“Chongqing, global and invisible.”

The West's 'wall of ignorance.'

Chongqing nightscape. (Jay Huang, cc by 2.0. / Wikimedia Commons.)

Guy Mettan, the prominent Swiss journalist, returns to The Floutist’s pages with this very fine piece on Chongqing, written after a recent visit. We like it for its exploration of China’s aspirations as these are manifest in advanced technologies and their applications. In this it is a reminder of how, obsessed as we are with China as a malevolent, globally ambitious menace, we are blinded to the nation as it is. More than this, Guy gives us a close-in view of a phenomenon that is evident to one or another degree across East Asia. This is the rediscovery among Asians of their Asianness—a salutary self-centeredness in the best meaning of this term. To modernize, at long last, no longer means to Westernize: This is a turn in consciousness of world-historical significance, in our view. Guy Mettan shows us what it looks like.

We offer this wonderful piece as a weekend reader.

—The Editors.

Guy Mettan.

4 JULY—If the reign of quantity inspires you, then Chongqing will delight you. It is the city of excess and superlatives. Two and a half millennia old, the largest city in China, the largest city in the world by area, by population equal to Austria (with 32 million permanent residents), with 2,200 office and residential towers, it is also the world's leading industrial metropolis: It manufactures, among other things, 30 percent of the planet’s laptops, countless smartphone components, a third of the world’s motorcycles, and an eighth of Chinese cars. Its growth rate has surpassed that of the Guangzhou–Shenzhen region. Chongqing’s importance now places it among the four cities that, along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Tientsin, are directly under the central government.

Located in a mountainous region of southwest China, on the banks of the Yangtze River, it bears witness to the economic takeoff of the provinces close to the country’s historic heartland, Szechuan. It owes its growth to the logistics routes it has created to open up its land: on the one hand a north-south axis to Xian–Beijing and Guangzhou and on the other an east-west axis to the ports on the Pacific coast, and the new Silk Road routes leading to Russia and Europe through Central Asia.

And yet, who outside Asia has heard of Chongqing (but for its place in some old films, perhaps, when it was “Chungking”), and who knows how to locate it on a map? Virtually no one. This wall of ignorance is emblematic of the gap separating the West from China and causes us to misunderstand the scope of China’s progress and the size of its real economy. We act toward it like Minister Bruno Lemaire, who predicted the collapse of the Russian economy on 25 February 2022, the day after Russian forces intervened in Ukraine. Obsessed by our moral biases, our growing Sinophobia, and our sense of superiority, we judge, condemn, and blame without bothering to learn.

At least, that’s the impression I get after another twelve-day trip to China, this time devoted to the developments of artificial intelligence in industry and the media, as well as to visiting ancient Buddhist sites and ultramodern museums in the Szechuan and Shanxi regions. The country is now paying increased attention to showcasing its rich cultural heritage, in all its forms, from A.I.–enhanced documentaries to classical painting exhibitions.

Artificial intelligence, of which Deepseek’s sudden emergence on the international scene is only the most notable epiphenomenon, has long since become a major national issue. Everywhere, cities, provinces, and companies are competing to be the first to produce the most efficient and cleanest software for managing wastewater treatment plants, electric cars, spark-recovery systems for welding robots, or podcast– and news-production systems. Thus, the Chongqing authorities have no doubt about the bright future awaiting their city, given the performance already achieved.

They are highlighting their intelligent management model for municipal administration and tasks. A.I. has greatly improved the operation of the sewer network, which must react quickly to the tropical downpours that can flood the city with hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of rainwater in a few minutes. It has facilitated the instant management of urban flows thanks to data provided by surveillance cameras, improving the flexibility of traffic lights and reversible traffic lanes, or escalators in metro stations, to reduce traffic jams. The driver of the first train to connect Asia to Europe thanks to the new Silk Road, in 2016, explains how A.I. has helped solve the problem of preserving goods when trains cross regions where temperatures fluctuate between +40°C and –40°C.

On the industrial side, alongside China's leading machine manufacturing group, Taiyuan Heavy Machinery, which produces everything from giant cranes to locomotive wheels and rocket launch pads, I will limit myself to mentioning the automobile manufacturers BYD (Build Your Dreams) and AITO (Adding Intelligence To Auto). Like Xiaomi, AION, and dozens of other Chinese manufacturers, the latter brand is the result of a joint venture between Huawei, the 5G and 6G giant, and SERES, a manufacturer of very-high-end smart electric vehicles. A megafactory, larger than Tesla’s gigafactory in Shanghai, has sprung up in the suburbs of Chongqing. You can visit it with a clean bill of health: Photos are prohibited and smartphones are disabled at the entrance.

