I'm a Chinese who has lived in China my entire life and am almost 40. Personally, I think the core point of this article is wrong. China has never been run by engineers, but by officials. In ancient times, it was scholars, or literati, while craftsmen were considered lowly. Even in modern times, do officials or engineers have the final say in factories? If it were the latter, there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs. Just go out and survey 100 people on the street and ask them who they think is running the country.
As a Chinese who have a lot of live/working experience in both systems just provide some clarifications for this comment: most Chinese people don't understand the difference between politicians and bureaucrats because as the country invented the bureaucracy thousands years ago there is never a clear difference between them. The parent comment is talking about the country is running by bureaucrats which IMO is irrelevant to this topic.
Bureaucrats with some numeracy skills that can focus on (rather career incentives depend on) hitting central gov quantifiable KPIs and managing public sentiment is about as close to being on engineering spectrum in terms of governance vs demographic systems where governance is referendum on incumbants ability to sell electoral rhetoric (and frequently fail) every X years.
> there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs.
Of course there would, that's how you know cold blooded technocrats are at work. Fucking over irrelevant SOEs and iron rice bowl jobs is sterotypical based analytic trade off. Mind you there's plenty of engineer type doing policy work in the west, they just have a much more sclerotic legal layer to jump through, and frequently, don't.
Go survey 100 diasphora Chinese who lived in PRC and west and ask them how the systems differ.
There are people who think that China is about to replace America as world's obviously dominant superpower, and there are people who think that China is about to collapse, nothing in-between.
I wish people who write such stuff would first work in a political system and understand what politicians actually do, and the constraints of their political systems they work in. No, America's problem isn't because of lawyers in power or lack of engineers in power. It's simply about the political system - the US is a federal democracy and the Chinese an authoritarian one-party State. An authoritarian state that isn't answerable to the people can do a lot of things that a democratic one simply cannot (at the same pace) because a democratic country first has to reach a consensus with all the stake holders involved.
Chinese leaders can allocate whatever money they want to a project. They can order their citizens, in mass, to move away from an area. They can ignore labour rights and force workers to work in hostile conditions. They can ignore their own laws, or quickly change it when they want, if it impedes some project they have deemed important. They can ignore any ecological concerns. And so on ... India and the USA cannot do all this, because of the constraints their democratic system places on their governing leaders.
This is why Rahul Gandhi (India's current opposition leader) says that the biggest challenge that both the US and India face today is to figure out how to revive domestic manufacturing without sacrificing our democratic values.
A lot of people here focus on the political side of this topic, so I want to share an engineering perspective instead.
At the core, solving any problem really follows the same pattern: first you figure out what the problem is, then you set up a way to measure it, come up with a possible solution, and test it against your measurement. If it works, keep going. If it doesn’t, try something else. The key is just running this loop quickly enough. This process applies no matter what kind of problem you’re tackling—engineering, politics, or social issues.
The U.S. has this loop at the company level. China has this loop at the local government level.
In China, the central government decides what the goals are and how they are measured, and then the local governments carry out the implementation. Local officials who perform well against those measures get promoted; those who don’t are demoted.
If the U.S. really wants to build this kind of feedback loop at the government level, voters need to judge election candidates based on their track record, not just campaign rhetoric. And for that to happen, the country needs a well-educated population with strong critical thinking skills.
I should also add that China has been operating this way for thousands of years. It’s not without problems, though—like the old saying goes: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
For example, GDP used to be the main measure of success. That pushed local governments to chase higher GDP numbers at all costs—regardless of whether the projects were actually practical or useful. This led to overbuilding, unnecessary construction, and even ghost towns.
> In China, the central government decides what the goals are and how they are measured, and then the local governments carry out the implementation. Local officials who perform well against those measures get promoted; those who don’t are demoted.
