Dan Wang

It would be some sort of a conflict somewhere in the Pacific that erupts into a bigger war.

And for something like Taiwan, that's not one of the things that really keeps me up at night right now.

Maybe it could happen, but generally, if you bet on peace, that's been a pretty good bet, and I expect that will continue.

The scary things are some sort of totally unpredictable border conflict, as we saw in 2020 with India, or some ship sinking with respect to the Philippines that escalates from there.

Yeah, I think that I feel more strongly that China will be a tech superpower in the way that it arguably already is.

Mostly as I wrote my chapter about Shenzhen and process knowledge and just really trying to conceptualize Shenzhen as an ecosystem, which...

university professors and VCs and factory managers and workers are rubbing shoulders with each other.

They're solving a lot of new problems every single day.

They're not necessarily affected by policies from either Beijing or DC.

And that gave me this metaphor of a engine of technological momentum that I think will not be derailed very easily because a lot of these investments have been

in place for 10 years, some for 15 years, and there's no easy thing, not export controls that will derail this tech engine very easily.

At the same time, I think I appreciated how traumatic the second half of the 20th century has been for so many Chinese.

You thought you were done with this rule of the Mao years, the famine of the Great Leap Forward, the total insanity of the Cultural Revolution.

Deng Xiaoping comes along, he starts to make everyone richer through reform and opening, and then he unleashes the one-child policy, which I describe as a campaign of rural terror meted out against overwhelmingly female bodies in the countryside.

This was something that I never quite realized just how awful it was to so many people.

You think of one child and

That sounds like nice and clean, but you don't associate 300 million abortions that China conducted throughout this period, 100 million sterilizations throughout this period, tens of thousands of Chinese girls being adopted by American couples who are living here because their parents had to give them up.

And this was also the time period when I was writing this period that

My wife suffered a miscarriage and it was exactly during this time when I was writing about the traumas of other female bodies that something like that happened.

I'm always trying to communicate that China could be very powerful and it is extremely capable.