2026-02-12 09:26:51
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Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.
Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Seneca Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the show and with the newsletter, please do consider lending your support.
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Today, my guest is Afra Wong. I suspect many of you will already have come across her work through her podcast, through appearances on other China-focused shows, or through the many provocative, beautifully written, and fascinating essays she’s published.
Afra is a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov.ai, and previously with the Roots of Progress Institute. Before going full-time as an independent writer last year, she spent six years in Silicon Valley covering AI and crypto, running newsrooms, building developer communities, and absorbing the Valley’s growth logic from the inside.
She writes about China and about Silicon Valley — the latter sometimes metaphorically — but about neither of these places ever as mere abstractions.
She writes about them as overlapping systems, how China’s technological interiority shows up in Western debates about AI, industrial policy, and even progress itself.
She’s also the host of the Chinese language podcast Pipei Jiao Wah, Cyber Pink, and part of the Baihua podcasting community.
We’re talking today about her recent Wired piece on what might be China’s most influential science fiction project that you’ve never heard of: the Morning Star of Ling Gao, or Ling Gao Qi Ming, and the worldview behind it, something known as the Industrial Party or the Gung Yedang.
If you haven’t read that yet, click the link, read the piece. It’s one of actually several China-focused pieces in this issue of the magazine — some really good stuff. Come back when you’ve finished. We will still be here.
This isn’t just going to be a conversation about time travel sci-fi — though that would be a lot of fun — but actually about:
About how a country explains to itself why it fell behind. and what it thinks salvation looks like.
Afra Wang, a very, very warm welcome to Seneca.
Oh, wow. Thank you so much, Kaiser.
When you were describing my work experiences, it’s almost like I’m reliving my past life, especially my time doing a lot of growth stuff for tech companies and crypto. And actually, I discovered the Morning Star of Ling Gao, or Ling Gao Qi Ming, as a collective science fiction novel writing project from my crypto phase.
Really?
Yeah. I was told by a lot of nerdy technologists, people who are Chinese cypherpunks, saying there is the greatest DAO experiment ever, which is a sci-fi story collectively written by many people, like hundreds of thousands of people. I was like, “wow, what do you mean?”
Because DAO in crypto represents decentralized, autonomous organization. Referring to this science fiction writing as a DAO experimentation is really fascinating. It also sort of reflects on the demographic — the people who are reading this story, right? Who are reading the Morning Star of Lingao? Who are reading Lingao Qiming? And it turns out to be:
Yeah, not surprising at all. A lot of overlap with sci-fi.
But before we get into sci-fi and about that essay, this is your first time on the show, so I’d like to give listeners a chance to get to know you a bit better.
You describe yourself as a kind of cultural in-betweener, and that really resonates obviously with me. For people who move between China and the West, especially when writing about technology and about power, translation isn’t just a linguistic exercise. It’s actually epistemic, but it’s also moral and maybe even aesthetic. I mean, it covers pretty much all of philosophy.
One thing that struck me reading your essay is how effortlessly you seem to do this, just to kind of code switch, not just in language, but also in your moral and emotional register, especially when you’re writing about something as charged as the industrial party. Is that something you experience as deliberate, or does it feel almost second nature to you at this point?
I think probably I am a somewhat open-minded and perceiving person, so I don’t know, people have been telling me that I tend to kind of like be able to make friends with all kinds of people. I think that’s, in a sense, like a good trade for me to be a more discerning writer because I think I’m really sensitive to vibes.
Also, I like to use the vibe because this is how I feel. I’m really sensitive to the aesthetic, the sensations when I encounter something, for example, the Silicon Valley mental model versus the Hangzhou-Shenzhen-Beijing mental model, right? I was really fascinated by the sort of the cognitive infrastructure, like the intellectual backbone of the Chinese version.
So I, you know, last year I wrote something called the China Tech Canon, which is a response.
Yeah, that was great. Thank you so much.
Yeah, I think it’s like, it’s all come to the sense that I want to like deeply, contextually translate certain, you can say:
I want to translate something to the Western discourse, but in a much more like humanistic and personal way because I think I am somehow constantly digesting cultures from both sides. I am native in Chinese, but I feel really native in English as well, in the Silicon Valley discourse as well. So I think that I’m just kind of like naturally juggled in between.
Do you go the other direction as well? Do you translate the Silicon Valley kind of tech canon into Chinese as well? Or do you find yourself doing more sort of the explanation in the direction of explaining China to the West?
Yeah, so not about technology, but I’ve been doing this Chinese language podcast for many years with my amazing co-host. I think all of us are cultural in-betweeners and we actually translate the Western popular culture and then talk about those Western popular culture in Chinese language. You know, for example, the popular movie Hamnet is a golden global hit. And we recorded a podcast about Hamnet in Chinese language, but the whole context, the theme, and the reaction, the catharsis we experienced — we were basically discussing this movie in Chinese language, although it’s a quintessential English movie.
Yeah, I read the novel. I have not seen the movie yet. Is it good?
Oh, it’s absolutely good. It’s so moving. It’s very touching, and you do experience this Greek tragedy style catharsis at the very end because it’s like a movie to Force you to confront a lot of eternal questions like death, like loss. Like, yeah, it’s such a layered movie, I can’t really explain it. It’s beautiful. It absolutely changes some part, like, deepest part of you.
So do you ever find yourself judging things differently depending on which context you’re inhabiting? I mean, because, I mean, not because you think one side is right, but because, you know, different histories seem to demand different weights, different priorities. You know, I mean, this is something I’m constantly wrestling with.
How conscious is that process for you when you’re writing? So, you know, you might have one view of the industrial party, say, as a Chinese person living in China and another entirely looking at them from the outside and talking about that to Americans. So, do you find yourself sort of having different standards?
I think I do. I think I’ve been having double consciousness since I grew up as a kid in China. I have double consciousness in a sense that a lot of stuff can coexist although they look like contradict to each other but they could both be true.
Like, you know, in a sense I went through the whole Chinese education, right? I finished high school in China and then I only went to U.S. for college. And I think, I guess, like, accepting a lot of contradictory views and philosophies, as you said, abstemious knowledge systems is part of reality to me, I would say.
But I still think the Chinese Chinese me and English me or the sensible me and anxious immigrant me, when they’re coexisting, I think there is a converging aesthetic standards or sensibility that I uphold. For example,
I think there is certain sensibilities and aesthetics that’s always true and always, I could always try to stay true to that.
Wow, that sounds so healthy and grounded. That’s fantastic. It seems like you experience this kind of ability to code switch and to experience sort of two whole different moral and epistemic systems as more of a freedom than a burden, then.
I would say so. Like, for example, this piece for Wired, it’s about Industrial Party, it’s about this poorly written, crowdsourced science fiction writing. I do not like reading this piece. I do not like reading this story at all because it’s so poorly written.
But at the same time, it gives this energy and spirit of what people are actually craving for in the rapidly developing, urbanizing China and why people feel so strongly about this developmentalism. And in a sense, maybe U.S. needs more poorly written collective science fiction like Lingao because U.S. right now kind of needs some industrial party people.
I mean, I hate the story. I hate the, you know, like the greatest Chinese science fiction as the title of this Wired piece is actually an irony, right? It’s not actually greatest because it’s like honestly really bad, but it speaks to so many things that I, yeah.
We’re going to get really deep into Ling Gao in just a second here, but there are a couple other things I still want to ask you about because there’s another divide that I see you moving across really fluently and that’s the one between STEM and the humanities, between, you know, the engineering ways of seeing the world and the more humanistic or cultural ways of seeing the world.
So reading your work, I get the sense that you’re genuinely at home in both of these registers. You’re able to translate between them without, you know, romanticizing the one or condescending to the other. Is that, again, something that you’re conscious of when you’re writing or does it feel like a natural part of, you know, how you make sense of tech and society?
I’m not sure if I’m really fluent in the STEM language. First, I am not a technologist. I don’t code except, you know, like right now, live coding makes everything easier. Everyone’s doing that.
Yeah, everyone’s doing it. Not me.
Yeah, I honestly don’t think I speak the KPI coded language, like optimizing everything, improve everything, because I do have a lot of friends that are like that, but I do think working in tech company gives me a sense that an entire corporation, like hundreds of people could just like grind really hard, iterate the product really hard just to like improve
- 2% of user retention or
- 1% of daily active user
because I’ve been there and… I was one of the people who were trying really hard to retain users, study the users, or try to improve the recommendation algorithm, so our app has more revenue that day. You can see this is all correlated, right? I was a content manager, a growth manager during my first job. When you put out a certain content or adjust the algorithm a little bit, there’s an instant bump in your revenue that day. It’s almost like it’s extremely correlated.
If you spend more money on Facebook’s advertisement, you will just get more new users. It is so direct in the tech world, and I do think I understand that eagerness or straightforwardness in the tech landscape.
This divide, though, between the STEM view and the humanities view, do you feel like that divide is even more acutely felt in Chinese life than in the Western context? I mean, the gap between the engineering dude and the artsy fartsy literati type—do you think that’s an outdated caricature by this point, or is that still something very much a dividing line in Chinese life?
I think China’s society logic was dictated by the STEM optimization logic, or like industrialization logic for a long time until the young people are so tired, people are so tired, and then this sort of optimizing bubble bursted.
So back then, maybe 10 years ago, optimizing everything — trying hard. There was an internet slang for people trying too hard, trying to get promoted, make a lot of money during the economic boom — during the Chinese economic boom and internet attack boom. This was admirable.
But right now, this bubble bursted, so people proactively do not want to participate, such as Nuli lore, Nuli fairy tales. Instead, you see China’s today’s mainstream sentiment is:
This is the current mainstream. I would say China is a post-industrial party society now.
Oh, good, good. I’ll feel more at home there because I’m a good old Gen X slacker, so I know all about avoiding work.
I mean, it’s interesting to me because I feel like I agree. There used to be a period where one side of that divide was absolutely treated as:
and the other was just written off. But yeah, I’m glad to see this swinging back.
Before we get into what Lingao represents, I think it’s worth situating it a bit. For listeners outside China, it’s almost completely unknown, as you said. How widely known is it inside China, especially among communities that care about:
Is this like a cult classic or is it something closer to shared cultural infrastructure?
I don’t think it’s widely known as a popular cultural product like a movie or Journey to the West. This is basically the most common vernacular day-to-day language.
But I think Lingao is very popular, very influential in a niche community. This community itself is what I would say the elite class of technologists, the STEM people who see themselves as pillars of China’s urbanization and industrialization, and predominantly male.
So Lingao, to be completely honest, strikes me as a semi-misogynist, misogynist novel because a lot of plots imply many things towards women.
But Lingao is a cult fetish. It is a Bible for the industrial party, this loosely connected intellectual group in China.
Yeah, I definitely want to ask you about the gendered nature of this book and about science fiction more broadly. I remember reading Senti, Three Body Problem and just being shocked. There’s stuff you could not get away with in America today, just the level of misogyny that was in there.
But how did you come across it yourself? You told me that you heard about it from Crypto Bros in the Valley, right?
Yes. Chinese Crypto Bros. I heard it from Chinese Crypto Bros.
Yeah, that’s hysterical.
What finally got you to read the thing? I mean, what did it just keep coming? And before you actually surfed over to it, what did you think it was? What kind of reputation did it have in your mind before you actually read a page?
I actually didn’t know anything except it is like a DAO experiment. It is a crowdsourced sci-fi lore. And like, to be honest, when I read anything that’s Chinese internet native, I tend to have lower expectations because I know some of the products, some of, especially those fiction writing stuff, is almost like Harry Potter fanfic, right?
It’s not written by J.K. Rowling herself, but written by the fans who just spend an afternoon, put a lot of scrappy plots together, and then you have a fanfic. So I tend to treat Ling Gao as an interesting phenomenon, like a part of the deeper corner of the Chinese intellect as a lore instead of as a serious science fiction. So I kind of had a lower expectation entering this novel.
And it turned out to be, yes, it is very scrappy. It was written by so many people to the point they started collectively writing it since 2006. And then people just keep writing and piling up and piling up.
A few years later, people were like:
“Okay, now we have too many things. Like the plots are going to multiple directions. We need to sort of come up with a kinetical plot together.”
So someone came up and compiled the storylines together, which creates the sort of, quote-unquote, kinetical Ling Gao timeline as we see today. But you can guess the nature of collaboration is:
There are thousands and thousands of different branches. When I was reading it, I couldn’t really tell which part is the kinetical story and which part is the fanfic back then. But because it’s well written, it’s sort of merged into the kinetical.
Is it because they’re all very put together and scrappy? It doesn’t read a thoughtful thing but reads like a collective stream of consciousness. There are these people who did the actual organizing, who actually decided what is canon and what is sort of peripheral.
What do we know about these people, about these principal writers? Who are they? What kinds of backgrounds do they come from?
They all use pseudonyms online, but we know some phenomenon writers sort of emerged out of the Ling Gao scene, later became the influencers or the writers for Guancha Zhe Wang (观察者网). And Guan Cha Zheu Wang is inseparable from Ling Gao’s collective writing.
Give us a sense of what Guan Cha Zheu Wang is. I mean, they have a certain political slant, a certain reputation. Why don’t you explain what Guan Cha Zheu is?
Okay, so in the Wired piece, I told the readers that Guan Cha Zheu Wang is almost like Chinese breadboard, but I think it’s less like breadboard because it doesn’t punch up. It kind of only punches west.
So Guancha isn’t that up though?
Yeah, so it is, I would argue, a more thoughtful patriotic or nationalistic collective online magazine delivering a lot of pro-industrial policy, pro-state opinion pieces, and some of the pieces are quite persuasive.
You know, I used to be a reader of Guancha when I was in college. Guancha reached its peak in the early 2010s. The founder himself, Eric Lee, I think he studied at UC Berkeley.
Yeah, I think he was the same year as me, in fact.
I see, I see. Yeah, he studied at UC Berkeley. It seems like he made a lot of money and he sort of diverted his money into this collective intellectual body building and started Guan Cha Zheu Wang.
It’s like a think tank and online publication, but it really represents a cohort of writers who, just like Ling Gao, have a strong stamp background, very pro-China, very pro-industrialization, and very anti-West.
And early on, a lot of their pieces are similar to a little bit like today’s narrative on how to establish a strong national, industrial national identity, and unapologetically loving China and being patriotic.
Yeah, so it’s very, how to say, very rad, very internet native. I would argue they’re very internet native because all of them know how to talk. They’re actually… Really good writers. You know, I mean, Eric X. Lee, the person who’s really sort of at the heart of it, as you say, you see Berkeley graduate and a venture capitalist of some success, very, very wealthy guy. He, in fact, is very well-spoken and quite persuasive in some quarters. You know, he has this famous TED talk in English. I agree. You know, he gets this gigantic standing ovation from him. I’ve described him before as sort of the first sword of China apology. He’s very gifted, I mean, in that sense. Yeah.
Let’s get back to the 共业党. Yeah. You know, it’s often spoken of in juxtaposition to the so-called 秦华党, which I’ve seen translated variously as the sentiment or the sentimental party. Does this 秦华党 actually have a representative online novel or a body of literature associated with it, you know, like we see with Lin Gao or is this just a straw man? Is it a real thing even?
I think 秦华党, if I understand correctly, is like the basically the civic space existed once on Chinese internet and I would say they no longer exist. I can say Chai Jing would be seen as a 秦华党 by industrial party standard because Chai Jing is this Chinese journalist who would make a documentary about air pollution, you know, she would Under the Dome. Yeah, Under the Dome. Like she would make a lot of influential documentary or journalistic pieces to remind people that the human cost of China’s rapid development load, you know, she would care about the migrant workers’ rights. She would care about the people who are dislocated because of the deformation of the city, because of the reconstruction of the city. Xi would, you know, care about air quality, right? Yeah.
So anything that’s been negatively affected or left behind by China’s headlong rush toward industrialization, right? Yeah, I would say that both the party and industrial party, I mean, industrial party doesn’t have the power to purge the sentimental party or, you know, the humanistic, the free journalist, the China’s civil civic space, but industrial party justifies for the state to marginalize and purge what they call sentimental party.
But I think sentimental party is actually a core part of my formative experience because I was growing up in China where the internet was a place to discuss real things from political reform to rule of laws to freedom expression to many things. I remember reading a lot of absolutely brilliant investigative reports about
I remember reading so many great stories about the one-child policy, about how this one town in China has forged some ties to systematically trade female babies to have them adopt in the U.S. A lot of the stories like this couldn’t exist in today’s China because of the demise of a sentimental party, because of the state’s effort of eradicating them.
So the industrial party in a sense doesn’t have any real political power, but I think they are a collective unconsciousness of the regime, of what CCP really prioritized or really think about.
Just to be clear, when you eradicated them, it’s not like they were rounded up and locked up. You’re talking about censorship, you’re talking about all sorts of different lawfare efforts, pressures to, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, when I was in high school, when I was in middle school, I could go on Weibo and read about Han Han’s pro-democracy essays, and those are really bold, quite fundamentally radical essays, if you see them now. I would be reading Chatter 08, written by Liu Xiaobo. I would be reading a lot about Arab Spring. I mean, a lot of the content sort of existed inside of the Great Firewall. It’s a beautifully diverse, chaotic, steaming, intellectual space. I kind of grew up in this internet.
People in those internet forums seriously talk about civic stuff, seriously talking about can China have a political reformation in the future? Because those possibilities were so real back then.
I think when you talk about the industrial party, you need to sort of dial your clock back to the 2000s and 2010s, it was because the tension between sentiment party versus industrial party were really real. I wrote in the piece, I think the signature event was the Wenzhou high-speed rail crash, the train wreck. I still remember vividly where I was that day and how I felt because I was about to board the high-speed rail from Beijing because the high-speed rail finally because I grew up in Shanxi.
Shanxi is an economically backward… Province, so I was really excited to see Taiyuan finally had a high-speed rail connecting to Beijing.
Instead of staying in the old train to take an overnight train to go to Beijing, you can actually spend only three hours to go to Beijing now.
Beijing as a cosmopolitan city, in my mind back then as a high schooler, it’s so close by to me, I can just go there. I was so excited and then the story burst out about the terrible train wreck in Wenzhou.
I remember there was a huge debate online about who was guilty, right? Like, where is the weakest link in this? If you dig way back in the Seneca archive to July or maybe August of 2011, you’ll find the show that we did about that.
Yeah, so I remember back then, all the public intellectuals were still active, their other accounts are still not banned. So a lot of people online writing lengthy articles or posting online about the liability of the authority that didn’t have a proper monitoring system.
And so basically, the thing is because a certain signal was missed, two high-speed rail trains basically crashed face-to-face. It was basically a pure human mistake. It was because a certain message didn’t send to the other side, so the tragedy happened. It was pure human mistake.
But anyways, I remember so many people writing about it online and there’s this one piece basically crying for China to slow down. And it was like,
“slow down China, wait for people.”
Implies don’t let such bloody train crashes happen again because this is a price we cannot afford just to aimlessly progress.
And this is a moment when industrial party people came and then they took the stage. They organized a systematic rebuttal against the humanistic sort of pro-slowdown discussion.
Because the industrial party intellectuals have a lot of advantages for knowing so much industrial knowledge because they are the ones building a lot of Chinese infrastructure. For example, I featured this one intellectual, his name is Ma Qianzu, one of the authors.
So the industrial party people organized a big rebuttal and they systematically published many articles to not justify this accident but saying we should take this accident seriously, but this shouldn’t be the reason for China to slow down its building on the high-speed railway infrastructure.
And yes, I think the industrial party and the development logic won in the debate and so the result is China didn’t slow down.
I mean, like I think retrospectively if it slowed down maybe China wouldn’t have such a convenient, vast, amazing network of high-speed rail today. But I think back then if China should develop was a real and very visceral and painful question to confront.
A lot of people’s idea is no, we really shouldn’t progress like this:
Like, are we, like, why are we allowing ourselves to be the colony for development?
But I think right now we’re basically sitting in the future to meditate on the dispute and one could say of course development is China’s thing, is what China always wanted.
But no, like, you know, there are people strongly against a lot of things the government proposed. There are people interesting to ponder that alternative.
Yeah, but that’s what this itself is — it’s a, you know, Lingao itself is pondering an alternative.
Now I haven’t read it myself, not one bit of it, I’m probably not going to, but I’m hoping you can give us kind of a controlled spoiler.
So a wormhole opens to 1628 from our present, or from the present of the time you know, 10 years ago when they were writing this.
So how does the alternate timeline then unfold? What kind of society do these guys end up building in Hainan? How different does it end up looking from our own history? How much do they change history in this project, in the book?
Yes, so okay. So reading this book is very interesting because the plot evolves as the people who write the story evolve. So like, and also a lot of the writers would write themselves in. The story features a captain—like a captain of the ship that would transport the 500 time travelers back to the Ming dynasty. The captain himself, his real name and real-life nickname, became known as Captain as well. At a certain point, the boundaries between past and present, fictional and reality, kind of blurred.
The same happens with Ma Qian Zu himself. He is one of the main people in the novel. So, it’s Qian Zu and Qian Zu—they almost spell the same in Pinyin, but one is Ma Qian Zu and the other implies humbleness. Ma Qianzu means you stand next to the horse to serve, but fictional Ma Qianzu is arrogant. You are Qianzu: you can see a thousand miles away. Zu means seeing.
I think things like this are very interesting. The basic premise starts from a simple thought experiment: what if you can travel back to the Ming dynasty with modern knowledge and equipment? People started writing about it without character building or discussion. The first 30 chapters are all about people getting together to think about what equipment they should bring to the Ming dynasty.
You will see this laborious preparation list, almost like the list a very organized person writes when packing for a long trip. People spend 30 chapters to prepare for this list.
Then, around chapter 37, people finally get together to board the ship that will take them to Ling Gao. You also see this immense obsession with details:
They conduct serious, detailed risk assessments. It’s really first principles thinking—almost like an action manual. If you really had a wormhole to travel to the Ming dynasty, you could simply follow it.
This is because a lot of the knowledge is factual. Professional people research and fact-check it themselves and each other in a peer review process ensuring scientific accuracy. People are thinking about how to bootstrap an industrial revolution on this island—what do we need?
But, let’s get to my question: how far do they take it? Are we talking decades of institutional development, or does it mostly stay in an early building and consolidation phase? Do they change history profoundly? Do we even know what history looks like now as a result of the changes they make?
The story kind of progresses as the current time progresses, I would say. Everything stays in the Ming Dynasty—there is no fast forward to the Qing Dynasty or the Republic period. The time flow of the Ming Dynasty basically matches today’s pace.
Because the story has been written for about 20 years, a lot has changed:
There are also plots, like some fanfic, which are not part of the main story:
There is also a story plot that diverges from the main story that… people ended up colonizing Australia, and they formed a huge sort of empire, almost like a British empire. In the 19th century, they forged a huge Linggao Australian empire across Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. The north part would be like Linggao county, like Hainan and Taiwan. Yeah, so like crazy stuff, really crazy stuff.
But what really strikes me about this, as you’ve described it, is this is an alternate history that doesn’t imagine salvation through new ideas, or a moral awakening, or the scientific revolution necessarily, but actually just through kind of competence, and very specifically through technological, technical competence.
There’s this like obsessive attention to getting the tech tree right, like:
It’s just like precise accumulation step by step, as you’ve described. But alongside that, there’s also, I guess, as you talked about in your piece, this kind of unglamorous work of building institutions that can sustain these capabilities over time.
They’ve thought through a lot it seems, seen that way. Linggao feels less like escape fiction and more like a thought experiment about governance and about why technocratic instincts have such appeal to China.
Let me ask about this because there’s this framework explicitly in academic terms. We usually talk about the Needham question and about things like Ken Pomerantz in his book The Great Divergence. These are ways of explaining why industrialization took off in Europe rather than in China when China seemed quite ready for it in some measures, by the Song dynasty.
We had the capability to do mass mechanized production in some ways. But again, I haven’t read it, but reading your essay and the broader discourse around the industrial party, it feels like this community has its own implicit theory of history.
How would you characterize the industrial party’s answer to the Needham question? What do they seem to think actually mattered in producing the divergence that we saw, that Pomerantz describes?
I think, I got educated in China. I think the sort of national scar, the hundred years of humiliation that China left behind, didn’t modernize until the European powers kicked your ass. Then China started industrialization.
This part of history has always been a sort of a collective scar, a wound, a true wound basically, among everyone that I know who received primary education in China.
Alternatively envisioning a China that started to modernize, started to industrialize at the pace of the European counterparts has always been, I think, a psychological comforting thought experiment.
I also noticed that sometimes the national consciousness in Linggao’s plot is really weak. Of course, it is a big part of almost like a salvation porn or like salvation.
“That’s a good way to talk about it: salvation porn.”
Part of it is salvation porn, but I realized a big part of it is the joy of meticulously planning everything itself. To the engineers, building itself is very joyful; it is beautiful, it is satisfying.
Because I observed this among not just Chinese engineers but among a lot of the western engineers that I’m friends with. They love YouTube channels like Primitive Technology. It is literally an Australian man using mud to build all sorts of tools from zero.
It seems like engineers really enjoy this sheer ability to transform the surroundings with the scientific knowledge they possess in their mind. It seems like totally my dad.
Like homo sapiens seems to us like we’re homo sapiens. We seem to really enjoy thinking about our ability to transform our surroundings.
I mentioned Robinson Crusoe. I think Robinson Crusoe is like the 18th-century Primitive Technology YouTube channel.
“For sure, for sure.”
When I was a kid, I obsessed with this book because I constantly imagined myself being this all-powerful human being, like going into a savage island and humanizing and civilized a place by my sheer intelligence, by the modern advanced knowledge I possess. And I think, thinking about this, it’s not just Li Gong Dan; it’s also Western engineers. I know, it’s also you, it’s also me. Very interesting, right? It’s like reading this makes you happy.
