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Moira:

Well, Dan, welcome to Tech Nation.

Dan Wang:

Myra, it's my delight to be here.

Moira:

Now let's be clear. You're a Canadian, and you've spent about equal time in your life in The US living in China. So that gives you some independent viewpoint or at least some independent data on your perspective. Tell us about that background. How did you how did you arrive here in The US right now?

Dan Wang:

Well, my family emigrated from Southwestern mountainous China when I was seven, and I moved to Toronto from Subtropical China into the land of snow, which could pile up for for days and weeks for the entire season on end. I mostly grew up in Ottawa, where I was a Royal Canadian Army cadet, and halfway through high school, we moved to the Philly area. So I finished high school in the suburbs of Philly, went to college in New York, worked a bit in Silicon Valley. And then in 2017, right after Trump entered the White House, I moved to Hong Kong to try to study China's technology developments. So I spent some time thinking about China and semiconductors, China and clean tech, China's general scientific development.

Dan Wang:

I was there for about six years, living through the repression in Shanghai, living through the repression in Hong Kong, the general repression in China, the trade war, the Shanghai lockdown. And so that was kind of a momentous six years of being in China.

Moira:

Well, we'll certainly get to your COVID in China experience. But I have to start everybody with a much bigger view. And I'm gonna start just taking four sentences out of the second paragraph of your introduction just to give people a a picture of the scope of this book. You write about China and The United States. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and wealth.

Moira:

Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime, the awe of grand projects pushing limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace, but masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don't get in line. Well, it sure sounds like The United States, but I didn't realize is it it's China as well.

Dan Wang:

There it is. And speaking as a Canadian who is feeling The United States sometimes throwing its way to ground a little bit too much to the north, I think that both of these countries can easily become hegemonic bullies. Now, I have to tell you why I spent about two months in Europe. In fact, I just landed yesterday back to The US from Denmark, and my wife and I were thinking a lot about how Europe and The US are now increasingly divergent. I feel a lot like Europe and Japan are pretty similar.

Dan Wang:

They both have a sense of perfectionism, there's a lot of coziness or hygge or gemutlichkeit in these countries, and The US and China are just different. They're so much bigger. They're often pretty ugly. It's just not a lot of great aesthetics. It's not very comfortable walking around, but they are driving all the change, and this is why we have to deal with them and think about them both a lot.

Moira:

And yet you talk about the differences. You tell us China is an engineering state while The US is a lawyerly society. Let's go there.

Dan Wang:

China at various points has been entirely run by engineers, and these are engineers of a very Soviet sort. So in 02/2002, the general secretary of the Communist Party was trained in hydraulic engineering. His deputy, the premier, was a trained geologist. And so you can go on and on and find so many Chinese top political leaders with some form of engineering background. Now, what do engineers like to do to confront any problem?

Dan Wang:

Well, it's just to build another bridge, another power plant, another hyperscaler, another home, and just build their way out of all of its problems. And one of the problems with being ruled into with a leadership that's entirely made up of engineers is that they tend to treat society as just another optimization exercise as well. And so China is also a country ruled by people who are fundamentally social engineers, social engineers who are responsible for the one child policy as well as zero COVID, which I looked through. But the number is right there in the name. There's no ambiguity about what these notions mean.

Dan Wang:

And The US is a lawyerly society because most of The US presidents have gone to law school. The Democratic Party is especially lawyerly. Every nominee, presidential nominee in the Democratic Party since 1980 has gone to law school. Half the US Congress has law degrees. The issue with lawyers is that they block everything, good and bad, so you don't have stupid ideas like the one child policy.

Dan Wang:

Also don't really have functional infrastructure in Bay Area where you and I tend to spend a lot of time lawyer, do we?

Moira:

That's right. That's right. And another thing about lawyers, and I have a lot of experience here, which we will not discuss on air.

Dan Wang:

Oh, no.

Moira:

The moment that you say, hey, let's do this, or I have an idea for this, you hear all of the reasons why you can't do it or shouldn't do it or it's just not done that way.

Dan Wang:

And what they say goes, you know, their word often really is the law. They, you know, a lot of companies are not necessarily run by the marketing executive or the salesperson or the technologist. Actually, it is mostly run by the lawyers.

Moira:

Now let's dip in here to all the things that are being built or have been built in the last twenty, thirty years in or would you say forty years? You guide us here in China.

