Earlier this week, China showed a power flex with its largest-ever military parade, proudly displaying a triad of nuclear weapons as if they were entries in an engineering expo.

The display came on the heels of a new book looking at how the country is now defined by its ambitious construction projects and scientific feats — while the US is mired in bureaucracy and falling behind.

“China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad,” writes Dan Wang in “ Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future ” (W. W. Norton & Company), out now. This stark differences between the superpowers may very well “define the twenty-first century,” 8

In reporting the book, Wang, a Canadian-bor

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