China's Quest to Engineer the Future | Dan Wang

21:26Dan Wang:that it would really like for the head of the state of, let's say, the Philippines, go to Beijing regularly and kowtow for the emperor's pleasure, and that it would like to be serenely untroubled by the turmoils of barbarians outside so that whatever madness is happening in the US, the Chinese don't even have to care. That is how I understand a lot of what China is trying to achieve.

21:49Demetri Kofinas:So this is really cool. One of the things that you have heard you say is that China obsessively interrogates how it became a weak power, and that the United States doesn't sufficiently interrogate how it became a strong power. Tell me a little bit about what do foreigners fail to grasp about what it means to be Chinese, specifically when it comes to the stories that Chinese tell themselves about their place in the world, how they got to where they are, where they're going, and the urgency with which they need to enact that role. Yeah.

22:27Dan Wang:I think that a lot of the Chinese belief, which is after guidance from Chinese elites for centuries, including the Communist Party, is that China is the civilized state and the rest of the world are to various shades of barbarians, that perhaps neighbors in East Asia are culturally a little bit more proximate to the Chinese in terms of Confucian heritage or whatever, and they are slightly less barbaric than much of the rest of the world. That they understood China to have been the center of the global economy for a few centuries, over the last millennium, that China was able to make all of these great crafts, namely things like porcelain or gunpowder or silk that the rest of the world really wanted, and that the British really knocked down this wonderful system, mostly by cheating and by addicting a lot of Chinese into opiums.

23:29Dan Wang:And I think this is kind of the centrality of the view that I would not say is necessarily the guiding ideology above all else in China. But I think there is a strain of Chinese elites, as well as some Chinese people, who really do believe that there is no particular reason for China not to be the dominant producer and the most sophisticated producer of absolutely all goods, as well as a great font of culture that the rest of the world wants to learn from. And I think the Chinese have been very good students of history. They've studied how it is that America turned out to be great. They studied the extensive failures of, let's say, two big countries in particular.

24:12Dan Wang:The first is the Soviet Union, in which the communist system fell apart after it became really clear that they had a pretty dysfunctional economy. They've studied some of these financial crises of Japan, in which the Japanese economy more or less broke apart after the 80s, was never really able to recover after they had a real estate implosion, and the economy never got back on its feet. And so they're studying these other failures. They study things that they determined to be politically successful institutions. Something I find kind of tickling is that they spend a lot of time thinking about the Catholic Church, which has to motivate millions and hundreds of millions of members through this ideology with this figure that has had endurance for, say, about 2 ,000 years.

24:56Dan Wang:And so they spend a lot of time studying others. And I wish that the Americans had spent almost as much energy trying to study the Chinese.

25:04Demetri Kofinas:So I remember reading something similar in Joseph Terrigian's book about Xi Jinping and how he views the importance of the larger mission of the Chinese Communist Party, that there has to be something more than just material prosperity to bind the country together and to motivate it. One last question here before I ask you to flesh out some details around the engineering state. And that has to do with, again, trying to empathize or understand a society that's very different than ours. In America, we are living during the most selfish individualistic period in the history of my lifetime in this country.

25:40Demetri Kofinas:I don't know if there's ever been a more selfish time. There probably hasn't been. It's a kind of malignant level of narcissism in this country. It's all about me. How do I make the system work for me? Me, me, me. Consumerism is built around the individual. Everything is catered to you. The algorithms cater it to you. So we don't have this sort of larger sense of mission as a country, as something that unites us. And in fact, part of the problem in America today is that we are in the midst of a kind of civil war where we hate each other more than we hate anyone else. And so out of that has yet to emerge a common sense of identity or to refashion a common sense of identity.

26:21Demetri Kofinas:That doesn't seem to be the case in China. And I'm just curious, when you're in China, how much does that feeling that you're part of something great come across in the lived reality of every person day to day?

26:35Dan Wang:I think there is some sense of that. I'm not sure if I want to overstate it. It's a little bit difficult to think about how the average person feels in China in the same way that I think it's pretty difficult to nail down how the average person thinks in America. But I think there is this historical sense that extends from the imperial times that the Chinese have gotten a lot of things figured out. It has its own traditions of, let's say, medicine and science and literature and plays and music and cuisine and everything else, and that it is just naturally much more superior to the cultural practices of many other peoples.

