Wang

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Breakneck— Dan Wang

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Introduction

Drive around America and China, on the other hand, and you’ll see people and places that are utterly deranged. That’s not a reproach. These two countries are messy in part because they are both engines for global change.

The Chinese state builds gleaming public works and doesn’t flinch from locking up ethnic minorities or locking down whole cities. Too many outsiders see only the enrichment or the repression. Living there puts you face to face with both a sustained rise in living standards and authoritarian pulses emanating out of Beijing. It became no contradiction for me to appreciate the things that are getting better and getting worse. 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.

As China emulated America’s past successes, the US government got busy undermining its own strengths. A procedure-obsessed left conspired with a thoughtlessly destructive right to constrain the government. Neither the left nor the right allows the state to deliver essential goods expected by the public. The Biden administration may have ushered through historic bills on industrial policy, but executive agencies were so obsessed with procedural concerns that little building actually took place before voters reelected Donald Trump, who has threatened to cancel many of these projects. The United States is still a superpower that is able to outclass China on many dimensions. But it is also in the grips of an ineffectual state where people are increasingly concerned with safeguarding a comfortable way of life.

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.

1. Engineers vs. Lawyers

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.

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. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams.

China’s ruling elites have practical experience managing megaprojects, suggesting that China is doubling down on engineers— and prioritizing defence— more than ever.

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 of 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.

Lawyers have so many tools available to delay or prevent building. You don’t just feel the difference going from the lawyerly society to the engineering state: You saunter, tread, and amble upon its works.

As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions. Its leaders aren’t only civil or electrical engineers. They are, fundamentally, social engineers. Emperors didn’t hesitate to entirely restructure a person's relationship to the land, ordering mass migration into newly opened territories and conscripting the people to build great walls or grand canals. Modern rulers are here, too, far more ambitious than the emperors of the past. The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul— a phrase from Joseph Staling repeated by Xi Jinping— heaving China’s population into modernity and then some.

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.

Not everyone born in 1949 suffered terribly and not everyone born in 1959 lived comfortably. But the engineering state is characterized by peculiar jerky rhythms, in which the decade of birth might determine whether a person stumbles into great wealth or a mass grave.

Lawyers create so many complications that the rules of governing everything from health care and housing to banking have become incomprehensible.

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 processes 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.

The other problem of the lawyerly society is a systematic bias toward the well-off. Lawyers are too often servants of the rich. They help wealthy homeowners block construction projects or get creative with their taxes. It is sometimes puzzling to follow along intellectual property cases, many of which seem to be a thrilling game invented for lawyers. American judges have to deal with bewildering disputes, like hedge funds pursuing sovereign governments on debt payments. Litigation offers endlessly tantalizing possibilities for settling scores.

But the United States will not remain a great power it it caters primarily to the wealthy. It’s failure to build enough has hurt working people and makes the country feel like a low-agency society.

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. It’s 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.

2. Building Big

After four days of cycling through Guizhou, we arrived in the municipality of Chongqing. The city’s downtown core is built around two rivers— the Yangtze and the Jialing— with a skyline dominated by tall buildings that sprout from steep hillsides. They seem to stack upon each other: you can enter a building at ground level, go up by elevator for over ten floors, and exit once more at ground level. Chongqing is my favourite Chinese city to visit because it has the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, most dramatic urban setting. Highways and bridges weave through huge buildings that look as if they are carved into the hills, connected to each other by systems of stairs, escalators, and walkways. The city is filled with ludicrous designs, like a subway line that passes through the middle of an apartment building sitting on a hill.

Each time the engineers built a bridge, they inevitably announce that travel times between two towns have been cut from many hours to perhaps a few minutes. That creates real convenience and connection for rural people. Some of these are bridges to nowhere, but after a few years, they become somewhere.

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.

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 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 work 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. China’s trade surplus hit a record high in 2021, and then again in 2022, approaching almost a trillion dollars. In spite of the tariffs that Donald Trump imposed on gigantic categories of Chinese-made goods, the United States and China experienced record trade in 2022.

As we sipped tea in his office after our 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.

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.

I’ve come to realize that there are many way 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 favours 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.

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 spiralling 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.

