Podcast Summary: How I Write with David Perell — "How Dan Wang Became America’s Favorite China Expert"

Guest: Dan Wang
Host: David Perell
Date: September 24, 2025

Overview

This episode features Dan Wang, renowned China analyst and author of Breakneck. The conversation dives deep into Wang’s distinctive annual letters about China, unpacking his writing process, inspirations, and the unique blend of personal and analytical insights in his work. Together with host David Perell, Wang explores why textured, detail-rich writing matters, the craft of observation, pitfalls of travel writing, challenges of censorship in China, the virtues of slow publishing, and the essential skills behind impactful books. The episode is dedicated to their mutual mentor, Tyler Cowen.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Unique Style and Purpose of Dan Wang’s Annual Letters

• Capturing China’s Dualities

  • Wang’s annual letters aim to bridge the contrast between China’s official, formal side (government statements, party doctrine) and its informal, everyday life.
  • Quote:
    “I really wanted to play up was a bit of the friction of simply living in a country that is fun and messy and bizarre...along with the newscast, the official Party Theory magazine’s view of China.” — Dan Wang [01:48]

• Texture and Rich Detail

  • Perell admires how Wang starts with granular observations (like soup in Kunming) to deepen understanding of bigger dynamics.
  • Quote:
    “You’ll use like a soup that you had in Kunming or something like that as entry point to talk about what’s going on there.” — David Perell [04:01]

• Comparative Lens

  • Wang challenges the “capitals only” narrative, comparing China’s regional diversity to that of the U.S.:
    “Nobody would ever really try to understand the United States purely through the lens of what’s going on in Washington D.C...yet I think that is what a lot of people do with China.” — Dan Wang [04:30]

2. Deliberate Craft: Inspirations and Editing

• Literary and Musical Influences

  • Wang draws inspiration from 19th-century French novels (especially Stendhal) and Italian comic opera (“opera buffa”), seeking to blend seriousness with ornament and humor.
  • Quote:
    “The Italians really prize cadence. They prize pacing...there are showers of ornament...I do like to have clean lines in my own writing, but also informed by a few flourishes and cadences.” — Dan Wang [07:35]

• Revision and Flow

  • Despite limited time, Wang composes essays around standout sentences and accepts the imperfection of hasty annual deadlines.
  • He confesses a closer kinship to Beethoven than Mozart:
    “Beethoven...you can detect a note of effort in most things that Beethoven wrote...And perhaps as a writer, I am a little bit closer to Beethoven.” — Dan Wang [20:38]

3. Process: Note-Taking, Observation, and Travel

• Year-long Note Accumulation

  • Uses Apple Notes to jot down impressions, sentences, and evolving thoughts throughout the year.
  • Assembles them in a “hasty sprint” in the last 10 days to meet his January 1st self-imposed deadline.
  • Quote:
    “If we’re able to have one great sentence, I think it is absolutely valid to try to construct everything around that.” — Dan Wang [16:16]

• Travel as a Method

  • Wang treats China as inexhaustibly interesting, traveling low-key and organizing days around food stops to fuel observation.
  • Rejects most travel writing as “not insightful” or too self-indulgent; instead, he seeks to unite the “tectonic plates” of policy and grassroots life, always seeking what his observations mean in the larger context of Beijing’s ambitions.

• Concrete Methodology

  • Organizes travel around moving through cities, eating, and extensive walking.
  • Quote:
    “Eat a ton...walk as much as you can...as you’re walking in between eateries, you’re just going to be bombarded with insights.” — Dan Wang [34:11]

4. Zooming In and Out: Abstraction & Concreteness

• Multi-level Analysis

  • Wang advocates balancing zoomed-in, concrete experience with large-scale analytical ambition:
    “There also has to be a level of ambition for writers to also be abstract and conceptual and analytical...combine all of these sort of things.” — Dan Wang [37:01]

• Answering the Big Questions

  • Uses each annual letter to confront the key political, economic, or social issues of that year in China (e.g., tech crackdowns, Covid policy, “common prosperity”).
  • Quote:
    “Let’s get to the heart of what is animating you, what is animating the world...offer answers to those questions.” — Dan Wang [37:01]

5. Crafting A Distinctive Voice and Path

• Academic Outsider Advantage

  • Wang attributes his distinctive style to not being deeply embedded in academic conventions; he focuses on synthesis and a blend of genres.
  • Quote:
    “My great gift was that I was not very well academically trained in college...to be a little bit more autodidactic, to really try to treasure good writing, as I understand it.” — Dan Wang [42:05]

• Book Types: Academic vs. Trade

  • Discusses the pitfalls and virtues of both academic and trade publishing; key is transcending genre conventions.

• Becoming a Better Reader

  • Writing a book heightened his sensitivity to passion vs. obligation in other authors’ works, gaining “X-ray vision” for discerning authentic engagement.
  • Quote:
    “I think becoming a writer and writing a serious, sustained work is a great way to train yourself to be a much better reader.” — Dan Wang [50:33]

6. Writing Discipline & Pace

• Slow Publishing as an Alternative
  • Wang’s tactic of writing one public piece per year challenges the modern tempo of newsletters and social media.
  • Quote:
    “My gripe with Substack...It is encouraging people to write at a more frequent cadence or a more frequent pacing. The tragedy of a lot of modern technologies is that it is really trying to make posts and thoughts as short as possible and as frequent as possible...I was trying to bring down the average. I was trying to write one piece a year.” — Dan Wang [57:27]

