A guest post by Professor at American University as well as the author of the new Xi Zhongxun biography and a book exploring succession politics in the USSR and CCP.

September 3 will mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and Xi Jinping will host Vladimir Putin in Beijing for a military parade to mark the occasion. For both men, it will be an opportunity to assert the civilizational agendas they are pursuing.

Xi and Putin see themselves as men who inherited a baton from their forefathers to continue a struggle against outside enemy forces who have always wanted to eliminate their countries’ distinct national characteristics and subjugate them.

For both, the war was personal. During World War II, Xi’s revolutionary father Zhongxun concentrated his energies against the Nationalists and was never near Japanese forces. Yet Jinping’s mother Qi Xin personally witnessed the Japanese seizure of Beijing, was nearly killed by enemy cavalry, and witnessed atrocities committed by imperial forces. Xi Jinping even lost a first cousin, only an infant, to the fires of war.

Putin’s family also suffered. His father was severely wounded in combat against the Nazis and survived the Siege of Leningrad, where an elder brother died. His maternal grandmother was slain by Nazi occupiers.

For both Xi and Putin, victory then was costly, but incomplete. Although the war concluded before they were born, it resonates with them differently from other contemporary world leaders. Xi and Putin believe that “hegemonic forces” still want to impose a foreign model upon them and block their rightful place in the world. Now, they want to use the memory of the war to inoculate future generations against Western values and legitimate the global order they envision.

Having witnessed the chaos their nations faced for much of the twentieth century, both are deeply preoccupied with the question of political order. Xi Jinping was incarcerated and exiled during the Cultural Revolution and feared state collapse during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Vladimir Putin famously saw the collapse of Soviet power in East Germany as a young KGB officer. Both Xi and Putin believe that their rise to power stopped centrifugal forces, supported by the West, that threatened to tear their nations apart before they came to power.

Commemorating World War II serves that mission. Both men clearly believe that their nations need a sense of idealism, sacrifice, and commitment to survive. History as moral education is a powerful tool for that purpose. World War II was a moment that showed their nations could achieve extraordinary victories.

Xi and Putin see the suffering their peoples experienced as something that deserves only the most profound respect both at home and abroad. The anniversary has been turned into an instrument to instill loyalty to the state among a younger generation. That message is especially significant for their militaries, as Russia continues its war against Ukraine and China prepares the People’s Liberation Army for a possible war on Taiwan.

It is also a time to remind the outside world what China and Russia think they deserve as major contributors to victory in World War II. At the war’s end, both nations were recognized as major powers. For Putin, Yalta meant Russia was given special rights in its so-called “near abroad.” For Xi, the defeat of Japan meant Taiwan should rightfully return to the Chinese mainland. Beijing and Moscow see American activities in their neighborhoods as a return to the power politics that led to war decades ago.

That is why Xi and Putin obsess over a perceived grievance that diminishes the contributions of the countries' role in the war. Control over history is literally a matter of regime security and strategic imperatives.

The Chinese Communist Party opposes any attempts to deny the Nanjing Massacre and the horrific biological and chemical warfare experiments on human beings at Unit 731 in Manchuria. Two movies, one on each of those topics, are being released this year in China. The party also opposes the largely accurate narrative that the communists sat out much of the war against the Japanese.

In Russia, former Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky used the words “human scum” to refer to anyone who debunked the legend of Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen, who allegedly all died fighting off the Nazis outside Moscow.

Yet questions remain about the long-term efforts by Xi and Putin to immortalize their regimes and their use of the memory of World War II for that purpose. The story of Chinese and Russian history is often one of unintended consequences. Mao Zedong launched his Cultural Revolution to prevent capitalism from appearing in China. It was such a disaster it triggered Reform and Opening. Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to save the Soviet Union destroyed it.

Putin sees the war against Ukraine as a sort of sequel to World War II that can help him recast another generation of Russians according to his vision. He sneered as young people fled the country to avoid the draft, describing them as “scum and traitors” that Russians would “simply spit out” “like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths.” He seeks to politically empower veterans – for instance through his Time of Heroes program to get them elected on his party’s ticket. Patriotic education has contributed to the militarization of society. The economy is now hardened against sanctions and geared to fight a long-term war. Yet what will Russia do without its most talented young people if they flee or die on the battlefield? Will Russians become exhausted by the war? And how long can prolonged competition with the West last with an economy whose future has been mortgaged on the war?

Xi can only use the memory of war and the possibility of potential war in the future. He uses the revolutionary legacy, of which the war against Japan was a part, to achieve what he calls “self-revolution.” It is a call to vigilance, a call to “eat bitterness,” a call to yet another young generation of Chinese to devote their lives not just to themselves but also to national rejuvenation. Yet Xi does not want his relationship with the West to go completely off the rails. Unlike Putin, he wants to benefit from economic, financial, and technological ties while he can. The question is whether Xi can achieve both struggle and pragmatism at the same time.

As for the international community, the commemoration in Beijing will likely not fundamentally change any feelings in the West towards Russia or China. No Western nation is convinced that the Ukrainians are Nazis, as Putin falsely alleges. And although China has sought to avoid economic and reputational costs, it has unambiguously been a major facilitator of Russia’s war machine. The military parade, along with the recent treatment of Japanese citizens and military exercises around Taiwan, might frighten China’s neighbors more than win them over with the memory of China’s role in the defeat of Imperial Japan.

No historian can deny the contributions of China and Russia in the defeat of fascism in World War II. But the war’s role in justifying authoritarianism at home and expansion abroad is not a tribute that will inspire everyone.

For more with Joseph Torigian, check out our podcast on his first book on CCP power struggles.

And the two-part five hour epic we did covering his monumental biography of Xi Zhongxun.

For the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan, ChinaTalk interviewed Ian Toll about his Pacific War trilogy, which masterfully brings America’s bloodiest war — and the world’s only nuclear war — to life. Ian’s detailed scholarship creates a multisensory historical experience, from the metallic tang of radiation after the bombs were dropped to the stench of Pacific battlefields.

Ian’s forthcoming book, The Freshwater War, will explore the naval campaign the US fought against Britain on the Great Lakes between 1812 and 1815.

Today our conversation covers….

• How Ian innovates when writing historical narratives,

• Whether Allied victory was predetermined after the US entered the war,

• Why the Kamikaze were born out of resource scarcity, and whether Japanese military tactics were suicidal as well,

• How foreign wars temporarily stabilized Japan’s revolutionary domestic politics,

• How American military leadership played the media and politics to become national heroes,

• Lessons from 1945 for a potential Taiwan invasion.

Cohosting is , author of Chip War. Thanks to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this podcast.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

The Pacific War — A Writer’s Guide

Jordan Schneider: I want to start with your closest scholarly forebearer, Samuel Eliot Morison. He was FDR’s buddy who ended up getting presidential approval to be embedded in the fight in the Pacific. Over the next 20 years, he published a 15-volume, 6,000-page history of United States naval operations in World War II.

For this show, aside from reading your 2,000 pages, I also read a few hundred pages of Morison, which — while there are echoes — feels like it was of a different time, era, and audience. When reflecting back on where you chose to spend your time in research and pages, compared to what he thought was most interesting and vital, what were the things that you both agreed needed the full treatment? What were things that you felt comfortable writing in the 21st century that you could spend less time on? What were some of the themes that you wanted to emphasize to a greater extent than he did in his book?

Ian Toll: Well, Morison will always be the first, if not the greatest, historian of the Pacific War. It’s an unusual case because Morison pitched the president of the United States — who was himself a former assistant secretary of the Navy — this idea. FDR ran the Navy day-to-day during the Woodrow Wilson administration and was fascinated with naval history going all the way back to the American Revolution. He was a collector and an antiquarian.

FDR was unique as a president in anticipating the importance of research and writing to document the history of this war, even before it began to unfold.

Samuel Eliot Morison, a historian at Harvard who was well-established in the field, said, “Why don’t you just put me in charge of this whole project and let the Navy know that I get an all-access pass to the Pacific War as it’s happening? I will produce a multi-volume official history — but really a history written by me, Samuel Eliot Morison, with all of my strongly opinionated views, having witnessed many of these events, in some cases from actually being aboard a ship in a task force as it went into battle.”

Morison’s concern was to write the first draft of the history, and he did a remarkable job. He had access in a way that no outsider could possibly have had. He became personal friends with many of the admirals who fought that war and was a direct witness to many events. That was true in Okinawa, where he was aboard a ship in the task force and could work his personal impressions into the narrative.

All of that is very unique. Morison was seeing the war through the eyes of his contemporaries. He was very much involved in the debates that the admirals had as they were rolling across the Pacific. He was probably less interested than I am in the way that the war was experienced by the ordinary sailor, soldier, and airmen, and more interested in grand strategy.

I like to pull those together — the way the war unfolded in the eyes of those who fought it, but then also returning to the conference rooms where the planning unfolded. I wanted to understand how the politics of inter-service rivalries in the US military affected decisions — that was an important story unique to the Pacific because of the divided command structure.

This Solomon-like choice to say the South Pacific will be MacArthur’s domain — the US Army will be in charge of the South Pacific, the Central and North Pacific will be Nimitz’s domain — meant we were really going to divide this enormous ocean into two theaters. We were going to let the Navy have one, let the Army have one. That was to establish peace within this large and fractious military.

In some ways, that was a suboptimal decision. In other ways, it seemed to work out fine because the United States had the ability to mobilize such an enormous war machine, such that we could fight two wars in the Pacific.

We fought two parallel counteroffensives — one south of the equator, one north of the equator. Because we had the ability to do that, the Japanese really were unable to concentrate their diminishing forces to meet either prong of this two-headed offensive.

Jordan Schneider: As you’re thinking about how to devote your research time and the pages that you allocate to these stories, can you reflect a little about your process of having all these simultaneous strains of the experiences of these individual soldiers, as well as these grand debates between MacArthur and Nimitz and the president about how to put all the pieces on the chessboard? What was both the research as well as synthesis process for you in this comprehensive history?

Ian Toll: My process, from when I first began doing this about 25 years ago, is to read everything. Now, with the Pacific War, you can’t literally read everything. The first book I wrote, Six Frigates, about the founding of the US Navy, I felt at times I was touching almost everything that had been written. That will never be the case with a war this big.

But to read very, very widely — histories, the original documents, the planning documents, the action reports, the memoirs, the letters, the letters of the military commanders and the lowest ranking soldier and sailor who experienced these events. Casting a wide net and spending years. before sitting down to write, going out and gathering up an enormous amount of material, and looking at the subject from every different angle.

Then there’s a middle step, which is important and often neglected by a lot of historians, which is to take all of that material and file it in a way that when you come back to the part of the narratives that you’re writing, you can immediately put your hands on that source to work it in. It is an information management issue, which requires a lot of thinking about how to do the research initially and how to organize it so you can then use it in the writing.

Eventually, it just becomes many thousands of documents organized in a certain way, a narrative that is going to unfold. The narrative is iterative in the sense that I may go down a blind alley and decide I need to throw that out. I throw hundreds of pages out. I’m doing it again with the book I’m writing now. To try to give the reader a sense that you’re shifting between different perspectives constantly — the perspective of Nimitz and his staff at Pearl Harbor planning an operation, then shifting immediately to the perspective of Marines in the Fifth Regiment who are landing on a beach and then carrying out the operation that you were just seeing how this was planned, then shifting to the Japanese perspective and shifting back to the US home front.

It’s a constantly shifting narrative, in which you’re looking at the same subjects from a different point of view, but then integrated into a narrative that unspools a little bit the way a novel would.

Chris Miller: How did you learn to do that, shifting perspective so smoothly? Because it’s easy to say, “Oh, shift from Nimitz’s room where he’s looking at the map, then shift to Iwo Jima.” But you do that in a way that few narrative histories do. Jordan and I both agreed that we’ve never read a 2,000-page history and wanted another page until we read yours. How do you learn that scene shifting? What were you looking at as examples? What were you reading that gave you a model for this type of vast, sweeping narrative history?

Jordan Schneider: To give a sense of what Ian does — one of my favorite scenes was Hirohito’s surrender speech, which covers 30 pages. First, there was a debate over whether or not to surrender in the first place. Then 10 pages of incredible palace drama — is there going to be a coup? Then, there was a coup, and it failed. Then the scene moves to NHK, and the phonograph is being placed, and the guy bows at the emperor’s photograph. Then you have these scenes all across Imperial Japan of different people responding to hearing the emperor’s voice in different ways.

The speech was in archaic Japanese, so people didn’t even know what it was saying. Some people decided, “Okay, if we’re going to surrender, then that means I need to do my final Kamikaze run.” Other people were saying, “Oh my God, thank God.”

It sounds overwhelming and kaleidoscopic, but it is actually one of the most incredible pieces of literature that I have consumed. Where does that all come from? How do you develop this skill?

Ian Toll: Well, I really appreciate the praise. It’s praise that keeps me going because this is hard work. I’ve been doing this full-time since 2002. That’s when I signed my first book contract. That’s 23 years, and I have four books to show for it. Part of the answer is that I take a lot of time. I throw a lot of work out. Probably a lot of that work is good, but it doesn’t work within the narrative pacing that I was going for. It’s a lot of following instinct.

I said in an author’s note that there’s room for innovation in this genre of historical narrative. It’s been a genre that has been trapped within certain ideas about narrative conventions — the idea that if you use the storytelling techniques of a novel or even a film, you might be compromising the scholarly purpose of the work. I don’t believe that’s true.

You can borrow from the techniques of novels or even films, in a way that may illuminate certain issues that you’re writing about, that may bring the reader closer to the way it felt for the participants to be there. I use research that I’ve accumulated over many years and have cast a very wide net to try to find material that hasn’t received as much attention as it should have in previous works.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about that filmic quality.. There are these moments of terrific awe-inspiring beauty that you point to — these ships blowing up and these massive artillery barrages, the sunrise over Mount Fuji that the admirals see as they’re pulling into the harbor, about to accept the surrender of the Japanese and the way that they see that as this flag that they’ve been fighting against and finding on people’s corpses for the past six years.

Your book made me watch some more World War II Pacific movies, and I was disappointed, honestly, with what I saw relative to the incredible Technicolor visions that you and your narrative painted in my head. How did you develop that sensibility and when did it become clear to you that you needed to make sure that your readers have some of the images that were in these soldiers’ heads in ours as well?

Ian Toll: As I’m coming through these sources, I often zero in on these images, descriptions of images. One of the things you’ll find if you start reading Pacific War narratives again and again is that you will have an American from Illinois who had never traveled beyond a few miles where he was born, seeing these extraordinary things in the Pacific, this exotic, remote part of the world.

Often they’d describe the sunsets, and you’d get a sense that they are having a sublime, ineffable experience seeing these things. That grabs my attention when I see it. Then I want the reader to see that image, but then also get a sense of how that felt for people who had not traveled widely before being thrown into this extraordinary war.

On that subject, there’s a whole genre of wartime art. You have talented watercolorists working on a destroyer who took a sketchbook along and brought back images, which are particularly important because you weren’t permitted to take a camera with you in the Pacific War. You had to have special authorization to have a camera. The art sometimes is useful to see the war through the eyes of the people who were there.

Those aspects of the Pacific War narratives always jumped off the page for me. Then I tried to in turn weave them into the narratives.

Jordan Schneider: There’s beauty and there’s also horror. You spend a lot of time describing deaths. Even when people aren’t literally dying, the smell of some of these battlefields and the smell of the corpses is another thing that’s going to live with me for a while. That contrast struck me — these incredible sunsets and these spectacular displays of mechanical might and fleets that are extending farther than the eye can see. Then every once in a while, they blow up and people die horrific deaths because of what all these machines can do. How did you try to do justice to that as well?

Ian Toll: In the case of the Pacific War or any other war, really any other aspect of World War II, there’s plenty of carnage in the historical record. These things happened. The challenge becomes describing those in a way that gives the reader a sense of what it was like to be there. You’re right about the smell — that’s another thing that just jumps off the page. If someone describes a smell, whether it’s the awful smells that you get on a battlefield or even the smell of flowers on a beach, those tend to leap out at me, and then I try to find a way to work those in.

We have five senses. If you can get three out of four of the physical senses into a description of a battle scene, you’re able to reach the reader through more than one route. Those images, those impressions, tend to build on themselves. If you can get many of them into a narrative — not doing what a novelist does where you make it up, you need to pull these details from first-hand accounts that are reliable — but if you get many of them, that tends to build to where the reader gets a sense of what it was like to be there.

Jordan Schneider: This is my big note for the Chip Wars revised edition. Chris, we need more smell in it.

Chris Miller: You know, the place that really stood out for me in the book was on Iwo Jima, which everyone knows is this absolute bloodbath. But the discussion of the sulfuric volcanic ash all around in these subterranean caves — you got smells and also tastes, talking about the water being sulfuric in its taste. It felt like I was walking into Mordor, but it wasn’t made up in Tolkien’s mind. It was a hellhole on Earth.

Jordan Schneider: The smell and the taste that’s going to live with me forever is the Enola Gay dropping the bomb and the pilots tasting metal because of the radiation. They hadn’t looked back, but they knew that the bomb had gone off because they felt it in their molars. What more can you ask for from a historian?

Ian Toll: That detail really grabbed my attention too. That’s in one of the pilot accounts, I believe. You had this electric taste in your mouth from the explosion, from the bomb. They noticed that at the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico, as well.

Chris Miller: You have these juxtapositions of extraordinary heroism and extraordinary barbarism on both sides. A lot of military histories tend in one direction or the other and don’t balance out both. You show them both being constantly present in different ways, competing impulses. Can you walk us through the ethics of what you’re recounting and how you, as a historian, try to properly balance these two competing impulses?

Ian Toll: You mean the impulses to acknowledge the humanity and suffering of the enemy — it’s part of what makes good war histories memorable, is that you have a situation in which it’s impossible for people on the battlefield not to feel a sense of hatred toward the enemy. This is murder on a mass organized scale. Then you have a war like the Pacific War, where, in some ways, that hatred reached a pitch that we haven’t seen, at least in any other American war — this dehumanization and hatred that was felt. Much of it was justified, honestly.

To evoke that for the reader, that sense of hatred, that sense that many Americans had that the Japanese were somehow less than fully human and that this justified wiping out their cities — to feel that in a visceral way for the reader because of the way you’ve shown how the war was experienced by the Americans who experienced it, by the POWs, by the civilians who were caught in the war zone in the way of rampaging Japanese armies. But then at the same time to acknowledge, to fully understand the humanity of the Japanese and the suffering of the Japanese.

It comes down to weaving these different perspectives together into one integrated narrative. Many others have done it well — such as John Toland’s book, The Rising Sun, which I recommend. He was one of the first to write the history of that war from the Japanese perspective in a way that was broadly sympathetic to the Japanese people and their suffering, while acknowledging that the Japanese militarists had tyrannized and abused that country and eventually brought on the immense suffering of 1944 and 1945.

The Kamikaze — A Problem of Scale

Jordan Schneider: The kamikaze dynamics that we get into in 1944 and 1945 are some of the most artful sections. The training system for Japanese airmen was incredibly selective, where a thousand people joined and only a hundred made it out the other side.

That led to this very elite core of fighter pilots, but ultimately, they were short of decent pilots such that pilots were so useless by 1942 and 1943 that the most efficient tactical maneuver to spend the least steel to deal the most damage on American ships was to use pilots as the 1940s version of guided homing missiles. It’s much easier to teach someone to fly into a plane than it is to dogfight with a Zero.

On one hand, it makes sense. On the other hand, you’re sending people to their deaths. On a lot of these missions, which aren’t literally suicide missions, you have Americans who are at some level doing the same thing, with flights that go off carriers where 12 planes go out and one or two make it back. But there is something that is particularly resonant and horrific about Kamikaze flights. My guess is, 500 years from now, if people are talking about anything when it comes to the Pacific War, the Kamikaze flights are going to be one of the three lines that people still remember.

How did you approach that? What are the different aspects of the story that you wanted to hit as you were describing the different parts of the Kamikaze story?

Ian Toll: The Japanese had trained what may have been pound for pound the best cadre of carrier pilots in the world at the beginning of the war. They were superb. There had been a national selection process, extremely difficult — tougher than getting into Stanford today — for getting accepted to naval pilot training in 1939-1940. Then they went through this extremely rigorous pilot training process that built these superb pilots. But they never thought seriously in Japan about the problem of expanding that training pipeline to produce many more pilots in order to fight a war on the scale of the Pacific War.

When their first team of pilots was killed off in 1942-43, with few left by 1944, they did not have a next generation of pilots to come in and carry on the fight. The decision to deploy Kamikazes on a mass scale was tactically correct in a sense. If you have pilots who you cannot afford to train — you don’t have the time, the fuel, the resources to train pilots to effectively attack ships using conventional dive bombing attacks, conventional aerial torpedo attacks, the kinds of attacks that the Japanese had used effectively in the early part of the war — then maybe what you do is train the pilot to fly a plane with a bomb attached to it into a ship like a guided missile. Maybe that’s simply the best tactical use of the resource that you have.

That is ultimately what persuaded the Japanese to go ahead and deploy Kamikazes on basically their entire air war — their entire air war was a Kamikaze war in the last year of the war. Then you have, on top of that, this question of the morality of sending 20-, 21-, 22-year-old men to their certain deaths in this situation.

The part of the story that has been neglected and forgotten in the West is that this was immensely controversial, even in Japan. The Kamikazes came to be revered. But at the outset, even within the military, within the Navy — the Navy was mainly the Kamikaze service that launched the Kamikazes — there was immense opposition to this within the ranks of the Japanese Navy. It took time for this to be accepted, but this was the way they were going to fight this war.

Trying to understand what it was like to be a Kamikaze pilot, to draw upon these letters and diaries that have been published, many of them in English, but then also what it did to the crew of a US ship to know that they were under this kind of attack. The unique sense of horror that they felt operating off of Okinawa in particular — the height of the Kamikaze campaign — where 34 ships were sunk, and many more were badly damaged with US Navy casualties running well into the thousands. Certainly, more Navy personnel were killed than Army or Marines at the Battle of Okinawa, as bad as the ground fighting was. That unique sense of horror and loathing that they felt as these planes came in making beelines, flying suicide runs, and doing terrible damage.

Chris Miller: I was struck by the other facet of how the Kamikazes emerged. There’s the logic of how you most efficiently use your limited number of airplanes and pilots to sink ships. But it also seemed like the Japanese army and all of its island defenses were pursuing a Kamikaze strategy. In all these island campaigns, 90% plus of the Japanese garrisons were killed. They would start the battle knowing they would lose, but trying to exact as much punishment as they could, which at a strategic level is rational, but tactically a brutal way to fight a campaign.

I found myself wondering, did the Japanese army have its own version of the Kamikaze mentality? Was the entire war effort on Japan’s side suicidal after 1942? It was obvious to everyone that the production differences were large enough that Japan would definitely lose. Is there something to that analysis?

Ian Toll: Absolutely. You could say that Kamikazes are a metaphor for the entire project of Imperial Japan, particularly after Midway and Guadalcanal when we reached the second half of the Pacific War, when it was clear that Japan was going to lose the war. Whatever that meant — losing could be many different versions of losing the war. But historians have traced a cultural change that occurred in the Japanese military after the Russo-Japanese War and then after the First World War, in which the Japanese Army leadership convinced itself, “We have got to do something about this problem of our soldiers surrendering. That’s not acceptable.”

They actually altered the military manuals and the standing orders to say, “You shall not surrender in any circumstance. There will never be any surrender in the Japanese Army.” That was a very fateful decision because once you’ve put your soldiers in that situation, which they know they’re not going to survive, that they’re going to fight to the last man, that alters the psychology on the battlefield and leads inevitably to a much more brutal environment.

On one island after another, starting most famously on the Aleutian island of Attu in the spring of 1943, you had entire Japanese garrisons fighting and dying to the last man. This being celebrated in Japan by a press that was being very closely guided and censored by the regime, building in Japan a sense that this is an extraordinary act of bravery, of commitment, of fanaticism that the allies, the Americans, would never be able to match.

This was going to be the secret weapon for the Japanese, showing that they were willing to make much greater sacrifices than their enemies were.

As the war went on and US forces drew closer to Japan, the story changed to, “This is how we’re going to protect the homeland. We’re going to show the Americans that the cost of invading our homeland, of trying to occupy our homeland, is so great that they won't want to pay it.” It became a question of whether they could force the Americans to the negotiating table to resolve this conflict in a way in which Japan would have to acknowledge its defeat. That would mean giving up some portion of its overseas empire, but preserving its emperor system and keeping American and allied troops out of Japanese territory. That became a driving obsession of the Japanese leadership in the last year and a half of the war.

These fanatical demonstrations, fighting to the last man on one island after another, the Kamikazes, all became a kind of theater. A way of showing the Americans, “This is what you’re dealing with. We’re different from other people. We’re willing to die — the whole country will die to the last man, woman, and child if necessary.” Wouldn’t it be better to sit down and negotiate some solution to this war, which leaves us with some vestige of the Imperial project intact?

Inside Japan’s Imperial Project

Jordan Schneider: There’s of course the irony that by the time the Americans land, MacArthur says, “Actually, when we got here, we were taking a big bet that they wouldn’t want to fight anymore.” Somehow, someone snapped a finger and the rebellion turned off, or we would be in trouble. We didn’t have enough troops to do this. But the fact was, once the war was done, the war was done. The only people still fighting were five guys in the hills of the Philippines who just didn’t get the message or something.

Another contrast is why Nazi Germany took it to the end and why the Japanese took it to the end. With Nazi Germany, it was one guy and all the generals. Definitely by late 1944, you had a whole plot. Everyone saw the writing on the wall, and there was a wide consensus — enough to have a whole conspiracy. You had these back-channel feelers to the English. But because of the lack of a focal point and because you had a consensus, even though you had dissenting voices, they weren’t able to mobilize even as much as the Operation Valkyrie folks were.

You have this thesis in Japan of, “If we just show them how crazy we are, then they’ll come to the negotiating table.” But they never really tried to do the negotiating in the first place, aside from this conversation with the Soviets, which anyone really could have seen wasn’t actually going anywhere.

Let’s talk about elite Japanese politics as well, starting in the second half of the war. Even though everyone was doing these suicide missions, even though everyone knew they were on this national suicide mission by 1943, a few million more people had to die before we got to the inevitable conclusion. Why is that?

Ian Toll: To understand what was happening in Japan’s ruling circle in the last year of the war, it’s necessary to go back to the beginning of the 1930s and understand how Japan descended into militarist tyranny. The story is one of extraordinary turmoil, chaos, revolutionary energy, assassinations, uprisings, and almost a complete breakdown of discipline within the ranks of the army, but also the Navy.

Again and again, hot-headed extremist officers and factions of younger mid-ranking officers threatened the Japanese leadership at gunpoint, forcing a much more right-wing, fanatical, imperialist, and aggressive foreign and domestic policy. Increasingly, the generals and admirals were running every aspect of military, foreign, and domestic affairs. The army took over the Japanese education system in the 1930s.

What happened with the China incident — the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 — and then the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war with Great Britain and the US beginning in 1941, was that these large foreign wars tended to heal, or at least stabilize, this domestic turmoil within Japan.

The leadership saw war as a way to maintain a fragile peace and stability within a society that was in many ways very revolutionary.

As you approach the end of the Pacific War, the problem isn’t whether to surrender or not. The problem is that whatever Japan did as a country — if they surrendered, if they initiated negotiations, if they tried to use diplomacy to get out of this war — there was the threat of a resumption of these assassinations, a civil war. You could have a civil war between different elements within the Army. You could have fighting between the Army and the Navy. This was seen in Japan as a real danger.

To complicate the picture even more, in the US we had a window — imperfect, but we had a window — into what was happening within the ruling circle in Japan because we were reading their diplomatic mail. We had broken their codes, communications between the foreign ministry in Tokyo and Japanese embassies throughout the world. We were intercepting those messages, decoding them, and reading them.

We were aware that the Japanese, by the spring of 1945, had seen their last hope as bringing Stalin and the Soviet government in to mediate between the US and Great Britain. The Japanese had a historical precedent for this. The end of the Russo-Japanese War ended with a negotiated peace between Russia and Japan, which had been mediated by the US. Theodore Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for Peace for that mediation.

They were trying to replicate what they had seen as the acceptable end to the Russo-Japanese War — a negotiated settlement which allowed them to maintain and build their empire. Here, they would like to try to negotiate a truce. They were deeply divided within the ruling circle over what such a negotiated arrangement might look like. But the point often forgotten in the West is that it wasn’t just a division — it was a fear of a descent into complete chaos and civil war, which would make it impossible for the Japanese government to do anything in an organized way.

Our leaders understood enough of that dynamic that we saw the necessity of strengthening the peace faction within the ruling circle, and neutralizing the Army in particular, which wanted to fight on. The atomic bomb became a means to that end.

Chris Miller: But the violence of Japanese politics in the ’20s and ’30s ends up seeming like a really important driver of the violence of Japan’s war effort and even the suicide dynamics that we just discussed. You get some of that in Japanese army politics in the ’20s and ’30s as well. It’s almost as if the Japanese army took over the entire country not just in terms of running the schools, but in terms of running the culture to a substantial degree.

Jordan Schneider: Yamamoto famously was doing his best to talk everyone out of bombing Pearl Harbor. But then at a certain point, he says, “All right, you guys are dumb enough to do it. Might as well do the dumb thing the smart way.”

The thing that strikes me about the tension of this narrative history is that once you get to Pearl Harbor and the American political reaction to it, that is your turning point — America’s decision to fight this war in the first place. Regardless of whether Midway had gone this or that way, if the Marines had gotten kicked off of Guadalcanal, you have such an enormous material imbalance between the Americans and the Japanese.

If, because of Japanese politics, you’re taking off the table Japan ever wanting to cash in their chips and negotiate, then it seems like a US victory was inevitable. What do you think about that inevitability question? If it’s all inevitable, aside from the human drama of the smells and the visuals, what is the point of spending so much time and energy studying the Pacific War?

Ian Toll: It’s an issue that will never be resolved. It’s the question of whether we want to take a determinist approach to understanding WWII. I probably lean a bit more toward the determinist way of thinking about it.

Winston Churchill, in his post-war memoir of WWII, had a famous passage in which, as soon as he had heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he said, “So we had won after all.” Meaning that this entire conflict, including the conflict with Nazi Germany, was now going to be settled. It was just a question of the proper application of military power. Now, that was written many years later. I think it was deliberately provocative in that mischievous, Churchillian way. But I do think it is true that before the attack on Pearl Harbor, you had a deeply divided political situation in Washington in which the isolationist movement was perhaps gaining strength in the fall of 1941.

This is a movement that had strength in both the Democratic and Republican parties. It had strength in every region. It was a formidable force in our politics, a sense of real moral fervor around the idea that we were not going to be dragged into a global war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, that movement collapsed overnight. When I say overnight, I mean literally overnight. FDR asked for a declaration of war against Japan the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It passed both houses of Congress. I think there was one dissenting vote in the house. There was a unanimous vote in the Senate.

It does not go too far to say that this one decision the Japanese made to attack and launch a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor completely altered the domestic politics around going to war against Japan. Three days later, Hitler made the curious decision to declare war on the United States when we hadn’t declared war on him.

Then it was a global war, and the largest economy in the world — the economy with the greatest latent military power — was a combatant.

Not only were we combatant, but we had the broad public political consensus that we needed to quickly mobilize our economies for war, which we did. I think that was the turning point. It was the attack on Pearl Harbor and the reaction — the political reaction within the US — that really made it inevitable that not just Japan, but Nazi Germany would be finished within three to four years.

The one other major contingency is that the Soviets were able to stop the German attack on the Eastern Front and stabilize that war and survive long enough so that Allied supplies could get in, allowing them to turn the tide. If there had been some surrender on the Eastern Front, that could have taken the entire war, including the Pacific War, in a different direction.

“What Becomes of a General?”

Jordan Schneider: Let's talk about the generals and admirals, starting with Chester Nimitz…

Paid subscribers get early access to the rest of the conversation, where we discuss…

• The various command styles that shaped US military strategy in the Pacific,

• How General MacArthur and Admiral Halsey became media darlings —controlling public opinion and war politics in the process,

• The evolution of submarine warfare and Japanese defensive strategy,

• Counterfactuals, including a world where the Allies invaded Taiwan,

• Broader lessons for the future of warfare, especially in the Taiwan Strait.

Read more

The Schneider clan will be heading to the Bay Area from September 9 through the rest of the month. If you're interested in meeting up or doing a house swap with a two-bedroom in Manhattan, or just happen to have an empty apartment that can fit a few adults and a very cute baby, please do reach out to jordan@chinatalk.media.

Dan Wang at long last makes his solo ChinaTalk debut! We’re here to discuss and celebrate his first book, Breakneck.

We get into…

• Engineering states vs lawyerly societies,

• The competing legacies of the 1980s in China, One Child Policy and Tiananmen vs intellectual debate, cultural vibrancy, and rock and roll,

• Methods of knowing China, from the People’s Daily and Seeking Truth to on-the-ground research,

• How to compare the values of China’s convenient yet repressive society with the chaotic pluralism of the USA,

• What Li Qiang’s career post-Shanghai lockdowns can tell us about the value of loyalty vs competence in Xi’s China.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

From One-Child to Zero-COVID

Jordan Schneider: So Dan, you chose Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible translation to sit next to your book. What can the Bible tell us about modern China?

Dan Wang: Something I wonder about is thinking less about the Old Testament, but more about the New Testament and the Catholic Church in particular. The Catholic Church and the Communist Party are very similar organizations, and it might be the case that the CCP and the Catholic Church will be enduring institutions that we’ll still find around 100 years from now — maybe even 500 years from now.

It’s no accident that the CCP resembles the Catholic Church, partly because, according to Kerry Brown, the Communist Party has spent an immense amount of effort trying to understand the Catholic Church. The Communist Party isn’t simply copying the Catholic Church, though. I understand the Communist Party to be a cross between the Catholic Church and the Sicilian Mafia, with this incredible sense of omertà and a very strong understanding that you can’t only be thugs. One has to build a church; one has to have an ideology. What we have is a very powerful Catholic Church in China that also has the omertà — that also has the gangsterism.

Jordan Schneider: One of the things I most admire about this book is how it looks forward multiple decades in a way that doesn’t bore me — unlike when someone like Peter Zeihan does it, talking about demographic destiny or geography. The way you incorporate different data points and pieces of context that you’ve absorbed over your years on this planet gives it weight that I take very seriously.

However, my critique is that you may have over-indexed on Xi and the Xi era, which at some point is going to end. Many of the forward-looking projections you have on the Chinese side are premised on whatever comes after Xi looking like what Xi was. Dan, how do you think about that issue?

Dan Wang: It’s interesting that you start by saying I may be over-indexed on Xi, because one strain of criticism I’ve seen is that maybe I’m under-indexed on Xi. In my central thesis of the engineering state, one can question whether Xi is really an engineer. On one hand, he is because he has a degree in chemical engineering from Tsinghua, but he also has a doctorate in Marxist economics, also from Tsinghua. There’s been debate about whether Xi is an engineer in the hydraulic mold set by Hu Jintao.

It’s very valid to consider that the China of the future will not look like the China of the present. In fact, we can guarantee it. But I have no confidence about what China of the future will look like in a post-Xi world. It could be that Xi Jinping represents someone like Chun Doo-hwan, South Korea’s dictator who intensified Park Chung-hee’s rule and triggered disaster as a result. Maybe someone who comes after Xi is an intensification of Xi in all aspects. Maybe it’s someone who looks quite different.

Given that we have to draw lines forward to some extent from what we have right now, I’m reluctant to assign a big rupture in China’s political traditions based on the idea that whoever replaces Xi might not end up looking like him.

Jordan Schneider: The story you focus on from the late 70s and 80s — which was a time in CCP history when you see more vibrancy, more lawyerly energy coming into the party — you focused on the most horrific, repressive arc of that period, which was the one-child policy and all the state invasion and suppression required to execute it.

But there are other stories you can tell about the late 70s and 80s that speak to many of the challenges you see in China today and project into China’s future. There’s the idea of a society that can create interesting cultural goods, party leadership that distrusts the people, bottom-up political innovation, economic innovation beyond what the state controls — and the state being more understanding of that than maybe it is today. How do you read that history beyond the universe that the one-child policy created?

Dan Wang: The 1980s were certainly China’s most interesting decade, and maybe it’s understudied and under-theorized. As you note, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about the one-child policy, and I didn’t quite grasp how brutal its enforcement was, partly because it was a while ago. The peak enforcement happened in the early 80s and then another wave in the late 90s, before both of our lifetimes. Much of the one-child policy enforcement focused mostly in rural areas, and we don’t have as many rural perspectives relative to elite urban perspectives.

That was one of the big stories of the 1980s. But you’re right — there were many other big stories. The 1980s is cited by many people, especially of my parents’ generation, as a decade when every question could have been asked inside Chinese society, inside the Communist Party. This was the decade of rock and roll. This was the decade when people really believed that China would have some degree of political liberalization.

Those questions kept persisting and might even have had a resolution different from how we know it resolved in June 1989, when the forces of liberalism were comprehensively crushed and the party took a pretty different direction. We could draw a different line from the 1980s, and maybe we should. But given that it ended with a really dramatic act of political repression and given that the conservative reformers — perhaps represented by Deng Xiaoping as well as Li Peng — had the upper hand, maybe the story is still more about politics than creativity.

Jordan Schneider: You have these two lines that capture the inverse of what the 1980s felt like. Someone you met in Chiang Mai who left China told you that contemporary China “feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower… To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.” You also write that, “After six years in China, I missed pluralism. It’s wonderful for me to be in America now, in a society made up of many voices, not only an official register meant to speak over all the rest.”

The flip side of those two lines captures some spirit of what the 80s were like. I buy your argument that one side has won. They’ve been winning for the past 40-plus years. But even with the White Paper movement, there are still undercurrents that seem impossible to disappear.

Dan Wang: Absolutely. The currents are always out there. This is part of what makes people like Ian Johnson’s work really interesting. When he documents something like Mao’s quote that “a single spark can start a prairie fire (星星之火，可以燎原),” he’s absolutely right. It has become really difficult to comprehensively and decisively eliminate the forces of creativity — that desire for a different future. That’s always there and always worth supporting.

Jordan Schneider: As an aside, I went into this book thinking you wouldn’t tell me many new things — that I would get your takes, but not much fresh information. The one-child policy in particular was the section that I hadn’t fully internalized. The magnitude and personal horror attached to what that meant for tens of millions of people was striking. This goes to show why everyone should read the book and not just listen to all the podcasts Dan’s going to be on over the next few weeks.

It’s a book written for a mass-market audience, but it’s also something that every single listener of ChinaTalk will derive something new, unique, and insightful from — whether it’s from your historical work, the memoir sections, the travelogues, or the big thoughts.

It’s a remarkable achievement, and I want to congratulate you on it.

Dan Wang: Thank you, Jordan. I’ve used different registers, and you picked up on exactly that. My favorite chapter to write was unexpectedly the one-child policy, because I didn’t really expect that the emotional arc of the one-child policy still produces so much anger in people. Many normally temperate people in China would be driven to a froth of rage when they remember that era. We all know a lot about Zero COVID, which is also one of the social engineering projects I write about. But the one-child policy is understudied and perhaps under-theorized.

Jordan Schneider: This is striking because we have many folks from the mainland who moved here, and there are many Chinese Americans too. Chinese Americans have siblings, but mainlanders who’ve moved here over the past 30 years basically don’t. It’s wild to have an entire generation — for literally all of human history, you have total fertility rates above 2 — and for it to go below that in such an intrusive and brutal way. Not in a slow fade you’re seeing in South Korea, but something truly heart-wrenching.

Dan Wang: I had a really interesting conversation with someone who read that chapter recently — someone who was adopted himself in the US Pacific Northwest. We’re of similar ages. One of the things he told me when he read my chapter was that when he was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, he would sometimes go to gatherings with other adopted children. A majority of the adopted children you could find in the US Pacific Northwest were Chinese girls. This is another one of those things that unless you have some experience here, is much less vivid than you might imagine.

Jordan Schneider: It’s the ghosts of all these lives that weren’t lived. What was it, something like 40 million?

Dan Wang: That’s the best estimate right now. We still don’t have a really comprehensive consensus on exactly how many lives the one-child policy cost, partly because the data is sketchy and it’s difficult to draw these hypotheticals. According to the Communist Party, state propaganda claims that the one-child policy averted something like 400 million births. That seems to be subject to strange extrapolation that not all demographers accept.

Some demographers say that the one-child policy was pure brutality without substantially affecting the birth rate in China. Even on this crucial period — and I acknowledge this in my book — it has become difficult to figure out exactly how many births the one-child policy era averted. But based on some of the more accepted scholarly estimates, there are 40 million Chinese girls. The femicide produced by the one-child policy was very intense, with families forced to keep boys and forced to discard their infant girls.

Jordan Schneider: I don’t know if I have a transition for that. It makes me think of the Bible. I have a new one-year-old, which you were just holding for a while, and reading that chapter in the context of now being a parent hit differently. You tell these truly horrific stories — you only give two paragraphs about some bureaucrat who was the “worst performing” when it came to births and decided “we’re not having births for a month.” There were abortions on the delivery table.

It felt cliché where everyone says, “Oh, the way you read the news and see the world is going to change when you have a child.” That chapter was maybe one of the first times where I experienced a piece of history or literature that sat with me in a different way. I don’t know if I want to thank you for that?

Dan Wang: Well, I thank you, Jordan, for letting me hold this extremely cute one-year-old. Part of what made this chapter difficult to write was that my wife suffered a miscarriage, coincidentally, just as I was writing this chapter. To think that it was a matter of state policy to have conducted over 300 million abortions — which is the official statistic from the National Health Commission — as well as many forced sterilizations, the brutality meted out against overwhelmingly female bodies. That was a challenge to think about, to try to place myself back in the 80s.

Methods of Knowing China

Jordan Schneider: …And we’re going to hard pivot. Methods of knowing. You’ve worked at a similar job that I had, covering Chinese policy at a very close, full-time clip. You’ve traveled around, you’ve read extensively, you slowed down and hung out in Michigan, looked at a pretty view, and wrote a book. You explore different levels in this book as well. I guess the answer is all of the above, right? Because it’s your revealed preference. But what are the limits of those different methods of exploring the world that you’ve used that ended up creating this book?

Dan Wang: There’s never enough information and sourcing about anything to satisfy even the most niche-specific question. This is something you know as an analyst or researcher. No matter how narrowly you try to define your research task, you’ll find that the literature is endless. Many people have covered this, and yet what they have is also totally incomplete.

I didn’t try to be overly formalist in my study of China. One could spend a lot of time thinking about everything Xi Jinping said. One could simply travel around the country and talk to people and experience how life differs between, say, Shenzhen and Guizhou. One could hang out mostly in Shanghai and try to be an analyst, figure out data, and talk to business executives.

I decided that I was going to do all of the above. I was going to read every speech published in Seeking Truth 求是, the party’s main theory magazine. I was going to read some of the necessary documents, but I wasn’t going to read every issue of People’s Daily. That would be madness. Thank you to the people who do this work — you’re doing God’s work. Not really for me, but I’m glad there are people synthesizing all of this excellent work.

I decided that I had to spend considerable time traveling around the country to physically see some of the ways Guizhou is improving through the build-out of better airports, better train stations, and bigger bridges. I decided that I had to spend time talking to folks in Beijing and Shanghai — the capital for politics, the business center for how executives think about the world. I did my best to try to be synthetic and not let any single perspective override the others, but to be as synthetic and comprehensive as possible, to produce whatever mix it ends up being.

Jordan Schneider: Not to praise you too much, but many people can choose to spend their time spreading their bets across different modalities of knowledge. Your ability to abstract away to get to the aphorisms and provocations while also being able to go levels down and levels up is what makes you a unique mind. But I’m going to stop giving you compliments.

Dan Wang: This is your show — you can give me all the compliments you want. The most important thing is to tread softly and lightly. Sometimes you need to dip deeper into a particular pond, but otherwise, maybe you should just be out there figuring out new ways to explore different areas.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe this is just me talking about myself, but going deeper and narrower seems easier to be useful and interesting, versus trying to do the big synthetic thing you did with this book, which is a higher degree of difficulty.

Over the long scope of ChinaTalk, I’m trying to think over a multi-decade horizon. But you’ve shown me what it actually means to do that in this book. You showed me a different way of going even further out, to levels of abstraction in a way that’s still interesting. Maybe the biggest provocation I’ll take from this is to try to think more at that level.

Dan Wang: Shucks, this is too many compliments, Jordan.

Do Books Matter?

Jordan Schneider: All right, let’s get some critiques. Your grandfather was in the PLA during the China-Vietnam War, and he was a propaganda officer. His job was dropping leaflets on Vietnamese troops urging them to resist. That, in retrospect, sounded laughable because these guys had just fought foreign colonialists for 30 years. What was a leaflet written in shitty Vietnamese going to do to them? But you think books matter?

Dan Wang: Books do matter. Maybe books matter a little less than they used to, but even if books are declining in importance, authors are gaining in importance. Especially if we are in the age of AI, as we seem to be, authors are gaining in importance. Maybe some people are just going to be Viet Cong troops trying to resist whatever big idea is going to threaten to enter their field of vision. But it’s still important for us to try to create knowledge.

This is something I admire you for, Jordan — maintaining ChinaTalk after a rebrand, having done this for so long. You were one of the first China podcasts, right? To have persisted in this format that was novel is admirable as well. That’s something we should applaud you for. If leaflets aren’t very good, well, maybe podcasts are the answer. Thank you for taking us there.

Jordan Schneider: Speaking of podcasts, you recently did a show with Stephen Kotkin — two hours, excellent, everyone should take a listen. He spoke in a misty-eyed way at some point about the dream of authors — you write a book, it’s read one year from now, read 10 years from now, maybe even, God willing, read 50 years from now.

I found it ironic that you both brought up The Power Broker with him and had this whole nice riff in your book about The Power Broker having soured the minds of a generation of Democratic politicians. Square the circle for me, Dan.

Dan Wang: Such is the power of books. No one would describe The Power Broker as a mere leaflet, which is what I’ve written with Breakneck. But The Power Broker has certainly had tremendous influence. It’s one of several books that we can pinpoint as having created the lawyerly society. Robert Caro’s monumental work is subtitled Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

Aside from The Power Broker, we can probably name Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which is about pesticide use in the United States. There’s also Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Maybe we can toss in The Population Bomb by the Ehrlichs as well. These four works were very important in confronting the mistakes of the American engineering society throughout the 1950s — which sprayed too many pesticides, which rammed highways across too many urban neighborhoods, which had exhausted itself with these gigantic land wars in Asia. They presented a very useful corrective.

If we doubt the power of books, let’s look at The Power Broker, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Now, I certainly don’t have aspirations that Breakneck would be read 50 years from now. I don’t have many aspirations that it will be read one year from now. But having just a little bit more to work with to think about — it’s always going to be important to have a sense of mutual curiosity between the US and China. Even if we can get people interested for just one year, that’s very well worth doing.

Pluralism in China and America

Jordan Schneider: You brought us to America. I want to come back to this idea of pluralism that you brought up. I was having a conversation at some very fancy China meetup — is there any other kind? — which was mostly white people. One of these white people had lived in Shanghai for a very long time, had become very wealthy, was an investor, and a ChinaTalk listener. He asked me, “Jordan, why don’t you live in China?” My response was, “Well, I couldn’t do my show in China.” He said, “But you’d have such a great standard of living. You’d be a great McKinsey consultant.” (He’s wrong — I’d be a terrible McKinsey consultant.) “You could have three nurses and two house cleaners, and if you just didn’t make any trouble, then you could have a really great life there.”

Reflecting on why I left China — the proximate reason was COVID; I was outside when the country closed and couldn’t get back — but the reason why six years, which is how long you made it, probably would have been my shelf life too, is this idea of living in a pluralist society. Having the freedom to say what I want and talk to people openly who have very divergent opinions is just core to what living a good life means to me. What’s my question? Is this enough to win a cold war? Should we go there? Where do you want to go with pluralist society?

Dan Wang: Your attitude towards this former Shanghai resident — I probably have the same attitude. This is insufficient for a flourishing society. But let me acknowledge that certainly for many people, a life in Shanghai or perhaps another first-tier city in China — maybe we can throw in Hong Kong here — is desirable because it is very convenient. This is one of the words that many Chinese bring up — that life is just very fāngbiàn, very convenient, to be in one of these big Asian cities.

There’s no doubt that life is very fāngbiàn in Shanghai or Hong Kong. The subways work very well, there’s excellent public order, there are great ways to try out new bars and new restaurants. One could have a nanny from probably Indonesia or the Philippines if you’re living in a city like Singapore, maybe from inland China, from Anhui, if you’re living in Shanghai. There are many ways in which life in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, or other first-tier Chinese cities is just much more pleasant than in New York, where we’re chatting. Here, the subways are extraordinarily loud, the streets aren’t necessarily very orderly and clean.

We can accept all of these things. But what we also have in New York — and this is part of the reason that I’m drawn back to the US again — are bookstores. At these bookstores, one can find books very critical of the US government, very critical of both the Republicans as well as the Democrats, who have both made incredible errors. For the most part, though there have been some restrictions on protests under Trump’s regime in America right now, there still is broad latitude for people to protest all of his illegal or inhumane actions, and that is still very real. Protest culture online is also very real.

What I’m saying is that I hope we don’t have to choose. The United States should be able to have, at its present levels of tolerance of dissent, as well as very functional cities that have good subways, good bus systems, nice airports, and where people are able to get around and have a rate of improvement that doesn’t come at truly absurd financial costs. New York in particular has a really hard time building anything. I don’t see why we should have to choose between having bookstores and Port Authority bus terminals that are well renovated in less than five years — which is not within the current project as proposed by Governor Hochul right now. We don’t have to choose.

Certainly, I acknowledge that for many Chinese who move back, they really like having the convenience of their food delivered to them. They get to save quite a lot of money because their rent isn’t necessarily very high. Maybe they really don’t care to think much about politics or philosophy or ideals. But there are also plenty of Chinese who do crave these things. These are creative types — journalists, feminists, people who are interested in ideas. They’re really keen to make something of their lives in cities like New York. That’s something we should welcome here in the United States and allow them to pursue the sort of activity that is borderline impossible in China.

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Jordan Schneider: You mentioned convenience. You had a whole chapter about when China was the least convenient place in the world. I love this line:

I often think about the China Daily headline “Shanghai Has No Plans for City Lockdown.” It could be read in two ways. I first understood it as a denial that the city would impose a lockdown. I understand it now as a totally accurate explanation of what happened next: The city had made no plans for confining twenty-five million people to their homes for eight weeks.

Dan Wang: Yes.

Jordan Schneider: Breakneck written in 2019 is a much different book than Breakneck written in 2023, 2024, particularly because since 1989, we really had close to three decades of the state not really imposing on people’s lives — as long as you were Han — in a way that really wrecked what you expected a functioning middle-class, convenient urban life to be.

Dan Wang: That’s one of the scary things about the engineering state: the capability is always there to make a lot of people’s lives go off track in really big ways. Throughout the 1950s, under this earlier, more idealistic era of the pursuit of communism, maybe most of the 1950s was pretty good if you weren’t a landlord, if you weren’t a kulak. But then that terminated with Mao’s great famine, in which these quack agronomy techniques, as well as lies to the central government, terminated in a famine that killed perhaps 30 or 40 million people.

After we felt that Mao was chastened, he again unleashed the forces of total mayhem to plunge the country into the Cultural Revolution. That is perhaps not so much a typical move by engineers. Mao was much more of a poet — he was romantic, he was a warlord. That was his answer to “bombard the headquarters.” The next great trauma that the Communist Party visited was the one-child policy, which was mostly against the rural areas.

You’re right — it was good for about three decades, if you didn’t mind the steadily worsening repression from Xi Jinping, which closed off a lot of avenues for creative expression as well as dissent, both online and offline. Maybe it would have been good if you weren’t a Uyghur in Xinjiang, if you weren’t a Tibetan in Tibet.

Then everybody around the country was plunged into this pandemic control, the apotheosis of which was Shanghai — probably the greatest lockdown ever imposed in the history of humanity, when 25 million people were unable to leave their apartment compounds over the course of eight to 12 weeks in the spring of 2022. The government organized, in the early stages, no adequate food delivery to many families who went hungry so that parents could save food for their children. That was about two weeks of the Shanghai lockdown, in which the food situation was quite severe.

In the midst of all of this, you have four decades of astonishing growth from China, in which the country was growing at a rate of 8 or 9%. That created tremendous wealth, alleviated poverty, and made a lot of Chinese right now feel really good about what the country was able to accomplish. This is where I really want to grapple with both the good aspects as well as the bad aspects of China. Yes, it’s absolutely the case that the wealth creation here was astonishing. That has been much more impressive than what any other developing country was able to achieve — India, Indonesia, Brazil have not had the economic takeoff that China enjoyed that brought so many people out of misery and poverty.

At the same time, we have more novel forms of political repression that humanity has never seen before. Both of these trends are real, and they both have to be acknowledged.

Jordan Schneider: If there’s one thing that’s missing in the book, it’s the Xinjiang chapter. Given that each chapter has some personal connection or observation from you, I get it — maybe you just didn’t spend a lot of time in Xinjiang. The Yunnan arc which you portray is this happy, fun, free place where these minorities are in the mountains so they can get away with not actually doing a lockdown.

The Xinjiang arc has an engineering story there. There’s an engineering of the soul story, which is probably even more dramatic than the digital authoritarianism arc. It’s this idea that you can do to the Uyghurs what you did to all the other minorities — basically wave your hand enough and then they stop being minorities anymore. Do you want to do your analysis of that? Did it get left on the chopping block? How do you think about covering that story?

Dan Wang: You’re absolutely right that I try to cover the stories that I have some personal experience of, something like Zero COVID. You’re right that I’ve never been to Xinjiang. I wish I had the opportunity to go, but it was challenging because foreign nationals — I’m a Canadian citizen — are tracked more intensively. I never quite had the courage to spend time in Xinjiang and see things for myself. I was actively discouraged by some folks in Beijing from even attempting the trip.

I try to write about things that I could talk more knowledgeably about. There was no other reason that I left off Xinjiang. I wrote a little bit about the treatment of Tibetans, mostly going off journal articles that I synthesized into the book. But there were plenty of things left on the chopping block. I could have written more about the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest power plant and displaced about a million people in China’s southwest. I could have written more about all aspects of social and digital control that people in China have to go through.

But I also wanted to write a relatively short book. My book is under 300 pages, and I wanted to hear that people criticized that I wrote a book that was too short by 100 pages, rather than a book that was too long by 100 or 200 pages. That’s where I chose to land and that was the side I chose to err on. But certainly if I had the ability to do some reporting and if I did take a look at this analysis, I would have written much more about the ethno-religious oppression that took place mostly under Xi.

Jordan Schneider: You did cram in a lot of good writing. Some quotes:

The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who douse blazes they themselves ignited.

The engineering state can be awfully literal-minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity — from mass production to reproduction — can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves.

What’s the point of good writing? You could have done this faster, presumably, without having nice sentences and extended metaphors.

Dan Wang: I write for one reason, which is pleasure. In my daily life, all of us must attend to our daily pleasures, and that’s going to be very important. I don’t read that much poetry, although I expect that I want to. But I spend a lot of time thinking about the voluptuous beauty of Italian comic opera. I take a lot of inspiration from the cadences and beats of composers like Mozart and Rossini and Bellini and Donizetti and Verdi. There has to be something important about if you’re going to write any sentence at all, why not make it beautiful and readable and full of cadence and full of splendor?

Jordan Schneider: We’re going to do a few more.

“As more Americans retreat into a digital phantasm, Xi will be shepherding Chinese through the physical world to make babies, make steel, and make semiconductors.”

“When Song assured China’s leadership that the population trajectories could be as firmly controlled as missile trajectories, they listened.”

“Skeptics of a one-child policy were making population projections with the aid of an abacus or a handheld calculator. Song Jian presented his group’s projections in precise machine-generated lines on graph paper; other groups drew uneven squiggles by hand. It wasn’t even a fair fight.”

Dan Wang: What does beauty mean to you, Jordan? How do you practice it? How do you try to enact it in your interviews, in your podcasting and your writing?

Jordan Schneider: I don’t know. I feel really sloppy and I guess I’m okay with that. It’s not something I spend a lot of time cultivating. We’re gonna have 200-plus newsletters this year. That means I’m not laboring over every sentence. Every once in a while I do, and then I think, “Oh wait, but if I do this, the output changes and it won’t be as much."

The subtext, the psychological undercurrent of why I do so many shows and write so fast is to quiet my brain. I’m scared of silence and the contemplation that’s necessary to do something this considered. Or maybe there’s just too much ADD to do writing like this. But yeah, I should give it a shot every Thursday — slow down and try to actually write something really worth reading.

Dan Wang: Sometimes it’s really important, Jordan, to have a pause.

Mao 70% Right, Xi 60% Right…

Jordan Schneider: Xi Jinping, 60% right? Derek Thompson says that Trump is a great assignment editor. Is it too early to give him a percentage? Because I do feel like a fair amount of the stuff he’s gesturing towards is adjacent to the critique of this lawyerly society. He’s Nietzschean and beyond law in a certain profound sense, right?

Dan Wang: I call Xi Jinping 60% correct on everything for two reasons. Many of Xi’s motivations for trying to restrain the debt of property developers or to examine some of the anti-competitive behaviors of internet companies in China — these are completely valid and well-reasoned motivations. It’s just that often the solution, Beijing’s solution, is often worse than whatever scary problem China has. I also assign Xi to be 60% correct on everything, partly because Deng Xiaoping assigned Mao Zedong to be 70% correct on everything (三七开定论). Xi would be the last person to put up his hand to say that he’s better than Chairman Mao in anything. So 60% correct for Xi.

Jordan Schneider: Pretty good, but 70% is high for Mao.

Dan Wang: Well, that’s the official verdict of history.

Jordan Schneider: Okay, but what’s your number for Mao?

Dan Wang: Mao was probably 30% correct. That might be the right projection for Trump. It’s too early to say. We need to have Trump move on from this world before his successors can really assess his legacy and maybe give him something like 70% correct in most of the things he did. Perhaps we’ll have that. Who’s going to be the Deng Xiaoping of America, Jordan?

Jordan Schneider: …Amy Klobuchar?

Dan Wang: Maybe… probably not.

Jordan Schneider: I don’t know. Jake Paul? There’s no one man.

I departed the country with a better appreciation of the self-limiting features of the Chinese system. Most notably, the Communist Party distrusts and fears the Chinese people, limiting their potential for flourishing.

If you want to make the inverse of the argument that I made at the very beginning — if we’re presuming a party is still going to be there and we’re presuming that that party has still internalized the lessons of Gorbachev, who probably didn’t fear the Soviet people nearly as much as maybe he should have if he wanted to keep the party — the guarding, literally and figuratively, is a constant you can draw through not just the post-Mao folks, but really everyone. Even the Hu Yaobangs and the Zhao Ziyangs, the most liberal folks we’ve seen, still distrust and fear the people at some elemental level. To imagine a Chinese leader coming up through the party system who doesn’t have that in their core is hard for me to project forward.

Dan Wang: That’s absolutely right. Maybe the Chinese are looking at the United States and saying, “Well, in 2016, maybe the American elites should have feared their people a little bit more, and they didn’t have quite enough fear there.” That’s certainly a possibility. Yes, it’s going to be the case that the Chinese are never going to fully trust their people, or maybe even not trust them very much at all. This is one of the reasons that China will not have a flourishing liberal society by any stretch of the imagination.

If the Communist Party goes away, we would still have a party. If the Nationalists had won before they were ejected to Taiwan in 1949, we would still have a country nursing its grievances over imperialist incursions in the past, still very intent on achieving some degree of technological primacy over the rest of the world. They probably wouldn’t be trusting their people very extensively either.

I hope that China could develop a regime that does trust its people much more than they do now, because the Chinese people are such a lovable folk. Don’t you agree, Jordan? They can be extremely creative. Their memes are no less than what American 20-year-olds and 14-year-olds are able to produce online. There’s so much wordplay with the Chinese language. There’s a lot of joking throughout China. The Chinese are very funny. People in Yunnan are very funny, which is my heritage. People in Beijing are very funny. The people in Shanghai… maybe not so funny, but most people everywhere else can be very funny.

I wish that the regime could recognize that it has a lot of people who have wonderful, creative spirits who are going to have great memes all day long. They’re going to create wonderful pieces of artwork and literature and all sorts of great shows, great movies. If they had that opportunity, they would have all sorts of wonderful jokes that they could play on us. I’m really optimistic that the spirit of the Chinese teenager is indomitable, just as the spirit of the American teenager is completely indomitable. It’s only that one of them is very actively suppressed by the state and the other is not.

Jordan Schneider: The one line I disagree with was when you say, “I missed the ambient friendliness of Americans,” as if you didn’t get that in China. I moved through the country in a different way than you did with my face, but it was still very friendly. That’s one of the things that will never leave me. You mentioned it at a different point in the book, talking about why this is the destination of choice for so many Chinese. It’s not just because it’s rich and a land of opportunity, but the cultural overlaps in terms of entrepreneurship and ease of engagement with other folks are really profound.

Dan Wang: Well, I would say that you do have a good face, and I wouldn’t sell it short. I have a different face. Not all of us can be so blessed. Certainly there is ambient friendliness in China. But there can also be an ambient “get in your face about your business” sense. There’s sometimes an ambient aggressiveness and pushiness in China, as there is in the US as well.

This is more stark to me because I spent some time in Europe. I just traveled to Europe for two months and we were mostly in Denmark. One of the things we hear about Danish folks is that they have a really hard time making friends after high school. You would have your friends from elementary school, some friends from university, maybe some friends you made when traveling to the United States. But after that, people have enough friends. They’re good. People travel around in roving packs to the bar and then they don’t really socialize with the other roving packs at the Danish bar.

It’s much easier to have a conversation with someone on the bus in New York, on the street in New York, walking around, and they don’t get up so much in your business. You’re right that there’s absolutely a lot of ambient friendliness in China. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about the place. But the flip side of that coin is that they can really get up in your business. How often are you asked as soon as you meet a new Chinese person — Are you married? How many children do you have? What’s your salary? Sometimes I don’t really feel like answering those questions. It’s a bit odd.

Jordan Schneider: The ambient anxiety as well is something very different in the US. Even when you have these think pieces about how people can’t afford rent and life is terrible, it’s not a nationally defining thing in the US the way modern anxieties are in China.

Dan Wang: This is certainly one of the many reasons I am glad that I did not grow up in China, especially not as a woman, because the pressure that women face in China is completely insane. It’s not only workplace stuff. In the workplace, you and I both know that Chinese women are many of the most capable people. They do most of the work; often they are the most efficient people in every organization and they are consistently passed over for leadership because they are not a guy. China really doesn’t treat women very well in the workplace.

Then imagine the pressure you face once you are seeing your neighbors or even worse, family over the most important Chinese holiday. Over Lunar New Year, every woman is asked one question. To the single: Are you married yet? To the married: When will you have children? It feels like, unless a woman has produced at least one child and at least one son, then she will not have broader respect within the family. Chinese women are consistently the most undervalued people, and they are the ones who should be elevated the most.

Generally, China is just a high-pressure society where one does need a little bit of pushiness to get ahead. That can sometimes be pretty wearing once you’ve spent enough time in China, because the pushiness is not really wonderful. The overworked aspects of a lot of people — 996 is real for a segment of the population who work from nine to nine, six days a week. Then they go home and face a lot of family pressures. Many people don’t have an easy time being able to afford their apartments in Shanghai or Beijing. It’s a high-pressure environment. That’s one of these things where you come to the US, you’re left alone. You go to Florida or Texas, and people aggressively leave you alone. That’s something I crave after being over there for a while.

Jordan Schneider: The pushiness of both the one-child policy stuff and now the party telling you that you need to have more kids is just — you have a number of these Orwellian flips which you document in modern society. That’s one of them. The other, of course, is COVID being this thing that would kill you and is worth not getting your cancer treatment in order to prevent, to “Oh, it’s a flu — and by the way, you don’t even need ibuprofen to get through, much less a vaccine, much less a Moderna vaccine."

You see echoes of it in the US sometimes, where Trump says, “Oh, don’t care about Epstein anymore.” But it doesn’t work really to completely turn on a gravity distortion field and just say when you were saying A is A one day, to say B is A the next day. That’s another benefit of a pluralist society — to have people, to have noise that pushes back on that.

Dan Wang: Well, this is what engineers do. They tell you for a while, “You must not have more than one child,” to “You really should have three children.” To hear that COVID is this life-threatening thing and it is our national duty to prevent any transmissions, to “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.” This is how engineers treat society — they swerve really suddenly every so often. At some point, that is going to give people very severe whiplash.

Jordan Schneider: “Beijing has been taking the future dead seriously for the past four decades. That is why they will not out-compete the United States.” What a line!

Dan Wang: The country that will outperform in the world has a sense of humor, and Beijing has the least sense of humor of all of them — at least official Beijing. Unofficial Beijing is very humorous. One of my favorite recent pieces is a gag where Alex Boyd, who is part of Asia Society, found and translated this page of official jokes from Xi Jinping.

You can read some of these jokes from Xi Jinping himself and decide how many of them are actually funny. Humor with Chinese characteristics isn’t really going to knock us off our feet. I prefer the superpower that isn’t taking the future with such seriousness. By taking the future with such gravity — this is one of the great insights from Stephen Kotkin — there is this apocalyptic sense in communist systems. You liberalize a little bit, you slip out a little bit, and somehow the entire system will collapse. Every day becomes an apocalyptic, life-or-death struggle for the Communist Party. That sort of system will end up being fairly brittle.

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Jordan Schneider: Another quote:

Engineers don’t know how to persuade. The Communist Party insists on a history in which the party is always correct and where all errors come from traitors or foreigners, rather than acknowledging fault and telling persuasive stories. The instinct of the engineering state is simply to censor alternative narratives. Xi comes off as someone who is a little too eager for groveling respect from the rest of the world, which is exactly why he’ll never get it.

Dan Wang: Yes.

Jordan Schneider: The other Kotkin-esque moment you highlighted is this idea that Li Qiang, who was the mayor of Shanghai initially, was one of the people trying to keep his city more open. But once it came down to it and he got the order, he implemented the biggest lockdown in human history. He became the most reviled local politician in the entire country, and then he got the biggest promotion anyone can get — to be premier. It’s such a reminder that while China is a country where people are promoted on performance at some level, once you reach the top rungs of power, it’s about loyalty. This man delivered on what he was told to do, even when it came at what would be considerable political cost in a democratic society. This is still a crazy system we’re dealing with — that’s not political logic.

You make the point that basically every party in the world that was in charge during COVID lost votes after COVID ended because people were upset about that time in their lives. But to have the emblem of bad Omicron-era COVID policy now be someone people are going to see on their TV for the next five years — this is remarkable.

Dan Wang: Well, maybe he’s going to be squeezed out of TV because he seems to be a remarkably weak premier by the standards of Chinese premiers. You’re absolutely right that in every pandemic country, the ruling party lost vote shares. It’s only in China that the most hated emblem of zero-COVID restrictions gets promoted to the top — the highest any politician could go under Xi.

Jordan Schneider: The idea that Kamala would have Fauci as her running mate is basically what we’re talking about.

Dan Wang: Yes, that would be quite something, wouldn’t it? This surely degrades and erodes some of the competence of other people inside the Politburo and Central Committee, because there were plenty of people who perhaps administered their cities more effectively with pandemic control policies.

One could debate how effective Li Qiang was. One could say he did his best trying to resist a very fierce lockdown, and then when that shifted, he was in charge with another vice premier of implementing that lockdown. Maybe he simply followed orders and did the best job he could. But certainly, I wouldn’t have expected after the Shanghai lockdown that Li Qiang, who was one of Xi’s protégés, would be promoted to anything as high as premier within the Chinese system. For him to become premier must surely have bred considerable resentment within his peers who looked at what an awful job he perhaps did. You can maybe debate that, but Li Qiang certainly created a lot of misery. For them to see this guy vault over them in terms of party hierarchy cannot feel good for other cadres.

Cold War 2.0?

Jordan Schneider: You’ve got Rickover, Moses, and Eisenhower as Americans you’re shouting out — all perhaps peaked in the 1950s or early 1960s, all products of Cold War America. Moses was doing his thing even in the ’30s, but there’s a narrative that was maybe a little more prominent in American politics a year or two ago: that Cold War framing is the thing that will get the US out of its engineering rut. We will do big things because now we have another adversary, and we’ll break eggs and build amazing stuff again because we have a new replacement for the Soviet Union. You’re still hopeful, though, that we can get there, even if this isn’t the defining framework for America for the next few decades.

Dan Wang: I certainly don’t hope we repeat all the mistakes of the last Cold War, which wasn’t very cold for Vietnam, which wasn’t very cold for Laos, and which wasn’t very cold for Afghanistan. The US and Soviet Union made tremendous mistakes and inflicted horrors on foreign populations, as well as somewhat on their own populations, in the course of pursuing the Cold War. I’m reluctant to say the US should desire or embrace anything resembling a Cold War, given how the last one went.

I’m hopeful the US will be able to recover some of its engineering chops, because it’s become tremendously obvious that the US needs to do this without any framing of China as the great adversary. We’re in New York right now. Affordable housing is a very big issue. New York can’t build subways at less than $2 billion per mile, which is far above European levels of construction. The US can’t fix Port Authority Bus Terminal in under five years. This is to say nothing of Massachusetts or California, which have really bad construction issues. None of that needs to implicate China. That’s purely an American lawyerly society problem.

We have movements like the Abundance Agenda trying to make sure US big cities are able to build quite a lot more. There’s broad complaint within both the American left and right that the US manufacturing base has rusted top to bottom, where apex manufacturers like Intel and Boeing have just an unbroken tail of woe if we look at any of their headlines. The US manufacturing base wasn’t able to produce anything as simple as masks and cotton swabs in the early days of the pandemic. That was pathetic.

We also have a defense industrial base that has significantly rusted, with the US unable to produce a lot of munitions or naval ships on time. Maybe the defense industrial base has to implicate China, but really that implicates already existing problems as well as the war in Ukraine, which took a lot of munitions from the United States.

The US needs to fix its own problems, not to be able to confront China, but because it has been doing pretty badly itself. The same goes for China — the contest will not go to the country that builds a bigger rocket or more homes. The contest will be won by the country that’s able to deliver better for its own citizens. That’s ultimately where both countries really need to get to.

Jordan Schneider: I agree with that. The question is: if we need a fundamental rethink and Cold War framing from 2020 to 2024 didn’t get us there, is Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein and Dan Wang evangelizing enough to have our Sputnik moment 2.0? Not only does it address the international stuff, but it also gets you the interstate highway system equivalent for what we need today. That’s our only data point. Maybe we can go back further in history.

Dan Wang: I’m also unsure that Cold War framing will work because right now, as we’re speaking at the end of August 2025, President Trump seems to be the most pro-China member of the White House, and he doesn’t seem terribly interested in a Cold War. A reporter asked him whether he should welcome more Chinese students to the United States. He responded, “It’s our honor to have them.” He’s right. The US should be attracting more students from China as well as from all nations. That won’t work if the commander in chief is uninterested in having a cold war.

We’ve tried to impose this Cold War framing for a while, and it hasn’t worked, at least so far. Maybe we will get there in some other way, but there isn’t a single knockdown argument that will have the US recover some of its engineering chops. There need to be many types of arguments, and the worse the situation becomes, the more the US needs to do.

Jordan Schneider: Mike Gallagher had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal basically saying we should dramatically tighten immigration policy from China. You have a USCIS head saying that F-1 visa holders should understand that they’re not welcome here after graduation, and OPT may be going the way of the dodo bird. We’ll see how it plays out. It’s clear that Trump is not entirely on board with this. But I wonder if Xi is going to do something more dramatic than a balloon — which doesn’t necessarily have to be an invasion of Taiwan — that clicks, that gives the Cold War framing a second breath of fresh air.

Dan Wang: Maybe. But I suspect Xi has studied his history and is really reluctant to give Americans an excuse to engage in another Cold War. Even the balloon seemed like it might have been an accident where the leadership didn’t know about it. We can deal with balloons, Jordan. We can deal with balloons all day.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, but can we deal with 50 Filipinos dying or something? We’ll see. As Kotkin says, history’s full of surprises. One thing we know about history is it’s full of surprises.

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On the Cold War stuff, when I had you and Ezra and Derek on, you asked me if the US should have a goal of constraining Chinese growth. Do you have an answer to that question? How would you frame our policy optimization function when thinking about that?

Dan Wang: The US should not be seen as being in a position to constrain China’s growth. It would be disastrous for the US if the Chinese earnestly believed that the US government was trying to hold down China’s innovation prospects or economic growth prospects, because that would seem very dramatically unfair. Now, there are some people in Beijing who already believe some version of this, but that’s not necessarily consensus.

It’s important for the US government to communicate that it wants a good future for Chinese people everywhere. There’s nothing Trump would lose by saying that he wishes the people of China can be rich, well off, and happy.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s close with some book recommendations. I don’t know why — read the Bible, Stendhal, someone you recommended to me the other day.

Dan Wang: The Book of Exodus, Jordan. That’s where it’s at. Maybe bested by the Book of Genesis. But the five books of the Torah — that’s something really important here.

Jordan Schneider: But you’re just shrugging off Prophets and Writings?

Dan Wang: Well, Ecclesiastes is very beautiful. As Robert Alter translates, the chapter is called Kohelet. There’s certainly a great deal of beauty in the Song of Songs and in the dreariness, frankly, of Ecclesiastes or Kohelet. Something important for us all to keep in mind is that the heart of the wise dwells in the house of mourning, while the heart of fools dwells in the house of mirth.

Jordan Schneider: Dan, what’s our outro song?

Dan Wang: There is no music more sublime than the ending of The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart, in which the Count asks and begs for forgiveness from the Countess for all of his incredible indiscretions.

The Schneider clan will be heading to the Bay Area from Sept 9 through the end of the month! If you’re interested in doing a house swap with a 2BR in New York, or happen to have an empty apartment that can fit a few adults and a very cute baby (no babyproofing or kid stuff required), please reach out!

This is a cross-post from the Cold Window Newsletter, a literature Substack about new and untranslated fiction from China. Each month, it features a handful of authors, books, trends, and news items from the Chinese literary world that haven’t yet caught much attention in English.

Over the last few months, I’ve sampled nearly every new Chinese short-story collection that’s come out this year.1 I want to tell you about my favorites.

Special: In search of the best new fiction in China

As of this summer, Chinese literary fiction is in a bit of a tough spot. Inside the country, there’s undeniable suspicion of literary writing affiliated with the cultural establishment: it is not a compliment to call someone 体制内, “inside the system.” A recent plagiarism scandal implicating many young establishment authors, and the schadenfreude with which their downfall was greeted on the Chinese internet, made this distrust abundantly clear.2 Outside of China, translators are working as tirelessly as ever to bring worthwhile stories out into the world, but there are still far too few young Chinese writers who get any sort of attention abroad (although I do think this tide is beginning to turn).

