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0:00:48 How do we AI-proof our jobs?
0:00:49 How do we fix the deficit?
0:00:52 How do we get our political system working again?
0:00:56 I’m Henry Blodgett, and I’m launching a new podcast called Solutions,
0:01:01 where every week I’ll talk to an innovative enterprising expert
0:01:05 to cut through the doom and focus on how to build a better world.
0:01:09 Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:13 The first episode will be out Monday, August 18th.
0:01:23 America has a hard time building stuff.
0:01:28 Roads, trains, light rail, bridges, housing.
0:01:34 Everything takes seemingly forever, if it even happens at all.
0:01:41 Last week, New York City approved a contract to start work on a subway extension
0:01:44 that was proposed a century ago.
0:01:45 A century.
0:01:52 Meanwhile, there’s China, a country that builds much, much faster.
0:01:54 High-speed rails take just a few years.
0:01:59 Solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, drones,
0:02:02 all churned out at breakneck speed.
0:02:04 Why is that?
0:02:06 Why can China do this?
0:02:10 And why does it seem like America can’t?
0:02:16 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:30 Today’s guest is Dan Wong.
0:02:33 He’s the author of a new book called Breakneck,
0:02:35 China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
0:02:41 It’s a deeply reported, deeply personal book about the country he grew up in,
0:02:43 returned to, and then left again.
0:02:48 And it’s filled with surprising insights into what China is,
0:02:53 what it’s becoming, what it reveals about America.
0:03:01 Dan Wong, welcome to the show.
0:03:02 It’s my pleasure to be here.
0:03:05 So, one of the first things you do say in the book,
0:03:08 you may actually say this on the very first page,
0:03:14 is that China and America are constantly locking horns.
0:03:17 And you find that both tragic and comical,
0:03:18 because, and now I’m quoting,
0:03:23 no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.
0:03:24 Why does it seem that way?
0:03:29 Well, I think the first thing that is true about both of these countries
0:03:33 is that, first, they’re mutually unintelligible to themselves.
0:03:38 I mean, how many Americans actually understand America?
0:03:41 You’re sitting in the Gulf Coast, Sean,
0:03:45 and I wonder how many Americans really have a really deep sense of what’s going on there.
0:03:50 So, the reason that I think that Chinese and Americans are alike
0:03:56 is that I’ve spent quite a bit of my life, you know, living through both of these countries.
0:04:01 I’m a Canadian, but I did spend, I have spent much more of my time in these countries.
0:04:08 And my rough schema is that I think that Japan and Europe are quite alike.
0:04:10 There’s a deep suspicion of change.
0:04:17 And I think Americans are pretty used to thinking about themselves as pretty different from the Europeans,
0:04:21 that they reject stasis, that they embrace dynamism.
0:04:24 There’s much more of a sense of hucksterism in the U.S.
0:04:27 There’s a sense that people take shortcuts.
0:04:31 And that’s exactly, I think, how the Chinese are as well.
0:04:37 That there is some sense that they come from a great country, a great civilization.
0:04:38 They have a great heritage.
0:04:41 At the same time, they do embrace change.
0:04:43 They do take shortcuts.
0:04:47 There’s just as much hucksterism over there as in the U.S.
0:04:51 And I think that’s kind of my schema for understanding China and the U.S.
0:04:55 is quite similar and pretty distinctive from Europe and the Japanese.
0:05:00 I want to get in to this idea, the central idea of the book.
0:05:08 Of China as an engineering state and America as a lawyer society.
0:05:10 It is a great frame.
0:05:15 And as soon as I heard it, so many things clicked into place for me.
0:05:19 How did you come up with this distinction?
0:05:21 And why do you find it so useful?
0:05:26 Well, I was really thinking about, you know, how the U.S. and China,
0:05:28 you know, two countries that I’ve spent a lot of time in.
0:05:36 Now that they’re locking horns, how should we really try to understand what they are doing?
0:05:42 And I wanted to go beyond some of these, you know, boring 20th century political science
0:05:48 terms like capitalist or neoliberal or authoritarian or democratic.
0:05:54 And to, you know, try to have a little bit more of a fresher framework for thinking about
0:05:56 both of these countries.
0:06:01 And, you know, China is a country I call the engineering state because at various points,
0:06:06 the entirety of the standing committee of the Politburo, China’s highest ruling echelon,
0:06:10 all of them had degrees in engineering of a very Soviet sort.
0:06:16 So this was true between 2002 to 2007, when the general secretary of the Communist Party,
0:06:19 then, Hu Jintao, was trained as a hydraulic engineer.
0:06:21 And this guy actually supervised the construction of a dam.
0:06:26 And his premier, the second in charge, Wen Jiabao, was a geologist.
0:06:33 And the issue with engineers is that they build a ton of shit, whether that’s roads or bridges
0:06:37 or hyperscalers or coal or container ports or homes.
0:06:43 But they’re also very inclined to treat society as just a giant math exercise.
0:06:49 So for Hu Jintao, society was just another big hydraulic system as if people can be directed
0:06:51 with the ease of valves.
0:06:58 And it’s pretty obvious also to realize that the U.S. started as a lawyerly society.
0:07:01 The Declaration of Independence reads like a legal case.
0:07:04 So many of the founding fathers were lawyers.
0:07:11 The first 16 presidents from Washington to Lincoln, all but three had been lawyers at some point.
0:07:17 And even in the present day, you know, the Biden White House is famously full of Yale Law School
0:07:22 grads, everyone from Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, Gino Raimondo, Brian Dees,
0:07:24 you can go on with these sort of things.
0:07:29 How lawyerly is America compared to the rest of the world?
0:07:31 Are we a unicorn on this front?
0:07:40 The U.S. is slightly exceptional, but I wouldn’t say that this is terribly exceptional in the
0:07:40 Anglosphere.
0:07:49 So, you know, the Anglosphere is full of this parliamentary tradition in which people who
0:07:53 are really skilled at debate tend to be the rulers of the country.
0:07:57 And that is kind of a sin that the British passed on to us.
0:08:02 So the U.S. is in some senses quite lawyerly.
0:08:05 Lawyers are a disproportionate part of the political class.
0:08:10 And I think just generally, if you take a look at, you know, not just the political elites,
0:08:16 but quite a lot of America’s business elites as well, many more of them have earned law degrees
0:08:18 than any other types of degrees.
0:08:21 And so in that sense, the U.S. really is quite lawyerly.
0:08:26 Donald Trump is not a lawyer, but in some sense, I think his governance is quite lawyerly.
0:08:29 I mean, suing people is part of his business strategy since the very beginning.
0:08:31 He has business.
0:08:34 He has lawsuits against people on all the time.
0:08:40 Former business associates, political opponents, even his former lawyers he’s in lawsuits with.
0:08:46 And there is the sense in which he is just accusing people in the public sphere and then saying,
0:08:51 you know, offering all manners of allegations that determine their guilt in the court of public
0:08:51 opinion.
0:08:54 In that sense, he is somewhat lawyerly to me.
0:08:58 And of course, his vice president, J.D. Vance, is a product of the Yale Law School.
0:09:05 There’s a story in the book about this five-day bike ride that you took in the summer of 2021
0:09:08 through Guzau province.
0:09:09 Is that how you say it?
0:09:10 Guizhou.
0:09:11 Guizhou province?
0:09:12 Yeah.
0:09:15 Why was that a pivotal trip for you?
0:09:23 To set the scene a little bit temporally, this was the summer of 2021 when China was, I think,
0:09:26 at the peak of its success in the pursuit of zero COVID.
0:09:35 And part of the means of accomplishing that breaking off transmission was sealing off the country
0:09:38 from essentially foreign travelers, including many Chinese nationals.
0:09:41 And so my parents were then in Pennsylvania.
0:09:47 They were telling me a very un-Chinese thing, saying, do not come and visit us.
0:09:52 And so I was thinking, well, you know, I should have some fun back in, while I was in China.
0:09:58 So I went to Cycle in Guizhou province, which is in China’s far southwest.
0:10:02 It is full of these green mountains.
0:10:04 It’s full of these jagged, karst rock.
0:10:07 It is very, very poor.
0:10:09 China’s fourth poorest province.
0:10:20 A place of great beauty, but inaccessible and very remote and not really part of the great export economy that was a significant driver of wealth.
0:10:30 And what I saw in China’s fourth poorest province was, you know, much better infrastructure than anything I’ve seen in California, where I work, or New York State, where I went to school.
0:10:34 And these are America’s richest states.
0:10:45 And, you know, they don’t have anything like the number of airports that Guizhou has, the number of great new highways that Guizhou has.
0:10:52 Guizhou has about a half dozen high-speed rail links to the rest of the country.
0:10:58 And I was able to cycle through a province that was still considerably really poor.
0:11:05 Also, apparently, 45 of the world’s 100 highest bridges, that’s wild in that one province.
0:11:05 Yeah.
0:11:07 And that is what the engineering state does.
0:11:20 It, rather than distribute, redistribute a lot of money from China’s wealthier class into the poor, what it does is that it just builds these gigantic works through these places.
0:11:29 So, you know, 45 of the world’s 100th tallest bridges, really new highways, 11 airports, some with fewer than a dozen flights per week.
0:11:32 And this was all stuff that I saw.
0:11:36 And so this is kind of how I understood socialism with Chinese characteristics to be.
0:11:43 This is kind of an agenda of state control, where the state wanted to have the discretion to spend money as it likes.
0:11:52 And the way that it wants to spend all this money is to build gigantic public works for people who may or may not want any of this big infrastructure.
0:12:00 And in the process, create these big monuments that do look very beautiful, but don’t necessarily improve people’s lives in every case.
0:12:13 How many projects like this can you find across the country, like these incredible structures and buildings and pieces of infrastructure that are beautiful, but not really needed and not really used?
