Dan Wang, a prominent analyst and writer on China's technology and economy, has offered numerous insightful observations over the years through his annual letters, interviews, and essays. His work is characterized by a nuanced understanding of the interplay between technology, culture, and governance in both China and the United States.

On China's "Engineering State" vs. America's "Lawyerly Society"

This is a central theme in Wang's recent work, forming the basis of his forthcoming book, "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future."

  1. On the fundamental difference: "The simplest idea I present is that China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America's lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad." [1][2]
  2. How this plays out in practice: "The U.S. has relied on legalisms — levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime — while China has focused on creating the future by physically building better cars, more beautiful cities, and bigger power plants." [1]
  3. The US predicament: "The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy. I believe that America cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected." [1]
  4. China's approach to problems: "For a long time, China has been governed by engineers, and engineers love to build." [3]
  5. The downside of the engineering state: "The heart of the book concerns how badly Beijing goes off track when it engages in social engineering." [1]
  6. A vivid comparison: A bike ride from Guiyang to Chongqing revealed that "China's fourth-poorest province, I was delighted to find, has much better infrastructure than California or New York, both wealthier by orders of magnitude." [1][2]
  7. The Communist Party's nature: "My handy formulation of the Communist Party is that it is a Leninist Technocracy with Grand Opera Characteristics — practical until it collapses into the preposterous." [2]
  8. The American contrast: The idea of the "lawyerly society" became starkly clear to him upon his return to the U.S. in 2023, particularly during his time at Yale Law School. [2]

On China's Economy and Development

  1. Manufacturing prowess: "China's manufacturing advantage isn't only this deep pool of labor. It also has comparably dense clusters of component makers. Its infrastructure for shipping goods around is excellent." [4]
  2. State support for industry: "Instead of trying to extract their share, local governments tend to bend over backwards to help large employers." [4]
  3. Leapfrogging in technology: Chinese firms were able to leapfrog in areas like electric vehicles "because they weren't committed to the old way of doing things." [4]
  4. The EV market success: China's dominance in the EV market came about "exactly because it didn't do well on the internal combustion engine. It was too difficult for Chinese automakers to beat the likes of Toyota or Volkswagen. So both policymakers and automakers went much harder" on EVs. [4]
  5. Bureaucratic incentives for growth: "China's system of incentives for local bureaucrats to encourage growth is extremely unusual, and seems only to exist in China. It is a blunt and powerful instrument." [5]
  6. Xi's focus on the economy: In July 2020, Xi Jinping reminded the state that "economic work must be our core task, if we succeed in that, then the rest of our tasks become easy.” [5]

On Governance and Social Control in China

  1. The problem of state overreach: "I think that one of China's essential problem is one of state overcapacity... it has the unique capacity to pursue these visions harder than other states. And because it doesn't know when to give up, the Chinese people suffer peculiar disasters." [4]
  2. A wish for the Chinese state: "It would be good, I think, if the Chinese state can one day learn to leave people alone." [4]
  3. The power of propaganda: The Communist Party leadership considers propaganda to be the “lifeblood” of the party state. [5]
  4. The role of the propaganda head: The head of propaganda in China always has a seat on the Politburo but is generally not allowed to reach the standing committee, as they are "not to be too imaginative, or he might dominate the entire political system." [5]
  5. The lingering threat of social control: Following the lifting of "zero-Covid" policies, Wang poses the question: "how easily will Beijing decide to re-impose these restrictions for other crises? China's leaders don't always exercise restraint once they know they have a useful tool for social control." [4]
  6. The nature of recent protests: Spontaneous protests, like those in 2022, "took simultaneous lockdowns across the country before people dared to go on the streets." [1]
  7. Future prospects for unrest: "I expect that China's aging society isn't so combustible, given that older people tend not to protest." [1]
  8. The Party's two main functions: "For the most part, the party's role can be boiled down to two items: inspiration, by setting the ideological direction, and control, through its power to select personnel." [5]

On US-China Relations and Geopolitics

  1. Xi Jinping's grand strategy: "What Xi Jinping is trying to do is make China self-sufficient from the rest of the world while making the rest of the world dependent on them." [3]
  2. A strategy of dependence: "For example, in terms of solar power and electric vehicle batteries – they want the world to buy Chinese. Whether this is a viable strategy remains to be seen.” [3]
  3. Shared traits of Americans and Chinese: "Americans and Chinese are fundamentally alike: restless, eager for shortcuts, ultimately driving most of the world's big changes." [1][2]
  4. Beyond outdated terminology: The rivalry between the US and China "should not be reasoned through with worn-out terms from the past century like socialist, democratic, or neoliberal." [1][2]
  5. Mutual self-inflicted harm: Both the US and China are "tangles of imperfection, regularly delivering — in the name of competition — self-beatings that go beyond the wildest dreams of the other." [1][2]
  6. Xi's erosion of China's strengths: "The main thing in America's favor is that Xi has been busy eroding China's strengths," particularly its political institutions. [1]