Seeing the primitive technology YouTube videos makes me calm. Like, I think as a hunter-gatherer, like offspring of a hunter-gatherer society, human being, I found this psychologically safe.
So I think a big part of Ling Gao’s dopamine hit comes from writing about technology and planning itself, writing about building the civilization itself, other than national, yeah, right, for sure.
I get that. I get that for sure. There’s something about—I mean, it’s a flex, you know? They get to show, look how I understand the very fundaments of the technologies that I deal with. But there’s also something like this kind of inherited historical vulnerability at work here.
You know what you talked about, this century of humiliation thing. I mean, not a grievance in a narrow sense, but just kind of a memory of how badly things can go, you know, when state capacity falters.
So I wonder, in addition to this satisfying kind of, you know, tech just tech qua tech, there is—I wonder if there’s this kind of implicit never again embedded in the discourse, you know? Not just about foreign domination but also about chaos, about fragmentation, about, you know, loss of national agency, right? I mean, that’s in there too. I wonder if that appeals to you as well.
I agree. I agree. I think this, we should memorize that engineering and industrialization and urbanization are the true things that truly gave the Chinese nation power. Like we shall engrave this in our bowl.
I think this is part of the message the Ling Gao Qiming Morning Star of Ling Gao has been sort of projecting. And it reminds me of—so there’s a scholar whose name is Wang Xiaodong, you’re probably familiar with, yeah, of course, who wrote, I think in 2009, China is Unhappy. I remember it was a big intellectual sensation.
Like he is the one who coined the term industrial party. So in this article that he coined the term industrial party, he stated very clearly that—I actually want to read this—he stated really clearly that:
“We must never envy the finance Hollywood, the Grammys, and NBA of the West. We would rather forge iron and smelt copper and let the Americans sing and dance for us because forging iron and smelting copper is the true—this is where true power lies.”
And I think this is a big—this basically crystallizes industrial party’s salvation arc, which is it is the industrial capability that made China powerful so other people couldn’t kick our ass again.
The true power, the true international strength that European countries wouldn’t bully us, like America and Japan wouldn’t bully us, is because now we can forge iron and melt copper. It is not because we can sing or dance, it’s not because we care about social welfare, it’s because we can build stuff.
I think industrial party has such a clarity about the importance of engineering and industrial knowledge.
I want to quickly shout out Fred Gall, who actually wrote another essay right after yours came out, and it happened that the very day that I read yours right away suddenly in my inbox there was Fred’s Substack. And he had actually written about it as well, and you know he definitely helped me to get oriented with this.
But what you’ve just described, it’s engineering then becomes an act of patriotism, right? It becomes synonymous with patriotism. Building is loving your country, and that connection seems to be quite explicit in the whole industrial party discourse.
I mean, building itself becomes a moral act. It takes on moral weight, which is a really interesting worldview.
Fred also frames this though in his writing as a generational revolt, especially against earlier, maybe more literary or humanistic modes of thinking about China, the China that you maybe described when we worried about the cost, we worried about the human cost.
I mean, it doesn’t describe this hostility exactly, but a sense of that those ways of talking had become just kind of unmoored from material reality.
So there is this tension between the When Yi Ching Nian phase and the Li Gong Nan dominance phase.
And, but I want to get to this gendered layer here that feels really important for me to acknowledge—that this industrial party worldview, this whole emphasis on engineering on… Discipline on technical mastery that to me feels very gendered in terms of who speaks with authority, what kinds of traits are valorized.
You’re somebody who identifies as a feminist and you work very fluently across technical and cultural domains. How do you read that gendered dimension to that, who gets to imagine the future in these narratives?
I think first of all Ling Gao Qiming itself is a piece of historical record because I think the collective writing process peaked maybe during 2011 to 2015, and this is the internet before China’s feministic awakening. So I would say certain feministic consciousness hasn’t arrived in China yet.
So Ling Gao Qiming is in a sense a product of its time — a pre-feminist cultural product — and people just really don’t have a lot of tools or instruments or frameworks to criticize it.
Just like a lot of women writers would participate in writing, they would probably feel extremely uncomfortable but they couldn’t name why they feel uncomfortable. But now, retrospectively looking at this text, looking at these primary sources, it is very much misogynistic.
It’s just like how much Liu Zixing’s Three-Body Problem feels extremely misogynistic when you’re reading in Chinese.
I mean Ken Liu did a great job in removing a lot of the poorly written female parts, it’s still in there, yeah, yeah. But you know like there’s definitely some plots in Liu Zixing’s work that would be like:
“Oh, you’re a woman but how can you listen to Bach, this German composer, like because Bach is such a representation of rationality, a rational music. How can women appreciate this beautiful, high class, high broad rational music?”
You know, such plots permit Lin Gao and the first 500 pioneers — like a very small group of them are women, predominantly men. And I think the made revolution is the part which is really fascinating because Lin Gao basically operates in the semi-military structure where the resource needs to be centrally planned and allocated to people.
It is a techno-authoritarian society where it’s also a little bit like plutocracy. I would say people who possess the most engineering knowledge have a better social status.
So at the time, there is this distribution of:
These people are very unhappy. I mean, they’re all fictional plots by the way, and those plots are the incels of Linggao — the single people from Linggao.
In the sense of domestic servants are also, you know, sex slaves, which is not being explicitly said but later you will see this Linggao society operating as a semi-feudal but techno-authoritarian style political structure.
Later, they recognize that:
This is all part of the modernization process.
China’s modernization success depends on female workers in the factory, so Linggao is like:
“Okay, if we’re rational enough to truly industrialize Hainan, to truly industrialize Ming dynasty, we shall truly give the female servants proper treatment, so we can properly…”
So it’s basically all rational, not like:
It’s not moral—it’s rational.
So it’s rational for the Linggao community to progress to a female-male equality scenario, and then this is basically a historical fatalistic direction instead of out of, you know, humanitarian concern or out of cuteness or moral goodness.
Wow, there’s just so much to plumb here, and it’s sort of the theory of history that underpins this that I’m particularly interested in. Maybe I will at some point take a crack at this thing. I’ll be good for my Chinese anyway.
So let me shift a little way away from Linggao here.
I do want to bring it back in frame but this book Breakneck, by Dan Wong, which is one of the most talked about books of 2025. Dan, of course, as you know, describes China as an engineering state.
I mean, listening to you talk about Linggao and the industrial party, that phrase starts to feel less like an abstraction and more like an actual lived… Worldview, right? Does that framing resonate with how you understand what Linggao is imagining, or does it miss something important?
You have this book club where you have been talking about, reflecting on Chinese language discussions of Breakneck. You know, it’s called What? Reading Breakneck in China.
Yeah, reading Breakneck from China.
Right, right.
One thing that struck me in your book club reflections—I’ll link to that because you’ve written about it on your Substack—is that Chinese language discussions about that book seemed less surprised by that framing than English language ones.
So, I mean, did the idea of an engineering state feel like any kind of a revelation to Chinese readers, or more like seeing something familiar finally given a name?
I really appreciate Dan’s framing. I think Dan’s framing is at least to better capture certain reality in China. I honestly think the democratic versus autocratic binary is not helpful anymore. Like, if you look at the US, what’s democratic about the US, right?
I know a few Chinese, China-focused scholars who used to study the authoritarian regime of China and now all sort of pivot to study the US authoritarian term.
You know, I honestly think Dan’s framework can somehow better explain the reality and better get to the point. It’s really helpful, it’s really instrumentally helpful.
And then, according to Dan, he tends to be playful with this framework. He’s like not 100% serious about it, doesn’t want to challenge the status quo of democracy versus autocracy. But yeah, I’m going to borrow that cop-out from him.
I’m just being playful here, I’m not really—it’s a way to not commit completely, right? I mean, that playful is—it doesn’t have like, you know, we have generations of scholars studying authoritarian systems, right? But like in a sense, I don’t think Dan wants to challenge that.
I think he comes up with this framework just to better explain today’s China and today’s US.
Yeah, I think I do appreciate this framework, and I think the engineering state captures a lot of the developmental, the knee-jerking intuition for the Chinese society as well as the party’s industrial policy.
I think the industrial party ideology is reflected by the CCP itself as well, and I would argue this industrial development is the priority spirit, is a collective unconsciousness among so many powerful people, so many decision makers in China.
For example, Xi Jinping mentioned the new productivity force. I think new quality forces of production is very industrial party coded—it’s because this implies that China’s economy is stagnating; the growth is that as we don’t have the prosperity like the growth like before, how do we solve this problem?
Okay, let’s shift to this magical new productivity, new quality productivity force. Let’s do more engineering, let’s upgrade our engineering so problems could be solved.
I think there is this industrial party-coded naivety or innocence in it, and then I think a big part of the CCP’s decision makers still think they can engineer a lot of problems away. But in reality, it’s not true anymore because the industrial party itself has a lot of intellectuals start to have their own reckoning on a lot of China’s problems, and then they realize that a lot of problems couldn’t be engineered away.
So, Dan Wong’s book, do you feel like it hits differently between English and Chinese audiences when it comes down to their different lived experiences? How would you, if you had to sum up the difference between how your Chinese friends—many of them have maybe not spent time in the West—how that hits differently?
A lot of people are overly obsessed with if China is a real engineering state. For example, they would argue:
So a lot of the Chinese language readers who are living in China would be dissatisfied with Dan’s engineering state verdict, because they would argue like, you know:
I tend to think it’s very useful to accept it in a sort of provisional and playful sense. But there’s this irony I keep coming back to: it feels like it’s only just in the last year or so that many Americans have really fully become aware of the scale of China’s industrial might or industrial power in China.
Yet, in our conversation, it sounds like the industrial party worldview—the whole framework that helped articulate and legitimize this push from within China, this crazy breakneck, engineering-driven mentality—is already losing some of its explanatory force in China. It’s weird that Americans are only starting to believe this is the case at the moment when the industrial party logic has lost or is losing its grip.
I don’t think the industrial party logic has lost its grip in China. I’m pretty sure a lot of the industrial policy decision makers still very much adhere to the industrial party logic:
But the intellectuals who were part of the industrial party movement in the early 2010s, I think they’re starting to suffer from China’s declining economy and, say, COVID. For example, Ma Qianzhu himself, an influencer in China with two million followers on Bilibili, is a very articulate writer. But his account was banned because he voiced certain issues during COVID. Ma Qianzhu himself got cancelled by the state even though he used to support everything for the state.
This brings us to the irony where the industrial party people, the engineers themselves, are very smart and aware of certain societal issues like:
These issues don’t necessarily yield to the logic of industrialism.
I’m curious about Fred Gao—I don’t know if you know him personally, but I’ve met him in Beijing. He’s a really nice guy and has been explicit about moving away from the industrial party orbit over time.
I wonder if this is a personal evolution or symptomatic of a broader shift in discourse. I think for many industrial party intellectuals, it feels like a personal evolution. They have kind of grown out of the industrial party phase. I would say they lost their innocence in believing engineering could solve everything. It’s not a magic potion.
Mai Tienzo himself definitely took some hits in life to realize that his youth was starry-eyed and innocent about many things. It’s called growing up. A lot of people I know had that kind of super faith in technology early on, and anything that didn’t surrender to the hard logic of mathematics and engineering was just worthless. They’d ask, “Why bother reading novels? You should be reading that kind of thing.”
People grow up, right?
It’s really funny because within the crypto community, I also met a lot of rational engineers—people who hang out in the rationalist forum community. I see them growing up as well, starting to learn that:
I see them also sort of grow out of this obsessive, almost purity phase.
It’s funny like my tensile right now, he speaks out. A lot about the child supply, and he speaks out about local government debts and certain central-local relations. He also has an absolutely descending voice during COVID. Well, I mean, it’s comforting to know that it’s still possible for people to change.
Yeah, let’s go for one final question just to wrap this all up about what Lingao tells us about China today. If someone wants to understand contemporary China—not the politics necessarily, or the policies, or the political imagination—what should they take away from the Lingao phenomenon? What does it tell us about how China thinks about:
What’s your big bottom line takeaway?
A big thing that tells us is maybe stories like Lingao are worth more attention. In a sense, it’s a more grassroots Senti—a Three Body Problem that’s more widely accessible. In a sense, it’s an egalitarian Liu Cixin collective building process. Like, you know, Three Body Problem’s Liu Cixin is representative, but I think Senti maybe speaks more to the unpolished, the authentic, the grassroots, the organic aspect of these things.
For me, reading Lingao is such a journey. It introduced me to knowledge I never really thought about. Part of the Industrial Party I constantly laughed about during the peak of their debate in the early 2010s: they constantly laugh at this humanistic journalist who would complain about the suffocating urban life and want to escape to the forest. As long as this journalist can take a hot shower and have access to the internet, the Industrial Party would laugh at this fantasy.
This escapist imagination ignored the infrastructure it needs to have a hot shower and wifi connection. The Industrial Party deeply advocates for the invisible wires buried in the ground. They advocate for the pipes that transmute the hot water to this escapist little Eden garden. This humanistic journalist would imagine oneself to be like this, but Industrial Party people are really making a lot of the invisible stuff visible to me.
In the process of US re-industrialization, such knowledge is revealing because I used to take hot water and electricity for granted. Then I learned that’s not true. China’s electricity supply is top of the world right now—the high voltage grids, convenient industrial basis—everything to fuel China’s innovation.
Yeah, I think Industrial Party really gives me certain knowledge that humbles me because I could be that ignorant humanistic journalist complaining about urban life. I want to take a hot shower in the forest and don’t reply emails, but I still want wifi. I could completely ignore the infrastructures—that’s like the iceberg under the ocean.
Yeah, I think, in a sense, Lingao is a textbook for me to learn about the industrial process at its very first principle. It’s not fun to read but also fun to read. That’s really an interesting take. I gotta wonder what these guys today would think of Li Ziqi.
I mean, you know, for those of you who know, Li Ziqi is a very, very popular video blogger, huge on YouTube and stuff like that. This woman is very attractive, who left her life in the city to go home and take care of her aging parents or grandmother in the countryside in Sichuan, and has made this enormous following because she’s so good. On the one hand, she sounds so far like that kind of journalist who wanted to flee as long as there were hot showers and internet.
But this woman also has mad skills. I mean, she crafts, she does, she’s a good asset on, you know, Hainan Island in 1628 for these guys because she knows how to build stuff, how to make stuff, and all these traditional crafts. I wonder what they would make of somebody like her.
She embodies, on the one hand, both what they don’t like and what they very desperately need.
Oh yeah, I think if I were a Lingao writer, if I were part of the Engineering Party, I would salute Li Ziqi because if I were them, I would meticulously break down the amount of planning for her to do in order to create. A seamlessly beautiful video like that—if I were an industrial party member, I would appreciate the engineering part of her production. I would be like,
“Oh my god, it’s because you did so much invisible infrastructural production work.”
So the 20 minutes—the visible time of you showing up on the screen—can look so effortless and seamless. I think, yeah, I generally think the Ling Gao people would appreciate her engineering skills in a sense—like production engineering and resource management skills for sure. Fantastic!
What a fun conversation this has been, and the time has just flown by. Afra, let’s move on now.
First of all, thank you for spending so much time speaking with me, and again, everyone’s got to go and read your piece if you haven’t done it already. It’s just a wonderful piece of writing. For me, I think it’s one of those things where this little slice, as you say, just this artifact of Chinese culture, made me think so much about the contemporary Chinese condition. It made me think so much about, you know, the mindset that really does—in so many ways—just sort of inform and shape the world that we inhabit today.
It’s become—it’s not just ideology, it’s more like infrastructure, right? The whole mentality, in many ways, has come to define the modern polity.
But let’s move on and talk about this segment that I call paying it forward. If you’ve got a young colleague or a friend or somebody whose work you want to call attention to, now is the time to do.
I think one thing I need to shout out is—I mentioned in a piece that there’s no English translation for Lingo, which is not true. So, two months ago, obviously a group of people took it as a passion project and translated the canonical version into English and made it a website.
They also basically have a GitHub commit about the tools they use to translate the piece. They use the GMLI 2.5 to translate everything.
Yeah, I’m just really glad that people are spending effort systematically translating Lingo into English, so I would recommend reading that. I think that’s the first recommendation.
Second is, unfortunately, if you’re not a Chinese language speaker or don’t listen to Chinese, you won’t get the great content. Baihua is this podcast incubator actually started by my friend Izzy. We’re all like sort of the founding members of Baihua, and we’re trying to incubate more Chinese language podcasts.
One of the podcasts I really like and really appreciate is called Xin Xin Renlei. I can also send the link.
“Please do.”
Xin Xin Renlei is a podcast hosted by three tech journalists who are also, like me, really bilingual and understand the tech world on both sides. They find some very interesting niche topics to discuss. For example, they would talk about:
Yeah, so highly recommend Xin Xin Renlei. The English name is Pixels Perfect.
Pixels Perfect, Xin Xin, Xin Xin, Xin Xin.
Okay, well excellent, excellent—that’s fantastic. Now, I don’t know whether that was your paying it forward recommendation or your actual recommendation recommendation. I distinguish between them, but did you have a book or something that you wanted to recommend?
Yes, I actually read voraciously. I do have a lot of books I would recommend. One would be, I think, it’s edited and written by Carrie Brown. It’s called
China from European's Eyes: 100 Years of History
I think that book, to me, is—
You know, like we always talk about how China is the foil and mural for the West’s imagination, and people’s obsession about China—the way people project China as a beacon for technological advancement today—is actually a sense of otherness, right? Like other in China.
So this book illustrated that this phenomenon is not new. It has been existing for 800 years. You know, many European intellectuals have been portraying China as the otherness projection—like it’s elderly, alien, different—but it… It could be either really beautiful or really ugly. It could be elderly powerful or elderly powerless. The reason why China couldn’t develop modern technology and modern systems, Hegel would argue, was because the Chinese language, the characters, are so laid back.
Basically, Cary Brown, as a historian, compiled 16 or 18 permanent European intellectuals on their takes of China. So the people from like Voltaire to Hegel. Yeah, so I think it’s a fascinating intellectual genealogy. I would recommend it.
Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, I have all the time in the world for Cary Brown. I think he’s wonderful, brilliant, and a fantastic writer. I don’t understand how he writes so much—like he’s gotten a new book every six months.
Oh, I have another one I really must say is Ilin Liu’s upcoming new book. It’s called The War Dancers. It’s coming out, I think, at the end of February, and this is a book about the history of the Chinese internet in the past 30 years. I think you’re going to be interviewing her.
Yeah, I read it. It’s absolutely such a craft—it’s a beautiful craft, so well written. She’s a great writer. Oh, she’s such a great writer. Honestly, as her friend, I really admire her craft. Such a role model.
Yeah, we know each other socially as well, and I am going to have her on the show to talk about the book. So yeah, I mean, it’s great because the book is really well written. I read that book—it’s called The War Dancers. I couldn’t remember the full title, but I have it. So I’ll make sure to put the title in there, and it’s an excellent recommendation.
Related to your recommendation of Cary Brown, just to remind people, I recommended this book ages ago. But it’s a very similar approach, although it’s not just China; it’s all of Asia. It’s Jürgen Osterhammel’s book Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, which is something that I haven’t recommended before, and yeah, it’s absolutely great.
My recommendation for this week actually has something in common with that. It’s Tami Mansari, who I’ve recommended another of his books before. He’s an Afghan American writer and journalist, and he wrote a book called Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.
It’s a real deep dive into the history of Islam as understood by Muslims themselves, from the time of the prophet in the 7th century all the way up to September 11th, viewed through the eyes of Muslims themselves. I think it’s a very useful exercise in building cognitive empathy and understanding the Islamic worldview—not that there’s one single monolithic worldview, but it’s a great book.
It also reminds me of another book written by Kim Stanley Robinson, who also likes to write about hard science like Liu Cixin and the Industrial Party. He has a book called The Years of Rice and Salt. I was just talking about that book the other day with a friend of mine. It’s a great book.
I have recommended that one on the show years and years ago. It’s an alternative history, which I really like. Even since we’re talking about alternative histories here, not a time travel one, but the premise is that the Black Plague actually ends up killing 99% of people in Europe. It starts with Tamerlane’s troops coming up to the Bosporus and then deciding, “Nope, we’re not going over there,” because they were planning on conquering Europe. But no need—the plague has already killed everyone.
Fascinating, yeah, fascinating book. It also has a lot of Buddhist touches, like reincarnation. The interstitial chapters are like the Bardo chapters.
Yeah, I really hope China has someone like Kim Stanley Robinson. I think he could be both spiritual and insanely technical, like Red Mars and Gray Mars, which are very detail-oriented in terms of Mars terraforming.
But a lot of his work is also deeply humanistic. Of course, there’s this cli-fi classic Ministry for the Future as well. So yeah. I would love to meet him one day. He seems like such a wonderfully interesting man. I know, I know, I love his recent preservation of Sierra, it is almost like he’s the embodiment of California spirit—both technologically aware but also deeply drawn to the mountains.
I don’t know, I think something fascinating about this guy, I really like him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, hey, well thank you so much, what an enjoyable conversation. I think we could go on recommending books to one another for several more hours, but we will call a stop to it.
I look forward to meeting you in person one day. I’m going to be in England at the end of the month of February, but I don’t know if you’ll be around. I think so.
If it’s London, yeah, I’ll be around. Yeah, it’s such a fun recording of a podcast with you.
Okay sir, thank you for inviting me. Yeah, yeah, what a great time.
You’ve been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through Substack at www.synicapodcast.com, where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio.
Email me at [email protected] if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show or if you just want to say hi. Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show. Huge thanks to my guest Afro Wong. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
I earned my degree online at Arizona State University. I chose to get my degree at ASU because I knew that I’d get a quality education. They were recognized for excellence and I would be prepared for the workforce upon graduating.
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2026-02-12 09:26:51
⚡️ Prism: OpenAI’s LaTeX “Cursor for Scientists” — Kevin Weil & Victor Powell, OpenAI for Science
Okay, we’re here at OpenAI with some exciting news from the AI for Science team. With us is Kevin Weil, from, I guess, your VP of AI for Science.
VP of OpenAI for Science, yeah. OpenAI for Science, and Victor Powell, who is the product lead on the new product that we’re talking about today. And with me is our new AI for Science host, RJ. Welcome.
“Thanks for having us.”
“Thanks for having us. Yeah, it’s very good to be here.”
“Thanks for hosting us as well. It’s always nice to come over to the office.”
What are we announcing today?
So we’re launching Prism, which is a free AI-native LaTeX editor.
What does all that mean? Because probably a lot of people on the pod haven’t worked with LaTeX in the past. LaTeX is a language, effectively, for typesetting mathematics, physics, and science in general.
So if you’re a scientist writing a paper, you’re probably not using Google Docs because you need to — you have diagrams, you have equations, et cetera. But it’s — and it’s been the standard for decades. But the tools that people use to actually write LaTeX, write their papers, haven’t changed in a long time.
And in particular, AI can help with a lot of the tasks, right? Because you spend your time doing the science, you need to write it up. That’s an important part of communicating your work. But you want that to be fast, and you want that to be accelerated, and AI can help in a ton of ways. And we’ll talk about some of those.
But if you step back, right, it is OpenAI for Science. Our goal is to accelerate science. And the surface area of science is very large. So we’re trying to build tools and products that help every scientist move faster with AI.
Some of that is obviously the work that we can do with the model, making the model able to solve really hard scientific frontier kind of problems, allowing it to think for a long time. But it’s not only that, right?
If there was a lesson from what happened over the last year with software engineering, it’s that part of the acceleration in software engineering came from better models. But part of it also came from the fact that you now have AI embedded into the workflows, into the products that you use as a software engineer, right?
And so that’s what we’re doing here. So OpenAI for Science, it’s both building great models for scientists and also speeding them up by bringing AI into the workflow. That’s what we’re doing with Prism.
I often say like every million copy and paste done in ChatGPT, there’s probably some product to be built.
“Right, exactly.”
That’s a good analogy.
“Yeah.”
That’s a good way to look at it. Especially with LaTeX, having written a lot of LaTeX papers.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, me too.”
The number of hours as a grad student I spent trying to get some diagram to line up exactly.
“Exactly.”
“Oh, man.”
Yeah. Cool. And Victor, this is your sort of baby.
“Yeah, I guess it started off as just a project. I left Meta about three years ago trying to look for various different projects to start. And this was one that like when I sort of presented it to people, they’re like, oh, I get it. That’s, I see what you’re doing.”
And so I’ve just been focused on that, building it for about a year and a half. And, you know, it has now become part of OpenAI and that’s been very exciting.
“Congrats.”
“Thank you.”
Yeah. So it’s kind of a fun story, right? I mean, we, as we were thinking, we had this thesis around, it’s not just models. It’s also building models into the workflow and accelerating scientists in that way.
And this is, there are obviously a lot of different ways that you can do that, but the scientific collaboration and publishing thing is definitely one of them. And I was looking around like, what is there in this space? And there hadn’t been a lot of innovation for a long time.
Like it wasn’t that different from when I was writing up my assignments and papers in tech and grad school. And then I found on this Reddit forum, maybe it was /r/LaTeX. I don’t remember, but somewhere on this Reddit forum, I found this thing about a company called Cricket.
And I was looking around, I couldn’t find who the founder was. It took me a little while. And then I think I found you on Twitter and DM’d you out of the blue and just said,
“Hey, I don’t know if you want to talk about this, but I would love to talk about this if you’re open to it,”
and gave you my number. And we talked on the phone and then jumped on a Zoom and eventually met in San Francisco and made it happen.
“That’s right.”
It’s awesome to have you guys here, but it’s just, yeah, I have a ton of respect. For what you, what you started to build. I actually never heard that full story from you until now. You gotta find that Reddit user and thank them because, you know, it might have been me.
