Guess what, shocker twist ending: it did not. Between Brexit and Trump, the island’s economy was in no mood to sponsor a foreigner’s work visa, and by the summer, I was kicked out of a country that once I thought could be my permanent home.

They say nobody ever regrets leaving a toxic job, but what nobody mentions is the stuff comes after: financial insecurity, self-doubt on a loop after each rejection, and more hard conversations with myself than I’d ever planned to have. I learned these lessons the hard way and genuinely did not expect I’d need them in the first 30 years of my life. So this one is for you, holding that resignation letter in your hand (or in your email draft), or you, currently stuck in an unemployment black hole.

1. side gigs keep you sane

I’ve always had jobs of some sort since 17, and I continue wanting to be in the productive workforce even if not in the form of an office job. It was not only a source of stability, but also a necessity to stay sane, to maintain social connections, and to have something to talk about when interviewing. I also found it helpful to have a role and affiliation when attending networking events. The sad truth about networking is that some registration forms literally won’t approve you without one, and it sucks to be made to feel invisible in a room full of lanyards.

So here’s what my year of “unemployment” looked like:

• Supported the legendary journalist Evan Osnos at The New Yorker on a piece about China’s AI rise and its implication to the US-China relations.

• Ran PR and digital comms for three European tech companies.

• Planned China treks for eight US MBA programs — 800+ students, four academic breaks, creating SOPs for everything from visas to dietary restrictions.

• Tore tickets and wrangled queues at the Roxie, San Francisco’s beloved independent cinema.

• Started volunteering with older adults.

• Walked dogs on the hilly terrain of San Francisco.

(Photo of Captain below. The most beloved client of the year.)

2. hold your people close (and find new ones)

Nobody warned me how lonely this would be when your friends were at their 9–5 and you were just at home submitting job applications, with no visible difference between your weekdays and weekends.

The turning point was a call from a friend also on a career soul-searching year, ringing me from a boat somewhere off Bali, a well-known haven for digital nomads. She sounded happier. She was surrounded by people on the same boat, no pun intended.

So I went looking for mine. I found other freelancers and career-gappers on Substack, on IG (plugging my housemate Vivienne’s account on her 1/3 life crisis), in hobby clubs. I felt seen when connecting with people over stories about how wild job hunting had been. Rejection is a highly relatable experience. So you get some lovely sympathy points for talking about it. You’re already putting yourself out there every time you hit submit on an application. You might as well put yourself out there in a goofy way too.

3. show some self-love and stop comparing yourself to others

One evening my partner came home, told me about his day, and asked about mine. I started crying before I could even speak.

• His day: helping train a state-of-the-art video language model, papers in the pipeline that might shape the future of AI.

• My day: a few chapters of a novel, a few job-application emails.

In the ledger my brain was keeping, that made him essential to humanity and me useless to it. And it felt super permanent.

Looking back, it’s obvious that measuring yourself against someone running a completely different track makes no sense. I just couldn’t get unstuck from that self-doubt loop at the time. In a somewhat desperate move, I got a career coach, which helped more than I expected. So get a coach, a therapist, or a friend who always picks up the phone. Showing yourself some self-love doesn’t have to be a solo job.

4. Who are you without the job title?

You’re here because the last job didn’t work out, for whatever reason. There’s no perfect time to sit with the big quintessential question: who are you without your job?

Growing up in an intellectual East Asian family with two PhD parents, I was no stranger to elitism. Top schools, then a top job. I didn’t know there was any other way to live. People used to look at me and say how high-achieving I was. God, I hate that adjective now. Because I wasn’t achieving anything, high or low. It turned out that without the achieving, I had no idea who the person underneath was supposed to be.

People weren’t born to have a job, right? So before AI takes all our jobs and we all wake up with universal basic income, what do you do with your Tuesday? If it does not have to be impressive to the parents, nor money-generating, nor what you’ve been doing all your professional life.

My answer came to me with my move to the tech epicentre that is Silicon Valley. Surrounded by frontier research that will reshape everything, however incomprehensible to anyone outside the bubble. I want to own that gap by bringing clarity to complexity, translating breakthrough technology into credible, human-centered messages that earn society’s trust.

