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Dan Wang
The Schneider clan will be heading to the Bay Area from September 9 through the rest of the month. If you're interested in meeting up or doing a house swap with a two-bedroom in Manhattan, or just happen to have an empty apartment that can fit a few adults and a very cute baby, please do reach out to jordan@chinatalk.media.
Dan Wang at long last makes his solo ChinaTalk debut! We’re here to discuss and celebrate his first book, Breakneck.
We get into…
Engineering states vs lawyerly societies,
The competing legacies of the 1980s in China, One Child Policy and Tiananmen vs intellectual debate, cultural vibrancy, and rock and roll,
Methods of knowing China, from the People’s Daily and Seeking Truth to on-the-ground research,
How to compare the values of China’s convenient yet repressive society with the chaotic pluralism of the USA,
What Li Qiang’s career post-Shanghai lockdowns can tell us about the value of loyalty vs competence in Xi’s China.
Listen now on your favorite podcast app.
From One-Child to Zero-COVID
Jordan Schneider: So Dan, you chose Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible translation to sit next to your book. What can the Bible tell us about modern China?
Dan Wang: Something I wonder about is thinking less about the Old Testament, but more about the New Testament and the Catholic Church in particular. The Catholic Church and the Communist Party are very similar organizations, and it might be the case that the CCP and the Catholic Church will be enduring institutions that we’ll still find around 100 years from now — maybe even 500 years from now.
It’s no accident that the CCP resembles the Catholic Church, partly because, according to Kerry Brown, the Communist Party has spent an immense amount of effort trying to understand the Catholic Church. The Communist Party isn’t simply copying the Catholic Church, though. I understand the Communist Party to be a cross between the Catholic Church and the Sicilian Mafia, with this incredible sense of omertà and a very strong understanding that you can’t only be thugs. One has to build a church; one has to have an ideology. What we have is a very powerful Catholic Church in China that also has the omertà — that also has the gangsterism.
Jordan Schneider: One of the things I most admire about this book is how it looks forward multiple decades in a way that doesn’t bore me — unlike when someone like Peter Zeihan does it, talking about demographic destiny or geography. The way you incorporate different data points and pieces of context that you’ve absorbed over your years on this planet gives it weight that I take very seriously.
However, my critique is that you may have over-indexed on Xi and the Xi era, which at some point is going to end. Many of the forward-looking projections you have on the Chinese side are premised on whatever comes after Xi looking like what Xi was. Dan, how do you think about that issue?
Dan Wang: It’s interesting that you start by saying I may be over-indexed on Xi, because one strain of criticism I’ve seen is that maybe I’m under-indexed on Xi. In my central thesis of the engineering state, one can question whether Xi is really an engineer. On one hand, he is because he has a degree in chemical engineering from Tsinghua, but he also has a doctorate in Marxist economics, also from Tsinghua. There’s been debate about whether Xi is an engineer in the hydraulic mold set by Hu Jintao.
It’s very valid to consider that the China of the future will not look like the China of the present. In fact, we can guarantee it. But I have no confidence about what China of the future will look like in a post-Xi world. It could be that Xi Jinping represents someone like Chun Doo-hwan, South Korea’s dictator who intensified Park Chung-hee’s rule and triggered disaster as a result. Maybe someone who comes after Xi is an intensification of Xi in all aspects. Maybe it’s someone who looks quite different.
Given that we have to draw lines forward to some extent from what we have right now, I’m reluctant to assign a big rupture in China’s political traditions based on the idea that whoever replaces Xi might not end up looking like him.
Jordan Schneider: The story you focus on from the late 70s and 80s — which was a time in CCP history when you see more vibrancy, more lawyerly energy coming into the party — you focused on the most horrific, repressive arc of that period, which was the one-child policy and all the state invasion and suppression required to execute it.
But there are other stories you can tell about the late 70s and 80s that speak to many of the challenges you see in China today and project into China’s future. There’s the idea of a society that can create interesting cultural goods, party leadership that distrusts the people, bottom-up political innovation, economic innovation beyond what the state controls — and the state being more understanding of that than maybe it is today. How do you read that history beyond the universe that the one-child policy created?
Dan Wang: The 1980s were certainly China’s most interesting decade, and maybe it’s understudied and under-theorized. As you note, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about the one-child policy, and I didn’t quite grasp how brutal its enforcement was, partly because it was a while ago. The peak enforcement happened in the early 80s and then another wave in the late 90s, before both of our lifetimes. Much of the one-child policy enforcement focused mostly in rural areas, and we don’t have as many rural perspectives relative to elite urban perspectives.
That was one of the big stories of the 1980s. But you’re right — there were many other big stories. The 1980s is cited by many people, especially of my parents’ generation, as a decade when every question could have been asked inside Chinese society, inside the Communist Party. This was the decade of rock and roll. This was the decade when people really believed that China would have some degree of political liberalization.
Those questions kept persisting and might even have had a resolution different from how we know it resolved in June 1989, when the forces of liberalism were comprehensively crushed and the party took a pretty different direction. We could draw a different line from the 1980s, and maybe we should. But given that it ended with a really dramatic act of political repression and given that the conservative reformers — perhaps represented by Deng Xiaoping as well as Li Peng — had the upper hand, maybe the story is still more about politics than creativity.
