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

“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

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

“Xi has declared that China targets completionism, which means that not even “low-end industries” should move out of China. Rather than follow economic logic, in which production gravitates toward countries with lower labor costs—which the United States and other high-income countries have more or less accepted—Xi does not want industry to keep shifting around.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Silvia Lindtner, a professor at the University of Michigan and my wife, has spent more than a decade studying Shenzhen’s technology ecosystems. In 2015, the Austrian government asked her how to create a Shenzhen in the Alps; in 2016, the White House invited her to present on how the United States might learn from the success of Shenzhen. She has felt, as I do, that these agencies misunderstood the point of Shenzhen. They were still more interested in individual inventors rather than understanding it as a community of engineering practice. The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“When I moved to China in 2017 to cover technology, it was still common to hear Americans say that Chinese companies couldn’t innovate. China could only copy and steal, they said. Some folks in Silicon Valley knew that there were cool things cooking in Shenzhen, but the broader attitude among Americans was condescension. When I left China in 2023, the tenor of American views had shifted. Fewer people were saying China hasn’t developed any important technologies, since it has become a major producer of electric vehicles and clean technologies. Alarm has crowded out the dismissiveness, as China’s surveillance capabilities are menacing US national security while its manufacturing capacity is threatening to engulf Western firms.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“They threw themselves into manufacturing toys, clothing, and other consumer goods in the 1980s, growing their capabilities each year. By the 2000s, Shenzhen was a major electronics hub. The workforce would become the spearhead for the greatest business endeavor of the early twentieth century: the campaign to put a smartphone into the hands of nearly everyone on the planet. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, there was no more natural place than Shenzhen for mass production. It had already scaled up manufacturing of the iPod there a few years earlier.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“This lack of emphasis on efficiency has been key to another Chinese success: Part of the reason that China dominates advanced manufacturing technologies is precisely because it tolerates lower profits while cultivating a large workforce.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“In Abundance, Klein and Derek Thompson advocate to unblock constraints and achieve supply-side progressivism. Here is where socialism with Chinese characteristics can shine. Building big can sometimes unblock market power. People in Guizhou may not have much. But they do point to new bridges with pride, while using new roads and high-speed rail to get to markets and cities. Infrastructure that cannot recoup its revenue might upset bondholders and banks. But they represent subsidies to social benefits enjoyed by regular people.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Though the Biden administration committed enormous funds to address climate change, the country moves far too slowly on building things. One cautionary tale: the story of Cape Wind, the United States’ first effort to develop offshore wind turbines. A developer tried to build turbines off the coast of Massachusetts, harnessing sea winds that are smoother and faster than those on land. Unfortunately, Cape Wind was in Nantucket Sound, home to some of the wealthiest, and mostly liberal, US citizens, like the Kennedy family, whose compound is in Hyannisport. These residents banded together, formed a nonprofit, and enlisted lawyers that included one of Harvard’s best-known constitutional law professors to challenge the development. After sixteen years of lawsuits, the developer abandoned the project.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“Their attention drifts, however, when it comes to installing the trained technicians capable of operating the facility, since the Communist Party is better at rewarding new construction than health outcomes. The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai. The engineering state has engaged in wild spasms of building over the past four decades. That has achieved considerable wonders and a fair degree of harm. The future would be better if China could learn to build less, while the United States learns to build more.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The worst-affected people are targeted minority groups, who have to bear Beijing’s social engineering. The state has singled out, for example, Tibetans, who are forced to relocate from high-altitude mountains, where they are able to graze their yaks and horses, to lower-altitude farms in part to monitor them more easily. What are yak herders supposed to do when they move down to apartment blocks? Rural people who know only their farming or pastoralist lives are often at loose ends when the government resettles them into rows upon rows of high-rises.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future