Chapter 7Learning to Love Engineers
In moving to the West, my parents made a wrenching personal decision based on what amounted to a guess about the future. It was an educated guess, grounded in part in deep family history that included a few troubling encounters with the state. But mostly it was about what lay ahead. Where did they and their young child (me, seven years old) have the best chance of living a good life? Which government, and which set of rules, was better for their well-being? Looking at a world they knew, run by engineers, and an alluring but mysterious one, run by lawyers (not that they knew that yet), they had to make a choice, a bet. All these years later, it’s not an open-and-shut case that they made the right call.
Both of my parents were born in Kunming, the capital of southwestern Yunnan province. Yunnan folks are reputed to be laid back, more eager to sit over tea and chat through the afternoon rather than drive themselves too hard. Not that there’s much to drive toward. The city was a backwater when my parents left and remains lackluster today. The government classifies Kunming as a third-tier city, which has the stagnant salaries and limp property values to prove it. When I think about my parents’ culture and their upbringing, I am surprised they made the decision to emigrate. We are a very Yunnan family. My mom, Rachel, and my dad, Frank, each have one parent with deep roots in Yunnan and one parent brought there by the war.
My dad’s father, my Yeye, was born into Yunnan’s most prominent merchant family. The Zhu Family Gardens was Yunnan’s largest residence, with gardens so splendid that it would have fit in among the charmed estates of Suzhou. Near the end of the Qing dynasty in the nineteenth century, the family patriarch oversaw a business focused on the mining of tin and copper, expanding (as successful merchants did at the time) into selling tea, distilling spirits, producing silk, and possibly partaking in the opium trade—although my relatives have been a bit vague when I ask them about this point.
Yeye was born in the Zhu Family Gardens a few years after the collapse of the Qing dynasty. There wasn’t much of a fortune left by the time he was born. The Zhu family lost its wealth after it kept siding with political losers: with the Qing before local warlords routed imperial forces, then with the Nationalists before their defeat by the Communists. The head of the Zhu family had already been executed for political disloyalty when my grandfather was born. So Yeye wound up in Kunming with his siblings, scattered and poor.
My grandfather had just enough means to be able to get an education. There he met a woman who had also fallen from elite origins. My dad’s mother, Nainai, was born in Nanjing, then the country’s capital. Her father was one of several secretaries to Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalist Party. Before the Japanese seized Nanjing, the secretary took my infant grandmother and retreated with the rest of Chiang’s government to Chongqing. Nainai once told me about one of her early memories, in which people frantically tried to shush her crying lest she attract the attention of Japanese bombers. From Chongqing she went to Kunming, the second capital of the wartime government.
Nainai met Yeye when they both were training as chemical engineers. In the 1960s, her Nationalist family connection disgraced her. The Communist Party sent her to labor in the countryside, and she was unable to see my dad or his brother for six years. When my dad was five, his brother fell sick from eating a poisonous mushroom (a common affliction among fungi-loving Yunnanese). He tried to send a letter to Nainai to alert her, but since he didn’t know how to write the character for “mushroom,” he drew one. She recounted how my dad’s note filled her with confusion and alarm: “Older brother fell sick from eating a (drawing of a mushroom).” Until the end of her life, Nainai cursed Mao for his crazy schemes to break up families.
My mom’s side of the family has rural origins. Her father, my Laoye, was born in the northern province of Henan. As a teen, he barely survived the great famine that struck the province in 1942; his two brothers did not. Laoye attended a school administered by successive regimes that wrested control of Henan: first Nationalist, then Japanese, then Nationalist again, until the Communist victory. He developed a great love for books. Since Laoye’s family had perished, he enlisted with the troops, and since he had some schooling and literacy, they selected him to become an officer. He joined the Second Field Army, whose commissar was Deng Xiaoping, dispatched to expel Nationalist troops from Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan.
In the early days of the Cultural Revolution, the army split into different factions, each proclaiming themselves to be more fervently devoted to Mao. My grandfather fell into the faction that got itself labeled “rightist” and therefore outside of political favor. The winning faction confined his unit to work at home to produce furniture. He had no idea how to do that but tackled the project with soldierly fortitude. After Mao’s death, Laoye saw action once more in his life, when China invaded Vietnam in 1979. Serving as a propaganda officer, he carried out a job—dropping leaflets on Vietnamese troops urging them not to resist—that in retrospect sounds laughable. Battle-hardened Vietnamese troops who repulsed the Americans only years earlier were not going to surrender to a leaflet.
