Gerhard’s Reviews > Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future > Status Update

Shanghainese marveled that they could worry about hunger while they lived in China’s richest city in the year 2022.

The coastal city of Xiamen swabbed the mouths of fresh-caught fish to test for Covid. A panda research base in Chengdu tested every animal in its facility. Medical workers chased down Tibetan and Mongolian herdsmen—who probably saw nothing but yaks for days on grassland steppes—to swab their mouths.

Shanghai was, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the brothel capital of the world.

There’s nothing that many Chinese love to hear more than the idea that the nation’s past glories were even more glorious than anyone had grasped.

Michael Weisskopf, who reported on the one-child policy in a series of pieces for the Washington Post in 1985, wrote that doctors sometimes injected formaldehyde into a baby’s head or crushed the skull with forceps. More typically, doctors would smother the newborn or leave it to die of exposure.

Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics became a hit, not because it was filled with equations but because of its intoxicating subtitle: Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine.

The one work that much of the Industrial Party has rallied around is the science fiction trilogy by Liu Cixin. The Three-Body Problem is one of China’s most successful cultural exports in the past decades, earning praise from American readers as well as a big-budget Netflix adaptation.

A focus on manufacturing gives China another advantage in technological competition with the United States. It can simply wait for American scientists to do the fundamental research before Chinese companies take over the production.

The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers.

...it was still common to hear Americans say that Chinese companies couldn’t innovate. China could only copy and steal, they said. Some folks in Silicon Valley knew that there were cool things cooking in Shenzhen, but the broader attitude among Americans was condescension.