Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I speak with Afra Wang, a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov.AI.

We're talking today about her recent WIRED piece on what might be China's most influential science fiction project you've never heard of: The Morning Star of Lingao (Língáo Qǐmíng 临高启明), a sprawling, crowdsourced novel about time travelers who bootstrap an industrial revolution in Ming Dynasty Hainan. More than a thought experiment in alternate history, it's the ur-text of China's "Industrial Party" (gōngyè dǎng 工业党) — the loose intellectual movement that sees engineering capability as the true source of national power. We discuss what the novel reveals about how China thinks about failure, modernity, and salvation, and why, just as Americans are waking up to China's industrial might, the worldview that helped produce it may already be losing its grip.

5:27 – Being a cultural in-betweener: code-switching across moral and epistemic registers

10:25 – Double consciousness and converging aesthetic standards

12:05 – "The greatest Chinese science fiction" — an ironic title for a poorly written cult classic

14:18 – Bridging STEM and humanities: the KPI-coded language of tech optimization

16:08 – China's post-Industrial Party moment: from "try hard" to "lie flat"

17:01 – How widely known is Lingao? A cult Bible for China's techno-elite

19:11 – From crypto bros to DAO experiments: how Afra discovered the novel

21:25 – The canonical timeline: compiling chaos into collaborative fiction

23:06 – Guancha.cn (guānchá zhě wǎng 观察者网) and the Industrial Party's media ecosystem

26:05 – The Sentimental Party (Qínghuái Dǎng 情怀党): China's lost civic space

29:01 – The Wenzhou high-speed rail crash: the debate that defined the Industrial Party

33:19 – Controlled spoilers: colonizing Australia, the Maid Revolution, and tech trees

41:06 – Competence as salvation: obsessive attention to getting the details right

44:18 – The Needham question and the joy of transformation: from Robinson Crusoe to Primitive Technology

47:25 – "Never again": inherited historical vulnerability and the memory of chaos

49:20 – Wang Xiaodong, "China Is Unhappy," and the crystallization of Industrial Party ideology

51:33 – Gender and Lingao: a pre-feminist artifact and the rational case for equality

56:16 – Dan Wang's Breakneck and the "engineering state" framework

59:25 – New Quality Productive Forces (xīn zhì shēngchǎnlì 新质生产力): Industrial Party logic in CCP policy

1:03:43 – The reckoning: why Industrial Party intellectuals are losing their innocence

1:07:49 – What Lingao tells us about China today: the invisible infrastructure beneath the hot shower

Paying it forward: The volunteer translators of The Morning Star of Lingao (English translation and GitHub resources)

Xīn Xīn Rén Lèi / Pixel Perfect podcast (https://pixelperfect.typlog.io/) and the Bǎihuā (百花) podcasting community

Recommendations:

Afra: China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter, edited by Kerry Brown; The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu

Kaiser: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

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 Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin, coauthors of The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. We're talking about China's college entrance exam — dreaded and feared, with outsized ability to determine life outcomes, seen as deeply flawed yet also sacrosanct, something few Chinese want drastically altered or removed. Cards on table: I had very strong preconceptions about the gaokao. My wife and I planned our children's education to get them out of the Chinese system before it became increasingly oriented toward gaokao preparation. But this book really opened my eyes.

Ruixue is professor of economics at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy, researching how institutions like examination systems shape governance, elite selection, and state capacity. Hongbin is James Liang Chair at Stanford, focusing on education, labor markets, and institutional foundations of China's economic development.

We explore why the gaokao represents far more than just a difficult test, the concrete incentives families face, why there are limited alternative routes for social mobility, how both authors' own experiences shaped their thinking, why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China, what happened when the exam system was suspended during the Cultural Revolution, why inequality has increased despite internet access to materials, why meaningful reform is so politically difficult, how education translated into productivity and GDP growth, the gap between skill formation and economic returns, how the system shapes governance and everyday life, and the moral dimensions of exam culture when Chinese families migrate to very different education systems like the U.S.

6:18 – What the gaokao actually represents beyond just being a difficult exam

11:54 – Why there are limited alternative pathways for social mobility

14:23 – How their own experiences as students shaped their thinking

18:46 – Why the gaokao is a political institution, not just educational policy

22:21 – Why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China

28:30 – What happened in late Qing and Cultural Revolution when exams were suspended

33:26 – Has internet access to materials reduced inequality or has it persisted?

