Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

Mirror Images and Polar Opposites

Dan Wang’s book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future begins with a slightly provocative premise: in his view, no two peoples are more alike than the American and the Chinese. This is followed by a list of shared characteristics, including a materialistic and pragmatic mindset, a penchant for boundary-pushing projects, the conviction in the greatness of one’s own nation, etc. Only by thoroughly understanding these two countries in their internal operations and mutual interaction can one, in Wang’s vision, adequately fathom the major shifts currently taking place globally. He is, of course, correct in this, but his jab at Europe feels a bit cheap. He compares its economy to a mausoleum, a pompous economic structure containing only the remnants of a glorious past.

Wang, a Chinese-Canadian who has spent an equal number of years in the US and in China, describes China as an “engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building big at breakneck speed” and America as a “lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.” This strikes me as a somewhat derailed exaggeration of intrinsically recognizable characteristics. Yet it is precisely these exaggerations that make this book so stimulating to read.

The Politburo’s Engineering Mentality

Around 2002, all nine members of the Politburo had an engineering background. What do engineers want? To build! Since ancient times, Chinese leaders have also been social engineers. In their relationship with society, Wang argues, they try to influence flows like hydraulic engineers, paying no heed to the individuals who make up those currents. They focus solely on the group as a whole.

In his view, engineers move forward with breakfast-neck speed, but in both directions: forward, and when things go wrong, backwards. In doing so, he refers to major policy shifts since 1949 – the year Mao founded the republic: the Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, the ruthless crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests, and the pandemic response. Whether engineers will be very happy with the attributes ascribed to them, I will leave in the middle for convenience’s sake, but prioritizing the group’s interests over those of the individual and the dogged pursuit of set goals in the process are recognizable.

The American Lawyer State

By contrast, in Wang’s vision, the US is not run by builders, but by obstructive lawyers. Illustrative of this is that five of the last ten US presidents studied law, as did half of Congress. In the^19th century, the American political elite was convinced of the importance of canals, railways and roads. Afterwards, the lawyers took over. They do useful work protecting the interests of individual citizens, but as a result, large projects in the US take a very long time and are also exceptionally costly.

According to Wang, China resembles the US of a century ago. I think that the emphasis on infrastructure – back then in the US, now in China and along the Silk Road countries, among others – cannot be separated from a country’s developmental phase. Infrastructure also played a major role in the Netherlands during the early industrialization period. King William I stimulated the construction of canals, paved roads and industrialization, fittingly earning him the nickname of the ‘Canal King’. William II, in turn, took a great interest in railways. The Netherlands owes a great deal to the importance both monarchs attached to infrastructure.

In several chapters, Wang goes into detail about the policy areas where, in his judgment, China has follewed an engineering approach: gigantic construction and infrastructure projects, technology, the one-child policy and COVID-19.

Construction and Infrastructure

In Wang’s eyes, China has achieved a tremendous amount with its engineering approach. Driven by internal migration flows, the urban population has grown by 16 million per year since 1978. This means that for 35 years, a city the size of (almost) the entire Dutch population had to be built every year, naturally accompanied by matching transport infrastructure. It is not entirely incomprehensible to me that during these types of colossal construction efforts, supply and demand did not always align seamlessly, leading temporarily to half-empty residential areas springing from the ground. However, there are also more structural downsides to the pursued policy: high debt for unprofitable, sometimes megalomaniacal projects, the implosion of the real estate sector, destruction of cultural heritage, low tolerance for dissent, negative environmental impacts, and overproduction.

According to Wang, China currently spends too much on infrastructure (13.5% of GDP in 2016), while the US spends too little (averaging only 3% over the last few decades). In his view, the approach in both countries is stalling. The approach in both countries is stalling, in his view. In America, neglect of infrastructure is visible everywhere (bridges, roads), while in China, other policy areas should be given a higher priority, such as the social safety net.

Technology

Wang’s observations on the development of the technology sector are particularly interesting. That development owes a great deal to American business. The establishment of Apple and Tesla factories in Shenzhen was crucial for the spectacular growth of the city, which evolved into the Silicon Valley of China. In these factories – whose supply chains became closely intertwined with Chinese companies – Chinese workers were trained, later applying their knowledge in other sectors. Thus, Shenzhen became home to BYD (electric vehicles), DJI (drones) and Huawei (telecommunications). The iPhone provided a massive impulse to the city’s development, including a Foxconn campus, shops, and residential areas. All of this took place in close cooperation with the authorities, who assisted in finding personnel and land.

