Dan Wang's Advice on Writing: How to Become America's Favorite China Expert

Dan Wang writes one piece per year. An annual letter about China, published on January 1st. It is read by Silicon Valley executives, policy analysts, journalists, and anyone trying to understand the world's second-largest economy without drowning in propaganda or academic jargon. He lived in Shanghai for six years. His book Breakneck was published by Norton.

His writing advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast and interviews surrounding his book.

One Piece Per Year

Wang's annual letter challenges the modern tempo of newsletters and social media. While Substack encourages weekly posting and Twitter rewards hourly fragments, Wang writes once. He gives it all year. He pours his heart into it from roughly December 20th through New Year's Eve.

Throughout the year, he captures observations in Apple Notes - analytical thoughts, individual sentences that drift into his mind, impressions from meals and walks and conversations. The notes accumulate. Then comes the sprint. Ten days of panic-driven writing, assembling a year's worth of thinking into a single coherent letter.

"I'd encourage more writers, especially young writers, to try to do this." The annual letter model builds reputation effectively, allows deep refinement, and provides a sustainable rhythm. It also forces you to say something worth waiting for.

Construct Around Beautiful Sentences

Wang is willing to build an entire essay around a single sentence if the sentence is good enough. If a great sentence drifts into his mind while listening to Mozart or eating a dumpling, he captures it in Apple Notes. Because he has no product to deliver until the end of the year, he has the space to refine a particular sentence over months. In some cases, he believes it is absolutely valid to construct everything around that one line.

His stylistic north stars are nineteenth-century French novels and Italian comic opera. His favorite novelist is Stendhal, whose The Red and the Black he has reread four times. His favorite genre of music is opera buffa - the funny opera - running from Mozart's three Italian operas (composed with the adventurer Lorenzo da Ponte, a man who lived in a brothel, was excommunicated, and eventually moved to Pennsylvania) through Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. The Italians prize cadence, pacing, repetition, and ornament for its own sake. Wang wants clean lines in his own prose, informed by flourishes that create variation in sentence structure and length - a thrust that propels the reader forward.

He learned his craft partly by copying New Yorker articles word for word, a method he ported from music training. As a young clarinetist, he went to the music library, pulled Beethoven string quartet scores, and copied every note on blank sheet music. Doing so revealed how harmonies fit together, what instruments were doing, and what was in the composer's mind. He applied the same technique to prose: take a New Yorker piece, type it out sentence by sentence, and you start thinking about the trade-offs and choices the writer made. At this point, maybe you would have used a different adjective. At that point, maybe the sentence should have flowed in a different direction.

Texture Over Themes

Wang's writing emphasizes granular detail rather than abstract tectonic-plate movements. A soup in Kunming serves as the entry point to larger analytical questions. A cafe in Shanghai where everyone photographs each other instead of talking becomes a lens on Chinese consumer culture. The furniture of daily life carries the argument.

This is how he makes geopolitics accessible to a general audience. He does not write about "U.S.-China relations" as an abstraction. He writes about walking through a specific neighborhood, eating at a specific restaurant, observing a specific tension between the official China of propaganda and the informal China where people actually live.

Where Fareed Zakaria synthesizes global trends through historical frameworks, Wang works from the ground up. Both arrive at geopolitical insight. Wang gets there through soup.

Travel Writing That Does Not Fail

Most travel writing fails for two reasons. Either the author cannot convey their personal ecstatic experiences to readers, or they focus exclusively on immediate observations without integrating data, expertise, or broader context.

Wang's method combines three elements: observational detail, analytical insight, and pedestrian experience. He books a hotel, walks around, and organizes daily activities around three or four restaurants he wants to try. "Often in these places, you don't need to find good food, because these places have extremely good food."

He rejects Agnes Callard's claim that travel does not aid understanding, aligning instead with Tyler Cowen's approach to analytical travel. The physical experience of place - the air, the food, the rhythm of a city - provides information that no dataset contains.