My family says that I resemble this grandfather more than anyone else: a round face, wider eyes, and higher cheekbones. These features could also come from his wife, my Laolao, who is descended from deep Yunnan stock. Rather than being able to trace her heritage for a dozen generations through a prosperous merchant family, the family origins of my mom’s mother are cheerily insignificant. They’ve been black tea farmers in the south of Yunnan for generations. Several ethnic groups are prominent where my grandma is from. It’s a bit of a joke in the family—since I look slightly unusual—that I have Tibetan or Wa heritage through her.
Laolao grew up in a family with a slightly bigger plot of land than others. That enabled her to get an education and move to Kunming to become a kindergarten teacher. Life was good until the Communist Party designated her family a minor landlord, condemning her to a bad class background. So she too was sent away to labor in the fields, apart from her three daughters. Most of her family is still farming black tea in southern Yunnan. Every time Laolao’s relatives visited Kunming, mostly to visit the city’s hospital, they brought along some tea and a local chicken, which she stewed into a wonderful, golden broth.
Soldier, landlord, traitor, capitalist. Each of my grandparents suffered through Mao’s political convulsions. Former wealth and a Nationalist background condemned my dad’s side of the family. But the military and rural family history on my mom’s side didn’t produce political favor either. Mao’s China was a churning cauldron, in which people’s positions bobbed up and drifted down by design: Mao sought continuous revolution. When I spoke to my grandparents about their experiences, only my Nainai was still bitter. The others chuckled about the futility of their lives in the Cultural Revolution, laughing off the times they were separated from my mom and dad. They told me they didn’t suffer especially badly. That’s true. None of them starved to death or faced the ritualized beatings that destroyed other families.
While their parents were sent away to the countryside, my mom and dad mostly enjoyed themselves. They remember the Cultural Revolution as a good time when they skipped school and did their part to advance communism by chanting slogans and beating drums. My mom and dad were lucky. By virtue of being urban residents and good students, both were later able to attend university. Both were born in the golden era of 1959. They were part of the generation of people going to universities and starting businesses. After high school, my dad went to Guangzhou to study computer science, and my mom studied thermal engineering in Kunming.
By the time they were in college, Deng Xiaoping had started to dismantle the planned economy. My mom began freshman year with four ration coupons for meat per month. She was careful not to use them all up in the first week so that she could have red-braised pork later in the month too. The ration coupon system had mostly disappeared by senior year, and she was able to eat meat when she felt like it.
But socialism didn’t dissipate at once. When my parents graduated from college in the mid-1980s, they were caught up in a Deng program that was a throwback to Mao’s agenda: Both were part of a teaching corps sent into a small city to be teachers to middle school students. The state dispatched the two of them to the Yunnan city of Dali—which also happens to be where Silvia and I fled in 2022 to escape the Covid lockdowns. It’s hard to imagine a better place to be dispatched. They became a couple in the teaching corps numbering three dozen youths. When my parents married, their fellow teachers made up most of the guests. Nobody had much money at that time. The groom and bride treated their wedding guests to dinner and handed each guest a piece of milk candy afterward.
Once they completed their teaching service, my parents returned to Kunming. The state assigned my dad to teach computer programming at the local university. At that time, an undergraduate degree in computing from Guangzhou was sufficient qualification to be a lecturer in Kunming. And the state assigned my mom to work at a coal plant. The job was filthy. Since my mom loved, as her dad did, to read and write, she found herself editing the internal news bulletin at the plant.
My mom was determined to leave the coal plant and do something in journalism. She grew up speaking standard Mandarin, amid army officers who came from all over the country, rather than the local Yunnan dialect. When she applied for a transfer to the news bureau, the provincial broadcaster noticed her clear and resonant Mandarin and hired her to report on the culture and health beat. Eventually, the bureau promoted her to be a radio news anchor and, occasionally, a TV anchor. Whenever she sees me on TV or hears me on a podcast, she comments on how I sound before she tells me her thoughts on anything I’ve said. The voice is best, she reminds me, if my speech starts from my tummy, while I should project the sound as if it were emerging from my forehead. (That’s a tip for all the people hosting podcasts today.)
My parents emigrated after a spell of gloom in China during the 1990s. Yunnan’s economic outlook was dim then. The political and economic optimism that people felt over the past decade collapsed with Deng’s order to violently suppress student protesters, which then triggered international sanctions. My parents—a few years older than the protesters—felt crushed as they watched the army take control of Beijing. There was plenty of doubt around the country that Deng would succeed in his reform and opening policy. Countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia were beckoning Chinese to immigrate. It wasn’t easy for a couple in their mid-thirties with a small child to move. Their most-prized possessions were the stacks of books piled in our small apartment, few of which they would be able to carry. But when the Canadian government declared them to be high-skilled immigrants and gave them work visas, they decided to depart.
