Afleveringen
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The summit in Beijing produced a "constructive strategic stability" framework and a warming of tone between the two presidents. But heads of state can announce a multi-year horizon; somebody else has to operationalize it. Does the United States have the people — the linguists, the regional experts, the long-haul institution-builders — to do that work?
This week, I chatted with two Texans answering that question from very different directions. David Firestein is the inaugural president and CEO of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations in Houston. A career State Department officer who served four administrations and spent five years in Beijing, he's one of the few Americans concurrently affiliated with both a Republican and a Democratic presidential legacy institution. Eddie Conger is a retired Marine major and the founder and superintendent of International Leadership of Texas (IL Texas) — a public charter network of 26 campuses serving 26,000 K-12 students and now the largest K-12 Chinese language program in the country. In January, IL Texas became the first-ever K-12 recipient of the Bush China Foundation's George H.W. Bush Award for Educational Excellence in U.S.-China Relations, joining past honorees including Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger.
The conversation tackles what David calls the Texas paradox: the same state that just forced its cities to dissolve their sister-city ties with China, that pioneered the closure of Confucius Institutes, and that has restricted Chinese land purchases is also where the country's deepest K-12 Mandarin pipeline is taking root — and where the most institutionally Texan China foundation has chosen to plant its flag. David and Eddie talk through engagement honestly (no straw-man Jeffersonian-democracy fantasies), the erroneous strategic assumptions undergirding U.S. China policy, what real national-language capacity would look like operationally, what they each saw in the Trump–Xi summit, and what 5,000 IL Texas graduates are already doing in the world.
05:40 — Eddie's path: Marine infantryman to fifth-grade math teacher to the country's largest K-12 Mandarin program09:12 — David on when the Nixon-through-Obama engagement consensus broke (fall 2017) and how the lexicon shifted13:30 — Engagement honestly defined: what its architects actually believed vs. the Jeffersonian-democracy straw man18:30 — The Texas paradox: HB 128, sister cities, Confucius Institutes — and the country's biggest Mandarin program in the same state31:26 — Texas business, Tim Dunn, faith, and the gap between political rhetoric and where Texans actually are41:54 — The Defense Department safety/security story: when one Chinese word ate an entire bilateral agreement46:16 — David's six (or seven) erroneous strategic assumptions: China doesn't want to be us, and it has benefited more than anyone from the current order52:28 — What real national-language capacity would actually look like: NSLI, WALARA, and why the pipeline still runs through one Marine major in Texas01:06:07 — Reading the Beijing summit: the warmth, the "constructive strategic stability" framing, and whether Trump's Taiwan call could blow it all up01:17:10 — Where 5,000 IL Texas graduates are now — White House interns, service academies, doctors, entrepreneurs, and one high-schooler who pulled a stranger out of the surfPaying it Forward
Eddie:
Carlos Carrasco; Emily, who is heading to Taiwan this fall on a one-year high-school program; and another student bound for the University of Texas at Austin who will be sent to South Korea for a semester as a freshman — a rarity at UT. And he closes with Miles, a high-school senior and Marine scholarship recipient who, just weeks ago at a national competition in Florida, heard someone screaming for help in the ocean, called for a boogie board, and swam out to save a drowning swimmer while a crowd of adults stood on the beach. "Others before self," as Eddie puts it — the IL Texas mission statement made flesh.
David:
Frank Zhou, who just graduated from Harvard and chaired the Harvard College China Forum; Selina Gong, a recent graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School involved in its annual China conference; and Dean Dai, a recent graduate of Columbia's SIPA who has been deeply involved in many of the most significant student-run China conferences in the country — and who, as it turns out, was one of the organizers of the University of Chicago U.S.-China Economy and Business Summit where Kaiser spoke earlier this month.
Recommendations:
Eddie: John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present (Henry Holt, 2016)
David: Stephen Roach, Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale, 2022)
Kaiser: David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday, 2023)
Also mentioned: Stephen R. Platt, The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II (Knopf, 2024)
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Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summits
This week I'm joined again by Eric Olander, founder of the China Global South Project, which runs the most indispensable English-language operation going for understanding China's engagement with Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
I came in with a plan: map, region by region, how the capitals of the Global South were reading the back-to-back Trump and Putin visits to Beijing — relief at a steadier U.S.-China modus vivendi, or foreboding at a G2 condominium squeezing shut their room to maneuver. Eric dismantled the premise within ten minutes. The honest answer, he warned me, is that most of the Global South simply isn't watching the way we are — and the disappointment turned out to be the most interesting thing in the room. What looked like the absence of a story was the story. I'd built my questions around one assumption about what mattered; Eric had built his answers around another, and I cop to being schooled.
Once you set the summit framing aside, what Eric's contributors are actually seeing comes into focus: Japan racing to recenter an Asia-Pacific security architecture, a region quietly de-risking from an unreliable United States, fresh cracks in the BRICS, Justin Yifu Lin's “three moves” for Chinese manufacturing, Latin America's “find out” phase, and a Gulf where the Chinese setback so many in Washington insist must exist simply isn't there. We get into all of it — and close on the summit as a remarkable piece of theater, the first since 1945 at which no one quite knew who the most powerful person in the room was.
04:27 — The dominant mood: pro forma coverage, exhaustion, and bigger problems at home
08:15 — Breaking news: the paused $14B Taiwan arms package and the canceled Colby trip
11:15 — The dog that caught the truck: China and the costs of a receding U.S. umbrella
13:00 — "Constructive strategic stability" — new equilibrium or just choreography?
28:23 — The snub: Beijing sends only an ambassador to the BRICS meeting in New Delhi
37:56 — Africa: tariff-free access, the trade imbalance, and Kenya's "collapsed" exports
44:34 — Justin Yifu Lin's "three moves": move up-market, localize, move south
51:00 — Latin America's "find out" phase in Panama, and very low China literacy
57:35 — The Gulf after the war on Iran: who really won?
Paying it Forward:
Boston University's Global Development Policy (GDP) Research Center
Recommendations
Eric: A “rabbit hole” of books on Xi Jinping, currently Party of One by Chun Han Wong (after Kevin Rudd's On Xi Jinping).
Kaiser: Angine de Poitrine, a “microtonal math rock” duo from Quebec — think Frank Zappa meets King Crimson — possibly the thing to breathe new life into progressive rock.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Andrew Seth Meyer, professor of history at CUNY Brooklyn College and the author of a remarkable new book from Oxford University Press, To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor. Sixteen years in the making, it’s the first proper one-volume narrative history of the Warring States in English aimed at a general reader — a gap in the field that Andy has now decisively filled. We talk about why this period — the roughly 260 years between Confucius’s death and Qin’s unification in 221 BCE — really is the deepest layer of Chinese political history that still genuinely matters, and we try together to find the line between responsible historical reasoning about modern China and the kind of lazy essentialism that reaches for Han Feizi every time Xi Jinping makes a speech. Along the way we get into the displacement of the hereditary aristocracy by the shi, the Lüshi Chunqiu as a piece of political genius, why the standard caricature of “Legalist” Qin is wrong, and what it means that the Chinese state is still, in some real sense, running on operating software written in the 4th century BCE.