5. start writing on Substack / having a public presence (oh, I would know)

My wonderful partner works in a field where his GitHub is his CV. Recruiters would go with the candidate with more projects to show. This inspired me to start writing online. At my last job I’d always wanted to find my own voice through long-form writing, but by the end of the workday I just had so little energy. I resonated with Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, a story of him cycling through gigs just to bank enough money and spirit to get back to writing in the countryside. If this man could build a writing life around parcel runs in Beijing, then I could build one around an empty calendar.

Publishing was nerve-racking at first, almost like stripping naked in public. Then strangers turn out to be very kind to your naked body (jk), and after a few shows, you’re just... yourself.

6. so much to learn, so little time!

I finally had time to do personal projects that I wasn’t able to during my last job. Got my Spanish to B2, then took it on the road to Colombia and El Salvador. Learned chess in Spanish, because why struggle once when you can struggle twice. Got onto the hype train of vibe coding and wrote a program that cleaned up and analyzed my entire email inbox. Became a certified barista. Read 25 books in 7 months (roughly one every week), with little reviews posted on Goodreads after each book.

As hard as unemployment sounds, I still believe that was the best decision I’ve made for myself. Life is hard, but it all shall pass. Why not make the most of it? So pick up a side gig or three. Hold your people close. Go easy on yourself. Ask what you’d do with a jobless Tuesday. Write in public. Learn something just for the joy of it.

If you’ve done your own stretch in the unemployment black hole, I’d love to hear it: what helped you the most?

“Yes?”

“I am a student in China and the author of an accepted paper. I won’t be able to get a visa to go to Denver. Could you put up my poster for me and take a photo of it?”

A message from a stranger arrived in my RedNote inbox a few days before I left for this year’s CVPR, the top conference in computer vision and one of the most influential gatherings in AI. The acceptance was a milestone in this student’s academic career - his first paper at a major international conference. He was heartbroken that he would not be there to stand beside it. I told him to keep his money. I’d be happy to help.

What follows are some honest, unpolished thoughts from my week in Denver, organized loosely by theme.

Research: the 3D debate isn’t what you think it is

^{( illustration from What Is (and What Is Not) a Good Use of AI in Journalism? by Juliana Castro Varón）}

The intellectual debate everyone was having came to a head at the Bitter Lessons workshop, where Vincent Sitzmann (MIT) and Jon Barron (Google DeepMind) gave back-to-back talks on whether explicit 3D representations still have a future in computer vision research. Both have already conceded enormous territory to the bitter lesson, the old observation by Rich Sutton that general methods riding on scale keep beating clever hand-crafted ones. 大力出奇迹, as how the Chinese research community describes it: brute force works miracles. Sitzmann’s position, laid out in his blog post “The flavor of the bitter lesson for computer vision,” argues that we scoped vision tasks like segmentation and 3D reconstruction because they were solvable — but the goal was always intelligence. He believes that end-to-end world models will eventually skip human-designed intermediate steps including 3D.

Barron’s rebuttal offered a scorecard instead, walking through one application at a time and asking what the final deliverable actually is. For robotics, explicit 3D isn’t needed when the deliverable is actions. The same goes for video generation, where the output is finished pixels and nobody minds if generating them is slow and expensive. By contrast, the calculus flips for interactive media: games, AR/VR, and live broadcasts can’t tolerate slow, costly pixels — especially while generative AI remains bottlenecked by the physics of compute. His strongest case was engineering, manufacturing, and construction, a fifth of the global economy, where the deliverable simply is the 3D model. As he put it: “You cannot live inside a video of a house!”

^{( image from @jon_barron）}

So the two supposed opponents actually agree: 3D is obsolete for robotics. The live disagreement covers only Barron’s last two cases, interactive media and physical manufacturing. And Sitzmann’s blog goes after exactly those, arguing that a 3D printer is ultimately just another robot. The debate has since spilled beyond the conference: a counter-blog from Brown’s IVL lab argues that 3D isn’t a hand-crafted bias at all, but a measurable property of the physical universe. So the question at CVPR 2026 was never whether 3D is dying, but really, how much of the map it still holds.

