At least for me, a measure of a good book is the extent to which it rearranges brain cells and perceptions and practically forces a reevaluation of one’s assumptions about life in general and your own life in particular. In other words, the extent to which it makes you uncomfortable.
Which is what happened recently when I read two very cool books: George Saunders’ latest novel, “Vigil,” and “Breakneck,” Dan Wang’s deep dive into the economic juggernaut China has become in clean technologies and the country’s failed social policies.
As often happens, I was reading the two books simultaneously, switching between them — Wang in the morning, Saunders in the evening — and at first glance, they could not be more different.
“Vigil” is a short novel taking readers on a wild ride through one man’s deathbed reckoning with his life as a fossil fuel executive; the other digs into the differences and commonalities between China and the United States as, respectively, engineer- and lawyer-led societies.
But as I read and alternated from one book to the other, I kept feeling this visceral buzz of resonance between them. They were talking about similar things — energy, political power, the decisions people make — but from entirely different and differently effective angles, which is why I wanted to write about them and encourage everyone to read them.
George Saunders has an absolutely wicked imagination, and in “Vigil,” he asks readers to literally plummet into a world where a dying man and spirits of the dead hold fierce, subconscious debates on the moral and real-world impacts of his largely successful efforts to discredit environmental opposition to fossil fuels.
It is a 21st-century, somewhat demented cross between “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol,” minus a final Scroogian redemption for the oil man, K.J. Boone.
A speech he gave in Denmark in 1997 almost overnight reverses U.S. policy on climate change, leading ultimately to a catastrophic drought in India. At Boone’s bedside, the spirit of a man who had died of heat and starvation describes his final minutes, watching his wife and mother die before him.
“It had not rained in over a year, he said. To graze against a metal door was to be burned. Graves could not be dug for the heat. I had not defecated in eleven days. … In the last half hour, we seemed, all at once, to shrivel, become skeletal, look identically ghoulish; it would have been difficult to say who was the youngest, who the oldest.”
The spirits of Boone’s parents also put in separate appearances as he reflects on his hard-scrabble childhood, his achievements building his company and the role of fossil fuels in building the American economy and way of life — a quintessential U.S. success story.
How Tesla ‘catfished’ China
On the other hand, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” is very much rooted in Wang’s real-world experience first as the son of Chinese parents who immigrated to Canada in the 1990s, and then living and working in China from 2017 to 2023.
What’s cool here are the book’s many “aha” moments in which Wang’s analysis and insights hit home, beginning with his explanation of the differences between China’s repressive, engineer-led Communist Party, and the nominally democratic political culture of the U.S., led by lawyers.
The U.S. has about 400 lawyers per 100,000 people, which is three times as many lawyers as most European countries, Wang writes. One result is “an elevation of process over outcomes. In American government and society, designing new rules and committees have so often become the substitute for thinking hard about strategy and ends.”
Bull’s-eye — plus, lawyerly societies tend to favor the rich, he says.
In China’s engineer-led culture, the focus is on making things and “process knowledge,” which Wang defines as “the proficiency gained from practical experience.”
“Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing ‘technology’ as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice.”
The United States’ loss of its manufacturing base — and Trump’s recent decimation of the federal government — means the loss of essential process knowledge. And I can’t help thinking that artificial intelligence — to the extent it means we do less — will wipe out even more.
So, while the U.S. may lead the world in technology innovation, the creation of communities of “engineering practice” and the high value they place on process knowledge have driven China’s dominance in clean tech manufacturing, Wang writes.
A prime example here is China’s leadership in electrified transportation, as detailed in “Breakneck.”
When the Chinese government let Tesla into the country — and allowed the company to own its Shanghai gigafactory — it “jolted China’s electric vehicle market. China’s business community began using the term ‘catfishing’ for what Tesla was doing in China. The idea was that introducing a powerful new creature into the domestic environment would make Chinese firms swim faster. That’s exactly what they did to raise their game.”
When Tesla’s first EVs hit the Chinese market in 2019, domestic automakers like BYD lost sales and profits. Less than five years later, BYD was reporting record profits and was exporting its high-quality, more affordable EVs to markets worldwide — except, of course, the U.S.
The downside here is that engineers are really bad at social policy, such as China’s one-child mandate and the government’s total lockdown of major cities like Shanghai during the COVID pandemic, each of which has a chapter in Wang’s book. In the wake of the lockdown, some of China’s smart, creative young people have been leaving the country, looking for economic opportunities and more personal freedom in Singapore, Japan and Thailand, he says.
Transformation deformed
How do we communicate with people about energy and affordability, about climate and fossil fuels at a time when these topics have become highly politicized and divisive, and the online world we rely on for information is equally politicized, divisive and rife with misinformation.
How should we balance the repressive regime of Xi Jinping with China’s game-changing achievements in clean tech? How do we honor the role of fossil fuels in U.S. history and our economy, while advancing technologies – at speed and scale – that will make them unnecessary?
And how do we depoliticize climate change as an essential part of all these issues, recognizing the role of clean tech in economic growth and global market competitiveness?
In other words, how do we live with complexity and contradiction, and the discomfort involved in trying to find some sense of balance and inclusivity?
I have asked these questions before, in an earlier E/lectrify post on the clean energy information wars, and know there are no easy answers. At least for me, the message from these books is that answers must come in all forms, fiction and nonfiction, and from all perspectives, personal, technological, political.
With E/lectrify, I am trying to tell the story of the clean energy transition in ways that make it interesting, engaging and even fun for many different audiences — thus far, with limited success. People take in stories and information in different ways, so one never knows what content in what form might slip in under set assumptions and beliefs and start rearranging things, start making people uncomfortable.
It is almost impossible to read “Vigil” without some level of discomfort, imagining one’s own deathbed scene and what the impacts of one’s small, finite life will be — things done and not done, the delusions and rationalizations left unchallenged. What spirits might hover? What new decisions and life paths might one still choose between now and then?
In “Breakneck,” Wang argues that the U.S. must reclaim its history as an engineering superpower — the country that built highways and bridges, skyscrapers and the electric grid — and its commitment to pluralism.
What the U.S. shares with China is a “commitment to transformation,” he says. “Both countries have an ethos of self-transformation that have [sic] become deformed in various ways. For both countries to develop the potential of its people, they have to figure out how to fully express their transformational urge.”
What might make people uncomfortable here is the extent to which the Trump administration is undermining the transformational power of clean technologies and U.S. pluralism. Keeping Chinese EVs out of the U.S. has meant U.S. automakers haven’t been catfished — forced to swim faster to compete — and have lost global market share.
Clean tech innovation remains strong in the U.S., but could move faster if fully supported by federal funding and other incentives. Wang notes that, despite its repressive policies, the Chinese Communist Party has been able to retain the support of the people because the country’s economic growth has improved lives and created a sense of optimism.
The Trump administration is failing on both counts. Clean tech is a critical part of the counternarrative that is vital to reclaiming and transforming our democracy. What I came out of both books with is a strong sense of urgency and commitment to looking for new and more effective ways of telling that story — and staying uncomfortable.
It is process knowledge. We have to keep trying and learning — which is really cool.