The China Thread

[Sheilbh]

I really want to read the book and posted a Foreign Affairs essay by the author which I think this book expands.

A short-ish review from the Times:

Engineers vs lawyers — why China is overtaking America
China's politicians have engineering backgrounds, says Dan Wang in Breakneck. That's how they get things done — and why they're so heedless of the human consequences
Yuan Yi Zhu
Friday August 22 2025, 6.00am, The Times

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future is easily one of the best books on China published this year. This is not much of an accolade in and of itself since most books in that category are shelf-fillers written by chancers who understand that all you need is a red cover and a cute title (perhaps with some sort of reference to a panda or a dragon) to sell copies.

First-hand knowledge of China or the ability to read Chinese are optional — indeed, some high-profile China commentators take offence when it is gently suggested that one should be able to speak the language of the country one is studying.

But Dan Wang labours under no such handicap. The Chinese-Canadian tech analyst has long had a loyal following among China watchers, who are fans of his rambling yet insightful annual email newsletters about the country, as well as opera. After years of covering Chinese technology in China for western hedge funds, Wang swapped his job for an academic perch in the US. He has now turned to the book form and the result is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in China.

Wang's thesis is put simply: China is an engineering state run by politicians with engineering backgrounds who are therefore obsessed with engineering their country through physical means (building things) and social ones (forcing women to have fewer, then more children).

The US, once also an engineering state, now has "a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers". This has led the two countries, whose people are in many ways similar by temperament (materialist, crass, capable of incredible dynamism), becoming inversions of one another.

China's solution to any problem is to build things often to excess, or to engineer technocratic solutions with scant regard for the people who are affected, whereas the default instrument of US governance is the lawsuit, which prevents anything from being done. To Wang the world would be a better place if US governance abandoned its fetish for process over outcome and China's leaders discovered the virtues of building less and governing at a human scale.

The thesis is not new and is capable of being challenged. After all, the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville was remarking on how American lawyers formed the "highest political class" almost 200 years ago, yet this did not stop the US from becoming the world's dominant industrial civilisation.

Meanwhile, while China's politburo standing committee — the country's highest political body — was once entirely composed of engineering graduates, today fewer than half of its members studied the subject. The standing committee even has a former law professor. In any case, that many Chinese leaders have engineering backgrounds does not mean that they are not politicians first and foremost.

It is true that the US seems to have lost the will to build compared with its rising competitor, as anyone who has had the misfortune of having to use its public transport will admit. Wang's book drips with astonishing figures as to China's building craze: China took 18 years to build a motorway network that matched the extent of the American interstate highway system. Then China did it again in nine years.

Even China's poorest provinces are served by its extraordinary high-speed railway system, once derided by western observers as a white elephant, while American attempts in this area so far have proven to be ruinously expensive and decades behind schedule. In California the French state railway company SNCF was so frustrated by the political dysfunction that afflicted its high-speed railway project that it decamped to Morocco to build it there instead.

In the book's best chapter, Wang convincingly argues, using his experience of Chinese industry, that China's great technological advantage lies in its valorisation of practical knowledge on how to make things that are kept alive through communities of engineering. For example to make an iPhone you not only need the technology and the design but a network of technologists, suppliers and a trained workforce. After decades of serving as the world's factory, China has these in abundance.

Meanwhile, much of the US's manufacturing sector has rusted, with workforces shrinking and precious process knowledge being lost. While China lags in critical sectors such as jet engines and pharmaceuticals, its manufacturing sector, once a byword for cheap and shoddy products, is now matching and in many cases surpassing American equivalents at the higher end of manufacturing.

At the lower end China's dominance is even greater since the US has largely given up on low-value manufacturing. The Chinese government boasts of making something in each one of the 419 categories of industrial goods classified by the UN, which reflects its obsession with having a comprehensive industrial base. During Covid the US and China made vaccines, but only China produced industrial quantities of masks and cotton swabs.

But the Chinese leadership's engineering obsession has a dark side, which Wang does not ignore. The second half of the book contains harrowing accounts of its one-child policy and Covid policy, the latter of which Wang lived through before moving back to the West. Being in the habit of seeing any social problem as an engineering problem, China's technocrats enacted one of the cruellest population control policies in world history before trying to reverse its consequences, so far with no success, using similarly coercive methods.

The neighbourhood committees that were used to enforce Covid lockdowns are now being used to call up recently married women to inquire about their menstrual cycles. It will not surprise the reader that a key intellectual mover behind the one-child policy was a politician with an engineering background.

China's early success with a technologically enforced lockdown turned from a source of pride to a sore point and even a source of social unrest as the engineering state let its obsession with zero Covid run amok. Pregnant women were left to miscarry outside of hospitals for want of a Covid test result, while the Shanghai lockdown was so severe that it collapsed the city's food supply chains. Then again, many would argue that the same excesses happened in the UK, which certainly is not run by engineers, unless PPE is taken to mean personal protective equipment.

Wang has written that rare thing: a book on China that avoids the clichés and conventions of the genre and that is based on first-hand knowledge instead of impressions gleaned from reading English-language sources from abroad. While it is primarily targeted at an American audience, policymakers in the UK would do well to ponder whether its message has any implication for this country.

