Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

The New York Times bestseller, Financial Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year

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The book we need to understand China today: a riveting, first-hand account of its seismic progress from an indispensable expert voice

For close to a decade, Dan Wang has been observing China’s tumultuous and astounding growth. The state has constructed towering bridges, gleaming railways and sprawling factories to improve economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout society.

China has grown so quickly in part by beating America at its own game: capitalism and harnessing the restless energy of a vast population. Here Wang blends political and economic analysis with reportage into a provocative new framework for understanding China – one that helps us see America more clearly, too. Whereas China is an engineering state, relentlessly building big, the United States has transformed into a lawyerly society, stalling every attempt to make change, both good and bad.

As relations between the US and China are tense and uncertain and the potential for dreadful conflict looms, Wang offers an inventive new way of thinking about the two superpowers. Breakneck reveals that each country points towards a better path for the other. How much better the world would be, he argues, if Americans could live in a society not only governed by lawyers, and Chinese citizens could live with a state that values their individual liberties.

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‘An illuminating account of China’s dizzying rise and its deepening pathologies’ Chris Miller

'One of the best books published on China this year' The Times

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Dan Wang (Author)

I’m a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. Previously, I was a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, and before that, I covered technology at Gavekal Dragonomics. For the better part of a decade, I’ve been trying to figure out China’s technology capabilities while I lived in Hong Kong, Beijing, and then Shanghai. In addition to my annual letters, my essays have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Opinion, and The Atlantic. I'm the author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future.