This week I sat down with Gloria Xiong, Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College, and Jessica Chen Weiss, the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, to discuss their new Foreign Affairs essay, "How China Found Its Most Potent Weapon: The Real History of Beijing's Rare Earth Dominance."

The story everyone tells is one of foresight — a master plan hatched by Deng Xiaoping and now coming to fruition. Gloria and Jessica argue the reality was far messier: reform-era export mania, environmental catastrophe, defiant local governments, scarcity anxiety, and a lesson in chokepoint weaponization that Beijing learned from Washington. Getting the story wrong, they argue, feeds an action-reaction spiral that neither side started and neither fully controls — and with the Busan truce expiring in November, the stakes could hardly be higher.

09:31 — "The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths": what Deng Xiaoping actually said, and how a quote got recruited for a story he wasn't telling

12:33 — Why the master plan narrative is so irresistible across the partisan spectrum in Washington

15:40 — The cheap and dirty origins: reform-era export mania, thousands of small mines, and rare earths sold "at the price of cabbage and dirt"

19:06 — The West as co-author of the chokepoint: offshoring the pollution, and the stockpile that was never built

21:53 — Beijing's struggle to control its own industry: quotas, "crime rings," and the partially failed 2002 consolidation

25:13 — September 2010: what really happened with the "embargo" against Japan, and why Beijing may have learned about it from Japanese customs

28:47 — Fans and fire hoses: how bottom-up nationalism can commit Beijing to coercive postures it didn't choose

32:13 — The debate inside China after 2010: protectionists versus Hong Feng's warning against using rare earths as "political chips"

35:44 — The 2015 WTO ruling: China complied — was it a rule-taker, or did it simply lack the tools to do anything else?

38:06 — Learning from Washington: Huawei, the Export Control Law, the China Rare Earth Group, and what distinguishes learning from planning

40:24 — The 2022–2024 ledger: what's the evidence for an action-reaction spiral beyond the timeline?

44:25 — April 2025: coercion or bureaucratic pileup? Thirty licensing officials and a 74% collapse in magnet exports

47:46 — October 2025: the extraterritorial rule that mirrored the Foreign Direct Product Rule, and the Busan truce

52:32 — The countdown to November: hawks in both capitals, "mutually assured disruption," and Xi's coming state visit

55:29 — The limits of leverage on both sides: yttrium, Japan's diversification, and China's own resource insecurity

58:32 — From crime rings to two national champions: has the Wild West been tamed, and are central-local relations "fractured"?

01:02:21 — Prescriptions: positive reciprocity, licensing Chinese technology, and managing interdependence rather than escaping it

01:05:51 — Everyone else: Myanmar, Congo, Australia, and how Beijing thinks about third countries that don't want to choose

Paying It Forward

Gloria name-checked Wendy Leutert of Indiana University, who works on the reform and global expansion of China's state-owned enterprises and, with Isaac Kardon, on Chinese investment in global ports; Ning Leng of Georgetown University, author of the award-winning Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party State in China; and Ketian Zhang, who has written extensively on Chinese coercion and maritime disputes.

Jessica first acknowledged the scholars whose research the essay drew on but couldn't cite in Foreign Affairs: Cory Combs of Trivium China, Arthur Kroeber, Henry Farrell, Duleep Singh, and Julie Klinger. She also flagged Jack Zhang, who runs the Trade War Lab at the University of Kansas, and Kyle Jaros and Sara Newland, who are writing a book on subnational economic statecraft — work that has shaped her thinking on disaggregating what the United States wants, not just what China wants.

Recommendations

Gloria: Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer — a book she first read in a college writing seminar and returned to as she heads back into the classroom.

Jessica: The Scientist and the Spy by Mara Hvistendahl, which she uses to close her SAIS seminar on Chinese foreign policy as a reminder about proportionality; and Ann Patchett's new novel Whistler.

