This book takes a hard look at China and the USA, and some of the contrasts and similarities between them. The author is a young American with Chinese ties and has a lot of interesting ideas about how the Chinese government operates and what America needs to do in order to improve. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing I liked right away is the author\u2019s caution – both countries need to do better to make life better for the citizens who live there. This is not a zero-sum game, and it would be simplistic to look at it that way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thanks to his insights, and his experiences in China there is a lot of timely information that I think would contribute to a better understanding for Americans reading the book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the first half of the book did a great job of looking at some key events in the history of China and how they see themselves, the second half of the book is almost entirely anecdotal stories which I got less benefit from. There is a very long chapter on how China handled the COVID pandemic, and that was interesting to me. Most people I meet are eager to forget that chapter of history (wherever they are from) but I appreciated the in-depth coverage here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is also a long section on the author\u2019s family and background, which felt sort of self-centered to me – I would prefer a bigger picture view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next I am reading The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This book takes a hard look at China and the USA, and some of the contrasts and similarities between them. The author is a young American with Chinese ties and has a lot of interesting ideas about how the Chinese government operates and what America needs to do in order to improve. One thing I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Books: Breakneck by Dan Wang","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-103","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}