Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Dan Wang

Dan Wang consacre son premier livre – Breakneck – à comparer les États-Unis et la Chine. C’est un sujet qu’il connait bien. D’abord, c’est son métier. Cela fait dix ans qu’il analyse les capacités technologiques de la Chine pour un institut de recherche – Gavekal – dont les clients sont des fonds d’investissement. Ensuite, il est lui-même chinois et a habité les deux pays. L’auteur est né en Chine où il a vécu jusqu’à sept ans quand ses parents ont émigré au Canada. Il a bougé aux USA vers l’adolescence et y a étudié. Puis il est retourné vivre en Chine de 2017 à 2022. C’est notamment pour ces raisons que passer quelques heures à lire Dan Wang n’est pas inintéressant : l’auteur sait de quoi il parle.

Son premier message est que la Chine est aujourd’hui un pays d’ingénieurs quand les États-Unis sont un pays d’avocats. C’est pour lui l’élément clé à garder en tête quand on souhaite comparer les deux régions et comprendre les racines des choix de chacune des nations. Il remarque que la Chine est dirigée aujourd’hui par 24 hommes qu’il considère être les seuls à réellement faire de la politique (le reste de l’administration exécute leurs décisions) et il engage les lecteurs à s’intéresser aux études universitaires de ces 24 hommes. En synthèse : ce sont tous des ingénieurs. Et, nous dit l’auteur, un ingénieur… ça construit. Et ça construit bien. La force de la Chine est donc dans les grands projets d’infrastructure et dans les secteurs industriels, que ce soient l’automobile, le photovoltaïque, l’électronique ou bien d’autres.

De leur côté, les élites politiques américaines ont pour une écrasante majorité réalisé des études d’avocat. J.D. Vance, le vice-président américain en 2025, est diplômé de Yale. Barack Obama est un avocat constitutionaliste. Et la liste est très longue autour d’eux. Les USA comptent d’ailleurs un nombre d’avocats par habitants très largement supérieur à ce que l’on observe dans n’importe quel autre pays du monde. L’auteur remarque qu’une société dirigée par des avocats tend à définir des règles, ériger des contre-pouvoirs, servir les puissants, conserver l’existant et dans l’ensemble… bloquer les constructions.

L’auteur tend à affirmer que les États-Unis et la Chine se ressemblent, mais se trouvent à l’opposé du spectre. Il faudra lire le livre pour savoir sur quelles dimensions exactement. Aussi, le second message de Dan Wang est qu’il espère que chaque groupe saura s’intéresser à l’autre. L’auteur souhaite que le peuple américain retrouve son appétence pour les grands projets d’ingénierie. Et il aimerait que la Chine s’inspire de la culture des avocats pour garantir des droits individuels et considérer sa population comme une somme d’individus dont il faut protéger les libertés plutôt que les rouages d’une immense machine que l’on peut écraser au besoin.

Breakneck passe beaucoup d’autres messages intéressants. Parfois indirectement.  L’auteur a lu tous les discours officiels du parti et suggère à tout observateur sérieux du pays de le faire. Dans un environnement politique où on demande à l’administration d’exécuter, il faut des ordres clairs. Le Parti a tendance à faire ce qu’il dit et dire ce qu’il fait. Lire les orientations officielles annoncées par les plans à 5 ans successifs et les discours de Xi n’est pas sans intérêt.

Surprise pour moi à la lecture : Dan Wang est moins positif qu’on ne pourrait s’y attendre quant au futur de la Chine. Bien sûr le pays est immense, affiche des ambitions très élevées dans presque tous les domaines et la mentalité d’ingénieur qui domine donne les moyens de ces ambitions. Pour autant, il rappelle que le vieillissement de la population – accélérée par une politique de l’enfant unique qu’il décrit comme une des pires horreurs sociétales du 20^e siècle – va fortement impacter le pays. Et il observe que les sociétés d’ingénieurs ont tendance à impressionner au début avant de dérailler ensuite. Il s’attend à ce que la Chine aille trop loin dans des constructions aux rendements marginaux déclinants. Il raconte d’ailleurs quelques exemples récents dont on l’avenir dira s’ils sont symptomatiques ou anecdotiques.

Et il craint qu’une élite dirigeante déclinante ne fasse progressivement les mauvais choix. D’ailleurs, il n’est pas impossible que cela ait commencé. L’auteur consacre en effet un chapitre au nouvel exode des chinois éduqués depuis 2022. Il raconte les politiques zéro-covid extrêmes. Il explique les décisions du gouvernement d’infléchir le secteur de la Tech. Il partage comment même les riches ne se sentent pas à l’abri des coups de barre de la politique économique du pays. Et donc comment plus d’une personne – dont lui-même d’ailleurs – décide à un moment de partir.

À la fin de la lecture, on peut tirer au moins trois conclusions. Celle que l’auteur souhaite, mais dont il sent bien qu’elle risque de rester un vœu pieux. Celle que l’auteur craint et affiche ouvertement. Et une plus personnelle dont l’auteur ne parle pas, mais sur laquelle je l’inviterais à réfléchir s’il était en face de moi.

