Breakneck: Will China engineer the future?  

Dan Wang’s Breakneck opens with an assertion that will immediately ring true with many observers of both China and the United States: despite their ongoing sparring, “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese”.

Both, Wang asserts, are characterised by a materialism that produces reverence for successful entrepreneurs and fierce competition, which brings with it occasional “displays of extraordinary tastelessness”. The two also share a penchant for the “technological sublime” and monumental projects. While elites in the world’s two largest economies tend to express skepticism about whether their broader populations really know what is in their best interests, the elites and general public of both are “united in their faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation”. What Wang does not mention, but perhaps should, is their mutual preoccupation with the other.

At the core of Wang’s argument is the assertion that for all their similarities, the two countries often function as “inversions” of one another. Labels of capitalist, neoliberal, communist and socialist have limited utility when it comes to the United States and China of the present. Instead, Wang argues, China is best understood as an “engineering state”, while the United States is a “lawyerly society”.

Wang defines China's engineering state as one dominated by technocratic engineers – Wang's paternal grandparents, he notes later in the book, met while they were studying to be chemical engineers – and characterised by major public works projects, often carried out despite huge environmental and human costs. But above all, Wang contends, China has long been engaged in a project of social engineering, shaping and moulding its population for more important political and economic ends.

The Great Leap Forward (1958–62) was a Chinese Communist Party campaign to rapidly industrialise China that resulted in the deaths of millions

The United States’ lawyerly society, by contrast, is dominated by lawyers who are better at blocking construction rather than enabling it. While the law is often used by the wealthy and elites to further their own interests, it has also enabled pluralism and respect for individual rights, features both notably absent in the engineering society. The United States was not always a lawyerly society, however, and Wang asserts that until the 1960s it boasted many engineering state characteristics, with figures such as mining engineer Herbert Hoover and urban planner Robert Moses towering figures in politics. Testament to this is that cities like New York still rely on the now undermaintained infrastructure built during the first half of the last century.

The observation that China’s leadership is dominated by engineers is not new—previous speculation that it would be increasingly made up of lawyers and humanities graduates has not proven true—but his pithy throughline makes for compelling reading.

In each chapter Wang, who was born in China, grew up in Canada, and has lived equal lengths in China and the United States, details the particulars of China’s engineering state, contrasting it where relevant with the United States.

The most visible feature of China’s engineering state is its major public infrastructure projects, which have transformed not only the country’s physical landscape but also installed in its population the expectation of change. Wang points out that for a Chinese person alive during the years in which China’s economy was averaging 10 percent annual growth, it would feel as if the country was reborn every seven years.

Guizhou’s Zheng’an County now produces one in seven of the world’s guitars

Drawing on his own experience traveling and cycling through some of the country’s poorest provinces, Wang describes how even remote rural villages and minor cities have been the beneficiaries of major infrastructure investment. While such projects are often ridiculed for their lack of human scale and the influence of Soviet aesthetics (not to mention the supposed “ghost city” phenomenon), they have had transformative impacts on residents’ lives. Wang notes that China’s high speed rail network is now longer than the rest of the world’s combined. It is this connectivity that has allowed remote rural towns – like Guizhou’s Zheng’an County, which now produces one in seven of the world’s guitars – to flourish. 

China has been able to carry out such vast infrastructure projects in part, Wang observes, because of standardised designs and good project management which have meant costs are a fraction of what they are elsewhere. According to Wang, China’s high speed rail costs around US $33 million per mile to construct, which is a whopping 80 percent cheaper than in California. (While not one-for-one, Auckland’s City Rail Link reportedly cost NZ $1.5 billion per kilometre.) 

China now operates a high-speed rail network longer than the rest of the world’s combined

Wang also points out that the country's leaders are all too aware of the adage “no taxation without representation”. “Perhaps no other self-proclaimed socialist country is as lightly taxed as China,” observes Wang. Instead, it is these infrastructure projects that are used to bring material benefit and improve the living standards of the population rather than taxation and resource redistribution.

