The most remarkable new Chinese slang word that developed during the pandemic was rùn.
It means what it sounds like. Chinese have appropriated this word (meaning “to moisten”) for its English meaning to express their desire to flee. Throughout the unpredictable and protracted lockdowns, rùn evolved to mean leaving big cities, where pandemic controls were tightest. Or it meant emigrating from China altogether. After I departed from China in 2023, I kept meeting Chinese who have, in recent years, decided to emigrate, gambling that their lives would be better abroad.
Young people want to go to Europe, the United States, or an anglophone country, but these governments tend to be miserly with visas to Chinese. Thus, many émigrés go to nearby countries in Asia. Those with ambition and entrepreneurial energy flock to Singapore, where Chinese companies like ByteDance have set up big offices. Those with wealth and means buy themselves a pleasant life in Japan. Everyone else—slackers, free spirits, kids who want to chill—is hanging out in Thailand.
At the end of 2023, I spent a month in Thailand’s Chiang Mai with people who have rùn. I had gotten to know many of them the prior year while I lived in Yunnan. They were young, creative types. These people working in journalism, the arts, or tech went to this mountainous part of southwestern China after they felt stifled by lockdowns and political controls on speech. Yunnan officials tended to be more relaxed, looking the other way while these youths immersed themselves in cryptocurrency projects by day and relaxed at speakeasies at night. These free spirits were interesting to me as a counterpoint to the cultural mainstream. They reject the corporate grind of Beijing and Shenzhen. They want to invent their own lives.
But even Yunnan has grown more restrictive in recent years. Some of these people therefore took a plane to hop over the mountain ranges separating the province from Thailand. Why Thailand? Because it’s easy. Chinese can visit for short stays without a visa; a longer-term residence isn’t difficult to arrange. If they so much as sign up for language classes or Muay Thai boxing lessons, they could qualify for an educational visa. None of them take these educational demands, or life itself, all that seriously. They are in their twenties or early thirties, trying to catch up on three years of lost fun after zero-Covid.
Many of them practiced the intense spirituality possible in Thailand. Chiang Mai is a beautiful holy city studded with golden-roofed temples and monasteries. One can find a meditation retreat in these temples or go to even more secluded retreats in nearby mountains. At these places, one meditates in silence for up to fourteen hours a day, speaking only to the head monk each morning to tell him about the previous day’s breathing exercises and hear the next set of instructions. After twenty straight days of this regimen, one person told me that he found himself slipping in and out of hallucinogenic experiences.
The other spiritual wellspring comes from the use of actual psychedelics, which are easy to find in Chiang Mai. Thailand was the first country in Asia to decriminalize marijuana, where pot stores are nearly as common as coffee shops. It seemed like everyone had a story about using mushrooms, ayahuasca, or even stronger magic. The best psychedelic mushrooms are supposed to grow in elephant dung, leading to a story I heard of a legendary set of backpackers who have been hopping from one dung heap to another on a long, unbroken trip.
I spoke with the young Chinese who are in Chiang Mai to have a good time and also with the longer-term residents about why they’ve decided to reside there. None of them made the decision to emigrate easily.
Yiju was one of the people starting over in Chiang Mai. He’s a friendly software developer in his thirties, pudgy from too much time in front of a computer screen. He worked for a while in Silicon Valley before he found himself caught up in the cryptocurrency craze in 2018. So he returned to China at a time when it was a major hub of cryptocurrency activities. Like many people in crypto, Yiju embodies a certain idealism. That came through with his eagerness to announce his views in manifestos filled with punchy statements on how the economy should operate and how people need to be kinder. Unlike many people in crypto, he was also given to quiet reflection on the limits of technology as well as what China means to him.
“China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” Yiju told me one day. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”
Young people in Chiang Mai told me they’ve felt a quiet shattering of their worldviews over the decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. These are people who grew up in bigger cities and attended good universities, some of them overseas, which endowed them with certain expectations: that they could pursue meaningful careers, that society would gain greater freedoms, and that China would continue to be more integrated with the rest of the world. These aspirations have mostly shriveled. Though their lives in big cities can be quite pleasant, with new milk tea shops to try or art spaces to take selfies around, they work in jobs that are stressful and menial. They feel smothered by political controls. After the lockdowns, many of them grew aware that they had an unwelcome tendency to inflect every future scenario with a sense of catastrophe.
Not everyone has been thrilled with the move to Thailand, where they don’t foresee great job prospects. They haven’t all mustered the courage to tell their parents where they really are: Mom and Dad are under the impression that they’re studying abroad in Europe. That can lead to elaborate games in order to maintain the subterfuge, like drawing curtains to darken the room when they video chat with family, since they’re supposed to be in a totally different time zone, or keeping up with weather conditions in the city where they’re supposed to be so that they’re not surprised when parents ask about rain or snow.
Yiju fled in the wake of the white paper protests against Covid. When police sought him out for questioning, he went to hide in a monastery. Many of the other residents in Chiang Mai had participated in the protests against Covid restrictions and have had friends who were arrested. Everyone had experienced some alienation. A few lost their jobs in Beijing’s crackdown on digital platforms. Several had worked in domestic Chinese media, seriously disgruntled by censors. Writers in particular have a hard time dealing with the shock of working for months on a story only for censors to delete it hours after publication. The first time that happens you’re enraged, the second time you’re embittered, the third time you rùn.
In Chiang Mai, these creative types gathered around a bookstore founded by a journalist. Nowhere Books had its first store in Taiwan before opening a second branch in Chiang Mai, offering books that can’t be bought on the mainland. Nowhere’s references to politics are subtle. Mixed with popular books—novels, travel guides, cookbooks—are works by authors that couldn’t possibly be published in mainland China. The store is proud to carry a Chinese translation of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Californian counterculture magazine published through the late 1960s and early ’70s that advocated for each reader to “conduct his own education.” And around the bookstore are faintly subversive signs: a sticker of the Urumqi Road sign, the focal point of Shanghai’s protests, and jesting passports handed out by the bookstore inviting patrons to become citizens of the Republic of Nowhere.
Many of my friends, both Chinese and foreign, have rùn too.
Shanghai’s foreign population was in decline even before the pandemic: Between 2010 and 2020, China’s most internationalized city lost a quarter of its long-term foreign residents. Since the lockdowns, this population has taken another big drop. Shanghai drew foreigners and Chinese who were excited about the economic and creative boom in the city. For business executives, a posting to China used to pave the way toward the C-suite. That’s starting to feel less the case since China has become such a different market (given political complexities and data controls) that a posting there is now viewed as a quagmire. As China’s economy slowed, people wondered why they were living in a place with uncertain growth and a lot of drama.
Xi might not be so upset with the creative types who want out. He might not be much bothered either by the foreign expats leaving Shanghai, even if they work at important companies like Apple or Tesla. But Beijing has displayed greater concern about the number of rich people taking their money out of the country.
My friend Jessie is the daughter in a wealthy family, growing up in both her native Shanghai and Vancouver. A tall girl with curly hair, she has usually been more interested in frequenting fitness classes than in reading the news. She had previously not paid much attention to political events, feeling like it wasn’t worth her while to dwell on matters that were often gloomy and always impenetrable.