8:14 – The 16-year gestation, why no general-reader Warring States book existed in English, and what made Andy think he could be the one to write it
11:06 – The romanization headaches: Wei vs. Wey, King Zhao of Qin vs. King Zhao of Yan, and the special agonies of writing about early China for an English audience
14:31 – Why he organized the book by state rather than strictly chronologically — and what that structure lets him do
18:14 – The relevance question: how to take the deep continuity of Chinese political life seriously without falling into the orientalist “eternal China” trap
25:52 – Why the Warring States is properly called a revolution: the destruction of Zhou-era hereditary aristocracy and the rise of the shi
33:15 – Fukuyama’s claim that Qin built the world’s first genuinely modern state — is “modern” the right word?
36:30 – Qin’s 38 commanderies, why the radical version lasted only 15 years, and the Han retreat: aristocracy or regional autonomy?
39:46 – Reading the Hundred Schools as embedded political actors rather than tidy textbook categories — and the Jixia Academy as ancient Brookings
44:06 – The Lüshi Chunqiu as a brilliant piece of political propaganda, and what its tripartite cosmological structure was actually arguing
52:31 – Why the cartoon-legalist version of the Qin is wrong: the 70 erudites, the Taishan stelae, and what the book-burning episode really was
57:05 – The axial age question: pattern-matching or something real?
1:00:40 – What the Warring States actually has to teach us about China in 2026: zhong guo as aspiration, not description
1:05:08 – How the Warring States is taught in China and Taiwan today, and what archaeology is doing to the field
1:08:36 – Constant self-reinvention as the real Chinese legacy, and why no plausible future China fully repudiates the CCP
Paying it forward:
Avital Rom (postdoc at Cambridge, early Chinese cultural history, editor of a forthcoming volume on disability and impairment in early China)
Liang Cai (Notre Dame, new book on Han-era jurisprudence and legal traditions)
Recommendations:
Andy: Hadestown on Broadway — and Anaïs Mitchell’s original concept album
Kaiser: To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis (audiobook especially recommended)
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This week I’m sharing the fourth and final installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — “The China Debate We’re Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead.” The first three episodes featured Jessica Chen Weiss’s opening remarks and the panels on what China wants, what the United States wants, and tech rivalry and competing visions of the future. This final installment is a fireside conversation between Henry Farrell and Alondra Nelson, followed by Jessica’s closing remarks.
Once again, my deep thanks to Jessica Chen Weiss, ACF’s inaugural faculty director, for organizing this terrific conference and for so generously letting me share this audio with Sinica listeners.
Henry Farrell, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at SAIS, sits down with Alondra Nelson — Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and former Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — for what turns out to be the day’s most generative reframing of the AI race. Henry begins by asking how it is that ideas once confined to 1980s science fiction — the singularity, AGI, brains-in-vats — have come to anchor mainstream American AI policy discourse. Alondra traces the genealogy back to the “Californian ideology” and the long history of outré thinking in Silicon Valley, but her real point is that something has shifted: U.S. negative sentiment around AI has been climbing and plateauing high since 2022, even as adoption has spread — the opposite of the usual technology-acceptance curve, and the opposite of what’s happening in China, Nigeria, or Brazil.
From there the conversation opens up into what I found to be its richest vein: the contrast between a Cartesian, disembodied American conception of AI — “we’re working on the brains,” as Sam Altman put it when OpenAI shut down its robotics team in 2022 — and a more embodied approach that integrates the cognitive and the physical, which is part of what’s powered China’s advances in advanced manufacturing and robotics. Alondra is sharp on the costs of the brain-in-a-vat framing: it treats AI as a state of exception in which existing laws and institutions somehow don’t apply, and it lets us float aspirational claims (”AI will cure cancer”) that elide all the clunky institutional stewardship actually required to get from aspiration to outcome.
She also offers an incisive reading of the Trump administration’s AI policy — which, she argues, is misleadingly described as “deregulatory.” Between export controls, the golden share in Intel, immigration restrictions on STEM talent, and the administration’s tight stewardship of who wins and who loses in the AI ecosystem, this is industrial policy by another name — and a narrowing of democratic input over decisions of enormous infrastructural consequence.
The conversation closes with Henry asking what a small-d democratic successor administration ought to do, and Alondra’s answer is bracingly practical: get rid of the state of exception, take the material supply chain of AI seriously (data centers, electricity, critical minerals, communities), let state-level policy generate evidence about what works, and aim for high-watermark aspirations — North Stars, in the spirit of the AI Bill of Rights — rather than pretending the technology itself will deliver our values.
Jessica then offers her closing remarks, thanking the panelists, previewing the ACF Insights Series, and putting out the call for new junior fellows at the Institute.
Participants:
Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study; former Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Henry Farrell, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins SAIS
Closing remarks: Jessica Chen Weiss, David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies and Inaugural Faculty Director, ACF
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This week on Sinica, I chat with Ali Wyne, Senior Research and Advocacy Adviser for U.S.-China at the International Crisis Group, just hours after President Trump's plane left Chinese airspace at the end of a three-day state visit to Beijing. We dig into the new framework Xi Jinping put on the table — what Beijing is calling 中美建设性战略稳定关系, a "constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability" — and ask whether it's a genuine doctrine of mutual restraint or a rhetorical tripwire that future American moves can be characterized as having violated. Ali and I work through Foreign Minister Wang Yi's morning-after media briefing, including his striking claim that the U.S. side now "does not accept" Taiwan independence — a notable shift from the standard American formulation. We talk about what Trump actually said on Taiwan in his Air Force One press gaggle and in his Fox News interview with Bret Baier, the gap between Trump's account of Xi's private remarks on Iran and what Beijing is willing to say publicly, and whether AI can serve as a durable basis for cooperation coming out of the summit. We also turn to the American domestic side: the bind Democrats find themselves in trying to critique Trump's China engagement without out-hawking him, the generational data showing a striking gap in American attitudes toward China that transcends partisan division, and the question of when that shift in mass opinion actually starts to bite on policy.