Dan Wang:

About the last forty five years, this is when Deng Xiaoping really started his reform and opening program after 1980, after the death of Mao, when China's great economic boom began. So China has built a lot, maybe even too much. China's first highway was constructed in 1993. This was to connect the two northern cities of Beijing and Tianjin.

Moira:

First highway. First highway.

Dan Wang:

First real modern highway built to international standards in 1993. So really late. And then they went on a giant building spree to make up for their highway deficiency. If you were born in 1993, the year China built its first highway, by the time you reached China's legal driving age, which is 18, you would be able to drive on a highway system that was exactly the same length as America's interstate highway system. And then nine years after that, America built and then nine years after that, China built another America's worth of highways.

Dan Wang:

And so this is just the grand scale that China is building. And it's not just highways, of course, it's also nuclear plants. There's about 35 nuclear plants under construction in the world, and China is building around 33 of them. It's everything like homes. It's everything like really top bridges, airports, you name any sort of infrastructure, subways.

Dan Wang:

China has been building it over the last forty five years.

Moira:

And also high speed rail, which is amazing to us because it's like we kind of abandoned railroads here in The US.

Dan Wang:

Well, there's one state that has been building a high speed rail program. That is the state of California. And I suspect most people know how that's going. But I think that is actually pretty instructive of a contrast between The US and China. So I locate 2008 as a pretty important year for high speed rail in both The US and China.

Dan Wang:

So in 02/2008, the voters in California approved a referendum to build the Los Angeles to San Francisco High Speed Rail project. And in 02/2008, China actually started building its high speed rail project between Beijing and Shanghai, connecting its two biggest cities. So how has these two high speed rail projects fared? Well, three years later, China actually built the Beijing Shanghai high speed rail at a cost of something like $36,000,000,000. And then over the next decade, it moved something like 1,300,000,000 people over passenger miles.

Dan Wang:

It moved something like It completed something like 1,300,000,000 passenger trips over the first decade of operation. And now here we are sitting in 2025, seventeen years after California approved a referendum to begin high speed rail, very little of it has been built. It might be built by the years 2030 to 2033 to connect Merced to Bakersfield, not even really connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles, and the cost is something like five times the cost that China is building it.

Moira:

You'd have to actually take a big trip to get on the train. Then And once you got off, you'd have to take another trip to get where you're going. So high speed, not so much. At the same time, I've taken one of the high speed trains in China, And, I was just so shocked because, well, first of all, all we know about China in many ways is there are all these people there, but they're not equally distributed across the landscape. And that's always true no matter where you are.

Moira:

But I was so shocked because there was nothing, nothing, nothing. And then suddenly, there would be perhaps 10 high rise apartment buildings in the middle of nowhere away from the high speed. You know, me you could see them. I don't know what how far they were away, but maybe a mile, but they'd be there. They'd jut up out of nowhere, and then it'd be nothing, nothing, nothing.

Moira:

And then this would happen again. I don't think they're building those on former villages, are they?

Dan Wang:

Yeah. That's a great question because a lot of it is a very engineering approach to a lot of their construction. And so I think part of what you're seeing with all of this farmland is that China is really, really serious about food security. And so it is pretty easy to get out of major cities like Beijing or Shanghai, and pretty quickly get into farmland, because Xi Jinping has been offering these folksy sayings like, the bowl of Chinese peasants must be filled with Chinese grains. And so he has these sort of sayings, and that makes a lot of farmland available.

Dan Wang:

At the same time, Xi Jinping is really excited about bringing villagers, peasants, rural peoples, farmers, into slightly more modern high rises. And sometimes that works great, some of these people are really happy to move out of what are frankly mud huts into concrete buildings where there's much better sanitation and there's much less risk of getting something like worms. On the other hand, not everybody is really thrilled to be living in these concrete mega blocks. So I think what you're seeing, Moira, is just another engineering approach to redesigning society and redesigning food systems too.

Moira:

You're listening to Tech Nation. I'm Moira Gunn, and my guest today is Dan Wang, a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University. Previously a fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, You might know him from his essays in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and Financial Times, among other publications. He's here today with breakneck, China's quest to engineer the future. Well, you mentioned the one child policy, and we all have sort of have an idea about that.

Moira:

But what is it in implementation? What is it in experience?

