Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

I didn’t write a letter last year. Rather, I wrote seven, all of which is new material.

They make up my book BREAKNECK: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It’s driven by a few simple ideas. That Americans and Chinese are fundamentally alike: restless, eager for shortcuts, ultimately driving most of the world’s big changes. That their rivalry should not be reasoned through with worn-out terms from the past century like socialist, democratic, or neoliberal. And that both countries are tangles of imperfection, regularly delivering — in the name of competition — self-beatings that go beyond the wildest dreams of the other.

The simplest idea I present is that China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America’s lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad.

Breakneck begins with a bike ride I took from Guiyang to Chongqing in 2021. China’s fourth-poorest province, I was delighted to find, has much better infrastructure than California or New York, both wealthier by orders of magnitude. Five days of grueling climbs on stunning green mountains gave me glimpses of what socialism with Chinese characteristics really looks like. But there is more to the engineering state than tall bridges. The heart of the book concerns how badly Beijing goes off track when it engages in social engineering. My handy formulation of the Communist Party is that it is a Leninist Technocracy with Grand Opera Characteristics — practical until it collapses into the preposterous.

The idea of the lawyerly society became obvious when I returned to the U.S. in 2023. The Paul Tsai China Center (as I say in my acknowledgments) was the best possible place to write this book, not only because it’s so supportive, but also because it set me inside the Yale Law School. Elite law schools, now and in the past, fashion the easiest path for the ambitions to step into the top ranks of the American government. The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy. I believe that America cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected.

The engineering state versus the lawyerly society is not a grand theory to explain absolutely everything about the U.S. and China. Rather, the book is rooted in my own experiences of living in China from 2017 to 2023. I offer this framework to make sense of the recent past and think about what might come next.

It helps to explain a number of things. For example, the trade war and the tech showdown. The U.S. has relied on legalisms — levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime — while China has focused on creating the future by physically building better cars, more beautiful cities, and bigger power plants. Though China has constructed roads and bridges abroad, it struggles to inspire global cultural appeal, because engineers aren’t smooth talkers and tend to censor whatever they can’t understand. The Chinese state is sometimes too rational, proceeding down a path that feels perfectly logical, until the country’s largest city is suddenly in a state of lockdown for months. 

Breakneck will be published on August 26. I hope you’ll order this book. You can also send me an email if you would like a review copy for your publication or Substack, or to book me for speaking.

***

It’s a bit boring to write only a book announcement. This is also a space for me to reflect on the bookwriting process.

The hard part of bookwriting is the beginning, the middle, and the end. Each stage demands unrelated skills. The opening phases involve engaging an agent, beating ideas into the shape of a proposal (which typically stretch over 50 pages), and approaching a publisher. The long middle is the writing. The end is the mishmash of tasks related to revision, production, and promotion. Fortunately I had a superb agent and a faithful editor to navigate the first and third stages. Overall the process was more fun than I expected, such that I now actively encourage friends to pursue their own book ideas.

Writing is necessarily a solitary task. My usual process is to putter around until late evening, until I finally cannot bear to avoid the page any longer, at which point I spend a lot of time picking out appropriate music, and finally get to the task. I knew that could no longer be a sane approach for a lengthier writing project (not that it ever was). Every day I repeated my mantra to be a cool, calm, collected Canadian, through which I achieved a modest degree of discipline. I met my deadline.

I became a better writer over the course of the book. Breakneck, as I said, is seven annual letters. I thought I understood this format, but I still saw myself improving, such that the final chapter was much easier to write than the first. I felt my prose loosening and my confidence rising as I moved from chapter to chapter. Bookwriting is a bit like climbing a mountain: best not to look up too much at the beginning and feel daunted by the task ahead. When I had completed two-thirds of the book, I started feeling elated about how much I’ve written, which propelled me towards the end.

Writing is thinking. As I worked on my final chapter, I found myself reflecting on my Yunnan heritage. Yunnan is, in my estimation, China’s freest province: far away amid southwestern mountains, it has mostly escaped sustained attention from the imperial center, which would be attracted to greater wealth or restive minority issues. My parents both have deep Yunnan roots. They would have been in China’s middle class, only the concept did not really exist when they emigrated to Canada when I was seven. I’m glad to have had an upbringing in this economic backwater, which is undeveloped in part because it’s inflected by a bit of the suspicion of the state that is common to mountain peoples everywhere. Growing up in the periphery endowed me with greater skepticism of the state glories that Beijing chooses to celebrate and greater reluctance to participate in the competitive culture common in Shanghai or Shenzhen.

