Notes - Breakneck - Chinas Quest to Engineer the Future

Dan Wang | January 4, 2026

Chapter 1: Engineers vs. Lawyers

The Contrast of Dysfunction and Dynamism

Silicon Valley is described as a "drab place" dominated by corporate parking lots and rug shops, failing to reflect its status as the "beating heart" of technological acceleration. In contrast, arriving in major Chinese hubs like Hong Kong or Shanghai often feels like encountering "functional infrastructure," with clean, brightly lit, and frequent subways connecting to vibrant commercial districts—features lacking in San Francisco. The Bay Area represents a contradiction: a red-hot center of corporate value creation surrounded by physical dysfunction, where even the wealthy rely on generators because the state cannot keep the lights on. While China is "building the future," America has become physically static, with its innovations largely confined to the virtual and financial realms.

Redefining Political Labels

Traditional 20th-century labels like "capitalist" or "socialist" are no longer adequate to describe these superpowers.

Capitalist America: Intrude upon the free market with dense regulation and taxation while providing imperfect redistributive policies.
Socialist China: Operates more like a right-wing state, detaining union organizers, providing a threadbare social safety net, and enforcing traditional gender roles and strict immigration barriers.

The defining lens for the 21st century is the engineering state (China), which is driven by a compulsion to build, versus the lawyerly society (United States), which is structured to block progress through proceduralism.

The Rise of the Engineering State

Engineers have literally ruled modern China since the 1980s as a corrective to the chaos of the Mao years. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee were trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering, while Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University. In hithird term, Xi has filled the Politburo with executives from aerospace and weapons ministries, effectively doubling down on defense and large-scale engineering.

This engineering mindset translates into massive physical feats:

Since 1980, China has built highways double the length of the US system.
Its high-speed rail network is twenty times more extensive than Japan's.
China produces between one-third and one-half of nearly every manufactured product globally, from structural steel to solar panels.

The Dominance of the Lawyerly Society

The United States is governed "of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers". Half of the US Congress and five of the last ten presidents attended law school, while only two (Hoover and Carter) were engineers—both of whom are remembered for dismal political instincts. While China’s system is geared toward delivering monumental projects, the US system excels at litigation and regulation to delay or stop them. This shift occurin the 1960s when lawyers turned their focus toward stopping environmental destruction and corporate interests, resulting in a mission to "stop as many things as possible".

Social and Economic Engineering

The Chinese state views society as a series of "liquid flows" that can be directed or restricted like turning a valve. This literal-minded approach applies to:

Population Control: The one-child policy was an attempt to solve population "math exercises" through mass sterilization and abortion.
Pandemic Management: Zero-Covid involved building hospitals at "breakneck speed" while confining millions to their homes.
The Tech Sector: In 2021, Xi used "regulatory thunderbolts" to erase a trillion dollars in corporate valuations for companies like Didi and Ant Financial to reorient priorities toward strategic industries like semiconductors and aviation.

This system is efficient because it ignores individual rights and treats people as aggregates, maximizing the discretion of the state.

A Tale of Two Rails

The year 2008 highlights the speed gap between the two nations. That year, California approved a high-speed rail between San Francisco and LA, while China began its Beijing-Shanghai line.

China: The 800-mile line opened in 2011, cost $36 billion, and carried 1.35 billion passengers in its first decade.
California: Seventeen years later, the project has only a small stretch of track, with costs ballooning to $128 billion. The estimated opening for just a partial leg is 2030-2033—a margin of error equal to the time it took China to build its entire line.

The Pathologies of Procedure

The "lawyerly society" suffers from two main pathologies:

Process over Outcomes: A "procedure fetish" requires agencies to conduct every conceivable study and engage every stakeholder before acting, ensuring that very little actually gets built.
Systematic Bias for the Rich: Lawyers often serve as the "servants of thrich," helping wealthy homeowners block transit or housing projects.

While the engineering state can be traumatic and lacks citizen input, its ability to build at scale provides a significant advantage in global competition. In a war scenario, the engineering state is better equipped to produce drones and munitions in overwhelming quantity, while the US risks bringing "lawyers to a technology fight". To remain a superpower, the US must recover its musculature for construction and make room for engineers among its ruling elites.

