China's Quest to Engineer the Future | Dan Wang

In Episode 444 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/chinas-quest-to-engineer-the-future-dan-wang of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Dan Wang, author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, about his pioneering new framework that compares the U. S. and China not along ideological lines or modes of governance, but by state capacity and the propensity to build. According to Dan Wang, China is an "engineering state," focused on building big projects and diffusing technologies across its economy, while America is a "lawyerly society" that has become proficient at protecting what it has and obstructing progress in areas that are vital for its long-term prosperity. Kofinas and Wang compare each nation's leadership—staffed by engineers and mega-project managers in China and litigators and regulators in America—against each other and against each country's own history, and examine when and why the United States, in particular, went from being a country that excelled in constructing things to one more concerned with obstruction and safeguarding a comfortable way of life for the wealthiest and older segments of society. The second hour is devoted to a discussion about the failures and unintended consequences of China's engineering state, most notably the devastating human impact of its one-child and zero-COVID policies. They also explore the similarities between the American and Chinese people, the prospects for conflict between the two superpowers, and what policies the United States can implement to get back to building again—like reforming immigration, advancing clean energy development, permitting the buildout of more housing, and increasing funding for basic scientific research and development. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 10/06/2025

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens, to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Dan Wang, author of the fantastic new book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Dan is a writer and analyst whose work focuses on technology, industrial policy, and U.S.-China relations. He spent six years in China from 2017 to 2023, and is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover History Lab.

• 0:43Demetri Kofinas?

  We spend the first hour of our conversation today unpacking the central pioneering new framework that Dan puts forward in his book, one that compares the U.S. and China not along ideological lines or modes of governance, but by state capacity and the propensity to build. China, according to Dan, is an engineering state focused on building big projects and diffusing technologies across its economy, while America is a lawyerly society that has become proficient at protecting what it has and obstructing progress in areas that are vital for its long-term prosperity. We compare each nation's leadership, staffed by engineers and mega-project managers in China and litigators and regulators in America,

• 1:26Demetri Kofinas?

  against each other, and against each country's own history, and examine when and why the United States in particular went from being a country that excelled in constructing things, from bridges, railway systems, and airports, to one concerned more with obstruction and safeguarding a comfortable way of life for the wealthiest and older segments of society. The second hour is devoted to a discussion about the failures and unintended consequences of China's engineering state, most notably the devastating human impact of its one-child-and-zero-COVID policies. We also explore the similarities between the American and Chinese people, the prospect for conflict between the two superpowers, and what policies the United States can implement

• 2:10Demetri Kofinas?

  to get back to building again, like reforming immigration, advancing clean energy development, permitting the build-out of more housing, and increasing funding for basic scientific research and development.

• 2:22Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you.

• 3:07Demetri Kofinas?

  And with that, please enjoy this incredibly valuable and paradigm-shifting conversation with my guest, Dan Wang.

• 3:18Demetri Kofinas?

  Dan Wang, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  It's my pleasure to be here to meet you.

• 3:24Demetri Kofinas?

  It is my honor to have you on the show, Dan. You've written a very good, good is not the word. You've written a fantastic book. As I've already told you, because I sent you an email about it when I completed the book on Sunday or Saturday, whenever it was over the weekend, I completed the book and I sent you an email and I told you what I loved about it. And essentially, I'm going to just repeat this for the audience. I think it's rather interesting. So I had a sense of what I was getting into when I read the book because I had heard about it. This book actually went viral in my network before it was even out. So many people sent it to me. So many people told me about it. It was just one of those books. And so I knew I was going to read a book that put forward a new framing for thinking about the United States and China,

• 4:08Demetri Kofinas?

  which is this concept of an engineering state to describe China and a lawyerly society to describe the United States. And the way that you prosecuted that case, again, prosecuted isn't quite the word to describe how you wrote in this book. But the way that you made that case, the examples you put forward, the way you described that framework was very compelling. And that alone would have made this book worthy of being in the Financial Times Best Book of the Year list. But the last chapter really caught me off guard. It was not what I was expecting. And it felt kind of like, first of all, you spoke with a kind of laconic candor

• 4:49Demetri Kofinas?

  and a directness that kind of came out of nowhere and smacked me over the head. And it also felt like a call, in some sense, it felt like a call to greatness for the readers. It was, man, I don't want to say too much because I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I have to say, I felt inspired. I felt, I even got a little emotional reading the last chapter, to be honest, because I was like, this guy is speaking with such candor and putting words into what I think so many of us, at least in the great middle, feel. And I thought that was rare, man. I think usually people who write books like this, they're very intellectual and good on them. That's fine, but they're not willing to take that extra risk to speak from their heart. And I really felt like you spoke from your heart in this book. You know, it's not really a subject that you'd think someone would speak from their heart, but that's what it felt like to me.

