Building things and breaking things in China (Summer School World Tour)

comedium bill Mar on his Mark Plain Award and the lost art of political debate just

engaged with the argument.

“Tell me if I'm wrong about something and then we're going to be cool but that's not”

what either extreme does in this country anymore. Bill Mar on this week's NewsMakers, watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is Planet Money from NPR. The world is filled with big economic ideas that can help us live better here in the United States.

So this summer, we've decided to collect them all. Bill Coleman and Bienvenu to Planet Money Summer School, World Tour, the only international educational experience that doesn't have a carry on weight limit. Bring the extra shoes. All summer long, we are traveling through the seven continents and looking for economic

lessons that can help us understand the place we call home. There are hundreds of ways to create jobs, keep prices low and make us all richer or screw up a perfectly good economy. Let's learn from them.

“Today's journey, China and the perils of an engineering economy.”

I'm Robert Smith. No country on earth has seen the kind of economic growth that China has over the last 50 years. China has become the factory to the world, a grand experiment in central government planning and personal ambition.

During the way China has created enormous wealth and pulled 800 million people out of extreme

poverty. It has been a wild trip. In 2012, led it when he traveled to China to marvel at the progress. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not just any train. This is part of China's new bullet train network, the largest in the world.

Topside it over 300 kilometers per hour, that's 200 miles an hour. Thanks, Amtrak, look primitive. Of course, now China is a rich country facing rich country problems, bubbles bursting, young people resentful, and we can learn a lot from China about how to handle the dispears of success.

In our guest professor today says we should pay attention because our two countries have the same economic soul.

Americans are crazy, Chinese are crazy, these are two countries full of these crazy hustlers.

And Wang is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of break neck, China's quest to engineer the future. That's no accident. That's the future is being invented in Shenzhen and in Silicon Valley and through Wall Street

“as well as Beijing, and I think that more countries around the world need to appreciate”

sort of this crazy household energy that both the US and China have. Then we consider you the perfect person to be our guest professor today. We're born in China, you've lived in both China and the US and in Canada, I should say. And you're about to travel back to China now and you've developed this fascinating theory

about how China grew so fast and why that's creating problems now. What is the theory? China is a country, I call the engineering state because at various points in the recent past, the entirety of the senior leadership have had degrees in engineering. What do engineers like to do, they like to build build, whether that is a hydraulic

dam or a coal plant or solar wind, nuclear, a lot of homes, roads, bridges, high speed rail, everywhere, they can also be awfully literal minded at treating society as if they were just another building material. I love this idea of the engineering state that every problem is solvable with enough money, manpower or duct tape, and it isn't just a metaphor, I should say in your book,

you talk about how the people in charge of the government have actual engineering degrees, chemical engineering degrees, mechanical engineering. Oh, hydraulic engineering, and the prior general secretary built a dam, the present general secretary, I had his undergraduate in chemical engineering, and these are people who sort of treat society as if it were just another hydraulic flow to be shifted

around and blocked and reach handle this. They wish. I should say Dan Long is going to be our guide on today's show, and in his book, you pointed out that the United States has more of a lawyer culture than an engineering culture. Most US politicians couldn't build a dam, but they would know how to use the law to slow

things down. So China builds the high speed trains, the US goes to court for years over where the track should go. That's the difference. But it will have two case studies about the perils of the Chinese engineering state, and

Dan will return with lessons we can take from it.

inside of it.

“Rapid economic growth can lead to more debt, more risk, and more chaos.”

It's a cautionary tale ahead after the break. On Consider This, NPR's afternoon news podcast, we cover everything for politics to the economy to the world, but every story starts with a question. And NPR, we stand for your right to be curious, to make sense of the biggest story of the day and what it means for you.

Follow Consider This, wherever you get your podcasts. Every story from shortwave and pure science podcasts starts with a question, like, why do we have nightmares? How does AI affect my energy bill? At NPR, we are here for your right to be curious about the world around you.

Follow shortwave wherever you get your podcasts, because the more you ask, the more interesting the world gets. Plenty Summer School World Tour has arrived in Shanghai, and our professor for the Grand Tour is Dan Wong from the Hoover Institution, hey, Dan, it's great to be in class, friends.