China is very decentralized though, Beijing has the ultimate say but their attention span limited. So they maybe set targets, or step in when a huge scandal happens, but most localities are fairly far away from Beijing’s attention. While China doesn’t have America’s federalism, it basically has it by default to deal with its huge size. Every city has different rules, taxes, they have their own local champions, imagine if every big city in the USA had their own auto producer, for example. Hukou means china’s illegal immigration is mostly internal. If you become homeless in Beijing or Shanghai, they will just deport you to whatever village your hukou is in (well, free train/bus ticket at least, but you probably came to the big city because you couldn’t make it in your village in the first place).
> And for that to happen, the country needs a well-educated population with strong critical thinking skills.
I think we have this already. Sure, if you go looking for it you can find any brand of stupidity you want—and if you want to sell a narrative when you find it you put a camera in front of them. But on the whole we have this. The problem is that the two dominant political parties have fundamentally incompatible visions for the country's future. And, at the national level, that's what we end up voting for. One of these visions has to win and both candidates need to share it before voters can evaluate the individuals. Even in primaries the metric for success isn't the best candidate but who has the best chance of winning in the general.
Pulling back the curtain winning the vision for the new US Right is likely to be a long drawn out fight because for many issues the opposition is a kind of person, e.g. the gays, women, who won't ever "move on" or accept defeat and so will require ongoing active suppression. It's why I'm sad to see Moderate Republicans pushed into obscurity because it seemed for a while there they were within spitting distance of a unified vision.
>When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Well that's ultimately central to the technocrat thesis, PRC's systemic benefit is is they can change the measure to get ahead / reset good hards / campbells law. Their moving metric is "live". The problem with democracies is votes are the immutable metric and it's very hard to reform voting, well gerrymandering... etc but that's still generational efforts.
> I should also add that China has been operating this way for thousands of years. It’s not without problems, though—like the old saying goes: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Yeah, that's a really good point. Chinese "democracy" is not one from our viewpoint, but from their, an oligarchy this large (10% of the population vote) is the perfect balance between democracy and their old imperial system.
When they coined "Communism with Chinese characteristics", in the west most people focused on "Communism", on all side of the political spectrum, but what's really important was "with Chinese characteristics".
Lawyers and accountants. Just look at the way that once great engineering companies like Boeing and Intel have been run into the ground by bean counters ('financialization').
It's neither the accountants nor the lawyers, in my opinion. In my experience, both accountants and lawyers tend to be non-prescriptive - they tell you how things are, options, and likely outcomes.
The people responsible for taking those options and making the choices they do... business and finance.
I generally just have this growing opinion that capitalism is fundamentally about lawyers and accountants. Capital is ultimately nothing more than paper or numbers and worthless in the real world without lawyers and accountants.
Makes sense though. Capitalism demands ever growing profits, and there is more money to be made in wealth accumulation and investments than in building things.
I listened to this podcast earlier this week, and yesterday listened to another in the series exploring the difference between corruption in the US and China.
It's always good to learn how other cultures govern themselves. China learned a lot from the US and other countries, adapted, and then benefitted immensely. In the US, we can learn a lot too.
Alas, American exceptionality as part of its premise precludes any act of learning from anywhere other than itself. Culturally, this is what inbreeding looks like.
In the US, around the turn of the last century, it used to be that if you had an idea for a new invention, you could wander into any mid-sized city and have your pick of a dozen different a machine shops that could make you a prototype. It was an incredible time for innovation in this country, and a big part of the boom that led to the US ramping up from zero to the largest producer of war materiel in WW2.
That's how China is now. Any decent city will have machine shops and plastic injection molders and electronics makers, everything you need to get a new idea off the ground. They spent the last few decades stealing every good idea from the West, just like the US stole every good idea from Britain and Europe 120 years ago, and now they're well into the transition of being the innovation hub of the world.
