China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpecks China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, Senior Fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is Pekingology. Welcome to a special crossover episode of Pekingology, which is also an episode of the China Power podcast. I'm Henrietta Levin, Senior Fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS and host of Pekingology. And I am thrilled to be co-hosting this episode with my CSIS colleague, Brian Hart, who is a Fellow and Deputy Director of the China Power project here at CSIS. We're doing this episode together today because we both loved Dan Wang's new book, Breakneck, and we thought he would be a perfect fit for the Pekingology podcast, which tries to unpack the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party and how Chinese politics affect the broader world. And also for the China Power podcast, which focuses on, unsurprisingly, Chinese power. Yeah, thanks Henrietta. It's great to be here and great to be co-hosting. And we're really glad to be joined by Dan Wang, who is a research Fellow with the Hoover Institution's Hoover History Lab. And as Henrietta said, the author of a new book, Breakneck, China's Quest to Engineer the Future. So we're really excited to speak with you, Dan. Great to be here and great to be on this crossover. So we like to start all of our Pekingology episodes with a personal question about how you became interested in researching China and for you, the Chinese technology ecosystem. But I actually want to go back a little further because you mentioned in the book that you went to high school in Bucks County and I also went to high school in Bucks County. Oh, no. So I have to ask, where did you go to school? I went to CPE East. Where did you go? Council Rock. Council Rock. I think we were jazz band rivals. I was more in the marching band. So I didn't know about the jazz band, but I am sure we can be rivalrous in all sorts of dimensions, just like the US and China. I was also in the Council Rock drumline. So we probably had intense rattle ring. A lot of Bucks County fans have revealed themselves to Art DePippo when it's your former colleagues who also grew up in the Philly area. I feel like that's like the real value of your book. Yes. That you've created this China-watching Bucks County originating community that I look forward to flourishing in the weeks ahead. But actually, how did you get into China and researching this important part of the world? In 2016, I was working in Silicon Valley and I had lunch one day in New York with an interesting fellow by the name of Arthur Krober, who's the founder of Dragonomics and now the research head of Goftel Dragonomics. In 2016, he told me of this very interesting program called Made in China 2025. At the time, I'd never heard of it before, but thinking about these big projects like electric vehicle batteries and ultra-high voltage transmission and memory chips, I felt much more exciting than the cryptocurrencies and the online platforms that Silicon Valley had been building at the time. And I was thinking that what China was building was kind of an alternative technology stack that is pretty different from what California had been building. And it was just much more exciting to try to go see it. So turning to your latest work, this book, Breakneck, your big thesis is that China is fundamentally an engineering state. And this works well when China needs bridges and trains and roads, but often less well when the party turns to social engineering. And you also contrast this model with America's lawyerly society. But since we're both China podcasts here, we'll focus on the China part today. So let's start with the party's feats of literal engineering. You know, many times in the book that Chinese officials work on a monumental scale. For the built environment, this approach has benefits and drawbacks. China can build infrastructure on a massive scale very quickly, but it doesn't always work on a more human scale. Perhaps best illustrated by your comment that in China, there are many public toilets, but the provision of toilet paper is only sometimes a thing. Tell us more about the party's monumentalism. I'm glad we get to talk about toilets. Toilets has been very important for Xi Jinping for a while. I believe he had called for a toilet revolution about 10 years ago, which was to create more toilets or more sanitary places for people to go to replace a lot of these latrines, which are still fairly common in the countryside, but are a little bit less of a common feature these days. Now, one could go to a lot of these fancy toilets in China now that are perhaps a little bit too fancy. There are plenty of places where you need to scan your face. You need to hold your face up to a little camera or iPad like device in order to get toilet paper. And I think this is one of those issues where the term technical solution is often used, and I feel like this is a really good example of the techno solutionism that's inherent in China. It cannot trust people to have and use toilet paper properly, rather than have to install some strange electronics device with, I'm sure, what are pretty sophisticated algorithms in order to allocate toilet paper out to the people. Now, I think there is a grander sort of monumentalism that one can see around the country that are beyond everyday lives. I feel like China has been very, very interested in building big projects to establish political prestige for a long time. Imperial China is famous for the Great Wall, as well as the Grand Canal. So the first is a fortification system. The second is a water management system. And I feel like you can trace a pretty direct lineage from the Grand Canal into these big hydraulic projects like the Three Gorges Dam in southwest China. Throughout the 1990s, the Three Gorges Dam took a life of its own, in part, to establish that China was much more interested