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A Nation of Lawyers Confronts China’s Engineering State
As the Chinese economy surges forward, the U.S. has lost its capacity for physical improvement.
Chinese firms are also dominant producers of many pharmaceutical ingredients (especially for antibiotics and ibuprofen), battery materials, and entire categories of electronics components—not to mention smartphones, household appliances, toys, and other finished goods that American consumers want. Successive American administrations have attempted to counter Beijing through legalism—levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime—while the engineering state has created the future by physically building better cars, better-functioning cities, and bigger power plants. Rather than expanding new subway systems, building nuclear-energy plants or rare-earths-processing facilities, or designing the path for a new transmission line, many of the country’s smartest engineers have been seduced by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where they can have more fun and make a lot more money.
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