Then she lived through Shanghai’s two-month lockdown. Subsequently, Jessie started to follow politics. “This stuff could affect us, you know,” Jessie told me one day while she was visiting in New York. She was talking about the Third Plenum meeting of the Central Committee.
“Could it?” I asked, surprised to hear that she was monitoring this weeklong party gathering.
“You never know what they’re going to do,” Jessie said. When I asked her whether party announcements have ever prompted her to act, she replied no. Paying attention is already a novel activity for her. It might, I feel, lead to more active political engagement in the future.
Jessie is keeping her roots in Shanghai, although she plans to spend an increasing amount of her time in Vancouver. Many other wealthy Chinese have decided to settle elsewhere for good. Hard numbers are difficult to work out, but one UK-based emigration firm estimated that nearly 14,000 millionaires emigrated from China in 2023 and over 15,000 in 2024. Parts of the United States popular with Chinese, like Irvine, California, have seen a surge in new homebuyers. Both the United States and Canada have reported a doubling in the number of Chinese migrants who have obtained permanent residence after making a large investment (which could mean buying property): from 2,000 to 4,000 in Canada between 2019 and 2023, and from 3,900 to 7,500 in the United States between 2019 and 2024.
Less fortunate Chinese take a different path to the United States: through a grueling trek across the southwest border. US border officials have apprehended rising numbers of Chinese nationals: from 450 in 2021 rocketing to 38,000 in 2024. The flow diminished in the second half of 2024 due to tighter border enforcement. But still there have been more than a thousand Chinese nationals attempting to cross the border on foot each month for two years. Many have flown to Ecuador (which did not demand a visa from Chinese nationals until July 2024) and then have taken the perilous road through the Darién Gap.
The creative diaspora has launched cultural events in the United States. New York and Washington, DC, have new Chinese bookstores like Nowhere in Chiang Mai. Once a month in New York, a feminist group operates an open-mic show for comedians to perform their acts in Mandarin. They sell out so quickly that I was lucky to get a ticket. On a chilly day in October, I went to an Italian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan that rented its basement for shows. Around a hundred people gathered that day to hear ten women performing a “story slam” rather than the usual standup. One person spoke about how she connived her way into an exclusive Berlin nightclub, and several shared accounts of their dating lives. Most stories tended to be sad: dealing with a layoff or the death of a grandmother. The audience reacted with tremendous encouragement whenever the performers’ voices cracked or their storytelling faltered.
A decade ago, it might have been difficult to imagine that New York would have a set of feminists organizing standup in Mandarin through which runs a streak of political discontent. As Xi became a more assertive leader, more Chinese have become unhappy with China’s direction. What is most surprising is that desperate migrants are willing to abandon the “China Dream” that Xi has preached and that they are willing to embark on a dangerous, monthslong journey to cross the US southwestern border.
Why are so many Chinese still leaving? Because entire generations feel whipsawed by the engineering state’s violent mood swings. Their jobs, and indeed their lives, in China felt like dead ends. They’re not making great money in Thailand either, but they are able to have a lot of fun in its relaxed atmosphere.
Xi has talked about achieving national greatness without backing it up with economic growth. The trouble is that when people suffer—as they do through a property collapse, high unemployment, or lockdowns—they start to wonder what they are really getting. It’s certainly not enrichment. When they’re given a cold, hard smack in the face by something that certainly doesn’t feel like greatness, they become unmoored. This sense of alienation has been a big reason to rùn.
After six years in China, I missed pluralism. It is wonderful to be in a society made up of many voices, not only an official register meant to speak over all the rest. I missed the ambient friendliness of Americans combined with a government that mostly leaves people alone. Most of all, I missed the ability to order books. To be able to read physical books, I relied on my folks to mail me periodic packages, usually in batches of twenty kilograms, while accepting the uncertainty that any of them might be confiscated by customs agents. It heightened the physical ecstasy of opening the box to see how many passed through the censor’s gauntlet. But it was a thrill I could have lived without.
So I had rùn myself after the collapse of zero-Covid, when I moved from Shanghai to Yale Law School. Shanghai has many things superior to that of any American city: walkable and safe streets, vibrant street life, splendid food, an ease to go anywhere in the city or the country through mass transit. It was the Chinese government’s overbearing presence—censorship, intolerance of dissent, a lingering threat of catastrophe—that pushed me away. The operators of the Great Firewall decided that my little personal website, where I publish my annual letters, should be blocked. I am still puzzled.
I changed my mind about several things over my time in China.
When I moved to Hong Kong at the start of 2017, I entertained the idea that we were living at the start of an “Asian Century,” in which China and India would restore Asia to the economically dominant role it played centuries ago. I didn’t believe it, necessarily. But it didn’t feel like a crazy scenario. Donald Trump, after all, had been shooting admiring glances at autocratic countries while unloading his petulance on Canada, Europe, as well as other American allies. Xi, by contrast, displayed a patient resolve to strengthen Chinese capabilities. Parts of that remain real, although I now have a better appreciation of China’s weaknesses. There are many things that China will be successful at, but I departed the country with a better appreciation of the self-limiting features of the Chinese system. Most notably, the Communist Party distrusts and fears the Chinese people, limiting their potential for flourishing.
The engineering state tends to begin impressively and end disastrously. The pursuit of zero-Covid isn’t the only example of that tendency I lived through. The regulatory storm that Xi unleashed against China’s digital platforms is another case in point.
In May 2024, while attending a symposium of entrepreneurs and investors in Shandong province, Xi Jinping asked the group, “Why are we producing fewer and fewer unicorns?” This stray comment created a minor ripple online. Why is China no longer a leader in producing the sorts of tech start-ups that are valued over $1 billion? Before their comments were censored, people posted, “But sir, you are the cause”; “Is the leadership compound in Beijing connected to the Internet?”; and “They were frightened away by blank pieces of paper.”
Xi’s question had produced fresh worry among businesses. Authoritarian systems aren’t good at disseminating bad news. The coronavirus had spread, after all, because local officials in Wuhan refused to let the news of a virus disturb their political serenity as they arrested medical whistleblowers. Companies and investors therefore wondered whether Xi was genuinely unaware of how much his policies had destroyed major segments of the economy. Perhaps nobody had told Xi that he was the most feared unicorn hunter of all.
For a while, China produced a herd so lusty that it looked like they were on the verge of outpacing even the unicorns in Silicon Valley. They raced neck and neck against their American counterparts in e-commerce, ride hailing, and social media. Sometimes they had help from Beijing—most notably when the state drove out Google and Facebook to the benefit of local platforms like Baidu and Tencent. Sometimes they outcompeted American firms, like Amazon and Uber, more or less fairly through brutal wars of maneuver. ByteDance had created a new category of short-video apps with TikTok, while new e-commerce platforms sprang up to challenge Alibaba. That company’s flamboyant founder, Jack Ma, would have fit in among the more eccentric personalities from Silicon Valley.
