Shenzhen is a city that builds. In the 1980s, during China’s economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping declared the city a special economic zone, calling on migrants from across the country to move there to construct a metropolis from the ground up. They built highways, bridges, and the city’s first skyscraper, the fifty-story Guomao Building, at a rate of one floor every three days—a pace that came to be known as “Shenzhen speed.” They dredged ports, carved tunnels through bedrock, and raised glass towers on reclaimed land. They built factories that first made T-shirts, cardboard boxes, and plastic toys, then circuit boards, televisions, karaoke microphones, gaming consoles, and most of the world’s iPhones. By the late 2010s Shenzhen produced more than 90 percent of the world’s electronics, earning it the moniker “the Silicon Valley of hardware.” Today the city is home to the world’s largest makers of electric vehicles, telecommunications equipment, and consumer drones.
Shenzhen serves as an example of China’s manufacturing power as well as a foil for Silicon Valley in Dan Wang’s new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future—the Valley’s stagnant downtowns and dysfunctional public infrastructure set against Shenzhen’s seamless efficiency and bustling commercial districts, the former’s glorification of invention led by isolated geniuses versus the latter’s pursuit of scale and widespread adoption pushed forward by communities of engineers. “While China was building the future,” Wang writes, “America had become physically static, its innovations mostly bound up in the virtual and financial worlds.”
In Eva Dou’s House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company, the city is the backdrop for a history of the tech company Huawei. Its rise has become a familiar part of Shenzhen’s lore: as the city swelled from sleepy fishing village to factory boomtown to manufacturer of the world’s critical technologies, so did Huawei evolve from a small supplier of telephone switches to a global juggernaut, earning $100 billion a year making everything from 5G base stations to advanced chips.
Both books grapple with a question that has captured the American political imagination: Why and how does China build? Especially since the release of DeepSeek R1 in January 2025, a breakthrough that signaled China’s ability to rival Silicon Valley in advanced AI, the United States seems to have been caught in a spell of China envy. Many voices from the liberal establishment have become obsessed with Shenzhen and what the city represents. Last April the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman returned from a trip there and wrote a breathless op-ed titled “I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America.” The Times rolled out two more op-eds in quick succession: the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the technology analyst Selina Xu recounted their own visits to the country (“DeepSeek. Temu. TikTok. China Tech Is Starting to Pull Ahead”), and the Princeton sociologist Kyle Chan spelled out its superior industrial policy (“In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The US Will Be Irrelevant”).
Behind the question of why China can build is of course the question of why America cannot. China looms large in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance (2025) as an example of a country that, unlike the US, can build solar panels and high-speed rail at speed and scale.* This anxiety is not confined to the commentariat. In 2022 the Biden administration poured billions into semiconductor factories, battery plants, and clean energy supply chains through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, legislation explicitly pitched as tools to outcompete China by reviving American manufacturing. Last July the Trump administration released “America’s AI Action Plan,” which calls for the rapid improvement of AI infrastructure, from data centers to grid upgrades. “American energy capacity has stagnated…while China has rapidly built out their grid,” the plan warns.
China now weighs heavily on the minds of US industrial policy planners, just as the US has long served as a benchmark for China’s development. But comparisons between the two countries have become increasingly simplistic and outdated, burdened by nationalist fervor and moral judgments. While old labels like “autocratic” and “democratic,” “capitalist” and “communist” still have some use, when trying to make sense of both countries today the distinctions often fall apart, as Wang writes. How can China be described as a communist state if it offers only a “threadbare social safety net” and bans independent workers’ unions? How can authoritarianism be used to explain both China’s ability to build cars and its capacity to suppress dissent? Wang offers a less ideologically loaded way to make sense of their differences: the China of the last four decades, he argues, is an “engineering state, building big at breakneck speed,” in contrast to the United States, a “lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
Aformer analyst for the China- focused research firm Gavekal Dragonomics, Wang made a name for himself over the past decade by writing lengthy annual letters on his personal website. These posts, which threaded together travelogues from Chiang Mai with musings on Yunnanese cuisine and close readings of the Communist Party’s flagship journal, were particularly refreshing in a field of China commentary saturated by impersonal think tank analysis. Breakneck reads like a compilation of seven new letters, each touching on one aspect of Chinese society, blending political theory, economic data, memoir, and personal observation.
