極速前進2：宏偉建築

 2025年11月29日 星期六

• 深入中國偏遠地區，我都會驚訝地發現，即使是中國最貧困的省份，其基礎設施也比美國最富裕的省份好。
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• 在中國，領導人通常需要先在貧困省份執政，才能晉升到國家政治的巔峰。
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• 工程型國家的另一個特色：製造中心遍佈各地，經常生產你意想不到的產品。
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• 國務院（中央政府的執行機構）在2012年發布了一項指令，鼓勵製造業企業從沿海省份遷往內陸省份。
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• 該指令建議貴州發展航太或電動車製造等技術密集產業。然而，貴州最終建設的卻是更符合其技術含量相對較低的實際情況的產業：吉他文化產業園。
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• 貴州將美國一個世紀以來——從橫貫大陸鐵路到州際公路系統——的投資，壓縮到了短短二十年內。
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• 中國特色社會主義
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• 中國在財富再分配方面做得很少，它奉行的是列寧主義路線，國家擁有巨大的自主權來支配經濟資源，以維持政治控制並建構一個後稀缺的世界。
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• 深陷貧困的縣。貴州人均收入僅8,000美元，與波札那相當，比中國全國平均低40%，甚至不到北京、上海等富裕沿海城市的三分之一。
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• 據瓦茨拉夫·斯米爾稱， 中國在2018年至2019年間生產的44億噸水泥， 幾乎相當於美國在整個20世紀的水泥產量。
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• 住宅、高速公路、地鐵和發電廠的建設刺激了對材料和就業的需求，影響遠超過施工現場本身。
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• 中國在短短幾十年內完成了美國一個多世紀的建設，但同時也吸收了許多自身的問題。
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• 儘管中國已經接受了美國的汽車文化，但在上海騎自行車旅行仍然非常方便。
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• 這種感覺加劇了美國人對中國的盲點。無法體會物質進步帶來的好處的人，也無法理解這些進步如何帶來自豪感和滿足感。中國的轉型為人們帶來了自來水和廁所、公共交通和高速公路、美麗的公園和現代化的購物中心。大多數人只能回憶起不久前還無法享受這些便利設施的時光。
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• 鱗次櫛比的摩天大樓和鐵路構成了共產黨執政合法性的核心支柱。
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• 2008年北京啟動高鐵建設時
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• 世界銀行2019年的研究發現， 中國的高鐵系統在經濟上是可行的，票價收入足以彌補成本。
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• 貴州並沒有將資源從富人重新分配給窮人，而是致力於基礎建設。
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• 列寧曾用「經濟制高點」來指稱電力、交通等戰略部門。在貴州，人們可以從高聳的橋樑上俯瞰這些制高點。
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• 以中國特色社會主義為綱領的工程型國家，其設立的目的只有一個：為人民提供物質上的改善，主要透過公共工程來實現。
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• 生產是推動共產主義的崇高事業，而消費則是資本主義的卑鄙行徑。
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• 中國也是一個由偽裝成左派的保守派所統治的國家。
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• 近四分之三的中國人口無需 繳納所得稅。中國也未能徵收廣泛的財產稅，使得 大部分富裕的城市居民的財富得以倖免。中國則較依賴消費稅，而消費稅具有累退性，因為它對窮人的負擔遠大於富人。
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• 低稅收使得中國在社會福利方面吝嗇。 其GDP中約有10% 用於社會支出，而美國這一比例為20%，歐洲一些較為慷慨的國家則高達30%。中國的退休金和醫療保健支出遠低於其他富裕國家。尤其 在失業保險方面，中國更是吝嗇：只有約十分之一的中國失業者有資格領取微薄的失業救濟金。
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• 「即使我們發展到了 更高的水平…我們也不應該過度依賴社會轉移支付。因為我們必須避免讓人民因為享有福利而變得懶惰。」擔心福利會使人民懶惰，這在共產黨領導人的言論中，聽起來頗有幾分羅納德·雷根的風格。
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• 建設、資本主義與控制。這些要素有時會相互衝突。
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• 缺乏社會保障體係是華人家庭大量儲蓄以備不時之需的原因之一。
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• 「十四五」規劃概述了星際探索和其他國家主導的大型計畫。
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• 鄧小平常說的，社會主義的本質特徵不是經濟再分配，而是「集中資源完成偉大任務」。
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• 在嶄新橋樑的背後，不僅隱藏著貧困，也隱藏著沉重的債務負擔。
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• 貴州已成為中國負債最重的省份之一，並開始感受到真正的財政困境。
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• 中央紀律檢查委員會
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• 中央紀委將李光耀的投資斥為“面子工程”，並秘密地將他送入司法程序。
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• “那是國家的錢，不是我的。”
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• 由於地方政府沒有房產稅，其主要資金來源是向房地產開發商出售土地。
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• 天津圖書館就像中國經濟的縮影：宏偉的硬體設施遠觀令人印象深刻，但缺乏真正重要的實質內容。
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• 中國政府更注重保障經濟供給面的順暢運行，而非直接援助消費者。
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• 北京方面認為，幫助工人的最佳方法是讓他們重返工作崗位。實際上，這意味著幫助企業重啟生產，而不是向家庭發放現金。
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• 「美國製造商一直在問自己，生產口罩和棉花棒是否屬於他們的『核心競爭力』。他們中的大多數都認為不屬於。」他放下茶杯，看著我。 “中國公司則認為 賺錢 是他們的核心競爭力，所以他們就去生產口罩，或者其他任何市場需要的產品。”
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• 儘管1992年至2018年間，中國經濟實際成長了八倍，但上證綜合指數卻是表現最差的主要股指之一。
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• 金融投資者不需要 我們的同情。中國特色社會主義還有更大的受害者。
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• 中國並不致力於保護環境，而是試圖以工程手段解決問題。
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• 四川倒塌的學校被家長戲稱為“豆腐房”，因為它們極其脆弱。換句話說，規模大並不總是意味著品質好。
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• 中國和美國在許多方面都截然相反。
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• 中國，家庭儲蓄率很高，而在美國，借貸或使用信用卡消費卻非常容易。
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• 在國家政策方面，中國更注重經濟的供給面：它透過提供優惠融資和各種政策支持來扶持製造業，從而抑制消費。同時，美國則專注於調節需求，例如，在房價高昂的城市實施租金管制，或在疫情期間向消費者發放支票。
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• 中國不可能透過建造更多高橋成為世界最大經濟體。它也不可能繼續生產超過國內銷量兩倍以上的汽車。
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• 美國也開始意識到過度關注經濟需求面的問題。例如，當聯邦政府在住房短缺的城市提供租金補貼時，房東可以提高租金，租屋者的處境並沒有改善。當政府增加對不斷上漲的大學學費的財政援助時，大學可以透過提高學費來抵消部分資金。
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• 「富足議程」、「供給面進步主義」和「進步研究」等旗幟
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• 美國必須重振在公共工程和製造業建設方面失去的實力，而中國則必須克服對民眾懶惰化的擔憂，從而增強消費者的自主權。
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• 共產黨之所以繼續建設，是因為黨內人才濟濟，也因為馬克思列寧主義者不願意將經濟自主權拱手讓給人民。
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• 2016年，中國將GDP的13.5% 用於基礎建設投資，而美國過去三十年的平均每年接近3%。難道這兩個國家就不能在基礎建設投資上拉近幾個百分點嗎？
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• 環境評估持續延誤再生能源項目。
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• 律師主導的社會非常擅長保護富人的利益。而工程型國家對基礎建設的延誤容忍度很低。
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• 中國特色社會主義的優點。大規模建設有時能夠釋放市場力量。
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• 中國是否已經在實踐供給面進步主義？並沒有
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• 中國的建設方式包括驅逐民眾、對環境保護和工人安全採取相對寬鬆的態度，以及在缺乏與民眾實質溝通的情況下解讀公共利益。
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• 約翰·梅納德·凱恩斯所說：「凡是我們能做的，我們都能負擔得起。」
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• 中國的決策者拒絕受華爾街投資者一些基本原則的約束——減少投資、縮減資產、追求獲利——這些原則都強調效率。
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• 中國之所以在先進製造業技術領域佔據主導地位，部分原因正是因為它在培養龐大勞動力的同時，能夠容忍較低的利潤。

