Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I sit down in Beijing with Tim Clissold. If you read one book about doing business in China in the 2000s, there’s a fair chance it was his Mr. China, the self-aware, admirably self-deprecating tragicomedy about standing between some $400 million of Wall Street money and twenty Chinese joint ventures that weren’t going to plan. He followed it with Chinese Rules, and for years since he’s worked mostly as a mediator between Chinese companies and the foreign investors who’ve fallen out with them. He’s a visiting fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has been living, working, and thinking in and about China for nearly forty years.

But that isn’t why he’s here. For twenty years Tim has been pursuing what I’ve taken to calling his Great Enterprise — his 大业 dàyè — a new A-level in Chinese Civilisation for British schools, modeled on the existing A-level in Classical Civilisation and taught entirely in English, no Mandarin required. He’s assembled a syllabus with a dozen of Britain’s leading sinologists, lined up ten vice chancellors, the chairs of some of the country’s biggest companies, and the money to pay for it. The Department for Education’s answer has so far been no. The campaign is the subject of his forthcoming, self-published book, Teach the People: How to Narrow the Knowledge Gap between China and the West, whose premise is that the Chinese know far more about us than we know about them, and that the gap is now a matter of national security. We test that premise, and then we talk about what closing it would actually look like. Along the way Tim is generous enough to cite my essay The Great Reckoning, which he says shaped the book’s historical frame.

• 03:44 – Evidence of the knowledge gap
• 09:18 – Is this more than the ordinary incuriosity of the bigger party? Late Qing parallels, and an energy transition the West willfully ceded
• 14:49 – What was the West’s Second Opium War?
• 19:35 – Feng Guifen, the Self-Strengthening Movement, and the reciprocal questions the West should be asking itself
• 23:12 – The A66 and the Romans: twenty years to widen eighteen miles, a generation that can’t build wealth by working, and Hobbes as a forgotten Western strand
• 26:41 – Inverting tǐ-yòng: Western values as essence, Chinese methods for use, and whether you can have the electro-state without the party-state
• 30:40 – Mínzú: nation or race? Nine dictionaries, eight professors, a running battle with the FT, and the Stalin-to-Hitler op-ed that followed
• 34:42 – The Woodward Scale: a tongue-in-cheek measure of China sentiment, and why knowing China ought to unite hawks and doves
• 38:34 – The Great Enterprise: why Mandarin alone is pushing water uphill, collapsing language A-levels, native speakers taking all the A’s, and the Classical Civilisation model
• 43:34 – Nick Gibb’s no, ten merry-go-round ministers, a chairman’s letter to the prime minister, a 272-page curriculum review that never mentions China, and “that’s in the particular”
• 48:38 – Mind-enhancing and useful: would the A-level matter if China were no threat?
• 55:55 – Who can say yes? Pockets in Whitehall, a British Tóngwénguǎn, Guan Zhong’s hundred-year horizon, and what a China-literate Britain would decide differently — from Mingyang to Huawei

Paying It Forward

Morrison Cleaver, Beijing-based policy analyst at the China-Britain Business Council — Cambridge Chinese Studies, Yenching Scholar, still in his twenties, and one of the very few Brits of his generation who actually studied Chinese at university. Tim calls him a trailblazer. He’s also the man who lent me his copy of Teach the People so I could read it ahead of this conversation.

Recommendations

Tim: Bleak House by Charles Dickens — the story of an interminable lawsuit that outlives its litigants and ruins plaintiff and defendant alike; deliberately hard to follow, Tim suspects, because the joke is on us. He’s also just read Middlemarch for the first time and loved it. (I’ll always put in a word for Middlemarch — it’s the second time Bleak House has been recommended on this show, so it goes to the top of my list.)

Kaiser: Two novels by Mohsin Hamid, who’s become a friend through the Georgetown Global Dialogues. The Reluctant Fundamentalist — a short, semi-autobiographical novel told entirely as one side of a conversation in a Lahore café, by a Princeton-educated Pakistani who once understood America intimately. And Exit West, a very different and perhaps braver book about a young couple fleeing a city coming apart, in a world where doors open onto Mykonos and north London and an unrecognizable Marin County. Mohsin, I owe you a Chinese novel.

