Latest / Liberty + Leadership / The Engineering State: Dan Wang on China’s Breakneck Modernization

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The Engineering State: Dan Wang on China’s Breakneck Modernization · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Roger Reen.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: My esteemed guest today is Dan Wong.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Dan is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover History Lab and the author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: He was a former fellow at the Yale Law School's Paul Psy China Center, and from 2017 to 2023, he worked in China as technology analyst at Gavakel Dragonomics.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Raised in Canada and Pennsylvania, Dan is one of the most cited experts on China's technology capabilities and is a highly sought-after keynote speaker.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: He recently spoke at a TFEST dinner here in Washington, D.C.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Dan's essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Atlantic.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's also been a guest on the Ezra Klein Show and Bloomberg's Odd Lots.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a great pleasure to welcome him today to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Dan, thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Roger.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'd like to start.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is a great book.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's a page turner, the way you write, some great stories in here, and great information.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I highly recommend it.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us a little about your background because it leads into what kind of led you to write this particular book.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: My family is from southwestern China, which is a backwater of China.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was seven years old, my parents and I emigrated to Toronto.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mostly grew up in Ottawa and like many Canadians moved a bit further south into the United States.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: My folks are now in the suburbs of the Philadelphia area.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: After working for a little while, after graduating from the University of Rochester with a philosophy degree, I spent a bit of time working in Silicon Valley.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought that in 2016 that a lot of the problems that Silicon Valley had been working on, which were so many consumer apps, which were so many cryptocurrencies, had looked much less ambitious than the Silicon Valley of, let's say, a few decades ago.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I had learned about a program called Made in China 2025, which was a major industrial plan to dominate a lot of key sectors of the future, which included electric vehicles and memory chips and ultra-high voltage transmission.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I moved to Hong Kong at the start of 2017, spent about six years there thinking about China, writing about semiconductors and clean tech before moving to the Yale Law School to be a fellow.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And after that, wrote this book.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: In the book, you contrast China's focus on technology and our country here in the US becoming a lawyerly society, as you say.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: And talk about a little bit about that contrast between the focus on engineers and technology versus lawyers.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: After spending six years of living in China, I thought that we're reasoning through the 21st century, this big economic, geopolitical competition between the US and China, using these 19th century political science terms like socialist or capitalist or autocratic.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And these did not seem terribly useful framings to me.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wanted to try to be fun and creative in coming up with a new framework, which is that China's a country I call the engineering state, because at various points in recent history, the entirety of China's most senior leadership, the standing committee of the Politburo, had degrees in engineering.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is engineering of a very Soviet sort.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so these people treat the physical environment as a big engineering project.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: China has engaged in these vast spasms of construction, building roads, bridges, high-speed rail, coal, solar, wind, nuclear, all sorts of different things throughout the entire country.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're also engineers of the economy.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: In 2021, I saw how Xi Jinping tried to restructure the economy so that fewer people were working for over-leveraged housing developers to try to encourage a lot more smart people who are graduating from top universities away from working in cryptocurrencies and more into semiconductors or aviation, more strategic technologies instead.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And China is also fundamentally made up of engineers of the soul.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I write a lot about social engineering projects, namely the one child policy as well as Zero COVID, which I lived through.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: I contrast the engineering state with the United States, which I call the lawyerly society, because it seems like everyone who wants to be president first has to go to law school first.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: So half of Congress or more than half of Congress.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: About half of Congress.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when there's very few people who have studied any STEM degrees in Congress.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: They're all trained in law.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Roger, you live in Washington, D.C., where we're speaking.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: You you know how it is.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Lawyers totally run the show.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the issue with lawyers is that they block more or less everything.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so you don't have stupid ideas like the one child policy.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: You also don't have functional infrastructure almost anywhere in the U.S.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they kill a lot of projects and building.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you mentioned in there that lawyers often are obstacles to progress and growth.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: I find it really pretty incredible that we are still mostly living with infrastructure built by not even our grandparents' generation.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the New York subway was built about a hundred years ago.