Breakneck by Dan Wang

How strongly I recommend this book: 9 / 10

Date read: May 16, 2026

Get this book on Amazon. Here are my other book notes on biographies, psychology, and more.

Reflection

This was a really interesting book to read, especially while reading The Power Broker and learning how Robert Moses built most of New York. I came into this from a place of frustration with the Los Angeles metro line, which feels like it has been taking forever. Meanwhile, friends and family visit China and talk about how fast their infrastructure is growing. If there is one book that explains that contrast, Breakneck does the job. I love Dan Wang’s definition: China is an engineering state, and America is a lawyerly state.

It connects directly to the idea of luxury beliefs from Rob Henderson’s Troubled. You might think dense legalism and procedural rules exist to protect people, but they mostly slow down projects and harm the poor. Public transit gets stalled, while real estate developers still manage to build skinny high-rises for the wealthy.

On hardware, Wang makes a memorable point about what happens when manufacturing leaves. When the US moved assembly for products like the iPhone to China, it outsourced actual tacit knowledge. As Dan puts it:

“When I worked in Silicon Valley, people liked to say that knowledge travels at the speed of beer. Engineers like to talk to each other to solve technical problems, which is how knowledge diffuses… Every day, millions of workers go to factories to build up technological process knowledge. That is the basis of China’s tech power.”

That kind of know-how lives in factory ecosystems, not in code or textbooks. At the same time, Wang does not pretend China’s model is perfect. Several chapters detailing state overreach, especially around Zero-COVID, were tough for me to read, but very enlightening. In the end, he makes a convincing case for balance: both states have blind spots, and both can learn from each other. Highly recommend reading this book.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

Chapter 1: Engineers vs. Lawyers

Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers.
China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.
Looking at these two countries, I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial(albeit imperfect) redistributive policies. Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles—where men have to be macho and women have to bear their children.
What do engineers like to do? Build. Since ancient times, the emperors have tried to tame the mighty rivers that sweep away not only farmland, but also imperial reigns. In modern times, new public works—roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, power plants, entire new cities—are the engineering state’s solution to any number of quandaries. Since 1980, after Deng’s reforms began, China has built an expanse of highways equal to twice the length of the US systems, a high-speed rail network twenty times more extensive than Japan’s, and almost as much solar and wind power capacity as the rest of the world put together. It’s not only the government that is fixated on production; the corporate sector is made up of overactive producers too. A rough rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic panels, or anything else.
Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua, China’s top science university. For his third term as the Communist Party’s general secretary starting in 2022, Xi filled the Politburo with executives from the country’s aerospace and weapons ministries. In the United States, it would be as if the CEO of Boeing became the governor of Alaska, the chief of Lockheed Martin became the secretary of energy, and the head of NASA was governor of a state as large as Georgia. China’s ruling elites have practical experience managing megaprojects, suggesting that China is doubling down on engineers—and prioritizing defense—more than ever.
Lawyers enable some of the success of Silicon Valley. You can’t build companies worth trillions without legal protections. But lawyers are also part of the reason that the Bay Area and much of the country are starved of housing and mass transit. The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible.
The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering. From 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee went to law school, but they make up many Republican Party elites as well as the top ranks of the civil service too. By contrast, only two American presidents worked as engineers: Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a nuclear submarine. Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats.
Modern China has many tools of social control. Within living memory, most Chinese residents worked inside a danwei, or work unit, which governed one’s access to essentials like rice, meat, cooking oil, and a bicycle. Many people still live under the strictures of the hukou, or household registration, an aim of which is to prevent rural folks from establishing themselves in cities by restricting education and health care benefits to their hometown. Controls are far worse for ethnoreligious minorities: Tibetans are totally prohibited from worshipping the Dalai Lama, and perhaps over a million Uighurs have spent time in detention camps that attempt to inculcate Chinese values into their Muslim faith.
China’s economy isn’t immune to engineering either. When Beijing grew uncomfortable with the debt levels of real estate developers in 2021, the state forced so many of them into distress that it triggered a prolonged slump in homebuyer confidence. Around the same time, Xi hurled a series of regulatory thunderbolts at China’s high-flying tech companies, including Didi, the country’s largest ride-hailing company, and Ant Financial, the payments company owned by Jack Ma, China’s best-known entrepreneur. Chinese tech founders(and their investors) were astonished to discover that Xi Jinping could erase a trillion dollars from corporate valuations over the course of just a few months. The leadership thought it was straightforward to reorient the nation’s tech priorities away from consumer platforms and toward science-based industries, like semiconductors and aviation, that serve the nation’s strategic needs. Beijing took years to appreciate how its actions had scared the daylights out of entrepreneurs and investors.
Can a government be too efficient? Six years in China taught me that the answer is yes, when it is unbounded by citizen input. There are many self-limiting aspects of a system that makes snap decisions with so little regard for people. This book reveals good things that the engineering state does: running functional cities, building up its manufacturing base, and spreading material benefits pretty widely throughout society. But I also lived through things that no other state would have attempted, like holding on to a zero-Covid strategy until it drove the country mad. The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals. The Communist Party envisions itself as a grand master, coordinating unified actions across state and society, able to launch strategic maneuvers beyond the comprehension of its citizens. Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals.
The engineering state can be awfully literal minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves.
Well-to-do people professionals who thought themselves secure in their jobs in finance or consumer internet faced a rude shock when Xi’s displeasure with these sectors caused rippling job losses. No US president has so much ability to overturn the lives of the rich. By contrast, in China, many pillars of society are liable to blow over when winds from Beijing shift direction, contributing to a sense of precarity among even the country’s elites. Since China doesn’t have many legal protections, not even its rich are well protected.
To capture both the traumatic aspects of the engineering state and its capacity to produce great pride, I like to think of a hypothetical question: What was the worst year to be born in modern China? A strong contender, I believe, is 1949, the year Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic.
Engineers go hard in one direction, and if they perceive something isn’t working, they switch with no loss of speed toward another. They don’t suffer criticism from humanist softies. Change in China can be so dramatic because so few voices are part of the political process. To a first approximation, the twenty-four men who make up the Political Bureau(the highest echelon of the Communist Party, usually shortened to Politburo) are the only people permitted to do politics. Once they’ve settled questions of strategy, the only remaining task is for the bureaucracy to sort out the details. But when it makes mistakes, it can drag nearly the entire population into crisis.
The generation of Chinese born in the 2000s are somewhere in between these extremes. College graduates have, in recent years, contended with record high youth unemployment while their parents mourn falling property values. For one group of online nationalists, nicknamed “little pinks,” China can’t stop winning. The collapse of the property sector was good and necessary, they contend, because investment is going into manufacturing. And if China’s broader economy is weak, they say that China’s economic woes are caused by the United States. The second argument is just ridiculous. Yes, tariffs and technology controls have hurt Chinese firms. But what is the US government’s damage to China’s economy next to the Politburo’s shock tactics? That the United States is able to hobble China’s growth is believable only inside the country’s highly censored information environment. But the little pinks have a line of argument that tickles me. “Look at those Americans,” a few say, “who have no high-speed rail or gleaming skyscrapers like we do. Their only skill is blocking themselves, which they are now doing to us.” Little pinks are wrong to say that the United States is powerful enough to tank China’s economy; they’re not wrong that the United States blocks itself.
Not everyone born in 1949 suffered terribly and not everyone born in 1959 lived comfortably. But the engineering state is characterized by peculiarly jerky rhythms, in which the decade of birth might determine whether a person stumbles into great wealth or a mass grave.
The year 2008 offers a direct comparison between California’s speed and China’s speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. Both lines would be around eight hundred miles long upon completion. China opened the Beijing–Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $ 36 billion. In its first decade of operation, it completed 1.35 billion passenger trips. California has built, seventeen years after the ballot proposition, a small stretch of rail to connect two cities in the Central Valley, neither of which are close to San Francisco or Los Angeles. The latest estimate for California’s rail line is $ 128 billion. Why does it cost so much? Partly because some politicians have demanded that the train add a stop in their district, forcing the line to take a more tortuous route through an extra mountain range. And partly because California’s rail authority prefers to tout the number of high-paying jobs it is creating rather than the amount of track it has been laying. The first segment of California’s train will start operating, according to official estimates, between 2030 and 2033. Which means that the margin of error for estimating when a partial leg of California’s high-speed rail will open is the same as the time it took China to build the entire Beijing–Shanghai line.
China today resembles the United States of a century ago while it was proving itself to be a superpower. But America’s construction boom slowed down after the 1960s. What happened next? The lawyers. In the 1960s, parts of the United States had grown into a frightful place. Oil platforms discharged petroleum into the sea, a foul smog settled over cities, and factories leaked so many chemicals that even rivers combusted. Urban planners rammed highways through urban neighborhoods. Legal discrimination segregated people by race and blocked them from exercising the right to vote. The public soured on the idea of broad deference to US technocrats and engineers: urban planners(who were uprooting whole neighborhoods), defense officials(who were prosecuting the war in Vietnam), and industry regulators(who were cozying up to companies). Students at elite law schools, especially Yale and Harvard, sprang up to act. Students founded environmental organizations around the rallying cry of “Sue the bastards!”(referring to government agencies). Through the 1970s, both the American left and the right worked harmoniously to constrain government effectiveness. Liberal activists like Ralph Nader declared themselves to be watchdogs of government, constantly filing lawsuits. Ronald Reagan returned the compliment when he replied, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the United States’ problems of the 1960s. Unfortunately, it has become the cause of many of its present problems.
The American courtroom is a battlefront to resolve political questions, in which judges are enlisted to rule on questions that most other countries leave to voters or regulators. When a political cause can’t be won through the electoral process, lawyers sometimes seek a victory through the courts.
The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries.
Though the lawyerly society corrected the problems of the past, it has produced two pathologies that weaken the United States today. The first is an elevation of process over outcomes. In American government and society, designing new rules and committees have so often become the substitute for thinking hard about strategy and ends. While engineers envision bridges, lawyers envision procedures.
America’s dysfunctions are not obstacles for the rich. Though New York City has barely been able to extend its system of mass transit, real estate developers have been able to build skinny high-rises for the wealthy. Though California can’t tame wildfires, the rich might be able to afford their own private firefighting services. The poor—those buried under paperwork trying to apply for SNAP benefits, who have to take dilapidated public transit and who would most benefit from new construction—are the ones who suffer most from the lawyerly society’s failures. — Note: Luxury beliefs?
The lawyerly society also includes a commitment to proceduralism and protecting wealth. Economically, the United States has experienced strong economic growth relative to other Western countries combined with astonishingly successful corporate value creation. But in political terms, this obsession with process over outcomes has made Americans lose faith that the government can meaningfully improve their lives. I want the US government to earn back that faith. To do so, it will need to recover some of its engineering prowess and make room for nonlawyers among its ruling elites. It will require the United States to build again, creating a momentum and the sense of optimism for the future that many Chinese have felt over the past two decades.
The engineering state is more than autocracy or technocratic high modernism. China has succeeded better than any other authoritarian country in history at combining economic growth with political control. The Communist Party has relentlessly broken up entrenched interests, partly to prevent rich people from gaining political power and partly to spread material benefits throughout the country. Its rise suggests that a country can grow powerful when it trains a lot of engineers and puts them to work, even under less-than-great institutional arrangements. In the words of one 1991 paper written by a trio of economists, “Our evidence shows that countries with a higher proportion of engineering college majors grow faster; whereas countries with a higher proportion of law concentrators grow more slowly.” Engineers are part of the reason that China has grown so much wealthier, despite its wavering commitment to secure property rights. An engineer mindset is also part of the reason that the state skirted so close to apocalypse—in the case of the Cultural Revolution—before it achieved a growth miracle.
The United States has immense advantages over China: robust economic growth, an expanding and more youthful population, innovation in digital technologies, a larger network of alliances, and more. But we need to recognize that the engineering state has a giant advantage: China can build. That will matter if the two countries ever decide, in an apocalyptic scenario, to go to war. No military can be powered by artificial intelligence alone; it will need drones and munitions. And the engineering state is better set up to produce these in overwhelming quantity.

