Geopolitics is a factor more than ever. It could have serious consequences. You should read “The end of the world is just beginning” or “Leading through disruption”.
Breakneck
That is why I decided to pick up “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”. If the power is moving. You need to look East. This book compares China with America. According to the author, no two people are more alike than Americans and Chinese. It is almost uncanny how much the United States and China have complemented each other. The most important thing that China and the United States share is a commitment to transformation.
Contrast
On a political level, these two systems are a study in contrasts. While the United States reflects the virtues of pluralism and protection of individuals, China reveals the advantages and perils that come from moving quickly to achieve rapid physical improvements. 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. 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.
Europe
It is also not very complimentary about the Europeans: 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. I also have heard that Europa will become the future theme park for Chinese tourists.
Bejing
To understand China, you must start in the country’s most riveting city: Beijing. A city of gravity and substance. Beijing attracts many of China’s smartest people, including scientists, technology leaders, and those seeking to advance in the Communist Party. But also study Shenzhen and Shanghai.
Engineers
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. While China was building the future, America had become physically static, its innovations mostly bound up in the virtual and financial worlds. China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it does. What do engineers like to do? Build. US infrastructure is falling into a pitiable state, while China is building new subway, bridge, and highway systems. The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn.
Democracy by lawsuit
It turned America into a “democracy by lawsuit”. Conduct every conceivable study, ventilate every option, engage every identifiable stakeholder, and weather the most stringent judicial review before any of its actions, however trivial, could take effect.” And Lawyers aren’t just defenders of the rich; many of them are the rich.
Some stats/comparisons
- The year 2008 offers a direct comparison between California’s speed and China’s speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai.
- China opened the Beijing–Shanghai line in 2011 at a cost of $36 billion.1 In its first decade of operation, it completed 1.35 billion passenger trips.
- The latest estimate for California’s rail line is $128 billion. The first segment of California’s train is expected to start operating between 2030 and 2033, according to official estimates.
- By 2020, China had built a second batch of expressways that again totalled the length of the US system. The first expanse of highways took eighteen years to build; the second took half that time.
- In 1957, the world’s first commercial nuclear plant started producing electricity in Pennsylvania. In 1991, China’s first commercial nuclear power plant started producing electricity. By 2025, China caught up to the United States in the number of nuclear plants: fifty-five and fifty-four, respectively.
- Meanwhile, thirty-one are under construction in China. The only US nuclear plant built in the twenty-first century took fifteen years and $30 billion. In August 2024, China’s nuclear authority approved construction of eleven new reactors,11 which are collectively expected to cost the same amount.
- Shanghai has vowed to open 120 new parks every year until 2025, when the city will reach 1,000 green spaces.
- The average cost to construct a high-speed line in China is about $33 million per mile, which is 40 percent cheaper than in Europe and 80 percent cheaper than California’s effort.
- China now has the capacity to produce around sixty million cars a year.
- In 2024, the United States had 42 megawatts of operational offshore wind production, 932 megawatts under construction, and an astounding 20,978 megawatts undergoing permitting review, most of which are waiting on environmental analyses.
- China is building most of the world’s renewable energy. In 2023, while the United States added 6 gigawatts of new wind installations, China added 76.
- In 2022, China had nearly 1,800 ships under construction, and the United States had 5.
- In 2021, Congress allocated $42 billion to expand broadband services to rural communities in a plan known as Internet for All. Four years later, not a single home has been connected to this network.
- The United Nations Industrial Development Organization forecast that China will have 45 percent of the world’s industrial capacity by 2030.
Physical and industrial technologies
China embraced a vision of technology radically different from Silicon Valley’s: the pursuit of physical and industrial technologies rather than virtual ones such as social media and e-commerce platforms. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, there was no more natural place for mass production than Shenzhen. Apple has trained hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, every year, to build sophisticated electronics. Chinese companies subsequently leveraged this workforce to lead the world in other industries centered in Shenzhen, including electric vehicles, battery systems, and consumer drones.
They have become proficient at developing a wide range of electronic components: small batteries, cable connectors, and display screens. Virtually everything one needs to produce any electronic product can be found in a short drive around Shenzhen.
Proximity creates efficiency
The hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the smartphone supply chain have caused the cost of electronic components—cameras, sensors, batteries, modems—to plummet. Indeed, Shenzhen is the headquarters of many of China’s most dynamic companies, including BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker; DJI, the world’s largest consumer drone maker; and Huawei, the beleaguered company that is the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker.