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This week on Sinica, I’m joined again by Afra Wang, the Bay Area-based writer behind the AI newsletter Concurrent, who was last on the show in January to talk about her Wired piece on The Morning Star of Lingao and China’s “Industrial Party.” She’s back with two new pieces of on-the-ground reportage that get beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism: her New Yorker Lede piece on Liangzhu, the town outside Hangzhou where laid-off and burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe code in each other’s living rooms (and where AI and BaZi fortune-telling have become strangely intimate), and a forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s sprawling, lucrative, and largely unregulated “learn AI, get rich” education industry. We talk about why 93% of Chinese respondents tell Gallup that AI will mostly help their country, what that number conceals, and whether what looks like optimism is sometimes closer to acceptance.

Afra’s pieces discussed in this episode:

• What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom — The New Yorker, September 23, 2026
• [Her forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s AI education industry — [LINK TK, expected after October 12]]
• You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel — Wired, January 2026, and our January 2026 Sinica conversation about it
• Subscribe to Afra’s newsletter, Concurrent

Also mentioned:

• Optimism About AI Globally Widespread Despite Uneven Adoption — the Microsoft-Gallup survey
• China’s OpenClaw gold rush — MIT Technology Review
• Damien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade
• Evan Osnos, Crazy English — The New Yorker, April 2008
• Lian Si 廉思, Journey Without a Map 无图之旅：一代青年的自我寻路
• Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction — Sinica, 2016

06:51 – Walking into Liangzhu’s living rooms: the San Francisco déjà vu, and the grimness beneath the techno-optimist story the West wants to hear

10:14 – Setting the scene: a real-estate developer’s utopian village, Neolithic ruins, Xi Jinping’s intervention, and a “road-to-food ratio” low enough to build real community

17:30 – Child of the layoffs or child of DeepSeek? The post-COVID “ego death” of Chinese tech — and a quibble about the word “crackdown”

21:42 – Master Qi and the living room as a social form: what Liangzhu offers that a Beijing office or a WeChat group can’t

24:11 – What the 93% really tells us: optimism, acceptance, or FOMO when you can’t protest a data center

29:26 – “Westerners get restless when they can’t protest; Chinese people get restless when they haven’t found a teacher”: qiúzhī 求知, meritocracy as religion, and the company called Shēngcái Yǒudào 生财有道

32:48 – Inside Shengcai Youdao: the “prosperity evangelist” conference room, the ladder from ordinary member to CEO class, Mr. Tree’s Hilton seminars, and who’s actually paying 3,000 yuan a year

37:44 – Scam or ladder? The state’s war on the “paid knowledge” mess, Dragon Ball referral credits, and the security guard running Claude Code on his phone during his shift

41:03 – How it compares to the Valley’s course-sellers; selling hope and upward mobility, echoes of Crazy English, and “the prosperity gospel with Chinese characteristics”

45:30 – “Take us to Silicon Valley!”: what the West means to a room of one-person companies building apps for the U.S. App Store

47:18 – Xiao Kai, the 25-year-old AI filmmaker from Heilongjiang: murder mysteries as model-friendly plots, government commissions, WaytoAGI, and the local-government AIGC fever

55:28 – Lian Si’s Journey Without a Map: a Party insider tells young people to “make peace with the ordinary” while everyone else says learn AI or be left behind

59:59 – FateTell and the gray zone of AI fortune-telling: tarot slot machines in Shenzhen, crystal shops, and Liangzhu as “China’s Sedona”

1:04:13 – Levy, the BaZi cosmology, Sam Altman’s chart, and Kaiser plays the skeptic: the Yijing as “humanity’s first statistical decision model,” the Whole Earth Catalog, and New Age re-imported from the West

1:12:27 – Do they actually believe it? Speech fasting, BaZi compatibility in hiring, and Chinese syncretism at work

1:14:45 – When the local government falls in love with the scene: Crazy Thursday, incubators, “new quality productive forces,” and why Liangzhu’s peak may already be over

1:19:42 – Are Chinese people really cavalier about AI safety? Pragmatism, scarce compute, trust in state capacity, the blind spots of EA — and a preview of Afra’s third piece on China’s “industrial AI slop”

Paying It Forward:

Zilan Qian, a GovAI fellow researching AI governance in China who writes the Substack Until Zilan Finds a Better Name and is a must-read on how AI-safety concepts like “loss of control” translate (or don’t) into the Chinese context. Her most widely shared piece: Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends.

Recommendations:

Afra: Ken Liu’s new collection, The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, whose title borrows a metaphor from Ursula K. Le Guin.

