The Ledger, every show

“The fundamental problem with China is that they're not just physical engineers, they're also social engineers, and they treat society as if it were just another building material, and I object strongly to their practices around ethno-religious minorities in Ti…”

“I think there's a pretty strong sense now that China will get to the moon by the end of the 20 twenties, and America might not be able to get back to the moon.”

“But if we take a look at many of America's apex manufacturers, companies like Boeing making aviation, Intel making chips, Detroit and Tesla making vehicles, mostly that's been going downhill.”

“There is no implosion. When one side is ahead, the other side will overstep, and then the, then, and then they'll need to catch up. And so I want to say that there is no winner here. There is no loser here. It's not a race. Nobody gets to hit the win button. A…”

“I don't feel like the Communist Party has Mastered some autocratic formula in order to really build to the future, because they cannot have anything like debate, discussion, and a long-term stable society.”

“The U.S., in my words, is really great at setting a lot of ladders in place, but its firms are no longer really great at climbing these ladders. It is really the Chinese firms that are able to climb all of these big technological ladders.”

“I think that it is harder for the US. The task is comparatively simpler for China and China has already gotten significantly better at a lot of these scientific projects that used to be, you know, only the preserve of American universities and a few other plac…”

“By most metrics that we can identify, Chinese scientists are producing better qualities of work, not just quantity. If we take a look at some of the most, the top one percent cited scientific papers, Chinese researchers are producing an increasing share of man…”

“They're the two great founts of entrepreneurial dynamism in the world. It is Shenzhen and Silicon Valley that are inventing the future and not so much Europe and Japan. Any longer.”

“On my very first page, I denounce Europe for being a mausoleum economy where things are very beautiful, but things are also very dead.”

“The US strategy over the last 30 years has been to kind of hope that markets and the internet will change China for the better and change this Communist system into something more like a liberal democracy. And that bet has not worked out.”

“By contrast, China has been much more open than Japan. China, most famously, is well known for building Apple's iPhones and Tesla's vehicles, and it, the communist system recognized that it was so far behind technological leaders, mostly through open the doors…”

“China right now has some of the control paranoia of the Soviet Union some of the manufacturing excellence of Japan, and some of the American entrepreneurial hustle. You combine all of that, and I think that is part of the reason that I think that China is goin…”

“I think that China will not become anything like a cultural superpower, in part because the engineers Are so censorious. They're so thin-skinned. They censor everything they can't understand, which is a lot.”

“I think that China will not become anything like a big financial superpower, in part because the control tendencies of the engineers is to impose a lot of capital controls and the That makes it much more difficult for foreigners to want to hold RMB.”

“I think that China throughout its imperial history has substantially lacked a liberal tradition a liberal tradition meaning one that is interested in restraining the power of the emperor and you know, promoting the power of the individual or the family or the…”

“Today, I think that the US still has a decisive lead on most aspects of artificial intelligence mostly because it has the compute resources here. It has the leading NVIDIA chips, and China does not.”

“But I think if we are going to have much more AI in our lives, I think the competition is much more of a toss-up. Again, looking forward in the next five years, which is a lifetime by the standards of a lot of AI, but maybe, maybe a shorter time span for the r…”

“And at least from what we can tell in some of the publicly listed hires for Meta's super intelligence lab a substantial number of these really elite. I think there are 11 engineers who are publicly disclosed. Something like seven of them had gone to Chinese un…”

“And, you know, to be very glib here, I, I'll say that, you know, maybe America gets a much better McKinsey, and China gets a much better Foxconn, and then they're gonna use this much better AI Foxconn to produce a lot more drones and munitions and ships as wel…”

“These companies generally don't like to talk to foreigners at the best of times. And then you have, An overbearing state that in some cases forbids deep seek from chatting with foreigners.”

“A lot of these investments have been in place for 10 years, some for 15 years and there's no easy thing, not export controls That will derail this tech engine very easily.”

“Repression can grow worse while technological dynamism grows richer.”

