Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

Wang presents an interesting analysis of the strengths/weaknesses of the Chinese society, dominated by an engineering mentality, with the US society, dominated by a lawyerly mentality. It is outside my general wheelhouse, so I can't comment on whether his analysis has overlooked things, but I can say that I learned a great deal. Specifically, I was not aware of the role of building/manufacturing in the incredible growth of the Chinese economy at a time when the US was switching to think about services, not building. There are big implications for the two countries preparedness for future crises. There are also major challenges to individual liberty in a society that can mobilize/relocate/destroy whole communities overnight to serve its show more larger goals. show less

This is a very interesting read. Wang has spent time living in Canada, the US, and China, so he has a lot of perspective on the differences between the US and China. Wang's main premise is that China is an engineering state, and the US is a lawyer state. Most of China's political leaders have engineering degrees, while most US politicians have law degrees. This means that China is incredibly good at building things, often at the titular breakneck speed, but in the process, they can trample on human rights. They tend to forget that humans aren't like machines that can just be made to do what the state needs. Wang goes into great detail about the One Child Policy and the Zero Covid Policy - these are both policies based entirely on show more engineering/scientific decisions (sometimes wildly misguided), and the government's implementation of them drastically ignored the difficulties of forcing humans to do things they don't want, and the sociological impacts of those policies.

The US, on the other hand, is run by lawyers. This usually means a better human rights record, but it also means that every single little thing we try to do gets mired down in lengthy processes, to the point that it is often difficult for the government to accomplish anything at all.

This book was just published a year ago, but the discussions about the US are already wildly out of date. I think Wang would write very differently about the US's potential future on the global stage now that Trump has sabotaged all diplomacy, all of the world's goodwill, and is in the process of killing the global economy thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

I think Wang overlooks or downplays a lot of bad aspects of the lawyer society: he never addresses the fact that lawyers are very expensive, and therefore tend to serve the interests of the wealthy. He also doesn't address the major income inequality in the US, and what that is going to do to the US's future.

Although Wang has a lot of praise for China's manufacturing prowess, and argues that the US needs to step up it's own manufacturing abilities, he is overall quite critical of China and much less critical of the US.

This is definitely an interesting and perhaps important book to read right now as the global balance of power is shifting away from the US. It will be interesting to see how long it is actually relevant. show less

This book by Dan Wang covers the economic and political implications of present and future competition between China and the United States and it will shape the world to come. Everyday in the news we are well aware of how this affects us all good and bad.

Wang educated in the United States gives his perspective having lived in China and gone back after his family emigrated to Canada and later the United States. He takes us through a number of the provinces and how the Chinese live under a strangely Communist government that rules over a production based economy that competes vigorously on a world stage.

He describes the United States that had developed from a production oriented economy to a lawyeristic orientation that has gradually show more allowed us to fall behind in what was once our worldwide domain. He believes we can regain our position through a tempering of the far left and right political influences to focus on getting back to what made us great on our way up. show less

Amazon October 2025