Chapter 1
Engineers vs. Lawyers
Silicon Valley can be an amazingly drab place. The peninsula south of San Francisco has natural beauty, with rolling hills and coastal views, but you strain to see them beyond so many corporate parking lots. Mountain View and Menlo Park are bizarrely full of rug shops, so when I walk through the towns that host the headquarters of AI leaders and some of the richest companies in the world, I often find myself wondering, “This is the beating heart of our technologically accelerating civilization?”
Each time I flew from California to Hong Kong or Shanghai, I felt almost unnerved to encounter functional infrastructure. Going from the airport into a subway (rather than an Uber) is an outstanding way to be welcomed to Asia. I would take a moment to savor a clean station, brightly lit, with trains running every few minutes, which would drop me off at a downtown filled with vibrant commercial areas—another feature that San Francisco lacks. Life in the Bay Area, an economic dynamo in America’s richest state, can feel awfully dysfunctional. San Francisco has been unable to serve its homeless population, and even many wealthy people have to keep a generator for their extraordinarily expensive houses because the state can’t keep the lights on.
The contradiction of the Bay Area, this red-hot center of corporate value creation that is surrounded by dysfunction, fuels the inquiry of this book. When I departed from Silicon Valley for China in 2017, it felt clear that the United States had lost something special over the past four decades. While China was building the future, America had become physically static, its innovations mostly bound up in the virtual and financial worlds.
Looking at these two countries, I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies. Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles—where men have to be macho and women have to bear their children.
China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.
Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams. His eight other colleagues could have run a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate: with majors in electron-tube engineering and thermal engineering, from schools like the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute and the Harbin Institute of Technology, and work experience at the First Machine-Building Ministry and the Shanghai Artificial Board Machinery Factory.
Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua, China’s top science university. For his third term as the Communist Party’s general secretary starting in 2022, Xi filled the Politburo with executives from the country’s aerospace and weapons ministries. In the United States, it would be as if the CEO of Boeing became the governor of Alaska, the chief of Lockheed Martin became the secretary of energy, and the head of NASA was governor of a state as large as Georgia. China’s ruling elites have practical experience managing megaprojects, suggesting that China is doubling down on engineers—and prioritizing defense—more than ever.
What do engineers like to do? Build. Since ancient times, the emperors have tried to tame the mighty rivers that sweep away not only farmland, but also imperial reigns. In modern times, new public works—roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, power plants, entire new cities—are the engineering state’s solution to any number of quandaries. Since 1980, after Deng’s reforms began, China has built an expanse of highways equal to twice the length of the US systems, a high-speed rail network twenty times more extensive than Japan’s, and almost as much solar and wind power capacity as the rest of the world put together. It’s not only the government that is fixated on production; the corporate sector is made up of overactive producers too. A rough rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic panels, or anything else.
When Chinese point to new cities that shimmer at night with drone displays, or metropolises connected to each other by a glistening high-speed rail network, their pride is real. Call it propaganda of the deed, but one way to impress a billion-plus people is to pour a lot of concrete.
The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering. From 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee went to law school, but they make up many Republican Party elites as well as the top ranks of the civil service too. By contrast, only two American presidents worked as engineers: Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a nuclear submarine. Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats.
Lawyers have so many tools available to delay or prevent building. You don’t just feel the difference going from the lawyerly society to the engineering state: You saunter, tread, and amble upon its works. Americans no longer manufacture well or build public works on reasonable timelines. US infrastructure is falling into a pitiable state while China is building new systems of subways, bridges, and highways. Over the past three decades, while Chinese manufacturers have been going from strength to strength . . . well, let’s just say that American automakers and chipmakers haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory. China’s political system is geared toward delivering monumental projects, such that the slightest economic tremble is enough to push Beijing to announce a mammoth plan for new public works. That’s one reason that the phrase “housing crisis” has evoked, over the past several years, a collapse of home prices for Chinese and spiraling unaffordability for Americans.
Lawyers enable some of the success of Silicon Valley. You can’t build companies worth trillions without legal protections. But lawyers are also part of the reason that the Bay Area and much of the country are starved of housing and mass transit. The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible.
