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Breakneck

Breakneck

£25.00 GBP
£25.00 GBP
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  • All proceeds directly fund our people-powered, independent journalism
  • 100% recyclable packaging sourced from Kite Packaging, a worker-owned and carbon-neutral certified company.

America used to pride itself on ambition. Today, it looks stuck. Meanwhile, China has been busy building the future. Over the past six years, technology analyst Dan Wang lived through China’s astonishing, messy progress and the dissolution of its relationship to the West.

In Breakneck, Dan Wang offers a new framework for understanding China and, in turn, global geopolitics at large. While China is an engineering state, fearlessly building megaprojects, America is a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. Building big has fuelled China’s economic ascent. At the same time, social engineering has led to unbearable costs, including the traumas of zero-Covid and the one-child policy. Wang traverses China’s dazzling metropolises and factory complexes, blending political and economic analysis with reportage to show how the Communist Party’s darkening ambitions have unsettled its people.

As the US and China are gearing up for a new Cold War, Breakneck reveals both the remarkable strengths and the appalling weaknesses of China’s engineering state. China has learned from the West's successes and failures - and now we in turn can learn from China, not least by taking its global ambitions seriously.

Author bio

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.

Ethical policy

All of our packaging is from Kite Packaging, a worker-owned company committed to minimising their impact on the environment  at every step of production.

To make it as easy as possible to reuse or recycle the packaging once your order arrives, everything is packed in recyclable materials which can be recycled in standard council-issued recycling bins. Our void filling packaging is either recyclable cardboard or reused bubble wrap from previous orders. 

For more about our ethical pledges and manufacturing partners, check out our full Ethical Policy.

Shipping, delivery & returns

UK delivery

All orders are sent via Royal Mail’s 48 hour tracked delivery service, with an average delivery time of 2-3 working days. We aim to post orders within seven calendar days from the point of purchase.  

International deliveries

We dispatch all of our overseas orders via Royal Mail’s tracked delivery service with an average delivery timeframe of 2 weeks. All international orders may be subject to duties and taxes which may incur additional costs. Please check your order tracking details, as you may have to collect your order from customs or a post office.

Due to the volatile nature of US import duty charges, we are sadly no longer able to ship to the USA.   

For more information, check out our full Shipping, Delivery & Returns Policy.

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