27:13Dan Wang:So I think there is a Chinese heritage there that is very much real that a lot of people would identify as being pretty significant, that the rest of East Asia is essentially only copying China, and that it is just a much more impressive civilization writ large than, let's say, the Germans have built or what the Americans have built. And then I think the sense is also turbocharged by the Communist Party in particular, in which the Communist Party has this heritage of Leninism, in which the people that are ruled by a cadre of dedicated revolutionaries, which they see as to be dragging the population into modernity and then some.

27:57Dan Wang:And so a lot of what the Leninists really try to do is to just organize society to be modernizing on its own terms. And I think there is also this turbocharging given by the Communist Party, in which I think the Communist Party could forgive and forget a lot of the problems of the imperialist past. So I think that they don't have to be so necessarily so upset at the British over the Opium Wars, even though what the British did was pretty odious. But the British didn't end up toppling the Qing Empire. A lot of that was through domestic rebellions. And even though Japan initiated this horribly brutal invasion, fascist invasion of China throughout the 1930s and the 1940s, You know, the European countries have also had devastating wars between themselves, and they managed to reconcile to each other in a way that the Chinese and perhaps the Japanese simply aren't very interested in.

28:56Dan Wang:And so I feel like there is this narrative of victimhood, that China was the victim of foreign bullying, that the Communist Party cannot let go of, that cannot forget. And I feel like, you know, they are really nursing these wounds and nursing these grievances in a way that I think is not terribly healthy.

29:12Demetri Kofinas:Does any of that stem from the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was also an insurgency organization?

29:19Dan Wang:I think that is important. I think that it is important to keep in mind that the Communist Party was an insurgency, that it was nearly wiped out several times in its life, either from the KMT forces under Chiang Kai-shek that was severely threatened by parts of the Japanese invasion, and it very nearly couldn't win the civil war against the KMT, which terminated only in 1949. And so I think there is that strong sense in which the Leninist party was on the brink of non-existence several times, and that makes them push much, much harder because they were nearly wiped out.

29:55Demetri Kofinas:So you've mentioned that it's a Leninist society a number of times. I've actually heard you describe it as a Leninist technocracy with grand opera characteristics. What does that second part mean? What does that mean that it has grand opera characteristics?

30:08Dan Wang:Do you listen much to the opera?

30:10Demetri Kofinas:I enjoy opera. I can't say that I'm some expert on it though. No.

30:14Dan Wang:I am very into the opera. It's on my Spotify list. Very good. I spend a lot of time in the Western corner of Lincoln Center, namely where the Metropolitan Opera holds its performances. I'm very deep into the opera. Mostly I spend some time listening to the German operas and some of the French operas, which are very grand. This is grand opera. This is Wagnerian in which the gods decide between themselves to enter Valhalla. And there is kind of this preposterous, absurd, and very theatrical pageantry to the Communist Party, in which it really feels like they are struggling for their lives and really trying to do well.

30:55Dan Wang:And there is kind of this apocalyptic sense. And that's actually not my favorite part of opera. I find a lot of that actually pretty ridiculous. I find a lot of Wagner, pretty ridiculous, though it has moments of great beauty. I'm much more into the Italian side of opera. I'm much more into opera buffa, which they call the funnies. I'm much more into the strain of Mozart that is represented through his Italian operas. I'm much more attracted to the comic operas of Rossini and Verdi and Bellini and Donizetti. And so I just really wish that there is a little bit more sense of irony and a little bit less deadly seriousness among the Chinese state, which really trends towards the apocalyptic in a way that I find kind of off-putting, just as I find some of Wagner off-putting.

31:41Demetri Kofinas:See, this is what... We're going so far off script, but I want to ask you to clarify this sense of the apocalyptic. But I just want to highlight something that may be obvious to most of the listeners at this point, which is it's exactly qualities like this that are probably responsible for why you've written such a unique book. What is the reference to this apocalyptic? What do you mean by that?

32:00Dan Wang:I think that if you are a communist regime, there is this sense of life and death in every decision. There is the sense that this regime needs to struggle every single day for its survival. And that if something slip, if there's a big crisis, or if there's even a small crisis that can really blow up. And this is, again, where the Chinese have spent a lot of time studying the failures of namely the Soviet Union, in which Gorbachev tried to initiate some political reforms within the Communist Party that ruled the Soviet Union, and that these reforms weren't very well controlled. And pretty quickly, this led into all sorts of wider demands for democracy, and Gorbachev wasn't able to rein it in.