Le souhait de l’auteur est que chaque pays s’intéresse à l’autre. Il affirme non sans raison que la curiosité est un bon moyen d’éviter un conflit. Dan Wang voudrait que les USA se rappellent leur passé d’ingénieur et que la Chine (re)découvre l’intérêt du respect des droits de chacun. Belle espérance pour l’avenir, même si nous n’en prenons pas collectivement le chemin.

Sa crainte est celle d’un conflit entre les deux puissances. Il observe que la Chine s’y prépare. Elle se focalise sur son autonomie agricole et industrielle. Elle se coupe du monde. Elle s’assurer de son autonomie technologique. Elle rattrape son retard dans les quelques secteurs – comme les semi-conducteurs – où elle n’est pas à la pointe. Elle souhaite relancer la natalité. La Chine coche toutes les cases du pays qui se prépare à la guerre. Dan Wang pousse même la comparaison jusqu’à insinuer ouvertement sur quelques lignes qu’elle réinvente un fascisme moderne. Aussi, si l’auteur ne prédit pas la guerre, il n’en écarte pas la possibilité. Bien au contraire.

Quelle est donc la troisième conclusion ? Eh bien c’est que le 21^e siècle pourrait bien être européen finalement. L’auteur ne parle jamais de l’Europe. Sauf une fois pour qualifier un peu vite son économie de « mausolée » (sic). Et il ne parle à aucun moment de la France – sauf pour faire l’apologie de Paris et rappeler que la meilleure partie de Shanghai est… le quartier français ! Pour autant, il encense les villes où l’on peut se déplacer à pied, où les transports en commun fonctionnent et où l’architecture est à taille humaine. Et il décrit les USA comme sur le déclin tout en doutant de la capacité du modèle chinois à ne pas virer dans les années à venir dans un totalitarisme technologique refermé sur lui-même dirigé par des ingénieurs vieillissants.

À la lecture de Dan Wang, on se surprend à penser que le modèle européen – s’il parvient à continuer à se développer – pourrait s’imposer comme un patron plus désirable que bien d’autres. Le qualifier de « mausolée » est peut-être aller un peu vie en besogne et l’indice d’un jugement hâtif de la part d’un analyste encore jeune qui connait certes bien la Chine et les États-Unis… mais qui bénéficierait visiblement d’un voyage d’étude sur le « vieux » continent.

Qui veut héberger Dan ?

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J’ai rassemblé ci-dessous un ensemble de passages du livre que j’ai surlignés. Le texte entre guillemets et de Dan Wang. J’ai classé les citations par thème avec des titres écrits en français. Ce sont des éléments que j’ai rassemblés pour pouvoir les consulter au besoin. Je les ai donc sélectionnés pour moi. Si vous les parcourez, j’espère qu’ils pourront aussi vous être utiles et surtout vous donner envie de lire l’ouvrage.

Par ailleurs, en complément, pensez à lire Bienvenue en économie de guerre de David Baverez et Dragon Tactics de Sandrine Zerbib et Aldo Spaanjaars. Ainsi que pourquoi pas l’inquiétant classique Clash of Civilizations de Samuel Huntington.

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Synthèse

“That’s the big idea behind this book. It’s time for a new lens to understand the two superpowers: 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.”

“China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.”

“Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua, China’s top science university. For his third term as the Communist Party’s general secretary starting in 2022, Xi filled the Politburo with executives from the country’s aerospace and weapons ministries. In the United States, it would be as if the CEO of Boeing became the governor of Alaska, the chief of Lockheed Martin became the secretary of energy, and the head of NASA was governor of a state as large as Georgia. China’s ruling elites have practical experience managing megaprojects, suggesting that China is doubling down on engineers—and prioritizing defense—more than ever.”

“The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering.”

“The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries.”

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.

“When I departed from Silicon Valley for China in 2017, it felt clear that the United States had lost something special over the past four decades. While China was building the future, America had become physically static, its innovations mostly bound up in the virtual and financial worlds.”

La Chine et les USA se ressemblent ou se sont ressemblé

Like China, the United States is able to move fast and break people, dealing tremendous brutality at home and abroad when it feels threatened.

“If you want to appreciate what Detroit felt like at its peak, it’s probably better to experience that in Shenzhen than anywhere in the United States.”

“The year 2008 offers a direct comparison between California’s speed and China’s speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. Both lines would be around eight hundred miles long upon completion. China opened the Beijing–Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $ 36 billion. 1 In its first decade of operation, it completed 1.35 billion passenger trips. 2 California has built, seventeen years after the ballot proposition, a small stretch of rail to connect two cities in the Central Valley, neither of which are close to San Francisco or Los Angeles.”

Depuis Xi et le Covid, la Chine attire moins

“Many Americans who previously traveled to China for business and pleasure have lost their enthusiasm for visits.”

Cultivons la curiosité, elle pourrait nous éviter la guerre

“The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble.”

