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.

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.

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.

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).