China Is Run by Engineers. America Is Run by Lawyers.

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. Before we get started on today’s episode, I’d love your help on a future episode we’re producing — especially if you happen to be a physician. We’re looking into the doctor shortage in the U.S., so if you happen to be a doctor, we want to hear from you. I’d like to know how your workload has changed over time, maybe how your workplace has changed, or if you have anything else on the topic to say you think we might find interesting. Just send a voice memo to radio@freakonomics.com, subject line: doctor shortage. Thanks in advance. Also: we’ll be doing a live taping of Freakonomics Radio as part of Sirius XM Podcasts Month, on Wednesday, October 8th in New York City. There’s room for a few Freakonomics Radio fans to come along, so if you’d like to be one of them, send an email to radio@freakonomics.com, subject line: “live taping.” Thanks for that — and now, on to today’s episode.

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If you are an American, how do you think about the relationship between the U.S. and China? You may see China as a political and economic bully, and a thief of American intellectual property. You may see China as a hardcore surveillance state — internally and externally; maybe a propaganda state too. But you probably don’t think about the relationship between China and the U.S. the way that Dan Wang thinks about it:

Dan WANG: I think that no two peoples are more alike. They have a hastiness around them. They have a sense of being willing to take shortcuts, especially on health and wealth. They both have a sense of the future in a way that I think is not so apparent anymore in Europe or Japan. They’re both striving towards something.

But for all those similarities between the U.S. and China, Wang sees one huge difference: China is a country that is run by engineers, while the U.S. is a country run by lawyers. Engineers, he explains, are driven to build while lawyers are driven to argue, and obstruct. Who is Dan Wang, and how did he come to hold this view? He was born in China, in the early 1990s. When he was seven, he immigrated with his parents to Canada and, later, to the U.S., near Philadelphia. But he returned to China in his twenties — as an analyst for an economic research firm. He stayed for six years, and each year he wrote a long letter home, and published it on his website.

WANG: Yes, that’s right. Every year I tried to tell my friends what I was up to, and try to tell my parents what I was up to. And it kind of took a life of its own after I was stuck in China during the entirety of “Zero Covid,” and very few other people were able to observe the country and write about it as I was able to do. 

He has now turned those letters into a book, called Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Wang sees much to admire about an engineering state:

WANG: They’ve just been solving seven problems a day before breakfast because they have so many problems to solve. 

But also, plenty of downside:

WANG: They are also fundamentally social engineers, and the physical engineers cannot restrain themselves from treating society as just another big optimization problem. 

Today on Freakonomics Radio, what happens when an engineering state goes up against a lawyerly society? What does the U.S. have to learn from China, and vice versa? And: what happens when an expat returns to explore the soul of his motherland? 

WANG: I was concerned at several points for my safety.

All that is coming up, starting now.

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Okay, let’s have a proper introduction.

WANG: Hi, I’m Dan Wang. I am a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. 

DUBNER: So Dan, what are you exactly? I ask because you’re not an academic researcher, quite. You’re not fully a journalist, quite. You’re not a business analyst, quite. So if you had to slap one big label on your forehead, what would it be? 

WANG: I am Dan Wang. I think that is all I can be. But maybe you can give me a label. I think a lot of what I have tried to do is to be an observer of China partly as an outsider just as I’m an observer of the United States partly as an outsider of being Canadian. 

These days, Wang spends most of his time in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

WANG: My wife is a professor at the University of Michigan. is an anthropologist, really, of technology cultures, and so, she wrote a book about Shenzhen maker spaces called Prototype Nation.

DUBNER: And where did she grow up? 

WANG: She grew up in Salzburg. So, she is Austrian and we just spent a bit of time in Austria. We were hiking through the Austrian Alps. 

Wang was born in the Chinese province of Yunnan.

WANG: I grew up in China’s periphery. I did not grow up in its imperial core of Beijing or these rich coastal cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen. 

One of Wang’s grandfathers barely survived famine, and he became an army officer. His other grandfather came from a family that had once been rich, from trading in everything from copper and silk to liquor and possibly opium.

WANG: My family is made up of some people with more elite origins, some people with more rural origins, but what was important was that they all suffered through the great turn of the Communist Party’s rule with Mao Zedong. Some of them made it out better than others. My parents were both lucky to be urbanites in China growing up. They were part of China’s luckiest generation, to have been born in the 1960s. They were able to attend university. They were able to have careers, to build a modicum of wealth, and they were able to emigrate abroad as well.

DUBNER: You write that for your parents when they were younger, and especially your grandparents’ generation, that poverty was the normal state of affairs, that there were shortages in just about everything.

WANG: That’s right.

DUBNER: Imagine that they had been born — the same people that you know as your mother and father — had been born, let’s say, 30 years later, 1990. How would their lives have been different? 

WANG: Yeah, well, that is around my age. I just turned 33, and this is one of these things that I reflect upon in China, that the decade of birth really, really matters. And so my parents were lucky in part because the socialist-planned economy was going away when my mom was in college. When she started college at the age of 18, she was given ration tickets to be able to eat pork once a month. That was all the pork that she was allotted. But most of that system had melted away by the time she reached her senior year of college. Now, if you were born in China in 1990 then I could expect that my parents by virtue of being urbanites should have been allocated two or three apartments from the state, which would be worth quite a bit more. And they may have been able to liquidate one of these homes in order to send me abroad for college, and maybe my parents could have afforded my college education much more easily.

From around 1980 until 2016, the Chinese government — concerned about overpopulation — enforced its one-child policy.

WANG: And my parents, I’m not sure whether they are really wanted to have a second child, but that option wasn’t available to them in part because when my mother gave birth to me, she was also forced to sign these documents in her workplace saying that she will not have a second child, and maybe she would have to consent to having a sterilization to make sure that she did not have a second child.