According to Wang, China’s success – for example in the automotive industry – is also thanks to the opening up of the market and the resulting competition, rather than forced technology transfer, exchange rate manipulation, or subsidies. Based on this, Wang concludes that – under the condition of technology transfer – the arrival of Chinese factories in the US should not be prevented. Perhaps we in Europe, too, should take a more nuanced look at Chinese car manufacturers rapidly building factories in Spain and Hungary to bypass import tariffs and shorten the logistics chain.

n technology, Wang argues, process knowledge and experience are vitally important. A major reason for the diminished interest in manufacturing (for which process knowledge is essential) is that in the US (and elsewhere in the Western world), financial investors prefer to invest in less capital-intensive products (e.g., social media, digital platforms) rather than heavy industry, with companies focusing more heavily on shareholder value. In Wang’s vision, America must pay less attention to the mythical moment of creation and more to scaling up and improving physical production processes. That realization seems to have grown under President Trump, but my impression is that it is being shaped rather unfocused and chaotically, including through the use of import tariffs.

The One-Child Policy

The one-child policy caused more social pain in China than any other policy. Bizarre standpoints were proclaimed regarding population size. For instance, Mao stated that he was not afraid of atomic bombs and was willing to lose half the population, because “The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before”. In Mao’s view, China could never have too many inhabitants because any problem could be solved by expanding production. Mao’s final years, with his Cultural Revolution, were chaotic. No one knew how many inhabitants the country had, but when the figure of nearly 1 billion surfaced in 1978, the authorities reacted with shock. Straight-line extrapolations then led to the conclusion that China would have 3 billion peoople by 2050, against an optimum food-sustaining size of 700 million. The Chinese leadership believed the assertions of scientists (particularly Song) that population growth could be controlled just as precisely as launching a rocket.

The Communist Party – Wang writes – could not entirely ignore human emotions and existing ethics. In 1980, it made an urgent, reasoned appeal to the public to content themselves with one child. But the implementation was gruesome: physical manual inspections, forced sterilizations, and abortions.

During the 35 years of the one-child policy, 321 million abortions were performed, 108 million women were sterilized and 26 million men. Wang derives these figures from official Chinese sources. His chapter on this reads like grim science fiction. In the countryside, women complained they were treated like livestock; in the cities, the situation was slightly less harrowing. In 1983, the policy was somewhat relaxed, and more couples were permitted a second child, but execution remained harsh and dehumanizing. In 2015, the one-child policy gave way to a two-child policy, and since 2021, three children have been allowed. The irony is that rising prosperity would likely have driven birth rates down sharply even without government intervention. A top Party economist told me as much back in 2017 or 2018.

The traumas have softened, but the echo of this policy will resonate for a long time. It is incomprehensible that this happened in a country with respect “for family, kin and filial piety”. According to Wang, only an engineering state could conceive and actually execute such a one-child policy, because in such a state, civil society is insufficiently developed to offer a counterweight.

The COVID-19 Crisis, The First Wave

Wang describes both the first and second waves of COVID-19 in China. The first wave started in January 2020 and was brought under control within 12 months; the second began in April 2022 and ran roughly until the end of that year. Early signs of a potential new virus had been flagged somewhat earlier, but reporting on it was initially suppressed by local authorities.

In early January 2020, I was still in Beijing, just before the lockdown on January 23 of Hubei province and its capital Wuhan, which had a poplulation of12 million. In the weeks and months that followed, I had regular contact with Chinese colleagues at the bank where I served as a non-executive board member. As a result, for the first few months, I felt as though I had landed in a parallel universe. Immediately after the lockdown, a Chinese friend emailed me to say he had fled to his house in the mountains because the government would only take such drastic measures if something extremely serious was happening. In an emergency teleconference with the bank a few days after Hubei province was sealed off, the gravity of the situation was once again elaborated in detail, and a decision was made to launch a major relief package for the virus’s victims. The bank’s motto (“Serving society”) was put into practice immediately.

Everyone in the Netherlands could follow on TV how seriously the Chinese took the outbreak of the virus, but initially – not only in our country and also when the virus had already arrived in Italy – there was a stubborn underestimation of the threat. My Chinese colleagues worried about the approach in the Netherlands. Their concerns included the absence of testing, face masks (which, some Dutch experts claimed did not help anyway and are “something for Asians”), informational and contact-tracing tests, and children still being allowed to go to school unprotected. They were also astonished, for instance, by the advice to sneeze into your sleeve without mentioning that you would then have to wash that sweater or coat immediately. Unprompted, they sent me face masks, gloves, and disinfectants several times.

Thanks to drastic intervention, China got the first virus wave under control much faster than the rest of the world. This was also true for several countries near China that had more or less followed the Chinese approach, as the SARS and MERS epidemics were still fresh in their collective memory. In October 2020, the Prime Minister of New Zealand described the necessary approach as a “go hard and early strategy, combining lockdown measures with a blitz of testing, contact tracing and quarantining”.

Initially, there was anger and uncertainty in China over the government’s harsh intervention, but according to Wang, this turned into national pride when that approach proved successful. However, deep intrusions into personal living conditions had to be endured for this (even pandas in research centers were tested for COVID). Not everything went smoothly. Although China had learned a lot from previous crises and developed an extensive surveillance system for epidemics, the weakness in the political system was that local politicians prevented health workers from reporting and even punished whistleblowers.

