In this comment, I quoted from Dan Wang’s piece in The Atlantic, A Nation of Lawyers Confronts China’s Engineering State. There is more from this guy, and not only from him, so I present you three YouTube videos, two of them with full transcripts as separate articles. China, our nemesis, is a very special construct.

New York Times’s Ross Douthat meets Dan Wang

A 63-minute video posted on Sept. 4: Does the Future Belong to China? | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat:

Is the United States still a worthy opponent for China? In this episode, Ross Douthat talks to Dan Wang, the author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” about the alarming speed at which China is able to build and could blow America out of the water.

01:08 – “A life full of ease and beauty”
05:16 – Rule by engineers
10:34 – China’s Technological Mastery
15:36 – Is autocracy driving innovation?
24:44 – What are the real stakes of the competition?
35:14 – How could China fail?
51:29 – Advice for America

Read the full transcript here: This Is Why America Is Losing to China (barrier-free).

🟡 Selected comments from YT:

  • Dan Wang’s argument is solid. I have been making complementary cases since 2005 or so. As an American with a MSEE who worked first in Shanghai in 1996/1997 and then lived and worked in China from 2004 to 2013 and recently spent a month traveling Western China in 2024, I could provide multiple alternate logics, with hundreds of anecdotes.
    The bigger vulnerability we in the U.S. are facing is not coming from the outside (e.g., China), but from the choices we’ve made at home. Things like de-industrialization, tech dependence, and crumbling infrastructure did not come from China; they came from decades of U.S. policy that prioritized short-term profit over long-term resilience. We shifted production overseas, opened the door to cheap labor markets, and helped accelerate China’s growth, not because they forced us to, but because it served corporate interests. Sometimes the threat is the system we’ve built and accepted for too long, and not external scapegoats.
  • One domestic element that is sure to play a role, hyper-partisan politics. You now have a ping pong policy schedule that cannot live beyond 4 or 2 years. There is almost zero planning for long term goals.
  • It should be noted that the policies that supported and promoted the deindustrialization were bipartisan, as is the scapegoating of China now. In September 2024 HR1157 was passed with an overwhelming bipartisan majority authorizing the expenditure of $1.6 billion to promote the dissemination of negative news stories about China in the national and international media.
  • Russ is trapped by his ideology. At the one-hour mark, his guest finally told him to stop thinking in political science terms.
  • The fundamental difference between an engineering society and a lawyerly society:
    Engineers see a problem and try to solve it.
    Lawyers see a problem and try to place blame on another party so as to avoid blame to their clients.
    Engineers see a problem and use clear, concise language to identify and solve that problem.
    Lawyers use language as a weapon to confuse and exclude the common person from understanding the issue this requiring the retaining of a lawyer to do anything.
  • As a political science student, an obvious difference between Chinese and US polo-sci curriculum is that the US focuses on procedural justice while the Chinese focuses on policymaking. People joke that politics in China should be renamed to policy, and I think that is a good representation of the different mindsets of thinking between US/Chinese political systems.
  • I am working in an engineer company. And I can tell, it’s not necessary about engineer or lawyer, it’s more about culture, morals and values. This is what is bringing about the rot in Western nations.
  • What he said in the last few seconds was so obvious to me, and I am glad he said it: the political science terms of autocracy or democracy are not relevant in the China/US competition. Apart from the fact that China is not an autocracy, what matters is governments that deliver security, education, and overall wellbeing to its people. The failings of Western democracies and political economies helped the rise of China abroad (due overwhelmingly though to the Chinese hard/smart work) and created unjust and polarized societies at home. Consider India, which is supposedly a democracy, with a population that is greater than that of China’s. Still, the Chinese economy is 5 times the size of the Indian economy. Matter of fact, using PPP (which is the more accurate measure) the Chinese economy is even bigger than the US economy.
  • No matter what the Western Imperialists will say, it is increasingly obvious that Asia and Africa are the future while Europe and the US are the past.
  • My first time in China was 3 months in 2002 in Guyiang Guzhou, I returned 2 years later and spent a 1 1/2 more years there. Moved to Chengdu in 2006 lived there for 20 years and have now moved to Guangzhou. Dan Wang summaries the China I have been privileged to live in during these momentous times with grace and accuracy — I look forward to reading his book. Thanks for this interview, it was very interesting and unlike many recent interviews left me feeling hopeful for a change.

🟢 Selected bits from the transcript (the transcription errors seen in the video have been corrected in the NYT article):

● Douthat: We’re going to talk about the Chinese model and how it compares to the American model — strengths, weaknesses, conflict, coexistence. But I want to start by talking about your own experience.

You were in China from 2017 through 2023. You were a technology analyst, you were a writer, you wrote an annual letter about what you saw in China and you traveled a lot.

So I want you to start by telling us a story or giving us an image or a place that you visited or saw or experienced that you looked at and it made you think: The 21st century is going to belong to China.

■ Wang: Here’s a vision from 2021. In the summer of 2021, China’s borders were closed because of Covid and I was living in China’s richest city, Shanghai.

My life was full of ease and full of beauty. You are never very far away from a subway station. They’re constantly expanding their subway stations. Shanghai had about 500 parks in 2020, and by the end of 2025 the city government declared that it will have about a thousand parks.

It has all of the big skyscrapers that are so iconic in China. But below these skyscrapers, you also have a lot of these wonderful noodle shops and dumpling shops that I love to frequent.

So Shanghai is a highly functional city. I would say much more functional than New York City.

…

China’s fourth-poorest province, I was surprised to see, had much better levels of infrastructure than one could find in much wealthier places in the United States, like New York State or California.

