ChinaTalk

By Jordan SchneiderNews Technology Government Politics

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ChinaTalk episodes

May 31, 2023Flournoy on US-China and DoD Innovation
Michele Flournoy, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under Obama, CNAS founder, and co-founder of WestExec Advisors, returns to ChinaTalk to discuss:
How the Biden Administration is trying to re-engage with China
Reflections on innovation in defense, AI, and the war in Ukraine

ChinaTalk meetup in NYC this Friday! https://partiful.com/e/taNb35oaCKjglbHHdEA1
Reuters reporting: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/why-us-delayed-china-sanctions-after-shooting-down-spy-balloon-2023-05-11/
New Yorker piece: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/29/two-weeks-at-the-front-in-ukraine
Socila history of the machine gun: https://www.amazon.com/Social-History-Machine-Gun/dp/0801833582

Outtro music: the great Tina Turner with Marvin Gaye: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTsy-uPvQoY

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1 hr 2 min
May 23, 2023DoD Tech Strategy: How the Pentagon Hopes to Innovate
The Pentagon has a new tech strategy! What does it say, what impact will it have, and what do its authors think about technological change and warfare?
Dr. Nina Kollars, advisor to Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) Heidi Shyu, and R&E’s Chief Data Officer Cyrus Jabbari join us to discuss in a wide ranging and at times philosophical conversation about
the challenges of peacetime innovation
critical technology lists
lessons from the origins of the machine gun and development of modern fighter jets
What Cezanne and Picasso can teach us about military innovation (from this piece https://warontherocks.com/2017/03/when-clausewitz-meets-cezanne-mastery-and-the-art-of-future-war/)

NYC ChinaTalk Meetup! https://partiful.com/e/taNb35oaCKjglbHHdEA1

Here's the strategy: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3389118/dod-releases-national-defense-science-and-technology-strategy/ R&E’s Chief Data Offcer yrHerus Jabbari
Music: a guy banging on pots and pans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQEedhz9ERs
Midjourney is a prompt of an F16 with this late 19th century Japanese calligraphy https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/55820

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1 hr 18 min
May 18, 2023AI Implementation: The View From the Trenches
Dan Faggella, who for ten years has interviewed business leaders about the challenges of implementing AI, joins ChinaTalk to discuss about just how hard it is to get AI to diffuse across an economy.
We also get into:
Why the past ten years of AI hasn't lived up to its promise
The technological, bureaucratic, and cultural challenges of corporate AI diffusion
Which sectors are most and least likely to adopt quickly

NYC ChinaTalk meetup: https://partiful.com/e/taNb35oaCKjglbHHdEA1

Music: Uyghur drill, Ahh? Ohh! by Athree https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdfgc2yr9Co

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44 min
May 11, 2023 Jeff Ding on US vs China AI and Lessons from Past Industrial Revolutions
Jeff Ding is the leading US scholar on China and AI and author of one of the earliest China-focused Substacks, ChinAI.
He recently published a fire paper called, “The diffusion deficit in scientific and technological power: re-assessing China’s rise.” It makes the argument that diffusion capacity (not just innovation capacity) is critical to economic growth — and China actually fares much worse in diffusion capacity than mainstream narratives imply.
In particular, “In cases when the emerging power has a strong innovation capacity but weak diffusion capacity (diffusion deficit), it is less likely to sustain its rise than innovation-centric assessments depict. Conversely, when the emerging power possesses a strong diffusion capacity but weak innovation capacity (diffusion surplus), it is more likely to sustain its rise than innovation-centric assessments portray.”
Mainstream narratives, meanwhile, “only compare the U.S. and China’s ability to produce new innovations, neglecting their ability to effectively use and adopt emerging technologies. By revealing the gap between China’s innovation capacity and diffusion capacity, this paper argues that innovation-centric assessments mistakenly inflate China’s S&T power.”
NYC ChinaTalk Meetup: https://partiful.com/e/taNb35oaCKjglbHHdEA1
Cohosting is Teddy Collins, formerly of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and DeepMind.
Outtro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Y7-gm8STI
midjourney prompt: "frank quietly industrial revolution"

