【By Observer News, Yuan Jiaqi】
In 2021, Canadian-born Chinese technology analyst Dan Wang returned to his homeland. This researcher, born in Yunnan and immigrated to Canada with his parents at the age of seven, cycled from Guiyang to Chongqing.
Along the way, Wang was surprised to see that Guizhou, which had already lifted all its poor counties out of poverty by 2020, had infrastructure levels far superior to those of California or New York State, despite the latter two being several orders of magnitude wealthier.
"Amidst the lush and beautiful mountains, I endured a five-day difficult bike ride to glimpse the true face of socialism with Chinese characteristics," Wang said感慨.
This contrast between the US and China became more pronounced two years later when he returned to the US.
In 2023, Wang spent some time at Yale Law School, during which he strongly felt that the US is a "society of lawyers."
"Whether in the past or present, elite law schools are the most convenient path for ambitious individuals to enter the upper echelons of the US government. The dominance of lawyers in the elite class has turned the US into a veto-driven country where litigation prevails. No matter what you want to promote, opponents can always block it through legal means," he said bluntly.
"If the US insists on maintaining this system primarily serving the wealthy and the elite, it will not be able to maintain its status as a superpower," he said.
Based on this strong comparison between China and the US, Wang wrote a new book titled "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future" (translated as "Racing Forward: China's Exploration to Shape the Future"). In the book, he did not use common classification labels in Western political contexts such as "liberals vs. conservatives" or "hawks vs. doves," but instead adopted a perspective more suitable for China's reality to interpret the country.
He wrote, "My most straightforward argument is that China is an 'engineering state,' solving problems with a 'big hammer' (practical and efficient action); while the US is a 'lawyerly society,' always using a 'gavel' when facing issues, which almost always hinders everything, regardless of whether it is good or bad."
Wang believes that although the concepts of 'engineering state' and 'lawyerly society' may not fully explain the differences in development between China and the US, they are sufficient to explain the recent Sino-US trade war and technological competition. "The US relies on legal means, such as imposing tariffs and designing various stringent sanction mechanisms; while China focuses on engineering the future, such as building better cars, more beautiful cities, and larger power plants," he said.
As a researcher born in China and raised in the West, Wang admitted that choosing this perspective for analysis was partly to sort out his understanding of China, a country that is both familiar and unfamiliar. His experience living in China from 2017 to 2023 gave him a deeper insight into China's development.
"China has established a good operational model for a resource-rich country. Over the past four decades, it has built how many miles of highways, constructed how many new nuclear power plants, and produced how much steel—writing them down is truly astonishing," he wrote. "The US does not have to copy China's infrastructure construction model, but should still learn from China's experience, as China has achieved many successes in urban construction."
Wang's new book will be available for sale in late August, and it analyzes the differences in development between China and the US from a unique perspective. It has recently attracted attention from many Western media outlets. On the 16th, the UK's Financial Times reported that Wang's new book thoroughly explores China's strengths and weaknesses, and sharply criticizes how the US leadership has fallen behind in the technological arms race with competitors due to self-harming decisions.
"It is often the US that builds the steps leading to technological leadership, but China becomes the first to reach the top," Wang wrote on his personal website introducing the book. "Many places in the US today resemble well-preserved ruins of a once-glorious civilization. Americans should more clearly examine industrial achievements that are usually ignored and often underestimated."
Wang and the cover of his new book. Screenshot from Bloomberg
"The engineering projects in China are fascinating, so I wanted to go back and see"
According to Bloomberg, Wang is less than 33 years old this year and currently works as a researcher at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. For over a decade, he has focused on studying China's technological development.
Wang was born in Yunnan Province, China. His father is a software development engineer, and his mother was a radio and television host. In 2000, when he was seven years old, Wang moved to Canada with his parents. Due to poor math performance, he did not follow his father's footsteps into the engineering field, initially working in marketing.
After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in the US in 2015, Wang soon regretted it. In his view, the atmosphere there was closed and narrow-minded.
"People always say that San Francisco is the center of the world, but I don't feel that way at all," he recalled. He was disappointed with the local transportation system and the catering industry, and the cryptocurrency, virtual reality, and online platforms that his peers were enthusiastic about failed to interest him.
On the contrary, the engineering fields being promoted in China fascinated him more, such as large-scale infrastructure projects, the semiconductor industry, and green energy development.
So, a year later, Wang first moved to Hong Kong, China, and joined a financial analysis company to help investors understand China's political and economic dynamics. This job also allowed him to re-understand China from a broader perspective. In 2018, Wang went to mainland China to observe the operation of China's system more closely.
After returning to the US in 2023, Wang found that the students he met at Yale Law School were ambitious but lacked initiative. This made him think of the views of Nicholas Bagley, a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan Law School, who stated that "the US government is overly obsessed with proceduralization." These thoughts combined to form the core framework of his new book.