DUBNER: How old were you when you learned about that?

WANG: I was maybe about seven or eight years old. This was shortly after we moved to Canada when I was growing up. My parents I think at least debated and discussed whether they should give me a sibling. We had a bit of a rocky start when I moved to Canada. My parents moved just after the dot-com bubble, and my dad was a software engineer. So they had a harder time finding their footing. And I was a handful, I admit. I was a rowdy child. I’m sorry, Mom.

DUBNER: Well, they got their revenge by placing you in some kind of military training program, yes? 

WANG: I was such a rowdy child that my parents decided that I was best served to be a Royal Canadian Army Cadet.

DUBNER: And that worked out well for you.

WANG: I was never all that good at school. But the army really straightened me out, I was part of the army band, and I was really good at drill, I was cadet of the year and that was something I was really proud of.

Wang studied philosophy at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, but he dropped out to work for the Canadian e-commerce startup Shopify. He then spent some time in Silicon Valley and in Germany. He did eventually get his college degree, and he did some freelance writing — including an article for Vox about Chinese drone technology. This led to a job with a firm called Gavekal Dragonomics, which provides investment research about the Chinese economy. He moved to Hong Kong in 2017.

WANG: We were trying to get beyond the headlines of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg to figure what’s really going on in China for a broadly financial audience of folks in hedge funds, pensions, asset allocators. We were journalists, we were diplomats, we were analysts, we were executives, all trying to figure out this big thing of what China is. I was there to really study a big program called Made in China 2025, which was Beijing’s grand ambition to dominate 10 different industries of the future, included electric vehicles, included new forms of material science, and at the time there was a lot of skepticism that China could innovate, that China could build cars better than Germans and Japanese. And I had been feeling that China was going to be able to build all the cars, going to build all the industrial robotics. What I found really important was to treat China seriously by reading a lot of the core texts of the party state. So I found myself reading most major speeches by Xi Jinping that was published in the party’s main theory magazine. It’s a magazine called Seeking Truth, “Qiushi” in Chinese. I found myself reading this beautiful magazine that was very well-produced every month and sent to party members and curious folks like me. So I understood that China has this formal system in which you have a Communist Party that has a lot of propaganda that is often trying to explain itself and what it is trying to do. I also understood that China was not strictly a formal system, that the formality of the official China contrasts with the complete casual informality of Chinese society. I found myself going to visit as many places in China as I could, first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai as well as to villages, as well to third- and fourth-tier cities across the countryside as well.

DUBNER: When you interact with these people, how open are they with you?

WANG: I think that Chinese everywhere, including in the imperial center of Beijing, have a very nice appreciation of the informalities of Chinese society. The most blasphemous things that one could hear would be among urban residents in Beijing even today, who would tell you about all the ways that the central government is meddling with their lives and becoming very weird with politics. For the most part, Chinese people are wonderful and informal and they complain very openly and very bitterly about all of the problems that they face. I think for the most part people are not generally intimidated unless, you know, you’re speaking to a party member and it’s clear that I cannot be a party member because I’m a foreigner. The only person they’re really scared of is Xi Jinping. I think nobody would complain to that big guy.

DUBNER: When you returned to China as a Chinese-born Canadian-American young person, now coming back to do economic research to benefit American investors, I’m curious how you were perceived? 

WANG: Oh boy, that makes my life sound even more complicated than I expected. If you are of Chinese heritage, the Chinese government will view you essentially as a ward of the state for as long as you live. Doesn’t matter if you haven’t spent any time in China, doesn’t matter if your parents came to San Francisco 100 years ago, you will be viewed as a ward of the state. That is also one of these frightening things about China. I don’t want to be treated as a ward of the state forever. I am very proud to be a Canadian. I’m very happy to be a resident of the United States. And this is not how I would choose to be identified for the rest of my life. 

DUBNER: Were you concerned for your safety there?

WANG: I was concerned at several points for my safety. At one point in 2022, the Chinese government banned my website within China. I was thinking, well, all I have is this rinky-dink website. It’s just my name, danwong.co. Did Beijing really feel like I was on par with Wikipedia or the New York Times in order to have to ban me? I had to go see the Canadian consul general in Shanghai to ask whether they needed me to leave in a hurry.

DUBNER: And what were you told when you went there?

WANG: They said that maybe this was just an algorithmic decision by the government. It’s not very clear. I didn’t have any censors’ doors I could knock on to ask, Hey, what’s going on, is there something I wrote? And so I had no idea.

DUBNER: Had you written things that you thought, had it caught the attention of the right people, it would have inflamed them?

WANG: What I decided to do was that I was going to write about the country in the best way that I could, and if it inflamed anyone, I wasn’t going to worry too much about it. There’s a great sinologist named Perry Link who came up with this excellent metaphor for how to think about Chinese censorship, and that metaphor was the anaconda and the chandelier. So, imagine that you’re at a dinner table. There is a chandelier above you, and within this chandelier was a great anaconda that was just coiled inside, sleeping. All of these dinner guests are very well aware that there’s an anaconda hanging above them. And if they say the wrong thing, maybe the anaconda will wake up and come down and strangle them. A lot of the censorship in China consists of self-censorship. A lot of dinner guests don’t know if the anaconda will wake up, but they self-censor regardless.

DUBNER: In that analogy, does the anaconda sometimes turn out to be a fake anaconda?

WANG: Yeah, it was a paper anaconda — as Mao Zedong might say. Sometimes you can say things and the anaconda will completely ignore you. I think fundamentally the issue here is uncertainty about when the anaconda might strike, and I think that produces a lot of the self-censorship. I decided I wasn’t going to self-censor. I wasn’t going to tread on eggshells here. I was going to write in the best way that I could whatever was going on in China as I observed it. If someone found my remarks inflammatory — well, that’s on them.

