A Nation of Lawyers Confronts China’s Engineering State

As the Chinese economy surges forward, the U.S. has lost its capacity for physical improvement.

Excerpt: "How did America lose so much productive capacity to China and end up in such a vulnerable position? Think about it this way: China is an engineering state, which treats construction projects and technological primacy as the solution to all of its problems, whereas the United States is a lawyerly society, obsessed with protecting wealth by making rules rather than producing material goods.

Successive American administrations have attempted to counter Beijing through legalism—levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime—while the engineering state has created the future by physically building better cars, better-functioning cities, and bigger power plants.

Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the ideological mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government from the 1980s onward. By 2002, all nine members of the politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers. Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University, China’s most prominent science institution. At the start of his third term, in 2022, Xi filled the politburo with executives who had experience in aerospace and weapons."