0:12:18 Guizhou is by no means all that exceptional among Chinese provinces.
0:12:29 So I think among all Chinese provinces, you will have many underused airports, many really tall bridges that cannot possibly recoup their costs, and plenty of waste.
0:12:37 Now, the reason that China is pursuing these sorts of projects is that first, the engineers love monumentalism, right?
0:12:42 What’s more thrilling than a really big bridge or really gigantic dam?
0:12:46 China announced that it is going to build this, the world’s biggest dam in Tibet.
0:12:49 Previously, it built the world’s biggest dam on the Three Gorges.
0:12:55 And this is going to be a dam that is going to use 60 times as much cement as the Hoover Dam.
0:12:58 So, you know, they are always trying to build stuff.
0:13:05 And I think this is, you know, the tendency towards monumentalism is certainly an aspect of the engineering state.
0:13:10 Another is that, I think, you know, why is it that China builds all this much?
0:13:15 A lot of these Chinese leaders don’t have any great ideas for how to develop these regions.
0:13:24 And they sort of bet that, you know, maybe it’s only a dozen flights per week at this, you know, Guizhou’s eighth most visited airport.
0:13:34 But perhaps in a few years, if they’re able to cultivate some tourism as well, that number of flights will quadruple and quintuple, and there will bring in many visitors.
0:13:38 Maybe it is building these super tall bridges to nowhere at the moment.
0:13:43 But as soon as you build the bridge, two nowheres become two somewheres, perhaps.
0:13:50 And so it is kind of investing in the future and then expecting that the future will be good and trying to lay out this path to get there.
0:14:03 So when Beijing wants to build some mega project, a high-speed rail, housing, airport, bridge, whatever, what does the actual process look like?
0:14:04 Who makes the decisions?
0:14:06 How do they measure progress?
0:14:11 It’s distributed between the central government as well as the local governments.
0:14:18 But basically, you have a lot of political leaders in China who are ambitious.
0:14:26 Part of the way that they get promoted into China’s central leadership is to show that they have boosted GDP in some way in their home provinces.
0:14:31 That building a really big bridge would certainly boost GDP temporarily for a little while.
0:14:38 And then they are able to point to their big-ass bridge and tell Beijing, you know, shouldn’t I get a big-ass promotion out of all of this?
0:14:41 And so these are sort of the incentives out there.
0:14:49 There’s a big technocratic industry in China that is made up of the ministries where people are always planning for the next big project.
0:14:53 So there are always shovel-ready projects that people are able to do.
0:14:57 Plus, a lot of political leaders don’t have a lot of creativity.
0:15:00 And so they just try to continue doing all these things that work.
0:15:07 And there is a big construction lobby made up of these state-owned enterprises, which are always whispering in everyone’s ears,
0:15:09 isn’t it time for yet another big bridge?
0:15:14 And so these are some of the incentives that produce a lot of mega-projects in China.
0:15:19 So obviously, China builds and moves very fast.
0:15:23 But it also, in your words, breaks people.
0:15:30 Can you say a bit more about the dark human side to all of this scale and monumentalism?
0:15:32 What do you mean when you say it breaks people?
0:15:43 So, you know, the engineering state, I think, if it only stopped at physical engineering, I think that would be a gigantic net positive.
0:15:47 So there are some, there’s a lot of waste with a lot of these projects.
0:15:48 There’s plenty of corruption.
0:16:06 But I think on net, what China has produced is, you know, excellent logistics, very well-functioning cities connected extensively by subway, by mass transit, with a lot of homes, and a national high-speed rail network that is carbon-efficient and really runs well.
0:16:13 And if Beijing could only stop here at building a lot of stuff for people, I think that would be great on net.
0:16:25 But the problem is, the fundamental problem with the engineering state is that Beijing cannot stop itself from also being social engineers, from also being population engineers.
0:16:30 So I think there are plenty of examples of social engineering we can think of.
0:16:45 The way that Beijing treats ethno-religious minorities in Tibet, as well as in Xinjiang, has been tantamount to running detention camps on a lot of these religious ethnic minorities in order to get them to stop pursuing these religions.
0:17:06 But even on the high majority in China, there, under the tenets of socialism, you know, my parents grew up in a society that decided where they would go to school, whether they would be able to buy a bicycle that year, and what sort of workplace they would have access to after they were made to study their state-designed majors.
0:17:16 A lot of people have been under the strictures of a hukou system, which regulates their movement, such that you can’t very easily move to the bigger cities and get an education for your child.
0:17:27 But the core social engineering projects that I really focus on in my book are, first, the one-child policy, and second, the zero-COVID, which I lived through.
0:17:40 And the one-child policy was by far my favorite chapter to write in this book, because I hadn’t really grappled with the extent of the brutality that the Chinese state visited upon the people.
0:17:41 Say more about that.
0:17:47 So the one-child policy was implemented in 1980 by Deng Xiaoping.
0:17:51 So Deng Xiaoping was the leader after Mao Zedong.
0:18:00 Deng felt that China had been way too chaotic under Mao, and his solution was to promote a lot of engineers into China’s central leadership.
0:18:05 And a very elite engineer at the time, his name was Song Jian.
0:18:09 He was one of China’s most brilliant mathematicians.
0:18:11 He worked in the missile ministry.
0:18:18 He started whispering to the Chinese leadership, you know, population trajectories can be just as firmly controlled as missile trajectories.
0:18:25 And that was part of the reason that Deng Xiaoping listened and implemented the one-child policy.
0:18:27 China then was a mess.
0:18:30 The population had surpassed a billion people.
0:18:37 And the Communist Party didn’t really realize that, because the Cultural Revolution destroyed anything that could be as organized as a national census.
0:18:47 And so China imposed the one-child policy, which was a vast campaign of rural terror against mostly female bodies that peaked in the 1980s.
0:19:04 And, you know, before thinking about the one-child policy, I didn’t quite realize that, well, of course, the only way to implement a one-child policy has to be through a system of forced sterilizations as well as forced abortions.
0:19:12 Because how else are you going to have rural women who were having three to four children at the time and convince them that one was the right number?
0:19:22 And so if you take a look at the number of abortions that China conducted over the one-child period, it was north of 300 million people.
0:19:24 This is according to official statistics.
0:19:27 And that is the present population of the United States.
0:19:39 And we have so many of these horrific stories of women losing their children, being forced to give up their children, having their children beaten out of them because Beijing had pursued this, I think, pretty idiotic policy.
0:19:51 So, Jesus, do you think China’s growth and enrichment depend on this kind of repressiveness?
0:19:53 I mean, could it grow like it’s growing?
0:19:58 Could it build like it’s building without this level of repression and control?
0:20:07 I want to believe so, because I don’t want to believe that repressiveness is any key to flourishing.
0:20:12 But it is a little bit hard to, you know, really try to establish that.
0:20:18 That’s certainly my own value, that I left China in part because I value pluralism.
0:20:33 But, you know, if you take a look at, you know, some of the economic discourse that has been around China over the last few decades, it is pretty obvious that China has been considerably more successful than India in development.
0:20:44 And on a lot of still pretty basic indicators, India, which is much more democratic, which does have a lot of pluralism, hasn’t achieved very excellent outcomes.
0:20:50 I’ve just seen a statistic that the female literacy rate in India is around 70%.
0:20:54 So three out of 10 women in India cannot read.
0:21:04 And there is still a pretty high rate of child malnutrition as well as stunting of children because a lot of children also don’t have very much to eat.
0:21:09 So India now is considerably poorer than China.
0:21:18 I certainly don’t want to embrace the idea that repressiveness was necessary, but we can say that repressiveness was part of China’s growth formula.
0:21:21 And that probably played a part in where it is today.
0:21:31 I’d like to know more about how Chinese people understand their own experience, their own life.
0:21:38 I mean, not that the entire country is a monolith, but in general, how do people feel in China about their own system?
0:21:40 I mean, is there anything like a consensus?
0:21:44 I mean, do we even really know what people think?
0:21:48 It is really hard to tell.
0:22:06 I think my sense of the public is that for most people in China who grew up essentially of my parents’ generation, my parents were born in the early 60s.
0:22:12 They did not have any memories of Mao’s Great Famine, which just preceded them.
0:22:21 They don’t have very strong memories of the Cultural Revolution, which hurt an earlier generation of intellectuals.
0:22:27 What they have seen is really steady improvement in their lives.
0:22:30 Some people have come into great wealth.
0:22:32 Unfortunately, my parents were not among them.
0:22:41 But, you know, some of their classmates from even in the backwaters of Ayu Inan did create, come into a lot of great wealth.
0:22:47 They’ve seen that their city has had subways when they didn’t have it before.
0:22:57 They’ve been able to ride on high-speed rail, which for a lot of Chinese is a very proud achievement and does feel pretty cool to be able to get on these bullet trains.
0:23:09 And I think the experience in China is of, you know, seeing their lives better and better, not necessarily year by year, but certainly decade by decade.
0:23:15 Now, I think that we could question how robust that trend is in Xi Jinping’s era.
0:23:35 There has been a lot more headwinds against China’s economy since Xi took over, in part because of China’s own government doings that have messed up the property sector and have smashed a lot of tech companies there, in part because of geopolitics with the trade war, in part because it tried to pop a property bubble.
0:23:39 And that’s why youth unemployment now in China is still really, really high.
0:23:47 But for, you know, many people to have lived through China’s growth over the last few decades, it feels pretty good.
0:23:54 And just in terms of, you know, one statistic that I like to cite now, China built its first highway really late.
0:23:56 It built its first highway in 1993.
0:24:12 So if you were born that year that China built its first highway, you would be able to drive on a highway system by the time you turned 18, which is the legal driving age, on a system of highways that was larger than America’s.
0:24:16 And so over the course of 18 years, China built an America’s worth of highways.
0:24:20 And then nine years later, China built another America’s worth of highways.
