Front Burner - The secret to China’s dominance

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Dan Wang is a tech analyst and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. He’s one of the leading China analysts in the world right now and his new book is called “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”.Today on the show he explains his novel way of understanding the clash between China and the United States: China owns the future because it is an “engineering state” whereas the U.S. is a “lawyerly society” that often gets in its own way.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

I never thought the enemy would be inside my own ranks. Hi, I'm Sandra Puraugh. I was Canada's first female infantry officer, and being the first man, I had to fight some pretty tough battles on and off the battlefield. You know they're going to use this to say women can't be in combat arms. If this picture gets out, it would damage the men who are bravely serving this country. Discover my true story on screen for the first time. Outstanding is now playing only in Canadian theaters.

This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Matthew Amma, filling in for Jamie. There's been much talk about the U.S. finding itself in a new Cold War. This time, in direct opposition with China. Trump's global trade war, he says, centers on a bid to return manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. after decades of them transferring overseas. But in that time, China's grown to hold over 27% of the world's manufacturing output, making the country a pretty indispensable part of the global supply chain.

So, is this much of a race at all? Dan Wong is a tech analyst and research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover History Lab. He's one of the leading China analysts in the world right now. In his book, Breakneck, China's quest to engineer. near the future, Dan arrives at the conclusion that China's claim to the 21st century is largely due to its identity as what he calls an engineering state, whereas the U.S. is a lawyerly society, often getting in its own way. We're going to get into exactly what that means, what the implications are, and whether there's any hope for the U.S. to catch up.

Hi, Dan. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for having me. You lived in China for six years, starting in 2017, and you've written about your observations from that time, eventually kind of culminating in this book, where you describe China as an engineering state. You lived in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, and kind of traveled throughout the country, kind of especially for someone who's never been there before. On the micro level, can you describe to me aspects of daily life that best illustrate what it's like to live? live in an engineering state? I think the first thing to say about living in China is just how much fun when could have. China is just more than anything else, a densely textured place with a lot of wonderful cuisine, a lot of fun parts of daily life, and most especially, amazing sorts of

infrastructure. So the city that I identify the most with across my six years of living in China is the city of Shanghai, which I think is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. One is never very far from a subway station. One could go through these leafy boulevards to sit in cafes, and there's also just this incredible high-speed rail system. And part of what I observed with the engineering state was in 2021, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I took the high-speed rail from Shanghai, China's richest city of about 25 million people. I took the high-speed rail. I took the high-speed rail deep into China's interior in the southwestern periphery into a province called Guajjo, which is China's fourth porous province. It is very, very mountainous, previously

and accessible, far away from the coasts. And throughout a five-day bicycle ride, I took throughout the mountains. I saw that Guajo has much better levels of infrastructure that one night find in New York State or California. Wayjo has about 15 airports, It has about 45 of the world's tallest bridges, not China's tallest bridges, but the world's tallest bridges. It has a high-speed rail network, and it is just really remarkable, the extent to which China is really intent on building great infrastructure for its people. I mean, given that there was that level of infrastructure there, I mean, what has that done, would you say, for the quality of life of folks living in places like Guajo? You think that people are broadly really happy to have new sources of infrastructure when they take a look at some of these super tall bridges, they feel proud and rightfully so that their travel time to get from their village into a city has been cut from so many hours to perhaps just a fraction of that time. They're really proud to be able to take the high-speed rail from the capital city into much richer cities like Shanghai as well as in Beijing, and for the most part, they feel that these big monumental projects are giving their province a sense of prestige.