Chapter 2: Building Big

Each time I left Beijing and Shanghai to enter more remote parts of the country, I was astonished by how even China’s poorest provinces have better infrastructure than America’s richest. The chief feature of the engineering state is building big public works, no matter the financial or human cost. For many people in Guizhou, it has produced an enthusiasm and an expectation for physical change, a feeling not often found among Americans today.
Chinese leaders are usually expected to administer a poor province before they can be promoted to the country’s political pinnacle. In the United States, it would be as if politicians had to gain some experience in the Rust Belt or coal country before they could get anywhere near a cabinet position.
Chongqing was China’s capital during World War II, then known as Chungking. There, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces huddled with Communists and the US general Joseph Stilwell inside air-raid tunnels carved into hillsides to shelter from Japanese bombers. Chongqing is a municipality that matches the landmass of Austria—and is just as mountainous—as well as the population of Texas—and is just as boisterous. The bridges that were elegant in the Guizhou countryside swelled toward monstrosity as we approached the city. Everything is bigger in Chongqing. It is raucous, full of unexpected sites, a city that teems. With its Blade Runner aesthetic, Chongqing is the embodiment of cyberpunk—or more aptly given its rivers, hydropunk. The mountains that protected the city from Japanese bombers also create a heat trap, making Chongqing one of China’s “four furnaces.” Perversely, the favorite food of locals is a cauldron of red chilies, beef oil, and Sichuan peppercorns—which generates a purring tingle on the tongue—into which one dips a swirl of thinly sliced meats and vegetables. Some of the air-raid tunnels have become hotpot restaurants, popular because the tunnels’ cool air helps spicy food go down more easily. Chongqing is also making plans to turn some of these shelters into art exhibitions or wine cellars. — Note: Makes me want to visit
China’s first interprovincial expressway opened in 1993, connecting Beijing with the nearby port city of Tianjin. Soon enough, highways reached everywhere. A Chinese citizen born when the country completed its first expressway would—by the time she reached the legal driving age of eighteen in 2011—be able to drive on a highway system that surpassed the length of the US interstate system. By 2020, China had built a second batch of expressways that again totaled the length of the US system. The first expanse of highways took eighteen years to build; the second took half that time.
In spite of the challenges of deep rural isolation, China’s fourth-poorest province—where household income is one-fifteenth that of New York State—has vastly superior infrastructure: three times the length of New York’s highways, as well as a functional high-speed rail network. And Guizhou isn’t exactly an exceptional Chinese province. Across the country, the engineering state has relentlessly built public works, making Guizhou an extreme case of China’s growth strategy rather than a deviation from it.
In 1957, the world’s first commercial nuclear plant started producing electricity in Pennsylvania. In 1991, China’s first commercial nuclear power plant started producing electricity. By 2025, China caught up to the United States in the number of nuclear plants: fifty-five and fifty-four, respectively. Though the United States might restart a few decommissioned reactors, it has just one under construction. Meanwhile, thirty-one are under construction in China. The only US nuclear plant built in the twenty-first century took fifteen years and $ 30 billion. In August 2024, China’s nuclear authority approved construction of eleven new reactors, which are collectively expected to cost the same amount.
Cars quickly filled these roads. In 1990, there were half a million automobiles in the country; in 2024, there were 435 million, many of them electric. China didn’t just build cars and highways. It also built mass transit. From 2003 to 2013, Shanghai added as much subway track as in the entire system in New York City. In 2025, fifty-one Chinese cities have subway lines, eleven of which are longer than New York’s. China now has a longer high-speed rail network than the rest of the world put together, ten times the length of Spain’s and Japan’s(second and third in the world, respectively). Sleek railcars in silver zooming on elevated bridges are telegenic things, their pictures adorning billboards and book covers. This system completes around two billion passenger trips each year.
This building boom was both a cause and an effect of China’s growing wealth. It stimulated economic activity directly: The construction of homes, highways, subways, and power plants spurred demand for materials and jobs that rippled beyond the immediate construction site. It also facilitated China’s urbanization, pulling people from farms into cities, where their productivity was much greater. In a crucial period while China’s labor force was expanding, this infrastructure laid the foundation for the country’s export-based manufacturing strategy. Most of China’s enrichment has been driven by the people themselves, finally freed from Maoist restraints to pursue a better life. Meanwhile, the state’s mania for building public works has helped the country grow faster. You can see how China differs from India, Indonesia, and other developing countries, where growth is lower in part because the state hasn’t built enough housing and infrastructure for their citizens.
Unfortunately, not much new construction in China is optimized for charm and beauty. The engineering state is built for a bird’s-eye view. The geometry of highway interchanges, rows upon rows of solar photovoltaic panels, and, under the right lighting, even a belching chemical plant can produce a pleasing thrill when viewed up high and at a distance. Down below, the urban environment is not always pleasantly livable. Big cities like Beijing and Shenzhen are poorly laid out, with no extensive walkable zones. It takes forever to get across town.
While China compressed more than a century’s worth of American construction into a few decades, it folded in many of its problems too. Highways have ripped apart too many cities in China, just as they have in the United States. Chinese have mustered tremendous enthusiasm for destroying the nation’s physical heritage in the recent past. It was prominent during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao ordered Red Guards to loot Buddhist temples, smash Confucian statues, and desecrate ancestral tombs.
Compulsive construction has benefits. Though people in Guizhou remain poor, the villagers we encountered on our bike trip told us they are thrilled to have new bridges and trains. For Chinese who have experienced economic growth rates of 10 percent a year, it would feel like their country was reborn roughly every seven years.(That’s how much time an economy takes to double with that growth rate.) It means better cars, more subway lines, cleaner streets, more parks, and a hundred other improvements.
A study undertaken by the World Bank in 2019 found that China’s high-speed rail system is economically viable, with ticket revenues able to recoup costs. China has been able to build high-speed rail cheaply because it has standardized designs and excellent project management. The average cost to construct a high-speed line in China is about $ 33 million per mile, which is 40 percent cheaper than in Europe and 80 percent cheaper than California’s effort, which has seen costs balloon to $ 192 million per mile. By taking a broader view, the World Bank suggests that China’s high-speed rail has delivered substantial benefits beyond ticket revenues, which includes saving time for users, increasing intellectual and business exchanges, reducing road accidents and traffic congestion, and lowering carbon emissions.
Perhaps no other self-proclaimed socialist country is as lightly taxed as China. Nearly three-quarters of China’s population are spared from paying income tax. China has also failed to levy a broad property tax, leaving the bulk of rich city dwellers’ wealth untouched. It relies more heavily on consumption taxes, which are regressive because they burden the poor more than the rich. Beijing has announced several times that it would impose a property tax. Each time it faltered. One of the political reasons is that China’s leaders are familiar with the American slogan “No taxation without representation.” Since the state levies relatively light taxes, which it takes unobtrusively from citizens, it reduces the risk that people start asking questions about what the state is doing with their hard-earned funds and whether their taxes should entitle them to greater political participation.
The Communist Party celebrates the birthday of Karl Marx; to close out its party congress, held twice a decade, the military band plays the “Internationale” socialist anthem inside the Great Hall of the People.
The engineering state, citing socialism with Chinese characteristics, is set up to give people one main thing: material improvements, mostly through public works. The engineering state builds big in part because it’s made up of self-professed communists who grew up admiring the Soviet Union. Communist Party leaders like Xi Jinping studied in an educational system steeped in Marxism. For them, production was a noble deed to advance communism, while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism. This party believes that only the state has the wisdom to invest in strategic megaprojects, whereas consumers will waste money on themselves. It is hostile to ordinary people having much command of resources, which empowers an individual’s agency rather than the state’s.
Low taxes make China stingy on welfare. Around 10 percent of its GDP goes toward social spending, compared to 20 percent in the United States and 30 percent among the more generous European states. China’s pension and health care spending are much lower than that of other rich countries. It is especially miserly with unemployment insurance: Only about a tenth of China’s unemployed are eligible for modest benefits. Occasionally, Chinese leftists have protested the state of affairs. Rather than provide better welfare in response, the state has detained students trying to organize Marxist reading groups. Xi has forcefully pushed back on the idea that China needs more generous welfare. In a major speech in 2021, he said, “Even when we have reached a higher level of development… we should not go overboard with social transfers. For we must avoid letting people get lazy from their sense of entitlement to welfare.” Worrying that welfare could make the people lazy is one of those instances when a Communist Party leader sounds like Ronald Reagan.

