Why China Builds and America Can't

In 2008, California voters approved a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Eighteen years and over $100 billion in projected costs later, not a single passenger has boarded a train. In roughly the same period, China built around 45,000 kilometres of high speed rail, a network larger than the rest of the world's combined.

It's tempting to reach for easy explanations: China is richer than we think, or authoritarianism is simply better at building. Two recent books I’ve read suggest the real answer is more uncomfortable and more useful.

Two books, one diagnosis

In Breakneck, Dan Wang describes China as an engineering state. Its leaders have historically been trained as engineers, and the system's instinct is to treat every problem; economic, social, even human as something to be built, poured, or demolished into submission. America, by contrast, is a lawyerly society: its political class is trained in law, and its instinct is to litigate, review, and block.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance makes the mirror image argument from inside America. The US hasn't lost the ability to build because of corruption or lack of money. It has constructed a vetocracy, a system where process comes first and outcomes come second, and where almost anyone can say no while almost no one can say yes.

Why America can't

The mechanics are mundane, which is why they're so persistent. Environmental review laws written in the 1970s to stop highways through neighbourhoods now generate thousand page impact statements and years of court cases, even for solar farms and bike lanes. Every project must survive challenges from every stakeholder, each holding an effective veto.

Then there's what Klein and Thompson call "everything bagel" governance: every public project must simultaneously deliver certain targets, such as labour targets, local hiring, small business quotas and climate goals. Each requirement is defensible; stacked together, they make building slow and very expensive.

The biggest culprits aren't the states you'd expect. They're the blue states and cities that shout loudest for more housing, transit and clean energy, and yet make all three the hardest to build.  This isn't the system failing. It's doing exactly what it was built to do. We built it to stop things.

Why China can and what it costs

China's advantage is state capacity aimed at construction. Land assembly happens without decades of litigation. Officials are promoted for delivering projects, not for surviving reviews. When Beijing decides to build a subway, the question is how fast, not whether.

But Wang is also clear about the limits of this approach. The engineering state can lead to ghost cities, rising municipal debt and major disruption when projects move ahead too quickly or at too large a scale. The same top down approach can also have significant effects on everyday life, particularly when broad policies are implemented with little room for adjustment. China's experience shows that the ability to build at extraordinary speed can be both a strength and a challenge. China's challenge isn't a lack of capacity to build, but ensuring that development keeps pace with genuine demand.

The lesson

The lesson is that America’s slower pace of development is not inevitable; a series of rules, and rules can be rewritten. Three places to start:

1. Permitting reform. Set firm deadlines for environmental review, and limit the endless court challenges to reviews that are already finished.
2. Strip the everything bagel.Let an infrastructure project be judged on whether it delivers the infrastructure, not on how many unrelated goals it carries.
3. Measure outcomes, not process. Reward officials for what actually gets built, on time and on budget, rather than for how many groups they consulted.

None of this requires abandoning democracy or environmental protection. Countries like France, Spain and Japan build high speed rail at a fraction of US costs, with courts, elections and green laws intact. The choice isn't between vetocracy and autocracy. It's between a democracy that can deliver and one that can only deliberate.

The bottom line

China’s challenge is building at an extraordinary scale, sometimes ahead of demand. America is moving more slowly, often held back by complex processes. Both offer lessons in how to build better.

(Inspired by "Abundance" by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, and "Breakneck" by Dan Wang.)