Timestamps
3:46 — Big-picture takeaways: Trump's stumble into a more sober appreciation of Chinese power
6:24 — The new Chinese framing: "constructive strategic stability" and what Beijing wants from it
10:21 — Unpacking the framework: Wu Xinbo, Sun Chenghao, and the nuclear-arms-control genealogy
14:52 — Doctrine of mutual restraint or rhetorical tripwire? The two readings circulating among China-watchers
18:04 — The Democrats' hawkish trap: what a non-out-hawking critique of Trump on China would actually sound like
23:50 — Who in the Democratic political class is modeling the right posture
28:38 — The generational gap in American attitudes toward China, and why it transcends partisan divisions
33:32 — When the public-opinion shift starts to bite on policy formation
37:16 — Taiwan: Xi's fire-and-water language, Rubio's "raise, note, move on," and what Trump said to Bret Baier
42:47 — Wang Yi's "does not accept" formulation and the marker Beijing is laying down
47:32 — Iran and Hormuz: the gap between what Trump says Xi told him privately and what Beijing will say publicly
51:57 — Closing: where Ali ends the week, and the case for Chinese strategic patience 55:18 — Recommended reading on the summit: Ryan Hass in The Atlantic and Jessica Chen Weiss in the FT
Paying It Forward
Afra Wang, author of the Concurrent newsletter — one of the most thoughtful writers on Chinese technological development and what it tells us about broader socioeconomic shifts in ChinaAllie Matthias, senior research assistant at Brookings, for her recent essay with Jonathan Czin in China Leadership Monitor on the inversion of the "peak China" thesisMackenzie Miller, program manager of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China RelationsKate Gross-Whitaker, research and editorial associate at the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF)Recommendations
Ali:
No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain by Rebecca SolnitA World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael PollanLiving in the Present with John Prine by Tom PiazzaKaiser:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad — a National Book Award–winning cri de coeur from a brilliant writer, in the same unflinching register as Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and MeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded as a live joint webcast with NYRB/Poets and Equator Magazine, I sit down with Eleanor Goodman — poet, scholar, research associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center, and one of the most accomplished translators working between Chinese and English — to talk about the extraordinary Sichuan-born poet Zheng Xiaoqiong (郑小琼).
Born in 1980 in a mountain village, trained as a nurse, Zheng joined the great tide of internal migration in her early 20s, ending up on the assembly line of a hardware factory in Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta. She picked up a pen after a workplace injury — part of her finger taken off by a lathe — and what came out across poems, essays, and reportage has made her one of the most singular voices in contemporary Chinese literature. Her trajectory from the assembly line to the editorial desk of an official literary magazine is, as far as I know, essentially without parallel.
Eleanor has been translating Zheng since around 2013, and the partnership they've built has given Anglophone readers access to a body of work that defies easy categorization — at once intimate and historical, ethnographic and lyric, tender and unsparing. We talk about how they met, about Zheng's resistance to the "migrant worker poet" label, about the bodily feminism that runs through her verse, about her unmoralizing portraits of sex workers, about lost youth and the way the body keeps the ledger of factory time. Eleanor reads Zheng's poem "Woman Worker: Youth Pinned to a Workstation" (女工: 被固定在卡桌上的青春) in both Chinese and her English translation — and it is, every time, devastating.
Huge thanks to Abigail Dunn at NYRB Poets and Ratik Asokan at Equator for organizing this conversation and for inviting me to host it, to Eleanor for her generosity and her brilliance, and most of all to Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose voice — even when she cannot be with us in person — comes through with absolute clarity.
Eleanor's translation of Zheng Xiaoqiong's In the Roar of the Machine is available from NYRB Poets. The Equator selections, drawn from Zheng's long-form prose, are available at Equator Magazine.
05:07 — How Eleanor and Zheng met in 2013, and why a book had to happen08:14 — Navigating the awkward proposition of China for the Western left10:50 — Zheng's trajectory: from a Sichuan village to the assembly line to the editor's desk16:29 — Resisting the "migrant worker poet" (打工诗人) label20:47 — Conventions of the genre: exhaustion, iron, lost identity, the screw in the machine24:58 — Who gets translated into English, and why28:34 — The translator's ethics: how do you render a factory poem honestly?32:42 — Eleanor reads "Woman Worker, Youth Pinned to a Workstation" (女工被固定在卡桌上的青春) in Chinese and English37:14 — Zheng's bodily feminism: irregular periods, a different way of caring40:37 — Lost youth and the passage of time44:36 — Sex work and women's labor: portraits without moralizing49:59 — Whose work actually counts in Chinese urban discourse?52:45 — Why Zheng Xiaoqiong wasn't able to join us, and how censorship really works54:44 — Rose Courtyard and what's next: classical allusions, ancestral homes, embroidering grandmothers57:39 — Audience Q&A: American worker poets, the WeChat communities of migrant writers, and Zheng's standing in Chinese lettersSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week I'm sharing the third installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead." The first two episodes featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the panels on what China wants and what the United States wants. This week's panel — "Tech, Rivalry, and Competing Visions of the Future" — turns to the domain that, more than any other, has come to define how Washington thinks about the U.S.-China relationship: technology, and especially AI.
Once again, my deep thanks to Jessica Chen Weiss, ACF's inaugural faculty director, for organizing this terrific conference and for so generously letting me share this audio with Sinica listeners.
Moderator Kat Duffy of the Council on Foreign Relations opens by interrogating the very framing of the panel: is "rivalry" actually the right word for what's going on between the U.S. and China in tech? The panelists give a range of answers — from "yes, because both sides believe it is" to Samm Sacks's pithy rejoinder that "rivalry serves specific actors and specific interests." From there the conversation ranges across the FCC's recent move to bar most foreign-made routers, the pitfalls of framing AI competition as a sprint to AGI rather than what Jeff Ding calls a "diffusion marathon," the many internal Chinas that get flattened in DC discourse, the cybersecurity reciprocity problem (Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, and what President Trump tellingly admitted about all of it), and what it would actually mean for the U.S. to compete by being its best self — what one panelist memorably calls "Americamaxxing." There's a lot of substance packed into this hour, and a lot of generative pushback against received DC wisdom.
The audience Q&A at the end takes up the role of race and xenophobia in the discourse — a topic that, as one questioner pointedly notes, had been conspicuously absent from the day's earlier discussions.
Panelists:
— Samm Sacks, Senior Fellow, New America and Yale Law School
— Jeff Ding, Assistant Professor of Political Science, George Washington University
— Mieke Eoyang, Visiting Professor, Carnegie Mellon University; former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy
— Selina Xu, Lead for China and AI Policy, Office of Eric Schmidt
Moderator: Kat Duffy, Senior Fellow for Digital and Cyberspace Policy, Council on Foreign Relations
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This week on Sinica: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrapped up his fourth visit to China in as many years last week, and this one may be the most consequential yet. It comes at a moment when Spain has emerged, almost improbably, as the most outspoken voice in Europe challenging the direction of American foreign policy — closing its airspace to U.S. military aircraft involved in the war in Iran, denying Washington the use of the Rota and Morón bases, recognizing Palestine, and getting expelled from the U.S.-led Gaza Coordination Center for its "anti-Israel obsession." Against that backdrop, Sánchez delivered a remarkable speech at Tsinghua University — a speech I wrote about in detail on the Sinica Substack (PM Pedro Sánchez's Tsinghua Speech: A Masterclass in Diplomatic Rhetoric) — defending multilateralism, calling the EU-China trade deficit unsustainable, and naming China "a country rebuilding its greatness."
