I am writing this from the middle of a year-end trip through Southern China, and what I have acquired so far, besides a suitcase problem and some regional opinions about chili, is a theory about a name. Not a grand theory. Not even, strictly speaking, a factual claim. More like a small, pleased suspicion, the kind of thing you turn over in your hand between cities and decide to keep.

MIXC (萬象城) is the luxury mall brand operated by China Resources, not much of a presence in Beijing, my usual base, but ubiquitous in the southern and eastern cities. Walking through Changsha in the last days of the year, seeing the logo on facades and shopping bags, the four letters suddenly rearranged themselves in my mind. MIXC. And then, almost immediately: MEXC.

The name itself is worth pausing on. MIXC is doing a good deal of work in four letters. The Chinese, 萬象城, suggests totality: all phenomena, the ten thousand forms. But the English is quietly clever in its own right. MIX carries its own freight: combination, variety, everything folded together. It is a word that already means plenitude before the branding department touches it. Add the C (for city, for commerce, for whatever formal justification was offered in the original pitch deck) and you have a name that manages to sound both cosmopolitan and comprehensive. A place where things come together. It is not an accident that the malls feel that way when you walk through them.

MEXC is the cryptocurrency exchange, formerly called MXC before a rebranding exercise added the vowel. The parallels, I think, are suggestive. MIXC positions itself as a premium marketplace, a city within the city, a curated enclosure where one finds everything worth wanting. A crypto exchange of MEXC’s ambition operates under a structurally similar promise: the bazaar where every token can be found. Both enterprises sell the idea of plenitude. Both are rooted in the Chinese commercial imagination. The phonetic distance between the two names is exactly one vowel, which is to say, no distance at all.

I am not reporting a fact. I have no memorandum, no confession from a branding consultant over drinks. What I have is a coincidence that feels like more than a coincidence, the kind the branding industry quietly manufactures and then declines to acknowledge. The best brand names do not invent associations from nothing. They appropriate associations already present in the cultural atmosphere, so ambient they are felt before they are understood. If someone involved in the MEXC rebrand had spent any time in the retail environments of southern China, M-I-X-C would have been part of the visual groundwater. That is not plagiarism. It is a form of commercial literacy. I like recording these small brand signals when they feel etymologically interesting.

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The trip itself corrected a prejudice I had not known I was carrying. Beijing is serious; it rewards seriousness. I had assumed, without quite articulating it, that this was simply the condition of urban China in the mid-twenties. Southern China disabused me of this with some speed. Changsha had a quotidian vitality I had not expected: the streets full, the restaurants full, the small pleasures of daily life conducted with an energy that felt less like recovery and more like temperament.

What surprised me further was the foreign presence. I had genuinely assumed that the expat communities of the pre-2019 era had largely dissipated. And yet there they were (Brits, Australians) in numbers that suggested not a remnant but a going concern. It was pleasant to be wrong. There is something reassuring about discovering that the world is slightly less contracted than you had imagined.

On the last night of the year, or perhaps the first of the new one, I met my friend Zky, and we talked about the things one talks about at such junctures. It was the kind of evening that resists summary, which is usually a sign that it was good.

Happy New Year, from Changsha, where the malls have interesting names and the coffee is getting better.