Breakneck review by Josh

Breakneck is an an excellent introduction to and survey of Chinese and American efforts to shape the future in the early 21st century.

In the first chapter, Wang contrasts China - a nation of Engineers - with America - a nation of lawyers. He points out that engineers like building stuff while lawyers are often more focused on blocking things from being built.

There's no denying the results. Economic Historians describe the "great divergence" - from the late 1700s to mid 20th century, in which Europe (along with the U.S., Japan, and and handful of other countries) shot ahead of the rest of the world economically. The last half century or so has seen a great convergence, with China compressing economic development that took hundreds of years in the West into a few decades.

Indeed, in some areas we now seem to be seeing a new great divergence as China pulls further ahead of the U.S. in infrastructure. The U.S. seems almost pathologically incapable of completing large scale physical engineering projects. Consider high speed rail: In 2008 the U.S. had barely over 100 km of high speed rail, and China had about the same amount. But both the Chinese and American governments announced big plans to develop high speed rail in their countries in that year. Eighteen years later China has built approximately 50,000 km of high speed modern track connecting the entire country. In the same period the U.S. has not managed to add a single kilometer of operating track. In the same period China has shot past the U.S. in areas like renewable energy installed capacity and electric vehicle production.

Chinese civil engineering projects tend to be completed about 10x as fast as in the U.S. and at 1/10th the cost. Wang notes that the U.S. spends just ~3% on infrastructure vs. ~13% in China and suggests that the U.S. must spend more. But given how inefficiently the money seems to be spent it's no wonder we're hesitant to spend more. The massive cost and delivery time differentials mean that far more work is economically viable in China than in the U.S. Incidentally, the Trump administration's policies seem likely to make this worse as tariffs raise the cost of materials and deportations take a significant bite out of the construction industry labor force.

I was a bit confused at first by Chapter 4 - on the one child policy. The policy is no longer in force and it seemed removed from the earlier focus on construction and infrastructure. But, I think it makes sense in the context of Wang's emphasis on China as a society of engineers. In Wang's view, the one child policy represented the 'engineering state' at its most literally invasive - asserting the right to go all the way into women's wombs if that was what it took to build utopia.

Most people would like to live in a society with both high speed rail but without mandatory abortions. I think it would be nice to have a functional health care system AND robust free speech protection. Personal safety AND extensive legal protections for civil liberties. In recent years the CCP and the American (and even more the Israeli) techno-right (e.g. Palantir) have insisted that this is impossible, and China proves it.

Wang, along with most sane observers, rejects this view. In Chapter 4 on One child and 5 on 'Zero Covid' he points out that in both of these cases, state overreach was probably economically counterproductive as well as violating civil liberties. Both are examples of the style of top-down central planning that China has largely moved away from in the economic sphere with Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms.

Curiously, while Wang regularly contrasts China with the U.S. he makes almost no mention of India - a country that China is in some ways closer to than the U.S. India was also extremely poor and in 1980 and has seen rapid economic growth - just not quite as rapid as China. India seems like a curious blend of lawyers and engineers, with the growth limiting Gandhian philosophy of Swadeshi casting a long shadow over both groups.

Any attempt to understand societies as diverse as the U.S., China, or India through binary generalizations has its explanatory limits. The U.S. has always been a society with a lot of lawyers, but it has only recently become incapable of building things. The problematic Chinese policies Wang highlights (One Child and Zero Covid) might also be described as products of bad engineering. Wang suggests the influence of hydrological engineering in CCP thought - they treat the mass of the population like water that can be redirected as they state sees fit.

Overall I thought this book was very good. If you're only going to read one book on contemporary China, I found more deep insights in The Rise and Fall of the East by Yasheng Huang. Wang's book is a far lighter read though, so perhaps better if you want something to take to the beach.