ChinaTalk Jordan Schneider

Kevin Xu, Obama-era White House official and creator of https://interconnect.substack.com/ comes on ChinaTalk to discuss:

Our impressions of the House's TikTok hearing

Continued cross-border reliances around batteries and cloud computing

The missed opportunity of Zhang Yiming's generation of founders

GPT4's remarkable translation capabilities

Outtro Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQiOA7euaYA
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Stephen Kotkin is a legendary historian, currently at Hoover, previously at Princeton. Best known for his Stalin biographies, his other works include Uncivil Society, Magnetic Mountain, and Armageddon Averted.
Our discussion on China is far-ranging yet in-depth — we manage to pack in:

The two dominant subjects taught at the CCP’s Central Party School;

Kotkin’s assessment of the main threat to Communism — what “Communism with a human face” means, and why Gorbachev’s reforms ultimately destroyed Communism in the USSR;

Why the CCP fears color revolutions more than, say, NATO expansion — and why Xi snapped on Hong Kong in 2020;

The twin components of Marxism-Leninism: anti-capitalism + anti-imperialism;

And an understanding of Lenin’s “commanding heights,” and what China’s commanding heights are today;

The case for optimism about US-China relations, despite — or because of — the recent ratcheting up of tensions;

Why Kotkin believes a US-China Cold War is both good and necessary;

How the US can get on the diplomatic “front foot”;

Making sense of Reagan’s foreign policy — how he was both a “movement conservative” and a “dealmaking conservative.”


Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4GLAKEjU4w.
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How will GPT4 change the world?
What implications does it have for policy, economics, and society?
How will US-China 'racing dynamics' play out and what are the implications for AI safety?
To discuss, I've brought together the AI Justice League: Zvi of 'Don't Worry About the Vase', Nathan Labenz of Waymark, and Matthew Mittelsteadt of Mercatus.
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Dennis Wilder returns to ChinaTalk — this time with some broader thoughts on how the US intelligence community can rise to the occasion vis-à-vis China. In particular, we discuss:

The importance of government hiring those with experience living in China;

Contributions that the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS) has made to China intelligence, and why it should be reinstated;

A serious request to make an ChatGPT as good as Alice Miller is at analyzing CCP documents; https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/clm57-am-final.pdf

Why the State Department has established China House and the CIA has established the China Mission Center;

What we can learn from Richard Danzig’s Driving in the Dark; https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/driving-in-the-dark-ten-propositions-about-prediction-and-national-security%C2%A0

How to maintain robust intelligence capabilities in the long-run;

Raymond P. Ludden and the “Dixie Mission” — and why the US needs more Luddens today. https://uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu/essays/we-need-more-luddens


Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l6vqPUM_FE
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Welcome back to the second part of my conversation with Nick Mulder and Lars Schönander.
Picking the narrative up in 1935, get real in this episode:

Why the Great Depression, counterintuitively, made importing commodities cheaper, and how that affected Germany’s and Japan’s protectionism;

The difference between autarky and autarchy;

Whether Kim Jong-un’s North Korea could survive a full-on fuel embargo today by using Nazi-era technology;

Nick’s definition of “temporal claustrophobia,” and what it has to do with Japan ultimately siding with the Axis;

Parallels between the “ABCD circle” (America, Britain, China, Dutch East Indies) and the semiconductor export controls today;

Why having an empire was a liability for Britain;

What sanctions had to do with the Czechoslovaks — even with a larger army — falling to the Nazis;

How the blockades of WWI differed from WWII;

And what lessons pro-decouplers should learn from this history of sanctions.


Nick’s book recommendations:

https://www.amazon.com/Athene-Palace-Rosie-G-Waldeck/dp/1592110088

https://www.amazon.com/World-Late-Antiquity-150-750-Civilization/dp/0393958035

https://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590171462

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Maisky-Diaries-Volumes-Communism/dp/0300117825


Nick’s excellent book: https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Weapon-Rise-Sanctions-Modern/dp/0300259360

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5mdvyIqrs4

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Today we’re releasing part one of our a two-part conversation with Nick Mulder, a history professor at Cornell and author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War — a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022.
With cohost Lars, Schönander, we discuss:

The recent advent of the use of sanctions (for example, in the Crimean War, Britain continued to fulfill payments to Russia, the nation it was fighting right then!)

Why Europeans were reluctant to employ blockades and sanctions in the early twentieth century, and how their thinking evolved through two world wars

How Wilson’s notion of “moral sanctions” and decision to keep blockades in place after the war were important to the development of sanctions, especially during the interwar period

The League of Nations’ efforts to establish a “positive sanctions” fund, and why the concept never took off

Nick’s take on why Hoover is underrated

When and why Italy almost fought a war against Germany over Austria


Stay tuned for part two, when we connect this sanctions history to implications to US-China relations today!
Nick’s excellent book: https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Weapon-Rise-Sanctions-Modern/dp/0300259360

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzd4VtkNjmc

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