- History
- International Affairs
- Democracy
- Confronting and Competing with China
- Revitalizing History
Andrew Roberts is joined by Dan Wang, Hoover research fellow and the author of Breakneck to explore the shifting balance of global power between China, the United States, and Europe. Wang argues that China’s massive manufacturing capacity, rapid electrification, and relentless infrastructure building are giving it a growing edge—even as Western democracies struggle with regulation, litigation, and political gridlock. The conversation ranges from tariffs, engineering education, and the “vetocracy” holding back Western construction to the geopolitics of EVs, AI regulation, and China’s demographic future. They also discuss the possibility of rising populism in Europe, and whether the West can rediscover the ambitious engineering spirit that once built Hoover Dam and the Apollo program.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dan Wang is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in its Hoover History Lab, and is one of the most-cited experts on China’s technological capabilities. He is the author of the forthcoming Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (W. W. Norton [US] and Penguin [UK], Fall 2025).
Wang was previously a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and a lecturer at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. From 2017 to 2023, he worked in China as a technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, based in Hong Kong, Beijing, and then Shanghai.
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ABOUT THE SERIES
Secrets of Statecraft is a bimonthly podcast hosted by Distinguished Visiting Fellow Andrew Roberts that explores the effect that the study of history has had on the careers and decision-making of public figures. The podcast also features leading historians discussing the influence that the study of history had on their biographical subjects. The title is taken from Winston Churchill’s reply on Coronation Day 1953 to a young American who had asked him for life advice, to whom he said, “Study history, study history, for therein lie all the secrets of statecraft.”
