Dan Wang's "Breakneck" (review)

This review of Dan Wang’s extraordinary Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (W.W. Norton, 2025) is a few months late for a good reason. As I told him the other day, I couldn’t bring myself to finish the ‘One-Child’ chapter. Dan sent me a draft of his book last year for my thoughts. I dove in, sending him compliment after compliment on his early chapters. “It’s excellent,” I wrote. “I am savoring!” I took about ten pages of notes in anticipation.

I was staying with my daughter and son-in-law, their hands full with a toddler and a new baby, born 17 months apart. My job was the overnight and early morning shift, walking and rocking and swaddling and burping. I was reading Dan’s doc during quiet moments but stopped when I got to that chapter. Over several weeks, every time I had a spare moment I returned to it, but always, after a few paragraphs, closed my laptop. Months went by.

Nobody likes ghosting a friend, especially one coming out with a brilliant book bound to be a bestseller, which it is. When it was officially published in August, I thought I’d try again in hard copy. I’d been reading all the reviews and praise in the meantime. Dan Wang “gets” China, all the reviews say. He is a brilliant writer, and his central framing that China is run by engineers and the US by lawyers has been taken up by all the best podcasts and reviews. Here are some paragraphs if you haven’t yet read it:

China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can. Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams. His eight other colleagues could have run a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate: with majors in electron-tube engineering and thermal engineering, from schools like the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute and the Harbin Institute of Technology, and work experience at the First Machine-Building Ministry and the Shanghai Artificial Board Machinery Factory. (2-3)

Once upon a time, America, too, had the musculature of an engineering state, building mighty works throughout the country: lengthy train tracks, gorgeous bridges, beautiful cities, weapons of war with terrible power, and missions to the moon. George Washington was a general, the first of many national security types who appreciated the value of building. As a young army officer, Dwight Eisenhower spent two months driving, or, more precisely, juddering, from coast to coast on unpaved roads. As president, he built the Interstate Highway System. When the United States had surging population and economic growth through the nineteenth century, political elites agreed that its vast territories needed canals, rails, and highways. Some of the leading figures in the Progressive Era embraced social engineering—and they conducted enough eugenics experiments to prove it. (p 11)

The excitement and praise are deserved. The engineer versus lawyer comparison has caught on. You see the “time to build” community excited about building and what it might take to embrace an engineering mindset. (I come from a family of engineers and find atoms far more interesting than bits.)

Nobody, however, likes talking about how 35 years of a one-child policy resulted in 321 million abortions and the sterilization of 108 million women and 26 million men, resulting in agony for rural women and families especially.

The problem with engineers doing social engineering is that things can go very, very wrong. Ideally a country would have lawyers and engineers. As Dan said in one early interview, “the issue with lawyers is that they’re really good at saying no. They’re really good at blocking things…and so in the lawyerly society you don’t have stupid ideas like the one child policy; you also don’t have very functional infrastructure almost anywhere throughout the country.”

Most reviews have tended to skim over the one-child data briefly or skip it altogether. In some cases, the brutality is played almost for laughs:

The policy inflicted much suffering on Chinese women through forced abortions and sterilisation and led to tragic femicide. But it was not effective in addressing China’s demographic challenges. Indeed, today the CCP is pushing women to have children!

Why do so many reviewers avoid taking the one-child policy chapter seriously, if they talk about it at all? Perhaps because it complicates the tidy engineer-versus-lawyer framework that makes for good podcast content. The one-child policy shows that the problem isn’t just that lawyers block things while engineers build them. It’s easy to romanticize engineers. But engineers can build working systems of mass coercion too.

I began to notice that when the trauma of the one child policy came up in interviews it was Dan who made sure to talk about forced abortions, not the (usually male) interviewer. Daniel Cheng’s review in Jacobin is an exception.

Here is the paragraph at which I stopped reading last year, a few pages in, after introducing us to Song Jian, the engineer who was the architect and key implementer:

Song Jian’s home province of Shandong experienced the most notorious incident of strict enforcement. Zeng Zhaoqi, newly appointed party secretary of Guan County, was humiliated that it ranked last in the province for family planning. So he summoned the twenty-two most senior party officials one day in April, berating them for their failings and shouting that their measures must be more extraordinary. He demanded there be zero births in the county between May 1 to August 10. In reports now censored, residents said that every woman was forced to have an abortion, no matter how far she was into her pregnancy or whether it had been authorized. Zeng found toughs from other counties—since locals were reluctant to hurt their own—to halt births. (109).