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Two months ago, I took the Excel train from New York City to Washington, D.C.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: to speak at the Abundance Conference.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the Excel train is more or less fine.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: I find it very shaky.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I always get some motion sickness in the car.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I saw this new headline saying that Excel is getting an upgrade.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're getting a new class of Excel trains.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was quite excited until I actually actually read the article.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out the new Excel's are 11 minutes slower than the prior Excelas.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: So what are we getting here?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're getting better foam seats, but Americans are moving slower and slower every year.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't feel like the country that has forward momentum behind it.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell You mentioned in your book that some years ago, I think all nine members of the top leadership in China were engineers, had engineering backgrounds, and even today it's dominated by engineers, the leadership of China.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is that something you think we need more of here?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because I want to get into this idea that you touch on of whether the central planning, in a sense, they're trying to do imposing this engineering plan on the country is the way to go.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you have another observation I think is very true about how these labels of capitalists and socialists are kind of flawed in terms of looking at China versus the United States.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd like to get into that a little.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: There are obviously drawbacks to being an engineering society, which you touch on.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: But overall, do you think we need to move more in that direction and they need to move more in the lawyerly direction?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think if there were slightly more convergence, I think that would be great for both countries.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we're sitting here uh in the US, and I think that the US is a country I chose.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: I moved back to the US because I am attracted to values like pluralism, which the lawyerly society is really good at protecting.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And what I find is quite challenging about the US is how there are some really critical shortages of pretty important goods, especially housing.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Most blue states have not built enough housing, especially big cities like New York City and Boston, as well as Los Angeles and San Francisco.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's very poor systems of mass transit.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: We've already mentioned trains, but subway systems in San Francisco as well as New York City more or less work, but they're slow and they're super loud, and there's all sorts of distressing things about that.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: The U.S.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: manufacturing base has not done very well, arguably over the last few decades.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: If we take a look at Detroit Automakers, Boeing, Intel, all of them have fallen on hard times.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I would really love is for the US to be 20% more engineering.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to be full bore, just 20% more engineering so that we are able to deliver homes to people who have struggled with housing costs, so that they can take mass transit to work in order to get there on time every morning without being assaulted by too many loud noises on the subway.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: There should be better public order in the streets.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think more better infrastructure would help with something like that.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, having a few more engineers, people trained in engineering in the US government, um, at least the U.S.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Congress, I'm not that hopeful that we'll have engineers in charge of the White House, but at least a few more members of Congress who have engineering degrees, that would be good.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, I would like it if the Chinese could be 50% more lawyerly, um, that it would be really good if the Communist Party could really learn to respect individual rights, if they could stop strangling the creative impulses of uh young Chinese who I think are super creative, they make amazing memes.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: I would fundamentally just love if the Communist Party could learn to leave people alone for a little bit so that they have some aspirations of individual liberty.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think that would be great.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: You do acknowledge in your book that we had two engineers as president, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, and both were one-term presidents who lost their elections.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: But uh in part because they probably had terrible electoral instincts because they were engineers, I'm sure.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned in your book, I think it was a Stalin quote, in fact, that the desire to engineer the soul, which you said was quoted, I think, by Xi Jinping.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it brought to mind, and then later you touched on the fact that, you know, the theory of moral sentiments, Adam Smith talked about the man of the system who tries to engineer society and move people like pieces on a chessboard or force them to stand still.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you think you strike that balance between pluralism and engineering and central planning?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned that in many blue states they have trouble with housing.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: To what extent is that due to government policy?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Not necessarily intended to help provide housing, but you know, the cost of housing is so much more expensive in cities with heavy regulation, where government is, you know, through zoning and other policies, rent controls, things like that are hurting the development of housing.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think that it is overwhelmingly a government procedural issue that cities like New York, Boston, SFLA are unable to build quite a lot of homes.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: If we take a look at these devastating fires that ravaged Los Angeles earlier this year, the Planning Council has issued very few permits in order to let people build homes again.