Dan Wang

These were Japanese companies making Japanese products.

And part of the complaints of the Reagan administration was that Japan was too closed and Japan needed to open up.

By contrast, China has been much more open than Japan.

China, most famously, is well known for building Apple's iPhones and Tesla's vehicles.

And the communist system recognized that it was so far behind technological leaders that it mostly threw open the doors with some restrictions to Western companies produced in China and then previously make China.

mostly foreign goods, only assembling these different components, until at this point, a great deal of Apple's supply chain is made up of Chinese components as well.

It's not quite the Soviet Union.

It's not quite Japan.

And I think there's this ineffable Chinese characteristics also thrown in, which the Chinese people, I think, are highly entrepreneurial, much like the Americans.

They're highly dynamic.

They take shortcuts.

There's a million and one hucksters trying to make a dime and trying to profit and trying to found companies.

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.

Combine all of that, and I think that is part of the reason that I think that China is going to be a pretty formidable power going forward.

I do.

I love the work of James C. Scott, former Yale political scientist, anthropologist, who very sadly passed away about a year ago.

But I've read pretty much all of Scott's works.

And if I can throw in another Scott work for listeners, it is The Art of Not Being Governed.

which is about highland Southeast Asia, these very mountainous parts of essentially southwestern China, this region that is about as big as Europe, and that includes southwestern China, as well as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, northern Thailand.

in which various peoples have decided to run away from the state, whether that's the Burmese state or the Tibetan state or especially the Han Chinese state.