More than a quarter of a century after China replaced the Soviet Union as the United States’ primary peer competitor, there is still no consensus about how to describe the nature of their systemic rivalry. The cold war framing of a contest between market capitalism and state socialism stopped making sense decades ago, and American claims to be defending democracy against authoritarianism are increasingly implausible.
Dan Wang proposes a new lens for understanding the two superpowers, identifying China as an engineering state and the US as a lawyerly society. China’s technocratic elite, most of whom are engineers by training, have built at breakneck speed for the past 40 years while the lawyers who dominate America’s governing class excel at blocking things, often for good reasons.
China’s engineering state has been remarkably successful at lifting its population out of poverty through rapid urbanisation and large infrastructure projects and is now challenging American leadership in technology. But without many of the legal and societal checks that hamper American dynamism, Chinese progress has come at a human cost.
Wang left China with his parents at the age of seven, growing up in Canada and the United States, where he worked in Silicon Valley before returning to China in 2017 as a technology analyst for an investment firm. For six years he published an annual letter blending narrative, analysis and personal observations that became required reading for anyone interested in China.
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Wang brings the same qualities of curiosity, open-mindedness and intellectual rigour to this book, along with a sympathy and admiration for both China and the US. And as anyone who has lived in both countries can attest, they have much in common, including a sense of national exceptionalism, a pragmatic, entrepreneurial spirit and what Wang describes as a sometimes crass strain of materialism.
It is hard to overstate the scale and speed of construction in China since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began in 1980, building a system twice the length of the US’s and a high-speed rail network 20 times the size of Japan’s. Hundreds of millions of people have left the countryside – and poverty – for new cities, many of them bigger than London, New York or Paris and some of which now form urban megahubs with more than 100 million inhabitants each.
In a country where the welfare state is threadbare by western standards, the large infrastructure buildout has created public goods that are a form of redistribution. And the impact of China’s development on human wellbeing is measurable in statistics such as average life expectancy, which has increased by more than 11 years since 1980.
Wang sees in today’s China the kind of dynamism and enthusiasm for building grand projects that drove American industrial expansion in the early 20th century. But big infrastructure projects in the US in recent decades have often been blocked or delayed by lawyers who usually represent the interests of well-off incumbents rather than those who would benefit from faster public transport links and more abundant, affordable housing.
China’s breakneck building spree has taken a heavy toll on the environment, which the government has only in recent years attempted to remedy. But where the engineering state has gone most badly wrong is when the Communist Party has applied the same approach to people’s personal lives as it does to industrial development, becoming – in Stalin’s phrase – “engineers of the soul”.
Wang documents the disastrous one-child policy in vivid detail, describing how what the leadership saw as a scientific, modern approach to population control led to a brutal campaign of forced sterilisations and abortions. Over 3½ decades, China conducted almost as many abortions as the current population of the United States, and the policy’s malign consequences will persist long into the future.
A similar approach drove Beijing to persist with its zero-Covid policy even after the Omicron variant proved itself to be impossible to control. Wang was in Shanghai for the imposition of a lockdown, when the city’s top mental health official urged people to “repress your soul’s yearning for freedom”.
Wang rejects the conventional western analysis that China’s authoritarian system will inevitably prevent it from achieving technological supremacy. He points to the example of Bismarck’s Prussia, which combined autocracy with the invention of the modern research university and became the pioneer in electrical engineering and chemicals.
At the end of the book, Wang considers whether his parents would have had a better life if they had remained in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan rather than emigrating to Canada and the US in the 1990s. The fact that he can even ask the question is testament to how much has changed in the intervening years, as is his conclusion that they might well have been happier.
