"Breakneck"
Mar. 10th, 2026 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeDan Wang
A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. .. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth.
Really, everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing.
I endured all three years of Xi’s pursuit of zero-Covid, which started impressively until it plunged the country into broad misery.
* sustained rise in living standards and the authoritarian pulses emanating out of Beijing. It became no contradiction for me to appreciate that things are getting better and getting worse. I saw how China is made up of both strong entrepreneurs and a strong government, with a state that both moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people.
China learned so well from the United States that it started to beat America at its own game: capitalism, industry, and harnessing its people’s restless ambitions. If you want to appreciate what Detroit felt like at its peak, it’s probably better to experience that in Shenzhen
* A procedure-obsessed left conspired with a thoughtlessly destructive right to constrain the government. Neither the left nor the right allows the state to deliver essential goods expected by the public.
The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity.
* an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction.
* Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies. Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles
Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers.
A rough rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic panels, or anything else.
Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering.
You can’t build companies worth trillions without legal protections. But lawyers are also part of the reason that the Bay Area and much of the country are starved of housing and mass transit.
* China embraced engineering in all its dimensions. Its leaders aren’t only civil or electrical engineers. They are, fundamentally, social engineers. .. The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul—a phrase from Joseph Stalin repeated by Xi Jinping
it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves. <> Can a government be too efficient? Six years in China taught me that the answer is yes, when it is unbounded by citizen input. There are many self-limiting aspects of a system that makes snap decisions with so little regard for people.
things that no other state would have attempted, like holding on to a zero-Covid strategy until it drove the country mad. The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals... Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals.
* Engineers often treat social issues as math exercises... There is no confusion about the purpose of zero-Covid or the one-child policy: The number is right there in the name.
As impressive as China’s railways and bridges may be, they carry enormous levels of debt that drag down broader growth. Manufacturers produce so many goods that China’s trade partners are now grumbling for protection.
To capture both the traumatic aspects of the engineering state and its capacity to produce great pride, I like to think of a hypothetical question: What was the worst year to be born in modern China?
That was the Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions perished from agricultural collectivization, quack agronomy, natural disasters, and Mao’s order to melt down household tools for the metal, all leading to the sort of mass starvation
Also around then, if he were an urban resident, Yao would catch China’s housing privatization. As the state moved to dismantle socialism, it offered homes to urban workers for a song. It was one of the greatest wealth transfers in history:
* The year 2008 offers a direct comparison between California’s speed and China’s speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. Both lines would be around eight hundred miles long upon completion... China opened the Beijing–Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $36 billion. ... The first segment of California’s train will start operating, according to official estimates, between 2030 and 2033. Which means that the margin of error for estimating when a partial leg of California’s high-speed rail will open is the same as the time it took China to build the entire Beijing–Shanghai line.
Though the political views of law students may twist in unexpected directions, we should keep in view that they are entwined most firmly around a pillar of personal ambition... More than any other group in the United States, lawyers are afforded license to be generalists, permitted to stomp into whichever intellectual realm pleases them.... In recent decades, lawyers have been able to muscle out economists even in economic policymaking. The Biden administration was staffed by many graduates of Yale Law,
* While engineers envision bridges, lawyers envision procedures... The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries. Since lawyers are everywhere, proceduralism has reached everywhere,.. The other problem of the lawyerly society is a systematic bias toward the well-off.
The Communist Party has relentlessly broken up entrenched interests, partly to prevent rich people from gaining political power and partly to spread material benefits throughout the country.
No military can be powered by artificial intelligence alone; it will need drones and munitions... Over the past decade, the United States brought lawyers to a technology fight.
If Americans look deeply into China, they will find reflections of its lost powers. China, right now, is in the midst of pursuing its own Great Society, where even its poorest provinces have impressive levels of physical dynamism.
The state-owned distillery behind Maotai, the hundred-proof spirit made of sorghum, grew into one of China’s most valuable companies. Its capital city of Guiyang now hosts several of the country’s biggest data centers.
* I saw that big guitar ornaments were hanging off of streetlamps. In the distance, I spied a hill topped by a giant rock guitar. It turned out that we were cycling through Zheng’an County, the self-styled guitar capital of the world. According to state media, one of every seven guitars made worldwide is produced in this township we passed through by chance. <> That is another feature of the engineering state: Manufacturing hubs are everywhere, often making goods you don’t expect.
China does little by way of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor; rather, it is enacting a Leninist agenda in which the state retains enormous discretion to command economic resources in order to maintain political control and to build toward a post-scarcity world.
In 2010, only half of Guizhou’s children attended high school—the lowest rate in the country.
* A Chinese citizen born when the country completed its first expressway would—by the time she reached the legal driving age of eighteen in 2011—be able to drive on a highway system that surpassed the length of the US interstate system. By 2020, China had built a second batch of expressways that again totaled the length of the US system.
China’s ports became the world’s busiest. Shanghai alone moved more containers in 2022 than all of the US ports combined.
Above all, China built housing. Its urban population has grown by an average of sixteen million people each year since 1978, which means, in effect, that the state built a new city the size of greater New York City and greater Boston combined every year for thirty-five years... the 4.4 billion tons of cement that China produced from 2018 to 2019 nearly equals the amount of cement the United States produced over the entire twentieth century.
Chinese have mustered tremendous enthusiasm for destroying the nation’s physical heritage in the recent past. It was prominent during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao ordered Red Guards to loot Buddhist temples, smash Confucian statues, and desecrate ancestral tombs.
People unable to appreciate the benefits of material improvements also don’t understand how it produces pride and satisfaction. China’s transformation has given people running water and toilets, mass transit and highways, beautiful parks and modern malls.
* When Beijing began construction of its high-speed rail program in 2008, critics charged that it was foolish for a then-poor country to acquire the sorts of luxury infrastructure out of reach even for many rich countries. “Infrastructure investment can be too good for a country’s development level,” concluded a line from economist Michael Pettis, which was not an atypical sentiment.
* an educational system steeped in Marxism. For them, production was a noble deed to advance communism, while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism. This party believes that only the state has the wisdom to invest in strategic megaprojects, whereas consumers will waste money on themselves.
