How the U.S. Is Falling Behind China’s Engineering State

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Dan Wang, welcome to the show.

 

DAN WANG: Thank you, Walter.

 

ISAACSON: I was reading your book “Breakneck” last night, and there’s a sentence at the very beginning that I think sets up the theme. Let me read it to you. You’re talking about the contrast between America and China. You say there’s “an American elite, made up mostly of lawyers excelling at obstruction versus a Chinese technocratic class made up mostly of engineers that excels at construction.” Tell me how that sets up your book and what you’re arguing.

 

WANG: Walter, the central idea of my book is that China is a country that I call an engineering state because at various points, the entirety of the most senior members of the Communist party have had degrees in engineering. What do engineers like to do? Well, build a lot of stuff. Whether that is roads or bridges or hyperscalers or coal plants whatever it is, homes especially. China is always trying to build another big project. The unfortunate fact of China is that they’re not only physical engineers, they’re also social engineers. And so they often treat society as if it were just another building material to be remolded and torn down as they wish. And I contrast that with the United States, which I call the Lawyerly Society. Part because so many presidents have gone to law school. They are now 47 US senators with law degrees. Only one has studied anything in STEM. And the issue with lawyers is that they’re really good at saying no rather than building stuff. And so we don’t have really terrible ideas like the one child policy in the United States, but we also don’t have functional infrastructure, I would say almost anywhere.

 

ISAACSON: Well, you’re talking about the one child policy, and I assume you mean in China, that was a social engineering thing. So they, what you’re saying is they can build high speed rail really great, but then when they start doing social engineering, like one child policy, that messes up.

 

WANG: That’s right. So I think the unfortunate factor China is that they cannot restrain themselves from being only physical engineers. I think for the most part, physical engineering, though it has a lot of costs, is pretty good. I think it is pretty good to have an expanding high speed rail network, expanding subway systems, more homes than people can buy, such that they have falling home prices now. And I think there’s plenty of problems around debt. There’s plenty of problems around demographics. Sometimes there’s human displacement involved, especially if they build a really big dam. But I think for the most part that is good. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes they treat many of their ethno-religious minorities like the folks in, living in Tibet or in Xinjiang as just another building material. I spent a lot of time thinking about the one child policy as well as zero COVID which I lived through for, during its entirety in China in which the number is right there in the name. There’s very little ambiguity about what these policies could possibly mean.

 

ISAACSON: Is there something connected to that though? In other words, could you have the great engineering skills without it slopping over into messy social engineering?

 

WANG: I want to get to a place much more like the Europeans, where the Europeans, perhaps the Japanese have ended up in. In Europe in let’s say Paris and Barcelona and Rome according to the subway costs that we have seen, according to the transit data that’s mostly compiled by New York University, what we see is that these cities are able to build new infrastructure systems, new subway systems at about one eighth or one ninth, the cost levels of New York City. And if I’m thinking about the populations in Barcelona and Madrid and Rome and Paris, they don’t seem to be really deeply distressed by all of these human rights violations that were involved in building their subways. And so I think there’s a way in which the Europeans and the Japanese have got it right, they have the high-speed rail systems, they have mass transit systems, perhaps they don’t have quite enough housing, but they’re much better than New York and California are at building. And what I’d like to say is that let’s get to European levels. We don’t have to do any social engineering but let’s have much more functional infrastructure that’s badly needed in the United States.

 

ISAACSON: You said we don’t have to do any social engineering, but there seems to be a mindset in the United States that’s not just lawyerly, it’s “not in my backyard” stopping things. And you mention high speed rail often you put it in your book. In 2008, they approved a high speed rail, I think from Los Angeles to San Francisco. They also in China, approved in 2008, one from Beijing to Shanghai. Tell me why it is that the US one could never get built.

 

WANG: Three years after 2008 in 2011, the Shanghai-Beijing high-speed rail line started operating. It moves really quickly, it transports a lot of people. And over the course of the first decade, according to Chinese state media the high-speed rail system moved something like 1.4 billion passenger trips over the course of the next decade. How many people have actually been able to ride on the California high-speed rail system? That answer is very simple. It is zero because almost none of it has actually been built. The first segment that would be built would, it’s supposed to open it’s lines in something between 2030 to 2033 connecting the towns of Bakersfield and Merced, which is not really close to San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

And this is one of these quite disappointing things about the United States, that the California high-speed rail has not built on time.  It’s basically built very little at all. And yet people aren’t super disappointed. People aren’t out on the streets saying, what’s going on with our tax dollars? Right now this whole system is supposed to cost something like $128 billion. And so that is kind of a strange thing to me. 