• 5:33Demetri Kofinas?

  So just wanted to share that experience with my audience.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  That's really kind, and I like that you pick up on a little bit of my family story, a little bit of how, why I find thrilling and disappointing about the US. And so I'm really glad that someone read it as a piece of candor and as an important piece of work that I really try to provoke and motivate Americans to do a little bit better.

• 5:56Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, that immigrant family experience of yours is something that I can relate to. And I think it's a difficult time. The truth is, it's a difficult time in America. I mean, guys like you and me, we're successful, so we have other things to fall back on. But we are part of this community of people that came here. I mean, I was actually born here the year my parents immigrated, but for all intents and purposes, we were an immigrant family. We traveled across the United States, lived in different places every few years. And it's a difficult time in America today to be an immigrant. I don't know, I'm sure you saw that what happened recently with the South Korean skilled workers down in Georgia. I mean, this is, you know, it's scary stuff. It's also disappointing because so much of what makes America great are its immigrants, and it's a source of cultural and intellectual renewal.

• 6:41Demetri Kofinas?

  So I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk about that. But before we do, let's just talk a little bit about your story. You moved to the United States with your parents in the 1990s. I don't know exactly how old you were. You must have been kind of a pre-teen or something like that, maybe a young teenager. Tell me a little bit about your story.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  We moved when I was seven years old to Canada from southwestern China. So I'm from a region of China called Yunnan Province. Yunnan is very mountainous, very inaccessible. Its north is essentially historic Tibet and the south is feels pretty identical to Thailand with a lot of rainforest. I was born in the middle, the capital city of Kunming, which is kind of an economic backwater even now, and especially an economic backwater throughout the 1990s. Our first port of call was Toronto and I mostly grew up in the city of Ottawa. So I am still a Canadian, I'm still a Canadian citizen. And when I was 16 years old, we moved from Ottawa to the suburbs of Philadelphia.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  So my parents are still there now. Went to college in New York, upstate New York, the University of Rochester, where I studied philosophy. Wasn't a very good student. I ended up dropping out and working in the tech industry. After working in the tech industry for a little while, I thought that I'd heard about what was going on in China once again. And I thought that what was going on in China was terribly interesting. Silicon Valley then was making cryptocurrency, all sorts of consumer tech. We hadn't even gotten to B two B SaaS yet. It just wasn't even all that thrilling what was going on in California. I learned about this program called Made in China 2025, which was this big Beijing

• 8:23Speaker 01

  announcement to dominate 10 key industries of the future. I had coffee with my boss, Arthur Krober, who founded the firm Dragonomics. And I ended up spending six years living in China between 2017 to 2023, really feeling like I experienced a pretty momentous time. So over those six years, Donald Trump in his first administration, launched the trade war, something that quickly morphed into a tech war. This was a time when Xi Jinping's China had grown more technologically capable, at the same time, more repressive in all sorts of novel ways. I spent the entirety of zero COVID in China, when I felt like there were fewer and fewer foreigners actually still living there. And so it felt like a really important time to be writing about China.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  And then afterwards, I went to the Yale Law School to write this book.

• 9:12Demetri Kofinas?

  So how long were you working on the book?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think the proper answer to that question is thirty-three years, which is my age. But the actual mechanical process was spending most of a year thinking about what I wanted the idea to be, doing some broad research, coming up with a proposal, spending about the next nine months actually writing that. And then throughout this year, twenty twenty-five, actually finishing everything up and getting it out into the world.

• 9:41Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, by the way, the readers may have noticed kind of mix up there in your age and when you went to the US. I think I still haven't adjusted to people writing smart, interesting books about things that inform me who are younger than me. So somehow in my mind, even though I knew.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  It's happening to me, too.

