ChinaTalk

By Jordan SchneiderNews Technology Government Politics

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ChinaTalk episodes

September 19WarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette
In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career.
Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and WarTalk's Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark.
We discuss…
Why 2027 is not a go date — the three "strategic capabilities" the PLA pulled forward from its 2035 goals, and why a capability milestone says nothing about intent

What the Iran war taught Beijing — day-one decapitation and the heaviest firepower campaign in decades still didn't deliver the political outcome, and PLA journals noticed

The purges are what they look like — Occam's razor on PLA corruption, "fake combat capabilities," and why joint fires fail when artillery support runs on connections

The nuclear shield — early-warning counterstrike, low-yield options, and why a thousand more US warheads would buy less deterrence than a thousand more boats

Beijing's Japan fixation — the Chinese nuclear strategy text with a chapter on every nuclear state, plus Japan

Inside vs. outside — what you can know about the PLA without a clearance, the mirror-imaging trap, and the pitch to undergrads who read Chinese
Plus: the PLA's corruption tip line, Polymarket odds on the next purge, and where an escaped POW should beg for food.

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1 hr 18 min
September 15ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier
ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy.
Why the Hugging Face hack broke through where years of extinction talk didn’t, and how Bernie, Tucker, and Rogan ended up on the same side

What “pacing” even means: Nathan’s case that nobody can measure the frontier, and why it still beats “pause”

Who gets Slack access: METR’s monopoly on trust, CAISI’s $10 million, jury duty for AI researchers, and why nothing survives without legislation

Will China slow down too? Zhipu and Moonshot turning the crank, military secrets leaking into Claude through proxy routers, and the MSS waking up

The Sacks clap-back: whether product liability does the job, and what an eighteen-month pause costs in cancer cures and vibe-coding projects

Send in Demis! plus Lu Xun as the antidote to Chongqing TikToks, and what DeepSeek’s Chinese name owes to Qu Yuan

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1 hr 9 min
September 11WarTalk: 9.11, Death of the Army, So Long Dan Driscoll
In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking, and quit. Days earlier his boss had fired the Chief of Staff, disbanded the Army's only drone battalion, and cashiered Chris Donahue — the last man out of Kabul.
Bryan Clark, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan for a hosts-only edition marking a quarter-century of the Global War on Terror.
We discuss…
Twenty-five years on the treadmill — how Rumsfeld's transformation agenda collided with GWOT budgets to produce LCS, FCS, and the F-35, and why a rotational, casualty-averse force forgot how to accept risk

Driscoll walks — the OSD meddling behind the exit, why Congress won't confirm anyone Hegseth nominates, and a Pentagon run by acting officials through 2029

The meritocracy of meritocracies — what firing Donahue tells every field-grade officer weighing the exit, the auto-promoted NCO corps nobody talks about, and why the Ranger tab discourse is real

Budget Steve takes the fall — Feinberg blamed for a munitions shortage created by fighting Iran with the stealthiest, priciest weapons in the inventory, plus NIH biodefense money quietly rerouted to the Pentagon

Lying to Putin with AI — ISW's report on Russian commanders faking battlefield progress, and what generative deception does to OSINT and soldiers' feeds

The Houthis have Claude Code — Anthropic's threat report, Yemeni drone guidance software, and DeepSeek routing PLA subcontractors' queries to Claude through a transfer station

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1 hr 12 min
September 05WarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why.
Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 Colby Award. He first embedded in the Pech as a college student in 2010 and later covered the Pentagon for Politico.
We discuss…
How a timber dispute became the Korengal — one Green Beret team refused the bait, the next took it, and Big Taliban followed

The three tribes of the war in the east — conventional forces, Green Berets, and the JSOC task force, each fighting its own war in the same valleys

Ten thousand beanie babies and record artillery expenditure — how measures of performance swallowed measures of effectiveness

Black Hawk Down, Ghost Recon, and the making of multicam — how Crye sold the camouflage of the elite through video games because it couldn't advertise its Delta contract

The death of the embed — Rumsfeld overruling Colin Powell, the 2013 shutdown, and why influencers in the briefing r4om beat reporters in the field