As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions. Its leaders aren’t only civil or electrical engineers. They are, fundamentally, social engineers. Emperors didn’t hesitate to entirely restructure a person’s relationship to the land, ordering mass migration into newly opened territories and conscripting the people to build great walls or grand canals. Modern rulers are here, too, far more ambitious than the emperors of the past. The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul—a phrase from Joseph Stalin repeated by Xi Jinping—heaving China’s population into modernity and then some.
Modern China has many tools of social control. Within living memory, most Chinese residents worked inside a danwei, or work unit, which governed one’s access to essentials like rice, meat, cooking oil, and a bicycle. Many people still live under the strictures of the hukou, or household registration, an aim of which is to prevent rural folks from establishing themselves in cities by restricting education and health care benefits to their hometown. Controls are far worse for ethnoreligious minorities: Tibetans are totally prohibited from worshipping the Dalai Lama, and perhaps over a million Uighurs have spent time in detention camps that attempt to inculcate Chinese values into their Muslim faith.
The engineering state can be awfully literal minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves.
Can a government be too efficient? Six years in China taught me that the answer is yes, when it is unbounded by citizen input. There are many self-limiting aspects of a system that makes snap decisions with so little regard for people. This book reveals good things that the engineering state does: running functional cities, building up its manufacturing base, and spreading material benefits pretty widely throughout society. But I also lived through things that no other state would have attempted, like holding on to a zero-Covid strategy until it drove the country mad. The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals. The Communist Party envisions itself as a grand master, coordinating unified actions across state and society, able to launch strategic maneuvers beyond the comprehension of its citizens. Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals.
Engineers often treat social issues as math exercises. Does the country have too many people? Beijing’s solution was to prohibit families from birthing more than one child—the subject of my fourth chapter—through mass sterilization and abortion campaigns, as the central government ordered in 1980. Is the novel coronavirus spreading too quickly? Build new hospitals at breathtaking speed, yes, but also confine people to their homes, as Wuhan, Xi’an, and Shanghai did to millions of people over weeks, which I cover in the fifth chapter. There is no confusion about the purpose of zero-Covid or the one-child policy: The number is right there in the name.
China’s economy isn’t immune to engineering either. When Beijing grew uncomfortable with the debt levels of real estate developers in 2021, the state forced so many of them into distress that it triggered a prolonged slump in homebuyer confidence. Around the same time, Xi hurled a series of regulatory thunderbolts at China’s high-flying tech companies, including Didi, the country’s largest ride-hailing company, and Ant Financial, the payments company owned by Jack Ma, China’s best-known entrepreneur. Chinese tech founders (and their investors) were astonished to discover that Xi Jinping could erase a trillion dollars from corporate valuations over the course of just a few months. The leadership thought it was straightforward to reorient the nation’s tech priorities away from consumer platforms and toward science-based industries, like semiconductors and aviation, that serve the nation’s strategic needs. Beijing took years to appreciate how its actions had scared the daylights out of entrepreneurs and investors.
When you travel around China, it’s staggering to see how much the engineering approach has accomplished over the past four decades. Then there’s the part you can’t see. As impressive as China’s railways and bridges may be, they carry enormous levels of debt that drag down broader growth. Manufacturers produce so many goods that China’s trade partners are now grumbling for protection. The social-engineering experiment known as the one-child policy has accelerated the country’s demographic decline. And China’s economy would be in better shape if Beijing hadn’t triggered an implosion of its property sector, smothered many of its most dynamic companies, and persisted in trying to push out the coronavirus.
Well-to-do people professionals who thought themselves secure in their jobs in finance or consumer internet faced a rude shock when Xi’s displeasure with these sectors caused rippling job losses. No US president has so much ability to overturn the lives of the rich. By contrast, in China, many pillars of society are liable to blow over when winds from Beijing shift direction, contributing to a sense of precarity among even the country’s elites. Since China doesn’t have many legal protections, not even its rich are well protected.
Engineers go hard in one direction, and if they perceive something isn’t working, they switch with no loss of speed toward another. They don’t suffer criticism from humanist softies. Change in China can be so dramatic because so few voices are part of the political process. To a first approximation, the twenty-four men who make up the Political Bureau (the highest echelon of the Communist Party, usually shortened to Politburo) are the only people permitted to do politics. Once they’ve settled questions of strategy, the only remaining task is for the bureaucracy to sort out the details. But when it makes mistakes, it can drag nearly the entire population into crisis.
