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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Authoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe. Wasn't thal Joe.
We are recording this on August twenty seventh. Did you catch the Trump Cabinet meeting yesterday?
I saw your tweets and they looked like some of the most obsequious. I mean a lot of these unusually obsequious. But even yes, I.
Saw your tweets, you could just say yes. So there are a bunch of things that stood out, But one in particular was Donald Trump talking about building out new energy capacity and he said specifically, I'm going to quote here. You know, in China they do it very quickly. They have one person that says do it, and that's it. But essentially, we have one person that says do it, and we've given that order.
Yeah, you know, like he's very abundance coded. He wants to like he wants to get rid of all of the uh or he seems to have this impulse to get rid of all of the myriad checks and balances and all these things that stand in the way of developing things. So it sounds like Trump is abundance pilled. I assume that's the direction you're going on. Yes.
If there's one thing I think you could say about China's economy and it's political economy, it is that China is pretty good at building things, yes, right, And we've seen various examples of that over time. Back when I was living in Hong Kong, I took the high speed rail from Hong Kong to Beijing and that was absolutely amazing. You get to Beijing in less than a day. The US is nowhere near having anything like that, and I speak as someone who takes Amtrak in the Northeast regularly.
On the other hand, China at various times has produced too much.
Right.
It's accused as such, right. I know that people say.
This, okay, But for instance, you think back to the Ghost City, Sure bridges to nowhere.
Sure at they were bridges to nowhere at the time.
Amusement parks that no one goes to.
Definitely, although we have amusement parks here that no one goes to.
Disagree or disagree hard. But this has sparked a new movement in China by policymakers called involution yes, which is basically an attempt to reduce over capacity in terms of building things.
There's definitely no question that there does seem to be this phenomenon which the government in Beijing seems highly cognizant of, which is this sort of like profitless competition, much of it driven by the incentive structure that is borne by the provinces promoting their local champions, and so far as much like sort of success as some of these companies have on some metrics, there's no money to be made
in many cases. It sounds sort of nice from the consumer perspective, you know, it's like Zurbier twenty tens when we were all getting like, you know, cheap ubers and stuff like that. But you know, there's a seems to be a risk of certain internal imbalances on that.
I think the issue is you have a lot of companies who are basically producing all the same thing and therefore, you know, racing to the bottom in terms of price, and no one can actually make money. And I don't know about you, but if I was a startup founder, I would probably want to make money right at some point. I would not want to be locked in a forever competition in terms of who could drive the absolute lowest cost.
Well, what if you were just a normal consumer who wasn't a founder?
Sadly, that is what I am. Okay, Well, on this note, we have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Dan Wong, friend of the Pod and who has just written a new book called Breakneck China's Quest to Engineer the Future. He's also a research scholar at the Hoover Institution. So Dan, welcome back to the show.
Thanks so much, Tracy, really glad to talk about moby Dick with my friends.
Why do coach trouble? Why do you coble?
You know, I was actually wondering if you were going to bring up the Moby Dick reference.
The problem Joe, I've been a ket for a very long time. Maybe this is the way needs to be getting into That's.
Right, okay, simple question to start. Why does China like building stuff?
China likes building stuff because it is made up of leadership that is very heavily engineering pilled. Many of them have been engineer's trained of a very Soviet sort, hydraulic engineers, electrical engineers, thermal engineers, which is kind of a termine China. That means producing coal and processing coal, they treat the megaproject as the solution to every problem. They are building enormous dams. They're building a big new dam now that is going to use sixty times more concrete than the
Hoover dam. They're it's going to produce I think, three times as much power as the three gorgeous dam. But this is a lot of their solutions to a lot of different economic problems and social problems as well. That new highways, new homes, coal plants, hyperscalers. It's what they know how to do, and it's what they're going to do.
First of all, Before we go any further, I just want to say it, like, having spoken to for years, I'm thrilled of all the recognition you're getting for this book. I know we weren't like the first to discover Dan Wong. I think Tyler Cowen got there first, but it's been fantastic talking to you over the years, and there's sort of like a vindication I think of your career, et cetera, because now everyone wants to see the world through the
Dan Wong lund. So think I just wanted to say how exciting it is and happy for you that you're getting all.
This is channeling the Trump cabinet.
Oh wow, I'm being am I Trump. Yeah, yeah, I guess, okay, good, Okay. As Tracy mentioned, Trump talked about you know if someone says do it and then they do it. But I'm curious, like how much is it? Would you say, like the political system really allows for that versus the actual like breadth of labor and just engineering knowledge, Like how would you tilt the sort of political structure versus the skills. I think it's both.
