Book Review Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang, 2025 (288 pages)
Capitalist versus communist, democratic versus authoritarian, open versus closed: the rivalry between the United States and China is often framed in these binaries. But for Canadian technology analyst Dan Wang, who has spent six years in China, the most revealing contrast between the two superpowers is that of a nation led by lawyers versus one led by engineers. In Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Wang argues that America has become a “lawyerly society,” paralyzed by process, while China is an “engineering state,” defined by speed, scale, and technocratic ambition.1 The result is a mirror image of the two nations a century ago, when American engineers created an industrial superpower as China lagged behind due to political dysfunction. Now the roles are reversed, and the question is whether the United States can still remember how to build.
Wang traces China’s industrial rise to Deng Xiaoping’s decision in the 1980s to promote engineers into political leadership, an effort that Xi Jinping has expanded by filling his cabinet with technocrats from aerospace and defense. As a result, Wang argues, China builds fast: it erected a national highway system rivaling that of the United States in half the time it took America, and today, it dominates the production of electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable technologies, in some cases outselling the Western companies it once imitated.2 Meanwhile, as China builds, America litigates — a nation “of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers.”3 Legal training eclipses engineering among the political and business elite, fostering an “obsession with process over outcomes” that has left housing scarce, stalled infrastructure projects, and bloated government budgets.4 An illustrative example is California’s high-speed rail, which remains unfinished, even with $128 billion spent. In contrast, China completed a comparable line in three years at under a third of the cost.5 Once defined by bold construction, America is now averse to risk, its citizens dwelling in what Wang calls “the ruins of an industrial civilization.”6
While Breakneck rightly exposes the crumbling of the American engineering state, it overstates the central claim that proceduralism undermines progress. History tells a more complicated story, as the courtroom has long held an outsized role in American politics — including during the period of American industrial dominance. Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that lawyers represented “the superior political class” in America and formed the true “American aristocracy.” American lawyers, de Tocqueville explained in the early 19th century, “are naturally called to occupy most of the public offices. They fill the legislatures and are at the head of administrations, so they exercise a great influence on the formation of the law and on its execution.”7 In contrast, Wang argues that lawyers rose to their current level of prestige in the 1960s, amid public efforts to curb the excesses of the construction boom.8 He does not deeply engage with the reality that lawyers have been central to American political life since the founding — and that their rise flourished alongside, rather than obstructed, the nation’s industrial ascent. Railroads stitched the continent together in the nineteenth century, and the Hoover Dam, interstate highways, and Apollo missions defined the twentieth. American legalism coexisted with American dynamism, indicating that Wang might have overemphasized the causal link between lawyerly dominance and industrial stagnation.
Indeed, the relationship may run in the opposite direction, as innovation often generates the need for legal protection. Silicon Valley is a prime example: its creative ecosystem depends on enforceable intellectual property rights, which give entrepreneurs and investors confidence to take risks and protect the value of their inventions. In China, such rights are weaker, and business often relies on guanxi, a system of personal networks that can outweigh formal legal mechanisms — limiting the kind of open, rapid innovation that has fueled America’s technological achievements.9 Europe also demonstrates that legalism and industrial stagnation are not causally linked: despite having fewer lawyers per capita than the United States, it lags in technological leadership and economic growth.10 Far from impeding productivity, a strong legal culture may in fact be critical to it.
Wang, however, does not romanticize China’s engineering state, depicting how its pursuit of control can warp ambition into abuse. He acknowledges the one-child policy, the zero-Covid lockdowns, and the recent crackdowns on consumer tech firms — the third of which erased a trillion in corporate valuation and chilled entrepreneurship.11 In China’s unchecked technocracy, Breakneck warns, efficiency is pursued at the expense of liberty. Yet Wang still frames legalism as a liability to be “overcome,” rather than an asset to be balanced.12 While he rightly argues that the United States must recover its ability to manufacture at scale, he leans too heavily on speed as the measure of innovation. He writes that there is “more glory in having big firms making a product rather than a science lab claiming its invention,” a claim that undervalues the slower, less visible work of scientific discovery.13 China still relies on the West for breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals, aircraft engines, and semiconductors, and it trails the United States in scientific Nobel Prizes, as Wang points out.14 Yet he still suggests that building fast is superior to inventing well — mistaking motion for progress.
Can America rise from the rust of its industrial base to compete with China’s advances? Breakneck encourages the United States to build large-scale infrastructure without mismanagement or delay, while advocating that China learns the virtues of legal protection to restrain state predations. In Wang’s view, whichever nation manages to absorb the best traits of the other will win this century’s defining rivalry. This vision of mutual learning is compelling in theory but oversimplified in practice. Wang is clear-eyed about the Chinese Communist Party’s inability to absorb American-style pluralist values. In contrast, he still suggests the United States might take “political lessons” from China’s engineering state without appreciating that America’s legalism is inseparable from its constitutional architecture.15 While the two states share “an ethos of self-transformation,” they operate on incompatible assumptions about authority and individual agency.16
Still, Wang’s argument can be salvaged as a cultural diagnosis rather than a policy prescription. He urges the “procedure-obsessed left” and the “thoughtlessly destructive right” to harness the government toward technological feats — a bold call to reinvigorate our national temperament, even if he leaves vague the mechanics of that shift.17 Buoyed by the firsthand authority of its author and the provocative framing of U.S.-China competition, Breakneck joins a growing chorus calling for a politics of abundance to counter America’s “democracy by lawsuit.”18 For strategists, policymakers, and technologists, the book insists that in a world moving at breakneck speed, the question is not only whether we can still build — but whether we can remember that we must.
1 Wang, Dan. Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Function, 2024. Kindle Edition, xv.
2 Wang, Breakneck, 28–29.
3 Wang, Breakneck, 4.
4 Jennifer E. Manning, “Membership of the 119th Congress: A Profile,” Congressional Research Service Report (CRS Product R48535, version 1), Library of Congress, May 13, 2025; Wang, Breakneck, 16.
5 Wang, Breakneck, 10.
6 Wang, Breakneck, 11.
7 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. English Edition. Vol. 1, edited by Eduardo Nolla and translated from the French by James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012).
8 Wang, Breakneck, 12.
9 Program on Negotiation, “The Importance of Relationship Building in China,” Negotiation Daily, Harvard Law School, July 7, 2025, Program on Negotiation.
10 Wang, Breakneck, 14.; Erixon, Fredrik, and Rosita Georgieva. Keeping Up with the United States: Why Europe’s Productivity Is Falling Behind, Brussels: European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), August 2023.
11 Wang, Breakneck, 181.
12 Wang, Breakneck, 230.
13 Wang, Breakneck, 92.
14 Wang, Breakneck, 70.
15 Wang, Breakneck, 54.
16 Wang, Breakneck, 231-232.
17 Wang, Breakneck, 224.
18 Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (New York: Avid Reader Press, March 18, 2025).
