PROJECT SYNDICATE: Is a Sino-American Synthesis Possible?: Reviewing Dan Wang's "Breakneck"
If you want to know what is driving today’s China or America, Dan Wang’s new book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future <https://danwang.co/breakneck/> is an indispensable guide. Wang shows that the world’s most urgent and challenging twenty-first-century task may be to forge a synthesis of the best of China and America, while avoiding the worst of each…
es, I am biased, because Wang is my friend. But I would say the same thing if I did not know him. Nor am I alone. The economist Tyler Cowen calls Breakneck “arguably the best book of the year flat out.” John Thornhill of the Financial Times calls it “compelling, provocative and highly personal.” Stripe CEO Patrick Collison says that Wang “illuminates China like no one else.” Bloomberg’s Tracy Alloway calls him “one of the best China writers out there.”
At seven, Wang’s family migrated from Yunnan, in China’s far southwest – where the local dialect differs from the Mandarin spoken in Beijing as much as Louisiana Cajun does from the English of Down‑East Maine. He now rotates between Palo Alto and Ann Arbor, and has lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Rochester, Freiburg, San Francisco, Kunming, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and New Haven.
An insider‑outsider across Canada, China, and the United States, Wang finds both China and the US “thrilling, maddening, and bizarre.” Drive around either and you will find places that feel deranged. He does not mean this as a reproach. Unlike tidy Canada, where he feels relaxed, China and America each exhibit the hallmarks of an engine of global change.
READ MOAR at Project Syndicate: <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-and-us-each-can-learn-from-the-other-dan-wangs-breakneck-by-j-bradford-delong-2025-08>