The Formal and Informal China

Wang draws a distinction that most Western coverage misses: the gap between official state China and actual Chinese life. Official China is rigid propaganda, party documents, formal speeches, Xi Jinping's lengthy essays in Qiu Shi magazine. Informal China is "fun and messy and bizarre" - ordinary people living normal lives, navigating an extraordinary system.

Understanding this gap is essential to writing about any complex society. The official version of any country is never the whole story. Wang writes about both, and the tension between them gives his letters their distinctive energy.

He also identifies China's regional diversity as a blind spot in most Western analysis. Shanghai is not Beijing is not the industrial northeast is not the tea-focused southwest where his family originates. Provincial backgrounds matter. Geography shapes perspective.

Nighttime Writer, Panic-Driven

Wang procrastinates through the day and writes at night. His writing has the space and rhythm of drinking whiskey with friends where time is not an object - not a license to ramble, but a license for depth. He compares himself not to Mozart, who made everything seem effortless, but to Beethoven, whose titanic struggles are audible in the music. You can detect a note of effort.

His hero in this regard is Christopher Hitchens, who legendarily staggered home blind drunk and composed a perfect essay that was publishable the next morning. Wang aspired to a little more sanity for the book. His mantra: "Be a cool, calm, collected Canadian." His wife Sylvia, a former book author herself, created writing retreats that punctuated the home routine - a week in Austin, time at a cafe in Vietnam, part of the proposal written in Barcelona. The variation helped.

His three hard parts of book writing: the beginning (conceptualizing the through line, convincing an agent, selling the proposal), the long middle (actually writing), and the post-production (title, cover, promotion). The title alone nearly defeated him. The working title was Move Fast and Break People: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. The publishers did not love it. They settled on Breakneck - a single word with mostly positive connotations (we fixed the bridge at breakneck speed) but a thread of violence coiled inside (break-neck). Untranslatable. Uniquely English.

The Outsider Advantage

Wang's perspective is shaped by permanent outsider status. He grew up in Ottawa - provincial Canada. His family comes from southwestern China - economically peripheral, far from the coastal elite. He attended the University of Rochester, not Harvard or Stanford. He later moved to imperial centers: Beijing, Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Washington.

The outsider sees what insiders cannot. Stanford graduates receive a "golden path" through networks and placement. Yale Law graduates fill administrations. But Wang observes that American elites "start coasting" rather than meeting performance expectations. Graduating from a second-tier institution required fighting to build networks and gain recognition. That fight sharpened both his writing and his analytical instincts.

His frustrations are structural: Silicon Valley building apps without addressing upstream semiconductor realities. American cities dysfunctional despite unprecedented wealth. Elite decision-makers lacking the rigor their positions demand. The writing emerges from conviction that "the world ought to be a lot better."

Keep AI Out of Your Writing

Wang deliberately avoided AI during his book writing. He conceptualized the project as his final major work before allowing "the super tool" into his life. He uses ChatGPT for music discussions, art interpretation, and restaurant recommendations - but not for research or writing.

"I want the sentences to come from within myself." At thirty, ChatGPT emerged. Wang believes living half one's life without AI provides valuable skills - library research, database navigation, the ability to read deeply - before leveraging acceleration. The technology should not replace foundational skill development.

Key Takeaways

• Write less frequently but more deliberately. One annual piece can build more reputation than fifty weekly posts.
• Construct essays around beautiful sentences. If the sentence is good enough, everything else serves it.
• Write texture, not themes. Specific detail carries more weight than abstract analysis.
• Combine observation, analysis, and pedestrian experience in travel writing. Data without texture is dead. Texture without analysis is tourism.
• Distinguish between the official and informal versions of your subject. The gap between them is where the story lives.
• Write at night if that is when you write. Ignore productivity advice that does not match your rhythm.

Wang proves that one piece per year, written with genuine expertise and stylistic care, can make you the definitive voice on your subject. Athens can help you refine the sentences you are building around, but only years of observation can supply the texture.

This post draws from Wang's appearance on How I Write and interviews about his book Breakneck. For more on writing about geopolitics for general audiences, see Fareed Zakaria's writing advice.