ChinaEconTalk

Is China different? Does secular stagnation apply?  How have Chinese economic policymakers changed over time? Should industrial policy be a thing? What should American academia navigate its relationship with China?

To discuss, ChinaTalk welcomes its first former cabinet secretary to the show! Larry Summers is a professor at Harvard, who previously served as Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury and Obama’s NEC Director.

Cohosting with me is Logan Wright, Director for China Markets Research at Rhodium.

Outtro Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FNtQth4yX4

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Xi Jinping will not rule China forever. What have CCP leadership transitions looked like in the past, and what can we expect when Xi exits stage left? To discuss we have today Richard McGregor, an Aussie journalist with decades of experience in East Asia and author of three absolutely mandatory China books The Party, Asia’s Reckoning, and Xi: The Backlash, and Peter Vanderslice, a recent college grad who just wrote a fantastic thesis on CCP leadership transitions.

I'm hiring a new editor for ChinaTalk! Please apply at: https://forms.gle/NNmY2vpm1fXibGYP7 

Please consider supporting ChinaTalk at https://glow.fm/chinatalk/ so I can pay said editor!

Richard's report on Xi transition: https://www.csis.org/analysis/after-xi-future-scenarios-leadership-succession-post-xi-jinping-era

Peter's favorite Liu Shoaqi speeches: https://file.io/ODncJdbhCC7d

Outtro Songs:

Whitesnake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyF8RHM1OCg

Moody Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2L3UzM_FfE

Rosemary Clooney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGeMWB41maM 

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Dave Aitel, who started his career at NSA and spent the past twenty years in offensive cybersecurity,  comes on ChinaTalk to discuss

• What he's learned in his quest to read every cyber policy paper
• What blindspots remain in the field
• How China ranks in offensive and defensive cyber ceapabilities relative to the US and what we can all learn from the Tianfu Cup (http://www.tianfucup.com/)
• Why Cyberpunk 2077 is a masterpiece

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Apply to be an intern at Rhodium! https://rhg.com/careers/ 

Graded China Policy Papers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D88loPVPBgGYj53lroS05rB1LJ2kA5DnbfRJIXghST0/edit?usp=sharing

Graded Cyber Policy Papers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pnISykZe1nn1wwWBJRiaxYaqDoj4ADeBtsoUL41Hw2Y/edit?usp=sharing 

Outtro Music: ICE-PROUD 🏴󠁩󠁳󠀱󠁿 🏴󠁩󠁳󠀱󠁿 🏴󠁩󠁳󠀱󠁿 CAPITALIST-ZIBENJIA feat. 李尔新- & FendigheeRicch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NFP2r6TcMU 

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Ben Reinhardt, an independent researcher and robotics PhD, discusses

• Why DARPA has so many hits to its name
• Why NASA wasted the past two decades
• What needs to be subtracted from the US research ecosystem
• Sci-fi book recommendations

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Intro Music: Mura Masa, Messy Love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwXuBAd7Hh4

Outtro Music: 贝贝 / Melo - backbone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26EDDCQcPEQ

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Dr. Yan Zheng, senior technical staff specializing in microelectronics at In-Q-Tel, discusses

• What it's like to invest in startups for the CIA and the rest of the US intelligence community
• What's broken in the early stage chip ecosystem and how to fix it
• Why the US government should consider expanding its direct investments in hard tech companies
• How the US needs to counterbalance CFIUS with carrots
• How anti-Asian violence has influenced the research community 

Please consider supporting ChinaTalk! https://glow.fm/chinatalk/

Outtro music: ICE - 随便玩玩 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RIS09dQjSQ

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Bell Labs is dead, long live Bell Labs! This week's guest, Ilan Gur, the CEO of Activate.org, has a plan to improve America's R&D apparatus: fund start-ups that allow entrepreneurial researchers to pursue the practical applications of their world-class basic research. We discuss why we're lucky to have Moderna and BioNTech (beyond the obvious reasons), the impact of research moving from corporations to universities, the Endless Frontier Act, why patents don't equal innovation, and more.

