季風人文講壇第68期：Dan Wang

Dan Wang on Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

with Dan Wang

September 4, 2025｜In English

Author Dan Wang discusses his new book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, driven by a few simple ideas: that Americans and Chinese are fundamentally alike—restless, eager for shortcuts, ultimately driving most of the world’s big changes. That their rivalry should not be reasoned through with worn-out terms from the past century like socialist, democratic, or neoliberal. And that both countries are tangles of imperfection, delivering—through competition—self-inflicted wounds beyond the wildest dreams of the other.

About the Speaker 

Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover History Lab. He was previously a fellow at the Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center and lived in China from 2017 to 2023 as the technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics. His essays have been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, New York Magazine, and more.