When I picked up a copy of Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, I had no clue how much it would teach me about the United States.
Wang, a Chinese-Canadian tech analyst and writer, doesn’t merely tell the story of China’s meteoric economic rise. He compares and contrasts the strengths and pathologies of the world’s two great economic superpowers. What’s more, his focus is not on abstract measures of economic or military dominance. He could care less about sources of national vanity.
Instead, he assesses the countries by how well they work for the people living in them. He builds on this decidedly humane approach by drawing on his family’s emigrant story and by mixing in his own experiences of having lived and worked equal amounts of time in both the U.S. and China. (Wang was also a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.)
The result is an astonishingly lucid, fair, fun-to-read analysis of two nations grappling with very different types of flaws. And lest you think he gets stuck in the usual rote comparisons of two opposing systems—one democratic, one authoritarian, blah, blah, blah—be aware that Wang wields his Canadianness brilliantly and insists that “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.”
If that declaration doesn’t wake you up, his explanation will:
“A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. Chinese and Americans are pragmatic: They have a get-it-done attitude that occasionally produces hurried work. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth. Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace. But masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don’t get in line.”
Stunning. Wang’s analysis is both humane and independent. Yet, for all its insights on China, what struck me most about Breakneck was its critique of—and advice for—America.
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The primary, and most stark, contrast Wang explores is that, for better or for worse, China is a nation run by engineers while the U.S. is run by lawyers. Because of that fact, China can build monumental projects in a short amount of time while the U.S. has become a “vetocracy” obsessed with proceduralism. Because lawyers know how to obstruct, he argues, the U.S. has lost sight of how government can and should build in the service of people.
On the flip side, lawyers can curb government power and protect individual rights, while engineers tend to employ ham-fisted, “literal minded” solutions to social issues, which not only make matters worse but “smother” people with political control. It stands to reason that a state that moves fast and breaks things can also “break people.”
Of course, once upon a time the United States was also an engineering nation. It would not have become a global power otherwise. But in the 1960s, in response to social problems, elite lawyers shifted course. “As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible.” So, while the lawyerly society emerged as a “necessary corrective” to America’s social problems, over time it “became the cause of many of its present problems.”
In addition to complicating—and rendering incomprehensible—the rules governing nearly every realm of society, lawyers are “too often the servants of the rich.” While in principle a lawyerly society serves to protect the rights of many, in practice it serves primarily to insulate and protect the wealthy. Furthermore, its ability to slow and stop countless public projects has made average Americans “lose faith that the government can meaningfully improve their lives.” Today, writes Wang, Americans live “in the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded.”
To earn back the faith of its people, Wang argues, the United States must stop catering to the wealthy, “recover some of its engineering prowess and make room for nonlawyers among its ruling elites.” There’s a lot about China that Americans would never want to emulate, but over the past two decades, the Chinese have been beating the Americans at their own game: optimism in the future, an outlook “in large part driven by physical dynamism.” Ultimately, Wang concludes, Americans will never again feel that kind of optimism unless the United States commits to relearning how to make and build big things.