Jordan Schneider: You have these two lines that capture the inverse of what the 1980s felt like. Someone you met in Chiang Mai who left China told you that contemporary China “feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower… To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.” You also write that, “After six years in China, I missed pluralism. It’s wonderful for me to be in America now, in a society made up of many voices, not only an official register meant to speak over all the rest.”
The flip side of those two lines captures some spirit of what the 80s were like. I buy your argument that one side has won. They’ve been winning for the past 40-plus years. But even with the White Paper movement, there are still undercurrents that seem impossible to disappear.
Dan Wang: Absolutely. The currents are always out there. This is part of what makes people like Ian Johnson’s work really interesting. When he documents something like Mao’s quote that “a single spark can start a prairie fire (星星之火，可以燎原),” he’s absolutely right. It has become really difficult to comprehensively and decisively eliminate the forces of creativity — that desire for a different future. That’s always there and always worth supporting.
Jordan Schneider: As an aside, I went into this book thinking you wouldn’t tell me many new things — that I would get your takes, but not much fresh information. The one-child policy in particular was the section that I hadn’t fully internalized. The magnitude and personal horror attached to what that meant for tens of millions of people was striking. This goes to show why everyone should read the book and not just listen to all the podcasts Dan’s going to be on over the next few weeks.
It’s a book written for a mass-market audience, but it’s also something that every single listener of ChinaTalk will derive something new, unique, and insightful from — whether it’s from your historical work, the memoir sections, the travelogues, or the big thoughts.
It’s a remarkable achievement, and I want to congratulate you on it.
Dan Wang: Thank you, Jordan. I’ve used different registers, and you picked up on exactly that. My favorite chapter to write was unexpectedly the one-child policy, because I didn’t really expect that the emotional arc of the one-child policy still produces so much anger in people. Many normally temperate people in China would be driven to a froth of rage when they remember that era. We all know a lot about Zero COVID, which is also one of the social engineering projects I write about. But the one-child policy is understudied and perhaps under-theorized.
Jordan Schneider: This is striking because we have many folks from the mainland who moved here, and there are many Chinese Americans too. Chinese Americans have siblings, but mainlanders who’ve moved here over the past 30 years basically don’t. It’s wild to have an entire generation — for literally all of human history, you have total fertility rates above 2 — and for it to go below that in such an intrusive and brutal way. Not in a slow fade you’re seeing in South Korea, but something truly heart-wrenching.
Dan Wang: I had a really interesting conversation with someone who read that chapter recently — someone who was adopted himself in the US Pacific Northwest. We’re of similar ages. One of the things he told me when he read my chapter was that when he was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, he would sometimes go to gatherings with other adopted children. A majority of the adopted children you could find in the US Pacific Northwest were Chinese girls. This is another one of those things that unless you have some experience here, is much less vivid than you might imagine.
Jordan Schneider: It’s the ghosts of all these lives that weren’t lived. What was it, something like 40 million?
Dan Wang: That’s the best estimate right now. We still don’t have a really comprehensive consensus on exactly how many lives the one-child policy cost, partly because the data is sketchy and it’s difficult to draw these hypotheticals. According to the Communist Party, state propaganda claims that the one-child policy averted something like 400 million births. That seems to be subject to strange extrapolation that not all demographers accept.
Some demographers say that the one-child policy was pure brutality without substantially affecting the birth rate in China. Even on this crucial period — and I acknowledge this in my book — it has become difficult to figure out exactly how many births the one-child policy era averted. But based on some of the more accepted scholarly estimates, there are 40 million Chinese girls. The femicide produced by the one-child policy was very intense, with families forced to keep boys and forced to discard their infant girls.
Jordan Schneider: I don’t know if I have a transition for that. It makes me think of the Bible. I have a new one-year-old, which you were just holding for a while, and reading that chapter in the context of now being a parent hit differently. You tell these truly horrific stories — you only give two paragraphs about some bureaucrat who was the “worst performing” when it came to births and decided “we’re not having births for a month.” There were abortions on the delivery table.
It felt cliché where everyone says, “Oh, the way you read the news and see the world is going to change when you have a child.” That chapter was maybe one of the first times where I experienced a piece of history or literature that sat with me in a different way. I don’t know if I want to thank you for that?
Dan Wang: Well, I thank you, Jordan, for letting me hold this extremely cute one-year-old. Part of what made this chapter difficult to write was that my wife suffered a miscarriage, coincidentally, just as I was writing this chapter. To think that it was a matter of state policy to have conducted over 300 million abortions — which is the official statistic from the National Health Commission — as well as many forced sterilizations, the brutality meted out against overwhelmingly female bodies. That was a challenge to think about, to try to place myself back in the 80s.
Methods of Knowing China
Jordan Schneider: …And we’re going to hard pivot. Methods of knowing. You’ve worked at a similar job that I had, covering Chinese policy at a very close, full-time clip. You’ve traveled around, you’ve read extensively, you slowed down and hung out in Michigan, looked at a pretty view, and wrote a book. You explore different levels in this book as well. I guess the answer is all of the above, right? Because it’s your revealed preference. But what are the limits of those different methods of exploring the world that you’ve used that ended up creating this book?
Dan Wang: There’s never enough information and sourcing about anything to satisfy even the most niche-specific question. This is something you know as an analyst or researcher. No matter how narrowly you try to define your research task, you’ll find that the literature is endless. Many people have covered this, and yet what they have is also totally incomplete.
I didn’t try to be overly formalist in my study of China. One could spend a lot of time thinking about everything Xi Jinping said. One could simply travel around the country and talk to people and experience how life differs between, say, Shenzhen and Guizhou. One could hang out mostly in Shanghai and try to be an analyst, figure out data, and talk to business executives.
