Dan Wang’s Breakneck is the China book of 2025. As a series of beautifully written sketches on recent Chinese history, it is well worth reading. But Wang’s central argument about China, that it is an “engineering state”, is provocative, interesting, and wrong.
What Does “Engineering State” Mean?
Wang makes four distinct claims:
- China has a lot of engineers and does a lot of engineering, much of it state-directed.
- China is ruled by engineers.
- The Chinese Communist Party is dominated by an engineering mindset that shapes all policy decisions.
- The West, particularly America, could learn from China’s engineering mindset.
Claim (1) is inarguably true. Claim (2) is partly true and worth brief discussion. But Claim (3), the heart of Wang’s argument, is wrong. If (3) fails, then (4) does not follow.
Is China Ruled by Engineers?
Wang doesn’t directly define the engineering state, but provides many examples. One story Wang highlights is the missile engineer Song Jian advocating the One Child Policy. But Song was only an advisor. The real decision makers were senior Party leaders like Chen Yun, who had limited formal education, and Deng Xiaoping, whose brief studies were in Marxist-Leninist theory. These were not engineers, they were politicians- trained in communist theory, hardened by civil war, purging cadres and being themselves purged in turn. The mass sterilisations and forced abortions that followed from their decisions were not engineering schemes. They were Communist Party policies.
Nor is it clear what is particularly “engineering” about a one child policy. Mao’s argument against population controls was that China could simply increase production to cope. This sounds like engineer inspired techno-optimism, not the words of the anti-engineer Wang makes Mao out to be.
This lack of clarity about what would constitute a specifically “engineering” policy runs through Wang’s case studies. Many verge on the unfalsifiable.
- Covid-19: Extreme lockdowns and absurd measures such as PCR-testing freshly caught fish are cited as “engineering.” But why would an engineer reject superior Western vaccines? What is “engineering” about persisting with a policy everyone could see was failing? These measures came from local officials terrified of disobedience, from nationalism, and from a Party incapable of admitting error. None of that is “engineering.”
- Tap Water: China’s undrinkable tap water is presented as evidence of an engineering mindset. Yet if China were truly an engineering state, wouldn’t safe urban water supplies be the ultimate megaproject?
- Tech Crackdowns: The suppression of software firms is also deemed “engineering.” But software engineering is itself a major scientific endeavour in China. Had the Party chosen to nurture rather than attack its software sector, Wang could just as easily have spun that as evidence of “engineering.” Heads, China is an engineering state. Tails, it is still an engineering state.
So Why Does China Build So Much?
Wang also points to the positives of China’s supposed engineering state, the relentless building. So if China is not an engineering state, why does it build so much?
The simpler explanation is that China is a fast-growing, middle-income country. Its economy doubled in size every seven years for decades. No poor country can reach middle-income status without rapid infrastructure expansion.
Much of the awe surrounding China’s achievements is a matter of scale. Yes, China has built tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail since 2009. But per capita, Spain has nearly three times more. Many Chinese cities with hundreds of thousands, even millions, of residents remain unserved by high-speed lines.1 China still has half the rail density of the UK, which is hardly an infrastructure powerhouse.
The same is true of electricity. Even though Britain has deliberately constrained energy consumption and China is building more of almost every form of generation than the rest of the world combined, UK households still consume about one-third more electricity per person.2
China’s buildout is impressive. But in many areas they are moving fast to match Western infrastructure standards, not surpass them. It is what one would expect from a nation of 1.4 billion people that has grown its economy fortyfold since 1978. It is evidence of growth, not of an “engineering state.” China does build more than other middle income countries, but that has more to do with communism than an engineering mindset.
The Central Party School Does Not Teach Engineering
The “middle-income growth” story explains much of China’s infrastructure boom, but not the stranger, more destructive choices Wang highlights: zero-Covid excesses, the One Child Policy, and the refusal to rebalance the economy toward consumption.
For that, you have to look not at leaders’ undergraduate degrees3 but at their real alma mater: the Party School.
Marx and Engels at the Party School
The closest Western equivalents might be Oxford’s PPE course or France’s ENA, but with two key differences: First, anyone can apply to PPE or ENA while the Central Party School selects its own cadres.4 Second, it is almost impossible to rise to the political elite without passing through the Party School’s doors, while there are many routes to political power in the west.5 Party School courses include Marxism, Party Theory, Economics, Administration, and Cadre Training. They do not include engineering.
For those selected, entry to the Party School signals that the life of a cadre they choose as a teenager may be leading to high office. With the partial exception of Wang Huning, all Politburo Standing Committee members committed to Party careers early. Xi Jinping was the most precocious, reportedly a village Party secretary as a teenager. After university he went straight into the central bureaucracy, then worked his way up through county and provincial posts. Li Qiang, now Premier, never used his engineering degree; he began as a lowly Youth League clerk and spent over 40 years climbing the ladder.
