Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

China’s tech successes are no convincing demonstration that a wise state can plan the future. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. It’s not encouraging for the future of Chinese and American relations that there are only about a thousand American students studying in China. In the 1990s, Henan province suffered an AIDS outbreak after blood banks reused needles and commingled diseased blood with healthy blood; the government spent years silencing whistleblowers in this slower-moving epidemic before finally confronting the problem.