Dan Wang

That, to me, is also something that is really striking, that so many people are willing to do this dangerous trek, essentially, to escape from China.

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.

And if you take a look at a lot of aspects of cultural production, whether that is books, novels, films in China, that has really 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.

Last I checked,

RMB still only made up about 4% of global trade volumes.

I want to make this narrow case that the engineering state is really good at building stuff.

They have the manufacturing workforce.

They have the entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

They have the government support in order to keep getting better and better at a lot of advanced manufacturing industries.

But even if China pisses off a lot of its own people, pisses off a lot of its neighbors, as well as a broader set of people,

The very fact that it can make manufactured products better and better, that is a pretty significant threat to the United States because there is a chance, I think, that they will do really well on artificial intelligence as well.

But even if they just get much better at making vehicles, I don't want to see the U.S.

further deindustrialized.

Right now, there's 12 million manufacturing workers in the U.S.

I don't want to get in a scenario where a decade from now, we have only 6 million.

I think that is going to hurt the economy and introduce greater political dysfunctions.