Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

My notes

This party believes that only the state has the wisdom to invest in strategic megaprojects, whereas consumers will waste money on themselves.

Since the state levies relatively light taxes, which it takes unobtrusively from citizens, it reduces the risk that people start asking questions about what the state is doing with their hard-earned funds and whether their taxes should entitle them to greater political participation.

Every day, millions of workers go to factories to build up technological process knowledge. That is the basis of China’s tech power.

Medical workers chased down Tibetan and Mongolian herdsmen—who probably saw nothing but yaks for days on grassland steppes—to swab their mouths.

Most notably, the Communist Party distrusts and fears the Chinese people, limiting their potential for flourishing.

Even if Xi’s judgments are right, his brute-force solutions reliably worsen things.

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

The issue isn’t that Chinese people are somehow less imaginative. Rather, the state’s deadening hand has suppressed their creativity.

Engineers can’t take a joke. It’s hard for art to thrive in an atmosphere of political paranoia plus social control.

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.

One reason that China lacks a liberal tradition—focused on protection of individual liberties—is that court intellectuals tended not to develop philosophies based on restraining the emperor or his bureaucracy.

They wield weapons of the weak. When folks see a flurry of senseless rules from the government, they might react with foot dragging, petty noncompliance, feigned ignorance, and arguing back.

The Communist Party will never be convinced that Chinese kids blissed out of their minds on psychedelics represent a hidden asset for the country.

It is a hope that the Communist Party might one day let its people flourish by leaving them alone.

Life in China is deeply textured and all-embracing. But the intensity of family and social demands can smother, and the embrace can come unbidden, firmly and unavoidably, from the state.

The problem with the American right is not its desire to make the government more efficient. Their problem is that they diagnose the causes of inefficiency as a lazy workforce rather than the mountains of procedure that civil servants labor under.

Shed a tear for the American states: wounded by the ostentatiously destructive tendencies of the right after it has been strangled and dragged down by the left.