We saw very tall bridges all around us. We saw a guitar-making hub. We saw a lot of fancy new roads that were a cyclist’s dream. And it was only afterward when I realized how bizarre it was that China’s fourth-poorest province — about the level of G.D.P. per capita of Botswana, much less than Shanghai or Guangdong — was able to build all of these things.

It is a province with 11 airports, 50 of the highest bridges in the world and brand-new, spiffy highways — and that’s because China was just building a lot in its equivalent of a South Dakota or West Virginia.

● Douthat: So your experience was basically like being in the New York of China and finding it more pleasant and beautiful and civilized than our New York, and then going out to China’s West Virginia and discovering that it had far better infrastructure than the richest American states?

■ Wang: That’s right. The cities in China are, I would say, quite a bit better than the cities in the U.S. Here in New York, we have these subway lines that are screamingly loud. Have you ever heard these metallic screeches once you’re in the subway stations?

…

● Douthat: So China builds and the U.S. doesn’t, and one of your arguments is that this reflects a fundamental difference in our elites and who rules our respective societies. China is a society of engineers: It’s ruled by engineers; the Communist Party is filled with engineers. And America is a society of lawyers.

What does rule by engineers mean, and what can it achieve that is harder to achieve in the United States?

■ Wang: My framing of China is as an engineering state because since the 1980s, then top leader Deng Xiaoping started promoting a lot of engineers into China’s leadership, really as a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years.

Mao was a romantic. He was a poet who inflicted all sorts of strange disasters on the Chinese population.

Deng Xiaoping took a look at what was wrong with China under Mao, and Deng said that what we need is a highly efficient technocracy. Technocrats at the time meant engineers, mostly trained in the Soviet style of heavy industry.

The Chinese were civil engineers. They were mechanical engineers. They were all sorts of electrical engineers that Deng Xiaoping promoted into the highest ranks of the Communist Party. By the year 2002, all nine members of the standing committee of the Politburo had degrees in engineering.

I contrast that with the lawyerly society of the United States. And what’s really striking about the U.S. is that the founding documents of the Declaration of Independence read almost like a legal argument. Most of the founding fathers were lawyers. And so that’s the kind of contrast that I set up, that China is an engineering state trying to build its way out of every problem.

The U.S. is a lawyerly society that is really good at stopping a lot of things. What that means is that the U.S. doesn’t have functional infrastructure almost anywhere, I would say. And it also doesn’t have these stupid ideas like the one-child policy either.

● Douthat: Talk a little bit more about how engineers see the world.

■ Wang: Something that engineers do is not only construct a lot of bridges and subway systems and highways and nuclear plants and coal plants in highly rational ways; they are also very intent on treating the economy as if it were a vast hydraulic system made up of a series of valves.

Part of what I have seen living in China was that Xi Jinping in the years 2020 to roughly 2022 decided that the economy was just something that could be pushed around as well.

He engineered a property crackdown to reduce the leverage of state-owned enterprises in terms of housing development. He also very dramatically re-engineered a lot of the online tech sector, as well.

There was a series of thunderclaps that Xi issued against major Chinese companies that included Alibaba, an e-commerce company; Didi, which was a ride-hailing company; the entirety of the online education sector. And Xi and the rest of the Politburo essentially wiped out about a trillion dollars from China’s stock market back then.

I think part of that was trying to funnel China’s best and brightest — the people graduating from the top universities — away from building cryptocurrencies or consumer tech and hedge funds into building industries that are more critical to strategic needs, something like semiconductors, aviation or chemistry instead.

What Xi Jinping really tried to do was to engineer the economy in a way so that the Communist Party achieves some vision of success.

● Douthat: What you just described in terms of the Communist Party’s view of what had gone wrong with the tech sector is a view widely shared in the United States, including by people deeply involved, as you know, in Silicon Valley itself.

The idea that at a certain point Silicon Valley just became a machine for generating new apps and ride sharing and getting people’s DoorDash deliveries there as fast as possible — but lost any direct connection to building rockets and flying cars and new infrastructure and making other kinds of breakthroughs.

But the American assumption is that when capitalism goes wrong, the solution has to be some kind of deregulation. You can’t just have someone sitting in Washington, D.C., say: OK, Silicon Valley, too many ride-share apps. We’re going to turn the dial and we’re going to develop more self-driving cars and high-speed rail. Or something like that.

Part of the argument you present in the book is that over the last 10 or 15 years, China has actually succeeded in turning its dials in ways that are generating cutting-edge breakthroughs, cutting-edge research and technological mastery.

So talk a little bit about what you see as that achievement.

■ Wang: I think China has achieved a pretty high level of technological mastery.

I moved to China at the start of 2017, in large part to study a major industrial plan that the state council had announced, called Made in China 2025. This was a grand, ambitious plan, one of a series of plans from the Communist Party, declaring that China really needs to master these industries of the future.

That included clean technologies, electric vehicles, maritime technologies, agricultural equipment, whatever you want to name. It is listed somewhere in these plans — sometimes with exquisite percentagesof exactly how much Chinese industries need to be as a share of the global total.

I think we can clearly see now that China is a leader in electric vehicles. It is a leader in all sorts of industrial robotics. China has a complete chokehold on the solar industry. China owns about 90 percent of this industry. If you take a look at rare earth magnets, which caused a lot of grief to the Trump administration earlier this year when it was trying to prosecute the trade war, China has about 90 percent of the processing for these goods.

And if we take a look at a lot of manufactured goods, segment by segment, we’ll see that China owns about 35 percent of global manufacturing value-add. And if we take a look at a couple of these particularly high-end technologies — almost everything aside from semiconductors and aviation, which are big Chinese weaknesses — China is becoming really strong in most advanced technologies.

Now, I wonder to what extent this is the result of government planning. I would certainly not say that this was some genius demonstration of spectacular central planning from Beijing that got China to where it is today.