• 9:57Demetri Kofinas?

  Even though I knew, I knew that if you had asked me, like, if I sat down, put pen to paper, and I'd known that it wasn't the early 90s that you moved to the United States from Toronto, but there you go. So here's another question, what inspired the framing of the book? And more to the point, like, was this a thesis that you developed through active inquiry? For example, like, did you end up in China and say, you know, I want to write a book. What's different about the US and China that people aren't getting? Or was it something that just was so obvious, the fact that China was an engineering state, that it just smacked you over the head? And maybe, maybe the lawyerly state was something that you had to think about a little bit more deeply.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was a mix of personal experience and taking these ideas that were out in the air, so to speak. So people had picked up on the very salient fact that in two thousand and two, the Standing Committee of the Politburo, which is the highest ruling echelon of the Communist Party, all nine members of the Standing Committee had degrees in engineering in the year two thousand and two. And so people had already been discussing China as a country ruled by technocrats. I think it is also really obvious in America that lawyers run the show right here. Now, after spending quite a few years in China, when I was writing an annual letter out of it that was well circulated,

• 11:18Speaker 01

  after I'd already written for magazines that included The Atlantic and New York Magazine and Foreign Affairs, I knew I wanted to do something like. Book project. But what ended up happening was that I was invited by the Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center very generously to become a fellow and to actually write my book there. And so it felt actually a little bit too perfect moving from China, which we'd already thought of as being ruled by engineers into the Yale Law School, where it is really, really obvious that a lot of students are hyper ambitious. They're often very smart. They're very gracious in manners. But I think their defining characteristic is just tremendous ambition that they view a J D from Yale Law as the ticket to the White House,

• 12:03Speaker 01

  whether as a staffer or potentially even the president. And so, you know, just feeling this contrast from the country that had been prosecuting zero COVID, that had shifted a lot of young people away from consumer internet companies and financial companies into aviation and semiconductors. That the contrast was really, really striking between these two big countries.

• 12:24Demetri Kofinas?

  So let me actually take a quote from your book where you speak directly to this. You write, quote, "For his third term as the Communist Party's general secretary in 2022, Xi filled the Politburo with the execution of the country's aerospace and weapons ministries. In the United States, it would be as if the CEO of Boeing became the governor of Alaska, the chief of Lockheed Martin became the Secretary of Energy, and the head of NASA was governor of a state as large as Georgia. China's ruling elites have practical experience in managing mega projects, suggesting that China is doubling down engineers and prioritizing defense more than ever." That lot quote in the book, as well as a number of adjacent ones, really hit home for me, this difference.

• 13:09Demetri Kofinas?

  And I think also you wrote, what was it, like over 50% of people in Congress have law degrees and just like a handful have engineering degrees. Was this always the case in the United States? Or have we gone through periods where there were more people with engineering backgrounds who served in public office?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  I think the US has always been lawyerly, but the lawyers themselves have not always been this way. So if we take a look at a lot of the founding fathers, most of them were lawyers. People like John Adams, people like Thomas Jefferson, they were quite lawyerly. First 16 US presidents, from Washington to Lincoln, 13 of them were lawyers. Something like the Declaration of Independence really reads like the start of a litigation document. And you can trace through even to the present moment in which the Democratic Party is especially lawyerly. Now, every single nominee to be president between 1980 to 2024, most recently Kamala Harris among the Democrats, all of them had gone to law school.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  And so this difference is really, really stark. But I think it is also important to acknowledge that the US used to be an engineering state in a slightly lighter form itself. That between basically the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, now the United States was this vast, open space that had a lot of territory and that immigrants were streaming in, mostly from European countries. And there was this political consensus among the elites that people really needed to build up this vast territory. And so what we saw was the construction of big projects like canal systems and the railway

