Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I sit down in Beijing with Tim Clissold. If you read one book about doing business in China in the 2000s, there’s a fair chance it was his Mr. China , the self-aware, admirably self-deprecating tragicomedy about standing between some $400 million of Wall Street money and twenty Chinese joint ventures that weren’t going to plan. He followed it with Chinese Rules , and for years...

This week on Sinica, I’m joined again by Afra Wang, the Bay Area-based writer behind the AI newsletter Concurrent , who was last on the show in January to talk about her Wired piece on The Morning Star of Lingao and China’s “Industrial Party.” She’s back with two new pieces of on-the-ground reportage that get beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism: her New Yorker Lede piece on...

This week on Sinica, I sit down with Dr. Ruby Wang, whose new book, China Cure: The Rise of a Biotech, AI Medicine and Global Health Superpower (Agenda Publishing, out October 31, with a foreword by Kerry Brown), is the explanation general readers have been missing for one of the most consequential and least understood transformations in China today. Ruby is a rare creature in this space: a practi...

This week I sat down with Gloria Xiong, Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College, and Jessica Chen Weiss, the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, to discuss their new Foreign Affairs essay, " How China Found Its Most Potent Weapon: The Real History of Beijing's Rare Earth Dominance ." The story everyone tells is one of foresight — a master plan hatched by D...

This week on Sinica, I’m joined once again by Ryan Hass, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, former NSC director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and co-host of the Beijing Brief podcast. Ryan has just published two pieces that couldn’t be better timed: a long essay in China Leadership Monitor , “ China’s Great Power Vision Comes into Focus ,” which argues that the 2020s ma...

This week on Sinica, I sit down with the writer Pallavi Aiyar — at her own dining table in Beijing, where in recent months I’ve been the lucky beneficiary of her and her husband Julio’s legendary hospitality. Pallavi first arrived in Beijing in 2002 to teach at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and went on to spend the better part of a decade as The Hindu ’s China correspondent — for much of that...

This week on Sinica, I welcome back Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, whose marvelous new essay, “ The Future, Made in China ,” chronicles a tech-focused return trip to Beijing, where he lived from 2005 to 2013 — first for the Chicago Tribune , then as The New Yorker ’s China correspondent. Evan is the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China , which won the Nation...

This week on Sinica, a rare treat: an in-person recording from Beijing with two dear friends who happen to be two of the very best in the business on technology and China — Samm Sacks and Paul Triolo, fresh off the exhibition floor of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. We dig into Xi Jinping's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive statement on AI to date, th...

This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded at the Davos On Air booth at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, I sat down with Angela Huyue Zhang, professor of law at USC's Gould School of Law and author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy , and S. Alex Yang, professor of management science and operations at London Business...

Recorded live from the Davos on Air booth at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, this special episode of Sinica tackles the "pacing problem": the widening gap between how fast AI moves and how slowly regulation can catch up. I sit down with Xue Lan, dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University and one of the architects of China's concept of "agile governa...

Last week in Brussels, EU leaders held their first sustained debate on China policy in three years, and were so wary of Beijing’s reaction they wouldn’t print the word “China” on the agenda. The trigger: a goods-trade deficit closing in on 360 billion euros, and, for the first time ever, all 27 member states in the red. Recorded at Summer Davos in Dalian, I sat down with economic historian Adam To...

This week on Sinica I'm joined by Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal , Nonzero , and The Evolution of God , for a conversation that runs a little outside our usual beat, though China sits closer to its center than you'd expect.  The occasion is his new book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning , which reads the AI revolution as the latest turn in a stor...

The summit in Beijing produced a "constructive strategic stability" framework and a warming of tone between the two presidents. But heads of state can announce a multi-year horizon; somebody else has to operationalize it. Does the United States have the people — the linguists, the regional experts, the long-haul institution-builders — to do that work? This week, I chatted with two Texans answering...

Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summits This week I'm joined again by Eric Olander , founder of the China Global South Project, which runs the most indispensable English-language operation going for understanding China's engagement with Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. I came in with a plan: map, region by region, how the capitals of the Globa...

This week on Sinica, I speak with Andrew Seth Meyer, professor of history at CUNY Brooklyn College and the author of a remarkable new book from Oxford University Press, To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor . Sixteen years in the making, it’s the first proper one-volume narrative history of the Warring States in English aimed at a general reader...

This week I’m sharing the fourth and final installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — “The China Debate We’re Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead.” The first three episodes featured Jessica Chen Weiss’s opening remarks and the panels on what China w...

This week on Sinica, I chat with Ali Wyne, Senior Research and Advocacy Adviser for U.S.-China at the International Crisis Group, just hours after President Trump's plane left Chinese airspace at the end of a three-day state visit to Beijing. We dig into the new framework Xi Jinping put on the table — what Beijing is calling 中美建设性战略稳定关系, a "constructive China-U.S. relationship of strate...

This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded as a live joint webcast with NYRB/Poets and Equator Magazine , I sit down with Eleanor Goodman — poet, scholar, research associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center, and one of the most accomplished translators working between Chinese and English — to talk about the extraordinary Sichuan-born poet Zheng Xiaoqiong (郑小琼). Born in 1980 in a mountain vi...

This week I'm sharing the third installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead." The first two episodes featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the panels on what China wants and what...

This week on Sinica: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrapped up his fourth visit to China in as many years last week, and this one may be the most consequential yet. It comes at a moment when Spain has emerged, almost improbably, as the most outspoken voice in Europe challenging the direction of American foreign policy — closing its airspace to U.S. military aircraft involved in the war in Ir...

This week I'm sharing the next installment from the terrific day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead." Last week's episode featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the first panel, "What China Wants...

Opening Remarks & Session 1: What China Wants Johns Hopkins SAIS ACF Conference, April 3, 2026 This week's episode features audio from a day-long conference hosted by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS, held on April 3rd in Washington, DC. The conference, titled "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ah...

Economic historian Adam Tooze returns to Sinica fresh from the China Development Forum and his second extended visit to Beijing in under a year. In this wide-ranging conversation, Adam and I cover the 15th Five-Year Plan — what it signals about Beijing’s development priorities and whether it represents a genuine shift away from investment-led growth — and the extraordinary scale of China’s renewab...

This week on Sinica, I welcome journalist and former colleague Chang Che. His recent New Yorker piece " How China Learned to Love the Classics " generated enormous attention. We explore one of the more surprising cultural phenomena in contemporary China: a growing, state-backed enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman classics. We dig into what's actually driving this revival, from the genuine intellectual...

David M. Lampton—“Mike”—is one of America’s most distinguished scholars of U.S.–China relations, director of China Studies Emeritus at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and the author of landmark works on Chinese politics and foreign policy. He joins me this week to discuss a striking new Foreign Affairs essay he co-authored with the eminent Chinese international relations scholar Wang Jisi of Peking University...