Sometimes China is able to produce these successes out of some degree of government policy. But just as often, whenever we can take a look at these examples, we can find other examples in which government policy produced only waste and scams and fraud — and to some degree overcapacity, as well.

I would situate China’s success mostly on the level of its fiercely dynamic entrepreneurs.

You can have capitalist competition. I would say far more cutthroat than what we would see in the U.S.

● Douthat: Why is that?

■ Wang: It starts with the scale of the country. I remember visiting a company that had already grown a little bit large. It was called Meituan, which is now one of these big Chinese online platform companies.

And Meituan said that we survived after being one of 5,000 clones of Groupon in China. They simply cloned the Groupon idea and out of this battle royal they managed to brawl it out with everyone else. And they were the only ones left standing.

If we take a look at a lot of these other industries that China completely dominates — solar, for example; China completely owns this industry — the solar industry has collapsed in prices. I think the figure is something like a 94 percent drop in prices since the year 2000.

That is in large part of what Chinese companies have done in making the processes better and making the panels themselves more efficient. But what has been a national strategic success for the government, as well as producing a lot of consumer benefits, has entailed absolutely miserable competition for these companies and absolutely miserable returns for their investors.

In a sense, I think this is what socialism with Chinese characteristics means: The state wins; consumers win. But it is actually pretty rough for any of these companies out there.

…

I think what matters a lot for innovation is simply the funding.

Sometimes they really care about free speech. Sometimes they care about creative expression. But for many of them, they’re able to make breakthroughs if you just give them a really big lab.

● Douthat: But what about the argument that says authoritarian and autocratic models can be really good at driving production and innovation in areas where there is low-hanging fruit? Clearly a lot of what China has done technologically is a catch-up where you are essentially taking a Western product or a Western innovation and perfecting it, figuring out mass production, doing these kinds of things.

But when it comes to discovery, figuring out what the new thing is — the thing that you can’t centrally plan — American democratic capitalism tends to be better. Liberal societies tend to be more successful.

By the 1970s, the Soviet Union was not doing anything substantially cutting-edge. The space program was amazing for a while, and then it wasn’t. The economy grew quickly, and then it didn’t.

So what is the case that China has escaped that kind of trap? That it’s not just catching up, but that it is actually going beyond what liberal and democratic societies are achieving technologically?

■ Wang: I’m not sure that this is a really big trap because I think that the U.S. is really good at making these sorts of discoveries, but the U.S. also is very significantly unable to actually follow through with building industries out of these discoveries.

Bell Labs invented this great new scientific project in the solar industry in 1954. It remained for the most part a scientific project until the Germans developed it into a much bigger industry throughout the 2000s.

And subsequently, all of the Chinese firms were able to copy the German expertise, and they completely overran the industry such that the Germans and the Americans barely have a strong solar industry anymore, even after quite a lot of tariffs and protection.

I think this dichotomy of innovation and production is at best blurry, because I’ve seen too many examples of the Chinese simply building up an industry accretively, step-by-step trying to perfect an industry such that you get to a whole new industry by the time that they really perfect it. The Chinese are much better at climbing the ladders that the Americans have placed.

…

I think that the first and most important part of China’s technological success has to do with something I call process knowledge.

Process knowledge is also known as tacit knowledge, also known as industrial expertise. In a kitchen analogy, it is something like the recipe, and the hardware is something like the stoves and the pots and the pans.

But let’s say, Ross, we give someone who’s never cooked a day in his life the most well-equipped kitchen, as well as the most exquisitely detailed recipe. Are we sure that this person will be able to do something as simple as frying an egg for breakfast?

I’m not sure if that person will burn the kitchen down in some big way.

● Douthat: My children have often given evidence for that hypothesis.

■ Wang: Yes. And I think the crucial part of technology is actually all of this tacit knowledge, process knowledge that we can’t really write down.

That is the core part of what has been driving China’s technological advantage. It started when China started making pretty simple things — socks, T-shirts, all these things that we think and know are not terribly important — before they get to slightly more complex things, like shoes.

Then they get to everything that now includes iPhones and electric vehicle batteries, and they are really good at climbing this ladder.

China’s hardware capital, Shenzhen, was mostly a backwater — making textiles all the way up until 2008, when Shenzhen started producing Steve Jobs’s iPhones.

…

And I think that is really the basis of China’s technology advantage: It’s just these gigantic investments and work force.

…

I think the crucial mistake in the U.S. was that it wasn’t even a choice that the U.S. made to outsource a lot of manufacturing. Now, there is this line that politicians like to trot out that China stole all the jobs — and sure, that’s one framing of it.

But I think a more accurate framing is that since the 1990s, big American manufacturers had been actively moving their production to China, and the U.S. government did almost nothing to restrain them.

I’m not sure whether that was actually a really deliberate choice plotted out by the Council of Economic Advisers advising Bill Clinton. Maybe it was, but I think this was just a process of business lobbying saying: Well, we need to tap into this market and produce at these cheaper places.

And something that the Communist Party actively decided was that they were going to import big American manufacturers in the 1990s and 2000s, Apple, Tesla.

If they want to build their products here, we are going to completely welcome Steve Jobs and Elon Musk to train our workers and make them as good as they can be.

That was a more conscious decision, I think, made by engineers who realized they had to catch up to the global frontier. They couldn’t do it with China’s existing level of technology, and they were going to have Americans help them.

…

I think you’re absolutely right that America is highly dynamic, and I don’t want to count out America in this stage of competition. I think at various points the U.S. will look weak. At various points it will look strong.

But what are the stakes here? Because I think there is still a broad view in the U.S. that deindustrialization has been pretty bad — not just for regions like Pennsylvania or Michigan, where the deindustrialization has been felt pretty badly.