Chapter 2Building Big

My most vivid encounter with the engineering state occurred, in classic Chinese fashion, on a bicycle.

In the summer of 2021, I traveled with two friends deep into China’s southwest. Over five days, we cycled nearly four hundred miles through Guizhou province and arrived in the city of Chongqing. Rather than riding a Flying Pigeon—the comfortable but single-geared bike from the Maoist era, available only in black—I was flying through on a Giant racing bike, which was fabulously strong and quick.

It was over this long ride that I started to realize how an examination of China’s problems throws US problems into stark relief. Each time I left Beijing and Shanghai to enter more remote parts of the country, I was astonished by how even China’s poorest provinces have better infrastructure than America’s richest. The chief feature of the engineering state is building big public works, no matter the financial or human cost. For many people in Guizhou, it has produced an enthusiasm and an expectation for physical change, a feeling not often found among Americans today.

Mountains dominate Guizhou’s landscape. They are made of karst stone, perplexed with intricacy. Even a decade ago, a cycling trip through Guizhou (pronounced Gway-JOE) might have been foolhardy. There just weren’t enough adequate roads. It is China’s fourth-poorest province and far away from prosperous coasts—a province, the saying goes, “where not three feet of land is flat, where not three days pass without rain, where not a family has three silver coins.”

In the nineteenth century, one of the imperial cartographers sent by the Qing emperor to map the territory grew exasperated by his task. “Southern Guizhou has a multitude of mountain peaks jumbled together,” he lamented. “They are vexingly numerous and ill-disciplined.” Visitors did not always find locals to be hospitable. Much of Guizhou is settled by the Miao minority, which has historically resented the intrusion of China’s Han-majority ethnic group.

Guizhou’s insularity and mystery are the stuff of legend. One traveler in the ninth century wrote about an ordeal: While exploring the province, he chanced upon an elegant monastery. Ten nuns at once emerged, merrily inviting him inside their thatched cottages. They were excellent hosts, plying him with dried fruits. When he felt the scene to be too fantastic, the traveler braved the dismay of the nuns and abruptly departed. Once he returned to the boat, the crew confirmed his fears: The nuns were monkey tricksters who sometimes took on human form to entice people into their midst.

In the present century, the central government has lavished Guizhou with attention. Several of Guizhou’s party chiefs have gone on to high positions in Beijing, including Hu Jintao, general secretary of the Communist Party before Xi Jinping. Chinese leaders are usually expected to administer a poor province before they can be promoted to the country’s political pinnacle. In the United States, it would be as if politicians had to gain some experience in the Rust Belt or coal country before they could get anywhere near a cabinet position. Guizhou has received several big projects. The central government built the world’s largest radio telescope—with an aperture measuring five hundred meters in diameter, named the Heaven’s Eye—in a remote corner of the province. 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 went to Guiyang with my friends Christian Shepherd, a journalist from the United Kingdom then working for the Financial Times, and Teng Bao, who grew up in Florida and founded a tech company in Shanghai. A century ago, it would have taken weeks of travel along twisting roads to reach Guiyang from Shanghai. For my friends and me, it took a seven-hour ride on high-speed rail.

Guizhou was one of the last provinces to be connected to the national high-speed network. When the railway opened its first station in 2016, engineers had finally blasted tunnels through the mountains and erected enough sturdy bridges to span the gorges. On the train, Christian, Teng, and I reclined in comfortable seats, tucking our disassembled bikes in the back of the compartment, picking up snacks or water from the attendant’s trolley when we wanted something. When we looked out the windows, the occasional blur of long tunnels hinted at the difficulty of the construction.

Christian is a great cyclist. Teng and I had more enthusiasm than experience. The three of us each packed a change of clothes, a first-aid kit, spare tires, and not much else. We stuffed our gear into sleek leather bags strapped on the back of our bikes. Then we were off. The plan was to reach our hostel accommodations by early evening each day, where we would wash our clothes in the sink, hang them out to dry, and then get up to do it all over again the next day.

Each day of cycling brought new thrills: spectacular landscapes, bridges and gorges that kept surpassing the last, waterfalls where we would occasionally linger. Our trek was tough—not because we were up against impassable roads or trickster monkeys, but because every day demanded the grind of pushing uphill. Guizhou’s infrastructure was a cyclist’s dream. On the first day of our trip, we cycled along a just-built highway not yet open to cars. That was our favorite moment: careening downhill at thrilling speeds amid luscious green mountains wreathed by bands of mist.

This bike ride was the greatest physical exertion of my life, as well as the most rewarding. We enjoyed not only the views but the food as well. Every few hours, we took a break along the side of the road. You expend an enormous amount of energy on a bike, so we would order bowls of noodles—spooning in the pungent pickles that make Guizhou cuisine so bracing—and then grab a vanilla ice cream bar before hopping back on our bikes. At night, we ordered local dishes: a fish stew full of sour pickles, braised goat, a salad of local herbs and roots, and rice balls (each the size of a lime) filled with sweet sesame, deep fried with savory pickles on the side.

If only that Qing cartographer could see Guizhou now. All sorts of new infrastructure are built into its countryside. On the third day, we came upon a sight nearly as strange as a monkey-filled phantasm. Teng was leading the three of us when he yelled, “Guitars!” When I raised my gaze, 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.