These are not engineers. They are professional Party men. Their formative experiences were not building power plants or railways, but building socialism and their own careers as they climbed the Communist greasy pole.
And their loyalty to the Party and to communism, more than anything, explains China’s odder policies: the campaign style, the refusal to admit mistakes, the prioritisation of investment over household consumption. These are not traits of engineers but of Communists. Mao launched many “People’s Wars,” usually much more destructive than the campaigns of the reform era. Communist history is littered with hare-brained schemes, from China’s attempt to exterminate all sparrows in the Great Leap Forward to the Soviet Union’s attempt to grow grain in near desert conditions in the ‘Virgin Lands’ campaigns, that make Xi’s Zero Covid look relatively sensible.
Compared to other middle-income countries, and like the Soviet Union before it, China almost certainly builds more infrastructure. This is not the result of an engineering mindset but of communism. Marxist-Leninist ideology privileges the development of “productive forces”: heavy industry, factories, and infrastructure are treated as the foundation of socialism, while consumer goods are dismissed as secondary or even decadent. Politically, megaprojects and rising output figures are easier for leaders to display as proof of progress, while meeting diffuse consumer demand brings fewer rewards within the Party.
This bias was as true for the poet Mao as it was for the engineer Hu Jintao. The difference is that post-Mao leaders have harnessed far more effective market methods to deliver on the same impulse than the planning and voluntarism that defined Mao or the Soviet Union. The result is a structural tilt toward investment over consumption- toward steel, cement, and railways rather than goods and services that ordinary people actually want. Soviet reformers spent decades trying and failing to correct this imbalance. China’s economists have been making the same arguments for twenty years, with at best partial success.
What the West Could Actually Learn
If Western countries need to learn anything from China, it is the importance of keeping costs down. China’s nuclear power plants and high-speed railways cost a fraction of those built in the UK, the US, and much of the West. These are not lessons that require communism, nor an “engineering state.”
South Korea delivers nuclear power at similar prices to China. Finland, hardly home to a vast industrial supply chain, manages to build nuclear at roughly half the cost of Britain. High-speed rail and metro projects are cheap in China, but they are also cheap in Spain. The lesson is not about ideology or mindset, but about political will, institutional design, and cost discipline.
Read With Caution
China is not an engineering state. It is a very large, once very poor country that has rapidly reached middle-income status under a Communist dictatorship. Its leaders are not engineers or technocrats, but Party loyalists. Fast growth and communism do not explain everything about Chinese governance: it is also an East Asian developmental state, a socially conservative state, an experimental state. There are potentially many useful frames for understanding the Party. The “engineering state” is not one of them.
Breakneck is well written, fast-paced and those unfamiliar with China’s modern history will learn a lot. But its master narrative should be treated with extreme scepticism. Wang’s conceit of the “engineering state” is less a description of China than a literary device, one that makes for a more compelling book, but a less accurate analysis. Ultimately, China does not suffer from too much engineering. It suffers from too much Party.
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Take Tonghua, a city of around 400,000 in north-east China, which I visited regularly between 2016 and 2019. It has no trains faster than 40mph (64 km/h), only three services a day to the nearest big city, and one to the second nearest. It has no metro or tram system. Tonghua is not a wealthy or touristy place, so the lack of investment is understandable in a middle income country. But nowhere in ‘Mausoleum Economy’ Europe of that size is so poorly served. There are many cities like Tonghua.
These are household electricity consumption figures. China’s total per capita energy consumption (including industry) is higher than the UK’s.
At first glance, three Politburo Standing Committee members appear to have engineering degrees, but two are misleading. Xi Jinping’s “chemical engineering” studies during the Cultural Revolution likely had little meaningful technical content; his later doctorate was a long policy paper on rural markets. Premier Li Qiang studied agricultural mechanisation but later added degrees in sociology, economics (at the Party School), and an MBA. The remaining members studied philosophy, French, political economy, and Chinese literature at undergrad.
With the help of the Organisational Department of the Chinese Communist Party, which manages elite recruitment and promotion.
Five of the seven current Politburo Standing Committee members have studied, taught and/or held senior roles at the Central Party School. Ding Xuexiang rose as Xi’s chief of staff in Shanghai and Beijing, and therefore did not follow the usual route through the ministries and provincial government to the politburo, and was never selected to study or teach at the Central Party School. He did however study and work at the Shanghai Party School. Wang Huning never studied at any Party School, but as a long-serving Party theorist he has shaped much of its curriculum and drafted many of the documents that define the Party doctrine studied there.