Sinica Podcast

This week I sat down with Gloria Xiong, Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College, and Jessica Chen Weiss, the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, to discuss their new Foreign Affairs essay, "How China Found Its Most Potent Weapon: The Real History of Beijing's Rare Earth Dominance." The story everyone tells is one of foresight — a master plan hatched by Deng Xiaoping and now coming to fruition. Gloria and Jessica argue the reality was far messier: reform-era export mania, environmental catastrophe, defiant local governments, scarcity anxiety, and a lesson in chokepoint weaponization that Beijing learned from Washington. Getting the story wrong, they argue, feeds an action-reaction spiral that neither side started and neither fully controls — and with the Busan truce expiring in November, the stakes could hardly be higher.09:31 — "The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths": what Deng Xiaoping actually said, and how a quote got recruited for a story he wasn't telling12:33 — Why the master plan narrative is so irresistible across the partisan spectrum in Washington15:40 — The cheap and dirty origins: reform-era export mania, thousands of small mines, and rare earths sold "at the price of cabbage and dirt"19:06 — The West as co-author of the chokepoint: offshoring the pollution, and the stockpile that was never built21:53 — Beijing's struggle to control its own industry: quotas, "crime rings," and the partially failed 2002 consolidation25:13 — September 2010: what really happened with the "embargo" against Japan, and why Beijing may have learned about it from Japanese customs28:47 — Fans and fire hoses: how bottom-up nationalism can commit Beijing to coercive postures it didn't choose32:13 — The debate inside China after 2010: protectionists versus Hong Feng's warning against using rare earths as "political chips"35:44 — The 2015 WTO ruling: China complied — was it a rule-taker, or did it simply lack the tools to do anything else?38:06 — Learning from Washington: Huawei, the Export Control Law, the China Rare Earth Group, and what distinguishes learning from planning40:24 — The 2022–2024 ledger: what's the evidence for an action-reaction spiral beyond the timeline?44:25 — April 2025: coercion or bureaucratic pileup? Thirty licensing officials and a 74% collapse in magnet exports47:46 — October 2025: the extraterritorial rule that mirrored the Foreign Direct Product Rule, and the Busan truce52:32 — The countdown to November: hawks in both capitals, "mutually assured disruption," and Xi's coming state visit55:29 — The limits of leverage on both sides: yttrium, Japan's diversification, and China's own resource insecurity58:32 — From crime rings to two national champions: has the Wild West been tamed, and are central-local relations "fractured"?01:02:21 — Prescriptions: positive reciprocity, licensing Chinese technology, and managing interdependence rather than escaping it01:05:51 — Everyone else: Myanmar, Congo, Australia, and how Beijing thinks about third countries that don't want to choosePaying It ForwardGloria name-checked Wendy Leutert of Indiana University, who works on the reform and global expansion of China's state-owned enterprises and, with Isaac Kardon, on Chinese investment in global ports; Ning Leng of Georgetown University, author of the award-winning Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party State in China; and Ketian Zhang, who has written extensively on Chinese coercion and maritime disputes.Jessica first acknowledged the scholars whose research the essay drew on but couldn't cite in Foreign Affairs: Cory Combs of Trivium China, Arthur Kroeber, Henry Farrell, Duleep Singh, and Julie Klinger. She also flagged Jack Zhang, who runs the Trade War Lab at the University of Kansas, and Kyle Jaros and Sara Newland, who are writing a book on subnational economic statecraft — work that has shaped her thinking on disaggregating what the United States wants, not just what China wants.RecommendationsGloria: Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer — a book she first read in a college writing seminar and returned to as she heads back into the classroom.Jessica: The Scientist and the Spy by Mara Hvistendahl, which she uses to close her SAIS seminar on Chinese foreign policy as a reminder about proportionality; and Ann Patchett's new novel Whistler.Kaiser: Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, the 1972 Pulitzer winner — a novel about mining camps in the American West and one of the most fully realized characters in American fiction.Also mentioned: Jessica's recent interview with Daniel Kurtz-Phelan on The Foreign Affairs Interview podcast, and her interview in The Monitor, the newsletter of the Carter Center's U.S.-China Perception Monitor.