In February 2000, we found ourselves in the suburbs of Toronto. The timing wasn’t great. It was my first time realizing that snowfall could be measured in feet and that it can sit for months and turn into increasingly foul ice. Worse, the dotcom bubble had just burst. My dad’s programming skills became at once unmarketable. My mom fell from reading the news in Yunnan to taking on odd jobs in Canada, including as a janitor, garment worker, and massage therapist. We moved to Ottawa shortly thereafter so that my dad could study for a master’s degree in computer science. I sometimes got up to no good while my dad studied and my mom worked, but I didn’t believe them when they threatened to send me to the army. To my surprise, they followed through. To their surprise, I enjoyed being a Royal Canadian Army Cadet. Twice a week after high school, I would go to the drill hall near Parliament Hill to practice map reading, bivouac, and occasionally marksmanship. The person most pleased about all this was my Laoye, happy that I chose the army like he did.
My parents were always stressed about money while I grew up. I was able to do most of the stuff that other kids did, but every so often, I received a brutal reminder of how little money we had. I didn’t go to birthday parties because we couldn’t afford to buy a gift. My parents brought me to a facility one winter to pick up, to my delight, a bag of toys for Christmas. The gladness soured when other kids told me, not with gentleness, that I must have been poor to qualify for these toys. We never had boots sufficient for trudging around in the awful Ottawa winters. When we ate out, it was at Subway, which charged five dollars for a footlong sub. Now, I feel a slight revulsion when I catch the distinctive whiff of the Subway breads.
When my dad found a job as a software developer in Pennsylvania, we packed up our life in Canada and moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia. Our timing again was poor: Three months after we left Canada, the US stock market began to convulse in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Thankfully, my dad held on to his job. And I went to high school in Bucks County, which is the sort of place that people describe as bucolic. While I was in high school, my dad told me one day that he had no money to send me to college. I didn’t doubt him: The US immigration system allowed only him, not my mom, to work at that time. I went to study at the University of Rochester, one of the few places that gave financial aid to Canadian citizens, offering me nearly a full ride. As soon as I began college, I started working to cover my expenses.
Every so often, I wonder about the counterfactual of what would have happened if my parents never departed from Yunnan. They think about it too.
My mom and dad sometimes feel regret. They emigrated just as China’s economic boom began in earnest. The country had joined the World Trade Organization, and Deng’s reforms really did release the pent-up entrepreneurial energy of the country. If my parents had stayed in Kunming, they would have been allocated housing units by the state. These homes didn’t enjoy the precipitous rise in value seen in Shanghai or Shenzhen, but it would have been a tidy sum of money. They would have been near their parents, their siblings, and their friends. And they could have had better careers rather than restarting their lives in a very foreign country.
When my parents wonder what life would have been like if they stayed, they can just take a look at how the rest of their classmates are doing. In China, schoolmates are lifelong friends. Past a certain age, typical socializing takes place inside a banquet room with twenty or so of your classmates, getting drunk and reminiscing. Looking around the banquet table would give them a sense of what they’ve missed.
A few of their classmates caught the boom, taking advantage of China’s two great sources of wealth creation: owning property (or participating in the great wave of construction) or owning a factory (and participating in the great wave of exports). Since my dad went to college in Guangzhou, he knew a number of businesspeople who made their wealth selling furniture or some other consumer goods. They aren’t billionaires. But they have been able to buy a home—and sometimes an investment visa—overseas, drive a German-made car, and take leisurely holidays abroad when it suits them.
My parents have no entrepreneurial instincts. So they would have probably been more like the majority of their classmates who earned their living by drawing a salary. They wouldn’t earn so much by American standards—$2,000 a month would be considered good—but they would have wealth from owning perhaps two or three homes around Kunming. Liquidating one of them would be enough to send their child abroad for education: the United States if the property were central, Australia or Canada if it were located in the outskirts. A few of these college classmates might be considered lower middle class. Perhaps they had a bad run in business, maybe they pissed off their boss—who decided not to allocate them an apartment—and all they had was their salary.
“Of course, I wish we never left,” my mom sometimes said to my dad and me. Her friends at the provincial broadcaster have enjoyed nice careers in radio or TV, retiring at the state-mandated age of fifty-five with a pension. My mom might be hanging out with her sister, a now-retired nurse, who spends her mornings doing tai chi exercises in the park and her evenings with a singing troupe. She would be caring for her elderly father while being driven crazy by her mom. My parents would have the freedom to try out new restaurants and to spend their copious leisure time with family and college friends.
My dad is more circumspect. “Most of our classmates would trade places with us, you know,” he counters. Yes, my mom knows.
