How China Engineered the Next Century

The United States today faces a challenge that China had in the 1980s. In the preceding decades of Mao Zedong’s long reign, his cyclical policies of class struggle ended up leaving a mess in their wake. Mao achieved some modicum of reduced inequality, albeit in bloody fashion, but those years culminating in the disastrous Cultural Revolution did little to foster economic growth. The government leadership of the ’80s, led by Deng Xiaoping, inherited an economy with dismal infrastructure, listless workers, and stagnation. A more egalitarian society didn’t mean much if everyone was still struggling to make ends meet. The state’s leaders knew they had to change course.

Deng began a process of remaking the state-run command economy of the previous era by incorporating more capitalistic elements. People who might have been designated class enemies a decade earlier found government support if it meant boosting output. However, Deng was wary of having China fully embrace capitalism. His answer, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” hinged on a continuous balancing act by encouraging enough privatization for growth, but not too much to bring in cronyism or, even worse, Western-style liberalism. As Deng put it, they were “crossing the river by feeling the stones.”

The United States is crossing its own river today. It too has been stuck in a period of prolonged class conflict, though with the capitalists besting the workers in this case. It too has a weakened economy lacking key inputs for development: housing, public infrastructure, and industrial capacity. Notably, these are inputs that China has accumulated in spades, so much so that America accuses it of “overcapacity.” A look across the Pacific raises some uncomfortable questions: Has China leapfrogged ahead? And should America change course by copying it?

Some Americans have developed a severe case of China envy; I’ve felt it grow over the course of my own life. As a kid, I went back to China to visit family every other year. I started out thinking that my life in America was, of course, superior to life in China. With plentiful toys, air conditioning, and toilets, it was no competition.

Sometime in my teens, I watched China build slick new subway stations as American public transit floundered. I found bidets where I expected latrine pits; I watched the state build so many high-rise apartments that housing actually became cheaper. In the decade after the 2008 recession, the average price of an urban apartment unit in China fell from nine times the average household income to seven (just picture a YIMBY drooling over that stat). My social media feeds now regularly feature memes about an upcoming “Chinese century,” and the Western commentariat has begun to mourn the end of the American one.

This shakiness in US dominance is a worrying sign for those in the political establishment whose primary motivation is beating China. While few in Washington may admit it outright, their strategy so far looks a lot like riffing on the Chinese playbook: adopt some tenets of a foreign political economy to revitalize a stagnant domestic one. Beat China by becoming China.

In this light, Joe Biden’s attempt to build out America’s semiconductor and green energy industries looks like a half-assed Chinese five-year plan, while Donald Trump’s efforts to foster domestic manufacturing through tariffs are a confused stab at a protectionist strategy that China has already perfected. The United States is clumsily feeling out the stones in the riverbed, trying to build what China has. But how did China do it?

In his book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, the technology analyst Dan Wang thinks the answer is obvious: China builds so much because, in the end, it’s a country run by engineers.

China’s current engineer in chief, Xi Jinping, trained as a chemical engineer at Tsinghua University, the country’s top science school. His predecessor, Hu Jintao, was a hydraulic engineer. The Politburo Standing Committee, the highest governing body of the Communist Party, is so full of engineers that they “could have run a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate,” Wang writes. And these engineers have helped China cement its place as an industrial powerhouse that, he estimates, “produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product.”

In America, the last president with any kind of engineering background was Jimmy Carter. Before him, it was Herbert Hoover. Wang chalks up America’s failure to build to the fact that it’s largely run by lawyers, a diagnosis that takes a page from Abundance. (Disclaimer: My boss cowrote the book.) In this telling, the pedantry of law-degree-toting political elites stalls construction and innovation.

For Wang, the benefit of having a lawyerly society is that it does a better job protecting people’s rights from a tyrannical state (President Trump’s latest overtures to authoritarianism notwithstanding). Meanwhile, China’s engineering state has been able to build so much partly because it can just bulldoze the rights of people who stand in the way.

The primary conflict of the 21st century, then, is not a clash of civilizations or a race between Chinese socialism and American capitalism—labels that Wang finds “are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were.” Instead he poses a new dichotomy: “an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction.”

But are these new labels of engineers versus lawyers up to the task?

Wang writes most vividly of the might of China’s engineering state in two of its southern provinces: Guizhou and Guangdong.

Guizhou is one of China’s poorest provinces, known for its jagged mountains and for being the birthplace of the famed Lao Gan Ma chili oil. It has also been a playground for China’s civil engineers for the past decade. The province boasts having nearly 50 of the world’s highest bridges. It has 11 airports and a thousand or so miles of high-speed rail. During a cycling trip through the province, Wang recounts unexpectedly passing through one of the world’s largest guitar manufacturing hubs, at least according to state media. Guizhou’s government is pitching its next industrial pivot to make the province a hub for AI data centers. This dynamism, as seen from one observer’s handlebars, is awe-inspiring: It serves as proof to the Chinese people that their economic system works and is enviable around the world. As Wang puts it, “Call it propaganda of the deed, but one way to impress a billion-plus people is to pour a lot of concrete.”

