Wang examines how Shenzhen transformed from a small oyster-fishing village into the world’s premier electronics manufacturing hub, and what this transformation reveals about China’s technological ascent. In 1980, Shenzhen had only 300,000 residents who made their living from the sea. When Deng Xiaoping designated it as a special economic zone that year, the city became a testing ground for capitalist reforms. Unlike Beijing and Shanghai with their established social hierarchies, Shenzhen welcomed migrants from across China with the slogan “You’re a Shenzhen local the moment you’re here” (57). Rural workers and frustrated state enterprise employees flooded the city, becoming the workforce that would drive China’s manufacturing boom.

By the 2000s, Shenzhen had evolved into a major electronics center. When Apple needed to mass-produce the iPhone after its 2007 announcement, Shenzhen was the natural choice. The city had already scaled up iPod manufacturing, and its workforce could handle the complexity of assembling thousands of components into sophisticated consumer devices. Wang argues this partnership between American design and Chinese manufacturing created enormous value for both nations—Apple became the first trillion-dollar company, while China gained invaluable industrial capabilities that it later leveraged to dominate electric vehicles, batteries, and consumer drones.

Wang describes the highly regimented environment inside Apple’s manufacturing facilities, operated primarily by Foxconn. At the company’s Shenzhen campus, which spans 500 acres, workers follow strict protocols: Uniforms indicate rank, employees cannot cross into other production lines, and multiple scanners check for theft. At peak production times, 300,000 people work at this single campus, operating three eight-hour shifts daily. Foxconn founder Terry Gou created Foxconn University on-site—which offered engineering majors—and he demanded that executives work six days a week, with study sessions on Sundays. The curriculum shifted from studying Steve Jobs’s philosophy to Xi Jinping’s political thought, reflecting China’s changing political climate.

The human cost of this manufacturing intensity became visible in 2010 when over a dozen workers attempted death by suicide by jumping from factory dormitories. This tragedy forced Foxconn to install extensive safety netting and drew international scrutiny to working conditions. As iPhone demand exploded, Foxconn expanded beyond Shenzhen to China’s most populous regions, including Zhengzhou, which eventually employed 350,000 workers at peak season. Local officials competed aggressively to host Foxconn facilities, sometimes resorting to extreme measures like forcing high school students to work assembly lines or recruiting retired military personnel during COVID disruptions.

Wang emphasizes that Shenzhen’s success stems not just from cheap labor but from its dense ecosystem of suppliers and skilled workers. The city’s Huaqiangbei electronics market exemplifies this concentration—vendors sell every imaginable component, usually by the hundreds. When Apple engineers needed specialized parts on short notice, they could typically find suppliers within Shenzhen through informal networks. This proximity enabled rapid problem-solving and iteration that would take weeks elsewhere. Workers who gained experience at one manufacturer could easily move to competitors or start their own companies, creating what Wang calls “communities of engineering practice” (59).

The author contrasts American and Chinese approaches to technology. Americans celebrate individual invention—the first solar cell, the first personal computer—while Chinese innovation emerges from scaling up production and continuous improvement. Wang introduces the concept of “process knowledge” (71), the practical expertise gained through hands-on manufacturing experience that cannot be easily communicated through blueprints or manuals. He illustrates this with the example of Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine, which has been completely rebuilt every 20 years since 690 AD to preserve construction techniques. This ritual ensures that craftspeople pass their knowledge to the next generation, preventing the loss of expertise. As a contrasting example, Wang mentions that the US National Nuclear Security Administration spent $69 million relearning how to produce a classified bomb material after failing to document the process properly.

Wang argues that by offshoring manufacturing to China, American companies transferred valuable process knowledge that enabled Chinese firms to climb the technological ladder. Chinese manufacturers progressed from contributing 4% of an iPhone’s value in 2007 to 25% by 2017, now producing acoustic parts, charging modules, and battery packs. This shift has allowed China to dominate solar panels, electric vehicles, and other industries where production expertise matters more than fundamental scientific breakthroughs.

The consequences of this knowledge transfer have been severe for American industry. US manufacturing employment collapsed from 17 million workers in 2000 to 11 million by 2010, partly due to offshoring to China. Wang observes that American elites were remarkably complacent about this decline. This consensus proved disastrous: Storied American companies like Boeing, Intel, General Electric, and Detroit automakers now struggle with delayed products, quality issues, and technological setbacks. The author attributes these failures to Wall Street’s preference for capital-light digital platforms over manufacturing, and to policymakers who failed to recognize that closing factories meant permanently losing production knowledge and dissolving entire communities of engineering practice.

Meanwhile, China deliberately embraced foreign manufacturers to train its workforce, taking a different approach than Japan, which kept its market relatively closed. Beijing allowed Tesla to fully own its Shanghai plant in 2018—an unprecedented move—creating what Chinese business leaders called a “catfish effect” that forced domestic companies to improve (79).

Wang argues that China’s strategy involves waiting for American scientists to conduct fundamental research, then having Chinese companies dominate the production phase, as happened with solar panels. Xi Jinping has pushed this approach further by demanding that China maintain manufacturing across all sectors, from low-end clothing to high-tech electronics, refusing to follow the economic logic that led Western countries to de-industrialize. China’s manufacturing now represents 28 percent of its GDP, compared to just 10 percent in the United States and United Kingdom (85).

Wang introduces the Industrial Party, a loose network of Chinese intellectuals who advocate organizing the state around technological competition. These writers argue that nations compete ruthlessly and that science and technology determine outcomes. The author notes their worldview aligns with Liu Cixin’s science fiction trilogy The Three-Body Problem, which depicts humanity subordinating itself to technocratic authorities and embracing brutal pragmatism for survival. This ideology reflects Xi’s vision of China as an engineering state that prioritizes physical manufacturing over what he dismisses as the “fictitious economy” of finance and digital platforms (84).

Wang concludes that Americans must develop a better understanding of how China became a technological superpower and rebuild their own communities of engineering practice, or risk losing entire industries as they did with solar panels—inventing the technology but relying on China to produce it.