Neither lawyers nor engineers run India and that’s fine

In his book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Dan Wang describes two distinct approaches to development.

- RAHUL MATTHAN

China, he argues, has risen to its current global stature on the back of an engineering mindset—the unshakeable belief that social problems can be overcome by solutions we build. America, by contrast, has focused on governance, letting the rule of law and process adherence guide its development pathways. Seen this way, today’s bipolar order is a contest between China’s engineering state and America’s lawyerly state.

China owes its approach to the fact that the political leadership in China has always been composed of STEM-trained technocrats. As a result, it treats infrastructure projects as tools of governance and executes them with single-minded focus. When it needed to bring mobility and connectivity to its more remote regions, China did not hesitate to undertake ambitious decadal mega-projects that involved the construction of high-speed rail networks, bridges over uncrossable gorges and tunnels that ran for kilometres through mountains. To modernize rural districts, it built ultrahigh-voltage lines to move power over thousands of kilometres and its South-North Water Transfer project to supply arid landscapes.

When the state prioritizes a sector in China, it does not merely subsidize it; it synchronises land, credit and procurement, and tasks local governments with aligning factories, training and logistics to meet that objective. This is engineering as statecraft: a bureaucracy that streamlines approvals, permits and procurement in order to meet state-supported objectives.