The mountains are still high, though the emperor may no longer be so far away.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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Aging autocrats easily turn cranky. It’s especially bad since factional struggle is built into the Leninist system: Xi will never stop feeling paranoid even if he has surrounded himself with sycophants. So I think the party-state will continue to make unforced errors.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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Executives may not be interested in Marxism-Leninism, but Marxists-Leninists are deeply interested in businesses. Companies are thus starting to think of China as a weird creature: one-third the China of old, which showers riches on the savvy; one-third Japan, an enormous market that won’t deliver booming growth; and one third Russia, a country one must potentially depart from in a hurry.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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Sometimes commentators will launch a tendentious debate on whether China is capitalist or socialist, state-driven or market-driven. It is never one or the other, of course. Contradictory slogans like “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics” allow the party wide scope for ideological maneuver. Beijing’s habit is to announce several mutually-incompatible policies to simultaneously pursue, tweaking priorities as it goes along.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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Over the last seven decades, China has experienced lengthy periods of stability punctuated by government-triggered chaos. The Chinese state is usually levelheaded; but every so often it succumbs to a manic episode, in which it grips the population, not relenting until it has shaken them out of their pots for backyard steel furnaces, out of their schools for class struggle, or out of their minds for dynamic zero clearing.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains. By contrast, it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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The most stimulating parts of this region are not the cities of Lijiang or Shangri-La, but the more remote Tibetan areas. Tibetans have been subject to decades of forced assimilation to Han culture, but they still find room to practice small acts of subversion. One guide told me, for example, that monks have slipped a portrait of the Dalai Lama behind the portrait of the Panchen Lama in their monastery, allowing them to pray in good conscience.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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