Beijing has announced several times that it would impose a property tax. Each time it faltered. One of the political reasons is that China’s leaders are familiar with the American slogan “No taxation without representation.” Since the state levies relatively light taxes, which it takes unobtrusively from citizens, it reduces the risk that people start asking questions... Around 10 percent of its GDP goes toward social spending, compared to 20 percent in the United States and 30 percent among the more generous European states.
a gigantic effort to draw water from China’s southern rivers toward its parched northern cities, along three canal systems, targeting completion in 2050. The plan envisions the creation of large water reservoirs across the country and the construction of major flood-control projects. <> The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan outlines interstellar research and other state-directed megaprojects.
* Of Guizhou’s eleven airports, five have less than a dozen flights each week—and there are three more airports still under construction. Guizhou has become one of China’s most indebted provinces, and it’s starting to feel real fiscal distress. In an unusual move, Guiyang’s finance bureau issued a public outcry in 2022 that it was at the end of its ability to deal with the debt. Quickly afterward, the government deleted its own admission.
Discipline Inspection to descend on Guizhou. They are unbound by even the modest levels of legal niceties afforded in China. Rather than investigating legal crimes, their remit is to find “violations of party discipline,” a nebulous charge that includes not only corruption but also misuse of public funds and political disloyalty to the Communist Party. That makes the commission akin to the Inquisition
One of the Communist Party’s personnel practices (inherited from imperial times) is to rotate officials between various jurisdictions, forcing them to gain broad experience and preventing them from drawing their power base from their home province.... Joe Biden’s, who, before becoming vice president and then president, spent his entire political life representing Delaware.
* since local governments don’t have property taxes, they primarily fund themselves through land sales to real estate developers. This combination of personnel policy and fiscal quirks produces officials like Li Zaiyong who invest in glamorous projects and whose failures are apparent only after they’ve left office.
I sometimes think of Tianjin’s library as a metaphor for China’s economy: great hardware that looks impressive from a distance, not filled with the softer stuff that actually matters... Moody’s, the American credit rating firm, listed Tianjin and Guizhou as China’s two most heavily indebted regions. Each has a debt-to-GDP ratio approaching that of Italy’s.
* “American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.” <> In 2020, I could have picked up face masks that were branded Foxconn (the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer), BYD (the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer), or JD.com (China’s second-largest e-commerce platform).
China won’t become the world’s biggest economy by building more tall bridges. It also can’t continue manufacturing more than twice the number of cars it sells at home. And the United States is starting to realize the problems of being too focused on the demand side of the economy. When the federal government offers, for example, rental support in housing-scarce cities, landlords can raise their prices, leaving renters no better off.
When I look at the United States, I marvel both at how much it did build before 1970 as well as how little it constructed afterward. China spent 13.5 percent of its GDP on infrastructure investment in 2016, whereas the US average over the past three decades is closer to 3 percent each year.
I came across a Metro North timetable from 1915. It revealed that the express train from New York’s Grand Central Terminal to New Haven took the same amount of time then as in 2025: around two hours.
Unfortunately, Cape Wind was in Nantucket Sound, home to some of the wealthiest, and mostly liberal, US citizens, like the Kennedy family, whose compound is in Hyannisport. These residents banded together, formed a nonprofit, and enlisted lawyers that included one of Harvard’s best-known constitutional law professors to challenge the development. After sixteen years of lawsuits, the developer abandoned the project.
So far, however, building big has improved the lives of regular people, not just a narrow set of elites. This lack of emphasis on efficiency has been key to another Chinese success: Part of the reason that China dominates advanced manufacturing technologies is precisely because it tolerates lower profits while cultivating a large workforce.
It was at Foxconn’s Henan sites where some of the most dramatic protests against zero-Covid took place, when young men flung bricks into massed ranks of riot police.
Shenzhen: Threaded between big avenues are bustling pockets of semi-preserved village structures that imbue the city with more liveliness than glass skyscrapers are able to provide.
United wrote that Apple booked fifty business-class seats daily from San Francisco to Shanghai, from which the airline made $35 million each year. That’s over eighteen thousand business-class seats on one route.
* These components were getting better every year, part of a trend that Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, called “the peace dividends of the smartphone wars.” The hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the smartphone supply chain have caused the cost of electronic components—cameras, sensors, batteries, modems—to plummet. .. Electric vehicles are full of the electronic components borrowed from smartphones; the consumer drone is roughly a reassembly of a smartphone camera and sensor with propellers for flight.
By the time that the iPhone X was released in 2017, Chinese firms were making acoustic parts, charging modules, and battery packs. According to a teardown analysis, China’s contribution to the iPhone X reached around 25 percent of the final value of the phone.
* We can see how China values process knowledge through its approach to architecture too. That reveals something deeper and more interesting about its culture. One of my favorite books about China is a collection of essays called The Hall of Uselessness by the Belgian sinologist Simon Leys... The approach in China, as Leys points out, is for builders to yield to the onrush of time by using eminently perishable, and indeed fragile, materials. By building temples out of wood with paneling sometimes made of paper, Chinese architecture has built-in obsolescence, demanding frequent renewal. .. The shining exemplar of this idea is found not in China but at the Ise Grand Shrine (or Ise Jingu) in Japan... It is also about the preservation of craft knowledge. Twenty years is the length of a generation, and the caretakers of the Ise Jingu have attempted to ensure that knowledge about how to rebuild this shrine can be passed on to descendants.
Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice.
Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers. We tend to refer to these intangibles as know-how, institutional memory, or tacit knowledge. They are embodied by an experienced workforce like Shenzhen’s... The value of these communities of engineering practice is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology.
Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel, said it best in 2010: that the United States needs to focus less on “the mythical moment of creation” and more on the “scaling up” of products. .. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing.
US manufacturing employment peaked in 1980 at nineteen million workers. In 2000, it still had seventeen million. .. In 2025, the United States has around thirteen million manufacturing workers.
One prominent line of argument regarding General Electric was that the company was taken over by finance. That applies in greater force against Boeing. Once run by engineers obsessed with safety and quality, its leadership shifted to executives more focused on delivering shareholder value than good planes.
