GoKawiilIn the 1970s, China opened up its markets to global trade and underwent rapid economic growth and industrialization.Credit: VCG/Getty
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future Dan Wang W. W. Norton (2025)
When it comes to accounts of China’s economic and technological success, a lot has been written but much of it isn’t worth the paper. Western scholars, especially, need to better understand the facts. Presenting those facts is the greatest strength of tech analyst Dan Wang’s excellent book Breakneck.
Here are some of the details he describes. Many of China’s poorest provinces have better infrastructure than the United States’ wealthiest regions. China’s policies designed to stimulate manufacturing growth have led to price wars, waste and debt crises. It is true that China’s one-child policy and zero-COVID strategy caused unnecessary suffering. It is also true that US regulatory policies are hindering the provision of public services such as railways in the United States. Just for including these facts, I would call Wang’s book one of the best English-language texts on China published in the past few years.
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However, Wang also wants to distil these facts into a particular narrative: China is ruled by engineers, whereas the United States is ruled by lawyers. He interprets China as a modern version of Prussian Germany or Meiji Japan — governments characterized by authoritarian rule and technocracy, where technical experts make decisions targeted towards narrow goals such as economic growth or industrial strength while neglecting others.
Wang is deeply sceptical of what he sees as China’s top-down, technocratic model. His core argument is a familiar one in the field of political economy: no central planner, however skilled, can manage a complex economy better than the market can. Economists and philosophers such as Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott have called this faith in central planning the ‘pretence of knowledge’ or ‘rationalist conceit’. What makes Wang’s version fresh is his framing of this idea through the relationship between the United States and China, and the richness of his on-the-ground reporting. But, in my view, the narrative that he constructs doesn’t always follow the facts.
Given that many of China’s leaders were educated in engineering, it’s only natural for scholars such as Wang to try to establish a causal link between their backgrounds and the country’s economic and technological achievements. But evidence doesn’t support this interpretation (see go.nature.com/4zytrx9). For example, China had the highest proportion of technocrats among the leaders of its provinces in the 1990s; there are fewer now (see go.nature.com/4rkszna). Chinese leaders are less likely than their US counterparts to have legal backgrounds, but this is because, in China, the legal profession mainly offers a route into the judicial system, which is mostly separate from the government.
And there are other paradoxes. If China’s leaders supposedly follow a logical and evidence-based engineering culture, why would they come up with so many convoluted policies, such as the one-child and zero-COVID rules? Such cases of overly complex governance are rare in other nations under technocratic governance (such as Japan and Singapore) or in technology companies (such as Google, Amazon and Huawei).
It’s common for scholars of China, especially those based in the West, to analyse how organizations’ rules and norms shape political, social and economic behaviour, but also to neglect more-fundamental aspects of societies.
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