A Book Worth Reading

Books and Media
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Some may be familiar with Dan Wang from the annual letter he has posted on the internet over the last few years. Wang was born in China, raised in Canada, and has worked in the US and China. Currently he is a research fellow at Stanford, where he will be quite at home thanks to his clear Left-wing tendencies.

As a genuinely multi-cultural, multi-lingual individual, he lived & worked in China for 6 years, including during the Covid episode. He has written a book about his experiences which is well worth consideration: “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”, ISBN 978-1-324-10603-6, 260 pages (2025).

Wang states “I am sure that no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese”. However, the two societies have taken different paths in the last half-century. “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’s top leaders mainly have a technical background, whereas US deciders are almost all lawyers.

Thus we get the classic example of California spending $Billions, mostly on lawyers, failing to build a single mile of operating high-speed rail while the engineers of China spent more frugally and built a high-speed rail network larger than the rest of the world put together.

Wang notes the pluses and minuses on each side. The lawyerly society in the US has focused on avoiding harm and protecting a comfortable way of life for some citizens, but it has lost the ability to build almost anything, especially to build anything at a reasonable cost. The US is no longer the kind of society which built massive hydro-electric dams and transcontinental railroads and landed a man on the Moon.

In contrast, since Mao’s exit and especially since the beginning of this century, China’s engineering state has charged ahead building massive infrastructure – modern cities, factories, roads, airports, railways, bridges, ports, universities, mass transit, military – but without much consideration for the people & places that got trampled in the process. Arguably China has over-built, but Wang points out that the bridges and roads have given ordinary Chinese people a sense of progress, a physical demonstration that their world is getting better.

China’s engineering state has also created some real surprises. Wang describes a bicycle vacation he took with friends through a remote part of China – only suddenly to stumble into one of the largest guitar-manufacturing centers in the world.

The downside of the engineering state comes when it applies the same can-do spirit to social matters. Wang dwells on the scars created by the now-abandoned one-child policy. Another example was the decision of the authorities in 2022 during the Covid episode to lock down the city of Shanghai with its 25 million people. Millions of people were ordered to remain in their apartments – apart from queuing up daily for Covid tests (which Wang suggests may have been the principal way the disease spread). But once a decision has been made, the engineering society charges ahead with implementation.

Confining people to their apartments for weeks on end raises an obvious question – how can they continue to eat? The high-tech engineering state dealt with that by quickly creating an app where residents could request food and have it delivered to their apartments. One hungry American woman in Shanghai thus was grateful to receive a food box; when she opened it, she was faced with a dead chicken, still with feathers. Culture clash!

Wang ends his book with a meditation on his parents, who got the opportunity to emigrate from China to Canada in 2000. Currently, they are retired in suburban Philadelphia, and Wang wonders if they are better-off because they emigrated. With the great economic advances in China since they left, Wang suspects the answer is – not really, even though life for middle class people in China is precariously dependent on the mood of leaders in Beijing and good jobs for their children can be hard to find. He has been trying to convince his parents to move to a predominantly Chinese area of New York City where they could re-experience some of the social upsides of a Chinese community. I can’t help but remember the old Bob Dylan song “I pity the poor immigrant who wishes he would’ve stayed home”.

Wang’s book provides a unique insight into two societies during a time of transition, and is definitely worth attention. It leaves us to ponder if it will ever be possible for a society to combine the best of both approaches?

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Here is another interesting view: Justice Scalia on the value of American gridlock:

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Whoa, there, cowboy. Oriental (yup, I said it) and Western culture are profoundly different.

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

China has followed a very different path for millennia. Europe was an engineering state long before China was (viz., the Industrial Revolution). At that time, China was more of a lawyerly society, or at least a more bureaucratic one. Whatever recent trends Mr. Wang thinks he has found, they are hardly intrinsic to their respective cultures. History tells a very different tale.

It’s more accurate to describe Chinese culture as copycat. China is recapitulating the Western Industrial and Information Revolutions. The term Chinese copy dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and was still in common use when I was a student in reference to pirated copies of textbooks produced in China. The usage note:

Sometimes with depreciative implication of lack of comprehension of what has been copied, as demonstrated by, e.g., the reproduction of errors found in the original.

On the other side of the equation, the problems in the West have little to do with lawyers’ prominence in government; it has long been so. Like it or not, lawyers will be overrepresented as legislators because they are in the business of writing the laws, after all. That goes double for the judiciary. In the executive branch, only about half of presidents in the last century have been lawyers (mostly the Democrats). Executives are the deciders.

No, the problem with the West is liberal democracy, which contains the seeds of its own destruction: the destruction we are now witnessing. Lawyers and our overly-litigious society is a symptom, not a cause. California has many problems, least of which is wasting money on lawyers connected with the rail project.

This is accurate but also confuses cause and effect. The problem is the elevation of harm avoidance: one of the values in Haidt’s Moral Foundations theory. Leftists elevate care/harm and fairness/cheating above the others, while conservatives value all of them equally. The elevation of care/harm over the others is a fruit of liberal democracy.

Cultural values are not a thing of the moment; they last for centuries — at least as long as the people are not replaced (subject for a different thread). Kipling was right about East and West, even if he was mostly thinking India. Hey, at least Hindi is in the same language family as European languages. Mandarin is, well, something out of left field.

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Would you like to expand on that? Just what is it about “liberal democracy” which renders a society incapable of meeting its own needs?

I ask that as a person with a low opinion of the governance of the West. We have a “performative representative democracy” rather than anything which corresponds to the idea that major decision should be made by a consensus among the majority of the citizens. And the representatives are anything but representative of the citizenry.

