The Annual Letter That CEOs Read Before Their Morning Briefings

A Letter That Takes Three Weeks to Write

Every January 1st, Dan Wang publishes a letter. Not a newsletter, not a brief, not a thread. A letter. It arrives without fanfare on his website, runs roughly 25,000 words, and contains his observations on the year just ended: China, technology, culture, geopolitics, and whatever else has lodged itself in his mind over the preceding twelve months. There is no paywall. There is no push notification campaign. There is just the text, posted on the first day of the new year, waiting for whoever wants to read it.

Ted Merz, writing in his personal archive, described the experience of reading it this way: "Every year I spend a couple of hours reading Dan Wang's annual letter, and he never disappoints. It's one of the rare pieces of online writing that combines depth of detail, global sweep, and a literary sensibility." Merz also noted a detail that speaks to the craft behind the apparent ease: Wang retypes the final draft of his entire letter, not to line edit, but to experience it in one long arc as the reader will.

That small act of revision reveals something about the letter's ambition. This is not a document produced at speed. It is a considered piece of long-form writing that its author treats as a literary object before releasing it into the world.

Who Writes This Letter

Dan Wang is a Canadian technology analyst and writer who specializes in contemporary China. He spent several years based in the country itself, from 2017 to 2023, publishing his annual letters from inside that experience. Before that, he studied economics and philosophy at the University of Rochester, graduating in 2014. He grew up in Canada, in both Ottawa and Toronto, after being born in Yunnan, China. As a teenager in Ottawa, he participated in the Royal Canadian Army Cadet program.

His professional credentials are substantial. He has worked as an analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, served as a visiting scholar at the Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, and held a research fellowship at the Hoover Institution. He has commented extensively on U.S.-China relations through the lens of technology, including semiconductor manufacturing and social media. In August 2025, his book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future was released.

He moved from Yale to Stanford in 2025. The sun and the dynamism of the west coast drew him back, he wrote. He found a Bay Area that had grown stranger since he lived there a decade ago, when people were mostly working on consumer apps, cryptocurrencies, and some business software. That earlier era, he noted, felt in retrospect like a more innocent, even a more sedate, time.

The Structure of an Unusual Document

The annual letter does not follow a fixed template. It does not open with market data or executive summary bullets. It opens with a scene, an observation, a provocation. The 2025 letter, for instance, begins with a comparison that surprises: Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party, presented as oddly similar. Both are serious, self-serious, and largely humorless. Both speak in flat bureaucratic language or in grand, end-of-world prophecy. Their influence stems from relentlessness and self-belief.

Wang quotes Sam Altman at a tech conference, combining both registers in a single sentence: "I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning." Wang calls this pretty funny. He then turns to the Central Committee and its official list of Xi Jinping's jokes, helpfully published by party propagandists. The jokes are not funny. The point is the humorlessness of power, and the parallel to Silicon Valley's own self-seriousness.

From there, the letter moves through terrain that includes Chinese industrial policy, American energy infrastructure, the state of AI development, European drift, and the strange culture of San Francisco in 2025. It is a document that refuses to specialize, that insists on connecting factory floors to geopolitical strategy to the texture of daily life in two very different cities.

What Makes the Letter Distinctive

TBPN Digest, a daily technology brief for Silicon Valley professionals, summarized the 2025 letter's central argument in a January 2026 analysis. The piece noted that Wang reframes the AI competition between the United States and China not as a race with a finish line, but as a sustained contest whose outcome depends heavily on energy infrastructure. American annual energy production grew just 0.1 percent from 2008 to 2021. China delivers consistent 6 percent growth and now accounts for one-third of global electricity consumption, contributing 54 percent of global demand growth in 2024.

That is not a technology story. It is an industrial story. And it illustrates what makes Wang's letter unusual: he looks at the forces that other analysts overlook because they are not glamorous. He goes to the factory floor. He reads energy statistics. He talks to German executives about what Chinese automotive competition is doing to their industry.

The TBPN Digest analysis captured Wang's core argument about manufacturing: he rejects the Western distinction between innovation and scaling, arguing that factory-floor improvements constitute innovation. Chinese workers embed technical knowledge into production daily. American scientists dream up ideas that American manufacturers fail to industrialize. Tesla's factories illustrate the gap. A worker at Gigafactory Shanghai produces 47 vehicles annually; a California worker produces 20.

This argument is not new in industrial economics, but Wang makes it with such specificity and accumulated evidence that it lands differently than when it appears in a policy paper. The letter's literary qualities do not soften its analytical edge. They sharpen it.

The Audience That Found Him

Who reads this letter? The sources do not provide a circulation figure or a subscriber count. What they provide instead is qualitative evidence: people who spend a couple of hours with it, who re-read it annually, who describe it as rare in the landscape of online writing. Merz calls it a document that combines depth of detail, global sweep, and literary sensibility. He also notes that it stands out for its willingness to be critical and clear-eyed without seeming partisan.

