Weekend Reading #338

This is the three-hundredth-and-thirty-eighth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 25th October 2025.

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*****

What we're thinking.

More all-time highs, more dispersion and more volatility all round this week. We are monitoring some price action for inflections points, and some are appearing but not yet on the overall market which looks strong. Are we setting up for a 2h21 environment where momentum second tier tech collapses and megacaps moon? Time will tell but we are watching very closely!
 
The dollar looks rather perky versus its peers and the US10 year seems to want to rally. If these two move together, could it be a throwback to years gone by where growth concerns come into play? These two variables have not rallied in tandem for some time. 

What we're doing.

After being a so-called armchair China "expert" for so long, I finally managed to convince my wife to take our children along to see the Middle Kingdom as part of our larger adventure. Until now China was just words. From media and investment banks. From books and podcasts. From social media. And of course, all those experts. Literally there isn't a place on earth that has been stuffed down my throat more than China. But when you arrive, you realise that it is just another country. Beijing, where we spent the past week, has people - lots of them. And cars - lots of them. And hence traffic! Traffic that makes Jakarta seem rather pleasant. And yes, there are police. Lots of them. Particularly around access to Tiananmen Square. It's quite unpleasant getting into Tiananmen square with numerous ID and bag checks, but once in it’s pretty seamless. Pretty much all the cars are Chinese. There are so many brands I had never heard of that I lost track. Using Didi (uber equivalent) to get around is a pleasure - for a massive, luxurious people carrier (too many kids) it cost maximum 8 pounds to get to the other side of town. One ride was 50 minutes. And if you are a normal-size family its 2-3 pounds for a normal sized car.
 
It's an almost forgotten sensation to be in a place where there are almost zero familiar brands, the writing on the walls (actual writing) is in an unfamiliar script and absolutely no one speaks English. My Chinese is what I'd describe as rudimentary, but it turns out it isn't too bad. It allowed me to communicate basic things. Even my wife was impressed that all those hours spent doing my homework for 3 years actually paid off! The food is completely weird, and the menus are filled with animal body parts one didn't even know were edible by homo sapiens. A relic of a poverty driven diet from not too long ago. Every time we see the word tripe it triggers us badly. Pigs’ trotters, pig colon or cartilage? The noodles are nice though but that's about it. There are few western food options in Beijing apart from MacDonalds which continues to illustrate what a global but local brand it has become. A great line from Chris Arnade's Walking the World Blog is when someone critiqued him for being in a foreign place and going to MacDonalds and he countered and told the guy that he was a moron because going to MacDonalds is exactly what locals do. Sanlitun, with its indoor/outdoor malls was a more cosmopolitan area with some trendy western options but still barely moved the dial. 
 
We walked around plush Wangfujing, the west-end equivalent of Beijing. Our very first street introduced us to invitations to try fried scorpion, grasshopper or cicada - complete with live specimens to choose from. There are lots of shops and malls, all modern and big and fancy. 
 
We went to Tiananmen and the Forbidden City. Then the Hutongs apparently representing old Beijing (all 3 streets of them) before finishing our day at The Temple of Heaven. The history was nice and interesting all round and it was a cultural education. But what was the most astounding thing for me was that there were almost zero westerners wherever we went. OK I exaggerate but still there were very few. But what there were, everywhere, were thousands and thousands of Chinese tourists. This blew my mind. And from everywhere in China. Towns I had never heard of. Towns the tour guide had never heard of. And they were absolutely ecstatic to be there in the capital, seeing the hallowed sights. I cannot overemphasize how important this is. How can a country not succeed when their people are so excited to be themselves. To celebrate their own history. Compared to the UK, US and Europe which have large parts of society which is somehow embarrassed about its own history.
 
