‘Breakneck’ Is Nice on China however Mild on America

If anywhere can steal the limelight from the Trump present for a second, it’s China. The Folks’s Republic of China, ruled by a party-state beneath the Chinese language Communist Celebration (CCP), is often portrayed as an antagonist of america—a strategic competitor, rival, adversary, enemy. For some, this juxtaposition harkens again to the times of the Chilly Struggle. However in 2025, China is as a lot related to manufacturing and exports as it’s with communism. The U.S. and Chinese language economies have turn into deeply depending on one another.

Many argue that this interdependence is harmful and that america wants to alter with the intention to reply to China’s threatening nature. However typically China is a mirror of america. On Ezra Klein’s podcast, Tom Friedman explicitly acknowledged that each time he wrote about China, he was actually writing about america. Klein himself has operated on this register.

In Klein’s bestselling ebook Abundance (co-written with Derek Thompson), which is about america’ incapacity to construct, there’s a small sliver touting China’s skill to construct with hints of jealousy and frustration. But there’s little or no in Abundance that truly grapples with the Chinese language manner of governance, whether or not which means corrupt officers or the speedy building of high-speed rail.

A lot of the advertising and marketing for Dan Wang’s Breakneck portrays the ebook as filling this lacuna. He even participated within the Abundance 2025 convention. As a gross sales pitch, it’s fairly compelling, as is the ebook’s tagline: “China is an engineering state; America is a lawyerly society.” The best model of its thesis is that China builds as a result of it’s led by engineers who attempt to break down issues into easy, quantitative packing containers after which clear up them, piece by piece. Whereas China does construct, it additionally destroys. Folks, with all their hopes, desires, and creativity, don’t do properly in easy packing containers, and typically they get smashed by the engineers’ plans. The US’ lack of constructing is blamed on its lawyerliness—an excessive amount of crimson tape getting in the best way of American dynamism.

In some ways, this framing undersells what Wang is doing. Reality be informed, the ebook comprises little or no about america, and so whereas one might dwell on the thinness of its arguments associated to the political dilemmas which have precipitated American building and infrastructural stagnation, they’re irrelevant.

Then again, there’s nice worth in what Wang has accomplished with Breakneck: He’s crafted an approachable, well-written narrative that grapples with what China is admittedly like for an American viewers. The truth that doing so requires framing China as a foil for america speaks extra to an issue with the viewers than the writer.

A scene at the beginning of the ebook’s second chapter crystallizes its worth. Wang is on an epic multiday biking journey in Guizhou with two companions all of whom took their bicycles on the high-speed rail from Shanghai to Guiyang, the place they stumbled upon streetlamps with guitar-shaped ornaments hanging off them. Unbeknownst to them, that they had entered Zheng’an county, a world middle of guitar manufacturing.

As Wang describes, a number of the county’s residents went to the coastal industrial hub of Guangdong for work within the Nineteen Nineties and located employment making guitars by likelihood, together with Zheng Chuanjiu. By 2012, the central and native governments have been considering spreading extra industrial manufacturing to China’s inside to cut back regional inequality. After discovering out that the locals had some knowhow in guitar making, this grew to become their focus. Now, the area makes one in seven guitars on the earth, with a variety of totally different corporations comparable to Zheng’s Zunyi Shenqu Musical Devices Manufacturing, Natasha Guitars, and Raysen making guitars for extra established worldwide corporations and more and more aiming to be seen as high quality manufacturers themselves, not simply low cost ones.

This second concretely brings collectively so many alternative elements of China’s growth. These guitars aren’t primarily made for home consumption however for export. The economies of scale and agglomeration come up from the focus of information about this enterprise, which has allowed the corporations on this neighborhood to develop. It demonstrates the ebbs and flows of China’s inner migrants, who go away their comparatively impoverished province to seek out higher alternatives in coastal factories however then return to construct their very own companies, making the most of cheaper property and labor again residence.

Building staff on the Huajiang Canyon Bridge in Anshun, China, on Sept. 4. Qu Honglun/China Information Service/VCG through Getty Photos

The chapter’s title, “Constructing Huge,” is properly mirrored in descriptions of the size of China’s infrastructure spending, each by the rail journey to Guizhou and the towering bridges that the three traverse to achieve Zheng’an on their approach to Chongqing. It’s a deft feat of writing in a ebook stuffed with such dense snippets that cement particular locations and narratives, which have been beforehand mere abstractions or fully unknown, within the reader’s thoughts. Guizhou will likely be remembered for issues apart from its world-beating Lao Gan Ma chili sauce.

