The United States and China are constantly looking for a leg up in their rivalry for geopolitical primacy. But what if the real advantage lies in adopting a bit of the other’s culture? A new book by Dan Wang, a researcher who has divided much of his life between the United States and China, makes the case that while China has become an engineering state obsessed with building, the United States has become a lawyerly society focused on procedures and blocking. Put another way, China builds too much, too fast; the United States builds too little, too late. Could the two learn from each other?
Wang’s book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, is out this week. I spoke to him on the latest episode of FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: To me, China and the United States feel like such different countries, but you begin your book with the claim that “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.” How so?
Dan Wang: Chinese and Americans are united by a hustle culture. They’re very hasty people. They love shortcuts in terms of health or wealth. As a Canadian who has lived in both of these countries, Canada is very tidy. Canada is very orderly. And the last thing that we could say about either China or the U.S. is that they’re tidy, ordinary, fun, easily accessible places.
Both the U.S. and China are fundamentally bizarre. The hustle culture produces a lot of dynamism. Both countries feel like they are parts of great civilizations that have merit in bullying around smaller countries that don’t get in line.
The simplest way to appreciate the similarities between Chinese and Americans is to compare China and the U.S. to Europe and Japan. Europe and Japan are more similar. They’re both perfectionists. They are much more tidy and orderly. Everything is really clean. And yet they are not exemplars of dynamism. They’re focused on improving their processes rather than inventing new processes. And this is why I think the future will still be invented by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and by Beijing and Shenzhen, which will dictate what most people in the world will think and will buy.
RA: I’d like to challenge that a bit. I would have argued that Indians and Americans, for example, are more alike than Chinese and Americans. They are the two biggest democracies in the world, with similar values and aspirations, and also the same appetite for hustling that you’re describing. I may have also named Nigeria or Indonesia. I wouldn’t have so easily gone to China.
DW: You may well be right that India might be the better analogy to the United States. But right now, I would say that China and the U.S. have been alike, in part because China’s growth story has been more impressive than India’s, at least over the last 20 years. Now, India is growing faster and from a lower base than China is, and so perhaps in one or two decades, the Indians may be a bit more alike the Americans.
A lot of the Chinese have grown up feeling like the U.S. is the center of the world. That’s not unique to China. Many people in developing countries are envious of and have felt attracted to the United States, whether to Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Wall Street. But now, it is more the Americans who sometimes cast an envious eye toward China, because China has held up a mirror to the U.S. and revealed China as, perhaps, like the United States at the end of the 19th century or at the start of the 1950s. They are doing a lot of manufacturing and providing public goods.
And so now, China’s more like the United States, but over the longer term, it could well be that India and the United States converge much more. I agree that democracy and pluralism are important and embodied by these two countries.
RA: The crux of your book’s argument, which is really a framework for looking at these two countries, is that China is an engineering state and America is a lawyerly state. What do you mean by an engineering state?
DW: At various points in the recent past, China has been almost completely ruled by engineers. [Former Central Advisory Commission Chairman] Deng Xiaoping made a deliberate decision to promote engineers into the top leadership of the Communist Party, in order to correct the mayhem of the Mao Zedong years. By 2002, all nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo (which is the highest ruling echelon within the Communist Party) had degrees in engineering [or related fields]. Most prominently, Hu Jintao, the general secretary, was a hydraulic engineer, and the premier, Wen Xiaobao, was a geologist.
The issue with engineers is that they treat everything as a building and optimization problem. And China is defined by these vast spasms of construction. One of my favorite things I did with this book was to try to figure out how much China has built over the last four decades. China built its very first highway in 1993, relatively late. This connected Tianjin and Beijing, two big cities in the north. And 18 years after that, China had built an America’s worth of highways. Nine years after that, China built another America’s worth of highways.
We can point to big power projects, most infamously the Three Gorges Dam, which displaced up to a million people and is the world’s biggest power plant by generation capacity. The Chinese are not to be outdone. They just announced plans for an even bigger power plant that is being built in Tibet. This will use more than 60 times as much cement as the Hoover Dam in the United States.
