In a live discussion on Substack in June with Derek Thompson, neoliberal pundit Noah Smith called Dan Wang’s Breakneck a “companion volume” to Thompson’s and Klein’s recent bestseller Abundance. Wang is slated to speak at the upcoming Abundance 2025 conference, which is headlined by Klein and Thompson. Given the furious fight between the abundance faction and progressives for the soul of the Democratic party, I figured I should read it.
With Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (W.W. Norton 2025), the Hoover Institution’s Dan Wang makes a powerful authorial debut, deftly tracing the promise and pitfalls of China’s “engineering state” model of governance, which Wang presents as a foil to the American “lawyerly” society. In many ways, Breakneck is an ethnography of a government. And the portions of the book that lean into that frame are generally the best (largely chapters 3, 5, and 6).
The book is fascinating and surprisingly fun—with Wang’s piercing dry wit interspersed at a near perfect frequency. It’s also frustrating. While the character of the engineering state is superbly developed, the points where its American “lawyerly” counterpart is brought into the mix are more tenuous. Wang leans heavily on a reiteration of Paul Sabin’s characterization of the American Left, from his book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (W.W. Norton 2021), with Wang’s explanation feeling paper thin next to the detailed portrait he paints of the engineering state.
Some of this is entirely understandable; Breakneck is, first and foremost, a book about China, not about the United States. The comparatively flimsy explanation of the lawyerly state, however, is largely taken from a footnote in earlier chapters to a central point of framing in the book’s conclusion.
While an overall terrific read, the book is somewhat uneven, great in most places but merely good in others. Perhaps the greatest criticism of the book is, in a way, a compliment to Wang as a writer: it should be at least 50 pages longer.
About Abundance?
Wang makes no secret that he is sympathetic to the abundance movement, though he seems to indicate that he may not count himself as a part of it. He writes on page 50:
Under banners like “abundance agenda,” “supply side progressivism,” and “progress studies,” various movements are trying to loosen American supply constraints. These are excellent ideas that I hope are broadly adopted.
All of those movements are really better understood as constituents of the broader abundance movement. After all, people within the movement will identify them as such, plus they share a common network of funders, conferences, and prominent personalities.
Wang, though is not wedded to the abundance “lens,” as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson term it, and instead is extremely clear in calling attention to some of the downsides such an approach entails when not balanced against other concerns.
In Wang’s parlance, the abundance movement seeks to make the United States less lawyerly and more engineering. And while Breakneck is supportive of that aim, it also cautions against overdoing it and promotes seeking to strike an appropriate balance between lawyers and engineers.
This is one reason why even many critics of abundance may enjoy the book. One of the more frequent criticisms, both of Abundance and the movement sharing its name, is that it fails to engage in the hard tradeoffs that can accompany the quest for efficiency. Proponents will laud China’s infrastructure without considering the limitations on political freedoms or repression of ethnic minorities that enable its monumental building. Or, as Klein and Thompson do, they will lament the old times when Americans built things like the transcontinental railroad, with no acknowledgement of the genocide, racialized exploitation, or corruption that enabled it.
Wang, largely, avoids this pitfall by confronting those questions head-on. He acknowledges, repeatedly, the environmental damage, persecution of ethnic minorities, and disastrous social engineering projects that came with high-speed rail, monumental bridges, and dams. The question presented by this acknowledgment, which could have been answered more substantially, though, is how possible it is to have an engineering society that steers around the worst of these harms.
First Kill All the Lawyers?
The single biggest flaw in Breakneck is its chronicling of the role and influence of lawyers in the United States. The topline argument here is simple enough: we used to be more of a nation of engineers before becoming extremely lawyerly in the back half of the twentieth century.
In particular, Wang points to Paul Sabin’s Public Citizens and blames this development substantially on the New Left, spearheaded by figures like Ralph Nader who continually sued the government to enact progressive ends. Yet Breakneck barely addresses the necessity of the lawyerly society to preserve and defend the public from powerful interests or corrupt political regimes. Red tape has its downsides, but it also can be an impediment to the worst impulses of those in power. Particularly in the age of Trumpian power-tripping and influence peddling, with the Supreme Court playing dead (at times quite convincingly), many people would probably like it if lawyers were able to slow things down more at this particular point.
At one point Wang proxies the level of lawyerliness on the number of lawyers per capita the United States has (p.14). Even by that metric, Israel, the Dominican Republic, Italy and Brazil are more lawyerly. Do they all struggle to build more than the United States?
There is also an issue of how one counts the lawyers. In the European continental civil law system, many nations separate out “lawyers” from “magistrates.” In the United States, by contrast, everyone who practices law is a lawyer, whether they are a defense attorney, a prosecutor, or a judge. In some places like France, for instance, prosecutors and judges are excluded. So when Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make a similar point to Wang and cite the United States as having four times the lawyers per capita as France (Abundance p.92-93), it is, at best, misleading.
Additionally, there are other metrics that would indicate the United States has become less lawyerly. If you look at presidents before and after the turn of the 20th century, the latter group has a much lower share of lawmen and includes the only two engineers (Hoover and Carter). Of the first eight presidents, six were lawyers. Of the eight most recent, only three went to law school. (Wang’s exploration specifically cites how many recent presidents were lawyers on page 4.)