DUBNER: If I recall correctly, because of Covid and because of the lockdown, you ended up staying in China either longer, at least more consistently, than you would have otherwise. Is that the case?

WANG: I think that is fair, yes. 

DUBNER: So what do you think would have happened to you if Covid had never happened?

WANG: I think I would have continued to study the path of U.S.-China relations, tried to study the trajectory of China’s technology improvements, and I would have probably not have been able to write quite a lot of this book. Because the Covid experience really was quite shocking to me, to have to stay in the country for three years, and I think it was shocking to absolutely everyone who didn’t expect the sort of measures that the Chinese government would enact.

DUBNER: Can you just talk about your experience, especially during that intense pursuit of “Zero Covid.” 

WANG: I was in China at the start of 2020 until the end of 2022, basically having not left for three years. My observation of “Zero Covid” in China was that it consisted mostly of these, let’s call it, three acts, to put it a little bit dramatically. The first act of “Zero Covid” consisted of a lot of anger at the Chinese government. Whis was really the winter, spring of 2020 when we had heard of a new respiratory virus that had broken out of a city named Wuhan. And a lot of folks, including me, including a lot of Chinese around me, were angry that this was the second big respiratory virus to break out of China in two decades. The first one was SARS in 2003. And it followed some of those early issues of SARS, in which the Chinese government tried to suppress some of these whistleblowers that were talking about medical conditions. The second act moved pretty quickly. By April and May of 2020, people saw that China actually contained the virus fairly well. And there was a bigger sense of appreciation, that these methods of “Zero Covid,” though very harsh, was able to stomp out a lot of chains of transmission. Now, people were still straining under some of these difficult aspects of “Zero Covid,” which included things like, if you tested positive, the government was going to make you go to a convention center or a stadium to quarantine with other folks. You had to go through these contact-tracing apps. A lot of things were shut down. You had to wear a mask outside in most places. But most people decided that these costs were worth bearing. Restaurants were starting to come back online, a lot of the economy was returning to life. There used to be this early commentary at the start of 2020, that Covid was going to be China’s Chernobyl moment, which meant a natural disaster that triggered the political downfall of the regime. And if anything, people thought that, maybe Covid is the Chernobyl movement for everyone else, because Donald Trump’s America in 2020 certainly didn’t seem like a really good place to be. And that was the year that my parents did a very un-Chinese thing and said, “Dan, don’t come back and visit us in Pennsylvania. It’s a mess over here, just stay in China, where life is better- ordered.” And then there was a third act of “Zero Covid,” which started with the Shanghai lockdown in the spring of 2022. It was probably the most ambitious lockdown ever attempted in the history of humanity. China essentially demanded that its population in its largest city of 25 million people essentially could not leave their apartment compounds over the course of 10 weeks in the spring of 2022 because the Omicron variant of the virus, which was highly transmissible, was spreading out of control in the city. Xi’an in the Northwest also was subject to a very long lockdown. And so people were kept inside. A lot of folks felt food-insecure. The city had no plan really to implement a lockdown while delivering a lot of food to everyone. People who needed treatment for their diabetes, treatment for cancer, were essentially told, you need to stay at home because we don’t want Covid spreading. A lot of people across China were feeling very dissatisfied with “zero Covid.” In a few places, protests erupted, and I remember going to the Shanghai protests in October of 2022.

Some residents of Shanghai protested the Covid measures by screaming out of their windows, for hours.

The government deployed drones to tell residents to keep quiet.

The announcement says, “Please comply with Covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.” And then, the central government tried a different approach.

WANG: The great denouement of “zero Covid” was that the central government essentially threw up its hands and said, “We’re not going to pursue this anymore.” Essentially, they dropped all of these barriers — not quite overnight, but over the course of a week in which “Zero Covid” became total Covid. And rather than trying to help and prepare the population to deal with this virus that the government has spent three years frightening people about, it really just allowed the virus to run rampant in the coldest month of the year, when a lot of people died.

According to research published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, there were nearly two million excess deaths in China among people 30 and over in the first two months after the “zero Covid” strategy was abandoned. Dan Wang reflected on this in his 2022 letter. “Over the last seven decades,” he wrote, “China has experienced lengthy periods of stability punctuated by government-triggered chaos. The Chinese state is usually levelheaded; but every so often it succumbs to a manic episode. It then comes to its senses and sets down a battered people, as the rest of the world looks on aghast.” And yet, despite this kind of failure, Dan Wang thinks the U.S. has a great deal to learn from China. That’s coming up, after the break; I’m Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.

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Last year, instead of writing his annual letter from China, Dan Wang wrote a book called Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. By the time it was published, in August of this year, he was living back in the States.

DUBNER: What was your goal in writing this book? I mean, on the one hand, it’s what you do and it’s just a good and interesting thing to do for yourself and your career and so on, but I’m curious whether there’s something more than that.

WANG: A big reason I wrote my book is that I have a pretty strong sense that most Americans will never visit China. A lot of Americans are not necessarily very curious about China. They have no great interest in being there, and perhaps rationally so, because they fear about their lives and they don’t find it necessarily very attractive. I was really interested in showing them that Shanghai is a really wonderful, splendid city; that Beijing is full of solidness, splendor; and that Shenzhen feels quite a lot like Silicon Valley, in which it is made up of a lot of these boring office parks; that Chongqing is the most hydropunk city in the world. I just wanted to give people a bit of a texture so that there is an aspect of mutual curiosity. I also felt that we’re reasoning through these two great superpowers that are sometimes locking horns, that are probably going to be in some degree of conflict with each other over the next few decades. It didn’t really make sense to reason through all of their problems with these 19th century political-science terms like socialist or capitalist or autocratic or neoliberal. I think what we need to do is to have a playful new framework.

