These notes are incomplete and are not a review.
Life in the Bay Area, an economic dynamo in America’s richest state, can feel awfully dysfunctional. San Francisco has been unable to serve its homeless population, and even many wealthy people have to keep a generator for their extraordinarily expensive houses because the state can’t keep the lights on.
I would like to give Mr. Wang the benefit of the doubt and assume that his editor pushed him to dramatize the introduction—he alluded to his editor pushing him to narrativize the book at his book talk. As a Bay Area native, it doesn’t sound to me like he has spent much time living among normal people in San Francisco or the Bay Area. I think he pulls a motte-and-bailey where the easy defensible claim is that there are things about the Bay Area that are not great (the levels of homelessness, “even many wealthy people” having backup generators1). The harder implied claim is that the Bay Area is more dysfunctional than the rest of the US, nay, the world. I would harp on this less except that this particular motte-and-bailey seems constructed to make the book feel like more of a hot take than it is.
Looking at these two countries, I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies. Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist.
During his book talk Mr. Wang mentioned that the reason he chose to emphasize the engineering vs. lawyerly state dichotomy is that there had already been enough discussion of other dichotomies, in particular democratic vs. authoritarian. I think this is a reasonable argument except that the implication of the book is that we ought to adopt some of China’s practices, presumably hoping to become more of an engineering state while not also importing authoritarianism. During his book talk he said as much, viz. that the U.S. ought to become 20% more of an engineering state, while China ought to become 50% more lawyerly, especially with respect to individual rights.
When reading the book the burning question I had throughout was what practices we might actually adopt. The idea that America has too many regulations (which seems reasonable as a general principle to me) has been more recently discussed recently among Democrats. But I finished the book a little confused as to what specific policy proposals Mr. Wang had. Instead he mostly mentions things that the U.S. shouldn’t adopt, like the One Child Policy or state-manufactured economic involution, e.g. the party secretary of the city of Liupanshui, Li Zaiyong, being sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve2 for getting his city into $21B of debt to fund nonsensical infrastructure projects.
The questions asked by the book talk crowd were almost identical to the questions I had myself, and Dan Wang seemed to anticipate them, which makes me confident that I am not the only one to have noticed the shadow of this question in his book. Unfortunately he did not have much of an answer to the question of why the Soviet Union didn’t qualify as an engineering state and what will prevent China from mirroring Soviet stagnation. This question was actually asked by the faculty interviewer, Stephen Kotkin, who noted (perhaps Mr. Wang mentioned it during his introduction?) that Xi borrowing of Stalin’s phrase that the Party ought to be “engineers for the soul”. One also wonders why the strategy of physical projects promoting political resilience attributed by Mr. Wang to China didn’t pay off for the Soviets, who if anything were even more ambitious—for example, transforming the Aral Sea into a desert in order to make cotton a cash crop for Uzbekistan; refer to Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation Nature.
Separately Mr. Wang gave his answer to the question of what is actually to be done in the U.S. to make it more of an engineering state when asked by another member of the audience. He observed that although the U.S. has a cursus honorum for lawyers to enter into government (getting into an Ivy League Law School, editing the law review there and clerking for a Supreme Court Justice, and so on), there is no equivalent for engineers. This is a fine proposal but feels underwhelming.
To be continued.
My middle-class parents didn’t have a generator, nor did any of my relatives or my friends’ parents. So “even” seems a strange emphasis. But maybe Dan Wang runs in different circles.
A common sentence for fallen officials in China. In reality, imprisonment, with the notional threat of execution if the official somehow commits further crimes during the reprieve period (while in prison). The performative nature of this sentence probably merits further discussion.