Dan Wang

strange confirmation hearings for his cabinet officials right when I left.

And I lived through this period when Trump launched a trade war that quickly morphed into a tech war.

And I wrote a lot of research notes about what exactly was happening to companies like Huawei and other sanctioned entities.

And throughout this time, I was open to the idea.

I didn't necessarily believe it, but I was open to the idea that we're at the start of something like an Asian century in which China and India were going to become much bigger powers.

By the time that I'd left in 2023, when I returned to the U.S.

to be a fellow not too far away from here at the Yale Law School's Paul Tai China Center in Connecticut,

I thought that the experiences that I lived through, some incredible technological successes, along with worsening repression, along with a worsening geopolitical environment for China, along with the centerpiece of zero COVID, all three years of which I was there,

I started being skeptical that China could tolerate debate, could really encourage some measure of useful dissent inside the official system, that they were going to be able to figure out these persistent problems with autocratic systems in terms of figuring out succession planning, for example.

that they were capable of a great number of successes.

But because there is this official voice that is meant to speak over everyone else, because that official voice is a little bit idiosyncratic in terms of all of the values that it really cares about, some degree of national power, some degree of sovereignty, some thin skin about anything that could be critical of the regime,

I don't feel like the Communist Party has mastered some autocratic formula in order to really build the future because they cannot have anything like debate, discussion, and long-term stable society.

One of the things I want to try to do in this book is to try to tackle this idea of what is innovation.

I think we here in the US, and I as someone who spends a lot of time in Silicon Valley as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution,

I think there is this mythical moment of invention in which you have an amazing genius like Steve Jobs hang out in a garage or many other geniuses hang out in garages and some incredible product pops out of the garage and a world-leading product takes shape.

And that is certainly an American strength.

I think what the Chinese have been able to do was to become a technological superpower

Without taking this Silicon Valley view of we need to just be in nature, take a lot of LSD, go into our garages, and then Apple computer comes out.

That's not the way that they tend to do things.

The way they tend to do things is to import a lot of managerial expertise, including from Apple computers.