Kaiser: Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, the 1972 Pulitzer winner — a novel about mining camps in the American West and one of the most fully realized characters in American fiction.

Also mentioned: Jessica's recent interview with Daniel Kurtz-Phelan on The Foreign Affairs Interview podcast, and her interview in The Monitor, the newsletter of the Carter Center's U.S.-China Perception Monitor.

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This week on Sinica, I’m joined once again by Ryan Hass, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, former NSC director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and co-host of the Beijing Brief podcast. Ryan has just published two pieces that couldn’t be better timed: a long essay in China Leadership Monitor, “China’s Great Power Vision Comes into Focus,” which argues that the 2020s may be remembered as the decade Beijing finally laid its cards on the table — and a shorter Brookings piece, “Why Beijing Isn’t Taking the Bait with Trump,” on why Xi Jinping has answered an unusually accommodating American president with a poker face, and what that means for Xi’s state visit to Washington later this month.

We start with the perennial question — what does China want? — and Ryan’s own two-decade journey with it, from chasing a supposed secret strategy in Zhongnanhai as a junior political officer to concluding that Beijing’s vision is now legible and consistent: an international political order stripped of its liberal core and rebuilt around sovereign equality and the “global majority.” We talk about “American decline” and “strategic stalemate” in Chinese discourse, the tension between China’s pitch to the developing world and its export juggernaut, the Middle East and Northeast Asia as test cases, and the central riddle of Ryan’s essay: why a country so willing to articulate its ambitions has been so unwilling to pay for them. Then we turn to the summit — constructive strategic stability, escalation dominance, and what will and won’t be on the table when Xi comes to Washington.

• 03:11 – The “What does China want?” genre — and why Ryan concluded there is no secret plan locked in a Zhongnanhai vault
• 06:10 – From participant to architect: what actually changed, and whether Beijing is revisionist or, as I cheekily put it, restorationist
• 09:12 – “American decline” (美国衰落) and “strategic stalemate” (战略相持): reading Beijing’s rhetorical restraint and the Maoist echo
• 14:34 – Champion of the global majority, or the world’s factory? The $6 toaster problem and the credibility gap on Ukraine and Japan
• 19:36 – The Middle East as a test case: economic enabler, not security patron — and the good-faith maximalist rebuttal
• 24:38 – Northeast Asia: why Beijing keeps generating the very encirclement it fears
• 26:59 – Rhetoric without resources: flat foreign aid, shrinking BRI lending, and the SCO as China’s proving ground
• 32:28 – The Pew swing that hasn’t materialized, and why Biden may have been America’s last restorationist president
• 36:01 – Why Beijing isn’t taking the bait: Xi’s poker face, “constructive strategic stability,” and the G2 refusal
• 41:55 – Confident abroad, anxious at home: the purges, the memory of 2020, economic escalation dominance, and a viewer’s guide to the September summit

Paying It Forward

Ryan flags two women doing important work in China studies, both with books out this fall: Emily Matson of Georgetown, whose China’s Date Debate: How Manchurian Scholars Rewrote World War II examines how the start date of China’s war with Japan was moved from 1937 back to 1931; and Shuxian Luo of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, whose Simmering Seas: Escalation and De-escalation in China’s Maritime Disputes is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in October. He also gives a shout-out to the engines of the Brookings China Center, research assistants Allie Matthias and Joyce Yang.

Recommendations

Ryan: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which he’s late to but found poignant for its eerie echoes of today’s battlefields — and Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change, an inside account of the second Trump administration that he calls harrowing but essential for anyone trying to anticipate the president’s behavior. (He also finally read The Three-Body Problem, and now knows his sophons from his Trisolarans.)

Kaiser: Robert Harris’s Agrippa, published September 1 — the memoir of Marcus Agrippa, the general who won Octavian’s battles and built half of Augustan Rome, and a story about the pivot from republic to empire that feels uncomfortably relevant. And if you’ve read Tuchman, do read Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Not my official recommendation, but astonishing.

