Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

Non-Fiction Forum: Words & Wine in-person

Hosted by Peter Lamell, Dianne Jacobs & Tony Nippard

From an indispensable voice on China comes a riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress.

The book we are reading and discussing is Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang.

* New York Times Bestseller
* Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year. 

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. 

Breakneck (Penguin 2025) 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.

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.

Join us for drinks at this Words & Wine in-person Non-Fiction Forum that marks the start of another great year of good conversations in good company about good books. The enjoyment of participating in these intimate discussions is that everyone who attends gets to comment on the book we’ve read, exchange ideas with fellow readers and share their perspectives.

Here's the full reading list for the rest of the year.