It took them a long while to make life work in the West. But they achieved a middle-class footing about twenty years after emigrating. My dad now works in the IT department for an insurance company. And my mom spends her time at home, glad to be free of laborious jobs. Their house in Pennsylvania is filled once more with books, like it was in Yunnan. On weekends they walk the Pennypack Trail or visit parks like the Delaware Water Gap. Since I worried about leaving them alone as an only child, I brought home a dog while I was in college, which gave them joy for years. Going to Costco is a weekend ritual for them like it is for many immigrant families. They’ve even taken up pickleball. After they naturalized as citizens, both of them cast votes in the 2024 presidential election.
The biggest beneficiary of my parents’ emigration is me. I have no idea what I would be like if I had grown up in Kunming rather than Ottawa. My parents tell me that the children of their classmates have mostly not found jobs that give them much meaning, not even the talented folks who made it to Beijing or Shanghai. My three cousins, who are in their twenties, all live at home with my aunts and uncles, because they don’t want to spend their meager paychecks on rent. If my parents never emigrated, they still might have been able to send me to an American university. In fact, they would probably have been able to afford it more easily. But I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do the sort of work I’m proud of, like writing this book.
It is because I have benefited from their move that I feel somewhat embarrassed. Guilty, even. My parents are materially impoverished relative to most of their friends. In many ways, they’re more spiritually impoverished too. They haven’t made many friends in suburban Philadelphia. Going anywhere from their housing development requires driving. To reach an Asian grocery store or a decent Sichuan restaurant, they spend two hours on highways driving to and from Princeton, New Jersey. I tell them that it is mostly their fault that they don’t have much of a community. They haven’t really made an effort. But they lack the context for being more engaged in this American suburban setting where it’s difficult to get to know others.
So why do their classmates envy my parents? Because they live a pleasant life without having to deal with the problems that attend the lives of even well-off Chinese citizens. The Chinese middle class is precariously exposed to changes in Beijing’s mood. Those in business have to deal with incredible stress, facing down threats from competitors or the local government. They have a gnawing sense that their lives are being shortened by the air they breathe or food they eat. And they feel deep uncertainties about their property values, the future of economic growth, or whether Beijing will visit some sort of disaster upon them or their companies. Life in China is deeply textured and all-embracing. But the intensity of family and social demands can smother, and the embrace can come unbidden, firmly and unavoidably, from the state. For many Chinese, a life in the American suburbs is worthwhile, even if their relationship with the community feels gossamer thin. Families in China still wonder whether they can establish a better life abroad and ask the same questions that my parents asked before they emigrated. Generations of Chinese people have prospered in the United States, in part, I’m sure, because their cultures are so alike. Millions of people look across the ocean and envision their futures, weighing the drawbacks and benefits, the similarities and the differences, asking themselves, Would it be better there?
My parents have a resigned contentedness about their lives. I have, however, a wish. For their benefit, I hope that they move to my favorite neighborhood in New York City: Sunset Park.
Walk south of the wealthy Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope—where brownstone homes retail for around $4 million—and you’ll reach Sunset Park. Its homes are not so handsome as those brownstones. Until the 1960s, Sunset Park was populated with Italian, Norwegian, and Finnish immigrants, who worked in the maritime trades on the nearby waterfront. Now the neighborhood is dominated by newer immigrants. Townhomes occupy the streets and commerce lines its avenues, where doctors and real estate agents advertise themselves in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Latino businesses line Fifth Avenue, while Chinese stores make up Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. Chicharrón is on display on the western avenues, while roast duck and poached chicken hang on Cantonese rotisseries on the eastern ones. Papaya and plantain are sold on the west side, and durian and melons on the east. Many of the Chinese stores, annoyingly, accept only cash, but their offerings are worth a trip to the ATM. A few of the grocers offer mitten crabs with bright orange roe in the fall, just like you can find in Shanghai.
At the north is Sunset Park itself, whose name graces the rest of the neighborhood, which offers excellent views of Manhattan and New York Harbor. Its most prominent feature is the Sunset Play Center. This facility has one of the eleven swimming pools that Parks Commissioner Robert Moses opened in 1936, featuring his typically bold designs. The bathhouse is a brick building in art deco style, with a lobby made of ceramic tile and bluestone that rises into a rotunda. Around the pool one might find tai chi practitioners doing their routines. At all hours, teens play while families stroll through.
Chinese would recognize something in Robert Moses. He was an American urban planner who built at breakneck speed. Moses held a dozen titles—a few forbiddingly boring (like parks commissioner) and a few that were considerably more tantalizing (chairman of the New York City planning commission and city construction coordinator). He bulldozed urban neighborhoods to make way for great bridges and highways, vast parks upstate, and a giant dam producing power from Niagara Falls, as well as urban amenities that the city desperately craved, like the swimming pool at Sunset Play Center.
