Dan Wang's Breakneck was featured in both The New Yorker and the Financial Times this week. Here's what the two pieces mean for leadership teams navigating the U.S.–China technology contest.
Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author of the New York Times bestseller Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Norton, 2025), appeared in two of the most widely read publications in the English-speaking world in a single week.
Evan Osnos’s twelve-page feature in the August 10 issue of The New Yorker, “The Future, Made in China,” places Wang and Breakneck at the center of the U.S.–China technology rivalry. Osnos uses Wang’s framework of an engineering state versus a lawyerly society to structure a sweeping reported piece on what China’s industrial surge, demographic crisis, and AI ambitions mean for the global balance of power.
Wang’s contribution sharpens the picture. China can produce “strong outcomes in science and technology,” he tells Osnos, but its internal contradictions are profound. “Shanghai is pretty amazing. It may even be one of the top-three great cities of the world. But how can China be a great civilization if almost no one wants to have kids?” The book itself is subtler than the engineering-vs.-lawyers shorthand suggests. Its working title was “Move Fast and Break People”; the publisher intervened.
Days earlier, the Financial Times published “Does Silicon Valley Dream of Philip K. Dick?“, a Weekend Essay co-authored by Wang and Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins. Where Breakneck examines China’s engineering ambitions, the FT essay turns the lens on the West’s own technological elites. Farrell and Wang argue that Silicon Valley is not building the optimistic, Asimovian future its leaders invoke. It is building something closer to the unsettling, glitchy worlds of Philip K. Dick: machines that claim consciousness while failing at basic tasks, billionaires who reshape information environments around their own alienation, political orders that teeter on collapse.
The essay’s political-economy diagnosis is sharp. Dick’s corporate titans and charismatic founders are, Farrell and Wang write, “smart and conniving but prone to a particular kind of self-deception.” His “most brilliant move is to reveal that the malign forces reshaping the world are in fact petty, self-obsessed and jealous beings.” The question the essay poses to leadership teams is not which grand technological vision to endorse, but how to build from the bottom up: solid connections between the communities organizations serve and the larger structures of the world, with technology put to work for human ends rather than becoming an end in itself.
Taken together, the two pieces give boards and strategy teams a paired framework. Wang’s engineering-state analysis explains why China can build at the speed it does, and why that speed may not translate into the civilizational outcomes Beijing hopes for. The Philip K. Dick lens explains why Silicon Valley’s own fever dreams are less a guide to the future than a symptom of the present. For any leadership team debating industrial policy, AI governance, or geopolitical risk, both lenses are worth having in the room.
Dan Wang is exclusively represented by Stern Strategy Group for keynotes, board sessions, and confidential advisory work with leadership teams working through industrial policy, U.S.–China technological competition, and the geopolitical implications of AI and advanced manufacturing.
