Grasping Reality · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:30:35 +0000
If you want to know what is driving today's China or America, Dan Wang's new book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future <https://danwang.co/breakneck/> is an indispensable guide. Wang ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- --- This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality--my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Upgrade to paid * * * # PROJECT SYNDICATE: Is a Sino-American Synthesis Possible?: Reviewing Dan Wang's "Breakneck" ### If you want to know what is driving today's China or America, Dan Wang's new book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future <https://danwang.co/breakneck/> is an indispensable guide. Wang | | Brad DeLong --- | Sep 5 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- ###### If you want to know what is driving today's China or America, Dan Wang's new book _Breakneck: China 's Quest to Engineer the Future_ <https://danwang.co/breakneck/> is an indispensable guide. Wang shows that the world's most urgent and challenging twenty-first-century task may be to forge a synthesis of the best of China and America, while avoiding the worst of each… Share * * * | | ---|---|--- Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality * * * es, I am biased, because Wang is my friend. But I would say the same thing if I did not know him. Nor am I alone. The economist Tyler Cowen calls _Breakneck_ "arguably the best book of the year flat out." John Thornhill of the _Financial Times_calls it "compelling, provocative and highly personal." Stripe CEO Patrick Collison says that Wang "illuminates China like no one else." Bloomberg's Tracy Alloway calls him "one of the best China writers out there." At seven, Wang's family migrated from Yunnan, in China's far southwest - where the local dialect differs from the Mandarin spoken in Beijing as much as Louisiana Cajun does from the English of Down‑East Maine. He now rotates between Palo Alto and Ann Arbor, and has lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Rochester, Freiburg, San Francisco, Kunming, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and New Haven. An insider‑outsider across Canada, China, and the United States, Wang finds both China and the US "thrilling, maddening, and bizarre." Drive around either and you will find places that feel deranged. He does not mean this as a reproach. Unlike tidy Canada, where he feels relaxed, China and America each exhibit the hallmarks of an engine of global change. READ MOAR at Project Syndicate: <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-and-us-each-can-learn-from-the-other-dan-wangs-breakneck-by-j-bradford-delong-2025-08> Give a gift subscription _Breakneck_ describes China as a country of the sledgehammer, and America as a country of the gavel. China's technocratic engineering elite solves problems with concrete, steel, and scale - with roads, bridges, power plants, and other massive projects. The same impulse extends to society, reflected in the notorious one‑child policy and the repression of Tibet and Xinjiang. China's technocracy prizes order, control, and visible achievement. By contrast, America's legalistic elite solves problems by assigning rights to property and security. This creates the conditions for people to live as they wish, and enterprise and innovation follow as a matter of course. The reflexive response to any problem is to establish another entitlement or right, pulling more people into the frameworks required for agreement and approval. At bottom, though, Americans and Chinese are alike - a fact that stands out when you compare Chinese to Japanese and Koreans, or Americans to Canadians and Europeans. Both peoples are restless and innovative. Both mix crass materialism with admiration for entrepreneurs. Both tolerate tastelessness. Both love competition. Both are pragmatic and will often rush work to "get it done." Both countries teem with hustlers and hucksters selling quick paths to health and wealth. Both admire the technological sublime - grand projects that push the limits. Elites and masses in both countries share a creed of National Greatness, represented by John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan's "City upon a Hill" in America, and in China by the "Central Country" inscriptions on Zhou Dynasty bronze ritual wine bowls. Both countries are also tangles of imperfections, often making them their own worst enemies. Old labels like "socialist," "democratic," or "neoliberal" simply do not fit, either. China delivers rapid, visible material progress, but at a cost to rights and with risks of overreach. Its Leninist technocracy goes off track with social engineering, careening from practical to preposterous. America goes off track by spending too much time specifying and vindicating rights, becoming a super‑litigious veto‑ocracy. Safeguards restrain excess, but also produce stagnation and squandered ambitions. China would benefit from more respect for rights and impersonal rules. Yet China's elite sees little appeal in any system that can elevate a Donald Trump instead of a Xi Jinping. Equally, the US once built ambitiously, especially between the late nineteenth century and the post‑World War II era, but it now needs to reclaim that building and engineering spirit. American sclerosis shows up even at the frontier of the global economy. Silicon Valley says it prizes invention, but it builds moats from network effects and legal maneuvering. China, by contrast, prizes scale and production, embracing the ethic of Intel's famous former CEO, Andy Grove. If either Silicon Valley or the Pearl River Delta could balance engineering scale and ambition with strong legal rights and safeguards, it would be unstoppable. What makes _Breakneck_ special is how it blends theory, economic data, sociology, and personal observation. Too much China talk nowadays mixes distant, derivative third-hand reporting with think-tank abstractions. But Wang lives the story. Familiar with the food, streets, cities, and politics in China, America, and Canada, he brings the perspective of both a native insider and a visiting outsider to each, letting readers see, feel, and taste the places that are moving the contemporary world. Details that seem like color become the substance of understanding. One of the world's most urgent and challenging twenty-first-century task may be to forge a synthesis of the best of China and America, while avoiding the worst of each. Read _Breakneck_ for the reporting as much as for the argument - and for its meditation on the trade-offs between ambition and restraint, building and blocking, sledgehammering and gaveling. Leave a comment Upgrade to paid ##### _**If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers --and myself--smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…**_ * * * ###### #dan-wang #dan-wangs-breakneck #central-country #is-a-sino-american-synthesis-possible _Please forward the email & otherwise share it to everyone you think would appreciate it…_ Share --- | | | Like --- | | Comment --- | | Restack --- (C) 2025 J. Bradford DeLong Holgate House, P.O. Box #5488, Berkeley, CA 904705 Unsubscribe