Dan Wang explores how the United States and China, while rivals in power, share surprising similarities that shape their economies, politics, and global influence.

The title of Dan Wang’s book Breakneck focuses on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) specifically, but it is really about the self-conscious great-power rivalry between China’s Communist Party leaders and the United States. Along the way, we encounter all the popular points of controversy between the two great nations, covering everything from bullet trains, iPhone factories, and Trump tariffs to zero-COVID lockdowns, rare-earth mineral supply chains, and the demographic long tail of the One Child policy.

This isn’t just another case of two big nations clashing—as big nations tend to do from time to time. For finance analyst and university research fellow Dan Wang, the US and the PRC are uniquely paired in world affairs. In his introduction, he writes, “…no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese,” citing their shared love of consumerism, pragmatic natures, and appreciation for technological progress.

Wang sees the US and PRC economies, in particular, as complements, which explains the rapid growth of trade between the two in the twenty-first century: “It is almost uncanny how much the United States and China have been complementary of each other.”

Yet at the same time, he says that, on a political level, “the two systems are a study in contrasts.” Fair enough, as they’re obviously very different. Yet in other passages, he frames the US and PRC systems as “inversions” of each other. This is seen in each society’s attitudes toward innovation and technology adoption, and to politics in general. It would take a sublime Confucian scholar to disentangle these contradictions. Perhaps the two nations are the phoenix and the dragon of world politics, the cobra and the mongoose, or simply each other’s evil twin.

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