Whether the Army learned anything at all — disbanding the Asymmetric Warfare Group, rebuilding short-range air defense from zero, and Ukraine as the excuse to never say "Afghanistan" again

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1 hr 22 min
September 02Cyber Apocalypse, Now? Hugging Face and the Future of Cyber Risk
OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first headline-grade AI breakout, and one that safety researchers saw coming. Is the cyber apocalypse finally on the calendar, or does the industry just need to do its homework?
Joshua Saxe spent his formative years as a DARPA and NSA contractor before four years at Meta, where he founded the company’s frontier cyber capabilities evals team and finished as its AI security tech lead. He recently left to co-found Abundant Security.
We discuss…
What actually happened in the Hugging Face hack, and why AI safety insiders weren’t surprised,

The “grad student lab” security culture inside frontier labs racing sixty hours a week to ship,

Why the cyber Pearl Harbor predicted since the early 2000s never arrived — and whether swarms of hacking agents finally change that,

How nation states will post-train open-weight models like GLM and Kimi into billion-dollar cyber weapons,

Why AI has so far favored defenders, from mass bug-squashing to superhuman network monitoring,

The industrial economics of cybercrime — kill chains, ransomware divisions of labor, and whether AI gives criminals 100x returns.

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1 hr 11 min
August 29WarTalk: USN Readiness Reckoning, Steampunk Navy, and AI Cyberwar with Shashank of the Economist
The USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home after a deployment that stretched past 240 days, and the bill is about to come due: mechanical failures, rations down to the emergency stores, 20,000 unfilled billets at sea, and a maintenance backlog funneling into the one carrier repair yard on each coast. Meanwhile, the White House wants to tear the electromagnetic catapults out of the Ford class and put steam back in.
We're joined by Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, a former submariner and Navy strategist, and Shashank Joshi, who has just handed off the defense brief at The Economist and decamped to Washington, alongside regulars Justin McIntosh and Tony Stark.
We discuss…
Why the fleet breaks: extended deployments, generators failing in the South China Sea, Diego Garcia resupply chains, and 12-hour flight deck shifts that don't end

The reenlistment cliff — what happens when half a carrier's crew hits their decision point right after the worst deployment of their careers

Steam catapults and hydraulic elevators: 35,000 successful EMALS launches, a four-year delay to the next carrier, and 500 sailors added back to a ship designed to need fewer

Whether agentic AI finally gives cyber its strategic moment, or whether dropping a bomb on the power plant remains the cheaper option

The offense-defense balance, and why the drone debate should make us humble about predicting it

The PLA Rocket Force's new corruption tip line — a purge that fixes a force, or one that reveals how deep the rot goes

Chinese components in Ukrainian drones, the Rockchip inside a $400 hugging-face robot, and how much of the Internet of Things you can afford to worry about

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1 hr 5 min
August 24How AI Becomes a Political Crisis
The political economy of AI — things are getting weird, it seems. We have models on the loose, open weights being dropped from the heavenly temple, and data center protests fanning out across the land. There’s a lot of salience in a way that feels really different than it did even six months ago. To discuss, we have the wonderful Anton Leicht, a fellow at Carnegie and author of the excellent Substack Threading the Needle.
Our conversation covers:
Why even a small amount of AI-driven unemployment could upend national politics, especially if agents start replacing junior white-collar workers and breaking the career pipeline,

What policymakers can do to protect workers without calcifying the economy, how to collect better data on AI and labor, and whether to subsidize junior hiring,

The case for funding the AI transition with corporate income taxes instead of token taxes, and why offering the government AI equity or “golden shares” would backfire,

Data center backlash, strategies for winning hearts and minds, and options for friendshoring AI infrastructure,

The political economy of safety — why pausing AI development wouldn’t work, but a coordinated slowdown might,

The coming reckoning between open source and the national security state.
Plus, Kafka on bureaucracy and happenstance, how Anton’s years in esports shaped his career, and why new ideas seem to travel more easily through American policy discourse than European institutions.

