Most commentary on China operates at a surface level. Xi Jinping is authoritarian, the economy is state-directed, and the Communist Party controls everything. That's all true, but it doesn't actually help you understand why specific things happen the way they do.

Manoj Kewalramani is one of the few Indian analysts who can go deeper than that. He's a China Studies research fellow at the Takshashila Institution, speaks Mandarin, and spent years living in China. In this conversation, we try to understand the country as it actually is, not as the headlines describe it.

We get into some genuinely interesting territory. On zero-COVID, Manoj explains why the policy became so brutal, not because Xi Jinping was being irrational, but because local officials were responding entirely rationally to a set of incentives from the centre. On China's economy, he makes the case that the overcapacity everyone criticises isn't a flaw in the system. It's how the system is designed to work. On India's favourite lesson from China, that the state should guide industry, he argues that Indian policymakers have actually got it backwards.

We also talk about the recent military purges, why success itself can make you a target in a system built around one person's power, and whether China is genuinely becoming more communist under Xi or whether that's just a label people throw around.

The honest answer to that last question, Manoj argues, is yes. China today is more Leninist than it was fifteen years ago. But it's also more adaptable than most people give it credit for.

More about Manoj:

https://school.takshashila.org.in/faculty/manoj-kewalramani

https://www.linkedin.com/in/manojkewalramani/