Book Review

Review: “Breakneck” – The one-handed economist

Dan Wang is a trenchant observer of the US and China. He was born in China but raised in Canada. He’s worked in the US and China as an adult, and he compares the culture of the two in this 2025 book.

Wang’s big point is that US culture is dominated by lawyers and China’s is dominated by engineers. As in “over-dominated.” Lawyers can stop progress on behalf of minorities or lobbyists. Engineers can roll over the vulnerable and ignore the greatest good. Both countries would do better by borrowing a bit of each other’s cultures and thus pulling back from the dominant perspective.

Aside: I’m not sure if the US and China will get into a hot war, but if they do fall into the Thucydides Trap, then it will be triggered by a third country. Taiwan is the traditional example, but Venezuela or Iran may fill that role, given Trump’s delusional onslaught. 

So, the book. It’s nicely written and even-handed in my opinion. The critique of too many lawyers in US politics is apt. The damage of the engineers to people (the one-child policy) and the environment and the economy (too much focus on building) is, as well.

If China has problems with “seeing like a state” then the US has problems with selling out to the sharpest trader, the biggest bribe, the lobbyist’s comma, and the populist manipulator. US institutions cannot cope: society is weakening; politics are collapsing.

I am being sharper on the US than on China for three reasons:

1. I know the US better.
2. The US has fallen farther from a decent position.
3. China’s goal of respect is more robust than America’s desire to dominate.

AB: Numerous Insights (quotes).

Now to Wang’s insights (these are all quotes):

