How the U.S. Uses Red Tape to Break Things and Break People.
Plus a reflection on Dan Wang's "Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future."
I’ve been reflecting on an interview with Dan Wang, conducted by Vox’s Sean Illing, on his new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. (I’ve only read excerpts, but after listening to the interview it’s definitely on my TBR list.) Wang’s thesis – as a Canadian who has lived most of his life alternating between China and the United States – is that “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’s lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
Whereas China’s Political Bureau is dominated by engineers (who have a bias toward building), the U.S. political class is dominated by lawyers (who have a bias toward erecting barriers – or at the least toward process, which tends to be slow).1
In Wang’s estimation, U.S. lawyers – beginning in earnest in the 1960s and 70s – embarked on a “mission [] to stop as many things as possible.” (He grants that this mission was a “necessary corrective” to the “frightful” place the United States had become in those decades.) Contrast this with China, which Wang describes as “moving quickly to achieve rapid physical improvements.”
Early in the book and interview, he provides two – rather startling – examples of the juxtaposition:
In the United States, the “housing crisis” refers to a staggering under-supply of housing units, as well as the increasing consensus among progressives and some conservatives that this is due to near-endless layers of administrative hurdles erected to achieve progressive-coded goals (union labor, environmental protection, civic participation by vulnerable communities, etc.). In China, the “housing crisis” refers to a collapse of home prices due to a staggering over-supply of housing units.
In 2008, both California and China began work to construct a high-speed rail link between major cities (San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Beijing and Shanghai). Three years later, in 2011, China unveiled its finished line at a cost of $36 billion. Seventeen years later, in 2025, there is no high-speed rail in California. The ambitious SF-LA line has been downgraded to a Bakersfield (pop. <500,000)-Merced (pop. <100,000) line, expected to open in the early-to-mid 2030s at a cost of nearly $130 billion.
The left’s new “abundance framework” – discussed at length all over the internet, as well as by me here – says that the reason the United States can’t get anything done is because we’ve created institutions that deliberately slow transformation in order to protect us from tyrannies of both majority and minority rule. On top of those institutions, we’ve hoarded processes – meant to further protect the most vulnerable communities, as well as further entrench the most special interests – that ground transformation to a halt.
But Wang’s argument goes further, ultimately asking whether process and barrier-building is the necessary cost of plurality. He explains that while China – with its state-imposed control over the material and, to a large extent, social and intellectual landscape of the nation – has the capacity to “move[] fast and break[] things,” it also “moves fast and breaks people.” He labels this “social engineering” and positions it opposite plurality:
“[China’s] leaders aren’t only civil or electrical engineers. They are, fundamentally, social engineers… [They are] engineers of the soul – a phrase from Joseph Stalin repeated by Xi Jinping.”
Essentially, the dichotomy Wang sets up is this:
Commitment to a pluralistic society and to the values inherent to individualism leads inevitably to accumulated and exaggerated – even if typically well-intentioned – processes that eventually function as enormous barriers to progress and to ensuring the rights, liberties, and material prosperity that pluralism promised.
Commitment to an engineered state, on the other hand, more easily and more rapidly leads to the creation of new tech, infrastructure, and other material developments, but also invariably removes from each individual some or all agency over their destinies and, often, bodies.
This seems correct to me, but I wouldn’t draw such a stark line between the two worlds. Plurality may be correlated with red tape, and social engineering correlated with action, but red tape – those processes borne of the United States’ commitment, however fraught and imperfect, to individual rights – can also be used to engineer outcomes and strip people of control over their own futures.
I’ll offer two cases-in-point:
1. We’ve already started on the bodies.
In the three years since Dobbs undid reproductive protections in the United States, conservative leaders at the local and state levels have been working to achieve all-out abortion bans – some with horrifying success. But alas, a majority of the nation values a woman’s right to govern her own body, her own pregnancy, and her own health; so while these bans continue to go into effect in many parts of the country, a federal statutory ban remains – for the time being – political kryptonite.
But there’s so many other ways – other processes in place – for lawyers2 and political leaders (and, sometimes, ordinary constituents) to target, demonize, and harm women whom they suspect of having abortions. These prosecutions aren’t typically based on legal loopholes recently established, creative litigation strategies freshly hatched, or new laws just handed down. Rather, based on existing statutes and common law – such as obscure and outdated regulations on what to do with fetal tissue, broad interpretations on child abuse and negligence precedents, abuse of corpse laws, and prohibitions on abandoning bodies – women are being criminalized for miscarriages. Sometimes decades after they occur.3
While the aim is different and the methods certainly far less coordinated, this systematic undoing of an individual right previously believed fundamental harkens back to China' s infamous One Child policy. During that policy’s nearly four-decade reign, as many abortions – many of them forced – were performed as there are people in the United States. The government made a decision about individual and collective futures, and engineered a brutal, but effective, pathway to get there.
