On Aug. 1, U.S. President Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, after the release of a report that showed weak jobs numbers. He has since nominated E.J. Antoni, an economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation and a Jan. 6 participant, to replace her. Antoni, who is seen as incompetent or malicious by most of his contemporaries, is likely to put out a dubious set of numbers to serve Trump’s agenda. The politicization of numbers is a hallmark of authoritarian governance, especially in China for the last four decades.
If any place can steal the limelight from the Trump show for a moment, it is China. The People’s Republic of China, governed by a party-state under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is typically portrayed as an antagonist of the United States—a strategic competitor, rival, adversary, enemy. For some, this juxtaposition harkens back to the days of the Cold War. But in 2025, China is as much associated with manufacturing and exports as it is with communism. The U.S. and Chinese economies have become deeply dependent on each other.
Many argue that this interdependence is dangerous and that the United States needs to change in order to respond to China’s threatening nature. But sometimes China is a mirror of the United States. On Ezra Klein’s podcast, Tom Friedman explicitly acknowledged that whenever he wrote about China, he was really writing about the United States. Klein himself has operated in this register.
In Klein’s bestselling book Abundance (co-written with Derek Thompson), which is about the United States’ inability to build, there is a small sliver touting China’s ability to build with hints of jealousy and frustration. Yet there’s very little in Abundance that actually grapples with the Chinese way of governance, whether that means corrupt officials or the rapid construction of high-speed rail.
Much of the marketing for Dan Wang’s Breakneck portrays the book as filling this lacuna. He even participated in the Abundance 2025 conference. As a sales pitch, it’s pretty compelling, as is the book’s tagline: “China is an engineering state; America is a lawyerly society.” The simplest version of its thesis is that China builds because it’s led by engineers who try to break down problems into simple, quantitative boxes and then solve them, piece by piece. While China does build, it also destroys. People, with all their hopes, dreams, and creativity, don’t do well in simple boxes, and sometimes they get smashed by the engineers’ plans. The United States’ lack of building is blamed on its lawyerliness—too much red tape getting in the way of American dynamism.
In many ways, this framing undersells what Wang is doing. Truth be told, the book contains very little about the United States, and so while one could dwell on the thinness of its arguments related to the political dilemmas that have caused American construction and infrastructural stagnation, they are beside the point.
On the other hand, there’s great value in what Wang has done with Breakneck: He’s crafted an approachable, well-written narrative that grapples with what China is really like for an American audience. The fact that doing so requires framing China as a foil for the United States speaks more to a problem with the audience than the author.
A scene at the start of the book’s second chapter crystallizes its value. Wang is on an epic multiday biking adventure in Guizhou with two companions all of whom took their bicycles on the high-speed rail from Shanghai to Guiyang, where they stumbled upon streetlamps with guitar-shaped ornaments hanging off them. Unbeknownst to them, they had entered Zheng’an county, a global center of guitar production.
As Wang describes, some of the county’s residents went to the coastal industrial hub of Guangdong for work in the 1990s and found employment making guitars by chance, including Zheng Chuanjiu. By 2012, the central and local governments were interested in spreading more industrial production to China’s interior to reduce regional inequality. After finding out that the locals had some knowhow in guitar making, this became their focus. Now, the region makes one in seven guitars in the world, with a number of different firms such as Zheng’s Zunyi Shenqu Musical Instruments Manufacturing, Natasha Guitars, and Raysen making guitars for more established international companies and increasingly aiming to be seen as quality brands themselves, not just cheap ones.
This moment concretely brings together so many different aspects of China’s development. These guitars aren’t primarily made for domestic consumption but for export. The economies of scale and agglomeration arise from the concentration of knowledge about this business, which has allowed the firms in this community to grow. It demonstrates the ebbs and flows of China’s internal migrants, who leave their comparatively impoverished province to find better opportunities in coastal factories but then return to build their own businesses, taking advantage of cheaper property and labor back home.
The chapter’s title, “Building Big,” is well reflected in descriptions of the scale of China’s infrastructure spending, both through the rail journey to Guizhou and the towering bridges that the three traverse to reach Zheng’an on their way to Chongqing. It’s a deft feat of writing in a book filled with such dense snippets that cement specific places and narratives, which were previously mere abstractions or completely unknown, in the reader’s mind. Guizhou will be remembered for things other than its world-beating Lao Gan Ma chili sauce.
