![\"Book](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/book_wang-525x630.jpg\")
It was spotted on the desk of Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Aides to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer\u00a0reportedly read\u00a0it on their recent trips to China. It made\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0bestseller list, was named one of\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s Best Books of the\u00a0Year, and\u00a0was shortlisted for the\u00a0Financial Times<\/em>\u00a0Business Book of the Year.\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0praised it for its clarity and urgency<\/a>. And it landed Wang on some of the most influential\u00a0news programs<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0podcasts<\/a>\u00a0in America.<\/p>\n Yet when Wang (pronounced \u201cWong\u201d) joins a video call with\u00a0Rochester Review<\/em>\u00a0from outside the Hoover Institution\u2014a public policy think tank at Stanford, where he is a research fellow in its History Lab\u2014he seems amused by the notion that his work has had an impact.<\/p>\n \u201cYou never really know what happens when you write a book,\u201d Wang says. \u201cOne always hopes that people will pick it up and read it.\u00a0I\u2019m\u00a0glad some people have.\u201d<\/p>\n Wang attributes some of the book\u2019s success to timing. It came out in a year of headlines about China, from the trade war to\u00a0DeepSeek. It was also published a few months after\u00a0Abundance<\/em>, another bestseller by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. That book has been called a guide for reforming government and overcoming socioeconomic problems in America\u2014if progressives can stop blocking big dreams and\u00a0good ideas\u00a0with what the authors call \u201can endless catalog of rules and restraints.\u201d<\/p>\n Both primed readers for the idea that Americans are right to be frustrated by the state of their state. \u201cThe stars aligned,\u201d Wang says.<\/p>\n Breakneck<\/em>\u00a0examines why the United States struggles to build housing, high-speed rail, and energy infrastructure at speed and scale while China\u00a0appears to erect\u00a0towering bridges, superhighways and gleaming railways, and sprawling factories overnight. Wang\u2019s conclusion: The American elite is \u201cmade up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction,\u201d\u00a0whereas\u00a0China is run by a \u201ctechnocratic class, made up mostly of engineers, that excels at construction.\u201d<\/p>\n China, Wang writes, \u201cis an engineering state building at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States\u2019 lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.\u201d<\/p>\n It may be tempting to view Wang as an overnight success. But\u00a0Breakneck<\/em>\u00a0was seven years in the making, and Wang\u2019s ascent to his rarefied perch in the global conversation about power, technology, and economic development was anything but linear.<\/p>\n The foundation for his book is a series of annual letters he wrote to family, friends, and followers that chronicled his observations during the seven years he spent in China after graduating from the URochester, a graduation that almost\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0happen.<\/p>\n He recalls his years at Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ with gratitude. He enrolled in large part, he says, because the University made going to college possible for him. Born in southwest China, Wang immigrated with his family at age seven to Canada, where he was raised mostly in Ottawa before his parents relocated to the Philadelphia suburbs when he was a teenager. As a Canadian citizen from a family he describes as being \u201cnot well off,\u201d Wang required \u201csubstantial financial aid\u201d to attend college. Ä¢¹½´«Ã½\u2019s generosity was the deciding factor.<\/p>\n \u201cI was able to graduate from college debt-free,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has been a nice thing.\u201d<\/p>\n But he was, by his own admission, an unremarkable student, despite earning accolades. In 2013, he was recognized as the\u00a0\u201cStudent Employee of the Year\u201d<\/a>\u00a0for his work as a news assistant in the Office of Communications.<\/p>\n In nominating him, then\u2013Associate Vice President of Communications Larry\u00a0Arbeiter\u00a0wrote that Wang had an uncanny knack for framing stories about the University that drew national media attention. \u201cThat kind of success is highly sought by experienced professionals,\u201d\u00a0Arbeiter\u00a0wrote, \u201cand is basically unheard of by a student.\u201d<\/p>\n When he\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0working in the office, Wang roamed the stacks in Rush\u00a0Rhees\u00a0or hunkered down in his \u201cdefault study space\u201d in the library\u2019s music section. \u201cIt was a tremendously pleasing experience to walk through so many books and be able to pull out books as one\u00a0wishes,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n He devoured the works of Edith Wharton and Honor\u00e9 de Balzac. In the music section, he browsed scores and once copied a Gustav Mahler symphony by hand,\u00a0measure\u00a0by measure. Wang did the same with prose, retyping articles in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0as something of a self-directed monastic apprenticeship aimed at absorbing the language, cadence, and rhythm of masters of their craft.<\/p>\n \u201cI think I did that three or four times, just rewrote the entire article by retyping it to see the choices a writer makes,\u201d Wang says. \u201cAnd I did the same thing as a music student because I thought seeing the choices a composer makes was important.\u201d<\/p>\n Wang majored in philosophy, wrestling with logic and classical texts that helped him hone arguments. But it was an economics professor, Michael Rizzo, who had the biggest impact on him as a student.<\/p>\n Rizzo, he says, organized reading circles of the works of Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek that left an impression on Wang and exposed him to great thinkers of the economics blogosphere like Tyler Cowen, who later became an intellectual influence. (Cowen\u2019s praise for Breakneck<\/em>\u00a0as \u201carguably the best book of the year flat out\u201d is displayed prominently on its\u00a0cover.)<\/p>\n \u201cDan was the kind of student who inspired me to want to learn\u00a0more\u00a0myself, and he had an extreme restlessness about him that resonated then and still does today,\u201d Rizzo says.