Beyond the Headlines
Is China a partner or a threat? Will it dominate the 21st century, or is its rise a fragile illusion? These questions saturate our headlines, often painting a picture in black and white. For years, I found myself caught between these polarized views, struggling to reconcile tales of unprecedented growth with reports of deep-seated fragility.
My perspective shifted dramatically when I encountered the analyses of Dan Wang, a technology analyst who spent years living and traveling across China. His on-the-ground experiences offer a guide to a more nuanced reality, one that sidesteps simplistic narratives. Wang reveals a series of counter-intuitive truths that challenge conventional wisdom about both China's formidable strengths and its critical, often overlooked, weaknesses. These six insights have reshaped my understanding of the world's emerging superpower.
1. Their Poorest Regions Have Better Infrastructure Than Our Richest
Dan Wang tells a story of a bike ride he took through Guizhou, China's fourth-poorest province. Expecting rugged, underdeveloped terrain, he was shocked to discover "much better levels of infrastructure" than he had ever encountered in wealthy U.S. states like New York or California.
In a region with a GDP per capita comparable to Botswana, he cycled on brand new, spiffing highways, surrounded by monumental feats of engineering. Guizhou, one of China's most impoverished areas, is home to:
11 airports
50 of the world's highest bridges
An expansive network of new roads
This stands in stark contrast to the American experience. Wang notes New York's "screamingly loud" subways and the notoriously dilapidated Port Authority Bus Terminal, a facility whose planned refurbishment will take years. The disparity isn't just about gleaming new projects; it's a physical manifestation of a society's will and capacity to build. It reveals a fundamentally different set of national priorities, where investing in the physical foundation of the country, even in its poorest corners, is paramount. This raises a crucial question: what kind of leadership class makes such a choice? The answer lies in a fundamental difference not of politics, but of profession.
2. The Ruling Elite is Made of Engineers, Not Lawyers
This disparity in infrastructure stems from a fundamental difference in the nature of each country's ruling class. Dan Wang frames China as an "engineering state" and the United States as a "lawyerly society."
This engineering focus began in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, who saw it as a necessary corrective to the chaotic, romantic disasters of the Mao years. Deng systematically promoted technocrats—civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers—into the highest ranks of the Communist Party. The result was staggering: "by the year 2002, all 9 members of the standing committee of the Politburo had degrees in engineering."
The United States, by contrast, was founded by lawyers. Its foundational documents, like the Declaration of Independence, read like legal arguments. This divergence has profound consequences. The engineering state attempts to build its way out of every problem, sometimes creating new ones in the process. The lawyerly society, however, excels at stopping things. While this can prevent disastrous ideas, it also leads to the kind of infrastructural paralysis that leaves bus terminals crumbling for decades. This lawyerly friction, however, serves as a crucial check on the state's power—a check whose absence in China enables not only breathtaking construction but also breathtakingly cruel social experiments.
3. Innovation Doesn't Necessarily Require Free Speech
A core belief in the West is that true innovation can only flourish in an environment of free thought and open expression. Dan Wang argues that this link may not be as crucial as we assume.
He points to uncomfortable historical counter-examples of highly autocratic regimes that produced significant "state driven innovation." Despite their oppressive natures, both Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany achieved major technological breakthroughs. Wang cites:
Soviet Nobel Prize winners who made their discoveries after barely staggering out of gulags.
Nazi Germany's breakthroughs in rocketry and fighter jets, developed under a fascist, totalitarian regime.
This is a difficult lesson to absorb, as it cuts against the West's most cherished belief that personal freedom is the essential ingredient for progress. Wang's point suggests a more transactional, and perhaps more cynical, reality: what often matters more for innovation is simply providing massive funding and giving researchers a "really big lab."
4. "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" Actually Means Vicious Competition
The idea that China's technological success is the product of brilliant, top-down central planning is a common misconception. According to Wang, the reality on the ground is far messier and more dynamic. Success is often driven by "fiercely dynamic entrepreneurs" operating in a market with competition "far more cutthroat than what we would see in the U.S."
He offers the vivid example of Meituan, a major tech platform that began as one of 5,000 clones of Groupon. It survived not through government decree, but by fighting and winning a commercial "battle royale" that left thousands of competitors in the dust.
Wang offers a surprising definition of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" through the lens of the solar industry. Chinese firms came to dominate the global market by driving a 94% drop in prices, a strategic win for the state and a huge benefit for consumers, but a brutal process for the companies and investors involved. He summarizes the dynamic concisely:
The state wins, consumers win. But it is actually pretty rough for any of these companies out there.
It is less a top-down command structure and more a state-managed gladiator pit, where the government sometimes harnesses the entrepreneurial energy and sometimes simply gets out of the way, sacrificing individual firms and investors for national strategic goals.
5. The Ultimate Paradox: A Mass Exodus from the Potential Superpower
For all its strengths, the Chinese model has a profound weakness: its own people are leaving. This desire to exit exists across all strata of society, from the politically connected elite to lower-skilled migrants. Wang identifies three distinct groups and their motivations:
The Wealthy & Politically Connected: They hedge their bets, fearing political purges or wealth confiscation. They buy property in places like Irvine, California, and send their children to schools in the U.S. or U.K., creating an escape route should they need one.
The Creative Class: Journalists, artists, and performers flee censorship and seek freedom of expression. Wang notes attending a feminist stand-up comedy show in Mandarin in New York—a creative and political act unthinkable in today's China.
Lower-Skilled Migrants: Lacking wealth or connections, they undertake perilous journeys, like crossing the Darién Gap, to escape economic constraints and seek opportunity in the United States.
The interviewer, Ross Douthat, puts a fine point on this vulnerability, an assessment with which Wang concurs:
As long as so many talented Chinese would choose that over China, that just seems like a really strong American advantage.
This is the ultimate paradox: a nation on the cusp of global dominance is unable to convince many of its best, brightest, and most ambitious citizens to stay for the ride.
6. The Engineering Mindset Has a Dark Side: The One-Child Policy
The same engineering mindset that builds the world's highest bridges also has a deeply troubling dark side. The fundamental problem with the "engineering state," Wang argues, is its inability to restrain itself. It views the population as just "another building material" to be molded, reshaped, or torn down at will.
The most disastrous example of this impulse was the one-child policy. What sounded rational and scientific was implemented as a "campaign of rural terror against overwhelmingly female bodies." The state prosecuted its demographic goals with "forced sterilizations, forced abortions," inflicting unimaginable trauma on millions.
The tragic irony is that the government, now facing a demographic crisis, is trying to engineer a baby boom. It is discovering that it is "much more easy to prevent births... rather than to coerce copulation." This, Wang reveals, is the engineering state's original sin: its inability to recognize where the blueprints must end and humanity must begin.
A Race to Do Better
Dan Wang's China is not a place of simple answers. It is a nation of staggering strengths built on terrifying flaws, of state-guided ambition and fierce entrepreneurial dynamism.
Wang notes that Beijing's strategy is to remain stable and simply "wait for the Western countries to collapse" under the weight of their own internal divisions. Ultimately, Wang argues the competition isn't about ideology or cynical deal-making, but about which society can better serve its people. His final challenge forces us to look in the mirror, asking whether the race to "win" the 21st century is actually a race to see who can first address their own profound internal failings:
The country that is going to be able to meet the needs of its own people is going to be the more triumphant power... I think the first step for these two countries is to stop delivering these humiliating self beatings and really try to understand and do better.