I thought you were totally in stealth because it was the hardest thing to actually figure out who the founder of this thing was. And then I was like, “Oh, for sure. He’s not going to respond to my random DM.”
I mean, I guess that’s a part of, part of our focus has always just been entirely on product, and to the point where it’s almost embarrassing how little we focus on anything else.
Yeah. It worked out for you.
Also full circle for a moment for you using Twitter to do your business development.
Yeah, that’s right. So that’s kind of interesting.
Like I actually, yeah, probably one of the most important social network innovations, I guess, is those, that stuff. And I’m sure you know a lot about that.
Shall we go right into a demo or talk about it?
Yeah, always fun to show it.
I’m a fan of show, don’t tell. Push people to the video.
All right. I’ll try and arrange this so you guys can see a little bit.
Yes.
So what you have here, so this is, this is Prism. And what you can see is on the left here, this is actual LaTeX. You can see why you might want AI to help you write it because it’s a little bit, it’s a language. It’s a little bit messy.
And then on the right, this is my colleague’s paper. Alex Lipsoske is a physicist. This is a paper that he wrote on black holes. And so you see it over here, all the, all the, you know, you can imagine trying to write this in Google Docs or something — it’d be impossible.
This is why LaTeX is super powerful.
And then, you’ve got kind of your files here that make up the project:
You can go through and change it and then you compile that into the PDF itself. But here I can say, at the bottom, you can use the AI using GPT 5.2. And I could say, you know, this introduction, maybe I want a little help writing the introduction.
So,
“Help me proofread the introduction section paragraph by paragraph, suggest places where I can simplify.”
There’s a lot of demo and we’re working on it pretty heavily. So just, you can’t be nervous.
Spoken like a true founder.
One of the nice things is you could do this in ChatGPT, but you’d have to go upload your files into a chat, right? And you’re going back and forth here because the AI is built into the product. It has all of the files that are part of your project. It automatically puts them in context. It works the way you think it would work.
So here it’s looking at the files.
And it’s given us kind of a diff here. So it’s suggesting changes. You’ve got:
You can see the different places where it is suggesting that we change things.
So, okay, we can, we’ll just keep all of them, right? YOLO.
Here’s the thing — we’re changing Alex’s paper. What’s the big deal?
So here’s another thing we were talking about: diagrams in LaTeX.
So, I’ve got a, say, I wanted to input a commutative diagram, right? It’s really easy to draw a commutative diagram like this. Yeah, it is an absolute nightmare to put these things into LaTeX.
So I will upload this photo and I’ll say here, whoops.
Is there a tech bench for this kind of stuff? Like a set of evals?
So here’s a commutative diagram that I drew on the whiteboard:
“Can you make it into a LaTeX diagram and put it right after the, I don’t know, right after, right before, right at the top of the introduction section? Make sure you get the details right.”
So, I didn’t want to interrupt you while you were typing, but why don’t you use voice?
Oh, actually I should. I totally could.
Yeah.
No, but isn’t it interesting that we all have these voice buttons and we don’t use it?
Yeah, it’s not second nature yet. Like it’s interesting.
And that one I totally should have. I was going to also show something. So here I am in the LaTeX and it’s working.
You also can create new parallel chats. So you can have whole sessions with ChatGPT that can be going in parallel.
So here I’ll ask it, there are all these equations. We’re talking about symmetries of this black hole wave equation. And in particular, there’s this complex symmetry here. I like how it. Notice how, yeah. Yeah. Notice how it sinks when I highlight it, but I’ll say like, why don’t you, I’ll go to my chat so I can start doing this in parallel.
I’ll say, please make sure, or please verify that the H plus operator in the new symmetries section is indeed a symmetry of the stationary axisymmetric black hole. Do you understand those questions? You lost me. Are there a whole wave of equations? I have, but after that. I don’t know if Brandon is actually a natural physics person.
Yeah. I’ll say, don’t do it in the paper. Show it here. I don’t want it to actually edit the paper. I just wanted to prove it here. Right. Yeah. Okay. So I’ll get that going.
Now, while we’re waiting for the diagram to finish, we can also get another thing going in parallel. So I’ll say, I need to write up a set of lecture notes on general relativity. You know, say I’m a professor, right? I’ve got, I’m teaching a class or something, put together a 30-minute set of lecture notes on a Riemannian curvature.
Wow. That’s a very different task. Put it into the file. I made this gr_lecture.tex. Okay. And so I’ve got this going.
All right. Well, it came back on my earlier one — H plus symmetry. Is it really here? You got ChatGPT doing a whole bunch of work to verify that this is indeed a symmetry of the equation. Okay. It does. It confirms it.
Right. So you’ve got the full power of a reasoning model that can think deeply about frontier science. And now we can go back while it works on the other thing.
Okay. So this was where I was making the diagram, right? It put it right below the introduction. I’ll compile it again. So this is an auto compile. You can turn that on.
Yeah. Okay. And it nailed it. So it looks like it got it pretty much exactly. Just a small check. Check the details.
Oh yeah. Good enough for me. Yeah. It’s pretty good, but all right, we can see if it’ll get it right. Let’s say, the C vertex should be directly…
To your point about voice though, I do think maybe over time the code might recede into the background more as you’re really interacting with the paper.
When you started this product, how were you envisioning it would be used? Or were there other design choices you were considering that you didn’t take?
By the way, before you answer it, we have our general relativity lecture notes here, but that was quick. So 30 minutes, this is a — yeah — so 30 pages there, 30-minute section.
Okay. So we got curvature, covariant derivatives. This looks like a reasonable set of notes if you were going to go teach a class, right? It just did it for you.
Or you can think like, you know, generate the problem set for this week.
So it’s got some examples here. We could tell it to work out solutions to the examples. That’s sort of a hidden feature of LightTeX too, that it actually makes it pretty easy to generate problem sets with answer sheets and things like this.
There’s so many cool features of LightTeX that I think are underutilized.
So anyways, you could see we:
And that’s just basically all in parallel.
And you can imagine lots of other things you can do.
For example, if you have a proof and maybe just have the bullet points on a proof, you can say, “Here are the bullet points. Now flesh it out for me.”
You can imagine checking all of your references before you publish, making sure all of them are real and up to date. You can imagine having it generate your references based on the topic.
There are just so many areas where AI can help. That’s a big problem when you’re trying to put together a paper: get all the references right.
This is time that used to go to typing a paper, not science. And now it can go back to science.
And that’s just one of the ways that we look at accelerating scientists all over the world.
I would say definitely be careful about including references you haven’t read.
Like that’s the point: you can put a hundred references, but if you didn’t read them, you might as well not have them.
But yeah, I think that web connection is very important.
And like, is this stock GPT five or is this like a fine tune?
It’s GPT 5.2.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, and by the way, when you’re looking at references, you can also ask ChatGPT to help you understand the reference, you know, read this paper, tell me the relevance. So all of the things that you might want to do to accelerate your work, you can just do from within this interface.
You still have to do your work, but it should make it faster, especially like even linking to the references. So you can go and verify like, okay, this is this one. So this might also make it easier to write the paper as you do the work, right? Rather than, rather than, oh, okay. Now I got to spend two days in LaTeX land, like trying to get my paper.
Right. Like a tool for thought rather than just a publishing tool.
Yeah.
What about collaboration?
It’s great.
Yeah.
So it’s built for, I mean, you can speak to this. Well, it’s built for collaboration. So you can bring on as many collaborators as you want, which is nice. I think most other tools in the space have hard limits and charge you money and other things. In Prism, it’s as many collaborators as you want for free.
Commenting.
Yeah. So you’ve got commenting, you’ve got all the kind of collaboration tools that you would want.
Yeah.
Good.
And then any of the like engineering choices, like, you know, what might engineers not appreciate when just looking at a tool like this?
Often it would be like multi-line diff generation that you need to do because you’re editing a pretty complex document. It does get pretty complicated. I mean, we’re using, let me know if I’m getting too technical into the weeds, but, you know, we’re relying heavily on the Monaco JavaScript framework.
So that I’m very familiar with the lack of documentation of Monaco. That’s actually interesting you say that because it’s very true that it’s an extremely powerful library that is almost entirely undocumented.
Yeah. It’s just types. But you can use codecs now to generate the documentation for you.
Yeah. You think Microsoft should get on that.
But yeah, yeah.
You know, like just stuff like that. Like I like to hear about the behind the scenes of like building something like this.
I think initially one of the, one interesting challenges was that we really pushed on it being WebAssembly and fully just running in the browser at first, the whole entire LaTeX compilation. That did help us in the sense that we were able to flesh out the design and the AI capabilities early on without having to invest heavily in the backend infrastructure.
But eventually we did hit a wall with that approach. Once we switched it to a backend PDF rendering, that’s when we really started to hit an inflection point with usage.
Now fast.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think we also, the AI in here benefits a lot from everything that we’ve learned building codecs. And as we go forward, I think we’ll likely just integrate the full codecs harness into the application here.
So you get all the benefits of the tools and the skills and all the things that codecs can do today, and you just sort of automatically can bring that into your environment here.
Yeah.
Are they just the same app?
Maybe. I think potentially it depends on…
I mean, here’s the reason I’m hesitating: I think the interesting thing with this and with codecs is we’re still mostly in a world today where:
But the more that AI improves, people trust it and they’re just YOLOing it, right? You’re generating code and you’re looking at the code sort of secondary to instructing the AI and driving from that.
The UI probably changes for all of these things, right? You don’t need your document front and center because you’re actually not looking at your document as much. That’s sort of your backup and your interaction with your AI is primary.
And as that happens, I think you might see these UIs kind of converge over time. So we’ll see.
But I definitely would love to see a world where people needed to spend less time thinking about the actual syntax and much more about what they’re trying to create.
Yeah.
I feel like this plus a notebook would be amazing.
Yeah.
Because, because, and something that AI can run quite, run a analysis, generate plots. So stick that in the paper here. Like, “Oh, read, you know, like this paper, like this part of the paper, like take that equation and like, you know, do something with it.” That would be a really amazing integration.
Yeah. Like think through the different corollaries of this thing from this paper and produce some alternatives. And then like, yeah, I completely agree. Yeah. Yeah.
I do think that’s sort of the progression where it’s like doing, doing maybe work for a few seconds versus maybe we’re already at a point where it’s doing work for a few minutes, eventually doing work for hours, days, coming back with very complicated analysis.
Yeah. I mean, that, that’s actually maybe a good segue into some of the other questions that I had about your initiative.
I mean, so stepping back to AI for science in general, can you talk a little bit? I have a million questions, but maybe start with what I… okay. I feel that validation of AI for science is critical to its success, right? You have to have some sort of real world validation of the results that you produce with your AI, right?
So what are the, I know that there’s been some publicity in the past. What are the latest and greatest hits of the things that big labs or any lab is doing with open AIs?
I mean, when you step back and look at the trend, I think that’s the biggest thing. Because we can debate exactly – like you’ve probably seen in the last few weeks, even – there’ve been a bunch of different examples of like GPT 5.2 contributing to open research problems and things like that.
And then you get into this debate of:
And you know, that’s a legitimate discussion. But when you step back two years ago, we were like, you know, this thing can pass the SAT. That’s amazing. And then you progress to like, it can do a little bit of contest math and it can start to solve harder problems. Wow.
And then you keep going and it’s starting to solve graduate level problems. And then you have a model that gets a gold medal at the IMO. And now we’re sitting here talking about, you know, it solving open problems at the frontier of math and physics and biology and other fields.
So it’s just, I mean, the progression is incredible. And if you think about where we are today, then you fast forward six months, 12 months. I am very optimistic about what the models are going to be able to do to accelerate science.
Yeah. It’s like, it’s already happening. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from my like two-ish years at OpenAI, it’s:
“You go very quickly from this thing is just impossible for AI to do. Like it’s too hard. I can’t do it” to “Hey, I can just barely do it. And it kind of doesn’t work. Only early adopters are doing it because it’s not particularly reliable yet, but it sort of works,” to “Oh my God, AI does this thing really well. And I could never imagine not using AI for this in the future.”
It’s like, once you start to get to, you know, five, 10% on some particular eval, you very quickly go to like 60, 70, 80. And we’re just at the phase where AI can help in some — not all, but in some elements of frontier science, math, biology, chemistry, et cetera. And it just means we’re like right at the cusp and it’s super exciting.
So, I mean, fast forward a year or, you know, the end of the year, and we have AIs that can do a lot of this discovery process. Then the bottleneck becomes the wet lab or the lab, right?
Yeah. So what are you seeing in that domain?
Yeah. By the way, I totally — we were talking a little bit about software engineering before and the analogies. I think 2026 for AI and science is going to look a lot like what 2025 looked like for AI and software engineering.
Where if you go back to the beginning of 2025, if you were using AI heavily to write your code, you were sort of an early adopter and it kind of worked, but it certainly wasn’t like everybody was doing it. And then you fast forward 12 months and at the end of 2025, if you were not using AI to write a lot of your code, you’re probably falling behind. I think we’re going to see that same kind of progression in AI and science where, today it’s early adopters, but you’re really starting to see some proof points and solving open problems, developing new kinds of proteins and things like that.
But you’re right, as it really starts to work. I think this is the year that it’s really going to start to work. It shifts the bottleneck.
And I think we’re going to be starting to talk a lot more about robotic labs and other things. Like, do you need to have a grad student pipetting things? No, probably not. Right now you do, but why shouldn’t we have robotic labs where you have AI models doing what they do best—reasoning over a huge amount of different information.
They have read substantially every paper in every field and can bring a lot of information to bear to help prune the search tree on, for example, a new material that you’re trying to create. Then you have a robotic lab that can roll out a bunch of experiments in parallel, do them while we sleep, and feed the results back into the AI, let it learn from them, design the next set of experiments, and go.
So, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t even have to be yellow science, right? To your point, you’re verifying it as you go because you have an actual lab building it in real life. But you can just do so much more in parallel. You can think harder upfront with AI to design the experiments, prune the search tree, search over a smaller number of higher-value targets, then automate the experimentation and turn it around faster.
And again, like this is acceleration: if we’re successful, you end up doing maybe the next 25 years of science in five years instead. So in 2030, we could be doing 2050 level science, and that would be an awesome outcome. The world is a better place if that happens.
Absolutely. I guess we spoke recently with Heather Kulik at MIT, and one of the things she pointed out was that there’s an element of serendipity to working in a lab that you lose. She was of the opinion that there’s
So again, you’re at a bottleneck, but humans need something to do.
Well, what she said sounds totally reasonable to me. There are probably places where humans are adding no value because they’re literally just trying to pipette a certain amount of a thing and do another thing, or do some repeated motion in a bunch of different ways.
And then there are places where it’s less well understood. You want the full flexibility of a really smart human thinking about the work they’re doing.
By the way, the same is true in the more theoretical fields as well, where it’s not about automating all humans out of their jobs. This is about accelerating scientists. It’s scientists plus AI together being better than scientists alone or AI alone.
I think the same is true whether you’re talking about:
- something happening in silico proving a theoretical problem
- something happening in the real world with a lab
Find the parts that you don’t need a human to do and try to automate them as much as possible so the humans can spend their time on the most valuable things.
I’m very pro the in silico acceleration, because you have more control over that and you can parallelize, repeat, and do all those things.
I think there will be huge value because a lot of fields are heavily simulatable. For example, nuclear fusion runs a lot of simulations before experiments because experiments are very time-consuming and expensive.
But I’m excited to see what you can do when you have a loop between a very intelligent reasoning model that understands fusion and a simulation: the model thinks about what parameters to set, runs a bunch of simulations in parallel, feeds that back, and you have the same sort of lab loop—except it’s all in silico, running on a giant GPU cluster.
Then, when you’ve really gotten to the end of that calculation, you go run it IRL.
This is bringing it back to prism. This is sort of a nice aspect that you’re getting a more sophisticated view of your result, right? Instead of just, you know, like a chat output in it, I would hope as it develops, it’s a way for a scientist to be able to interact with the information before you kick off your nuclear fusion experiment for, you know, $10 million or whatever.
And the human can learn from more things, right? You just get more data that you can look at and evaluate. So, yeah.
So this, by the way, this fusion discussion makes me think like, you know, if one day opening after science, you know, it gets serious enough and starts to self-accelerate, you should solve cold fusion and, you know, be your own power source.
Well, I mean, this is why we’re so excited about this, right? I mean, imagine our mission is to bring AGI to the world in a way that’s beneficial to all of humanity.
It’s right there at the lobby. Yeah. It’s amazing. You see it every day you walk in, you see it. Yeah, absolutely.
And imagine, I mean, if we had GPT-9 inside of ChatGPT today, it would be awesome. You could do lots of things. But if you had GPT-9, which I’m using as a stand-in for AGI, and it could:
Like, that’s the real benefit of AGI. That’s, I think, maybe the most tangible way that we’re all going to feel AGI as it starts to be real.
Yeah. And that’s why this work is so mission-driven for us.
So, that brings up two questions in my mind:
Because this is how—though you laugh, it’s a little bit serious—all the AI for drug discovery companies ended up being drug companies because they couldn’t sell the drug, so far, with some exceptions now like Noetic, for example.
But they end up being drug companies because they can’t sell the drug. In any event, there’s a lot of precedence for using AI to basically build your own portfolio.
So, are you thinking about that angle or this is right now just about enabling scientists outside of OpenAI?
Yeah, I mean, my personal belief as we drive towards AGI is not that we’re going to create AGI and then all sit back and enjoy our universal basic income and write poetry. The future will involve, especially advanced science, experts helping to drive these models.
I don’t believe any one company is going to do everything. That’s why we’re focusing, first and foremost, on accelerating scientists outside of these walls. Our goal is not to win a Nobel Prize ourselves, it is for a hundred scientists to win Nobel Prizes using our technology.
Yeah.
At the same time, I think there are places where sometimes, when you’re building for other people, you learn best if you actually go end to end on something.
Yeah.
Because then you’re your own customer and you understand it in a tighter loop than you would if you were purely building for people outside the walls.
So, I think it makes sense for us to take a handful of bets like that, but by and large, we’re going to partner because the surface area of science is massive.
Yeah.
And we want to accelerate all of science.
Yeah.
We’re covering all sorts of disciplines from chemistry to structural biology to material science. It’s all over the place. There’s a lot to do.
One thing I did want to bring across also was that AI for Science sits within the broader research org at OpenAI. One of the more interesting things is like self-acceleration, let’s call it.
Where Jakub has very publicly declared that we’ll have an automated researcher by September 2026.
Yeah. The beginnings of one, I think you said, right? Like the intern version this year?
Right.
First product.
Yep.
And I’m sure you have more cooking internally, but why so soon? That’s eight months away. What’s the goal there? Anything you can share?
Yeah, I mean, eight months feels like forever in this industry. AGI by then? Basically infinite time.
I mean, no, it’s exactly what you said, right? It’s if we can create a a model, an AI researcher that can actually do novel AI research, then we can move way faster, right? We will self-accelerate. We can discover more things quickly. We can apply GPUs and compute to moving our own research faster. And that just means that we can improve our models at a faster rate.
And every bit that we improve our models means that we are a step closer to bringing AGI and all the things that we were talking about with personalized medicine and new materials. And, like, we can bring these amazing things into the world faster. So it is about self-acceleration.
Yeah.
I think one thing I’m most trying to figure out is how closely is machine learning research, which is a science, or high-performance compute, which is also something that you guys are doing a lot of, close to the traditional hard sciences, let’s call it, like physics and chemistry.
I think in a lot of ways it’s sort of a parallel effort to this. Like, it is the work that we’re trying to do with AI, OpenAI for Science, and accelerating other scientists. The parallel internally is they’re trying to build products and models for AI researchers to accelerate them.
So there’s a lot of sort of parallelism to these two work streams. They’re similar in goal, just for a different set of users.
Yeah.
Okay.
Any parting thoughts, questions, anything we should have asked?
Well, I hope everybody tries Prism. It’s available today at prism.openai.com. It’s totally free. You log in with your ChatGPT account, and you can go build anything you would like. We’re really excited to see what people use it for, and if you run into issues or have any feedback, let us know.
I have a paper I’m going to write really soon on that.
Amazing.
We’ll just show notes on this thing. I don’t know. Let’s see what it does in LaTeX.
Yeah. Totally.
Yeah.
Congrats on your first OpenAI launch.
There you go. Congratulations.
Congrats.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah.
Thank you.
2026-02-12 09:26:51
The Engineering State and the Lawyerly Society: Dan Wang on his new book “Breakneck”
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Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China.
In this program, we’ll look at:
that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s:
Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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Dan Wang has been on the Sinica Podcast a couple of times before, and I am delighted to have him back today.
He is one of the sharpest and most original observers of China’s technology sector and manufacturing landscape, having won a certain level of fame for his annual letters and other essays — writings that somehow managed to combine on-the-ground insights with big picture perspectives.
Dan has worked for Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing since 2017. After a stint with the Paul Tsai China Law Center at Yale, he’s now at the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
If you’ve seen the PBS Nova documentary “Inside China’s Tech Boom,” which I had the pleasure of narrating — it’s a film by David Borenstein — you’ve already encountered Dan. He was a featured voice helping to explain the deeper drivers behind China’s technological rise and talked eloquently, I thought, about the importance of process knowledge, of what the Greeks called metis, which is an important idea that’s really stayed with me and has become quite foundational to my understanding of China and the importance of manufacturing.
Today, we’re going to be talking about his new book, which comes out just about the time you’ll be listening to this. It’s called:
“Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”
It’s a book that posits — and here I’m greatly oversimplifying — that China is ruled by engineers and they do what engineers like to do: they build. America, on the other hand, is ruled by lawyers. It’s an engineering state on the one hand and a lawyerly society on the other.
Dan’s book is full of memorable witticisms and pithy, trenchant observations. Perhaps most importantly, it explores what each side might ideally learn from the other. They obviously each have their strengths and their weaknesses, so I’m really anxious to ask Dan about whether he thinks Americans are actually learning the right lessons or just burying their heads in the sand and inhaling big plumes of copium.
Before we jump in, I want to point out that this book was especially interesting for me as somebody whose abortive doctoral dissertation was specifically about the rise of this engineering state, about the… The emergence of technocrats in post-Mao China. So things might get a little in the weeds. I ask your forgiveness in advance and will do my best to keep it reasonably accessible.
Dan Wang, welcome back to Sinica and happy birthday, man.
Dan Wang: Thank you very much, Kaiser. And what better birthday present than to speak to old friends like this?
Dan Wang: Yeah, it’s great to have you.
We have to start with what, for me, was clearly the most important part of your entire book, which is that magical and totally improbable guitar-making hub in Guizhou that you stumbled upon as you and Christian Shepard from the Washington Post and another friend rode your bikes through that mountainous province toward Chongqing.
As a card-carrying guitar nerd, this totally blew my mind. I got to find this place. How does a little inland town end up just cranking out guitars for the whole world? I mean, is this just one of those serendipitous quirks of China’s industrial sprawl? Or is there something systematic in how the state, local governments, and entrepreneurial networks operate so that these clusters take root in the unlikeliest places?
And I guess more importantly, were there any of you guys who were guitar players? And if so, did you guys try out some of the local handiwork while you were there?
Kaiser, you’re much cooler than me. You are a guitar player. I am a clarinet player. And I think by coolness, that just really outranks me.
How indeed did kind of a third or fourth tier city in Guizhou become one of the great hubs of guitar making?
Well, in 2021, when I was stuck in China during the summer due to the success of the zero COVID strategy at the time, I asked two friends of mine,
“Hey, why don’t we go on a really long bike ride somewhere in the southwest, which I find the most beautiful part of China?”
Oh, for sure.
And so over five days, we cycled from Guiyang to Chongqing. It was four days in Guizhou, the province of Guizhou, and then until the fifth day when we reached Chongqing.
It was on our second or third day when we came across these giant guitar cymbals on the side of the road. So there were these guitars that were hanging off streetlights. There’s this giant guitar that was on a hill that was kind of this ornamental thing. And off in the distance, there was another big guitar that you could see on the town square.
And so we were very puzzled by this. We unfortunately didn’t stop to try out the handicraft. I’m pretty sure that neither Chris, Zheng, Tung, nor I are anything of real guitar players ourselves.
And afterwards, I went to find that Zhengan County in Guizhou is indeed the largest guitar-making hub in the world. I think it’s something like 30% of guitars in China is produced there. I have to get the exact figure right in my book.
And that happened due to a great accident in which a lot of folks in Guizhou were moving to Guangdong. In the 90s, Guangdong was making absolutely everything and anything. Some people were making guitars for export. And so a lot of people from Guizhou just happened to move to a particular guitar factory.
One of the things that we really found on our bike ride was when you’re going through China’s countryside, Tristan made this very astute observation that there are hardly any middle-aged or people in their 20s or 30s that you could find in Guizhou. It’s a lot of children being led with the grandparents. And that’s because anyone who is able to work has been moving over to the coastal areas where you could have a much better job producing guitars or whatever it is for export.
And something that the local government in Zhengan did was that it found that, well, there’s a lot of people making guitars here. Guitars are not really endemic to the local culture of people playing guitar. That’s not really a Guizhou thing. That’s not really necessarily a Chinese thing.
I’m working to change that, but yeah.
Well, you’re a big force, Kaiser. Maybe we can change that. But it just attracted a lot of people to try to say,
“Hey, why don’t you move back home to Guizhou? You can make a lot of guitars here.”
And somehow that strategy worked. And so a lot of people moved back to Guizhou from Guangdong, and now they’re producing guitars mostly on the lower end.
So this is not the sort of things that will be sold in, I think, the high-end guitar shops that you would probably frequent, Kaiser. But there is some innovation here, and I expect that they will get better and better.
Yeah. I mean, it’s amazing how good quality the Chinese guitars have. I mean, it’s astonishing. And all of the major brands are actually making a lot of their guitars in China now.