32:50Dan Wang:They study failures like Chernobyl, in which when we refer to something like a Chernobyl moment, this refers to some sort of a natural disaster that triggers the political downfall of the regime. And so I think that for a lot of these communists, for a lot of these Leninist parties, they have to be on their guard every day. And they have to be on their guard three times a day before breakfast, making sure that none of these disasters really try to topple the regime. I feel like there is this sense from Silicon Valley. One of the major founding fathers of Silicon Valley was Andy Grove, who ran Intel for a few years.

33:27Dan Wang:And Andy Grove liked to say, only the paranoid survive. And I think that this is the sort of apocalyptic element that I'm talking about with China, in which they are really paranoid because they're interested in survival. Yeah.

33:38Demetri Kofinas:When you mentioned the importance of struggle, I was frantically looking through my transcript in the episode that I had with Joseph Turingian, because that came up so often in his book and in that conversation, how important that is to the sense of identity within the Chinese Communist Party. Let's move now to... I think we've done a decent job of giving people a basic idea of some of the cultural differences between China and the United States. Let's just talk about some of the material differences. Can you give our audience a sense of the scale of China's industrialization. For example, you open one of your chapters by vividly describing this five-day cycling journey you took with some friends deep into one of China's Southwestern provinces as a way of showcasing what it's actually like to live in an engineering state.

34:27Demetri Kofinas:And I also found this just absolutely wild. Can you maybe recount some anecdotes from that particular story and just give us a sense of what is it like to live in an engineering state of which China, I think, is the most paradigmatic example.

34:42Dan Wang:Yeah. So let's think a little bit about physical engineering, to say nothing of economic engineering or social engineering. But physical engineering is just a very stark difference between the US and China. So in the summer of 2021, during the height of zero COVID in which the containment policies were pretty successful, I felt like Shanghai, where I was living, was a little bit stifling. And so I scared up two friends to go with me to the southwestern province of Guizhou to go on a long bike ride.

35:12Demetri Kofinas:Question now, weren't you not supposed to leave? What exactly were the lockdown policies in Shanghai at that time?

35:19Dan Wang:At that time in the summer, it wasn't so bad. This was a time when the zero COVID policy still worked pretty well to keep out the virus. It was really difficult for anyone to travel inside China. Only Chinese citizens were allowed in for the most part. And if you went into China, you had to stay in essentially the equivalent of a Days Inn or a Best Western to just stay in a hotel room for 14 to 21 days eating hotel food. You had to accept contact tracing apps pretty much everywhere. And if you were tested positive for the virus, the state was probably going to drag you off into a hospital or a convention center so you don't infect many other people.

35:58Dan Wang:And so in the summer of 2021, these did not feel too onerous. And so people were able to travel between provinces as I was. And so I took two friends to go to the province of Guizhou, which is in China's southwest, super mountainous and very, very poor, China's fourth poorest province. And what I found there over five days of cycling was that Guizhou has remarkable levels of infrastructure. The roads there were often very new. It was kind of a cyclist's dream to cycle on through these highways, which were really, really excellent. Guizhou has about 45 of the world's tallest bridges, not China's tallest bridges, but the world's tallest bridges.

36:38Dan Wang:And Guizhou also has a lot of airports. And so two centuries ago, it would have taken weeks through really arduous travel to go from Shanghai to Guizhou. My friends and I took the high-speed rail and we got there within seven hours. And so it became really, really striking for me to contrast China's fourth poorest province with some of America's richest states. So Guizhou, frankly, has much better levels of infrastructure than California, from where I'm speaking to you right now. It has much better levels of infrastructure than New York City, where I believe you are at this moment, right? And so I think that what is really striking is that California tried to start building high-speed rail.

37:17Dan Wang:About a decade ago, in 2008, voters delivered a referendum to say there should be high-speed rail connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. Construction began a couple of years later. And I highly doubt that anyone will be able to go on high-speed rail 20 years after the start of this referendum. About a month ago, I took the New York City Accela down to Washington, DC to speak at the Abundance Conference. The train was fine, I guess. The Accela is okay. It is a little bit wobbly. On the train, I read a headline that we're going to get a new class of Accela. Accela is getting an upgrade. And it turns out, as I read the article, that the new Accela will be something like 11 minutes slower than the present Accela.

38:01Dan Wang:And I find that really, really strange that we're going to get better foam seats. But at a first approximation, we're moving slower than before. And that just seems kind of tragic. And I'll just give one more train story, which is that I wrote this book substantially when I was a fellow at Yale Law School in New Haven. New Haven is about two hours by train to New York City to Grand Central through the Metro North trains. Metro North trains are really good. They're pretty reliable. They're a little bit slow. And I thought I didn't mind too much until I came across a timetable from 1914, which I saw that it was slightly faster getting from New York City to New Haven about 100 years ago, in part because they just make more stops today.