0:24:29 And so once you have this sort of tangible change, I think most Chinese are still pretty optimistic that the next few decades will be better than the last few decades.
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0:27:36 Let’s bring this back to America because the point, certainly one of the points of the book,
0:27:43 is to say that there’s a lot we can learn about our own society by comparing it to China.
0:27:50 How has watching China’s ascendance helped you see America more clearly?
0:27:59 If we take a look at some of the big debates of the moment in the United States,
0:28:03 you know, I think they include something like, how are living standards doing?
0:28:09 How are we dealing with these material shortages that we find most evident in housing?
0:28:13 The lack of provision of mass transit?
0:28:16 You know, the evisceration of our manufacturing sector.
0:28:20 How quickly can the United States decarbonize?
0:28:27 Is it building as much solar and wind and transmission lines and nuclear power plants as necessary?
0:28:33 Right now, you know, as we’re recording in 2025, there’s a whole set of other debates with Donald Trump.
0:28:38 And is the United States becoming, you know, losing some of its democratic traditions?
0:28:41 Well, maybe China can inform on that too.
0:28:49 But at least economically, I think that China is a pretty good model of operating model of abundance.
0:28:54 You know, the term housing crisis in the United States refers to spiraling unaffordability.
0:29:01 But in China, it refers to a collapse in home prices, in part because the state has built far too much.
0:29:06 And China has a very robust manufacturing sector.
0:29:10 It is able to produce not only leading technologies like electric vehicles,
0:29:18 but also masks and cotton swabs in the pandemic and all this personal protective equipment that U.S. manufacturers were not.
0:29:23 And China is also building these vast systems of mass transit as well.
0:29:29 So I think in a couple of crucial areas, namely related to abundance,
0:29:34 I think that China at least has some good lessons for the United States.
0:29:39 But I also want to be very clear that the U.S. doesn’t have to learn directly from China.
0:29:48 You know, if the U.S. was able to build mass transit at the level of costs of Japan or Spain or France,
0:29:49 that would be perfectly good enough.
0:29:51 We don’t have to study China here.
0:29:55 But let’s at least, you know, be a little bit more curious about the outside world
0:29:57 because China does have some good lessons.
0:30:01 We have this procedure fetish, I think is the phrase you use in the book, right?
0:30:06 It’s like it is impossible to build shit here or very difficult to build shit here
0:30:08 because everything is so painfully slow.
0:30:11 There’s a lot of friction in the system.
0:30:18 I mean, do you think on some level that friction is the price of this level of pluralism,
0:30:22 that all the rules and the legalism, however maddening,
0:30:28 are partly what keep diverse societies like ours from falling apart?
0:30:34 If we walk around big parts of the U.S., New York, the Midwest,
0:30:40 what it almost feels like is that we’re walking around the ruins of a formerly great industrial civilization
0:30:46 where the infrastructure is just barely maintained and nothing more can really be built
0:30:50 unless it is with these astronomical sums.
0:30:56 And I think it is a little bit difficult to see that this must be the price of pluralism
0:31:02 because I think that pluralism can thrive even better if the government could actually deliver
0:31:06 on some of the core state functions that states are meant to do.
0:31:12 So if I’m thinking about something like, you know, safe public streets, creating some sort of public order,
0:31:16 that is something that a lot of American cities have not done very well.
0:31:21 Creating affordable housing, building where the jobs are, building where the transit is,
0:31:24 that is also something that doesn’t really take place in cities.
0:31:30 And, you know, to say nothing of having to organize investment for the decarbonization drive
0:31:34 for wind, solar, and transmission, all of which will require a lot of land.
0:31:38 You know, none of that has been very, very impressive.
0:31:44 Now, I take the point that some degree of litigiousness is a guarantee of pluralism.
0:31:50 But the way also I feel is another similarity between the U.S. and China is that
0:31:55 I think that the U.S. and China kind of work okay for the middle class,
0:31:58 where, yes, it works really well for the really wealthy.
0:32:05 And so part of this is why the reason that I think the Chinese and Americans all want to get rich
0:32:07 because society works much better for them.
0:32:12 If you’re a resident of New York, if you’re a wealthy resident of New York,
0:32:16 you’re probably not so bothered by the housing crisis.
0:32:21 You’re able to build these skinny high-rises that are part of the skyline now.
0:32:22 You don’t need to take the bus to work.
0:32:24 You don’t need to take the subway to work.
0:32:27 You can take your helicopter or a car.
0:32:33 And so there are so many ways also in which California works really well for the wealthy
0:32:35 and not so much well for the middle class.
0:32:38 You know, there’s some wealthy people through the L.A. fires
0:32:41 that were able to have their own private firefighting service.
0:32:46 But I think that America is not sustainable if it works primarily well for the wealthy
0:32:49 because I think it needs to work for the broader people as well.
0:32:52 God knows you’re right that we’ve got too many damn lawyers.
0:32:55 But we also had a bunch of lawyers when we built the Hoover Dam.
0:32:59 And we also had a bunch of lawyers when we sent people to the moon.
0:32:59 Sure.
0:33:04 So why does the procedure fetish seem to be getting worse over time?
0:33:06 As you say in the book, we used to be in an engineering state.
0:33:10 And then something shifted in the 60s.
0:33:11 Yeah, that’s right.
0:33:14 I think the lawyers themselves changed in character.
0:33:20 So I think the first thing to acknowledge is that America has always had a lot of lawyers.
0:33:27 But with the first 16 presidents from Washington to Lincoln, 13 were lawyers, but there were three
0:33:27 who were not.
0:33:32 And the three who were not were all generals, especially, most famously, George Washington.
0:33:38 And I think among the military establishment, the military industrial complex, there is a
0:33:40 sense that shit needs to be built.
0:33:45 And these are people who are much more intent on creating big infrastructure.
0:33:49 Eisenhower, when he was a young officer, drove from coast to coast.
0:33:54 And it was a horrific, shuddering adventure because they were almost entirely on paved roads.
0:34:00 And maybe it is not surprising that Eisenhower initiated the construction of the interstate
0:34:03 highway system when he became president.
0:34:08 And so I think the U.S. always had a little bit of this martial tradition of actually building
0:34:08 a lot.
0:34:14 And the elites understood very well that a growing country with vast inflows of new immigrants
0:34:16 had to have the infrastructure in place.
0:34:26 And what really changed was in the 1960s, I think the public became very rightfully so super
0:34:27 skeptical of the lawyers.
0:34:33 What happened through the 1960s was that the public lost trust with the technocratic establishment
0:34:34 of the United States.
0:34:38 And so people were reacting against environmental destruction.
0:34:41 This was the time that Silent Spring came out.
0:34:47 People were reacting against Robert Moses and all of these urban planners that rammed highways
0:34:49 through dense urban cores.
0:34:55 There was the Vietnam War, which made people highly distrustful of the military establishment
0:34:55 as well.
0:35:02 And lawyers shifted from being more like dealmakers into more litigious regulators.
0:35:07 And this was something that really took off at Harvard Law School, as well as Yale Law School,
0:35:13 as well as other elite law schools, in which a lot of law students decided that their slogan
0:35:15 was going to be something like, sue the bastards.
0:35:20 And the bastards referred to the government, which was seen as to be working too closely in cahoots
0:35:22 with business to drive people away.
0:35:25 And so the lawyers themselves changed character.
0:35:28 They decided that they really had to focus on environmental protection.
0:35:30 I think rightfully so.
0:35:37 But the lawyers’ changing character has really created a lot of America’s present problems
0:35:39 by solving the previous generation of problems.
0:35:48 I just at least wanted to ask one question about Trump and his approach, particularly in the
0:35:50 second administration to China.
0:35:53 I still have no idea what’s happening with the tariffs.
0:35:55 I’m not sure the administration does either.
0:36:03 Our policy seems to shift every couple of weeks, but certainly Trump has brought a renewed interest
0:36:06 in bolstering American manufacturing.
0:36:11 And the administration seems pretty openly antagonistic towards China.
0:36:19 I’m just curious how you assess that, the current dynamic, and what you think Beijing makes of it.
0:36:31 Yeah, I think the way that Beijing has always viewed Trump is almost as a kind of a familiar figure
0:36:33 that they know what to do with.
0:36:43 So Trump alternates between being a frightful person waving a big stick and threatening China,
0:36:49 which is something that he has certainly done, and alternately being pretty transactional.
0:36:53 This sort of businessman that the Chinese are quite familiar with.
0:36:56 I think the Chinese would have a term for someone like him.
0:37:03 He would be someone who was like a coal mine boss, someone who just happened to own land near a coal mine,
0:37:10 came into great wealth, has no real manners, but is savvy in this sort of animal instinct way
0:37:12 that is really transactional.
0:37:17 And, you know, even the Communist Party knows what to do with these sorts of characters.
0:37:24 And so, when I was living in Beijing, when Trump went over for a state visit, he really rolled out the right carpet,
0:37:33 he took them into the National Museum, allowed Trump to handle this urn made out of gold, and he was able to lift it.
0:37:37 And it was really clear that Trump found this all quite glamorous.
0:37:48 And I think the view that segments of Beijing has had is that Trump is someone who has never said a bad word about Xi Jinping.
0:37:50 Those two are bros.
0:37:58 And that really only shifted after the pandemic and his first term, when, you know, the pandemic was a really bad thing for the country
0:38:02 and for his political prospects and for his own health as well.
0:38:10 But it seems like Trump has been much more hostile towards Germans and Japanese,
0:38:17 which were more of the traditional enemies of America when Trump was coming of age in the 1980s.
0:38:24 And yet today, there is still the sense that President Trump is the most pro-China member in the White House
0:38:31 who would declare that, you know, our Chinese students coming to America, well, it’s our honor to have them.
0:38:33 And this is something I’m quoting from him verbatim.
