With China in the headlines a lot recently (and always), it’s a good time to take a deeper look at the relationship between the US and China to try to figure out where we’ve been and where we might be headed.
The book “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang is an illuminating read as he explains, as someone Chinese by birth but not living there anymore, just what China is trying to do as it grows larger and more powerful.
At the heart of the difference between these two superpowers is that China is run by engineers and the US is run by lawyers. What this has meant is that China upholds growth, population control and designing a self-sufficient country above everything else. What having lawyers in control of the US has meant that building projects have become ridiculously hard to accomplish and thus our identity as being a country that builds big things (such as the interstate highway system) and does mind-boggling feats of science (such as the moon landing and developing the Covid vaccine) has now morphed into a place where putting in a bike lane on a street requires far too long at far too great a cost.
As Wang writes, however, China’s penchant for building big isn’t always building well. No where in China is it advisable to drink the tap water, not even Shanghai, the most advanced city in the country.
But China has made great strides in expanding its knowledge when it comes to manufacturing our smart phones and things like semiconductors. This is because they have been manufacturing so many things for so long that other countries have become addicted to outsourcing the production of so many things to them. Wang claims that one third of everything produced in the world comes from China. That’s crazy.
The cost of China’s growth and being led by engineers who don’t care about the environment or individual rights has been steep. The chapter about China’s one-child policy is downright horrific since it involved forced abortions, sterilizations, child abandonment and possible kidnappings to unsuspecting families looking to adopt a child from China.
And the chapter about the Covid pandemic and Beijing’s zero-Covid policy is also a cautionary tale since it was also extremely destructive to the people since prevention methods were doled out with an iron fist and little warmth. People were trapped in their residences for weeks at a time and food distribution systems collapsed, leaving people without food.
After things got worse and worse during the end of the pandemic, Beijing realized that zero-Covid was a good name for the project, but not realistic. And so they announced mission accomplished and let things open up.
The damage was done though. Many young and creative types decided that the state was too suffocating and too controlling and have left their career tracks. And, according to Wang, many of the cities like Shanghai are now less glitzy than before and have lost their pre-Covid zest.
The main point in the book that I found interesting is China’s clear efforts to become “Fortress China”, meaning that it wants to raise the walls around it, in order to become both more powerful and almost entirely self-sufficient in terms of food, energy, defense and manufacturing. It doesn’t take a PHD in global relations to guess why a country would be so determined to not have to rely on any other country. Wang doesn’t really go too deep into what a war between China and US would like. He doesn’t really need to once you’ve read about how China, in 2022, was building 1,800 military ships. The US had five under construction. And then there’s the toll that the Ukraine-Russia war and the Iran war has taken on US munition levels.
As far as business is concerned, international companies are starting to take notice of this strategy by China to become even more Chinese and they are acting accordingly. “International companies continue to tell me,” Wang writes, “that they are still reluctant to completely pull up their roots from what remains an extraordinary production hub and a very big market.”
So what is China doing before they can move out?
“The engineering state is intent on achieving tech primacy before multinationals pull away,” Wang writes. China basically wants to take over the manufacturing of everything that it is making from companies like Apple and Tesla and just do it themselves.
It was hard to not think of the phrase “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”
So what does Wang suggest in terms of US-China relations? He thinks that the US should treat China with humility and acceptance.
“The sooner that the United States treats China as a peer worthy studying, the sooner it can develop a new playbook for success. Chinese companies are currently beating the rest of the world in the production of electric vehicle batteries. So why not allow a few of them to build factories, as they are trying to do, in states like Michigan, and force them to give up their technology?”
It’s a nice thought but maybe not a realistic one, in my opinion.
I think a more realistic strategy is to indeed take some control back from lawyers in this country and to get back to thinking, as Wang suggests, like a developing country once more and not one in which, yes, we built some amazing infrastructure like NYC subways systems that are somehow still going. But we can do better building across America with less red tape. And we don’t need to have a Politburo that’s filled with engineers as China has, but a few more engineers in the government’s leadership wouldn’t be a bad thing.
In conclusion, this relationship is a messy one for many reasons. Culturally we are very different and a vastly different outlook on both our histories and our futures make things even messier. Throw in a Chinese desire to control both their people and their economy and the US desire to maintain a messy democracy with checks and balances and you end up in a maze of misunderstanding.
But this isn’t a zero-sum game. Both sides can benefit from working together. The stakes are too high to let communication and efforts at understanding be thrown away in favor of violence.