I decided that I was going to do all of the above. I was going to read every speech published in Seeking Truth 求是, the party’s main theory magazine. I was going to read some of the necessary documents, but I wasn’t going to read every issue of People’s Daily. That would be madness. Thank you to the people who do this work — you’re doing God’s work. Not really for me, but I’m glad there are people synthesizing all of this excellent work.
I decided that I had to spend considerable time traveling around the country to physically see some of the ways Guizhou is improving through the build-out of better airports, better train stations, and bigger bridges. I decided that I had to spend time talking to folks in Beijing and Shanghai — the capital for politics, the business center for how executives think about the world. I did my best to try to be synthetic and not let any single perspective override the others, but to be as synthetic and comprehensive as possible, to produce whatever mix it ends up being.
Jordan Schneider: Not to praise you too much, but many people can choose to spend their time spreading their bets across different modalities of knowledge. Your ability to abstract away to get to the aphorisms and provocations while also being able to go levels down and levels up is what makes you a unique mind. But I’m going to stop giving you compliments.
Dan Wang: This is your show — you can give me all the compliments you want. The most important thing is to tread softly and lightly. Sometimes you need to dip deeper into a particular pond, but otherwise, maybe you should just be out there figuring out new ways to explore different areas.
Jordan Schneider: Maybe this is just me talking about myself, but going deeper and narrower seems easier to be useful and interesting, versus trying to do the big synthetic thing you did with this book, which is a higher degree of difficulty.
Over the long scope of ChinaTalk, I’m trying to think over a multi-decade horizon. But you’ve shown me what it actually means to do that in this book. You showed me a different way of going even further out, to levels of abstraction in a way that’s still interesting. Maybe the biggest provocation I’ll take from this is to try to think more at that level.
Dan Wang: Shucks, this is too many compliments, Jordan.
Do Books Matter?
Jordan Schneider: All right, let’s get some critiques. Your grandfather was in the PLA during the China-Vietnam War, and he was a propaganda officer. His job was dropping leaflets on Vietnamese troops urging them to resist. That, in retrospect, sounded laughable because these guys had just fought foreign colonialists for 30 years. What was a leaflet written in shitty Vietnamese going to do to them? But you think books matter?
Dan Wang: Books do matter. Maybe books matter a little less than they used to, but even if books are declining in importance, authors are gaining in importance. Especially if we are in the age of AI, as we seem to be, authors are gaining in importance. Maybe some people are just going to be Viet Cong troops trying to resist whatever big idea is going to threaten to enter their field of vision. But it’s still important for us to try to create knowledge.
This is something I admire you for, Jordan — maintaining ChinaTalk after a rebrand, having done this for so long. You were one of the first China podcasts, right? To have persisted in this format that was novel is admirable as well. That’s something we should applaud you for. If leaflets aren’t very good, well, maybe podcasts are the answer. Thank you for taking us there.
Jordan Schneider: Speaking of podcasts, you recently did a show with Stephen Kotkin — two hours, excellent, everyone should take a listen. He spoke in a misty-eyed way at some point about the dream of authors — you write a book, it’s read one year from now, read 10 years from now, maybe even, God willing, read 50 years from now.
I found it ironic that you both brought up The Power Broker with him and had this whole nice riff in your book about The Power Broker having soured the minds of a generation of Democratic politicians. Square the circle for me, Dan.
Dan Wang: Such is the power of books. No one would describe The Power Broker as a mere leaflet, which is what I’ve written with Breakneck. But The Power Broker has certainly had tremendous influence. It’s one of several books that we can pinpoint as having created the lawyerly society. Robert Caro’s monumental work is subtitled Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
Aside from The Power Broker, we can probably name Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which is about pesticide use in the United States. There’s also Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Maybe we can toss in The Population Bomb by the Ehrlichs as well. These four works were very important in confronting the mistakes of the American engineering society throughout the 1950s — which sprayed too many pesticides, which rammed highways across too many urban neighborhoods, which had exhausted itself with these gigantic land wars in Asia. They presented a very useful corrective.
If we doubt the power of books, let’s look at The Power Broker, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Now, I certainly don’t have aspirations that Breakneck would be read 50 years from now. I don’t have many aspirations that it will be read one year from now. But having just a little bit more to work with to think about — it’s always going to be important to have a sense of mutual curiosity between the US and China. Even if we can get people interested for just one year, that’s very well worth doing.
Pluralism in China and America
Jordan Schneider: You brought us to America. I want to come back to this idea of pluralism that you brought up. I was having a conversation at some very fancy China meetup — is there any other kind? — which was mostly white people. One of these white people had lived in Shanghai for a very long time, had become very wealthy, was an investor, and a ChinaTalk listener. He asked me, “Jordan, why don’t you live in China?” My response was, “Well, I couldn’t do my show in China.” He said, “But you’d have such a great standard of living. You’d be a great McKinsey consultant.” (He’s wrong — I’d be a terrible McKinsey consultant.) “You could have three nurses and two house cleaners, and if you just didn’t make any trouble, then you could have a really great life there.”
Reflecting on why I left China — the proximate reason was COVID; I was outside when the country closed and couldn’t get back — but the reason why six years, which is how long you made it, probably would have been my shelf life too, is this idea of living in a pluralist society. Having the freedom to say what I want and talk to people openly who have very divergent opinions is just core to what living a good life means to me. What’s my question? Is this enough to win a cold war? Should we go there? Where do you want to go with pluralist society?