1. Canada is tidy. I sometimes find myself relaxing as soon as I cross into its borders. Drive around America and China, on the other hand, and you’ll see people and places that are utterly deranged. That’s not a reproach. These two countries are messy in part because they are both engines for global change. Europeans have a sense of optimism only about the past, stuck in their mausoleum economy because they are too sniffy to embrace American or Chinese practices.
2. Over the past four decades, China has grown richer, more technologically capable, and more diplomatically assertive abroad. China learned so well from the United States that it started to beat America at its own game: capitalism, industry, and harnessing its people’s restless ambitions. If you want to appreciate what Detroit felt like at its peak, it’s probably better to experience that in Shenzhen than anywhere in the United States.
3. The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble. The starkest contrast between the two countries is the competition that will define the twenty-first century: an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction. That’s the big idea behind this book. It’s time for a new lens to understand the two superpowers: China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.
4. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies. Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles—where men have to be macho and women have to bear their children.
5. The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible.
6. This book reveals good things that the engineering state does: running functional cities, building up its manufacturing base, and spreading material benefits pretty widely throughout society. But I also lived through things that no other state would have attempted, like holding on to a zero-Covid strategy until it drove the country mad. The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals. The Communist Party envisions itself as a grand master, coordinating unified actions across state and society, able to launch strategic maneuvers beyond the comprehension of its citizens. Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals.
7. The American courtroom is a battlefront to resolve political questions, in which judges are enlisted to rule on questions that most other countries leave to voters or regulators. When a political cause can’t be won through the electoral process, lawyers sometimes seek a victory through the courts. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the American left pursued a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy that conservatives have revealed themselves to be no less capable at playing.
8. The lawyerly society also includes a commitment to proceduralism and protecting wealth. Economically, the United States has experienced strong economic growth relative to other Western countries combined with astonishingly successful corporate value creation. But in political terms, this obsession with process over outcomes has made Americans lose faith that the government can meaningfully improve their lives.
9. As best as I can tell, the United States and China are both racing to erode their governance capabilities. Xi Jinping has forcefully centered the political decision-making process on himself, demonstrating that he intends to rule the Communist Party for as long as he pleases. The American government, meanwhile, has been mired in ineffectualness. For decades, the American right connived to drown the government in a bathtub while the left was strangling it with rules and lawsuits. The left has barely shown resolve to reform creaky institutions, and the second Trump administration behaves as if it must destroy the government in order to save it.
10. While China compressed more than a century’s worth of American construction into a few decades, it folded in many of its problems too.
    Highways have ripped apart too many cities in China, just as they have in the United States. Chinese have mustered tremendous enthusiasm for destroying the nation’s physical heritage in the recent past.
11. China’s transformation has given people running water and toilets, mass transit and highways, beautiful parks and modern malls. Most people can remember a time in only the recent past when they didn’t have these things. This growth trendline matters. The glittering skyscrapers and rail lines form a core plank of the Communist Party’s legitimacy. Though China’s growth has slowed substantially under Xi’s rule, people have a hope for improvement. The better infrastructure that has been built helps people to feel that progress still courses throughout the country.
12. Tianjin has built not only China’s third-tallest skyscraper (ninety-seven floors, little occupied) but also one of its most photogenic libraries. The Dutch architects behind Tianjin’s Binhai Library put a bright white sphere in its center, around which undulating curves make up shelving space. Except few of these shelves held any books. Once I got up close, I could see that the beautiful shelves had only digital prints of book spines. All around me were people taking selfies rather than browsing or reading. I sometimes think of Tianjin’s library as a metaphor for China’s economy: great hardware that looks impressive from a distance, not filled with the softer stuff that actually matters.
13. China now has the capacity to produce around sixty million cars a year (one-third electric, two-thirds combustion), out of an annual global market of around ninety million cars sold. China’s domestic market absorbs less than half of its production. China produces so much in part because every province wants to be an automotive manufacturing hub. The country has over a hundred automotive brands, most of them small, all of them fighting for sales. The competition is so fierce in part because auto companies receive extensive support from local governments, who all try to promote their champion through cheap credit and consumer rebates to local companies.
14. Overreliance on Chinese manufacturing accelerated US neglect of its supply side. Meanwhile, China hasn’t felt the need to wean off its dependence on exports because American consumers are always there to buy its goods. As these countries grow apart, they are going to have to do something difficult: The United States will have to regain all the muscle it has lost for building public works as well as manufacturing capacity, and China will have to empower consumers by getting over its fear of making people lazy.
