Dan Wang: China since 1980 has become an "engineering state, building big at breakneck speed," whereas the US has become a "lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad"
note: "Five of the last ten US presidents attended law school, as did every Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee from 1984 to 2020." By contrast, "all nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China's most powerful governing body, were former engineers [by 2002]. Hu Jintao was a hydraulics engineer; his successor, Xi Junping, studied chemical engineering"
Yi-Ling Liu, at NYRB, notes the limitations of this analysis, however: "if lawyers have hamstrung America's ability to build, how do we explain the speed with which the nation is constructing data centers, outpacing China in what is now the largest infrastructure project in US history? Tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers across the country, cutting through bureaucratic hurdles thanks to their disproportionate political power."
Liu quotes J. S. Tan: "What looks like procedural paralysis is, in fact, a system that privileges powerful actors"