On Technology and Society

  1. The value of cryptocurrency in a controlled state: "Digital currencies are solutions looking for problems most everywhere in the Western world, but they have real value for people who suffer from state controls." [1]
  2. The inspirational value of space exploration: "The benefits of space exploration are instead mostly inspirational. Few other human activities are so grand to captivate the imagination, and doing these uneconomic projects have pulled forward technological capabilities that may otherwise have languished." [5]
  3. The dual nature of Chinese society: "This is a society that practices move fast and break people. So we have both move fast and break things and move fast and break people. And I think we should never forget that both of these things are true, that we cannot let the repressiveness and invalidate the dynamism, nor vice versa." [6]

On Learning and Personal Growth

  1. The compounding nature of knowledge: "Knowledge can compound. I'd like for us to think more about how to accelerate the growth of learning." [7]
  2. How to accelerate learning: "One can learn more by traveling to new places, being social in different ways, reading new types of books, changing jobs or professions, moving to a new place, by doing better and by doing more.” [7]
  3. The process of writing a book: "Bookwriting is a bit like climbing a mountain: best not to look up too much at the beginning and feel daunted by the task ahead." [1]
  4. Learning from wartime logistics: When reading about war, "the pleasure I draw from war books is to think through the logistical efforts involved in producing goods and delivering them to the front." [5]
  5. On good writing: "Good writing is specific." [7]
  6. Discerning an author's care: "A good acknowledgment is a sign that an author has put some care into their book." [1][2]
  7. Identifying a writer's passion: "I've learned to detect when writers attempt the difficult and when they succumb to laziness. There are parts of every book where writers cover a topic they have little interest in... at which point I try to figure out how many pages I need to flip before getting to the parts they care about." [1][2]
  8. The value of mentorship: Surrounding yourself with people who know more than you is "extremely important because they'll have experienced things that you haven't come across yet." [8]
  9. Learning from others' experiences: "You'll see how they deal with certain problems that maybe you haven't achieved that skill yet so you don't you don't face those problems yet but then you can kind of see from their mistakes or or their successes." [8]

On the Chinese People and Culture

  1. The "rùn" phenomenon (emigration): "No wonder that so many Chinese are now talking about rùn," referring to the trend of people looking to leave China. [9]
  2. Destinations for Chinese emigrants: "Those who have ambition and entrepreneurial energy are going to Singapore. Those who have money and means are going to Japan. And those who have none of these things — the slackers, the free spirits, kids who want to chill — are hanging out in Thailand." [9]
  3. The search for new ideas: "After the slowdown in economic growth and the tightening of censorship over the past decade, people are looking for new ways to understand the world." [1]
  4. The "Jews of the East" comparison: Some in the Chinese crypto community use "Semitic tropes to describe how they've become a beleaguered people driven out of their homeland... I find this comparison overdramatic." [1]
  5. The future of China is its youth: "The China of the future will not look like the China ruled by old men today." [1]
  6. On the hope in youth: "I suspect that they'll do good things for the China they'll one day inherit." [1]
  7. A barbarian's life: In his final annual letter from China, Wang signed off with, "It's a barbarian's life for me," signaling his departure from the "court center" of Beijing and his move to the West. [4]
  8. On the diversity within China: Wang expresses discomfort with a "Han-centric view that has so many gradations of barbarians, whether these are mountain folks, horse folks, or just foreign folks." [1]
  9. Celebrating the marginal: "I wish we can celebrate the rebellious, marginal peoples that have practiced ways to stay at arms-length from the state." [1]
  10. The nature of Chinese society as a "contradictory mess": "It is all a big contradictory mess that we have to figure out how to really understand." [6]

Learn more:

  1. Dan Wang | The secure transport of light
  2. Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future - Dan Wang
  3. Dan Wang - China Tech Strategy Speaker and Advisor
  4. Interview: Dan Wang, China specialist - by Noah Smith
  5. 2020 letter | Dan Wang
  6. Browser Interviews: Dan Wang
  7. Dan Wang's 2023 letter. It may be his last… - Floodlights and Goalposts
  8. Dan Wang's Transition to Digital Advertising Success: An Entrepreneur's Journey - YouTube
  9. Dan Wang on Chinese expatriates in Thailand. [Whole Earth revival] - NEW SAVANNA