    … The Communist Party continues to build because it’s full of engineers and also because Marxist-Leninists don’t want to cede economic agency to the people. China would be better off if it built less and built better. But we should also resist judging it by the standards of the United States, which is frankly underprovisioned in public infrastructure. Because there is perhaps one thing worse than an overactive state that can’t stop moving—and that is a state that can’t move at all.
15. Americans expect innovations from scientists working at NASA, in universities, or in research labs. They celebrate the moment of invention: the first solar cell, the first personal computer, first in flight. In China, on the other hand, tech innovation emerges from the factory floor, when a new product is scaled up into mass production. At the heart of China’s ascendancy in advanced technology is its spectacular capacity for learning by doing and consistently improving things.
16. Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers. We tend to refer to these intangibles as know-how, institutional memory, or tacit knowledge. They are embodied by an experienced workforce like Shenzhen’s.
17. Economic studies have shown that the recipients of Chinese subsidies have, on average, lower productivity growth. Xi’s aggressive promotion of industry has triggered trade wars with not just the United States but also many developing countries as well. China’s tech successes are no convincing demonstration that a wise state can plan the future. When the state shoves its weight around—forcing foreign companies to hand over technology, showering a favored sector with subsidies, injuring a firm while elevating another—it is often far from being helpful. The forced technology transfer agreements meant to prop up China’s state-owned automakers instead robbed their need to invest in their own innovative capacities.
18. The Trump administration certainly throttled Chinese companies. But it did so by making American companies (especially those selling semiconductors) unreliable vendors. Previously, Chinese companies bought the best components on the market, which were often American, because they wanted to sell a globally competitive smartphone or drone. When they couldn’t buy American, it lit a fire under Chinese companies to try domestic vendors that they would never have previously given the time of day.
19. The reality is that the United States will never again be a bigger manufacturer than China. Its much smaller population, the higher wage and standard-of-living expectations, and the dollar’s status as a global reserve currency make that harder. On a practical level, it is difficult to imagine that Americans can tolerate the work habits of people in Shenzhen or Henan: working on assembly lines for eight hours a day, eating at cafeterias at designated times, crammed six to a dorm room at night.
20. Through the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping and the leadership in Beijing decided that promoting engineers into the central government was a counterstroke against Mao’s misrule. They were gripped, however, by a misbegotten scientism, which used straight-line projections to predict catastrophe if China did not diminish its population.
21. Song wrote, “China’s population by the second half of the next century would go up to 4.5 billion, equaling the total world population today. And it would continue to grow forever.” Only an engineer might have believed in this sort of straight-line analysis, as if population can grow at an unvarying rate. Song had no awareness that fertility rates might fall as economic growth and educational levels rise—as neighboring East Asian countries had already realized. He presumed that China had a fixed stock of resources, leaving no room for the possibility that technological change, or Deng’s pivot away from the planned economy, could increase agricultural productivity. Ironically, this mechanistic thinking made Song a bad cybernetician because his model failed to be dynamic to feedback.
22. Enactment of the one-child policy meant forcing a mostly rural people to change deeply ingrained habits. It was social and population engineering at scale.
23. No other country would have let a missile scientist anywhere near the design of demographic policy. Its roots lie partly in the control tendencies of Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, who wanted to engineer the population so that they could engineer the economy. Partly in reaction to Mao, partly using language given to them by Song Jian, they viewed themselves to be acting on a science that was detached from popular passions, based on Western ecological concerns, and formulated in terms of control theory. They understood themselves to be acting as technocrats. The lawyerly society debated the one-child policy and rejected it. The United States and other Western countries also considered implementing strict population controls in reaction to The Population Bomb. Social scientists, especially economists, were quick to criticize the flaws in these linear projections. But in China, social scientists had become meek from Mao’s bullying. At this critical moment, the country lacked the intellectual antibodies to resist the policy’s adoption. Chinese leaders were just enough exposed to the West to absorb this neo-Malthusian doomerism, without being exposed enough to the Western pushback against it. And the one-child policy could only have been implemented in the engineering state.
24. Throughout the three years of the pandemic, China developed a weightier state apparatus, one better able to impress itself upon its subjects using digital surveillance. Enforcement of the one-child policy was an intensely physical act, in which health workers got up close and personal with vulnerable women. To achieve zero-Covid, the state once more mobilized millions of people: a mostly male workforce that donned white protective gear to become dabai, or the public enforcers of pandemic control, and a mostly female workforce that worked as contact tracers to investigate people’s travel histories between and within cities. Digital technologies gave the engineering state a tool it did not have.
25. Mountains have beckoned, as Scott has written, to dissenters, rebels, and subversive types. It is not only the air that thins out at higher altitudes: The tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people tired of tax administration or the other ills of governed life have climbed upward. As a consequence, mountain dwellers tend to be seen as unruly folks, be they Appalachian Americans, Highland Scots, or various ethnic groups in Yunnan and other parts of Zomia. What is a difficulty for government administration and industrial growth is often a positive for personal liberties. The mountains of Yunnan protected local peoples from the state-produced famines in the Great Leap Forward and the harangues of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.
