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.
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startupsventure capitalcensorshipSilicon Valley
Their wordsStartups don't need dissent; they want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don't like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley's soft Leninism.
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Our reading
China trails the United States in AI capability, but only by a small margin rather than years.
Their wordsOn AI, China is behind the US, but not by years. There's no question that American reasoning models are more sophisticated than the likes of DeepSeek and Qwen. But the Chinese efforts are doggedly in pursuit, sometimes a bit closer to US models, sometimes a bit further.
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Their wordsI believe that Chinese technological success is now the rule rather than the exception.
- 5 months earlier
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Their wordsChina is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America's lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad.
↗Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Futuredanwang.co 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy.
↗Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Futuredanwang.co 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
A country cannot remain a great power if its system serves mainly the wealthy and well-connected.
Their wordsAmerica cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected.
↗Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Futuredanwang.co 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 18 months earlier
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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.
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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.
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Chinabatterieselectric vehicles
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Their wordsIt is that China will not fade away, meaning that America must reform itself for a protracted contest with a peer competitor.
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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.
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Their wordsAnd Xi Jinping has formally de-prioritized economic growth as China’s top task.
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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.
- 6 months earlier
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Their wordsI suspect the Chinese leadership views large language models as something akin to social media platforms: technologies with little economic upside and significant political risk.
↗China notes, July ’23: on technological momentumdanwang.co 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
China will substantially close its strategic technology gaps, including in chips and aviation.
Their wordsSo I continue to hold the view that China will mostly patch up its strategic deficiencies, including in chips and aviation.
↗China notes, July ’23: on technological momentumdanwang.co 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Semiconductor manufacturing is a more technologically challenging endeavor than rocket science.
Their wordsNonetheless, I think that chips are much more challenging than rockets.
↗China notes, July ’23: on technological momentumdanwang.co 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
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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.
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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.
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Their wordsSecond, China’s problem is usually not too little state capacity, but too much.
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Their wordsBeijing decided to partner with Russia, an imperial aggressor, when it is the US and Europe that have markets and technology.
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Their wordsWhereas the US has a track record of doing great science, China’s technology competitiveness is grounded in manufacturing capabilities.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Their wordsBeijing diagnosed the problems with financialization earlier than the US, where the problem is now endemic.
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Their wordsThe leadership is targeting a high level of manufacturing output, rejecting the notion of comparative advantage.
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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.