The other phrase you couldn’t escape in the hallways: world models. Everything is a world model now. Which brings me to —

Robotics: vision became embodied AI

^{( image from the Bittersweet Lessons of Recognition by Georgia Gkioxari）}

The ultimate test of vision is intelligence, which is why robotics, embodied vision, and world models dominated this year’s conversation. The honest caveat, which even the world-model optimists admit: the bottleneck is paired perception-action data at scale. If a robot has never seen a river before, would it know how to cross it?

But this is also where the most optimistic idea of the conference lives. Georgia Gkioxari’s workshop talk reframed the bitter lesson as a bittersweet one: every time a layer of technology matures, it stops being the frontier and becomes the foundation for the next batch of barely-working problems. The field spent decades grinding the same ten problems because nothing worked. Now that core vision largely does, the horizon has exploded. If you’re a student feeling discouraged: this is the best time to start, and not all of it requires a gazillion GPUs.

China: present in the papers, absent from the halls

^{( image from @CVPR）}

The China story of this conference is really one about the two doors at a top US AI conference: one is being opened for talent while geopolitics closes another.

Chinese research is now the center of gravity at CVPR, while Chinese researchers are increasingly missing from it. This year’s numbers set new records — 44,011 authors and 25,149 reviewers across 97 countries — and China dominated both: 23,233 authors from mainland China alone, more than half the total and three times the US count of 7,556. The reviewer pool tells the same story: 10,687 from China against 6,363 from the US.

However, the immigration challenge kept many Chinese first authors home, producing an awkward situation — a second author delivering the oral by reading a script, then standing helpless through Q&A on work they didn’t know much about. The poster sessions felt noticeably emptier than in past years. The student from my inbox was one of many. On the second morning, I pinned his poster to its assigned board, photographed his first internationally accepted work, and sent the picture to him over WeChat. His visa was rejected largely because his university is one of China’s “Seven Sons of National Defense,” a group of institutions that has become a near-automatic red flag in US visa screening.

^{( photo of an attendee chcking out my student’s poster）}

Against that backdrop, Chinese scholars did enjoy a feel-good underdog moment this year: an honorary mention for a paper by a group of undergraduates from Guangdong University of Technology, a school most people had never heard of. No PhD advisors. Ancient Titan GPUs. The running joke online: their real advisor was ChatGPT.

^{( image from @CVPR）}

Jokes aside, something interesting is here: AI tools are dismantling one of research's oldest gatekeepers — the English language. A friend who reviews academic papers at these conferences has admitted, off the record, that papers sometimes get rejected not because the ideas are bad but because the prose is impenetrable. LLM translation is changing the game: if one's thinking is clear in their own language, they can now write clearly in any language. In a field where the majority of authors now think in Chinese first, that's a liberating thought.

Benchmarks: we would all be better off with more openness

^{( image from @CVPR）}

This year’s best paper came from Google DeepMind (with University College London and Oxford collaborators), and the award committee praised it for elegantly unifying depth estimation, camera pose, 3D point tracking, and 4D point clouds. The criticism, nonetheless, followed almost immediately: no code, no public API, private datasets, and too little detail to reproduce.

That has pushed an open argument about the rules: should awards require releasing something the community can build on? One proposal that many seem to like is benchmarks with weight classes. Stop comparing papers on raw performance and start comparing within compute brackets, the way boxing separates heavyweights from featherweights. Your 10-GPU result competes against other 10-GPU results. It wouldn’t fix the closed-artifact problem, but it would let academia compete on cleverness rather than capex.

Networking: a big tech workers’ summer camp

Honestly, the best thing about CVPR is the community — being in the same building as people who are normally too busy to exist, and having the spontaneous hallway conversations that no amount of cold emailing can produce. CVPR feels like a big field party for tech talent, a once-a-year migration where everyone shows up.

