A Tale of American Lawyers and Chinese Engineers

‘No two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese… masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don’t get in line’, according to Dan Wang in his recent book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.

Wang was born in China and, at seven years of age, migrated with his parents to Canada, and then moved to the United States. He is currently a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University. He spent six years in China, from 2017 to 2023, as an economic and technology analyst and writer, and his book grew out of this experience.

Despite their commonalities, the U.S. and China have fundamental differences, writes Wang. China would be an ‘engineering state’ whereas the U.S. is a ‘lawyerly society’. Most Chinese Communist Party leaders have been engineers focused on building mega projects such as highways, bridges, fast trains and airports. Such construction has been a source of domestic and international political prestige. It has also been a key foundation for China’s rise as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse.

Another example of wrong-headed social engineering was China’s zero-Covid policy which was ultimately ineffectual and abandoned following protests in Shanghai. Wang argues that over the past seven decades China has experienced lengthy periods of stability punctuated by government-triggered chaos. The Chinese state is usually level-headed but every so often succumbs to extreme, ineffective policies. In sum, Wang argues that the engineering state has remarkable strengths and appalling weaknesses—a more lawyerly society can help prevent these weaknesses.

Wang argues that the U.S. used to be an engineering state. It enjoyed a big growth spurt between the 1850s and 1950s. During this period, it built canals, interstate railways and highways, the commercial airline system, and skyscrapers in Manhattan and Chicago. Then there was the Manhattan Project which produced the first nuclear weapons, and the Apollo program which landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969.

But the U.S. engineering state made mistakes, triggering public opposition. Urban planners such as Robert Moses rammed highways through dense urban neighbourhoods; U.S. government agencies sprayed pesticides, especially DDT; and some government regulators were captured by big business.

This provoked a backlash against the U.S.’s engineering state, giving rise to the ‘lawyerly society’ as the country’s elite—dominated by lawyers focused on procedure and process rather than getting things done. Indeed, over the past 50 years the U.S. has not been effective at maintaining and building infrastructure.

New York and other big cities have long had housing shortages. New York and California are ineffective at building mass transit compared with such places as Rome, Paris or Barcelona. The military-industrial complex is behind schedule in many projects. Even in the private sector, Detroit automakers and companies such as Intel and Boeing have many tales of woe, sapping the U.S.’s dynamism.

Wang is critical of the offshoring of large parts of the U.S.’s manufacturing sector to China, motivated by short-term profits. One consequence has been the loss of process knowledge, proficiency gained from practical experience, which is so critical for efficiency and flexibility. By contrast, Chinese workers who assembled the early versions of Apple’s iPhone were able to turn their newly acquired skills to making other products, such as drones.

Wang’s analysis can seem simplistic as it reduces much of America’s and China’s challenges and differences to the roles of engineers and lawyers. And it is not clear how their roles could be wound back, as Wang recommends. But Wang’s book is of great value as it offers many insights based on firsthand experience in China. While the engineering state has many inefficiencies, notably excess capacity and overproduction, Wang argues it is enabling the top five percent of Chinese companies to be technological leaders and challenge the U.S. in fields including AI, semiconductors, biotechnology and renewable energy.

John West is the author of Asian Century … on a Knife-edge and executive director of the Asian Century Institute. His career has included major stints at the Australian Treasury, the OECD, the Asian Development Bank Institute and Tokyo’s Sophia University.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).