ChinaTalk

By Jordan SchneiderNews Technology Government Politics

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ChinaTalk episodes

May 26WarTalk: Ukraine's Forward Drone Line with Rob Lee
Rob Lee dials in from Ukraine for a long-form WarTalk on what the front line actually looks like in year four — where infantry sit underground for six months without seeing the sun, where 2% of casualties come from small arms, and where the "forward line of troops" has been quietly replaced by a forward line of UAV teams.
Rob Lee is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and one of the most-read analysts of the Russia-Ukraine war; he's joined on the show by WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark, Tony Stark, and Justin.
We discuss…
The six-month infantry rotation and what isolation, drone threat, and zero-line resupply do to a human being

Why Ukraine has reclaimed the drone edge — and what the Hornet, Bumblebee, and FP2 are doing to Russian logistics

Ukraine's new corps structure, where the brigade-only model broke down, and what the Azov-derived elite corps look like

Why 2% of Ukrainian casualties come from small arms and what infantry are actually doing on the zero line

Starlink as the indispensable game-changer — and Russia's increasingly serious attempt to jam it

Combat casualty care when CASEVAC takes 12 hours, the golden hour is dead, and tourniquets sit on for a month

What the Marine Corps should steal from Ukraine — pushing Hornets to the battalion, Bumblebees to the company, and giving up something to make room
this ep's a little too dark for a suno song

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1 hr 10 min
May 22Doing Big Things in Policy: It's All White Space
Wanna do big things? This week, a how-to guide for technically minded people who want to stop posting and start changing things — covering everything from why every globally important problem is "white space."
Joining Jordan are Kumar Garg, founder of Renaissance Philanthropy and a veteran of the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Remco Zwetsloot, co-founder of the Horizon Institute for Public Service, which builds pipelines into government for emerging-tech talent.
We discuss…
Why $10 million globally on lead remediation tells you everything about how undertalented the world's most important problems are

Ambition + humility as the Horizon Fellowship's selection criteria — and why most candidates need to hear the opposite of what they expect

"We care meetings" vs. "we decide meetings," the Geithner heuristic for surviving senior government roles

The tribal KPIs of the White House — what the Office of Public Engagement, speech writing, and comms actually want from a policy nerd

The conscious-incompetence quadrant and why "your job is not to be the expert, your job is to mobilize expertise"

The posting-to-policy pipeline, the rise of the individual writer, and the introspective work that public writing forces

My Bulgarian tanks fantasy vs. the value-over-replacement case for picking your own hobby horse
Horizon recently launched Launchpad, a Substack on working in emerging tech policy with advice, explainers, and conversations like this one — if you enjoyed this conversation, you’ll probably like their other stuff as well.

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57 min
May 18Trump's China Visit: Prestige on the Cheap
From Mar-a-Lago to the Great Hall, Trump returns to Beijing desperate for validation while Xi Jinping treats him to strategic flattery. It’s the first time an American president has been to China in seven years. It deserves a podcast, although, as Trivium said, the outcomes could have been an email instead of a summit.
Today’s guests are Sergey Radchenko, author of To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power — which won a ChinaTalk Book of the Year award and got the four-hour podcast treatment — as well as ChinaTalk regulars Kevin Xu of Interconnected and Jon Czin, formerly of the CIA and NSC, now with Brookings.
Our conversation covers:
Prestige politics on the cheap — How Trump's delegation gawked at Chinese architecture while Xi scored propaganda points by getting the U.S. president to fawn over Zhongnanhai's gardens — reversing decades of diplomatic protocol.

The G2 that never was — Why Trump's dream of running the world with Xi echoes Nixon and Brezhnev's failed détente, and how strategic competition makes genuine cooperation impossible regardless of personal chemistry.

The AI factor — As Beijing struggles with compute constraints and export controls, the US brings its AI safety dialogue proposal as its only real leverage in an otherwise empty summit.