In a socially engineered state, people – their destinies, their bodies – are as constructable as steel. In the United States, people are not quite so easily manipulated… but even the most process-heavy, regulation-laden, litigiously-inclined society will eventually build something. It may take three decades, but California will eventually open a high-speed rail.
I worry that, while it may take three decades (or three years, until the end of Trump 2.0), the United States will engineer a path to the kind of total control – at least over women’s bodies, and in turn, their livelihoods and countless other points of individual agency – that China practiced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
2. Red tape is routinely used to entrench special interests.
For years, environmental advocacy groups have repeatedly found themselves fighting against climate justice and green energy projects and policies. Wally Nowinski explained in 2021:
“America’s biggest green groups are over and over again lining up on the wrong side of decarbonization. The Audubon Society is suing to block California wind farms. The Natural Resources Defense Council supported closing nuclear power plants in New York and California. The Sunrise Movement is supporting a moratorium on large solar projects in Amherst, MA. And the Sierra Club has organized opposition to solar projects in Florida, California, Maryland and elsewhere.
In Nevada, the Sierra Club and groups like it were the primary challenger to a 14-square-mile solar project. The reason? Affection for the plot of land, which also shelters endangered tortoises… What’s going on here?”
He concluded that these groups are “vulnerable to NIMBYism,” which “rais[es] the temptation to value the fate of a few acres of land over potentially game-changing climate solutions.” NIMBYism, at its core, is the marriage of entrenched special interests (leading, over time, to enormous inequity and entitlement), performative plurality, and creative lawyers and litigants willing to stampede values by manifestly – but legally – misusing well-intentioned policies and processes for protecting real plurality.
In each of the examples referenced by Nowinski, groups – some of whom advocated strongly and impactfully for many of the environmental protections now codified into state and federal law – leveraged the existing laws, originally designed to slow down anti-environmentalist development, to stop projects manifestly and objectively good for the climate and/or biodiversity.
Why? Because navigating hurdles is time and money. That’s the whole point, that’s how these protections were intended to shield against expensive and years-long infrastructure projects sure to damage ecosystems and send carbon into the air. Protection through process, because process is time and money. And those with power have more of it to spend than those without. Red tape becomes currency.
Ok, so what’s the point?
The point is this: The United States is a pluralist society. We place a high premium on individualism. Our Bill of Rights is a roster of individual entitlements, and both the structure and substance of our legal system reflects this bias.
To a large extent, a “lawyerly society” is the price we pay for the ability to be individuals in a society where others are also empowered to be individuals. Every person is their own universe, and universes bump up against one another. Resolving these conflicts is tedious, as is designing responsible remedies and reaching new communal understandings. Process is how we do it, however imperfectly.
But process – or policy, or regulation, or administration, or bureaucracy, or whatever other phrases we might use to describe an awful lot of procedural barriers to accomplishing much of anything – is a tool like any other. It can be used effectively for many purposes, including state control and power accumulation by a select few.
The United States, whether it's moving fast or slow, is no stranger to breaking things and breaking people. Even more dangerous, we might do so while carrying our historical ode to plurality. We might operate under the tedious guise of lawyers, all while engineering a very different, darker version of America.
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My recs for the week:
“And let’s not forget, as we all bumble along, burned out, isolated, and drowning in the demands of whatever life or career stage we’re at, we’re also expected to constantly consume and metabolize horrific world events in the background.” [Rosie Spinks, The Friendship Problem]
I doubt this is something we could ever take on, but I’m low-key obsessed with Amanda Litman’s pact with her husband to host (host!) people at their home for dinner every (every!) Saturday of 2025. Her most recent post (there’s at least 2) on how it’s going is one I’ve gone back to a few times in the last couple months.
Book: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovksy. It’s the first of a 3-book series and it is sweepingly good. Yes, it’s sci-fi. Yes, it’s still worth picking up even if you don’t typically read sci-fi. The world-building is the best I’ve ever read. It’s a story about two species stretching across millennia, and by the end of it you’ll have a new perspective on the scale of time and the size of your own tiny — but precious — imprint on evolution.
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For a stretch in the early 2000s, every member of China’s Political Bureau was a trained engineer. Contrast that to the United States, where 27 out of 44 Presidents have been lawyers and 187 members – just over a third – of the current Congress have law degrees. But of course, we’re more than who we send to Washington. (Neither here nor there, but there are only 155 members who are women – just to be very clear, women make up half the U.S. population so we’d have to add more than 110 women members to achieve parity.)
This isn’t a lawyer takedown piece. I’m proud to be a lawyer. I get to engage in serving and protecting others as well as the ideals and values I believe in. But… there’s an awful lot of process. And, as this essay tries to point out, that process can be weaponized for better and for worse.
Adding terror to terror, some prosecutors are using genetic data – collected by companies like AncestryDNA or 23AndMe – to match women with uncovered fetal remains, even decades after a miscarriage or stillbirth occurred.