I start my book, my very first paragraph, to say that Chinese and Americans are more alike than any other people... They're the two great founts of entrepreneurial dynamism in the world. It is Shenzhen and Silicon Valley that are inventing the future and not so much Europe and Japan any longer. There's kind of a hustle energy, there's a hastiness... [25:30]
That's another similarity between the U.S. and China: They're often very future-oriented. They have a sense of optimism, much more so than the Europeans who have a sense of optimism only about the past. [27:45]
[...]
Maybe we can say that China right now has some of the control paranoia of the Soviet Union, some of the manufacturing excellence of Japan and some of the American entrepreneurial hustle. You combine all of that and that is part of the reason that I think that China is going to be a pretty formidable power going forward. [1:05:50]
[...]
I think that China will not become anything like a cultural superpower in part because the engineers are so censorious. They're so thin-skinned, they censor everything they can't understand, which is a lot. If you take a look at a lot of aspects of cultural prediction, whether that is books, novels, films, China really has become much more constricted over the past 12 years of Xi's rule. I think that China will not become anything like a big financial superpower in part because the control tendencies of the engineers is to impose a lot of capital controls and that makes it much more difficult for foreigners to want to hold RMB. [1:10:20]
[...]
I want the U.S. to be 20% more engineering and I want China to be 50% more lawerly. I think that it would be amazing if the Chinese state actually respected the creative impulses of its own people... if individual rights would actually be respected. [1:30:00]
[...]
We can and should recognize both of these things, that repression can grow worse while technological dynamism grows richer. I always feel myself that I have to fight this two-front war against people who think that China will collapse because of all the repression or that, because China's economic growth has been so impressive at lifting so many millions of people out of poverty, that gives the Communist Party a free pass on all of the sorts of violations that it has inflicted upon the people. I think we can acknowledge both things are true, that the Communist Party has grown oppressive in more novel ways over the past 10 to 30 years; at the same time, it has grown richer and more technologically capable. [1:37:20]
~ Dan Wang, "Dan Wang - The US vs China in the 21st Century," Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, October 16, 2025