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is very, very puzzling.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: The state of Texas is building enormous amounts of solar as well as wind power, not necessarily because the Republicans there are really, you know, endorsing climate change ideas or clean technologies themselves necessarily, but only because Texas has a much, much more permissive permitting regime than California, which is nominally much more committed to developing green.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I see is the problem of America is that there has been a lot of people who have already been very well established, people who already have their own homes, very intent on pulling up the ladder to prevent other people from moving to where they are.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: I spend a lot of time in the California Bay Area.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is absolutely one of the most pristine and beautiful uh regions of the country, and I would argue the world.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: There have been a lot of people who have moved to these places in, let's say, Marin County, which is just north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, who decided they would like for no one else to move to where they are.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: And California really exhibits a lot of these anti-growth mindsets where places like Santa Barbara and little counties in Marin that have the homeowners that have their own place and then are preventing more mass transit or sewage and water development from moving there.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is one aspect of the American spirit that has been deformed by uh partially by the lawyers.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: My view is that America is a country that works really, really well for the wealthy.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a lot of money, this works very well for you.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: In America, it is relatively straightforward to transmute a lot of your wealth into some degree of political influence, especially now that we're seeing with the second Trump administration.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: In China, they do not respect the wealthy.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they cut them down.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: In Europe, you can't even get wealthy.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: But America, you know, it's really good for the wealthy.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: You don't really have to worry about these high housing costs if you're living in New York.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: You get to live in one of these skinny skyscrapers that overlook Central Park.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that America cannot stay a great power for the longer term if it works only very well for the wealthy.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: In your book, you have a lot of interesting insights about China.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned in there about one of the worst years to have been born in China was 1949.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: That was kind of fascinating.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then 10 years later, you presented it being a pretty good year to be born.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: You want to talk some about that?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the worst year in to be born in China is 1949, because if you were born that year, about the time that you're 10 years old, you would live through a man-made famine made by Chairman Mao Zedong called the Great Leap Forward, in which tens of millions of uh people starved because of these quack agronomy techniques that Mao Zedong was promoting.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so, first it would be good for you to survive this big famine.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then at about the time you would enter university, Mao Zedong closed almost all the universities in order to agitate for the cultural revolution.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so, if you were a smart high school student, maybe you'd be working in the fields because that was what the Communist Party ordered you to do.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if you were having a child at around age 30, you would run headlong into the one child policy, which I describe in the book as a campaign of rural terror, mostly meted out against female bodies.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And near the end of your life, when you're into your 70s and 80s, maybe you would live through zero COVID, which ravaged the elderly in pretty big ways after trying to held on controls far too long and then drop them essentially all overnight.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, I think that is a really negative period to be born, but only 10 years later, if you're born in 1959, you would skip the famine.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: You would be able to re-enter the universities, right as Mao passed away, and uh Deng Xiaoping reopened these universities.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: You might be allocated units of housing by the state, or maybe you start a manufacturing business.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And really, these two sources are the great sources of wealth creation for a lot of Chinese over the last 40 years.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Either you have some property which appreciated substantially in value, or you started some sort of great business right as China was integrating into the world after it formally acceded to the WTO in 2001.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you would still live through zero COVID, but this was a golden moment to produce a lot of wealth.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what does that say about a state that is so easily chirped between the worst year to be born into the best year to be born in only 10 years?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I mean by an engineering state that engineers shift very quickly and unpredictably.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: They hold on too long to some bad ideas, and then they shift a little bit too quickly.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: There was a book that came out, it was called The Coming Collapse of China.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: You're probably familiar with it.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Gordon Chang is the one.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: He seemed to be off in his prediction.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: He thought membership in the WTO would, I think, bring down many of these large industries in China, and we'd see the collapse of China.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, there are a lot of Americans who have great fears about China as a threat to our country, something we should be very alarmed about, its dominance in Asia.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you think the truth lies?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, is China rising to be a dominant force in the world in a way that we should fear its success and we need to counter it?