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

“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

“As Deng was fond of remarking, the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Chinese leaders were just enough exposed to the West to absorb [their] neo-Malthusian doomerism, without being exposed enough to the Western pushback against it.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“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

“American manufactures spent the better part of three decades unwinding its stock of process knowledge when it opened so many factories in China. Every US factory closure represents a likely permanent loss of production skill and knowledge. Line workers, machinists, and product designers are thrown out of work; then their suppliers and technical advisers struggle as well. Entire American communities of engineering practice have dissolved, leaving behind a region known as the Rust belt. But they were continuously scorned by economists and executives, who sought low-wage production in the name of globalization. Still today, many American economists doubt there is anything special about manufacturing and put their faith in the inevitable march to a service economy.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“If the iPhone were built in the United States rather than Shenzhen, then an American city—say, Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh—might be hailed as the hardware capital of the world. The follow-on innovations in consumer drones, hoverboards, electric vehicle batteries, and virtual reality headsets could have sprung from American firms. Engineers wouldn’t have to fly from Cupertino across the Pacific to reach their giant factories. They could iterate on product improvements closer to home…The United States must regain, at a minimum, the manufacturing capacity o scale up production that emerges from its own industrial labs. If it does not, continuing to value scientific breakthroughs rather than mass manufacturing, then it might lose whole industries once more—as it did by inventing the solar photovoltaic panel but relying on China to produce them. The United States likes to celebrate the light-bulb moment of genius innovators. But there is, I submit, more glory in having big firms making a product rather than a science lab claiming its invention. Otherwise, US scientists would once again build a ladder toward technological leadership only to have Chinese firms climb it.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

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

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