So China has a lot of economic ministries like the NDERC, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the MIIT, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technologies. You have all of these planners that are making new plans all the time, and they have exactly great plans to know where the next subway station in Beijing or Shinjin or quimming On to go. And so there's plenty of shovel ready projects because people have already been planning for these things for years.
And every time China's economy has any sort of a wobble, then the Communist Party says, okay, well we're going to build another really big dam, or we're going to build more highway systems. So you have a lot of shovel ready projects in place, and then you have the government thinking that while pouring more concrete is still going to be the solution to a lot of our different problems. And on top of that, you have a very skilled
manufacturing workforce. You have a very skilled public sector that has been building a lot of high speed trains, that have been building a lot of big ships, that have been building subway systems. They know how to do this stuff, and so it just comes really naturally. You have the system plus the politics all favoring a lot of construction.
When you say Chinese policy makers are made up of engineers, I have two questions. So one, how did that come to be? And then secondly, could you maybe give us some specific examples of how that manifests in actual policy. So, for instance, does having an engineering background make you perhaps better at making strategic decisions about economic priorities? Like how does that background actually come into play?
I think China's engineering state has deep roots, but the modern manifestation really took shape after the nineteen eighties when dunzhel Peing took over from the total mayhem of the mal Years and dounzheal Peing thought, well, Mao was kind of this poet. He was a warlord, he was a romantic, he was a murderer.
What is the opposite of all of that.
Well, we're going to put mechanical engineers within the polit bureau, and that is exactly what Deng Xiaoping did. So throughout the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties, don't put a lot of engineers in the polit bureau, such that by the year two thousand and two, every single member of the Standing Committee, all nine people, especially Hu Jintao and Buen Jabal, the General Secretary and the Premier at the time, everyone had degrees in engineering, and that.
Has fluctuated a little bit.
By the time that Seizing Pain came to office, who's undergrad was a chemical engineer, I think he saw the light and his doctorate was Marxist economics, so you know, we have a pseudo economist up there. By the time that he came into office, his Premier, He Kutiang, was
trained in I believe law in the economics. But now in the twentieth Party Congress after twenty twenty two, China's engineers are really dominant again, which you have a lot of people from the military industrial complex in the top of the politbureau. But I also want to suggest, but playfully and lightly, that there are ancient roots of China's
engineering state as well. This is famously the state that administered a vast exam nation system, which people became mandarins by doing these exams administered by the court.
You had a lot of.
Chinese emperors that didn't hesitate to conscript people to build great walls or grand canals. So these are fortifications and waterway systems, and so I don't want to take this too literally, but you can sort of see how a lot of emperors never really hesitated to completely restructure a person's relationship to our land. And so that's a little bit deeper too.
So, you know, Tracy mentioned that, and I have no doubt that it is true that there's you know, these various like white elephant projects are things that get built that aren't necessary. In your book talks about them. All that being said, it seems like one of the objective facts in the world is that Chinese living standards and the economy has dramatically in the last ten twenty years, like to an extraordinary degree. Does the success of all
these Chinese planning boards? Do you think it strikes a heart in certain conventionalism, planning isn't supposed to work. Economists are very skeptical of planning, the hi Ekian idea that the market and prices are the best signals for these things. What kind of challenge does China's success opposed to some of these ideas.
I don't want to think that China's success strikes at the very heart of planning in economics. I think that China has not demonstrated the success of central planning a large I think I would defend a narrower case that a lot of construction has been good for a lot of people. So I think that China is what other tests is there? Well, maybe there are other tests, which
is that whether people are happy. I think that is a decent test, whether they feel the ability to have creative expression, whether they feel that their lives are going to be better because they're able to save some money. I think not just about the physical living standards, although I think that is really important because I've spent plenty of time in China's rich re zones. I was living in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, where you can see
that these cities get better and better every year. You have new subway stations. Shanghai this year will have a thousand parks, up from five hundred in twenty twenty. All
of these cities are really highly functional. I've been in China Southwest and Gwaijo Province, China's fourth poorest province, and you have these enormous bridges that are bridges to nowhere when they start, but then to nowhere has become maybe two somewhere, so after it is built, and people actually feel a lot of pride about all of these things.
And so I think that a lot of construction, a lot of home building, a lot of electricity production through coal as well as hydro and solar, these things are all really good. I think you can definitely point to a lot of costs. There's a lot of material waste and all of this concrete that's very carbon intensive. There's a lot of financial problems. Squadjo can't really pay a lot of its debts right now. There's a lot of displacement of people. Three gorgious scam display something like a
million people. I would say that physical construction is mostly pretty good, though there are plenty of costs.
