Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

by Dan Wang

I suspect it's a form of social welfare. Historically, the state or government doesn't typically redistribute wealth. Instead, they often create unnecessary positions where people do unproductive work but still receive a paycheck.

Americans live today in the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded.

This party believes that only the state has the wisdom to invest in strategic megaprojects, whereas consumers will waste money on themselves.

the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.”

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

For an infrastructure-starved place like the United States, construction can generate long-run gains from higher economic activity that eventually surpass the immediate construction costs. And the experience of building big in underserved places is a means of redistribution that makes locals happy while satisfying fiscal conservatives who are normally skeptical of welfare payments.

Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments.

science and technology are the decisive forces in this Darwinian competition;

Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

In 2018, Xi praised teachers as engineers of the soul, a phrase first used by Joseph Stalin a century ago.

It is a hope that the Communist Party might one day let its people flourish by leaving them alone.

“We wanted flying car, instead we got 140 characters.”

China has greater manufacturing capabilities, more sophisticated physical infrastructure, a more robust defense industrial base, and more abundant housing.

The United States can prove itself the stronger country over the next century if it can hold on to pluralism while building more.

The United States has lost its ability not only to build but also, in part, to govern. The procedure-obsessed left and the destructive right have robbed from the people the sense that physical dynamism is desirable.