Wang begins by pointing to differences in the makeup of each country’s political elite. Five of the last ten US presidents attended law school, as did every Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee from 1984 to 2020. In China, after the ideological chaos of Mao’s reign, Deng introduced a highly technocratic approach, promoting engineers to the top ranks of the government. By 2002 all nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s most powerful governing body, were former engineers. Hu Jintao was a hydraulics engineer; his successor, Xi Jinping, studied chemical engineering.
According to Wang, a chief feature of China’s engineering state is its ability to deliver one crucial thing: material improvements through public works. Wang illustrates the sheer scale of China’s physical infrastructure through his descriptions of a cycling trip through Guizhou, which, though one of China’s poorest provinces, seemed to offer better infrastructure than America’s richest regions. Guizhou contains forty-five of the hundred highest bridges in the world, eleven airports, and five thousand miles of expressway. Its residents, according to Wang, have an “enthusiasm and an expectation for physical change, a feeling not often found among Americans today.”
On the other hand, the country’s efforts to build big have long entailed evicting people from their land, damaging the environment, and neglecting worker safety. To construct the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest power station, the government disrupted entire ecosystems and resettled up to 1.5 million people. Reckless construction has often led to tragedy: during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, thousands of children died when their classrooms collapsed, victims of shoddy building practices.
A political system that incentivizes construction also produces immense waste. Wang describes how the party secretary of Liupanshui, the westernmost city in Guizhou, tried to transform it into a ski town, even though it barely gets any snow. He borrowed billions of dollars from local banks to build a giant cable lift, snowmakers, and faux-European town squares. Liupanshui never became a ski destination, the city got mired in debt, and the party secretary was eventually sentenced to prison for misusing public funds. Guizhou as a whole suffers from an enormous debt burden because of its relentless building—those bridges aren’t facilitating enough economic activity to recoup their costs. Wasteful construction projects can be found across China, such as Ordos, an entire “ghost city” of empty skyscrapers in Inner Mongolia.
Wang’s depiction of America as a lawyerly society is less developed, more useful as a contrast to China’s dynamism than as a way to explain US stagnation. According to Wang, America once had the “musculature of an engineering state,” but problems began to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century: oil spills, polluted cities, urban planners bulldozing neighborhoods. The lawyerly society, embodied by advocates like Ralph Nader, emerged in the 1960s as a necessary corrective to these failures but ended up overcorrecting, resulting in an “elevation of process over outcomes.” Wang’s argument echoes Klein and Thompson’s in Abundance: parochial interests and bureaucratic barriers have hampered America’s ability to build.
But is the fundamental flaw of America’s lawyerly society its fixation on procedure? As the scholar J.S. Tan pointed out recently in his newsletter, Value Added, if lawyers have hamstrung America’s ability to build, how do we explain the speed with which the nation is constructing data centers, outpacing China in what is now the largest infrastructure project in US history? Tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers across the country, cutting through bureaucratic hurdles thanks to their disproportionate political power. “What looks like procedural paralysis is, in fact, a system that privileges powerful actors,” Tan writes. Wang does note that “lawyers are too often servants of the rich,” but that understates the issue: the problem seems to lie less with the lawyers’ power than with the power of the rich. Elon Musk’s deregulatory blitz at DOGE is perhaps the most obvious example of how easily procedures bend in the face of corporate power; if anything, America needs to embolden its lawyers to defend the public from its oligarchic CEOs.
Wang’s argument also underplays China’s byzantine bureaucracy. Companies are required to set up party committees, organize ideological study sessions, and undergo rigorous national security reviews. Entrepreneurs must cultivate informal ties with local officials to secure permits and subsidies, which are often subject to political discretion. And lawyers, far from impeding growth, have been instrumental to China’s economic ascent, helping to streamline processes and enable businesses to operate more efficiently. Chinese lawyers made foreign investment possible; without the enforceable contracts and coherent system of trade law that they built, foreign multinationals would not have brought their capital, expertise, and supply chains to China.
