China Is Run by Engineers. America Is Run by Lawyers

I was really interested in showing them that Shanghai is a really wonderful, splendid city; that Beijing is full of solidness, splendor; and that Shenzhen feels quite a lot like Silicon Valley, in which it is made up of a lot of these boring office parks; that Chongqing is the most hydropunk city in the world. WANG: When people feel that they can’t have affordable housing, when people see that prices of goods around them are going up, when people take a look at some of America’s apex manufacturers — companies like Intel and Boeing and Detroit automakers — which have, for the most part, been an unceasing tale of woe for their production over the last couple of years, I think there is a pretty broad sense that things in America are not working as they should, that it’s lacking some aspect of dynamism. And a lot of what China is interested in is what the Qing emperor said to Lord Macartney, who was the head of the British embassy, to say, “we have no use of your splendid trinkets because we are self-sufficient in all the best goods in the world.” DUBNER: So, a lot of Americans, especially the political class, have argued for years that China has advanced in large part by essentially stealing I.P., intellectual property, from the U.S. and others, and that they don’t innovate.