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This week on Sinica, I sit down with the writer Pallavi Aiyar — at her own dining table in Beijing, where in recent months I’ve been the lucky beneficiary of her and her husband Julio’s legendary hospitality. Pallavi first arrived in Beijing in 2002 to teach at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and went on to spend the better part of a decade as The Hindu’s China correspondent — for much of that time, the only Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent in the country. That period produced Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, still one of the very few sustained attempts to look at China through Indian eyes. After 16 years away — years spent in Brussels, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Madrid — she’s back in Beijing, and turning her gaze inward with her latest book, Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts. She writes the wonderful Substack The Global Jigsaw, which I recommend without reservation.

Our conversation is built around her recent essay for Noema Magazine, “The Real Problem Underlying India-China Tensions,” which argues that the deepest problem in the relationship isn’t the border or the trade imbalance but the distorting lenses through which each side reads the other: China reads India through the lens of colonial subordination, while India reads China through the lens of betrayal. We talk about the ugly etymology of an ethnic slur, the partial historical memories each country mistakes for the whole picture, her serialized interviews with the Chinese India-watcher Mao Keji, the aporia-inducing impossibility of explaining either country to outsiders — and how her answer to the question she first posed in 2008, “Would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?”, has changed, painfully, in the years since.

• 4:35 – Beijing, 2002: an ad in That’s Beijing, [email protected], and becoming The Hindu’s correspondent
• 10:03 – “Beijing and I grew up together”: the aughts as a shared coming-of-age
• 12:16 – The asymmetry of obsession: why India watches China, but not the reverse
• 16:39 – The unacknowledged third vertex: Western discursive power in the India-China relationship
• 18:08 – Back after 16 years: the Liangma River, blue skies, and the panopticon
• 21:35 – Walks in the park and the “buddy system”: what access looks like now
• 25:43 – Where did all the foreigners go?
• 29:59 – The scene at CCG: candor, offense, and the register of truth
• 33:10 – “Asan”: the etymology of a slur, Sikh policemen, opium fortunes, and China’s colonial lens
• 40:10 – 1962 and India’s betrayal lens
• 42:15 – Aporia: the foolhardy task of explaining India or China
• 47:22 – Shame and indignation: explaining a place you love versus a place you merely know
• 52:29 – The big question, 2008: born Indian or Chinese?
• 55:44 – The 2026 answer: “It hurts”
• 1:00:08 – Kaiser pushes back: cherry-picked comparisons, and can this essay’s very existence complicate its conclusions?
• 1:04:43 – Twin nations of the exam
• 1:06:57 – Cognitive empathy: what it would take for ordinary Indians and Chinese to actually see each other

Paying It Forward

• Yaqi Li, a young Chinese international relations scholar recently returned to China after a year in Singapore — Pallavi admires the rare self-reflectiveness of his memoir-inflected IR writing on his Substack, New China Literacy, and notes that he makes an interesting case for AI-assisted writing as a way for second- and third-language English speakers to find their voice.

Recommendations

• Pallavi: Flashlight by Susan Choi — a novel spanning Japan, the U.S., and North Korea, built around the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s. Also This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin — the first novel from her favorite Pakistani writer, a sprawling, Chekhovian portrait of feudalism and politics in modern Pakistan.
• Kaiser: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner — beautiful at the sentence level, painted on a small canvas: two couples who meet as young academics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and their friendship across the decades. Emotionally rich despite the absence of grand drama.

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This week on Sinica, I welcome back Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, whose marvelous new essay, “The Future, Made in China,” chronicles a tech-focused return trip to Beijing, where he lived from 2005 to 2013 — first for the Chicago Tribune, then as The New Yorker’s China correspondent. Evan is the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the National Book Award, as well as Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury and The Haves and Have-Yachts.