La Chine est une dictature très à droite

“To a first approximation, the twenty-four men who make up the Political Bureau (the highest echelon of the Communist Party, usually shortened to Politburo) are the only people permitted to do politics. Once they’ve settled questions of strategy, the only remaining task is for the bureaucracy to sort out the details. But when it makes mistakes, it can drag nearly the entire population into crisis.”

“The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles—where men have to be macho and women have to bear their children.”

“Xi has forcefully pushed back on the idea that China needs more generous welfare. In a major speech in 2021, he said, “Even when we have reached a higher level of development … we should not go overboard with social transfers. For we must avoid letting people get lazy from their sense of entitlement to welfare.”  Worrying that welfare could make the people lazy is one of those instances when a Communist Party leader sounds like Ronald Reagan.”

La Chine est un immense pays avec d’énormes capacité de production

“A rough rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic panels, or anything else.”

Une société d’ingénieurs a des limites

The engineering state can be awfully literal minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves.

“Engineers often treat social issues as math exercises. Does the country have too many people? Beijing’s solution was to prohibit families from birthing more than one child—the subject of my fourth chapter—through mass sterilization and abortion campaigns, as the central government ordered in 1980. Is the novel coronavirus spreading too quickly? Build new hospitals at breathtaking speed, yes, but also confine people to their homes, as Wuhan, Xi’an, and Shanghai did to millions of people over weeks, which I cover in the fifth chapter.”

“Since China doesn’t have many legal protections, not even its rich are well protected.”

Pékin n’est pas une belle ville

“Beijing enthralls not because it is nice but because it isn’t. By most measures, life in Beijing is dreary. It is in China’s arid north, where dust storms descend every so often upon the city’s twisting alley homes, dating from imperial times, or gray apartment blocks, built in the Soviet style. In the last decade or so, the state has bricked up many of its liveliest sites, including its many bars and roadside barbecues, turning the city into a no-fun zone. Want to take your life into your hands? Try braving the cars that speed through Beijing’s gigantic roads. Much like Moscow or Pyongyang, its avenues feel like they were built for army parades rather than for normal life. Really, everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing.”

“The engineering state is built for a bird’s-eye view. The geometry of highway interchanges, rows upon rows of solar photovoltaic panels, and, under the right lighting, even a belching chemical plant can produce a pleasing thrill when viewed up high and at a distance. Down below, the urban environment is not always pleasantly livable. Big cities like Beijing and Shenzhen are poorly laid out, with no extensive walkable zones. It takes forever to get across town.”

Il faut lire les écrits du parti. Ils sont très clairs quant aux objectifs

“There is no confusion about the purpose of zero-Covid or the one-child policy: The number is right there in the name.”

On peut avoir très bien ou très mal vécu en Chine récemment

“To capture both the traumatic aspects of the engineering state and its capacity to produce great pride, I like to think of a hypothetical question: What was the worst year to be born in modern China?”

“Not everyone born in 1949 suffered terribly and not everyone born in 1959 lived comfortably. But the engineering state is characterized by peculiarly jerky rhythms, in which the decade of birth might determine whether a person stumbles into great wealth or a mass grave.”

There is hope

“But there is hope for everyone. The most important thing that China and the United States share is a commitment to transformation. China is led by a Leninist party whose core aim is to mobilize society toward modernization. Its propaganda organs stage centralized campaigns of inspiration toward the centenary goal to achieve, by 2049, “a modern socialist country” and “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The US commitment is more open-ended, inherent to the experiment to keep democracy going. That has been partly deformed, but we should revive the dream that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish.”

La Chine a ses problèmes aussi

“While China compressed more than a century’s worth of American construction into a few decades, it folded in many of its problems too. Highways have ripped apart too many cities in China, just as they have in the United States. Chinese have mustered tremendous enthusiasm for destroying the nation’s physical heritage in the recent past. It was prominent during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao ordered Red Guards to loot Buddhist temples, smash Confucian statues, and desecrate ancestral tombs. Over more recent decades, destruction was more systematic than the ruin of particular cultural treasures, as whole neighborhoods fell to the bulldozer. In their place are wide avenues and concrete superblocks. Unfortunately, not much new construction in China is optimized for charm and beauty.”

“Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai.”

“China doesn’t seek to protect the environment. It tries to engineer away the problems.”

L’auteur – qui ne parle jamais de l’Europe et sembla mal la connaître – en fait souvent l’apologie indirecte

“I was much happier to live in Shanghai, where many streets have remained human-scaled rather than being built for cars. The French Concession, where I lived, remains leafy and full of cafés. Shanghai is highly walkable, and one is rarely more than a fifteen-minute walk from one of the city’s many subway stations. Shanghai has vowed to open 120 new parks every year15 until 2025, when the city will reach 1,000 green spaces.”

“Though China has embraced American car culture, it’s still easy to get around by bike in Shanghai. The city has in recent years refashioned a stretch of its riverside into a series of wetland parks along a fifteen-mile bike path, where one can cycle past the brick warehouses and glass skyscrapers that make Shanghai feel quite like New York City.”

