How the U.S. Stacks Up to China’s ‘Engineering State’

Bold Names

The Wall Street Journal

Technology

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The relationship between the U.S. and China is typically framed as competitive and even adversarial. Each superpower brings strengths and weaknesses to how it approaches its society, business and growth. In his new book "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future," author and China expert Dan Wang, frames the key differences between the two superpowers. He argues that China can be understood as an "engineering state" that builds at breakneck speed regardless of public opinion or dissent. He says the U.S., on the other hand, is a "lawyerly society" that offers civil and environmental protections, but blocks everything, good and bad. On the latest episode of the Bold Names podcast, Wang speaks to WSJ’s Christopher Mims about how this framework could help us understand which country ultimately has the upper hand in the current geopolitical and technological arms race. To watch the video version of this episode, visit our WSJ Podcasts YouTube channel or the video page of WSJ.com. Check Out Past Episodes: This CEO Says Global Trade Is Broken. What Comes Next? What This Former USAID Head Had to Say About Elon Musk and DOGE ‘Businesses Don’t Like Uncertainty’: How Cisco Is Navigating AI and Trump 2.0 Why This Tesla Pioneer Says the Cheap EV Market 'Sucks' Let us know what you think of the show. Email us at [email protected]. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Read Christopher Mims’s Keywords column. Read Tim Higgins’s column. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Why are businesses like HelloVet choosing Apple products and services?
0:04.8	So we started the business two years ago.
0:07.2	We had a few people who were used to PCs and this was their first foray into Macs.
0:12.5	But it's been super smooth getting everyone onto those devices and everyone seems really, really happy.
0:18.0	Find out how Mac can help you run and grow your business at apple.com forward slash
0:23.6	HelloVet.
0:25.9	Where were you?
0:27.5	What were you doing when you realized that the U.S. had lost its global dominance to China?
0:34.8	I was on the train, on the metro north, commuting between New York
0:41.5	City and New Haven, Connecticut. One day I came across this timetable from 1914. I found that the trains
0:49.1	over 100 years ago were faster than they were in 2023. Now, it's not totally an apples-to-apples
0:57.3	comparison because the trains make many more stops today than in the past. But still, something's going
1:04.8	really badly off track when we're not building trains that are faster than 100 years ago. What's going on?
1:14.9	This week on bold names, Dan Wong.
1:17.6	He is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
1:21.8	He's also the author of a new book.
1:24.0	It's called Breakneck, China's Quest to Engineer the Future. That's why I invited him on to
1:30.7	talk about the competition between the U.S. and China. And Mims, you went solo this week because I was off,
1:37.1	but before I went, you were so excited about getting him on because all the stuff in his book,
1:42.9	the stuff you learned, and also some of
1:44.5	the provocative kind of arguments that he's making. Yeah, Dan Wong is very opinionated, but he also
1:51.3	brings receipts because he lived in China from 2017 all the way until 2023, where he was a tech
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Wall Street Journal, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Wall Street Journal and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.