To capture both the traumatic aspects of the engineering state and its capacity to produce great pride, I like to think of a hypothetical question: What was the worst year to be born in modern China?
A strong contender, I believe, is 1949, the year Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic. A person born that year—let’s call her Lu—would live through several of China’s utopian experiments, which curdled into terror campaigns led by the state. Lu would be born into a country torn up by Japan’s invasion and a civil war, but hopeful about Mao’s promise of communism. Around age ten, Lu would suffer some degree of food shortage as she lived through Mao’s scheme to get industrialized quick. That was the Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions perished from agricultural collectivization, quack agronomy, natural disasters, and Mao’s order to melt down household tools for the metal, all leading to the sort of mass starvation that forced people to forage tree bark to survive. At age eighteen, Lu might have just missed her chance to attend college as Mao shut down higher education. “Rebellion is justified,” he told students while launching the Cultural Revolution. “Bombard the headquarters,” he instructed youths while sending them into the countryside.
If Lu decided to have a child after the age of thirty, she would have run into the one-child policy. Over the policy’s three-and-a-half-decade duration, China conducted nearly as many abortions, according to official figures, as the present population of the United States. If Lu had given birth at age twenty, her child might have attended college in 1989. That spring and summer, students led protests throughout the country, most prominently in Beijing. By June, Deng Xiaoping declared martial law and deployed the army to mow down students from the country’s most elite colleges. A few years after the killings around Tiananmen Square, China’s economic boom began in earnest. But as Lu turned seventy and entered the twilight of her life, she would feel one last spasm of a state-led terror campaign: lockdowns in the pursuit of zero-Covid. Depending on whether Lu lived in an unlucky city, she might not have been able to leave her residence for weeks.
But change the year of birth by a decade and outcomes can shift spectacularly.
Someone born in 1959 would have no memory of famine. Call this luckier citizen Yao. By the time he turned eighteen, Mao would have died, and Yao could have earned a spot in university just as Deng was reopening the schools. As he turned forty and entered the prime of his career, he might have established a business that capitalized on China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Also around then, if he were an urban resident, Yao would catch China’s housing privatization. As the state moved to dismantle socialism, it offered homes to urban workers for a song. It was one of the greatest wealth transfers in history: If Yao was among the elites who owned real estate in Beijing and Shanghai, which grew into two of the world’s most expensive cities, he could have become prodigiously wealthy.
Not everyone born in 1949 suffered terribly and not everyone born in 1959 lived comfortably. But the engineering state is characterized by peculiarly jerky rhythms, in which the decade of birth might determine whether a person stumbles into great wealth or a mass grave.
The generation of Chinese born in the 2000s are somewhere in between these extremes. College graduates have, in recent years, contended with record high youth unemployment while their parents mourn falling property values. For one group of online nationalists, nicknamed “little pinks,” China can’t stop winning. The collapse of the property sector was good and necessary, they contend, because investment is going into manufacturing. And if China’s broader economy is weak, they say that China’s economic woes are caused by the United States.
The second argument is just ridiculous. Yes, tariffs and technology controls have hurt Chinese firms. But what is the US government’s damage to China’s economy next to the Politburo’s shock tactics? That the United States is able to hobble China’s growth is believable only inside the country’s highly censored information environment.
But the little pinks have a line of argument that tickles me. “Look at those Americans,” a few say, “who have no high-speed rail or gleaming skyscrapers like we do. Their only skill is blocking themselves, which they are now doing to us.” Little pinks are wrong to say that the United States is powerful enough to tank China’s economy; they’re not wrong that the United States blocks itself.
The year 2008 offers a direct comparison between California’s speed and China’s speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. Both lines would be around eight hundred miles long upon completion.
China opened the Beijing–Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $36 billion. In its first decade of operation, it completed 1.35 billion passenger trips. California has built, seventeen years after the ballot proposition, a small stretch of rail to connect two cities in the Central Valley, neither of which are close to San Francisco or Los Angeles.