* Tesla’s presence jolted China’s electric vehicle market. China’s business community began using the term “catfishing” for what Tesla was doing in China. The idea was that introducing a powerful new creature into the domestic environment would make Chinese firms swim faster.
The results of the Chinese government’s unceasing interventions in the economy are at best ambiguous. Economic studies have shown that the recipients of Chinese subsidies have, on average, lower productivity growth. .. China’s tech successes are no convincing demonstration that a wise state can plan the future. When the state shoves its weight around—forcing foreign companies to hand over technology, showering a favored sector with subsidies, injuring a firm while elevating another—it is often far from being helpful.
The US government has indulged a preening self-regard concerning how much technological power its country still wields.
* Xi isn’t just ambitious about manufacturing. A better word to describe his views might be “completionist.”... a 2024 boast from the minister of industry and information technology that China has a “comprehensive” industrial chain, since it produces something in each of the 419 industrial product categories maintained by the United Nations to classify industrial production. It’s a very Chinese sort of boast.
That is what the engineering state is about. It likes to build not just public works but also manufacturing capacity.
In the heavily censored realm of the Chinese internet, where no group is allowed to be very organized, one set of intellectuals has made themselves heard. They are loosely affiliated writers who refer to themselves as the Industrial Party. Their views are simple to summarize: that nation-states ruthlessly compete with each other; that science and technology are the decisive forces in this Darwinian competition; and that therefore the state must be organized around the pursuit of science and technology.
* Perhaps the most interesting way that the Industrial Party’s ideas have been propagated is through an online novel, The Morning Star of Lingao, which has been serialized by a group of authors since 2009. It is an alternate-history project that imagines that five hundred people from contemporary China traveled back in time to Lingao County in Hainan (the tropical island that is China’s southernmost province) in the year 1628. Their goal? To trigger an industrial revolution in the Ming dynasty.
Scientists and engineers are the ultimate decisionmakers, leaving no room for humanists, the faint of heart, or sentimentalists. Governments are made to submit to the will of select geniuses who do not hesitate to sacrifice millions. The prevailing idea in Liu’s trilogy is that the only hard truth is survival, where opposing civilizations resemble “blood-drenched pyramids lit by insidious fires seen through dark forests.”
Rare earth metals are not really rare. Processing them, however, demands enormous amounts of energy and water while spewing carcinogens into the atmosphere. Few parts of the Western world have the stomach for processing rare earth metals, which is why China controls this supply chain.
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For his third term, Xi shrank the Politburo to twenty-four members, dropping the one space that had been given to a woman. By locking women out of China’s political leadership, Xi might well have been trying to set an example.
Only a year after proclaiming the new communist state, he sent troops into Korea, mostly to fight US forces who were newly armed with nuclear weapons. Various world leaders were taken aback by his serene attitude toward atomic attack.
central idea was to develop the mathematics to control complex systems by feeding the system’s outputs back into its algorithms as a continuous optimization. It is the study of regulation and control of technological or biological systems. Cybernetics has occupied an intellectual sweet spot: electrifying in its premise—attracting subordinate terms like “machine intelligence” and “systems analysis” that are irresistible in themselves—and constructed with an inherent vagueness that affords it the theoretical space to wriggle out of refutation... Martin Heidegger claimed that philosophy was dying, and cybernetics would be its successor.
* Just One Child. During policy conferences, Song and his team of elite scientists made their case with calculations from China’s most sophisticated computers. Skeptics of a one-child policy were making population projections with the aid of an abacus or a handheld calculator. Song Jian presented his group’s projections in precise, machine-generated lines on graph paper; other groups drew uneven squiggles by hand. It was never a fair fight.
This incident in Guan County is known by two names: the “childless hundred days” as well as the “slaughter of the lambs,” since 1991 was the year of the sheep in the Chinese zodiac. The slaughter ended well for Zeng. He was rewarded with successively more desirable promotions in Shandong.
State-enacted kidnapping was one of the perverse consequences of the one-child policy. China started sending children abroad starting in the early 1990s.
In 2025, adult diapers are expected to outsell baby diapers. China has already grown old before it grew rich: When Japan’s population started to decline (fourteen years before China’s), it was more than twice as rich.
Demanding a politically loyal cadre to have many children is not new. I think Heinrich Himmler, however, said it better when he exhorted SS officers to have more than four children: “Think of Bach! He was the thirteenth child in his family! After the fifth or sixth, or even the twelfth child, if Mama Bach had said ‘that’s enough now,’ which would have been understandable, the works of Bach would never have been written.”
Marriage has become even less appealing since Chinese judges are increasingly reluctant to grant a divorce: 70 percent of divorce applications were granted in the mid-2000s, a rate that fell to 40 percent a decade later.
* China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic embodies all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses. It is a powerful reminder of how the engineering state could accomplish things that few other countries would even attempt, while revealing how its literal-minded enforcement can lead to tragic results for human well-being and freedom.
The day after Wu Fan’s defiant proclamation, Shanghai announced it would lock down. The announcement was ever so softly worded. Shanghai was enacting a “partial pause” to enter a “quiet period” that would last eight days.
* Since the start of the pandemic, the state had dispatched megaphone-equipped drones to nag the uncompliant. A person walking without a mask might hear a whirring craft above his head, from which a distorted, barking voice would yell at him to mask up or return home.
The city’s top mental health official introduced an unexpectedly sparky phrase in an otherwise drab press conference on the course of the virus, demanding that Shanghainese “repress your soul’s yearning for freedom.”
Delivery workers: A few made the choice to be homeless in order to continue work. At the cost of sleeping under bridges or in other public spaces, they were able to roam around the city, delivering food to earn higher commissions.
After taking the infected to quarantine facilities, health authorities entered people’s homes to sanitize them. That meant dousing everything in disinfectant—furniture, books, electronics, clothing, the piano. Pet owners faced a particular dilemma.