“Anyone who's been to China is just immediately struck by how much they can build, how”

fast they can build. As you've said, build, build, build. You see the neon-covered skyscrapers, highways, bridges, factories, biggest cities, you have one image that sticks with you as a symbol of what they're going to accomplish. In the summer of 2021, my two friends and I cycleed, and this really mountainous province

called Guachau, China's fourth poorest province in the mountainous southwest, and what I saw over these very tall bridges, that were some the highest in the world. In afterwards, I looked up some of these bridges, and I found that this one province of Guachau has 50 of the world's tallest bridges, 50 of the world's tallest bridges, not China's highest bridges.

China has something like 13 airports, there you have the engineering state. Okay, keep this image in your mind, the bridges, the airports, build, build, build, as you

listen to our first case study, which is the perfect illustration of the dangers of growth.

When there's money to be made, no one thinks, maybe it should slow down a bit. It's an excerpt from a 2023 planet money episode about the boom and bust of China's real estate sector. Nick Fountain and Emily Feng take us behind the scenes of China's Go Go Years, to meet a man who got very rich in the early 2000s from that pushed to build more bridges, airports,

and logistics. And then after we'll talk to our professor about the big lessons, we can take from this case study. If we're going to talk to anybody about those Go Go Years, it should be this one property developer who wrote a tell all book about his time in China.

Yeah, and that guy is Desmond Shom. Desmond was an insider's insider during the Go Go Years, and talking to him is a bit like getting a glimpse through a keyhole into this period of extreme growth, and also extreme wealth creation in China. So first, I don't know, the easy question, who are you and what do you do?

Where am I?

I think that's never a easy question.

“That's why there's actually the hardest question when people ask me to.”

In simple terms, Desmond was a real estate developer. He had a business with his then-wife Whitney. Whitney was friendly with the wife of the second in command of the country, the premiere of China, and Desmond and Whitney used those political connections to make deals with local governments.

Yeah, Desmond told us the story of one of their most famous deals. It shows just how wild these growth years were. The story starts in 2003 when Desmond and Whitney saw this piece of land with great potential next to Beijing's airport. They came up with a kind of audacious idea.

They wanted to build a huge logistics hub, with millions of square feet of warehouses and

important export processing centers, the airport hub would be the first of its kind.

It was a bit crazy. We think it's going to be profitable because it's, you know, it's a money-al-pre-business. Every money-al-pre-business got to be profitable. But at the same time, we know Zipbo about a business. Since this was a time of economic growth in China, Desmond knew that having the only error

cargo logistics hub in Beijing could mean massive profits. Because essentially, they could get a little richer. Every time goods came in and out of Beijing's airport. He hires consultants, hires a staff, and he does a lot of winding and dining. The here Desmond tell it, at this point in China's economic development, it was rational

to engage in casual bribery on a day-to-day basis. Because there was so much money to be made off these deals. Desmond said he would routinely spend thousands of dollars buying officials dinner.

of a part of a fish called an air bladder. You write that at one point.

“You just went to Hong Kong and bought half a dozen watches of 10-to-20,000 dollar value,”

and you just had them as bribes for the future. No, as tribute on a respect for the future. Oh, sorry. Keep calling them bribes, but it sure trivils of respect. Because really, I mean, for the people we deal with, like, you know, 10,000 is nothing.

It's like nothing for them. It's like, you know, they're in the community. We move in. Those are really trivils of respect. If I give them anything less, they're definitely what do you think of me?

I'm just like a beggar of the street. Desmond, I can't tell if you're being a little facetious or what? Do you now see these as bribes, or do you still-- I mean, obviously, you know, in a West, we see, you know, it's obviously the bribe. But in the community, we're moving in the situation of the time.

Nobody actually seriously, nobody considered that bribes. Was it just-- Because it's not going to tell you, it's not people not going to do something for you

“because you give them 10,000, 20,000, that's what.”

In the community, we were moving. According to Desmond, those bribes got way bigger than the watches.

Yeah, one amazing story, he tells.

