New Books In East Asian Studies

Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, and previously a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Before that, he was an analyst focused on China’s technology capabilities at Gavekal Dragonomics, based across Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. Dan is perhaps best known for a series of annual letters, published between 2017-2023, which encapsulate his reflections on Chinese society; his writing has also appeared in other outlets including Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and beyond. In this New Books Network Episode, Dan discusses his debut book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Norton, 2025). Styled as an aggregation of seven of his famed annual letters, Breakneck presents a dichotomy of China and the US as an “engineering state” and "lawyerly society” respectively, and traces how China’s “engineering state” has shaped Chinese society over the last decade.  Breakneck is now available for purchase online and in physical bookstores.