Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

"Yes, it’s a play on words. Dan Wang’s big conceit here is that China is an engineering economy, and America an economy dominated by lawyers. The book actually echoes some of the Abundance themes, because he, like Klein and Thompson, is arguing that America is stuck and China is building the future. So that’s the broad framing. As I’ve described it, it sounds as though he’s saying China has won this, but it’s more interesting than that. He also points out the risk that China is going to kill off its own ambition with its social engineering. Ensuring that people are monitored and their political views are kept under control risks undermining the Chinese advantage that it might have earned through being an ambitious engineering state. In a sense, Dan Wang’s conclusion is that China needs some of America’s respect for freedom of political expression and America needs quite a lot of China’s engineering ambition. Both countries risk killing off the best of themselves if they overdo one or other of those particular tendencies. That’s fascinating and it speaks to Wang’s warning to China. Things like the dreadful, full lockdown on Covid—that they continued pursuing long after others had lifted it—and the one child policy: these are all things that can potentially hold back China. In some respects, they’re realizing that now. In the meantime—back to the Huawei book—they’ve built a lot of very fine commercial and engineering-based enterprises. So he frames this very nicely, I think, as a battle between two cultures, if you like, as much as anything else."

"Dan Wang, starting in the in the 2010s, would write an annual letter from China, a fascinating, long-form reflection on the year where he would talk about stories that he had covered, experiences he had moving in the world of tech and economics, and books he had read and liked on all sorts of places and topics. It was like an erudite holiday letter where someone fills you in on their last year, and it really conveyed an interesting personality. I thought this book was going to be in that vein, and parts of it are — it’s very much driven by stories and reflections. It’s too bad that one of the less interesting parts of it has become the takeaway that gets talked about the most, which is the idea that China is a country of engineers and America a country of lawyers. The idea is that an engineering state can do things on a big scale without worrying about regulation and can accomplish amazing things, but can go in terrible directions via social engineering. Wang uses the one child policy and the zero covid policy as examples of the engineering state gone wrong. The achilles heel of the lawyerly society, by contrast, is an obsession with legality that can get in the way of getting things done. The benefit is it can potentially protect people. A couple of reviewers within China studies have pointed out that, actually, some of the same things he is saying about today’s China as an engineering state were said about Japan late in the last century. As a historian, I go back even further. I was reading Jules Verne ‘s From the Earth to the Moon . In it, he says America is going to launch a rocket to the moon first because America is a country of engineers. America used to be able to build things, but was thought of as a pretty lawyerly place as well, so it wasn’t as though you had to choose between the engineering and lawyerly sides. Anyway, it’s not that the idea of a contrast is wrong but it oversimplifies things. One good thing is that, to counteract drawing too stark a divide, Wang makes the point that he’s often struck that the people he knows who are Americans and those who are Chinese seem to have more in common with each other than they think. No. One of the real values of it is trying to think about not having to choose between either being impressed by some of the things that are going on technologically in China, or being horrified by the political repression — he walks this line between. It’s important that he has the chapters on the one child policy and zero covid, about things that go terribly wrong when the human impact of big projects is not taken seriously enough. What I like about the book the most is being in the company of an incredibly thoughtful person who spent time in many different parts of China thinking about what’s going on. Sure. I haven’t done research in China for about a decade but, certainly, it’s more restrictive now. A big shift in terms of access to scholarship on the Mao era is what’s happened to Hong Kong, which used to hold an easily accessible and amazing archive of documents about China under communism . Another shift is an expansion of the topics that are seen as sensitive. For example, you can be criticised for your interpretation of the Qing era if you say that the Qing were as much influenced by Manchu as by Chinese traditions. I think it’s challenging to be a foreign historian writing on China in terms of getting access and getting visas, and it’s more difficult to figure out what an unproblematic topic to be researching is. Some things are night and day; in the early 2010s people could do research in Xinjiang, and that’s off the table. It used to be I felt I could give a talk on anything related to protests in Hong Kong, whereas on the mainland I’d have to be careful, especially about anything that happened in the recent past. Now I can’t give talks at Hong Kong universities on the protests there in the 2010s. So, yes, there are lots of changes. This was an extraordinary year for books about China, so I imposed some rules on myself to make it easier to pick a group of five. I didn’t include any books about Taiwan , although I could easily have included one of several very good 2025 titles, such as Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation , in my set of five. I didn’t include The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear , although I liked it very much, because I thought of it more as a work of literary criticism than a work on China per se, though it has memoir elements. I tried to err on the side of books that I felt were getting too little attention. I also tried to steer clear of books that were as much about the United States as about China (I partly violated the two last rules with Breakneck , but it is really about Chinese phenomena much more than American ones). There are probably two good books on China a month that come out, so any list of “the five best” is bound to be incredibly subjective, partly in my case driven by a sense of some works that I would like to see more people read and would pick for my selections if I were in a book club."

"It’s powerful because it’s simple without being simplistic and, like Rogoff’s book, is interspersed with engaging personal stories that deepen the substantive argument. Dan Wang’s claim is that China is largely governed by engineers and the United States by lawyers, and that this difference shapes everything from infrastructure to innovation to risk tolerance. Once you adopt that lens, a lot of observed differences suddenly make sense. Engineers tend to optimize for building and execution; lawyers optimize for process, rights, and constraint. Wang is careful not to turn this into a morality play. An engineering mindset can deliver breathtaking speed and scale, but it can also be ruthless when individuals or rights get in the way. That tradeoff—capacity versus constraint—is one of the most illuminating ways to compare political systems. According to Wang, engineering works well for building big stuff. It doesn’t work well for protecting the rights of people who are in the way of that big stuff. Wang tends to support the engineering approach (but not without reservations) for infrastructure and manufacturing but condemns it (pretty much without reservation) for the one-child policy, zero COVID, and “fortress China.” At times it does feel a bit too neat. You sometimes wonder whether the deeper distinction is simply authoritarianism versus democracy, with engineers and lawyers acting as proxies. But even when the analogy strains, it remains clarifying. It forces you to ask what a system is trying to maximize and what it is willing to sacrifice. That’s a productive question to ask about both China and the United States, especially in debates about infrastructure, regulation, and what people now call an abundance agenda. Wang’s admiration for making things is visceral, and I share some of that instinct. But the book doesn’t fully articulate why the United States should manufacture more, or under what conditions. If the implicit model is Shenzhen-style assembly lines with harsh working conditions, that’s not an obvious aspiration. If the argument is about productivity, resilience, national security, or high-quality jobs through automation, then that case needs to be made explicitly. Relatedly, I am skeptical of the admiration for Chinese ‘completionism’—the idea of being present in every manufacturing sector. Specialization matters, and there’s a real question about whether completionism diverts resources away from higher-productivity uses and ultimately slows improvements in living standards. Despite these differences—or perhaps because of them—I found the book enormously stimulating and well worth engaging with."