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Can you touch a little bit on that subject?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we can talk a little bit about that.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think there is no right answer.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think that it is very valid for specialists as well as all sorts of people to debate what exactly is the right threat of China.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there should be no single answer here.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: There should be some degree of pluralism and debate about all of these sort of things.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I think that one can have a viewpoint that the United States has more or less vanquished other threats to its power in the past, especially the Soviet Union, which collapsed pretty spectacularly by the end of the 1980s.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: And probably the Americans were over-threatened.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't need not need to treat the Japan economic threat as a very big deal at all.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there was some overreaction about that.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: That was in the 1980s.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: That was in the 1980s as well.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so what my view is that we can have some due acknowledgement that China is doing very well in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of economic ways that could threaten American interests.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't think that it is mostly due to China that Detroit has been struggling for decades.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And probably economic competition with Japan stimulated production of American automotives because they had greater competition that they actually had to worry about.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I think if we take a look at many sectors of American strengths, namely a lot of manufacturing with respect to clean technologies, with respect to semiconductors, aviation, and so on, China really is doing better on a lot of these different technologies.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that represents some sort of economic challenge to the US.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: There is an obvious flashpoint with the island nation of Taiwan, as well as the broader South China Sea, in which China could be saying something like, Well, you know, we heard about this Monroe doctrine that Americans invented, in which you need to dominate your near neighbors and, you know, have your backyard.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we would like some of that ourselves and dominate, you know, essentially near neighbors of China, some of which are clear US allies, like the Philippines or Japan, the US has been at least somewhat committed to the self-sovereignty of Taiwan.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's also perhaps a values question of if China somehow dominates the world, whatever that means.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't expect that it will.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: But even if it dominates its near neighbors, that the rest of the world doesn't love it if Hong Kong might be treated as it is, or Uyghurs and Xinjiang are treated as they are.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that these are all quite legitimate topics that we can all debate.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't think that China will ever try to seize the state of Oregon.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: What would they do with it?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that the Americans really want to seize the province of Shandong off the coast.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: What would they do with it?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't have to be very fanciful about what the China threat is, but I think there is room for a very robust debate of can China dominate its near neighbors and should it, and what should US policy do?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: I will say you know better than to offer a highly confident view of what China will be like in the future or what it will do.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that was an interesting way to start off in your book, and that there's some people who have the all this great confidence of being able to predict what China will do.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And to do so, as you note, requires getting in the heads of these leaders, and that's not something that's really possible.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: So would you say that it's quite possible when there is a leadership change in China, there could be a dramatic change in the policies of China?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: One can always expect that policies can shift.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, certainly we can acknowledge that it's been totally impossible to get China right in all sorts of big debates.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: The communist victory over the nationalists in 1949 was a darn close-run thing.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: The nationalists could well have triumphed over that year.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think people didn't expect Mao to turn out as he did.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: People didn't expect the cultural revolution.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Even after Mao's death, there was no certain sense that Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms would make China as rich of a country as it is today.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so we keep getting China wrong.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I would be the first to put up my hand to say I've gotten China wrong three times a day before breakfast, every day, and that I uh have no idea what's going on in China.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm always the first to put up my hand to say something like that.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so I feel like I have enough forbearance not to make overconfident predictions about the future.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, could we hope for some sort of big shift in policy?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, we can always hope.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it is the case that after Chiang Kai-shek died in Taiwan, his son, uh Chang Ching Kuo, became a liberalizer who turned Taiwan into the democracy it is today.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: We can also take a look at the South Korean example.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: After Park Chong-hee was murdered by his own security guards, the person who took office after him, Chondu Wan, was a much more repressive figure than the former army general.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: And after he fired on students, he was deposed.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And only after that did South Korea liberalize.