If you only read one non-fiction book this year it must be this one. Dan Wang has spent most of his time in the United states, but is of Chinese parentage and was born there. He summarises thoroughly the situation of both China and the US. He emphasises the important aspects of both histories, which explains where they are now. He suggests what each country should do now for the good of the country and the people (he explains that these might not necessarily be the same thing, so suggests compromises where appropriate). I was fascinated by the book. I liked the content, the style and the layout. I loved it. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

There's a thing I have noticed about contemporary politics books, particularly if there's a bit of a manifesto behind them. You open with your big idea, or your big point, and then spend the rest of the book proving it: it's very much the Master's thesis approach, and depending on the distance from academia, it may be more or less elegant than that. Breakneck - a modern survey largely of China and its future compared to that of the United States or America - sets its point out at the opening. America is a country run by lawyers, China is a country run by engineers. And whilst Dan Wang does go into quite some detail as to what that means about projects, growth and internal politics, he drops his proof pretty much instantly. All 24 members if the Chinese Communist Party Politburo have some kind of hard science or engineering background. Well over three-quarters of the US cabinet have law degrees, and that was a lot higher in the last Democratic government. To be fair to Dan Wang, he does then offer quite an in-depth set of case studies to show why an engineering mindset has given China such growth, before also showing the catastrophic side to it. The most eye-opening of which is the genesis and aftermath of the one-child policy which was attacked with engineering zeal, but was not exactly carried out in a scientific way. And whilst there are a lot of criticisms of China's engineering mindset running roughshod over human rights, there is a sense that you feel he thinks rights have gone too far in the US - which feels like the kind of distanced argument that might collapse under too much scrutiny. Wang is wary about prognosticating for the future, beyond seeing the current lawyer and process-dominated future as a dead end for the US (he doesn't really engage with the second Trump period beyond seeing its slash-and-burn right-wing rhetoric as being even worse). As for China he is impressed by the engineering when it sticks to infrastructure and projects, less so when it becomes social engineering. And he also sees the third term, and the all-male politburo and anti-women rhetoric as being retrograde. He just about manages to temper his enthusiasm for the grand schemes with a wariness for human rights. But by the end his point was already made two hundred pages before, and it's the fact of the number of engineers in central government that I will be dining out on.