China’s Engineering State vs. America’s Lawyerly Society (w/Dan Wang)

Summary

The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer
Episode: China’s Engineering State vs. America’s Lawyerly Society (w/ Dan Wang)
Date: April 29, 2026
Vox Media Podcast Network

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Overview

In a special live edition of "The Long Game," hosts Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer sit down with Dan Wang—author of the influential book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future—at the Endless Frontiers Conference in Austin, Texas. The episode dives deep into Wang’s central premise: China has become an “engineering state” that builds relentlessly, while America is hampered by a “lawyerly society” more adept at blocking than building.

Wang, whose unique perspective stems from his life split between China, Canada, and the U.S., and professional experience embedded in China’s tech sector, unpacks these cultural and structural contrasts. The conversation explores how these differences influence both countries’ trajectories, the human and institutional costs of their respective models, and what the U.S. can learn from China’s feats—with a clear-eyed look at both the strengths and failings on either side.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Core Thesis: Engineering State vs. Lawyerly Society

• Wang’s Argument: China relentlessly builds (engineering culture); America expertly blocks (legal culture).

  • “China is an engineering state they cannot stop building, and the United States has become a lawyerly society that cannot stop blocking.” — Jake Sullivan quoting Dan Wang (03:17)

• Wang traces the U.S. “lawyerly” turn to a post-1970 correction against mid-century overreach—think Robert Moses era projects, environmental damage, and disenfranchisement—shifted by public demand and a new wave of public-interest litigation.

  • “Something changed in 1970...throughout the 1960s, a bunch of students heard the beckons of Ralph Nader to say government is part of the problem, that we need to be watchdogs… So the lawyers turned from being creative deal makers...to constrain the government.” — Dan Wang (15:00–16:52)

• America’s Resulting Problem: Proceduralism, vetocracy, inability to build key infrastructure or industrial capacity, exemplified by big projects stalling for decades.

  • Example: Both China and California started high-speed rail planning in 2008—China finished in 2011 for $36B; California is still incomplete, at triple the cost. (12:00)

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2. Comparing the Societies: Similarities and Differences

• Exceptionalism and Hustle: Both China and the U.S. are “messy,” ambitious, striving, and have “medium trust” societies. Both invent the future and drive global progress.

  • “Chinese and Americans are just kind of really friendly ... both countries are full of ambitious hustlers...but they have this essence of striving that makes the cities not necessarily very nice, not necessarily very functional.” — Dan Wang (07:02–08:36)

• Contrast with Europe & Japan: Wang dubs Europe the “mausoleum economy,” content to polish the past, and notes Japan’s economic stagnation.

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3. Societies at Their Extremes: Human Costs and Systemic Flaws

• China’s Blind Spots:

  • “Sometimes the only thing scarier than China's problems are Beijing's solutions.” — John Finer (22:32)
  • Wang highlights the profound human costs of China's engineering: mass overbuilding, intrusive social engineering (e.g., One Child Policy, Zero COVID), and the state's focus on aggregates over individuals.
    • “...over 35 years...China conducted around 300 million abortions...sterilized about 100 million women, 25 million men. Really brought trauma to so many different families.” — Dan Wang (19:25)

• Authoritarianism and Succession:

  • Under Xi Jinping, engineering emphasis persists, but systemic succession problems and political purges erode capacity and morale.
    • “If you want to improve morale, it's probably not a good idea to annihilate High Command...that substantially erodes how people interact with him.” — Dan Wang (34:00)

• America’s Blocked Future:

  • The procedural “vetocracy” stemming from legalism prevents modernization and infrastructure, but also avoids China’s moral and human costs.

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4. The Middle Ground—Is There a Sweet Spot?

• Wang insists that democratic countries can build without authoritarian overreach.

  • “The question is not so much whether democracies can build. I think that is almost the wrong framing...there are examples today in the United States [and abroad] which are able to build.” — Dan Wang (12:26)

• Cites successes in Japanese and Danish infrastructure as proof that building at scale and speed can coexist with rights protections.

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5. China’s Industrial and Technological Edge: How They Do It

• Beyond Stereotypes: Not just IP theft, cheating, or top-down selection—China’s approach includes:

  • Super-functional infrastructure (ports, electrical capacity)

  • Massive labor pools (70M manufacturing workers vs. 12M in the U.S.)

  • Fierce competition among firms (e.g., dozens of EV makers)

  • Government support, deep process knowledge, and industrial clustering

  • “Technology is three different things: the tooling; direct instruction—patents, blueprints; and everything that is unwritten—process knowledge. Technology ultimately is people... All of this is about knowledge that needs to be cultivated and not forgotten.” — Dan Wang (51:14–54:32)

• China’s share of global manufacturing is likely to rise further—“engineering is the state’s raison d'être.”

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6. Process Knowledge: The Real Competitive Moat

• “What really sustains technological power is process knowledge...how to actually do things... that is lost once factories close and experts retire. The blueprints don’t really matter.” — Jake Sullivan (53:19; Dan Wang responds 53:31)

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7. Prescriptions for America

• Three Recommendations to Rebuild the U.S. Engineering Edge:

  1. Attract Global Talent: Make it easier for ambitious global engineers to immigrate and work in the U.S.
     • “Let's stop punching ourselves in the face... the most ambitious people… want to move to the United States. And we should not block them.” (41:28)
  2. Reconsider Tariffs & Regulation: Tariffs hurt U.S. manufacturers and impede re-industrialization.
  3. Welcome Foreign Investment, Even Chinese: Chinese investment (as with Japanese auto plants long ago) can improve American process knowledge, productivity, and global competitiveness.
     • “If the Chinese did force technology transfer to us, why don't we do it back to them?” (41:28)

• Importance of Process Knowledge: “Technology is people—workers, managers—practicing and refining skills.”

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8. Technologists, Lawyers, and American Power

• Lawyerly Society: America empowers lawyers to opine and legislate on all; recent waves (Trump, technologists) may not escape this legacy.

  • “Trump is still more lawyerly than not… He is quite lawyerly [in] flinging accusations, trying to establish guilt in the court of public opinion...” (55:30)

• Technologists in Government: Recent efforts to “shake up” government haven’t yielded the “buildership” of past engineering giants (Bush, Rickover). Instead, they’ve aimed to cut or disrupt rather than construct.

• Soft Leninism: Wang critiques Silicon Valley elites’ humorless, apocalyptic, or political-flavor-following behavior.

  • “Both [Silicon Valley] and the Chinese Communist Party are serious, self-serious, and indeed completely humorless...the register fluctuates between mundane, boring corporate speak or this apocalyptic register...” (57:59)

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9. Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “No place is more deranged than San Francisco today...trying to invent God in a box...Peter Thiel giving lectures on the nature of the Antichrist...we are much more living in some sort of a cosmic horror novel than real life.” — Dan Wang (09:30)

• “Can a state have a conscience?” — Dan Wang (23:07)

• “Technology is people. ... Once you close a factory, you lose all this factory design expertise... The United States has lost all sorts of knowledge because [retired] nuclear engineers simply went out to pasture…” — Dan Wang (53:31)

• “He’s fooled a lot of people. The guy looks just like Winnie the Pooh.” — Dan Wang on Xi Jinping (36:03)

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10. Reflections and Wrap-Up

• Hosts’ Takeaways:

  • Wang brings “nuanced, narrative, and anecdotal analysis” beneath his “one big simple idea.”

  • The enduring policy question: How do you get Robert Moses outcomes without the moral cost of Robert Moses’ methods? (67:14)

  • The challenge is not diagnosis but prescription—how to build with speed and scale without trampling rights, environment, and communities.

