ChinaTalk

By Jordan SchneiderNews Technology Government Politics

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Typical duration
71 min
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ChinaTalk episodes

April 02, 2023What to Do About Foreign Interference
What actually is foreign influence, and how might Canada handle China’s interference in its domestic affairs? Akshay Singh is a research associate at the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa. We discuss:
How to roll out a foreign agent registry;
The role of the US-Canada relationship;
Whether foreign influence is a diaspora problem;
And performance reviews for the United Front’s Canada desk.
Akshay on how democracies should respond to foreign influence: https://www.cigionline.org/articles/faced-with-foreign-interference-how-should-democracies-respond/
Outtro music: 公公偏頭痛 by Jay Chou https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y
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41 min
March 28, 2023Chips Avengers 2023: Chips Act + AI Revolution
The Chips Avengers assemble once again! Reva Goujon of the Rhodium Group, JP Kleinhans of the European think tank SNV, Jay Goldberg of Digits and Dollars, and Dylan Patel, who writes SemiAnalysis.
In this episode of ChinaTalk, we all:
Deep dive into the CHIPS Act's recent Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO);
Discuss the potentially existential impact of AI on global power dynamics;
Consider the true intentions of the October 2022 export controls — from military constraining China to crippling manufacturing in the broader economy;
Muse about the potential for a "splinternet" to emerge as countries around the world — in particular, the US, China, EU members states — adopt different standards and regulations for their tech industries;
And more!

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1_Amc4Ysv0

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56 min
March 24, 2023TikTok Hearing: The End of an Era
Kevin Xu, Obama-era White House official and creator of https://interconnect.substack.com/ comes on ChinaTalk to discuss:
Our impressions of the House's TikTok hearing
Continued cross-border reliances around batteries and cloud computing
The missed opportunity of Zhang Yiming's generation of founders
GPT4's remarkable translation capabilities
Outtro Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQiOA7euaYA

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59 min
March 20, 2023Kotkin on China
Stephen Kotkin is a legendary historian, currently at Hoover, previously at Princeton. Best known for his Stalin biographies, his other works include Uncivil Society, Magnetic Mountain, and Armageddon Averted.
Our discussion on China is far-ranging yet in-depth — we manage to pack in:
The two dominant subjects taught at the CCP’s Central Party School;
Kotkin’s assessment of the main threat to Communism — what “Communism with a human face” means, and why Gorbachev’s reforms ultimately destroyed Communism in the USSR;
Why the CCP fears color revolutions more than, say, NATO expansion — and why Xi snapped on Hong Kong in 2020;
The twin components of Marxism-Leninism: anti-capitalism + anti-imperialism;
And an understanding of Lenin’s “commanding heights,” and what China’s commanding heights are today;
The case for optimism about US-China relations, despite — or because of — the recent ratcheting up of tensions;
Why Kotkin believes a US-China Cold War is both good and necessary;
How the US can get on the diplomatic “front foot”;
Making sense of Reagan’s foreign policy — how he was both a “movement conservative” and a “dealmaking conservative.”

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4GLAKEjU4w.
Check out the newsletter and other ChinaTalk content at https://www.chinatalk.media/.

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1 hr 16 min
March 16, 2023 GPT4—AI Unleashed?
How will GPT4 change the world?
What implications does it have for policy, economics, and society?
How will US-China 'racing dynamics' play out and what are the implications for AI safety?
To discuss, I've brought together the AI Justice League: Zvi of 'Don't Worry About the Vase', Nathan Labenz of Waymark, and Matthew Mittelsteadt of Mercatus.

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1 hr 24 min
March 13, 2023The CIA’s China Capabilities
Dennis Wilder returns to ChinaTalk — this time with some broader thoughts on how the US intelligence community can rise to the occasion vis-à-vis China. In particular, we discuss:
The importance of government hiring those with experience living in China;
Contributions that the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS) has made to China intelligence, and why it should be reinstated;
A serious request to make an ChatGPT as good as Alice Miller is at analyzing CCP documents; https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/clm57-am-final.pdf
Why the State Department has established China House and the CIA has established the China Mission Center;
What we can learn from Richard Danzig’s Driving in the Dark; https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/driving-in-the-dark-ten-propositions-about-prediction-and-national-security%C2%A0
How to maintain robust intelligence capabilities in the long-run;
Raymond P. Ludden and the “Dixie Mission” — and why the US needs more Luddens today. https://uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu/essays/we-need-more-luddens