There’s also a pretty clear loss of manufacturing expertise that is represented in the declining fortunes of American apex manufacturers. Companies like Intel, Boeing, Detroit automakers and now, increasingly, Tesla.

They’ve had mostly bad news over the last few quarters, last few years. In the case of Detroit, the last few decades. Apex manufacturers are not working very well.

If we take a look at the early days of the Covid pandemic, the U.S. manufacturers were not very good at making simple products either — necessary products, like cotton swabs and cotton masks. And they weren’t able to really rejig their supply lines in order to build out critical materials.

If we take a look at the U.S. defense industrial base, after the U.S. shipped a lot of munitions to Ukraine for its self-defense against Russia, the U.S. hasn’t really been able to rebuild its munition stockpiles.

If we take a look at naval ships with the U.S. Navy, every class of ships is now behind schedule.

…

I wonder whether services are going to be able to absorb even more of the U.S. work force. Right now, about 11 percent of the American work force works in manufacturing; much of the rest is in services.

Can the U.S. be a great power if a lot more people are working in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, in Wall Street, in health care, in consulting? Is that even a likely scenario? If we have a lot of people in Silicon Valley trying to produce artificial intelligence, that is going to make it much more difficult, I think, for entry-level people to find jobs in a lot of these service-, knowledge-based sectors.

So I’m not very optimistic that very many people will be able to manufacture in the U.S., but I think there are also strong limits on how much services can absorb, and this is where the economics make me nervous.

…

● Douthat: … How could China, how could this model fail? What do engineers get wrong?

■ Wang: Engineers are meddling extensively in the economy. And maybe we will wake up and find one day that central planning is a ginormous failure and the Chinese will not be able to fundamentally overcome these contradictions in the model of state capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

That is a potential scenario in which the extensive meddling that has scared the living daylights out of a lot of venture capital investors in China, as well as a lot of entrepreneurs who would really prefer not to suffer through a lot of the edicts of the Politburo — they decide to not contribute so much to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.

I think that a lot of people have been pretty extensively burned out by the mistakes and some of the foibles of the Communist Party. A lot of what I have seen is that many young Chinese are willing to take leave of the great rejuvenation that is conducted in their name.

We have a lot of data on Chinese entrepreneurs, a lot of wealthy Chinese people who would much rather live their lives in Chinese communities like Irvine, Calif., by buying some property and just having their businesses be established in Singapore, and still not really quite trusting the Communist Party to respect everything that they want to do.

Young Chinese creative types are interested in smoking dope, just as young California types may be. They are smoking dope in Chiang Mai. I’ve spent a little bit of time seeing these people who are just as into marijuana, as well as cryptocurrencies, as folks are in Silicon Valley.

We also see a lot of Chinese migrants who are not necessarily rich, who are not necessarily the creative types, dare to fly to Ecuador, which has been visa-free for a period of time to the Chinese, and try to walk across the Darién Gap — a perilous journey to cross to the southwestern border of the United States.

At its peak in 2024, the U.S. was apprehending something like 30,000 to 40,000 Chinese who were trying to cross over into Texas. It still blows my mind that many people would try to do that to escape the regime.

…

If we take a look at the wealthy, the rich, the politically connected: Still, many Communist Party senior members have their kids in the U.S. or the U.K., somewhere abroad, because they’re not quite sure if they’re going to be purged.

There is something peculiarly precarious about authoritarian regimes where if you’re a rich person, let’s say in Beijing, you might be working in the financial industry. And last year the Communist Party declared that there was going to be a salary cap of $400,000 for people working in finance.

And you may have to give some of your money back to the state if you’ve been earning more than that. Or if you are a part of the party elite or part of the military elite and your patron is purged for corruption, the entire network falls away.

You could be a creative person working as a journalist in China. There are still many creative journalists in China who have their pieces, their essays, their reporting completely censored by the state. And after this happens a few times, a lot of people get quite mad and they move to a place like New York.

…

● Douthat: Let’s also talk about not just how an engineering society can feel oppressive, but also how it can actively fail. …

There is a kind of a problem of overbuilding, of building for building’s sake. …

China’s engineers looked around in the 1970s and ’80s and said: Our population is growing exponentially. We need the one-child policy. We need to impose low birthrates.

And having imposed low birthrates in an incredibly brutal way, it turned out to be very hard to turn higher birthrates back on.

So, looking at those two problems, I feel like you can see a future in China where China in 2050, 2070 — more 2070 maybe than 2050 — isn’t this self-sufficient, dynamic, Asia-dominating empire, but it’s a society of ghost cities with no children that are monuments to engineering’s failure. Talk about those scenarios.

■ Wang: Yeah. Well, let’s consider physical engineering as well as social engineering. I would say that for the most part, physical engineering is still overwhelmingly positive for China, though you have these bridges to nowhere. Guizhou is heavily, heavily indebted. The local government has a problem paying back the bonds to build these bridges. And there’s not only a financial cost; there’s an environmental cost in which you’re pouring a lot of carbon-intensive cement for essentially nothing.

There is also a human displacement cost because a lot of people have been moved out to places that they’re not very familiar with, especially for building hydroelectric dams. But I would say that’s something that’s maybe an 80 percent positive, 20 percent negative. That ratio might change over time.

But I think physical dynamism is a good thing, and I would say that the United States needs a lot more of this.

I would assign completely the opposite ratio on social engineering. Because the fundamental problem of China — the most fundamental problem with the engineering state — is that they cannot restrain themselves from being only physical engineers.

They have to also get into social engineering because they view the population as just another building material, as if it could be remolded and torn down at their pleasure.

