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Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the FutureBook

by Dan Wang, 2025

Who uses, recommends or left Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

4 people

Henry Farrell
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS, co-author of Underground Empire, and author of the Programmable Mutter newsletter.
loved

Dan Wang suggests in his fantastic forthcoming book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

Farrell on the unravelling of the Washington consensus about technology and national security.

2025-08-19·programmablemutter.com ↗

Jason Furman
Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard and former Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers.
recommended

It's powerful because it's simple without being simplistic and, like Rogoff's book, is interspersed with engaging personal stories that deepen the substantive argument.

Five Books interview on the best economics books of 2025

2025-12-21·fivebooks.com ↗

Tyler Cowen
Economist at George Mason University and co-author of the blog Marginal Revolution.
recommended

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

Cowen's year-end list of the best non-fiction books of 2025.

2025-11-22·marginalrevolution.com ↗

Jasmine Sun
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
recommended

Breakneck is also worth reading because it's fun: it's a political economy book with chutzpah, as China letter aficionados will expect.

A July 2025 link roundup of what she read, watched and used that month.

2025-08-02·jasmi.news ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.