Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
Decide its fate
The split screen one reader describes: China opens the world's highest suspension bridge the same day a presidential tweet about a sombrero swallows the American news cycle. The book supplies the mechanism: engineers govern one country, lawyers the other, and an admirer who set the Politburo's engineering degrees beside Congress's law diplomas reports that "you cannot unsee it as you think about both the United States and China." The lens flatters nobody. The same machinery that pours the bridges produced the one-child policy, "one of the most vicious and horrifying stories in modern history, and one I believe I’ll never unhear," because this is "a Chinese state so high-capacity that they crush diversity and vitality in the name of growth." A reader four thousand books deep: "Essential reading. And short."
Engineers run China, lawyers run America: that is the sentence, and once you have it the other 280 pages are anecdote arranged around it, "its theoretical frame is disappointingly thin," one reader writes. Ask why the Beijing to Shanghai line got built while San Francisco to Los Angeles stalled and the material answer (state-bank financing, a railway ministry that controlled its own production) never arrives; you get professional temperament instead, which by the censorship chapter has curdled into explaining Chinese comedy's troubles with "engineers can’t take a joke." The back half coasts, one chapter a recycled newsletter entry, the last one autobiography, and the zero-Covid section "turned into a Hoover Institute screed about covid lockdowns." Shelve it where a detractor does: "a must read for the deranged DC cocktail circuit."