^{( image from @CVPR）}

The field now has genuine fan culture, too. Computer vision has celebrities, and some researchers carry near-idol status — I watched Dr. Kaiming He get stopped for photos more than once, and big names like Alyosha Efros were booked into speaking slots several times over in the same week.

And the media — my own tribe — loves a good story. Within days, the undergrad paper became instant content for three major Chinese tech WeChat accounts (量子位, 机器之心, 新智元), and the race to land the first interview with the first author was on. But almost all of the coverage stops at the viral underdog narrative; very little engages with the substance of the work itself. Part of why I’m writing this post is to keep some of the nuance on the record.

See you next year in Seattle, CVPR.

Please watch the full podcast here, and support its channel Zhang Xiaojun Podcast.

1. Teaching AI How to Love

Early in the interview, Xie recalls a phone call with Ilya Sutskever. The call was meant to be about whether Xie might join Ilya’s company at the time. Instead, they spent the whole time talking about how to teach AI to love.

There was no action plan at the end, but the anecdote comes to show the kind of question Xie thinks is worth spending time on. He sees the ability to love as basic to the future stability of AI. At the same time, he sees the other side of the coin: if a system can love, hate may follow. That is part of why he’s drawn to world models not as a purely technical goal, but as a path to safer intelligence.

2. On the Nature of Research

Xie said he dislikes the word “influence.” He agrees with his friend Kaiming He (whom he mentioned 84 times during the conversation) that the nature of research is to share knowledge. A paper should help us understand something, which matters much more than performance numbers or academic posturing.

Xie invokes Arendt’s well-known distinction between influence and understanding—in a 1964 interview she called the desire to be influential ‘a masculine question’ and said she preferred to understand. As Arendt put it, the purpose of this pursuit is “understanding”: living beings need to be understood.

That is the version of research Xie wants to do. You arrive at some understanding, you write it down, you put it out into the world. If it resonates, the understanding spreads — and somewhere along the way, you feel understood too. He described that loop as something close to family.

Xie added: influence is self-centred; mutual understanding raises the collective intelligence of the whole planet. And more intelligence benefits everyone.

3. Research Taste

Xie said good research taste is hard to define directly. But he was clear on what bad taste looks like.

Bad taste, in his view, comes from chasing appearances: conference acceptances, praise, hype, quick results, status—all the external signs that make something look successful.

He linked this to a line from the Diamond Sutra: all appearances are illusory; what you see on the surface is often not what matters most.

That idea applies far beyond research—to products, marketing, writing, and life in general. It is easy to do things because they look right or because society rewards them. It is much harder to keep asking what is fundamental.

Xie mentioned the non-linear research career by Professor Bill Freeman. Strong researchers are often driven by long-term passion and pure curiosity. They care less about short-term reception and more about whether their work eventually reaches its fullest expression.

4. Doing Research and Filmmaking

Xie mentioned many times that he loves movies. His childhood dream was to become a director, though it quickly faded.

As an adult, he soon realised that doing research is no different from making a film.

A good paper is not just a pile of methods and results. The techniques matter, but what matters just as much is the story behind the paper: what decisions were made, why they were made, what changed, what the researchers saw that others missed, and whether the reader leaves with a new path to explore.

He puts this in personal terms as well. Quoting Martin Scorsese’s idea that the most creative things are the most personal, Xie argues that long-term work needs an inner force behind it. Technique matters. But so does finding “the fire in your heart” and using your own perspective to guide the work.

5. Video as non-Static

On studying world models through video, Xie mentioned his admiration for Chinese directors Jia Zhangke and Bi Gan, both known for long takes.

Xie summarised Jia Zhangke’s idea: what makes cinema interesting is that every frame on the timeline can be expanded through cinematic space – what he called as “blank space (留白)”. Although we see a sequence of frames, what lies behind it is the state of the world and global information across space.

At the same time, this raises a harder question. Different people could infer different things from the same scene. What exactly should a universal world model reconstruct? Is there one shared world behind perception, or is part of the difficulty that interpretation is never fully identical?

