The Engineering State v. the Lawyerly Society, Dan Wang

Dan Wang's book, "BREAKNECK: China's Quest to Engineer the Future" (forthcoming Fall 2025 by Norton in the US and Penguin in the UK) reveals a new way to think about China and America. New public works — roads, bridges, dams, entire new cities — are Beijing's solution to any number of quandaries. China's leaders are not only civil engineers: they are also social engineers, bringing a literal-minded approach to implementing the one-child policy and zero-Covid. America used to be an engineering state itself. Then the lawyers took over after the 1960s, subjecting everything the government does to more stringent rigors of procedure, leaving it poorly equipped to deal with the undersupply of homes and infrastructure. The world would be better, Dan suggests, if the two countries could learn from each other: for China to embrace substantive legal protections, and for Americans to learn once more to love engineers.

Dan Wang is a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. From 2017 to 2023, he was a technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, becoming one of the most authoritative and frequently cited experts on China and technology. His essays have been published in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs (cover story), The Financial Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Opinion, and The Atlantic. Dan has appeared on The Ezra Klein Show, Bloomberg's Odd Lots, Kaiser Kuo's Sinica, and other podcasts. He studied philosophy at the University of Rochester and previously worked in Silicon Valley.