38:40Dan Wang:But again, And this is a failure of America in which we're not moving faster than 100 years ago. And so it is really, really striking to go from big American airports like JFK into Asia, where JFK really feels like this decrepit pit, which is really difficult to get in and out of. Whereas in Asia, everything is clean, it's brightly lit, it's connected very well by subways. And I just wish that more Americans could have a little bit of this experience.

39:06Demetri Kofinas:Speaking to a cultural distinction, would you say also that in China, there's more of a sense of optimism around problem solving than there is in America today?

39:17Dan Wang:I'm not sure if there is greater optimism writ large. I think that American businesses certainly have a good sense of problem solving. America has built a lot of these extremely competent companies like NVIDIA and Meta and Apple, these are very impressive organizations. But I think that there is definitely the sense that public works are just so much better in China.

39:42Demetri Kofinas:Okay. So let me be more specific. I've cited this article a number of times, but honestly, at this point, I've cited it so many times that I wonder whether or not the memory itself has been polluted by personal feedback and doesn't necessarily accurately reflect the original article in The Atlantic that I read years ago. But I could swear that I read this article and it was about the period in the early 20th century when we were on the verge of a food crisis in America. There were concerns about whether the food supply would be able to keep up with growth in population. And people were worried that we're going to run out of beef.

40:14Demetri Kofinas:We were going to run out of meat. And so someone in the government had this ingenious idea, or someone in the private sector working with the government had this ingenious idea to import hippopotami from Africa and breed them in Louisiana, in pins, in the swamps, because there was also an analogous swamp problem in Louisiana. And so the idea was, let's combine these two. Let's solve the swamp problem by bringing in hippopotami, and simultaneously, we're going to generate all sorts of a new supply of meat. And I remember when I read this, and I think also the author was making the point, this is why he brought it up and as an example, it really highlighted a difference between the attitude at that time in America, which was like, we can do anything.

40:59Demetri Kofinas:There is no problem for which we cannot find a solution as a country, versus now where it just feels like we're in this grip of the Kleinism as a mentality. It's like, we can't do anything right. We suck. China's winning. We're losing, much of which is mental. And that was really what I meant by my question.

41:20Dan Wang:Yeah. Well, why don't you and I, Dimitri, make a field trip out to Louisiana and try out some hippopotamized steak? I don't know if it looks good. All that blubber on that hippopotamus. I'm kind of curious to try. I'll try it if you try it. I wonder if we're still eating that. I mean, I think, yeah, this is kind of incredible. I mean, I am speaking to you from San Francisco. Yesterday, I was in the Presidio looking at the Golden Gate Bridge, which is still one of these most beautiful things I think that Americans have ever built connecting the Golden Gate, this bright red bridge. And it took about four and a half years to be able to actually build this bridge.

41:56Dan Wang:And in San Francisco, I don't know if you are very familiar with this, some of your listeners will be, the city government has tried to revamp Van Ness Avenue to make it more bus friendly. And it's essentially spent about 20 years repainting the roads and redoing some of the underground road work and piping work in order to make this much more bus friendly. And just think about this contrast, redoing the road in a little bit of a way versus the last century building something as impressive as the Golden Gate Bridge. I certainly agree with you that there is the sense that, I don't know if people around me are saying China's winning, but there is definitely the sense that America can't do very much of anything at all.

42:36Dan Wang:Whenever there's a construction project, whenever there's road works or subway works, a lot of things are covered up for a really, really, really long time, which the work simply cannot get done. And I think that is definitely a spirit of loss in America that it doesn't have the self-confidence or the ability to actually pull off grand projects anymore.

42:54Demetri Kofinas:So another great phrase you have is that China constructs the United States abstracts. And I guess that's one of the tenets of a lawyerly society. But we've always been a lawyerly society, as you say, that we've gone through periods where we've been really great at building stuff. So, what is the story that you would tell that explains how we got here? How we got from being a country that constructs to a country that obstructs?

43:17Dan Wang:I think that the 1960s was the decisive decade in which people felt really upset about highways that were tearing neighborhoods apart, the pesticides that the US government was spraying, people were really exhausted over these giant land wars in Asia, especially around Korea as well as Vietnam. People like Ralph Nader decided that regulators were excessively cozy with the automakers. And so there was kind of this consumer protection moment. And a lot of elite law students decided that government was the problem and not the solution in almost exactly the same way that Ronald Reagan started talking about this.