The central idea of Wang's book is that China is a country governed by "engineering thinking," led by people with engineering backgrounds, skilled in planning and construction. In contrast, the US has evolved into a "lawyer-dominated society," where everything tends to be obstructed, and the federal government has become "a government of lawyers, by lawyers, and for lawyers."
He believes that this difference leads to the result that the "legal elite class" in the US prioritizes procedures over outcomes, and its institutional design systematically favors the wealthy. He pointed out that all US Democratic Party presidential and vice-presidential candidates from 1984 to 2020 had attended law schools.
The differences in governance models are particularly evident in high-speed rail construction.
In 2008, voters in California approved a funding plan to build a high-speed rail line connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, stretching 800 miles. Almost at the same time, China started the construction of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail, with a similar mileage.
Three years later, China's high-speed rail officially opened, with a total cost of over $30 billion, and in the first ten years of operation, it transported nearly 1.4 billion passengers. However, the first segment of the California high-speed rail project has yet to materialize, and the opening date has been delayed again to 2030, with costs surging to $12.8 billion.
On April 25, in Suzhou, Jiangsu, a high-speed train of the Beijing-Shanghai line speeds across the Yangcheng Lake section, with the sunset creating a beautiful summer landscape. Visual China
In 2024, after three years and $1 billion, a 1,600-foot-high (about 488 meters) elevated bridge over the Fresno River in California was finally completed.
In his book, Wang also lists more of his defined "engineering state" achievements. The Financial Times commented that some data cited in Wang's book describing China's remarkable economic and technological changes in the past few decades have the impact of "a sledgehammer blow."
For example, in 1990, China had only 500,000 cars. By 2024, this number had increased to 435 million, many of which are electric vehicles. Currently, China produces more than 60 million cars annually, while the global car market's total sales amount to 90 million.
Additionally, China has become a global leader in drones, precision manufacturing, industrial robots, solar and wind energy, and is accelerating its deepening of expertise in artificial intelligence, showing signs of catching up with the US. In the nuclear power sector, China currently has 31 nuclear power plants under construction, while the US has only one.
According to data from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, by 2030, China will account for 45% of the global industrial capacity, while the combined industrial capacity of all other high-income economies, including the US, Europe, and Japan, will be only 38%. Wang added that at the same time, China's top tech companies have the strength to challenge global top enterprises.
"The US should acknowledge that it is a 'developing country,' and 'developing' is actually a label worth being proud of."
In his book, Wang stated that if the US wants to win in the competition with China, it first needs to truly understand China, which means abandoning the "traditional narrative" sold by the US government and Silicon Valley.
"I believe all the stereotypical narratives about China have been wrong from the start," he mentioned. In certain areas, the notion that "China only copies, but does not innovate" is still considered the norm, but in the context of TikTok, DeepSeek, and BYD's rise, this absurd accusation obviously does not hold water.
Wang further pointed out that the conventional thinking of Silicon Valley is fixated on the latest breakthrough inventions, such as next-generation generative AI models, but this focus is misguided. Instead, he believes that "technology" should be understood as the "human resources and process knowledge" required to build manufacturing capabilities.
He used Apple's iPhone as an example. Apple invented the iPhone, but most of the devices are produced in China, which also helped Shenzhen become the most innovative electronics hub in the world.
According to Bloomberg, Wang hopes to advise the US to rekindle its passion for "construction," urging the US to learn from China's approach, to re-embrace hard-core engineering as a proud cause, and to praise the "physical world composed of atoms, rather than the virtual world composed of bits."
The Financial Times mentioned that the end of the book saw Wang make sharp criticisms of the current situation in the US. He accused the country of being dragged into a quagmire by "obsessive left-wingers" and "destructive right-wingers," stating that the nation "not only lost its ability to build, but also, in some ways, its ability to govern."
He urged the newly established "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) to shift its focus from "reducing staff" to "streamlining bureaucratic processes,"重塑 "a government governance model with clear goals," to free itself from the rigid constraints of lawyer-led governance, and to rebuild the country's engineering technical strength.
Subsequently, Wang proposed a unique idea: he believes that to achieve all this, the US must first acknowledge itself as a "developing country," and that there are many areas where it needs to draw lessons from China, an "engineering state."
He summarized in the book: "The term 'developing' should naturally be a label worth being proud of."
Bloomberg takes a more pessimistic view. The report suggests that given the US is currently moving in the opposite direction of the recommendations made by Wang, his new book reads more like a "warning."
"The word 'breakneck' in the book's title seems to refer to China's rapid development, but perhaps this word applies equally to the US: after all, when a country 'slips and falls,' its rate of decline might be just as astonishing."
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Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7539832023003857458/
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