China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

In this special crossover episode of Pekingology and the ChinaPower Podcast, CSIS Freeman Chair Senior Fellow Henrietta Levin and CSIS ChinaPower Project Deputy Director and Fellow Brian Hart are joined by Dan Wang to discuss his new book, ⁠Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future⁠. The conversation unpacks China’s monumentalist obsessions, the consequences of building at the largest possible scale, China’s rapid progress on key technologies, and what happens when Beijing applies its engineering mindset to social challenges.

Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. Previously, he was a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and a lecturer at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. From 2017 to 2023, he worked in China as the technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, based in Hong Kong, Beijing, and then Shanghai.

Pekingology is the podcast that unpacks Chinese politics, the inner workings of the Communist Party, and how China's domestic and foreign policy will impact the world.