Breakneck and Other Rivers: Two Must-Read Books on China

The Underwater Musuem at Chongqing (Source )

In the summer of 2020, the American government sent cash payments to households in the United States. This was to help them tide over the crisis caused by the pandemic. In all, the US government sent $3,200 to its citizens.

Dan Wang tells us about this in the second chapter of his excellent new book, Breakneck. Later on, in the same chapter, he tells us about his visit to the factory of a technology manufacturer, just outside of Shanghai. Over a cup of tea in his office, the manufacturer tells him about the difference between American manufacturing and Chinese manufacturing.

“American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.”

Peter Hessler, in his excellent new book, Other Rivers, also tells us about the same episode. He has also been talking to a Chinese manufacturer. This manufacturer used to make shoes back then:

He also knew the number of shoes he was shipping to America every day: three thousand pairs. “The U.S. government has been sending out more money recently,” he said.
I told him that he was mistaken—there hadn’t yet been a second stimulus program. But Li swore that government money was reaching consumers: he could see the impact in sales. The following day, I received an email from the young woman who was renting our family’s house in southwestern Colorado. She had sent me a list of things that had appeared in our mailbox, including a CARES Act debit card labeled “Economic Impact.” It was in the amount of thirty-four hundred dollars.
I learned that during the past couple of weeks the government had been sending debit cards to citizens who had been missed in April, often because their bank information wasn’t on file. Previously, I had wondered why we hadn’t received a stimulus check, but I was too busy with life in China to look into it. Now I realized that if I wanted to keep updated on the U.S. government’s payment schedule, I could always go to southern Chengdu and ask Li Dewei.

Don’t you find this remarkable? We live in a world where the government of a supposedly capitalist nation sends out checks to its population during a pandemic, while the government of a supposedly communist nation expects its citizens to fend for themselves.

Even more remarkably, not only do the citizens of this supposedly communist nation manage to do so, but they also run firms whose core competency is making money.

Reading both of these books is a great way to discover many such fascinating questions about the country, and to go some way towards answering some of them. In today’s post (and it is going to be rather a lengthy one, I’m afraid) I’m going to tell you about why you should read both of these books if you are interested in China. We’ll begin with Breakneck, and switch every now and then to talking about Other Rivers.

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The Analytical Knife

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig tells us about the analytical knife:

The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us—these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road—aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.

Dan Wang, it must be said, is pretty damn good with his analytical knife. For he took a look at his task - making sense of the United States and China today - and wielded his knife in such a beautiful way that we now cannot help but think of the world except in his framing.

Of course the United States is about lawyers, and China is about engineers. It’s obvious!

Except for the fact that we had to wait until Dan Wang published his book to realize this oh-so-self-evident framing. Dan Wang, for those of you who don’t know, is a writer. He’s lots of other things too, but I know of him because of his excellent annual letters, some of which I have covered on this blog before. This year, as he puts it, he didn’t write just the one annual letter. Rather, he wrote seven. These seven letters make up the seven chapters of his book.

Much has been made (and rightfully so) about the impressive intellectual cleaving that Dan Wang has managed with his lawyer/engineer framework.¹ But the ends of the spectrum aren’t where Dan Wang wants us to focus - the book is actually a great read for readers of EFE, because the entire book is in one sense a plea for both the US and for China to realize that the Truth Always Lies Somewhere In The Middle.

Both countries, as he puts it so beautifully, “have an ethos of self-transformation that has become deformed in various ways”. Both of them will have to figure out how to “fully express their transformational urge”. Or put another way, China has to learn how to become a little more lawyerly, and Americans have to rediscover their engineering heritage.

Or as an economist might put it - no solutions, only trade-offs.

Saying this is one thing, getting it to happen is another. Social inertia is even more difficult to overcome than physical inertia, and I have no idea what unholy mix of catalysts and cataclysms are going to be needed in both countries to get this to happen. But we will leave that topic for another day, and immerse ourselves in the specifics of Dan Wang’s book for today.

Good Engineering

Breakneck is full of the statistics that we’re all vaguely aware of. We may not have the exact magnitude at our fingertips, but the direction of China’s vector when it comes to infrastructure is all too clear: upwards, and rising rapidly:

Since 1980, after Deng’s reforms began, China has built an expanse of highways equal to twice the length of the US systems, a high-speed rail network twenty times more extensive than Japan’s, and almost as much solar and wind power capacity as the rest of the world put together. It’s not only the government that is fixated on production; the corporate sector is made up of overactive producers too. A rough rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic panels, or anything else

There are statistics like this in virtually every chapter. Sample these snippets from the next chapter, for example:

A Chinese citizen born when the country completed its first expressway would—by the time she reached the legal driving age of eighteen in 2011—be able to drive on a highway system that surpassed the length of the US interstate system. By 2020, China had built a second batch of expressways that again totaled the length of the US system. The first expanse of highways took eighteen years to build; the second took half that time.