Chapter 2: Building Big

The Guizhou Encounter: Infrastructure in the Hinterlands

A vivid encounter with the engineering state occurred during a nearly 400-mile bicycle trip through Guizhou province in 2021. Guizhou, historically known as a place "where not three feet of land is flat," is China's fourth-poorest province, yet it possesses infrastructure that often surpasses that of America's richest regions. This province, once inhabited by the Miao minority and characterized by "ill-disciplined" mountain peaks, has been lavished with central government attention and megaprojects. Key developments include the Heaven's Eye—the world's largest radio telescope—and the capital city of Guiyang, which now hosts major data centers and is connected to the national high-speed rail network. During the trip, even remote counties are part of the engineering state's manufacturing reach; for instance, Zheng'an County has become the "guitar capital of the world," producing one out of every seven guitars worldwide.

Urban Monoliths and "Hydropunk" Chongqing

The cycling journey concluded in Chongqing, a massive municipality the size of Austria with a population comparable to Texas. Chongqing embodies cyberpunk or "hydropunk," where skyscrapers and highways are carved directly into steep hillsides, and subway lines famously pass through the middle of apartment buildings. The city's geography created a "heat trap" known as one of China's "four furnaces," which locals combat by eating spicy hotpot inside cooled-down former air-raid tunnels. This dramatic urban scenery represents the pinnacle of China's physical transformation, where the sheer scale of construction serves as a form of "propaganda of the deed".

The National Building Spree: Statistics and Comparisons

China’s modernization has involved compressing a century's worth of Western development into just a few decades. Since the 1990s, the state has built an expanse of highways equal to twice the length of the US interstate system. In the realm of mass transit, Shanghai added as much subway track in a single decade as exists in the entire New York City system, and by 2025, eleven Chinese cities will have subway lines longer than New York's. Nuclear energy follows a similar trajectory; while the United States has only one reactor under construction, China has thirty-one. In terms of housing, China's urban population grew so rapidly that the state effectively built a new city the size of greater New York and Boston combined every year for thirty-five years. This spree consumed colossal amounts of materials, with China producing nearly as much cement between 2018 and 2019 as the United States did during the entire twentieth century.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: Welfare and Control

"Socialism with Chinese characteristics" is defined not as economic redistribution, but as a Leninist agenda where the state commands resources to maintain political control and build toward a "post-scarcity world". Unlike Western welfare states, China spends only about 10 percent of its GDP on social spending, compared to 20 percent in the U.S. and 30 percent in parts of Europe. The state is particularly "miserly" with unemployment insurance and relies on regressive consumption taxes because low direct taxes reduce the risk of citizens demanding "representation". Xi Jinping has explicitly pushed back against generous welfare, warning that it could make people "lazy". Instead of a social safety net, the engineering state offers material improvements through massive public works.

The Debt Trap and Vanity Projects

Beneath the "glittering hardware" of bridges and high-rises lies a massive debt burden. Guizhou, despite its poverty, has built forty-five of the world’s one hundred highest bridges, many of which do not generate enough revenue to recoup their costs. The political system rewards officials for short-term growth, leading to "vanity projects" like those of Li Zaiyong in Liupanshui. Li spent $21 billion to transform a coal-mining city into a ski destination, building Asia’s longest cable lift and using snowmakers in an area that rarely sees snow; the project failed, leaving the city in debt and Li sentenced to death with a reprieve. Similarly, Tianjin’s Binhai district attempted to become "China’s Manhattan" but remains largely empty, with a photogenic library where the "books" are actually just digital prints on the walls—a metaphor for an economy that prioritizes impressive hardware over substance.

Supply-side Focus and Global Competition

China's economic model is heavily skewed toward the supply side, favoring manufacturers with cheap credit and subsidies over household consumption. This has led to massive overcapacity; China can produce sixty million cars a year, which is far more than its domestic market can absorb, forcing a reliance on exports. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while Western governments sent cash to households (demand-side), Beijing focused on getting factories back to work (supply-side). This strategy allowed Chinese manufacturers to capture global markets while others were stalled, resulting in record trade surpluses. However, this "brutal price war" often results in low profitability even for dominant industries like solar panels.