Introduction

Companies and people were engaging in transactions—buying goods, borrowing money, contracting for services—without mediation by the state. And digital platforms created billionaires who could not resist flaunting their wealth or wisdom, much as their Silicon Valley counterparts do. Subsequently, the Communist Party smashed many of their businesses before they had begun to wield real power. The state wants to have the ultimate say in controlling economic relations throughout society.
I am sure that no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese. A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. Chinese and Americans are pragmatic: They have a get-it-done attitude that occasionally produces hurried work. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth. Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace. But masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don’t get in line.
When Chinese officials talk about promoting consumption, it often involves building new malls or replacing old industrial equipment. In other words, it’s still more about investing to build stuff rather than shifting the propensity of households to spend a greater share of their income.
One man wondered to a TV crew, “We don’t have much to see here. How much money would we have to spend to create something worthwhile?” Li Zaiyong believed a great deal, and he mobilized a great deal of funds to make things happen. Since he was the top official in the city, local banks had a hard time saying no to him. But none of Li’s efforts bore fruit. Liupanshui never developed into an appealing ski destination: China’s skiers went to the northeast in the winter, which has real slopes and real snow. Richer tourists from Beijing and Shanghai skipped Li’s gaudy European facsimiles for the real deal in Venice and Vienna. — Note: How do you do an agile building for cities? How could have he test his hypothesis? No idea
The political system of the engineering state rewards construction. China’s political leaders, after all, are selected, not elected. To reach higher office, they are given probing assessments by the Organization Department, which, along with the Propaganda Department and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, are the Communist Party’s most important governing instruments. The Organization Department evaluates local leaders on a few soft metrics, like leadership, loyalty, and resistance to graft. The department also assessed whether an official was capable of stimulating economic growth while suppressing political dissent. But few party secretaries have great ideas for growing the township or province they’ve landed in. Furthermore, since local governments don’t have property taxes, they primarily fund themselves through land sales to real estate developers. This combination of personnel policy and fiscal quirks produces officials like Li Zaiyong who invest in glamorous projects and whose failures are apparent only after they’ve left office.
Tianjin has built not only China’s third-tallest skyscraper(ninety-seven floors, little occupied) but also one of its most photogenic libraries. The Dutch architects behind Tianjin’s Binhai Library put a bright white sphere in its center, around which undulating curves make up shelving space. Except few of these shelves held any books. Once I got up close, I could see that the beautiful shelves had only digital prints of book spines. All around me were people taking selfies rather than browsing or reading. I sometimes think of Tianjin’s library as a metaphor for China’s economy: great hardware that looks impressive from a distance, not filled with the softer stuff that actually matters. Tianjin could have focused on filling its amazing skyscrapers with better businesses. Instead, it could only build more hollow shells, while it gained considerable debt.
China now has the capacity to produce around sixty million cars a year(one-third electric, two-thirds combustion), out of an annual global market of around ninety million cars sold. China’s domestic market absorbs less than half of its production. China produces so much in part because every province wants to be an automotive manufacturing hub. The country has over a hundred automotive brands, most of them small, all of them fighting for sales. The competition is so fierce in part because auto companies receive extensive support from local governments, who all try to promote their champion through cheap credit and consumer rebates to local companies. Shanghai, for example, is full of the locally produced SAIC-Volkswagen cars, while Shenzhen is dominated by its own champion, BYD.
China’s government is much more focused on the smooth functioning of the supply side of the economy rather than on helping consumers. This principle became really apparent in 2020. While Western governments reacted to the global pandemic by sending cash payments to households—in the United States, three rounds totaling $ 3,200—Beijing gave little financial support to people. It offered only meager increases to unemployment insurance, which only a fraction of the millions of unemployed workers were able to claim. Beijing decided instead that the best way it could help workers was to get them back to work. In practice, it meant assisting companies to restart production rather than sending cash to households. It did that with its pursuit of the zero-Covid strategy, which involved taking drastic action to seal the country off from foreign travelers and imposing protracted lockdowns wherever it detected the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Beijing wanted especially for manufacturers to maintain operation. While the rest of the world was having trouble producing stuff—masks and cotton swabs, electronics for remote work—and while foreign consumers had stimulus money to spend, Chinese factories were positioned to meet the world’s demand. For a while, that scheme worked.
The United States offered extraordinary bailouts to Detroit automakers in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In China, local governments help companies out every day. As a result, few of the brands can achieve really big scale, and China has to depend on exports to absorb all the vehicles domestic consumers aren’t buying.
Huawei, for example, expanded from making telecommunications infrastructure equipment to tread on companies like Xiaomi, which makes smartphones. And both have now leapt into the automotive business. This sort of expansion is driven both by the fiercely competitive market environments and by government subsidies that make it easier for companies to try their hand at making new products. They allow companies to unleash a flood of undifferentiated products, ruthlessly underbid each other, and pray their competitors run out of money before they do. China now dominates the solar industry, but almost no firms are happy because of the overcapacity. Many of these Chinese companies will inevitably go out of business, after they’ve dragged down their competitors all over the world in brutal price wars. This trend has produced a frustrating quirk in China’s equity markets. Financial investors have seen that there is no relationship between Chinese stock market performance and GDP growth. Although the economy has grown by a factor of eight in real terms between 1992 and 2018, the Shanghai Composite Index has been one of the worst-performing major indices. In China, for a variety of reasons that includes weak corporate governance, onshore stocks dance to their own tune. Part of the reason is that even for technologies that Chinese firms dominate—like solar photovoltaic panels—few firms are able to make much profit.
And the manufacturers were cranking out a lot of goods. In the fall of 2020, I remember visiting the factory of a technology manufacturer outside of Shanghai. An executive had invited me in to tour his new production line. He was a Chinese national who had mostly worked for American companies and still traveled between the two countries. As we sipped tea in his office after the tour, we chatted about why the United States was then mired in production difficulties, unable to make much of the personal protective equipment that people wanted. “American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.”
Europeans have a sense of optimism only about the past, stuck in their mausoleum economy because they are too sniffy to embrace American or Chinese practices. And the rest of the world is either too mature or too young to match the impact of these two superpowers. It is Americans and Chinese—Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, Wall Street, and Beijing—that will determine what people everywhere will think and what they will buy.
Though rich students in Shanghai score splendidly on international exams, education in China’s rural areas is still often abysmal. The Covid pandemic revealed that the country’s health care system is weak, with shortages of doctors and nurses and six times fewer intensive care unit beds per capita than in the United States. An official like Li Zaiyong might be more interested in building a gleaming hospital filled with sophisticated equipment. Their attention drifts, however, when it comes to installing the trained technicians capable of operating the facility, since the Communist Party is better at rewarding new construction than health outcomes. The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai.
The economic partnership between the United States and China made many groups better off. But it also exacerbated the problems inherent in the economic systems in both countries. Overreliance on Chinese manufacturing accelerated US neglect of its supply side. Meanwhile, China hasn’t felt the need to wean off its dependence on exports because American consumers are always there to buy its goods. As these countries grow apart, they are going to have to do something difficult: The United States will have to regain all the muscle it has lost for building public works as well as manufacturing capacity, and China will have to empower consumers by getting over its fear of making people lazy.
China won’t become the world’s biggest economy by building more tall bridges. It also can’t continue manufacturing more than twice the number of cars it sells at home. And the United States is starting to realize the problems of being too focused on the demand side of the economy. When the federal government offers, for example, rental support in housing-scarce cities, landlords can raise their prices, leaving renters no better off. When it increases financial aid for spiraling college tuition costs, universities are able to eat part of that by raising their tuition. Under banners like “abundance agenda,” “supply side progressivism,” and “progress studies,” various movements are trying to loosen American supply constraints. These are excellent ideas that I hope will be broadly adopted.
I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other. Households save a great deal of their earnings in China, while it is really easy to borrow money or spend on credit in America. In terms of national policy, China is much more focused on the supply side of the economy: It suppresses consumption as it favors manufacturers with preferential financing and all manner of policy support. The United States, meanwhile, is focused on regulating demand, for example, by imposing rent control in expensive cities or mailing out checks to consumers during the pandemic.
Has China already been practicing supply-side progressivism? No, because nothing about it is “progressive” in a way that someone on the American left would understand. China’s means of construction entail evicting people from their land, adopting a relatively lax approach to environmental protection and worker safety, and interpreting the public interest without substantial engagement with the actual people.

