America vs. China
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What does the host mean by “reviewing a country” and why is it important?
One of the more tragic TV show cancellations of the last decade was this show I really loved called Review, starring the comedian Andy Daly. Daley played a character named Forrest McNeil. Forrest, a tweety intellectual, a professional reviewer who reviewed not books or movies or albums, but life experiences his audience requested on a five star scale. From the mundane, like there was an episode about eating pancakes, to the more interesting. Here viewed stealing and drug addiction, forgiveness and being buried alive. I liked the show because it's funny, but also because it made me notice something about real life, which is that we really do live in a very review-obsessed culture. There's no experience too personal or intimate or sacred to avoid being the subject of a review.
People review not just their cancer treatment, but their experience of cancer. People review the sermons they hear in church, the dates they go on, everything. I this week read reviews for chili recipes for beans, beans, a backpack I already own, three separate reviews of the novel Glorious Exploits, which I'd already read, just to see if anyone besides my friend Zev had loved it as much as I did. A different podcaster here might fall into the trap of speculating about what all this reviewing means, what it says about us modern humans that we want to testify constantly, about the quality of subjective experiences. I instead am raising the specter of our review epidemic to point to one area that shockingly mostly goes unreviewed.
A core part of human life that I cannot recall reading, a straightforward pros and cons review for. Countries. The countries we live in. Where you live determines so much about your life, and countries, you may have noticed, are very different from each other. But while you can read reviews of vacation destinations, you'll almost never read a review that describes here or the pluses and minuses of being a citizen here. Maybe it's too big a task, maybe we're afraid of being impolite or judgmental, I don't know. All I've noticed is that most of us review pretty much everything. Except one of the most important things. Most of us, except for my guest today.
Dan, can you introduce yourself? Yeah, I'm author of Breakneck, China's Quest Engineer of the Future. I'm speaking to you from San Francisco. I'm a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and I'm really excited to be on the
show. Thank you for uh joining us. Dan Wong does not refer to himself as a country reviewer. This is my silly frame, not his. But I'm very curious about modern China, a place I know too little about. This despite how often China shows up in our headlines, including our trade talks this week. In Dan's new book, it actually kind of functions as a review of both China and America. His writing voice is a critic's voice, meaning he's not a stand for either place. He's dispassionately trying to think through how each country works, how it doesn't, how each could be better. And I wanted him to join us on Surge Engine because reading him, I learned about China, but I also learned about America. So okay, just tell me like your story.
Like tell me about your relationship with China and how that's evolved as you've moved through your life and your career.
My family is from southwestern China, a region called Yunnan, which is heavily mountainous, very far away from the coasts, where the food is spicy and the people are relatively relaxed. My parents and I emigrated from Yingnan when I was seven years old. We moved to Toronto in Canada. And I mostly grew up in Ottawa, and so I'm still a Canadian citizen. But my parents and I also moved when I was sixteen to Bucks County PA, as this is um Philly Burbs, where my parents still are, and I feel like I've spent about equal amounts of my life between the US, Canada, as well as China. Now I studied philosophy in college. I dropped out to go work in tech. Uh, went to go work in Silicon Valley. And in the year 2016, I thought that what Silicon Valley had been doing then, uh, you know, a lot of these consumer startups, a lot of cryptocurrencies, I thought that was much less interesting than what was going on in China.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does the host mean by “reviewing a country” and why is it important?
0:25–7:28
2
How did Dan Wang’s childhood and trans‑national upbringing shape his view of China?
7:28–13:48
3
What are Dan’s impressions of daily life in Hong Kong – from subways to the skyline?
13:48–19:48
4
How does living in Beijing and Shanghai contrast with Hong Kong for an expatriate?
19:48–28:14
5
Why does Dan call China an “engineering state” and how does that differ from America’s “lawyer‑led” system?
28:14–35:45
6
What explains the stark difference between China’s rapid high‑speed‑rail build‑out and California’s stalled project?
35:45–42:50
7
How does China’s manufacturing ecosystem generate new technology versus the U.S. model?
42:50–49:19
8
What lessons should the United States take from China – and which should it avoid?
49:19–56:38