As exports soared, China’s ports became the world’s busiest. Shanghai alone moved more containers in 2022 than all of the US ports combined

Its urban population has grown by an average of sixteen million people each year since 1978, which means, in effect, that the state built a new city the size of greater New York City and greater Boston combined every year for thirty-five years. Though Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen have soaring housing prices, high rates of construction plus rising wages have broadly improved affordability. From 2007 to 2018, the average price of an urban apartment fell from nine times the average household income to seven times. This building spree consumes colossal amounts of steel, aluminum, copper, cement, and glass. According to Vaclav Smil, the 4.4 billion tons of cement that China produced from 2018 to 2019 nearly equals the amount of cement the United States produced over the entire twentieth century.

These stories are legion, and if you have read any article at all about China in the last dozen years or so, you’ve probably heard of similar statistics. Again, more than the magnitude, these statistics help you be clear about the direction - China builds a helluva lot of stuff. In fact, too much of it.

It is easy to be dismissive of the excesses of Chinese manufacturing, but the breadth and the depth of what China has achieved is staggering. You might have heard of the (sadly not true) factoid about Isaac Asimov having published in each of the ten categories of the Dewey Decimal classification system. Well, China has its own equivalent:

Xi isn’t just ambitious about manufacturing. A better word to describe his views might be “completionist.” Andrew Batson, research director at Gavekal Dragonomics, came upon a 2024 boast from the minister of industry and information technology that China has a “comprehensive” industrial chain, since it produces something in each of the 419 industrial product categories maintained by the United Nations to classify industrial production. It’s a very Chinese sort of boast

But this focus on having an engineering mindset from top² to bottom, has resulted in China’s staggering achievements in the realm of physical infrastructure.

No Solutions, Only Tradeoffs

Dan Wang talks about how the engineering state is built for the bird’s-eye view. He also mentions, in another part of the book, about how the engineering state prefers talking about aggregates:

The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals. The Communist Party envisions itself as a grand master, coordinating unified actions across state and society, able to launch strategic maneuvers beyond the comprehension of its citizens. Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals

This is also a good way to think about both books. Breakneck analyses at the level of the aggregates, and then seeks to understand how this impacted the lives of ordinary people. Other Rivers, on the other hand, observes the lives of ordinary people, and asks what impact government policies have had upon them³.

And nowhere is this more true than in the harrowing descriptions of how China implemented its one child policy. If we in India are horrified (and with good reason!) at what went on during the Emergency, then the good news is that we were bumbling amateurs. I cannot bring myself to quote much about the fourth chapter from Breakneck, but I strongly encourage you to read this chapter, even if you choose to not read the entire book. If you, like me, have had to answer questions about why we can’t be “more like China”, this chapter is for you.

How did the Chinese people react to all the atrocities that were wreaked upon them? Through revolt and rebellion in isolated parts, through deception and intrigue in others. Through adjustments, if one can call it that, and through… well, read for yourself:

Once, when I was meeting with another student in my office to talk about something else, she offhandedly mentioned that her mother had had around eight abortions.

She later clarified her memories in an email:

I think my mom was pregnant 9 times. For the last one (I was already in college), she mentioned it briefly before and after the operation. But for the others, she told me years later. I remember we went out for a walk, and she was complaining about my dad and then she told me about her abortions. It was a casual mention and we didn’t talk much. I think mentally, she seems fine about abortions. . . . I remember there was one time she just aborted and then went directly back to work.

Hessler, Peter. Other Rivers: A Chinese Education (p. 87). (Function). Kindle Edition.

And hey, through economics. Trade is win-win!

If a family had a child with a serious disability, they could apply to have a second baby. The previous year, I had visited the former student and spent some time with his eldest daughter, a bright-eyed girl who already spoke good English by the end of elementary school. I asked how anybody at the government office could possibly believe that this child was mentally disabled. “Of course we didn’t bring her !” the father said, laughing. “We brought another child.” He explained that it involved a simple commercial transaction. The parents of an actual disabled child made her available for a fee, and she was taken by clients to the government office, where her disability was registered in the name of the clients’ child. Then the clients embarked on another fully approved pregnancy. Meanwhile, the parents of the disabled child continued to hire her out to other families. Sometimes, Chinese people described such arrangements with an English phrase that made my heart drop: “win-win.”

