Dan Wang (王丹) is a renowned poet and a former student leader of the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China. His literary work often draws from his personal experiences with activism and political oppression. Wang's poetry is characterized by profound reflections on the loss of freedom, the resilience of the human spirit, and the search for identity in tumultuous times. His writings resonate with a powerful personal voice, offering a unique perspective on the complexities of Chinese history and society.
Specially designed for young adult and adult learners, this four-level beginner Mandarin Chinese course employs a communicative approach to language learning. The Workbook extends and reinforces the material learnt in the Student's Book with a variety of speaking and listening activities to help students become confident Chinese language speakers.
A riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress and a whole new way of understanding its rise America 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. In Breakneck, 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. As the US and China are gearing up for a new Cold War, Breakneck 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.