Engineers, Lawyers, and the Costs of ‘Building’

Today there are two great peoples on earth who, starting from different points, seem to advance toward the same goal …

—Alexis de Tocqueville (2012: 655)

In 1919, after visiting Bolshevik Russia, the American journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared: ‘I have seen the future, and it works’ (Reed 2023). A century later, a related impulse runs through Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, published in August 2025 by W.W. Norton & Company. Wang, a technology analyst turned writer, sketches an arresting picture of two countries on diverging tracks. China appears as a technocratic ‘engineering state’ that builds swiftly and at scale, while the United States is cast as a rule-bound ‘lawyerly society’ that struggles to execute even widely supported projects. In the time it takes Washington to debate an infrastructure package, Wang suggests, Chinese leaders extend high-speed rail lines, span rivers with monumental bridges, and raise entire districts where there were only fields a decade earlier. America, by contrast, is portrayed as a nation trapped in hearings, paperwork, and litigation—an enticing contrast for readers looking for a story about why the United States no longer seems able to build.

The argument is aimed at American policymakers and intellectuals searching for lessons in Beijing’s rise. It tracks a broader zeitgeist—captured by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance (2025)—that calls for rekindling a lost American ethos of construction. A New York Times bestseller, Breakneck has been named a ‘Best Book of the Year’ by The New Yorker, NPR, and the Financial Times, and shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year award. Economist Tyler Cowen (2025) praised it as the ‘best recent book on China, on China and America, and arguably the best book of the year flat out’. After reading the book, Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s national security adviser, expressed a kind of envy: he wished the United States had more room to direct capital into industrial policy to compete with China (Schneider and Ottinger 2025).

Unfortunately, while Breakneck is energetic, timely, and often vivid, its central contrast is too clean to carry the weight Wang places on it. The book’s mix of travelogue and grand diagnosis—biking across Guizhou, marvelling at new highways and vertiginous viaducts, and describing an online ‘Industrial Party’ that embraces harsh measures in the name of industrial dominance—makes for engaging reading. Yet, the argument frequently substitutes a memorable slogan for historical explanation. Wang highlights achievements while downplaying the trade-offs that made them possible, and he treats ‘engineers’ and ‘lawyers’ as though they were stable national destinies rather than shifting coalitions within evolving states.

In a market in which books on China rarely reach beyond specialists, Breakneck has enjoyed striking success—not despite its analytical weaknesses, but partly because of them. The book invites a blunt inference: Chinese engineers build the future; American lawyers write memos about why the future is noncompliant. That inference lands because it matches a widespread American sense of panic. Across the ideological spectrum, commentators lament procedural ‘gridlock’ and call for institutions that can execute. Wang’s framing caters to that hunger. It offers a tidy diagnosis for perceived American decline: one society empowers builders, the other empowers gatekeepers. And because the diagnosis is tidy, it suggests a tidy cure: reclaim the engineer’s confidence and cast off the lawyer’s restraints. This is the logic that makes the book attractive to policy elites interested in industrial policy and infrastructure reform, especially those who look at China’s electric vehicle supply chains, ports, and rail networks and ask what combination of state direction and private capacity made them possible.

However, a contrast this neat risks becoming less an analysis than a parable. What follows is a critique of those simplifications. The point is not to deny China’s capacity to build, nor to defend American dysfunction as a virtue, but to insist that any serious comparison must reckon with costs, context, and the hard problem Wang largely evades: how to pursue speed without sacrificing accountability.