0:38:37 He openly admires Xi Jinping every so often.
0:38:44 And generally, I think that Trump has enjoyed his transactions and his dealings in China.
0:38:53 And you do see in some cases where Trump is, he has been much more threatening towards the Europeans as well as the Japanese.
0:38:55 And so I don’t think this is a very stable equilibrium.
0:38:59 There is kind of businessman Trump as well as scary Trump.
0:39:05 And I think if Xi Jinping could choose to deal with anyone, it would not be to deal with Trump.
0:39:08 I think he does not personally like Trump very much.
0:39:15 But it can’t be denied that Trump is just this completely mercurial figure, mixed policy by whim.
0:39:20 He has already relaxed a lot of export controls on semiconductors to China.
0:39:23 And so two of them seem to be buddy buddies again.
0:39:29 And so Trump was someone who brought this big anti-China shift in U.S. policy in his first term.
0:39:39 But he’s also, every so often, you know, the biggest threat to the China hawks in his cabinet out there where he’s able to, completely willing to crush them when he needs to make a deal.
0:39:41 So I think that’s how the Chinese see Trump.
0:39:44 It is not unambiguously good or bad.
0:39:53 I think that we, you know, Americans, get that China is this formidable political object.
0:40:01 But is China more than just a great power looking to pursue and defend its own interest?
0:40:03 I mean, is it also an ideological project?
0:40:10 Does Beijing want to remake the world in its image or does it just want to dominate its sphere?
0:40:20 That is a question among a lot of the China scholarly community, a lot of debate among the China watching community.
0:40:29 Now, I think there is a view out there, Stephen Kotkin, with whom I work, would like to say that the appetite grows with the eating.
0:40:31 They’re going to take what they can.
0:40:40 And if you give them an inch, if you give them Taiwan, then perhaps they will take, you know, other parts of the Asia Pacific.
0:40:57 And I think there is also another view that China is very intent on controlling its own sphere of influence, which is, you know, mostly dominating the East Asian Pacific as well as Southeast Asia.
0:41:08 And it would really love for all the rest of the world to count out for the emperor’s pleasure, because that is part of the great dream of the emperors.
0:41:28 And I think, you know, something we can debate is, furthermore, is if a lot of China’s close neighbors, namely countries like Cambodia and Laos and Thailand and Vietnam, you know, are pretty subservient to the Communist Party, is that a grave threat to American interests?
0:41:35 And perhaps the answer is yes, perhaps the answer is no, but these are the sort of questions that we want to ask.
0:41:48 And even if the Chinese government is mostly interested in a sort of a defensive aggressiveness, trying to, for example, muzzle criticism of the Communist Party in the United States.
0:42:00 You know, it is not necessarily trying to change the United States ideologically into socialism or anything, but if it were only intent on muzzling critics, its critics overseas, how much of a problem is that?
0:42:26 And perhaps we decide that is intolerable and unacceptable and has to be defeated, but these are the sorts of questions that I, you know, what I’m always more interested in is trying to, you know, frame these sorts of questions, trying to define what the question is, trying to define what acts we should declare to be permissible or intolerable, and what are we able to do to really fight back on the practices we declare to be intolerable?
0:42:30 What would it look like to combine the best of the U.S. and the Chinese systems?
0:42:34 Has a country done something close to this?
0:42:41 Is there a hybrid system that offers the virtues of both without all the pathologies of each?
0:42:44 I mean, or is this just a utopian political fantasy?
0:42:48 I think that there is no utopia anywhere out there.
0:42:53 Now, I’ve spent quite a lot of the summer traveling around in Europe.
0:42:56 My wife is Austrian.
0:42:58 We have been in Austria.
0:43:01 We’ve been in Paris, London, now Copenhagen.
0:43:13 And, you know, maybe we can see that in some ways that European countries embody some level of, you know, delivering goods for the middle class, delivering a lot of mass transit.
0:43:22 And so in some ways that European countries may be good, but I’m also highly skeptical of the case that anyone’s really gotten it figured out.
0:43:33 You know, you can name any country and we can name dozens of really grave, severe problems that face, for example, Japan with demographic issues and a lackluster economy.
0:43:38 We think that we have a housing affordability crisis in America, and we do.
0:43:45 But housing unaffordability is much worse in the United Kingdom, in Canada, in much of continental Europe.
0:43:48 How are people supposed to survive under these conditions?
0:43:52 And so, you know, I don’t think that there is any perfect country out there.
0:43:55 I think we’re all tangles of imperfection.
0:44:01 And what we have to do is to make ourselves a little bit less perfect, learn from each other, and then do much better.
0:44:09 And here’s where I’m still somewhat optimistic about the United States, where I think the U.S. is constantly in a state of change.
0:44:10 It is constantly in a state of debate.
0:44:27 It might, there’s millions of ways for it to implode, but I also see that it is asking the right questions much more fervently than anywhere else is, and still has a more serious shot at, you know, fixing itself than almost any other country in the world.
0:44:29 And that’s still something I believe.
0:44:39 You do say at the end, and did not get the sense that it was perfunctory, that you’re still relatively optimistic about both countries.
0:44:41 What is that optimism based on?
0:44:59 That they are not like Japan and Europe, where stasis is much more of the norm, where these countries are, I think, countries where if you don’t make your friends by high school, then you don’t really have more friends after that.
0:45:11 That these are countries that are really skeptical of dynamism and change, that are unable really to try to really restructure their societies in ways to be considerably more open.
0:45:26 And I think, you know, China is never going to become heavily driven by immigrants, but there is a sense of change and reform that is, that the Communist Party professes to embrace, and sometimes does embrace.
0:45:31 And they sometimes have really speedy fixes to some of their grave problems.
0:45:48 The U.S. change is much more difficult, but I admire that there is always a sense of debate, and that we’re always trying to come to better terms, and that we’re always trying to figure out, how did we mess up so badly before, and how can we do a little bit better?
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0:48:05 I do genuinely wonder how far this experiment can go for China.
0:48:13 As you say, and now I’m quoting, that the Communist Party is too afraid of the Chinese people to give them real agency.
0:48:19 As long as that’s the case, it’s hard for me to feel confident in the durability of this system.
0:48:25 I think the issue here is not exactly durability.
0:48:30 I think that the system can be resilient at a pretty bad state for quite a long while.
0:48:38 I think the gigantic shame of this is that it is enforcing a lot of lost opportunity.
0:48:42 Important essays are censored in China all the time.
0:48:45 Reporters are very heavily muzzled.
0:48:50 And people just have less and less ability to debate.
0:48:58 And I think the idea of the Communist Party is not only to control speech, but it is to also control free thought.
0:49:00 And that is one of these things that is pretty scary.
0:49:05 Joseph Stalin had this phrase of poets and teachers being engineers of the soul.
0:49:08 And this is a phrase that is tremendously creepy.
0:49:09 Tremendously.
0:49:11 That Xi Jinping decided to echo.
0:49:14 And so, you know, I think this is what they want to be.
0:49:16 It’s also engineers of the soul.
0:49:21 And I don’t think that it will succeed, but I think it is creating a lot of discontent.
0:49:27 And it is suppressing China’s growth, even though authoritarian regimes can be pretty durable over the longer run.
0:49:33 I don’t want another mammal engineering my soul without my input.
0:49:34 Yes.
0:49:43 I think you say it well in the final pages that the contest between the U.S. and China, insofar as there is a contest,
0:49:46 will be won by the country that works best for the people living in it.
0:49:52 And I think you’re also right that both countries have some distinct advantages over the other.
0:49:59 And I think you’re right that the big question for us, America, is whether we can hold on.
0:50:03 Hold on to our pluralism while also actually building shit.
0:50:09 But to do that, we will have to overcome the lawyerly society.
0:50:14 And I have no idea how that’s going to happen.
0:50:29 I still think, though, having said all that, that pluralism in the long run is a safer bet than top-down control and the sort of whipsaw changes you get in an engineering state.
0:50:30 I believe that pretty firmly.
0:50:35 I’m not sure what it would take to move me off of that view.
0:50:38 Maybe you feel that way, too.
0:50:47 I think that I completely agree that pluralism is the right virtue over the longer run.
0:51:02 But not being able to govern effectively and not being able to do well for the citizens is one of the big deficiencies of the United States.
0:51:05 Not just of the moment, but also of the past.
0:51:21 And I also believe that if the Chinese regime were able to build a lot more, that would substantially weaken the United States because it would further de-industrialize an already weak manufacturing sector in the U.S.
0:51:39 It could credibly threaten the U.S. by building quite a lot more than it could, you know, inspire a lot more national pride in China by delivering actually better economic outcomes, as well as, you know, political prestige projects that inspire the population.
0:51:51 And I think the problem of the U.S. right now has to be that it needs to stop eating the shit out of itself, first of all, and then actually do well for broader masses of people.
0:51:54 And that’s really the important thing that we all got to try to achieve.
0:52:00 Once again, the book is called Breakneck, China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
0:52:02 Thank you for coming on the show, Dan.
0:52:03 Thanks very much, Sean.
0:52:04 This was a lot of fun.
0:52:13 All right.
0:52:15 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:52:17 I really, truly did.
0:52:18 Dan is a great guest.
0:52:19 He wrote a great book.
0:52:24 And China is something I have wanted to learn more about for a very long time.
0:52:26 And it was a wonderful education.
0:52:28 So I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
0:52:31 As always, we want to know what you think.
0:52:42 So drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
0:52:48 And when you’re done with that, please go ahead, rate, review, subscribe to the podcast.
0:52:50 It helps our show grow.
0:53:00 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Erica Wong, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:53:03 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:53:05 Listen and subscribe.
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0:00:48 How do we AI-proof our jobs?
0:00:49 How do we fix the deficit?
0:00:52 How do we get our political system working again?
