Review: Breakneck

 Breakneck is Dan Wang's book contrasting Chinese and American societies. It's actually mostly about Chinese society, because though the author is very familiar with American society, he presumes you know nothing about Chinese society.

The author worked as an analyst in China, living in Beijing or Shanghai, but has also traveled to Guizhou and the mountainous areas in the past. In fact, he did a bicycle tour in Guizhou on roads that were just recently built before cars were allowed on them, which sounds pretty cool. He also met his wife there.

Dan Wang uses the analogy that China is run by engineers and America by lawyers. He makes blanket statements like: "What do engineers like to do? Engineers like to build, so China builds. Roads, high speed rail, housing, etc." He makes other much less flattering statements about engineers, for instance, about how engineers have no sense of humor and cannot stand to be made fun of in social media. Ultimately, however, what Mr. Wang meant is that China is run by technocrats. (Engineers I know in real life are bright, full of humor, and not all of them are fascinated by railroads. In particular, engineers and scientists I know in real life who actually are good engineers and scientists are universally committed to truth --- some of them so much so that they cannot tell a lie even when it benefits them --- whatever else you can say about Chinese politicians you cannot claim that they universally are committed to truth)

The statement that America is run by lawyers is probably familiar to those of you who've read Abundance. The theme here is that by forcing government permitting to go through massive amounts of red tape, lawyers have successfully eliminate the American government's ability to build great infrastructure, and of course the big example is California's high speed rail, which still hasn't build much in 10 years, while China in the same time built enough high speed rail to exceed the track length of multiple European countries. Near the end of the book, Dan Wang notes that he did read The Power Broker, about Robert Moses' dominance of infrastructure building in New York, whose abuses led to the curtailment of government power as previously described. He makes broad statements essentially saying that he visited one of the neighborhoods that were split in half by Robert Moses but there's no a thriving community so people shouldn't villfy him anymore since he built stuff. That segment made me wonder if Dan Wang read the same book I did. One of the big points of the book was that Robert Moses had so much power that he was chauffeured everywhere by private car, and as a result never had to suffer the traffic jams New Yorkers put up with, and so declined to extend the subway/railroad lines. Giving someone like Robert Moses the same power wouldn't result in high speed rail being built either!

I don't want to say I learned nothing from this book. For instance, I didn't know how bad the Shanghai lockdown was, and obviously while I've heard stories about the rigidity and horrors inflicted on girls and women during the one child policy, Mr. Wang provides those details in ways that you can't look away from. (And sad to say, it sounds like the Chinese government is entirely capable of turning women into baby incubators if they ever got it into their head that they could do so)

On the other hand, I will note that the difference that Mr. Wang notes was summarized in much more eloquent form by Iain M. Banks in his essay, A Few Notes on the Culture:

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

I'm not saying you shouldn't read this book. But I think it says a lot that a few paragraphs by a dead Scottish novelist (who might never have been to China) seems way more insightful to me than an entire book by Dan Wang.