Environmental and Human Costs

The engineering state often treats the environment as something to be "engineered away" rather than protected. While China builds massive amounts of renewable energy, it also burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. Large-scale projects like the Three Gorges Dam required the resettlement of 1.5 million people, and the state uses coercive "thought work" to force ethnic minorities, such as Tibetans, into high-rise apartment blocks to monitor them more easily. Furthermore, "reckless construction" has occasionally resulted in "tofu houses"—poor-quality buildings like the schools that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

The Future of Building: China vs. the United States

The United States has become a "lawyerly society" that prioritizes process over outcomes, leading to stagnation. For example, a high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai was built in three years, while a similar project in California remains unfinished after seventeen years and carries a price tag of $128 billion. The U.S. permitting process, exemplified by the failed Cape Wind project, allows wealthy stakeholders to use litigation to block essential infrastructure for decades. While China needs to learn to build "less and better," the U.S. must recover its engineering prowess to address climate change and economic inequality.

Analogy: The engineering state is like a master builder who is obsessed with the speed and scale of the structure but often ignores the comfort of the residents and the mounting debt used to buy the bricks. Conversely, the lawyerly society is like a homeowner association so entangled in its own bylaws and committee meetings that it cannot even agree on how to fix a leaking roof.

Chapter 3: Tech Power

The Transformation of Shenzhen

In 1980, Shenzhen was primarily known for its succulent oysters, harvested by villagers from cages along the coast. However, the industrialization required to build the world’s greatest boomtown eventually flushed away this habitat. After Deng Xiaoping designated Shenzhen a "special economic zone" in 1980, it became a magnet for rural and urban migrants seeking opportunity outside of rigid state enterprises. By the 2000s, the city had evolved from a producer of toys and clothing into the world’s premier electronics manufacturing hub. Today, Shenzhen is often called the "Silicon Valley of hardware," serving as an ecosystem where creative engineers sit in a "sea of components" alongside a massive, experienced workforce.

The Apple-Foxconn Ecosystem

The partnership between Apple and contract manufacturers like Foxconn represents the crowning achievement of the U.S.-China trade relationship. Foxconn’s Shenzhen campus is essentially a city within a city, occupying five hundred acres and housing up to 300,000 workers during peak seasons—roughly the population of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. The facility is self-contained, featuring its own hospital, cinemas, swimming pools, fire brigade, and a "Foxconn University".

Manufacturing at this scale requires extreme discipline:

Regimented Labor: Workers wear color-coded uniforms by rank and undergo multiple security scans to prevent theft.
Management Style: Foxconn founder Terry Gou was known for his relentless dedication, once monitoring production from a golf cart equipped with a bicycle bell.
Government Support: Local officials in Henan, Sichuan, and Shenzhen competed to host Foxconn by offering cheap land, tax rebates, and even "borrowing" workers from state coal companies to meet production surges.

Process Knowledge: The True Meaning of Tech

Technology should be understood as three distinct things: tools (the hardware), explicit instruction (blueprints and patents), and process knowledge. Process knowledge is the most critical; it is the tacit proficiency gained through practical experience that cannot be easily written down or taught without "doing".

To illustrate this, the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan has been completely rebuilt every twenty years since 690 AD using 7th-century techniques. This ritual ensures that the craft knowledge is passed down to each generation; the building is fragile and perishable, but the "eternity" lives in the builder. In contrast, the U.S. has struggled to maintain its process knowledge:

The "Fogbank" Example: The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration once spent $69 million to relearn how to produce "Fogbank" (a classified nuclear material) because the original experts had retired and records were insufficient.
Scaling Up: Former Intel CEO Andy Grove noted that the U.S. is too focused on the "mythical moment of creation" (invention) while neglecting the "scaling up" phase where true technological ecosystems are built.

The U.S. Manufacturing Decline

The U.S. manufacturing base has rusted as policymakers and executives prioritized capital-light "virtual" businesses over physical production. The decline of manufacturing (from 19 million workers in 1980 to 11.5 million in 2010) has resulted in a permanent loss of production skills.

Several "ailing" U.S. giants:

Boeing and Intel: Both have suffered from delayed product timelines and quality issues, often attributed to a shift from engineering-focused leadership to executives focused on shareholder value.
The Defense Industrial Base: Despite spending nearly $1 trillion annually, the U.S. has struggled to scale up munitions production for conflicts like the war in Ukraine, and its naval ship programs are years behind schedule.

Xi Jinping’s Industrial "Fortress"

Unlike the U.S., which values digital platforms, Xi Jinping favors the "real economy" (manufacturing) over the "fictitious" economy (finance and virtual services). Xi has explicitly stated that China must "never deindustrialize" and has mandated that manufacturing's share of the GDP remain constant.

