All-In Summit: Claire Cormier Thielke on China + Q&A with Flexport's Ryan Petersen

The session opens with the hosts jokingly introducing Claire and pretending that China is an easy, breezy topic after armaments and Ukraine. She says she will keep the talk largely apolitical and focus on parts of China that make fewer headlines, at the request of one host who wanted to understand some of the problems on the ground.

She describes herself as a property developer running Greater China operations for what she calls the largest private real estate firm in the world, a self-description the transcript does not back with figures. Her team works across Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and she cites a skyscraper billed as China's greenest, early international-standard serviced apartments, and a distressed Hong Kong hotel being turned into tech-enabled collaborative living for young people who, she says, would need 20 years of salary to buy an apartment.

Using Miami as the backdrop, she credits its mayor for advertising the city on Twitter and lists the ingredients she thinks matter: universities, an upward trajectory, and young people who want to collaborate. She says she teaches a Stanford class called "who owns your city", and that students quickly identify the basics: infrastructure, jobs, affordability and enough culture to keep a place from being bland.

Her central argument is that buildings are the most extreme form of hardware. They must stay relevant for 50, 70 or 100 years and cannot be moved, so developers study macro trends and where startups want to be. The strategy she describes is taking what works in one part of the world and applying it in another, which she presents as the source of both good returns and useful places, even as East and West are "more divided" than ever.

She argues that multifamily rental buildings run by a single landlord are not really a thing in Greater China, where renters often deal with individual landlords, pay very large deposits and receive lower-quality product. Her firm applies this Western model for users she says are 10 to 15 years ahead technologically: they unlock doors with a phone, use WeChat as ID, make introductions by shaking hands on it, and store coupons and pay rent, and in some regards taxes, through it.

Two projects illustrate the point. One is a six-story logistics building described as a high-rise, tech-enabled refrigerator, sitting within a 45-minute drive of 45,000,000 people, in a country she says has a quarter of the per-capita cold storage the US has. The other is a roughly million-square-foot tower in Shanghai whose tenants interact with the landlord, the building and each other on WeChat, including organizing a yoga outing. These are her own examples and the statistics are unverified in the transcript.

She closes the framing by saying that sitting between the two worlds shows many chances to combine the best of the West with innovation happening in China, but that this is hard to discuss in a divided world. She chooses a positive angle and promises a story the audience may not have read much about.

Her story starts with Deng Xiaoping, whom she credits as an experimenter who saw physical infrastructure as a way to push the economy further. She says Shenzhen had about 58,000 people in 1980, was barely a fishing village with few paved roads, and was declared a special economic zone so that it could experiment with elements of capitalism and free trade. She adds that he was from Sichuan and so knew what it meant not to be from a big city.

Today, she says, Shenzhen has over 12 million people with an average age of 29. She calls it China's tech hub, home to DJI, which she says makes 70% of the world's drones, and close to two of the world's five biggest ports by tonnage. Her question is how to turn that head start into something bigger.