Wang’s background is as a technology analyst, and his argument is at its most detailed and convincing when it comes to the two countries’ approaches to tech production. In Wang’s telling, China has prioritized physical and industrial technologies, like electric vehicles and solar panels, over virtual ones, like social media and e-commerce platforms. While Americans often understand innovation as occurring in a “mythical moment of creation,” spearheaded by genius founders and scientists working in research labs, Chinese tech innovation often “emerges from the factory floor, when a product is scaled up into mass production.”
Most importantly, Wang argues, China has prioritized what he calls “process knowledge”—the proficiency gained from practical experience. He draws an analogy to cooking: even with a sophisticated kitchen and a detailed recipe, someone who has never fried an egg before might still make a mess. China, particularly Shenzhen, has been accumulating manufacturing process knowledge since the 1980s.
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, Shenzhen was the most obvious contender for its mass production because it was already a major electronics manufacturing hub. Since then Apple has trained hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers to make the most popular products of the twenty-first century, cultivating what Wang calls “communities of engineering practice,” in which technology is passed down through the heads and the hands of its skilled workforce. The Huaqiangbei electronics market, a sprawling marketplace in the center of Shenzhen, brings together talent spanning the entire supply chain, from designers to manufacturers to salesmen, collaborating and competing with one another under one roof. The New York Times reported that Apple once needed to hire nine thousand engineers to ramp up iPhone production. In the US, hiring them was projected to take nine months; in China, it took just two weeks. “In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” Tim Cook once said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”
According to Wang, American policymakers failed to understand the importance of process knowledge. Silicon Valley’s engineering community lacks a critical link: the manufacturing workforce. The outsourcing of US technology manufacturing to China, including Apple’s collaboration with Shenzhen, represented a permanent loss of production skills. US manufacturing employment fell from 19 million workers in 1980 to 13 million in 2025; today China’s manufacturing workforce is eight times larger. As Shenzheners became skilled cooks, Americans forgot how to fry eggs.
Huawei is one of the most dramatic success stories to have emerged from Shenzhen. The company was founded in 1987 by a former army engineer named Ren Zhengfei as a small telephone switch supplier, initially run from the top floor of a Shenzhen apartment building. It grew to become the world’s largest telecommunications firm, employing more people than Apple and generating more in annual sales than Disney and Nike combined. Huawei’s research and development center in Dongguan, an hour’s drive from Shenzhen, is a sprawling complex of European city replicas, complete with life-size renditions of Versailles and Heidelberg Castle.
“The rise of such an absolute corporate juggernaut was not supposed to be possible through Communism,” Eva Dou writes in the introduction to House of Huawei.
It was the kind of thing that made people reconsider what they knew to be true…. They were reconsidering if the source of innovation really was college dropouts’ garages and not the state picking winners and losers. Because if so, then how did a company like Huawei exist?
Dou’s history weaves together different theories without providing a straightforward answer. Some of Huawei’s success seems to have come from its contradictory identity as an independent private company with close ties to the state. Strong government support allowed it to benefit from cheap loans, a protected domestic market, and diplomatic help in expanding overseas. But its success might also be attributed to Ren’s entrepreneurial hustle and the hypercompetitive work culture that he cultivated at the company, dubbed “wolf culture.” Dou describes “mass resignation” events Ren organized, in which sales managers were told to prepare both a work summary and a resignation letter, one of which Ren would accept.
Competitors like Cisco and Nortel have claimed that Huawei succeeded through intellectual property theft, copying their software, user manuals, and trade secrets. But theft alone cannot explain how Huawei can build the physical infrastructure of the digital world with such speed and scale. We often forget that the Internet has a body, consisting of “glass, copper, silicon, and a thousand other things—things that have to be dug out of the earth and hammered into useful shapes, with significant inputs of labor and energy,” as the tech writer Ben Tarnoff put it in his book Internet for the People.
