While Americans lament their crumbling infrastructure, China is rapidly expanding high-speed rail, subway systems, and airports across the country. Chinese tech products, from autonomous vehicles to drones to addiction-inducing algorithms, have won over global consumers and put companies such as BYD, DJI, and TikTok in pole position.
China’s prowess in engineering and manufacturing is now at the center of the U.S.–China rivalry in artificial intelligence. Despite Washington’s efforts to block China from advancing in AI, the country has continued to make progress in developing chips and training state-of-the-art large language models.
Dan Wang moved to Canada at age seven from Yunnan in southwestern China. A former tech analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, his stints in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai allowed him to closely observe China’s trajectory. In his new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Wang compares the country’s “engineering” state, which favors large-scale manufacturing, with America’s “lawyerly” society, which he believes hinders new construction and development.
The US continues to set itself up to fail big. It’s really like they want this to happen and they do everything they can to accelerate it.
‘They’ do want it to happen. Ordinary USians are gettng uppity and need to be taken down a peg.
The global elite don’t really need anything specific from the US anymore. For a brief moment, the world needed our higher education system, which is why anyone under 60 who went to grad school had lots of non-US folks in their cohorts. Those folks have gone back home in large part so there are plenty of skilled experts in critical fields internationally.
The US has no remaining unique resources, be they skilled people or natural resources. So we need to be dealt with since many of us still hold on to quaint notions like ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘living wage’.
Very well put. I see it the same way.