Today I'm talking to Dan Wang. He has a great new book, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Dan spent the better part of the last decade in China and published a yearly letter summarizing his thoughts, explorations, and eating.

Breakneck is like those letters: it goes all over the place, as does our conversation. Topics include:

* America's overabundance of lawyers

* Whether our ruling class should be all economists

* Stylish propaganda

* The book collections of Yale professors

* iPhone manufacturing

* Forced sterilization

* Planting cassava

One of the things I like most about Dan's work is that he's comfortable looking at China through multiple, very different lenses. Parts of Breakneck explicitly use China as a lens to think about the US and its political culture and institutions. Other parts of the book try very hard to take China on its own terms, without reading our own culture into it. It’s that mix that made the book so enjoyable for me, and I hope you enjoy it too.

Thank you to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits, and to Katerina Barton for her audio edits. You can find the full, annotated transcript to this conversation at www.statecraft.pub.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub