hello, i'm afra!

I am a writer and freelance journalist working between the California Bay Area and London. I write about China and Silicon Valley: their cultures, power structures, and paths of innovation, and the ways AI paradigm shifts are reshaping the future.

I was a Winter Fellow at GovAI and a fellow at the Roots of Progress Institute. My Substack, Concurrent, is the main home for my writing, though I also freelance for other publications.

Before turning to writing full-time, I spent six years in Silicon Valley working across AI news and decentralized technology. In March 2025, I finally surrendered to a childhood dream and made the leap into full-time writing. Over the past year, I have published work in WIRED, The Ideas Letter, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Asterisk, among other publications.

What keeps me busy these days:

I write Concurrent, a Substack newsletter about AI in China and Silicon Valley.

I host a podcast called CyberPink 疲惫娇娃 (in Mandarin Chinese). It dives into the US–China zeitgeist, contemporary culture, and society, with movie reviews and cultural commentary. With over 70+ episodes released.

I also contribute to Baihua, a Chinese-language podcast incubator, and we write a fun newsletter.

Other facts about me:

Other obsessions: I occasionally paint (oil painting, soft oil pastel, acrylic, traditional Chinese ink painting). Visiting museums. I feel alive and deeply connected to nature when snowboarding, mountain biking, and hiking.

👋 afrazhaowang[at]gmail[dot]com

writings

I'm eager to write and publish more! Publications seeking stories, please reach out.

The Center and The Periphery

The Ideas Letter

The Great Chinese Novel: Morning Star of Lingao and China's Industrial Party

On China's Industrial Party movement and its sprawling crowdsourced sci-fi ur-text — a novel about time travelers who bootstrap an industrial revolution in Ming Dynasty Hainan.

WIRED

Learn to Love Engineers

Los Angeles Review of Books

The China Tech Canon

How Chinese tech founders absorbed the Silicon Valley canon with almost devotional intensity — and what that reading list reveals.

Asterisk

On Typing Chinese

Reboot Newsletter

Media and Other Presence:

Talk at Oxford China Policy Lab, "Is China Techno-optimistic?" (April 2026)

Guest on ChinaTalk: Chinamaxxing — on the growing American fascination with Chinese short-form content (February 2026)

Guest on Sinica Podcast: The Morning Star of Lingao (临高启明) and the Rise and Reckoning of China's "Industrial Party" (January 2026)

Moderated Asia Society book talk on Yi-Ling Liu's The Wall Dancers (February 2026)

Panelist at Asia Society roundtable: "Seeing the Other China: AI in China Beyond Chips and DeepSeek" (November 2025)

Guest on ChinaTalk Overfit: AI Lovers, Chinese Model Takeover, Vice Signalling, Hefei Model (November 2025)

Speaker at Stanford University workshop: "Open Models in China" (November 2025)

Panelist at NCUSCR roundtable: "China's AI Ecosystem" (November 2025)

Guest on Sinocism Live: Dispatches from China with Jasmine Sun (2025)

Guest on Zero Shot podcast: "China built AI differently than the US. Can India do the same?" (April 2025)

Guest on 不明白播客 Bumingbai podcast: "Silicon Valley Embraces 996 Work Culture" (2025, Mandarin)

Moderated the panel "From Western Liberalism to World Liberalism" featuring Vitalik Buterin and Bruno Maçães at DevCon, Ethereum Foundation's largest annual conference, watch the panel discussion (November 2024)

Guest on 新新人类 Pixel Perfect podcast, Is Elon Musk the antihero of Silicon Valley? (2024)

Guest on The Blockchain Socialist podcast, China is a Process: Understanding the Chinese Crypto Diaspora Community (2024)

Guest on 美轮美换 The American Roulette podcast, Crypto's Trump Card and Silicon Valley's Political Shift

Moderator and MC for ETH Shanghai 2023 and 2022

Guest on 硅谷早知道 What's Next podcast, The tale of GameStop memestock (2022)

Talk: "Podcast as a verb, a lifestyle, and a community" at Google's Shanghai office (2022)

working experiences

Winter Fellow, GovAI and The Roots of Progress Institute

Research fellowships focused on AI governance and the history and philosophy of technological progress.

Growth and Marketing at NEBRA Labs

Crypto SaaS company focuses on zero-knowledge infrastructure on Ethereum. Developed GTM plan for a zero-knowledge infrastructure product UPA. Built Proof Pass, a ZK ticketing product based on NEBRA's technology. Managed social account and maintained partnerships. Led growth-focused events "Proof Day" series in Brussels, SF, NYC, Denver, and Istanbul. Participated a16z's CSX in London and presented during demo day.

Growth Marketing and Operations at Mask Network

Focusing on next-gen internet, decentralized social networks, DIDs (decentralized identity/identifier) and public goods. Started and hosted a bilingual web3 podcast called Web3 Revolution (it was shut down). Growing decentralized social application "Firefly," an aggregator of Lens Protocol, Farcaster, and Twitter. Hosted hackathons, hacker houses, events, and conferences including "Social Oneness Day and Hackathon"; ZuSocial Hacker House (a 2-week hacker house, here is the resident handbook); Zuzalu's Think Beyond the Twitter Box; in 2023; Web3 Social House in Eth Denver 2023; SXSW's Decentralized Social Day; The Future of Human Connection during DevCon; EthShanghai 2022, 2023 (Fireside chat with Jaan Tallinn).

Co-founder, Loud Murmurs Podcast

Co-founded and co-hosted podcast that was reported by Politico, featured by University of Toronto's course "Reading Chinese and English: China from the Inside Out", and mourned by many netizens when we had to shut it down due to personal reasons.

Content Strategist at SmartNews

AI-driven news company where I collaborated with lead product managers and ML engineers within a 24/7 newsroom environment alongside former journalists transitioning their expertise to tech.

Managing Editor at NewsBreak

AI-powered local news platform. Worked on push notification engagement strategies, newsletter growth initiatives, news ranking algorithms, local content development, and election coverage features.

commonplace book

Having lived nearly half of my life far from my birth country, I describe my Chineseness as a linguistic belonging.
―Yangyang Cheng
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
― James Baldwin
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.
– Ernest Hemingway
Computing and new media depend upon flesh-and-bone metabolism. Our "virtual worlds" are made possible by battalions of human beings.
— Thomas S. Mullaney
Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.
― Martin Luther King
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
― Ursula K. Le Guin
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
― Joan Didion
Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.
― Kevin Kelly
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.
― Ted Chiang
Where am I to find strength and hope in this world? In my work, in trying to write well. What's a writer's calling, now or at any time? To write, to try to write well. What work will make a difference? Well-made work, honest work, writing well written.
― Ursula K. Le Guin
I have stolen ideas from every book I've ever read. My principle for researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,' and if this story contains any honey, it is because of the quality of the nectar I have found in the work of better writers.
– Phillip Pullman
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
― George Orwell
A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.
― Frantz Fanon
Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things. As things they are present to the senses, yet they are also displaced in the focus on the matter they move around. We often see computers not cables, light not electricity, taps and water but not pipes and sewers.
― Brian Larkin
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
― James Baldwin
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
― Lao Tzu
In its collective sense, technology is not merely a catalog of individual parts. It is a metabolic chemistry, an almost limitless collective of entities that interact to produce new entities-and further needs. And we should not forget that needs drive the evolution of technology every bit as much as the possibilities for fresh combination and the unearthing of phenomena. Without the presence of unmet needs, nothing novel would appear in technology.
― Brian Arthur