Dan Wang > Quotes

“The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible. As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions. That is one of the defining characteristics of the engineering state. The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who douse blazes they themselves ignited.”
― Dan Wang

“Women in urban cities are reporting that they are regularly getting calls from neighborhood officials asking when they plan to have children. These officials are inquisitive, asking when a woman has had her last period, and argumentative, insisting that owning a cat can be no substitute for a child. Most of all, they are nagging. One woman posted, “Government officials have asked me five or six times when I plan to have a child, while my parents have asked me only once.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Above all, China built housing. Its urban population has grown by an average of sixteen million people each year since 1978, which means, in effect, that the state built a new city the size of greater New York City and greater Boston combined every year for thirty-five years. Though Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen have soaring housing prices, high rates of construction plus rising wages have broadly improved affordability. From 2007 to 2018, the average price of an urban apartment fell from nine times the average household income to seven times. This building spree consumes colossal amounts of steel, aluminum, copper, cement, and glass. According to Vaclav Smil, the 4.4 billion tons of cement that China produced from 2018 to 2019 nearly equals the amount of cement the United States produced over the entire twentieth century.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Rare earth metals are not really rare. Processing them, however, demands enormous amounts of energy and water while spewing carcinogens into the atmosphere. Few parts of the Western world have the stomach for processing rare earth metals, which is why China controls this supply chain.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Chinese leaders were just enough exposed to the West to absorb [their] neo-Malthusian doomerism, without being exposed enough to the Western pushback against it.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Rather than halt Chinese technology leaders in their tracks, these legal controls have riled them up. When Xi started his third term in 2022, he didn’t stack the Politburo with clever lawyers able to deliver a really good rebuttal. He filled it with scientists and engineers. They will help to design the Fifteenth Five-Year Plan, which will place even greater emphasis on building technological strength.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Though the Biden administration committed enormous funds to address climate change, the country moves far too slowly on building things. One cautionary tale: the story of Cape Wind, the United States’ first effort to develop offshore wind turbines. A developer tried to build turbines off the coast of Massachusetts, harnessing sea winds that are smoother and faster than those on land. Unfortunately, Cape Wind was in Nantucket Sound, home to some of the wealthiest, and mostly liberal, US citizens, like the Kennedy family, whose compound is in Hyannisport. These residents banded together, formed a nonprofit, and enlisted lawyers that included one of Harvard’s best-known constitutional law professors to challenge the development. After sixteen years of lawsuits, the developer abandoned the project.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“If only that Qing cartographer could see Guizhou now. All sorts of new infrastructure are built into its countryside. On the third day, we came upon a sight nearly as strange as a monkey-filled phantasm. Teng was leading the three of us when he yelled, “Guitars!” When I raised my gaze, I saw that big guitar ornaments were hanging off of streetlamps. In the distance, I spied a hill topped by a giant rock guitar. It turned out that we were cycling through Zheng’an County, the self-styled guitar capital of the world. According to state media, one of every seven guitars made worldwide is produced in this township we passed through by chance. That is another feature of the engineering state: Manufacturing hubs are everywhere, often making goods you don’t expect. Guizhou locals may be as surprised as anyone to host the world’s guitar capital. Not many of them play the instrument. Zheng’an became a guitar hub because a lot of its residents had moved to coastal Guangdong for work, many of them finding employment by coincidence in guitar factories. Then the local government made a big effort to entice them to return to Guizhou as part of a policy to develop the interior. That effort coincided with a 2012 directive from the State Council (the executive agency of the central government) that encouraged manufacturers to relocate from coastal provinces to inland ones. The document had suggested that Guizhou pursue technologically intensive industries like aerospace or electric vehicle manufacturing. Instead, what Guizhou built was more suitable to its less-skilled realities: the Guitar Culture Industrial Park.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“For three years, the government made it difficult for people to buy ibuprofen, Advil, and other fever reducers for fear that people might disguise their fevers to avoid detection. During an outbreak, pharmacies limited purchases of fever meds or removed fever meds from their shelves entirely. Therefore, much of the Chinese population met this Covid wave without medication on hand.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“When I moved to China in 2017 to cover technology, it was still common to hear Americans say that Chinese companies couldn’t innovate. China could only copy and steal, they said. Some folks in Silicon Valley knew that there were cool things cooking in Shenzhen, but the broader attitude among Americans was condescension. When I left China in 2023, the tenor of American views had shifted. Fewer people were saying China hasn’t developed any important technologies, since it has become a major producer of electric vehicles and clean technologies. Alarm has crowded out the dismissiveness, as China’s surveillance capabilities are menacing US national security while its manufacturing capacity is threatening to engulf Western firms.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“China’s economic model isn’t a simple-minded application of Marxism. The Communist Party would say that its system is modulated by certain Chinese characteristics. The sort of central planning that is part of Marxist-Leninist states have certain resonances with the centuries-old predispositions of China’s engineering state, especially construction and control. But China has some element of capitalism as well, which explains why the country has created a far more durable economic model than the failed Soviet-style states.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The worst-affected people are targeted minority groups, who have to bear Beijing’s social engineering. The state has singled out, for example, Tibetans, who are forced to relocate from high-altitude mountains, where they are able to graze their yaks and horses, to lower-altitude farms in part to monitor them more easily. What are yak herders supposed to do when they move down to apartment blocks? Rural people who know only their farming or pastoralist lives are often at loose ends when the government resettles them into rows upon rows of high-rises.