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 joined once again by Ryan Hass, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, former NSC director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and co-host of the Beijing Brief podcast. Ryan has just published two pieces that couldn’t be better timed: a long essay in China Leadership Monitor, “China’s Great Power Vision Comes into Focus,” which argues that the 2020s may be remembered as the decade Beijing finally laid its cards on the table — and a shorter Brookings piece, “Why Beijing Isn’t Taking the Bait with Trump,” on why Xi Jinping has answered an unusually accommodating American president with a poker face, and what that means for Xi’s state visit to Washington later this month.We start with the perennial question — what does China want? — and Ryan’s own two-decade journey with it, from chasing a supposed secret strategy in Zhongnanhai as a junior political officer to concluding that Beijing’s vision is now legible and consistent: an international political order stripped of its liberal core and rebuilt around sovereign equality and the “global majority.” We talk about “American decline” and “strategic stalemate” in Chinese discourse, the tension between China’s pitch to the developing world and its export juggernaut, the Middle East and Northeast Asia as test cases, and the central riddle of Ryan’s essay: why a country so willing to articulate its ambitions has been so unwilling to pay for them. Then we turn to the summit — constructive strategic stability, escalation dominance, and what will and won’t be on the table when Xi comes to Washington.03:11 – The “What does China want?” genre — and why Ryan concluded there is no secret plan locked in a Zhongnanhai vault06:10 – From participant to architect: what actually changed, and whether Beijing is revisionist or, as I cheekily put it, restorationist09:12 – “American decline” (美国衰落) and “strategic stalemate” (战略相持): reading Beijing’s rhetorical restraint and the Maoist echo14:34 – Champion of the global majority, or the world’s factory? The $6 toaster problem and the credibility gap on Ukraine and Japan19:36 – The Middle East as a test case: economic enabler, not security patron — and the good-faith maximalist rebuttal24:38 – Northeast Asia: why Beijing keeps generating the very encirclement it fears26:59 – Rhetoric without resources: flat foreign aid, shrinking BRI lending, and the SCO as China’s proving ground32:28 – The Pew swing that hasn’t materialized, and why Biden may have been America’s last restorationist president36:01 – Why Beijing isn’t taking the bait: Xi’s poker face, “constructive strategic stability,” and the G2 refusal41:55 – Confident abroad, anxious at home: the purges, the memory of 2020, economic escalation dominance, and a viewer’s guide to the September summitPaying It ForwardRyan flags two women doing important work in China studies, both with books out this fall: Emily Matson of Georgetown, whose China’s Date Debate: How Manchurian Scholars Rewrote World War II examines how the start date of China’s war with Japan was moved from 1937 back to 1931; and Shuxian Luo of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, whose Simmering Seas: Escalation and De-escalation in China’s Maritime Disputes is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in October. He also gives a shout-out to the engines of the Brookings China Center, research assistants Allie Matthias and Joyce Yang.RecommendationsRyan: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which he’s late to but found poignant for its eerie echoes of today’s battlefields — and Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change, an inside account of the second Trump administration that he calls harrowing but essential for anyone trying to anticipate the president’s behavior. (He also finally read The Three-Body Problem, and now knows his sophons from his Trisolarans.)Kaiser: Robert Harris’s Agrippa, published September 1 — the memoir of Marcus Agrippa, the general who won Octavian’s battles and built half of Augustan Rome, and a story about the pivot from republic to empire that feels uncomfortably relevant. And if you’ve read Tuchman, do read Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Not my official recommendation, but astonishing.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 sit down with the writer Pallavi Aiyar — at her own dining table in Beijing, where in recent months I’ve been the lucky beneficiary of her and her husband Julio’s legendary hospitality. Pallavi first arrived in Beijing in 2002 to teach at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and went on to spend the better part of a decade as The Hindu’s China correspondent — for much of that time, the only Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent in the country. That period produced Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, still one of the very few sustained attempts to look at China through Indian eyes. After 16 years away — years spent in Brussels, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Madrid — she’s back in Beijing, and turning her gaze inward with her latest book, Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts. She writes the wonderful Substack The Global Jigsaw, which I recommend without reservation.Our conversation is built around her recent essay for Noema Magazine, “The Real Problem Underlying India-China Tensions,” which argues that the deepest problem in the relationship isn’t the border or the trade imbalance but the distorting lenses through which each side reads the other: China reads India through the lens of colonial subordination, while India reads China through the lens of betrayal. We talk about the ugly etymology of an ethnic slur, the partial historical memories each country mistakes for the whole