His essay is far more than another breathless account of China’s advances in robotics and electric vehicles. It’s a meditation on what China’s technological ascent means for the United States, for how both societies are organized, and for the rest of us, whose futures increasingly seem to be wagered by two small circles of powerful men in Beijing and Washington. We talk about the Xiaomi Hyperfactory, “Chinamaxxing,” the export control debate, and the deeper contest Evan identifies: not democracy versus authoritarianism, but humanism versus scientism.

• 3:04 – Walking Beijing’s streets again: quieter, richer, more surveilled
• 11:26 – The Xiaomi Hyperfactory: choreography, awe, and what’s actually real
• 18:10 – Doomed to coexist: Evan’s message for the American reader
• 24:15 – Schrödinger’s China: joke or juggernaut?
• 27:16 – The limits of knowability in an increasingly opaque system
• 31:56 – Threat narratives vs. “Chinamaxxing”: America’s two China conversations
• 43:20 – “Thank Trump”: America’s self-inflicted wounds
• 47:29 – Revisiting the Sullivan doctrine and export controls
• 53:10 – Mankind 2000: humanism, scientism, and rival oligarchies
• 1:02:48 – Convergence: arriving at dystopia from opposite directions
• 1:07:21 – Self-strengthening redux: Levenson and America’s meum-verum gap
• 1:17:53 – The other Sputnik moment: the backlash against tech oligarchy

Paying It Forward

• Yi-Ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet — Evan admires how her work grapples with the competition between scientism and humanism across national borders.
• Chang Che, who writes for The New Yorker and The Guardian — watching China’s technological developments up close, “creating history in real time.”

Recommendations

• Evan: How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker — the youngest-ever Polk Award winner on how a rising generation at Silicon Valley’s feeder school perceives its opportunities and obligations. Also True Grit by Charles Portis — splendid, sentence-savoring dialogue.
• Kaiser: Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams, author of Stoner — a Western with the same sentence-level craft; for fans of Melville and Cormac McCarthy.

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This week on Sinica, a rare treat: an in-person recording from Beijing with two dear friends who happen to be two of the very best in the business on technology and China — Samm Sacks and Paul Triolo, fresh off the exhibition floor of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. We dig into Xi Jinping's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive statement on AI to date, the launch of the World AI Cooperation Organization, Moonshot's release of Kimi K3, the Trump administration's reported push to shut Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. market, the coming age of agents, the untranslatable problem of ānquán, and what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue in September.

8:51 – The view from the floor: heat, humidity, robot boxing grandmas, WeChat-gated free water, and the "AI+" vibe — why WAIC 2026 felt less like an AI conference than a sector-by-sector snapshot of China's entire economy being supercharged with AI, with attendance swelling to some 200,000 tickets

16:32 – Why Xi showed up: what the leader's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive AI statement to date signal, and why domestic drivers matter as much as geopolitics

18:01 – Chapter and verse: which phrases from the speech will be put to work in the system — "secure and orderly development" and the governance of agents, and Xi's strikingly extensive language on AI safety after China was frozen out of the Paris process

22:26 – The ānquán problem: one word meaning both "safety" and "security," the three buckets of AI risk, and how China's safety community has moved from bias and deepfakes toward CBRN and loss-of-control concerns — Black Mirror versus Star Trek

28:14 – Shanghai's baby: how WAIC's ownership structure differs from the CAC-run World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Chen Jining's very visible host duties, and whether the center of gravity in AI policy is shifting to the Yangtze River Delta

30:05 – WAICO: what the new World AI Cooperation Organization with its 29 founding members is actually for, Xi's concrete deliverables for the Global South — 5,000 AI training slots, regional cooperation centers, the MAZU early-warning system — and healthy skepticism about follow-through

34:39 – Kimi K3: what's technically significant in Moonshot's big new model, why it's the fourth arguably frontier-class Chinese release in a single month, the two-way traffic in distillation accusations, and what it all says about the state of the frontier gap four years into export controls