During this era of light regulation, China’s unicorns grew into mighty beasts. Lu Wei was the director of the Cyberspace Administration, making him the chief internet regulator. He was a colorful character in that role. When I visited start-ups in Beijing around 2018, I heard lurid stories: Lu supposedly took equity in companies and then placed his regulatory thumb on the scales in their favor; sometimes, he would walk through an office and remark on how pretty a female employee was, expecting executives to take his hint. His reign was characterized by regulatory forbearance, perhaps because he was a personal beneficiary of the sector’s growth.
In 2018, Lu fell from grace. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection expelled Lu from the Communist Party and published an unusually explicit list of his crimes. It went beyond the usual accusation of bribery to include charges of “deceiving the central leadership” and “trading power for sex.” Lu subsequently wrote a letter so self-abasing that it was featured in a national museum celebrating forty years of China’s policy of reform and opening.
China’s tech companies were on the verge of convincing global investors that they could reach the valuations of Silicon Valley giants. At home, however, they produced similar forms of discontent as their American counterparts, facing allegations of exercising corporate power against smaller firms and insufficiently protecting data. Lu Wei’s fall took the era of light regulation down with him.
New regulators subsequently announced that digital platforms would be subject to “rectification measures.” A former ByteDance executive has publicly accused the company of facilitating bribes to Lu. And ByteDance became the target of an investigation, which would later produce a groveling public apology from that company’s founder. “I have been filled with remorse and guilt, entirely unable to sleep,” Zhang Yiming, then CEO, wrote to his staff. “Our product has been incommensurate with socialist core values. . . . I am responsible because I failed to live up to the guidance and expectations supervisory organs have demanded.”
But China’s tech platforms continued to grow larger, developing certain digital capabilities that the state did not have and barely understood. Ominous rumblings emerged from the central leadership. Xi issued warnings against the “disorderly expansion of capital” and promised to “deepen structural reforms.” Starting in late 2020, Beijing declared open season on the digital economy. Every government agency lined up to take shots.
Securities regulators derailed the public listing of Ant Financial, a fintech company founded by Jack Ma, accusing it of sowing financial instability. Data regulators investigated Didi, a ridesharing app that had just gone public on the New York Stock Exchange, for vague charges of endangering national security. The press regulator announced that minors were permitted to play video games during only three designated hours per week: between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Antitrust authorities launched a flurry of investigations against big platforms. Even the Ministry of Education took part in the great hunt: It declared that the online education sector, which offered supplementary lessons outside the formal schooling system, could no longer produce profit.
Over the course of 2021, hardly any major Chinese tech company emerged unscathed. Xi’s regulatory storm wiped out a trillion dollars of market value from Chinese companies. New Oriental, one of the education companies, lost 90 percent of its market cap and then laid off 60 percent of its employees. Alibaba toppled from being an $800 billion company to just a quarter of that size two years later. Jack Ma disappeared from public view for months after the cancellation of Ant Financial’s IPO. Meanwhile, securities regulators in both the United States and China were making it more difficult for companies to be publicly listed. And Xi’s pursuit of zero-Covid pulverized service industries targeted by tech companies. The economy that emerged out of the pandemic is characterized by high youth unemployment, shaky household confidence, and limp consumer demand.
Unicorns aren’t easily bred on such impoverished fields. Especially not when there’s a giant hunter stalking to ensure they conform to socialist core values. Consequently, fewer entrepreneurs are founding start-ups, and venture investment in China has collapsed.
Xi’s reining in of tech giants are not altogether different from what a lot of American and European regulators wish to do to Silicon Valley. Every government in the world is grappling with companies that have too much influence over the flow of information and commerce. Individually, China’s regulations around antitrust, data protection, or financial risks may pass muster on technocratic grounds. But Beijing issued regulations with a speed and ferocity that no other state can match. It did so for reasons that the West would not: to shift investment and talent into state-prioritized industries and to crush the power that these companies were gaining at the expense of the state.
That’s another way that the US and Chinese political systems are inversions of each other. In the United States, the political drama is around legislative processes and Supreme Court rulings; implementation of policy is quickly forgotten as political attention moves to the next big issue. In China, the policymaking process is conducted significantly in secret, then its outcome is dumped on the people.
Whereas the United States or Europe might tussle with a Silicon Valley tech giant for years in court and then extract a few billion dollars in fines, Chinese companies don’t challenge administrative actions. Rather, they issue supine statements as the founder of ByteDance did, or as Didi wrote after it received an enormous fine, “We sincerely thank the relevant authorities for their inspection and guidance.”
The regulations weren’t only an exercise of technocratic governance. They added up to a sweeping exertion of political control. China’s crackdown consisted of both technocratic regulation and an effort to impose political discipline on a freewheeling sector. Xi has forcefully reminded China’s tech companies that they cannot represent a power center that challenges the state’s sovereignty. It was, in other words, an attempt to change the cultural mindset of companies. The Communist Party reminded them that it retains the discretionary power to engineer all aspects of society, which means putting tech companies in their place.
There might be something to be said for this sort of approach. What if, say, the US government had responded to the 2008 financial crisis by reshaping Wall Street’s risk management culture rather than engaging in the endless negotiations that yielded a 2,300-page statute that nobody understands? But Xi’s attempt to achieve cultural change has left people disgruntled and whole industries disfigured.
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is perhaps 60 percent correct on everything.* He’s driving toward a usually admirable long-term goal. But in the name of achieving change, the engineering state delivers such beatings on people or industries that they are unable to pick themselves back up again. Even if Xi’s judgments are right, his brute-force solutions reliably worsen things. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but stomping out their businesses has traumatized entrepreneurs. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them toward default subsequently triggered a collapse in homebuyer confidence, prolonging a property slump. Does the government need to rein in corruption? Definitely, but Xi has terrorized the bureaucracy to the point of paralysis.
Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.
That is one of the defining characteristics of the engineering state. The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who douse blazes they themselves ignited. China’s national effort contained the spread of Covid, for a while, after Wuhan officials did nothing to prevent it. Decades earlier, the engineering state overreacted to its population growth with the one-child policy. Economic confidence wouldn’t be so fragile if it weren’t for regulatory thunderclaps emerging from Beijing.
Here is where the lawyerly society shines. We don’t have to worry about the US government imposing the one-child policy or zero-Covid, because it would never with the former and could never with the latter. The United States also wouldn’t have caged so many of its tech companies. Lawyers, as I wrote in my introduction, are excellent servants of the rich. Chinese tech founders (and their investors) are indeed very rich. Given the absence of lawyers and a political culture sympathetic to rights, they could find no protection.
After alienating so many people, has Xi decided to change course? No, he’s doubling down on promoting engineers to leadership. When Xi coronated himself as China’s leader for a third term in 2022, he unveiled a new leadership team stacked with executives of China’s aerospace and defense industries. They are people with practical experience managing megaprojects. Yuan Jiajun, chief designer of China’s crewed space program, became party secretary of Chongqing; Li Ganjie, a nuclear engineer, became the party’s chief personnel manager; and Zhang Guoqing, a former executive of one of China’s largest defense contractors, became a vice premier.
Social engineering will increase as well. In 2018, Xi praised teachers as engineers of the soul, a phrase first used by Joseph Stalin a century ago. Xi’s instructions have increasingly moved toward physicality. He has talked about how love of the party and the country needs to start young, which means to “grab little ones from the cradle.” The party’s messages need to “enter the mind, enter the heart, and enter the hands.” Beijing’s public security office has promised to get up close and personal in its attempts to offer “zero-distance service.” These efforts don’t sound less sinister in Chinese than they do in any language.
