Business

Why China Builds Faster Than the Rest of the World

In a his new book Breakneck, Dan Wang argues that if the US really wants to compete with China, it needs to focus more on engineering and less on litigating.
Technology analyst and essayist Dan Wang
Technology analyst and essayist Dan Wang was long known for his sharp annual letters on China’s innovation, economy, and manufacturing. He has compiled seven new dispatches into a book.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph: Courtesy of Dan Wang

There’s never been a shortage of hot takes about what really makes the United States and China so different: Capitalism versus socialism; democracy as opposed to authoritarianism; Christianity or Confucianism; equity versus efficiency. In his highly anticipated new book, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, Hoover Institution fellow Dan Wang proposes a fresh lens for looking at the world’s two largest superpowers: the US is a “lawyerly society,” he argues, while China is an “engineering state.”

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