I wrote this book partly to sort out my own thoughts about China. It really was staggering to write about how many miles of roadways, how many new nuclear power plants, how much steel China has produced over the past four decades. China is a good operating model of abundance. I state clearly in the book that America doesn’t have to become China to build infrastructure; it would be sufficient to reach the construction cost levels of France, Japan, or Spain. Still, the U.S. should still study some aspects of China’s method: how do they build it? What are the tradeoffs? How do we learn? China has gotten a lot of things right with mass transit, plentiful housing, and functional cities.

The problem is that China’s leadership just can’t stop at physical engineering. Sooner or later, they treat the population as if it were another building material, to be moulded or torn apart as the circumstances demand. That’s why America shouldn’t look to China as the model. My favorite chapter concerned the one-child policy. I had been completely unprepared to study the brutality of its enforcement, which was only possible through mass sterilizations and forced abortions. At its peak in the 1980s, the one-child policy morphed into a campaign of rural terror meted out against female bodies, namely the mother and the cruelly discarded daughter.

Nearly all the letters are focused on China. The final one is about the United States. I concluded my book by writing about what my parents gained and lost with their emigration. They lost the chance to build wealth as part of China’s luckiest generation: urban residents born after 1960 who were able to acquire property or build businesses after the 2000s. But they would not trade that for their gain of living in the suburbs of Philly, which I find boring, but their friends find enviable. I also reflected on America’s own legacy as an engineering state, focused on two engineers: Robert Moses and Hyman Rickover. Too many parts of America feel like the well-preserved ruins of a once-great civilization. Americans should take a clearer look at the industrial achievements that are usually ignored and frequently scorned.

***

I became a better reader, too, over the course of bookwriting.

I’ve learned to detect when writers attempt the difficult and when they succumb to laziness. There are parts of every book where writers cover a topic they have little interest in (out of some obligation), at which point I try to figure out how many pages I need to flip before getting to the parts they care about. I’ve learned to pay more attention to books in which authors say something in their acknowledgments. That doesn’t mean I like gushiness — rather, that tends to be a negative signal. A good acknowledgment is a sign that an author has put some care into their book.

I’ve learned to be more discerning about China books in particular. It’s a tricky genre. A good China writer, I believe, has to be able to avoid various extremes. Some writers believe that the Communist Party has been excessively demonized and needs to be celebrated for its anti-poverty achievements; others believe that China is the Antichrist. Some writers invoke tired tropes and the same old stories to make the most sweeping judgments about the country; others constrain themselves to investigating the narrowest topics rather than broader questions that readers also care about. Some writers focus too much on law or party pronouncements, as if the country consisted of only formal systems; others act as if none of these statements should be treated with seriousness, preferring to document only their day-to-day lives.

I’m keen to read books that make an attempt to thread these needles. A good China writer should recognize that economic growth has been astounding, while it has coincided with new forms of repression; that Party-speak can be mostly ignored but sometimes requires being treated with care; and that the best way to pierce through the complexity is to combine analytic judgments with a sense of how people actually live. In my book, I pay homage to the writers who have covered China well.

Working with the publishing industry has also made me more discerning about which books to read generally. Before I do anything to a book, I take a look to see if it’s from an academic press (like Yale or Oxford) or a trade press (like Norton or Penguin). It doesn’t determine anything. Rather, I am more alert to pitfalls. At a first approximation, academic books are written for the benefit of their authors, while trade books are written for the benefit of readers. There’s also a needle to be threaded between the former, whose failure mode is to deliver narrow arguments while bogged down with proving small points, and the latter, whose failure mode is to deliver small ideas in flamboyant prose, often packaged in bite-sized chapters. I look for books that manage to transcend the limitations of these categories.

These days, I’m drawn back to novels. I am thinking of spending the next few months re-reading my quartet of favorites: The Red and the Black, for Stendhal’s very funny depictions of the rampant stupidity produced by desire; Bleak House for Dickens’ density of clever expressions and its miracle of construction; Proust for his accounts of intoxicating love; and Melville’s Moby-Dick for hundreds of pages of mesmerizing whalelore. 

***

Finally, I learned how to be a better eater over the course of bookwriting.

I cooked a lot of fish as I wrote, in the Cantonese style: steaming a whole bronzino or a filet of sea trout for ten minutes, then drizzled with ginger, spring onion, soy sauce, and sizzling olive oil. My wife and I also planned a few writing retreats, in which we would park ourselves in new places to focus on food, exercise, and writing. After six years of intensively eating Chinese cuisines, I was also pleased to move into new culinary worlds.