Chapter 3: Tech Power

Shenzhen was China’s greatest boomtown and, therefore, the world’s. Its population soared from three hundred thousand in 1980 to seven million in 2000 and eighteen million in 2020. For many Chinese, who are intently judged on the region they’re from, Shenzhen was a land of opportunity where no one was a local. One of the city’s slogans, still occasionally found on billboards, reads, “You’re a Shenzhen local the moment you’re here.” It’s a poke at Beijing and Shanghai, cities where older families maintain a certain exclusivity(as they might in Paris or London).
The iPhone has become one of the rarest sorts of consumer products—both ubiquitous and coveted as a status object. It is also the crowning success of the trade relationship between two countries, in which American inspiration and marketing savvy met China’s millions of workers, managed by contract manufacturers like Taiwan’s Foxconn, to make state-of-the-art electronics. It wasn’t easy to organize a workforce to assemble thousands of components into the most complex consumer product the world has ever known. Mastering this feat propelled Apple to become the first trillion-dollar company. China, if anything, gained something even greater from this partnership. While the company enjoyed a surge in valuation, the country experienced a boost in national power, produced by the international collaboration needed to train hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, every year, to build sophisticated electronics. Chinese companies subsequently leveraged this workforce to lead the world in other industries centered in Shenzhen, including electric vehicles, battery systems, and consumer drones. As China did so, it embraced a vision of technology radically different from Silicon Valley’s: the pursuit of physical and industrial technologies rather than virtual ones like social media or e-commerce platforms. In China, technology is not represented by shiny objects; rather, it is embodied by communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen, where technology lives inside the heads and in the hands of its workforce.
Really, everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing. But the capital is also a city of gravity and substance. Beijing attracts many of China’s smartest people, including scientists, technology leaders, and those seeking to advance in the Communist Party. The po-faced members of the Politburo don’t fool around. Greatness isn’t only a slogan for them: It’s a full-on, life-or-death pursuit. Beijing, for the rest of this book, stands in as the Communist Party and the central government. China’s leaders are driven by intense paranoia, doing everything they can to control the future.
The iPhone turbocharged factory complexes to enormous scale: Foxconn’s manufacturing campus in the north of Shenzhen occupies five hundred acres. The site has factories, of course, and dormitories. It also has grocery stores, cafés, a fire brigade, a hospital, cinemas, swimming pools, and vendor-operated restaurants. The factory is the size of a city. The population peaks in early fall as production ramps up to meet demand for the Christmas season. Dormitories fill up then, with up to six men or women crammed into one room. Assembly lines operate for three eight-hour shifts a day; there is never a minute that factories aren’t producing iPhones. At the peak times, three hundred thousand people work at Foxconn’s Shenzhen campus, about as many as live in Pittsburgh or St. Louis. A Chinese report from 2009 estimated that the campus each day consumed forty tons of rice, twenty tons of pork, ten tons of flour, and five hundred barrels of cooking oil.
China, as I said in my introduction, is often messy. But in some places, it is spick-and-span. The most orderly places I’ve been to in the country are the manufacturing sites producing for Apple. Every worker is in place at all times.
Officials in Henan outdid themselves in hustling workers into factories. In 2016, Henan officials “borrowed” workers from state-owned coal companies to meet the iPhone production surge. In 2017, the Financial Times reported that up to three thousand high school students had to work on assembly lines—a few of them for eleven-hour days—and if they did not, their school withheld their graduation diplomas. They were euphemistically called “interns” who assembled iPhones for “vocational experience.” In 2022, when Covid controls snarled supply chains, they recruited retired People’s Liberation Army personnel to staff production lines. It was at Foxconn’s Henan sites where some of the most dramatic protests against zero-Covid took place, when young men flung bricks into massed ranks of riot police.
What does capitalism need? A stock market, which Shenzhen established in 1990. What else? Belching factories with dismal labor conditions. That it had aplenty. Walmart invested deeply in that region to source goods: socks, toys, lighting, and nearly anything else that consumers wanted in a supercenter.
Helen told me that Shenzhen conducted leveling operations along mountains to make land suitable for production. Another former Apple engineer told me that a grassy field had turned, four months later on his next visit from Cupertino, into an industrial building with six floors getting ready to install equipment. Local officials in Shenzhen, Sichuan, and Henan not only collaborated to find labor. They also offered cheap land, extended vast tax rebates, and built roads, dormitories, and factories. The central government pitched in to help too, creating “bonded zones,” which facilitated customs clearance. The state worked closely with the companies to move workers and components into factories and finished products out.
Today, Shenzhen is one of China’s most desirable places to live, gleaming with skyscrapers and malls and full of big trees. But new construction has not obliterated the city’s past. Threaded between big avenues are bustling pockets of semi-preserved village structures that imbue the city with more liveliness than glass skyscrapers are able to provide.
In 2019, United Airlines made a promotional banner about how valuable Apple was to its business. United wrote that Apple booked fifty business-class seats daily from San Francisco to Shanghai, from which the airline made $ 35 million each year. That’s over eighteen thousand business-class seats on one route.
It’s fully appropriate to call Shenzhen the “Silicon Valley of hardware.” As in the stretch from Palo Alto to San Jose, Shenzhen is full of boring office parks along highways in a beautiful natural setting. And friends would tell me that Shenzhen, as in Silicon Valley, is a great place to found a start-up. A group of people would discuss an idea over dinner, divide up the tasks, and get to work the next morning. By contrast, in Beijing, dinner will feature interminable rounds of liquor shots, reckless bluffs about connections in high places, and uncertain follow-up afterward.
Each year, Apple might have a pretty good sense of where most valuable iPhone components are coming from(the camera module, for example, from Sony; the memory from Samsung; its chips made by TSMC), but there are constant surprises further down the supply chain. “There are always new components or processes that a new design requires, like a certain type of adhesive or a screw of a slightly different size.” Therefore, Apple constantly had to scramble to find suppliers on short notice. “Almost always,” the engineer continued, “we found someone in Shenzhen by asking a guy who knows a guy whose cousin might be able to produce a few hundred thousand new screws.”
A 2012 story in the New York Times reported that Apple needed to hire nearly nine thousand industrial engineers in the earlier days of iPhone production. The company’s analysts expected recruitment to last nine months to hire that many engineers in the United States. In China, they were able to do it in two weeks. A large pool of good labor increases the speed of design and production cycles. As Tim Cook once said, “In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”
The magic of Shenzhen is the combination of the world’s most creative hardware engineers sitting in a sea of components that improve every year amid a labor force of millions who know how to put together electronics. This buzzing ecosystem has produced many other products that follow in Apple’s wake, like hoverboards, electric scooters, virtual reality headsets, and who knows what’s next?
China remains weak in several industries, however. The leadership is sore that the country remains dependent on the West for aircraft engines and semiconductor technologies. And though China’s biotech industry is big, Chinese pharmaceuticals haven’t yet produced a blockbuster new drug or vaccine. Not often do its universities generate groundbreaking new papers that force American scientists to sit up and pay attention. The fact is that China remains fairly weak at producing scientific advancements. Whereas Japanese researchers have earned more than twenty Nobel Prizes in the sciences, only one has ever been awarded to a Chinese national. Now the state is dedicating enormous resources to pursuing better science. In 2019, China became the first country to land a rover on the far side of the moon; a year later, Chinese scientists achieved quantum-encrypted communication by satellite. Its space agency has announced that it will land people on the moon by 2030. That’s hardly outdoing the United States in space, which landed astronauts on the moon six decades before China’s target. But it is a sign that China is steadily investing in scientific capabilities that give it the power to achieve increasingly difficult tasks.
When we talk about technology, we should really distinguish between three things. First, technology means tools. These are the pots, pans, knives, and ovens required to prepare a dish. Second, technology means explicit instruction. These are the recipes, the blueprints, the patents that can be written down. Third and most important, technology is process knowledge. That is the proficiency gained from practical experience, which isn’t easily communicated. Ask someone who has never cooked before to do something as simple as fry an egg. Give him a beautiful kitchen and the most exquisitely detailed recipe, and he might still make a mess. We can see how China values process knowledge through its approach to architecture too.
It’s another of the ways that the United States and China are inversions of each other. Americans expect innovations from scientists working at NASA, in universities, or in research labs. They celebrate the moment of invention: the first solar cell, the first personal computer, first in flight. In China, on the other hand, tech innovation emerges from the factory floor, when a new product is scaled up into mass production. At the heart of China’s ascendancy in advanced technology is its spectacular capacity for learning by doing and consistently improving things.
Builders everywhere have attempted to overcome the erosion of time. Ancient Egypt and medieval Europe built great pyramids and cathedrals out of stone. The approach in China, as Leys points out, is for builders to yield to the onrush of time by using eminently perishable, and indeed fragile, materials. By building temples out of wood with paneling sometimes made of paper, Chinese architecture has built-in obsolescence, demanding frequent renewal. “Eternity should not inhabit the building,” Leys writes. “It should inhabit the builder.” Rather than using the strongest materials, Chinese builders have embraced transience to ensure the eternity of spiritual designs. The shining exemplar of this idea is found not in China but at the Ise Grand Shrine(or Ise Jingu) in Japan. Ise Jingu is the holiest shrine in Japan’s Shinto faith. Since it was first erected in 690 AD, craftspeople have completely rebuilt its sacred temples—made of wood and hay—every twenty years. In 2033, the temple will be rebuilt for its sixty-third reconsecration. Ise Jingu’s halls are made of Japanese cypress timbers that support a raised floor and are covered by a thatched roof of dried silvergrass. These structures use techniques from the seventh century: no nails, only dowels and wood joints. Though wood joinery is a complex craft, the rest of the construction is simple. Why does this ritual persist? In part, it has to do with the Shinto faith in spiritual renewal. And it is also because these shrines are built in the style of rice warehouses, dedicated as they are to the god of agriculture, which rot every few decades. It is also about the preservation of craft knowledge. Twenty years is the length of a generation, and the caretakers of the Ise Jingu have attempted to ensure that knowledge about how to rebuild this shrine can be passed on to descendants. Junko Edahiro, an environmental writer who witnessed the sixty-second rebuilding, heard an elderly fellow say to younger folks, “I will leave these duties to you next time.”
I saw how China is made up of both strong entrepreneurs and a strong government, with a state that both moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people.
It’s not just Boeing and Intel that have lost their way. In the time it took to do one rebuild of the Ise Jingu, the US government forgot something only as important as nuclear weapon material. The National Nuclear Security Administration found that it could no longer produce “Fogbank,” a classified material used to detonate the bomb, because it hadn’t kept good records of the production process and everyone who knew how to produce it had retired. The NNSA then spent $ 69 million to relearn how to produce this material.
Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice. That is closer to the approach used in China and Japan.
Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers. We tend to refer to these intangibles as know-how, institutional memory, or tacit knowledge. They are embodied by an experienced workforce like Shenzhen’s. There, someone might work at an iPhone plant one year, for a rival phone maker the next, and then start a drone company. If an engineer in Shenzhen has an idea for a new product, it’s easy to tap into an eager network of investors. Shenzhen is a community of engineering practice where factory owners, skilled engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers mix with the world’s most experienced workforce at producing high-end electronics.
The United States does want to re-create Shenzhen’s success. But it has had, at best, a surface-level understanding of its success. Silvia Lindtner, a professor at the University of Michigan and my wife, has spent more than a decade studying Shenzhen’s technology ecosystems. In 2015, the Austrian government asked her how to create a Shenzhen in the Alps; in 2016, the White House invited her to present on how the United States might learn from the success of Shenzhen. She has felt, as I do, that these agencies misunderstood the point of Shenzhen. They were still more interested in individual inventors rather than understanding it as a community of engineering practice. The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing.
The US manufacturing base has, with some exceptions, rusted from top to bottom. Why have so many manufacturers crumbled? Partly, I think, we can examine the culture of financial investors. Wall Street has been far keener to invest in capital-light businesses: digital platforms like social media and search engines or chip companies that focus on design rather than cumbersome fabrication facilities. If it weren’t for Tesla(which makes many of its cars in Shanghai), the United States would be even further behind China in electric vehicles. And Tesla’s survival was a close-run thing.
Beijing did something unprecedented for Tesla in 2018: It allowed the company to fully own its plant in Shanghai. Previously, any automaker that wanted to produce in China had to partner with a domestic company. So Japanese, German, and American companies dutifully partnered with state-owned enterprises in order to access the enormous market. The state had hoped that these domestic companies would learn from the likes of Toyota and Mercedes-Benz and match their quality. In reality, Chinese automakers were sluggish from their research dependence on their foreign friends.
Low-wage ecosystems like Shenzhen became a giant magnet for US process knowledge. Beijing made a deliberate decision not to be like Japan, which kept its market limited to American companies; rather, China mostly welcomed foreign manufacturers to train its workers. It is some sign of China’s economic openness that so much of its exports are driven by Apple and Tesla, while Japanese exports have been driven almost entirely by its own companies. After it built up a critical mass of process knowledge, however, Shenzhen became as much an innovator of new electronics as an implementer of American ideas.
Mostly, though, I think the problem lies with American policymakers and executives who fail to grasp the importance of process knowledge. American manufacturers spent the better part of three decades unwinding its stock of process knowledge when it opened so many factories in China. Every US factory closure represents a likely permanent loss of production skill and knowledge.
Tesla’s presence jolted China’s electric vehicle market. China’s business community began using the term “catfishing” for what Tesla was doing in China. The idea was that introducing a powerful new creature into the domestic environment would make Chinese firms swim faster. That’s exactly what they did to raise their game. When Tesla vehicles started rolling out of the Shanghai Gigafactory in 2019, BYD saw its sales decline by 11 percent, while profits fell by 42 percent. But Tesla would eventually do the whole market a favor. As in the United States, the company’s audacious branding stimulated consumers to think of electric vehicles as more than high-powered golf carts. And Tesla made investments in China’s tooling ecosystem that other automakers exploited to produce better cars. BYD benefited as well, reporting record profits in 2023 and becoming the world’s largest electric vehicle maker. And even the Communist Party’s main newspaper praised how Tesla produced the “catfish effect” for Chinese firms. As Grace Wang, founder of Shenzhen-based Luxshare(one of Apple’s new contract manufacturers), poetically expressed, “Flying with phoenixes will nurture outstanding birds.” It is another lesson that capitalist Shenzhen has taught the Communist Party: Market competition tends to lower prices and raise quality.
Science matters of course. China remains weak in chips and aviation in part because these are much more scientifically complex industries than solar. Not every technology improves through iterative adjustments to manufacturing processes, but a great deal can follow its logic. When lots of companies are doing similar things, in a brutally competitive environment where profit margins are small, they establish communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen. These factories will never be as glamorous as the desirable branding represented by Apple or Tesla. Every day, millions of workers go to factories to build up technological process knowledge. That is the basis of China’s tech power.
A focus on manufacturing gives China another advantage in technological competition with the United States. It can simply wait for American scientists to do the fundamental research before Chinese companies take over the production. That is, in essence, what happened with the solar industry. Bell Labs invented the first solar cell, and German companies produced solar production equipment. Beijing’s designation of solar as a “strategic emerging industry” invited Chinese companies to rush into this industry. Chinese companies bought German equipment and competed fiercely to make the most efficient solar cells. By the mid-2010s, Chinese companies figured out how to make all the German tools, as well as the entirety of the solar value chain. The plunge in solar power costs over the last decade has been driven less by breakthroughs in science—which is the United States’ strong suit—than by efficient production, which is China’s strength. The beneficiaries are not only the climate but also China’s national power.
Overall, China’s manufacturing workforce employs more than a hundred million people, around eight times that of the United States. That is a big stock of people who are fueling the creation of new process knowledge.
When I worked in Silicon Valley, people liked to say that knowledge travels at the speed of beer. Engineers like to talk to each other to solve technical problems, which is how knowledge diffuses. They are poached by rival firms or sometimes rival countries. Over the longer run, it’s difficult for countries to monopolize their dominance over any technology. If such a thing were possible, then the United States would still be behind the United Kingdom or Germany, which were much greater scientific innovators. — Note: Knowledge travels at speed of beer
Previously, Chinese companies bought the best components on the market, which were often American, because they wanted to sell a globally competitive smartphone or drone. When they couldn’t buy American, it lit a fire under Chinese companies to try domestic vendors that they would never have previously given the time of day.
United States still controls a lot of technological chokepoints, if only the government weren’t asleep at the wheel while China stole its way to primacy; and that if the US government stepped hard on export controls, it would be able to recover technology primacy from a country that cannot match American ingenuity.
According to Apple’s most recent supplier report(released in 2023), 156 of its top 200 suppliers have manufacturing sites in China. Seventy-two of them are in Shenzhen’s province of Guangdong, which is as many as there are in the United States, Vietnam, and India combined.
Xi isn’t just ambitious about manufacturing. A better word to describe his views might be “completionist.” Andrew Batson, research director at Gavekal Dragonomics, came upon a 2024 boast from the minister of industry and information technology that China has a “comprehensive” industrial chain, since it produces something in each of the 419 industrial product categories maintained by the United Nations to classify industrial production. It’s a very Chinese sort of boast.
On a 2023 inspection tour through Jiangsu province(like Guangdong, a manufacturing powerhouse), Xi said, “The real economy is the foundation of a country’s economy, the fundamental source of wealth creation, and an important pillar of national strength.” It is the basis, he continued, of “human production, life, and development.” He has repeatedly said that China needs to prioritize the real economy, which means the world of manufactured products, rather than the virtual or financial economy, sometimes referred to in state media as the “fictitious” economy.
So far, China hasn’t felt the economic pressure to abandon low-end manufacturing(clothing, footwear, and so on), in part because there are still a lot of poor Chinese provinces like Guizhou that have cheap labor. That trend might not hold given escalating tariffs. But if Xi is successful, it means that other developing countries(in Asia, Africa, and around the world) will be unable to climb the industrial ladder that China reigns over. Developed countries have reason to be alarmed as well. Since China is so large, it has the financial firepower to target any industry it wants for technological leadership. Small countries have had to pick their battles, as Denmark did in the wind industry and South Korea did with memory chips. China wants to have it all.
In the heavily censored realm of the Chinese internet, where no group is allowed to be very organized, one set of intellectuals has made themselves heard. They are loosely affiliated writers who refer to themselves as the Industrial Party. Their views are simple to summarize: that nation-states ruthlessly compete with each other; that science and technology are the decisive forces in this Darwinian competition; and that therefore the state must be organized around the pursuit of science and technology. They patriotically view the Communist Party as the world’s most capable political organization for this pursuit.
Every Chinese leader since the Qing emperors who lost the Opium Wars has felt aggrieved about falling behind in technology. Maintaining an industrial base is the best guarantee that China won’t lose again.
The morality of the Three-Body trilogy is, meanwhile, animated by the bleakest of worldviews. On one level, the trilogy is a celebration of humanity’s ingenuity in an existential struggle. To defeat the alien threat, Liu depicts humanity’s total subordination to technocratic authorities. Scientists and engineers are the ultimate decisionmakers, leaving no room for humanists, the faint of heart, or sentimentalists. Governments are made to submit to the will of select geniuses who do not hesitate to sacrifice millions. The prevailing idea in Liu’s trilogy is that the only hard truth is survival, where opposing civilizations resemble “blood-drenched pyramids lit by insidious fires seen through dark forests.” Again and again, Liu resolves the plot in favor of the party that is willing to be the most brutal in its will to survive. It’s easy to see why Industrial Party enthusiasts have elevated Liu’s work to the top of its canon. It may as well be, in addition, a guide to the ideology of the engineering state.
How can the United States do better? As a starting point, it could develop a better understanding of how China has grown into a technology superpower. If members of Congress continue to resort to the laziest explanations(“ they’re just stealing all our IP”), then the United States will never grasp the importance of building up process knowledge. And it will fail to gain urgency to fix its technological deficiencies. At the same time, Americans should develop a bit more humility about their own technological capabilities. The sooner that the United States treats China as a peer worth studying, the sooner it can develop a new playbook for success. Chinese companies are currently beating the rest of the world in the production of electric vehicle batteries. So why not allow a few of them to build factories, as they are trying to do, in states like Michigan, and force them to give up their technology? The US government could force Chinese battery makers to transfer intellectual property in exchange for accessing the giant US market for cars.
Most forms of low-end manufacturing aren’t as bad as that, but the United States was just as willing to let them go, with little understanding of how much it would hurt the country. It’s hard, I admit, to draw a straight line between the loss of, for example, television manufacturing in the United States through the 1980s to the stumbles by Boeing and Intel over the past decade. But if we think about technology ecosystems as communities of engineering practice, it makes sense that factory closures accelerated as process knowledge dissolved, prompting production problems and more job losses. And it also makes sense that Chinese workers went from merely assembling iPhones to producing some of their most valuable components as well. As one country lost its process knowledge, the other gained whole industries.
And which types of technologies the United States should pursue is also worth meditating on. Should it really go all in on artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and other things that the Communist Party mocks as the fictitious economy? Or should it pursue the sorts of heavy industry that have long fallen out of fashion among American elites and out of favor among American investors?
The United States likes to celebrate the light-bulb moment of genius innovators. But there is, I submit, more glory in having big firms making a product rather than a science lab claiming its invention. Otherwise, US scientists would once again build a ladder toward technological leadership only to have Chinese firms climb it.
China’s leaders are ready to learn from Europe, Japan, Singapore, and many others, sure. But they have looked up to the United States more than any other country, benchmarking themselves against the world’s preeminent power.

