{"title":"Dan Wang","description":"\u003cp\u003eDan Wang's works explore the intersections of history, culture, and the arts with a sharp, insightful lens. Readers can expect narratives that delve into the complexities of human experience, blending rich historical detail with lyrical prose.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the intensity of conflict to the subtleties of personal identity, Wang's writing captures both the grandeur of military history and the nuanced textures of cultural expression. His books offer thought-provoking reflections that resonate beyond their immediate subjects.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"breakneck-by-dan-wang-9780241729175","title":"Breakneck","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom an \u003cem\u003eindispensable voice on China\u003c\/em\u003e (Evan Osnos) comes a riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAmerica used to pride itself on ambition. Today, it looks stuck. Meanwhile, China has been busy building the future. Over the past six years, technology analyst Dan Wang lived through China's astonishing, messy progress and the dissolution of its relationship to the West.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eBreakneck\u003c\/em\u003e, Wang offers a new framework for understanding China—which helps us to see global geopolitics more clearly too. While China is an engineering state, fearlessly building megaprojects, America is a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. Building big has fuelled China's economic ascent. At the same time, social engineering has led to unbearable costs, including the traumas of zero-Covid and the one-child policy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWang traverses China's dazzling metropolises and factory complexes, blending political and economic analysis with reportage to show how the Communist Party's darkening ambitions have unsettled its people.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAs the US and China are gearing up for a new Cold War, \u003cem\u003eBreakneck\u003c\/em\u003e reveals both the remarkable strengths and the appalling weaknesses of the engineering state. China has learned from the West's successes and failures—and now we in turn can learn from China, not least by taking its global ambitions seriously.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House Distribution","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46545540514028,"sku":"9780241729175","price":55.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780241729175.jpg?v=1750038039"},{"product_id":"lyric-personhood-by-dan-wang-9780226843575","title":"Lyric Personhood","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eA new theory of personhood makes the case that a \"person\" has always been an aesthetic category, not just a legal, political, or moral one.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhat 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? \u003cem\u003eLyric Personhood\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003esomeone\u003c\/em\u003e, a sense transmitted not only in language but also through encounters with aesthetic form.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThrough 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt'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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eTracing a surprisingly continuous imagination of personhood through opera and film aesthetics, \u003cem\u003eLyric Personhood\u003c\/em\u003e introduces modes of reading audiovisual works that allow a longer story to be told about the forms that make personhood sensible in the West.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47031798137068,"sku":"9780226843575","price":118.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/58be5a4bbd6705cc901ad3d0f0ff0198.jpg?v=1764154273"},{"product_id":"breakneck-by-dan-wang-9781802067798","title":"Breakneck","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom an \u003cem\u003eindispensable voice on China\u003c\/em\u003e (Evan Osnos) comes a riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAmerica used to pride itself on ambition. Today, it looks stuck. Meanwhile, China has been busy building the future. Over the past six years, technology analyst Dan Wang lived through China's astonishing, messy progress and the dissolution of its relationship to the West.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eBreakneck\u003c\/em\u003e, Wang offers a new framework for understanding China – which helps us to see global geopolitics more clearly too. While China is an engineering state, fearlessly building megaprojects, America is a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. Building big has fuelled China's economic ascent. At the same time, social engineering has led to unbearable costs, including the traumas of zero-Covid and the one-child policy. Wang traverses China's dazzling metropolises and factory complexes, blending political and economic analysis with reportage to show how the Communist Party's darkening ambitions have unsettled its people.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAs the US and China are gearing up for a new Cold War, \u003cem\u003eBreakneck\u003c\/em\u003e reveals both the remarkable strengths and the appalling weaknesses of the engineering state. China has learned from the West's successes and failures – and now we in turn can learn from China, not least by taking its global ambitions seriously.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House NZ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47976654536940,"sku":"9781802067798","price":35.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781802067798-breakneck.jpg?v=1784694472"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.pro\/collections\/dan-wang.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}