Guizhou locals may be as surprised as anyone to host the world’s guitar capital. Not many of them play the instrument. Zheng’an became a guitar hub because a lot of its residents had moved to coastal Guangdong for work, many of them finding employment by coincidence in guitar factories. Then the local government made a big effort to entice them to return to Guizhou as part of a policy to develop the interior. That effort coincided with a 2012 directive from the State Council (the executive agency of the central government) that encouraged manufacturers to relocate from coastal provinces to inland ones. The document had suggested that Guizhou pursue technologically intensive industries like aerospace or electric vehicle manufacturing. Instead, what Guizhou built was more suitable to its less-skilled realities: the Guitar Culture Industrial Park.

Zheng’an isn’t making the best guitars in the world. For the most part, it’s serving the lower half of the market. But its manufacturers are improving as local brands are getting hungry for global recognition. One of them is experimenting by adding bamboo into its guitars. Many of them are trying to become known for quality, not cheapness. I suspect many of them will get there. Chinese manufacturers are steadily gaining recognition for producing quality knives, sound systems, electric vehicles, consumer drones, and many other products. Why not guitars too?

After four days of cycling through Guizhou, we arrived in the municipality of Chongqing. The city’s downtown core is built around two rivers—the Yangtze and the Jialing—with a skyline dominated by tall buildings that sprout from steep hillsides. They seem to stack upon each other: You can enter a building at ground level, go up by elevator for over ten floors, and exit once more at ground level. Chongqing is my favorite Chinese city to visit because it has the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, most dramatic urban setting. Highways and bridges weave through huge buildings that look as if they are carved into the hills, connected to each other by systems of stairs, escalators, and walkways. The city is filled with ludicrous designs, like a subway line that passes through the middle of an apartment building sitting on a hill.

Chongqing was China’s capital during World War II, then known as Chungking. There, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces huddled with Communists and the US general Joseph Stilwell inside air-raid tunnels carved into hillsides to shelter from Japanese bombers. Chongqing is a municipality that matches the landmass of Austria—and is just as mountainous—as well as the population of Texas—and is just as boisterous. The bridges that were elegant in the Guizhou countryside swelled toward monstrosity as we approached the city. Everything is bigger in Chongqing. It is raucous, full of unexpected sites, a city that teems. With its Blade Runner aesthetic, Chongqing is the embodiment of cyberpunk—or more aptly given its rivers, hydropunk.

The mountains that protected the city from Japanese bombers also create a heat trap, making Chongqing one of China’s “four furnaces.” Perversely, the favorite food of locals is a cauldron of red chilies, beef oil, and Sichuan peppercorns—which generates a purring tingle on the tongue—into which one dips a swirl of thinly sliced meats and vegetables. Some of the air-raid tunnels have become hotpot restaurants, popular because the tunnels’ cool air helps spicy food go down more easily. Chongqing is also making plans to turn some of these shelters into art exhibitions or wine cellars.

Christian, Teng, and I were in a celebratory mood when we reached the city. After four days of cycling through nature, it felt great to be thrown into Chongqing’s dramatic urban scenery. At night, the city’s skyscrapers come to life with bright lights dancing along their sides. As we watched the sun set, people gathered around low tables, the centers of which held steaming pots of crimson broth.

I almost never drink. If there was ever an occasion, I decided, it would be the end of this bike ride. The three of us toasted each other with cold beers and then ordered food so spicy that it altered my auditory capacity. Below us were lazy pleasure boats cruising on the Yangtze River, a few headed toward the Three Gorges Dam. The following day, I hopped back on the high-speed rail to return to work in Shanghai.

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It was only afterward that I started to appreciate the strangeness of what I had cycled through. I had traversed a poor region to which the engineering state has devoted tremendous resources to modernize. Guizhou had compressed the century’s worth of investments that the United States had made—between the Transcontinental Railroad and the Interstate Highway System—into two decades.

After cycling through Guizhou, I came to a different understanding of the term “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

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. By examining Guizhou’s development, as well as the developments of a few other places that I want to bring readers’ attention to, we can grasp just what those “Chinese characteristics” actually entail.

Guizhou has built forty-five of the world’s one hundred highest bridges. It has eleven airports, with three more under construction. It has five thousand miles of expressways, ranked fourth among provinces in China by length. It has around a thousand miles of high-speed train track. Guizhou’s infrastructure isn’t made only of the twentieth-century stuff of steel and concrete. Guiyang bills itself as a “big data valley,” touting that its cool air can lower heating costs. Enormous facilities housing data servers make Guizhou emblematic of the modern infrastructure that powers AI too.

The Guizhou locals we chatted with were prouder of their bridges than anything else. My friends and I cycled across bridges that were set above plunging ravines. State media boasts that Guizhou has become a “museum of bridges,” a few of which are trying to develop into tourism sites: The tenth-highest bridge in Guizhou (which is twenty-third globally) hosts the world’s highest bungee jump. Each time the engineers build a bridge, they inevitably announce that travel times between two towns have been cut from many hours to perhaps a few minutes. That creates real convenience and connection for rural people. Some of these are bridges to nowhere, but after a few years, they become somewhere.

Still, beneath Guizhou’s engineering marvels are counties mired in poverty. At $8,000 per capita, the province has the income of Botswana, 40 percent below China’s national average and less than a third that of rich coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai. One day, Christian remarked on how few working-age adults we saw in Guizhou: Those who don’t have a job making guitars have mostly migrated to other provinces, leaving small children in the care of grandparents. In 2010, only half of Guizhou’s children attended high school—the lowest rate in the country. News reports often featured stories of children having to rise at the crack of dawn and hike through harrowing mountain paths, some with rope ladders, to be able to attend school.

In spite of the challenges of deep rural isolation, China’s fourth-poorest province—where household income is one-fifteenth that of New York State—has vastly superior infrastructure: three times the length of New York’s highways, as well as a functional high-speed rail network. And Guizhou isn’t exactly an exceptional Chinese province. Across the country, the engineering state has relentlessly built public works, making Guizhou an extreme case of China’s growth strategy rather than a deviation from it.

Modern China has been on a building spree. It began in the 1990s, after economic reopening took hold, and then received another boost in 2008, when the central government approved vast public works to respond to the global financial crisis.

China’s first interprovincial expressway opened in 1993, connecting Beijing with the nearby port city of Tianjin. Soon enough, highways reached everywhere. 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. The first expanse of highways took eighteen years to build; the second took half that time.

Cars quickly filled these roads. In 1990, there were half a million automobiles in the country; in 2024, there were 435 million, many of them electric. China didn’t just build cars and highways. It also built mass transit. From 2003 to 2013, Shanghai added as much subway track as in the entire system in New York City. In 2025, fifty-one Chinese cities have subway lines, eleven of which are longer than New York’s. China now has a longer high-speed rail network than the rest of the world put together, ten times the length of Spain’s and Japan’s (second and third in the world, respectively). Sleek railcars in silver zooming on elevated bridges are telegenic things, their pictures adorning billboards and book covers. This system completes around two billion passenger trips each year.

