Dan Wang

Or if it is to build a really great train track.

Or if it is to stop overpopulation as they imagined it throughout the 1980s.

They barely hesitate to do what are some pretty brutal measures.

So China's a country I call the engineering state because they want to engineer the physical environment, the economy, the people as well.

And I want to be just pretty playful with this framework, that they're a country of engineers.

In part, the roots are from the fact that in recent years, if you take a look at the most senior leadership, the entirety of the standing committee of the Politburo had degrees in engineering.

And I also draw this back to slightly older roots.

If we take a look at the Chinese emperors way back in the past, let's say 1500 years, two of China's biggest projects include the Great Wall, as well as the Grand Canal.

So a fortification system in the first case, and then a big water management system in the second case.

That is a country that has built a lot of big projects in the past.

A lot of the emperors barely hesitated to completely reorder a peasant's relationship to our land.

And throughout Chinese history, they've really moved a lot of people around to settle the frontiers here or defeat the nomadic tribes over there.

And so that's kind of my playful framework for saying that China is really ruled by this engineering mindset that

really wants to build.

They're often very liberal-minded about governing society as if people were just a series of chess pieces to be moved around.

And that extends from the imperial times all the way to the modern day.

I spent six years living in China.

I moved to China at the start of 2017 to be a technology analyst at an economic investment research firm called GovCal Dragonomics.

At the time that I moved there, at the start of 2017, Trump had just taken office.

I remember watching these...