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In the 1970s, China opened up its markets to global trade and underwent rapid economic growth and industrialization.<\/span>Credit: VCG\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n Breakneck: China\u2019s Quest to Engineer the Future Dan Wang W. W. Norton (2025)<\/p>\n When it comes to accounts of China\u2019s economic and technological success, a lot has been written but much of it isn\u2019t worth the paper. Western scholars, especially, need to better understand the facts. Presenting those facts is the greatest strength of tech analyst Dan Wang\u2019s excellent book Breakneck.<\/p>\n Here are some of the details he describes. Many of China\u2019s poorest provinces have better infrastructure than the United States\u2019 wealthiest regions. China\u2019s policies designed to stimulate manufacturing growth have led to price wars, waste and debt crises. It is true that China\u2019s one-child policy and zero-COVID strategy caused unnecessary suffering. It is also true that US regulatory policies are hindering the provision of public services such as railways in the United States. Just for including these facts, I would call Wang\u2019s book one of the best English-language texts on China published in the past few years.<\/p>\n China\u2019s biotech boom: why the nation must collaborate to stay ahead<\/p>\n<\/p>\n However, Wang also wants to distil these facts into a particular narrative: China is ruled by engineers, whereas the United States is ruled by lawyers. He interprets China as a modern version of Prussian Germany or Meiji Japan \u2014 governments characterized by authoritarian rule and technocracy, where technical experts make decisions targeted towards narrow goals such as economic growth or industrial strength while neglecting others.<\/p>\n Wang is deeply sceptical of what he sees as China\u2019s top-down, technocratic model. His core argument is a familiar one in the field of political economy: no central planner, however skilled, can manage a complex economy better than the market can. Economists and philosophers such as Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott have called this faith in central planning the \u2018pretence of knowledge\u2019 or \u2018rationalist conceit\u2019. What makes Wang\u2019s version fresh is his framing of this idea through the relationship between the United States and China, and the richness of his on-the-ground reporting. But, in my view, the narrative that he constructs doesn\u2019t always follow the facts.<\/p>\n Given that many of China\u2019s leaders were educated in engineering, it\u2019s only natural for scholars such as Wang to try to establish a causal link between their backgrounds and the country\u2019s economic and technological achievements. But evidence doesn\u2019t support this interpretation (see go.nature.com\/4zytrx9). For example, China had the highest proportion of technocrats among the leaders of its provinces in the 1990s; there are fewer now (see go.nature.com\/4rkszna). Chinese leaders are less likely than their US counterparts to have legal backgrounds, but this is because, in China, the legal profession mainly offers a route into the judicial system, which is mostly separate from the government.<\/p>\n And there are other paradoxes. If China\u2019s leaders supposedly follow a logical and evidence-based engineering culture, why would they come up with so many convoluted policies, such as the one-child and zero-COVID rules? Such cases of overly complex governance are rare in other nations under technocratic governance (such as Japan and Singapore) or in technology companies (such as Google, Amazon and Huawei).<\/p>\n It\u2019s common for scholars of China, especially those based in the West, to analyse how organizations\u2019 rules and norms shape political, social and economic behaviour, but also to neglect more-fundamental aspects of societies.<\/p>\n The first variable affecting China\u2019s political situation, I suggest, is scale. Humans are limited in their ability to organize in large groups. Governing a vast country such as China, which has 1.4 billion people, requires several layers of administrative institutions, all managing the nation at various scales. These layers inevitably reduce the ability of the premier \u2014 the head of government administration \u2014 to govern with precision at a local level. What happens in Shanghai\u2019s Lujiazui area, Shenzhen\u2019s Nanshan district and in the mountainous province of Guizhou is distinct, even though they\u2019re all in the same nation. People in diverse regions think and operate differently, as if they are in parallel worlds.<\/p>\n China dominates global manufacturing of drones, smartphones and computers.