America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Light rail. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever, if it even happens at all.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, there\u2019s China. A country that builds much faster \u2014 high-speed trains, solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, drones \u2014 all churned out at breakneck speed.<\/p>\n
Why can China do this, and why does it seem like America can\u2019t?<\/p>\n
Dan Wang is the author of a new book called Breakneck: China\u2019s Quest to Engineer the Future.<\/a> It\u2019s a deeply reported, deeply personal book about the country he grew up in, returned to, and then left again. And it\u2019s filled with surprising insights into China\u2019s evolution as a country.<\/p>\n There isn\u2019t a single answer to the question about why China can move fast and why we can\u2019t, but Wang offers one I haven\u2019t heard before. He says one of the most important distinctions between the US and China is that the US is a society run by lawyers and China is a society run by engineers \u2014 and that many of our differences flow from this divide.<\/p>\n I invited him onto The Gray Area<\/a> to talk about how that engineering mindset has shaped China, and what these two societies can learn from each other. As always, there\u2019s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area<\/a> on Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, Pandora<\/a>, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.<\/p>\n This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n One of the first things you say in the book is that China and America are constantly locking horns. And you find that both tragic and comical because, \u201cno two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.\u201d Why do you see it that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n The first thing is that both countries are, in many ways, unintelligible to themselves. How many Americans truly understand America? You\u2019re sitting in the Gulf Coast, Sean, and I wonder how many Americans have a deep sense of what\u2019s going on there.<\/p>\n I think Americans and Chinese are alike because both embrace dynamism and shortcuts. There\u2019s a kind of hucksterism in the US \u2014 a willingness to cut corners, to improvise \u2014 and that exists in China, too. Both societies carry the pride of a great civilization, but also a restless embrace of change. In contrast, places like Europe or Japan tend to be far more suspicious of change, more comfortable with stasis.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s get into the central idea of your book: China as an \u201cengineering state\u201d and America as a \u201clawyerly society.\u201d It\u2019s a striking frame. How did you come up with it, and why is it useful?<\/strong><\/p>\n I wanted a fresh framework to understand these two countries beyond the stale 20th-century categories of capitalist, neoliberal, authoritarian, or democratic.<\/p>\n China, I argue, is an engineering state. At times, the entire Standing Committee of the Politburo, the country\u2019s top leadership, was filled with trained engineers. Hu Jintao, for example, was a hydraulic engineer who supervised the building of a dam. His premier, Wen Jiabao, was a geologist. They approached society as if it were a giant technical problem, something to be solved like a hydraulic system or a math equation.<\/p>\n America, by contrast, began as a lawyerly society. The Declaration of Independence reads like a legal case. Many of the Founding Fathers were lawyers, and so were the vast majority of presidents up through Lincoln. Even today, lawyers are dramatically overrepresented in politics and business. The Biden White House was famous for its Yale Law grads<\/a>.<\/p>\n The US isn\u2019t unique, but the Anglosphere in general has this tradition: skilled debaters rising into political power. Lawyers dominate not just politics but corporate leadership, too. Even President Donald Trump, though not a lawyer, governed in a lawyerly way \u2014 suing people constantly, using accusations in the court of public opinion. His vice president, JD Vance, is also a Yale Law product.<\/p>\n You tell a story in the book about a five-day bike ride you took through Guizhou Province in 2021. Why was that trip so pivotal for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n This was the summer of 2021, when China was at the height of its zero-Covid success. The country was sealed off, even from many of its own citizens abroad, so I decided to travel internally.<\/p>\n Guizhou is in the far southwest: green mountains, jagged karst rocks, breathtaking beauty. It\u2019s also China\u2019s fourth-poorest province, very remote, not part of the booming export economy. Yet what I saw there stunned me: far better infrastructure than in California, where I work, or New York, where I went to school.<\/p>\n This poor province had half a dozen high-speed rail links, brand-new highways, and multiple airports. Meanwhile, America\u2019s richest states struggle to maintain basic infrastructure.<\/p>\n Apparently 45 of the world\u2019s 100 tallest bridges are in that one province, which is\u2026wild.<\/strong><\/p>\n Exactly. That\u2019s what the engineering state does. Instead of redistributing wealth, Beijing pours resources into colossal projects. Guizhou alone has 11 airports, some with barely a dozen flights a week. Monumentalism is part of the culture: What\u2019s more thrilling for an engineer than a record-breaking bridge or the world\u2019s biggest dam?<\/p>\n Local leaders are also incentivized. If you\u2019re a provincial official who builds a gigantic bridge, GDP ticks up for a while and you can point to your \u201cbig-ass bridge\u201d when asking Beijing for a promotion. There\u2019s a construction lobby, too \u2014 state-owned enterprises always whispering, \u201cIsn\u2019t it time for another mega-project?\u201d<\/p>\n China builds fast, but you write that it also \u201cbreaks people.\u201d What do you mean by that?<\/strong><\/p>\n If the engineering state only stopped at physical infrastructure, the ledger might be mostly positive. China now has excellent logistics, well-functioning cities, and a carbon-efficient national high-speed rail system.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t believe repression is necessary, but it certainly played a role in the trajectory we see today.\u201d<\/p>\n