We talk more about financial problems from all of this, because obviously the local government debt situation has been much discussed. But you point out in the book, for instance, that you can see evidence of some of this impact in things like Chinese stocks. So because you have all these companies who are basically racing to the bottom in terms of price, it's difficult for them to produce a profit, and so the stock price basically has traded sideways for
like a decade. I guess part of that would also be capital controls and the impact from that. But how does this manifest in terms of finances.
Well, let's take a look at something like the solar industry, which I think is kind of an emblematic Chinese success. You have China producing something like ninety percent of the solar PV modules in the world. But China isn't only producing the final product, it is also producing all of the polysilicon as well as all the tools to produce solar. And in the solar industry, you have basically zero differentiation
between most of the big solar producers. You know, something like the third largest solar producer in China is not that different from the fifteenth largest, and maybe not even that different from the thirtieth largest. They're all making pretty undifferentiated products. And what this has represented is kind of a strategic trium for the Chinese government that they have a lock on one of these critical industries of the future that a lot of countries will need. It is
awesome for consumers everywhere. So if you are trying to build a solar panel onto your roof, either in China or in the US, you know, solar costs have plunged something like ninety four percent since the year two thousand or so. I think that's about the right figure. And it's been total misery for these companies as well as
their investors. And maybe this is what socialism with Chinese characteristics means, which is a lot of state power, a lot of consumer power, but not very much financial investor's benefit.
So, speaking of her novelle this is not about Moby Dick, I'm actually thinking about his novella Bartleby, in which you know, the famous character Bartleby decides I would prefer not to. He's working on Wall Street and then one day he would prefer not to, and the people around him are
completely exasperated at this person. And of course we saw a few years ago people were talking about the live flat movement, And so when you talk about, oh, you know, like perhaps it's come at the cost of happiness, Like how wide spread is this? How much of this success in China? I mean one of the other aspects of
you know, unions aren't legal in China. I presume striking isn't legal in China, and so forth, Like how much of this material success that everyone enjoys to some extent in your view, has come down to sort of extracting the worker surplus. And how big do you think is there like a larger brewing impulse to fight against that.
Well, when I first read bartle B the Scrivener, I saw some commentary that it's actually a lot about homo eroticism. I thought that maybe that's where we were going to go, but maybe we'll take a look at that later. I think that whether people in China are happy is always a very interesting and excessively broad question, and I always wonder about things like.
That, if anyone's happy in the world, but keep going.
You know, Bhutan, with something like four traffic lights in the country is supposed to be super happy. We don't really get that. Certainly, we can observe that there are a lot of Chinese, mostly elites, who are interested in creative expression. Many of them have become deeply unsatisfied. So they are moving to the Netherlands, They're moving to New York, They're moving to Chang Mai. I've seen some of their
events here in New York. There's a feminist stand up comedy which is, you know, having a lot of comedy shows in Chinese. That is pretty active of a scene here in Manhattan actually, And so there's a lot of people journalists who have had their pieces completely censored Six Ways to Sunday who are pretty dissatisfied. There's plenty of people dissatisfied in Shanghai who had a horrible time throughout
the lockdown. And we had these astonishing numbers of something like, at its peak, forty thousand Chinese flying to Ecuador where they don't have to get a visa to walk up to the southwestern border in the United States because they are so upset with a seizing pain. But it's the broader mass of Chinese unhappy, well pretty hard to say. I think there are plenty of people who are working for state don't enterprises and you know, not really enjoying
much of their time there. You could be working for one of these big tech companies and working nine ninety six hours nine am to nine pm, six days a week, and that's not very happy. You could be living with your parents.
Because which, by the way, is the same Silicon Valley.
Well, I thought it was the same as Bloombergley, but yeah.
It's probably nine nine to seven in Stilicon Valley.
But do you get equity in the company in return for your hard work?
Maybe some of them do, but it's probably not to the same extent in Silicon Valley. But at the same time, you know, if you're a young Chinese living in Shanghai, perhaps your cause of living is not super high because they're living with your parents. You get to save some money by working at a state owned enterprise. You have excellent cafes popping up all the time. A lot of things are pretty cheap. You can get a bowl of
noodles really cheaply. And you know, for people who are debating whether they want to try to make a career in London or New York and try to be really ambitious or just have a thumping lifestyle life flat lifestyle in Shanghai. Maybe that's kind of a wash. So I don't see simmering discontent that threatens the top older gem, but certainly there are plenty of people dissatisfied.
There's also arguably a sort of existential dread hanging over certain sectors or certain entrepreneurs, which is that at any time, the Chinese government could change its mind about what industry it actually wants to promote and nurture. And we saw that happen. I think when you and I were both in Hong Kong in twenty twenty slash twenty twenty one,
and this was a big deal. So this idea that China all of a sudden kind of turned its back on more consumer oriented technology companies, how big of a legacy did that have or how big of an impact did that have on the sort of entrepreneurial spirit of China.