In a conversation with Dou at Asia Society in New York City, Wang said that he believes the company thrived in part because it was embedded in Shenzhen, surrounded by the workers, entrepreneurs, and engineers of other companies that had mastered the process knowledge required to make high-end electronics. Huawei tapped Shenzhen’s talent pool to tweak designs and refine products, and it was also motivated by competition, such as with the rival telecoms company ZTE, also based in the city. Huawei today is what Kyle Chan calls a “hydra”: decades of experience give it both the skills and the network to build everything from tablets to cloud computing services, smart health care, surveillance systems, and humanoid robots.
Huawei is just one example of China’s increasingly interconnected industrial ecosystem. Once-discrete technologies are now merging their hardware and software; the same kinds of sensors, chips, and operating software made for Huawei phones can be slotted into a sedan. Advances in one industry, like lidar or more efficient batteries, spill over into others, like electric vehicles and drones. The smartphone company Xiaomi is now making EVs; the carmaker BYD is developing its own chips.
The ability to build big and quickly remains critical. Covid-19 shattered the illusion of a stable global supply chain; the green transition urgently depends on new physical infrastructure; AI technologies run on hardware, from chips to data centers to energy grids. Yet as China ramps up its production of just about everything, the Trump administration is cutting US markets off from their supply chains, slashing public research funding, canceling clean energy programs, and turning away foreign talent. As Americans retreat, Wang writes, “Xi will be shepherding Chinese through the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.”
While China has been remarkable at building steel and semiconductors, it has done a disastrous job at social engineering. Wang writes that the nation’s leadership treats human issues like fluid dynamics problems, “as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves.” The engineering state, along with its ability to move fast and build things, also tends to “move fast and break people.”
He details two examples of the devastating consequences. The first is China’s notorious one-child policy, implemented in 1980 to curb population growth. Its architect, the missile scientist Song Jian, was inspired by cybernetics, using mathematical models to control society like any other complex system. In the late 1970s China was both populous and poor; scientists like Song warned that without limits, the population could reach 4.5 billion by the middle of the twenty-first century and keep rising. These predictions, which failed to account for how fertility rates fall with economic growth and increasing education, turned out to be completely wrong.
Demographers argue that the policy was unnecessary and caused irreparable harm. During the three and a half decades it was in effect, the one-child policy inflicted psychological trauma on hundreds of millions of men and women who were forced into abortions and sterilization. Cultural preference for sons led to female infanticide and child abandonment, leaving a severe gender gap. China now faces the exact opposite problem to the one Song predicted: the crisis of a shrinking, aging populace. In 2022 its population declined for the first time since 1961, with fertility rates averaging just one child per family, well below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. Across the country, maternity wards are closing, and kindergartens are being converted into elder care homes. The party is urging and incentivizing childbirth, with little success.
Wang’s second example is China’s response to the pandemic, which embodied “all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses.” From early 2020, after the first outbreak in Wuhan, China pursued a “zero-Covid” policy, eliminating cases through mass testing, lockdowns, and compulsory quarantines. Companies like Foxconn and BYD redirected their assembly lines to churn out masks and ventilators; construction firms built quarantine centers within weeks. Authorities rolled out a health tracking system on WeChat and Alipay, assigning every user a QR code to monitor their health and movement. By the summer of 2020, as the virus ravaged the rest of the world, China had largely returned to normal.
Then, as the Omicron variant spread in 2022 and most other countries shifted to living with the virus, China doubled down on zero-Covid. When Shanghai went into lockdown that March, a once-effective approach unraveled.
The goal was to keep infection rates at zero, no matter the human cost: residents were confined in their apartments without basic food or medicine, students were trapped on campus, and factories forced workers to live on-site. In the span of two months, the country’s most vibrant metropolis deteriorated into health care crisis, food insecurity, and soaring unemployment. In Xi’an a pregnant woman miscarried after hours of waiting outside a hospital because she lacked a valid Covid test; a nurse died from an asthma attack after being denied urgent treatment. In Guizhou province in September 2022, more people died from Covid controls than from the virus itself. China’s response was “a powerful reminder of how the engineering state could accomplish things that few other countries would even attempt,” writes Wang, “while revealing how its literal-minded enforcement can lead to tragic results for human well-being and freedom.”
