What Dan Wang Saw on His Last Trip to China

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:22)
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:24)
Joe, I heard, I might have heard, you know, just a little bit, that you went to China for the first time.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:29)
I haven't been that obnoxious about it. I haven't, like, no, but, okay, can I just say one thing? I didn't, like, do a, I've posted about it, I've talked about it.
I have, I did not come home and do, like, a 20-tweet thread about, like, China's, like, future in the world, but I consider myself to be a heroic, heroic act of restraint.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:51)
So you're not a China expert after your one day in Shenzhen.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:54)
I fully admit that I'm not a China hand after one day. And I will also say I can't do that anyway because I got over the border on a tourist visa. So I'm not even, you know.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:03)
You know the China, the China expert pipeline, right?

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:06)
How does it work?

**Tracy Alloway** (1:07)
So you gotta, first of all, you have to go to China and be an English teacher for a few months.
And then you have to move there and become a China consultant. And then you have to start a YouTube channel and start calling yourself Joe Weisenthal.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:25)
Someone said Joe Shandow would be a good China, sinification of my name, which I thought was decent. You know that actually almost happened to me? There's a different version of my life. So when I was in college at University of Texas, I saw a poster on the campus. Now this was Taiwan, but I would have learned the language. I said, come be an English speaker in Taiwan. So I was like, I didn't have any plan for my life or anything like that. And I called the number.
And I didn't have a cell phone at the time, because we just shared a house phone.
And I called the number and I left it. And then the person on the other side called back, but one of my roommates answered the call and ended up getting the job and going to Taiwan. And I always think about that version of my life where I wouldn't be doing Odd Lots because I was home and answered that call. And would I be one of those people that like helped American businesses source parts in Southern China?

**Tracy Alloway** (2:18)
What a segue, Joe.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:19)
Yeah. Well, you reminded me that there is this one of the various versions of my life, that that was actually one of them.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:26)
All right. Well, I'm sure you have your own impressions of China for the first time.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:31)
Based on 24 hours.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:32)
Based on 24 hours. I know you do because you did tweet about it a lot.
But there's someone else we talked to when we want to get general China impressions. Take the temperature on the vibes in China, I guess. And that is the one and only Dan Wang. He's been on the show a number of times before. He is, of course, the author of Breakneck, China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Also a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. So Dan, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots.

**Dan Wang** (3:00)
Tracy, it's great to be back home.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:02)
Thank you.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:03)
So vibes in China. Well, first of all, was this your first time going back in a couple of years?

**Dan Wang** (3:09)
It's sort of been my first time going back.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:12)
Give us the timeline of when you left and now.

**Dan Wang** (3:14)
I left at the start of 2023, right after the total collapse of zero COVID. And then I was back in Yunnan, just finishing my book writing in the mountains in the south of the province.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:27)
Sounds so nice.

**Dan Wang** (3:28)
And then this time, I spent about a month in China between Shanghai for two weeks and then Yunnan for two more weeks.
And I think the big news when I was in China was were two big things happening in New York. One was that the Knicks won some sort of sports ball. And then Joe Weisenthal...

**Tracy Alloway** (3:46)
That's another thing I heard a little bit about, just a little.

**Dan Wang** (3:48)
Yeah, and then Joe Weisenthal went to Shenzhen. That was big news on Twitter that day.