40:33 – Washington reacts: the reported menu of options for shutting Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. — entity listings, a draft executive order, supply-chain security authorities — and why none of the tools actually fit the problem

49:36 – Strange bedfellows: David Sacks versus the "closed lab duopoly," the FUD strategy, why some 80% of Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies reportedly run on Chinese open models, and how gating U.S. frontier models while Chinese weights flow freely supercharges the AI sovereignty argument worldwide

54:55 – The model is infrastructure, the agent is the product: the ByteDance–ZTE agentic phone, the CAC's new initiative on agent trust and interoperability, and why agents fused into operating systems upend both super-app walled gardens and China's data protection regime

1:02:27 – An exegesis of kěkòng: the many meanings of "controllable," the long history of ānquán kěkòng in Chinese tech policy, and the unanswered question of who — CAC, NDRC, or somebody new — actually owns AI safety in either system

1:08:54 – The road to September: what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue, why Mythos tops the Chinese grievance list, the securitization feedback loop that starves trust-and-safety advocates of resources on both sides, and why recursive self-improvement makes this feel like a last, best chance

Paying It Forward

Paul nominates Tony Peng, whose Substack RecodeChinaAI offers sharp, well-written analysis of the application side of China's AI industry — part of an impressive new generation of independent China tech writers.

Samm gives a shout-out to Professor Zhu Yue of Tongji University Law School, published in Science and doing pioneering work at the intersection of disability law and AI law.

Recommendations

Samm: The Land and Its People by David Sedaris — laugh-out-loud funny, especially the "Enough is Enough" chapter; Transcription by Ben Lerner, a perfect small novel about fathers, sons, memory, and technology as enabler or disabler of connection; and Didion and Babitz, on Joan Didion and Eve Babitz and the 1970s California rock scene.

Paul: The Party's Interests Come First by Joseph Torigian — dense but beautifully written, and essential for understanding the current Chinese leadership.

Kaiser: A fiction-only summer! Stoner by John Williams, a small life told most grandly in some of the most beautiful sentence-level writing anywhere; Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, an epistolary novel dense with distilled wisdom from a dying Iowa minister; and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age (黄金时代) in Yan Yan's excellent new translation — bawdy, hilarious, and super Beijing-y despite its Cultural Revolution setting.

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This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded at the Davos On Air booth at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, I sat down with Angela Huyue Zhang, professor of law at USC's Gould School of Law and author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, and S. Alex Yang, professor of management science and operations at London Business School. Angela and Alex — who are also married, and who arrived at this collaboration from opposite ends of the academy — have developed what I think is one of the most useful new mental models for understanding China's political economy: the platform state. Their argument is that we should think of the Chinese state less as a central planner or owner and more as a platform company like NVIDIA or Apple, one that builds architecture, sets standards, and governs an ecosystem within which fiercely competitive private firms fight it out. Value accrues at the system level rather than as firm profit, and the payoff may decide who wins the race to put AI to work across an entire economy.

5:37 – Three puzzles the framework is built to solve: profitless dominance in solar, EVs, and batteries; why the "grabbing hand" hasn't strangled Chinese innovation; and how China is attempting both zero-to-one invention and one-to-hundred scaling at once

7:57 – The platform state thesis: why the Chinese government behaves like a platform company, how nurturing an ecosystem of private firms solves the information deficit that cripples command-and-control, and why over-entry, involution, and consolidation are a repeated pattern — from EVs to the 140-plus humanoid robot companies operating today

16:13 – The aha moment: how a paper on the legal infrastructure of physical AI became the platform state idea over the Zhang-Yang dinner table, and whether this is a new species of political economy or the East Asian developmental state in new clothes

20:44 – State conditions: why state capacity and domestic scale are the two preconditions for the model, and why an ambitious Vietnam — which has the top-down capacity — may still find the Chinese playbook impossible to replicate

