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

 

China expert Dan Wang explains why China needs to slow its pace of building, while America needs to to do the opposite. 

Dan Wang was born in Yunnan, China. Aged seven, his family moved to Canada, hoping to build a better life. As an adult, Wang has lived in both China and the United States, these experiences informing his work as a technology writer. 

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future benefits from an easy to understand premise. China is an engineering culture, capable of producing enormous infrastructure projects on budget and on time, but often of dubious quality and utility. America, on the other hand, is a lawyerly society. Once a great engineering nation, the US now is mired in a thicket of laws, rules and regulations, stopping much needed building. Wang argues that China needs be more lawyerly and adopt some breaks on their engineering zeal, while the US, with its crumbling infrastructure, could learn from China’s can-do approach.

One wouldn’t expect a book on comparative economics and engineering to be such a fun read. Breakneck is just that. Wang brings first hand experience and a gift for organising complex ideas into a rollicking narrative that humanises China - authoritarian on the surface, but messy and complex underneath. 

A brilliant explainer from a generous guide. 

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang. Published by Allen Lane. $55

APRIL2026

The Shortest History of China, by Linda Jaivin

 

A pithy, entertaining short history of China. 

Writer and sinologist Linda Jaivin takes the reader on a speedy, drive-through history of China, starting with Stone Age Peking Man (homo erectus pekinensis) eking out a living along the Yellow River's fertile alluvial plain, through millennia of dynastic rule – the Zhou, the Qin, the Hang etc. – right up to the last great dynasty, the Qing. Incursions from the British (the humiliating Opium Wars) and the Japanese (the Rape of Nanking) during the 20th century caused great instability and civil war. Mao Zedong and the Communist Party would eventually win, only for China to be further plunged into turmoil, with famines and the so-called Cultural Revolution causing extraordinary mayhem and disorder. Jaivin finally documents the economic rise of China in the post-Mao era and ends with a word of caution about the repressive, authoritarian government of President Xi Jinping, with its cult of personality.

Linda Jaivin writes a snappy history, thronged with a teeming cast of great personalities. Special attention is paid to women's contribution, through sketches of female warriors, politicians, scientists, radicals and trailblazers. For those seeking perspective on this complex and multifaceted society, The Shortest History of China is instructive and enjoyable.

The Shortest History of China, by Linda Jaivin. Published by Black Inc. $24.99

Review by Chris Saliba

Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

Academics Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg examine how the Chinese Communist Party influences world affairs by stealth.

Following on from Clive Hamilton's Silent Invasion (2018), which investigated the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on Australia's politics and culture, comes Hidden Hand. This new book is written with Mareike Ohlberg and takes a global perspective, examining in granular detail how the CCP has slowly and quietly made its influence felt in business, politics and academia. In short, it uses money as leverage. Fear of having markets cut off or finance denied makes business leaders and politicians toe the China line, often parroting Xi Jinping's talking points. It's a creeping and insidious infiltration of Western democracy and business. Many of the guilty Western parties (economist Jeffrey Sachs is highlighted in the book) should really know better.

Hidden Hand makes for depressing reading. Its detail and exhaustive research, with its endless listing of names, government bodies and institutions, is often quite dizzying. That said, it's an important book that raises a lot of important questions. For several decades, we in the West have courted China, thinking of it as a capitalist democracy in the making. Instead, it has become increasingly autocratic.

Essential reading for the informed citizen.

Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg. Published by Hardie Grant. $32.99

First published at northmelbournebooks.com.au July 2020