Dan Wang: Your attitude towards this former Shanghai resident — I probably have the same attitude. This is insufficient for a flourishing society. But let me acknowledge that certainly for many people, a life in Shanghai or perhaps another first-tier city in China — maybe we can throw in Hong Kong here — is desirable because it is very convenient. This is one of the words that many Chinese bring up — that life is just very fāngbiàn, very convenient, to be in one of these big Asian cities.
There’s no doubt that life is very fāngbiàn in Shanghai or Hong Kong. The subways work very well, there’s excellent public order, there are great ways to try out new bars and new restaurants. One could have a nanny from probably Indonesia or the Philippines if you’re living in a city like Singapore, maybe from inland China, from Anhui, if you’re living in Shanghai. There are many ways in which life in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, or other first-tier Chinese cities is just much more pleasant than in New York, where we’re chatting. Here, the subways are extraordinarily loud, the streets aren’t necessarily very orderly and clean.
We can accept all of these things. But what we also have in New York — and this is part of the reason that I’m drawn back to the US again — are bookstores. At these bookstores, one can find books very critical of the US government, very critical of both the Republicans as well as the Democrats, who have both made incredible errors. For the most part, though there have been some restrictions on protests under Trump’s regime in America right now, there still is broad latitude for people to protest all of his illegal or inhumane actions, and that is still very real. Protest culture online is also very real.
What I’m saying is that I hope we don’t have to choose. The United States should be able to have, at its present levels of tolerance of dissent, as well as very functional cities that have good subways, good bus systems, nice airports, and where people are able to get around and have a rate of improvement that doesn’t come at truly absurd financial costs. New York in particular has a really hard time building anything. I don’t see why we should have to choose between having bookstores and Port Authority bus terminals that are well renovated in less than five years — which is not within the current project as proposed by Governor Hochul right now. We don’t have to choose.
Certainly, I acknowledge that for many Chinese who move back, they really like having the convenience of their food delivered to them. They get to save quite a lot of money because their rent isn’t necessarily very high. Maybe they really don’t care to think much about politics or philosophy or ideals. But there are also plenty of Chinese who do crave these things. These are creative types — journalists, feminists, people who are interested in ideas. They’re really keen to make something of their lives in cities like New York. That’s something we should welcome here in the United States and allow them to pursue the sort of activity that is borderline impossible in China.
Jordan Schneider: You mentioned convenience. You had a whole chapter about when China was the least convenient place in the world. I love this line:
I often think about the China Daily headline “Shanghai Has No Plans for City Lockdown.” It could be read in two ways. I first understood it as a denial that the city would impose a lockdown. I understand it now as a totally accurate explanation of what happened next: The city had made no plans for confining twenty-five million people to their homes for eight weeks.
Dan Wang: Yes.
Jordan Schneider: Breakneck written in 2019 is a much different book than Breakneck written in 2023, 2024, particularly because since 1989, we really had close to three decades of the state not really imposing on people’s lives — as long as you were Han — in a way that really wrecked what you expected a functioning middle-class, convenient urban life to be.
Dan Wang: That’s one of the scary things about the engineering state: the capability is always there to make a lot of people’s lives go off track in really big ways. Throughout the 1950s, under this earlier, more idealistic era of the pursuit of communism, maybe most of the 1950s was pretty good if you weren’t a landlord, if you weren’t a kulak. But then that terminated with Mao’s great famine, in which these quack agronomy techniques, as well as lies to the central government, terminated in a famine that killed perhaps 30 or 40 million people.
After we felt that Mao was chastened, he again unleashed the forces of total mayhem to plunge the country into the Cultural Revolution. That is perhaps not so much a typical move by engineers. Mao was much more of a poet — he was romantic, he was a warlord. That was his answer to “bombard the headquarters.” The next great trauma that the Communist Party visited was the one-child policy, which was mostly against the rural areas.
You’re right — it was good for about three decades, if you didn’t mind the steadily worsening repression from Xi Jinping, which closed off a lot of avenues for creative expression as well as dissent, both online and offline. Maybe it would have been good if you weren’t a Uyghur in Xinjiang, if you weren’t a Tibetan in Tibet.
Then everybody around the country was plunged into this pandemic control, the apotheosis of which was Shanghai — probably the greatest lockdown ever imposed in the history of humanity, when 25 million people were unable to leave their apartment compounds over the course of eight to 12 weeks in the spring of 2022. The government organized, in the early stages, no adequate food delivery to many families who went hungry so that parents could save food for their children. That was about two weeks of the Shanghai lockdown, in which the food situation was quite severe.
In the midst of all of this, you have four decades of astonishing growth from China, in which the country was growing at a rate of 8 or 9%. That created tremendous wealth, alleviated poverty, and made a lot of Chinese right now feel really good about what the country was able to accomplish. This is where I really want to grapple with both the good aspects as well as the bad aspects of China. Yes, it’s absolutely the case that the wealth creation here was astonishing. That has been much more impressive than what any other developing country was able to achieve — India, Indonesia, Brazil have not had the economic takeoff that China enjoyed that brought so many people out of misery and poverty.
At the same time, we have more novel forms of political repression that humanity has never seen before. Both of these trends are real, and they both have to be acknowledged.