The ‘Engineers versus Lawyers’ Fallacy

The central theme of Breakneck reprises a familiar cliché: China is governed by engineers, while the United States is managed by lawyers. The contrast not only oversimplifies—indeed, romanticises—both professions; it is also conceptually thin and empirically fragile. Start with the claim that China’s ruling class is an elite of engineers. It was true that many top officials in the 1990s and early 2000s had technical training, and observers sometimes treated this as evidence that reform-era governance would be pragmatic. But the label fits the present less well. Today’s leadership is more academically varied, with prominent figures trained in law, economics, and public administration (Li 2013). Former premier Li Keqiang, for example, studied law and earned a doctorate in economics at Peking University. Xi Jinping did not rise as a professional engineer; he studied chemistry at Tsinghua University during the Cultural Revolution—a period widely regarded as one in which academic standards were severely degraded. His highest degree is in Marxist theory, with research focused on the marketisation of rural China. While Xi has promoted a cohort of military and aerospace technocrats in recent years, this reflects a turn towards national security hard lines (amid a new Cold War atmosphere) more than some enduring technocratic meritocracy (Lam 2022; Wijaya and Jayasuriya 2025). Indeed, by Jonathon Sine’s (2024) count, engineers made up a striking 70 per cent of Politburo members in 2002; by 2017, that share had fallen to 20 per cent, before rising again to 33 per cent in 2022.

More important than the sociology of degrees is the analytical problem with the binary itself. To frame governance as a contest between engineers and lawyers is to imply that ambition and procedure are mutually exclusive. In practice, they are complementary capacities. Every modern economy needs engineers to design and execute projects, and it needs law to allocate property, adjudicate claims, enforce safety, compensate harms, and constrain corruption. Wang at times concedes this, suggesting that China would benefit from more ‘lawyerly’ protections and that the United States should streamline certain processes to build faster. But he offers little guidance on how to secure that balance. The real question is not whether to choose builders or legal safeguards; it is how to build institutions that can deliver housing, transit, and industrial capacity while still protecting rights and resisting capture by private interests. By reducing the dilemma to an either/or, Breakneck sidesteps the hardest work of comparative political analysis: specifying which rules matter, which are manipulable, and which trade-offs are non-negotiable.

The binary also flattens variation within each country. The United States is not uniformly ‘lawyerly’. Some states and cities approve housing or infrastructure faster than others; some rely on standardised permitting, by-right zoning, or strong executive authority to push through projects. Likewise, not every Chinese project moves at breakneck speed and not every locality is eager to assume the political and fiscal risks of large-scale construction. Environmental protests, land disputes, and fiscal constraints have at times slowed or reshaped projects in China, even though only a small share of such conflicts are resolved through protracted litigation (Liu 2020). The question is less about national character than about specific institutional bottlenecks: agency staffing, procurement capacity, land-use rules, intergovernmental coordination, and the political incentives that reward delay, caution, or grandiose spending. A framework that treats outcomes as the product of occupational culture risks missing the levers that policy could actually move.

A longer historical view further weakens the frame. What Wang describes may reflect not fixed national character but different stages of development. Countries industrialising rapidly often elevate technocrats and tolerate disruption in the name of growth; later, as societies grow wealthier and more complex, demand rises for regulation, welfare provision, and legal remedy—in other words, for more law. The United States followed a similar arc. Transcontinental railroads in the 1860s were pushed through with land grants, political bargaining, and brute force, and only later did Americans construct legal guardrails that today slow projects but also limit dispossession and corruption. From this perspective, China’s current ‘age of engineers’ is historically legible and likely temporary. The very problems generated by breakneck growth—debt, inequality, environmental crises, and public resentment—tend to produce pressure for transparency and rule of law.

History’s Warnings: Missile Gaps and Miracle Myths

Wang is far from the first writer to look at an authoritarian rival to American power and conclude that the rival’s discipline must be the key to its success. Moments of geopolitical anxiety have repeatedly produced romanticised envy of illiberal models. In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union’s technological feats—Sputnik, above all—sparked fears that a planned system could outpace a democracy. Politicians warned of a looming ‘missile gap’ in which the USSR had supposedly surged ahead in intercontinental ballistic missiles. John F. Kennedy leveraged the theme in the 1960 presidential campaign, accusing the Eisenhower administration of dangerous complacency (Preble 2004). Later evidence showed that the feared gap was largely illusory: Soviet missile numbers were below US levels and the panic owed as much to propaganda, uncertain intelligence, and domestic politics as to any real military imbalance. The episode is a reminder that perceived technological gaps can become political weapons and that democracies are vulnerable to overreaction when anxiety outruns data.

