There’s never been a shortage of hot takes about what really makes the United States and China so different: Capitalism versus socialism; democracy as opposed to authoritarianism; Christianity or Confucianism; equity versus efficiency. In his highly anticipated new book, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, Hoover Institution fellow Dan Wang proposes a fresh lens for looking at the world’s two largest superpowers: the US is a “lawyerly society,” he argues, while China is an “engineering state.”
Wang’s argument is based on looking at the professional backgrounds of each country’s elite class. In Washington, most politicians are trained as lawyers, but in Beijing, senior leaders are more often educated in civil or defense engineering. Wang theorizes that the academic subjects political leaders study during their formative years later profoundly shape their respective governance styles. Lawyers tend to emphasize compliance and patience. Engineers prefer to move fast, build big, and only later contend with the costs.
Wang’s framework isn’t about declaring winners and losers. Instead, he places the US and China at opposite ends of a spectrum, while countries like France, Germany, and Japan fall somewhere in between. His prescription? “For the US to be 20 percent more engineering, and for China to be 50 percent more lawyerly,” he told me earlier this week.
Our conversation took place on Tuesday, the day Wang’s book was published, in a small park in Manhattan. New York City has one of the world’s oldest subway systems, but it hasn’t approved a major new train line since 2007. In his book, Wang includes a detailed discussion about Robert Moses, the controversial urban planner who built some of the city’s most famous and enduring infrastructure but also tore up marginalized neighborhoods in the process. He argues that New York could use another transformative builder like Moses.
The conversation felt personal because of the contrast between New York, where I now live, and Wuhan, where I grew up. When I left Wuhan for college, the city built seven new subway lines in four years, stretching almost 100 miles. Locals nicknamed Wuhan’s mayor at the time 满城挖 or “Mayor Dig-It-All-Up,” to show their disapproval. But now that the construction is finished and Wuhan has been completely transformed, Mayor Dig-It-All-Up is remembered fondly by many locals, and he has been elevated by the central government to manage a province in China’s southwest.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Ambition to Build
WIRED: Do you think the US should move to the other end of the engineer-lawyer spectrum you describe and become a full-blown engineering state?
Dan Wang: The US used to be more of an engineering state—it's certainly built a lot. We're chatting in New York City right now, and this is the city that built subway stations about 120 years ago. The United States built canal systems and highways and transcontinental rail systems and the Apollo missions, as well as the Manhattan Project. A lot of what I'm trying to do is to say that the US should recover some of these engineering muscles. It certainly doesn't have to be like China.