One video managed to achieve censorship escape velocity. Someone (or a group of people) collated a chronological montage of audio clips into a video titled “Voices of April.” The six-minute clip included Wu Fan’s remark that Shanghai was too important to lock down; shouts of people demanding food; a man pleading for his sick father to have medical treatment;
* Only later did the increasingly severe movement controls and state disregard for any medical condition except Covid turn the strategy into a farce. Officials brought a literal-mindedness to enforcing zero-Covid that created situations best described as whimsical. The coastal city of Xiamen swabbed the mouths of fresh-caught fish to test for Covid. A panda research base in Chengdu tested every animal in its facility. Medical workers chased down Tibetan and Mongolian herdsmen—who probably saw nothing but yaks for days on grassland steppes—to swab their mouths.
Yunnan: It is part of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia that various scholars have labeled Zomia, which holds innumerable hill peoples who have developed state-repellent practices. James C. Scott has written most elegantly about how people in Zomia have become “barbarians by design,” who cultivate shifting root crops (which are less assessable by tax collectors) and maintain an oral culture (which makes their histories and ethnic identities more malleable).
With its lake, nature, and sunny weather, the city has gained the nickname of Dalifornia. .. Yunnan can be a hub for drug trafficking, cryptocurrency gatherings, or the most radical activity in recent years: lax Covid enforcement.
Xi Jinping wanted nothing to go wrong in 2022. At the party congress that October, he was about to appoint himself to a third term. It would have disrupted his political plans to let Covid break loose in China
Carrying blank pieces of paper became a way to symbolize China’s censorship. It was a perfect echo: Whiteness represented the enforcement of pandemic controls, through the protective medical suits of massed groups of dabai (big whites), until young people appropriated it for protest. Later, anti-Covid demonstrations in China were collectively known as “the white paper protests.”
* For three years, the government made it difficult for people to buy ibuprofen, Advil, and other fever reducers for fear that people might disguise their fevers to avoid detection. During an outbreak, pharmacies limited purchases of fever meds or removed fever meds from their shelves entirely. Therefore, much of the Chinese population met this Covid wave without medication on hand... It is a perfect encapsulation of the engineering state’s twisted logic.
Propaganda authorities had no special warning, though they shifted seamlessly from declaring that the virus must be stomped out in one week to saying that everyone had to be responsible for their own health the next. It felt like living through the scene in Orwell’s 1984, in which officials switched directions, mid-speech, declaring that Oceania was at war with Eastasia rather than Eurasia.
In authoritarian China, the politician who oversaw the largest lockdown was elevated to the second-highest office. <> And so the Covid-19 pandemic ended in China as it began, hostage to political events:
The best psychedelic mushrooms are supposed to grow in elephant dung, leading to a story I heard of a legendary set of backpackers who have been hopping from one dung heap to another on a long, unbroken trip.
The engineering state tends to begin impressively and end disastrously. The pursuit of zero-Covid isn’t the only example of that tendency I lived through. The regulatory storm that Xi unleashed against China’s digital platforms is another case in point.
Over the course of 2021, hardly any major Chinese tech company emerged unscathed. Xi’s regulatory storm wiped out a trillion dollars of market value from Chinese companies. New Oriental, one of the education companies, lost 90 percent of its market cap and then laid off 60 percent of its employees. Alibaba toppled from being an $800 billion company to just a quarter of that size two years later.
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is perhaps 60 percent correct on everything... Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but stomping out their businesses has traumatized entrepreneurs. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them toward default subsequently triggered a collapse in homebuyer confidence, prolonging a property slump. Does the government need to rein in corruption? Definitely, but Xi has terrorized the bureaucracy to the point of paralysis. <> Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.
The control neurosis of engineers is also an obstacle to another characteristic of a great power: a global currency. The US dollar is overwhelmingly the world’s dominant currency, while China’s renminbi accounts for 3 percent of global payments. That share has barely grown over a decade. Beijing has imposed a stiff system of capital controls to prevent money from easily moving out, which promises greater stability for the country’s highly leveraged financial system.
Two photographs have circulated on the Chinese internet: of the Belt and Road Forum in 2017, when Xi Jinping was surrounded by 120 world leaders, and of the same forum in 2023, when there were only three dozen.
Plenty of autocratic systems in history have delivered startling technological advances. <> German states, for example, have done just that. The nineteenth-century Prussian state combined autocracy with the invention of the modern research university. After Bismarck unified the German states under Prussian rule in Berlin
US support of Ukraine against Russian aggression also exposed the paltry state of its domestic munition capacity. In two days, Ukraine could fire as many shells as the United States makes in a month.
Even if the United States achieves artificial general intelligence, it will need to be able to actually manufacture drones or munitions; algorithms alone will never win a battle.
People find ways to adapt around the most onerous demands of the engineers. They wield weapons of the weak. When folks see a flurry of senseless rules from the government, they might react with foot dragging, petty noncompliance, feigned ignorance, and arguing back. The system for negotiability is one reason that people have been able to accommodate themselves to engineers.
* Chinese would recognize something in Robert Moses. He was an American urban planner who built at breakneck speed.
Not coincidentally, The Power Broker was also one of the books that played a part in the consolidation of the lawyerly society. On par with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, it taught Americans to fear and loathe engineers.
If the left can reckon with Robert Moses, the right should reckon with Admiral Hyman Rickover—an engineer who improved national security through a large-scale, government-led project. <> Better known as the father of the nuclear navy, Rickover launched the USS Nautilus in 1954. It was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, able to travel underwater for weeks
I think about Robert Moses and Hyman Rickover not because they were gentle souls. Each had an unseemly lust for power. Both men were idealists with sharp elbows. Both men, as it happens, were also Jewish, experiencing prejudice in institutions meant to be genteel: Yale University for Moses and the US Navy for Rickover.
It costs five times as much to build a kilometer of subway in New York City as it does in Paris. If it only cost twice as much, it might be a national tragedy; since it costs five times as much, it is only a statistic.
* The United States inherited a common law system typical for anglophone countries, in which judges have much more discretion (relative to legislatures) to shape the law. It is no coincidence that housing and infrastructure costs are astronomically high across the anglosphere, including in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Ireland.
Both countries have an ethos of self-transformation that have become deformed in various ways. For both countries to develop the potential of its people, they have to figure out how to fully express their transformational urge.
