Book Review — “Breakneck” by Dan Wang

I picked up Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future after economist Tyler Cowen hailed it as one of the best books of 2025. Written by Dan Wang, a Hoover Institution research fellow and former China-based technology analyst, the book seeks to explain how China and America have developed such different strengths despite their similarities. What results is a wide-ranging, often brilliant meditation on political economy, technology, and culture.

Wang begins by insisting that “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.” Both societies, he writes, are materialistic, pragmatic, competitive, and awed by the technological sublime. Yet America has become a lawyerly society while China has become an engineering state. This framing device is powerful. It helps explain why China can build high-speed rail lines at breakneck pace while the United States drowns in lawsuits and permitting processes. Wang’s own travels, such as his cycling trip through Guizhou province, illustrate this vividly. Even in remote areas, China’s infrastructure exceeds what Americans in wealthy states enjoy. The contrast captures his admiration for China’s ability to bend geography and compress time.

The praise, however, is balanced by critique. Wang’s sharpest chapters focus on the cruelty and hypocrisy of China’s one-child policy and the brittleness of its zero-Covid lockdowns. He describes how propaganda once promised that “the state will care for you when you’re old and tough,” only to later demand that families produce three children to avoid burdening the state. The whiplash exposes the dangers of engineering society as if it were a machine, reducing people to inputs and outputs. Similarly, zero-Covid revealed both the power and fragility of state capacity. China could close borders, mobilize resources, and enforce quarantines at scale, but its rigidity led to suffering, supply chain breakdowns, and a failure to adapt to new variants. Wang warns that what looks like science can quickly become dogma.

Where Wang is most convincing is in his treatment of China’s industrial strength. He highlights the importance of “process knowledge,” the tacit know-how embedded in factories and supply chains. This is what makes Shenzhen not a copy of Silicon Valley but a global workshop, able to produce and iterate hardware at speeds no Western economy can match. The Tesla case is especially striking. In 2018, Beijing allowed Tesla to fully own its Shanghai plant. The move shocked the market, as foreign automakers had always been forced into joint ventures. Tesla’s arrival created a “catfish effect,” forcing Chinese firms like BYD to raise their game. The result was not Tesla’s dominance, but a revitalized EV sector that propelled BYD to global leadership by 2023. Wang uses this as a vivid example of how competition and engineering drive can transform an industry.

Yet his admiration never veers into naivety. He notes that China’s engineering feats have carried environmental costs. For instance, as incredible as it sounds, almost nowhere in China is tap water safe to drink. To me, this is a reminder that speed and scale often outpace sustainability. And unlike what many think about China’s state capitalism, the country actually bails out companies more frequently than many assume, and such interventions distort scale and force reliance on exports. The engineering mindset produces power, but also fragility.

If Wang is tough on China, he is not gentle with America. He portrays the U.S. as shackled by legalism, regulation, and a rentier elite. Too often, lawyers rather than builders dictate outcomes, leading to paralysis. He laments America’s inability to construct affordable housing or modern infrastructure, while praising the dynamism of immigrant neighborhoods that remind him what America could be. His critique, however, draws heavily on anecdotes and familiar arguments. Readers hoping for a more detailed analysis of America may find these sections less developed than those on China.

Breakneck succeeds because it blends first-hand observation with deep reflection. Wang’s personal experiences in China give the book a vividness that purely academic accounts often lack. He is at once admiring and critical, able to appreciate China’s astonishing capacity to build while warning of its human costs. He does not argue for America to copy China, but rather to recover its own spirit of building without losing its protections for individual rights and dissent.

For me, the book lingers because it is not only about China or America, but about what happens if both lose their way. Wang worries that China’s drive could hollow out its legitimacy, while America risks becoming a shell of itself. His vision, however imperfect, is a call to imagine a synthesis: societies that can build at scale but also respect human variability and error.

The book forces readers to think about the world’s two superpowers in fresh ways, while also questioning the stories we tell ourselves about progress. I see why Cowen praised it so highly. Even if you disagree with parts of it, you will come away with sharpened insight into the century-defining competition of our time.