There's plenty of data to suggest that VC funds in China are having a hard time actually raising funds and also having a hard time deploying their capital. Certainly, it's become pretty difficult for a lot of startups to exit because they can't necessarily list in the US, and they can't necessarily list very easily in China as well. China's consumption over the last few years has been pretty limp
after the COVID crackdowns. A lot of companies had to have pretty extensive layoffs, and they're just not having a really easy time given the limp consumption, spending really large in China. I think this goes to a kind of a broader point within authoritarian systems, which is that no one feels very safe in a lot of authoritarian systems. You can be an elite in Beijing, and what is your life going to be? Your life could be working in the financial industry, which is a definite elite everywhere,
including in Beijing. And two years ago, Beijing announced that it was going to have a salary cap of three hundred thousand dollars roughly for people working in state owned banks. And if you made over that figure the last couple of years, you may have to give some money back
to the government. Maybe you're working for a tech company and you think that online education is going to be totally safe, because Chinese love education and they're always going to be spending more money on their kids, and then that worked until the government declared everything must be a nonprofit.
If you're working for the military, if you're working for the government, your life could be subject to either a corruption crackdown or some sort of the political wins changing and your patron is no longer in place, and then
your whole network of patronage has to fall. And so this is one of these things where there is kind of this apocalyptic sense that hangs over you if you're living in Beijing, Shanghai, perhaps even in Hong Kong, where a lot of your life could fall apart and there's no one really to protect you, no lawyers that you can turn to, the court system to really turn to.
You know, one of these things that comes up a lot, and I don't really find it to be that interesting with a conversation. Look, oh, is China a communist or capitalist? And it seems like a very tedious conversation. I mean, it has a you know, a leninist system of government. I think that fact says to say, is it going in the direction of something that we could call socialist?
I think Doung Choupang said the goal was to have a modern socialist state by year twenty forty nine, So twenty four years from now, is it going into direction that would be described this is so well, there.
Are a bunch of Marxists over there, and they would always tell you that history is the most important and we are marching towards socialism. So their answer is yes. I have my doubts. I took a look at China today and I think it is the most right wing major country in the world. This is a country that really prizes manufacturing above all else. It doesn't really have much by way of immigration. You have a state that enforces totally traditional gender roles, and you have a pretty
minimal welfare safety net. Where taxes in China are not actually that high. It is pretty regressively funded on consumption taxes. This is a country that arrests union organizers and that has busted up certain Marxist reading groups in universities. And I take a look at that, and I think, doesn't this look kind of like Eisenhower's America? You know?
This is it certainly doesn't soun liberal.
It doesn't sound very liberal at all, and I'm not even sure if it sounds very socialist. There is absolutely a Leninist aspect in which state control of public enterprises. You know, public ownership of production is very much real. Many important sectors telecommunications, aviation, energy are state owned, and you have some redistribution between the provinces. But you know, kind of my handy snapshot is not to think of China as socialists or autocratic. I think these are pretty
limited terms that don't really offer much anymore. My simple formulation of China is that it is a Lendinness technocracy with grand Opera characteristics, pretty rational most of the time, but then every so often we'll do something pretty preposterous and then kind of collapse in something really ridiculous.
That said, we have seen recently China make some moves to boost social safety nets. So they've said they're going to you know, do more for seniors, and they're also going to try to boost consumer spending. One thing that I thought was kind of amusing was they basically rolled out a cash for clunkers equivalent. And again, I think of all those things focus on consumer spending, social safety nets, though arguably in the US those are perhaps declining cash
for clunkers, that sort of thing. I think that is very American in many ways in terms of the political economy. And meanwhile in the US, you know, Trump is talking about how he wants to be more efficient in terms of controlling the economy. Like China. We've also had some instances of the US government taking stakes in companies recently that seems very Chinese in certain respects. Is the US starting to emulate China and China emulate.
The US tracy? When I first heard of the tariffs on Liberation Day, I thought that liberation doesn't sound very much like an American word. It sounds much more like a Chinese word to my ears.
Now five liberations campaign.
Yes, right, we're going to liberate Taiwan into socialism. You know, this is what they're up to. And certainly there are a lot of aspects in which the US and Trump in particular, is copying China. We are making Intel a state,
don't enterprise with American characteristics. There's a lot of questions now with data probity and whether the unemployment figures are going to be well reported, And there is kind of just this you visiting stochastic terror on the downtrodden, especially undocumented immigrants, and all of these things are not very nice things that I think that Trump is learning from c and right now, I think what we have is authoritarianism without the good stuff, and the good stuff of
actually building quite a lot of mass transit and clean technology generation, clean energy generation. Rather, we don't really have the Port Authority bus terminal being built and renovated on time. You don't have California high speed rail. We don't have smoothly functional cities that have a lot of public order. And I don't think that the US should try to emulate a lot of these things. But I think there are better things to emulate, because a lot of what
Trump is building are gilded ballrooms and detention centers. I had, you know, we're getting quite a lot of just I think many of the worst aspects of authoritarianism.