My parents haven’t responded to my entreaties to help them move to Sunset Park. I recognize that they took a great risk in their lives—moving abroad with a little one in tow—and no longer have the appetite for another big change. But I wish they could have ended up in a more vibrant place than suburban Philly. They shouldn’t have to choose between a typical life in China, where politics can overturn lives at any moment, and a typical life in the United States, where the bulk of people inhabit suburban lifestyles that feel kind of dreary.
No, not everyone has to live in the suburbs. But Americans do often have to choose between poorly governed cities or car-dependent suburbia. I wish that there were more spaces like Sunset Park: a relatively affordable neighborhood in a city connected by mass transit that enables people of different cultures to mix. For all of New York City’s flaws, it remains one of the few truly urban places in the United States, dense, walkable, with some degree of economic integration. But rather than continue to improve and modernize such places, as Robert Moses tried to do, we have left them in a weird, disconnected state while funneling the country’s abundant talent into creating new virtual worlds. Is that the trade Americans want?
By the time my parents and I immigrated to the United States in the 2000s, Moses had long departed the scene. He was not merely dead; he was discredited. The imperative that drove Moses—improving society through large-scale, government-led projects—had gone to the grave with him. My parents don’t know who Robert Moses is.
New Yorkers used to celebrate Moses. Then in 1974, Robert Caro published a biography of him titled The Power Broker, immortalizing Moses for his big projects and his equally big lapses in judgment. To call this biography monumental would be an understatement: Caro poured painstaking research and literary power into each of its 1,300 pages. 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.
Robert Moses, let it be said, was neither a lawyer nor an engineer. But as New York’s master builder, he was both—and more. The Power Broker can be understood by several lists: the list of Moses’s official titles; the list of his construction projects, which included bridges, expressways, and New York landmarks; and the list of his mistakes, flaws, and prejudices, which has made his name an oath against physical change. Moses, as Caro demonstrated, was an elitist who bulldozed poor neighborhoods in the service of the middle class. He was arrogant, unwilling to involve anyone else in the interpretation of the public interest, especially not members of the public. And he connived against anyone—poor or powerful—who dared oppose his plans. Though he burned with zeal, he was also burdened with racism and a penchant for petty vengeance.
When it was first published, the book seemed prescient. The Power Broker carried a subtitle fit for its time: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York was legendary for being awful through the 1970s, facing urban unrest and the threat of bankruptcy. In one of Caro’s most compelling chapters, Sunset Park is described as an irredeemable slum. Moses had barely taken a glance at the neighborhood before he thrust an elevated expressway above its busiest commercial street. The expressway, paraphrasing Caro’s vivid imagery, tore the heart out of the neighborhood by driving Finnish eateries and Norwegian shops away for the convenience of trucks. Commerce left when the expressway came, leaving a community to crumble.
Stroll around Sunset Park’s restaurants that peddle empanadas and noodles today, and its residents would be bewildered to learn that their neighborhood had had its heart torn out. The expressway Moses built is still there. Working-class immigrants are also still there, only now the locals speak Spanish, Cantonese, or Mandarin. The Sunset Play Center that Moses built for the neighborhood stands also, enjoyed by a new generation of families. Rather than fatally collapsing after losing its heart, Sunset Park has endured. It has endured because the neighborhood is bigger than a single construction project. And it has endured because migrants are still seeking a better life in the United States. I would be delighted to settle my parents in Sunset Park. It would bring them closer to the good parts of China that they no longer have access to: a walkable neighborhood where they could find foods they love, a great park where they could practice tai chi or play pickleball, and the option to take the subway around New York City to visit bookstores and cultural events.
The Power Broker has become a dated book. New York may be flawed, but it hasn’t fallen. The city walked itself back from the precipice in a way that industrial cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Cleveland have not. These cities have lost two-thirds of their population since the 1950s, while New York has grown by attracting not only the working class but also the wealthy.
Like many builders, Moses wielded prejudices and made extravagant mistakes. His reign ended at the right moment: Critics like Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford called time on his relentless construction projects before he obliterated Lower Manhattan with yet another highway project. But his legacy of physical dynamism has also propelled New York into the global city it is today. Moses thought more deeply about how to attract families into the city than his critics give him credit for. The cultural centers he built have lent their gleam to a city that continues to attract creatives, too.