A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. .. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth.
Really, everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing.
I endured all three years of Xi’s pursuit of zero-Covid, which started impressively until it plunged the country into broad misery.
* sustained rise in living standards and the authoritarian pulses emanating out of Beijing. It became no contradiction for me to appreciate that things are getting better and getting worse. I saw how China is made up of both strong entrepreneurs and a strong government, with a state that both moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people.
China learned so well from the United States that it started to beat America at its own game: capitalism, industry, and harnessing its people’s restless ambitions. If you want to appreciate what Detroit felt like at its peak, it’s probably better to experience that in Shenzhen
* A procedure-obsessed left conspired with a thoughtlessly destructive right to constrain the government. Neither the left nor the right allows the state to deliver essential goods expected by the public.
The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity.
* an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction.
* Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies. Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles
Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers.
A rough rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic panels, or anything else.
Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering.
You can’t build companies worth trillions without legal protections. But lawyers are also part of the reason that the Bay Area and much of the country are starved of housing and mass transit.
* China embraced engineering in all its dimensions. Its leaders aren’t only civil or electrical engineers. They are, fundamentally, social engineers. .. The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul—a phrase from Joseph Stalin repeated by Xi Jinping
it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves. <> Can a government be too efficient? Six years in China taught me that the answer is yes, when it is unbounded by citizen input. There are many self-limiting aspects of a system that makes snap decisions with so little regard for people.
things that no other state would have attempted, like holding on to a zero-Covid strategy until it drove the country mad. The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals... Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals.
* Engineers often treat social issues as math exercises... There is no confusion about the purpose of zero-Covid or the one-child policy: The number is right there in the name.
As impressive as China’s railways and bridges may be, they carry enormous levels of debt that drag down broader growth. Manufacturers produce so many goods that China’s trade partners are now grumbling for protection.
To capture both the traumatic aspects of the engineering state and its capacity to produce great pride, I like to think of a hypothetical question: What was the worst year to be born in modern China?
That was the Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions perished from agricultural collectivization, quack agronomy, natural disasters, and Mao’s order to melt down household tools for the metal, all leading to the sort of mass starvation
Also around then, if he were an urban resident, Yao would catch China’s housing privatization. As the state moved to dismantle socialism, it offered homes to urban workers for a song. It was one of the greatest wealth transfers in history:
* The year 2008 offers a direct comparison between California’s speed and China’s speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. Both lines would be around eight hundred miles long upon completion... China opened the Beijing–Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $36 billion. ... The first segment of California’s train will start operating, according to official estimates, between 2030 and 2033. Which means that the margin of error for estimating when a partial leg of California’s high-speed rail will open is the same as the time it took China to build the entire Beijing–Shanghai line.
Though the political views of law students may twist in unexpected directions, we should keep in view that they are entwined most firmly around a pillar of personal ambition... More than any other group in the United States, lawyers are afforded license to be generalists, permitted to stomp into whichever intellectual realm pleases them.... In recent decades, lawyers have been able to muscle out economists even in economic policymaking. The Biden administration was staffed by many graduates of Yale Law,
* While engineers envision bridges, lawyers envision procedures... The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries. Since lawyers are everywhere, proceduralism has reached everywhere,.. The other problem of the lawyerly society is a systematic bias toward the well-off.
The Communist Party has relentlessly broken up entrenched interests, partly to prevent rich people from gaining political power and partly to spread material benefits throughout the country.
No military can be powered by artificial intelligence alone; it will need drones and munitions... Over the past decade, the United States brought lawyers to a technology fight.
If Americans look deeply into China, they will find reflections of its lost powers. China, right now, is in the midst of pursuing its own Great Society, where even its poorest provinces have impressive levels of physical dynamism.
The state-owned distillery behind Maotai, the hundred-proof spirit made of sorghum, grew into one of China’s most valuable companies. Its capital city of Guiyang now hosts several of the country’s biggest data centers.
* I saw that big guitar ornaments were hanging off of streetlamps. In the distance, I spied a hill topped by a giant rock guitar. It turned out that we were cycling through Zheng’an County, the self-styled guitar capital of the world. According to state media, one of every seven guitars made worldwide is produced in this township we passed through by chance. <> That is another feature of the engineering state: Manufacturing hubs are everywhere, often making goods you don’t expect.
China does little by way of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor; rather, it is enacting a Leninist agenda in which the state retains enormous discretion to command economic resources in order to maintain political control and to build toward a post-scarcity world.
In 2010, only half of Guizhou’s children attended high school—the lowest rate in the country.
* A Chinese citizen born when the country completed its first expressway would—by the time she reached the legal driving age of eighteen in 2011—be able to drive on a highway system that surpassed the length of the US interstate system. By 2020, China had built a second batch of expressways that again totaled the length of the US system.
China’s ports became the world’s busiest. Shanghai alone moved more containers in 2022 than all of the US ports combined.
Above all, China built housing. Its urban population has grown by an average of sixteen million people each year since 1978, which means, in effect, that the state built a new city the size of greater New York City and greater Boston combined every year for thirty-five years... the 4.4 billion tons of cement that China produced from 2018 to 2019 nearly equals the amount of cement the United States produced over the entire twentieth century.
Chinese have mustered tremendous enthusiasm for destroying the nation’s physical heritage in the recent past. It was prominent during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao ordered Red Guards to loot Buddhist temples, smash Confucian statues, and desecrate ancestral tombs.
People unable to appreciate the benefits of material improvements also don’t understand how it produces pride and satisfaction. China’s transformation has given people running water and toilets, mass transit and highways, beautiful parks and modern malls.
* When Beijing began construction of its high-speed rail program in 2008, critics charged that it was foolish for a then-poor country to acquire the sorts of luxury infrastructure out of reach even for many rich countries. “Infrastructure investment can be too good for a country’s development level,” concluded a line from economist Michael Pettis, which was not an atypical sentiment.
* an educational system steeped in Marxism. For them, production was a noble deed to advance communism, while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism. This party believes that only the state has the wisdom to invest in strategic megaprojects, whereas consumers will waste money on themselves.