  • “Our ability to do this effectively is a vital component to America's national security, to our resilience, to our competitiveness.” — Jake Sullivan (69:59)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:17 – Sullivan introduces Wang’s core thesis: engineering vs. lawyerly culture
• 12:00 – High-speed rail example: China vs. California
• 15:00–16:52 – Origins of America's lawyerly society and shift in government role
• 19:25 – Wang on One Child Policy and human costs in China
• 22:32 – “Only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.”
• 30:10–34:00 – Xi Jinping’s era, succession challenge, and political purges
• 41:28 – Wang’s top three prescriptions for building an American engineering state
• 51:14–54:32 – “Process knowledge” and America’s loss of manufacturing expertise
• 55:30 – Are technologists any better than lawyerly culture?
• 57:59 – Silicon Valley’s “soft Leninism”
• 60:56 – Who’s more interesting: Politburo or Silicon Valley?
• 67:14 – Hosts: How to achieve Robert Moses outcomes without the cost
• 69:59 – Why this question is critical for national security

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Tone and Style

• Analytical, nuanced, candid—Wang is incisive and sometimes humorous (“the guy looks like Winnie the Pooh”).
• Hosts blend policy wonkery with personal anecdote, adding depth and relatability.

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Conclusion

This episode provides a rich, multidimensional examination of the U.S.-China rivalry—not merely as a contest of economies or power, but as a clash of institutional cultures. Wang argues for a candid reckoning with America’s self-imposed barriers to building, while warning against the perils of China’s blinkered pursuit of engineering at all costs. The challenge for American policymakers is not to become China, but to recover lost process knowledge, welcome global talent, and find ways to build again at speed and scale—without sacrificing the values of an open society.

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Notable Quotes

• "China is an engineering state that cannot stop building, and the United States has become a lawyerly society that cannot stop blocking.” — Jake Sullivan, quoting Dan Wang (03:17)
• “Sometimes the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.” — John Finer (22:32)
• “Technology ultimately is people.” — Dan Wang (51:14)
• “He’s fooled a lot of people. The guy looks just like Winnie the Pooh.” — Dan Wang on Xi (36:03)

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For Further Exploration:

• Dan Wang's Breakneck
• Foreign Affairs essay: “The Real China Model”
• Reports on U.S. process knowledge in manufacturing and defense

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Transcript

[Dan Wang]

Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe [e-mail]. Does anyone really know what goes on behind closed doors at the Supreme Court?

[John Finer]

Four years ago I got a tip

[Dan Wang]

about the court and I was not

[John Finer]

in the market to cover it whatsoever.

[Jake Sullivan]

But this tip was about a secret

[John Finer]

influence campaign that had been carried out inside the court.

[Jake Sullivan]

As you know, the very idea of that is outrageous. I'm Preet Bharara and this week New

[Dan Wang]

York Times investigative journalist Jodi Kanter joins me to discuss her expose on the Court's shadow docket. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay tuned with Preet Wherever you get your podcasts, the United States and China are the two countries that are really inventing the future. That the future is being financed by Wall street, invented in Silicon Valley, as well as Shenzhen, built out of there. And then we also have this really big two jealous centers of power, Washington, D.C. and Beijing, in which the elites of both countries sort of view themselves as we are great powers and everyone else is a smaller country that has to listen to us.

[Jake Sullivan]

Welco welcome back to the Long Game. I'm Jake Sullivan.

[John Finer]

And I'm John Finer.

[Jake Sullivan]

Today we have another special episode of the podcast. We spoke last week with author Dan Wong before a live audience at the Endless Frontiers Conference in Austin, Texas.

[John Finer]

Here's that conversation,

[Jake Sullivan]

John. It's another first for us this week, the first ever live show of the Long Game coming to you live from the Endless Frontiers Conference right here in Austin, Texas. And we're really excited because we just have a fantastic guest today. Joining us is Dan Wong. He is the author of one of the most talked about books on US China competition in years. It's called Breakneck China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Many of our listeners will have read it. Those who haven't go buy it right now. The book is a New York Times bestseller. It was named one of the New Yorker's Best books of the year. So Dan was born in China. He emigrated to Canada at age seven, later moved to the Philadelphia suburbs for high school. He identifies as a Canadian who has spent almost equal amounts of time living in the United States and China. So he's got a unique vantage point on these two powerhouse countries and how they operate. Dan spent six years from 2017 to 2023 living and working on the ground in China, I think spanning Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, is that right?

[Dan Wang]

Yes.

[Jake Sullivan]

And over those years, he produced deep analysis on China's technology sector, its industrial policy, and its macro trends. His public annual letters became must reads for anyone who cares about what's happening in China, and they remain must reads to this day. Dan is now a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In Breakneck, Dan makes a single piercing argument that basically boils down to this. China is an engineering state they cannot stop building, and the United States has become a loyalist society that cannot stop blocking. That's Dan's observation at the core of the book. And the implications of that, in his telling, are profound. So this is about as long game as it gets, and we're going to dig into what it all means and where it's going. So please join me in welcoming Dan Wong to the long game. Dan, welcome. Good to see you.

[Dan Wang]

It's great to be here.

[John Finer]

All right, so let's dive right in. Dan, I want to start with this core insight that Jake just described. What somebody else could have maybe called a clash of civilizations between an engineering state and a lawyerly society. And I want to stipulate up front, just in the spirit of full disclosure, you're being interviewed by two lawyers here, but this is not an ambush. We don't mean it that way at all. And any lawyer who actually worked with us in the government would tell you that our credentials as actual lawyers are pretty limited. So don't worry too much. Can you just lay out the basic argument that you make in the book about the challenges associated with this lawyerly society? And then we were both curious. Is this an insight that came to you in a single moment that. That you arrived at kind of over study and over time? Because it's rare that a topic and a problem that's looked at as carefully and has been looked at as long as this results in actually, like, a new insight about how things are organized?

[Dan Wang]

The. You know, I should say also that I have a little bit of lawyering tendency in myself as well. I think the Yale Law School implicates all three of us. I wrote my book very substantially when I was a fellow at the China center there. And when I was there, it really felt like Yale Law School, you know, getting J.D. from Yale Law. Harvard Law sort of feels like your ticket to the White House as maybe you two are sort of emblematic.

[Jake Sullivan]

We don't know anything about that. No, no, actually, no.

[Dan Wang]

And it was quite striking that in the Biden administration, Politico wrote this little gag that people at Yale Law were Just, it was kind of like a college reunion for them. They were just running into alum all the time. And I think writing my book there, being at what I felt was kind of one of the high temples of American elite finishing culture. The finishing school.

[John Finer]

Doesn't sound like praise when you say it that way, by the way.

[Dan Wang]

No, no. And then contrasting that with my six years of living in China, three of which was throughout zero Covid in which it really feels like the Communist party was treating everyone as a system of aggregates. There's no individual. People are moved around like chess pieces here and there. And then thinking through some of the challenges that the United States faces today. The pretty severe housing shortages in big cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, Louisiana, Louisiana, which suffered from some pretty devastating fires, which is still barely rebuilding. We're here at endless frontiers, thinking very extensively about our manufacturing base, our defense industrial base, a lot of which has rusted. We're taking subways in New York City that are over 100 years old train lines. The new axela is somehow slower than the previous accela. Our subways are getting worse, our trains are getting worse. Defense industrial base is rusting. These are sort of the problems that I think the lawyerly society has not been very well set up to solve.

[Jake Sullivan]

Now, Dan, you pair this observation about the difference between China and the United States with an observation that actually no two people are more alike than Americans and Chinese, that they're both exceptionalist societies. You point out a number of similarities. I think a lot of people in the US and probably a lot of people in China will be surprised by that observation. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean?