Yeah. No, that’d be great. You can pedal there. Right. Yeah. No, I’m not going to do that.
But yeah, was the enticements just the usual package of tax incentives, of steeply discounted infrastructure promises of raw materials? What do they do to entice people to a place like that? What do they typically do?
I think the typical enticement is:
A lot of folks in Guizhou, folks in the Southwest can’t necessarily love the Southeast and Guangdong where they were working. It’s too humid. They might say, “we don’t love the Cantonese food. Where’s all the spices? Where’s all the pickles? Where is the really pungent flavors that folks in Guizhou are used to?”
And so this coincided with sort of this rural revitalization program that Beijing has emphasized for quite a while now. And so I think it is just this big happy accident that I would say a pretty random place in Guizhou is just making so many guitars now.
Awesome. Dan, I know you’re going to end up on every major podcast talking about this book, so I want to avoid just asking you about the main themes or going through chapter by chapter. Instead, I was hoping that we could use the main themes of the book as kind of a jumping-off point to explore a lot of the questions that popped into my head as I read it, questions I’m sure you’ve thought about as well. Not necessarily things that made their way into the pages of the book itself, but let me start here.
I mean, we can all rattle off the obvious differences between an engineering state and a lawyerly society. You got speed versus procedure, certain social orderliness versus the chaos of pure market forces. But what are some of the more subtle trade-offs, the ones that most people don’t even know that they’re making that maybe shape daily life in each system? I’m thinking predictability, dignity, moral legitimacy. I mean, which of these things matters to people who live inside each system?
Yeah. Well, I want to push you a little bit on this, Kaiser. I wonder which is the system that delivers legitimacy. I could posit that the lawyerly society has some degree of legitimacy because there are some procedures in place that people expect that rules have to be followed, and maybe the lawyers are better at following the rules.
On the other hand, the Communist Party, I think, would say, well, we have much greater legitimacy. We have this, what is that term, whole process, substantive democracy, in which we are delivering much better things for the people. So I think legitimacy is a concept here that we can play around a little bit with.
What I’ll say is that the engineering state, I think I came onto this framework in part due to these excellent articles I found in 2001, I believe, that was written by an interesting analyst at the time called Kaiser Kuo, who pointed out that there were quite a lot of engineers that were being promoted into the Central Committee and the Politburo.
And I think there has been quite a lot of discussion since 2002, which is the really striking year when every member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, notably Hu Jintao, as well as Wen Jiabao, had degrees in engineering.
Of course this was a really striking fact for a lot of people.
I think there has also been this kind of view and understanding that America is very lawyerly and that the government is of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers.
And so what I wanted to add onto this kind of general understanding that was in the air, so to speak, was that I felt like I really experienced the merits and the madness of the engineering state by living there from 2017 to 2023.
I was in China at a time when a lot of things were getting a lot better. The high-speed rail system had really come into fruition at that time. People were no longer shoving each other around to get in line. The system felt quite rational and well-organized.
Shanghai is a marvelously functional city where one is never really more than 15 or 20 minutes away from a subway stop. Shanghai was building all sorts of parks. It built about 500 parks by the year 2020. By the end of this year, the city targets that it will have a thousand parks. Shanghai is just this remarkably well-functional, livable place.
And so that was something that I really experienced by living there. But Shanghai is also infamously the city that suffered perhaps the worst lockdown ever. In the history of humanity, in which 25 million people were unable to leave their apartment compounds for about eight to ten weeks over the course of the spring in 2022. And so that was something that I felt very ethically myself.
When I moved to the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, really being embedded in one of these most elite, elite-making institutions in the United States, really seeing that the US is run by lawyers, seeing how the Biden administration at that time had been really, really lawyerly. About 11 out of 15 cabinet members in Joe Biden’s administration had gone to law school. Many prominent folks went to Yale Law in particular.
That was sort of what I wanted to add, that this was something I lived and felt in both places.
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll talk a little bit about this idea of performance legitimacy down the road here. But so I want to dig into sort of maybe philosophical underpinnings of this contrast that you highlight.
In the West, we often reach for the trolley problem as a kind of shorthand for thinking about moral tradeoffs.
I mean, do you pull that lever to sacrifice one life in order to save five? I’ve often wondered how this dilemma looks different through the lens, you know, like the one that you’ve drawn, whether it looks different between an engineering state and a lawyerly society.
I would imagine an engineering-oriented society be more inclined to treat this as kind of a technical optimization problem. You just kind of minimize total loss, while a maybe more lawyerly society would insist on:
Kind of, you know, a utilitarian versus a deontological philosophical orientation.
Maybe that points to a deeper distinction. I mean, do these orientations that you’ve described, do they line up with the classic contrast between communitarian or group-oriented values on the one hand and on individualistic ones on the other?
Yeah. I think that’s actually a pretty fascinating question. I wonder if there is a systematically different way that Chinese tackle the trolley problem in a way that is pretty distinct from the way that Westerners think about the trolley problem.
I think the level that I was thinking a little bit more about was that I think part of the reason I wanted to come up with this framework of engineers and lawyers is that I think we’ve been reasoning about the US-China conflict in these 20th century terms like:
And all of these terms have some use, but I’m not really sure that they still really apply in very nice ways now.
You know, are we going to say that something like, is China fundamentally left-wing or right-wing? Well, I can make arguments on both sides. Is the US fundamentally more left-wing or right-wing? Again, this is something that we can debate and I’m not sure how far exactly we get up to these sort of frameworks.
And so the framework that I came up with of the engineering state and the lawyerly society, I would submit is just no worse than trying to figure out exactly to what extent China is Marxist today.
You know, I don’t think that Marxism is quite the right lens to try to understand the people’s republic. Maybe it is, but I think this is what we need to do is to have a plurality of frameworks here.
Maybe we should have something like the discussion of:
We just need to have more than one framework really to think about the great conflict of the moment.
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And that’s what I really like about this particular framework is it takes us beyond these sort of binaries of ideology, you know, China being just such an incredibly syncretic society that blends so many aspects.
But the one thing that I think it all circles around is this technocratic policy, and I think it feels like, to me, a very, very good explanatory lens. So I applaud that.
I’ve often used a concept I kind of borrow from economics when I think about what a society values. And that’s, you know, the concept of elasticity.
You know, I imagine that in every society, individuals have kind of an intuitive sense. I don’t think they have it mapped out really explicitly, but, you know, how much of one thing that they value, they’d be willing to give up to gain some amount of something else that they value.
You can, you know, kind of almost put numbers to it.
I'll trade you three points of administrative efficiency to get one point of procedural fairness, right?
Or I'll trade you two points of transparency for one point of speed.
I mean, it seems to me like for decades, Americans’ coefficient of elasticity has been really, really rigid. They’ve been very unwilling to trade down in civil and political rights for even for, you know, pretty markedly… Improved economic outcomes. But I mean, it’s my sense, Dan, I’m wondering if you agree that lately, because of China’s example in manufacturing strength, in infrastructure, in its energy build-out, in the energy transition, in education, in STEM education especially, I feel like there’s a shift happening and this is happening. And I think you note this, it’s both on the right and the left, in America, like within MAGA and among also, say the abundance bros, right? You know, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein and those guys, more Americans seem willing to accept some erosion in rights or process in exchange for what they believe are better material outcomes.
Do you think that that coefficient is changing? And if it is, does it change the way that you think about the lawyerly versus engineering states, especially if we start seeing each side borrowing from the other’s value hierarchy?
Well, there’s certainly a lot of borrowing between the U.S. and China at the moment. But I’m not sure that they’re borrowing all the right things.
Yeah. That’s the big issue. Are they?
Well, I think what we are seeing with the Trump administration is a lot of authoritarianism without the good stuff—good stuff like functional subways, better transport infrastructure, and better infrastructure generally. I think you’re very right to point out that there is a sense of deep dissatisfaction in the U.S. I mean, that is always true everywhere at all times, but I think there is an especially big sense at the moment that the U.S. has not been very functional for quite a long while.
The U.S. has not been very functional because especially in the bigger cities, where things are just far too expensive. If we’re thinking about cities like New York, Boston, or San Francisco, housing prices are really unaffordable for too many people. These are cities that try to build new infrastructure—mass transit—and basically don’t do a very good job of it.
You know, I was really struck that it’s not just that New York is unable to build new subway stations and new subway lines with any sort of efficiency; it costs about $2 billion per mile to build a new mile of subway in New York City. They’re not even doing simpler stuff very well.
And so this is the sort of thing that looks kind of ridiculous. Why does it take several years to upgrade a bus station? I realize that’s kind of a complex structure. There are all sorts of intricacies with the tunnels, but still this is fundamentally a bus station that shouldn’t take more than five years to build out.
So, you know, we have broken mass transit. We have unaffordable housing. The pandemic revealed that the U.S. isn’t able to manufacture a lot of pretty basic goods. There were shortages of masks and cotton swabs. There were shortages of furniture, all sorts of simple consumer goods that weren’t easily exportable from China at the time.
And so there is a pretty big sense that nothing is working when we have to face this critical transition to decarbonize the economy and to build a lot more solar, wind, transmission lines, which all demand quite a lot of land.
And so I think I wonder if there is the case that the U.S. has even made a conscious decision to try to erode some of the elasticity of the proceduralism. Because I think one of my arguments in the book is that the proceduralism has encrusted itself throughout a long period of time without anyone’s real intention to create a lot of processes everywhere throughout the American government.
This is sort of a force that kind of took a life of its own. And this was something that a lot of homeowners and especially the NIMBY set exploited, I would say, to block new housing in Berkeley for students, to block a solar or a wind project as well as their transmission grids. This became something that richer people were able to access and exploit to block projects that they didn’t like.
And that isn’t even really a majoritarian demand for greater proceduralism. This was kind of an independent life force that grew upon itself and has a very vested interest of minoritarians that are really vested in trying to keep that system so they are able to block a new apartment building if it takes them with their light away, for example.
You know, you work to be very fair in the book and that’s something I really like about it. I mean, you don’t just heap praise though on the engineering state. You make a point of calling out the downsides. And they’re very real. Can we talk about some of those? What the problems are of the engineering state? What does it get wrong? You sort of channel the James Scott scene like a state thing and a lot of the excesses of that thinking.
There’s two chapters in particular of your book that really dwell on this. And they are about, of course, the one-child policy, which is a conspicuous failure of the engineering state mentality and also the zero COVID policy, which starts off as sort of a triumph, not right away, right? It, I guess, displays some of the pathologies of it, but by the spring of 2020 you see this V-shaped recovery. You see China really use its state capacity to wrangle the COVID epidemic.
But then of course, you talk quite a bit about the lockdown. So, talk a little bit about what some of the major downsides are. I think the engineering state has major upsides.
Um, so to be clear, I really want to articulate that the speed of construction of new housing in China, new roads, tall bridges, subway systems, nuclear, all sorts of construction in China, I would say is net positive. You could go to Guizhou as I did, look at these really tall bridges. It is pretty easy to say, well, this is a bridge to nowhere, but I think it is also true that a bridge to nowhere quickly turns nowhere into two somewheres at the ends of these bridges.
If you take a look at China’s major infrastructure, I would say that on net, it’s been extremely positive, that the benefits have way, way, way exceeded the costs.
Now, I would say that there have certainly been some costs:
But in spite of these costs — human, environmental, financial — I would still say that the benefits of infrastructure way exceeded the downsides of so much frenetic construction.
When I say that you talk about downsides, I don’t mean to suggest that you present a kind of moral equivalence between the systems. It’s pretty clear that you believe one side needs to learn more from the other right now.
It’s pretty clear where you think the osmotic gradient should flow.
The problem, I think, is that the Chinese leadership is not only physical engineers. They’re also fundamentally social engineers, and they cannot stop themselves from treating the population as just another building material to be remolded or torn down as the circumstances demand.
And so I think we can point to a lot of social engineering projects in China and we can point to the repression of ethno-religious minorities in Tibet as well as Xinjiang. Even with the Han majority, people have lived for a long while with the hukou system, which is not even fully abolished yet, in which it becomes really difficult for a migrant worker to move to Beijing or Shanghai and access educational facilities for her child.
What I really decided to focus on were these two big projects that you mentioned:
And I think you’re really right to point out that zero COVID follows an arc that isn’t very straightforward.
I think the first act of this big dramatic arc of zero COVID was the spring of 2020, or even earlier in the winter of 2020, when I was living in Beijing and we heard about this new pneumonia that was spreading through Wuhan.
And when we saw the Wuhan lockdown, which was in January, I believe January 23rd, you have these sort of dates that are emblazoned in your mind if you lived through the pandemic in China.
Wuhan lockdown, hearing the stories of the ophthalmologist, Dr. Li Wenliang, who raised valid concerns and was disciplined by the state for raising these sort of concerns, created a lot of anger among pretty much everyone I knew that there was yet another respiratory virus that was spreading from China.
This is the second one after 20 years with the first SARS crisis.
There had been some political suppression of bad news up until the state really tried to react and try to tamp it down. A big way. And so that was the great first act when a lot of commentators from the U.S. and parts of the West were sometimes even gleefully saying that this might be China’s Chernobyl moment in which a disaster triggers the political downfall of the entire regime. And so that was the first act.
And then the second act proved a lot of that wrong. So the second act of China’s COVID experience was the much longer time period when Beijing, Shanghai, central government, local governments proved that China was able to control the virus much more effectively than the U.S. can or much of the West could. And so the second act was people in China feeling relatively glad that they were living in China and able to be free of transmissions, able to carry on life relatively normally.
There were some costs. I wasn’t able to see my parents who were in Pennsylvania. My parents were telling me this very un-Chinese thing, which is to say,
“Stay there. Don’t come to visit us. Trump’s America in 2020 is a terrible mess. So, you should just stay in China where life is a lot better.”
They weren’t wrong. They weren’t wrong at the time.
But then there was the third act of China’s COVID experience. That third act was triggered by the much more transmissible Omicron variant of the virus, which overcame a lot of vaccines and was just extraordinarily transmissible. That was really the variant of the virus that forced Shanghai to go into lockdown for about eight weeks in the spring of 2022 when people could only go downstairs to their apartment compounds to have their noses and their throats swabbed. Otherwise, you couldn’t really go outside even for any sort of fresh air.
And so this was a time that drove a lot of people crazy. This was a time when a lot of families were suffering some degree of food insecurity because the Shanghai government had no logistical capacity to really try to deliver food to a lot of families. I knew a lot of families where the parents really tried to reduce their food intake so that they could save some food for their kids.
The food shortages resolved after, I believe, something like the second week of April. But, you know, this was something that was pretty extraordinary—that people were feeling food insecure in China’s largest city in the year 2022. That was really surprising.
And then the great denouement of the great dramatic act of China’s COVID experience was when in 2022’s December, Beijing decided to drop all COVID restrictions in the coldest month of the year, when people had very few fever reducers in stock to meet this great ending of the pandemic when zero COVID kind of became total COVID.
And so in Shanghai, I caught COVID around December 22nd, when I think everybody else was catching COVID at around the same time. So luckily, I had quite a fine experience with all of these things. But there were a lot of folks in Shanghai who didn’t have a very good time getting COVID at that point.
And so, you know, this is where the engineering state is pretty ambiguous, I think, in terms of its effect. So sometimes it looks pretty good that it was able to follow WHO recommendations and control the virus until it then collapsed under its own weight.
So the evidence here is pretty ambiguous, I would say.
Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, at the same time, I worry that there’s a certain type of American copium smoker who is taking these failures of the engineering state, assuming them to be inevitable consequences of adopting the sorts of things that you would like them to say. And, you know, they’re telling themselves these sort of self-soothing daily affirmations, like:
So, you know, actually, America is doing great. Thank you very much.
Yeah, I wonder.
I think I absolutely agree with you that the mood in the U.S. especially fluctuates way too wildly for what the situation actually is.
I remember at the end of 2022, there was just excessive triumphalism in the U.S. because China ended its zero COVID program in this horrible collapse in which a lot of people died and the state suppressed all of this data.
Russia then wasn’t doing very well in its fight against Ukraine. And so it looked like Ukraine was also winning against autocracy.
And the end of 2022 was also the years when it seemed like the U.S. had these great technological breakthroughs,
and the autocracies simply didn’t have these technologies in place.
And so the views have shifted quite a lot. And these views go up and down, I think, a little bit too wildly given the state of… The evidence. And one of the things that I’m always trying to say, you know, when I was at China, now when I’m at the Hoover Institution is always that this is going to be a really long struggle between the U.S. and China. This conflict, these tensions will go on for a very long time. I don’t think that it is anything like a static picture in which one country is winning and they will have any sort of a decisive advantage. I think that the struggle will take place over a very long time.
And there’s not going to be any scenario in which one country simply disappears off the face of the earth. That is a fantasy. And I think it is also a fantasy to imagine that either country will collapse and never get back on its feet. I think that both countries are going to be winning and losing. And when they’re winning, they’re going to be making a lot of mistakes. When they’re losing, they’re going to try to catch up. And that’s just going to be a dynamic process over the next few decades.
Do you agree?
I do agree. I think the language of existential threat and the framing of zero sum is foolish when you see it on either side. Let me get to the things that we ought to be, we as Americans ought to be learning from China. One of the things that you really emphasize is process knowledge. I mentioned that in the introduction. For you, is that primarily a cultural asset? That is the status of engineers, the kind of tolerance for iteration. Is it a firm level capability, having long patient capital, kind of shop floor autonomy? Or for you, is it kind of a policy environment with permitting and procurement and standards at the fore?
Where would you intervene first, in other words, to sort of rebuild process knowledge in the United States where it’s so sorely lacking?
I think it is all of the above, Kaiser, that it is cultural, it is policy driven, it is a matter of economics. So I think the most important thing to grasp about technology is not the actual physical instruments or tools that we can see, anything like a robotic arm. It’s also not a recipe or a blueprint or a patent, any sort of knowledge that’s really easy to write down.
I think the most important part of technology has to be the process knowledge, which is all of this meta and tacit knowledge that exists more on a population level. And so this is something that various hubs of knowledge production have been able to recreate in the past.
You know, at the start of the industrial revolution in the UK, there was just a lot of knowledge about how to build textiles in order and how to build engines.
Right.
When that moved from Britain to Germany, Germany had a lot of process knowledge about how to do interesting new fields like electrical engineering, as well as chemistry. And that has moved from country to country. The US has been a major industrial leader on something like automotives, on something like semiconductors in the past.
And right now, a lot of process knowledge with manufacturing is being built and activated and grown in China, where you could be a worker in Shenzhen, making iPhones in the first year, being poached to make Huawei phones the second year, then making a DJI drone the third year, and then making a CATL electric vehicle battery the fourth year.
And so there’s just so much knowledge that can’t be written down with technology that is necessary for the production of a lot of different goods.
So I think this is one of these things that the US didn’t sufficiently appreciate when a lot of corporates did offshore a lot of jobs to China. I want to be clear that a lot of the manufacturing job losses in the US have been triggered by automation and technological change, not so much by offshoring, but something like 10% of the manufacturing change is created by offshoring.
And one of these things that I wonder about is if Apple didn’t build all of its iPhones in Shenzhen, and rather built it in, let’s say:
What if all of that knowledge involved in building hardware was actually in the industrial Midwest in the US as well? Could it be that Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio are actually major producers of:
that is present in Shenzhen as well?
And so this is one of these things that I think has been critically understated in the US that has been driven by an excessively financial profit-driven model that didn’t account for all of the most important things with process knowledge.
Right. I mean, this possibility, this hypothetical that you float of an Apple producing in Cleveland, that seems to place a little too much of the onus on Apple. It’s not as though that decision could have been undertaken in a vacuum. There were other factors that it had to consider rather than just simply the cost of labor. It was, as you say, you know, there was a policy… Environment. You know, there are other reasons they chose not to do that. And surely you would agree that it’s not just on Apple.
Absolutely. I think that the infrastructure wasn’t in place. The costs were much, much lower in the past. And so these are all real.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you, when you talk about, when I asked you about process knowledge and, you know, whether it’s a cultural asset or a firm-level capability or policy environment thing, you said all of the above. I mean, that reminds you of something that you wrote recently. You just published in Foreign Affairs with your former boss, Arthur Kroeber, who is, by the way, one of the people in the China space who I just admire the most.
You guys wrote that, you know, China has taken in all of the above technology strategy. What would you include as the pieces of that strategy that perhaps people are less aware of?
I think that people know, you know, big pieces of it, but some of it, I think there is still a gap in our understanding of how China did this. What would you identify?
Arthur and I wrote that piece in Foreign Affairs called The Real China Model, in part to try to rebut the sense that China has succeeded technologically simply because it has stolen all the IP from the US. And so, you know, I, one of my favorite boogeymen is this tweet by Senator Tom Cotton, which he tweeted on World IP Day,
“China doesn’t innovate, it only steals.”
I think that is a flagrantly wrong presumption that I think we just need to discard because it is not helping us understand China any better.
There’s also this view out there that China succeeded simply by subsidizing its way into technological leadership. I think that’s not wrong, but I think it is woefully incomplete to say that the Chinese have been able to make central planning work and been able to select winners. I think they haven’t had a terrific track record on that.
What we point out in this piece is that China has actually built a lot of what we call deep infrastructure to be able to have its success.
Now, deep infrastructure goes beyond traditional infrastructure where China is superb — of trains and ports and highways to move goods around. What we point out are three big things:
Yeah, you noted, I mean, I think just to throw one stat, that China’s total electricity output is greater than the United States and the EU combined, and every year it adds another Britain’s worth of electrical production.
That’s right. Chinese people are on smartphones constantly, maybe even a little bit too much. And the Communist Party is very much in charge.
And so when you marry these three pieces of deep infrastructure —
- power
- connectivity
- process knowledge
— to the fierce dynamism among Chinese entrepreneurs who are really competitive in trying to build interesting new projects, build more cheaply than the other guy, not necessarily achieving a lot of profit, but creating new and worthwhile products, when you marry all of these things together, I think it is no surprise that China has become the technological superpower that it is today.
There are some elements of technology theft from the West. There is an obvious element of the state trying to pick winners, subsidizing all of these things.
What we can acknowledge is that China has both a strong state as well as strong entrepreneurs that have built a lot of these technological achievements.
Dan, I’ve often remarked on how China in the 21st century is a much less technophobic or techno-pessimistic society than America is today. You can see it in survey research on attitudes toward things like AI. But I mean, anyone who’s lived in China and the US, as both you and I have, we know this intuitively, right? Just in the posture that people have toward technology.
I mean, so years ago, I interviewed a philosopher named Anna Greenspan about a book that she wrote.
Called Shanghai Future, one I highly recommend.
Me too.
You’ve read this?
Yes, I’m a big admirer of Anna’s work.
Yeah, she’s great. So you remember, she talked about this big difference in attitudes toward futurity in the US and China. I’ve come to use kind of shorthand that I like. China is still in its Star Trek phase and the US is in its Black Mirror phase, right?
So the question I have for you is, what is the causal direction, if indeed you see any causality at work here, between China’s technocratic engineer-dominated polity and its technophilic society? Does the technocracy create the technophilia or does the technophilia create the technocracy?
I think that the technocracy creates the technophilia. I’m willing to change my mind on this, but I think it is definitely the case that China’s leadership uses mega projects, big prestige projects, really to try to rally the population into doing something better. And I think there are some ways in which this could be a little bit insidious.
One theory that I’ve come across is that one of the reasons that Li Peng, the premier throughout the 1990s, was so heavily invested in the Three Gorges Dam was in part to try to distract from his own image as what the Western media labeled as “the butcher of Beijing” for having ordered the Tiananmen crackdowns.
And so the Chinese government decided that it is going to try to build its way out of this political crisis of 1989 and to really invest in a lot of technology here. There should be a forthcoming book about this. And so once that book is out, maybe we can point to it.
I think it is definitely the case that the Chinese government loves pointing at pictures of great infrastructure. You can’t open an issue of Tioshe, which I was fervently reading when I was living in China, without coming across some amazing new bridge that the government has built, some great new port, which always looks very telegenic, or some speeding high-speed rail going through the countryside.
And so they definitely love to create these sort of images. There is a sense, I think, in which the Chinese government really likes to promote these big novels like Wandering Earth, which has been adapted into a film, and Three-Body Problem, in which there is kind of this emphasis on a world government that is entirely run by engineers working together to overcome a great threat to humanity.
That is, I think, a common theme to Liu Cixin. I think he is one of these progenitors of the engineering state’s mindset.
Right. Of the so-called Industrial Party, the Gongyedang.
That’s right. It’s sort of the Ur text of the Gongyedang.
And I spent a lot of time talking about the Gongyedang in my chapter on tech power.
Right.
And I think the contrast is with the United States, which has had a pretty major tech clash. I think we saw a lot of skepticism of social media, especially after 2017. There right now is still a lot of worries about what smartphones are doing to young people, what social media is doing to young people, what AI might be doing to all of us.
That is all real. And that strain is less present in China, I think, in part because the state loves to create new engineering projects, and in part because I think the Chinese have naturally been more optimistic over the last 40 years than Americans have because they’ve seen their lives improve in such obvious ways.
In lockstep with the improvement of technology. So yeah, it’s reinforcing, right?
And I wonder to what extent the Chinese government might actually be actively censoring some of these views. There has been extensive censorship of opposition to the Three Gorges Dam. And there may even now be some censorship to the big new dam that is being built in Tibet as well.
And so I think there is, on the one hand, the leadership itself is technophilic and trying to engineer their way out of every problem. On the other hand, they may also be censoring some of the perhaps merited, humanistic, critical backlash against what technologies are doing to us.
I want to get into how maybe the technophilia has enabled the technocracy in just a little bit, but because I do think there’s a little bit of bidirectional causality here.
