Breakneck
Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award
An August 2025 Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book
A riveting, firsthand investigation of China’s seismic progress, its human costs, and what it means for America.
For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang—“a gifted observer of contemporary China” (Ross Douthat)—has been living through the country’s astonishing, messy progress. China’s towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality—political repression and astonishing growth—is not a paradox, but rather a feature of China’s engineering mindset.
In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China—one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad
Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux. Breakneck traverses metropolises like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, where the engineering state has created not only dazzling infrastructure but also a sense of optimism. The book also exposes the downsides of social engineering, including the surveillance of ethnic minorities, political suppression, and the traumas of the one-child policy and zero-Covid.
In an era of animosity and mistrust, Wang unmasks the shocking similarities between the United States and China. Breakneck reveals how each country points toward a better path for the other: Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering—and to produce better outcomes for the many, not just the few.
My posts about this book
Finished reading: Breakneck by Dan Wang 📚
Finished reading: Breakneck by Dan Wang
This was a fast-paced and really good reflection on the differences between China and the United States—the stark differences between a country run by engineers and a country run by lawyers.
It made me question whether I would buy an iPhone again, and shocked me by the depth of suffering many people in China endure. Especially, reading the stark realities of the three-and-a-half-decade duration of the one-child policy.
It brings back the line I use far too often: “Stop the Planet, I want off.”
Highly recommend the book; it’s a quick read, and Dan does a very good job at explaining the complexities of China from a lived perspective.
“The future would be better if China could learn to build less, while the United States learns to build more.” (Dan Wang, Breakneck)
“It costs five times as much to build a kilometer of subway in New York City as it does in Paris. If it only cost twice as much, it might be a national tragedy; since it costs five times as much, it is only a statistic. There’s no reason that much older European cities should be able to build more cheaply than New York. And the people in charge don’t seem to be able to do anything about it” (Dan Wang, Breakneck)
“Americans live today in the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded.” (Dan Wang, Breakneck)
“Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.” (Dan Wang, Breakneck)
“It’s not just the government. America’s problem is the lawyerly society. The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries.” (Dan Wang, Breakneck)
“Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai.” (Dan Wang, Breakneck)