Since Xi started his third term in 2022, he has warned ever more darkly about “extreme” scenarios. In speeches to China’s national security community, he has spoken about “ensuring normal operation of the national economy under extreme circumstances.” What does that mean? As usual, the top leader is oblique, but it suggests that he’s worried that China will one day be cut off from the rest of the world. “We must be prepared for worst-case and extreme scenarios,” Xi said in 2023. “And be ready to withstand the major test of high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms.” So he has surrounded himself with executives from the aerospace and defense agencies. The intention, it feels to me, is to build China into a great fortress.
What sort of dangerous storm is Xi preparing for? Probably outright conflict with the West. Under Xi’s leadership, the engineering state is working seriously to harden itself to win a war, should one ever come.
Xi has already put up higher walls. In 2018, while I was living in Hong Kong, I started to tell people that China might close its doors in forty years, by the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic. At that point, it will once again become the Celestial Empire, its people serenely untroubled by the turmoils of barbarians beyond its borders. Most of my friends reacted with disbelief, saying that it was unimaginable to close a country once it has globalized. It turned out that I was off by a centenary: China had been mostly shut in 2021, a hundred years after the founding of the Communist Party. The pandemic was like a practice run—an exercise in what life in China would be like with its doors closed to the outside world. Xi apparently liked what he saw. After the pandemic, Xi has doubled down on self-reliance.
One of the things I’ve been surprised by in recent years is how many Americans who used to make regular trips no longer care to visit China. These were businesspeople, investors, and academics who are familiar with China. Many of them felt real fear that they would no longer be able to depart once they entered. Most have nothing to worry about, I’m sure. But it is hard to put that fear away after China took two Canadians hostage and after it has imposed so many exit bans on foreign nationals over business disputes or drug charges. Even those who are not afraid of detention cite the annoyance of having their digital lives cut off. Without a VPN, an American traveling to China will have a hard time communicating with her family back home (since many messaging and email apps are blocked), a hard time glancing at news headlines from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and a hard time navigating cities without Chinese payment apps.
I returned to China only once after the dissolution of zero-Covid. At the end of 2024, the country felt more fortresslike than before the pandemic. Shanghai is strangely muted, restaurants substantially less full, the shopping districts lacking vitality. Consumers clearly have less spending power. People have felt profound economic uncertainty after the economy failed to pick back up following the end of Covid controls in 2022. It’s not encouraging for the future of Chinese and American relations that there are only about a thousand American students studying in China. Just before the pandemic, there were ten times that many.
China had been moving away from the West. When the Communist Party selected Xi to be general secretary in 2012, the party had reached an important decision: that China would not attempt to try to be like the United States. The financial crisis that started on Wall Street in the preceding years had disturbed China’s leaders. Should China really adopt a system prone to such instability? Around this time, they settled a debate about constitutionalism. Previously, some Chinese legal scholars attempted to advance the notion that the Communist Party should be bound by laws. Lawyers had won striking victories in the protection of individual liberties, garnering significant domestic media as they did so. Then the victories slowed. And the chief justice of China’s supreme court publicly denounced the idea of judicial independence, an action that elevated the party above the law. It is clear, in retrospect, that the selection of Xi was part of a course set by the Communist Party not to follow in the United States’ footsteps.
China’s economy is faltering while the central government becomes more repressive. It is facing more problems around debt, hostile diplomatic relations with the West, and demographic decline, which was a problem even before many attempted to emigrate. All of this is exacerbated by an unpredictable political factor: Aging autocrats easily get cranky, which is a problem since Xi is likely to stay in office into his eighties.
Is the Asian Century still on? Questions involving Asia’s future are more subtle and more interesting than who “wins.” Even though I don’t believe that China will meaningfully surpass the United States as a global power, it still represents a terrific challenge.
The engineering state remains incredibly capable. Though Xi Jinping has grown increasingly comfortable with disregarding economic growth in favor of national security, it doesn’t mean the country has turned into North Korea. Chinese firms are still operating in a robust business environment, though one that is definitely more constrained. The country’s relations with the West are not so friendly, but there will still be trade and educational exchange. And China will still be a giant market with enormous numbers of ambitious people who want to make their mark. Only now, it is steadily working to insulate itself from a turbulent world filled with conflict.
The engineering state still has many strengths. There is one thing I haven’t changed my mind about since 2017: I remain more confident than ever that China will become a technological leader in manufacturing industries.
Marxists like to reason through contradictions. What is the central contradiction facing China? I submit that we must reconcile two realities when we read the headlines. First, the rich, the creative, and the desperate have chosen to rùn from the economic and political gloom that pervades Xi’s third term. Second, the manufacturing sector continues to go from strength to strength in the mastery of electric vehicles, clean technology, and other advanced technologies.
How might they be reconciled? With the idea of the engineering state.
The reckless interventions that engineers have dealt to economy and society have left many people seriously disgruntled, spurring them to move their wealth or themselves abroad. Meanwhile, China has embarked on a quest to build a technologically powerful country. On that, I believe it might succeed. My view is that Xi will not achieve his bigger gambit, which is to propel China to displace the United States as the world’s preeminent nation, measured not only by economic size but also diplomatic influence, cultural output, and national prestige. The control neurosis of the engineers is the fundamental limit to China’s power. But it will also push China to be an advanced manufacturer with dominant positions in many of the high-tech supply chains of the twenty-first century, with military capacity to match and a good chance to challenge US hegemony in Asia.
Engineers are bad at several things. They’re not very good, for example, at producing appealing cultural products.
During the height of the pandemic, Xi declared that China needs to become more “lovable.” The country’s image had suffered as people around the world blamed China for the spread of the virus. But China faced a more fundamental problem than the pandemic. Over the past forty years, the engineering state has done a terrible job of creating cultural output that the rest of the world finds appealing.
I regularly ask Americans what sort of Chinese cultural products they enjoy. Even cosmopolitan people need to take a moment to ponder. Go on, think about it. The answers tend to be niche. People cite the movies of Zhang Yimou, who directed Raise the Red Lantern, while the more art house–inclined bring up Jia Zhangke. Those who read sci-fi are likely to mention Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem. TikTok might be another reply, although I’m not sure how much that counts, since the app doesn’t often serve Chinese content overseas. Collectors of modern art and video gamers tend to have more to say. Broadly, however, most Americans don’t seek out music, art, movies, or literature from China.
It’s not, I think, out of prejudice. Americans have had no problem embracing the cultural products of East Asia. Japan produced a wave of pop culture that included animé and manga, Nobel Prize–winning novelists, and popular consumer products like the Sony Walkman and Nintendo Gameboy. South Korea continues to churn out hits, whether these are pop bands or breakouts like Parasite or Squid Game. Chinese youths are as likely to watch a Korean drama or a Hollywood movie as they are to pick a domestic equivalent.