China doesn’t only build a lot of highways and power plants. It also builds high-speed rail. It builds a lot homes. It builds transmission lines to transport power that is generated by solar, wind, nuclear, and coal from China’s west to China’s east.
RA: I got a clear sense from your book that building creates a sense of dynamism. So if you live in a rural part of a country, you have a sense that life is improving. Over the course of seven years, standards of living have improved; GDP per capita has nearly doubled. But there are limits to this. Things can’t always continue getting better. So you’re also describing overreach. The one-child policy distorted demographics dramatically. And then zero-COVID, which you lived through, made people very angry. How do the Chinese today think through this trade-off?
DW: I spent a lot of my time in my book talking about the one-child policy as well as zero-COVID. The number is right there in the name; there’s no ambiguity about what these policies could portend. And this is where I’m a little bit skeptical that society can be just another engineering exercise, as if people can be so easily commanded.
The engineering state is very committed to more engineering. Any time that China needs more stimulus, any time the Chinese economy might be trembling due to some sort of shock or weakness, Beijing doesn’t follow the traditional American or Western approach of handing checks out to people to try to stimulate the economy. Rather, the engineering state is still very intent on solving all of its economic problems by building more infrastructure. In the last few years, Beijing announced that it was going to spend trillions of renminbi on flood control issues. Is that potentially useful? Absolutely. Is that what China most needs in order to get its economy going again? I’m skeptical.
And China is still trying to bring an engineering approach to governing the people. After engineering itself into a demographic mess, in part through the one-child policy, China is trying to engineer the population to encourage them to have more children. We’ve seen reporting over the last few years that urban neighborhood party committee people are going up to women in cities to ask, “When was your last period? And wouldn’t you like to have another child?”
I’m skeptical that the Politburo, that the Communist Party, has really seen that engineering is not a helpful way to think about economic issues or social issues. For the most part, I think the engineering state has delivered vast benefits. It has delivered fast connectivity to cities as well as villages that never had train connections, that never had the ability to go by bridge rather than a long circuitous path to get to the market or to other villages. Having a lot of tall bridges, subway systems, and high-speed rail really improves the urban and the village experience of being in China. But they cannot stop themselves from veering into social engineering, and I think that is where the problem is.
RA: So let’s contrast all of this with the United States now. Because you claim that these two people are very similar in many ways, but that they’ve picked completely different approaches. So the United States is a “lawyerly” society. It blocks things from being built. Explain how this lawyerly nature ends up slowing American growth.
DW: Just as China is very heavily engineered, America has been lawyerly since the very founding of the country. The Declaration of Independence reads like a lawsuit against the United Kingdom. Of the first 16 American presidents, 13 of them were lawyers. A lot of the Founding Fathers were lawyers.
And in the most recent past, the Democratic Party especially is heavily lawyerly. From 1980 to 2024, every single presidential nominee of the Democratic Party had gone to law school, including [former Vice President] Kamala Harris. This is a really striking contrast between the United States and China.
What lawyers are set up well to do is to block everything, good and bad. So we don’t have stupid ideas like the one-child policy. But we also don’t have functional infrastructure almost anywhere in the United States.
Ravi, I wrote this book substantially while I was a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. There’s a fairly good train system that takes me from Grand Central Station in New York all the way up to New Haven. It is a bit slow, but never too late. But I came across a pamphlet from 1914 listing the time it took then to get from New York to New Haven: two hours. That is less time than it takes today. Now, this is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison because the trains make more stops now, but it is pretty pathetic that Americans are not moving any faster than they were about 100 years ago.
RA: Even the new Acela that has been announced between New York and Washington, D.C., is only faster by maybe five or ten minutes, really. Part of that is because the tracks need to be relaid, which is very difficult to do. But trying to build high-speed rail in California, for example, has taken forever. And only a tiny sliver has been built. What goes wrong when America does try to build these days?
DW: What goes wrong is very substantially a litigious culture that creates a lot of lawsuits. The government decided to outsource a lot of its expertise to contractors, a trend that started in the 1970s, so the government itself has lost a lot of its expertise. There’s also an element in which the government is excessively cautious. It has tied its hands up in fear of treading upon public interest concerns: disturbing the environment, disturbing the people who have an interest in not having anything built.
