Lineages of the Engineering State: On China, the United States, and the Future

Being reviewed: Advertisement How should we conceive of modern China? Doing so is nearly impossible—according to the Chinese intellectual Lin Yutang, writing in the 1930s—since a “mass of foreground details” from recent history would “swamp … the foreign observer, [and] the modern Chinese as well,” preventing anyone from getting a conceptual handle on the country. An attempt to break through this morass can be seen in Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, which offers a simple and memorable account of modern China and its growing pains. In Wang’s telling, the Chinese regime is an “engineering state”: a technocrat-run system which for better or worse “can’t stop itself” from pursuing big social and economic projects at astonishing speed.1 This is an appealing story, one which echoes the literary and pop cultural discourse surrounding China’s embrace of technological development: for years, the figure of the engineer has cast a shadow over fictional (and particularly science fictional) depictions of the Chinese state and its successors. The Chinese speculative fiction author Gu Shi’s stories, for example, show Chinese engineers pushing against the limits of ecology and mortality in the hope of remaking everything from a climate-ravaged Earth to humanity’s relationship with death itself. Elsewhere, The Wandering Earth—a dazzling high-budget space epic distributed by Netflix and based on a short story by Liu Cixin—depicts a future Earth saved from an oncoming supernova by the power of Chinese engineering, in what the critic Sasha Karsavina has identified as a “spectacular paean to the Chinese state.” Breakneck is no paean to any state, Chinese or otherwise. Nevertheless, Wang offers a prescription, delivered lightly, that American society should become more Chinese (that is to say, more engineer-like) in its preferences and the Chinese engineering state should become more American (in Wang’s words, more “lawyerly”) in its organization. Breakneck begins with the claim that “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese” (emphasis mine); at the same time, it also hangs much of its argument on emphasizing the fundamental differences in statecraft and political economy between the United States and China. But are either of these things really “Chinese” or “American”? Is there anything in the history of the “engineering state” that would convincingly mark it as more Chinese than Western? These questions remain unanswered. As such, it remains difficult to figure out the context in which one should interpret Breakneck. Wang’s writing occupies an interesting space in the US-China discourse: on the one hand, because Breakneck aims to be a catch-all introduction to contemporary China, it has reached an unusually wide audience. At the same time, however, Wang leaves those of us interested in the longer arc of Chinese or world history with very little in the way of how we should fit his theory into a bigger picture. Where, after all, did China’s alleged “engineering state” come from? Despite its straightforward thesis, Breakneck turns out to be remarkably capacious: the book, developed from a series of essays written by Wang over the course of more than half a decade living in China, ably traverses a wide range of subjects, from the Chinese state and economy to more atypical musings on technology, culture, literature, history, political philosophy, migration, public health, gender relations, and even Wang’s personal family history. Along the way, Breakneck showcases some of the PRC’s most impressive feats of economic and engineering dominance. Wang takes readers on a clearly written and impressively detailed tour of the ways in which the Chinese state built out glowing megacities and built up high-tech manufacturing. Lest we mistake Breakneck for a work of unabashed China boosterism, Wang is also careful to cover some of the darker sides of the engineering state; he is especially unsparing when he turns to the absurdities and indignities the Chinese system visits upon its subjects, from mismanaged pandemic lockdowns to ill-conceived social engineering efforts like the One-Child Policy. All this, as well as Breakneck’s even-handed approach overall, makes Wang’s book well worth reading. But that has not stopped many of the book’s readers from arguing, predictably, that there is something unique and essentially non-Western about the Chinese engineering state. For example, the journalist Kaiser Kuo takes a maximalist stance on the issue. In a controversial and widely discussed essay, Kuo reads Breakneck as part of a “Great Reckoning”: an increasingly visible faltering of US imperial confidence in the face of growing political dysfunction at home and a rising PRC abroad. Drawing on the work of the economic historian Adam Tooze, Kuo argues that the Chinese engineering state makes “the industrial histories of the West [look] like prefaces to something larger,” comprising “a fundamental challenge to assumptions long embedded in Western thought—about development, political systems, and civilizational achievement itself.” Echoing this in a response to Kuo’s essay, the intellectual historian Nils Gilman remarked that “China’s reemergence as a civilizational pole of modernity” poses a “shock [that] is existential, not merely geopolitical” to the West. Whatever disagreements exist between Wang and his readers on this issue, they nevertheless share a belief that the categories used by Americans to define China and the very notion of modernity are no longer sufficient. “Looking at these two countries,” explains Wang, “I came to realize the inadequacy of 20th-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal.” More strikingly, Kuo sees a challenge to the entire global order: “What we are living through seems, with each new day, less like a passing rearrangement of power, less like a momentary realignment of nations. We sense something deeper and more enduring: a transformation whose outlines we are only beginning to discern.” Kuo, Gilman, and others are clearly