Xie did not offer a final answer. But that may be part of the point. World models are difficult not only because they must recognise what is visible, but also because they must learn the hidden structure behind what we see.

6. What Problem Does Computer Vision Solve?

This is where video becomes interesting. A still image gives us a scene, but video gives us continuity, motion, and clues about cause and effect. Xie draws on cinema to argue that each frame points beyond itself to a larger world behind the image. This matters because it shows what he thinks current AI lacks. Humans process the world via inferring space, objects, continuity, and hidden structure across time. In a sense, seeing is a form of modelling. A system that only labels pixels is doing something far narrower than perception as humans experience it.

In Cambrian-S, Xie and his co-authors argue that multimodal AI must move beyond simple image description toward what they call “spatial supersensing.” The key idea is that real progress will require models that go beyond labelling what they see and build internal structure from continuous experience.

Xie uses an analogy from autonomous driving levels to explain the path from language-only models to systems that can perceive continuous visual streams, infer spatial structure, and eventually predict the world. The exact labels in the interview are informal, but the underlying argument is consistent with Cambrian-S:

• L0: Pure LLM. It cannot see images or video, knows the world only through language, like Plato’s cave.

• L1: Current multimodal systems. Show them an image, and they can answer questions about it.

• L2: Systems that can handle continuous visual streams, not just still images, and understand what is happening.

• L3: Spatial cognition. At every point in time, the system can infer the real 3D space behind the pixels.

• L4: A predictive world model—an agent that truly lives in the real world.

In Xie’s view, computer vision tackles a basic problem that intelligence must solve: to build lasting internal models of the world, use them to organise incoming information, and predict what happens next.

7. Representation Learning Sits Underneath Everything Else

A related theme is representation learning. Xie keeps returning to how a system learns the right internal representations in the first place. On his personal site, he describes his work as pushing the boundaries of multimodal intelligence and “spatial supersensing” across images and videos. The emphasis is on both outputs and the underlying structure that enables a model to perceive and reason well.

This is also why he worries that language can become a crutch. If vision only serves language, the model may never learn the deeper abstractions that perception should provide on its own. In his view, good intelligence may depend less on piling up more text and more on learning stronger internal representations from the world itself.

8. LLMs Are Anti–Bitter Lesson

The Bitter Lesson (Rich Sutton) says: AI history keeps showing that using lots of computing power with general-purpose methods always beats human-designed “clever” solutions in the long run. In other words, don’t overvalue human prior knowledge; let machines learn for themselves.

Many see LLMs as a perfect example of the Bitter Lesson. But Xie argues the opposite. He thinks LLMs are anti–Bitter Lesson.

Language itself is one of humanity’s most refined designs over thousands of years. It has syntax, structure, logic. From day one, LLMs have remained within human prior frameworks. As Xie put it: “Language is an extremely refined human structure.” Leaning too heavily on language risks distorting the core of vision research.

In Xie’s view, it might be abandoning language’s structure and learning something more basic—pixels, or even other than pixels (which we will dive in deeper in the later part).

This points to a deeper question: what really counts as intelligence? If a system only ever works within rules humans laid down for it, in what sense is it thinking? Real intelligence, the argument goes, would be a system that breaks past our categories and works out the basic logic of the world on its own.

9. Robotics as a Problem of Intelligence

The same logic appears in the interview’s discussion of robotics. Xie’s view is that robot hardware has advanced way faster than intelligence. The dancing robots we all saw on the Chinese New Year gala were surely spectacular, but in reality, according to Xie’s private conversation with the research team behind these robots, they were worried about the missing piece — the “brains”.

That fits the broader public direction of AMI Labs, which aims to build AI systems that understand the real world and apply them in robotics, automation, healthcare, and wearable devices. The emphasis is on systems that are reliable and controllable in messy real environments, not only impressive in demos.

10. Goal, Not a Route

Xie’s definition of a world model is simple: given the current state of a system and an action, the AI predicts what comes next. That prediction is what guides the decision.

The idea isn’t new. Psychologist Kenneth Craik proposed it in 1943. Engineers used it to fly moon probes in the 1960s and 70s. Reinforcement learning uses it too.

