Partially, yes. Every child is influenced by the people and systems around them. My son is no exception. But the perspective he has inherited did not arise in a vacuum.

My children have grown up with the ever-present possibility of being separated from one parent or the other by a distance they cannot meaningfully traverse.

They live in a world seemingly unable to account either for their family or for the environment in which they will grow up, while remaining exceptionally good at accounting for institutions, borders and material wealth.

Their right to a family life depends upon our ability to hold our communities—and the systems they sustain—to account.

My son grew up in China until he was seven, where he learned fluent Chinese from the community around him and fluent English from me.

We returned to the UK after the systems governing my ability to work in China changed. The move had been planned a year before COVID.

Back in the UK, there were no accessible language schools capable of continuing what our children had begun, and little recognition of their parents’ work across two systems that did not properly recognise one another.

The responsibility for maintaining their language, education and integration therefore fell largely to me.

I had already developed reasons to distrust the West before I was thirteen. I saw systems that claimed to protect freedom repeatedly fail to protect children, especially when institutional, commercial and ideological priorities were placed above them.

The enemy was never the child, but the machine—the dark satanic mills we continue to build around them.

So yes, I teach my children that there is a sickness here.

I am not suggesting there are no serious problems in the East either. I trust neither side unconditionally with my children.

That is not the same as teaching them what to think.

It is teaching them to examine the systems asking for their trust.

And now here I stand: King Wolf, with an ironic sense of humour.

My wife is in China. I am here in the UK, trying to help our children regain their Chinese as an English speaker with rotten Chinese of my own—so that one day they may choose a place, or a side, that accepts them.

Or, if these systems continue to divide our family, so that they can survive without their father beside them.

Perspective

If AI can create the first one-person billion-dollar company, then by heck, I will use it to fight for my children’s right to exist as a family in a world artificially divided around them.

It is ironic that the technology I prepared myself to fight as a boy has now become my ally against the broken forms of “artificial intelligence” our communities already support: institutions, borders, markets and bureaucracies that account for themselves while failing to account for the children living between them.