China on the Move

On Jia Zhangke’s ‘Caught by Tides’ and Dan Wang’s ‘Breakneck’

Construction Site in Beijing, China, 2016, Photograph, Getty Images

Much of contemporary discourse about China remains trapped in what might be called an all-consuming Trump vortex, where nearly everything is refracted through the prism of the 45th and 47^th president.

Two new works on China manage to escape that pull for a wider lens look at a country that has undergone a rapid shift over the course of the past several decades.

Jia Zhangke, perhaps China’s most internationally celebrated filmmaker, and deservedly so, returns with Caught by the Tides, an elliptical tone poem and time-lapse romance that doubles as an anthropological portrait of modern China, revisiting central characters of his past films and following their lives across decades as the country transforms around them. Meanwhile, Dan Wang’s new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, offers an assured and lively technocratic account of the political and economic machinery behind that transformation.

In an early scene in Caught by the Tides, which stitches together new and archival fragments, and features actors from Jia’s prior films, including his longtime artistic collaborator and wife, Zhao Tao, a group of Chinese youth dance ecstatically to the Swedish pop song “Butterfly” by Smile.dk. The kinetic dancing scenes bleed into street celebrations of Beijing’s successful bid to host the 2008 Olympics. The evocative montage feels like a fever dream of a country in motion, being thrust into modernity.

Wang’s book traces the very same rise more soberly, explaining how the Soviet Union’s love of heavy industry shaped Beijing’s Politburo, for whom “production was a noble deed to advance communism, while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism.” Wang’s story, and Jia’s more lyrical companion, is one of a relentless focus on the “real” economy: modernizing poor regions of the country, glorifying production, and disdaining consumption. In the U.S., where a financialized economy long ago eclipsed a manufacturing one, Americans are almost resigned to a kind of material decay, if not a spiritual one.

Yet Wang also details the cracks in the China Hype Machine. One fissure in the growth narrative is the fallout from China’s imploded real estate bubble, including the corner-cutting that the breakneck growth encouraged. Long before the bubble burst, parents were already referring to collapsed schools in Sichuan as “tofu houses” due to their fragility, a shorthand for the costs of corruption and speed.

Tofu houses aside, Wang’s central thesis is that China has nevertheless become an able “engineering state,” focused on building, as opposed to America’s “lawyerly society,” which is overly focused on procedure and blocking everything. Like most grand dichotomies, it explains much and collapses perhaps too much, but it is a useful frame. The sense of possibility in American public life, especially among liberals and the left, has narrowed dramatically. It’s now difficult to imagine the U.S. undertaking projects involving statecraft or public investment of the scale or ambition of FDR’s New Deal. Gripes with the lawyerly society have given rise to the Abundance movement, which Wang himself supports, advocating for more building to alleviate scarcity in housing, energy, and infrastructure. Slow progress is now being made to make America more conducive to building again. Even before the Abundance movement gained steam, the Biden administration fell in love with industrial policy again, and prior to that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed for a Green New Deal, which laid conceptual ground for an industrial policy revival, envisioning a massive investment in infrastructure. But Wang’s book captures a sense that the U.S. has already fallen too far behind, in spite of recent piecemeal efforts.

As a boy growing up in Fenyang before China’s building-led transformation, Jia longed to escape his provincial hometown, like many others looking to “escape constricting expectations” and “rural drudgery.” In a 2009 New Yorker profile, he said that he “cycled ten miles just to catch a glimpse of a passing train, which looked to him like a symbol of ‘the faraway world, the future, hope.’” His works, Caught by the Tides included, often follow characters making similar journeys and not always finding the future they sought. Watching his films, one imagines what we might have seen amidst the steel and tenements if a filmmaker with his keen, naturalistic eye had captured America during its frenzied industrial transformation.

In China, that sense of new energy still persists, although it has taken many different forms. In August 2025, NBA star Steph Curry arrived for a promotional tour, as the American basketball world league has made up with China after a rocky few years and seeks to again expand its brand in Asia, particularly in basketball-obsessed China. Curry was welcomed by a light show which included a reported 5,000 drones mimicking his three-point shot falling through a basketball hoop, a spectacle which went viral on social media. The videos joined a growing genre of Chinese infrastructure porn, including breathless content about new bridges and trains, artifacts of a tech boom that some have deemed Sinofuturism.

And it’s not just an obsession with bridges and trains, apparently “[t]he most fashionable thing you can do in downtown New York these days is drink a beer on Canal street, crouched on a low plastic stool…” in a nod to “the habits of old Chinese men,” part of a phenomenon known as Chinesemaxxing.

All of this content feels like dispatches from a future America that hadn’t been strangled and sclerotized by all sorts of political dysfunction.

In Breakneck, Wang observes that “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese,” arguing that “both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth.” It’s somewhat ironic that the current occupant of the White House, a onetime developer who was a gaudy, gold-plated symbol of the 1980s shortcut to wealth mentality, now presides over a country that is nostalgic for its capacity to build.