That’s why I decided to try reading everything newly published in China this year. This project was intended to be a pulse-check, an attempt to investigate in good faith the throwaway complaint that you see from Chinese readers online all the time: there’s no good literature in China anymore.

Surprise: that complaint is wrong. The five books below are some of the best I have ever read in Chinese. They’re mostly by women. They’re all by writers born after 1980. And, to a greater and greater extent as you move up my ranking, they all poke at the boundaries of today’s urban, technologized, hyper-globalized society, until it’s hard to tell what’s fantasy and what’s reality. That’s the kind of story that makes Chinese fiction worth reading right now. And it’s the kind that can only be written by young authors.

Let’s get into it.

Some stray thoughts on this project as a whole

• Speculative elements were extremely common across the whole sample and were nearly ubiquitous in my top 5. Not the hard sci-fi that China has become known for since The Three-Body Problem, but more commonly the uneasy, dreamlike invasion of magical or uncanny elements into everyday life.

• Related: stories about the internet were everywhere in the collections I read. English-language authors accurately capturing a text conversation in Serious Literature still feels like a rare achievement, but Chinese fiction seems to include convincing text-speak as a matter of course at this point.

• Domestic abuse and sexual assault were notable recurring themes across the sample, but I generally found that they were treated with the appropriate gravity, which is not always a given. If you read along with my recommendations, be forewarned that the top two entries on my list are particularly graphic in this regard.

• My favorite stories, nearly without exception, were long-ish novellas of the kind that are too long to ever ever get published in an English-language literary periodical. Someone invent a platform where we can publish high-quality translated novellas!!!

• Chinese cover design is just better than almost all of what I see in the US. Look at the book covers below. I’m not crazy, right?

• Overall: this project required a lot of reading. Some of the books on offer were boring, some were bewildering, and a handful were just bad. At least one was a strong contender for my top 5 but had to be dropped when that summer plagiarism scandal hit. I didn’t read any of the books in full, just in pieces, whittling away the ones that lost my interest until I was left with the list below. (I know I picked a good top 3 because they kept me reading late into the night, long after I should have set them aside and moved on to the next contestant.) Reading all these stories was exhausting and super fun, and I’d love to reprise the challenge for the second half of 2025.3

5. 邵栋《不上锁的人》(Those Who Leave the Door Unlocked by Shao Dong)

This entry is the odd one out on my list. I’d never heard of the author until he was nominated for the Blancpain-Imaginist Prize 宝珀理想国文学奖 earlier this month; he’s a bit younger than the other writers below, the only man of the bunch, and, judging by the pieces I read, the one who’s most grounded in realistic stories about traditional life. He won me over with the story 《文康乐舞》 “Recreational Dancing.” Its protagonist is a young female documentary student from Hong Kong poking around Fujian for material, and something about her voice as a narrator, both savvy and genuinely curious, made her feel like a real person in a way that not all literary narrators do. The nauseating, heartbreaking evocation of her father’s death during pandemic quarantine kicks the story into a darker mode and proves that the author has real range. I don’t think he’ll win the Blancpain prize, but he’s got me in his corner.

Shao Dong 邵栋
Born 1989

Recommended story in Chinese: 《文康乐舞》(excerpt)

Originally from Changzhou in Jiangsu Province, Shao Dong holds a doctorate from the School of Chinese at Hong Kong University. He currently serves as an assistant professor in the School of Humanities and Sociology at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. His fiction has appeared in Harvest, October, Shanghai Literature, and Hong Kong Literature and has been recognized with the first Lin Yutang Literature Award and the Hong Kong Youth Literature Award. His books include the fiction collections 《空气吉他》 Air Guitar and 《不上锁的门》 Those Who Leave the Door Unlocked, and the academic monograph Projecting on Paper: Yingxi Novels in the Early Republic of China. Air Guitar and Those Who Leave the Door Unlocked were both nominated for the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize.

4. 默音《她的生活》(Her Life by Mo Yin)

I’ve always been curious about Mo Yin. I like that she translates novels from Japanese, including one by Yoko Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear) that has gotten a lot of acclaim in China this year. I like that she has a reputation for mixing genre elements into literary writing. I like that this Reddit user went to the effort of making a (really good!) guide to her work, even though nary a word of her fiction has ever been translated into English so far. Sounds like something I would do...

《她的生活》 Her Life seems to have flown mostly under the radar within China, a small flourish between her better-selling novels and translations, but it proves that everything I’d heard about her writing is true. Consider the novella 《梦城》 “City of Dreams,” a sci-fi take on Hollywood set in future Japan. Through the eyes of a TV producer navigating corporate interests and cast-member intrigue, we explore a sci-fi world that feels upsettingly familiar: climate crisis, celebrity deepfakes, portable VR technology (“dreamvision”) that encourages you to isolate yourself from the world. I only learned later that Mount Fuji Diary, the book being adapted for dreamvision throughout the novella, is a real diary by Takeda Yuriko that was translated into Chinese by Mo Yin herself. The density of the ideas and references that Mo Yin plays with here is astounding.

Mo Yin 默音
Born 1980

Recommended story in Chinese: 《梦城》(excerpt)

Mo Yin is a novelist and translator. Her books include the fictional works 《甲马》Warhorse, 《星在深渊中》The Star in the Abyss, 《一字六十春》 One Word, Sixty Springs, and 《尾随者》 Tailgaters. She has also translated many literary works from Japanese, including Handymen in Mahoro Town by Shion Miura, Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, Normal Temperature in Kyoto by Kiyokazu Washida, Child’s Play by Ichiyō Higuchi, and Daily Notes and Mount Fuji Diary, both by Takeda Yuriko. Her newest collection of short fiction, 《她的生活》 Her Life, is accompanied by a sister book entitled 《笔的重量》 The Weight of the Pen, a collection of literary criticism.

3. 郭爽《肯定的火》 (Undeniable Fire by Guo Shuang)

I only read one of the three long pieces in this book, but it immediately made me want to press it into a new reader’s hands. The novella 《拱猪》 “Push Out the Pig” (named after a card game) is just such a perfect showcase of what new Chinese fiction is so good at: documenting the anxious disconnect between old and new, between parents who grew up in poverty and their children who grew up on the internet. I don’t know if Guo Shuang is a participant in fan culture herself, but she does an admirable job portraying how absorbing, liberating, and ultimately crushing it can be for a working-class child to seek escape inside online fandom. This deserves to be one of the first books people read if they want to learn about class in contemporary China.

Guo Shuang 郭爽
Born 1984
Paper Republic

Recommended story in Chinese: 《拱猪》(full story)

Available in English: review of 《月球》 Planet Moon in the China Books Review

Guo Shuang was born in 1984 in Guizhou. Her fiction has been published in Harvest, Writer Magazine, Mountain Flowers, Zhongshan, and West Lake. Her books include 《月球》Planet Moon, 《我愿意学习发抖》 I Want to Learn to Tremble, and 《正午时踏进光焰》 Stepping into the Noontime Light. She has been the recipient of the Selected Fiction Newcomer Prize, the Zhongshan Star Young Author Award, the West Lake–New Chinese Literature Award, and the Chu Jiwang Literary Award.

2. 杜梨《漪》 (The Ripple of Shattered Cuckoo by Du Li)

Now we’ve arrived at the truly magical writing on my list. I predicted in my end-of-year coverage for 2024 that 杜梨 Du Li would be an author to watch this year, and I’m pleased to discover how right I was. Her writing is not easy to read, at least for a non-native speaker—it’s dense, fast-paced, and prone to unexpected leaps into hallucinatory nightmarescapes. But it’s worth the effort.

There’s 《三昧真火》“True Samādhi Fire,” a novella about an amateur rapper named Najia who has to contend with unexpected fame after her verses at a local competition go viral. In mingling satire about Beijing youth culture with a gradual excavation of the troubled life Najia left behind in her home province, the novella manages simultaneously to be silly, contemplative, learned, and very dark.

And then there’s 《鹃漪》 “The Cuckoo Vanishes,” Du Li at her unsettling best. A young couple moves into an apartment known for uncanny occurrences—and, as in any good haunted-house story, it’s less the apartment that turns out to be haunted than the occupants themselves. At every turn I found myself thinking back to 《竹峰寺》 “Zhufeng Temple” by 陈春成 Chen Chuncheng, one of my favorite short stories of all time.4 Both stories use the collision of traditional culture with the present as the root of a mystery story—in “Zhufeng Temple,” it’s a legendary stone stele that has gone missing; in “The Cuckoo Vanishes,” it’s a Ming-dynasty text linked to women disappearing into their dreams. The difference is that Du Li, unlike Chen Chuncheng, likes to dive deep into the haunting nonsense aesthetics of a nightmare. The worlds she describes are disturbing—both the dream world, and the real world that it masks.

Du Li 杜梨
Born 1992

Recommended story in Chinese: 《鹃漪》(excerpt)

Du Li is a novelist and translator. A contracted author at Beijing’s Lao She Literature Institute, she received a master’s degree in literature in England and currently lives in Beijing. Her books include 《致我们所钟意的黄油小饼干》 You’re the Holy Light of My Junky Life, 《孤山骑士》 Knight of the Lonely Mountain, and 《春祺夏安》 Seasons of the Palace. She has received recognitions including the Hong Kong Literary Award, the Paper–Mirror Image Nonfiction Award, the Zhongshan Star Best Young Author of the Year Award, and a gold medal at the He Cailin Science Fiction Awards.

1. 张天翼《人鱼之间》 (Beyond Truth and Tales by Zhang Tianyi)

One thing that this project has taught me is that I like fiction that overflows with ideas. If an author has a capacious enough brain to come up with ten wildly different storylines and figure out how to weave them together, I don’t want her to cut a single one out. Give me writing like a rainforest: bursting with so many sights and sounds that I can’t take it in all at once, but still somehow forming a single dense, fecund ecosystem.

That describes all the books on this list to a greater or lesser extent, but none more than 《人鱼之间》 Beyond Truth and Tales. 张天翼 Zhang Tianyi takes the elements of the other books I liked and dials them up to eleven. Allusions to classic texts? The whole book is structured around postmodern deconstructions of myths and fairy tales.5 Speculative elements reflecting the excesses of real-world pop culture? This is the only book on my list where you will find a candy-colored parody of Hogwarts where students wear skinsuits to look like their favorite celebrities. (See《豆茎》 “The Beanstalk,” the collection’s closer.)

Most of all, Beyond Truth and Tales is just fun to read. Like Du Li, Zhang Tianyi knows how to make a silly moment deadly serious—and more importantly, she knows how to pull a deeply upsetting plot out of a tailspin and give you permission to laugh. I couldn’t help getting deeply attached to the awkward, endearing protagonists of 《雕像》 “The Statue” (a classical-art-themed romance)! And at the end of “The Beanstalk,” when it finally clicks into place how the story’s various threads link to each other—reader, I gasped aloud.

Zhang Tianyi is already a celebrity for her prior collection, 《如雪如山》 Like the Mountains, Like the Snow, which is among the most influential works of Chinese fiction from the last five years.6 If her writing stays this good, then we’re going to be reading her for a long, long time.

Zhang Tianyi 张天翼
Born in the 1980s

Recommended story in Chinese: 《豆茎》(excerpt)

Available in English: “Pottery Husband” (purchase); 2023 feature in ChinaTalk

Zhang Tianyi is a freelancer and a handcrafter of novels. She enjoys tulips, islands, swimming, cheese, and horror movies. She is catless. She once grew an osmanthus tree. Her books include the fiction collections 《如雪如山》Like the Mountains, Like the Snow and 《扑火》 Jumping into the Fire, as well as the essay collection 《粉墨》Face Powder. She has received the Zhu Ziqing Literary Award, the Zhongshan Star Literary Award, and the Flint Literary Award, and her work has been adapted into film.

That’s it for this issue. If there’s more good fiction you think I missed, let me know. Look forward to a shorter, more personal interim post in the near term, and another full issue next month. Thanks for reading.

Cold Window Newsletter

Reading, recommending, and reporting on new literature from China.

By Andrew

Are GPUs being smuggled into China? Nvidia says no. But Steve Burke, editor in chief of Gamers Nexus, has traced out the entire smuggling chain in an epic three-hour YouTube documentary. Earlier this year, he also he filmed another masterpiece of independent journalism exploring the impact of tariffs on America’s gaming computer ecosystem.

In today’s conversation, we discuss…

• Steve’s investigative process, including how he found people in mainland China willing to speak on the record about black market GPUs,

• The magnitude of smuggling, weaknesses in enforcement, and crudeness of US restrictions,

• China’s role in manufacturing GPUs they aren’t allowed to buy,

• And what it takes to stand up to Nvidia as an independent journalist.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

As of August 21st, YouTube has removed the full documentary via DCMA.

Having watched the entire documentary, I can confirm this video had zero business getting struck. GamersNexus is working on getting the video back on YouTube, but you can watch it here in the meantime.

From Craigslist to Shenzhen

Jordan Schneider: Steve, you are a madman. What motivated you to try to trace the GPU smuggling supply chain from the US into China?

Steve Burke: Honestly, I saw a Reuters story a couple of years ago about the concept of a GPU black market, and that concept is dystopian, cyberpunk, and weird. It’s really compelling because you normally don’t think of something that was historically used for playing video games as being marketable on a black market. That’s what started it.

We sat in the background for a couple years, and then this year, with all the policy changes, it came up naturally. Plus, Nvidia almost seemed to be inviting a response with their whole “smuggling doesn’t happen and it’s a non-starter” stance.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, at one point they’re writing blog posts saying no one’s smuggling GPUs, while there are photos from the Hong Kong Police Department — DEA-style shots of captured CPUs instead of drugs, smuggled with fake pregnancy baby bumps or by packing the CPUs with live lobsters. It’s an interesting communication style that was so strident it attracted moths to the flame of incredibly ambitious YouTubers. How does one start reporting something like this?

Steve Burke: The concept of the story was simple — there are GPUs that are not permitted for sale into China by United States companies, but they’re getting there anyway. We wanted to find out how.

Our tariffs video introduced a new style where we flew around and spoke to people affected by the issue. Instead of writing the story around the information we gathered, we ran their discussions mostly unedited and learned a lot from it. We thought it would be great to go out to China and talk to people involved in GPU smuggling to see what they’d say.

I spent a lot of time looking for people to talk to, collecting research, and figuring out who the key players were. At some point, I decided we just had to pull the trigger and get on a plane.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because there’s nothing illegal in China about bringing banned GPUs into the country — they’re not banned there. There’s this weird dynamic where these people aren’t criminals in the PRC. If they were, they probably wouldn’t be speaking to a Western journalist. You found this gray area where someone was buying RTX 4090s on Craigslist in the US and shipping them off by flying to Hong Kong and China. Connecting that full chain was really remarkable. Walk us through some of the steps.

Steve Burke: The hardest part of putting together a story where you’re relying on people to explain their part of the chain — and we wanted them to explain it themselves, not through me — was finding the first person.

We found Dr. Vinci Chow, who works at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was referenced in an old Reuters story, and I emailed him. From there, I was able to ask him about the steps involved. He couldn’t reveal his sources or supply chain for how he buys export-controlled GPUs, but he pointed us in the right direction to find people ourselves.

The first step was crawling through Alibaba listings. As stupid as that sounds, I typed in the names of banned GPUs into Alibaba, and they’re everywhere. I started messaging people, always telling them, “We want to make a video. I’ll buy a card if I have to, as long as you talk to me.” A lot of them responded with confusion, asking if I actually wanted to buy something or not. But we found a couple people who were game for it.

The two main sources we found were basically middlemen for these GPUs in China. Both of them wanted to be involved because they were curious about how Western media works — they wanted to see the process.

From there, the next step was taking it further. We had the user — Dr. Vinci Chow, who uses these GPUs — and someone representing the middlemen. What we really needed were the people supplying the middlemen, which would be the smugglers we found. We also needed anyone else in the chain who might be modifying cards or exchanging them in another middle process.

Basically, we broke down the supply chain into categories and needed to find one person for each category to follow a GPU from start to finish. That was the goal.

Jordan Schneider: There are a lot of fun, colorful personalities you met along the way. Why don’t you give some profiles? We start with the university professor who’s maybe the easiest to picture — he’s just teaching his students and has three or four A100s. Not an enormous national security risk, in my humble opinion, but you start upping the level of sketchy characters.

Steve Burke: First, it’s important to point out that at no point did I feel unsafe with any of these people. I was at an Asian grocery store a couple days after publishing this, and someone from China who was visiting ran up to me. The first thing he said was, “Oh my God, this seems so dangerous!” I think that’s the common conception, but we never felt unsafe with anybody.

They were all very interesting characters. The sketchiest guy would have been the person in the US from China who buys export-controlled devices from Americans through normal Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace sales. Then he gets them back to China to collect a profit. He was the only one where — I’m not versed in criminal law — but I’m pretty sure he was definitely breaking laws.

The middle people we worked with in China, who sit between the users and the smugglers, basically buy from people in the US. It was amusing talking to this one guy, Vincent. He’s basically a solo operator running a trading company. He doesn’t care about GPUs or any of the stuff he sells — he just knows it makes money. He can buy it, sell it, and make money.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah.

Steve Burke: He didn’t even know which cards were banned and which weren’t. In the video, he asked me, “Is the RTX 5090 banned or not?” I said it was banned, and he replied, “But you can just buy them on the market.” It was baffling to him — they’re right there, so how are they banned?

Jordan Schneider: Those visuals are incredible — you’re just in a room with walls of these GPUs.

One of the big takeaways for me is that yes, fentanyl is banned in America, but there’s still a lot of fentanyl in America. There are millions and millions of these GPUs made, so it’s not shocking that there’s some leakage. The fact that there are enough of these people out there for Steve to build a whole story around it — and as someone who has tried and failed for years to get mainland guests to come on shows with me in either English or Chinese — you have to imagine an enormous iceberg under this little thing you were able to capture on camera. What other indications did you get of the magnitude of this?

Steve Burke: One of the better examples was the repair shop. It’s just a repair shop that fixes video cards. They’re not formally involved in any black market — they’re not intentionally part of some illicit market. They just fix GPUs, and as part of that, they happen to fix export-controlled GPUs that are on what the US would consider a black market.

This was really interesting because it didn’t click for me until I got home and started editing. The repair shop owner talks about how he modifies these GPUs to increase memory capacity and make them more viable for AI users. What I picked up on was that it’s keeping export-controlled silicon in circulation.

Normally, the part that dies on a video card isn’t the silicon itself or the GPU — those are super resilient. It’s usually a MOSFET or a capacitor that costs three cents to replace. In the US, these types of shops that can modify memory are relatively uncommon. I don’t know of a single one, though there might be someone out there.

The point is that in China, if this silicon is export-controlled and there’s restricted flow into the country, you have these shops that can keep devices in service through no illicit intent of their own. They’re just repair shops making money. That’s really interesting because you can see how it prevents their supply from diminishing when devices go out of service due to something fixable breaking.

Jordan Schneider: Playing Nvidia rep hat here with some critiques — there are a handful of gaming PCs slightly above the thresholds, but the things folks are more worried about are accelerators and full racks. You have quotes from Jensen and David Sacks saying these things are really big and heavy — how could anyone smuggle them? What’s your take on that line?

Steve Burke: He said something about not being able to fit a Grace Blackwell system in your pocket. It was a brilliant misdirection for someone who doesn’t really understand the device he’s talking about, because there are a few problems with that.

First, you don’t need the device in China to use it — you can remote into it somewhere else. The problem with that approach is the data is remote, so processing is slow. If they have a lot of data and really need it on-premises, then you would still want to get it in country.

One of the companies we found and spoke to in Taiwan is basically a testing firm. What they do is bring devices on behalf of other companies, test them, clear or screen them, then forward them to the company that hired them to test the device. Maybe they’re testing a server rack or cooling solution to make sure it’s sufficient before forwarding it.

These types of companies can also work to forward export-controlled racks. The one Jensen was talking about in that video — yeah, you can’t fit it in your pocket, but you can fit it in a crate and ship it from Taiwan.

From what we saw, it happens. We weren’t allowed to film this part, but we were in a room where they had Grace Blackwell systems just sitting there. I asked, “Where are these going?” The response was, “China — there’s a company that hired us, and we’re sending them to China when we’re done testing.” He thought nothing of it, as if he wasn’t revealing some big secret.

Jordan Schneider: The stuff you got on camera was more small-scale operators, but it makes sense that this larger-scale smuggling is happening. This is a desirable product, after all.

The thing that’s different with fentanyl is that it’s illegal in America, so you have domestic law enforcement making it harder for gangs and cartels — they have to get creative, creating a cat-and-mouse game. But if the destination for the black market goods is outside the export-controlling country, and the rest of the world doesn’t care, then it’s much easier once this stuff leaves the US. Tens of billions of dollars of this product ships every year.

Particularly when we don’t have systematic tracking — there was this Reuters article that seemed like a deep state warning saying they put tracking devices on things, but you don’t really have systematic tracking. What I assume is happening is the DOJ is building a handful of cases against these smuggler people, not a systematic effort to track tens of billions of dollars.

Steve Burke: Especially because most of these devices are made in China. Almost all of them are manufactured there, so the DOJ isn’t at the end of the factory line putting trackers on products. It would have to be somewhere else — maybe at Nvidia’s warehouse or whoever handles their logistics locally.

It’s definitely possible, but I think a lot of this stuff isn’t distributed through a chain that would ever be intercepted by the DOJ. If a factory in China is assembling an accelerator and “oops,” this accelerator has a defect, it’s not going to America — it’s going in the bin. What happens after it gets in that bin is unclear.

In at least one instance, we found that with the university’s accelerators, it appeared that an accelerator with a defect was assembled from other components kept from other defective units or spares. It’s almost naive to think that every one of these devices has to go through an export flow through the US that would be trackable by the US or Nvidia. Stuff can just disappear.

Jordan Schneider: The packaging happens in China. What sort of level of involvement does China have in the process?

Steve Burke: The assembly process works this way — Nvidia designs the silicon (done all over the world, but they’re headquartered in California), and TSMC manufactures and fabricates the silicon in Taiwan. Then, Chinese companies manufacture — and sometimes engineer through contract — the cooling solutions, the PCB (printed circuit board), and source all the capacitors and voltage regulator components. Everything that makes one of these devices — pretty much everything — is sourced in China.

They bring it to a factory that assembles it on an assembly line, typically with automated machines called SMT lines (surface mount technology lines). These pick and place thousands of components down the line, with some manual assembly of the heat sink, and then it comes out the other side. They box it and ship it if it’s going to retail, or if it’s something going on a server, it’s simply shipped to the next location.

The assembly locations act as collection or aggregation points for everything else. The company that assembles the video card receives components from at least dozens of other factories. The company that puts that accelerator or video card into a server is itself receiving components from dozens of factories. They assemble it, and from there it should go out to whoever the customer is, which is often Nvidia.

Jordan Schneider: This needs to sink in for people. There are server racks which the US government — even the Trump administration — has decided are too powerful, too dual-use, too scary to give China access to. But we still need Chinese firms to make these things.

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Steve Burke: Yes, but they’re not allowed to have the thing that they make. It’s very interesting. I tried to drive this home in the video — it’s a black market from the US perspective. The people we spoke to in China see it as just the market.

The guy Vincent we spoke to in his small shop — we asked him, “Does China care? Does the Chinese government care?” His answer was essentially that it’s none of China’s business. They don’t have a reason to care about what he’s buying or that America thinks it should be export-controlled. As a small business owner, he doesn’t have any control over it anyway. If it’s on the market, he buys it. If someone wants it, he sells it. It’s really that simple.

Jordan Schneider: Then there’s the question of where Nvidia fits in all this. Clearly they’d like to sell as much as they can, but they also don’t want to literally break the law. I thought it was very funny that you had four or five different interviewees basically hit you with the same Chinese idiom.

Steve Burke: “Open one eye and close the other (睁一只眼闭一只眼).” Yeah, they all said that. The question I asked pretty much everyone was, “Does Nvidia know, and do you think they care to control it?” The answer was that they just turn a blind eye.

I do think there’s truth to that. Jensen’s on camera one day denying this is a thing, talking about how it’s a non-starter because some smugglers got arrested. But then you look at it — well, they made tens of millions of dollars, according to the DOJ, before they were arrested. Is it really a non-starter? That much money is a pretty good starter.

Jordan Schneider: That’s a pretty good starter, and these are the stupidest ones.

Steve Burke: Yes, these are the ones who got caught. Exactly.

Jordan Schneider: I just asked ChatGPT, and it said that Blackwells are mostly assembled outside of China. But the RTX 5000 series — are those the ones you’re referencing?

Steve Burke: We could talk about that. It depends on what they mean by assembly, because Blackwell includes RTX 5090s, which are assembled in China — a lot of them. A lot of Hopper is done in China. The GB — I’m not 100% sure where Grace Blackwell systems are all assembled, but I know for a fact that some of Nvidia’s largest partners for manufacturing and assembling the boards we’re talking about are in China. The RTX 5090s most certainly are.

Jordan Schneider: Gotcha. Just to close the loop on this — we had Chris Miller and Leonard Lerer on last week. Leonard was pounding the table on the idea that if we want this to happen and we’ve decided it’s okay for China to get GPUs, let’s keep doing the playbook we have now where you can have cloud access in Singapore and Malaysia. There’s a little lag, but you can train all your models. It’s easier to see if someone’s doing something sketchy if it’s happening in Malaysia versus in a data center in western China. If the world really goes to shit, it’s much easier to turn those off if they’re in another country than if they’re already in the PRC.

ChinaTalk

EMERGENCY POD: H20 Drama

We’re bringing back Lennart Heim of RAND and Chris Miller author of Chip Wars and newly on substack, to discuss the new H20 drama, when exports were banned in April, and now selling it with a 15% export fee…

Read more

15 days ago · 48 likes · Jordan Schneider

Steve Burke: It’s interesting where, with sufficient power, an open market leader also benefits from being the leader of a closed market or black market. If those in charge — Nvidia and the government — decide that access in Singapore, Malaysia, or wherever is safer because it can be toggled or monitored for military use, the interesting byproduct is that it’s creating or fueling this secondary market in China for these devices to be purchased locally.

The most interesting thing to me personally is that we cover this stuff as gaming hardware — DIY PCs that you build to play video games. That’s how it started. What stands out is that gaming users, when they look at content about the product, aren’t trying to figure out how much money they can make from it. They want to buy it and use it to play video games. They’re not making money.

The whole thing has shifted now with AI use cases being so in demand and everybody trying to make a buck off of it. The person at the other end of the product consumption pipeline is trying to figure out how much they can make on this and whether it’s sufficient for the thing they’re trying to use to make money — like an H100 with higher memory capacity.

From my perspective, it feels so much less innocent than where it started with Nvidia’s GPUs, which was about getting high frame rates in Quake or Counter-Strike.

Jordan Schneider: I remember literally talking to people in the White House over the past few years, and they’d say, “We’re not trying to screw over Chinese gamers here. This is not our intention.” But the past 30 years of what Nvidia has built is so odd and happenstance — the thing they’ve been developing happens to enable you to create God as well as render 3D environments.

We’re in this weird moment where the RTX 5090 is marketed and sold as a gaming card, and that is its primary use case. But if you take that technology and put a lot of them together, you can train AI models that can do lots of wonderful things — and also train your AI drone swarms on how to target Taiwanese Marines.

Steve Burke: That’s the other thing that’s interesting — the computing time. One of the points brought up by one of the two professors we spoke to was, “Okay, you’re forcing me to use a slower device, but it can still do it, so I’ll just wait another day or two for that processing.” From the perspective of the US Government, that is still somewhat of the impact they want. If you slow someone down to two days instead of one, that’s a big difference — a 100% increase in processing time.

At the same time, it’s interesting from our vantage point as a more technical outlet — the US government really doesn’t know how to control any of this. They don’t seem to understand how performance is calculated. They don’t use benchmarks that make any sense. If they were to contract someone making YouTube reviews from a bedroom, they might have a better formula for controlling these things.

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Instead, what we get is, “Well, let’s just take the FLOPS from the brochure and multiply it against the bit length of the operation or something and see if that works out.” It seems like they backwards-computed that formula until they restricted the ones they wanted, and then the formula broke when the next generation came out.

The US doesn’t seem to have put the right people on this or done it in the right way to think through the problem. As a technical reviewer, I look at it and wonder: why are we not benchmarking something that considers time to complete, memory capacity, memory bandwidth, and then maybe FLOPS at the end and clock speeds? For whatever reason, that’s not what the formula is.

It blows my mind that it seems so naive to not factor in these other specs on the spec sheet when judging performance, because every application is different.

Jordan Schneider: We should explain who you are and what Gamers Nexus is.

Steve Burke: Generally speaking, we do consumer hardware-facing product reviews and benchmarks — technical analysis of computer components to help people decide whether they should or shouldn’t buy something, whether it’s accurately represented, things like that. We also do consumer advocacy reporting. We’ll take stories about companies screwing over the little guy — warranty denials, things like that.

It’s an advocacy approach where we’ll take a case from a viewer who feels they’ve been wronged by a company, then we’ll take ownership of it and see it through to the end. We try to fix it while also figuring out what went wrong.

On YouTube, we have something like two and a half million subscribers. I started it in 2008 as a website — an article-driven website. Our core team currently has four members, with eight to nine people working on stuff daily.

Tariff Mania and 21st-Century Journalism

Jordan Schneider: All right, tariffs. What was the story you guys tried to tell with that documentary?

Steve Burke: The tariff story was fun because that was a three-hour documentary — our test case for this approach. We got to the GPU story because of the tariff story, where we thought, “All right, that formula worked, let’s try that again."

The way we got to the tariffs story was through conversations I’d already been having with hardware manufacturers who were warning me of price increases. They were trying to figure out how to convey this incoming increase to an audience that would be very upset about it. We were already having those conversations when what I believe was called “Liberation Day” — those tariffs came down.

That was the day I immediately started calling everybody I knew, dating back twelve years in the industry, to see if we could get them on camera to talk about this. Everybody was freaking out because this would potentially mean — in some cases — up to 170% tariffs. It was also starting to target other countries that companies had just started moving to in order to avoid tariffs.

The topic was hot, everybody was upset, and they were willing to go on camera. The problem they ran into was, “We’re going to have to skyrocket the prices on a computer case that should be $90, and customers are going to think we’re gouging them.” In some cases that may be true — that can also happen — but it was just the right moment to try and talk to everyone.

Jordan Schneider: There were two levels that made it such compelling content. First, you had Corsair, but it was mostly small to medium-sized businesses saying, “Oh, Steve’s coming. Let me share a spreadsheet of our future cost structure.” You had these very granular case studies of what the Liberation Day numbers would mean to these companies, as well as the emotional impact of all these conversations.

People forget that when you have a new tariff number, it means an enormous amount of stress on management thinking, “Oh shit, do we need to cancel this buildout? Do these SKUs need to die? Our entire business plan is thrown out the window.” Because this number went from 3% to 50%, down to 20%, up to 25% — and every single one of them repeatedly saying, “There’s absolutely no way I’m building a factory in America. I’m not embarking on a manufacturing renaissance of PCB boards or coolant or decals or whatever, because I’m just trying to stay alive. I’m not trying to plan for the future here."

Steve Burke: Most of these companies don’t own their own factories. Even if they wanted to make products here, that’s not their decision — they don’t have the capital, and the supply chain isn’t here.

Personally, as an individual endeavor, I can take a 3D rendering of a product idea to SEG Market (赛格电子市场) in Huaqiangbei in China, show it to a guy who prints PCBs and a guy who sells capacitors and MOSFETs, and probably have a sample within a couple of days. That doesn’t exist here. That’s a problem if you want to move the supply chain, because you can’t just bring over the end product — you have to bring over all the components that go into it to avoid these tariffs.

For some companies in the story, like Hyte (a small computer case and cooler company), they decided it was easier to halt shipments to the US and move all their advertising and product sales to Germany, England, and anywhere they wouldn’t get hit with these tariffs. They focused on those markets instead.

It ended up creating the opposite of the intended effect — now you’ve got a shortage of products in the US that people really want, and prices are going up due to low supply and tariff concerns.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting — it doesn’t really show up in inflation if the thing doesn’t exist anymore. That was really striking. In the interview, you asked if companies might die from tariffs:

Steve Burke: “Do you think this kills some American companies? Not necessarily anyone’s here at this table.”

Guest: “Oh yeah. This is a high-stress event. This will kill some people.”

Steve Burke: That’s a good point. Even for non-owners — just someone whose job is logistics for a company — if you’re responsible for millions, tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars of product and you’ve got the company breathing down your neck not to screw it up, that’s an enormous amount of stress for something they have very little control over. It comes down to decisions like “Do we take it off the boat or send it back to China?"

Jordan Schneider: Steve, watching you take these big swings and put out two of the most remarkable pieces of journalism I’ve seen this year has been fascinating. You have this deep domain expertise, decades of connections, and experience as a live player building things and seeing the industry evolve. What has the experience been like for you and your team to bite off these stories?

Steve Burke: First, it’s always weird coming off the back of these stories because we post something about black market GPUs and US export control in China, and then in a couple of days I’m going to post a review of a computer case.

One of my friends in the industry recently said to me at a trade show, “What are you doing running around the show floor talking about computer cases?” I still enjoy that stuff — it’s fun for me, easy, and interesting. But for the audience, the biggest thing we have to navigate is that the audience isn’t fully cohesive. It’s not one big mass. You’ve got people who really enjoy these stories and people who really don’t.

What we’ve been trying to do is focus one of our two channels on reviews content. Eventually, a lot of this reporting will probably move over to GN2, which is our consumer advocacy channel. The reason is that YouTube poses a big challenge: if someone subscribed because they enjoy these pieces — tariffs and geopolitical ones — but then they don’t click on anything reviewing a CPU because they don’t care or understand it, YouTube will mark that person as having become disengaged, even if they’re actually just waiting for the content they want.

We’ve been trying to allow the audience to choose if they want one or both types of coverage. That’s been an interesting journey. There’s this background battle people don’t consider — we’re also battling with the YouTube algorithm, which nobody understands. YouTube can’t tell me how it works. They don’t know. They built it and then it went off and became the Terminator.

For the team, it’s been fun because it’s a creative challenge. It’s interesting to talk to all these different experts and learn. At the end of the day, if we want a break from the travel and these stories, we just go review a computer part, and that’s still just as fun.

Jordan Schneider: How do you monetize something like this? It’s an enormous amount of effort to pull one of these together.

Steve Burke: This one was expensive. The travel alone, not counting staff costs, was maybe $15,000. We were overseas for three weeks with a lot of flying around.

For this particular story and most of our funding, it comes from audience support — things like Patreon or our own store where we make computer building products that people can use to help build PCs or other miscellaneous items. That’s the biggest component of our revenue.

Then there’s YouTube AdSense, which is pretty small — those third-party ads that everybody hates and hopefully can skip at the beginning of a video. Finally, there’s direct ad sales where we go to manufacturers directly and offer to sell them an ad for their product, though we didn’t put any of those in this video.

Jordan Schneider: Do you think other corners of your micro-niche are interested or have taken these other swings? How do other folks conceptualize speaking to bigger stories?

Steve Burke: Micro-niche is a good phrase for this. Because we’ve been so historically embedded in benchmarking components and testing video games, a lot of the people I know and respect are in that segment. A couple of the guys I’ll shout out — Hardware Unboxed does excellent benchmarks. He’s talked to me at shows, and the paraphrase of the conversation was more or less, “You can have those stories. I don’t want them.” Fair enough — if you enjoy what you do, then sure.

I don’t think a lot of the people I know directly want to do hardware component-oriented political coverage. No one really wanted to talk about politics in any capacity. I certainly didn’t. I’m on record in a lot of videos in the past saying we’re just reporting on this as hardware-relevant news and keeping all the politics out of this particular story.

As time has gone on and especially as companies like Nvidia have become more relevant to governments, I decided it’s not only not possible to fully separate it anymore — it starts to become almost irresponsible at some point to try to keep separating it because it’s integrated.

A lot of people are just happy to benchmark computer hardware news. This kind of coverage causes a lot of new stresses or problems because you’re potentially stepping on the toes of an audience that’s thinking, “I just watch you because you talk about computer cases. I don’t want to hear you talk about Donald Trump."

Jordan Schneider: The LeBron James “shut up and dribble” mentality. But let’s do a little Steve history — did you work for your high school newspaper? Where did this come from?

Steve Burke: I did. That’s funny, I forgot about that. I also distributed a — God, I was probably 10 or 12 or something — neighborhood newspaper that I wrote for my local area. I forgot about that too until right now.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting, the choice to do more political coverage and reporting. There are people like Tim Ferriss who comes to mind — a very popular person who just leaned out of any of this and lost national relevance. You see folks like Joe Rogan or All-In Pod getting much more into this, and the audience excitement and interest for these types of things increasing over time.

Watching the micro-niches I follow — yours and other sports-style coverage — it’s very bifurcated. There are people who have something in their past where they wrote for a high school newspaper and are just into this, and then there are other people who say, “Look, this is not my thing. I enjoy my niche. I don’t want the smoke that comes with it."

Steve Burke: It’s very uncomfortable to get into political stuff. For me, it’s one of those situations where we’ve got a story we think is interesting to everybody, regardless of politics, but we can’t separate it from politics. There’s a chance we piss off someone who we want to come back tomorrow and watch a computer case review. That’s uncomfortable.

It can also be uncomfortable because you’re making some of those people in the audience uncomfortable — maybe they’re confronted with these reviewers now having opinions they don’t agree with about things they don’t think we should talk about. There’s validity to that.

At the same time, I feel our job is to push buttons and be a thorn in the side of big companies. If that means making some people feel a little uncomfortable with this being different — “I don’t know if I enjoy it, but I’ll try it” — that’s kind of where we want to be. We’re saying, “It’s relevant enough. Hear us out. We’ve earned your trust so far. Just hear me out."

Jordan Schneider: There are a few levels to this. One is that you’re coming at this from a consumer advocacy perspective, and you’ve been getting into arguments with Nvidia about warranties and the Bitcoin GPU situation. Having the wherewithal to pick fights with trillion-dollar companies is step one.

From the audience perspective — and let me know if you think I’m practicing what I preach here — authenticity really helps. Look, I voted for Biden and I voted for Kamala. I don’t think anyone who listens to the show is surprised by that. But that’s not what defines this show. What defines this show is that I’m really curious about China and technology. I think this stuff is important and I want to explore these issues.

Coming at it from a place of investigation and curiosity as opposed to strict advocacy — you weren’t starting from the premise that “Trump’s an idiot, let’s use this tariff story to make him look really dumb.” Your premise was, “This is a really big deal for this industry that I cover. I want to show my audience and the world more broadly what these policies are doing to these businesses.” Through that, you had a really fascinating exploration. I’m not worried about you. You’re two for two right now, Steve. It’s going to be fine.

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Steve Burke: I appreciate it. It really helps to let the people you have on just speak. Going into it with the plan of “I’m just going to ask questions and see what they say, and that’s kind of it. I’m not going to push them on their beliefs. I’ll ask more questions maybe, but I don’t really care what this person does or doesn’t believe. I just want to know what they think.”

Then we put it together with all the other stuff people think, and the audience can decide who they agree with. That approach really helps defuse a lot of it, because then you’re just coming up with good topics and going from there.

Jordan Schneider: From my perspective, I do an interview show, not “Jordan talking for an hour.” It’s much more fun for me to learn as opposed to trying to argue with someone or convince them of something. Starting from a place of curiosity is generally a good thing.

By the way, there’s another media aspect worth processing that you mentioned with the government folks — it’s the same with mainstream media reporters. They’re not coming to this having been computer nerds since they were eight years old. They’re coming to this because they were assigned to it — they became a journalist and the Financial Times or Reuters or Wall Street Journal said, “You’re on this beat right now."

The level of connections, sophistication, and specific knowledge that you can bring to these stories is really rich in a way that mainstream media and reporting has a lot going for it, but deep subject matter expertise on the part of the reporters themselves sometimes happens but isn’t really the default. Specifically when you’re talking about stories that have such an industry technical component, being able to tell them through the eyes of someone who really knows their stuff adds another level of sophistication that really shows.

Steve Burke: I used to be worried that this would be a one-hit wonder type of thing — okay, it’s pretty narrow, I happen to overlap with this expertise, but does this happen again? I don’t know. But now, you look at it — Nvidia really is the best example. They are so intertwined with government and Intel now. The government’s talking about buying 10% of AMD, and they’re in the audience for some of these things.

It seems like this line is going to continue to be blurred between tech — especially big tech companies — and government regulation in ways that are still very strange to me. I know the people who are talking to Donald Trump. I’ve met a lot of them in these different briefings, and I know them because they told me how many frames per second their product gets in this video game. Now they’re talking to him about whether this thing should or shouldn’t be banned from another country. It’s very strange still.

Jordan Schneider: It’s such a wild arc. I’m going to refer folks back to the episode on the history of Nvidia I did with Doug O’Laughlin. He was making video cards for gamers — that was 95% of his business for decades. Then crypto gave them this big capital infusion. Jensen was a man with a dream, and it turned out he was right about parallelized computing. He made the best chips in the world, which were able to make GPT-3, and then we’re off to the races.

This is not baked in, and it’s fun for you and for the broader community of people who grew up reading PC Gamer every month, thinking “Oh man, this new chip is so crazy. Let’s see if I can steal money from my parents’ wallet to buy it at CompUSA.” Now this company is probably the most important company in the world.

Steve Burke: Yeah, it’s very bizarre.

Jordan Schneider: Steve, I hear you’ve got a follow-up.

Steve Burke: Yes. The only follow-up I’ve promised to the audience so far is that we will try to find literally anybody in government to interview about GPU export controls. I don’t care who it is, what their viewpoints are, or what state they’re from. We’re trying to find any politician or someone attached to politics — attorney general, whatever — to talk about GPU smuggling, GPU black markets, and export control. We want to understand more of that political viewpoint.

I don’t know who we’ll find. It’s not really the circle I run in.

Jordan Schneider: This seems like a Gamers Nexus–ChinaTalk collaboration opportunity.

Steve Burke: Sure.

Jordan Schneider: More to come on this front. I’m really glad to have you on this beat, Steve. It’s great to have new voices. This is a really important story that has flown under the radar — investors know about it, but this isn’t something your average American has any understanding of. But it’s a big deal, and there are a lot of changes happening. I trust you more than anyone else to tell this story.

Mood Music:

Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian army and author of three books — War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict, White Sun War, which is a piece of fiction about a near-future Taiwan war, and The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire. He also writes the excellent Substack, which has taught me a tremendous amount over the past few years. The way Mick synthesizes history and contemporary conflict makes it one of my few true must-read Substacks.

In today’s conversation, we discuss…

• Lessons from the history of warfare, and how to apply them to modern conflict,

• Why superweapons don’t win wars, and how the human dimension of war will shape military applications of AI,

• Why economic integration alone cannot prevent a US-China war,

• The role of deception and the limits of battlefield surveillance, with case studies in Ukraine and Afghanistan,

• Mick’s four filters for applying lessons from Ukraine to a Taiwan contingency, and the underappreciated role of Taiwanese public opinion in shaping CCP goals.

Thanks to the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology for sponsoring this podcast.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Why Humans Win Wars

Jordan Schneider: We’re not passing up an opportunity to open a show with Andrew Marshall. You’re fond of the following quote from him:

The most important competition is not the technological competition. The most important goal is to be the best in the intellectual task of finding the most appropriate innovations in the concepts of operation and making organizational changes to fully exploit the technologies already available and those that will be available in the next decade or so.

Is that really the key to fighting and winning wars?

Mick Ryan: There’s only one real future of war, and that’s the human being. If you take the human out of it, it’s not war by definition. That quote really gets to the human aspects of competition and warfare. Regardless of how spectacular technology might be — and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a longbow, a tank, a B-29, an atomic bomb, or AI — it’s ultimately humans who develop those technologies and humans who employ them as part of a larger national warfighting system, not just a military system.

I think it’s a really important quote and really needs to continue driving how military and national security organizations think about absorbing and integrating new technologies into their capability.

Jordan Schneider: On the other side of the spectrum, you have a book like Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. I thought it was interesting and almost ironic that he writes this book, Engineers of Victory, which contains these wonderful little jewels of chapters that goes into specific technological innovations and how they get deployed and scaled up to have operational and ultimately strategic impacts. But at the end of the day it was really the broader industrial weight of what the Allies could bring to bear that decided the war for the most part. If you zoom out on a century-by-century level, that’s definitely what he argues in Rise and Fall.

Why isn’t it just the GDP or correlation of how many factories you have that ends up deciding this stuff? What was Andrew Marshall actually getting at?

Mick Ryan: Well, I think they’re complementary ideas. I don’t think they exist in tension, because at the end of the day, in the wars he examined — and it’s a fabulous book — both sides had industrial capacity, but the one that’s able to leverage it cleverly is the one that wins.

In the Second World War, Germany started with massive industrial capacity, but it didn’t mobilize it until too late. It didn’t mobilize its national workforce very well by still having servants and people working in household roles well until the third or fourth year of the war. Ultimately, it was about decisions made by humans — politicians and industrial leaders — to cleverly apply, prioritize, and mobilize industrial resources that won them the war.

Yes, in the macro, it was industrial capacity that won, but it was those who most cleverly mobilized, applied, and prioritized their industrial capacity that won.

Jordan Schneider: Here’s a relevant quote from Paul Kennedy’s Victory at Sea:

“[I]t would be a very grave error to think that great contests are won solely by larger and larger forces moving inexorably toward victory, by global trends, or by sophisticated causation-chains. To be sure, if vast shifts occur in the economic substructure and productive forces (for example, if an entire American continent is mobilizing for war), and an overwhelming flood of ships, planes, and guns is being sent to the battlefields, then it is more than likely that the enemy’s battalions will be crushed; indeed, if victory did not follow, the historian would be hard-pressed to explain that. But the deficit in all deterministic explanations—the substructure alters, therefore the superstructure is changed—is that they lack human agency. The victor’s ships, planes, and guns need courageous men to steer them, insightful men to organize them, and clever men to give them superior battlefield performance.”

Mick Ryan: We thought the future of war was drones, and then Bakhmut happened. At the end of the day, there is no technology that fully replaces every other technology that’s gone before it. That just has never happened. Even the longbow, revolutionary as it was, didn’t replace every other technology that went before it.

War is what I call additive. It just adds layers of sedimentation of everything that’s gone before it, and the new technologies add something on top. Even in Ukraine, drones have not — and I’ll repeat this — they have not changed a whole lot of existing ideas and technologies. They’ve evolved some of them, certainly, but largely what drones have done is extended what military organizations have done, not totally changed them.

At the end of the day, on the ground, you have to fight and take ground. That has not changed. Drones help with that; they help with holding ground. But if you talk with any Ukrainian soldier, they will tell you drones alone are insufficient. There’s a whole lot of other things that are required. It’s the same in the land, in the air, and in the maritime domain.

Jordan Schneider: Mick, can you imagine a future where the longbow makes a comeback?

Mick Ryan: Yeah, World War IV, I think, to paraphrase Einstein — but I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Jordan Schneider: Low signature, very quiet, doesn’t emit anything. Come on, it’s gotta be something, right?

Mick Ryan: Well, you just never know. But I did recently attend the Chalke History Festival in England, and they did have someone there teaching all about the longbow and giving demonstrations of its efficiency.

Jordan Schneider: Speaking of human beings, another book which I’m going to credit you for turning me onto is On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, written by Norman Dixon. He was a Royal Engineer for ten years, then became a professional practicing psychologist, and ten years into that decided to write about all the poor decisions that British generals have made throughout history.

The book came out in 1976, but in the introduction, he has this great little riff where he writes about generals.

“The contemplation of what is involved in generalship may well, on occasion, suggest that incompetence is not absolutely inevitable — that anyone can do the job at all. This is particularly so when one considers that military decisions are often made under conditions of enormous stress, where actual noise, fatigue, lack of sleep, poor food, grinding responsibility add their quotas to the ever-present threat of total annihilation. Indeed, the foregoing analysis of generalship prompts the thought that it might be better to scrap generals and leave decision-making of war to computers.”

What reflections does that quote prompt for you in 2025?

Mick Ryan: I think he got it partially right, but it’s not the full story. That was his view, and notwithstanding the fact we’re both engineers, there’s also counter-evidence. If you read studies — for example, Aimée Fox’s Learning to Fight is a wonderful study of how the British Army became a learning organization during the First World War — you can imagine a universe or history where both exist at the same time.

Every military organization has rock stars and incompetents. He focused and chose to focus purely on the incompetents, but there are also many rock stars — brilliant people involved in planning, execution, and leadership of military affairs. You need to consider both in the same context.

Having war taken over by computers — “taken over” is the wrong term — but guided more by computers is already here. We’ve seen that since 1991 in the First Gulf War. But computers making key decisions about strategy and operations? We’re not there yet, and I don’t know whether we want to go there. I would be deeply concerned if we went that way.

However, short-term tactical engagement decisions have been made by computers in systems like close-in weapons systems and air defense systems for a very long time. The range of tactical decision-making by AI and computers will continue to be extended. But the big questions about war — whether to go to war, the key trajectory of war, whether to end a war — will remain human.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about the crawl up the command chain that autonomous decision-making could have. We’ve been doing targeting since the 1990s, but there’s an aspect that seems inevitable at a surface level: once systems get smart enough, you’re going to want them to take up more and more of at least the decision-making space.

Maybe there are things on the battlefield that humans can do that machines can’t, but this orchestration — if it is more effective and you have this competitive dynamic between two reasonably equally matched adversaries — if there’s an advantage there, someone’s going to lean into that, right?

Mick Ryan: Absolutely, and for the most part we’d be crazy not to. But there are still limits to seeking advantage. We’ve accepted that through the Biological and Chemical Weapons Convention, so it’s not a 100% free-for-all — it’s about a 90% free-for-all when it comes to weapons and the conduct of war. We’ve also signed up to things like the Geneva Convention.

Even though war is the most awful thing that can occur to human beings, we’ve still accepted that there must be some limitations on it. Now whether those limitations continue to hold is an open question. Russia has clearly decided that it will no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions. It has rarely done so in the war in Ukraine — it has executed POWs, tortured virtually every single POW it’s taken, deliberately murdered civilians, and used chemical weapons on the battlefield in hundreds of recorded incidents.

China will be learning from that, and we might surmise that they might decide it’s in their advantage not to abide by those rules. Whether the norms about limitations on warfare hold, or whether we find ourselves falling into total war — and I mean real total war — remains to be seen.

Jordan Schneider: You’ve seen this increasing digitization of command and control. Right now we’re in a very interesting, sticky moment on the front in Ukraine. At what point are we going to have AIs making recommendations which humans are going to follow because they trust the AIs more than their own intuition about how to deal with a front where there’s some tactical breakthrough? That’s an interesting one to ponder at least.

Mick Ryan: There’s a lot of talk about static front lines in Ukraine and how to break them, but they’re not truly static — they are moving. As we’ve seen throughout the course of the war, surprises are possible and you can do things that generate an advantage resulting in penetration and breakthrough, at least on the ground. We’ve seen that in the air as well.

This has not really been an air war — it’s been a drone war, but there hasn’t been a large-scale air war. The future of air warfare is probably more about what we saw Israel using against Iran than what we’ve seen in Ukraine. The same applies to maritime warfare — we haven’t seen a full-on maritime war. Ukraine offers us many lessons, but not in every single dimension and domain of warfare.

Jordan Schneider: I want to come back to human fallibility one more time. Maybe this was a theme in your novel — you kept emphasizing when people were tired. It seems clear to me that of all the things most legible for an AI to process and spit out recommendations for, these point-in-time decisions of “do we do A or B or C” seem to be on the multi-decadal timeline of things that are coming.

Before we’re going to have humanoid robots that can do everything infantry do, before we’re going to have robots make crazy material science breakthroughs, the types of things that someone in a command post or someone managing a battalion does — those decisions seem closer than AGI or what have you.

From another angle: what would you need to see from your war games or your interactions with some automated command and control system in order for you as a commanding officer to start handing more and more of the reins over — up from the super tactical stuff towards the more operational decisions?

Mick Ryan: We already see this happening in digital command and control platforms that the Ukrainians and many others are using. They offer very good situational awareness. Just the recall function alone — you don’t have to have people marking maps anymore. It’s automatically updated with friendly and enemy locations. That alone is an enormous step forward from many traditional ways of warfare.

The ability to understand the capacity of friendly units and those you’re opposing — their weapon ranges and holdings. The ability to quickly contact neighboring units in ways you may not have been able to do with radios in certain circumstances. Then there’s the ability to support planning and decision-making with data that you’ve either forgotten or wouldn’t traditionally access. The ability to quickly war-game lots of different options rather than having to do it manually when you’re tired, wet, hungry, and under threat.

These are the kinds of tactical functions that digitization and bespoke AI offer at the moment and will continue to improve. We’ve seen it really close the kill chain. Others are using it to work on what they call the “live chain” — casualty evacuation operations. AI is not just about improving the speed and capacity to kill people. It’s also improving the speed and capacity to treat, evacuate, and save people’s lives on the battlefield as well.

Learning from History

Jordan Schneider: Your most recent book is this extended meditation on what the war in Ukraine confirms about the nature of war broadly, as well as what disjunctures we may see today and tomorrow. I imagine there’s an aspect of this being surreal. The fact that we have now spent three years living through a high-intensity conflict that many people imagined was much more far-fetched than it turned out to be.

What has it been like following this halfway across the world, traveling there, traveling back, meditating on it, and living and breathing the conflict that we hoped wouldn’t happen in the 21st century?

Mick Ryan: The whole reason I wrote War Transformed is because these kinds of wars are inevitable. Humans are not smart enough to prevent war. I don’t care what any academic says about this issue — 5,000 years of history prove that humans are not beyond fighting each other yet. Unless there’s some change in the fundamental nature of humans, and there hasn’t been for a long time, we will, through calculation or miscalculation, continue to fight and kill each other. That was the core reason why I wrote War Transformed and how it might look in the future. Then nine days after that was published, Putin invaded Ukraine.

For me, the surprise was only about timing, not that it happened. Unfortunately, politicians and citizens still believe, or at least before 2022 believed, that this kind of thing was impossible — that conventional war wouldn’t take place because of economic integration. Well, once again, that’s a very old idea that’s been proven wrong in the lead-up to the First World War, even the US Civil War. If you look at that, the economic integration between the North and South was enormous, yet they still went to war.

Once again, there are all these fallacies that tend to become facts in the minds of many people about warfare. At the end of the day, you just need one person who miscalculates for us to fall into some massive conflagration. As I’ve written in White Sun War and elsewhere, that’s entirely possible in the Asia-Pacific. It’s very imaginable that America and China could find themselves at war regardless of any economic interest they have in not going to war.

It’s a little bit like climate change. The science is all there to say that things are clearly going to get worse over the course of this century, yet we still have politicians and people going on about how there’s no such thing as climate change, or it’s a made-up thing, or it’s a natural thing when all the science disproves that — and we’ve failed to act. Ultimately, humans are pretty good at ignoring facts and data if it’s in their economic or ideological interests. Because of that, we’ll continue to do things like go to war, just as we have in Ukraine and just as we may in other places in the future.

Jordan Schneider: Do you want to do a US Civil War detour? Do we have lessons from that conflict for Ukraine or Taiwan?

Mick Ryan: Well, every war has lessons. Many of the lessons from the US Civil War apply to Ukraine. There are lessons about mobilizing industrial production — clearly the North was able to mobilize its industry. It had more industry to start with, but it was able to mobilize it. It was clearly able to look at new technologies and absorb them into the military: telegraph, steam train, steamboats along the coast and along the Mississippi. There are lessons there about integration of new technologies, particularly at the operational and strategic level.

There are good lessons about civil-military relations. Both the North and South had issues with this, but there are some amazing and wonderful case studies about the interaction between Lincoln and the commanding generals of the Northern armies throughout the war, and then the relationship he had with Grant, which found its right level. Then there are great lessons about keeping citizens informed about good national strategy.

All these lessons from the Civil War — and there are great lessons about training, leadership, and these kinds of things as well — are every bit as applicable today, notwithstanding the different technological era, because these are human things. The human element of war is its enduring part, which Clausewitz wrote and is yet to be disproven.

Jordan Schneider: Another thing you point out in War Transformed is this idea of the future shock moment of the 1900s and 1910s being perhaps the one most applicable to today, just in terms of all this new stuff making your head spin perspective. If you could go back and be a war correspondent or work on a general staff, is that the time period you’re picking to get a better sense of, or are there others on your time travel list that you’d be excited about? Cholera notwithstanding.

Mick Ryan: It was an interesting period because the Second Industrial Revolution threw up all these new technologies that really disrupted the conduct of warfare in all the domains. There was a lot of thinking before the First World War about how these might impact. There was a lot of fiction written — hundreds of books literally sought to understand the impact of these new technologies on strategic competition and warfare. Lawrence Freedman has actually written a tremendous book that looks at this, but I look at it in War Transformed as well. Fiction has been a very powerful way of looking at the future of war.

I think that’s a very important period. Philipp Blom’s book, The Vertigo Years, looks at each year in the fifteen years that led up to the beginning of World War I, and looks at societal, technological, and industrial issues that emerged and how the world in 1914 ceased to exist by 1918. We could lay that over the top of 2022 and 2025. The world that existed in 2022 doesn’t exist anymore. The security architecture of Europe doesn’t exist like it did three years ago. The security situation in the Pacific doesn’t exist like it did three years ago. There are lots of parallels there, lots of rhymes, as Mark Twain might tell us.

I think that’s a really important period for study, probably one of the most important periods to study. But there are lots of other periods of human history that are equally worthy of study, from the ancient Greeks and the Peloponnesian War to Rome’s rise, its heyday, and its eventual fall. All of these offer profound insights into how humans think about governance, about war, and about competing with their adversaries.

Jordan Schneider: If you could spend one year as a fly on the wall in which bureaucracy over the course of the past 300 years, do you have a top three?

Mick Ryan: The first one for me would be 1939 in the Australian military, to see how they worked with government to industrialize and prepare for the Second World War. Probably the next one would be 1942 in the same place, to look at how the entry of Japan into the war fundamentally shifted everything. Those two periods for me would be really interesting.

Then probably the United States in 1940-41. There’s a lot of great literature on that period, but just to see how the United States planned to mobilize for the Second World War — the strategic and political decision-making that was involved and the political leadership that was required by the President to drag the American people into an understanding that they couldn’t avoid this forever. That was very interesting and very relevant to the contemporary world.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe that’s a good transition to talk about how the strategic level often completely wipes out whatever creative stuff you could do at the tactical or operational level. It’s the way you avoid wars in the first place. We’ve seen a lot — your most recent book on Ukraine as well as the subsequent year have cataloged an enormous amount of creative and awe-inspiringly horrific strategic decisions. What have the past few years made you reflect upon most about how the strategic level relates to other levels of war?

Mick Ryan: First, I’d start with the Russian side of things. Before he decided on this invasion, Putin had a series of strategic assumptions. This speaks to the importance of getting your assumptions as right as possible. At the start of the war, he had three big assumptions.

1. That the Ukrainian government would run away and he could insert his own government,

2. That the Ukrainian military was analogous to the 2014 military and wouldn’t last very long,

3. That NATO would act like it had for the preceding ten years over Russia’s invasion and illegal takeover of Crimea and parts of the Donbas.

He got all of those assumptions wrong, and we’re still in this war because he got those assumptions wrong.

From a European perspective, they assumed that they could continue being economically integrated with Russia and that would condition their behavior towards its neighbors. Very much the old Norman Angell “won’t go to war because we’re economically integrated” model. Once again, Russia proved Europe wrong and that it wasn’t a reliable energy provider.

The US Administrations made some assumptions about Ukrainian capacity up front. They didn’t think they’d last very long. The Ukrainians proved them wrong, thank goodness. They made assumptions about how much risk they were willing to assume in dealing with Russia in the first year. Because of the risk aversion in the Biden administration in the first year of the war and the very slow pace at which they made decisions about support — I remember when towed artillery was considered escalatory — well, it’s impossible to escalate when you provide a piece of equipment to a friend that’s being used against them the whole time. The Russians used everything in their inventory against the Ukrainians, so none of this was escalatory. But it was used by the peaceniks and the risk-averse in the Biden administration to slow down aid.

It manifested in the Ukrainians not being able to exploit the defeat of the Russians at the end of 2022. The great strategic lesson from the end of 2022 is: if you have your boot on the neck of your enemy, don’t take the boot off. That’s what happened at the end of 2022 with European and American decision-making in this war.

Surprise, Deception, and Taiwan Tripwires

Jordan Schneider: Let’s turn to Taiwan for a bit. Obviously you’ve been thinking about what is and isn’t applicable from the past three years and have a new piece coming out in the next few weeks. What’s the right framework to start taking and applying lessons?

Mick Ryan: The first thing is to understand what China wants. What does the CCP want? What does Xi want? That’s the start for any investigation of Taiwan. If you don’t understand that — if you haven’t read all of Xi’s speeches over his term as president and chief of the Chinese Communist Party and head of the Chinese Military Commission and every other appointment he’s got — you don’t understand the overall situation. That’s a good starting point.

Then you need to understand the aspirations of Taiwan and look at different literature that relates to that — the speeches by this president and his predecessors over many years, and how the Taiwanese democracy has developed. The polls that look at Taiwanese views of themselves — are they Chinese, are they Taiwanese? These are the necessary foundation for any exploration of the ongoing tension and competition between Taiwan and China.

Then of course, you need to understand regional dynamics. There’s no regional NATO. There are some alliances that are very important, and INDOPACOM in Hawaii is central to all those. Those are the essential ingredients of any understanding of the situation in the western Pacific.

Then it’s just about continuously tracking Chinese military aggression and where countries are pushing back against that, and the level of deterrence that might be achieved against a Chinese Communist Party that is hell-bent on taking Taiwan — on unifying it with China. You have an aging Chinese leader who’s looking at his legacy. He is looking at how does he get himself a fourth term in office. All these things come together in the second half of the 2020s in ways that don’t augur well if we’re not decisive and determined in standing up for not just Taiwan, but all democracies in the western Pacific and pushing back against coercion, subversion, and aggression.

Jordan Schneider: You lay out this framework of four filters for interpreting what you’re seeing in Ukraine and applying it to Taiwan. You have geography/distance, terrain/vegetation (underappreciated), weather, and political environment/adversary capabilities. Pick your two favorites.

Mick Ryan: The first one is always you’ve got to focus on the enemy, and you can never take your eye off the adversary. That one is very important in the Pacific region because, unlike Europe, where they’ve only got to deal with Russia, in the Pacific, they’ve got to deal with China, North Korea, and Russia. You’ve got three very different but connected adversaries that have formed a learning and adaptation bloc — not an alliance, but a series of interactions where they’re learning from each other in a way that they haven’t done before, more quickly and more substantively.

You also have a significant potential adversary in China who’s bigger, richer, and more technologically advanced than any other adversary that Western democracies have ever come up against. Ultimately, this is an ideological war. You have two very different ideologies rubbing up against each other, potentially causing even more conflict and war down the track. We need to understand the dimensions of that ideological conflict. Is there room for agreement or accommodation, or will it eventually and ultimately lead to some kind of showdown over who is the top dog in the world? That’s the really scary part of a future conflict. If it does occur between the US and China, it will be about who is number one in the world. Traditionally, the number one doesn’t like to give up that spot, and they can fight pretty hard and ruthlessly. We need to understand that dimension.

My other favorite is terrain and vegetation, primarily because so many people think Pacific war is a maritime war. That is not the full truth. It’s partially the truth because yes, there’s lots of water, but a lot of that water is just in parts of the Pacific that we’ll be traveling or fighting through, not fighting for. There’s nothing in the middle of the Pacific worth fighting for. It’s an area you go through, not an area you go to. The western Pacific is where the real competition is, and that’s a mix of air, land, sea, space, and cyber conditions. There are lots of green bits where there is potential to fight. Those green bits might be jungle, those green bits might be cities. But we really need to understand them because that’s where people are and, importantly, that’s where the politicians are that ultimately make the big decisions about war and about ending war — who need to be influenced.

I emphasize that because we absolutely have to push back on this being a naval war or a maritime war. It’s a multi-domain war. The area of decision will be that strip of land within 1,000 kilometers of the Eurasian heartland that runs from Vladivostok to Tasmania.

Jordan Schneider: Foreign tripwires in Taiwan feature prominently in your novel. Where are you today on the idea of sending bodies in harm’s way as a way to signal commitment to Taiwan?

Mick Ryan: I think it’s still the way we do business. You’ve seen a step-up in foreign assistance to Taiwan even though not all of it will be declared. But it is a way of signaling that you are taking a big risk of targeting Taiwan because if you hit these people of ours, regardless of which country they’re from, you will have to answer to us. That’s still a valid theory. It can be dangerous and it can be provocative at times, but it’s also a good way of signaling will and your determination to support friends and security partners and indeed allies.

America has forward-based ever since the end of the Second World War. It’s done it in Europe as a statement of commitment and will and as part of its signaling to an adversary that if you invade West Germany, you’re not just coming up against us, you’re coming up against an entire alliance. The United States has done it in Japan since the end of the Second World War to signal other countries, whether it’s North Korea or Russia or others, the same kinds of things it did in Europe. Forward basing by America and others is still a valid part of national strategy and probably will be for some time to come.

Jordan Schneider: This idea of surprise is somehow still underappreciated, even though we’ve had a number of wild surprises just over the past three years. What is that? People just get too confident? Why is pricing in the idea that you can be surprised such a hard thing?

Mick Ryan: There are lots of reasons for this. Lack of humility is a really important contributor to this. A lack of understanding of the enemy is another one. If you look at 1941, most Western allies really discounted the capacity of the Japanese to fight. They said, “Well yes, they’ve been fighting the Chinese for X years, but when they fight us it’ll be totally different.” It wasn’t. The Japanese achieved massive surprise and were able to launch this six-month offensive that spread out across the Pacific.

You see that kind of arrogance in Western military organizations today. You’ve seen many, particularly in the first eighteen months of the war in Ukraine, going, “Yeah, well, I don’t think there are lessons for us because it’s different and we’re far smarter.” We should call bullshit on those assumptions. Never underestimate the enemy because they will surprise you and they will hurt you. Once again, we have 5,000 years of case law to support that case. Humans have not changed.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the transparent battlefield. That is a fallacious view. It’s wrong — it’s not transparent. It’s highly visible, there’s no doubt about that, and better visible than ever before. But that hasn’t stopped Ukraine and Russia from surprising each other, even down to this latest twenty-kilometer penetration of the Ukrainian front line just to the north of Pokrovsk. There have been lots of examples of surprise in this war in what was supposed to be a transparent battlefield.

I served in Afghanistan, and up until Ukraine, Afghanistan was the most densely surveilled battle space in the history of human warfare. We were still surprised regularly. This notion of transparency is a terrible fallacy. It’s one we should not encourage because humans are still able to deceive. This was a subject I wrote about with Peter Singer, and we published a detailed report through an American think tank in June this year. This will continue into the future and indeed may get more sophisticated because AI will help us not just with seeing more, but it will help us with deceiving more. You’re going to have this constant perception battle in warfare.

Jordan Schneider: The way the Pentagon talked about how they bombed Iran and how proud they were about sending some bombers to Guam so people looked left and then the bombers went right made me really pessimistic about the ability of the US military to do this. If they really feel like they have to wiggle their tail feathers around something this simple, I’m worried we don’t have too many more moves up our sleeve.

But maybe a broader question: at the conclusion of your novel — no spoilers — there is a super weapon that gets unveiled. I’m curious because at other points in time, and one of the big lessons of the Ukraine war is the fact that there isn’t really one thing that you can cook up at home that is going to drastically change everything for you. What was your thinking behind concluding your book with something that was cooked up under a mountain that has this big strategic effect?

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Mick Ryan: Just on the deception for Operation Midnight Hammer, I would add that it worked. At the end of the day, it might have been a simple deception measure, but it worked.

Jordan Schneider: Did it, though? I don’t know. Plenty of people on Polymarket were predicting military action the day before the bombing.

Mick Ryan: But that’s different from projecting exactly how that’s going to happen. The deception measure worked. You saw huge commentary around those bombers that headed over to the west, and no one picked up that this was being done another way. We probably need to give them some credit there — it actually worked and every aircraft got in and out safely. That’s a great achievement. Even if the Israelis had taken down most of the air defense network, that’s still significant.

The ending of the book wasn’t just about the super weapon. There were five different elements — it was just one of the elements. The message there was yes, we are still going to develop exquisite technologies, but there was a whole range of things, including cyber operations, ground warfare, aerial warfare, drones, and other systems that all added up to that culminating point. Super weapons don’t win wars, but they’re going to be part of our desire to help end wars in the future.

Jordan Schneider: I asked Jeff Alstott at RAND, who spent time at ARPA, point blank on the mic whether or not he’s been working on weather manipulation. He gave me a very confident no, but maybe he’s just deceiving us, setting us up for that big reveal one day.

Mick Ryan: Once again, it wasn’t so much about manipulating the weather. You can’t do that, but you can manipulate how people see the weather and give them a different picture that’s not the same as reality. That’s a simpler undertaking, as complex as that might be.

Jordan Schneider: This idea of mobilizing intellectual capacity is a really powerful idea and an interesting one to think of as a civilian, as someone who just sits at home and writes stuff. What is the right way for folks in the broader commentary and think tank community to try to do work that plugs in to help answer some of these big intellectual challenges and questions that Andrew Marshall posed at the beginning of the show?

Mick Ryan: The first thing is you can’t just study one war. You can’t study Ukraine and think you understand war. If you study Ukraine, you understand the Ukraine war and nothing else. You need as a foundation the study of war — its past, present, and future. Then you look at the Middle East, Ukraine, and others as case studies that either prove or disprove hypotheses about the trajectory of warfare.

Ukraine, I’ll be very clear, is not the future of war. It is not the future, but many elements that have emerged from the war in Ukraine will influence all future wars. We should remember that many of the lessons from Ukraine — probably 90% — are not new lessons. They’re lessons relearned about the importance of leadership, industrialization, organization, training, and these kinds of things. It’s reinforced old lessons rather than introduced new things. Now there are some new things, whether it’s the use of drones and similar technologies, but we cannot afford to see Ukraine as the future of war. But it will be very influential on all forms of future war.

I know that’s a fine line, but it’s a very important point to makeou have to study war in all its dimensions, not just the war in one place at one time, to really understand the trajectory of warfare.

Self-Improvement and Recommended Reading

Jordan Schneider: I’m going to link your posts with syllabi of dozens of books that people can dive into. But maybe I’m curious, Mick — there’s a lot in the Bay Area and also in Washington of this idea of AI as this millenarian solution that’s going to answer all the questions. I’m curious if there are a handful of books that come to mind that are maybe starting points for folks who haven’t already read fifteen books of military history to give folks a sense of just how messy the introduction of new technology to warfare ends up playing out in practice.

Mick Ryan: Some of the material about the interwar period — the debate about tanks and cavalry, the debate about battleships versus aircraft carriers — those were important debates about old and new technology and their potential impact on war. Institutions had to make some pretty big bets before war about these technologies in the hope that they were right, because ultimately you don’t know whether you’re right until you actually go to war.

Those past debates on new technologies offer some really important insights into how individuals and institutions respond and debate the impact and absorption ability of organizations for these new technologies, how they influence the development of entirely new organizations. In 1900, there was no such thing as an air force — it didn’t exist. In 2000, there was no such thing as a space force — it didn’t exist.

There are lots of historical analogies because ultimately the technology doesn’t matter. It’s how humans react to the technology. It’s how humans debate its impact, how humans develop the organizational and conceptual constructs within which those technologies will be used that are the most vital part. There are lots of examples of that over the last hundred years that can inform current debates over AI, over quantum technology, over future space and cyber capabilities.

I wish more of the technologists would read these examples, because there are too many people who are purely focused on the technology and don’t understand the foundational ideas behind war and human conflict that will ultimately decide how these things might be used.

Jordan Schneider: Great. Let’s throw them some titles. Where should we start them?

Mick Ryan: There’s a huge amount in there. I really loved Aimée Fox’s book Learning to Fight, which is about the British Army in the First World War, and how an organization learns how to learn better. It really challenges some existing paradigms about stupid British generals in the First World War — they weren’t all stupid because at the end of the day they won. Now, they didn’t do it by themselves — there were lots of other countries that helped — but part of winning was learning how to learn better.

Murray and Millett’s book Military Innovation in the Interwar Period is important, but also their three-part series on military effectiveness in World War I, the interwar period, and World War II across multiple countries provides a really good analytical framework and a good study of how institutions have learned and adapted across three different domains that were the principal concerns in those wars.

Trent Hone’s book Learning War is absolutely fabulous about how the US Navy developed a learning culture in the lead-up to the Second World War. Not perfect, but good enough to win, because war is not about being perfect — it’s about being better than the other person. Those are probably a good start.

There’s a recent book I’ve been reading, Brent Sterling’s Other People’s Wars, about how the US learns from foreign wars and how it has learned and adapted, or not learned and adapted, based on those. Dima Adamsky’s work on military innovation is extraordinarily important. Finally, Meir Finkel’s two books are terrific — On Flexibility and Military Agility. Military Agility is very important because it’s one of the few books that looks at adaptation not in war, not in peace, but the third really important part of adaptation, which is adapting from peace to war and how institutions and individuals need to do that.

I’ve covered this in a new report that’ll come out in September for the Special Competitive Studies Project, so watch for that one. But that’s a selection of very useful books. There are many, many others out there. I probably need to update my recommended adaptation reading list. I might do that in the next couple of weeks to include the full gamut of books. But that’s a pretty good start for anyone who’s interested in this topic.

Jordan Schneider: Awesome. I’ll throw in two more. Andrew Krepinevich’s The Origins of Victory — these are chapter-length pieces that aren’t really anecdotes but almost feel reported — they have characters in them and they develop over time. You really get the sense of, “Oh wow, it’s 1931, planes are just starting to be a thing — can we land them on boats? Not sure yet. Maybe if we make longer boats it’ll be easier.” It shows all of the little iterations you need to get to Midway. It shows the kind of personalities that you need to have in these systems in order to feel your way through the darkness.

I also recommend The Wizard War by R.V. Jones. It’s written by an engineer, it’s a memoir, it’s got a lot of color and characters, and does a really good job of illustrating just how dynamic these technological competitions can be where you have engineers on both sides trying to outdo each other. Something that maybe worked for you in January will be obsolete by April and actually might get you killed. That kind of dance that you saw in the Battle of the Beams and all of this other crazy electronic signals stuff that happened over the course of World War II — where a 27-year-old was able to do incredible things because physics was cool at the time — makes for some fantastic summer reading.

Mick Ryan: No, I agree. I’ll just throw in one final book there: a terrific book called Mars Adapting by Frank Hoffman. He looks at just how do you build an institution that is adaptive, that is learning and is able to adapt. He has a whole lot of case studies, but importantly offers a really important four-part model for how do you build this institutional learning capacity. It’s a really important contribution to this literature.

Jordan Schneider: Mick, how are you trying to improve?

Mick Ryan: I’m constantly trying to improve. Obviously I read a lot. My reading, my writing, my interaction with a bunch of different people is important. But also, I’m completing a PhD in creative writing to learn how to write better, to communicate better, because there’s always room for improvement.

