The Engineering State

REVIEW ESSAY
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
by Dan Wang
W.W. Norton, 2025, 304 pages

What forces created such an awe-inspiring material civilization? What administrative and intellectual systems created the conditions for this development? Is such an [end-state] the result of chance, or was it a historic inevitability?

—Wang Huning, 1991

It has been my experience that members of the legal profession are contributing substantially to the erosion of values and institutions on which our society is based. In their quest for money and power many lawyers seem to have forgotten their obligations. By so doing, they alienate their countrymen, breed distrust of our institutions and those who run them, and undermine the traditional values of honor, humility, and honest dealing.

—Hyman Rickover, 1979

Readers of this journal will be familiar with the divergence of outcomes between China and the United States. The former now possesses the world’s dominant industrial base and a rapidly expanding power grid, while the latter is the world’s consumer and debtor nation supported by amorphous service sectors, its once-great physical economy now suffocating under procedural overhead. In our increasingly reductive discourse on China, these differences are attributed to the broad ideological categories that separate the two nations: America’s free but messy liberal democratic capitalism against China’s centralized one-party dictatorship and socialist planned economy.

Dan Wang offers a different set of categories in his new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. While a bottom-up view might look at mass movements and a top-down view might look at leaders or systems of government, his analysis comes from an “upper-strata view” of history: it is not the head of a state or the social organization of the populace but the shared outlook and mores of the ruling class that shapes the trajectory of a nation.

According to Breakneck, the central challenge facing the United States in its strategic competition with China today is that one country builds and the other does not: its simple but striking core thesis is that the United States is fundamentally a “lawyerly society,” while China is an “engineering state.” Wang’s framing is helpful because it provides a broader explanatory framework for these divergent outcomes and helps us understand—unlike so much else written on the topic—how China actually works.

In Wang’s framing, the inability of the United States to build is not a vice inherent to democracy, nor is it necessarily a question of the right economic model, since China is intensely capitalist in many ways. Rather, it boils down to the cultural and professional attitudes that elites bring to the problems of governing a complex society.

A Tale of Two Elites

The standard account of China’s economic rise simply places it at the apex of a natural arc of industrial development. Endowed with abundant resources of labor and raw materials, China seems like just the greatest fulfillment of the standard model of industrialization, where countries move from low-value goods production to higher-value services, just as the United States and other industrialized nations once did.¹ Such narratives lead us to believe that the elevation of one billion people out of poverty into material prosperity in a single generation was the consequence of material forces alone; China’s ability to innovate and mass produce cutting-edge technologies, from electric vehicles to a high voltage direct current power grid, was, in this view, only a matter of course. To be sure, labor costs, economies of scale, and myriad other structural factors matter greatly. But to dwell exclusively on those inputs is to miss the real foundations of China’s industrial ascent—and to overlook what the United States might still learn from it.

In Breakneck, Wang builds on the approach that earned him fame in Silicon Valley as the perceptive author of annual letters on China, written while he was living there from 2017 to 2023. Wang not only offers a novel framing for understanding China’s idiosyncrasies and neuroses (and ours) but also brings a first-hand perspective to understanding the paradoxes of the People’s Republic. He draws heavily from personal anecdotes of his time in China and helps capture the nuances of its society, while still providing a cogent understanding of the dangers, and the material benefits, of CCP rule. Rather than deploying figures and statistics to prove his case, Wang leans primarily on his vivid narrative powers to convey his knowledge and understanding of China as an “engineering state.”

Wang describes both the means and ends of this engineering state. It is characterized by “physical dynamism” and the distribution of “material improvements, mostly through public works.”² As a result, in China, “manufacturing hubs are everywhere, often making goods you don’t expect.”³ At the same time, the engineering state moves in “peculiarly jerky rhythms,”⁴ which results in the juxtaposition, perhaps jarring to Westerners who assume that freedom and development go together, of gleaming infrastructure and crushing repression, as witnessed during the draconian “Zero Covid” lockdowns and the brutal implementation of the one-child policy, both of which Wang covers at length. In his telling, the engineering state feels as if it is governed by “hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as flows,” and it can be hard to know where infrastructure stops and human rights begin.⁵

Indeed, far from being an unqualified admirer of the CCP’s methods of rule, Wang laces the book with stark images of the engineering state deploying its immense energies in ways that would strike any American observer as chillingly inhumane. Wang relates the story of a party secretary in Shandong province who decided that there were to be no babies born for one hundred days to meet quotas.⁶ Amid Zero Covid, drones flew around Shanghai during protests, blaring calls to “repress your soul’s yearning for freedom.”