It's from when they were building that cargo logistics hub in Desmond needs a sign off from the customs chief. Who tells them over dinner? Sure, I'll help you out. But I'm going to need the following amenities for my 300-person workforce.

Regulation size, basketball, badminton, and tennis courts, and indoor gym, a 200-seat theater, a banquet hall, and a karaoke bar. And Desmond agreed to it. He needed the custom heads approval. It added $50 million to the project.

But once the logistics hub got built, Desmond says they sold it for a profit of close to $200 million. Desmond and his wife got very rich. They also started building a fancy hotel with a fancy condo project, and they became part of this new extremely rich elite. But he was small-fry compared to the really big property developers who are

massing wealth in China at the time. People like this one man, he met named Shudayin. Yes, the founder and head of this property development company. It's called Evergrande. And while Desmond was giving out $10,000 watches,

he says Shudayin's bribes were next level. Like according to Desmond, Shudayin offered to buy Desmond's wife Whitney,

a ring worth more than a million dollars.

Presumably for her political connections, Desmond says she declined. Was he a fun person to hang out with? No really, I mean, no. Desmond tells this one story of a trip that he took with Shudayin that shows just how enormously wealthy these property developers were becoming. The story goes that he and Shudayin were thinking about investing in a new

members only wine club in Beijing, with a few other rich families. And they decide to go to France to try some wines. They initially planned on each taking their own private jet, but right before they take off, they decide, actually we want to play cards. So they end up flying all three private jets to France.

They play cards on one and the other two fly empty. What game do you play? Oh, they've been doing these with it. So come here, come on, Chinese cod game.

“But Desmond for people who don't speak Chinese was what does Thothi Sumin?”

Thothi Sous, uh, struggle the landlord. Struggle against the landlord. You're playing a card game called struggle against the landlord on a private jet with two of the biggest real estate developers in China? Yeah, that was the game.

If there was a top to China's real estate boom, it might have been this moment. Two private jets flying empty on route to France. Next to one full of real estate moguls playing struggle against the landlord. Yeah, these folks were getting enormously wealthy because over just a couple of decades

China went from basically not letting people own private property to 90% of people owning their own homes.

And there was so much demand prices kept rising. And real estate started to seem like a great investment. So people were sometimes buying second or third homes. Now for the crisis. And Emily, you actually witnessed the exact start of this chapter.

You were a reporter in Beijing at the time. Who were you working for? 2017 I was still working for the financial times. It's this lovely little salmon colored British newspaper. And it was my first ever party congress that I was covering.

So that was really exciting. Yeah, the party congress. This happens every five years. And it's where the Communist Party gets together to decide the future of China. Yeah, and it's at this party congress in 2017 that the head of the party,

Xi Jinping, says something very important that will change China's entire

Xi Jinping starts his big speech, but deep in the speech he drops the bombshell.

“Yeah, he says one line about how houses are made for living in, not for speculating.”

And that is a very clear direct criticism of people who are just buying apartments for investment, but not actually living in them. This is a very big deal, because essentially she is saying all that building that real estate developers have been doing, much of it was unproductive, not good for the party, not good for China, cut it out.

And so that's when you see this sea change of tighter regulation on all parties, on local governments, on banks, on private developers, on regular investors to limit them on how many

apartments they can buy because basically he's saying there's too much of this stuff.

But problem was, Xi Jinping could only do so much at once. And all these different parts of the economy were relying on more apartments, more growth. Starting with regular people, many people were still waiting on their apartments to be built and delivered, because the way it works in China is you often pre-pay for your apartment before it's even constructed.

“Also, the property developers with all their debt, they had to keep selling new apartments to pay”

off those debts. And of course, local governments needed the building to keep happening too, because a good portion of their revenues came from property and land sales. So for a few years after Xi Jinping's big speech, China's real estate market just keeps ramping up. Until 2020, when the government decides, we got to slow this market down. And so the central government draws a line in the sand.

Well, three of them actually. Yeah, the policy is called the three red lines, and the three red lines are pretty hard caps on how much debt a developer can have, specifically on three different measures of debt. And if a developer is above those debt levels, no more loans for them. This was the turning point.

