Breakneck - China’s Quest to Engineer The Future
Segment #679
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
Author: Dan Wang
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: August 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781324106036 This nonfiction book is a New York Times bestseller and has been shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award. It was named one of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year So Far, NPR's "Books We Love" of 2025, a Financial Times Best Book of the Year, and an August 2025 Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book. As of November 2025, it continues to generate significant discussion, with economist Tyler Cowen describing it as one of the two most talked-about books of the year (alongside Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance).Author BackgroundDan Wang is a technology analyst and research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University. Born in China, he immigrated to Canada at age seven and later moved to the United States. He has lived extensively in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, where he served as a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and as a technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics.
We are all busy so in the event you don’t have the time to read this I have clipped excerpts to create a “Reader’s Digest” highlight. Its worth the time
China Vs The United States
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. China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it
can.
U.S. Lawyers
Lawyers enable some of the success of Silicon Valley. You can’t build companies worth trillions without legal protections. But lawyers are also
part of the reason that the Bay Area and much of the country are starved of housing and mass transit. 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.
Chinese Engineers
When you travel around China, it’s staggering to see how much the engineering approach has accomplished over the past four decades. Then
there’s the part you can’t see. As impressive as China’s railways and bridges may be, they carry enormous levels of debt that drag down broader growth. Manufacturers produce so many goods that China’s trade partners are now grumbling for protection. The social-engineering experiment known as the one-child policy has accelerated the country’s demographic decline. And China’s economy would be in better shape if Beijing hadn’t triggered an implosion of its property sector, smothered many of its most dynamic companies, and persisted in trying to push out the coronavirus.
Engineers go hard in one direction, and if they perceive something isn’t working, they switch with no loss of speed toward another. They don’t
suffer criticism from humanist softies. Change in China can be so dramatic because so few voices are part of the political process. To a first
approximation, the twenty-four men who make up the Political Bureau (the highest echelon of the Communist Party, usually shortened to Politburo) are
the only people permitted to do politics. Once they’ve settled questions of strategy, the only remaining task is for the bureaucracy to sort out the
details. But when it makes mistakes, it can drag nearly the entire population into crisis
Comparing Systems 2008
THE YEAR 2008 OFFERS a direct comparison between California’s speed and China’s speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between
Beijing and Shanghai. Both lines would be around eight hundred miles long upon completion.
China opened the Beijing–Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $36 billion. In its first decade of operation, it completed 1.35 billion passenger trips.
California has built, seventeen years after the ballot proposition, a small stretch of rail to connect two cities in the Central Valley, neither of which
are close to San Francisco or Los Angeles. The latest estimate for California’s rail line is $128 billion. Why does it cost so much? Partly because some politicians have demanded that the train add a stop in their district, forcing the line to take a more tortuous route through an extra mountain range. And partly because California’s rail authority prefers to tout the number of high-paying jobs it is creating rather than the amount of track it has been laying. The first segment of California’s train will start operating, according to official estimates, between 2030 and 2033. Which means that the margin of error for estimating when a partial leg of California’s high-speed rail will open is the same as the time it took China to build the entire Beijing–Shanghai line.
Chinese Nuclear Power
In 1957, the world’s first commercial nuclear plant started producing electricity in Pennsylvania. In 1991, China's first commercial nuclear power
plant started producing electricity. By 2025, China caught up to the United States in the number of nuclear plants: fifty-five and fifty-four, respectively.
Though the United States might restart a few decommissioned reactors, it has just one under construction. Meanwhile, thirty-one are under
construction in China. The only US nuclear plant built in the twenty-first century took fifteen years and $30 billion. In August 2024, China’s nuclear
authority approved construction of eleven new reactors, which are collectively expected to cost the same amount
Chinese High Speed Rail
A study undertaken by the World Bank in 2019 found that China’s high speed rail system is economically viable, with ticket revenues able to
recoup costs. China has been able to build high-speed rail cheaply because it has standardized designs and excellent project management. The average cost to construct a high-speed line in China is about $33 million per mile, which is 40 percent cheaper than in Europe and 80 percent cheaper than California’s effort, which has seen costs balloon to $192 million per mile. By taking a broader view, the World Bank suggests that China’s high-speed rail has delivered substantial benefits beyond ticket revenues, which includes saving time for users, increasing intellectual and business
exchanges, reducing road accidents and traffic congestion, and lowering carbon emissions.