Now, I think what some observers would also realize is that these super-tall bridges are also saddling the province with enormous quantities of debt. Many parts of Guajos government is now fully focused on servicing its debt. The displacement has been an issue, especially around bigger projects like hydraulic dams, which are not so much present in Guajos. But there is also an element of environmental waste in which the government has been pouring a lot of concrete, which is extremely carbon-intensive into the ground. But overall, I think that for most residents, China, whether one is a resident of a big city like Shanghai or the provinces like Wei

Zhou, the sense of physical dynamism has pervaded throughout a person's life, that they see that their cities get better, that their transit systems get better, that gives them a measure of not only economic stimulus through the construction of these projects, but it also makes them have a sense of optimism for the future because they expect that their life will get better because it has over the previous years. As I understand it, you kind of arrive to this engineering state label, when you found that our more traditional political labels of, you know, kind of socialist or communist versus capitalist, don't necessarily describe the true nature of China's political reality, that it's not actually leftist. And can you explore that in further detail for me and why you think that this engineering state moniker

is a more useful, maybe more complicated description? Yeah. So throughout my six years of living in China from 2017 to 2023, I experienced President Trump's first trade war. Game on here. A trade war between the United States and China is here. It's real.

At the stroke of midnight, the U.S. hit China with tariffs on $34 billion worth of goods. China immediately responded. with its revenge tariffs of equal value, accusing the U.S. of launching the largest trade war in economic history and calling America trade bullies. I experienced President Xi's darkening repression throughout the country. I saw how a lot of Chinese companies became bigger technological superstars. And the centerpiece of my time was the zero COVID program, which I looked through.

Zero COVID itself could be understood as a bit of an engineering exercise in which the target, is right there in the name, there's no ambiguity about what zero COVID could possibly mean. If we chose to lay down now, our efforts will have come to nothing. We unswervingly insist on zero COVID. The policy aims to stop reproduction of the virus as soon as it's detected, rather than just controlling it. Mass test and trace, strict isolation and extended lockdowns are used to get an area back to zero new infections as soon as possible. And as I observed through all of these different things, that I thought that socialists, autocratic, capitalist, neoliberal, these all feel like 19th century political science terms that are no longer really fit for purpose for describing the world as we ought to understand it today.

It's China fundamentally leftist, right wing, well, a little bit of both, all at the same time. And the way that I try to describe China as an engineering state is to point out that first and foremost, the country, is very, very interested in building big infrastructure, building monumental pieces of infrastructure, in part to inspire pride, as I mentioned. Xi Jinping is also very interested in engineering the economy. Another part of what I lived through was this crackdown that Xi and the rest of the party state initiated against some of China's most dynamic companies working in consumer internet. China is clamping down on its internet sector, not even the likes of e-commerce giant Alibaba,

are safe, with it receiving a record-breaking fine in April. Beijing's competition regulator is dishing out fines and investigating some of the biggest names in the platform economy after issuing anti-monopoly guidelines that target internet platforms. At a stroke, Presidency more or less stopped the operations of a lot of online education companies, stopped a lot of minors from being able to play video games. Three hours a week.

That's the absolute maximum. amount of time under 18s can spend on video games in China, after the country introduced, a drastic new limit to combat gaming addiction. And there was an element of trying to push China's brightest young people, brightest university graduates, to not work on financial projects or consumer internet projects, but to work on projects of more importance to the state, something like semiconductors or aviation or chemicals. canonicals. And I think the centerpiece of my book is also talking about how the engineering state

is also made up of social engineers. I spend a lot of time thinking about zero COVID. I spent a lot of time thinking about the one-child policy in which the country has treated the population as if it were just another building material to be torn down and remolded as it wishes. I mean, to kind of better understand how China came to be this nation of engineers, a technocratic society that makes stuff for the world. I've seen Deng Xiaoping being highly credited as the leader, one of the leaders that helped to send the country in this trajectory. Can you talk to me about what he did? One of the things that Deng Xiaoping did was when he took power after the misrule of the Maltzedong years, when Deng Xiaoping became top leader in the late 1970s, he surveyed the wreckage of the country,

and he took a look at Monsadon, who, was a poet, who was a romantic, who was a mass-murdering warlord, and decided that whatever Mao Zedong did, Deng Xiaoping was going to do the opposite. What was the opposite of the poets? Well, it was really to promote a lot of engineers into the senior leadership of the Communist Party. And so what we saw throughout the 1980s and the 1990s