America’s lawyerly society may have dysfunctions, but it appears as the more attractive and compelling option once contrasted with the hard excesses of the engineering state mentality. And through such comparisons, Breakneck underscores how the engrained belief in civil liberties treasured by Americans has guarded against moral catastrophes and mass coercion. While the idea of a population bomb alarmed global elites, U.S. civil society easily rejected the implied solution of population control. Lawyerly societies likewise avoid the nervous intensity of an engineering state but at the cost of physical stagnation and institutional stasis. Whereas China tries to engineer and build its way out of problems, the lawyerly society treats “a more rigorous process” as the solution.⁷

While Wang acknowledges clear developmental benefits in the American model—for instance, the rule of law’s role in stabilizing investment, among other things—its predominance has come at too high a cost for the United States. In the final analysis, Breakneck posits, the state that builds will win, his own and others’ moral caveats notwithstanding. From such a position, Wang argues that making progress in the race against China will ultimately require the right kinds of people in charge, rather than just changing systems or models or regulations. To do so, we must “elevate a greater diversity of voices among” American elites,⁸ including engineers, and “unwind the dominance of lawyers.”⁹

Wang chose lawyers as the defining elite of American society, rather than investors or financiers. Economics does not seem to him as problematic a practice as law. He acknowledges, on the one hand, that many in the discipline even today “put their faith in the inevitable march of a service economy,” while on the other, he singles them out in positive terms as “technocratically minded brethren” to engineers.¹⁰ In his account, the proceduralism of lawyers is the universal cultural bottleneck, whereas finance and investment can be handled and balanced after the fact as a secondary concern

Regardless of Wang’s equivocation, it is true that we likely need more nationally oriented capitalists playing a role in government, not fewer. As Thomas Hochman has argued previously in these pages, realizing energy abundance and new investment in capital projects will require significant deregulation but also targeted public capital support.¹¹ While we may have too many lawyers, it is also the case that we lack the right kind of financiers. Unlike lawyers, however, financiers seem bound to material incentives. As some results of the Inflation Reduction Act demonstrated, once the right incentives are in place, investors will follow market signals toward manufacturing projects, at least to a degree.¹²

Bound to proceduralism, lawyers are more inherently antagonistic toward rapid progress. As Wang quotes Grant Gilmore in Breakneck, “The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law. . . .”¹³ One can debate and discuss the right temperament and kind of engineer or financier, but the thrust of Breakneck, which I’m inclined to agree with, is that we could all use fewer juris doctors in the halls of power.

To reduce the book’s main observation to a mere misallocation of political power, or a credential gap between the Chinese and U.S. governments, however, is to miss the point. It must be said from the outset that more degree-counting is likely not Wang’s prescription, as much as more engineers in government would help. Wang is more concerned with who enjoys the freest reign in each country’s government. In the United States, lawyers are “afforded license to be generalists, permitted to stomp into whichever intellectual realm pleases them.”¹⁴ By contrast, in China, it is the engineers who are allowed entry into policymaking early in their careers and trained to have “practical experience managing megaprojects” before ascending to the upper echelons of the governing class.¹⁵

Instead of presuming that someone like Jake Sullivan, the former National Security Advisor and Yale J.D., can fully grasp GPU inference bandwidth limits or semiconductor wafer supply chains, perhaps we should invest in preparing those with real engineering experience to navigate the complexities of the federal bureaucracy. Yet too few have done so. The only U.S. presidents in a century to boast engineering backgrounds, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, are remembered less for technical competence than for political naïveté.

One could reasonably quibble with Wang’s thesis. For instance, the United States has never had large proportions of engineers in government. Indeed, from the time of the founding and throughout America’s long history of industrial development, lawyers have predominated in government. And as others have noted, the ascendancy of engineers in the Chinese Communist Party and China’s industrial rise is not quite complete.¹⁶ Some characteristics that Wang ascribes to China’s unique engineering state—its zeal for engineered state planning that can veer into the absurd—is to some degree characteristic of authoritarian regimes in general. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both employed technocratic expertise to murderous ends, with less to show for it than China.

