by Dan Wang
First published 2025
Technology analyst Dan Wang explores China's rapid transformation in this investigation of the world's most important rivalry. Wang has witnessed China's extraordinary development firsthand for nearly ten years. He travels through gleaming cities and massive industrial sites to show how the Communist Party's grand ambitions have affected ordinary Chinese people. The country's focus on building enormous projects has driven economic growth, but social control has created severe problems. Zero-COVID policies traumatized citizens, while the one-child policy left lasting damage. Wang argues that China operates as an engineering state that pursues massive infrastructure projects without pause. Meanwhile, America has become a lawyerly society that blocks progress at every turn. The book presents a new way to understand the competition between these superpowers. Wang shows that America must learn from both China's impressive capabilities and its terrible failures to recover its own drive for ambitious achievement.
Genres: business, political-science, economics, non-fiction, technology, 21st-century, current-affairs, academic
Vibes: fast-paced, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: investigative-journalism, social-commentary
Setting: China, United States
Period: 21st-century
288 pages · Hardcover · W. W. Norton & Company