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Dan Wang
Breakneck
Breakneck
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From an 'indispensable voice on China' (Evan Osnos) comes a riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress
GABI'S REVIEW
Dan Wang’s Breakneck chronicles China’s ascent while sketching the map of America’s manufacturing crises that resulted from decades of offshoring decisions. Wang argues that the familiar socialist versus democratic binary is inadequate for understanding the present moment, and instead examines two superpowers through a different lens. He frames China as an “engineering state,” forging futures at warp speed, while the U.S. wallows in a “lawyerly society,” suing its way to stasis. I find this an urgent and persuasive thesis, one that contrasts China’s lightning-speed organizational abilities with the U.S.’s tendency toward bureaucratic inertia; symbolized by million-dollar ablution facilities that take years to complete.
According to Wang, China is fuelled by a technocratic elite that prizes “process knowledge” over profit margins. He contends that the nation has harnessed manufacturing to create energy abundance, technological edge, and a world-class infrastructure buildout. Wang’s portraits of Shenzhen’s maker spaces particularly resonate with me: they capture how constraint and improvisation can drive creative leaps, as engineers there devise superior AI models at a fraction of U.S. costs. However, Wang also acknowledges, and I agree, that the same engineering ethos that drives innovation can exact heavy social costs. The zero-Covid policy, the one-child program, and pervasive surveillance systems illustrate how an engineering mindset, when fused with autocracy, can extend its control into the social fabric. For me, Wang’s conclusion, that scale doesn’t justify sacrifice and that both nations have much to learn from each other, feels both sobering and balanced.
As an immigrant observer (born in China, raised in Canada and the U.S.), Wang argues that America’s engineering culture has been slowly eroded by litigation and overregulation. Reading this, I’m struck by how convincingly he connects the U.S.’s infrastructure stagnation to a culture of legal paralysis, while China’s builders press ahead with high-speed trains and integrated AI systems. In my view, Breakneck is essential reading for anyone concerned about how governance models shape innovation and the future of economic and political systems in the AI age.
PUBLISHER REVIEW
America used to pride itself on ambition. Today, it looks stuck. Meanwhile, China has been busy building the future. Over the past six years, technology analyst Dan Wang lived through China's astonishing, messy progress and the dissolution of its relationship to the West.
In Breakneck, Wang offers a new framework for understanding China - which helps us to see global geopolitics more clearly too. While China is an engineering state, fearlessly building megaprojects, America is a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. Building big has fuelled China's economic ascent. At the same time, social engineering has led to unbearable costs, including the traumas of zero-Covid and the one-child policy. Wang traverses China's dazzling metropolises and factory complexes, blending political and economic analysis with reportage to show how the Communist Party's darkening ambitions have unsettled its people.
As the US and China are gearing up for a new Cold War, Breakneck reveals both the remarkable strengths and the appalling weaknesses of the engineering state. China has learned from the West's successes and failures - and now we in turn can learn from China, not least by taking its global ambitions seriously.
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