Didn't hit the same spot as his yearly letters. Less sense of wonder.

I loved reading the yearly letters Dan Wang published on his website when he still worked for Gavekal Dragonomics (a fascinating company that employs a bunch of smart people to observe and think and then write their distilled thoughts down for investments firms to consume as signals). That was when I still lived in Finland. I remember lounging on the university campus in a harsh winter, reading Dan's vivid descriptions of the Yunnan mountains and its cuisine. Or how people from Shanghai have a different view of China compared to people from Beijing. These letters filled me with a sense of wonder for this significant share of the world's population that's too large and diverse to truly comprehend. Billions of Chinese people over the course of time. In many cases arguably literally a different world. And the yearly letters tried to dig deeper than anything I'd ever read about China before. They didn't just talk about whatever shallow procedural thing happened recently without ever taking the time to attempt to convey understanding of the systems and the traditions and the people behind all of what's happening on the surface. The letters were a distillation-in-progress in human life real-time of Dan's understanding of the different powers at play, their historical context, their personalities, and how all of that could explain what's happening in this country.

And then the food. Parts of Dan's letters are dedicated to his exploration of the different cuisines in China. He goes by provinces, mostly. But I've also seen it classified into the Eight Great Traditions or even sixty-three Chinese cuisines. And though his descriptions are minimal, I find them to be irresistible. From the 2022 letter:

I can describe Yunnan cuisine only through dishes special to me. I think of pickled bamboo shoots, gently fried, lending their funky sourness to fish soups. I think of ham, sometimes steamed on its own, sometimes sautéd with some chili peppers, sometimes dropped in the pot to enliven a broth. I think of whole stems of flowers, tossed with vinegar in salad. I think of various types of rice noodles, in thick strings like Udon or as thumb-sized slices, which are more supple-bodied and offer greater chewiness than noodles made of wheat. I think of simple farm cheeses — a rare find in Chinese culinary traditions — steamed with slices of ham. I think of spicy pickles, indiscriminately sharpening the flavors of noodle soups or a vegetable dish, say a quick fry of lotus root. I think of yellow strips of pea pudding, tossed in chili oil, vinegar, and some bean sprouts. I think of a simple lunch of rice cakes fried with ham, eggs, and chives. I think of stewed beef garnished with handfuls of fresh mint, of mashed potatoes that do not drown in butter but are suffused with salty pickles, and of simple pans of soup that have up to a half-dozen types of dark, leafy greens.

I think most of all about mushrooms, which are the pride and glory of Yunnan. Mushrooms are still too smart for us to tame in greenhouses, so the best are foraged in the wild during the rainy months of the summer. The best types offer mesmerizing combinations of flavor and mouthfeel. Their flavors tend to be best with a light sauté, combined with chili peppers for a jaunty kick, and ham slices if need be. My favorite is the Ganba, found only under pine trees, which release so much gorgeous savoriness that it can suffuse a whole plate of rice with its musk when fried.

Considering all of my positive associations with Dan's writing, I was properly excited for his book. Especially since he described it as follows:

I didn’t write a letter last year. Rather, I wrote seven

But after having read the book, I'm slightly disappointed. The appeal of the yearly letters was precisely that they struck the right balance between in-the-middle-of-it and distilled conclusion. Partly stream-of-consciousness, but on the scale of a year. For this book to work, it needed a simple and clear premise. Dan found one, and I'm sure it took much thinking to verbalize all the arguments, but I feel it cheapens the discussion. Where the letters have a sort of humble self-awareness about only ever being able to scratch the surface despite going relatively deep, the book must speak confidently on a theory of contrast born from dimensionality reduction.

So that's its main premise: China is an engineering state to its own detriment, and the US is a lawyerly society to its detriment. And Dan acknowledges the simplified nature of it:

The engineering state versus the lawyerly society is not a grand theory to explain absolutely everything about the U.S. and China. Rather, the book is rooted in my own experiences of living in China from 2017 to 2023. I offer this framework to make sense of the recent past and think about what might come next.

But for the book to become a book, all of the chapters had to be written in order to support this theory. Despite that, I still found some to be quite strong. The chapter on the One Child policy was ruthless and gave me a much better understanding of it. And there were luckily still mouthwatering descriptions of Chinese food sprinkled throughout.

The two diagnoses Dan leaves us with in the final pages make for an apt summary.