China Builds, The US Regulates - EP 35 Dan Wang

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
I don't know, man, you've done these things. It's like having a chat. But yeah, you feel good? I feel good. You feel good, okay.
Dan Wang, thank you for coming on the show.

**Dan Wang** (0:28)
Thanks for having me, Ashlee.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:30)
I'm really excited about this. Okay, let's start at the very beginning, which is you've just written this amazing book. We'll make sure I get it there on the screen just as a fellow author. While I know most people are listening, we'll call it out. So Breakneck is The New York Times bestseller, which is hard to do. So congratulations on that.

**Dan Wang** (0:53)
It's good. I mean, Ashlee, you've done it, and this is a nice experience.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:58)
It's a good feeling, right? Yeah. So obviously, we're going to talk about the book, so we'll get into everything, but it's about China, and China is this engineering culture and its relationship to the United States. It's about both countries in a lot of ways, and where they're heading or could be heading, and we arranged this podcast pretty quick, so I had to race through the book.
I did get through the whole thing, but quicker than I had hoped, because I really wanted to marinate with this. It's a topic that's near and dear to my heart. It's a fantastic book.

**Dan Wang** (1:38)
Thank you.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:38)
I'm not saying this just because you're sitting here. It's very easy to read, it's smart, it's very clear, it moves quickly, so that's nice.
It's like for anyone who just wants to have a sense of what China has accomplished over the last four decades. This is a path to get there very directly. And it's just wonderfully written. I mean, I was really taken away. And then, just so people know, I mean, I don't think it's not like pro-China, anti-China, it's not pro-US, anti-US. It's you kind of give both sides.
And you offer kind of like, you do a thing that most people don't, which is do some criticism, but not really come back with any ideas for what each country could do differently or maybe better. And you do do that throughout the book. So I found that really fantastic. Anyway, congratulations, it's a wonderful book. I shamefully, people have been following your work for many years, many prominent people. You're a scholar and I think you were born in China and then grew up in Canada, US and Canada. And then while writing this book, lived in China for six or seven years. Okay, and then now you're back in the US. And is it fair to, you're an intellectual, you're an academic, is that fair?

**Dan Wang** (3:11)
I'm an academic, I admit it, I'm sorry.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:15)
And is the Hoover, is that the best place to, where should we anchor you?

**Dan Wang** (3:20)
I'm a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:23)
Okay, and then, and so in four years, you've been writing this like annual letter about China that's very well read and just incredibly thoughtful on the country, what's happened. All right, so that's my intro. We do okay so far?

**Dan Wang** (3:36)
Sounds great.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:36)
Okay. I've got a million questions. I mean, what you are writing about, okay, you kind of frame it as China as this engineering economy versus the US, which you argue, especially since the 1960s has turned into this lawyerly economy and that the US has managed to, yeah, kind of like in some ways, sue itself into inaction has not tended to its infrastructure at all while China has been building at this incredible clip. You note that China's top politicians tend to be engineers, whereas in the US, they tend to be lawyers.
And yeah, I mean, it's quite, you know, it's just these are things that I've known and followed. You just laid out so starkly in this book. And so obviously you'd been thinking about this for a long time. I mean, did you, when you went back to China, did you go there with like doing a book in mind or all these ideas came from your experience and just watching this firsthand?

**Dan Wang** (4:44)
These ideas came as I lived through what I felt were pretty big issues in China. I moved to China at the start of 2017 after working here in Silicon Valley. And at the start of 2017, when I moved to Hong Kong and then subsequently to Beijing and Shanghai, I didn't realize all of these big changes that I would be expecting. At the start of 2017, I remember watching some of the Senate confirmation hearings of Donald Trump's first cabinet meetings. And the whole world was totally unsure about what was going to come for the first Trump administration.