Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

He's a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

And he's an author whose book, Breakneck, follows the incredible development in China and argues why that's happened.

Hi, Dan.

Hi.

And I'm Celia Hatton.

This week, we're asking, can China build its way out of climate change?

We've been speaking with the author Dan Wong about his book, Breakneck, and exploring the idea that China approaches the problem of climate change with an engineer's mindset.

Dan.

Economist Dan Wang has spent years thinking about what makes China so good at this.

He's the author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future.

And one of the places that helped him understand it was one of China's poorest provinces, which he decided to cross on a bicycle.

One of my, uh, tasks that I set myself was to scare up two friends of mine to go on a very long bicycling trip into the southwest of China, into the province of Guizhou, uh, which is really mountainous.

If China continues to build at this pace, and America has no answer, I think that is actually gonna be a pretty big, uh, challenge for, uh, Washington, D.C. to really try to manage.

[Instrumental music] That's Dan Wang.

His new book is Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future.

And I keep thinking about those bridges in Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces, 50 of the tallest bridges in the world.

I don't disagree.

There's a book called Breakneck that I read not too long ago.

A gentleman that grew up in Canada, Hong Kong, he's Hong Kong born, grew up in Canada, Chinese, but he lived in China for a while.

And he said, if you look at the parliament in China, if you look outside of Xi Jinping, like at the rest of their legislator, it's slation, it's mostly Chinese.

Ex- unless you, if you own Micron or SanDisk.

[laughs] So I, um, I read this book not too long ago called Breakneck.

I think I've told you about this.

Uh, this guy, I believe his name is Dan Wang, and he had this great comparison between the US and China.

So I know you're aware about the book Abundance, and basically an indictment of how government doesn't work in California.

There's another book called Breakneck by Dan Wang, and this is about China and how it can build anything at any cost, including any cost to people, the environment, markets, they have more high speed rail than the entire rest of the world combined.

And probably three quarters of it is empty all the time.

And so there's space in between.