The People and the State

What does the state do, and how do people respond? That’s Breakneck.

What are the lives of ordinary Chinese people like, and how have these lives been impacted and shaped by what the state has done? That’s Other Rivers.

I’m not implying that either of the two authors have written books to answer these specific questions. What I am saying, however, is that this is how I read both of these books: with this scaffolding in mind. Reading both books more or less in tandem, and with this framework as my anchor, helped me understand these books better, and therefore helped me understand China better.

It takes a special kind of state to pull off a trick where you are at one point admonished to “have one child, it will be enough; the state will care for you when you’re old and tough” - and then for that same state to turn around and say, fifty years later, that no, you should instead “have three children so you won’t have to seek state-supported elder care.”

This special state cannot exist without a supporting network of party cadres, local level volunteers, and “Little Pinks”. Breakneck helps you begin to understand how and why the state is the way it is. Other Rivers also covers the topic of the Little Pinks, but it does so by telling us how Little Pinks can make the life of the author, and of other ordinary Chinese people, extremely interesting. One understands why Little Pinks are around by reading Breakneck, and one understands what impact Little Pinks can have on ordinary lives by reading Other Rivers.

That’s one side of the story. It also takes a special kind of people to have the wherewithal to live with, and under the tender loving care of, a state such as the one that China has. It takes guanxi, it takes the ability to take wrenching social and societal changes in one’s stride, and it takes a special mixture of gumption, resilience and patience. It also takes the ability to form, sustain and develop networks, but also the ability to choose when and how to use these networks. Should you use your networks to challenge the state, adjust to it, or to escape it? Do your answers change as a function of the times you find yourself in? Your age? Your prospects? These are not easy questions, and both books help you think about the challenges, and the set of possible solutions (and their costs and benefits!)

What is remarkable is how in-step the two books are in with each other - your takeaways from one book are likely to be in resonance with the other, and reassures you, as the reader, that there is significant overlap in the consistency and applicability of their framing and their hypotheses and observations.

To answer the question of whether Chinese people possess that special mixture is to think very carefully about time. Young people, Dan Wang hypothesizes in Breakneck, would much prefer to run:

“The most remarkable new Chinese slang word that developed during the pandemic was rùn.

It means what it sounds like. Chinese have appropriated this word (meaning “to moisten”) for its English meaning to express their desire to flee. Throughout the unpredictable and protracted lockdowns, rùn evolved to mean leaving big cities, where pandemic controls were tightest. Or it meant emigrating from China altogether. After I departed from China in 2023, I kept meeting Chinese who have, in recent years, decided to emigrate, gambling that their lives would be better abroad.

Young people want to go to Europe, the United States, or an anglophone country, but these governments tend to be miserly with visas to Chinese. Thus, many émigrés go to nearby countries in Asia. Those with ambition and entrepreneurial energy flock to Singapore, where Chinese companies like ByteDance have set up big offices. Those with wealth and means buy themselves a pleasant life in Japan. Everyone else—slackers, free spirits, kids who want to chill—is hanging out in Thailand”

Who is more likely to rùn? Younger people, or the elderly? On the surface, an easy question to answer, but the deeper you choose to dig, the more difficult it gets. What was it about the political and social climate of the seventies and the eighties that shaped the choice sets and the decisions of the folks around then? How did the first few market-oriented steps of the Chinese state shape these same things in the nineties? And what about the Chinese youth of today?

Peter Hessler’s earlier book (Country Driving), paired up with Other Rivers, helps answer this question, and also helps give a lovely little twist to the title of the latest book. Many hundreds of years ago, Greek philosophers pondered the question of rivers and time. Is it possible, they asked, to step into the same river twice?

Peter Hessler has answered the question, in a manner of speaking. He tells us the story of Huang Dejian, whose work-unit, or danwei, was White Crane Ridge, on the Yangtze River. When Hessler returned to China a couple of decades later, the Three Gorges Dam had been completed. White Crane Ridge was now completely underwater - and the engineering state had, of course, built an underwater museum at the site. The guy managing the museum was the same guy, still at his same danwei - Huang Dejian.

So: same person, at the same office, on the same river. But the engineering state, in just twenty breakneck years, had made sure that it was another river.

Could, and should, the people have managed to remain the same?

These two magnificent books take us part of the way to answering this question, and that is why it is worth your time to read both of them.

1. And as with every Indian who has read this book, I have grappled with the obvious question myself, without being able to settle on a definitive answer

2. The statistic about all nine members of the Politburo being engineers by 2002 was especially instructive!

3. Note that this observation of mine is also at the aggregated level, and therefore by definition only partially correct!