[Dan Wang]

I think that the United States and China are the two countries that are really inventing the future. That the future is being financed by Wall street, invented in Silicon Valley as well as Shenzhen, built out of there. And then we also have this really big two Chann zealous centers of power, Washington, D.C. and Beijing, in which the elites of both countries sort of view themselves as we are great powers and everyone else is a smaller country that has to listen to us. Chinese and Americans are just kind of really friendly. You can go anywhere in Texas, you can go anywhere in China, you can have a conversation. It kind of feels like a warm bath. Speaking as a Canadian who drives around America feeling like everything is just very big and very bizarre. And so, you know, as soon as I enter Canada, I kind of just relax a little bit more. But here in the US and China, things are a little bit more rollicking I think is a little bit of the word. And I think I contrast that. Being bizarre is mostly a good thing, I think, about Europe as well as Japan. Europe is a region that I call the mausoleum economy. In the opening page of my book, there's kind of a self satisfied preening of trying to polish up all of these wonderful museum pieces. And Japan, I think has been been not grown very substantially for much of basically the last 30, 40 years. And so I think that both of these countries are full of ambitious hustlers. They take all sorts of shortcuts, but then they have this essence of striving that makes the cities not necessarily very nice, not necessarily very functional. Both are maybe medium trust societies. So there's all sorts of ways in which both countries break down. I think the United States is not very good towards the elderly. The Chinese state is not very good towards young people. There's all sorts of ways in which both countries break down. But they are inventing the future and they are really driving forward all sorts of progress.

[Jake Sullivan]

So just to pull on that string a little, you said in your book that as a Canadian you find Canada very tidy, whereas you find the US and China both messy. And I think you said a little deranged. So two questions here. One, is a certain level of derangement required to actually be a superpower to be the country that is writing the future? And then two, if America is the lawyer and China's the engineer, what profession is Canada? Canada as a Canadian, what profession are you guys?

[Dan Wang]

Nation of beaver hunters? I'm not sure. Fur traders? I think Canadians. One of the issues with being a superpower is that normal countries don't have such dominance by engineers in China. In the United States, so many of the political elites are lawyers. Normal countries have more normal sized distributions of professions. So I really think that I'm very cautious about extending this analysis to Germany or to Canada or to India. I think these two countries are deranged. And I spent quite a bit of time as a fellow at the Hoover Institution going to visit AI Land. No place is more deranged than San Francisco today. We are spending quite a bit of time now thinking about AI populism. And when I'm in sf, what is pretty striking to me is that we're in a fantastically beautiful environment. We have all of these nerds, 25 years old, trying to invent God in a box. And in the background is Peter Thiel giving lectures on the nature of the Antichrist. And this is where I think that we are Much more living in some sort of a cosmic horror novel than real life. But here we are, here we are in which people are very upset about data centers. People are upset about the water, they're upset about the power. Somehow AI is supposed to be the great salvation for our economic problems as well as our national security. When the approval rating for AI is something like 25%, the only thing with lower approval rating than AI in the United States is the Democratic Party. So you know, how are we going to get around that?

[John Finer]

So you derive in the book kind of the origins of the lawyerly society in the United States and you talk about how it emerged in the 60s as a correction maybe in your view, I think an overcorrection to the sort of unfettered Robert Moses esque building boom that took place in infrastructure before that, but that resulted in charges of systemic racism, environmental degradation. And the result, as you describe it, is this vetocracy where nothing gets built and everything can be stopped. And you highlight just one example that we want to give people, which is that in 2008 both China and California began planning high speed rail lines. China completed its Beijing Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $36 billion. California spent 17 years building a small segment of its line with the current cost estimates running to $117 billion. So therein sort of lies the problem. But it does lead us to this question, which is ultimately what we want. Is Robert Moses like outcomes being able to build big and important things at speed, at scale, but without Robert Moses methods of leveling entire low income neighborhoods, et cetera, et cetera. Is that achievable? Can, can we hit that sweet spot?

[Dan Wang]

I think that we can hit that sweet spot. There are plenty of countries, let's say, you know, here's where I want to praise the mausoleum economies a little bit more. Japan, Western Europe have built excellent infrastructure without expropriating people, without horrible environmental damage in let's say Tokyo or Copenhagen. I spent quite a bit of time in Denmark last summer. Copenhagen built these amazing subway stations. They're super clean, as clean, cleaner than in Asia. They're fully automated. And so you don't have these workers who demand that, as you do in New York City subway, that there must be two conductors per train. And I don't think that we necessarily associate the Danish as well as the Japanese with really horrible rights problems. We don't associate really serious cost overruns with them. And so the question is not so much whether democracies can build. I think that is almost the Wrong framing. There's all sorts of ways in which rich societies have been able to do basic things like build homes. Right now we are here in Austin, which had a surge of people coming into the city after the pandemic for online work. How did the city greet those people? By building homes for them, by crushing rents, by building quite a lot. And I think that is super positive. There are parts of the United States that has been able to build quite a lot. And we don't have to reach back into the past of Robert Moses of the Army Corps of Engineers, of Department of Agriculture, spraying ddt. Absolutely. Through everywhere. There are examples today in the United States which is able to build. There are examples overseas of friends and allies which are able to build. So let's not get too caught up on, oh, is authoritarianism the right framing? I say there are successes in our backyard. Let's look at them and build in our backyard too.

[Jake Sullivan]

Dan, your book has gotten a lot of responses and a lot of very positive response and a lot of very thoughtful responses. One guy named Jonathan Sein, I thought wrote, wrote one of the more interesting and thoughtful responses to the book. It was extremely positive and sympathetic to your argument. But he did make this one note where he said, america's basically always been run by lawyers, back to the founding, the framers, the founders, et cetera, through the 1800s through the 1900s. So that even in our building phase, it was lawyers more or less running the show. What's your take on that? And so is the issue not so much that we're run by lawyers, but the lawyers have become more lawyerly or something else has happened? I'm just curious how you respond to that historical observation.

[Dan Wang]

For any book author, it would be a dream to have a review on the quality and thoughtfulness of John Sign. So, you know, may this be a blessing for all authors out there. The United States has always been governed by lawyers. So if we take a look at the first 13 U.S. presidents, everyone from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, 10 of them were lawyers, the other three were generals. But so the lawyerly instinct has been in the United States for a very long time. I think that the United States used to be an engineering state up until basically 1970. And so the United States built all sorts of railways that built canal systems through New York, skyscrapers in Chicago and Manhattan, the interstate highway program, Manhattan Project, Apollo missions. We can go on and on with all these amazing achievements of the technological sublime driven very substantially by the United States government. Something changed in 1970, which was the correction to the excesses of the American engineering state. When New Yorkers got really tired of Robert Moses bulldozing busy neighborhoods, Department of Agriculture spraying too many chemicals around US Army Corps of Engineers essentially dammed every river in the American West. There needed to have been a correction. And what happened was that throughout the 1960s, a bunch of students, especially students at especially Harvard Law, Yale Law, a lot of the elite law schools heard the beckons of Ralph Nader to say government is part of the problem, that we need to be watchdogs of government. We should not serve inside government. That the lawyers turn from being creative deal makers working on behalf of Franklin D. Roosevelt to do the New Deal. The FDR cabinet was full of lawyers building all sorts of great works. They stopped working on behalf of robber barons, Wall street to expropriate a lot of people or raise bonds for the railroad barons. And then a lot people's highest calling became social impact litigation to really try to restrain the government. And there is a little bit of an irony that Ralph Nader's messages flowed very well into Ronald Reagan's messages that government is the problem, not the solution. Right. I see that as being quite a big problem with the United States. That it does not want to empower the government to do the sort of things that the government itself sets out to do. That the people demand that the government does that. Still right now I dare say that that most law students feel like their role is to constrain the government. And I'm much more interested in correcting the pendulum swing slightly so that we have many more American elites who are very excited about building inside the government to achieve the technological sublime of Golden Gate Bridge, Manhattan Project Apollo missions, go to the moon, go to Mars and so on. And not really try to think that we have to protect every bird and every butterfly on our way to getting there.