I completed revisions in Mexico City. CDMX has excellent high-end cuisine, but of course my focus was mostly on street food. I believe that a plate of chilaquiles is a perfect breakfast. The masa there tastes amazing, and I love being able to fill them with oreja, trompa, or buche cuts of the pig which are not easy to find in America. We typically had a big meal for lunch and brought home fruits for the evening. There’s nothing better than mixing together some tropical fruits — mamey, mango, canistel — and squeezing a bit of lime with scoops of passionfruit all over them.

I submitted my manuscript in Da Nang. This part of central Vietnam has the most creative use of rice products I’ve seen anywhere: sticky, in noodle form, or fashioned into little cakes. My favorite meals feature grilled meats or seafood, laced with chillies and fresh herbs, alongside a lot of vegetables and a nice soup. You can find that easily in Da Nang as well as Xishuangbanna, my favorite part of Yunnan. The more complex Vietnamese stews are also very worthwhile.

I finished my proposal in Barcelona. The Spanish, like the Japanese, know how to work miracles on beef as well as seafood. The chefs in Barcelona produce very intense beef flavors through dry-aging, and they don’t do anything silly like trimming away all the fat off of a ribeye before they serve it to you. I had the best all-around meals in Paris. I kept feeling struck that Parisian restaurants were filled to the brim with enthusiastic eaters at all hours. And Copenhagen has not only inventive modern cuisine, but also maybe the best bakeries in the world.

What is the most innovative food city in America? Perhaps it is Austin. I had great eating over a week there, though it’s not anywhere near Asian or European levels. Anglophone countries are never going to produce the best food; their superpower is that they import the immigrants who bring better food. That’s something in America’s favor in the crucial culinary race against China.

When I last visited Shanghai, at the end of 2024, I was surprised to feel that the average person might be eating worse than before. The trend of consumption downgrading has been real. Smart restaurants are no longer difficult to book. Sichuan and Hunan restaurants are taking over. A lot of the restaurant foods are prepared in centralized commissaries. Many more places focus more on deliveries than the sit-down experience. And there seems to be a trend of chain restaurants from third-tier cities moving to first-tier cities, offering slightly worse food at much cheaper prices. 

The worst part is the influencer culture. China’s influencer culture is much more intense than America’s. It’s easy to see, in public spaces, how many people are glued to their phones. Anywhere charming, whether a café or a mountaintop, is full of people intently taking photos. It’s common to see Chinese couples or groups of friends barely interacting with each other over a meal, leaning over their phones. I remember having coffee once at the Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai, where a group of girls sat near me photographing each other over cakes for over an hour. Influencer culture has pushed restaurants to make dishes better photographed than tasted.

It doesn’t mean that China will fall behind America in food. No way. China retains a commanding lead, and it has so much vitality in smaller cities and the countryside. But I wonder whether China will maintain its culinary peaks, or if they will be corroded by consumer-driven homogenization and the priority of convenience over tastiness. On present trendlines, America is learning to get better, while China is slightly worse.

Large language models have helped me plan my travel. I use them to find restaurants, cafés to work in, and context for the neighborhood, city, or country I’m in. My enthusiasm for AI is relatively recent, coming with the release of o3 and the conclusion of my book. I’ve made it a point not to use AI for any part of Breakneck. Tyler once wrote that he lived around half his life without the Internet, which made him better able to appreciate its value once it arrived. It occurs to me that, thirty years from now, I too can look back at having lived half my life without AI before learning to use it.

AI can be an amazing companion for the intellectually peripatetic. It is able to engage on any issue, especially cultural matters. Context is no longer scarce. I can go to an art exhibit and then interrogate AI on what I’ve seen, or to a string quartet and have a great conversation on what I’ve heard. I get quick answers to questions I wonder about (“Why did the Spanish develop such a virulent Inquisition while Austrian Catholicism feels relatively cheerful?”). I much better appreciate its value after having suffered the frustrations of flipping through library books for information, doing long Google searches, and rifling through data sets to find the right series. Maybe it’s a shame that people in college now never had to go through these experiences before AI dropped into their laps.

And it was to be closer to AI that I’ve recently shifted my institutional home. I had been happily based at Yale until Stephen Kotkin recruited me to the Hoover History Lab, where I am now a research fellow. You can listen to a two-hour conversation we had on how historians work. I had thought that I wanted to be tied up with New York City. But the Bay Area is so stimulating that I’ve decided to restart my letter this year. It feels wholly appropriate to say, after all, that Silicon Valley is as bizarre and compelling as China can be.

Breakneck (突破：中国探索构建未来) will be released on August 26. order it on Amazon or your favorite platform by clicking through to Norton in the U.S. and Penguin in the U.K.