Breakneck: China\u2019s Quest to Engineer the Future<\/a>.<\/p>\nWang sees these two countries as \u2018thrilling, maddening, and, most of all, deeply bizarre\u2019, but as \u2018engines for global change\u2019. The two countries are reconfiguring the international order and each other too. In contrast, \u2018Europeans have a sense of optimism only about the past, stuck in their mausoleum economy\u2019.<\/p>\n
Wang was born in China and, at seven years of age, migrated with his parents to Canada, and then moved to the United States. He is currently a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University. He spent six years in China, from 2017 to 2023, as an economic and technology analyst and writer, and his book grew out of this experience.<\/p>\n
Despite their commonalities, the US and China have fundamental differences, writes Wang. China would be an \u2018engineering state\u2019 whereas the US is a \u2018lawyerly society\u2019. Most Chinese Communist Party leaders have been engineers focused on building mega projects such as highways, bridges, fast trains and airports. Such construction has been a source of domestic and international political prestige. It has also been a key foundation for China\u2019s rise as the world\u2019s manufacturing powerhouse.<\/p>\n
While Wang admires China\u2019s engineering state, he argues that China\u2019s physical engineers are often \u2018social engineers\u2019 who treat society as just another big optimisation problem. As an example, he offers a detailed analysis of China\u2019s one-child policy. The policy inflicted much suffering on Chinese women through forced abortions and sterilisation and led to tragic femicide. But it was not effective in addressing China\u2019s demographic challenges. Indeed, today the CCP is pushing women to have children!<\/p>\n
Another example of wrong-headed social engineering was China\u2019s zero-Covid policy which was ultimately ineffectual and abandoned following protests in Shanghai. Wang argues that over the past seven decades China has experienced lengthy periods of stability punctuated by government-triggered chaos. The Chinese state is usually level-headed but every so often succumbs to extreme, ineffective policies. In sum, Wang argues that the engineering state has remarkable strengths and appalling weaknesses\u2014a more lawyerly society can help prevent these weaknesses.<\/p>\n
Wang argues that the US used to be an engineering state. It enjoyed a big growth spurt between the 1850s and 1950s. During this period, it built canals, interstate railways and highways, the commercial airline system, and skyscrapers in Manhattan and Chicago. Then there was the Manhattan Project which produced the first nuclear weapons, and the Apollo program which landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969.<\/p>\n
But the US engineering state made mistakes, triggering public opposition. Urban planners such as Robert Moses rammed highways through dense urban neighbourhoods; US government agencies sprayed pesticides, especially DDT; and some government regulators were captured by big business.<\/p>\n
This provoked a backlash against the US\u2019s engineering state, giving rise to the \u2018lawyerly society\u2019 as the country\u2019s elite\u2014dominated by lawyers focused on procedure and process rather than getting things done. Indeed, over the past 50 years the US has not been effective at maintaining and building infrastructure.<\/p>\n
New York and other big cities have long had housing shortages. New York and California are ineffective at building mass transit compared with such places as Rome, Paris or Barcelona. The military-industrial complex is behind schedule in many projects. Even in the private sector, Detroit automakers and companies such as Intel and Boeing have many tales of woe, sapping the US\u2019s dynamism.<\/p>\n
Wang is critical of the offshoring of large parts of the US\u2019s manufacturing sector to China, motivated by short-term profits. One consequence has been the loss of process knowledge, proficiency gained from practical experience, which is so critical for efficiency and flexibility. By contrast, Chinese workers who assembled the early versions of Apple\u2019s iPhone were able to turn their newly acquired skills to making other products, such as drones.<\/p>\n
Wang\u2019s analysis can seem simplistic as it reduces much of America\u2019s and China\u2019s challenges and differences to the roles of engineers and lawyers. And it is not clear how their roles could be wound back, as Wang recommends. But Wang\u2019s book is of great value as it offers many insights based on firsthand experience in China. While the engineering state has many inefficiencies, notably excess capacity and overproduction, Wang argues it is enabling the top five percent of Chinese companies to be technological leaders and challenge the US in fields including AI, semiconductors, biotechnology and renewable energy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018No two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese\u2026 masses and elites are united in the faith…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":["post-226618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-books","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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