To help make sense of it, I'm joined by Mario Esteban Rodríguez, full professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, director of its Center for East Asian Studies, and senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute. Mario is the scholar most frequently quoted in Spanish and European media coverage of Spain-China relations, and the author most recently of China's Vertical Multilateralism and the Global South (Routledge, 2026). We discuss whether Sánchez is running an updated Merkel playbook or something qualitatively new, how much of the pivot is really about Trump, the sectoral politics of EVs and Iberian pork, the Chery plant in Barcelona, Spain's role as a gateway to Latin America, and whether Madrid is now a trailblazer for a broader European — and transatlantic — reorientation toward Beijing.
06:33 — Sánchez's China strategy: pragmatism, consistency, and political capital
08:35 — Domestic politics: the PSOE–PP consensus, Vox, and the regional contradiction
12:40 — Merkel's playbook vs. Sánchez's: COVID, Ukraine, and the macroeconomic imbalance
15:55 — The Tsinghua speech: Matteo Ricci, multipolarity, and the human rights omission
28:17 — The Trump factor: Iran, Gaza, and the limits of overestimating the American effect
35:48 — Trade, EV tariffs, pork, and Chinese investment in Spain (the Chery plant in Barcelona)
47:04 — Agricultural constituencies and the paradox of Vox voters who benefit from China trade
49:01 — Spain's influence in Brussels and the conditions for other member states to follow
53:09 — Spain as gateway to Latin America, and the wider European (and Canadian) turn to Beijing
Paying it Forward: The European Think-Tank Network on China (ETNC) — a network providing country-specific insights on EU member states' approaches to China, including the granular differences and nuances that non-European analysts often miss.
Recommendations
Mario Esteban: A trip, rather than a book — New Zealand, which he's visiting this summer with his family to mark the 25th anniversary of the release of The Fellowship of the Ring. A nod to his love of Tolkien and tabletop role-playing games (conducted, he is careful to note, in his own basement — not his parents').
Kaiser Kuo: CONG — a new large-format magazine published out of Hong Kong (the title is pronounced Kong, though its ambiguous Pinyin-like spelling invites a second reading), now preparing its third issue. Beautifully produced on glossy and textured paper, with broad coverage of the art, culture, and design scene across East and Southeast Asia. Check it out online here: https://www.serakai.studio/cong
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This week I'm sharing the next installment from the terrific day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead." Last week's episode featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the first panel, "What China Wants." This week, I've got the companion panel — "What Does the United States Want?" — which I think pairs beautifully with that first session, and which takes up a question that's arguably harder and more uncomfortable to answer.
The panel is moderated by SAIS Dean James Steinberg, who served as Deputy National Security Advisor in the Clinton administration and Deputy Secretary of State under Obama — and who keeps this moving with real sharpness. He's joined by Matt Duss, Executive Vice President at the Center for International Policy, who starts things off with a bracing observation: the United States does not know what it wants. The old foreign policy consensus has shattered, he argues, and neither the Trump administration nor the Democratic establishment has produced a coherent replacement. He locates the most interesting thinking in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, where he hopes the 2028 primary will force some of these hard questions into the open.
Katherine Thompson, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute who previously served in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, brings a military-strategic lens. She makes a sharp case that the new National Defense Strategy, for all its imperfections, at least opens the door to an honest conversation about trade-offs — something Washington has been allergic to. If you're going to prioritize deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, she argues, you have to actually give things up elsewhere, and the Iran situation is making that tension impossible to ignore.
Jonas Nahm, the Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor at SAIS who served in the Biden administration, reframes economic competition with China in refreshingly concrete terms. Rather than abstract great-power framing, he identifies three specific buckets — affordability and energy, technological catch-up, and manufacturing competitiveness — where Chinese capacity could actually help solve American problems, if we had the political imagination to let it.
And Leslie Vinjamuri, president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, brings striking new polling data showing a 40-percentage-point swing in American favorability toward China since 2024 — now at 53 percent — driven largely by Democrats but with movement among Republicans too. She situates this in the fading of pandemic-era hostility and the absence of sustained anti-China rhetoric from the current administration, and adds an invaluable perspective on how utterly confused America's allies are about what Washington actually expects of them.
The conversation ranges across Taiwan and strategic ambiguity, whether allies arming up in the Indo-Pacific helps or hurts, the collapse of U.S. credibility on human rights, the future of dollar dominance, and whether the 2028 election will finally force a reckoning with these questions. It's a rich, candid discussion — and a reminder that the hardest debates in U.S.-China policy may not be about China at all.
Panelists:
— Matt Duss, Executive Vice President, Center for International Policy
— Katherine Thompson, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
— Jonas Nahm, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins SAIS
— Leslie Vinjamuri, President and CEO, Chicago Council on Global Affairs
Moderator: James Steinberg, Dean, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
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Opening Remarks & Session 1: What China Wants
Johns Hopkins SAIS ACF Conference, April 3, 2026
This week's episode features audio from a day-long conference hosted by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS, held on April 3rd in Washington, DC. The conference, titled "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead," brought together a wide range of scholars, former officials, and analysts to interrogate some of the foundational assumptions underlying US policy toward China — a conversation I found compelling enough to share directly with Sinica listeners, with the full blessing of the organizers.
You'll hear two segments in this episode.
Opening Remarks — Jessica Chen Weiss
ACF's inaugural faculty director Jessica Chen Weiss opens the conference by framing its central provocation: that much of the prevailing US policy discourse assumes an intrinsically zero-sum competition with China, and that this assumption has not been adequately examined. She argues for a more rigorous, evidence-based conversation — one that takes seriously the possibility that American and Chinese interests are competitive but not necessarily adversarial, and that may even leave room for complementarity in some domains. She previews the day's three thematic sessions — on what China wants, what the United States wants, and the stakes of technological and AI rivalry — and situates the whole enterprise in what she describes as a hinge moment in world history.
Session 1: What China Wants
Moderated by Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times, the first panel takes up the deceptively simple question of what China is actually trying to achieve on the world stage — and whether its ambitions are as expansive as much US policy discourse assumes.