was that a lot of engineers ended up inside the Central Committee and inside the Politburo, such that by the year 2002, this was a bit after Dunsiao Ping passed away, all nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, which is the highest ruling echelon of the Communist Party, all of them had engineering degrees. The top leader, then, Huchentau, was trained as a hydraulic engineer. His deputy, the premier, was trained as a geologist. And I think this is one of the reasons that the modern engineering state took shape, because the Communist Party really wanted to demonstrate that it wasn't about ideological class struggle

all the time. What I wanted to demonstrate was that it was able to build enormous projects like the Three Gorges Dam or very tall bridges or, in more recent times, high-speed rail, because it is committed to monumentalism and it is committed to economic development. But I would also say that China's engineering state also has a few older roots. If we take a look at some elements of China's imperial history. The emperors were famous for building the Great Wall, as well as the Grand Canal, a fortification system in the first case, and then a water management system in the second case. That China is famous for administering an impartial exam towards its entire bureaucracy so that the only way to get into court was to pass this

pretty rigorous exam. And so these are some of the ways that I want to be playful with this idea. I don't want to take it too seriously. I think that it is not much more and not much less useful than using a term like socialist or autocratic to describe China, but to be a little bit invented with this framework to think about how China has been an engineering state for a very long time. I never thought the enemy would be inside my own ranks. I was Canada's first female infantry officer, and being the first man, I had to fight some pretty tough battles on and off the battlefield. You know they're going to use this to say women can't be in combat arms.

If this picture gets out, it would damage the men who are bravely serving this country. Discover my true story on screen for the first time. Outstanding is now playing only in Canadian theaters. Hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the health. of the credit counseling society. Whoa, seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy. I called and spoke with a credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and help me along the way. You had a ton of debt, and you're saying credit counseling

society helped with all of it? Yep, and now I can sleep better at night. Right on! When debt's got you, you've got us. Give credit counseling society a call today. Visit no more debts.org. You often hear criticism of the way that China builds and manufactures, whether for the way the government subsidizes these industries or for how much they can overproduce or run into issues having to do with things like overcapacity. So what are some of the pitfalls from your view of the way that they tend to do things? I think the pitfalls include building bridges to nowhere. Sometimes these no-wheres become to somewhere after the bridge is constructed,

but sometimes these nowhere stay no-wheres. and what you have is a fantastically expensive bridge being built in pretty remote areas and not very used by many people such that these bridges aren't really able to pay back their bonds. And so that has created a real financial drag with local governments, especially the Guajjo government. And a lot of big projects like the Three Gorgeous Dam project has also displaced about a million people from their homes when their villages, had become flooded after the Three Gorges Dam had been built and had been in place.

But I think what I would emphasize is that when it comes to physical dynamism, the benefits of the engineering state, I would say mostly outweigh the costs. I think that people really like having new and better subways, new and better highways, new and better bridges. It really makes people more optimistic about the future. And I would say that the elements of social engineering are mostly cost and very little benefit that people have become really upset at projects like the one child policy as well as zero COVID, as well as repressive elements against the ethno-religious minorities in Xinjiang as well as in Tibet.

And so I think that for the most hand, physical engineering is mostly pretty good and social engineering mostly pretty bad. This may be a question kind of coming from a place of ignorance, but I'm curious to see what you might say of it. I mean, are there means for citizens of China to be able to petition their government on this front or to be able to make some of these criticisms or critiques known? I mean, how are you as somebody that, I mean, obviously live there, but has these connections to the West? How are you able to get a pulse on how folks are feeling in a climate maybe of repression or even silence in some sense? I think that it is the case that Chinese do have some degree of a petition system.

There's a, in fact, a formalized petition system in which people line up, submit petitions, and hope that their grievances could be redressed. And there is, to some extent, a protest culture in China. Every so often you would see these videos online of pensioners complaining that their pensions have been cut or residents in some of the wealthier cities complaining that there's going to be a trash into the raider right next to their homes. And then they go on in the streets and they protest. And most famously, there were plenty of protests over zero COVID in the year 2022 when Beijing imposed vast lockdowns throughout the country.