Kaiser: Marilynne Robinson’s Home, the second of the four Gilead novels — set in the same few weeks of 1956 as Gilead but seen from inside the Boughton household, as Glory and her prodigal brother Jack circle a secret the book doesn’t name until nearly the end.

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This week on Sinica, I sit down with Dr. Ruby Wang, whose new book, China Cure: The Rise of a Biotech, AI Medicine and Global Health Superpower (Agenda Publishing, out October 31, with a foreword by Kerry Brown), is the explanation general readers have been missing for one of the most consequential and least understood transformations in China today. Ruby is a rare creature in this space: a practicing physician in Britain’s NHS, trained in surgery, who worked London’s hospital wards through the first wave of COVID; the former head of the UK government’s health engagement in China at the British Embassy in Beijing; a former health adviser within the UN system; a onetime medical adviser at AliHealth in Hangzhou; and a Schwarzman Scholar. She now runs the strategy consultancy Lintris Health and writes the excellent China Health Pulse newsletter and podcast, both of which I recommend to anyone trying to follow this space.

Anyone who spent time in a Chinese hospital in the late ‘80s or ‘90s — the pre-dawn queues, the ticket scalpers, the cashier’s window at every step, the IV drips for a head cold — will find the arc of this book hard to believe. Within living memory, China sent barefoot doctors into the countryside with herbal remedies and antibiotics in army-green satchels; last year, Chinese companies signed something like 186 out-licensing deals worth a disclosed $137 billion, roughly half the global total and close to ten times the 2021 figure, with Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, GSK, and Eli Lilly all buying. Since Ruby gave a terrific interview to my friend Kyle Chan on his High Capacity podcast this spring on the apps, data flows, and clinical AI, I deliberately steered elsewhere: to her family — a deckhand grandfather, a father’s crooked splint, a grandmother’s transnational hunt for Gleevec — to the four reinforcing conditions she argues made the transformation possible, to the “China is fast because China is loose” shortcut and what’s actually behind the speed, to BIOSECURE and its successors, to the AI doctor avatars now fielding millions of inquiries a year, and to the burnout and violence that still bedevil the lives of Chinese clinicians.

• 10:31 – Two family stories from 1970s Zhejiang: a deckhand grandfather and a barefoot doctor’s crooked splint
• 15:57 – Four reinforcing conditions, part one: demographic pressure and crisis as catalyst (SARS, melamine, fake vaccines)
• 23:42 – The long view: Healthy China 2030 and why China’s health ministers are technocrats
• 27:54 – The cultural inheritance: who signs the consent form, and China’s health codes vs. Britain’s billion-pound app
• 35:26 – Grandma and Gleevec: a family’s transnational hunt for a drug in 2003
• 40:17 – The reversal: hǎiguī, copycats to first-in-class, and the tenfold surge in out-licensing
• 42:35 – Is China fast because China is loose? Where China leads (oncology, GLP-1s) and where it lags
• 50:22 – BIOSECURE, COINS, and BINSA: who loses when politics meets pharma
• 55:37 – Digital health in three systems, Ant Afu’s AI doctor avatars, and whether the silver generation can keep up
• 1:08:44 – “A lifetime of eating bitterness”: Dr. Wang of Guangzhou, burnout, and yī nào

Paying It Forward

• Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor at Seton Hall — the go-to voice on the geopolitics of China and health, and Ruby’s first port of call.
• Afra Wang, writer of the Concurrent newsletter — Ruby admires how she reads the cultural currents beneath technology, and finds it endlessly useful to take those insights to the health-tech angle.
• Olivia Plotnick, Shanghai-based founder of Wai Social — on-the-ground work on branding and consumer behavior across some 30 lower-tier Chinese cities, including health and wellness.

Recommendations

Ruby: Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person, edited by Arthur Kleinman with Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, and others — what being sick reveals about society and culture in China: psychiatry, caregiving, and how patients and families have changed as the country has. Kleinman’s The Soul of Care is also worth your time.

Kaiser: Augustus by John Williams — the third of his novels I’ve recommended on the show, and the National Book Award winner: an epistolary novel of imperial Rome told through a crazy quilt of letters and fragments from family, friends like Agrippa, and poets like Virgil and Horace, each given a completely distinct voice. Quiet campus novel, anti-Western, imperial Rome — the range, and the restraint, are astonishing.

Also: Ezra Klein’s conversation with Carnegie’s Matt Sheehan — a masterclass in clarity on AI safety and the U.S.-China relationship, and the best thing to listen to in the wake of Dario Amodei’s “Pacing the Frontier” essay.

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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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