Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism and lived abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes.

Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.