This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to be joined by Dan Wang, formerly of Gavekal Dragonomics and the Paul Tsai Law Center at Yale University, now with the Hoover Institute's History Lab. Dan's new book is Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, and it's already one of the year's most talked-about books. In this conversation, we go beyond what's actually in the book to discuss the origins and implications of the Chinese "engineering state" — the world's biggest technocratic polity — and what the United States should and should not learn from China. We discuss how Dan's ideas sit with Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, and much more. Don't miss this episode!
03:51 – Guitar industry in Guizhou
09:49 – Engineering state vs. lawyerly society
23:13 – Downsides of the engineering state
34:24 – Process knowledge: U.S. vs. China
43:01 – Attitudes toward technology: U.S. vs China
52:32 – Historical roots of the engineering state in China
59:48 – Building institutions that bind outcomes to rights
01:04:15 – What can be learned from the COVID lockdowns
01:07:51 – The tradeoff between resilience and efficiency
01:10:52 – Dan's view on Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein's "Abundance" argument
01:13:41 – Legitimacy in China and the U.S.
01:21:13 – Building toward cultural pluralism
Paying it Forward: Afra Wang, He Liu.
Recommendations:
Dan: Mozart's Italian operas, written with Lorenzo Da Ponte; The Red and the Black by Stendhal; In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust; Moby Dick by Herman Melville; Bleak House by Charles Dickens.
Kaiser: China is enjoying Trump 2.0 by Yun Sun (article), books: Revolutionary Spring, The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark
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