Chapter 4: One Child

Mao Zedong was not an engineer. He was a librarian at Peking University who then helped found the Communist Party, after which he became a warlord. After he established the People’s Republic in 1949, Mao’s stature became nearly godlike. He spent much of his time reading literature and philosophy, leaving the details of running the state to technocratic deputies like Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Chen Yun. Mao’s gifts in military leadership as well as poetry collided in a folksy slogan he was fond of repeating: Ren duo, li liang da. With people come power.
It’s not the first time that fertility was politicized: Mao Zedong promoted births because he believed it would deter imperialist invasion. It’s not the second time either: Deng Xiaoping implemented an infernal system of population control. Population engineering has now seesawed a third time, back to birth promotion under Xi.
Karl Marx had criticized Thomas Malthus’s work on overpopulation. Mao, following Marx’s lead, thought it was absurd that a country could have too many people. “It is a very good thing that China has a big population,” he wrote in 1949. “Even if China’s population multiplies many times, it is fully capable of finding a solution.
In 1954, Mao boasted to Jawaharlal Nehru that he did not fear a nuclear strike by the United States. The imperialists, he declared, simply wouldn’t have enough bombs to annihilate the hardy Chinese people. Three years later, he told a stunned Nikita Khrushchev, “We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic missiles. No matter what sort of war breaks out, conventional or thermonuclear, we’ll win.” Mao declared he was ready to lose half of the population to fight imperialists. “The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.” Khrushchev later cut off Soviet support to China’s nuclear program, in part out of alarm for Mao’s casualness toward apocalypse.
Over the past four decades, China has grown richer, more technologically capable, and more diplomatically assertive abroad. China learned so well from the United States that it started to beat America at its own game: capitalism, industry, and harnessing its people’s restless ambitions. If you want to appreciate what Detroit felt like at its peak, it’s probably better to experience that in Shenzhen than anywhere in the United States.
Cybernetics has occupied an intellectual sweet spot: electrifying in its premise—attracting subordinate terms like “machine intelligence” and “systems analysis” that are irresistible in themselves—and constructed with an inherent vagueness that affords it the theoretical space to wriggle out of refutation. It is a concept that might go dormant but never completely falls out of fashion. The 1956 Dartmouth Conference coined the term artificial intelligence partly in reaction to cybernetics; Martin Heidegger claimed that philosophy was dying, and cybernetics would be its successor. — Note: Bike shed effect?
In political influence, Song Jian might be comparable to Albert Einstein, whose letter to the White House inspired the United States’ pursuit of the atomic bomb.
An overseas trip to hear from environmental doomers convinced Song that China needed radical measures to control population. In 1978, he flew from Beijing to Helsinki to take part in a cybernetics conference, where he listened to the fashionable views of natural scientists who warned of catastrophe, including presentations to determine which year the apocalypse would descend. Song later wrote that he grew “extremely excited” as he listened to these remarks.
Song wrote, “China’s population by the second half of the next century would go up to 4.5 billion, equaling the total world population today. And it would continue to grow forever.” Only an engineer might have believed in this sort of straight-line analysis, as if population can grow at an unvarying rate. Song had no awareness that fertility rates might fall as economic growth and educational levels rise—as neighboring East Asian countries had already realized. He presumed that China had a fixed stock of resources, leaving no room for the possibility that technological change, or Deng’s pivot away from the planned economy, could increase agricultural productivity. Ironically, this mechanistic thinking made Song a bad cybernetician because his model failed to be dynamic to feedback.
Skeptics of a one-child policy were making population projections with the aid of an abacus or a handheld calculator. Song Jian presented his group’s projections in precise, machine-generated lines on graph paper; other groups drew uneven squiggles by hand. It was never a fair fight. The military scientists outclassed their intellectual opponents in every possible way. — Note: Ambiguity uncertainty mental model - a prime example
Qian threw these shock troops against the bewildered masses of China’s rural folk. When the one-child policy started in 1980, urban fertility rates were already trending toward 1.0 child per couple, while rural fertility was closer to 2.5. For the four-fifths of Chinese who lived in the countryside, having several children was the basis of economic security. Without multiple children, and ideally sons, a farmer couldn’t count on having enough work and old-age support. In 1982, China was finally organized enough to undertake its first census since 1964. Deng and Chen regarded the results with glumness. China’s population increased by three hundred million in those eighteen years, becoming the first country ever to surpass one billion people. The leadership felt even more convinced of the need for population control. The Communist Party had declared family planning a “foundational national policy” and wrote it into the constitution, removing it from the realm of debate and empowering Qian’s most ruthless instincts.
Over the thirty-five years of the policy’s existence, it left few Chinese families untouched. By 1990, in order to have a first child, a woman needed up to twelve documents from her workplace and various party officials and a consent form agreeing to contraceptive measures after birth.
The browbeating often worked: Few families could endure up to a hundred visits by a rotating cast of officials with ever more insistent demands. But if the tactics still were ineffective, the officials could threaten firing or fines worth up to several years of wages. They could detain the woman or a family member, which required paying for one’s food each day without being able to contact the outside world. Sometimes they carted off furniture or sewing machines, seized cattle and other livestock, or sent a bulldozer to tear the roof off their home. A family that thought it had the means to support an additional child then had to ponder whether it still could do so. Nothing was more important than hitting numerical quotas.
The slaughter ended well for Zeng. He was rewarded with successively more desirable promotions in Shandong. His superiors didn’t seem to have a sense of irony when they appointed him later to be the deputy head of the provincial committee on Caring for Future Generations.
Zeng Zhaoqi, newly appointed party secretary of Guan County, was humiliated that it ranked last in the province for family planning. So he summoned the twenty-two most senior party officials one day in April, berating them for their failings and shouting that their measures must be more extraordinary. He demanded there be zero births in the county between May 1 to August 10.
The one-child policy didn’t create so much difficulty in urban areas. Many people in cities were able to navigate the situation. They were also more likely to have the means to travel abroad to have a second birth. And the party trod cautiously in restive minority regions, since problems associated with overpopulation were caused by the majority Han settlers in Tibet or Xinjiang, not by the locals. Sometimes, villagers were able to pay the fine for an additional child and get on with their lives. A bribe could do the trick. Local officials had an interest, after all, in concealment, protecting both themselves and their villagers.
But by 1999, China’s health ministry statistics show that 35 percent of married women of reproductive age had been sterilized. The campaign produced agony for rural folks. They fumed that the state was treating them exactly as they dealt with their own livestock. Wives and daughters were being sterilized in much the same way that farmers spayed their pigs.
Two decades later, she wrote a moving book, China’s Hidden Children, in part, as she put it, to help Chinese children who were adopted abroad understand the impossible circumstances of their birth parents. It dawns on some out-of-plan or adopted children to say, as early as age three, “I should never have been born” when they learn of their own legal discrimination or abandonment. In scores of interviews, Johnson found that rural families, including the father, experienced lasting emotional scars from anguish and rage that they could not keep their child. They felt that they had no choice in the matter. But they also suffered a deep sense of loss and personal failure.
If birth parents couldn’t identify a good family, they might abandon the girl in the city, reluctantly, since they had little idea who might pick up their child. It became a common story for city folks to hear a baby’s cries from inside a cardboard box or by a trash heap.
Eventually, a few ended up in the United States, Poland, and Holland. Longhui residents have accused the government of abducting their children for revenue, raising the horrifying possibility that American adoptive families may have taken in children who weren’t actually abandoned.
Over the thirty-five years of the one-child era, China performed a total of 321 million abortions(not far off from the present population of the United States) and sterilized 108 million women and 26 million men. In 2024, Beijing announced that it would end international adoptions. By that time, more than 150,000 children had been sent abroad(around half to the United States), almost all girls.
The lawyerly society debated the one-child policy and rejected it. The United States and other Western countries also considered implementing strict population controls in reaction to The Population Bomb. Social scientists, especially economists, were quick to criticize the flaws in these linear projections. But in China, social scientists had become meek from Mao’s bullying. At this critical moment, the country lacked the intellectual antibodies to resist the policy’s adoption. Chinese leaders were just enough exposed to the West to absorb this neo-Malthusian doomerism, without being exposed enough to the Western pushback against it.
The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble. The starkest contrast between the two countries is the competition that will define the twenty-first century: an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction. That’s the big idea behind this book. It’s time for a new lens to understand the two superpowers: China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.
There’s no question that Chinese people experienced severe shortages of everything prior to the adoption of the one-child policy in 1980. But these shortages were the result of the socialist planned economy. This system was characterized by agricultural collectivization, an emphasis on heavy industry, and lavish spending on national defense, leaving little left for consumer production. Consumer shortages eased when Deng moved China away from socialism. It’s unclear if Deng was aware of the irony that he was attempting to impose planning on the population while he was trying to dismantle planning for the economy.
How will the one-child policy be remembered? At its conclusion in 2015, a trio of demographers offered an assessment in the journal Studies in Family Planning: “Future generations will likely look back at China’s one-child policy with bewilderment and disbelief. To many it will be incomprehensible why, of all countries that faced the challenge of rapid population growth in the second half of the twentieth century, only China went to such an extreme; incomprehensible why in a society based on respect for the family, kin, and filial piety, the government enforced a policy that effectively terminated many kin ties for at least a generation; incomprehensible why China instituted such a policy after the country had already experienced substantial fertility decline; and incomprehensible why China waited so long to end such a harmful policy.” Of all the critiques of the one-child policy, perhaps the most poignant is that it was not necessary to reduce China’s fertility rate. That was already falling due to earlier, less coercive family planning policies. China’s fertility rate was around 6.0 per woman at the start of 1970; a decade later, when the state implemented the one-child policy, the fertility rate had already fallen to 2.7.
Demographers give credit to Deng Xiaoping for driving down fertility not through the one-child policy but through economic reopening. Higher rates of urbanization, educational attainment, and, most of all, economic growth have been the best contraceptive measures devised by modernity. These were factors that drove neighboring Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to lower their fertility rate too.
Song’s example is one reason that I’ve become suspicious of anyone who advocates “following the science.” We have to get quite worried if anyone in power starts saying that science alone is an object to be pursued rather than having to situate it in a social and ethical context. There is still truth, I think, to Winston Churchill’s quip that scientists should be “on tap, not on top.”
China’s fertility rate of 1.0 is now lower than Japan’s and keeps falling short of even recent low-fertility projections. So the party has grown more vocal in blaming one final group: women. It’s hard to be a woman in China today. Many of them did not survive the one-child policy: There are approximately forty million more Chinese men than women. Though the country has plenty of successful female entrepreneurs and billionaires, Xi has shoved women out of the top echelon of the Chinese government. His primary message is that women must become docile promoters of family harmony, which means bearing more children. That theme is also being echoed by the rest of society. Rather than being joyful, Lunar New Year is an irksome time for younger Chinese women. They must face dozens of relatives, from whom they expect only one question: “When will you marry?” to the single woman, and “When will you have kids?” to the married.
As China shifts away from birth control under Deng(and several successors) to birth promotion under Xi, it is relying once again on the tools of the engineering state. But the state is starting to see that this dial cannot be turned back. Although the state has had many tools to prevent births, it can’t seem to find the right tools to encourage copulation.
Women in urban cities are reporting that they are regularly getting calls from neighborhood officials asking when they plan to have children. These officials are inquisitive, asking when a woman has had her last period, and argumentative, insisting that owning a cat can be no substitute for a child. Most of all, they are nagging. One woman posted, “Government officials have asked me five or six times when I plan to have a child, while my parents have asked me only once.” She goes on to say, “These officials call only to rush me, not to offer any support.”

