China Watch

In May 2025, the film “State Organs: Unmasking Transplant Abuse in China” was set to open a human rights film festival in Seoul. The award-winning documentary is about state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting in China, in which organs are taken from prisoners of conscience without consent. Tickets for the screenings had mostly sold out. Then, days before opening night, the cinema chain pulled out....

Before the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) fifth plenum, a closed-door meeting of its roughly 200 top officials, the Asia Society Policy Institute studied decades of past meetings to forecast the outcome. Several of its key calls missed the mark. In our last episode, guest Alex Liao made his own forecast, and much of what happened fit his read. The difference was the method. Alex wasn’t counting p...

Days after Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington, the Wall Street Journal reported that he needed unusual rest breaks at the White House. Now, the Chinese Communist Party’s top leadership is meeting for its Fifth Plenum, from Oct. 26–29, and the question of who comes after Xi is out in the open. China expert Alex Liao explains why he believes the leak about Xi’s health came from Beijing, how Xi c...

Chinese leader Xi Jinping, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi are expected to be in Shenzhen in November for the APEC summit. How does Tokyo view meetings between Trump and Xi, and where does Taiwan fit? Stephen Nagy, a professor at International Christian University in Tokyo and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, explains why Japan sees Taiwan a...

In 2025, China eliminated 670 small rural banks—nearly one in five—as they were facing elevated financial risks. Most weren’t shut down; they were folded into larger banks. It was consolidation of an unprecedented scale. But the risks haven’t gone away. They’re now concentrated in fewer, larger banks, often tied to local governments that are themselves deep in debt. And the problem isn’t limited t...

China's control over rare earths is already fading, but only industry insiders seem to know it, says Christopher Ecclestone, mining strategist at the financial advisory firm Hallgarten & Company. He suggests that within three years, the West could have more rare earths than it needs, and China could lose its grip on the market. The key to China's power, he says, is control over prices, or at l...

Beijing waited until 48 hours before takeoff to confirm Xi Jinping's trip to Washington. Why so late? China expert June G. Liao has a theory. She thinks Xi used the visit as leverage to "seal the deal" on Zhang Youxia, the Chinese general who was once Xi’s second-in-command. The same day that Beijing confirmed the trip, the Politburo expelled Zhang from the Party and the military. Xi also brought...

Gift cards are a great thing to receive, until you realize the card has no money on it! Did your friend make a mistake, or is something more sinister going on? Unfortunately, it’s often the latter. That’s this week’s topic, and Terri dives into how organized crime in China is stealing money from gift cards before they can be used. We’re not talking just hundreds of dollars—we’re talking more than...

China has updated its laws, in what looks like a move to gear up for war. The threshold for a “national threat” is lower than ever. And one of the major targets is private ownership. This time, American businesses are on the front line. The same thing happened in the 1950s, when U.S. claims of assets lost in China totaled $197 million—smaller than today’s business footprint. Listen to this week’s...

Newly declassified FBI files reveal how alleged Chinese intelligence asset Christine Fang—also known as "Fang Fang"—used a years-long sexual relationship, illegal straw donations, and planted congressional interns to work her way into the office of a sitting member of Congress. The files also expose "Rusty Thumbs," an FBI operation that tried to quietly turn Fang into a double agent before realizi...

Neither the Canadian prime minister nor the U.S. trade chief, in their own public accounts, has named China as a reason the U.S.–Canada trade talks collapsed. However, the China factor is very much present. What’s in it for China? If the North American manufacturing alliance breaks down, China will be better placed to maintain its economic leverage over the global supply chain. Exports are its lif...

What is the best strategy when one is up against overwhelming odds? That’s the Empty City Strategy that Terri Wu shares in this week’s episode of “China Watch,” in the context of Taiwan’s potential defense against the Chinese Communist Party. Two Taiwanese military experts join Terri in this episode: Max Tsung Chi Yu, a retired Major General in Taiwan and a former Dean of the Political Warfare Col...

For years, "decoupling" and "de-risking" have been the go-to words for describing U.S.–China economic relations. Host Terri Wu argues that neither term captures what's actually happening anymore and proposes a new one: degrading. Terri argues the United States and China are now playing to win on the same integrated chessboard. Both want the same things, and both have concluded that simply continui...

