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 Introduction

Each time I see a headline announcing that officials from the United States and China are once more butting heads, I feel that the state of affairs is more than just tragic; it is comical, too, because I am sure that no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.

A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. Chinese and Americans are pragmatic: They have a get-it-done attitude that occasionally produces hurried work. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth. Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace. But masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don’t get in line.

I came to this view as a Canadian who has spent almost equal amounts of time living in the United States and China. To me, these two countries are thrilling, maddening, and, most of all, deeply bizarre. Canada is tidy. I sometimes find myself relaxing as soon as I cross into its borders. Drive around America and China, on the other hand, and you’ll see people and places that are utterly deranged. That’s not a reproach. These two countries are messy in part because they are both engines for global change. Europeans have a sense of optimism only about the past, stuck in their mausoleum economy because they are too sniffy to embrace American or Chinese practices. And the rest of the world is either too mature or too young to match the impact of these two superpowers. It is Americans and Chinese—Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, Wall Street, and Beijing—that will determine what people everywhere will think and what they will buy.

They are not the only two countries in the world that matter. Far from it. But if we don’t understand how the United States and China function and interact, then in large part we won’t quite understand many of the biggest changes in the world. The two countries are reconfiguring the international order and each other too. Seeing China more clearly—its dazzling strengths, appalling weaknesses, and everything in between—also helps us to see America more clearly.

To understand China, we must start in the country’s most riveting city: Beijing.

Beijing enthralls not because it is nice but because it isn’t. By most measures, life in Beijing is dreary. It is in China’s arid north, where dust storms descend every so often upon the city’s twisting alley homes, dating from imperial times, or gray apartment blocks, built in the Soviet style. In the last decade or so, the state has bricked up many of its liveliest sites, including its many bars and roadside barbecues, turning the city into a no-fun zone. Want to take your life into your hands? Try braving the cars that speed through Beijing’s gigantic roads. Much like Moscow or Pyongyang, its avenues feel like they were built for army parades rather than for normal life. Really, everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing.

But the capital is also a city of gravity and substance. Beijing attracts many of China’s smartest people, including scientists, technology leaders, and those seeking to advance in the Communist Party. The po-faced members of the Politburo don’t fool around. Greatness isn’t only a slogan for them: It’s a full-on, life-or-death pursuit. Beijing, for the rest of this book, stands in as the Communist Party and the central government. China’s leaders are driven by intense paranoia, doing everything they can to control the future.

My parents and I emigrated from China to Canada when I was seven. During high school, we moved to the woodsy suburbs of Philadelphia (where my mom and dad still live). After going to New York for college and Silicon Valley for work, I returned to China to investigate its technology developments. I learned to appreciate something vital: The country is always in motion. Living in Hong Kong, Beijing, and then Shanghai was a good education not only because these were China’s most prosperous economic zones. For six years, I lived through a period of economic dynamism that gave way to smothering political repressiveness. I experienced top leader Xi Jinping’s ongoing mobilization of the country for great-power competition. I tracked the expanding web of US restrictions on Chinese tech companies, as well as their struggle to escape from American restraints. And I endured all three years of Xi’s pursuit of zero-Covid, which started impressively until it plunged the country into broad misery.

The Chinese state builds gleaming public works and doesn’t flinch from locking up ethnic minorities or locking down whole cities. Too many outsiders see only the enrichment or the repression. Living there puts you face to face with both a sustained rise in living standards and the authoritarian pulses emanating out of Beijing. It became no contradiction for me to appreciate that things are getting better and getting worse. I saw how China is made up of both strong entrepreneurs and a strong government, with a state that both moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people.

I was the technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, an investment research firm serving a financial audience. We were a small team of analysts managed by editors who used to be economics journalists. My task consisted of writing research notes for hedge funds, endowments, and other asset managers hungry for China analysis. Dragonomics research wasn’t focused on particular companies but rather on more ambitious macro questions about the direction China was heading and what it means for the world. Portfolio managers aren’t shy about getting to the heart of the matter, asking me: Can China’s political system really breed tech giants? Will advanced manufacturing succeed when the rest of the world is throwing up trade barriers? How does a faltering economy affect Beijing’s designs on Taiwan?

If I didn’t offer good answers, the conversations could feel like a Socratic beating rather than a collegial chat. Though hedge fund managers can be obnoxious, I found conversing with them to be valuable. Folks in finance easily turn philosophical, pushing me to sharpen my views on important questions. I worked hard to decipher where Xi was taking China, which meant reading party texts, no matter how arcane, and visiting different regions, no matter how obscure.

