In modern times, the world’s most powerful and influential states have also had the largest economies. When the United States overtook Britain in the early 20th century, it was only a question of time before it assumed international political leadership too. Indeed, the failure to assume this role is widely thought to explain the duration of the Great Depression and the turmoil of the period between the two world wars.

At a time when American hegemony seems to be in terminal decline and China might overtake the US economically, plausible and original explanations of their relative fates are welcome.

Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, succeeds on both counts. At the heart of this very readable book is Wang’s argument that there is a profound difference between the two rivals: the US is run by lawyers and China is ruled by engineers.

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Review: Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future – Dan Wang (Allen Lane)

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Wang is perfectly placed to unpack this deceptively simple idea, having been born in China and spent large chunks of his relatively short life there and in the US. He is a keen and shrewd observer of both societies, and the book is sprinkled with personal anecdotes and illustrations of his key claims. Consequently, it’s not a conventional “academic” account, but that may come as a relief to many prospective readers.

Lawyers versus engineers

The biggest difference between China and the US today, according to Wang, is not the sort of ideological differences that distinguished America’s competition with the Soviet Union, but their respective abilities to get things done.

“The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist,” Wang argues. “China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.”

There is currently a major debate in the US about quite why it has failed to fulfil its potential and achieve “abundance”. America certainly has an abundance of lawyers, and they are part of the explanation, because they create legal obstacles to development. This results in Americans living in what Wang calls “the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded”.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much, especially when compared to China’s developmental mania. In part, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) enthusiasm for building provides a sort of performance legitimacy, in which “socialism with Chinese characteristics, is set up to give people one main thing: material improvements, mostly through public works”.

There are lots of examples of the two countries’ comparative ability to deliver infrastructure. One of the most notorious is California’s failure to build a rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, while China has built a truly astounding amount for a fraction of the cost. Such contrasts are commonplace these days, but Wang’s analysis highlights why and how China has rapidly caught up to, and is possibly poised to overtake, the US in the most dynamic and lucrative forms of economic activity.

Anyone who has been to Shenzhen will have been astounded by its dazzling modernity, which has seemingly appeared overnight. But Wang argues that the city’s less visible role as a centre of innovation is its real strength and achievement. He puts this down to

its spectacular capacity for learning by doing and consistently improving things […] The value of these communities of engineering practise is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology.

In some ways, these are familiar debates and claims. The idea that “manufacturing matters” has been around for decades. It still informs Trump’s justification for trying to bring manufacturing back to the US. That train that really has left the station, though. Deindustrialisation looks set to continue, Wang thinks, unless America “recover[s] its ethos of building”.

Shenzhen has become a city of dazzling modernity. Robert Bye/Unsplash

A spanner in the works

Impressive and unparalleled as China’s achievements undoubtedly are, all is not well in the People’s Republic, and mainly because the engineers are in charge. Wang cites two sobering examples of what can happen when technocrats and scientists make decisions about social policy: the one-child policy and China’s response to the Covid pandemic.

The one-child policy was instigated to address what was seen, at the time, as a looming crisis of overpopulation. In Wang’s reading it

is one of the most searing indictments of the engineering state. It represents what can go wrong when a country views members of its population as aggregates that can be manipulated rather than individuals who have desires, goals, or rights.

Perhaps so, but it’s also worth pointing out that, without it, China’s current population of 1.4 billion might be closer to two billion. Its environmental problems – and the world’s – might be even more serious than they already are.

Either way, Wang is probably right to claim that the policy “could only have been formulated by the engineering state”. As he mournfully notes, “the female body is now a fixation of the Politburo’s all-male political gaze”. Consequently, it is still “hard to be a woman in China today”, a reality reflected in the complete absence of women at senior levels in the ruling elite.

If there had been some, perhaps the draconian lockdowns that distinguished China’s response to Covid might have been less brutal. The policy of locking people in their apartments for months on end culminated in an avoidable tragedy when (at least) ten people died because their tower block caught fire and they were unable to escape.

As it was, Wang suggests, “China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic embodies all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses”.

The great theoretical advantage of lawyerly societies, by contrast, is that there are institutionalised norms and practices that potentially act as a brake on overweening state power – although that proposition is currently being put to the test by a Trump administration with little time for legal niceties.

In China, there isn’t much pretence about the all-consuming role of the state, because it “doesn’t have a robust system for political contestation”. As Wang puts it, “engineers will simply follow the science until it leads to social immiseration”.

This is precisely what happened during the Covid crackdown, which convinced many of China’s brightest and best, like Wang, to flee overseas.

A clash of civilisations?

Surprisingly, given that China and America represent very different models of civilisation and views of the good life, there is no mention of Samuel Huntington’s controversial “clash of civilisations” thesis.

Whatever one thinks about Huntington’s claims about the inevitability of clashing social values and traditions, such ideas are not irrelevant. After all, the emergence of Silicon Valley as the epicentre of the latest technological revolution owes something to underlying social values and networks.

It’s worth remembering that the first technological revolution happened in Britain and not in China, because British society was more adaptable to industrial possibilities. It created institutions to facilitate capitalist development.

This time around, Wang claims, “China 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”.

While China’s leaders may not like being described as having led a successful capitalist revolution, it is not inaccurate. They have, however, prevented what many China-watchers in the US expected to be the consequence of such a structural transformation: the inevitable rise of individualism and the concomitant demand for democratic reform.

What China has managed instead is a “mixture of permitting free enterprise while building big infrastructure”. This is, Wang argues, “part of the reason that the Communist Party has held onto consent of the governed”.

There is plainly something in this. Many Chinese can remember when even food was scarce, let alone the consumer durables its largely urban population now takes for granted. Materialism isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing either.

What’s next?

The key question for many outside observers is what China’s leaders do next. Having largely solved many of the country’s most fundamental problems at “breakneck” speed, how can the CCP continue to justify a role that seeks “to maximise the discretion of the state and minimise the rights of individuals”?

One answer may be to emphasise threats to China and prepare for possible conflict, something Wang argues is happening under President Xi’s leadership.

All of which raises another interesting question. “If China and the United States ever come to blows,” Wang writes, “they would be entering a conflagration with different strengths. Which would you rather have: software or hardware?”

That’s a bit simplistic, and it is far from an either/or question, but it does highlight another widely held belief among influential analysts of international relations who believe that conflict between rising and declining great powers is more likely than not.

But as China’s leaders like to remind us, they have more historical examples to draw on than anyone else and thus far, at least, they have been remarkably circumspect about throwing around their increasing weight, unlike their counterparts in the US.

Let’s hope engineers are as temperamentally averse to destroying things as they are enthusiastic about building them.