7. On AI as Tool and Threat

• AI as a Research & Consumption Tool

  • Wang distinguishes AI’s strengths (augmenting “thinking through” with music, art, food recommendation) from the irreplaceability of generating original prose.
  • Quote:
    “I will try as much as possible, and perhaps even declare it verboten, not to let AI get into my writing. I don’t want it prompted to have any sentences that I could actually just use. I want the sentences to come from within myself.” — Dan Wang [64:16]

• AI Modeled After Tyler Cowen

  • Wang finds ChatGPT sometimes channels the perspective and analysis style of his mentor, Tyler Cowen, and uses it as a sparring partner for reflection and knowledge.
  • Quote:
    “The way that I treat ChatGPT is as my friend Tyler, who I maybe see once every couple of months...but if I really wanted to have an instant Tyler-like reaction...I just ask ChatGPT.” — Dan Wang [66:39]

8. China’s Social Media & Censorship

• Influencer Culture and Mediation by Phones

  • Notes the pervasiveness of Chinese influencer (Wanghong) culture, with urban spaces and social life increasingly optimized for photos and online sharing.
  • Quote:
    “Maybe my least favorite part of contemporary China among informal society is just absolutely how much the phones have taken over everyone’s lives.” — Dan Wang [69:49]

• State & Social Censorship

  • Describes the extensive and worsening censorship regime, the absence of independent journalism, and chilling effect on critical thought.
  • Relates personal experience of his own website being blocked in China and the complexities and arbitrariness of enforcement.
  • Quote:
    “There is extensive censorship that pervades throughout Chinese society. And it has gotten worse, a lot worse over the last 10 years.” — Dan Wang [89:40]

9. Comparative Reflections: U.S. and China

• Infrastructure vs. Intellectual Freedom

  • Wang observes that while China’s cities often feel safer and more functional, intellectual freedom is severely constrained.
  • Quote:
    “It just feels very bizarre to me that San Francisco is just so rich and it works so poorly...But I would not defend any proposition that intellectually China could be more free, because...there is very extensive censorship from above that keeps getting worse and worse.” — Dan Wang [98:00]

• Elite Formation & Disappointments

  • Shares observations about U.S. and Chinese elites, noting his outsider sensibility and disappointment in stagnation and parochialism among American elite networks.
  • Quote:
    “A lot of my writing has been driven by disappointments. It is to try to introduce better error correction because I am in part an outsider and because I feel disappointment that things aren’t quite so good.” — Dan Wang [74:18]

10. The Realities and Skills of Book Writing

• Three Phases of Book Writing

  • Outlines the three main phases as:
    1. Conceptualization & proposal
    2. The “long middle” of actual writing
    3. Post-production and promotion
  • Each demands different skills and disciplines, from structuring arguments to refining prose, to marketing.

• Practical Tips: Writing Retreats, Titles, Covers

  • Discusses the value of changing environments and support from his wife for sustained focus.

11. Writing as Learning: Compounding Knowledge

• Rejection of Linear Deceleration

  • Wang advocates for continual, compounding learning rather than stagnation after formal education.
  • Quote:
    “Maybe we should take the Silicon Valley model of network effects in which growth can accelerate to some degree over time. And the more you know, the more you’re capable of knowing.” — Dan Wang [116:54]

• Influence of Tyler Cowen & Ezra Klein

  • Draws inspiration from mentors who continually reinvent themselves, advocating for constant curiosity and adaptation.

Notable Quotes

• On texture and detail:
  “Reality has a surprising amount of detail.” — David Perell [36:21]

• On writing and editing:
  “No writer is ever very satisfied. I’ve spent quite a bit of time chatting with some really good essayists...who would tell me that, yeah, no writer would ever get above 85% [satisfaction].” — Dan Wang [16:16]

• On book writing:
  “There’s three hard parts of book writing, and it is the beginning, the middle, and the end.” — Dan Wang [101:49]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• The Duality of China: Official vs. Informal Life — [01:48–06:09]
• Sources of Writing Style: Stendhal & Opera Buffa — [07:35–11:46]
• Crafting Annual Letters: Notes and Process — [14:35–19:54]
• Travel Writing & Observational Methods — [26:12–36:21]
• Zooming In and Out in Analysis — [36:21–41:53]
• Academic Outsider & Synthesis — [42:05–44:21]
• Pitfalls of Trade/Academic Books — [44:21–49:59]
• Gaining Readerly “X-ray Vision” — [49:59–52:42]
• On Publishing Pace and Slow Writing — [56:42–60:18]
• AI as Tool and Tyler Cowen as Model — [60:18–66:39]
• China’s Influencer Culture and Censorship — [69:49–89:40]
• Infrastructure & Freedom: China vs. USA — [98:00–101:32]
• The Bundle of Skills for Writing a Book — [101:32–108:13]
• On Compounding Knowledge and Learning — [116:03–119:38]

Memorable Moments

• Wang’s encouragement for writers to write fewer, but more considered, public works—the “anti-Substack” philosophy. [57:27]
• The dedication of the episode to Tyler Cowen, their mutual mentor and model of intellectual generosity and curiosity. [Start/end references, esp. [00:00]]
• Wang’s revelation that his distinctive, elegant prose partly owes itself to copying New Yorker articles by hand. [113:14]
• The poignant moment of Wang’s website being blocked in China, marking the personal stakes of his work. [89:40]

Takeaways

• Dan Wang’s approach exemplifies the power of slow, richly-observed, and synthesized writing.
• True intellectual progress and distinctiveness come from blending granular observation with conceptual ambition, and refusing to be captured by speed, genre, or convention.
• The importance of mentors, deliberate process, and disciplined curiosity shines throughout both Wang’s career and the episode itself.

For anyone interested in China, observational writing, or the craft of impactful, original prose, this episode offers both inspirational and highly practical insight—distilled from a decade of practice, travel, and hard-won wisdom.