Dan Wang

At the same time, it is also highly capable, not just technologically, but inflicting these traumas and horrors upon the population.

And we can and should recognize both of these things, that repression can grow worse while technological dynamism grows richer.

And I always feel myself that I have to fight this two-front war against people who think that China will collapse because of all the repression, or that because China's economic growth has been so impressive in lifting millions of people out of poverty, that gives the Communist Party a free pass on all of the sorts of violations that it has inflicted upon the people.

I think we can

acknowledge both things are true, that the Communist Party has grown repressive in more novel ways over the past 10, 30 years.

At the same time, it has grown richer and more technologically capable.

Yeah, I decided over the course of writing this book that I wanted to write the truest story that I know.

And I decided to just try to do the best job that I possibly can.

Part of the reason I moved out of China to the Yale Law School, where I substantially wrote this book, was in part to tear myself away from the headlines so that I don't have to be living in Shanghai and feel like I'm living through a lot of headlines.

Partly it is because the Chinese state is overwhelmingly censorious.

In China, my personal site, danwan.co, has been blocked.

I found that, to my surprise and some degree of distress, one day in 2022.

I had to go see the Canadian Consul General to ask whether I needed to leave in a hurry, because usually they block big sites like the New York Times or Facebook or Wikipedia, not rinky-dink websites like mine.

And I have friends in China who have been detained by the Chinese state arbitrarily for a number of years based on who they were and based on alleged activities that we don't believe are true.

And I've decided that I wasn't going to give in to any sort of hard censorship or soft.

There's a wonderful analogy about China's censorship by a sinologist named Perry Link.

called the anaconda and the chandelier.

So imagine that we're sitting around a dinner table, all of us are chatting over dinner.

The censorship isn't necessarily very direct, but above us hangs a chandelier in which a giant anaconda lies sleeping.

And you never really know when the anaconda might wake up and decide to strangle you.