The Sledgehammer & the Gavel: Dan Wang’s "Breakneck" Has Very Important Things to Say About China, America, & Building the Future
Engineering State vs. Lawyerly Society in a world that needs to build things & networks & also to empower & secure people—& what a smarter hybrid could unlock. Contemporary lived experience meets...
Engineering State vs. Lawyerly Society in a world that needs to build things & networks & also to empower & secure people—& what a smarter hybrid could unlock. Contemporary lived experience meets economic analysis and the locked-in path-dependence of historical development in the not parallel but resonating development paths of the world’s two most dynamic and bizarre dynamo societies…
Breakneck is Dan Wang’s sharp, lived account of a world with two dynamos: the “thrilling, maddening, and bizarre” engines of change that are China and the United States. China solves problems with concrete, steel, and scale and then extends that mindset into counterproducive social engineering. social engineering: one‑child policy, surveillance, repression. America solves problems with rights, litigation, and vetoes—protecting freedoms while sacrificing speed and ambition. Silicon Valley prizes invention and legal moats; The Pearl River Delta prizes scaling and production. The big payoff isn’t choosing sides but synthesizing strengths: engineering drive with rights and due process. About 20% more building-engineering in America, about 40% more respect for rights-process in China, and each would truly attain the utopian hopes and dreams of a John Winthrop or of a Chéng Wáng (成王).
Read it for the reporting as much as the argument. It is a field guide to the trade‑offs that will determine the twenty‑first century, for Dan Wang lives his China story—streets, factories, lockdowns—and writes with the analyst’s clarity, the reporter’s eye, the insider’s local knowledge, and the outsider’s perspective. Breakneck is a corrective to clichés and a blueprint for balancing ambition with restraint.
My friend Dan Wang's Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future is out this week:
Wang, Dan. 2024. Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. <https://danwang.co/breakneck/>.
I am biased, because he is my friend. However, you need to read it. I would say the same thing if I did not know him from Adam. And I am not alone: Tyler Cowen calls it "arguably the best book of the year". John Thornhill calls it "compelling, provocative and highly personal". Patrick Collison claims that it "illuminates China like no one else". Tracy Alloway calls him "one of the best China writers out there".
At seven, Dan’s family migrated from Yunnan in China’s far southwest, where local speech differs from Beijing Mandarin as much as Louisiana Cajun from Down‑East Maine English. He lives in Palo Alto and Ann Arbor, and has lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Rochester, Freiburg, San Francisco, Kunming, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and New Haven. An insider‑outsider across Canada, China, and the U.S., he finds China and the U.S. “thrilling, maddening, and bizarre.” Drive around either, he says, and you see places that feel deranged. He does not mean this as a reproach: it shows both as the messy engines of global change that they are.
By contrast, he relaxes when he crosses back into tidy Canada.
Breakneck sees China as the country of the sledgehammer. Breakneck sees America as the country of the gavel.
China’s technocratic engineering élite solves problems with concrete, steel, and scale—roads, bridges, power plants, hyperscale projects. The impulse extends to society: the one‑child policy and repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. This technocracy prizes order, control, and visible achievement.
America’s lawyer élite solves problems by assigning and vindicating rights to property and security. Enterprise and innovation follow as people live as they wish. The reflex response to any problem is to create another entitlement or right, pulling more people into the set required for agreement and approval.
At bottom, Americans and Chinese are alike. The likeness stands out when you compare Chinese to Japanese or Koreans, and Americans to Canadians or Europeans. Both peoples are restless, eager for shortcuts, and drive much of the world’s change. Both mix crass materialism with admiration for entrepreneurs. Both tolerate tastelessness. Both love competition. Both are pragmatic—“get it done”—and often rush work. Both cultures teem with hustlers selling quick paths to health and wealth. Both admire the technological sublime—grand projects that push limits. Elites and masses in both nations share a creed of National Greatness: John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan’s “City upon a Hill” in America, and the “Central Country” inscriptions on Zhou‑dynasty bronze ritual wine bowls in China.
