What Dan Wang thinks about America
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.
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.
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14 dated positions, 2020 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Dan Wang has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Our readingChina 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.
- 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 readingA 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 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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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 readingThe 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.
- 11 months earlier
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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 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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Their wordsBeijing diagnosed the problems with financialization earlier than the US, where the problem is now endemic.
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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.
- 2 years earlier
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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.