Never mind that China has gotten less growth from each unit of new investment since its big infrastructure binge of 2008. The Communist Party continues to build because it’s full of engineers and also because Marxist-Leninists don’t want to cede economic agency to the people.

China would be better off if it built less and built better. But we should also resist judging it by the standards of the United States, which is frankly underprovisioned in public infrastructure. Because there is perhaps one thing worse than an overactive state that can’t stop moving— and that is a state that can’t move at all.

Environmental reviews continue to delay renewable projects. In 2024, the United States had 42 megawatts of operational offshore wind production undergoing permitting review, most of which are waiting on environmental analyses to be completed. Meanwhile, China is building most of the world’s renewable energy. In 2023, while the United States added 6 gigawatts of new wind installations, China added 76. That year, China built two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar plants, as well as four times more than the rest of the G-7 group of rich countries put together.

The lawyerly society is great at protecting the wealthy. The engineering state has a limited tolerance for how long infrastructure can be held up. It’s barely imaginable that a group of wealthy people would be able to use legal means to force the cancellation of clean energy projects in China. If it is really going to be a climate emergency, then the rest of the world will need to move as fast as the engineering state.

3. Tech Power

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.

The idea of having something designed in California and manufactured elsewhere “requires a kind of hand-in-glove partnership.” 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.

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 labour 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 labour force of millions who know how to put together electronics. The 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?

In 2007, Apple imported nearly all of the high-valued components— display screen glass from the United States, camera modules from Japan, memory chips from South Korea, sensors from Germany— to Shenzhen. China’s contribution consisted mostly of the labour involved in assembling foreign products, which was around 4 percent of the phone’s final value. One former Apple executive told me that the iPhone supply chain grew more “red” over the next decade as it incorporated domestically produced components— meaning that it incorporated more Chinese components.

By the time that the iPhone X was released in 2017, Chinese firms were making acoustic parts, charging modules, and battery packs. According to a teardown analysis, China’s contribution to the iPhone X reached around 25 percent of the final value of the phone.

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.

Edahiro wrote a piece entitled “Rebuilding Every 20 Years Renders Sanctuaries Eternal.” Shrine staff make plans measured in centuries: They have a two-hundred-year roadmap to plant enough cypress trees to make the nearby shrine forest self-sufficient, rather than having to ship timber in from other parts of Japan.

Can we moderns preserve manufacturing knowledge without enacting the rituals of craftspeople?

The answer, perhaps, is that we can't. 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.

But is 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.

Viewing technology as people also helps us understand why economic relations between the United States and China have broken down.

US manufacturing employment peaked in 1980 at nineteen million workers. In 2000, it still had seventeen million. Then it collapsed over the next decade, in part due to China, in part due to technology changes, and especially after the global financial crisis, when the workforce fell to just eleven million in 2010. In 2025, the United States has around thirteen million manufacturing workers.

Now it’s more obvious that the departure of manufacturing has created economic and political ruination for the United States. We are still only beginning to understand how much it set the country back technologically.

Many of the United States’ most storied companies have been ailing. Detroit’s automakers, having limped along for decades, are now stumbling through the transition to electric vehicles. US Steel, General Electric, and IBM are shadows of their past selves. Intel, mired in cycles of blown product timelines and layoffs, went from a semi-conductor trailblazer to a clear laggard behind Taiwan’s TSMC.

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. Line workers, machinists, and product designers are thrown out of work; then their suppliers and technical advisers struggle as well. Entire American communities of engineering practice have dissolved, leaving behind a region known as the Rust Belt. Some mayors and governors tried to stem this receding tide. But they were continuously scorned by economists and executives, who sought low-wage production in the name of globalization. Still today, many American economists doubt there is anything special about manufacturing and put their faith in the inevitable march to a service economy.

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 on solar power costs over the last decade has been driven less by breakthroughs in science— which is the United State’s strong suit— than by efficient production, which is China’s strength. The beneficiaries are not only the climate but also China’s national power.

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.

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.

That is what the engineering state is about. It likes to build not just public works but also manufacturing capacity. The engineering state resists economists as easily as lawyers. Economists may cite David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage as a reason to permit production to move away. The engineering state declines, aghast at losing manufacturing because it’s somehow cooler to be in services.

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 labour.

