ChinaTalk

This week’s episode is a crossover with the China Tech Investor podcast. Join Jordan in conversation with China Tech Investor co-hosts James Hull and Elliot Zaagman as they discuss their perspectives on Chinese ecommerce, live streaming, fashion, the lessons Facebook is learning from WeChat, and emerging investment opportunities. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and o...

This episode of ChinaEconTalk features a discussion with two of the people behind recent, high-profile efforts to mobilize Chinese programmers against labor exploitation via GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform: Suji Yan, CEO of Dimension, and Katt Gu, J.D., Advisor at Asian-Pacific Blockchain Development Association and PhD candidate in informatics at the University of Illino...

This week on ChinaEconTalk, host Jordan Schneider speaks with James Griffiths, senior producer for CNN International, to discuss his new book, The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet. Together, they trace the history of the internet in China, from the early, heady days of relative freedom through the slow but steady tightening of government cont...

One hour, Two Sessions China’s Two Sessions, the national annual gathering of the leadership of the People’s Republic of China, will soon be coming to a close. This week on ChinaEconTalk, Jordan sat down with Chris Beddor, a columnist for Reuters Breakingviews, to discuss highlights from this year’s gathering, including state-owned enterprise reform, implications for Made in China 2025, the evolvi...

This week's guest is Russ Roberts. He's a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the host of the EconTalk podcast, a weekly interview-based show that’s vaguely about economics but that has, over time, evolved into an extended meditation on the human condition. Its diverse topics in the last few weeks have included Solzhenitsyn, the 2008 financial crisis, and gratitude. Even though th...

“The champagne days are over,” writes Dan Harris, reflecting on how the tone of his China Law Blog has evolved since its creation in 2006. As the founder of Harris Bricken, an international law firm with a major China presence, Dan has a unique window into how macro changes in China’s economy and trade relations play out within a law firm. In this conversation, Jordan and Dan discuss common miscon...

This week’s guest on ChinaEconTalk is Ryan Hass, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy program, who is jointly appointed to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. From 2013 to 2017, he served as the director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the National Security Council (NSC) during President Obama’s second term. Ryan o...

Today, nearly half of the top 100 apps in India's Google Play store are made by Chinese companies. After past failures to enter the Indian tech market, what's driving China tech's sudden success on the subcontinent? How have new Chinese companies like Bytedance and Xiaomi been able to localize more successfully than the likes of Tencent in the early 2010s? And just how seriously do Chinese firms t...

How did the U.S.-China economic relationship evolve during the Obama administration? Are the economic tensions we see today between the two countries a product of inevitable forces, or more contingent on the choices of the Trump and Xi administrations? To discuss these topics and more, we have on today’s show Caroline Atkinson, who served as President Barack Obama’s deputy national security advise...

How does autocratic repression impact societies? Can the legacy of political repression ripple out across centuries, creating a vicious autocratic cycle? Today, on ChinaEconTalk, we're going back to the Qing dynasty — the time of the Qianlong Emperor, and before — to find out. Our guest is Melanie Meng Xue, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Economics and the Center for Economic History at...

“The U.S.-China equilibrium of the past 20 years has gone,” declares Gordon Orr in his recent piece on what to expect in China in 2019. So what will replace it? What impact will the increasingly activist Chinese government have on the broader economy? And what broader reflections does a 30-year China veteran have about recent changes in China? Orr is currently a director emeritus at McKinsey, havi...

China’s video game market is the world’s largest. Over 600 million people play video games in China, and collectively, they spend over $40 billion a year on games. This episode, featuring Abacus reporter Josh Ye and localization expert Frankie Huang, explores the market as well as gaming culture in China. Check out our newsletter exploring the best long-form Chinese reporting on tech and business...

Chinese politics is boring and confusing. Or is it? This week Jordan speaks with Andrew Polk and Trey McArver, economics and politics specialists at Trivium China. The three discuss the size of the Chinese bureaucracy, how policy is formed and implemented, and the Chinese economy.  Check out the Trivium China's daily tip sheet for "a cheeky dose of China analysis" each morning.  Sign up to the rec...

Foreign investors have lost billions expecting a Chinese financial crisis that hasn't come yet. So what gives? According to the Rhodium Group's Logan Wright, it's not China's domestic savings rate or RMB-denominated debt that’s keeping the economy afloat, but rather the government's credibility. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more abou...

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, the executive editor of Foreign Affairs, is the author of the recent book The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945–1947. George Marshall, World War II hero and creator of the Marshall Plan, spent 1945-47 drinking baijiu with Mao and playing croquet with Chiang Kai-shek, fighting to stave off a civil war. Was the “loss of China” to the CCP inevitable? Did Marsh...

China's government aims to create a $500 billion sports industry by 2020. But how are those ambitions playing out on the ground in the Chinese basketball and soccer leagues? There's more to sports in China than the well-known problems of exorbitant transfer fees and match fixing, but with the government apparently unable to resist interfering in private leagues, does China have much hope for ever...

What is Bytedance and how does it make its money? How do politics and culture get in the way of Chinese firms' internationalization efforts? What can Chinese phones in Africa and electric buses in LA teach us about localization challenges? Elliott Zaagman, co-host of TechNode's China Tech Investor podcast, takes on these issues for the latest episode of ChinaEconTalk. Get bonus content on Patreon...

Why is KFC so big in China? What is the “Toilet Revolution” and why does it matter? How does Chinese propaganda work? How have bicycles’ role in Chinese society evolved over time? Neil Thomas of MacroPolo takes on all this in ChinaEconTalk’s latest show. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch...

What is the history of Google in China? Does the company have any hope of bringing its search engine back into the Chinese market? How does China’s development of artificial intelligence stack up against the rest of the world’s? To answer these questions, Matt Sheehan of MacroPolo makes his triumphant return to ChinaEconTalk. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-o...

When it came to trade wars, the British didn't mess around. Four steam-powered battleships sent by the English to force China to change its trade policy in the mid-19th century changed the course of history. But how did they end up fighting the Chinese in the first place, and what are the contemporary echoes of this historical trade fight? Stephen Platt, the author of the recent Imperial Twilight:...

Matt Brennan, professional speaker and co-host of China Tech Talk, comes on the show to discuss the history and evolution of China's most popular app, WeChat, as well as threats on the horizon for the company that created it, Tencent. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Dollar is a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. He has previously served as the U.S. Treasury Department emissary to Beijing during the Obama Administration, and the World Bank's country director for China and Mongolia. He discusses his storied career and the recent history of U.S.-China financial relations, including the current trade war's origi...

Rhodes Scholar Jeff Ding breaks down how China stacks up to the rest of the world in the race to develop AI. He delves into the connections between Chinese tech companies and government AI targets, AI’s military implications, as well as the ethical considerations of AI applications in China’s police state. We discuss his recent paper “Deciphering China’s AI Dream” as well as recent articles on AI...

Chad Bown is a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC and cohost of the excellent Trade Talks, a weekly podcast on the economics of international trade policy. In this episode, we discuss the competing grand strategies of US and China as well as their different tactics for executing their trade war policies. We touch on potential internal inconsistencies in...

Guest Samm Sacks Senior Fellow, Technology Policy, Center for Strategic and International Studies @CSIS Samm Sacks | Center for Strategic and International Studies Samm Sacks (@SammSacks) | Twitter Samm Sacks, Senior Fellow at CSIS, is perhaps America's leading expert on Chinese data privacy policy. Yes, you heard that right, the world's most advanced surveillance state has a corporate data privac...