Visions

December 14, 2025

Luis Rubio

The divisions and conflicts that define our era—magnified by social media—often obscure the similarities and differences among development models, and with them, the possibilities they hold for overcoming the obstacles to progress. Some nations have advanced spectacularly in recent decades, while others remain stagnant. Many, Mexico included, have tried to break free from the historical shackles that have prevented that great leap forward. China, in particular, has shown what can be achieved in a short period when a government aligns its goals, policies, and actions with a clear determination to transform. What remains uncertain is whether China’s experience is a model for others.

Dan Wang, a Chinese-born American scholar, argues in his book Breakneck that “too many outside observers see only enrichment or repression,” when what truly defines China is its identity as an engineering state—one that has devoted itself to building the country at breakneck speed. Wang contrasts China with the United States, suggesting that America has become a “lawyerly society” that has lost sight of how to propel itself forward. His conclusion is provocative: if the United States wants to compete with China, it must relearn how to build, while China must learn to build less and consume more.

For Mexico, the most striking part of Wang’s book is his vivid description of the infrastructure erected in China in just a few decades, including in its poorest and most remote regions. Highways, bridges, airports, ports, city streets, and high-speed trains appear everywhere—often matching or surpassing the best in the world. Even the most jaded observer cannot help but marvel. Meanwhile, Mexico drowns in potholes, sinkholes, and electricity shortages, while China has already built for the next fifty years or more.

Carl Benedikt Frey, an Oxford professor, offers a very different perspective in his book The End of Progress. He traces how business, institutional, and cultural forces have historically shaped cycles of technological advance and stagnation. Frey advances two central arguments. First, there is no single pathway to an innovative and developed economy. The essential ingredient is the presence of conditions that allow constant adaptation, rooted in openness, competition, and the liberalization of both productive forces and the institutions that sustain them. His second argument goes to the heart of the matter: there is always tension between the decentralization that sparks productivity and the professional bureaucracy required to make broad-based development possible. Frey concludes bluntly: “If governments cannot balance the benefits of central coordination with the necessary productive decentralization, recent efforts in industrial policy and the like will end in stagnation, not progress.”

Together, these two books offer critical lessons for Mexico. The most important is that there is no single way forward, but that the worst path of all is attempting to copy models that look successful elsewhere without accounting for local realities. China’s case—analyzed by both authors—is particularly instructive: its enormous achievements coexist with structural weaknesses that continue to fuel debate about whether it can face an uncertain future with first-class infrastructure but fragile institutional, political, and demographic foundations.

Another lesson, central to Frey’s thesis, cuts directly to the heart of Mexico’s recent political trajectory. Development becomes possible only when there is sufficient centralization to enable large-scale progress (as Wang might say, China’s infrastructure qualifies on that count), coupled with enough decentralization to unleash productive forces, allow society to grow, and find new opportunities on its own. The balance between centralization and decentralization is crucial. Mexico, however, has lurched between half-hearted decentralization and increasingly authoritarian controls, consistently denying itself the opportunities these analyses identify as essential for development.

A recent article by Sergio López Ayllón illustrates this drift. Writing on the proposed reforms to the amparo law, he notes: “Put plainly: if amparo was born as a mechanism to protect individuals against state power, this reform inverts that logic and strengthens the State’s position as a litigant.” In other words, control takes precedence over development. And when that happens, development becomes impossible.