26. Doctors and nurses received no special warning that zero-Covid would end abruptly, leaving them to face a surge of patients… As best as I can tell, China is the only country that denied its people fever medications during a fever-producing pandemic. It is a perfect encapsulation of the engineering state’s twisted logic….Propaganda authorities had no special warning, though they shifted seamlessly from declaring that the virus must be stomped out in one week to saying that everyone had to be responsible for their own health the next. It felt like living through the scene in Orwell’s 1984, in which officials switched directions, mid-speech, declaring that Oceania was at war with Eastasia rather than Eurasia.
27. Engineering only works if it is using good data. But data probity is another of China’s casualties in the aftermath of Covid. The government has had a wobbly commitment to accurate reporting at the best of times. After the pandemic, the government has more regularly succumbed to the temptation not to share bad news.
28. Why are so many Chinese still leaving? Because entire generations feel whipsawed by the engineering state’s violent mood swings. Their jobs, and indeed their lives, in China felt like dead ends. They’re not making great money in Thailand either, but they are able to have a lot of fun in its relaxed atmosphere. Xi has talked about achieving national greatness without backing it up with economic growth. The trouble is that when people suffer—as they do through a property collapse, high unemployment, or lockdowns—they start to wonder what they are really getting. It’s certainly not enrichment. When they’re given a cold, hard smack in the face by something that certainly doesn’t feel like greatness, they become unmoored. This sense of alienation has been a big reason to rùn.
29. I had rùn myself after the collapse of zero-Covid, when I moved from Shanghai to Yale Law School. Shanghai has many things superior to that of any American city: walkable and safe streets, vibrant street life, splendid food, an ease to go anywhere in the city or the country through mass transit. It was the Chinese government’s overbearing presence—censorship, intolerance of dissent, a lingering threat of catastrophe—that pushed me away. The operators of the Great Firewall decided that my little personal website, where I publish my annual letters, should be blocked. I am still puzzled.
30. Xi’s reining in of tech giants are not altogether different from what a lot of American and European regulators wish to do to Silicon Valley. Every government in the world is grappling with companies that have too much influence over the flow of information and commerce. Individually, China’s regulations around antitrust, data protection, or financial risks may pass muster on technocratic grounds. But Beijing issued regulations with a speed and ferocity that no other state can match. It did so for reasons that the West would not: to shift investment and talent into state-prioritized industries and to crush the power that these companies were gaining at the expense of the state.
31. What if, say, the US government had responded to the 2008 financial crisis by reshaping Wall Street’s risk management culture rather than engaging in the endless negotiations that yielded a 2,300-page statute that nobody understands? But Xi’s attempt to achieve cultural change has left people disgruntled and whole industries disfigured. The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is perhaps 60 percent correct on everything.  He’s driving toward a usually admirable long-term goal. But in the name of achieving change, the engineering state delivers such beatings on people or industries that they are unable to pick themselves back up again. Even if Xi’s judgments are right, his brute-force solutions reliably worsen things. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but stomping out their businesses has traumatized entrepreneurs. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them toward default subsequently triggered a collapse in homebuyer confidence, prolonging a property slump. Does the government need to rein in corruption? Definitely, but Xi has terrorized the bureaucracy to the point of paralysis. Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.
32. Engineers can’t take a joke. It’s hard for art to thrive in an atmosphere of political paranoia plus social control. Today, Chinese artists and writers have to follow socialist core values, which cannot carry a whiff of political criticism. Directors are finding their movies inexplicably pulled from theaters or international film festivals. Most of the movies released domestically are nationalist blockbusters, sappy romances, or supernatural action flicks. No wonder these aren’t exportable. Even among captive Chinese audiences, they’re not necessarily popular.
33. The most important thing that the engineering state is set up to do is to build manufacturing capacity. Though China faces many headwinds, it is continuing to strengthen its position in a wide range of technologically intensive industries as well as in its military capacity. Even if the United States is able to outclass China in diplomacy, finance, and innovation, the contest between these two great powers is going to be close if the United States can’t build anything in the physical world.
34. I envision China becoming something like a more successful East Germany, a state that combines surveillance and political controls with strong outcomes in science and technology. The Communist Party will not relent on the political atmosphere; meanwhile, it will continue its pursuit of science and technology. Though East Germany was a leader within the Soviet bloc, it was still behind the West, but I expect China to be more successful. Chinese firms will produce high-quality products, perhaps lagging behind global leaders by only a few years and in only a few industries. They’ll make chips not powerful enough to fit into the latest iPhone but good enough for electric vehicles and drones, planes not as efficient as the latest from Airbus but good enough to fly between Bangkok and Shanghai.
35. My sense, while I watched the crackdown unfold in China, was that Beijing was trying to avoid the economic structure of the modern United States. Over the past two decades, the major American growth stories have been in Silicon Valley on one coast and Wall Street on the other. Subsequently, both tech and finance have been blamed for many social ills. If there is an era of American innovation that attracts Beijing, it might be the Silicon Valley of the 1960s and 1970s. Chipmakers like Intel were hitting their stride, becoming, in part, major suppliers to the Pentagon and NASA. That was a period when tech companies manufactured stuff, employed big workforces, and minded the state’s national security needs.