23:39 – Profitless dominance by design: harvesting versus extracting, the Uber analogy, overshooting as a control-theory strategy for nudging sectors, and how the anti-involution campaign and the 60-day supplier payment mandate show the state moderating the very competition it engineered

30:33 – Organized chaos: from the bike-sharing graveyards of the O2O wars to today's disciplined market, the exit of more than 400 EV makers since 2018, and why the survivors of China's "Premier League" of competition are now turning profitable

32:59 – The 3Gs playbook: growing markets by solving the cold-start problem, from Liuzhou's EV test drives to Beijing's green license plates, and how subsidy is only one lever among many

38:36 – Governing the ecosystem like Apple runs its App Store: why Beijing regulates generative AI with a light touch but physical AI is a different species entirely, law as the sixth layer of the AI stack, why robotaxis scale faster in China than in the U.S., and the state-convened standard-setting that's driving down humanoid robot costs

46:54 – Two flywheels: the familiar data-and-cost flywheel and the deeper state capacity flywheel, and how the National AI Fund's small but voting stake in DeepSeek aligns a complementor with the domestic stack — tilting the ecosystem toward Chinese chips

53:28 – Guarding the moat: automotive data rules and Tesla's stalled FSD ambitions, the unwound Manus sale, China's own small yard and high fence, and the closing provocation — that America could build the smartest frontier models and still lose the diffusion race to "artificial good-enough intelligence." Plus: the case for coopetition, and what policymakers should (and shouldn't) borrow from the platform state

Links from the episode

Angela's paper on law as the sixth layer of China's AI stack:

• The Sixth Layer: The Legal Infrastructure for Physical Artificial Intelligence in China (SSRN)

Three Project Syndicate op-eds on the platform state idea:

• The Rise of the Chinese Platform State by S. Alex Yang & Angela Huyue Zhang
• Are Government Stakes the Key to AI Sovereignty? by Angela Huyue Zhang
• Overcapacity Is China's Biggest AI Advantage by Angela Huyue Zhang

Two Management Science papers on commercial platforms:

• Crowd-Judging on Two-Sided Platforms: An Analysis of In-Group Bias
• Improving Dispute Resolution in Two-Sided Platforms: The Case of Review Blackmail

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Recorded live from the Davos on Air booth at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, this special episode of Sinica tackles the "pacing problem": the widening gap between how fast AI moves and how slowly regulation can catch up. I sit down with Xue Lan, dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University and one of the architects of China's concept of "agile governance," to unpack what that term means in practice. He traces China's regulatory evolution from the 2017 AI plan through the generative AI rules and the 2021 tech crackdown, compare Chinese, American, and European approaches, and ask whether Beijing's adaptive style can travel to other political systems — including liberal democracies.

• 00:09 – Live from Dalian: the “pacing problem” and why AI has turned it into a chasm
• 03:18 – Introducing Xue Lan, dean of Schwarzman College and architect of “agile governance”
• 04:34 – Why AI’s pace makes it uniquely hard to regulate
• 06:01 – Defining agile governance: mindset, partnership over adversary, and light-touch tools
• 11:54 – From the 2017 AI plan to today: China’s two-track approach to tech and governance
• 20:07 – Balancing development and security amid the US-China AI race
• 23:24 – Revisiting the 2021 tech crackdown: failure of the model, or agility of a different kind?
• 26:14 – The “DeepSeek moment,” open-weight models, and regulatory uncertainty by design
• 37:10 – EU comprehensiveness vs. US patchwork vs. China’s modular, adaptive approach
• 46:59 – Can agile governance travel to liberal democracies? Finding common ground on global AI risk

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Last week in Brussels, EU leaders held their first sustained debate on China policy in three years, and were so wary of Beijing’s reaction they wouldn’t print the word “China” on the agenda. The trigger: a goods-trade deficit closing in on 360 billion euros, and, for the first time ever, all 27 member states in the red. Recorded at Summer Davos in Dalian, I sat down with economic historian Adam Tooze to ask why the panic, and why now. Polanyi, the Plaza Accord, “glut shaming,” a $1.2 trillion surplus, and what Europe and China each most need to understand about the other.