“After zero-Covid, Shanghai is a little bit less like the Paris of the East, a little bit more like another Pyongyang. The city remains amazingly beautiful, with so much art deco, neoclassical, and modernist architecture. Its pleasures continue to deepen, with entrepreneurs competing ferociously to introduce new ways to have fun. But it also has long-term wounds that are not so visible. Owen, who is still in Shanghai, told me that lockdowns no longer come up often in conversation. “But when people get really drunk, it’s still something that people get worked up about.””

Les leaders chinois se médient de l’économie digitale

« Construction, capitalism, and control. These elements are sometimes in tension. After China’s digital platforms grew powerful and profitable, the Communist Party reined them in (the focus of my sixth chapter). It found a lot to dislike among tech tycoons and their business models. Companies and people were engaging in transactions—buying goods, borrowing money, contracting for services—without mediation by the state. And digital platforms created billionaires who could not resist flaunting their wealth or wisdom, much as their Silicon Valley counterparts do. Subsequently, the Communist Party smashed many of their businesses before they had begun to wield real power. The state wants to have the ultimate say in controlling economic relations throughout society.”

Toujours plus d’État ingénieur

“The engineering state isn’t finished with building big. “We will perform basic scientific research on the origin and evolution of the universe, carry out interstellar exploration such as Mars orbiting and asteroid inspection,” goes the opening section of the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan on science and technology. It gets better from there. “We will construct hard X-ray free-electron laser devices, high-altitude cosmic ray observation stations, comprehensive extreme condition experimental devices, deep underground cutting-edge physical experimental facilities with very low background radiation.” China wants not only to explore deep space but also to use “heavy icebreakers” for polar exploration in the deep sea. “We will add 3,000 kilometers of urban rail transit” states the section on mass transit. The plan specifies the sections of highways and high-speed rail that it will build. It has major targets for energy: “We will build hydropower bases on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River,” which will have triple the power-generating capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, and the construction of ultra-high voltage transmission lines to connect power from the country’s west to east. It has a plan for climate change, especially water management. Beijing will work on the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, which feels like a throwback to the Grand Canal of the seventh century AD. It involves a gigantic effort to draw water from China’s southern rivers toward its parched northern cities, along three canal systems, targeting completion in 2050. The plan envisions the creation of large water reservoirs across the country and the construction of major flood-control projects.”

Pragmatisme

As we sipped tea in his office after the tour, we chatted about why the United States was then mired in production difficulties, unable to make much of the personal protective equipment that people wanted. “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.”

Les profits ne sont pas nécessairement au rendez-vous pour les actionnaires

“China now dominates the solar industry, but almost no firms are happy because of the overcapacity. Many of these Chinese companies will inevitably go out of business, after they’ve dragged down their competitors all over the world in brutal price wars. This trend has produced a frustrating quirk in China’s equity markets. Financial investors have seen that there is no relationship between Chinese stock market performance and GDP growth. Although the economy has grown by a factor of eight in real terms between 1992 and 2018, the Shanghai Composite Index has been one of the worst-performing major indices. In China, for a variety of reasons that includes weak corporate governance, onshore stocks dance to their own tune. 39 Part of the reason is that even for technologies that Chinese firms dominate—like solar photovoltaic panels—few firms are able to make much profit.”

Chine vs. USA – Une inversion

“I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other. Households save a great deal of their earnings in China, while it is really easy to borrow money or spend on credit in America. In terms of national policy, China is much more focused on the supply side of the economy: It suppresses consumption as it favors manufacturers with preferential financing and all manner of policy support. The United States, meanwhile, is focused on regulating demand, for example, by imposing rent control in expensive cities or mailing out checks to consumers during the pandemic.”

“As these countries grow apart, they are going to have to do something difficult: The United States will have to regain all the muscle it has lost for building public works as well as manufacturing capacity, and China will have to empower consumers by getting over its fear of making people lazy.”

Les rendements marginaux décroissants d’une ingénierie qui va trop loin

“Since the planning is already completed, a fresh infusion of funds can have a quick impact on growth, with spending on a new bridge making an impression on economic statistics immediately. Never mind that China has gotten less growth from each unit of new investment since its big infrastructure binge of 2008. The Communist Party continues to build because it’s full of engineers and also because Marxist-Leninists don’t want to cede economic agency to the people. China would be better off if it built less and built better.”

Le capital humain d’un lieu explique la réussite

“And friends would tell me that Shenzhen, as in Silicon Valley, is a great place to found a start-up. A group of people would discuss an idea over dinner, divide up the tasks, and get to work the next morning. By contrast, in Beijing, dinner will feature interminable rounds of liquor shots, reckless bluffs about connections in high places, and uncertain follow-up afterward.”

