Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

(Hardback)

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From an 'indispensable voice on China' (Evan Osnos) comes a riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress America used to pride itself on ambition. Today, it looks stuck. Meanwhile, China has been busy building the future. Over the past six years, technology analyst Dan Wang lived through China's astonishing, messy progress and the dissolution of its relationship to the West. In Breakneck, Wang offers a new framework for understanding China - which helps us to see global geopolitics more clearly too. While China is an engineering state, fearlessly building megaprojects, America is a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. Building big has fuelled China's economic ascent. At the same time, social engineering has led to unbearable costs, including the traumas of zero-Covid and the one-child policy. Wang traverses China's dazzling metropolises and factory complexes, blending political and economic analysis with reportage to show how the Communist Party's darkening ambitions have unsettled its people. As the US and China are gearing up for a new Cold War, Breakneck reveals both the remarkable strengths and the appalling weaknesses of the engineering state. China has learned from the West's successes and failures - and now we in turn can learn from China, not least by taking its global ambitions seriously.

Reviews

An illuminating account of China's dizzying rise and its deepening pathologies -- Chris Miller, author of Chip War
Dan Wang is an indispensable voice on China issues because he has the rarest combination of precious resources: deep knowledge and unflinching judgment. Half of his mind runs on philosophy, the other half runs on engineering. If Dan did not already exist, we would need to invent him for precisely this day and age -- Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition
A brilliant book about how China got ahead, the United States stagnated, and the challenges that both will face in the future -- Odd Arne Westad, co-author of The Great Transformation: Chinas Road from Revolution to Reform
A must-read book on the intense competition between the United States and China for global leadership in the twenty-first century -- Julian Gewirtz, former White House Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs and author of Never Turn Back
A timely meditation on technology and governance -- and a rollicking read, to boot -- Eva Dou, author of House of Huawei
The best recent book on China, on China and America, and arguably the best book of the year flat out. It is marvelously written and brilliantly understands the dilemmas of our modern world -- Tyler Cowen

Author Bio

Dan Wang is a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University. He was previously a fellow at the Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center and the technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, working in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. Dan is the author of an annual letter from China and has published essays in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, New York Magazine and the Atlantic.