Daniel Cheng is a former sociology PhD student and independent researcher on Chinese political economy and technology.
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in South Korea yesterday to strike a deal to end the trade war between their two nations. Instead, China showed that it had learned from its rival how to use its economic heft as a weapon.
In the US, lawyers gridlock politics, and in China, engineers solely concerned with development steamroll individual liberties. A new book argues that both nations could learn from one another, but their rivalry is obscuring the social crises they share.