The incident has two names, Dan writes: the “childless hundred days” and, because 1991 was the year of the sheep in the Chinese zodiac, the “slaughter of the lambs.” The slaughter ended well for Zeng, Dan writes. He was promoted.

Then Dan texted a few days ago to say he’d be in town and could we have coffee. In the quiet of my apartment, far from infant cries, I forced myself finally to read Breakneck’s One-Child Policy chapter closely. It was grueling. Such beautiful prose for such a bloody policy:

Wives and daughters were being sterilized in much the same way that farmers spayed their pigs. It didn’t help that the abortion posses sometimes literally carted women off in hog cages. Michael Weisskopf wrote in the Washington Post, “Expectant mothers, including many in their last trimester, were trussed, handcuffed, herded into hog cages and delivered by the truckload to the operating tables of rural clinics.” The toll on women’s bodies was enormous. The stainless-steel IUD rings inserted after births created long-term physical problems, provoked menstrual bleeding, and tended to wear out after two years. Abortions and invasive tubal ligations were often done in a hurry and en masse, sometimes without anesthetic. Men could have volunteered for vasectomies. But typically, four women received a tubal ligation for every vasectomy. (110)

The chapter is long and detailed. I have long known about the one-child policy. It was in place for most of my fertile life, in fact: I was a teenager when it was put into place, in 1980 and entering menopause when it ended, in 2015. I have two children and (so far) two grandchildren. I’ve visited and lectured in China several times and have several married friends there who have said, in passing, that they’d had “several abortions,” over the years. I’ve written about how the many Chinese students studying literature have no siblings, a relation so central to the novels and plays I teach. How can one understand the Hebrew Bible or Antigone or King Lear without understanding sisters and brothers? I may not have taken this history as seriously as I should have.

“Breakneck is the story of the Chinese state that yanked its people into modernity—an action rightfully envied by much of the world—using means that ran roughshod over many—an approach rightfully disdained by much of the world.” (xv)

Brutal natalist policies are a fact of history in every country. My own scholarship is about the wrenching effects of slavery on women: rape and forced pregnancy, forced separation from families. Frederick Douglass opens his famous autobiography with his story of not knowing his birthday or his mother, except as a shadowy figure who visited when she could.

After reading Breakneck’s one-child policy chapter, I found the relative lack of interest in what Dan writes as the cost of an engineering outlook to be concerning. Dan himself is unflinching:

One of the notorious legacies of the one-child policy was the high rate of female infanticide. Rural families tended to have two preferences: to have multiple children, and that at least one should be a boy. The one-child policy collapsed these desires into a preference for sons. Reports of female infanticide poured into government offices. Baby girls were being smothered, drowned, poisoned, or left in trash heaps as soon as they were born. (112-113)

My son-in-law’s younger sister was adopted as a baby from China some 20+ years ago, one of the apparently 75,000 who were adopted by U.S. families (116). She is a robotics engineer and a talented musician. Dan’s one-child policy chapter details the brutal conditions that led to her being here, to the benefit of everyone who knows her and to our nation’s economic growth.

The one-child policy, Dan writes, “could only have been implemented in the engineering state. While the state possessed a bureaucracy to enforce controls of such extraordinary scale, there wasn’t a sufficiently developed civil society to fight for legal protection against it” (118).

Just a few years ago there were protest marches around the world featuring women in costumes from a Margaret Atwood novel. In the U.S., debates over the Freakonomics data that abortions reduced crime in America are still ongoing, and on X, a site run by a man who has fourteen children by multiple mothers, the “trad wife” posts abound, as does praise for the Supreme Court working-mother Associate Justice with seven children. But somehow the trauma of rural Chinese women undergoing forced third-trimester abortions because of social engineering bureaucracy, not ideology, is not something that captures the imagination.