in economic growth and the production of power rather than something like political liberalization. And that's how the Communist Party was going to do well by the people. But even today, if you walk around Shanghai, which is, I think, generally not a super monumental-list city, one would find still all of the big skyscrapers in Pudong, which was built in part by Jiang Zemin's era, to say that China is going to have these really big skyscrapers that is going to outmatch Chicago and Manhattan in terms of great prestige. This is especially evident if you walk around in Beijing, where the centerpiece of the city is the Forbidden Palace, where people went regularly to Kowtow for the Emperor's Pleasure. And so I feel like a lot of China is really built for a bird's eyes view of cities. You know, a lot of these cities look beautiful if you're hovering above in the skies or perhaps taking a drone shot. When it comes to the provision of goods essential for everyday lives, whether that is a public toilet or just a small and simple noodle shop and dumpling shop, it is a little bit harder to find these in Beijing. Rather, they really like big, grandeur and monumental projects. Yeah. And I mean, that monumentalism is very expensive. And one of the things that you've noted in your book is that China often builds without efficiency in mind. They're not always focused on hyper-profitability of these things. And so I'm wondering what you think that means in terms of the long-term affordability and sustainability of the kind of China model. You know, I've seen recently, you know, some Chinese scholars have started to criticize their high-speed rail system as being maybe overbuilt. You know, there may be some of these lines that have been built are no longer profitable and may not be sustainable. So I'm just wondering, you know, is that a long-term disadvantage for China in terms of if you're thinking about this in competition with the US, where, you know, US companies are often hyper-focused on profitability and sustainability. So what does that look like in terms of China's model in the long-term? I think that you've really put your finger on one of the big differences between the US and China. I think the sense of monumentalism is aesthetic. It is political and it is not very financially driven. There's been some estimates out there that a lot of Chinese local governments are spending much more of their revenues actually servicing debt than doing anything else. And certainly if you take a look at some of these grand projects, Super Tall Bridges in Guizhou, it is really obvious that China's fourth poorest province is struggling to pay for its amount of infrastructure. Guizhou has about 11 airports. It has 45 of the world's tallest bridges. Many of these bridges aren't able to pay back their bonds. And again, in the theme of monumentalism and walking around in Beijing, you can see a lot of these malls that are built by world-class architects who have these really beautiful buildings. But inside these buildings, there aren't necessarily a lot of stores or, you know, as soon as you finish a building, a lot of the bathrooms are still not fully functional. And so they don't pay enough attention to the small stuff. And I think what I'm always trying to say is that both China and the US are deeply flawed. They're always wrong. And we should always try to find an alternative approach beyond the two countries. I feel like China's model does reveal certain advantages. Especially in a crisis. When I looked through zero COVID in 2020, one of the really striking things was that there was basically no shortages, even though lockdowns were pretty severe in Wuhan, as well as a lot of other big cities. The logistics systems worked really well. Whereas in the US, Americans suffered shortages of all sorts of goods, according to the news that I was reading at the time. There were shortages of consumer goods. There were shortages of furniture. There were shortages of personal protective equipment. A lot of grocery goods disappeared, depending on which area of Mexico was suffering from COVID at the time. And so, you know, overbuilding sometimes just creates a lot of resilience. Overemployment of people in state-owned enterprises might drag down their profitability, but also keeps their skills and muscles alive in terms of being able to produce a lot during a crisis. And so, you know, my message is always that US and China are both wrong. No one should really try to copy both of them. And let's get to a better half-year middle in between. Yeah. Well, pivoting a little bit to the technology side of things in tech competition, one of the key points you make in your book is that China has become a tech superpower by exalting what you call process knowledge and the communities of engineering practices that keep that alive. Can you explain what you mean by that and kind of how that's been pivotal to China's progress in the technology sphere? Technology is really three things. The first aspect of technology is tooling, equipment, hardware, all of these things that we can see and feel and poke at. And in a kitchen analogy, which I often like to use, technology is the stove, the oven, the pots and the pans. And technology is also written instruction. So these are patents, blueprints and recipes as well. And I think the third and most crucial element of technology is what I call process knowledge, which is also tacit knowledge, industrial expertise, just practical experience. And a lot of that is represented by just knowing how to do things, because if you give someone really great kitchen and the most exquisite recipe, they may not be able to do something as simple as cooking breakfast. And what China has is an excess of process knowledge is represented also by these communities of engineering practice in which you have workers making a Apple phone in Shenzhen, perhaps in her first year of work. And then she moves on to make