The state loves showing footage of big container ships that berth under enormous cranes, plucking from a mosaic of containers. As exports soared, China’s ports became the world’s busiest. Shanghai alone moved more containers in 2022 than all of the US ports combined. China’s export engine sputtered in the early 2000s, not for a lack of ports but for a lack of power in Guangdong. So the state invested in a network of new power plants mostly burning coal. In addition to using fossil fuels, China builds a third to a half of the world’s new wind and solar capacity each year. It is sending renewable energy from its sparse western provinces into its industrialized eastern provinces.

In 1957, the world’s first commercial nuclear plant started producing electricity in Pennsylvania. In 1991, China's first commercial nuclear power plant started producing electricity. By 2025, China caught up to the United States in the number of nuclear plants: fifty-five and fifty-four, respectively. Though the United States might restart a few decommissioned reactors, it has just one under construction. Meanwhile, thirty-one are under construction in China. The only US nuclear plant built in the twenty-first century took fifteen years and $30 billion. In August 2024, China’s nuclear authority approved construction of eleven new reactors, which are collectively expected to cost the same amount.

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. Though Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen have soaring housing prices, high rates of construction plus rising wages have broadly improved affordability. From 2007 to 2018, the average price of an urban apartment fell from nine times the average household income to seven times. This building spree consumes colossal amounts of steel, aluminum, copper, cement, and glass. According to Vaclav Smil, 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.

This building boom was both a cause and an effect of China’s growing wealth. It stimulated economic activity directly: The construction of homes, highways, subways, and power plants spurred demand for materials and jobs that rippled beyond the immediate construction site. It also facilitated China’s urbanization, pulling people from farms into cities, where their productivity was much greater. In a crucial period while China’s labor force was expanding, this infrastructure laid the foundation for the country’s export-based manufacturing strategy.

Most of China’s enrichment has been driven by the people themselves, finally freed from Maoist restraints to pursue a better life. Meanwhile, the state’s mania for building public works has helped the country grow faster. You can see how China differs from India, Indonesia, and other developing countries, where growth is lower in part because the state hasn’t built enough housing and infrastructure for their citizens.

While China compressed more than a century’s worth of American construction into a few decades, it folded in many of its problems too.

Highways have ripped apart too many cities in China, just as they have in the United States. 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. Over more recent decades, destruction was more systematic than the ruin of particular cultural treasures, as whole neighborhoods fell to the bulldozer. In their place are wide avenues and concrete superblocks. Unfortunately, not much new construction in China is optimized for charm and beauty.

The engineering state is built for a bird’s-eye view. The geometry of highway interchanges, rows upon rows of solar photovoltaic panels, and, under the right lighting, even a belching chemical plant can produce a pleasing thrill when viewed up high and at a distance. Down below, the urban environment is not always pleasantly livable. Big cities like Beijing and Shenzhen are poorly laid out, with no extensive walkable zones. It takes forever to get across town.

I was much happier to live in Shanghai, where many streets have remained human-scaled rather than being built for cars. The French Concession, where I lived, remains leafy and full of cafés. Shanghai is highly walkable, and one is rarely more than a fifteen-minute walk from one of the city’s many subway stations. Shanghai has vowed to open 120 new parks every year until 2025, when the city will reach 1,000 green spaces. The city of twenty-five million people works remarkably well. Like Tokyo, it has flourishing spaces for commerce, where little dumpling shops are tucked away even in subway stations. And Shanghai is superbly connected by high-speed rail to nearby cities—for example, Hangzhou, home to tech companies like Alibaba, and Suzhou, where many multinationals have manufacturing operations—which are themselves some of China’s most successful cities.

Though China has embraced American car culture, it’s still easy to get around by bike in Shanghai. The city has in recent years refashioned a stretch of its riverside into a series of wetland parks along a fifteen-mile bike path, where one can cycle past the brick warehouses and glass skyscrapers that make Shanghai feel quite like New York City. I loved taking my Giant along the river, zooming past the World Expo development, the Mercedes-Benz Arena, bridges tall enough to allow barges to sail underneath, and all sorts of beautifully preserved industrial buildings.

Compulsive construction has benefits. Though people in Guizhou remain poor, the villagers we encountered on our bike trip told us they are thrilled to have new bridges and trains. For Chinese who have experienced economic growth rates of 10 percent a year, it would feel like their country was reborn roughly every seven years. (That’s how much time an economy takes to double with that growth rate.) It means better cars, more subway lines, cleaner streets, more parks, and a hundred other improvements.

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The United States used to make enormous investments to modernize its poorer regions. Today, Americans rarely feel so excited for major construction projects, in part because they’re associated with environmental damage, in part because they take so long to complete, and in part because they’re so rare that people have forgotten how much they can improve lives.

Americans are no longer able to appreciate that a physically dynamic landscape creates a sense of progress. People living in Texas, Arizona, and the southern states that have built new skylines and masses of new homes might know how that feels. But in the largest cities in the Northeast and California, the default is toward rigidity. A new building here and there, perhaps a cute new shop or café, a toilet that cost over a million dollars—these overall inspire little eagerness for physical change.

That feeling contributes to a blind spot that Americans have for China. 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. Most people can remember a time in only the recent past when they didn’t have these things. This growth trendline matters. The glittering skyscrapers and rail lines form a core plank of the Communist Party’s legitimacy. Though China’s growth has slowed substantially under Xi’s rule, people have a hope for improvement. The better infrastructure that has been built helps people to feel that progress still courses throughout the country.

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. But China’s railways had been hugely crowded, with passenger trains sharing the same tracks as freight trains, which caused endless delays. The creation of this fast and dedicated passenger network relieved congestion for all.

A study undertaken by the World Bank in 2019 found that China’s high-speed rail system is economically viable, with ticket revenues able to recoup costs. China has been able to build high-speed rail cheaply because it has standardized designs and excellent project management. The average cost to construct a high-speed line in China is about $33 million per mile, which is 40 percent cheaper than in Europe and 80 percent cheaper than California’s effort, which has seen costs balloon to $192 million per mile. By taking a broader view, the World Bank suggests that China’s high-speed rail has delivered substantial benefits beyond ticket revenues, which includes saving time for users, increasing intellectual and business exchanges, reducing road accidents and traffic congestion, and lowering carbon emissions.

Rather than redistribute resources from the rich to the poor, the state builds infrastructure in Guizhou. Lenin used the term “commanding heights of the economy” to refer to strategic sectors like power generation and transportation. In Guizhou, the commanding heights may well be seen from its tall bridges.

The engineering state, citing socialism with Chinese characteristics, is set up to give people one main thing: material improvements, mostly through public works. The engineering state builds big in part because it’s made up of self-professed communists who grew up admiring the Soviet Union. Communist Party leaders like Xi Jinping studied in 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. It is hostile to ordinary people having much command of resources, which empowers an individual’s agency rather than the state’s.

