Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo
  • 4,8 (55)
  • POLITIK
  • WÖCHENTLICH

A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo.

  1. VOR 4 TAGEN

    Brookings' Patricia Kim Takes Stock of Trump's Second-Term China Policy

    This week on Sinica, I speak with Patricia Kim, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center, where she focuses on U.S. policy toward China and the broader Asia Pacific. One year into Donald Trump's second term, Pattie and her colleague Joyce Yang have published a comprehensive Brookings assessment titled "Making America Great Again? Evaluating Trump's China strategy at the one-year mark," which examines whether the administration's stated objectives on reindustrialization, AI leadership, strategic dependence, and global standing are actually being met. We discuss the paradox of Trump's China policy (which is surprising consistency in goals despite the absence of a formal strategy document), with its mixed results on economic rebalancing and supply chain security, the troubling deterioration in U.S.-China diplomatic and military channels, and why the administration's approach to allies and partners may be undermining its own objectives. Pattie brings analytical discipline and empirical rigor to debates that are often long on rhetoric and short on evidence, cutting through a lot of noise to assess what's actually working, what isn't, and where the strategy is running up against reality. 4:45 – Does Trump have a China strategy? Consistency without a formal framework 8:15 – Assessing the economic rebalancing goals: reindustrialization and tariffs 15:30 – Technology competition: export controls and AI leadership 23:45 – Supply chain security and strategic dependence challenges 31:20 – The deterioration of diplomatic and military-to-military channels 39:50 – The ally and partner problem: how Trump's approach undermines his own goals 47:15 – Global standing and American credibility in the Trump era 52:30 – Paying it forward: The Lost in Translation series at Brookings Paying it forward: Lost in Translation Series (Brookings Global China Project) Recommendations: Pattie: To Dare Mighty Things by Michael O'Hanlon Kaiser: Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 Std. 5 Min.

  2. 4. FEB.

    Uneasy Calm: Ryan Hass on Three Pathways for U.S.-China Relations Under Trump

    This week on Sinica, I speak with Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings and one of the most clear-eyed analysts of the U.S.-China relationship working today. Ryan was director for China at the NSC during the Obama Administration. As Donald Trump moves through his second year in office, the bilateral relationship has defied easy characterization. The once-dominant language of great power competition has receded, China hawks have been sidelined, and Trump’s personalistic approach—marked by praise for Xi Jinping and a willingness to bracket ideological disputes—represents a sharp departure from recent Washington orthodoxy. Ryan has just published an essay laying out three plausible pathways for the relationship under Trump: a soft landing, a hard split, or what he considers most likely—a period of uneasy calm in which both sides seek stability not out of trust, but out of mutual constraint. We discuss Trump’s apparent strategy, the vibe shift in American attitudes, Beijing’s choice between managing Trump versus managing uncertainty, the critical importance of Xi’s planned April visit, and whether we’re headed toward genuine stabilization or just buying time before the next collision. 5:24 – Trump’s approach: respect for Xi, military deterrence, and the rare earths constraint 8:03 – The vibe shift and Trump’s “reptilian feel” for American exhaustion with confrontation 10:52 – Three scenarios: soft landing, hard split, or uneasy calm through mutual constraint 16:30 – Beijing’s bet: managing Trump versus managing whoever comes next 26:46 – Economic interdependence and why decoupling is like “separating egg whites from a scrambled egg” 37:12 – The April visit as a critical test: pageantry, protests, and what both sides are watching for 42:18 – Taiwan as the most dangerous variable and where theory meets practice 46:58 – Lack of institutional guardrails and the risks of Trump’s personalistic foreign policy Paying it forward: Audrye Wong (USC) Recommendations: Ryan: The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer by Robert Suettinger Kaiser: The Last Cavalier (Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine) by Alexandre Dumas; Asia Society conversation with Lizzi Lee, Bert Hoffmann, and Gerard DiPippo on rebalancing China’s economy; Trivium China Podcast with Andrew Polk, Joe Peissel, Danny McMahon, and Cory Combs on capital expenditure headwinds See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 Std. 4 Min.

  3. 28. JAN.

    Afra Wang on "The Morning Star of Lingao" (临高启明) and the Rise and Reckoning of China's "Industrial Party"

    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.

    1 Std. 25 Min.

  4. 21. JAN.

    The Highest Exam: Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin on China's Gaokao and What It Reveals About Chinese Society

    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.

    1 Std. 16 Min.

  5. 14. JAN.

    Daniel Bessner on American Primacy, Cold War Liberalism, and the China Challenge

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

    1 Std. 4 Min.

  6. 8. JAN.

    Eric Olander: After the Maduro Capture — Assessing China's Real Exposure in Venezuela

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

    1 Std. 10 Min.

  7. 2. JAN.

    Michael Brenes and Van Jackson on Why U.S.-China Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy

    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.

    1 Std. 3 Min.

  8. 26.12.2025

    Paul Triolo on Nvidia H200s, Chinese EUV Breakthroughs, and the Collapse of the Sullivan Doctrine

    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.

    1 Std. 25 Min.
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A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo.

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  • Erstellt von
    Kaiser Kuo
  • Jahre aktiv
    2016 - 2026
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    535
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    Sinica Podcast

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