a Huawei phone in the second year. And then in the third year, she starts an electric vehicle battery company and really starts to upgrade through the technology stack. And such things are possible because there is quite a lot of engineering knowledge that is circulating, that is being kept alive. And I think this is one of the big things that the US has lacked. If we take a look at US manufacturing employment, it has decreased by about a million workers since 2008, and especially since its peak throughout the 1970s. US manufacturing workforce has dissipated. And given that dissipation, a lot of these communities of engineering practice have also been eviscerated. A lot of that knowledge really has moved to China. And a lot of what I'm interested now is to ask, how do we rebuild these communities of engineering practice? Because a lot of American manufacturing competences have already been weak, and we need it to be much stronger to not just patch up the present industrial base, but to build the industrial base of the future. So that process knowledge has been really crucial, as you say, in the manufacturing area and things like experimental research. But China has historically lacked the United States and maybe other more established tech powers in the fundamental sciences, scientific breakthroughs. But China has been pouring a lot of money into basic research and science in recent years. So you think that those basic sciences will become a core Chinese strength as well? Can China close the gap in those areas? And might that precipitate a lessened focus on the process knowledge that has gotten China this far? Will China kind of move beyond that to focusing more on this basic areas? I expect that China will become much stronger in a lot of basic scientific research. And indeed, we've seen that it already has. When I first moved to China in 2017, when I moved to Hong Kong first and then spent two years there, two years in Beijing and two years in Shanghai, China really wasn't producing much groundbreaking research. But now if we take a look at some of the most highly cited research, the US still has the decisive edge within its universities, but China has caught up very, very substantially since 2017. And we can take a look at a lot of different aspects of different scientific disciplines, everything from material science to chemistry, certain aspects of computer science and mathematics, Chinese researchers are already in the lead. And I expect that China will probably not have to make a choice between basic research as well as building up the technology stack, because I think that is for the most part a false choice that these things feed each other, that these things are going to build each other, that the better that you are at basic research, I think it is also going to be the case that the better it is that they're going to be building out a lot of these products. And what I see is that though the US is already really strong in basic research, it hasn't made up as many efforts as China has in building up its process knowledge. And so I feel like China is definitely catching up in this area of weakness, but I'm not sure that the US is really getting better in terms of technology production and building out its industrial base as well. Yeah, one of the things you notice that the Chinese Communist Party doesn't value all technology equally. The state has really prioritized the pursuit of physical and industrial technology over some of these virtual ones like social media and e-commerce platforms. You had this good quote that she has scorned the virtual economy, preferring his industry heavy and his output hard. So China might be home to the most innovative e-commerce system in the world. So how has that happened despite this focus on the hard economy versus the virtual economy? Is this China kind of succeeding in an area even though the party wants to focus on some of these harder areas? Yes, absolutely. And I think my first model of China is that though the state is very strong, entrepreneurs are also very strong and it is not always going to shake out in the favor of the state. There are plenty of areas in which Chinese entrepreneurs have succeeded without much government intervention and perhaps they thrived because they did not have much government intervention. And a lot of the crucial sectors of Chinese success and something like electric vehicles, the dominant producers of electric vehicles did not grow out of the state. It wasn't the state owned enterprises, the state owned automakers that really built the best EVs. Right now it is really BYD, an entrepreneurial firm. And so I think there is definitely a sense that the state is going to be really strong. But I think the record of the state in industrial policy is decidedly mixed. Often they mess things up, they crush a lot of entrepreneurs, they take away a lot of dynamism. And at the same time, there is this churning mass of entrepreneurial talent in China that I believe the state will never be able to crush. And if they do somehow manage to crush it one day, then that will be very bad news for China indeed. But for the most part, there is still plenty of things going on in China that the state doesn't really detect. I think one of the things that we learned about deep seek was that, you know, though there has been a lot of efforts by the state to really become a technology leader in terms of AI, this hedge fund, which is not in the good political crisis of Beijing, that was working pretty far away from Beijing. Hongzhou is not exactly a distant backwater, but it is not exactly right next to Beijing either, and that it was able to produce a great success. And the state was mostly following its lead and trying to appropriate it and get close to it only afterwards. So there is still plenty going on in China that is not fully managed by the state. So there's a lot of talk about ideology, how she views the world. You ascribe