Omicron, The Second Wave

The second wave (omicron), starting in December 2021, came as a major, unexpected shock. Once again, a harsh approach followed: placement of infected people in quarantine buildings, babies and children separated from their parents, overcrowded hospitals, major problems with food deliveries (partly because trucks all had to be checked for contamination), uncertainty about how long it would last, and constantly shifting government policies. It was sometimes cynically said: this is Xi’s common prosperity. People began to protest (for example, banging on pots and pans at night), and some even committed suicide. Those who spread harrowing stories were often dealt with harshly. However, Xi marketed the fight against the virus as a people’s war. Censorship, already formidable, grew increasingly severe.

Why did Xi suddenly halt the zero-COVID policy? According to Wang, probably not because of the protests. The number of demonstrators was never very large, but everyone was exhausted, and it was clearly hurting economic growth. Government actions were also erratic. My impression is that this rapidly eroded confidence in the effectiveness of government policy. In November 2022, control over the virus was lost, including in Beijing, where resistance to the measures during the second wave was relatively high. In December, the zero-COVID policy was brought to an end.

COVID, no more than the one-child policy, has not faded from the collective memory, according to Wang. Deep wounds have been inflicted. Just as older people remember the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution, young people remember the corona crisis as a product of the engineering state. While the one-child policy was enforced and monitored physically, this time digital tools such as facial recognition, mobile networks, and apps were used.

The Search for the Right Response

Taking stock, the obvious conclusion is that there has been an overreaction in China with regard to the infringement of the rights of the individual, and in Western countries an approach has been taken too late and sometimes too insufficiently drastic. However, what makes this conclusion so unsatisfactory in its simplicity is that the infringement of individual rights should also be weighed against the number of fatalities and long-term victims of the virus. The official number of corona deaths in China is 125,000, but scientists arrive at a considerably higher, maximum figure of almost 2 million. In America, around 1 million people are said to have died of corona. Scaled to the size of the population, there would have been at least 4 million deaths in China if the American ratio between the number of deaths and the population size were used. However, completely conclusive calculations are not possible due to differences in definition and registration. Loss of life, the resulting grief of family and acquaintances, long covid and other repercussions of the coronavirus are consequences that must be taken into account when assessing the acceptability of the degree of infringement of individual rights. An almost impossible task, also because it is partly dependent on culture.

I am curious about the findings of the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee, which recently began interviewing key figures. As I wrote in my 2020 book Ontgelden, I would very much like to know what stance Dutch experts took during the meetings of the WHO Emergency Committee on January 22 and 23 regarding whether the WHO should declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Intensive international consultation took place in the weeks that followed, and it seems relevant whether politically responsible figures in Germany and the Netherlands were sufficiently informed about this. I discussed the challenges of decision-making by administrators, experts, and politicians during the corona crisis at length in 2021 in my contribution to the farewell volume (Cum Suis) for the rector magnificus of Leiden University, Carel Stolker.

The Future

Distrust and animosity between the US and China have now replaced mutual admiration. Economically, technologically and diplomatically, the two superpowers are now competing fiercely, casting a shadow over the lives of those with connections on both sides. The question is how this can be managed without spiraling out of control, with globally disastrous consequences. Understanding one other is crucial.

Wang wonders which country holds the best prospects for the future. According to him, it is the US. America has an advantage over China due to the space is affords to a wide variety of cultures, religions, and ideas, and through its full acceptance of individual rights. However, Wang argues that the US must rebuild its manufacturing sector; otherwise, people all over the world will end up driving Chinese cars, using Chinese robots, flying in Chinese aircraft, and so on. Americans should remember their engineering past more than they currently do and realize that their country can thrive without lawyers and micro-management.

Wang’s impression is that Xi wants to turn China into one large stronghold cut off from the outside world. Although trade and exchange with foreign countries still exist, Xi strives for a high degree of self-sufficiency. China’s greatest strength, according to Wang, is its workforce, which preserves and passes down process knowledge. In the field of manufacturing, China can become a world leader. America has accelerated the Chinese drive through its trade policy and treatment of scientists, an increasing number of whom are returning to China, lured by generous research budgets and stimulated by the increasingly hostile climate in the US.

The problem with China, according to the author, is that Xi may be 60% right, but his approach is too blunt. Entrepreneurs are traumatized, and letting real estate developers go bankrupt erodes confidence. Corruption must, of course, be tackled, but not in a way that leaves the bureaucracy feeling terrorized. It is the overreactions that cause damage. To prevent them, you need a lawyerly society that can provide a counterweight and protect the individual. The Communist Party should put the human being more at the center. The country still lacks a genuine commitment respecting the rights of the individual.