• 14:51Speaker 01

  systems and skyscrapers in Manhattan as well as Chicago. And in the 20th century, we had the Hoover Dam and the highway systems, Manhattan Project, Apollo missions. And so the US did a lot of the core engineering projects. And I think about 100 years ago, even the people who ran the New Deal on behalf of FDR, many of them were lawyers, but many of them were kind of Wall Street lawyers. They were creative deal-making types. They were working on behalf of robber barons to try to raise bonds for railways or using eminent domain to turf people out for the actual But a lot of these lawyers, a lot of the engineers, made a lot of pretty big mistakes in the US.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  So, you know, Robert Moses in New York ran through too many neighborhoods by putting highways through them. The US Department of Agriculture was spraying DDT absolutely everywhere. And that was also another disaster. And people got really tired of, you know, sort of this engineering, proto-engineering approach. And a lot of the lawyers changed in character in which they turned into litigators, they turned into regulators. And so I think what we're living through are the law schools built throughout the 1960s in which people were much more interested in constraining government and, you know, constraining businesses, all for good reasons. But right now, I think we need to fix the problems of today and not continue to litigate the problems of the 1960s.

• 16:18Demetri Kofinas?

  It's also interesting because that was largely driven by the progressive side of the Democratic Party. The progressive side was interested in constraining.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think the person I would say most responsible for driving this was Ralph Nader, who was really critical of the automotive companies in particular. And what he wanted to do was to be a watchdog of the US government, not to be actually working inside the government, but basically to try to hold it to account as he understood it. And I think what is really strange was that only a few years later, the folks like Ralph Nader sounded really a lot like Ronald Reagan, who said that government is the problem, not the solution. And so here there was this strange horseshoeing of Nader types and Reagan types altogether.

• 17:00Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah. So what was missing in the existing framework of, say, communist versus capitalist or authoritarian versus democratic liberal that was used to describe the distinctions between the United States and China, that you were looking to remedy with this book?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  I think that they are still somewhat valid, but my main thought was that. The US and China are locking horns. They're in conflict. They have some sort of frictions. And why are we still using these 19th century political science terms? Terms which have not always been very stable. You know, capitalism has changed in flavor throughout the last few years. Neoliberalism, whatever that means. You know, I think these are kind of just boring words that we shouldn't use to try to understand these two countries. That's one aspect of it. And another aspect of it is that I am growing more and more suspicious of this idea that China is some sort of a socialist utopia that is practicing communism. You know, fine, they call themselves a people's republic. They celebrate the major birthdays of Marx.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  There is a lot of state ownership of a lot of major industries. I grant that all of that has the aspects of socialism or capitalism or Marxism. But, you know, I also view China as one of the most right wing regimes in the world, in which there is basically a pretty threadbare social safety net. There's just not that much redistribution. There's not very much welfare from the rich to the poor in China. There's no property tax really in China. There's only the hints of something like a property tax. A lot of taxation in China is driven by consumption taxes, which means that it's relatively much more regressive, being paid more by the poor than the rich. The Chinese regime is very pro manufacturing, very anti immigrant.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Looks like the, you know, Eisenhower's America from the 1950s. And they're also enforcing these very traditional gender roles. And so, again, is China a left wing regime? Is it a right wing regime? This has become slightly less interesting for me to debate and litigate. It just doesn't feel like the most important question of the moment. And when I observe this idea that China tries to build another big mega project, another big dam or a big highway system or another super top bridge, which they just unveiled last week, you know, all of this seems like they are trying to engineer the environment. It seems like they're trying to engineer the economy as well by shuffling resources this way and that and changing incentives this way and that as well. And looking at the fact that they are social engineers who really firmly held on to zero

• 19:31Speaker 01

  COVID, as well as the one child policy, which the number is right there in the names of these policies. There's absolutely no ambiguity about what they mean. You know, I just thought it's fun and playful to be thinking about China as an engineering state and the US as a lawyerly society.

• 19:49Demetri Kofinas?

  So I want to spend some time drawing up these distinctions and fleshing them out. Is engineering in China an end in and of itself? Or if not, what is the end goal? What is the sort of motivating force? Is it to return China to its proper place in the world? Is it to build a world that is safe for the Chinese Communist Party? What would you say? And maybe it's all of those things, or none of those things, or you know, some other combination of things. But how would you describe what the goal is of these policies in an engineering state like China's?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  I think that a lot of what China is trying to achieve, and a lot of what Xi Jinping in particular is trying to achieve, is something that he and the rest of the Communist Party calls the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethno-state under the leadership of the Communist Party. I think they are very, very, very interested in holding on to power. And so this has to be led by the Communist Party. And where is the Communist Party leading people? Well, it is to return China into the centrality of the world's economy, a position that it held at various points over the last millennium, that China was the center of the world economy, that it is especially politically dominant in the rest of East Asia,