What New York has lost since the 1960s are updates to its physical environment. The city is still relying on the infrastructure that came to a stop when the reign of Moses ended, which makes me think that there’s not much to be gained in stomping on Moses’s name still further. New York, and the United States writ large, cannot survive indefinitely on the infrastructure built nearly a century ago. There are always trade-offs and compromises inherent to building large-scale public works, and instead of vilifying the people from our past who made tough choices, we must confront these tough choices ourselves.
The United States has been weakened not only by a procedure-obsessed left—which has become so determined to avoid the errors of Moses that few big works are built at all—but also a thoughtlessly destructive right. I bring up Moses to suggest that the American left needs to rouse itself to deal with the problems of the present day rather than the problems of the previous midcentury.
The American right, I hope, can remember that it is possible to build wonders using the government. In 2025, the tech right celebrates the achievements of Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seeks to shred the federal government. No one can dispute that the US government is capable of astonishing inefficiency, but it used to be able to deliver the technologically astonishing too. 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 (rather than the diesel-powered crafts that could stay underwater for hours), which represented a decisive advantage against the Soviets when it was first unveiled. He was a perfectionist engineer who had the patience to work for decades within the government to see his vision through. What Rickover delivered is a fleet of submarines that remains the pride of the US Navy today. During World War II, industrialists went into government to scale up aircraft and naval production. The US government concentrated resources to accomplish great technological tasks like the Manhattan Project, which produced the bomb, and Apollo Program, which sent humanity to the moon. These kinds of massive technological feats could only be accomplished through the government.
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. Both were also devoted public servants who spent their entire lives building great works for government pay. Rickover and Moses achieved something we no longer see among public officials. They delivered projects on time and under budget, year after year, while avoiding corruption charges.
There are still plenty of people with tremendous vision and drive in the modern era. Only they are, like Elon Musk, more likely to found tech companies or hedge funds than to work for the public interest. Or departments like DOGE. The Department of Government Efficiency has brought contempt for government, lopping off core institutions and services. Are billionaires like Musk somehow more accountable than America’s prior generation of builders? I submit that they are only more obnoxious. The problem with the American right is not its desire to make the government more efficient. Their problem is that they diagnose the causes of inefficiency as a lazy workforce rather than the mountains of procedure that civil servants labor under. DOGE would be more effective if it targeted reductions in process rather than personnel.
The American right, I hope, can remember that the government is capable of building mighty works too. If ambitious people are mostly working in consumer internet companies, then there’s little wonder at the disappointment embedded in Peter Thiel’s quip: “We wanted flying car, instead we got 140 characters.” Shed a tear for the American states: wounded by the ostentatiously destructive tendencies of the right after it has been strangled and dragged down by the left.
The ultimate contest between China and the United States will not be decided by which country has the biggest factory or the highest corporate valuation. This contest will be won by the country that works best for the people living in it. The United States has deep and enduring advantages over China. But the engineering state has a powerful card to play: It can harness physical dynamism. China has greater manufacturing capabilities, more sophisticated physical infrastructure, a more robust defense industrial base, and more abundant housing. The United States can prove itself the stronger country over the next century if it can hold on to pluralism while building more.
Right now, it is failing. It won’t be able to respond to climate change, drive better economic outcomes, or deliver broader measures of social equality if the physical world remains underdeveloped. American governance is stronger if it can demonstrate that it has a political system capable of delivering essential services to its people, including safe public streets, functioning mass transit, and plentiful housing. For various American ideals to be fully realized, the country will need to recover its ethos of building, which I believe will solve most of its economic problems and many of its political problems too.
The United States will be stronger if it can manufacture. If it does not recover manufacturing capacity, the country will continue to be forcibly deindustrialized by China. US global power will be reduced if people around the world find it more attractive to drive Chinese cars, deploy Chinese robots, and fly Chinese planes. The world is more dangerous if Beijing believes that the United States has insufficient ships and munitions to respond to an aggressive act against Taiwan or in the South China Sea. If the two superpowers fight in East Asia, it’s not at all clear that the United States will win. America has to build to stave off being overrun commercially or militarily by China.
The United States will be stronger if it builds more homes. American progressives have a slogan that every billionaire is a policy failure. Since common folks are more on my mind, I propose an amendment: Every rise in housing prices is a policy failure. Prosperous places with substantial job creation—especially New York, San Francisco, and Boston—have perversely done the most to block new housing. Overall, half of American renters are considered cost-burdened (meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their pretax income on rent), and many people who would like to buy a first home cannot afford one. The lack of building new homes has locked people out of cities with good jobs. It is increasing segregation by class and race.
