China is a nation of engineers, America of lawyers. By Fred Reed.

Having passed part of a misspent life in East Asia, I subscribe to Asia Times, Nikkei Asia, the South China Morning Post and, being something of a tech head, I haunt tech sites. The China reported in these, and that I see on trips, is not remotely the China that is imagined by many in the West.

The American media, whether by intention or inattention, do not convey the scale of what the Chinese are doing.

Multiple extremely high-voltage power lines thousands of miles in length carrying power from solar farms in the northwest to cities in the southeast.

• Over 25,000 miles of fast, quiet, comfortable rail.
• New dams.
• Factories automated to the point of almost seeming alive.
• Astonishing bridges. On and on.

Why does this happen there, and not here?

Because America has a corrupt, inefficient, and outmoded economic system rotted by an impractical and equally outmoded society, often managed by incompetents if not actual fools. It cannot compete against China’s multiple advantages. Let us consider these.

Advantage One:

China is a nation of engineers, America of lawyers. Of the 535 members of Congress, eight are engineers. In a world dominated by science and engineering, a country ruled by technical illiterates will be at a disadvantage. And is.

Advantage Two:

China’s government is a serious enterprise within the limits of human fallibility. The United States government is not. America chooses its leaders not for competence but by popularity contests among provincial lawyers. No President since Jimmy Carter could calculate the first derivative of sin x, freshman calculus. No one on the House China Committee reads, writes, or speaks Chinese, or has a university degree in East Asian studies. A friend of mine, a former US senator, once estimated to me that ninety percent of the Senate doesn’t know where Myan Mar is. Of the forty members of the House Science Committee, there are one or two scientists, depending on definition. This is not serious governance.

Advantage Three:

China is authoritarian. This means that if (an engineering-oriented) Beijing decides that China needs a high-speed rail line between A and B, construction begins the next day. California has tried for a couple of decades to run a high-speed line between Los Angeles and San Francisco at great expense and with no results. America will never have high-speed rail because the line will run through a black ghetto or an Indian burial ground that the Indians have forgotten and there will be fifteen lawsuits over the route and the airlines will bribe Congress to block the project because it would gut their business. No one has the authority to take a decision and make it stick.

Advantage Four:

Hard to prove and impossible to quantify, the Chinese have an affinity for business that seems almost genetic. They are competitive to the far edge of cutthroat and commercially agile. When a new technology appears, such as 5G or Deepseek, it quickly becomes embedded in other products. Almost carnivorous, Chinese often go first for market share and for profit later. They have been called the Jews of Asia and are often hated because overseas Chinese frequently end up dominating business in other countries, sometimes resulting in riots. In the United States, Chinese are greatly over-represented in tech and the sciences.

Advantage Five:

China is not democratic, at least not in the Western sense. This means that policy is not shaped by whims of a public ignorant of underlying complexities.

 

 

It also means that the Chinese can undertake projects lasting for as many years as needed. Policy does not change every two, four, or six years. In America one President is for imigration or green energy or electric cars, the next one against, the following one for, and so on. By contrast China, having decided that fast rail was essential to the country’s future, kept building year after year until, at last count, it has over 25,000 miles. This pattern of sustained, focused effort over many years is common in China.

Advantage Six:

China’s approach to foreign policy is primarily commercial and America’s, military. Beijing has one, small, overseas military base, at Djibouti. America has some 750. Around the world China builds sea ports, factories, and rail lines. America builds military bases. …

What losing looks like:

Note that in the trade war, America is tactically aggressive but strategically defensive. In industry after industry, it cannot compete with China or, increasingly, with the developing world. The economic and technological center of gravity moves inexorably toward Asia. Consequently America has to use strong arm measures to fend off the Chinese commercial juggernaut.

For example, America once dominated in automobiles but now resorts to tariffs to exclude superior Chinese electric vehicles. America, whose technological dominance was once absolute, now has to strong-arm Taiwan into building semiconductor fabs in-Arizona. China has replaced the US as the dominant manufacturing power, in scale, technology, and efficiency. …

Washington is now alarmed at China’s rate of advance in things from reusable launch vehicles to semiconductors, in the latter case not competing but trying to prevent China from accessing American tech in one of few fields in which the US still dominates.

The American attempt to prevent China from using American technology unsurprisingly spurs Beijing to try to develop indigenous tech to replace American.

When China decides that it needs something, it throws money and engineers at it for as long as it takes. This would seem to make perfect sense, and works, but the US can neither decide nor throw. You can’t develop dominant ship-building, or electric cars, or manufacturing by sitting around and hoping that someone will come along and do it.

Consider Tian Jian, a Chinese automated seaport that operates twenty-four seven, without people, its cranes automatically putting containers on trucks that drive themselves to wherever needed.

 

 

Such ports do not grow up in isolation. For example, an automated seaport requires steel, self-driving electric trucks, a mature electric-vehicle industry to supply the trucks, advanced batteries for the trucks, a trained work force, advanced 5G or better, advanced automation engineering, excellent universities to provide the engineers, and good pre-university schooling to make the engineers possible. Behind all this is civil engineering that supplies highways, bridges, electricity, mines, and raw materials. China has all of these. America? Almost none. We are seeing WASP rot on a continental scale. This does not bode well for the attempt to regenerate America as a dominant manufacturing power.

When was the last time you saw something about an engineer on the front page of a Western newspaper?

A feminized longhouse cannot compete. Perhaps that’s why there aren’t any feminist societies — they don’t last long.