The next chapter, “Tech Power,” builds on these insights. It dives deep into Shenzhen, the special economic zone next to Hong Kong that famously transformed from a fishing village into the global locus of hardware innovation. In 2025, the myth that China simply steals intellectual property rather than generating original inventions and innovations has dissipated but not disappeared from the discourse.
Wang evaporates any remaining misconceptions. He distinguishes between three types of technologies. First are tools, items that allow people to manipulate the world around them. Second are explicit instructions, what the Greeks called techne—particular ideas that can be written down and legibly understood at a distance. Third is process knowledge, akin to the Greek metis, which is “proficiency gained from practical experience, which isn’t easily communicated.” Wang argues that it’s this third category where China has truly excelled and the United States has floundered.
The hundreds of billions of dollars that have been thrown at the production of smartphones have funded the development of communities buzzing with knowledge and capacity. China has built big and become a tech power by investments, in physical infrastructure and in education—both formal schooling and on-the-job technical training. University funding, enrollments, and specialized degrees across the spectrum have expanded tremendously since the 1990s, producing massive returns. These investments have unlocked the economic potential of China’s huge population to such an extent that it has remade the world’s economy enough that an American audience might read a book about China.
Yet the successes of China’s engineering state are coupled with failures emerging from the same mindset. The book’s next three chapters detail ways in which China’s government gone too far down a path of social engineering in ways that harmed the people whose lives they were intended to protect.
The one-child policy is a well-known source of suffering in China, but Wang’s portrayal of its inhuman implementation and erroneous origins is moving in its unflinching specificity. Demographics are not rocket science, but that didn’t keep missile engineer Song Jian from stepping forward in 1979 with precise mathematical extrapolations that impressed many in the CCP and led to the one-child policy.
The “scientific” definitiveness of the numerical policy led to brutality when implemented by Chinese officials on the ground in the country’s myriad of villages, townships, and counties. Forced abortions, sterilizations, and other abuses became commonplace.
Wang depicts China’s zero-COVID policy as something of a sequel to the one-child policy: Another policy shaped by supposedly inescapable equations that, when implemented, led to harms greater than the original problems it was intended to solve. The pandemic originated in Wuhan, and its global spread has much to do with the unwillingness of local officials there to transparently report bad news. The success of early lockdowns and temporary suppression of the virus led to extreme, unsuccessful measures when more transmissible variants emerged in 2021 and spread even faster the following year.
Wang and his wife had been living in Shanghai in 2022 but fled to Yunnan at the last minute before the cordon sanitaire was lowered around them. In the mountain retreat of Dali, they found a community of creatives that basked in the comparative freedom of its fellow travelers. Life in major cities during COVID-19 was a constant regimen of nasal screening and ubiquitous surveillance apps on smartphones, but Dali was free from testing.
The initial victory against the virus led to governmental hubris about other thorny problems that Wang depicts well. He is particularly appalled by the software squeeze—restrictions on platforms, cryptocurrencies, and gaming—which eventually wiped nearly a trillion dollars off the valuation of firms that he had followed as a tech analyst at a local economic consultancy.
Many of these creative elites end up leaving the country, where Wang finds them in Thailand on the rùn, a Chinese term that originally meant “profitable” but has had its meaning flipped to its English homonym. A significant slice of those with means—and generally without families—chose to flee the tightening grip of Chinese President Xi Jinping rather than stay under his thumb. In its desire to control, the engineering state meets its limits. Wang sees pervasive restrictions in China as keeping its best and brightest from achieving greatness. He contrasts the lack of Chinese cultural products with Japanese anime and Korean pop music, attributing their absence to the engineering state’s strictures, including its focus on hardware over software.
Breakneck concludes with an anticipated bit of advice: that the engineering state could use a more lawyerly society while the United States’ lawyerly society needs to inject some engineering-state mojo to get building again. To do so, Wang points to individuals operating in an earlier period when perhaps America was great.
