Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future (2025)

In search of reading material for a course next semester on capitalism(s) since 1945, I asked my friend Will Pyle, a professor of economics at Middlebury, specializing in the Russian and Chinese economies, what he would recommend. He told me that Wang's book has been getting a lot of attention. It's quite readable and I will almost certainly use parts of it in the course. Wang contrasts China's engineering society with America's lawyerly one. Wang writes as an insider in both countries - emigrating from China to Canada with his parents when he was seven, Wang lived as an adult from 2017 to 2023 in China, working as an economics and technology analyst; he has studied and held academic positions in the US. Wang skillfully interweaves analysis and personal anecdotes and reflections in his account of each society's strengths and weaknesses. In the Chinese case, he ascribes China's unprecedented growth over the last four decades to its determination to build infrastructure, even on a scale that often outstrips current demand, and to the Chinese workforce's giant pool of "process knowledge" - the often tacit skills gained by working in foreign-funded factories, which later could be transferred to Chinese-owned endeavors. By contrast, each factory closing in the US has not only impacted particular workers, but has also diminished the country's process knowledge. The book doesn't present much, if any, systematic evidence; rather, it paints a portrait and gives the author's assessment. Wang's argument about process knowledge was new to me, and I'd be curious how academic specialists view it and the book generally.