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1 hr 9 min
August 21Lessons from the American Civil War
Note: This episode was recorded in late 2024. Luckily, there haven't been any US Civil War updates since then, so the episode's content still holds up. Enjoy!
During paternity leave, the new influx of dad energy compelled me to read close to 15 titles on the American Civil War.
The Civil War is a case study in traditional ChinaTalk themes like technological change and organizational design. It is also a uniquely well-documented war, just on the cusp of modernity, with gripping characters and human drama basically wherever you look.
To discuss all things Civil War, ChinaTalk interviewed Jeremy Neufeld, Director of Immigration Policy at IFP and author of an incredibly nerdy Civil War Twitter account, as well as Wayne Hsieh, a professor at the Naval Academy and co-author of A Savage War, an excellent new military history of the Civil War.
We discuss…
How the Civil War played a role in America’s rise to superpower status,

The impact of technological innovation on the war, including the telegraph, the steamship, and the railroad system,

The Confederate invasion of Kentucky and other strategic missteps,

Strategies for mobilizing industry and civil society for warfare,

Differences in institutional culture between the Northern and Southern armies.

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1 hr 33 min
August 19North Korea's Messiah
Why is North Korea so weird? Is it Stalinism? Maoism? Japan-style emperor worship? Ancient Korean hermit kingdom energy? No, argues Jonathan Cheng, Beijing bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Korean Messiah: The Failed Dynasty That Shaped the Hermit Kingdom. You’ve all been sleeping on the influence of 19th-century American revival Protestantism.
To discuss why Kim Il-sung kind of thought he was Jesus — or at least wanted to convince everyone else he was — we have the honor of Jonathan joining ChinaTalk today, with Alex Boyd.
Our conversation covers:
Billy Graham meets Kim Il-sung — how America’s pastor visited Pyongyang in 1992 and bonded with the dictator over their shared Presbyterian childhoods, while touring a birthplace resembling the nativity story.

From “Jerusalem of the East” to totalitarian theocracy — how 22-year-old missionary Samuel Moffett brought eschatological founder energy to the wickedest city in Korea, and transformed Pyongyang into the most Protestant city in Asia, complete with jazz clubs and a Chevrolet dealership.

The Manchurian cauldron — how the lawless frontier of 1920s Manchuria blended Christianity, Korean nationalism, and Marxism to forge Kim Il-sung’s messiah complex — and why the 33-year-old decided to let peasants believe he could walk on water.

Jim Jones, superfan — how the Jonestown cult leader became obsessed with Kim Il-sung, adopted Korean children, and traded tips with North Korean diplomats on running a closed religious society.

Christianity as political technology — how Kim weaponized Protestant doctrine and ritual to build a state religion that has outlasted the Soviet Union by three decades.
Plus, why North Korea is best understood not as a nation-state but as a religious society, and what Hong Xiuquan and Xi Jinping have to do with any of this.

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2 hr
August 17The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry
How did China grow its EV industry? Hint: it wasn’t really central planning from Beijing. It was a magical concoction of entrepreneurs and local officials using their guanxi to dance around giant SOEs and central-government regulation, leverage private and foreign capital, and just be really excellent business people. That’s led to our situation in 2026 — world-beating companies that have a ton of overcapacity and are set to take over the planet.
To discuss, we have ANU Professor Fengming Lu, who recently wrote a fantastic paper in The China Journal, titled The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry: Strategic Alliances Between Local Governments and Private Capital, alongside Irene Zhang, contributor and analyst at China Talk. We also get into the lessons this story holds for other strategic industries like robotics and AI — plus a little detour into the Chinese podcasting ecosystem.
Our conversation covers:
China’s automotive transformation from 130 small carmakers in the 1990s to the world’s most competitive EV industry.

The rise of Chery, Geely, and other Chinese auto champions — how local connections, foreign technology, and creative financing helped them break into an industry dominated by state-owned enterprises.

The downside of success — how China’s EV boom created an overcapacity problem.

The role of guanxi and elite politics in deciding who gets to build cars.

When Chinese EVs go global — record exports, overseas factories, trade tensions, and whether the same local-government playbook will shape the next wave of industries, from robotics to AI.

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1 hr 55 min

About ChinaTalk

From the publisher's feed

Conversations exploring China, technology, and US-China relations. Guests include a wide range of analysts, policymakers, and academics. Hosted by Jordan Schneider.