ChinaTalk

Jeremiah Jenne, history teacher, writer, and the man behind Beijing by Foot, is in the guest seat this week. He speaks with Jordan about the changes — both tangible and intangible — that Beijing has undergone in the last few decades. They chat about how Chinese history is reinterpreted through the lenses of different regimes, the ways in which this new history is presented to the world, and Beijing’s modernizing cityscape and the varied reactions it is met with.

10:57: Out with the old, in with the new

15:17: What to make of the Qing dynasty, with help from the CCP 

27:40: An age of censorship

29:37: History is different in Beijing and Taipei

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Puzzled by rising drug deaths at raves in the United States, author and investigative journalist Ben Westhoff set out to find answers. A Google search for “Buy fentanyl in China” took him down a rabbit hole that led to a face-to-face meeting with the CEO of a company selling fentanyl on Skype “all day long” and a drug lab in Shanghai. Ben tells Jordan the remarkable story.

5:06: The digital rabbit hole

9:20: Want to make fentanyl? Just Google it.

13:57: Between Heisenberg and Pfizer

22:17: How suppliers dodge U.S. Customs

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Bloomberg technology reporter Lulu Chen gives the scoop on the tech world in China: what’s to come for Alibaba under newly minted CEO Daniel Zhang, the long-standing grudge Meituan CEO Wang Xing holds against Jack Ma, the Communist Party’s growing presence within technology companies, and her own views on reporting on tech in China. 

2:07: Hong Kong protests

24:03: Daniel Zhang’s new venture

28:11: Meituan drama

36:22: International expansion of Chinese tech

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Jake Sullivan served in the Obama administration as National Security Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden and Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department. He currently teaches at Yale Law School. In this episode, Sullivan discusses his perspectives on the current U.S.-China relationship, his experiences working in the Obama administration and on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton campaign, and the ways our relationships with other governments around the world are changing under Trump. 

What to listen for on this week's ChinaEconTalk:

5:05: Reflections on the Obama years

19:03: A case for internationalism

27:46: Doing more to achieve less with China

45:20: The direction of U.S. foreign policy

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Mira Rapp-Hooper, senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, provides an overview of the history of U.S. foreign policy from Washington’s farewell address to the modern day. She also discusses the implications of a rising China for the future of U.S. alliances.

3:20: The costs of going it alone 

10:41: Cold War “Great Power” competition

36:32: The Taiwan Strait crisis

41:47: Trump and the future of U.S. alliances

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ChinaEconTalk is live from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., with Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow in the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. Host Jordan Schneider sits down with Martijn to discuss a few of the more contentious topics surrounding the ongoing friction between the United States and China, including rare earths, the strategic implications of 5G, concerns about Huawei software and security, and global ICT standard setting. Get bonus content on Patreon

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Douglas Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and the author of Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy. On this episode, Irwin provides an overview to the history of U.S. trade policy from the 18th century to the modern day, highlighting significant legislation as well as the formation of important intergovernmental organizations that have sprung up along the way.

19:53: On the flawed logic behind the Tariff Act of 1930, and the parallels with similarly problematic thinking in the modern day: “There’s absolutely a parallel there because some Democrats in Congress said, ‘You know, we ought to really think about this carefully, and not just our domestic interest but also our export interests, and other countries might retaliate.’ And basically, the reaction of most members of Congress was, Republicans at the time, ‘No, we don’t have to worry about that. This is a domestic piece of legislation, it doesn’t really concern other countries. They’re not going to retaliate.’ And, of course, they did.”

39:40: Doug discusses the tips and tricks behind one example of “tariff engineering”: “The tariffs applied to motorcycles with piston displacements of 700cc and above. What Honda started doing is producing a 699cc version. Now the difference [between the two] is imperceptible, but just by changing that one cubic centimeter, it changed the whole tariff treatment and you avoided a 45 percent tariff and were assessed at a much, much lower rate.”

Jordan will be hosting his first-ever live recording of ChinaEconTalk at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, D.C., at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 19. Be sure to drop by Mission Dupont afterward for dinner or drinks!

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Douglas Fuller is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong and the author of Paper Tiger, Hidden Dragons: Firms and the Political Economy of China’s Technological Development. In his book, Fuller explores a question that has hounded heads of state around the world for decades: How can a developing country get ahead in the tech sector? Drawing on the results of 499 interviews from experts over the course of 15 years, Fuller discusses China’s answer to this question in the context of its attempts to dominate the global semiconductor industry. Fuller and Jordan also touch on the transformative impact of the trade war and the concept of technology transfer and their implications for the immediate future of the Chinese tech sector. 