Chinese Conservatives?
But as I said in my introduction, China is also a country governed by conservatives who masquerade as leftists. Perhaps no other self-proclaimed socialist country is as lightly taxed as China. Nearly three-quarters of China’s population are spared from paying income tax. China has also failed to levy a broad property tax, leaving the bulk of rich city dwellers’ wealth untouched. It relies more heavily on consumption taxes, which are
regressive because they burden the poor more than the rich.
Low taxes make China stingy on welfare. Around 10 percent of its GDP goes toward social spending, compared to 20 percent in the United States
and 30 percent among the more generous European states. China’s pension and health care spending are much lower than that of other rich countries. It is especially miserly with unemployment insurance: Only about a tenth of China’s unemployed are eligible for modest benefits. Occasionally, Chinese leftists have protested the state of affairs. Rather than provide better welfare in response, the state has detained students trying to organize Marxist reading groups
Under Mao, China practiced a more literal form of Marxism, with full state control of the means of production. Deng Xiaoping pivoted the country away from that failed experiment. As Deng was fond of remarking, the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.” That flexible definition allowed for greater adaptability, generated higher growth, and sustained the
regime into the twenty-first century.
They allow companies to unleash a flood of undifferentiated products, ruthlessly underbid each other, and pray their competitors run out of money
before they do. China now dominates the solar industry, but almost no firms are happy because of the overcapacity. Many of these Chinese companies
will inevitably go out of business, after they’ve dragged down their competitors all over the world in brutal price wars. This trend has produced
a frustrating quirk in China’s equity markets. Financial investors have seen that there is no relationship between Chinese stock market performance and
GDP growth. Although the economy has grown by a factor of eight in real terms between 1992 and 2018, the Shanghai Composite Index has been one
of the worst-performing major indices. In China, for a variety of reasons that includes weak corporate governance, onshore stocks dance to their own
tune. Part of the reason is that even for technologies that Chinese firms dominate—like solar photovoltaic panels—few firms are able to make
much profit.
Chinese Energy
China now burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. Though the country’s air quality has improved over the past decade, this obsession
with heavy industry is why a gray and dreadful smog still descends on many of its cities.
China Environmental Concerns
Though rich students in Shanghai score splendidly on international exams, education in China’s rural areas is still often abysmal. The Covid
pandemic revealed that the country’s health care system is weak, with shortages of doctors and nurses and six times fewer intensive care unit beds
per capita than in the United States. An official like Li Zaiyong might be more interested in building a gleaming hospital filled with sophisticated
equipment. Their attention drifts, however, when it comes to installing the trained technicians capable of operating the facility, since the Communist
Party is better at rewarding new construction than health outcomes. The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are
many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai
China and the U.S. - Polar Opposites
I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other. Households save a great deal of their
earnings in China, while it is really easy to borrow money or spend on credit in America. In terms of national policy, China is much more focused
on the supply side of the economy: It suppresses consumption as it favors manufacturers with preferential financing and all manner of policy support.
The United States, meanwhile, is focused on regulating demand, for example, by imposing rent control in expensive cities or mailing out checks
to consumers during the pandemic. Both approaches are running into problems. China won’t become the world’s biggest economy by building more tall bridges. It also can’t continue manufacturing more than twice the number of cars it sells at home. And the United States is starting to realize the problems of being too focused on the demand side of the economy. When the federal government offers, for example, rental support in housing-scarce cities, landlords can raise their prices, leaving renters no better off. When it increases financial aid for spiraling college tuition costs, universities are able to eat part of that by raising their tuition. Under banners like “abundance agenda,” “supply side progressivism,” and “progress studies,” various movements are trying to loosen American supply constraints. These are excellent ideas that I hope will be broadly adopted.