Protesters in China's largest city crying down with the Chinese Communist Party and down with Xi Jinping. We need to be brave, this man says, am I a criminal for holding a flower? dragged away by police, but unclear if arrests alone can stop simmering anger from nearly three years of harsh COVID lockdowns, boiling into something bigger. So I think at a first approximation, there is some degree of protest petition culture that is alive in China. But I think that it is also a fairly limited sort of protest and petition system because there are plenty of cases. in which the wishes of the people are not redressed, that plenty of people get arrested for their protests

and are told, stop making such a fuss, you are embarrassing everyone, you need to go home now and stop it with your grievances. And I think that in this sort of authoritarian system, in this sort of an engineering state, there is only so much protest and dissent that the engineers are able to tolerate. They're a very thin-skinned type of people,

and they do not like it if they are embarrassed over long. So let's now pivot to the U.S. for a little bit. You have referred to the United States, as we've talked about, as a so-called lawyerly society, in contrast to China's engineering state. If an engineering state builds things, what does a lawyerly society do? the lawyer has subtract things, for better or for worse. So after I left China, I moved to the United States to be a fellow at the Yale Law School's Paltai China Center, very substantially wrote this book.

And so I moved away from the engineering state after living through zero COVID, which again I would situate to be an engineering project, and moved into one of the high temples of the lawyerly society in the United States. If we take a look at the United States, you'll find. that plenty of U.S. presidents have gone to law school. If you read the Declaration of Independence, it really feels like the start of a legal brief. And in the modern era, the Democratic Party is especially lawyerly. And so I think there is this really striking dominance of lawyers in the American political elite such that, as I say in my book, the U.S. government is a government made up of the

lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. And the issue with lawyers is that they're able to block everything good and bad. So you don't have stupid ideas like the one child policy. We also don't really have functional infrastructure almost anywhere in the United States. And so that is kind of the great contrast they set up between these two great superpowers. Can you maybe give me an example of how being a lowerly society, kind of, you know, this tradition of obstruction has maybe hindered or limited America's plans for the future? I mean, or like even maybe like specific state project maybe. Sure. I love trains. And trains love me back. But not. always American trains have been very good. I'm right now a fellow at the Hoover Institution

at Stanford University, and in 2008, the voters in California approved a referendum to build a big train project to connect San Francisco with Los Angeles. And it has now been about 17 years after the start of the referendum. How many people have actually taken any California high-speed rail? The number is zero, because the first segment is supposed to be. to start operating between 2030 and 20303. It was supposed to be finished in 2020, but five years after the deadline, it's still under construction with an estimated price tag of more than $90 billion. And so this is a very expensive project that has been built at glacial speed, in part because

lawyers have kept getting in the way of trying to stop the development of this project. One last example I'll give you is that I substantially wrote this book when I was a fellow at the Yale law school. And sometimes I would take the train from New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is based down to New York City. And the train is fine. It takes about two hours to get from New Haven to New York. I'm pretty reliable. And I was radicalized when I saw a timetable from 1914 in which the trains used to be slightly faster to get from New York to New Haven. And, you know, it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison because the trains now make more stops. But At a first approximation, Americans are not moving faster than they were 100 years ago.

And this is, again, I think, a failure of the Laurelian Society that there were a lot of homeowners around in Connecticut who put up their hands and said, we do not want a rail line in our backyard. They made the tracks longer and more curvy than they should have been. And this is a country that is not able to build stuff. Since the start of Donald Trump's second term, one of his kind of stated core missions has been to compete with China in a serious way and bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Before we get into some of how he's been aiming to do that, can you going to briefly remind us how the manufacturing sector in the U.S. saw this decline in the first place and kind of how it was often working to the benefit of China? The U.S. manufacturing sector has not been in good health. the U.S. has lost quite a lot of over a million manufacturing jobs since 2008. A lot of that has not recovered. Output has been a little bit steady, but if you take a look at some of