The Communist Party celebrates the birthday of Karl Marx; to close out its party congress, held twice a decade, the military band plays the “Internationale” socialist anthem inside the Great Hall of the People. But as I said in my introduction, China is also a country governed by conservatives who masquerade as leftists. Perhaps no other self-proclaimed socialist country is as lightly taxed as China. Nearly three-quarters of China’s population are spared from paying income tax. China has also failed to levy a broad property tax, leaving the bulk of rich city dwellers’ wealth untouched. It relies more heavily on consumption taxes, which are regressive because they burden the poor more than the rich.

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 about what the state is doing with their hard-earned funds and whether their taxes should entitle them to greater political participation.

Low taxes make China stingy on welfare. 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. China’s pension and health care spending are much lower than that of other rich countries. It is especially miserly with unemployment insurance: Only about a tenth of China’s unemployed are eligible for modest benefits. Occasionally, Chinese leftists have protested the state of affairs. Rather than provide better welfare in response, the state has detained students trying to organize Marxist reading groups.

Xi has forcefully pushed back on the idea that China needs more generous welfare. In a major speech in 2021, he said, “Even when we have reached a higher level of development . . . we should not go overboard with social transfers. For we must avoid letting people get lazy from their sense of entitlement to welfare.” Worrying that welfare could make the people lazy is one of those instances when a Communist Party leader sounds like Ronald Reagan.

China’s economic model isn’t a simple-minded application of Marxism. The Communist Party would say that its system is modulated by certain Chinese characteristics. The sort of central planning that is part of Marxist-Leninist states have certain resonances with the centuries-old predispositions of China’s engineering state, especially construction and control. But China has some element of capitalism as well, which explains why the country has created a far more durable economic model than the failed Soviet-style states.

Construction, capitalism, and control. These elements are sometimes in tension. After China’s digital platforms grew powerful and profitable, the Communist Party reined them in (the focus of my sixth chapter). It found a lot to dislike among tech tycoons and their business models. Companies and people were engaging in transactions—buying goods, borrowing money, contracting for services—without mediation by the state. And digital platforms created billionaires who could not resist flaunting their wealth or wisdom, much as their Silicon Valley counterparts do. Subsequently, the Communist Party smashed many of their businesses before they had begun to wield real power. The state wants to have the ultimate say in controlling economic relations throughout society.

The lack of a safety net is one of the reasons that Chinese households save a great deal of their income for contingencies. The engineering state likes that just fine. Xi’s generation came of age in the 1950s, when China imitated a Stalinist program for intensive control over enterprises as well as a focus on industrialization and heavy industry. If people can bear some pain now and save, the Communist Party has long been saying, then life in the future will be better.

Xi was born in 1953, the year that Beijing unveiled its First Five-Year Plan, which concentrated the state’s resources to build seven hundred industrial projects. Drawing directly from Soviet practices, it also had substantial aid from the Soviet Union, which provided technical guidance to projects that included metallurgy plants, chemical facilities, and defense projects. In 2020, Xi announced the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan, the ambitions of which are more breathtaking than anything the Soviets attempted.

The engineering state isn’t finished with building big. “We will perform basic scientific research on the origin and evolution of the universe, carry out interstellar exploration such as Mars orbiting and asteroid inspection,” goes the opening section of the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan on science and technology. It gets better from there. “We will construct hard X-ray free-electron laser devices, high-altitude cosmic ray observation stations, comprehensive extreme condition experimental devices, deep underground cutting-edge physical experimental facilities with very low background radiation.” China wants not only to explore deep space but also to use “heavy icebreakers” for polar exploration in the deep sea.

“We will add 3,000 kilometers of urban rail transit” states the section on mass transit. The plan specifies the sections of highways and high-speed rail that it will build. It has major targets for energy: “We will build hydropower bases on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River,” which will have triple the power-generating capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, and the construction of ultra-high voltage transmission lines to connect power from the country’s west to east. It has a plan for climate change, especially water management. Beijing will work on the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, which feels like a throwback to the Grand Canal of the seventh century AD. It involves 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. There’s something for the ordinary consumer too, but it’s nowhere near as exciting. To promote consumption, the plan suggests measures like “expanding the coverage of e-commerce in rural areas,” “improving product recalls,” and “improving in-city duty-free shops.” Fine measures, but puny relative to orbiting Mars. The economic planners have obviously poured their hearts into the scientific projects, whereas the consumption measures look like a hasty afterthought. When Chinese officials talk about promoting consumption, it often involves building new malls or replacing old industrial equipment. In other words, it’s still more about investing to build stuff rather than shifting the propensity of households to spend a greater share of their income.

Under Mao, China practiced a more literal form of Marxism, with full state control of the means of production. Deng Xiaoping pivoted the country away from that failed experiment. As Deng was fond of remarking, the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.” That flexible definition allowed for greater adaptability, generated higher growth, and sustained the regime into the twenty-first century. Under Deng’s definition, the United States has also achieved plenty of socialism. The Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Program all concentrated resources to accomplish great tasks. Maybe even Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could have been understood as socialism.

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When the engineering state works, it can produce beautiful cities like Shanghai. But Shanghai is exceptional: It has been China’s richest and most westernized city for the better part of a century. The engineering state also produces a lot of problems. To see them, we should return one more time to Guizhou.

Under the gleaming new bridges lurk not only poverty but also a massive debt burden. The underlying hope of Guizhou’s construction is that infrastructure will invite lasting economic activity. Part of that has worked out: Guizhou incomes have risen by nearly 10 percent annually from 2011 to 2022, driven partially by urbanization and by the tourism facilitated by new infrastructure.

But most of Guizhou’s infrastructure spending looks dubious. Its super-high bridges aren’t producing the revenue to recoup anywhere near their super-high costs. 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.

Guizhou’s debt has kindled Beijing’s wrath. In China, the only people scarier than debt collectors are political inspectors from the central government. The Communist Party has unleashed teams of officers from the Central Commission for 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, enforcing doctrine and discipline on its members.

Financial inquisitors found something in Liupanshui, the westernmost city in Guizhou, home to the world’s highest bridge. Li Zaiyong, sixty-two, was a handsome man who had big plans for his city. In the three years that Li was party secretary of Liupanshui, he authorized twenty-three tourism projects, including elegant Chinese temples and replicas of European town squares, which looked pretty from a distance but poorly painted up close. Li aimed to transform his city into a ski town, though Liupanshui would be lucky to get a few inches of snow each year. To attract skiers, he built a cable lift that he declared to be Asia’s longest, as well as dozens of artificial snowmakers to spray powder on bunny slopes. And Li blanketed the hillsides with orchards of chestnut rose hips, a bulbous yellow fruit bristling with spiny protuberances, which looks slightly nightmarish but is much loved by locals for its sweet flesh. With enough will and snowmakers, Li believed he could create a tourism hub from scratch.

