The title of Dan Wang’s book Breakneck focuses on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) specifically, but it is really about the self-conscious great-power rivalry between China’s Communist Party leaders and the United States. Along the way, we encounter all the popular points of controversy between the two great nations, covering everything from bullet trains, iPhone factories, and Trump tariffs to zero-COVID lockdowns, rare-earth mineral supply chains, and the demographic long tail of the One Child policy.
This isn’t just another case of two big nations clashing—as big nations tend to do from time to time. For finance analyst and university research fellow Dan Wang, the US and the PRC are uniquely paired in world affairs. In his introduction, he writes, “…no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese,” citing their shared love of consumerism, pragmatic natures, and appreciation for technological progress.
Wang sees the US and PRC economies, in particular, as complements, which explains the rapid growth of trade between the two in the twenty-first century: “It is almost uncanny how much the United States and China have been complementary of each other.”
Yet at the same time, he says that, on a political level, “the two systems are a study in contrasts.” Fair enough, as they’re obviously very different. Yet in other passages, he frames the US and PRC systems as “inversions” of each other. This is seen in each society’s attitudes toward innovation and technology adoption, and to politics in general. It would take a sublime Confucian scholar to disentangle these contradictions. Perhaps the two nations are the phoenix and the dragon of world politics, the cobra and the mongoose, or simply each other’s evil twin.
Focusing on differences, Wang describes a Chinese government run by relentlessly practical but unsentimental engineers, who excel at building impressive infrastructure projects yet often disregard the negative impact on individual citizens. By contrast, America—the home of legal proceduralism and bureaucracy—has, in recent decades, erected a bewildering array of roadblocks to major projects, but does a much better job of recognizing and safeguarding individual rights.
This summary of strengths and weaknesses naturally suggests that each nation could benefit from borrowing elements of the other. The Chinese would be better off in certain ways by becoming more American, and vice versa. The first nation to adopt its counterpart’s advantages, Wang argues, will—like a comic book villain or mythic hero—bring balance to the force of good governance and “win” the twenty-first century.
It’s a reassuring prescription in a way, implying that there are no fundamental conflicts between the two nations that can’t be resolved through better understanding. Yet it contrasts sharply with the rhetoric coming out of both Beijing and Washington, D.C., where policy hawks from each country frame a twenty-first-century showdown that many fear could lead to war in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere.
It also recalls the attitudes of some Western academics and center-left pundits during the Cold War, who assumed that the US and Soviet systems were similarly paired and would eventually converge in ways beneficial to both societies.
As late as 1988, for example, famed Affluent Society author John Kenneth Galbraith co-published a book with Marxist economist Stanislav Menshikov that imagined a future of increased trade and cooperation between the US and the USSR. They also, as Publisher’s Weekly put it at the time, “…criticize[d] establishment interests on both sides that seek to perpetuate the cold war.”
Galbraith and Menshikov were right that the Cold War would soon end—but not in a way that left the Soviets with a 50 percent stake in the world’s political future. If the collapse of the Soviet system—at a time when some Western economists were still predicting that the Warsaw Pact countries were on track to surpass the West economically—arrived so unexpectedly, one wonders what yet-unseen surprises the Chinese Communist Party has in store for the twenty-first century.
The Party, after all, has delivered plenty of dramatic—and mostly unpleasant—shocks to its own people over the decades. Wang takes deep dives into two of the most infamous: the One Child policy and the zero-COVID containment strategy. The former was certainly more horrific, although the latter’s impacts are far more recent and the responsibility of the current government, giving the pandemic lockdowns more resonance for younger Chinese citizens.
The PRC’s One Child policy was enforced, in successive iterations, from 1980 to 2015, and as a two- and three-child policy until 2021. The statistics, as Wang recounts them, are grim. In 1983, for example, the government sterilized 16 million women and aborted 14 million babies. Women who tried to resist were pressured, harassed, and sometimes even kidnapped by enforcement squads. Official propaganda claimed the procedures were voluntary, but in reality, they were the result of well-organized coercion: “…women [were] hauled before mass rallies and harangued into consenting to an abortion.”
