Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

I finished Breakneck as part of my reading list on China. And we’re starting from the top. Dan Wang’s book is recent. It has the most recent insider—or not insider, but groundside—view of what is going on in China. And therefore, I thought it would be a good place to start. It’s also something that was hyped up a lot when it was first released and hit the podcast circles that I am most affectionate of.

Dan hits up the podcast circles. It’s great. I think one thing to recognize is that that means I’ve heard a lot of what he has said in his book before, so not much of this is new. But let’s talk about what he talks about.

The entire conceit that Dan has is that China represents the engineering state, and America represents the lawyerly state. What does this mean? It means that China, number one, is actually staffed by engineers. China represents what every sophomore college student imagines would be the ideal society, where the engineers rule. Where the engineers are not debating how to get this done, what to get done, or if things should be done. They are simply looking at problems and solving those problems. That is the ideal way of seeing it.

You could almost actually say, in the same way that Iran is the Platonic Republic brought to real life through Islam, China is the sophomore engineering student’s ideal state brought out through kind of cultural and hydraulic production. So that’s a positive view that Dan puts forth for China.

On the other hand, you have America, the lawyerly state. The lawyerly state is a state run by the lawyers, maybe for the lawyers. Things are really set on process, procedure. You have to do things the right way, not bound and not limited by the forces of nature, but by precedent, by the rules and morals of society that have this state.

And this dichotomy is how Dan is choosing to kind of reflect on things that happen. And Dan reflects on a couple of things. He reflects on the one-child policy. There’s a lot of controversy about that. He reflects on China’s zero-COVID policy, and also reflects on the massive economic engine that China has created, and on instances when China has not necessarily stayed true to that economic engine. For example, he really dives into China to explain why China attacked its tech sector.

And actually, a lot of these do make a lot of sense in the engineering state and in the lawyerly state. You can kind of think of them as having a positive mode and a failure mode.

So for the concept of the engineering state, essentially, you have an almost corporate state, a country that is organized more like a company, where KPIs and OKRs are able to be taken to their extreme. Unlike a company, a state, especially a non-democratic state, is not going to be pursuing just profit. It can be pursuing almost any number. And this means that the state has a problem of getting Goodharted. That means the managed measure is managing those who measure.

And this creates, on one end, this huge economic engine. Because when you have the engine being: make money, don’t be poor, sell your land, keep taxes low, create as many factories as you can, and get as much technological capital as you can, then that’s kind of a legible thing that engineers can solve. Build more factories, at the end of the day, is a physics problem that, once you’ve got the flywheel working, will continue to work.

But on the other hand, when you point this engineering mode of thinking and governing to questions of rights and society, then you end up in very dark places. So the two big ones here that Dan talks about are the one-child policy, which Dan basically describes as almost an infection that hits China via Western cybernetics research, and the fact that it is taken drastically too far, which I think is correct. But he does linger on this question: how is it possible that it stayed there for so long? And the answer ultimately boils down to the engineering state finding it very hard to lose measures. The one-child policy stayed there too long.

The COVID policy, which Dan describes through his own harrowing experience from within China, is something that is pretty not great.

Throughout the book, Dan is comparing America to the lawyerly state. And I think it’s worth talking about why certain things are good and why certain things are bad.

On the good end, it’s pretty clear that the lawyerly state is the state of human rights. It is the state that says, hey, you can’t do that because that is stepping on somebody else. You are harming somebody else by doing this. When you are bound under law, which the Chinese party is not bound by law, then that keeps people within certain moral, ethical boundaries. And even though we might have some presidents who don’t believe that is true for them, most people, even people who we might consider political enemies, actually do stay within those bounds, or at least are scared of what would happen if they tried to push those bounds too much.

So that’s the big pro. And Dan comes back to that all the time. The zero-COVID policy couldn’t have happened in America. The one-child policy obviously could never happen in the same brute-force way, at least outside of what America did to her people of color, who were kind of honestly outside of the broader society for certain historical periods. But that’s a parenthetical.

What are the problems? Well, the reverse of the engineering state’s problems, really. Process and procedure replace economic growth. They get in the way of what would otherwise be a race to achieve some economic outcome. And Dan, I don’t remember if he actually gives that many examples, but anybody who’s familiar with abundance literature would be pretty familiar with what he’s talking about here, because he’s essentially giving the abundance literature theory via China.

America has basically too many onerous regulations. It doesn’t prioritize progress as much as it’s risk-averse and loss-averse in ways that are maybe not actually at equilibrium. And this basically is kind of an economic problem for America: if it can’t build things, then it can’t really hope to stay at the same pace of building as it needs to be in the face of China.

So, the economy described, I think that the book is good. It was very easy reading, but I’ve also read a lot of this type of content before. I think that there is a certain amount of it that helps to understand the current Goodharted state that China has now. But I don’t think that it was as good, or will be as good, as what I need to answer these questions in understanding: where did the state come from?

And by that, I mean it doesn’t really go into much deeper Chinese history. The previous book I read about the rise of the Communist Party goes more into that, but it doesn’t have all the cultural background, cultural lore that the CCP was even able to grow out of. So that’s where I’m reading next.