“It’s rare for blueprints to encode enough information to be technologically valuable. Imagine if we were able to send the most detailed instructions for building any modern technology back to the past. The lead chariot engineer of a Roman caesar would get nowhere with the most detailed manual and finely drawn blueprints on how to produce a Model T. Nor would many of us in the present be able to do much if we got our hands on the instructions for producing an Intel processor or ASML lithography machine. I am not proud to have struggled with putting together a footrest from IKEA. Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers. We tend to refer to these intangibles as know-how, institutional memory, or tacit knowledge. They are embodied by an experienced workforce like Shenzhen’s. There, someone might work at an iPhone plant one year, for a rival phone maker the next, and then start a drone company. If an engineer in Shenzhen has an idea for a new product, it’s easy to tap into an eager network of investors. Shenzhen is a community of engineering practice where factory owners, skilled engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers mix with the world’s most experienced workforce at producing high-end electronics.”

“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.”

L’importance des éco-systèmes technologiques

“It’s hard, I admit, to draw a straight line between the loss of, for example, television manufacturing in the United States through the 1980s to the stumbles by Boeing and Intel over the past decade. But if we think about technology ecosystems as communities of engineering practice, it makes sense that factory closures accelerated as process knowledge dissolved, prompting production problems and more job losses. And it also makes sense that Chinese workers went from merely assembling iPhones to producing some of their most valuable components as well. As one country lost its process knowledge, the other gained whole industries.”

La force du nombre pour créer une masse critique industrielle

“Overall, China’s manufacturing workforce employs more than a hundred million people, around eight times that of the United States. That is a big stock of people who are fueling the creation of new process knowledge.”

“Every day, millions of workers go to factories to build up technological process knowledge. That is the basis of China’s tech power.”

La recette pour concurrencer Shenzen

“China has become a tech superpower by exalting process knowledge and the communities of engineering practice that keep it alive. Holding on to process knowledge helps us resist bad ideas about China’s rise. The Communist Party would love to claim that China’s technology sector developed the way it has through wise planning from Beijing. And the American government also overstates the importance of the Chinese government through its accusations of cheating (including with unfair subsidies) or stealing (especially through cybertheft).”

“Silicon Valley used to be like this too, but now it lacks a critical link in the chain—the manufacturing workforce. The value of these communities of engineering practice is greater than any single company or engineer.”

“The United States does want to re-create Shenzhen’s success. But it has had, at best, a surface-level understanding of its success.”

“She [la femme de l’auteur] 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.”

“The results of the Chinese government’s unceasing interventions in the economy are at best ambiguous.”

Agriculture -> Industrie -> Services -> Finance

“Now, it’s more obvious that the departure of manufacturing has created economic and political ruination for the United States. We are still only beginning to understand how much it set the country back technologically.”

“Financialization also intersects with corporate consolidation. One prominent line of argument regarding General Electric was that the company was taken over by finance. That applies in greater force against Boeing. Once run by engineers obsessed with safety and quality, its leadership shifted to executives more focused on delivering shareholder value than good planes.”

Le déclin américain

“The US government has indulged a preening self-regard concerning how much technological power its country still wields. American companies have spent two decades building communities of engineering practice in China, made up of people who roll up their sleeves to figure out how to overcome their daily bottlenecks. It wasn’t going to be easy to stop their progress; if anything, American policies risked accelerating it. So far, Chinese companies have managed to innovate around most technological restraints; rather than face precipitous collapse, as US policymakers predicted, some have even managed to keep growing at a healthy clip.”

“The engineering state declines, aghast at losing manufacturing because it’s somehow cooler to be in services.”

Les ambitions chinoises dans la technologie

“China’s Communist Party might be the most technology-obsessed institution in the world.”

“For them, there is no problem heavy industry cannot solve.”

“Xi has repeatedly said that China needs to prioritize the real economy, which means the world of manufactured products, rather than the virtual or financial economy, sometimes referred to in state media as the “fictitious” economy.”

“So the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan released in 2021 demands that the manufacturing share of the economy stay constant. Manufacturing already accounts for 28 percent of China’s GDP, which is much higher than Germany’s 21 percent and Japan’s 20 percent, to say nothing of deindustrialized economies like the United States and the United Kingdom (both around 10 percent).”

“Small countries have had to pick their battles, as Denmark did in the wind industry and South Korea did with memory chips. China wants to have it all.”

Tentation fasciste et spectre de la guerre

“I wonder, when I read these works, whether the Industrial Party is a modern name for an old idea. These writers have a futurist bent, they denounce liberal niceties, and they demand total mobilization of the economy to pursue science and technology. Are they simply reinventing fascism? The Industrial Party wants to depoliticize society to enable rule by technocrats, who would wield the propaganda organs to motivate people to pursue science and manufacturing. They are a heavily male group that mocks pluralism. They are not advocating conquest, but they do pine for a future in which China is stronger than any other nation.”

Les métaux rares

“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.”

Quelques suggestions pour les USA

“How can the United States do better? As a starting point, it could develop a better understanding of how China has grown into a technology superpower. If members of Congress continue to resort to the laziest explanations (“ they’re just stealing all our IP”), then the United States will never grasp the importance of building up process knowledge. And it will fail to gain urgency to fix its technological deficiencies.”

“The sooner that the United States treats China as a peer worth studying, the sooner it can develop a new playbook for success.”

“And the solution has to involve reconstituting its communities of engineering practice that prioritize process knowledge. It means attempting to build up every segment of manufacturing: training workers and creating incentives for manufacturers in order to relearn mass production.”