Beijing has announced several times that it would impose a property tax. Each time it faltered. One of the political reasons is that China’s leaders are familiar with the American slogan “No taxation without representation.” Since the state levies relatively light taxes, which it takes unobtrusively from citizens, it reduces the risk that people start asking questions... Around 10 percent of its GDP goes toward social spending, compared to 20 percent in the United States and 30 percent among the more generous European states.
a gigantic effort to draw water from China’s southern rivers toward its parched northern cities, along three canal systems, targeting completion in 2050. The plan envisions the creation of large water reservoirs across the country and the construction of major flood-control projects. <> The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan outlines interstellar research and other state-directed megaprojects.
* Of Guizhou’s eleven airports, five have less than a dozen flights each week—and there are three more airports still under construction. Guizhou has become one of China’s most indebted provinces, and it’s starting to feel real fiscal distress. In an unusual move, Guiyang’s finance bureau issued a public outcry in 2022 that it was at the end of its ability to deal with the debt. Quickly afterward, the government deleted its own admission.
Discipline Inspection to descend on Guizhou. They are unbound by even the modest levels of legal niceties afforded in China. Rather than investigating legal crimes, their remit is to find “violations of party discipline,” a nebulous charge that includes not only corruption but also misuse of public funds and political disloyalty to the Communist Party. That makes the commission akin to the Inquisition
One of the Communist Party’s personnel practices (inherited from imperial times) is to rotate officials between various jurisdictions, forcing them to gain broad experience and preventing them from drawing their power base from their home province.... Joe Biden’s, who, before becoming vice president and then president, spent his entire political life representing Delaware.
* since local governments don’t have property taxes, they primarily fund themselves through land sales to real estate developers. This combination of personnel policy and fiscal quirks produces officials like Li Zaiyong who invest in glamorous projects and whose failures are apparent only after they’ve left office.
I sometimes think of Tianjin’s library as a metaphor for China’s economy: great hardware that looks impressive from a distance, not filled with the softer stuff that actually matters... Moody’s, the American credit rating firm, listed Tianjin and Guizhou as China’s two most heavily indebted regions. Each has a debt-to-GDP ratio approaching that of Italy’s.
* “American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.” <> In 2020, I could have picked up face masks that were branded Foxconn (the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer), BYD (the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer), or JD.com (China’s second-largest e-commerce platform).
China won’t become the world’s biggest economy by building more tall bridges. It also can’t continue manufacturing more than twice the number of cars it sells at home. And the United States is starting to realize the problems of being too focused on the demand side of the economy. When the federal government offers, for example, rental support in housing-scarce cities, landlords can raise their prices, leaving renters no better off.
When I look at the United States, I marvel both at how much it did build before 1970 as well as how little it constructed afterward. China spent 13.5 percent of its GDP on infrastructure investment in 2016, whereas the US average over the past three decades is closer to 3 percent each year.
I came across a Metro North timetable from 1915. It revealed that the express train from New York’s Grand Central Terminal to New Haven took the same amount of time then as in 2025: around two hours.
Unfortunately, Cape Wind was in Nantucket Sound, home to some of the wealthiest, and mostly liberal, US citizens, like the Kennedy family, whose compound is in Hyannisport. These residents banded together, formed a nonprofit, and enlisted lawyers that included one of Harvard’s best-known constitutional law professors to challenge the development. After sixteen years of lawsuits, the developer abandoned the project.
So far, however, building big has improved the lives of regular people, not just a narrow set of elites. This lack of emphasis on efficiency has been key to another Chinese success: Part of the reason that China dominates advanced manufacturing technologies is precisely because it tolerates lower profits while cultivating a large workforce.
It was at Foxconn’s Henan sites where some of the most dramatic protests against zero-Covid took place, when young men flung bricks into massed ranks of riot police.
Shenzhen: Threaded between big avenues are bustling pockets of semi-preserved village structures that imbue the city with more liveliness than glass skyscrapers are able to provide.
United wrote that Apple booked fifty business-class seats daily from San Francisco to Shanghai, from which the airline made $35 million each year. That’s over eighteen thousand business-class seats on one route.
* These components were getting better every year, part of a trend that Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, called “the peace dividends of the smartphone wars.” The hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the smartphone supply chain have caused the cost of electronic components—cameras, sensors, batteries, modems—to plummet. .. Electric vehicles are full of the electronic components borrowed from smartphones; the consumer drone is roughly a reassembly of a smartphone camera and sensor with propellers for flight.
By the time that the iPhone X was released in 2017, Chinese firms were making acoustic parts, charging modules, and battery packs. According to a teardown analysis, China’s contribution to the iPhone X reached around 25 percent of the final value of the phone.
* We can see how China values process knowledge through its approach to architecture too. That reveals something deeper and more interesting about its culture. One of my favorite books about China is a collection of essays called The Hall of Uselessness by the Belgian sinologist Simon Leys... The approach in China, as Leys points out, is for builders to yield to the onrush of time by using eminently perishable, and indeed fragile, materials. By building temples out of wood with paneling sometimes made of paper, Chinese architecture has built-in obsolescence, demanding frequent renewal. .. The shining exemplar of this idea is found not in China but at the Ise Grand Shrine (or Ise Jingu) in Japan... It is also about the preservation of craft knowledge. Twenty years is the length of a generation, and the caretakers of the Ise Jingu have attempted to ensure that knowledge about how to rebuild this shrine can be passed on to descendants.
Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice.
Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers. We tend to refer to these intangibles as know-how, institutional memory, or tacit knowledge. They are embodied by an experienced workforce like Shenzhen’s... The value of these communities of engineering practice is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology.
Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel, said it best in 2010: that the United States needs to focus less on “the mythical moment of creation” and more on the “scaling up” of products. .. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing.
US manufacturing employment peaked in 1980 at nineteen million workers. In 2000, it still had seventeen million. .. In 2025, the United States has around thirteen million manufacturing workers.
One prominent line of argument regarding General Electric was that the company was taken over by finance. That applies in greater force against Boeing. Once run by engineers obsessed with safety and quality, its leadership shifted to executives more focused on delivering shareholder value than good planes.