0:00:56 I’m Henry Blodgett, and I’m launching a new podcast called Solutions,
0:01:01 where every week I’ll talk to an innovative enterprising expert
0:01:05 to cut through the doom and focus on how to build a better world.
0:01:09 Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:13 The first episode will be out Monday, August 18th.
0:01:23 America has a hard time building stuff.
0:01:28 Roads, trains, light rail, bridges, housing.
0:01:34 Everything takes seemingly forever, if it even happens at all.
0:01:41 Last week, New York City approved a contract to start work on a subway extension
0:01:44 that was proposed a century ago.
0:01:45 A century.
0:01:52 Meanwhile, there’s China, a country that builds much, much faster.
0:01:54 High-speed rails take just a few years.
0:01:59 Solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, drones,
0:02:02 all churned out at breakneck speed.
0:02:04 Why is that?
0:02:06 Why can China do this?
0:02:10 And why does it seem like America can’t?
0:02:16 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:30 Today’s guest is Dan Wong.
0:02:33 He’s the author of a new book called Breakneck,
0:02:35 China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
0:02:41 It’s a deeply reported, deeply personal book about the country he grew up in,
0:02:43 returned to, and then left again.
0:02:48 And it’s filled with surprising insights into what China is,
0:02:53 what it’s becoming, what it reveals about America.
0:03:01 Dan Wong, welcome to the show.
0:03:02 It’s my pleasure to be here.
0:03:05 So, one of the first things you do say in the book,
0:03:08 you may actually say this on the very first page,
0:03:14 is that China and America are constantly locking horns.
0:03:17 And you find that both tragic and comical,
0:03:18 because, and now I’m quoting,
0:03:23 no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.
0:03:24 Why does it seem that way?
0:03:29 Well, I think the first thing that is true about both of these countries
0:03:33 is that, first, they’re mutually unintelligible to themselves.
0:03:38 I mean, how many Americans actually understand America?
0:03:41 You’re sitting in the Gulf Coast, Sean,
0:03:45 and I wonder how many Americans really have a really deep sense of what’s going on there.
0:03:50 So, the reason that I think that Chinese and Americans are alike
0:03:56 is that I’ve spent quite a bit of my life, you know, living through both of these countries.
0:04:01 I’m a Canadian, but I did spend, I have spent much more of my time in these countries.
0:04:08 And my rough schema is that I think that Japan and Europe are quite alike.
0:04:10 There’s a deep suspicion of change.
0:04:17 And I think Americans are pretty used to thinking about themselves as pretty different from the Europeans,
0:04:21 that they reject stasis, that they embrace dynamism.
0:04:24 There’s much more of a sense of hucksterism in the U.S.
0:04:27 There’s a sense that people take shortcuts.
0:04:31 And that’s exactly, I think, how the Chinese are as well.
0:04:37 That there is some sense that they come from a great country, a great civilization.
0:04:38 They have a great heritage.
0:04:41 At the same time, they do embrace change.
0:04:43 They do take shortcuts.
0:04:47 There’s just as much hucksterism over there as in the U.S.
0:04:51 And I think that’s kind of my schema for understanding China and the U.S.
0:04:55 is quite similar and pretty distinctive from Europe and the Japanese.
0:05:00 I want to get in to this idea, the central idea of the book.
0:05:08 Of China as an engineering state and America as a lawyer society.
0:05:10 It is a great frame.
0:05:15 And as soon as I heard it, so many things clicked into place for me.
0:05:19 How did you come up with this distinction?
0:05:21 And why do you find it so useful?
0:05:26 Well, I was really thinking about, you know, how the U.S. and China,
0:05:28 you know, two countries that I’ve spent a lot of time in.
0:05:36 Now that they’re locking horns, how should we really try to understand what they are doing?
0:05:42 And I wanted to go beyond some of these, you know, boring 20th century political science
0:05:48 terms like capitalist or neoliberal or authoritarian or democratic.
0:05:54 And to, you know, try to have a little bit more of a fresher framework for thinking about
0:05:56 both of these countries.
0:06:01 And, you know, China is a country I call the engineering state because at various points,
0:06:06 the entirety of the standing committee of the Politburo, China’s highest ruling echelon,
0:06:10 all of them had degrees in engineering of a very Soviet sort.
0:06:16 So this was true between 2002 to 2007, when the general secretary of the Communist Party,
0:06:19 then, Hu Jintao, was trained as a hydraulic engineer.
0:06:21 And this guy actually supervised the construction of a dam.
0:06:26 And his premier, the second in charge, Wen Jiabao, was a geologist.
0:06:33 And the issue with engineers is that they build a ton of shit, whether that’s roads or bridges
0:06:37 or hyperscalers or coal or container ports or homes.
0:06:43 But they’re also very inclined to treat society as just a giant math exercise.
0:06:49 So for Hu Jintao, society was just another big hydraulic system as if people can be directed
0:06:51 with the ease of valves.
0:06:58 And it’s pretty obvious also to realize that the U.S. started as a lawyerly society.
0:07:01 The Declaration of Independence reads like a legal case.
0:07:04 So many of the founding fathers were lawyers.
0:07:11 The first 16 presidents from Washington to Lincoln, all but three had been lawyers at some point.
0:07:17 And even in the present day, you know, the Biden White House is famously full of Yale Law School
0:07:22 grads, everyone from Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, Gino Raimondo, Brian Dees,
0:07:24 you can go on with these sort of things.
0:07:29 How lawyerly is America compared to the rest of the world?
0:07:31 Are we a unicorn on this front?
0:07:40 The U.S. is slightly exceptional, but I wouldn’t say that this is terribly exceptional in the
0:07:40 Anglosphere.
0:07:49 So, you know, the Anglosphere is full of this parliamentary tradition in which people who
0:07:53 are really skilled at debate tend to be the rulers of the country.
0:07:57 And that is kind of a sin that the British passed on to us.
0:08:02 So the U.S. is in some senses quite lawyerly.
0:08:05 Lawyers are a disproportionate part of the political class.
0:08:10 And I think just generally, if you take a look at, you know, not just the political elites,
0:08:16 but quite a lot of America’s business elites as well, many more of them have earned law degrees
0:08:18 than any other types of degrees.
0:08:21 And so in that sense, the U.S. really is quite lawyerly.
0:08:26 Donald Trump is not a lawyer, but in some sense, I think his governance is quite lawyerly.
0:08:29 I mean, suing people is part of his business strategy since the very beginning.
0:08:31 He has business.
0:08:34 He has lawsuits against people on all the time.
0:08:40 Former business associates, political opponents, even his former lawyers he’s in lawsuits with.
0:08:46 And there is the sense in which he is just accusing people in the public sphere and then saying,
0:08:51 you know, offering all manners of allegations that determine their guilt in the court of public
0:08:51 opinion.
0:08:54 In that sense, he is somewhat lawyerly to me.
0:08:58 And of course, his vice president, J.D. Vance, is a product of the Yale Law School.
0:09:05 There’s a story in the book about this five-day bike ride that you took in the summer of 2021
0:09:08 through Guzau province.
0:09:09 Is that how you say it?
0:09:10 Guizhou.
0:09:11 Guizhou province?
0:09:12 Yeah.
0:09:15 Why was that a pivotal trip for you?
0:09:23 To set the scene a little bit temporally, this was the summer of 2021 when China was, I think,
0:09:26 at the peak of its success in the pursuit of zero COVID.
0:09:35 And part of the means of accomplishing that breaking off transmission was sealing off the country
0:09:38 from essentially foreign travelers, including many Chinese nationals.
0:09:41 And so my parents were then in Pennsylvania.
0:09:47 They were telling me a very un-Chinese thing, saying, do not come and visit us.
0:09:52 And so I was thinking, well, you know, I should have some fun back in, while I was in China.
0:09:58 So I went to Cycle in Guizhou province, which is in China’s far southwest.
0:10:02 It is full of these green mountains.
0:10:04 It’s full of these jagged, karst rock.
0:10:07 It is very, very poor.
0:10:09 China’s fourth poorest province.
0:10:20 A place of great beauty, but inaccessible and very remote and not really part of the great export economy that was a significant driver of wealth.
0:10:30 And what I saw in China’s fourth poorest province was, you know, much better infrastructure than anything I’ve seen in California, where I work, or New York State, where I went to school.
0:10:34 And these are America’s richest states.
0:10:45 And, you know, they don’t have anything like the number of airports that Guizhou has, the number of great new highways that Guizhou has.
0:10:52 Guizhou has about a half dozen high-speed rail links to the rest of the country.
0:10:58 And I was able to cycle through a province that was still considerably really poor.
0:11:05 Also, apparently, 45 of the world’s 100 highest bridges, that’s wild in that one province.
0:11:05 Yeah.
0:11:07 And that is what the engineering state does.
0:11:20 It, rather than distribute, redistribute a lot of money from China’s wealthier class into the poor, what it does is that it just builds these gigantic works through these places.
0:11:29 So, you know, 45 of the world’s 100th tallest bridges, really new highways, 11 airports, some with fewer than a dozen flights per week.
0:11:32 And this was all stuff that I saw.
0:11:36 And so this is kind of how I understood socialism with Chinese characteristics to be.
0:11:43 This is kind of an agenda of state control, where the state wanted to have the discretion to spend money as it likes.
0:11:52 And the way that it wants to spend all this money is to build gigantic public works for people who may or may not want any of this big infrastructure.
0:12:00 And in the process, create these big monuments that do look very beautiful, but don’t necessarily improve people’s lives in every case.
0:12:13 How many projects like this can you find across the country, like these incredible structures and buildings and pieces of infrastructure that are beautiful, but not really needed and not really used?
0:12:18 Guizhou is by no means all that exceptional among Chinese provinces.
0:12:29 So I think among all Chinese provinces, you will have many underused airports, many really tall bridges that cannot possibly recoup their costs, and plenty of waste.