Wang uses both examples to make sense of the two Chinas that coexist in the headlines today. There is the technological and manufacturing superpower, where AI start-ups and EV giants race ahead to build the future. But there is also the country teetering on the edge of economic decline, with weak consumer spending and rising unemployment. Jaded young people are choosing to “lie flat” instead of pursuing their ambitions, and they describe this era as the “garbage time” of history—a sports term referring to the final moments of a lopsided game, when players run out the clock before an inevitable defeat.
It is impossible to read Breakneck without thinking of the audience most likely to embrace it: anxious American elites—policymakers, commentators, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, adherents of the Abundance agenda—witnessing decline at home and projecting their fears and desires onto a China that many have never experienced firsthand. The Valley craves a succinct manifesto, one book that will give them everything they need to know about China today.
But Wang is careful not to present his analysis of China as a prescription for a specific American policy agenda. Just as he emphasizes that the country’s capacity to build is not simply attributable to its authoritarianism, he makes clear that it is not a model the United States can uncritically adopt and emulate. He calls, broadly, for the United States and China to learn from each other, without laying out how exactly this might be done.
Still, for all its texture and nuance, Breakneck has replaced an old binary with a new one. “Engineers versus lawyers,” taken out of the context of Wang’s book, could very well ossify into another neat and totalizing myth: beat China by being like China, bypassing the lawyers and emboldening our engineers to build big. Many in Silicon Valley appear to have already come to this conclusion. OpenAI is aggressively lobbying the government to roll back regulation and channel its resources into building data centers, to “ensure that AI around the world is based on US rather than China-based technology.” The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is championing its American Dynamism portfolio—including the defense tech firm Anduril and the aerospace manufacturer Hadrian—as part of a push to increase military and industrial capacity to outcompete China and fix American stagnation.
While Breakneck offers a comprehensive account of why and how China builds, it pays less attention to who is doing the building. China can build big not simply because the engineering state loves to do so but because it can mobilize a vast rural labor force, which the book touches on only briefly. Although Wang examines the industrial policies that helped Shenzhen’s workers accumulate decades of experience, he does not examine the social policies that made it possible for them to live and work in the city in the first place—in particular, the hukou, or household registration system, which ties citizens’ access to social services and housing to remaining in their official place of residence. He mentions the hukou in his chapter on the one-child policy as an example of social engineering but does not discuss it as the foundation of China’s manufacturing power. It enabled cities like Shenzhen to absorb millions of migrant workers from the countryside who could move to the cities and take factory jobs but, without an urban hukou, were excluded from many public services and social benefits. There would be no process knowledge without that labor force—and no such labor force without a state system that privileged urban citizens over rural ones.
Without this background, American readers of Breakneck may not fully grasp the labor costs that enabled China’s rise and that any serious effort at American reindustrialization would involve. Silicon Valley tech tourists might visit Tencent’s headquarters or Shenzhen’s bustling Huaqiangbei market, but they rarely see other places equally central to the city’s growth.
One such place was Baishizhou, once Shenzhen’s largest and most densely populated urban village. It served for decades as a haven for millions of migrant workers who powered the city’s manufacturing boom, drawn to its cheap rent and proximity to the city’s tech hubs. At its peak some 200,000 people lived there in a maze of “handshake buildings,” built so close that residents could reach out and shake their neighbors’ hands. Makeshift electric wiring hung from rooftops; its dark and congested alleyways were lined with fruit carts, karaoke parlors, communal laundry wells, and schools for migrant children who could not attend the city’s public schools. In 2016 Shenzhen launched a major redevelopment of Baishizhou; by 2019, 150,000 residents had been evicted to make way for luxury apartments, malls, and offices.
In Chinese narratives of the country’s rise, Shenzhen’s growth is cast as nothing short of miraculous. A patriotic folk song, “The Story of Spring,” tells of “an old man who drew a circle by the South China Sea/mythically building a great city/forming a mountain of gold.” The “old man” is Deng Xiaoping, the technocratic leader of the engineering state who transformed a fishing village into a manufacturing metropolis. Today Silicon Valley executives, caught up in their own Shenzhen envy, have fallen for the same myth. In doing so, they may lose sight of the fact that while Shenzhen is indeed a city that builds, it wasn’t the old man who did the building.
English (US) · 