| When Dan Wang first heard President Donald Trump describe the date for imposing tariffs on US trade partners as “Liberation Day,” the phrase caught his ear. “‘Liberation’ is not a very American word,” he told me recently. “It’s much more of a Chinese word.” Wang would know. For years, as a China-based analyst for a macro research firm, he pored over speeches and official documents of the Chinese Communist Party, trying to extract meaning from jargon. Wang now sees parallels between Trump and President Xi Jinping, he says: the blind loyalty of their base, the demonization of foreigners and a willingness to foment unease among immigrants and minorities by threatening their status within society. “What we have in the US is authoritarianism without the good stuff,” he says. The good stuff being, according to Wang, things such as high-speed trains, well-functioning cities, and political and economic stability. The United States needs to study China if it’s going to remain a superpower, Wang argues in his new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. But it needs to learn the right lessons — including, most importantly, how to build. In Breakneck, Wang argues that the key difference between the two giants is that China is run by engineers — in 2002 all nine members of the Politburo standing committee had engineering backgrounds — whereas the US is run by lawyers. China prioritizes building colossal public works such as bridges, dams and airports, as well as products like toys and iPhones. The US excels at making and enforcing rules. This was a good thing during the 1960s and ’70s, when lawyers pushed back against the American technocratic regime that had damaged the environment, run highways through urban neighborhoods and gotten the country mired in Vietnam. But now the rulemaking has gone too far, Wang says, and it’s preventing the US from keeping pace with rivals. Wang calls for the US to take a page from Xi’s playbook and rediscover hard engineering as a proud pursuit, to celebrate “the world of atoms instead of the world of bits.” It doesn’t matter how many apps the US designs — or even tools for AI warfare — if it runs out of missiles. — Christopher Beam, Bloomberg Weekend Read more: China Is Run by Engineers, and the US by Too Many Lawyers | 