picture, her serialized interviews with the Chinese India-watcher Mao Keji, the aporia-inducing impossibility of explaining either country to outsiders — and how her answer to the question she first posed in 2008, “Would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?”, has changed, painfully, in the years since.4:35 – Beijing, 2002: an ad in That’s Beijing, [email protected], and becoming The Hindu’s correspondent10:03 – “Beijing and I grew up together”: the aughts as a shared coming-of-age12:16 – The asymmetry of obsession: why India watches China, but not the reverse16:39 – The unacknowledged third vertex: Western discursive power in the India-China relationship18:08 – Back after 16 years: the Liangma River, blue skies, and the panopticon21:35 – Walks in the park and the “buddy system”: what access looks like now25:43 – Where did all the foreigners go?29:59 – The scene at CCG: candor, offense, and the register of truth33:10 – “Asan”: the etymology of a slur, Sikh policemen, opium fortunes, and China’s colonial lens40:10 – 1962 and India’s betrayal lens42:15 – Aporia: the foolhardy task of explaining India or China47:22 – Shame and indignation: explaining a place you love versus a place you merely know52:29 – The big question, 2008: born Indian or Chinese?55:44 – The 2026 answer: “It hurts”1:00:08 – Kaiser pushes back: cherry-picked comparisons, and can this essay’s very existence complicate its conclusions?1:04:43 – Twin nations of the exam1:06:57 – Cognitive empathy: what it would take for ordinary Indians and Chinese to actually see each otherPaying It ForwardYaqi Li, a young Chinese international relations scholar recently returned to China after a year in Singapore — Pallavi admires the rare self-reflectiveness of his memoir-inflected IR writing on his Substack, New China Literacy, and notes that he makes an interesting case for AI-assisted writing as a way for second- and third-language English speakers to find their voice.RecommendationsPallavi: Flashlight by Susan Choi — a novel spanning Japan, the U.S., and North Korea, built around the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s. Also This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin — the first novel from her favorite Pakistani writer, a sprawling, Chekhovian portrait of feudalism and politics in modern Pakistan.Kaiser: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner — beautiful at the sentence level, painted on a small canvas: two couples who meet as young academics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and their friendship across the decades. Emotionally rich despite the absence of grand drama.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 Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, whose marvelous new essay, “The Future, Made in China,” chronicles a tech-focused return trip to Beijing, where he lived from 2005 to 2013 — first for the Chicago Tribune, then as The New Yorker’s China correspondent. Evan is the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the National Book Award, as well as Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury and The Haves and Have-Yachts.His essay is far more than another breathless account of China’s advances in robotics and electric vehicles. It’s a meditation on what China’s technological ascent means for the United States, for how both societies are organized, and for the rest of us, whose futures increasingly seem to be wagered by two small circles of powerful men in Beijing and Washington. We talk about the Xiaomi Hyperfactory, “Chinamaxxing,” the export control debate, and the deeper contest Evan identifies: not democracy versus authoritarianism, but humanism versus scientism.3:04 – Walking Beijing’s streets again: quieter, richer, more surveilled11:26 – The Xiaomi Hyperfactory: choreography, awe, and what’s actually real18:10 – Doomed to coexist: Evan’s message for the American reader24:15 – Schrödinger’s China: joke or juggernaut?27:16 – The limits of knowability in an increasingly opaque system31:56 – Threat narratives vs. “Chinamaxxing”: America’s two China conversations43:20 – “Thank Trump”: America’s self-inflicted wounds47:29 – Revisiting the Sullivan doctrine and export controls53:10 – Mankind 2000: humanism, scientism, and rival oligarchies1:02:48 – Convergence: arriving at dystopia from opposite directions1:07:21 – Self-strengthening redux: Levenson and America’s meum-verum gap1:17:53 – The other Sputnik moment: the backlash against tech oligarchyPaying It ForwardYi-Ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet — Evan admires how her work grapples with the competition between scientism and humanism across national borders.Chang Che, who writes for The New Yorker and The Guardian — watching China’s technological developments up close, “creating history in real time.”RecommendationsEvan: How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker — the youngest-ever Polk Award winner on how a rising generation at Silicon Valley’s feeder school perceives its opportunities and obligations. Also True Grit by Charles Portis — splendid, sentence-savoring dialogue.Kaiser: Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams, author of Stoner — a Western with the same sentence-level craft; for fans of Melville and Cormac McCarthy.