There’s never been a shortage of hot takes about what really makes the United States and China so different: Capitalism versus socialism; democracy as opposed to authoritarianism; Christianity or Confucianism; equity versus efficiency. In his highly anticipated new book, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, Hoover Institution fellow Dan Wang proposes a fresh lens for looking at the world’s two largest superpowers: the US is a “lawyerly society,” he argues, while China is an “engineering state.”
Wang’s argument is based on looking at the professional backgrounds of each country’s elite class. In Washington, most politicians are trained as lawyers, but in Beijing, senior leaders are more often educated in civil or defense engineering. Wang theorizes that the academic subjects political leaders study during their formative years later profoundly shape their respective governance styles. Lawyers tend to emphasize compliance and patience. Engineers prefer to move fast, build big, and only later contend with the costs.
Wang’s framework isn’t about declaring winners and losers. Instead, he places the US and China at opposite ends of a spectrum, while countries like France, Germany, and Japan fall somewhere in between. His prescription? “For the US to be 20 percent more engineering, and for China to be 50 percent more lawyerly,” he told me earlier this week.
Our conversation took place on Tuesday, the day Wang’s book was published, in a small park in Manhattan. New York City has one of the world’s oldest subway systems, but it hasn’t approved a major new train line since 2007. In his book, Wang includes a detailed discussion about Robert Moses, the controversial urban planner who built some of the city’s most famous and enduring infrastructure but also tore up marginalized neighborhoods in the process. He argues that New York could use another transformative builder like Moses.
The conversation felt personal because of the contrast between New York, where I now live, and Wuhan, where I grew up. When I left Wuhan for college, the city built seven new subway lines in four years, stretching almost 100 miles. Locals nicknamed Wuhan’s mayor at the time 满城挖 or “Mayor Dig-It-All-Up,” to show their disapproval. But now that the construction is finished and Wuhan has been completely transformed, Mayor Dig-It-All-Up is remembered fondly by many locals, and he has been elevated by the central government to manage a province in China’s southwest.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Ambition to Build
WIRED: Do you think the US should move to the other end of the engineer-lawyer spectrum you describe and become a full-blown engineering state?
Dan Wang: The US used to be more of an engineering state—it's certainly built a lot. We're chatting in New York City right now, and this is the city that built subway stations about 120 years ago. The United States built canal systems and highways and transcontinental rail systems and the Apollo missions, as well as the Manhattan Project. A lot of what I'm trying to do is to say that the US should recover some of these engineering muscles. It certainly doesn't have to be like China.
Since we're talking about New York. You wrote about Robert Moses in your book. Is he an example of a positive engineer leader to you?
Robert Moses was neither a lawyer nor an engineer, but he was someone who built at breakneck speed. He should have been indicted, as he was by Robert Caro [who wrote The Power Broker, a damning biography of Moses]. He should have been stopped by the 1960s.
But it doesn't make sense that we are still stomping on Robert Moses' name at a time when it has become completely impossible to build mass transit in New York City. We do need a little bit of construction. It doesn't have to be exactly Robert Moses–style, but we need to be focused a little bit more on delivering outcomes rather than focusing on process.
Is it enough to just employ engineers in the government? Or is there another factor?
There has to be more. There has to be a sense that the law is a way also to strike deals rather than an instrument to create litigation and regulation.
One big challenge for New York’s subway system now is how to maintain a 100-year-old system. Yes, China has been building a lot in the last decade, but will they be able to maintain it well?
The engineering state is always going to be tearing things down and building more, in part, because they are engineers. Neither the local nor the central governments are very imaginative, because whenever they have the ability to spend on something, they just build on more infrastructure.
Swallowing Pride
When you talk about bringing back manufacturing to the US, are you envisioning bringing back all kinds of manufacturing or only a selective few?
I think we should err on the side of bringing back more rather than less. Maybe it is hard to say that sneakers and T-shirts are the most important thing, but for anything more complex, the US has a really hard time building. It is good for the US to have more electronics production; it is good for us to have more electric vehicle battery production.
Can the US really bring those industries back, given that China does not seem interested in letting go of its manufacturing advantage or deindustrializing?
Chinese technology leaders, like BYD and CATL, are really eager to invest more in the US. It might be difficult at some point, say if Beijing disallows CATL from investing in the US, but for the most part, what we see is considerable eagerness from Chinese companies to make these investments. And for the most part, I believe that the US should be welcoming them.
Beijing is already scrutinizing this kind of overseas investment, because it doesn’t want to lose China’s trade secrets. Did they learn that from the US?
Perhaps they learned from the US. But I think the US now should learn more from China. If China had substantial help, especially from companies like Apple and Tesla, building up manufacturing facilities in Shenzhen and Shanghai, then the US can still learn more from China rather than refusing to learn and blocking Chinese technology leaders from building more.
And that requires swallowing our pride here, right? Like we actually need to learn from China, even though US politicians don’t want to admit that.
Yes. I think that we should all swallow pride. My personal philosophy is that if anyone wants to serve me shit, my answer is always going to be: “Please sir, may I have another?” That's just how we should all be living.
Engineering Gone Wrong
Do you think tech companies prefer operating in an engineer-led country like China rather than America’s lawyerly society?
Companies generally prefer having some degree of rule by engineers. Because engineers are much more focused on doing very rational things, like figuring out how to build a great subway system. Perhaps their regulations are also more rational.
That doesn't mean lawsuits everywhere are bad. Sometimes companies have a great time suing each other and protecting their intellectual property. But, in general, a common sentiment among business elites is that China's government understands us. You see this with Elon Musk, praising China's premier who helped him build the Gigafactory in Shanghai.
But you also wrote recently that entrepreneurs and executives can sometimes feel miserable because the Chinese government changes its mind very abruptly.
Sometimes it is the case that the engineering state treats a lot of the society and the economy as simply another engineering problem. They try to engineer the population, first from not having kids, and now, into having more kids, or the economy, from valuing profitable sectors to delving too much into sectors that better serve the national interest. And these efforts often backfire, because the economy and society are not relatively simple systems like a really big hydroelectric dam.
One of the core conclusions you draw is that an engineering-led government is supposed to make more rational decisions. To some degree, I agree with you, but I also don't know if I can trust the Chinese government to always make a rational decision. That kind of uncertainty, isn't that bad for companies?
Yes, I think six years of living in China made me realize that a government could be too efficient.
This idea of being fixated on a specific target and just charging at it at full speed.
That's right. And having lived through the zero-Covid experience, I think something I've realized is that the line between rationality and irrationality is kind of blurry.
Did that experience influence your belief that China should be 50 percent more lawyerly?
It would be good if people had some way to assert themselves against some of these horrible things, like the one-child policy. I don't worry that China will ever become quite like the lawyerly society, and be unable to build almost anything at all. It would be great if China could have some actual procedural safeguards, and for the US to have reasonable costs associated with building infrastructure in reasonable timelines, too.
This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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