Chapter 5: Zero-Covid

Shanghai was, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the brothel capital of the world. The city was also full of opium dens, consuming perhaps 90 percent of the world’s narcotic drugs. Professional Chinese criminal organizations ran this vice trade and became as powerful as any other political authority in the city. Shanghai dimmed in the 1930s after Japan began its brutal invasion.
To enter most public spaces—my office, a restaurant, even many outdoor commercial areas—I had to pull out my phone to display my contact-tracing QR code to the burly man guarding the entrance. Green meant normal, while yellow meant that I had had some degree of proximity to a positive case; one wouldn’t have needed to flash a red code, since the state would probably have hauled that person off to quarantine. The cell towers that triangulated a person’s location and the contact-tracing workforce sometimes produced errors. Merely walking by a restaurant with a known infection might turn your code yellow, even if you never went in. People often complained that no would explain why their code stopped being green. But quarantines and movement restrictions felt like inconveniences worth respecting. Having to fumble for my phone to pull up my contact-tracing app whenever I entered a public space didn’t feel like too big a deal when I looked at how other nations were suffering. China was piling on these controls gradually, so the incremental asks felt more acceptable.
An even more bewildering use of drones took place in the early days of the Shanghai lockdown. The city’s top mental health official introduced an unexpectedly sparky phrase in an otherwise drab press conference on the course of the virus, demanding that Shanghainese “repress your soul’s yearning for freedom.” Social media users immediately began to make fun of the phrase by putting it into memes. People weren’t used to poetry from bureaucrats. One night in April, as the lockdown swung into high gear, a drone carrying a megaphone began blasting that message into apartments full of huddling residents: “Repress your soul’s yearning for freedom,” with a woman’s voice played on loop while a light blinked from the drone. “Do not open your windows to sing, which can spread the virus.” The phrase stopped being amusing.
Government drones descended throughout the city. Since the start of the pandemic, the state had dispatched megaphone-equipped drones to nag the uncompliant. A person walking without a mask might hear a whirring craft above his head, from which a distorted, barking voice would yell at him to mask up or return home. A Shanghai neighborhood official outlined what would happen if a drone came upon an illegal gathering of people: “The drone will try to dissuade,” in other words, berate them, “and ground forces will be linked in real time.”
Shanghainese marveled that they could worry about hunger while they lived in China’s richest city in the year 2022. People muttered darkly that China had achieved “common prosperity,” Xi Jinping’s new signature initiative to reduce inequality, in China’s most capitalist city a decade ahead of schedule. Though some people connected to the government might have had better access to food, nearly everyone—rich and poor, young and old, local and foreign—was in the same hungry boat. Celebrities complained online that they had to spend nearly $ 300 to have some vegetables and eggs delivered. One of the country’s top venture capitalists, who was an investor in grocery delivery companies, sent a message on social media asking people how to get food.
My friends felt they had to do two full-time jobs: their regular one and the many hours a day spent trying to procure food necessities. Bulk orders weren’t possible for everyone. Smaller buildings didn’t have enough residents to place egg orders by the thousands. And the system disfavored the elderly, who struggled to navigate mobile purchases.
Parents of young children were even more frightened. Shanghai practiced a policy of separating babies and infants from parents, even if both tested positive. Photos spread of infants crying as they were held in metal cribs, while panicked parents told media that they hadn’t received updates from hospital staff on the status of their children for days. One woman told a reporter that the virus no longer frightens her. “Separation from my loved ones scares me more than anything else.” After an outcry online, the city dropped its policy of isolating children.
There was no universal experience of the Shanghai lockdown. The city of twenty-five million people dealt with situations ranging from the nightmarish to the merely difficult. Not everyone experienced hunger: Certain compounds found fairly regular access to food, especially if a government official lived in the building. Introverts found ways to create structure in their lives.
Gao had it right when he said that China had developed a technically impressive disease surveillance system. What he failed to factor in were the weaknesses in China’s political system, in which local officials prevented health workers from reporting the disease. Rather, Wuhan officials directed police to punish medical whistleblowers. And so China faced its worst public health crisis yet.
Only a country ruled by engineers could be so single-minded about pursuing a number. Since the early days of the pandemic, Chinese officials became obsessed with two numbers: new infections and the reproductive rate of the virus. The engineering state did everything it could to stomp them down. It led, ultimately, to the pursuit of zero-Covid(formally known as dynamic zero clearing in Chinese). Just as with the one-child policy, the target could not be clearer: The number was in the name. And just as with the one-child policy, zero-Covid was suffused with military language: China was fighting a people’s war against the virus, and cities like Wuhan and Shanghai were battlegrounds that had to be won.
Sometimes, China’s digital platforms introduced helpful interfaces, for example, when mapping services made it easier for people to find fever clinics nearby. Sometimes, they were enlisted to control the movements of people. To access the showers at Shanghai University, students had to display a code on their phones, which was green for five and a half hours every two days. A sociology student marveled at her experience to a Shanghai newspaper: “It’s such a strange feeling: the idea that all our daily activities—what we eat, or when we can take a shower—are included in the authorities’ plan.”
The first act of zero-Covid was characterized by fury, the second act by pride mixed in with some degree of exhaustion. The third act, which began after Shanghai’s lockdown, led to desperation and, later, broad protests.
With its lake, nature, and sunny weather, the city has gained the nickname of Dalifornia. While I continued my work remotely, Silvia was doing ethnographic fieldwork. She introduced me to some of the young people there, who were exploring their interests in agriculture or virtual technologies. The city has attracted an odd mix of people: China’s burgeoning organic movement, which is mostly made up of younger people who want to take advantage of Dali’s fertile soils; moms who bring their kids to experience nature-focused educational programs as a break from the hypercompetitive schools in Shanghai and Shenzhen; and foreigners who came for the cannabis and stayed for the slower pace of life, opening sourdough bakeries, cafés, and techno clubs. Nowadays young Chinese and foreigners go to Dali not for cannabis but for more thrilling drugs: cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other Web3 paraphernalia.
It is a little bit difficult to praise the US response to Covid. In retrospect, the whole thing looks shambolic, with different states having different policies, mostly made worse under Donald Trump’s chaotic management. Americans stumbled into learning to live with the virus in large part because of the ineffectualness of the government. But the United States(under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed) produced mRNA vaccines that China could not. And in retrospect, China’s response to Covid looks shambolic as well. The engineering state tried as hard as it could to hold on to earlier triumphs, until it was forced to let everything go. After the Shanghai lockdown, it grew increasingly apparent that there was no industry that Xi would hesitate to crush and no personal misery worth noticing by the state if it could halt the spread of omicron. It didn’t matter that companies were feeling deeply uncertain about future investments, that local governments were running out of funds as they spent everything on testing, and that people were deeply exhausted. When the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote in 2020 that his country’s pandemic control measures resembled a “sanitation terror” and a “juridical-religious obligation that must be fulfilled at any cost,” he was criticized. His remark, in my view, applies in far stronger force to the engineering state’s commitment to zero-Covid. Chinese people grew livid that the medical system was prepared to ignore any number of deaths from diabetes, cancer, and other life-threatening conditions and that their entire lives had to be subordinated to the targeting of this number.
An earthquake struck Sichuan in September 2022. When panicked residents in the city of Chengdu hastened to exit their homes, pandemic control officers barred some people from leaving, locking them inside trembling buildings. A bus carrying people to quarantine facilities overturned on hilly terrain in Guizhou, killing twenty-seven people. A fire broke out in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where ten people died after fire trucks were obstructed by pandemic-control barricades such that they couldn’t direct water on the blaze. All these were extensively reported in Chinese media. So was the 2022 FIFA World Cup, where millions of soccer-loving Chinese watched crowds of people cheer inside Doha’s stadiums. Two years ago, they’d scorned how the rest of the world handled the virus. Now Chinese watched with envy and wondered, was Covid really more dangerous than fires and earthquakes?
The number of protesters was never very large. They were special because they involved upper-class Chinese families: wealthy people who didn’t want to suffer lockdown and well-off youths who attended good schools. The Communist Party had always counted on these people for their support. The denouement of China’s Covid experience features broad exhaustion.
When I think back to this moment, it’s the lack of fever medications that really sticks with me. For three years, the government made it difficult for people to buy ibuprofen, Advil, and other fever reducers for fear that people might disguise their fevers to avoid detection. During an outbreak, pharmacies limited purchases of fever meds or removed fever meds from their shelves entirely. Therefore, much of the Chinese population met this Covid wave without medication on hand. As best as I can tell, China is the only country that denied its people fever medications during a fever-producing pandemic. It is a perfect encapsulation of the engineering state’s twisted logic.
After moving from China to the Yale Law School, I gained some new perspectives. It was a good thing that the United States stumbled to “live with the virus.” I found one item particularly quite irksome on my return to America in 2023: a yard sign that begins “In this home we believe science is real.” The Communist Party “followed the science” of zero-Covid to its logical conclusion: barring people from their homes, testing people on a near-daily basis, and doing everything else it could to break the chains of transmission. Four decades ago, it “followed the science” to forcibly prevent many pregnancies in the pursuit of the one-child policy. We can agree that “science is real.” But we have to keep in mind that there is a political determination involved with how to interpret the science. And that is something the lawyerly society is better at. It has lawyers interested in protecting rights, economists able to think through social science, humanists who consider ethics, and many other voices in the mix, attempting to open policy prescriptions up for debate. China doesn’t have a robust system for political contestation; engineers will simply follow the science until it leads to social immiseration. Engineering only works if it is using good data. But data probity is another of China’s casualties in the aftermath of Covid. The government has had a wobbly commitment to accurate reporting at the best of times.
Some of the older people said that the lockdown wasn’t the worst thing to happen to them, pointing to the Cultural Revolution. Younger people born after 1990, however, who had known only rising prosperity, had their first real taste of the disaster that could be inflicted by the engineering state.