[John Finer]

So Dan, we've focused a lot in the early part of this conversation on the American side of the equation. Understandably, it's where we are and we want to better understand ourselves before we take on the world. But you're also not a romanticizer at all of the Chinese model. You've been one of the people who's best highlighted, I think, the profound human costs, the blind spots associated with a state run by pretty literal minded engineers who can see human beings sometimes as or variables in a macro optimization equation as opposed to on their own terms. And you came by this honestly. You lived through the COVID lockdown in Shanghai. You've observed the excesses of Three Gorges and kind of other big infrastructure projects that have caused massive human consequences. I was wondering if you could just say a little bit more about what your own experiences in China have taught you about the engineering state and its own deficiencies.

[Dan Wang]

The chief deficiencies, I think, are two. I think that for the most part, being run by physical engineers is. Is substantially a good thing. That a housing crisis in the United States means surging home prices, whereas a housing crisis in China means spiraling prices in part because they have overbuilt. There's all of these empty apartment blocks. Which would you rather have? I would have more homes rather than less. That China right now is able to deploy so much new electrical power, so much more renewable power infrastructure. Right now China has about 40 nuclear power plants under construction. The United States has zero. Last year, China deployed about 300 gigawatts of solar. The United States deployed about 30 gigawatts of solar. And China, you know, it still bears saying that China has a much more functional manufacturing base. China's manufacturing as a share of China's GDP is around 25%. The United States is around 9%. And so they have achieved quite a lot through physical engineering. But the fundamental problem with the physical engineers is that they cannot stop themselves from also being social engineers, from also being population engineers. And so I spend a lot of time in my book talking about the one child policy as well as zero Covid. Now, I'm not sure if authors are allowed to have a favorite chapter, but my favorite chapter to write was definitely about the one child policy, which according to the official data from National Health Year Books published by the State Council in China, over the 35 years of the implementation, China conducted around 300 million abortions, which is not shy, not that much shy of the present population of the United States. They sterilized about 100 million women, 25 million men. Really brought trauma to so many different families. You know, wrenching, I think, is the descriptor of first resort when we're thinking about some of the experiences of some of these families and, you know, part of the demographic problems of China today of having 40 million missing women after insistent femicide, as well as just the broader population decline in China, is directly attributable to the one child policy. I spend a lot of time thinking about zero Covid, in which people in Shanghai were kept indoors for about 10 weeks in the spring of 2022, when many families went hungry because parents went hungry to save food for the kids, because the municipal government had no plan in place to really Deliver food over so severe of a lockdown.

[Jake Sullivan]

And you were there during that time?

[Dan Wang]

I left right before Shanghai locked down. But I was in China throughout all three years of zero Covid. I left into the mountains of the southwest in China. My wife and I were on literally the last flight out of China. I had a little bit less faith in the government when it said that the. The lockdown would last only eight days. And then I was back in Shanghai throughout the summer. I was in Shanghai when the protests broke out. And I saw some of these protests in which young people had staggered out of these cocktail bars. It was a very spontaneous event. And I'll never forget watching some of these videos as well as the actual protests in person afterwards in which people chanted on the streets, down with Xi Jinping. Down with the Communist Party is completely unimaginable for people who have a sense of living in China. Seeing the extent of security services patrolling the streets at all times, that people dare raise their voices and demonstrate their anger in such a severe way. And this is the sort of thing that all these physical engineers push people to extremes when they also engage in social engineering.

[John Finer]

You have this very succinct phrase or sentence, I think, that captures a lot of what you just said, which is that sometimes the only thing scarier than China's problems are Beijing's solutions. And obviously the one child policy, zero Covid are the examples you use. But basically what this says to me is that technical problems get technical fixes, whatever the human consequences in some cases. And maybe the corollary of the question we asked you about whether it's possible to hit the sweet spot in the United States between a building without human consequences is, can an engineering state retain a conscience?

[Dan Wang]

No, I don't think. Yeah, well, can a state have a conscience? You know, what is the well, Will the White House have a conscience? I wonder. I wonder. So my feeling is that the Chinese government, the Communist Party, is interested in national greatness, and it will achieve it by hook or by crossing crook. That is its intention. And I think this desire for national greatness, this desire for national respect, is precisely the impediment for China actually achieving everything that it wants to achieve out of international recognition. That top leader Xi Jinping has this raw desire that he has almost on his sleeve, that he wears almost on his sleeve, that he wants broader relationships, recognition, that he wants to be seen as a peer of the United States. And it is exactly this tendency in which China is just, I think, a little bit too scary that is going to Block greater international recognition for a lot of what Beijing really seeks to achieve. And just to be explicit about what I believe about the future of China, my view is that China will not supersede the United States as the overall superpower in every respect over the next few decades. The United States is a financial superpower, it is a cultural superpower, it is a diplomatic superpower in addition to a military superpower and so on. China will never be a financial superpower because the engineers are in charge of the financial system with very strict sense of capital controls. And that makes investors uncomfortable. If you can't be confident you can get the money out, maybe you don't want to put the money in. And so the engineering state is exactly the impediment to China becoming much more of a financial superpower. They're much more censorious. And so we can go on and on about all the ways in which the engineering state has all of these self limiting features. But I think that the engineering state is also very well set up to do one big thing that is to do very, very well on advanced manufacturing, on technology, on many aspects of science as well, such that I expect that China's share of over manufacturing capacity in the world I think will continue going up over the next decade. Going up from a very high base. China right now has about one third of the world's manufacturing base. My expectation is that it will hold on to net share and probably go up over the next decade because it has built so many of these competences.

[Jake Sullivan]

It's interesting, you actually wrote a piece in Foreign affairs called the Real China Model, which I think is an intriguing description. And a key point you make in that piece is that the real China model is isn't bureaucrats picking winners, it's about the state building out what I think you call the deep infrastructure that's required to do what you just said to drive frontier industries at scale, to not just be satisfied at current global market share, but to grow it over time in these manufacturing areas. Can you tell us about that? And you put a particular emphasis on electrification as kind of core to their ability to achieve this. You just gave some eye popping statistics earlier about what China's doing compared to what the US is doing. So can you just walk us through how you see this playing out over time?