Now, for the most part, procedural concerns are good because every government in the world (and especially, perhaps, the U.S. government) is capable of wielding terrible power. And it is important that if the president steps out of line, or if New York City steps out of line, judges are able to block these bad decisions. But the balance has gone very badly off track. It is tilted against the government being able to do anything.
California High-Speed Rail is barely able to build any high-speed rail at all. Its government agencies are more interested in placating different interest groups than building the high-speed rail that people want to see. And when they have actually begun construction, they’re terrified of lawsuits, which have emerged from homeowners who are saying “Well, maybe you didn’t study these issues properly, especially on environmental rights.” And once you’re larded down by all of those different lawsuits, then it’s no wonder that California High-Speed Rail, which was first approved 17 years ago, is still not open and might not be open for perhaps another five or 10 years.
RA: So you might argue that we need, in other words, an America with Chinese characteristics. As you compare these two countries, which model is currently best suited to correct itself over the next several years and decades? And it’s interesting, because some of your critique of the lawyerliness of America is also a strength. It makes it less likely that things go awfully wrong. It makes it more likely that rights will be protected. And as draconian as zero-COVID was, in the end, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping did seem to listen to the Chinese people’s sense of anger. So which of these two societies is best suited to pivot and adapt in the 21st century?
DW: One remarkable thing about the U.S. and China is that both societies can adapt, and radically change direction, more than Europe or Japan can. These two other regions, Europe and Japan, look much more stuck, whereas China and the U.S. are able to muster a lot of dynamism. The way they do so is still quite distinct from each other.
The Chinese are led by a Leninist party—namely, the Communist Party—that sees itself as dedicating a cadre of revolutionaries who are intent on modernizing the population by hook or by crook. So great change is possible. It is absolutely right to point to zero-COVID as a means of adaptation. The engineers were working hard to enforce zero-COVID. So restrictions continued to pile up in China until the engineering state decided to swerve and change directions and then abandoned everything. It was a rapid approach.
The United States can also adapt itself—through the process of democracy, through the process of pluralism. American society doesn’t swerve quite as hard as the engineering state can. The progress tends to be more gradual and creative. But what is the real guarantee of American dynamism? A degree of pluralism where people know that the lawyerly society is off track, but we need—and have needed over the past two decades—more housing construction, better provision of mass transit, better provision of infrastructure writ large, to say nothing of big projects to decarbonize our economy. Including in the Democratic Party, which has been responsible for a lot of the delays in infrastructure, there’s a very deep sense that the people want more. The people want a more functional manufacturing base. There’s consensus among the elites that the defense industrial base has also badly rusted. And so, the country needs to get going again. The process will be gradual. It won’t look like China’s approach, but I am very optimistic that America will get there one day.
RA: You write toward the end of the book that U.S.-China competition is not just geopolitical but a contest of philosophies. That whoever adopts more traits of the other will succeed. Who’s more likely to?
DW: At the present moment, no one is likely to succeed. Both countries need to learn good things from the other. Right now, President [Donald] Trump is learning the bad things of China without learning some of the good things. We have authoritarianism, perhaps without the good stuff. Trump has suggested putting an export tax on Nvidia’s chips. He is taking golden shares in companies. Perhaps the U.S. government will partially nationalize Intel by taking equity stakes in the company. Meddling in America’s technology champions will not be positive over the longer run.
The United States doesn’t have to be exactly like China. The U.S. needs to build better infrastructure. But it doesn’t need the Chinese model to do so. Take the Europeans and the Japanese, whom we’ve been beating up over the course of this conversation. Japan has excellent subway stations as well as high-speed rail. Spain, France, [and] the Danish have all built excellent infrastructure without stomping all over the public interest and human rights.
And I would love the Chinese to also become a little more lawyerly. China desperately needs more of a lawyerly society by which the leadership respects rights, is cautious of trampling on the public interest, and is held to account by an independent judiciary.
I would love the United States to be 20 percent more engineering to meet the needs of the people. And I would like the Chinese to become 80 percent more lawyerly to give substantive protections from state predations.
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