Dan Wang, a Chinese-American China specialist, brings to Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future a depth of lived experience rare among contemporary analysts. Having spent years in China as a technology analyst and travelled extensively across its showcase cities and industrial hinterlands, Wang writes with authority grounded as much in observation as in data.

The book is more analytically ambitious than Yukon Huang’s Cracking the China Conundrum (2017) and complements Ananth Krishnan’s India’s China Challenge. Where Krishnan excels as an India-focused reporter-analyst, Wang operates as a systems thinker, probing how industrial capability, state capacity, and engineering culture intersect.

At the heart of the book lies a stark assertion: China’s ascent as the world’s leading manufacturing power has paralleled the weakening of America’s industrial base. By outsourcing production while retaining design and branding, the West gradually surrendered its manufacturing capabilities. This enabled China to build depth in scale, tooling, dense supplier networks, and the accumulated process knowledge that eventually spills over into design and innovation.

China’s dominance

The result is China’s dominance across an extraordinary range of world-beating products, from electronics and renewable energy to electric vehicles and ships.

Wang traces how America’s manufacturing ecosystem hollowed out, leaving behind Rust Belt decline and social dislocation. Few comparisons are as revealing as infrastructure. He contrasts China’s Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line, completed in 2011 for about $36 billion, with California’s high-speed rail project, which, after 17 years and projected costs exceeding $120 billion, has delivered only a limited Central Valley stretch.

Wang amplifies a now widely held belief that the United States is unlikely to regain industrial primacy. Manufacturing today accounts for roughly 13 per cent of US GDP, compared with about 21 per cent in Germany and close to 30 per cent in China. He is sharply critical of America’s “lawyerly society,” where litigation and procedural vetoes delay or derail large projects.

By contrast, China’s leadership, including Xi Jinping, is largely composed of engineers by training, fostering a technocratic mindset inclined to treat society as an aggregate system rather than as a collection of thinking individuals. There is a hint that Wang judges China as marginally better placed than the US to overcome its own distortions, despite the authoritarian excesses of its system.

Yet Wang’s argument also invites qualification. A useful corrective was offered by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in a recent World Economic Forum discussion at Davos. China, he noted, remains a roughly $15,000 per capita economy, compared with America’s $85,000, and lacks anything comparable to the United States’ dense web of military alliances and economic partnerships. The point does not so much undermine Wang’s thesis as refine it: industrial dominance is necessary, but not sufficient, for global leadership.

China’s problems

Importantly, Wang’s book is not China-boosterism. It addresses hidden poverty, heavy local-government indebtedness, wasteful vanity projects, and the demographic damage inflicted by the one-child policy. He vividly captures the punishing regimentation of factory life and the disastrous Covid lockdowns that exposed the system’s capacity for self-inflicted harm. His account of rural deprivation echoes findings in Scott Rozelle’s Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise (2020).

For Indian readers, the implications are unavoidable. In the first 20 years of independence, India undertook major industrial and engineering projects — steel plants, fertilizer units, heavy engineering complexes, big dams, and other emblematic ventures of the Nehruvian industrial push — that built indigenous technological capability. Public sector enterprises such as HMT earned global respect for quality, and engineering graduates entered manufacturing rather than immediately diverting into management careers.

That trajectory later broke. The fire that crippled Semiconductor Complex Ltd. (SCL) in Mohali in 1989 came to symbolise a deeper institutional failure: India never seriously rebuilt the technological capability it had begun to create. China, by contrast, repurposed comparable institutions into global champions of innovation and manufacturing.

Lessons for India

Today, India’s manufacturing share of GDP at about 16-17 per cent is only marginally higher than America’s, leaving it with rust belts and a depleted engineering depth that cannot be easily rebuilt. Wang’s book should therefore be read by Indian policymakers. With a demographic window still open, India’s challenge is not merely to attract factories, but to restore the engineering culture and institutional depth that once underpinned its industrial ambitions.

The reviewer is a columnist exploring the intersections of state, society, and history, and has taught public policy and contemporary history at IISc, Bengaluru

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Published on February 15, 2026