America's apex manufacturers, companies like Boeing, the plane maker, Intel, the chip maker, Detroit automotive makers, as well as Tesla, most of them have been dealing with this unending series of tale of woe over the last few years. And in the case, of Detroit over the last few decades. And I was really struck that in the early days of the pandemic, a lot of manufacturers in the United States were unable to retool their production lines in order to make essential medical equipment, things like cotton masks as well as cotton swabs. And I think that there is something quite fundamentally rigid and unhealthy about the U.S. manufacturing sector, in part because a lot of these manufacturing jobs had been moving

to China over much of the last 30 years. Trump has kind of been aiming to correct this in part with his trade war. The U.S. has imposed 30% tariffs on China, and that's led to a pretty steep decline in Chinese exports to the U.S. but China has managed to weather the storm so far by keeping up their exports to other countries. How effective do you think this will be for the U.S. and their goal to have manufacturing jobs flow back into the country? I would say almost completely ineffective. we take a look simply at the number of manufacturing jobs since Liberation Day in April,

the U.S. has lost about 40,000 manufacturing jobs over the last five months. U.S. manufacturing production has been contracting over the last six months. And I am highly skeptical of any agenda to make the U.S. more of a scientific or technological power by cutting funding to the National Science Foundation or the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. I think it does not encourage a lot of appetite for foreign investment in the United States when Trump's immigration enforcers decide to raid a South Korean factory in the state of Georgia and deport about 300 South Korean engineers in chains. And so I think there is very little of Trump's agenda that I think is going to herald a great

manufacturing renaissance. Perhaps one could be positive about some aspects of his energy agenda. Perhaps one could be positive about aspects of his regulatory agenda. But where it matters, in terms of immigration, in terms of workers, in terms of new forms of scientific development, all of the news has been, for the most part, I would say, unrelentingly negative. How do kind of smaller nations, especially, you know, American allies like Canada, get caught up in the middle of this lawyer versus engineer binary, do you think? And like, does this binary hold, if we're talking about the West writ large? Like, is Canada also a kind of lowerly society? Is England a lowerly society? Is the same true of Germany and France and kind of countries like it? Or is this an observation

that's kind of more unique to the United States? Well, I would first begin by asking as Canada, even an American ally anymore. Now, Matthew, I grew up in Ottawa. I am Canadian. and I have distinctly felt that there is, you know, strange, it is very, very strange that Donald Trump destabilized the Canadian relationship almost on a whim by making so many hostile annexation threats against Canada. My view is that Canada, by virtue of being a more reasonably sized country, also has a slightly more reasonable elites. There's a term I like from a political scientist named Edward Ludvac, who came up with the term great power autism in which I said that a lot of superpowers tend to have really narrow

focuses and tend to be are really narrowly minded. And I think it is the prerogative of the superpowers really to specialize, really to specialize in engineering and really to specialize in the lawyers and other more reasonably sized countries like Canada, like the UK, like the Netherlands, they don't tend to specialize so much. Now, what is a little bit strange to me is that Canada actually does seem to have a lot of the afflictions of the United States without having so many lawyers in Parliament. But maybe there is also something to do with the common law system, which is an inheritance from the United Kingdom, in which there's a lot of people that are simply able to put up

their hands, get a judge to sign onto their argument, and block a lot of development. So I certainly think that Canada has not built enough housing. That is abundantly clear. I think that Canada in particular ought to take a leave from both the Americans and the Chinese in terms of building bigger companies and better brands. I think that this has been a big Canadian weakness in not building better corporations that are able to compete on the global stage. And I think that the Chinese have proved that they have been able to maintain a fast and robust manufacturing base.

And this is something that Canada, I think, should also be a little bit better at. I was just taking a look at some data that showed that Canadian businesses have utterly collapsed in their business investment in industrial machinery. And so I think that there is an element of Canada, which I find very cozy and tidy. But there is also an element of Canada that I wish could be much more ambitious than it presently is because a lot of ambitious Canadians do tend to move abroad. and I really wish that ambitious Canadians could actually find

really excellent job opportunities at home and really make Canada into a bit more powerful of a country, especially over a more domineering neighbor right now. Really interesting stuff, Dan. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much, Matthew. All right, that's all for time. today. I'm Matthew Amha. Thanks so much for listening.