If you want to understand China and its distinctive relationship to the United States, then framing it as communism vs capitalism isn’t helpful, argues Dan Wang. Instead, think of the differences between lawyers and engineers.
“China is an engineering state, building at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good or bad.” This isn’t theoretical. Xi Jinping is a chemical engineer by training. His predecessor, Hu Jintao, was a hydropower engineer. Jiang Zemin before him was an electrical engineer. The top echelons of the communist party are similarly stacked with engineers. Meanwhile in America, half of congress has a law degree.
Taking this “intuitive” framework, the book explains how China has a technocratic state that’s great at building things, while America’s lawyerly elites specialise in obstructing things. It’s a similar conclusion to the one reached in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, but while that book focuses on the United States, Breakneck turns its attention to China.
Dan Wang is a useful guide to modern China. He’s Canadian analyst and scholar who has lived and reported from the country for years, and whose parents emigrated from China. The book is full of details about living in China, the quality of its infrastructure, the character of its cities and the restrictions of its politics. It combines the personal and the political, and it’s balanced in its approach – though a line about how “the trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is perhaps 60% correct on everything” will probably burn any remaining bridges.
The book takes the form of a series of long essays, each one dealing with a particular aspect of China’s engineering state. There are things to admire here, such as the way the country has built renewable energy, high speed rail or electric vehicles at a pace nowhere else in the world comes close to. On the other hand, the things that make them good at physical construction often work against human rights and freedom. China approaches its people with the same mindset, resulting in massive social engineering projects. The best known is the one child policy, which gets a chapter here. Its zero covid policy gets another, something the author saw first hand.
Wang argues that if American and Chinese citizens understand each other better, they’ll be more likely to “stay out of trouble”. They can also learn from each other. “I hope that China learns to value pluralism while embracing substantive legal protections for individuals and the United States recovers the capability to build for its people.”
I appreciated Breakneck. It’s engaging and curious, well informed and well written. Its central premise might not explain everything about China and the United States, but it’s a useful way of thinking about the differences. In setting out the advantages and the shortcomings of an engineering state, Breakneck offers some useful clues to China’s future as a global power.
- Breakneck is out next week and you can pre-order it from Earthbound Books.
The Earthbound Report 
What chinese and american citizens share is despise of state and government.
Meritocracy and technocracy are common all over the world since always. Certain qualities were always a need in order to be close to power.
I read Breakneck and found it interesting, but it felt narrow — mainly China vs. the U.S. By coincidence, Mining Is Dead. Long Live Geopolitical Mining was released the very same day, and reading them in parallel was a revelation. While Breakneck frames China as an “engineering state,” Mining Is Dead goes much further — from supply chains to legitimacy to global power struggles. It’s the broader book I had hoped Breakneck would be.