay Area, born and raised in China, who spent many years in Silicon Valley working across AI and media, a Roots of Progress Institute Fellow and a winter fellow with GovAI. That itinerary is the newsletter’s method. Wang writes about China’s AI industry neither as a distant commentator nor as a purely domestic insider, but as someone who has worked inside Silicon Valley’s AI world and travels repeatedly into China’s, interviewing engineers in Shenzhen living rooms, labs in Beijing’s Haidian district and start-up clusters in Hangzhou’s suburbs. As she explained on Sinocism Live, she started Concurrent, on 25 March in its first year, to perform a kind of deep contextual translation: having grown up in China and worked in Silicon Valley, she saw misconceptions on both sides and wanted to translate the topology of the China tech world systematically for Western readers at a moment of intense China curiosity.

Her long-form journalism runs in parallel with the newsletter and feeds it. For Wired’s China issue in January 2026 she wrote “You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel,” an account of The Morning Star of Lingao, the sprawling crowdsourced time-travel novel that serves as a founding text of China’s Industrial Party, the loose online current that treats engineering capability and manufacturing-led growth as close to a creed. For The New Yorker in September 2026 she reported from Liangzhu. For New York Magazine she investigated China’s sprawling, lucrative and largely unregulated “learn AI, get rich” education industry, visiting the country’s largest get-rich-with-AI company, with more than 80,000 paying members, and profiling a 25-year-old AI filmmaker from Heilongjiang who built a business earning several million yuan through free AI classes. The three pieces form what she calls a reporting trilogy on AI and Chinese society, and Concurrent is where their arguments are developed and extended.

Topology of China AI

One of Concurrent’s defining essays, “Topology of ‘China AI’,” is built around a single long conversation with an engineer at one of China’s largest technology companies who leads an open-source project, met in Shenzhen during a self-organised China AI and tech tour with American tech writers. The engineer, identified only as H, wakes to the same feeds as his Californian peers, debates on LessWrong, drives a NIO to work, uses English more heavily than when he studied in California, and treats Gödel, Escher, Bach as AI scripture. His conclusion anchors the essay: “‘Chinese AI’ is merely a geopolitical label,” because all large language models fundamentally compress and regenerate collected data, and the global open-source community reads the same papers, laughs at the same memes and solves the same problems.

Yet the essay’s real subject is the profound topological differences that persist beneath that universalism: how the two ecosystems are wired differently, in state relations, capital, talent circulation and habits of knowledge production. Wang draws out, for instance, the reluctance of Chinese entrepreneurs to become public sources of knowledge, where Silicon Valley abounds with philosopher-kings writing books, and the humility imposed on American executives by constant disruption, in which top leaders personally test small companies’ products because no incumbent can see the whole market. The essay exemplifies Concurrent’s genre: a reported conversation expanded into a structural map, with the author’s own cross-cultural experience as the measuring instrument.

Mandate of AI: Who Defines the Future

“Mandate of AI,” another signature essay, begins with a drive from the AI labs of Beijing’s Haidian district to a robotics company in Yizhuang and arrives at the newsletter’s most quoted formulation. Many Chinese AI researchers Wang met were focused, with almost monastic intensity, on the technology itself; they did not imagine themselves, as their Silicon Valley counterparts often do, as people entrusted not only with pushing the frontier of model capabilities but with thinking through the fate of humanity. She calls that entrusted role the mandate of AI, and asks who bears it in China. Her answer structures the essay: in any society, who gets to define the future is settled long before who builds it; in Silicon Valley the industry, especially its richest AI leaders, defines the future, while in China the state defines it, and the AI industry is one of the instruments through which the definition will be carried out.

The essay contrasts the two civilisations’ imagined endgames. Silicon Valley imagines recursive self-improvement, a software-driven intelligence explosion in which AI builds AI in a loop, casting AI as the agent of its own future and the lab as its steward. Chinese thinking, by contrast, converges on something more embodied: human-level intelligence that must interact with the physical world to mean anything. Wang also dissects the race frame itself, observing that in the West the United States-China AI race is the deepest groove in the record, that attaching the word China to anything has become a way to get things done in Washington, and that inside Chinese labs almost nobody thinks about the race at all, with the term near-peer used mainly by international-relations scholars rather than practitioners. The essay’s closing image, of China’s AI industry as the bloodstream of Chinese innovation confined by vessels not of its own making, captures Concurrent’s habit of fusing reportage, metaphor and institutional analysis.

Liangzhu: Reportage from the Vibe-Coding Capital

Wang’s New Yorker reporting from Liangzhu, the town outside Hangzhou where laid-off and burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe-code in one another’s living rooms, brought Concurrent’s themes to a general audience, and her Sinica podcast discussion of it is the fullest account of her method. She found the community through contrarian programmers at open-source meetups. Inside it she documented a world where AI and BaZi fortune-telling have become strangely intimate, where a start-up called FateTell operates in the grey zone of AI divination alongside tarot machines in Shenzhen and crystal shops, and where young people give one another AI lessons for free while the commercial AI-education industry elsewhere sells hope and upward mobility, in her phrase a prosperity gospel with Chinese characteristics, echoing the Crazy English phenomenon Evan Osnos chronicled for The New Yorker in 2008.