Dan Wang:

In 1979, China's top leadership, consisting of Deng Xiaoping, as well as a few elders, thought that China was in crisis. So around that time, China had grown into a country that was over a billion people. But the leadership had been substantially in the dark about what is that precise figure, because the country was still reeling from the years of rule by Mao Zedong. And so the leadership believed that there were far too many people in China, there was nothing as organized as the census. When the census actually produced a figure of slightly over a billion people, that kind of freaked out the leadership in Beijing, and they thought that there could be no space for economic development if they had such a big overpopulation issue.

Dan Wang:

And so part of what Deng Xiaoping decided to do was to listen to a missile scientist by the name of Song Jiang, who was one of China's most brilliant mathematicians, who was designing missiles. And he managed to convince China's leadership that population trajectories can be just as firmly controlled as missile trajectories. And so he had this simple idea, one might call it really too simple to say that China should limit its families to have one child per couple. There were some nuances added in later, such that rural peoples could have two, and there are some minorities that could have three, but for the most part, China had a one child per couple family. Now, we could think about something like that, but if you think, if you remember that for a largely rural, pretty poor country at that time, most people were having something like three to four children in rural areas, as it's pretty common even today, where people know that having more than one child is kind of the basis for a lot of economic security.

Dan Wang:

And what the leadership did was, when it implemented one child per couple, it created this brutal campaign of mass sterilizations, as well as forced abortions, to bring that preference down from three or four down to one. So this was kind of the engineering state, you could say, at its best and at its worst, where it was sort of seduced by a scientific, I wouldn't say scientific, but a scientific approach to thinking that the population could be simply engineered. This is population engineering on a vast scale. And over the course of the one child policy, which lasted from 1980 to 2013, the official numbers from China indicate that China conducted over 300,000,000 abortions about the population of the present United States, and sterilized many, many women. And this was something that was just immensely brutal for a lot of rural families.

Dan Wang:

And that's something that I think about a lot that, you know, it would be great if the engineering state could constrain itself to building more subways, bridges, high speed rail, homes, I think for the most part, are really positive for China. The problem is that they are also social engineers that are willing to tear down the population as if it were just another building material, and this is where things go really off the rails.

Moira:

Now I must say that one of my favorite sentences in the book is three words long. Canada is tidy, period. Like, oh, it's interesting. Where is it going with this? You know?

Moira:

And, and as you continue reading, you say that you find traveling around The United States, you may run into people who are utterly deranged. And you keep reading, and you find that China is dreary. Actually, Beijing, in particular, is dreary at a no fun zone. Its avenues built for army parades rather than for normal life. But Silicon Valley, you're right, Silicon Valley can be an amazingly drab place.

Moira:

So the two big innovations in the world, all of it coming out of these two countries, and they're coming out of drab and dreary.

Dan Wang:

That's absolutely right. So, you know, if we think about what is actually Silicon Valley, not the pretty parts of San Francisco where there's the Golden Gate Bridge, there's the Presidio Park where there's a really nice ferry building. Where has been much of the innovation in the San Francisco Bay Area? Well, it hasn't really been in the cities, it's been kind of this middle stretch between San Francisco and San Jose. And San Jose itself is not a a really pretty place.

Dan Wang:

It's kind of full of these parking lots. It's full of office parks. Everybody kind of just drives into their office building.

Moira:

The invention of the cubicle.

Dan Wang:

That's right.

Moira:

Nobody has an office. All these cubicles.

Dan Wang:

It's a place of cubicles and parking garages. Right? So I think the maybe the similarity between Beijing and California Silicon Valley is that maybe they're both so dreary that there's not so much to do on the weekends, so why don't you just stay in your garage and build a computer or something? Now, I think it's no wonder that Apple wasn't founded in a city like New York. You could just have too much fun going to the ballet, going to the opera, going to the clubs that Steve Jobs would have been far too easily seduced elsewhere.

Dan Wang:

And so it kinda makes a lot of sense that a lot of innovation takes place in kind of boring, dreary places.

Moira:

You also mentioned earlier zero COVID. Here in The US, we talk about what was it like for you during COVID? Where were you? And we all have a sort of a common fairly similar experience. If not, we understand the experience of others.

Moira:

But zero COVID, this was really interesting. I know you you started in Beijing and quickly moved to Shanghai, eventually went into the countryside. Tell us about what it was like in China during the pandemic.

Dan Wang:

The pandemic in China was a superbly interesting time. The first thing to say about that time was that when I talked to Americans about the pandemic years, there's kind of a sense that lines sort of started to blur, and people had a hard time, you know, remembering when it started, when it ended. Think maybe there's a lot of willful forgetfulness. And the experience was really different in China because people had a pretty clear sense of the start and the end. It started in January 2020, when Wuhan locked down, and it ended in December 2022, so these three years when the national government dropped all COVID restrictions.

