Dan Wang

The New York Times bestseller, Financial Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year The book we need to understand China today: a riveting, first-hand account of its seismic progress from an indispensable expert voice For close to a decade, Dan Wang has been observing China's tumultuous and astounding growth. The state has constructed towering bridges, gleaming railways and sprawling factories to improve economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout society. China has grown so quickly in part by beating America at its own game: capitalism and harnessing the restless energy of a vast population. Here Wang blends political and economic analysis with reportage into a provocative new framework for understanding China - one that helps us see America more clearly, too. Whereas China is an engineering state, relentlessly building big, the United States has transformed into a lawyerly society, stalling every attempt to make change, both good and bad. As relations between the US and China are tense and uncertain and the potential for dreadful conflict looms, Wang offers an inventive new way of thinking about the two superpowers. Breakneck reveals that each country points towards a better path for the other. How much better the world would be, he argues, if Americans could live in a society not only governed by lawyers, and Chinese citizens could live with a state that values their individual liberties.

A new theory of personhood makes the case that a “person” has always been an aesthetic category, not just a legal, political, or moral one.   What does it mean to be a person? One might think of the possession of certain rights, having the capacity for love, or being self-determined. But if words like “person” or “love” seem to carry an internal meaning, where does this meaningfulness come from? Lyric Personhood contends that to be encultured in the modern West is to learn, on top of everything else, an unspoken and mostly felt sense of what it means to be someone, a sense transmitted not only in language but also through encounters with aesthetic form. Through close readings that span nineteenth-century European opera, commercial cinema, and amateur YouTube proposal videos, Dan Wang shows that a “person” has become an aesthetic concept—and not just a legal, moral, political, or philosophical one—in the last two hundred years of Western culture. It’s hard to let go of the organizing promise of romantic love, the dream of therapeutic “health,” and the aspiration to belong to national culture, Wang argues, because these longings have been shaped by an archive of sentimental and melodramatic works that trains people's expectations for life, genre, and even the knowing promised in theory itself. Tracing a surprisingly continuous imagination of personhood through opera and film aesthetics, Lyric Personhood introduces modes of reading audiovisual works that allow a longer story to be told about the forms that make personhood sensible in the West.

From an indispensable voice on China comes a riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress For close to a decade, Dan Wang has been observing China's tumultuous and astounding growth. The state has constructed towering bridges, gleaming railways and sprawling factories to improve economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout society. China has grown so quickly in part by beating America at its own game: capitalism and harnessing the restless energy of a vast population. Here Wang blends political and economic analysis with reportage into a provocative new framework for understanding China - one that helps us see America more clearly, too. Whereas China is an engineering state, relentlessly building big, the United States has transformed into a lawyerly society, stalling every attempt to make change, both good and bad. As relations between the US and China are tense and uncertain and the potential for dreadful conflict looms, Wang offers an inventive new way of thinking about the two superpowers. Breakneck reveals that each country points towards a better path for the other. How much better the world would be, he argues, if Americans could live in a society not only governed by lawyers, and Chinese citizens could live with a state that values their individual liberties.