The US is Run By Lawyers, and China by Engineers

In his new book, Dan Wang argues that America could learn from Beijing’s focus on technical innovation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Engineering Lessons Firm China by Christopher Beem read by Mark Lee.
When Dan Wang first heard President Donald Trump described the
date for imposing tariffs on US trade partners as Liberation Day,
the phrase caught his ear. Liberation is not a very
American word, he told me recently. It's much more of
a Chinese word. Wang would know. For years as a

(00:23):
China based analyst for a macro research firm, he poured
over speeches and official documents of the Chinese Communist Party,
trying to extract meaning from OPAQ jargon. Wong now sees
parallels between Trump and President Shi Jinping. He says the
blind loyalty of their base, the demonization of foreigners, and
a willingness to create a sense of unneeds among immigrants

(00:45):
and minorities by threatening their status within society. What we
have in the US is authoritarianism without the good stuff,
he says, the good stuff being, according to Wang, things
such as high speed trains while functioning city and political
and economic stability. The US needs to study China if
it's going to remain a superpower, Wang argues in his

(01:07):
new book Breakneck. China's quest to engineer the future, but
it needs to learn their right lessons, including most importantly,
how to build in breakneck he argues that the key
difference between the two giants is that China is run
by engineers. In two thousand and two, all nine members
of the Politburo Standing Committee had engineering backgrounds, whereas the

(01:29):
US is run by lawyers. China prioritizes building colossal public
works such as bridges, dams, and airports, as well as
products like toys and iPhones. The US, by contrast, excels
at making and enforcing rules. This was a good thing
during the nineteen sixties and seventies, when lawyers pushed back
against the American technocratic regime that had damaged the environment,

(01:52):
run highways through urban neighborhoods, and gone the country mired
in Vietnam. But now the rule making has gone too far,
Wang says, and is preventing the US from keeping pace
with rivals. In this sense, Wang's argument dovetails with that
of Abundance, the recent bestseller by Ezra Kleine and Derek Thompson,
which urges US policymakers to cut red tape and boost

(02:14):
a supply of housing and transportation. But his book is
less of a policy treatise than a tour of what
China's engineering forward society looks like on the ground. The
good high speed rails and drones, the bad, the one
child in zero COVID policies, and the ugly human rights
violations and pointless replicas of European town squares. If the

(02:35):
US is going to outcompete China, Wong suggests, we need
to understand it first. That means letting go of simplistic
stories peddled by Washington and Silicon Valley. I think all
narratives about China are wrong all the time, he says.
For example, it's still conventional wisdom in some corners that
China can't innovate but only copy, an absurd charge in

(02:58):
the TikTok Deepseek budd Era, he's similarly unconvinced that China
is an unstoppable juggernaut destined to overtake the US as
the world's top power. Wang rejects familiar categories of China analysis,
liberal and conservative, hawk and dove, and resists pat answers,
except when it comes to hot pot, which he's described

(03:20):
as terrible. His idiosyncratic approach comes from experience. In his
book and in a recent conversation over Zoom while he
was vacationing in Paris. He shows an appreciation for how
the vagaries of a political and economic system can shape
both a country and a life, including his own. Wang,
who's just shy of thirty three, was born in Yunon

(03:42):
Province in southwestern China, a region known for its distance
from the seat of power and therefore its relative freedom.
His father was a software developer and his mother worked
as a radio and TV anchor. He had a blood
disease and lung issues as a child, which isolated him
from his peers. In two thousand, when Wang was seven,

(04:02):
his parents moved the family to Toronto and two years
later to Ottawa. He was enrolled in local public schools
and developed eclectic interests. At fifteen, he enlisted as a
Royal Canadian Army cadet. He also learned clarinet and hoped
to play professionally. Wang got a scholarship to the University
of Rochester in New York, where he studied philosophy. There

(04:24):
was never a question of following in his father's engineering footsteps,
since he was bad at math. He dropped out after
his junior year to work at Shopify in Toronto in
a marketing role, and then moved to the San Francisco
Bay Area in twenty fifteen to do similar work for Flexport.
He did eventually get his diploma. Wang found the Bay
area insular and blinkered. People were saying San Francisco was

