Pun Salad

Tyler Cowen plugged this book on his blog: "a great book". And it turns out that Tyler also provides a front-cover blurb: "The best recent book on China, on China and America, and, arguably, the best book of the year flat out."

Good enough for me. And (it turns out) I liked it a lot too. It's full of trenchant observations and fun anecdotes. And the author, Dan Wang, has an obvious love of both China and the USA. And a deep level of disgust for each country's current leadership.

The 40,000-foot theme of the book, stated boldly on page 2: China is an engineering state, while America is a lawyerly society. Upsides: China builds stuff, quickly and well; while the US has numerous protections against despoiling the environment and running roughshod over individuals and communities.

But the downsides: China does run roughshod over its people and its environment. And American government increasingly can't seem to even get started on its noble (and ludicrously expensive) projects and goals. A theme also echoed in the Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson book Abundance.

Wang's portrait of China is illuminating, especially for someone (like me) who kind of assumed it was a homogeneous and faceless mass of humanity, under the thumb of its Commie masters. That's not totally wrong, but Wang's travels show a lot of interesting diversity. (Yunnan province is "relaxed", full of "free spirits". For a while, anyway.)

Of course, the central government is married to a central-planning ideology, and that devotion appears to have increased under Xi Jinping. This results in shiny new infrastructure, but also a lot of resource misallocation, corruption, and (generally) shoving people around.

An early chapter tells the story of Li Zaiyong, a high-flying executive in China's Guizhou province. He had big plans, spent big money, and nothing worked out, ending in fiscal disaster. So he crashed and burned, was found guilty of graft and accepting bribes, and sentenced to death "with a two-year reprieve."

Death! Impressive! Tim Walz might have been more diligent in his state's profligacy if we went in for that sort of thing here.

Wang is a bigger fan of "industrial policy" than I am. He's concerned about America's "hollowed out" manufacturing sector; I don't think there's a government-determinable "right" level for manufacturing, either in aggregate or in its mix of products.

Wang devotes one chapter each to China's big mistakes: its one-child policy and (more recent) its draconian Covid-19 policy. In each case, the top leadership decreed drastic controlling measures, and the result was death and misery. (Wang doesn't weigh in on the Wuhan lab-leak theory.)