But Wang is also quick to note that not every project brings with it the intended benefits. The engineering state has enabled politicians and officials eager to advance their careers to carry out nearsighted and at times comical projects that have racked up vast amounts of public debt, such as the attempt to turn Liupanshui, a city in Guizhou province, into a tourist ski destination despite its lack of snow. The failed project resulted in US$21 billion in additional debt. Wang adds that nearly every Chinese province now has “laughable replicas” of European town squares and famous sites that have failed to attract visitors. (In Chinese, the term “face engineering” (面子工程), similar to the English “vanity project”, has become common parlance.)

A lack of snow did not deter officials in Guizhou Province trying to turn the city of Liupanshui into a ski destination

Singapore-based political scientist John Donaldson has separately argued that by 2010 Guizhou had abandoned its strategy of inclusive rural-based development in favour of large-scale infrastructure projects and high-tech industry development, which, while boosting the province’s GDP, have actually curbed gains in poverty alleviation and rural incomes.

Still, Wang contends, anglophone nations like the United States and New Zealand, where construction—particularly when it comes to housing—is often hamstrung by regulatory frameworks and legal mechanisms leading to ballooning house prices, have much to learn from China’s experience (although it should also be noted that many major Chinese cities also face significant affordability challenges).

Another area in which China has a real advantage over the United States, Wang argues, is in electronic manufacturing. The engineering state has enabled former fishing villages like Shenzhen to become the world’s electronic manufacturing hubs. While the United States’ manufacturing base eroded, China has effectively agglomerated communities of engineers, entrepreneurs, and a huge and experienced labour force to produce high-quality electronics at low cost. Wang points to the 500-acre Foxconn campus in Shenzhen, responsible for producing much of the world’s iPhones, which during peak times has around three hundred thousand people working there.

The engineering state has enabled former fishing villages like Shenzhen to become the world’s electronic manufacturing hubs

Wang notes that China is right to want to build and retain its manufacturing capacity (what Xi Jinping refers to as the ‘real’ economy (实体经济) as opposed to the ‘virtual’ service economy (虚拟经济)). The United States may still be a leader in scientific innovation, but the decline of its manufacturing base has also led to the withering away of the process knowledge held by individuals. Not only has this reduced employment opportunities, but it has also meant organisations like the National Nuclear Security Administration have spent tens of millions relearning how to produce things that were once institutional knowledge.

It is not just roads, railways, and electronics that China has been set on building. Chinese leaders have also long dabbled in social engineering, Wang argues, noting the utopian projects of the Mao period and emperors who set much of the mandatory curriculum for would-be civil servants (although it famously emphasised poetry and arts over the likes of science and engineering). The pinnacle of this is the one-child policy. Spanning the three and a half decades from 1980, the policy was the brainchild of Song Jian, a missile scientist and enthusiast of cybernetics (the study of nature and mechanical systems). “No other country would have let a missile scientist anywhere near the design of demographic policy,” he writes, noting how unlikely the policy was in a country that places such emphasis on kinship ties and filial piety. Wang argues that the policy and its brutal enforcement by local officials are the biggest indictments of the engineering state, resulting in generations of traumatised parents and leaving China with 40 million more men than women and a rapidly aging population.

With such a mixed scorecard, will China prove successful in its quest to engineer the future?

Wang thinks not. The absence of pluralism and respect for individual rights will ultimately be the undoing of the engineering state, he surmises. For all its advantages, China will not dominate the future in the same way the United States has dominated the twentieth century. It will, however, dominate high-tech supply chains with corresponding military capability, continue to wield influence in developing countries, and prove a powerful challenge to US pre-eminence in Asia.

The United States too, Wang concludes, must learn from China. “I like to imagine how much better the world would be if both superpowers could adopt a few pathologies of the other.”

If the engineering state is reaching its limits and Chinese leaders heed Wang’s advice, perhaps, in time, it will ultimately best be understood as another stage in the radical economic and political experimentation that has characterised so much of China’s recent history.

 The Foundation's Asia in Focus initiative publishes expert insights and analysis on issues across Asia, as well as New Zealand’s evolving relationship with the region.