For decades, China's government has reshaped the country with dramatic displays of state power from vast infrastructure projects that have remade entire provinces to nationwide campaigns that attempt to shape citizens' behavior.

Ali Rogan takes a look at what those sweeping measures say about China's ambitions and what they may mean for the future of US-Chinese competition.

From high-speed rail.

to state of the art factories.

and soaring bridges, China is building infrastructure projects at an unprecedented scale and pace.

The poor rural province of Guizhou is now home to nearly half of the world's 100 tallest bridges.

This fall, cars crossed the newest, tallest bridge in the world for the first time.

The bridge cut travel across the river from hours to mere minutes, according to state media.

Visitors and locals celebrated the grand opening with a water and light display and base jumps from a special viewing platform.

Part of the record breaking project's tourism appeal.

Its several purposes symbolic, political, economic, and just in terms of improving vastly the quality of life of people that use them.

Andrew Murtha is the director of the China Global Research Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

I think it's difficult for people in the US to understand just what a massive change, this type of infrastructure building over the past 30 years has meant for China.

In just a few decades, China has built highways twice the length of the entire US interstate highway system.

The country's first high-speed rail line opened in 2008.

Now high speed trains crisscross China in a network 20 times more extensive than Japan's, and China has built as much solar and wind power capacity as the rest of the world put together.

but the quest for efficiency isn't limited to physical infrastructure.

During the pandemic, China implemented a zero COVID policy, one of the world's most restrictive COVID-19 lockdowns.

The system of surveillance, mass testing, and forced quarantine kept China's case numbers lower than most countries early in the outbreak, but the response to the Omicron variant in 2022 prompted sudden lockdowns lasting far longer than expected, and draconian restrictions on residents.

Over four decades, China's one-child policy achieved its goal of birth rate reductions but led to enforcement actions that traumatized generations.

Today China's birth rate is in freefall, and the government is hoping to reverse it by pushing a three-child policy.

And for all of that building, massive housing and infrastructure projects are saddled with enormous debt.

and many projects get abandoned, leading to entire ghost cities, feats of engineering with no one to enjoy them.

For more on the costs and benefits of China's approach.

I am joined by Dan Won.

He is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of a new book Breakneck China's Quest to Engineer the Future.

Dan, thank you so much for being here.

It's great to be here.

You frame China and the US as a nation of engineers versus the lawyerly society.

Why is that a useful framework to view these two countries.

So China is a country I call the engineering state because at various points in the recent past, all 9 members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the Communist Party's highest ruling echelon had degrees in engineering.

They treat the physical environment as an engineering project.

They engineered the economy and they're also social engineers.

I think about the United States as a lawyerly society, because it seems like if you want to be president or a member of Congress, you have to go to law school.

5 of the last 10 US presidents went to law school.

The issue with lawyers is that they tend to block everything, good and bad, so you don't have stupid ideas, like the zero COVID policy or the one child policy, you also don't have functional infrastructure.

I would say almost anywhere in the US.

You write about the tradeoffs of China's rapid approach to change that the state moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people.

Explain that.

China is defined by in part by these big spasms of construction over the last 40 years.

China built its very first highway in 1993.

18 years later, China built one America's worth of highways.

Nine years after that, China built another America's worth of highways.

Every year since 1980, China has built an average of one New York City plus one Boston area worth of housing every single year.

And so you can take a look through a lot of these infrastructure projects which I would say for the most part improve people's lives.

People feel a sense of optimism for the future when they see new subway lines in their cities, new parks, more big bridges in the countryside.

And so people get really excited about what could be coming next.

That has produced a lot of costs, uh, with the infrastructure alone, there are very heavy debt costs, very heavy financial costs with these really tall bridges that do not produce an economic return.

There is an environmental cost and then there's the social engineering.

The one child policy is something that I describe in my book as a campaign of rural terror that was carried out against overwhelmingly female bodies throughout the countryside throughout the 1980s, in which, according to China's official statistics, uh, over the 35 years of the one child policy era, China conducted about 300 million abortions, um, it had sterilized 100 million women and sterilized 25 million men in order to reduce population.

And of course the great irony now is that China is facing a demographic crisis in which it would really like for more women to have kids, to have bigger families.

Living in China really feels like they treat society as yet another math exercise, as if people were just another building material to be torn down and remolded as they wish.

So she also talks about the need to plan for some sort of extreme scenario, and that is happening at the same time that China is also ramping up its military production which is far outpacing what the United States is doing.

Is he talking about a military confrontation, and if one were to happen, what would that look like?

Xi has spoken about extreme scenarios, but as is pretty typical for a lot of the Communist Party.

They speak in these euphemisms, they speak in these obliquities, and that it is not always very clear what exactly that they're referring to.

And so I think that they are planning for uh some sort of extreme severance from the rest of the world in which China is very intent on becoming more energy secure, for example.

They're very serious about all sorts of food security issues, and so local provinces and local cities are really expected to produce a vast majority of their own food.

Xi has a much greater sense of seriousness about patching up a lot of China's own deficiencies.

He is trying to, you know, pivot away from foreign sources of energy, and they are trying to become technologically self-sufficient as well.

And when the, we take a look at some of these figures showing that China has about 1500 ships under construction and the United States has 5.

These are some really obvious disparities, and that's not necessarily because China builds too much.

There's also that the United States builds too little.

And so I am very interested in the US trying to fix up a lot of its manufacturing problems, defense industrial based problems because it has not been very good at building ships that has not been very good at building munitions.

It has not been very good at building drones, and there are all these ways at which the um United States military might feel outclassed if there is ever going to be, God forbid, any serious conflict.

You write, quote, I like to imagine how much better the world would be if both superpowers could adopt a few of the pathologies of the other.

How do you see that playing out?

I would love it if the United States could be 20% more engineering um to have a few more people building the homes that we desperately need to fix up the mass transit systems, build better public works, and fix up the manufacturing base as well.

At the same time, I think it would be a really amazing if China could be 50% more loyally because the Communist Party has never really respected individual rights.

It has been very intent on strangling the creative impulses of young Chinese, and I think that Chinese youths are a wonderfully creative people.

They can meme with the best American youths.

Um, they have amazing TikToks, they have amazing Douyings, and I think that fundamentally what I would really ask is for the Communist Party to learn.

to leave people alone.

The book is Breakneck China's Quest to Engineer the Future.

Dan Wang, thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Ali.