Perhaps the most interesting way that the Industrial Party’s ideas have been propagated is through an online novel, The Morning Star of Lingao, which has been serialized by group of authors since 2009. It is an alternate history project that imagines that five hundred people from contemporary China travelled back in time to Lingao County in Hainan (the tropical island that is China’s southernmost province) in the year 1628. Their goal? To trigger an industrial revolution in the Ming Dynasty. Ma Qianzu is a writer involved in the early creation of this series and is one of the more interesting personalities on the Chinese internet.

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 a some of their most valuable components as well.

Everything starts from the recognition that something has gone quite wrong in US technology. Too many people have argued away the strategic importance of manufacturing. And the solution has to involve reconstituting its communities of engineering practice that prioritize process knowledge. It means attempting to build up every segment of manufacturing: training workers and creating incentives for manufacturers in order to relearn mass production.

This scenario sounds a bit fantastic, but if the iPhone were built in the United States rather than Shenzhen, then an American city— say Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh— might be hailed as the hardware capital of the world.

The United States must regain, at a minimum, the manufacturing capacity to scale up production that emerges from its own industrial labs. If it does not, continuing to value scientific breakthroughs rather than mass manufacturing, then it might lose whole industries once more— as it did by inventing the solar photovoltaic panel but relying on China to produce them. 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.

4. One Child

The one-child policy is one of the searing indictments of the engineering state. It represents what can go wrong when a country views members of its population as aggregates that can be manipulated rather than individuals who have desires, goals, or rights

Rather than acknowledge that it could not deliver the goods, the Communist Party decided instead to blame the people. It was their “overpopulation” that was the problem, not the inadequate economic system that the leadership insisted on.

5. Zero-Covid

China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic embodies all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses. It is a powerful reminder of how the engineering state could accomplish things that few other countries would even attempt, while revealing how its literal minded enforcement can lead to tragic results for human well-being and freedom. I lived through all three years of the zero-Covid strategy that China pursued to stomp out the highly transmissible virus. In the first year, the country felt like a realm of serene calm after it pushed out the virus that was raging far away.

China’s already formidable censorship regime distinguished itself in this crisis, meeting the challenge with a staggering response. Complaints and protest videos were deleted quickly after they went viral. When Shanghai residents posted en masse the first line of China’s national anthem, “Arise, you who refused to be slaves,” their posts were removed. Censors took down posts spreading a National People’s Congress spokesperson’s remark that quarantines may be unlawful. At one point, social media platforms blocked the word “Shanghai” from search results.

I felt baffled and angry that winter. Covid-19 was China’s third epidemic in three decades, exploding in exactly the same pattern as the previous two. In the 1990s, Henan province suffered an AIDS outbreak after blood banks reused needles and commingled diseased blood with healthy blood; the government spent years silencing whistleblowers in this slower-moving epidemic before finally confronting the problem. In 2003, officials on Beijing and Guangdong attempted to suppress new of the SARS outbreak before moving decisively to control it.

A trip we thought would take two weeks turned into something that lasted nearly half a year. Yunnan is a good place for reflection because it is plausibly China’s freest province. In the mountains of Yunnan, I glimpsed the idea of not only the engineering state but also the lawyerly society.

It remains one of China’s poorer regions, its economy sustained by tourism and resource extraction, particularly minerals and tobacco. The northernmost part of Yunnan is historic Tibet, home to a chunk of the Himalayas— including Kawa Karpo, one of the most sacred mountains in Tibetan Buddhism. Shangri-La is the largest city. In the region. The small roads around Tibetan monasteries are strewn with prayer flags and studded with impassive yaks. In Yunnan’s south, where I flew from Shanghai, the mountains are greener and gentler. Tea hills and rubber plantations rise above the Mekong River, carrying snowmelt from Tibetan highlands that eventually drains beyond southern Vietnam. Xishuangbanna is one of China’s most biodiverse regions, home to many trees and plants, wild elephants, peafowls, bears, and birds galore.

