In June, Nature published a list of the top research universities in the world. Harvard was at No 1, MIT at 10, the rest were all in China. Other publications have alternative lists that include the usual superstars like Stanford and Imperial College London, but they also show the Chinese universities advancing rapidly.
We pay a lot of attention to the US – we’re so integrated with its culture; wired into its media and politics. China is more opaque – different language, history and government. It’s easy to regard it as a mere trading partner: we send milk powder in exchange for Temu products. But in recent decades it has transformed into an advanced industrial power; a leader in robotics, aerospace, green energy and a military superpower.
When technology analyst Dan Wang – now a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover History Lab – travelled from rural China to Silicon Valley, he noted that the poorest regions of China had better public infrastructure than the richest parts of the US.
Wang is famous for his end-of-year letters about life in modern China. He was born there; his family moved to Canada when he was seven. He relocated to San Francisco as an adult, then Hong Kong, followed by time in Beijing then Shanghai. Each December he wrote a letter to his friends and family considering his personal experiences during the previous 12 months, documenting his favourite books alongside developments in China’s economy, politics, culture, society. He posted these online.
Wang is an intellectual in a very Silicon Valley mode: polymathic, interests ranging across world literature, industrial development, anthropology, military history, science fiction, classical music. The letters went viral among China watchers across tech, business, government – anyone paying close attention to the dramatic changes taking place inside the rising superpower.
Breakneck argues that the people of China and the US are fundamentally similar. Ambitious and driven, these countries are the primary sites where the future of the world is being built.
Their key difference is the composition of their ruling classes. The US is a nation run by lawyers who tend to focus on processes rather than outcomes, who excel in minimising risk and preserving stasis, finding reasons not to do anything. They advance the interests of the rich because they are themselves very rich.
China is run by engineers who prioritise outcomes, construction projects and growth but are naturally prone to elaborate social engineering projects – “treating the population as if it were another building material, to be moulded or torn apart as the circumstances demand” – such as zero Covid, the one-child policy and mass resettlements of minority populations.
President Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University, which is sixth on the Nature list. His politburo is stocked with executives from aerospace and weapons ministries – China’s equivalents of Boeing or Nasa.
Wang describes growth and infrastructure as China’s alternative to a redistributive welfare system. Aspiring leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are usually expected to administer a poor province before they can be promoted to the top tier in Beijing. The Organisation Department – the CCP’s HR department on steroids – tracks each posting and scores officials on their success at stimulating economic growth while suppressing dissent.
The most reliable way to boost GDP and impress the CCP’s central committee is via the delivery of mega-projects: hydro dams, nuclear power stations (11 nuclear plants gained consent in 2024 alone; the US has built one this century), cyclopean housing complexes, canal networks, high-speed rail and vast expressways.
This growth at all costs incentive has been the most effective poverty reduction programme in human history, lifting about 800 million people out of extreme poverty between 1980 and 2020.
The best parts of Breakneck are a travelogue taking in the failures that sit alongside the modernisation triumph. Wang visits the Tianjin Binhai Library, an engineering marvel designed by a Dutch architectural firm to look like an iris, with a white sphere in the centre surrounded by undulating curves. This was approved and built within three years. But few of the shelves in the library contain books – instead, there are digital prints of book spines. It’s filled with people taking selfies in front of them. Nobody reads in the library, because there is nothing to read.
“It’s a metaphor for China’s economy,” Wang says. “Great hardware that looks impressive from a distance, not filled with the softer stuff that actually matters.” It sits near Tianjin’s financial district, a site conceived as “China’s Manhattan” but which consists of mostly empty high rises looming over empty malls.
Other cities have entire housing districts with no tenants. The logic of growth has delivered a new city the size of greater New York City and greater Boston combined every year for 35 years, but not even a population of 1.4 billion can fill them, and there’s a heavy social, financial and environmental debt that the state is only beginning to confront.
Like a lot of tech-adjacent thinkers, Wang is preoccupied with Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, routinely cited as the greatest book about politics ever written. It documents the life of Robert Moses, the urban planner who built much of modern New York. He’s simultaneously a hero – he designed the world’s first great modern city – and a villain, razing working-class neighbourhoods, entrenching car dependence and embedding racial barriers into the structure of the city.
Wang’s conclusion is that both China and the US learnt the wrong lessons from Moses, the former replicating his grand visions on a national scale and reproducing the same crimes; the latter overcorrecting towards a litigious vetocracy that cannot build anything. “Too many parts of America feel like the well-preserved ruins of a once-great civilisation.”
Unsurprisingly, he offers a synthesis. How about a society that builds great things but also defends individual rights? It sounds banal, too obvious – but convincing any ruling class to cede power is never simple.
New Zealand’s culture is obviously closer to the US’s than China. We struggle to build anything. There’s a chronic housing shortage. Our per-capita electricity generation has been declining for 20 years. Auckland light rail? The second harbour crossing?
Instead, successive Labour and National regimes create a new ministry or government agency every 14 months on average. We don’t need to fill Milford Sound with concrete or build a financial district on the Chatham Islands, but we could still learn a few lessons from the Chinese Communist Party about dynamism, capitalism and the perils of bureaucracy.
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang (Allen Lane, $65 hb). The ebook and audio book of Breakneck are released on August 26. The hardback will be available in November.