A generation later, Japan played a similar role in the American imagination. In the 1970s, Japan’s export success and coordinated industrial policy inspired a wave of commentary that praised technocratic management and long-term planning while depicting the United States as chaotic and short-sighted. Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One (1979) captured the moment’s mood, and it was hardly alone. Then, Japan’s asset bubble burst, growth stalled, and many of the institutional features once celebrated—dense state–business ties, protected markets, rigid corporate governance—looked less like a formula for superiority than a set of constraints. The point is not that Japan was never impressive; it is that sweeping lessons drawn from a rival’s moment of ascent often age badly, especially when they treat institutions as easily transferable and ignore the costs carried by different social contracts.

These episodes also caution against nostalgic myths about a lost American age of frictionless building. Much of the infrastructure Americans now romanticise—canals, railroads, highways, and dams—was constructed in periods when democratic safeguards were weaker and when the costs could be imposed on marginalised communities with limited recourse. The interstate highway system, for example, delivered enormous mobility benefits while cutting through urban neighbourhoods and reshaping cities in ways that later generations judged unjust (Archer 2025). If the contemporary ‘build’ discourse seeks to strip away review and consultation in the name of speed, it risks re-creating those inequities under a new banner. A more serious lesson from past panic cycles is that renewal cannot be purchased by simply lowering constraints; it requires building administrative capacity, improving project selection, and confronting distributional conflict openly rather than suppressing it.

American discourse has long swung between complacency and panic—between ‘we are number one’ and ‘we must copy whoever is beating us’. Breakneck belongs to the panic pole, though in measured prose. It urges the United States to ‘learn’ from China at a moment when fear of falling behind in infrastructure, manufacturing, and artificial intelligence is widespread. History counsels caution. Anxiety can empower factions that benefit from crisis narratives, encourage expensive gambles, and tempt democracies to compromise their own values. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning about the ‘military–industrial complex’ spoke to this dynamic (National Archives 2021). As a former general, he grew increasingly alarmed by the deepening alliance among defence contractors, federal technical bureaucracies, and elected politicians—an alliance whose expanding political influence, he feared, could skew American choices from foreign policy to domestic resource allocation and ultimately threaten democratic institutions themselves during the Cold War. More recently, president Joe Biden also warned that the entanglement of technology, security, and state patronage can distort policy and, in the process, nurture oligarchic power (Holland and Singh 2025). The United States does need to rebuild and modernise. But the lesson of past ‘gap’ panics is that emulation of authoritarian rivals can produce new pathologies—illiberal shortcuts and institutions that are difficult to unwind—while failing to address the underlying sources of dysfunction at home. 

Romanticising Authoritarian ‘Progress’

China’s ability to build quickly is real, yet it cannot be reduced to temperament or professional composition. It reflects institutions, incentives, land regimes, fiscal arrangements, and a political order that can absorb social costs that liberal democracies are designed to contest. A historically grounded comparison requires attention to the machinery beneath the spectacle. China’s speed has rested on distinctive arrangements of land, finance, and authority. Local governments—rewarded for growth—can assemble land quickly and finance projects through state-backed credit, while compensation disputes are hidden in a political order that limits litigation. Central directives can be translated into coordinated action by provincial bureaucracies and large state-linked firms. These arrangements deliver pace, but they also generate side effects: rising debt, uneven safety oversight, and the displacement of those with the least leverage. American systems, by contrast, spread veto points across jurisdictions and embed property and environmental claims in comparatively accessible courts. That architecture slows execution, especially when agencies are understaffed, but it also forces more public justification for who benefits and who pays.

To his credit, Wang does not present China’s technocratic model as unalloyed good. Midway through Breakneck, he turns to two episodes that expose the dangers of treating governance as a planning problem: the One-Child Policy and the Zero-Covid lockdowns. Drawing heavily on Susan Greenhalgh’s Just One Child (2008), Wang recounts the coercion that sustained population control: forced sterilisations, coerced abortions, and the bureaucratic violence required to reach demographic targets with intimate intrusions. This chapter underscores an uncomfortable truth: policies on this scale can be implemented only where civil society is weak and independent legal constraints are absent. The Zero-Covid chapter, grounded in Wang’s own experience of China’s 2022 lockdowns, offers a contemporary illustration of the same pattern: sealed apartments, mass quarantine, and a state apparatus capable of enforcing uniformity at the expense of individual rights. Read together, these episodes should complicate any enthusiasm for technocratic decisiveness.

