The Wire China Podcast

Before Nvidia won approval to sell more chips to China, it first told the U.S. government that Huawei sales would soar if it was kept out. This week, Noah Berman joins fellow journalist Rachel Cheung to discuss his scoop on one reason why the U.S. government gave Nvidia permission to sell its H200 chips to China last December: a report outlining the alleged threat to Nvidia's business if it c...

China’s leading science organization does much more than spearhead basic research. It runs universities, advises the government, and incubates leading technology companies in frontier areas such as quantum and AI. In this episode, news editor Andrew Peaple and reporter Savannah Billman discuss her recent overview of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A crucial engine behind China’s technological ris...

Jupiter Systems is an American company that makes video screen technology for the U.S. military. In 2024, the government discovered something shocking — it had been sold to a Chinese tech company years earlier. Reporters Noah Berman and Rachel Cheung are back on the podcast to go behind the scenes on their recent investigation into the sale of Jupiter Systems and how the United States government i...

AI is driving layoffs and discontent across the United States. China wants to avoid the same problems — or is it already too late? Reporter Rachel Cheung and editor Tom Mitchell discuss her recent article on how much pain Beijing may allow AI to inflict on Chinese society in exchange for productivity gains. From the unemployed Chinese youths ‘squatting’ in their parents’ homes to the optimistic hu...

SALE: We’re offering your first month of The Wire China for just one dollar. More details below! For years, the United States has tried to stop China from getting its most advanced chips out of concern the technology could bolster the People’s Liberation Army’s capabilities. But the web of export controls it has imposed has not stopped the Chinese military from trying to get Nvidia’s products.  Jo...

SALE: We’re offering your first month of The Wire China for just one dollar. More details below! The world is facing a global memory chip shortage, with companies scrambling to buy what they can. The crunch puts desperate U.S. firms in a bind: will they need to start purchasing chips from China? In this episode, reporters Rachel Cheung and Noah Berman discuss the rise  and global allure of China’s...

SALE: We’re offering your first month of The Wire China for just one dollar. More details below! Move over, DeepSeek and Minimax. Investors are flocking to a new set of AI winners: the Chinese manufacturers making circuit boards and other components that keep the world's AI models humming along.  In this episode, reporters Rachel Cheung and Savannah Billman discuss the growing importance of t...

SALE: We’re offering your first month of The Wire China for just one dollar. More details below! TP-Link is having a tough year. The California-based, Shenzhen-founded internet router company can’t seem to shake skepticism that moving to the United States means it is no longer Chinese. This week, reporters Noah Berman and Savannah Billman return to the podcast to discuss the strange story of TP-Li...

There are fewer U.S. journalists working in China now than at any point since the two countries normalized relations in the 1970s. Today, the New York Times has one reporter in the country, the Wall Street Journal two, soon to be one, and the Washington Post none. Features editor Tom Mitchell and reporter Eliot Chen return to the podcast to discuss Eliot’s investigation into why the journalist pop...

Another day, another AI chip smuggling ring has been busted by the United States government. But this one is different: for the first time, executives from U.S. server manufacturer Super Micro have been charged with selling NVIDIA chips to Chinese buyers — a violation of U.S. export controls. Reporter Eliot Chen returns to the podcast with editor Andrew Peaple to discuss how the operation worked,...

In the high-stakes world of cryptocurrency, traders are writing big checks with borrowed funds — a risky investment trend known as leveraging. To understand whether this will help or hurt the industry, The Wire looks back at the trend's emergence in China. In this episode, we are joined by a new guest: journalist Grady McGregor, who discusses his upcoming piece on crypto leverage and its Chin...

After so many years of Canada and the United States presenting a united front against Chinese electric vehicles, some were surprised by Canada's announcement earlier this year it would drop its high tariffs on EVs — and even allow them to set up factories. But, as reporters Eliot Chen and Savannah Billman discuss, security risks haven't disappeared as the tariffs have. In this episode, E...

China's solar imports aren't welcome everywhere, but that's not the case in Africa. Solar exports to the continent as a whole increased by almost 50 percent last year.  In our latest episode, editor Andrew Peaple and reporter Noah Berman discuss his upcoming reporting on Chinese solar's booming sales to the continent. Solar proponents spy opportunity to improve electrical grids...

25 years ago, a Chinese and a U.S. plane collided over the waters off of China's southern coast. The Chinese pilot was never found, while the 24 surviving American crew members made an emergency landing on a Chinese military base on the island of Hainan. In this special episode, The Wire China kicks off our two-part oral history series on the Hainan spy plane crisis, a defining diplomatic tes...

It seems as if everything is AI now — well, not this podcast. But you can't discuss U.S.-China relations without understanding which one is ahead in artificial intelligence. Who leads on the scorecard? In our eighth episode, reporters Rachel Cheung and Savannah Billman discuss Rachel's upcoming story on where the United States and China score across the stack of technologies and capabili...

Reporter Noah Berman and editor Tom Mitchell take us to small-town North Carolina, where a new magnet factory has set up shop. Vulcan Elements wants to make magnets without sourcing any materials from China — a difficult task, because Chinese companies monopolize the supply and production chain for the rare earths needed in the process. Also in this episode, an excerpt from this week's Q&...

In our sixth episode, reporters Eliot Chen, Rachel Cheung, and Savannah Billman discuss the latest breakthroughs in Bytedance’s AI video generation tool, Seedance 2.0. The extremely lifelike videos went viral around the world, but also triggered existential questions for the film industry and the Chinese startups looking to make a profit from AI cinema. We also explore why AI diffusion in China is...

Smugglers in Texas, New Jersey, and New York. A mysterious Hong Kong client. And a plot to illegally sell Nvidia AI chips to China. In our fifth episode, The Wire China reporter Eliot Chen ventures into the criminal underworld with news editor Andrew Peaple. They discuss how Eliot mapped out an international smuggling ring busted late last year for sending advanced chips to Chinese customers. It&a...

China's economic rise beckoned Jeffrey Epstein in the 2010s. Associates of the financier and sex offender, who made much of his money from advising billionaires, sought opportunities to connect him with a network of powerful men in China. Though no concrete deals ever materialized, the Epstein files demonstrate how power, connections, and opportunities flowed among the elite as China's s...

In our third episode, features editor Tom Mitchell is joined by reporter Noah Berman to discuss shifts for two of China's most consequential exports: military armaments and electric vehicles.  Even as wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa raged on in 2024, newly released data for that year shows that China's arms exports decreased by ten percent as Xi Jinping's anti-corruption...

Welcome to the second episode of The Wire China podcast, in which we take you behind the scenes of the stories we cover each week in our magazine, thewirechina.com . In this episode, reporter Eliot Chen walks us through a true crime thriller with news editor Andrew Peaple. A mild-mannered Chinese software engineer working for Google in California schemes to make it big as a tech entrepreneur by se...

Welcome to the first episode of The Wire China podcast, in which we will take you behind the scenes of the stories we cover each week in our magazine, thewirechina.com . In this episode, news editor Andrew Peaple talks to reporter Rachel Cheung about her latest cover story on China's fast-growing robotaxi industry, and whether a recent spate of accidents involving self-driving cars will drive...