Guangdong, on China’s southern coast, is what Guizhou and many other provinces aspire to. Guangdong is home to Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley. Whereas America’s Silicon Valley is mostly sleepy high-income suburbs and fancy software campuses, Shenzhen is a metropolis of tech giants and manufacturing facilities, from the high end to the low end. People physically build gadgets there, imbuing the workforce with a know-how that only experience can provide.

With all this expertise in the neighborhood, supply chains can mold themselves around whatever a new product requires. As one former Apple engineer told Wang, “Almost always, we found someone in Shenzhen by asking a guy who knows a guy whose cousin might be able to produce a few hundred thousand new screws.” It’s this kind of proximity that lets a Chinese company like Huawei grow from a regional telephone-switch manufacturer to a global titan in telecommunications—which is just one of the company’s many pursuits (artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, smartphones, drones, and whatever else Shenzhen can make being the others). Meanwhile, Apple killed its electric vehicle side project last year and seems more interested in prestige TV.

An engineering state does not come without costs. The builders of Guizhou’s vacant airports and bridges connecting empty cliffsides are unlikely to recoup the cost of their investments. The provincial government has a severe debt problem, and inspectors from Beijing have locked up some of its more overzealous builders. The aforementioned reduction in housing prices was a byproduct of a collapsing real estate bubble that wiped out an estimated $18 trillion in household wealth. The state is still propping up the housing market and trying to unwind the crisis. Even China’s much-admired electric vehicle industry required state bailout after state bailout as the country’s industrial policy spurred start-ups to cannibalize each other’s profit margins and drive each other out of business. Yet again, the state called for a thousand flowers to bloom, only to let them wither.

The government’s fixation on heavy manufacturing and public works accompanies a meager social safety net. China has a regressive tax system, largely taxing consumption and ignoring wealth by failing to levy property taxes. With little tax revenue, the government spends less on pensions, unemployment insurance, and healthcare than other rich peer countries. In a 2021 speech, Xi lectured, “For we must avoid letting people get lazy from their sense of entitlement to welfare.” Wang argues that in this respect—the stingy state of social services and the moralistic browbeating of it all—China is an American conservative’s fondest dream. Xi is especially disdainful of the younger generation facing record unemployment, advising them to “eat bitterness.” Wang recalls a 2017 incident where a Henan province high school had 3,000 of its students do compulsory “vocational experience” as “interns” in a Foxconn factory assembling iPhones. It’s this churn of labor that powers China’s engineering state.

Periodically, this technocratic system goes haywire, especially when these engineers dabble in the most intimate part of people’s lives. Wang recounts how it was actually one of China’s top missile engineers who dreamed up the country’s one-child policy. This program set the birthrate as an engineering metric to hit by any means necessary, whether through forced sterilizations, child trafficking, or infanticide. These “engineers” were too successful: The country faces a precipitous decline in birth rates. Decades of the policy skewed the gender ratio as parents selectively aborted female fetuses. Additionally, as China became more middle-class, families grew smaller, matching global development trends. Now the government is trying to engineer the opposite result by cajoling and shaming women into having more than one child. The engineering state’s ambition easily bleeds into hubris again and again, from population controls in one era to pandemic lockdowns in the next. Wang’s book devotes nearly equal attention to his reverence for China’s engineering state and his sober accounting of its horrific costs. And despite this balance, he still thinks it’s a model with lessons for the United States.

The US recently flirted with the idea of an engineering state, one administered by the world’s most famous engineer, Elon Musk. Musk has spoken admiringly of China’s manufacturing might, especially its capacity to get people to work like hell. Once in government, though, Musk ended up leading a campaign of destruction rather than construction, slashing contracts and threatening to lay off federal employees in a vain attempt to get them to work harder. After Musk unceremoniously left the administration, President Trump mused about deporting him for his insolence.

Alex Karp, CEO of the defense tech firm Palantir, meanwhile, does seem quite interested in building a US engineering state. Karp shares Wang’s critique that American engineers have not been able to build useful things. It is true that many in the American tech industry have dedicated their careers to building B2B workflow solutions or apps that make teens depressed. However, instead of building public infrastructure, Karp’s vision of the engineering state is focused on creating enterprise software for the Department of Homeland Security—the code to fight wars abroad and surveil Americans at home. So far, the lessons that Musk and Karp seem to have taken from the Chinese model is to condescend to their workforce or build the panopticon.