To spur domestic excellence, China uses the "catfish effect":

The Tesla Case: In 2018, Beijing allowed Tesla to fully own its Shanghai Gigafactory—a first for a foreign automaker.
The Result: Introducing this "powerful creature" forced domestic firms like BYD to "swim faster" to survive, ultimately stimulating the entire Chinese electric vehicle supply chain.

The "Industrial Party" and Cultural Ideology

An online movement known as the "Industrial Party" has become influential in China, advocating for a society organized entirely around science, technology, and manufacturing to win a Darwinian competition between nations. They reject "romanticism" and prioritize technocratic rule.

The movement draws ideological inspiration from Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. The novel depicts an existential struggle where humanity must submit to the will of geniuses and technocrats who are willing to be brutal in the pursuit of survival. This worldview aligns with the engineering state's philosophy: that physical dynamism and industrial power are the ultimate measures of a nation's strength.

Analogy: Think of technology not as a cookbook (the blueprint), but as the chef’s ability to cook (process knowledge). You can give a novice the most detailed recipe and a professional kitchen, but they will likely still burn the meal. The expertise lives in the hands and the experience of the cook, just as China's "tech power" lives in the hands of its millions of factory workers rather than in just a patent or a tool.

Chapter 4: One Child

The Pivot from Control to Promotion

The pursuit of population control is described as the essence of China’s modern engineering state, driven by a misbegotten "scientism" that used straight-line projections to predict catastrophe if the population did not decrease. This approach produced more social pain than any other policy in the last half-century. Recently, the state has pivoted from control to promotion. In 2013, Xi Jinping encouraged women to "shoulder greater responsibilities" in economic development, but by 2023, his message shifted to a traditionalist tone, urging women to "cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbirth" and focus on building families. This shift follows a 2023 announcement of China’s first population decline since 1960. The fertility rate has collapsed to 1.0 children per family, far below the 2.1 needed for stability. To set an example, Xi’s third-term Politburo excluded women entirely for the first time in decades.

The Maoist Cult of Population

Mao Zedong, who was not an engineer but a "librarian turned warlord," viewed a large population as a source of national strength. He famously remarked, "With people come power" (ren duo, li liang da). Mao was so casual about population that he told Nikita Khrushchev in 1957 that China did not fear a nuclear strike because, even if half the population perished, they would soon produce more babies than ever before. He rejected Malthusian concerns of overpopulation as "bourgeois". However, his technocratic deputies, like Deng Xiaoping, found it difficult to execute five-year plans without population control and eventually persuaded Mao to accept some family planning incentives in the 1970s. After Mao’s death, a 1978 estimate revealed the population had reached one billion, shocking a leadership whose administrative functions had been decimated by the Cultural Revolution.

The Missile Scientist and the "Optimal" Population

The solution to this "shock" came from Song Jian, a missile scientist trained in the Soviet Union in the field of cybernetics. Cybernetics, the study of "control and communication in the animal and machine," appealed to the engineering state because it suggested complex systems could be optimized through feedback and regulation. Song, who helped develop submarine-launched ballistic missiles, applied these "machine intelligence" principles to humans.

Influenced by Western environmental "doomerism" (like The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome), Song used China's few advanced computers to calculate that China's "optimal" population was no more than 700 million. His model was fundamentally flawed; he used "straight-line" logic, assuming population growth was a fixed variable and ignoring how economic growth naturally lowers fertility. Nevertheless, his machine-generated graphs outclassed the hand-drawn squiggles of social scientists, and in 1980, the leadership—led by Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun—adopted the one-child policy for its perceived scientific precision and administrative simplicity.

The Mechanics of Coercion: "Shock Brigades"

Enforcement was treated like a military campaign, led by General Qian Xinzhong. "Shock brigades" of family planning officers were deployed to carry out "man-on-man tactics" and "shock attacks" on rural villages. Hospitals were ordered to perform the "four procedures": IUD insertions, tubal ligations, vasectomies, and abortions. While urban residents mostly navigated the policy through documentation, the four-fifths of the population in the countryside faced a "campaign of rural terror".

Tactics included:

Browbeating: "Persuasion groups" would visit a pregnant woman up to 100 times, or detain her in a village hall until she "consented" to an abortion.
Property Destruction: Officials would seize cattle, furniture, or send bulldozers to tear the roofs off the homes of those who refused to comply.
Forced Procedures: In late-term pregnancies, doctors sometimes injected formaldehyde into a baby’s head or smothered newborns.
The "Childless Hundred Days": In 1991, one county secretary ordered a 100-day period with zero births, forcing abortions on every pregnant woman in the jurisdiction, regardless of whether the birth was authorized.

