Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang
Dan Wang makes a startling assertion on page one of Breakneck: “I am sure that no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.”
Of Chinese heritage, Wang grew up in Canada, has lived in the U.S. and traveled extensively in China as a technology analyst for an investment research firm. Now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, Wang reflects on the two superpowers’ increasing antagonism and rues the possible outcome. Wang sees Chinese and Americans as entrepreneurial, competitive, occasionally crass, peddling shortcuts to health and wealth, and with “an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits.”
The China he has watched over the past 20 years has gotten better and worse, rising living standards coupled with rising oppression. The Chinese are willing to emulate many models, but Wang sees that the U.S. remains the benchmark. “China has learned so well from the United States that it started to beat America at its own game: capitalism, industry, and harnessing its people’s restless ambitions,” he writes.
So which nation is better positioned for the future? Wang worries that America’s “procedure-obsessed left and destructive right have robbed from the people the sense that physical dynamism is desirable.” The U.S. is treadmilling, yet unlike China, is a pluralistic society drawing from many sources, while China’s unitary monoculture can produce only a limited number of ideas.
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