Four decades after China liberalized, its contributions to global cultures are mostly confined to artistic fringes. It is because engineers don’t know how to persuade. The Communist Party insists on a history in which the party is always correct and where all errors come from traitors or foreigners. Rather than acknowledge fault and tell persuasive stories, the instinct of the engineering state is simply to censor alternative narratives. Xi comes across as someone who is a little bit too eager for groveling respect from the rest of the world, which is exactly why he’ll never get it.
The issue isn’t that Chinese people are somehow less imaginative. Rather, the state’s deadening hand has suppressed their creativity. I know that Chinese kids are creative and capable of driving a surge of lovable culture if only they didn’t have to face an overbearing censor. After a stand-up comic in Beijing made a joke in 2023 that deployed a military slogan as the punchline, censors crushed the comedy industry. The comedian, Li Haoshi, was detained, his social media platforms suspended, and the studio that employed him fined $2 million. Comedy troupes, which have to submit their scripts to censors weeks before any performance, found their shows canceled throughout the country. For months afterward, comedy clubs across Shanghai were closed.
Engineers can’t take a joke. It’s hard for art to thrive in an atmosphere of political paranoia plus social control. Today, Chinese artists and writers have to follow socialist core values, which cannot carry a whiff of political criticism. Directors are finding their movies inexplicably pulled from theaters or international film festivals. Most of the movies released domestically are nationalist blockbusters, sappy romances, or supernatural action flicks. No wonder these aren’t exportable. Even among captive Chinese audiences, they’re not necessarily popular.
The Communist Party’s Propaganda Department has treated the media like a manicured garden. It has walled out a lot of foreign content, blocking access to Wikipedia, social media, and many news sites. Only a handful of Hollywood films a year are approved for showing in domestic theaters. Artists know they have to trim their content to be in line with political sensibilities or be uprooted. And propaganda authorities spend a lot of effort to bolster official voices. Step into a bookstore in China and very likely the desk at the entrance will feature a table full of collections of Xi’s essays, pristinely arranged (and mostly untouched). Go into a museum and you might find one of his quotes plastered on the wall, having nothing to do with any exhibition. Even aggregators that are not run by the state, including ByteDance, always reserve the prominent spaces for messages directed by propaganda authorities.
The control neurosis of engineers is also an obstacle to another characteristic of a great power: a global currency. The US dollar is overwhelmingly the world’s dominant currency, while China’s renminbi accounts for 3 percent of global payments. That share has barely grown over a decade. Beijing has imposed a stiff system of capital controls to prevent money from easily moving out, which promises greater stability for the country’s highly leveraged financial system. These are exactly the sorts of restrictions that are anathema to global financial institutions. So long as Beijing insists on capital controls, there’s a ceiling on how much the rest of the world will want its currency.
China’s rise has faltered for many reasons. But there is one thing that it has continued to do well. What do engineers like to do? Build. That has produced considerable benefits at home for spreading material benefits throughout the country, even in very poor provinces. It has helped build food and energy resilience throughout the economy. The engineering state is still on track to become an advanced manufacturer that dominates most of the tech supply chains of the twenty-first century. And the focus on building is winning China some degree of support in developing countries as well.
Exporting China’s infrastructure is core to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), one of Xi’s signature initiatives. Chinese firms have taken their expertise in building roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, dams, and power plants abroad. And they sometimes also bring the sorts of surveillance systems and censorship tools that find eager customers among autocratic leaders. They have gone on a spending spree overseas, with $1 trillion worth of loans outstanding in 150 countries. China has financed trains in Southeast Asia, ports in Europe, light rail in Africa, roads, bridges, libraries, sports stadiums, and many other things besides. According to Deloitte, China has become the single largest financier of infrastructure in Africa, building one in four projects on the continent.
Its results are mixed. Some of the infrastructure projects have helped cement China as a trade hub: Its high-speed rail link with neighboring Laos, for example, has facilitated exports and investment. But not even Chinese construction firms are immune to cost overruns and project delays when they build abroad. One of the BRI’s flagship projects is a high-speed rail line connecting Indonesia’s capital Jakarta with the city of Bandung. Though the railway has high use, Chinese builders went a billion dollars over budget and completed it four years late. Locals have complained that BRI projects tend to bring the entire workforce from China. Several countries that signed on to the initiative have since withdrawn, most notably Italy. Two photographs have circulated on the Chinese internet: of the Belt and Road Forum in 2017, when Xi Jinping was surrounded by 120 world leaders, and of the same forum in 2023, when there were only three dozen.
Even if Chinese construction companies haven’t always shown consistent respect for foreign workers and the local environment, and even though several Belt and Road countries are clamoring for debt forgiveness from Beijing, it appears to have been a net positive for China. On a narrow financial view, the World Bank found in 2024 that BRI projects have generated a positive return for Chinese lenders, though it is small. China has built useful infrastructure in countries that need it. So it’s not surprising that overall, developing countries hold China in more positive regard than do Americans and Europeans.
So China’s strategy has been to try to rally the rest of the developing world to its side. Proponents would say that China might not need great relations with the West when there are billions more people in the developing world, who have higher economic growth rates than the United States and Europe, which is all true. But consumers in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America have far less spending power than Europeans. And Chinese firms will have a harder time becoming global leaders when they’re barred from selling to richer consumers, giving them the profits to compete with incumbents that can. Meanwhile, diplomatic relationships are rarely uncomplicated, as manufacturers in developing countries have suffered from Chinese exports too. Officials from Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa have all pleaded with Beijing to have a more balanced trade relationship.
There’s one more thing that engineers are especially good at: building resilience into the economy. Rather than prizing efficiency and just-in-time deliveries, China has invested in redundancies and shock buffers.
China takes energy security seriously. The enormous effort it has made to build low-carbon capacity—solar, wind, and nuclear—has to be understood as part of a broader motivation to make the country dependent on energy sources within its borders. Beijing is trying to mitigate the pain if it ever loses access to sea-lanes that deliver its oil. That is also why, in 2023, China added twenty times more coal-burning capacity than the rest of the world put together. It is serious about addressing issues in climate change, yes. But Beijing is not turning its back on its rich coal reserves. That also explains why China is so enthusiastic about electrifying the auto fleet: It would rather burn domestic coal than Middle East oil to power its cars.
China takes food security seriously as well. Xi Jinping has been known to stand in the middle of a field of wheat while offering a folksy remark: for example, “The bowls of the Chinese people should be filled mostly with Chinese grain.” The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have made Beijing more conscious of food self-sufficiency. Chinese leaders have always been aware that food shortages have toppled imperial dynasties. And so one of the things that provincial governors are graded on is whether they are self-sufficient in rice and wheat, while mayors of major cities have to make sure that a variety of foods are grown locally. Mayors are graded on the amount of land they dedicate to vegetables and on ensuring that grocery markets are within walking distance for most residents, that there are no food safety scandals, and that prices are stable.
Get on a high-speed train out of Beijing, and you quickly hit farmland. Drive around the outskirts of Shanghai, and you find vast systems of greenhouses growing vegetables. After Xi’s remarks, China has in recent years attempted to reclaim salty marshes from the sea and turn idle mines into farmland, even though these are probably not very productive. I don’t mind, however, that China is demolishing golf courses, which are environmentally wasteful, and giving that land to farmers.