After decades of rapid growth, property prices, especially in smaller cities, started to drop.

Evergrande, the company whose founder Xi Jinping liked to give out $1 million rings.

Well, by 2021, Evergrande had hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. Yes, hundreds of billions of dollars. And they started to miss payments. Nick Fountain and Emily Fountain from 2023. Let's jump now to 2026 to finish the story, Robert Smith here.

Evergrande did indeed default on its debt. It's founder recently pled guilty to fraud. And China is mired in the deaths right now of a real estate boss. There are an estimated 90 million empty, unsolved, or unfinished homes in the country. Desmond Shum, our developer and occasional briber escaped before the crash fully happened.

He moved to the United Kingdom. I want to bring back our professor Dan Wong here. Hey, Dan, have you ever tried the Airbladder soup?

I have never tried the Airbladder soup.

I'm not a Desmond's level here. The rise and fall of the real estate sector in China is an interesting case study because it seems to contain the worst excesses of capitalism and socialism wrapped up in one disaster. They didn't regulate enough when the real estate bubble was forming. And then they probably popped the bubble too quickly when it was at its top.

There's a phrase that Chinese used Dan to describe this particular mixture of economic systems. Why don't you give it to us now? Socialism with Chinese characteristics. The socialism with Chinese characteristics. What is the difference between these two models?

If you're a socialist country, probably what that means, that the state commands quite a lot of the means of production, owning a lot of things like telecommunications or oil and gas or airlines. If you're a market economy, it means that the state does not get involved in doing sort of things.

“So ultimately, how is this attention resolved while by adding in this magical phrase with Chinese characteristics?”

And ultimately, what that means is that the Communist Party will let all points determine whether it needs to be more state-driven or market-driven and it's the party's pleasure to decide. And so this is where China has this very strange economy by any standard that it is substantially state-controlled. It is also, in many ways, more capitalist than the United States. In my view, China is practicing capitalism read in tooth and claw, in some cases,

much more effectively than the Americans are. And ultimately, this is the Communist Party's prerogative to determine whether it wants to be more state-driven or market-driven at any given moment. There is a term that we use often when states are talking about intense control of the economy, depending on how they do it, and that term is malinvestment. And malinvestment is when the resources get misallicated, the money and the time and the resources go into one area of the

committee. How has that been a problem for China? Let's go back to the province of Guachau, China's fourth-person province in which I cycle through in 2021. As I mentioned, Guachau has something like 15-year ports. And when I took a look through some of these databases, tracking Chinese flights, some of these airports have only a couple of flights per week, and laptop does. Not great utility, a capacity utilization here. Should one province,

though it is very mountainous, have 50 of the world's tallest bridges, is that some sort of economic success or is that warranted the occasion of bureaucratic lack of creativity? I would say, it is perhaps more of the lack. And so when you have engineers who are perhaps more invested in building engineering projects, for their own sake, for the value of the prestige, we can start to question whether what the Guachau residents most need is yet another Chinese bridge, or hey,

wouldn't they like some perhaps better health care? How about that? How about some better cash transfers

“so that they are able to live a little bit better, how about better schooling over their kits?”

And so this is a way in which the Communist Party is much more invested in big, prestige power projects rather than delivering for the people. Well, you know, I experienced this when I took my kids to Shanghai, and we got on the high-speed Mag left train. It goes 186 miles per hour. It just blows your mind to be on this train. And then when we get to a hotel, I have to tell them, oh yeah, don't drink the water here. Be very careful about this.

It is one still one of these puzzles to me that China, though it is doing all sorts of

amazing engineering projects, is not built enough sanitation plants such that people are

able to drink the tap water. This is how I understand China to be much more interested in doing things that look amazing through the lens of an influencer that is shooting a vertical video, but it is not necessarily paying that much attention to what the people actually need. I guess this goes back to that big idea of the engineering state. Someone has to direct the engineering energy at some particular problem that needs to be solved, but without the market

to signal what people want, China has to sort of rely on, I don't know, the guts, or maybe the

“whims of its party leadership. So coming up next on planet money, what do people want in China?”

