Azeem Azhar

speaker

7,268 appearances 34 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Mar

Azeem Azhar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.

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Azeem Azhar's Exponential View · Why China builds while America debates, with Dan Wang · 1 Oct 2025 podcast

I think one of the really helpful things is it gives us a frame to try to make sense of things that may feel a little bit disconnected, but in a sense, there is something that pulls it all together.

I suppose one of my questions around all of this is why does it work in China?

I mean, people have tried technocratic engineering in the past.

Of course, the Soviet Union was a good example, you know, the five-year plans, Gauss plan, all these other things.

What is it about the intersection between Chinese leadership, Chinese society, Chinese culture,

That has meant that it has this momentum that we can observe when we see you land in Beijing and the airport is pretty phenomenal.

You walk around a clean city, you go on high-speed rail, you see the numbers of BYD cars that are now driving around the streets of London.

You see what's happened with the exports of solar panels.

Why does it work when it didn't work previously?

There is something that's relatively distinct, which appears to be the transition between engineered outcomes that we might have seen

before 1979 or, you know, before the opening up of capitalism with Chinese characteristics where there were engineering efforts, right, under the leadership of Mao, and many of those didn't really work well.

You know, the attack on the four pests, for example, is a great example.

But I think the thing that struck me about reading about China in my recent trip was that there's also a degree of competition in this engineering, that in a way, city mayors and regional leaders compete

with each other in a way that we didn't really see in the era of the centrally planned engineering state.

Can you just characterize that and just tell me whether you think that competition is relevant or important?

Let's dig into zero COVID because I think for many of us who are not in China, we lived through the lockdowns that you had in the UK and certain parts of the US and parts of Europe, but it was very, very different as it played out in China.

And you describe this in your book as well, but just for people who are listening, what was it really like and what did zero COVID actually mean to live through?

You're right.

I mean, engineers, it's a bit unfair, I'm going to generalize, but nuance is complicated, complex to engineer for, and second and third order effects are complicated to engineer for a priori.

But I have a quick question about the lockdown.

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