That playful new framework is also the framework of Breakneck. “That’s the big idea behind this book,” he writes. “It’s time for a new lens to understand the two superpowers: China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”

WANG: China is a state defined very much by a leadership that views itself as not so much interested in soft, fuzzy stuff, of creative expression, but very much more interested in building highways, building mega-projects, building dams, building coal plants, building hyperscalers, building homes. That was the way for it to create political prestige over anything else. At various points in China’s recent past, the entirety of the senior leadership, all nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, had degrees in engineering, and this was engineering of a very Soviet sort. We had top leaders that were hydraulic engineers and thermal engineers and mechanical engineers, and part of my central thesis is that China is ruled as an engineering state because China treats building a megaproject as the solution to any number of problems.

DUBNER: What would you say are the key downsides of an engineering state? 

WANG: The problem is that they are fundamentally also social engineers that treat society as just a giant math exercise as well, which is why I spend a lot of time thinking about the one-child policy as well as “Zero Covid” — which, the number is right there in the name. There’s no ambiguity about what this means. So China is made up of physical engineers, people who try to engineer the economy as well. They’re also social engineers. I think that for the most part, what the Chinese are interested in is being an engineer of the soul, which is a phrase from Joseph Stalin that Xi Jinping has recently repeated. They’re not just all social engineers, they’re also engineers of the soul. The main downsides are when the Chinese government decides that the population is just another problem to be optimized, as if the population could be controlled through a series of valves. This is where I document some of the ethno-religious minorities in Tibet as well as Xinjiang who are really suffering through the engineering of being Sino-fied because they are treated as their cultures do not matter, and must be harmonized into the dominant Han culture.

DUBNER: How much of that is related to the building of infrastructure projects and populations being displaced? 

WANG: I think there is a component of trying to move, let’s say, Tibetans who are living in highland Himalayas down to the lowlands where they are probably better monitored by living in these big apartment blocks rather than these mountains that the government finds it really difficult to hike into. I think there is a component of that. There is a component of building very big detention centers and detention camps for the weaker minority in Xinjiang and to try to Sinicize them as well. 

DUBNER: This reminds me of, it was I think the first line of your 2022 letter from China, “Mountains offer the best hiding places from the state,” you wrote. Can you say a little bit more about that? 

WANG: Yeah, I was born in China’s most mountainous province, and I am still very much attracted to mountains in part because of the works of political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott of Yale University. His best-known work is Seeing Like a State, in which Scott wrote about how the state really tries to organize the population in order to better control them. And one of Scott’s best works, maybe his very best work, is called The Art of Not Being Governed, in which he wrote about a zone he called Zomia. That is a region of highland Southeast Asia that stretches from the southwestern part of China, where I’m from, all the way down to Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, where you have all of these peoples that are uninterested in being part of organized states. They retreated to these mountain areas in part to run away from the Burmese state or the Tibetan state, and most especially the Han Chinese state. They’re tired of taxation, they’re tired of conscription, they’re afraid of the diseases that spread in urban quarters, and so they decided to be in the mountains, which are much more difficult to find them. 

Okay, so if that’s what Wang means when he calls China an “engineering state,” what does it mean when he calls the U.S. a lawyerly society?

WANG: I think that the U.S. is a lawyerly society because at first approximation, a lot of folks who end up in the White House have gone to Yale Law School.

As Politico has pointed out, there were around 140 lawyers in the Biden White House, and about 25 percent of them had Yale law degrees.

WANG: If we take a look at the founding of America, a lot of the founding fathers were trained as lawyers. If we look at the Declaration of Independence, essentially it reads like a lawsuit as the start of a great legal argument. The lawyerly society has persisted in the modern past, and the Democratic Party is especially lawyerly. I think the issue with lawyers is that lawyers are really good at saying no. Lawyers block everything, good and bad. So on the one hand, we don’t have a functional infrastructure almost anywhere in the U.S., but we also don’t have stupid ideas like the one-child policy. 

DUBNER: I’d like to know why you call the U.S. a lawyerly society versus a lawyerly state, especially considering that so many of our elected politicians are lawyers. 

WANG: I call it a lawyerly society because this is something that we all participate in. One of the great things about lawyers is that they’re able to protect people with property. Unfortunately, what that has ended up in is that a lot of lawyers are protecting people who have already made it. They’re mostly already protecting the rich, and it is mostly the people with property, who are suing to block, let’s say, a new piece of housing from being developed around them, creating more mass transit systems, creating new highways.

DUBNER: When you talk about the U.S. not being good at infrastructure, you know, I think of the interstate highway system, which is I think by most regards, still considered pretty good. And that was obviously a government project. I think about the commercial airline system, which is a collaboration between private firms and a big state architecture as well. Do you say that we’re bad at infrastructure because in the last 50 years, we’ve had, A, decay of the older stuff, and, B, an inability to build especially big public transportation projects, is that the primary accusation here?

WANG: Yes. I think it is both, that the U.S. is not maintained and it is also not building. Now, I acknowledge that the U.S. used to be an engineering state. The U.S. had this really big growth spurt between 1850s and 1950s. In the 19th century, the U.S. had been building these big systems of canals, it built the interstate railways, it built these big skyscrapers in Manhattan as well as Chicago. And then throughout the Second World War, the U.S. built a lot of other big projects as well, especially the highways, as you point out, but also the Manhattan Project as well the Apollo missions. I think the U.S. engineering state had made a lot of mistakes, it probably overbuilt. Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, people started to revolt against these decisions made by urban planners, when folks like Robert Moses were ramming highways through dense urban neighborhoods. When the U.S. government agencies were spraying pesticides, especially D.D.T., absolutely everywhere. When fossil-fuel executives had gotten really close with the regulators as well as the automakers. And so people decided that a lot of big business, as well as a lot of big government, had to be restrained. We had a movement out of elite law schools, especially at Harvard Law as well as Yale Law, that decided that lawyers and law students had to be regulators as well as litigators. There were these movements of “sue the bastards,” and the bastards refer to the U.S. government as well as big businesses. And so a lot of the lawyers decided to restrain activity rather than build new activity. 