When I look at the United States, I marvel both at how much it did build before 1970 as well as how little it constructed afterward. China spent 13.5
percent of its GDP on infrastructure investment in 2016, whereas the US average over the past three decades is closer to 3 percent each year. Could
not the two countries just move a few percentage points closer to each other?
That’s another way that the US and Chinese political systems are inversions of each other. In the United States, the political drama is around
legislative processes and Supreme Court rulings; implementation of policy is quickly forgotten as political attention moves to the next big issue. In
China, the policymaking process is conducted significantly in secret, then its outcome is dumped on the people.
Chinese and US Dependency
The economic partnership between the United States and China made many groups better off. But it also exacerbated the problems inherent in the
economic systems in both countries. 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.
Chinese Overbuilding
China’s overbuilding has produced deep social, financial, and environmental costs. The United States has no need to emulate it uncritically. But the Chinese experience does offer political lessons for America. China has shown that financial constraints are less binding than they are cracked up to be. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” For an infrastructure-starved place like the United States, construction can generate long-run gains from higher economic activity that eventually surpass the immediate construction costs. And the experience of building big in underserved places is a means of redistribution that makes locals happy while satisfying fiscal conservatives who are normally skeptical of welfare payments
Chinese Manufacturing - A Strategy
In 2017, TikTok was gaining traction, and China looked like it might be strong on AI and maybe dominate Bitcoin too, given that most of the world’s mining servers were there. A few years later Xi Jinping kneecapped most of China’s digital platforms. Xi prefers his industry heavy and his output hard. He scorned the virtual economy, denouncing the “barbaric growth” of capital and focusing instead on industrial developments. That meant throwing everything into manufacturing. Though it remains several steps behind the West in a few critical industries, especially semiconductors and aviation, Chinese manufacturing has caught up in most other fields.
Andrew Batson, research director at Gavekal Dragonomics, came upon a 2024 boast from the minister of industry and information technology that China has a “comprehensive” industrial chain, since it produces something in each of the 419 industrial product categories maintained by the United Nations to classify industrial production. It’s a very Chinese sort of boast. Batson has furthermore detected a shift in Xi’s rhetoric on manufacturing. Previous Chinese leaders have talked about the importance of upgrading industry, which sometimes means limiting investment into labor-intensive or highly polluting sectors that China no longer needs. Xi has declared that China targets completionism, which means that not even “low-end industries” should move out of China. Rather than follow economic logic, in which production gravitates toward countries with lower labor costs—which the United States and other high-income countries have more or less accepted—Xi does not want industry to keep shifting around
Chinese Energy Strategy
China leads the world in deploying ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines, high-speed rail, and 5G networks. Chinese manufacturers make machine
tools—die-casting machines, steel presses, robotic arms—that approach German and Japanese levels of quality. They’ve muscled out most other
Asian competitors on consumer electronics. Phone makers like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi tapped into the worker and component ecosystem
that Apple helped to build. In 2025, the world’s largest phone makers are Apple, Samsung, and a half dozen Chinese firms that concentrate on sales
to developing countries
China leads the world in deploying ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines, high-speed rail, and 5G networks. Chinese manufacturers make machine
tools—die-casting machines, steel presses, robotic arms—that approach German and Japanese levels of quality. They’ve muscled out most other
Asian competitors on consumer electronics. Phone makers like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi tapped into the worker and component ecosystem
that Apple helped to build. In 2025, the world’s largest phone makers are Apple, Samsung, and a half dozen Chinese firms that concentrate on sales
to developing countries
China and Apple
According to Apple’s most recent supplier report (released in 2023), 156 of its top 200 suppliers have manufacturing sites in China. Seventy-two of them are in Shenzhen’s province of Guangdong, which is as many as there are in the United States, Vietnam, and India combined
A Woman in China
It’s hard to be a woman in China today. Many of them did not survive the one-child policy: There are approximately forty million more Chinese
men than women. Though the country has plenty of successful female entrepreneurs and billionaires, Xi has shoved women out of the top echelon
of the Chinese government. His primary message is that women must become docile promoters of family harmony, which means bearing more
children. That theme is also being echoed by the rest of society. Rather than being joyful, Lunar New Year is an irksome time for younger Chinese
women. They must face dozens of relatives, from whom they expect only one question: “When will you marry?” to the single woman, and “When
will you have kids?” to the married.