I'd go a bit further and say it's not just access to a machine shop than makes it. I don't think I'm belong pedantic, but manufacturing has evolved since the 80's. If it were just access to a team of people with a couple of machines for metal, those aren't that difficult and those still exist, albeit far fewer of them. What China does have is one stop prototype to full stack mass manufacturing places. For even the simplist device, a machine shop won't do. You'll need (powder coating) painting, packaging design and manufacturing, and shipping. The attitude of the US machine shop is that it's your problem. "We're just a machine shop, you gotta deal with the rest yourself. Which, I mean, fine, but I don't want to become an expert in manufacturing products. My specialty is writing code for my product. Meanwhile, China's got a one stop shop to take my prototype that I ghetto rigged with cardboard and duct tape with a breadboard, and make iterate on a professional protoype with me, and then take it to a mass manufactured product I can sell to consumers, with a smile on their face. The Americans are going to make fun of me to my face for not knowing the difference between 316L vs A500 structural tube. Now, one could argue that I need to develop thicker skin, but fuck that. China's gonna do what I want without being a bag of dicks and help make me a pile of money. So tell me which one you'd choose.
A broken clock is right twice a day. America has some of the highest numbers of lawyers per capita by far out of developed nations. These lawyers do not work for us, most middle and low income people do not get legal representation that they need at all. You learn where these lawyers actually work when you work in corporate, and you see quickly how this single department has complete unilateral control over all operations of the organization. Everything goes through them and they can shut down anything. Even directives by the chief executive officer who is supposedly at the helm are crafted by legal.
And when you understand that the american government is controlled by corporations, given the above logic that really means it is controlled by their lawyers. Most politicians in representative government come from law backgrounds as well.
This is why everyone should have at least a basic education in materialist analysis. Our material relations dictate the structure of society, not the other way around. China is a manufacturing economy, that's why it's run be engineers, and America is built on exploiting the productive capacity of the rest of the world, so of course there's lots of lawyers.
I am not sure this makes conservatives sound great. They talk about how absolutely self-defeating Trump's policies are towards reshoring efforts. Freakonomics seems pretty genuinely centrist to me.
It's the same thing you see in companies. Once you have something built that is making you comfortable, you get complacent and protective. And there's nothing sexy about maintenance.
(For instance, China wants to build best-in-world industry and infra, which they didn't have before, but they are not running their government in a growth- or building- engineering-driven sense. Not a lot of move-fast-and-break-things iteration there! Lots of people comfortable and protective of that system.)
Anyone can be a cost cutter. The reason China is ahead is that they're building like crazy. They made and continue making long term capital investments in education, infrastructure, and energy. Guaranteed success. US is basically all in on AI right now for anything long term, and it's not even clear that AI will be something that will be a net benefit to the middle or working classes.
Don't mean to sound like a doomed or China glazer, but if the AI calls don't print when the debt collectors come knocking, it's gonna be serious trouble.
I don't think this is really true about either country. America builds plenty. When people talk about it not being able to build they really mean mass transit and to some extent certain types of housing in some areas. Everything else gets built just fine.
Theoretically you’re right. But having read the book, I agree with the general thesis. Things just move so much faster in China when it comes to making or building anything. Like I know firsthand people whose towns were converted from run-of-the-mill village to a T2 city in the span of a couple of decades. When hundreds of millions of people experience major change in their lives in front of their eyes, it’s a nit different than waiting for 5 years to start a new bridge across the river. I’m not even talking about factories, or policy course-corrections, or long-term goal settings either.
You can make a lot of arguments in this debate, but in terms of speed and execution, there’s a clear winner.
> When people talk about it not being able to build they really mean mass transit and to some extent certain types of housing in some areas. Everything else gets built just fine.
Also, the obsession with public transit coverage and walkability as some sort of benchmark for how well your country is doing is at best misguided and at worst ableist and ageist.
Public transit fucking sucks even in countries where it's supposed to be good, because it's inherently sucky. Most of America is car-centric and it's pretty good once you buy into that model of living. Not everyone is a childless 25-year-old healthy able person who doesn't mind living in some 350 sqft box in the middle of a loud downtown hellscape and take public transit to almost-get-to everywhere they need to go before walking the last mile.