<\/p>\n That restlessness became more\u00a0apparent\u00a0than ever when, after his junior year, Wang dropped out.<\/p>\n Wang had landed a job in marketing and communications in Toronto at the cloud-based e-commerce platform Shopify when the company was in its infancy. He was making good money and enjoyed the work. \u201cThere was a point in my life when I thought I was going to be quite happy to be a dropout,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n But\u00a0Ä¢¹½´«Ã½\u00a0officials persisted in trying to persuade him to\u2028return and finish his degree. He\u00a0says he told them\u00a0he preferred to stay at Shopify. \u201cThen they asked, \u2018Is there anything you would like to do?\u2019\u201d Wang recalls. \u201cI\u2019m\u00a0being a bit cheeky here, but I said, \u2018You know, I would like to spend my last semester drinking beer in Germany.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cAnd, again, I\u2019m being stylized and cheeky, but they said, \u2018We have a program for that!\u2019\u201d Wang finished his degree in Freiburg im Breisgau through the Institute for the International Education of Students, better known as IES Abroad.<\/p>\n He skipped commencement to take a content marketing job in Silicon Valley at the supply chain logistics company Flexport. There he stood at the corner of global trade and technology\u2014an intersection that would become the backbone of Breakneck<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cRochester mailed me my diploma,\u201d Wang says. \u201cBut I\u2019m glad I had the patience to finish my degree.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2017, Wang moved to China. He joined an economic research firm as a technology analyst, writing about semiconductors and clean-tech manufacturing primarily for an audience of hedge fund clients around the world.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt like I moved to China on the cusp of a technological flowering. I knew people were underestimating China, but living there was kind of like being on a very different branch of the technological tree that Silicon Valley wasn\u2019t going down.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The country was, in many ways, familiar terrain. He had visited relatives there growing up and spoke fluent Mandarin thanks to his mother, a former television news anchor, who saw to that.<\/p>\n But living there as an adult, Wang\u00a0observed\u00a0distinct differences between the China he knew as a child and his homes in Canada and the United States. While Silicon Valley cast itself as the unquestioned center of technological innovation, he saw in China a country that was positioning itself to compete, often ferociously. There was a sense of optimism.<\/p>\n The country was churning out new cars, including varieties of electric vehicles, in a fraction of the time that American companies did. It leapfrogged from credit cards to mobile payments. Tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance were going toe-to-toe with their peers in the West.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt like I moved to China on the cusp of a technological flowering,\u201d Wang says. \u201cThe magnitude was not quite what I expected. I knew people were underestimating China, but living there was kind of like being on a very different branch of the technological tree that Silicon Valley wasn\u2019t going down.\u201d<\/p>\n He chronicled his observations and thoughts in his letters and eventually compiled them into a narrative in Breakneck<\/em>, where he framed the differences between his native and adopted countries as the result of an \u201cengineering mindset\u201d in China that valued ideating, building, and scaling, and a \u201clawyerly\u201d one in the United States that regulated, litigated, and protected.<\/p>\n To drive home his point, he details how in 2008 both countries began construction of\u00a0roughly 800\u00a0miles of high-speed rail\u2014in China\u00a0\u2028between Beijing and Shanghai, and in the United States between San Francisco and Los Angeles. China opened its line three years later at a cost of\u00a0$36 billion. California is still struggling to complete the first phase of its line, and authorities estimate it\u00a0won\u2019t\u00a0be operational until 2032 at a price tag of up to\u00a0$128 billion.<\/p>\n Wang is not romantic about China. He fiercely criticizes its authoritarian reach in areas like its one-child policy, \u201czero Covid\u201d lockdowns, censorship, and individual rights. He says he wishes the country were \u201c50 percent more lawyerly.\u201d On the other hand, he wishes the United States were \u201c20 percent more engineering.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBuilding homes should not be that difficult,\u201d Wang says of America\u2019s housing shortage. \u201cWe know how to build homes.\u201d<\/p>\n Wang left China in 2023 to return to the United States. \u201cI choose the West,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s\u00a0unambiguous. I want the United States, with its values, to succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, he splits his time between Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his wife is a professor at the University of Michigan, and Northern California, where he works at the Hoover Institution under another\u00a0Ä¢¹½´«Ã½\u00a0alumnus, Stephen Kotkin \u201981.<\/p>\n But\u00a0Breakneck<\/em>\u00a0has Wang hopscotching the globe for speaking engagements. He is, it seems, moving at breakneck speed and, like he did at the URochester, engineering his own future.<\/p>\n This story appears in the spring 2026 issue of <\/em>Rochester Review<\/a>, the magazine of the Ä¢¹½´«Ã½<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For seven years, Dan Wang \u201915 observed, documented, and analyzed a nation changing at breakneck speed. Now he\u2019s got world leaders hanging on his every word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1262,"featured_media":703062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41112,456],"tags":[42,42902,21482,19242,16072],"class_list":["post-701642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-magazine","category-society-culture","tag-alumni","tag-class-of-2015","tag-department-of-philosophy","tag-global-engagement","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLearning from the masters<\/h3>\n
![\"Larry](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Dan-Wang-Student-Employee.jpg\")
A detour, then a diploma<\/h3>\n
![\"Dan](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Dan-Wang-in-China.jpeg\")
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