China’s innovation speeds ahead while America is mired in bureaucracy

Earlier this week, China showed a power flex with its largest-ever military parade, proudly displaying a triad of nuclear weapons as if they were entries in an engineering expo.

The display came on the heels of a new book looking at how the country is now defined by its ambitious construction projects and scientific feats — while the US is mired in bureaucracy and falling behind.

“China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad,” writes Dan Wang in “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” (W. W. Norton & Company), out now. This stark differences between the superpowers may very well “define the twenty-first century,”

In reporting the book, Wang, a Canadian-born author who’s lived in both the US and China, travelled to Guizhou, a mountainous province in southwest China, about 250 miles from the nearest coastline.

It’s long been known as one of China’s poorest provinces, but in recent years, the region has transformed. The once-impoverished county had become “the self-styled guitar capital of the world,” writes Wang. “According to state media, one of every seven guitars made worldwide is produced in this township.”

It’s also at the center of some of China’s most ambitious infrastructure projects. The area now has 45 of the world’s 100 highest bridges, 11 airports (with three more under construction), 5,000 miles of expressways, and around 1,000 miles of high-speed rail.

Such a rapid transformation is hard to fathom in the US, but it wasn’t always this way.

Once upon a time, America had the musculature of an engineering state, building mighty works throughout the country,” Wang writes. “Lengthy train tracks, gorgeous bridges, beautiful cities, weapons of war with terrible power, and missions to the moon.” But the construction boom slowed after the 1960s, thanks to changing public perception. 

Americans grew alarmed by the “unpleasant by-products of growth” Wang writes. The price of progress meant environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, and corporate interests taking precedence over public interests. The nation “soured on the idea of broad deference to U.S. technocrats and engineers,” he writes. “The mission became to stop as many things as possible.”

That disillusionment gave rise to a new class of leaders. Law students began founding environmental organizations around the rallying cry of “Sue the bastards!” (referring to government agencies). Through the 1970s, activists on the Left, from Ralph Nader on down, made a mission of filing lawsuits and watchdogging the government, while conservatives joined in from the other direction. 

Ronald Reagan put it bluntly: “Government is the problem, not the solution.” 

What began as a corrective to national excesses gradually hardened into habit. “The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the United States’ problems of the 1960s,” Wang writes. “Unfortunately, it has become the cause of many of its present problems.”

It’s now a governing philosophy, with lawyers excelling at obstruction and engineers drifting out of the picture. “Americans live today in the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded,” Wang observes. 

The US has essentially become a government “of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers,” Wang writes. Five of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half of Congress holds law degrees, while only a handful of members have backgrounds in science or engineering. And from 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee came out of law school.

China, meanwhile, looks today much like the United States did a century ago, when America was proving itself as a superpower through steel, railroads, and skyscrapers. And it’s because modern China embraced the engineer’s blueprint as its governing philosophy. 

“Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China,” Wang writes, noting that former supreme leader Deng Xiaoping elevated engineers into the top ranks throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, every single member of the Politburo’s nine-person standing committee had trained as an engineer. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams; his colleagues specialized in electron-tube engineering, thermal engineering, and other fields that could have staffed a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate.

That legacy shows up in the sheer volume of what the country builds. Since 1980, China has laid highways equal to twice the length of the US interstate system, and installed nearly as much solar and wind power as the rest of the world combined.

It’s not just the state — corporate China is equally relentless, producing one-third to one-half of almost every manufactured good on earth, from container ships to steel to solar panels. “There are 70 million manufacturing workers in China, which is nearly five times as many as the U.S.,” Wang told the Post.

“China treats construction—tall bridges, high-speed rail, giant dams—as not only economic stimulus, but also as projects to improve political resilience,” Wang explained. “The leadership builds so much in part because they understand that a frenetic pace of construction helps people feel like their lives are improving, which supports the legitimacy of the Communist Party.” 

Nowhere is the contrast between China’s engineering state and America’s lawyerly society clearer than in their attempts to build high-speed trains. In 2008, California voters approved a ballot proposition to fund a rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles. At the same time, China began work on its high-speed line connecting Beijing and Shanghai. Both projects were designed to be roughly 800 miles long.

China opened its line in 2011 — three years later — at a cost of $36 billion. In its first decade, it carried 1.35 billion passenger trips. California, by contrast, has spent the past seventeen years — and $128 billion — building only a short stretch of track in the Central Valley, connecting two cities that are neither San Francisco nor Los Angeles.

Part of the problem, Wang notes, has been the fact that politicians demanded new stops in their districts, forcing the route through an additional mountain range. Another issue is that California rail authority, “prefers to tout the number of high-paying jobs it is creating rather than the amount of track it has been laying.”

Such a fixation on process has crowded out outcomes, Wang argues. And it’s made Americans “lose faith that the government can meaningfully improve their lives.” To reverse that disillusionment, Wang suggests that the U.S. will need to recover some of its engineering strength, and perhaps just as importantly, bring more non-lawyers into positions of leadership. 

“The most important thing that China and the United States share is a commitment to transformation,” he writes. China’s Communist Party has pursued modernization as an existential mission, with centralized campaigns aimed at achieving “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” by 2049. 

The United States’ commitment is different, more open-ended, and embedded in the democratic experiment itself. It’s time to revive the dream, Wang writes, so that “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish.”

Despite America’s current malaise, Wang remains optimistic that the pendulum will swing back. As he told the Post, “Both the American Left and Right appreciate the need to build. Houses are too expensive, energy costs too much, and our cities work too badly.”

If America doesn’t ramp up construction, it risks becoming a nation of paperwork, watching the trains go by.