36. It’s not clear for which country AI will prove more destabilizing. Fortress China is being protected from the ravages of social media platforms. By putting strict limits on the internet and AI, Xi has built China into a security state able to police vast information flows. The hope from Beijing might be that Americans will be driven mad by the dangerous storms produced by the double whammy of social media plus artificial intelligence. Perhaps these things will magnify the internal divisions of Americans. As more Americans retreat into a digital phantasm, Xi will be shepherding Chinese through the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.
37. I don’t want to get rid of lawyers. Rather, I want to help lift the engineers (and also their technocratically minded brethren, the economists) back up. Not to raise them onto a pedestal but to elevate them so that there are other voices in the mix. The United States could use fewer lawyers who devote their careers to litigating the life out of government agencies and more lawyers of the dealmaker bent who are interested in working out how to deliver better services…It is harder to see how China could move away from engineers… China’s civil society has long been weak, with strong family clans, but not made up of the sorts of religious organizations and military aristocracy that produced political contestation in Europe… One reason that China lacks a liberal tradition—focused on protection of individual liberties—is that court intellectuals tended not to develop philosophies based on restraining the emperor or his bureaucracy.
38. So why do their classmates envy my parents? Because they live a pleasant life without having to deal with the problems that attend the lives of even well-off Chinese citizens. The Chinese middle class is precariously exposed to changes in Beijing’s mood. Those in business have to deal with incredible stress, facing down threats from competitors or the local government. They have a gnawing sense that their lives are being shortened by the air they breathe or food they eat. And they feel deep uncertainties about their property values, the future of economic growth, or whether Beijing will visit some sort of disaster upon them or their companies. Life in China is deeply textured and all-embracing. But the intensity of family and social demands can smother, and the embrace can come unbidden, firmly and unavoidably, from the state. For many Chinese, a life in the American suburbs is worthwhile, even if their relationship with the community feels gossamer thin. Families in China still wonder whether they can establish a better life abroad and ask the same questions that my parents asked before they emigrated.
39. The United States can prove itself the stronger country over the next century if it can hold on to pluralism while building more. Right now, it is failing. It won’t be able to respond to climate change, drive better economic outcomes, or deliver broader measures of social equality if the physical world remains underdeveloped. American governance is stronger if it can demonstrate that it has a political system capable of delivering essential services to its people, including safe public streets, functioning mass transit, and plentiful housing. For various American ideals to be fully realized, the country will need to recover its ethos of building, which I believe will solve most of its economic problems and many of its political problems too. The United States will be stronger if it can manufacture. If it does not recover manufacturing capacity, the country will continue to be forcibly deindustrialized by China. US global power will be reduced if people around the world find it more attractive to drive Chinese cars, deploy Chinese robots, and fly Chinese planes. The world is more dangerous if Beijing believes that the United States has insufficient ships and munitions to respond to an aggressive act against Taiwan or in the South China Sea. If the two superpowers fight in East Asia, it’s not at all clear that the United States will win. America has to build to stave off being overrun commercially or militarily by China. The United States will be stronger if it builds more homes. American progressives have a slogan that every billionaire is a policy failure. Since common folks are more on my mind, I propose an amendment: Every rise in housing prices is a policy failure.
40. No matter how China’s economy develops in the future and how its international status improves,” Communist Party propaganda organs blared in 2023, “China will always be a developing country.” I find that beautiful. This declaration is part of a cynical diplomatic effort to convince the poorer countries of the world that China stands for their interests. That’s not the appeal for me. Rather, I think it is wise for the country to declare that it is “developing.” The United States should do that too. Isn’t it better than to be a “developed” one, which implies that you’re done, finished, at the end of the road? Leave “developed” status, I say, to Europe’s beautiful mausoleum economy.
41. But there are still some things that the United States can learn from the engineering state. Although the creative class wants to rùn, the material benefits for most of China’s population are widely spread. The reason that consent of the governed is still pretty strong in China is that Chinese have seen their conditions of life improve immeasurably, such that most people have space in their lives to do most of what they want, most of the time.
42. The United States has lost its ability not only to build but also, in part, to govern. The procedure-obsessed left and the destructive right have robbed from the people the sense that physical dynamism is desirable. But the United States has pluralistic values, which positions it to better figure out the right solutions. I’ve written this book because the very thing that drew my parents to the United States—not lawyers, but pluralism—still provides the potential for course correction. The ultimate reason to be hopeful for the United States is that it can look to its own history to see the path forward. You can see the musculature of the engineering state amid the mighty industrial works scattered all over the country. There’s a natural legacy it has to draw on to stage this next act of transformation.

I give this book FIVE STARS. Anyone interested in the US and China — as rivals, as leaders, as cultures — should read it.