Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
Language: English
Published by Penguin Books Ltd, 2025
- Hardcover
- Used

Seller: Book Grocer, Tullamarine, VIC, AustraliaBook Grocer
AbeBooks seller since October 15, 2025
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Dan Wang, Penguin Books Ltd. 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.…
Seller Inventory # 9780241729175-RETAIL
- Title
- Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
- Author
- Dan Wang
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Publication year
- 2025
- Book Type
- Hardback
- Binding
- Hardback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0241729173
- ISBN 13
- 9780241729175
- Item weight
- 474 grams
- Dimensions
- 164
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
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.
‘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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Book Grocer
Tullamarine, VIC, Australia
AbeBooks seller since October 15, 2025
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