Thank you for picking up the one-child-policy chapter of my book. That was unexpectedly my favorite chapter to write. The one-child policy, the peak of it was mostly throughout the 1980s.

This was before I was born; I was born in 1992. My parents were both college-educated urbanites in the southwestern province of Yunnan, where there wasn’t very high birthrates in the cities already. Dredging through the history of the brutality of the one-child policy, it sounded quite scientific at the time and sounds quite rational — you know, it’s just a number out there.

But it was accomplished with the most brutal means of forced sterilizations, forced abortions that were meted out to mostly people in the countryside in what I described as a campaign of rural terror against overwhelmingly female bodies.

…

I think that the Chinese government is now realizing that it cannot turn the dial back up. It is trying to engineer the population again to try to encourage people to have children. So far, it’s finding that it’s much easier to prevent births with sterilizations and abortions rather than to coerce copulation.

● Douthat: Do you think there’s any scenario where discontent with that mode — social engineering, authoritarian means and so on — actually someday leads to a political revolution in China? Because this conversation has been taken for granted, as a lot of people do know that the Chinese regime is stable, that the idea of liberalization and democratization was sort of a fantasy.

Is there any future where that’s wrong, and where China in 2050 or 2060 has experienced some kind of democratic revolution?

■ Wang: My view is that the regime is still broadly stable in spite of these traumas that it has inflicted on the population.

The one-child policy is not even discussed much these days. I think a lot of this trauma has faded for a lot of people.

● Douthat: But there was — not at the same scale — but there was trauma under the “zero Covid” policy, too. And that’s fresh in people’s memories. …

■ Wang: Yes. You’re absolutely right that “zero Covid” produced a lot of trauma. I was living in Shanghai, and Shanghai is the city that suffered probably the greatest lockdown ever attempted in the history of humanity — 25 million people were unable to step foot outside of their apartment compounds for about eight to 10 weeks in the spring of 2022.

…

Shanghai had no way to organize logistical deliveries of food to 25 million people when most of the city should have been in lockdown and they didn’t want to spread the virus.

So this was a very traumatic time. And I think it is no surprise that Shanghai had this sort of protest culture that you mentioned.

…

There were police everywhere, as well as a lot of people milling about, waiting for something to happen. The night before, people were — we have videos of this — chanting, “Down with the Communist Party, down with Xi Jinping,” which was completely absurd. I would not have been able to believe something like this could have happened.

But after the collapse of “zero Covid,” if you go to Shanghai right now — the last time I went was in December of 2024 — people have drunk away a lot of their sorrows. If we take a look at Ürümqi Road today, it is still full of cocktail bars. People would rather forget about this terrible experience and see no profit in dredging it back up again.

…

● Douthat: Let’s end with advice for the United States. What are the actual implications of your analysis — and especially the bull’s case that we started with, the Chinese century case for what the U.S. should do right now? What should we be doing differently if China is poised to be as powerful as you think it might be?

■ Wang: I think that the U.S. should first and foremost rebuild its manufacturing base. That follows quite naturally from a lot of my analysis of China’s greatest strength, which is that China is a manufacturing superpower and China is poised to further deindustrialize Europe and it is poised to further deindustrialize the United States as well.

I am skeptical that President Trump’s efforts to reindustrialize America through the tariffs have been very effective. I am more positive about the Biden administration’s policies on efforts to reshore through industrial policy. But we can still see a lot of flaws with that approach as well.

…

Europe right now is adrift — caught between the Chinese, who have waged a far more successful trade war against German automakers, as well as the Americans, with their much stronger service industries.

I feel very much that a lot of regions and countries are going to be caught adrift by these two big powers, that Europe is going to be deindustrialized. It’s going to have much more competition in the services.

Right-wing populist parties in Europe are outpolling their incumbents’ ruling parties pretty much everywhere, and as the economics get worse, I don’t think that the politics will get better.

So I fear this for the United States as well — as the economics get worse in some ways, as you mentioned, the U.S. might actually be poor in some meaningful way. This is what I’m really nervous about for the West.

🔴 Selections from the comments in the NYT:

● John, VA: My wife and I visited China 4 months ago. Make no mistake about it. China is ahead of US. I made a post on here about US using AI, robots and automation to get back in the manufacturing game and people on these chats complained about “the loss of jobs”. These folks have no understanding of what is going on. The world is headed for another Industrial Revolution, and if we don’t update our processes and get back in the manufacturing game we are DEAD! People better wake up, read and understand that it is incumbent upon those who will lose their jobs to retrain themselves for something new.

China plans to have men on the moon in 2030. The US wants to get there first (once again). Well, good luck to US. We don’t have the money or the engineers to do this. Dan Wang is right. Our nation is ruled by lawyers… and they don’t have a clue as to what the future holds. May God bless our souls.

● Fajita, NY: The future belongs to China largely because the U.S. has squandered it and continues to do so. We spent the last 80 years of the “post-war” era starting new wars, invading, occupying, overthrowing more foreign countries than any regime on earth, needlessly killing millions of innocent people and spending trillions of dollars to sustain an immoral empire. China, for all its flaws, hasn’t done that, and they prioritized lifting their people out of poverty–a mixed record, if you look at the totality of it, with many controversies. But they, at some point, corrected their mistakes and it’s paying dividends for them now and proven much better than out method of brutalizing the world to exploit its resources. We deserve to lose, practically and spiritually.

● St. Trumpus, Texas: We have an uneducated and uninformed/misinformed electorate. A democracy that elects Donald Trump has President (twice!) cannot hope to maintain world leadership. The chickens are coming home to roost now. We have an anti-vaxxer as head of HHS; we have a state that is allowing parents to send their unvaccinated kids into the world; we have alienated all of our traditional allies; we’re imposing tariffs, not based on economic reasons, but because Trump doesn’t like the fact that Bolsonaro is being prosecuted by Brazil (50% tariff) and is upset because India won’t nominated him for a Nobel (50% tariff). We have a President who attacks higher learning and forces university presidents to resign, and who is carrying out a cruel deportation policy that only hurts the United States. Under these circumstances, China would have to implode in order to avoid becoming the world’s dominant superpower.