Our next case study on planet money summer school is about the economics of young people today in China. What does the future look like when you've already built the future and amazing looking cities and bridges after the break? From the light bulb to the internet, human history has been driven by innovation and shortwave is exploring how the technology of tomorrow will transform our future. Would you write in a flying

taxi? Will AI models fight wars? Here about the technological frontier every Monday on tech camp, the new series from SureWave. Listen on the Empire app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, every day on up first NPR's Golden Globe nominated morning news podcast,

we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story, our questions.

What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow a first wherever you get your podcasts and start

“your day knowing what matters and why. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of fresh air.”

Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with us and listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the fresh air podcasts from NPR and WHY. We are back on our world economic tour this time we take to the streets of Beijing. Before we hear our case study, Dan Wong, our professor, Dujer, says we should keep in mind

another bust that China is dealing with right now, a demographic one. People in China just don't want to have kids. The total fertility rate across the entire country according to official statistics in China is 1.0 which means that the average family, the average woman is having one child in her lifetime. The United Nations demographic body expects that China's population will be cut in half

by the year 2100. Now 700 million people by the year 2100 is still a pretty substantial population.

It will still be bigger than the United States but it will be also a very old population in which the median age, I believe, could be something like the early 60s and it is just kind of hard to imagine a society functioning in which half the population is over 60s but that is the demographic

to put on young people in China. Our next case study is from Planet Money's Indicator hosted by

Whalen Wong and Durian Woods. It comes from 2023. In Beijing, about six months ago, Aza quit her job and she didn't tell her parents. So I had to go out on time at 8 o'clock every morning and then appear downstairs in her house. Wearing her work clothes in a face full of makeup each morning, Aza pretended to walk to her old bus stop and then she would keep walking. She'd get breakfast at KFC or McDonald's. Then around 10, she'd go to a cafe like the one we met

her in and it's here where she would usually take out her pencils and start drawing. "You can't do this, you can't do this, you can't do this. You can't do this."

“Drawing is the best way to pass the time in my opinion because you'll spend most”

of the time drawing without even knowing it. Aza is one of tens of millions of young Chinese people who don't have jobs in art in school. In June, the urban youth unemployment rate hit 21%. And that's way up from pre-bandemic times. It's 1 in 5, 16 to 24-year-olds who have looked for a job over the last few months, but don't have one. "And the numbers are so disconcerting that a few weeks ago, the Chinese government put a pause

on publishing them, citing the need for a review. But this vast number of unemployed people is getting a lot of scrutiny because what it means has big implications for the Chinese economy

and the world." Aza always wanted to be a cartoonist growing up. She couldn't quite get that job

out of college, but she worked instead as a content editor for an entertainment news publication.

“And initially, she loved it. "You're a little bit old, and it was a little high, so my job was”

so great. I was very happy every day and felt amazing when I produced a good content. When I looked at the results of our output, it thought to myself, "Well done, it's worth all the effort." Well, it didn't last. Aza found herself hopping from job to job, and it ended up in a job that didn't give her a lot of joy. "Wait, there was pressure from various targets which made my boss quite stressed, and he passed that stress onto us. Our work life was like being on a horror

cruise every day." So earlier this year, she quit. But when deciding whether or not to take on a new

job offer, she reflected on work life in general in China at any workplace. In China there's a schedule called "996." That means starting the day at 9 a.m. finishing at 9 p.m. six days a week. And although this is technically illegal, very long hours are still common in China. And Aza was no exception. She'd had to take a lot of overtime. It was just too much for her. And so, she told her parents she was still working and meanwhile worked on her hobbies instead.

She grew plans, made necklaces, painted. "Now how do I go? Good work." I'd started a new hobby every time. I've become unemployed. I'd see if I can find something I'd really like, and if it's possible to make that become my work. "And you might be thinking, I could she afford this?" Well, Aza doesn't have to pay rent to our mortgage, which is perhaps more common for young people in urban China than you might think. "There are almost certainly going to be an

only child, on both sides of their family." Nancy Chan is a professor of economics at Northera University. She points to China's one child policy. This brutal enforcement of long-term contraception, sterilizations, and huge fines for having more than one kid. The policy was in place in China from 1980 to 2016, which means that most people Aza's age are only children. And they'll have grandparents who are from the city. So what this means is that they're going to

be inheriting a lot of real estate from their grandparents. Not to mention, you know, maybe savings that their parents have been accumulating over time. Nancy was born in Shanghai in the late 70s, and as a kid moved to the U.S. with her family, but she goes back often and has younger cousins, who have struggled with China's changing economy. As China's growth has slowed entry-level jobs in law, finance, tech, and government have dried up. White collar jobs are incredibly competitive.