Both countries are tangles of imperfection, often their own worst enemies. Old labels—“socialist,” “democratic,” “neoliberal”—do not fit.
China delivers rapid, visible progress, but at a cost to rights and with risks of overreach. It goes off track with social engineering, becoming a Leninist technocracy with grand‑opera traits—practical until it turns preposterous.
America goes off track by spending too much time specifying and vindicating rights, becoming a super‑litigious veto‑ocracy. Safeguards restrain excess, but also buy stagnation and lost ambition.
China would benefit from about 40% more legal respect for rights and process. Yet China’s elite sees little appeal in any system that can elevate a Donald Trump instead of a Xi Jinping.
The U.S. once built ambitiously—the late 19th century and the post‑WWII decades. It should reclaim roughly 20% more building and engineering spirit. American failure shows even at the frontier of the global economy. Silicon Valley prizes invention, then builds oligopoly moats from network effects and legal maneuvering. China, by contrast, prizes scale and production, embracing the Andy Grove ethic.
If either Silicon Valley or the Pearl River Delta could balance engineering scale and ambition with strong legal rights and safeguards, it would be unstoppable.
What makes Breakneck extra special is how it blends theory, economic data, sociology, and personal observation. Too much China talk is distant and derivative—third‑hand reporting and think‑tank abstraction. Wang lives it: food, streets, cities, politics, in China, America, and Canada, able to see each one both as a native insider and as a visiting outsider. Thus if you want to know what is happening and what it feels like, read the entire book. He lets readers see, feel, and taste these movers and shakers in the contemporary world. Details that seem like color become the substance of understanding. Read it for the reporting as much as the argument. Break free of clichés and caricatures.
And so that is the book Breakneck: a meditation on ambition vs. restraint, building vs. blocking, sledgehammer vs. gavel, China vs. U.S., with the conclusion that the 21st‑century task is to create a synthesis of the best of both while avoiding the worst of each, and that the true City on a Hill, the true Central Country, will be the one that best accomplishes that task. And might turn out, come 2100, to be the same trans-Pacific place.
It wasn't clear from the reviews, although hinted at, that the US was somewhat like China from teh Gilded Age through the 1950s. Britain was similar, but started earlier. The legacy of "build" and damn the locals is still apparent everywhere, from ill-sited polluting factories to freeways carving through neighborhoods. The US and other developed countries still try to do it, even over legal resistance - HWY 85 in Silicon Valley, and the continuing ill-fated attempts at high-speed rail in California and the now-abandoned HST in England.
What we have is teh experiences of unforeseen consequences - failures of nuclear reactors, facilities from military bases, and chip fabs polluting groundwater. Filthy cities covered in smoke particles (look at films of UK cities before rules were changed to allow cleaning historic buildings.)
Gleaming new buildings and structures will decay and become a nuisance. Those new buildings in modern cities will eventually look like Venice when their raison d'être passes. Then there will be the fights between the preservationists and the developers. China just hasn't gotten there yet. Give it 50 - 100 years.
Take the USA's typical "modern" city plan or a grid, compared to teh radial plans of European cities. Grids work well for auto traffic, but not so well for public transport. Arguably, much of the grid roadways are becoming obsolete as workers can deliver their inputs via electronic communication. Physical presence may be replaced with robots and robot avatars. The result will no doubt be crumbling roads no longer heavily used in many towns, especially those without historic city centers.
The "Abundance" people seem to be on board with the "get rid of the obstructionist legal system" as if this will cure the problems of Western nations. It has already worsened inequality in China, just as it did in the Gilded Age in the US. Why should we assume that returning to this model brings lots of benefits to everyone?
The older I get, the more I think the Amish, and indeed indigenous peoples, may have a better perspective on change compared to those who want to "move fast and break things".
I just read that China went from empty apartments to empty shopping centers. Back in the before times, say at least 20 years ago I was reading that their housing boom was over extended. Numbers always. go up!!