Even if a woman is married, state media is unkind. A Xinhua news editorial urged women not to make a fuss if they discover marital infidelity:
“When you find out that he is having an affair, you may be in a towering rage. But you must know that if you make a fuss, you are denying the man
‘face.’ Try changing your hairstyle or your fashion.” The Women’s Federation is often the amplifier of these messages. Since it is the state’s
designated organization on women’s issues, it is often in the position of enforcing state policies. One former employee of the Women’s Federation
told the Wall Street Journal that her office in Guangzhou spends more of its budget to give to social media companies to censor gender-related topics
than on women’s advocacy.
A Man in China
Rather than being totally fixated on women, the engineering state is now also thinking about men. State media has started to fret about leftover
men too. The tens of millions of Chinese men who will never be able to find wives may become a threat to public safety, who could, in the words of one
university researcher, “be driven to kidnap women or become addicted to pornography.” Men have also taken to social media to complain that it’s
getting too difficult to obtain a vasectomy. Some hospitals turn men away from vasectomy unless they can prove they already have children. National
health yearbooks reveal a breathtaking collapse in vasectomies performed in China. They fell from 181,000 in 2014 (the start of Xi’s rule) to fewer
than 5,000 in 2019. In the new era, men are getting a taste of birth planning too
Chinese Surveillance of the Population
Government drones descended throughout the city. Since the start of the pandemic, the state had dispatched megaphone-equipped drones to nag the
uncompliant. A person walking without a mask might hear a whirring craft above his head, from which a distorted, barking voice would yell at him to
mask up or return home. A Shanghai neighborhood official outlined what would happen if a drone came upon an illegal gathering of people: “The
drone will try to dissuade,” in other words, berate them, “and ground forces will be linked in real time.” An even more bewildering use of drones took place in the early days of the Shanghai lockdown. The city’s top mental health official introduced an unexpectedly sparky phrase in an otherwise drab press conference on the course of the virus, demanding that Shanghainese “repress your soul’s yearning for freedom.” Social media users immediately began to make fun of the phrase by putting it into memes. People weren’t used to poetry from bureaucrats. One night in April, as the lockdown swung into high gear, a drone carrying a megaphone began blasting that message into apartments full of huddling residents: “Repress your soul’s yearning for freedom,” with a woman’s voice played on loop while a light blinked from the drone. “Do not open your windows to sing, which can spread the virus.”
The phrase stopped being amusing.
Zero Covid in China
People had to report for Covid testing nearly every day, sometimes twice a day. A medical team would enter an apartment compound and summon everyone downstairs, either on WeChat or with a bullhorn. Anyone who didn’t come down would receive a buzz on the downstairs gate; if that didn’t work, they would hear a knock on their door. It was absurd that elderly people—some of whom rarely left their apartments without a pandemic—were squeezed into elevators with neighbors. It’s impossible for anyone to be certain how exactly they caught the virus. Perhaps omicron was so transmissible that people caught it through the plumbing or ventilation systems that connect people in Shanghai’s apartments. Perhaps it spread through food deliveries. Most people believe they caught it through the daily testing regime: from a neighbor while they were waiting in line. Every so often, a story popped up that the medical worker swabbing everyone’s throats had the virus himself, which at least contaminated your sample and perhaps infected you. Despite exacting measures, the number of new confirmed cases kept rising for four weeks until the end of the lockdown.
