Taking the bus to Pyongyang

On a 2023 inspection tour through Jiangsu province (like Guangdong, a manufacturing powerhouse), Xi said, “The real economy is the foundation of a country’s economy, the fundamental source of wealth creation, and an important pillar of national strength.” It is the basis, he continued, of “human production, life, and development.” He has repeatedly said that China needs to prioritize the real economy, which means the world of manufactured products, rather than the virtual or financial economy, sometimes referred to in state media as the “fictitious” economy. State-affiliated researchers commonly denounce financialization with the hollowing out of manufacturing in the same breath. [...] Xi has declared that China targets completionism, which means that not even “low-end industries” should move out of China. Rather than follow economic logic, in which production gravitates toward countries with lower labor costs—which the United States and other high-income countries have more or less accepted—Xi does not want industry to keep shifting around. So the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan released in 2021 demands that the manufacturing share of the economy stay constant. Manufacturing already accounts for 28 percent of China’s GDP, which is much higher than Germany’s 21 percent and Japan’s 20 percent, to say nothing of deindustrialized economies like the United States and the United Kingdom (both around 10 percent). Xi has repeatedly stated that he’s not interested in abandoning manufacturing for services. In authoritative speeches, Xi cited “certain Western countries” that forsook the real economy for the fictitious economy. No points for guessing which Western countries these might be. And Xi has declared that “the real economy is the basis of everything . . . so we must never deindustrialize.” That is what the engineering state is about.

"At the best of times, electronics assembly is overwhelmingly repetitive. Managers prize workers with daintier fingers, favoring women because they are presumed to be nimbler. When I asked factory overseers why iPhones are not made in the United States, they always bring up fingers. “Look at those meaty American hands,” Taiwanese managers tell me. “How can they possibly put together something as intricate as an iPhone?”"

"One cautionary tale: the story of Cape Wind, the United States’ first effort to develop offshore wind turbines. A developer tried to build turbines off the coast of Massachusetts, harnessing sea winds that are smoother and faster than those on land. Unfortunately, Cape Wind was in Nantucket Sound, home to some of the wealthiest, and mostly liberal, US citizens, like the Kennedy family, whose compound is in Hyannisport. These residents banded together, formed a nonprofit, and enlisted lawyers that included one of Harvard’s best-known constitutional law professors to challenge the development. After sixteen years of lawsuits, the developer abandoned the project.

"From 2003 to 2013, Shanghai added as much subway track as in the entire system in New York City. In 2025, fifty-one Chinese cities have subway lines, eleven of which are longer than New York’s. China now has a longer high-speed rail network than the rest of the world put together, ten times the length of Spain’s and Japan’s (second and third in the world, respectively)."

"China’s first interprovincial expressway opened in 1993, connecting Beijing with the nearby port city of Tianjin. Soon enough, highways reached everywhere. A Chinese citizen born when the country completed its first expressway would—by the time she reached the legal driving age of eighteen in 2011—be able to drive on a highway system that surpassed the length of the US interstate system. By 2020, China had built a second batch of expressways that again totaled the length of the US system. The first expanse of highways took eighteen years to build; the second took half that time."

"In spite of the challenges of deep rural isolation, China’s fourth-poorest province—where household income is one-fifteenth that of New York State—has vastly superior infrastructure: three times the length of New York’s highways, as well as a functional highspeed rail network. And Guizhou isn’t exactly an exceptional Chinese province. Across the country, the engineering state has relentlessly built public works, making Guizhou an extreme case of China’s growth strategy rather than a deviation from it."

"The year 2008 offers a direct comparison between California’s speed and China’s speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. Both lines would be around eight hundred miles long upon completion. China opened the Beijing–Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $36 billion. In its first decade of operation, it completed 1.35 billion passenger trips. California has built, seventeen years after the ballot proposition, a small stretch of rail to connect two cities in the Central Valley, neither of which are close to San Francisco or Los Angeles. The latest estimate for California’s rail line is $128 billion."