The latest estimate for California’s rail line is $128 billion. Why does it cost so much? Partly because some politicians have demanded that the train add a stop in their district, forcing the line to take a more tortuous route through an extra mountain range. And partly because California’s rail authority prefers to tout the number of high-paying jobs it is creating rather than the amount of track it has been laying. The first segment of California’s train will start operating, according to official estimates, between 2030 and 2033. Which means that the margin of error for estimating when a partial leg of California’s high-speed rail will open is the same as the time it took China to build the entire Beijing–Shanghai line.
The United States wasn’t always like this. American mayors and governors used to love attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies. These are now few and far between. American cities have broadly failed to build adequate housing or infrastructure. What they do complete—a public bathroom, a bus stop, or, my goodness, a subway station—arrives embarrassingly late or over budget. Americans live today in the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded.
Once upon a time, America, too, had the musculature of an engineering state, building mighty works throughout the country: lengthy train tracks, gorgeous bridges, beautiful cities, weapons of war with terrible power, and missions to the moon. George Washington was a general, the first of many national security types who appreciated the value of building. As a young army officer, Dwight Eisenhower spent two months driving, or, more precisely, juddering, from coast to coast on unpaved roads. As president, he built the Interstate Highway System. When the United States had surging population and economic growth through the nineteenth century, political elites agreed that its vast territories needed canals, rails, and highways. Some of the leading figures in the Progressive Era embraced social engineering—and they conducted enough eugenics experiments to prove it.
China today resembles the United States of a century ago while it was proving itself to be a superpower. But America’s construction boom slowed down after the 1960s. What happened next? The lawyers.
In the 1960s, parts of the United States had grown into a frightful place. Oil platforms discharged petroleum into the sea, a foul smog settled over cities, and factories leaked so many chemicals that even rivers combusted. Urban planners rammed highways through urban neighborhoods. Legal discrimination segregated people by race and blocked them from exercising the right to vote. The public soured on the idea of broad deference to US technocrats and engineers: urban planners (who were uprooting whole neighborhoods), defense officials (who were prosecuting the war in Vietnam), and industry regulators (who were cozying up to companies).
Students at elite law schools, especially Yale and Harvard, sprang up to act. Students founded environmental organizations around the rallying cry of “Sue the bastards!” (referring to government agencies). Through the 1970s, both the American left and the right worked harmoniously to constrain government effectiveness. Liberal activists like Ralph Nader declared themselves to be watchdogs of government, constantly filing lawsuits. Ronald Reagan returned the compliment when he replied, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the United States’ problems of the 1960s. Unfortunately, it has become the cause of many of its present problems.
As a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, I peered at the lawyerly society from within one of its high temples. The law students I got to know are smart, friendly, and most of all, ambitious. They are good at climbing prestige ladders—joining a law review board as a student and clerking for a federal judge after graduation. Yale Law students mostly lean left, but there are also many conservatives among them. Case in point: J. D. Vance. Though the political views of law students may twist in unexpected directions, we should keep in view that they are entwined most firmly around a pillar of personal ambition.
More than any other group in the United States, lawyers are afforded license to be generalists, permitted to stomp into whichever intellectual realm pleases them. “American aristocracy,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “is not composed of the rich . . . but occupies the judicial bench and the bar.” Lawyers have become even more powerful since Tocqueville wrote those words in 1833. In recent decades, lawyers have been able to muscle out economists even in economic policymaking. The Biden administration was staffed by many graduates of Yale Law, who were willing to ignore the logic of the invisible hand. Instead, they roll up their sleeves to perform surgery on the American economy, one case at a time, devising a subsidy scheme for one corporation or bringing an antitrust case against another. Lawyers create so many complications that the rules governing everything from health care and housing to banking have become incomprehensible.
The American courtroom is a battlefront to resolve political questions, in which judges are enlisted to rule on questions that most other countries leave to voters or regulators. When a political cause can’t be won through the electoral process, lawyers sometimes seek a victory through the courts. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the American left pursued a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy that conservatives have revealed themselves to be no less capable at playing.
