Dan Wang

And so this is where I'm hopeful that lawyers aren't going to get in the way of absolutely everything, especially the sort of broader infrastructure that serve the masses needs.

I think this would be challenging because I really believe that the future will be determined by these two big countries.

That I think what's most important is for these two countries to get along because my very first page, I denounce Europe for being a mausoleum economy where things are very beautiful, but things are also very dead.

And I don't quite yet believe that India and Indonesia are quite ready yet to challenge these two bigger powers.

But I think this gets back to the broader question of the equilibrium that you brought up.

And I think what we don't want is for there to be too much destabilization.

I think most Americans, as well as most Chinese, ought to be thinking about is how do we avoid a conflagration and how do we avoid a hot war?

Because...

World War I took something like 10 million lives.

The World War II took something like 50 million, and we don't want to get to World War III in which tens of millions die.

There's a scenario in which the U.S.

strategy over the last 30 years has been to hope that markets and the internet will change China for the better and change this communist system into something more like a liberal democracy.

And that has not worked out.

And that, I think, could be firmly laid to bed.

And so now we have to ask, is there some sort of uneasy equilibrium that we can really stumble in to avoid a hot war?

And at least my guru at the Hoover Institution, historian Stephen Kotkin, would say, what we need is a new Cold War in which the two countries decide not to have a very big fight.

but rather to compete on the level of the systems to deliver better for the people.

Now, I think a lot of people are nervous about this Cold War framing, including me.

The Cold War was not very cold for a lot of other countries, say something like Vietnam.

The Cold War created so many crazy abuses within the Soviet Union, as well as the U.S.