a kind of worldview to Xi Jinping called completionism. What does that mean? One of the most curious brags I've seen from any Chinese official came from a minister of industry and information technology, in which he said that China produces in every single statistical category maintained by the United Nations. And I feel like this is very much a Chinese sort of a boast because they really like to view things in terms of categories and try to have a really high mark in terms of all of them. And I feel what China wants is some degree of completionism, some degree of self sufficiency, that what China ultimately wants is to achieve the great dreams of the Qing dynasty, which called itself in the latter half the dynasty as the celestial empire, in which China really wants to become the center of the world again, which doesn't need so many of the foreign trinkets that it can produce itself, and that it can close its doors and be blissfully serene about the turmoil of barbarians outside. But first to get there, China needs to break the American stranglehold on semiconductors, the Western stranglehold on aviation technologies, as well as a lot of other crucial dependencies in things like biotech, as well as a lot of other goods. China needs to be able to subdue foreign powers such that they don't feel like other powers could be a threat economically, militarily, or in terms of ideology. A completionist big state, I think, is one of the goals that Xi is trying to achieve. Now, I'm hoping we can talk about how the engineering state views the people who actually live inside of it. And you do note that on the social engineering side of the equation is where some of these practices, the culture of building of engineering starts to show some challenges. And as China's population continues to drop, the party has adopted an increasingly obsessive focus on social engineering when it comes to fertility and the role of women in society. And yet, as you highlight in the book, since the 2022 National People's Congress, the Politburo has lacked any women for the first time in decades. And of course, there's normally only one or two women, but at least there was one or two and now zero. How is this playing out? One of the most fascinating little news stories that I've seen in the last few years is that a lot of the birth planning officers that used to enforce the one child policy have done a complete 180 in order to go from restricting births into promoting births. And I believe it was the economist that did a little story of how neighborhood committees in China are going up to women and asking them about their menstrual cycles and asking them about their family preferences. And these people are often telling women, well, you may like cats, but cats are no substitute for children. And this is one of these things that we hear from a lot of obnoxious politicians everywhere. This is mostly on TV, everywhere else, but in China, this is kind of up close and personal by party committees. And my favorite little tidbit from the story was that one woman noted that her parents after she married has asked her about her childbearing preferences only once, whereas the local committees sent out by the party have asked her already six times, when will you have children? And so I think this is the sort of thing that is pretty obnoxious for women everywhere. This question of when would you like to have kids? But I think it is especially obnoxious in China, where it's not just the family's doing it, it is also the party state encouraging it. I think this sort of speaks a little bit to the aspect of engineering in China, in which the Chinese state is finding that the one child policy could be enforced through these brutal campaigns of forced sterilizations and mass abortions, but they are having a rather difficult time trying to engineer the population in order to get them to coerce copulation or something in order to have kids. And I think this is one of the things that we can see in which a lot of folks in China, not by any means a great percentage, but a substantial number of people have expressed and displayed a great willingness to leave and take leave of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people that is undertaken in their name. We see that a lot of people have fled to Ecuador, in which they don't have to get a visa in order to do the very dangerous, months-long walk to cross the southwestern border in the United States. We've seen a lot of apprehensions by CBP in 2023 and 2024 of people who are crossing over. We see a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs have moved to the US, the UK, Japan in order to move their businesses there. You've seen a lot of creative people who've moved to Thailand where I spend a bit of time in Chiang Mai, as well as New York, as well as the Netherlands, because they are not so thrilled with the degree of social control that they're suffering. Again, I feel like this is a very narrow slice of the population, mostly pretty elite, aside from those who decide to walk across the border to Texas and Arizona, but that discontent is real and the question is just how widespread it is. Many of the neighborhood committees you highlight in the book that are now enforcing these increasingly aggressive and awkward conversations around women's fertility have their origin in implementation of zero COVID and the COVID lockdown. And you have a powerful chapter on your experience of the COVID lockdowns in Chiang Mai, including a drone that helpfully approaches the window of your apartment with a reminder to repress your soul's yearning for freedom. How did China's character as an engineering state lead to what became an increasingly disastrous zero COVID policy and then the sudden decision to reverse course? Yeah, I think the drones were a pretty scary part of the Chiang Mai lockdowns. Not only when they broadcast these absurd messages like repress your soul's yearning for