 

ISAACSON: Well wait, let’s get at the reason there. I mean, you say it’s lawyers, but you know, we’ve always –, our founders were lawyers. Most of the people who signed the declaration were – we used to be able to build things. What’s gone wrong?

 

WANG: The lawyers have always been present in the US, but I think the character of the lawyers has changed quite substantially essentially in the last 50, 60 years. In my book, I trace out that the US has a heritage of being an engineering state. The US certainly built a lot of stuff, much as the Chinese have. Between the, around the 1850s to around the 1950s, America built these awesome infrastructure projects, things like canal systems, transcontinental Railroad skyscrapers in Manhattan as well as Chicago. We had the Manhattan Project, we had the Apollo missions, we had the interstate highway system. And I think that’s in part because the technocratic engineering elites in America, sometimes represented by the military industrial complex, had been in power a little bit more. 

And there was also the case that the lawyers were slightly different as well. If we take a look at lawyers about a hundred years ago, they were much more often creative deal makers. So we had people like Franklin D Roosevelt who was kind of a Wall Street lawyer who packed his cabinet in the New Deal with other lawyers. And they were very effective and creative in thinking about how to structure new deals in order to get things done. Something really shifted in the 1960s and the 1970s when people had gotten really tired of all of these big engineering projects that the US had been managing. Things like the high speed rail system in which urban planners like Robert Moses ramped through too many highways through New York City. People were really exhausted by the war. People were really exhausted by DDT and other pesticides. And the lawyers themselves turned away from deal makers into much more regulators as well as litigators. And I think that is what we are living with the remnants of. Lawyers that are much more eager to stop things rather than build things.

 

ISAACSON: You were born in Yunnan province, I think in southwest China. 

 

WANG: Correct. 

 

ISAACSON: And when you were young, you moved to Canada, but then you moved back to Shanghai during the CO– and happened to be there when COVID struck. Tell me what you learned about being there during COVID.

 

WANG: I was in China from 2017 to 2023, which I experienced the first trade war that President Trump launched. I saw how that morphed into much greater geopolitical tensions between the US and China. My centerpiece for living in China was experiencing the entirety of zero COVID from 2020 to the end of 2022. And zero COVID started out in a kind of a political disaster in which people had gotten really upset that a respiratory virus had been spilling out of Wuhan in the start of 2020, in which people were reminded that only two decades before the start of COVID, that China had a different respiratory virus, namely SARS in 2003, in which the government suppressed a lot of news and then suppressed a lot of whistleblowers. And then the virus was allowed to spread because people weren’t really allowed to know about it. And people had gotten quite angry. 

But then there was a next stage of COVID’S development in which China implemented all of these World Health Organization guidelines to really try to stop the transmission of the virus sometimes through fairly coercive means. But what that did achieve was a level of transmissions that was almost non-existent, that was absolutely minuscule, and the ability to restart life in a pretty compelling way. 

And that worked pretty well up until the spring of 2022 when we had the much more transmissible omicron variant of the virus in which the Chinese state tried to use these same methods to try to contain a much more transmissible virus and was not successful. So we had the Shanghai lockdown, which took place in the spring of 2022 in which I say that the state attempted probably the most ambitious lockdown in the history of humanity in which China’s largest city Shanghai of 25 million people were unable to leave their apartment compounds over the course of 8, 9, 10 weeks. And so I think one of the messages I want to convey with the engineering state is that the line between rationality and irrationality is pretty thin. It could look like China is achieving these spectacular successes up until it goes too far and holds on for too long, in which case it veers into disaster. And so that is one of these strange paradoxes that we see with China and the engineering state.

 

ISAACSON: One of the things you did when you were back living in China is you took a bicycle trip. I think it was through Guizhou province. And it a somewhat poor province. And yet you saw a lot of things that I think informed the rest of your book.

 

WANG: It’s a very poor province. It’s far deep in China’s Southwest where it is highly mountainous a lot of jungles and previously a lot of diseases that arose from malaria. So by way of context, Guizhou is very distant from the much more prosperous coasts of China which are much richer because they are able to export a lot of goods because Guizhou is so distant and so mountainous, it just hasn’t been able to get much industry started. So this is China’s fourth porous province, and yet when I took that bicycle trip in the summer of 2021, I saw astounding levels of infrastructure. Has about 11 airports with four more under construction. Has excellent integration into the high speed rail network. Its cities have very good subway lines. Also has about 45 of the world’s tallest bridges. Not, China’s tallest bridges, but the world’s tallest bridges. And so I was really struck that when I was traveling through America’s equivalent of, let’s say West Virginia or maybe a South Dakota, not the most wealthy places, that it has much better levels of infrastructure than what we –

 

ISAACSON: Well, let me stop right there. How do they afford that? Are they taking on too much debt to do that?