Digital technologies gave the engineering state a tool it did not have when enforcing the one-child policy. Implementing zero-Covid was a
technologically intensive affair that used mobile networks to track people’s movements, sometimes aided by facial recognition technologies and other
forms of digital surveillance enabled by the mobile devices that nearly everyone carried. Sometimes, China’s digital platforms introduced helpful interfaces, for example, when mapping services made it easier for people to find fever clinics nearby. Sometimes, they were enlisted to control the movements of people. To access the showers at Shanghai University, students had to display a code on their phones, which was green for five and a half hours every two days. A sociology student marveled at her experience to a Shanghai newspaper: “It’s such a strange feeling: the idea that all our daily activities—what we eat, or when we can take a shower—are included in the authorities’ plan.” The state attempted to reduce movement throughout society. Since Chinese university campuses were already self-enclosed areas, often far from urban zones—and since college students are meant to spend all their time studying anyway—officials simply decided to lock them in. During lockdowns, students struggled to stay sane in their dorm
rooms, which might have four people bunking together
Immigration from China
Hard numbers are difficult to work out, but one UK-based emigration firm estimated that nearly 14,000 millionaires emigrated from China in 2023 and over 15,000 in 2024. Parts of the United States popular with Chinese, like Irvine, California, have seen a surge in new homebuyers. Both the United States and Canada have reported a doubling in the number of Chinese migrants who have obtained permanent residence after making a large investment (which could mean buying property): from 2,000 to 4,000 in Canada between 2019 and 2023, and from 3,900 to 7,500 in the United States between 2019 and 2024. Less fortunate Chinese take a different path to the United States: through a grueling trek across the southwest border. US border officials have apprehended rising numbers of Chinese nationals: from 450 in 2021 rocketing to 38,000 in 2024. The flow diminished in the second half of 2024 due to tighter border enforcement. But still there have been more than a thousand Chinese nationals attempting to cross the border on foot each month for two years. Many have flown to Ecuador (which did not demand a visa from Chinese nationals until July 2024) and then have taken the perilous road through the Darién Gap
That is one of the defining characteristics of the engineering state. The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who
douse blazes they themselves ignited. China’s national effort contained the spread of Covid, for a while, after Wuhan officials did nothing to prevent it.
Decades earlier, the engineering state overreacted to its population growth with the one-child policy. Economic confidence wouldn’t be so fragile if it
weren’t for regulatory thunderclaps emerging from Beijing. Here is where the lawyerly society shines. We don’t have to worry about
the US government imposing the one-child policy or zero-Covid, because it would never with the former and could never with the latter. The United
States also wouldn’t have caged so many of its tech companies. Lawyers, as I wrote in my introduction, are excellent servants of the rich. Chinese tech
founders (and their investors) are indeed very rich. Given the absence of lawyers and a political culture sympathetic to rights, they could find no
protection
I returned to China only once after the dissolution of zero-Covid. At the end of 2024, the country felt more fortresslike than before the pandemic.
Shanghai is strangely muted, restaurants substantially less full, the shopping districts lacking vitality. Consumers clearly have less spending power.
People have felt profound economic uncertainty after the economy failed to pick back up following the end of Covid controls in 2022. It’s not
encouraging for the future of Chinese and American relations that there are only about a thousand American students studying in China. Just before the
pandemic, there were ten times that many.
Chinese Economy and Commitment to Engineering
China’s economy is faltering while the central government becomes more repressive. It is facing more problems around debt, hostile diplomatic
relations with the West, and demographic decline, which was a problem even before many attempted to emigrate. All of this is exacerbated by an
unpredictable political factor: Aging autocrats easily get cranky, which is a problem since Xi is likely to stay in office into his eighties.
The engineering state still has many strengths. There is one thing I haven’t changed my mind about since 2017: I remain more confident than
ever that China will become a technological leader in manufacturing industries.