Jessica Chen Weiss argues that China's core objectives remain relatively modest and sovereignty-focused: security, development, and legitimacy within an order long dominated by the United States. She pushes back on the idea that China is eager to assume the burdens of global leadership, noting that Chinese interlocutors are acutely aware of the domestic overextension that has constrained American power. Sevastopulo coins — with Weiss's amusement — the term "China-first" to describe Beijing's orientation.
Dan Taylor, drawing on his decades in the Defense Intelligence Agency, urges the audience to take Chinese leadership statements seriously rather than projecting worst-case intentions onto them. He notes that Beijing still sees itself as a developing nation with enormous domestic work ahead, and that its articulated goals leave considerable room for interpretation before one arrives at the conclusion that China seeks to displace the United States as global hegemon.
Arthur Kroeber adds an economic dimension, tracing how China's export-driven model has generated massive global surpluses — and why the resulting tensions with trading partners are, in his view, a structural problem rather than evidence of strategic malice. He argues that much of what looks like geopolitical aggression is better understood as the consequence of an economic model operating at enormous scale with insufficient domestic demand to absorb its own output.
Shao Yuqun, speaking from her perch at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, offers the most pointed challenge to the panel's relatively sanguine framing. She argues that the United States' own behavior — erratic policy, withdrawal from multilateral commitments, and the disruptions of the Trump era — has itself destabilized the order that American strategists claim to be defending. She is measured but direct, and her presence gives the conversation a texture that too many Washington panels lack.
The discussion ranges across China's Iran diplomacy, the prospects for a US-China summit, the question of whether Beijing is exploiting Trump-era tensions to deepen ties with traditional US allies, and — in a lively closing exchange — who the next generation of Chinese leadership looks like (with Kroeber's deadpan answer, "Xi Jinping," getting the biggest laugh of the session).
Guests:
Jessica Chen Weiss, David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies, Johns Hopkins SAIS; Inaugural Faculty Director, ACFDan Taylor, Adjunct Researcher, Institute for Defense Analyses; Senior Fellow, Johns Hopkins SAIS ACFArthur Kroeber, Founding Partner, Gavekal DragonomicsShao Yuqun, Director, Institute for Taiwan, Hong Kong & Macao Studies, Shanghai Institutes for International StudiesModerator: Demetri Sevastopulo, US-China Correspondent, Financial Times
Remaining sessions from the conference — on what the United States wants, tech rivalry and competing visions of the future, and a fireside chat between Henry Farrell and Alondra Nelson on the AI race reconsidered — will be released over the coming weeks.
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Economic historian Adam Tooze returns to Sinica fresh from the China Development Forum and his second extended visit to Beijing in under a year. In this wide-ranging conversation, Adam and I cover the 15th Five-Year Plan — what it signals about Beijing’s development priorities and whether it represents a genuine shift away from investment-led growth — and the extraordinary scale of China’s renewable energy buildout, which Adam argues may be bringing us to the global peak of CO2 emissions right now.
They discuss the concept of the “big green state,” why Western analysts keep dancing around the role of the CPC in driving China’s environmental transformation, and what the “Chinamaxxing” phenomenon says about a slow but real reckoning in Western public consciousness. From Europe’s evolving posture toward China — caught between EV anxieties and transatlantic rupture — to China’s role in the Global South’s energy future, the conversation moves through coal transitions, Indonesian nickel zones, African microgrids, and the collapse of the flying geese model.
The episode closes with a frank exchange on the Iran war, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, the stunning political silence on American campuses, and what Beijing is most likely doing: sitting pretty and waiting it out. Adam also offers a preview of his forthcoming book on the energy transition — which turns out to be another massive one — and recommends Tim Sahay and Wang Hui as essential reading.
02:44 – Adam’s Chinese language study: HSK3, the Confucius Institute curriculum, and the joys of chasing characters
09:41 – The jìhuà/guīhuà distinction and what the shift in nomenclature from the 11th Five-Year Plan onward actually signals
12:01 – The 15th Five-Year Plan: green energy tinkering, sci-tech ambitions, and the human development dimension
18:10 – Does Beijing genuinely mean to shift from investment-led growth? Reading “high quality development” and “common prosperity”
22:38 – The Great Reckoning: has Western intellectual and policy consciousness actually moved on China?
29:45 – Environmental authoritarianism, the CPC as mobilizing institution, and why Xi’s “petty bourgeois environmentalism” deserves to be taken seriously
33:39 – Persistent misperceptions of China in Western discourse; the “jaundiced American” trench perspective
39:16 – European neuralgia: EV overcapacity, Ukraine, and whether transatlantic rupture opens a window for China
45:02 – China and the Global South: the end of the flying geese model, African microgrids, Indonesian nickel zones, and BRI record lending
59:32 – Mark Carney’s “age of rupture”: does the framing capture something real, or does it flatter the West?
01:05:18 – What Beijing sees from its windows: Iran, Venezuela, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, and a five-point plan for Chinese hegemony (that won’t happen)
01:14:55 – Preview of Adam’s forthcoming book on the energy transition and the “second world” thesis
Paying It Forward: Tim Sahay (PolyCrisis / Phenomenal World)
Recommendations:
Adam: Wang Hui’s The End of the Revolution
Kaiser: The Chinese series Shēng mìng shù (Born to Be Alive)
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, I welcome journalist and former colleague Chang Che. His recent New Yorker piece "How China Learned to Love the Classics" generated enormous attention. We explore one of the more surprising cultural phenomena in contemporary China: a growing, state-backed enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman classics. We dig into what's actually driving this revival, from the genuine intellectual curiosity of scholars like He Yanxiao, who fell in love with the Odyssey as a Chinese high school student and went on to earn a Chicago PhD, to what might be the more deliberate strategic ambitions of figures like Politburo member Li Shulei and the shadow of philosopher Liu Xiaofeng's Straussianism. We also compare Chang's warmly enchanted 2022 China Project piece on Austrian classicist Leopold Lieb to the politically sharper New Yorker piece four years later — and ask what that shift in tone tells us about what's actually changed. This is an episode about civilizational discourse, soft power, and the strange fate of scholarship when the state decides it finds your obscure passion useful.
00:32 – Kaiser introduces the episode from Beijing and reflects on the asymmetry in how the West covers Chinese intellectual curiosity
04:08 – Civilizationist discourse: Spengler, Huntington, and The Civilization Trap
10:56 – Introducing Chang Che and the evolution from his 2022 China Project piece to the New Yorker
15:38 – How Chang first got drawn into the subject: Latin classes, Charlottesville, and young Chinese classicists returning from American PhDs
21:38 – What changed in four years: the state moves from background to foreground
25:28 – Inside the institutional push: what China's "classics departments" actually look like, and who controls the definition of "classics"
31:13 – Xi Jinping's letter to Greek scholars and the move, perhaps, to sever ancient Greece from the modern West
39:57 – Liu Xiaofeng, Leo Strauss, and why Strauss fever gripped Chinese intellectuals after 1989
47:03 – The Padilla Peralta "incident" and the strange porousness between American and Chinese discourse communities on the classics
52:13 – Chenchen Zhang's framework: civilizationist discourse claims difference internationally while enforcing homogeneity domestically
57:30 – He Yanxiao, K-pop, and the idea of "Chinatown classics"
01:07:13 – Where will China's classics revival be in ten years?