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: So what way will the Politburo resolve if Xi Jinping were gone suddenly, which is always a possibility, I have no idea.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: But my bet is probably that they will keep course on some sort of recognizable way rather than shift direction really radically.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think that he is his own person, but he is also a person of the system.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that, you know, if he weren't in power, the next guy may well have been someone quite like him because they have a political and bureaucratic logic that is essentially Leninist about the Communist Party.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so it is not crazy to me that things could have been quite like this.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell You're right in your book that the greatest trick the CCP has ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Could you explain that?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that was fascinating.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a country ruled by a communist party that engages in all sorts of communist pageantry, like every so often celebrating the birthday of Karl Marx.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is really strange to see this giant portrait of Karl Marx, this German dude with a big German beard in the Great Hall of the People, and then you have everybody in the central committee celebrating this guy.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're trying to kick out the imperialist foreign ideas, and then they celebrate this German dude.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I find that very uh delightful and strange.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: But if I take a look at the actual lived experience of being in China, this is a country that offers a pretty threadbare social safety net.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Xi Jinping said several years ago, we should not give people too much welfare, otherwise, it will make them lazy.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that Ronald Reagan would never have gotten away with saying something as bald as that.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: China does not redistribute much income.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's effectively no property taxes, which means that the wealthy have their source of wealth mostly untouched by taxation.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the taxation is regressive in nature because consumption taxes are funding most of China's social expenditures.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is a country that almost entirely keeps out immigrants, that is holding on to manufacturing, that is enforcing very traditional gender norms.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: In my mind, this feels more like 1950s Eisenhower America than it does, you know, 21st century Biden America.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: In addition to your book, what are some books you might recommend for people that, not experts who want to become experts on China, but just to understand China?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Are there some books you'd recommend?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: The first book on China for me is by uh British writer Fuchsia Dunlop called Invitation to a Banquet that is talking about the greatest Chinese creation, namely its cuisine.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so this uh runs through a lot of Chinese cuisine, organized by technique.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Fuchsia is a gorgeous writer, and I think that her book is really, really excellent.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot about a Belgian Sinologist by the name of Simone Lays, who wrote a book called The Hall of Uselessness, in which it's a series of essays about how he understood China.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is someone who was more active in the 1960s and the 1970s.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think he really captures the spirit of something essential about the Chinese spirit.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe in more contemporary times, I was a big fan of the New Yorker writer Peter Hessler's book, Other Rivers, in which he was also in China during zero COVID.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: He was teaching at uh university in Sichuan province.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Hessler is an excellent storyteller.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is a you know really nice way to understand again something about how Chinese live their lives based on his vantage point from a not very elite part of China.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: I uh am partial also to the book Wild Swans.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you think highly of that orview.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a woman who wrote a book many years ago.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: She's no longer living, Yan Chang, who wrote Life and Death in Shanghai.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: We had the opportunity to have her speak to our students, and she would tell quite a tale about the cultural revolution.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: I also wanted to ask, bring us up to date.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know there's news today, but how do you see our uh trade disputes?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, those are hard to predict too, because of our president.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's very hard to predict when it comes to tariffs, but he and was in Asia and talking about trade, and evidently they reached some sort of deal.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: But do you see that improved trade relations might help the relationship develop in a more positive direction?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think that improved trade relations would stabilize the relationship, but I'm not sure how likely it is that we will have improved trade relations.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure that such a trade truce is likely to be enduring.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I say that because I lived in Beijing throughout the first trade war, in which both sides ended up negotiating for a very long time.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: And either side might walk away.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: One time he walked away from a deal, another time Trump walked away.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: After they walk away, there's all sorts of escalations.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: This whole thing concluded at the very beginning of 2020 with this optimistically named phase one trade deal, which was supposed to stabilize the trade relationship.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: But what happened at the beginning of 2020, the most noteworthy news was not the trade deal, but this novel coronavirus that was circulating in the city of Wuhan.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And right after that, US and China fell into much bitter recriminations after this phase one.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, where is phase two?