Dan Wang:

And so the three years of China's COVID experience kind of resembles this dramatic arc, in which the first act of COVID in China consisted of the outbreak in Wuhan, in which everybody got news that there was this new respiratory virus emerging out of a big city in Central China that was a big logistics hub, a very important city, I think about the seventh largest city in China, therefore bigger than most American states. And people were despairing of this new respiratory virus, which was the second to emerge in twenty years after the first SARS crisis in, 02/2003, and people were upset about the cover up that local authorities had made about the extent of the virus.

Moira:

And they were upset in China, is what you're saying?

Dan Wang:

They were very upset in China. They had seen news of the local police detaining a whistleblowing doctor for sharing legitimate medical advice. And so that prompted a lot of people to lose their nerve and be quite upset in China at the government. And that was in addition to all of these stories and the videos and images that were spilling out of Wuhan of people having a hard time, and some of them dying in hospitals. So that was the first act, of a lot of people being pretty upset.

Dan Wang:

And then the longer second act was that when people were calling for that this was a big political crisis in China, they were surprised to see that many other countries had a far worse experience handling the pandemic. And so ordinary Chinese saw that America, which is still substantially wealthier than China with much greater medical facilities, didn't do that stellar of a job in managing it, and neither did Europe, neither did Japan. So all of these wealthier countries had a much harder time actually managing their own pandemic. And so the second act was the Chinese people saying, oh, well, maybe life in China is not so bad after all. There were some restrictions on daily life, you couldn't really easily travel around different provinces, maybe you couldn't really leave the country, but look at those Americans.

Dan Wang:

Donald Trump's America in 2020 certainly didn't look like any sort of a paradise at that time. And then the attitudes changed once more, which is kind of the third act of COVID when major cities like Shanghai started shutting down in 2022 after the outbreak of the super transmissible Omicron variant of the virus. Xi'an, a city in the Northwest, also locked down. And so this was a time when people understood that China's zero COVID measures were not sufficient to really block the transmission of the virus. And so people started questioning the government again, and there were these broad protests in cities like Shanghai, where I was living, and I saw some of these protests when people were really, really upset at what Shanghai went through over the Shanghai lockdown, in which, over the course of around eight to ten weeks, 25,000,000 people couldn't really leave their homes.

Dan Wang:

They couldn't really leave their homes unless it was to go downstairs from their apartment compounds in order to get their noses and their throat swabs. Many people had food insecurity at this time because the government simply couldn't organize the logistics of delivering food to 25,000,000 people, and so people have become really, really upset. And the denouement of this, I think, tragic act was that Beijing dropped all COVID restrictions in December 2022. That was when I was still living in China. I got COVID in Shanghai, along with the rest of the city.

Dan Wang:

This was in one of the coldest months of the year. People didn't have many medicines on hand because all of this was so unexpected. And so, you know, three years of really tight restrictions ended with a collapse in which everybody got sick in one of the coldest months of the year. It just felt, frankly, bizarre, and still something that upsets a lot of Chinese.

Moira:

Couple of things I wanna ask you about, and that's the QR codes. I suspect those were your personal QR code was on your on your phone. Did everybody have a phone?

Dan Wang:

Almost everybody had a phone. Even many older people in China are able to pay with their phones, and they don't really carry cash around anymore. And so most everybody was required to, on their phone, to load your personal contact tracing QR code that that you sometimes had to display whenever you entered any public space, whether that was a mall, a store, a grocery, a subway station, you had to sort of flash it at a security person standing right there to make sure that your code was the right color. Now your code could be one of three colors. It could be green, which means that you hadn't come into contact with anyone who has the virus, could be yellow, in which case you might have been in close contact, in close physical proximity, tracked through mobile cell telephony towers in order to detect where you are at all times.

Dan Wang:

Maybe you entered the grocery shortly after someone who did test positive entered the grocery, which case your phone turned yellow. Or your phone could be red, in which case you have the virus, the government has detected that you have the virus, most people wouldn't even see that code, because by the time your phone turned red, the government would have already dispatched a lot of health workers to take you into something like a centralized quarantine facility, which is a big facility consisting of a lot of beds, like a convention center or a stadium, which all the infected people were required to gather. So the centralized quarantine system was something that worked really well in the early days of the pandemic, because if you had COVID, one of the things that was guaranteed to happen was that your entire household would eventually be infected because this virus was so transmissible. And this was one of the key instruments that the Chinese government used. It removed the affected people from the families, concentrated them in a stadium, waited until they got better before sending them home.

