How did Xi Jinping’s formative years influence how he views the world today? Veteran China scholar Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, looks back at decades of writing and working on China, weathering the cycles of the country opening up and shutting down and gives his two cents on what’s going on in Xi’s head.

We also discuss

—  Why Mao Zedong is a better read than Xi

— China’s reciprocity problem on the international stage

— How US officials reacted to Tiananmen in a secret meeting with Deng Xiaoping

— A history of accessing China for academics, businesspeople and journalists

— Xi and victim culture

Outro Music: Glenn Gould performing Contrapunctus, I, IV from Bach’s amazing Art of the Fugue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqDCieiDWAE

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Stephen Roach is a Yale professor with extensive experience in China. He also taught the first China class I ever took, so it may be fair to say he's partially to blame for the entire ChinaTalk enterprise.

In our conversation (taped on February 23), we discuss:

• The nexus between US-China relations and the DSM-5 (we need some relationship therapy!);
• How false narratives strangle effective diplomatic development;
• What Stephen thinks about the odds of a hot conflict over Taiwan;
• Practical proposals to improve the bilateral relationship, including what a “US-China Secretariat” (based in neutral Tahiti, obviously) would look like;
• Is it the US or China — or both — who fundamentally has no interest in engagement?

Apologies for my audio quality in the second half of the show.

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRM70Jw7F4M

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Paul Scharre, Vice President and Director of Studies at CNAS, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AI, military, strategy, and US-China geopolitics.

Listen in for a discussion on:

• How AI will impact the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war
• How and why AI operates — whether in chess, Dota 2, or aerial dogfighting — in fundamentally different ways than humans;
• Why AI called for a “protective response from the bureaucracy”
• The significance of the US’s comparative advantage over China in talent and compute — two of Scharre’s “Four Battlegrounds”;
• The dictator’s dilemma, and how advances in AI will challenge the CCP in the coming years;
• When in China, how to interview like a pro!

Outro music: a missy elliot + spice girls mix from Arthi, a UK-based DJ who's also an economics correspondent for the times of london! https://youtu.be/iHkfmwy1-OI?t=252

Paul’s latest bestseller: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Battlegrounds-Power-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0393866866

The cover image is Midjourney on “Dota 2–inspired F-35 dogfight”

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What actually is foreign influence, and how might Canada handle China’s interference in its domestic affairs? Akshay Singh is a research associate at the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa. We discuss:

• How to roll out a foreign agent registry;
• The role of the US-Canada relationship;
• Whether foreign influence is a diaspora problem;
• And performance reviews for the United Front’s Canada desk.

Akshay on how democracies should respond to foreign influence: https://www.cigionline.org/articles/faced-with-foreign-interference-how-should-democracies-respond/

Outtro music: 公公偏頭痛 by Jay Chou https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y

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The Chips Avengers assemble once again! Reva Goujon of the Rhodium Group, JP Kleinhans of the European think tank nv.de/en/person/jan-peter-kleinhans">SNV, Jay Goldberg of Digits and Dollars, and Dylan Patel, who writes SemiAnalysis.

In this episode of ChinaTalk, we all:

• Deep dive into the CHIPS Act's recent Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO);
• Discuss the potentially existential impact of AI on global power dynamics;
• Consider the true intentions of the October 2022 export controls — from military constraining China to crippling manufacturing in the broader economy;
• Muse about the potential for a "splinternet" to emerge as countries around the world — in particular, the US, China, EU members states — adopt different standards and regulations for their tech industries;
• And more!

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1_Amc4Ysv0

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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; am-final.pdf">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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