Learn to Love Engineers

New books by Dan Wang and Hu Anyan depict ‘both the achievements and the costs of China’s technological rise,’ and why Americans should take note.

By Afra WangJanuary 22, 2026

• Politics

• Science & Technology

WHEN I COLLECTED MY long-awaited copy of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (2025), its technologist author Dan Wang and I met in East London’s Shoreditch, where the weekend market unfolds within a former textile factory.

Victorian brick walls that once echoed with the machinery of Britain’s industrial might now frame hip vendors selling handcrafted goods and vintage clothing. Two centuries ago, this neighborhood housed the workers who powered an empire’s manufacturing dominance. Today, the traces of the Industrial Revolution have been reduced to small copper plaques etched with this history on the ground. Yet even the market’s “handcrafted” goods betray their origins to the trained eye—uniform stitching patterns and mass-produced glazes reveal their birthplace might be the factories of Yiwu or Hangzhou in China.

Over lunch, we found ourselves reflecting on this trajectory from manufacturing colossus to postindustrial economy struggling to regain its footing. The central thread of Wang’s book responds directly to such decline: How does the United States avoid becoming today’s Britain—a former power that couldn’t manage to reindustrialize when the moment demanded it? And can China’s ascent provide the answer?

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Wang’s response unfolds through what may be the most illuminating comparative framework for understanding contemporary China and the United States: the “engineering state” versus the “lawyerly society.” China, in his analysis, operates according to engineering logic—not merely because the Communist Party’s leadership ranks overflow with engineers, but also because the state has oriented itself around the fundamental engineering impulse to build, terraform, and transform the physical world. The results speak with eloquence: glittering metropolises that rise within years, an extensive high-speed rail network threading through impossible terrain, and manufacturing capabilities so advanced that they materialize technologies that seem summoned from science fiction.

The United States, by contrast, has evolved into what Wang calls a “lawyerly society,” where the smartest minds are systematically channeled toward blocking rather than building. This manifests in the endless proliferation of procedures and regulations, each more sophisticated and impenetrable than the last, creating formidable barriers to physical transformation—what he recently described as “litigious vetocracy.” Environmental impact studies stretch across election cycles. Housing projects die in committee. Infrastructure crumbles while permits gather dust. He notes that while “real estate developers have been able to build skinny high-rises for the wealthy” in New York, the city has barely been able to extend its system of mass transit. The lawyerly society’s failures hit hardest the people who are “buried under paperwork trying to apply for SNAP benefits, who have to take dilapidated public transit and who would most benefit from new construction.”

We are familiar with the human cost: the entire US population endures inadequate public transportation, surrenders ever-larger portions of their income to housing costs, and witnesses the moral theater of NIMBYism. Wang’s analysis reads like an inversion of the abundance literature that has recently gained prominence—particularly works by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson diagnosing the United States’ institutional sclerosis—but applied to illuminating China’s opposite trajectory.

Yet to write this engineering society, Wang refuses the China-as-foil caricatures. China isn’t just an authoritarian monolith haunting American policy papers, nor does it conform to the “everything-is-an-extension-of-the-state” abstraction they put forth. It appears in full complexity: a nation pulsing with human warmth, populated by individuals living concrete lives amid landscapes of infinite poetic beauty. Simultaneously, this same country operates as a manufacturing engine of unprecedented scale, a breakneck superpower engineering futures that the rest of the world struggles to comprehend.

Nowhere in Breakneck’s pages will you find a single chart, graph, or statistical illustration. This choice reflects, I suspect, Wang’s training as a philosopher with longtermism in mind. Books laden with dated graphs and GDP projections become prisoners of their historical moment, no matter how elegantly written. Wang has chosen instead to distill observations into structural knowledge that transcends its specific China-US context and temporality.

The framework about engineering state vs. the lawyerly society, the analysis of how “process knowledge” drives industrial capabilities, the examination of what happens when societies become “overengineered”—these insights possess durability that allows them to discover patterns across cultures, histories, and geography. I see my future self constantly coming back to this book, and this is where Wang’s work achieves its greatest intellectual value.

Wang’s voice carries an unusual combination of bold simplicity and poetic insight:

Communist Party propaganda organs blared […] “China will always be a developing country.”

I find that beautiful. […]

I think it is wise for the country to declare that it is “developing.” The United States should do that too.

There’s something oracular in such moments, as if Wang has achieved a perspective that allows him to see familiar conflicts from an entirely unexpected angle. Rather than ignoring or flatly accepting the technique of the government’s message, Wang discerns the power in the word choice. He recognizes the emphasis when ethos is encased in propagandistic language. This ethos—China existing in a state of perpetual self-improvement—is precisely what the United States needs right now. I can see Wang’s skill in “contextually translating” the Chinese state’s mental framework. Propaganda often contains overlooked signals that receive undue prejudice and dismissal, when in fact these signals can be remarkably revealing.

