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.

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.

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.

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.

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).