Dan Wang opens this chapter by recounting a five-day, 400-mile bicycle journey he took through Guizhou province in southwestern China during summer 2021. Traveling with two friends, he cycled from Guangzhou to Chongqing and observed firsthand how even China’s poorest regions possess superior infrastructure compared to America’s wealthiest areas. This observation forms the foundation for his examination of China’s engineering state and its relentless commitment to constructing large-scale public works regardless of financial or human costs.

Guizhou serves as Wang’s primary case study. Historically one of China’s most impoverished and isolated provinces, characterized by rugged mountains and limited accessibility, Guizhou has been transformed through massive state investment. The central government constructed the world’s largest radio telescope there, developed major data centers in the capital city of Guiyang, and connected the province to the national high-speed rail network in 2016. Wang and his companions traveled from Shanghai to Guizhou in seven hours on comfortable high-speed trains, a journey that would have required weeks a century earlier. During their cycling expedition, they encountered newly built highways, spectacular bridges spanning deep gorges, and unexpected manufacturing centers, including Zheng’an County, which produces one in seven guitars manufactured worldwide.

Wang argues that China’s construction boom represents a compressed timeline of development, achieving in two decades what took the United States over a century. Since the 1990s, China has built highway systems twice the length of America’s interstate network, established subway systems in 51 cities, and created a high-speed rail network longer than the rest of the world combined. The country has also constructed massive housing stock to accommodate an urban population that has grown by an average of 16 million people annually since 1978. According to researcher Václav Smil, China produced nearly as much cement between 2018 and 2019 as the United States produced during the entire 20th century.

However, Wang emphasizes that this building frenzy comes with significant problems. Guizhou exemplifies both the benefits and costs of the engineering state. The province has accumulated massive debt, with infrastructure projects that generate insufficient revenue to justify their costs. Wang profiles Li Zaiyong, a party secretary in Liupanshui who authorized 23 tourism projects, including ski facilities in a region with minimal snowfall and replicas of European town squares. These vanity projects accumulated $21 billion in debt and failed to attract tourists, ultimately leading to Li’s arrest and death sentence by China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

China’s political system rewards construction because officials advance their careers by demonstrating economic growth in their jurisdictions. Since local governments primarily fund themselves through land sales rather than property taxes, officials have strong incentives to pursue glamorous infrastructure projects. Wang also examines Tianjin, a city near Beijing that built a financial district that now features mostly empty skyscrapers and a photogenic library with fake book spines on its shelves—a metaphor, Wang suggests, for impressive hardware that lacks meaningful substance.

Wang acknowledges that the engineering state incurs substantial costs beyond financial waste. Environmental damage has been severe, as China now burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. Large-scale construction has displaced millions of people, including targeted minority groups like Tibetans forced from high-altitude pastoral lands. Rushed construction has sometimes resulted in poor quality buildings, including schoolhouses that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, killing thousands of children. The state prioritizes monumental hardware projects over “softer” investments in healthcare and education in rural areas.

Despite these criticisms, Wang concludes by comparing China’s overbuilding problem with America’s underbuilding problem. China spent 13.5% of its GDP on infrastructure in 2016, while the United States averaged only 3% over the previous three decades (52). Wang argues that America’s permitting processes and legal challenges create paralysis. He suggests both countries would benefit from moving toward a middle ground, with China building less while America learns to build more, particularly for climate change mitigation.