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Outtro Music:

עטר מיינר - זמן לדיכאון : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwSj4egHxvE (god that violin)

Peled - Sababa 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1Pe0Gxbx5c

 טדי נגוסה ויסמין מועלם - Teddy Neguse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajN_M2k_STM&t=98s 

Photo of Bell Labs, abandoned. 

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The Endless Frontier Act, the most important piece of legislation no one's heard of, got blown to bits in committee this week. Sam Hammond of the Niskanen Center joins to discuss. 

My recent coverage in the ChinaTalk newsletter https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/endless-frontier-the-most-important 

Sam's coverage: https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-congress-ruined-the-endless-frontier-act/ 

Outtro Music: Live As You Like by (my new favorite artist) Takayan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85NA-prJZJE

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Why hasn’t North Korea emulated Deng’s Opening & Reform? Are China’s wealthy, educated, urbane youth liberals? Could the PLA cooperate with the U.S. military in the event of Korean reunification?

Dr. Sungmin Cho of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies joins ChinaTalk for a discussion of the Korean Peninsula as viewed by Beijing. This episode is a companion to this week’s ChinaTalk with Odd Arne Westad. Ainikki Riikonen, a research assistant at Center for a New American Security, joins as today’s co-host. Thanks to CNAS for sponsoring this episode. 

Read Dr. Cho’s recent article on the joint recovery of fallen soldiers on the Korean Peninsula as a “guardrail to prevent the worsening of” any potential military crisis in the region: https://apcss.org/nexus_articles/the-joint-recovery-of-fallen-soldiers-from-the-korean-war-one-way-for-american-chinese-north-and-south-korean-soldiers-to-cooperate-and-reconcile/

Outtro Music: Dean - D (Half Moon) ft. Gaeko

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eelfrHtmk68

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Odd Arne Westad joins ChinaTalk to discuss his latest book Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years of China-Korea Relations. Westad’s work is a diplomat’s handbook that connects the sweeping currents of history to the geopolitics of today. Co-hosting today is Danny Crichton of Techcrunch. We explore how Korea, past and present, navigates its relationship with the powerful empires on its doorstep.

Korea’s unique Confucianism serves as a launching point into a discussion on empire and nation-state that takes us from the Joseon Dynasty’s navigation of the Ming Dynasty’s collapse all the way up to the present day (with snippets on espionage in Qing China, Korea’s own version of the Taiping Rebellion, and Japanese imperialism).

We end on K-drama’s popularity in Zhongnanhai and how the flow of South Korean pop culture into China might complicate Chinese leaders’ decision to intervene on behalf of the DPRK in a conflict on the peninsula.

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Outtro music (which really is fire this time, stick around for three Korean bangers): 

Ash Island, Melody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8L2OLu6JZo

Sooljalee (술자리) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJAKYX8A_WM

NO:EL _ 00 (DOUBLE O) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sALhYkA-ij4

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For Part Three of ChinaTalk's industrial policy series, we are joined by two leading lights of the American left: Saikat Chakrabarti, AOC's former Chief of Staff, and Zack Exley of the 2016 Bernie campaign. (Don't forget to check out Part One with Rob Atkinson and Part Two with José Fernandez.) Co-hosting is Vishnu Kannan, a junior fellow in Carnegie's Technology and International Affairs Program. Saikat and Zack take us inside the creation of the Green New Deal, lay out how bold leadership can change a nation's economic trajectory, lament Democrats' lukewarm appetite for industrial policy, and offer up their vision for an American developmental program that harnesses the full potential of its people and capital. We discuss everything from how Harvard teaches economics wrong to what CIA Director Bill Burn's declassified Iraq War cables have to do with the classic film Casablanca.

Please consider supporting ChinaTalk at https://glow.fm/chinatalk/

Outtro music: https://youtu.be/DuVJeJcMod0 

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