Dan Wang:

So that wasn't something that people really enjoyed. It was a super unpleasant experience if you tested for positive and you couldn't rest at home rather than you were sleeping in this, you know, poorly maintained convention center, but that was the way that they kept transmissions well. But eventually, that system collapsed because too many people were getting infected, and it was a really challenging system to implement.

Moira:

I read the number of 50,000 beds in a convention center. 50,000 beds of people who had contracted the virus. How could you how could you possibly take care of that many people?

Dan Wang:

Yeah. And there was probably wasn't more than 20 bathrooms for for something like that because, you know, if you're going to sleep in a football stadium, people aren't really planning. People haven't really built the bathrooms and everything in order to accommodate everyone.

Moira:

Now I must say I am a major fan of the title of chapter seven. In fact, I'll go out of my way to say this may be my favorite chapter title ever.

Dan Wang:

It's Wow.

Moira:

Learning to love engineers. So let's talk about that.

Dan Wang:

Moira, I now it's time for me to turn the question around slightly, and I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about your engineering background. What what have you been up to?

Moira:

Well, my PhD is in mechanical engineering. I went from there to to NASA, did large scale computations there. I've got a software patent in nutrition research. I've done all kinds of computing, and now I created and direct the biotech entrepreneurship program at the University of San Francisco. I'm all over the joint, as they say.

Moira:

Nothing I like better than an engineer most of the time.

Dan Wang:

Nothing I like better most of the time than an engineer as well, Moira. I think you should be in the White House. Frankly, that's what I do.

Moira:

Vote of one. No. Vote of one.

Dan Wang:

You've got my vote. So I think that engineers are important, and what I think is most important is for The United States to have a little bit more pluralism within the governing elites. Because as I mentioned, so many presidents go to law school, especially among the Democratic Party, where almost everyone in the top leadership has gone to law school at some point. And if you take a look even at the makeup of the current US Senate, there's been 47 senators who went to law school. Guess how many have been trained in engineering, Moira?

Dan Wang:

Think

Moira:

it's one at this point. How many are there?

Dan Wang:

There you That's correct. That's correct. That's one. So one engineer versus 47 lawyers, and I think that there should just be a little bit more pluralism within America's governing elites. And so that's why I wrote this chapter.

Dan Wang:

Thank you for giving a shout out to my title, Learning to Love Engineers, in which I say, you know, it's really important that we're not ruled by only one class of people, all with the same educational background. I don't want to be ruled fully by engineers, I also don't want to be fully ruled by lawyers, because both have their own pathologies, they both have so many different flaws, I want a little bit more pluralism. And where I end my book is to say that The US doesn't have to be like China. It would be sufficient to build infrastructure at the cost levels of, let's say, France or Japan or Spain or Denmark. These are countries that are able to get it done without causing all sorts of distresses among the population.

Dan Wang:

For the most part, they're doing it at pretty good levels. And so what I would love is for The US to be slightly, slightly, slightly more engineering, just to have a little bit more engineering into the representation of the political elites, and for China to become more lawyerly as well. And by lawyerly, I mean that the leadership should respect procedures, it should respect individual rights, it should be able to treat the public interest as important, and not just another optimization problem. And I just want The United States to build a little bit more again, such that we are able to have high speed rail, we're able to have public infrastructure built in California. I want to have quite a lot more homes in California as well because the real estate prices have become unaffordable for so many people.

Dan Wang:

And so I just hope that The US could be slightly more engineering and the Chinese to be lawyerly as well.

Moira:

Well, I have to tell you, you've been listening, there's so much more in this book than we talked about, but I'm so glad we were able to have this conversation. Thank you, Dan. I hope you'll come back and see us again.

Dan Wang:

Thank you, Moira. I hope you'll be in the White House someday.

Moira:

Oh, yeah. Hold your breath, Dan. Hold your breath on that. My guest today is Dan Wang. His book is breakneck, China's quest to engineer the future.

Moira:

It's published by W. W. Norton. I'm Moira Gund. You're listening to Tech Nation.

Moira:

It's published by W. W. Norton. For Tech Nation, I'm Moira Gund. Yes.

Moira:

Okay. Now don't hang up because it'll say it's all uploaded.