Liupanshui locals greeted Li’s plans mostly with skepticism. Though their region is home to waterfalls, karst caves, and stunning green mountains, the city itself has little of beauty. Local industry consisted of coal and iron mining. One man wondered to a TV crew, “We don’t have much to see here. How much money would we have to spend to create something worthwhile?” Li Zaiyong believed a great deal, and he mobilized a great deal of funds to make things happen. Since he was the top official in the city, local banks had a hard time saying no to him.

But none of Li’s efforts bore fruit.

Liupanshui never developed into an appealing ski destination: China’s skiers went to the northeast in the winter, which has real slopes and real snow. Richer tourists from Beijing and Shanghai skipped Li’s gaudy European facsimiles for the real deal in Venice and Vienna. The faux European town squares have been taken over by local black goats, which treat the lawns as grazing grounds. Even the chestnut rose bushes died.

All that the city got for its troubles was $21 billion of new debt, an enormous amount for a poor city in a poor province. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection denounced Li’s investments as “vanity projects” and hustled him into its secretive judicial proceedings. In 2024, state media made an example of Li in a primetime documentary. He still had good looks in prison. But detention had turned his hair gray, whether from stress or lack of access to hair dye. As Li spoke inside a dimly lit room, he explained his reckless spending: “It was the nation’s money, not mine.”

Li misused public funds. But he was also playing a political game recognizable to any other party secretary. 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. China has few officials with careers like Joe Biden’s, who, before becoming vice president and then president, spent his entire political life representing Delaware. Li Zaiyong had been an official all over Guizhou before landing in Liupanshui. The way for him to reach even higher office was to demonstrate a track record for growth.

The political system of the engineering state rewards construction. China’s political leaders, after all, are selected, not elected. To reach higher office, they are given probing assessments by the Organization Department, which, along with the Propaganda Department and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, are the Communist Party’s most important governing instruments. The Organization Department evaluates local leaders on a few soft metrics, like leadership, loyalty, and resistance to graft. The department also assessed whether an official was capable of stimulating economic growth while suppressing political dissent.

But few party secretaries have great ideas for growing the township or province they’ve landed in. Furthermore, 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.

Li’s larger goal was to impress his superiors, and on that he succeeded for a while. The party promoted him to be a vice governor of Guizhou, a position he held for five years before his fall. When the debt came due, Li’s career was over. A few months after his televised confession, a provincial court sentenced Li to death with a two-year reprieve.

Li wasn’t the only Guizhou official to be detained. Beijing investigated a huge number of mid-to high-level provincial officials in 2023, ensnaring even a former party secretary—Guizhou’s highest official. Again, the situation in Guizhou was not an aberration from China’s growth strategy. Dubious projects can be found all over the country, since nearly every province has laughable replicas of European town squares that fail to attract tourists, underused infrastructure that can’t repay bondholders, and overbuilt cities that struggle to chart a course away from resource extraction.

Li dreamed up crackpot schemes for development. It would have been what any party official would do if they were dropped into a land as unpromising as western Guizhou. But he had grown too brazen in a political game very much designed by the central government in Beijing.

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The engineering state is not all glittering Shanghai. It is sometimes Liupanshui, a city that made all the wrong investments. Sometimes it is Tianjin, which was a success until it overbuilt. When I lived in Beijing, I heard the name of nearby Tianjin used as a byword for excess. One day, I took a thirty-minute train ride from Beijing to see it for myself.

Tianjin is relatively rich. In the 2000s, it spent heavily to build a financial district, styling itself “China’s Manhattan.” It was a fanciful branding exercise, though the city did manage to import a real institution from Manhattan: The Juilliard School opened its first international campus there in 2020. Tianjin used to be among China’s most industrialized cities—when the country looked to the Soviet Union for all its economic ideas. Now it is emblematic of China’s rust belt and nothing like a real financial zone. The skyscrapers in Binhai, the zone that Tianjin has designated a financial district, are mostly empty. On the weekday that I visited in 2020, the central mall in Binhai had a few people walking around, but almost none of the commercial buildings looked occupied. China’s Manhattan was hollow.

Tianjin has built not only China’s third-tallest skyscraper (ninety-seven floors, little occupied) but also one of its most photogenic libraries. The Dutch architects behind Tianjin’s Binhai Library put a bright white sphere in its center, around which undulating curves make up shelving space. Except few of these shelves held any books. Once I got up close, I could see that the beautiful shelves had only digital prints of book spines. All around me were people taking selfies rather than browsing or reading.

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. Tianjin could have focused on filling its amazing skyscrapers with better businesses. Instead, it could only build more hollow shells, while it gained considerable debt.

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. In 2018, Tianjin acknowledged that Binhai’s growth was far overstated, forcing it to revise down its GDP by nearly 20 percent. It is rare for the Chinese government to acknowledge data fraud. So it’s all the more curious that the central government is trying to pull off another major development scheme nearby. Not far from Tianjin is one of Xi Jinping’s signature new initiatives: the Xiong’an New Area. Xi has declared that Xiong’an will be the country’s most modern city and central to China’s “strategy for the next millennium.” Xiong’an is likely to receive extensive new investments because Xi has given it so much personal attention—unless that attention wanders, or if Xi is no longer around, in which case Xiong’an could turn into another Binhai.

The creation of urban megahubs, like the zone connecting Beijing to Tianjin and Xiong’an, is a part of a bet. The central government has designated a dozen urban regions for concentrated investments. The five largest—Beijing in the north, Shanghai-Hangzhou-Suzhou in the east, Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou in the south, Wuhan-Changsha in central China, and Chongqing-Chengdu in the west—average 110 million people, each nearly the population of Japan. The state is investing in rail, subways, buses, and highways to knit them into regional hubs. Alain Bertaud, a former principal urban planner at the World Bank, has told the Economist how these agglomerations can achieve previously unseen levels of productivity, representing the difference between England and the rest of the world during the Industrial Revolution.

It’s part of a growth strategy that involves building a lot of stuff. That’s not something that only China’s government does. Its companies do it too. The United States and Europe have launched trade wars on the basis of the overproduction by Chinese firms, lodging diplomatic protests and countervailing tariffs against steel, aluminum, solar photovoltaic panels, and electric vehicles. The engineering state is much more interested in promoting building and manufacturing than services.

China now has the capacity to produce around sixty million cars a year (one-third electric, two-thirds combustion), out of an annual global market of around ninety million cars sold. China’s domestic market absorbs less than half of its production. China produces so much in part because every province wants to be an automotive manufacturing hub. The country has over a hundred automotive brands, most of them small, all of them fighting for sales. The competition is so fierce in part because auto companies receive extensive support from local governments, who all try to promote their champion through cheap credit and consumer rebates to local companies. Shanghai, for example, is full of the locally produced SAIC-Volkswagen cars, while Shenzhen is dominated by its own champion, BYD.