right to identify a widespread panic, especially in US national-security circles, over the rise of a putatively non-Western power capable of acting as a counterweight to America’s economic dominance. But is a corresponding existential transformation of the global order really taking place? What exactly is conceptually new about the China model, as depicted in Breakneck or elsewhere? Perhaps when we claim that China has exhausted the conceptual resources of the West, what we really mean is that China has exhausted the conceptual resources of American journalists and defense intellectuals in the Washington, DC, area. Though US media and think-tank accounts of China’s rise are only now beginning to catch up with the realities Wang depicts in Breakneck, a generation of intellectuals from the PRC have long grappled with the problem of the modern Chinese state, seeing in its specificities and contradictions a great deal of resemblance to the West. These thinkers lived and wrote through the country’s embrace of capitalism and its integration into global markets. And, for their part, these Chinese intellectuals understand Wang’s “engineering state” as a variant of the norms of capitalist state-building in the Western world, rather than an existential divergence. For example, the political scientist Cui Zhiyuan has made the case—in collaboration with the aforementioned Adam Tooze—that China’s regime has a great deal in common with the highly ambitious, politically robust, and usually Western 20th-century regimes that the historian Charles Maier has dubbed “project-states.” Though Cui remains an optimist about China’s potential to innovate in the realm of political economy, others, like the academic and cultural critic Dai Jinhua, have argued that the emergence of the “China model” and the creation of the engineering state as we know it are outright concessions to the ways of Western statecraft rather than challenges to them; she reads the history of the reform era as an effort to purge China of the legacies of the 20th century’s experiments with central planning and open the door for the Chinese regime to “push … for capitalism with unprecedented energy.”2 When Wang acknowledges that China “learned so well from the United States that it started to beat America at its own game: capitalism, industry, and harnessing its people’s restless ambitions,” longtime readers of Dai’s work have good reason to feel vindicated. Therefore, despite the hype, Breakneck is best read by contextualizing its vivid depictions of the Chinese economy within a longer history of global capitalism. It is difficult, for instance, to read Wang’s chapter on what America should learn from China’s development of process knowledge—that is to say, the ways in which China built up an architecture for the acquisition and retention of manufacturing expertise—and not agree with Dai, who has argued that the main value of the China model is to serve as a leading example of the “low systemic costs and high management efficiency” to which so many capitalist societies aspire.3 Dai is similarly dismissive of pronouncements like the headlines surrounding Breakneck: “This Is Why America Is Losing to China”; “Does the Future Belong to China?”; “Who’s Going to Win the Future?”; and so on. Neither China nor the US, she writes, can “proffer any choice of path outside of global capitalism or any plan to resolve” its crises.4 How would an economic order “led by China [be] different than where it is heading anyway?” Dai asks. “The Chinese model … will only achieve a new version of the same old story of winner takes all.”5 6 In light of the work of thinkers like Dai Jinhua, what might explain the persistent appeal of stories that emphasize the distance between the Chinese state and its Western counterparts? For answers, we might take a dive into the engineering state’s natural habitat: not China, not the United States, and not even the 20th century, but the realm of fiction, storytelling, and political imagination. As mentioned previously, Breakneck exists in the context of more than a decade of cultural discourse about Chinese engineering; Wang acknowledges as much in a set of revealing passages about the role of stories in shaping the public consciousness, where he writes that literary works have long wrestled with the problems depicted in Breakneck.7 What he doesn’t discuss is the degree to which these fictional accounts often tell us a great deal about what Western observers see when they look at China’s governance model, and vice versa. We can think of the story Liu Cixin tells in The Wandering Earth, for example, as continuous with the logic of Breakneck. If Wang gives the engineering state credit for revitalizing China and reinventing industry, then Liu goes several steps further, extending the rule of the engineers to an interstellar scale where even the laws of physics must bend to the power of the engineering state. Not satisfied with merely transforming Shenzhen and Shanghai like Breakneck’s engineers, the protagonists of The Wandering Earth transform the entire planet by brute force, constructing a network of some 10,000 titanic fusion engines that consume “half of the mountains on the Asian continent” as fuel in an effort to propel a frozen Earth out of the orbit of its dying sun. Perhaps this is why the European diplomat Bruno Maçães, writing for the magazine of Australia’s hawkish Lowy Institute, admitted that he found the film adaptation of The Wandering Earth a “breath of fresh air,” in large part because of the “civilisational differences” it reflected between China’s culture and his own. Watching a global (though clearly Chinese-coded) government get to work saving the Earth on screen, Maçães wryly remarked that “the Chinese [of the film] seem fully in charge” because “they alone can build and run basic infrastructure.” Of course, someone with a greater facility for Chinese literature can see past the optimist theatrics of the film, just as someone familiar with the history of the Chinese state will not be swayed by just-so stories of Chinese engineers warping the whole of modern