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Books

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future : Dan Wang used to write excellent annual letters about China, usually with a focus on political and economic issues but plenty of time for cuisine and the arts. It's a format that translates quite well to a book, because things can be organized more topically.

Wang's broad summary of his thesis is that America is run by lawyers and China by engineers, which is both a literal description of which academic/career background is most overrepresented in government, and a great summary of each country's pathologies—in the time it takes for an American real estate developer to get permission to build a single apartment building, a Chinese city could construct a dozen of them in a city that already has a double-digit vacancy rate and declining population! This model is obviously easy to exaggerate, but it's a great framing for many of the details—China has a great high-speed rail network, but the book mentions in an aside that there still aren't any places where it's completely safe to drink the tap water.

The book's strongest chapter covers China's Covid response. You'll read some detail, think to yourself, "that's the most cyberpunk-dystopian thing that has or will ever happen. It simply can't be topped." And then a page later, you'll read about people in Shanghai, stuck in their apartments while a loudspeaker-equipped drone outside chants the slogan "Repress your soul's yearning for freedom."

This book does a great job of highlighting some of the things that China's already ahead of the US on, and some of the weird brittleness of their system. It would be interesting to look at the US from the same lens, probably with a focus on social trust—that you can raise money from someone you've never met in-person, but if you're at a pharmacy in a big city you need to talk to someone to buy toothpaste. The Chinese system is great at building things and relatively worse at figuring out which things people want built. The demand problem is easy to ignore for a small and desperately poor country, but it's a much more important one for a country that makes a growing share of just about everything.

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