freedom, but also there were a few instances of drones being used to monitor the population. If they were outside, let's say, signing themselves on the balcony or in the green area of an apartment compound, perhaps the drones will descend and you would have an officer of the state barking at you to say, go back home. You're not allowed to be outside. It's a terrifying experience. I'm glad I didn't experience it, but for the people who have, it is not very pleasant indeed because who knows what else those drones can do. I think that the zero COVID experience really feels like something that reveals that the line between rational and irrational can be very thin indeed. And the engineering state is able to get us to cross that line. China initially had a disastrous response to the very opening of the zero COVID pandemic in which it suppressed the whistleblower accounts for the sake of maintaining political stability, which is exactly how the SARS virus erupted about 20 years ago. But then China enforced these very effective lockdowns that were exactly in line with what the World Health Organization demanded in terms of a cordon sanitaire in which a lot of people were dragged off to centralize quarantines, which limited the ability of the virus to spread within a household. It sealed off a lot of its borders and it had very extensive contact tracing apps. And that was, I felt like, definitely a plus at the time of zero COVID because by March and April of 2020, a lot of the restaurants had started to reopen, movie theaters had started to reopen later in the year, and life was really back to normal without many deaths. But then at the start of 2022, when the highly transmissible strain of Omicron started to circulate in Shanghai, these approaches were no longer effective, given the transmissibility of the Omicron variant, but the state really had to double down. And so I think this is where we have to question the extent to which the engineering state could really be helpful and good and rational towards people, because a lot of engineers are unable really to change direction. They are really intent to maintain a path and they don't really care about human emotions or human suffering that is in their way. And they are ready to really commit to this until they're not, in which case they completely swerve and change direction, as we saw at the end of 2022. In which COVID was abandons more or less overnight over the course of a week when the virus really started to spread throughout Beijing, which I think the central government decided not to enforce a lockdown on the central government. This speaks to some of the successes, the merits as well as the madnesses of engineering state when we take a look at the experience of COVID in China. I think those tensions are also illustrated very clearly in your earlier point that from a certain perspective, there were no shortages in China during the pandemic. Logistics networks held up, production held up when those same systems were collapsing in the United States and elsewhere around the world. But then you also see people locked in their apartments in Shanghai going hungry. How do you think about the tension between extreme success and extreme failure, even on that same question of logistics and supply chains? Yes, that's right. And I think a lot about this headline that ran in China daily shortly before the Shanghai lockdown in 2022, in which the Shanghai government declared that Shanghai has no plans for a citywide lockdown. Initially, I read that as saying, well, we're going to deny that we're going to have a lockdown. But now I understand it to mean what we had made no plans to enforce a lockdown against 25 million people at the start of 2022. And I think in this case, Shanghai really did not plan for that situation because the order came down from Beijing that the virus was circulating too widely in Shanghai, spilling over to other provinces. The party secretaries of neighboring provinces had really started to complain that Shanghaiers were bringing the virus with them. And so they really had to enforce a sudden lockdown without much notice in which a lot of these neighborhood committees, which were tasked to distribute food, had made no preparations. These neighborhood committees were mostly these gossiping clubs where people gathered to read party speeches, drink some tea and maybe talk, play a little bit of Ma Jiang afterwards. But now these older folks who never really used Excel before had to figure out how to deliver food to thousands of people at a time. That system obviously couldn't work. But I think this also speaks a little bit to the tendencies of the engineering state in which extreme success and extreme failure don't go too far apart. One of the points I make in my book is that let's think about what was the very worst year in China to be born. I think it is going to be something like 1949, the founding of the People's Republic. If you were born in 1949, by the time that you turned age 10 roughly, you might have experienced some degree of famine during the Great Leap Forward. If you were an urbanite by the time that you were able to attend college, Mao would probably have shut down all of the universities with his injunction to bombard the headquarters as he kicked off the Cultural Revolution. By the time that you were having kids, perhaps in your 30s, Deng Xiaoping would have announced the one child policy, which was really, really brutal. And then you would have suffered this last spasm of a state-run mobilization campaign, namely Zero COVID, when you were in your late 60s and 70s. If you just shift the year of birth by just 10 years by one decade, if you were born in 1959, you would have no memory of famine. You would not have been too severely affected, probably, by the cultural revolution. Deng Xiaoping would have opened the universities just at the time when you were able to attend university and people were able to build