Wang offers a reappraisal of Robert Moses, arguing that Robert Caro’s The Power Broker overweighs Moses’s flaws compared with his successes. He also suggests another midcentury icon: Hyman Rickover, whose domineering ways yielded tangible results in the nuclear domain. But Wang’s stylish flair is apparent even here—the conclusion starts with a dozen pages of family history, blending the book’s arguments with the intimacies of memoir to avoid the usual thinness of conclusions and inability to solve the problems analyzed in the prior 180 pages in just a few paragraphs.
Breakneck is a great read that brings considerable things to the discursive table. Yet it rings a few notes that feel off-key or at least out of tune to the moment.
The tension between the United States and China is cursorily presented and lean on the idea that conflict or war is all but inevitable. Comparative munitions production receives more attention than possible paths of negotiation and compromise between the two superpowers. The twists and turns of the U.S.-China relationship make it hard to discuss in book form—given publication timelines and the rapid shifting of policies—but in presenting a nuanced portrait of China and Chinese people who, as Wang notes, seem so familiar along so many dimensions to the United States and Americans, one might imagine that a less mechanistic portrayal of the international relationship could frame the analysis.
More directly, perhaps one could say that the book has 2024 vibes. It extols Elon Musk as a positive force pushing in an engineering direction rather than highlighting his efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency to rip out the last vestiges of American state capacity. Like Abundance, it blames the lawyerly left for the United States’ problems rather than the truly destructive forces of the anti-science and anti-democratic MAGA right. The idea that laws are a problem for the United States in 2025 is tough to countenance when emergency declarations, illegal impoundments, and weaponized investigations are no longer frightening possibilities but daily realities. Trump and Musk have not just been going after enemies—such as science, higher education, and state capacity—but also directly enriching themselves through blatant corruption.
Perhaps most surprising is the book’s forward-looking assessment of China. Wang says it could be a more successful East Germany, which is a strange place to land given all the material laid out in the previous pages and given how much larger and more significant China is. The 21st century may not definitely be China’s, but China is unavoidable regardless.
While filling an immense amount of space about Chinese realities for an American audience, Breakneck’s omissions connect it to a different book that also links China and the United States: Yuen Yuen Ang’s China’s Gilded Age. Ang’s 2020 book is a theoretical unspooling of corruption paired with empirical studies of China’s recent experiences with it, including discussions of the critical real estate sector, which drove much of China’s pre-2020 growth.
Contemporary China is juxtaposed with the American gilded age, a period of corrupt governance consigned to the now relatively distant past of 1870-1920. Corruption is typically anathema to growth, but Ang shows how different kinds of corruption distort economies in distinct ways—with China and the United States in its gilded age tending toward “access money,” which she describes as akin to steroids, pushing forward some aspects of economic activity while having nasty side effects.
Statistics from economists at the U.S. Federal Reserve show the top 1 percent holds more than 30 percent of wealth in the United States. Both American and Chinese societies can be characterized as having high levels of inequality and deep corruption. Chinese inequality is mentioned in Breakneck but mostly at the level of regions—Guizhou is poor while Shanghai is rich.
But walking around Shanghai, inequality is so inescapable that it can literally run you over. While Americans turned to the convenience of home delivery when it was subsidized by the era of zero interest rates, only to complain when prices returned to more natural levels, food delivery in China has been the norm for many years. Delivery apps are powered by cheap labor, with an incredible number of drivers zipping around to take packages to their more wealthy buyers. These drivers hustle through shopping malls that house many of the city’s best restaurants, still wearing their helmets as the timers tick down in the gig apps that control their lives. This gig-worker culture isn’t just in rich enclaves like Shanghai; I saw the same thing in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, this summer.
Chinese and American societies are far from simple entities with singular identities. They are fractured and potentially fractious along many different lines. And, unfortunately, both governments share a desire to hide, reject, or distort reality rather than trust the people with the truth. As Trump dumps the U.S. government’s ability to collect and share data of all kinds and attacks independent economic bodies like the Federal Reserve, he’s dismantling sources of trust that underlie the societies in which we live. It is deeply worrying that the governments of the world’s two largest states seem more intent on making sure that the world presented to their citizens is sunny, despite the possibility of coming storms.
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