[Dan Wang]

I want to present three caricatures, three straw men about how most of us see China. So you know, how did China get to its technological sophistication? I think there's a variant of the argument that China got there Essentially through IP theft. There's another variant, variant of the argument that it's all through industrial subsidies. So either it's stealing or it's cheating. There's another variant in which I think this is more the European variant that essentially the Communist Party is just one big meaty. The Japanese MITI Central Planning Agency that picked all these sorts of winners and defeated America in some industries over some time periods. And I think all three of these, these are valid. China does engage in quite a substantial amounts of IP theft. The industrial subsidies are breathtaking. There is an central planning element to a lot of what the Communist Party does. In addition to these, I would argue that there are many other components that are just as important. China has super functional infrastructure. The rail lines are next to the ports. Very straightforward stuff that somehow often the United States is not really able to achieve. They're building so much electrical capacity. In the year 2000, China had about one third the level of electrical power generation that the United States had over the last 25 years. The United States basically did not build very much new electrical power. It's gone up basically a tick over the same time period. China started at 1/3 US levels. Now it's 2 1/2 times US levels. So they just have so much more electrical power driving down the costs. There's another element in which I think China is by many measures the most competitive market in the world. So, you know, we take a look at their electric vehicle makers. They have dozens of EV makers. They have dozens of solar photovoltaic makers. It takes about five years for a Detroit automaker to dream up a new car model and actually release it onto the streets. It takes about 18 months for Chinese automakers to do the same thing. Now, did the Shenzhen Beijing automakers come over to Detroit and hypnotize American automakers into moving slowly? No. They are much more competitive. They have access to very dense labor ecosystems. China has about 70 million manufacturing workers. The United States has about 12 million manufacturing workers. You can throw a rock in Shenzhen and hit a factory manager or a line engineer or a component supplier that can give you all of these amazing components really, really quickly. And what that allows China to do is. We had Sam d' Amico here earlier in this conference talking about the electric tech stack. Sam has done really excellent work thinking about how everything is now a smart contract. So what is now an electric vehicle? It's kind of a smartphone on tires. What is now a drone. It's kind of a smartphone with a propeller. And it is not an accident. That Shenzhen, which has been still making the majority of the world's smartphones, with all of that labor, with all of that managerial expertise being flown in from Cupertino, they're not just building all the smartphones, they're creating all of the follow on innovations, the drones, the EV batteries as well as everything else. Such that when there's with this gas prices where they are right now, a lot of countries are asking whether they want to continue buying gas from the United States as well as the Middle east, or maybe they should buy some batteries as well as solar from China as well as. Let's throw in some EVs from China as well. And China is positioned really to supply a lot of these different goods as well as invent all sorts of goods at the United States, United States needs through the electric tech stack.

[John Finer]

Dan, you've mentioned Xi Jinping a number of times in the course of this conversation and I guess I'm just wondering that in the midst of a, of a third term with no end in sight and a decision making process, if you want to call it that, that is increasingly personalized, centralized in one individual, is China still an engineering state in the way that you described, or is it evolving into something more sinister or at least something different from that?

[Dan Wang]

Yes, I think that China will be both sinister as well as engineering for some time to come. So in Xi's third term, he brought in a couple of people within the Politburo who have actually ran very big megaprojects. So the head of the crewed space program became the party secretary of Zhejianjian, which is one of the richest and most industrialized provinces in China. One of the major people who ran the weapons industry was also brought into the Politburo. This is like appointing the chief of Anduril or Lockheed into Department of Defense or something. So that is something that they have brought people who ran megaprojects into the Politburo in a big way. And I think that Xi has all of these obvious authoritarian tendencies that will not go away. And one of the big challenges I see with China going forward is that I think that authoritarian systems cannot manage succession. It's simply an unsolvable problem for them. My expectation is that in the party congress next year, top leadership will, will probably not designate a successor. He would be in power for four terms and maybe in his fifth term he will designate a successor within the Standing Committee of the Politburo. But I'm also very sure that person will never make it to the top of being General Secretary. So I think that Xi is aware of the succession issue, but he cannot possibly designate a rival center of power. It never works in these sort of systems. And he is just hoping that somehow China wins over in his lifespan. And Xi is not terribly old. He's 72 years old right now. Our current president is substantially older. In 10 more years, Xi would be old enough to run for US President. So he has a bit of a punch, but he seems to be in good health. And I would point out that a lot of these Communist Party leaders have been able to hang on to, you know, they substantially outlive their actuarial tables. So Deng Xiaoping, I think was alive into his 90s. One of the big Communist Party elders died two months ago, Song Ping. His age was I think like 108. And so, you know, you, you, you don't want to expect to live to 108, but for, for only 72, Xi is not terribly old yet.

[Jake Sullivan]

A lot of these attention authoritarian guys live a very long time. It's interesting, I wonder if you know, that's, that's one of the, the kind of prescriptions a doctor could give you is find a fiefdom and run it. So just one more question down this track of Xi Jinping's leadership and how he conducts himself. A lot of corruption investigations, a lot of high level purges. Does that kind of activity within the Chinese Communist Party, no one feeling quite secure in their position. A lot of top folks kind of taken out as she has moved forward over the time as leader. Is that eroding the capacity of the engineering state? Is it refreshing the capacity of the engineering state? How do you look at this whole issue of his anti corruption campaigns in the context of his capacity to achieve his objectives?

[Dan Wang]

If you want to improve morale, it's probably not a good idea to annihilate High Commission man, which is what Xi has done to the Central Military Commission. Right now there are 21 members of the Politburo. Normally the number is 25, but he's removed one seat as well as three actual people, I wonder. Within the Central committee of around 400 people, within the politburo of around 20 people and the standing committee of seven people. How many people actually feel confident where they stand with Xi? And that substantially erodes how they think about how people interact with him. But I haven't met the guy. You two have. Tell us what you think about how these authoritarian systems are going to be managing things.

[Jake Sullivan]

You know, what's interesting about him from my perspective is that he combines a certain Rigid authoritarianism, a Leninism with some of the skill sets of Western politicians, a certain charm and ease and a presentation before the cameras, but also behind closed doors that remind you much more of an American politician than previous Chinese leaders have. And I think it's that combination, for me, that is distinctive about Xi Jinping. I also think the other thing, he's got this studied nonchalance like always. Everything just seems to roll off his back. But you could see behind it, his mind is constantly, constantly racing. But this makes him, I think, a unique kind of figure and such a massive difference from Hu Jintao, who we also dealt with during the Obama administration. But I think your point. I also met with Zhang Yusha, who was the vice chair of the Central Military Commission, who when I met with him, seemed very confident in his position and not too long later was purged by Xi. I think your analysis that basically everybody feels just deeply uncomfortable is correct. And that at some level, at some basic human level, has got to take a toll on the ability of the state to be able to execute against its objectives.

[Dan Wang]

He's fooled a lot of people. The guy looks just like Winnie the Pooh.

[Jake Sullivan]

I would just say that he is prepared to set aside speaking notes, is prepared to make observations about the world that are personal, that are not kind of just in the flow of whatever the rigid Communist Party talking points are supposed to be. And when he would talk with President Biden, one thing that he would studiously do is go back to previous conversations they had had about their fathers, about their families, and inject that into the conversation. Now, that was pretty transparent to an American politician. Okay, we've seen that tried and true method, method before, but I found it unusual for a Chinese leader like that to operate in that mode. And that's a skill. That's not to say praise to him that, oh, he's a good guy, but he is good at something that enables him to. Has enabled him to consolidate and sustain power in the way that he has.

[John Finer]

I want to go back to the book for a second. You've, I'm sure, consumed at least some of the many reviews and responses, responses that have been written. We talked about Jonathan Saenz earlier in this conversation. Have there been any critiques or commentary that caused you to rethink any of the core tenets of your book? Or has anything else happened since the book has come out that caused you to revisit any of the big ideas that you put out?

