This week on Sinica, recorded at Yale University, I speak with Michael Brenes and Van Jackson, coauthors of The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy. Their argument is that framing the U.S.-China relationship as geopolitical rivalry has become more than just a foreign policy orientation — it's a domestic political project that reshapes budgets, norms, and coalitions in ways that actively harm American democracy and the American people. Rivalry narrows political possibility, makes dissent suspect, encourages neo-McCarthyism (the China Initiative, profiling of Chinese Americans), produces anti-AAPI hate, and redirects public investment away from social welfare and into defense spending through what they call "national security Keynesianism."

Mike is interim director of the Brady Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, while Van is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington and host of the Un-Diplomatic Podcast. We discuss the genesis of their collaboration during the Biden administration, how they navigate China as a puzzle for the American left, canonical misrememberings of the Cold War that distort current China policy, the security dilemma feedback loop between Washington and Beijing, why defense-heavy stimulus is terrible at job creation, how rivalry politics weakens democracy, recent polling showing a shift toward engagement, and their vision for a "geopolitics of peace" anchored in Sino-U.S. détente 2.0.

5:47 – The genesis of the book: recognizing Biden's Cold War liberalism 

11:26 – How they approached writing together from different disciplinary homes 

13:20 – Navigating China as a puzzle for the American left

21:39 – How great power competition hardened from analytical framework into ideology 

28:15 – Mike on two canonical misrememberings of the Cold War 

33:18 – Van on the security dilemma and the nuclear feedback loop 

39:55 – National security Keynesianism: why defense spending is bad at job creation 

44:38 – How rivalry politics weakens democracy and securitizes dissent 

48:09 – Building durable coalitions for restraint-oriented statecraft 

51:27 – Has the post-COVID moral panic actually abated? 

53:27 – The master narrative we need: a geopolitics of peace 

55:29 – Associative balancing: achieving equilibrium through accommodation, not arms

Recommendations:

Van: The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi 

Mike: The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 by Vladislav Zubok 

Kaiser: Pluribus (Apple TV series by Vince Gilligan)

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Happy holidays from Sinica! This week, I speak with Paul Triolo, Senior Vice President for China and Technology Policy Lead at DGA Albright Stonebridge Group and nonresident honorary senior fellow on technology at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.

On December 8th, Donald Trump announced via Truth Social that he would approve Nvidia H200 sales to vetted Chinese customers — a decision that immediately sparked fierce debate. Paul and I unpack why this decision was made, why it's provoked such strong reactions, and what it tells us about the future of technology export controls on China. We discuss the evolution of U.S. chip controls from the Entity List expansions under Trump's first term through the October 2022 rules and the Sullivan Doctrine, the role of David Sacks and Jensen Huang in advocating for this policy shift, whether Chinese firms will actually want to buy H200s given their heterogeneous hardware stacks and Beijing's autarky ambitions, what the Reuters report about China cracking ASML's EUV lithography code tells us about the choke point strategy, and whether selective engagement actually strengthens Taiwan's Silicon Shield or undermines it.

This conversation is essential listening for understanding the strategic, technical, and political dimensions of the semiconductor competition.

6:44 – What the H200 decision actually changes in the real world

9:23 – The evolution of U.S. chip controls: from Entity Lists to the Sullivan Doctrine

18:28 – How Jensen Huang and David Sacks convinced Trump

25:21 – The good-faith case for why export control advocates see H200 approval as a strategic mistake

32:12 – What H200s practically enable: training, inference, or stabilizing existing clusters

38:49 – Will Chinese companies actually buy H200s? The heterogeneous hardware reality

46:06 – The strategic contradiction: exporting 5nm GPUs while freezing tool controls at 16/14nm

51:01 – The Reuters EUV report and what it reveals about choke point technologies

58:43 – How Taiwan fits into this: does selective engagement strengthen the Silicon Shield?

1:07:26 – Looking ahead: broader rethinking of export controls or patchwork exceptions?

1:12:49 – What would have to be true in 2-3 years for critics to have been right about H200?

