Dan Wang

From an indispensable voice on China (Evan Osnos) comes a riveting, first-hand account of China's seismic progress. 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....

A new theory of personhood makes the case that a "person" has always been an aesthetic category, not just a legal, political, or moral one. What 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...