The subsequent chapter, “Tech Energy,” builds on these insights. It dives deep into Shenzhen, the particular financial zone subsequent to Hong Kong that famously remodeled from a fishing village into the worldwide locus of {hardware} innovation. In 2025, the parable that China merely steals mental property reasonably than producing authentic innovations and improvements has dissipated however not disappeared from the discourse.

Wang evaporates any remaining misconceptions. He distinguishes between three kinds of applied sciences. First are instruments, gadgets that enable folks to control the world round them. Second are express directions, what the Greeks referred to as techne—specific concepts that may be written down and legibly understood at a distance. Third is course of data, akin to the Greek metis, which is “proficiency gained from sensible expertise, which isn’t simply communicated.” Wang argues that it’s this third class the place China has actually excelled and america has floundered.

The lots of of billions of {dollars} which have been thrown on the manufacturing of smartphones have funded the event of communities buzzing with data and capability. China has constructed huge and turn into a tech energy by investments, in bodily infrastructure and in training—each formal education and on-the-job technical coaching. College funding, enrollments, and specialised levels throughout the spectrum have expanded tremendously because the Nineteen Nineties, producing large returns. These investments have unlocked the financial potential of China’s big inhabitants to such an extent that it has remade the world’s economic system sufficient that an American viewers would possibly learn a ebook about China.

A manufacturing line of business robots in Foshan, China, on March 25.Deng Hua/Xinhua through Getty Photos

But the successes of China’s engineering state are coupled with failures rising from the identical mindset. The ebook’s subsequent three chapters element methods through which China’s authorities gone too far down a path of social engineering in ways in which harmed the folks whose lives they have been meant to guard.

The one-child coverage is a widely known supply of struggling in China, however Wang’s portrayal of its inhuman implementation and faulty origins is shifting in its unflinching specificity. Demographics will not be rocket science, however that didn’t maintain missile engineer Track Jian from stepping ahead in 1979 with exact mathematical extrapolations that impressed many within the CCP and led to the one-child coverage.

The “scientific” definitiveness of the numerical coverage led to brutality when applied by Chinese language officers on the bottom within the nation’s myriad of villages, townships, and counties. Pressured abortions, sterilizations, and different abuses grew to become commonplace.

Wang depicts China’s zero-COVID coverage as one thing of a sequel to the one-child coverage: One other coverage formed by supposedly inescapable equations that, when applied, led to harms larger than the unique issues it was meant to unravel. The pandemic originated in Wuhan, and its world unfold has a lot to do with the unwillingness of native officers there to transparently report dangerous information. The success of early lockdowns and short-term suppression of the virus led to excessive, unsuccessful measures when extra transmissible variants emerged in 2021 and unfold even sooner the next 12 months.

Wang and his spouse had been residing in Shanghai in 2022 however fled to Yunnan on the final minute earlier than the cordon sanitaire was lowered round them. Within the mountain retreat of Dali, they discovered a neighborhood of creatives that basked within the comparative freedom of its fellow vacationers. Life in main cities throughout COVID-19 was a relentless routine of nasal screening and ubiquitous surveillance apps on smartphones, however Dali was free from testing.

The preliminary victory in opposition to the virus led to governmental hubris about different thorny issues that Wang depicts properly. He’s significantly appalled by the software program squeeze—restrictions on platforms, cryptocurrencies, and gaming—which finally wiped almost a trillion {dollars} off the valuation of corporations that he had adopted as a tech analyst at a neighborhood financial consultancy.

Many of those inventive elites find yourself leaving the nation, the place Wang finds them in Thailand on the rùn, a Chinese language time period that initially meant “worthwhile” however has had its which means flipped to its English homonym. A major slice of these with means—and customarily with out households—selected to flee the tightening grip of Chinese language President Xi Jinping reasonably than keep beneath his thumb. In its want to regulate, the engineering state meets its limits. Wang sees pervasive restrictions in China as protecting its greatest and brightest from reaching greatness. He contrasts the shortage of Chinese language cultural merchandise with Japanese anime and Korean pop music, attributing their absence to the engineering state’s strictures, together with its give attention to {hardware} over software program.

College students attend a commencement ceremony at Wuhan College in Wuhan, China, on June 20, 2023. AFP through Getty Photos

Breakneck concludes with an anticipated bit of recommendation: that the engineering state might use a extra lawyerly society whereas america’ lawyerly society must inject some engineering-state mojo to get constructing once more. To take action, Wang factors to people working in an precedent days when maybe America was nice.