But ultimately, if you want to develop what I’ve called this intellectual edge, you need to have humility. You need to understand that you don’t know everything, and that’s the starting point for all learning. Humility is vital, and we’ve all had to be pretty humble over the last four years with the Ukraine war. We’ve had to learn new things, had to relearn some old things. There are fortunately a lot of people out there who do possess that humility and have demonstrated the capacity to learn new things and recontextualize some elements of warfare. That’s an important part of learning.

Jordan Schneider: Do you want to assign me and maybe the audience some paper topics? Where have you not seen coverage to the degree there should be?

Mick Ryan: One of the reasons I’ve focused on adaptation is we need to focus more on how organizations learn how to learn better. That’s a core macro skill for every organization. This is a topic I’ll cover in my September report, which will be released at a conference in Austin at the end of September.

Jordan Schneider: Awesome. Well, I just want to say, for my part, I moved to China when I was 26, and I already felt behind the ball from the kids who started learning Chinese in high school. Now as I start to spend more time at 35 thinking and learning and writing about all these military history and technology applications, it’s both exciting and also deeply humbling to be at the bottom of a new knowledge mountain.

There are aspects of what I’ve learned over the past ten years when it comes to China and technology which are applicable. Then there’s this whole other universe of things and organizations and institutions to start understanding, and weapon systems to start to wrap your head around in order to be able to make a contribution and say something useful.

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Preemptive apologies to my audience for all the war stuff you’re going to get in the feed over the next few months and years. But this stuff is really intellectually fascinating — as important as it gets. There’s just an endless amount to be explored and turned over in a way that, over the past ten years of writing about Xi and the CCP, I mean, I’m not at 100%, but we’ve covered a lot of bases when it comes to those types of dynamics here at ChinaTalk.

I appreciate you all bearing with me as we mix more defense and defense technology stuff into the content mix, and I hope you all come along for the ride.

Mick, I want to close on funerals. This was the most powerful part of your novel to me — this little moment where you have one of the officers note that all of the deaths in Afghanistan could be acknowledged individually because they would happen spaced out enough to give people time to grieve individually. Whereas in your future Taiwan war, they’re happening by the dozens and by the hundreds on a daily basis, which just changes the “battle rhythm” for grief care. Reflect on that little moment.

Mick Ryan: It’s an important part of military service — acknowledging those we lose. Military organizations are ultimately designed to lose people. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t acknowledge and recognize those people and their families and those who love them. It is a core part of military service. When people die, they don’t just disappear — they live on in the units they served, in the friendships they had, in the families that are left behind. There’s a reason why we have that saying: “Never leave someone behind.” Whether they’re alive or dead, we continue searching for them for as long as we possibly can.

I wanted to project that maybe in the future we may be losing people at a rate that we may not be able to do that individual recognition that’s essential, at least not during the war. It was an attempt just to say the wars we’ve just finished are not the ones we’ll be fighting in the future. We can’t prepare for those ones. We really need to make sure we’re preparing for the future of war, not the past of war. It was all wrapped up with those ideas.

But at heart it was about one of the most famous bits of writing — the funeral oration in the Peloponnesian War. It’s a very powerful piece, and while I could never replicate that, just acknowledging that this is a part of military service was important.

Jordan Schneider: We’re going to be doing a series on AI and how it applies to different technological futures and different domains of warfare. But it’s important to recognize the stakes of all of this and ultimately that it’s life and death — it’s the fate of nations. Being too distracted and too perversely into how fast your missile can go or how autonomous your command and control can get, sometimes you can get too abstracted away from why we care about this stuff in the first place.

We’re bringing back Lennart Heim of RAND and author of Chip Wars and newly on substack, to discuss the new H20 drama, when exports were banned in April, and now selling it with a 15% export fee.

Today our conversation covers….

• What’s at stake and the strongest arguments in favor and against selling AI chips to China

• Will cutting off chips really make China more likely to invade Taiwan?

• Where Trump goes from here on Blackwell exports, HBM, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and what could change the current conciliatory direction of travel for the broader US-China relationship.

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Why Care About AI Chip Exports to China

Jordan Schneider: Lennart, what is the H20? Why should people care about it? What were the first few months of the Trump administration doing when it came to this chip?

Lennart Heim: The H20 is a chip that NVIDIA designed as a response to export controls in 2023. It’s the typical game: you draw some lines, and then new chips get created right below those lines. The H20 is exactly such an example, but it did a neat trick.

It maxed out the specifications that are not controlled — memory bandwidth. They put the best high-bandwidth memory the world currently has on this chip and created an export control-compliant chip that was introduced at the beginning of 2024, a couple of months after the updated controls. The chip was sold throughout 2024 with lots of interest.

When the Trump administration started in January, the Biden administration didn’t get around to addressing this problem. Many officials spoke out in favor of taking action, but they never got to banning it because of many stakeholders, different opinions, and running out of time.

Trump then banned this chip, as reported in April 2025. Not through the normal regulatory process, but by using a tool called “is-informed” letters, which are pretty fast. You can send a letter to the companies that produce these chips telling them they can’t sell these chips anymore because you suspect an export control violation is going on. The administration argued this chip was simply too good.

From my personal point of view, banning the chip was a big success. This chip should not be sold. We need to reduce our thresholds — this is simply too good of a chip. That was the latest status. Then over the last few weeks, we saw some flip-flopping back and forth, with more information revealed every day. While we talk, probably more things will come out.

Jordan Schneider: Here was President Trump on Monday:

[Trump Audio Clip]:

Let me ask you two questions — one about China, one about Russia, if I could. On China, your administration agreed to send the most advanced or advanced NVIDIA and AMD chips...

No, obsolete chips. The 20s? No, this is an old chip that China already has, and I deal with Jensen, who’s a great guy, and NVIDIA. The chip we’re talking about, the H20, is an old chip. China already has it in a different form, different name, but they have it, or they have a combination of two that will make up for it, and even then some.

Now Jensen — Jensen’s a very brilliant guy — also has a new chip: the Blackwell. Do you know what the Blackwell is? The Blackwell is super-duper advanced. I wouldn’t make a deal with that, although it’s possible I’d make a deal with a somewhat enhanced — in a negative way — Blackwell. In other words, take 30% to 50% off of it. But that’s the latest and greatest in the world. Nobody has it. They won’t have it for five years.

But the H20 is obsolete. It still has a market. I said, “Listen, I want 20%. If I’m going to approve this for you, for the country, for our country, for the US — I don’t want it myself. You know, every time I say something, it’s for the Air Force.” When I say I want 20%, I want it for the country. I only care about the country, not about myself.

He said, “Would you make it 15%?” We negotiated a little deal. He’s selling an essentially old chip that Huawei has a similar chip for — a chip that does the same thing. I said, “Good, if I’m going to give it to you” — because they have what we call a stopper, not allowed to do it, a restrictive covenant — “if I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something, because I’m giving you a release.”

I released him only from the H20. Now on the Blackwell, he’s coming to see me again about that. But that will be an unenhanced version of the big one. We will sometimes sell fighter jets to a country and give them 20% less than what we have. Do you know what I mean?

Jordan Schneider: This is a good moment to take a step back and look at the arguments for and against selling China AI chips.

There are arguments against selling AI chips because selling helps upgrade the Chinese AI ecosystem that’s going to compete with America’s. There are specific applications of the chips that we would be selling to China that we would be very uncomfortable with — military ones, intelligence ones, or broad human rights violations that you wouldn’t want American technology to be helping to further.

There are also arguments in favor of selling. These include the idea that selling NVIDIA chips would retard domestic chip development, making it harder for SMIC and Huawei, and whoever else wants to try to build domestic AI chips to find a marketplace. There’s also the idea that selling chips into China would maintain Chinese dependency on the US stack, keeping Chinese developers using CUDA, building infrastructure around US technology. There’s some broad soft power and agenda-setting advantage that China's use of NVIDIA hardware will give to the US going forward.

Maybe we should run through those systematically. Let’s start with the biggest one, which is that you shouldn’t sell these chips to China because upgrading the Chinese AI ecosystem is a strategic threat to the US. Chris, this is almost a grand strategic question of how much of China’s rise is okay and how much isn’t, because the military intelligence and human rights applications are almost secondary to how scary you see a richer, more flourishing, more powerful China to be.

Chris Miller: I would segment out the “richer and more flourishing” side and just talk about technological capabilities. They’re interlinked, but the US strategy hasn’t been to try to make China poorer or less flourishing. The question is just who’s going to lead in AI.

The trend over the last five years, and the last 50 years, has been that if you want advanced AI, you need lots of advanced computing, and there’s a small number of companies that produce the chips in question. If you think that advanced technology has mattered in the past in geostrategic competition — which is pretty hard to argue with — it’s probably going to matter in the future. Therefore, who wins in AI matters.

Just as we would be less happy if we were all using Huawei phones and relying on Alibaba Cloud 阿里云 because there would be pretty significant political ramifications downstream of that, if we find ourselves in a future where either the US or third countries are relying on Chinese AI providers — whether for models, applications, or AI cloud — that implies less political influence for the US, a weaker US, and a stronger China. Those are the stakes.

Both sides of this argument agree on that basic framing. The question is, how best do you get there? One argument is that you restrict compute access and thereby hobble the growth of Chinese AI firms. A second argument is that you try to, as Secretary Lutnick has said, get China addicted to the AI stack. The question to ask is: how addicted are they willing to become? How addicted could you make them? Can you leverage that addiction in the future, or not? These are where the empirical questions are focused.

Jordan Schneider: One more argument in favor of selling: the idea that keeping China dependent on TSMC-fab chips lowers the risk of a Taiwan war, which I have some questions about. This is something that Ben Thompson has been pushing, which has percolated into the administration and Congress.

Will selling Beijing TSMC chips make them less likely to invade?

Lennart Heim: What do you think? What do you make of it, Jordan? I’m curious. For me, it doesn’t seem to be the main calculus behind it. I buy it on the margin.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe on the margin a little bit. There are two levels to the question. First, the political calculus to go to war or not to go to war — this would be an extremely weighty decision where the fates of nations would be at stake to do a serious blockade, strike, or actual D-Day style invasion.

Whether or not the chips are there, whether China is gaining or losing relatively in AI hardware, strikes me as about the 12th thing you would be thinking about if you were a Chinese premier. Domestic political developments in Beijing, how much you trust the PLA to not be corrupt and actually work as intended, political developments in Taipei, how willing the US seems to fight for Taiwan, how excited Japan is to let the US fight from its territory — all of those strike me as much more germane decisions.

There’s some real technological myopia among tech analysts thinking that the chips are the one thing — the Silicon Shield stopping war. As cool and important and potentially world-shaking as advanced semiconductors and artificial intelligence may be over 50 years, if you are a head of state making the biggest decision of your life, it’s not going to come down to “Well, Huawei tells me they can only make 750,000 chips in 2028, so it’s not going to work out, might as well bomb Taiwan because if we can’t have toys no-one can.”

Ben concludes his latest piece arguing that selling chips reduces invasion risk by saying that “Far too many people in this debate seem to operate as if the U.S. is the only actor in the world, with every other country, including China, operating as mere props. That’s simply not true, and accepting that is the first step to a cogent policy that preserves what leverage we still have, while minimizing the risks that too many are too unwilling to contemplate.” Ben Thompson more than anyone should know that technological progress does not reach a static end point and China has lots of case studies to point to of making it up value curves under adverse conditions. Thinking that their only out is to invade does what Ben says he wants to avoid, painting China as a prop. A more likely future where you price in agency for the government and their firms will see attempts to strive commercially under a set of geopolitical constraints, just like engineers at Deepseek did. The idea that a Chinese leader would think that “we’re missing out on AI so I guess we’ll have to start WWIII” strikes me as a bizarre conclusion.

One level down from that, there is this very open question, which we debated on Sunday’s edition of our new defense tech podcast Second Breakfast, about to what extent the chips and technology are going to be enabling ends up reshaping the military balance of power. That is still very much an open question that smart people can disagree on — whether what you can do with putting chips in your autonomous drones so they can target without interference, or whatever. You can imagine a lot of different crazy futures where AI matters.

By the way, it could work in the other direction, lowering the risk of a Taiwan war if America has a big lead when it comes to semiconductors. Then a leader in Beijing would look at the military balance of power and the advantage that US and Taiwanese forces get from being more AI-applied, and think, “There’s no chance of us winning. Why even try to play this game in the first place?”

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Chris Miller: The other key facet here is that if you look at sales of advanced chips from Taiwan and its ecosystem to China, most of them are not AI chips. It’s mostly smartphone chips and PC processors. AI chips are a portion, but a small portion. This gets back to the question you’ve raised on a lot of shows, Jordan: how AI-pilled is Xi Jinping?

The answer doesn’t seem very AI-pilled. The best evidence for this is that SMIC and its seven-nanometer production are still producing a whole lot of smartphone chips, which you would not do if you thought we were in a race for AGI that will define the future. Both of those facets again point against the Silicon Shield as it relates to AI chips being central here.

Lennart Heim: Just to clarify, they’re not allowed to produce AI chips at TSMC. They can produce everything else there. Why not? Because Ante — they did some bad stuff — but almost every other Chinese company can just go to TSMC and produce chips there. There’s a significant flow of chips from Taiwan to China as we’re speaking right now, just ideally not AI chips. We had some hiccups in the past where there were also AI chips.

Chris Miller: A key question, Lennart, is how obsolete is the H20 relative to what Blackwell can do, but probably more importantly, what Huawei can do? Want to walk us through the numbers?

Lennart Heim: I don’t think it’s fair to describe the H20 as an obsolete chip.

Chips have many specifications. Let me break it down to two simple ones. We should care about computational power — how many FLOPS it has, how many operations per second it can crunch. But then also memory bandwidth, which means you need to read and write memory. The memory capacity and bandwidth — how fast you can read and write this memory — is key.

One of the key inventions we’ve seen over the last few years, which AMD did first, is so-called high bandwidth memory, which is a complex technology. We’ve got three companies in the world doing it right now: SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron, building this HBM.

The H20 is bad on the FLOPS — seven times worse than the H100, even worse, 14 times worse than upcoming chips like B100s or more. It’s not a competitive chip there. But on the memory bandwidth side, which is again key for deploying chips, it’s pretty good. It’s even better than H100 because the H100 uses five units of HBM, whereas this one has six units of HBM. It gets a mind-boggling four terabytes per second of high-bandwidth memory.

No Chinese chip has such good high-bandwidth memory. More importantly, even if they have the right now, the Ascend 910C, which has some HBM at 3.2 terabytes per second, they’re not allowed to buy it anymore. It’s been banned since December 2024. Right now, China is struggling to get its hands on this HBM. They’re trying to produce it domestically, but this will take time, and even if they produce it domestically, it would initially be worse.

I don’t think the H20 is an obsolete chip. It’s a pretty competitive chip. It’s fair to say it’s a worse chip than many others, but if you look at this other dimension — the dimension of deployment — it’s pretty good. It’s really good.

Chris Miller: That is one of the key axes of debate. Some people say the goal is to stop China from training high-end models, and therefore, you focus on the FLOPS. If your goal is to constrain inference, you focus more on memory bandwidth. Walk us through the way these different chips are used.

Lennart Heim: That’s a fair debate we should be having here. We should think about export controls: what do we want them to achieve? Right now, it’s fair to say that the H20 is not an amazing chip for training AI systems. There are some things that numbers don’t always capture. You still build on top of the NVIDIA software stack. If your company used NVIDIA before, there’s a pain in switching. There are a bunch of problems with Huawei chips that you don’t see in the specifications — they overheat, you need more of them, the software stack isn’t great yet, and you can’t even get enough.

All of these things just mean that the H20 is not a great training chip, but beyond the numbers, you’re still stuck on the software ecosystem.

On the training goal, that’s still being achieved here. Where the debate begins is what we think about deployment. What I’ve learned over time is that if you want to be precise — if your goal is to only stop them from training, but everything else is below, or you only stop them from training big systems — it’s really hard to be precise on all of this. AI is ever-changing.

The biggest thing we’ve seen over the last few months is this rise of test-time compute of AI models thinking — how they think, how they produce tokens. That’s what the H20 is amazing at. One could say the usability and importance of the H20 only went up since we got models that do more thinking, generating more tokens, and also generating tokens to then train the next generation of AI systems. These are the arguments that Paul would say: “Well, actually, this is a pretty good chip for producing these new things that are more important in the AI development lifecycle.”

Chris Miller: The other argument that the president made is that Huawei already makes these chips, which is true to an extent, but walk us through the numbers there as you see them. There are questions both about the quality of Huawei’s chips as well as the numbers that can be produced. Secretary Lutnick said they can produce 200,000 a year, and I suppose that’s right. How does that compare with what we’re going to see with H20s?

Quality or Quantity?

Lennart Heim: The key dimensions here are quality and quantity. Many always talk about the quality argument here. I think the quantity argument is way more important. You already mentioned a number — Lutnick said Tesla also testified that 200,000 Ascend chips are being produced in 2025. How does this compare to the US? We’re churning out around 10 million chips this year — significantly more. This means if we’re selling — and there have been projections about NVIDIA selling a million H20s — we sell them five times more than what they can produce.

This is where the debate starts. The quantity argument is key here. If you would only sell them a couple thousand or 200,000 something, that’s a vastly different debate than selling a million or potentially even more. Just the sign that China wants to buy them speaks to their problems producing domestic chips.

On the quantity side, China’s simply not there yet. They’re getting better and producing more chips as we speak, but they have many difficulties along the way to produce more chips. Do they have enough high-bandwidth memory? How good is the smuggling operation to get this memory? How good is the packaging yield? All of these things just add up so that you eventually really can’t produce competitive chips.

The chips they get out of it — if you compare the Ascend 910C to NVIDIA’s best chip right now, which is being sold, the B200 — it’s way worse. It’s way worse on the high-bandwidth memory part, and it’s also way worse on the computational performance. It’s also worse than the H20, which you’re selling, at least on the memory part.

The point is, if you’re selling the H20 — and what many missed, there’s a chip, at least there were rumors around it, and pretty good rumors — there’s a chip called the H20E. What does it do? It doesn’t use HBM3. It uses HBM3E. I previously said it has four terabytes per second. If you use HBM3E, you can probably go up to five terabytes per second or even more.

What indications do we have that this chip is not getting sold? The FLOPS are still being kept, but the memory just continues going higher and higher and higher. That’s another thing to be tracking here. As long as we don’t have updated regulations for it, we just don’t know where the line is going to be drawn here in terms of quality of memory bandwidth, but also most importantly in terms of quantity.

If I could ask for one thing, please reduce the quantity. That’s the key thing we should pay attention to here.

Jordan Schneider: One of NVIDIA’s lines that Jensen has been saying they used to have 95% market share before the restrictions, and now it’s down to 50%. First off, they’ve never actually given numbers for that. But second, I’d guess that they were the only people making accelerators that people wanted. Even if it did go down to 50%, it’s not like it was the same pie — the pie went down such that the 5% it used to be now turns into 50% of the whole pie. The idea that Huawei — that number does not tell you that Huawei necessarily can fill it up.

As Lennart said, Jensen cares about this because lots of Chinese companies are willing to spend — his projection is what, $15 billion a year in sales? To think that Huawei and Baidu, and Tencent — they are not dumb. They are going to spend billions and billions of dollars in CapEx. By the way, this CapEx number seems small if you’re talking about Google and Meta, but is pretty large relative to the total CapEx that you’re seeing from the Chinese hyperscalers. They’re doing this because they think it is useful and important and relevant to their AI ambitions going forward, not to do Jensen a favor or anything.

Existential Priorities, Moral Values and AI Chips

Chris Miller: Could we talk about what we know in terms of who in China will be the large-scale buyers of these chips? Jordan, you mentioned Tencent, Alibaba. There’s AI firms like DeepSeek. There’s ByteDance, a huge player in China’s ecosystem. Lennart, if you have a sense of numbers, if any of those are public, or at least talk about who are the buyers of these chips inside of China?

Lennart Heim: I don’t think we have public reporting of it exactly. There’s definitely been some reporting that big hyperscalers, the big cloud companies — Tencent, ByteDance and others — are definitely interested in this. I’m not sure how interested ByteDance is because they’re building tons of clusters in Malaysia, which by the way, can buy whatever chips they want there and just continue building.

The normal hyperscalers will continue buying these kinds of chips, but they’re all hedging. They all also get Ascend chips. They’re not stupid. We just see with the policy flip-flopping, they don’t know when they’re going to get cut off. They’re all just hedging with Huawei Ascend chips while they’re getting better, because something we would just subsidize the transition while we do this.

That’s the thing I’m worried about here. It’s just a case that Huawei will get better, they will produce better chips. The chips will be significantly worse and significantly less quality than the US, but they will get better. That’s the thing we all need to acknowledge. There was a policy at some point which was made, which was telling Huawei they will need to produce their own chips. That’s just the path we’re going down here. There’s no going back here. The question is: what do we do in the meanwhile? How big will the gap potentially be? I’m a firm believer that this will be quite a massive gap, which will have big impact on the AI competition.

Chris Miller: That is one of the key lines of debate, but also empirical questions that’s hard to research or get hard data on, which are the decisions of the private tech firms in China, the Alibabas, the Tencents, and others. Because to the extent that you’re right, that there’s a meaningful quality difference between NVIDIA and Huawei GPUs, for example, they got a strong incentive to build as much as possible on NVIDIA.

You can see an argument that says, well, they’re going to buy Ascends, but put them in the closet or not really take them seriously because they want to build their products. But you’re saying no, that’s probably not the case because even those firms that don’t have a strong incentive on their own to help out Huawei, do in the context of potential future export controls and loss of access to NVIDIA chips. The argument that controls align the incentives of Tencent and Alibaba with Huawei and the Chinese state — you think those incentives are already fully aligned.

Lennart Heim: More importantly, we should always work through the arguments for it. There are arguments in favor of selling H20s, and that’s the same debate to be had here. On the other side, it sometimes lacks some technical details here.

The market share argument is a fair argument — you want to maintain NVIDIA’s bigger market share, and reduce demand for Huawei. I just don’t think that’s the case.

It’s an existential priority for China to develop the semiconductor industry.

Importantly, it’s not like the semiconductor industry only gets better because of AI chips. The majority of chips the world produces are not AI chips. Who’s producing at the most advanced node at SMIC, but also TSMC? It’s Apple. Usually we produce mobile phones first there, so they’re pushing it forward anyway for the newest Huawei smartphone that will probably soon produce something like a six-nanometer node, which will then be leveraged to produce better AI chips.

Even if you reduce the market demand right now, semiconductors will get better and these will lead to better AI chips eventually. If they then just transition to this, then also what is the tech stack argument here? Sure, we keep them hooked on CUDA, and it’s a pain to go from CUDA to PyTorch to MindSpore to the Huawei ecosystem. We can model this as a one-time transition cost. Many American companies have done this. Google switched to TPUs at some point. OpenAI right now is using Trainium chips on AWS. They pay a significant amount of cost to switch and run these different hardware stacks. But eventually they’re doing it, and they’ll also eventually do it with Huawei.

It’s not like if you use CUDA, your systems are more aligned. If you sell China AI systems that don’t spit out CCP propaganda, I’m in favor of that. That’s spreading American values, liberal values. That seems fine. But if you were just selling them chips, there are no values, no constraints that come with selling chips. You can just do whatever you want on it.

That’s again where we’re just missing this tech component. We kind of got it right in the UAE: sell them the cloud, let Microsoft build here, versus here we just sell the underlying component. They can build whatever they want on top of it. That’s just missing in the debate.

Chris Miller: This is a key aspect of the export control debate that’s fascinating. A lot of people don’t get this: if you restrict sales of tools, then you hurt the tool makers, but you help the users of those tools. In the chip industry, if you sell fewer lithography tools, it’s bad news for ASML, but it’s probably good in the long run for TSMC and other companies that face less Chinese competition. Similarly, if you sell GPUs to China, it’s bad news for GPU sellers. Or sorry, it’s good news for GPU sellers, but bad news for US AI firms who face stronger competition.

One of the strategic questions is at which level do you try to cut off? The US has, until recently, cut off at multiple levels and is now shifting. Well, we’ll see where we are next week, but this week it seems like it’s shifted towards a policy of sell the GPUs but keep the controls on the chip-making tools.

Lennart Heim: Which makes sense. If we would reverse, selling them extreme ultraviolet lithography machines from ASML, I would be way more on a rampage than selling them AI chips. I also complain more if we start selling Blackwells over H20s. That’s a fair debate we should be having here. People can fall into different types of positions here. We can disagree on some arguments here. You have these different types of controls, which stack with each other, and the AI chips are the first ones to fall. That makes sense.

Chris Miller: One of the arguments is that if you make China addicted to AI chips, you gain long-term leverage. The mental model that people think of here is: if you get them using EUV lithography tools, they don’t have their ecosystem, and it takes a decade to try to replicate your tools. So maybe this is a good one for Lennart. Does the same dynamic hold here, or if not, why? What are the differences?

Lennart Heim: There are many different facets of being addicted to something. In the ideal case, it just means all Chinese firms are really reluctant to adopt Chinese chips, and therefore, they have less revenue. SMIC is wondering, nobody wants to buy their chips, and instead, all the Chinese just buy US chips.

I already talked about how SMIC and semiconductors get better anyway, independent of AI. But it’s a fair thing to say: the less people use Huawei’s AI software ecosystem, the worse it is. That’s a fair argument to be made. I just think they know they want to produce it anyway. They just know we need our AI chips at some point. They’re not full steam on this. Maybe they could go stronger if they wanted to. Maybe they’re full steam on it, but they just don’t do better for many reasons.

China is using the US tech right now, maybe delays it to some degree, and even subsidizes it. Let’s just think about Volkswagen — you know my German heritage — and its love affair with China. How’s this going right now? Did this stop BYD? Not really. I expect the share of Volkswagen being sold to China in the future will be low. The argument to be made here: they made a ton of money in the meantime. That’s a fair argument to be made.

The reason I feel nervous about AI chips is that they increase the total compute deployment training capacity in the interim. If AGI is a singular point, AI’s just not going to materialize in five years, then all we discuss here doesn’t matter that much, because the good thing about AI chips is they get exponentially better. We’re not going to talk about H20s in five, six years from now because we have exponentially better chips already here.

That’s an argument. We can just say: don’t worry, we just sell them, we make some money, they get a little bit better AI, but AI’s not going to be decisive in the next four to five years. But then later, ideally, we stop it. We don’t sell them. We have better chips that are exponentially better. Again, it goes back to where we draw the threshold, and when and how AI matters. Which is a diffuse question.

I have a pretty uncertain view here. I’m just like, man, AI could be a really big deal in the next three to four years. It seems likely it’s going to be a big deal — bigger or less big, depending on how it goes from just transformative economic growth being determined, to the future of the military, up to just going to fizzle out. We should address this uncertainty here. I just work on national security ris,k and I’m trying to minimize downside risks. I don’t see the benefits here in the long run, that why we should sell them. Fair argument. There are some good arguments here, but overall, it doesn’t cut it, at least for me.

National Security and Politics

Jordan Schneider: When you look at some companies, it’s a really big deal having Chinese market access. Intel — 35% of their revenue is from selling CPUs into China. This was a big deal for the tool manufacturers. In some years, it was 30, 40% over the past few years. NVIDIA’s a $4 trillion company — they will be just fine and still be able to deliver you that exponential curve of rapidly improving AI chips even without the extra $10 billion of sales.

There’s the maximalist version of this question: if you are 100% sure that AI does not matter and is not a strategic technology, then yeah, sell it. Go crazy. Do whatever you want with it. But it’s a tricky line of thought where we’re writing an AI action plan where we want to make AI dominance, we think this is going to usher in a new golden age, but we’re willing to take some of this downside risk that we’re making it easier on China, which we’ve identified as a major strategic threat.

There is a broader context of the relationship that you can try to trade things in. Say, we wanted them to scuttle some submarines or stop messing with the Philippines — there are lots of other asks you can make from a balance of power regional dynamics perspective that you could have put on this. It’s wild that it didn’t even seem to be in the context of the debate or discussion between the US-China trade deal, but was just a decision that Trump made independently because Jensen got to him, and he wanted to have good vibes in the relationship, and the 15% tax we’re putting on it.

What if it went to buy drones for Taiwan or to shore up funding for BIS so they could do a better job of tracking down all the chips that are getting leaked out into China? There are some lines where if you are going to follow the premise that China is a strategic threat and we’ve got to watch and hopefully shape how much they’re going to gain on the US from a relative technological competition perspective, there are other moves you can do to use this card more in your favor than letting the other side pocket it.

Lennart Heim: What we’ve seen so far is that the H20 got sold again. Then some said it was part of the trade talks, and others denied it. Then the Chinese came out denying it was part of the trade talks. Eventually, what I don’t like about it: export control was a national security consideration. When the October framework came out, and there were certain companies in countries like Poland, Switzerland, in this tier two, many were complaining, “you’re dividing a European trade union,” but it’s a national security thing. It’s not a trade deal we’re doing here. This is at least where export controls originally came from.

Now we are mixing them with trade things, and now we get 15% of the revenue share, and amazing, let’s pay off the debt, let’s do other great things. I don’t think national security is for sale here. If we could get other national security concessions here in return, that’d be amazing. It would be nice to hear more and communicate about this. There are people like me who are willing to walk back. Hell yeah, let’s sell the H20 because we got a beautiful deal out of it.

I just don’t think 15% of the sales cuts it here. It’s just money. Money doesn’t help you.

Jordan Schneider: It’s really interesting, the analogies that Trump used in his talk, where on the one hand, he talked about selling fighter jets to allies. This is something we do — we sell F-35s to Saudi Arabia, ostensibly an ally, and we cut off a few miles per hour off its top speed or what have you. And then the other word he said: restrictive covenant. This is a real estate word. That’s the only time I’ve ever heard it used before. It’s like, okay, I am a landlord, and we’re cutting you a deal, doing some sort of deal, which is a straightforward commercial transaction, not having anything to do with national security.

I remember on Logan Paul’s podcast, he was like, “This is the most important thing and it’s going to shape the future” — to go from that to “oh, this is just another real estate deal. Yeah, I started at 20, Jensen got me down to 15.” Not without any of the grand strategic import that this decision again may not, but also may end up having for the future of this technology in the world.

Lennart Heim: Can I make a point about real estate? What you do with real estate is often you don’t sell it, you rent it out. If you want to give the Chinese computing power, rent these chips — it’s the best of both worlds. They get the computing power, you make money, you might even make more money because there is NVIDIA making money, and maybe Microsoft or your favorite hyperscaler in between. You still have more control and more leverage.

You don’t need chips in your basement to run them, you can access them remotely.

They could literally dial in. They could dial into our beautiful new UAE five-gigawatt cluster or dial in to the US and existing cloud providers. Then, in the future, if they go rogue, or you want to make sure it doesn’t go to certain military-linked entities, you usually have more leverage.

If we do the concessions we talked about — the different things we want to walk back before you sell chips — just tell them you can use the cloud, which is by the way, perfectly legal as we’re speaking right now. If they want the computing power, use our cloud. It’s all legal, you can go for it. We still make money.

Jordan Schneider: FYI Trump White House, NVIDIA employees gave to Kamala over Trump in 2024, 10 to one…

Chris Miller: There’s an interesting political economy dynamic here, which Lennart, you’re referencing, which is getting back to: if you sell the tools, you enable the chip maker; if you enable chip makers, that type of competitive dynamic.

What we’ve seen is GPU sellers, NVIDIA most prominently, being very vocal on this issue. We haven’t seen hyperscalers be vocal at all, even though one should conclude this implies more competition for them. Then we’ve seen mixed responses from AI model companies. Anthropic has been pretty vocal in opposition. I haven’t seen OpenAI. It strikes me that companies that have a lot at stake have been taking very different strategies — some being vocal, some not. I don’t know what exactly explains that.

Lennart Heim: You know which GPU they’re using? NVIDIA, and if you speak out against them, Jensen’s going to get you. If you look at Anthropic, who is slowly migrating to more Google TPUs and Amazon Trainium, you can see the deals, they can speak out against it where everybody else is reliant on Jensen.

I can at least confirm from many conversations with many people in these companies, this is part of the calculus they do here — you would rather not come out against Jensen. It’s clearly in NVIDIA’s interest. That’s why they’ve been pushing sovereign AI, selling chips as their thing. That’s beautiful. This helps them. Nobody else is doing it. This is not where Google’s coming in. The only competitor here is AMD.

NVIDIA’s market share is only going to go downhill from here. The total market will go up — AI is a big deal but AMD is getting better. Google GPUs are getting better, Microsoft chips are getting better, and Amazon chips are getting better. We have more and more startups getting better. We just have more AI chip competition. NVIDIA also feels slightly nervous about all of these issues.

I would love to live in a world where NVIDIA had a smaller market share and see what the hyperscalers and AI companies would say. Many of them would come out. OpenAI at least came out in favor of export controls historically when they talk about energy dominance and more. Right now, they’re all quiet because somebody else might then knock on the door.

Chris Miller: I’ve gotten lots of questions about what does industry think? Of course, what you’re saying is, well, which part of industry are you looking at? Which segment, which specific companies?

Jordan Schneider: Why don’t you do the HBM political economy? This has been reported that the Chinese government is asking for high-bandwidth memory as part of concession number two. What does that tell you, Lennart, that ask?

Lennart Heim: If I were running China, I would ask for high bandwidth memory over asking for H20s personally, because I’ve got my sovereign drive anyway. I want to build better and better AI chips. If I look at my current AI chip industry, I would want EUV, but maybe this is too much to ask for because we did this early on. Trump did it back in the day. But what is the thing we’ve only recently done is banning high-bandwidth memory units.

We got our chip, and next to the chip, we put the memory, and these memory units are being produced by Samsung and SK Hynix, and Micron. They’re not allowed to go to China anymore. We’ve seen reporting that at least the Chinese, again, the Chinese put forward: could HBM be traded? Is there something we can do here? I hope the US government will draw a clear red line here.

We talked about how you would walk back things. There are arguments in favor of selling chips. We talked about them. What we do here is not sell them our chips. What we do here is enable them to build better chips. The best way how the 910C or the 910D, whatever the next best chip they produce, will get better is by having higher bandwidth memory. Right now, China does not have the capacity to produce even HBM3.

There’s reporting about the first trial production of HBM3. In contrast, NVIDIA is starting to equip HBM4 and using HBM3E right now. Again, don’t get me wrong, China will get better. They will eventually produce high-bandwidth memory. There’s a lot more to be done, which could stop them from producing better memory. But in the meantime, while they’re scaling up this production and trying to get better, at least we should probably not sell them our high-bandwidth memory to make their AI chips more competitive. Because we might regret this in many years when we’re then competing in emerging markets and Huawei has a better chip, which can better compete with ours.

Chris Miller: The interesting dynamic in the memory space is that two of the three producers are not US, but Korean.

Lennart Heim: That’s also why we see probably tons of smuggling here, because it’s pretty close to China, and there are certain tricks to get more HBM. Don’t get me wrong, China is smuggling HBM right now, which is sand in the gears, but again, I’m in favor of throwing sand in the gears, and ideally, we get better enforcement, and they will get less HBM eventually.

[h2] AI Chips and Chinese Political Economy

Jordan Schneider: On July 15th, we got the news that the Trump administration is letting Nvidia start to sell H20 chips. A week later, the MSS published a notice to the public, saying to beware of digital spying via foreign-produced chips. Ten days later, the CAC — the Cyberspace Administration of China 国家互联网信息办公室— summoned Nvidia representatives over risks of being able to control AI systems in China remotely and accused them of having planted a kill switch in them.

Then we have a private leading cybersecurity research firm in China hat published a report which went viral, talking about all the ways that there could be backdoors. Ten days after that, on August 9th, state television did a whole report about how there might already be backdoors in these H20s, and they cite former ChinaTalk guest Tim Fist from CNAS and his report on this topic.

Why Beijing is pretending they hate the H20

Chris, what’s your read on this interesting brushback pitch we’ve gotten from the central organs about H20s in China?

Chris Miller: There are three potential explanations, not mutually exclusive. One is that the Chinese security services are paranoid. The discussion in Washington of the Chip Security Act, which would mandate geolocation verification, has been happening simultaneously with the H20 debate and has intensified those concerns. That’s explanation one.

Explanation two is that it’s part of an effort to discourage private Chinese tech firms from using H20s. There are people around Huawei or in the government who are afraid that H20s will take market share, and this is a way to say “buy more Huawei chips” as well.

The third explanation is that this is pressure on US firms like Nvidia to say, “We need you to do more, or else we’re not going to let you back in the market.” We’ve seen this in other segments of the tech sector, where China will ramp up pressure on a private US firm to have that firm then try to use its resources to shift the debate in Washington. You could maybe envision the HBM debate being part of what China’s looking for in the broader trade negotiations that are underway.

But it certainly wouldn’t be a very attractive endpoint for Nvidia if they got approval from the US and then didn’t get approval from the Chinese side to sell. Perhaps China thinks it has some leverage there. How exactly to attribute these three causes? I’m not exactly sure what shares I would put on each of them, but all three seem potentially relevant.

Lennart Heim: China also put out guidance a while ago on energy efficiency. This was actually in April or May when the H20 was sold before it got banned initially. They put out guidance that the H20 is famously energy inefficient if you look at FLOPS because of the export control bandwidth limitations. I don’t know exactly what this guidance means, but it discourages companies from using it.

Nobody’s been following it because now they’re buying it up in the single millions of chips. But it feeds into the same narrative here. You try to push certain companies or create artificial demand for Huawei chips and slowly tell them, “Hey guys, at some point we want to do our own AI chips.” As Chris was saying, I think all of these stories are simultaneously true. It all just makes sense, and there’s no big downside for them to do these kinds of things.

Chris Miller: Actually, there was a state media source — I don’t know if this is the one you’re referencing, Jordan — but one of its criticisms of the H20 was that it wasn’t environmentally friendly.

Jordan Schneider: They cite this exact NDRC line that Lennart talked about, where the goal is 5 teraflops or half a teraflop per watt, and the H20 can only give you 0.37.

Lennart Heim: It’s pretty bad — pretty environmentally unfriendly for training, but pretty damn environmentally friendly for deployment of AI chips. Way better than any Huawei chip, I can tell you that.

Jordan Schneider: Here’s a moment where some mirroring might be in order. We’ve just had an hour-long conversation about how messy and convoluted American policy towards artificial intelligence is, with many conflicting priorities. The same thing is happening in all these different ministries in China.

This is big news — a change in the landscape where people want to have their say and make their stamp on it. You don’t necessarily need to attribute some four-dimensional chess move. I’m sure the people in the MSS read Tim’s report and thought, “It would be stupid if we bought all these chips only for them to turn into bricks or spy on us or have bombs in them that are going to blow up like beepers in Lebanon.”

I’m sure folks in CAC feel the same way. Then there’s the same debate that we’ve been having for the past hour: is it net positive or net negative for domestic self-sufficiency to have a competitor to Huawei potentially take a big chunk of the market domestically? This is being played out in China.

At a broad level, now is the right time to ask for more from Nvidia. Now that they’ve gotten the green light and there’s $10-15 billion of demand for these chips sitting somewhere in Taiwan that they’re excited to ship out, they can say, “You better step it up or cut the price or do an extra screen to make sure there aren’t any kill switches.”

The way this is playing out on Twitter is, “Oh, China’s saying they don’t want them. That means we should sell them.” Reading that Chinese state media or state organs are saying something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. It’s not that hard to play — let’s not even give this credit for four-dimensional chess. This is just two-dimensional chess of saying, “Oh no, we’re worried about the chips. We don’t even want these chips.” That changes the political economy of the debate in Washington, where it makes selling these chips potentially easier.

That’s something to watch out for as we see the Chinese government saying, “Ah, no, we didn’t want these all that much. This isn’t a big concession. We’re worried about the second-order effects of this.”

But the fact is, the demand is not going anywhere. It’s not as if Alibaba’s not going to buy these chips because of these warnings.

Lennart Heim: Alibaba would be pretty sad if they suddenly only needed to rely on other inferior chips, where they can’t produce enough of them. Ideally, if I were running the Chinese government, I would put out regulations that I can sell all of the Huawei chips I can produce, and then fill the rest with some nice Nvidia chips.

But what’s interesting is that there’s some misunderstanding of what the Chip Security Act is supposed to do, and location verification. The idea is not to check if a chip is in China and then have a problem. The idea is to check if a chip is in Malaysia, Singapore, wherever you think chips are being smuggled, and then verify they don’t end up in China. This was never supposed to go on chips that go to China, because ideally, we don’t have any chips going to China, at least not the advanced ones.

This is an interesting confusion. This whole debate of hardware-enabled mechanisms and location verification was big in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Malaysia, all of these smuggling hotspots, that people were worried about. Some people have been pushing — if we now stop selling chips, I’m arguing we should sell them cloud — but people could say, “We can sell them chips, but put something on the chip.”

But just knowing a chip is now in China and we know its location and city — how does this help us? Everyone can dial in remotely. Even if it sits at Tencent, who says that the PLA isn’t using it? You can dial in remotely. I don’t know what’s going on there. If there’s some misinterpretation of documents, it’s a confusing situation.

Jordan, you previously made a point about Intel, which is interesting. Intel made a lot of money in China, and Intel is still allowed to sell its CPUs, but Intel’s CPU share in China is going down. We will see the same with Nvidia and AI chips. Even if you’re allowed to sell in China, your share will potentially go down. Why is this the case? There is similar guidance, for example, for all government computers to go to homegrown, domestically produced chips. “We can’t trust Intel anymore on this.” We will see the same on AI chips.

China is pushing self-reliance to produce its own AI chips. They also named security concerns here — that’s why the government is coming first. I don’t know the exact numbers of Intel sales right now in China and how much money they’re making there, but I’m pretty confident it’s been going down, and the government is not buying any more Intel chips because they just put out this guidance.

We’ve seen this playbook before. The only difference is now we have this confusion about which chips are allowed to be sold, which ones are not to be sold, and how good they are. But the story’s nothing new.

Chris Miller: Could we talk about what we know in terms of the big buyers of AI chips in China and their relationship with the state? You’ve got the private tech firms — Alibaba and Tencent. You’ve got the AI labs, DeepSeek most prominently. One of the key questions seems to be: what is the relationship with the state today, and how is it changing?

To what extent should we see them as arms of the state? That’s certainly not accurate. Totally independent is certainly not accurate either. There’s a spectrum. To what extent are these political priorities shaping their procurement decisions?

Jordan Schneider: There was some reporting which was clearly sourced by the intelligence community over the past few years that after the Chinese Ministry of State Security 国家安全部 hack of the SF-86 — that’s the form you submit to the US government when you want a security clearance, which basically is your confession of sorts to the Catholic Church where you talk about all your divorces and all your debt and everything that a foreign intelligence community might want to know about you — that data was tapped by the MSS through Alibaba and ByteDance engineers to put into a more useful format.

We’ve seen over the past few weeks reporting from Business Insider about a public tender from some corner of the PLA that wanted H20s to do whatever they wanted to do with it. I used to be more sanguine on this type of thing, but this is the most dual-use technology to beat out other dual-use technologies. It seems preposterous that, insofar as this is a strategic resource, the Chinese government would not be able to leverage data centers that are located in China — that the US does not have any kill switches or on-chip governance on — to do whatever they want with it, whether that’s building a surveillance system or helping with weapons manufacturing.

The Pentagon has now signed what I think is a $200 million contract with OpenAI, and this is just the beginning. This stuff is useful — we’re willing to pay a lot of money to get it into the Pentagon in one form or another. If selling a lot of H20s materially raises the amount of usable functional compute that can be put into anything in China — it would be really surprising if you didn’t have the Chinese government wanting to take these new tools out for a spin, if you didn’t have the Chinese military-police complex wanting to take these new tools out for a spin.

Chris Miller: There are two points you can analyze. One is: if AI tools exist, will the military use them? Obviously the answer is yes. But on the procurement side, if you’re a data center procurement official or executive at Alibaba Cloud, to what extent is your decision-making shaped by what you read in state media versus what your boss tells you to build an effective cloud, in which case maybe H20s are your best option versus a sense of — how do we think about this? Because those are the people who are going to decide how many Ascend chips to buy, unless they’re getting a dictate from the top, which maybe they are.

The counter-example I’m thinking of is there was a time when parts of the US military were using Chinese drones — not because there was a policy to use Chinese drones, but because they didn’t have any US drones. Is there a scenario in which your procurement executive at Alibaba is just going to try to ignore Ascend chips because they were told to build a good data center?

Jordan Schneider: At some level, yes. These are companies that report quarterly earnings and pay their employees based on how well the company performs. People get stock options. By and large, the incentives of the people who are buying these chips are to drive the most revenue for the money you’re spending on your CapEx.

But it only goes so far. There is this broader strategic realization, which you don’t even need Beijing to tell you — this door could be closed at any time.

Lennart Heim: We closed it.

What could change the current conciliatory White House dynamic towards China?

Jordan Schneider: Maybe now’s an interesting moment to talk about the sorts of things that could change the dynamic we’re on now on chips and the broader US-China relationship. We have Congress as a variable. There have been several senators and congresspeople who’ve been like, “Wait, what are we doing selling these chips to China? I thought we banned and said this was our golden ticket to the 21st century.”

Because Trump is doing this at such a personal level — we’ve seen him turn on Putin, right? We’ve seen him go from all-in on Putin to “we’re going to ask some questions about this guy.” We’ll see what happens in Alaska. But there is the possibility of Jensen saying the wrong thing, taking too much of a victory lap, or Xi Jinping doing something obnoxious. There are a lot of personal interpersonal dynamics that could change what the Trump administration ends up doing, which is probably the more relevant variable than whether or not Lennart can convince you that Huawei can only make X amount of chips.

Lennart Heim: It’s an interesting moment in time because we just have all of the trade negotiations, right? Everything is volatile, and certain things are just on the table, and they’d be willing to discuss them. We see the Chinese bringing forward, at least according to reporting, the idea of HBM.

It will be interesting to see what the government is going to say. It’s going to draw a red line. We had statements before the trade negotiations in London that H20 is above the red line — they wouldn’t negotiate it. We can all try to put together the story of what happened, but we won’t know for sure. But there will be more discussions about these kinds of things. The Chinese can bring it up.

But I’m also more interested in the semiconductor manufacturing equipment companies. If Nvidia got this beautiful deal, I know what we’re doing — they’re all trying to give the president a call. It seems like it’s a handful of people who are making these decisions, and I hope they’re well-informed about which things are more important. If I see any news about EUV machines being sold to China, I’m probably going to get a heart attack because I don’t want this to happen.

Jordan Schneider: From a personal transaction perspective, there isn’t someone in the semiconductor capital equipment ecosystem that Trump is going to give the time of day to. He felt like he had to deal with Jensen because this is America’s most important CEO. I don’t think any of those folks have the panache and skill to make it work.

Even Ben Thompson, who I gave a hard time earlier in this podcast, understands very clearly that there’s a lot of risk in selling more tools to China than we already have.

Lennart Heim: Going even further, it wouldn’t be good for Jensen if Huawei is not good at producing AI chips. It wouldn’t be in their interest to say, “Hey, yeah, let’s make sure we sell ASML chips. Let’s make sure to hit them on every single dimension we can to make sure Huawei is just less competitive.” I would love to see that this would be at least a good part of the story here.

Chris Miller: Congress will be interesting to watch on this issue. The trend in Congress has been vocally pushing for tougher controls, both in the first Trump administration and under Biden — not universally, but that’s been the predominant push. We need to watch Senator Cotton, for example, and what he does or does not say publicly on this issue.

Jordan Schneider: Chris, do you want to tease out the Russia comparison a little bit? Congress was really not happy. They ended up putting some sanctions on the table. What have the dynamics been there over the past six months?

Chris Miller: The last six months in Russia have seen Congress officially not play much role at all. They put sanctions legislation on the table and then pulled it back actually after Trump requested it. But there have been a number of Republican senators who have been influential in shaping Trump’s thinking. Lindsey Graham, for example, seems to have played a role in shaping Trump’s thinking on Putin over the last six months and the way that Putin is stringing along.

We’re going to Alaska later this week, and maybe all that will prove irrelevant if Trump changes his mind. But it does seem like you could argue that even though Congress has done nothing on Russia, in fact, it has helped change thinking in the White House. I wonder if this would be true here, but this seems like a place where Trump’s going to make more of his own decisions, especially insofar as it intersects with the China trade negotiations, which it seems like it may.

Jordan Schneider: It’s less salient than a land war.

Chris Miller: There’s no domestic constituency.

Jordan Schneider: Just weirdos with tech national security podcasts.

Nvidia Chips Past the H20

Chris Miller: Before this week, it was reported that Nvidia is coming out with a downgraded version of some new downgraded chip post-H20, the B40 or B30. That’s now irrelevant because of H20.

Lennart Heim: It’s unclear. We flip-flopped the decision on the H20, but notably there is still a license requirement. Nvidia had a license granted, so if they wanted to go all the way back, they could have removed the license requirement. From October 2023 to April 2025, there was no license requirement. Then they introduced the license requirement, which is still intact. The only thing which happened as of last Friday is they granted the licenses according to reporting.

If they still want to sell a chip which is not subject to export controls, they would produce a new chip called B30 or B40. It needs to be below the computational power threshold, so the same as H20, and also have lower memory bandwidth.

According to the reporting, I think the FT leaked what is in the formulation — it needs to be less than 1.4 terabyte per second memory bandwidth. The H20 is at four terabyte per second, so the B40 would probably not use HBM anymore. It would probably use an inferior memory technology, but significantly cheaper because why use HBM if you can’t have that much memory bandwidth anyway? It’s so-called GDDR technology, which you usually use for graphics GPUs.

If people talk about this being only the fourth best chip, I don’t think H20 is the fourth best chip. The B30, B40 — that’s a more fair description of a fourth best chip, and I would still not call it an obsolete chip, but it’s definitely a worse chip. It’s only a chip where the US government at least decided, “Here’s where we draw the new lines. This chip is fine to be exported without a license,” so it could still be coming. I have not heard they’re stopping production yet. I guess Nvidia’s making a calculus right now on how much demand there is, but it’s clearly the case that H20 is better. The question is, will all the licenses be granted going forward?

Chris Miller: Trump said at the press conference a couple days ago that he’ll consider a downgraded Blackwell. Are there ways we should think about what that might look like, if in fact it materializes? Of course, with huge questions over whether or not that’s actually real.

Lennart Heim: One thing which stood out — he said ~ 30% or 15% to 50% less performance. What many people are missing about AI chips and computing chips is they get exponentially better. If your chip is 15% less, that’s nothing. That’s still the same generation.

If you really want to sell worse chips, you need to go back a few generations and then the chip needs to be like seven times worse, not only 50% or 15%.

There’s an argument to be made that you want to sell worse chips, but it’s not a little bit of a downgrade. We really need to take the exponentials into account. If we trim down a Blackwell chip, for example, a B200 by 15% to 50%, it’s still roughly twice or three times as good as the Huawei chip. We can produce millions of them while Huawei struggles, according to reporting, to produce 200,000 this year.

That’s a key thing to get right here. People need to keep in mind the exponentials — chips get exponentially better. Fifteen to 50% trim is nothing in the grand scheme of things. I would make my voice heard to say this is probably not a good idea of what we should be doing here. The government drew lines before, and the lines are way lower, and that’s where they should be.

Mood Music

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement — the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Professor Ben Nathans — is the sharpest, richest, and funniest account of the Soviet dissident movement ever written. Today, we’ll interview Nathans alongside the legendary Ian Johnson, whose recent book Sparks explores the Chinese dissident ecosystem.

We discuss…

• The central enigma of the Soviet dissident movement — their boldness in the face of hopeless odds,

• How cybernetics, Wittgenstein, and one absent-minded professor shaped the intellectual backbone of post-Stalinist dissent,

• Why the Soviet Union was such fertile ground for dark humor, and why humor played a vital role for Soviet resistance movements,

• How the architect of Stalin’s show trials laid the groundwork for, ironically, a more professional legal system known as “socialist legality,”

• Similarities and differences between post-Stalinist and post-Maoist systems in dealing with opposition,

• Plus: Why Brezhnev read The Baltimore Sun, how onion-skin paper became a tool of rebellion, and why China’s leaders study the Soviet collapse more seriously than anyone else.

Listen now in your favorite podcast app.

The Dissident’s Playbook

Jordan Schneider: I want to start with the title. It’s pretty much the best title I’ve ever come across because Soviet jokes are the best things that exist in the twentieth century. Where did it come from and how did you choose it?

Ben Nathans: Long after all the physical remnants of Soviet civilization have deteriorated into dust and no physical traces are left of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Soviet anecdotes — or anekdoty (анекдоты) — will remain as the single best, most compact and pungent guide to what that place and time was about. I couldn’t agree with you more about Soviet humor.

I deserve no credit for the title of the book, “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause.” It’s literally borrowed from a toast that dissidents would make, typically sitting around kitchen tables in cramped apartments in Moscow, Kyiv, Leningrad, and other cities. For me, besides the sonic resonance of that phrase, it captures with amazing efficiency the central enigma of that movement and these people — their ability to be bold and despairing at the same time.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s take it back to the death of Stalin. None of what happens in this book — the court cases, personal dramas, and legal maneuvering — happens in a Stalinist Soviet Union because if anyone plays around with this stuff, you’ll get shot or go to the Gulag and no one, much less Amnesty International, ever hears from you again.

Let’s talk about that transition and why those who came after Stalin decided to take a different approach than Stalin to political dissent.

Ben Nathans: Whenever you have a system where power is highly concentrated at the apex of society and where the personality and predilections of the ruler are so decisive — and this applies in many ways to modern China as much as it does to the Soviet Union — “biological transition events” (fancy language for the death of the leader), are fraught with uncertainty.

It’s worth remembering that the Soviet system really was formed under Stalin. During his twenty-five years in power from roughly 1928 to 1953, the fundamental characteristics of the system came into focus and were fixed, not in the sense of made better, but anchored and became more or less stable.

To speak to your question directly — the reason why things changed so fundamentally after Stalin’s death in March of 1953 is that the system of state-sponsored political terror, the use of state resources to go after real or perceived enemies, was incredibly damaging to the political elite itself. The riskiest position you could occupy under Stalin was to be a high-ranking member of the Communist Party. What was really dangerous was to be a member of the security apparatus, because many of the people who were carrying out political terror fell into the vortex of this enormous punitive machine themselves, or they committed suicide because of the psychic stress of having to sign death warrants for thousands of people.

If only as a matter of self-preservation, Stalin’s successors decided that this system could not continue and it needed to somehow stabilize itself. When you look back at the twentieth century and ask what leaders or what systems were most effective at killing communists, it wasn’t Hitler’s Germany — it was Stalin. Stalin killed way more communists than Hitler did. It’s also possible that Mao killed more communists than Stalin did. Ian would have to weigh in on that. It’s worth keeping in mind what kind of autocannibalism this system was capable of exercising.

Jordan Schneider: Ian, can you draw a parallel to how the post-Mao leadership began thinking about ways to prevent the political system from becoming a complete blood sport?

Ian Johnson: The parallels and the differences are quite striking. While I was reading the book, I kept thinking how it was similar but also different to China. In China, everything was delayed until Mao died in ’76. There was no real de-Maoification in the way there was under Khrushchev with de-Stalinization. People say the main reason for this is that for the CCP, Mao was Lenin and Stalin rolled into one. You couldn’t get rid of Mao without calling into question the entire revolution, whereas that could happen in the Soviet Union.

There was a push for a bit of de-Maoification in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but it wasn’t sustained. The structure of the system may have changed in the ’80s and ’90s, but the guts of the repressive system was still there. You end up with something quite different in China than what happened in the Soviet era under Brezhnev.

Jordan Schneider: Now is maybe a nice point to introduce Volpin, perhaps the century’s most impactful autist. What a character this guy was.

Ben Nathans: Alexander Volpin was a Moscow-based mathematician, who ended up becoming what I describe as the intellectual godfather of the dissident movement. He was the absent-minded professor to end all absent-minded professors, someone who was famous for walking around Moscow in his house slippers, who had an extreme interest and ambition for what cybernetics could do for the world. Cybernetics was the movement unleashed by the MIT professor Norbert Wiener in the 1940s and ’50s that attempted to translate every known phenomenon into the language of algorithms. It’s a clear predecessor of computer science and software engineering.

Jordan Schneider: Which also has an afterlife in China and is famously the intellectual superstructure for the one-child policy.

Ben Nathans: It also has an afterlife in the United States, where algorithmic attempts to refashion society, human life and human beings themselves — that impulse is very much alive in certain pockets of the United States today.

Volpin was not just a mathematician, but a mathematical logician, which is to say he was interested in the nature of truth statements in mathematics and how we know that this or that given proof is rigorous or not. He also was a keen student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein’s quest for what he called “an ideal language.” This goes back to the analytic philosophy movement that was centered in Oxford in the interwar period. Wittgenstein was an Austrian Jew, but he made his way to Oxford and made his first mark in the United Kingdom.

Ideal language philosophy is based on the idea that many philosophical problems stem from the messiness and ambiguity of the language we use to think. Human languages like English, Russian, and Chinese are just inherently messy. They use one word to describe many different things, some of them having nothing to do with each other. For example, the word “patient” can mean the person who a doctor sees, but it can also be an adjective meaning someone who has the capacity to wait without getting agitated. There may be some deep Latin-based etymological connection between those two, but for all intents and purposes in English, that one word performs multiple, essentially unrelated functions. This is an example of how human languages are just really bad for thinking clearly.

Volpin’s quest was to develop a language that would be free of those ambiguities and lack of clarity. He obviously looked at mathematics as the gold standard for clarity and rigor when pursuing truth or trying to make statements about reality. But he, like everybody else in this movement, including Wittgenstein himself, ultimately failed to come up with an ideal language that could fulfill those criteria of clarity and rigor.

Over the course of his life in the Soviet Union under Stalin, he, like tens of millions of others, had a number of nasty encounters with the police, the secret police, the broader punitive apparatus, and, in his case, with the practice of sending certain inconvenient people to psychiatric institutions against their will. These run-ins with the Soviet legal system were deeply traumatic and difficult for him to process.

But he had a lot of time on his hands, while in prison and in exile in Central Asia, in Karaganda in Kazakhstan. One of the things he spent time doing was reading the Soviet Constitution and the Code of Criminal Procedure. To his surprise, he found a parallel attempt at an ideal language — something most legal systems strive for. The goal is to clearly map out what you are allowed to do, what you are required to do, and what is forbidden: the three fundamental moral categories

Having failed, along with everybody else, to produce an actual algorithmic ideal language, he realized that Soviet law was a plan B for this quest. He gradually developed this approach that if the Soviet government could be held to its own laws, which he thought were actually pretty good, the civil liberties that were enshrined in the Soviet Constitution and the various procedural norms that were encoded in the code of criminal procedure — things would be a lot better.

This became the disarmingly simple grand strategy of this movement, which was: make the government honor its own laws. We’re not out to change the government, we’re not out to topple the government, we’re certainly not out to seize power ourselves. It’s impossible for me to imagine someone like Volpin running anything because of how abstract and literal his thinking was. He was not a social creature. But this quest for the rule of law in a society that had gone through some of the worst episodes of lawlessness and state-sponsored terror. This became the master plan for the movement.

Jordan Schneider: Ian, from a personality perspective and strategic perspective, what echoes did you see in the Volpin story to what you covered in China?

Ian Johnson: Interestingly, Ben mentioned in his book that this was picked up by other Soviet satellite states, especially in Eastern Europe. Notably, it was also adopted in the ’90s by the Chinese rights defense movement, the Weiquan movement (维权运动). This core idea — if activists hold the government to its laws, they can’t be easily labeled as subversive or counter-revolutionary. They’re not trying to overthrow anything, to subvert the state. This approach was largely successful for the movement and its lawyers for about fifteen years, roughly from the late ’90s to the early 2010s. While the dynamic shifted later, we can see clear parallels between the Chinese movement and its Soviet counterparts.

Significant foreign funding and NGO support were channeled into this movement, creating a small industry focused on rule of law dialogues, judicial training, and legal workshops. This strategy was partly inspired by the perceived success of similar initiatives during the Soviet era, leading many to believe a comparable development could occur in China.

For a period, it did. A flowering of civil society emerged, for about a twenty-year-period, if you want to be optimistic, from the 1990s into the early 2010s. However, the party abruptly decided this was ridiculous, and they cracked down on the movement in a notably more severe way than the Soviet authorities had done.

Ben Nathans: I’m interested in whether what you described is a function of Soviet-style regimes producing a specific kind of opposition movement. One that favors the rule of law, one that is essentially conservative and minimalist rather than revolutionary and innovative. Or were there actual lines of influence? Were people reading texts produced by the Soviet dissident movement or coverage of it, where we could really talk about cause and effect rather than just typological repetition?

Ian Johnson: Well, they were very influenced by the Czech movement. For example, a very well-known public intellectual in China named Cui Weiping (崔卫平) — she’s a film critic and activist – translated many things by Václav Havel which were widely read. They weren’t published in China, but they circulated in a Chinese version of samizdat (самиздат).

In the Soviet Union, you had the old-style samizdat where somebody hammered through multiple pieces of carbon paper to copy it, and then others made more copies. In China, the movement took place during the digital revolution, so they simply made books or magazines into PDFs and emailed them.

While they were influenced by the Soviet movement, I don’t know whether the construction of the rule of law was influenced by the Soviets. I wonder if any authoritarian states, Soviet-style or not, have to rely on laws to some degree because society is too complex otherwise. Not everything can be decided by the party secretary. You have to have some kind of legal system for disputes among companies or minor issues between people.

A quick word from the sponsor of today’s episode:

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Jordan Schneider: Ben, could you talk a little bit about going from revolutionary justice to more boring justice with laws and statutes?

Ben Nathans: That transition happens, at least aspirationally, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. This transition was overseen by an unlikely figure — Andrei Vyshinsky, who was Stalin’s Minister of Justice. He was the architect of the infamous show trials in Moscow, in which some of the most prominent Old Bolsheviks – people like Nikolai Bukharin who had been close to Lenin and had been members of the party long before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 – appeared on witness stands and confessed to the most outlandish crimes. They confessed to spying for Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and Japan, often simultaneously.

These confessions were entirely scripted and detached from reality; nearly all defendants were subjected to torture or threats against their families. These tactics are the hallmarks of show trials.

But the irony is that Vyshinsky, who oversaw these trials, was also the person who essentially oversaw the transition away from revolutionary justice toward a more professional legal system, which he called “socialist legality."

Revolutionary justice is the idea that you don’t need professionally trained lawyers the way bourgeois societies do, societies that place much of the legal decision-making process in the hands of people who have degrees, pedigrees and credentials from elite, usually conservative, educational institutions. Revolutionary justice holds that real Justice — capital-J Justice — flows most profoundly and reliably from the instincts of people who are on the right side of history: members of the working class. You don’t need professional jurists. What you need are workers whose gut instincts about right and wrong are the most reliable (some have said infallible) means to decide guilt or innocence.

In the 1920s, the most revolutionary period of Soviet history, all kinds of experiments were being carried out — some breathtaking, others absolutely horrifying. During this time, revolutionary justice was seen as the highest form of adjudicating issues in courts, applied in everything from divorce cases to questions of political justice, high, low, and everything in between.

But the Bolsheviks soon learned that revolutionary justice was really unpredictable. Workers did not always produce the results that the party leadership wanted or expected. As in many other arenas, by the 1930s, Soviet leaders began to retrench. They decided it would actually be a good idea to have professionally trained judges — people who could retain certain standards of legal procedure, including precedence, the proper use of evidence and what a confession should look like.

The actual practice of justice was nothing like what we would call professional. These show trials were travesties of justice according to Western standards. But we have to bear in mind — and Ian will be able to speak to this in the Chinese case — that the term show trial itself is often used condescendingly, like this is all just pretend, this is a bullshit trial, this is not real justice being meted out, this is all scripted in advance. The Soviets called it pokazatel’nyy protsess (показательный процесс), which translates more accurately to “demonstrative trial.” A demonstrative trial had a pedagogical goal: to teach the population about right and wrong and, above all, about the state’s power to punish the guilty.

Once we move away from the condescension that the term “show trial” conjures up, we’re in much more complicated terrain. Western legal systems are also engaged in the business of teaching. That’s why trials are public. It’s not just that the actions of the prosecution, defense, judges, and to some extent the jury can be subject to scrutiny. It’s because trials are also classrooms where certain lessons about right and wrong are broadcast and where state power is on display.

It’s much more complicated when you realize that Vyshinsky was presiding over a transition away from revolutionary justice. It wasn’t just about these farcical show trials — it was also about a Soviet version of a professional judiciary.

Jordan Schneider: The Chinese echoes of this are fascinating. On one hand, you have revolutionary justice meted out in land reform and Cultural Revolution struggle sessions. Then sometimes you’re dealing with malfeasance like the Gao Gang case in the mid-1950s behind the scenes. But most famously with the Gang of Four, where Deng said, “No, we’ve got to put these guys on TV and show everyone that we’re never going back to the Cultural Revolution.” More recently, Xi put Bo Xilai (薄熙来) on trial. I don’t think it was live-streamed, but there were definitely clips of that trial that circulated for instructive effect.

I’d like to ask Ian for any other thoughts.

Ben Nathans: Ian, how successful do you think these overtly pedagogical, spectacular trials were in China? In the Soviet case in the 1930s, most people seemed to believe the defendants were guilty of the insane crimes to which they confessed.

Ian Johnson: That’s a good question. I’m not sure exactly how much people in China believed what they were seeing, but the government certainly used similar tactics — holding trials in football stadiums, staging mass trials and public executions, and forcing people to attend.

But for those who attended — I think it’s a universal human tendency to believe that there must be some truth to a statement someone makes. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Maybe it’s exaggerated a bit, but it’s got to be somewhat true. It can’t be all made up.

That mindset likely held during cases like Gao Gang’s in the 1950s and others from that era. But sometimes these trials elicited a different reaction — solidarity. I remember an example from 1960 involving one of the students who published the underground magazine Spark (星火). She attended a show trial in Lanzhou, in Gansu Province in China’s far west.

The famous filmmaker Hu Jie (胡杰) later interviewed her for a documentary. She recalled being deeply moved by the defendants — by the way they held themselves, by their refusal to concede to making any mistakes. She found their dignity inspiring. So I wonder whether, at least in some cases, the spectacle backfired — eliciting sympathy rather than submission.

Ben Nathans: The trials of the dissidents in the ’60s backfired to a great degree. Ironically, the government was actually much more responsible about the kinds of evidence that it introduced in these trials, and they didn’t torture any of the defendants. They didn’t even beat them. It’s weird to think that the procedurally more respectable trials were less convincing than the stage-managed show trials of the ’30s.

A Hysterical Day in Court

Jordan Schneider: The split screen of 1960s Chinese Cultural Revolution stadium denunciations and executions, and then what we’re about to talk about with Sinyavsky and Daniel — this kind of absurdist comedy of two writers — is something to keep in mind. Ben, why don’t you transition us from Volpin to this literary scene, which has its completely hysterical day in court?

Ben Nathans: Yes, in both senses of the meaning of hysterical, very funny and also nuts. Volpin has this strategy that he’s developing privately, and you can find the evolution of his thinking about the legal strategy in his diaries, which are housed in the archive of the Memorial Society in Moscow. I worked with them when one could still do that, before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Volpin loved to write a long entry on New Year’s Eve every year. He was big into taking stock and taking account, not only reviewing what had happened the previous year, but setting out goals for the next one. In one entry, I think it was 1958 or ’59, New Year’s Eve, and having arrived at this legal strategy, he says in essence, “I’m just waiting for the right opportunity to put this into practice.”

That opportunity arrived in the fall of 1965. This is one year after Khrushchev had been yanked from the top position as General Secretary of the Communist Party, allegedly for mental health reasons, but the real reason was that the rest of the party elite couldn’t stand how unpredictable and erratic his policies were. Khrushchev had been out of power for a year and everyone was wondering: What comes next? Are we going back to Stalinism? What kind of future can we imagine for this country that has just gone through this epochal transition away from mass terror?

When these two figures — Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel — were arrested in September of 1965, it sent shockwaves through the intelligentsia because this seemed very ominous. Many people had not heard of these guys and were unaware that they had been publishing short stories, novellas, and essays under pseudonyms outside the Soviet Union — all completely hush-hush. When it came to light that they had been arrested and were going to be charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, there was a kind of panic: “This is the first sign of a return to the kind of repressive state that we knew in the 1930s and ’40s under Stalin.”

Volpin decides this is an occasion not to demand the innocence of these writers, not to insist that they be released from custody, but simply to apply the demand of the rule of law to this particular case. They were arrested in conjunction with each other because they had been operating together. They used the same person to smuggle their works abroad.

He came up with something that had never before happened in Soviet history, or anywhere else. That was organizing a meeting in the name of transparency — a meeting for glasnost (митинг гласности). The word itself is not new. It goes back at least to the 19th century, maybe even the 18th century. It means transparency, publicity, or openness. People of a certain generation are very familiar with this word because it was one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s key words during the glasnost era — the era of transparency and reformation, perestroika. But Volpin was the one who mobilized the word in a new way, as a way of responding to the arrest of these two writers.

The demand of the meeting that he was going to call was very simple: an open trial for these two writers and everything in accordance with the Soviet Constitution and the code of criminal procedure. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

In the book, I detail how, in fits and starts, the planning for this glasnost meeting — this transparency meeting — came into focus. It’s an absolutely fascinating story, and in some ways it was, for me, parallel to the histories that have been written about the coming into existence of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a slightly grandiose analogy because the Declaration was the launching pad for not just a new country, but a new kind of political system. But people have done fantastic work on the various drafts of the Declaration of Independence, not only by Thomas Jefferson but by other authors. And I tried, in my own small way, to do something similar for the opening salvo in what would become the Dissident Movement — namely, this appeal to Muscovites and others to meet on December 5th 1965, which is the anniversary of the ratification of the Soviet Constitution, to make this very minimalist demand: open trial.

You can watch Volpin’s thinking evolve in real time over the course of the fall of 1965. Even more interesting, you can watch other people enter what was originally a kind of monologue on his part, entering the conversation about this new rule-of-law strategy. There was enormous skepticism, not to mention just derision of this idea. Most people’s initial response to Volpin’s approach was: “Are you nuts? Have you lost your mind? This government doesn’t care about law. Why are you being naive, thinking you can use Soviet law against the Soviet state?” It’s counterintuitive to take Soviet law seriously because everyone grew up thinking that it was just window dressing.

Volpin’s response to those criticisms was always: “You’re part of the problem. There are too many people like you who don’t take law seriously and who aren’t ready to hold the government accountable when it breaks the law. If there were more people like me who insisted on the literal application of the law — not only to the behavior of Soviet citizens but to the behavior of the Soviet state — we’d all be much better off.”

Ian Johnson: Let me ask you: Why did the government agree? Why didn’t they just make these people disappear? Why did they feel this need to conform? Was it because they were concerned how it would come across in the West, or was there something else going on internally?

Ben Nathans: I think it’s both. First of all, this was a government, not only under Khrushchev, but also under his successors (principally Leonid Brezhnev, who governed for the next 20 years), in which all of these leaders shared Khrushchev’s sense that they couldn’t go back to Stalinism. It was just too lethal, and above all, too lethal to the party elites themselves. Everybody wanted stability and predictability, and the new benchmark of success and power was no longer, “How are we doing compared to tsarist Russia, say in 1913 on the eve of the First World War?” That’s a fixed benchmark — it’s not changing over time. But under the conditions of the Cold War, the comparative framework was always, “How are we doing in our competition with the United States?”

The United States was not set in amber. The United States was probably the most, or at least one of the most, dynamic societies on the planet. To be able to claim that the Soviet Union was getting closer and closer to generating the kind of wealth that the United States could generate and was superior to the United States in the way it distributed that wealth required certain forms of predictability, of stability at the top of the system, and of the ability to satisfy the needs of the Soviet population. That’s why you have creeping consumerism in the Soviet Union starting in the 1960s.

Part of why the Soviet government didn’t just execute Sinyavsky and Daniel is that it wanted to showcase itself now on a global stage — that it could compete and essentially outcompete its rival. But there were also internal reasons that have often been overlooked.

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In Stalin’s time, the name of the security apparatus was the NKVD. This is the predecessor to the KGB, the name that everybody is familiar with, if only because Vladimir Putin himself was a KGB agent. KGB stands for the Committee for State Security (kомитет государственной безопасности).

This is the crux of what you’re getting at, I think. The KGB itself wanted to become more professional, more modern. It wanted an image of a professional kind of intelligence service that didn’t keep dungeons and torture chambers for its victims, but was fully consistent with modern governance. That’s why the dissident trials of the 1960s and to a lesser extent in the 70s demonstrate how the Soviet system was really trying to have modern professional trials, not show trials. They don’t torture the defendants in advance. They don’t hand them a script and say, “This is what you’re going to say.”

Now it’s true that the judges and the prosecution are always working together, but that’s not specifically Soviet. That’s the way most continental judicial systems work. It’s the United States and the Anglo-American world with an adversarial system that’s the outlier historically.

The Soviet Union was trying to have a professional judicial system. It wanted to broadcast an image of itself around the world, not just to the West, but to the newly decolonizing states in the developing world that faced this kind of choice. There’s a fork in the road: Are we going to go the American route — capitalist, multi-party systems — or are we going to go the Soviet route — socialist economy, a planned economy, single-party rule? One of the ways of competing is to show that you have a modern judiciary with procedures that everyone can respect.

So there are performative elements, but there are also internal elements that have to do with the attempted self-professionalization by the KGB.

Jordan Schneider: It’s hard to do. You have this great closing metaphor in the book of stage and actors playing their parts, with some people who don’t want to play their parts. This dance between what’s real and what isn’t, and how much you want to commit to the bit, creates a lot of tension throughout the book.

Volpin picked a great test case. Sinyavsky and Daniel played their role to the T and were on a very different script than what the prosecutors and judge had any idea they were going to go up against. Granted, if you pick some absurdist, creative fiction writers pushing the bounds of form to put on trial, then maybe you should be ready for the unexpected.

This trial was my favorite of the ones you profile. What were they called in for? What were the facts?

Ben Nathans: The facts are that for the course of nearly 10 years, these two were publishing works abroad using pseudonyms, and the KGB took a decade before it could figure out who the actual authors were. It’s an amazing detective story. The initial thought was, “These are émigrés who harbor this lifelong, biographically driven grudge against the Soviet Union because it destroyed tsarist Russia, the country they grew up in and loved.” So they hunted for émigrés. As you know from current events, when the Soviet intelligence services decide an émigré is acting against the interests of Moscow, they’re not shy about going after them no matter where they live.

But they couldn’t find émigrés. They also started to think, “Whoever these guys are, they write about Soviet reality with such incredible specificity and tactile familiarity. Maybe they’re living inside the country because they seem to know this system from the inside out.” Their humor and satire was on target. It was hard to believe someone who doesn’t live here and know the system intimately could produce this kind of fiction.