Xie’s point is that a world model isn’t a particular algorithm or technique. It’s a destination. LLM researchers, video researchers, and robotics researchers are all walking toward it from different directions.

Video generation gets you closer than language alone, because to make a believable video, a model has to know things about the physical world — for example, that a cat has four legs, not three.

Still, Xie doesn’t think pixels are the final answer. Pixels are a grid we built for human eyes — a simulator made for watching, not for predicting. The point of a world model is to predict the world, not to render a nice-looking video.

11. How to Train a World Model: Download Humanity

If the LLM era meant downloading the whole internet, then the world model era means downloading humanity.

That sounds like science fiction, because the data scale is terrifying. LeCun gave an example: a four-year-old child has seen roughly 50 times more visual data than the largest LLMs are trained on.

But starting from internet videos is a workable path, and Xie agrees. YouTube has huge amounts of data. The current issue is copyright and access. (The interviewer commented, “ByteDance has a real advantage,” and Xie agreed.)

Another interesting question: what is the product of a world model?

LLMs have chatbots—a huge success. Xie mentioned two directions: AI glasses (always-on real-world perception and smart decision-making) and robots (but the brain problem remains unsolved).

12. AI Companies Are in an Arms Race; AMI Labs Wants a “Grassroots Alliance”

On the endless hot topics and competition in AI, Xie noted that there is a huge value chain:

At the top are stories like AGI, scaling laws, LLMs. These stories define which benchmarks to compete on. Benchmarks decide where resources go. Resource allocation forces everyone onto the same track.

The result: everyone loses the ability to define the problem.

He gave an example: at Google, a researcher wanted to do representation learning work but was stopped after two weeks because the product cycle had to finish. It is not that people lack the desire or ability—it is that the value chain leaves no room.

What AMI Labs wants to do, Xie calls “reverse OpenAI.” Instead of taking shortcuts by downloading internet data, they work with real-world people who have specific problems and data to co‑build a world model. He compares it to how Mastercard once fought Visa: one small bank cannot beat Bank of America, but if many join forces to launch a credit card, they can compete. Hence a “grassroots alliance.”

13. LeCun’s Magnetism and the “Metaphysical” Side of Research

When talking about starting a company, Xie shared many details about working with Yann LeCun.

He admired LeCun’s many hobbies—astrophotography, building model aeroplanes, electronic music, sailing, watching films. LeCun came across as a deeply passionate and many‑sided person. Xie said that was part of why he wanted to work with him.

Beyond academics, LeCun also seems to have a personal pull for Xie. In Xie’s words, like Jobs and Musk, LeCun has a kind of “reality distortion field” that makes it easy to believe in what he is saying.

In a sense, Xie’s choice to work with LeCun reflects his broader view of world models: that they emerge through contact with the real world and through human relationships. The path is hard, but the problem is worth solving, and worth taking risks for.

This outlook shapes his research taste, his community, and even his career and startup decisions. He describes part of this as “metaphysical (玄学)”.

14. What Is True Intelligence?

Xie prefers not to define intelligence. Different animals have different kinds of it, and humans are just one kind.

He agrees with a point Rich Sutton has made: we treat LLMs that write code, win IMO gold medals, and help us reach Mars as impressive — but the truly hard thing is building a squirrel’s intelligence.

It is a deliberately non-anthropocentric view. If you can build a squirrel — give it its own goals, emotions, hunger, and ability to survive in the real world — then writing code or going to Mars becomes trivial by comparison.

The same shift applies to world models. Instead of asking when AGI will arrive, ask whether any robot today can do all the chores a 12-year-old can. In Xie’s view, that is the question every robotics company should be asking.

15. “I Am the Normal One”

Near the end of the interview, the interviewer asked Xie about something he had said: “I am not the chosen one, I am the normal one.”

Xie explained the line came from his favourite football coach, Jürgen Klopp. Klopp may dress like a punk and project confidence, but he still believes he is not the chosen one—just an ordinary person.

