Breakneck Quotes

“The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible. As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“If Americans look deeply into China, they will find reflections of its lost powers. China, right now, is in the midst of pursuing its own Great Society, where even its poorest provinces have impressive levels of physical dynamism. Delivering the goods is part of why consent of the governed is still pretty strong in China. I saw that for myself when I spent five days furiously pedaling through the jagged mountains of Guizhou.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Since lawyers are everywhere, proceduralism has reached everywhere, including universities and corporations. Anyone working in these today has seen how procedures become an end in themselves, such that people grow obsessed with their logic and forget about the outcome.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Lawyers have much more scope with the law to stop something rather than create something. Before a government agency can build anything—from simple things like a bike lane to more complex projects like California’s high-speed rail—it ties itself down with mountains of procedure. The agency has to check so many boxes because it knows that a lawsuit could derail that bike lane if people are able to convince a judge it didn’t study environmental problems hard enough. After exhaustive research and review, it is no wonder that little ends up built. Americans are left with decaying infrastructure, little new construction, and a deep sense that nothing is working.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Though the lawyerly society corrected the problems of the past, it has produced two pathologies that weaken the United States today. The first is an elevation of process over outcomes. In American government and society, designing new rules and committees have so often become the substitute for thinking hard about strategy and ends.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The starkest contrast between the two countries is the competition that will define the twenty-first century: an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction. That’s the big idea behind this book. It’s time for a new lens to understand the two superpowers: China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The United States is still a superpower that is able to outclass China on many dimensions. But it is also in the grips of an ineffectual state where people are increasingly concerned with safeguarding a comfortable way of life.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Perhaps the lawyerly society will have the ideological resilience not to be seduced by artificial intelligence”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The American right”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“New Yorkers used to celebrate Moses. Then in 1974”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The agency has to check so many boxes because it knows that a lawsuit could derail that bike lane if people are able to convince a judge it didn’t study environmental problems hard enough.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The starkest contrast between the two countries is the competition that will define the twenty-first century: an American elite”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Even if the United States is able to outclass China in diplomacy”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The reality is that the United States will never again be a bigger manufacturer than China. Its much smaller population”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“US manufacturing employment peaked in 1980 at nineteen million workers. In 2000”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“By 2025”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“An obsession with technology has spawned what is perhaps the most interesting online movement in China. In the heavily censored realm of the Chinese internet”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Over the last few decades the United States brought lawyers to a technology fight.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Women in urban cities are reporting that they are regularly getting calls from neighborhood officials asking when they plan to have children. These officials are inquisitive, asking when a woman has had her last period, and argumentative, insisting that owning a cat can be no substitute for a child. Most of all, they are nagging. One woman posted, “Government officials have asked me five or six times when I plan to have a child, while my parents have asked me only once.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“For three years, the government made it difficult for people to buy ibuprofen, Advil, and other fever reducers for fear that people might disguise their fevers to avoid detection. During an outbreak, pharmacies limited purchases of fever meds or removed fever meds from their shelves entirely. Therefore, much of the Chinese population met this Covid wave without medication on hand.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“These two countries are messy in part because they are both engines for global change. Europeans have a sense of optimism only about the past, stuck in their mausoleum economy because they are too sniffy to embrace American or Chinese practices. And the rest of the world is either too mature or too young to match the impact of these two superpowers. It is Americans and Chinese—Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, Wall Street, and Beijing—that will determine what people everywhere will think and what they will buy.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“It is because engineers don’t know how to persuade.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” Yiju told me one day. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Rare earth metals are not really rare. Processing them, however, demands enormous amounts of energy and water while spewing carcinogens into the atmosphere. Few parts of the Western world have the stomach for processing rare earth metals, which is why China controls this supply chain.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Europeans”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice. That is closer to the approach used in China and Japan.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“As John Maynard Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future