The midterm calculation — How Xi is withholding concessions until September 2026, betting that Trump will need wins most desperately right before the elections.

Who’s using the pause better? — While China methodically builds domestic chip capacity and refuses even approved Nvidia exports, the U.S. struggles with basic industrial policy on rare earths.

song: https://suno.com/s/cwNGihewAFKpkJls

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1 hr 8 min
May 12The Stalemate Summit: Xi-Trump in the Long Sweep of US-China Relations
Julian Gewirtz, former Biden administration China official, now at Columbia, joins me to chat about the Xi-Trump visit and all things US-China. Matt Sheehan, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, drops by to give his takes on the AI angle.
We cover:
What to expect (and not expect) from the Trump-Xi “stalemate summit”

Historical echoes from the 1793 Macartney mission and the 1972 Nixon-Kissinger opening — summit optics, status games, and the choreography of power.

Taiwan — arms sales, declaratory language, and Beijing's long game on Taiwanese morale and politics.

The good and bad case for China in the Iran conflict, and how Chinese officials may be reading America's military commitments, political cohesion, and staying power.

US-China AI safety conversation after Mythos, China's approach to frontier AI risks, and the control, harness, govern playbook for emerging technologies.

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1 hr 20 min
May 09WarTalk: Iran War 'Love Tap' Edition feat. Jack Shanahan
The White House says the war is over. The White House also says it's continuing in a new form. Two weeks after the launch of Project Freedom, only two Maersk ships took the offer. Roughly 900 ships remain trapped in the Persian Gulf, and the Saudis just declined to grant basing or overflight rights.
Retired Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan — founding director of the Pentagon's Joint AI Center and former head of Project Maven — joins Bryan Clark, Eric Robinson, Tony Stark, and Justin McIntosh to dig into the purgatory.
We discuss…
Why Project Freedom collapsed
A leaked CIA assessment putting 70% of Iran's ballistic missile capability still intact
The Anthropic supply chain risk designation, Mythos, and the "call me" moment
Four F-15Es down, 30 MQ-9s shot down, and why Jack thinks the Air Force was one inch from a televised POW disaster
song:https://suno.com/s/kBuJ4ruS5UkfTdY3

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1 hr 21 min
May 07(Audio Fixed!!) Ken Liu on AI, Daoism, and Freedom
Ken Liu graces ChinaTalk with his presence. He is the author of the Dandelion Dynasty silkpunk fantasy series and a brilliant short fiction writer — one of his stories was recently adapted into Sam Altman’s favorite show, Pantheon. We all know his translation work on the first and third volumes of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, but even better was his absolutely brilliant translation and commentary of the Dao De Jing. As much as I hoped that project would get him fully on the classical Chinese translation train, he followed it up with a very different direction — a techno-AI thriller, All That We See or Seem, released late last year. Irene Zhang of ChinaTalk joins us to co-host.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Ken Liu argues that:
Technology is the most human thing we do — humans have always externalized our minds into the world and then allowed those creations to reshape who we are.

AI “slop” won’t stop humans from making art that matters, and the real distinction isn’t quality versus slop, but between desire-fulfilling machines and artists who draw from the collective unconscious.

The deeper danger of AI isn’t machines replacing humans, but systems that train humans to behave like machines.

Science fiction isn’t prophecy, but mythology — and ideologies are just mythology’s cheaper, hack cousins. Orwell, Shelley, Tolkien, and Le Guin endure not because they predicted the future, but because they gave us metaphors powerful enough to think with across generations.

Large language models are intelligent, but can’t be wise. Drawing on Laozi and Zhuangzi, Ken explains why everything that truly matters lies beyond language.