Resistance and "Weapons of the Weak"

Rural families resisted using "weapons of the weak": timing births for winter to hide bellies under heavy clothes, timing pregnancies to flee to other villages, and even bribing officials or faking minority ethnicities. Some families "rented" disabled children to qualify for a second-birth permit. When pushed to the brink, villagers retaliated by burning the homes of birth-planning officials or kidnapping their children. These officials became the most hated figures in the bureaucracy, often requiring special government insurance to cover damages to their property.

The Haunting Legacies of Social Engineering

The policy produced a staggering demographic and human toll:

"Missing" Women: A preference for sons led to female infanticide—smothering, drowning, or abandoning baby girls—and later, sex-selective abortions. This resulted in an estimated 40 million "missing" women.
Trafficking and Kidnapping: Demand for sons and future brides fueled trafficking rings; in 2004, 24 drugged baby girls were found in tote bags on a bus.
International Adoptions: Over 150,000 children (mostly girls) were sent abroad, though some orphanages were accused of "selling" children or even state-sanctioned kidnapping to meet demand.
Statistical Trauma: Over 35 years, China performed 321 million abortions and sterilized over 130 million people.

The New Era: Nagging and Traditionalism

The engineering state is now attempting to reverse the decline, but the "dial cannot be turned back". Three decades of the one-child policy worked too well; young women now view children as a burden and cite old propaganda slogans to mock current birth-promotion efforts. The state’s new tools include:

State-Sanctioned Stigma: Media outlets use terms like "leftover women" to shame single women over age 27 into marriage.
Invasive Nagging: Neighborhood officials now call women to ask about their menstrual cycles and argue that "owning a cat is no substitute for a child".
Controlling Bodies Again: Hospitals are increasingly denying vasectomies to men unless they can prove they already have children; recorded vasectomies fell from 181,000 in 2014 to fewer than 5,000 in 2019.

The chapter concludes that the one-child policy was an unnecessary tragedy, as fertility was already declining due to urbanization and education. It serves as a stark warning of what happens when a state views its population as aggregates to be manipulated rather than individuals with rights.

Analogy: The engineering state treats society like a hydraulic system, viewing people as "liquid flows" that can be redirected, restricted, or blocked as easily as turning a series of valves.*

Chapter 5: Zero-Covid

The Contrasting Spirits of Beijing and Shanghai

The experience of the pandemic was shaped by moving from Beijing to Shanghai in 2020, fleeing the former's intense political temperament for the latter's commercial splendor. Beijing is described as a city of monumentalism, reshaped by Stalinist architects to reflect socialist magnificence, where avenues feel built for army parades rather than life. In contrast, Shanghai—the "Paris of the East"—was built for pleasure and commerce, featuring colonial architecture, leafy plane trees, and a history of extraterritoriality where merchants, not officials, dictated the city's rhythm. Before the pandemic curdled its atmosphere, Shanghai was a city of indulgence, celebrated for its sophisticated cuisine, from seasonal mitten crabs to savory soup dumplings.

The Rise of the Engineering State's "People’s War"

China’s initial response to Covid-19 was characterized by pride and mobilization. After the initial cover-up in Wuhan—where local officials suppressed news of the virus to avoid disrupting political meetings—the state launched a "people’s war". This first act demonstrated the engineering state’s capacity for rapid physical action, exemplified by the construction of a new hospital in just eleven days. As the virus ravaged the West, the Chinese government used its success in containment to declare the superiority of the socialist system, and many citizens felt a sense of pride as they watched wealthier nations bungle their responses.

Life Under "Dynamic Zero"

For much of 2020 and 2021, life in China felt like a "realm of serene calm" compared to the rest of the world. Containment relied on a technologically intensive apparatus:

Contact-Tracing QR Codes: Movement was governed by green, yellow, or red codes on mobile phones that determined access to public spaces.
Quarantine Hotels: International travelers were shuttled into designated hotels for two to three weeks of isolation.
The Dabai (Big Whites): Millions of enforcers in white protective suits became the ubiquitous symbols of state control.

People initially accepted these measures because the state introduced them gradually and they appeared effective at preventing mass death.