You know, I'm curious, I say, at the beginning, you've had this huge rise. Everyone is obsessed with this story right now. Everyone, it's just every every day I wake up, it's on social media, it's coming from DC, it's et cetera. Everyone is sort of maybe miles of gate, but the capacity of China to build that, damn Or you know, you open uh Instagram and it's some crazy drone show or something like that that shows the technical prowess there.
You know, this wasn't the case the sort of popularization of all this when you started your book, or certainly not the first time we had you on this show. What do you make of that, Like, how has perceptions of China changed, or maybe even your own perception of China changed since you started really focusing on this stuff.
Well, Joe, maybe Chinese industrialism has been my white whale for a lot of time.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I moved to Hong Kong at the start of twenty seventeen from Silicon Valley, where I used to be working, in part because I was feeling that a lot of the technologies that was important in Silicon Valley at the time were not so interesting. It was a lot of cryptocurrencies, was a lot of consumer platforms. We hadn't even gotten to SaaS for business yet, and so it was just
not that interesting. And so when I had lunch with Arthur Kroeber and you told me about something called Made in China twenty twenty five, I thought that ultra high voltage transmission, electric vehicle batteries, memory trips, these were far more interesting. But I felt that it was actually making a distinctively popular decision among my Silicon Valley peers because they thought that they were the center of the universe,
which is a view they still hold. And what are we doing if we're not being in San Francisco and not pursuing some aspect of tech? And so when I moved to China, it definitely didn't feel like the elitist popular thing to do. But I was really glad to go take a look at what China was building. And I think that there is a broader sense in Silicon Valley that tech is important, but non tech is also important.
Right now, I feel like a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, where I spend a lot of time as a fellow at Hoover, you know, a lot of folks are trying to build God in a box, and that attention has shifted to AI, and I feel like that has become a totalizing aspect once more, and I feel like part of my task is still to remind people that drones are important and bridges are important, and we live in a material world, and you know, let's build up a manufacturing base as well.
So with the focus shifting to AI, you could make an argument that the US has the lead there still, even though we've seen moments of panic with the deep Seek model early this year and things like that. But on the other hand, I suppose you could argue that AI also needs vast amounts of physical infrastructure, including data centers, energy chips. Who has the upper hand when it comes to AI.
I don't have a super strong view on this, but I could outline a potential scenario in which China is going to be leading on AI based on a few factors. First and most important, as you point out, Tracy, that China has a lot of electrical power. So the US may have all of the computing because it has all of the advanced chips from Nvidium. As Howard Letnik says, China has a best the fourth best chips in terms
of AI, and that is a pretty substantial constraint. But what is a bigger US constraint, maybe right now going forward, is that there just isn't enough electrical power, especially if Trump is taking winterbines offline and being very discriminatory about
certain types of energy. And China I think has organized itself as a civilization to nine nothing towards heavy industry whatever heavy industry wants it is going to get and that could be powered by solar, could be powered by wind, it could be powered by coal, it could be powered by nuclear. But China will not have this issue that META faced earlier in the end of last year, in which a rare species of be prevented META from building a giant new power facility, and China will definitely not
do that. So China has a lot of electrical power. China may not have a lot of advanced chips, but it has a lot of mature chips which are going to be necessary for inference. So if we do invent God in a box, you know, we're going to be running queries all the time to figure out how to automate and shop and whatever else. And that is going to require a lot of processing power. And I think this is where China's mature chips are going to have
a pretty good advantage. And China also has I think another unique advantage, which is that training data might be more strategically valuable. China has most of the manufacturing capacity in the world, or about thirty percent of manufacturing value add but that is quite a large chunk. And you know what does the US have, Well, we have a lot of consulting companies and a lot of healthcare companies.
So maybe the US will automate something on the scale of McKinsey, and China will automate something on the scale of fox Con. And you know, they're going to have a lot more manufacturing production and we're going to have a lot more better consultants.
Yeah, I suppose there's a synergy here where you could use AI to make your manufacturing more efficient.