0:12:37 Now, the reason that China is pursuing these sorts of projects is that first, the engineers love monumentalism, right?
0:12:42 What’s more thrilling than a really big bridge or really gigantic dam?
0:12:46 China announced that it is going to build this, the world’s biggest dam in Tibet.
0:12:49 Previously, it built the world’s biggest dam on the Three Gorges.
0:12:55 And this is going to be a dam that is going to use 60 times as much cement as the Hoover Dam.
0:12:58 So, you know, they are always trying to build stuff.
0:13:05 And I think this is, you know, the tendency towards monumentalism is certainly an aspect of the engineering state.
0:13:10 Another is that, I think, you know, why is it that China builds all this much?
0:13:15 A lot of these Chinese leaders don’t have any great ideas for how to develop these regions.
0:13:24 And they sort of bet that, you know, maybe it’s only a dozen flights per week at this, you know, Guizhou’s eighth most visited airport.
0:13:34 But perhaps in a few years, if they’re able to cultivate some tourism as well, that number of flights will quadruple and quintuple, and there will bring in many visitors.
0:13:38 Maybe it is building these super tall bridges to nowhere at the moment.
0:13:43 But as soon as you build the bridge, two nowheres become two somewheres, perhaps.
0:13:50 And so it is kind of investing in the future and then expecting that the future will be good and trying to lay out this path to get there.
0:14:03 So when Beijing wants to build some mega project, a high-speed rail, housing, airport, bridge, whatever, what does the actual process look like?
0:14:04 Who makes the decisions?
0:14:06 How do they measure progress?
0:14:11 It’s distributed between the central government as well as the local governments.
0:14:18 But basically, you have a lot of political leaders in China who are ambitious.
0:14:26 Part of the way that they get promoted into China’s central leadership is to show that they have boosted GDP in some way in their home provinces.
0:14:31 That building a really big bridge would certainly boost GDP temporarily for a little while.
0:14:38 And then they are able to point to their big-ass bridge and tell Beijing, you know, shouldn’t I get a big-ass promotion out of all of this?
0:14:41 And so these are sort of the incentives out there.
0:14:49 There’s a big technocratic industry in China that is made up of the ministries where people are always planning for the next big project.
0:14:53 So there are always shovel-ready projects that people are able to do.
0:14:57 Plus, a lot of political leaders don’t have a lot of creativity.
0:15:00 And so they just try to continue doing all these things that work.
0:15:07 And there is a big construction lobby made up of these state-owned enterprises, which are always whispering in everyone’s ears,
0:15:09 isn’t it time for yet another big bridge?
0:15:14 And so these are some of the incentives that produce a lot of mega-projects in China.
0:15:19 So obviously, China builds and moves very fast.
0:15:23 But it also, in your words, breaks people.
0:15:30 Can you say a bit more about the dark human side to all of this scale and monumentalism?
0:15:32 What do you mean when you say it breaks people?
0:15:43 So, you know, the engineering state, I think, if it only stopped at physical engineering, I think that would be a gigantic net positive.
0:15:47 So there are some, there’s a lot of waste with a lot of these projects.
0:15:48 There’s plenty of corruption.
0:16:06 But I think on net, what China has produced is, you know, excellent logistics, very well-functioning cities connected extensively by subway, by mass transit, with a lot of homes, and a national high-speed rail network that is carbon-efficient and really runs well.
0:16:13 And if Beijing could only stop here at building a lot of stuff for people, I think that would be great on net.
0:16:25 But the problem is, the fundamental problem with the engineering state is that Beijing cannot stop itself from also being social engineers, from also being population engineers.
0:16:30 So I think there are plenty of examples of social engineering we can think of.
0:16:45 The way that Beijing treats ethno-religious minorities in Tibet, as well as in Xinjiang, has been tantamount to running detention camps on a lot of these religious ethnic minorities in order to get them to stop pursuing these religions.
0:17:06 But even on the high majority in China, there, under the tenets of socialism, you know, my parents grew up in a society that decided where they would go to school, whether they would be able to buy a bicycle that year, and what sort of workplace they would have access to after they were made to study their state-designed majors.
0:17:16 A lot of people have been under the strictures of a hukou system, which regulates their movement, such that you can’t very easily move to the bigger cities and get an education for your child.
0:17:27 But the core social engineering projects that I really focus on in my book are, first, the one-child policy, and second, the zero-COVID, which I lived through.
0:17:40 And the one-child policy was by far my favorite chapter to write in this book, because I hadn’t really grappled with the extent of the brutality that the Chinese state visited upon the people.
0:17:41 Say more about that.
0:17:47 So the one-child policy was implemented in 1980 by Deng Xiaoping.
0:17:51 So Deng Xiaoping was the leader after Mao Zedong.
0:18:00 Deng felt that China had been way too chaotic under Mao, and his solution was to promote a lot of engineers into China’s central leadership.
0:18:05 And a very elite engineer at the time, his name was Song Jian.
0:18:09 He was one of China’s most brilliant mathematicians.
0:18:11 He worked in the missile ministry.
0:18:18 He started whispering to the Chinese leadership, you know, population trajectories can be just as firmly controlled as missile trajectories.
0:18:25 And that was part of the reason that Deng Xiaoping listened and implemented the one-child policy.
0:18:27 China then was a mess.
0:18:30 The population had surpassed a billion people.
0:18:37 And the Communist Party didn’t really realize that, because the Cultural Revolution destroyed anything that could be as organized as a national census.
0:18:47 And so China imposed the one-child policy, which was a vast campaign of rural terror against mostly female bodies that peaked in the 1980s.
0:19:04 And, you know, before thinking about the one-child policy, I didn’t quite realize that, well, of course, the only way to implement a one-child policy has to be through a system of forced sterilizations as well as forced abortions.
0:19:12 Because how else are you going to have rural women who were having three to four children at the time and convince them that one was the right number?
0:19:22 And so if you take a look at the number of abortions that China conducted over the one-child period, it was north of 300 million people.
0:19:24 This is according to official statistics.
0:19:27 And that is the present population of the United States.
0:19:39 And we have so many of these horrific stories of women losing their children, being forced to give up their children, having their children beaten out of them because Beijing had pursued this, I think, pretty idiotic policy.
0:19:51 So, Jesus, do you think China’s growth and enrichment depend on this kind of repressiveness?
0:19:53 I mean, could it grow like it’s growing?
0:19:58 Could it build like it’s building without this level of repression and control?
0:20:07 I want to believe so, because I don’t want to believe that repressiveness is any key to flourishing.
0:20:12 But it is a little bit hard to, you know, really try to establish that.
0:20:18 That’s certainly my own value, that I left China in part because I value pluralism.
0:20:33 But, you know, if you take a look at, you know, some of the economic discourse that has been around China over the last few decades, it is pretty obvious that China has been considerably more successful than India in development.
0:20:44 And on a lot of still pretty basic indicators, India, which is much more democratic, which does have a lot of pluralism, hasn’t achieved very excellent outcomes.
0:20:50 I’ve just seen a statistic that the female literacy rate in India is around 70%.
0:20:54 So three out of 10 women in India cannot read.
0:21:04 And there is still a pretty high rate of child malnutrition as well as stunting of children because a lot of children also don’t have very much to eat.
0:21:09 So India now is considerably poorer than China.
0:21:18 I certainly don’t want to embrace the idea that repressiveness was necessary, but we can say that repressiveness was part of China’s growth formula.
0:21:21 And that probably played a part in where it is today.
0:21:31 I’d like to know more about how Chinese people understand their own experience, their own life.
0:21:38 I mean, not that the entire country is a monolith, but in general, how do people feel in China about their own system?
0:21:40 I mean, is there anything like a consensus?
0:21:44 I mean, do we even really know what people think?
0:21:48 It is really hard to tell.
0:22:06 I think my sense of the public is that for most people in China who grew up essentially of my parents’ generation, my parents were born in the early 60s.
0:22:12 They did not have any memories of Mao’s Great Famine, which just preceded them.
0:22:21 They don’t have very strong memories of the Cultural Revolution, which hurt an earlier generation of intellectuals.
0:22:27 What they have seen is really steady improvement in their lives.
0:22:30 Some people have come into great wealth.
0:22:32 Unfortunately, my parents were not among them.
0:22:41 But, you know, some of their classmates from even in the backwaters of Ayu Inan did create, come into a lot of great wealth.
0:22:47 They’ve seen that their city has had subways when they didn’t have it before.
0:22:57 They’ve been able to ride on high-speed rail, which for a lot of Chinese is a very proud achievement and does feel pretty cool to be able to get on these bullet trains.
0:23:09 And I think the experience in China is of, you know, seeing their lives better and better, not necessarily year by year, but certainly decade by decade.
0:23:15 Now, I think that we could question how robust that trend is in Xi Jinping’s era.
0:23:35 There has been a lot more headwinds against China’s economy since Xi took over, in part because of China’s own government doings that have messed up the property sector and have smashed a lot of tech companies there, in part because of geopolitics with the trade war, in part because it tried to pop a property bubble.
0:23:39 And that’s why youth unemployment now in China is still really, really high.
0:23:47 But for, you know, many people to have lived through China’s growth over the last few decades, it feels pretty good.
0:23:54 And just in terms of, you know, one statistic that I like to cite now, China built its first highway really late.
0:23:56 It built its first highway in 1993.
0:24:12 So if you were born that year that China built its first highway, you would be able to drive on a highway system by the time you turned 18, which is the legal driving age, on a system of highways that was larger than America’s.
0:24:16 And so over the course of 18 years, China built an America’s worth of highways.
0:24:20 And then nine years later, China built another America’s worth of highways.
0:24:29 And so once you have this sort of tangible change, I think most Chinese are still pretty optimistic that the next few decades will be better than the last few decades.