Ultimately, Breakneck lacks the rigor of hard data about the impact of engineers in government, and it is light on the financial rebalancing China did to spur investment over consumption. Wang nonetheless accomplishes a task of comparable merit and perhaps even greater difficulty: Breakneck inspires much-needed curiosity about how China actually works, curiosity direly needed as currently popular explanations of the Chinese system fail to account for how it actually works and achieves technological progress. Moreover, it shows how America might once again reorient its political economy toward production grounded in a sense of national purpose. Indeed, Wang states that the framing of engineers versus lawyers is in part meant to encourage “mutual curiosity.”¹⁷ Wang’s natural, conversational prose, which captures the striking awe of Chinese productive capacity, serves well to stoke his readers’ curiosity, even if it may fail to convince readers looking for empirical and quantitative depth, ironically the very metrics that an engineer would ask for.

The value of Breakneck is perhaps best understood in Straussian terms, as creating tractable mimetic competition. “Engineering state versus lawyerly society” provides a critical frame that encourages American elites to imagine themselves as builders again, to emulate China’s seriousness about material progress. In this sense, the dichotomy of the engineering state versus the lawyerly society, despite its surface-level simplicity, is far more useful as a means to discovering helpful policy prescriptions, than as an analytical or academic frame. It offers a generative heuristic for national rejuvenation, one that moves us beyond outdated ideological binaries and toward a more grounded motivation for rebuilding state capacity.

Reengineering America

Breakneck arrives amid a paradigm shift in America’s approach to industrial strength. Over the past several years, politicians and technologists alike have accepted Wang’s assertion that industrial capacity, not GDP or purchasing power, is the true measure of national strength. This unlikely and loosely defined coalition of venture firms and start-ups from California and new think tanks across the political spectrum has already achieved growing bipartisan success. The fruits of this change in thinking can be seen from the introduction of Section 301 tariffs in the first Trump administration, to the bipartisan chips and Science Act in the Biden years, to the unique financing instruments used by the second Trump administration to support domestic rare earth production and semiconductors.

This reexamination of policy and ideological priors is exemplified of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance and the associated movement, which is gaining momentum within the Democratic Party. Wang provides a brief nod to them, as a budding movement on the political left that traditionally has “tended to favor physical stasis in the name of environmental protection or neighborhood preservation.”¹⁸ Insofar as abundance is born out of Ezra Klein’s earlier attempts at articulating a return to supply-side progressivism rather than regulating demand, Wang is clear that these are “excellent ideas that I hope will be adopted.”¹⁹ And I would agree with Wang on this point. But I would argue there are also important difference between Abundance and Breakneck. While the authors of both agree on the need for reducing lawyerly process burdens to focus on building physical infrastructure, it is Wang who offers a deeper diagnosis of the cultural hangups that constrain material progress in the United States.

Within Breakneck’s frame, Abundance looks more like a lawyerly society’s prescription: simply tweak a few regulations and rules, and our well-meaning bureaucrats and markets will be unleashed to deliver abundance. Notably missing throughout Abundance is the question of “who is actually going to make abundance happen?” While writers play an important role in shaping ideas, at the end of the day, New York Times columnists are not going to be the ones to actually bring about an abundance agenda. In this regard, many Republicans, often categorized under “dark abundance” flavor, have argued convincingly that they have been “doing abundance” all along.²⁰ Breakneck presents a strongly worded rejoinder to both groups: material abundance and industrial vitality require far more than the right policy tweaks; it is downstream of the right kind of governing class with an enthusiastic attitude toward building.

A growing number of fellowships and talent pipelines now aim to bring AI and tech talent into U.S. government: the Horizon Institute, TechCongress, and the former U.S. Digital Service, to name a few. But thus far there has not been any effort to train real engineers in the arts of politics, even as America cries out for a new generation of Hyman Rickovers and Bill Knudsens—that is, technical leaders capable of organizing production and driving innovation. Earlier this year, my organization, the Center for Industrial Strategy, launched the Knudsen Industrial Strategy Fellowship, where we host reading discussion groups and guest lectures on the history and practical policies that shape industries, to close some of the distance between technical talent and government.²¹ Breakneck will hopefully sound a clarion call for more programs and support to galvanize technically minded engineers and encourage them to join in government-led efforts to rebuild American industries.

