Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, in a joint episode with the China-Global South Podcast, I speak with Eric Olander, host of the China Global South Podcast and founder/editor-in-chief of the China-Global South Project. In the early hours of January 3rd, U.S. forces carried out a coordinated operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, followed by their rendition...

This week on Sinica, recorded at Yale University, I speak with Michael Brenes and Van Jackson, coauthors of The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy . Their argument is that framing the U.S.-China relationship as geopolitical rivalry has become more than just a foreign policy orientation — it's a domestic political project that reshapes budgets, norms, a...

Happy holidays from Sinica! This week, I speak with Paul Triolo, Senior Vice President for China and Technology Policy Lead at DGA Albright Stonebridge Group and nonresident honorary senior fellow on technology at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis. On December 8th, Donald Trump announced via Truth Social that he would approve Nvidia H200 sales to vetted Chinese customer...

This week on Sinica, I speak with Mark Sidel, the Doyle Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior fellow at the International Center for Not for Profit Law. Mark has written extensively on law and philanthropy in China and across Asia, including widely cited analyses of how the Chinese security state came to play a central role in managing forei...

This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to have Iza Ding as guest host. Iza is a professor of political science at Northwestern University and a good friend whose work on Chinese governance I greatly admire. She's joined by Deborah Seligsohn, who has been a favorite guest on this show many times. Deb is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University and was previously a science and...

This week on Sinica, I speak with Zhong Na, a novelist and essayist whose new piece, " Murder House ," appears in the inaugural issue of Equator — a striking new magazine devoted to longform writing that crosses borders, disciplines, and cultures. In January 2024, a young couple, both Tsinghua-educated Google engineers living in a $2.5 million Silicon Valley home, became the center of a tragedy th...

This week on Sinica, I welcome back Finbarr Bermingham, the Brussels-based Europe correspondent for the South China Morning Post, about the Nexperia dispute — one of the most revealing episodes in the global contest over semiconductor supply chains. Nexperia, a Dutch-headquartered chipmaker owned by Shanghai-listed Wingtech, became the subject of extraordinary government intervention when the Neth...

This week on Sinica, I welcome back Jeremy Goldkorn, co-founder of the show and my longtime co-host, to revisit the "vibe shift" we first discussed back in February. Seven months on, what we sensed then has fully borne out — there's been a measurable softening in American attitudes toward China, reflected not just in polling data but in media coverage, podcast discussions, and public discourse. We...

This week on Sinica, I chat with Lizzi Lee, a fellow on the Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute and one of the sharpest China analysts working today. We dig into the 4th Plenary Session of the 20th Party Congress and what it reveals about China's evolving growth model — particularly the much-discussed but often misunderstood push against "involution" in key sectors like EVs and so...

This week on Sinica, I chat with Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, editor of Foreign Affairs , about how the journal has both shaped and reflected American discourse on China during a period of dramatic shifts in the relationship. We discuss his deliberate editorial choices to include heterodox voices, the changing nature of the supposed "consensus" on China policy, and what I've called the "vibe shift" in how...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, I speak with Jonathan Czin, the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. His new essay in Foreign Affairs , “China Against China: Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success,” challenges the dominant Western narrative of Xi Jinping as either Mao reincarnate or a brittle autocrat...

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...

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...

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’...

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...

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-...

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...

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...

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,...

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 Un...

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 A...

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, b...

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...

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 p...

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 la...