And the United States will be stronger if it can provide better infrastructure. Though New York has mass transit, most of it was built a century ago, such that entering a subway station in Manhattan feels too often like descending into a rotting pit, where one stands amid trash and worrisome leaks, until a deafening metallic screech announces the train. It’s not that the city doesn’t spend enough on these problems: New York has the honor of hosting five of the six most expensive transit projects in the world. 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. There’s no reason that much older European cities should be able to build more cheaply than New York. And the people in charge don’t seem to be able to do anything about it.
To the Biden administration’s credit, it made a serious attempt to conduct industrial policy and build up US infrastructure. But the pace of building has been terribly slow. In 2021, Congress allocated $42 billion to expand broadband services to rural communities in a plan known as Internet for All. Four years later, not a single home has been connected to this network. Two years after Congress allocated $7.5 billion to build electric vehicle charging stations across the United States, just seven have become operational. The leisurely pace of construction was a political failure for the Democrats: After winning the 2024 election, President Trump will be either able to reap the political benefits of naming many new bridges for himself or cancel some of these projects.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had an early viral moment in 2019 when she lashed out at people holding up the green transition: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” she said. “And your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?” You can’t look at New York’s transit projects, where it costs billions to build a mile of subway, and conclude that the city doesn’t pay. The problem, rather, is that the government insists on tripping itself up. The ludicrously slow pace of construction in the United States would not be such a big deal if the world wasn’t facing, as Ocasio-Cortez points out, a climate crisis. What the United States has lost sight of is that the public might prefer a government that does something rather than one that’s so exquisite about process. When public works arrive seriously over budget, when the state is barely able to maintain existing infrastructure, when timelines for a new train or a new station can be more than a decade away, we have to question whether the present approach is fit for purpose.
To succeed, the United States doesn’t need to adopt China’s means of construction. This book has detailed how the engineering state’s approach has wrought horrors and is no longer fit for purpose even in China. Rather, the United States can look toward other Western countries, like Spain, Germany, and Japan, which strike a better balance between public consultation and environmental review on the one hand and getting stuff built on the other.
To achieve all of this, I propose—very gently—to unwind the dominance of lawyers in the United States. That will require us to confront the proceduralism that exists inside government and broader society. And it will require us to renew our faith in government institutions to deliver essential services.
It is difficult, I confess, to pry American political institutions out of the grip of law schools. They have built not just a pipeline funneling graduates into the federal judiciary; ambitious students have cleared paths toward the White House and executive agencies too. It is even harder to change the more fundamental philosophical basis of American law. 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.
The United States will not overcome the lawyerly society by debating the kinds of issues that law students thrill to: the correct ruling on any particular case or the personalities on the Supreme Court. I want to invoke the classic line by professor Grant Gilmore, in a text often assigned to first-year law students: “The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”
Rather, I want Americans to experience what the previous generation of Chinese have felt: a sense of optimism about the future driven in large part by physical dynamism. Chinese who have experienced the country’s blistering economic growth over the past four decades look to the past with pride and to the future with hope. When residents of Chongqing or Shenzhen see a new cityscape unfold before their eyes, they expect the future to keep changing for the better.
When my parents emigrated, China’s economy was growing above 10 percent a year; if they had stayed in Kunming, they would have felt like they were living in a new city roughly every seven years, since that’s how long it takes for the economy to double. Each time they return to visit their parents, they discover a new, cleaner, better city. Such growth rates are beyond the United States’ wildest dreams. They’re also no longer in China’s reach. But the engineering state continues to build big works because the political economy is fully geared toward it. My parents traded their life in China for the quiet comforts of suburban Philadelphia. It has been good for us, but we all feel that the United States has become distinctly unambitious.
The path forward demands that we reclaim a sense of optimism: an ability to make plans and deliver on them. The United States has to do two things to overcome the lawyerly society.
First, it has to remember that the country has a heritage of engineering. America built beautiful cities full of monumental buildings. Throughout the nineteenth century, it filled these cities with engineering marvels: the world’s then-longest suspension bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan (later superseded in length by the Golden Gate Bridge), the world’s first skyscrapers in Chicago, subway lines in New York City that ranked with any in Europe. It built bridges, tunnels, highways, and railroads. It demonstrated the technological sublime, like fleets of nuclear-powered submarines as well as vessels that brought humans to walk on the surface of the moon.
Second, the United States needs to elevate a greater diversity of voices among its elites. The most important American virtue is the commitment to pluralism—the ability of diverse cultures to coexist and thrive under equal protection. It means lawyers should be joined by engineers, economists, and other sorts of humanists to make sure that the country is able to work for the many, not only the few.
China, classified in 2025 as an “upper middle-income” country by the World Bank, will in a few years cross the “high income” threshold. Beijing will not celebrate that achievement. “No matter how China’s economy develops in the future and how its international status improves,” Communist Party propaganda organs blared in 2023, “China will always be a developing country.”