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, a rare treat: an in-person recording from Beijing with two dear friends who happen to be two of the very best in the business on technology and China — Samm Sacks and Paul Triolo, fresh off the exhibition floor of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. We dig into Xi Jinping's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive statement on AI to date, the launch of the World AI Cooperation Organization, Moonshot's release of Kimi K3, the Trump administration's reported push to shut Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. market, the coming age of agents, the untranslatable problem of ānquán, and what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue in September.8:51 – The view from the floor: heat, humidity, robot boxing grandmas, WeChat-gated free water, and the "AI+" vibe — why WAIC 2026 felt less like an AI conference than a sector-by-sector snapshot of China's entire economy being supercharged with AI, with attendance swelling to some 200,000 tickets16:32 – Why Xi showed up: what the leader's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive AI statement to date signal, and why domestic drivers matter as much as geopolitics18:01 – Chapter and verse: which phrases from the speech will be put to work in the system — "secure and orderly development" and the governance of agents, and Xi's strikingly extensive language on AI safety after China was frozen out of the Paris process22:26 – The ānquán problem: one word meaning both "safety" and "security," the three buckets of AI risk, and how China's safety community has moved from bias and deepfakes toward CBRN and loss-of-control concerns — Black Mirror versus Star Trek28:14 – Shanghai's baby: how WAIC's ownership structure differs from the CAC-run World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Chen Jining's very visible host duties, and whether the center of gravity in AI policy is shifting to the Yangtze River Delta30:05 – WAICO: what the new World AI Cooperation Organization with its 29 founding members is actually for, Xi's concrete deliverables for the Global South — 5,000 AI training slots, regional cooperation centers, the MAZU early-warning system — and healthy skepticism about follow-through34:39 – Kimi K3: what's technically significant in Moonshot's big new model, why it's the fourth arguably frontier-class Chinese release in a single month, the two-way traffic in distillation accusations, and what it all says about the state of the frontier gap four years into export controls40:33 – Washington reacts: the reported menu of options for shutting Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. — entity listings, a draft executive order, supply-chain security authorities — and why none of the tools actually fit the problem49:36 – Strange bedfellows: David Sacks versus the "closed lab duopoly," the FUD strategy, why some 80% of Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies reportedly run on Chinese open models, and how gating U.S. frontier models while Chinese weights flow freely supercharges the AI sovereignty argument worldwide54:55 – The model is infrastructure, the agent is the product: the ByteDance–ZTE agentic phone, the CAC's new initiative on agent trust and interoperability, and why agents fused into operating systems upend both super-app walled gardens and China's data protection regime1:02:27 – An exegesis of kěkòng: the many meanings of "controllable," the long history of ānquán kěkòng in Chinese tech policy, and the unanswered question of who — CAC, NDRC, or somebody new — actually owns AI safety in either system1:08:54 – The road to September: what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue, why Mythos tops the Chinese grievance list, the securitization feedback loop that starves trust-and-safety advocates of resources on both sides, and why recursive self-improvement makes this feel like a last, best chancePaying It ForwardPaul nominates Tony Peng, whose Substack RecodeChinaAI offers sharp, well-written analysis of the application side of China's AI industry — part of an impressive new generation of independent China tech writers. Samm gives a shout-out to Professor Zhu Yue of Tongji University Law School, published in Science and doing pioneering work at the intersection of disability law and AI law.RecommendationsSamm: The Land and Its People by David Sedaris — laugh-out-loud funny, especially the "Enough is Enough" chapter; Transcription by Ben Lerner, a perfect small novel about fathers, sons, memory, and technology as enabler or disabler of connection; and Didion and Babitz, on Joan Didion and Eve Babitz and the 1970s California rock scene.Paul: The Party's Interests Come First by Joseph Torigian — dense but beautifully written, and essential for understanding the current Chinese leadership.Kaiser: A fiction-only summer! Stoner by John Williams, a small life told most grandly in some of the most beautiful sentence-level writing anywhere; Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, an epistolary novel dense with distilled wisdom from a dying Iowa minister; and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age (黄金时代) in Yan Yan's excellent new translation — bawdy, hilarious, and super Beijing-y despite its Cultural Revolution setting.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.