Dan Wang
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From one piece 2025 letter 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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startupsventure capitalSilicon Valley
Their words
Startups don't need dissent; they want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don't like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley's soft Leninism.
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Their words
I believe that Chinese technological success is now the rule rather than the exception.
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korrents.com
China trails the United States in AI capability, but only by a small margin rather than years.Their words
On AI, China is behind the US, but not by years. There's no question that American reasoning models are more sophisticated than the likes of DeepSeek and Qwen. But the Chinese efforts are doggedly in pursuit, sometimes a bit closer to US models, sometimes a bit further.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Red and the BlackTheir words
I last picked up Stendhal’s The Red and the Black a decade ago. I wasn’t certain that the novel, which I keep calling my favorite, would hold up on re-reading.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The WallTheir words
Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall is short and engrossing. It was deemed a “Cold War” novel by the German press when it was published in 1963.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Eastern FrontTheir words
Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front covers the clashes between Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire as well as the Austro-Hungarians against the Italians and the Serbs. Whereas the western front was essentially static throughout the whole war, the east was characterized by the sort of maneuver warfare that most generals had expected to fight.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Austria 1867-1955Their words
John Boyer’s Austria 1867-1955 offers parts of the answer, though not in a conceptually organized way. It’s a work of history written for specialists, which means that the narrative serves the footnotes rather than the other way around.
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Likedrcmnd.app
1913: The Year Before the StormTheir words
1913: The Year Before the Storm presents a whimsical slice of Central Europe. Art historian Florian Illies collates fragments of leading figures month by month, diary-entry style.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Chinese Tragedy of King LearTheir words
Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear also has an experimental form. Da is a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins who emigrated from Hangzhou before she was 7.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
PiranesiTheir words
I’d like to read more experimental books like this one. Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi is a glittering jewel.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with CommentaryTheir words
There is something deeply satisfying with reading out loud phrases like: “for in mere breath did it come, and into darkness it goes, and in darkness its name is covered.” Though King James is iconic, Robert Alter better conveys overall the literary power of the Hebrew Bible.
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25 July 2025
From one piece Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A country cannot remain a great power if its system serves mainly the wealthy and well-connected.Their words
America cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected.
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korrents.com
The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has turned the United States into a litigious vetocracy.Their words
The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy.
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Their words
China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America's lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad.
23 January 2024
From one piece 2023 letter 10 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So it feels to me that the US is treating its deficiencies — an inability to build stuff or create a functional system for admitting high-skilled migrants — as mysteries to be endured rather than problems to be solved.
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Their words
And Xi Jinping has formally de-prioritized economic growth as China’s top task.
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Their words
As I’ve written in each of my previous letters, the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products.
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Their words
China built half of the world’s ships (by gross tonnage) in 2022, while the US had 0.2 percent of capacity: in practice, this meant that while China builds hundreds of new ships a year, the US builds three to five.
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Their words
Though companies are relocating production to India and Vietnam, China is going to remain the world’s largest manufacturer for many more years to come.
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korrents.com
China will not fade away, so America has to reform itself for a protracted contest with a peer competitor.Their words
It is that China will not fade away, meaning that America must reform itself for a protracted contest with a peer competitor.
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Their words
While 50 percent of China’s economy might be dysfunctional, the 5 percent that’s going spectacularly well is pretty dangerous to American interests.
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Their words
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.
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korrents.com
China's industrial lead was manufactured by deliberate state industrial policy rather than by market forces alone.Chinabatterieselectric vehicles
Their words
The foundations of China’s success in EVs were built a decade ago, when the state decided to bet on batteries, and then bought up a lot of the mines for these metals.
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korrents.com
The West's biggest blindspot is repeatedly underestimating China's speed and capabilities.Their words
I worry however that one of America’s superpowers is to spin up yarns to reduce the urgency for action.
18 July 2023
From one piece China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
China will substantially close its strategic technology gaps, including in chips and aviation.Their words
So I continue to hold the view that China will mostly patch up its strategic deficiencies, including in chips and aviation.
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korrents.com
Semiconductor manufacturing is a more technologically challenging endeavor than rocket science.Their words
Nonetheless, I think that chips are much more challenging than rockets.
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Their words
I suspect the Chinese leadership views large language models as something akin to social media platforms: technologies with little economic upside and significant political risk.
4 March 2023
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Their words, before
My view is that it’s going to take more than this regulatory campaign to defeat dynamism in China.
Their words now
What I did not sufficiently appreciate is that a state that would so casually decapitate a sector like online tutoring would also have the will to visit catastrophe upon whole cities.
From one piece 2022 letter 6 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Consider the solar industry, for which the US laid the scientific groundwork, only for Chinese firms to make all the photovoltaic cells.
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korrents.com
China's technological competitiveness is grounded in manufacturing capability rather than in scientific research.Their words
Whereas the US has a track record of doing great science, China’s technology competitiveness is grounded in manufacturing capabilities.
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Their words
Beijing decided to partner with Russia, an imperial aggressor, when it is the US and Europe that have markets and technology.
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korrents.com
The Chinese state's famous capability is largely spent putting out fires it started itself.Their words
First, it increasingly resembles a crew of firefighters who bring extraordinary skill to dousing fires that they themselves ignited.
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Their words
Second, China’s problem is usually not too little state capacity, but too much.
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Their words
And on balance I believe we should think of the Chinese state today as an autocratic regime that is occasionally capable of economic pragmatism rather than a technocratic regime that slips occasionally into Marxist faults.
1 January 2022
From one piece 2021 letter 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports.
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Their words
Beijing diagnosed the problems with financialization earlier than the US, where the problem is now endemic.
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korrents.com
Beijing deliberately rejects comparative advantage and targets a high level of manufacturing output for its own sake.Their words
The leadership is targeting a high level of manufacturing output, rejecting the notion of comparative advantage.
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Their words
It has displayed a stronger record of reform than any other developing country, as the leadership keeps pulling off politically-difficult tasks: shrinking the state sector, re-orienting the economy towards export-led growth after WTO accession, and so on.
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korrents.com
China's cultural and intellectual output to the world is far smaller than its economic weight.Their words
Never has any economy grown so much while producing so few cultural exports.
1 January 2021
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