Post by Stanislas Kihm

My review of Dan Wang's Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future is out in Business History. First 50 reads and downloads are free here: https://lnkd.in/e7CbqVnw Wang reads the US-China rivalry as an engineering state, built to deliver, against a lawyerly society, built to deliberate. Two images stay with you: the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed line, opened in 2011 for $36bn and already carrying 1.35 billion passengers, and California's, launched in 2008, now repriced at $128bn and still not running. Or this: Apple can hire 9,000 industrial engineers in Shenzhen in two weeks; in the US, it would take nine months. What I found most compelling is not the politics but the materiality of production. Wang's key idea is the "community of engineering practice": industrial power rests less on individual genius or technology transfer than on process knowledge that thickens as workers, suppliers, and engineers circulate. Shenzhen (300,000 inhabitants in 1980, 18 million in 2020) is the paradigm. The solar industry tells the same story: the West invented the cell and built the machines, China bought the tools, competed ferociously, and absorbed the whole value chain. And yet the same force has a hidden cost. What China now calls involution (nèijuǎn), chronic overcapacity, factory-gate deflation, national champions barely profitable at home, is the flip side of the very dynamism the book celebrates. A fast, vivid book on how China actually builds, and why it now struggles to do so profitably. Well worth the read. With thanks to Ian Jones for the opportunity, and to Ziyuan TANG for his careful proofreading. ISTEC - Ecole Supérieure de Commerce et de Marketing