Jordan Schneider: If there’s one thing that’s missing in the book, it’s the Xinjiang chapter. Given that each chapter has some personal connection or observation from you, I get it — maybe you just didn’t spend a lot of time in Xinjiang. The Yunnan arc which you portray is this happy, fun, free place where these minorities are in the mountains so they can get away with not actually doing a lockdown.
The Xinjiang arc has an engineering story there. There’s an engineering of the soul story, which is probably even more dramatic than the digital authoritarianism arc. It’s this idea that you can do to the Uyghurs what you did to all the other minorities — basically wave your hand enough and then they stop being minorities anymore. Do you want to do your analysis of that? Did it get left on the chopping block? How do you think about covering that story?
Dan Wang: You’re absolutely right that I try to cover the stories that I have some personal experience of, something like Zero COVID. You’re right that I’ve never been to Xinjiang. I wish I had the opportunity to go, but it was challenging because foreign nationals — I’m a Canadian citizen — are tracked more intensively. I never quite had the courage to spend time in Xinjiang and see things for myself. I was actively discouraged by some folks in Beijing from even attempting the trip.
I try to write about things that I could talk more knowledgeably about. There was no other reason that I left off Xinjiang. I wrote a little bit about the treatment of Tibetans, mostly going off journal articles that I synthesized into the book. But there were plenty of things left on the chopping block. I could have written more about the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest power plant and displaced about a million people in China’s southwest. I could have written more about all aspects of social and digital control that people in China have to go through.
But I also wanted to write a relatively short book. My book is under 300 pages, and I wanted to hear that people criticized that I wrote a book that was too short by 100 pages, rather than a book that was too long by 100 or 200 pages. That’s where I chose to land and that was the side I chose to err on. But certainly if I had the ability to do some reporting and if I did take a look at this analysis, I would have written much more about the ethno-religious oppression that took place mostly under Xi.
Jordan Schneider: You did cram in a lot of good writing. Some quotes:
The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who douse blazes they themselves ignited.
The engineering state can be awfully literal-minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity — from mass production to reproduction — can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves.
What’s the point of good writing? You could have done this faster, presumably, without having nice sentences and extended metaphors.
Dan Wang: I write for one reason, which is pleasure. In my daily life, all of us must attend to our daily pleasures, and that’s going to be very important. I don’t read that much poetry, although I expect that I want to. But I spend a lot of time thinking about the voluptuous beauty of Italian comic opera. I take a lot of inspiration from the cadences and beats of composers like Mozart and Rossini and Bellini and Donizetti and Verdi. There has to be something important about if you’re going to write any sentence at all, why not make it beautiful and readable and full of cadence and full of splendor?
Jordan Schneider: We’re going to do a few more.
“As more Americans retreat into a digital phantasm, Xi will be shepherding Chinese through the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.”
“When Song assured China’s leadership that the population trajectories could be as firmly controlled as missile trajectories, they listened.”
“Skeptics of a one-child policy were making population projections with the aid of an abacus or a handheld calculator. Song Jian presented his group’s projections in precise machine-generated lines on graph paper; other groups drew uneven squiggles by hand. It wasn’t even a fair fight.”
Dan Wang: What does beauty mean to you, Jordan? How do you practice it? How do you try to enact it in your interviews, in your podcasting and your writing?
Jordan Schneider: I don’t know. I feel really sloppy and I guess I’m okay with that. It’s not something I spend a lot of time cultivating. We’re gonna have 200-plus newsletters this year. That means I’m not laboring over every sentence. Every once in a while I do, and then I think, “Oh wait, but if I do this, the output changes and it won’t be as much."
The subtext, the psychological undercurrent of why I do so many shows and write so fast is to quiet my brain. I’m scared of silence and the contemplation that’s necessary to do something this considered. Or maybe there’s just too much ADD to do writing like this. But yeah, I should give it a shot every Thursday — slow down and try to actually write something really worth reading.
Dan Wang: Sometimes it’s really important, Jordan, to have a pause.
Mao 70% Right, Xi 60% Right…
Jordan Schneider: Xi Jinping, 60% right? Derek Thompson says that Trump is a great assignment editor. Is it too early to give him a percentage? Because I do feel like a fair amount of the stuff he’s gesturing towards is adjacent to the critique of this lawyerly society. He’s Nietzschean and beyond law in a certain profound sense, right?
Dan Wang: I call Xi Jinping 60% correct on everything for two reasons. Many of Xi’s motivations for trying to restrain the debt of property developers or to examine some of the anti-competitive behaviors of internet companies in China — these are completely valid and well-reasoned motivations. It’s just that often the solution, Beijing’s solution, is often worse than whatever scary problem China has. I also assign Xi to be 60% correct on everything, partly because Deng Xiaoping assigned Mao Zedong to be 70% correct on everything (三七开定论). Xi would be the last person to put up his hand to say that he’s better than Chairman Mao in anything. So 60% correct for Xi.
Jordan Schneider: Pretty good, but 70% is high for Mao.
Dan Wang: Well, that’s the official verdict of history.
Jordan Schneider: Okay, but what’s your number for Mao?
Dan Wang: Mao was probably 30% correct. That might be the right projection for Trump. It’s too early to say. We need to have Trump move on from this world before his successors can really assess his legacy and maybe give him something like 70% correct in most of the things he did. Perhaps we’ll have that. Who’s going to be the Deng Xiaoping of America, Jordan?
Jordan Schneider: …Amy Klobuchar?
Dan Wang: Maybe… probably not.