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: Where is phase three?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're not going to call it that anymore.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so my view is that the US and China have a lot of these fundamental challenges in which they don't see eye to eye on a lot of matters, whether that is security or geopolitics or technology or economics.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: It is not going to be, you know, one handshake in Asia that is going to fix everything up.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think it is really positive that they are speaking.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking is much better than not speaking, especially when you deal with a mercurial US president and a Chinese top leader that is unsure of how to handle this relationship.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think it is really difficult to see how they could be fast friends anytime soon.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: You have a chapter in here about zero COVID, a chapter about the one child policy that China pursued for many years.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think there were lessons from that that were learned by the leadership of China that might prevent them from pursuing such draconian policies in the future?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: I doubt it.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: If I remember correctly, you said that so many abortions that it equaled the size of the U.S.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: population today?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's the official statistics that is published by the Chinese National Health Yearbook.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: So over the 35 years of the one-child policy, which turned into a two-child policy, China conducted about 320 million abortions, which is the present population of the U.S.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in a normal year, there would be certain numbers of abortions, but they also sterilized about 100 million women and sterilized about 25 million men.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: And these are pretty astonishing figures that they engineered their way into partly into a demographic crisis.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: At least in demography, they have not learned their own lesson.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: I read at the end of my book that a lot of these neighborhood committees that used to be in charge of enforcing birth planning have turned 180 degrees right around to encouraging births.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: So they are going up to women to say, when was your last period?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how's her menstrual cycle?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: I quoted a one woman who said to a journalist that after she married, her parents asked her only once whether she plans to have children.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the government neighborhood officials have already asked her six times.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so they are trying to engineer the population into um having kids.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it is very difficult to imagine how they can coerce copulation.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that could work.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Which a lot of countries in the West are trying to do as well.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they're struggling.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: And even if you're able to spend a lot of money, um, namely the Hungary case does not seem to have worked very, very well.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the Chinese are going to double down on engineering.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're always going to be, you know, thinking more about how to engineer their own population.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm doubtful that these methods would really succeed.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now you write an annual letter on China.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Who's the audience for that?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's somewhat renowned, I guess.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: How do people get a hold of it?
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: My audience when I first started uh was my mother.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just wanted uh my parents and my friends to know uh what I was up to in China.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: It took a little bit more of a life of its own, especially as I was uh living in China in zero COVID after China kicked out most of the US correspondence out of China from the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was one of the people who were able to observe China from the inside, especially during the zero COVID crazy years.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: It is published on my website, so anyone is able to read it.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll give you a sneak preview, Roger, of what I'll be writing about this year, which is that now that I'm a fellow at the Hoover Institution, I spend a lot of my time in Silicon Valley, which is a deeply, deeply strange place, almost as strange as China, but also a place that I take very, very seriously because I think Silicon Valley and China are both pretty self-serious places, deeply humorless.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: And they are thinking about sort of the end of the world.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you're the communist party, you're always wondering, is this the day that everything is brought down?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in California, people also talk about the end of the world, mostly created by artificial intelligence.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, there's a lot of striking similarities between these two places.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that I am uh my annual letter this year will be uh exploring the difference between California as well as China, the similarities as well as the differences.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: I thank you for joining me today.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: His book, Dan Wong, W A N G is Breakneck, published by Norton just out a month or so ago.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: I highly recommend it.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: Please consider buying it and reading it, and you'll be so much better informed.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: It has an endorsement on the cover by Tyler Cowan, who's at our academic partner, George Mason University.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to understand China, I suggest you read this book, Breakneck.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Dan, for being with me today on the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: My pleasure, Roger.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: This is a lot of fun.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfas.org.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: And be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Roger Reem, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.