The cost of this self-sufficiency drive is that a lot of valuable land around cities is tied up for agriculture, in areas that aren’t always suited for growing crops. More important, much more of the Chinese workforce is kept rural: Despite its rapid urbanization over the last generation, China still has twice as much of its population living in rural areas as does the United States. The benefit is that during the Covid pandemic, China didn’t suffer intense food shortages. The farmland and greenhouses even around the most locked-down cities—Wuhan, Xi’an, and Shanghai—were producing food, but it couldn’t be delivered by an overwhelmed logistics system to every resident. Whereas China’s food system provided fairly stable production, food insecurity spiked among low-income Americans at the start of the pandemic in 2020. Meat and vegetable production is concentrated in relatively few places. When workers fell ill at slaughterhouses in the Midwest, grocery stores on the East Coast ran out of beef.
Food was not the only item to run short during the pandemic in the United States. Many different items were hard to find: furniture, semiconductors, personal protective equipment. The Chinese government and Chinese companies tend, on average, to maintain greater stockpiles of different goods so they have better resilience. The American corporate dictum is that “inventory is evil.” Although having spare capacity hurts various profit measures of Chinese firms, especially its state-owned enterprises, they are better able to leap into action in any crisis. A lot of manufacturing and food capacity is a useful thing to have if there is another pandemic—or a war.
The most important thing that the engineering state is set up to do is to build manufacturing capacity. Though China faces many headwinds, it is continuing to strengthen its position in a wide range of technologically intensive industries as well as in its military capacity. Even if the United States is able to outclass China in diplomacy, finance, and innovation, the contest between these two great powers is going to be close if the United States can’t build anything in the physical world.
The strongest wind in China’s sails is the entrenched technological workforce that preserves process knowledge that I wrote about in Chapter 3 on tech power. Though 50 percent of China’s economy might be dysfunctional, 5 percent is doing superbly well (an approximation I borrow from Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal). That 5 percent is dangerous for American interests: It is China’s manufacturing capability, chiseling away at the American industrial base.
Remember that Chinese companies totally dominate many parts of the clean technology supply chain, especially related to solar and batteries. They’re still exporting electric vehicles around the world (though many of those exports are products of foreign companies like Tesla). They’ve gained ground on all sorts of advanced manufacturing, like consumer drones, industrial robotics, and steel presses. China is still behind on semiconductors and aviation, but it has established supply chains in these areas and is determined to catch up. A lot of the groundwork for China’s successes were laid before Xi took office. These buzzing ecosystems of technology production are made up of designers, engineers, and technicians who meet every day to solve problems. Their lives don’t necessarily depend on policy developments from either Beijing or Washington, DC.
It’s also about people. China has around a hundred million people working in manufacturing. The country’s population is declining, yes, but it’s important to keep in mind that only a thin slice of the workforce is engaged in technological production. Germany and Japan are mighty exporters with, respectively, eight million and ten million manufacturing workers. A country doesn’t need so many people to have a robust semiconductor industry: A few hundred thousand highly trained workers are enough. In 2025, China will graduate more than twice as many PhDs in STEM fields as the United States—and many in American universities are Chinese nationals likely to repatriate.
Making China technologically powerful has become a major priority for Xi’s third term. He talked about it at the start of his first term, when he remarked that China’s greatest historical problem was its lack of technology. In Xi’s telling, China was unable to keep up with modernity, as the Qing empire had rotted from within while besieged by “Western ships and their cannons.” Subsequently, his government announced Made in China 2025, a sweeping plan to dominate ten technological industries. In 2023, Beijing announced the creation of a new high-level body: the Central Science and Technology Commission. And the following year, Xi declared that the country must become a “science and technology superpower” by 2035.
“The competition for national strength,” goes one commentary from the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2024, “is essentially a contest of scientific and technological innovation, ultimately proving which political system is superior.” It is a strange sort of declaration, implying that countries should not be judged by whether they create better economic outcomes, generate greater aesthetic or intellectual flourishing, or produce some more general measure of well-being for the population. In the last Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union argued over broader measures of success. For a segment of elites in Xi’s China—echoing the beliefs of the Industrial Party—who can do better on science and technology determines all.
In a crucial way, the United States accelerated China’s progress on science and technology. In his first term, Donald Trump unleashed a trade war against Chinese exporters and a technology war against its leading companies. His administration designated Chinese tech leaders—Huawei, drone-maker DJI, chip leader SMIC—on opaque sanctions lists, which throttled their ability to access American technologies. A few were pushed to the brink of collapse. Concurrently, Trump’s Department of Justice subjected scientists (mostly of Chinese heritage) to the tender mercy of the US criminal justice system, usually for charges related to relatively low-level problems implicating research integrity. Joe Biden broadened technology controls, demanding that all advanced chips and chipmaking equipment be approved by the US government before they could be sold to China.
I spent years covering the twists and turns of these technology restrictions. The more it went on, the more I felt that the United States was committed to a strategy of destroying its scientific and industrial establishment—through prosecutions of scientists and cutting off the sales of chipmakers—in order to save it. Rather than realizing its own Sputnik moment, the United States triggered one in China.
China’s technology leaders have always bought American chips because they wanted to sell globally competitive products. They ignored Beijing’s beseeching to buy from domestic vendors for the simple reason that Chinese technologies were not good enough. But the Trump administration gave China’s tech leaders every reason to fear being cut off from American technologies. And so the US government fully aligned those Chinese firms that were previously reluctant to build up the domestic industrial base to Beijing’s self-sufficiency agenda. All the money and engineering talent that China’s most dynamic tech companies used to send to the United States were now staying at home.
Was it worthwhile to devalue the reliability of American companies, not just to Chinese firms but to companies around the world? So far, export restrictions haven’t dealt a decisive blow to Chinese tech companies, which have found ways to limp along without full access to American chips. Even Huawei, which suffered the most intense US restrictions, is still selling 5G equipment globally and smartphones at home. Sometimes I think that the United States’ tech competition with China—chaotic policymaking under Trump, porous implementation under Biden—has ended up in the worst of all worlds. These restrictions have scorched China’s most dynamic companies without killing them, which riles them up to break free of American restrictions.
Meanwhile, Beijing is eagerly funding technology development. As bank lending to real estate projects has collapsed, funding has surged toward manufacturers. Beijing partially engineered this scenario. Though China has lost wealthy and creative types, it has been gaining scientists. Since 2020, high-profile scientists of Chinese descent have left the United States, pulled as much by China’s generous offers of research funds as they were pushed by the Trump administration’s investigations of research impropriety. Fewer than 1,000 scientists of Chinese descent moved from the United States to China in 2010; more than 2,500 did in 2021. A wave of positive media in China has greeted the biologists or mathematicians that move from an elite American university to China. Xi probably doesn’t mind trading disgruntled youths for senior scientists.
Is it possible to do science in a tightening political environment? A common contention I hear is that China can’t innovate because it “doesn’t have free speech.”
There’s no question that Xi has tightened the country’s already limited space for free speech. Free thought is essential for the humanities and the social sciences. But I’m not so sure that it’s a necessary condition for the natural sciences, for very little in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and engineering is innately political. Plenty of autocratic systems in history have delivered startling technological advances.
