America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Light rail. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever, if it even happens at all.

Meanwhile, there’s China. A country that builds much faster — high-speed trains, solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, drones — all churned out at breakneck speed.

Why can China do this, and why does it seem like America can’t?

Dan Wang is the author of a new book called Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It’s a deeply reported, deeply personal book about the country he grew up in, returned to, and then left again. And it’s filled with surprising insights into China’s evolution as a country.

There isn’t a single answer to the question about why China can move fast and why we can’t, but Wang offers one I haven’t heard before. He says one of the most important distinctions between the US and China is that the US is a society run by lawyers and China is a society run by engineers — and that many of our differences flow from this divide.

I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about how that engineering mindset has shaped China, and what these two societies can learn from each other. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One of the first things you say in the book is that China and America are constantly locking horns. And you find that both tragic and comical because, “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.” Why do you see it that way?

The first thing is that both countries are, in many ways, unintelligible to themselves. How many Americans truly understand America? You’re sitting in the Gulf Coast, Sean, and I wonder how many Americans have a deep sense of what’s going on there.

I think Americans and Chinese are alike because both embrace dynamism and shortcuts. There’s a kind of hucksterism in the US — a willingness to cut corners, to improvise — and that exists in China, too. Both societies carry the pride of a great civilization, but also a restless embrace of change. In contrast, places like Europe or Japan tend to be far more suspicious of change, more comfortable with stasis.

Let’s get into the central idea of your book: China as an “engineering state” and America as a “lawyerly society.” It’s a striking frame. How did you come up with it, and why is it useful?

I wanted a fresh framework to understand these two countries beyond the stale 20th-century categories of capitalist, neoliberal, authoritarian, or democratic.

China, I argue, is an engineering state. At times, the entire Standing Committee of the Politburo, the country’s top leadership, was filled with trained engineers. Hu Jintao, for example, was a hydraulic engineer who supervised the building of a dam. His premier, Wen Jiabao, was a geologist. They approached society as if it were a giant technical problem, something to be solved like a hydraulic system or a math equation.

America, by contrast, began as a lawyerly society. The Declaration of Independence reads like a legal case.........

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