This is the high paying high-skilled jobs that have been shrinking in numbers, and these are what the current cohorts of college graduate students have been trained for with their expecting what they wanted. They're not there. So a lot of young people like Aza end up not working at all. That said, Nancy says they are likely to face a lot of emotional pressure to find a job. They have their parents and their grandparents saying you're being spoiled,

“like why are you not more successful? We've given you everything, right? What's wrong with you?”

Let us how we made it, how poor we were. Even people with college education at different points

The China that her parents grew up in was just so different to hers. I mean, China grew at

“10% per year for almost two decades, but for some urban areas, we're going like a 20-30% per year.”

And to illustrate what that kind of turbocharged growth looks like, Nancy used the example of where she was as a young kid in the French concession district of Shanghai. I lived in an extended family with around 10 people in three rooms, probably around 300 square feet. We had a flush toilet, so we were considered really rich. Well, that was the marker of a relative wealth at the time.

Yeah, I thought really special. People living in those neighborhoods now, they're living in skyscrapers, surrounded by Louis Vuitton and protestors. They're a Lamborghini car dealer who's left and right. I'm emphasizing this because the places that had the highest expectations about the future, they're being hit with an employment. It's kind of a whiplash feeling. Yeah, and so I think that makes us concerned about the social ramifications.

Nancy says these young people are both spoiled in her words and also miserable at the same time. There's this huge goal between expectations and what kind of jobs are available. It's not a great idea, just as a society, to have young people feeling hopeless with no

direction in a funk. That's never good. In China, it's translating into a potentially huge

problem for the economy. There's a real concern that not working those lost years of work right out of college can have serious negative impact on your lifetime productivity later on, which is going to impact the aggregate productivity of the economy as a whole. Azah has a different view.

“That's what you're going to learn. Work is one of the only things that you can choose by yourself,”

and if you can't find your footing at work, then you don't have much meaning. Azah eventually got tired of all the questioning from her parents and lying to them, so she decided to confess. While her mother was watching TV, Azah said she hadn't been working. They said that's okay, they very calmly accepted it, so I think they already knew. That was during Woods and Whalen Wong from back in 2023 on the indicator, planet money's daily show.

If you aren't listening, you're missing out. By the way, the Chinese government changed the way it measured the youth unemployment rate. It sounds better now in 2026 with the new statistics. It is around 17% unemployment. Still a devastating number of people looking for work. After the break, our professor returns to tell us how an engineering state deals with a low birthday.

“Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with us,”

and listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians, and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY.

Big news stories don't always break on your schedule. But with the MPR app,

news, culture, and podcasts are ready when you want them in your pocket. Download the MPR app today. We're back with our summer school professor, Dan Wong. What are you here when you talk to young people in China today? We have this go-go country that feels like it has this great future ahead of it, and it seems like some of the young people are not excited by that. You know what I hear? Robert, I hear American kids. I hear that there's a lot of people who are

slackers who are trying to just have some fun. That's not following these dictates of the state. That are interested in trying drugs that would be legal in the state of California. Chinese kids who are graduating from universities today have a pretty clear sense that they are no longer living in the boom era of the Chinese economy, which probably petered out roughly 10 years ago, that they are not so excited about the economic future.

And the Chinese state, I know, like the engineers, they are. Look at this like an engineering problem, the demographics and the young people, and so they have these programs in place to encourage women to start having more children. They're looking, this is a supply problem for the factories of the future. Is that working? Because if you feel despair about the future, you're not going

trying to plan a lot of the future in this case women's child-bearing intentions. And the Communist

“Party has sent these neighborhood committees, which are formally the lowest level of the Communist”

Party to go up to young families to ask about their child-bearing intentions. And in my book, I quoted a woman who complained that her neighborhood committee has been harassing her to ask about her menstrual cycle. And in particular, she was upset that truly after marriage, she said that her parents asked her only once, whether or not she plans to have kids, or yes, the Communist Party has already asked her six times.

