I had been working on this long but captivating book for a few weeks and managed to finish it recently. Breakneck China’s Quest To Engineer The Future is the work of Dan Wang, a Canadian writer who was born and worked extensively in China. The book’s thesis is that America used to have a better balance of being both an engineering and lawyer state, but has dominantly been the latter since the 1960s, focusing on processes over outcomes yet lacking the drive to build, whereas China has been an enigneering state that is maniacal about the end results with little regard to processes and human costs.

The author took readers through the last few administrations in China, starting with Mao Zedong and ending with Xi Jinping, the current paramount leader. Dan discussed some major policies to show pros and cons of the engineering state model. China’s ability to build infrastructure and grow megacities in just a few decades is a marvel. However, the poverty in rural areas as well as the utterly ruthless firm-hand approach to achieve whatever ends are the ugly side of the engineering state model. The one-child and the zero-Covid policy were served as the two examples in which China envisioned an outcome and went to extreme lengths trying to achieve it.

I have heard about comparison of China with the US and that China is going to be THE superpower, even over the US, for years. There is some truth to that. Nonetheless, I agree with Dan Wang that the US model has a higher ceiling. The engineering state tolerates innovation and enterpreneurship of the private sector, but only to some extent, and is willing to clamp down any company that is not aligned with the state’s agenda. That’s the main prohibiting factor of the engineering state. For all of its flaws, the US is still THE place for innovation, enterpreneurship and freedom of speech, the latter of which is much more valuable than not having a high-speed train or the tallest bridges in the world.

“Each time I left Beijing and Shanghai to enter more remote parts of the country, I was astonished by how even China’s poorest provinces have better infrastructure than America’s richest. The chief feature of the engineering state is building big public works, no matter the financial or human cost. For many people in Guizhou, it has produced an enthusiasm and an expectation for physical change, a feeling not often found among Americans today.

Guizhou has built forty-five of the world’s one hundred highest bridges. It has eleven airports, with three more under construction. It has five thousand miles of expressways, ranked fourth among provinces in China by length. It has around a thousand miles of high-speed train track. Guizhou’s infrastructure isn’t made only of the twentieth-century stuff of steel and concrete.

Still, beneath Guizhou’s engineering marvels are counties mired in poverty. At $8,000 per capita, the province has the income of Botswana, 40 percent below China’s national average and less than a third that of rich coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai”

“Communist Party leaders like Xi Jinping studied in an educational system steeped in Marxism. For them, production was a noble deed to advance communism, while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism. This party believes that only the state has the wisdom to invest in strategic megaprojects, whereas consumers will waste money on themselves. It is hostile to ordinary people having much command of resources, which empowers an individual’s agency rather than the state’s.”

“China’s contribution consisted mostly of the labor involved in assembling foreign products, which was around 4 percent of the phone’s final value.

According to a teardown analysis, China’s contribution to the iPhone X reached around 25 percent of the final value of the phone.”

“Ise Jingu is the holiest shrine in Japan’s Shinto faith. Since it was first erected in 690 AD, craftspeople have completely rebuilt its sacred temples—made of wood and hay—every twenty years. In 2033, the temple will be rebuilt for its sixty-third reconsecration. Ise Jingu’s halls are made of Japanese cypress timbers that support a raised floor and are covered by a thatched roof of dried silvergrass. These structures use techniques from the seventh century: no nails, only dowels and wood joints. Though wood joinery is a complex craft, the rest of the construction is simple. Why does this ritual persist? In part, it has to do with the Shinto faith in spiritual renewal. It is also about the preservation of craft knowledge. Twenty years is the length of a generation, and the caretakers of the Ise Jingu have attempted to ensure that knowledge about how to rebuild this shrine can be passed on to descendants.

When a fire broke out on the roof of Notre Dame de Paris in 2019, it revealed how little knowledge about cathedral construction is left in the world. I would bet that Ise Jingu, built out of wood, will endure longer than the great pyramids and cathedrals made of stone.

Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice. The National Nuclear Security Administration found that it could no longer produce “Fogbank,” a classified material used to detonate the bomb, because it hadn’t kept good records of the production process and everyone who knew how to produce it had retired. The NNSA then spent $69 million to relearn how to produce this material.

“Previous Chinese leaders have talked about the importance of upgrading industry, which sometimes means limiting investment into labor-intensive or highly polluting sectors that China no longer needs. Xi has declared that China targets completionism, which means that not even “low-end industries” should move out of China.

“Xi has repeatedly stated that he’s not interested in abandoning manufacturing for services. In authoritative speeches, Xi cited “certain Western countries” that forsook the real economy for the fictitious economy.

“How can the United States do better? As a starting point, it could develop a better understanding of how China has grown into a technology superpower. If members of Congress continue to resort to the laziest explanations (“they’re just stealing all our IP”), then the United States will never grasp the importance of building up process knowledge. And it will fail to gain urgency to fix its technological deficiencies. At the same time, Americans should develop a bit more humility about their own technological capabilities. The sooner that the United States treats China as a peer worth studying, the sooner it can develop a new playbook for success

“Why are so many Chinese still leaving? Because entire generations feel whipsawed by the engineering state’s violent mood swings. Their jobs, and indeed their lives, in China felt like dead ends. They’re not making great money in Thailand either, but they are able to have a lot of fun in its relaxed atmosphere.

Xi has talked about achieving national greatness without backing it up with economic growth. The trouble is that when people suffer—as they do through a property collapse, high unemployment, or lockdowns—they start to wonder what they are really getting. It’s certainly not enrichment. When they’re given a cold, hard smack in the face by something that certainly doesn’t feel like greatness, they become unmoored. This sense of alienation has been a big reason to rùn.

The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is perhaps 60 percent correct on everything.* He’s driving toward a usually admirable long-term goal. But in the name of achieving change, the engineering state delivers such beatings on people or industries that they are unable to pick themselves back up again. Even if Xi’s judgments are right, his brute-force solutions reliably worsen things.

It is because engineers don’t know how to persuade. The Communist Party insists on a history in which the party is always correct and where all errors come from traitors or foreigners. Rather than acknowledge fault and tell persuasive stories, the instinct of the engineering state is simply to censor alternative narratives. Xi comes across as someone who is a little bit too eager for groveling respect from the rest of the world, which is exactly why he’ll never get it.”

“That is why China will not outcompete the United States. The engineering state has delivered great things. But the Communist Party is made up of too many leaders who distrust their own people and have little idea how to appeal to the rest of the world. They will continue to bring literal-minded solutions for their problems, attempting to engineer away their challenges, leaving the situation worse than they found it. Beijing will never be able to draw on the best feature of the United States: Embracing pluralism and individual rights. The Communist Party is too afraid of the Chinese people to give them real agency. Beijing will not recognize that the creatives and entrepreneurs it is chasing into exile are not the enemy. It will not accept that their creative energy could bring as much prestige to China as great public works.”