Right, No, totally, And we talked to Cameron Johnson about that, the diffusion of AI within it, and right, like a factory that's monitored properly is brimming with fresh training data all the time, and that has a compounding effect and the accelerating effect and so forth potentially widening that gap. I want to ask actually another AI question. It's not even about US China per se, maybe more US question. Use the word totalizing. And I've been thinking about this
exactly in a couple of different ways. Like one is, like I wonder about whether people have lost interest in things like say, drug discovery in part because of this implicit assumption, Well, once we achieve AGI in two years, that will do all the drug discovery, So why are we even bothering with working on that in the meantime? And also it feels like much of culture strikes me in the US as sort of disappearing and other things
like that. People are just sort of losing interest in lots of things because AI is crowding out in the psychological space everything else. And I'm curious if, in your time in Bay Area think about these things, whether that rings sure or not.
Definitely, I hear the craziest when I'm in California, and I hear, you know, I think a lot of people are very smart Stanford kids who are very smart, and yet they could be very narrow minded and not have a very broad view. I heard some things like people say, well, maybe you don't need to think so much about climate change, for example, anymore, And I say, oh, well, why don't we have to think about climate change because AI will figure out what we need to do with climate change
and implement everything. Maybe we don't need to be so careful about teaching kids how to read the great books or maybe even to read at all, because AI will just help us get there. And they're trying to manifest the eskaton in Silicon Valley. And there is also this bit of an apocalyptic error in which maybe the world will end in twenty twenty seven because AGI will be out there and it's not going to be aligned, and all of our world will kind of just end. I
really don't buy that view. I believe that we have to have a longer term view about everything. There is kind of this sense often in DC. This is not consensus, but every so often when we'd hear that, oh, the Communist Party is so weak, their legitimacy is so thin and that might topple over at any moment, and we don't really have to treat it serious like that feels
very much like cope. And there is also a Silicon Valley variant which is not really the same about China, but there is the sense that, well, you know, we're all going to ascend into utopia in twenty twenty seven when we know invent all the AI and the superintelligence.
I like how binary everything is. It's either utopia or you know, the apocalypse. On the note of potential own goals, one of the things we've had now is years and years and years of US export controls on semiconductors going into China, and I remember you were very early in describing this as a sort of Chinese Sputnik moment, this idea that this was the moment when China really realized that it actually had to produce these things itself and try to regain or get the lead over the US
when it comes to crucially strategic technology. Now that the dust has kind of settled, although clearly things are happening on the tariff side, but now that we've had years and years and years of export controls, does it look like that spurred China's technological development.
I think that it definitely spurred Kina technology development. If we take a look at some of these sanctioned companies today, Smick, which was on the entity list in twenty twenty, now has double the revenues of that level. Huawei, which had the most severe export controls, it was kind of like a new export control invented specifically to heard Huawei has by now recovered its revenues back to the twenty nineteen
pre sanctioned levels. And I being in China was just this really stark reminder that US export controls really accelerated a lot of Chinese efforts to do better. Now Beijing has always had this ambition to be a technology power. It's had this ambition for a very long time, but for the most part, it didn't have a lot of
China's most dynamic companies willing to sign on. Because a lot of China's most dynamic companies, let's say Huawei, by Dance Dji, they were able to say to Beijing, well, we need to make the most efficient five G equipment, or the most efficient drones, or the most efficient short form video, whatever it is, products that we should export around the world, and therefore we need to be buying
the best products in the world. And that was overwhelmingly things like Qualcom chips or Nvidia chips or whatever else. And what the US government did was that it recapped their ability to access US equipment at a stroke, and that fully aligned them into Beijing's goals of technology pursuit. And now you have Huawei being all sweetness and light to Chinese domestic vendors to say, well, why don't we work together. We really have a lot of common interests here.
Huawei was not super big into semiconductors in twenty nineteen in terms of their production, but now Huawei is one of the biggest spenders in semiconductors R and D, and I believe I just saw a Bloomberg piece saying that Huawei's chips are now rolling off the production line, and that was something I think entirely created by the US government, that all of these fiercely competitive companies really were fighting for their lives solving seven problems a day before breakfast
because they had to solve all of these problems, and I think that probably wasn't necessary. Over the broader strokes.
One of the things that causes alarm for DC regarding China. I mean, look, it's great that countries are getting richer and the technological frontier is being pushed, and innovation anywhere theoretically can help anyone everywhere. But this question, and it's more sort of political, perhaps geopolitical, than economic, is does China have ambitions outside of its borders?
Right?
We know the US is we have military positions all over the place, and we clearly have ambitions outside of its borders. China has no formal alliances, I believe, with any country, etc. But there's always this concern what do you think about China's interest in the rest of the world beyond sort of export destinations.
I think that China is very deeply interested in Taiwan and the South China Sea, and which it defines as within its own borders, and so that is a matter of dispute. I think that China is very keenly interested in dominating most of Southeast Asia, and.
What is dominating me.