Still, that flawed form of governance did a fairly good job of delivering positive results to US citizens for much of the 20th Century – just as China’s strange non-communist system has done a fairly good job for Chinese citizens in the 21st Century. More than one way to skin a cat?

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This is a topic that deserves its own thread. Briefly, the expansion on the franchise is one element. Another, already mentioned in my prior comment, is the elevation of care/harm and fairness/cheating values about the others.

The movement away from a republic towards democracy means that the most important skill a successful political leader needs is persuasion — not truth or contact with reality. In short, the best liars will win. The churn in a democracy means politicians have no interest in long-term thinking. These factors make it unlikely that the government will act in the interests of the public. The political class has little stake in the success of the country as a whole.

I’m not so sure about this. The second half of the 20th, not to mention the first quarter of the 21st, has not been so good. It’s not clear that US involvement in two world wars was beneficial for US citizens, on net. Taking a broader look, the US has been at war for a significant part of its history. US involvement was often initiated by the political class by exploiting (or creating) an incident for propaganda: Gulf of Tonkin incident, USS Maine, RMS Lusitania). Were these involvements in the best interests of the citizenry?

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I am not so sure about that, although we are probably both touching the same elephant.

In today’s version of “liberal democracy”, the key election is usually the primary election, in which only a tiny minority of the population votes – and that tiny minority is self-selected to be non-representative of the population as a whole.

Once a politician has grabbed that primary victory, the (s)election is over in most constituencies, because the outcome of the general election is pre-ordained, regardless of the ability or inability of the politician to persuade. And once the politician has attained the exalted state of incumbency, she is almost impossible to remove – because of the advantages of incumbency which incumbents have created.

You are right that this system gives the politician little stake in the actual success of the country – but it does guarantee personal wealth beyond the dreams of most entrepreneurs, inventors, or workers.

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I agree this is often true, especially in Congressional races but it certainly is not true for presidential elections. Nevertheless, even in truly contested elections the original point holds: the successful candidate is the most persuasive liar. This problem dates back to the Athenian democracy. It’s no coincidence that being called a sophist is not a compliment. The pejorative sense of this term came about because these individuals were viewed as the teachers of Athenians so they could make specious arguments. In some sense, it was a critique of philosophers generally, which reminds me of a favorite quote from a blogger I used to read:

Idle hands do the Devil’s work and the best proof of that is philosophy. Everywhere there have been idle hands we find the philosopher and Hell follows with him.

Right, and this is accomplished in the short term and at the expense of the public interest. The politician’s time horizon is how long he wants to spend in public ‘service’. It doesn’t take too long to make a tidy bundle; Obama did it in less than a decade. There’s a real rags-to-riches story.

And, yes, these are all parts of the same elephant.

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I’ve been reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and came across this passage yesterday:

The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom, nor is it the building of an ideal polity. What matter, of course, are the moral foundations of society.
Gulag Archipelago, part 5 (Kartoga), ch. 4.

This gets to a problem with liberal democracy, which elevates freedom above all. Don’t get me wrong; I’m in favor of freedom but it is not an end in itself, much as capitalism is not an end in itself. Both these are merely means, yet both are treated as ultimate goals. This ties in with my previous mention of Haidt’s Moral Foundations theory. One problem with liberal democracy is the values it has elevated.

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Just curious if this theory falsifiable? Does it allow tests or palaeontological findings that can reject it?

I looked at Moral foundations theory - Wikipedia and could not find any competing theory of morale based on natural selection. That is, that the morale of a particular group we observe today is the result of survival of this groups in competition with other groups that practiced different moral systems in that geographical region. Do you happen to have good pointers to such ideas?

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I’m not sure social psychology theories are falsifiable but maybe that’s just me being unkind about the social sciences. Haidt’s evidence for his foundation categories is the responses to his questionnaire. There has likely been work on the evolutionary basis of the foundations, especially given the moderate heritability (~0.5) of personality traits. I seem to recall some work on this but it’s been a long time since I was interested in Haidt’s work. However, I did find this game theory paper on the topic:

The full text is available. The authors claim, with references to back it up, that:

There are reasons to believe that human morality has been shaped partly by evolutionary pressures. Very young babies show proto-moral behavior, suggesting that certain moral principles are partly innate and, hence, potentially inheritable.

Anyhow, Solzhenitsyn wasn’t referring to Haidt-style moral foundations. Regardless of where they come from, his point was that the moral values are what count, not the instrumental values like freedom that are emphasized in the contemporary understanding of democracy. I think of Haidt’s foundations as an empirical observation: political orientation is associated with emphasis on different foundations. Liberal democracy has resulted in the elevation of care and fairness over the others. Because of this imbalance, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

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Maybe a misunderstanding of freedom. Certainly democracy has not driven freedom. My father would be 107 this year had he lived. Every generation has had less freedom. If you want data, check out the number of laws and regulations.

Freedom shouldn’t be confused with main character syndrome or narcissism or selfishness.

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True. Furthermore, “democracy” has not resulted in democracy. In other words, what the regime calls Our Democracy has little to do with democracy. The clearly-expressed will of the people is ignored or overturned by judges. Besides, the US is meant to be a republic. What I meant by liberal democracy is what prevails in the US and most of Europe. That is how the regime brands itself and it is, in the US case, the natural evolution of the Republic that began in the 19th century, continuing through the 17th Amendment, the Roosevelt administration, and the judicial activism of the 20th century through the present. That’s Our Democracy.

Also true yet that has become its current meaning: freedom from unchosen bonds. Freedom now means license and no responsibility. But even in its original sense, Solzhenitsyn is making the point that freedom is a means to an end: that of human flourishing in a manner consistent with moral values. Exactly what those values should be is not specified. They will be culture-dependent, which is why mass migration is a bad idea. Returning to the original topic, these thoughts were put forward in the context of China and the West.

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