The debates about China vs US couldn’t be more wrongheaded and foggy. While Breakneck, the best-selling book by Dan Wang might bring some progress in the US vs THEM, it is still a binome of totalitarianism vs liberal democracies. This caption sounds completely clickbaity, and so it is. Forget about the declinist and alarmist messaging; the discussion offers a quick introduction to one of the most talked-about books to appear lately. Why it is timely, why it is talked about remains to be seen.
Many on these titles seem specifically tailored to the Western panicky and even feed into the sinophobic hawkish atmosphere in Washington and Brussels, but in this case, the discussion is with one of the authors who has marked the current perception of China around the world: Dan Wang.
Dan Wang is a Canadian tech analyst with a keen eye on today’s Chinese Leap Forward and a longtermist view, but also let us not expect more than what he represents, a product of the startup Big Tech Californian ideology. His book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (2025) has become a viral news since a year or so, on social networks, talked about in podcasts, quoted and lionized everywhere, acclaimed by nearly everyone, pretty uncritically to say the least.
While in the rest of the industrial core of the world we’ve seen a waning of the developmental state and rampant deindustrialisation for half a century, everyone is looking outside of the usual explanations (capital flight, inter-imperialist and inter-capitalist strife, class struggle and global capitalist totality and the counter-revolution of lavish tax breaks and perpetual austerity in public affairs) China’s global rise (altough it is long not a “rise” anymore and more of an established fact) is explained apolitically by different and diversified elite rule. While the US needs more engineering, China needs more startup cryptobro deregulated entrepreneurship and or course more financialization.
The biggest conundrum is why China is proudly affirming that it will be in perpetual development, and everyone is using the Orientalist mirror to read into the Chinese tea leaves, trying to divine why China is hiding its power. But for now, we have analysts like Dan Wang, representative of the cheerily liberal consensus. What can we expect from a former financial analyst who was born in China, raised in Canada, and educated in the US before returning to live in China from 2017 to 2023, encouraging the US to mirror more of China’s command economy and China more of…Silicon Valley (?!). This mirroring idea appears deeply problematic, as this mimesis and the mimetic got attached to Chinese knockoffs (Made in China vs Created in China), where one would create (the West) while the other just imitates (China). There are histories that detail why China was constantly used as a sort of orientalist foil and mirroring “other” since the 18 century at least. Either dazzling and méritocratic, or deeply flawed and corrupt.
Even if Daniel Wang binome of lawyerly society vs engineering state sounds refreshing and less zero sum than other binary explanations, it is still quote simplistic and very confusing. Sometimes his allegiance to the cryptobro contingent veers into Agorism, techno-libertarian hubris, and IQ elite (especially considering all the article in FT about the “genius” contingent to win the AI race). Maybe his current work at the Hoover Institute, one of the arch-conservative institutions of the US, should raise some eyebrows.
Here’s an excellent article to temper this long history of mirrorings and foggy thinking about China through the lens of the US/Canada/Europe: SINOPHOBIC SINOPHILIA
Shortly put, the whole book is anchored around the dialectic of a US lawyerly (characterized as “litigious vetocracy”) society and the Chinese engineering logic that runs not just at the level of the Politburo, but to the fictional and speculative realism as well. At some point, the feeling that it is technocracy wink-wink to another technocracy across the Great Firewall. The conclusion is pretty watered down, since the wonky solutionism offered is a more diversified governing class – besides the all-powerful lawyers US needs more engineers, more economists (!!), and …(the “wild card”) assorted humanists (!?). In the end, the missed target is not the over- lawyerly society, but a deeply financialized economy under Wall Street Consensus (Gabriela Gabor’s WCS).
For this, get shaped up and read asap the transcript of the discussion around the collectively written Ming dynasty alternate history “The Morning Star of Lingao” (临高启明) and theIndustrial Party (工业党, gongye dang) recent talk on the Sinica podcast.
A recent review of this book in LARB by Afra Wang (Learn to Love the Engineers) is of particular note. It is a must-read and currently one of the top-most-read articles on LARB.
TimeSpace Warps 