Paying it forward:

Poe Zhao and his Substack Hello China Tech

Recommendations:

Paul: Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Amerca's Great Power Propheti by Ed Luce; Hyperdimensional Substack by Dean Ball

Kaiser: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green; The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green; So Very Small by Thomas Levenson

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I speak with Mark Sidel, the Doyle Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior fellow at the International Center for Not for Profit Law.

Mark has written extensively on law and philanthropy in China and across Asia, including widely cited analyses of how the Chinese security state came to play a central role in managing foreign civil society organizations. Since the Law on the Management of Domestic Activities of Overseas NGOs took effect on January 1, 2017, China has introduced a remarkably comprehensive, vertically integrated system of oversight for foreign NGOs, foundations, and nonprofits.

We discuss how this system combines securitization and political risk management with selective accommodation of service provision and technical expertise, Mark’s typology of organizational responses (survivors, hibernators, regionalizers, work-arounders, and leavers), the requirement that foreign NGOs secure professional supervisory units, the impact on China’s domestic nonprofit ecosystem, and what this tells us about the party-state’s long-term vision for controlled engagement with the outside world.

4:43 – The landscape of non-state organizations before the 2016 law

7:06 – What changed: color revolutions, Arab Spring, and domestic anxieties

9:08 – Public security intellectuals and their influence on the law

11:51 – How registration and temporary activity filing systems work in practice

13:48 – Why the Ministry of Public Security, not Civil Affairs, was put in charge

19:31 – The professional supervisory unit requirement and dependency relationships

22:48 – How the state shifted foreign NGO work away from advocacy without banning it

26:17 – Mark’s typology: survivors, hibernators, regionalizers, work-arounders, and leavers

35:19 – What correlates with success for those who have survived

40:41 – Impact on China’s domestic nonprofit ecosystem and professional intermediaries

45:54 – What makes China’s system distinctive compared to India, Egypt, Russia, and Vietnam

50:19 – The Article 53 problem and university partnerships

55:32 – Advice for mid-sized foundations or NGOs considering work in China today

Paying it Forward: Neysun Mahboubi and the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations

Recommendations:

Mark: Everyday Democracy: Civil Society, Youth, and the Struggle Against Authoritarian Culture in China by Anthony Spires

Kaiser: The music of Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs, The Dregs, Steve Morse Band)

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to have Iza Ding as guest host. Iza is a professor of political science at Northwestern University and a good friend whose work on Chinese governance I greatly admire. She's joined by Deborah Seligsohn, who has been a favorite guest on this show many times. Deb is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University and was previously a science and environmental counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. This episode was recorded in three parts: the first two in Belém, Brazil during COP30 (the 30th UN Climate Change Conference), and the final segment after the conference concluded. Iza and Deb discuss China's role at the climate summit, the real story behind the famous 2007 U.S. Embassy air quality monitor in Beijing (spoiler: it wasn't China's "Silent Spring moment"), Brazil's management of the conference, why China leads on technology but not on negotiation, and what the outcomes of COP30 mean for the future of global climate cooperation. This is an insider's view of how climate diplomacy actually works, complete with unexpected fire evacuations and glut-shaming of The New York Times.

3:43 – Deb's impressions of COP30 and Brazil's inclusive approach

9:21 – China's presence at COP30: technology leadership without negotiation leadership

15:34 – Xie Zhenhua's absence and the U.S.-China dynamic at previous COPs

24:46 – Inside the negotiation rooms: language, politeness, and obstruction

33:06 – BYD's presence in Brazil and Chinese EV expansion 40:54 – The real story of the 2007 U.S. Embassy air quality monitor in Beijing

45:00 – Fire evacuation at COP30 and UN territorial sovereignty

1:22:06 – What actually drove China's air pollution control: the 2003 power plant standards

1:41:27 – The dramatic final plenary and the Mutirão decision

1:55:17 – China's NDC 3.0: under-promise and over-deliver strategy

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I speak with Zhong Na, a novelist and essayist whose new piece, "Murder House," appears in the inaugural issue of Equator — a striking new magazine devoted to longform writing that crosses borders, disciplines, and cultures. In January 2024, a young couple, both Tsinghua-educated Google engineers living in a $2.5 million Silicon Valley home, became the center of a tragedy that captivated Chinese social media far more than American outlets. Zhong Na explores how the case became a collective Rorschach test — a mirror held up to contemporary Chinese society, exposing cracks in the myths of meritocracy, the prestige of global tech firms, and shifting notions of gender, class, and the Chinese dream itself. We discuss the gendered reactions online, the dimming of America's appeal, the emotional costs of the immigrant success story, and the craft of writing about tragedy with compassion but without sentimentality.