 

WANG: They are taking a lot of debt to, to be able to do that. And they’re barely able to afford that. Perhaps they’re not able to afford it. Because we can see that Guizhou is one of the most indebted provinces in China. A lot of these local governments are unable to pay back the interest on their bonds that they use to build these big bridges that are not terribly economical. And I think that is definitely one of these big problems of the engineering state, that they don’t care enough about profitability. They pile on a lot of debt. 

But when I was cycling through Guizhou and chatting to some of these folks who are living in these villages, for the most part, they are really proud of everything that they see around them that previously it took them hours to get to their neighboring village. But now with this new bridge it takes them a matter of minutes, perhaps in order to drive across this bridge. They feel really good that they have the high speed rail lines in which they’re able to go to much bigger cities like Shanghai or Beijing, perhaps, to work. And so that is something that I think the engineering state is has been really good at. That a lot of what it builds is perhaps economically questionable, but what that has also achieved is a degree of political resilience. And I think building a lot of infrastructure inspires genuine pride with a lot of Chinese. And I think that goes some length to explaining why the Communist Party has been robust and has been as stable as it is because people are really happy to get better cities, better parks, more subway lines, better integration, and they are very genuinely proud of these big monumental projects.

 

ISAACSON: Lemme ask you a philosophical question because a lot of what you’ve been talking about involves America’s emphasis on individual freedom, individual rights, the rights to stop things or whatever. Things that you do not see in Chinese society, whether it’s a lockdown in Shanghai or data privacy. To what extent is individual freedom a detriment to America’s ability to build things? And to what extent might it actually be the secret sauce that allows more innovation in America?

 

WANG: I think it is both. I think it is both the secret sauce as well as some extent detriment. Now, I wanna say that part of the reason that I moved out of China at the start of 2023 was because I missed some degree of individualism that I wanted to be left alone by the state and not suffer these dramatic crackdowns and lockdowns that a lot of Chinese had been experiencing. I really miss the pluralism that exists in the US and I think I’ll say one nice thing about the lawyers is that they guarantee everyone’s ability to have some sort of voice in the system. And I much appreciated that over the Chinese system in which the official voice is really meant to speak above everyone else. 

At the same time, I think that there are issues that in the United States, especially in California in particular, there are all sorts of problems in which a single homeowner, a single property owner, is able to put up his hand, hire a pretty expensive lawyer and convince a judge not to do something that many, many other people desperately need.

And I think what the US system has is this entrenched homeowner base, entrenched political base that is much more interested in protecting their own interests rather than building out more so that more people can share the goods. And a lot of what I want to do is to try to encourage the US to be slightly more engineering, let’s call it 20% more engineering, because that’s what we need to build our homes and build our infrastructure. And I wish that China could be 50% more lawyerly. It needs a lot more lawyers in order to protect individual rights in order to permit individual flourishing, allow some degree of creative expression. And I think that the world would really be better off if the US could build a little bit more again, and if the Chinese state could actually respect the wills and bushes of its own people.

 

ISAACSON: Do you see similarities between President Xi of China and President Trump of the United States?

 

WANG: I certainly see that president Trump is learning a lot from President Xi. Yes, it is very often the case that Trump is saying all sorts of nice things about his buddy Xi Jinping. I’ve heard him praise Xi’s great head of hair. I think that is a really remarkable thing to say about another world leader. And part of my concern is that rather than learning all of the good things that China has been doing well, I worry that the United States is learning a lot of really bad things. I think that Trump is learning to be like China, to be visiting a lot of misfortune upon the downtrodden along, upon some of the most unfortunate among us. There’s now much greater questions around data probity which is an issue among the statistical agencies now in both the US as well as in China. Which, I think the top leader demands a lot of fealty and every problem is caused by either foreigners or traitors. And I think these are all things that Trump has been learning from Xi. 

And I would really hope that Trump can learn some of the good stuff because right now I think it feels to me like we have authoritarianism without the good stuff, the good stuff of functioning cities, functioning logistical systems, public order as well as very extensive infrastructure build outs that we need very much. And so rather than learning the good stuff, I am, I think it’s unfortunate that Trump is learning mostly the bad stuff.

 

ISAACSON: Dan Wang, thank you so much for joining us.

 

WANG: Thank you, Walter.