Le déclin démographique annoncé

By 2100, China’s population is projected to halve to seven hundred million. Childbearing is collapsing in China. The country’s official (and certainly overstated) number of new births has undershot even the most pessimistic projections. In 2019, China had fifteen million births; four years later, it fell to nine million. The number was below what the United Nations described as a “low-fertility scenario” only a few years before. Six million Chinese married3 in 2024, half the level of a decade ago. Chinese families now have a lifetime average of 1.0 children, 4 far below the 2.1 children needed for a stable population.

Le virement traditionnaliste de la Chine

“For his third term, Xi shrank the Politburo to twenty-four members, dropping the one space that had been given to a woman. By locking women out of China’s political leadership, Xi might well have been trying to set an example.”

“The vision Xi laid out to the women seated around him in 2023 sounds rather traditionalist. A woman’s role is to keep the husband happy and the elders cared for; most important of all, she should have kids. “We should,” Xi said, “cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbirth.” That means imposing the party’s doctrine on “how young people should view love and marriage, having children, and building a family.” The Economist’s headline2 on the meeting was frank: “China wants women to stay home and bear children.””

Un ingénieur a défini la politique de l’enfant unique

“The anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh traced Song’s influence on the one-child policy in her remarkable book Just One Child. During policy conferences, Song and his team of elite scientists made their case with calculations from China’s most sophisticated computers. Skeptics of a one-child policy were making population projections with the aid of an abacus or a handheld calculator. Song Jian presented his group’s projections in precise, machine-generated lines on graph paper; other groups drew uneven squiggles by hand. It was never a fair fight. The military scientists outclassed their intellectual opponents in every possible way.”

Les revirements des slogans

“Whereas one of the former propaganda slogans read, 60 “Have one child, it will be enough; the state will care for you when you’re old and tough,” a new slogan now reads, “Have three children so you won’t have to seek state-supported elder care.””

Faut-il laisser les sujets politiques aux ingénieurs ?

“Song’s example is one reason that I’ve become suspicious of anyone who advocates “following the science.” We have to get quite worried if anyone in power starts saying that science alone is an object to be pursued rather than having to situate it in a social and ethical context. There is still truth, I think, to Winston Churchill’s quip that scientists should be “on tap, not on top.””

“Demographic decline will entail a slow grinding down of China’s actual capabilities to achieve geopolitical preeminence. China’s low birth rate worries Xi Jinping and the rest of the Communist Party. In the 2023 meeting with the women’s federation, Xi vowed that over his third term his administration “will improve and implement pro-fertility policies.” The shift to the two-child policy in 2016 and the three-child policy in 2021 did not produce many more births. China’s fertility rate of 1.0 is now lower than Japan’s and keeps falling short of even recent low-fertility projections.”

Difficile (impossible ?) de relancer la natalité

“The one-child policy persisted for one and a half generations. Its effects will echo far longer. I am skeptical that the engineering state will be successful in producing a surge of births. There have been pronatalist policies in other countries (Hungary, Israel, and many others), with little evidence that they could structurally push up birth rates for long.”

“Although the state has had many tools to prevent births, it can’t seem to find the right tools to encourage copulation.”

“No country ever could”

Les dangers d’un état d’ingénieurs

“China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic embodies all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses. It is a powerful reminder of how the engineering state could accomplish things that few other countries would even attempt, while revealing how its literal-minded enforcement can lead to tragic results for human well-being and freedom.”

“Over April 2022, stress in Shanghai spiked to unimaginable levels. The primary worry for most people was how to secure food when they could not leave their homes. The surprise lockdown announcement, coming in the evening, gave people in Pudong, in the eastern half of the city, only hours to stock up on food. Puxi, the more populous western half where I lived, had four more days to prepare. Many people had failed to stockpile essential goods, after repeated denials of lockdown by city officials diminished their sense of urgency. Even among people who were able to stock up, it was difficult to keep fruit and vegetables fresh after ten days or so.”

“Most people believe they caught it through the daily testing regime: from a neighbor while they were waiting in line. Every so often, a story popped up that the medical worker swabbing everyone’s throats had the virus himself, which at least contaminated your sample and perhaps infected you. Despite exacting measures, the number of new confirmed cases kept rising for four weeks until the end of the lockdown.”

“Chinese people grew livid that the medical system was prepared to ignore any number of deaths from diabetes, cancer, and other life-threatening conditions and that their entire lives had to be subordinated to the targeting of this number.”

“The neighborhood committees that took a starring role in enforcing Covid lockdowns haven’t been disbanded; they are now being used to call up recently married women to ask about their menstrual cycles and whether they wouldn’t like to have a few children. Some are able to bear it. But many young Chinese are tired of being lectured by old men to work hard and have kids while facing a horrid job market.”