The Merits and Madness of the Shanghai Lockdown

The "madness" of the engineering state became apparent during the eight-week lockdown of Shanghai in the spring of 2022. Despite officials repeatedly denying a lockdown was planned, they eventually confined twenty-five million people to their homes to fight the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

The Logistics of Hunger

The lockdown shattered Shanghai’s food supply chain, leading to widespread food insecurity in China’s richest city.

Broken Delivery Systems: Trucking activity fell to 15% of normal levels as drivers were trapped in their cabs by Covid controls.
The Struggle for Rations: Residents had to set alarms for 6:00 a.m. to fight for grocery delivery slots that vanished in seconds.
WeChat Group-Buying: Communities relied on self-organized "group-buying" through WeChat, where neighbors coordinated bulk orders directly from wholesalers.

Medical Neglect and "Sanitation Terror"

The state’s literal-minded pursuit of "zero" cases led to the neglect of all other medical conditions. Hospitals refused treatment for non-Covid conditions, such as asthma or diabetes, resulting in preventable deaths. Furthermore, the state practiced what some called "sanitation terror," which included dousing homes in disinfectant and, in some cases, killing the pets of those taken to centralized quarantine.

The Collapse of the Strategy and the "White Paper" Protests

By late 2022, the strategy became a "farce," with officials performing senseless acts like swabbing the mouths of fish and yaks for the virus. Public desperation culminated in the "White Paper" protests in November 2022. These rare acts of defiance saw young people in Shanghai and Beijing holding blank pieces of paper to symbolize censorship and chanting, "Down with the Communist Party! Xi Jinping step down!".

The Abrupt Reversal

Following the protests and the realization that the virus was already spreading uncontrollably in Beijing, the government abandoned Zero-Covid overnight in December 2022. This transition was haphazard:

Lack of Preparation: The state had not accelerated vaccinations for the elderly or stockpiled medicine before the reopening.
The Fever Medicine Paradox: For three years, the state had restricted the purchase of ibuprofen to prevent people from hiding fevers; consequently, when the virus was unleashed, the population had no medicine on hand.
Mass Casualties: Scholarly estimates suggest the resulting wave caused nearly two million excess deaths, while crematoriums operated nonstop.

Philosophical and Governance Lessons

The pandemic revealed a fundamental difference between the engineering state and a lawyerly society. The engineering state "follows the science" to its logical, often inhumane conclusion—whether it is the One-Child Policy or Zero-Covid—treating people as aggregates to be manipulated. Conversely, the lawyerly society, while often less efficient, relies on a diverse mix of voices—lawyers, economists, and humanists—to protect individual rights and provide political contestation that can prevent such extreme social immiseration.

Analogy: The engineering state’s pursuit of Zero-Covid was like a firefighter who successfully puts out a small blaze but does so by flooding the entire house with so much water that the foundation rots and the residents drown. It solved one specific numerical problem (the infection rate) while ignoring the total collapse of the human system it was intended to protect.

Chapter 6: Fortress China

The Rùn Phenomenon and the Creative Exodus

The pandemic gave rise to a remarkable new slang word in China: "rùn," which uses a Chinese character meaning "to moisten" but is appropriated for its English phonetic meaning: to flee. This term evolved to describe the desire of citizens to escape the tightening political controls and unpredictable lockdowns of big cities, often by emigrating from China altogether.

While ambitious entrepreneurs often flock to Singapore and the wealthy seek a pleasant life in Japan, the "slackers" and creative spirits frequently land in Thailand, particularly Chiang Mai. These young émigrés, often from the arts, tech, or journalism, felt stifled by the "lowering ceiling" of Xi Jinping’s China, where staying meant walking with "heads lowered and backs hunched". In Chiang Mai, this diaspora gathers around cultural hubs like Nowhere Books, which carries titles banned on the mainland, such as the Whole Earth Catalog, symbolizing a desire for self-conducted education and intellectual freedom.

The Decline of Foreign Presence and the Wealthy Diaspora

Shanghai, once China’s most internationalized city, saw its foreign population decline by a quarter between 2010 and 2020, a trend that accelerated significantly after the 2022 lockdowns. For many international executives, a posting to China is no longer a path to the C-suite but is viewed as a "quagmire" due to political complexities and data controls.

The exodus includes wealthy Chinese, with an estimated 15,000 millionaires emigrating in 2024 alone. Even less-privileged citizens are increasingly desperate, with US border officials apprehending 38,000 Chinese nationals in 2024—many of whom undertook a perilous trek through the Darién Gap to escape a sense that their lives in China had reached a "dead end". This alienation is a direct result of the engineering state’s "violent mood swings," which have left entire generations feeling whipsawed.