To me, this echoes Xie’s broader life philosophy. It is an attempt to step outside egocentrism and stay self‑aware. That may be why his research feels both grounded and otherworldly.

Appendix: Most influential AI papers mentioned by Xie in the interview

· Sutton, R. S. (1991). Dyna, an integrated architecture for learning, planning, and reacting. (Dyna)

· LeCun, Y., Bottou, L., Bengio, Y., & Haffner, P. (1998). Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition. (LeNet)

· Deng, J., Dong, W., Socher, R., Li, L.-J., Li, K., & Fei-Fei, L. (2009). ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database. (ImageNet)

· Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., & Hinton, G. E. (2012). ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. (AlexNet)

· Goodfellow, I., et al. (2014). Generative adversarial nets. (GAN)

· Girshick, R., Donahue, J., Darrell, T., & Malik, J. (2014). Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation. (R-CNN)

· Ren, S., He, K., Girshick, R., & Sun, J. (2015). Faster R-CNN: Towards real-time object detection with region proposal networks. (Faster R-CNN)

· He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., & Sun, J. (2016). Deep residual learning for image recognition. (ResNet)

· Vaswani, A., et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. (Transformer)

· Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. (BERT)

· Ho, J., Jain, A., & Abbeel, P. (2020). Denoising diffusion probabilistic models. (DDPM)

· Brown, T. B., et al. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. (GPT-3)

· Mildenhall, B., et al. (2020). NeRF: Representing scenes as neural radiance fields for view synthesis. (NeRF)

· Dosovitskiy, A., et al. (2021). An image is worth 16x16 words: Transformers for image recognition at scale. (ViT)

· Radford, A., et al. (2021). Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision. (CLIP)

· Rombach, R., Blattmann, A., Lorenz, D., Esser, P., & Ommer, B. (2022). High-resolution image synthesis with latent diffusion models. (LDM)

· Kerbl, B., Kopanas, G., Leimkühler, T., & Drettakis, G. (2023). 3D Gaussian splatting for real-time radiance field rendering. (3DGS)

Last summer marked the end of a six year chapter: working for Western think tanks as a China programme specialist. I studied international affairs at a policy school in the US and built my career around one question: how to narrow the gap between China and the world, without flattening either side into caricature. My CV is full of organisations with “Asia” or “China” in their names.

A few months have passed since I left my last role at Asia House in London. This is my attempt to share what I overheard on that lonely yet rewarding path, working at the intersection of China and policy.

Often, I found myself caught between competing interests. Often, I had to navigate prejudice from peers and, at times, colleagues. Often, as the only Chinese person in the room, I envied the solidarity I saw in adjacent worlds of journalism, law, finance and etc.

So what DID I overhear?

Security risks

The UK has been repeatedly unsettled by China related espionage allegations since the previous administration. From the “two Christophers” cases to the latest reporting involving the spouse of a Labour MP, it is hardly surprising that anyone with China based ties or China facing work is quickly pulled into what can feel like “spy territory”, against a backdrop of heightened national security scrutiny.

A friend once suggested an analogy with insider trading, not because the offences are the same, but because both turn on how societies police sensitive information and proximity. Imagine if you have a partner working in finance and sharing an offhand view about the markets over dinner, have they crossed a legal line, or simply talked about their day-to-day? Similarly, working close to foreign governments, let alone the “enemy” ones, could feel like walking a even tighter rope given the high stakes. You can be as meticulous as you want about what you say, but trust can remain very fragile. I have crossed paths professionally with people later described as suspected spies, without any awareness at the time. What I remember most is not recklessness, but thier restraint and carefulness. It brings to mind a darker logic familiar from Xi’s anti-corruption campaign: in any system, few are spotless under a microscope. The difference is who gets examined, when, and to what end.

To make this less abstract, I’ve worked in foreign think tanks inside China (RIP Carnegie-Tsinghua Center), where scrutiny feels immediate and personal. Local staff at foreign organisations are always on the radar and sometimes would be “invited to tea”, a euphemism for an interview with public security. What stayed with me was the speed with which surveillance could become intervention. After a brief phone call about an incoming delegation, I received a follow up call asking, in detail, what I was working on and who I would meet. It is not uncommont that local staff feels caught between official pressure and a basic professional duty to protect the organisation’s privacy.