We visited the less busy Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. It is a bit further out from the city but really lovely. The further you drive from the city the easier you breathe out. The city is gargantuan and concrete, glass and steel. After an hour of driving you begin to see fields and trees and eventually the mountains where the wall is. We took the open cable car up, walked along a couple of sections of the wall and then tobogganed down which was great fun. The views from the wall are awesome and the wall itself snaking long the mountainside is really pretty. A relic of old China away from the city and it was every bit as glorious as I’d imagined. Having read a lot of Mongol history, standing on the wall at the ramparts facing north and imagining the Mongols surging towards it was quite cool.
 
We also went to the summer palace which was lovely. A gift from emperor Qianlong to his mother, it was destroyed in the wars with the British, French et al. Rebuilt by the dragon lady - Empress Cixi who ruled first as regent for her small son and then ended up ruling for 47 years! She is the subject of many recent Qing era themed tv series and movies and also a favourite of Chinese AI as she is made to sing, dance and the rest. She was the first to introduce photographs to the dynasty and loved being the subject of the camera. 
 
The city itself is not what I would call aesthetically pleasing. It's massive and square. Block buildings and massively wide roads which just repeat again and again for tens of miles. Very homogenous. All the quaintness has been removed and replaced with modernity. As Chris Arnade also noticed (long before me), the city's soul seems to have been removed in order to uplift from poverty and replace with "modernity". And practically to build housing and amenities for its 40 million people.
 
My wife's search for a market ended in failure as we realized they had all been destroyed and upgraded to malls - for the sake of modernity of course. She also observed the quiet on the streets which is indicative that the EV revolution here is alive and well. Outside our hotel window there is no noise despite it being a busy street. Optically there are lots of blue number plates which means petrol cars still proliferate but the trend is clear. Here more than anywhere. And my son (5) asked me why there are so many cameras everywhere. We all know the answer to that one. No one seems to mind though. What seems clearer to me than ever is that as long as the CCP can deliver improving living standards, no one really cares about the lack of individual liberties. 
 
Something will need to give policy wise however to allow this to continue happening given the economic quagmire the country is in at present. The CCP's 15th five-year plan (2026-2030) was up for discussion at this week’s fourth plenum and these often herald major policy changes. There is talk finally of a shift to stimulate consumption which has been trumpeted for as long as I can remember. If this is enacted there will be fireworks. You'd never guess it’s needed though here in Beijing. The capital is pumping. 
 
Yet despite all this I wouldn’t say Beijing is a city to be enjoyed versus a city to be experienced. Despite all the bells and whistles and clear economic upliftment, it feels somewhat harsh here. After bathing in the warmth and friendliness of Indonesia for the last two weeks, Beijing is rather cooler and more serious. Few have time for chit chat and smiles. They are too busy surviving the city.
 
Next stop is Shanghai which I will report back from next week. We took a bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai in 4 and a half hours. In China it’s just a called a train and apart from being faster there is nothing really novel about it!  DC

What we're reading.
 
Just to add to the travel blogging, I came across a blog called “Dirona around the world”, which is the travel blog of a couple called Jennifer and James Hamilton. It’s a blog about a couple that has effectively lived on a boat and travelled all around the world (at least once now) since 2009. And why did this random blog show up on the reading list? Because James Hamilton is also Amazon’s top AWS engineer, effectively the brains behind AWS, which came into the spotlight this week as an outage in AWS US East 1 cascaded all around the world, as retold in this article on Wired. For the scale that it was, it was fixed respectably quickly, but events like this continue to underscore how interconnected and fragile our networks are becoming – the AWS regions are supposed to be segregated and serve as failovers, each one for the others. And while we jokingly think “Well if AWS goes down we have bigger problems heh” when asked if AWS redundancy is good enough – perhaps this is the answer: not yet enough.
 
On a separate note, in an interesting counter-argument to Fermi’s paradox (i.e. that there should be some sign of some intelligent life out there), it has been proposed that just like we are seeing an acceleration in scientific and technological advancements with AI applications, should this have happened with another civilisation out there, they would very quickly use these advancements to make themselves invisible, making them detectable only for a tiny window of time relative to the age of the universe. Not an unfamiliar concept – that of the “Dark Forest”, from our favourite sci-fi novel series and namesake. EL