[Dan Wang]

Well, the trade war happened. And I would say that for the most part, that was an intensification of my thesis rather than of revision that President Trump last year over Liberation Day issued these tariffs. Tariffs are, I consider, a legalism in a way to confront China. How did Xi Jinping respond? Not by filing a super clever lawsuit in the WTO or any court. He asserted control over rare earth magnets, which was a substantial part of, of what made President Trump back down. Auto plants had to suspend production because we lacked for these magnet parts. And so this is where the engineering state, by virtue of controlling so many different inputs, is able to sort of veto a lot of pretty major decisions that the United States takes against China. And I am still struck by some of the restraints drained by Beijing because rare earth magnets is far from China's only choke point. We can take a look at all sorts of electronics products, battery materials, active pharmaceutical ingredients. I know that Rashidoshi here is doing some active thinking here. How well do we really understand the extent to which China is controlling all sorts of really important inputs? My sense is that they China makes a lot of ibuprofen, cardiovascular drugs. Who's going to be happy if, you know, the United States doesn't have ibuprofen, only RFK Jr. I expect. But you know, if you expect them

[John Finer]

to use that choke point or that category of choke point against the United

[Dan Wang]

States, I expect them to know about that choke point and, you know, have that ready in place if they wanted to, to deny things like cardiovascular drugs to America's elderly. And so, you know, I wonder how much the United States government organizations, companies really understand. If China cuts off, let's say 30% of cardiovascular drugs. Can we source really quickly from India? Can we source really quickly from Indiana? Is that even possible? Or are we in a bit of a pickle like we were with rare earths? That is an element of a lot of what they have been able to do. I am heartened in some ways that the United States is re industrializing. There's certainly intent to re industrialize. My sense of the numbers is that we're not in a stealth manufacturing boom. We have, you know, IP production has been significantly harmed by tariffs. The United States has cost about 100,000 manufacturing workers. That's a lot of engineering knowledge that we need, that we need to grow instead that we're losing. Maybe we are getting some really innovative policy fixes through, let's say offtake agreements with rare earth magnets as well as the minerals. So there is some creativity here. But I'm not sure that we're seeing the emergence of an engineering state with American characteristics, whether that can really overcome all of America's deficiencies.

[Jake Sullivan]

It's interesting. Your reference to the trade war reminded me of something else that you said more recently, which is that the US China competition is actually going to be decided by who I think you said wins by losing less, meaning you see both sides as making unforced errors driven by some combination of hubris or politics or other considerations. You've specifically called out this trade war. However, I'm curious. Let's say you got called into the Oval Office to talk to President Trump and his team and they asked you, Dan, what are three things we could do right now to actually become an engineering state with American characteristics, actually solve our challenges in this regard? What would you say to President Trump?

[Dan Wang]

I think one of America's great assets is being attractive to many of the most ambitious people in the world. I think that it is really clear that the most ambitious people in the world are not chomping at the bit to move to China. They're not chomping at the bit to move to much of Europe. The most ambitious people, including many of the most ambitious Chinese, really want to move to the United States. And I think that we should not block the them. I think that the United States is industrializing substantially through Taiwanese engineers building the fab in Phoenix, Arizona. That there are a lot of Korean engineers building electric vehicle batteries facilities in the United States. And if these facilities stand up, that creates the self sustaining ecosystem to train many local workers as well as people to build critical technologies. Instead we have the jerking around of the visa policies of H1BS as well as last year deportation of 300 South Korean engineers out of Georgia in chains. And so that's a simple way in which let's stop punching ourselves in the face. That would be great. There's all sorts of ways in which I think that the tariffs are hurting manufacturers. This is what manufacturers universally talk about. There's ways in which the United States could electrify more quickly if President Trump did not have a personal peccadillo against wind turbines in particular, he's tweeted them in all caps as scam of the century. Now, they don't seem like a giant scam to me, but there's all sorts of ways in which I think we are hobbling ourselves. And then I know this is a little bit more controversial, but I would encourage greater Chinese investment into the United States. That in the U.S. history, what we saw was that Detroit automakers were not doing terribly well throughout the 1970s and 1980s. What gave them a pretty serious boost was Japanese automakers building in all sorts of American states that made American products more competitive. And in general, I think, think that we can have some degree of protection. But in general, competition increases product quality, reduces price, and more competition is in general a good thing. And that my high level takeaway is that I think that the United States has nothing to lose by acknowledging that China has substantially overcome a lot of its deficiencies, such that it is ahead of the United States in all sorts of ways in all sorts of industries. And China has written, I think, a pretty good playbook for how to industrialize in the 21st century that includes all of the things that I mentioned above. Electrification, infrastructure, government support, and very crucially inviting in foreign companies that the Communist Party swallowed its pride in the 1990s to invite in companies like Walmart and then Apple as well as Tesla to build very big facilities in China trained a lot of its workers to be at the cutting edge. And I say, you know, if the Chinese did force technology transfer to us, why don't we do it back to them? I'm Mitch, first two time indwisl champion, championship MVP and forward for the US Women's National Team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology, which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that costs. In my podcast, Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology, mindset, and unseen battles on the path to greatness. So take a seat and learn from the Confessions of an elite athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. So we are 250 years into this American experiment and I'd say it's going okay.

[Jake Sullivan]

I give us like a C. There is no perfect past, but there is

[Dan Wang]

also no exclusively negative past, because humans are gonna human.

[Jake Sullivan]

That's what we do. I think the story of America is

[Dan Wang]

the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of America

[Jake Sullivan]

to expand those principles to include more people.

[Dan Wang]

What's gonna determine the next 250 years of America?

[John Finer]

And how do we write a new

[Jake Sullivan]

social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve?

[John Finer]

Okay, so I'm just gonna be a

[Jake Sullivan]

jerk here because I'm a historian. So we have to have a prologue

[Dan Wang]

explaining, you know, we the people.

[Jake Sullivan]

Oh, okay.

[Dan Wang]

You know, I do still remember it from Schoolhouse Rock. We the people in order to form

[John Finer]

a war, Perfect union Establish justice.

[Jake Sullivan]

What is it? Ensure domestic tranquility.

[Dan Wang]

So you're talking about a foundational document. So I'm building a document that will protect American democracy. That's this week on America Acts for League.

[Jake Sullivan]

Hey, I'm Matt Buchel, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYI ip. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, Don't Swipe away. It's called that sounds like a lot. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world and then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. That sounds like a lot. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network,

[Dan Wang]

Elon Musk spent most of this week sitting in a courtroom litigating some of the most important moments in the early history of the AI revolution. He didn't do a great job. And the ways in which he didn't do a great job may come back to haunt Elon Musk in a pretty big way. This week on the Vergecast, we're talking about what's going on in Musk vs OpenAI and how it might affect the rest of the tech industry. Plus the most exciting laptop we've seen in a while and maybe the most exciting game controller we've seen in a while. All that on the Vergecast. Wherever you get podcasts,

[John Finer]

can you say a little more about how that could work? Because obviously the Chinese will not be oblivious to the strategy they employed to extract things from our efforts to invest in in China. And just because this is likely to be, it seems like a major issue in the various summits that will take place this year between President Trump and President Xi. Can you just, just double click a bit on what constraints how you would try to shape Chinese investment in the United States to maximum advantage for us the way China seems to have for it in an earlier period.

[Dan Wang]

First, overcoming the objections of various governors, whether Republican or Democratic, against some of the Chinese factories. If we can overcome that, I would say that I think that we should welcome these sort of investment in American manufacturing hubs. I understand that there is an IP issue and we don't want some security officers that are kicking around in Ohio or Michigan, but I think I take it as a sign of a lack of confidence in American capabilities to just block a lot of these people in because it seems to me like we have a pretty effective security apparatus, namely the FBI, that should be able to govern, govern a lot of these potential nefarious actors. I think that our FBI ought to be competent enough to figure out who is nefarious here. And I think that Beijing might not want a lot of direct technology transfer to flow to the United States. But I think that this formal technology transfer schema is probably overstated as a way in which technology moves. I think that if Chinese managers come over to the United States and simply train workers on how to work with different battery parts, how to have leading practices, how to use these machines a little bit better, a lot of technology transfer is simply managerial expertise as well as practice and keeping this knowledge alive. I think that that will be the bigger vector of actual technology transfer that doesn't require the say so from Beijing that it's able to bl.