DUBNER: When you think of the downsides of the lawyerly society, what are the top three or five that come to mind? 

WANG: The first is that the U.S. has really lost a lot of its ability to be physically dynamic. We’re speaking in New York City. New York City has had a very extensive housing shortage for a very long time. The rents here are far too high. And the U.S. generally has not built enough housing in many of its big cities. New York is really bad at building mass transit. If we take a look at the data that’s being maintained by N.Y.U.’s transit project, New York spends about $2 billion building a mile of subway and this is not just a little bit more pricey than places like Spain and Italy and France, which are also complicated to build. It’s something like eight or nine times more expensive than subway projects in Rome or Paris or Barcelona. 

DUBNER: And in what ways are lawyers the cause? 

WANG: The lawyers are in part the cause because the state agencies are much more focused on procedure and process rather than actually getting the result done. I think a lot about the California high-speed rail project, in which nearly now 20 years after voters first approved the project in a referendum in California, basically none of us are able to ride a high-speed rail. The first segment will open probably later than 2030. Lawyers and the legal system have also made it really easy for any vested interest groups to file lawsuits alleging that there is some issue of environmental protection that the state has not sufficiently studied. I think that there is broad energy in the U.S. to correct some of these problems of the past. There is a strain of the left that is very interested in improving the power of the government, and to restrain some of the lawsuits that are excessively strangling core government functions. There is an element of the right that is interested in that as well. But I think the part of the American right that is thinking more about building is a little bit more animated about the rusting manufacturing base, the rusting defense industrial base, in which it has become quite clear that the U.S. is unable to make things like semiconductors, things like the top aviation jets, at high-enough quality levels. And even parts of the military industrial base have become quite non-functional. The U.S. has shipped off a lot of its munitions to Ukraine in its defense against Russia, and the U.S. hasn’t been able to replenish a lot of these stockpiles because it can’t get the production facilities in order and figure out all of the supply chain issues. According to the Government Accountability Office, every class of U.S. Naval ships is behind schedule by 18 months to three years. Even a lot of the core projects that the Department of Defense — a very powerful agency — cares about, it hasn’t been doing very well. So I think this is where the right and the left are both animated.

DUBNER: To what degree do you think that our lawyerly society has contributed to our political partisanship? 

WANG: When people feel that they can’t have affordable housing, when people see that prices of goods around them are going up, when people take a look at some of America’s apex manufacturers — companies like Intel and Boeing and Detroit automakers — which have, for the most part, been an unceasing tale of woe for their production over the last couple of years, I think there is a pretty broad sense that things in America are not working as they should, that it’s lacking some aspect of dynamism. When the economy is weak, when it’s not working for the many, when it is working mostly for the elites — which is also the people that lawyers are most set up to serve — that people get quite mad. And I think that is creating some sort of political dysfunction.

DUBNER: So what would you argue are the best lessons that the U.S. has to learn from China’s engineering state, or maybe the best components of being an engineering state that are worth trying to copy?

WANG: I think the U.S. needs a little bit of the engineering spirit of Robert Moses once again today. New York City has just not built enough infrastructure. Part of what China has really decided to build is a lot of infrastructure, mass transit, but also parks, a lot of power capacity and also a lot of very tall bridges in the countryside. I think when people see that their cities have new subway lines, when the rivers are being connected by bridges, when their city is becoming more pleasant, they also have a broader sense of optimism about the future. This is in part a redistribution strategy in which, you know, you have these bridges built in pretty poor areas in order to try to make them better- connected. And so, that has produced not only a lot of economic gains, but it has also created some degree of political resilience for the party. Because when Chinese are pointing to their high-speed rail networks or drone shows with pride, I think their pride is very real. So we can call it propaganda of the deed, but I think this is what people feel really good about. I think they feel really good when they are able to access better manufacturing goods, as China has been able to deliver. One of the strange things about the early days of Covid in the U.S. was how manufacturers were unable to retool their production lines in order to produce basic goods like masks and cotton swabs. This is something that the Chinese had no shortage of.

DUBNER: One factor that’s often overlooked when people talk about how the U.S. and other countries have offshored manufacturing to China over the past 30 or whatever years is that we also offshored our pollution. Can you just talk about that from the Chinese side especially, and what kind of sentiment and perhaps accusations, complaints go into that? 

WANG: Yeah, the Chinese have sucked up a lot of these highly polluting industries, something like rare-earth processing. Rare earths is a bit of a misnomer. Most rare earths are not actually very rare. There’s about, I think, 20 elements on the periodic table that are classified as rare earths. But for the most part, they are pretty abundant. Anyone can dig them up and then process them into refined material. The challenge with rare earths is that processing is so energy-intensive and so polluting that only the Chinese have the stomach to do something like this. If you take a look at some of the cities and the towns and the villages around these rare earths processing facilities, the cancer rates are off the charts, and I think it is absolutely valid for Americans to think about whether they want to live near one of these highly polluting, belching toxic facilities. But the Chinese have been able to stomach it in part because former top leader Deng Xiaoping stated as a matter of national strategy that China has rare earths. We don’t have very much, he said this in the 1980s, we don’t have very much, but we have these rare earths and we are going to be able to process them. 

DUBNER: I’ve heard you say that neither lawyers nor engineers are the best people, especially in concentration, to run a government. And you’ve said that economists would be better. Now, I will not argue with you on that, but I think some people would argue. So give me your best pitch for why economists are the kind of analysts, thinkers, maybe even doers who belong in government.

WANG: Well now, Stephen, you’re really trying to get me canceled by having to praise economists.