Unsurprisingly, the policy was extremely unpopular among the women and families subjected to it, and the regime did little to blunt the pain it inflicted. “It didn’t help,” Wang dryly notes, “that the abortion posses literally carted off women in hog cages.”
The PRC’s COVID containment strategy was similarly authoritarian. Despite officials praising themselves for initially managing the pandemic well, by early 2022, rising infections were creating growing anxiety among Politburo members in Beijing. The government eventually imposed some of the largest forced quarantines in modern history, confining most of Shanghai’s population, for example, to their homes from March onward.
The lockdown lasted roughly five months—in a metro area of 25 million people, three times the size of New York City. Officials failed to ensure that residents could maintain reliable access to food and clean water. Chaos and panic were widespread, with many forced to adopt digital hunting and gathering as a full-time strategy to supplement the unpredictable and insufficient official provisions.
Wang quotes the unexpectedly poetic—and horrifying—propaganda broadcast throughout the city via drones: “Please comply with COVID restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom,” the floating loudspeakers intoned.
Compared with scenes like that, the 3,000-page environmental impact statements and NIMBYism of US lawyerly society hardly seem so bad. Certainly, if most Americans had to choose between enduring the persistent defects of the United States and living under a system designed by the Chinese Communist Party, they would almost certainly opt for slow trains and the Bill of Rights.
Also, as Wang describes in a chapter on dissatisfied PRC expats, plenty of Chinese nationals with the money and initiative to leave have done so. Some of them, in line with popular narratives, have come to the US to get STEM doctorates and apply for H1B engineering jobs, but plenty have also become beach bums in Thailand or slam poets, democracy activists, and bookshop proprietors in global outposts.
Ultimately, Wang’s equal-but-opposite framework shows the limits of its evenhandedness. While understandably not wanting to depict his family’s home country as evil and vicious, it is difficult to “both sides” the human rights atrocities of something like the One Child policy. Are fast trains and tall bridges as admirable a civilizational achievement as respect for freedom of speech, religion, and the press? Should we pretend that the PRC could have had all of the former if they had brought themselves to embrace the latter?
More prosaically, the “each should be more like the other” framing muddies the question when it comes to issues like housing affordability and supply, which Breakneck repeatedly identifies as a problem in the US today. Wang argues that US institutions of government haven’t built enough.
“American cities have broadly failed to build adequate housing or infrastructure,” he writes. But in a market economy with robust property rights, it is not the government’s job to build housing—that’s what D.R. Horton, Pulte Homes, hundreds of smaller companies, and thousands of work crews are for. The problem is that major American cities have made it nearly impossible for the private sector to actually do its job.
Our problem is not, as many industrial policy proponents claim, a “lack of state capacity,” but precisely the opposite. We have empowered governmental institutions far beyond their constitutional limits with too much capacity for spending, debt, obstruction, and veto. We are being strangled and impoverished by the state capacity we have now. Making San Francisco and New York more like the land of ghost cities and abandoned theme parks will not be an improvement. Does anyone really believe that the most indebted nation in the history of the world is being chiefly held back because its government agencies aren’t able to borrow even more money and saddle future taxpayers with even more debt?
Granted, Wang generally does an admirable job of holding Americans’ feet to the fire with respect to our own problems around productivity and growth, which are significant. We would, after all, not want to end up like the CCP itself, which is notoriously bad at processing bad news and dealing with dissent, leading to consequences ranging from farcical to nightmarish.
We also wouldn’t want our industrial strength to decline so far that we end up like Europe, which Wang dismisses as a “mausoleum economy.” Americans, both as citizens and policymakers, will need to step up to compete with the machinations of the Communist mandarins in Beijing. We should, however, be careful not to copy their worst policies along the way.