In 1999, when China’s own building spree was beginning to take hold, Jia was blacklisted by government censors. He had just made his debut feature, Xiao Wu (Pickpocket), without official state approval. The film, a reinterpretation of Robert Bresson’s 1959 classic, starkly portrays the decaying, stagnant life of Jia’s hometown and the young people struggling to get by. Its unflattering portrait of Chinese youth ran against prevailing state sensibilities. China would later grant Jia official state approval for his films, perhaps recognizing, for practical reasons, that his international success could be an asset and by the state’s own desire to encourage its homegrown film industry. Wang notes this same ideological flexibility at the core of Chinese governance, observing that “the greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist.”

In 2015, Jia commented on the restrictions on his filmmaking, remarking that “how we see or understand freedom differs from person to person,” before bluntly adding that “as a filmmaker, the clearest issues have to do with censors in China, and how I can maintain a certain level of freedom within the limitations and restrictions imposed upon me.” Like the pragmatism of the Chinese state itself, even its truest artists are compelled to color within the lines.

When Jia was growing up, life in the town of Fenyang was confined and offered few opportunities for young people, especially those seeking creative freedom. In Breakneck, Wang describes how today’s free spirits can travel to places like Thailand’s Chiang Mai, where psychedelics like mushrooms and ayahuasca are accessible, or China’s Yunnan province, where officials are more relaxed, “looking the other way while…youths immersed themselves in cryptocurrency projects by day and relaxed at speakeasies at night.” A growing number of Chinese elite are also moving to Tokyo, where there’s “much more space to discuss anything freely.”

While the U.S. builds far less physical infrastructure, it has begun to resemble China in less expected ways. As Xi has tightened controls over free speech in China, now punishing not just political speech, but “excessively pessimistic sentiment” about life in general, the U.S. is cracking down on pro-Palestinian activists, critics of the administration, university administrators, and the media, and deploying state power in ways that make earlier cancel culture war battles seem quaint.

As a rebuke to critics who claim that China can’t innovate because it doesn’t have free speech, Wang explains that he believes China, like other autocratic regimes, has gotten far in the realm of scientific advancement, in areas like solar power, electric vehicles, and robotic arms, “in an atmosphere of worsening political repression.”

That worsening political repression sometimes takes the form of social engineering, which Wang describes as China’s embrace of engineering in all its forms, not just civil or electrical. He explains that the Soviet Union once inspired Chinese technocrats to become “engineers of the soul,” a Stalinist phrase which Xi has repeated. Wang chronicles the harrowing systems of social control behind forced sterilizations and abortions under the One Child Policy, including instances where bulldozers were sent to tear the roofs off the homes of noncompliant families, as well as the excesses of China’s zero-COVID policy.

The pandemic-era sequences in Caught by the Tides, with images of mandatory COVID-19 testing lines, hazmat suits, and a more disquieted people, capture the mundane efficiency of the Chinese state, as well as the isolation of the population. Jia noted that this period “created a sharp contrast with the kind of energy and momentum that [he] witnessed in 2001.” Breakneck, meanwhile, conveys even darker sides of social engineering and China’s rigid lockdowns, recounting the story of a pregnant woman who was denied access to a hospital because she hadn’t yet verified a negative PCR test. She would go on to miscarry outside of the hospital. Wang notes that “the story went viral until censors deleted it.”

Like other deeply humanist filmmakers, including the Dardenne brothers and Ken Loach, Jia gives voice to those dislocated by 21^st century capitalism. His work is less overtly political, yet contemporary China’s state-led interventions serve as both a backdrop and character in all his films, raising questions that are inherently political, if not explicitly stated. That interplay may owe to the influence of Italian neorealism, which Jia has said shaped his work’s “fusion of documentary and fiction.”

Caught by the Tides doesn’t reach the visceral heights of Jia’s 2013 masterpiece, A Touch of Sin, a more urgent and confrontational film. But his latest work is doing something altogether different, a contemplative chronicle of people swept up in China’s radical transformations, presented almost as a historical artifact.

By the end of Caught by the Tides, the film’s protagonists, having traversed decades of upheaval, from urbanization to the displacements caused by the Three Gorges Dam and the rise of the digital age, are older, wandering through the streets of a gleaming hypermodern China. Yet we sense that their dislocation remains unchanged. In Breakneck, Wang reflects on the dislocation of his own parents, who emigrated from China to Canada and then to Philadelphia. He wonders whether they might have lived a more pleasant life in China, or at least one with more community than the atomized life offered by American suburbia.

Both Caught by the Tides and Breakneck ultimately converge on a similar truth, if unarticulated, which is that amid the machinations of engineers or lawyers, and despite all of China’s enviable material progress, ultimately, human connection is the only force that still confers meaning.

Kiren Gopal is a consumer protection lawyer and policy strategist who writes about film, politics, and culture. Follow him at x.com/kirenitynow.