Year of snakes, ladders

As China celebrates the Lunar Year of the Snake, the first angpow (red packet gift) was the DeepSeek AI software that shook Wall Street to the tune of nearly $1 trillion in market capitalization.

- ANDREW SHENG

This reminded me of the classic game called Snakes and Ladders, whereby players roll the dice to go up ladders and slide down via snakes. The element of chance (dice-rolling) and its multiplayer form reflects the spectre of widening volatility whereby US President Trump gives stunning Executive Orders daily amidst huge uncertainty from natural disasters to game-changers like DeepSeek on the whole AI tech wealth generation game.

How do we figure out who and what is up and down in this snaky slippery year?

Reflecting on this during the Chinese New Year holidays, the best analysis I have heard was from the Hong Kong-based insightful Louis-Vincent Gave, who argued that mainstream media has overlooked the fact that the Chinese economy has leapfrogged the West in engineering and increasingly in technology. After eight visits to the Chinese mainland last year, I arrived at the same conclusion—most of us overlooked the qualitative change in the mainland economy because few outside "experts" visited the factories and looked at what was really going on.

The macro-statistics that outsiders examine in excruciating detail suggested that the Chinese economy is in deep trouble, whereas what we are witnessing is a qualitative change in supply (production) and demand (consumption or investment) which Louis-Vincent identified brilliantly. A structural and cyclical change has happened in China largely within a world distracted by the Ukraine and Gaza wars and the domestic political turmoil in the West.