<\/span>Credit: Qilai Shen\/Bloomberg\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n Roughly speaking, I divide these worlds into three zones: Hayekian China, Fundamental China and Communist Party China. Hayekian China (named after Hayek, who championed free markets) is closely connected to globalization and technological progress, and can be found in the tech-savvy urban agglomerations of the Yangtze and Pearl river deltas. These regions have a combined per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of roughly US$25,000 a year, and together they are home to 300\u2013350 million people \u2014 equivalent to more than twice the population of Japan and approaching that of the United States. Here you will find many young and capable engineers, entrepreneurial spirit that rivals that of Silicon Valley in California and world-class supply-chain efficiency.<\/p>\n Drive a few hundred kilometres away, however, and you will find other regions in which per capita GDP, business spirit and governance capabilities are much lower. You will enter Fundamental China, which contains roughly one billion people. The local economy here barely survives on money from the issuance of land-use rights and transfer payments to local governments from the central government. The massive infrastructure projects that make China\u2019s governing class so proud mainly make it possible for people living in such regions to travel to work in the Hayekian cities, where they endure harsh working conditions with a lack of basic welfare protection.<\/p>\n Gluing these two worlds together and maintaining their operation as a nation is Communist Party China, centred in the nation\u2019s capital, Beijing. Rather than resembling Prussian Germany or Meiji Japan, this world more closely resembles that of traditional Chinese rulers: adopting \u2018realpolitik\u2019 methods that use every opportunity and resource (including globalization and technological advancements) to maintain their own rule. This is self interest, not the principles of engineering.<\/p>\n How China is vying to attract the world\u2019s top scientific talent<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Instead, the globalization that the world has witnessed over the past 50 years is the product of cooperation between the Chinese and US governments to oppose the Soviet Union during the cold war. After 1969, China and the Soviet Union had border conflicts in the northeast and northwest. In the 1970s, US diplomat Henry Kissinger observed the possibility of Sino\u2013American cooperation and established contact with the Chinese government.<\/p>\n What many people overlook is that it was under Mao Zedong\u2019s leadership in the 1970s that the technological trade barriers between China and the Western world began to drop. Through a scheme initiated in 1973, China imported technological equipment on a large scale from the United States, West Germany, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy. Ren Zhengfei, who later founded Huawei, began his engineering career at the Liaoyang Petrochemical Fiber General Factory, which was established under this policy. This gradual loosening of trade barriers was a by-product of a mutual need for geopolitical security.<\/p>\n The consequences of this cooperation wildly exceeded the expectations of the US and Chinese governments at the time: this collaboration turned China into a manufacturing giant. I think that China\u2019s success was less the result of institutions or trends in governance, as Wang argues, and more the result of the second fundamental variable in the nation\u2019s rise to tech dominance that people often overlook: the properties of technology itself.<\/p>\n Every industrial revolution that has occurred around the world over the past 250 years has had some core industries that possess the most complex supply chains in that era. Those industries become closely tied to the national economy and people\u2019s livelihoods. Countries that manage these supply chains successfully tend to experience strong economic growth.<\/p>\n How provinces and cities can sustain US\u2013China climate cooperation<\/p>\n<\/p>\n During the First Industrial Revolution (1760\u20131830), the core industry was steel manufacturing, as well as the building, railway and ship construction that steel made possible. In the Second Industrial Revolution (from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century), the key industries were automobile, electricity and petrochemical production. To this day, construction and automotive production remain the world\u2019s two largest industries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the 1970s, China opened up its markets to global trade and underwent rapid economic growth and industrialization.Credit: VCG\/Getty Breakneck: China\u2019s Quest to Engineer the Future Dan Wang W. W. Norton (2025) When it comes to accounts of China\u2019s economic and technological success, a lot has been written but much of it isn\u2019t worth the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46850,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[2474,455,1522,722,5285],"class_list":{"0":"post-46849","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-chinas","9":"tag-real","10":"tag-story","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-triumph"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A complex society<\/h2>\n
Tech trade inevitabilities<\/h2>\n