5:06 – How the story first reached Zhong Na, and the Luigi Mangione comparison 

7:05 – Discovering she attended the same Chengdu high school as the alleged murderer Chen Liren 

8:10 – The collaboration with Equator and Joan Didion's influence 

10:30 – Education, class, and the cracks in China's meritocracy myth 

16:01 – Tiger mothers vs. lying flat: two responses to a rigged system

19:12 – The pandemic and the dimming of the American dream 

22:49 – Chinese men as perpetrators: immigrant stress and the loss of patriarchal privilege 

25:56 – The gender war online: moral autopsy and victim-blaming 

30:25 – The obsession with the ex-girlfriend and attraction to the accused

34:37 – The murder house, Chinese numerology, and the rise of Gen Z metaphysics 

37:08 – Geopolitics, the China Initiative, and rethinking America as a destination 

39:42 – Craft and moral compass: learning from Didion and Janet Malcolm 

42:31 – Zhong Na's fiction: writing Chinese experiences without catering to Western expectations

Paying it forward: Gavin Jacobson and the editorial team at Equator

Recommendations: 

Zhong Na: Elsewhere by Yan Ge 

Kaiser: Made in Ethiopia, documentary by Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan (available on PBS)

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I welcome back Finbarr Bermingham, the Brussels-based Europe correspondent for the South China Morning Post, about the Nexperia dispute — one of the most revealing episodes in the global contest over semiconductor supply chains. Nexperia, a Dutch-headquartered chipmaker owned by Shanghai-listed Wingtech, became the subject of extraordinary government intervention when the Netherlands invoked a Cold War-era emergency law to seize temporary control of the company and suspend its Chinese CEO. Finbarr's reporting, drawing on Dutch court documents and expert sources, has illuminated the tangled threads of this story: preexisting concerns about governance and technology transfer, mounting U.S. pressure on The Hague to remove Chinese management, and the timing of the Dutch action on the very day the U.S. rolled out its affiliate rule. We discuss China's retaliatory export controls on chips packaged at Nexperia's Dongguan facilities, the role of the Trump-Xi meeting in Busan in unlocking a temporary thaw, and what this case reveals about Europe's agonizing position between American pressure and Chinese integration in global production networks.

4:34 – Why the "Europe cracks down on Chinese acquisition" framing was too simple

6:17 – The Dutch court's extraordinary tick-tock of events and U.S. lobbying

9:04 – The June pressure from Washington: divestment or the affiliate list

10:13 – Dutch fears of production know-how relocating to China

12:35 – The impossible position: damned if they did, damned if they didn't

14:46 – The obscure Cold War-era Goods Availability Act

17:11 – CEO Zhang Xuezheng and the question of who stopped cooperating first

19:26 – Was China's export control a state policy or a corporate move?

22:16 – Europe's de-risking framework and the lessons from Nexperia

25:39 – The fragmented European response: Germany, France, Hungary, and the Baltics

30:31 – Did Germany shape the response behind the scenes?

33:06 – The Trump-Xi meeting in Busan and the resolution of the crisis

37:01 – Will the Nexperia case deter future European interventions?

40:28 – Is Europe still an attractive market for Chinese investment?