They’re looking all over, and it literally takes them 10 years before they crack this case. Meanwhile, Andrei Sinyavsky had been working as a literary critic and an instructor at the Gorky Institute for World Literature. One of the most delicious ironies in this story is that in its attempt to ferret out who the real authors were, the KGB actually shared some of its classified material with the faculty of the Gorky Institute. The thinking was that these guys really know literature, and maybe their stylistic analyses of these pseudonymous publications abroad can help with this investigation. Sinyavsky was literally being consulted about his own case at one point. I can’t imagine what was going through his mind when this happened.

Yuli Daniel was less well known professionally. He worked mostly as a translator in his day job and produced satirical stories, which are amazing. If I may be permitted a brief detour, one of Daniel’s stories is called “Murder Day.” It’s a counterfactual science fiction story about an experiment that the Bolshevik leadership runs in the early 1960s.

The idea is that the Bolshevik revolution is not just about creating a more just society. It’s not just about abolishing private property and greed and selfishness and cultivating collectivism and solidarity. Ultimately, it’s all for the creation of a new kind of human being — Humanity 2.0. People who will have been born and grown up under this new system will have different characters from people who grow up under capitalism. That’s the most radical agenda of the Bolshevik Revolution: to create new kinds of human beings, not just a new kind of society.

Daniel’s story runs with this idea and imagines a day in the early 1960s when the government declares that murder is now legal because it wants to find out: What do these new human beings do when there are no institutional constraints on their behavior, there’s no sword hanging over their head saying, “If you kill someone, you’re toast”? They’re going to remove that entire incentive and disincentive structure and see how people behave. Will the new Soviet person refrain from this most heinous of crimes if left to their own devices without the threat of punishment? The story plays that out. It’s just this amazing, not just thought experiment, but a way of thinking through the Bolshevik experiment and wondering if it actually succeeded in creating new kinds of human beings?

Needless to say, the Soviet government didn’t like this. It didn’t like anybody saying anything satirical or funny about it.

Sinyavsky and Daniel are eventually found out. It’s like a whodunit detective story that involves analysis of the typewriters that were used to disseminate their stories. It turns out the conduit to the West for their stories was none other than the daughter of the French naval attaché at the embassy in Moscow — a woman who’d formed very close friendships with both Sinyavsky and Daniel and others, named Hélène Peltier. She went on to become a professor of Slavic literature in France. She eventually married someone and took on a different last name, Zamoyska. But this is an amazing story of a kind of platonic smuggling love triangle, and then the whole thing unravels and these two writers are arrested.

You mentioned the trial itself. Thanks to the wives of the two defendants, particularly the wife of Yuli Daniel — a woman who had a PhD in linguistics, Larisa Bogoraz, who went on to become, I would say, a more important dissident than Daniel himself (and we can talk about her later, and also why it’s the men who became famous rather than the women in general) — she and the wife of Sinyavsky, a woman named Maria Rozanova, as spouses were permitted to enter the courtroom. That was a small form of transparency that the state allowed.

They were able to create verbatim transcripts of the trial, and those transcripts were eventually reproduced under the technique known as samizdat, which is just a Russian neologism that means “published it myself.” What it means in reality is people with typewriters, carbon paper, and onion skin paper just multiplying — like a chain letter — a text of anywhere from 1 to 500 pages. The transcripts of these trials started to spread around the Soviet Union. They were also smuggled abroad and published in all of the major European languages as well as Japanese, I believe.

These trial transcripts were dynamite. Like a lot of historians, we all want to bring our protagonists to life. We want to create, within the realm of the factually verifiable, stories that bring the past to life. We want to do what the great historian Bill Cronon described as carving stories out of what is true. At some point it hit me when I was working on this book: I have dialogue that I can reproduce in my book. I don’t have to make up people talking to each other. I actually have dialogue that was captured in two forms — trials (the back and forth between the prosecution and the defendants or the witnesses) and interrogation transcripts (the dialogue between the interrogator and the victim or the witness in any given case). It’s a dream come true for a historian to be able to say, “And then he said, and then he said, and then she said,” and it’s literally something you can document.

To make it even better, I discovered something when I was working at the archive of the Hoover Institution in California at Stanford. For all these years we’ve known that the two wives created this transcript of the trial, and that transcript has been read very widely — people have written about it. But always in the back of my mind was: How accurate is that transcript? Larisa Bogoraz was a linguist, she was very skilled at shorthand note-taking, but we have no way of knowing whether that is a full and accurate record.

Then I found the KGB dossier on Andrei Sinyavsky at the Hoover Archive. During the early post-Soviet period, any dissident or the descendant or spouse of a dissident had the right to request a copy of their KGB dossier. Andrei Sinyavsky did this for himself, and after he died, his widow, Maria Rozanova, sold that dossier to the Hoover Institution.

There is — talk about a Eureka moment — amazing material in that archive. Interrogation records from before and during the trial. But among other things, I found that the government produced its own transcript of the trial. If you look carefully at photographs during the trial, you’ll see that on the defendant’s dock where Sinyavsky and Daniel are sitting are two things that look a lot like microphones. I’m pretty sure that the KGB was making a recording of the trial. The plan was that they would release the transcript in an attempt to damn the defendants.

But they were kind of rookies at trials that weren’t scripted. They were rookies at trials where the defendants hadn’t been tortured in advance. What they got with this recording was: “Oops, this is a transcript that really doesn’t make us look good. It makes the defendants look good."

The key point is that I compared the official transcript, which had never been released, with the one that was created by the wives of the defendants. Lo and behold, the transcript that circulated in samizdat and eventually in the West was about 95% accurate. It was extremely close to a transcript that was made from what I am convinced was a tape recording. In some cases, the unofficial transcript was more accurate because it recorded the audience reaction — there are moments where it says “stormy applause” or “grumbling in the audience.”

Jordan Schneider: It’s like stage direction.

Ben Nathans: Exactly. It’s just like “you are there” text. I can’t make up anything better than this transcript. It’s like the interrogation transcripts — I can’t do better than that. This was a dream.

Jordan Schneider: I think we owe it to them to do a little reading session. Here are my two favorite excerpts from this. This is the interrogator speaking — “The majority of your works contain slanderous fabrications that defame the Soviet state and socialist system. Explain what led you to write such words and illegally send them abroad.”

The defendant responds, “I don’t consider my works to be slanderous or anti-Soviet. What led me to write them were artistic challenges and interests, as well as certain literary problems that troubled me. In my works, I resorted to the supernatural and the fantastic. I portrayed people who were experiencing various maniacal conditions and sometimes people with ill psyches. I made broad use of devices such as the grotesque, comic absurdities, illogic, bold experiments of language.”

The interrogator continues, “In the court session and in the collection published under the title ’Fantastic Stories,’ the Soviet Union is described as a society based on force, as an artificial system imposed on the people in which spiritual freedom is impossible. Is it really possible to call such works fantastic?”

The defendant replies, “I don’t agree with this evaluation of my works.”

It’s brilliant because he’s getting the interrogator to essentially admit that what he’s saying is true — that the Soviet Union is a crappy place to live.

Ben Nathans: Yes, there are many layers going on here. But I want to push back a little against what you said earlier. The purpose of Sinyavsky’s and Daniel’s self-defense — and they’re amazingly eloquent when they’re on the stand — was to make the case for the autonomy of the literary imagination. They were trying to say that literature is outside the sphere of ideology, politics, and also the law. That’s very different from what Volpin wanted to make out of this trial.

The two writers in the dock were trying to assert the freedom of the literary imagination — in other words, to defend the vocation of the writer of fiction. What Volpin wanted to show was how the government couldn’t put together a consistent legal case and how important it was for the details of this trial to be made known to the public.

Even though Volpin wasn’t the one who arranged for the codification and dissemination of the unofficial transcript, the people who did came up with a very clever strategy. The trial lasted roughly three days. What they did was punctuate the unofficial transcript with coverage in the Soviet press. You’d have day one of the trial — here’s what was said verbatim by the judge, witness, defendants, prosecutor, whatever. Then here’s what the Soviet press said about the trial for all the tens of millions of Soviet citizens who couldn’t be there.

When you saw this juxtaposition and how warped and skewed and tendentious the Soviet media coverage was, the effect was devastating. Anybody who read this could only conclude that the Soviet media was a completely unreliable reporter on what had actually happened in this trial. It was a devastating document in its time.

Jordan Schneider: One more excerpt on the literary aspect. This is the judge speaking to Daniel — “You wrote directly about the Soviet government, not about ancient Babylon, but about a specific government, complaining that it announced a public murder day. You even named the date, August 10, 1969, right? Is that a device or outright slander?”

Daniel responds, “I’ll take your example. If Ivanova were to write that Sidorova flies around on a broomstick and turns herself into an animal, that would be a literary device, not slander. I chose a deliberately fantastic situation. This is a literary device.”

The judge asks, “Daniel, are you trying to deny that ‘public murder day’ supposedly announced by the Soviet government is in fact slander?”

Daniel replies, “I consider slander to be something that at least in theory, you could make other people believe.”

Ben Nathans: Yes! If you find it credible, you’re an enemy of the Soviet state. But if you recognize it as fantastical, like I do, then you’re not. Brilliant argument, absolutely brilliant.

Jordan Schneider: This tactic of making the system risible — are there parallels in the Chinese context that come to mind?

Ian Johnson: In some ways the avant-garde artists in the 1990s were trying to achieve that with some of their art, but I don’t think there’s anything quite the same as what happened here.

It made me very envious because I kept thinking, “These are such colorful characters and there’s such a richness of data that you have because of the archives being open, at least for a certain amount of time — enough time to get the stuff out in a way that hasn’t happened with China.” Perhaps we’ll see stuff like that happen in the future.

Ben Nathans: It’s actually, as always with humor, a seriously interesting subject — why things are funny, what makes them funny, what context allows these things to be perceived as funny. The question for me is: was it the absurdity of the Soviet system that generated so much dark humor?

Jordan, first of all, I’m delighted that you picked up on the funny parts of the book, because it would be tragic if that got missed. But I want to be clear: it’s not only dissidents that made jokes about the government and the Soviet system. Joking was pervasive. This was a very widespread coping mechanism and also a meaning-generating mechanism.

I could rattle off any number of Soviet anecdotes that have nothing to do with dissent per se, but are meant to capture the absurdity of some aspects of life in that system. My favorite one is: “First learn to swim, then we’ll fill the pool with water.” (“Учимся плавать…нам воды нальют.”) This captures the out-of-sync-ness of so much of the patterns of life in that country.

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When I tell these jokes to my students at Penn, the result is usually a sea of blank faces. The minute you explain a joke, you have executed that joke, and it loses its frisson or energy. These are culturally specific jokes, but what they capture is profound and deep.

I don’t know enough about Chinese culture to say, but there’s some combination of the predecessor to the Soviet Union — namely the Imperial Russian substratum — and the absurdities of the Soviet way of organizing society that produced this bottomless reservoir of dark humor. It really is the thing that I think will abide after all the other traces of that civilization are gone. The humor will still be there.

Jordan Schneider: There’s just this aspect of earnestness that you see in the Chinese post-imperial political tradition where... perhaps this is a ChatGPT query. I’ll try to find the funniest stuff written by Chinese people about Chinese politics. But none of the dissidents today are particularly funny in the Chinese context.

Ian Johnson: Chinese people, of course, are funny and they love to tell jokes, but there’s this phrase in Chinese, “you guo you min” (忧国忧民) — “worrying about the nation, worrying about people”. One is essentially a Confucian official, concerned about the country and concerned about people, and therefore it’s your duty to do this, as opposed to this scallywag, ne’er-do-well aspect that comes out a bit in the Soviet era.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, you have Taoist holy fools, but the Taoist holy fools aren’t there to make fun of the emperor. They’re just there to be drunk and have a good time.

Ben Nathans: It’s worth noting that when the Soviet dissident movement was covered in real time, above all by Western journalists, they almost never mentioned humor. People like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn were not perceived as having any sense of humor. It’s only when you start digging below the surface, and especially into the memoirs and the diaries and the letters and other less well-known sources, that you realize there is this substratum of coping through humor and satire. It’s very deep.

Ian Johnson: That’s a good point because when journalists are trying to sell the story, they’re trying to sell it as a big serious story about people standing up to authority, and humor doesn’t fit into that narrative well.

Disseminating Defiance

Jordan Schneider: Ben, let’s take it back to this incredible trial of these authors. How does anyone end up hearing about it? How does this get disseminated?

Ben Nathans: Samizdat (Cамиздат) is a DIY technology where people create copies of restricted literature in their bedrooms. The two wives of the defendants produce their own unofficial transcripts. They do this day in and day out over the course of the trial. Eventually it becomes part of an anthology of documents — the transcript of the trial, coverage by the Soviet press, letters from various observers. It circulates through this technique known as samizdat, which is just a Russian neologism that means “I published it myself.” The implication is: I never could have published this in any of the state-sponsored publishing houses, where everything has to pass through the censor’s office.

The technique is almost unbelievably simple. All you need is a typewriter and very thin, preferably onion skin paper, and carbon paper. You create a stack of alternating onion skin and carbon paper. It could be three deep, five deep. Some people say it could be as many as 10 or 12 sheets deep. You wind it around the platen in your typewriter and you pound on the keys. When you’re typing, you’re actually making three, five or ten copies of the document. One of the typists said that by the time you finish typing a novel on samizdat, you’ve got shoulders like a lumberjack because you’re just pounding the keys.

Then it disseminates the way a chain letter disseminates. You give one copy of this text to someone and that’s essentially a gift. You’re saying to that person, “I’m allowing you to read this uncensored text which is technically illegal” — although that’s a gray zone — “and could get you into trouble.” In return for the favor of granting you access to this forbidden fruit, you yourself have to create multiple copies of it and distribute it again to people who you trust.

It seems very primitive, but a couple of things were happening around samizdat that made it much more efficient than it might first appear. One is that samizdat texts were often — not always, but often — smuggled abroad, and a certain proportion of those smuggled texts were taken up by publishing houses in the West. They were either translated and published for Western readers or translated by an émigré press in Russian or Ukrainian or Lithuanian or whatever indigenous Soviet language they’d been composed in. Typically they would be published in small pocket-sized editions and smuggled back into the Soviet Union in a technique known as tamizdat (tamиздат), which means “published over there."

I have an example that I purchased years ago of this little book. It’s a handbook for dissidents or anybody who thinks they might be called in for an interrogation by the KGB. It’s by another mathematician named Vladimir Albrecht, and it’s called How to Be a Witness (Как Быть Свидетелем). It’s literally a manual for: “What do you do? What do you say? What do you not say? How do you say it?,” if you get hauled in by the KGB in a trial. It’s a fantastic book, well worth reading now. In fact, it’s been reproduced on the internet in Russia now for protesters starting in 2011, who also were getting hauled in by the KGB’s successor, the FSB.

Tamizdat significantly amplified the reach of samizdat publications. The true power emerged when these smuggled samizdat texts reached the research divisions of shortwave radio stations broadcasting to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This included broadcasters like Voice of America (which Trump is in the process of obliterating), Radio Free Europe, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Kol Yisrael. Many foreign countries used shortwave radio to broadcast what we would now consider audiobooks.

Samizdat texts themselves were typically homemade books, crudely bound perhaps with a paperclip. The networks involved in producing and distributing samizdat encompassed tens of thousands of people. I can say that with some confidence because the KGB did my research for me in this case. As you can imagine, there was no institution in the world that was more interested in the dissident movement and in what it was doing and producing than the KGB.

The KGB conducted an incredibly thorough investigation of the most popular underground samizdat periodical, A Chronicle of Current Events. Their findings demonstrated that samizdat was available in every medium to large size Soviet city, from Moscow to Vladivostok, across all 11 time zones. They compiled lists of tens of thousands of individuals involved in these distribution networks — people who were creating, distributing, or just reading samizdat. That’s a significant number of people.

When considering “radizdat” (radio publishing through shortwave radio stations), then we’re talking about millions, probably tens of millions of listeners. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to calculate the number of Soviet listeners, but the anecdotal evidence from diaries and memoirs is overwhelming that this was a very widespread phenomenon all across the Soviet Union.

These distribution networks start looking a little less backward and inefficient than they might at first glance. Between 2000 and 2010, in the heyday of the internet when all kinds of utopian aspirations were being read into the internet and what it would do in terms of creating a globally transparent information society, people liked to say, “Oh, the internet is the samizdat of the 21st century. It leaves samizdat in the dust because now we’re talking about billions of people able to communicate below the radar screen with unmediated contact to each other. Isn’t that wonderful?"

Well, it turns out that in some ways samizdat was far superior to the internet. The most obvious way is that samizdat was an ownerless technology. Nobody owned it. There was no platform belonging to Meta, Google or to anybody else. That meant samizdat couldn’t be disrupted, controlled, or censored in the way internet platforms are — and trust me, the KGB tried many times. In that respect, while it may be technologically backward, it was far more effective as a medium for true freedom of expression.

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Jordan Schneider: I want to read my two favorite paragraphs of your writing in the book that describe the experience of what it was like to be a samizdat reader and creator:

“Samizdat provided not just new things to read, but new modes of reading. There was binge reading: staying up all night pouring through a sheath of onion-skin papers because you’d been given twenty-four hours to consume a novel that Volodia was expecting the next day, and because, quite apart from Volodia’s expectations, you didn’t want that particular novel in your apartment for any longer than necessary. There was slow-motion reading: for the privilege of access to a samizdat text, you might be obliged to return not just the original but multiple copies to the lender. This meant reading while simultaneously pounding out a fresh version of the text on a typewriter, as a thick raft of onion-skin sheets alternating with carbon paper slowly wound its way around the platen, line by line, three, six, or as many as twelve deep. “Your shoulders would hurt like a lumberjack’s,” recalled one typist. Experienced samizdat readers claimed to be able to tell how many layers had been between any given sheet and the typewriter’s ink ribbon. There was group reading: for texts whose supply could not keep up with demand, friends would gather and form an assembly line around the kitchen table, passing each successive page from reader to reader, something impossible to do with a book. And there was site-specific reading: certain texts were simply too valuable, too fragile, or too dangerous to be lent out. To read Trotsky, you went to this person’s apartment; to read Orwell, to that person’s.

However and wherever it was read, samizdat delivered the added frisson of the forbidden. Its shabby appearance—frayed edges, wrinkles, ink smudges, and traces of human sweat—only accentuated its authenticity.75 Samizdat turned reading into an act of transgression. Having liberated themselves from the Aesopian language of writers who continued to struggle with internal and external censors, samizdat readers could imagine themselves belonging to the world’s edgiest and most secretive book club. Who were the other members, and who had held the very same onion-skin sheets that you were now holding? How many retypings separated you from the author?”

Ian Johnson: That really demonstrates a fact of civil movements or civic movements — that it’s smaller groups that are bound together in some way that have a much more lasting impact. The problem with social media is it’s good at creating a straw fire. Let’s all go out to protest, to “take down Wall Street” or whatever it is, but two months later, how many people are still with you? After somebody gets arrested, who’s with you? Immediately people drop away. But people who are bound in this collective act are much more likely to have some impact.

Jordan Schneider: It was scary, but also fun, exciting, and cool. They’re all hanging out together, drinking till five o’clock in the morning. It was a lifestyle in a way that just being on Twitter and posting is not. Because there was this thrill of the chase and excitement.

Ben Nathans: To the list of qualities that you just mentioned, I would add something essential to this movement from start to finish: the intense adult friendships that kept these face-to-face communities together and the kinds of trust and loyalty that those friendships entailed. These are meaningful things in any setting, but they are especially meaningful in a setting like the post-Stalinist Soviet Union where the level of public or social trust was really catastrophically low.

People were afraid of informers and people who might denounce them, whether they were neighbors or co-workers. The counterpart of these little islands of trust and friendship among men and women in these groups was a high degree of suspicion and cynicism about society as a whole. Those are legacies that are still at play in Russia today. They were certainly enabling for the dissident movement, because to engage in these kinds of activities — which could get you arrested, could prevent your children from ever getting into a university — you really had to trust the people that you worked with, whether it was on drafting a document or taking part in a demonstration or simply housing and disseminating samizdat texts.

Those were really important qualities, and the intensity of friendship and trust within the movement had a dark side which made the movement rather elitist. It made the participants skeptical of people that they didn’t know. One of Volpin’s criteria for success for these demonstrations was always, “Did I see people there that I don’t know?” Because he wanted that. He recognized that to become an actual social movement, one needed to move beyond these circles defined by friendship and intimacy. But that was easier said than done. For many people, the suspicion of strangers never went away, and they preferred to work in small groups with a lot of mutual knowledge and the ability to work together creatively.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because on the one hand, unless you can have a chain reaction — real exponential growth — it’s hard to have real change. But on the other hand, for a lot of these people, what triggered them down this path was the KGB putting them into a position where they had to start incriminating their friends. That was the ethical fork in the road. Most people chose to comply, but for a handful of folks who became the core among the thousands who challenged the system, that was the thing that brought them to a moment of truth about how they were going to relate to the regime.

Ben Nathans: Yes. It’s what I call, and I borrow this from Andrei Sinyavsky himself, the “moral stumbling block.” It could take many different forms. For someone at the elite level of the system like Andrei Sakharov, this great physicist who was the architect of some of the Soviet Union’s most lethal nuclear weapons, the stumbling block was when he realized that he was going to have no say about how those weapons were used, including how they were tested and the environmental damage that resulted from the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.

But for many people it was more like what you described, where they’re brought in to the KGB in whatever city they live in and they’re told that they are going to become informants for the KGB and they’re going to have to tell the KGB in weekly or monthly meetings what their friends are up to. For some people that was such an ethical crisis that they couldn’t live with themselves if they adopted that role. Yet they were loyal citizens; they had been brought up to respect the KGB as the protector of the revolution. These created crisis moments. Most people ended up making their peace with the system, adjusting to it. But for certain very high-minded Soviet citizens, that was morally impossible. Those are the people who sometimes found their way to the movement.

Jordan Schneider: In the post-Stalinist context, you’re not getting shot, but this is not costless. There are lots of examples in your book of people losing their jobs, people being sent away from their kids, of not being able to care for elder relatives. It’s still a very aggressive step to take, even though the KGB is not going to take you behind the shed.

Ben Nathans: Yes. All of those things that you mentioned are terrible. They disrupt lives, they ruin lives. But to really assess their historic significance, you have to see them in comparison with the kind of punishments that were meted out under Stalin. Under Stalin, the people who populate my book would have been shot. These dissidents would have been shot in dungeons in the KGB headquarters in Moscow and in the various provincial headquarters, or they would have been sent to the gulag for hard labor for up to 25 years.

The last thing I want to do is whitewash the punitive system under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, but it’s a sea change from what preceded it. That was noticed by the dissidents themselves. Sinyavsky writes about his interrogation based on his own father’s experience that he was expecting to be beaten and possibly tortured. Instead, he describes the KGB agents who interrogated him as astonishingly polite. They’re trying to get him to talk.

“Redder than Red” Dissidents

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about someone who had some gulag stripes, Grigorenko. There’s a really interesting parallel with the line he takes, because a fair number of folks in China also have this “redder than red” justification for their issues with the regime.

Ben Nathans: Early on in the history of both of these regimes, the typical worldview of someone who became a protester or a dissident was Marxism-Leninism. They held this idea that the regime had somehow jumped the tracks and was no longer living up to the ideals of the revolution. This, after all, was Mao’s great criticism of the Soviet Union after Stalin: that it had somehow slipped into a very pernicious form of revisionism, and that Khrushchev, under the guise of de-Stalinization, was actually turning the Soviet Union into a reactionary bourgeois country. Therefore it was incumbent upon Mao and China to take up the banner that Lenin had led and to become the vanguard of the world socialist revolution.

Similarly, domestic opposition in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 50s generally advocated a return to Marxism and Leninism. It’s when that ideological worldview starts to run out of gas, starts to lose its energy and its mobilizing capacity, that a space is opened up for a new approach. That new approach is the legalist philosophy, which is much more minimalist. It’s not about toppling the regime, it’s certainly not about any kind of revolution. Volpin and other rights defenders were fed up with revolutions and their accompanying violence. They wanted incremental, fully law-abiding change.

Someone like Grigorenko was a convinced Leninist. It’s only very late in life, after he has played out his part in the dissident movement and has been forced to leave the country and settle in New York, only then does he really adopt a new worldview of Christianity and give up the Leninism that he had advocated for most of his professional life, both in the army and as an important member of the dissident movement.

Ian Johnson: That’s really true for China as well. A lot of the people would always talk about reading or ransacking the collected works of Marx and Engels for the footnotes, because that was their way of finding out more about Western philosophy and outside ideas. It was inspiring to them as well, but in different ways.

Ben Nathans: Somebody should do a history of the various modes of reading Marx, Lenin, and Mao. It’s a particularly good group of authors to do such a study for because their works were produced in mass state-subsidized editions of tens of millions. That means that we have an unusually large readership. The work of the historian will be to recapture the nature of those readings and the receptions of those works.

Any work that has even a minimal level of complexity lends itself to different ways of reading and misreading or creative misreading. This would be a fantastic case study of texts that were read by millions, maybe billions of people. They’re a touchstone for how people read — what they make of a given text in any given time and place.

Jordan Schneider: It makes you feel for Xi Jinping printing all those books with no one reading them. I want to do a reading from some of the Grigorenko transcripts. This is the prosecutor saying: “We’re not here to lead a theoretical discussion. You created an underground organization whose goal was to topple the Soviet government. Fighting against that is the task of the organs of state security, not of party commissions.”

"That’s an exaggeration,” he responded. “I didn’t create an organization with the aim of violently overthrowing the existing order. I created an organization for the dissemination of undistorted Leninism, for the unmasking of its falsifiers.”

The prosecutor: “If it was only a matter of propagating Leninism, why were you hiding in the underground? Preach within the system of party political education and its meetings.”

His response: “You know better than I that that’s impossible. The fact that Leninism has to be preached from the underground demonstrates better than anything that the current party leadership has deviated from Leninist positions and thereby lost the right to leadership of the party and has given to communist Leninists the right to struggle against that leadership.”

Ben Nathans: Bravo. This is Grigorenko who is a major general in the Soviet army. When people talk about dissidence as coming from the fringes of society, I always bring up Grigorenko because he is as embedded in that society and as much a product of its educational system as anybody you can imagine. I hope this is one of the deep themes of the book that emerges over time: orthodoxies produce their own heresies.

It’s impossible to imagine a person like Grigorenko existing in any society other than that of the Soviet Union. He is a poster child for Soviet values. These people are the products of their own system. They’re very Soviet in a way, but they’re repurposing the cognitive categories and the moral ideals in directions that the state had not anticipated.

Jordan Schneider: Ian, in a lot of the more recent protests in China as well, you have this critique from the left as much as from a small-l liberal right. The contemporary Chinese government is not living up to the ideals of socialism as defined in a different way than Xi would.

Ian Johnson: When looking at these people also in the Chinese context, similarly, it’s a mistake to think of them as just coming from the fringes. There are people firmly embedded inside the system — as they say in Chinese, tizhinei (体制内), inside the system — who are critics and who write these things. Certainly in the Mao era, but even now, these are people who often have access to more information and have a better idea of the way the system works. They become that much stronger and more effective critics.

PR with Chinese Characteristics

Ian Johnson: Something else I noticed in reading the book is that the Soviet leadership seemed more sensitive to the West than I would expect in a Chinese context. In the Chinese context, maybe in the 90s when they were trying to get into the World Trade Organization, people paid attention to what Western governments said. But the Soviet leadership seemed much more concerned about how they were perceived in Western countries. Is that accurate? How much of a role did that play in the leeway that these people got in your book?

Ben Nathans: It’s accurate, and it was an extremely significant fact — this sensitivity to Western opinion. This came home to me in a moment during my research that I didn’t include in the book, but I’ll share it with you now.

Among the many genres of documents that I drew on are transcripts of Politburo conversations. During the time when the post-Soviet Russian Federation was more open to researchers, you could get your hands on quite a few transcripts of Politburo conversations, including conversations about human rights, dissidents and Western criticism.

There’s one moment where Leonid Brezhnev is on a rant about Western coverage of Soviet policy, and he starts to cite a critical article from the The Baltimore Sun. Now, I’m a native of Baltimore. I was born there and grew up there and The Baltimore Sun’s a great newspaper. It’s probably a second or third tier newspaper in the American hierarchy of papers, clearly less important and influential than The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Miami Herald or The LA Times.

So I’m thinking, “Okay, just take a deep breath here and realize that the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, one of two superpowers in the world, is getting upset by an article that was published in The Baltimore Sun.” Has there ever been an American president who could even name a Soviet newspaper other than Pravda and Izvestia? I seriously doubt it. This brought home to me the extraordinary prickliness of Soviet leaders when it came to Western criticism.

Why is that? Why does Brezhnev even care what The Baltimore Sun is saying about him or his government? It’s a clue to the idea that the Soviet Union saw itself as coming out of the same enlightenment modernizing tradition as Western countries. It didn’t see itself as civilizationally different or superior. Marxism-Leninism and socialism was seen as civilizationally superior to capitalism. But the point is that the story they were operating within is a succession story. It’s like Christianity emerging from Judaism or any of the other religious stories of religious evolution over time.

To Soviet leaders, it really did matter what people in the West thought, not just because they were competing with Western societies and attempting to outdo them, but they saw themselves as essentially genetically emerging from those societies. Therefore it was just unacceptable to be described as inferior or having lost their way in this historical trajectory that begins with the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848 and all the things that formed the traditions of socialism and social democracy.

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Ian would know much more about this than I do, but having read a little bit in the debates about Asian particularism when it came to defending Asian countries against charges of human rights violations, and the idea that human rights are a Western cultural code, and they’re not really — the individualism that is embedded in human rights thinking is not appropriate for societies in which the family and the collective is the preeminent unit. The Soviet leaders never took that defense the way the leaders of, say, Singapore or China have been known to do. They saw themselves as having a superior set of human rights norms than that of the West. They had outdone the West at its own game.

This is a really crucial difference and remains true today, although the contrast is not as sharp because Putin and his entourage are fed up with criticism from the West that they just don’t care anymore. They no longer defend their values on a continuum that includes the West. Now the talk is of the Russian world, of Russia as a civilization unto itself. That way of thinking is much older and much more familiar to the Chinese.

Ian Johnson: The Chinese government's response to human rights criticisms is purely tactical. They might issue white papers highlighting human rights issues in the United States, for example, but this is often a way of “thumbing their nose” at the U.S., essentially saying, “You think we have problems? You've got equally big ones.” Unlike countries that signed agreements such as the Helsinki Accords, committing to specific benchmarks, China has never truly agreed to external human rights standards. Fundamentally, they don't value Western opinions on these matters as much.

This highlights significant differences between the two systems. In the Soviet Union, deep-seated economic problems fueled a groundswell of support for dissidents. In China, however, economic conditions improved relatively quickly after the Mao era, which meant less grassroots support for dissident movements. This echoes something you write in the conclusion about the German historian Mommsen’s observation about the Nazi era — “resistance without a people.”

China's success with economic reforms, something Gorbachev couldn't replicate, effectively undercut much of the potential dissident support in China compared to what existed in the Soviet Union.

Ben Nathans: Yeah, that’s super important. If you ask yourself what was the single greatest, most resonant achievement of the Soviet state across its entire history, everyone from that country will tell you the defeat of Nazism in World War II. That was the shining moment. If you listen to Putin talk, he just reinforces that point — that it’s the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, this epic struggle that cost the Soviet Union roughly 25 million lives.

The problem with having a peak performance like that is that it’s fixed in time and it’s constantly receding in time from the current generation. The Chinese government’s greatest achievement is having lifted 700 million people out of poverty. It continues to provide a form of material well-being — it’s the gift that keeps on giving. It’s not stuck in time. It’s not an event that ended in 1945, the way the so-called Great Patriotic War ended. As a source of not just legitimacy, but prestige, the Chinese government has a product that is much more effective than the Soviet government or today’s Russian government has.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, the theme of prestige is something that has come up on past episodes of ChinaTalk. We did a four-hour two-part series on the new book, To Run the World. Ben, the sheer level of embarrassment among Soviet leaders is remarkable. You frequently mention how the Politburo would hold 30 or 40 meetings just to discuss handling someone like Sakharov. It's remarkable how worried they were about individuals making funny jokes at their expense and pointing out to the rest of the world that they’re a society where the emperor doesn’t have any clothes.

Ben Nathans: Yes, it’s something that I continue to struggle to understand. On the one hand, there was a tremendous degree of self-confidence. The Soviet Union won the war, they launched the first human into space, they were the largest country on earth, feared and respected by everyone, they were no longer alone in the socialist camp, it had a series of allies in Eastern Europe and was gaining more in Asia and in Africa, it even had Cuba in the Western Hemisphere. There were many markers of success and achievement.

This isn't even considering their performance in elite pursuits like chess, physics, math, ballet, poetry, and literature. In terms of high culture, all the benchmarks were met. Yet, as you point out, these apparent symptoms of insecurity were completely out of proportion to the actual threat. One gets the feeling there was a deep, subterranean anxiety they simply couldn't shake.

Henry Kissinger famously stated during détente that if a kiosk in Moscow could sell The New York Times or The Washington Post — effectively breaking the Soviet state's information monopoly — it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't make any difference. Evidently, the Politburo thought otherwise. They believed they couldn't afford any disruption to their control over what information Soviet citizens could access. That's why they tried to jam Western shortwave radio broadcasts, punished dissidents, and conducted thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of apartment searches in a completely quixotic attempt to literally destroy all samizdat. This was impossible because it was an entirely decentralized system of textual production; you simply can't control it, and the KGB failed miserably.

It's challenging to fully grasp the mindset of figures like Yuri Andropov, who led the KGB and briefly the Communist Party. How did he balance the Soviet Union's perceived security with its underlying insecurities? Did he genuinely view individuals like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and other dissidents, as potentially fatal threats to the Soviet system? The sheer number of man-hours and the level of anxiety dedicated to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago are mind-boggling. The regime truly perceived these texts and individuals as potentially lethal adversaries, despite the fact that, as mentioned earlier, the core activist group likely never exceeded a thousand people in a population of 250 million.

I had to ask myself, how did this tiny band of dissidents come to appear so threatening to the regime? Part of the answer is there was this underlying, unacknowledged current of anxiety about the Soviet Union’s sustainability. But there was also this belief that these dissidents were puppets of Western intelligence services. While they might look like a tiny band of intellectuals and misfits, they had the backing of the CIA, MI6, and other security services, and therefore they were worth taking seriously as a threat to the Soviet system. But there’s some mystery here that I have not been able to solve.

A Cautionary Tale 前车之鉴

Ian Johnson: There’s a corollary to that. If they took it all seriously, Xi Jinping in a speech bemoaned the fall of the Soviet Union. He said, “At the end of the day, no one was man enough to stand up and save it.” Essentially, why didn’t somebody send in the tanks? Why did they just let the whole thing collapse? On the one hand, they take all this so seriously, but at the end of the day, they seem also paralyzed by the same fear or the anxiety that you’re talking about, and they just can’t do anything about it.

Ben Nathans: It remains one of the greatest enigmas of the Soviet collapse: How could a superpower, armed to the teeth and having survived the most lethal attack in human history — Hitler's Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 — ultimately collapse like a house of cards?

I’m inclined to think that the explanation doesn’t lie in fear and anxiety. The truly surprising aspect, which you precisely identified, is the lack of resistance from those with the most to lose: the political elites. Why weren't the stakeholders in the Soviet system more aggressive, proactive and willing to use violence in its defense?

Here there are two parts to the answer. One is Gorbachev, who had orchestrated the reforms that ended up unintentionally unraveling the system. Gorbachev was such a perfect Leninist and had mastered and internalized the language of restoring the ideals of the Bolshevik and of Leninism to such a great extent that his conservative rivals inside the party bureaucracy and the state apparatus couldn’t find a distinct discourse to oppose him. He essentially co-opted the language of Leninism and of socialist idealism in a way that made it very hard for Soviet conservatives and system defenders to outmaneuver him. It took them a relatively a long time, relatively speaking, to understand that Gorbachev, while he sounded like the ultimate poster child for Soviet values and the Soviet system, was actually going to undermine it by trying to fix it and reform it. There’s that famous phrase from Alexis de Tocqueville: the most dangerous moment for an authoritarian regime is when it embarks on a campaign of reform. That’s when everything can go haywire.

There are two main parts to this answer.

1. Gorbachev himself — Gorbachev orchestrated reforms that, unintentionally, led to the system's unraveling. Gorbachev was such a devout Leninist, so adept at mastering and internalizing the language of restoring Bolshevik and Leninist ideals, that his conservative rivals within the party bureaucracy and state apparatus couldn't find a distinct discourse to oppose him. He essentially co-opted the very language of Leninism and socialist idealism, making it incredibly difficult for Soviet conservatives and system defenders to outmaneuver him. It took them a relatively long time to understand that while Gorbachev sounded like the ideal proponent of Soviet values, his attempts to "fix" and reform the system would actually undermine it. This aligns with Alexis de Tocqueville's famous observation: the most dangerous moment for an authoritarian regime is when it embarks on a campaign of reform, as that's when everything can go haywire.

2. Lack of systemic legitimacy — the other reason why Soviet elites did not, to use Xi’s words, stand up like a man and defend their interests and the system that had raised them and that they allegedly stood for, is that the dissidents had helped hollow out the legitimacy of that system. That was not really the dissidents’ goal. Remember, their goal was to disseminate legal consciousness among their fellow citizens and to get the Soviet state to be more law-abiding. They failed on both of those fronts. If anything, the KGB became less law-abiding as it grew more frustrated with the fallout from these various dissident trials. They always got the guilty verdict. Everybody was sentenced to five or six or seven years, and that’s because the KGB got on the phone with the lawyer before the trial began and dictated the outcome. But the political fallout of these trials was a disaster. The government looked clumsy, ham-fisted, authoritarian and secretive.

The unintended effect, but possibly the most important effect, historically speaking, of the dissident movement was that it hollowed out the legitimacy of the regime. Time and again, it demonstrated that the Soviet state, which 24/7 proclaimed itself the avant-garde of human history, the most modern and forward-looking society on Earth, couldn't even abide by its own laws. It was perpetually improvising and subverting its own legal system. Reconciling these two realities—an image as the vanguard of human history versus an essentially lawless government—was impossible. This contradiction undermined people's inherent loyalty to the system and led them to question its own self-promoting rhetoric.

Furthermore, by the time you get to the 1980s, this is a system that’s been around for 70-some years. Revolutionary energy, like all energy, is subject to entropy. It dissipates over time. What we’re dealing with by the 1960s and 70s is what I call “second-generation socialism.” It lacked the fervor, the “bloodlust” and the convictions that go along with revolutionary fervor of the original generation of Bolsheviks.

Among the many excellent reasons why one should learn Chinese if you’re a historian of the Soviet Union, it’s that the Chinese have studied the Soviet collapse more closely than anybody, because they perceive it as being the most important historical episode for them to master. God forbid that China should fall apart the way the Soviet Union did. I would love to be able to read what Chinese historians have written about the Soviet collapse, because the lessons that they draw are really important for the way the current Chinese government understands what it is, what it must avoid, and what it must do.

My understanding from secondhand accounts is that the dominant Chinese interpretation of the Soviet collapse interprets the collapse as a function of a loss of ideological vigor and of ideological commitment. That is why Xi is absolutely determined to constantly buttress ideological commitment to the party, to the nation, to the state. This is a hugely important example of the way countries extract historical lessons from other countries’ experience.

Jordan Schneider: It's interesting to consider this in the context of the era you're describing, Ben. The abundance of content and the ability to live a life largely removed from direct state interference in China today is fundamentally different from the Soviet experience. This holds true not just for the 1930s and 40s, but also through the 60s, 70s, and 80s in the USSR. You’re not stuck listening to state media all the time. You can read pretty much whatever book you want. You can even get on the Western internet for the most part and watch MrBeast. Actually, MrBeast is even on Bilibili. The extent to which the Soviet state’s hypocrisies have a detrimental impact on daily life in the latter half of the USSR creates a fundamentally different experience.

On one hand, the contemporary Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) survival strategy seems to be: “We'll make people richer and richer over time, ensuring they never have to think about politics.” However, this approach can be somewhat disappointing for someone like Xi Jinping, who was shaped by the Cultural Revolution and deeply believes in the Party and its mission. Having everyone simply tune out politically isn’t ideal; it’s neither particularly satisfying nor a reliable long-term strategy.

You also have this attempt, sometimes clumsy, sometimes more effective, to integrate Party ideology into college classes and other spheres. Ian, what are your thoughts on this tension between encouraging people to “tune out” politically while simultaneously trying to “tune them in” to bolster the party?

Ben Nathans: Is it truly the case that you can access virtually anything you want on the Chinese internet without fear of repercussions?

Ian Johnson: Well, a lot of things are blocked, but you can live a very full life — if you don’t ask too many questions about society around you. Often, people feel they’re getting almost everything they need. If you’ve studied abroad, you might want to access Facebook, but for most, there’s a parallel universe of perfectly adequate Chinese social media apps. People are generally prosperous and can travel.

While some might desire a bit more knowledge, even if you want to know about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, a government account is available. If you’ve heard about it, you can go online to Baidu, China’s equivalent of Wikipedia, and find an entry. It hasn’t been erased. It says that there were some chaotic people in China who caused an uproar and the government had to come in. They have accurate photos of government tanks that were burned out. If you see the picture of Tank Man, they’ll say, “Yeah, Tank Man, it shows the government didn’t run over people. There’s a guy standing in front of a bunch of tanks. The tanks are trying to get around him.”

They employ a lot of people to construct this matrix-like alternative universe. If you’re really hell-bent to dig deeper, you can get a VPN and jump over the firewall and see what’s going on. But most people, like in any country, are not that political. For 90% of the population, if tomorrow’s a better day, that’s pretty much okay.

Ben Nathans: Yeah. That description isn’t far off from how I’d describe life for many Soviet citizens in the 1970s, minus the economic prosperity. But there was still a sense that you could carve out a life for yourself outside the state’s constant ideological mobilization. People felt they had access to a lot — through shortwave radio, for instance — and while there was no internet, plenty of foreign literature circulated. As you said, most people in any society don’t particularly want to be politically engaged. That was definitely true during the Soviet period. I think it’s still true in Russia today, where for the vast majority, politics is seen as dirty. It’s something morally contaminating and therefore most people don’t want anything to do with it.

“Many Lives”

Ian Johnson: We talked earlier about how Soviet dissidence was primarily a male-dominated area, but there were very important women involved as well, including many of the famous people who put together the samizdat publications. But what was their role? The earlier dissident movement in China, especially after Tiananmen, is often criticized for being very male-dominated with big male egos clashing and creating organizations that fight more against each other than against the state. Whereas in more recent years, perhaps the only enduring civil society structures against the state now in China are feminist movements, and women working together seem to be able to get more things done than men. I don’t mean to essentialize or idealize things, but I wonder what it was like in the Soviet era, because it seems like we have these big names and they’re all men. Why was that?

Ben Nathans: It’s an interesting question. There’s the question of who actually did what and were there unspoken gender roles in a movement that, at least on the surface, resisted any kind of formal division of labor and formal hierarchy or leadership. In that sense, there was a strong anarchistic strain within the movement, the idea being that people should protest according to what their conscience has told them to do. But if you look at the history of who made the big programmatic statements, who articulated the legalist philosophy, and who started coming up with policy recommendations for the Soviet government when that started happening in the 1970s, that activity skews heavily towards males. We could talk at length about the actual roles that people played. A vast majority of people who typed samizdat and retyped it, were women.

But there’s a different layer on which you have to pose this question because the movement was partly shaped by the way it was covered by the Western media. The Western media was such a powerful bridge to a truly receptive audience — namely Western publics and governments — in contrast to the absence of any kind of dialogue with the Soviet state and with most of the Soviet population. Since the Western media was crucial to that, the way the media covered the dissident movement and its individual figures ended up having an impact on the movement itself.

What the Western media did was what it almost always does, which was to pluck out a handful of individuals for an enormous amount of attention and a very bright spotlight. It made household names out of people like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Natan Sharansky. Now, I don’t mean to take away from those individuals at all. They were extremely impressive. Sakharov was a world-class physicist, Solzhenitsyn arguably one of the most important writers of the 20th century. I don’t mean to belittle the Western journalists. Let’s face it, in the 1960s and 70s, being the Moscow correspondent of your newspaper meant you were certainly at the top of the foreign corps because you were being stationed at the epicenter of the Cold War enemy. These were very talented people, but they were almost all male, almost without exception, whether it was from the Times, the Post, Le Monde, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, you name it. They brought with them a certain set of unspoken expectations about who was a credible leader of a movement like this. They seem to have assumed from the outset, as did the KGB, that the only people who could possibly be credible leaders were men.

It’s interesting when you look at Western coverage, they’ll refer to someone called Mrs. Sakharov. Now, Mrs. Sakharov would have been known in her own country as Yelena Bonner. They refer to someone as Mrs. Sinyavsky. Mrs. Sinyavsky would have been known as Maria Rozanova, just like Mrs. Daniel was known as Larisa Bogoraz. I’m mentioning these examples because the naming practices are emblematic of certain assumptions about gender roles. Larisa Bogoraz was far more important to the dissident movement across its history than her husband and then ex-husband Yuly Daniel. I wouldn’t say Yelena Bonner was more important than Sakharov, but what she contributed to the movement was totally different and independent of what Sakharov was about. She was a different kind of human being entirely. He was shy and retiring and absorbed with physics problems and she was a firebrand and someone who would not take no for an answer.

Western coverage, which did much to put the movement on the map globally, was also a filtration system that highlighted the importance of some people, almost all male, and made invisible a whole bunch of other people. That’s why the subtitle of my book is The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Because, with all of the deserved respect for Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, both Nobel Laureates, they didn’t create the movement. They didn’t lead the movement. In many ways, while they were very important, they were not the people who really propelled it forward. I wanted to highlight those other lives that have been largely forgotten, both in the West and in today’s Russia.

Just as a footnote, the second meaning of the subtitle is a bit of a play on words there — the many lives of the Soviet dissident movement also refers to the fact that the movement went through several near-death experiences when it was almost crushed and annihilated by the KGB, and each time it had to reinvent itself and reformat itself in order to take up the banner of the rule of law in a new way and in a new mode, until the last time when it actually was crushed, really pretty much finally in 1982.

Jordan Schneider: Since publishing this book, has any unexpected information or contact emerged from readers?

Ben Nathans: There have been some readers who have contacted me to say either, “Oh, I knew so and so,” or “Why didn't you mention so and so?” But for me, the most unexpected response stems from the fact that I finished the book in the summer of 2023, it came out in the summer of 2024, and then Donald Trump won the election that November.

I came to this project wanting to understand how people who live in authoritarian societies construe their options for public engagement with the issues of the day. My background is in Russian and Soviet history, so that became my case study, obviously with the intention of it being relevant to those studying China, Iran, North Korea, and other authoritarian contexts. But then the election happened, and people began reading the book as a guide to being a dissident in the United States in 2025. They started asking themselves, “What would a rule-of-law platform look like under an administration that seems determined to, to put it mildly, repeatedly bend, abuse, or outright break the law?”

The American resonance of this story is something I absolutely did not anticipate. It has simply come up again and again and again.

Jordan Schneider: It's interesting because I almost read it the opposite way. Look, I am nominally a public person. I have a podcast and a newsletter that a lot of people read. I can say whatever the hell I want and pretty much nothing's gonna happen. I'm reflecting on the characters in Ian's book and in your book, and the challenge and the risk that they're going up against, and just the levels of seriousness of a decision to go up against the regime.

Look, 60 million Americans who voted for an opposition figure to Trump, right? We have elections that happen every few months, these special elections, mayoral elections. I mean, I’m sorry, guys, you are not Soviet dissidents out there. We still very much have a system and rule of law. My takeaway was that this is really apples and oranges here.

From a strategic lessons perspective, as well as a “look, don't get too high on your own supply and thinking you're really lying on the cross when you get to challenge these people in courts and elections and win it,” it almost comes off to me as offensive to the memory and the efforts that these people have made and are making in Russia and China today.

Ben Nathans: Sure, that's totally fair. As you say, the level of risk and what's on the line in engaging in dissenting activities is completely different in the two settings. But when you think about it, if you believe that the courts and the free press are the most important sources of institutional — call it what you want — resistance, balance, containment of this very aggressive executive branch, that resonates with the dissident story, right?

Samizdat is their version of a free press, and the various trials are their forms of testing the Soviet judiciary. But yes, obviously the differences are more striking and greater than the similarities, but who would have thought that the similarities would even be as striking as they are?

Jordan Schneider: Well, the biggest difference is it's not just the courts and the press, it's power. There is no universe in which Volpin gets elected to the Politburo. You have a Senate, and there's 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats. The Republicans, by the way, can barely pass any laws. There’s gonna be an election 18 months from now. That’s not not going to happen.

It's a stark contrast: for dissidents facing an incomprehensible, monolithic regime, their struggle is often perceived as hopeless. It demands a profound, almost holy conviction in truth and freedom just to imagine a world where change is possible. This level of existential commitment is what these dissidents embody.

In America, all one has to do is to start campaigning for an election 14 months from now. It simply doesn't equate. The impulse to draw parallels between contemporary American political action and the sacrifices of genuine dissidents in authoritarian states feels less about accurate comparison and more about a desire for self-heroization.

Ben Nathans: Yeah, that could be. What I had hoped would be the takeaway for American readers who were inclining in that direction would be that if the Soviet dissidents could operate under a system and a set of circumstances that was many orders of magnitude more hopeless than ours, then no one in this country has the right to give up hope. Because we have so many more grounds for optimism and confidence that the system will withstand a stress test. That would be a very healthy takeaway from this story. But as you know, people read things the way they want to read them.

Jordan Schneider: Is there a movie or a miniseries or some dramatization that you would really like to come out of this? Just picking one or two of these trials and turning that into a feature film would be something really special.

Ben Nathans: Various documentaries have been made about the dissident movement by Russians, including Vladimir Kara-Murza, one of the guys who was exchanged in the prisoner exchange last summer, who is very knowledgeable about the dissident movement and has interviewed many of the former dissidents. I don't know of a dramatization. There is a director who's toying with the idea of doing a biopic about Andrei Sakharov.

I think it's easier to organize a script around an individual than around my book, which has dozens and dozens of individuals. But if someone were to undertake that, I would, of course, be delighted. I just hope that it would be someone who can really capture the texture of life in the Soviet Union and not Hollywood-ize it.

Jordan Schneider: I think you can set it around one of these trials. The two novelists — it's gold. We didn't talk a lot about Amalrik, but what a character! I mean, you have the dialogue there already. It's just waiting for you.

Ben Nathans: Yes. Sometimes when I was writing, I just felt like I needed to do justice to my sources because they're already so fantastic.

Jordan Schneider: Well, if any Hollywood agents are reading this, feel free to reach out! Maybe once the AI tools get good enough, I'll use them to produce this movie, Ben. How about two quotes for us to close on to focus on these people and their experiences? We haven’t even talked about the international Soviet foreign policy dimensions and how to kept providing impetus to this movement.Vadim Delaunay said in a court hearing — he participated in the August 1968 public demonstration after the Czech invasion — “All my conscious life, I have wanted to be a citizen, a person who proudly and calmly speaks his mind. For 10 minutes, I was a citizen.”

Here’s a line from Sakharov saying, “It is essential that we get to know ourselves better. Soviet society had started out on a path of self-cleansing from the foulness of Stalinism. Drop by drop, we are squeezing the slave out of ourselves.”

The self-purification and the ennoblement of these people that they brought both to themselves, to their peers, and then to the world is one of the things that’s going to stick with me for a long time.

Ben Nathans: It’s going to stick with me, too.

Jordan Schneider: This is really one of them where, look, we just did a two-hour podcast and I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface. The details and drama and overall narrative arc of this book is really special. Every time I get something of this quality in the subject matter that fits right in ChinaTalk’s lane of Leninist history, communist history, it just brings a big smile to my face. I could not recommend this book more. Ben, thank you much.

For more Chinese context, check out Ian’s awesome book Sparks and all his other ones, Souls of China, one of my personal favorites as well. We close on a song. Ben, is there a song or two that you feel inspired by or captures the essence of the Samizdat movement?

Ben Nathans: Yes. Fortunately, the dissident movement had a kind of soundtrack, and that was the music that was being produced by the so-called bards. These were singers, men and women, who would sing just accompanied by their own guitar, often not well tuned. But that was deliberate, like samizdat, rough around the edges, lots of sweat and dirt. They were really poets who wrote poems set to music.

One of my favorites of these singers and songwriters, who was also an actor, was a guy named Vladimir Vysotsky, sometimes called the Bob Dylan of the Soviet Union. He has a song called “Hunting After Wolves” (“Охота на волков”), where he talks about the instinct of wolves to face up to the people who are trying to kill them. It’s been read, among other things, as a metaphor of the dissident movement that wolves cannot do other than their nature dictates. Dissidents were people who simply couldn’t live with a version of themselves that did not stand up and speak out against the injustice that they saw.

Great, you want to be a policy analyst in a topic vaguely adjacent to ChinaTalk. How to get started?

The following is my attempt to put my best advice in one place, supplemented with input from people I admire. What follows is biased towards my personal experience, namely working in China-adjacent policy research outside of academia in the US and building the ChinaTalk newsletter and podcast, though much of what I say likely applies more broadly outside the US and to other policy areas.

Start a Substack

Writing online is the most surefire way to get your first job in policy. There is more supply than demand for these jobs, so just having coursework and good grades in a given topic will not get you a position. A strong writing portfolio is the best way to break into a field where early career jobs are mostly filled through connections and unpaid internships. Employers want to know how you think and write, and that you care enough about these topics to do more than just assigned papers. Sole-authored internet writing is the most legible way to communicate your skill and value as a potential policy hire. And by doing it on a consistent basis, you’ll be improving in the research and writing skills necessary for any of these gigs, better setting yourself up for success once you do land a job.

Some social proof from a ChinaTalk disciple:

This should be the fun part! Unlike, say, fabbing chips, you don’t need to work at Intel or TSMC to get experience of doing the job. Researching and writing Substack posts on whatever you want is pretty much the best part of what any entry-level job at a think tank or policy research firm would consist of. If you don’t find yourself enjoying it and carving out time for this work while you’re in school, policy research and analysis roles are probably not the best fit.

Read this post below. If you want to maximize your impact in DC, you need to embody this energy. If it sounds like fun, you should know that you can do this sort of work even while you’re still in college or grad school.

Green Tape

One Year in DC

I graduated college a year ago today and moved down to DC…

Read more

4 months ago · 119 likes · 12 comments · Thomas Hochman

For some more inspiration, see the conversation I had with Divyansh Kaushik on how he got active on immigration policy while a PhD student (Spotify, iTunes).

I also talk with on this show in the last 10 minutes about how sole-authored writing earns you portable credibility in your field.

Nathan: Internal company work is how you get promoted, but external mindshare is how you always have a job available to you. That kind of power means I can do what I want. I’ll just go get a different job if I want a different job.

Jordan: If you’re at a consulting firm and you do good work, maybe five people will know about it. If you write something online and you do good work, your entire career cohort and all the hundreds of other future people who could hire you will know about it.

It’s important to do a good job in your work, especially when you’re junior — actually, at any time. But people forget that the number of people in your field and the opportunities out there that are beyond the direct thing you could be promoted for in your company are orders of magnitude larger. Particularly now that we live in the age of the Internet, you can write things even anonymously and people can read them.

Having some sort of public profile or portfolio that you can gain credibility points from is something that everyone should be taught by their career counselor when they’re 21 years old looking for a job.

has also written a great career guide of sorts on the intellectual journeys you’ll do if you want to contribute to the frontier of knowledge in these spaces.

Common objections I hear:

What if I get stuff wrong and people disagree with me?

Of course you’ll get stuff wrong! Policy research and analysis isn’t an exact science and if you’re not making conclusions with less than 100% confidence you won’t be interesting or relevant. If you’re worried about this, I’d explicitly highlight in your writing what you’re more and less confident about.

Responses to your work, both positive and critical, are an opportunity to learn things, get feedback and meet people interested in the same topics you are. And for what it’s worth for the first few times you publish online it is highly unlikely that it will garner much attention, giving you a bit of a breather before the really-not-all-that-bright lights of the internet start to shine on your work. To make it a little less intimidating, take ChinaTalk. Even today with 50k free subscribers on substack, we get less than a dozen substantive responses from our audience each time we publish.

What if someone digs up something I write and then I’ll never get confirmed as Assistant Secretary of X?

I would encourage you to highly discount this possibility, particularly relative to the opportunity cost of opting out of Twitter or writing publicly while a student or junior think tanker. If you’re the sort of person who is even worried in the first place about embarrassing themselves in front of future employers, as long as you don’t have a closet mean streak and let yourself get baited into attacking people personally, I can almost guarantee you it will not happen. It’s really not that hard to stop yourself from going full Neera Tanden. The chances of something you say going viral, particularly before you’ve spent enough time on the platform to know what might go viral, are infinitesimal. I have to expect that ChinaTalk readers are sharp enough not to say racist, misogynist or homophobic things on social media. And don’t forget, in 2016, Vance wondered whether Trump was America’s Hitler. Now he’s one heartbeat away!

With that all said, if you’re still nervous you can always write and tweet anonymously at first. It’s very easy to transition anonymous internet social capital to your real self later on.

Shouldn’t I just try to write an article for Foreign Affairs instead?

No.

1. The staffers who write laws and execute policy are mostly in their twenties and early thirties, probably don’t pay for a ton of paywalls, and like reading stuff they find engaging and useful at work. Mainstream policy outlets won’t let you be fun, develop a voice that people will remember as yours, and go into the requisite technical or legal depth necessary to really be useful for policymakers in the trenches. You can’t even use charts!

2. Foreign Affairs probably won’t take your pitch (which does not mean it’s a bad idea…honestly might be a positive signal). If they will do, they will flatten your prose, and you don’t gain as much professionally from having a byline that no-one will notice as opposed to someone subscribing to your substack and signing up for more of you in their life.

Does any of this actually change the world?

Yes. The showcase for publishing a think tank report (many of which get under fifty PDF downloads…) is often an event with a hundred people attending while scrolling twitter and a webinar that a few dozen tune into. After a month of weekly posting in a defined policy niche, you will have 100 subscribers on your substack in your field who will look to your takes. That’s holding a think tank event on demand! Your “eyeball minutes per effort” vs a DC happy hour is also far stronger on Substack even with a tiny audience.

Writing in public is how you will meet people interested in you in your field. It will generate interview requests from mainstream press and inbound from decisionmakers who are curious about your takes. Insofar as ideas matter, which they do (politicians and their staff do things not because a randomizer tells them to…), substack posts are the most efficient venue for early career folks to make a name for themselves and make an impact.

Don’t trust me that ideas matter, trust all the dictators who knew they had to kill the intellectuals! See ’s excellent piece:

Examples of folks who have had their careers and influence dramatically accelerated thanks to substacking include High Capacity, Cogitations, Interconnected Green Tape and SemiPractice. Folks with jobs in the current administration who used to substack regularly include (who started anonymously, mind you!) and . Sriram Krishnan at OSTP now had a popular podcast and David Sacks of course the All-In pod. I would be shocked if the posting to policy pipeline does not continue through whoever’s in the White House come 2029 (see all the Dem 2028 contenders who now have pods and substacks).

For a few examples close to home, I’d like to think our posting about TikTok helped raised the firm’s salience in DC and ChinaTalk’s work around export controls helped build momentum for smarter and sharper policy. Dylan Patel’s ‘Why America Will Lose Semiconductors’ helped get the Chips and Science Act across the finish line.

To help jump-start you, after you write three posts you’re proud of, email me and I’ll give you some feedback. You’re also welcome to write for ChinaTalk (pitch us here!) and do some posts with us you can cross-post on your own channel to get started.

You can also start a podcast!

Here are my generic tips for starting an interview-based show, which is the easiest format to get off the ground. In brief, interviews benefit from you not having to come up with original ideas to make the content as you can just riff off of your guests’ research and insight, plus you get to meet and (as long as you prepare by actually reading their work) impress people who could otherwise only maybe guilt into a not particularly insightful short career talk.

Thanks to 80,000 Hours for sponsoring this post. 80,000 Hours — named for the average length of a career — has been doing in-depth research on AI issues for over a decade, producing reports on how the US and China can manage existential risk, scenarios for potential AI catastrophe, and examining the concrete steps you can take to help ensure AI development goes well.

Their research suggests that working to reduce risks from advanced AI could be one of the most impactful ways to make a positive difference in the world. They provide free resources to help you contribute, including:

• A job board with hundreds of high-impact opportunities,

• A podcast featuring deep conversations with experts like Carl Shulman and Ajeya Cotra.

• Free, one-on-one career advising to help you find your path.

To learn more and access their research-backed career guides, visit 80000hours.org/ChinaTalk.

To read their report about AI coordination between the US and China, visit http://80000hours.org/chinatalkcoord.

Read

Your particular information diet is going to be what allows you to bring unique value as an analyst and thinker, so as you start to get caught up on what “everyone” is reading, aim to spend half your time reading stuff “no one” else is.

Give your assignments a chance. And the supplementary reading. And the papers of footnoted things that seem interesting. Get cheap used versions of your coursework on Amazon so you can read with a pen and write in the margins. If you’re struggling to focus while reading PDFs on your computer, get an old iPad, and take notes there.

If your assigned classwork reading isn’t grabbing you, don’t be scared to ditch boring stuff and hunt for what keeps you up at night wanting to finish. As the wise Tyler Cowen once said, “don’t read stuff you don’t love reading”.

Where to start? For China, The China Project’s best 100 China books list, the fantastic FiveBooks website which has a very well-developed China section, and Tanner Greer’s attempts to introduce folks to Chinese history or his favorite books. Don’t read books about China without citations from Chinese sources (much more common than you’d expect).

On AI policy, has put together a fresh new syllabus.

I’m biased against spending too much time reading the news vs developing a foundation of knowledge, though for interviews for policy-relevant internships and jobs you will have to demonstrate a strong level of fluency in current developments. To start on that path, subscribe to Sinocism (he offers a student discount), follow his links and get engaged in some storylines, and read what people are talking about on Twitter.

Yes, You Should Still Learn Chinese and Spend Real Time (not just a semester…) in Taiwan/China

Everyone you will talk to, people who can’t speak Chinese included, will say that the amount of Chinese they have is the bare minimum required to write credibly about China.

As AI-assisted translation is really good and will only get better, the marginal value of getting to HSK 4-5 from a pure analyst perspective has diminished. But fluency in the language and deep context gives you what you need to know where to look, a nose for what is and isn’t real, the ability to have conversations and consume media directly in Chinese. No one is writing something like this about Xi and the emerging succession crisis without having devoted years to understanding China and Party dynamics.

The best way to get good at Chinese is to live in China, which is much harder than it was in pre-COVID times. I wrote about my experience at Yenching Academy here, even though I finished the program in 2019 I’ve kept up with newer students who have been able to have similar experiences post-COVID. Taiwan still seems reasonably accessible for study abroad programs and has a boatload of scholarship programs to help ease the financial burden.

My collection of beginner to intermediate tips I made into a youtube lecture. In brief, don’t learn how to handwrite, don’t waste time in group classes, and spend the $10/hr on 1-1 classes with someone you vibe with on iTalki. For advanced learners, check out the app 小宇宙 for podcasts and troll Douban for contemporary TV and movie recommendations (here are my favorite recent Chinese tv shows). Learn Chinese with Rita is a fantastic youtube channel and I highly recommend her pronunciation course (which you should take the earlier the better so you don’t learn bad speaking habits).

My main mandarin grinding years were 2017-2020, so I’m a little out of date on the tooling—the best recent essay I’ve come across you can read here.

If you’re looking for things to write on the new substack you’ll make after you finish this post, there is still a huge amount of informational ‘alpha’ left in taking Chinese language sources and putting out summaries or annotated translations. Just posting random interesting things you see on Weibo or WeChat plus a tiny bit of context can earn you tens of thousands of Twitter followers.

Advanced language ability is not a golden ticket to a career working in and around China policy, just like having technical skills doesn’t necessarily give you a tech policy career. But it makes the experience so much richer. Try to frontload investments in language, as the older you get the harder it will be to find time.

Get on Twitter, I Think

José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente @ArtirKel

@m_ashcroft @nickcammarata Not being on twitter is a form of self harm due to deprivation of personal and work-related opportunities

5:50 PM ∙ May 28, 2021

I’m pretty sure Jose’s right.

My time on ‘China Twitter’ has been a profoundly intellectual and empowering experience. It’s degraded from where it used to be, but it is still where a ton of people spend a ton of time. For starters, you get to:

• Ask smart people questions. It’s one thing to go to Zoom office hours from 2:30-3:15 and ask your frazzled professor something about a topic they’re probably not that deeply read in. It’s quite another to be able to directly reach out to the leading expert in a said topic, who if they’re on Twitter is probably up for random conversation, and, if you ask politely, you can likely start a conversation with that person who may bring his or her other expert friends into the discussion. Twitter, if used correctly, can be office hours 3.0.

• See how people in the field think and read. ‘Meta-reading,’ or developing deep media literacy around news stories and policy discussion is one of the most useful skills you won’t get just through books. Spending time on Twitter watching how professionals discuss whatever in particular it is you’re interested in will give you a baseline that you can then engage with and contribute to.

• Short-circuit credentialism…to a point. Fancy degrees, recommendation letters and personal references from prestigious people don’t hurt. But personal connections are the way to get around not having the standardized test scores or the money to go to lots of expensive schools. You can develop these sorts of relationships through what may start as a random Twitter back and forth, just like you will with your readers once you start a Substack.

• Meet and develop genuine relationships with peers. 95% of the people you meet in “real life”, your high school and college friends, don’t care about China as much as or in the same way as you do. You may make a handful in a policy graduate school, and some more living in Beijing or Shanghai or DC, but you don’t have to do either of those things to find your crew. Perhaps the most affirming thing about the time I’ve spent on Twitter is that I now have maybe two dozen folks in the field, some of whom I’ve never met in person, with whom I feel “in this together” navigating research and career questions.

• Realize you’re just as smart as the ‘experts.’ On twitter you’ll see people who have fancy think tank jobs, once served in senior levels of government, and have tenured academic positions have terrible takes that you know are wrong. It’s fine to feel depressed at the amount of mediocrity that exists out there, but also let this inspire you that you’re less far from contributing to the knowledge frontier than you might think!

If Twitter is just too chaotic and Elon-y for you, Substack Notes is a slower, wholesome place where you will also find a ton of policy folks who are more likely to respond substantively than even on Twitter. Apparently there are people on bluesky too but I am not one of them.

Who should you follow? If you like ChinaTalk, seeing who I follow and interact with on Twitter is a decent place to start. Some other pointers from friends:

• Quality over quantity (by Pradyumna): As you tweet more and see posts going viral it may seem as if the most important thing is building a large audience. But that is harmful for the reason that you should not write or tweet for most people. It is worth having a high quality of things you tweet to attract the right quality of people. Or in other words, do things you are proud of. 

• Quote Tweets as an Onramp (by Emily Weinstein): Get started by tweeting quotes from and links to articles, reports, or speeches you find of particular interest or significance. You don’t have to hop on Twitter tomorrow and immediately have the hottest takes in town. Think of your profile as a curated newsfeed to start, and once you feel more comfortable, then start engaging with more of your personal view.

See ’s post featuring lots of really smart people saying how important Twitter was to them. Also, Guzey’s Best of Twitter substack is an powerful advertisement for the platform.

Get off Twitter too

It is addictive and you can overdose on it. Check out the OneSec app or just don’t install Twitter on your phone. Consider using the free StayFocused chrome add-on to limit the amount of time you can spend on social media. It also helps to mute Twitter notifications on your devices.

Scattered thoughts

Don’t spend too much time writing for college or grad-school outlets unless they let you repost on your Substack.

As you’re networking, discount heavily any advice you receive (including mine) as basically everyone will either tell you to do what they did, or if they’re miserable to not do what they did.

China generalists are a dying breed. See if you can pair your interest in China with another skillset (data science, energy policy, climate science, tech policy, transportation policy….) to set you apart from the crowd. Even if you don’t end up getting a job that lines up 1:1 with your interest, having developed a specialization will signal to potential employers your ability to bone up on topics that aren’t just ‘China.’

Living in DC, going to a DC-based school for an MA, and interning in-semester as much as possible is the dominant strategy for getting a DC blob job. That said, taking this route will by no means guarantee a position, and you very well may have to intern for $15-20hr with no benefits/health care for a considerable amount of time even after graduating before finding yourself a fulltime position. What’s more, this path is not really going to help you differentiate your thinking and analysis or support your language progress.

FAQ

Should I even get into the China-adjacent policy game in the first place?

I buy the 80,000 Hours-y argument that China analysts have a uniquely important role to play in helping the 21st century not go off the rails, and I’ve made about a decade of life choices around this contention. But from a lifestyle perspective, if you can find other things to do with your life that will fulfil you, you honestly probably should. Supply exceeds demand for policy analysis, and even people who have demonstrable expertise in very hot topics like China tech will not have the easiest time finding gainful employment (unless you wrote a popular substack while in undergrad/grad school I promise!).

Even if you do get on a track, pay is poor relative to what your brainpower could earn if you applied it in a different direction. Undergrads with the intellectual capacity to succeed in policy-land can make 3x+ straight out of the gate in tech, finance or consulting, and that gap only widens over time. If everything broke right for you over the past two decades, you today might be sitting in a brand name Mass Ave think tank making 150-250k as a senior fellow, with, if you’re lucky, some consulting work on the side. Here’s a ChatGPT query with specific salaries for think tank leadership you can find through IRS documents nonprofits have to file and some job posting salary bands to get a sense of what you’re getting into.

On the plus side, it mostly feels like work with a purpose and that helps ward off existential dread. Because of the labor market challenges, people are generally only getting into this game because they care, so your colleagues are likely to be passionate and enthusiastic (and/or have a financial cushion). Because supply outstrips demand, they’ll most likely be pretty competent as well. I’ve found it to be, with a very small handful of exceptions, a supportive community I enjoy engaging and spending time with. Also, very few positions in this field will have you consistently working 100-hour weeks like the highest paying white collar jobs out there.

How scared should I be that whatever things I do in China/interactions I have with Chinese people will stop me from getting a security clearance in my home country?

It’s impossible to know, but I find it hard to even get on a path to “know China” without going to China and living in the PRC for an extended period of time. That said, you should be wary of out-of-the-blue DMs on LinkedIn, ostensible Chinese think tank employees offering you money in exchange for research, and, for that matter, anyone offering you money in China.

Your odds of getting a clearance are probably a tad higher if your time in China was under a recognized program (probably academic) and not spent freelancing.

How should I network?

I’d highly recommend doing it organically via Twitter. The people you meet who are active on Twitter are self-selecting for being open to engaging with random people on the internet. Plus, you can first off get a sense of whether they are interesting and not jerks from how they tweet.

When reaching out to folks, I’d recommend carefully reading something they write, and in your email make it clear you did–reference specific things they wrote and say “oh X was really interesting”, and have follow-ups.

Lead with wanting to have a conversation about the content, maybe tack on a few career questions you may have in the end, and don’t ask for more than 20-30 minutes of someone’s time. More than any advice you can get from the person you’re talking to, having a conversation about the content that impresses the person will be of higher long-term value to you because you’ll stick out from the 95% of people who ask them questions you can get pretty good answers from in this post.

Should I get an MA?

Some few factors to consider: do you have a scholarship or money to burn? Do you know how to read by yourself? Reading a lot, writing publicly, soliciting feedback, and making friends on the internet can substitute for much of what an MA offers. That said, there is serious credential creep that makes it difficult with a BA to outcompete folks with MAs for entry-level jobs, and lots pathways into the US government and getting paid decently in government like the [now on indefinite hiatus…] PMF program and McCain Fellows have graduate degree requirements.

Q: Should I go to law school?

I have no idea, but try to talk to at least three lawyers whose careers seem really cool and who are happy in their jobs before you do. My two cents is that it’s very expensive and if you’re dead set on doing China-adjacent policy work, a JD really isn’t a prerequisite. Don’t forget about opportunity cost when considering the years and money you’ll end up pouring into advanced education!

Q: Should I get a PhD?

I’m not the right person to ask. I decided not to because I realized I was a little too ADHD to focus that long on one question. I have also found myself happier scratching my ‘teaching’ itch through making ChinaTalk content for the masses as opposed to teaching classes in person. That said, people do cool stuff in academia too!

Do not base a decision to get a PhD only on your GPA and professors’ advice. Find current PhD students and in particular PhD dropouts to get a different view of the path.

Q: I’m not a US national and want to work in DC, what should I do?

Be advised that it will be near impossible to find someone in the policy space to sponsor your visa. Only having one year of OPT to offer potential employers will be a difficult sell. STEM-y programs that offer three years of OPT seem to be a much better value proposition, but even then, three years of an American entry-level think tank salary are unlikely to make you whole from what an MA without a scholarship would cost.

Q: So Jordan, you do tech + China: any thoughts on working in that space?

Never a dull day on the China tech beat! That said, even with all the attention this space gets there seem to be maybe only thirty analysts outside of government who work in think tanks and research firms so for as hot a topic as it is, it’s still a very niche field.

A serious technical background isn’t necessary to do good work, but a technical degree coupled with an understanding of policy and political debates is a hack that can very quickly get you to a knowledge frontier where you can be adding to the broader discussion. Justin Sherman, for instance, was writing articles galore for major publications while a college junior because he brought a technical analytical mindset to the table that the vast majority of think tankers writing about technology-adjacent issues don’t have. The same with taking Chinese content and putting it in a format digestible for English speakers, taking basic technical knowledge in CS, EE, bio or what have you and applying it to a policy setting can be very valuable.

Thoughts from other young analysts I respect

of

Book reviews remain an underrated way to start generating your own ideas and figure out how you actually want to share them with the world. Ditto book threads on Twitter. Far more people want to hear about the book you’re reading than have actually read it. That’s especially true if you’re pulling something niche/from a back catalog/in another language/orthogonally related to the field you’re in.

Think in terms of arbitrage. Ideas that may be table stakes in one field may be incredibly underrepresented in another field. The grand strategy lens on X, or the technical lens on Y, or the political theory lens on Z.

Relatedly, don’t be scared to sound the same notes repeatedly. Most people who encounter your stuff aren’t religious readers of yours. They haven’t gotten tired of your three bits yet. Don’t abuse that privilege, and try to deepen your thinking on the topics you regularly discuss. But it’s okay to be a bit dogged about attacking the same intellectual interest from slightly different angles.

Jake Eberts on creating BadChinaTake

As an early-career professional or student, you unfortunately have to respect the pecking order to some extent, which is why anonymous accounts can get away with being more aggressive as long as they know what they're talking about. Regardless, do not mistake any sort of argument or contention for fighting; it's perfectly okay to use Twitter as a forum to challenge others' ideas. Your name will pop up in people's feeds, which is a good thing.

Do keep in mind that even the most esteemed figures in the field can be functionally just large children, so de-escalation will usually be your responsibility if it ever gets to that, unfortunately.

Emily Jin: Ask yourself what is your “northern star” for being in the China policy space? 