I think that they would really like for the leaders of Malaysia and Vietnam and the Philippines to come regularly to Beijing, to Kawtel for the emperor's pleasure, and maybe that is a pretty big threat to US interests. I think that is something that we can debate. I would be skeptical that China has broader goals to seize Japan. I think that would be pretty fanciful. I think that China's success right now is building a lot of advanced manufacturing.
You're right.
I've been tracking this for a very long time. I remember my first appearance on odd Lass in twenty seventeen to talk about Made in China twenty twenty five, and I was pretty constructive that China was going to figure out a lot of these technologies, and I think that was fairly out of consensus at the time, and I think that was fairly. China has made incredible strides beyond my expectations of and I has been pretty bullish about
a lot of that. And something I worry about is that I think that China's success in advanced manufacturing will continue.
I just wrote a piece with Arthur Kroeber and Foreign Affairs pointing out that even though China's economy is slowing, and even though there's all sorts of problems with the economy and the political system, they're going to keep advancing on manufacturing and technology because they have the manufacturing process knowledge and they have the investments really to push them forward. And I think that we're already seeing that China is
de industrializing Germany. Brat Setzer has great charts on this all the time, especially in the automotive sector. I think that China will continue to de industrialize the rest of East Asia Europe as well, and that will move on
to the United States as well. And I don't have too many great views about the security threat or what is going to happen with military, but I think this the clear and present danger is that China's technology keeps advancing and that will further de industrialize parts of the Midwest as well as many parts of Europe, and I think that is going to create all sorts of political problems in the West as well, And that is the big danger that I'm nervous about.
What does the US need to do in order to preserve its own manufacturing capacity, and I guess ideally build it out.
I think there has to be a lot more investment in manufacturing process knowledge, which is all of the TACIT knowledge that we can't really write down that we have to have be a lot better at producing things like not only semiconductors, but also electric vehicle batteries and broader sets of electronics as well. I think it would be a good idea for the US to invite more Chinese companies to build factories in Michigan and Ohio Wisconsin find
put some controls on them. But if China's Force technology program worked against let's say, Apple and Tesla and all of these other American companies, why don't we do it to them and learn from the best. In terms of manufacturing. I'm really skeptical that everything that the Trump administration right now is doing has been good for manufacturing. As best as we can tell, the US has lost forty fives manufacturing jobs since Liberation Day, and that was the last
data reading that we have forty thousand jobs lost. I think that it doesn't make sense to pursue technology while decapping the NSF and the NIH, doesn't make sense tonecap top universities. It doesn't make sense to deport a lot of lower skilled labor that are really important for construction as well as manufacturing. And it doesn't make sense to try to intimidate higher skilled people researchers to be in the US as well. Now, maybe there's something good to
be said for energy production in the US. There's probably something good to be said for the deregulatory agenda under Trump to build a little bit more, But right now I'm not seeing much energy and further to build more than let's say, detention centers, coal plants, skilled ballrooms, not really the sort of you know, advanced manufacturing that America needs.
It's funny to think about coal powered electric vehicles in the future, coal powered AI data centers or whatever, but seems like a plausible thing that we'll see at one point. One area where the US is clearly dominant, and we've already touched on this is like global Internet services, and obviously you have what I guess now we'd call the
legacy ones like your metas and Microsoft's and Amazon. But also, you know, open Ai is still you know, it's the biggest in the world, and it could be on scale and have a footprint as big as some of these other giants. It seems like the world is very happy to buy bid cars and other built things. But we
saw the UK di Juae itself several years ago. Will the rest of the world adopt Chinese core tech or do you think there's still an anxiety about this, maybe because of perceptions of the influence that the party would have over these companies, et cetera. Does the US still enjoy a relative advantage in the comfort that around the world people have with using sort of US digital service.
Certainly, I think there's a lot of governments that are really nervous about Chinese technologies the UK, there's all sorts of restrictions on Huawei products kind of globally, and we've seen even countries really friendly towards China really complain about how much it is flooding their markets. We've seen Brazil complain about this, We've seen Russia complain about this, and so I think governments all over the world are trying
to have some measure to block Chinese goods. On the other hand, I think consumers really don't care, you know what.
I mean, like for a car or you know, I would I'd like to show me phone. No, I don't know, maybe they look they look pretty cool, or a zte phone or.
Powerful show that's a national security threat we are reporting you. But I think, yeah, definitely, there's a lot of people who camera. The cameras seem great, and the BYD cars and the Salami cars seem to be also really good as well. People want to buy these things, and I think the Chinese attitude is, Okay, if you want to terrify us, we'll challenge you in wto if that's still a thing or will you know, try to push back diplomatically,
but we're not going to restrain our own exports. What we need to do is, you know, if you want to block our exports and make good it's more expensive for your consumers, that's on you. So, you know, I think that's kind of its attitude, and I think there's also some nervousness now among European governments from buying American Cloud. I don't know if that is going to necessarily lead to your purchases, but maybe.
