The Engineers of China beating the Lawyers of U.S.

Mark O'Neill August 19, 2025 17:49

China, a state run by engineers, is rapidly catching up the U.S., a state run by lawyers. One excels at construction and the other at obstruction.

That is the contention of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”, a new book by Dan Wang, a Chinese-Canadian who is now a research fellow at Stanford University.

The U.S. has become “a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers”, he said. “Its legal aristocracy favours process over outcomes and systematically favours the well-off.”

China, on the other hand, is run by engineering and science graduates who favour construction and manufacturing.

In 2024, China had 435 million cars, compared to 500,000 in 1990. It has the capacity to build 60 million cars a year, out of a total global market of 90 million.

By 2030, it will account for 45 per cent of the world’s industrial capacity, compared to 38 per cent for all the rich countries, including the US, Europe and Japan, according to the U.N. Industrial Development Organisation.

As of the end of 2024, China had 48,000 kilometres of high-speed rail, The U.S. had none.

Wang spent the first seven years of his life in China, before his family emigrated to Canada. Later he returned to China from 2017 to 2023, as an analyst in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai.

He said the book began with a bicycle ride in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces in the southwest. “I was delighted to find that Guizhou has much better infrastructure than California or New York, both wealthier by orders of magnitude,” he said.

“China is an engineering state which brings a sledgehammer to problems both social and physical, in contrast to America’s lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad.”

China has become a world leader in drones, precision manufacturing, industrial robotics and solar and wind energy.

It has massive and wasteful inefficient over-capacity in many sectors, which makes it harder for rivals to compete. Wang said that, although 50 per cent of China’s economy may be dysfunctional, five per cent perform superbly well, with its leading tech companies challenging the best in the world.

The U.S. is run by lawyers, he argues. From 1984 to 2020, every Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee had attended law school.

“Elite law schools, now and in the past, fashion the easiest path for the ambitions to step into the top ranks of the American government. The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy. I believe that America cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected.” Vetocracy means a system where decision-making is paralysed by the use of the veto. “The U.S. has lost its ability not only to build but also to govern,” he said.

But China’s sledgehammer does not work well in social policy. Like Josef Stalin, its leaders want to be “engineers of the soul.” This has resulted in many disasters.

The worst was the one-child policy from 1980 to 2016 that, Wang said, was the result of “misbegotten scientism” of a missile scientist named Song Jian.

In 1978, Song and his associates presented to the government their calculations that determined the "ideal" population for China in the next 100 years was 650 to 700 million, two-thirds of its then-population of one billion. To achieve this, he showed that the "optimal" trajectory was to reduce fertility rapidly to one child per couple by 1985, maintain that level for 20 to 40 years, and slowly raise it to the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman

The policy was responsible for 321 million abortions and the sterilisation of 108 million women. Demographers estimate that it caused 40 million “missing women” – girls killed so that their parents could try for a son,

This was completely antithetical to the family traditions of China of many centuries.

Wang compared this policy to the theories of Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet scientist who won the favour of Stalin. He rejected the mainstream science of Mendelian genetics in favour of his own crackpot ideas that were not based on science.

The use by farmers of his methods caused widespread famine in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Scientists who opposed him were imprisoned and some executed.

Another disaster of the “sledgehammer”, said Wang, has been the detention of tens of thousands of Muslim Uighurs and their brainwashing into becoming Chinese.

It was also behind many of the measures used to control the Covid pandemic. Wang was in Shanghai during that period. He saw drones flying through the air ordering residents to return home and wear facemasks.

Mark O'Neill

A Hong Kong-based writer, teacher and speaker.