DUBNER: Can I say — when I heard you explain this, you then said, “but economists are the most reviled of the social scientists” — and I was surprised to hear you say that. Economics has plainly taken its hits over time, as any field does, but when you look at how influential it’s been in policymaking, especially compared to the other social sciences, there’s no contest. But again, that’s my assessment; maybe I’m biased. 

WANG: I think that is still not a very good position to take in the academy, because people attribute every wrong in the world to the evils of economists. I have great admiration for economists because I think they synthesize the best from the lawyers as well as the engineers. I think that economists are indeed very empirical. They look at a lot of data and they also have a very keen sense of social science. They know that systems are dynamic. One of the things I will always be grateful to economists for is that economists were the greatest critics of the one-child policy in China, as well as briefly when it was kind of discussed in the U.S., after Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Economists could tell in a way that many engineers could not that population change is a dynamic variable. We don’t reason through straight lines. When the population gets wealthier or better educated, the fertility rate might fall. And so I think the economists are good blends of both technocratic empirical expertise as well as having enough humanistic tendencies to really have the right formulas.

Coming up after the break: what does Dan Wang think about Donald Trump’s approach to China?

WANG: I’m pretty skeptical that reshoring under Donald Trump is going to work very well.

I’m Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio. We’ll be right back.

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Okay, back now to my conversation with Dan Wang, the author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.

DUBNER: I’m just curious who you most want to read the book? Because I can imagine that you have a variety of constituencies in mind. 

WANG: I think the modal audience member that I had in mind was a lawyer in Ohio, or a — 

DUBNER: Would that be J.D. Vance? 

WANG: I would be down if J.D. Vance decided to pick up this book — also of Yale Law School.

DUBNER: I would imagine that J.D. Vance would find a lot to be interested — not just interested in your book, but would feel like confirmatory evidence of what he has been talking about, yes? 

WANG: Yes, although I think I’m not quite so critical of the Yale Law School as he is. Critical, though I am about the broader lawyerly culture. But I was trying to write for the smart person who was deeply curious about China coming from a perspective of someone who spoke the language and read the language and who was living there through this recent period of darkening relations between the U.S. and China.

DUBNER: Talk to me about the degree to which China wants to be a global superpower. The reason I ask you that question is, you know, if you read even a little bit of Chinese history, this notion of the Middle Kingdom, and their embrace of that idea, is really just compelling. There’s Heaven, there is the lowly rest of the civilizations on earth, and there’s China in the middle, and it does feel like an aspiration toward supremacy. But in the last century and a half or whatever, there hasn’t been such a big imperial appetite. So does China want to be that kind of superpower, as we tend to think, or do they just want to be, you know, a regional hegemon that gets left alone?

WANG: I think that is a really important question to figure out, and this is something that the specialists are always up in a conniption about. I think the first thing to say is that, Yes, China really does view itself as the center of the world. One can translate it as the Middle Kingdom. Another way to translate it as the Central Kingdom. This is the center of the world. In the last days of the Qing Empire — this was the last empire of China before it became a republic — the Qing Empire also referred to itself as the Celestial Empire. There is a way in which the Chinese have viewed themselves to be the center of the world and everybody else is just another shade of barbarians. But what does this really mean? This is where the specialists debate. Does China want only regional hegemony? And what does regional hegemony really mean? Well, maybe it means something like demanding that the heads of state of Malaysia and Vietnam and the Philippines regularly come to the top leader in Beijing and kowtow for the emperor’s pleasure. If that is the case, is that a very big threat for American interests, if a lot of China’s near neighbors are paying fealty to China’s top leadership? I am a little bit skeptical of the case that China would want to be much more aggressive and try to, let’s say, seize Japan or seize Russia. I think that China is much more interested in declaring itself to be a great power with sufficient credibility for its own people by doing things like being a center of culture, being a center of order, producing many splendid goods that the rest of the world doesn’t have, which is how the Chinese have regarded themselves. The Chinese were able to make porcelain, were able to make silk, they were able to make tea, and the barbarians were not. That was really what defined Chinese, apart from others. And I think what that means perhaps in the modern context is that China has these fantastic cities full of drone shows in which electric vehicles, the best in the world, are speeding through. And a lot of what China is interested in is what the Qing emperor said to Lord Macartney, who was the head of the British embassy, to say, “we have no use of your splendid trinkets because we are self-sufficient in all the best goods in the world.” 

DUBNER: So, a lot of Americans, especially the political class, have argued for years that China has advanced in large part by essentially stealing I.P., intellectual property, from the U.S. and others, and that they don’t innovate. My sense is that that may have been true 10 or 20 years ago, but very much no longer true. Can you tell me what’s what? 

WANG: China has stolen a lot of American I.P., and I think it is not the most relevant comparison for thinking about the U.S.-China competition. My starting point is to think that China is really good at climbing ladders, and the U.S. is really good at laying ladders. So what does that mean? The U.S. invents major industries — I’m thinking about something like solar production. Do you know who invented the first solar cell? 

DUBNER: I guess you’re going to tell me it’s in the U.S. 

WANG: It is in New Jersey. It was Bell Labs of New Jersey that invented the first solar cell in 1954. And the U.S. didn’t really do enough with the solar industry. It was really a big science project for a while. The Germans took a lot of the solar industry from the U.S. and the Chinese have completely taken it away from the Germans. So if you take a look at the solar industry, everything from the polysilicon processing in the upstream end down to the actual production of the solar photovoltaic cells, that is 90 percent a Chinese product. One of the things that I always like to ask American policymakers is, which has a greater glory: is it to invent a product but not really to own the industry, or is it to actually own this industry?

DUBNER: The way you’ve been describing this so far, you sound like you subscribe at least somewhat to the zero-sum line of economic thinking, which is a win for China or Germany or the U.S. is inevitably at least a partial loss for the others. Is that the way you think, or not necessarily? 

