EP000 - Preface

why I write The Remnants of Globalization

Born in the 70s in China, I was part of a very lucky generation.

Globalization became the dominant theme that swept the world by storm. China opened up to the world in 1978¹ and entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. Studying in America or at elite universities in Europe/UK was the aspiration for many top students in China and India. Multinational companies in America raced each other to expand to Europe, Asia, and other continents. Anglo-Saxons were posted to Asia countries to set up local branches, enjoying a comfortable and adventurous expat lifestyle.

All this is reminiscent of a bygone era, from 1886 to 1914 in Austria, that was vividly recalled in Stefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday. Europe was at the peak of its intellectual and cultural prosperity. Playwrights, composers, painters, writers, and philosophers mingled in the bars of Vienna and Zurich, roamed around from one country to another without being asked to produce a visa or even a passport. Europe was essentially one big country where life was peaceful and people were happy.

That was, until everything collapsed overnight on July 28, 1914², when the First World War broke out. The blissful life that Europeans had taken for granted for decades was thrown out the window. An empire vanished³. Countries were torn apart. Artists became vagabonds. It was a painful realization that life could be so fragile and harmony could not last long enough.

After the First World War, as countries slowly recovered from their wounds, the roaring twenties brought out another wave of exuberance. In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the nouveau riche showed off their wealth unapologetically, and people marveled at their incredible journey of achieving class mobility. In Hemingway's A Movable Feast, intellectuals and artists gathered in the coffee houses in Paris to enjoy meetings of the minds and clashing of new ideas. The world seemed to climb back to another renaissance.

That wishful thinking was short-lived. Another world war came. Lives were lost. Homes went to shambles. Lands were deserted. Cities were destroyed.

It's been 80 years since the end of the Second World War. Most countries in the world have been blessed with many years of peace and progress. Globalization, which encourages international collaboration, cross-border trade, and cultural exchange, played a significant role in achieving that growth.

However, in 2025, this trend has firmly and coldly reversed. Countries are out for their own. Outsourcing is replaced by insourcing. WTO and NAFTA are no more. The Paris Accord is being abandoned. Tariffs are raised. Social media networks implement regional control. Rapid technological advancement toward Artificial General Intelligence ("AGI") led to a new arms race of computer chips, data centers, and STEM talents. They become national strategic resources and are mandated to stay domestically. Hegemonies of the world staked out a line in the sand, saying, You cannot pass! Globalization is suddenly becoming a thing of the past.

I didn’t see this coming.

I grew up a poster child of globalization. I have lived and worked in many cities in Asia, America, and Europe. I have developed a passion for both Eastern and Western cultures. I have made friends all over the world with diverse ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds. I have worked for Chinese, American, and European companies. I used to think having a view and experience as a global citizen was desirable.

I was not alone in this state of puzzlement and anxiety. Many friends from the same Generation X⁴ are also wrestling with rapidly changing macro and micro conditions. We are still in the prime days of our journey, but the end of the runway starts appearing in sight. Many of our skill sets are no longer relevant and quickly losing value, but we still have some gas in the tank and want to put our hands on the wheel for mankind’s next 20-30 years, when AGI, climate change, geopolitical tensions, longevity, and inter-planetary travels are all interwined to make their presence felt.

This series, The Remnants of Globalization, is a collection of stories of the men and women who rode that wave and enjoyed its full visceral impact. We were made in that era and still carry its mark. It was an age of youthful innocence and blissful ignorance. We boarded the USS Enterprise⁵ to explore the boundary of the galaxy to infinity and beyond. Some of us have found Arrakis⁶ to settle down, and many of us are still searching for the Terminus⁷.

The series is a feeble attempt to answer some questions on what got us this far, though in doing so, it inevitably raises even more questions - where do we go from here? That is left open for the readers to find out. It is a continuously evolving documentary that is still anxiously awaiting its own closing chapters. At the dawn of the AGI era, human existence is gradually defined by a digital footprint. The line between facts, real human stories, and machine-generated data is increasingly blurry. But the laughter and tears shall not disappear into the dust of history just yet. They deserve better. Before these stories are all forgotten and become part of a gigantic pre-training dataset feeding into the next AI LLM⁸, let’s at least preserve them while the memory is still refresh and colors are still bright.

The goofy names for the characters come from the lore of J.R.R.Tolkien⁹. It's a tongue-in-cheek reminder that it would be meaningless to pinpoint the characters to real-life personalities, and there is no need to become too emotionally attached to them. It's quite possible that they're all fictional anyway. If you find their stories to be similar to someone you might know, that would be a pure coincidence.

DISCLAIMER: "This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental."

Let's start with Tavano.

1. The Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China took place in December 1978, which reset China’s direction toward opening up to the world.

2. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, exactly one month after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, marking the start of the First World War.

3. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918 at the end of World War I.

4. Those who were born from 1965 to 1980.

5. USS Enterprise is the spaceship in Star Trek that serves as the primary setting for many Star Trek series and films, symbolizing exploration, diplomacy, and futuristic adventure.

6. Arrakis is a harsh desert planet in the sci-fi Dune series of novels by Frank Herbert. It’s the most important planet in the Dune lore as it is the only source of the drug melange.

7. Terminus is the home of the First Foundation in Issac Asimov’s Foundation novels.

8. Large Language Model is a type of artificial intelligence algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and massively large data sets to understand, summarize, generate, and predict new content.

9. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, scholar, artist, and linguist, best known for authoring The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.