businesses, acquire housing and build a lot of their wealth. So that was the luckiest generation. And I think this absolutely speaks to the very thin line between rationality and madness, as well as great success and great failure. I want to briefly return to the role of ideology in party decision making, which I think fits a little bit uneasily in your book, because on the one hand, of course, the idea of production as a moral act, which you describe has a clear Marxist resonance, but we tend to think of engineers as problem solvers, not as priests or philosophers or necessarily Marxists. So what is the role of ideology in the party today? I think this is maybe something like role of law as designed by engineers. I think that is something I would always try to be conciliatory, and that is how I will reconcile it. You're right that in general, in our conception of engineers, that they do not tend to be heavily ideological, although perhaps we can say that among the more ideological engineers, they can be really, really ideological. One of these books that is out there, and I'm never very sure whether this book was mostly just a big joke, was that it pointed out that a lot of the hijackers of the planes on 9-11 had degrees in engineering. It's like most of them were trained to be engineers, and a lot of the jihadists back in the late 90s and early 2000s had degrees in engineering. And so it is possible that once an engineer becomes ideological, the ideology becomes really virulent. I think that China is certainly in a heavily ideological state, but we can see is that the propaganda department is still one of the most important instruments of the Communist Party. The person in charge of propaganda must be only a functionary. That person should generally not be allowed to sit in the Standing Committee, otherwise that person could be way too powerful. And again and again, we've seen that China is organized through these centralized campaigns of inspiration in which the leadership sets out a few important objectives, and then the rest of the party state is expected to mobilize and produce a campaign. Now, some of these slogans can be a bit of a mouthful, something like common prosperity or new productive forces. And so a lot of these Marxist terms don't necessarily inspire a lot of confidence, but then there are some terms that do work quite well. Something like socialism with Chinese characteristics is still, I think, one of these all time great terms anywhere that helped China pivot away from Maoism. And I think that the state is very organized around these certain keywords. It helps the rest of the party state, all hundred million members know what to do. And you can see these being communicated all the time in the People's Daily or Seeking Truth, Qiushua. And I think that is still going to be a pretty important part of how they govern. I just have one last question. I mean, we're sitting here in Washington thinking about the US-China relationship. Based on your thesis of China being an engineering state, the United States being a lawyerly society, what council would you have for the leaders of both countries in seeking a constructive relationship with each other? Well, I think the first thing is I wonder to what extent one could ever counsel Xi Jinping or Donald Trump. I think that both people are quite difficult to speak to, though for different reasons. I think what I would love to see is a world in which the US gains a little bit more engineering capability. Let's say that US becomes 20% more engineering because right now, throughout the country, we have shortages of all sorts of things. We have shortages of housing. We have shortages of mass transit. We're not building enough solar wind and transmission lines in order to decarbonize. And the defense industrial base is rusting as well to say nothing of the broader manufacturing base in which a lot of America's apex manufacturers like Intel and Boeing and Detroit and Tesla have not been doing very well over the past few years. And so I think the US needs to recover some of its engineering chops to be able to build bus stations and high speed rail and housing, especially in blue states. And while the US is 20% more engineering minded, I think that China should be 50% more lawyerly. I would love it if the Chinese had some ability to actually enjoy some greater legal protection that people don't fear that their businesses are going to be smashed, that their articles are going to be censored, that their home is not going to be taken away from them in the course of a grand dam project and for people to feel like they have the ability to protect themselves and achieve some degree of flourishing. So my prescription for the two countries is slightly more engineering in the US and a lot more lawyers in China. Well, Dan, thank you so much. This has been really fascinating and a great conversation. I'm sure we could go into a lot more detail on these. For those who do want to dig more into Dan's argument, you could read his book, Breakneck, or you can do like me and listen to it on audiobook. You can also read his foreign affairs piece, The Real China Model, Beijing's Enduring Formula for Wealth and Power, co-authored with Arthur Krober. So yeah, Dan, thank you so much and thanks, Henrietta, for co-hosting. This was a lot of fun. This was a lot of fun indeed. To our listeners who might be hearing about peckingology or China Power for the first time on this special crossover episode, we hope you will subscribe to both podcasts to hear from leading experts on the most important trends in Chinese politics and power. If you enjoyed this podcast, check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts from into Africa, the Asia chess board, China Power, the trade guys, smart women's smart power, and more. You can listen to them all on major streaming platforms like iTunes and Spotify. Visit csis.org slash podcasts to see our full catalog.