04:26 – Why the alarm now? Imbalances are decades old, so what changed—and the shift from China slotting into Western supply chains to climbing the value chain

07:04 – Karl Polanyi, the “double movement,” and how the European working-class question becomes the politics of right-wing populism

11:21 – Autos as the core of the fight—12 million jobs—and why the Ukraine alignment gives the whole thing its moral charge for von der Leyen

14:14 – “Glut shaming”: the accusation of illegitimacy baked into the Western framing, and how it lands on a Chinese ear

18:16 – Wěiqu (委屈)—the swallowed sense of being wronged and why the EU should exercise a bit of cognitive empathy

20:14 – Merz reaches for the 1985 Plaza Accord, and the empathy gap that lets a German politician miss what that signals in Beijing

22:00 – The currency-manipulation argument, Germany’s own history with the euro, and why Switzerland is the real manipulator

25:49 – The $1.2 trillion surplus—”nothing we’ve ever seen before”—and the consumption China refuses to do

26:12 – Sorting the sectors: solar, batteries, and EVs where resistance is futile, versus steel and shipbuilding as “Polanyi double-movement as cosplay”

32:04 – The Draghi report and the house of mirrors: is China the cause of Europe’s malaise or just the thing exposing a homegrown one?

36:27 – If Tooze had von der Leyen’s ear: investment-linked talks, phased protection with a clear exit, and “investment, investment, investment”

41:16 – The October clock on the U.S.–China truce, and why this autumn could get very ugly

43:09 – Closing advice: what Europe and Beijing each most need to understand if this ends in managed rebalancing rather than a trade war

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This week on Sinica I'm joined by Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and The Evolution of God, for a conversation that runs a little outside our usual beat, though China sits closer to its center than you'd expect. 

The occasion is his new book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, which reads the AI revolution as the latest turn in a story going back billions of years. We get into the French Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin's "noosphere," Bob's argument that we evolved large language models rather than engineered them, the cognitive empathy we've both long preached, and the two-word talking point — "But China!" — that Bob thinks is most likely to lead us astray.

6:56 – Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere, and why a planetary "global brain" has become necessary

14:49 – Directionality without the mysticism: complexification, teleology, and the "cell's-eye view" worry

21:57 – The God Test: is moral progress really the price of governing AI, and is that hopeless on a short clock?

28:33 – Why Bob says we evolved large language models rather than built them, and the sycophancy problem that follows

35:19 – Open weights and open source: a real safety argument, or competitiveness in safety's clothing?

40:03 – Cognitive empathy as the master key, and the same capacity as an engine of deception

48:06 – Arms-race fatalism and its limits: cheetahs, gazelles, and the rival who can pick up the phone

53:40 – "But China": fear of Beijing, Anthropic and Amodei, Jeff Ding, and the chip-control backfire

1:10:48 – Nonzero: game theory, common threats, and the takeoff scenarios that worry Bob most

1:23:22 – Attribution error and projection, Ed Fredkin's old warning, and the actual first move

Paying It Forward: Garrison Lovely, author of the forthcoming Obsolete (Nation Books) and the Substack of the same name on the AI race.

Recommendations:

Bob: Pantheon, the animated series on uploaded minds and emergent superintelligence; and the Crowded House song "Don't Dream It's Over."

Kaiser: Kyle Chan's High Capacity podcast, especially his episode with Carnegie's Matt Sheehan, "Is China Getting Worried About AI?"; and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.

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The summit in Beijing produced a "constructive strategic stability" framework and a warming of tone between the two presidents. But heads of state can announce a multi-year horizon; somebody else has to operationalize it. Does the United States have the people — the linguists, the regional experts, the long-haul institution-builders — to do that work?

