Book Review - The (London) Financial Times

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https://www.ft.com/content/261a0eaa-7fb ... d8d9969e72


Breakneck — why China’s engineers beat America’s lawyers
Dan Wang’s compelling and provocative book explores both the merits and the madness of China’s engineering state

John Thornhill - the FT’s innovation editor
Published Aug 15 2025


In April 2022, during China’s belated Covid-19 lockdown, airborne drones buzzed around Shanghai repeatedly blasting 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.”

Such a scene may seem like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, but Shanghai’s 25mn residents had already grown used to drones barking at them to mask up or return home. Little escape was to be had online either as ever-attentive censors quickly expunged all posts and videos from anti-lockdown protesters, who provocatively cited the first line of China’s national anthem: “Arise, you who refuse to be slaves.”

For Dan Wang, a Chinese-Canadian tech analyst who was living in Shanghai at the time, this striking fusion of technological prowess and social control encapsulates both the merits and the madness of China’s engineering state. Those dynamics form the central theme of his compelling, provocative and highly personal book, providing a fresh perspective on the world’s emerging superpower.

Now a research fellow at Stanford University, Wang established a reputation as one of the most astute China watchers during the six years he spent working in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. In Breakneck, he deftly mixes data-rich analysis with vivid personal anecdotes and punchy opinions. His book is both a fascinating exploration of China’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as a searing critique of how a self-harming American leadership could lose the technological arms race to its rival.

Wang’s central contention is that China is run as an engineering state that excels at construction while the US has become a lawyerly society that favours obstruction. By 2020 all nine members of the Chinese Politburo’s standing committee had trained as engineers. By contrast, the US has turned into a “government of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers.”

The result is that the country’s legal aristocracy prioritises process over outcomes and systematically favours the well-off, Wang argues. From 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee had attended law school.

The consequences of these differing approaches can be seen in how the two countries have built high-speed railways. In 2008 Californian voters approved funding for an 800-mile rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles, while China began construction on a similar length railway between Beijing and Shanghai. Three years later the Chinese line opened at a cost of $36bn and carried 1.4bn passengers in its first decade of operation. The first segment of California’s train line may open some time between 2030 and 2033 at an estimated cost of $128bn.

As a Canadian whose parents emigrated from China when he was seven, Wang has spent roughly equal time in China and the US and can view both countries as a knowledgeable outsider. “To me, these two countries are thrilling, maddening, and most of all, deeply bizarre,” he writes.

In spite of their ideological differences, no two peoples are more alike than the Chinese and the Americans, in Wang’s view. Both countries are bursting with optimistic, pragmatic, can-do hustlers, who often exhibit crass materialism and believe theirs are uniquely powerful nations with a 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.

Readers might cavil at such sweeping generalisations, which gloss over some critical exceptions. American lawyers bring benefits too in defending property rights and the rule of law, for example.

where Wang is at his most insightful is in describing China’s extraordinary economic and technological transformation over the past few decades. Some of the data he cites hits home like sledgehammer blows.

For example, in 1990 there were just half a million cars in China. By 2024 there were 435mn, many of them electric. China now has the (over) capacity to build 60mn cars a year out of a total global market of 90mn cars sold. The country 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 also has 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. To be sure, that reflects massive — and inefficient — overcapacity in many sectors but it also makes it harder for rivals to compete. Although 50 per cent of China’s economy may be dysfunctional, Wang argues 5 per cent performs superbly well with its leading tech companies now challenging the best in the world.

We are also mistaken to obsess about the latest breakthrough inventions, such as the latest generative AI models, which is the default mindset in Silicon Valley, he suggests. Instead, he argues technology is better viewed as the people and process knowledge needed to build manufacturing capacity. Apple may have invented the iPhone but China has manufactured most of the devices, helping to turn Shenzhen into the world’s most innovative electronics hub.

Often, the US has built the ladder towards technological leadership, but China has been the first to climb it. As Wang puts it, there is more glory — and economic advantage — in the factory than the science lab, an argument with which US President Donald Trump now appears to agree.

Having exalted the achievements of China’s engineering state, 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 1mn Muslim Uyghurs to inculcate them with Chinese values. Wang’s time in China left him craving for the privileges of pluralism available in the democratic west.

Like Stalin, China’s Communist leaders want to be “engineers of the soul,” Wang writes. And in the most devastating chapter in the book, he recounts the human catastrophe that stemmed from “misbegotten scientism” when a missile scientist called Song Jian took charge of demographic projections leading to the one-child policy from 1980.

Like Trofim Lysenko, the Russian agronomist who peddled pseudoscience that contributed to famine in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Song was responsible for death and misery on an industrial scale, Wang writes. Over the 35 years of the one-child policy, 321mn abortions were performed and 108mn 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 40mn “missing” women.

As the product of the one-child policy himself, whose wife suffered a miscarriage while he wrote the book, Wang writes with barely suppressed anger at this inhuman policy that was so antithetical to Chinese familial traditions and has now been reversed. “The one-child policy could only have been implemented in the engineering state,” he writes.

Breakneck concludes with a withering indictment of the US, which he claims has been ruined by a procedure-obsessed political left and a destructive right. “The United States has lost its ability not only to build but also, in part, to govern,” he writes. But President Xi Jinping’s self-defeating authoritarianism still gives the US a chance of maintaining its geopolitical and technological hegemony, at least if it does not do greater damage to itself. That struggle for supremacy may yet be won by the country that now pursues the least bad policies. “As best as I can tell, the United States and China are both racing to erode their governance capabilities,” he writes.

Wang’s analysis may be oversimplified but that makes his recommendations all the more stark. 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,” he concludes.