Dan Wang

What was the title of your book before Breakneck?

We had a series of titles, and the one that I thought that would make the most sense was Move Fast and Break People, China's Quest to Engineer the Future.

Publisher did not like that one?

Too much like Facebook, they thought.

They were right.

And I think breakneck is a nice, snappy title.

I love that it mostly has a positive connotation.

We made the vaccines at breakneck speed.

We built the bridges at breakneck speed.

Yeah, look at that coil of violence inside the title.

I think this one worked.

What about breaking people is relevant, though?

I think the part of China that I object to the most is that, for the most part, physical dynamism in building a lot of new things, bridges, subways, highways, new homes, hyperscalers, whatever else.

Some problems there, but mostly pretty positive.

The fundamental problem with China is that they're not just physical engineers.

They're also social engineers.

And they treat society as if it were just another building material.

And I object strongly to their practices around ethno-religious minorities in Tibet as well as Xinjiang.

I object strongly to the one-child policy, and I thought that the zero-COVID policy was also a disaster.

I think the issue is that when you feel the need to run roughshod over people, whether that's to build a giant dam like the Three Gorges Dam, which displaced around a million people,