The Regulatory Storm: Hunting the Unicorns

In 2024, Xi Jinping famously asked why China was producing fewer "unicorns" (start-ups valued over $1 billion), seemingly unaware that his own policies had made him the "most feared unicorn hunter of all". For years, the digital economy thrived under the light regulation of officials like Lu Wei, allowing giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance to rival Silicon Valley. However, Lu Wei’s 2018 fall for "trading power for sex" and "deceiving the central leadership" signaled the end of this era.

Starting in late 2020, Beijing launched a regulatory storm that wiped out $1 trillion in market value. Key actions included:

Derailing the Ant Financial IPO due to concerns over financial instability.
Investigating Didi for national security concerns immediately after its US public listing.
Banning profits in the massive online education sector, leading to 60,000 layoffs at New Oriental alone.
Restricting minors to just three hours of video games per week.

The Engineering State’s Logic: Real vs. Fictitious Economy

These crackdowns were not merely technocratic; they were a sweeping exertion of political control intended to ensure no corporate entity could challenge the state's sovereignty. Xi expressed a deep suspicion of the "fictitious economy" (virtual platforms, social media, and finance), preferring instead the "real economy" of hard manufacturing.

Beijing’s "economic surgery" aimed to redirect talent and capital away from hedge funds and social media toward strategic "hard" technologies like semiconductors, aviation, and clean energy. Author Dan Wang notes that Xi is perhaps "60 percent correct" in his goals—such as reducing debt and reining in tech power—but the brute-force execution of the engineering state often delivers such severe "beatings" to industry that the survivors are traumatized and unable to recover.

Building the Fortress: Security and Self-Sufficiency

Xi Jinping’s third term is characterized by a drive to build a "Fortress China" capable of withstanding "extreme scenarios," including outright conflict with the West. His leadership team is now stacked with aerospace and defense executives who have practical experience managing megaprojects.

To harden the nation, the state has prioritized:

Energy Security: Massive investments in coal, nuclear, and renewables to ensure the country is not dependent on foreign sea-lanes.
Food Security: Provincial governors are now graded on their self-sufficiency in rice and wheat, leading to the reclamation of farmland from golf courses and mines.
Economic Insulation: Maintaining a "comprehensive" industrial chain across all 419 UN industrial categories to resist deindustrialization.

Technological Persistence and the Scientific Autocracy

Despite its political repression, the engineering state remains a technological powerhouse. The US-led technology war—characterized by sanctions on firms like Huawei and DJI—actually triggered a "Sputnik moment" in China, forcing domestic firms to align with Beijing’s self-sufficiency agenda.

Science can coexist with autocracy, noting that history is full of repressive regimes (like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany) that produced startling scientific advances because abundant funding is often more critical than free speech for the natural sciences. China currently graduates twice as many STEM PhDs as the United States and is projected to hold 45% of the world's industrial capacity by 2030.

The Cultural Deficit of the Fortress

The fundamental limit of the engineering state is its "control neurosis," which prevents China from becoming a truly "lovable" global power. Engineers are historically bad at producing appealing cultural exports, as the state's "deadening hand" and overbearing censors suppress the very creativity required for art and humor to thrive.

A prime example is the 2023 crackdown on the comedy industry, where a single joke resulted in a $2 million fine and the suspension of comedy troupes across the country. While the engineering state can build a fortress and dominate global manufacturing, its distrust of its own people ensures it remains isolated and unable to project the soft power necessary for global cultural hegemony.

Analogy: The engineering state is like a skilled but paranoid firefighter who is so obsessed with fireproofing a building that he soaks the furniture in water and bars the doors, successfully preventing a blaze but making the building nearly impossible to live in.

Chapter 7: Learning to Love Engineers

A Family History Shaped by State Turmoil

The parents made the wrenching decision to emigrate from China to the West in 2000, a choice based on an educated guess about their future well-being and the nature of the rules they wished to live under. Both parents were born in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, a city known for its laid-back culture but classified today as a "third-tier" city with stagnant salaries. Their family histories are deeply intertwined with the rise and fall of various Chinese regimes; the paternal grandfather was born into the Zhu Family Gardens, once Yunnan's largest merchant residence, which lost its fortune by repeatedly siding with political losers, including the Qing and the Nationalists. His paternal grandmother was from a high-ranking Nationalist family—her father was a secretary to Chiang Kai-shek—and she recalled hiding from Japanese bombers in Chongqing during the war.

