Breakneck
China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
by Dan Wang
Allen Lane £25 pp288
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future is easily one of the best books on China published this year. This is not much of an accolade in and of itself since most books in that category are shelf-fillers written by chancers who understand that all you need is a red cover and a cute title (perhaps with some sort of reference to a panda or a dragon) to sell copies.
First-hand knowledge of China or the ability to read Chinese are optional — indeed, some high-profile China commentators take offence when it is gently suggested that one should be able to speak the language of the country one is studying.
But Dan Wang labours under no such handicap. The Chinese-Canadian tech analyst has long had a loyal following among China watchers, who are fans of his rambling yet insightful annual email newsletters about the country, as well as opera. After years of covering Chinese technology in China for western hedge funds, Wang swapped his job for an academic perch in the US. He has now turned to the book form and the result is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in China.
Wang’s thesis is put simply: China is an engineering state run by politicians with engineering backgrounds who are therefore obsessed with engineering their country through physical means (building things) and social ones (forcing women to have fewer, then more children). The US, once also an engineering state, now has “a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers”. This has led the two countries, whose people are similar by temperament (materialist, crass, capable of incredible dynamism), becoming inversions of one another.
China’s solution to any problem is to build things often to excess, or to engineer technocratic solutions with scant regard for the people who are affected, whereas the default instrument of US governance is the lawsuit, which prevents anything from being done. To Wang the world would be a better place if US governance abandoned its fetish for process over outcome and China’s leaders discovered the virtues of building less and governing at a human scale.
The thesis is not new and is capable of being challenged. The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville was remarking on how American lawyers formed the “highest political class” almost 200 years ago, yet this did not stop the US from becoming the world’s dominant industrial civilisation.
Meanwhile, while China’s politburo standing committee — the country’s highest political body — was once entirely composed of engineering graduates, today fewer than half of its members studied the subject. The standing committee even has a former law professor. In any case, that many Chinese leaders have engineering backgrounds does not mean that they are not politicians first and foremost.
But it is true that the US seems to have lost the will to build compared with its rising competitor, as anyone who has had the misfortune of having to use its public transport will admit. Wang’s book drips with astonishing figures as to China’s building craze: China took 18 years to build a motorway network that matched the extent of the American interstate highway system. Then China did it again in nine years.
Even China’s poorest provinces are served by its extraordinary high-speed railway system, once derided by western observers as a white elephant, while American attempts in this area so far have proven to be ruinously expensive and decades behind schedule. In California the French state railway company SNCF was so frustrated by the political dysfunction that afflicted its high-speed railway project that it decamped to Morocco to build it there instead.
In the book’s best chapter, Wang convincingly argues, using his experience of Chinese industry, that China’s great technological advantage lies in its valorisation of practical knowledge on how to make things that are kept alive through communities of engineering. For example, to make an iPhone you not only need the technology and the design but a network of technologists, suppliers and a trained workforce. After decades of serving as the world’s factory, China has these in abundance.
Meanwhile, much of the US’s manufacturing sector has rusted, with workforces shrinking and precious process knowledge being lost. While China lags in critical sectors such as jet engines and pharmaceuticals, its manufacturing sector, once a byword for cheap and shoddy products, is now matching and in many cases surpassing American equivalents at the higher end of manufacturing.
At the lower end China’s dominance is even greater since the US has largely given up on low-value manufacturing. The Chinese government boasts of making something in each one of the 419 categories of industrial goods classified by the UN, which reflects its obsession on having a comprehensive industrial base. During Covid the US and China made vaccines, but only China produced industrial quantities of masks and cotton swabs.
But the Chinese leadership’s engineering obsession has a dark side, which Wang does not ignore. The second half of the book contains harrowing accounts of its one-child policy and Covid policy, the latter of which Wang lived through before moving back to the West. Being in the habit of seeing any social problem as an engineering problem, China’s technocrats enacted one of the cruellest population control policies in world history before trying to reverse its consequences, so far with no success, using similarly coercive methods.
The neighbourhood committees that were used to enforce Covid lockdowns are now being used to call up recently married women to inquire about their menstrual cycles. It will not surprise the reader that a key intellectual mover behind the one-child policy was a politician with an engineering background.
China’s solution to any problem is to build. The default in the US is the lawsuit
China’s early success with a technologically enforced lockdown turned from a source of pride to a sore point and even a source of social unrest as the engineering state let its obsession with zero Covid run amok. Pregnant women were left to miscarry outside of hospitals for want of a Covid test result, while the Shanghai lockdown was so severe that it collapsed the city’s food supply chains. Then again, many would argue that the same excesses happened in the UK, which certainly is not run by engineers, unless PPE is taken to mean personal protective equipment.
Wang has written that rare thing: a book on China that avoids the clichés and conventions of the genre and is based on first-hand knowledge instead of impressions gleaned from Englishlanguage sources from abroad. While it is primarily targeted at an American audience, policymakers in the UK would do well to ponder whether its message has any implication for this country.
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