Leading
China leads the world in deploying ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines, high-speed rail, and 5G networks. Chinese brands are not only making many of the lowest-end consumer goods (the junk found on e-commerce apps) but also higher-end kitchen products and audio equipment. China’s clearest industrial success is in clean technology, or the renewable power equipment we need to decarbonize our economies. In 2025, Chinese firms dominate every segment of the solar value chain. The plunge in solar power costs over the last decade has been driven less by breakthroughs in science—which is the United States’ strong suit—than by efficient production, which is China’s strength.
The plans
The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan outlines interstellar research and other state-directed megaprojects. China has invested in redundancies and shock buffers. China takes energy security seriously. They take food security seriously as well. “Made in China 2025”, is a sweeping plan to dominate ten technological industries. Every government in the world is grappling with companies that have too much influence over the flow of information and commerce. Individually, Beijing declared open season on the digital economy. Every government agency lined up to take shots. Compare that to the EU and the USA
The contrast with the USA
Americans expect innovations from scientists working at NASA, in universities, or in research labs. In China, on the other hand, tech innovation emerges from the factory floor when a new product is scaled up into mass production. At the heart of China’s ascendancy in advanced technology is its spectacular capacity to learn by doing and to continuously improve.
Understanding technology
When we talk about technology, we should really distinguish between three things:
- First, technology means tools.
- Second, technology means explicit instruction. These are the recipes, the blueprints, the patents that can be written down.
- Third and most important, technology is process knowledge.
Process knowledge
Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and in the patterns of their relationships with other technical workers. They are embodied by an experienced workforce like Shenzhen’s. Every day, millions of workers go to factories to build up technological process knowledge. That is the basis of China’s tech power. Silicon Valley used to be like this, too, but now it lacks a critical link in the chain—the manufacturing workforce. The value of communities of engineering practice is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology. For example, Tesla invested in China’s tooling ecosystem, which other automakers later exploited to produce better cars. BYD benefited as well, reporting record profits in 2023 and becoming the world’s largest electric vehicle maker.
Invention obsession
The United States likes to celebrate the light-bulb moment of genius innovators. The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strengths. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, the author believes we should view them as milestones in training 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.
Ruination
Now, it’s increasingly clear that the decline of manufacturing has brought economic and political ruin to the United States. We are still only beginning to understand how much it set the country back technologically. Even the military-industrial complex looks challenged. The United States spends nearly $1 trillion a year on defense, about as much as the next ten countries combined. The US Navy has reported that every class of its ships and submarines is 1 to 3 years behind schedule.
General Electric was taken over by finance. That applies in greater force for Boeing. Once run by engineers obsessed with safety and quality, its leadership shifted to executives more focused on delivering shareholder value than good planes.
Take over
A focus on manufacturing gives China another advantage in technological competition with the United States. It can simply wait for American scientists to conduct fundamental research before Chinese companies take over production. China has become a tech superpower by elevating process knowledge and the communities of engineering practice that keep it alive. American companies have spent two decades helping build these communities of engineering practice in China.
- According to Apple’s most recent supplier report(released in 2023), 156 of its top 200 suppliers have manufacturing sites in China.
- China has a “comprehensive” industrial chain, since it produces something in each of the 419 industrial product categories maintained by the United States.
- Chinese companies are currently beating the rest of the world in the production of electric vehicle batteries.
If politicians continue to resort to the laziest explanations (“they’re just stealing all our IP”), they will never grasp the importance of building process knowledge. And it will fail to gain urgency to fix its technological deficiencies. The reality is that the United States will never again be a bigger manufacturer than China.
And then there is AI
In the United States, every shift in mass media—from cable television in the 1990s, the internet in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s, and now AI—has increased discontent among the masses and between the elites and each other.
It’s not clear for which country AI will prove more destabilizing. Fortress China is being protected from the ravages of social media platforms. By putting strict limits on the internet and AI, Xi has built China into a security state able to police vast information flows. The hope from Beijing might be that Americans will be driven mad by the dangerous storms produced by the double whammy of social media plus artificial intelligence. Even if the United States achieves artificial general intelligence, it will need to be able to actually manufacture drones or munitions; algorithms alone will never win a battle.
What to do
The United States can prove itself the stronger country over the next century if it can hold on to pluralism while building more. Right now, it is failing. What the United States presently lacks is the urgency to make the hard choices to build. Americans have to trust that society can flourish without empowering lawyers to micromanage everything. First, it has to remember that the country has a heritage of engineering. Second, the United States needs to elevate a greater diversity of voices among its elites.
- The United States will be stronger if it can manufacture.
- The United States will be stronger if it builds more homes.
- And the United States will be stronger if it can provide better infrastructure.
Americans should experience what the previous generation of Chinese has felt: a sense of optimism about the future, driven in large part by physical dynamism.
What do you think Europe should do?