But I want to first ask you whether you think that things like the fact that so many of the leaders are themselves engineers, it sets up a ladder of success, right? I mean, where high status and access to resources and power are kind of enabled by technical, technological prowess, right? So it sets up an incentive system.
So if you are a parent, you’re raising children, you’re going to want to push your children into STEM education. And that itself kind of reinforces that technophilia in society, you know, to your point.
I feel like that’s a big piece of it. Have you given much thought to that as well, to the sort of social forces that work in reinforcing technocratic politics? I think there is definitely a sense that Chinese parents prefer that their kids study STEM degrees. And that is definitely much more obvious that many more Chinese kids are studying math relative to American kids, which I think is a shame. Many more Americans need to be much, much better than the pathetic math capabilities that they presently possess through a lackluster education focused on STEM. I think that should definitely be the case.
So Vivek Ramaswamy was right. Maybe Vivek was right. The issue, I think, is that the slight wrinkle that I would present to you, Kaiser, is I wonder if it is the case that though parents encourage kids to study STEM, they’re not necessarily encouraging the kids to become engineers.
I think the allure of working in tech and consumer internet, especially for one of these big, prestigious firms like
is still much more alluring than working as an engineer. Maybe it is so much more alluring to work in the financial sector rather than in some sort of a technical engineering field, in part because they pay so much better. And so I think the kids are still facing the same tug of incentives that smart kids in the U.S. also feel in being drawn to Silicon Valley as well as Wall Street.
And something else I wonder about, I’m really curious for your take on this, Kaiser. You’ve been spending a little bit more time in China than I have over the last few years. But I was in China in December of 2024. And one of these things that I become really cranky and annoyed by is just how much people are on their phones all the time.
So people are texting other folks over the middle of a dinner. You know, you can see over a hot pot and a hot pot restaurant, many people are just on their phones instead of speaking to their dinner companions. Every trendy cafe shop is better photographed rather than a place to sit and have coffee with other people.
Maybe I’m just getting too old and cranky here, Kaiser. Maybe you can talk me into, you know, being a little bit more sympathetic.
No, you’re only going to hear the same crankiness from me. I mean, it’s something I freaking hate. And I’m also probably guilty of it. I mean, I find myself just having that tug. I mean, I can’t even conceive of taking a subway ride without having my headphones. I’ll walk three blocks back to my apartment if I’ve forgotten my headphones. Yeah, I’m terrible about it. But yeah, this is like the plight of modern homo sapiens. It’s not just a China or America thing. I see it in the States almost just as bad.
But yeah, I mean, I’ve remarked on this before. I used to, you know, you’re standing on the sidelines of a soccer game and you turned another parent of one of your kids’ classmates and you say,
“What are you doing about juniors’ screen time?”
And they’re too busy on their own damn phone to even hear your question. And yeah, it’s a problem.
It’s a problem. I wonder if it might be slightly worse in China because everything has to be turned into a Wang Hong spot and everything has to be photographed as well.
Oh, Christ. Yeah. I mean, I was in Shaxi in Yunnan and it’s becoming that way, you know, because Li Weifei shot a television show called
“Chiou Fung Le Di Phang”
and everyone has to, you know, like have their picture taken where she was and where that scene was shot. Christ.
Maybe let’s check our crankiness and get back to some techno-optimism.
Yeah. You know, actually, I want to dig into history here. I mean, you don’t explore this so much in the book, but I’m sure you’ve given us a lot of thought, which is, you know, the question of what gave rise to the engineering state in China?
I mean, when do we start to see it emerge? Was it a deliberate policy choice or something that just sort of happened? I mean, because this is something I explored quite a bit in my own work as a graduate student I mentioned in the intro and that you so kindly name-checked. I was really inspired to write on this question because by the early nineties, when I was doing this work, it was already, you know, China was already so thoroughly technocratic.
It was already so dominated by engineers. It hadn’t even peaked yet, but already you could see it. I mean, there were already books about this, but like Lee Chung, who’s now at HKU, Lynn White of Princeton, they did a lot of work on, on technocracy. But what struck me was that it had become so technocratic, but somehow it had gone unremarked upon in China itself.
There were foreigners who were looking at this fact and marveling at it, but it was in China itself. It was like, “yeah, of course.”
I wonder if there’s something deeper in China’s history, maybe the imperial civil service examination system, or this, you know, oriental despotism idea of Karl Wittfogel in his hydraulic theory of civilization. You know, he posits that… The technical demands of water management in China created both the opportunity and the necessity for centralized political control. So you have engineers sort of running the state. These were the things that I was exploring and I was wondering what you think about this. What are the historical and maybe cultural roots of the engineering state?
Yeah, I think there are definitely deeper roots in both the engineering state as well as the lawyerly society. That was my next question.
The part of America being very lawyerly, you can read the Declaration of Independence as almost a legal document. So many of the founding fathers were lawyers: first 16 U.S. presidents from Washington to Lincoln—13 of them have been lawyers at some point. And so in the U.S. there is definitely this very obvious legal tradition.
And I think that you can say the same about China as well. I don’t want to take this too literally. I think the work of Karl Wittfogel on oriental hydraulic despotism was a product of the time. He was this strange cold warrior that was trying to discredit the Soviet Union. I don’t refer to Wittfogel at all in my book. But I am definitely a big fan of the work on the clergy system. In particular, Professor Huang Yashun’s book, The Rise and Fall of the East. What is it? Examination.
The Rise and Fall of the East. Examination, autocracy, science and technology. That might be right. We have to fact-check that one. But I think the examination system is very real.
And so I do want to trace a lineage of the engineering state to imperial times. Without being too literal about this, but one might be able to say that imperial China was a proto-engineering state in part because the emperors ordered so many people to build Great Walls or Grand Canals.
So many people died trying to build this canal. The historical records here may be exaggerating some things, but so many people were supposed to have fallen in the course of building this Grand Canal. One might be able to say that the emperors rarely hesitated to almost completely reorder a peasant’s relationship to her land. So there was some social engineering here as well.
Again, I don’t want to be too literal to say that the emperors were straightforwardly engineers, but I think one can trace the sort of lineage because of the state’s management of the imperial exam or the Keji system.
And I think one of these differences I want to trace between the West and China is that I think the Chinese were practicing a source of a sense of absolutism starting from the first Qin dynasty with Qin Shi Huang, in which the state really tried to control quite a lot of things.
This is someone that we label today in China as a despot who buried the scholars and standardized the weights. And so there’s this sense of autocracy stretching back for about 2,000 years now. The Chinese had been practicing absolutism way before the European monarchs ever whiffed this idea in the 17th and 18th centuries.
And so one of my ideas here is that one of the reasons, perhaps, that China did not develop a liberal tradition was that the court administered the exams, which was how one became an intellectual in the first place. And so it becomes really difficult for an intellectual to become a court intellectual by advocating for constraints on the power of the emperor. So mostly all of the mandarins were encouraged to just say,
“How do we govern better? How do we increase the discretion of the sovereign?”
You don’t really get very far by saying,
“Well, what we need is some sort of property rights. What we need is to protect the business people.”
You never really quite had that. And so you didn’t have as vibrant a sense of a liberal intellectual tradition emerging out of China. Rather, that was much more of an absolute sense of trying to increase the power of the sovereign.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you’ve put your finger on it right there. This cooptation of the entire literati class just by making their advancement contingent on their support for a state orthodoxy.
Right. And I think we see parallels to that today in the Communist Party. I actually think that, I mean, I could spend a lot of time talking about this, but that there’s always been this sort of privileging of knowledge elites. And that assumes, of course, that there’s some objective knowledge in the universe against which you can be tested.
So I mean, at all points, there is this sort of a paradigm of what is true. And there is some canonical set of texts. They could be the Confucian classics or they could be, you know, engineering texts. And if you have demonstrable knowledge of that, somehow that qualifies you for office. I mean, that seems to be sort of the common… Thread. Yeah. So something that I, so, you know, the U.S. obsession with process, in its best form, protects the weak, which is really good. But, as we’ve discussed, it can impede the provision of public goods, the building of infrastructure that can really hurt the weak.
So China’s obsession with outcomes often lifts the many, but can screw the few or occasionally, as in the case of the one-child policy and zero COVID, which you talked about, it can screw the many as well.
So I guess the big question is, how do you build or design institutions that kind of somehow bind outcomes to rights? That is, build fast without trampling people. And what are the kinds of small practical reforms that can move either system in that direction?
Maybe we can start with China. What are some ways where these institutions can be bound up more in rights? And then we can move to the U.S. because you’re very hard on U.S. proceduralism. You’re very generous about its civic function, but maybe we could talk a little bit about the reforms that lawyers could champion that would improve build speed without betraying that kind of ethical core.
Yeah. Well, here is where I would give a plug to my friend, Nick Bagley’s work. He is a law professor at the University of Michigan. He has a book that will be coming out that I think is a perfect encapsulation of the problems of the lawyerly society. He doesn’t quite call it that. And he proposes these tangible legal reforms such that:
So that is one of these books that will be coming out sometime next year.
You know, I think there is actually a kind of a simple answer to a lot of construction. It’s not that the U.S. and China are the only countries that are unable to hit the right balance. I think actually a lot of countries have hit the sweet spot in terms of constructing mass transit while protecting the public interest. And so this is most of Europe. This is Japan. And we can just take a look at what these other countries do.
You know, I was just back to the U.S. after spending much of the summer in Europe. My wife and I spent a month in Denmark. Denmark is really highly functional in terms of public transit. You can go down to the subway systems that are completely spotless. They’re cleaner than anything in Shanghai. They’re fully automated and they just work really well. And you don’t even have to buy any tickets or go in any turnstiles. It’s such a high trust society that people know that you will have bought your tickets beforehand.
And so, countries like Denmark, countries like Japan, which has built a lot of high-speed rail, these are not shining exemplars of human rights abuses.
I would say that, you know, we can just take a look at:
They are able to build trains and subways and all sorts of infrastructure at really reasonable costs without having violated a lot of rights. And so it is mostly the Chinese and the Americans that have gotten the balance wrong.
Yeah, that’s a good point. And do you see efforts now on either side to try to learn from these better examples?
I wonder to what extent China is learning better examples of public interest. I think there have been some ways in which China is learning good lessons. I think it is not the case that environmental reviews for high-speed rail, for example, are entirely perfunctory. I think that the builders are actually trying to do their best to mitigate a lot of environmental issues.
What’s just not available in China is endless lawsuits that can delay absolutely everything on purely procedural bases.
And I think the Chinese have also had some examples of protests that achieved the delay or the cancellation of projects. Remember, I think it was in 2020, when folks in some bigger city—may have even been in Shanghai—went onto the streets to protest the construction of a new trash processing site near their home.
Now, maybe that’s nimbyism. Maybe that is misbegotten. But, you know, we do see that there have been some protests of people trying to maintain their neighborhoods and tell what they like. Maybe that’s positive. Maybe that’s negative.
And I think there is definitely this big sense in the U.S., as we mentioned before, that the U.S. has been dysfunctional for the many, and we need to get much better at building housing, mass transit, all sorts of infrastructure to get the country moving again.
Now, for the most part, I would say that the U.S. government now isn’t learning the right lessons from China. Rather, it’s learning most of the bad lessons from China.
Yeah, as you said. So on the topic of learning lessons, you know, the COVID lockdowns… showed the extreme downsides of the engineering state. I mean, a good engineer, a good scientist, presumably learns from mistakes. I think it’s widely accepted that there were a lot of mistakes made during that time.
What lessons do you think China’s leaders themselves drew from the experience?
That’s a great question. And I haven’t given that too much thought. And I wonder whether there is a lot of studies here. Now, how did enforcing these lockdowns really change the leadership’s mind? Now, I wonder whether they have also learned some of the wrong lessons with COVID.
I mean, one of the things that really struck me was that the Shanghai lockdown, locking down 25 million people in 2022 for eight weeks was accomplished through just the normal police systems. You know, you just had the regular police actually enforce COVID lockdowns.
As best as I can tell, no officers of the People’s Armed Police, which is the paramilitary force that wear what looked like army uniforms, were really deployed to try to enforce a lockdown of that magnitude. And they certainly didn’t have to bring out the People’s Liberation Army to try to suppress the desire to be free.
And so I wonder whether the leadership has learned a lesson that actually the coercive internal security apparatus doesn’t have to be so large in order for the people to be pretty obedient about what are really extraordinary controls that no one had expected at that time. That could be a potential lesson there.
Perhaps other lessons have been that the Chinese surveillance state grew very extensively, that people were tracked on their phones all the time for contact tracing purposes. And there were some issues about privacy concerns. But for the most part, people went along with all sorts of these projects.
And I wonder if the Chinese state has just learned that autocracy is actually much more possible. It’s even more possible than they thought. And I’m hopeful that they learn some good lessons out of this as well. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure I can name any, but I’m wondering, what do you think?
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that you touched on something that I wanted to ask you about, because you know, a lot of people who believe that, you know, the COVID era biosecurity state that was coming into being — you know, the controls that the health code apps and the checkpoints created — that this was just never going to be set aside once the pandemic passed, that this was going to be a regular feature of life.
They thought that the leadership was going to get so addicted to this level of control that they just never let go of it. But it seems like they have. I mean, the app is gone. The checkpoints, the screenings, they’re all, you know, a thing of the past.
Indeed.
I think that’s a pretty good example of maybe a lesson, if not a lesson learned, at least that they exercise a little bit of restraint. Touch wood.
Right. The question is whether they have very long memories and built up this muscle such that if they ever need to exercise these muscles again, they’re going to be able to roll these things out.
It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of the checkpoints, a lot of these apps, and a lot of these COVID testing facilities have been torn down because they became these hated symbols of enforcement. So it could be the case that they took away these highly visible symbols of enforcement, but they have the memory and the muscles to try to bring them back really quickly if necessary.
Yeah, that’s a very good point. I think they certainly have that muscle memory now.
Dan, you write about fortress capabilities, the kind of redundancy, the overcapacity that Western analysts often dismiss or disparage as wasteful. But you actually make the argument in your book, I thought that was a really interesting one, how inefficiency can actually be kind of a source of resilience in China’s system.
How should we be thinking about the trade-off between resilience and efficiency when comparing China’s fortress model with America’s maybe leaner, but possibly more fragile system?
I think one of the things that the pandemic revealed was exactly how fragile a lot of America’s supply chains really were. They were poised for perfection, and it didn’t take much for everything to be ruined.
And there has been this…
Depending on just-in-time delivery and…
Exactly. Just-in-time delivery is something that creates a lot of profitability because you’re reducing your flow of inventory. I think this is also really attributed to Tim Cook of Apple that created these hyper-optimized supply chains. Things were moving around all the time, and so they built very little inventory in order to prepare for shocks.
And I think one of the benefits, mostly a benefit of the engineering state, is that they do build a lot of redundancy. It creates a lot of inefficiency. You can find… There is extreme inefficiency in the Chinese state with the state-owned enterprise sector. There’s just so many redundant jobs. You would just have too many people doing the same things. You have dragging down profitability in all sorts of ways. But that turns out to be really useful in a crisis, that you have the capacity to retool your manufacturing lines in order to build not electronics, but cotton masks, as was the case with JD, Jindong, as well as Foxconn as well.
And so China has a lot of redundancy. China is trying to build up its own oil and gas sector, even though it’s much more costly to tap Chinese gas and oil relative to Russian or American gas or oil because Xi Jinping really treasures energy sovereignty. They’re building a lot more farmland in less than optimal places. I think it is also very striking that as soon as you take the high-speed train out of Beijing or Shanghai, you run into farmland really quickly. And that is because they want to set aside a lot of land for provinces and major municipalities to be food self-sufficient.
And so all of the redundancy involved with manufacturing, all of this overcapacity, there’s also a way to maintain process knowledge that they are constantly training their workers to make sure that their skills don’t go rusty. And I think, again, this is where I think for the most part, China’s engineering state in a lot of economics, you can point to a lot of flaws with debt, with environmental destruction, with all sorts of profitability costs. But there are also some benefits, and these are really revealed during a crisis which you can never predict could emerge.
So Dan, I mean, shame on me. I have not yet finished reading Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s Abundance, but I think I get the gist of their argument. It’s interesting to me how little they actually talk about China. But where do your ideas sit in relation to their ideas?
I would want to be a card-carrying member of the Abundance movement. I am slated to speak at the Abundance Conference in Washington, D.C. in the first week of September. So I think I am proximate enough to that.
Now, I think my challenge to Ezra and Derek are to speak a little bit more about China. I think the first parts of the Abundance book, there’s a lot of discussion of how the U.S. isn’t building enough mass transit and infrastructure.
And then the second part of Abundance is talking a little bit more about the scientific failings of the U.S., in which they’re not really taking advantage of being able to scale up and commercialize a lot of American scientific innovations. So China is a good operating model for Abundance. It’s not the best. It is not the most amazing, shining example for the U.S. to follow.
I would love people to ask them whether that was a tactical choice on their part to avoid making the China comparison just to, you know, I mean, because the optics of it aren’t necessarily good. It no longer looks like rah-rah, go America. It erodes some of the, I think, the patriotic oomph that the book otherwise has.
I suspect that what is the case is that, I mean, it’s not only, I mean, it’s not the case that China is avoided entirely. Both Abundance as well as Breakneck talk about California high-speed rail and its awful failings relative to the Beijing-Shanghai line. I suspect what is the case is that Ezra and Derek believe, as I do, that America doesn’t need to become like China in order to build infrastructure. It would be good enough to be like France, Denmark, or Japan.
And so I think we really don’t need to reach the China model. There’s just much better models for the U.S. to reach. And so this is why I say that China is a good operating model of abundance, not the best.
It is good because China has demonstrated that there are virtues to overcapacity, that it is really good to have a hyper-competitive solar sector that is driving prices down, not making a lot of money for investors, but, you know, creating a lot of consumer surplus and building a lot of mass transit for a country that desperately needed it.
There were a lot of costs, but, you know, again, we don’t have to fully copy the Chinese model wholesale in order to get to a better mode of abundance.
You know, you close your book down by emphasizing lived experience, what ordinary citizens feel day to day in terms of dignity, of fairness, of security. I mean, I’ve argued for a long time that Chinese people, like all people, most people at least, anchor their feelings about a given government and its legitimacy, not just in performance, however important that is, but also in whether the state feels to them intuitively morally upright or whether it feels just.
States that emphasize procedural legitimacy obviously tend to foreground this. You know, in China, when you have local corruption, You have arbitrary crackdowns, you have unequal treatment. It can definitely undermine legitimacy, legitimacy on the ground. And when people see the state standing up to bullies or ensuring national dignity, it can bolster this type of legitimacy, which I would love together. You know, it’s this sort of sense of moral uprightness or justice, and that can be domestic or foreign.
How much do you think legitimacy in China actually rests on what I would call the moral dimension, the state, you know, being just or upright and defending dignity? In other words, when you have corruption or arbitrary crackdowns and this stuff eats away at moral standing versus when the state asserts itself against bullies or delivers on fairness, how decisive is that in shaping how people experience the party’s legitimacy day to day?
I ask this because so often there’s this idea that China’s only about performance legitimacy and that somehow an economic downturn or slowdown could deliver a death blow to performance legitimacy. I feel like that’s only a part of the story.
I certainly agree that it has been a persistent fantasy in the U.S. and some parts of the West that China’s political legitimacy depends entirely on economic growth. You’ve seen this narrative come again and again:
I think that is just a silly argument that we see even in 2025. I think that China’s legitimacy is more broadly based than that. I wonder to what extent moral legitimacy, the sort of Confucian virtue, is very much present in China.
I think certainly there is a view that the leadership would try to act as if they are very good Confucians in China. And I wonder to what extent that is actually very effective. Because I think one of the issues I have with China, and it was Professor Huang Yasheng who laid this out very well, is that the state tries to increase a lot of legitimacy in the virtue of the rulers, but they’re not thinking in terms of incentives and constraints and systems that really try to police behavior and induce better governance.
When they reduce things into a matter of morality and virtue, it becomes more about the person rather than about the system. And I think Huang Yasheng has been really good at pointing out how virtue has been a distraction to better governance. What do you think?
Yeah, no, I think that he’s not wrong, that that is a problem. It’s not systematized; that it’s still subject to a lot of kind of patrimonialization. And I think that he’s absolutely right, that if you look at patterns of protest in Chinese history, the way that it is voiced often is in terms of moral failings of leaders rather than particular policies. That is not always a helpful framing when it comes from above or from below. So I tend to agree with him there.
I want to move on though and talk about legitimacy itself. I think there’s this inability among many Americans, and I think you just hinted at it just now, to see beyond procedural legitimacy as the only possible foundation for proper political authority.
I have long believed that this fundamental refusal—it’s not always articulated, but it’s often really present in the American habitus, just in the language that we use—is a big part of the problem when it comes to forming a good understanding of China. It produces a very unhelpful moral framing, and it makes us interpret everything that Beijing does in the most negative possible light.
I think it fuels escalation. It’s not like Beijing is unaware also that there is this kind of assumption of illegitimacy on the American part. I mean, it’s pretty obvious from China’s point of view, and it makes them very defensive. It makes them very anxious. It makes them also assume the worst: that they assume America’s real goal is to destabilize China, which, yeah, they’re not necessarily wrong.
Maybe you’re not.
So my question is, does this appear to you to be changing? Do you think that there is now an appeal to the American public of this idea of performance legitimacy, especially since procedural legitimacy no longer appears in America to deliver the goods when it seems to be so badly eroded? Is there kind of an uptick in appreciation for performance legitimacy?
Because I mean, just to put my cards on the table, I mean, I’ve noticed since January of this year a vibe shift, especially among younger people, in their attitudes toward China. And often it seems to be on the grounds that, hey, look, they deliver the goods.
I think there absolutely is a sense even within the American elite to say, well, we design all of these… Procedures in place in order to ensure some sort of fairness and making sure that the public interest is consulted. And I think there has been a sense even within the Democratic Party that, you know, we take a look at these blue states and blue cities, big cities, which are almost unanimously governed by Democrats. And they don’t seem to be working all that well.
You know, there’s tremendous public disorder in a lot of cities. Mass transit isn’t functioning very well. A lot of politicians are much more interested to govern on social issues rather than delivering economic issues that many families, working-class families care the most about. And I think there is a sense that we can’t just rely on processes in order to deliver the sort of legitimacy that we’re talking about.
I think that that is a very vibrant debate within the left now, that we can’t simply be the lawyerly society anymore. How do we actually deliver the goods? And so this is where, to put my own cards on the table, I am in favor of abundance. I am in favor of Ezra and Derek’s program to create much better cities, show that California and New York are not deeply broken things.
That when voters point to the track record of Democratic mayors as well as governors, there is something real here to be able to say that they’re actually meeting the needs of the people rather than just making sort of statements and performative gestures that don’t actually deliver the goods for anyone.
So in the end, and here, I mean, we’ll kind of wrap up with this, but you know, the engineering mindset can be way too literal, right? And the lawyerly mindset can be way too formal. I guess what I want is some kind of conceptual pluralism. I want like this set of institutional practices that somehow are able to switch frames, you know, to use the right frame in the right moment.
I guess what I’d like to see is somehow that we build the muscle inside China, its one-party state, to build that muscle inside polarized democracies like the one we live in right now, to be able to do that, to be able to be, you know, conceptually plural in that way. And I feel like that’s what your book gets at.
Is that a fair characterization? And what are the ways we can build toward that kind of, you know, conceptual pluralism?
You’re absolutely right, Kaiser. And I’m glad that you picked up on this point, that one of the things I really craved after spending six years in China was some degree of pluralism, that, you know, it wasn’t just one official register speaking above all the rest. That was really eagerly censoring all of these different viewpoints.
And I think I’ve said so many cancelable remarks on this podcast, Kaiser, but let me offer a yet more cancelable remark. I think there is a better profession rather than engineers and lawyers to govern the population, and that is dentists. No, I joke.
I think that the right profession to govern the population, if we had to choose but one, would be something like economists. I think that economists have a sense of procedure, they have a sense of getting things done, and they have a sense of social science, not to engage in really stupid things.
Unfortunately, I think economists are the most reviled academic profession on the planet. They certainly have gotten into a sticky wicket for themselves. But I think one thing that I will always be glad for for economists is that they were the people most actively pushing back against things like policies like the one-child policy.
That was the case in China, in which it was the economist who was the head of Peking University that really pushed back against the one-child policy in earlier formulations in the 1950s. And it was mostly the economic profession in the West that pushed back against the population bomb by Ehrlich.
And so I think that economists are the happy go-between. But I think that economists certainly need to be supplemented by degrees of pluralism on themselves. There should be lawyers in government. Absolutely. There should also be engineers in government rather than the U.S. Senate, which has 47 people who went to law school and one person trained in engineering.
I think there should be some sort of a balance with all of these things. I certainly don’t want to be entirely ruled by humanists. Mao Zedong was many things. He was, I think, primarily a poet. And if you take a look at earlier iterations of the Soviet Union, you had all these fantastic writers around Joseph Stalin. They were such good writers. They were such good literary critics.
And look at what a mess they made. So I don’t want to be governed by poets and literary critics. That sounds like an absolutely terrible paradigm. I think what we need are people who understand social science. And so my nomination is to be ruled by economists.
I’m going to put my vote in for historians. I think they have that sort of… Perspicacity and then that broader frame. And they’re not as paralyzed as economists are. And if we have to go with economists, I’m going to go with the Arthur Krobers over the Michael Pettises to rule us. That’s a better economist, perhaps. I think I, as someone who belongs to an institution called the Hoover History Lab, think that historians would not be so bad either.
Yeah, not so bad at all. Well, Dan, what a fantastically fun and wide-ranging conversation I’ve had. I cannot recommend the book more highly. Make sure that you get out and buy it right away. It comes out on the 26th, on August 26th. I encourage you all to pick up a copy. Above all, it’s a really fun read. It’s full, like I said, of really great turns of phrase. I had a long list of memorable quotes from it that I put together as I was reading it.
