The West gets China wrong. Spectator readers know the country as a vampire state feasting on foreign intellectual property and spewing out phony economic data in its thirst for wealth and power. It certainly is these things – but it also isn’t. It is more complex, and telling only half the story is ultimately self-defeating. While there is plenty to appal us about modern China, there is also much that we can learn from it.
In Breakneck, Dan Wang reveals both sides of the ledger. ‘Too many outsiders see only the enrichment or the repression,’ he complains. His ‘big idea’ is that China is an engineering state, building at breakneck speed, whereas the United States is a ‘lawyerly society’ that has forgotten how to get stuff done. For America to compete with China it needs to learn how to build again, while China needs to build less and consume more. It’s a neat conceit, if hardly original.
Born in Yunnan province, Wang went to high school and university in the US. He worked in Silicon Valley before moving back to China as a technology analyst – to Beijing and Shanghai, where he published a series of long, self-consciously intellectual ‘annual letters’. Though perhaps a little earnest for British tastes, they revealed an unusually inquisitive and fertile mind.
On a bike ride across Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces, Wang marvels at the quality of roads and bridges – superior to the infrastructure of America’s richest states. China’s leaders believe that welfare makes people lazy; far better to redistribute wealth by funnelling economic resources into useful assets that generate growth. Bridges to nowhere soon become bridges to somewhere. In addition to turning conventional labels of left and right inside out, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ produces pride and satisfaction in its people. The mountain of debt left behind can be dealt with later.
Even more impressive is China’s journey from copycat to global tech power, leading the world in batteries, electric vehicles and green energy. Wang acknowledges that cheating (state subsidies) and stealing (IPR infringements) play a role, but he attributes China’s success to its dense network of factories and ‘process knowledge’. If the US wants to compete, he says, it must first understand how China caught up and surpassed it. It needs to stop whingeing about cybertheft and recover its industrial mojo. A good start would be to invite Chinese EV makers to set up factories in America, reversing the technology flow.
So much for the triumphs of China’s physical engineering. On the other side of the balance sheet is the madness of its social engineering. The one-child policy – adopted in 1980 and abolished in 2016 – was dreamed up by missile scientists and built on faulty cybernetic modelling, which brings to mind the epidemiologist Neil Ferguson’s crazy Covid extrapolations. Only an engineering state that views people as aggregates rather than individuals could formulate and implement a policy founded on mass sterilisation and forced abortions. With its belated attempt to engineer a population revival set to fail, China now faces a demographic time bomb.
Wang astutely draws a parallel between the one-child policy and the quest for zero Covid, Beijing’s doomed attempt to eliminate the coronavirus. His chapter is a useful reminder of just how nutty the policy was. Visit Wuhan now, as I did last month, and you would never know it had happened. In Shanghai, China’s richest city, citizens locked in their apartments feared they would starve. Children were separated from their parents; depressed singletons leapt to their deaths from high-rises. When the policy was abandoned without warning in December 2023, the inevitable result was total Covid.
Writing with verve and style, Wang is a dab hand in one-liners: ‘The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who douse blazes they themselves ignited.’ And pontificating confidently from a perch at Yale Law School, he is not short of chutzpah – happy to tell both China and the US where they have gone wrong, and to make pronouncements on their future trajectories.
We could sometimes do with hearing a little less of Wang and more of the people he meets. He says he interviewed more than 20 scientists. What do they think? There is also little detail on how Chinese tech companies rose to the top and fought back against US export restrictions. The weakest chapter is the last, in which he tells a potted family history and diagnoses the ills of modern America. Do we need to hear a lengthy account of New York’s urban design failings?
Quibbles aside, Breakneck deserves to be read. Ten or 20 years ago, on-the-ground accounts from China were two-a-penny. There was a sizable contingent of English-speaking correspondents in Beijing and Shanghai – which were truly international cities. Xi Jinping’s security state and the exodus from zero Covid put paid to that. To understand China, we need to hear more from people in the country and less from desk jockeys in London and Washington.
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