Yet, the complications do not substantially alter the book’s trajectory. After acknowledging these tragedies, Wang returns to an exhortation: America should learn from China’s capacity to execute and should set aside the assumption that authoritarian regimes inevitably stagnate. He even indulges a personal counterfactual—if his parents had not migrated to North America in the 1990s, might their lives have been materially better in China—that reinforces the book’s underlying admiration for China’s developmental arc. Wang also marshals historical examples, such as Bismarck’s Prussia, to argue that autocratic states have sometimes driven scientific and industrial advances, from electrification to the modern research university. The point is not wrong as far as it goes, but it is strategically deployed. It encourages readers to view authoritarianism as a manageable price for state capacity rather than a system whose coercive tools are not accidental but constitutive.

This is the romantic centre of Breakneck. The book lingers on China’s accomplishments and treats its pathologies as episodic excesses rather than structural features. A reader could move through the early chapters on infrastructure and manufacturing and reasonably conclude that Wang is defending China’s system, or at least urging admiration for its outcomes. Only later does he concede that technocratic hubris can become catastrophic—and even then, the warning reads as a caution to temper a broadly admirable model, not a reason to doubt it. The comparison is therefore weighted. China’s advantages shine in Wang’s telling, while its political and social costs appear as footnotes. That imbalance matters because Wang writes for an American audience tempted to turn frustration into emulation. To admire what China has built is one thing; to treat its governing form as a template is another. Breakneck often blurs the line and, in so doing, it risks smuggling a dangerous conclusion beneath an appealing story: look how much they have built—surely the rest is noise.

Wang’s fascination with an ethos of building leads him to understate how easily ‘construction’ can become a language of power. The ‘Industrial Party’ he describes is not merely a cluster of enthusiastic builders; it is a current of techno-nationalism that links production to geopolitical struggle and treats dissent as obstruction. Modern history offers many analogues—think, again, of the Soviet Union. States that equate legitimacy with output often slide from infrastructure to discipline, insisting that results are the only measure and that critics are enemies of progress. Even when projects are materially beneficial, political logic can be corrosive, obscuring whose labour made the miracle possible, whose homes were cleared, and whose voices were excluded from deliberation.

Ignoring the Real Costs of Authoritarian Efficiency

The most troubling feature of Breakneck is what it leaves in the margins. As mentioned above, Wang’s discussion of coercion concentrates on two major episodes—Zero-Covid and the One-Child Policy—but the broader infrastructure of repression that sustains contemporary governance receives little sustained attention. There is little mention of the pervasive surveillance state erected by Beijing in recent years: the nationwide network of cameras, facial recognition systems, and digital monitoring that keeps close watch on citizens’ lives. The mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s ‘re-education’ camps—one of the most chilling technocratic social engineering projects of the twenty-first century—is essentially absent. Because Breakneck addresses American policymakers looking for inspiration, these omissions are consequential: a reader skimming for lessons could too easily conclude that the ugly parts are exceptions and the visible infrastructure is the main story.

Authoritarian speed also carries economic costs that are easier to overlook when attention stays fixed on physical outputs. China’s investment-driven growth model has periodically produced overbuilding, underused infrastructure, and real estate booms that leave local governments dependent on land sales and vulnerable to downturns (Lee 2025). Large projects can be politically attractive because they are visible, measurable, and associated with elite prestige, but visibility is not the same as social return. Where independent media, opposition parties, and transparent budgeting are weak, it can be difficult to distinguish productive investment from waste until debts come due. Information constraints matter here. Officials who fear punishment for bad news have incentives to report success and hide failure, which can amplify planning errors. These are not incidental defects; they are recurrent problems in systems that concentrate power while limiting open criticism. A comparison focused primarily on completion speed risks mistaking a capacity to spend for a capacity to allocate wisely.