Let’s move on now, though, down to the segment I call “Paying It Forward,” where I ask you to name-check a younger colleague, maybe somebody at Hoover. I mean, Hoover was full of villains as far as I can tell, but there’s got to be one person worth name-checking there before we move on to recommendations. So who do you offer “Paying It Forward”?
I will offer two names:
So those are my two names, Afra Wong as well as He Liu. He Liu and I have crossed swords a little bit on Substack. He’s extremely committed to the liberal project when it comes to China, and nothing wrong with that. But like I said, we’ve crossed swords a bit. But great recommendations both. Afra, I’ve seen some of her work as well, and it’s excellent.
What about recommendations, Dan? Do you have a book you’ve read recently that you would like to recommend or anything, film, music, anything at all?
Well, I think over the course of book writing, I really got myself back into the classics, the things that I have really enjoyed. And so I guess I will recommend two sets of things.
The first set are the Mozart’s Italian operas written with Lorenzo da Ponte. These are:
I found myself, over the course of book writing, listening to these highly pleasurable, fun, and inventive operas that I think will stay with me for the rest of my life. So these are the Italian operas by Mozart.
Yeah.
And I think what I will do is also recommend my quartet of favorite novels. I have four novels that I’ve been rereading recently. And so the first one is The Red and the Black by Stendhal, which has these incredible depictions of the mistakes and stupidities that one commits in the act of love. This is a French novel that was published in 1830.
I will also throw in another French novel, the Proust. And so these are really wonderful, intoxicating tales of love that Marcel Proust has created for us. The entire series of In Search of Lost Time.
That’s right. And the Penguin translations are all quite good in English.
A third novel is that everybody is reading Moby Dick this summer.
Yeah. Why is that? Why is everyone reading Moby Dick? I mean, I know that Joe Weisenthal from the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast seems to be leading the charge on this. But I reread Moby Dick about, well, maybe six or seven years ago. Yeah, fantastic novel. But what do you think explains it being such a zeitgeist thing this summer?
It is just like a strange and bizarre marvelous white whale. You never know at which corners of the four seas that Moby Dick will shoot his spout up. And so I think that’s a little bit of a mystery to me. But I am I am a dickhead. And I love the depictions of mesmerizing whale lore.
And my favorite final novel is Bleak House by Charles Dickens. It is just this very fun, inventive, clever book that is a miracle of construction. So I commend it to your listeners.
Operas by Mozart, as well as this quartet of novels. Fantastic. Great, great, great, great.
I have a couple of recommendations. One is by Yun Sun from the Stimson Center. She heads their China practice. It’s in Foreign Affairs. It’s called China is Enjoying Trump 2.0, which I thought did a really good job of sort of channeling Beijing’s perspective on what’s happened in the time since Trump took office now. It’s like seven months now.
It’s really good. She’s always solid. And this is a particularly, I think, Excellent view into the Chinese mind on this. I also want to plug a book I’m reading right now. It’s called Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clarke, who is one of my favorite historians. It’s just an amazing work of history.
Hopefully, you’ve read his earlier book, The Sleepwalkers, which is about the run-up to the First World War, which I also highly recommend. I’ve actually recommended it before on Seneca.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a working historian who has all the things that Clarke brings to the table, which is just an obvious facility in so many languages and this ability to just zoom in. Because the revolutions of 1848, which is what Revolutionary Spring is about, these happen all over Europe and at the same time.
So if you’ve got to write a book on this, you need to be able to:
And the other thing, of course, is that Clarke is just a brilliant, brilliant writer. His prose is just delicious.
I think it’s such a good book. It’s a really hardcore history. I mean, it’s not for the faint of heart. There’s more detail than I think a lot of people are used to, and it’s just great. So that and Sleepwalkers—my recommendations.
Dan, once again, thank you so much for taking so much time to talk to me. And happy birthday.
“Thank you.”
What is it? Happy birthday.
“It is my 33rd birthday.”
What is three? Is that an auspicious number?
“I’m not sure.”
Well, it’s half of 66, which is an auspicious number.
“Okay, that’s good.”
Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time. And congrats on the book, which is, again, just so terrific. It’s been a total delight.
“Thank you again, Kaiser.”
Looking forward to seeing you again.
You’ve been listening to The Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Kuo. Support the show through Substack at www.sinecapodcast.com, where there is a terrific offering of original China-related writing and audio.
Email me at [email protected] if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show. Huge thanks to my guest, Dan Wong.
Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.
Bye.
2026-02-04 08:00:01
Uneasy Calm: Ryan Hass on Three Pathways for U.S.-China Relations Under Trump
Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.
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As we move into the second year of Donald Trump’s seemingly interminable second presidency, U.S.-China relations have once again defied easy characterization.
What began as a return to tariff escalation and hardball trade tactics has somewhat unexpectedly given way to a period of relative strategic calm marked by:
Even in the national security strategy and the national defense strategy that was just released.
The once dominant language of great power competition has definitely receded, and many of the most vocal China hawks who shaped Washington’s approach for the past decade appear to have been sidelined.
In their place, we’ve seen a policy posture that reflects Trump’s highly personalistic approach to foreign affairs and emphasis on leader-to-leader rapport.
“Xi Jinping’s my friend,” deal-making over doctrine, and a willingness to bracket or at least downplay ideological disputes in favor of transactional progress on trade, technology, and risk reduction.
Trump’s repeated praise for Xi Jinping, his apparent sensitivity to certain of Beijing’s red lines, including on Taiwan, and his apparent comfort at treating China as a peer rather than a civilizational rival mark a sharp departure from recent bipartisan orthodoxy in Washington, if you indeed believe that it was a bipartisan consensus.
Supporters argue that… This shift has lowered the risk of conflict and delivered tangible gains. Critics, though, counter that the United States is conceding leverage without securing durable returns. Either way, the result is a relationship that feels less confrontational for now.
In my private communications with certain among my more panda-hugging friends, there’s this sort of bewilderment. It’s like, we kind of agree that Trump is awful for this country but not so bad for U.S.-China relations, right? But beneath the surface calm lie unresolved structural tensions, deep mutual dependencies, of course, that can be weaponized, and parallel efforts in both capitals to reduce those vulnerabilities.
So, what comes next? Are we headed toward a genuine lasting stabilization or a familiar snapback to the acrimony that once dominated, once our expectations collide with reality? Or a more ambiguous middle path, one in which both sides buy time, avoid escalation, and quietly work to insulate themselves against future shocks?
Well, to help us think through all these questions, I am joined by Ryan Haas, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, and one of the most clear-eyed analysts of the U.S.-China relationship working today. Ryan has just published an essay on the Brookings website laying out three plausible pathways for the relationship under Trump scenarios ranging from:
He joins me from D.C. And Ryan, welcome back to Sinica, man.
Thank you, Kaiser. It’s wonderful to be back with you.
So Ryan, like I said, you’re joining us from Washington. Let me start there. One of the strengths of your piece is that it treats leaders as not free agents but constrained actors. From where you sit in D.C., what are the most powerful domestic forces that are shaping the U.S.-China policy right now? And which of them do you think actually matter to President Trump?
Well, it’s a really interesting question. I have to say, sitting in Washington, D.C., one thing that is very palpable is a hope, a wish among many inside the beltway that we will soon snap back to the way things were before—that this one to two-year window is just sort of a brief pause from the long-term trajectory of intensifying competition and confrontation.
I’m a little less confident of that. In fact, I’m fairly skeptical that’s where things are headed, but that’s certainly a palpable sense of mood within the beltway.
To your question, I actually think that President Trump is fairly unconstrained in terms of his approach to China. I believe he is pursuing the approach that he thinks will yield the best benefit for him personally and politically, but also for the country. The basic contours of it, to the extent that you can assign strategy to what President Trump is doing, are:
- Trying to lower the temperature of the U.S.-China relationship through direct engagement with President Xi.
- Showing tremendous respect to President Xi and, by extension, China in service of that effort.
- Building deterrence in Asia militarily.
- Reducing dependence upon China for critical inputs to the U.S. economy.
- In his own way, trying to rebalance the U.S.-China economy.
That’s the direction he is trying to take things. I don’t think he surveys the landscape of the U.S. political class and finds too many threats to his vision and approach to the relationship. But he’s thinking about midterms, he is thinking about 2028, and he’s thinking about affordability and things like that.
I mean, is that part of the logic that’s driving him to soften things with China right now—to hit pause?
Yeah. I think that there are a few things causing him to do that. First, he believes that China has us over a barrel in terms of their control over earth and other critical inputs. Until we get out from under the sword of Damocles that the Chinese have above our head, I don’t think he sees much value in taking the U.S.-China relationship toward head-on collision.
He also recognizes that he’s managing a lot of other problems around the world simultaneously. Adding to that list with intensifying confrontation with China may not be wise or prudent.
But I think he also recognizes that there isn’t a ton of appetite in the United States among the body politic for head-on confrontation.
This is something, Kaiser, you have written about and talked about—the vibe shift in the United States. President Trump, one of his unique strengths is… His reptilian feel for the mood of the American people. And in this regard, I think that the president reflects what he can sense from the American people in terms of what their expectations are for the U.S.-China relationship today.
Well, that’s comforting. The other questions, industrial policy coalitions used to be, at various times, a ballast for stability or even an active force for improved relations with China. Are they acting on him today? Is there business pressure somewhere? Is Jensen Huang a major force in his thought these days?
Well, I think that President Trump operates much differently than traditional U.S. presidents, in the sense that he is not sitting in the Oval Office waiting for his staff to bring him options for him to decide upon as it relates to China. As we’ve talked about before in Berkeley and elsewhere, he is his own China desk officer. He takes his own responsibility for calling the shots and setting the direction of U.S. policy towards China.
And in doing so, he is not informed by stale, turgid intelligence briefings that stone-faced people deliver to him early in the morning. He is talking to a range of people in and outside of government. He’s talking to people he treats as peers and considers as peers, including Jensen Huang, but not just Jensen Huang. He is basing judgments upon the body of inputs he’s receiving, which are far broader than a traditional U.S. president would.
So if he is so unconstrained and if his policy toward China, as with all things, is such a function of his just idiosyncratic whims and his character, is this current pivot away from ideology credit where it’s due? It’s something that I’m really happy to see. Is this something that could survive Trump or is it inseparable from his personal instincts and his incentives?
Well, I’ll try to take this in two parts. The first is that I think Trump is in a category of one amongst the U.S. political class in his willingness and tolerance to affect the change in America’s overall orientation towards China. And you noted this very articulately in your introduction, that he has moved the United States away from sort of an emphasis and a framing of great power competition as the sole lens through which to view the U.S.-China relationship to something that’s much broader.
I think of it as sort of non-conflictual coexistence, a more pragmatic, realistic appraisal of the nature of the U.S.-China relationship than preceded President Trump. But it does raise the question, I think a very legitimate question that you’re asking, which is, is this just something that will perish when President Trump departs office?
I can’t tell you. I honestly don’t know. But my instinct would be that no, this has the potential to outlast President Trump. However, for it to do so, a few things will need to happen:
First, President Trump will need to demonstrate return on investment. Over the next couple of years, he will need to demonstrate that this less harsh approach to the U.S.-China relationship yields tangible benefits for the American people and American workers.
Secondly, whoever succeeds him, whether Democrat or Republican in 2029, will need to be able to make a case for what America’s national goals are and how China relates to them.
It’s impossible to know how those two variables will play out, but it is certainly a possibility that we could see an elongation of this period beyond just Donald Trump.
The ball then is sort of in Beijing’s court. They need to pay a return on that investment, and I think if they want it to endure beyond Trump.
But speaking of Beijing, let’s flip the lens to Beijing. Is Xi similarly unconstrained? Is he a sort of singular determinant of Chinese policy toward the U.S., or does he have domestic determinants of China’s policy toward the United States at this point?
I mean, and if they are, is it like economic stabilization in the post-COVID period? There’s plenty of things that bedevil the Chinese economy right now.
Is it:
What are Xi’s considerations as far as you can tell?
Well, one of the unique aspects of this moment is that we are in a situation where the two countries are driven by very personalistic leadership styles. There are some, for me, uncomfortable similarities now in the way that the two countries are sort of operating.
I don’t think that Xi is perfectly unconstrained. I’ve never subscribed to the view that he has a monopoly on power in China and that he alone can determine the outcomes for 1.4 billion people. But I do think that there are certain things that… He is very invested in and that his brand is associated with, his political brand. One of them is making progress towards greater self-reliance and less dependence upon the United States and the West for China’s future growth, innovation and technological breakthroughs. And this period of relative calm in the relationship, I think serves that purpose. It gives breathing room and space for China to make progress down the path of greater self-reliance.
The second is being able to give proof to the narrative that time is on China’s side, that China has “winded its back” and that it’s the United States that on a relative basis is declining. And I think there are plenty of proof points that President Xi and those around him can point to, to build that case persuasively inside China today, which I think also gives some momentum to the current direction that we’re in.
I mean, I know it’s hard to say with any certainty, but is it your sense that there’s debate within the Chinese system about how hard or soft to lean into this current period of calm? Is this something that, you know, is he facing opposition? In other words, are there people who are saying,
“Hey, America’s showing weakness, time to press our strength,”
or does it seem to be, you know, Xi’s calling the shot in that case?
Ryan Hass: You know, it’s a good question. My latest sort of touch for that is a bit dated. I was last in Beijing and Shanghai in December. So I’m a month plus out from my last contact with people who are in policy circles in China.
But based upon that last round of conversations, my view is that many people recognize that this moment is serving China’s interest well, that China’s goal is to try to relieve pressure and sort of unblock the path to China’s continued rise.
To the extent that President Trump is willing to play a role in that by relaxing pressure upon China, whether it be through:
I think those are all sort of indicators that this is working to China’s long-term benefit.
Kaiser Guo: So Ryan, a central claim or assumption in your essay is that both sides, Beijing and Washington, are behaving less out of mutual trust than out of mutual sense of vulnerability. That, I think, isn’t a claim that many people would challenge, actually, and I wouldn’t.
To what extent do you think that policymakers in both capitals genuinely understand this as kind of a negative sum dynamic? And to what extent are they simply discovering through painful trial and error that they are mutually vulnerable and that they need to chill out?
Ryan Hass: Well, I have a pretty high degree of conviction around this point, but I don’t have some smoking gun evidence that I can point to to prove it.
My sense is that both leaders and those around them have come over the past year to recognize that the other side is capable of doing immense harm to itself.
And I think that this has been a revelation, more so on the US side than the Chinese side. The Chinese side has been well aware for a long time that the United States is capable of being a dangerous superpower that can do immense harm to China.
But when President Trump and Secretary of Treasury Besant and others entered office last year, they entered office with a certain degree of bravado and hubris. Secretary Besant famously said that
“China is holding a pair of twos in terms of, you know, the cards it has in its hand and the lack of leverage it has over the United States.”
No one is talking like that anymore.
Through painful trial and error, both sides have come to realize that they are each capable of doing harm to the other. And that if one side initiates action against the other, it should expect painful retaliation response.
And so I don’t think that President Trump and President Xi over the past year have developed some like brotherly friendship where they decided not to do harm to each other.
I think they both come to recognize that if they take actions that are harmful to the other, that they will get hit back in response. And that it will hurt.
And that was the whole lesson in 2025 leading up to Busan, right?
Kaiser Guo: And you know, your trip may have been a couple of months ago, but that was still in the post-Busan era. So I think you have a probably quite accurate read of how they’re feeling right now. Not much has changed since then, so.
Ryan Hass: Right.
Right.
Yeah. There haven’t been many major ruptures or fluctuations from then till now. Except the rupture that, you know, Mark Carney spoke of.
But so Ryan, let’s jump in with your first scenario, the soft landing. In this pathway, both leaders:
I mean, you know, they’re really talking about investment right now. We’ve got Ford talking about working with Xiaomi possibly, according to the FT, at least on a battery plant, right?
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think for this scenario, the soft landing scenario to take root, a couple of things would need to happen.
So that’s the first prerequisite.
I think one of the things that some people point to who are advocates of this approach would be some type of grand bargain.
So we know that President Trump is planning to travel to China in April. If that visit were to yield a sort of significant breakthrough on a contentious issue, most people would identify Taiwan as the candidate, Taiwan combined with some type of transactional benefit for the United States and its workers. Then that would give momentum or solidity to the idea that we could travel down this path.
But short of that, I think it’s hard to imagine both sides really sort of believing and acting in ways that both leaders believe they can sustainably improve over the long term of the nature of the relationship.
What makes that costly from the American side?
So you say that it would require both sides to send costly signals. What sorts of signals are we talking about from Beijing, and what would be costly about those? How hard would they be to deliver domestically in Beijing?
It’s a great question. I think in the case of China, there is a certain degree of skepticism about whether the Chinese leadership would be comfortable seeing some of its companies and crown jewels invest or produce outside of China. We see this in particular with Meta’s efforts to acquire a Chinese-origin AI company that relocated to Singapore.
Meta’s, yeah.
Another area, in the Taiwan context, would be if President Trump were to alter longstanding declaratory policy toward Taiwan, would China reciprocate by:
These are the types of questions that sort of point to costly signals that each side would expect the other to give if they were to give it themselves.
I have trouble seeing that is costly to China compared to the electoral costliness of signals from America. So it feels like China can ram this through; Trump faces electoral pressure.
Yeah, he might. But let’s keep in mind, he’s never going to be on a ballot again for the rest of his life.
That’s true.
And so, President Trump has never shown a lot of conviction about election outcomes that don’t involve his name on the ballot.
Ryan, looking back over recent U.S.-China history, is there a precedent that you can point to for restraint for restraint actually holding for any decent length of time?
I can’t think of anything off the top of my head right now that would give a lot of confidence to the notion that restraint for restraint is a time-tested and well-established trend. This is the critique that I think people of the soft landing approach would make, is that the soft landing would The discussion involves the United States making concessions to China without receiving reciprocal benefits in return. There’s a pretty calloused skepticism that has built up over years, including within the Trump administration, as a consequence of the underperformance of China in the phase one trade deal.
Obviously, you floated this possibility that something like a fourth joint communique on Taiwan could anchor the sort of soft landing you’re talking about, the grand bargain.
What problem would such a document actually be trying to solve? What would be the content of a fourth communique? And is Taiwan ultimately the issue that makes this scenario maybe politically untenable, even if both leaders are inclined toward restraint? I mean, is Taiwan going to flummox this?
I think it will be very difficult. The idea would be that the last time that the United States and China had a communique was in 1982. A lot has happened in the last 40 plus years. A new framework that sets out a baseline of understanding for how both sides will approach cross regulations may be a useful stabilizing mechanism.
I’m on the more skeptical end of the spectrum on this question. I don’t think that the challenge is a lack of understanding about the nature of cross-strait issues. I think that there are just competing interests involved that need to be managed.
In Washington, it’s treated as sort of a foregone conclusion that Beijing is desperately seeking a fourth communique or some type of new understanding related to Taiwan with President Trump. There are a few factors that may mitigate against that as a foregone conclusion:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to remind everyone, this is your most optimistic scenario. And in this most optimistic version, there is still a sense that the soft landing would be kind of inherently provisional, something closer still to a pause than to a full reset.
I am ineradicably optimistic but still have trouble seeing either polity really arriving at some kind of durable modus vivendi right now. There’s just no trust. There are many deeply entrenched habits of mind on both sides.
But there are other scenarios that you posit here. The second scenario is the one I sincerely hope to avoid: a hard split.
You frame this as a familiar arc: Trump starts conciliatory, grows very frustrated, and then swings really hard. We’ve seen this many times. What are the most plausible triggers that could push the relationship down this kind of path toward a hard split?
Well, there are a few ways we could get here:
1. There could just be a misunderstanding on what each side agrees to. President Trump comes to the conclusion that the Chinese are under-delivering on their promises. He grows frustrated, angry, and we find ourselves back following the same cycle as we did during the first term, where:
- The first three years focused on negotiating a phase one trade deal.
- The fourth year focused on letting it rip because the president was so angry and frustrated that COVID had spread and undercut his reelection prospects.
2. China takes actions against American allies that involve **use of force** and puts the United States in a very difficult position of deciding whether or not to employ force against China to come to the defense of their allies and uphold **Article 5 commitments** or traditional understandings of security commitments.
Examples of such allies include The Philippines or Japan. Right. Right. Right. And then what some people in Washington would say is that as the midterms get closer, the political incentive for President Trump to become harder and harder towards China will grow, and that the political imperatives of President Trump wanting to hold off Democrats gaining control of the House and relaunching impeachment probes against him will compel him to grow tough.
This is the hope, I think, of a lot of people in Washington who want us to get back into the business of great power competition. And I’ll just offer just a quick caution, Kaiser, as to why I’m not yet convinced that this is the natural course of events that we’re going to find ourselves in.
First, you know, the president has demonstrated that he is very sensitive about America’s dependence on rare earths. That dependence is not going to change in the next 12 months, 18 months, even two years.
Yes. The second is that President Trump just genuinely is not activated by the military threat or the ideological nature of competition between the United States and China. But he’s much more focused on economic and tech issues. He wants to make deals that he can point to and tout his as successes and breakthroughs.
And having a hostile relationship with China would sort of move against that objective.
I also think that President Trump is pretty comfortable with the status quo right now. He doesn’t face immense political pressure at home for where the US-China relationship stands. He also likes to brag privately with his colleagues and counterparts about how much tariff money he believes that the United States is generating from tariffs on China, never mind the fact that it’s US importers that pay the tariffs.
And then lastly, I think that President Trump is very focused on legacy and blowing up relations, burning down the house with China is not a legacy enhancing exercise. Putting the relationship on a new plane potentially could be.
So, I mean, the fear of a blue wave in 2026 in the midterms, I mean, I get that. But part of him also has somebody’s got to be showing him these polls that say,
“there’s just not a lot of appetite right now among voters for tough on China. It’s not a winning campaign strategy right now.”
I mean, poll after poll after poll is showing that that is fundamentally weakened vibe shift once again.
Right.
So, I mean, hopefully that’s a mitigating force.
Yeah.
And traditionally, midterm elections are not animated by China or by foreign affairs. I mean, there really isn’t any empirical evidence that going tough on China improves the odds of House and Senate candidates getting elected.
So, from Beijing’s perspective, I mean, it’s pretty easy for us to think of what kinds of U.S. actions would collapse strategic calm and force Beijing to take a harder line that would be reciprocated by Washington. I mean, all sorts of triggers, right?
But where do you think miscalculation is especially dangerous? What are the areas where you think that crossed wires and signals misinterpreted are particularly dangerous?
I would suggest, just as a hypothetical scenario, if the United States became more aggressive with other countries about urging them, insisting that they adopt America’s AI tech stack—
Right.
—and conditioning security support for them doing so. That could be an example of how things could go off track.
And if there were further actions like we saw last fall where the Department of Commerce rolls out something in an uncoordinated fashion, the 50% rule, the affiliates rule.
Right.
Something along those lines that the Chinese perceive as violating the truce, the understanding that was reached between both leaders—that could compel the Chinese to reciprocate and retaliate.
Well, that problem may be solved. Trump has apparently neutered BIS, right? So we’ll see.
One thing that struck me is how much this scenario depends on momentum, on anger compounding on anger. Once the relationship starts moving in this direction, how easy is it to reverse?
I ask because this isn’t the first time either Beijing or Washington has seen things go sideways. And you’d think that both sides might have learned something about how to manage that sort of crisis. And at least sometimes they’ve managed to get the relationship back on track.
And we saw that with the taco meal that resulted in Busan.
Has there been any learning? I mean, do you think that there’s enough sort of wisdom on either side to avoid that kind of scenario?
Well, I think that the key to avoiding that scenario is the two leaders. When things begin to veer off track, it’s the two leaders that usually put things back on track. And the challenge, the structural challenge, is that the Chinese traditionally, historically, are pretty reticent about requesting calls from President Xi to President Trump.
So if there is an incident that is an unplanned encounter between naval vessels or whatever it may be, and things begin to sort of go off the rails, pressure builds. We have a spy balloon-like dynamic emerge inside the United States where there is just boiling angst and anger about something that China has done that violates American airspace or hurts American sailors or whatever it may be.
When the Chinese do not appear to be reaching out to President Trump personally, we could find ourselves in a tough spot. And if the Chinese are perceived to be the instigator of this downward spiral and they don’t communicate directly with President Trump but try to operate through intermediaries, I think that President Trump could find himself both humiliated and offended in ways that could sort of compound the initial problem.
So that’s scenario two: one where there’s a hard split, not an optimal outcome at all, obviously.
You, fortunately, ultimately judged scenario three, which is about buying time and building insulation, as the most likely path. I would certainly concur. But what, in your mind, makes this outcome more resilient than the other two? I mean, because it seems sort of inherently unstable, right? It’s provisional. It’s about sort of just playing for time. And so it feels very impermanent.
But why do you think this is maybe more durable than the other two possible outcomes?
To me, Kaiser, and this is unscientific, this is just sort of a feel, it feels like the most realistic scenario. I don’t think that either of the two leaders is prepared to sort of make significant lasting concessions to the other. I don’t think that either country is prepared to accept a subordinate status to the other.
I think that both countries, in their own way, are able to tell themselves a story that time is on their side. And if they just regenerate or strengthen themselves, that they will be able to outlast and outpace the other.
And so this third scenario of sort of buying time and building insulation, it’s most appealing to me because it works for both leaders and how they describe their intentions and their goals.
This scenario allows him to make directional progress on all those goals.
Similarly, for President Xi, I think that there’s a fairly mirrored set of objectives.