41:59 – The Europe China Forum: unusually polite in a time of tenterhooks

Paying it forward: Dewey Sim (SCMP diplomacy desk, Beijing); Coco Feng (SCMP technology, Guangdong); Khushboo Razdan (SCMP North America); Sense Hofstede (Chinese Bossen newsletter)

Recommendations:

Finbarr: Chokepoints by Edward Fishman; Underground Empire by Henry Farrell and Abe Newman; "What China Wants from Europe" by John Delury (Engelsberg Ideas)

Kaiser: The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan and Milady (2023 French film adaptation)

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I welcome back Jeremy Goldkorn, co-founder of the show and my longtime co-host, to revisit the "vibe shift" we first discussed back in February. Seven months on, what we sensed then has fully borne out — there's been a measurable softening in American attitudes toward China, reflected not just in polling data but in media coverage, podcast discussions, and public discourse. We dig into what's driving this shift: the chaos of American politics making China look competent by comparison, the end of Wolf Warrior diplomacy, the gutting of China hawks in the Trump administration, Trump's own transactional G2 enthusiasm, and the generational divide in how younger Americans encounter China through TikTok rather than legacy media. We also discuss the limits of this shift, the dangers of overcorrection, and what it feels like to watch the fever break after years of panic and absolutism in U.S.-China discourse.

5:29 – The [beep] show in America as the biggest factor

8:38 – China hawks deflated: from Pompeo to Navarro's pivot to India

11:21 – Ben Smith's piece on the end of a decade of China hawkism

13:30 – Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu's Atlantic piece on tech decoupling

17:17 – Long-form China podcasts: Dwarkesh Patel with Arthur Kroeber, Lex Fridman with Keyu Jin

19:35 – Jeremy's personal vibe shift: distance from The China Project and renewed perspective

23:33 – The world turning to predictability and stability

26:05 – The Chicago Council poll: dramatic shift away from containment

29:09 – The generational shift: TikTok, infrastructure porn, and Gen Z's globalized worldview

31:15 – The end of Wolf Warrior diplomacy and why it mattered

37:03 – Kaiser's "Great Reckoning" essay and why it didn't get the usual hate

39:00 – The destruction of Twitter and the vicious China discourse culture

41:10 – The pendulum swinging too far: China fanboys and new hubris

43:20 – How the vibe shift looks from inside China

Paying it forward: Echo Tang (Berlin Independent Chinese Film Festival organizer) and Zhu Rikun (New York Chinese Independent Film Festival organizer)

Recommendations:

Jeremy: Ja No Man: Growing Up in Apartheid Era South Africa by Richard Poplak

Kaiser: Rhyming Chaos podcast with Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I chat with Lizzi Lee, a fellow on the Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute and one of the sharpest China analysts working today. We dig into the 4th Plenary Session of the 20th Party Congress and what it reveals about China's evolving growth model — particularly the much-discussed but often misunderstood push against "involution" in key sectors like EVs and solar. Lizzi walks us through the structural incentives driving overcompetition, from local government finance and VAT collection to the challenges of rebalancing supply and demand. We also discuss her recent Foreign Affairs piece on China's manufacturing model, why "overcapacity" is a misleading frame, the unexpected upsides of China's industrial strategy for the global green transition, and what happened at the Trump-Xi meeting in Busan. This is a conversation about getting beyond the binaries and understanding the actual mechanisms — and contradictions — shaping China's economic trajectory.

4:43 – What Western reporting missed in the 4th Plenum communique

6:34 – The "anti-involution" push and what it really means

9:57 – Is China's domestic demand abnormally low? Context and comparisons

12:41 – Why cash transfers and consumption subsidies are running out of steam

15:00 – The supply-side approach: creating better products to drive demand

18:33 – GDP vs. GNI: why China is focusing on global corporate footprints

20:13 – Service exports and China's ascent along the global supply chain 24:02 – The People's Daily editorial on price wars and profit margins

27:31 – Why addressing involution is harder now than in 2015

29:56 – How China's VAT system incentivizes local governments to build entire supply chains

33:20 – The difficulty of reforming fiscal structures and local government finance 35:12 – What got lost in the Foreign Affairs editing process

38:14 – Why "overcapacity" is a misleading and morally loaded term

40:02 – The underappreciated upside: China's model and the global green transition

43:14 – How politically potent deindustrialization fears are in Washington and Brussels 46:29 – Industry self-discipline vs. structural reform: can moral suasion work?

50:15 – BYD's negotiating power and the squeeze on suppliers

53:54 – The Trump-Xi meeting in Busan: genuine thaw or tactical pause?