German states, for example, have done just that. The nineteenth-century Prussian state combined autocracy with the invention of the modern research university. After Bismarck unified the German states under Prussian rule in Berlin, the country became the pioneer in chemicals—arguably the first science-based industry—as well as in electrical engineering. Nobel Prizes in the sciences continued to be awarded to Nazi Germany while it enlisted its scientists to make Wunderwaffen like the world’s first ballistic missiles and jet fighters for the war. The Soviet Union provides an even starker example. Its scientific establishment conducted groundbreaking research throughout Stalin’s Terror. The state had arrested a remarkable number of scientists, including the chief theoretician of the hydrogen bomb and the head of the Soviet space program. More than one scientist had barely staggered out of Stalin’s gulags before doing the work that would win him a Nobel Prize. The Soviets built the atomic bomb under the direction of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s odious chief of police. Just as in Nazi Germany, the Soviets kept making scientific advancements during the period of the most intense tyranny.
Modern China is nowhere near as extreme as the police states run by Stalin or Hitler. How is it that science can coexist with autocracy? Mostly, I believe, because the precondition for science is that abundant funds are far more critical to science than free speech, and that is something dictators can deliver.
Perversely, repression might encourage scientists to throw themselves still further into their work rather than paying attention to the rest of the world falling apart around them. I don’t believe that autocracy is good for science, only that it doesn’t guarantee its destruction. China has gotten plenty far on industrial advances—solar power, electric vehicles, robotic arms—in an atmosphere of worsening political repression. Now Xi is shoveling money toward scientists. I’ve interviewed over two dozen scientists in China, most of whom were trained in the United States, who have told me that it’s easier to receive funding in Chinese universities than in American universities. Their money comes without many strings attached, whereas a grant application to the National Science Foundation demands fastidiousness on formatting, endless reporting requirements, and the threat of jail if they don’t make a proper disclosure.
I envision China becoming something like a more successful East Germany, a state that combines surveillance and political controls with strong outcomes in science and technology. The Communist Party will not relent on the political atmosphere; meanwhile, it will continue its pursuit of science and technology. Though East Germany was a leader within the Soviet bloc, it was still behind the West, but I expect China to be more successful. Chinese firms will produce high-quality products, perhaps lagging behind global leaders by only a few years and in only a few industries. They’ll make chips not powerful enough to fit into the latest iPhone but good enough for electric vehicles and drones, planes not as efficient as the latest from Airbus but good enough to fly between Bangkok and Shanghai.
My focus, for much of the past decade, has concerned China’s rejection of advanced technology with American characteristics. And though I would love for China to adopt greater legal protections for people, I’m not sure the technology path it has chosen has been unwise.
Throughout this book, I’ve avoided calling Xi’s regulatory storm a “tech crackdown.” While disciplining digital platforms and the real virtual economy with one hand, Beijing has with its other dispensed favor to harder technologies like semiconductors. Xi was trying to reorient technology companies to be less focused on virtual or financial innovation, and for the best and brightest from Tsinghua and Peking Universities to work in strategic industries instead.
Underlying Beijing’s actions against digital platforms is a suspicion that tremendously profitable digital companies are not producing value for the rest of society. Entrepreneurial dynamism in online education, social media, or fintech are producing various forms of social harm. The virtual economy, including cryptocurrencies and the metaverse, sucked up too much talent and money. Xi and the rest of the Politburo were discomfited that the cutting edge of the economy seemed to have been driven by the vagaries of investors rather than the interests of the state.
My sense, while I watched the crackdown unfold in China, was that Beijing was trying to avoid the economic structure of the modern United States. Over the past two decades, the major American growth stories have been in Silicon Valley on one coast and Wall Street on the other. Subsequently, both tech and finance have been blamed for many social ills. If there is an era of American innovation that attracts Beijing, it might be the Silicon Valley of the 1960s and 1970s. Chipmakers like Intel were hitting their stride, becoming, in part, major suppliers to the Pentagon and NASA. That was a period when tech companies manufactured stuff, employed big workforces, and minded the state’s national security needs.
So Beijing attempted economic surgery. China’s leadership wanted dynamism in science-based industries that can patch its strategic deficiencies. In particular, that meant advanced manufacturing industries like semiconductors or clean technologies. It meant that China needs to keep producing and “never deindustrialize.” Beijing understands social media sites, like Facebook or TikTok, primarily as freewheeling platforms of expression. They bring little gain in economic productivity while creating huge potential for political unrest. Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership looks more longingly at places like Germany, a country that hasn’t developed digital giants but is firmly grounded in manufacturing industries.
In the United States, physics and mathematics PhDs hardly have a chance to consider working in their field before a tech giant or hedge fund picks them up at the sidelines of a conference, flashes them with a humongous pay package, and folds these eager minds into their glamorous embrace. Senior government advisers have more or less stated that Beijing intends to block these temptations. Yao Yang, a dean at Peking University, has remarked with satisfaction that salaries have fallen in the financial industry after regulators imposed a salary cap of $400,000 on the financial sector. Its idea, Yao said, is “to reduce the attractiveness of finance and to increase the development of manufacturing.”
The strategy has backfired in a major way. Most notably, it has dampened the animal spirits among entrepreneurs after so many had their businesses crushed. And it’s also unlikely that running major technological industries like national security science projects will always produce winners. The Soviet Union, after all, ultimately failed to keep up with the technological frontier set by the West, even though it was doing great science. China has created successful commercial firms in a way that the Soviets never did, though they risk being engulfed by the state. In much the same way, the United States still has a certain degree of manufacturing excellence, represented by firms like Tesla. But that is an outlier. Though Tesla might lead the country toward manufacturing strength once more, it might also be engulfed by the diminishing levels of process knowledge that have dragged down the formerly mighty Boeing and Intel.
Though Chinese firms labor under political restrictions from Beijing and chip restrictions from Washington, DC, they have delivered breakthroughs. DeepSeek, made by a Hangzhou-based company, is one of a handful of frontier AI models, with costs that are a fraction of those demanded by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Chinese AI researchers haven’t been laggards. They publish a great number of papers on AI, and its companies have released models that score highly on technical benchmarks. Furthermore, the state is deploying AI, but more for the purposes of censorship, facial recognition, and other means of control.
China has advantages it can bring to bear in artificial intelligence. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that American companies are not so much constrained on computing power as they are on electrical power. AI data servers are so energy hungry that Microsoft has attempted to restart the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and Meta was about to build a data center (running also on nuclear power) until it was halted by the discovery of a rare species of bee near that site. Well, nothing thrills the engineering state like gigantic investments in energy production for industry. What China lacks in technological sophistication, it might make up for in electrical power.
There is also a risk that China misapplies AI. The Chinese system is sometimes overenthusiastic about new technologies or new theoretical ideas. In 1978, one of China’s top scientists went abroad to learn about an exciting science called cybernetics and took back home the seeds of an idea that bloomed into the one-child policy. Perhaps the lawyerly society will have the ideological resilience not to be seduced by artificial intelligence, while authoritarian countries wreck themselves by doing so. But it’s also possible that Western minds will be broken by AI. In the United States, every shift in mass media—from cable television in the 1990s, the internet in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s, and now AI—has increased discontent between the masses and the elites, as well as between the elites and each other. American society has become much messier than two decades ago, when people were bound by a consensual reality rather than spinning off into different worlds.
