Chinese-Canadian, Technology analyst, Dan Wang, from Stanford University, has been living through China’s astonishing messy progress. China’s towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. Rapid changes also meant pain throughout the Chinese society, controlled by political repression ending in astonishing growth, a feature of China’s engineering mindset.

In Breakneck, Wang, reveals a provocative new framework for understanding China – one that helps us see America more clearly. 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.

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 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. Break neck also reveals how each country points towards 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.

According to Wang, whose parents emigrated to Canada from China, when he was seven, has spent equal time in China and the US, China is run as an engineering state that excels at construction. “To me, these two countries are thrilling, maddening, most of all, deeply bizarre” he writes.   Both countries are bursting with optimistic, pragmatic, can-do hustlers, who often exhibit crass materialism and believe theirs are uniquely powerful nations with special destiny that can force smaller countries into line.  Both countries are also capable of tremendous brutality at home and abroad when they feel threatened. As Wang puts it, there is more glory – and economic advantage- in the factory than in the science lab”. By 2020 all nine members of the Chinese Politburo’s standing committee had trained as engineers while the US which has turned into a “government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers, redefining democracy, as the country’s legal aristocracy prioritises process over outcomes and systematically favours the rich, as the rich becomes richer and poor becomes poorer. From 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee had attended law school.

In 2008, Californian voters approved funding for an 800-mile rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles, while China began constructing on a similar length railway between Beijing and Shanghai. Three years later the Chinese line opened carrying 1.4bn passengers in the first decade of operation at a cost of $36bn. The first segment of the California’s train line may open may be between 2030 and 2033 at an estimated cost of $128bn.

In 1990, there were just half a million cars in China. By 2024 there were 435million, many of them electric. China now has the over capacity to build 60 million cars a year out of a total global market of 90n million cars sold.  China has emerged as a world leader in drones, precision manufacturing, industrial robotics and solar and wind energy and is rapidly deepening its expertise in artificial intelligence, where the US, probably still retains an edge. China has also 31 nuclear power stations under construction, compared with just one in the US.

By 2030, China will account for 45 per cent of the world’s industrial capacity compared with 38 per cent for all the world’s other high-income states, including the US, Europe, and Japan according to the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation. According to Wang 50 per cent of China’s economy may be dysfunctional, 5 per cent performs superbly well with its leading tech companies now challenging the best in the world.

Wang argues that technology is better viewed as the people and process knowledge needed to build manufacturing capacity. Apple may have invented iPhone, but China has manufactured most of their devices, helping to turn Shenzhen into the world’s most innovative electronics hub.

Although the US has often built the ladder towards technological leadership, but China has been the first to climb it. Wang condemns how this same mentality has extended into political and social control. China spends more money countering domestic security threats than potential foreign foes and has detained more than 1 million Muslim Uyghurs to inculcate them with Chinese values. 

Wang writes, “Like Stalin, China’s Communist leaders want to be engineers of the soul”. When a missile scientist called Song Jian took charge of demographic projections leading to the one-child policy from 1980. Wang writes over the 35 years of the one-child policy, 321 million abortions were performed and 108 million women were sterilised. Female infanticide was also common, as boys were deemed more valuable than girls, resulting in a ratio of 120 to 100 births by 1999. Demographers estimate this resulted in 40 million missing women.

In April 2022, China’s belated Covid-19 lockdown, drones buzzed around Shanghai uttering commands to hungry residents huddling in their apartments. “Repress your soul’s yearning for freedom,” a woman’s voice ordered. “Do not open your windows to sing, which can spread the virus.”

Wang  explains “The United States has lost its ability not only to build but also, in part, to govern.  But President Xi Jinping’s self-defeating authoritarianism still gives the US the chance of maintaining its geopolitical and technological hegemony, at least it does not do greater damage to itself. United States and China are both racing to erode their governance capabilities”.

He urges the US to refocus the newly created department of Government Efficiency on slashing bureaucratic, processes rather than personnel, reanimate purposeful government, loosen the dead hand of lawyers and rebuild the country’s engineering muscle.  But for that to happen, the US must accept that it is a developing country that has much to learn from the good aspects of China’s engineering state. Developing is a term to embrace with pride.”

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang, Allen Lane £25, 288 pages