Around half of China’s officially recognized minority groups have their homes in Yunnan. They live between its snowy mountains, rainforests, rice terraces, and fast-moving rivers. Many of them have historically resisted rule by the dominant Han. It is part of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia that various scholars have labeled Zomia, which holds innumerable hill peoples who have developed state-repellent practices. James C. Scott has written most elegantly about how people in Zomia have become “barbarians by design,” who cultivate shifting root crops (which are less assessable by tax collectors) and maintain an oral culture (which makes their histories and ethnic identities more malleable). It is not surprising that people in these hills claim various liberties, like foraging wild mushrooms, hunting game, or trafficking harder drugs. Not even the Han-Chinese state has been able to assert jurisdiction over the dense jungles and rugged mountains of the region.

Silvia and I spent several months in the city of Dali, which has a lake on one side and a mountain range on the other. The local Bai people built lovely lakeside houses, made of white walls ornamented with wooden carvings and blue ink paintings. The Bai are mountain farmers who have a long culture of craftmaking, producing marbleware or indigo linens for trade with the Han.

Mountains have beckoned, as Scott has written, to dissenters, rebels, and subversive types. It is not only the air that thins out at higher altitudes: The tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people tired of tax administration or the other ills of governed life have climbed upward. As a consequence, the mountain dwellers tend to be seen as unruly folks, be they Appalachian Americans, Highland Scots, or various ethnic groups in Yunnan and other parts of Zomia. What is a difficulty for government administration and industrial growth is often a positive for personal liberties.

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.

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.

Propaganda authorities had no special warning, though they shifted seamlessly from declaring that the virus must be stomped out in one week to saying that everyone had to be responsible for their own health the next. It felt like living through the scene in Orwell’s 1984, in which officials switched directions, mid-speech, declaring that Oceania was at war with Eastasia rather than Eurasia.

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. After the pandemic, the government has more regularly succumbed to the temptation not to share bad news.

6. Fortress China

“China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” Yiju told me one day. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”

Young people in Chiang Mai told me they’ve felt a quiet shattering of their worldviews over the decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. These are people who grew up in bigger cities and attended good universities, some of them overseas, which endowed them with certain expectations: that they could pursue meaningful careers, that society would gain greater freedoms, and that China would continue to be more integrated with the rest of the world. These aspirations have mostly shriveled. Though their lives in big cities can be quite pleasant, with new milk tea shops to try or art space to take selfies around, they work in jobs that are stressful and menial. They feel smothered by political controls. After the lockdowns, many of them grew aware that they had an unwelcome tendency to inflect every future scenario with a sense of catastrophe.

Not everyone has been thrilled with the move to Thailand, where they don’t foresee great job prospects.

Writers in particular have had 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.

Shanghai’s foreign population was in decline even before the pandemic: Between 2010 and 2020, China’s most internationalized city lost a quarter of its long-term foreign residents. Since the lockdowns, this population has taken another big drop. Shanghai drew foreigners and Chinese who were excited about the economic and creative boom in the city. For business executives, a posting to China used to pave the way toward the C-suite. That’s starting to feel less the case since China has become such a different market (given political complexities and data controls) that a posting there is now viewed as a quagmire.

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.

Both the United States and Canada have reported 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.

Less fortunate Chinese take 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.

Xi has talked about achieving national greatness without backing it up with economic growth. The trouble is that when people suffer— as they do through a property collapse, high unemployment, or lockdowns— they start to wonder what they are really getting. It’s certainly not enrichment. When they’re given a cold, hard smack in the face by something that certainly doesn’t feel like greatness, they become unmoored. This sense of alienation has been a big reason to rùn.

After six years in China, I missed pluralism. It is wonderful to be in a society made up of many voices, not only an official register meant to speak over all the rest. I missed the ambient friendliness of Americans combined with a government that mostly leaves people alone. Most of all, I missed the ability to order books. To be able to read physical books, I relied on my folks to mail me periodic packages, usually in batches of twenty kilograms, while accepting the uncertainty that any of them might be confiscated by customs agents.

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 now I 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.

Xi’s question had produced fresh worry among businesses. Authoritarian systems aren’t good at disseminating bad news. The coronavirus had spread, after all, because local officials in Wuhan refused to let the news of a virus disturb their political serenity as they arrested medical whistleblowers. Companies and investors therefore wondered whether Xi was genuinely unaware of how much his policies had destroyed major segments of the economy. Perhaps nobody had told Xi that he was the most feared unicorn hunter of all.