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In surprising places, Breakneck becomes deeply personal and vulnerable. In his final chapter, “Learning to Love Engineers,” Wang writes as an immigrant whose life has been carved between China, Canada, and the United States: his family left China when he was seven, carrying questions that would shadow them for decades. His parents found themselves haunting an alternate timeline, wondering what might have happened if they had remained as China’s economy began its ascent. Wang himself embodies the most direct witness to these two worlds.

This question resonates with familiarity. I recognize in his family’s story the same existential A/B test that has shaped my own life, though from the opposite direction. My parents chose to remain in China during its economic transformation, and I grew up witnessing China’s metamorphosis. Yet they sent me to the United States at 17, investing everything in my education and future as I later joined the exodus of Chinese international students settling in the Bay Area in California. My parents often pose their own counterfactual: What if they had immigrated to the United States and raised me there? Would I have endured less pain in the lonely immigration journey?

What Wang never explicitly declares, yet what suffuses every page of his analysis, is his deep and complicated devotion to (or love for?) China. Though he maintains the careful stance of a scholarly observer throughout, interrogating China with analytical precision, beneath the rational language lies something far more tender: a gentle, almost protective gaze directed toward places he has lived and traveled—Kunming, Guizhou, Shanghai, Beijing.

This emotional undercurrent becomes most visible in the chapter titled “Building Big,” which I consider the book’s finest. Wang takes readers on a multiday cycling expedition through Guizhou’s Liupan Mountains, and through his composed yet excited eyes, we see a landscape utterly transformed: this province, once among China’s poorest, now showcases some of the world’s most impressive mountain highways and bridges, hosts the country’s largest radio telescope, and houses giant data centers.

Yet Wang’s Guizhou pulses with life beyond its technological achievements. It remains a place of “steaming pots of crimson broth” and “luscious green mountains wreathed by bands of mist,” where China reveals itself not as geopolitical abstraction but as lived experience, something more fundamental: a “home” in James Baldwin’s sense—“not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

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Throughout Breakneck, Wang, who has been affiliated with various think tanks over the years and is now based at the Hoover Institution, describes China with a mixture of caution and unspoken pride, concern and sometimes heartbreaking clarity. As someone who is Chinese, I recognize this complexity intimately. Witnessing China’s transformation often inspires deep pride in me—the sheer scale of development, the hundreds of millions lifted from poverty, the technological achievements that seemed impossible just decades ago. Yet this same transformation brings sorrow: the erosion of civil society, the tightening control over every aspect of social life, the geopolitical hubris that seems to accompany the technological prowess.

This is China for those of us whose hearts remain entangled with its fate: a country that carries unspeakable downward weight. The very success that makes us proud also creates the conditions that make us worry about what has been sacrificed along the way.

Wang’s chapters titled “One Child,” “Zero-Covid,” and “Fortress China” probe these darker dimensions of China’s rise, examining what happens when a society becomes overengineered—when the same logic that builds magnificent infrastructure gets applied to human behavior and social organization. Here, Wang’s framework proves its analytical power: the engineering mindset that produced China’s economic miracle also generated the demographic catastrophe of the one-child policy, the authoritarian overreach of Zero-COVID, and the nationwide intolerance of pluralism.

Reading these chapters alongside Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing—a work that has generated a lot of buzz in China since it came out there in 2023 (Astra House and Allen Lane published an English translation this fall)—creates a stereo effect that reveals both the achievements and the costs of China’s technological rise. Hu Anyan, a gig worker in Beijing who has cycled through 19 jobs since graduation, offers a rare first-person account from the very bottom of China’s economic miracle. His tone—half dark humor, half unflinching honesty, captured well in a spirited yet spare translation by Jack Hargreaves—chronicles life as a delivery worker trapped within Kafkaesque algorithms and bureaucracies.

Where Wang’s perspective remains macro and intellectual, Hu’s story feels raw and punishing, revealing the human machinery that enables digital efficiency: algorithms that track deliver workers’ every movement, wages that barely cover an air-conditioned room in an urban village rental, and working conditions optimized for everything except human dignity. Most importantly, Hu shows how one preserves sanity amid poverty, overwork, and degrading conditions. Hu maintains an almost cheerful tone throughout, yet his meticulous attention to workplace details creates an inadvertent horror. In one passage about “bagging parcels,” he writes:

I was using my index fingers like hooks to yank and shake the material from over the parcels, instead of simply pinching the bag’s tail between forefinger and thumb, and pulling. It felt fine at first doing it my way, there was no pain, but after three nights of handling the bags like this, the nails on both my index fingers were bent backward. They turned black some days later and eventually fell off. It was almost three months before they grew back.

