Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Dan Wang
[00:00:00] S1: 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 role 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 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, that China could be very powerful and it is extremely capable. 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.
· Dan Wang, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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 oppression 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 source 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 and has grown richer and more technologically capable. [00:00:00] S0: How do you think this book and this experience will change your relationship to China, the place, and Chinese nationals more generally? And was any part of it risky? Did it feel risky to you to write the book, given you lived there for so long, may want to live there again in the future?
· Dan Wang
[00:00:00] S1: 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 for 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, DanWang.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. 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 in the Chandelier. So imagine if 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, but you're kind of just aware that the anaconda is there and you start self censoring yourself in all sorts of ways. And I decided I didn't need to live in China and have that. Now I wonder whether the Chinese state will like my book. I tried to write the truest story as I can, which meant capturing the successes as well as the traumas of the Chinese state. What I plan to do is in a couple of months from now, when I submit my visa application, they'll have some time to think about it. They'll have had time to react to my book. No surprises. If they give me a visa to go to my favorite city in the world, Shanghai, my favorite region of the world, southwest China, along with all those wonderful mountains and wonderful pickles and bowls of noodles in Guizhou, I would be delighted to visit. And if they do not give me a visa, then I cannot visit.
· Dan Wang, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And so I think my life is really quite simple. [00:00:00] S0: What's next for you? Having completed this really epic project that I think will be seen as the definitive account of what's going on in China vis-à-vis the US for a long time, what do you do next? [00:00:00] S1: Curl up on my couch and read some great novels. Everyone's reading Middlemarch. I haven't read Middlemarch yet, so that is something that's quite exciting for me. I want to be engaged with the broader Chinese diaspora people who have decided to move to Thailand. There's a set of people who've moved to New York. They host feminist standup comedy in Mandarin. And I want to be supportive of these sorts of efforts. Engineers I know in Silicon Valley, I want to help integrate them into society and help them appreciate the good parts of America that I enjoy the most. If there's anything that they can't necessarily access very easily, I want to be helpful in trying to give them a little bit of community and then otherwise, as I always do, think big thoughts and then write them down in my letters. [00:00:00] S0: The closing question I ask everybody is the same. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
· Dan Wang
[00:00:00] S1: There's a quote I really like from Ursula K. Le Guin, which is that love is not like a stone which only sits there. Love has to be continuously made like bread and remade once again. And that's something I think about with something like kindness. I think we can sub in kindness for love here. That the way that I think about kindness is not only a single act. I think it is more a disposition and a spirit of generosity. So I brought up before earlier, Tyler Cowen, who has been a mentor of mine for over the past decade. We've traveled together in Asia. We've traveled together in Yunnan and Taiwan. We've gone to the opera together here in New York. We've seen a great Brahms concert here in New York. And Tyler has been very generous in helping me orient and tweak my thinking and giving me some degree of ambition because that is something that Tyler is really good at, raising people's ambitions at crucial times. And because I bring up Ursula K. Le Guin, I have to think about my other guru, Arthur Kroeber, who is the founder of Gavekal Dragonomics. We were having lunch once near the end of 2016 when he told me about Made in China 2025, a big industrial plan which I hadn't heard of at the time. And then a few months afterwards I moved to Hong Kong to work for Gavekal Dragonomics. And shortly after that, two years after that I moved to Beijing and then I moved to Shanghai. Two hours from now, I'm going to go to Arthur's home for a book launch party which he is very kindly hosting for me. And I find Arthur not only very wise about China, but very wise about all things. And so for me, kindness is an act that has to be performed again and again. This is something I want to try to do for other younger people, but to have these long lasting relationships in which we try to help mentor each other, guide each other and raise our ambitions at crucial periods.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Dan Wang
[00:00:00] S0: A beautiful closing definition. I've never heard that quote despite having read many of her books. [00:00:00] S1: A new one. Great. [00:00:00] S0: Wonderful place to close. Dan, thank you so much for your time. [00:00:00] S1: Thank you very much Patrick.