Synonymous with this question: What gets you out of bed in the morning? What is your raison d’etre? How central is “understanding China” to your purpose, since not everyone’s full focus would be China? For example, you could be coming from a functional background in political economy, and you really want to understand how China may prove or disprove frameworks you picked up in your undergraduate/graduate classes. Your “northern star” in this case may be to understand whether autocratic political-economic systems may prevail in the next century. In that case, China is then by default a polity of focus, though you may still retain your primary analytical lens of political economy.

Test your answer out (recommend stream of consciousness style word doc typing or go old school with a pen) and see if what’s on the page compels you.

Emily Weinstein on humility and being a woman in policy/national security

As in most industries, there are egos galore in DC, and learning how to navigate these is unfortunately part of the experience. This can be even more daunting as a young woman (or minority in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual identity, etc.), as the space has traditionally been dominated by white men. Look at how Erik Larson described the State Department in In the Garden of Beasts as “an elite realm to which only men of a certain pedigree could expect ready admission.” We’ve certainly come a long way since the 1930s, but we still have a long way to go.

Starting out, I felt a strong urge to write on every topic on China – I wanted to be at the forefront of every think tank event, every diplomatic call, every Xinhua article, and more. I stayed up late watching events streamed in Beijing overnight to make sure I was the first person (to my knowledge) to tweet something catchy or notable. I tried to soak up every piece of analysis and have a take on everything. I was exhausted. I felt like I had to do more to stand out, partly thanks to my gender, but also thanks to my own unrelenting competitive spirit, which I see in many of the younger folks making their way to Washington. 

This was not sustainable. Instead of continuing down that competitive route, I found myself wanting to lean on others more. Where I previously sought to compete with colleagues to have the best assessment or strongest prediction, I instead wanted to hear their thoughts–not only on their impressions of my takes but also on their takes as well. In doing so, I stopped the relentless doing and started listening. Once I started listening, I stopped thinking that I had “discovered” the next hot topic in China studies, and instead started listening to others in the community–not just the ones who had been around for decades, but also my peers. This was such a humbling practice, and I truly believe it has helped get me to where I am today.

In my experience, humility is such a crucial part of navigating not only the China policy world but also the broader professional environment. It has helped me find a diverse set of allies (and friends!) in my community as well as invaluable teachers and mentors. DC is exhausting and lonely without these resources. Find people to lean on, and don’t let the rat race get to you. Take your time to do honest and thoughtful work, and you will grow your brand organically from there.

David Fishman on unknown unknowns

When you get started in China studies, and especially learning Chinese, you get a lot of praise and attention in China. The expectations for a non-Chinese person are pretty low in terms of language achievement, grasp of Chinese cultural, political, or historical features, etc. It’s too easy to learn a little bit and then get mountains of praise and fool yourself into thinking you know a lot. You’re even more in danger of overestimating your own knowledge after you’ve legitimately learned a fair amount (e.g. a specialized higher degree).

In a world where quality China credentials are still rare (relative to the importance of the subject anyway), even partial knowledge is enough to score you a respectable career. But just like anything else in life, knowing some can end up being worse than knowing nothing, especially if you only learned the 皮毛.

The deeper you get into learning specialized things in China, the more you appreciate just how large the body of knowledge is that you didn’t know. About history, political trends, cultural sentiments, prevailing attitudes, everything. Whatever it is, there’s definitely an angle you missed. Having healthy respect and appreciation for the potential existence of all the stuff you don’t even know you don’t know will make you a much better analyst.

After a while, you want to use hedging language for everything, which might sound like a lack of surety to a layperson’s ear, (or maybe a turnoff to certain kinds of bosses, who want a black or white answer) but probably will sound like wisdom to your most experienced peers, who know true black and white answers are as rare as pandas. No matter how much “China stuff” you know, there’s still more stuff you don’t know, and even more stuff you don’t know that you don’t know. That stuff will lead you to bad assumptions and false conclusions if you don’t make an effort to account for it.

Kelsey Broderick - try out different jobs, find your niche

Being a China analyst seems relatively straightforward: learn the “truth” about China or US-China and give your take on it. However, your take will vary based on the sector you’re in and the job you take. At a think tank, you will probably be closest to a straightforward analysis job (primary source research, writing, etc.) but you might find that you need a PhD.

At a gov job (in this case a USG job) politics unsurprisingly and definitely matter. Your analysis will be used to fit into the administration’s overarching China policy and you will work toward that end (currently competitive/antagonistic). If you decide to work in the private sector (political risk, in-house analyst at MNC) your analysis will be leveraged more for cooperation or finding the space to continue or expand commercial activity with China.

You will need to decide how you want to use your knowledge and what you feel comfortable using it for. Who you want to inform about China? Do you want to prevent China from rewriting the international system? Do you want to promote commercial ties/try to prevent WWIII? Etc. etc. If you can, try internships in various industries to see what you like - this is where it’s important to reach out to people with China jobs you’re interested in because they can point you in the direction of good/paid experiences.

Gerard DiPippo, former CIA analyst, on how to get into the CIA

Getting a job at CIA requires planning, patience, and luck, but it can be rewarding, especially for those interested in China. The CIA website lists programs, vacancies, and hiring needs and only U.S. citizens should apply. My impression is that functional expertise—economics, technology, cyber, programming, etc.—are in higher demand relative to regional expertise, in part because you’re more likely to be able to acquire the latter on the job. Priority language skills, including Mandarin, are a plus. CIA does not require a master’s degree (or PhD) to join, though if of interest there are programs for officers to continue their studies after they join. I recommend you work through a recruiter, which is easiest if you are enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program. Online applications without recruiter support or referrals are a long shot. If you do not get an interview, reapply in a year or two, as sometimes hiring is subject to budgetary cycles. CIA offers internships for analysts, which are a path to a full-time position.

Everyone must undergo the security clearance process. Even if you receive a “conditional offer of employment,” your clearance could take up to a year, sometimes longer, and is not guaranteed. You should have a personal sense of whether this is a real risk or a drawn-out formality, but at a minimum I recommend not using illegal drugs, be honest and forthright, and don’t try to overthink or game the process. Have a backup plan while you wait. If you manage to navigate the process, you’ll have wonderful opportunities, especially for someone early career. 

I hope for this to be a living document and for more folks to contribute their two cents, particularly as there are plenty of aspects of the China analyst experience I either gave short shrift to (JD, PhDs) or didn’t feel qualified to comment on (navigating this world as a Chinese-American or PRC national). If you’d like to add your two cents please drop them in the comments and I can incorporate into the main body as appropriate.

What does it take to make a living betting on politics? Can prediction markets offer insights about the future that other analyses cannot?

To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed Domer, a professional prediction markets bettor. Domer is the number one trader by volume on Polymarket, and he’s been trading since 2007. He initially entered this world through poker, but now makes bets about who will win foreign elections, whether wars will start, and which bills will become law.

We discuss…

• Why some issues — like Romanian elections, the NYC mayoral race, or Zelenskyy’s outfit choices — can attract hundreds of millions of dollars in trading volume,

• Systematic biases in prediction markets, including why they overestimate the likelihood of a Taiwan contingency,

• What happens to prediction markets in the absence of insider trading regulations,

• Why prediction markets are still a solo endeavor, and what a profit-maximizing team of traders would look like,

• Bonus: How betting markets backfired on Romanian nationalists, what AI can teach you about betting, and other insights on winning from one of Domer’s contemporaries.

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

This episode is brought to you by ElevenLabs. I’ve been on the hunt for years for the perfect reader app that puts AI audio at the center of its design. Over the past few months, the ElevenReader app has earned a spot on my iPhone's home screen and now gets about 30 minutes of use every day. I plow through articles using Eleven Reader’s beautiful voices and love having Richard Feynman read me AI news stories — as well as, you know, Matilda every once in a while, too.

I’m also a power user of its bookmark feature, which the ElevenReader team added after I requested it on Twitter. ChinaTalk’s newsletter content even comes preloaded in the feed.

Check out the ElevenReader app if you’re looking for the best mobile reader on the market. Oh, and by the way — if you ever need to transcribe anything, ElevenLabs’ Scribe model has transformed our workflow for getting transcripts out to you on the newsletter. It’s crossed the threshold from “95% good” to “99.5% amazing,” saving our production team hours every week. Check it out the next time you need something transcribed.

The Rise of For-Profit Forecasting

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start with the basics. How do these markets work, and how are they different from buying Apple stock or betting on a sports game?

Domer: It’s somewhat similar to betting on a sports game. The most popular market by far is predicting who will win the US presidential election. This happens every four years, and it’s not just Americans who are interested — people around the world like to participate.

The system works on a 0 to 100 scale that assigns odds. For instance, in the 2016 Hillary versus Trump race, Trump had about 30% odds to win going into election day. If you wanted to bet on Trump, you might bet $3. If he loses, your bet goes to zero. If he wins, it goes up to 100, so you’d get $10 back.

It’s basically a binary outcome — you either win zero or you win 100, depending on whether your prediction comes to fruition.

Jordan Schneider: For context, we now have eight figures being bet on the outcome of the New York City mayoral election. We have $200 million of volume traded on whether Zelenskyy will wear a suit before July. These markets are extremely liquid, with millions or tens of millions of dollars in volume. We reached billions during the presidential election, but even niche topics like a Romanian mayoral election saw $6 million in total volume traded.

This is no longer a niche phenomenon. Dismissing these numbers as lacking proper price discovery compared to the trading volume of NVIDIA or Apple isn’t necessarily accurate. How have you seen the relative efficiency of these markets change as they’ve grown larger and more popular?

Domer: They’ve grown tremendously since I started. When I first began, a $10,000 bet made you a big whale. Now you’re just a small fish in the ocean. As they’ve gotten bigger, they’ve also expanded significantly in scope.

When I started, there were basically two major markets: who would win the presidential election, and who would win Best Picture at the Oscars. Now it’s become this widespread phenomenon that encompasses many countries, numerous races, economic predictions — like what the Fed will do. The breadth of topics and the level of participant interest have exploded.

Jordan Schneider: I’m curious about the professional approach to this. How would you describe your process? Let’s pick something more esoteric than a presidential election — maybe you could walk through the Pope example or another market you’ve been analyzing. What does it take to develop an edge in these topics?

Domer: At the basic level, succeeding in these markets requires two things. First, you need to be a curious person who’s eager to learn. Second, you need to enjoy following the news and staying current with daily developments in various stories.

Take the Pope example. Papal conclaves only happen every 10 to 15 years. These aren’t areas where people maintain expertise — you have to dig into archives to understand what happened last time and read stories from 15 years ago about how these events unfold. You need to train yourself to examine all the contours of an event.

When a pope passes away and they’re selecting a new one, everyone interested in betting starts at the same point. You’re competing against perhaps a thousand other people, all beginning from the same starting line. Success comes down to whether you can research faster, better, and more accurately than your competitors. That’s essentially what my job entails.

Jordan Schneider: What’s interesting, as you’ve mentioned in past podcasts, is that even with niche topics like a Romanian election or Israeli politics, the betting pool isn’t dominated by Romanians or Israelis reading local news sources. Even when there are locals involved, the center of gravity consists of international observers. The local knowledge advantage isn’t as pronounced as you might expect.

Domer: That’s mostly accurate. The center of any election market will be people who aren’t necessarily subject matter experts. However, it will attract a minority of people who live in the region or are directly impacted by the event. This brings in additional interest and new participants, though that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re more informed.

Being closer to an event might actually create bias. If you have a personal interest, you might bet on someone you’re rooting for, whereas as an American, I’ve never heard of this candidate, so I don’t have a rooting interest. Various factors come into play regarding whether someone directly impacted by an event will participate and how that affects their judgment.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s discuss the social utility argument for these markets. Having accurate betting lines on the Knicks and whether they’ll win on any given Tuesday night — providing a price discovery function for that — doesn’t seem particularly beneficial for the world. But it’s very different when you’re talking about whether wars will start or end, elections, and similar events. As prediction markets have grown in prominence and sophistication, how has your thinking evolved about their broader utility?

Domer: That’s an excellent question. Consider a world where prediction markets don’t exist at all. If you’re trying to figure out whether there’s going to be a recession this year, you’ll typically rely on pundits to inform that decision. The world of punditry doesn’t reward you for being right, nor does it punish you for being wrong. It revolves around entertainment — is this pundit convincing? Is he entertaining? Is he saying interesting things? That’s the nature of punditry. It’s not necessarily punishing you for being wrong or rewarding you for being right.

Prediction markets are essentially the next level of punditry. They’re not a perfect solution — if Polymarket says the chance of a recession is 25%, that doesn’t mean we have the definitive answer. Nobody came down from heaven and declared it’s 25%. We have no idea. But it’s a more advanced form of punditry where you are punished if you’re wrong and rewarded if you’re right. It’s punditry with skin in the game.

Obviously, prediction markets encompass more important topics than sports games, though that’s not to say betting on sports isn’t fun or important for people who are interested in it. It’s just a different facet of predicting outcomes.

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Jordan Schneider: As you start to see news stories about prediction markets and politicians feeding off those stories — particularly with Vivek Ramaswamy over the past few months, as his number crept up from 1% to 5% to 10% — this became a tangible way for him to demonstrate his momentum. Are you seeing more of these feedback loops where prediction markets manifest in reality, which then manifest back in prediction markets?

Domer: It’s a fascinating question because it raises the possibility of the tail wagging the dog. If this happens, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy where someone with deep pockets goes onto one of these markets and bets themselves up. Then they can say, “I have momentum. Here’s proof. Someone’s betting on me. My price is going up."

There’s a perfect example from 2012 during the GOP nomination, which was essentially a clown car with multiple candidates going up and down — Herman Cain, Mitt Romney (who ultimately got the nomination), Rick Perry, and others. Every week brought a new frontrunner — Newt Gingrich, and so on. Interestingly, during the summer, someone on InTrade

was buying massive amounts of Donald Trump contracts — ridiculous amounts, way above where the market should have been. I was thinking to myself, “This might literally be Donald Trump or one of his associates.” Back then, the market wasn’t as liquid, so maybe the person was spending $50,000 on this, which is significant but essentially functions as a commercial. Was this guy preparing to run and trying to boost himself? I thought it was an interesting case study.

Going back to your question about whether the tail wags the dog — yes, I think there are interesting feedback loops. The other factor is market liquidity. Sometimes these markets have more liquidity than the event’s apparent importance would suggest, like the Zelensky wearing a suit market.

Jordan Schneider: What’s interesting is the story from the 2024 election about the “French whale” who was buying up Trump contracts, basically driving the price up five or six points for only $25 million. In the context of a presidential election, that’s equivalent to a handful of ads, which might win you a few votes. Instead, it created an entire news cycle about someone knowing something others don’t, and voters tend to vote for winners.

This dynamic seems very affordable, especially in something like a New York City Democratic primary, where it would cost only $50,000 to $100,000 to get Brad Lander’s name on the map as having momentum. I’m surprised it isn’t happening more frequently. I guess we’ll reach that world eventually. Maybe these markets just need to be liquid enough for someone to make enough money on the other side to buy it back down.

Domer: You mentioned the French whale — I was actually one of the people who helped break that story. One really interesting aspect was that people would DM me their guesses about who it was. The number one guess by far when the story first broke was that it was probably Elon Musk, because he had started a super PAC and has enormous wealth. To him, this would be a drop in the bucket. It made total sense that one of the benefactors would be the one doing this, rather than some true believer who had been investigating and conducting polling.

Jordan Schneider: What’s interesting is that the narrative reinforcement cycle seems most relevant for elections. But there are markets where it’s basically one person making a decision — will Trump bomb Iran? Will Netanyahu bomb Iran? Will Hamas and Israel make a peace deal? Will Zelensky wear a suit? The momentum behind these predictions is unlikely to influence outcomes, or maybe it does. Perhaps we’ll reach a point where these numbers become so prominent that a president will feel they’re letting people down if they don’t do what the markets expect, which could become self-reinforcing and factor into their calculations.

Domer: That’s a fascinating and relevant question, and I’m not sure I have a good answer. It’s something I grapple with — whether the markets could theoretically get too big for the actual events they’re trying to predict.

Jordan Schneider: The other issue is there’s no SEC oversight — no insider trading regulations. There are plenty of people who know whether many of these things will happen. No one knows who’s going to win a presidential election, but there are many markets involving specific decisions where insiders exist. If I’m some random person in Iran working in the IRGC and this is my one opportunity to make $10 million because I know whether we’re going to attack America back, why not? How do you think about the insider trading dynamic, and has it manifested at all?

Domer: What’s interesting is that I’ve been doing this for such a long time, and from the beginning, people’s first reaction to big swings is, “Oh, some insider is betting on this market.” 99.9% of the time it has nothing to do with an insider. It’s a true believer or somebody who clicked the button by accident or similar.

But lately, with the markets getting so big, I’m becoming more suspicious. There were a few markets recently asking what Israel would do, and these accounts that were newly created and funded with $100,000 or so came in. They only bet on this one market — Israel’s going to do XYZ. It happens, and then they withdraw. This behavior seems exactly like what an insider would do. As the markets become bigger, my initial assumption that 99.9% of the time it’s never an insider starts to break down given how much money is involved.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because specifically on international relations, there are DOJ indictments showing how much money people make when they’re caught spying. If you’re a really good spy selling secrets, you probably make a few million dollars. Once these markets are big enough where you can make $10 million in an afternoon through crypto with no one knowing, or you can convince yourself you won’t get caught, this creates a new dynamic.

Not many national security establishments or intelligence agencies have processed this yet: why sell my secrets to the Chinese when I can tell the world 24 hours or even three hours before something happens by making a bet on it, then retiring six months later and moving to Bermuda?

Domer: You’re exactly right. It’s untraceable. But I do think the arc of these markets is toward regulation. This might not be a 20-year problem, but it could be a problem over the next few years as we figure out regulations.

Jordan Schneider: What would that look like? Would you have to trade with a driver’s license? That would probably solve some of those issues, right?

Domer: It could. This is a fraud issue not only with crypto, but trading in general regarding the depth to which you examine your customers and their funds. If you’re going to put up markets sensitive to national security and trade in a country where those national security issues are very important, then the arc of these markets seems to be toward disclosure rather than obfuscating what’s actually happening.

Jordan Schneider: What’s your take on the broader ethics and where you would draw the line? We already have markets that are pretty close to death markets — asking when a leader will lose power. It’s not phrased literally that way for smart legal purposes, but where would you draw the line on what’s not acceptable to trade on?

Domer: It’s a hard question. If you think about a straight war market — will Russia and Ukraine get into a war — and you rewind four years, this was a really important question. People should know the answer to this. We should be trying to figure out what the answer is, and prediction markets are really good at figuring this stuff out.

I see both sides of the argument because it does feel distasteful. Obviously, it’s not just economic impacts or world impacts, but people on an individual level are going to be hugely impacted, possibly in negative ways. In that aspect, it feels unseemly. But to me, the importance of the event overtakes the unseemliness because we’re answering questions that need to be answered. We need to assign a probability to some of this stuff to an extent.

Jordan Schneider: One class of questions that makes me really uncomfortable — and it doesn’t really exist on Polymarket yet, but occasionally shows up on Manifold — are these very personal ones about people who aren’t celebrities. If you’re in high school and you can make a betting market on whether this couple will break up, that seems problematic. It’s similar to how no one’s allowed to bet on high school sports, and you can’t do prop bets on college athletes. You don’t need to expose anonymous individuals to this stuff.

Then you have this sci-fi arc where a lot of those Biden markets were kind of like Biden death markets. The assassination connection to some of these feels unseemly, but having some sense of the probability that Putin will succeed in assassinating Zelensky is useful. But then you have horrible incentives where someone bets on it and commits an assassination. There are enough crazy people out there, right?

Domer: It’s definitely something we need to grapple with. I’m not sure I have the answer. I do agree that not everything necessarily deserves a market, and where we draw the line between what gets a market and what doesn’t requires careful consideration.

Jordan Schneider: As you trade and see these markets move, I’m curious about the balance between slow versus fast thinking. On one hand, you mentioned the Pope earlier — how you want to understand how past conclaves played out and get the backgrounds of all the different players. But once news starts happening, these markets can move very quickly. It seems there’s a lot of money made and lost in responding to breaking news and processing it correctly. How do you think about that conceptual difference, and how has the speed of these markets changed over time?

Domer: It used to be that if you read some tweet and logged into the market, it might take minutes for that tweet to be fully incorporated. By tweet, I mean some breaking news event, which is usually encapsulated in a quick tweet. But if you look at what’s happening recently — in the past few months — if you take more than three seconds to react, you’re glacially slow. The speed of these markets adapting to news has become so much faster than it used to be.

You have to be very careful and quick in how you react to things. But then the second-order effect is that once the quick reaction has happened, you need to think slower about it. You need to figure out whether this actually makes sense, because sometimes the initial move isn’t necessarily correct.

A Rōnin’s Game

Jordan Schneider: Is there algorithmic trading like there is on public financial markets, or is it just more people who click faster?

Domer: Someone at a VC firm was actually asking me about this the other day because they’re looking into it. I know at least two people have tried it, and there wasn’t much success. I know in one instance — because I invested in this guy, and he now works for an AI company — it didn’t work out for us, but it worked out for him.

It hasn’t been successful yet that I know of. Who knows? Maybe there are people with secret Polymarket accounts using AI agents, but it’s coming.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because we’re now very much in a world where AI processes quarterly reports and listens to earnings conference calls in real time. It does it faster and probably better than the analyst sitting there. But the fact that this hasn’t come to Polymarket yet is partially a function of there being less money to be made. Maybe there’s also something about these markets being much more idiosyncratic than comparing this quarter’s Walmart returns to last quarter’s.

Domer: There’s a very strong qualitative element to it, not necessarily quantitative. Not that AI is amazing at quantitative analysis yet either, but there are idiosyncrasies, intricacies, and little things in the rules that may alter a market one way or another. AI isn’t quite at that level yet.

Jordan Schneider: Are there teams trading yet? Is it still mostly an individual game?

Domer: At the high level, yes, it’s individual. I know teams have been created around the presidential election because there’s a lot of information out there and you need to get it very quickly. Teams were created for the US presidential election. I was on a team for that in the previous two elections.

But most of the time, I describe it as being rōnin — we’re individual samurai going about our lives. We talk to a lot of the other rōnin, but we are not necessarily coordinating with them.

Jordan Schneider: This is the financial parallel of hedge funds, right? Now you have entire — almost all of the most successful hedge funds have dozens, if not hundreds, if not even a thousand-person research teams. Can you talk me through an example of a market you traded where you felt like if you could duplicate yourself and had more research, you could get more of an edge? Is it wider coverage where you think there’s more alpha? What could a 10-person outfit potentially do in this space?

Domer: People have approached me about forming a team, so I know a little about it. Where you would really want to focus is making sure everybody has different strengths. If I were building a 10-person team, I would want somebody really strong on politics, somebody really strong on foreign politics, somebody really strong on quantitative things and statistical modeling. Then I would probably want to duplicate each of those people so there are two people doing the same things.

The other thing about prediction markets that doesn’t get much focus compared to financial markets is that prediction markets are 24/7. The news doesn’t sleep. If you’re trading financial markets, you can safely get your eight hours of sleep. You could theoretically do that and not miss any news whatsoever, but in prediction markets, sleep is the enemy. It’s very dangerous to sleep. If you’re building a team, you would probably want redundancies and widespread expertise in many different areas.

Jordan Schneider: You said you talk to a lot of other people in this space. Give us a little anthropology — who are these folks who make up the majority of trading in the market?

Domer: I come from a poker background, and a poker player is probably a good benchmark to think about these players. It’s mostly young men who like taking risk, who are good at math, good at analyzing things, and interested in the world. That describes 95% of people using prediction markets.

Jordan Schneider: That’s interesting because poker is about getting better at this very closed system, right? There’s an aspect of reading human beings, but every new market you explore, you’re learning something novel — about a new country or situation or politician or something about the economy. There’s a different type of curiosity between someone who wants to memorize all the openings in chess or all the hands and ratios in poker versus someone willing to play in such an open-ended space as political prediction markets.

Domer: A poker player or chess player is very math-focused and very good at pattern recognition, which includes reading the opponent and reading patterns. That’s an element of prediction markets. But to your point, the other element is creative thinking and being able to pivot from one topic to another that may be very disparate and may not be related at all, but you can notice similarities and quickly come up to speed on a new topic. It’s not only the chess or poker element, but also creative thinking.

Jordan Schneider: Another thing is that there’s not a lot of emotional valence and connection that you have with any given poker hand, aside from your personal investment in it, as opposed to a war starting or a presidential election. I’m curious how you and other folks have trained — or maybe anesthetized is not the nicest word — but how you divorce yourself from the actual developments in order to be a more clinical analyst of this stuff.

Domer: I was nodding nonstop to that question because it absolutely applies. You have to divorce yourself because I’m a person who reads the news. I watch a lot of news. I follow the news. I’m well aware of the world. I talk with other people. I talk with my spouse, and I have very strong opinions. You have to leave those opinions at the door, which is very hard to do.

If you’re trying to predict something that you want to happen, maybe limit yourself to only a couple hundred bucks and not really try to make a living betting on things that you want to happen or betting against things that you don’t want to happen. You have to both put it at the door and self-limit yourself — not get too involved in something that you want or don’t want to happen.

Jordan Schneider: Speaking of a topic people have strong feelings about, a lot of politics in these markets involves modeling the thought process of Donald Trump. What are the mental models of his decision-making that you’ve found most helpful over the years?

Domer: The big-level view of Trump is that he’s very chaotic, and chaos is great for prediction markets. If you just have a president like Biden, Biden didn’t fire a single cabinet secretary. The only cabinet secretary that left was going to become the commissioner of the NHL. If you have this very boring presidency versus this very chaotic presidency, obviously the chaotic presidency is going to be much more conducive to predicting what’s going to happen next and people following what’s going to happen next.

But the interesting thing about Trump is he’s changed between his first presidency and his second presidency. In his first presidency, he was firing people all the time. He probably had three cabinet secretaries fired within six months. Left and right, there was controversy after controversy. This time, he’s weathering through it.

The interesting model of this presidency is he’s moved to an Elon Musk type of over-promise, under-deliver, especially on trade deals. He’s constantly threatening to “whack this country,” but when it comes down to it, he pulls back. It’s interesting not only trying to get into the mind of Trump, but also how Trump has changed from one presidency to the next. He’s gotten less chaotic in some ways, but more chaotic in others, particularly in how he’s dealing with economic policy. It’s very hard for a company to plan if they think there’s going to be tariffs one day and no tariffs the next day. It’s a very different type of chaos in this second Trump presidency.

Jordan Schneider: How have you applied the reality television framework in the past?

Domer: Somebody smarter than me said a long time ago that if you want to figure out who Trump is going to pick for something, print out pictures of everyone he’s considering. Go up to a random person and ask, “Who would you cast for a TV show if you were casting a Supreme Court justice?” The person they point to is probably who he’s going to pick because he’s casting his show.

That’s how I think about Trump — a lot of what he’s doing is focused on presentation. He’s the star of a TV show and that’s how he treats much of what he’s doing, not only personnel decisions (are they good on TV?), but also policy. Does this sound strong? Do I look strong? A lot of what he’s doing is entertainment-focused, and that’s obviously his background as well. He’s been a showman since the 80s when he took over from his father. I think that’s a very strong core tenet of Trump — the entertainer, somebody who’s trying to keep people engaged with what he’s doing, a marketer.

Jordan Schneider: What are your heuristics for separating fact from fiction — dealing with fake news?

Domer: What do you mean by that?

Jordan Schneider: What you have to do as someone who works in prediction markets is essentially high-stakes news literacy with money on the line. You have this mental model of what you think is happening, and then there are new data points that you have to process and react to. At the same time, you’re watching these markets move as other people react and process them. Are there news literacy heuristics that you think are broadly useful as a citizen? Or maybe category errors that you’ve seen these markets make over time, where they overread or underread into specific types of new data points?

Domer: That’s a really interesting question. There are two facets that come to mind. Number one is fake news. One of the markets recently is whether Elon Musk will form his own party. He’s made this big announcement with a lot of fanfare, but whether he actually does the paperwork is TBD — that’s what the market is about.

Recently there was this filing with the FEC pretending to be the American Party. It wasn’t actually true, but someone new to prediction markets might see this FEC filing, which looks very official. It’s on the FEC website. Somebody actually filled it out and put Elon Musk’s name on it. They’re going to see that and think, “Oh, the market’s over. He formed it. Yes. Easy money, free money.” But somebody who’s been doing this a long time knows that people make fake FEC filings all the time.

It comes from experience and being able to distill fact from fiction. If you’ve been doing it a long time, you’re definitely on the lookout for fake news because it happens all the time. Actually, it’s increased in frequency lately, especially with people trying to create fake news in order to profit from it, whether in financial markets or prediction markets.

The second part of your question that struck me was knowing which reporters to trust. This is very important, especially if you’re predicting American politics, because there are dozens of reporters covering Congress, the presidency, etc. A lot of the focus is on day-to-day drama: Is this bill going to pass? This person just said this, that’s happening. You have to be very careful about who you trust.

The longer you’re doing it, the more you learn. For instance, the Punchbowl guys — people in this space get tons of newsletters every single day. Punchbowl is one of the main ones, along with Politico. If you’re getting the Punchbowl newsletter and you see that the head of the Republican Party in Congress is saying this and that, and it looks like maybe the bill is in jeopardy — well, Punchbowl constantly slightly exaggerates whether a bill is in danger of passing or failing. They really play up the drama.

The longer you’re in this space, the more you realize the intricacies of reporters — who you can trust, who is reliable, who is constantly exaggerating what’s happening. It’s very important as a trader to be able to distill between what’s happening and what people are trying to pretend is happening.

Jordan Schneider: It is an ineffable thing that only really comes from following these stories in real time and seeing how people behave. It’s more nuanced and sophisticated than just giving any Punchbowl headline a 20% discount factor in your model.

As I’ve dabbled a little in the legal markets open to US citizens, it has been a remarkable and humbling learning experience. As someone who has been following news pretty closely and professionally since at least 2013, only trading in markets where I think I know something and being wrong a lot has taught me about probabilities and degrees of confidence. These markets are real now and liquid enough to have a lot of signal in them.

It’s a really useful exercise for people who work in and around politics to go from being a pundit to someone who’s forced to discipline their thinking and opinions about the future with a market. That didn’t really exist until relatively recently, whereas financial market participants were able to have that learning experience of taking views and seeing them play out correctly or incorrectly and gaining context and experience over time.

Don’t get addicted. Don’t spend a lot of money on this stuff. I don’t endorse gambling here on ChinaTalk, but as a learning tool to understand what the world is like, putting $10 in an account and trying to size markets and react to news is a worthy experiment to do for at least a month in a topic you’re interested in.

Domer: I would second that. It’s fun to do, even if you’re just doing five or ten bucks, because if you’re following it anyway, it gives you a little rooting interest, like watching a sports game. From that aspect, it’s really fun.

The other thing is that prediction markets are easy if you know what you’re doing, but it’s also very easy to lose a lot of money very quickly. For instance, if you rewind to last year during the Trump versus Biden debate, there were whole accounts that are just gone now because they didn’t think there was any chance that Biden would drop out even after the debate. I was thinking, “I don’t know, I’m not going to stake my account on this. It seems sketchy."

It’s not just about being able to predict things correctly, which isn’t that hard if you’re familiar with the space. The really hard thing is being able to avoid the pitfalls and not betting against things that are actually more likely than you think they are.

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Jordan Schneider: Domer, there were three lines in one big beautiful bill that got a lot of professional gamblers very worried. Why don’t you give the audience some context?

Domer: In the House version, it didn’t exist. In the Senate version, nobody noticed it until after it passed. It was three little lines saying that for people who are betting professionally or even non-professionally, you can only deduct 90% of your losses.

What does that mean? If somebody is gambling recreationally and they win $10,000 and lose $10,000 — so they’re an even recreational gambler who didn’t win any money — if you can only deduct 90% of your losses, you can only deduct $9,000 from that $10,000. All of a sudden, even though you didn’t make any income, you now have $1,000 of taxable income.

You can imagine some professional gamblers — if you multiply that times 100, all of a sudden they have phantom income that is very large and they go from maybe owing $20,000 to owing $120,000, depending on the circumstances of the specific gambler. It can have a very deleterious effect on not only sports bettors but also poker players.

It’s TBD whether it impacts prediction market traders because there is some leeway where you can count it as a capital gain, mark it as a future, or whatever. It really depends on how the IRS classifies prediction market winnings in the future. But anything that’s bad for poker players or sports players, I view as akin to prediction market trading. It’s very, very not good.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe your markets are about to get a whole lot more liquid, Domer. If all the unproductive, socially unproductive sports gambling gets shifted into more efficient trading on markets that are actually useful for the world to have numbers on.

Domer: More competition is coming, which is not necessarily a great thing, but we’ll see how it goes. One thing that’s interesting about prediction markets is that often there are rule fights over things that you cannot possibly see coming, like this Zelensky suit where he wore a suit, but he didn’t wear a suit, and then it devolves into a rule fight and you’re arguing over the judges.

It’s easy to imagine that happening with Taiwan if China says, “Okay, this little outlying island that nobody lives on, we’re going to take it over.” But Taiwan says, “Well, that’s our island.” Did they invade or did they not invade? It’s easy to see how these markets that are important — we should have a market on whether China invades Taiwan — could get railroaded by very minute details.

Jordan Schneider: Currently, “Will China invade Taiwan?” has three and a half million dollars of volume and an 8% chance of happening in 2025, according to Polymarket. It’s defined as resolving to yes if China commences a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Taiwan by the end of the year. What are the things you’ve seen move that market in the past? What does 8% even mean?

Domer: You have to look at things not only from the event itself, but also the risk-free rate. Markets that don’t expire for a long time are going to trade in the mid-single digits no matter what. You can factor that into your analysis. What it’s basically telling you is it’s a very, very low chance of happening.

But the other interesting thing about that market is that it’s correlated with what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine. As Russia has more success, that market may start to push up — not necessarily this year, but if that market existed for 2030, maybe it’s trading at 25%. If Russia starts to have a lot more success, maybe it moves up to 30%, because these events are correlated and the US reaction to what’s happening in Russia-Ukraine also has a lot of impacts on that market as well. The interesting thing is how it correlates with other things happening in the world.

Jordan Schneider: The risk-free rate concept is important because when I see 8%, I think that’s insanely high. But you don’t earn the treasury rate for holding a position on Polymarket.

Domer: “Will aliens invade the US?” is probably trading at 4%. “Will Jesus return to Earth?” is trading at about 2.5%. There are markets where you can figure out what the risk-free rate on the site is. This is 0% chance of happening or a very, very small percent chance of happening. Everything pivots off of that. I would view the real odds [of a Taiwan invasion] as probably closer to 4 to 5%, which is still way too high in my opinion. But people disagree.

Jordan Schneider: You can earn about 3.9% by owning a treasury bill for a year. Getting to 2.5% for aliens or Jesus being resurrected — it’s like people will pay 2.5% to have a meme stock. Walk me through the logic of how we have these markets where you will not make any money and it sits for a long time.

Domer: I’m not sure what the logic is for the people who are buying yes, but bonding as a general concept is very popular in prediction markets where you’re betting on events that you think are impossible. For instance, aliens landing — that’s not impossible, but it’s so unlikely that it’s very close to zero. Plus, if you lose the bet anyway, I’m not sure you need to worry about money.

The risk-free rate on prediction markets usually sits in the mid-single digits for a year. It’s usually maybe 2 or 3% above the bond rate in the US.

Jordan Schneider: What would you say to policymakers or folks working on this stuff in Washington about how they should think about and interpret what they see on Polymarket?

Domer: First of all, I would focus on the liquidity. If it’s a liquid market with a lot of volume, then there’s been a lot of thought that went into this market and there’s a lot of money involved. It’s not just random people making bets and trying to move prices around for fun. People treat this very seriously. Number one, assuming that the volume is substantial and it’s pretty liquid, treat it seriously.

Number two, it’s advanced-level punditry. It’s not just people being paid to have opinions. It’s actually, “This is very important whether I get this right or wrong.” It’s the next level of people figuring out what’s going to happen in the future.

Number three, there can be some quirks on prediction markets that cause events to not necessarily be reflective of reality. For instance, “Will the US get an Air Force One jet from Qatar?” Looking at that from six months ago — actually taking possession of the jet may not happen for three years, but the big announcement may happen immediately. Sometimes there’s a little bit of lag between announcement and event happening, and that can cause prices to be a little askew from what you think they would be. It’s always important to pay attention to what the rules are in terms of what the event’s trying to predict.

Jordan Schneider: What’s been the most fun for you? Are there particular countries that you’ve really enjoyed getting to learn about, or questions that have — aside from the money-making aspect — what learning journeys have you gone on that you found most intrinsically rewarding?

Domer: I’m not sure I think about intrinsically rewarding versus monetarily rewarding. I have more fond memories of monetarily rewarding, I guess. But the countries I enjoy following the most are the most chaotic countries. If you look at Israeli politics or Italian politics or, a few years ago, South African politics — things are very chaotic.

It’s not like what’s happening in Canada, for instance, where they just rejected a populist and reelected the technocrat. They’ve had the same party in leadership for a very long time — it’s a very stable country. Whereas if you look at Israel, there’s elections every nine months maybe at this point, or in Italy where they’re switching parties from year to year.

The chaotic countries are far more fun because there are more events, they’re repeatable, and you know the ins and outs. People who joined the site a year ago don’t know about these six other Italian elections that you’ve predicted in the past seven years. I’m drawn to chaos in general — not necessarily in a negative way, but in a fun, dynamic way.

Jordan Schneider: It’s the oil trader energy when it comes to prediction markets. If everything’s too predictable, what’s the fun in that? It’s interesting how homework pays off. As an American who doesn’t speak Hebrew or Italian, what’s it like getting your handle on a foreign country’s politics? Or do you speak Italian?

Domer: No, I only speak English and un poquito de español. Number one, you’re subscribing to newspapers in foreign countries, which can be hard to sign up for because you’re not sure what to type in the sign-up fields. You’re also trying to get to a base of knowledge — you have to pretend that you’re a prediction market trader in Italy. Who are the top political people I need to follow? Who are the smart analysts? What accounts do I need to be following? You have to get up to speed.

The other facet is often I’ll be watching Israeli TV, and I have my phone out, literally holding my phone up to the TV and translating the chyrons in real time so I can understand what they’re saying. It can get ridiculous sometimes, but it’s fun. It’s funny. It’s a lot of work, but it’s rewarding.

Jordan Schneider: If you were going to teach a college class on learning how to make money in prediction markets, what would you put on the syllabus?

Domer: That’s a really good question. In my Twitter profile, I have a list of books. Going back to what I was saying earlier, it’s easy to teach people how to read politics and learn about politics. If you immerse yourself enough, you can get caught up. If you get the Politico newsletters, if you’re following people on Twitter, if you watch Meet the Press, if you’re watching the nightly news, you can get into it pretty quickly.

The harder part is knowing how to react quickly and not making big mistakes. From that perspective, I would probably teach very quick reacting — more the poker element and managing your bankroll. There are a lot of intricacies that would go into it beyond just the knowledge element. It’s how you think and how you react and how to not make mistakes.

Jordan Schneider: The mental ability to be calm when you have those big market swings, especially because AI can’t do it for you yet, apparently.

Domer: Yeah, I don’t know.

Jordan Schneider: We’ll throw some meditation classes in there, too.

Domer: The number one mistake I see people making, especially when they first join these markets, is being afraid to take a loss. Loss aversion is such a strong thing. It’s like, “Oh, I put 100 bucks in. I’m gonna try my hardest to get 100 bucks out.” They’re averse to taking that $20 loss and being at $80, whereas me, who’s been doing it a long time — if I think I’m wrong on something, oh my God, I’ll gladly take that $80 and maybe put it on the other side and try to get my money back that way. Being averse to taking losses is probably the number one mistake that people make.

Market Manipulation in Sen. Collins Votes and a Reckoning in Romania

For another perspective on prediction markets, we interviewed Jonathan Zubkoff, otherwise known as ZubbyBadger, who is also a full-time prediction markets trader.

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Yenching Academy and the Schwarzman Scholars program comprise China’s attempt to set up a Rhodes/Marshall-style master’s degree. Both programs are fully-funded masters degrees comprised mostly of non-Chinese students. I was a Yenching Scholar in its third cohort from 2017-2019. What follows are some of my reflections on the experience and advice for applicants considering these programs.

Application process (from 2016…there have been two deans since I applied)

• There was a big emphasis on the essay on ‘why China,’ so be sure to explain what role you expect China to have in your future professional life and why Yenching will help you achieve those goals.

• Of late I hear more emphasis has gone on demonstrated interest in China through language study and past academic work. That said, there are generally a few people from each cohort who haven’t studied Mandarin (though this is easier to pull off if you’re from a region where Chinese instruction is less accessible like South Asia or Africa).

Academics

• My classes at Yenching were significantly less demanding than advanced undergrad courses at top schools in the US, with many not going much deeper than what you’d learn in a lecture or seminar aimed at Freshmen. Yenching suffers from a ‘principal contradiction’ of on the one hand wanting to have students that have diverse academic interests and having to teach in English at a Chinese university. There are only so many courses they can offer to a program with just 120 students (most of whom don’t have Chinese strong enough to take graduate school courses in PKU’s other schools), so the courses for any discipline have to remain accessible to students who didn’t take courses in that discipline in undergrad. For example, a Yenching class in economics needs to not assume enough background to leave a philosophy or international relations major overwhelmed. This means that while you’re unlikely to learn new methodologies in disciplines you’re familiar with outside of self-study. However, it was certainly a lot of fun as someone with a history and economics background to get to take courses in Chinese literature and art history.

• Your teachers will all be full-time PKU professors from other schools, 85% of them mainland Chinese and many with western PhD (there were a few white guys who teach at PKU’s business school that also taught Yenching courses). They vary in quality (some are quite good) but are limited in what they can teach by the central contradiction.

• Non-native English speakers who haven’t written long papers in English or had to manage 50+ page English reading assignments may find the coursework slightly more challenging, but squeezing out passing grades should not be challenging for anyone Yenching admits.

• Chinese language courses are still hidebound by many of the issues that plague Mandarin instruction more broadly, including dated material and an undue emphasis on reading. I eventually convinced my teachers to let me opt out of learning how to handwrite characters after finally convincing them that I didn’t care even if they gave me Ds. If you come to Yenching speaking no Chinese, and don’t do anything outside of the Yenching language requirements, you will maaaybe pass HSK3 after a year of instruction.

• You are required to write a thesis but you have an entire year of funding to do so. Any PKU professor can be your thesis advisor, and the level of attention

• In terms of academic freedom, I had no problem saying whatever I wanted on my class papers, but theses are another story as your advisor’s name will be forever attached to your paper so they’ll be somewhat responsible for your work. I had to make significant revisions to some pretty non-controversial stuff about tech regulations, and another classmate was forbidden entirely from writing a thesis relating to Islam in China.

Student Body and Campus Life

• Far and away the best part of Yenching was the diversity and quality of human being in the student body. For starters, it’s maybe 30% American, not a high enough percentage for the Yankees to set the rules of the road. Nearly every student went to undergrad in their country of origin. While Americans likely encountered international students in undergrad, the type of Russian who went to an international school in Moscow before studying in the US is very different than a kid who went to a public high school and studied at St Petersburg University. Then you’ve got 20% Chinese and that final 50% encompassed 50+ countries in a 120-person student body.

• In my year, every mainlander went to school in a Chinese university, meaning almost none of them went to international feeder high schools that lead their students to take the SAT and study abroad. While some foreigners complained that the Chinese students were too insular, my sense is that if you as a non-Chinese weren’t able to make friends with the Chinese students in Yenching, then it was your fault not theirs. The cohort of Chinese students who sign up to Yenching have fluent English and have opted into spending two years at a weird program without much of a domestic reputation whose entire draw is the exposure it provides to international classmates. If you can’t get chummy with these people, you probably weren’t ever going to make any Chinese friends anyways…

• I’ve worked at the UN and can say with confidence this was easily as diverse a pool as you see in NY. Everyone’s shared interest in China and English fluency gave folks a starting point to engage on

  • In my year there really wasn’t a lot of drinking and in particular binge drinking (it’s not part of campus culture in China and most students outside America just drink to excess a lot less) compared to what you’d see at an MBA program in the west.

• Yenching’s structure makes it much more straightforward to integrate with the broader campus. Two years allows you time to really invest in regular PKU campus clubs. The most fun I had was playing with the badminton club, painting with the landscape painting club, and spending every weekend for six months rehearsing for a production of Hamilton with the musical club. Yenching has no dedicated cafeteria so you’ll eat all your meals mixing broadly with the student body.

Yenching vs Schwarzman (Dorms, Career Services)

• Perhaps the important difference is the length of the program. Schwarzman is a one year program, which really only gives you nine months on campus, too short a period of time for many to make real progress on Mandarin or uncover a job offer required to stay in China after graduation.

• Schwarzman has a higher percentage of Americans (40% in 2021) and far more internationals who have exposure to the US, making its social culture much more westernized. For example, of the mainland Chinese students in the class of 2021, only five of twenty-four Chinese nationals did their undergrad on the mainland, with most of the others having gone to school in the US or the UK. This led many Schwarzman scholars in my era to lament (/celebrate) that school is just like home.

• The bar for ‘interest in China’ is much lower in Schwarzman (it’s more oriented to produce ‘leaders’ who ‘understand’ Asia), as a far higher percentage of students come into the program having never studied Chinese. Many of its faculty are flown in for a year or two from the west and don’t really have much of a China background (this may have changed by the looks of their faculty page it seems they now have more Tsinghua profs).

• Schwarzman in general keeps you much busier than Yenching, with more mandatory lectures, career development sessions etc. They also import western profs to stay for a few years, many of whom have zero China background.

• Schwarzman’s campus is the nicest building I ever visited in China, and even puts Yale’s residential colleges to shame. It has centrally filtered air and water, something even the nicest banks in China can’t boast of. Its gym is Equinox-level and their campus features its own cafeteria that’s mostly western food. It also is literally a castle, with some pretty professional security that checks everyone who enters. This whole setup leads Schwarzman students to spend a lot less time interacting with other Tsinghua students (at one point there was a contest for who could not leave campus for the longest period of time…) and breeds more low-level resentment in the broader campus that these westerners have way better amenities than their Chinese counterparts. Yenching’s dorm setup, in contrast, partially takes over some floors of a rough-around-the-edges campus hotel but we had to deal with random middle-aged Chinese folks who were often smoking in their rooms…

• In terms of career services, Schwarzman is on par with top western grad schools. They hired a senior career services professional with decades of experience at Booth and Yale’s SOM to stand up the program and that investment has paid off for students looking, in particular, to go into traditional corporate routes in the west. Schwarzman has structured on-campus recruiting for the big banks and consulting firms. Big backers of the institution like Ray Dalio (Bridgewater) and of course Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone) wregularly hire out of the program.

• Yenching’s career services, in contrast, is bare-bones. The only people in my year who ended up in bulge bracket banks or top consulting firms had offers going into the program. In general, Yenching’s student body has a more academic bent, with more students ending up in PhD programs or law school.

• Neither program is particularly good at finding placements for students in Chinese firms. Bytedance is far and away the most common domestic firm that picks up internationals from Schwarzman and Yenching.

Why Go To Yenching?

• If you want a way to get into China, not have to teach English, and have two years of funding where you can pretty much choose your own adventure

• If you want to make an incredible group of friends who share your interest in China

Why Not Go To Yenching?

• If you don’t really care about China (you’ll have to put up with a fair amount of BS that will be off-putting to anyone who doesn’t appreciate that it comes with the territory with anything official on the mainland)

• If you want to be taught things in grad school (which isn’t to say you can’t learn things, you just need to be more proactive than at a western program)

Other Notes

• From Wikipedia: “While Tsinghua Schwarzman expects to raise about US$550 million (originally 300 million) from mostly foreign donors for its endowment, it is understood that the Peking Yenching endowment is even better funded through significant donations from Chinese philanthropists and special grants from the Chinese Central Government.” Schwarzman College has lots of rooms named after westerners and a big plaque in front showcasing all of its major donors (a real who’s who of billionaires and multinationals). Aside from Robin Li (Baidu’s CEO), I don’t know of any other particular funders for Yenching and to be honest, would be pretty shocked if it had a larger endowment than Schwarzman. For both programs, the whole idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding mostly foreigners to spend a year or two in China when there’s so much that needs better funding in the broader Chinese educational system is more than a little off-putting…

This is a totally functional document with a surplus of creative ideas. It feels like it comes from a parallel universe of a White House that didn’t also roll out DOGE and the most chaotic trade policy in US history. But I’ll take it!

Let’s jump in.

Isn’t declaring any model to objectively reflect truth is itself a social engineering agenda? I’m happy to see government encouragement for Chinese model evals, something we’ve been doing at ChinaTalk since early 2023!

and I have been banging on of late about the dangers of America ceding the open source landscape to hungry Chinese firms. It was encouraging to see this issue get pride of place in the document, coming in as the third subsection after traditional Trumpy concerns around red tape and free speech. Now that Zuck’s done with open source and we’re selling H20s to China, it will take real change to the status quo for an American model to out-compete what well-funded Chinese startups and established firms like a 300bn market cap Alibaba can deliver. Either USG needs to invest 9 figures to relevant nonprofits like Ai2, frontier American labs need to believe in the business use case to open source leading models, or the government needs to make them do so.

Oh, and this bit was weird…if “Advanced AI compute is essential to the AI era…Denying our adversaries access to this resource, then, is a matter of both geostrategic competition and national security,” why exactly are we selling H20s to China?

Enable AI Adoption

I recorded a show this morning with the legendary Richard Danzig discussing his excellent new paper ‘AI, Cybersecurity and National Security: The Fierce Urgency of Now’. His conclusion ran as follows:

The White House’s AI adoption section encouragingly echoes some of these themes, but I would give the section below a “we hit the alarm and are still rubbing our eyes” as opposed to full “get out of bed” rating.

ChinaTalk’s ongoing AI and semiconductor coverage can read as a living AI net assessment, so it’s exciting to see more orgs getting encouraged to jump in. Given how important the private sector is to national security AI competition (see this later riff on the ‘break glass and commandeer datacenters in case of emergency’ bullet below), these net assessments should pay at least as much attention to public AI developments as PLAN vs USN implementation plans.

It might be nice to still have an active Office of Net Assessment to lead and share lessons on how to do this work well.

The IC does not have a good institutional home or the muscle memory to do emerging technology net assessment particularly for comparing red vs blue dual use technologies. Here’s the best paper laying out different structures to execute this work, and a pod we did on it.

Hurray for FROs! We’ve come a long way from the show we did with Adam Marblestone back in 2021!

Journalists should be asking agencies and the White House weekly what models they have access to on their work computers. If Trump is leaning so hard into deregulation, how hard can this really be?

The US government is going to want to commandeer private sector cloud resources in the event of a US-China conflict. But there’s nothing today preventing the sort of pre-placed drone attacks we’ve seen this year by Ukraine to Russia and Israel to Iran from happening to datacenters in Virgina.

It’s cute seeing the NSC get assigned some work when Loomer got its entire staff fired a few months back.

Good to see multilateral orgs getting a shoutout but hard to take seriously when Rubio just fired dozens of staffers who work these very portfolios.

I feel some type of way about selling China H20s and disagree with the White House’s conclusion that building datacenters in the UAE is better for America’s long term national power trajectory than husbanding chips. But even Ben Thompson gets that selling H20s only makes sense if you lock down semicap export controls. While nothing substantial has happened on this front seven months into this administration, it’s encouraging to see a policy document call out this side of the controls. We discussed the importance of subsystem controls at length with Dylan on ChinaTalk and in this SemiAnalysis post.

Trump 2 has revealed how it scared it is of China’s rare earths controls and that it’s willing to cave on chip controls that Presidents traditionally held the line on being a national security initiative not up for debate or linkage. The Times reported yesterday that “officials throughout the government say the Trump administration is putting more aggressive actions on China on hold, while pushing forward with moves that the Chinese will perceive positively. That includes the reversal on the H20 chip.” A Trump administration that’s prioritizing a visit to Beijing and trade deal will not be pushing hard on SME. My guess is at this point it will take a national security-adjacent shock along the lines of a balloon to change the trajectory of Trump’s China policy.

Lastly, who gets the licenses to buy H20s in China still an open question. Commerce presumably will try to pick the most civilian-y companies, but the ones that get the H20s will certainly be receiving calls to help out the national security establishment. The new CIA history The Mission by Tim Weiner relates an anecdote that “the MSS gave [the SF86 hack] data to Alibaba, who crunched it all in 90 days. Then the MSS integrated the intelligence on people it suspected to be CIA officers with passport records and biometric data stolen from immigration kiosks.” This Foreign Policy article has more color and also implicates Baidu, Huawei, Tencent and Bytedance. What happens when the IC gets wind of another civ-mil fusion partnership that leverages Nvidia’s best chips?

West Point in the 19^th century was America’s leading engineering institution. Today it has a statutory ceiling for salaries at $225k a year. Without real money and new pay scales, we will not grow military colleges into centers of AI excellence.

And speaking of attracting talent, there was zero discussion of immigration policy, a pretty damning insight when Zuck has shown that the best team money can buy is 3/4 1st generation immigrants.

Why was this not called the Lewis and Clark Initiative? Sounds sick regardless.

Overall, I’m giving this plan a grade of “would be real nice if it happens”, one tick above “too good to be true.” Hopefully most of what’s in this document is not salient enough to allow whoever did the good work of pulling it together too much headache in implementation.

This is part two of our series with Joseph Torigian, author of the definitive biography of Xi Zhongxun. This episode traces the inner world of a man navigating power politics, exile, and reform, and the legacy he left his son, Xi Jinping.

Against the backdrop of the Great Leap Forward, the Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution, and reform and opening up, we discuss…

• The moral dilemmas of a mid-level party cadre,

• What it’s like to be purged, and why the party prescribes self-criticism as therapy,

• “Frenemies” in the CCP, Deng Xiaoping’s autocratic side, and the unsung heros of the reform period,

• How Xi Zhongxun instilled party loyalty and other values in his son,

• Xi Zhongxun’s return from exile and his complicated relationship with reform,

• How Chinese leaders think about redemption, guilt, and survival,

• And a bonus: Why the PRC-produced biopic of Xi Zhongxun is so disappointing — and why his life deserves the Star Wars treatment.

Listen on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

“The Blue Flame in the Taoist Stove” 爐火純青

Jon Sine: In 1949, Xi Zhongxun is king of the Northwest. This presages three to four years in which he will be moved into a very important position in Beijing. What is particularly noteworthy about his time in the Northwest?

Joseph Torigian: Two things stand out as interesting. First is how he’s dealing with ethnic minorities. The Northwest includes Xinjiang, but also Qinghai, Gansu, and other provinces with many Hui Muslims as well as Tibetan Buddhists. This process of incorporating these regions into the regime is very bloody — it’s the crushing of an insurrection. But we see that Xi Zhongxun is simultaneously learning certain things about how to deal with ethnic minorities. He’s recognizing the value of winning over local power brokers, of not going too far too fast, of pursuing socialism in a way that’s less costly.

In fact, in 1952, he purges two leaders from Yining who pursued land reform in the nomadic areas and were suppressing at a level that Xi Zhongxun thought was inappropriate. For him, to do work in the Northwest means doing ethnic politics and the United Front. This is an important moment for him because in later years, he would spend much time on ethnic politics and he drew lessons from this period.

The other significant aspect is that in the early years of the People’s Republic of China, Mao began mass campaigns, trying to figure out how the regime could solidify, but also prevent the party from becoming divorced from the masses. During the Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries, it’s interesting to consider whether Xi Zhongxun was pursuing an agenda that was relatively humane and how much he was listening to Mao versus working on his own. There were anti-corruption campaigns as well.

Xi Zhongxun’s absolute priority is to intuit what Mao wants and deliver it better than anyone else can. He doesn’t do perfectly, but he does a good enough job that Mao says something very striking to this man named Bo Yibo, who is the father of the notorious Bo Xilai. He says that Xi Zhongxun is like the blue flame in a Taoist stove, used to creates elixirs by the alchemists.

Mao always uses phrases that can be interpreted in many different ways, deliberately as the Sage King. Part of it was this idea that Xi Zhongxun had spent much time at the grassroots, that he had really dealt with the peasants and had been forged by them. But he also knew how much suffering Xi Zhongxun had gone through, including at the hands of his own party, and yet remained loyal to the party. This was the famous phrase that people would associate with Xi Zhongxun as Mao giving him essentially the highest, most superlative way of describing him.

It’s around that time that Xi is brought to Beijing. He’s not the only one brought to Beijing from a major bureau — another person who was brought was Deng Xiaoping. To be among what were called the five horses who entered the capital, especially because once again he was by far the youngest, makes Xi Zhongxun’s career stand out.

Mao Zedong was doing this possibly to balance against people like Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi, to make sure that these guys who had spent many years in these bureaus didn’t slip out of the control of the central government. So Xi is brought to the capital and he’s made minister of propaganda. His task is to figure out how to explain to hundreds of millions of people how they’re going to build communism and why they should believe in communism, which is both an ideological thing but also a very concrete, practical thing. How exactly do you achieve literacy? What are you going to have them read? How are you going to produce what it is that they’re going to read? Are you going to work with intellectuals and inspire intellectuals, or are you going to really scare them and tell them exactly what to do? They’re struggling and figuring things out, and Xi Zhongxun’s story is part of that.

Jon Sine: You mentioned the Xinjiang purge, and the two people you’re referring to are Wang Zhen and Dong Liqun.

Joseph Torigian: Very interesting people.

Jon Sine: Very interesting. But I would like to discuss the enmities that form in this period and that linger onward. Wang Zhen, Dong Liqun, but also Deng Xiaoping, who’s leading the Southwest Bureau — this is a point at which Xi runs into problems with them that you could argue linger on for the next 30-plus years of their lives. What do you make of that?

Joseph Torigian: One of the things I tried to get across with the book was the sprawl of party history — that’s the best word for it. These people knew each other for decades and often didn’t like each other, but they still had emotional attachments to one another. All of these feelings are refracted through the party, and it’s a party that is very leader-friendly. It’s a party in which if you act as a small group, if you act as a faction, it’s extremely dangerous for you.

Certainly people have affections for each other or they have dislikes for each other or they have career ties or they happen to have similar views of a policy issue. But at the same time, even when they hate each other, they’re still frenemies in a sense because they have to work with each other. They recognize this norm of putting the party’s interests first. Even when they’re really going after each other, there are certain limitations, especially in terms of how much they can do that in concert with allies, because as soon as you start forming a small group, you’re vulnerable to the charge of factionalism.

Charisma, Coercion, and Control

Jon Sine: This is a key area in which Xi Zhongxun comes across as a nicer guy, as something of a reformer. In the Xinjiang example, he wants to use the local power brokers who are religious figures, and he doesn’t want to excessively go after them because, for the party, religion is, if not threatening, at least backward and things could get out of hand. But Xi seems to want to turn down that flame. When it comes to Tibet, Deng is leading the Southwest Bureau and it ends up having responsibility for going in there as opposed to the Northwest Bureau — if Xi might have had a slightly less...I don’t know how you would phrase that, but...

Joseph Torigian: You’re asking whether we can characterize him in particular ways with regards to ethnic politics — is he systematically different from other people in a way that’s more humane, in a way that’s more moral, in a way that’s less radical?

I could give you lots of examples where he has differences of opinions with people in the elite, where he seems to want to take a more gradual approach, a less violent approach — an approach that’s more about economic growth, addressing grievances, bringing religion into the open so that it can be controlled, and forging alliances with people who have a preexisting status within their own communities as a vector for communist power.

But we should think about that in a relative sense. These are just other tools of control. Maybe they’re more efficient tools, but ultimately his final objective is the same as everyone else, which is socialist transformation and dominance of these borderlands and placing them under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. There are lots of examples where he doesn’t come off as a soft-liner.

You talked about Xinjiang, which is a rather obvious case. But on Tibet, what’s interesting is that Xi Zhongxun has this very close relationship with the Panchen Lama. The Panchen Lamas had a falling out with the Dalai Lamas decades before, and the 10th Panchen Lama is born in Xining — he’s a young person. The party, especially Xi Zhongxun, sees the Panchen Lama as more progressive and a more natural ally to the party who can be used to pursue transformation faster.

But people like Deng Xiaoping argued that the Dalai Lama was too influential to ignore — that the Party needed to work with him, and that relying too heavily on the Panchen Lama or pushing reform too quickly in Tibet would be risky.

In 1959, the Dalai Lama flees and the people from the Northwest, like Xi Zhongxun, feel vindicated because they never trusted the Dalai Lama and preferred to empower the Panchen Lama to achieve socialist transformation more rapidly.

While Xi Zhongxun is deeply involved in ethnic politics — now in the State Council in the late 1950s — the party is literally at war with these areas that Xi Zhongxun had incorporated into the regime. It’s literally fighting a war against people in Qinghai and Gansu, and Xi Zhongxun is working with the Ethnic Affairs Commission.

He had a sensitivity. At the very least, he had an intuition for how to work with people when he wanted to, which wasn’t a very common characteristic of these guys. When he interviewed the Dalai Lama, he talked about how people often were very rude to him and they would just say things about what he was wearing and make those kinds of remarks. Whether Xi Zhongxun liked him or not, the Dalai Lama felt like he did. That was a credit to Xi Zhongxun’s ability not only to do what the party wanted, which was to win over the Dalai Lama, whatever his views might have been, but because he could be rather charming when he wanted to — which is a somewhat rare talent in the Chinese Communist Party.

Jordan Schneider: In the theme of grays, you have this quote later on where he’s like,“We need to kill people to do revolution”? That was probably during the...

Joseph Torigian: Campaign against Counter-Revolutionaries — when he uses very Stalinist language about how the bad guys are going to become more brazen because we’re doing so well, which means that they’re scared, which means that they’re going to be more dangerous. This is a way of saying that there are enemies because we’re successful, not because we’re screwing up, which means that we need to kill them and not win them over because there’s something inherently wrong with them.

Jordan Schneider: As an illustration for moral judgments — he wasn’t the one to roll the tanks into Tibet, right? That was more of a Deng-Mao thing than it was a Xi Zhongxun thing. Yes, they’re killers, but they’re killers at scale and they’re killers in a very dogmatic way. It’s more a question of whether we can do this easier or more aggressively, which is the right frame to see his actions, as opposed to projecting our own image of this man as a liberal bulwark in a revolutionary time.

Joseph Torigian: One other thing to say about the United Front is that it demonstrates an inherent dilemma. The United Front was described by Mao as one of the three treasures of the party’s toolkit. It’s essentially a way of figuring out who likes you, who’s wishy-washy about you, and who hates you. Then you empower the people who like you, you win over the people that are in the middle, and you either isolate or destroy the dead-enders. It’s a very intuitive idea — it’s what politics is all about.

But for the party it’s really hard to get right. Judging which people fall into what group is totally arbitrary and often difficult to figure out. Then, when you are winning people over, you need to listen to them, making them feel they can speak out and not get punished. It means empowering them so that their communities still have faith in them. All of those things are dangerous because those people can actually take you at your word and say things that other people don’t like, and these people also don’t like you.

You’re the party, you’ve taken over the country, you’ve conquered the nation. A lot of people think, “Why are we paying attention to these people at all? Why don’t we just kill them or throw them in jail? We’re the ones who won. Why do we have any need to accommodate these people?”

For example, in 1957, the anti-rightist campaign — it was doubly embarrassing for Xi Zhongxun because he’s working at the State Council and there are lots of people who are not members of the Chinese Communist Party working there. He’s one of the people who tells them to speak out. They do and they get punished for it. The party is mad at him for not handling these people better so they didn’t complain in the first place. These people also feel betrayed that Xi Zhongxun told them that they would be safe and then they weren’t.

In 1962, one of the accusations against Xi Zhongxun is that he was too accommodationist to the Panchen Lama and that’s why the Panchen Lama made all of these criticisms of party policy. You get this question — they returned to it in the 1980s — which is when you give space for people within the party to speak up, at what point do you co-opt them, and at what point do they take advantage of you?

In the 1980s, there was this debate. “Why are all these people protesting now? We’re being so much nicer to them than we were in the past.” In a way, it’s clueless, because people protest — that’s what they do. Perhaps you haven’t gone far enough to give them other opportunities to complain, or you haven’t done enough to make them happy.

There’s this interesting quote by Hu Yaobang where he’s just stunned at people protesting. But also he’s someone who brought this whole new model that seemed insightful and open to possibilities. This speaks to the heart of authoritarianism — when you co-opt and when you repress, how you decide and how you do it, and how you interpret certain behavior as either threatening or the system working. It’s not easy to get right, especially when there are a lot of other people in the system who don’t like you and will, when you make a mistake, not work with you to figure out a better way of doing it, but accuse you of ideological heresy of being either too left or too right. Doing the United Front is really hard.

Jordan Schneider: The question of the rate of change, both for party discipline as well and in handling restive regions, is a really interesting one. It echoes de Tocqueville’s observation that revolutions happen when you give people a little bit and then you take it away. You let up a little bit and then people are like, “Oh my God, maybe they won’t kill me if I tell them that I would actually like to pray every once in a while."

But it’s a hard thing to process if you’re as abstracted away as you are as a Hu Yaobang. Maybe your soul is a little softer and you don’t necessarily want to be burning everyone’s temples, but you want to be in control too.

Jon Sine: United Front is one of DC Policy Circle’s favorite bogeymen hiding behind potentially every organization. But reading your book is very interesting because I imagine this might be replaying nowadays — nobody actually wanted to work with the United Front. Not only because it was low status, but also because you might run the risk of being associated with people who will get you in trouble.

Joseph Torigian: The vector can go in both directions. If you tell the party, “Hey, these people are telling me stuff that makes them unhappy,” and they’re like, “Why are you telling me that they’re unhappy and not telling them to stop being unhappy?” It’s an implicit criticism of the party when you voice their criticism for them.

I thought about this a lot, which is people are really afraid of the United Front. It’s hard to do it well, you get in trouble for not doing it well, and you just don’t like doing it because it means listening to people you don’t like that much. But on the other hand, intuitively and empirically, it is nevertheless a very powerful thing.

I hope my book shows that, at the very least, even though it is something that the party has used very effectively in the past, it’s not something that’s perfect. It’s actually something that it’s easy to get wrong and that the party does get it wrong pretty regularly.

Jordan Schneider: There’s a parallel there to actually listening to the masses, because on the one hand, yes, we’re the Communist Party, of course we’re going to listen to the masses, the masses are going to lead us. Can you talk about this in the context of Xi running the remonstration bureau and the challenges that he has bringing up these complaints to the central government?

Joseph Torigian: During the Mao era, Xi Zhongxun, as a Vice Premier, was an important person but not a leading figure per se. His work on the State Council, particularly his role in managing the Petition Bureau, is interesting because of his relationship with Zhou Enlai, the State Council’s relationship with the Secretariat, and with what happens to Peng Dehuai, who is a close associate with Xi.

He’s running the petition bureau management system for the State Council, in which Chinese citizens formally had a right to go to Beijing to complain or to write messages to the party center to complain. For a party that was deeply worried about becoming divorced from the masses, you can see why in principle this is something that they should take seriously and often did, because you want to know what’s going through their heads. There were a lot of tensions in Chinese society during the 1950s, and they accelerated in dramatic ways during the Great Leap Forward.

But then you get into the politics of information control in the Leninist system, especially at a moment of crisis, and especially at a moment where you have one leader who is dominant and frightening and mercurial. One of the themes of the book is how dangerous the politics of course correction are in the Leninist system.

Xi Zhongxun knows better than most people within the elite about how bad things are going, but he has to figure out when and where to pick his battles. He also appreciates that the information he’s getting probably often is not perfect, because as he admits in a rather remarkable speech that he gives, he knows that local party officials are arresting people who are trying to complain to the top leadership.

When there’s famine everywhere and you’re trying to get a sense of how serious it is, they return to the Petition Bureau saying, “We’re not getting nearly as many complaints as we used to.” Of course, if you’re getting a lot of complaints and you’re reporting on a lot of complaints, people might say, “The Great Leap Forward is going great. Why are you taking these complaints seriously and not hunting down the people who are complaining as saboteurs who are trying to destroy this wonderful thing that’s going so well?"

He’s watching Mao who often changes his mind not because of people who are high ranking and have a lot of information showing him the evidence, but sometimes it’s his family that actually changes Mao’s mind, which is quite revealing.

Then in the 1980s — we haven’t talked about this yet — but one of the most interesting roles for Xi Zhongxun is his two stints at the National People’s Congress. This is a moment when they’re trying to figure out whether the NPC can be something more than a rubber stamp, but they’re also thinking a lot about the rule of law and how you can use the rule of law, and what the rule of law means for the party and party control.

There are debates about whether it can be used as an effective tool, but there’s tons of crime in the 1980s because the Cultural Revolution had been damaging to society and reform is in trouble if you can’t get a handle on it. They decide to do the Strike Hard campaign. Even though Xi Zhongxun says remarkable things about how seriously he takes the rule of law, he’s also still sensitive to these exigencies of the situation and allows the party to do things that have negative effects on that trajectory.

The Art of the Purge

Jon Sine: Let's turn to the Gao Gang Affair. I'm curious about your perspective, particularly through the lens of factionalism. There are different academic views on CCP factions: some, like Victor Shih, see them as more fluid ‘coalitions of the weak,’ while others view them as more durable networks. It’s quite popular now, on some websites, to categorize figures into factions based on where they worked or where they grew up. Xi Zhongxun is often placed in a ‘Northwest Faction’ alongside Gao Gang, but your evidence doesn’t lead to that conclusion. What was the Gao Gang affair actually about?

Joseph Torigian: Faction is one of these words that, like ideology, depends on which definition you’re using. If you reify this idea of faction, you have this image of cohesive blocks that work closely with one another because they happen to have had career ties — that’s very misleading. But to say that historical ties don’t matter at all would also be misleading. People are paying a lot of attention to it precisely because it’s become easy to measure those career ties. It’s valuable, but needs to be put into the context of what the party is about.

What does the party do? It makes you put the party’s interests first, and factions are a violation of that norm. Factions are one of the great taboos of party culture. It’s clumpy, but it’s not blocky, if that makes sense.

The Gao Gang affair — this is a foundational moment in Chinese Communist Party history because it’s the first great purge of the People’s Republic of China. Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun are both Northwesterners. They have a relationship with each other. Were they acting in a factional way? Not really. In fact, Xi Zhongxun was telling Gao Gang to be careful. He wasn’t really supporting Gao Gang’s machinations and thought that Gao was acting in a dangerous way.

Then, Gao Gang goes too far. Xi Zhongxun says, “I told you to be careful, you didn’t listen to me.” When Gao goes down, Xi Zhongxun is very upset, but nevertheless, he goes along with the party’s decision. He says these terrible things about Gao Gang. If they’re a faction, then why didn’t Xi Zhongxun go down along with Gao Gang? The reason for that is how far a purge goes, who’s included in the purge, how the purge is characterized is an art form that is shaped by a myriad of different considerations that are only fully understood by the top leader. In that sense, you can see that historic ties mattered, but if we take them too far, they can be very misleading.

Jon Sine: For people who maybe don’t remember what happened in the 1950s, Gao Gang was seeing if he could get support for displacing Liu Shaoqi as the presumed successor — if I have that right.

Joseph Torigian: What was going on was two things. First, Liu Shaoqi’s problem wasn’t that he was pursuing a different line than Mao Zedong. His problem was that he just wasn’t lining up with Mao Zedong, and Mao was really unhappy about this. He starts complaining to people like Gao Gang about Liu Shaoqi and Gao is motivated by his own historical antagonisms and his own distaste for Liu Shaoqi. But Gao goes too far. He whispers to the wrong people and they go to Mao and they say, “Mao, we’re worried about this. We think it’s going to split the party.” Mao then decides to give up on Gao Gang.

He’s accused of ridiculous things. The attacks on him are so vociferous that Xi Zhongxun is frightened and surprised. In fact, he says, “I’ve never seen the premier like this. I’ve never seen Zhou Enlai like this.” The way that the purge of Gao Gang was characterized foreshadowed many other purges that would happen in subsequent years because it showed that party members were not treated like they were in a court of law. It wasn’t like they were given a serious opportunity to explain themselves. There wasn’t an objective adjudication of the evidence. Mao decided what was going to happen, everybody lined up and that was the end of that, which was a violation of the party’s own alleged norms at the time.

Jordan Schneider: Let's discuss Mao and the concept of contingency. Under Mao, under Deng and now in the Xi era, the Party has consistently operated under a model where the top leader ultimately dictates its direction, including purges and promotions, despite occasional rhetoric about collective leadership. This is the institution that Xi grew up with in this time period.

Considering the Leninist system and Mao's personal influence, what’s your interpretation of how much of this current reality is simply a downstream effect of the Leninist structure itself, versus the unique impact of ‘Mao being Mao’?

Joseph Torigian: There are different ways of thinking about this. One is that a person like Mao tends to rise to the head of an organization like the Communist Party, that people who are unlike Mao wouldn’t be able to survive as heads of the Communist Party, or that once you’re the head of a Communist Party, you become a Mao-like figure. Those are ways of thinking about counterfactuals that are important.

This question of possibility is at the very heart of the study of not just China, but the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, the question was, what if Bukharin had been the successor and not Stalin? Or what if Mao had died in 1950 before the party had given up on this idea of new democracy, which was putting off socialism, putting off violent transformation before Mao changed his mind, which is one of the reasons that Liu Shaoqi got caught up because he didn’t realize Mao was changing his mind so quickly in that regard? Or in the 1980s, what if Deng Xiaoping had died in ’84 or ’85 and Hu Yaobang had become the top leader?

These are really tough questions. But one thing that does emerge from the book that’s relevant for this, even though it can’t give a definitive conclusion, is that these are such leader-friendly systems that make the leader behave in particular ways that are strikingly similar, no matter who they are. This emerges in particular in the story of Deng Xiaoping, because Deng more than anybody should have understood the pathologies of the two-line system where you have a top leader and a deputy that breeds all of this distrust. He should have understood better than anybody the pathologies of succession politics.

These two are related because if the deputy isn’t doing what you want and this person might be the leader after you go, then that’s a big problem because you don’t want them to do a Khrushchev thing and de-Stalinize you after you’re dead to violate your legacy.

Here we have Deng Xiaoping, who was purged by Mao twice. This view that Deng opposes Mao or is not as radical as Mao and that he was with Liu Shaoqi or more pragmatic — it’s just not been borne out in the evidence. We have a different understanding of this interim between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which is a story of Mao being distant and people misreading him as opposed to really a concerted effort to undermine him.

In 1975, Deng Xiaoping is brought back after he’s purged a few years earlier and told to get the country back on its feet. He thinks he’s doing exactly what Mao wants him to do. Then people like Ye Jianying say, “Are you sure you understand what it is that Mao wants you to do?” Deng says, “Oh, he trusts me. Of course he trusts me.” Then he’s purged again because he goes too far too quickly and Mao — mercurial as ever — changes his mind.

