Home

Mark Beeson, Adjunct Professor, Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney. In modern times, the world’s most powerful and influential states have also had the largest economies. When the United States overtook Britain in the early 20th century, it was only a question of time before it assumed international political leadership too. Indeed, the failure to assume this role is widely thought to explain the duration of the Great Depression and the turmoil of the period between the two world wars. At a time when American hegemony seems to be in terminal decline and China might overtake the US economically, plausible and original explanations of their relative fates are welcome. Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, succeeds on both counts. At the heart of this very readable book is Wang’s argument that there is a profound difference between the two rivals: the US is run by lawyers and China is ruled by engineers. Wang is perfectly placed to unpack this deceptively simple idea, having been born in China and spent large chunks of his relatively short life there and in the US. He is a keen and shrewd observer of both societies, and the book is sprinkled with personal anecdotes and illustrations of his key claims. Consequently, it’s not a conventional “academic” account, but that may come as a relief to many prospective readers. Lawyers versus engineers The biggest difference between China and the US today, according to Wang, is not the sort of ideological differences that distinguished America’s competition with the Soviet Union, but their respective abilities to get things done. “The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist,” Wang argues. “China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.” There […]