By traveling as often as possible to smaller cities-some that are little more than urbanized industrial parks— grasped something that most Americans, and even many Chinese, do not: Going to little-known cities in China is fun. Wherever I went I found amazing food, bizarre sights, and memorable people. I saw that China had greater dynamism than acknowledged by most headlines about the country, which fixate on Beijing's political machinations. Just imagine what the rest of the world would miss if they understood the United States exclusively through developments from Washington, DC.

It is almost uncanny how much the United States and China have been complementary of each other. It was no accident that the two countries established, for a few decades, an economic partnership that worked tremendously well for American consumers and Chinese workers. But on a political level, these two systems are a study in contrasts. While the United States reflects the virtues of pluralism and protection of individuals, China revealed the advantages and perils that come from moving quickly to achieve rapid physical improvements.

If you want to appreciate what Detroit felt like at its peak, it's probably better to experience that in Shenzhen than anywhere in the United States.

A paramount question of our times is whether hostility between China and the United States can stay at a manageable simmer. Because if it boils over, they will evastate not only each other but also the world.

The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble.

China is an engineering state, which can't stop itself from building, facing off against America's lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.

The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers.

Chinese tech founders (and their investors) were astonished to discover that Xi Jinping could erase a trillion dollars from corporate valuations over the course of just a few months. The leadership thought it was straightforward to reorient the nation's tech priorities away from consumer platforms and toward science-based industries, like semiconductors and aviation, that serve the nation's strategic needs. Beijing took years to appreciate how its actions had scared the daylights out of entrepreneurs and investors.

To capture both the traumatic aspects of the engineering state and its capacity to produce great pride, I like to think of a hypothetical question: What was the worst year to be born in modern China?

A strong contender, I believe, is 1949, the year Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic.

THE YEAR 2008 OFFERS a direct comparison between Californias speed and China's speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. Both lines would be around eight hundred miles long upon completion.

China opened the Beijing-Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $36 billion. In its first decade of operation, it completed 1.35 billion passenger trips. California has built, seventeen years after the ballot proposition, a small stretch of rail to connect two cities in the Central Valley, neither of which are close to San Francisco or Los Angeles.

While engineers envision bridges, lawyers envision procedures. In a seminal paper titled "The Procedure Fetish," University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley outlines how the federal government requires an agency to "conduct every conceivable study, ventilate every option, engage every identifiable stakeholder, and weather the most stringent judicial review before any of its actions, however triv-ial, could take effect."

It's not just the government. America's problem is the lawyerly society. The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries.

The engineering state and the lawyerly society are not the only ways to understand the two countries; old labels like "autocratic" or "capitalist" still have some use, of course. I want to be inventive and even playful with these terms in the interest of encouraging mutual curiosity between the two. countries.

Each time I left Beijing and Shanghai to enter more remote parts of the country, I was astonished by how even China's poorest provinces have better infrastructure than America's richest. The chief feature of the engineering state is building big public works, no matter the financial or human cost.

With its Blade kunner aesthetic, Chongqing is the embodiment of cyberpunk-or more aptly given its rivers, hydropunk.

Some of these are bridges to nowhere, but after a few years, they become somewhere.

In 2010, only half of Guizhou's children attended high school-the lowest rate in the country. News reports often featured stories of children having to rise at the crack of dawn and hike through harrowing mountain paths, some with rope ladders, to be able to attend school.

That feeling contributes to a blind spot that Americans have for China. People unable to appreciate the benefits of material improvements also don't understand how it produces pride and satisfaction.

Beijing has announced several times that it would impose a property tax. Each time it faltered. One of the political reasons is that China's leaders are familiar with the American slogan "No taxation without representation." Since the state levies relatively light taxes, which it takes unobtrusively from citizens, it reduces the risk that People start asking questions about what the state is doing with their hard-earned funds and whether their taxes should entitle them to greater political participation.

Guizhou has become one of China's most indebted provinces, and it's starting to feel real fiscal distress. In an unusual move, Guiyang's finance bureau issued a public outcry in 2022 that it was at the end of its ability to deal with the debt. Quickly afterward, the government deleted its own admission.