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l6vqPUM_FE
Check out the newsletter and other ChinaTalk content at https://www.chinatalk.media/

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40 min
March 08, 2023Economic Warfare: Implications for Sanctions Today
Welcome back to the second part of my conversation with Nick Mulder and Lars Schönander.
Picking the narrative up in 1935, get real in this episode:
Why the Great Depression, counterintuitively, made importing commodities cheaper, and how that affected Germany’s and Japan’s protectionism;
The difference between autarky and autarchy;
Whether Kim Jong-un’s North Korea could survive a full-on fuel embargo today by using Nazi-era technology;
Nick’s definition of “temporal claustrophobia,” and what it has to do with Japan ultimately siding with the Axis;
Parallels between the “ABCD circle” (America, Britain, China, Dutch East Indies) and the semiconductor export controls today;
Why having an empire was a liability for Britain;
What sanctions had to do with the Czechoslovaks — even with a larger army — falling to the Nazis;
How the blockades of WWI differed from WWII;
And what lessons pro-decouplers should learn from this history of sanctions.
Nick’s book recommendations:
https://www.amazon.com/Athene-Palace-Rosie-G-Waldeck/dp/1592110088
https://www.amazon.com/World-Late-Antiquity-150-750-Civilization/dp/0393958035
https://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590171462
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Maisky-Diaries-Volumes-Communism/dp/0300117825

Nick’s excellent book: https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Weapon-Rise-Sanctions-Modern/dp/0300259360

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5mdvyIqrs4

Check out the newsletter and other ChinaTalk content at https://www.chinatalk.media/.

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1 hr 2 min
March 03, 2023Economic Warfare: A History
Today we’re releasing part one of our a two-part conversation with Nick Mulder, a history professor at Cornell and author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War — a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022.
With cohost Lars, Schönander, we discuss:
The recent advent of the use of sanctions (for example, in the Crimean War, Britain continued to fulfill payments to Russia, the nation it was fighting right then!)
Why Europeans were reluctant to employ blockades and sanctions in the early twentieth century, and how their thinking evolved through two world wars
How Wilson’s notion of “moral sanctions” and decision to keep blockades in place after the war were important to the development of sanctions, especially during the interwar period
The League of Nations’ efforts to establish a “positive sanctions” fund, and why the concept never took off
Nick’s take on why Hoover is underrated
When and why Italy almost fought a war against Germany over Austria

Stay tuned for part two, when we connect this sanctions history to implications to US-China relations today!
Nick’s excellent book: https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Weapon-Rise-Sanctions-Modern/dp/0300259360

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzd4VtkNjmc

Check out the newsletter and other ChinaTalk content at chinatalk.media.

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1 hr 18 min
March 02, 2023How does AI actually work, anyways?
Data scientist Bryan Cheong breaks down how AI actually works, creating video using AI and how the technology is being used beyond image and language models.
Also, I've got a meetup March 7th in Palo Alto! https://partiful.com/e/dVY7k51xQX4WhNr6AUcH
Joined by Zheng, we also discuss:
The farmers in India using AI for marketing
Denoising and weights, the tech behind AI image generation tools
What's next for developments in AI
Singapore's tech scene

Outro music: 我說所有的酒都不如你 by 房東的貓 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2zj74iK1MI
Check out the newsletter and other ChinaTalk content at chinatalk.media.

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50 min
February 28, 2023 Will Xi Give Putin Arms? Has A Cold War Already Begun?
Today we’re going to do a show about the scariest US-China news story I’ve seen in years, that “The US has intelligence that the Chinese government is considering providing Russia with drones and ammunition for use in the war in Ukraine.”
Would China really arm Russia, and if so what will that mean for the world if the US and China end up on opposite sides of a proxy war?
To discuss this I have on today Georgetown’s, Dennis Wilder, a longtime CIA veteran who served as an NSC director on the China desk under the bush administration and spent six years under Obama editing the presidential daily brief before concluding his career in government as the CIA’s deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific.
Outtro Music: Ukranian rap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgDXAAh-cXw

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47 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.