economic thought around them.8 Still, can we really blame Maçães for being, in a way, tricked? Maçães says that as he watched the movie, he found a “rare beauty” and a “moment of wonder” in the idea of moving the entire Earth, feeling that “Western sensibilit[ies]” would never have entertained such a possibility. Drawing a direct comparison to China’s real-life Belt and Road infrastructure projects, he notes that the movie has “no politics and no ethics,” just a commitment to make sure that problems “can be successfully solved.” For a moment, Maçães sounds like Kuo, or another admirer of the faraway engineering state. In the political imaginations of The Wandering Earth and the Belt and Road, he says, he can feel an alternative “state of reality”—a “reality transformed to further our desires.” If there is a part of Breakneck’s logic of difference that we should accept, it has to do with this: the projection of desires. Even if we doubt the explanatory power of Wang’s theorizing, we might still glean something about the cultural dynamics of US-China relations from the oppositions that Breakneck sets up. Gu Shi, a Chinese author with her own formidable reputation as a social critic, has written a set of stories that we might think of as speaking to another dynamic in Breakneck: the engineers-and-lawyers binary that Wang leans on to emphasize the differences between American and Chinese politics. Gu’s stories, at best ambivalent about the effects of social engineering and the mediation of human relations through technology, often pit lawyers and the law against engineers and the engineering state. In “Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition,” a pseudo-historical account of the development of human life–extension technologies, technological advances are slowed and occasionally stymied by a flurry of dogged lawsuits filed by individuals attempting to save their children, their families, or even the social fabric at large from engineers’ efforts to beat the limits of the human lifespan. Gu’s 2023 story “City of Choice” likewise sees its protagonist, herself an eager social engineer and a technologist employed by the Chinese state, grapple with the eugenic implications of an AI system designed to allocate resources in the face of climate emergency. Eventually, she is forced to reverse course by the threat of a legal investigation brought on by one of the system’s victims. These are familiar problems to both Americans and Chinese, to say the least, and Gu’s skeptical accounts of the engineering state have found an eager audience in China and abroad, just as Liu’s more optimistic work has. Charitably, this would suggest that regardless of how much Breakneck’s thesis about engineering states and lawyerly societies might tell us about the types of governance under which American and Chinese citizens are actually living, it does tell us something about the types of governance under which they would like to live. When Chinese readers think of a lawyerly society, they can picture room for robust social criticism, political space for individuals to live against the grain, and a set of institutional checks, however attenuated, on the engineers’ relentless drive toward optimization and technological progress. When Western readers think of the engineering state, they can imagine that they, too, might live in a society carried along by the seemingly apolitical bulldozing of barriers to the future; more distantly, they can envision an alternative to the norms of stagnation, infrastructural decay, and financialization that have taken hold in the Western world. This is all to say that pace Lin Yutang, we may indeed be unable to get a handle on modern China, but the foreground details occluding our view are not so much historical as ideational. We would like to imagine that under alien conditions of governance, grand social projects are still feasible and new political models may yet emerge to sweep away the problems in front of us. Yet if the engineering state eludes our conceptual grasp, it is only because we want it to. This article was commissioned by Ben Platt. - Wang contrasts this to America’s “lawyerly society,” which he argues is conversely obsessed with bureaucratically blocking large-scale projects, but Breakneck actually spends relatively little time discussing America’s social and economic architecture or its origins. ↩︎ - Dai Jinhua, “Introduction,” After the Post–Cold War: The Future of Chinese History, translated by Jie Li (Duke University Press, 2018), p. 5. ↩︎ - Dai Jinhua, p. 17. ↩︎ - Dai Jinhua, “The new Cold War? That is the question,” translated by Rebecca E. Karl, Episteme no. 5 (2021). ↩︎ - Dai Jinhua, “Introduction,” After the Post–Cold War: The Future of Chinese History, translated by Jie Li (Duke University Press, 2018), p. 17. ↩︎ - Dai’s view is echoed by prominent thinkers in East Asia, including those outside of China. The Japanese political theorist Kohei Saito, for example, has argued that the economic upheaval of the last decade is “not merely [a] crisis of American hegemony, but rather [a] crisis of capitalism as such,” warning that “the emergence of a new Chinese hegemony would not [ultimately] alter [the] destiny” of the international order or global economy. ↩︎ - As examples in different chapters, Wang names Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, which Wang blames for “stomp[ing on Robert] Moses’ name” and teaching Americans to “fear and loathe” civic ambition, and the Chinese science fiction novel The Morning Star of Lingao or Illumine Lingao, which Wang correctly identifies as appealing to readers who want to “reinven[t] fascism.” ↩︎ - Literary critics writing about The Wandering Earth have expressed an interest in the differences between Liu’s story and the film adaptation; Sasha Karsavina, for example, identifies the original text as the wretched “story of a doomed cosmic voyage” and pins the film down as distorted by time “in the editing room.” The Chinese scholar Song Mingwei concurs, outlining the ways in which the film is hastily chopped up to mask a “darker and more insurgent” tale. ↩︎