Speaker

Dan Wang

Dan Wang

Writer and technology analyst best known for his annual letters on China’s technology industry and his 2025 book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.

Wang grew up in China, moved to Canada with his family in 2000, and spent years living in Shanghai as a researcher covering semiconductors, clean technology, industrial robotics, and China’s broader political economy — first at Gavekal Dragonomics under Andrew Batson and Arthur Kroeber, later at the Hoover Institution. His annual letters on China (published on his personal site) built a large following among investors, policymakers, and technologists for their combination of granular industrial reporting and literary sensibility. He draws on James C. Scott, Stendhal, and Mozart as readily as on semiconductor supply chains.

Core positions

Wang holds that China and America each possess the other’s missing virtue. America is too financialised — too obsessed with margins and return on capital to build the infrastructure, manufacturing base, and energy capacity a technological civilisation requires. China is too engineering-minded in the worst sense: the Communist Party treats people as objects of social design rather than subjects of rights, and the result is zero-COVID announced by press release, forced abortions in the countryside, and a Politburo that cannot take a joke. His prescription is asymmetric: America needs a 20% injection of engineering orientation; China needs a 50% injection of lawyerly constraint on power.

On China’s political trajectory, he is a clear-eyed pessimist. He argues that democratisation in East Asia was always contingent on external shocks — occupation, assassination, generational change — and that the Communist Party has studied the Soviet dissolution too carefully to repeat it. He is, however, an optimist about the 5% of China’s economy that is genuinely world-class: he expects China to become the global centre for automotives, drones, and much of consumer electronics, and thinks the West is wrong to dismiss Chinese technological capacity on the basis of aggregate TFP decline.

In the wiki