Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the FutureBy Dan Wang, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2025. 260 pp. $31.99. ISBN: 978‐1‐32‐410603‐6.

In “Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future,” Dan Wang, a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University, compares and contrasts China and the United States in several social and technological areas. His main thesis is that China, an “engineering state,” has been able to crank out an endless stream of industrial and infrastructure megaprojects that have transformed the nation while the United States, formerly an engineering state, has stalled, unable to build anything of consequence due to its transition to a “lawyerly state” fixated on litigation and delay. There is no question that China spends more on fixed-asset construction than the United States—in 2024 the United States spent about $2.2 trillion for public and private construction versus about $3.8 trillion for China—but before drawing too much from these figures, we should keep in mind that H.L. Mencken may have been correct when he stated that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” First, for its entire existence, the United States has understood the importance of infrastructure. In the 19th century, canals, riverboats, and railroads provided the means to knit together a huge and mostly empty geography. Rivers and steam engines provided power to mills and factories long before the advent of commercial electricity, and the telegraph and telephone connected people in real time and enabled enormous leaps forward in efficiency and productivity. For the most part, these projects were financed with private capital. The infrastructure marvels of the 20th century—high-speed interstate highways, a national electric grid, massive multi-purpose water projects, ubiquitous air travel connections, and the Internet—only refined the goal of moving goods, people, and information quickly and cheaply; they did not create fundamentally new service paradigms. Now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, with an economy radically different from the past, the United States is faced with numerous questions regarding its future and the infrastructure systems necessary to support continued economic growth, environmental sustainability, and community resilience. On the other hand, China's move toward industrialization was initiated by Deng Xiaoping's decision in the late 1970s to embrace a “socialist market economy” but was really energized and accelerated with the widespread move to globalize manufacturing to take advantage of vastly lower labor costs in the developing world. The explosive growth of China's economy as the “world's workshop” was unprecedented and provided the funds to support a quantum leap in infrastructure construction. Given its starting point—although certainly not as “empty” as the United States in the post-Civil War era, China was still largely rural—it was not burdened by widespread legacy systems and the path dependence they generate. With few constraints already in place, seemingly limitless capital, and an enormous but underutilized labor force, China was free to build whatever and wherever it wanted. Not only did this produce a lot of projects, it also provided jobs and incomes for millions of workers. Entire cities appeared, seemingly overnight, as did mega-factories to produce everything from low-end clothing to high-tech machine tools and electronics. However, in its rush to modernize, many externalities such as air and water pollution, community disruption, and individual rights were not addressed. In this regard, early 21st century China, does closely resemble mid-20th century America. While Mr. Wang laments that the United States, apparently lost its mojo for building as it transitioned from an engineering to a lawyerly society, he fails to mention the driving forces behind this change; one of which was a growing environmental awareness. Before a spate of environmental legislation in the 1970s, the United States suffered from rather dreadful air and water pollution; closing schools in Los Angeles due to smog, blackening the skies over Pittsburgh, and causing the Cuyahoga River in Ohio to catch fire on numerous occasions. At about the same time, minority communities gained voice and spoke out against being the dumping ground for “necessary but unpleasant” projects like landfills, sewage treatment plants, and urban freeways. These laws were passed because in a democratic society, ordinary people can affect their fate, and Americans thought that the United States deserved better than unbreathable air, undrinkable water, shattered communities, and environmental devastation and elected representatives who translated those desires into law. China doesn't exactly work that way. In China, the goals of the state are foremost, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the state. The CCP develops strategy to achieve its goals and then directs the country to provide the infrastructure and development to make it happen. The Chinese “engineering state” is very good at this and the results are plain to see. However, what has also often been plain to see is unbreathable air, undrinkable water, shattered communities, and widespread environmental devastation. The Three Gorges Dam definitely qualifies as a multi-purpose megaproject. It was designed to control Yangtze River flooding, generate hydroelectric power, and improve navigation for inland shipping. It also displaced a reported 1.3 million people. This review is not the place to discuss whether or not this was an equitable trade-off but the project did result in forced displacement, inadequate compensation, and a loss of homes and livelihoods. Although the United States once operated in a similar manner, and still utilizes eminent domain, the lawyerly society has provided people with a voice to speak against unilateral and unfettered government action. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two nations in the infrastructure space is that China builds to implement a strategy while the United States seems to have lost its strategic direction and doesn't quite know what to build. China is focused on urbanization, full employment, and a growing economy as a means to ultimately displace the United States as the world's major superpower. This has resulted in an impressive array of transportation, energy, and water projects. While Mr. Wang calls on the United States to build more, he's a little sketchy on what that might look like on the ground. Do we really need a national hi-speed rail network? There are certainly hubs such as Boston-New York-Washington that would probably benefit but where in that corridor do we find the space to build a dedicated right-of-way? Does it make sense to connect Albany to Buffalo, Chicago to Milwaukee, Philadelphia to Pittsburg, Houston to Dallas, or even Los Angeles to San Francisco? How many will ride and who will pay? We've already over-engineered just about every major river basin in the country so the era of the multi-purpose water project has probably passed. There is an obvious need to upgrade the national power grid and embrace a wide range of low- and no-carbon emission sources, but energy projects are mostly within the domain of the private sector. There is definitely a need for projects to help communities mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change, but the current Administration and Congress show little interest in the topic. In a nation that can't seem to agree where the sun rises and sets, the idea of finding some elusive “common ground” to help forge a consensus on where we want to go and what we need to build to get there, seems overly optimistic. Along the same lines, he also notes that the United States no longer makes much of anything anymore. Currently, manufacturing makes up about 10% of the US economy and accounts for about 8%–9% of the total workforce. These are not trivial numbers, but they do represent a significant decline from the peak of 1955 when 38% of the economy came from manufacturing, which employed 32% of the nonagricultural workforce. Mr. Wang is not alone in calling for the US to manufacture more but what would that look like? Is it realistic to expect US factories to replace the textiles from Africa, Latin America, and East Asia; cellphones, TVs, and solar panels from China; or ships from South Korea? A recent article in the NY Times Tobin & Wu [1] discussed US dependence on screws made in Taiwan and quoted an executive from a major screw maker who summed up the situation well: “Americans would not want to work in screw factories at Taiwan's pay rates.” Unless we can identify those areas where the United States has a strategic advantage and can add sufficient value to justify our labor rates, a magical leap back in time will not occur. At the same time, we can and should address some mission critical areas that impact national security. At the moment, China's dominance in rare-earth metals is causing havoc in the supply chains that depend on them, such as computer chip making. This dominance is less the result of geology—rare-earths occur in many areas outside of China—than the willingness of China to undertake processing of the ores, which is an environmentally messy activity that most nations are happy to outsource. This could be an excellent opportunity for the US to harness the combined capabilities of academia and industry to conduct the research necessary to develop refining processes that are more environmentally friendly and support them with regulatory adjustment and financial incentives. The US has excelled at this sort of challenge in the past, and most recently in the “Warp Speed” initiative that produced the Covid vaccine years ahead of expectation. Two areas where Mr. Wang thinks the engineering state didn't do so well were the “one child” policy and the handling of the Covid pandemic. His take on these issues was not to send an engineer to deal with social issues. The response of the Chinese people to the “one child” policy, that was viewed as an unwarranted intrusion into tradition and family structure, was decidedly negative and also put China on a path towards a bleak future where the elderly will have no offspring to care for them. The Covid lockdown was a physical and mental health disaster from which parts of the country have still not fully recovered. Although the US response to Covid was certainly not a model to be followed, it did not include forced isolation, food shortages, and daily testing for the virus. During the course of the book, Mr. Wang holds that the Chinese and Americans are more alike than different. This may be true, but our governance structures and societal expectations differ widely. Further confounding the analysis is that both countries are at vastly different points on the timeline. Albeit with much jazzier infrastructure and technology, China is about where the United States was in 1955, a manufacturing juggernaut with nearly unlimited resources and capacity and much less concern for environmental externalities and societal equity. Over the past 70 years, the United States may have become a “lawyerly” society, but we have definitely become a society where making things has become secondary to producing and consuming services and issues like sustainability and environmental justice matter to many. As an infrastructure guy, I hesitate to say whether that's bad or good. Perhaps in 70 years China will be where we are today, and the United States will be somewhere further along the societal evolutionary timeline. In the interim, “Breakneck” does provide many interesting observations from someone who's been personally close to what's currently going on in China. Given the importance and intricacies of the China–United States relationship, the book is definitely worth a read. The authors have nothing to report.