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang (Allen Lane £25 pp288). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

[crazy canuck]

The headline is they are an engineering society and the Americans are a lawyer society that can't get stuff done.

The person being interviewed (a Canadian who lived in China for seven years and is now an academic at Yale) points out that China has engineers in the top government position.  The Americans are governed by people who are legally trained and have no idea how to build infrastructure.

Edit: what Sheilbh said

[The Minsky Moment]

Same thing was said about the US vs the Soviet Union.

Politics is the art of balancing competing interests in society and balancing policy priorities in the light of limited resources.  Engineers are not necessarily ideal for that task.

To wit:

Wang's thesis is put simply: China is an engineering state run by politicians with engineering backgrounds who are therefore obsessed with engineering their country through physical means (building things) and social ones (forcing women to have fewer, then more children).

As a thesis, it seems more self-indictment.  The PRC has become notorious for wasteful and inefficient capital allocation in infrastructure and real estate.  As for the child control policies, these have not only been morally repugnant, but disaster as policy.  The policy badly overshot and the PRC economy is now at risk because of precipitous demographic decline.

[crazy canuck]

Politics is the art of balancing competing interests in society and balancing policy priorities in the light of limited resources.  Engineers are not necessarily ideal for that task.

How has that been working out for you?  Trump aside, the infrastructure in your country is crumbling and Abundance (a book about how terrible your country has become at building infrastructure) became a best seller.

The answer is not to put your head in the sand and say to yourself everything is just fine.

[HVC]

Working with a lot of engineers at different companies I don't actually know if they're better than lawyers

[crazy canuck]

I know who I would rather have in charge of building a bridge. Or building high speed rail. Or building anything.

[Tamas]

Engineer concludes that the country he is familiar with can be analysed from an engineering standpoint. Next up: Man with hammer finds nail.

I am just being mean. He is probably right.

[DGuller]

One problem with engineers as the ruling class is that they can come to view disagreement with the master plan as an engineering challenge to overcome.

[crazy canuck]

One problem with engineers as the ruling class is that they can come to view disagreement with the master plan as an engineering challenge to overcome.

Agreed, and that is one of the weakness in the Chinese system that the author being interviewed pointed out.

The Chinese model is not being identified as ideal.  It is simply an explanation for why the Chinese have succeeded where the Americans have failed, miserably.

[The Minsky Moment]

Politics is the art of balancing competing interests in society and balancing policy priorities in the light of limited resources.  Engineers are not necessarily ideal for that task.

How has that been working out for you?  Trump aside, the infrastructure in your country is crumbling and Abundance (a book about how terrible your country has become at building infrastructure) became a best seller.

The answer is not to put your head in the sand and say to yourself everything is just fine.

I'm just saying engineers aren't the solution.  I'm not saying trust fund real estate moguls are.

[Jacob]

I'm just saying engineers aren't the solution.  I'm not saying trust fund real estate moguls are.

Ideally, of course, it's some sort of blend between engineers engendering physical productivity, merchants engendering economic productivity, lawyers engendering fair process and rights protection, the creative class engendering cultural productivity, intellectuals providing intellectual productivity, technocrats organizing things efficiently and so on*

While there are likely many different combinations that are more or less functional, leaning too heavily into a specific class to frame the problems and formulate solutions is like going to lead to imbalances and problems that that particular type of leadership group is unable to solve.


*obviously the "this type of people --> this kind of value production" is a bit of a generalization.

[The Minsky Moment]

Sure of course we need engineers. Engineers are great.

But the question posed was the composition of the governing class.  I don't think engineers - or anyone else - should be categorically excluded from governance.  But I also don't think a governing class made principally or entirely engineers would be a good idea.

That's not to say I think the governing class should be principally lawyers, I hope that should be clear from the sig I've been carrying. The US has been plagued by lawyers running things since its inception, and it has caused a lot of problems and issues over the years.  I don't know why Wang thinks that is a recent thing.  America has never been run by engineers, unless you count Hoover, and there is one heck of an exception that proves the rule.

Plato had it right, politics requires a talent of its own. Plato went off in a lot of bad directions from there, but the basic premise is sound. The US needs fewer lawyers running things, and more natural statesmen.

[Razgovory]

I think that Plato was correct in assessing the Universe did not have legs.

[Jacob]

I think that Plato was correct in assessing the Universe did not have legs.

That argument doesn't have a leg to stand on.

[Jacob]

Sure of course we need engineers. Engineers are great.

But the question posed was the composition of the governing class.  I don't think engineers - or anyone else - should be categorically excluded from governance.  But I also don't think a governing class made principally or entirely engineers would be a good idea.

That's not to say I think the governing class should be principally lawyers, I hope that should be clear from the sig I've been carrying. The US has been plagued by lawyers running things since its inception, and it has caused a lot of problems and issues over the years.  I don't know why Wang thinks that is a recent thing.  America has never been run by engineers, unless you count Hoover, and there is one heck of an exception that proves the rule.

Plato had it right, politics requires a talent of its own. Plato went off in a lot of bad directions from there, but the basic premise is sound. The US needs fewer lawyers running things, and more natural statesmen.

No disagreement from me there.