The reporting complicates the headline statistic that 93 percent of Chinese respondents tell Gallup that AI will mostly help their country. Wang asks what that number conceals, and whether what looks like optimism is sometimes closer to acceptance: pragmatism, scarce compute, trust in state capacity, and the social pressure of a national campaign in which a Party insider’s book advises young people to make peace with the ordinary while everyone else tells them to learn AI or be left behind. Concurrent’s newsletter essays work the same territory between the official story and the lived one, which is why the Sinica podcast introduces her as a writer who gets beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism.

The Industrial Party and the Culture of Chinese Tech

Concurrent’s cultural beat is as important as its industry beat. The Wired essay on The Morning Star of Lingao traced how a collaborative online novel became the urtext of the Industrial Party, whose influence extended into the founding of the nationalist commentary site Guancha in 2012 and into the keyboard politics of Chinese internet forums after the 2011 Wenzhou high-speed train collision, when Industrial Party voices answered calls to slow down by demanding the opposite: learn from mistakes and push through. By taking that current seriously as an ideology of engineering, Wang gave English readers a key to the values inside China’s tech workforce that product coverage never supplies.

Recommendations from within the community underline the point. Writer Lesley Gao’s note, circulated on Substack, calls Wang’s work among the cultural observation of both Silicon Valley and China’s tech scenes that she recommends most, praising portraits that bridge the emotional texture of modern ambition with the intellectual frameworks shaping it through a distinctly humanist lens. Concurrent is where that humanism is practised weekly: engineers, course-sellers, fortune-tellers and founders are treated as people whose inner lives explain an industry better than its press releases do.

Concurrent in the China Newsletter Ecosystem

Concurrent is published on Substack at afraw.substack.com and belongs to the loose federation of independent China publications that now carries much of the English-speaking world’s serious China analysis. Wang appears across that federation’s platforms: twice on the Sinica podcast in 2026, on Sinocism Live with fellow writer Jasmine Sun to discuss their joint tech tour of China, and in a 2022 academic roundtable on podcasting about China at the University of California, Irvine, alongside Cindy Yu and Yangyang Cheng, one of the first public academic events on transcontinental podcasting about China. Her self-organised China AI tour with American tech writers, and the essays it produced, exemplify the ecosystem’s working method: small groups of bilingual writers travelling together, sharing access and publishing complementary accounts.

Within that field Concurrent’s territory is distinctive. Pekingnology works from policy texts; trade and industry newsletters work from data; Concurrent works from people and places, the living rooms of Liangzhu, the labs of Haidian, the classrooms of the AI cramming industry, and reads the technology through them. For readers in Silicon Valley it functions as an early-warning system for cultural and technical shifts that will reach them as products and competitors; for readers in China studies it is a running ethnography of the AI generation.

Readership, Reach and Continuing Work

Concurrent’s author is based between London and the California Bay Area; Beijing is the nominal city assigned in this rollout for foreign-based China-focused outlets, following the precedent of earlier batches. The newsletter’s readership, judging by its citations and invitations, spans technology workers and founders, AI researchers, investors, journalists and academics, the audiences of Big Think, the Sinica podcast and Sinocism, all of which have platformed Wang as an interpreter of China’s AI scene. She continues to publish through 2026, developing the AI-and-society trilogy and the newsletter in tandem, with further reported work on industrial AI previewed in her podcast appearances.

The publication’s title is its thesis. Concurrent currents run in parallel and collide; Silicon Valley and China are not converging into one system nor decoupling into two sealed ones, but interacting continuously through people exactly like its author and her subjects, bilingual engineers and writers who doomscroll the same feeds in Shenzhen and San Francisco. A newsletter written from inside that overlap, by a reporter who can interview a fortune-telling start-up in the morning and a LessWrong-reading open-source lead in the afternoon, gives English readers something no wire service can: the feeling, documented and argued, of how China’s AI revolution is actually lived.

A Note on Sources and Verification

The facts in this profile are drawn from Concurrent’s own published essays, including “Topology of ‘China AI’” and “Mandate of AI” on Afra Wang’s Substack, from her author biography at Big Think, and from the transcripts and episode notes of her appearances on the Sinica podcast and Sinocism Live, which document her Wired essay on The Morning Star of Lingao, her New Yorker reportage from Liangzhu published on 23 September 2026, and her New York Magazine investigation of China’s AI education industry. Her own account of founding Concurrent to translate the topology of China’s technology world for Western readers comes from her Sinocism Live interview, and the characterisation of her work by peers is taken from the Sinica podcast’s introductions and from published recommendations within the Substack community. No biographical detail beyond those sources has been asserted.