America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Light rail. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever, if it even happens at all.
Meanwhile, there’s China. A country that builds much faster — high-speed trains, solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, drones — all churned out at breakneck speed.
Why can China do this, and why does it seem like America can’t?
Dan Wang is the author of a new book called Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It’s a deeply reported, deeply personal book about the country he grew up in, returned to, and then left again. And it’s filled with surprising insights into China’s evolution as a country.
There isn’t a single answer to the question about why China can move fast and why we can’t, but Wang offers one I haven’t 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 — and that many of our differences flow from this divide.
I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about how that engineering mindset has shaped China, and what these two societies can learn from each other. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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, “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.” Why do you see it that way?
The first thing is that both countries are, in many ways, unintelligible to themselves. How many Americans truly understand America? You’re sitting in the Gulf Coast, Sean, and I wonder how many Americans have a deep sense of what’s going on there.
I think Americans and Chinese are alike because both embrace dynamism and shortcuts. There’s a kind of hucksterism in the US — a willingness to cut corners, to improvise — 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.
Let’s get into the central idea of your book: China as an “engineering state” and America as a “lawyerly society.” It’s a striking frame. How did you come up with it, and why is it useful?
I wanted a fresh framework to understand these two countries beyond the stale 20th-century categories of capitalist, neoliberal, authoritarian, or democratic.
China, I argue, is an engineering state. At times, the entire Standing Committee of the Politburo, the country’s 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.
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.
The US isn’t 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 — suing people constantly, using accusations in the court of public opinion. His vice president, JD Vance, is also a Yale Law product.
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?
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.
Guizhou is in the far southwest: green mountains, jagged karst rocks, breathtaking beauty. It’s also China’s 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.
This poor province had half a dozen high-speed rail links, brand-new highways, and multiple airports. Meanwhile, America’s richest states struggle to maintain basic infrastructure.
Apparently 45 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges are in that one province, which is…wild.
Exactly. That’s 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’s more thrilling for an engineer than a record-breaking bridge or the world’s biggest dam?
Local leaders are also incentivized. If you’re a provincial official who builds a gigantic bridge, GDP ticks up for a while and you can point to your “big-ass bridge” when asking Beijing for a promotion. There’s a construction lobby, too — state-owned enterprises always whispering, “Isn’t it time for another mega-project?”
China builds fast, but you write that it also “breaks people.” What do you mean by that?
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.
“I don’t believe repression is necessary, but it certainly played a role in the trajectory we see today.”
But Beijing also insists on social engineering. It treats populations as if they can be managed like valves in a hydraulic system. Ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang face detention camps and forced assimilation. For the majority population, the hukou system has long restricted movement.
And then there’s the one-child policy. This was my favorite chapter to write, though also the most horrifying. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping empowered engineers to shape policy, and one brilliant mathematician from the missile industry convinced him that population trajectories could be managed like missile trajectories. The result was decades of forced sterilizations and abortions.
The official number is over 300 million abortions during the one-child era, the equivalent of the entire US population. Rural women were terrorized. Children were taken from mothers or beaten out of them. It was an idiotic policy pursued with staggering brutality.
Do you think China’s growth actually depended on this kind of repressiveness?
I’d like to say no, because I don’t want to believe repression is essential to flourishing. But it’s hard to deny that it was part of China’s growth formula. Compared with India, which is far more democratic and pluralistic, China has outperformed on many development indicators. India still has high illiteracy rates and malnutrition. China is considerably richer.
I don’t believe repression is necessary, but it certainly played a role in the trajectory we see today.
How do ordinary Chinese people feel about their own system?
It’s difficult to know, but many of my parents’ generation — born in the early 1960s — saw steady improvement. Their cities now have subways. They can ride high-speed rail. Some classmates became wealthy. The general sense has been: Life keeps getting better, decade by decade.
That said, under Xi Jinping, there are more headwinds: slowing growth, youth unemployment, government crackdowns on tech and property sectors. But the tangible improvements still matter. China opened its first expressway only in 1988. By the time that generation turned 18, the country had built a highway system larger than America’s. Nine years later, it had built another. That scale of visible change fuels optimism.
Let’s pivot back to America. What has China’s rise helped you see more clearly about the US?
In the US we debate living standards, housing shortages, decarbonization, and the hollowed-out manufacturing sector. On all of those, China offers lessons.
