China’s engineering state: the hidden machinery of speed and scale

Dan Wang. China is an “engin­eer­ing state” that has been build­ing at a fren­et­ic pace. This aspect of the coun­try took shape in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaop­ing came to power. He shaped this vis­ion in response to the dis­asters left in the wake of the Great Leap For­ward (1958–1961) and the Cul­tur­al Revolu­tion (1966–1976), led by his pre­de­cessor, Mao Zedong.

At the end of the Maoist era, an extens­ive catch-up pro­gramme was launched aimed at rap­idly mak­ing up for the accu­mu­lated short­fall in infra­struc­ture. Until then, a large pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion was liv­ing in unsat­is­fact­ory con­di­tions: there were repeated elec­tri­city short­ages, the rail­way net­work was over­burdened, there were very few ports along the coast, and no motor­ways had been built before 1993.

Faced with this glar­ing lack of infra­struc­ture, the rul­ing class of the 1980s set about pro­mot­ing engin­eers to the highest pos­i­tions of state. A new gen­er­a­tion of stu­dents, trained accord­ing to a Soviet-inspired mod­el, began to emerge. With­in a few years, they became the country’s rul­ing elite, and by 2002 all nine mem­bers of the Polit­buro Stand­ing Com­mit­tee¹ held engin­eer­ing degrees (in hydraul­ic engin­eer­ing, geo­logy, elec­tric­al engin­eer­ing, etc.).

Engin­eers are, by their very nature, build­ers. Their pres­ence with­in the state appar­at­us partly explains why, over the last three dec­ades, a massive wave of con­struc­tion has swept across the coun­try. Hydro­power dams, motor­ways, hous­ing, and sol­ar and wind power facil­it­ies have sprung up.

The coun­try has developed an extraordin­ary capa­city to train engin­eers to meet the needs of its industry, to the point where this has become a sig­ni­fic­ant stra­tegic asset. A report pub­lished in 2012 in the New York Times revealed that, when pro­duc­tion of the iPhone first began, Apple needed to recruit nearly nine thou­sand engin­eers. At that time in the United States, it would have taken around nine months to recruit that num­ber of engin­eers, where­as in China, the task was accom­plished in just two weeks.

This capa­city is now help­ing to make China a man­u­fac­tur­ing super­power, account­ing for around a third of glob­al pro­duc­tion capa­city. Its factor­ies pro­duce around sixty mil­lion cars a year (one-third elec­tric, two-thirds pet­rol or dies­el), and in the field of robot­ics, for example, it is one of the only coun­tries in the world to man­u­fac­ture con­sumer drones. There are still some areas of weak­ness, such as semi­con­duct­ors and avi­ation, but China is now able to pro­duce goods whose qual­ity rivals that of European and East Asi­an products.

The “engin­eer­ing state”, which claims to uphold “social­ism with Chinese char­ac­ter­ist­ics”, exists to bring about sig­ni­fic­ant improve­ments for the people and derives its legit­im­acy primar­ily through the imple­ment­a­tion of pub­lic works, without resort­ing to demo­crat­ic mech­an­isms. Under this approach, demo­crat­ic prin­ciples are seen as poten­tial obstacles to the imple­ment­a­tion of major pro­jects deemed neces­sary for the com­mon good. Beijing thus favours a tech­no­crat­ic form of gov­ernance to main­tain its growth tar­gets, without serving the interests of spe­cif­ic groups or individuals.

The engin­eer, by nature, fol­lows this guid­ing prin­ciple, even if it means treat­ing social issues as math­em­at­ic­al exer­cises. The one-child policy (1979–2015) and the hand­ling of the Cov­id crisis are par­tic­u­larly illus­trat­ive of this. The Party thus pos­i­tions itself as a con­duct­or, coordin­at­ing uni­fied actions and mak­ing decisions that are bey­ond the com­pre­hen­sion of ordin­ary citizens.

This is one of the most strik­ing con­trasts between the two coun­tries. As explained, the Chinese elite is a tech­no­crat­ic group com­pris­ing a major­ity of engin­eers spe­cial­ising in con­struc­tion. The Amer­ic­an elite, on the oth­er hand, is made up of law­yers who form a leg­al­ist­ic soci­ety, struc­tured around pro­ced­ures where obstruc­tion is rife. This dif­fer­ence in back­ground res­ults in a strik­ing dis­par­ity in out­comes. To put it in fig­ures, China spent 13.5 % of its GDP on infra­struc­ture fund­ing in 2026, whilst the US aver­age stood at around 3 % over the last three decades.

The pro­duc­tion of car­bon-free energy is cer­tainly the most com­pel­ling example. In the US, six gigawatts of new wind power capa­city were added in 2023, com­pared with 76 in China. In the same year, China installed two-thirds of the world’s wind and sol­ar power plants, four times more than the G7 coun­tries com­bined. The United States clearly retains some major strengths, ran­ging from its innov­at­ive prowess in digit­al tech­no­lo­gies to a net­work of inter­na­tion­al part­ner­ships, but when it comes to con­struc­tion, its rival has become a mas­ter of the field.

Dur­ing an offi­cial vis­it to Beijing in May 2026, which passed without incid­ent, Don­ald Trump showed a cer­tain degree of respect for Xi Jin­ping and the power he wields. He appeared to treat him as an equal, acknow­ledged the mil­it­ary pro­gress made and recog­nised the areas in which China excelled. Their shared appet­ite for power fosters a cer­tain under­stand­ing between the two heads of state.

Europeans are only optim­ist­ic when look­ing back at the past. Their super­power lies mainly in their way of life and their her­it­age. Chinese and Amer­ic­an mega­cit­ies are indeed unat­tract­ive com­pared to European cit­ies. But both powers are made up of res­ol­utely ambi­tious entre­pren­eurs, focused on the future and with little attach­ment to the ideas of the past. Both China and the United States, in their own way, are invent­ing the future.

On the oth­er hand, the European Uni­on seems to be fight­ing a battle on two fronts: against China and against the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor. And they are los­ing, fall­ing sig­ni­fic­antly behind the United States (in bio­tech­no­logy, fin­ance, soft­ware and AI) and facing their own dein­dus­tri­al­isa­tion, driv­en by off­shor­ing to Chinese sites. It is not a ques­tion of becom­ing an engin­eer­ing state, but of quickly recog­nising this decline and estab­lish­ing a pro­gramme to excel in a par­tic­u­lar field.

Interview by Alicia Piveteau