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Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
An engineering-state lens on China’s physical progress, social costs, and rivalry with the United States. The book I keep tapping when the China discourse gets too easy.
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Ideas worth keeping close
A working library
Not a scorecard or a completion log. Just the books that changed, sharpened, or complicated how I see technology, capital, and power.
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House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company
A company history that makes Huawei legible through Ren Zhengfei, state power, and the collision between business and geopolitics.
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Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America
A life spanning forced labor in the Gobi, US academia, and Asian private equity—modern China told at human scale.
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Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
The Santa Fe Institute story, and a durable way to think about systems whose order emerges without a central planner. Still waiting for Waldrop’s AI-era sequel.
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