Paying It Forward: Dongxian Jiang (Fordham) and Simon Luo (Nanyang Technological University)
Recommendations: Chang recommends House of the Dragon; Kaiser recommends the Ah-Q Arkestra, led by trombonist Matt Roberts, whose latest album Méiyǒu yìjiàn is on Spotify.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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David M. Lampton—“Mike”—is one of America’s most distinguished scholars of U.S.–China relations, director of China Studies Emeritus at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and the author of landmark works on Chinese politics and foreign policy. He joins me this week to discuss a striking new Foreign Affairs essay he co-authored with the eminent Chinese international relations scholar Wang Jisi of Peking University: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back from the Brink.”
Written against the backdrop of President Trump’s planned visit to China (and before the outbreak of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran), the essay is less a routine policy paper than an urgent intervention — two veteran scholars, one American and one Chinese, throwing a rope across a widening chasm. They argue that strategic rivalry has become self-reinforcing, that the greatest danger is no longer deliberate conflict but accidental war driven by miscalculation and escalation dynamics neither side fully controls, and that a rare, narrow window for “a new normalization” may now be opening.
We range across the essay’s boldest claims — on Taiwan as the unlikely starting point for stabilization, the corrosive logic of securitization, the ghost of the first Cold War, and the looming talent crisis in serious China studies — in a meaty, substantive conversation.
3:39 How the Lampton–Wang Jisi collaboration came together
6:31 The division of labor and the essay’s unified voice
9:15 Wang Jisi’s cognitive empathy and his unusual depth of American understanding
13:57 The essay’s emotional register: veteran scholars and the specter of another Cold War
16:32 From reassurance to deterrence—and why deterrence keeps getting harder to maintain
25:02 Mirror-image threat narratives as self-fulfilling operating systems
32:08 Securitization, the “one-way ratchet,” and whether economic interdependence can be rebuilt
39:23 Accidental war: what has changed since Hainan 2001 and Belgrade 1999
44:16 Where the most damaging choices were made—China’s Ukraine pivot, U.S. arms-control withdrawals
51:29 The window of opportunity: Trump’s China visit, the 4th Plenum, and post-Iran recalculation
1:01:30 Taiwan as the counterintuitive starting point for stabilization
1:10:03 Collapse fantasies, hubris, and the Pearl Harbor danger of “act now or lose the window”
1:13:14 The looming China-talent crisis and the future of the field
Paying It Forward
Mike highlights Rosie Levine, executive director of the U.S.–China Education Trust, where she is leading a major new initiative to expand serious American scholarship in China and encourage Chinese institutions to open their doors wider to foreign researchers and students.
Recommendations
Mike: The Raider by Stephen R. Platt (Knopf, 2025) — a biography of Major Evans Carlson, the swashbuckling Marine officer who trained with Chinese Communist forces in the 1930s, befriended Zhu De, brought the word “gung-ho” into English, and died in 1947 just in time to miss both the PRC’s turn away from liberty and McCarthyism’s persecution at home.
Kaiser: “How China Learned to Love the Classics,” a New Yorker piece by Chang Che on the remarkable renaissance of interest in Greco-Roman philosophy and literature in contemporary China — and what it says about the world we now inhabit.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo, co-authors of Governing Digital China, a new book that examines how an authoritarian state governs a digital ecosystem it doesn't fully own, can never fully control, and yet fundamentally depends on. Danie — a professor of digital governance at the Hertie School in Berlin and a returning Sinica guest, having joined us way back in 2014 to discuss her earlier book on media commercialization and authoritarian rule — and Ting, associate professor in government and artificial intelligence at the University of Birmingham, together offer a richly empirical account of the triangular relationship between the Chinese state, major platform companies, and ordinary internet users. Rather than treating firms as mere instruments of party control or citizens as passive subjects of surveillance, they develop a framework they call "popular corporatism," which captures how bargaining, incentives, and user preferences shape what is and isn't permissible in China's digital spaces — including the endlessly misunderstood social credit system.
4:32 — The digital dilemma: how digital platforms simultaneously empower economic development and create political risk for the party-state — a tension that isn't unique to authoritarian regimes
7:45 — Why the command-and-control model falls short: platforms require technical expertise and user engagement the state lacks, and firms like Tencent and Sina have real leverage as a result
11:41 — Popular corporatism explained: why users — including the "silent majority" of lurkers — must be foregrounded in any account of China's digital governance, and how firms become state "consultants" and "insiders"
21:09 — The survey: GPS-based nationally representative sampling, how to desensitize politically sensitive questions, and why this kind of research can no longer be conducted in China
27:22 — Lurkers vs. discussants: the 90-9-1 rule and the counterintuitive finding that users who perceive more openness on platforms like WeChat and Weibo report higher political trust in the central government
35:40 — Functional liberalization: why partial openness should be understood as governance strategy, not mere concession — and what the fandom-community doxing wars illustrate about that
39:23 — The social credit system: what it actually is, what it is not, and why the Black Mirror version is a myth
42:38 — Two subsystems, one misunderstood system: the financial/commercial credit infrastructure, the local-government behavioral programs, and how Sesame Credit and court blacklists actually fit together
46:20 — The privacy paradox and political trust: why convenience routinely overrides stated privacy preferences — and why where Alipay is most embedded, residents trust the state most
52:42 — Stability, exportability, and the Orwell-versus-Huxley question: what preconditions popular corporatism requires, which other developmental states it might apply to, and why China's digital governance is better understood as a coercion-cooption balancing act
Paying It Forward
Ting Luo recommends Ning Leng, assistant professor at Georgetown University and author of Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party State in China.
Daniela Stockmann recommends Felix Garten, postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School, whose work examines how Chinese tech companies behave when operating in regulatory environments outside China — including the EU, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Recommendations
Daniela: The Legend of the Female General 《锦月如歌》, a Chinese historical drama available on YouTube with English subtitles, especially for anyone interested in internal martial arts and martial heroines in Chinese popular culture.
Ting Luo：Bordeaux, France — specifically, just going there and drinking excellent wine.