Jordan Schneider: I don’t know. Jake Paul? There’s no one man.
I departed the country with a better appreciation of the self-limiting features of the Chinese system. Most notably, the Communist Party distrusts and fears the Chinese people, limiting their potential for flourishing.
If you want to make the inverse of the argument that I made at the very beginning — if we’re presuming a party is still going to be there and we’re presuming that that party has still internalized the lessons of Gorbachev, who probably didn’t fear the Soviet people nearly as much as maybe he should have if he wanted to keep the party — the guarding, literally and figuratively, is a constant you can draw through not just the post-Mao folks, but really everyone. Even the Hu Yaobangs and the Zhao Ziyangs, the most liberal folks we’ve seen, still distrust and fear the people at some elemental level. To imagine a Chinese leader coming up through the party system who doesn’t have that in their core is hard for me to project forward.
Dan Wang: That’s absolutely right. Maybe the Chinese are looking at the United States and saying, “Well, in 2016, maybe the American elites should have feared their people a little bit more, and they didn’t have quite enough fear there.” That’s certainly a possibility. Yes, it’s going to be the case that the Chinese are never going to fully trust their people, or maybe even not trust them very much at all. This is one of the reasons that China will not have a flourishing liberal society by any stretch of the imagination.
If the Communist Party goes away, we would still have a party. If the Nationalists had won before they were ejected to Taiwan in 1949, we would still have a country nursing its grievances over imperialist incursions in the past, still very intent on achieving some degree of technological primacy over the rest of the world. They probably wouldn’t be trusting their people very extensively either.
I hope that China could develop a regime that does trust its people much more than they do now, because the Chinese people are such a lovable folk. Don’t you agree, Jordan? They can be extremely creative. Their memes are no less than what American 20-year-olds and 14-year-olds are able to produce online. There’s so much wordplay with the Chinese language. There’s a lot of joking throughout China. The Chinese are very funny. People in Yunnan are very funny, which is my heritage. People in Beijing are very funny. The people in Shanghai… maybe not so funny, but most people everywhere else can be very funny.
I wish that the regime could recognize that it has a lot of people who have wonderful, creative spirits who are going to have great memes all day long. They’re going to create wonderful pieces of artwork and literature and all sorts of great shows, great movies. If they had that opportunity, they would have all sorts of wonderful jokes that they could play on us. I’m really optimistic that the spirit of the Chinese teenager is indomitable, just as the spirit of the American teenager is completely indomitable. It’s only that one of them is very actively suppressed by the state and the other is not.
Jordan Schneider: The one line I disagree with was when you say, “I missed the ambient friendliness of Americans,” as if you didn’t get that in China. I moved through the country in a different way than you did with my face, but it was still very friendly. That’s one of the things that will never leave me. You mentioned it at a different point in the book, talking about why this is the destination of choice for so many Chinese. It’s not just because it’s rich and a land of opportunity, but the cultural overlaps in terms of entrepreneurship and ease of engagement with other folks are really profound.
Dan Wang: Well, I would say that you do have a good face, and I wouldn’t sell it short. I have a different face. Not all of us can be so blessed. Certainly there is ambient friendliness in China. But there can also be an ambient “get in your face about your business” sense. There’s sometimes an ambient aggressiveness and pushiness in China, as there is in the US as well.
This is more stark to me because I spent some time in Europe. I just traveled to Europe for two months and we were mostly in Denmark. One of the things we hear about Danish folks is that they have a really hard time making friends after high school. You would have your friends from elementary school, some friends from university, maybe some friends you made when traveling to the United States. But after that, people have enough friends. They’re good. People travel around in roving packs to the bar and then they don’t really socialize with the other roving packs at the Danish bar.
It’s much easier to have a conversation with someone on the bus in New York, on the street in New York, walking around, and they don’t get up so much in your business. You’re right that there’s absolutely a lot of ambient friendliness in China. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about the place. But the flip side of that coin is that they can really get up in your business. How often are you asked as soon as you meet a new Chinese person — Are you married? How many children do you have? What’s your salary? Sometimes I don’t really feel like answering those questions. It’s a bit odd.
Jordan Schneider: The ambient anxiety as well is something very different in the US. Even when you have these think pieces about how people can’t afford rent and life is terrible, it’s not a nationally defining thing in the US the way modern anxieties are in China.
Dan Wang: This is certainly one of the many reasons I am glad that I did not grow up in China, especially not as a woman, because the pressure that women face in China is completely insane. It’s not only workplace stuff. In the workplace, you and I both know that Chinese women are many of the most capable people. They do most of the work; often they are the most efficient people in every organization and they are consistently passed over for leadership because they are not a guy. China really doesn’t treat women very well in the workplace.
Then imagine the pressure you face once you are seeing your neighbors or even worse, family over the most important Chinese holiday. Over Lunar New Year, every woman is asked one question. To the single: Are you married yet? To the married: When will you have children? It feels like, unless a woman has produced at least one child and at least one son, then she will not have broader respect within the family. Chinese women are consistently the most undervalued people, and they are the ones who should be elevated the most.
Generally, China is just a high-pressure society where one does need a little bit of pushiness to get ahead. That can sometimes be pretty wearing once you’ve spent enough time in China, because the pushiness is not really wonderful. The overworked aspects of a lot of people — 996 is real for a segment of the population who work from nine to nine, six days a week. Then they go home and face a lot of family pressures. Many people don’t have an easy time being able to afford their apartments in Shanghai or Beijing. It’s a high-pressure environment. That’s one of these things where you come to the US, you’re left alone. You go to Florida or Texas, and people aggressively leave you alone. That’s something I crave after being over there for a while.
