Last night, Space House hosted writer and Stanford fellow Dan Wang in conversation with Alexander Evans (LSE) in the Clubhouse. It was a lively, occasionally alarming hour on what's really driving the US-China rivalry.

Dan was telling us about his thesis, drawn from his new book, Breakneck. He argued that China is run by engineers. America is run by lawyers. (And the UK, for what it's worth, is run by “the sounding clever industries".)

The majority of the Chinese politburo are engineers. American presidents are (with a couple of notable exceptions) law graduates. (Britain, meanwhile, has a long tradition of Prime Ministers with PPE degrees from Oxford.)

Dan argued that while there aren't many comedy clubs per capita in China, there was a lot of building going on.

The engineer's state. China's technocrats are relentless builders. Nuclear plants, solar capacity, EVs, high-speed rail, all at a scale the West can't match. But, Dan argued, that same instinct suffocates everything that doesn’t fit a blueprint: comedy clubs shuttered, dissent quietly managed, a national mood he described as strong on infrastructure, thin on joy.

The lawyer's state. America's strength is different. It protects intellectual property, litigates rivals, tolerates risk, and lets Silicon Valley take the kind of bets that build trillion-dollar companies. The cost: chronic inability to build anything physical. As Dan put it, the fact that America's tech giants are so valuable is itself "a sign of failure" everywhere else.

So who was winning? Neither, said Dan. That’s the point. The race isn't fixed; it's dynamic. Whoever feels they’re ahead gets complacent and starts making unforced errors. He drew a line from China's zero-COVID and property crackdowns to America's own tariff wars under Trump: both superpowers have self-sabotaged and tripped over their own confidence.

On AI, the conversation got livelier still. Dan argued Silicon Valley was winning the race for now because, in his words, its founders were simply better at raising money than China's engineers were at raising power plants, even as China was building the energy infrastructure that could out-scale America's AI ambitions within a decade.

A packed room, a lot of laughs at the engineers' expense, and a reminder that the sharpest analysis of superpowers often comes with the driest wit.

Dan Wang's book is available now. Thanks to everyone who joined us at Space House for the evening.