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice. That is closer to the approach used in China”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“As Deng was fond of remarking, the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” Yiju told me one day. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“could”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“In Abundance, Klein and Derek Thompson advocate to unblock constraints and achieve supply-side progressivism. Here is where socialism with Chinese characteristics can shine. Building big can sometimes unblock market power. People in Guizhou may not have much. But they do point to new bridges with pride, while using new roads and high-speed rail to get to markets and cities. Infrastructure that cannot recoup its revenue might upset bondholders and banks. But they represent subsidies to social benefits enjoyed by regular people.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Silvia Lindtner, a professor at the University of Michigan and my wife, has spent more than a decade studying Shenzhen’s technology ecosystems. In 2015, the Austrian government asked her how to create a Shenzhen in the Alps; in 2016, the White House invited her to present on how the United States might learn from the success of Shenzhen. She has felt, as I do, that these agencies misunderstood the point of Shenzhen. They were still more interested in individual inventors rather than understanding it as a community of engineering practice. The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals. The Communist Party envisions itself as a grand master, coordinating unified actions across state and society, able to launch strategic maneuvers beyond the comprehension of its citizens. Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals. Engineers often treat social issues as math exercises.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice. That is closer to the approach used in China and Japan.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“If only that Qing cartographer could see Guizhou now. All sorts of new infrastructure are built into its countryside. On the third day, we came upon a sight nearly as strange as a monkey-filled phantasm. Teng was leading the three of us when he yelled, “Guitars!” When I raised my gaze, I saw that big guitar ornaments were hanging off of streetlamps. In the distance, I spied a hill topped by a giant rock guitar. It turned out that we were cycling through Zheng’an County, the self-styled guitar capital of the world. According to state media, one of every seven guitars made worldwide is produced in this township we passed through by chance. That is another feature of the engineering state: Manufacturing hubs are everywhere, often making goods you don’t expect. Guizhou locals may be as surprised as anyone to host the world’s guitar capital. Not many of them play the instrument. Zheng’an became a guitar hub because a lot of its residents had moved to coastal Guangdong for work, many of them finding employment by coincidence in guitar factories. Then the local government made a big effort to entice them to return to Guizhou as part of a policy to develop the interior. That effort coincided with a 2012 directive from the State Council (the executive agency of the central government) that encouraged manufacturers to relocate from coastal provinces to inland ones. The document had suggested that Guizhou pursue technologically intensive industries like aerospace or electric vehicle manufacturing. Instead, what Guizhou built was more suitable to its less-skilled realities: the Guitar Culture Industrial Park. Zheng’an isn’t making the best guitars in the world. For the most part, it’s serving the lower half of the market. But its manufacturers are improving as local brands are getting hungry for global recognition. One of them is experimenting by adding bamboo into its guitars. Many of them are trying to become known for quality, not cheapness. I suspect many of them will get there.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Modern China has many tools of social control. Within living memory, most Chinese residents worked inside a danwei, or work unit, which governed one’s access to essentials like rice, meat, cooking oil, and a bicycle. Many people still live under the strictures of the hukou, or household registration, an aim of which is to prevent rural folks from establishing themselves in cities by restricting education and health care benefits to their hometown. Controls are far worse for ethnoreligious minorities: Tibetans are totally prohibited from worshipping the Dalai Lama, and perhaps over a million Uighurs have spent time in detention camps that attempt to inculcate Chinese values into their Muslim faith.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“These two countries are messy in part because they are both engines for global change. Europeans have a sense of optimism only about the past, stuck in their mausoleum economy because they are too sniffy to embrace American or Chinese practices. And the rest of the world is either too mature or too young to match the impact of these two superpowers. It is Americans and Chinese—Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, Wall Street, and Beijing—that will determine what people everywhere will think and what they will buy.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“American manufactures spent the better part of three decades unwinding its stock of process knowledge when it opened so many factories in China. Every US factory closure represents a likely permanent loss of production skill and knowledge. Line workers, machinists, and product designers are thrown out of work; then their suppliers and technical advisers struggle as well. Entire American communities of engineering practice have dissolved, leaving behind a region known as the Rust belt. But they were continuously scorned by economists and executives, who sought low-wage production in the name of globalization. Still today, many American economists doubt there is anything special about manufacturing and put their faith in the inevitable march to a service economy.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“They threw themselves into manufacturing toys, clothing, and other consumer goods in the 1980s, growing their capabilities each year. By the 2000s, Shenzhen was a major electronics hub. The workforce would become the spearhead for the greatest business endeavor of the early twentieth century: the campaign to put a smartphone into the hands of nearly everyone on the planet. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, there was no more natural place than Shenzhen for mass production. It had already scaled up manufacturing of the iPod there a few years earlier.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Xi has declared that China targets completionism, which means that not even “low-end industries” should move out of China. Rather than follow economic logic, in which production gravitates toward countries with lower labor costs—which the United States and other high-income countries have more or less accepted—Xi does not want industry to keep shifting around.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future