In 1958, China tried and failed to cut Taiwan off from American help. Taiwan's 2026 war games rehearse the same scenario on a much larger scale—a blockade of the entire island, not just Kinmen. Host Terri Wu unpacks what has changed since 1958, drawing on analysis from Taiwan-based experts Qi Leyi and Shen Ming-shih on the drills, Japan's rising alarm, U.S. President Donald Trump's ambiguity about...

Chinese artificial intelligence is making another push for world leadership. But the actual value of the services may be exaggerated and tailored to look good, misleading users on the ability to deliver practical results at the tempting, low prices being offered, analysts say. Listen as Terri talks to two experts about why AI is a deeply competitive, economically relevant topic for the future. It’...

A sacked Chinese hydroelectric executive. A shocking death toll. A leaked analysis of what a full collapse of the Three Gorges Dam would look like. Record rainfall has caused a dam collapse in southern China. At the same time, the situation for northern China is more dire, as downpours 20-50 percent higher than normal are forecast until mid-August. What did the dam collapse reveal about China’s fl...

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is all in with his gamble on artificial intelligence. AI will have to perform magic by pulling China’s economy out of its current downward spiral and helping Beijing overtake Washington’s global primacy. Xi is directing domestic capital to AI. At the same time, Beijing is trying to “tell the China story well” by attracting foreign investments. That requires a convincing s...

A major anniversary of an international tribunal ruling passed over the weekend—one that the Chinese regime hates and has continuously violated for 10 years. While many people are focusing on the Strait of Hormuz, another waterway that likely has more influence on the global economy is receiving much less attention. But if something happens that gives it attention, such as kinetic warfare, the imp...

Terri Wu marks America's 250th birthday with a personal reflection on what freedom really meant to her as a Chinese immigrant. She recalls the culture shock of her U.S. visa interview in Beijing, including an accidental slur that could have cost her everything under a system she knew punished such mistakes severely, and her relief at discovering a country that didn't retaliate. She traces her jour...

When China cut off rare earth exports to the United States, most rare earth companies scrambled to copy China's technology. Curtis Wu, founder and CEO of Maglut Heavy Industries, had a different idea: steal a page from biotech instead. Drawing on his years in the biotech industry, Curtis saw that chromatography—the same precision purification technique used to manufacture cancer drugs—could replac...

China controls the rare-earth chokepoint that nearly every modern industry depends on: from smartphones and EVs to missiles and fighter jets. Rare earths are a tiny market—just $20-30 billion globally—yet they sit beneath trillions of dollars in downstream value, making them one of the most powerful leverage points in U.S.–China relations. In this episode, Terri Wu sits down with Carl Coward, co-f...

It started with a strange email: an unsolicited invitation for host Terri Wu to become a "senior geopolitical analyst" for a shadowy "defense advisory trust"—confidential, decoupled from her reporting, and sent from a personal Gmail. Then came the Five Eyes "Safeguarding Our Secrets" bulletin, warning that foreign intelligence services court exactly the people who get pitches like that: journalist...

Terri sits down with Piero Tozzi, a China expert whose deep roots in both Western and Confucian thought give him a truly rare lens on the U.S.–China competition. In this conversation, they unpack why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never been—and can never be—a normal trading partner or good-faith rival, and how America has been deceived into thinking otherwise, repeatedly, since the 1940s....

The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment on May 19, charging Chinese shipping container manufacturers with price-fixing their products during the COVID years. As a result, container prices nearly doubled between 2019 and 2024. And a leading defendant saw its profit increase by nearly 100-fold. This case is not an isolated case. Join Terri and maritime historian Salvatore Mercogliano in unp...

For years, Chinese investors used Tiger, Futu, and Longbridge to buy Tesla and Nvidia — through a side door Beijing called illegal but tolerated anyway. On May 22, Beijing finally shut it. Why now? Most headlines frame this as another step in U.S.–China decoupling, or as Chinese leader Xi Jinping putting another aspect of Chinese society under total control. But there's a third possibility. Join T...