During his recent delegation to Beijing—the first by a Canadian prime minister since relations between the two countries became strained in 2018—Mark Carney agreed to allow 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles into the Canadian market at a reduced tariff rate. The move was presented as a pragmatic reset that could draw joint-venture capital back into Canada’s auto corridor and offer relief to an industry squeezed by United States president Donald Trump’s trade war.

With Ottawa attempting to patch its trade relationship with Beijing, it felt like the right moment to speak with Dan Wang.

Wang is a Canadian writer who covers technological, macroeconomic, and geopolitical dynamics between China and the US. His book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future was one of last year’s most talked-about works of nonfiction.

At its core, Breakneck argues that political power in the US is dominated by lawyers, while, in China, it is largely held by engineers—and that these contrasting professional cultures produce profoundly different approaches to industrial policy and trade: regulatory caution and incremental growth on one side, rapid manufacturing scale and infrastructure build-out on the other.

As Canada tests a recalibrated relationship with China, I wanted Wang’s perspective on how a middle power can navigate an era of intensifying great-power rivalry—and what trade deals can realistically achieve. He spoke to me over video call from his home in Palo Alto, California, about all of this and more. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

To start, I wanted to talk a bit about this concept you popularized: the lawyer/engineer binary. There are people I speak to who have no real investment in great-power competition, but they’ve nonetheless heard about the concept through the ether. It strikes me as kind of like a Malcolm Gladwell “10,000 hours” thing. I’m curious about how you found this framing.

You may not be invested in great-power competition, but great-power competition is interested in you. That’s the first thing. Maybe that’s part of why this idea has reached “the ether.” My feeling in writing a book about China is that, in the wrong hands, China is a super boring subject because of how complicated everything is. I think we need to do better, because we need to understand this big place.

I was very deliberate in not trying to under-explain China and the US through boring political science terms like “capitalist,” or “socialist,” or “democratic,” or “authoritarian.” They’re all correct in many ways, and we didn’t necessarily need another framework that suffers a lot of flaws and can be reductive—but my concept is probably no worse than trying to understand countries through this idea that they’re socialist or capitalist. And so, I think what we need are new angles, new lenses, to think about both the US and China. This was my attempt to make a playful contribution.

You’ve used adjectives like “tidy” and “reasonable” to describe Canada and its governing mentality. Speak a little bit more about that. Where do you see Canada along this lawyer/engineer continuum?

Canada, as “peace, order, and good government,” is as good an encapsulation as any. But I think it is still a bit of a boring encapsulation. If the US is a lawyerly society, I don’t know what that makes Canada—a fur-trading society?

But I think the problem is that it’s a privilege of the great powers to have some sort of specialization, and maybe it doesn’t even make sense for any other country to be quite dominated in a similar way. I am just reluctant to extend my framing of lawyers and engineers anywhere in industrialized Western countries beyond the US and China. I think all these middle powers are more reasonable, but they’re also weaker in substantial ways.

Can you just speak a little bit more to that point of specialization and how it’s harnessed by the great powers?

There’s a term from Edward Luttwak, a Romanian-American political theorist, called “great-power autism.” He means great........

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