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1 hr 14 min
May 06, 2023 Crafting A National Tech Strategy and Reviving Net Tech Assessment
PJ Maykish, Abigail Kukura, and Will Moreland from the Future Technologies platform team of the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) join the conversation to discuss critical technologies and the development of a national technology strategy.
The guests provide insights into how the United States can create a comprehensive technology strategy that prioritizes the development of critical technologies to compete with China. They also discuss the importance of international collaboration in the development of emerging technologies and the challenges faced in building consensus among different stakeholders.
This is the paper we primarily discuss: Platforms-Panel-IPR.pdf (scsp.ai)
Vishnu Kannan of Carnegie cohosts.
Midjourney art: the prompt is "A Bauhaus poster for a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Featuring a young man looking out from a turret on a castle out towards the sea" but I thought it has a bit of a tech forecasting vibe!
Music by the great Cab Calloway: Hi De Ho Man - YouTube

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1 hr 1 min
May 02, 2023 Sen. Warner on the RESTRICT Act, AI, Bipartisanship on China and a New Era of Intelligence
On Monday, May 1, I interviewed Virgina Senator Mark Warner.
We get into the RESTRICT Act, state capacity to analyze emerging technologies, the future of industrial policy, the nature and limits to bipartisanship around China, as well as the government’s role in regulating artificial intelligence.
Check out the ChinaTalk newsletter for a full transcript! https://www.chinatalk.media/
Art via midjourney prompt: corporate America’s naïveté vis-à-vis China

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44 min
April 25, 2023Hoover, Communism, and the FBI
J. Edgar Hoover was a controversial figure who served as the director of the FBI for nearly five decades. In this episode, we explore his life and legacy with Beverly Gage, a professor of 20th-century U.S. history and author of the Bancroft Prize-winning biography "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century."
We discuss
The context in which Hoover developed his anti-communist worldview, and how this shaped his approach to law enforcement.
The deportation of anarchists to Bolshevik Russia.
Similarities between Hoover and Xi Jinping.
The role of FBI informants, including one who met with Mao Zedong.

Outro music: G-Man Hoover by Van Dyke Parks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E566LbON5QA
Check out ChinaTalk.media for transcripts, analysis and more!

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1 hr 36 min
April 14, 2023 Schell on The Long Arc of US-China and Long Reach of Leninism
How did Xi Jinping’s formative years influence how he views the world today? Veteran China scholar Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, looks back at decades of writing and working on China, weathering the cycles of the country opening up and shutting down and gives his two cents on what’s going on in Xi’s head.
We also discuss
— Why Mao Zedong is a better read than Xi
— China’s reciprocity problem on the international stage
— How US officials reacted to Tiananmen in a secret meeting with Deng Xiaoping
— A history of accessing China for academics, businesspeople and journalists
— Xi and victim culture

Outro Music: Glenn Gould performing Contrapunctus, I, IV from Bach’s amazing Art of the Fugue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqDCieiDWAE

Check out the newsletter at ChinaTalk.media!

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1 hr 20 min
April 09, 2023Roach on US-China Couples Therapy
Stephen Roach is a Yale professor with extensive experience in China. He also taught the first China class I ever took, so it may be fair to say he's partially to blame for the entire ChinaTalk enterprise.
In our conversation (taped on February 23), we discuss:
The nexus between US-China relations and the DSM-5 (we need some relationship therapy!);
How false narratives strangle effective diplomatic development;
What Stephen thinks about the odds of a hot conflict over Taiwan;
Practical proposals to improve the bilateral relationship, including what a “US-China Secretariat” (based in neutral Tahiti, obviously) would look like;
Is it the US or China — or both — who fundamentally has no interest in engagement?

Apologies for my audio quality in the second half of the show.
Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRM70Jw7F4M
You all should check out the ChinaTalk newsletter!

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54 min
April 02, 2023AI Military Competition: Tactical, Operational, and Strategic Implications
Paul Scharre, Vice President and Director of Studies at CNAS, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AI, military, strategy, and US-China geopolitics.
Listen in for a discussion on:
How AI will impact the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war
How and why AI operates — whether in chess, Dota 2, or aerial dogfighting — in fundamentally different ways than humans;
Why AI called for a “protective response from the bureaucracy”
The significance of the US’s comparative advantage over China in talent and compute — two of Scharre’s “Four Battlegrounds”;
The dictator’s dilemma, and how advances in AI will challenge the CCP in the coming years;
When in China, how to interview like a pro!

Outro music: a missy elliot + spice girls mix from Arthi, a UK-based DJ who's also an economics correspondent for the times of london! https://youtu.be/iHkfmwy1-OI?t=252
Paul’s latest bestseller: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Battlegrounds-Power-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0393866866
The cover image is Midjourney on “Dota 2–inspired F-35 dogfight”
You should all subscribe to the ChinaTalk newsletter! https://www.chinatalk.media/

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1 hr 4 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.