By traveling as often as possible to smaller cities—some that are little more than urbanized industrial parks—I grasped something that most Americans, and even many Chinese, do not: Going to little-known cities in China is fun. Wherever I went I found amazing food, bizarre sights, and memorable people. I saw that China had greater dynamism than acknowledged by most headlines about the country, which fixate on Beijing’s political machinations. Just imagine what the rest of the world would miss if they understood the United States exclusively through developments from Washington, DC.

Everywhere I felt China’s breathless and, at times, reckless speed. I tried to capture the country’s shifts and tussles, buffeted by a pandemic and a darkening international environment, by writing an annual letter. These were a journal of sorts to record everything I observed and felt. In 2020, I wrote about reading every Xi Jinping speech in Seeking Truth, the Communist Party’s flagship theory magazine; in 2021, the differences between Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai; and in 2022, what it was like to wander through the mountains of Yunnan province—whose north is historic Tibet and whose south feels like Thailand—during the worst period of zero-Covid.

I thought constantly about the United States. It wasn’t only that the Trump administration was prosecuting a trade and technology war; Beijing holds America steadfastly in its gaze. China’s leaders are ready to learn from Europe, Japan, Singapore, and many others, sure. But they have looked up to the United States more than any other country, benchmarking themselves against the world’s preeminent power.

It is almost uncanny how much the United States and China have been complementary of each other. It was no accident that the two countries established, for a few decades, an economic partnership that worked tremendously well for American consumers and Chinese workers. But on a political level, these two systems are a study in contrasts. While the United States reflects the virtues of pluralism and protection of individuals, China revealed the advantages and perils that come from moving quickly to achieve rapid physical improvements.

Over the past four decades, China has grown richer, more technologically capable, and more diplomatically assertive abroad. China learned so well from the United States that it started to beat America at its own game: capitalism, industry, and harnessing its people’s restless ambitions. If you want to appreciate what Detroit felt like at its peak, it’s probably better to experience that in Shenzhen than anywhere in the United States.

As China emulated America’s past successes, the US government got busy undermining its own strengths. A procedure-obsessed left conspired with a thoughtlessly destructive right to constrain the government. Neither the left nor the right allows the state to deliver essential goods expected by the public. The Biden administration may have ushered through historic bills on industrial policy, but executive agencies were so obsessed with procedural concerns that little building actually took place before voters reelected Donald Trump, who has threatened to cancel many of these projects. The United States is still a superpower that is able to outclass China on many dimensions. But it is also in the grips of an ineffectual state where people are increasingly concerned with safeguarding a comfortable way of life.

Americans used to love the great opportunity that China represented. Nearly a century ago, they were wartime allies, with ties cemented by cultural connections and business relationships. Today, natural amity is being crowded out by mutual mistrust. Beijing and Washington are competing with each other economically, technologically, and diplomatically, casting a pall on those of us connected to both countries. In 2022, Beijing’s censors blocked the personal website where I publish my annual letters. The Great Firewall tends to block access to big platforms like the New York Times, not little sites like mine. That week, I had to seek out the Canadian consul general to ask whether I needed to organize my departure from China. Beijing had already detained two Canadians in response to Canada’s arrest of a prominent Chinese businesswoman. Many Americans who previously traveled to China for business and pleasure have lost their enthusiasm for visits.

We are now in an era where the two countries regard each other with suspicion, and often animosity. Like China, the United States is able to move fast and break people, dealing tremendous brutality at home and abroad when it feels threatened. A paramount question of our times is whether hostility between China and the United States can stay at a manageable simmer. Because if it boils over, they will devastate not only each other but also the world.

The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble. The starkest contrast between the two countries is the competition that will define the twenty-first century: an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction. That’s the big idea behind this book. It’s time for a new lens to understand the two superpowers: China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.

Breakneck is the story of the Chinese state that yanked its people into modernity—an action rightfully envied by much of the world—using means that ran roughshod over many—an approach rightfully disdained by much of the world. It is also a reminder that the United States once knew the virtues of speed and ambitious construction. Traversing dazzling metropolises and gigantic factories, Breakneck will illuminate the astounding progress and the dark underbelly of the engineering state. The lawyerly society has virtues, too, to teach China. Each superpower offers a vision of how the other can be better, if only their leaders and peoples care to take more than a fleeting glance.