The Mao era brought intense suffering to these families due to their "bad" class backgrounds; the paternal grandmother was sent to labor in the countryside for six years, separated from her children, because of her Nationalist connections. On the maternal side, the grandfather survived the 1942 Henan famine before becoming a propaganda officer for Deng Xiaoping's Second Field Army. Despite these military and rural origins, his maternal grandmother was designated a "minor landlord" and also sent to the fields. While the parents remember skipping school to chant slogans during the Cultural Revolution, their generation ultimately became the beneficiaries of Deng's dismantling of the planned economy, moving from meat ration coupons to relative abundance during their college years.

The Bet on the West

After serving in a teaching corps in Dali, the father taught computer science and the mother became a radio and television news anchor in Kunming. However, the political and economic gloom following the 1989 suppression of student protesters in Tiananmen Square prompted them to seek a way out. When they moved to Canada in 2000, the timing was poor due to the burst of the dot-com bubble, which made the father's programming skills temporarily unmarketable and forced the mother into various odd jobs as a janitor and garment worker. Eventually, the family moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just as the 2008 financial crisis struck.

Looking back, the parents' decision to emigrate is not an open-and-shut case of "the right call". While they achieved a middle-class footing, they are materially and perhaps spiritually impoverished compared to their former classmates who stayed in China. Those who remained benefited from China's massive property and export boom, often owning multiple homes and enjoying a vibrant social life. Yet, the parents do not have to deal with the precariousness of the Chinese middle class, where lives can be overturned by a shift in Beijing's mood, nor do they face the environmental and social stresses of modern China. The move allowed the freedom to pursue the intellectual work valued today.

Master Builders and the Lawyerly Society

Sunset Park, a diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, serves as a lens to examine the legacy of the American master builder Robert Moses. Moses was an urban planner who built at "breakneck speed," constructing massive bridges, highways, and public works like the Sunset Play Center. While Moses is often vilified in modern accounts—most notably in Robert Caro's The Power Broker—for his elitism, racism, and the destruction of neighborhoods, his legacy of physical dynamism helped make New York a global city. The United States has lost this ability to modernize its physical environment, choosing instead to funnel talent into virtual worlds while the real world relies on century-old infrastructure.

To reclaim its strength, the U.S. must reckon with the "procedure-obsessed left" and the "thoughtlessly destructive right," both of which have hindered the state's ability to deliver for its people. Figures like Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, serve as a model for how the government can concentrate resources to achieve massive technological feats. Currently, the U.S. is failing to deliver basic infrastructure; for instance, out of billions of dollars allocated in 2021 for rural broadband and EV charging stations, almost no progress had been made years later. The U.S. must learn from Spain, Germany, and Japan to strike a better balance between public consultation and actually getting projects built.

The Path Forward: A "Developing" Mindset

The ultimate contest between the United States and China will be won by the country that works best for its people. While the Chinese engineering state has delivered material benefits and resilience, it is limited by a "control neurosis" and a fundamental distrust of its own citizens. Conversely, the U.S. is hamstrung by its "lawyerly society," where due process is meticulously observed but outcomes are rarely achieved. Unwinding the dominance of lawyers and elevating the voices of engineers and humanists can restore a sense of optimism driven by physical dynamism.

In a final paradoxical insight, both countries should embrace the status of a "developing country". Being "developed" implies reaching the end of the road, whereas "developing" suggests a commitment to self-transformation and reform. The United States must recover its heritage of engineering to avoid being overrun commercially or militarily by China's expanding industrial base. Ultimately, the American commitment to pluralism and individual rights provides the potential for course correction, provided the nation can regain the urgency to build in the physical world.

Analogy: The current state of the two superpowers is like two different types of shipbuilders. China is the Ironclad Constructor, obsessed with the hull's thickness and the engine's raw power, but so fearful of mutiny that the crew is kept in chains and forbidden from speaking. The United States is the Committee Architect, possessing the most brilliant navigational charts and a free-thinking crew, but the ship never leaves the dry dock because every single sailor has the legal power to sue the captain to stop the anchor from being raised. For either to succeed, the Ironclad must learn to trust its crew, and the Committee must learn to finally let the ship sail.