For all those undertaking the challenge of sustaining this evolution in American governance, China once again offers useful historical examples. In a previous issue of American Affairs, Kelvin Yu and I outlined how Chinese thinkers grappled with the question of progress for a century and a half, and how this engagement aided Chinese revitalization.²² During the late Qing dynasty and early republican era, Chinese elites faced many similar questions as the United States today. They struggled to gain the ability to mass manufacture arms and munitions at cost while losing wars to rivals like Japan; they were burdened by concerns about how to jumpstart manufacturing and technological growth through foreign investment without losing domestic culture, and so on. Yet as we wrote in these pages, “it took China 150 years of reform, interrupted by catastrophes and ideological detours, to arrive at the current techno-industrialist outlook the party carries today.”

The rise of the political movement that drove China’s emergence as an industrial superpower was neither quick nor painless. Its progress came through decades of experimentation, coercion, and extraordinary administrative focus that produced both industrial miracles and moral disasters. Even as political and intellectual movements gain momentum, the United States should not expect its own renewal to be easy. Nor should it mistake China’s methods for a model to imitate. Breakneck is valuable precisely because it revives curiosity about that evolutionary process among readers in both policymaking and technology, helping us distinguish between what enabled China’s productive dynamism and what excesses we must avoid.

Breakneck can inspire and inform flexible movement building and programmatic proposals, notably in industrial policy. For instance, one key objective of industrial policy Breakneck highlights is cultivating the process knowledge embodied in ecosystems of engineering practice, where the diffusion of such knowledge fosters integrated supply chains and innovation under market conditions.

Wang tells the story of Zheng’an Guitar Culture Industrial Park, which manufactures one of every seven guitars in the world.²³ One can point to a bounty of other examples of towns in China that have moved up the value chain after specializing in niche prod­ucts, from oil paintings and lighters to LCD screens and battery manu­facturing.²⁴ Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei electronics market and Yiwu consumer marketplace are incredible examples of the kinds of export-oriented industries that can emerge from a close proximity of industrial suppliers.

In this regard, the Trump administration’s Opportunity Zones offer a promising example of how Breakneck’s ideas might translate into practical policy—though they currently lack sufficient congressional authorization and funding.²⁵ One legislative path to incentivizing regional manufacturing ecosystems is to allow for both an expanded and more targeted 45X production tax credit. Today, the 45X production tax credit provides a per-unit credit for each eligible component manufactured domestically. It applies to a range of technologies, including solar modules, battery cells and packs, and critical mineral processing, with the credit amount, and expiration date, varying by component type and volume of production.²⁶

Currently, however, 45X applies uniformly across the country to any facility producing eligible components. To jumpstart genuine regional industrial clusters, Congress could authorize federal agencies to designate specific areas as industrial zones for each 45X-eligible technology. Manufacturers operating in these zones would receive larger credits for longer durations. Congress could also broaden 45X eligibility to cover additional technologies like gas turbines and rare earth magnets.

This approach avoids the bureaucratic overhead of grants and the delays of federal permitting, while encouraging bottom-up competition among states and regions to attract industrial investment. And unlike many subsidy programs, the production tax credit is relatively cost-effective—currently estimated at just $4 billion annually across all covered sectors—a bargain for revitalizing American manufacturing.²⁷ Indeed, there is much more to be done along these lines, and we are only just beginning to envision the new policy ideas that come from the new U.S.-China dichotomy offered by Breakneck.

The American Promise

In American politics, discourse on China is ideological and one-dimensional, lacking in actual grounding in how this vast civilization-state actually works. I am optimistic that Breakneck will help move the national debate to a more nuanced understanding of China, and one that can inform the development of better industrial policy in the United States.

Wang’s perspective is bolstered and molded by the fact he has spent significant amounts of time in China, something that is increasingly rare as both countries close their borders to one another. And perhaps even more so by his own personal heritage as the child of Chinese immigrants. As someone from a similar background, I particularly appreciated that he dedicated his final chapter to his parents’ experience of leaving China and immigrating to a new life abroad. The same promise which drew my parents across an ocean still animates this country. The cultural diagnoses in Breakneck offer fertile ground to inspire a new generation of leaders and nation-builders. But perhaps Wang’s most important reminder is this: America’s strength lies not in perfection but in the promise of possibility, its to-be-determined future shaped by the wide variety of voices it accommodates and its resilience in adapting to new challenges, ever changing, always becoming.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2025): 79–89.

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Notes