• 21:09Speaker 01

  as well as the Asian Pacific, that it would really like to be able to claim, as the Qianlong Emperor did to the British Embassy of McCartney, when the Qianlong Emperor said that we have no need of foreign trinkets, for we have enough technologies at home, that it would really like for the head of the state of, let's say, the Philippines, go to Beijing regularly and kowtow for the emperor's pleasure, and that it would like to be serenely untroubled by the turmoils of barbarians outside. So that whatever madness is happening in the US, the Chinese don't even have to care. That is how I understand a lot of what China is trying to achieve.

• 21:49Demetri Kofinas?

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

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that a lot of the Chinese believe, which is after guidance from Chinese elites for centuries, including the Communist Party, is that China is the civilized state and the rest of the world are to various shades of barbarians, that perhaps, you know, neighbors in East Asia are culturally a little bit more proximate to the Chinese in terms of Confucian heritage or whatever, and they are slightly less barbaric than much of the rest of the world, that they understood China to have been the center of the global economy for a few centuries over the last millennium, that China was able to make all of these

• 23:11Speaker 01

  great crafts, namely things like porcelain, or gunpowder, or silk that the rest of the world really wanted, and that the British really knocked down this wonderful system, mostly by cheating and by addicting a lot of Chinese into opiums. And I think, you know, this is kind of the centrality of the view that I would not say is necessarily the guiding ideology above all else in China, but I think there is a strain of Chinese elites, as well as some Chinese people, who really do believe that there is no particular reason for China not to be the dominant producer and the most sophisticated producer of absolutely all goods, as well as a great font of culture

• 23:56Speaker 01

  where that the rest of the world wants to learn from. And I think the Chinese have been very good students of history. They've studied how it is that America turned out to be great. They've studied the extensive failures of, let's say, two big countries in particular. The first is the Soviet Union, in which the communist system fell apart after it became really clear that they had a pretty dysfunctional economy. They've studied some of these financial crises of Japan, in which the Japanese economy more or less broke apart after the eighties, was never really able to recover after they had a real estate ablation and the economy never got back on its feet. And so they're studying these other failures. They study things that they determined to be politically successful institutions.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Something I find kind of tickling is that they spend a lot of time thinking about the Catholic Church, which has to motivate millions and hundreds of millions of members through this ideology with this figure that has had endurance for, say, about 2,000 years. And so they spend a lot of time studying others, and I wish that the Americans had spent almost as much energy trying to study the Chinese.

• 25:04Demetri Kofinas?

  So I remember reading something similar in Joseph Torigian's book about Xi Jinping and how he views the importance of the larger mission of the Chinese Communist Party, that there has to be something more than just material prosperity to bind the country together and to motivate it. One last question here before I ask you to flesh out some details around the engineering state, and that has to do with, again, trying to empathize or understand a society that's very different than ours. In America, we are living during the most selfish, individualistic period in the history of my lifetime in this country. I don't know if there's ever been a more selfish time. There probably hasn't been. It's a kind of malignant level of narcissism in this country.

• 25:47Demetri Kofinas?

  It's all about me, how do I make the system work for me, me, me, me. Consumerism is built around the individual. Everything is catered to you, the algorithms cater it to you. So we don't have this sort of larger sense of mission as a country, as something that unites us. And in fact, part of the problem in America today is that we are in the midst of a kind of civil war, where we hate each other more than we hate anyone else. And so out of that has yet to emerge a common sense of identity, or to refashion a common sense of identity. That doesn't seem to be the case in China. And I'm just curious, when you're in China, how much does that feeling that you're part of something

• 26:30Demetri Kofinas?

  great come across in the lived reality of every person day to day?