WANG: I would say that there is a little bit more nuance than that, which is that technological advancement is a dynamic process. We can’t expect countries to be amazing at different technologies all out of their own. A lot of advancements in something like engines came out of really good machinery goods that were being produced in Germany, that the British textile industry laid the basis for. Part of the reason that I’ve been concerned about America’s loss of manufacturing prowess is that the U.S. lost a lot of production of televisions to Japan in the 1980s. At the time, policymakers were thinking, Well, is this a problem? Maybe we don’t really care that much about television production. But if you don’t master something like television production, then it becomes quite a lot more difficult to master other aspects of consumer electronics. The first city that really produced iPhones at scale was Shenzhen in southern China, which is right across from Hong Kong. After Shenzhen mastered the iPhone production, workers in Shenzhen were pretty quickly able to turn their skills into building other major electronics products. It is no accident that Shenzhen also became the center of the worldwide drone industry. The world’s biggest drone maker is D.J.I., it’s centered in Shenzhen, it also makes all sorts of other batteries. Let’s imagine that Apple, working with a contract manufacturer not in southern China, but in, let’s say, the industrial Midwest in the United States, call it Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin, could it have been possible that drones and batteries and all sorts of other electronics advancements were made in the U.S. Midwest rather than Shenzhen? I think that would have been quite likely. 

DUBNER: What you’re describing now, is this what you write about as “process knowledge”?

WANG: That’s exactly right.

DUBNER: That was a particularly interesting piece of your argument to me because it is much more subtle than the usual argument we hear about manufacturing jobs being off-shored. You talk about how Chinese workers, especially in technology fields, that they progress through different jobs to become sort of master craftsmen even in an industrial-assembly setting, and that really does seem to differ from the U.S. So how do you see, with the current emphasis from the Biden administration, but especially in Trump 2 administration, the emphasis on reshoring and rebuilding a variety of manufacturing now. How would you see that playing out? Because I would assume that that depth of process knowledge takes considerable time and considerable intention and education and so on. Do you think that’s something that can be captured or recaptured well here? 

WANG: I think it’s first really important to understand a little bit of what process knowledge really is. So Stephen, if we’re thinking about what exactly is technology, I would propose that there are three different segments of technology. The first aspect of technology is the hardware, it’s the equipment, it is all these things that we can physically observe and use. If we wanted to use a kitchen analogy, I would say that technology is something like the stove, the pots and the pans that we use to cook with. Second, technology is written instruction. So these are patents, these are blueprints, these are the recipes from which we can actually make something. And the third and I think the most important part is process knowledge, which we can also call tacit knowledge. It’s just the practical experience of doing things. So if we wanted to put someone who has never cooked a day in his life to make something quite simple and we give him the most well-equipped kitchen as well as the most exquisite recipes, are we sure that that person is able to do something as simple as fry an egg? That might be quite risky. That is really the fundamental Chinese advantage in technology. They’ve just been solving seven problems a day before breakfast because they have so many problems to solve. They have all of this experience that accrues, and then people take this process knowledge to invent whole new industries. I think it is really important for the U.S. to engage in some degree of reshoring, and I am critical of both the Biden approach as well as the Trump approach. I think the Biden administration was absolutely right to try to spend a lot more in the United States with big projects like the CHIPS Act as well the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act as well as the Inflation Reduction Act. But the problem with a lot of these programs was that the Biden administration moved really slowly. It was plodding, it was proceduralist, it was lawyerly, and a lot of this money wasn’t even allocated by the time that voters chucked Joe Biden out of the White House and brought back in Donald Trump. Because the Biden administration moved so slowly, President Donald Trump is going to have a lot of opportunities to name these big bridges and roads and highways after himself because the Biden administration was so lawyerly. And even though Donald Trump is not a lawyer by any means, I think he is still a product of the lawyerly society, because lawsuits have been completely central to his business career. He has sued absolutely everyone. He has sued business partners, he has sued political opponents, he has sued his former lawyers as well. And there is, I think, something still very lawyerly about Donald Trump in which he is flinging accusations left and right, he’s trying to intimidate people, trying to establish guilt in the court of public opinion.

DUBNER: And a mentor of his was Roy Cohn — who, you could argue, essentially invented the modern concept of lawfare.

WANG: Right, right. Yes, exactly, and this sort of bare-knuckled lawfare is completely natural to Donald Trump. I’m also pretty skeptical that reshoring under Donald Trump is going to work very well, in part because Trump is weakening most aspects of American strengths in science and technology. Manufacturing employment has fallen by about 40,000 workers since Liberation Day in April. That’s quite a lot of skill loss as well. I think it is not an intuitive idea that we will become a greater scientific superpower by cutting off funding to our science funding agencies, namely the National Science Foundation as well as the National Institutes of Health. I think it doesn’t quite make sense to attack universities, because the universities have driven a lot of science advancements over the past few decades in the U.S. And finally, it doesn’t make sense to deport a lot of workers. To kick them out of the country is not going to rebuild much of the process knowledge base and also, to frighten away a lot of higher skilled researchers through intimidation at the border or anything else.

DUBNER: A lot of the Chinese expats I know — who are plainly a different group than those living there — they talk about China almost as a prison to be escaped. And I feel it’s unfair for someone like me to interpret that as the main mode of the way to think about China, for sure. But, you know, I think about the artist Ai Weiwei, I think he now lives in Portugal — he was actually imprisoned in China. So that’s obviously a heightened example. But I’m curious to know how Chinese expats of your generation think about the motherland, and I’m also just curious to how patriotic the median Chinese of that generation is.