Chapter 6: Fortress China

Writers in particular have a hard time dealing with the shock of working for months on a story only for censors to delete it hours after publication. The first time that happens you’re enraged, the second time you’re embittered, the third time you rùn.
Less fortunate Chinese take a different path to the United States: through a grueling trek across the southwest border. US border officials have apprehended rising numbers of Chinese nationals: from 450 in 2021 rocketing to 38,000 in 2024. The flow diminished in the second half of 2024 due to tighter border enforcement. But still there have been more than a thousand Chinese nationals attempting to cross the border on foot each month for two years. Many have flown to Ecuador(which did not demand a visa from Chinese nationals until July 2024) and then have taken the perilous road through the Darién Gap.
Many other wealthy Chinese have decided to settle elsewhere for good. Hard numbers are difficult to work out, but one UK-based emigration firm estimated that nearly 14,000 millionaires emigrated from China in 2023 and over 15,000 in 2024. Parts of the United States popular with Chinese, like Irvine, California, have seen a surge in new homebuyers. Both the United States and Canada have reported a doubling in the number of Chinese migrants who have obtained permanent residence after making a large investment(which could mean buying property): from 2,000 to 4,000 in Canada between 2019 and 2023, and from 3,900 to 7,500 in the United States between 2019 and 2024.
When I moved to Hong Kong at the start of 2017, I entertained the idea that we were living at the start of an “Asian Century,” in which China and India would restore Asia to the economically dominant role it played centuries ago. I didn’t believe it, necessarily. But it didn’t feel like a crazy scenario. Donald Trump, after all, had been shooting admiring glances at autocratic countries while unloading his petulance on Canada, Europe, as well as other American allies. Xi, by contrast, displayed a patient resolve to strengthen Chinese capabilities. Parts of that remain real, although I now have a better appreciation of China’s weaknesses. There are many things that China will be successful at, but I departed the country with a better appreciation of the self-limiting features of the Chinese system. Most notably, the Communist Party distrusts and fears the Chinese people, limiting their potential for flourishing.
Over the course of 2021, hardly any major Chinese tech company emerged unscathed. Xi’s regulatory storm wiped out a trillion dollars of market value from Chinese companies. New Oriental, one of the education companies, lost 90 percent of its market cap and then laid off 60 percent of its employees. Alibaba toppled from being an $ 800 billion company to just a quarter of that size two years later.
Xi’s reining in of tech giants are not altogether different from what a lot of American and European regulators wish to do to Silicon Valley. Every government in the world is grappling with companies that have too much influence over the flow of information and commerce. Individually, China’s regulations around antitrust, data protection, or financial risks may pass muster on technocratic grounds. But Beijing issued regulations with a speed and ferocity that no other state can match. It did so for reasons that the West would not: to shift investment and talent into state-prioritized industries and to crush the power that these companies were gaining at the expense of the state. That’s another way that the US and Chinese political systems are inversions of each other. In the United States, the political drama is around legislative processes and Supreme Court rulings; implementation of policy is quickly forgotten as political attention moves to the next big issue. In China, the policymaking process is conducted significantly in secret, then its outcome is dumped on the people. Whereas the United States or Europe might tussle with a Silicon Valley tech giant for years in court and then extract a few billion dollars in fines, Chinese companies don’t challenge administrative actions. Rather, they issue supine statements as the founder of ByteDance did, or as Didi wrote after it received an enormous fine, “We sincerely thank the relevant authorities for their inspection and guidance.”
Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions. That is one of the defining characteristics of the engineering state. The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who douse blazes they themselves ignited. China’s national effort contained the spread of Covid, for a while, after Wuhan officials did nothing to prevent it. Decades earlier, the engineering state overreacted to its population growth with the one-child policy. Economic confidence wouldn’t be so fragile if it weren’t for regulatory thunderclaps emerging from Beijing.
At the end of 2024, the country felt more fortresslike than before the pandemic. Shanghai is strangely muted, restaurants substantially less full, the shopping districts lacking vitality. Consumers clearly have less spending power. People have felt profound economic uncertainty after the economy failed to pick back up following the end of Covid controls in 2022. It’s not encouraging for the future of Chinese and American relations that there are only about a thousand American students studying in China. Just before the pandemic, there were ten times that many.
The control neurosis of the engineers is the fundamental limit to China’s power. But it will also push China to be an advanced manufacturer with dominant positions in many of the high-tech supply chains of the twenty-first century, with military capacity to match and a good chance to challenge US hegemony in Asia. Engineers are bad at several things. They’re not very good, for example, at producing appealing cultural products.
The engineering state still has many strengths. There is one thing I haven’t changed my mind about since 2017: I remain more confident than ever that China will become a technological leader in manufacturing industries. Marxists like to reason through contradictions. What is the central contradiction facing China? I submit that we must reconcile two realities when we read the headlines. First, the rich, the creative, and the desperate have chosen to rùn from the economic and political gloom that pervades Xi’s third term. Second, the manufacturing sector continues to go from strength to strength in the mastery of electric vehicles, clean technology, and other advanced technologies.
Americans have had no problem embracing the cultural products of East Asia. Japan produced a wave of pop culture that included animé and manga, Nobel Prize–winning novelists, and popular consumer products like the Sony Walkman and Nintendo Gameboy. South Korea continues to churn out hits, whether these are pop bands or breakouts like Parasite or Squid Game. Chinese youths are as likely to watch a Korean drama or a Hollywood movie as they are to pick a domestic equivalent. Four decades after China liberalized, its contributions to global cultures are mostly confined to artistic fringes. It is because engineers don’t know how to persuade.
The US dollar is overwhelmingly the world’s dominant currency, while China’s renminbi accounts for 3 percent of global payments. That share has barely grown over a decade. Beijing has imposed a stiff system of capital controls to prevent money from easily moving out, which promises greater stability for the country’s highly leveraged financial system. These are exactly the sorts of restrictions that are anathema to global financial institutions. So long as Beijing insists on capital controls, there’s a ceiling on how much the rest of the world will want its currency.
So China’s strategy has been to try to rally the rest of the developing world to its side. Proponents would say that China might not need great relations with the West when there are billions more people in the developing world, who have higher economic growth rates than the United States and Europe, which is all true. But consumers in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America have far less spending power than Europeans. And Chinese firms will have a harder time becoming global leaders when they’re barred from selling to richer consumers, giving them the profits to compete with incumbents that can.
Chinese leaders have always been aware that food shortages have toppled imperial dynasties. And so one of the things that provincial governors are graded on is whether they are self-sufficient in rice and wheat, while mayors of major cities have to make sure that a variety of foods are grown locally. Mayors are graded on the amount of land they dedicate to vegetables and on ensuring that grocery markets are within walking distance for most residents, that there are no food safety scandals, and that prices are stable. Get on a high-speed train out of Beijing, and you quickly hit farmland. Drive around the outskirts of Shanghai, and you find vast systems of greenhouses growing vegetables.
China takes energy security seriously. The enormous effort it has made to build low-carbon capacity—solar, wind, and nuclear—has to be understood as part of a broader motivation to make the country dependent on energy sources within its borders. Beijing is trying to mitigate the pain if it ever loses access to sea-lanes that deliver its oil. That is also why, in 2023, China added twenty times more coal-burning capacity than the rest of the world put together. It is serious about addressing issues in climate change, yes. But Beijing is not turning its back on its rich coal reserves. That also explains why China is so enthusiastic about electrifying the auto fleet: It would rather burn domestic coal than Middle East oil to power its cars.
Food was not the only item to run short during the pandemic in the United States. Many different items were hard to find: furniture, semiconductors, personal protective equipment. The Chinese government and Chinese companies tend, on average, to maintain greater stockpiles of different goods so they have better resilience. The American corporate dictum is that “inventory is evil.” Although having spare capacity hurts various profit measures of Chinese firms, especially its state-owned enterprises, they are better able to leap into action in any crisis. A lot of manufacturing and food capacity is a useful thing to have if there is another pandemic—or a war.
Even if the United States is able to outclass China in diplomacy, finance, and innovation, the contest between these two great powers is going to be close if the United States can’t build anything in the physical world. The strongest wind in China’s sails is the entrenched technological workforce that preserves process knowledge that I wrote about in Chapter 3 on tech power. Though 50 percent of China’s economy might be dysfunctional, 5 percent is doing superbly well(an approximation I borrow from Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal). That 5 percent is dangerous for American interests: It is China’s manufacturing capability, chiseling away at the American industrial base.
Making China technologically powerful has become a major priority for Xi’s third term. He talked about it at the start of his first term, when he remarked that China’s greatest historical problem was its lack of technology. In Xi’s telling, China was unable to keep up with modernity, as the Qing empire had rotted from within while besieged by “Western ships and their cannons.” Subsequently, his government announced Made in China 2025, a sweeping plan to dominate ten technological industries. In 2023, Beijing announced the creation of a new high-level body: the Central Science and Technology Commission. And the following year, Xi declared that the country must become a “science and technology superpower” by 2035.
But the Trump administration gave China’s tech leaders every reason to fear being cut off from American technologies. And so the US government fully aligned those Chinese firms that were previously reluctant to build up the domestic industrial base to Beijing’s self-sufficiency agenda. All the money and engineering talent that China’s most dynamic tech companies used to send to the United States were now staying at home.
I spent years covering the twists and turns of these technology restrictions. The more it went on, the more I felt that the United States was committed to a strategy of destroying its scientific and industrial establishment—through prosecutions of scientists and cutting off the sales of chipmakers—in order to save it. Rather than realizing its own Sputnik moment, the United States triggered one in China.
There’s no question that Xi has tightened the country’s already limited space for free speech. Free thought is essential for the humanities and the social sciences. But I’m not so sure that it’s a necessary condition for the natural sciences, for very little in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and engineering is innately political. Plenty of autocratic systems in history have delivered startling technological advances. German states, for example, have done just that. The nineteenth-century Prussian state combined autocracy with the invention of the modern research university. After Bismarck unified the German states under Prussian rule in Berlin, the country became the pioneer in chemicals—arguably the first science-based industry—as well as in electrical engineering. Nobel Prizes in the sciences continued to be awarded to Nazi Germany while it enlisted its scientists to make Wunderwaffen like the world’s first ballistic missiles and jet fighters for the war. The Soviet Union provides an even starker example. Its scientific establishment conducted groundbreaking research throughout Stalin’s Terror. The state had arrested a remarkable number of scientists, including the chief theoretician of the hydrogen bomb and the head of the Soviet space program. More than one scientist had barely staggered out of Stalin’s gulags before doing the work that would win him a Nobel Prize.
Fewer than 1,000 scientists of Chinese descent moved from the United States to China in 2010; more than 2,500 did in 2021. A wave of positive media in China has greeted the biologists or mathematicians that move from an elite American university to China. Xi probably doesn’t mind trading disgruntled youths for senior scientists.
Even Huawei, which suffered the most intense US restrictions, is still selling 5G equipment globally and smartphones at home. Sometimes I think that the United States’ tech competition with China—chaotic policymaking under Trump, porous implementation under Biden—has ended up in the worst of all worlds. These restrictions have scorched China’s most dynamic companies without killing them, which riles them up to break free of American restrictions.
Mostly, I believe, because the precondition for science is that abundant funds are far more critical to science than free speech, and that is something dictators can deliver.
Throughout this book, I’ve avoided calling Xi’s regulatory storm a “tech crackdown.” While disciplining digital platforms and the real virtual economy with one hand, Beijing has with its other dispensed favor to harder technologies like semiconductors. Xi was trying to reorient technology companies to be less focused on virtual or financial innovation, and for the best and brightest from Tsinghua and Peking Universities to work in strategic industries instead.
I’ve interviewed over two dozen scientists in China, most of whom were trained in the United States, who have told me that it’s easier to receive funding in Chinese universities than in American universities. Their money comes without many strings attached, whereas a grant application to the National Science Foundation demands fastidiousness on formatting, endless reporting requirements, and the threat of jail if they don’t make a proper disclosure. I envision China becoming something like a more successful East Germany, a state that combines surveillance and political controls with strong outcomes in science and technology.
In the United States, physics and mathematics PhDs hardly have a chance to consider working in their field before a tech giant or hedge fund picks them up at the sidelines of a conference, flashes them with a humongous pay package, and folds these eager minds into their glamorous embrace. Senior government advisers have more or less stated that Beijing intends to block these temptations. Yao Yang, a dean at Peking University, has remarked with satisfaction that salaries have fallen in the financial industry after regulators imposed a salary cap of $ 400,000 on the financial sector. Its idea, Yao said, is “to reduce the attractiveness of finance and to increase the development of manufacturing.” The strategy has backfired in a major way. Most notably, it has dampened the animal spirits among entrepreneurs after so many had their businesses crushed. And it’s also unlikely that running major technological industries like national security science projects will always produce winners. The Soviet Union, after all, ultimately failed to keep up with the technological frontier set by the West, even though it was doing great science. China has created successful commercial firms in a way that the Soviets never did, though they risk being engulfed by the state. In much the same way, the United States still has a certain degree of manufacturing excellence, represented by firms like Tesla. But that is an outlier. Though Tesla might lead the country toward manufacturing strength once more, it might also be engulfed by the diminishing levels of process knowledge that have dragged down the formerly mighty Boeing and Intel.
Beijing understands social media sites, like Facebook or TikTok, primarily as freewheeling platforms of expression. They bring little gain in economic productivity while creating huge potential for political unrest. Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership looks more longingly at places like Germany, a country that hasn’t developed digital giants but is firmly grounded in manufacturing industries.
My sense, while I watched the crackdown unfold in China, was that Beijing was trying to avoid the economic structure of the modern United States. Over the past two decades, the major American growth stories have been in Silicon Valley on one coast and Wall Street on the other. Subsequently, both tech and finance have been blamed for many social ills. If there is an era of American innovation that attracts Beijing, it might be the Silicon Valley of the 1960s and 1970s. Chipmakers like Intel were hitting their stride, becoming, in part, major suppliers to the Pentagon and NASA. That was a period when tech companies manufactured stuff, employed big workforces, and minded the state’s national security needs.
Entrepreneurial dynamism in online education, social media, or fintech are producing various forms of social harm. The virtual economy, including cryptocurrencies and the metaverse, sucked up too much talent and money. Xi and the rest of the Politburo were discomfited that the cutting edge of the economy seemed to have been driven by the vagaries of investors rather than the interests of the state.
The hope from Beijing might be that Americans will be driven mad by the dangerous storms produced by the double whammy of social media plus artificial intelligence. Perhaps these things will magnify the internal divisions of Americans. As more Americans retreat into a digital phantasm, Xi will be shepherding Chinese through the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.
There is also a risk that China misapplies AI. The Chinese system is sometimes overenthusiastic about new technologies or new theoretical ideas. In 1978, one of China’s top scientists went abroad to learn about an exciting science called cybernetics and took back home the seeds of an idea that bloomed into the one-child policy. Perhaps the lawyerly society will have the ideological resilience not to be seduced by artificial intelligence, while authoritarian countries wreck themselves by doing so. But it’s also possible that Western minds will be broken by AI. In the United States, every shift in mass media—from cable television in the 1990s, the internet in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s, and now AI—has increased discontent between the masses and the elites, as well as between the elites and each other. American society has become much messier than two decades ago, when people were bound by a consensual reality rather than spinning off into different worlds.
AI data servers are so energy hungry that Microsoft has attempted to restart the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and Meta was about to build a data center(running also on nuclear power) until it was halted by the discovery of a rare species of bee near that site. Well, nothing thrills the engineering state like gigantic investments in energy production for industry. What China lacks in technological sophistication, it might make up for in electrical power.
And I worry that the United States is counting far too much on AI to change the tide. Even if the United States achieves artificial general intelligence, it will need to be able to actually manufacture drones or munitions; algorithms alone will never win a battle. Though the United States has the most sophisticated fighter jets and submarines in the world, it makes precious few of them. The US defense industrial base does not often target efficiency when it distributes production to the jurisdictions of favored members of Congress.
China’s large and adaptive manufacturing base keeps growing. In 2024, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization forecast that China will have 45 percent of the world’s industrial capacity by 2030. The United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and all other high-income states combined add up to 38 percent of capacity.
It is harder to see how China could move away from engineers. The emperors practiced absolutism a millennium before any European monarchs whiffed the idea. China’s civil society has long been weak, with strong family clans, but not made up of the sorts of religious organizations and military aristocracy that produced political contestation in Europe. And ever since the introduction of the imperial examinations in the sixth century by the Sui dynasty, would-be intellectuals have mostly conformed to studying a curriculum set by the emperor. One reason that China lacks a liberal tradition—focused on protection of individual liberties—is that court intellectuals tended not to develop philosophies based on restraining the emperor or his bureaucracy. China needs lawyers. Or, to be more precise, the ability for people to decline the state’s designs on their bodies, their speech, and their minds.
Rather, I hope that China learns to value pluralism while embracing substantive legal protections for individuals and the United States recovers the capability to build for its people.
That doesn’t mean rule of law as the West might understand it. Xi has rejected the idea of constitutionalism, and the president of the Supreme People’s Court has denounced the idea of constitutional democracy as a “false Western ideal.” China lacks a real commitment to respecting individual rights. The state allows only limited scope for citizens to challenge government actions, while the Communist Party is off-limits from lawsuits. The judicial system doesn’t always publish the records of a case and regardless has plenty of discretion to make legal challenges go its way or go away. How might change come? Perhaps through ordinary acts of resistance. China’s leaders have for millennia tried to impose greater controls on the people. And the people have developed their own strategies for dealing with this control.