• 26:35Speaker 01

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

• 27:16Speaker 01

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

• 27:58Speaker 01

  of what the Leninists really try to do is to just organize society to be modernizing on its own terms. And I think there is also this turbocharging given by the Communist Party, in which I think the Communist Party could, you know, forgive and forget a lot of the problems of the imperialist past. So.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  I think that they don't have to be so necessarily so upset at the British over the Opium Wars, even though what the British did was pretty odious. But the British didn't, you know, end up, you know, toppling the Qing Empire. A lot of that was through domestic rebellions. And even though Japan initiated this horribly brutal invasion, fascist invasion of China throughout the 1930s and the 1940s, you know, the European countries have also had devastating wars between themselves and they managed to reconcile to each other in a way that the Chinese and perhaps the Japanese simply aren't very interested in. And so I feel like there is this narrative of victimhood, that China was the victim

• 29:00Speaker 01

  of foreign bullying, that the Communist Party cannot let go of, that cannot forget. And I feel like, you know, they are really nursing these wounds and nursing these grievances in a way that I think is not terribly healthy.

• 29:12Demetri Kofinas?

  Does any of that stem from the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was also an insurgency organization?

• 29:18Speaker 01

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

• 29:54Demetri Kofinas?

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

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I do listen much to the opera.

• 30:10Demetri Kofinas?

  I enjoy opera. I can't say that I'm some, you know, expert on it, though. No.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  I am very into the opera.

• 30:16Demetri Kofinas?

  It's on my Spotify list.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Very good. I spend a lot of time on the the western corner of Lincoln Center, namely where the Metropolitan Opera holds its performances. I'm very deep into the opera. Mostly, I spend some time listening to the German operas and some of the French operas, which are very grand. This is grand opera. This is Wagnerian, in which the gods decide between themselves. Enter Valhalla. And there is kind of this, you know, preposterous, absurd, and very theatrical pageantry to the Communist Party, in which it really feels like they are, you know, struggling for their lives and really trying to, you know, do well. And, you know, there is kind of this apocalyptic sense. And that's actually not my favorite part of opera.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  I find a lot of that actually pretty ridiculous. I find a lot of Wagner pretty ridiculous, though it has moments of great beauty. I'm much more into the Italian side of opera. I'm much more into opera buffa, which they call the funnies. I'm much more into the strain of Mozart that is represented through his Italian operas. I'm much more attracted to the comic operas of Rossini and Verdi and Bellini and Donizati. And so I just really wish that there is a little bit more sense of irony and a little bit less deadly seriousness among the Chinese state, which really trends towards the apocalyptic in a way that I find kind of off-putting, just as I find some of Wagner off-putting.

• 31:41Demetri Kofinas?

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

• 32:01Speaker 01

  I think that if you are a communist regime, there is this sense of life and death in every decision. There is the sense that this regime needs to struggle every single day for its survival. And that if something slips, if there's a big crisis, or there's even a small crisis that can really blow up. And this is again where the Chinese have spent a lot of time studying the failures of, namely, the Soviet Union, in which Gorbachev tried to initiate some political reforms within the Communist Party that ruled the Soviet Union. And that these reforms weren't very well controlled.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And pretty quickly, this led into all sorts of wider demands for democracy, and Gorbachev wasn't able to rein it in. They study failures like Chernobyl, in which when we refer to something like a Chernobyl moment, this refers to some sort of a natural disaster that triggers the political downfall of the regime. And so I think that for a lot of these communists, for a lot of these Leninist parties, they have to be on their guard every day. And they have to be on their guard three times a day before breakfast, making sure that none of these disasters really try to topple the regime. I feel like there is this sense from Silicon Valley. One of the major founding fathers of Silicon Valley was Andy Grove, who ran Intel for a few years.

• 33:26Speaker 01

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

• 33:38Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, you know, like this, when you you mentioned the importance of struggle, I was like frantically looking through my transcript from the episode that I had with Joseph Turegian, because that came up so often in his book and in that conversation, how important that is to the sense of identity within the Chinese Communist Party. Let's move now to, so we did, I think we've done a decent job of giving people a sort of basic idea of some of the cultural differences between China and the United States.

• 34:06Demetri Kofinas?

  Let's just talk about some of the material differences. Can you give our audience a sense of the scale of China's industrialization? For example, you open one of your chapters by vividly describing this five-day cycling journey you took with some friends, deep into one of China's southwestern provinces, as a way of showcasing what it's actually like to live in an engineering state. And I also found this just absolutely wild. Can you maybe recount some anecdotes from that particular story? And just give us a sense of what is it like to live in an engineering state, of which China, I think, is the most paradigmatic example?