“I have friends in China who have been detained by the Chinese state arbitrarily for a number of years based on who they were. And based on alleged activities that we don't believe are true.”

“There's been very little by way of infrastructure actually built by the Infrastructure Act, and there's been very little built by the way of clean technology.”

“So, you know, socialism with Chinese characteristics also means to me investors and companies kind of lose. They're pretty miserable. Consumers win, and the national government wins.”

“When China had a crisis, as it did in with the COVID pandemic, when it had a production issue, there were a lot of pretty inefficient state-owned enterprises, as well as entrepreneurial firms that had a giant workforce that had a lot of slack in the system, an…”

“What I want to say is that the competition, I believe, between the U.S. And China will Last for decades. It will not be solved or resolved through any single technology, not even a technology as crucial as artificial intelligence.”

“Over the last 15 years, the U.S. Has a lead on software, no question about that. But its manufacturing and hardware has not gotten that much better. So the Chinese are learning at a much faster rate and patching up their deficiencies than the Americans are.”

“The way that I would characterize China's foreign policy is that it's very engineer-driven. They, the way that they conduct a lot of diplomacy in Africa and Southeast Asia, as well as Latin America, is just to go up to these countries. Build some roads. Build …”

“In his view, the their conflict between Beijing and Taipei is not imminent and not inevitable, and that's kind of my view.”

“And now about 90% of the solar industry is in China, everything from the polysilicon processing down to the final module assembly”

“I think this is one of the things that China really does well is that it takes manufacturing super seriously, and the US has not taken it super seriously since various points in the 19 eighties.”

“Chinese and Americans are more alike than any other people.”

“China hasn't experienced this broad tech clash that has come across big tech companies in the U S. There is no sense that tech is partisan because nothing in China is allowed to be partisan. There's no sense of a tech right.”

“I find Shenzhen probably the most boring city in China. It's a lot of these big office parks. A lot of it is meant for driving. The city layout is actually kind of weird. It's like there's several big hubs that are connected by highways that are pretty distant…”

“According to these statistics, which are out there, it takes a, an automaker from the US or Japan or Germany, roughly six years to conceptualize of a new model and actually get it out on the roads of a new vehicle. And In China, it's something more like 18 mon…”

“By the end of this year, China is expected to add 500 gigawatts of solar capacity. The U.S. Is expected to add about 50 gigawatts, so just one order of magnitude more.”

“There's 33 nuclear plants under construction in China right now. There's zero under construction in the U.S.”

“At this point, by the end of this year, one out of every two cars sold in China will be electric”

“I think it's China. I think China is a high agency, high T society where they are really able to, you know, once they decide to do something, they are, you know, once they decide to build this infrastructure, it comes out and it gleams.”

“And at least in the early days of COVID, that's something that China really had where manufacturers were working really well together. Tech companies were making it really clear where the fever clinics were on the mapping services and the government really ste…”

“I think the fundamental problem of among lawyers is that they are, for the most part, protectors of the rich. And that is essential in some ways, because you can't build companies worth four trillion dollars, like Nvidia, without substantial legal protections.”

“China is, is a Leninist system like the Soviet Union. But it has a thriving, substantial consumer economy, which is doing superbly well in terms of creating all sorts of products that the Soviet Union never created. All it did was a ton of heavy industry. It p…”

“By one count 14,000 millionaires departed from China in the year 2023 to move to Singapore, to move to Japan, to move to the UK and the US, in part because the Communist Party has smashed a lot of their businesses.”

“Even if we have a Deng Xiaoping-like figure, China might still have a lot of dysfunctions, because I would say that Deng Xiaoping introduced a lot of the dysfunctions that carry over to Xi Jinping.”

“One of the, my conclusions, one of my new realizations after writing this book is that Maybe there can be too much state capacity. Maybe you don't want a state to be too efficient. Now, if the engineers are too efficient, and they really decide to track societ…”

“Right now I see the status quo persisting because the status quo works well for the Chinese, the Taiwanese and the Americans.”