* Tesla’s presence jolted China’s electric vehicle market. China’s business community began using the term “catfishing” for what Tesla was doing in China. The idea was that introducing a powerful new creature into the domestic environment would make Chinese firms swim faster.
The results of the Chinese government’s unceasing interventions in the economy are at best ambiguous. Economic studies have shown that the recipients of Chinese subsidies have, on average, lower productivity growth. .. China’s tech successes are no convincing demonstration that a wise state can plan the future. When the state shoves its weight around—forcing foreign companies to hand over technology, showering a favored sector with subsidies, injuring a firm while elevating another—it is often far from being helpful.
The US government has indulged a preening self-regard concerning how much technological power its country still wields.
* Xi isn’t just ambitious about manufacturing. A better word to describe his views might be “completionist.”... a 2024 boast from the minister of industry and information technology that China has a “comprehensive” industrial chain, since it produces something in each of the 419 industrial product categories maintained by the United Nations to classify industrial production. It’s a very Chinese sort of boast.
That is what the engineering state is about. It likes to build not just public works but also manufacturing capacity.
In the heavily censored realm of the Chinese internet, where no group is allowed to be very organized, one set of intellectuals has made themselves heard. They are loosely affiliated writers who refer to themselves as the Industrial Party. Their views are simple to summarize: that nation-states ruthlessly compete with each other; that science and technology are the decisive forces in this Darwinian competition; and that therefore the state must be organized around the pursuit of science and technology.
* Perhaps the most interesting way that the Industrial Party’s ideas have been propagated is through an online novel, The Morning Star of Lingao, which has been serialized by a group of authors since 2009. It is an alternate-history project that imagines that five hundred people from contemporary China traveled back in time to Lingao County in Hainan (the tropical island that is China’s southernmost province) in the year 1628. Their goal? To trigger an industrial revolution in the Ming dynasty.
Scientists and engineers are the ultimate decisionmakers, leaving no room for humanists, the faint of heart, or sentimentalists. Governments are made to submit to the will of select geniuses who do not hesitate to sacrifice millions. The prevailing idea in Liu’s trilogy is that the only hard truth is survival, where opposing civilizations resemble “blood-drenched pyramids lit by insidious fires seen through dark forests.”
Rare earth metals are not really rare. Processing them, however, demands enormous amounts of energy and water while spewing carcinogens into the atmosphere. Few parts of the Western world have the stomach for processing rare earth metals, which is why China controls this supply chain.
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For his third term, Xi shrank the Politburo to twenty-four members, dropping the one space that had been given to a woman. By locking women out of China’s political leadership, Xi might well have been trying to set an example.
Only a year after proclaiming the new communist state, he sent troops into Korea, mostly to fight US forces who were newly armed with nuclear weapons. Various world leaders were taken aback by his serene attitude toward atomic attack.
central idea was to develop the mathematics to control complex systems by feeding the system’s outputs back into its algorithms as a continuous optimization. It is the study of regulation and control of technological or biological systems. Cybernetics has occupied an intellectual sweet spot: electrifying in its premise—attracting subordinate terms like “machine intelligence” and “systems analysis” that are irresistible in themselves—and constructed with an inherent vagueness that affords it the theoretical space to wriggle out of refutation... Martin Heidegger claimed that philosophy was dying, and cybernetics would be its successor.
* Just One Child. During policy conferences, Song and his team of elite scientists made their case with calculations from China’s most sophisticated computers. Skeptics of a one-child policy were making population projections with the aid of an abacus or a handheld calculator. Song Jian presented his group’s projections in precise, machine-generated lines on graph paper; other groups drew uneven squiggles by hand. It was never a fair fight.
This incident in Guan County is known by two names: the “childless hundred days” as well as the “slaughter of the lambs,” since 1991 was the year of the sheep in the Chinese zodiac. The slaughter ended well for Zeng. He was rewarded with successively more desirable promotions in Shandong.
State-enacted kidnapping was one of the perverse consequences of the one-child policy. China started sending children abroad starting in the early 1990s.
In 2025, adult diapers are expected to outsell baby diapers. China has already grown old before it grew rich: When Japan’s population started to decline (fourteen years before China’s), it was more than twice as rich.
Demanding a politically loyal cadre to have many children is not new. I think Heinrich Himmler, however, said it better when he exhorted SS officers to have more than four children: “Think of Bach! He was the thirteenth child in his family! After the fifth or sixth, or even the twelfth child, if Mama Bach had said ‘that’s enough now,’ which would have been understandable, the works of Bach would never have been written.”
Marriage has become even less appealing since Chinese judges are increasingly reluctant to grant a divorce: 70 percent of divorce applications were granted in the mid-2000s, a rate that fell to 40 percent a decade later.
* China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic embodies all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses. It is a powerful reminder of how the engineering state could accomplish things that few other countries would even attempt, while revealing how its literal-minded enforcement can lead to tragic results for human well-being and freedom.
The day after Wu Fan’s defiant proclamation, Shanghai announced it would lock down. The announcement was ever so softly worded. Shanghai was enacting a “partial pause” to enter a “quiet period” that would last eight days.
* Since the start of the pandemic, the state had dispatched megaphone-equipped drones to nag the uncompliant. A person walking without a mask might hear a whirring craft above his head, from which a distorted, barking voice would yell at him to mask up or return home.
The city’s top mental health official introduced an unexpectedly sparky phrase in an otherwise drab press conference on the course of the virus, demanding that Shanghainese “repress your soul’s yearning for freedom.”
Delivery workers: A few made the choice to be homeless in order to continue work. At the cost of sleeping under bridges or in other public spaces, they were able to roam around the city, delivering food to earn higher commissions.
After taking the infected to quarantine facilities, health authorities entered people’s homes to sanitize them. That meant dousing everything in disinfectant—furniture, books, electronics, clothing, the piano. Pet owners faced a particular dilemma.