My view is that Xi will not achieve his bigger gambit, which is to propel China to displace the United States as the world’s preeminent nation,
measured not only by economic size but also diplomatic influence, cultural output, and national prestige. The control neurosis of the engineers is the
fundamental limit to China’s power. But it will also push China to be an advanced manufacturer with dominant positions in many of the high-tech
supply chains of the twenty-first century, with military capacity to match and a good chance to challenge US hegemony in Asia.
The control neurosis of engineers is also an obstacle to another characteristic of a great power: a global currency. The US dollar is overwhelmingly the world’s dominant currency, while China’s renminbi accounts for 3 percent of global payments. That share has barely grown
over a decade. Beijing has imposed a stiff system of capital controls to prevent money from easily moving out, which promises greater stability for
the country’s highly leveraged financial system. These are exactly the sorts of restrictions that are anathema to global financial institutions. So long as
Beijing insists on capital controls, there’s a ceiling on how much the rest of the world will want its currency
Chinese Energy Security
China takes energy security seriously. The enormous effort it has made to build low-carbon capacity—solar, wind, and nuclear—has to be
understood as part of a broader motivation to make the country dependent on energy sources within its borders. Beijing is trying to mitigate the pain if
it ever loses access to sea-lanes that deliver its oil. That is also why, in 2023, China added twenty times more coal-burning capacity than the rest of
the world put together. It is serious about addressing issues in climate change, yes. But Beijing is not turning its back on its rich coal reserves.
That also explains why China is so enthusiastic about electrifying the auto fleet: It would rather burn domestic coal than Middle East oil to power its
cars
China and Food Security
China takes food security seriously as well. Xi Jinping has been known to stand in the middle of a field of wheat while offering a folksy remark: for
example, “The bowls of the Chinese people should be filled mostly with Chinese grain.” The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have made
Beijing more conscious of food self-sufficiency. Chinese leaders have always been aware that food shortages have toppled imperial dynasties. And
so one of the things that provincial governors are graded on is whether they are self-sufficient in rice and wheat, while mayors of major cities have to
make sure that a variety of foods are grown locally. Mayors are graded on the amount of land they dedicate to vegetables and on ensuring that grocery
markets are within walking distance for most residents, that there are no food safety scandals, and that prices are stable.
China Buying Back Scientists
Since 2020, high-profile scientists of Chinese descent have left the United States, pulled as much by China’s generous offers of research funds as they
were pushed by the Trump administration’s investigations of research impropriety. Fewer than 1,000 scientists of Chinese descent moved from the
United States to China in 2010; more than 2,500 did in 2021. A wave of positive media in China has greeted the biologists or mathematicians that
move from an elite American university to China. Xi probably doesn’t mind trading disgruntled youths for senior scientists
Modern China is nowhere near as extreme as the police states run by Stalin or Hitler. How is it that science can coexist with autocracy? Mostly, I
believe, because the precondition for science is that abundant funds are far more critical to science than free speech, and that is something dictators can deliver.
Perversely, repression might encourage scientists to throw themselves still further into their work rather than paying attention to the rest of the
world falling apart around them. I don’t believe that autocracy is good for science, only that it doesn’t guarantee its destruction. China has gotten
plenty far on industrial advances—solar power, electric vehicles, robotic arms—in an atmosphere of worsening political repression. Now Xi is
shoveling money toward scientists. I’ve interviewed over two dozen scientists in China, most of whom were trained in the United States, who
have told me that it’s easier to receive funding in Chinese universities than in American universities. Their money comes without many strings
attached, whereas a grant application to the National Science Foundation demands fastidiousness on formatting, endless reporting requirements, and
the threat of jail if they don’t make a proper disclosure.
In the United States, physics and mathematics PhDs hardly have a chance to consider working in their field before a tech giant or hedge fund
picks them up at the sidelines of a conference, flashes them with a humongous pay package, and folds these eager minds into their glamorous
embrace. Senior government advisers have more or less stated that Beijing intends to block these temptations. Yao Yang, a dean at Peking University,
has remarked with satisfaction that salaries have fallen in the financial industry after regulators imposed a salary cap of $400,000 on the financial
sector. Its idea, Yao said, is “to reduce the attractiveness of finance and to increase the development of manufacturing.