Tracy, do you have the show me dog feeder?
No, that I wasn't even aware of that.
Yeah, there's the thing. There's incredible showing with me. It's not just oh's the phone company? Then when cars? You know, there's a Shelby rice cooker. There's a shell me TOAs.
What does the dog feeder do?
I think it's like a smart dog feeder and it knows when to release more food into the bowl using all these centers.
No, I'm old school. I just have a bowl that I feel.
That might be my Christmas present too, if I can acquire one.
Thank you. You're getting an autograph copy of Herman Melville's movie Deck if I can find one. Wait, I shouldn't say that because people will be like, oh, don't you know he's dead. You're getting a first edition of the Moby Dick if I can find.
The Rockwell Kent illustration.
Okay, all right, noted, I just want to go back to what we were talking about in the intro for a second, which is the new Involution campaign. Again, it seems like China is trying to get a handle on some of these overcapacity issues. Is it going to work, and what are your general thoughts on this fresh attempt.
I was living in China when China first announced this big supply side reform effort back in twenty seventeen, when I tried to reduce a lot of its expansions in steel, and this was kind of the big effort. What's really different right now is that China's trying to control not really the activities of the say, own enterprise sector, is trying to control more of the activities of the private sector, and I think that is much more difficult as well.
And I think, you know, it's going to be too early to say, but there may be a future in which China actually consolidates a lot of the solar production to bigger firms, but then all of them become much more capable, and they become much bigger threats to foreign
solar makers to the extent that there are any. But consolidation is probably going to help raise quality because there are going to be fewer firms earning more profit that are going to be able to reinvest more in expansion in R and D. So I think that overproduction is kind of endemic to China, which is partly why it's the engineering state. This is what they're really good at.
They're just not thinking enough about services, and so I'm skeptical that they're going to be able to really tamp down overproduction a little longer run.
All right, Dan Wong, The book is breakneck. It's a fantastic read. Joe and I make a very brief appearance, so if anyone's interested in that as well, definitely pick it up. But d yeah, thank you so much for coming back on and for being on the Pod repeatedly over almost a decade.
Now I want to be a friend of the Pod for the next decade as well.
Thank you, Joe.
Always good to have Dan on, and I'm so glad he's sort of like synthesized and laid out all of his thoughts because again, like Dan has been watching Chinese technology and analyzing the Chinese economy for years and years of fear was before it was cool, and really in many respects had a front row seat do some pretty big developments like the tech crackdown, like COVID zero policies in China. So it's really good to read his narrative and get his thoughts.
No, Dan's the best. I love him. You know what's interesting I was thinking about and I saw some discussion of this online. I forget who. But one thing we didn't talk about is, you know, there isn't the persistent real estate slump right in China. They have not there has not yet been a bottom. It's not the end of the world. And actually cheaper housing. Many people would say that would be a nice problem they have in
this perspective right now. But if you think about the combination of consolidating the private sector, if you say, okay, there's overproduction in the private sector, what that means is that there's a lot of people employed who shouldn't be or who are it's unsustainable. If you think about that shrinking, that's going to be a contributor to a softening in the real estate. That's fewer people of jobs, that's fewer
people who can buy homes. See, when you think about the internal balances, there's some real attentions because it's like, yeah, of course, let's consolidate. But then you add to the woes of one of the biggest sectors in the economy.
And I mean, we have seen the youth unemployment rate pick up recently, and I think that's where you start to get into some interesting questions around the social contract that the party has with people and this you know, expectation that living standards are going to continue to improve forever like that is the pressure on the party right, and to some extent, as you point out, it's intention with the idea of having very efficient companies that are operating at scale and at low cost.
You know.
One of the things too, it comes up I think in a lot of the China conversations is this sort of uselessness of a lot of political terms that we use here. It came up with Joseph Triggan when we were talking about a look, what is the right, you know, the the ultra left within the party, mean the ultra right, et cetera. But even hearing Dan talk about well it's
a sort of right wing Leninist country, et cetera. Like these words that we use to describe politics, I think they maybe they detract more than they clarify when we're talking about China.
I don't believe in political labels.
Joe, No, that's good. That's good, all right. I respect that. Shall we leave it there, Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the aud Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow Dan Wong He's at Dan w Wong, and of course check out his new book Breakneck. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carman armand Dashill Bennett at Dashbot and kill Brooks at Kilbrooks. For more Odd Loots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots with the daily news letter and all of our episodes, and you can chat about all of these topics twenty four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash hotlines.
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