Later, Deng purges Hu Yaobang because he says that Hu is not listening to him enough, not obeying him enough. He’s incensed that Hu Yaobang agrees when Deng says that he’s going to resign. Then Zhao Ziyang gets purged, although he’s not even opposing Deng during the June 4 crisis. He’s trying to figure out a way of saving Deng and protecting his authority while also not allowing a violent crackdown to happen. Then in 1992, Deng Xiaoping almost gets rid of Jiang Zemin. This idea that Chen Yun and Li Xiannian reined him in and he didn’t do it because they opposed him — that’s not been borne out in the evidence that I’ve been able to collect.

The puzzle here is quite striking, which is that these deputies never oppose the top leader. That’s clear from the evidence. The problem is that they keep misreading the top leader, and the top leader interprets it in this way that makes a mountain out of a molehill than is really necessary. Whether they know that and they’re doing it anyways or whether they really believe it, whatever the reason, it’s one of the fundamental factors that explains why elite politics in China has always been so explosive and why it’s always been such a leader-friendly system.

Jordan Schneider: The muscle memory of the purges and how these “personnel changes” are the way to stamp your vision onto the system seems like something which is baked in from the very beginning. With Deng and all the personnel moves as well as Mao and all the personnel moves — it’s just age. These guys are old and they’re making these decisions. You can just imagine a cranky person who has lived through everything and is convinced that they have all the answers. If you imagine the most decisive, self-confident, temperamental person, and then add on to that 60 years of revolutionary history.. But interestingly, the transition between going from someone who is subordinating themselves to another leader to being the leader yourself — or even Xi Zhongxun at the very end of his life, once his career was over, being like, “Look, I’m an independent person. I have views on this, and there were some mistakes that maybe not everyone else agreed with, but I thought were really dumb.” It’s a very interesting and maybe a more human way to relate to these folks.

Joseph Torigian: One other thing to say about this too is the Mao of the 1940s and much of the 1950s was very different from the Mao that later emerged. Fred Teiwes writes about this very eloquently, which is part of it was the story of hubris. As you said, for Mao, think of what he had accomplished, the legacy that he had forged. When things start going wrong with the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution — even for Mao these are clearly tragic failures. It was one of the reasons why he was so worried about his legacy and why elite politics was so explosive in so many ways.

Xi Zhongxun was always loyal to Mao, always loyal to Mao’s memory, always someone who believed that Mao was a titan of Chinese history who deserved respect. But Xi Zhongxun also was not totally incapable of reflection. When he’s talking about Mao as he’s getting rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, he’s talking about the Mao before the 1950s, or at least the Mao of the early 1950s. You can see how he would be loyal to someone who was able to save the revolution and actually for a very long time was known as someone who is rather pragmatic and flexible and was known as someone who would take people he had defeated and let them stay in the leadership. They were given sinecures, but they weren’t shot like they were in the Soviet Union. The Chinese took some pride in that for some time. Then the purges started getting more and more...

Jordan Schneider: They started shooting people.

Joseph Torigian: Well, even in China during the Cultural Revolution, most of the deaths were like persecution to death, not executions. For Chinese citizens, many of them were executed, but there weren’t many executions of leading Chinese party officials during the Mao era or the Deng era, really, which is very different from the Soviet experience.

Jordan Schneider: That’s interesting. Most of the senior leadership deaths were suicides?

Joseph Torigian: Or just the physical torment was overwhelming. Or you’re not given treatment. Or mentally it was not easy to experience.

Frenemies and Deng’s Culture of Fear

Jon Sine: If you have the pleasure of listening to Joseph on more than one occasion, you may notice that when he says Deng, sometimes he will put an adjective before it, which is “autocratic” — “autocratic Deng” — which is part of a project of reevaluating Deng because he’s been so lionized. Let’s say more on the Great Leap Forward, because another forms at this time. Xi Zhongxun is again in a role that could be seen as “reformist.” He’s in the State Council run by Zhou Enlai in 1957. But then in ’58, Mao basically moves control of the economy out of the State Council to the Secretariat that Deng Xiaoping was running and Deng becomes the chief implementer of the Great Leap Forward. Can you speak on that?

Joseph Torigian: Through the 1950s and early 1960s, there are a handful of areas where Deng and Xi saw some tension between each other. This has come up already, but just to refresh for your listeners: Xi Zhongxun was head of the Northwest Bureau and Deng Xiaoping was head of the Southwest Bureau. The Panchen Lama was living in the Northwest Bureau when Xi Zhongxun was head of the Northwest Bureau and they established their relationship. Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand, was someone who was more supportive of the Dalai Lama. He thought that the party should not think that they could use the Panchen Lama as a weapon to undermine the Dalai Lama and that that would just backfire and that they needed to recognize the stature of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan society and work with him and win him over and get him to have faith in the Communist cause.

In the 1950s, you see this kind of weird dance between the two of them. This is the closest part in my book to something resembling factions, because you have these cadres from the Northwest Bureau in the Tibet Autonomous Region with Xi as their patron, and you have these cadres from the Southwest Bureau in the Tibet Autonomous Region with Deng as their patron, and they don’t get along. In fact, they hate each other. Xi and Deng support their protégés, but they’re reining them in and not letting them go too far. Xi and Deng are expressing respect for each other and trying to work with each other, even though they have these different inclinations. It’s such a delicate dance.

Then you have the Gao Gang incident. As I said earlier, Xi Zhongxun had said to Gao Gang, “These are Long Marchers. These people aren’t going to take us seriously.” Deng was a Long Marcher who played a fundamental role in the fall of Gao Gang. When Xi Zhongxun was forced to do self-criticisms and write reports about his relationship with Gao, the person who read them and went through them, and asked Xi all these questions was Deng Xiaoping.

Deng Xiaoping would say, decades later, that when Gao Gang fell, “We protected certain people and we promoted them, including Xi Zhongxun.” He’s taking credit for being good to Xi Zhongxun and helping him survive, although I’m sure for Xi Zhongxun, it wasn’t an especially pleasant experience.

There’s also another area of tension between them, which is related to the relationship between the State Council and the Secretariat. The State Council is the government apparatus, and it’s run by Zhou Enlai. The vice premiers include Chen Yun and one of the party’s economic czars, Chen Yi. Xi Zhongxun is essentially the secretary of the State Council. He runs the daily affairs. He works for Zhou Enlai. Then there’s the Secretariat, which had been created to run party affairs, and that’s run by Deng Xiaoping. His right hand man is Peng Zhen 彭真, a very interesting figure.

Deng and Zhou basically get along. They respect each other. Peng Zhen hates Zhou Enlai and Zhou Enlai hates Peng Zhen for all of these historic and personality reasons. Then Mao decides that Zhou Enlai doesn’t get it and he takes control over the economy from the State Council and gives it to the Secretariat. People think Zhou Enlai might be removed from the leadership. He’s going through this mental torment and Xi Zhongxun is witnessing it. At this time, the Great Leap Forward is run by the Secretariat where Deng and Peng are really true believers.

Then in 1962, Xi Zhongxun is purged from the leadership and it’s a collective effort against him and Deng Xiaoping eggs on one of the people who goes after Xi Zhongxun in the first place, Yan Hongyan 阎红彦, who is from the Northwest.

In the 1980s, it’s impossible to say how much they’re thinking about these antagonisms. Xi Zhongxun is certainly not happy that Deng Xiaoping doesn’t allow Gao Gang to be rehabilitated. I’m sure that grated on Xi Zhongxun. There are all these rumors that Xi Zhongxun will be the general secretary of the party, but it’s Hu Yaobang instead, even though Hu doesn’t have the level of prestige and status as Xi does. Whether Xi Zhongxun was unhappy about that, we don’t know. Deng was possibly using Xi even though he didn’t fully trust Xi.

Over the 1980s, Xi Zhongxun is increasingly unhappy with Deng’s autocratic style. He’s unhappy with how Hu Yaobang is treated, and he’s certainly unhappy with how Tiananmen Square goes down. But again, these are stories of frenemies. It’s not a story of Xi opposing Deng. It’s not them having fundamentally different views of how the party should work. It’s once again a complicated dance.

On the big picture of reform and opening, Xi and Deng were quite close. I’m sure that Xi was thrilled when Deng did the southern tour in 1992 and restarted reform. It was a complicated sense of emotions. One last coda to this: in the 1990s, Xi Zhongxun said something very interesting, which is that we shouldn’t give credit for all good things to Deng Xiaoping alone. It wasn’t just Deng.

Jordan Schneider: You mentioned this in the first episode — how your book gives a sense of the sprawl of party history across time, across geographies, and across these people who have these half-century of professional relationships, of purge and counter-purge and ideological arguments and policy arguments.

The book manages to contain all of this complexity, giving you a sense of the scale and scope of these people and their relationships to the party and to their colleagues over time, how it evolves, and how weighty and pressureful one’s experience as a person and as a professional becomes over the course of these decades. No other party history book has really given you that sense, because the ones people first gravitate to are the biographies of Zhou and of Deng and of Mao. In Deng’s early years, you get a bit of this sense, but in the middle tier — or the bottom of the top, which is where Xi Zhongxun ends up landing over the course of his career — there are so many forces being pressed upon them at all times. You’re on this religious mission, there are all these trials and tribulations, you want to be a better person, and then you have these enemies who you think are screwing you over, but also screwing the people over. There are these incredible decisions that you have to make. Can you illustrate this with the Great Leap Forward as a case study in how you respond when you see really horrific things happening, while understanding that you are just an atom in this broader system?

Joseph Torigian: The Great Leap Forward is interesting because Xi had very powerful insight into what was going on throughout the country because of his relationship with the civil ministries and the petition bureau. Nevertheless, at the same time he is trying to radicalize the government apparatus, and he’s saying all these remarkably leftist and extreme things about how individualism is a virus, that even if you’re a very heavy-set person, if the tiniest bit of the virus gets into you, it will engulf you and consume you very quickly.

There’s a constant inner struggle within every human being to destroy the individualist and bourgeois elements — and one of the ways you do that is through physical labor. You go help build a dam or you’re sent to the countryside. He warns people: “You think you’re such an expert, but really you don’t know nearly as much as the peasants do.” He’s facilitating this radicalization by calling for things like big character posters, by empowering non-technical people to criticize technical people. That’s foreshadowing something that I don’t need to describe to you as historians of Chinese politics.

Later on, in private conversations in the 1980s, Xi Zhongxun would talk about how he had tried to prevent things from getting even worse. He claims to have ended the campaign to kill sparrows, one of the most famous elements of the Great Leap Forward. He claims to have tried to protect people like Li Rui by giving him a less serious political categorization. He was involved in famine relief. He was going to the countryside and he could see people putting a mound of dirt and putting seeds in it. And people would say, “Oh, that’s creating more space for more growth.” He was a peasant himself and he knew it didn’t work that way. He would talk about how there were fields where the crops were on the outer rim, and then you look past the crops and the whole field is empty.

He’s learning essentially about what a culture of fear does to the party. He talks about how people would watch him as he tried to fix things and then feel grudges toward him and wait and then come back at him. He talks about some of his experiences during the Great Leap Forward and this habit of lying, how lying is dangerous for the party. But in the speech where he’s talking about the fall of Hu Yaobang after Hu has just been defeated [in 1987] — we know Xi Zhongxun is unhappy and he knows all of these alleged crimes against Hu Yaobang are false, and he knows that this is a violation of collective leadership — but he says all of these horrible things about Hu Yaobang that we know he didn’t believe. He’s praising Deng for being a collective leader and saying Hu Yaobang was not a collective leader because he would just make these sudden decisions. It’s almost certain he doesn’t believe these things. In that same speech he’s talking about the Great Leap Forward as a dangerous moment where people were lying too much. How do you explain that? I don’t really know, but it’s interesting that he was reflecting on the Great Leap Forward at that particular moment.

Jon Sine: Xi Zhongxun, as you mentioned, has a quite large portfolio in the book, and one of them is managing, at least in part, the Soviet experts at the time. One plausible partial interpretation of the Great Leap Forward is as part of Mao’s growing disillusionment with the idea of fully implementing the Soviet model in China. How Xi Zhongxun’s role as mediator with the Soviets play into this? At this point Xi is traveling and going mostly to the former Soviet Union.

Joseph Torigian: The story of global communism is a big part of the book. The relationship between China and the Soviet Union in the ’50s and early ’60s is part of that. The reason it’s part of Xi’s life is, as you said, he was managing the Soviet expert program, and he was visiting Eastern Europe semi-regularly. He’s also part of the Great Leap Forward, which as you mentioned, is part of a reaction to Mao drawing certain conclusions about the trajectory of the October Revolution and Mao’s preoccupation with how China can do it better — that the Soviets are no longer ambitious enough, aggressive enough, and that he is going to show them there is an even better model than the one that Xi Zhongxun had helped export wholesale for much of the 1950s into the PRC.

In 1962, it’s Mao’s preoccupation with class struggle that Xi Zhongxun gets in trouble. One of the biggest reasons Mao care about class struggle is because he’s worrying about what happened in the Soviet Union. He’s concluding that the reason the Soviet Union has become bureaucratic and privileged — the reason the Soviet Union isn’t aggressively opposing American interests (he’s unhappy with what they tout as peaceful coexistence) — is because of revisionism. Revisionism is another way of saying that they’re not really communists anymore, that they’re heretics. He’s worried about this happening at home. He’s talking and thinking a lot about class struggle. That’s one of the reasons he reacted strongly to this novel in 1962 that saw Xi Zhongxun purged. One of the many crimes that Xi Zhongxun found himself facing was that he was a spy for the Soviet Union.

Jon Sine: We talked about this when we had Sergey Radchenko on. He doesn’t think there’s a real ideological divergence between them when Mao uses terms like revisionism. It seems like when Mao is saying something like revisionism, he’s talking about obsession with material interests. Some source said that he had read The New Class by Milovan Djilas. Putting material interest first, even if it’s within a planned structure, is anathema to him. He’s more concerned with a true spirit for forging a new man and a new world. What are your thoughts on that?

Joseph Torigian: I admire Sergey so much and he’s right that in many cases when we would think ideology would matter, it didn’t. There are lots of cases where competing interests explain a lot. But ideology and factions — these two concepts have something in common with each other, which is that they can mean many different things. To say that ideology explains everything or that it doesn’t explain anything at all, is not the right way of thinking about it. Ideology mattered at certain times, in certain ways, and it shouldn’t be understated or overstated. The Sino-Soviet split wasn’t primarily for ideological reasons, but ideology made it severe and difficult to repair. This stemmed from Mao's characteristic way of explaining differences as manifesting something deeper than reasonable people drawing reasonable conclusions.

Introspection with Chinese Characteristics

Jordan Schneider: How did Xi get purged?

Joseph Torigian: There was the trigger, and there was the political background. The trigger was that a woman, Li Jiantong, a sister to another Northwestern revolutionary named Liu Jingfan, is asked to write about Liu Zhidan, who is also Liu’s brother and Xi Zhongxun’s first great mentor. At first, Xi Zhongxun tells her not to. He’s very cautious. He thinks it’s a mistake. Gao Gang’s purge a few years earlier is making it hard to talk about the Northwest. Another level of sensitivity is what happened to Peng Dehuai in 1959 because Peng Dehuai had a very close relationship with the northwesterners. He wasn’t just the commander to Xi Zhongxun’s commissar on the Northwest Battlefield. When Peng Dehuai was fighting in the Korean War, Gao Gang was head of the Northeast and the guy who got him all of the materials that he needed. He was the logistical machine for Peng Dehuai. They were quite close.

Li Jiantong keeps pressuring him. She enlists all of these other Northwest revolutionaries, and they all put pressure on him, and they say, “You’re the only one who hasn’t died or been purged and we really need you to give approval to this because we really care about Liu Zhidan.” Xi Zhongxun finally accedes, but he also gives all this advice about how and why she should be careful. He’s still not really all that enthusiastic. He says, “You should talk a lot about Mao,” and he also says,“You also need to go talk Yan Hongyan."

Who is Yan Hongyan? In the 1940s, Mao was trying to pick a Northwesterner to represent them as a group that he could then ally with. He picks Gao Gang. But this other guy, Yan Hongyan hates Gao Gang. He thinks that he, Yan, has the revolutionary prestige and status that should justify him as being the leader of the Northwesterners. He’s really unhappy about this. So when Gao Gang is purged in the early 1950s, Yan is thrilled. He’s hoping that this is going to facilitate a revision of history that recognizes what he thinks is his rightful place.

When parts of this novel are published, Yan Hongyan is furious because he thinks this is moving backwards from the direction that he hoped, which was to make sure that Gao Gang is never rehabilitated and people like him get the respect that he thinks he deserved. He doesn’t believe that Li Jiantong wrote it. He thinks Xi Zhongxun wrote it. He doesn’t think that this woman could have produced such a work, so he complains. It’s not exactly clear what he thought would happen, but people within the leadership take this novel and they go to Mao and they say, “Why is this novel being written right now?”

“Right now” is a very sensitive political moment because Mao, for many reasons, is preoccupied with class struggle. Many members of the elite are using this to show Mao that they can find trouble when it rears its head and they can warn him so that it can be resolved before it becomes a bigger issue. We don’t know whether Mao actually believed that this was a kind of revisionist novel. It may have just been useful for him to talk about it in that particular way. But for whatever reason it was, it led to 16 years of persecution.

Jon Sine: 16 years is insane.

Jordan Schneider: The craziest thing is Xi Zhongxun is spending years and years and years reflecting on what it is that he did wrong in this and he’s doing all this self-criticism and “Oh, did I misinterpret something? What was my part in this error?” Then 40 years later he’s like, “No, I actually didn’t do anything wrong. These people are crazy.” But it took him a while to get there.

Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting that my book is a book of history and much of that 16 years is Xi Zhongxun doing self-criticism about his history and then when he’s fighting for rehabilitation, which actually doesn’t happen fully until several years after he returns to work — it’s these constant battles about how his life should be understood by the party. It speaks to how much these people, their entire sense of self-worth, their entire worldview is shaped by how the party characterizes them.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about that turn for a second, because going from the self-flagellation to, “Let me do everything I can to convince these people my self-flagellation was wrong and I was not a bad guy the whole time.” It’s a weird turn, right?

Joseph Torigian: You’re absolutely right. When he was actually writing the self-criticism, whether he was forcing himself to believe what he was writing because he recognized that the party is always right, or he was just doing it to get by — that’s an interesting question. We can only conjecture what was really going through his mind. My suspicion is that he really did find the charges ridiculous. He thought they were outrageous. But gradually, painfully and emotionally he forced himself to come as close to acknowledging the charges as he could because he recognized the possibility that it was his individuality that was the problem. He had this faith in the party always being right and in Mao always being right.

When he saw the party moving in another direction and he saw space for his case to be revisited, you can see him seeing it from the other perspective, which is he cares so much about there being a better evaluation that he would fight tooth and nail for it. We can only guess as to what his interiority was during this time, but ultimately you put the party’s interest first and if that means self-criticism, if that means transforming yourself, then that’s what happens.

One other thing too is you want to do a good self-criticism because you don’t want to hurt other people. If you fight it, it just makes things worse because it drags in other people and the party decides that they need to do even more to punish you, to scare you and to get you to break, essentially.

Jordan Schneider: Who was the guy who tried to kill himself, and everyone was like, “Why did you try to kill yourself? These are only words. You could have just chilled out and things would have come back around.”

Joseph Torigian: There’s this interesting hope that if the party is always right and you have faith in yourself, that even if you’ve made mistakes, even if you’ve done something terribly wrong, you can still win back the party’s trust by going far to acknowledge that the party is right, even when they’re going after you, and then to work even harder to show how good you are at your job and how devoted you are. The quote is from Xi Zhongxun to Gao Gang. There might have been this hope that even if you are going to be persecuted, even if you are going to be attacked, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do revolution anymore. It means you do revolution on a smaller scale. Or it might mean that you can’t do revolution for a while and then later on you come back.

Xi Zhongxun makes a remarkable statement in the 1980s, where apparently he says to somebody, “People come up, they go down, it’s cyclical, you can’t hold grudges. It’s just how our party works.” It’s almost like Democrats and Republicans and political parties in Western societies. There is this hope that they will get your case right because even if you were wrong and even if you failed, your heart is still clean and you can still prove it to them if you work even harder to dig yourself out of that hole.

Jordan Schneider: Psychologically, it is easier to stay in that mode than it is to question the essence of this and whether all the decisions you’ve made leading up to that moment were actually fighting for something which is bad.

Joseph Torigian: Oh yeah, 100%. You’re faced with two choices. One is to say that everything you’ve done so far is wrong, and you know that now because the party turned against you. That’s much harder, exactly as you said, than saying that you weren’t good enough for the party. You were the one who made the mistake. You were the one who allowed yourself to be shot by the sugar-coated bullets of bourgeois liberalization. This is how they thought. Even Xi Zhongxun himself kept warning people that there’s no stasis, there’s no equilibrium, there’s no point where you are invulnerable to mistakes because bourgeois elements keep creeping back in. You have to keep fighting it. The more confident you are, the more vulnerable you are. It’s an interesting way of thinking about the world.

Jordan Schneider: These leaders are the most into-therapy people that you could ever come across. All they’re trying to do is reform themselves and shape themselves and interrogate what it was about them as individuals that led them to do this deviation instead of that deviation. On the one hand, they’re trying to create themselves into these automatons, but there’s so much dialogue with their own interiority and individuality, which they’re trying to squeeze out of but can’t because they’re human beings. You’re basically stuck in this weird version of — it’s almost like he has nothing else to do for 16 years, aside from screwing in iPhones and just meditating on himself and all his mistakes and how he thought this wrong thing at this time.

Joseph Torigian: That’s what makes him interesting, is that when he comes out the other end, it’s remarkable how reflective he is, but it’s also remarkable how many limitations still confine him.

Jinping, I Am Your Father

Jon Sine: This is one of the quotes that has stuck with me the most. A man named Yang Ping worked with Xi Zhongxun in a factory when he was exiled. I guess he was in Henan in Luoyang for close to a decade.

Joseph Torigian: He was there twice, both before and in the later years of the Cultural Revolution.

Jon Sine: This one is from 1976, the very late years, near the finale. At this point, Deng is being widely denounced and criticized. Yang Ping goes into Xi Zhongxun’s apartment at 8 p.m. one night:

“Yang was surprised to find Xi drinking strong cheap liquor and crying alone in the dark. Xi explained that it was his son Jinping’s birthday. Xi said, ‘Your father is better than I am; he took such good care of you. I am also a father, but because of me . . . Jinping only narrowly escaped death!’ Xi then proceeded to tell Yang about Jinping’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Yang later wrote, ‘That night, Old Xi spoke to me, and at the same time, he cried. He kept saying he had let down everyone in his family. He said that in terms of taking care of his entire family, his behavior had been criminal and so on. One could say that his emotional state was approaching a total lack of control. It made me feel extremely sad. Normally, his words would be very concise. He wasn’t verbose, and he didn’t repeat himself. He definitely was never incoherent.’”

At the end of this same paragraph is the thing that stuck with me the most — Xi Jinping comes to visit him a few days later. They’re both sweltering because it’s summer and they’re both sitting in their underwear smoking as Jinping recited Mao speeches from memory while Xi Zhongxun watched. At some point near the end of the book, you say that we shouldn’t necessarily think of Xi Jinping as thinking, “How could I be loyal to a party that treated my father so badly?,” but rather the inverse — “My father sacrificed so much for the party, yet still is this loyal, and still wants me to be reciting Mao speeches. How could I ever transgress that party?” In some ways, this underwear incident actually helped make that stick a little bit more for me.

Joseph Torigian: Yang Ping is struck by this. He knows Zhongxun cares about his son, he knows he feels bad about what happened to his son, and the son comes to see him on a rare visit, and what do they do? It raises questions about why this is the case.

One reason is the political background. Xi Zhongxun didn’t want his family to be a hotbed for privilege, entitlement and weakness, even though they were high ranking figures. One way of addressing that is by being tough. Xi Zhongxun had this view that if you’re not a very strict disciplinarian (and he was famous for being one), that when your children grow up, they’re not good members of society because they can’t live collectively.

But even if you are that strict and you see that strictness as a gift, as a sign of care and love, why you would have him recite Mao is an interesting question. One reason is that in 1976, Mao is still the lodestar of the communists’ sense of meaning for these people. Mao used to tell Xi Zhongxun, “You’re not reading enough. You need to read more, you need to improve your cultural side, you need to improve your ability to think ideologically.” In a way he’s doing to his son what Mao did to him, which was to tell him to read, and now he’s telling him to memorize Mao.

Xi Zhongxun is hoping is that if you’ve mastered Mao and can use Mao’s language, you can protect yourself in powerful ways. It allows you to think ideologically and not purely empirically. It allows you to be able to justify what it is that you’re doing because “I memorized Mao.” That’s a sign of political and social capital in this society. At this very same time, he’s telling other people about certain distasteful elements of the Mao era that stuck with him. Complicated person.

Jordan Schneider: It’s like a catechism, right?

Joseph Torigian: You have to memorize the ancient texts. That’s how it works.

Jon Sine: It’s kind of weird to me that Xi Jinping ends up going to Liangjiahe.

Joseph Torigian: Which happens to be Shaanxi, near where his father... I mean, the sense of historical sprawl, to use this word again, must have been palpable for him. Returning to the roots of not only communism, but of Chinese civilization, for self-revolution and for continuous re-baptism in Chinese traditional culture and revolutionary legacy.

Jon Sine: Victor Shih said in a recent podcast that the lesson that Xi Jinping likely learned from the Cultural Revolution is that what really matters is to make sure you’re on the winning side of political struggles, so that you can be the one who inflicts your will on the other side. Do you think that is a valid read? Is that interpretation in tension with the “getting redder than red” interpretation?

Joseph Torigian: That’s a false binary, frankly. I don’t think that Xi Jinping concluded when he was 15 years old that he needed to be a leader of the country so that he could protect himself and that nobody could ever hurt him. I don’t think that’s right. But I do think that he learned a lot about politics. He learned about the fickleness of human relations, the fickleness of human nature. He said that literally, in a remarkably candid moment.

How does someone who has seen the fickleness of human nature also have such a preoccupation with ideals and conviction? Stalin was the same way. Stalin was both an idealist and a realist at the same time. I don’t think that these are binaries. You need to be practical and flexible so you can achieve these idealistic goals. And you need to have faith in the final victory to motivate you to work hard and innovate and change so that you can meet the challenges as they emerge and transform.

Xi Jinping is the top leader. When he does things, we can see how it would fit the goals of a vainglorious person. I’m sure Xi Jinping has a healthy sense of personal ambition, but I don’t think he differentiates that from the party’s interests at all. He almost sees himself as an avatar for party interests. He probably almost sees himself as a person inside a machine pushing all those buttons, but the machine itself is a purposeful device that’s useful for the party to achieve its goals.

Both of those things are there at the same time. What’s good for him is good for the party. The party is an organizational weapon because it has a core. What the core does is it imposes discipline and cohesion on people who might have their own views, who might be susceptible to corruption and individualism and materialism and peaceful evolution, etc., and that he is there to stop that. That’s why he needs the power that he has brought into himself.

Jon Sine: I’m glad you call it a false dichotomy. I just spent two months of my life reading the Robert Moses biography by Robert Caro. Brilliant book. It exactly explains that this is an idealist who becomes a realist in one, but the ideals don’t necessarily match with what other people would want. The first volume of Niall Ferguson’s biography of Kissinger is titled, The Idealist. It would be quite wrong to put them as a dichotomy.

Joseph Torigian: You can be as utilitarian as you need to be precisely because you have so much conviction that the final goal deserves so much sacrifice.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about Xi’s experience during the Cultural Revolution and how his relationship to his father played into that.

Joseph Torigian: Now we’re doing this armchair Freudianism. If you want, we can put them on the couch.

Jordan Schneider: This is your time to shine.

Joseph Torigian: To be fair, Xi Jinping’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution are obviously formative. Xi Jinping, before he came to power, talked about them all the time. He talked about how when he went to the countryside, he brought these dogmatic ideas from the capital. He couldn’t get along with the peasants. He was too extreme. He ran away once because it was too hard for him. The physical labor was overwhelming. He was constantly getting bitten by bedbugs. He said that he doubted. But because he went back to it, his faith is much more unshakable than somebody who didn’t go through that process. He says that anybody who’s gone through that, nothing could make you tougher.

Now that raises an interesting question, which is, you need to go through doubt to have strong conviction. But what happens if you go through doubt and you don’t come out on the other side with strong conviction? Should you subject people to doubt? What kind of doubt is good and what kind of doubt is bad? What kind of suffering leads to dedication and what kind leads to alienation? Is it situational or is it dispositional? These are all very interesting questions to think about.

Jordan Schneider: You got this cute line in your acknowledgements. You write that this book will likely not be welcomed in the PRC at the time of publication. It’s a somewhat ironic outcome. Xi Jinping once said that his devotion to the legacy of the revolution was the result of undergoing a period of doubt when seeing the past at its worst. If the evidence shared in this book helps explain his own choices, why would the party doubt that others would not draw different conclusions about his family’s forging?

Joseph Torigian: I don’t know if you watched this TV show about Xi Zhongxun that was produced on the mainland. It was all these episodes, and I was pretty excited. I spent years of my life studying this guy, and now I get to see him on television, and I thought at the very least it would be exciting and that at least I could hear the clarion call through the show of Xi speaking to young people, and I didn’t hear it. Why? Because it didn’t have any grit, it didn’t have any sense of hazard, it didn’t have any sense of risk. It was kind of maudlin and sentimental, and there were a lot of monologues, and it was, the revolution was kind of a dinner party in a way, to turn Mao’s phrase on its head. I found that almost less inspiring than my book, where you have all the wars and everything. I can kind of get Xi Jinping a little bit when I look at the pages that I wrote, but I couldn’t get him watching this TV show. That should have been even more inspiring because you cut out all of the bad stuff.

Jon Sine: It’s what Kathleen Kennedy and Disney did to Star Wars.

Jordan Schneider: I’m going to have Tony Gilroy on to talk about Andor. He’s talked about how it was inspired by reading history and Stalin in particular as its protagonist. I’m going to pitch to him — you gotta do Xi Zhongxun next. He deserves his own Star Wars-inspired film. It’s a sad irony that the party has all this incredible material, which I think you can turn into something very inspiring from a “love the party” perspective. But the fact that they’re too scared to do that is very instructive of where we are in Xi-era China and how they view and don’t view history as an instrument.

Joseph Torigian: This is what I try to do with the book, to show that the party doesn’t just have coercive and organizational power, but that it has real emotional power. For people trying to figure out how to find meaning in their lives, Xi Jinping is telling young people to eat bitterness, telling them to go to the countryside, telling them to learn from their forebears. I’m sure that a lot of people are not going to react positively because they want to rùnxué 润学, meaning they want to learn how to live overseas, or they want to tǎngpíng 躺平, meaning they want to lie down. For Xi Jinping, those are existential problems, because if the young people aren’t on board, then that’s peaceful evolution, and you don’t want that to happen.

But his message is not totally unpersuasive for everyone. It’s human to want to be bigger than yourself and national rejuvenation is something that you would find meaningful to sacrifice for. Collective values are something that people are often attracted to emotionally. What emerges, however, from this kind of system is not just all of this excitement and meaning, but terrible suffering as well. Whatever conclusions people want to draw from that is up to them.

Jordan Schneider: That’s something that we struggle with a lot now, trying to understand the appeal that Communism had in the 1900s to the 1940s, both in the countries where revolution was happening as well as in the Western-educated world, which also found incredible inspirational power in it. Democratic socialism in America today is such weak sauce compared to what was being offered to Xi Zhongxun when he was a teenager in Shaanxi.

Joseph Torigian: There’s one way of living life, which is Netflix, dinner parties, brunch, consuming materialism, watching Andor. And there’s another where you’re a member of an organization that is leading your country to a rightful place in the world that had been lost for centuries. Choosing to support that kind of mission has repercussions, often tragic repercussions. I’m helping people understand these decisions and also helping people understand the implications of those decisions.

Return and Reform

Jon Sine: Let’s talk about how Xi Zhongxun finally comes out of the wilderness and makes it back.

Joseph Torigian: There’s this dramatic moment where Xi Zhongxun is crying again. This time he’s crying in front of a picture of Zhou Enlai who’s just died. It’s sobbing, it’s uncontrolled crying. I’ve wondered who he’s crying for, whether he’s crying for Zhou Enlai or whether he’s crying for someone else, or whether he’s crying for himself. Because the death of Zhou raises questions about what’s going to happen next. Mao is still alive. It’s unclear what the succession is going to be. There had been a brief moment when Deng had been brought back to power when it seemed like the nation was finally digging itself out of the hole in which it had found itself during the Cultural Revolution.

Mao dies, another wrenching experience again. No matter how much Xi had reflected, Mao was deeply meaningful to him in many ways. Then the Gang of Four are arrested. Mao’s initial successor is Hua Guofeng. Xi Zhongxun is rehabilitated primarily by Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing 汪东兴, who is in charge of the special case committees and propaganda.The decision to send Xi to Guangdong not made by Deng Xiaoping, but by Ye Jianying, who at the time was part of a triumvirate along with Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping.

It’s interesting that his first job is in Guangdong because it’s really obvious in Guangdong how bad things are, because the Gang of Four had connections there, Lin Biao had connections there, and all these killings that happened there.

It’s also right on the border with Hong Kong. Tens of thousands of people are fleeing to Hong Kong. Many of them are dying in the process. You can literally see across the street, across the river, how far behind China was.

But the case against him is not revised until 1980. He’s back to work, but on the books he’s still not fully rehabilitated, which is also kind of interesting.

Jordan Schneider: I want to stay on that moment. It must be disorienting where what you’ve devoted your life to, it’s taken 20 years out of your life and killing tens of millions of people is just losing to these colonialist capitalists, to the bourgeois people. He has to grapple with that. On the one hand, he says, “Look, we need to educate them spiritually that capitalism is bad,” but he also understands, “If we don’t step our game up, people want to eat, they want to provide for themselves and their family. Me telling them war stories about Shaanxi in the 1920s is not gonna stop folks from leaving my socialist not-so-paradise.”

Joseph Torigian: It’s another dilemma. On the one hand, you see the sources of political order and belief. On the other hand, if socialism means empty bellies, that’s dangerous. It’s a balance that’s hard to get right. You see him reflecting on it and thinking about it in real time — how you can achieve economic development without giving up on the ideology and how you can make sure people take ideology seriously even as their lives are getting better and even as you’re changing things in society that raise questions about what the heck socialism even is in the first place.

Jon Sine: The other important thing while Xi Jinping is in Guangdong, how much he’s responsible for the reforms, especially the special economic zones. He has a substantial role in the special economic zones, but initially he seems to be against the household responsibility system, which is one of the most important parts of China’s economic takeoff again in the late 70s and early 80s. Can you clarify, based on your deep research, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping’s respective roles to reform?

Joseph Torigian: How we think about their roles with respect to the special economic zones speaks to a lot of party historiography and how the party functions. The traditional story is that the special economic zones happened because Deng Xiaoping wanted them to happen. Xi Zhongxun played a big role too. That’s part of that story.

But actually, Deng Xiaoping wasn’t present for most of the work conference in the spring of 1979 that decided they were going to approve the special economic zones. It’s important that Deng gave his imprimatur because it was still a dangerous risk, because they could be accused of being revisionists and Trotskyites. I don’t want to discount the importance of having Deng’s approval, but it’s also very clear that Hua Guofeng was the main driver of the idea in the beginning.

We know from both memoir and archival accounts that when Xi Zhongxun went back to Guangdong, he was talking mostly about Hua Guofeng and the role that Hua Guofeng had played in this. There’s a coda to this, which is in the 1990s, Hua Guofeng tries to visit Xi Zhongxun and he’s not allowed for somewhat mysterious reasons. He’s finally granted an audience and says, “People say I’m crazy because I say that you [Xi] need to deserve credit for some of these reforms,” which is kind of a remarkable thing to say for a lot of reasons.

But the relationship between Hua Guofeng and Xi Jinping is interesting. When Xi is brought to Beijing to work on the Secretariat, he does what he’s supposed to do. He says all these horrible things about Hua Guofeng that he probably didn’t believe to signify that he was now on board with the new order that was marked by Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang.

Jon Sine: It’s remarkable. People should reflect on this. You have this whole idea of the Mao-Deng transition and many people who write histories of it and make a clear delineation. Deng is the reformer and gets all the credit in the party’s details and the Western retellings of it. But here we have Hua Guofeng who is known in the West primarily for the “two whatevers,” of being Mao’s “running dog,” when there’s far more historical evidence of Deng Xiaoping serving as Mao’s right-hand man, being his “running dog,” and implementing the Great Leap Forward. The mental rejiggering this requires for some people is remarkable.

Joseph Torigian: Frankly, I don’t like talking in terms of who deserves credit for reform and opening, because there is a little bit of a historical element to it, of who did what and when. It is somewhat empirical, but it’s also such an easily weaponized and politicized debate because reform and opening is an inherently ambiguous idea and not even the Chinese could really explain it all that well. However, if not for Deng, would reform and opening look the way it did? I don’t think it would.

The bigger point here is that the through line of all these dilemmas went through Deng Xiaoping again and again. For example, the dilemma of “the three” versus “the four.” “The three” was the Third Plenum in 1978 on economic modernization. Just a few weeks later, Deng Xiaoping gives another speech where he introduces “the four” cardinal principles, which were very conservative formulations. So people were wondering, are we going to reform or not?

What’s interesting is when Xi Zhongxun saw those remarks, he was happy apparently, according to his secretary, and that Xi said, “We can’t do reform and opening right without the four cardinal principles because it sets a guideline, it sets a red line. It helps us be clear that there are certain things that aren’t going to be changed, which is very important.”

In theory this makes sense, but that in practice is hard to do at the same time. And so there are these extraordinary zigzags. We think of the Deng era as a stable era, an era of moving in one direction of economic modernization. But as I already mentioned in the previous episode, as soon as Xi Zhongxun goes to work in Beijing from Guangdong, people think another cultural revolution is happening because of a movie that people are criticizing.

Then in 1983, the campaign to eliminate spiritual pollution, people think another cultural revolution is happening. Xi Zhongxun is really unhappy with this campaign, but nevertheless he’s telling foreigners in meetings that spiritual pollution is a real problem.

The challenge of maintaining order without going too far, especially when the top leader is changing his mind and people are trying to figure out what he thinks was a formula for these really dramatic shifts throughout the entire Deng era. In some ways, Xi Jinping is a reaction to this. I don’t want to put him on the couch or anything, but Xi Jinping says, “We’re not going to be as radical as the Mao era, but we’re also going to recognize that reform and opening created real problems and we need to resolve them and I’m the one to do it.” We’re not rejecting either of these eras, but we’re going to find a happy middle. He’s saying, we’re not going to lurch back and forth. We haven’t seen quite as many really stunning things appearing under his rule as we saw during the Deng administration.

Jon Sine: Xi Zhongxun’s next spot is going back to Beijing and working under Hu Yaobang at the Secretariat. There’s a very interesting book by Julian Gewirtz, which is Never Turn Back. It’s a history of the 1980s as this possibility-hood of what could have been in terms of political reform. Hu Yaobang, there’s another good recent book, Robert Suettinger, The Conscience of the Party, Hu Yaobang. If you say reformer, Hu’s is the image that would be conjured to mind of this period. Xi Zhongxun is working under him. How does this get tied into Xi Zhongxun’’s own legacy as a reformer?

Joseph Torigian: At the Party Life Meeting that criticized Hu Yaobang, one of the individuals who was present said to Xi Zhongxun, “You went even farther than Hu Yaobang.” The question becomes, in what direction is he going even farther?

In the 1980s the party is determining whether or not it can move to a new equilibrium, both with the ethnic minorities and with society, but not just those two areas. They are also reflectively thinking about how to reorganize politics at the very heart of Zhongnanhai. At the same time, they only considered certain possibilities, and it was really easy for them to get scared when things weren’t going well. Whether you’re more impressed by their insights or their limitations, I think is up to the reader. But it’s certainly the case that you could see there were good reasons for why that period did not end up in the direction that people looking back now wish that it would.

Ultimately, the question of how serious this possibility was forces us to look at certain counterfactuals that are really hard to answer. How likely were they? Can we really control them? How much can we really guess how different it would be? One of the themes of the book is yet another kind of contradiction — the continuities are obvious and they’re strong, yet at the same time the sense of contingency and accident and the myriad of all of these different structures, how they actually manifest at a particular moment, can also be something that’s hard to guess.

People within the system couldn’t read each other very well and the system could also change people. Let’s say that it was somebody who was not Deng Xiaoping who was the leader. Xi Zhongxun whispered privately that power corrupts. Li Rui said the same thing. Li Rui said, “You know, I really liked Jiang Zemin. Jiang Zemin used to come to me all the time and ask for advice. Then Jiang Zemin became the top leader and then he ignored me. I’ve seen this kind of person a lot.” He was, you know, clearly also alluding to his relationship with Xi Jinping. It’s not a question that’s easy to answer.

But one last thing I’ll say about Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang — I don’t think that they represented two different lines. The problem wasn’t that Deng and Hu had consistently different views of thinking about the world. The problem was that Hu Yaobang thought he had more space than he really did. He thought that he had Deng’s confidence and that he was given a task of achieving modernization, but also party control. Hu Yaobang agreed with party control, but that he was scapegoated and punished in part because of the student protesters and in part because he didn’t handle the succession issue well.

Jon Sine: This two-line structure where you have the leader, Mao or the “autocratic Deng” and then their deputies — is it fair to call this a Leninist characteristic of a Leninist system?

Joseph Torigian: Yes, absolutely. The tensions between Brezhnev and Kosygin in some ways mirror some of the problems that we saw in China. What’s interesting is the two-line system was created because of the lessons they drew from the Soviet Union.

Mao was very explicit about this at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He said that when Stalin died, his named successor, Malenkov, was pushed out because Stalin didn’t give Malenkov enough time before Stalin’s death to secure his position.

What we in China need to do is allow a successor to essentially run the show long enough ahead of time before Mao dies, so that when Mao dies, somebody who will not allow de-Stalinization to happen in China can hold down the fort and can survive any challenge.

Mao also had this conception of himself — he was the Sage King. He didn’t want to be boxed in with day-to-day decision making, which was a huge problem because if you didn’t report to him enough, you got yelled at. If you reported to him too much, you got yelled at. He got to decide when he was going to be mad.

Liu Shaoqi was brought in so that he could give Mao time to do Mao things, but also so that he could secure himself as a successor so you don’t have in China what happened in the Soviet Union — meaning that the named successor is pushed out and then there’s a move in a new direction.

This is ironic because Liu Shaoqi, as the successor, as the deputy, raises fears in Mao’s mind of revisionism because Liu Shaoqi is not getting it right even while Mao is alive. Liu Shaoqi was not opposing Mao. He did not represent a cohesive different line compared to Mao. In fact, this one figure who appears in my book, Hu Jiwei 胡绩伟, who was at People’s Daily, says in the 1980s, “Boy, I wish there was a Liu Shaoqi line. It’s really too bad there wasn’t one."

Mao gets rid of Liu Shaoqi in the most dramatic way possible, which of course is the Cultural Revolution. The origins of the two-line are related to the Soviet Union model. It’s related to succession and to the nature of Mao as a leader.

When Deng comes to power, it’s even worse in some ways, because he’s not even the chairman of the party. He’s only chairman of the Central Military Commission. He’s harder to manage in some ways because he doesn’t want people to think he’s acting like Mao. Nevertheless he thinks that he’s the core and that the party needs a core. It’s this very confusing environment and he gives enough rope to Hua Guofeng to hang himself with.

Jon Sine: Can you say a little bit more about Leninist pathologies? It seems like it all emanates from the really core issue of succession politics, which was the core focus of your previous book. This two-line thing tries to solve that. You could also tie this into democratic centralism — a dialectic that doesn’t quite seem to work because it tends to just end in centralism. What other pathologies do you see, and does Xi Jinping’s own life bring these to bear?

Joseph Torigian: Pathology is probably too strong of a word, although obviously it can lead to really tragic outcomes, and the reason for those outcomes are structural and can’t really ever be fully resolved.

Ideology is another dilemma that’s really hard to solve — this question of how you take ideology seriously enough, but not too seriously. That also emerges a lot in Xi Zhongxun’s life.

Another is how you co-opt people, whether you co-opt people, how to do that along with repression and how to get that balance right. These are all dilemmas that have been with them since the beginning that different leaders bring their own approaches to, but nevertheless remain with the party.

Stay tuned for part three, where we address Princeling Politics and Tiananmen.

Mood Music:

Why has Japan fallen out of Trump’s good graces? Will Japan close a deal with the US before tariffs take effect? And how will the upcoming Japanese election impact relations?

To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed Professor Tomohiko Taniguchi, a longtime observer of US-Japan relations and former advisor to the late Shinzo Abe.

We discuss…

• Why 1970s trade competition is still impacting US-Japan relations today, and how Japan could create “Wow factor” when dealing with Donald Trump,

• How Shinzo Abe used golf, dinner parties, and history lessons to cultivate a close personal friendship with Trump,

• The roots of Japanese resolve in dealing with PRC aggression,

• The emergence of Russian disinformation surrounding the Japanese election,

• The political economy of the Japanese Self-Defence Force, and how Abe managed the controversy surrounding his reinterpretation of Article 9.

Co-hosting today is Charles Litchfield of the Atlantic Council. Thanks to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this episode.

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

Golf and Good Graces

Jordan Schneider: We are recording this on Tuesday, July 15th, a few days before an election in Japan and in the midst of rising tariffs on the part of the US. Maybe let’s start with the present day and circle back in history to explore how we got there. Why don’t you begin by laying out the state of play with respect to the US-Japan relationship in the Trump 2.0 era?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: There was a much worse moment than today. If you recall what the situation was like in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, and up until the early 2000s, the trade frictions — usually dubbed a “war” between the United States and Japan — were much more tense and fierce. It was almost as if Japan was America’s primary adversary.

Compared to that, what’s happening at the moment is manageable, and one should not forget the bigger picture. Without the United States and Japan closely working together, you couldn’t possibly cope with this juggernaut in the making, which is in Japan’s — or for that matter America’s — neighborhood.

Jordan Schneider: All right, well, since you brought us there, let’s take it all the way back to the late ’70s and ’80s. You mentioned that it felt a lot more severe and dire at the time. How did that manifest in domestic Japanese politics?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Right. It was in the Reagan era, but continued to become worse. The bottom was hit during the Clinton era, and Japan’s terms of trade were severely negatively affected by the engineered appreciation of the Japanese currency from something like 240 yen versus $1 to even 79 yen versus $1.

That actually set in motion Japan’s massive investment in Southeast Asian nations. Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia took off in no small part because of the massive inflow of Japanese capital. The end result is that you now see a great supply chain covering those nations. History is sometimes ironic. The attack, quote unquote, against Japan culminated in a boost for those Malaysia, Indonesia, and Southeast Asian nations’ economies.

That was then. Today, Japan, as many of your viewers and listeners understand, is the biggest ever investor in the United States, having created a significant number of jobs in, interestingly, battleground states such as Ohio, where Japanese auto manufacturer Honda has been operating for some time and has created many jobs.

However, that rhetoric has not worked vis-à-vis Donald Trump. President Trump wants to teach a lesson or two to the US’s long-term allies, including Japan, that nothing is free and you must pay your own club fee if you wish to maintain the order maintained not by China, but by the United States.

Charles Lichfield: Do you think that President Trump has a particular fixation with Japan? In the period we were mentioning just a few seconds ago, in the ’80s, he himself, as he became a popular figure on people’s TV screens quite often, would mention how Japan and Japanese exports to the US were causing jobs to be lost in the US. He certainly had a fixation then, but do you think that’s rubbed off on his policies now, or is Japan just one of many that he’s going after?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: The late Prime Minister Abe, with whom I worked happily for almost eight years, played golf together with Donald Trump a number of times, not because both of these men were big golf fans, but because Shinzo Abe wanted to spend more time with the United States. President Trump in a way is like a broken record — at one point he says, “Yes, I understand,” and the next moment he comes back to where he was 10 minutes ago.

It’s very important to continue to have good conversations with Donald Trump. After all, there is no luxury for Japan to choose one from another when it comes to dealing with the President of the United States. The establishment of good rapport with whoever happens to be in the highest office in the United States makes very important sense for Japan. That’s the reason why Shinzo Abe worked extra hard to work with Donald Trump.

But I can assure you, had it not been the Donald Trump administration, but the Hillary Clinton administration, Shinzo Abe would have had as good a rapport with Mrs. Clinton as well.

Charles Lichfield: Understood. But the way that Shinzo Abe dealt with Donald Trump in the first term is almost cited as an example by other countries as they were preparing to deal with him in the second term. Always arrive with a new investment announcement, and in this way, try to convince Donald Trump to avoid targeting Japan with additional tariffs. It worked in the first term. It isn’t working now.

Now, there are many countries being targeted with tariffs, so it’s not necessarily the failing of the Japanese government this time. But still, do you think that there’s something lacking in the Japanese government strategy without Shinzo Abe that was there last time? What’s missing?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: What’s missing is making Donald J. Trump himself say, “Wow.” You know, that big surprise is what’s lacking. One should not forget that bureaucratic channels do not necessarily work. The Japanese government seems to be pulling strings as much as possible from the bureaucratic institutions of the United States.

But you need to convince the topmost guy, Donald J. Trump, and make him say, “You did a great job. You’re awesome. I’m very surprised.” You know, that’s the message that not only Japan but many other countries have been unable to deliver.

Jordan Schneider: I do want to stay on this legacy of the 1980s for Trump because there are lots of quotes from memoirs where people ask him, “Why do you believe this stuff? Why are you so focused on it?” And he’s like, “I don’t know. It’s what I’ve thought for 30 years.” Gary Cohn was the one who said, “Well, President Trump, when I was 18, I thought I could be a professional baseball player. But sometimes things I think aren’t true."

It’s remarkable that today, a singular individual in America whose political consciousness was awakened by the trade tensions between the US and Japan in the 1980s is now reshaping the global economic order. I just think it’s worth reflecting on this weird historical moment where something that should be ancient history by now — this is like 40 years ago — is still the thing that is driving the most dramatic policy changes in Washington today.

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Well, I wouldn’t disagree with you. What’s important is for Donald Trump to remember the new Japan by remembering someone that he likes, before remembering what it was like in the 1980s.

If you look at Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies, seldom you see Japanese cars running in the streets of California. However, since that time, there has been an inflow of a massive number of Japanese cars, for sure. That’s the image — the Rising Sun, you know, the movie Rising Sun, where Japan was portrayed as a villain, as a very horrible, terrifying being. That image and perception is something that Japanese manufacturers and industries have had to struggle with for many years, state by state.

No wonder Japanese companies have been the biggest or the second biggest investor in the United States. But the truth of the matter is, however you cite those facts, it wouldn’t fly. It wouldn’t make much impression on Donald J. Trump.

Still, Donald J. Trump could remember someone with good memories. Try to think what impression he may have when he remembers Italy. He would probably remember that charming lady prime minister. That’s very important. When Donald J. Trump remembers Japan, he just remembers how terrible the trade relationship was in the 1980s, rather than remembering someone he cherishes — someone with whom he very much values the relationship.

It takes a lot of effort on the part of the leader of the nation to forge a good relationship. This is very much a personified relationship rather than a sovereign-to-sovereign relationship. I think that’s what’s important always to remember. In that sense, Shinzo Abe succeeded in bringing Donald Trump’s perceptions of Japan to the reality of the 21st century. But it took a huge amount of time and effort on the part of Shinzo Abe, which, as I said, was the reason why Abe played golf a number of times together with Trump.

Once I asked Abe, and he answered, “Yes, I’m certainly interested in playing golf together with someone who is an avid player, but playing golf gives you an ample amount of time alone by ourselves to speak with each other on whatever topics you could possibly speak about."

Jordan Schneider: Do you think he actually liked him or humored him? I mean, what is your sense of the internal Shinzo Abe monologue as he’s spending three hours with this very interesting character?

Charles Lichfield: Because many of us remember the photo from dinner at Mar-a-Lago and the look that Abe pulled wasn’t necessarily one of absolute comfort and relaxation. That’s why we’re intrigued.

Tomohiko Taniguchi: I see. There are many other photographs where Abe showed very much a relaxed posture. Abe showed a big, big smile, actually. I was reminded of what Shinzo Abe said to us delegates when Shinzo Abe just came back from Trump Tower, where Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump met for the first time, when Donald Trump was not even president — he was just president-elect.

The first thing that Shinzo Abe told us over dinner was the following: “I got surprised. Trump in private was very much different from Trump in public. He was calm and he was very much a good listener and he paid keen attention to what I had to say."

It was the beginning of a very good friendship — may I say genuine, very good friendship. Shinzo Abe was extremely grateful when Donald Trump in Japan granted a longer than planned time meeting with victims of abduction — many of those parents whose children were kidnapped by the state of North Korea. Unlike Donald Trump, who spent a minimum amount of time standing, Donald Trump sat together with those victims.

The other thing that Shinzo Abe got impressed by is that Donald Trump remembered each and every member of the employees of his Mar-a-Lago resort. Donald Trump possibly remembered hundreds of names — first names, of course. It’s interesting to observe that Donald Trump still seems to be unable to remember the name of the current Japanese Prime Minister.

Charles Lichfield: The golf worked quite well. I’m not that surprised to hear that Donald Trump was a good listener when he had just been surprised himself to have won and was almost in need of fellow leaders who could explain a few things to him. He was basically looking for friends and people to talk to on the global stage, and I’m not necessarily sure that his attitude is the same now, but that’s not to say that Abe’s personal qualities didn’t play a role there.

But I suppose I do have a question about how you and his team prepared for every meeting. You mentioned the wow factor. It was always important to turn up with something that would make President Trump say, “Wow,” without wanting to talk about what’s going on now and the fact that this Prime Minister in Japan perhaps lacks a bit of a wow factor. I’m just curious about how you’d prepare a new impressive surprise for him. After all, there has been an investment deal this time around — the Nippon Steel investment has been cleared. But my impression is you’re saying that isn’t enough, and last time you were able to prepare better surprises. If you could perhaps describe to us the process that will go into preparing the next surprise before every meeting.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, and I guess to complement that, this isn’t — it’s a very different mode for governments to prepare. It’s almost like you want someone who works with celebrities or is good at movie promotion or something. It’s almost like a different modality of thinking about foreign relations, no?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: What has not changed is this continued importance to spend more time by themselves one-on-one between the President of the United States and the leader of the nation that he’s meeting. You must spend a huge amount of time covering all sorts of issues. Prepared talking points prepared by bureaucracy do not actually mean much because by spending two hours, three hours, four hours together, there’s nothing that bureaucracy could cover in its entirety.

For instance, the conversation between the two leaders, Abe and Trump, went to cover some of the historical issues in the modern era in the Indo-Pacific — in Asia more precisely. To the surprise of many, Donald Trump once raised a question, “Is it true that Japan had a war with China in the 19th century?”

Shinzo Abe said, “Yes, Mr. President, there was a war between Qing Dynasty China and Japan.”

Donald Trump said, “Wow, you must have been defeated badly.”

“That’s not true, Mr. President. It was Japan that won the war.”

Mr. Trump’s response was, “Really?”

“Further than that, Mr. President, there was a war between Tsarist Russia and Japan.”

“Are you kidding? You must have been badly beaten.”

“That’s not the case. Japan actually won.”

“You are warriors!”

You know, that’s the conversation. Donald Trump really liked having those conversations, and Shinzo Abe did so.

However, Donald Trump is also very much a volatile individual. He once said “Shinzo, you always think that Japan is in a very much precarious environment, neighborhood, ‘Taiwan could fall in the hands of China anytime soon,’ you know, those are the things that you say. But when the war erupts, it is not you Japanese, it’s always us American boys and girls who shed blood, sweat, and tears. You look at us fighting with the Chinese on Sony TV screens, don’t you?"

Shinzo Abe had to answer with great care, but he was able to answer by saying, “Mr. President, in order for that not to happen, I did my homework by revising the interpretation of the Constitution so that when it comes to military confrontations in the neighborhood of Japan, now the Japanese armed forces and the US military can work and must work in a collective unit. In peacetime, it is the Japanese armed forces, self-defense forces, that give protection, Mr. President, 24/7, 365 days to the military assets, ships, and aircraft personnel of the United States."

Mr. Trump did not know that, and he was awed. “Is that right? Huh, Japan has changed.”

Constant reminding is necessary, and in order for this to be made possible, one has to have a deep, long conversation.

Charles Lichfield: That’s very interesting. You’ve just mentioned the wow factor towards the end — at least what Abe could say that he’d done himself. “I’ve done my homework, I’ve reinterpreted Article 9.” But what I hadn’t realized is that there was a second layer of wows that came from history and things that Japan had achieved long before that President Trump was happy to hear about. That’s very interesting indeed.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s not forget Singapore, Pearl Harbor... We've got a lot of these we can do.

Charles Lichfield: I think Donald Trump knows about Pearl Harbor.

Tomohiko Taniguchi: May I say that it seems Abe actually liked Donald Trump. Very straightforward and broad-minded if you build a good relationship with Donald Trump. When Shinzo Abe stepped down as prime minister due to his illness — this was September 2020 — there was a last phone call between these two individuals, Trump and Abe. It was so emotional that the interpreter went into crying himself. Trump said to Abe, “Shinzo, I will miss you.” That’s the tone that Donald Trump used.

Charles Lichfield: This is always a difficult topic, but I’m curious whether you knew anything about President Trump’s reaction when Prime Minister Abe, unfortunately, died when he was killed. How did President Trump react to that? By this time, President Trump wasn’t in office. This was when Biden was president.

Tomohiko Taniguchi: He has continued to cherish the friendship he had with Abe, the evidence of which was shown clearly when Melania and Donald Trump extended an invitation to the wife of Shinzo Abe. Akie is her name. Akie Abe went to dine with Mr. and Mrs. Trump. The photograph that was delivered afterwards showed the kind of relaxation that you couldn’t possibly imagine from Donald Trump in normal times. I think Donald Trump was utterly shocked by the death of his friend. Each and every time he still remembers Shinzo Abe, that memory comes back to him with very much a warm feeling.

Jordan Schneider: I was making jokes about whether or not Shinzo Abe enjoyed interacting with Trump, but I think the way — I’m convinced, and maybe this is a transition to talk about the Shinzo Abe-Xi relationship, where I imagine the interactions were a lot less playful, perhaps is the word. What was his perspective coming into office about the relationship with China and how did it evolve over time?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Well, on the first day when Abe met Trump, Abe had to say to the President-elect, “North Korea may be a threat, but it’s a manageable short-term threat. If you run good relationships with major powers around North Korea, like Russia, China, North Korea is a function that is very much dependent, not independent function. China is a long-term threat. First and foremost, one must remember that.” That’s one key message that Shinzo Abe tried very hard to convey to the new president-elect.

Shinzo Abe took office first in 2006, and that term ended only in a year. But 2006 was a momentous period. If you look back, it was in 2010 — 15 years ago — the Chinese GDP overtook Japan’s. Japan became the second biggest economy in the world back in 1968. Forty-two years after that, Japan was overtaken by China. It was writing on the wall. With that, the Chinese military buildup was awesome. Now China is probably five times as large as Japan, and if you look at the military balance in the Western Pacific or the Indo-Pacific, it is China that’s maintaining the biggest naval presence.

As Elbridge Colby mentioned several times, the United States could ill afford to provide Australia with nuclear-powered strategic submarines because the United States is short of military assets such as that in counterbalancing China. That’s the scenario that Shinzo Abe had. I think he knew very well that Japan could not cope with China alone by itself anyway. You need to build a wider network of allies and partners. First and foremost, you need to recalibrate the US-Japan alliance. You needed to reinvest into that. But in addition to that, you must bring Japan closer to allies or partners. The prime candidates for that matter were Australia and India.

Japan and Australia made a lot of effort in bringing Indo-Japanese and Australia-Japanese relationship to a level where you could call these partnerships alliance relationships. After building diplomatic capital and after implementing some of the legislative bills which eventually have made it possible for Japan to work with the United States as a collective seamless unit, then Xi Jinping’s attitude mellowed, if you like. It gives us a very good lesson that if you wish to have a manageable relationship with China, you need to show no weakness. You need to show strength.

I think Shinzo Abe did that by cementing Japan’s relationship with the United States, even under Donald Trump, and by forging, for instance, the Pacific-wide trade regime, CPTPP — Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership — even without the United States. The Quad was another setup: Indo-Australian, Japanese-American military network. Even Japan under Shinzo Abe made it possible for Japan and some of the select NATO member nations that share maritime orientations to work more closely together.

By the way, in a month, the UK’s new aircraft carrier, one of the new aircraft carriers, Prince of Wales and its strike group, will make a port call to Tokyo and Yokosuka. It’s a symbolic act. The two nations, the UK and Japan, are talking now about making it regular for those strike groups to come to Japan.

By the way, you said Donald Trump remembers Pearl Harbor. For sure, he does remember. But I’m curious if he remembers that shortly after Pearl Harbor, Japan’s military sank the newest battleship of the Royal Navy. The name was Prince of Wales. We have come a long way. Prince of Wales — now HMS, His Majesty’s Ship, Prince of Wales and its strike group and Japanese Navy boats will exhibit a massive joint drill, possibly joined by the Filipino Navy and Australian Navy. I’m not sure, but if that happens, that would be even greater.

The Tyranny of Proximity

Charles Lichfield: The early Abe era, in his first term, was before China overtook Japanese GDP, it was before Xi Jinping, it was before China restricted the export of critical minerals to Japan. A lot of aggressive behavior by China had not been exhibited yet. Nonetheless, Abe had already made a speech to India’s parliament in 2007, which I’m sure you influenced a little bit at the time, which I think suggested there was already some concern that the Pacific would be less navigable, less free. That’s when he developed the whole free and open Indo-Pacific concept. Why do you think so early, long before Donald Trump became president, why do you think he already had this concern about China?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: It was in the year 2008 when the Chinese authorities started to send their official ships to provoke Japanese territorial waters, particularly around the chain of islands Senkaku. When Shinzo Abe was in office 2006 and 2007, the Chinese started to make their physical presence felt acutely by surrounding nations. In the South China Sea, the Chinese started to develop their military presence, and whether or not there should be a code of conduct signed between China and the ASEAN nations had, until that time, been hotly discussed. Chinese ambition was quite clear.

If you look at the map, it’s obvious that without having presence either in the South China Sea or over Japanese Okinawa Island chain, the Chinese could not possibly gain access to blue water. It was also obvious that in order to fuel the growth of Chinese economy, copper, rare minerals from countries such as Chile, Peru were very important. In order to secure the free passage of the sea lane between South America and China, they started to look at some of those countries in the middle of the South Pacific, such as Fiji. Investment into Fiji had already begun, and it was not doubtful about the Chinese ambition.

I, for one, had a chance of a rare opportunity of speaking with the late Andrew Marshall, the Yoda of Pentagon, who gave consultations to a number of presidents back from Richard Nixon, who told us that in order for Japan and for that matter the United States to cope with this rising behemoth of China, it is vitally important for us to look at the maritime domain because China — Chinese coastline is relatively short. Japan has got the eighth largest exclusive economic zone, and Australia is a big island nation, so you must work together to give pressure from the seas to China. When Shinzo Abe spoke about confluence of the two seas, namely Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, he was well versed as regards this geostrategic picture that was rapidly in the making.

Jordan Schneider: As last year’s Marshall Foundation Andrew Marshall scholar, I’m always happy to hear that his influence has spread across time and space. By the way, my glasses are also an Andrew Marshall homage. We’re trying to bring his fashion back for everyone on YouTube.

Charles Lichfield: I never heard “the Yoda of the Pentagon.” That was good.

Jordan Schneider: What has always been remarkable to me is that it’s not just elite politicians who have this view towards China even before 2010, 2011, the Senkaku disputes, rare earths, what have you. You still had Japan as one of the lowest countries in the world for polling favorability towards China. Back then it was around 20%, and now we’re down to below 10%, which is the second lowest in the world. Even the US is still up at around 35% for polling favorability towards China. It was already pretty dark back in the pre-Xi era, which is a remarkable thing. Can you help me interpret those numbers of why even in the 2000s, before you had all of this naval aggression, the Japanese populace at large was so skeptical of the PRC?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Two things — long history and modern history. Modern in the sense that in the 1970s and ’80s, like the United States, Japan made rapprochement with the PRC in 1972. Since that time, China had done well in projecting a friendly image towards countries like Japan. Panda diplomacy worked well. In the 1970s and in the early 1980s, China was happy projecting a perception to the Japanese that it was a faithful student of making its economy modern and advanced.

One has to say, had it not been for Nippon Steel, which was then called Shin-Nippon Steel, the Chinese steelmaking industry would not have taken off that rapidly. As regards a lot of manufacturing know-how and industrial knowledge, Japan, the closest neighbor to China, played an important role. Many of the generations who worked to that end from Japan had this tremendous sense of guilt about what Japan did during the war. That was the happy honeymoon period that lasted about 10-15 years. Poll after poll taken at that time indicated that Japan had a very high trust level — even higher than the one Japan had vis-à-vis the United States at the time. Long gone are those periods.

Then some long, long memories kick in. By which I mean that dates back to even millennia. If you ask what makes Japan Japan, I would answer by saying that Japan is Japan because Japan is not China. What does it mean? Japan actually did borrow some important cultural traits, such as written characters. But in the Sino-centric suzerain tributary world order, Japan was a proud outlier. It was only between the 15th and 16th centuries — I must check my history book, but for about 70 years — Japan was happy being a dependent nation on China. The Chinese emperor did give recognition to the head of the warrior regime of Japan, but with that being rather an exception, Japan was not in the orbit of Chinese-centric civilization. That’s a point of pride for Japan.

In the modern era, since the 19th century, one of the sources of pride for Japan was that Japan was the only nation that evaded the fate of colonization from the Western powers. However, during the same time, China understandably developed a big amount of grudge and bad feelings toward Japan. After all, Japan was the only Asian nation that did tremendous harm on top of the humiliations that the Chinese had already suffered from Britain, France, and Russia. That’s the subtly and densely knitted emotional connections between the two.

These days, a daily phenomenon is that there is an influx of Chinese tourists, students, investors in Japan, and that’s been causing a daily wake-up call to the Japanese. One out of four registered foreigners are Chinese, mainland Chinese. 50% of foreign students working in name-brand universities are Chinese. Tokyo real estate property market has gone up remarkably, primarily because of the massive amount of investment flowing into Tokyo from Shanghai and other areas of China.

I call this phenomenon — remembering what it was called between Australia and Japan — a tyranny of proximity, not tyranny of distance. Tyranny of distance is something that Australians always used when describing the distance between their motherland, namely Britain and Australia, but China and Japan are very close together geographically. There’s a tyranny of proximity.

The current election, the upper house election, has turned to make this issue more prominent. For some foreigners living in Japan, it may sound a little bit scary because all of a sudden, the Japanese sound xenophobic. But it’s mainly not about Americans, not about Vietnamese, not about the Filipinos, but about the Chinese. This phenomenon is going to continue to be a daily concern.

In order for Japan to cope with this new phenomenon, first and foremost, you need to have political stability. You need to have clear-cut leadership. You need determined leadership who could say both to China and to the Japanese: to China, he or she must be able to say that “don’t underestimate the will of the Japanese, don’t ever underestimate the resolve of the Japanese,” but also to the Japanese people, “don’t panic, calm down, try to accommodate the Chinese in a balanced way.” Those dual messages are the ones that you need to hear from the Japanese leadership, but you can detect the tone with which I’m speaking of this issue, because I’m pessimistic — I’m not optimistic that this leadership would emerge anytime soon in Japan.

Charles Lichfield: Thank you. We want to discuss the election in a very short moment, but given we were discussing the awareness of China’s rise, public opinion in Japan having a very negative view of China, and yet at the same time, there was quite a lot of criticism of Prime Minister Abe when he tried to reinterpret Article 9, which in its interpretation before his Premiership made it very difficult for Japan to do anything other than self-defense. You mentioned that Donald Trump was impressed that Japan had done its homework, but not everyone in Japan was impressed by those changes. Yet, in public opinion, it does seem to be quite a unanimous view that is skeptical of China. Why did those two things happen at the same time?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: I remember the days when Japanese Prime Minister’s official residence was surrounded by thousands of protesters. Interestingly, however, there was a unique profile about those protesters. Many of them were Japanese baby boomers in their 70s even. They fought, if you like, one final fight against the incumbent power.

Charles Lichfield: Against the man.

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Against the man. The change that Abe introduced was so unprecedented and new that naturally I understand there was a considerable amount of hesitance and reluctance on the part of the public to change the modus operandi, the common picture. But on the other hand, there was a growing concern held widely about this growth of Chinese military. In that sense, many, even many of those protesters were bifurcated.

Now when 10 years — literally 10 years — have passed since the enactment of the bill that made it possible for the Japanese armed forces to work with the United States in a seamless manner, people in Japan have generally accepted the change. However, the real revision of the Constitution which Shinzo Abe earnestly wanted to achieve did not materialize. He wanted to add one small sentence to the renowned Article 9 by legitimizing the presence of the armed forces of Japan.

If I may remind, the Article 9 has two parts. One, renunciation of warfare. That’s good enough because the peoples in the world have made warfare illegal since the First World War. That’s not an issue. The second part of the article is still unique. It says, “To that end, Japan possesses no means of warfare.” That’s clearly a signature of Douglas MacArthur and the liberal-minded members of the occupation force.

But almost the next day, Korean War erupted, and Japan and the United States, for that matter, have had to make this white lie continuously. You get an awesome presence of Japanese self-defense forces. Japan is going to equip itself with as many as 400 F-35 most advanced fighter aircraft, Aegis destroyers. Japan has quite a few, and Japan finally is going to have a small but effective aircraft carrier being able to accommodate F-35 fighter aircraft. Are they not means of warfare? Certainly they are. The Japanese and, for that matter, Americans have had to make this white lie.

But it’s caused a negative impact on the members of the self-defense forces because they have been regarded as something illegal, even unconstitutional. Shinzo Abe wanted to add one clause only to legitimize the presence of the Japanese armed forces — to no avail. That’s something that Shinzo Abe was not able to achieve.

Charles Lichfield: It would be remiss of us not to talk about the present and the immediate future. In the next few days, there’s an election in Japan on Sunday. I believe only half of the upper house is up for re-election, so it’s a bit like the US Senate when not all the senators are running at the same time. But perhaps you could share your expectations. I hear there’s a debate — or I hear there isn’t a consensus — over whether the current coalition government will keep its majority. What is your prediction?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: The coalition government, the ruling coalition, is already a minority coalition in the lower house. In the Japanese parliamentary system, the upper house is much stronger than is the case with countries like India or the United Kingdom. It is almost certain, given the circumstances, the LDP Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner will lose their simple majority even in the upper house.

If that materializes, if that happens, nothing would be determined in a swift fashion. Everything is going to be determined in a keep-it-cool way, and much less transparency because more things have to be done behind the scenes between the party operatives from the ruling and the opposition. I’m very concerned about the loss of direction going forward.

Already over the last three years since Abe passed away, there is a sense of directionlessness. Many young generations once favored Abe administration left the ruling coalition and are jumping into newly formed parties, which are unknown presences.

One thing that I must say is that there is someone who would potentially benefit from this chaotic situation that is going to take place after the elections, and that someone is Russia. Russia is making a huge confusion into the SNS sphere by using bot applications. Those SNS entries that discredit the ruling coalition got amplified, and those favoring opposition parties equally got amplified because of this engineered bot situation.

Charles Lichfield: Is this receiving much coverage? Is this being covered much in the press? Because listeners will remember how much this came up in the 2016 campaign in the US, also in the Brexit referendum. I’m not surprised that Russia has been pointed out as the culprit, but how are the Japanese voters responding to this news?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Well, frankly speaking, it’s been in the news only over the last couple of days. The question of whether or not the general public are duly concerned about this — I would say not so much at the moment. But finally, as you say, Japan has caught up with the United States and Britain for that matter. I’m very curious about the seeming lack of Chinese influence for that matter, because China would equally benefit from the confusion that Japan’s politics is going to have.

Charles Lichfield: They’re just relying on their partners to do it for them, perhaps.

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Maybe.

Charles Lichfield: That’s speculation. I did want to ask about some of the factors that are driving the election. Both Jordan and I are in the US and we have the tendency, as many will, to see everything through the lens of what’s going on here. I’m sure the tariffs have played a role, but I was amazed to see just how high inflation has been in Japan. The price of rice has really skyrocketed over the past few years. Independent of how the US is behaving towards Japan, there are many other things going on that will influence voters’ behavior. What’s driving this election?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Tariffs have been important as a factor because it showed to the voters that the current incumbent administration, Prime Minister Ishiba’s administration, has failed to secure early deals with the United States.

Charles Lichfield: They’re not alone. Only two countries have.

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Yes, in my view, that’s exactly the reason why the Japanese public have not made these tariff issues as prominent, as important.

Inflation is an issue. Why? It’s indicative. It’s a quintessential Japanese phenomenon for that matter. This country has more elderly citizens than many other nations, and many of them are dependent on fixed income, namely pension. Pensions will not rise. Prices will. That’s made a lot of people nervous.

The younger generations, for that matter, are grossly discontented because they know that the government cares much more about the senior citizens. They are the ones that will continue to live well into the next century, the 22nd century. The 18-year-olds today who are eligible to vote will live another 80 years, perhaps. They are naturally frustrated by the fact that the current politicians — ruling and opposition both — talk much more about how to compensate the decrease of revenues for the elderly.

Inflation is painful, especially in a country that’s got fewer young people and more senior citizens.

Charles Lichfield: I’m just curious what you think will happen to Prime Minister Ishiba after Sunday.

Tomohiko Taniguchi: There are two interpretations. No one knows for sure which one is going to take place. He seems to be interested in sticking to where he is. After all, the government that’s going to emerge after the elections will be a coalition government. Since the ruling coalition lost the majority in the lower house, it’s been Prime Minister Ishiba who has somehow maintained a subtle balance between the Liberal Democratic Party and the opposition parties.

When it comes to the prime ministerial contenders within the LDP, not many would be interested in taking charge in such difficult circumstances. “Let Ishiba continue to bite bitter bills, bitter medicines” may be a prevalent feeling among the ruling party members. If that’s the case, if that will be the case, I would imagine political apathy would be deepened and people would get frustrated even further. Eventually the new government may have to be pushed into dissolving the lower house.

Chances are, even if the Prime Minister dissolves the lower house, the snap elections will result in even worse consequences for the LDP. Either way, you should anticipate that for the next couple of years, Japanese politics will be far from stable. Again, that’s going to be a fertile ground for the Chinese to make all kinds of provocations and even assaults. That’s what’s happening already.

Charles Lichfield: Cheeky question. What did Shinzo Abe think of Mr. Ishiba?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Mr. Ishiba was known to be a designated outlier in the LDP establishment. Mr. Ishiba was a straight talker when it comes to making critiques about the incumbent, namely Shinzo Abe. I wouldn’t say that Abe and Ishiba were on good terms, even though Abe included Ishiba twice as a member of his own cabinet.