WANG: Among a lot of expats, there’s still a sense of considerable pride in China, even though there has been a lot of prison-like aspects of China as well. There is a very broad sense that China has been able to achieve something amazing among developing countries. This degree of economic growth has not yet been matched by India and Brazil and Indonesia. China has been a much more decisive grower of its economy than these other countries. That in itself aspires quite a lot of pride. There is a sense of skepticism of a lot of the democratic impulses of the West. One sees a lot of the disorderliness in the streets of New York. One sees disorderliness on January 6th in 2021. There are a lot of people who do genuinely feel that China doesn’t have these sort of issues. There are also a lot of Chinese who lived in, let’s say, New York or California, who lived through life in the U.S., and have decided that it’s a much easier life to live in Shanghai. Let’s say you have a degree in the U.S. from a good school. You may well be able to earn roughly the same salary in China as you would in the U.S., but you can save a lot of money, you have a lot more convenience, the subway systems work a lot better, there’s much better public order in the streets.

DUBNER: What kind of person do you think you would be had you been born in China when you were, but of parents who decided not to immigrate and were 33 years old now — what would Dan Wang be doing in China now?

WANG: I would certainly not be writing this book. Because part of the joy of having studied philosophy and then dropped out to go work in Silicon Valley and did everything that I did — and I await your excellent label about what exactly it is that I do — I certainly wouldn’t have been able to pursue the sort of intellectual projects that really drive me right now. I may well have ended up working in let’s say a state-owned enterprise, being bored most of the time, probably not working very hard and not earning quite a lot of money as well. I may be working for a tech company, where the default is for people to work 9-9-6, which means 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week. And that would be probably a little bit more interesting but also much more stressful as well.

DUBNER: Toward the end of the book, you reflect on your parents’ decision to immigrate long ago, when you were seven years old — first to Canada and then the U.S. — and you kind of ask whether it was worth it. I gather your mother and father may have different feelings from each other, but how do they feel about that decision? And I’m also curious whether you know how they actually feel, or if that’s a guarded conversation?

WANG: I am thankful that my parents are relatively unguarded with me. We have always had very open communication. Right now they are very content, and I think content is the right word, with their suburban lifestyle that I find a little bit dreary, but they feel is quite good. Because when they compare themselves with their peers in China, with some of their college classmates who are some of their best friends, they’ve seen that a lot of these college classmates have much, much more money than they do. But it came at these pretty considerable costs, and pretty high levels of stress, because in China, you never really know when the government might take away your company or might smash your entire industry, which is something that has happened to quite a lot of folks in business in China because they crossed some sort of political line and then they saw that their industry no longer really exists. So though my parents’ lives in suburban Philadelphia are a little bit too quiet, quiet is something that has worked very well for them.

DUBNER: Do you have children?

WANG: No, not yet.

DUBNER: If you have children, where do you think you would most like to live with them, and why?

WANG: That’s a superb question. It is also something that we think quite a lot about. We just spent the last two months in Europe. We’d been thinking about whether Europe is quite the place that makes sense. For the most part, we decided it’s not. I think that there still are so many strange, stagnant issues in Europe. 

DUBNER: The “mausoleum economy,” you call it.

WANG: The mausoleum economy. Thank you for picking that up. That was, um — I’m still quite proud of that phrase.

DUBNER: It’s a great phrase. I read that sentence over and over and over again. And I suspect it’s deeply true although I’d never thought of it that way. This is you describing the dynamism of both the U.S. and China, and then you write “Europeans have a sense of optimism only about the past. Stuck in their mausoleum economy because they are too sniffy to embrace American or Chinese practices.” So, again, that resonates with me, and I’m pretty sure many people will also agree. But can you give me the best evidence that that is indeed true?

WANG: I think there is something extremely dynamic about both the United States as well as China. And I set out in the opening stages of my book to say that no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese. There is quite a big difference between Americans and Chinese, and let’s say Europeans and Japanese. In Europe and Japan, there is something very perfectionist, something very cozy about these places. And these places are, let’s say, much more beautiful than a lot of the hustle and bustle of the United States. But for the most part, I remain convinced — more than ever, after having spent a lick of time in the mausoleum economy — that it is still China and the U.S. that are going to be driving the future. Because either the government can’t stop it, because the societies are so dynamic, and in some cases, the government is producing it. I feel really, you know — I’m not sure if “optimistic” is quite the right word. But I believe that the U.S. can still change for the better, and I see this especially in matters of economics.

It is of course impossible to predict the future. But if you look at the recent past, I’d say that the central framework of Dan Wang’s argument — a nation of engineers versus a nature of lawyers — holds up pretty well, and it explains a lot. I’d also argue that in the U.S., there is a fair amount of backlash against the lawyerly approach. I think the anti-lawyerly backlash also helps explain why President Trump is so popular in some quarters. Even though Trump plays the legal game very well, as Dan Wang pointed out in our conversation — including lawfare when it suits him — Trump often seems to say exactly what he is thinking, and do exactly what he wants, both of which are the opposite of lawyerly behavior. Anyway, this conversation with Dan Wang gave me a lot to think about, and I hope you feel the same way.

DUBNER: It was so much fun to talk to you, Dan. And I did think of what to call you, if you want to know. 

WANG: Oh, yes, please. I’m dying to know, yes. 

DUBNER: I think you’re a Chi-losopher. 

WANG: A Chi-losopher. What does that mean? 

DUBNER: A philosopher whose understanding of China is deep in many dimensions. 

WANG: Thank you very much. That is very kind. 

DUBNER: I’m not saying you have to use it.

WANG: I’ll toy with it. 

DUBNER: It’s your portmanteau to adjust. 

WANG: Very good. 

My thanks to Dan Wang for today’s conversation; again, his book is called Breakneck. Let us know what you thought of this conversation. Our email is radio@freakonomics.com. Until then, take care of yourself — and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski, and edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jasmin Klinger. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jeremy Johnston, Morgan Levey, Sarah Lilley, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; and our composer is Luis Guerra.