Yet suspicion also runs in the other direction. More than once, I waited outside foreign embassies in Beijing with the Chinese driver while my expat colleagues went in, a small ritual that made the hierarchy of trust visible. Learning to move between these systems with empathy, discretion, and respect for real constraints became one of the most valuable lessons one was able to learn from working inside foreign policy institutions.

Identity and positioning

When I moved to London in early 2023, I was struck by how limited the city’s “China capacity” felt compared with Washington. At the risk of minimising my credentials, I often became the “China expert” by default, simply because of how I look. The label could be useful, but it also narrowed me, turning a whole career into a single identity tag.

At a sponsored event by a Chinese company at the think tank I was working at, an attendee questioned whether I, the only Chinese employee, influenced the event’s “friendly” take on China, even though I hadn’t been involved into running the programme. Another time, when a journalist’s attendance was rejected due to venue overcapacity, they asked to speak to me specifically — “the Chinese staff” — assuming my nationality had something to do with this decision to turn down their attendance. Moments like that reminded me that my expertise and identity are intertwined with professional perception as I often felt like a bridge between cultures and an outsider within them.

Another more extreme incident was a Westminster special adviser once joked to my face that I had been sent by Beijing as a “honey trap”. Even though the claim was clearly untrue, I still felt at the moment shaken with uncertainty what I could say that would not make things worse. There remains a strain of paranoia in parts of the China rhetoric abroad, shaped by history and politics that reinforce each other. I feel for the people whose genuine efforts to build relationships and support constructive engagement are recast as something malign.

China through the lens of DC and London

Living in San Francisco at the moment, I have been struck by the mood of Chinamaxxing and “you met me at a very Chinese time in my life”. People pass around books like Dan Wang’s Breakneck, trade jokes about Trump admiring Xi’s authority, and scroll TikToks that turn China’s infrastructure into a kind of abundance spectacle.

London feels different. Perhaps it’s the city’s colonial legacy that still lends certain circles an old-boy-club air, a faint nostalgia for its historic connection to China through its dominance of Hong Kong. I’ve met retired UK business executives who fondly recall the bicycle-filled streets of 1990s Beijing yet show little curiosity about the electric vehicles that have replaced them. Still, London brings together a wide range of voices, though fewer with recent on-the-ground experience in the political and policy circle. In Jeremy Goldkorn’s Very British China problems, he argues that the UK is stuck in a weird position. It wants to stay on good terms with the United States and needs trade and investment after Brexit. That leaves Britain dependent on China, which now holds far more leverage. Chinese voices have made it plain that the UK no longer carries the weight it once did and can be replaced in China’s wider strategy.

What matters

I often get messages from students asking for advice to pursue a career in China policy studies. Here is what I thought might be helpful if I were to do this again.

1. Stay current
   Pick two or three reliable newsletters and stick with them. Add sector specific reads that match your interests: energy, climate, finance, tech.

2. Learn how policy is made
   Surprisingly few people, even in the field, can explain it clearly. Learn how bills move through committees, appropriations, and conference stages in your interested jurisdiction. Learn how agencies draft and finalise regulations. Then practise explaining those processes out loud.

3. Master your Specilisation
   “Proximity to power deludes some into thinking they wield it.” Frank Underwood was right. Being in the room is not the same as being heard, but you can still learn from everything. Pair China expertise with another skillset: data, energy, climate, tech, transport. Find a topic that keeps you up at night and make it yours.

What has your experience been like working in policy. Which place shaped your view of China most. Any moments that changed how you see the whole China watching world. I would love to hear them.

[I would like to thank my two Substack spirit animals, and for being the star examples to encourage me to start writing. And to the mentors who guided me through deep waters: Jan Berris, Paul Haenle, Dan Russell, Michael Hart, and Geoffrey Jackson, thank you for showing me what diplomacy looks like in practice.]