Sometimes not even bankruptcy can stop an automaker from production. Zhido, a producer of small EVs, went bust in 2019; five years later, it had restructured, with government help, and restarted its production lines. NIO Inc. was right on the brink of bankruptcy in 2020 until its home government of Hefei rescued it; the company has since turned around its fortunes and is once more shipping its electric vehicles. The United States offered extraordinary bailouts to Detroit automakers in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In China, local governments help companies out every day. As a result, few of the brands can achieve really big scale, and China has to depend on exports to absorb all the vehicles domestic consumers aren’t buying.

China’s government is much more focused on the smooth functioning of the supply side of the economy rather than on helping consumers. This principle became really apparent in 2020. While Western governments reacted to the global pandemic by sending cash payments to households—in the United States, three rounds totaling $3,200—Beijing gave little financial support to people. It offered only meager increases to unemployment insurance, which only a fraction of the millions of unemployed workers were able to claim.

Beijing decided instead that the best way it could help workers was to get them back to work. In practice, it meant assisting companies to restart production rather than sending cash to households. It did that with its pursuit of the zero-Covid strategy, which involved taking drastic action to seal the country off from foreign travelers and imposing protracted lockdowns wherever it detected the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Beijing wanted especially for manufacturers to maintain operation. While the rest of the world was having trouble producing stuff—masks and cotton swabs, electronics for remote work—and while foreign consumers had stimulus money to spend, Chinese factories were positioned to meet the world’s demand.

For a while, that scheme worked. China’s trade surplus hit a record high in 2021, and then again in 2022, approaching almost a trillion dollars. In spite of the tariffs that Donald Trump imposed on gigantic categories of Chinese-made goods, the United States and China experienced record trade in 2022. China’s manufacturing surge, however, could not make up for the losses created by lockdowns elsewhere in the economy. But Beijing’s attitude was that so long as manufacturers could crank out more goods, then the economy was robust and there would be little need to hand out checks or any other sort of welfare.

And the manufacturers were cranking out a lot of goods. In the fall of 2020, I remember visiting the factory of a technology manufacturer outside of Shanghai. An executive had invited me in to tour his new production line. He was a Chinese national who had mostly worked for American companies and still traveled between the two countries. As we sipped tea in his office after the tour, we chatted about why the United States was then mired in production difficulties, unable to make much of the personal protective equipment that people wanted. “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). Companies retooled some of their production lines to get into the masks and money business. Chinese conglomerates rarely hesitate to go after the core business lines of others. Huawei, for example, expanded from making telecommunications infrastructure equipment to tread on companies like Xiaomi, which makes smartphones. And both have now leapt into the automotive business. This sort of expansion is driven both by the fiercely competitive market environments and by government subsidies that make it easier for companies to try their hand at making new products.

They allow companies to unleash a flood of undifferentiated products, ruthlessly underbid each other, and pray their competitors run out of money before they do. China now dominates the solar industry, but almost no firms are happy because of the overcapacity. Many of these Chinese companies will inevitably go out of business, after they’ve dragged down their competitors all over the world in brutal price wars. This trend has produced a frustrating quirk in China’s equity markets. Financial investors have seen that there is no relationship between Chinese stock market performance and GDP growth. Although the economy has grown by a factor of eight in real terms between 1992 and 2018, the Shanghai Composite Index has been one of the worst-performing major indices. In China, for a variety of reasons that includes weak corporate governance, onshore stocks dance to their own tune. Part of the reason is that even for technologies that Chinese firms dominate—like solar photovoltaic panels—few firms are able to make much profit.

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Financial investors have no need for our sympathy. There are far bigger victims of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The environment is a prominent victim of all this construction. China’s environmental reviews are not unserious, but they are almost always subordinate to economic development. All those highways are made from hulking amounts of steel and concrete, which have pulverized many habitats. Their construction also requires enormous amounts of energy: China now burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. Though the country’s air quality has improved over the past decade, this obsession with heavy industry is why a gray and dreadful smog still descends on many of its cities.

China doesn’t seek to protect the environment. It tries to engineer away the problems. Over the past five years, the country has been repeatedly struck by climate-related tragedies, and it is hard to prove that the investments China has made in flood control and water diversion megaprojects have improved matters. In the summer of 2022, a year after my bike trip to Chongqing, I returned to find the city in a historic drought. I was stunned to see that one of its two rivers, the Jialing, had nearly run dry; even the mighty Yangtze had prominent dry patches. People tried to avoid heat by staying indoors. But many of them couldn’t turn on air conditioning because the rivers had lost so much flow that even the hydropower failed.

China’s other climate disasters have included major floods in Henan province (in which fourteen people drowned in a subway train, according to official numbers), power outages in central China over the winter of 2022, and floods that displaced more than a hundred thousand people in Guangdong in 2024. Perhaps megaprojects have ameliorated what were already disastrous conditions; perhaps they had no impact at all. But environmental scientists do often question whether this sort of engineering has made things worse. The construction of a dam might well provide flood relief, or it could worsen a drought by reducing downstream flow and increasing evaporation losses.

When the state builds big dams, it floods ecosystems and dispossesses residents. The world’s biggest dam is the Three Gorges Dam, not far from Chongqing. Building it has demanded the resettlement of up to 1.5 million people. The government’s compensation for resettlement is often generous. But it has limited patience for suffering residents who block development, whether that’s a new highway or a new mall, eventually moving holdouts by hook or by crook.

The worst-affected people are targeted minority groups, who have to bear Beijing’s social engineering. The state has singled out, for example, Tibetans, who are forced to relocate from high-altitude mountains, where they are able to graze their yaks and horses, to lower-altitude farms in part to monitor them more easily. What are yak herders supposed to do when they move down to apartment blocks? Rural people who know only their farming or pastoralist lives are often at loose ends when the government resettles them into rows upon rows of high-rises. Two researchers at the University of Colorado have documented China’s coercive tactics to compel locals to leave their homes. It is a process it calls “thought work,” ranging from presenting resettlement as a voluntary and happy choice to holding intensive one-on-one meetings with recalcitrant folks who do not want to leave. Officials mix inducements with threats until they wear down the farmers. Thus, the state has been able to achieve “voluntary” resettlement rates of 100 percent.

Reckless construction has often produced rubbish quality. Builders employed cheap materials to construct even schoolhouses. The 2008 earthquake that tore through Sichuan also shattered thousands of schoolrooms, killing five thousand children (according to official figures). Grieving parents who tried to take investigations of official corruption into their own hands have faced detention. Public works give government officials plenty of discretion about how to build a project, giving them a lot of opportunities to accept kickbacks. Even if officials are upstanding, the developer might contract out the construction to a lower-cost builder, who takes a margin and subcontracts out again, and on and on until it reaches someone willing to cut costs to the bone. Parents called the collapsed schools in Sichuan “tofu houses” for their fragility. Building big, in other words, does not always mean building well.

