Afra Wang on "The Morning Star of Lingao" (临高启明) and the Rise and Reckoning of China's "Industrial Party"
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.7 • 710 Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2026
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, I speak with Afra Wang, a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov.AI.
We're talking today about her recent WIRED piece on what might be China's most influential science fiction project you've never heard of: The Morning Star of Lingao (Língáo Qǐmíng 临高启明), a sprawling, crowdsourced novel about time travelers who bootstrap an industrial revolution in Ming Dynasty Hainan. More than a thought experiment in alternate history, it's the ur-text of China's "Industrial Party" (gōngyè dǎng 工业党) — the loose intellectual movement that sees engineering capability as the true source of national power. We discuss what the novel reveals about how China thinks about failure, modernity, and salvation, and why, just as Americans are waking up to China's industrial might, the worldview that helped produce it may already be losing its grip.
5:27 – Being a cultural in-betweener: code-switching across moral and epistemic registers
10:25 – Double consciousness and converging aesthetic standards
12:05 – "The greatest Chinese science fiction" — an ironic title for a poorly written cult classic
14:18 – Bridging STEM and humanities: the KPI-coded language of tech optimization
16:08 – China's post-Industrial Party moment: from "try hard" to "lie flat"
17:01 – How widely known is Lingao? A cult Bible for China's techno-elite
19:11 – From crypto bros to DAO experiments: how Afra discovered the novel
21:25 – The canonical timeline: compiling chaos into collaborative fiction
23:06 – Guancha.cn (guānchá zhě wǎng 观察者网) and the Industrial Party's media ecosystem
26:05 – The Sentimental Party (Qínghuái Dǎng 情怀党): China's lost civic space
29:01 – The Wenzhou high-speed rail crash: the debate that defined the Industrial Party
33:19 – Controlled spoilers: colonizing Australia, the Maid Revolution, and tech trees
41:06 – Competence as salvation: obsessive attention to getting the details right
44:18 – The Needham question and the joy of transformation: from Robinson Crusoe to Primitive Technology
47:25 – "Never again": inherited historical vulnerability and the memory of chaos
49:20 – Wang Xiaodong, "China Is Unhappy," and the crystallization of Industrial Party ideology
51:33 – Gender and Lingao: a pre-feminist artifact and the rational case for equality
56:16 – Dan Wang's Breakneck and the "engineering state" framework
59:25 – New Quality Productive Forces (xīn zhì shēngchǎnlì 新质生产力): Industrial Party logic in CCP policy
1:03:43 – The reckoning: why Industrial Party intellectuals are losing their innocence
1:07:49 – What Lingao tells us about China today: the invisible infrastructure beneath the hot shower
Paying it forward: The volunteer translators of The Morning Star of Lingao (English translation and GitHub resources)
Xīn Xīn Rén Lèi / Pixel Perfect podcast (https://pixelperfect.typlog.io/) and the Bǎihuā (百花) podcasting community
Recommendations:
Afra: China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter, edited by Kerry Brown; The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu
Kaiser: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynica Podcast, weekly discussion of current affairs in China. |
| 0:13.0 | In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural |
| 0:18.2 | trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. |
| 0:24.9 | Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how |
| 0:30.5 | we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you this week from my home in |
| 0:35.3 | Chapel Hill, North Carolina. |
| 0:41.1 | Cynica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Cynica |
| 0:46.5 | podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing |
| 0:50.8 | with the show and with the newsletter, please do consider lending your support. You can reach me at Cinecapod.g.com. And listeners, please support my work by |
| 1:00.1 | becoming a paying subscriber at Cinecapodcast.com. You'll enjoy, in addition to the pod, |
| 1:05.9 | the complete transcript of the show, essays for me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your |
| 1:10.6 | favorite China-focused columnists and commentators. And of course, you can bask in the transcript to the show, essays for me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite |
| 1:11.0 | China-focused columnists and commentators. And of course, you can bask in the knowledge that you're |
| 1:15.7 | helping me do what I honestly believe is important work. So do check out the page, see all it is |
| 1:21.8 | on offer, and consider helping me out. Today my guest is Afro Wang. I suspect many of you will already have come across her work through her podcast, through |
| 1:32.3 | appearances on other China-focused shows, or through the many provocative, beautifully written, |
| 1:38.2 | and fascinating essays she's published. |
| 1:40.4 | Afra is a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov AI and previously with the Roots of Progress Institute. |
| 1:48.7 | Before going full-time as an independent writer last year, she spent six years in Silicon Valley, covering AI and crypto, running newsrooms, building developer communities, and absorbing the valley's growth logic from the inside. |
| 2:01.9 | She writes about China and about Silicon Valley, the latter, sometimes metaphorically, |
| 2:07.2 | but about neither of these places ever as mere abstractions. |
| 2:10.9 | She writes about them as overlapping systems, |
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