Podcast
Sinica Podcast
Hosted by Kaiser Kuo · EN
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo.
49episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
The View from Everywhere Else: Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summits
2d ago01:20:37Summary readyEric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summitsThis 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 home08:15 — Breaking news: the paused $14B Taiwan arms package and the canceled Colby trip11:15 — The dog that caught the truck: China and the costs of a receding U.S. umbrella13:00 — "Constructive strategic stability" — new equilibrium or just choreography?28:23 — The snub: Beijing sends only an ambassador to the BRICS meeting in New Delhi37:56 — Africa: tariff-free access, the trade imbalance, and Kenya's "collapsed" exports44:34 — Justin Yifu Lin's "three moves": move up-market, localize, move south51:00 — Latin America's "find out" phase in Panama, and very low China literacy57:35 — The Gulf after the war on Iran: who really won?Paying it Forward:Boston University's Global Development Policy (GDP) Research CenterRecommendationsEric: 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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
SummaryTo Rule All Under Heaven: Andrew Meyer on His New Popular History of the Warring States
1w ago01:20:37Summary readyThis 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 it11:06 – 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 audience14:31 – Why he organized the book by state rather than strictly chronologically — and what that structure lets him do18:14 – The relevance question: how to take the deep continuity of Chinese political life seriously without falling into the orientalist “eternal China” trap25:52 – Why the Warring States is properly called a revolution: the destruction of Zhou-era hereditary aristocracy and the rise of the shi33:15 – 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 Brookings44:06 – The Lüshi Chunqiu as a brilliant piece of political propaganda, and what its tripartite cosmological structure was actually arguing52:31 – Why the cartoon-legalist version of the Qin is wrong: the 70 erudites, the Taishan stelae, and what the book-burning episode really was57:05 – 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 description1:05:08 – How the Warring States is taught in China and Taiwan today, and what archaeology is doing to the field1:08:36 – Constant self-reinvention as the real Chinese legacy, and why no plausible future China fully repudiates the CCPPaying 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 albumKaiser: To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis (audiobook especially recommended)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Summary"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 4: The AI Race Reconsidered
2w ago00:36:24Summary readyThis 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 PolicyHenry Farrell, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins SAISClosing remarks: Jessica Chen Weiss, David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies and Inaugural Faculty Director, ACFSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Summary"Constructive Strategic Stability": Ali Wyne of the International Crisis Group on the Trump-Xi Summit
2w ago01:06:18Summary readyThis 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.Timestamps3:46 — 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 FTPaying It ForwardAfra 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)RecommendationsAli: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.
SummaryThe Poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong: A Conversation with Translator Eleanor Goodman
3w ago01:11:32Summary readyThis 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.
Summary"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 3: Tech, Rivalry, and Competing Visions of the Future
4w ago01:06:21Summary readyThis 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 RelationsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
SummarySpain's China Gambit: Pedro Sánchez, Strategic Autonomy, and the European Turn to Beijing — with Mario Esteban Rodríguez
Apr 2201:06:14Summary readyThis 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 capital08:35 — Domestic politics: the PSOE–PP consensus, Vox, and the regional contradiction12:40 — Merkel's playbook vs. Sánchez's: COVID, Ukraine, and the macroeconomic imbalance15:55 — The Tsinghua speech: Matteo Ricci, multipolarity, and the human rights omission28:17 — The Trump factor: Iran, Gaza, and the limits of overestimating the American effect35:48 — 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 trade49:01 — Spain's influence in Brussels and the conditions for other member states to follow53:09 — Spain as gateway to Latin America, and the wider European (and Canadian) turn to BeijingPaying 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.RecommendationsMario 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/congSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Summary"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 2: What Does the United States Want?
Apr 1501:07:19Summary readyThis 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 StudiesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Summary"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 1: What China Wants
Apr 901:08:20Summary readyOpening Remarks & Session 1: What China WantsJohns Hopkins SAIS ACF Conference, April 3, 2026This 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 WeissACF'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 WantsModerated 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 TimesRemaining 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.
SummaryAdam Tooze is Chinamaxxing!
Apr 201:25:59Summary readyEconomic 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 characters09:41 – The jìhuà/guīhuà distinction and what the shift in nomenclature from the 11th Five-Year Plan onward actually signals12:01 – The 15th Five-Year Plan: green energy tinkering, sci-tech ambitions, and the human development dimension18:10 – 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 seriously33:39 – Persistent misperceptions of China in Western discourse; the “jaundiced American” trench perspective39:16 – European neuralgia: EV overcapacity, Ukraine, and whether transatlantic rupture opens a window for China45:02 – China and the Global South: the end of the flying geese model, African microgrids, Indonesian nickel zones, and BRI record lending59:32 – 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” thesisPaying It Forward: Tim Sahay (PolyCrisis / Phenomenal World)Recommendations:Adam: Wang Hui’s The End of the RevolutionKaiser: 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.
Summary