Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang (W.W. Norton, 260 pp., $31.99)
Dan Wang knows China. But does he know America? In Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Wang, a Hoover Institution research fellow and former technology analyst for Gavekal Dragonomics, sets out to explain the governance cultures of both countries, give credit where due, and diagnose pathologies that hinder success in each place. He frames China as an “engineering state” and America as a “lawyerly society.”
In analyzing China, Wang’s vivid, often autobiographical reporting delivers. His tale of bicycling across the pristine highways and gorge-spanning bridges of poor Guizhou province inspires. His documentation of Chinese social media posts during the Covid lockdowns shocks. His testimony of his own family’s grim encounters with the Cultural Revolution sears.
Where the U.S. has a government “of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers,” Wang shows how engineers have “quite literally ruled modern China.” This engineering bias has yielded extraordinary physical development, rapid productivity gains, and wealth accumulation that was unimaginable at the end of Mao Zedong’s disastrous reign.
Wang deftly contextualizes the virtues of the engineering state for American readers. He shows how it enabled Apple’s global dominance in consumer devices, illustrated through a conversation with an Apple procurement specialist in China and a tour of Shenzhen’s industrial parks. He highlights China’s key advantages: “process knowledge” (tacit, hard-to-codify know-how) and “communities of engineering practice” (dense webs of connection and skill). Three decades ago, Shenzhen was a low-end manufacturing center; today, it is a global innovation hub, home to BYD and Huawei.
Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Beijing, and other Chinese cities, Wang warns, have absorbed these strengths over decades—at the expense of the American firms that set up shop there. He describes a one-way street, with every part of the value chain eventually shifting to China. “The reality,” he concludes, “is that the United States will never again be a bigger manufacturer than China.” Moreover, “China’s industrial might is a strategic advantage that could overwhelm all the rich countries in the world.”
Yet Wang is no engineering-state booster. Born in China in 1992 and returning there as an adult in 2017, the Canadian national has witnessed both the state’s worst tendencies and the misery they produce. The Communist Party, he said on an August podcast, does not treat the Chinese people as individuals but regulates society “as if it’s a series of pipes.”
Wang uses China’s two most grandiose social engineering programs of the post-Mao era—the one-child policy and the zero-Covid policy—to show the engineering state’s catastrophic downside. Though implemented four decades apart, the two plans have much in common. Each began with scientistic hubris and ended in national exhaustion.
The engineering state’s fixation on numeric targets and disregard for organic human bonds render it, in Wang’s analysis, too rigid to allow the Chinese people to live happily. Even China’s vaunted growth has slowed under Xi Jinping. Despite China’s technological advances, industrial power, and larger population, Wang does not expect it to surpass America across the board.
Wang’s account of China is compelling, but his treatment of America is less convincing. Though his title references only China, the opening chapter signals that his scope is wider. He intends also to chart a way forward for America’s lawyerly society, which “has become distinctly unambitious” and “blocks everything it can.”
Like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance, Wang identifies the thicket of procedural hurdles that stifle growth in contemporary America as the source of its ills. But like them, he stops short, offering only tepid prescriptions. To overcome lawyerliness, he suggests, America must first “remember that the country has a heritage of engineering” and second “elevate a greater diversity of voices among its elites.”
Salutary as national pride and pluralism may be, can they defend against a hypersonic missile from the industrial colossus across the Pacific? What Wang, Klein, and Thompson avoid confronting is that progressivism is not only burdened by a procedural fetish but is itself an obstacle to material advancement.
One example illustrates this blind spot: Wang credits the Biden administration with making “a serious attempt to conduct industrial policy and build up U.S. infrastructure.” In reality, while the administration nominally championed reindustrialization, it undermined that agenda with a chaotic hodgepodge of progressive policies. The two signature industrial policy initiatives of the Biden era—the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act—were cluttered with extraneous progressive pet programs, like bonuses for companies that built in low-income areas and requirements that they provide child care for workers. Such errors are not incidental. As Charles Fain Lehman has written of Abundance, the purpose of a system is what it does.
Still, Wang deserves praise for introducing nomenclature from China’s domestic discourse that carries over, in part, to America. He describes a loose circle of bloggers who write under the banner of the Industrial Party, offering a distilled version of the mainstream engineering-state model. Wang calls them modern fascists. From an American standpoint, the more instructive detail is whom they oppose: the Sentimentalists, who indulge liberal pieties.
While the Industrial Party doesn’t resonate with much that is recognizable in America, the Sentimentalists do. For America to become once again a place where big things are built and ambition stirs, it must not only overcome the proceduralism that Wang, Klein, and Thompson decry. It must also triumph over the progressive sentimentalism they decline to confront.
Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images