President Xi is very committed to strengthening China’s self-reliance and moving down that path. He certainly, in my mind at least, does not seek a confrontation or conflict with the United States. But he also isn’t interested in making any significant gestures or major concessions to the United States either.
I think that the Chinese believe that they have momentum behind them. And the wave of leaders that have come to Beijing over recent weeks to visit President Xi, I think, have reinforced that perception.
So a core insight of your piece, Ryan, is that both sides are constrained by deep mutual dependencies. I think most people who are listening are aware of some of these and can rattle them off:
But what do you see as underappreciated vulnerabilities on each side that might reinforce this uneasy equilibrium? Are there things that we’re not talking about enough where there is mutual dependence?
Well, I’ll offer a few.
When I was in China last December, I was discomforted to be reminded in almost every meeting about America’s dependence upon active pharmaceutical ingredients from China, APIs. And I don’t think that that was just sort of a stream of consciousness idea that bubbled into the minds of everyone we were sitting down with. It was a reminder that rare earths aren’t the only source of American dependence upon China.
Similarly, I think for China, they are painfully aware of their dependence upon the United States and the West for:
But also at a more intangible level, access to America’s higher educational system. This is something both from the students themselves and their future contributions to Chinese society, but also Chinese leaders’ ability to keep that door open for students, the children of their peers, is critically important. And if the relationship were to deteriorate, we’ve already seen that this is something that the Trump administration has considered using as a retaliatory tool.
Now he’s talking about 600,000 Chinese students in America. I guess maybe he thinks about them as a service export rather than as human beings who contribute to the flourishing of our academic community.
But whatever the case, I think that having Chinese students in the United States enhancing the education of classrooms that they’re a part of is a net benefit for the American people.
So, Ryan, in this scenario, you kind of suggest that the way we score this is by measuring who reduces dependence faster. I mean, if we look out five, ten years from now, which side do you think is better positioned to actually succeed in reducing those dependencies? I mean, who’s working hard at this?
But what’s your assessment of this?
Well, we have a tendency to swing from one extreme to the other in the way that we talk about this in Washington. A few years ago, Kaiser, you and I were talking about peak China, whether it’s a serious thing, how should we think about it? Everyone was focused on all of China’s weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and soft spots.
In recent months, it feels like the pendulum has swung to the other extreme where China can make everything. China can do anything. Ten foot tall again, right?
The world is sort of gravitating towards China. The United States is in dire straits. I’m uncomfortable with either of those extremes.
I think that China does have profound challenges, but it also has immense strengths. Neither of those are going to go away anytime soon. We have to get comfortable to be able to look at both of those side by side.
And the same can be said of the United States.
I will just make one observation that I hope is in service of answering your question, which is that I am deeply uncomfortable with the direction that our country is headed in certain respects. I think that right now the social fabric of the country is tearing, and national unity is the foundation of national strength.
No country can be stronger on the world stage than it is at home.
What we are watching in Minnesota and elsewhere is deeply troubling, both for me from a spiritual standpoint, but also just from a civic standpoint, and also in a measure of national power.
Secondly, I worry very much about America’s alliance network fraying and unraveling. Alliances traditionally have been a force multiplier of American influence on the world stage. Now, I think that our alliance network exists more in name than function.
This is going to be a long-term cost that the United States is going to pay for the moment that we find ourselves in.
But more fundamentally, and this I think, speaks most directly to the question that you’re asking, I worry that America’s economic competitiveness is eroding somewhat.
I just feel like at a certain level, President Trump is pursuing a 19th century strategy of assuming the control of natural resources will be the source of national power. We find ourselves in a different world today.
I think that his resource obsession is a strategic distraction.
For me, the goal needs to be to stimulate growth.
Growth comes from productivity. Innovation and diffusion come from:
- Talent
- Ideas
- Efficient allocation of capital
- A transparent and predictable legal system
This is how America gains strength.
The further we turn from that, the more that I fear we will lose our ability to achieve the sort of escape from dependence that your question was anchored in. Yeah, I mean, it’s so frustrating to be, this is a man whose favorite metaphor is cards, but, you know, he’s talking about who’s got the stronger hand, you know, who holds more cards.
It feels like somebody’s got to be able to convince him that what he’s been doing by, like you say, turning away talent at the border, by destroying those things like predictability, rule of law, alliances, all these things, you know, that act as force multipliers for us.
He’s plucking valuable cards out of his hand and, you know, lighting them on fire to light his cigars. It’s just bizarre.
I mean, I feel like at this point, Beijing must look at, you know, the hands that each side holds and conclude that there’s some very pronounced asymmetry here.
I feel also like that could really make this equilibrium that you described in scenario three more fragile. I mean, if one side succeeds faster than the other in reducing vulnerability, and right now it looks like China’s succeeding faster in reducing vulnerability, that actually seems like it would destabilize this equilibrium.
I agree with you if the equilibrium is measured in bilateral terms only.
And I thought that Adam Tooze made a very important point in the interview that you flagged to his with Ezra Klein after Davos, which is that if we are thinking about the world as undergoing a power transition from the United States to China, it is going to trigger all the anxieties, insecurities, and antibodies in the United States about China’s rise and compel us to try to suppress it.
And if we rather think about what’s going on in the world, not as a power transition, but as a power diffusion, where the United States is not significantly declining, but power is growing much more diffuse in the international system. The international system is splintering. It’s growing more disordered.
Then the nature of the challenge shifts, and the way that we think about and address and respond to it also evolves.
I am much more inclined to the latter view, that we’re seeing a splintering and a diffusion of power rather than a transition in power. But this is going to be, I think, sort of a core aspect of the debate that will be underway about the way that America relates to the world for the next couple of years.
Yeah, it’s interesting. I seized on that metaphor that Tooze used, too.
And I started thinking about that kind of moral panic securitization that we’ve seen in this country as an autoimmune response.
“You’ve got to take some goddamn antihistamines and chill.”
I agree with you that this scenario, this third scenario that you describe, is probably the most likely.
Does this framework, just stepping back, suggest that we’ve entered a phase right now where U.S.-China relations are less about, you know, trying to build trust or establish shared norms and more just about engineering resilience under assumed conditions of enduring mistrust?
I mean, where each side, you know, we’ve got a hand on the other’s choke points,
It’s, you know, I guess it’s structurally analogous to, obviously not identical to, kind of, you know, mutual assured destruction during the Cold War.
If that’s right, how should it change the way policymakers even think about stability?
Well, it’s a great question. I am inclined to your second scenario that you just described. I do think that we’re both sort of holding each other’s oxygen tubes to a certain extent.
I don’t think that there’s any outbreak of goodwill or warm, fuzzy feelings towards each other right now. And I also think that we’re in a pretty fraught moment. Both countries believe that they are gaining a certain degree of advantage over the other or that they can do immense harm to the other.
But on top of that, if you look at, you know, social science work and some public polling data,
And so this isn’t the time. We are not at a moment where there’s going to be some grand breakthrough in the relationship.
I think that if we manage it well through this coming period, we will have done a service as stewards of a long-term relationship rather than as authors of some concluding chapter to it.
Well put. Beautiful.
A final question to you. I mean, if listeners wanted to just cut through the rhetoric and only watch for just a handful of real concrete indicators over the next, say, 12 to 18 months, what would you tell them to focus on to assess which scenario we’re actually in or which we’re careening toward?
I would encourage people to watch the frequency of interaction between the two leaders,
- how often they talk on the phone,
- how often they acknowledge exchanging views through each other as ambassadors or intermediaries.
I would pay attention to the degree to which both sides are preparing for engagements, direct face-to-face summits between the two leaders, whether this is a professional process or just sort of a slapdash trip across the ocean. I would watch to see how well the United States is doing in terms of building or stockpiles, reducing its sort of vulnerability to shocks in the industrial supply chain system from China.
And similarly, I would watch to see the degree to which China is sort of making progress and innovating around some of the export controls and other obstacles that the United States has put in its development path.
So how important are atmospherics going to be around the April Trump visit to Beijing? Well, I think it’ll be significant.
You know, it’s somewhat ironic, Kaiser, because traditionally, the United States trades form for substance. You know, we decide to negotiate away different sort of bells and whistles of a Chinese leader’s visit to the United States in exchange for substance. Because we know that the Chinese leader cares deeply about the imagery that comes out of such engagements because
it bestows respect and gives people inside China pride that their leader is being treated with dignity on the world stage.
Now, I think we’re in a moment where sort of the roles are reversing, where it’s President Trump will be committed to the trappings of dignity and respect, and we’ll want something grander and more dramatic than what he experienced with the state visit plus in 2017 or 18. 17 it was, yeah. I expect that he will probably go to a second city this time as part of his trip.
And so how he is received by the public, but also, you know, the imagery that comes out of that will be important to him. But ultimately, I think that the measure will be to what extent has his travel to China benefited the American worker and the American people. And, you know, we’ll have to see.
Well, I will be there on the ground in Beijing in April. I’m leaving very soon. In fact, just two weeks from now. And I will report faithfully. I’ll do a couple of shows about, you know, preparations for the Trump visit and see how that plays out. Because I think that is a very, very telling indicator.
And I think you’re absolutely right. We are in this world right now where the Trump presidency cares very much about all the symbolism, the pageantry, all the sort of etiquette and the formalism of it. And I think Beijing knows that. Beijing knew that before November 2017 when he went. They sort of turned up the flatterometer to very, very high. They know how to do this.
Well, I will be listening carefully to your reporting from on the ground, Kaiser.
Well, thank you, Ryan. Make sure to read the piece. It’s on the Brookings website and everything else that Ryan writes because it’s all super, super good.
Ryan, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. Let’s move on to paying it forward. Do you have a younger colleague or somebody who you’ve been working with who deserves a shout out here on the show?
I do this selfishly because, you know, I’m looking to cultivate, you know, new guests to bring on. I would point to Audrey Wong, who is an incredibly thoughtful, talented researcher, writer, public intellectual, who is doing tremendous work explaining China’s economic orientation to the world.
Fantastic.
And we can find her stuff on Brookings?
Audrey, I believe she’s at USC right now.
Oh, okay. Cool. Excellent. Audrey Wong. I will look out for her.
And what about recommendations? As you know, we do a recommendation every week. What do you have for us? You got a book or a film or some music, a travel destination, something that you want to recommend?
You know, Kaiser, I wish that I had something super cool to share. I’m going to just default to a book recommendation from Robert Sutton. He wrote The Conscience of the Party, the biography of Hu Yaobang.
And it’s as much just a gripping human story about Hu Yaobang, the last reformer in China, as it is a sort of an x-ray of the Chinese Communist Party system and the way that it operates and how it operates. So it’s for anyone who’s sort of interested in the functions of the party. I think that Robert’s book is a tremendous starting point.
That’s been on my list for a while. I really need to finally get around to reading it.
That’s an excellent recommendation. Thanks, Ryan.
So I’ve got a book as well, as well as a couple of China-related things. But my book is just for fun. I’ve been reading the long-lost final book that Alexander Dumas wrote. The English translation that I have is called The Last Cavalier, but it’s also known as The Knight of Saint-Hermain. The French title is Le Chevalier de Saint-Hermain.
But either way, it is a really fun bit of Napoleonic-era historical fiction in which actually Napoleon himself is a major character. And Dumas gives him a really kind of believable personality. I mean, much better than Ridley Scott gave him in that lamentable film, which I hope none of you had to suffer through.
But there are loads of fascinating characters. Many of them are historical. It sent me skirting to Wikipedia many a time just to sort of look these people up. But it’s also just got a ton of historical material mixed in. It’s got letters and decrees and courtroom proceedings, all kind of jumbled into the fictional stuff.
I mean, the story, the plot is a bit of a shaggy dog. It’s maybe, you know, 40% fewer total tangential plot lines might have made this book a little more sort of readable. But it’s still worthwhile if you’re interested.
Dumas actually writes himself or his father. I mean, he does this sort of breaking the fourth wall thing where he suddenly starts talking to the first person and then talks about his father, who was this Napoleonic general, who’s also Alexander Dumas.
It’s anyway, great stuff to take your mind off the world as it is. But still, you kind of get to scratch this itch for, you know, political turmoil and intrigue. If you’re listening to this show, you probably have such a niche.
For a couple of quick China-related recommendations, some really good sense-making of the Chinese economy has dropped just in the last couple of days for the day we’re taping. Check out the Asia Society conversation led by Lizzie Lee, who listeners will know, of course, from her many appearances on the show.
She’s joined by two of my faves:
It’s about the challenges of rebalancing the Chinese economy, but it goes way beyond that. It goes, you know, into the – obviously, you know, the problems of the property market and much else. It’s as good as you would expect with these three all taking part.
Related to that is the latest outstanding Trivium China podcast, of course, which you can find on the Sinica Network. It’s hosted by Andrew Polk, and it is just a banger of an episode.
Joe Peisal, who heads macro research at Trivium, is the guest for the first half, and they do this thing that they’re going to be doing every month or so, just looking at the macro numbers. But this one sort of looks at just – not just macro numbers for Q4, but for the year. And it’s a great survey.
The second half, though, features Danny McMahon and Corey Combs, who are both absolutely brilliant.
They are both really brilliant. It’s on, you know, why China is facing headwinds on boosting capital expenditure, which, if you follow the Chinese economy, you’ve probably heard, dropped really, really precipitously in the last quarter. So check out those shows.
I’m a neophyte soul when it comes to the Chinese economy, but I’m always interested in learning. So these guys have taught me just enormous amounts.
Anyway, Ryan, great to have you on again, man. And this is going to be a very Brookings-heavy month because I’m going to be talking to your colleagues, Kyle Chan and Patty Kim about the work of theirs recently.
“Delighted to hear it, and thanks for having me on, Kaiser.”
Thank you. You’ve been listening to the Sinica Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through Substack at SinicaPodcast.com, where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio.
Email me at [email protected] if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Do not forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. And, of course, huge thanks to my fabulous guest, Ryan Haas, who is always a favorite, fan favorite, my favorite.
I’m really – thank you, Ryan, once again. Thank you, guys. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week. Take care.
2026-02-03 08:00:01
Why the Belt and Road Is Back in a Big Way
The China Global South podcast is supported in part by our subscribers and Patreon supporters. If you’d like to join a global community of readers for daily news and exclusive analysis about Chinese engagement in Asia, Africa, and throughout the developing world, go to ChinaGlobalSouth.com/subscribe.
Hello and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Sinica podcast network. I’m Eric Olander. Today, we’re going to get an update on the state of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Now, for the past several years, we’ve been hearing that the BRI is spent. The Chinese have run out of money and Global South countries that were the destination for so much of that investment simply can’t afford to take on more debt. And even the Chinese themselves have tried to change the narrative to make way for what was supposed to be a new, more austere era. Remember all of that talk about small yet beautiful? In Chinese, it’s called Xiao Er Mei (小而美). That was the line that they told everyone about smaller, more affordable, less risky BRI projects around the world.
Well, the data tells a very different story. BRI engagements last year actually reached an all-time high of more than $200 billion. Construction projects increased by 81% and investments surged by 61% compared to 2024. Energy engagements, especially in the fossil fuel sector, were very, very hot in 2025. And while the U.S. may have soured on Africa, Chinese investors haven’t. The continent was the top destination for BRI engagements anywhere in the world last year.
All of this comes from a new report published by the Green Belt and Road Center at Fudan University in Shanghai and Griffith University in Australia. Our old friend, Christophe Nedepil, is the man in charge of the project and joins us today from his office at Griffith University.
Good morning, Christophe, and welcome back to the show.
“Good morning to you, Eric. Great to be here and good to see you.”
It’s wonderful to see you and to get these surprising numbers because, again, we had heard that the BRI was all but done. Even the Chinese themselves were trying to brace us for a much more austere era. Your data says otherwise. What do you explain for this big surge of construction and investment by Chinese stakeholders?
“Yeah, I think that was a very big surprise already. When we were tracking the data, this level of commitment that we’ve seen in 2025, it’s something that we hadn’t expected and obviously hadn’t seen before.”
We’re at levels of BRI engagement and engagement, again, there’s construction contracts and investments—construction contracts where Chinese construction companies, like particularly state-owned enterprises, take the lead in implementing a large project. And investments are much more where the Chinese are investing their own money through equity investments, so they take ownership.
Now, these levels are more than double from the COVID years. So it is quite impressive. And you mentioned the energy engagement over $90 billion, and that over $90 billion is more than we’ve seen. Just kind of only the energy engagement is higher than we’ve seen during the COVID years. So this level of engagement is really something that is quite surprising to us.
I think there are a couple of explanations, of course. In the COVID years, 2020, 2021, and 2022, there was this whole idea of Xiao Armei, like small, yet beautiful, which was, I think, very logical. There was a lot of global risks. It was difficult to make deals. It was difficult to travel. And so the projects overall, the project volume decreased.
And now, really, this uptake in a still very volatile world, but with massive deals, scales more than $10 billion for single engagements.
So I think the largest one, also outside the BRI, is $37 billion by TikTok in Brazil. But we’re also tracking outside BRI. So we’re not just tracking BRI. We’re reporting on BRI, but in all the massive engagements:
And this $10+ billion engagement, we’ve not seen before. This is a new level of BRI engagement that I think is quite interesting to observe, and we’ll see whether that continues over the years to come.
So a lot of us were surprised, not only because of the size of the numbers but also the timing of it. Coming in 2025, when Donald Trump comes back into power, the international system goes into disarray, is there any connection that you can see in the data between the events that have been happening, say, within the new Trump era—that is the disruptions? Do they see an opportunity to move as the United States is pulling back from the world? Or are these just more coincidental in terms of the timing?
“I think there’s both. These projects take a while, particularly large-scale projects, take a while to negotiate.” This is not something that the Chinese are able to do with their partner countries in months. This is usually maybe a year in the making. So not everything that we have seen in 2025 was agreed to in 2025.
Now, what we know, of course, that over the last years, and this is not just the Trump era, this is also Obama era. And there was supply chain diversification, supply chain de-risking, with manufacturing plants being constructed in countries outside of China in order to reduce the tariff burdens from exporting directly from China, so rather exporting from other countries.
And there, of course, then came Liberation Day in April 2025, and with the massive increase of tariffs around the world to the U.S. And again, some of the Chinese companies have actually reacted quite quickly and also, for example, scrapped investment decisions for manufacturing from Vietnam and brought them to Morocco or other countries that have lower tariffs. So there’s still a lot of movement around in terms of the investment decisions, and that is also driven, of course, by geopolitics.
Let’s go back to energy. You mentioned that that was one of the major investment surges of last year. In fact, it was the highest of any period since the BRI’s inception at $94 billion, more than double what it was the previous year back in 2024. Give us the profile of these energy investments, because we had heard that the surge in Chinese investment overseas was in solar panels and new energy. But it seems to get these numbers at $94 billion, you’re going to have some of the older energy modes in there as well. Tell us a little bit about what happened in the energy sector.
Yeah, so I think kind of one of the quotes that have been picked up, it’s like
“2025 was the dirtiest and the greenest year in terms of energy engagement.”
And that’s true in absolute terms. So the overall engagement, as you said, increased quite a bit. It is particularly driven by oil and gas related engagement. These, for example, in Nigeria, the gas energy industrial park, there are a number of other fossil fuel engagements across the region.
So fossil fuel engagement actually has taken by far the majority, I think 75% of the total engagement is related to fossil fuel. And that’s a very high emitting energy engagement. And this is, so I remember in 2020, we celebrated that green energy or renewable energy has broken the 50% mark of the total energy engagement. And we’ve been backsliding since then in terms of the share. So that’s a worrying trend in some ways, particularly if we want to talk about a green Belt and Road Initiative and China’s green engagement.
Now, at the same time, the green energy engagement also increased to record levels. So that’s why we can also say it’s been the greenest year. And so that’s particularly in solar construction, but also in solar and wind construction, as well as in battery storage. As a broader kind of engagement portfolio that the Chinese have compared to previous years.
What’s important to note here, and I think we’ve also discussed this previously, Eric, is that we’re not looking at exports. So China’s green energy-related exports, solar panels and wind, whatever Pakistan, for example, imports 19 gigawatt of rooftop solar, this is not captured in the data. But because this is just pure export, we’re not capturing export. We’re capturing construction engagement and investment. And again, in the export space, China’s green-related exports, of course, are also increasing. And there’s great other reports out there that look at that.
Do you get a sense that in the fossil fuel sector the Chinese are building infrastructure and connectivity for exports from other countries to China? Or is this building coal, gas and oil infrastructure for these countries to use themselves or a mix of both? How does that break down?
So we don’t know exactly what it is used for each single project. What we see is that a lot of the fossil fuel engagement is indeed through construction contracts. So where Chinese construction companies just have a very strong expertise in
where Chinese companies potentially, either through a government-to-government contract or even through open bidding, have offered the most competitive price and therefore get chosen to lead this implementation.
And it might come with some Chinese financing, but it also might just come with local financing. What’s interesting for the Chinese construction companies is that a lot of these projects are very well-financed because you have the fossil fuel that in the end generates revenue. So you can be pretty sure that you’re going to get paid back for the construction that you do. And that’s different, for example, probably we’re going to talk about it in road infrastructure, which is public infrastructure, where there’s not such a strong revenue model. And therefore, the risks for the Chinese construction companies are much higher.
Again, fossil fuel, very clear. You’re going to sell the fossil fuel. You’re going to make money. And then you can pay back the Chinese construction companies. And so it’s a very lucrative business also for the Chinese.
That seems to be one of the trends that you’ve been following over several years now: the types of infrastructure that the Chinese are financing and building that used to be railroads, roads, things that we would call public goods, are less prominent today as opposed to telecommunications networks, fossil fuels — things that the moment you turn on, revenue starts coming in.
So that debt sustainability issue becomes paramount in what the Chinese are funding because, obviously, a lot of the countries where they’re doing these activities are having debt issues. So they’re looking for projects that are revenue generating right from the start. Is that a fair assessment?
I think that’s a very fair assessment.
So in 2019, the Chinese published the debt sustainability guidelines. That means for companies to evaluate whether they’re going to give a loan or work with a country to build an infrastructure project and look at the country’s profile, whether they are able to pay back the debt and whether they’re actually exacerbating the debt issues of that country.
Since 2019, this debt sustainability framework exists, and so that was before COVID. Then we saw during COVID that a lot of the global South countries were subject to a lot of sovereign debt issues. That impacts Chinese construction companies quite severely because, in the end, it’s the construction companies, if they took out loans for building, let’s say, a coal-fired power plant or a road project, and whatever country — Pakistan, for example — does not pay back the loan or does not pay back the loan in time, who’s going to be paying the loan?
And in the end, it is actually often the construction companies that have to shoulder some of the banks necessarily, but it’s the construction companies that have to shoulder the risk.
So there’s a very clear risk management necessity to understand:
I was surprised that Africa turned out to be the top destination last year for BRI engagement, $61.2 billion, an increase of 283%, largely by this big project in Nigeria that you referenced, $24.6 billion.
Just to be clear, is that project in Nigeria:
Because sometimes it’s not clear.
It is so true, Eric. So we are trying our best in our data to distinguish project-level commitments. I think every database is running into the same issues. We don’t track money. We track announcements of projects by two independent sources where possible, or a stock market announcement. So we try to be as rigorous with our methodology as possible.
There are different levels of commitments that we track. This one is, I think, more than an MOU. It’s agreed. We have the location. We have the amount. We have both sides’ agreement.
In the end, I believe this project will change and will evolve. It’s not kind of… The design phase is definitely not finished from what we can see. So there’s a lot more work that needs to come to make this project actually real. But the commitment is quite explicit from both sides and confirmed. And so that’s why we were willing to include it in the database.
Yeah, the report also said that part of the reason for this surge in Chinese engagement in Africa was because of potentially, again, just a theory, because of the lower U.S. tariffs that African countries received traditionally through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which is now in the process of being renewed through Congress.
By the way, something very interesting on the renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act.
But you said that there might be some connection between lower U.S. tariffs and the surge of Chinese BRI engagement. Tell us a little bit more about that. If a Chinese company wants to export to the U.S. and is in the process of making an investment decision, the logic is, of course, that the Chinese company will look at countries that have a tax regime that is favorable or a tariff regime that is favorable to them to be competitive against other competitors. It might be sitting in a country with a high tariff regime. So these investment decisions are just normal. I don’t think that any country or any company would not make those.
What’s interesting with the Chinese, and I think there’s an upside and a downside to that, is that China’s speed, making quick decisions, being able to build factories very quickly, and to churn out the products very quickly, is an opportunity, I think, also for host countries, for BRI countries, to attract specific types of investment.
The downside is that, and the downside is that, once the regime changes, and maybe there’s some issues, and maybe another opportunity for the same Chinese company, there’s also a risk that the facility will be abandoned very quickly.
Now, early on in the BRI, back in the 2013-2014 era, it was a lot of Chinese state-owned enterprises backed by Chinese policy bank loans that were going out and doing these big deals, these huge projects. We saw that run-up of lending that peaked in 2016, and that’s gone down. And the Chinese private sector back then played a secondary role.
Over the past couple of years, as we’ve talked to you, one of the things that we’ve noticed is that
Are you seeing that in the data for 2025 as well?
Yeah, so definitely for the investment side, it’s mostly private companies that are leading the fray, and it’s interestingly also a lot of these new tech companies that are both in kind of the IT tech, like TikTok and Alibaba, as well as in the green tech space, like Jinko Solar and other green tech companies that are leading the way.
These are private companies that are interested in:
- being closer to their customers
- diversifying their supply chains
- de-risking their supply chains
- going abroad
And that’s also now the capacity, management capacity, and technological leadership to be actually a really, really attractive partner in host countries to set up factories.
And that’s not just in BRI countries, that’s also in a lot of developed countries, and those are trying to attract battery manufacturers from China, because this is state-of-the-art technology, very different from the early phases of the BRI, where such technological leadership just did not exist.
