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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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 Studies Moderator: 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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This week on Sinica, I speak with Daniel Bessner, the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and co-host of the American Prestige Podcast. If you follow U.S.-China relations even casually, you can’t avoid hearing that we’re in a new Cold War — it’s become a rhetorical reflex in D.C., shaping budgets, foreign policy debates, media narratives, and how ordinary Americans think about China. But what does it actually mean to call something a Cold War? To think clearly about the present, I find it helps to go to the past, not for simple analogies but to understand the intellectual and ideological machinery that produced and now sustains a Cold War mentality. Danny has written widely about the architecture of American power, the rise of the national security state, and the constellation of thinkers he calls Cold War liberals who helped define the ideological landscape of U.S. foreign policy. We explore how Cold War liberalism reshaped American political life, how the U.S. came to see its global dominance as natural and morally necessary, why the question of whose fault the Cold War was remains urgent in an age of renewed great power rivalry, the rise of China and anxiety of American decline, and what it would take to imagine a U.S.-China relationship that doesn’t fall back into old patterns of moral binaries, ideological panic, and militarized competition. 6:20 – Danny’s background: from Iraq War politicization to studying defense intellectuals 11:00 – Cold War liberalism: the constellation of ideas that shaped U.S. foreign policy 16:14 – How these ideas became structurally embedded in security institutions 22:02 – The Democratic Party’s destruction of the genuine left in the late 1940s 27:53 – Whose fault was the Cold War? Stalin’s sphere of influence logic vs. American universalism 31:07 – Are we facing a similar decision with China today? 34:23 – The anxiety of loss: how decline anxiety distorts interpretation of China’s rise 37:54 – The new Cold War narrative: material realities vs. psychological legacies 41:21 – Clearest parallels between the first Cold War and emerging U.S.-China confrontation 44:33 – What would a pluralistic order in Asia actually look like? 47:42 – Coexistence rather than zero-sum rivalry: what does it mean in practice? 50:57 – What genuine restraint requires: accepting limits of American power 54:14 – The moral imperative pushback: you can’t have good empire without bad empire 56:35 – Imperialist realism: Americans don’t think we’re good, but can’t imagine another world Paying it forward: The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Responsible Statecraft publication; The Trillion Dollar War Machine by William Hartung and Ben Freeman Recommendations: Danny: Nirvana and the history of Seattle punk/indie music (forthcoming podcast project) Kaiser: Hello China Tech Substack by Poe Zhao (hellotechchina.com) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, in a joint episode with the China-Global South Podcast, I speak with Eric Olander, host of the China Global South Podcast and founder/editor-in-chief of the China-Global South Project. In the early hours of January 3rd, U.S. forces carried out a coordinated operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, followed by their rendition to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. The operation unfolded quickly, with minimal kinetic escalation, but has raised far-reaching questions about international law, hemispheric security, and the Trump administration's willingness to use force in the Western Hemisphere. Just before the raid, China's Special Envoy for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, had met with Maduro in Caracas. Commentary linking Trump's action to China has ranged widely—claims about spheres of influence, arguments this was all about oil or rare earths, and pronouncements about what this means for Taiwan. Eric helps us think through China's actual stake in Venezuela, how deeply Beijing understands Latin America, what this episode does and does not change about China's role in the region and the global South more broadly, China's immediate reaction and concrete exposure on the ground, how it manages political risk when partner regimes collapse, and what Chinese military planners may be studying as they assess how this operation unfolded. 5:18 – How Beijing is reading this episode: official messaging versus elite thinking 7:40 – The Taiwan comparisons on Chinese social media and why they don't work 11:09 – How deep is China's actual expertise on Latin America? 14:56 – Comparing U.S. and Chinese benches of Latin America expertise 18:02 – Are we back to spheres of influence? Why that framing doesn't work 20:09 – Where is China most exposed in Venezuela: oil, loans, personnel? 23:41 – The resource-for-infrastructure model and why it failed 28:27 – The political assets: China as defender of sovereignty and multilateralism 36:25 – Will this push left-leaning governments closer to Beijing? 40:07 – The "China impotence" narrative and what doing something would actually mean 46:26 – What Chinese military planners are actually studying 51:46 – The Qiu Xiaoqi meeting: strategic failure or intelligence delivery? 58:40 – What actually changes and what doesn't: looking ahead Paying it forward: Alonso Illueca, nonresident fellow for Latin America and the Caribbean at the China Global South Project Recommendations: Eric: "China's Long Economic War" by Zongyuan Zoe Liu (Foreign Affairs) Kaiser: The Venetian Heretic by Christian Cameron See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.