36:55 – Hongbin's direct experience trying to reform the gaokao—and why it failed

40:28 – How education improvement accounts for significant share of China's GDP growth

42:44 – The gap: college doesn't add measurable skills, but gaokao scores predict income

46:56 – How centralized approach affects talent allocation across fields

51:08 – The gaokao and GDP tournament for officials: similar tournament systems

54:26 – How ranking and evaluation systems shape workplace behavior and culture

58:12 – When exam culture meets U.S. education: understanding tensions around affirmative action

1:02:10 – Transparent rule-based evaluation vs. discretion and judgment: the fundamental tradeoff

Recommendations:

Ruixue: Piao Liang Peng You (film by Geng Jun); Stoner (a novel by John Williams)

Hongbin: The Dictator's Handbook

Kaiser: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field; Black Pill by Elle Reeve

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 Daniel Bessner, the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and co-host of the American Prestige Podcast. If you follow U.S.-China relations even casually, you can’t avoid hearing that we’re in a new Cold War — it’s become a rhetorical reflex in D.C., shaping budgets, foreign policy debates, media narratives, and how ordinary Americans think about China.

But what does it actually mean to call something a Cold War? To think clearly about the present, I find it helps to go to the past, not for simple analogies but to understand the intellectual and ideological machinery that produced and now sustains a Cold War mentality. Danny has written widely about the architecture of American power, the rise of the national security state, and the constellation of thinkers he calls Cold War liberals who helped define the ideological landscape of U.S. foreign policy. We explore how Cold War liberalism reshaped American political life, how the U.S. came to see its global dominance as natural and morally necessary, why the question of whose fault the Cold War was remains urgent in an age of renewed great power rivalry, the rise of China and anxiety of American decline, and what it would take to imagine a U.S.-China relationship that doesn’t fall back into old patterns of moral binaries, ideological panic, and militarized competition.

6:20 – Danny’s background: from Iraq War politicization to studying defense intellectuals

11:00 – Cold War liberalism: the constellation of ideas that shaped U.S. foreign policy

16:14 – How these ideas became structurally embedded in security institutions

22:02 – The Democratic Party’s destruction of the genuine left in the late 1940s

27:53 – Whose fault was the Cold War? Stalin’s sphere of influence logic vs. American universalism

31:07 – Are we facing a similar decision with China today?

34:23 – The anxiety of loss: how decline anxiety distorts interpretation of China’s rise

37:54 – The new Cold War narrative: material realities vs. psychological legacies

41:21 – Clearest parallels between the first Cold War and emerging U.S.-China confrontation

44:33 – What would a pluralistic order in Asia actually look like?

47:42 – Coexistence rather than zero-sum rivalry: what does it mean in practice?

50:57 – What genuine restraint requires: accepting limits of American power

54:14 – The moral imperative pushback: you can’t have good empire without bad empire

56:35 – Imperialist realism: Americans don’t think we’re good, but can’t imagine another world

Paying it forward: The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Responsible Statecraft publication; The Trillion Dollar War Machine by William Hartung and Ben Freeman

Recommendations:

Danny: Nirvana and the history of Seattle punk/indie music (forthcoming podcast project)

Kaiser: Hello China Tech Substack by Poe Zhao (hellotechchina.com)

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This week on Sinica, in a joint episode with the China-Global South Podcast, I speak with Eric Olander, host of the China Global South Podcast and founder/editor-in-chief of the China-Global South Project.

In the early hours of January 3rd, U.S. forces carried out a coordinated operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, followed by their rendition to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. The operation unfolded quickly, with minimal kinetic escalation, but has raised far-reaching questions about international law, hemispheric security, and the Trump administration's willingness to use force in the Western Hemisphere. Just before the raid, China's Special Envoy for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, had met with Maduro in Caracas. Commentary linking Trump's action to China has ranged widely—claims about spheres of influence, arguments this was all about oil or rare earths, and pronouncements about what this means for Taiwan. Eric helps us think through China's actual stake in Venezuela, how deeply Beijing understands Latin America, what this episode does and does not change about China's role in the region and the global South more broadly, China's immediate reaction and concrete exposure on the ground, how it manages political risk when partner regimes collapse, and what Chinese military planners may be studying as they assess how this operation unfolded.

5:18 – How Beijing is reading this episode: official messaging versus elite thinking

7:40 – The Taiwan comparisons on Chinese social media and why they don't work

11:09 – How deep is China's actual expertise on Latin America?

14:56 – Comparing U.S. and Chinese benches of Latin America expertise

18:02 – Are we back to spheres of influence? Why that framing doesn't work

20:09 – Where is China most exposed in Venezuela: oil, loans, personnel?

23:41 – The resource-for-infrastructure model and why it failed

28:27 – The political assets: China as defender of sovereignty and multilateralism

36:25 – Will this push left-leaning governments closer to Beijing?

40:07 – The "China impotence" narrative and what doing something would actually mean

46:26 – What Chinese military planners are actually studying

51:46 – The Qiu Xiaoqi meeting: strategic failure or intelligence delivery?

58:40 – What actually changes and what doesn't: looking ahead

Paying it forward: Alonso Illueca, nonresident fellow for Latin America and the Caribbean at the China Global South Project

Recommendations:

Eric: "China's Long Economic War" by Zongyuan Zoe Liu (Foreign Affairs)

Kaiser: The Venetian Heretic by Christian Cameron

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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)

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

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

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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)

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