You know, it's interesting. Usually when we talk about socialist nations, they tend to have a really like expansive safety net, meaning government programs to support people who are unemployed, who are poor, who have economic hardships, programs to support the elderly and mothers and fathers who choose to have children and stay home. But China ranks pretty low on these metrics when you compare it to other developed countries. What happened to a socialist country that

that doesn't provide that level of support? Welcome to socialism with Chinese characteristics. There you go. And this is the sort of socialism that has a pretty low tax regime and a pretty thread bear social safety net. And China has all of these strange things about the taxation system.

For example, no property tax. China has never quite gotten around to being able to impose a

property tax, or it is a pretty marginal property tax. And a lot of China's taxation is funded by consumption taxes, which are a regressive form of taxation because the poor pay a relatively higher share of the taxes than the rich. And roughly speaking, among the Western European countries, they spend about 30% of their annual income on redistribution. The United States spends about 20%

“of its annual income and China spends about 10%. In many ways, I think that the present”

Communist Party feels like sort of the Eisenhower Republican Party run America in the 1950s, in which there is this giant emphasis on manufacturing. There's skepticism of immigration. There is a very fierce commitment to traditional gender roles. And I think this is the sort of state that probably Eisenhower and Reagan would recognize more than any of the socialists of European countries today. I love this hot take. China as a US conservatives dream of a

centrally planned and yet sort of capitalist country. It's probably why these days when we hear our politicians talk about China, you can hear outrage occasionally, but often you hear jealousy. This sense of like, why can't we grow that fast? Why can't the US be the manufacturer to the world? Dan, we're doing one last thing in each of these episodes. If the US could take one trick from the Chinese economy, one lesson that might help us in the United States. What should

that lesson be? China's agenda is to build build build build. It's way out of every problem.

“And in my view what the United States should do is to build build regulate. I think we need to build”

more homes. We need to build a lot more of infrastructure. And I also think that we need to build a lot more of the manufacturing base back because this is sort of one way to get ourselves out of these choke points that no other countries around the world can exert over the United States. And this is also a way to invent the future. We can call it capitalism with American characteristics. I'd love to have some of that. Thank you so much for coming in to be our professor today,

Dan Wong. You may not know this, but our listeners are sort of front row students. They like to take notes and do well on the test. And we do indeed have a test at the end of the planet money summer school semester and online quiz. Everyone should take it. And so in order to prepare for the test, we like to do a few concepts, a few vocabulary words to help everyone get that A.

All right, we're going to go over them now. The first one is engineering state. What is that

dim? Being too literal minded about building too much across the country, but also treating people as if they were building materials to be torn down and revolted as the state wishes. We talked about one of the dangers of the engineering state and state control and central planning is mal-investment. What is mal-investment? Too many rows and bridges to nowhere. Too many airports. Or in economic terms, state investment that doesn't go where it's actually

needed and will do the most good. Okay, I'm going to be impressed if you can do the following one in just one sentence because you wrote a whole book about it. Socialism with Chinese characteristics.

There you go. I hope you enjoy your trip there. They're going to like the last answer.

Oh yeah, always. For sure.

“Dan Wong is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of Breakneck,”

China's quest to engineer the future. Speaking of books that I recommend, if you like summer school,

you will love our book, Planet Money, a guide to the economic forces that shape your life,

that and breakneck dance book are available wherever you get your books.

“Planet Money Summer School is produced by Sophia Pulisekar and edited by Alex Goldmark.”

It's fact checked by Sierra Waters. The show is engineered by Maggie Lufar.

I'm Robert Smith and this is NPR. Thanks for listening. Ladies and gentlemen, gather up your bags and your children who are not boarding for the planet

“Money Flight to Busiya Kenya. Join us for a special tour of the small town that taught the”

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