57:23 – Pete Hegseth's "God bless both China and the USA" tweet

1:00:01 – How China's leadership views Trump: transactional or unpredictable?

1:03:32 – The pragmatic off-ramp and what Paul Triolo predicted

1:05:26 – China's AI strategy: labor-augmenting vs. labor-replacing technology

1:08:13 – What systemic changes could realistically fix involution?

1:10:26 – Capital market reform and the challenge of decelerating slowly 1:12:36 – The "health first" strategy and investing in people

Paying it forward: Paul Triolo

Recommendations:

Lizzi: Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare by Edward Fishman

Kaiser: Morning Coffee guitar practice book by Alex Rockwell

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I chat with Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, editor of Foreign Affairs, about how the journal has both shaped and reflected American discourse on China during a period of dramatic shifts in the relationship. We discuss his deliberate editorial choices to include heterodox voices, the changing nature of the supposed "consensus" on China policy, and what I've called the "vibe shift" in how Americans across the political spectrum think about China. Daniel also reflects on his own intellectual formation, including his work on George Marshall's failed mission to mediate China's Civil War and the cautionary lessons that history holds for today's debates. We explore the challenges of bringing Chinese voices into Foreign Affairs, the balance between driving and reflecting policy debates, and whether we're witnessing a genuine opening of the Overton window on China discussions.

7:15 – Foreign Affairs in the era of Iraq and "China's peaceful rise"

12:09 – The Marshall mission and the "Who Lost China?" debate

17:17 – China's changing role and the journal's coverage density

19:43 – The Campbell-Ratner "China Reckoning" and subsequent debates

25:00 – The challenge of including authentic Chinese voices

29:42 – How Chinese leadership perceives and reads Foreign Affairs

32:12 – The "vibe shift" on China across the American political spectrum

35:56 – Cultivating contrarian voices: Van Jackson, Jonathan Czin, and David Kang

40:17 – Avoiding the trap of making everything about U.S.-China competition

43:12 – Diversifying perspectives beyond the Washington-Beijing binary

48:18 – The big questions: American exceptionalism and Chinese identity in a new era

51:42 – The dangers of cutting off U.S.-China scholarly conversations

56:26 – The uses and misuses of historical analogies

58:09 – Spain's Golden Age and late Qing memes as contemporary analogies

Paying it forward: The unsung editorial staff at Foreign Affairs

Recommendations:

Daniel: Equator.org; The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young; Granta's new India issue; The Party's Interests Come First by Joseph Torigian; The Coming Storm by Odd Arne Westad

Kaiser: The Spoils of Time by C.V. Wedgwood

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on the Sinica Podcast, I speak with Jonathan Czin, the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. His new essay in Foreign Affairs, “China Against China: Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success,” challenges the dominant Western narrative of Xi Jinping as either Mao reincarnate or a brittle autocrat presiding over imminent collapse. Instead, Czin argues that Xi’s most illiberal reforms can be understood as attempts to cure the pathologies of China’s own success. We discuss his framing of Xi’s “Counterreformation,” how it helps explain China’s current political direction, and what it reveals about our own analytical blind spots in the West.

7:15 – Xi’s “reformation” and Carl Minzner’s “end of reform and opening”

12:18 – Corruption, decentralization, and the “lost decade” under Hu and Wen

20:12 – Defining “resilience” and what Xi means by “eating bitterness”

29:45 – The “downsides of success”: property, corruption, and governance contradictions

45:30 – Counter-reformation vs. counterrevolution: what Xi wants to preserve and discard

54:20 – The myth of yes-men: triangulation and feedback in Xi’s leadership style

1:07:07 – Cognitive empathy and why most U.S. analysis of Xi falls short

1:15:35 – Systems that can’t course-correct: comparing the U.S. and China

1:22:05 – Cognitive empathy, ideology, and the problem of American exceptionalism

Paying it forward:

Jonathan: Allie Mathias and Dinny McMahon

Recommendations:

Jonathan: The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgewood; The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

Kaiser: Transplants by Daniel Tam-Claiborne

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.