From that perspective, I’m always very, very impressed, and I think the rapid emergence of these technological leaders in China over the past couple of years has very much flipped kind of our logic, what type of investment we want to attract.
It was at the beginning, of course, the Chinese wanted to attract Western technology, and now it is often the case that everybody wants to, particularly in the green space, attract the Chinese technological leaders to set up shop.
In the construction engagement, it’s still a lot of state-owned enterprises that are very engaged abroad. So, these are real leaders in driving these construction engagements.
What’s, I think, also clear is that state-owned enterprises have a different mandate, particularly of spending their own money. Now, construction engagement really brings them in money. That’s just revenue. You’re a service provider.
For investment, you have to, of course, use your own money, and Chinese state-owned enterprises might have a mandate to also invest domestically to create jobs. And it also, kind of, their financing modalities are quite different. Their approval processes are quite different from private companies. And so, their ability to invest abroad has also changed over the last year.
So, that’s, I think, why we’re also seeing less state-owned enterprise investments compared to the previous years.
As we look forward to 2026, which obviously is now underway, some of the trends that we should watch out for are probably:
And mining is something we didn’t talk about, but that was one of the areas that was also showing a lot of activity.
Do you expect Africa to continue to be a main focus, or will the Chinese look elsewhere to spread out some of those investments?
Man, that’s always the golden question, looking into the future. Obviously, we don’t know. I always start with that.
The trends that we’ve seen over the last years, I think, can continue. So, I think we’ll see even more tech-related engagement.
And we’ve seen this tech-related engagement, not just in developed countries, but really in emerging economies. I believe that this will continue. There are a lot of opportunities for the Chinese to set up shop. There is a lot more capacity for the Chinese in the management skills to do so, to manage all the local staff. So, I think this is really a learning. And therefore, I think this trend will continue.
In terms of the mining, there’s a very clear engagement across the world to kind of own more mines, to kind of also use this accelerated need for a lot of the transition minerals to utilize on this trend. And it’s not just the Chinese. It’s also, of course, the Australians and other countries that are trying to get their mines and their processing in order.
In terms of regional engagement, there will be a lot of kind of up and down. So, I always believe that kind of one year does not give a trend. And so, this year, of course, we saw a lot of Africa engagement. In the previous year, we often saw a lot of Southeast Asia engagement.
I think the only one that has been very constant over the last years is actually the Middle East, where there has been just a very strong engagement across a number of different sectors. It includes:
So, I think this Middle East engagement has been very strong. Also, in countries that are often not seeing a lot of Western engagement, it includes Iraq, Afghanistan, where the Chinese had some good engagement.
Again, Africa, Southeast Asia, I think this is always kind of up and down. I’m not able to see a very clear trend where it will go over the next year.
Okay. The report is the China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2025. It is by far the most authoritative report on the trends related to the BRI, where the money is going, what they’re doing with it, and who is actually engaged.
It was prepared by Christoph Nedepil, who is the director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University in Australia, and the acting director of the Green Finance and Development Center that’s part of the School of Finance at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Thank you so much, Christoph, for letting us know about everything that’s going on. We’re looking forward to talking to you later in the year to get an update on how things are going in the first half.
You do these reports every, I think, two or three times a year, correct?
“Every six months.”
“Every six months.”
So we’ll talk to you over the summer to get an update on how the first half of 2026 is going.
Thank you so much for joining us.
“What a pleasure to be here again, Eric.”
“Always a pleasure to see you.”
Thank you, Christoph, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today.
We’ll be back again next week with another edition of the China Global South Podcast on behalf of everyone around the world at the China Global South Project.
Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
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2026-01-30 08:00:01
How South Asian States Navigate Rivalries Between the U.S., China, and India
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Hello and welcome to the show. I’m Eric Olander. Today, the fallout from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos is still reverberating.
If you recall, he declared that the old U.S.-led international order is dead and called for middle-power states to work together to form a new coalition.
Not surprisingly, his remarks were not well-received in the United States, but they sparked a lot of conversation in wealthier middle-power countries like:
We’re reading a lot about that right now in international media coverage.
But we haven’t heard much at all about what all this means in smaller, lesser-developed countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The dynamics are very different and oftentimes because they are much more vulnerable due to their size. Oftentimes, it’s poverty or weak governance that are factors that play into all of this.
So we’re going to focus on a fascinating report that came out last October focusing on how small states in South Asia are navigating this new multipolar world that we’re in.
What’s interesting is that the dynamics of what’s happening over here in Asia are very similar in many ways to the challenges that smaller countries and other developing regions are also confronting. There’s an opportunity here to apply learnings from one region to another. But of course, not in all cases, and there are a lot of differences.
The report I mentioned looks beyond just the U.S.-China competition, but also includes India in the mix as well. And that’s something important in certain parts of the world.
I’m thrilled to have two of the lead authors of the report join me today for our discussion.
Zagar and Mandakini, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
Thank you for having us.
It’s great to have you today, and what a great time to have this. When you wrote the report back in October, you could never have foreseen where we are today.
Before we get started looking into the report, I’d like to get both of your perspectives, both from India and from Nepal, on the Carney speech. Whether you think the message he signaled is as important where you are as it’s being discussed in Europe and parts of industrial Asia.
Sagar, let’s start with you, and then Mandakini, I’d like to get your take on that.
Yeah, so it’s like that moment when somebody suddenly screams from the sides, you know, the emperor has no clothes, right?
And so, in that sense, the existence of the U.S. hegemony was well understood at all levels, at political levels, at sort of in financial domain and otherwise.
And the average Nepali cannot buy or sell anything without first changing their currency into dollars. And so, the presence of the dollar is quite overwhelming everywhere.
But for the immediate stakeholders, which is the foreign policy establishment in Nepal and those who keep track of the issues like these, it was like, well, we all knew. It’s just that there is an open admission.
And in that sense, even in that speech, the precursor was that, well, we all knew, but, you know, at the same time, we never quite mentioned it or openly confronted the U.S. in this fashion.
And so, there was some, let’s just say, a quiet celebration that the truth is out, right, from that angle.
But for countries like Nepal, you know, which is right in the middle of India and China, it’s got only two neighbors, China to the north and India to the south. Both are emerging giants, disproportionately larger than what Nepal is.
And so, therefore, it lived in a different geopolitical setting where the U.S. mattered, of course, because it overwhelmingly matters everywhere, and to a certain extent, particularly as a sort of developing partners, and Europeans also mattered.
But beyond that, Nepal has always a predominant concern about what happens in China and India rather than elsewhere.
Mandakini, the India reaction has been very interesting in part because India has seen this dynamic play out before as well. India, during the Cold War, very skillfully played both sides.
And so, I’m wondering if the reaction in New Delhi was similar to what Zagar was hearing in Nepal.
Well, I think for one thing, I’m not sure that it actually made the frontline news. I think it was buried somewhere in the newspaper. And, of course, I heard about it and was very curious to hear what he had said. And when I heard it back, I was actually a little underwhelmed. Underwhelmed in the sense that what he was saying was not really new.
I think countries, developing countries, middle-income countries, countries which are kind of small island countries, have been talking about the structural inequalities that they have been seeing in these international processes, whether it’s the WTO, the World Trade Organization, or on trade, or financing for decades. And I’ve been calling it out quite vociferously.
And I think India has been one of those countries, South Africa, Brazil. You know, the Prime Minister of Barbados, if nobody heard, is absolutely fabulous. I mean, I think she calls out…
Hypocrisy, she calls out quite a bit. She calls out the hypocrisy.
I think what was interesting was the fact that, as Sagar said, for the first time, you had a Western democratic leader actually calling it out and saying that,
“Oh, you know, the post-World War institutional structures, this rules-based international order that has been shoved down the throats of many countries is unfair in many ways.”
And that larger, more powerful, more financially powerful countries for years have been pursuing their own foreign policy or diplomatic economic imperatives with a lot of impunity. And it’s been the kind of hush-hush secret that everybody has kind of gone along with.
So I think it was a bit of… Yeah, I think that the reaction, I think, just not only from India, but many countries in the global South was,
So I think, for example, just to give an example, with the rise of China, as Sagar mentioned, the concerns about China’s expanding footprint across the world has been…
It was such big news for the last decade. It led to the Indo-Pacific becoming a new geographic construct. The Quad alignment between India, USA, Japan, and Australia came as a result of that. All a bit focused around very much controlling China’s strategic rise. And in fact, even Canada came up with an Indo-Pacific strategy for China. And now you have Mark Carney saying, okay, you know, we’re willing to talk to China.
So, I think India very much on…
It took over to your point around the Cold War, which is, you know, when you had the US-Russia, the tensions rising, particularly of the last couple of years. Trump wanted India to stop buying Russian oil. He still wants us to stop buying Russian oil. And I think India has been more muted about it now. But the foreign policy position was like,
“Look, we’re going to exercise our strategic autonomy and buy oil from where we can, because we’ve got, you know, our economy needs to grow.”
And India has actually done a lot to respond to Trump’s demands as well. But yet now we have some of the highest tariffs being imposed of all the countries in South Asia. So I think calling out that kind of double standard is something that countries have experienced for a long time. But now that it’s coming to bite the West, I think there is more open acknowledgement target.
Yeah. And he even acknowledged that they knew that this was a flawed system, but went along with it.
Just very quickly before we get on, I mean, you were being very polite that it was saying it’s from a wealthy or G7 country. Is the fact that this is coming from a white man different?
Yes. Because we don’t, I mean, the whiteness matters here.
Oh, it does. I was trying, I was wondering, should I say it or not? But yeah, it does matter.
No, no, no. Let’s kind of be, take, you know, be as direct as you can.
I mean, 100% it matters. I think, you know, the fact that a white person who is, you know, the leader of a G7 country saying,
“Oh, you know, it’s unfair and it’s unfair to Canadian people.”
You’re like, well, what about the millions of people south of the equator who have been saying it’s been unfair for generations?
So I think there is definitely a factor. And I suspect it would not have made such mainstream headline news had it not been a white leader who had said it, a white male leader. I mean, if Modi said it or if Modi or she said it, people would have been like, yeah. And they have. Modi, she, the prime minister, Barbados, the BRICS countries, all of them.
If you Google it, ChatGPT, you will find statements from them going back decades, which would have said something to the effect that the existing world order is not fair.
You know, there’s a similar phenomenon going on in the United States where white people are shocked, shocked that the police are abusive and that even video recordings of police brutality… Against white protesters in places like Minneapolis and killings now of white people and brown and black people, many have been saying this for decades, for centuries actually, that the police have been impartial. So again, this is a reckoning happening both inside and outside the U.S.
As much as I’d like to continue that line of our conversation, I want to get back to the report that you guys worked on last year. Now, it focused on three countries in particular: Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. You also had some insights included in it from Bhutan and Maldives as well.
Sagar, let’s talk a little bit about the understanding that a lot of countries have where we hear the top line, which is they don’t want to take sides between the various powers. And as you pointed out, in Nepal, we cannot make this only about the U.S. and China. Obviously, India plays a very important role.
You also wrote in the report that they don’t follow the textbook strategies for hedging because there’s the impact of domestic politics, there’s regime survival, all sorts of other factors. Let’s start at the high level about how these three countries in particular are managing these rivalries and what we should take away from it.
What we are essentially bringing out in that paper is that, look, countries are—it’s difficult to say countries are rational actors because countries are only as rational as their ruling establishments are rational, right? And it’s like what you see in the U.S. right now.
Like you can’t call the U.S. behaving rationally or irrationally. It’s more like Trump and his coterie behaving rationally and irrationally. So that happens in smaller states too.
You’ve got the ruling elites who have a particular interest. They would want to extend the legitimacy to rule as much as possible. And in that process, if China is a resource, if China’s influence is useful, then they would be more than happy to take it.
You see this in countries like Maldives, where Maldives has periodically, election after election, either become very close to India or very close to China. Other states have sort of, in some ways, tried to balance it.
But what we are arguing is this balancing act is really, really difficult because it’s never—the foreign policy positions are never derived from a broad, national, consensus-based interest determination.
These things happen at the will of the ruling elites, and it can go in any direction. That makes it all the more risky.
Mandakini, Sagar gave us a really nice kind of setup for this. One of the things that we’ve seen is that in Sri Lanka, Maldives, Bangladesh, and certainly Nepal, there’s been this flirtation with the major powers in the region to varying levels of success.
But again, talk to us about this question of the interests that Sagar brought up. Sometimes the ruling elites’ interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the population or the foreign policy. And as such, they don’t necessarily behave rationally.
So if we want to look at how these countries are managing these rivalries, give us a little bit of your insights of what you found on the research.
Well, I think it’s useful to think of it in sort of like an analogy, right?
I think we often forget how strongly that legacy of partition—both in terms of the division of land, people, and resources—has truly affected the way in which states in the region actually see each other and are able to engage with one another.
So it’s kind of like when you divide land amongst your, if you were to divide land amongst, you know, your five brothers of five men and women. And it’s been fundamentally unequal in some instances. Some geography was traded, some people got left to Bahrain on one side.
Those wounds, I don’t think, have ever really knitted.
So India has, and the region has a baggage which it carries, which I think very often plays very emotionally into foreign policy decision-making.
And very often, by the political parties in different countries, in particular moments of either political upheaval or economic hardship, it plays into decisions that they might take with respect to:
- Choosing a particular infrastructure project from India versus China
- Taking a particular line of credit or a particular loan
So what I’m trying to say is that engagement with India always comes with a certain degree of historical baggage, one of which also is this idea of it being a regional hegemon and behaving like a big brother. It’s something that India has been accused of for decades, and I think justifiably so.
But at the same time, it’s kind of like that big brother who you hate, but you love to hate. And we all know we love to hate him. But in a time of crisis, you know that big brother is the one that’s going to come.
So in the instance that during the COVID pandemic, when the whole world locked down, it was India that actually manufactured vaccines and was the first to provide them to a lot of countries in its neighborhood. But to be fair, until India shut down its own vaccine manufacturing, the rest of Asia could not get drugs from India. So there are limits to that. And that exposes the risks, though.
So we in Vietnam were counting on India to provide vaccines to us. Now, the West hoarded all the vaccines for themselves. But when India made a decision in its own interest, at the expense of everybody else, it exposed the asymmetries in these relationships.
Can you speak a little bit to the imbalances that exist in these great power rivalries?
When you’re sitting in Nepal and you’re relying on India, you’re up to the whims of what happens in New Delhi, and that’s it. Like the vaccine during COVID. I mean, I think it’s not just the vaccines, right?
And I think would be a rational policy choice for any government in that moment to diversify options.
But I think what the paper is also showing is that those decisions sometimes are genuinely reflective of what the country needs at that point of moment. Sometimes it’s to do with just servicing the interests of the ruling political elite, for example, right?
So that hedging sometimes works and sometimes it doesn’t. That balancing works sometimes, but it doesn’t.
The lesson I think for countries like India is that, you know, also the geography and South Asia has changed in the sense that, very often you’re looking at a population of 2 billion people. The median age in India is 20, not India, in the region is 27. That means that’s a young, very young population, all of whom are looking for jobs, all of whom have social media, and they’re seeing a lifestyle which they all aspire to.
So there’s a lot of pressure on local governments, on countries in the region to provide for their young voting elites and middle class a lifestyle that they aspire to. And the question is:
And India, unfortunately, has done a terrible job of opening up its markets to its neighbors. And so they will look for markets elsewhere. They will look to send their labor elsewhere because India, I mean, the region is famously called one of the least integrated regions in the world, right?
So unlike ASEAN, which is quite a well, you know, really well-functioning, to some extent, regional unit and political bloc, mobility is really hard in South Asia. You know, people can’t even visit relatives across the border.
And what you’re saying, I think, will resonate with a lot of people in Africa where mobility is also an issue and also a very young population that is looking to upgrade their lifestyles and certainly against what they see in TikTok, but also just in absolute terms as well.
Sagar, this question of the great powers, the U.S., China, and India, and how they’re being perceived. When we were in Indonesia a couple of weeks ago, we met with some senior stakeholders and they explained the relationship that they have with China as one where Indonesians don’t look at China as an ally or a threat, but an opportunity. And what they said was,
“This is basically a conditional relationship. The moment it ceases to be an opportunity, they will look somewhere else for opportunities.”
How do you think the smaller powers in South Asia, especially in places like Nepal, look at the major powers, all three of the major powers, in that same way as Indonesia? Or do they see it differently?
It is more or less the same as Indonesia. China is an emergent actor here. And then it comes with all these goodies. It’s an opportunity, right? But what the Chinese trajectory is of a kind that will probably not stop being an opportunity for some time to come, right? And that’s largely because how well it has established itself in the technology front, right? Like you, in the whole world as some anticipation that AI, for instance, would be part of their economic engine or a sort of a new window for innovation in all economies.
But look at how AI is developing, right? If in the entire world, there is this particular space in the US, in Silicon Valley, where seven companies have invested more than a trillion dollars in that technology. And for that technology to become ever affordable or for any other country to sort of think of coming up with their own AI ecosystems is completely impossible from cost-wise, talent-wise, and so on and so forth.
So while there is almost a preoccupation among the seven giants as to who beats who, China is quietly putting ecosystems, the entire AI ecosystems, that’s the hardware and the model and, you know, lock, stock, and barrel ready to be sold at much lower prices to any buyer in the global south, right?
So that’s what they did with the cell phone industry. That’s what they’ve done with the EV. So if you just look at these two products with which we already have prior experience, which is EV and cell phones, now think about if at a much lower cost, companies, governments, militaries across the world can buy Chinese-produced almost break the seal, open the package and start running kind of AI modules, right?
So there are opportunities like that, right? And even in terms of financing, right? So it’s easy to say we can live without the U.S. But the reality is, U.S.’s current annual budget is 1.5 times larger than the Indian economy, right? So you can’t escape the influence that comes from that kind of money, right?
From that angle, and then for most South Asian countries, India’s market is as in, why is the EU in India today? And Canada as well was there as well. Canada as well. So they’re in India. And that fact is not unnoticed by India’s neighbors. Like, what about us, the little guys here, right?
So from all of those considerations, I don’t think China is, at least not foreseeably, going to weaken in terms of what goodies it has to offer. And from that angle, the balancing, edging, sort of thinking about what lies ahead in future will continue to make geopolitical calculations difficult.
Mandakini, the points that Sagar raised on AI and the goodies relate to oftentimes infrastructure. And infrastructure becomes a very important part of the dynamics of great power management in these parts of the world.
The U.S. has sought to become a bigger player with its various initiatives that it’s brought out over the years with the DFC and others to counter the Belt and Road. India is a big infrastructure builder in the small states that you guys covered in your report. And of course, China with its Belt and Road initiative, particularly in places like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Talk to us about the importance of infrastructure as a vector of the great power competition in this part of the world.
I think infrastructure is a really big one. And of course, India cannot hope to compete with China in terms of the scale and the number of projects with the BRI, the Belt and Road Initiative. Of course, India is very concerned about things like CPEC, you know, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, because that has a certain, you know, and the border roads construction happening around India’s northwest and western eastern frontier.
But I think when it comes to the small states that we looked at, obviously, whether if you’re a small island state like the Maldives, which is basically a bunch of island atolls, which are very inaccessible, I mean, inaccessible either by flight or by boat, right? So, infrastructure for them is a real need.
And I think it’s interesting to see how the Maldives has been very effective in kind of extracting infrastructure contracts or getting infrastructure investment from both China and India, and also by successive governments.
So a few years ago, the government of, I think it was Mohamed Yameen, had investment that he brought in from China. And then subsequently, the following prime minister brought in, president brought in investment from India.
So I think also you have this flip-flop very often between competing opposition political parties where, you know, one is openly pro-China, while they’re in government, they’ll bring in Chinese investment, that the person in opposition will be like,
“No, no, China out, India in.” And when they come into power, they bring India in.
And of course, a recent president of the Maldives came into power on a very anti-Indian stance. He wanted India’s defense support to the Maldives. We had some troops stationed there for them to leave. He came into power, the troops left, and then the following year, he came to India seeking investment.
So also a lot of these decisions are politically expedient and demonstrate certain optics to your domestic constituency, which is also important. So verity is very important to small states. The optics of being seen as being neutral, non-aligned, not pro-one party or one power or the other is actually strategically very important to them.
So I think to the point around infrastructure, I just want to make one point, which is, I think it goes without saying that, if you go to Sri Lanka, for example, China has built the most amazing fall-in highways.
So I think India needs to do better if it hopes to compete with China. But it is in many ways it can’t because of the scale, the sheer proficiency with which China has been building roads and infrastructure around the world. Africa is a good example: I had a friend who was posted in Sierra Leone, six-lane highway in like a couple of months. It’s very impressive.
I’d like to close our discussion looking forward a little bit. You wrote this report back in October of last year. And again, the world has changed dramatically since October. We see a breakdown of the international system and also of the institutions themselves. The United States has all but quit the United Nations. The United Nations is doing significant layoffs now of its staff.
What does it mean for these kinds of countries when the institutions and the systems that have been in place for 70, 80 years are not there anymore? It’s obviously a risk, but is it also an opportunity?
So for the small states, it’s a risk. It’s a risk because the number one issue comes from the fact that small states as such couldn’t or never did have much of a voice in actually making these rules in the rules-based order. But anything that promises to treat everybody equally is always good when you are a geopolitically weak actor.
And so there is a natural leaning towards a rules-based system in small states. And that being shaken is a serious problem. Because now the middle powers jostle. In the sense that when the Canadian prime minister spoke about it, it sounded good. But then there is internal competition between the middle powers.
So there’ll be a lot of jostling. And then the smaller states have a more heightened risk of being squished in one direction or the other.
The third thing about the upheavals that we’ve seen is this whole jeopardy on development financing stream. America withdrew lock, stock, and barrel. Europe, because of its own war in the backyard and failing economies and now that it has an issue with tariffs with the U.S., its biggest trading partner, the European outlook economically isn’t good.
So whatever they were able to do through EU or at a bilateral level, particularly U.K., Germany, France—France in Africa, others elsewhere—that development financing stream is also in some ways being compromised. And then now the latest news is Japan is being shaky. Japanese bonds being as cheap as they were, borrowing from Japan was a great advantage for very many developing countries in Asia where Japan has some degree of focus:
- India has borrowed heavily.
- Sri Lanka has borrowed heavily.
- Nepal has borrowed heavily.
- Bangladesh has borrowed heavily.
That’s because the interest rates were so low. Now the Japanese interest rates are growing very rapidly high.
Because of all of these changes, it’s like just because the dominoes started falling from the U.S., it has sort of taken the whole world in a sweep. And so all of those development prospects, financing and so on and so forth has become a problem for smaller states. Mandakini, what do you think?
I think it’s, you know, it’s sort of like you may, we all may have known that the rules of the game were not fair, but at least we knew what the rules were. I think now when you’ve thrown the rules out of the window, it is a situation of, it’s an unknown situation of just not knowing what will happen, what you’re going to wake up to and read in the papers tomorrow, right?
I mean, for a large country like India, yes, certainly it’s a concern. You never know whether the tariffs will go up or down tomorrow, what Trump will tweet about overnight.
And I think for small states, the existential anxiety will probably be even more. And I think one underestimates the power of a single vote in the UN, right? So even a small island state, like a small like Nauru or Kiribati or one small little island in the Caribbean, that vote really mattered in the UN.
So if the devaluation of that UN vote, I think is significant. Equally, the fact that, you know, the UN has been passing all these resolutions on whether it’s Ukraine or on Gaza, and none of them have been backed. You know, if a country like Ukraine or, you know, a large political, a big political conflict like Gaza, no one is going to come, essentially, the message is:
“No one is coming to our rescue,” right? And no one is listening.
And I think that’s very disconcerting.
I think in terms of an opportunity, you know, with this whole Don Roe or Monroe doctrine of America wanting to kind of withdraw and create its own sphere of influence in the West, that means it’s going to create a vacuum, right? Now, who is going to fill that vacuum?
It’s a player, but not in the same way. It doesn’t have that kind of military capability. But I would suspect that there’s a lot of head scratching and thinking going on in countries in South Asia, whether they are small or big about, you know:
I think we’ll see the rise of more minilaterals or trilaterals, you know, triumph groups of two or three countries trying to come together. But as Sagar said, you know, economics matters, and they will be looking at how do they shore up their economy so that you don’t see the kind of domestic political upheaval you’ve seen in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, right?
So it’s going to be a very tough balancing act and also maintaining your own strategic integrity as a country, you know?
Yeah. And we also didn’t touch on it, but there’s going to be bottom-up pressure as well from Gen Z where if a cigar, I mean, we can talk about that at some other future time, but, you know, Nepal was ground zero for one of the most violent uprisings of Gen Z that expressed their frustration.
So these governments are going to be facing:
And we saw these same pressures in Nairobi and in Jakarta and in other parts of the world as well.
Absolutely fascinating to start thinking about this because we’re in a whole new world now. And it is, as you pointed out, maybe this is something that, you know, many of these countries expected because they’ve seen the hypocrisies for so long, but actually talking about them now is so important given that it’s being discussed in Berlin and London and Brussels and Washington, but it’s not necessarily being discussed as much elsewhere.
So we’re happy that you both were able to join us.
Mandakini Suri and Sagar Prasai are both independent development consultants who’ve been in this business for a very, very long time. They did some fascinating research on how small powers in South Asia are dealing with this new world that we’re in.
Now, again, they wrote it last year. The new world is even more new this year. And so we’re happy that you were able to join us.
Thank you both for taking your time today to share some of your insights. We really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Eric.
Thanks, Eric.
And we want to thank everybody for joining us today for another episode of the show. We’ll be back again next week with another edition. And we hope that in the meantime, you’ll check out everything that the team at CGSP is doing around the world in French and Spanish and English.
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