43:55Dan Wang:And so I think that this was this regulatory litigious turn among a lot of the lawyers that produce the problems today.

44:01Demetri Kofinas:But wasn't that overdue? And how much of that was actually necessary? We did have lots of pollution. I mean, if kids are developing brain cancer because chemical companies are polluting the water supply with their waste products, we want to live in a society that holds those countries accountable. But it seems like what's happened has gone way beyond that to now where we're dismantling basic research, the collaboration between the government funding and universities, the kinds of programs that led to the general purpose technologies that diffused across our economy and became commercialized throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

44:40Demetri Kofinas:I mean, are you just saying that that's just kind of the natural continuum of the forces that were unleashed in the 60s and 70s? Or did something else happen that led us to this point of absurdity where government truly is the dumbest, stupidest force on the planet in the way that we describe it. It can't do anything right, and it's responsible for all the ills. And where the president comes in and puts Elon Musk ahead of a department that's meant to basically just take a chainsaw to government as if this is Argentina. Though I have said that America is becoming Argentina, but for other reasons.

45:17Dan Wang:Right. Well, I think that the lawyerly society took shape for really good reasons, that the engineering state, the proto-American engineering state really did mess up for exactly all the things that are the reasons that I said. There was too much pollution and industry really was too cozy with the government and there should have been better controls. But I feel like even though the problems have changed now, the lawyers have not, that the lawyers are still obsessed with solving the problems of the 1960s. Because right now we don't have the problems of the 1960s of over construction. We don't have a Robert Moses trying to build a lot of public housing, trying to build a lot of public infrastructure.

45:57Dan Wang:Right now, we have the opposite. Right now, it is not the case that we need really severe environmental controls because right now we need to build a lot more clean energy capacity, namely solar, wind, transmission lines, which are all very land intensive and which environmentalists, so-called environmentalists -

46:15Demetri Kofinas:It can require eminent domain laws as well. That's an important point.

46:18Dan Wang:That's right. So I think we need new laws. I think we need new lawyers because we have a new set of problems. These are not exactly the problems of the 1960s. We need to save some of these procedural safeguards. But for the most part, I think that what we need is just more homes, more mass transit, more clean technology. And so let's figure out a new set of lawyers really to tackle this problem. So Dan, I'm going to move us to the second hour.

46:41Demetri Kofinas:Here's where I want to focus on ways of both reversing the decline of the United States, as well as things that you think the Chinese state can do better. Because we've spent quite a bit of time here, I think, talking rather enviously about what China has accomplished. But of course, the engineering state comes with many downsides because engineering doesn't stop at the physical door. It also moves into social engineering and China has done quite a bit. And you speak masterfully in this book, especially in the chapter having to do with the one child policy. I mean, that was an incredible chapter, seeing how that mentality of trying to put order, just this obsessiveness with order and ordering and linear thinking, the devastating effect it had, not just on the larger demographic statistics of China that impact its prospects today, but on the individual lives of human beings and people.

47:34Demetri Kofinas:And you're also a product of that, right? I mean, you were born in China during the one child policy. Your parents couldn't have another child. I mean, I didn't even know, for example, that there were so many Chinese girls that were sent to the United States and other countries to be adopted because parents wanted to have a boy. I mean, they knew about some of the other horrible... And again, you write about it really incredibly in the book. So I want to talk about some of those unintended consequences that that stemmed from social engineering. I want to talk about how we reverse the decline. And I also have some other more philosophical questions, one of which is like, for me at least, and this is a question I ask myself often, and I think I actually asked this of Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell in their recent appearance on the podcast, which is, what exactly is worth saving in America today?

48:22Demetri Kofinas:I feel like we're in this place, when it comes to the conversation about China, it's really about we we can't let China win. We've got to maintain hegemony because if China wins, they will dominate the supply chains in Asia. They'll set the rules. We'll be less wealthy. But it's like, is that the argument? It's like, what exactly are we fighting for? And also, there's no doubt that China is a surveillance state. I mean, it's scary looking at the level of control. But also it's like, well, we aren't doing anything to curb our excesses on that front. So that's an example of some of the more philosophical kind of questions that I want to broach in the second hour, Dan.

49:03Demetri Kofinas:For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Dan, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers get access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Dan, stick around. We're going to move the rest of our conversation onto the premium feed.

49:42Demetri Kofinas:If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. you