Jordan Schneider: The pushiness of both the one-child policy stuff and now the party telling you that you need to have more kids is just — you have a number of these Orwellian flips which you document in modern society. That’s one of them. The other, of course, is COVID being this thing that would kill you and is worth not getting your cancer treatment in order to prevent, to “Oh, it’s a flu — and by the way, you don’t even need ibuprofen to get through, much less a vaccine, much less a Moderna vaccine."
You see echoes of it in the US sometimes, where Trump says, “Oh, don’t care about Epstein anymore.” But it doesn’t work really to completely turn on a gravity distortion field and just say when you were saying A is A one day, to say B is A the next day. That’s another benefit of a pluralist society — to have people, to have noise that pushes back on that.
Dan Wang: Well, this is what engineers do. They tell you for a while, “You must not have more than one child,” to “You really should have three children.” To hear that COVID is this life-threatening thing and it is our national duty to prevent any transmissions, to “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.” This is how engineers treat society — they swerve really suddenly every so often. At some point, that is going to give people very severe whiplash.
Jordan Schneider: “Beijing has been taking the future dead seriously for the past four decades. That is why they will not out-compete the United States.” What a line!
Dan Wang: The country that will outperform in the world has a sense of humor, and Beijing has the least sense of humor of all of them — at least official Beijing. Unofficial Beijing is very humorous. One of my favorite recent pieces is a gag where Alex Boyd, who is part of Asia Society, found and translated this page of official jokes from Xi Jinping.
You can read some of these jokes from Xi Jinping himself and decide how many of them are actually funny. Humor with Chinese characteristics isn’t really going to knock us off our feet. I prefer the superpower that isn’t taking the future with such seriousness. By taking the future with such gravity — this is one of the great insights from Stephen Kotkin — there is this apocalyptic sense in communist systems. You liberalize a little bit, you slip out a little bit, and somehow the entire system will collapse. Every day becomes an apocalyptic, life-or-death struggle for the Communist Party. That sort of system will end up being fairly brittle.
Jordan Schneider: Another quote:
Engineers don’t know how to persuade. The Communist Party insists on a history in which the party is always correct and where all errors come from traitors or foreigners, rather than acknowledging fault and telling persuasive stories. The instinct of the engineering state is simply to censor alternative narratives. Xi comes off as someone who is a little too eager for groveling respect from the rest of the world, which is exactly why he’ll never get it.
Dan Wang: Yes.
Jordan Schneider: The other Kotkin-esque moment you highlighted is this idea that Li Qiang, who was the mayor of Shanghai initially, was one of the people trying to keep his city more open. But once it came down to it and he got the order, he implemented the biggest lockdown in human history. He became the most reviled local politician in the entire country, and then he got the biggest promotion anyone can get — to be premier. It’s such a reminder that while China is a country where people are promoted on performance at some level, once you reach the top rungs of power, it’s about loyalty. This man delivered on what he was told to do, even when it came at what would be considerable political cost in a democratic society. This is still a crazy system we’re dealing with — that’s not political logic.
You make the point that basically every party in the world that was in charge during COVID lost votes after COVID ended because people were upset about that time in their lives. But to have the emblem of bad Omicron-era COVID policy now be someone people are going to see on their TV for the next five years — this is remarkable.
Dan Wang: Well, maybe he’s going to be squeezed out of TV because he seems to be a remarkably weak premier by the standards of Chinese premiers. You’re absolutely right that in every pandemic country, the ruling party lost vote shares. It’s only in China that the most hated emblem of zero-COVID restrictions gets promoted to the top — the highest any politician could go under Xi.
Jordan Schneider: The idea that Kamala would have Fauci as her running mate is basically what we’re talking about.
Dan Wang: Yes, that would be quite something, wouldn’t it? This surely degrades and erodes some of the competence of other people inside the Politburo and Central Committee, because there were plenty of people who perhaps administered their cities more effectively with pandemic control policies.
One could debate how effective Li Qiang was. One could say he did his best trying to resist a very fierce lockdown, and then when that shifted, he was in charge with another vice premier of implementing that lockdown. Maybe he simply followed orders and did the best job he could. But certainly, I wouldn’t have expected after the Shanghai lockdown that Li Qiang, who was one of Xi’s protégés, would be promoted to anything as high as premier within the Chinese system. For him to become premier must surely have bred considerable resentment within his peers who looked at what an awful job he perhaps did. You can maybe debate that, but Li Qiang certainly created a lot of misery. For them to see this guy vault over them in terms of party hierarchy cannot feel good for other cadres.
Cold War 2.0?
Jordan Schneider: You’ve got Rickover, Moses, and Eisenhower as Americans you’re shouting out — all perhaps peaked in the 1950s or early 1960s, all products of Cold War America. Moses was doing his thing even in the ’30s, but there’s a narrative that was maybe a little more prominent in American politics a year or two ago: that Cold War framing is the thing that will get the US out of its engineering rut. We will do big things because now we have another adversary, and we’ll break eggs and build amazing stuff again because we have a new replacement for the Soviet Union. You’re still hopeful, though, that we can get there, even if this isn’t the defining framework for America for the next few decades.