There are reasons to be happy for lawyers to have an outsized presence in American society. They are reliable conversationalists at cocktail parties, for example—much better than engineers or economists. More seriously, they help to maintain America’s civic-mindedness and its commitment to laws. Many of them do important work: facilitating people’s access to bankruptcy, divorce, or immigration services; helping secure civil rights; and working to protect wildlife and clean water. When the White House acts out of line, we hope that the judiciary will restrain it.
Though the lawyerly society corrected the problems of the past, it has produced two pathologies that weaken the United States today.
The first is an elevation of process over outcomes. In American government and society, designing new rules and committees have so often become the substitute for thinking hard about strategy and ends.
While engineers envision bridges, lawyers envision procedures. In a seminal paper titled “The Procedure Fetish,” University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley outlines how the federal government requires an agency to “conduct every conceivable study, ventilate every option, engage every identifiable stakeholder, and weather the most stringent judicial review before any of its actions, however trivial, could take effect.” In the lawyerly society, a more rigorous process is the solution to any number of quandaries. To deal with a new problem, it designs another procedure, which usually entails longer bureaucratic deliberation, greater public discussion, and more intensive judicial review.
Lawyers have much more scope with the law to stop something rather than create something. Before a government agency can build anything—from simple things like a bike lane to more complex projects like California’s high-speed rail—it ties itself down with mountains of procedure. The agency has to check so many boxes because it knows that a lawsuit could derail that bike lane if people are able to convince a judge it didn’t study environmental problems hard enough. After exhaustive research and review, it is no wonder that little ends up built. Americans are left with decaying infrastructure, little new construction, and a deep sense that nothing is working.
It’s not just the government. America’s problem is the lawyerly society. The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries. Since lawyers are everywhere, proceduralism has reached everywhere, including universities and corporations. Anyone working in these today has seen how procedures become an end in themselves, such that people grow obsessed with their logic and forget about the outcome. Because who can keep the goal straight after the seventh monthly committee meeting?
The other problem of the lawyerly society is a systematic bias toward the well-off. Lawyers are too often servants of the rich. They help wealthy homeowners block construction projects or get creative with their taxes. It is sometimes puzzling to follow along intellectual property cases, many of which seem to be a thrilling game invented for lawyers. American judges have to deal with bewildering disputes, like hedge funds pursuing sovereign governments on debt payments. Litigation offers endlessly tantalizing possibilities for settling scores. And motivated parties are willing to pay top dollar for superstar lawyers. Lawyers aren’t just defenders of the rich; many of them are the rich. “On Wall Street, Lawyers Make More Than Bankers Now” was a headline from the Wall Street Journal in 2023. “Pay for Lawyers Is So High People Are Comparing It to the NBA” claimed the New York Times in 2024.
America’s dysfunctions are not obstacles for the rich. Though New York City has barely been able to extend its system of mass transit, real estate developers have been able to build skinny high-rises for the wealthy. Though California can’t tame wildfires, the rich might be able to afford their own private firefighting services. The poor—those buried under paperwork trying to apply for SNAP benefits, who have to take dilapidated public transit and who would most benefit from new construction—are the ones who suffer most from the lawyerly society’s failures.
I am not saying, as Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher snipes in Henry VI, Part 2, that “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” The system of checks and balances has been, and is, fundamental to the success of the United States. Since the government is capable of wielding terrible power, judges and the law are often the last and best hope against abuses. But the United States will not remain a great power if it caters primarily to the wealthy. Its failure to build enough has hurt working people and makes the country feel like a low-agency society.
The engineering state is more than autocracy or technocratic high modernism. China has succeeded better than any other authoritarian country in history at combining economic growth with political control. The Communist Party has relentlessly broken up entrenched interests, partly to prevent rich people from gaining political power and partly to spread material benefits throughout the country. Its rise suggests that a country can grow powerful when it trains a lot of engineers and puts them to work, even under less-than-great institutional arrangements. In the words of one 1991 paper written by a trio of economists, “Our evidence shows that countries with a higher proportion of engineering college majors grow faster; whereas countries with a higher proportion of law concentrators grow more slowly.” Engineers are part of the reason that China has grown so much wealthier, despite its wavering commitment to secure property rights. An engineer mindset is also part of the reason that the state skirted so close to apocalypse—in the case of the Cultural Revolution—before it achieved a growth miracle.