The greatest builder of all American presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was also a lawyer. The transcontinental railroad, one of our nation’s most defining megaprojects, was begun during the administration of Abraham Lincoln, famously a lawyer.
Wang quotes Alexis de Tocqueville calling lawyers the “American aristocracy” all the way back in 1833 (p.13). Breakneck’s conclusion would have been strengthened by an exploration of when America transitioned from an engineering society to a lawyerly one and how to determine the threshold where legalism becomes overburdening.
While there is some truth to the argument that the United States is a procedure-obsessed nation, Wang’s under exploration of this point results in the book concluding on what is probably the weakest link of his analysis.
Embracing Engineers
The limits of Wang’s description of the lawyerly state are stark because of how they stand in contrast to the detailed and nuanced articulation of the engineering state. To wit, Breakneck’s third chapter is a superb crash course on the cast of engineers who made China into the nation it is. Wang strikes an excellent balance here, keeping the conversation approachable to readers without much knowledge of modern Chinese history while still getting into the weeds enough to provide valuable commentary and insights.
In the third chapter, Wang outlines a way of thinking about technology that sharply diverges from its American counterpart. He argues for what is in some ways a very worker-centered model of technology, noting that “Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing” (p.75).
Reasoning from this model, Wang goes on to criticize the “elite consensus” that viewed American manufacturing as dispensable, and the dismissal of unions and heterodox economists who warned against deindustrialization (p.76, 78). Wang also points to financialization and corporate consolidation as major drivers in America’s transformation into a country that doesn’t build anymore (p.77). This is another key point where Wang aligns with many critics of abundance.
It is also at this point, however, where Wang begins a pattern of praising Tesla, calling it “America’s great hope in auto manufacturing” (p.77). While he does rebuke Musk’s shredding of the federal government towards the end, there are several other instances where Tesla is cited as an exemplar of American industry. That Elon Musk is gambling the company on a robo-taxi gambit and has directed Tesla away from its successful sedan models and towards the disastrous cybertruck is largely undiscussed. Also undiscussed are longstanding arguments that Tesla is actually a case in point of financialization driving manufacturing rationales and the company’s reliance on selling regulatory credits as a critical source of income.
The chapter also introduces the critique of America’s emphasis on software and intangible technology at the expense of what Xi Jinping calls the “real economy,” or making physical things. “Too many people,” Wang contends, “have argued away the strategic importance of manufacturing” (p.91).
After establishing the importance of being able to build and transform the real world, the next two chapters explore the downsides of the engineering state that have accompanied China’s building prowess. The fourth chapter discusses how the cadre of engineers in the Deng Xiaoping-era tried to engage in social engineering, and the chaos that such policies sowed. Interspersed with stories of forced sterilization, infanticide, and coercive abortion, Wang’s telling of the one-child policy is chilling. As he explains, “the one-child policy could only have been implemented in the engineering state. While the state possessed a bureaucracy to enforce controls of such extraordinary scale, there wasn’t a sufficiently developed civil society to fight for legal protection against it” (p.118, emphasis in original).
The hardline positions of affixing social policy to clear numerical benchmarks is demonstrated again in the next chapter’s telling of Wang’s firsthand account of the zero covid policy. This account is part of the dire warning embedded in Breakneck about what happens when a country is not lawyerly enough.
Talking Tradeoffs
Wang argues that China and the United States would both benefit if they were a little more like one another. China should invite some of the lawyerliness in order to protect and serve its citizens, while we should do away with some procedural obsession to be able to build more. How exactly, and how much, to do that are left mostly open.
This is probably the point on which I most wish Wang had elaborated. I would like to know more how he envisions the United States becoming more engineering-focused without sacrificing the procedural protections provided by lawyerliness.
One point completely absent from the book is how important the rule of law is at preventing authoritarianism. Particularly in light of January 6th, 2021 and the more recent attempted coup in Brazil, along with an attempted coup in South Korea and redistricting arms races at home, it seems that legal bulwarks’ ability to defend themselves is extremely topical. And yet Wang does not offer any thoughts on whether lawyerliness is important to stave off democratic backsliding.
With just eight pages left in the book, Wang declares that “For various American ideals to be fully realized, the country will need to recover its ethos of building, which I believe will solve most of its economic problems and many of its political problems too.” This is reflective of the last chapter, which tries to parlay the complex comparative tapestry Wang so intricately wove into a series of straightforward, broad conclusions. Those conclusions aren’t wrong, but are dependent on the context from which they are taken. Thus, the more sweeping general conclusions feel somewhat hollow coming after six chapters of richly developed contextualization.
The Bottom Line
Breakneck will be of great value to anyone interested in modern China, geopolitics, infrastructure, or industrial policy. Wang’s perspective is invaluable, grounding debates on how to have a society that builds with his own lived experiences, interweaving historical analysis and personal reflection, and fleshing out the Chinese “engineering state” model, which is often invoked but rarely interrogated in contemporary American discussions of industrial policy.
There is no shortage of debatable points the book makes, but there is absolutely no denying that it is an excellent read. Breakneck is handily one of the best-written popular nonfiction books in recent years.