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.

Xi has forcefully reminded China’s tech companies that they cannot represent a power center that challenges the state’s sovereignty. It was, in other words, an attempt to change the cultural mindset of companies. The Communist Party reminded them that it retains the discretionary power to engineer all aspects of society, which means putting tech companies in their place.

There might be something to be said for this sort of approach. What if, say, the US government had responded to the 2008 financial crisis by reshaping Wall Street’s risk management culture rather than engaging in the endless negotiations that yielded a 2,300-page statute that nobody understands? But Xi’s attempt to achieve cultural change has left people disgruntled and whole industries disfigured.

The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is perhaps 60 percent correct on everything. He’s driving toward a usually admirable long-term goal. But in the name of achieving change, the engineering state delivers such beatings on people or industries that they are unable to pick themselves back up again. Even if Xi’s judgments are right, his brute-force solutions reliably worsen things. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but stomping out their businesses has traumatized entrepreneurs. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them toward default subsequently triggered a collapse in homebuyer confidence, prolonging a property slump. Does the government need to rein in corruption? Definitely, but Xi has terrorized the bureaucracy to the point of paralysis.

Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

All of this exacerbated by an unpredictable political factor: Aging autocrats easily get cranky, which is a problem since Xi is likely to stay in office into his eighties.

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.

How might they be reconciled? With the idea of the engineering state.

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.

During the height of the pandemic, Xi declared that China needs to become more “loveable.” The country’s image had suffered as people around the world blamed China for the spread of the virus.

Four decades after China liberalized, its contributions to global cultures are mostly confined to artistic fringes. It is because engineers didn’t know how to persuade. The Communist Party insists on a history in which the party is always correct and where all errors come from traitors or foreigners. Rather than acknowledge fault and tell persuasive stories, the instinct of the engineering state is simply to censor alternative narratives. Xi comes across as someone who is a little bit too eager for groveling respect from the rest of the world, which is exactly why he’ll never get it.

Engineers can't take a joke. It’s hard for art to thrive in an atmosphere of political paranoia plus social control. Today, Chinese artists and writers have to follow socialist core values, which cannot carry a whiff of political criticism.

And the focus on building is winning China some degree of support in developing countries as well.

Exporting China’s infrastructure is core to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), one of Xi’s signature initiatives. Chinese firms have taken their expertise in building roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, dams, and power plants abroad. And the sometimes also bring the sorts of surveillance systems and censorship tools that find eager customers among autocratic leaders. They have gone on a spending spree overseas, with $1 trillion worth of loans outstanding in 150 countries.

Two photographs have circulated on the Chinese internet: of the Belt and Road Forum in 2017, when Xi Jinping was surrounded by 120 world leaders, and of the same forum in 2023, when there were only three dozen.

There’s one more thing that engineers are especially good at: building resilience into the economy. Rather than prizing efficiency and just-in-time deliveries, China has invested in redundancies and shock buffers.

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.

Food was not the only item to run short during the pandemic in the United States. Many different items were hard to find: furniture, semi-conductors, 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).

Germany and Japan are mighty exporters with, respectively, eight million and ten million manufacturing workers. A country doesn’t need so many people to have a robust semiconductor industry: A few hundred thousand highly trained workers are enough. In 2025, China will graduate more than twice as many PhDs in STEM fields as the United States— and many in American universities are Chinese nationals likely to repatriate.

I spent years covering the twists and turns of these technology restrictions. The more it went on, the more it 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.

China’s technology leaders have always bought American chips because they wanted to sell globally competitive products. They ignored Beijing’s beseeching to buy from domestic vendors for the simple reason that Chinese technologies were not good enough.

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.

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.

How is it that science can coexist with autocracy? 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.

Perversely, repression might encourage scientists to throw themselves still further into their work rather than paying attention to the rest of the world falling first around them. I don’t believe that autocracy is good for science, only that it doesn’t guarantee its destruction.

Now Xi is shoveling money toward scientists. I’ve interviewed over two dozen scientists in China, most of them 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.

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 favour 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.

Underlying Beijing’s actions against digital platforms is a suspicion that tremendously profitable digital companies are not producing value for the rest of society. 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.

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.

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 advisors 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 increase the development of manufacturing.