That last quality may explain the audience. Senior executives and investors tend to be allergic to writing that announces its conclusions in the first paragraph and then spends the rest confirming them. They have seen too many reports that tell them what they already believe. Wang's letter does not do that. It observes. It connects. It draws unexpected parallels. And it arrives with the authority of someone who has lived inside the material he is writing about.

The 2025 letter covers several distinct themes that would each merit a separate report: the similarity between Silicon Valley and the Communist Party in tone and self-regard; the genuine meritocracy of Silicon Valley and its tendency to narrow horizons; the dismantling of the myth that China only scales Western inventions; the momentum behind China's industrial electrification; the skepticism with which Wang treats sweeping claims about AI fixing everything; the destabilizing near-term effects of synthetic media and emotional attachment to machines; the Trump presidency as a stress test for American institutions beyond an aberration; the contrast between New York as a curator of legacy and San Francisco as a wager on destiny; the risk that Western policymakers comfort themselves with expectations of Chinese collapse more than preparing serious countermeasures; and Europe described with affection and concern: beautiful cities, high quality of life, low momentum.

That range would be incoherent in less disciplined hands. Wang holds it together because every section is filtered through the same sensibility: empirical, curious, skeptical of conventional wisdom, willing to follow an argument wherever it leads.

The Year He Skipped

Wang noted in the 2025 letter that he skipped a letter the previous year. The sources do not explain why. What they show is that the letter resumed on January 1, 2026, with a year-in-review structure and a post on his main site titled The secure transport of light. The title is unexplained. It does not appear to be a metaphor for the letter's contents, or at least not in any obvious way. It arrives without context, which is consistent with the letter's overall tone: confident enough to let a title sit unexplained.

The gap year makes the letter's regularity more notable, not less. It is not a quarterly obligation or a content calendar item. It is a document that appears when the author has something to say. When he skipped, readers noticed. When he returned, readers returned.

Why This Matters

For readers researching practitioners, frameworks, and ideas in the space of digital authority and publishing, Wang's letter offers a case study in what builds genuine influence without distribution machinery. He does not have a media company behind him. He does not have a Substack with premium tiers. He has a website, a Twitter account, and a book. And he has the letter, produced annually, read by people who make decisions that shape industries.

The lesson is not that anyone can replicate this. Wang's credentials are substantial, his access is unusual, and his writing ability is rare. But the structure is replicable in principle: produce something of genuine depth and regularity, treat it as a literary object, release it without fanfare, and let it find its audience over time. The audience for serious long-form writing is smaller than the audience for takes. It is also more durable.

There is also something in the method that speaks to how the letter is built. Wang retypes the final draft to experience it as readers will. He skips a year when he has nothing to say, and returns when he does. He draws unexpected comparisons that force readers to see familiar subjects in unfamiliar light. These are not just writing techniques. They are editorial practices, and they suggest that the letter succeeds partly because it is edited with unusual rigor, even if the editing is invisible to the reader.

A Document That Refuses to Be a Report

The sources describe the 2025 letter as containing humor, literary allusion, and philosophical digression alongside its hard analysis. Wang quotes Ecclesiastes and Stendhal. He discusses Pascal's Wager. He describes Peter Thiel hovering in the background presenting lectures on the nature of the Antichrist. He calls the Bay Area setting more appropriate for a Gothic horror novel than for real life, and then immediately clarifies: "Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I want to say that I am rooting for San Francisco."

This is not how policy analysts usually write. It is how writers write. And it is part of why the letter occupies a unusual position in the landscape: it is taken seriously by people who make serious decisions, precisely because it does not read like a briefing document. It reads like a letter from someone who has thought carefully about the year, and wants to share what he found.

What This Means for MyArticlePosts Readers

For readers interested in how authority is built in digital publishing, the story of Dan Wang's annual letter offers a useful counterpoint to the dominant narrative about growth, distribution, and audience development. The letter succeeds not through SEO optimization, content calendars, or social media amplification, but through depth, specificity, and a voice that does not apologize for being literary. It finds its readers because those readers are looking for something that most writing does not offer.

If you are building a publication, a newsletter, or a content practice, the question is not how to reach more people. It is how to produce something worth finding. Wang's letter is a reminder that the audience for serious writing is smaller and more loyal than the audience for optimized content. That audience will wait for January 1st.

Where to Read Further

• The full 2025 letter is available on Dan Wang's website, posted January 1, 2026.
• Ted Merz's personal reflection on reading the letter annually is archived at ted-merz.com.
• TBPN Digest's analysis of the 2025 letter's key arguments about energy, manufacturing, and AI competition is available at tbpndigest.com.
• Wang's background, credentials, and publication history are documented on his Wikipedia entry.
• His book, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, was released in August 2025.

Summary Table: What the Letter Covers