Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I chat with Peking University's Professor Wang Dong (王栋), an international relations scholar at the School of International Studies at Peking University, where he also serves as Deputy Director and Executive Director of the Office for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding. Professor Wang’s scholarship and public commentary focus on U.S.–China relation...

This week on Sinica, co-host Tianyu Fang makes his debut on the show to join me in interviewing his Stanford classmate and talented writer Jasmine Sun, who studies the anthropology of disruption. This summer, she took a trip to China with a group of friends with different levels of China experience, from people raised in the country to total novices. She reflects on how it hit, and how a group of young people reckoned with...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, I chat with well-known author and public intellectual Yascha Mounk about his recent fascination with China, his approach to learning about the country and learning Chinese, and his thoughts on how China fits into the current crisis of Western liberal democracy.

7:15 – Yascha’s experience of living in China and learning Chinese

12:18 – Yascha’s perspective on China’s strengths and weaknesses

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This week on Sinica, I speak first with retired Senior Colonel Zhou Bo, a frequent commentator on Chinese military and security affairs and a prolific writer now at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, and with Rana Mitter of the Harvard Kennedy School and author of Forgotten Ally, a book about World War II in China.

4:08 – The primary objectives behind the September 3rd parade

10:0...

This week on Sinica, I chat with Dave Kang (USC), Zenobia Chan (Georgetown), and Jackie Wong (American University in Sharjah, UAE) about their new paper in International Security titled "What Does China Want?" The paper, which has generated quite a bit of controversy, takes a data-driven approach to examine the claim that China seeks global hegemony — that it wants to supplant the U.S. as a globe-spanning top power.

I'...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, I welcome back Evan Feigenbaum, Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Evan served for many years as a State Department official, was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Central Asia among his numerous positions in government, and was instrumental in building the U.S.-India relationship after 2000 — only to watch Trump round on I...

This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to be joined by Dan Wang, formerly of Gavekal Dragonomics and the Paul Tsai Law Center at Yale University, now with the Hoover Institute's History Lab. Dan's new book is Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, and it's already one of the year's most talked-about books. In this conversation, we go beyond what's actually in the book to discuss the origins and implications of the Ch...

Artificial intelligence has been a frequent topic on Sinica in recent years — but usually through the lens of the two countries that have produced the leading models and companies: the United States and China. We’ve covered generative AI, national strategies, governance frameworks, and the geopolitical implications of AI leadership.

This webinar, broadcast on the morning of August 14, broadens that lens to explore...

Join me for a conversation with four fantastic panelists about nuclear safety and security issues brought on by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and more broadly on the state of nuclear security globally during this era of dramatic change.

This program was made possible by the Ukrainian Platform for Contemporary China and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina ...

This week on Sinica, Paul Triolo of DGA Albright Stonebridge and tech investor Ryan Cunningham join to talk about their observations and insights from the World AI Conference (WAIC), held in July in Shanghai, and what it tells them about China's ambitions in the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence. Don't miss this one!

04:21 - Ryan on his Edgerunner fund

06:23 - Impressions of the World AI Conference in Shanghai

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This week on Sinica: On my final two days in Shaxi in Yunnan, Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li, the hosts of the marvelous YouTube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified, joined me for some cooking and lots of chatting about food! We recorded this show together and focus our conversation on their heroic attempt at a taxonomy of different Chinese cuisines. We don't talk about all 63 that they identify, but we do get into their

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I'm in Shaxi, a wonderful little town in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, and I was joined here by the Columbia economic historian Adam Tooze, who shared his thoughts on what he sees happening on the ground in China. Adam's been in China for the last month and reflects on his experiences learning about the country — and even attempting the language!

03:49 - The economic situation in China

10:42 - Patterns of consumpti...

This week on Sinica, in a show taped in early June in Washington, Kaiser chats with Tong Zhao (赵通) of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a leading expert on Chinese nuclear doctrine, about why the PRC has, in recent years, significantly increased the size of its nuclear arsenal. Zhao offers a master class in the practice of strategic empathy.

03:12 – China’s nuclear doctrine: core principles

06:56 – Xi Jinping’s...

In 2014, the writer Christopher Beam published a humorous, heartwarming story in The New Republic about an unlikely team of American football enthusiasts in Chongqing who went on to defeat their archrivals in Shanghai to win a championship. The piece was optioned by Sony Pictures, and had some big names attached, but was ultimately never made — not, at least, by an American studio. Eleven years later, Chris has written...

This week on Sinica, I chat with Stephen Platt, historian at UMass Amherst and author, most recently, of the book The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II. Like his previous works, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom and Imperial Twilight, it offers a compelling narrative history of an overlooked chapter through a deeply empathetic and well-researched examination of ...

This week on Sinica, I chat with Jostein Hauge, political economist and an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, based at the Centre of Development Studies and the Department of Politics and International Studies, and author of the book The Future of the Factory: How Megatrends are Changing Industrialization.

3:09 – Self Introduction: Jostein Hauge

4:23 – Anti-China Sentiment in Western D...

This week on Sinica, I speak with Kendra Schaefer, the partner at Trivium China who heads their tech practice. She recently published a fascinating paper looking at the Cyberspace Administration of China's comprehensive database of generative AI tools released in China, and she shares the insights and big takeaways from her research on that database. It's a terrific window into what Chinese firms, both private and state-af...

Jeremy Goldkorn joins for this largely unedited throwback to the early, sweary days of the show. We talk about the announcement made on Wednesday, 28 May 2025, on the "aggressive" revocation of Chinese student visas for students with Party "connections" or who study "critical fields." You've been warned!

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

A bonus episode this week. On May 22, I moderated a panel organized by Vita Golod and the UNC Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. The focus was on the U.S.-Ukraine Mineral Security Partnership, and it features Ivan Us, Chief Consultant at the Center for Foreign Policy at the National Institute for Strategic Studies; Jim Mullinax, a Senior Foreign Service Officer and former Consul General at the U.S. Co...