• 34:42Speaker 01

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

• 35:12Demetri Kofinas?

  Question now, weren't you not supposed to leave? Like, what exactly were the lockdown policies in Shanghai at that time?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  At that time, in the summer, it wasn't so bad. This was a time when the zero COVID policies still worked pretty well to keep out the virus, that it was really difficult for anyone to travel inside China. Only Chinese citizens were allowed in, for the most part. And if you went into China, you had to stay in essentially the equivalent of a Days Inn or Best Western to just stay in a hotel room for 14 to 21 days, eating hotel food. You had to accept contact tracing apps pretty much everywhere. And if you were tested positive for the virus, the state was probably going to drag you off into a hospital or a convention center, so you don't infect many other people. And so in the summer of 2021, these did not feel too onerous.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And so people were able to travel between provinces, as I was. And so I took two friends to go to the province of Guizhou, which is in China's southwest, super mountainous, and very, very poor, China's fourth poorest province. And what I found there, over five days of cycling, was that Guizhou has remarkable levels of infrastructure. The roads there were often very new. It was kind of a cyclist's dream to cycle on through these highways, which were really, really excellent. Guizhou has about forty-five of the world's tallest bridges, not China's tallest bridges, but the world's tallest bridges. And Guizhou also has a lot of airports. And so, you know, two centuries ago, it would have taken weeks through really arduous travel

• 36:46Speaker 01

  to go from Shanghai to Guizhou. My friends and I took the high-speed rail and we got there within seven hours. And so it became really, really striking for me to contrast China's fourth poorest province with some of America's richest states. So Guizhou frankly has much better levels of infrastructure than California from where I'm speaking to you right now. It has much better levels of infrastructure than New York City, where I believe you are at this moment, right? And so I think that what is really striking is that California tried to start building high-speed rail about a decade ago. In 2008, voters delivered a referendum to say there should be high-speed rail connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. Construction began a couple of years later. And, you know, I highly doubt that anyone

• 37:30Speaker 01

  will be able to go on high-speed rail, you know, twenty years after the start of this referendum. About a month ago, I took the New York City Exela down to Washington DC to speak at the Abundance Conference. The train was fine, I guess. The Exela is okay. It is a little bit wobbly. On the train, I read a headline that we're going to get a new class of Exela. Exela is getting an upgrade. And it turns out, as I read the article, that the new Exela will be something like eleven minutes slower than the present Exela. And I find that really, really strange, that we're going to get better foam seats. But at a first approximation, we're moving slower than before. And that just seems some kind of tragic. And I'll just give one more train story, which is that I wrote this book substantially

• 38:14Speaker 01

  when I was a fellow at the Yale Law School in New Haven. New Haven is about two hours by train to New York City, to Grand Central through the Metro North trains. Metro North trains are really good. They're pretty reliable. They're a little bit slow. And I thought, I didn't mind too much until I came across a timetable. From nineteen fourteen, which I saw that it was slightly faster getting from New York City to New Haven about a hundred years ago. In part because they just make more stops today. But again, this is a failure of America in which we're not moving faster than a hundred years ago. And so, you know, it is really, really striking to go from big American airports like JFK into Asia where, you know, JFK really feels like this decrepit pit, which is really difficult to get in and out of.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Whereas in Asia, everything is clean, it's brightly lit, it's connected very well by subways. And I just wish that more Americans could have a little bit of this experience.

• 39:06Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, speaking to a cultural distinction, would you say also that in China, there's a more of a sense of like, optimism around problem solving than there is in America today?

• 39:18Speaker 01

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

• 39:41Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay, so let me be more specific. I've cited this article a number of times, but honestly, like at this point, I've cited it so many times that I wonder whether or not the memory itself has been polluted by personal feedback and doesn't necessarily accurately reflect the original article in The Atlantic that I read years ago. But I could swear that I read this article and it was about the period in the early twentieth century when there was a, we were on the verge of a food crisis in America. There were concerns about whether the food supply will be able to keep up with growth and population. And people were worried that we were going to run out of beef, we were going to run out of meat. And so someone in the government had this ingenious idea, or someone in the private sector working with the government, had this ingenious idea to import hippopotami.

• 40:27Demetri Kofinas?

