Breakneck Divide: China's Builders Vs America's Lawyers

Today, it is still relatively poor, but crossed by highways and bridges that make a cycling trip possible, with shops selling noodles and ice cream bars for lunch and restaurants serving dinners of fish stew, braised goat, local pickles and salads and rice balls filled with sesame.

Guizhou is home to the world's largest single-aperture radio telescope , known as“China Sky Eye,” and Zheng'an county, which calls itself“the guitar capital of the world.” According to China Daily, more than 2.25 million guitars are produced in Zheng'an every year, making it the world's largest center of guitar production. They aren't the world's best guitars, but China has displaced South Korea, which displaced Japan, as the world's largest producer of affordable guitars.

Wang points out that“Several of Guizhou's party chiefs have gone on to high positions in Beijing, including Hu Jintao, general secretary of the Communist Party before Xi Jinping.“Chinese leaders,” he writes,“are usually expected to administer a poor province before they can be promoted to the country's political pinnacle. In the United States, it would be as if politicians had to gain some experience in the Rust Belt or coal country before they could get anywhere near a cabinet position.”

Incidentally, Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of Huawei, was born in Guizhou. Wang makes only a brief mention of Huawei in the book, but it is worth pointing out that Ren, too, started out as an engineer . So did Hu Jintao.

“Engineers,” writes Wang,“have quite literally ruled modern China.... Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua, China's top science university.” And:“What do engineers like to do? Build.” A road network twice as long as that of the US, a high-speed rail network 20 times longer than Japan's, and nearly as much solar and wind power as the rest of the world combined. The problem is, they can't stop, applying their methods to social problems even when that it not appropriate.

After an inspiring description of the rise of venture capital and high-tech manufacturing in Shenzhen, Wang turns his attention to the brutal enforcement of the one-child policy and the severe Covid lockdown that drove people to desperation.

Judging from the severe criticism in these chapters, it was not surprising to me that Chinese censors shut down the website where he published his annual letters. (The chapters were written after the website was shut down.)

Wang also sees things that other writers tend to miss. In politics, for example,

In the realm of technology, Wang writes, Americans celebrate invention, whereas for the Chinese,“innovation emerges from the factory floor.”

There are three aspects to technology: tools, recipes (blueprints, patents) and process knowledge, he says. The last, process knowledge, he terms“proficiency gained from practical experience” – and that's the one that he considers most important of the three.

This is what has brought Chinese manufacturing close to the levels achieved in Germany and Japan. It is also the Japanese way of doing things, although the Japanese, unlike the Chinese, have also won an impressive number of Nobel Prizes. China is now working hard to close that gap.

And what about the American lawyer-led way of doing things? Wang chooses high-speed rail to make his point. In 2008, Californians voted to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That same year, China began construction of a high-speed rail link between Beijing and Shanghai.

Three years later, at a cost of US$36 billion, the Chinese railway was operational. Seventeen years later, only a quarter of the line in California has been built and the budget to completion is estimated at $128 billion.

What happened? Lawyers happened.“The United States ... has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers.... Americans no longer manufacture well or build public works on reasonable timetables.”

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The US was once, like China, an engineering state, building canals, the transcontinental railway and, not so long ago, the interstate highway system. Learning from China, therefore, would mean going back to American roots. And China, in Wang's view, could use some of the American lawyer's concern for the environment and civil rights.

Breakneck will be published on August 26. Follow this writer on X: @ScottFo83517667

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