● Olympus View: In the world today, top-down decision-making is insufficient for success. What is needed in top-down implementation. The US, and most Western countries, are tied down with process, not with results. The fragmentation of responsibility creates lack of motivation to get things done quickly and within budget.

A well-known example is the success that China had in building a high-speed railway between Beijing and Shanghai in three years. The LA-SF railway, started in the same year, almost two decades ago, doesn’t have an inch of useful track as yet. The problem isn’t “democracy,” but the way in which it is practised. “The clock is ticking” should be the concept to apply to all aspects of government. It works in business.

● John, VA: My wife and I visited China 4 months ago. Shanghai, for example, looked like a city out of the year 2100! Like something out of Blade Runner. There were full motion pictures, 40 feet high, on buildings. There were lights everywhere. The subways were futuristic! … and clean and beautiful. Our NYC subways, by comparison, are an abomination!

Make no mistake about it. China is winning. Our infrastructure is an embarrassment. China plans to have men on the moon by 2030. For US to even suggest we will do the same is laughable. We have neither the money nor the engineers. We better wake up! And fast!!

● Duncan Connall, Massachusetts: This reminds me of the confrontation between the UK and the US. In the early 1800s the UK was an industrial super power, as well as having the largest empire. It bested its natural rivals such as Spain, France and Germany, but eventually lost its status as a world power to the US. Much of the US great industrial power was “borrowed” from the UK in the 19th and 20th centuries, just like China’s has been from the US (and Europe) in the 21st.

There may be lessons from the UK decline that are worth studying in the confrontation US v China.

● Bob, NYC: Here is the key sentence:

“In a sense, I think this is what socialism with Chinese characteristics means: The state wins; consumers win. But it is actually pretty rough for any of these companies out there.”

In other words, China is not ruled by engineers. It is ruled by Communists with engineering degrees. The US is not ruled by lawyers. It is ruled by capitalists who are (for the most part) Republicans and conservatives. These people make sure that the capitalists, not the consumer, not the country, always wins. And yes, their lawyers play a big role in this debacle. But that is not what is driving the difference.

● Walter Reisner, Montreal: China’s problem has always been that during periods of sustained innovation and growth its authoritarian leadership eventually views the emerging entrepreneurial classes and technologies as a threat and shuts them down. Historians have famously argued that this is why the industrial/scientific revolution happened in Europe, not China, because power was too decentralized in Europe for one leader to dominate and halt progress. I would have said that the US would never face such a scenario, but evidently this is what Trump is doing, shutting down sources of innovation/excellence in the US (e.g. health research, natural science, clean energy) because he views them as political threat. The question, which is still to be decided, is whether power in the US is sufficiently decentralized to resist.

● smartypants, NJ: The U.S. has always depended on importing foreign talents to maintain a competitive edge, lacking any realistic possibility of home grown. And the white-nationalists are succeeding at putting an end to it, Meanwhile China has abundant home grown talent.

● Critical Thinker, CA: Xi promotes science and research, while Trump shutters US scientific agencies and fires thousands of America’s brightest scientific minds. Trumps is allowing long-defeated diseases in the US to have free reign to 340 million potential victims. Xi will vaccinate 1.2 billion Chinese to ensure that never happens, and he won’t be influenced by unschooled lunatics whose guts tell them what’s right and wrong scientifically.

There’s no coming back for the US from this colossal mistake, ever. The US decline is permanent, and I think it’s fair to say the Chinese have already won the future by investing in that which Trump has ignorantly rejected. The pseudo-religious half of Americans cheered Trump on while he allowed junk science to become US policy. While they’ll be the first to suffer, that will be cold comfort for the rest of us. China 1, US 0.

● Deutschmann: Thanks to Trump’s tariff insanity and his war against our allies and reality, the present belongs to China.

● Shaun Narine, Canada: I’m a keen observer of China, too, and I believe that the game is long over. For China to fail now, the CPC would need to show a level of incompetence that he has not displayed for the past 30 years. China is a bigger economy than the US, it has an exponentially more competent government, it leads in most cutting edge technologies, it is the world’s only manufacturing superpower, it graduates more STEM students than the rest of the world combined, it has proven to be remarkably innovative and future-oriented. Even the constant Western focus on China’s real estate bubble popping misses the point that China’s real estate/rent is affordable, greatly improving the lives of its people. At the same time that China is surging ahead in renewable energy and electriying its economy, the US is run by a man-baby who is actively attacking renewables and throwing tantrums. He has surrounded himself with grossly incompetent individuals who are selected more for their mindless loyalty than any ability. The game is already over. The real question is “will the US accept this fait accompli?” or will it blow up the world in a desperate bid to regain its lost glory?

● John Rager, Montreal: The global tariffs that Trump is using is isolating the USA from most if not all other countries especially former allies and trade partners. China is investing in other countries and quite predictably its influence is growing.

● Gustav, Colorado: Teamwork, pooling resources both financial and intellectual, makes a society stronger. This is not the extreme form of communism the fearmongers on Wall Street keep warning about.

Since Reagan we’ve failed in every aspect of society except making corporations and billionaires more wealthy.

Novara Media talked even more with Dan Wang

I have to admit I haven’t watched this video yet because it’s 2 hours long! Expert Reveals The Stunning SECRETS Behind China’s Economic Rise | Aaron Bastani Meets Dan Wang.