  From Africa and breed them in Louisiana, in pins, in the swamps. Because there was also an analogous swamp problem in Louisiana. And so the idea was, let's combine these two. Let's solve the swamp problem by bringing in hippopotami. And simultaneously, we're going to generate all sorts of new supply of meat. And I remember when I read this, and I think also the author was making the point. This is why he brought it up as an example. It really highlighted a difference between the attitude at that time in America, which was like, we can do anything. There is no problem for which we cannot find a solution as a country. Versus now where it just feels like we're in this grip of declineism as a mentality. It's like, we can't do anything right. We suck.

• 41:12Demetri Kofinas?

  China's winning, we're losing. You know, much of which is mental. And that was really what I meant by my question.

• 41:19Speaker 01

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

• 42:02Speaker 01

  The city government has tried to revamp Van Ness Avenue to make it more bus friendly. And it's essentially spent about 20 years repainting the roads and redoing some of the underground road work and piping work in order to make this much more bus friendly. And just think about this contrast, you know, redoing the road in a little bit of a way versus the last century, building something as impressive as the Golden Gate Bridge. I certainly agree with you that there is the sense that, I don't know if people around me are saying China's winning, but there is definitely the sense that America can't do very much of anything at all. Whenever there's a construction project, whenever there's road works or subway works, a lot of things are covered up for a really, really, really long time, which the work simply cannot get done.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  And I think that is definitely a spirit of loss in America that, you know, it doesn't have the self-confidence or the ability to actually pull off grand projects anymore.

• 42:54Demetri Kofinas?

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

• 43:17Speaker 01

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

• 43:55Demetri Kofinas?

  Right.

• 43:55Speaker 01

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

• 44:01Demetri Kofinas?

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

• 44:46Demetri Kofinas?

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

• 45:17Speaker 01

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

• 45:57Speaker 01

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

• 46:14Demetri Kofinas?

  so-called environmentalists- It can require eminent domain laws as well. That's an important point.

• 46:18Speaker 01

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

• 46:39Demetri Kofinas?

  So Dan, I'm going to move us to the second hour. Here's where I want to focus on ways of both reversing the decline in the United States, as well as things that you think the Chinese state can do better. Because we, we've spent quite a bit of time here, I think, talking rather enviously about what China has accomplished. But of course, the engineering state comes with many downsides because engineering doesn't stop at the physical door. It also moves into social engineering and China has done quite a bit. And you speak masterfully in this book, especially in the chapter having to do with the one-child policy. I mean, that was an incredible chapter, seeing how that mentality of trying to put order, like just this obsessiveness with order and ordering and linear thinking, the

• 47:24Demetri Kofinas?

  devastating effect it had, not just on the, the larger demographic statistics of China, that impact- It's prospects today, but on the individual lives of human beings and people. And you're also a product of that, right? I mean, you were born in China during the one child policy. Your, your parents couldn't have another child. I mean, I, I didn't even know, for example, that, that there were so many Chinese girls that were sent to the United States and other countries to be adopted because parents wanted to have a boy. I mean, I knew about some of the other horrible, and again, you write about it really incredibly in the book. So I want to talk about some of those unintended consequences that, that stem from social engineering. I want to talk about how we reverse the decline. And I also have some other more philosophical questions, you know, one of which is like,

• 48:10Demetri Kofinas?

  for me at least, and this is a question I ask myself often. And I think I actually asked this of Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell in their recent appearance on the podcast, which is what exactly is worth saving in America today? You know, I feel like we're in this place when it comes to the conversation about China, it's really about like, we can't let China win, like we've got to maintain hegemony because if China wins, like, you know, they will, they will dominate the supply chains in Asia. They'll set the rules, we'll be less wealthy. But it's like, is that the argument? You know, it's like, what exactly are we fighting for? And also, you know, there's no doubt that China is a surveillance state. I mean, it's like scary, like looking at the level of control.

• 48:52Demetri Kofinas?

  But also it's like, well, we aren't doing anything to kind of curb our excesses on that front. So that's an example of some of the more philosophical kind of questions that I want to broach in the second hour. Dan, for anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supportive. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Dan, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers get access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device, using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now.

• 49:36Demetri Kofinas?

  Dan, stick around, we're going to move the rest of our conversation onto the premium feed. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter @Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.