Dan Wang
Writer and analyst of Chinese technology and industry, for years based in Beijing and Shanghai, best known for his annual letters and for the argument that manufacturing capability lives in accumulated process knowledge rather than in tools or intellectual property.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Dan Wang did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
-
Their wordsThe trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.
-
Their wordsWhile 50 percent of China’s economy might be dysfunctional, the 5 percent that’s going spectacularly well is pretty dangerous to American interests.
-
Their wordsThe foundations of China’s success in EVs were built a decade ago, when the state decided to bet on batteries, and then bought up a lot of the mines for these metals.
-
Their wordsThough companies are relocating production to India and Vietnam, China is going to remain the world’s largest manufacturer for many more years to come.
-
Their wordsChina built half of the world’s ships (by gross tonnage) in 2022, while the US had 0.2 percent of capacity: in practice, this meant that while China builds hundreds of new ships a year, the US builds three to five.
-
Our reading
The West's biggest blindspot is repeatedly underestimating China's speed and capabilities.
Their wordsI worry however that one of America’s superpowers is to spin up yarns to reduce the urgency for action.
-
Their wordsIt is that China will not fade away, meaning that America must reform itself for a protracted contest with a peer competitor.
-
Their wordsSo it feels to me that the US is treating its deficiencies — an inability to build stuff or create a functional system for admitting high-skilled migrants — as mysteries to be endured rather than problems to be solved.
-
Their wordsAnd Xi Jinping has formally de-prioritized economic growth as China’s top task.
-
Their wordsAs I’ve written in each of my previous letters, the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products.
- 11 months earlier
-
Their wordsAnd on balance I believe we should think of the Chinese state today as an autocratic regime that is occasionally capable of economic pragmatism rather than a technocratic regime that slips occasionally into Marxist faults.
-
Our reading
The Chinese state's famous capability is largely spent putting out fires it started itself.
Their wordsFirst, it increasingly resembles a crew of firefighters who bring extraordinary skill to dousing fires that they themselves ignited.
-
Their wordsSecond, China’s problem is usually not too little state capacity, but too much.
-
Their wordsBeijing decided to partner with Russia, an imperial aggressor, when it is the US and Europe that have markets and technology.
-
Their wordsWhereas the US has a track record of doing great science, China’s technology competitiveness is grounded in manufacturing capabilities.
-
Their wordsConsider the solar industry, for which the US laid the scientific groundwork, only for Chinese firms to make all the photovoltaic cells.
- 14 months earlier
-
Our reading
China's cultural and intellectual output to the world is far smaller than its economic weight.
Their wordsNever has any economy grown so much while producing so few cultural exports.
-
Their wordsIt has displayed a stronger record of reform than any other developing country, as the leadership keeps pulling off politically-difficult tasks: shrinking the state sector, re-orienting the economy towards export-led growth after WTO accession, and so on.
-
Their wordsBeijing diagnosed the problems with financialization earlier than the US, where the problem is now endemic.
-
Their wordsThe leadership is targeting a high level of manufacturing output, rejecting the notion of comparative advantage.
-
Their wordsThe US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports.
- 2 years earlier
-
Their wordsI find it bizarre that the world has decided that consumer internet is the highest form of technology.
-
Their wordsIn fact, I suspect that Chinese firms should be considered underperformers as a whole.
-
Their wordsWe should think of technology as a living product, which has to be practiced for knowledge even to be maintained at its current level.
-
Their wordsI believe that the hard-to-measure process knowledge is more important than the more easily observable tools and IP.
-
Their wordsToday, Chinese workers produce most of the world’s goods, which means that they engage more than anyone else in the technological learning process.
-
Their wordsFirst, even if most of the workforce learns little, a few thousand line engineers become the world’s greatest experts in electronics assembly.
-
Their wordsThese hubs allow for tight connections between R&D and manufacturing, shortening the circulation of knowledge in a production loop.
-
Their wordsThat bet has failed at least in technologies that include high-speed rail, shipbuilding, and telecommunications equipment.
-
Their wordsAnd it’s difficult for any country to monopolize a key technology over the long term.
-
Their wordsOne lesson is that technology is highly path-dependent.
-
Their wordsThe skills US workers learned in the process of becoming an industrial giant helped set the US up for technological leadership over the rest of the century.