The lawyerly society doesn’t have such dramatic shifts. It is made up of democracy, pluralism, vetocracy, and not only these things. The lawyerly society also includes a commitment to proceduralism and protecting wealth. Economically, the United States has experienced strong economic growth relative to other Western countries combined with astonishingly successful corporate value creation. But in political terms, this obsession with process over outcomes has made Americans lose faith that the government can meaningfully improve their lives. I want the US government to earn back that faith. To do so, it will need to recover some of its engineering prowess and make room for nonlawyers among its ruling elites. It will require the United States to build again, creating a momentum and the sense of optimism for the future that many Chinese have felt over the past two decades.
The reason we have to get smarter about both the United States and China is not because they are fascinating intellectual puzzles in themselves. It is because the two superpowers are uneasily circling each other, reorienting their economies and national security apparatuses to prepare for conflict.
As China and the United States gear up for competition and conflict, we need fresh ways—using terms that are not amalgamations from political science texts—to think about how both countries function and how they fail. The engineering state and the lawyerly society are not the only ways to understand the two countries; old labels like “autocratic” or “capitalist” still have some use, of course. I want to be inventive and even playful with these terms in the interest of encouraging mutual curiosity between the two countries.
The United States has immense advantages over China: robust economic growth, an expanding and more youthful population, innovation in digital technologies, a larger network of alliances, and more. But we need to recognize that the engineering state has a giant advantage: China can build. That will matter if the two countries ever decide, in an apocalyptic scenario, to go to war. No military can be powered by artificial intelligence alone; it will need drones and munitions. And the engineering state is better set up to produce these in overwhelming quantity.
Over the past decade, the United States brought lawyers to a technology fight. The first Trump administration blacklisted scores of Chinese tech companies. In the Biden administration, the ranks of the National Security Council and the Department of Commerce were filled with graduates of elite law schools, including their department heads. Lawyers have designed exquisite webs of technology controls, ensnaring Chinese chipmakers, telecommunications firms, and any company hoping to deploy AI. Rather than halt Chinese technology leaders in their tracks, these legal controls have riled them up. When Xi started his third term in 2022, he didn’t stack the Politburo with clever lawyers able to deliver a really good rebuttal. He filled it with scientists and engineers. They will help to design the Fifteenth Five-Year Plan, which will place even greater emphasis on building technological strength.
A contest between a literal-minded dragon and lawyerly weenies wouldn’t be a fair fight. The struggle is more complex than that. Whether one can outlast the other will depend not only on physical dynamism or technological prowess. It will depend on governance—which country can do a better job managing its affairs over the next century.
As best as I can tell, the United States and China are both racing to erode their governance capabilities. Xi Jinping has forcefully centered the political decision-making process on himself, demonstrating that he intends to rule the Communist Party for as long as he pleases. The American government, meanwhile, has been mired in ineffectualness. For decades, the American right connived to drown the government in a bathtub while the left was strangling it with rules and lawsuits. The left has barely shown resolve to reform creaky institutions, and the second Trump administration behaves as if it must destroy the government in order to save it.
But there is hope for everyone. The most important thing that China and the United States share is a commitment to transformation. China is led by a Leninist party whose core aim is to mobilize society toward modernization. Its propaganda organs stage centralized campaigns of inspiration toward the centenary goal to achieve, by 2049, “a modern socialist country” and “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The US commitment is more open-ended, inherent to the experiment to keep democracy going. That has been partly deformed, but we should revive the dream that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish.
I am not impressed with California’s governance. But I want to reveal there is one aspect of the California attitude that I fully imbibe: I am a sunny optimist for the future, with faith that both societies can change for the better. Both countries are in a state of becoming, which means that either of the superpowers are able to tilt away from their present, bad courses.
If Americans look deeply into China, they will find reflections of its lost powers. China, right now, is in the midst of pursuing its own Great Society, where even its poorest provinces have impressive levels of physical dynamism. Delivering the goods is part of why consent of the governed is still pretty strong in China. I saw that for myself when I spent five days furiously pedaling through the jagged mountains of Guizhou.