Dan Wang: I certainly don’t hope we repeat all the mistakes of the last Cold War, which wasn’t very cold for Vietnam, which wasn’t very cold for Laos, and which wasn’t very cold for Afghanistan. The US and Soviet Union made tremendous mistakes and inflicted horrors on foreign populations, as well as somewhat on their own populations, in the course of pursuing the Cold War. I’m reluctant to say the US should desire or embrace anything resembling a Cold War, given how the last one went.
I’m hopeful the US will be able to recover some of its engineering chops, because it’s become tremendously obvious that the US needs to do this without any framing of China as the great adversary. We’re in New York right now. Affordable housing is a very big issue. New York can’t build subways at less than $2 billion per mile, which is far above European levels of construction. The US can’t fix Port Authority Bus Terminal in under five years. This is to say nothing of Massachusetts or California, which have really bad construction issues. None of that needs to implicate China. That’s purely an American lawyerly society problem.
We have movements like the Abundance Agenda trying to make sure US big cities are able to build quite a lot more. There’s broad complaint within both the American left and right that the US manufacturing base has rusted top to bottom, where apex manufacturers like Intel and Boeing have just an unbroken tail of woe if we look at any of their headlines. The US manufacturing base wasn’t able to produce anything as simple as masks and cotton swabs in the early days of the pandemic. That was pathetic.
We also have a defense industrial base that has significantly rusted, with the US unable to produce a lot of munitions or naval ships on time. Maybe the defense industrial base has to implicate China, but really that implicates already existing problems as well as the war in Ukraine, which took a lot of munitions from the United States.
The US needs to fix its own problems, not to be able to confront China, but because it has been doing pretty badly itself. The same goes for China — the contest will not go to the country that builds a bigger rocket or more homes. The contest will be won by the country that’s able to deliver better for its own citizens. That’s ultimately where both countries really need to get to.
Jordan Schneider: I agree with that. The question is: if we need a fundamental rethink and Cold War framing from 2020 to 2024 didn’t get us there, is Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein and Dan Wang evangelizing enough to have our Sputnik moment 2.0? Not only does it address the international stuff, but it also gets you the interstate highway system equivalent for what we need today. That’s our only data point. Maybe we can go back further in history.
Dan Wang: I’m also unsure that Cold War framing will work because right now, as we’re speaking at the end of August 2025, President Trump seems to be the most pro-China member of the White House, and he doesn’t seem terribly interested in a Cold War. A reporter asked him whether he should welcome more Chinese students to the United States. He responded, “It’s our honor to have them.” He’s right. The US should be attracting more students from China as well as from all nations. That won’t work if the commander in chief is uninterested in having a cold war.
We’ve tried to impose this Cold War framing for a while, and it hasn’t worked, at least so far. Maybe we will get there in some other way, but there isn’t a single knockdown argument that will have the US recover some of its engineering chops. There need to be many types of arguments, and the worse the situation becomes, the more the US needs to do.
Jordan Schneider: Mike Gallagher had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal basically saying we should dramatically tighten immigration policy from China. You have a USCIS head saying that F-1 visa holders should understand that they’re not welcome here after graduation, and OPT may be going the way of the dodo bird. We’ll see how it plays out. It’s clear that Trump is not entirely on board with this. But I wonder if Xi is going to do something more dramatic than a balloon — which doesn’t necessarily have to be an invasion of Taiwan — that clicks, that gives the Cold War framing a second breath of fresh air.
Dan Wang: Maybe. But I suspect Xi has studied his history and is really reluctant to give Americans an excuse to engage in another Cold War. Even the balloon seemed like it might have been an accident where the leadership didn’t know about it. We can deal with balloons, Jordan. We can deal with balloons all day.
Jordan Schneider: Yeah, but can we deal with 50 Filipinos dying or something? We’ll see. As Kotkin says, history’s full of surprises. One thing we know about history is it’s full of surprises.
On the Cold War stuff, when I had you and Ezra and Derek on, you asked me if the US should have a goal of constraining Chinese growth. Do you have an answer to that question? How would you frame our policy optimization function when thinking about that?
Dan Wang: The US should not be seen as being in a position to constrain China’s growth. It would be disastrous for the US if the Chinese earnestly believed that the US government was trying to hold down China’s innovation prospects or economic growth prospects, because that would seem very dramatically unfair. Now, there are some people in Beijing who already believe some version of this, but that’s not necessarily consensus.
It’s important for the US government to communicate that it wants a good future for Chinese people everywhere. There’s nothing Trump would lose by saying that he wishes the people of China can be rich, well off, and happy.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s close with some book recommendations. I don’t know why — read the Bible, Stendhal, someone you recommended to me the other day.
Dan Wang: The Book of Exodus, Jordan. That’s where it’s at. Maybe bested by the Book of Genesis. But the five books of the Torah — that’s something really important here.
Jordan Schneider: But you’re just shrugging off Prophets and Writings?
Dan Wang: Well, Ecclesiastes is very beautiful. As Robert Alter translates, the chapter is called Kohelet. There’s certainly a great deal of beauty in the Song of Songs and in the dreariness, frankly, of Ecclesiastes or Kohelet. Something important for us all to keep in mind is that the heart of the wise dwells in the house of mourning, while the heart of fools dwells in the house of mirth.
Jordan Schneider: Dan, what’s our outro song?
Dan Wang: There is no music more sublime than the ending of The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart, in which the Count asks and begs for forgiveness from the Countess for all of his incredible indiscretions.