Chapter 7: Learning to Love Engineers

Whenever she sees me on TV or hears me on a podcast, she comments on how I sound before she tells me her thoughts on anything I’ve said. The voice is best, she reminds me, if my speech starts from my tummy, while I should project the sound as if it were emerging from my forehead.(That’s a tip for all the people hosting podcasts today.)
New Yorkers used to celebrate Moses. Then in 1974, Robert Caro published a biography of him titled The Power Broker, immortalizing Moses for his big projects and his equally big lapses in judgment. To call this biography monumental would be an understatement: Caro poured painstaking research and literary power into each of its 1,300 pages. Not coincidentally, The Power Broker was also one of the books that played a part in the consolidation of the lawyerly society. On par with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, it taught Americans to fear and loathe engineers.
What New York has lost since the 1960s are updates to its physical environment. The city is still relying on the infrastructure that came to a stop when the reign of Moses ended, which makes me think that there’s not much to be gained in stomping on Moses’s name still further. New York, and the United States writ large, cannot survive indefinitely on the infrastructure built nearly a century ago. There are always trade-offs and compromises inherent to building large-scale public works, and instead of vilifying the people from our past who made tough choices, we must confront these tough choices ourselves.
Like many builders, Moses wielded prejudices and made extravagant mistakes. His reign ended at the right moment: Critics like Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford called time on his relentless construction projects before he obliterated Lower Manhattan with yet another highway project. But his legacy of physical dynamism has also propelled New York into the global city it is today. Moses thought more deeply about how to attract families into the city than his critics give him credit for. The cultural centers he built have lent their gleam to a city that continues to attract creatives, too.
The United States has been weakened not only by a procedure-obsessed left—which has become so determined to avoid the errors of Moses that few big works are built at all—but also a thoughtlessly destructive right. I bring up Moses to suggest that the American left needs to rouse itself to deal with the problems of the present day rather than the problems of the previous midcentury.
The United States will be stronger if it can manufacture. If it does not recover manufacturing capacity, the country will continue to be forcibly deindustrialized by China. US global power will be reduced if people around the world find it more attractive to drive Chinese cars, deploy Chinese robots, and fly Chinese planes. The world is more dangerous if Beijing believes that the United States has insufficient ships and munitions to respond to an aggressive act against Taiwan or in the South China Sea. If the two superpowers fight in East Asia, it’s not at all clear that the United States will win. America has to build to stave off being overrun commercially or militarily by China.
To the Biden administration’s credit, it made a serious attempt to conduct industrial policy and build up US infrastructure. But the pace of building has been terribly slow. In 2021, Congress allocated $ 42 billion to expand broadband services to rural communities in a plan known as Internet for All. Four years later, not a single home has been connected to this network. Two years after Congress allocated $ 7.5 billion to build electric vehicle charging stations across the United States, just seven have become operational. The leisurely pace of construction was a political failure for the Democrats: After winning the 2024 election, President Trump will be either able to reap the political benefits of naming many new bridges for himself or cancel some of these projects.
And the United States will be stronger if it can provide better infrastructure. Though New York has mass transit, most of it was built a century ago, such that entering a subway station in Manhattan feels too often like descending into a rotting pit, where one stands amid trash and worrisome leaks, until a deafening metallic screech announces the train. It’s not that the city doesn’t spend enough on these problems: New York has the honor of hosting five of the six most expensive transit projects in the world. It costs five times as much to build a kilometer of subway in New York City as it does in Paris. If it only cost twice as much, it might be a national tragedy; since it costs five times as much, it is only a statistic. There’s no reason that much older European cities should be able to build more cheaply than New York. And the people in charge don’t seem to be able to do anything about it.
The United States will be stronger if it builds more homes. American progressives have a slogan that every billionaire is a policy failure. Since common folks are more on my mind, I propose an amendment: Every rise in housing prices is a policy failure. Prosperous places with substantial job creation—especially New York, San Francisco, and Boston—have perversely done the most to block new housing. Overall, half of American renters are considered cost-burdened(meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their pretax income on rent), and many people who would like to buy a first home cannot afford one. The lack of building new homes has locked people out of cities with good jobs. It is increasing segregation by class and race.
Rather, the United States can look toward other Western countries, like Spain, Germany, and Japan, which strike a better balance between public consultation and environmental review on the one hand and getting stuff built on the other.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had an early viral moment in 2019 when she lashed out at people holding up the green transition: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” she said. “And your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?” You can’t look at New York’s transit projects, where it costs billions to build a mile of subway, and conclude that the city doesn’t pay. The problem, rather, is that the government insists on tripping itself up. The ludicrously slow pace of construction in the United States would not be such a big deal if the world wasn’t facing, as Ocasio-Cortez points out, a climate crisis. What the United States has lost sight of is that the public might prefer a government that does something rather than one that’s so exquisite about process. When public works arrive seriously over budget, when the state is barely able to maintain existing infrastructure, when timelines for a new train or a new station can be more than a decade away, we have to question whether the present approach is fit for purpose.
Chinese who have experienced the country’s blistering economic growth over the past four decades look to the past with pride and to the future with hope. When residents of Chongqing or Shenzhen see a new cityscape unfold before their eyes, they expect the future to keep changing for the better.
the classic line by professor Grant Gilmore, in a text often assigned to first-year law students: “The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”
They have built not just a pipeline funneling graduates into the federal judiciary; ambitious students have cleared paths toward the White House and executive agencies too. It is even harder to change the more fundamental philosophical basis of American law. The United States inherited a common law system typical for anglophone countries, in which judges have much more discretion(relative to legislatures) to shape the law. It is no coincidence that housing and infrastructure costs are astronomically high across the anglosphere, including in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Ireland.
Second, the United States needs to elevate a greater diversity of voices among its elites. The most important American virtue is the commitment to pluralism—the ability of diverse cultures to coexist and thrive under equal protection. It means lawyers should be joined by engineers, economists, and other sorts of humanists to make sure that the country is able to work for the many, not only the few.
Beijing has been taking the future dead seriously for the past four decades. That is why China will not outcompete the United States. The engineering state has delivered great things. But the Communist Party is made up of too many leaders who distrust their own people and have little idea how to appeal to the rest of the world. They will continue to bring literal-minded solutions for their problems, attempting to engineer away their challenges, leaving the situation worse than they found it. Beijing will never be able to draw on the best feature of the United States: Embracing pluralism and individual rights. The Communist Party is too afraid of the Chinese people to give them real agency. Beijing will not recognize that the creatives and entrepreneurs it is chasing into exile are not the enemy. It will not accept that their creative energy could bring as much prestige to China as great public works. But there are still some things that the United States can learn from the engineering state. Although the creative class wants to rùn, the material benefits for most of China’s population are widely spread. The reason that consent of the governed is still pretty strong in China is that Chinese have seen their conditions of life improve immeasurably, such that most people have space in their lives to do most of what they want, most of the time.
What the United States presently lacks is the urgency to make the hard choices to build. Americans have to trust that society can flourish without empowering lawyers to micromanage everything. The United States should embrace its transformational urge. I hope one day that America can declare itself to be a developing country too. It can demonstrate that the country is able to reform itself, get unstuck from the status quo, and ultimately unlock as much as possible of human potential. “Developing” is a term to embrace with pride.