Chinese Tech and AI
Though Chinese firms labor under political restrictions from Beijing and chip restrictions from Washington, DC, they have delivered breakthroughs. DeepSeek, made by a Hangzhou-based company, is one of a handful of frontier AI models, with costs that are a fraction of those demanded by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Chinese AI researchers haven’t been laggards. They publish a great number of papers on AI, and its companies have released models that score highly on technical benchmarks. Furthermore, the state is deploying AI, but more for the purposes of censorship, facial recognition, and other means of control.
China has advantages it can bring to bear in artificial intelligence. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that American companies are not so much
constrained on computing power as they are on electrical power. AI data servers are so energy hungry that Microsoft has attempted to restart the
infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and Meta was about to build a data center (running also on nuclear power) until it was halted by the
discovery of a rare species of bee near that site. Well, nothing thrills the engineering state like gigantic investments in energy production for
industry. What China lacks in technological sophistication, it might make up for in electrical power
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. And AI shouldn’t distract us from broader American deficiencies. I do not think that outright war between the United States and China is certain to happen. But each side is closely studying the other’s military strengths and weaknesses in anticipation of conflict. If it does come to pass, it would be an apocalyptic scenario for the world. War might erupt in the Pacific or elsewhere. As relations between the United States and China become more hostile, the chances of conflict grow. The United States is facing a peer competitor that has four times its population, an economy with considerable dynamic potential, and a manufacturing sector that can substantially outproduce itself and its allies. If China and the United States ever come to blows, they would be entering a conflagration with different strengths. Which would you rather have: software or hardware? The quantitative disparities between the United States and China are
stark. In 2022, China had nearly 1,800 ships under construction, and the United States had 5. US support of Ukraine against Russian aggression also
exposed the paltry state of its domestic munition capacity. In two days, Ukraine could fire as many shells as the United States makes in a month. At
the very end of the Biden administration, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said bluntly that the United States will experience “exhaustion of
munition stockpiles very rapidly” if it were ever to face the Chinese military
The Great Battle for Supremacy
THE ULTIMATE CONTEST BETWEEN China and the United States will not be decided by which country has the biggest factory or the highest corporate
valuation. This contest will be won by the country that works best for the people living in it. The United States has deep and enduring advantages
over China. But the engineering state has a powerful card to play: It can harness physical dynamism. China has greater manufacturing capabilities,
more sophisticated physical infrastructure, a more robust defense industrial base, and more abundant housing. 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. Prosperous places with substantial job creation—especially New York, San Francisco, and Boston—have perversely done the most to block new housing. Overall, half of American renters are considered cost-burdened (meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their pretax income on rent), and many people who would like to buy a first home cannot afford one. The lack of building new homes has locked people out of cities with good jobs. It is increasing segregation by class and race. And the United States will be stronger if it can provide better infrastructure. Though New York has mass transit, most of it was built a century ago, such that entering a subway station in Manhattan feels too often like descending into a rotting pit, where one stands amid trash and worrisome leaks, until a deafening metallic screech announces the train. It’s not that the city doesn’t spend enough on these problems: New York has the honor of hosting five of the six most expensive transit projects in the world. It costs five times as much to build a kilometer of subway in New York City as it does in Paris. If it only cost twice as much, it might be a national tragedy; since it costs five times as much, it is only a statistic. There’s no reason that much older European cities should be able to build more cheaply than New York. And the people in charge don’t seem to be able to do anything about it.
Pluses and Minuses for China
Beijing has been taking the future dead seriously for the past four decades. That is why China will not outcompete the United States. The engineering state has delivered great things. But the Communist Party is made up of too many leaders who distrust their own people and have little idea how to appeal to the rest of the world. They will continue to bring literal-minded solutions for their problems, attempting to engineer away their challenges, leaving the situation worse than they found it. Beijing will never be able to draw on the best feature of the United States: Embracing pluralism and individual rights. The Communist Party is too afraid of the Chinese people to give them real agency. Beijing will not recognize that the creatives and entrepreneurs it is chasing into exile are not the enemy. It will not accept that their creative energy could bring as much prestige to China as great public works.