The question Dan’s book raises — can we celebrate China’s achievements while reckoning with its costs? — hovers at the edges of other recent pieces on China. It’s easy, just focusing on the breathtaking bridges and infrastructure, to romanticize a country so different from the U.S. Lizzi C. Lee’s new piece “The China Model’s Fatal Flaw: Why Beijing Can’t Overcome Overcapacity” in Foreign Affairs, is not so optimistic about China. Kaiser Kuo’s recent piece, The Great Reckoning, is not so optimistic about the U.S. Kuo mentions Dan’s book, “arguably the most talked-about, if not the most important, book of 2025 for anyone who thinks seriously about China’s trajectory. Wang’s argument that technocracy and engineering governance have driven China’s success has found an eager audience among Americans finally ready to confront what they had ignored or dismissed.”

In his brief piece, Kuo doesn’t mention the one-child policy (though he has talked about it at length in his podcasts and touches on it here in his recent conversation with Dan). But it’s unsettling to read this (by Kuo) after reading Dan’s chapter:

If we are to speak honestly, we must take stock of what China has achieved in human terms. The numbers are staggering, but numbers alone cannot capture their significance. Since the early 1980s, according to the World Bank, China has lifted nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty, accounting for roughly three-quarters of the global reduction in poverty during that time. Life expectancy in China, which stood at only 33 in 1960, reached 78 in 2023; life expectancy at birth in the United States in 2023 was 78.4. Nearly every household in China has had access to electricity for about a decade. Secondary school enrollment is now nearly universal. Per capita income has risen from just a few hundred dollars at the start of reform in the late 1970s to over $13,000 today.

These numbers ought to be in conversation with the numbers of missing persons. But, as the piece makes clear, Kuo is pessimistic about the U.S.: “I take no pleasure in witnessing what my country has become—a nation I love, torn apart by political tribalism so intense and so toxic that I fear it may be beyond repair, at least in the coming, and critical, decade.”

**

But let me end where I began, with why it was so hard to stop reading even when I wanted to. The answer is Breakneck’s remarkable prose. I’ve known Dan for eight or so years, through the excellent Tyler Cowen, and have, like everyone, praised his Christmas letters. Dan and I share an interest in Dickens, novels generally, and what makes a prose style “stand the test of time.” Time has less to do with it than strong paragraph structure. Strong paragraph structure will keep your readers with you. The best writers are engineers whose facades don’t crumble.

Dan has talked about his paragraphs as he makes the rounds. In one interview he said “I would love to be able to refine the connections between the sentences, the connections between the paragraphs. I feel like I could do a much better job with that.” I was dismayed when the interviewer didn’t immediately follow up, saying “wait, what? Where is there a paragraph you think is unconnected? Show me now!” I was impressed that while so many of the paragraphs I’d copied out from the early draft Dan sent were revised for the final book, many of the best ones weren’t! That’s what a craftsperson he is.

Here’s one paragraph opening I liked that stayed the same:

The engineering state is built for a bird’s-eye view. The geometry of highway interchanges, rows upon rows of solar photovoltaic panels, and, under the right lighting, even a belching chemical plant can produce a pleasing thrill when viewed up high and at a distance (31).

Here’s another:

Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers (74).

And finally, even in a long paragraph about food, the prose is delightful and certainly, in these days of high supermarket prices, offers an appealing view of our rival:

China takes food security seriously as well. Xi Jinping has been known to stand in the middle of a field of wheat while offering a folksy remark: for example, “The bowls of the Chinese people should be filled mostly with Chinese grain.” The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have made Beijing more conscious of food self-sufficiency. Chinese leaders have always been aware that food shortages have toppled imperial dynasties. And so one of the things that provincial governors are graded on is whether they are self-sufficient in rice and wheat, while mayors of major cities have to make sure that a variety of foods are grown locally. Mayors are graded on the amount of land they dedicate to vegetables and on ensuring that grocery markets are within walking distance for most residents, that there are no food safety scandals, and that prices are stable. (193-194)

That bird’s-eye view Dan praises characterizes most of his reviewers. From “high and at a distance” you can admire the engineer-versus-lawyer framework, quote the compelling statistics about infrastructure, nod approvingly at the prose style. Most reviews stay up there. I almost did. But I’d rather be late with this review and dwell on what others don’t. Dan’s prose makes it possible to admire systems from altitude and to see the people crushed inside them. Breakneck won’t let you have one without the other.