When you go to someplace like the Netherlands and see "everyone" riding a bicycle, just keep in mind that what you're seeing isn't actually "everyone".
I agree. Also the US seems to be smarter about what to build: the US has not built cities the size of Manhattan that stand empty year after year like China has.
This is less because of any special attitude toward governance, and more because the only university degrees you could get during the Cultural Revolution were in engineering.
Does it matter if American elected officials are often lawyers if they don't read the bills they vote on? [0][1]. Or if the bills in questions often contain language copy-pasted from lobbyists' memos?
This topic runs the risk of being reduced to the same "Humanities v STEM" binary that so much of US public discourse has been reduced to. The real point of discussion should be that an engineering background may instill a political culture more focused on risk aversion, efficiency and longevity. A lawyer-heavy political culture may end up in the arena of "let's see what we can get away with".
Do these highly simplified stereoptypes apply to contemporary America? I'm not sure if an America led by the likes of Zuck, Ellison, Andreessen etc would end up differently from the one we see today. Whatever particularly genius they were able to leverage into massive wealth, they are all ultimately subservient to the same national culture of short-term gains, popularity contests and superficial macho posturing that afflict the political class.
What goes unsaid in this podcast is that a large number of CCP officials have a military background as well which inherently instills a a long-term view of governance, whereas the most successful American politicians with a pro-military stance (GWB, DT) have routinely denigrated rival politicians who served their country (John Kerry, Tammy Duckworth) while maintaining, not coincidentally, a low profile while in public office.
If that is true - which I don't think it is - then I am happy I live in a country run by lawyers. I am not a huge fan of lawyers, but at least lawyers do not put millions of people into concentration camps and don't disassemble them into organs. Maybe it's appropriate to call those people "social engineers" but I wouldn't like to be a subject to that kind of engineering.
[+] [-] dylanzhangdev|5 months ago|reply
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I'm a Chinese who has lived in China my entire life and am almost 40. Personally, I think the core point of this article is wrong. China has never been run by engineers, but by officials. In ancient times, it was scholars, or literati, while craftsmen were considered lowly. Even in modern times, do officials or engineers have the final say in factories? If it were the latter, there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs. Just go out and survey 100 people on the street and ask them who they think is running the country.
[+] [-] fancl20|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] maxglute|5 months ago|reply
> there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs.
Of course there would, that's how you know cold blooded technocrats are at work. Fucking over irrelevant SOEs and iron rice bowl jobs is sterotypical based analytic trade off. Mind you there's plenty of engineer type doing policy work in the west, they just have a much more sclerotic legal layer to jump through, and frequently, don't.
Go survey 100 diasphora Chinese who lived in PRC and west and ask them how the systems differ.
[+] [-] singularity2001|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] c0nstantien|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anal_reactor|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thisislife2|5 months ago|reply
Chinese leaders can allocate whatever money they want to a project. They can order their citizens, in mass, to move away from an area. They can ignore labour rights and force workers to work in hostile conditions. They can ignore their own laws, or quickly change it when they want, if it impedes some project they have deemed important. They can ignore any ecological concerns. And so on ... India and the USA cannot do all this, because of the constraints their democratic system places on their governing leaders.
This is why Rahul Gandhi (India's current opposition leader) says that the biggest challenge that both the US and India face today is to figure out how to revive domestic manufacturing without sacrificing our democratic values.
[+] [-] tnt128|5 months ago|reply
The U.S. has this loop at the company level. China has this loop at the local government level.
In China, the central government decides what the goals are and how they are measured, and then the local governments carry out the implementation. Local officials who perform well against those measures get promoted; those who don’t are demoted.
If the U.S. really wants to build this kind of feedback loop at the government level, voters need to judge election candidates based on their track record, not just campaign rhetoric. And for that to happen, the country needs a well-educated population with strong critical thinking skills.