(04:47):
a center of the world. He says, that didn't feel
right to me. The transportation system and food scene underwhelmed,
and he wasn't excited about the same technologies that his
peers were crypto, virtual reality and web platforms. He was
more intrigued by the kind of heart engineering that was
happening in China, such as infrastructure mega projects, semiconductors, and

(05:09):
green energy. So in twenty sixteen, Wang moved to Hong
Kong to work at the financial analysis firm Gavaco Dragonomics,
demystifying China's politics and economy for investors who wanted to
know how they might affect, say, Brazilian soybean prices. The
firm didn't treat China as just another data set, he says,

(05:29):
but rather took a holistic view. He came to see
the CCP as an intellectual puzzle, a deeply weird institution
that thinks state control and capitalism are not mutually exclusive.
In twenty seventeen, he began posting an annual letter as
a way to keep up with friends. His interweaving of travelogs,
economic analysis, and riffs on sci fi and opera gained

(05:52):
a devoted following, including the economist Tyler Cowen and the
tech writer Ben Thompson. In an interview when whom Wang
considers a mentor, credited Wang's background as an outsider, a
Canadian looking at US politics, a Unon native looking at
Beijing policy with shaping his distinct worldview. Wang moved to

(06:13):
mainland China in twenty eighteen to get a closer view
of how the system works. He got what he wished for.
The COVID nineteen pandemic helped crystallize Wang's idea of the
engineering state. He lived in Shanghai during the draconian lockdowns,
when people often struggled to get food. Workers in all
white protective suits, sprayed buildings, and megaphones instructed residents to

(06:36):
repress your soul's yearning for freedom. The fiasco revealed the
downside of treating people like cogs in a piece of machinery.
The experience, combined with China's one child policy showed him
that the engineering state is not just about infrastructure. It's
also about population and social engineering. He says that's the
much scarier part. After returning to the US and twenty

(06:59):
twenty five three to accept a fellowship at Yale Law School,
he was struck by the ambition, but also the conformity
of the students he met, an observation he connected to
University of Michigan professor Nicholas Bagley's argument that the U
S Government is too procedure obsessed. Combined, these ideas became
the framework of breakneck Wong towards the successes of the

(07:20):
engineering state, from a town that makes guitars to Shenzen's
nimble ecosystem of tech startups and factories, while recognizing that
toll the system takes on individual Chinese, particularly young people,
many of whom have fled the cities or the country entirely. Meanwhile,
he exhorts the US to learn to love building again.
Anyone looking for policy specifics should look elsewhere, He says,

(07:45):
there are plenty of think tanks and books dedicated to
how America might reindustrialize. Wang instead calls for the US
to take a page from Shi's playbook and rediscover hard
engineering as a proud pursuit to celebrate the world of
atoms instead of the world world of bits. He argues
that we should rehabilitate Robert Moses, who created some of

(08:05):
New York City's most dynamic infrastructure, and recognized Navy Admiral
Hymen Rickover, who launched the first nuclear powered submarine, and
if the randy and romance of bridges and skyscrapers doesn't inspire,
a strong manufacturing base is essential to maintaining military advantage.
It doesn't matter how many apps the US designs or

(08:26):
even tools for AI warfare. If it runs out of missiles,
what are the odds that the US maintains its dominance?
Wang is surprisingly sanguin. He points to China's debt burden,
its aging population, and the government's fear of its own
people as problems that he predicts will prevent it from
surpassing the US. Meanwhile, he argues that the US is

(08:47):
in a strong position to win the long game if
it recommits to building. That's a big if, and it's
looking bigger every day. The US is already falling behind
China when it comes to research and key fields such
as renewable energy, quantum mechanics, and nuclear power. The gaps
in this and other strategic areas only threaten to widen

(09:08):
as a second Trumpet administration undermines the country's competitiveness by
imposing tariffs, cutting funding for science, and driving immigrants away.
Wog calls American export controls on goods sent to China
the worst of all worlds. They've scotched the snake, to
quote Macbeth, not killed it, and Elon Musk, America's best

(09:29):
candidate for a modern Robert Moses, has fallen out with
the Trump administration. Given that the US is running away
from Wang's prescription, Ragnek reads as a warning. The book's
title seems to refer to China's speedy growth, but it
might also apply to the US. After all, it's what
can happen when you slip