Dan Wang writes essays and annual letters on technology, industrial capacity, and China and the US, and wrote the book Breakneck.
HN commenters recommend his blog and book for understanding China and the US, and quote his essay How Technology Grows.
By reading coverage in Nikkei and analysts that are on the ground in China. Notably Dan Wang, who totally called it 8 months ago:
https://danwang.co/2020-letter/
> While promoting the status of science and technology with one hand, the Chinese government has with its other hand reined in the activities of consumer internet companies. I’ve never stopped lamenting the marketing trick that California pulled off to situate consumer internet as the highest form of technology, as if Tencent and Facebook are the surest signs that we live a technologically-accelerating civilization. The “tech” giants are highly-capable companies that print cash. But they’re barely engaged in the creation of intellectual property, excelling instead on business-model innovation and the exploitation of network effects. It’s become apparent in the last few months that the Chinese leadership has moved towards the view that hard tech is more valuable than products that take us more deeply into the digital world. Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” This expression preceded the passage of securities and antitrust regulations, thus also pummeling finance, which along with tech make up the most glamorous sectors today. The optimistic scenario is that these actions compress the wage and status premia of the internet and finance sectors, such that we’ll see fewer CVs that read: “BS…
Quite small, but does it matter?
Yes it matters because there are 55,000 people graduating in computer science every year (https://danwang.co/why-so-few-computer-science-majors/). How many of those do you think will be doing research versus getting a non research job?
It's not as if for profit businesses do not have research departments, consider Microsoft Research for example.
And they employ a grand total of around 1000 people. How many of those do you think were hired with just an undergrad degree in CS coming straight out of college?
I fail to see how this is relevant.
Why the use of the term "ivory tower" and the quotes around the word research? Are you implying that CS research is not real research or something?
No, it is real research but the vast majority of opportunities for CS grads are outside of research and most businesses are looking for people who can contribute to profit making projects.
Ivory Tower research is the type of research that MS does. Very little of it has ended up in shipping products. Compare that to Google, Apple, or Amazon (AWS). MS is littered with failed research. The best thing that Jobs did was kill the research department at Apple and focus research on shipping products.
Not everything is a propaganda there is some truth to it, given Hong Kong is the only ground left for US to try to destabilise China to slow its growth.
This is also the reason China took hardline on Hong Kong as they see it as strategic weak spot. Moreover actions of China in Hong Kong are supported by majority of people in China. This tyranny of majority exists in democracy too, what happened in Kashmir is 100 times worse than HK.
Given the way US president pardoned people who committed genocide in Afganistan and killed scores of kids and unarmed civilians. There is hardly any ground left for them to teach others.
No real death in over an year of violent protests by police firing in Hong Kong vs 5 deaths in capitol building siege speaks volumes about the professionalism with which Hong Kong police handled the protests.
China is built by hard work of its people not by CCP [1].
May be work there for a while and than you can see why Korea, Japan and Greater China did so well not others in growth. It’s easy to talk rhetoric, but hard to do hard work to bring about transformation.
[1] https://danwang.co/2020-letter/
Typical shortages are really: We cannot find anyone who will do it for minimum wage ... cry cry cry.
This is usually followed by comments: <country of choice> people are just unwilling to do this job ... cry cry cry
Both cases are 'For your cheap pay they are not'.
One good question for the western world, why are so few people studying CS https://danwang.co/why-so-few-computer-science-majors/
I suspect it is the working conditions.
Of course I find it interesting I have a dozen head hunters asking me if I am interested in a job that does not match my skill set. Ok I am a techie, but I am not a ... All I can figure is these companies have some H1B visa thing coming up and they need to prove no American will do the job. Last time I was actively looking was 2009. So they are going back 10 years to prove there cheating statistics.
I found it 'Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act' is going to import more techies from India. So they need to prove that a C# back end developer will not take a javascript job doing web pages.
I have a few - Bill Bishop's Sinocism is probably the first that comes to mind - https://sinocism.com/about More cynical towards China - Sinocism is a word-play. (But I think he is mostly fair in his critique)
https://supchina.com/ is a good website on this topic. I discovered them through a podcast call Sinica https://supchina.com/series/sinica/ (the podcast is extremely good)
Dan Wang https://danwang.co/ - some of his writing is scattered across different publications - it's best to follow him on Twitter - He is perhaps one of the deepest thinkers on the topic. More sympathetic towards China. If you really want to dive down the rabbit hole - look up his employer. It is a think-tank on China, and has some excellent publications.
Economist's coverage of China is also good.
Also I would like to recommend a book - Trade Wars are Class Wars - it's a popular book lately, and bring up some excellent concepts. From what I've heard this book is playing a role in framing how Washington is thinking about China now.
Nope, you are spot on. The broad argument is "Engineers are in power in China, lawyers in America." I see the US as no different as when Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged; everything about making and building takes a back seat to line go up. Well, you can't eat, live in, build with, or go to war with line go up. The stock market is not the economy, nor your industrial and manufacturing base. But it keeps going up, so everything must be fine, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_Assets_Supervision_and_Administration_Commission_of_the_State_Council
Dan Wang: 2025 Letter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454413 - January 2026 (323 comments)
(Dan Wang’s book, Breakneck [https://danwang.co/breakneck/], is excellent and I highly recommend on this topic as others do in the above thread)