How China Builds

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Title reviewed: Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
Author of the reviewed book: Dan Wang
Reviewer: MELANIE W. SISSON, senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's foreign policy program
Publication: F&D Magazine, March 2026
Book details provided: W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2025, 288 pp., $31.99
Contextual reference: Andrew W. “Andy” Marshall and the Office of Net Assessment, appointed in 1973

Dan Wang frames China with an “engineering mindset” contrasted with a “lawyerly” United States.
Wang’s book blends genres: autobiography, travelogue, sociopolitical observation, statistics, bits of history, and personal anecdotes.
The book examines CCP efforts to:
- manage the national economy;
- control population growth and then arrest its decline;
- accelerate technological innovation;
- limit the damaging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wang is described as evocative, warm, and unsparing but not ungenerous in assessing successes, failures, benefits, harms, and comparative advantages of China’s engineered projects relative to US approaches.
The review notes Wang frequently contrasts the US emphasis on pluralism and protection of individual rights with China’s view of citizens in the aggregate.

The reviewer situates Wang’s work in the intellectual tradition of net assessment—comparing long-term strategic competition in terms of adaptability, institutional strengths and weaknesses, technological trajectories, and strategic culture.
The review highlights an implicit portrait of long-term competition:
- CCP’s vision: national greatness achieved by directing citizens to sacrifice and strive.
- US vision: national greatness as the outcome of unleashing citizens to pursue individual achievement.
The reviewer criticizes Wang for hinting at but not fully developing a deeper analysis connecting governing philosophies to their logical consequences, noting he “invites, but does not guide” that consideration.

Wang ends the book with a hopeful tone, advocating selective adoption of attributes from each country:
- Belief that US citizens are more likely to embrace tangible results of an engineering mindset.
- Skepticism that the CCP will tolerate the volatile energies of pluralism and individual rights.
Overarching theme: governments—whether composed of engineers or lawyers—have limited control over the “unruly currents of large, complex, globally interconnected societies.”

International Monetary Fund — F&D Magazine, March 2026

How China Builds
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