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1 hr 19 min
April 30WarTalk: Still Very Much Out of Ammo!
Two weeks into the US-Iran ceasefire, CENTCOM is requesting Dark Eagle hypersonics, the 82nd Airborne is flowing into theater, and the wargames keep telling us the same thing — there’s no military solution to the Strait of Hormuz.
Becca Wasser, America’s wargaming queen, currently with Bloomberg, joins WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark, Eric Robinson, and Justin Mc.
We discuss…
Why CENTCOM is using JASSMs to hit targets a glide bomb could handle

What cosplay costs the Indo-Pacific

The myth of US air superiority over Iran, and the SEAD legwork no one wants to do

Who actually benefits from the ceasefire and why Iran has the lower bar for reconstitution
Song: https://suno.com/s/wUhL26xyvUiklraY
We now have the songs on spotify! https://open.spotify.com/artist/3wltBV7tzUjci0vyTSv6h7?si=aVdBxNM7QVOknAXRakJZCg

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1 hr 3 min
April 27Quantum 201: US v China Quantum Industrial Base
Constanza Vidal Bustamante joins Chris Miller and Zachary Yerushalmi to break down her new report with John Burke, Quantum's Industrial Moment: Strengthening US Quantum Supply Chains for Scalable Advantage — a deep dive into the components, chokepoints, and policy levers that will decide who wins the race to a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
We discuss…
(00:00) Why quantum is "pre-transistor" — and why the US still has time to lock in supply chain dominance before the next-gen architecture is even invented

(09:53) Dilution refrigerators, helium-3 from the nuclear stockpile, and whether mining the moon is actually a viable Plan B

(17:43) Did the 2024 export controls backfire? Inside the case study of China going from zero to dominating dilution-refrigerator publications in two years

(48:44) Lasers, photonics, and the Chinese supplier that reverse-engineered a Danish flagship — and is still selling into US labs under R&D tariff exemptions

(1:03:45) Why quantum looks more like biotech than semiconductors: 90 companies, ~7 modalities, and the anthropology of an industry where everyone thinks their qubit is the right one
Constanza's report: https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/quantums-industrial-moment
The Quantum Throne song: https://suno.com/s/9kBx74ZqUHsgYiQ2

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1 hr 15 min
April 24WarTalk: No Ammo for Taiwan, Polymarket, Bye Phelan, Will Driscoll Go The Distance?
The Pentagon is leaking to the press that America doesn't have the missiles to win a war over Taiwan — and the Iran war is the reason why. Meanwhile, a Special Forces master sergeant is looking at federal charges for a $400,000 Polymarket bet on the Maduro regime, and SecNav John Phelan spent an hour sitting in the West Wing lobby waiting to get fired.
To discuss, WarTalk is joined by Bryan Clark (former submariner, Hudson Institute), Justin Mc (former Green Beret, now in defense tech), Eric Robinson (former OSC NCT and 101st Airborne, now a lawyer), and Tony Stark of breaking beijing.
We discuss…
Why the Pentagon is leaking that the U.S. can't win a war over Taiwan — and what it means when the primes, INDOPACOM, and the deputy all scatter-shot the same message through the Washington Post

The case for scrapping the legacy munitions portfolio — burning LRASMs on the Iranian Navy, the GPS-jamming Excalibur problem, and why locking in seven-year buys of Cold War weapons sets us up for the next round of failures

A Special Forces master sergeant, $400,000, and the Polymarket Maduro bet — plus the hairdryer-next-to-a-thermometer scam at Charles de Gaulle, and why financial libertinism is "smoking in daycares"

The firing of SecNav John Phelan — the waffle-bar bundler, the Golden Fleet fantasy, and how Stephen Feinberg captured the submarine program office and knifed his own Navy secretary
A preview of the last two years of Trump II — DeSantis, Cotton, Chairman Rogers, and whether Congress flipping means more foreign adventurism or just acting secretaries all the way down
Song, "Phelan on the couch when it happened" https://suno.com/s/C0LmG53KdrT3evfe

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59 min
April 23 Sen. Chris Murphy on Corruption, China and AI
outtro music: Pardon Pen! https://suno.com/s/2tXSJ7uJFA7k1pUC

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26 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.