America has a hard time building stuff.

Roads, trains, light rail, bridges, housing.

Everything takes seemingly forever if it even happens at all.

Last week, New York City approved a contract to start work on a subway extension that was

proposed a century ago, a century.

Meanwhile, there's China, a country that builds much, much faster.

High-speed rails take just a few years, solar panels,

electric cars, bridges, ports, drones, all churned out at breakneck speed. Why is that? Why can China do

this? And why does it seem like America can't?

I'm Sean Elling, and this is the gray area.

Today's guest is Dan Wong.

He's the author of a new book called Breakneck, China's quest to engineer the future.

It's a deeply reported, deeply personal book about the country he grew up in, returned to, and then left again. And it's filled

with surprising insights into what China is, what it's becoming, what it reveals about America.

Dan Wong, welcome to the show.

It's my pleasure to be here.

So one of the first things you do say in the book, you may actually say this on the very first

page, is that China and America are constantly blocking horns.

And you find that both tragic and comical because, and now I'm quoting,

no two peoples are more like than Americans and Chinese. Why does it seem that way?

Well, I think the first thing that is true about both of these countries is that,

first, they're mutually unintelligible to themselves. I mean, how many

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