Kaiser: Two Substack newsletters for following China's relationship with the Middle East, especially as the American-Israeli war against Iran continues to unfold: Jonathan Fulton's China-MENA Newsletter and Jesse Marks's Coffee in the Desert
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Yi-Ling Liu, journalist, former China editor at Rest of World, and author of the new book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Yi-Ling's book traces the arc of Chinese online life through five protagonists — a rapper, a gay rights entrepreneur, a feminist activist, a science fiction writer, and an internet censor — each navigating the creative and constrictive forces of the Chinese internet in their own way. The result is a deeply reported, novelistic account of what it felt like to live, create, and push back in one of the most surveilled and dynamic digital environments on earth. We discuss the book's central metaphor of "dancing in shackles," the early utopian glow of Chinese netizen culture, the parallel fates of hip hop and science fiction under the state's alternating embrace and constraint, and the eerie convergence between the Chinese internet and our own.
0:06 — "Wall dancers" as a metaphor: what it captures that "dissident" or "netizen" doesn't
0:09 — Why 网民 (wǎngmín) took root in China as a concept of digital citizenship
0:13 — The early Chinese internet: more open than we remember, but not as free as the myth suggests
0:15 — Ma Baoli: closeted cop to CEO of China's largest gay dating app, and the Gay Talese reporting strategy
0:20 — Lan Yu, Beijing Story, and the film that became a coming-out moment for a generation of queer men
0:22 — Pragmatism at the heart of the dance: how individuals and the state negotiated the internet together
0:28 — Lu Pin and Feminist Voices: from "playing boundary ball" to sudden exile
0:35 — Stanley Chen Qiufan and the state's attempt to co-opt science fiction for nationalist ends
0:43 — The generational split in Chinese sci-fi: Liu Cixin's cosmic scale vs. the near-future unease of Chen Qiufan and Hao Jingfang
0:46 — Hip hop's arc: from underground scenes in Chengdu and Beijing to The Rap of China and sudden constraint
0:51 — Eric Liu, the Weibo censor: humanizing the firewall from the inside
0:55 — Common prosperity, Wang Huning, and the moral panic behind the crackdown on "effeminate" culture
0:59 — Techno-utopianism in retrospect: was the emancipatory internet always a fantasy?
1:03 — The convergence of the Chinese and American internets: Weibo and Twitter, TikTok and Oracle
1:07 — What it means to be free: how the book expanded Yi-Ling's sense of what freedoms people actually want
Paying it forward:
Zeyi Yang, technology reporter at WIRED, and co-author (with Louise Matsakis) of the excellent tech x China newsletter Made in China
Recommendations:
Yi-Ling: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai; Machine Decision is Not Final, an anthology of essays on Chinese AI compiled by scholars affiliated with NYU Shanghai.
Kaiser: The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad (forthcoming);
Essays from Pallavi Aiyar's Substack The Global Jigsaw, particularly "How Has China Succeeded in Making People Mind their Manners" and "Why I Would Rather Be Born Chinese than Indian Today."
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Kyle Chan, a fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, previously a postdoc at Princeton, and author of the outstanding High-Capacity Newsletter on Substack. Kyle has emerged as one of the sharpest and most empirically grounded voices on U.S.-China technology relations, and he holds the all-time record for the most namechecks on Sinica’s “Paying it forward” segment. We use his recent Financial Times op-ed on “The Great Reversal” in global technology flows and his longer High-Capacity essay on re-coupling as jumping-off points for a wide-ranging conversation about where China now sits at the global technological frontier, why the dominant decoupling narrative misses powerful structural forces pulling the two economies back together, and what all of this means for innovation, choke points, and the global tech ecosystem.
4:35 – How Kyle became Kyle Chan: from Chicago School economics to development, railways, and systems thinking
12:50 – The Great Reversal: China at the technological frontier, from megawatt EV charging to LFP batteries
17:59 – The electro-industrial tech stack and China’s overlapping, mutually reinforcing tech ecosystems
22:40 – Industrial strategy and time horizons: patience, persistence, and the long arc of China’s auto industry
33:45 – Re-coupling under pressure: Waymo and Zeekr, Unitree robots, and the structural forces binding the two economies
40:22 – The gravity model: can political distance overwhelm technological mass?
47:01 – What China still wants from the U.S.: Cursor, GitHub, talent, and the AI brain drain
51:52 – Weaponized interdependence and the danger of securitizing everything
57:30 – Firm-level adaptation: HeyGen, Manus, and the playbook for de-sinification
1:02:58 – The view from the middle: Gulf states, Southeast Asia, and India as geopolitical arbitrageurs
1:10:18 – Engineering resilience: what policymakers are getting wrong about the systems they’re building
Paying it forward: Katrina Northrop; Grace Shao and her AI Proem newsletter
Recommendations:
Kyle: Wired Magazine’s Made in China newsletter (by Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis); The Wire China
Kaiser: The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Patricia Kim, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center, where she focuses on U.S. policy toward China and the broader Asia Pacific. One year into Donald Trump's second term, Pattie and her colleague Joyce Yang have published a comprehensive Brookings assessment titled "Making America Great Again? Evaluating Trump's China strategy at the one-year mark," which examines whether the administration's stated objectives on reindustrialization, AI leadership, strategic dependence, and global standing are actually being met. We discuss the paradox of Trump's China policy (which is surprising consistency in goals despite the absence of a formal strategy document), with its mixed results on economic rebalancing and supply chain security, the troubling deterioration in U.S.-China diplomatic and military channels, and why the administration's approach to allies and partners may be undermining its own objectives. Pattie brings analytical discipline and empirical rigor to debates that are often long on rhetoric and short on evidence, cutting through a lot of noise to assess what's actually working, what isn't, and where the strategy is running up against reality.
4:45 – Does Trump have a China strategy? Consistency without a formal framework
8:15 – Assessing the economic rebalancing goals: reindustrialization and tariffs
15:30 – Technology competition: export controls and AI leadership
23:45 – Supply chain security and strategic dependence challenges
31:20 – The deterioration of diplomatic and military-to-military channels
39:50 – The ally and partner problem: how Trump's approach undermines his own goals
47:15 – Global standing and American credibility in the Trump era
52:30 – Paying it forward: The Lost in Translation series at Brookings
Paying it forward:
Lost in Translation Series (Brookings Global China Project)
Recommendations:
Pattie: To Dare Mighty Things by Michael O'Hanlon
Kaiser: Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings and one of the most clear-eyed analysts of the U.S.-China relationship working today. Ryan was director for China at the NSC during the Obama Administration.
As Donald Trump moves through his second year in office, the bilateral relationship has defied easy characterization. The once-dominant language of great power competition has receded, China hawks have been sidelined, and Trump’s personalistic approach—marked by praise for Xi Jinping and a willingness to bracket ideological disputes—represents a sharp departure from recent Washington orthodoxy.