Why the US Could be in Trouble
What the United States presently lacks is the urgency to make the hard choices to build. Americans have to trust that society can flourish without
empowering lawyers to micromanage everything. The United States should embrace its transformational urge. I hope one day that America can declare
itself to be a developing country too. It can demonstrate that the country is able to reform itself, get unstuck from the status quo, and ultimately unlock
as much as possible of human potential. “Developing” is a term to embrace with pride
More Bio on Dan Wang
Wang is renowned for his annual "Letter from China," which has appeared in outlets like The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Opinion, and The Atlantic. His writing often blends economic analysis, philosophy, and on-the-ground reporting to explore China's tech landscape and its global implications.Summary and Key ThemesIn Breakneck, Wang offers a firsthand, immersive account of China's rapid technological and infrastructural transformation, drawing from his years living in the country during events like the COVID-19 lockdowns. The book argues that the U.S.-China rivalry of the 21st century boils down to a clash between two societal archetypes: America's "lawyerly society"—obsessed with litigation, regulation, and individual rights, which excels at obstruction but stalls progress—and China's "engineering state," driven by technocrats who prioritize megaprojects, construction, and collective outcomes, often at the expense of personal freedoms.Wang structures the narrative around seven "annual letters" from China, blending political economy, philosophy, and vivid reportage. He traverses cities like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen to showcase China's dazzling infrastructure (e.g., high-speed rail networks, urban megastructures) and optimistic ethos, while critiquing its flaws: over-rational governance leading to absurd policies (like prolonged lockdowns), censorship of unengineerable complexities, and a lack of cultural soft power. Wang posits that each nation holds lessons for the other—China could benefit from embracing liberties to foster creativity, while the U.S. needs to rediscover engineering ambition to deliver broad-based prosperity.The book avoids outdated Cold War binaries (e.g., socialism vs. democracy) and instead emphasizes shared human restlessness: both countries are "eager for shortcuts" and engines of global change. It's praised for its provocative yet balanced lens—Evan Osnos calls it a mind "half on philosophy, half on engineering"—though some critics note it occasionally oversimplifies (e.g., reducing geopolitics to lawyers vs. engineers).2025 Updates and ReceptionPublished in August 2025, Breakneck arrived amid escalating U.S.-China tensions over tech decoupling and trade. As of November 2025, there are no formal "author updates" or revised editions announced—Wang's primary post-publication engagement has been through interviews, podcasts, and his newsletter. However, the book's timeliness has amplified its impact:
Media Buzz: In September 2025, Tyler Cowen highlighted it in The Free Press as a must-read for understanding U.S. stagnation versus Chinese dynamism. Noah Smith (Noahpinion blog) recommended it as a companion to Abundance and Why Nothing Works, praising its alignment with debates on innovation policy.
Reviews and Excerpts: Marginal Revolution (July 2025) called it "a great book" for its economic insights. Goodreads users (average rating ~4.2/5 as of late 2025) appreciate its accessible storytelling but debate its "New Hammer" thesis (i.e., over-relying on the engineer-lawyer dichotomy).
Author Activity: Wang has discussed the book in outlets like The Atlantic and on platforms such as his Substack (danwang.co), where he teases related essays on topics like "whalelore," Austrian Catholicism, and China's influencer economy. No major revisions are planned, but Wang continues his annual letters, with the 2025 edition expected soon.
Where to Buy or Read
Purchase: Available on Amazon (hardcover ~$28), Penguin (UK edition), or W.W. Norton.
Excerpts/Samples: Free previews on Amazon or Wang's site danwang.co/breakneck.
Audiobook/eBook: Widely available via Audible, Kindle, etc.
If you're looking for a specific excerpt, interview, or deeper dive into a chapter, let me know for more tailored info!