Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (hardcover)

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.