Review

China’s New Gilded Age Comes to Life in ‘Breakneck’

Dan Wang’s account of an engineering state mixes the grand and the intimate. September 19, 2025, 2:30 PM Comment icon View Comments ( )

An aerial view shows several workers in hard hats and vests amid a circular rebar gridded construction site.

On Aug. 1, U.S. President Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, after the release of a report that showed weak jobs numbers. He has since nominated E.J. Antoni, an economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation and a Jan. 6 participant , to replace her. Antoni, who is seen as incompetent or malicious by most of his contemporaries, is likely to put out a dubious set of numbers to serve Trump’s agenda. The politicization of nu

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