China’s “housing crisis” is oversupply — prices collapsing because they built too much. In the US, prices are skyrocketing because we build too little. China manufactured masks, swabs, and PPE during the pandemic at a scale US factories couldn’t match. It has built vast mass transit systems.
I don’t think we need to copy China. If America could just spend as much on building transit as Japan, Spain, or France, that would be enough. But China reminds us what abundance looks like.
Is the friction we’re talking about here — the endless procedures, lawsuits, rules — the price of pluralism?
That’s hard to accept. Walk around New York or the Midwest and it feels like the ruins of a once-great industrial civilization. Infrastructure is just barely maintained. Housing is unaffordable where the jobs are. Decarbonization requires transmission lines and wind and solar projects, but we can’t build at scale.
Some degree of litigiousness protects pluralism, yes. But right now America mostly works for the wealthy. If you’re rich in New York, you can live above the housing crisis in a skinny high-rise, travel by car or helicopter, even hire private firefighters. But a society that only works for the wealthy is not sustainable.
Why does this procedure fetish seem worse now than it used to be? We had lawyers when we built the Hoover Dam and sent people to the moon.
The lawyers changed. For much of American history, lawyers were deal-makers, often working alongside generals and builders. Eisenhower, for example, had personally experienced the misery of driving cross-country on unpaved roads, which helped inspire the interstate highway system.
But in the 1960s, public trust in the technocratic establishment collapsed. People reacted against environmental destruction, against Robert Moses ramming highways through cities, against Vietnam. Law students at places like Harvard and Yale embraced a new slogan: “Sue the bastards.” Lawyers became regulators and litigators, not builders. They solved the problems of the previous generation, but in doing so created new ones: paralysis, gridlock, endless procedure.
Let’s talk briefly about Trump. How does Beijing see him?
As a familiar type. Trump is like a coal-mine boss who stumbled into wealth: uncouth, transactional, driven by animal instinct. The Communist Party knows how to handle people like that.
Beijing rolled out the red carpet for him, literally letting him handle ancient golden artifacts. Trump clearly loved the glamour. He’s never had a bad word for Xi Jinping, except during the pandemic. In some ways, he’s been friendlier to China than to Germany or Japan.
But he’s mercurial. Sometimes he waves a big stick, sometimes he cuts a deal. That instability makes him both a threat and, oddly, a comfort. They know how to manage a figure like him.
I think Americans understand that China is this formidable political object, but is it more than just a great power looking to pursue and defend its own interest? Is it also an ideological project? Does Beijing want to remake the world in its image, or does it just want to dominate its sphere?
Scholars debate this. Some argue that if you give China an inch — say, Taiwan — it will take more. Others think China mostly wants to dominate its own sphere, East and Southeast Asia, and muzzle critics abroad.
China doesn’t necessarily want to turn America into socialism. But it does want to suppress dissent about the Communist Party, even overseas. The question is: Do we tolerate that as mere influence, or do we see it as intolerable interference?
What would it look like to combine the best of the American and Chinese systems?
Honestly, there’s no utopia. Every country is a tangle of imperfections. Europe provides mass transit and middle-class goods, but housing is often less affordable than in the US. Japan has demographic stagnation. Canada has soaring home prices.
The lesson isn’t that anyone has it figured out, it’s that we can all learn from each other. The US remains uniquely dynamic, always debating, always questioning. That constant self-criticism gives it a better shot at fixing itself than most places.
You end the book on a surprisingly optimistic note about both countries. Why?
Because neither China nor America is condemned to stasis. Europe and Japan often are. Both the US and China still embrace dynamism and change, even if imperfectly.
In the US, I admire the relentlessness of debate. We’re always asking how we screwed up, and how we might do better. In China, the system is rigid, but it sometimes produces shockingly fast fixes to deep problems. That capacity for reform, even if inconsistent, is real.
I still think pluralism is the safer long-term bet than top-down control and the sort of whipsaw changes you get in an engineering state.
I agree. Pluralism is the right virtue. But the US also has to govern effectively. If it can’t provide housing, infrastructure, safety, or opportunity for ordinary citizens, pluralism won’t save it.
Meanwhile, if China continues to build and deliver visible improvements, it could weaken America by further hollowing out our industries and inspiring pride at home. The real contest is simply this: Which country works best for the people living in it?
And right now, America’s biggest task is to actually do better for the broad majority. That’s the challenge we all have to meet.