[Jake Sullivan]

You know, one thing that I've really been struck over the course of time that you've been opining on these issues is that you really drive this point that the US has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of technological dominance, that really we fixated on this, quote, mythical moment of creation, as you put it, basically the blueprints, the patents, the software code, and that what really sustains technological power is process knowledge. And that's really what you've been talking about about here. How does the United States recapture process knowledge for things like manufacturing electric vehicles or drones or batteries at scale and at a cost effective price point? So you think that if, in fact the United States invited in a substantial amount of Chinese investment in these various areas, we could restore that process knowledge in those areas? Are there other things that you would recommend that we do on this process knowledge question? Is there a pathway to building that to the point where, in fact, the United States has the kind of industrial base that is diversified and resilient and capable of actually competing effectively?

[Dan Wang]

Yes. So to be a little bit more concrete about what process knowledge means, technology is, let's be clear, three different things. It's the tooling. This is in a kitchen analogy, this is the pots, pans, and the stove to actually cook something. Second part of technology is direct instruction. So these are patents, blueprints, anything that could be written down that could be passed around. And then the third part of technology is everything that is unwritten. This is process knowledge. This is all the knowledge that lives in our heads and in our fingers of how to actually do things. And all of us know in our daily jobs, we try to write a memoir for an intern or for our favorite LLM to do our jobs. There's all sorts of subtleties that there's no way that any of us can actually convey. And my view is that technology ultimately is people. That technology ultimately is people who are practicing all the time about how to figure out how to make a better product, how to make a new product. All of these factory engineers in Shenzhen are solving three new problems a day before breakfast on how to make a better battery, how to make a better drone. They're not really thinking about what's going on in the mind of Xi Jinping, just as most of us in our day to day work, especially in the technology sector, don't necessarily have to pay attention to every tweet by the President. So I think that a lot of what knowledge is, is something that has to be maintained and practiced even for a test, just exist at our current levels. This is why I find it so disastrous that the United States has lost about 100,000 manufacturing workers. Once you close a factory, you lose all of this factory design expertise. A lot of workers start forgetting their knowledge. The United States has this is especially forgetful that we've lost all sorts of knowledge because of these retired nuclear engineers simply went out to pasture and then. And we forgot to build a whole lot of things because a bunch of people have retired.

[Jake Sullivan]

You have an amazing example on this in your book about these nuclear engineers and how literally we couldn't figure out what to do with a pretty old technology because all the engineers had retired.

[Dan Wang]

There's a classified material called fog bank, which is necessary for the detonation of a fission bomb. And we forgot how to make it. We didn't know how to make it anymore after a bunch of people retired. There's a GAO report about this. And then I think the Department of Energy had to spend something like $50 million to dust off the blueprints and then just read it and then figure out how to make all of these things again. And so the blueprints don't really matter. At a first approximation, let's say that we had all of the blueprints in the world of how to build a TSMC fab, how to build a Boeing aircraft, and we gave hundreds of billions of dollars to everyone in this room. I do not believe that we are able to build a commercial aircraft within a couple of years. I don't believe that we can stand up a TSMC FAB if we had all of the written secrets. So all of this is about knowledge that needs to be cultivated and so we need to cultivate that knowledge and not forget all of it it and then value the workers and not just be so focused on the shiny tools.

[John Finer]

So, Dan, you've moved back to the United States. And so to turn the conversation again back to the United States a bit, another of your observations about the lawyerly society is that lawyers are afforded a license in America, not a literal license, but a permission structure to opine on just about anything, to work in almost any field, to make policy in almost any area, and that there are problematic aspects of that. What's interesting to me about the current administration is that that maybe seems less the case than it's ever been, at least in recent history. And instead, we arguably have technologists who are given a permission structure to opine on things, make policy in areas, whether or not it's the core of their expertise. And I guess I'm wondering whether you think that is better, worse, or similarly problematic.

[Dan Wang]

I would still situate Donald Trump as a product of the lawyerly society rather than the antithesis. So, first of all, we cannot understand Donald Trump's many decades in business without seeing how central lawsuits are to his business career. This man has sued everyone. He has sued his former business partner, the New York Times, the BBC, his political opponents, trained by, was it Roy Cohn in this lawfare space? So, you know, he is quite lawyerly flinging accusations left and right, trying to establish guilt in the court of public opinion. I think that Donald Trump is still more lawyerly than not. And, you know, if we are, if the three of us are still speaking in our capacity, capacity as officers and representatives of the Yale Law School, well, we still got our guy in the White House. His name is J.D. vance. So the Trump administration still feels pretty lawyerly to me. Now, there was a moment in which Elon Musk, as well as there's a team of technologists that about a year ago try to shake up the US Government and try to do more from a technology to achieve more. And for the most part, that has not worked, maybe not for almost any part has that turned out very well as a shakeup of the federal bureaucracy. And I think that it was a little bit tragic that Elon Musk decided to take a chainsaw to the federal government in order to cut jobs, as if payroll is the biggest expense of the federal government. And I think that it is, is very, very different from engineers in the past when we had folks like Vannevar Bush or Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear Navy, or Robert Moses, actually go into government to build. What we had were technologists who entered government to destroy. And that was a very strange thing to me. And what I would much rather see are technologists who go into the government to actually build these big projects on behalf of the people, on behalf of national security, to achieve something that more Americans can be proud of.

[Jake Sullivan]

In your most recent annual letter, you were pretty hard on Silicon Valley on technologists. I think you used the phrase soft Leninism that the tech elite has adopted a form of soft Leninism. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that? Yeah.

[Dan Wang]

My opening thought here is that after living for six years in China and now being in Silicon Valley, one similarity between Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party is that both places are serious self serious, and indeed completely humorless. Who is the funniest tech founder today now? Elon Musk believes he is funny. But do the rest of us? I'm not sure. It is really difficult to find people who are not PO faced in Silicon Valley when they discuss AI. It is really difficult to to or not what faced PO faced that they're just a little bit too self serious about all of these sort of things. And I think the register in terms of speaking between both Silicon Valley founders as well as Communist Party officials is that they fluctuate between these super mundane boring corporate speak or this apocalyptic register that AI is going to make our unemployment rates shoot to 25%. This is Dario's remark on 60 Minutes as well. Or this is either going to take our jobs, but there's also a chance that it's going to kill us all. This does not feel like an especially appealing sales pitch to me, but this is kind of the normal register that a lot of these AI funders talk about things. And so both the Communist Party as well as Silicon Valley have a little bit of this image problem, communication problem. Perhaps we can say now they are very intent on inventing the future. And so the soft Leninism comes in that I think there is seriousness between both the Communist Party as well as Silicon Valley. They have built a lot of successful projects and they can't communicate very well to the rest of the world. Maybe what they do is fundamentally objectionable in all of sorts, sorts of ways. And they also tend to kind of just fall in line when the political winds shift. And I think the Silicon Valley from both the founders as well as many of the rank and file said, oh well, in the Biden administration we have to care much more about these equity issues. Okay, we'll do that. Oh, that administration is out of office. Okay, so let's ignore all of these things now. And so there is kind of a bit of a sense that everybody sort of falls in line depending on the political weight, wins at the top.