Hu writes with childlike candor, cataloging everything he experiences in granular detail, unfiltered: conversations and their duration, the physical appearance and tone of his interlocutors, his lunch menu, his afternoon tasks. Yet he also honestly documents the “calculations” running through his mind. After months of gig work, Hu begins thinking in algorithmic terms about his own existence:

[I]f a minute [of my life] was worth 0.5 yuan, then the cost of urination was 1 yuan—that is, if the toilet was free to use and I only took two minutes. Eating lunch needed twenty minutes—ten minutes of which were spent waiting for the food—and had a time cost of 10 yuan. If a simple dish of rice and meat cost 15 yuan on top of this, then the whole endeavor was too extravagant! Basically, I skipped a lot of lunches. I also hardly drank any water in the mornings to reduce the frequency of restroom breaks throughout the day.

Such passages appear throughout the book, making it impossible not to empathize with both the author’s circumstances and his algorithmically alienated mind. While gig worker exploitation exists globally, the Chinese case illustrated in I Deliver Parcels in Beijing carries particularly realistic intensity. If Breakneck allows Western readers to understand how China engineers the future from a familiar and safe perspective, then reading Hu’s account reveals how a gifted storyteller—an unfortunate everyman—becomes pinned to China’s ground, unable to escape. Reading these books together creates a strange yet authentic experience: they emerge from different contexts and address entirely different audiences, yet both illuminate the texture of shadows cast by the same rapidly developing China.

Hu concludes with existential reflections on how literature and writing offer him solace, humanity, and a sense of freedom. Yet I cannot find comfort or inspiration in the author’s self-salvaging “freedom [as] a matter of consciousness.” His hard-won philosophical silver linings seem more like survival mechanisms for the trapped. In this sense, Wang’s unflinching critique of China in Breakneck offers a bit of condolence. He doesn’t merely condemn China’s particular forms of suppression and social engineering but also relentlessly exposes the shared rationalist and dehumanizing mindset that pervades both the tech industry and Chinese leadership. As Wang writes in his recent essay, “sooner or later, they treat the population as if it were another building material, to be moulded or torn apart as the circumstances demand.” Breakneck reveals how both the glittering infrastructure of Guizhou and the algorithmic control of delivery workers emerge from identical engineering logic—one that can produce magnificent results and go terribly wrong with equal efficiency.

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What Wang writes most explicitly is his faith in the United States’ potential and his disappointment with its current trajectory. Even when facing institutional failure, he argues, Americans must maintain technological optimism and agency—a perspective that places Breakneck squarely within the recent abundance movement gaining bipartisan traction. This coalition pushes the United States toward ambitious infrastructure building, clean energy deployment, advanced technology scaling, and the systematic removal of bureaucratic obstacles that frustrate physical transformation.

From this perspective, Breakneck provides intellectual ammunition. It’s precisely the analysis Silicon Valley and Washington need as they oscillate between China envy and China fear. Wang’s prescription is direct: Americans must “lear[n] to love engineers” and work to “unwind the dominance of lawyers[,] […] confront the proceduralism that exists inside government and broader society[,] [and] renew our faith in government institutions to deliver essential services.”

Wang doesn’t advocate importing China’s authoritarian methods but points instead to countries like Spain, Germany, and Japan that “strike a better balance between public consultation and environmental review on the one hand and getting stuff built on the other.” His vision draws on the United States’ own engineering heritage: “Throughout the nineteenth century, it filled these cities with engineering marvels: the world’s then-longest suspension bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan[,] […] the world’s first skyscrapers in Chicago, subway lines in New York City that ranked with any in Europe.”

The transformation Wang envisions is about recovering a sense of optimism about the future driven in large part by “physical dynamism.” He wants Americans to experience what “many Chinese have felt over the past two decades” whenever they witness infrastructure materializing before their eyes. When Wang’s parents return to their hometown, Kunming, they “discover a new, cleaner, better city” each time: the kind of tangible progress that ignites confidence.

As someone who writes about the intersection of Silicon Valley and China, I find myself grateful for Wang, who approaches seemingly intractable problems with both agency and hope. His definite optimism offers an antidote to what I recognize as my own tendency toward humanistic melancholy, that liberal inclination toward an all-knowing yet ultimately disempowering perspective that condemns progress while offering no alternative path forward.

At the end of the book, Wang captures the stakes: “The ultimate contest between China and the United States will not be decided by which country has the biggest factory or the highest corporate valuation. This contest will be won by the country that works best for the people living in it.” In this sense, Breakneck functions to remind the reader of the United States’ own unrealized potential.