I've started reading "Breakneck" by Dan Wang, after reading several superlative comments. The book is aimed at an American audience and hopes to contribute to maintaining the US - China competition and hostility at a "simmering" level. Because, the author writes, "if it boils over [it] will devastate not only each other but also the world"
I'm reading the book as an European, genuinely interested in catching up with modern China. I've never visited it and my idea of China is based on an old image dating back from the communist era, poorly "patched over" with the random headlines I gather from the mass media.
But through this book I'm also trying to understand better Europe, a once leading continent, and what went wrong with us. And the first thought that sparked in my mind while reading was "we, in Europe, have put the wrong people in charge; we are being led by the wrong people". The turn-of-the-XXth-century Europe was that grouping of engineering states that Wang explains China is today.
A "procedure-obsessed left" has turned today's Europe into a "lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad" (how Wang describes today's America).
We used to stretch our necks to peer far into the future. Our necks tired of the effort. Just like in America (according to Wang), people in Europe are nowadays mostly "concerned with safeguarding a comfortable way of life." Is that something to worry about? I think everyone is entitled to his/her own answer to this question.