Nouvel exode

“The most remarkable new Chinese slang word that developed during the pandemic was rùn. It means what it sounds like. Chinese have appropriated this word (meaning “to moisten”) for its English meaning to express their desire to flee. Throughout the unpredictable and protracted lockdowns, rùn evolved to mean leaving big cities, where pandemic controls were tightest. Or it meant emigrating from China altogether. After I departed from China in 2023, I kept meeting Chinese who have, in recent years, decided to emigrate, gambling that their lives would be better abroad. Young people want to go to Europe, the United States, or an anglophone country, but these governments tend to be miserly with visas to Chinese. Thus, many émigrés go to nearby countries in Asia. Those with ambition and entrepreneurial energy flock to Singapore, where Chinese companies like ByteDance have set up big offices. Those with wealth and means buy themselves a pleasant life in Japan. Everyone else—slackers, free spirits, kids who want to chill—is hanging out in Thailand.”

“Writers in particular have a hard time dealing with the shock of working for months on a story only for censors to delete it hours after publication. The first time that happens you’re enraged, the second time you’re embittered, the third time you rùn.”

Les raisons de l’exode

“Why are so many Chinese still leaving? Because entire generations feel whipsawed by the engineering state’s violent mood swings.”

“The trouble is that when people suffer—as they do through a property collapse, high unemployment, or lockdowns—they start to wonder what they are really getting.”

“Shanghai has many things superior to that of any American city: walkable and safe streets, vibrant street life, splendid food, an ease to go anywhere in the city or the country through mass transit. It was the Chinese government’s overbearing presence—censorship, intolerance of dissent, a lingering threat of catastrophe—that pushed me away.”

Le 21e siècle sera-t-il asiatique ?

When I moved to Hong Kong at the start of 2017, I entertained the idea that we were living at the start of an “Asian Century,” in which China and India would restore Asia to the economically dominant role it played centuries ago. I didn’t believe it, necessarily. But it didn’t feel like a crazy scenario. Donald Trump, after all, had been shooting admiring glances at autocratic countries while unloading his petulance on Canada, Europe, as well as other American allies. Xi, by contrast, displayed a patient resolve to strengthen Chinese capabilities. Parts of that remain real, although I now have a better appreciation of China’s weaknesses. There are many things that China will be successful at, but I departed the country with a better appreciation of the self-limiting features of the Chinese system. Most notably, the Communist Party distrusts and fears the Chinese people, limiting their potential for flourishing. The engineering state tends to begin impressively and end disastrously. The pursuit of zero-Covid isn’t the only example of that tendency I lived through. The regulatory storm that Xi unleashed against China’s digital platforms is another case in point.

Le gouvernement chinois a tué la Tech

“Companies and investors therefore wondered whether Xi was genuinely unaware of how much his policies had destroyed major segments of the economy. Perhaps nobody had told Xi that he was the most feared unicorn hunter of all.”

“Over the course of 2021, hardly any major Chinese tech company emerged unscathed. Xi’s regulatory storm wiped out a trillion dollars of market value from Chinese companies.”

“Alibaba toppled from being an $ 800 billion company to just a quarter of that size two years later. Jack Ma disappeared from public view for months after the cancellation of Ant Financial’s IPO. Meanwhile, securities regulators in both the United States and China were making it more difficult for companies to be publicly listed. And Xi’s pursuit of zero-Covid pulverized service industries targeted by tech companies. The economy that emerged out of the pandemic is characterized by high youth unemployment, shaky household confidence, and limp consumer demand.”

“Consequently, fewer entrepreneurs are founding start-ups, and venture investment in China has collapsed.”

“Xi has forcefully reminded China’s tech companies that they cannot represent a power center that challenges the state’s sovereignty. It was, in other words, an attempt to change the cultural mindset of companies. The Communist Party reminded them that it retains the discretionary power to engineer all aspects of society, which means putting tech companies in their place.”

Les possibles dérives de l’État ingénieur

“The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is perhaps 60 percent correct on everything. He’s driving toward a usually admirable long-term goal. But in the name of achieving change, the engineering state delivers such beatings on people or industries that they are unable to pick themselves back up again. Even if Xi’s judgments are right, his brute-force solutions reliably worsen things. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but stomping out their businesses has traumatized entrepreneurs. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them toward default subsequently triggered a collapse in homebuyer confidence, prolonging a property slump. Does the government need to rein in corruption? Definitely, but Xi has terrorized the bureaucracy to the point of paralysis. Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.”

“Social engineering will increase as well. In 2018, Xi praised teachers as engineers of the soul, a phrase first used by Joseph Stalin a century ago. Xi’s instructions have increasingly moved toward physicality. He has talked about how love of the party and the country needs to start young, which means to “grab little ones from the cradle.” The party’s messages need to “enter the mind, enter the heart, and enter the hands.”  Beijing’s public security office has promised to get up close and personal in its attempts to offer “zero-distance service.” These efforts don’t sound less sinister in Chinese than they do in any language.”

La tentation de la guerre ? Au moins sa préparation

“In speeches to China’s national security community, he has spoken about “ensuring normal operation of the national economy under extreme circumstances.” What does that mean? As usual, the top leader is oblique, but it suggests that he’s worried that China will one day be cut off from the rest of the world. “We must be prepared for worst-case and extreme scenarios,”  Xi said in 2023. “And be ready to withstand the major test of high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms.” So he has surrounded himself with executives from the aerospace and defense agencies. The intention, it feels to me, is to build China into a great fortress.”