I should also add that China has been operating this way for thousands of years. It’s not without problems, though—like the old saying goes: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
For example, GDP used to be the main measure of success. That pushed local governments to chase higher GDP numbers at all costs—regardless of whether the projects were actually practical or useful. This led to overbuilding, unnecessary construction, and even ghost towns.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|5 months ago|reply
China is very decentralized though, Beijing has the ultimate say but their attention span limited. So they maybe set targets, or step in when a huge scandal happens, but most localities are fairly far away from Beijing’s attention. While China doesn’t have America’s federalism, it basically has it by default to deal with its huge size. Every city has different rules, taxes, they have their own local champions, imagine if every big city in the USA had their own auto producer, for example. Hukou means china’s illegal immigration is mostly internal. If you become homeless in Beijing or Shanghai, they will just deport you to whatever village your hukou is in (well, free train/bus ticket at least, but you probably came to the big city because you couldn’t make it in your village in the first place).
[+] [-] Spivak|5 months ago|reply
I think we have this already. Sure, if you go looking for it you can find any brand of stupidity you want—and if you want to sell a narrative when you find it you put a camera in front of them. But on the whole we have this. The problem is that the two dominant political parties have fundamentally incompatible visions for the country's future. And, at the national level, that's what we end up voting for. One of these visions has to win and both candidates need to share it before voters can evaluate the individuals. Even in primaries the metric for success isn't the best candidate but who has the best chance of winning in the general.
Pulling back the curtain winning the vision for the new US Right is likely to be a long drawn out fight because for many issues the opposition is a kind of person, e.g. the gays, women, who won't ever "move on" or accept defeat and so will require ongoing active suppression. It's why I'm sad to see Moderate Republicans pushed into obscurity because it seemed for a while there they were within spitting distance of a unified vision.
[+] [-] maxglute|5 months ago|reply
Well that's ultimately central to the technocrat thesis, PRC's systemic benefit is is they can change the measure to get ahead / reset good hards / campbells law. Their moving metric is "live". The problem with democracies is votes are the immutable metric and it's very hard to reform voting, well gerrymandering... etc but that's still generational efforts.
[+] [-] orwin|5 months ago|reply
Yeah, that's a really good point. Chinese "democracy" is not one from our viewpoint, but from their, an oligarchy this large (10% of the population vote) is the perfect balance between democracy and their old imperial system.
When they coined "Communism with Chinese characteristics", in the west most people focused on "Communism", on all side of the political spectrum, but what's really important was "with Chinese characteristics".
[+] [-] hermitcrab|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] terribleperson|5 months ago|reply
The people responsible for taking those options and making the choices they do... business and finance.
[+] [-] fluidcruft|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NoboruWataya|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FranzFerdiNaN|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|5 months ago|reply
It's always good to learn how other cultures govern themselves. China learned a lot from the US and other countries, adapted, and then benefitted immensely. In the US, we can learn a lot too.
[+] [-] sigfubar|5 months ago|reply
Alas, American exceptionality as part of its premise precludes any act of learning from anywhere other than itself. Culturally, this is what inbreeding looks like.
[+] [-] bearjaws|5 months ago|reply
I learned today Chuck Grassley plans to run again and would be 95 years old in congress. This is insane.
If you've worked retail you know many above 75 are not all there, plain and simple.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025...
[+] [-] psadauskas|5 months ago|reply
That's how China is now. Any decent city will have machine shops and plastic injection molders and electronics makers, everything you need to get a new idea off the ground. They spent the last few decades stealing every good idea from the West, just like the US stole every good idea from Britain and Europe 120 years ago, and now they're well into the transition of being the innovation hub of the world.
[+] [-] fragmede|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mwkaufma|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|5 months ago|reply
And when you understand that the american government is controlled by corporations, given the above logic that really means it is controlled by their lawyers. Most politicians in representative government come from law backgrounds as well.
