Marshall here, welcome back to the realignment. My guest today is Dan Wong, a research fellow at

Stanford's Hoover History Lab and author of Breakneck, China's quest to engineer the future, out today.

Dan spent almost a decade in China as a technology analyst, and Breakneck charts the country's

astonishing but messy progress over the course of that decade.

China's breakneck growth is compared and contrasted with America's current struggle to keep up.

Dan's really interesting takeaway about the U.S. and China centers on the type of person.

Each country elevates to power.

China is an engineering state, with much as

leaders coming from an engineering profession. The U.S. by contrast, is a lawyerly society.

For example, every Democratic nominee this 1980 has been a lawyer, and during the Biden administration,

11 out of 15 of the members of the cabinet or lawyers themselves. What I really appreciated, though,

is that Brickneck isn't just a lawyers, bad, engineers, good, cold take. For example, on the one

hand, engineers can do big projects and move quickly, often knocking aside obstacles, legal or

otherwise. On the other hand, though, China's engineering state produced the

twin disasters of the one-child policy and the zero COVID policy. With America's lawyers,

we can definitely get too caught up in procedure, vutocracy, and just can't build new things.

These are the arguments at the center of the abundance argument. At the same time, though, these things that often hold the state back are key to protecting our rights,

protecting the environment, and preventing ambitious technocrats from riding Rashad over the rest of us.

Overall, Dan's point is that both countries, as they work out their relationship,

can and should learn from one another,

with America taking on a more ambitious engineering mindset, and China becoming more lawyerly,

as it reckons with the costs of the past 40 years of growth. Hope you all enjoy the conversation.

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