Breakneck
China's Quest to Engineer the Future
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Publishing:26th Aug '25
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 26th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress and a whole new way of understanding its rise
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.
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
Dan Wang's Breakneck is the best recent book on China, on China and America, and arguably it will be the best book of the year flat out. It is marvelously written and brilliantly understands the dilemmas of our modern world -- Tyler Cowen
A brilliant book, about how China got ahead, the United States stagnated, and the challenges that both will face in the future. Chinese and Americans have more in common than most people think, and this book is a very good place to start exploring why the two countries have moved in different directions and why their leaders are at odds -- O.A. Westad
Provocative, ambitious, and beautifully crafted, Breakneck is a must-read book on the intense competition between the United States and China for global leadership in the 21st century. Dan Wang is one of the world's most insightful analysts of the Chinese economy and technological developments. Written with extraordinary grace and verve, this book will be discussed and debated for years to come -- Julian Gewirtz, former White House Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs and author of Never Turn Back
In Breakneck, Dan Wang provides a subtle and illuminating account of China's dizzying rise and its deepening pathologies. China's 'engineering state,' he shows, is extraordinary at building—high speed railroads, soaring bridges, electric vehicles, miles of apartment blocks. Chinese society has been transformed yet hollowed out by the rate of change. The United States shouldn't replicate the engineering state, Wang argues, but we nevertheless have much to learn from it -- Chris Miller, author of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technologies
ISBN: 9780241729175
Dimensions: 240mm x 156mm x 28mm
Weight: 500g
224 pages