Wang affords a reappraisal of Robert Moses, arguing that Robert Caro’s The Energy Dealer overweighs Moses’s flaws in contrast together with his successes. He additionally suggests one other midcentury icon: Hyman Rickover, whose domineering methods yielded tangible ends in the nuclear area. However Wang’s fashionable aptitude is clear even right here—the conclusion begins with a dozen pages of household historical past, mixing the ebook’s arguments with the intimacies of memoir to keep away from the standard thinness of conclusions and incapacity to unravel the issues analyzed within the prior 180 pages in only a few paragraphs.

Breakneck is a good learn that brings appreciable issues to the discursive desk. But it rings a number of notes that really feel off-key or at the very least out of tune to the second.

The stress between america and China is cursorily offered and lean on the concept battle or struggle is all however inevitable. Comparative munitions manufacturing receives extra consideration than potential paths of negotiation and compromise between the 2 superpowers. The twists and turns of the U.S.-China relationship make it exhausting to debate in ebook kind—given publication timelines and the speedy shifting of insurance policies—however in presenting a nuanced portrait of China and Chinese language individuals who, as Wang notes, appear so acquainted alongside so many dimensions to america and Individuals, one may think {that a} much less mechanistic portrayal of the worldwide relationship might body the evaluation.

Extra instantly, maybe one might say that the ebook has 2024 vibes. It extols Elon Musk as a optimistic drive pushing in an engineering course reasonably than highlighting his efforts on the Division of Authorities Effectivity to tear out the final vestiges of American state capability. Like Abundance, it blames the lawyerly left for america’ issues reasonably than the actually harmful forces of the anti-science and anti-democratic MAGA proper. The concept that legal guidelines are an issue for america in 2025 is hard to countenance when emergency declarations, unlawful impoundments, and weaponized investigations are now not scary prospects however day by day realities. Trump and Musk haven’t simply been going after enemies—comparable to science, larger training, and state capability—but in addition instantly enriching themselves by blatant corruption.

Maybe most stunning is the ebook’s forward-looking evaluation of China. Wang says it may very well be a extra profitable East Germany, which is an odd place to land given all the fabric specified by the earlier pages and given how a lot bigger and extra important China is. The twenty first century might not positively be China’s, however China is unavoidable regardless.

Whereas filling an immense quantity of area about Chinese language realities for an American viewers, Breakneck’s omissions join it to a special ebook that additionally hyperlinks China and america: Yuen Yuen Ang’s China’s Gilded Age. Ang’s 2020 ebook is a theoretical unspooling of corruption paired with empirical research of China’s current experiences with it, together with discussions of the vital actual property sector, which drove a lot of China’s pre-2020 progress.

Up to date China is juxtaposed with the American gilded age, a interval of corrupt governance consigned to the now comparatively distant previous of 1870-1920. Corruption is often anathema to progress, however Ang exhibits how totally different sorts of corruption distort economies in distinct methods—with China and america in its gilded age tending towards “entry cash,” which she describes as akin to steroids, pushing ahead some elements of financial exercise whereas having nasty unwanted side effects.

Statistics from economists on the U.S. Federal Reserve present the highest 1 p.c holds greater than 30 p.c of wealth in america. Each American and Chinese language societies could be characterised as having excessive ranges of inequality and deep corruption. Chinese language inequality is talked about in Breakneck however principally on the stage of areas—Guizhou is poor whereas Shanghai is wealthy.

However strolling round Shanghai, inequality is so inescapable that it could actually run you over. Whereas Individuals turned to the comfort of residence supply when it was sponsored by the period of zero rates of interest, solely to complain when costs returned to extra pure ranges, meals supply in China has been the norm for a few years. Supply apps are powered by low cost labor, with an unimaginable variety of drivers zipping round to take packages to their extra rich patrons. These drivers hustle by purchasing malls that home lots of the metropolis’s greatest eating places, nonetheless carrying their helmets because the timers tick down within the gig apps that management their lives. This gig-worker tradition isn’t simply in wealthy enclaves like Shanghai; I noticed the identical factor in Ordos, Inside Mongolia, this summer season.

Chinese language and American societies are removed from easy entities with singular identities. They’re fractured and doubtlessly fractious alongside many alternative strains. And, sadly, each governments share a want to cover, reject, or distort actuality reasonably than belief the folks with the reality. As Trump dumps the U.S. authorities’s skill to gather and share information of all types and assaults unbiased financial our bodies just like the Federal Reserve, he’s dismantling sources of belief that underlie the societies through which we reside. It’s deeply worrying that the governments of the world’s two largest states appear extra intent on ensuring that the world offered to their residents is sunny, regardless of the potential of coming storms.