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0:27:36 Let’s bring this back to America because the point, certainly one of the points of the book,
0:27:43 is to say that there’s a lot we can learn about our own society by comparing it to China.
0:27:50 How has watching China’s ascendance helped you see America more clearly?
0:27:59 If we take a look at some of the big debates of the moment in the United States,
0:28:03 you know, I think they include something like, how are living standards doing?
0:28:09 How are we dealing with these material shortages that we find most evident in housing?
0:28:13 The lack of provision of mass transit?
0:28:16 You know, the evisceration of our manufacturing sector.
0:28:20 How quickly can the United States decarbonize?
0:28:27 Is it building as much solar and wind and transmission lines and nuclear power plants as necessary?
0:28:33 Right now, you know, as we’re recording in 2025, there’s a whole set of other debates with Donald Trump.
0:28:38 And is the United States becoming, you know, losing some of its democratic traditions?
0:28:41 Well, maybe China can inform on that too.
0:28:49 But at least economically, I think that China is a pretty good model of operating model of abundance.
0:28:54 You know, the term housing crisis in the United States refers to spiraling unaffordability.
0:29:01 But in China, it refers to a collapse in home prices, in part because the state has built far too much.
0:29:06 And China has a very robust manufacturing sector.
0:29:10 It is able to produce not only leading technologies like electric vehicles,
0:29:18 but also masks and cotton swabs in the pandemic and all this personal protective equipment that U.S. manufacturers were not.
0:29:23 And China is also building these vast systems of mass transit as well.
0:29:29 So I think in a couple of crucial areas, namely related to abundance,
0:29:34 I think that China at least has some good lessons for the United States.
0:29:39 But I also want to be very clear that the U.S. doesn’t have to learn directly from China.
0:29:48 You know, if the U.S. was able to build mass transit at the level of costs of Japan or Spain or France,
0:29:49 that would be perfectly good enough.
0:29:51 We don’t have to study China here.
0:29:55 But let’s at least, you know, be a little bit more curious about the outside world
0:29:57 because China does have some good lessons.
0:30:01 We have this procedure fetish, I think is the phrase you use in the book, right?
0:30:06 It’s like it is impossible to build shit here or very difficult to build shit here
0:30:08 because everything is so painfully slow.
0:30:11 There’s a lot of friction in the system.
0:30:18 I mean, do you think on some level that friction is the price of this level of pluralism,
0:30:22 that all the rules and the legalism, however maddening,
0:30:28 are partly what keep diverse societies like ours from falling apart?
0:30:34 If we walk around big parts of the U.S., New York, the Midwest,
0:30:40 what it almost feels like is that we’re walking around the ruins of a formerly great industrial civilization
0:30:46 where the infrastructure is just barely maintained and nothing more can really be built
0:30:50 unless it is with these astronomical sums.
0:30:56 And I think it is a little bit difficult to see that this must be the price of pluralism
0:31:02 because I think that pluralism can thrive even better if the government could actually deliver
0:31:06 on some of the core state functions that states are meant to do.
0:31:12 So if I’m thinking about something like, you know, safe public streets, creating some sort of public order,
0:31:16 that is something that a lot of American cities have not done very well.
0:31:21 Creating affordable housing, building where the jobs are, building where the transit is,
0:31:24 that is also something that doesn’t really take place in cities.
0:31:30 And, you know, to say nothing of having to organize investment for the decarbonization drive
0:31:34 for wind, solar, and transmission, all of which will require a lot of land.
0:31:38 You know, none of that has been very, very impressive.
0:31:44 Now, I take the point that some degree of litigiousness is a guarantee of pluralism.
0:31:50 But the way also I feel is another similarity between the U.S. and China is that
0:31:55 I think that the U.S. and China kind of work okay for the middle class,
0:31:58 where, yes, it works really well for the really wealthy.
0:32:05 And so part of this is why the reason that I think the Chinese and Americans all want to get rich
0:32:07 because society works much better for them.
0:32:12 If you’re a resident of New York, if you’re a wealthy resident of New York,
0:32:16 you’re probably not so bothered by the housing crisis.
0:32:21 You’re able to build these skinny high-rises that are part of the skyline now.
0:32:22 You don’t need to take the bus to work.
0:32:24 You don’t need to take the subway to work.
0:32:27 You can take your helicopter or a car.
0:32:33 And so there are so many ways also in which California works really well for the wealthy
0:32:35 and not so much well for the middle class.
0:32:38 You know, there’s some wealthy people through the L.A. fires
0:32:41 that were able to have their own private firefighting service.
0:32:46 But I think that America is not sustainable if it works primarily well for the wealthy
0:32:49 because I think it needs to work for the broader people as well.
0:32:52 God knows you’re right that we’ve got too many damn lawyers.
0:32:55 But we also had a bunch of lawyers when we built the Hoover Dam.
0:32:59 And we also had a bunch of lawyers when we sent people to the moon.
0:32:59 Sure.
0:33:04 So why does the procedure fetish seem to be getting worse over time?
0:33:06 As you say in the book, we used to be in an engineering state.
0:33:10 And then something shifted in the 60s.
0:33:11 Yeah, that’s right.
0:33:14 I think the lawyers themselves changed in character.
0:33:20 So I think the first thing to acknowledge is that America has always had a lot of lawyers.
0:33:27 But with the first 16 presidents from Washington to Lincoln, 13 were lawyers, but there were three
0:33:27 who were not.
0:33:32 And the three who were not were all generals, especially, most famously, George Washington.
0:33:38 And I think among the military establishment, the military industrial complex, there is a
0:33:40 sense that shit needs to be built.
0:33:45 And these are people who are much more intent on creating big infrastructure.
0:33:49 Eisenhower, when he was a young officer, drove from coast to coast.
0:33:54 And it was a horrific, shuddering adventure because they were almost entirely on paved roads.
0:34:00 And maybe it is not surprising that Eisenhower initiated the construction of the interstate
0:34:03 highway system when he became president.
0:34:08 And so I think the U.S. always had a little bit of this martial tradition of actually building
0:34:08 a lot.
0:34:14 And the elites understood very well that a growing country with vast inflows of new immigrants
0:34:16 had to have the infrastructure in place.
0:34:26 And what really changed was in the 1960s, I think the public became very rightfully so super
0:34:27 skeptical of the lawyers.
0:34:33 What happened through the 1960s was that the public lost trust with the technocratic establishment
0:34:34 of the United States.
0:34:38 And so people were reacting against environmental destruction.
0:34:41 This was the time that Silent Spring came out.
0:34:47 People were reacting against Robert Moses and all of these urban planners that rammed highways
0:34:49 through dense urban cores.
0:34:55 There was the Vietnam War, which made people highly distrustful of the military establishment
0:34:55 as well.
0:35:02 And lawyers shifted from being more like dealmakers into more litigious regulators.
0:35:07 And this was something that really took off at Harvard Law School, as well as Yale Law School,
0:35:13 as well as other elite law schools, in which a lot of law students decided that their slogan
0:35:15 was going to be something like, sue the bastards.
0:35:20 And the bastards referred to the government, which was seen as to be working too closely in cahoots
0:35:22 with business to drive people away.
0:35:25 And so the lawyers themselves changed character.
0:35:28 They decided that they really had to focus on environmental protection.
0:35:30 I think rightfully so.
0:35:37 But the lawyers’ changing character has really created a lot of America’s present problems
0:35:39 by solving the previous generation of problems.
0:35:48 I just at least wanted to ask one question about Trump and his approach, particularly in the
0:35:50 second administration to China.
0:35:53 I still have no idea what’s happening with the tariffs.
0:35:55 I’m not sure the administration does either.
0:36:03 Our policy seems to shift every couple of weeks, but certainly Trump has brought a renewed interest
0:36:06 in bolstering American manufacturing.
0:36:11 And the administration seems pretty openly antagonistic towards China.
0:36:19 I’m just curious how you assess that, the current dynamic, and what you think Beijing makes of it.
0:36:31 Yeah, I think the way that Beijing has always viewed Trump is almost as a kind of a familiar figure
0:36:33 that they know what to do with.
0:36:43 So Trump alternates between being a frightful person waving a big stick and threatening China,
0:36:49 which is something that he has certainly done, and alternately being pretty transactional.
0:36:53 This sort of businessman that the Chinese are quite familiar with.
0:36:56 I think the Chinese would have a term for someone like him.
0:37:03 He would be someone who was like a coal mine boss, someone who just happened to own land near a coal mine,
0:37:10 came into great wealth, has no real manners, but is savvy in this sort of animal instinct way
0:37:12 that is really transactional.
0:37:17 And, you know, even the Communist Party knows what to do with these sorts of characters.
0:37:24 And so, when I was living in Beijing, when Trump went over for a state visit, he really rolled out the right carpet,
0:37:33 he took them into the National Museum, allowed Trump to handle this urn made out of gold, and he was able to lift it.
0:37:37 And it was really clear that Trump found this all quite glamorous.
0:37:48 And I think the view that segments of Beijing has had is that Trump is someone who has never said a bad word about Xi Jinping.
0:37:50 Those two are bros.
0:37:58 And that really only shifted after the pandemic and his first term, when, you know, the pandemic was a really bad thing for the country
0:38:02 and for his political prospects and for his own health as well.
0:38:10 But it seems like Trump has been much more hostile towards Germans and Japanese,
0:38:17 which were more of the traditional enemies of America when Trump was coming of age in the 1980s.
0:38:24 And yet today, there is still the sense that President Trump is the most pro-China member in the White House
0:38:31 who would declare that, you know, our Chinese students coming to America, well, it’s our honor to have them.
0:38:33 And this is something I’m quoting from him verbatim.
0:38:37 He openly admires Xi Jinping every so often.
0:38:44 And generally, I think that Trump has enjoyed his transactions and his dealings in China.
0:38:53 And you do see in some cases where Trump is, he has been much more threatening towards the Europeans as well as the Japanese.
