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

New York, and the United States writ large, cannot survive indefinitely on the infrastructure built nearly a century ago.

The hope from Beijing might be that Americans will be driven mad by the dangerous storms produced by the double whammy of social media plus artificial intelligence. Perhaps these things will magnify the internal divisions of Americans. As more Americans retreat into a digital phantasm, Xi will be shepherding Chinese through the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.

Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

The Communist Party “followed the science” of zero-Covid to its logical conclusion: barring people from their homes, testing people on a near-daily basis, and doing everything else it could to break the chains of transmission. Four decades ago, it “followed the science” to forcibly prevent many pregnancies in the pursuit of the one-child policy.

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.