Ryan has just published an essay laying out three plausible pathways for the relationship under Trump: a soft landing, a hard split, or what he considers most likely—a period of uneasy calm in which both sides seek stability not out of trust, but out of mutual constraint. We discuss Trump’s apparent strategy, the vibe shift in American attitudes, Beijing’s choice between managing Trump versus managing uncertainty, the critical importance of Xi’s planned April visit, and whether we’re headed toward genuine stabilization or just buying time before the next collision.
5:24 – Trump’s approach: respect for Xi, military deterrence, and the rare earths constraint
8:03 – The vibe shift and Trump’s “reptilian feel” for American exhaustion with confrontation
10:52 – Three scenarios: soft landing, hard split, or uneasy calm through mutual constraint
16:30 – Beijing’s bet: managing Trump versus managing whoever comes next
26:46 – Economic interdependence and why decoupling is like “separating egg whites from a scrambled egg”
37:12 – The April visit as a critical test: pageantry, protests, and what both sides are watching for
42:18 – Taiwan as the most dangerous variable and where theory meets practice
46:58 – Lack of institutional guardrails and the risks of Trump’s personalistic foreign policy
Paying it forward:
Audrye Wong (USC)
Recommendations:
Ryan: The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer by Robert Suettinger
Kaiser: The Last Cavalier (Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine) by Alexandre Dumas; Asia Society conversation with Lizzi Lee, Bert Hoffmann, and Gerard DiPippo on rebalancing China’s economy; Trivium China Podcast with Andrew Polk, Joe Peissel, Danny McMahon, and Cory Combs on capital expenditure headwinds
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Afra Wang, a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov.AI.
We're talking today about her recent WIRED piece on what might be China's most influential science fiction project you've never heard of: The Morning Star of Lingao (Língáo Qǐmíng 临高启明), a sprawling, crowdsourced novel about time travelers who bootstrap an industrial revolution in Ming Dynasty Hainan. More than a thought experiment in alternate history, it's the ur-text of China's "Industrial Party" (gōngyè dǎng 工业党) — the loose intellectual movement that sees engineering capability as the true source of national power. We discuss what the novel reveals about how China thinks about failure, modernity, and salvation, and why, just as Americans are waking up to China's industrial might, the worldview that helped produce it may already be losing its grip.
5:27 – Being a cultural in-betweener: code-switching across moral and epistemic registers
10:25 – Double consciousness and converging aesthetic standards
12:05 – "The greatest Chinese science fiction" — an ironic title for a poorly written cult classic
14:18 – Bridging STEM and humanities: the KPI-coded language of tech optimization
16:08 – China's post-Industrial Party moment: from "try hard" to "lie flat"
17:01 – How widely known is Lingao? A cult Bible for China's techno-elite
19:11 – From crypto bros to DAO experiments: how Afra discovered the novel
21:25 – The canonical timeline: compiling chaos into collaborative fiction
23:06 – Guancha.cn (guānchá zhě wǎng 观察者网) and the Industrial Party's media ecosystem
26:05 – The Sentimental Party (Qínghuái Dǎng 情怀党): China's lost civic space
29:01 – The Wenzhou high-speed rail crash: the debate that defined the Industrial Party
33:19 – Controlled spoilers: colonizing Australia, the Maid Revolution, and tech trees
41:06 – Competence as salvation: obsessive attention to getting the details right
44:18 – The Needham question and the joy of transformation: from Robinson Crusoe to Primitive Technology
47:25 – "Never again": inherited historical vulnerability and the memory of chaos
49:20 – Wang Xiaodong, "China Is Unhappy," and the crystallization of Industrial Party ideology
51:33 – Gender and Lingao: a pre-feminist artifact and the rational case for equality
56:16 – Dan Wang's Breakneck and the "engineering state" framework
59:25 – New Quality Productive Forces (xīn zhì shēngchǎnlì 新质生产力): Industrial Party logic in CCP policy
1:03:43 – The reckoning: why Industrial Party intellectuals are losing their innocence
1:07:49 – What Lingao tells us about China today: the invisible infrastructure beneath the hot shower
Paying it forward: The volunteer translators of The Morning Star of Lingao (English translation and GitHub resources)
Xīn Xīn Rén Lèi / Pixel Perfect podcast (https://pixelperfect.typlog.io/) and the Bǎihuā (百花) podcasting community
Recommendations:
Afra: China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter, edited by Kerry Brown; The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu
Kaiser: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin, coauthors of The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. We're talking about China's college entrance exam — dreaded and feared, with outsized ability to determine life outcomes, seen as deeply flawed yet also sacrosanct, something few Chinese want drastically altered or removed. Cards on table: I had very strong preconceptions about the gaokao. My wife and I planned our children's education to get them out of the Chinese system before it became increasingly oriented toward gaokao preparation. But this book really opened my eyes.
Ruixue is professor of economics at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy, researching how institutions like examination systems shape governance, elite selection, and state capacity. Hongbin is James Liang Chair at Stanford, focusing on education, labor markets, and institutional foundations of China's economic development.
We explore why the gaokao represents far more than just a difficult test, the concrete incentives families face, why there are limited alternative routes for social mobility, how both authors' own experiences shaped their thinking, why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China, what happened when the exam system was suspended during the Cultural Revolution, why inequality has increased despite internet access to materials, why meaningful reform is so politically difficult, how education translated into productivity and GDP growth, the gap between skill formation and economic returns, how the system shapes governance and everyday life, and the moral dimensions of exam culture when Chinese families migrate to very different education systems like the U.S.
6:18 – What the gaokao actually represents beyond just being a difficult exam
11:54 – Why there are limited alternative pathways for social mobility
14:23 – How their own experiences as students shaped their thinking
18:46 – Why the gaokao is a political institution, not just educational policy
22:21 – Why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China
28:30 – What happened in late Qing and Cultural Revolution when exams were suspended
33:26 – Has internet access to materials reduced inequality or has it persisted?
36:55 – Hongbin's direct experience trying to reform the gaokao—and why it failed
40:28 – How education improvement accounts for significant share of China's GDP growth
42:44 – The gap: college doesn't add measurable skills, but gaokao scores predict income
46:56 – How centralized approach affects talent allocation across fields
51:08 – The gaokao and GDP tournament for officials: similar tournament systems
54:26 – How ranking and evaluation systems shape workplace behavior and culture
58:12 – When exam culture meets U.S. education: understanding tensions around affirmative action
1:02:10 – Transparent rule-based evaluation vs. discretion and judgment: the fundamental tradeoff
Recommendations:
Ruixue: Piao Liang Peng You (film by Geng Jun); Stoner (a novel by John Williams)
Hongbin: The Dictator's Handbook
Kaiser: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field; Black Pill by Elle Reeve
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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