“What sort of dangerous storm is Xi preparing for? Probably outright conflict with the West. Under Xi’s leadership, the engineering state is working seriously to harden itself to win a war, should one ever come.”

“I returned to China only once after the dissolution of zero-Covid. At the end of 2024, the country felt more fortresslike than before the pandemic.”

“It’s not encouraging for the future of Chinese and American relations that there are only about a thousand American students studying in China. Just before the pandemic, there were ten times that many.”

“All of this is exacerbated by an unpredictable political factor: Aging autocrats easily get cranky, which is a problem since Xi is likely to stay in office into his eighties.”

“The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have made Beijing more conscious of food self-sufficiency. Chinese leaders have always been aware that food shortages have toppled imperial dynasties. And so one of the things that provincial governors are graded on is whether they are self-sufficient in rice and wheat, while mayors of major cities have to make sure that a variety of foods are grown locally. Mayors are graded on the amount of land they dedicate to vegetables and on ensuring that grocery markets are within walking distance for most residents, that there are no food safety scandals, and that prices are stable.”

“A lot of manufacturing and food capacity is a useful thing to have if there is another pandemic—or a war.”

La Chine devrait continuer son développement

Chinese firms are still operating in a robust business environment, though one that is definitely more constrained. The country’s relations with the West are not so friendly, but there will still be trade and educational exchange. And China will still be a giant market with enormous numbers of ambitious people who want to make their mark. Only now, it is steadily working to insulate itself from a turbulent world filled with conflict.

“The engineering state still has many strengths. There is one thing I haven’t changed my mind about since 2017: I remain more confident than ever that China will become a technological leader in manufacturing industries.”

La faiblesse de l’attrait de la culture d’un état d’ingénieurs

“Engineers are bad at several things. They’re not very good, for example, at producing appealing cultural products.”

Engineers can’t take a joke. It’s hard for art to thrive in an atmosphere of political paranoia plus social control. Today, Chinese artists and writers have to follow socialist core values, which cannot carry a whiff of political criticism. Directors are finding their movies inexplicably pulled from theaters or international film festivals. Most of the movies released domestically are nationalist blockbusters, sappy romances, or supernatural action flicks. No wonder these aren’t exportable. Even among captive Chinese audiences, they’re not necessarily popular.

La science est compatible avec la dictature

“Is it possible to do science in a tightening political environment? A common contention I hear is that China can’t innovate because it “doesn’t have free speech.” There’s no question that Xi has tightened the country’s already limited space for free speech. Free thought is essential for the humanities and the social sciences. But I’m not so sure that it’s a necessary condition for the natural sciences, for very little in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and engineering is innately political. Plenty of autocratic systems in history have delivered startling technological advances.”

Modern China is nowhere near as extreme as the police states run by Stalin or Hitler. How is it that science can coexist with autocracy? Mostly, I believe, because the precondition for science is that abundant funds are far more critical to science than free speech, and that is something dictators can deliver. Perversely, repression might encourage scientists to throw themselves still further into their work rather than paying attention to the rest of the world falling apart around them. I don’t believe that autocracy is good for science, only that it doesn’t guarantee its destruction. China has gotten plenty far on industrial advances—solar power, electric vehicles, robotic arms—in an atmosphere of worsening political repression.

“I envision China becoming something like a more successful East Germany, a state that combines surveillance and political controls with strong outcomes in science and technology. The Communist Party will not relent on the political atmosphere; meanwhile, it will continue its pursuit of science and technology.”

Un éventuel conflit pourrait tourner en faveur de la Chine

“Even if the United States is able to outclass China in diplomacy, finance, and innovation, the contest between these two great powers is going to be close if the United States can’t build anything in the physical world.”

“It’s also about people. China has around a hundred million people working in manufacturing.”

“I spent years covering the twists and turns of these technology restrictions. The more it went on, the more I felt that the United States was committed to a strategy of destroying its scientific and industrial establishment—through prosecutions of scientists and cutting off the sales of chipmakers—in order to save it. Rather than realizing its own Sputnik moment, the United States triggered one in China.”

“As relations between the United States and China become more hostile, the chances of conflict grow. The United States is facing a peer competitor that has four times its population, an economy with considerable dynamic potential, and a manufacturing sector that can substantially outproduce itself and its allies. If China and the United States ever come to blows, they would be entering a conflagration with different strengths. Which would you rather have: software or hardware?”

“China does not lack for munitions. In the case of an emergency, it will be able to scale up production of munitions, just as it has with personal protective equipment, while the United States stumbled on basic things. And I worry that the United States is counting far too much on AI to change the tide. Even if the United States achieves artificial general intelligence, it will need to be able to actually manufacture drones or munitions; algorithms alone will never win a battle. Though the United States has the most sophisticated fighter jets and submarines in the world, it makes precious few of them.”