Dan Wang is a technology analyst and author whose life experience, spent partly in North America, partly in China, sets him up as an authoritative observer of the differences and similarities between the American and Chinese empires.

In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Wang shares his thesis that elite overproduction of engineers in China, and lawyers in America, can explain the traits of each empire as they face down the 21st century, from high speed rail and housing, to lockdown policy and manufacturing strategy.

Why has China been able to roll out high speed rail while America hasn’t? Why does so much of the anglophone world appear to be living in the ruins of industrial society? How did the one child policy come into being and has there been any reparation for the atrocities committed in its name? And is China today fundamentally left or right wing?

00:00 Intro
02:37 China’s Technological Rise
11:06 The Engineering State and the Lawyerly Society
21:46 Militarism and Technology
27:13 Case Study: High Speed Rail
34:03 The Post Industrial Ruin of the Anglophone World
43:20 Is China Left or Right Wing?
58:40 The Importance of Renewing Practical Knowledge
01:06:15 The Problems with the Engineering State
01:18:25 The One Child Policy
01:32:11 Zero-Covid and its Failings
01:40:54 Renewables
01:47:11 Microprocessors
01:56:04 What Happens if China Invades Taiwan?

I selected some negative comments:

  • Wang gets another thing wrong. The infanticide of girls and abandonment of them was not a government policy but a result of traditional male preference, particularly in rural areas. I would note that my own childhood in Shanghai in the 1960-1970s and my wife’s in the 1970-1980s rural Anhui province was one of poverty and hunger, and the population explosion in the 1970s was a problem with no simple solutions. The application of the policy was always more strict in cities, because they had more demand for food and less production of it. Was the one-child policy wrong? Probably yes. Was the implementation of it wrong-headed and cruel? Definitely yes. But let me give Mr Wang some perspective on Mr Xi: he’s is one of the officials that recognized the folly of the policy, initiated relaxation and abandonment of it, and initiated more effective poverty reduction measures to solve the real problems. Xi was sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and worked his way up from there. Honestly, you do not understand Xi and what he has accomplished. Suggest to study more.
  • I listened for 1 hr and realized that these guys understand neither China nor the West.
  • Same here. At first I thought he would be knowledgeable because he worked for Gavekal (I really think Louis Vincent Gave is a good economist and bridge between the West and China) but turns out that this man (Wang Dan not “Dan Wang”) is the typical “left China for the West” kind of Chinese (even though he grew up in the West not China). Thought I would be listening to Jin Keyu-esque economist but then I had wasted my time…
  • Also as an actual Electrical Engineer by training, I can say that this guy has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to engineering solutions. The problem with US and UK is deliberate de-industrialization by its financial elite. You can’t retain engineering knowledge if your industry disappeared and shipped overseas.
  • After 3 minutes, I stopped watching it.
  • The ‘Chinese’ guest literally knows nothing about China.

Enter Zhang Weiwei

Wikipedia:

Zhang Weiwei is a Chinese professor of international relations at Fudan University and the director of its China Institute. Zhang is also an Internet celebrity, spreading his political ideas through online video platforms such as Xigua Video, Bilibili, TikTok and YouTube.

Zhang is a strong defender of China’s political and economic system. Therefore, he is favored by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Some of his political views, such as the “Superiority of the China Model” and the One Belt One Road is “an unprecedented change in five thousand years”, have been criticized by scholars such as Xiang Lanxin for not being in line with historical facts.

In 1975, at the age of 17, he was recruited into the No.2 Shanghai Carving Factory as a worker and jade carving apprentice.

Soon after, the college entrance examinations resumed with the end of the Cultural Revolution, and in 1977 Zhang was admitted to the foreign languages department of Fudan University, where he persuaded the dean to sit in on courses in international politics. From 1981 to 1983, Zhang was a postgraduate student at Beijing Foreign Studies University, studying translation.

In 1988, Zhang went to the University of Geneva-affiliated Graduate Institute of International Studies for a master’s degree in international relations (1990) and then pursued a PhD, which he received in 1994.

From 1983 to 1988, Zhang was one of many English interpreters of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, worked for some Chinese leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, in the mid-1980s.

Zhang has written extensively in English and Chinese on People’s Republic of China’s economic and political reform, China’s development model and comparative politics. Zhang is among the major proponents of a “Chinese model”, which he defines as a blend of a planned economy with market mechanisms and a top-down governance structure complemented by some grassroots electoral participation.

Zhang emphasizes what he sees as the unique features of China’s political practices and culture. He encourages Chinese to develop “self-confidence” in these areas and to “no longer be subservient to the Western discourse.” According to Zhang, Chinese should be more vocal in praising their country’s system and its benefits tell China’s story with pride in order to increase its discourse power.

Zhang describes the Western system as having its own merits and defects, “but its systemic defects now start to eat away its strengths”. Zhang criticizes Western liberal democracy. He promotes the idea of Chinese socialist democracy, which he describes as a combination of “selective democracy” and electoral democracy. Zhang’s view is that Chinese socialist democracy outperforms “Western procedural democracy” because the Western approach is insufficient to choose trustworthy leaders and the Chinese approach is more meritocratic. Zhang also points to China’s long-term stability and economic growth as further evidence of what he believes is the superiority of its system.

Zhang believes that “good governance” should be the main standard for evaluating political systems rather than their normative underpinnings.

According to Zhang, the concept of political party in the Western context does not apply to the CCP. The CCP is a ruling group that follows Chinese political traditions and represents the interests of a nation as a whole.

On May 17, 2016, Zhang attended the National Symposium on the Work of Philosophy and Social Sciences chaired by CCP general secretary Xi Jinping. On May 31, 2021, Zhang gave a lecture to the Politburo of the CCP on strengthening China’s international propaganda.

