Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. By Dan Wang. Published by W.W. Norton, August 26 2025.

The United States’ dealings with China, whether positive or negative, cannot escape Cold War framing. The United States, currently led by a billionaire real estate tycoon, is shorthand for a capitalist democracy. China, of course, is led by the Chinese Communist Party. The clash of civilizations between the United States and China is usually portrayed through the lens of  capitalism versus communism.

But Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover History Lab, sees things a little differently. In Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Wang complicates how both free markets and state intervention impact these superpowers’ economies.  He does so by offering a competing dichotomy to ‘capitalism versus socialism’: Wang asserts that the United States is a “lawyerly” society, while China is an engineering society.

Wang is at his best when he is describing the nuances of the Chinese “engineering society.” He is at heart a travelogue, showing, not telling, the complexities of Chinese engineering. Wang brilliantly describes the horrors of Zero Covid, where Maoist terms were appropriated for social engineering. Having lived through Shanghai’s 2022 lockdown, Wang describes how delivery drivers chose to be homeless to continue their work, how food scarcity meant bread was $40 a loaf, how the the term “Shanghai” was blocked from search results after protests, how neighbors coordinated bulk orders of groceries via WeChat, and how Covid-positive babies were separated from their Covid-positive parents. Wang writes of China’s “Zero Covid” goal: “only a country ruled by engineers could be so single-minded about pursuing a number.” Another haunting chapter reviews the one-child policy, another striking example of how the CCP’s focus on a single number could veer wildly off course.

Wang also gives readers a window into Dali, a city in Yunnan, China’s “plausibly freest province” where Wang himself  escaped during Shanghai’s lockdown. The city is nicknamed “Dalifornia” because it is the home of organic movements, weed, and a cryptocurrency scene — even the more liberal aspects of American capitalism have some presence in China. Perhaps the freedom inherent within capitalism still thrives in China’s West in spite of strict Chinese regulations, though in small doses.

Reconciling the triumphs and pitfalls of the engineering state, one of the most striking parts of Breakneck is when Wang describes his bike journey through Guizhou, a mountainous, rural province that now produces one out of every seven guitars made worldwide. Guizhou has forty-five out of one hundred of the world’s highest bridges, and eleven airports, but also maintains an $8,000 USD/capita GDP and a scarcity of working-age adults — most of whom make guitars. And five of the eleven airports have fewer than a dozen flights a week. Guizhou is both a portrait of the engineering state at its best  —  extracting value from  rural communities, building impressive infrastructure, and manufacturing niche but important goods that may be overlooked by the free market (like guitars). But Guizhou, with its empty airports and myopic focus on a single industry, is also a prime example of the waste and absurdity that almost always arises from central planning. Does the future look like an empty mountain city that makes nothing but guitars?

Breakneck is light on analysis about the United States’ lawyerly society, other than statistics about how many lawyers the country has (400 per 100,000 people) and the slow speed of American building projects in the last fifty years (see the San Francisco to Los Angeles high-speed rail that has been promised but has never materialized). Wang does not quite say the United States is ‘in decline,” but admits that the United States is in a state of decadence, no longer needing to prove itself to be a superpower. Wang ends Breakneck by arguing that the United States should copy China’s 2023 slogan — “China will always be a developing country” — so that the United States can once again become dynamic.

In illuminating the nuances of this clash of civilizations, Wang updates our priors about what a “capitalist society” is, and isn’t. China, despite viewing tech companies as “challenges [to] the state’s sovereignty,” actually has much more of the infrastructure needed to create innovation and technology than we Americans do. Wang explains how Shenzhen’s large labor pool and proximity of manufacturing hubs allow for impressive technological innovations like iPhone sensors, drones, and semiconductors. Unlike Americans, “who expect innovations from scientists at NASA, in universities, or in research labs,” Wang argues that innovation in China comes not from universities nor research labs but “emerges from the factory floor.” In China, the production of commodities is at the heart of innovation, with the hundred million Chinese who work in manufacturing driving technology forward, rather than theorists in ivory towers.

It is possible that to the capitalism of the twenty-first century, markets need not apply. With such large and civilization-critical prizes at stake, like AI and robotics, it is possible that the diversity of sectors promoted by the classic free market is no longer necessary, or desirable. Moreover, many of the most profitable fields that have emerged from American free market capitalism in the last decade — from addictive apps to high frequency trading — seem actively harmful to society at large. Xi Jinping has denounced the “virtual economy” as a waste of talent and resources, an offshoot of the “barbaric growth” of capital. He wants China instead to focus on industrial developments.” Wang notes how Xi has punished technology entrepreneurs who Xi believes built “unicorns [that] grew into mighty beasts” by derailing public listings. Xi, in 2021 alone, wiped out a trillion dollars of market value, investigating companies on “vague charges of endangering national security,” and forbidding profit-making in the online education sector. Wang concludes that Xi’s attack on China’s virtual economy was because of a fear that it would end up like the United States.

Wang has written extensively about how an over-focus on the services economy is detrimental to societies and their economies, a sentiment I happen to share. Shenzhen succeeds, he argues, because it is a “community of engineering practice” that can quickly adapt to changing market conditions — like quickly pivoting to produce Covid masks in 2020. In the United States, by contrast, hyper-financialization has made it difficult to finance manufacturing equipment: the immediate return on investment just isn’t there, so essential industries languish, while dubiously useful ones like cryptocurrency thrive. Wang asserts that it is an “indictment of the American financial system” that Tesla, an American manufacturing powerhouse, came near bankruptcy in 2018.

In some places, it was hard not to read a dogmatically anti-capitalist attitude into Wang’s descriptions. “What does capitalism need? A stock market, which Shenzhen established in 1990. What else? Belching factories with dismal labor conditions. That it had aplenty.” Though Wang describes Shenzhen as “dynamic,” and seems to respect the great wealth and prosperity that a strong economy can bring, his descriptions of factory conditions in Shenzhen often sound like a caricature of Adam Smith’s monotonous pin factory. (Though, given the suicide nets installed at Apple’s factories, this characterization may not be undeserved). At other times, Wang lands with a simplistic Keynesian celebration of the Chinese economy for effectively turning its population towards large-scale industrial projects. But, as Guizhou’s empty airports demonstrate, in any Keynesian system, a lot of this “work” will just be make-work on seemingly grand projects that go unused and unappreciated in practice.

Wang is careful to remind us that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is not just straight-up wealth redistribution, but in fact “a Leninist agenda in which the state retains enormous discretion to command economic resources in order to maintain political control and to build toward a post-scarcity world.” This sounds a lot like Keynesianism to me. So does Wang’s critique of DOGE and the “destructive right” for focusing more on cutting wasteful government spending than encouraging the  United States federal government to take on more great mega-projects.

But the heart of Wang’s argument is that China has “learned so well from the United States that it started to beat America at its own game: capitalism, industry, and harnessing its people’s restless ambitions.” I wholly agree with Wang’s plea that the United States ought to become less lawyerly, less bogged down with regulations and an obsession with process. I also agree that the United States’ economy needs to re-prioritize manufacturing over hyper-financialized get rich quick schemes. But Wang skirts around the deeper question his book raises: have the essential natures of capitalism and socialism changed in the 21st century? And even more cutting: is China now more capitalist than the United States?

To reconcile Wang’s argument with my own, I suggest: let us make sure the United States is fully, undoubtedly more capitalist than China. All else will fall into place.