Jordan’s newsletter is now available for sign-ups: chinaecontalk.substack.com. In the past few weeks, he’s translated articles on topics like the troubled future of VPNs in China, the role of “operations” in Chinese internet companies, and the rise of a cheese tea Starbucks slayer. 

What to listen for in this week’s ChinaEconTalk:

27:38: Chinese tech companies are often portrayed as monolithic, but in reality, the financial decisions that brought companies like ZTE and Huawei to the international stage are significantly different: “[Huawei CEO and founder] Ren Zhengfei — there was a method to his madness. He decided to forgo what were these rational incentive structures to just embrace state procurement and instead took a very high risk strategy of very early on looking abroad for contracts, for markets because he really wanted to hone Huawei’s capabilities by competing against the best… In contrast, a firm like ZTE was more than happy to be much more reliant on the Chinese marketplace when it went abroad. It sort of very much followed this [path of taking] China Development Bank subsidized loans to sell equipment in African countries where the leading foreign firms were not interested because the price points were so low.”

41:16: What should U.S. policy look like in regards to Chinese tech policy? In considering this question, Fuller notes: “Investment binges [by China] have wrecked certain markets… Now the United States is extrapolating forward. What if they do this in memory chips or other semiconductor products? Those two areas are of high concern, particularly when thinking about, ‘Well, are these natural outcomes, or not?’ And I would say the investment binges and the levels of subsidization of a lot of industrial investment in China, this obviously didn’t just happen because the market dictated it.”

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Danit Gal is a former Yenching Scholar and coauthor of a recent paper, “Perspectives and Approaches to AI Ethics: East Asia.” On this episode, Gal discusses how Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese experts are forging new paths in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), exploring societal applications — and the unexpected drawbacks of “female” virtual assistants. Gal also explains the tech connections between China and Israel, and the possible impact of the U.S.-China trade war on this relationship.

What to listen for on this week’s ChinaEconTalk:

15:56: Gal on her trip to Longquan Monastery in Beijing: “They basically have a Chinese robot monk, named Xian’er. I spoke to him and he gives you all these responses and talks to you about the deep meaning of Buddhist ceremonies… And then I asked him, ‘Who is your master?’ And then he answered to me very clearly, ‘The data is my master.’ And the monks freaked out — they [said] ‘No, no, no. We give him the data. We are the data. We feed him the ceremonies, and everything he has to say!’” 

42:15: In a recent piece, Gal wrote that trade and technology tensions between the U.S. and China present both challenges and opportunities for Israel: “One clear way is that it’s really disrupting supply chains in that you would have to choose your alliances in order to get certain components at a good price and time. We’re getting to the point where a lot of companies are not allowed to trade directly and that significantly adds costs and uncertainty… An upside to that is actually that because American companies are not allowed to directly trade with China, they go through technical middlemen.” 

Jordan will be in New York and Washington, D.C., this September and October, so reach out if you want to meet up! Email him at [email protected] or connect on WeChat using his WeChat ID, jordanschneider.

Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to chinaecontalk.substack.com!

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On this episode of ChinaEconTalk, Jordan interviews Lauren Teixeira, a freelance reporter based in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. After what has been a jam-packed few months of China news, Lauren discusses a wide range of topics, from engaging with mainlanders about the anti-Extradition Bill protests in Hong Kong to the downsides of Chinese superblock urban planning. Lauren finishes the interview with a wide-ranging introduction to contemporary pop culture artists in China whose innovation and creativity are helping people to stay inspired at a challenging time. 

What to listen for on this week’s ChinaEconTalk:

6:59: Lauren recalls Ian Johnson’s comments to her during their conversation on engaging in political discussions in China: “He said to me, ‘There’s a ceiling for your rhetoric because at some point you can’t tell someone to “look it up” because they can’t look it up.’ Epistemologically you’re not on even ground. And so, if you want to really get into a real discussion with someone,  you basically have to redpill them.”

14:41: On K-pop and geopolitics, as China tries to develop its own pop music industry: “It’s half import substitution and half, I think, just a concerted effort to build your own idol industry that you can better control. For example, there would be all these geopolitical conflicts. If something happened in the South China Sea, the Chinese idols would have to go on Korean television and be like, ‘F*** this, I’m a patriot.’ There was once a Taiwanese idol who waved a Taiwanese flag on a Korean reality show and she had to absolutely bend the knee to get back into the good graces of China, which was putting pressure on her agency.” 

Jordan will be in New York and Washington, D.C. this September and October so reach out if you want to meet up! Email him at [email protected] or connect on WeChat using his WeChat ID, jordanschneider.

Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to chinaecontalk.substack.com! You've all signed up already, haven't you?

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