Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
Dan WangResearch fellow, Hoover History Lab, Stanford UniversityChina’s Quest to Engineer the Future
A riveting, firsthand investigation of China’s seismic progress, its human costs, and what it means for America.
For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang―“a gifted observer of contemporary China” (Ross Douthat)―has been living through the country’s astonishing, messy progress. China’s towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality―political repression and astonishing growth―is not a paradox, but rather a feature of China’s engineering mindset.
In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China―one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad.
Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux. Breakneck traverses metropolises like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, where the engineering state has created not only dazzling infrastructure but also a sense of optimism. The book also exposes the downsides of social engineering, including the surveillance of ethnic minorities, political suppression, and the traumas of the one-child policy and zero-Covid.
In an era of animosity and mistrust, Wang unmasks the shocking similarities between the United States and China. Breakneck reveals how each country points toward a better path for the other: Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering―and to produce better outcomes for the many, not just the few.
About Dan Wang
Why is China so good at building while America appears woefully slow? Dan Wang answers that question from firsthand experience. In Breakneck, he contrasts China’s “engineering state” with America’s “lawyerly society” and shows how these opposite approaches have led the two countries down different paths. He has delivered corporate keynotes to UBS, Jane Street, Stripe, Apple and Intel, and has presented to senior American and European government officials.
Wang lived in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai through all three years of the country’s zero-Covid strategy. As a technology analyst, he wrote reports on China’s technology development for an audience that included many of the world’s most prominent endowments and hedge funds. Being one of the few foreigners on the ground helped him see the state’s logic while the rest of the world looked on in bafflement. “There are a lot of signals out there,” he explains, “and it’s worth keeping in mind what’s going on, what the party is saying, and even what the party is saying to itself and the broader world when planning ahead.”
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