This week, I chatted with two Texans answering that question from very different directions. David Firestein is the inaugural president and CEO of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations in Houston. A career State Department officer who served four administrations and spent five years in Beijing, he's one of the few Americans concurrently affiliated with both a Republican and a Democratic presidential legacy institution. Eddie Conger is a retired Marine major and the founder and superintendent of International Leadership of Texas (IL Texas) — a public charter network of 26 campuses serving 26,000 K-12 students and now the largest K-12 Chinese language program in the country. In January, IL Texas became the first-ever K-12 recipient of the Bush China Foundation's George H.W. Bush Award for Educational Excellence in U.S.-China Relations, joining past honorees including Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger.

The conversation tackles what David calls the Texas paradox: the same state that just forced its cities to dissolve their sister-city ties with China, that pioneered the closure of Confucius Institutes, and that has restricted Chinese land purchases is also where the country's deepest K-12 Mandarin pipeline is taking root — and where the most institutionally Texan China foundation has chosen to plant its flag. David and Eddie talk through engagement honestly (no straw-man Jeffersonian-democracy fantasies), the erroneous strategic assumptions undergirding U.S. China policy, what real national-language capacity would look like operationally, what they each saw in the Trump–Xi summit, and what 5,000 IL Texas graduates are already doing in the world.

• 05:40 — Eddie's path: Marine infantryman to fifth-grade math teacher to the country's largest K-12 Mandarin program
• 09:12 — David on when the Nixon-through-Obama engagement consensus broke (fall 2017) and how the lexicon shifted
• 13:30 — Engagement honestly defined: what its architects actually believed vs. the Jeffersonian-democracy straw man
• 18:30 — The Texas paradox: HB 128, sister cities, Confucius Institutes — and the country's biggest Mandarin program in the same state
• 31:26 — Texas business, Tim Dunn, faith, and the gap between political rhetoric and where Texans actually are
• 41:54 — The Defense Department safety/security story: when one Chinese word ate an entire bilateral agreement
• 46:16 — David's six (or seven) erroneous strategic assumptions: China doesn't want to be us, and it has benefited more than anyone from the current order
• 52:28 — What real national-language capacity would actually look like: NSLI, WALARA, and why the pipeline still runs through one Marine major in Texas
• 01:06:07 — Reading the Beijing summit: the warmth, the "constructive strategic stability" framing, and whether Trump's Taiwan call could blow it all up
• 01:17:10 — Where 5,000 IL Texas graduates are now — White House interns, service academies, doctors, entrepreneurs, and one high-schooler who pulled a stranger out of the surf

Paying it Forward

Eddie:

Carlos Carrasco; Emily, who is heading to Taiwan this fall on a one-year high-school program; and another student bound for the University of Texas at Austin who will be sent to South Korea for a semester as a freshman — a rarity at UT. And he closes with Miles, a high-school senior and Marine scholarship recipient who, just weeks ago at a national competition in Florida, heard someone screaming for help in the ocean, called for a boogie board, and swam out to save a drowning swimmer while a crowd of adults stood on the beach. "Others before self," as Eddie puts it — the IL Texas mission statement made flesh.

David:

Frank Zhou, who just graduated from Harvard and chaired the Harvard College China Forum; Selina Gong, a recent graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School involved in its annual China conference; and Dean Dai, a recent graduate of Columbia's SIPA who has been deeply involved in many of the most significant student-run China conferences in the country — and who, as it turns out, was one of the organizers of the University of Chicago U.S.-China Economy and Business Summit where Kaiser spoke earlier this month.

Recommendations:

Eddie: John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present (Henry Holt, 2016)

David: Stephen Roach, Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale, 2022)

Kaiser: David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday, 2023)

Also mentioned: Stephen R. Platt, The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II (Knopf, 2024)

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