I find that beautiful.
This declaration is part of a cynical diplomatic effort to convince the poorer countries of the world that China stands for their interests. That’s not the appeal for me. Rather, I think it is wise for the country to declare that it is “developing.” The United States should do that too. Isn’t it better than to be a “developed” one, which implies that you’re done, finished, at the end of the road? Leave “developed” status, I say, to Europe’s beautiful mausoleum economy.
Over the past forty years, China has resembled the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Both were feeling their way into superpower status. It was a time for building great works but also a time when scam artists and swindlers abounded, cheating people of their savings for fantastic investment projects. Both were focused on scaling up established technologies rather than doing great new science. Neither country was a great inventor of new products over these periods. Rather, they stole and copied from real scientific innovators: the United Kingdom and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the Western world at the start of the twenty-first.
Then the United States exited its Gilded Age. The masses lost their affection, to the extent they ever had any, for the robber barons and their domination of the political system. American progressives launched all sorts of reforms to set the country on a better path. The country harnessed its commitment of transformation to improve its civil service, build new cities throughout its vast territories, and demonstrate that democracies are not militarily weak.
That commitment to transformation is an ideology that both the United States and China share. The United States has a distinctly ideological character as a nation, founded on values and principles rather than heritage; modern China is intent on proving that its historical heritage is glorious. 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.
Part of the process that drove Deng Xiaoping to embark on reform and opening was his tours to rich countries: A visit to a Texas supermarket, offering so much choice, overwhelmed him; when he heard that an auto worker at Japan’s Nissan might be able to produce ninety-four cars a year, while an auto worker in China could produce but one, he realized this was modernity. Now these roles are reversed. It is China that executes on highly complex tasks and Americans who should be looking on with astonished expressions, wondering if they can recover the ability to do such things themselves.
The Communist Party’s method of expressing its transformational urge is a top-down effort to organize centralized campaigns of inspiration, which it deployed to achieve communism and, subsequently, economic growth. There would have been every reason to expect Deng to fail when he became China’s top leader in 1980. The country had just suffered through the lethal utopian experiments of the Mao years. Deng unleashed the terror of the one-child policy at the same time as his economic reform program. Reform and opening suffered bruising setbacks over the course of the next fifteen years, especially after Deng ordered the army to clear Beijing of protesters in 1989. But then economic growth really did take hold.
The question all of this is leading up to is, Who is better positioned for the future?
Beijing has been taking the future dead seriously for the past four decades. That is why China will not outcompete the United States. The engineering state has delivered great things. But the Communist Party is made up of too many leaders who distrust their own people and have little idea how to appeal to the rest of the world. They will continue to bring literal-minded solutions for their problems, attempting to engineer away their challenges, leaving the situation worse than they found it. Beijing will never be able to draw on the best feature of the United States: Embracing pluralism and individual rights. The Communist Party is too afraid of the Chinese people to give them real agency. Beijing will not recognize that the creatives and entrepreneurs it is chasing into exile are not the enemy. It will not accept that their creative energy could bring as much prestige to China as great public works.
But there are still some things that the United States can learn from the engineering state. Although the creative class wants to rùn, the material benefits for most of China’s population are widely spread. The reason that consent of the governed is still pretty strong in China is that Chinese have seen their conditions of life improve immeasurably, such that most people have space in their lives to do most of what they want, most of the time. Part of the hopefulness of prior decades has evaporated under Xi, which is another substantial reason that China will not outcompete the United States. But Xi can still count on momentum from China’s many strengths to push the engineering state to achieve astounding building feats over the next decade.
The United States has lost its ability not only to build but also, in part, to govern. The procedure-obsessed left and the destructive right have robbed from the people the sense that physical dynamism is desirable. But the United States has pluralistic values, which positions it to better figure out the right solutions.
I’ve written this book because the very thing that drew my parents to the United States—not lawyers, but pluralism—still provides the potential for course correction. The ultimate reason to be hopeful for the United States is that it can look to its own history to see the path forward. You can see the musculature of the engineering state amid the mighty industrial works scattered all over the country. There’s a natural legacy it has to draw on to stage this next act of transformation.
What the United States presently lacks is the urgency to make the hard choices to build. Americans have to trust that society can flourish without empowering lawyers to micromanage everything. The United States should embrace its transformational urge. I hope one day that America can declare itself to be a developing country too. It can demonstrate that the country is able to reform itself, get unstuck from the status quo, and ultimately unlock as much as possible of human potential. “Developing” is a term to embrace with pride.
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