Jordan Schneider: You spent a long time working in media. I’m curious — there’s a lot of discourse in the US about the health or death of journalists and media outlets. What’s your take on the well-being of Japanese political coverage and international analysis in the press?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Legacy media, print media, broadcasting media have lost their trust very rapidly. People spend much more time on what the SNS sphere says. Like in many other nations, many in Japan are in their bubble, reciting messages of similar kind all the time.

When it comes to international coverage, the lack of revenues for the legacy media have actually worked to the detriment. Many companies can no longer afford dispatching correspondents across the world. They have had to rely upon the purchased video clips, possibly from BBC and others. Japan’s been introducing the same bias you may or may not detect in those international media coverage.

What’s important for this is that there’s been a massive growth of anti-Israeli feeling, because each and every time if you turn on the TV or you look at YouTube entries, you get the messages created by Al Jazeera, no one else. Every time you see kids injured and carried to hospital beds. It’s a powerful, powerful message that shaped the views of ordinary Japanese about the Gaza situation.

Three years ago, if you asked “what’s your view about Israel,” 70% of the Japanese would say, “I have no idea.” The rest of the Japanese would have said, “Israel is an advanced, technology-oriented country.” But now, a lot of people have turned anti-Israeli. That’s primarily to do with the fact that almost all coverage is coming from Al Jazeera.

Jordan Schneider: That’s fascinating.

Charles Lichfield: I have noticed the output of NHK World has become a little bit more entertaining. They now have sumo wrestling matches with very good English language commentary. I advise listeners to go and have a look. I remember stumbling on NHK World about seven, eight years ago and finding it quite boring. It is better now.

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Only because they’re airing the sumo matches these days.

Charles Lichfield: That’s one considerable factor, but it’s not the only one.

Jordan Schneider: Say we get a new prime minister in the next few weeks. Is there one book, either Japanese or English, that you’d want to assign to whoever that person is going to be?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Well, by 70%, it’s a fair chance that Ishiba will continue to stick to where he is despite massive frustrations and oppositions. One thing that makes me frustrated all the time is that unlike in the United States or in the United Kingdom for that matter, biographies, long sketches of some important individual, have not been in the tradition of political coverage of this country. Biographies are being written only after spending a huge amount of time after the death of the person of the subject.

Charles Lichfield: Whereas in the US there’s a nice tradition of autobiographies. Has Vice President Vance’s autobiography has made its way to Japan?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: Yes, Hillbilly Elegy was translated into Japanese very early, and many people began buying the book when Vice President Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate.

Charles Lichfield: What’s the title in Japanese?

Tomohiko Taniguchi: It’s the same, written phonetically in katakana as ヒルビリー・エレジー (Hirubirī Erejī).

Jordan Schneider: That’s disappointing.

Mood Music

Bolds are best reads, *Bolds are best of the best.

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Soviet / Russian History & the Cold War

*To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, Benjamin Nathans, 2024. Covered in an upcoming podcast. A masterful book. For a taste:

Samizdat provided not just new things to read, but new modes of reading. There was binge reading: staying up all night pouring through a sheath of onion-skin papers because you'd been given twenty-four hours to consume a novel that Volodia was expecting the next day, and because, quite apart from Volodia's expectations, you didn't want that particular novel in your apartment for any longer than necessary. There was slow-motion reading: for the privilege of access to a samizdat text, you might be obliged to return not just the original but multiple copies to the lender. This meant reading while simultaneously pounding out a fresh version of the text on a typewriter, as a thick raft of onion-skin sheets alternating with carbon paper slowly wound its way around the platen, line by line, three, six, or as many as twelve deep. "Your shoulders would hurt like a lumberjack's," recalled one typist.

Experienced samizdat readers claimed to be able to tell how many layers had been between any given sheet and the typewriter's ink ribbon. There was group reading: for texts whose supply could not keep up with demand, friends would gather and form an assembly line around the kitchen table, passing each successive page from reader to reader, something impossible to do with a book. And there was site-specific reading: certain texts were simply too valuable, too fragile, or too dangerous to be lent out. To read Trotsky, you went to this person's apartment; to read Orwell, to that person's.

However and wherever it was read, samizdat delivered the added frisson of the forbidden. Its shabby appearance—frayed edges, wrinkles, ink smudges, and traces of human sweat—only accentuated its authenticity. Samizdat turned reading into an act of transgression. Having liberated themselves from the Aesopian language of writers who continued to struggle with internal and external censors, samizdat readers could imagine themselves belonging to the world's edgiest and most secretive book club. Who were the other members, and who had held the very same onion-skin sheets that you were now holding? How many retypings separated you from the author?

*The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973. Survivor and stylist. Energy and humanity sparks though the prose.

Look around you—there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear. Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there.

*To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, Sergey Radchenko, 2024. Covered in a two-parter.

Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War, Sergey Radchenko, 2014.

Apple in China. Patrick McGee, 2025. Covered in a pod here.

China & East Asia

*The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, Joseph Torigian, 2025. A China book at the level we get only a few times a decade. A true must read for anyone hoping to deeply understand the CCP and Chinese 20th century history. Covered in a podcast here.

A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598, Kenneth M. Swope, 2009. Inspired by the Yasheng Huang shows.

Hideyoshi, man. A letter he sends to the Koreans before he invades them…

Whenever and against whomever I have waged war, the victory has always been mine. The lands and districts invaded by me have always been conquered. Now our empire has entered upon a period of peace and prosperity, and the people are enjoying a benevolent rule. Lonely old men and forlorn widows are all well provided for. Both the national wealth and that of individuals has been so greatly augmented that it is unparalleled in our history. Since the nation’s founding, our empire has never before witnessed such glory as that of our imperial court and such splendor as that of our imperial capital.

However, human life in this world is brief. . . . I am not willing to spend the remaining years of my life in the land of my birth. According to my idea, the empire that I would create should not be separated by mountains and seas, but should include them all. In starting my conquest, I plan that our forces should proceed to the country of the Great Ming and compel the people there to adopt our customs and manners. Then that vast country, consisting of more than four hundred provinces, would enjoy our imperial protection and benevolence for millions of years to come. I have in mind a plan of conquest which shall surely be carried to a successful ending. Your kingdom has taken the lead among the continental states by sending an envoy to our court, thus showing reverence to our throne. You have acted in accordance with the wise saying of the ancients that one who has foresight and is humble and cautious will always be free from grief and worry. . . . You, King of Korea, are hereby instructed to join us when we proceed to [the country of the] Great Ming at the head of all your fighting men. You may thereby further renew your pledge of service due to us as a neighboring state. Our sole desire is to have our glorious name revered in the three countries [of China, Korea, and Japan].

Swope writes: “while some of Hideyoshi’s statements to foreign rulers are overbearing to the point of laughter, it seems likely that he, like so many great conquerors, truly believed in his destiny and ability to overcome all odds.”

People used to be so petty too!

Hideyoshi at that time was on campaign, so the envoys had to await his return. But this was not the first indignity they had suffered. When they first got to Tsushima, the Koreans were treated discourteously in their eyes, for Sō Yoshitoshi’s retainers had brought him into a banquet hall in a palanquin, then Sō proceeded to sit in an elevated position. This infuriated Kim Sŏngil, who stormed out, exclaiming, “These barbarians really have no sense of propriety and cannot distinguish between higher and lower officials.

Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security, Fiona S. Cunningham, 2025. Covered in a pod here.

Beyond Power Transitions: The Lessons of East Asian History and the Future of U.S.-China Relations, David Kang and Xinru Ma. Covered in a pod here.

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company, Eva Dou, 2025. Covered in a pod here.

Israel & Jewish Studies

Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History, Joseph Telushkin, 2014.

Fascinating less for any particular advice he gave people or viewpoints about Judaism or politics and more rather how and why people held him in such esteem. We already have something close to a Rebbe we can consult 24/7 in our pockets but no-one feels like asking ChatGPT a personal question deserves the weight and reverence that a private meeting with or letter from the Rebbe does.

Why? Meetings were scheduled months in advance and all after dark, with many occuring after midnight following a multi-hour long build up as you wait in line. “You saw the Rebbe when the rest of the world was asleep.” All who went through this ordeal came primed with the understanding that the Rebbe has access to deep spiritual knowledge and decades of learning of a religion you hold in high regard.

When you finally get your meeting, for the time you’re together he interacts with you as if you’re the only other person in the world. “The Rebbe’s most striking physical characteristic, the one most often commented upon, particularly by those who met him in yechidus, were his eyes; in Swados’s case, he recalled how ‘the pale blue eyes remain fixed upon [me] with an unblinking directness that could be disconcerting.’”

Clinton could do this too: Game recognize game, from Obama in 2009: “Now, I think everyone knows what it’s like when Bill Clinton asks you to make a commitment. He looks you in the eye … he makes you feel like you’re the only person in the room.”.

McChrystal is the only person I’ve sat in the same room with whose gaze made me feel this way. Six weeks after getting fired in Afghanistan he’s teaching a seminar at Yale and sitting down with me to talk about some sophomore about a mediocre paper idea. I don’t think this is a thing people can fake—this breed is that curious and able to live in the moment.

The fact that someone important took the time to care about your situation means something that you can’t get from Scarlett Johannsen in Her.

The case involved a seventeen-year-old girl who was having extreme emotional difficulties, involving issues of rebellion and serious doubts about faith and religious practice—‘the typical kinds of things that you find among teenagers, but in this case quite severe and for some reason.’ The young woman herself would often write to the Rebbe and then share and review with the young rabbi the responses she received. Kaplan was amazed at the speed with which the Rebbe responded to the girl’s letters—sometimes within hours, never longer than a day. One exchange of letters remains vivid to Kaplan: the young woman had written an extended letter describing the continuing emotional turmoil and constant anguish she was experiencing, and the Rebbe, in turn, responded that he felt her pain. Kaplan recalls the impact of these words: the girl felt that there was a person who actually did feel what she was going through and truly wanted to help her; from that point on, her life slowly started to turn around. To this day, Kaplan remains staggered that the Rebbe—a man known to receive hundreds of letters a day—placed himself in this situation with such intensity, ‘answering the girl’s letters back and forth…and doing so within a day, and sometimes within hours.’

Like , the Rebbe “was known to personally open all letters addressed to him.”

Productivity hacks brought to you by the Rebbe.

His father-in-law taught him the secret of “success with time,” a technique that the Frierdiker Rebbe had learned from his father, the Rebbe Rashab: The first prerequisite for fulfilling one’s responsibilities is to fully grasp that a person can never add to the amount of time in the day or the night. Since time is finite, the only way we can carry out all that we need to do is to utilize whatever time we do have to its full capacity; this means giving our entire focus—our full concentration—to whatever we are doing at that moment.

Therefore, while working on one task, “we must regard anything else we have done before and anything that we are planning to do later as totally insignificant.”

This was a good line. Or maybe I just don’t consume enough chicken soup.

Rabbi Zev Segal, a community activist, encountered a similar, though subtly different, response. After a long career in the rabbinate, Segal went to work for the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Once, as he was getting ready to depart on an overseas mission, he received a call from Rabbi Hodakov, with a request from the Rebbe that he fulfill a certain assignment. Segal agreed to do so, although he eventually found the task requested by the Rebbe to be much more difficult than he had anticipated, and even a bit dangerous.

When he returned, he said, “I came back and gave the Rebbe a report and I concluded that the Rebbe should know that this was not an easy task for me. It was, rather, very difficult. The Rebbe looked at me quizzically and said, ‘Rabbi Segal, since when did you make a contract with the Almighty for an easy life?’

At a speech delivered after the Rebbe’s death, Segal explained how this one, seemingly throw-away line, uttered in fewer than ten seconds, permanently affected him. Even though a task will not be easy, each of us must do what we know we were put on earth to do.

“If the Nazis had murdered Jews with Zyklon B gas because it was cheap, a few pennies for each person they suffocated, the Rebbe wanted to elevate the value of human life…I recall him saying something to the effect that even capturing the Kotel ha‑Ma‘aravi (Western Wall) was not worth losing one innocent Israeli soldier’s life.”

And I found this quirk endearing.

For the Rebbe, the desire to choose positive words was so deeply ingrained that he hesitated to use terms like “evil,” even when describing something that was…The Rebbe’s search for non-negative language went well beyond anything traditional Jewish texts might have intended. He apparently believed that words with bad connotations could trigger harmful associations even in the most innocent contexts. He avoided the word “undertake,” lest it evoke “undertaker.” And, no matter how great the pressure to finish a project, he never referred to the due date as a “deadline.” Once “deadline” is removed from one’s vocabulary, a natural alternative is “due date,” with “deadline” connoting death and “due date” connoting birth.

*Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt, 1963. I would have read this years ago if anyone told me how funny it was! As she wrote to a friend, “You are the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted—namely that I wrote Eichimann in Jerusalem in a curious state of euphoria.” It shows and is so much better for it.

World-historically funny.

Extended excerpts here in my Tel Aviv writeup.

I paired this with Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Voice of Nazi Germany, Rebecca West, 2025.

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, Ronen Bergman, 2018. Love how sourced this book is, mostly by people who did cool secret shit for years, retired, and now want to tell the world how cool the secret shit they did was. His conclusion that the incredible tactical successes have helped cover up for massive strategic failues seems a little premature in light of Israel eliminating Hezbollah and tbd on Iran…though if Iran ends up with the bomb in two years the thesis will have been all too true. Deserves a new edition!

World War II

Eastern Front

*The Stahel Arc

Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East, David Stahel, 2009
Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March on Moscow, October 1941, David Stahel, 2013
Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East, David Stahel, 2012
The Battle for Moscow, David Stahel, 2015
Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany’s Winter Campaign, 1941-1942, David Stahel, 2019
Hitler’s Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded, David Stahel, 2023

Operational history does not get more grounded and gripping than this. The enormity of the Eastern Front from a manpower, space, and materiel perspective even after consuming all these books is still too much for my brain to get around. He also weaves in enough human color to let you start to develop a feel for the experience of the soldiers and officers.

Once Moscow survived the initial push in 1941, which Stahel convincingly argues wasn’t really even all that close-run a thing due to the Nazis burning their mechanized army and didn’t really have any contingency plan…

Industrial weight and, as Williamson Murray called it, the Nazis “strategic myopia” completely washes out always beats out tactical and operational creativity if you’re committed to staying in the fight over a long enough time horizon.

In November 1941 Stalin confidently exclaimed: ‘Modern war is a war of motors. The war will be won by the one who produces the most motors. The combined motor production of the USA, Britain, and the USSR is at least three times that of Germany.’ In fact the combined motor production of the three Allied powers was far in excess of Stalin’s three-fold estimate. The remaining years of the war continued to see a commanding Allied lead in armament production, dooming Germany to eventual defeat by sheer weight of arms. The ebb and flow of bat­tlefield successes affected only the length of the war, not its eventual outcome.

Oh, and it’s never a good look when you feel like you had it worse than a Napoleonic soldier.

Brilliant page of analysis here.

A death cult means living soldiers aren’t important.

The most nauseating bit of all this military history was reading Heinz Guderian’s love letters.

War is the fucking worst.

The Soviet Union at War 1941-1945, David R. Stone, 2010 + lots of David Stone articles.

The Military History of the Soviet Union, Robin Higham, 2002.

All this I cover in an upcoming podcast with Stahel and David Stone together (that’s still looking for a sponsor! Hit me up!)

Espionage & Intelligence

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal, David E. Hoffman, 2015

The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West, Shaun Walker, 2025.

Military History & Theory

Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War, S. L. A. Marshall, 1947. The guy has a weird relationship with the truth, but still worth reading for the unique perspective on WWII infantry combat. Lots of aphorisms that sound right?

The most common cause of psychological shock, however, is a partial victory. The adage that "the weakest point fol­lows success" is a fundamental truth of minor tactics and the danger is always greatest when the success is easily won.

Success is disarming. Tension is the normal state of mind and body in combat. When the tension suddenly relaxes through the winning of a first objective, troops are apt to be pervaded by a sense of extreme well-being and there is apt to ensue laxness in all of its forms and with all of its dangers.

The ideal relation­ship between a commander and his subordinate is nowhere better illustrated than in a passage from the letter of instruc­tion wherein Grant told Sherman to proceed to the destruc­tion of Johnston's Army: "I do not propose to lay down for you a plan of campaign: but simply to lay down the work it is desirable to have done and leave you free to execute it in your own way."

Great Captains Unveiled, B. H. Liddell Hart, 1927.

Reputations, 10 Years After, B.H. Liddell Hart, 1928. Hart at 33 years old delivers a hundred pages of scorching takes on the leading WWI generals. France’s Joffre “not a general but a national nerve-sedative”. Von Falkenhayn “The ablest and most scientific general, ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish,’ who ever ruined his country.” Luttendorf was “the Robot Napoleon.” Hart would have killed it on substack.

A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War, Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, 2016. Covered in a podcast to come!

Economics, Technology & Innovation

Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, 2025. Covered in a pod with Dan Wang, Ezra, and Derek.

Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth, James Bessen, 2015

Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, Edward Fishman, 2025. Covered in a pod.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, Ben Smith, 2023. If we thought the race to clicks was brain-warping, just wait until we have AI friends that optimize for engagement and microtransactions.

Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level, James K. Sebenius and Nicholas Burns, 2018. Written almost like a business book, “what lessons can we learn from Kissinger the negotiator,” but if you get over that there’s good diplomatic archival work in here. Covered briefly in a pod here.

Best bits were about the 4D chess he used on Rhodesia to try to get them to change their ways.

Loved this bit about how trilateral leverage unlocked a ton in the US-China relationship.

Dobrynin also was probably more into Kissinger than he should have been. Zhou Enlai would never be caught glazing like this, clearly Kissinger’s superior on the political mindgames front.

The 1920s

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, Frederick Lewis Allen, 1931. did a great job summarizing this book here.

Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression, Christopher Knowlton, 2020. The best part about history books is even if they aren’t great as long as someone has spent real time in the archives and has a decent eye you’re bound to learn things! Good sociological details on really rich people in the 1920s and architecture.

At the very top of the social heap were those who arrived in Florida by private yacht or, better yet, in their own private railcar. During this period, which fell at the end of the Gilded Age, “The near­est thing to a real aristocracy in America was the private-car peerage,” ac­cording to the New Yorker writer Alva Johnston, “and Palm Beach had the world’s most snobbish rail road yard—a Newport-on-wheels, an exalted trailer camp for the gold-encrusted Pullmans of the New World nobility.”

Nothing changes.

Popular resorts, it was commonly thought, had an almost Darwinian evolution: first, they were discovered by writers, artists, and academics; following them came the “nice” millionaires, who didn’t flaunt their wealth and valued their privacy; these were then followed by the “naughty” millionaires, who did flaunt their wealth by building extravagant houses, opening social clubs, throwing grand balls, and, in general, consuming conspicuously. The latter was the moment when an architect on the scene could succeed beyond his wildest imaginings—and Florida was rapidly approaching that stage. In the social historian Cleveland Amory’s view, there was one final step in this evolution, which he simply, and aptly, described as “trouble.”…

Restrictions against buying property or frequenting the hotels often applied to Jews as well as blacks. Anti-Semitism had been on the rise since the arrival in the United States of large numbers of Jewish immi­grants from Eastern Europe starting in the 1880s. Exceptions to the restric­tions were often made for wealthy or prominent “assimilated” Jews who ran investment banks or successful corporations. Fisher’s correspondence in later years is full of letters of exception he wrote for friends such as yeast company president Julius Fleischmann, taxicab magnate John Hertz, and department store mogul Bernard Gimbel, granting them access to his ho­tels or privileges at his clubs. Fisher liked to think of himself as a fair per­son, staunchly unbiased, but for business purposes, he was quite willing to share in the prevailing bigotry of the day. It wasn’t until 1948 that the US Supreme Court eventually ruled such race covenants unenforceable. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 would ban the practice altogether.

Cool kids got divorced in Paris.

Elizabeth left for Europe around September 5 on the liner Homeric, accompanied by her best friend, presumably to vacation for a month and then to establish domicile in Paris for a quickie Paris divorce—a favored method for the wealthy to part ways during those years. As the lawyer Frank Shutts explained to Carl Fisher, whose marriage was in similar trou­ble, “the French court will grant divorce decrees up on the general proposi­tion that two people do not want to live together anymore.”

Retvrn actually looks like advertising “social supremacy” in your real estate brochures.

‘Social supremacy and fi­nancial solidarity are assured to Boca Raton by the wealth and standing, the character and achievement of its proprietary sponsors. These men and women of world-standing in society, finance, and affairs know that the best of democracy is the flower of genuine aristocracy. They therefore invite men and women of substance and standing to participate in their unique undertaking.’

You used to be able to get sued for ‘breach of promise’ if a guy renegged on marrying you.

They built ‘foreign villages’ in Coral Gables just like Huawei did with its campus. Here’s a photo of the Chinese one refurbished today:

Bruce Catton on the 50’s, good line but not surprising from a Civil War historian: “All the old rules seemed to be vanishing in the twenties. In exchange came a strange new world both gaudy and sad.”

Ex-Wife, Ursula Parrott, 1929. Vivid and gripping proto-Nora Ephron. You really have to wait until the 1920s to read prose that feels completely modern, and this alongside some early Fitzgerald passes the threshold for me.

Grab Bag

They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Carlos M. N. Eire, 2023. Fun read of a careful and writerly historian who takes seriously claims of levitation in the late Middle Ages.

Every age and culture has its own unquestionable beliefs, and our own tends to prize the rationality and superiority of unbelief as one of its core beliefs, especially in regard to denying the existence of a supernatural dimension. Such unquestionable pervasive beliefs—Troelstch’s “social facts”—which William Blake called “mind-forged manacles” in 1794 and Max Weber spoke of as the “steel-hard casing” or an “iron cage” a century later, are difficult to detect and acknowledge, for they frame our thinking and are very much like the air we breathe, which we take for granted as much as an octopus takes water for granted. And even when perceived for what they are—as difficult as that is to do—these manacles and cages are even harder to discard or annihilate.

Monasticism itself is deeply rooted in holy foolishness because of its rejection of worldly values, which can make every monk or nun seem insane, or even a raving lunatic. The Cistercian luminary Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), who greatly admired Antony the Great, captured the essence of monastic foolishness brilliantly in one of his letters:

For what else do worldlings think we are doing but playing about, when what they desire most on earth, we flee, and what they flee, we desire? We are like jesters and tumblers, who, with heads down and feet up, exhibit extraordinary behaviour by standing or walking on their hands, and thus draw all eyes to themselves. But ours is not the play of children or of the theatre, which excites lust and represents sordid acts in the effeminate and shameful contortions of the actors. No, ours is a joyous game, decent, grave, and admirable, delighting the gaze of the heavenly onlookers.

Strong writing here:

Discerning the difference between the natural and the supernatural or between genuine and fraudulent miracle claims can become immensely difficult, if not impossible, for the clerical elites in charge of ensuring the purity of the faith, as well as for the laity, including crowned monarchs. Inevitably, given the devil’s reputation as the ultimate trickster—the fact that he was “a liar and the father of lies,”1 ever eager to cause trouble—he, too, could more easily wheedle his way into the picture.

Such was the dilemma faced by early modern Catholicism when miracles became a highly valued feature of Catholic identity as well as a polemical weapon to wield against Protestants and skeptics of all stripes. It was a vexing conundrum, and a painful one, for it required doubting, and doubt always rubs faith raw. Sorting the genuinely divine from the fraudulent or demonic was an ordeal that also required intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual fortitude on the part of all involved in the process. Teresa of Avila, Joseph of Cupertino, and María de Ágreda were liminal avatars of the impossible, suspended between the divine and demonic, their sanctity revered and questioned simultaneously, perfectly poised to play the role of tricksters acting as agents of the devil, the ultimate trickster. All three bore the brunt of doubt and survived their ordeal. But many other liminal “living saints” who claimed similar impossible feats did not survive intense scrutiny.

We will never know how many, exactly, since so many of the Inquisition’s records have been lost, but it is undeniable that in the surviving records, those found guilty of fraud or diabolical mischief do outnumber those who were not. Consequently, to fully understand the context in which belief in impossible feats was forged, one must also consider cases of ostensibly holy individuals whose impossible feats failed to be recognized as genuinely divine; that is, one must take into account cases in which doubt and reason trumped faith.

And it was dangerous to go for sainthood! Tough as its one of the few ways for lay women to have an exciting life. See the story of Sor María, who was on the sainthood track until she got got.

All in all, [the Insquisition] concluded, María’s wounds were a miracle of “supernatural origin and beyond the ability of all human artifice.” The chief lesson to be learned from their report, they concluded, was that the miracles made possible by the Catholic faith testify to its genuinely divine character and that Sor María’s miracles had been ordained by God “to awaken those who are asleep during these times when malice reigns supreme.”

María had prevailed once again. After receiving this report, Master General Sixto Fabri declared all the accusations against María to be false. She was no fraud, after all, but a genuinely holy stigmatic and worthy of admiration. Shortly after this pronouncement was made, María was reelected prioress of La Anunciada, apparently well on her way to heaven, ultimately, and to a privileged place of honor in the Catholic Church. But Fabri had made one decision that undermined the results of the past three investigations: he refused to punish or expel those nuns who had “falsely” accused María of fraud.107 With her enemies still surrounding her, María had no real chance of avoiding conflict. Complaints kept flowing, many of which had more to do with her lack of humility and her poor leadership than with feigned miracles.

But she got re-investigated thanks to politics…

If the Spanish Armada blessed by María had been successful rather than a humiliating disaster, she might have escaped further scrutiny, at least for a few years. But the Armada’s annihilation was doubly harmful for her.

First, it raised new questions about her holiness and miracle-working powers since her blessing of the armada had obviously failed. Then, by giving the Portuguese some hope for their own cause—including the possibility of a successful English invasion led by the contender Antonio—that colossal defeat pulled María into the realm of conspiracies, willingly and unwillingly.

And it didn’t end well! The Inquisition, who contrary to reputation was remarkably diligent and even scientific in looking into miracle claims looking for multiple witnesses and weighing higher the views of not particularly pious people, took another look and concluded…

All of her prolonged ecstasies and trances had been faked; the stigmata on her head were small self-inflicted wounds; the stigmata on her hands, feet, and chest had been painted on; the cross-shaped bloodstains she produced were carefully crafted using blood from self-inflicted wounds; her levitations had been accomplished with the aid of thick-soled footgear known as chapines and wooden poles hidden from view under her habit; and her halos and luminescence had all been produced through the manipulation of lamps and mirrors. And so on. Not a single miracle had been genuine, even those healings that had supposedly occurred through her agency, which she now attributed to the faith of those who believed in her.115 In addition, she also confessed that she had feigned her pain during previous inspections of her wounds, knowing that this ruse would prevent the examiners from scouring them vigorously enough to take off the paint, and that she never thought anyone would ever dare to give her a scrubbing such as the one that revealed her duplicity.

Unlike Magdalena de la Cruz, who had immediately blamed the devil for her duplicity as soon as her fraudulence was discovered, Sor María insisted that she alone deserved blame. When pressed to ferret out the devil, she repeatedly held firm: nothing she had done whatsoever was demonically induced or the result of some pact with the devil. All she would admit was that she had excelled as an actress and illusionist and that her sole aim had been to gain admiration as a saint and mystic, for purely selfish reasons.

On November 7, 1588, the Inquisition passed sentence on María, declaring her guilty of “trickery and deceit” through her own “artifice and invention.” Consigning her to “perpetual incarceration” at a convent outside Lisbon, the inquisitors ordered her to spend the rest of her life continually doing penance, shut off from contact with the outside world. In addition, they decreed that all physical objects and pseudo-sacramentalia related to her were to be destroyed—images, books, manuscripts, crosses, beads, cloths, and any such items—to make it seem “as if they had never existed.”

When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep, Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold, 2021

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, 2024. I will read anything Lucy writes.

Ex Supra, Tony Stark, 2022. Covered in a pod here.

Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interest Comes First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping is a monumental scholarly achievement — easily a contender for one of the best China books of the decade. Joseph’s goal, in his own words, was to “shine as much light into the darkness of the past as possible” to understand the nature of authoritarian politics, and he succeeds beyond my wildest expectations.

This biography gives me a feel for Chinese politics that I honestly thought I’d never have. It does an incredible job of digging deep to shed light on some of the most consequential moments in CCP history, as well as conveying what it was like to live as a senior official under Mao and Deng. Reading it was a powerful experience at both an intellectual and human level.

We get memorable vignettes, like 15-year-old Xi Zhongxun attempting to assassinate a teacher, or General Peng Dehuai using his shoe to silence Xi Zhongxun’s snoring in their shared bunk.

In this interview, we discuss:

• What we can learn about authoritarianism, the CCP, and China’s future from studying Xi’s father,

• Torigian’s methodology for uncovering hidden Party history,

• How the Party became an existential source of meaning, and how it weaponized suffering to paradoxically deepen political loyalty,

• The arc of Xi Zhongxun’s life — from a young revolutionary to key advocate of reform — and his role during Tiananmen,

• The interplay of family, love, and career under the all-encompassing shadow of the Party,

• The role of “Surrogate fathers” and patronage in navigating political ascent,

• How literature shaped China’s early revolutionaries, and even impacted the Party as we know it today.

Co-hosting today is Jon Sine, former ChinaTalk intern.

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From Teenage Assassin to Tiananmen

Jordan Schneider: Joseph, how do you define the purpose of this book?

Joseph Torigian: There is inherent value in going to the past and telling stories about these people’s lives, especially because they suffered so much. Second, this book helps people understand authoritarian politics and how the party works, in a way that gives us special insight into Xi Jinping. Finally, the book allows you to draw your own conclusions in many ways.

One of the themes that emerges from the book is how much suffering people in the party experienced and how they brought different meanings to it. The party imposes one interpretation on the past, but what I wanted to do with my book is facilitate multiple different interpretations for people who want to read it closely.

Jordan Schneider: Generally, when people read biographies of major political figures, there’s a bias in authors to tie bows around the narrative and make some overwhelming moral judgment about whether their decisions were right or wrong, and whether this person was morally upright or lacking in how they behaved and their impact on the world.

Remarkably, this book stops before going there. This man, whose life was incredibly gray, complex, and shaded from many different dimensions, could have been interpreted through party narratives or through the lens of liberal outside reformers projecting their ideas onto him. As you were going through his life and trying to portray what you learned and discovered to your audience, how did you think about your role as the author?

Joseph Torigian: I wanted the evidence to lead me in the direction of what was most interesting about his life. I didn’t feel there was a missing part of the literature that needed to be explored. I just wanted to do justice to his life in a way that would allow people to make their own judgments. As you see in the book, people in his own life — and Xi Zhongxun himself — sometimes found it unclear which morality was most relevant to make a particular decision.

Narrative certainly plays a role in the book. I wanted to make people feel just how dramatic, exciting, and electric it was to be a member of this organization, especially in the times and places where Xi Zhongxun found himself. I wanted people to draw broader lessons about how the party worked.

But I also didn’t want to allow the need for it all to come together or for there to be a single argument to do violence to the evidence. As I said before, I wanted people to be able to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of his life. Certainly I needed to bring an interpretive lens and my own analysis because facts don’t speak for themselves. Even choosing which evidence to include in the book required some level of reflection and thought. In many ways, a lot of the conclusions are obvious, but I don’t spell them out because they’re obvious. Allowing people to think about the most striking parts of his life on their own is a better approach.

Jordan Schneider: Before we get too meta, I think it’s important to ground folks. Generally, when you read a political biography, it’s about the number one leader, maybe the number two. Xi Zhongxun, though he was not quite at that level, lived one of the most incredible lives I’ve ever engaged with in book format. Joseph, can you give us an introduction to the arc of this man’s life?

Joseph Torigian: He grew up in Shaanxi province, which was a fascinating place because his home village was near Xi’an, where the first unified state was forged by Qin Shi Huang, and dynasties had ruled from there for millennia. But by the time he was born, two years after the Qing collapsed, it had fallen into banditry, war, famine, and poverty. It was a place of extremes.

He’s trying to figure out a way to address these wrenching problems facing society — feudalism, imperialist encroachment. He’s attracted to the party, but he doesn’t really understand it well. In fact, he’s able to read this revolutionary literature because the Nationalists and the Communists are still getting along. But of course, that all changed in 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek betrayed the Communists and massacred them.

It’s in this milieu of violence that Xi Zhongxun is told to kill an academic administrator. He fails, instead getting a bunch of other teachers sick. He goes to prison and joins the party while incarcerated.

Jordan Schneider: At nineteen?

Joseph Torigian: Fifteen. He was fifteen years old. He became a founding member — although not one of the most important ones — of the base area in the northwest, which is where the Long March concludes. If it weren’t for that base area there, Mao Zedong and the other members of the Central Leadership would have needed to move even farther away from the interior Chinese areas.

He works in these fascinating places on the border of the base area, where he has to think about the United Front and manage relations with the Nationalists. They’re not at war with the Nationalists, but they’re not at peace either. It’s a very complicated liminal world he finds himself in.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was head of the Northwest Bureau, which is a giant expanse of Chinese territory that includes not just Han areas, but also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hui. He was brought to the capital and worked as Minister of Propaganda. There, he was a witness to several power struggles — the target of the first great purge of the People’s Republic of China is a man named Gao Gang, who was also a Northwesterner quite close to Xi Zhongxun.

Xi Zhongxun worked for Zhou Enlai, the famous premier who ran the government at the State Council. Xi Zhongxun was purged in 1962 because of a novel. He spent 16 years in the political wilderness facing incarceration, humiliation, and exile.

When he went back to work, it was in Guangdong province, where the failures of the revolution are perhaps most obvious. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing from the Communist mainland to capitalist Hong Kong. He sees with his own eyes just how developed things are right across the river.

Then he went back to Beijing to work on the Secretariat, managing its daily affairs. He’s the right-hand man to Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦, the general secretary of the party. He has a fascinating set of tasks — he spends about 70% of his time on the United Front, returning to ethnic politics. But he also looks at Beijing’s relations with foreign leftist, revolutionary, and communist parties.

He witnessed this difficult relationship between Hu Yaobang and Deng Xiaoping, which mirrored Zhou Enlai’s relationship with Mao Zedong. It all comes together in June 1989 when Xi Zhongxun faces the question of how he’s going to react to these student protests. Ultimately, he goes along with the crackdown, even though it seems he had very intense doubts and skepticism about using violence to resolve the crisis.

He spent much of his later years in the south, only rarely returning to Beijing. It’s quite a dramatic life — marked in particular by persecution by his own party. On many occasions, the party hurt people close to him or forced him to betray people close to him. One of the central themes that emerges is how he balances his own thoughts, emotions, and feelings with a party to which he is totally loyal, but which often does things that are deeply, deeply distressing to him.

Jordan Schneider: This book was especially engaging because you were able to find sources that really brought you into all these moments in his life. They also gave you a sense of his interior monologue and psychology at all these moments of incredible stakes, trial, and national as well as personal drama.

You take us on this arc from this 15-year-old who tries to kill his teacher all the way through to Tiananmen Square, including the family life and the experience of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and reform and opening. But it’s all through this man who is incredibly faithful but also scarred in ways that are almost impossible to comprehend as a coddled person who grew up in America over the past 30 years. This book is a tremendous accomplishment.

Jon Sine: You open the book saying that Xi Zhongxun can fill one of three roles at least — his legend in the party, the role of the father to Xi Jinping, and the role that you take him as, which is a lens to party history. Could you explain how this book evolved, and why you chose to focus on Xi Zhongxun? I’m sure you’ve experienced the immediate reaction from many readers is, “How does this explain Xi Jinping?” when the thrust of the book is how Xi Zhongxun illuminates party history through the 20th century. We’d love to hear more about that.

Joseph Torigian: The book was kind of an accident, actually. I was asked to participate in an edited issue of an academic journal and was asked to write about Xi Jinping. I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Then I decided that the best way would be through a historical lens. I envisioned an article that was half about Xi Zhongxun and half about Xi Jinping as a young person.

I had just finished a book on elite party history, and that had been a training session on how to do it, find sources, and interpret them. As I started working on it, I realized there were many more sources than I had envisioned, even though I had just finished this other project. But also that Xi Zhongxun was an interesting person, not just because he was the father of Xi Jinping, but precisely as you said — he is someone whose life illuminates in powerful ways party history and party culture. His life is really a microcosm of the party in the 20th century.

With the book, it’s certainly the case that people are reading it because of Xi Jinping, and I’m glad people are reading it. I’m not going to be nitpicky about what reason they pick up the book. But ultimately, it says two things about Xi Jinping.

One is that it says a lot about the party and how the party works, and how every leader has tried to manage dilemmas that have been with it from the beginning. These are dilemmas that can be managed, not problems that can be solved. Xi Jinping is bringing his own approach, and we can understand how he’s bringing that approach because party history gives us the context. That’s the clearest line between the book and Xi Jinping.

But of course, there’s another line which is psychological. Here, we need to be careful because even Xi Jinping’s siblings drew very different lessons from the meaning of their father’s life. Xi Jinping, like his father, is a product of multiple influences. He’s someone who changes his mind, someone who reacts often to the peculiarities of his situation as opposed to some dogmatic worldview that always makes him do the same thing.

I hope my book is one tool in a box of tools that will be useful as we think about contemporary China. I didn’t write the book so that people will know what he’s going to do during the tariff war, although these Taiwanese talk show hosts quite loudly thought that my book might be relevant in that regard. That might be true to some extent. But the real value of the book is to take a step back and just get a general sense of the party and the milieu from which Xi Jinping emerged.

The Politics of Suffering

Jordan Schneider: There’s a very striking quote you have at the end of your book from Xi Jinping, where he wrote a letter to his father on his 88th birthday. I guess he couldn’t visit because everyone in the party is too busy to be at their kids’ births and parents’ birthdays —

Joseph Torigian: The party’s interest comes first, Jordan.

Jordan Schneider: Exactly. But the line that stuck out to me was him saying, despite the Cultural Revolution, “I always stubbornly believed that my father was a great hero and that he was a father most worthy of feeling proud of.”

The central question in Xi Zhongxun’s life, as well as Xi Jinping’s life, is, “Why are you sticking with these guys?” The party was treating them terribly while they were giving their lives to this organization. On several occasions, the lesson seemed to be that the party does not care about you and will chew you up and spit you out in ways that are illogical and detrimental both for yourself and for the country.

But you write this line explaining it:

“Some may wonder why Xi Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his own father. But perhaps the better question is how could Xi Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?”

That’s the central psychological question we explore over these 500 pages — how does this man relate to this organization, to which he has devoted his life, but is riddled with problems? What did the party mean to Xi Zhongxun?

Joseph Torigian: The party was the source of meaning in his life. It was the source of purpose. It was salvation. It was a place where a young boy growing up in a society wrecked by turmoil found an answer to solving that chaos. This was someone who didn’t really understand the intricacies of Das Kapital, but believed that only an organization as powerful as the Chinese Communist Party could respond to the challenges China was facing. It was the only way of organizing society that would allow China to return to its rightful place in the world and defeat the imperialists, the warlords, and all these other people who had brought China to the brink of collapse.

Sometimes when you join an organization like this, you don’t always fully understand what it’s going to be, but once you’re in it, it also changes you. You understand the principle of the organization, but then the organization has all these methods for changing your very soul. That’s not the language I’m using — it’s the language the Communists used. You have self-criticism, you have study sessions.

If you believe you are participating in a grand adventure, where you are a leading figure in a world historical force that is inevitable, that is a really exciting place to be. Also, think for a moment that you keep seeing the party failing over and over again, and then suddenly one particular person emerges in the form of Mao Zedong, who seems to finally have a way of getting it right. He takes this ragtag group of revolutionaries who had nearly been destroyed on many occasions and forges a new nation.

For Xi Zhongxun to reject someone like that would be rejecting his own self. When the party persecuted him, it didn’t turn him away from the party. It motivated him to ask, “How do I win back the party’s trust? How do I show that I’m better than other people? How do I show that, actually, precisely because I am going through this torment and still return to it, I am even more dedicated than other people who didn’t have to suffer?”

You see other people grumbling about the party, and Xi Zhongxun would say, “Yeah, well, I bet you didn’t go through this.” It was almost like a badge of honor that he could weaponize — this politics of suffering, of who went through the worst experiences, and that gives you political capital within the party. It’s an interesting way to think about life, but it does raise the question — what kind of suffering leads to dedication and what leads to alienation? This is really a fundamental question or puzzle.

Xi Zhongxun admitted that during the Cultural Revolution, he went through a period of doubt. But Xi Zhongxun says precisely because he wasn’t sure for a little while and nevertheless returned to the cause of the party, therefore his dedication is totally unshakable and even more powerful than someone who didn’t go through that experience.

That also raises a question for young people in China today: If you want them to eat bitterness, how do you do that without turning them away from the cause entirely? That’s a philosophical question in some ways, and it’s one that Xi Jinping thinks about all the time—something that keeps him up at night, I’m sure. It’s also at the very heart of the question of the future of the People’s Republic of China: whether or not they get that right.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, there was this very evocative moment with Xi Zhongxun towards the end of his life. In the 80s, during this spiritual pollution campaign, all these old revolutionaries were excited for the future but also worried that the youth were going soft and didn’t understand. One of his answers was that they just needed the old comrades to go into the high schools and tell their stories — like the astronaut showing up in middle school and telling you how cool space is.

Joseph Torigian: Yeah. He talks about them as flowers in a hothouse garden, right? They need to go out into the real world so they can survive in the real world. Interestingly enough, he thinks that young people who went through the Cultural Revolution might be a good group of successors because they underwent these terrible experiences.

Of course, the Cultural Revolution was largely about succession issues at the very top and at the very bottom — getting rid of Liu Shaoqi, the revisionist who proved to be unsuitable to the task, but also toughening young people who had been growing up in the privilege of youth in a socialist nation. Many of those youth actually did go through a period of disillusionment. They wanted to have fun, they wanted to study overseas, they wanted to make money.

Xi Zhongxun consciously contrasted himself with those other youth, and he saw a lot of danger in this spiritual crisis that many young people in China found themselves in during the 1980s. Of course, this was one of the roots of what happened in 1989.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, I mean, it is a religious attachment. There’s no other word to describe what someone like Xi Zhongxun or Xi Jinping has to the party. You have these little trials of faith, right?

The decision to go left or go right from Xi Zhongxun, as compared to all the other princelings who are having fun in Hong Kong and driving cars or whatnot. A wide swath of humanity would get disillusioned from the fact that you have all these people you idolize turn on you and say you’re a capitalist roader and making leftist deviations and being anti-party and whatnot.

The emotional effort to harmonize whatever you’ve seen and experienced and look back at that time in the wilderness from 1962 to 1978 — not as these people stealing 20 years of my life, but actually as a forging event that is making me a better party cadre, more well-honed to serve the people — requires some kind of deep spiritual belief. Even something as catastrophic as watching this party starve tens of millions of people or turn the country upside down in a Cultural Revolution is not able to shake it.

Joseph Torigian: We should remember though that even though he had this idealism, this conviction, these were not easy experiences to live through and he suffered. It was difficult for him to understand why this was happening to him. Part of it was this sense that the party was still the best future for China. But part of it was utilitarian, right? The sense that if we are going to move forward, we can’t think about the past too much.

There’s both an idealistic sense, but also this idea that if we are too reflective, if we’re too critical of the party, if we go too far, then we’re going to shake the whole house of cards and it’s going to come down with us. That was a central puzzle for the 1980s: how do we justify moving in any direction but still maintain this sense of faith even as we can’t even say what communism really is because we’re groping as we try to figure out a new direction?

That was the reason why there were so many zigs and zags in the 1980s. That was the shoal that Hu Yaobang crashed on. You could understand in theory how you could integrate reform with conservative principles because you needed to have stability to reform and you needed to have reform to have stability. But as Hu Yaobang said in his self-criticism, even though in theory that makes sense, practically it’s not easy and you need a lot of political skill. His inability to do that was one of the reasons that Deng Xiaoping scapegoated him.

Of course, Xi Zhongxun is this very close associate of Hu Yaobang and felt very strongly about that, even though he put the party’s interests first and went along even with Deng’s persecution of this very close associate of his.

Jon Sine: You cite Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government several times, primarily for its generational analysis and its examination of how faith erodes over time. But Slezkine’s central thesis is that the old Bolsheviks functioned essentially as a millenarian sect. You don’t use much of that religious language in your book, but I’m curious whether you see similar parallels. As someone who studies both Soviet and Chinese history, what similarities and differences do you observe between the old Bolsheviks and these Chinese revolutionaries?

Joseph Torigian: Culturally, they’re very similar. Xi Zhongxun, on his very first trip overseas, goes to Russia and meets these sinologists. He talks about how he loves reading a Russian novel, What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevsky. Of course, it has this very famous character, Rakhmetov, a professional revolutionary who would sleep on a bed of nails to inculcate his revolutionary élan. Xi Zhongxun said he wanted to mimic this person and walk around in the wind, in the rain, in the snow, and sleep on a hot kang stone bed with his shirt off. In that sense, there are some very powerful similarities.

Just like during the terror in the Soviet Union, people were sent to their execution yelling “Long live Stalin!” During the Cultural Revolution, these old revolutionaries had no idea what Mao wanted, didn’t understand what Mao wanted, and were going through intense physical and emotional torment. For them, the problem wasn’t Mao — it was that they weren’t keeping up with Mao. It was that they didn’t understand Mao. They were looking into themselves for the problem. They weren’t looking at Mao for the problem. That’s how they thought about the world.

More broadly speaking, what’s interesting too is sometimes when I give this talk, a person will come up to me and say, “You know, I was raised in a faith tradition. I went to Catholic school. A lot of what you’re saying, it’s not that unfamiliar.” Seeing meaning in suffering, redemption in suffering — it’s a universal thing.

Now, whether you call it a religion or not, or how similar these phenomena are, that’s a big discussion. Certainly, the contexts are very different. Class struggle is a message of violence. The gospel is a message of love. The gospel is also a message of individual conscience, while the party’s message is that conscience is the party’s conscience.

I don’t want to essentialize similarities or differences, but at the very least, even though many of the themes we’re discussing today seem very foreign to us, I think with radical empathy, it’s not impossible to understand these lives, and we should try to understand these lives. We should never underestimate how hard it is. We should never think that it’s easy to appreciate how culturally dissimilar or unique these situations can be, but nevertheless we’re all part of the human condition.

Jordan Schneider: I also think that one level down, at a tactical level, you see a lot of parallels in the moves that the church uses and the moves that the party uses. This whole confession, self-criticism thing, which is a central part of these guys’ lives, is this introspection and these doctrinal fights of who has the right line. Are we doing this right? The importance of words is just a really remarkable thing — they’re arguing about phrases and spending days and days trying to get the idea right, which is something that’s really important for religion and not really important for a lot of other parts of life. But it was literally life and death for these folks a lot of times.

Joseph Torigian: That’s one of the other ironies of this book. One of the communities in China that Xi Zhongxun was tasked with managing in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s was Catholics. He sees Catholics as the biggest problem for the party, partly because they’re in communion with the Pope and Xi Zhongxun sees the Pope as a tool of imperialism. But they’re also hierarchical, they’re very motivated, they’re very idealistic. They also have these texts that need to be interpreted. It’s not surprising that they have a very interesting collision both in the 50s and the 1980s, which people can read about in the book.

Jordan Schneider: But the Catholics figured out succession in a way that maybe the party hasn’t. Jon…

“Eating Sawdust” 吃木屑

Jon Sine: Let’s talk about the art and science of putting together a book like this, because I think a lot of people have a perception, maybe a misperception, that the regime today is hiding everything, that if you go to the government sources, sanctioned sources, you can’t really rely on them. But when you have the background that you do, there are things that you can pull from them and you can triangulate something — I think you call it “a mosaic.” There are about 2,000 endnotes in this book, and I know that you’ve probably had to cut quite a bit.

Joseph Torigian: A lot.

Jon Sine: Can you speak on the art and the science behind putting this together?

Joseph Torigian: Well, it wasn’t easy. We’ve talked a lot about ideals and conviction, and for Xi Jinping to achieve that, you need to have a single view of history. Xi Jinping was a surprise to a lot of people, but one of the first signs that he wasn’t going to be a reformer like people thought his father was came when he gave the speech about the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said one of the reasons they collapsed is they lost control of their history, and nobody took it seriously anymore.

If you want people to think that the party is an inevitability, that it just goes from one triumph to another, the more you talk about its dark past, the more dangerous that is for party rule. He has this term “historical nihilism” that he uses to describe people who talk about the party’s mistakes too much. For someone with that view to write about their father is certainly something that is challenging.

I don’t want to say that my book is the final verdict on Xi Zhongxun’s life. It really is just the latest draft. Whether or not it’s a meaningful draft has to do with whether or not there are enough new sources since the last person took a look and whether or not you’re doing enough justice to the sources that are available.

The question becomes: what are those sources? I don’t really think in terms of good and bad evidence. I think in terms of getting as much evidence as possible and then parsing it and then using it in different ways as that piece of evidence demands. You can’t just go to one archive and collect the materials and then write it up. You really need to have a detective sensibility. You need to be sensitive to possibility and limitation. You need to have a capacity for tedium.

There’s this expression “eating sawdust,” that China watchershands have used, becausewhere you need to eat a lot to get any protein. I’d probably say 99.99999% of everything I read is totally useless. But when I do find something that is really useful, it’s very, very exciting.

I was able to get some primary sources, of course. For a variety of reasons, a lot of documents or internally circulated material have become available at US institutions, as you saw in the book. Some very interesting document collections were also published in Hong Kong, as well as memoirs and party history written by insiders who had access to a lot of evidence. I did a lot of interviews for the book. I used a lot of material published in the mainland. There were these party history journals that were really pushing the envelope for a very long time that included subjects that were very sensitive — the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward.

I use official sources as well. That might strike people as surprising, but they are absolutely essential. There are cases where they changed the literal words that people said, but they’re quite rare. More often the problems are what they don’t include. But what that means is that you can treat what they do include as a hypothesis for what happened, at the very least. Then you look for other sources to back it up. It sensitizes you to things you might want to look at. Or, you use this phrase ’mosaic theory’ — they reveal a piece of evidence, unaware that I can connect it with all these other pieces of material.

The other thing I did was to make a list of every time Xi Zhongxun met with a foreigner. Then I went to speak to that foreigner, or I went to their archives, which are open. That allowed me to tell a story not just about Beijing’s relations with global communism, which I think is a very meaningful part of the book, a very significant part of the book, but even to get his understanding of Tibet, right? I interviewed the Dalai Lama. I was able to get these Tibetan language transcripts of negotiations between Dharamsala and Xi Zhongxun in Beijing and have them translated into English so I could use them in the book.

If we are taking these issues, these questions, these subjects with the seriousness they deserve — and because in a way it is a matter of life and death, right? I mean, people are dying and we’re writing about why these people are dying — we should feel a sense of moral obligation to do everything we can to get these stories right. I certainly didn’t in this book, as I say in the acknowledgments. I’m sure that in some cases somebody else will come and tell me I got something wrong, but I’m very open to that. I hope people will tell me.

I’m hoping my book will lead to further questions and other avenues for research because the world files its information very miscellaneously, which means that people may figure out that there was something I didn’t look at because I didn’t think of it. If there weren’t so many people who knew what I was working on, who said, “Oh, by the way, I stumbled onto this.”You never know what tiny, tiny breakthrough then leads to huge breakthroughs. That happened so many times in my book that there was some complete stroke of luck where I was looking at something completely different, or I was going for a long walk and I said, “You know, maybe I should go back and reread this.” Then you reread it and then it has a new meaning that wasn’t there before.

For example, the Li Rui Diaries. Li Rui (李锐) was a secretary to Mao Zedong. He was working for the Organization Department in the eighties, knew Xi Zhongxun very well, was the senior pro-reform constitutionalist comrade in Beijing during the 2000s and 2010s. His diaries are available at the Hoover Archive. Now they’re extraordinarily hard to use because it’s a diary. There’s a lot in there that’s wrong because he would write down rumors, and he wrote a lot in shorthand, which I couldn’t understand at all the first time I read it. But when you read other stuff, you go back, even if it’s just a few characters, and suddenly it has this huge meaning that was totally invisible to you the first time that you looked at it.

Jordan Schneider: For instance?

Joseph Torigian: One example was a curious incident in the 1980s where there was a debate about how to think about princelings and how to promote princelings, especially the ones that had engaged in really brutal violence as the so-called old Red Guards in the first months of the Cultural Revolution. Somebody wrote a letter and it was immediately approved by Chen Yun. It raised these questions about whether or not the whole thing had been planned ahead of time in the first place.

I saw the names had been mentioned in a conversation between Xi Zhongxun and Li Rui, and I wasn’t quite sure what that was all about. But I read a memoir written by the person who knew about this letter and then suddenly, because I knew that background, this very brief discussion between Xi Zhongxun and Li Rui that Li Rui didn’t include a lot of information about because it was his own diaries — suddenly I knew what Xi Zhongxun thought about this very interesting moment. That would be one example.

Jordan Schneider: That is just a tiny window into the amount of work that went into this book. Because you have that moment, but you actually have a 90-year life, and on every single page you can feel the amount of sawdust that you chewed through, Joseph.

Joseph Torigian: Each chapter has its own ecology of sources. I need to mention that I relied heavily on histories written by Chinese scholars — work published both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. For his family life, I inevitably needed to rely on commemorative essays written by the children about their father. You need to take these sources seriously, but one way to approach them is to understand the broader context.

What was it like to grow up in Beijing in the 1950s? What was it like to attend that particular school? Often, instead of researching Xi Jinping directly, I would take a different approach. If Xi Jinping went to August 1st School (北京市八一学校), I’d find every book I could about August 1st School. When Xi Zhongxun was exiled to a factory in Luoyang, I’d research the history of that factory. His name might not even appear in these sources, but you can at least understand what happened to him while he was there and what he would have experienced, even if we can’t say exactly what he did or thought about it.

Jordan Schneider: Those moments showcased your scholarship at its best. People will probably flip ahead to read the Tiananmen chapter first, but I appreciated how you condensed these experiences. In just a few paragraphs, you gave readers a sense of what these worlds were like — it’s some Robert Caro-level work. You’re not literally getting a job in a factory in Luoyang, but you’re doing the best you can with the available material.

Joseph Torigian: Robert Caro is my idol. His book on research methodology is perhaps the best guide to research ever written. The only other useful recommendation I have for aspiring researchers is watching old Gordon Liu kung fu movies like 36th Chamber of Shaolin or Fists of the White Lotus. Those training sequences offer a great way to think about learning research skills.

Caro writes about trying to understand LBJ but feeling like he couldn’t get close to his subject. He told his wife they were moving to the hill country in Texas. Only when he experienced how difficult life was there did he feel he understood who LBJ became — seeing the poverty and hardship firsthand. I often wonder how different my book would have been if I had lived in Shaanxi Province for two or three years. Those are the regrets you think about. You can only write the book that’s possible with the sources available to you, but it does make you wonder.

No Saints, Only Martyrs: Xi’s Early Years

Jon Sine: This seems like a good jumping-off point to discuss the book’s chronology. My first question is about getting into the mindset of someone like Xi Zhongxun, who was born in 1913 in a place of unimaginable suffering, death, battle, and tragedy — at least from a modern developed-world perspective. You might be uniquely positioned to answer this, having spent time reading dark literature from the Soviet archives and authors like Solzhenitsyn.

You open the book with Xi Zhongxun attempting to murder a teacher at age 14, which serves as a device to help us understand that this wasn’t particularly strange for the time — people of all ages were dying and being killed. How do you advise readers to get into the mindset of this world when Xi Jinping was growing up?

Joseph Torigian: One regret I have about this book is that people sometimes focus on the most salacious moments, like the one you described. You need to put these events in context. I’m not saying that understanding him means we should forgive him, but we should understand the conditions that led to this behavior. This book is as much about the party system as it is about Xi Jinping.

People like to think of the party as inhabited by good guys and bad guys, but it’s much more complicated. They’re all part of a system, trying to figure out what they can do in limited situations. This needs to be understood when we consider who these people were.

When Xi Zhongxun was 15 years old and attempted to kill this academic administrator, it occurred in a milieu of violence. The Nationalists were killing many of his comrades. This was an act of desperation by a frightened young person — a huge failure that wouldn’t have improved the party’s position even if it had succeeded. Not only did the administrator survive, but Xi Zhongxun and many others were arrested.

This illustrates a pattern Xi Zhongxun faced throughout his life: you need zeal and fearlessness, but too much zeal can lead to actions that go too far and trigger backlash, often making situations much worse. However, if you’re not aggressive enough, others will accuse you of being a rightist — an opportunist too frightened to use violence and risk to advance the revolutionary agenda.

There’s a famous communist text called “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder that recognizes being too radical can get you killed. But they don’t debate these questions rationally because of the ideological charge, which makes management extremely difficult and can lead to purges, arrests, and executions.

Jordan Schneider: The life-or-death stakes and emotional charge of those early years are hard to comprehend.

Joseph Torigian: Those were the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days.

Jordan Schneider: Kids these days aren’t getting horses shot out from under them or taking bullets through the leg while running from Nationalists. But seriously —

Joseph Torigian: You can see how Xi Jinping in the 1980s looked at younger people born under socialism, after all that violence was gone. When they criticized the party, he wanted to tell them what it was really like. I can see how some students would be inspired by that, while others wouldn’t be. It depends on who listens and who is moved.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s stay with the 1920s and 1930s. There was this one guy accused of something serious who said, “I’m going to show you just how committed to the party I am.” He was reckless in battle, got shot, and died. That tension — if you’re redder than red, you might literally end up being killed.

Joseph Torigian: You’re referring to Xi Zhongxun’s first great mentor, Liu Zhidan (刘志丹). What’s fascinating about him is that even though they faced persecution and their cases hadn’t been fully rehabilitated, he would tell Xi Zhongxun that the party would eventually get things right and he should talk to others about this. Then this same person, Liu Zhidan, because he still had a black mark in his file and wanted to show his loyalty, got himself killed.

Jordan Schneider: It’s not like the Catholic Church as we know it today — this is early Christianity. There are martyrs, everything is life and death, the world is against you. To believe and commit your life to it, you need a truly revolutionary vision of how society will change.

Joseph Torigian: When you see people around you getting killed for these reasons, once the regime is established, you can understand wanting to do everything possible to ensure the regime persists not just during your lifetime, but for decades or even centuries into the future. This is something Xi Zhongxun thought about constantly — he would ruminate on how to make sure the party survives not just him, but deep into the future. This makes the fact that his son is now the leader of the country particularly interesting.

Jon Sine: There are a lot of novels in the book. When Xi Zhongxun is young, he read a novel with the same title as your second chapter (which is among my favorites of the 30 chapters, by the way). The novel is called The Young Wanderer 少年漂泊者. Xi Zhongxun sees a lot of himself in the protagonist. But I’m also reminded of Stalin. According to Kotkin’s biography, Stalin was very motivated by a novel he read before he was a committed Marxist-Leninist, which has a similar, though less tragic, heroic figure named Koba. So much so that Stalin uses Koba as a nickname for himself.

I’m curious both if you could explain the Xi Zhongxun example, but also what you think of the fact that so many of these revolutionaries were inspired by something like a novel before they even really had a conception of what they were going to be sacrificing their lives for.

Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting that his life as an early revolutionary was so deeply shaped by this book. In fact, he told Xi Jinping, his son, that he reread this novel after being released from jail to rekindle his love for the party. At the time of his release, he was desperate and couldn’t walk. He was covered in eczema and boils. His father had died, apparently because of the stress related to watching what his son had just gone through. Soon after, he lost his mother and two sisters. There was famine everywhere. He couldn’t link back up with the party because most of it had been destroyed. He couldn’t go back to school because he’s a wanted man. He read this book to get himself back in the mood, so to speak. He rededicated himself because of reading this novel. Then in 1962, he was thrown out of the leadership because of another novel. It’s an interesting bookend.

Then Xi Zhongxun, of course, returned to work in Beijing in the Secretariat. The very first thing that happens is people think that the country is going to fall into another Cultural Revolution because of a movie, a movie called Bitter Love (苦恋). It’s a movie that probably should speak to him in some ways. It’s a movie that is about someone who is deeply dedicated to the party and to the nation, but who the party persecutes. It includes this famous line — “You have always loved the motherland, but did the motherland love you?”

He doesn’t like stuff that criticizes the party, but he still sees the need to reflect on the Mao era, and he’s not quite sure how to criticize it without going too far. But repeatedly, we keep seeing that movies and novels have really fundamental impacts, not just on the party, but on Xi Zhongxun in particular. It speaks to this issue of communism being preoccupied with souls and for communist writers being “engineers of the soul.” And why in the 1980s, Xi Zhongxun, who in many ways was a reformer, would still say things like, “We also need to have a spiritual civilization."

People held different views on how to solve the same problems that Xi Jinping was witnessing. Some believed the solution lay in enlightenment, cultural change, science, and democracy. Mao Zedong disagreed. He thought the right path involved violence, class struggle, and forceful transformation.

In the 1980s, there was a reflection on these two different paths and how the May 4th movement represented one approach while the Yan’an Rectification represented something quite different. The Yan’an Rectification, as I write about in my book, addressed a fascinating problem — all these young people had hero complexes. They were young, entitled, and spoiled, yet nevertheless wanted to save the nation. They went to Yan’an and recognized they needed to become good party soldiers, but transforming into a party soldier proved extremely difficult. It was a wrenching, traumatic experience. However, when they emerged from this process of struggle sessions and self-reflection, they felt like completely new human beings and often experienced euphoria.

Jon Sine: Your book uses Xi Zhongxun as a lens to examine the party. However, for the first twenty years of his life, the party center hadn’t yet consolidated in Shaanxi and Yan’an. This raises a question about the story you’re telling, which relies heavily on Joseph Esherick’s excellent book Accidental Holy Land. How representative do you think this experience in Shaanxi was during these first twenty years of establishing the base area?

Joseph Torigian: The Northwesterners took great pride in the fact that almost all other base areas had been destroyed except theirs. This raises an interesting question. I’ve discussed how Xi Zhongxun was incarcerated in 1935 by his fellow communists and was still in prison when Mao arrived. Mao didn’t release them immediately and wasn’t the primary person involved in investigating. Nevertheless, if that base area hadn’t existed, it would have created a huge problem. Mao didn’t even know it was there. The Party Center only learned about this base area’s existence through a newspaper in some dusty, isolated town, which led them to investigate and eventually arrive. This raises the intriguing question: who saved whom? Did the Party Center save the Northwesterners, or did the Northwesterners save the Party? That situation was unique.

Another factor was the severe infighting in all these base areas, but it was especially bad in Shaanxi for various reasons. No clear leader emerged from the region. One potential leader I’ve already mentioned, Liu Zhidan, was killed for reasons we’ve discussed. Even before him, there was another prominent leader, Xie Zichang 谢子长, who was also killed. They weren’t represented by a single figure who could command the loyalty and affection of the entire group.

When Mao was in Yan’an, he needed to identify a representative who could speak for the Northwesterners’ group and whose promotion would signal to the Northwesterners that they were taken seriously. He chose Gao Gang. Many people disliked Gao Gang — in fact, they hated him. This left behind the potential for struggles that would emerge in subsequent years and continue to affect Xi Zhongxun’s life for decades.

Jon Sine: I was recently in Ruijin in Jiangxi, which some may know as the starting point for the Long March and the capital of that base area. When you’re there, you see the whole place covered with Mao’s little wax statues showing him standing and giving speeches. However, from what I understand of the history, he was actually marginalized for most of the period there after the Central Committee moved down around 1931.

I had a friend who recently went to Yan’an to visit the museum and see what role Xi Zhongxun plays and how he’s memorialized there. His view was the same as mine when I visited — the portrayal seems right-sized, which is pretty small. How would you right-size Xi Zhongxun’s importance, especially during the period before Mao arrived?

Joseph Torigian: He was primarily involved in civilian governance, mostly working with the Soviet structure. While that sounds important, what was even more crucial during this period were the military leaders. In some cases, these military figures who were actually commanding soldiers looked down on the civilians, and Xi Zhongxun was considered as such.

When Liu Zhidan, the commander of these forces, would interact with Xi Zhongxun and show deference to him as someone working for civilian government structures, Xi Zhongxun was quite struck by that respect. After the Party Center arrived, Xi Zhongxun was sent to some real backwaters — dangerous ones — and only gradually, as the party continued to review the 1935 persecution, was Xi Zhongxun placed in increasingly important positions.

What’s striking is that by the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, Xi Zhongxun was the youngest candidate member of the Central Committee. He benefited from Gao Gang’s rise because they were now on the right side of history, according to the view of the past that Mao was imposing on the party. You’re right that I wouldn’t place him as one of the leading figures who helped establish the base area. This was also important for Xi Zhongxun because later, when he was seen as an informal leader of Northwesterners within the leadership, he wasn’t as dominant over the rest of them as figures from other factions were seen as clear standard bearers with much more prestige and status.

Jon Sine: What about the factions that seem to emerge at this time? You have the Long Marchers, whom Mao derisively said something about — that just because you walked a lot doesn’t mean you have special status. Obviously, many of them certainly thought they did. Could you speak about the tension between the Long Marchers arriving and the people in the Shaanxi base area?

Joseph Torigian: The Long Marchers were the central leadership — the Central Committee. Many were very well educated with extensive experience. Many had studied in Moscow. Then they showed up in the Northwest and thought the locals were bumpkins. Yang Shangkun even said, “You consider this a city? I can’t believe you think this is an urban area given how undeveloped it is."

The Northwesterners had built the base area, and then the Long Marchers arrived and basically took over. People like Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun continued to face the shadow of the 1935 purge — they weren’t immediately rehabilitated. The Long Marchers looked down on them, while the Northwesterners felt they had built this base area and were upset about the lack of respect they received.

Mao Zedong adopted the Northwesterners in quite striking ways. He gave them so many positions at the 1945 Seventh Party Congress that Mao’s associates from the Jiangxi base area became very jealous and quite unhappy. The story Mao told was essentially this: when he was in Jiangxi, dogmatic people who had learned in the Soviet Union told him to do wrong things and pushed him out through domineering behavior. He said that’s basically what happened in 1935 when people like Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun were persecuted — because they were doing good, real, sinicized revolution and were persecuted by people who had no idea what they were doing.

For Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun, this must have been thrilling. Here was Mao saying flattering things about the Northwesterners, claiming their historical experiences mirrored his, and promoting them rapidly at the expense of his old associates.

Then something interesting happened. In the early 1950s, Mao Zedong started complaining about Liu Shaoqi. He talked to Gao Gang, and Gao Gang harbored antagonism against party cadres who had spent most of their time in the “white areas” — meaning the cities doing underground work. He didn’t understand why they had all these cushy positions when it was the “red areas” — the base areas — that had done the bulk of work during the revolution. He also thought the Northwesterners needed more respect as reflected in official party history. He was motivated by how the party evaluated their contribution to the revolution.

Part of Gao’s machinations against Liu Shaoqi were based on Mao’s encouragement and certain things Mao was saying about Liu Shaoqi. But Gao also had this view of history that explains why he was acting dangerously. Xi Zhongxun was much more cautious. He said they wouldn’t be respected because they weren’t Long Marchers — they didn’t have that credibility, status, and prestige. Xi Zhongxun felt that people like Deng Xiaoping, who was a Long Marcher and knew Mao for a long time, were people he and Gao needed to be careful of. Ultimately, it was Deng Xiaoping who betrayed Gao Gang, went to Mao, and signaled Gao’s defeat.

The Party as Mother and Matchmaker

Jordan Schneider: We have this elite drama as well as human drama. There’s love, there’s death. What’s his relationship to his parents and his first wife?

Joseph Torigian: Xi Zhongxun’s parents died when he was quite young — fifteen or sixteen years old — leaving him an orphan for a while. After he was released from prison, he had to take care of his entire family. Then he left them to join the revolution, which led to an unflattering comment from an uncle. On one occasion, he actually referred to the party as “mother” — I don’t have that in the book, but it’s an interesting word choice. By fifteen or sixteen, the party was essentially his only family, or at least the most important family he had. He went back to his home village once or twice, but the entire emotional center of gravity of his life was the party, not his immediate relatives.

His first wife, Hao Mingzhu 郝明珠, was a very interesting figure. She came from a revolutionary family and was very capable. She did extensive work trying to explain to women why the revolution was something they needed to take seriously and why they shouldn’t be frightened by it. She became pregnant several times, but she hadn’t joined the revolution to get pregnant — she joined to make revolution. That tension apparently led to the break between them.

Jon Sine: Can we pause on his first wife for a second? One of the things that stuck with me most from your book—almost haunting—was a one-sentence line about her first husband who was killed and beheaded. She had to retrieve his body, which was severed from the head, and bury him. She was eighteen at the time. People should sit with that for a second to imagine what kind of normal setting this was, where this woman had to endure that.

Joseph Torigian: She’s also interesting because she went on to have a pretty good career in a very male-dominated institution like the Chinese Communist Party. She became a powerful individual in Shaanxi in subsequent decades.

Jon Sine: Despite this very grown-up tragedy she suffered at eighteen, you offer a very strange description — which I presume is completely factual — of the way Xi Zhongxun courts her.

Joseph Torigian: The stories in the book are funny from our perspective. They’re frightening and sad at the same time.

Jon Sine: I don’t know if you want to give that story, because it has all these elements — they’re twenty, adolescents, but also patriarchal, yet also progressive in some weird way.

Joseph Torigian: As I mentioned, one interesting thing that emerges from the book is how often the party’s own ideals and mission would bump up against something else — exigencies and political needs. You would have matchmaking sometimes to pursue political goals, even as you’re telling women not to bind their feet. It was quite a striking contradiction.

Jordan Schneider: Tell the story.

Jon Sine: I have it off the top of my head. She’s in this group, they basically show up, and they all start pointing to Xi Zhongxun and say…

Joseph Torigian: “This is the guy.”

Jon Sine: She has a shy girl reaction, runs away, and they chase her. Maybe you could pick it up from there — how that eventually ends rather swiftly in their marriage.

Joseph Torigian: There was extensive, forceful party matchmaking during this period. To put it in context, this was an organization built to achieve revolution, and these relationships were seen as something that should be built on principles of what facilitates the revolution. That led to pressure on people to marry people they didn’t know well or might not have even liked.

Jordan Schneider: How does getting married help revolution in the first place?

Joseph Torigian: To move on to the relationship between Xi Zhongxun and Qi Xin 齐心, it’s very striking how much he doesn’t want to be distracted by her, especially during dicey moments for the party, as the Nationalists were tearing up and breaking up much of what had been the Yan’an base area in the second half of the 1940s. When he meets Qi Xin, he tells her, “Why are you coming to see me? We’re in the middle of fighting this war. It’s just a distraction.”

The party was supposed to break down personalistic relationships so people wouldn’t put romance first — they put revolution first. This was something they all understood and intuited. I can’t remember if I left it in the book, but there was one time when Xi Zhongxun facilitated a meeting between Peng Dehuai and Peng Dehuai’s wife, and Peng yelled at him, saying he needed to focus on bigger things than setting up an occasion for him to see the woman he was married to.

Jordan Schneider: This reminded me of arranged marriages where the woman meets this man who’s in good standing with the party, and they get married the next day — like ISIS. ISIS would arrange marriages with women they captured as spoils. On one hand, Joseph, these guys like sex, which you bring up, but at the same time, you have these women who are incredibly conscious and want to contribute to the party. They’re also annoyed by the fact that they have to do all the childbearing. We end up in this weird dynamic where, because Xi Jinping’s mother is a very active person, they just don’t do parenting for six days a week. It shows how dedicated and religious they are — the family stuff and sex are there because they’re human beings, but they’re subordinating this to the broader goal of making revolution and having the party flourish.

Joseph Torigian: Some more context that’s not directly relevant to what you’re saying, but that we saw very commonly in Yan’an, is that the old revolutionaries had wives they had married years before getting to the base area. Many of those wives had their own seniority, prestige, and status because of when they had joined the revolution and what they had done for it. But then these men left their wives for younger party cadres — women often from more privileged backgrounds with more education. Xi Zhongxun’s two marriages were something quite common in Yan’an — they divorced their first wives and married younger wives. Sometimes that was quite controversial.

For example, in Yan’an, Mao was married to a woman who had contributed and sacrificed a lot for the revolution, and he married another person who was an actor from Shanghai who had been in movies and whose life had been affected by rumors about her love life. When Mao started courting her, some people were unhappy about that. This was another element of the social fabric of what was happening in Yan’an during this period.

Jordan Schneider: It’s funny because Xi Jinping almost goes in the other direction where the first wife is too educated and too into the Western world, ends up moving to the UK and living out a global cosmopolitan lifestyle. Then he finds this woman whose background and worldview much more echo what he had from the perspective of coming into the party and forging and suffering.

But we shouldn’t jump that far ahead. Jon, bring us back.

Jon Sine: On the topic of Xi Zhongxun maybe not being that high-ranking at the time, in the late thirties and forties, he’s maybe just an alternate Central Committee member. He’s the head of a county called Suide 绥德, a sub-region of the Northwest.

Joseph Torigian: It was northeast of Yan’an. The first big jump of his life was really in 1945 when he became a candidate member of the Central Committee — he was very young. Then the next huge jump was when he became head of the Northwest Bureau that same year. Peng Dehuai and He Long (贺龙) were also very important figures in the Northwest, but for someone that young to have a position that weighty is one of the more striking parts of his story. He repeatedly was the youngest person in these very delicate positions. He kept winning over older people to support him. He had this habit of collecting big brothers — that’s something that marked his life.

Jon Sine: I wanted to talk about the Suide period when he was there. You’re pulling out these threads of contradictions and tensions that exist within this individual, as opposed to other biographies that might have more of a clear arc for narrative reasons. But it’s a through line — is he a reformer, is he conservative? These tensions run through land reform there, they run through political rectification that he goes through. Sometimes he seems to tone it down, but sometimes he also seems to be turning it up, which just actually means purging, potentially killing, leading to the deaths of people. How do you see that period, if we linger on that, as a harbinger of some of these contradictions?

Joseph Torigian: During the rectification in 1942, at this period, it focused on transformation and education. Xi Zhongxun was the dean of a university in Yan’an for a few months. Then in 1943, he went to the Suide sub-region, which you just mentioned. Their rectification turned into something called the Confession Movement or the Rescue the Fallen Campaign. Now it was looking for spies — it wasn’t just about taking these young people and turning them into good communists, but finding which ones were spies so they could be rescued. That required a whole new level of investigation, persecution, sometimes even torture, and it completely went off the rails.

Xi Zhongxun had a reputation for being more humane and pro-reform, but the Confession Campaign — the Rescue the Fallen Campaign — was really a case of political radicalism that Xi Zhongxun seems to have been pushing and we should ask why that was the case. In some ways, it’s a puzzle because just a few years earlier, he himself had been persecuted largely on trumped-up charges that resulted from people being forced to give false confessions. He knew this would happen.

Part of it was that the party told him to find spies, and of course he was going to find spies. Part of it was war hysteria — there was fear in 1943 that the Nationalists were going to invade. Also, the Communists had their own spies, making it easy to imagine that the Nationalists were sending agents into this region.

