Building a metaverse with Chinese characteristics

THE YEAR is 2035. You are walking along the Bund, Shanghai’s storied waterfront, with two of your old classmates, pointing out how much has changed since the last time you were here 20 years ago. You almost joke about how the only thing that never changes is Xi Jinping being in power, but you think better of it. Someone might be listening. A message flashes in your glasses, and you say hurried goodbyes. The landscape of the Bund dissolves into the fantasy realm of a multiplayer game, where three friends in magical armour are waiting, swords at the ready.

The metaverse is for the foreseeable future quite literally science fiction: a fully immersive, persistent virtual world where, with the help of high-tech goggles and other kit, people interact, work and play via online avatars of their real-world selves. In the West, Mark Zuckerberg has become its most famous promoter. His renaming of Facebook in October, as Meta, accelerated a race among tech giants in Silicon Valley and Asia to be the first to turn the idea of the metaverse into reality.