On a 2023 inspection tour through Jiangsu province (like Guangdong, a manufacturing powerhouse), Xi said, âThe real economy is the foundation of a countryâs economy, the fundamental source of wealth creation, and an important pillar of national strength.â It is the basis, he continued, of âhuman production, life, and development.â He has repeatedly said that China needs to prioritize the real economy, which means the world of manufactured products, rather than the virtual or financial economy, sometimes referred to in state media as the âfictitiousâ economy. State-affiliated researchers commonly denounce financialization with the hollowing out of manufacturing in the same breath.
[...] Xi has declared that China targets completionism, which means that not even âlow-end industriesâ should move out of China. Rather than follow economic logic, in which production gravitates toward countries with lower labor costsâwhich the United States and other high-income countries have more or less acceptedâXi does not want industry to keep shifting around.
So the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan released in 2021 demands that the manufacturing share of the economy stay constant. Manufacturing already accounts for 28 percent of Chinaâs GDP, which is much higher than Germanyâs 21 percent and Japanâs 20 percent, to say nothing of deindustrialized economies like the United States and the United Kingdom (both around 10 percent). Xi has repeatedly stated that heâs not interested in abandoning manufacturing for services. In authoritative speeches, Xi cited âcertain Western countriesâ that forsook the real economy for the fictitious economy. No points for guessing which Western countries these might be. And Xi has declared that âthe real economy is the basis of everything . . . so we must never deindustrialize.â
That is what the engineering state is about.
So far in this book, Dan Wang just keeps repeating that China does what it does because China is an "engineering state" (and the US is the way it is because it's a "lawyerly society"). He keeps avoiding the core reason why China focuses on developing their productive forces, which is because the Communist Party is in control and they are dedicated to the working class and poor Chinese people by taking the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. And the US is the way it is not primarily because of lawyers, but because the capitalist class is in control.
