What China's Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom

What China's Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom Tech workers have flocked to Liangzhu, a small town outside Hangzhou, looking to escape China's corporate culture and build their future with A.I. In mid-May, days after Donald Trump visited Beijing, a Chinese tech founder named Levy invited me to an office party for his A.I. fortune-telling company. It's called FateTell, and it makes an app that, in the vein of traditional Chinese astrology, reads your, a chart that tracks the elemental forces associated with your birth date and time. According to his invitation, my governing element, fire, would counteract the water element that Levy carries in oversupply.) So I travelled from Beijing to FateTell's headquarters, situated on the edge of Hangzhou--one of China's tech hubs, home to Alibaba and the insurgent Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek --in a town called Liangzhu. Liangzhu means "beautiful waterland," and it more than earns the name--rivers, lakes, and marshes thread through the low hills at the town's edge. The town is hip, idyllic, contrarian, and increasingly known as an escape for workers burnt out by the grind of China's booming tech industry.