Dan Wang

And China has already gotten significantly better at a lot of these scientific projects that used to be only the preserve of American universities and a few other places.

By most metrics that we can identify, Chinese scientists are producing better qualities of work, not just quantity.

If we take a look at the top 1% cited scientific papers, Chinese researchers are producing an increasing share of many of these top papers.

We can see that China has produced a lot of really good scientific projects, to say nothing of the moon missions.

I think there's a pretty strong sense now that China will get to the moon by the end of the 2020s, and America might not be able to get back to the moon, that it has forgotten a lot of these skills.

that China has invested a huge amount in trying to improve its universities.

We can see that a lot of American researchers, often American researchers of Chinese descent, have decided to move to China because there's better funding, there's more grad students they can work with, there's a more stable environment for them to do their science.

And conversely, I think we have not seen that the US is really learning the hard parts of manufacturing really well.

I think there are some successes.

We can see that the TSMC fab in Arizona is actually doing fairly well now, according to the latest reporting.

But if we take a look at many of America's apex manufacturers, companies like Boeing making aviation,

Intel making chips, Detroit and Tesla making vehicles.

Mostly that's been going downhill.

The U.S.

isn't making a huge number of iPhones.

It's barely making a huge number of Apple's desktop computers.

And so I feel like the Chinese are learning at a much faster rate to patch up their deficiencies than the Americans have.

I am against fully in control.

I want no dictator in China, and so therefore I renounce being dictator of the U.S.

I think what I'm really thinking about for this particular book project, as well as my broader writing over the past 10 years on China, is to be less focused on policy prescriptions, fixing statutes, fixing regulations.