The M9 model drives like a SpaceX rocket. The steering wheel and pedals seem to be there only for decoration. With assisted driving, you can lie back in your seat and watch movies or listen to podcasts by tapping on one of the countless screens that line the cockpit, while simply giving driving instructions via voice recognition. Caution, however: Chinese manufacturers are fighting to sell their models to young, technology-hungry customers and are overselling their capabilities. Recently, a trio of young drivers were killed by placing too much reliance on the driver-assistance system. The industry is now demanding better government regulation. The most advanced models reach Level 3, with fully automated driving only reaching Level 4. In the meantime, European manufacturers BMW, VW, and others are courting Huawei to add A.I. to their models to maintain their positions in the Chinese market.

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The media, the press, and cultural industries are not left out. In the modest town of Yuncheng, deep in Shanxi Province 900 kilometers north of Chongqing and 800 east of Beijing, the head of the newsroom explains how the local newspaper’s editors are integrating A.I., computer-generated images, and videos into the print edition, radio and TV channels, websites, and social media platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and TikTok, while taking into account instant data collected from readers, listeners, and other followers. Journalists have unlimited access to big data and the publishing group's fully digitized archives since its founding in 1971. Production runs 24 hours a day.

In Beijing, at the Xinhua News Agency headquarters, a giant screen thirty meters long and four meters high covers the newsroom, which resembles a Pentagon war room. Artificial intelligence handles story selection, script creation, and narrative. the production of images and visual/sound effects, as well as post-production. Virtual presenters and influencers handle the dissemination of news and information across various media. A certain alyona.nana, entirely Chinese and digital, has just surpassed five million followers and generated her first million dollars on Russian networks. The agency is actively working on the production of large-format videos, LMVs, in foreign languages, adding an emotional, “close-to-human” aspect to avoid the impression of artificiality produced by computer-generated images and characters. Amazing!

It is obviously difficult to describe in words activities that are entirely related to digital technology, sound, and image. But a visit to Tsinghua University in Beijing, which ranks among the world’s best universities and whose Faculty of Journalism and Communication has just been ranked among the best in Asia according to the Times Higher Education rankings (yes, really!), allows us to better appreciate the scope of Chinese efforts in this field. One of the faculty’s founders points out that China has the largest national linguistic market of internet users, with 1.1 billion people connected, far more than the world’s population of native English speakers. The wealth of data and collective intelligence available to researchers is therefore unparalleled.

This explains the success of Huawei, which has managed to manufacture microchips, enable 6G, and develop GPS satellite networks, surpassing the American majors on their own turf despite U.S. sanctions. The same will be true of artificial intelligence, which is at the heart of the next technological battle. The fate of large language models, LLMs, depends on the number of players available. China now intends to embark on the creation of a New Digital Silk Road.

Our professor recalls that about fifteen years ago, the country sought to imitate the West by copying it, following the CNN model, by developing global media such as CCTV in English and by multiplying cultural promotion programs. Noting the limitations of this strategy in the face of competition from American platforms, China decided in 2018 to change its strategy, focusing not on developing content but on global platforms and technologies focused on national culture (of which TikTok and Deepseek are the most well-known examples). It has moved from producing films such as Wolf Warriors, modeled on Captain America, to films that owe nothing to American models, such as the series Wandering Earth (No. 1 on Netflix in 2019) and Black Myth: Wukong (2024), whose Monkey King, the superhero of the story, is inspired by Journey to the West, the 16^th century epic. In short, the country has freed itself from its dependence on Hollywood and intends to rely on its own cultural resources.

More than ever, the medium and technology are the message! We’ll see if Chinese soft power, once it has integrated foreign languages into the online distribution of its works, will succeed in matching the United States in terms of globalized cultural production. For the time being, Beijing insists it wants to avoid a “cultural Cold War” at all costs, so as not to add another layer to the battle over customs tariffs. In any case, the duel is under way and it promises to be fascinating.

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Guy Mettan is an independent journalist in Geneva and a member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva. He has previously worked at the Journal de Genève, Le Temps stratégique, Bilan, and Le Nouveau Quotidien. He subsequently served as director and editor-in-chief of Tribune de Genève. In 1996, Mettan founded Le club suisse de la presse, of which he was president and later director from 1998 to 2019.

Two of Mettan’s books, Europe’s Existential Dilemma: To be or not to be an American vassal, and Creating Russophobia: From the Great Schism to anti–Putin hysteria, are available in English from Clarity Press.