It is in moments of national self-doubt that the case for liberal institutions deserves restating. Independent courts, procedural constraints, and a free press are not decorative obstacles to efficiency. They are mechanisms that protect individuals and minorities against state overreach, expose corruption, and force public justification for coercive acts. Wang’s fascination with outputs risks reviving an old technocratic fallacy: if the trains run on time, governance must be good. Modern history supplies too many counterexamples. High-modernist schemes have often produced impressive monuments while inflicting staggering human costs and hiding long-term dysfunction behind short-term metrics. The anthropologist James C. Scott made this argument forcefully in his work on state planning and its blind spots. Breakneck references Scott, but it curiously avoids his most direct intervention, Seeing Like a State, which remains one of the clearest accounts of why centralised ambition can slide into catastrophe when legal and social constraints are weak (Scott 1998).

Other Paths and Possibilities

In fairness, Breakneck has real virtues. Wang offers vivid on-the-ground reporting from factories and construction sites, and he captures a debate with which American policymakers are indeed grappling: how to rebuild industrial strength and infrastructure in a geopolitical environment shaped by rivalry with China. He forces readers to confront uncomfortable comparisons and to acknowledge that the United States has allowed basic capacities to atrophy. The family story he tells—his parents’ immigration to North America and his own upbringing—also gives the book an emotional register that helps readers sympathise with his ambition and his yearning to ‘build’. But, as a guide to action, his analysis is weakened by contradictions and omissions. The engineers-versus-lawyers dichotomy clarifies a frustration, but it obscures the institutional specifics that would have to change to address it. And, by treating authoritarian costs as secondary to developmental outputs, the book invites precisely the kind of selective admiration that past episodes of ‘rival envy’ have produced—an admiration that tends to evaporate once the rival’s crises become visible or once the promised lessons prove difficult to transplant.

Breakneck also suffers from a kind of superpower tunnel vision. By presenting development as a two-horse race between Beijing and Washington, Wang implies that the world must choose between China’s speed and America’s proceduralism. Comparative history suggests many other combinations. European social democracies such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries pair high living standards and extensive welfare provision with reliable infrastructure and substantial industrial capacity. These societies have no shortage of lawyers, yet they also deliver projects and maintain public trust in institutions. Small, advanced economies—Sweden, Switzerland, Singapore—have likewise built distinctive mixes of planning, markets, social insurance, and administrative competence. To focus solely on the United States and China is to miss a broader lesson: state capacity is not a synonym for authoritarianism and legal constraint is not a synonym for paralysis. The relevant question is how institutions are designed, staffed, and legitimated, and how they distribute costs and benefits.

For American reformers, this broader comparative field suggests a different kind of agenda than simple emulation. The aim should be to rebuild state capacity inside a democratic system: professionalise and expand the public workforce that plans and manages projects; modernise procurement so that caution does not become permanent paralysis; standardise permit systems where possible; and align incentives so that localities that accept housing and infrastructure are not punished fiscally for so doing. It also requires discipline about what to build. Rapid execution is not a virtue if it accelerates the wrong projects or socialises costs on to communities with the least voice. A historically informed ‘building’ program would therefore treat participation and fairness as design constraints, not afterthoughts. The challenge is to shorten timelines without weakening rights, to make the state more capable, not more arbitrary.

History suggests that fashionable narratives of foreign ‘miracles’ are often short-lived. The alarmist literature of the Japan boom years now reads less like prophecy than a record of American anxiety, and earlier Western enthusiasms for Soviet modernity appear, in retrospect, tragically naive. Breakneck may come to occupy a similar place—as an artefact of a moment when the United States, worried about decline, searched abroad for a shortcut back to competence. If America is to recover an ethos of building, it will have to do so on its own terms—melding innovation with rule of law, speed with fairness, and ambition with accountability. The task is not to imitate China’s authoritarian shortcuts, but to prove that a liberal democracy can build decisively while remaining bound by rights and public reason. That is a harder project than Wang’s parable allows and it is also, historically speaking, the only kind of renewal worth pursuing.

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