As relations between the United States and China become more hostile, the chances of conflict grow. The United States is facing a peer competitor that has four times its population, an economy with considerable dynamic potential, and a manufacturing sector that can substantially counter produce itself and its allies. If China and the United States ever come to blows, they would be entering a conflagration with different strengths. Which would you rather have: software or hardware?

The quantitative disparities between the United States and China are stark. In 2022, China had nearly 1,800 ships under construction, and the United States had 5. US support of Ukraine against Russian aggression also exposed the paltry state of its domestic munition capacity. In two days, Ukraine could fire as many shells as the United States makes in a month. At the very end of the Biden administration, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said bluntly that the United States will experience “exhaustion of munition stockpiles very rapidly” if it were ever to face the Chinese military.

In the modern world, many manufactured products can be refashioned for military purposes. The smartphones we carry around have sensors that would have been military grade a decade ago. The consumer drone is also dual use, which is why Ukrainians and Russians have tried to buy China’s DJI drones for the battlefield. That’s why industrial capacity should be understood, increasingly, as military capacity. All the drones, smartphones, and batteries that are overwhelmingly produced in China give it an advantage that the United States does not necessarily have.

I don’t want to get rid of lawyers. Rather, I want to help lift the engineers (and also their technocratically minded brethren, the economists) back up. Not to raise them onto a pedestal but to elevate them so that there are other voices in the mix. The United States could use fewer lawyers who devote their careers to litigating the life out of government agencies and more lawyers of the dealmaker bent who are interested in working out how to deliver better services. Law professor Nick Bagley concluded his seminal paper on proceduralism (which I referenced in the first chapter) with a polite, but deceptively powerful, proposition that I want to echo: Lawyers should consider whether they could achieve more by stepping out of the way.

7. Learning to Love Engineers

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.

I think about Robert Moses and Hyman Rickover not because they were gentle souls. Each had an unseemly lust for power. Both men were idealists with sharp elbows. Both men, as it happens, were also Jewish, experiencing prejudice in institutions meant to be genteel: Yale University for Moses and the US Navy for Rickover. Both were also devoted public servants who spent their entire lives building great works for government pay. Rickover and Moses achieved something we no longer see among public officials. They delivered projects on time and under budget, year after year, while avoiding corruption charges.

Right now, its failing. It won't be able to respond to climate change, drive better economic outcomes, or deliver broader measures of social equality if the physical world remains underdeveloped. American governance is stronger if it can demonstrate that it has a political system capable of delivering essential services to its people, including safe public streets, functioning mass transit, and plentiful housing. For various American ideals to be fully realized, the country will need to recover its ethos of building, which I believe will solve most of its economic problems and many of its political problems too.

To succeed, the United States doesn’t need to adopt China’s means of construction. This book has detailed how the engineering state’s approach has wrought horrors and is no longer fit for purpose even in China. 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.

To achieve all of this, I propose— very gently— to unwind the dominance of lawyers in the United States. That will require us to confront the proceduralism that exists inside government and broader society. And it will require us to renew our faith in government institutions to deliver essential services.

I want to invoke 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.

The path forward demands that we reclaim a sense of optimism: an ability to make plans and deliver on them. The United States has to do two things to overcome the lawyerly society.

First, it has to remember that the country has a heritage of engineering. America built beautiful cities full of monumental buildings. Throughout the nineteenth century, it filled these cities with engineering marvels: the world’s then longest suspension bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan (later superseded in length by the Golden Gate Bridge), the world’s first skyscrapers in Chicago, subway lines in New York City that ranked with any in Europe.

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.

Americans have to trust that society can flourish without empowering lawyers to micromanage everything.

Acknowledgments

This book wouldn’t be what it is without the support and companionship of Hugo Lindgren, who elevated my ambitions and enlivened its stories. I prospered from Hugo’s regular infusions of writerly confidence. My thanks to Uri Bram, who introduced me both to Toby (whom he called “the best of all agents”) and Hugo (“the world’s finest editor”). Uri is correct. If my spirit wavered, I could expect Nick Bagley to rouse me with his exuberance. The lawyerly society came together after I listened to Nick’s appearance on the Ezra Klein Show and over regular lunches in Ann Arbor.