[John Finer]

So, Dan, this has been a very insightful conversation and we're grateful for it. Maybe we can end on a slightly lighter note in the last minute or two that we've got left. You've noted that Silicon Valley tech elites and the Chinese Communist Party share one key trait. They are both, in your phrase, completely humorless and entirely self serious, which you just alluded to. Wondering who you'd rather have dinner with a top tier tech leader or a Politburo member and who would make the better joke about lawyers in that conversation.

[Dan Wang]

Can we grab drinks later? If I could spend some real time with a member of the Politburo. It's not going to be fun. It's not going to be fun, but it might well be interesting. And I think that this is something that all of us ought to aspire to to how many people in the United States have spent serious time with a sitting member of the Politburo today? How many people actually have a pretty keen sense of what they're thinking about? Their hopes for their kids, their anxieties, what they really think about For China, maybe not very many. And so this is where I hope that it would be great if know their system understood ours and our system understood theirs quite a lot better.

[Jake Sullivan]

That's a great way to end this. Dan, we are so grateful to you for spending the time with us. Thank you for navigating us effectively through our first ever live show. Thanks to the audience and let's give it up for Dan Wang.

[Dan Wang]

Thank you very much.

[Jake Sullivan]

So, John, it's a couple days later. We've just come down off the high of our first ever live show. It's very exciting.

[John Finer]

I'm not quite down yet. Maybe you are. I'm still riding the wave.

[Jake Sullivan]

What did you make of what Dan had to say now that you've had a chance to reflect?

[John Finer]

I was pretty impressed by the degree to which he is both a fluent analyst of two very different cultures, strategic cultures, industrial cultures, and also someone who is able to be, I think, a clear eyed critic of, of the advantages and disadvantages that both sides in this competition bring to bear without revealing obvious biases one way or the other. So I was, I was pretty impressed by that and felt like he gave us a lot to think about. Obviously, as people who have been on one side of this Competition about where our side needs to up its game a bit.

[Jake Sullivan]

You know, as I was reading Breakneck and then listening to him, I was reminded of the first time I was in the President's daily brief with President Obama. This was in the Oval office back in 2013. I had just become the National Security Adviser to Vice President Biden, and in the room was Barack Obama, the President of the United States. Lawyer Joe Biden, Vice President Lawyer Tom Donilon, National Security Advisor Lawyer Tony Blinken, Deputy National Security Advisor. Lawyer Lisa Monaco, Homeland security advisor, lawyer me, lawyer. And Dennis McDonough, who is not a lawyer, the chief of Staff, but was the most lawyerly person in the room by a mile, as I've told him before. And so it did hit home pretty hard. And you mentioned at the beginning of the episode that we're both Yale Law graduates. He himself has operated in the Yale Law ecosystem, as we discussed on the episode. So all of this hit home. And I thought what he said basically about proceduralism, about caution, about the vitacracy, these are all things you and I experienced in government as we were trying to make progress on industrial strategy, on supply chain resilience, on a lot of national security things, not to mention, of course, an issue that has come very much in the news, our defense industrial base and our ability to produce munitions at speed and scale. And I think America as a country that cannot build as rapidly or comprehensively as we need to, we felt and saw in so many ways. I guess if I were to say one thing, I walked away still having a real question about. It's something you posed to him about how actually in this administration, it's really the technologists, not the lawyers who are at the center of the policy conversation. And technologists, like lawyers, think they know everything about everything. And I kind of wanted to hear more from him about a world in which Silicon Valley has its hand on the tiller to a greater extent than, say, New Haven, Connecticut, and felt he gave, as he always does, a judicious and interesting answer. But that to me is a big question. And particularly in the age of AI, I think it's increasingly going to be a question. And I was not satisfied with him saying, well, that's still very lawyerly in its own way, because I don't think it quite captures the difference in mindset and zeitgeist in Washington, D.C. as a result of one group, I think, having a much more dominant position than the other.

[John Finer]

Yeah. He also sort of said Trump likes to sue people he learned from at the foot of Roy Cohn it was a good answer, but I think you're right that we still have have a lot to learn and the jury is still out on how well that the technologists are going to do in lieu of lawyers in this administration. And probably hard to imagine an administration in which lawyers have had less power and been more pushed around than in the current Trump administration, right up to and including the firing of the Attorney general, who was favorably inclined towards almost everything the President wanted to do and still couldn't manage to survive, had much more than a year of this administration. I'll tell you the other thing that I've been thinking about, which is what makes a successful and impactful book. I've not written a book. You're in the process of doing so. But what was interesting to me about Breakneck is it both had one big simple idea, society of engineers versus a society of lawyers. But also so much nuanced and detailed and narrative and anecdotal analysis that flowed beneath that. But actually, I think both were kind of the key to the success of that book. When I mentioned to people who obviously haven't heard the podcast yet that we had just interviewed Dan Wong, almost everybody could immediately say, oh yeah, engineers versus lawyers. And half the time I was like, well, did you read the book? About half the time they said no, they hadn't read the book, but they were aware that it had this one big impactful idea. So I think that made a big difference for him. But also being able to bring the goods analytically behind it was that it was not just.

[Jake Sullivan]

Yeah, sloganeering or kind of a. A simple heuristic. Yeah, the. I guess I will sum up my view on this entire conversation by paraphrasing another question you asked, which is kind of how I think about this whole issue at this point, and that is how do you produce Robert Moses outcomes without Robert Moses as trail of destruction? Is that really viable? Or is the idea of shifting back to building at speed and scale almost necessarily based on the premise that you're going to have to cut through low income neighborhoods, environmental regulations, someone's going to be a loser in a real way, and that's just part of the price tag of building? It certainly was in our country. It certainly has been in spades in China. And Dan Wong does a brilliant job of detailing that. But for me, the diagnosis part here is easier, the prescription part of how you actually achieve a greater degree of engineering outcomes without giving up on the protection of the rights of people, of the habitat of communities. That's a whole other thing. And I think that for me, I've not yet seen either in his project or in the Abundance Project, a particularly clear set of prescriptions for how to achieve that. I know it's not a mechanical formula or an algorithm, but to me, that really is where the rubber hits the road and where policymakers need to center the their attention.

[John Finer]

Yeah, it's funny. Urban renewal, which is the sort of euphemistic in some ways phrase that's been applied to that Robert Moses period and to the objectives that they pursued is I think come to be seen in the rearview mirror as something far different from that in retrospect and maybe even in real time in many places, including by the way, in New Haven, Connecticut. Not to bring everything back full circle, but that was a place that was in some ways is the cradle of not Robert Moses own work, but the processes and the building that was inspired by it and I think aged quite badly. And let's hope that this period of attempted reindustrialization in the United States and all of the policy work that flows from it is handled more responsibly this time and ultimately more durable and successful. Because it's a big ticket question that's not a particularly partisan one. They're Democrats and Republicans that are invested in this.

[Jake Sullivan]

Absolutely. And this is not just an economic policy or infrastructure policy or domestic policy question. It is absolutely a matter of national security. And you and I spent a lot of time over our four years in the NSC suite, in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room, on phones with cabinet secretaries and deputy secretaries talking about this set of issues, because our ability to do this effectively is a vital component to America's national security, to our resilience, to our competitiveness, to our ability to effectively lead in the 21st century. And so this is not just some curiosity of a book for us. This was kind of our lived experience and will be the lived experience of future National Security advisors and deputy National Security advisors. And so for our listeners, maybe some of them listened and thought, huh, this is kind of a detour. It certainly is not. This is right down the main highway of what is necessary to fortify America's competitive edge and the foundations of our national strength. Well, that's all for today. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Long Game.

[John Finer]

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions and [e-mail] and

[Jake Sullivan]

subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode. You can find us at [e-mail] the links are in the show Notes.