It's Wednesday, October 1st, 2025, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution

broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow. I'll be your moderator today. Begin with a little sad news for you. We don't have our full complement of good fellows today. John Cochran is trekking around Europe as we record. He might jump on the show. He might not. We will see. John, we miss you. Hope to get you back on the show soon. But we're going to make do with our two remaining fellows who are

more than capable of carrying the show. And those good fellows would be the historian, Sir Neil Ferguson,

and former Presidential National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster,

Neil and HR, in addition to their many accolades and honors are Hoover Senior Fellows.

Gentlemen, good to see you. Hope all is well in your worlds,

and today we have two segments for you. But first, we're going to turn our attention to China.

The timing here is appropriate. Today is October the 1st. This is National Day in China,

which is the annual observation of the founding in 1949 of the People's Republic of China.

And we have a very good guest today to talk about all things China, and that is

Hoover Research Fellow Dan Wong. Dan is a historian and analyst of China's technology and development.

More importantly, he is the author of the New York Times bestseller Breakneck, China's quest to

engineer the future. Dan, welcome to Goodfellows. It's great to be here. So question for you,

if I may dumb down your book for you a

little bit, the premise is simply this. You have two great powers on a competition right now. The

powers have their similarities, but they have one big difference. You contend that China is a society

based on engineering. The United States is a society based on litigation. So two questions for you, Dan. Is there any way the United

States can be more like China, be more about engineering? And as you look at these two countries,

which one is better designed to win the future, the one that builds or the one that litigates?

Well, at first approximation, I think you want to be a country that is able to build

something at all because it really feels like the

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