Many construction projects represent a tremendous waste of the steel and cement that was produced by burning so much coal. There are better uses for these resources: softer concerns around health and education, not the gigantic hardware of more highways.

Though rich students in Shanghai score splendidly on international exams, education in China’s rural areas is still often abysmal. The Covid pandemic revealed that the country’s health care system is weak, with shortages of doctors and nurses and six times fewer intensive care unit beds per capita than in the United States. An official like Li Zaiyong might be more interested in building a gleaming hospital filled with sophisticated equipment. Their attention drifts, however, when it comes to installing the trained technicians capable of operating the facility, since the Communist Party is better at rewarding new construction than health outcomes. The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai.

The engineering state has engaged in wild spasms of building over the past four decades. That has achieved considerable wonders and a fair degree of harm. The future would be better if China could learn to build less, while the United States learns to build more.

I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other. Households save a great deal of their earnings in China, while it is really easy to borrow money or spend on credit in America. In terms of national policy, China is much more focused on the supply side of the economy: It suppresses consumption as it favors manufacturers with preferential financing and all manner of policy support. The United States, meanwhile, is focused on regulating demand, for example, by imposing rent control in expensive cities or mailing out checks to consumers during the pandemic.

Both approaches are running into problems. 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 it increases financial aid for spiraling college tuition costs, universities are able to eat part of that by raising their tuition. Under banners like “abundance agenda,” “supply side progressivism,” and “progress studies,” various movements are trying to loosen American supply constraints. These are excellent ideas that I hope will be broadly adopted.

The economic partnership between the United States and China made many groups better off. But it also exacerbated the problems inherent in the economic systems in both countries. Overreliance on Chinese manufacturing accelerated US neglect of its supply side. Meanwhile, China hasn’t felt the need to wean off its dependence on exports because American consumers are always there to buy its goods. As these countries grow apart, they are going to have to do something difficult: The United States will have to regain all the muscle it has lost for building public works as well as manufacturing capacity, and China will have to empower consumers by getting over its fear of making people lazy.

Doing these things won’t be easy for either country. Any time the Chinese economy wobbles, Beijing’s knee-jerk response is to announce another gigantic public works package. After a year of sluggish growth at the end of 2023, Beijing announced it would spend a cool one trillion renminbi (or $140 billion) on flood prevention and natural disaster resilience. Its instinct is still to keep building, as each of its Five-Year Plans reveal. Government ministries and state-owned enterprises are always formulating plans for the next rail extension, the next bridge, the next set of subway lines. Since the planning is already completed, a fresh infusion of funds can have a quick impact on growth, with spending on a new bridge making an impression on economic statistics immediately. Never mind that China has gotten less growth from each unit of new investment since its big infrastructure binge of 2008. The Communist Party continues to build because it’s full of engineers and also because Marxist-Leninists don’t want to cede economic agency to the people.

China would be better off if it built less and built better. But we should also resist judging it by the standards of the United States, which is frankly underprovisioned in public infrastructure. Because there is perhaps one thing worse than an overactive state that can’t stop moving—and that is a state that can’t move at all.

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. Could not the two countries just move a few percentage points closer to each other?

I wrote this book mostly out of my office at the Yale Law School. New Haven is well connected to New York City on the Metro North trains, which are comfortable and reliable but a bit slow. One day, 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. The comparison isn’t totally fair because trains today make more stops than before. But I think it is reasonable for Connecticut residents to demand faster service than what was available a century ago. The entire American Northeast badly needs better train service. At present, its only high-speed train (the Acela) would be stripped of that label if it operated anywhere in Europe or Asia.

One might think that it’s not the end of the world for the United States to build gingerly and at extravagant cost; it is a rich country, after all. But slowness today risks global disaster. There is no way to achieve large-scale decarbonization without large-scale construction, of the sorts of solar, wind, and electrical transmission projects that China has been so good at.

Though the Biden administration committed enormous funds to address climate change, the country moves far too slowly on building things. One cautionary tale: the story of Cape Wind, the United States’ first effort to develop offshore wind turbines. A developer tried to build turbines off the coast of Massachusetts, harnessing sea winds that are smoother and faster than those on land. 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.

Environmental reviews continue to delay renewable projects. In 2024, the United States had 42 megawatts of operational offshore wind production, 932 megawatts under construction, and an astounding 20,978 megawatts undergoing permitting review, most of which are waiting on environmental analyses to be completed. Meanwhile, China is building most of the world’s renewable energy. In 2023, while the United States added 6 gigawatts of new wind installations, China added 76. That year, China built two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar plants, as well as four times more than the rest of the G-7 group of rich countries put together.

The lawyerly society is great at protecting the wealthy. The engineering state has a limited tolerance for how long infrastructure can be held up. It’s barely imaginable that a group of wealthy people would be able to use legal means to force the cancellation of clean energy projects in China. If it is really going to be a climate emergency, then the rest of the world will need to move as fast as the engineering state.

Americans are starting to regain an awareness of the virtues of building. This political consciousness has budded in the political left, which has tended to favor physical stasis in the name of environmental protection or neighborhood preservation. Ezra Klein of the New York Times has pointed out that it’s hardest to build in the most Democratic-leaning locales: high-speed rail in California, the Second Avenue subway in New York, and housing in practically all big cities. In Abundance, Klein and Derek Thompson advocate to unblock constraints and achieve supply-side progressivism.

Here is where socialism with Chinese characteristics can shine. Building big can sometimes unblock market power. People in Guizhou may not have much. But they do point to new bridges with pride, while using new roads and high-speed rail to get to markets and cities. Infrastructure that cannot recoup its revenue might upset bondholders and banks. But they represent subsidies to social benefits enjoyed by regular people.

Has China already been practicing supply-side progressivism? No, because nothing about it is “progressive” in a way that someone on the American left would understand. China’s means of construction entail evicting people from their land, adopting a relatively lax approach to environmental protection and worker safety, and interpreting the public interest without substantial engagement with the actual people.

China’s overbuilding has produced deep social, financial, and environmental costs. The United States has no need to emulate it uncritically. But the Chinese experience does offer political lessons for America. China has shown that financial constraints are less binding than they are cracked up to be. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” For an infrastructure-starved place like the United States, construction can generate long-run gains from higher economic activity that eventually surpass the immediate construction costs. And the experience of building big in underserved places is a means of redistribution that makes locals happy while satisfying fiscal conservatives who are normally skeptical of welfare payments.

Rather than worry about bond vigilantes, the engineering state has focused on delivering material improvements for the people. Rural folks in Guizhou have seen their material conditions of life improve immeasurably over the past few decades. The mixture of permitting free enterprise while building big infrastructure is part of the reason that the Communist Party has held on to consent of the governed.

China’s policymakers have declined to be bound by some of the fundamental tenets of Wall Street investors—reduce investment, shrink assets, produce profitability—all of which emphasize efficiency. Perhaps it will trigger financial distress in the future. 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.