It’s not clear for which country AI will prove more destabilizing. Fortress China is being protected from the ravages of social media platforms. By putting strict limits on the internet and AI, Xi has built China into a security state able to police vast information flows. The hope from Beijing might be that Americans will be driven mad by the dangerous storms produced by the double whammy of social media plus artificial intelligence. Perhaps these things will magnify the internal divisions of Americans. As more Americans retreat into a digital phantasm, Xi will be shepherding Chinese through the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.
And AI shouldn’t distract us from broader American deficiencies. I do not think that outright war between the United States and China is certain to happen. But each side is closely studying the other’s military strengths and weaknesses in anticipation of conflict. If it does come to pass, it would be an apocalyptic scenario for the world. War might erupt in the Pacific or elsewhere. As relations between the United States and China become more hostile, the chances of conflict grow. The United States is facing a peer competitor that has four times its population, an economy with considerable dynamic potential, and a manufacturing sector that can substantially outproduce itself and its allies. If China and the United States ever come to blows, they would be entering a conflagration with different strengths. Which would you rather have: software or hardware?
The quantitative disparities between the United States and China are stark. In 2022, China had nearly 1,800 ships under construction, and the United States had 5. US support of Ukraine against Russian aggression also exposed the paltry state of its domestic munition capacity. In two days, Ukraine could fire as many shells as the United States makes in a month. At the very end of the Biden administration, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said bluntly that the United States will experience “exhaustion of munition stockpiles very rapidly” if it were ever to face the Chinese military.
China does not lack for munitions. In the case of an emergency, it will be able to scale up production of munitions, just as it has with personal protective equipment, while the United States stumbled on basic things. And I worry that the United States is counting far too much on AI to change the tide. Even if the United States achieves artificial general intelligence, it will need to be able to actually manufacture drones or munitions; algorithms alone will never win a battle. Though the United States has the most sophisticated fighter jets and submarines in the world, it makes precious few of them. The US defense industrial base does not often target efficiency when it distributes production to the jurisdictions of favored members of Congress.
In the modern world, many manufactured products can be refashioned for military purposes. The smartphones we carry around have sensors that would have been military grade a decade ago. The consumer drone is also dual use, which is why Ukrainians and Russians have tried to buy China’s DJI drones for the battlefield. That’s why industrial capacity should be understood, increasingly, as military capacity. All the drones, smartphones, and batteries that are overwhelmingly produced in China give it an advantage that the United States does not necessarily have.
China’s large and adaptive manufacturing base keeps growing. In 2024, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization forecast that China will have 45 percent of the world’s industrial capacity by 2030. The United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and all other high-income states combined add up to 38 percent of capacity. In a crisis, China has demonstrated a greater track record of expanding manufacturing production than the United States has, so it’s not clear whether wartime conditions would change this ratio. Meanwhile, US manufacturing capacity faces greater erosion as China’s manufacturers, boosted by subsidies, produce even if they’re missing profits. China’s industrial might is a strategic advantage that could overwhelm all the rich countries in the world.
I like to imagine how much better the world would be if both superpowers could adopt a few of the pathologies of the other. I don’t see much danger that Americans could wake up one day with a government that effectively steamrolls every opposition to building big projects, and I don’t expect Chinese will encounter a government at last willing to leave them alone. Rather, I hope that China learns to value pluralism while embracing substantive legal protections for individuals and the United States recovers the capability to build for its people.
I don’t want to get rid of lawyers. Rather, I want to help lift the engineers (and also their technocratically minded brethren, the economists) back up. Not to raise them onto a pedestal but to elevate them so that there are other voices in the mix. The United States could use fewer lawyers who devote their careers to litigating the life out of government agencies and more lawyers of the dealmaker bent who are interested in working out how to deliver better services. Law professor Nick Bagley concluded his seminal paper on proceduralism (which I referenced in the first chapter) with a polite, but deceptively powerful, proposition that I want to echo: Lawyers should consider whether they could achieve more by stepping out of the way.
It is harder to see how China could move away from engineers. The emperors practiced absolutism a millennium before any European monarchs whiffed the idea. China’s civil society has long been weak, with strong family clans, but not made up of the sorts of religious organizations and military aristocracy that produced political contestation in Europe. And ever since the introduction of the imperial examinations in the sixth century by the Sui dynasty, would-be intellectuals have mostly conformed to studying a curriculum set by the emperor. One reason that China lacks a liberal tradition—focused on protection of individual liberties—is that court intellectuals tended not to develop philosophies based on restraining the emperor or his bureaucracy.
China needs lawyers. Or, to be more precise, the ability for people to decline the state’s designs on their bodies, their speech, and their minds.
The country doesn’t lack regulations or statutes. Xi provides everything for his friends; for his enemies, he has the law. Since he made it a signature priority to impose “rule by law,” the country has drowned in laws and regulations. That doesn’t mean rule of law as the West might understand it. Xi has rejected the idea of constitutionalism, and the president of the Supreme People’s Court has denounced the idea of constitutional democracy as a “false Western ideal.” China lacks a real commitment to respecting individual rights. The state allows only limited scope for citizens to challenge government actions, while the Communist Party is off-limits from lawsuits. The judicial system doesn’t always publish the records of a case and regardless has plenty of discretion to make legal challenges go its way or go away.
How might change come? Perhaps through ordinary acts of resistance. China’s leaders have for millennia tried to impose greater controls on the people. And the people have developed their own strategies for dealing with this control. Though the state wants to see society as an engineering exercise, the reality of China—immediately apparent to those of us who have spent any time there—is that the country is messy. Daily life in China is far more disorderly than the images projected by state media, in which every village is immaculate and where everyone sits with a straight back as they listen to Xi’s pronouncements.
Neither is the Communist Party staffed by a far-planning technocracy, nor is it able to squeeze as hard as it wants to achieve national security. People find ways to adapt around the most onerous demands of the engineers. They wield weapons of the weak. When folks see a flurry of senseless rules from the government, they might react with foot dragging, petty noncompliance, feigned ignorance, and arguing back. The system for negotiability is one reason that people have been able to accommodate themselves to engineers.
It would be a better future if the Communist Party could learn some restraint and put a higher value on the individual. Spending time with young people who have rùn is a good reminder that the Politburo isn’t representative of the country. The Communist Party will never be convinced that Chinese kids blissed out of their minds on psychedelics represent a hidden asset for the country. What I see in them, as well as among other Chinese people who do their best to deal with the engineering state, is a steady effort to hold one’s own against overwhelming odds. It is a hope that the Communist Party might one day let its people flourish by leaving them alone.
Creative youths weren’t the first people from China to have rùn. Two decades ago, a pair of people in their mid-thirties emigrated from Yunnan. They weren’t nearly as hip as the Chiang Mai kids. But my parents left China for many of the same reasons: feeling disappointment in the country’s direction and willing to roll the dice on a better life abroad. They carried me, a seven-year-old child, with them on their way to Canada.