Wang admittedly doesn’t want these kinds of engineers at the helm, but suggests instead looking to Robert Moses, the famed New York City planner. As a builder of bridges, parks, and highways, Moses is someone the “Chinese would recognize something in,” Wang writes. Infamous for carving his projects through working-class and predominantly Black neighborhoods, Moses has enjoyed a recent revisionist moment, as commentators interested in reviving state capacity romanticize his achievements. Wang is fully aware of Moses’s defects and prejudices, but still argues that we gotta hand it to him—the guy had moxie! Moses “achieved something we no longer see among public officials,” Wang writes: He “delivered projects on time and under budget, year after year, while avoiding corruption charges.”

In attempting to rehabilitate Moses, Wang charts a straightforward pathway across the river, but it’s really more of a trap. He offers such a balanced accounting of praise and criticism for Moses and the Chinese engineering state that his ultimate endorsement of engineers is undermined by all the tradeoffs he has already pointed out. How nice it would have been to have a Robert Moses who wasn’t racist and liked taking the train. How nice it would be for America to embrace the good parts of China’s building policies and avoid the wasteful and punitive authoritarian tendencies. Wang’s path to the riverbank tries to launch the reader across from a single stone—as if the way a society builds and innovates is not an interwoven synthesis of political, social, and economic conditions.

Wang’s fixation on Chinese engineers and American lawyers also elides all the other professions with an outsize effect on growth or stagnation. Both countries have a whole lot of consultants, civil servants, and—probably the most important—financiers. One of the first steps of construction is getting investors to fall in love or fall in line with a project. China’s financial sector is almost entirely state-run—bankers are fully invested in the engineering agenda, even if it offers questionable returns. Billionaires and other private sources of capital who stray from the state’s engineering blueprint are periodically disappeared. Jack Ma, founder of the fintech giant Ant Group and one of China’s richest men, was not seen for several months after he criticized government regulation. The state also nixed his company’s IPO, which was set to be one of the largest in world history. In America, finance has far more freedom, though it has used this freedom to build more of itself—micro loans, blockchain tokenization, the kind of stuff Chinese policymakers might call the “disorderly expansion of capital” or the “fictitious economy.”

Even Wang’s category of engineers is more fraught than it appears. Viewing Chinese leaders as such strips them of their most prominent identity: as politicians. During his teenage stint as a party secretary in a rural village, Xi contributed to local construction projects like dams, roads, and a methane tank, but his education at Tsinghua had less to do with organic chemistry and more to do with applied Marxism. After graduating, Xi went straight into the bureaucracy, serving as a military aide and then moving up the ladder of local government positions, where his projects ranged from boosting religious tourism and cleaning out corruption rings. He was not so much an engineer as an apparatchik, implementing policies and navigating factions.

Inane procedural hurdles in China can also impede state efficiency. Wang laments how the American legal system gets in the way of construction, but is it really more bureaucratic than the Chinese Communist Party? Chinese leaders, especially Xi, rule like Chinese parents: They emphasize the importance of homework, no matter how tedious. Xi even made an app for it. Tens of millions of workers, students, and civil servants have had to download the app to study and score points on how well they know Xi’s latest ideological pronouncements. At least Joe Biden didn’t make us all download an app to quiz us on “modern supply-side economics” or whatever he did with AUKUS. (Or maybe he might have had slightly better reelection chances if he had.) China has been able to build great industries, but it’s not necessarily because its engineers have escaped the slog of proceduralism. Wang tries to untangle the threads that help explain why China builds, but he ends up leaving a knot. His answer—that China builds because it is a nation run by engineers—has the unfortunate quality of being obvious yet incomplete.

In one of Breakneck’s later chapters, Wang takes a break from discussing engineers to highlight a group that is fed up with them: the defectors and émigrés. Some are young slackers trying to escape China’s intense work culture. Others dabble in illegal interests, whether it’s political dissidence, crypto, or ayahuasca. The less fortunate—those left behind by Chinese development—have a much more arduous trek to make if they want to escape. Last year, US officials arrested almost 40,000 Chinese nationals trying to cross the southwest border, up from just a few hundred a couple of years ago. Many took the dangerous route that other migrants take, crossing the Darién Gap in Panama and moving up through Central America. The well-off are leaving too, wary of the Chinese state’s capricious policies. Over 15,000 Chinese millionaires were projected to emigrate in 2024, according to one estimate. As Wang writes, “The only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.” American onlookers like myself must be careful where we place our envy.

While those fleeing China might be in the minority, this group poses a different measure of competition: which country offers its citizens the best chance at “the good life.” Wang is right to focus on this metric, and America’s attempt at “crossing the river by feeling the stones” should be about settling this question. Even after all its building, China might be losing ground on this front as its people vote with their feet. If Americans had the chance, how many would want to give life in China a shot?