0:38:55 And so I don’t think this is a very stable equilibrium.
0:38:59 There is kind of businessman Trump as well as scary Trump.
0:39:05 And I think if Xi Jinping could choose to deal with anyone, it would not be to deal with Trump.
0:39:08 I think he does not personally like Trump very much.
0:39:15 But it can’t be denied that Trump is just this completely mercurial figure, mixed policy by whim.
0:39:20 He has already relaxed a lot of export controls on semiconductors to China.
0:39:23 And so two of them seem to be buddy buddies again.
0:39:29 And so Trump was someone who brought this big anti-China shift in U.S. policy in his first term.
0:39:39 But he’s also, every so often, you know, the biggest threat to the China hawks in his cabinet out there where he’s able to, completely willing to crush them when he needs to make a deal.
0:39:41 So I think that’s how the Chinese see Trump.
0:39:44 It is not unambiguously good or bad.
0:39:53 I think that we, you know, Americans, get that China is this formidable political object.
0:40:01 But is China more than just a great power looking to pursue and defend its own interest?
0:40:03 I mean, is it also an ideological project?
0:40:10 Does Beijing want to remake the world in its image or does it just want to dominate its sphere?
0:40:20 That is a question among a lot of the China scholarly community, a lot of debate among the China watching community.
0:40:29 Now, I think there is a view out there, Stephen Kotkin, with whom I work, would like to say that the appetite grows with the eating.
0:40:31 They’re going to take what they can.
0:40:40 And if you give them an inch, if you give them Taiwan, then perhaps they will take, you know, other parts of the Asia Pacific.
0:40:57 And I think there is also another view that China is very intent on controlling its own sphere of influence, which is, you know, mostly dominating the East Asian Pacific as well as Southeast Asia.
0:41:08 And it would really love for all the rest of the world to count out for the emperor’s pleasure, because that is part of the great dream of the emperors.
0:41:28 And I think, you know, something we can debate is, furthermore, is if a lot of China’s close neighbors, namely countries like Cambodia and Laos and Thailand and Vietnam, you know, are pretty subservient to the Communist Party, is that a grave threat to American interests?
0:41:35 And perhaps the answer is yes, perhaps the answer is no, but these are the sort of questions that we want to ask.
0:41:48 And even if the Chinese government is mostly interested in a sort of a defensive aggressiveness, trying to, for example, muzzle criticism of the Communist Party in the United States.
0:42:00 You know, it is not necessarily trying to change the United States ideologically into socialism or anything, but if it were only intent on muzzling critics, its critics overseas, how much of a problem is that?
0:42:26 And perhaps we decide that is intolerable and unacceptable and has to be defeated, but these are the sorts of questions that I, you know, what I’m always more interested in is trying to, you know, frame these sorts of questions, trying to define what the question is, trying to define what acts we should declare to be permissible or intolerable, and what are we able to do to really fight back on the practices we declare to be intolerable?
0:42:30 What would it look like to combine the best of the U.S. and the Chinese systems?
0:42:34 Has a country done something close to this?
0:42:41 Is there a hybrid system that offers the virtues of both without all the pathologies of each?
0:42:44 I mean, or is this just a utopian political fantasy?
0:42:48 I think that there is no utopia anywhere out there.
0:42:53 Now, I’ve spent quite a lot of the summer traveling around in Europe.
0:42:56 My wife is Austrian.
0:42:58 We have been in Austria.
0:43:01 We’ve been in Paris, London, now Copenhagen.
0:43:13 And, you know, maybe we can see that in some ways that European countries embody some level of, you know, delivering goods for the middle class, delivering a lot of mass transit.
0:43:22 And so in some ways that European countries may be good, but I’m also highly skeptical of the case that anyone’s really gotten it figured out.
0:43:33 You know, you can name any country and we can name dozens of really grave, severe problems that face, for example, Japan with demographic issues and a lackluster economy.
0:43:38 We think that we have a housing affordability crisis in America, and we do.
0:43:45 But housing unaffordability is much worse in the United Kingdom, in Canada, in much of continental Europe.
0:43:48 How are people supposed to survive under these conditions?
0:43:52 And so, you know, I don’t think that there is any perfect country out there.
0:43:55 I think we’re all tangles of imperfection.
0:44:01 And what we have to do is to make ourselves a little bit less perfect, learn from each other, and then do much better.
0:44:09 And here’s where I’m still somewhat optimistic about the United States, where I think the U.S. is constantly in a state of change.
0:44:10 It is constantly in a state of debate.
0:44:27 It might, there’s millions of ways for it to implode, but I also see that it is asking the right questions much more fervently than anywhere else is, and still has a more serious shot at, you know, fixing itself than almost any other country in the world.
0:44:29 And that’s still something I believe.
0:44:39 You do say at the end, and did not get the sense that it was perfunctory, that you’re still relatively optimistic about both countries.
0:44:41 What is that optimism based on?
0:44:59 That they are not like Japan and Europe, where stasis is much more of the norm, where these countries are, I think, countries where if you don’t make your friends by high school, then you don’t really have more friends after that.
0:45:11 That these are countries that are really skeptical of dynamism and change, that are unable really to try to really restructure their societies in ways to be considerably more open.
0:45:26 And I think, you know, China is never going to become heavily driven by immigrants, but there is a sense of change and reform that is, that the Communist Party professes to embrace, and sometimes does embrace.
0:45:31 And they sometimes have really speedy fixes to some of their grave problems.
0:45:48 The U.S. change is much more difficult, but I admire that there is always a sense of debate, and that we’re always trying to come to better terms, and that we’re always trying to figure out, how did we mess up so badly before, and how can we do a little bit better?
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0:48:05 I do genuinely wonder how far this experiment can go for China.
0:48:13 As you say, and now I’m quoting, that the Communist Party is too afraid of the Chinese people to give them real agency.
0:48:19 As long as that’s the case, it’s hard for me to feel confident in the durability of this system.
0:48:25 I think the issue here is not exactly durability.
0:48:30 I think that the system can be resilient at a pretty bad state for quite a long while.
0:48:38 I think the gigantic shame of this is that it is enforcing a lot of lost opportunity.
0:48:42 Important essays are censored in China all the time.
0:48:45 Reporters are very heavily muzzled.
0:48:50 And people just have less and less ability to debate.
0:48:58 And I think the idea of the Communist Party is not only to control speech, but it is to also control free thought.
0:49:00 And that is one of these things that is pretty scary.
0:49:05 Joseph Stalin had this phrase of poets and teachers being engineers of the soul.
0:49:08 And this is a phrase that is tremendously creepy.
0:49:09 Tremendously.
0:49:11 That Xi Jinping decided to echo.
0:49:14 And so, you know, I think this is what they want to be.
0:49:16 It’s also engineers of the soul.
0:49:21 And I don’t think that it will succeed, but I think it is creating a lot of discontent.
0:49:27 And it is suppressing China’s growth, even though authoritarian regimes can be pretty durable over the longer run.
0:49:33 I don’t want another mammal engineering my soul without my input.
0:49:34 Yes.
0:49:43 I think you say it well in the final pages that the contest between the U.S. and China, insofar as there is a contest,
0:49:46 will be won by the country that works best for the people living in it.
0:49:52 And I think you’re also right that both countries have some distinct advantages over the other.
0:49:59 And I think you’re right that the big question for us, America, is whether we can hold on.
0:50:03 Hold on to our pluralism while also actually building shit.
0:50:09 But to do that, we will have to overcome the lawyerly society.
0:50:14 And I have no idea how that’s going to happen.
0:50:29 I still think, though, having said all that, that pluralism in the long run is a safer bet than top-down control and the sort of whipsaw changes you get in an engineering state.
0:50:30 I believe that pretty firmly.
0:50:35 I’m not sure what it would take to move me off of that view.
0:50:38 Maybe you feel that way, too.
0:50:47 I think that I completely agree that pluralism is the right virtue over the longer run.
0:51:02 But not being able to govern effectively and not being able to do well for the citizens is one of the big deficiencies of the United States.
0:51:05 Not just of the moment, but also of the past.
0:51:21 And I also believe that if the Chinese regime were able to build a lot more, that would substantially weaken the United States because it would further de-industrialize an already weak manufacturing sector in the U.S.
0:51:39 It could credibly threaten the U.S. by building quite a lot more than it could, you know, inspire a lot more national pride in China by delivering actually better economic outcomes, as well as, you know, political prestige projects that inspire the population.
0:51:51 And I think the problem of the U.S. right now has to be that it needs to stop eating the shit out of itself, first of all, and then actually do well for broader masses of people.
0:51:54 And that’s really the important thing that we all got to try to achieve.
0:52:00 Once again, the book is called Breakneck, China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
0:52:02 Thank you for coming on the show, Dan.
0:52:03 Thanks very much, Sean.
0:52:04 This was a lot of fun.
0:52:13 All right.
0:52:15 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:52:17 I really, truly did.
0:52:18 Dan is a great guest.
0:52:19 He wrote a great book.
0:52:24 And China is something I have wanted to learn more about for a very long time.
0:52:26 And it was a wonderful education.
0:52:28 So I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
0:52:31 As always, we want to know what you think.
0:52:42 So drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
0:52:48 And when you’re done with that, please go ahead, rate, review, subscribe to the podcast.
0:52:50 It helps our show grow.
0:53:00 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Erica Wong, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:53:03 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
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America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever. Meanwhile, China seems to have no trouble at all: high-speed rails, solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, all churned out at breakneck speed.
Why is that?
Sean’s guest is Dan Wang, author of the new book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. They discuss the policies and mindset that allow China to tackle remarkable feats of engineering, the advantages and drawbacks of America’s “lawyerly society,” and what China and America must learn from each other.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Dan Wang, author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
This episode was made in partnership with Vox’s Future Perfect team.
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