So, through Zhang Weiwei, it’s like Xi Jinping himself would be speaking, right?

Here’s the 30-minute video: How does China’s system really work? This famous Chinese professor explains:

How do China’s government, political system, and socialist market economy actually work? How does China see democracy, the USA, and Donald Trump’s trade war? Renowned Chinese scholar Zhang Weiwei explains the China model in this interview with Ben Norton.

0:00 Highlights
1:30 Introduction to Zhang Weiwei
1:51 The China model
3:23 Civilization-state
4:13 Meritocracy
5:01 Socialist market economy
7:52 US capitalism vs Chinese socialism
9:36 Foreign investment in China
11:15 How China sees democracy
13:46 How laws are made in China
15:59 Economic planning
16:59 Debate with Francis Fukuyama
20:11 US trade war on China
23:36 Dedollarization of financial system
28:17 The multipolar future
29:36 Outro

Transcript here (with slides and links!): How does China’s system really work? Renowned scholar Zhang Weiwei explains the ‘China model’.

The transcript is actually a standalone propaganda article on its own, with supporting charts and pictures.

I didn’t read it because I watched the video, which has forced English subtitles in a large font. I’d quote nonetheless this bit:

In fact, it is a kind of mixed economy. But many countries also have a mixed economy. But the Chinese one is unique.

It means the state owns so many resources, from minerals to land, everything. Yet, the right to use the land is flexible. It’s very often shaped by market forces.

A good example of why China can be so successful in internet applications, even for those apps used in the United States, such as TikTok, Temu, or Shein.

They are Chinese inventions, because it came from internal competition within China. And after this, they become very competitive internationally.

So if you look at the Chinese internet applications, the whole digital infrastructure is created by the state sector.

Each and every village must have 4G and 5G. I told my French friends, I said that, if you go to Tibet or Xinjiang, there, you find the internet connections are better than in central Paris. Indeed!

Because this is a political task. You have to fulfill that. Even a village might have 4G, if not 5G, at least 4G.

At the same time, the private sector, like Alibaba Group, made the best use of this availability of top-notch infrastructure, to provide internet services and e-commerce to the best of their capability.

Also, as a civilization-state, the huge size matters a lot. Which means, sometimes I think, maybe China is the only type of country that can practice a real market economy, with full competition.

In China, we say 卷 (juǎn), which means competition, competition, competition.

They have 100 automobile plants that produce EVs [electric vehicles]. So those who are successful are extremely competitive. And then costs go down.

Socially, rather than the Western model of pitting society against the state, China is a state and society engaged in mutually positive relations.

You look at the Chinese state, and the party, it is far more reactive to whatever, you know, events, or incidents, or earthquakes. Whatever happens in China, the response is much faster in the Chinese model.

You don’t have to take everything at face value, but it seems to be a fact that in China the infrastructure (roads, bridges, railways, Internet) is part of China’s Five-Year Plans, which means they’re done, not contemplated.

BONUS: Christiane Amanpour also hosted Dan Wang!

Fresh from the oven: How the U.S. Is Falling Behind China’s Engineering State | Amanpour and Company (“and Company” meaning Walter Isaacson), 18 minutes.

Originally aired on September 11, 2025.

Selected comments:

  • Wang studied economics and philosophy at the University of Rochester, graduating in 2014.
    He is not an engineer !
    Skip !
  • This dude is a traitor who hates China. He sounds mentally challenged at best.
  • Anyone who has travel outside the US will note the lack of Made in the USA. The US is simply not competitive, the Chinese go into debt to build, while Americans barrow to party.
  • A very superficial analysis about engineering vs. Legal emphasis between China and usa. Btw, social engineering is way big in every society. It’s usually done through education, cultural norms, language and religion. Usa is so powerful due to propaganda via Hollywood. Look how brainwashed the average us citizen is regarding standard beliefs about the world. This dude is very social engineered by the us system too.
  • Just a another Gordon Chang. It’s all US ideological talking head blah, blah, blah. The opening statement should have been that the USA has technically illiterate leaders vs China who has exceptionally compentent, technically inquisitive, and literate leadership. Please do not blame my profession for the failure of the USA.
  • “The Coming Collapse of China”. By Gordon Chang 2001
  • He’s way more reasonable than Gordon Chang.
  • Why should we want to stop China’s rise to dominanet superpower? The US is dangerous, unstable and violent. China generally focuses on its own affairs, does not believe in interference, and has not been in a major war in more than 45 years. Like it or not, China’s present government is the best government the Chinese people have ever had, based on its results.
  • Chinese leaders are engineers they engineer developments and solve problems.
    Where as US leaders are mostly lawyers and they do as below
    1. Injunction
    2. Stay Order
    3. Writ Petition
    4. Contempt of Court
    5. Restraint Order
    6. Environmental Clearance Challenge
    7. Public Interest Litigation (PIL)
    8. Violation of Zoning Laws
    9. Lack of Due Process
    10. Ultra Vires
    11. Non-Compliance
    12. EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) Deficiency
    13. Encroachment
    14. Doctrine of Legitimate Expectation
    15. Abuse of Power / Mala Fide
  • China has already taken over the superstar status. Didn’t you get the memo?
  • This dude is everywhere, he’s been a thought leader for a while. Why only him? He’s super smart and seems to call it well, but why is it so hard for others? They literally publicize their Maoist-state capitalism (almost an oxymoron) philosophy. “Treat society as a building material” – so well said 🎉
  • This dude moved to US and tried to make it more socialist 🤣🤣
  • Mr Wang’s main theme – China’s quest to engineer the future – is on the target. However, his view on topics he is not familiar with, such as social engineering or human rights, is way off a good analyst would say or write about.
  • CCP propaganda at it finest.