[+] [-] xmonkee|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fhrjfbdhdhd|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tacitusarc|5 months ago|reply
So I guess they’re doing something right.
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] majormajor|5 months ago|reply
(For instance, China wants to build best-in-world industry and infra, which they didn't have before, but they are not running their government in a growth- or building- engineering-driven sense. Not a lot of move-fast-and-break-things iteration there! Lots of people comfortable and protective of that system.)
[+] [-] ummonk|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|5 months ago|reply
On the other hand, DOGE didn't go a great job running America.
[+] [-] bearjaws|5 months ago|reply
The goal was never to save money. The deficit is the largest its ever been.
[+] [-] kklisura|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] adverbly|5 months ago|reply
Engineers are builders - not cost cutters.
Anyone can be a cost cutter. The reason China is ahead is that they're building like crazy. They made and continue making long term capital investments in education, infrastructure, and energy. Guaranteed success. US is basically all in on AI right now for anything long term, and it's not even clear that AI will be something that will be a net benefit to the middle or working classes.
Don't mean to sound like a doomed or China glazer, but if the AI calls don't print when the debt collectors come knocking, it's gonna be serious trouble.
[+] [-] treis|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tokioyoyo|5 months ago|reply
You can make a lot of arguments in this debate, but in terms of speed and execution, there’s a clear winner.
[+] [-] pengaru|5 months ago|reply
https://www.npr.org/2011/09/16/140515737/california-turns-to...
immediately comes to mind
[+] [-] roncesvalles|5 months ago|reply
Public transit fucking sucks even in countries where it's supposed to be good, because it's inherently sucky. Most of America is car-centric and it's pretty good once you buy into that model of living. Not everyone is a childless 25-year-old healthy able person who doesn't mind living in some 350 sqft box in the middle of a loud downtown hellscape and take public transit to almost-get-to everywhere they need to go before walking the last mile.
When you go to someplace like the Netherlands and see "everyone" riding a bicycle, just keep in mind that what you're seeing isn't actually "everyone".
[+] [-] hollerith|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] canjobear|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|5 months ago|reply
This topic runs the risk of being reduced to the same "Humanities v STEM" binary that so much of US public discourse has been reduced to. The real point of discussion should be that an engineering background may instill a political culture more focused on risk aversion, efficiency and longevity. A lawyer-heavy political culture may end up in the arena of "let's see what we can get away with".
Do these highly simplified stereoptypes apply to contemporary America? I'm not sure if an America led by the likes of Zuck, Ellison, Andreessen etc would end up differently from the one we see today. Whatever particularly genius they were able to leverage into massive wealth, they are all ultimately subservient to the same national culture of short-term gains, popularity contests and superficial macho posturing that afflict the political class.
What goes unsaid in this podcast is that a large number of CCP officials have a military background as well which inherently instills a a long-term view of governance, whereas the most successful American politicians with a pro-military stance (GWB, DT) have routinely denigrated rival politicians who served their country (John Kerry, Tammy Duckworth) while maintaining, not coincidentally, a low profile while in public office.
[0]:https://www.pennstatelawreview.org/penn-statim/dont-be-silly...
[1]: https://www.heritage.org/commentary/congress-read-it-voting
[+] [-] tayo42|5 months ago|reply
But I would probably say America is run by mbas, not lawyers.
[+] [-] 4ndrewl|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DangitBobby|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bbor|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] herval|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cadamsdotcom|5 months ago|reply
It’s a lot easier to agree what should get built when
a) you can point to wealthy nations and say “lets try to have what they have”
and
b) you’ve seen projects go fast and deliver big in your own country done by people just like you.
By contrast in the US it’s often a debate over which incremental improvement to make and why; without unilateral clarity on outcomes or value.
This “run by lawyers” / “run by engineers” claim is a symptom of that difference - it’s a byproduct, it’s not the core problem needing solving.
[+] [-] myroon5|5 months ago|reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/china-amer...
[+] [-] smsm42|5 months ago|reply