One video managed to achieve censorship escape velocity. Someone (or a group of people) collated a chronological montage of audio clips into a video titled “Voices of April.” The six-minute clip included Wu Fan’s remark that Shanghai was too important to lock down; shouts of people demanding food; a man pleading for his sick father to have medical treatment;
* Only later did the increasingly severe movement controls and state disregard for any medical condition except Covid turn the strategy into a farce. Officials brought a literal-mindedness to enforcing zero-Covid that created situations best described as whimsical. The coastal city of Xiamen swabbed the mouths of fresh-caught fish to test for Covid. A panda research base in Chengdu tested every animal in its facility. Medical workers chased down Tibetan and Mongolian herdsmen—who probably saw nothing but yaks for days on grassland steppes—to swab their mouths.
Yunnan: It is part of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia that various scholars have labeled Zomia, which holds innumerable hill peoples who have developed state-repellent practices. James C. Scott has written most elegantly about how people in Zomia have become “barbarians by design,” who cultivate shifting root crops (which are less assessable by tax collectors) and maintain an oral culture (which makes their histories and ethnic identities more malleable).
With its lake, nature, and sunny weather, the city has gained the nickname of Dalifornia. .. Yunnan can be a hub for drug trafficking, cryptocurrency gatherings, or the most radical activity in recent years: lax Covid enforcement.
Xi Jinping wanted nothing to go wrong in 2022. At the party congress that October, he was about to appoint himself to a third term. It would have disrupted his political plans to let Covid break loose in China
Carrying blank pieces of paper became a way to symbolize China’s censorship. It was a perfect echo: Whiteness represented the enforcement of pandemic controls, through the protective medical suits of massed groups of dabai (big whites), until young people appropriated it for protest. Later, anti-Covid demonstrations in China were collectively known as “the white paper protests.”
* For three years, the government made it difficult for people to buy ibuprofen, Advil, and other fever reducers for fear that people might disguise their fevers to avoid detection. During an outbreak, pharmacies limited purchases of fever meds or removed fever meds from their shelves entirely. Therefore, much of the Chinese population met this Covid wave without medication on hand... It is a perfect encapsulation of the engineering state’s twisted logic.
Propaganda authorities had no special warning, though they shifted seamlessly from declaring that the virus must be stomped out in one week to saying that everyone had to be responsible for their own health the next. It felt like living through the scene in Orwell’s 1984, in which officials switched directions, mid-speech, declaring that Oceania was at war with Eastasia rather than Eurasia.
In authoritarian China, the politician who oversaw the largest lockdown was elevated to the second-highest office. <> And so the Covid-19 pandemic ended in China as it began, hostage to political events:
The best psychedelic mushrooms are supposed to grow in elephant dung, leading to a story I heard of a legendary set of backpackers who have been hopping from one dung heap to another on a long, unbroken trip.
The engineering state tends to begin impressively and end disastrously. The pursuit of zero-Covid isn’t the only example of that tendency I lived through. The regulatory storm that Xi unleashed against China’s digital platforms is another case in point.
Over the course of 2021, hardly any major Chinese tech company emerged unscathed. Xi’s regulatory storm wiped out a trillion dollars of market value from Chinese companies. New Oriental, one of the education companies, lost 90 percent of its market cap and then laid off 60 percent of its employees. Alibaba toppled from being an $800 billion company to just a quarter of that size two years later.
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is perhaps 60 percent correct on everything... Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but stomping out their businesses has traumatized entrepreneurs. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them toward default subsequently triggered a collapse in homebuyer confidence, prolonging a property slump. Does the government need to rein in corruption? Definitely, but Xi has terrorized the bureaucracy to the point of paralysis. <> Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.
The control neurosis of engineers is also an obstacle to another characteristic of a great power: a global currency. The US dollar is overwhelmingly the world’s dominant currency, while China’s renminbi accounts for 3 percent of global payments. That share has barely grown over a decade. Beijing has imposed a stiff system of capital controls to prevent money from easily moving out, which promises greater stability for the country’s highly leveraged financial system.
Two photographs have circulated on the Chinese internet: of the Belt and Road Forum in 2017, when Xi Jinping was surrounded by 120 world leaders, and of the same forum in 2023, when there were only three dozen.
Plenty of autocratic systems in history have delivered startling technological advances. <> German states, for example, have done just that. The nineteenth-century Prussian state combined autocracy with the invention of the modern research university. After Bismarck unified the German states under Prussian rule in Berlin
US support of Ukraine against Russian aggression also exposed the paltry state of its domestic munition capacity. In two days, Ukraine could fire as many shells as the United States makes in a month.
Even if the United States achieves artificial general intelligence, it will need to be able to actually manufacture drones or munitions; algorithms alone will never win a battle.
People find ways to adapt around the most onerous demands of the engineers. They wield weapons of the weak. When folks see a flurry of senseless rules from the government, they might react with foot dragging, petty noncompliance, feigned ignorance, and arguing back. The system for negotiability is one reason that people have been able to accommodate themselves to engineers.
* Chinese would recognize something in Robert Moses. He was an American urban planner who built at breakneck speed.
Not coincidentally, The Power Broker was also one of the books that played a part in the consolidation of the lawyerly society. On par with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, it taught Americans to fear and loathe engineers.
If the left can reckon with Robert Moses, the right should reckon with Admiral Hyman Rickover—an engineer who improved national security through a large-scale, government-led project. <> Better known as the father of the nuclear navy, Rickover launched the USS Nautilus in 1954. It was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, able to travel underwater for weeks
I think about Robert Moses and Hyman Rickover not because they were gentle souls. Each had an unseemly lust for power. Both men were idealists with sharp elbows. Both men, as it happens, were also Jewish, experiencing prejudice in institutions meant to be genteel: Yale University for Moses and the US Navy for Rickover.
It costs five times as much to build a kilometer of subway in New York City as it does in Paris. If it only cost twice as much, it might be a national tragedy; since it costs five times as much, it is only a statistic.
* The United States inherited a common law system typical for anglophone countries, in which judges have much more discretion (relative to legislatures) to shape the law. It is no coincidence that housing and infrastructure costs are astronomically high across the anglosphere, including in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Ireland.
Both countries have an ethos of self-transformation that have become deformed in various ways. For both countries to develop the potential of its people, they have to figure out how to fully express their transformational urge.