Xi Zhongxun had reasons to be loyal to and grateful to Mao for what we just described — Mao’s new version of history that must have been thrilling to the Northwesterners, crediting them as being on the right side of history along with Mao Zedong.

But Xi went very far, and the form these campaigns took in Suide were very interesting because they focused on a school and included lurid details about many of the young women allegedly being spies sent by Nationalists to infiltrate the party by essentially being honey traps.

Jordan Schneider: To be clear, by young, we mean one of the women who ended up getting caught up in this purge was fourteen. She’s supposedly some prostitute for the Nationalists who can barely write her name.

Joseph Torigian: They had mass rallies where these young people went up and lied about having been spies and having been sent on these missions. What’s interesting is that the target of these campaigns in Suide was this school, and Qi Xin was a student at this school. That’s when Qi Xin and Xi Zhongxun first started to get to know each other. He showed off this inscription that Mao gave him that said, “The party’s interests come first” — something she never forgot.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah. Relationships that start in high school purges tend to be the ones that really see you through the decades.

Joseph Torigian: You can see it was an electric atmosphere. That’s one way of putting it. But he also told her to be careful, otherwise she would be caught up in it. On one occasion, she visits one of the students being persecuted and even interviews her. It was a messy scene.

Post-1945: Surrogate Fathers and Succession

Jon Sine: We can move forward to the part where the Japanese are defeated in 1945. At some point, maybe two or three years into the Civil War, the Nationalists chase the Communist leadership out of Yan’an. What happens to Xi Zhongxun at this point?

Joseph Torigian: 1947 was a really interesting moment. Yan’an had been the Communist capital for many years and was a symbol of the Chinese Communist Party. Then the Nationalist General Hu Zongnan (胡宗南) attacked, and Xi Zhongxun was on the front line. He screwed up a really key battle, and the party was facing a real crisis. Peng Dehuai, a very famous military figure in Chinese history, was plucked from the Central Military Commission and ordered to command the Northwest forces. Xi Zhongxun worked for him. In the subsequent battles, it looks like the two of them basically got along.

Later in the 1940s, Xi Zhongxun also spent time on governance, civilian work, logistics, and land reform, where he worked under He Long 贺龙. On the military side, he worked under Peng Dehuai, and on the civilian side, he worked under He Long. These were very weighty positions, especially for someone young.

I want to dwell on this moment for just another second — how emotional it must have been for Xi Zhongxun in March 1947. He’s in Yan’an, the Nationalists are coming, and Mao refuses to leave. Mao was really frightening the people around him by staying in the city even as the Nationalists were at the very gates. It was Peng Dehuai and Xi Zhongxun who finally saw him off and then tried to create this rearguard action to hold off the Nationalists to ensure the Central Committee could escape. To have spent that much time building up Communist forces in this area and then see them destroyed by the Nationalists must have been another very emotional moment in his life.

Jon Sine: Xi Zhongxun and Peng Dehuai, serving together, would be sleeping in the same room. Apparently Xi Zhongxun was quite the snorer. You write that Peng Dehuai would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and put his shoe on Xi Zhongxun’s face to wake him up and stop him from snoring.

Joseph Torigian: Comrades-in-arms.

Jordan Schneider: Dude, that’s sleep apnea. That’s serious.

Joseph Torigian: Peng Dehuai was famously mean to people under him, and Xi Zhongxun sometimes acted as a peacemaker, a mediator between Peng Dehuai and whoever Peng was mad at. Xi Zhongxun’s ability to manage interpersonal relationships was emerging here. Even though Peng could really yell at people and get agitated, he also had this communist egalitarian ethos. In that sense, it’s not surprising that he would be sleeping right next to Xi Zhongxun and waking him up with his shoes. It was this interesting mix of hierarchy and egalitarianism that we see in Peng Dehuai.

Jordan Schneider: He does have this LBJ energy to him.

Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting — a few years later, there were tensions between Xi Zhongxun and Deng Xiaoping over Tibet. Xi Zhongxun was very close to Peng Dehuai and one of his protégés. Xi Zhongxun went to complain to Peng about something, and Peng said to him, “You need to be careful because Peng likes to fire cannons.” Then of course, Peng fired a cannon in 1959 at the Lushan Plenum that led to people doubling down on the Great Leap Forward in tragic ways. Xi Zhongxun could read people pretty well sometimes.

Jon Sine: People who have heard of Peng Dehuai, maybe in the China field, probably remember him from the Great Leap Forward, which we will get into. But it speaks to this — at least to me—because my conception of him is drawn from this idea of good versus bad guy. He was the good guy who tried to stop the Great Leap Forward, and people read this back into history. But when you go through the details, you realize he was a very complex person who would be very angry. Everyone at this time was a killer.

Joseph Torigian: Peng Dehuai, too, if you read this wonderful book by Yen-Lin Chung, which is a biography of Deng Xiaoping before the Cultural Revolution. Shortly before Peng Dehuai was targeted in 1959, there had been a campaign of anti-dogmatism in the People’s Liberation Army. Peng was just brutal to people. He especially went after this very famous general named Su Yu 粟裕. Peng was a victim, but very shortly before that, he was a victimizer — another very complicated figure.

Jordan Schneider: The LBJ thing I was going for was this cultivating of older men and having these surrogate father figures.

Joseph Torigian: I could give a whole list for Xi Zhongxun. Even later in his life, he was still making new friends older than him, like Ye Jianying 叶剑英, a man with whom he had no historic ties, no career ties. Suddenly, Ye Jianying took a shine to him, sent him to Guangdong, and became a patron to him. It’s very interesting. Apparently in 1959, the person who nominated Xi Zhongxun to become a vice premier was Chen Yi 陈毅, another very powerful marshal who apparently only really worked with Xi Zhongxun on the State Council for a few years in the 1950s but seems to have liked him. It’s really interesting.

There are reasons this might have been the case. Xi Zhongxun could be charming. These older men who liked to drink — Xi Zhongxun could roll with them in a lifestyle sense. He was good at his job, good at intuiting what people wanted, and could manage personal relations. That’s why he did United Front work. He was a Northwesterner — he wasn’t a Long Marcher. He had been orphaned, essentially, when Liu Zhidan, Xie Zichang, and then Gao Gang were gone. He was looking for big brothers. He needed big brothers. Maybe these big brothers didn’t really feel threatened by him because the Northwesterners as a group weren’t really that frightening.

Jordan Schneider: He was young, too.

Joseph Torigian: They were thinking about succession — how are we going to hand over the reins to somebody who knows what they’re doing? We need to test these people and give them an opportunity to show whether they’re good at it and gain experience. He was the youngest vice premier in 1959, the youngest candidate member of the Central Committee in 1945, and the youngest major figure from a regional bureau brought to Beijing in 1952. Then, when he went back to work in the 1980s, he never quite reached the top. In fact, he was sent to work for Hu Yaobang, who was much younger than him and had much less revolutionary prestige. But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll pick up the story in 1949.

Today we’re running a guest translation by the great of the Sinification substack which translates leading Chinese thinkers.

Below, Liu Shaoshan — a leading figure in China’s embodied AI research with a PhD from UC Irvine and an official state-designated “high-end overseas talent”— proposes a roadmap for Chinese AI dominance cueing off America’s successful diffusion of TCP/IP protocols in the late 20th century. Just as influence over the internet afforded the USA “a truly global mechanism of discursive control,” Liu argues, AI diffusion and the standards exported along with AI systems will be key to power projection in the 21st century.

He outlines four strategic levers for achieving open source dominance — technological competitiveness, open-source ecosystem development, international standard-setting, and talent internationalisation. Acknowledging that China’s engagement in open source AI still has a long way to go, he advocates for the creation of a comprehensive “China HuggingFace” that maximizes market share by publishing toolkits for model training, embodied AI implementation, and everything in between. Finally, the author argues that Beijing should encourage Chinese AI talent to live and work abroad, especially in Belt and Road participant countries, rather than encouraging them to come back to China.

This piece is particularly resonant at a time when leading White House AI advisors are tweeting stuff like this:

For the policy answer to the challenges Liu raises, check out Nathan Lambert’s call for action to replicate Deepseek in America.

Interconnects

The American DeepSeek Project

While America has the best AI models in Gemini, Claude, o3, etc. and the best infrastructure with Nvidia it’s rapidly losing its influence over the future directions of AI that unfold in the open-source and academic communities. Chinese organizations are releasing the most notable…

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2 months ago · 80 likes · 1 comment · Nathan Lambert

1. US tariffs and export controls heighten global uncertainty but create a strategic opening for China’s AI industry to expand internationally and reshape “the global technological order”.

2. Global adoption of US or Chinese technology — not domestic technological prowess alone — is becoming the key battleground for great-power status in AI.

3. America’s success with TCP/IP’s global rise in the 1980s shows centrally-led government policies, open-source, mandatory standards and talent “exports” can turn national tech into the global default.

4. Rogers’ diffusion model suggests four steps for China: woo “innovators” with cutting-edge tech, attract “early adopters” through open-source, secure an “early majority” by setting international standards, and reach late adopters through Chinese talent going global.

5. Thus, China’s first objective should be to match US-level capabilities so that its AI-related technologies are credible and attractive to global “innovators” and “early adopters”.

6. China’s DeepSeek-R1 and other LLMs now rival OpenAI in maths, coding and/or reasoning, demonstrating their technical credibility for such global uptake.

5. Moreover, China’s embodied AI sector shows strong international competitiveness, with robust upstream manufacturing, rapidly improving midstream technologies and world-leading pilot deployments, forming a highly competitive end-to-end ecosystem that supports rapid technological advancement.

6. Nevertheless, China still trails the US in the maturity of its open-source community reach and its influence over international standards systems.

7. Recommended actions:

   1. Back talent-going-abroad schemes that help place Chinese experts in key positions in emerging markets such as in universities, labs and start-ups, thereby supporting the spread of Chinese technologies and standards internationally.

   2. Establish an “Open-Source Co-construction Fund” to boost China's influence in global technical governance and standards-setting.

   3. Shift from ISO-centric competition to a “code-as-standard” strategy: export products pre-loaded with open-source standards, ensuring that adoption effectively becomes standardisation.

   4. Promote collaborative hardware-software stacks that embed Chinese standards directly in already established code repositories like GitHub and Hugging Face, thereby easing global adoption.

   5. Build a “Chinese Hugging Face”: an integrated and globally influential open-source hub for models, middleware and applications, covering the full pipeline from model development to deployment.

Name: Liu Shaoshan (刘少山)
Year of birth: est. 1984 (age: 40/41)
Position: Director of the Embodied Intelligence Centre at the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (AIRS); Founder and CEO of intelligent robotics company PerceptIn.
Previously: Technology Leadership Panel Advisory Group Member, National Academy of Public Administration (2023-4); Senior Autonomous Driving Architect, Baidu USA (2014-6); Senior Software Engineer, LinkedIn (2013-4); Software Development Engineer, Microsoft (2010-3)
Other: IEEE Senior Member; Recognised as a “national high-level overseas talent” (国家高层次海外人才) by the Chinese government (under its broader Overseas High-Level Talent Recruitment Programme, historically known as the Thousand Talents Plan)
Research focus: Embodied AI; Autonomous driving; Computing systems; Technology policy
Education: BSc, MSc and PhD (2010), UC Irvine; MPA, Harvard University.

As we moved into 2025, the Trump administration reintroduced tariffs across the board [统一关税] on global goods while simultaneously implementing stricter controls on technology exports, delivering a dual blow to global trade and technological ecosystems. This latest round of trade protectionism and technological blockade policies has significantly increased systemic uncertainty across the global economy and technology sectors. In March 2025, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) revised its forecast for global growth in 2025 from 3.3% down to 3.1%, and further downgraded it to 2.9% in June, citing “trade policy uncertainty” and “structural barriers” as factors dragging down global investment and supply chain stability. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) also warned that escalating trade tensions and policy volatility could slow global growth to 2.3%, leading to stagnation in both investment and innovation. Against this backdrop, a strategic window of opportunity has opened for Chinese AI to “go global”. As the United States increases obstacles to trade and to the sharing and export of technology [技术壁垒], China should participate actively in the restructuring of the global technological ecosystem. It can do this by exporting its technology, building an open-source ecosystem, setting standards [标准制定] and encouraging the global mobility of Chinese AI talent [人才国际流动]. This would then mark a shift from a passive posture to a proactive strategic approach. This article offers a systematic analysis of the strategic pathways and concrete steps that China should take across these four key dimensions.

On 8 May 2025, during a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Commerce titled “Winning the AI Race”, Microsoft President Brad Smith issued a warning: “The number-one factor that will define whether the US or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world.” His statement underscored a fundamental shift in the strategic landscape: against the backdrop of Trump's increasingly stringent technology and global trade policies, the extent to which [a country’s technology] is adopted globally has become the key determinant of [that country’s] great power status in AI. It is precisely within this climate of mounting restrictions that China’s AI industry has encountered a window of opportunity to “go global” and reshape the international technological ecosystem.

Looking back at the 1960s to 1980s, the United States successfully capitalised on the opportunity offered by its technological ascendancy in IT. First, in terms of technology export, in 1969 the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched ARPANET [a forerunner to the Internet], and by 1980 had incorporated TCP/IP [its new communications protocol] into its defence communications system. On 1 January 1983, a full network-wide transition to TCP/IP was completed, laying the foundation for the global internet. Next came the construction of the open-source ecosystem: DARPA’s TCP/IP protocols were incorporated into the open-source BSD system, thereby initiating an “open-source means of dissemination” [开源即传播] model. In 1986, the NSFNET project extended this model to the academic community. This made networking functions readily accessible at the operating system level and further stimulated broad participation from the research and developer communities. It was precisely this “code usable is code used” [代码可用即可用] design philosophy that accelerated the internet’s diffusion from the laboratory to commercial and civilian domains. The evidence demonstrates [实践证明] that only when core communication protocols move from closed-loop research to open-source community development can exponential technological breakthroughs occur — moving from source code to [forming the core of] global infrastructure [从源代码走向全球基础设施].

In addition to its advanced technology research and development (R&D) and open-source contributions, the United States also achieved widespread adoption of TCP/IP by standardising outputs and aligning government policy with open-source practice to establish a globally compatible basic infrastructure [全球兼容基础]. In March 1982, the US Department of Defence officially designated TCP/IP as the standard for military communications and announced a nationwide transition scheduled for 1 January 1983 — the so-called “flag day” policy. This was not merely a technical upgrade, but a form of “compatibility mandate”: all hosts connected to the network were required to support TCP/IP, or else they would be disconnected on the day of the switch. This compulsory standardisation not only enforced synchronised upgrades across the US military-industrial and research systems but also fostered a nationwide consensus on protocol standards.

More importantly, this standards rollout did not take place in a closed-off system [输出非封闭]. Rather, it advanced in tandem with the open-source ecosystem: DARPA awarded contracts in phases to institutions such as BBN, Stanford and Berkeley to develop TCP/IP implementations for major platforms including Unix BSD, IBM systems and VAX, subsequently incorporating the code into the 4.2BSD version of Unix for public release. In 1986, the NSFNET project further accelerated [进一步推动] the widespread deployment of this protocol across the national academic network, effectively achieving near 100% coverage.

This series of measures served collectively as the blueprint [机制范本] for the internationalisation of a US-developed communications standard. The government played a leading role by setting a compatibility timeline to guide synchronised upgrades to [this new] standard. Open-source practices facilitated multi-platform availability, enabling “use on demand” by research institutions and enterprises. The infrastructure for global system compatibility was deployed in parallel with the release of open-source code. This strategy — combining policy, open-source and platform integration — not only accelerated the adoption of the standard [缩短了标准推广路径], but also rapidly established TCP/IP as the default protocol for international communication.

From the 1960s to 1980s, the United States established its leading role through the export of technical standards. Of even greater long-term significance was [its strategy of] sending IT talent abroad [人才走出去], which profoundly influenced the global internet architecture. This experience offers valuable lessons for Chinese AI’s [ambition to] expand overseas [中国AI出海]. America’s engineers and researchers didn’t close themselves off from the world [封闭体系]— large numbers participated actively in international standards organisations and met with different parts of the academic community [社区会议]. For example, the International Network Working Group (INWG), founded in 1972 by American scholars such as Vint Cerf and Steve Crocker, played a key role in designing global network protocols and laid the groundwork for the birth of TCP/IP.

Subsequently, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), established in 1986, held its first meeting in San Francisco [Note: its first meeting was held in San Diego, not San Francisco] with 21 American researchers and received government funding and support. These platforms became key frontlines through which American researchers exercised technological discourse power [成为美国人才传递技术话语权的前沿阵地]. American experts held core technical and leadership roles within the INWG, the IETF and its parent body, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) [ — which together oversaw the development of the internet’s technical architecture]. Figures such as Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, and David Clark participated in meetings for many years, published RFC documents, and oversaw the registration of technical parameters and the standardisation process. These efforts not only ensured the professionalism of the adopted standards, but also reinforced the central role of the United States within global internet governance.

More importantly, the institutional design adopted by these organisations was one of open collaboration, enabling engineers from around the world to influence the direction of standards through voluntary participation. By leveraging their first-mover advantage and influence within the research community [社区影响力], American researchers led the development of key standards. In doing so, the US not only exported the technology itself, but also [American] internet culture, projecting its governance discourse power [overseas]. Furthermore, this strategy of internationalising talent meant that the US exported not just protocols, but also the capability to shape their evolution and the associated rule-making process — thereby establishing a truly global mechanism of discourse control over the Internet.

Technology diffusion is a systemic endeavour [系统工程]. In this section, I will draw on the theory of “innovation diffusion” to analyse the historical experience of US internet technology diffusion, offering systematic strategic recommendations for how Chinese AI can go global.

The theory of “innovation diffusion” was introduced by Everett Rogers in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations. Its main aim is to explain how new technologies and ideas spread and are adopted within a social system. This process does not happen instantaneously but unfolds gradually over time, spreading slowly between different groups in society through various channels.

The diffusion of innovation is the result of the interaction of multiple factors, including the innovation itself, the channels through which it spreads, the social environment and time. In his theory, Rogers proposed that members of society vary significantly in their willingness to adopt new ideas and can be categorised into five groups: “innovators”, “early adopters”, “early majority”, “late majority” and “laggards”. A technology’s influence gradually accumulates [缓慢累积影响] until it begins to be adopted by the “early majority”. Once it reaches this point of critical mass, its adoption accelerates rapidly. By observing the adoption process of key actors and leveraging their demonstration effect [借助他们的示范效应], an innovation can move beyond niche uptake and achieve widespread acceptance.

In fact, this theory emphasises the evolutionary process whereby an innovation adapts continuously to the needs of [different] social groups [创新自身不断适应群体需求]. It not only explains why some innovations enter the mainstream successfully while others stall due to lack of trust from “latecomers”, but also highlights the critical role of communication strategies, social networks and opinion leaders in the diffusion process.

In short, whether an innovation can truly achieve widespread adoption often depends on its ability to bridge the gap between marginal experimentation and mass adoption. This theory offers important insights for understanding technology export and international uptake: true diffusion is not a one-off success, but a gradual process of acceptance.

Step One: attract [the interest of] “innovators” through technological sophistication [通过技术先进性获取“先驱者”]. Innovators focus on the breakthrough advantages of the technology itself. Only by possessing technological capabilities [技术实力] on a par with the global frontrunners—which means, for example, having Large language models (LLMs) approaching the performance of OpenAI’s, or surpassing them in reasoning ability—can Chinese AI technologies be deemed worthy of adoption by [these early] global users.

Step Two: attract early adopters through open-sourcing. Early adopters are not only interested in how cutting-edge a technology is but also in usability and real-world application scenarios. During the internet era, the United States fostered an early ecosystem by open-sourcing the TCP/IP protocol, enabling the global research and engineering communities to use and experiment with it directly. If China, at this stage, open-sources large model code, interface documentation, inference APIs and the like, it would enable overseas developers to adopt and test these models quickly in local environments, thereby building recognition and participation in an international community.

Step Three: Reach the “early majority” by promoting global standards. These users place greater value on whether a technology has become an industry standard and whether it is widely compatible. The United States established global compatibility and interoperability by implementing a “flag-day” — when all connected systems automatically switched over to the new TCP/IP standard — thereby establishing it [统一] as the standard communication protocol. If Chinese AI could similarly embed interface protocols, model formats and evaluation metrics into international standard frameworks, it would help bridge the gap between the peripheral [early users] and the mainstream, thus accelerating widespread adoption.

Finally: [China needs to] gain the remaining user groups by exporting talent [人才输出]. This stage involves reaching the “late majority” and the “laggards”, and relies heavily on “talent going global” [人才走出去]. This is not limited to technical personnel going abroad to implement projects. A more important part is the active participation of Chinese AI engineers, researchers and policymakers in international standards bodies, community conferences and open-source projects—writing forum articles, submitting technical specifications and serving as working group leads. Just as Vint Cerf and Jon Postel once brought American protocol concepts into the IAB/IETF [which set technical standards for the internet], shaping global rules through RFCs and governance, China must also foster deep expert-level international engagement in order to shape norms at the conceptual level and establish its technologies as a credible global standard.

Based on the innovation diffusion theory discussed in the previous section, this next part explores whether Chinese AI technology is cutting-edge enough to “go global” [是否具备“走出去”的领先性], which is fundamental for technology diffusion.

First and foremost, DeepSeek has already clearly demonstrated its ability to compete alongside the world’s leading foundational models. Multiple independent benchmark tests show that DeepSeek-R1 performs comparably to OpenAI’s o1 model in mathematics, programming and reasoning tasks. In some tests, such as the MATH-500 question set, it even slightly outperforms it. [Additionally, based on DeepSeek’s own research], it also outperforms on the SWE [coding] question set. Its reasoning ability has been widely recognised by its community of users. Although DeepSeek-R1 falls slightly short of OpenAI’s o1 on some complex reasoning problems, its overall performance remains at a high level. As the first open-source large model with comparable capabilities — and with its code freely available and easily accessible — it is quickly gaining traction globally among developers. Even more important are its cost advantages and open approach. By using a mixture-of-experts architecture and reinforcement learning techniques, DeepSeek significantly reduces training and inference costs, achieving international top-tier performance not only in capability but also in efficiency.

Second, in the field of embodied AI enabled by foundational models, China has demonstrated clear global competitive advantages. The supply chain for embodied intelligence encompasses upstream core components, midstream system technologies—including foundation models and computational power—and downstream application scenarios. On the upstream side, the rise of the new energy smart vehicle industry has propelled China’s component manufacturing to a high level of localisation and mass production capacity, spanning key elements from sensors and LiDAR to servo motors. This supply chain advantage provides a solid foundation for the large-scale deployment of embodied intelligence systems.

Turning to midstream system technologies, as previously mentioned, products like DeepSeek are at the global cutting edge. In the area of computing chips, companies such as Huawei and Rockchip continue to make significant progress. Although they are still trailing behind their American counterparts for now, they are closing the gap rapidly.

In downstream application scenarios, China currently leads the world—particularly in large-scale pilot deployments of robotics projects initiated by local governments. A notable example is the “robotics district” in Longgang, Shenzhen. Robots are being deployed in urban management, manufacturing, logistics, elderly care and other sectors. Governments in cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen are providing subsidies and development platforms to support the implementation of these projects.

Overall, China has established a comprehensive closed-loop [完整闭环] AI ecosystem spanning upstream, midstream and downstream segments. Although midstream technologies still lag slightly behind, the gap is narrowing rapidly. This industrial structure enables Chinese products to be competitive in international markets and provides a solid foundation for the future diffusion of its AI technologies.

The previous section concluded that China’s AI technology is sufficiently cutting-edge to “go global”. This next section will examine the current state of China’s AI open-source ecosystem—specifically, whether the open-source infrastructure is sufficiently prepared to attract the world’s “early adopters”.

So far, China has achieved certain foundational milestones [取得初步成就] in building an open-source ecosystem for AI and embodied intelligence. However, it still lags significantly behind the United States in terms of global reach, community governance and platform influence—factors that constrain the depth and breadth of its technology’s international expansion. In terms of LLMs, more than ten Chinese open-source models with over 100 billion parameters—such as DeepSeek—have been released. Some of these models have matched or even surpassed OpenAI’s o1-level performance in MATH and SWE-bench, demonstrating strong technological momentum.

By contrast, the US continues to dominate the open-source ecosystem. The LLaMA series of models released by Meta have fostered a broad and robust ecosystem. The LLaMA2 series alone has amassed more downloads and citations on the Hugging Face platform than all Chinese open-source models combined [Note: the time period for this comparison is not specified]. Moreover, the US has established comprehensive mechanisms for model publication, data annotation, benchmark testing and community engagement — particularly through platforms like Hugging Face — affording its models the status of “default standard” within the open-source community.

In the field of embodied AI, China has leveraged its service robotics and smart vehicle industries to establish leading advantages in sensor technology, full-machine platforms and scenario integration. For example, the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics has released the AIRSHIP, AIRSPEED and AIRSTONE series of open-source projects, which together form an end-to-end open-source system connecting the model, computing and application [Note: Liu is involved in the first two of these projects]. However, given the relatively short time this ecosystem has had to develop, there remains a significant gap in core middleware and the broader development ecosystem when compared with the US-led ROS (Robot Operating System) framework.

ROS, [an open-source framework for building robot software,] was released in 2007 by the US-based Willow Garage, and its core developers remain concentrated primarily in the United States and Europe. It boasts a clear contributor structure and abundant training resources. By contrast, domestic Chinese alternatives to ROS—such as CyberRT and XBot—have achieved partial system compatibility. However, their visibility on GitHub [a code repository], global developer participation and completeness of development documentation remain low. A strong and influential open-source community around these projects has yet to emerge.

Based on this, as China promotes the upgrade and international expansion of its open-source ecosystem, [my] recommendation is to focus on the following three areas:

1. A “Chinese Hugging Face” with global influence should be established. That is, an integrated open-source platform that unifies foundational models, system middleware and application scenarios, forming a complete pipeline from model training to deployment.

2. The Chinese government could set up an “Open-Source Co-construction Fund” to support universities, research institutes and enterprises in participating in technical governance and standards-setting within international organisations such as IEEE, ACM, RFC and IETF, thereby amplifying China's voice on the global stage.

3. Finally, leveraging China’s current supply chain advantages, efforts should be made to promote “collaborative open-source” for embodied intelligence hardware and software platforms, establishing a standardised open-source stack across hardware and software to truly realise the global deployment and ecosystem integration [potential] of Chinese technologies.

The previous section concluded that China’s AI open-source ecosystem still has significant room for development. In this section, I will examine the current state of the international standardisation of China’s AI technologies, with a particular focus on whether Chinese technologies have formed internationally recognised standard systems capable of attracting the global “early majority” of users.

China’s participation in international standardisation in the fields of AI and embodied intelligence is gradually increasing, but its overall influence still lags significantly behind that of the United States. In recent years, China has actively engaged with international standards organisations such as ISO/IEC JTC 1, IEEE, and ITU, and has submitted proposals on topics including “AI Terminology”, “AI Risk Management” and “General Requirements for Intelligent Service Robots”. However, by comparison, the United States continues to hold a dominant position in international bodies such as ISO and IEEE SA, retaining crucial discourse power on core issues [核心议题中仍掌握关键话语权] such as AI ethics, model interpretability, trustworthy AI and algorithmic transparency.

Most importantly, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 is the core body for setting international standards in artificial intelligence. Its secretariat is the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), operating through ANSI (the American National Standards Institute). Since 2018, this body has led the drafting of several key standards, including the AI Management System (ISO/IEC 42001:2023) and AI Risk Management Guidelines. SC 42 comprises five working groups (WGs), each responsible for a distinct technical area. Among these, Chinese experts hold the convenorship of only one group—WG5 on “Computational Approaches and Computational Characteristics of AI Systems”. The convenors of the other groups come from Canada, the US, Ireland and Japan. As such, in terms of strategic direction, control of the secretariat, and agenda-setting, China still lags far behind the United States. This structure highlights that while China is making sustained efforts in international standardisation, there remains considerable room for it to increase its presence in organisational leadership and more generally in senior roles [within international standard-setting bodies].

Given the current situation, I recommend that China promote the internationalisation of embodied intelligence standards by moving beyond the traditional mindset of “intra-ISO competition” and shifting towards an “ecosystem-led” model driven by technology and open-source platforms. Standards should be embedded into the open-source implementations of leading platforms such as AIRSHIP, with reference implementations and toolchains published on global mainstream technical communities like GitHub and Hugging Face—thereby enabling external adoption through a “code-as-standard” model.

At the same time, standards should be tightly integrated with Chinese hardware and software systems, accompanying product deployments abroad into emerging markets, thereby establishing these standards as the de facto choice. Only when Chinese standards are widely adopted in technical applications and development can China truly build global discursive power — elevating itself from “participant” to “rule-maker”.

Due to how and when it developed [历史发展原因], China lags far behind the United States in both the maturity of its AI open-source ecosystem and its influence over international standards systems. This section will discuss the international discourse power and influence of Chinese AI researchers. In particular, it will look at how global influence of individuals can help China reach mainstream user groups worldwide.

In recent years, Chinese AI experts have significantly increased their standing within — and become distributed more widely across — the global academic community, laying a solid human capital foundation for China's technological internationalisation. According to MacroPolo’s 2023 report, 38% of top AI researchers in the US were originally from China—slightly surpassing the 37% with domestic US backgrounds. In top international AI and robotics conferences and journals, Chinese scholars are approaching US levels in terms of both their output of papers and participation in peer review. Data from Guide2Research also show a steady rise in China’s share among the world’s top-ranked computer scientists, indicating that the academic calibre of Chinese AI talent is now world-leading.

Building on this, national and local authorities in China have introduced numerous policies in recent years to encourage talent repatriation [Note: of which Liu is a beneficiary] and to support the development of research platforms—strengthening the country’s AI R&D capabilities. However, boosting the global influence of Chinese AI cannot rely solely on “talent returning home”; it also requires a systematic strategy for “talent going abroad”. More outstanding Chinese AI professionals should be encouraged to work in Belt and Road countries and other emerging markets. This means actively engaging in the development of local education systems and industry by taking up academic positions, establishing research institutes, launching joint laboratories, or founding tech companies. This will not only support the global diffusion of Chinese technologies and standards but also help build a China-centred global network of scientific and technological cooperation.

Although systematic data on the number of Chinese scholars teaching in Belt and Road countries is still lacking, the activity level of cooperation platforms such as the University Alliance of the Silk Road suggests that China has considerable potential in terms of talent export and knowledge diffusion. Accordingly, while continuing to encourage “talent repatriation”, the state should also establish institutional frameworks to support “talent going abroad”. These might include setting up dedicated overseas teaching and research cooperation funds, advancing joint training mechanisms with Belt and Road countries, and promoting localisation of technology standard certifications and curriculum development—thereby enabling the global expansion of Chinese AI and embodied intelligence and strengthening China’s international discourse power.

This article has provided a systematic examination of the current international landscape and the technological, open-source, standards-based and talent-related foundations underpinning the global expansion of Chinese AI.

In the face of a new wave of trade protectionism and technological blockades launched by the United States in 2025 — which are leading to the restructuring of the global technological order — China is entering a strategic window for technology diffusion. Historical experience shows that while technological leadership is a prerequisite, without the combined strength of early adopters, standard disseminators and consensus-builders in governance, it remains difficult to establish a dominant position within the global technology system. Therefore, the development of Chinese AI must not be confined to domestic applications and talent repatriation; instead, it must shape the global ecosystem proactively, foster international consensus and construct a China-led pathway for innovation diffusion.

To this end, the article recommends that China formulate and implement an integrated internationalisation strategy built around “technology–open-source–standards–talent”. Specifically, this means:

1. Strengthening technological leadership by focusing on critical areas in foundation models and embodied intelligence systems, and promoting continuous technological [upgrades] through iteration;

2. Building an open-source ecosystem portal, enabling the international release of systems, models and toolchains via platforms to capture greater market share;

3. While striving for greater influence [话语权] within the existing international standards system, China should simultaneously promote an “open source is the standard” approach—embedding standards into hardware–software product systems and exporting them to emerging markets as part of their global deployment;

4. Encouraging the international mobility of top-tier talent, supporting their development in Belt and Road countries and beyond, and building a global network for R&D and standards dissemination—thereby securing meaningful international discourse power and a structural advantage for Chinese AI technologies and governance frameworks.

Are we cooked? We’re going to be revisiting this question quarterly now, it seems. To discuss, we have Peter Harrell, former Biden official and host of the excellent new Security Economics podcast, Kevin Xu, who writes the Interconnected newsletter, and Matt Klein, author of Trade Wars Are Class Wars and The Overshoot substack.

We discuss…

• Short-term positive indicators, including the stock market rebound, the continued independence of the Federal Reserve, and the administration’s compliance with court rulings,

• Why talent is the ultimate bottleneck to AI progress, and how the attacks on foreign students, universities, and scientific research will impact America long term,

• Whether Trump’s policies will cause mass divestment from dollar-denominated assets,

• The state of U.S. alliances, from the apparent thawing of relations with NATO and Zelenskyy, to signs of friction with Japan,

• Next steps for Trump’s industrial policy.

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Dollar Depreciation and Self-Inflicted Brain Drain

Jordan Schneider: Peter, kick us off.

Peter Harrell: We did this last quarter in late April, and looking around the short term over the last three months, the indicators are decent. We’re looking less cooked. Trump TACO’d out on a lot of the tariff wars, so the stock market rebounded. He can post memes about bombing Iran and get away with it — the short-term indicators actually suggest the last couple of months have gone decently well for the United States from a big picture perspective.

However, I’m pretty concerned about the long-term trajectories. Looking at some of the core things that have made the US what it is today — substantial investment in scientific R&D, attracting talent from around the world to do science and innovation, business leadership here in the United States, and the social fabric we have — I remain worried about whether we’re cooked long term, even though I have to give some credit to the last three months.

Kevin Xu: To add onto what you just said, Peter, in preparation for this podcast, I looked at the value of the dollar chart because I remember we brought it up the last time we talked about this. It went down by another 5 to 6 percent from our last recording to today. That was one of the biggest conundrums at the time. Right after Liberation Day, everyone who thinks about tariffs in perhaps the most conventional way would expect the dollar to go up, everything else being equal.

But the erosion of the dollar, no matter how you want to slice it, continues slowly but surely going down. It’s no longer a big story because there have been so many other attention-grabbing geopolitical and economic stories since then. But for me, that’s something I’m going to watch from time to time as this collective “how does the world vote with their feet” question regarding how much credibility they place in the United States government and leadership through how they treat the dollar.

Matt Klein: The overall level of “cookedness” has not actually changed much one way or another. Partly because I discounted the damage from the tariffs. Not that the tariffs announced on April 2nd were good, but that was never the main issue. The attacks on scientific research, the attacks on foreigners coming into the country — and we’re not just talking about changes in Southern border policy, but the way European tourists are treated — across the board restrictions on foreign students coming into universities, the attacks on the rule of law — these things have not abated in any way.

There has been ongoing pushback from courts, but many things remain problematic. The changes to scientific research policy, the changes to approaches on medical research funding in particular and vaccinations — that has not improved in the past few months. If anything, it’s been entrenched.

If I wanted to be more pessimistic, I would say the fact that immediate concerns about things such as tariffs have subsided and the stock market has recovered might actually reduce the pressure to unwind those longer-term, more damaging policy changes that have occurred over the past six months, making them more likely to persist. Even if the immediate impact is not necessarily substantial, it could be a very long-term drag, not just on GDP growth, but on the quality of life, power, and well-being in this country.

The analogy is Brexit. When the UK was voting about whether to leave or remain in the European Union, there were concerns — people called this “project fear” — about an immediate catastrophe if they voted to leave. That didn’t happen, so people said the case was overstated. But the more realistic and correct argument was that everything would be worse — not catastrophically worse, but persistently worse over time. That has been borne out. I fear we’re ending up in a similar, if not worse, situation as a result of all this.

Jordan Schneider: I’m going to take the other side of this argument. Many of the worst-case scenarios we were contemplating in April are much less likely to manifest now. I’m taking Brexit as a win, if that is our analogy, as opposed to something even more dramatic.

Elon is done. DOGE’s energy is abating for the most part, which I think is positive for governance and civil service. We have Congress — maybe they’ll pass a bill — it doesn’t look great, but it’s also not republic-wrecking. There’s going to be an election not that long from now.

On the immigration side, yes, the direction of travel is not great, but we have not banned all foreign students. The country bans that we’ve seen and will continue to see are directionally problematic, but we could have had much more aggressive paths that would have presaged an even more aggressive four years, which have not happened. You’ve even seen Trump at one point tweeting about protecting the farmers, saying we can’t kick out all of our undocumented immigrants.

It’s not just on trade where this administration has blinked. It seems there are other topics — science accepted, we’re in a pretty poor timeline on that front — but at least on the immigration front, it seems we could be in a worse place than where we are now.

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Peter Harrell: I’ll add two points, one on each side of the ledger, building on what you’ve both said.

On the positive side, Trump appears to be stepping back from the brink, at least somewhat, on whether he’s going to outright defy the courts. That felt more real to me a couple of months ago. He did bring home the individual who was sent to El Salvador and charged with crimes — a complicated issue. But he does seem to be stepping back from his showdown with the judiciary, though time will tell. I’d put that in the positive ledger.

On the other side are things that are eroding U.S. centrality in the international economic system, at least long term. I want to pick up where Kevin left off on the decline in the dollar’s value. We’re seeing several other data points where foreign governments and private parties have quadrupled or quintupled their efforts to create financial networks substantially outside U.S. jurisdiction.

You see this in the drop in the dollar’s value — investors are clearly beginning to pull back from the United States. You also see it in the large run-up in gold prices. This 3,000-year-old store of value has had an explosive couple of months, building on a strong year or two, driven very much by central bank purchases of gold as a way of hedging and reducing their exposure to the dollar.

But perhaps moving to gold isn’t even enough. There’s now a debate in Europe, in Germany and Italy, about whether they need to repatriate their gold reserves — which are currently stored deep in the rock underneath Manhattan, in the custody of the New York Fed — because they don’t even trust us as custodians of their gold anymore.

This is a significant data point. Now, it’s not easy to develop large-scale financial networks outside the U.S. — it’s very hard and doesn’t happen overnight. We’re still seeing foreign investment here, and we’ll still attract the capital levels we need. But this foreign government distrust about the long-term stability of the United States, whether right or wrong, is driving something that you’re beginning to see in the numbers.

Matt Klein: I might push back on that a little because while that intuitively makes sense, the numbers aren’t necessarily showing something as extreme as one might have expected.

The dollar depreciation was sharp around April 2nd, but if we zoom out, the dollar is still quite expensive on a trade-weighted basis relative to the rest of the world. It’s still up something like 20 percent compared to early 2021, up 30 percent compared to 2014. It’s still quite expensive — maybe not quite as expensive as before.

Foreign investors had been massively overweight in U.S. assets. On a market cap basis, they were equally weighted, but 70 percent of stock market capitalization being American feels odd given that the U.S. economy is a quarter of the world economy. Yes, American companies may be more profitable, but still, there were plenty of reasons why, with more benign catalysts, you would have seen some of these market moves, particularly on exchange rates or foreign allocations.

In some ways, the story is that there hasn’t been as much of a move yet. I agree that if the Germans and Italians move their gold, that’s symbolically interesting, although what that means in practice is debatable. But it’s striking what hasn’t happened, which is honestly surprising.

The same thing applies on the U.S. side — have Americans been moving a lot of money out of the U.S. into foreign assets? Maybe some, but it’s not super clear in the data that it’s been enormous volumes of the kind you would have expected.

We have other examples of countries with sharp moves in response to political instability — Turkey in March, for example, after the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul. There was a very sharp move, actually a similar-sized move in the exchange rate for the Turkish lira as for the dollar. But in terms of the quantities of what was actually happening, it was on a much different scale. Turkey’s central bank only has $40 billion in reserves to keep the currency stable. We didn’t see that here.

As much as it would be logical to say that’s what’s happening, I don’t think we’ve seen it yet. Maybe we will; maybe it’ll be more gradual. The gold price move is certainly interesting, although that really dates back to the sanctions on Russia’s central bank when that trend began. Otherwise, it’s hard to see it as a dollar-specific story.

Jordan Schneider: Matt, we’re doing better on the Fed, right? That was a news story that completely burned itself out. I think we’ll have a Fed come 2028.

Matt Klein: Maybe. This is the other thing — I talk about the independent Fed, the independent judiciary, but these are Senate-confirmed positions. It’s not clear to me what kind of pushback the Senate would provide if you have a Trump-supporting majority there.

The judiciary we have now is not necessarily the judiciary we’ll have four years from now. That could change. The Fed situation could change. If I remember correctly, there’s a passage in the big, beautiful bill they’re putting through that basically says administration officials would be immune from contempt of Congress. I’ll defer to the lawyers on the exact terminology, but there are things being done by the other branch of government to support the potential for further executive overreach, which should be concerning even if it’s not necessarily generating the same kind of headlines and market responses as tariffs.

Peter Harrell: In fairness, I said a couple of minutes ago that Trump is stepping back from his confrontation with the judiciary in a noticeable way, though the long-term impact remains to be determined. Part of that is because he’s winning. He’s making the assessment that he can win at least a large enough percentage of his cases in front of the judiciary.

We saw that today, at least temporarily, with what the Supreme Court did on nationwide injunctions and birthright citizenship. He’s essentially saying, “If I’m winning two-thirds of my big cases in the courts, maybe I don’t need to outright confront or defy them over the third that I’m losing."

As a lawyer, I’ll take compliance with judicial rulings. That’s all I’m saying.

Jordan Schneider: Peter, give us the “tariffs are actually illegal” update.

Peter Harrell: This is one near and dear to my heart. Most of Trump’s tariffs — certainly all of the Liberation Day tariffs from April that caused significant market turmoil — weren’t imposed under a trade law statute. He imposed these tariffs under a 1977 emergency powers statute that previous presidents had used for sanctions on Iran and Russia. It had never previously been used for tariffs.

This is progressing through the court system. There’s a specialty district court in New York called the Court of International Trade. Plaintiffs challenging these tariffs won at the specialty district court, but that victory is on hold while the government and plaintiffs deal with an appeal before the Federal Circuit, one of the federal appellate courts.

The Federal Circuit will have its hearings on this case on July 31st. We’ll likely get an opinion from the Federal Circuit by the end of August, and then this will go up to the Supreme Court in the fall.

If I were betting, I would bet Trump loses on the merits here. At the end of the day, these tariffs are going to be found unlawful. That doesn’t mean the end of all tariffs — it means a mad scramble across the U.S. government to see what tariffs they can recreate under other legal authorities.

Matt Klein: They’ve been doing that with Section 232. The 50 percent tariff on steel isn’t being challenged. The pharma tariffs in the pipeline are now separate.

Kevin Xu: There’s your alpha for the episode.

Peter Harrell: For those thinking about this from a market perspective, one thing that’s going to happen is that companies paying the tariffs this year will get a rebate. They’ll be entitled to a rebate of paid unlawful tariffs, which would probably happen next year. From a market perspective, you’ll see an earnings shift from this year to next year as they get rebates of tariffs paid this year, which they’ll then have to pay going forward again. Retroactively, 2025 might look better on earnings than it does right now.

Matt Klein: Are the tariffs tax-deductible? Are tariff payments deductible against income tax? Is the rebate going to be taxed?

Peter Harrell: I’m not a tax lawyer — that’s a good question. It’s certainly a business expense, so you can claim it as such.

Kevin Xu: They’re not going to tax tips.

Peter Harrell: How to tax this is full employment for lawyers. That’s Trump trade policy 101 — full employment for lawyers.

Talent > Transistors

Jordan Schneider: Kevin, how about an AI update?

Kevin Xu: One thing in the AI world — whether it’s investment or technological progress — speaks to how equipped the U.S. is. I’m not necessarily saying China will lead or run the table — I’m analyzing our country specifically.

CapEx is growing for at least another one or two years. The AI trade is on. But everyone’s realizing that GPUs are no longer scarce. That was more of a temporary thing. If you have the money, you can get whatever latest NVIDIA GPU you want for a data center.

The pace of energy coming online in the U.S. is still relatively slow compared to other places. That’s why the Middle East swing by the president and all the AI executives is so consequential. There’s an executive order coming from the White House to make that easier in the U.S. — we’ll see what happens in real life.

All of this really comes down to people. I’m talking about both the supply of general contractors to build and dig data centers and wire all the power sources to make data centers come online as quickly as possible, as well as the top-end research talent that’s becoming more of a bottleneck — not just for which country could advance, but which company within which country will advance.

The most interesting position right now is probably Mark Zuckerberg’s spending spree to hire whoever from OpenAI is willing to jump ship. He’s willing to pay whatever he needs to pay. It’s like a classic “buy the free agent market” way to win the championship.

It’s an interesting comparison, keeping the sports analogy going, to how DeepSeek got to where it is — a pure scouting and drafting way of building their team. Their team got built within China (maybe they got some secret offer from Meta too, we don’t know), but these are very different ways of accumulating AI talent, which we know is in real scarcity — not the hardware anymore.

How do we extrapolate that to which country or company will be first to reach the promised land? This makes me think about the immigration issues we discussed at the beginning. Our country never had a great immigration policy for any kind of immigrant, to be perfectly honest. We had enough prestige and resources to attract the brightest in the world. But when that chilling effect sets in, it could be a problem for the long haul, while the scouting ecosystem or drafting source on the China side seems sufficient to put together a DeepSeek, if nothing else.

Peter Harrell: Can I ask you a question, Kevin? It’s not an area I know much about. Is Europe anywhere on the map with AI these days, or is this really remaining a U.S.-China competition?

Kevin Xu: This is very much a U.S.-China competition, particularly because of the talent question — not so much about the money. Jensen went through a Europe swing just a couple of weeks ago and announced a bunch of sovereign AI projects in the UK, France, Germany, Slovenia, and some smaller countries. The governments are generally pretty good at building hard infrastructure from the ground up and signing really big checks when everyone comes together politically. That’s what governments are good at.

But when it comes to organic talent development, most European top-end talent either moves to the U.S. if they can — because they find the European system generally stifling if you want to move fast — or they work locally at the labs of American companies that are building locally to recruit there. The three most recent successful Zuckerberg recruits from OpenAI were from the Sora Lab of OpenAI. Is that European talent or American talent? You tell me.

Matt Klein: DeepMind is UK, right? They’re owned by Google, but —

Kevin Xu: That’s the one shiny example.

Jordan Schneider: Does it count anymore? They were a subsidiary as of 10 years ago. It’s an interesting question, all this sovereign AI buildout. It almost reminds me of Chinese provinces that spin up their own data centers and proudly buy some hardware chips. What are we doing here?

Another aspect I wanted your take on, Kevin: there are rumors that Meta was going to bow out of the open source game. In that case, we’d have no 10-figure companies in the U.S. really pushing on open source, basically seeding the entire ground to Alibaba and DeepSeek. What does that mean from a 10-year perspective?

Kevin Xu: First, Meta’s version of open source — LLaMA — since we do have a lawyer in the room here, is actually from a legal perspective less open than all the Chinese open source models currently, from a legal licensing perspective. Meta came up with its own version of an open source license that was hotly debated within the tiny community of open source licensing lawyers that I’m part of.

Part of those restrictions is that once you use LLaMA’s model up to, I believe, 700 or 750 million monthly active users, then you need to engage with LLaMA’s parent company to have a commercial licensing agreement. That’s an important nuance to start with.

From that perspective, and I’ve heard this from other sources too, there was at least an expectation from LLaMA at some point to still make money directly from its open source models. If it gets competitive enough — whether it embeds into another coding agent like OpenAI and Anthropic, or some other B2B or enterprise product — they had some expectation of that. They weren’t just going to throw a ton of money and talent into this theoretical financial dark hole and do something good for the world, even though they were falling behind.

The fact that this was even leaked as an internal discussion point — I don’t know if they’re really going to do it — but the fact that serious people inside Meta have considered abandoning the open source part of LLaMA and actually abandoning LLaMA entirely in favor of just the best model in the market has so many layers of irony. We have the open society here in America, the open this and that, freedom and whatnot, but we chose this most singularly transformative technology direction to be as closed as possible among the companies.

You can imagine a lot of siloing going on. A lot of things that probably could have been shared but aren’t shared for one reason or another. That actually blunts progress on the long-term horizon, as well as the diffusion pace of certain technology, where open source is just the best way to diffuse a lot of technology — even if it’s the worst way to make money off that technology. That might be the reason why a lot of U.S. companies are choosing the closed source path, while the Chinese side is right now leading in all the open source model benchmarks.

Peter Harrell: Jordan, it’s a question for you. When we think about “Is America cooked,” we often think about this in the U.S.-China context.

Peter Harrell: Has China done anything right over the last three months?

Kevin Xu: I’ll jump in here real quick. This is actually related to the dollar again — speculative because it’s very recent. They did have a recent high-level finance summit in Shanghai, the Lujiazui Forum 陆家嘴论坛, where the governor of the People’s Bank of China and all the relevant high-level financial regulators came and gave speeches.

What came out of this specific forum this year is a concerted willingness to really promote the RMB in ways and places where the dollar is falling short for one reason or another — not to necessarily replace the dollar as the global reserve currency, because that’s a whole other can of worms that I don’t think anybody in China really wants to be. But in countries or trade directions where having the RMB be the settlement currency in lieu of the dollar, or being able to buy global commodities in large chunks using the RMB versus the dollar, is advantageous, there is now a policy appetite.

This is very much a reaction to Liberation Day, to the way that the U.S. instigated global trade war has unfolded. That prompted this. How far will this particular policy direction go? Nobody knows at this point — it’s way too early. But the appetite is there now to be a little more proactive about making whatever reforms necessary to make the RMB more attractive in certain situational settings when the dollar is becoming a little less appealing.

On Allies and Immigration

Jordan Schneider: How bad is Trump going to end up being to the allies? Q1 was probably pretty close to a worst-case scenario with those really obnoxious speeches in Munich. But since then, we had Haley do a trip to Asia where she basically said things that a Nikki Haley administration would have said.

What does the Iran bombing mean for America’s commitment to Asian allies? On one hand, it shows that Trump’s willing to bomb stuff, but on the other, it’s bringing us back to the Middle East. Maybe that’s a bit of a wash.

There was also talk of some crazy DOGE cuts to the Pentagon, but there are basically going to be no defense funding cuts. Whether they’re actually going to reform defense acquisitions and buy stuff we need to buy is an open question.

Even though we’ve had some serious U.S.-Japan weirdness — with Japan being sick enough of the Americans to cancel a two-plus-two dialogue — I still think we could be on a worse timeline than the one we’re on now with the way Trump has treated Asian allies.

Matt Klein: If you really want to be optimistic, you just say the way that the administration is now treating European allies — that’s where you’re seeing the biggest shift, maybe. We’re friends with Zelenskyy all of a sudden. Who knows how long that will last, but that is notable. The European NATO countries seem to have managed to figure out how — with the exception of Spain — to put together a deal that looks like it’s getting everyone on the same page. Who knows how that will play out longer term, but if you want to be encouraged, that’s definitely somewhere to look.

Kevin Xu: Isn’t that just giving Trump what he wanted?

Peter Harrell: That is part of it.

Matt Klein: You reframe it. He said he wanted five percent, and they said three and a half percent plus one and a half percent other, which is fine. Everyone agreed on it. Arguably, it’s good for them too. But the shift with Zelenskyy is interesting, as Jordan said. Trump met him at the NATO summit and said they had a great conversation. Now he’s saying, “Supposedly, Putin called and I need help with mediating with Israel, and I need help with you.” Who knows?

Jordan Schneider: It’s hard to know what’s really going on there. But if you want to be optimistic, the thing with this stuff is that it was unclear if Trump was going to be doctrinaire about these things or just vibrate to weirder places than any American president had gone to, then vibrate back to a more mainstream place and keep swinging. But him staying at “No, we’re leaving NATO, this is a terrible thing" — that’s not something that’s happened. He has shown the capability to get pissed off and fed up by people like Putin, which is something you may not have entirely priced in April of this year. I consider that positive.

Although I’m the Trump optimist here.

Matt Klein: To be fair, it’s also not as if we’ve actually adjusted our Russia policy in a way to imply that he’s actually gotten upset with them. So far, it’s just words. But we’ll see.

Jordan Schneider: I’ll take words.

Matt Klein: Better than the other words.

Jordan Schneider: They’re a start.

Peter Harrell: I very much agree with the point Matt made. Obviously, the words coming out of the NATO summit and the words around Zelenskyy are much better. The lived experience over the last six months is that words change. The thing I’d note in the other direction: two or three weeks ago, Trump was saying nice things about Canadian Prime Minister Carney. Right before we got on this call, he’s now back to saying Canada’s the worst and we’re going to tariff them all over again. Nothing really stays stuck with our current president.

Jordan Schneider: But if things don’t stay stuck on the dumbest timeline, then that is — again, it’s more the Brexit arc, less the actual America self-owned catastrophe one, which is okay.

Peter Harrell: Maybe I should be worried here. The other thing I’m watching to see how it plays out — conceptually related to immigration but also distinct — is where we’re going with our universities. To pick up on a point Kevin made earlier, it’s not that we always had the best immigration policies. American immigration policy has been totally dysfunctional for my entire life — I’m 45 — but we have had, against a backdrop of dysfunctional immigration policy, some very important bright spots. The ability to attract truly great talent to some of the world’s best universities who then stay here and found and run businesses and contribute to scientific innovation.

Trump’s war on the universities has now spread, at least with Harvard, beyond just cutting off funding to trying to cut off their ability to enroll foreign students. It appears that he may be trying to get the University of Virginia to fire its president. I’m not going to defend all kinds of crazy things universities have done over the last five to eight years — there have been plenty of challenges with American universities — but they are a huge source of long-term American strength from a scientific innovation perspective, from a talent attraction perspective, from educating people who then go out and do great things.

It’s looking like a fairly full-out war and not just something that he’s looking for a détente on. There’s a ton of institutional strength in American higher education. I have bias here because both my parents were full-time academics all my life growing up, so I’m biased toward American educational institutions. I worry that if we structurally harm our higher education system, that would be another thing — cutting scientific R&D — that helps us be cooked longer term.

Matt Klein: That’s part of how we’re hurting it. They get a lot of that scientific R&D funding, and if that’s cut off — and also, this is not just a Trump obsession — in the bill that currently passed was this punitive tax on endowment income for universities. For universities that have enough endowment income for that to matter, that pays a very large chunk of their operating expenses. Most of the rest comes from things like government grants for research.

If you cut those things at the same time, they’re going to go out of business or they’ll have to drastically change what they do. Again, this is not something that’s really getting a lot of pushback because people pay a lot more attention to other things — the tariff on this is going up by this amount or whatever — but these other things are still steadily going on despite the fact that people’s attention isn’t focused on that. As you said, it could be a relatively benign Brexit outcome, but it adds up and would be very harmful.

Kevin Xu: That will never show up in these more short-term twitchy indicators, whether it’s the market, the dollar, or any of that stuff. Two points I want to add to what Peter said — which probably makes the best case for long-term cookedness if there’s no really forceful reversal of what’s happening right now, but hopefully some actual tangible improvement on immigration — not just keeping together whatever we had left prior to this presidency.

First, the way in which a lot of these scientific research grants are cut isn’t just a problem because they’re cut from an absolute value perspective, but they’re cut from a “Control-F” perspective. You go through the grants, you Control-F for words that the administration doesn’t like for entirely ideological reasons, and you cut them. That is the reason a lot of the top academics and researchers who came to the United States from other countries specifically came to escape from.

Matt Klein: Right, like “neurotransmitters” because it has “trans” in there. Now you’re saying you’re not looking at Alzheimer’s research.

Kevin Xu: Exactly. The word “diversity” just trips up a bunch of alerts from this Control-F way of thinking about scientific research when the word “variance” could have replaced “diversity” and that grant could have been safe. All these very blunt instrument ways defeat not just the fact that we get to have this innovation happen in our country, but that the people who come to this country to do the research and want to stay — they didn’t just come for the money. Nobody in academia, even at Harvard or Princeton, really celebrates the amount of salary they get to make, even at the highest level. They came here because they don’t have to be worried about being Control-F’d in their own country of origin.

The second point that builds off of that — which is really the long-term cook scenario — every time we have this American declinism conversation (this is not the first time we’ve had this conversation as broader public discourse) the most common way that we patted ourselves on the back or were able to go back to sleep after the conversation was immigration. We still had immigration. All the smartest people in the world are going to save our ass by coming here. That may not be an answer we can just default to anymore. That’s probably the one thing that would put you on the cook ledger in the 10-year timeframe — certainly not a quarter-by-quarter timeframe, because who knows what the market is going to do.

To come back to immigration today — we’re actually selling Trump cards. We’re selling a spot in the best country in the world, quote-unquote, to the highest bidder, not the smartest people. What kind of people do you attract from that? I’ll let the listeners have their own imagination over what those people could be.

Matt Klein: It’s worth noting that the U.S. university system has been so dominant and so good for so long that we assume it has always been that way. But that’s not actually true. Before 1933 — which is a significant date to think about — the U.S. university system was not particularly competitive globally. After that, it was. English wasn’t even the dominant language among academics — it was German. It’s not inherent that it has to always be this way. You’d have to work hard at it, but if you’re committed enough to self-harm for ideological reasons, then you can get rid of these long-term advantages.

Peter Harrell: Another topic that the Trump administration needs to prove it can handle — and it’s an open question — is supporting U.S. manufacturing and some of these strategic industries and products it talks about. There’s also a lot of bipartisan support for the idea that we should have at least some onshore or ally-shored critical minerals production, shipbuilding, and these strategic lower-tech industries.

The administration has certainly talked a good game about some of this. They’ve put out executive orders, they’ve said they want to reduce permitting hurdles to make it easier. It seems entirely up in the air whether they’re actually going to be able to achieve any of this manufacturing renaissance that they’re talking about.

This is going to require a more integrated approach than what we’ve seen from them to date. That’s a big X factor for me: Are they going to be able to actually put this together or not? Will it be in the industries that actually matter to us? All due respect to Howard Lutnick, I’m not sure “screwing tiny, tiny screws into iPhones” is really the industry we want to be focusing on in terms of our manufacturing.

Jordan Schneider: Are there any data points that are encouraging on this line? We’ve seen various efforts to gut the DOE loans program. The CHIPS Act has been exploded.

Peter Harrell: If you look at what they’ve actually done with the money, the DOE loans program was focused on clean energy, and they don’t want clean energy. That seems to be fizzling. There’s anecdotal evidence — Matt, you may have plugged into the data more — that some of the big announced manufacturing investments in those sectors have been put on pause. There’s a slowdown there.

While Trump’s talking about things like shipbuilding, we’re not actually seeing shipbuilding. Let’s put aside the climate impacts of oil and gas and current energy prices — I’m not sure you’re going to see a huge oil and gas boom.

Matt Klein: We haven’t. The joke about “now we’re going to unleash drilling” — you should talk to the shale drillers. They don’t want to do that. Briefly, when Brent went close to $80 because of fears of Iranian activity in the Strait of Hormuz, if it had stayed there long enough, maybe you would have seen more shale. But between the fact that their costs have gone up tremendously because of tariffs on steel — what do you think the pipes are made of? — and the fact that the price of the product they sell has gone down, plus labor costs are still going up over time, it’s not super compelling.

Investment in manufacturing peaked in the middle of 2024. A lot of the growth in investment and manufacturing capacity in this country had been directly attributable to CHIPS and IRA — semiconductors, batteries, things like that. If that’s what the incremental investment is coming from, and then those sources of incentives are being gutted as quickly as possible, it’s not surprising that you’re going to see that move in reverse.

Some of the money may already be out the door enough that it won’t be pulled back on projects that have already started. But it’s not super encouraging. The Loan Programs Office was talking about clean energy, but they were also talking about doing it for critical minerals. Those minerals have green energy-related uses, so you could say, “Oh, we’re going to get rid of it.” But to the extent that they say those things are strategic — whether it’s magnets or whatnot — if you cut the funding, it doesn’t matter whether you call it green energy or not. You still are not going to have the resources.

It’s going to be very difficult to have a domestic industry in those sectors be competitive without some kind of government support because they’re so cyclically volatile on price and because the main producers right now are in China, where market-based constraints are not as severe. Because the capacity is there, they can basically flood the market when they want to. If any seemingly viable competitor shows up — which is why you’ve had such problems with lithium in the U.S. in the past — you need some kind of government backstop to prevent that. That was being done out of DOE.

It could change, but it’s not clear to me there’s strong interest in doing that. I don’t know why a manufacturing renaissance would occur. On top of which, if part of the rationale for a manufacturing renaissance is that these tariffs are going to make U.S. production for the U.S. market more competitive, but then no one knows what the tariffs are going to be — either because they’re illegal or because they’re going to get negotiated away for unclear gains — why would you make a commitment now? It doesn’t pencil out. You want to use a pencil, not a pen, because you can just change.

I don’t see it. It’s not showing up in the data that we’re having any kind of manufacturing renaissance. Far, it’s the opposite. It’s not like it crashed or anything, but it’s not clear to me why we would see a big change given what we know so far.

Kevin Xu: This is a question for Matt, but obviously anybody can jump in. What are the things that got some play but did not get nearly enough play during the DOGE stuff? The cutting of staffing or investment in places like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and BEA. Basically the only neutral arbiter of actually accounting for how cooked we are or not as a country — hard data, not soft data, not live data, not sentiment data.

That’s another thing that just confounds me. If we were to actually answer this question from a statistics perspective or in a rigorous way a year from now, two years from now, whatever — I don’t even know if I could really trust any of the GDP numbers going forward, any of the non-farm payrolls going forward. The government pumps out so much good data and it takes so much time to build up that infrastructure, but you need one bad cut to completely get rid of that discipline.

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Matt Klein: One thing I would say is some of that actually precedes even the election. It had to do with some of the budget deals that were being done in 2023-24. I don’t know why these were agreed to, but basically — I’ve talked to the BEA people and seen they announced tables have been discontinued because they’re not in the budget for it. This was over a year ago. That’s unfortunately been an ongoing problem.

The BLS, which compiles things on inflation and labor market, has been having issues for a while — not necessarily because of underfunding, though that’s probably related to it, but just because people don’t respond to surveys the way they used to, for who knows why. You take a survey of employers every month, figure out how many people are working, and then aggregate it up to give an estimate. But if the employers are not answering your call for whatever reason, or fewer of them are proportionally, that creates potential problems. That was already an issue.

It’s compounded by cutting people arbitrarily. There was an announcement in the past few months — the Commerce Department, which runs the BEA and the census (not BLS, that’s in the Labor Department), had this outside body of advisors, mostly academics, to judge the quality of federal statistics. They just decided to cancel the meetings. Who knows? Maybe they just decided we don’t need the meeting. But it’s the kind of thing where if you were to say, “Okay, this would be the first step if you wanted to fudge the numbers."

I don’t see any evidence that’s what’s going on so far. I don’t want to impugn any of the numbers or any of the work that’s being done now. I don’t see any evidence of that yet. I don’t even know what it would look like, but I agree it’s something to be worried about. Just the fact that we’re talking about it is indicative of the kinds of people who are in charge and what they’ve generally shown in their attitude toward things — that this is a possibility, that it could be happening, even if it hasn’t actually happened yet.

Jordan Schneider: It would be pretty remarkable if we’re in a world where we start treating American numbers like Chinese numbers. There’s the intel community stuff of fudging judgments and people leaking out what the real numbers are. I can imagine that happening also in BLS pretty quickly, where there’s enough of an institutional allergy to this that you hear pretty fast within that org of any of these types of shenanigans happening.

Matt Klein: I had two things. One is that far there are independent ways of verifying inflation stuff. The Billion Prices Project was invented by an Argentine working in the United States as an academic economist — very appropriately — to figure out alternative measures of tracking inflation. They just look at online listings. Far for the U.S., you say, “Okay, what are the prices of a basket of goods that matches the CPI basket of goods based on online listings?” And it’s tracked perfectly so far. That’s encouraging.

On the Chinese side, I guess you might know more than I do. My understanding is the headline GDP numbers may or may not be massaged. The underlying stuff is probably the good faith best estimate. But if they don’t like something, they just stop publishing it. It’s not even that they make it up — they just stop publishing the number. That seems like that actually could be an issue, especially given you have budget cuts anyway.

Jordan Schneider: There’s enough money in getting good numbers on U.S. employment that people will just invest in getting this right.

Matt Klein: It might not be public. There’s value in it being publicly available.

Kevin Xu: It’s locked up in Jane Street’s data center somewhere.

Peter Harrell: Bloomberg will add it to the terminal for an extra $500 a month.

Jordan Schneider: Does anyone have recommendations? Anything you’re reading or enjoying?

Peter Harrell: I just finished reading a book from 15 to 20 years ago by a Wall Street Journal reporter about the rise of the Texas oil families from the 1930s to the 1950s — the wildcatters like the Hunt family and similar figures. It’s fascinating because there are so many parallels, both culturally and psychologically, to the people who have made fortunes in tech over the last 20 years.

These were individuals doing innovative things with new technology who made tremendous amounts of money and then started converting that wealth into political influence. They began buying up media — literally purchasing radio stations at the time. It was quite striking to see how these people started out drilling oil wells in the 1920s and eventually came to build or at least fund the modern conservative political movement in the 1950s. It’s a very interesting piece of history.

Kevin Xu: I started reading Inside the House of Money, which is a collection of interviews with macro hedge fund managers, conducted by another macro hedge fund professional. The interviews are very intimate and revealing.

One of the interviews features our current Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, from when he was running his own fund right after leaving Soros. Apparently, going into this interview, he was extremely sleep-deprived — he hadn’t slept for days — and was worried about something that might happen in China. He didn’t specify what, but that was the context for his interview.

This book was written between 2004 and 2005, and I still haven’t figured out what was happening in China at that time that kept our future Treasury Secretary awake at night. If anyone can help me solve that mystery, I’d appreciate it. Regardless, the book is a really engaging read if you enjoy understanding the mindset of global macro traders.

Matt Klein: I don’t have anything quite as sophisticated, but I recently started watching Your Friends & Neighbors, and I’ve been enjoying it tremendously. I also bought The Party’s Interests Come First on your recommendation, though I haven’t started reading it yet. It sounds excellent.

Jordan Schneider: I have another recommendation that will preview a future China Talk episode — To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. It just won the Pulitzer Prize.

It was actually amusing because I booked the author before he won the Pulitzer, and then we had to postpone our interview because he suddenly had major media obligations to attend to. The book is beautiful and literary, with incredible sources. You have all these transcripts from court cases where these dissidents are essentially mocking the prosecutors and judges, taking them to task at every turn.

While it doesn’t necessarily tell you much about this moment in American politics, it provides a fascinating window into the world of these very brave and frankly eccentric people who made remarkable choices in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the Soviet Union. This was after the Stalin era, so they weren’t going to be executed, but they were still putting an enormous amount on the line to confront the regime.

Our “cooked level” remains undetermined. See you all in September.

Mood Music

How does Russia prevent uprisings, and what can other authoritarians learn from Moscow’s methods of coup control?

For the second anniversary of the Wagner uprising, ChinaTalk interviewed London-based historian Kamil Galeev, who was also a classmate of Jordan’s at Peking University.

We discuss…

• Why the Wagner Group rebelled in 2023, and why the coup attempt ultimately failed,

• How Wagner shifted the Kremlin’s assessment of internal political challengers,

• Similarities between post-Soviet doomerism and the American right,

• Historical examples of foreign policy influenced by a victimhood mentality,

• Barriers to Chinese hegemony.

Listen on your favorite podcast app.

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Why Russians Don’t Rebel

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, can you explain the Wagner insurrection that happened two years ago in Russia?

Kamil Galeev: The Wagner coup attempt in summer 2023 was perhaps the lowest point for Russia during the course of this war — the biggest moment of internal instability. It made a profound impression internally and changed the priorities and policies of the ruling regime.

How did the coup attempt become possible in the first place? Before discussing that, we need to examine why coups haven’t been more common in Russian history prior to the Wagner insurrection.

The primary reason is that since 1917, the modern Russian state has carried direct, uninterrupted institutional continuity. Since the October Revolution, the Russian Armed Forces have been heavily co-opted, which is easy to explain.

Imagine you’re Lenin, Trotsky, and others taking power in 1917. You’re constantly comparing yourselves with revolutionaries of the past, most importantly the French Revolution, but also the English Revolution. What pattern do you see?

You see English parliamentarians taking power from the King and waging war. As they wage war, they create an army, a military force that eventually overthrows them. The same happens with the French Revolution — National Assembly deputies take power and wage war, but the powerful armed force they create ultimately overthrows them.

The pattern they observed from history is that the English Revolution ends with Cromwell and the French Revolution ends with Bonaparte. This became their primary fear for their own revolution.

They took massive, systematic precautions against this outcome. In Trotsky’s memoirs, My Life, he describes discussing an officer of the Red Army called Blagonravov, who performed admirably. Lenin had a strong reaction when Trotsky remarked that Blagonravov, if translated into Italian, sounds like “Buonaparte.” This may seem paranoid, but it demonstrates their deep concerns.

“‘Out of such a lieutenant,’ I had once said jokingly to Lenin, ‘even a Napoleon may come some day. He even has the right name for it: Blago-nravov, [In Russian this means “good-natured” or “good-mannered.” - Trans.] almost like Bona-parte.’ Lenin laughed at this unexpected comparison, then he grew thoughtful, and, with his cheek-bones bulging even more, said very seriously, almost threateningly, ‘Well, I think we’ll manage the Bonapartes, don’t you?’”

~ Leon Trotsky, My Life p. 317

When building the Red Army, they were constantly obsessed with the possibility of Bonapartism, scanning for potential Bonapartes and weeding them out. From the beginning, the Red Forces, from which the Russian army naturally inherits, were extremely optimized to prevent any coup attempt.

This explains what the KGB was all about. You don’t build an enormous, all-permeating, all-powerful state security apparatus merely to fight dissidents — that would be overkill. You don’t even build it just to suppress rebellions. You build the KGB to infiltrate the army, control it, and if necessary, suppress armed insurrections. It’s essentially a second internal army to control the first.

Since 1917, Russian military development has been heavily optimized for this specific purpose. All armed forces, either in the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, were heavily infiltrated by state security agents with double and triple layers of control. The system was designed so that, first, you cannot prepare an insurrection in secrecy, and second, you cannot execute one because these layers of control would be activated.

State security agents were embedded in every unit, regiment, and army. They would simply eliminate a general who attempted anything subversive. This system worked effectively in preventing military coups, which may explain why the Russian state remained internally stable through the 1990s, despite poverty, lack of resources, and extreme discontent within the military. Many officers were upset, but taking action was impossible.

The interesting thing about Wagner is that it may have been the first military unit since 1917 that avoided this state security infiltration, escaping these double and triple layers of control.

Wagner famously recruited people with various backgrounds — former military officers, police officers, customs officials, drug control agents, and prison guards. Interestingly, they even recruited ethnic Russians from the French Foreign Legion. However, they didn’t recruit state security personnel for obvious reasons — if you start recruiting former state security officers, you’ll quickly be completely infiltrated by current state security officers.

Why was this allowed to happen? It seems like a completely irrational decision for the political leadership. To answer this question, we need to view it not as a single decision but as a sequence of consecutive decisions.

The creation of this large, non-infiltrated force without checks or control layers didn’t happen instantly. It evolved over time, iteratively. Originally, Wagner was a small unit of mercenaries, primarily for special operations far from Russia’s borders — in Syria, Libya, and eastern Ukraine.

A member of the French Foreign Legion displays Wagner-affiliated patches, December 2022. Source.

Early Wagner was small — dozens, then hundreds of fighters who were usually far away, sometimes thousands of miles from Russian borders, with some veterans in reserve at home. These reservists lived normal lives in Russia until called upon. At any given moment, the force was small and mostly distant, which allowed it to largely bypass direct control, partially because it wasn’t considered important.

The enormous expansion occurred only in 2022. Before the Ukraine war, Wagner was essentially an assassin group or hit squad. When the initial invasion failed massively, the political leadership tried to improvise new tools, mobilizing whatever resources they had. At this point, Wagner was authorized for massive expansion.

This wasn’t part of the original plan. When Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border, Wagner wasn’t there. After the initial invasion failed, they mobilized whatever they could — they called reservists, recruited other people, and soon began mobilizing prisoners.

Before long, they went from having a few hundred fighters mostly in Africa or Syria to tens of thousands relatively close to Russian borders. As this happened rapidly, normal control mechanisms weren’t established. The most basic control would have been oversight by state security officers and possibly the Federal Protective Service, who are essentially Putin’s bodyguards.

When the political leadership eventually tried to impose stricter control by integrating Wagner into the normal military structure, the uprising began.

My point is that although creating a large, uncontrollable structure seems irrational for the leadership, that’s not how it happened historically. First, they created a small structure where additional control layers seemed unnecessary. Then, when the situation deteriorated dramatically, they had to improvise with tactical responses to tactical problems, dealing with consequences later. This happened through many iterations, not just one.

Wagner’s rebellion represents perhaps the greatest internal threat to the regime in decades. Not only during Putin’s rule, but including through Yeltsin’s era as well. There hasn’t been a military rebellion of this scale probably since the October Revolution. It was the most serious internal political threat. The question is, why did it evaporate and turn into nothing?

There could be several valid answers to that question. One possibility is that the Wagner group never actually intended to take power. It was most probably a negotiation attempt rather than an effort to overthrow the political leadership and replace them. It appears to have been an attempt to renegotiate their position, perhaps as a reaction to being taken over. They tried to avoid the imposition of additional control through a show of force. It didn’t work out, but they likely never aimed to overthrow the leadership from the beginning.

This may actually be a common occurrence. Many rebellions and revolts don’t initially aim to overthrow leadership but rather to make specific demands. However, in many cases, these still bring disastrous consequences. Why didn’t this one?

Another valid explanation is that they were positioned too far away. Were there any Wagner garrisons in the Moscow region? Had there been, events might have unfolded differently.

The main reason, however, is that the dirtiest secret about military coups is that successful ones are typically invited. In most cases, it’s extraordinarily difficult to execute one without invitation. The creation of Wagner as an independent and uncontrollable armed force didn’t happen overnight but resulted from an accumulation of many tactical decisions over time.

The common image of military officers secretly preparing and then executing a lightning strike to seize power is largely fictional. In most functional regimes, this approach simply wouldn’t work. For the military to successfully take power, they typically need to be invited or solicited.

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, would you apply a Nazi Operation Valkyrie analogy here? How would you classify that within the solicited versus unsolicited framework?

Kamil Galeev: Consider the Eighteenth Brumaire — probably the most famous and iconic military coup in history, when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power. The important understanding here is that it didn’t happen in a vacuum but culminated a long process.

Since at least the Thermidorian Reaction, the political leadership in France had been using the military to control political processes. They deployed troops to deal with armed rebellions in Paris or popular mutinies. When afraid of losing elections, they used troops to “correct” electoral procedures and break the opposition. When wanting to purge political opponents from parliament and the National Convention, they used troops.

This happened repeatedly. Early in the French Revolution, the use of force was disguised as popular rebellion. Eventually, it became undisguised military force. With each passing year, the government ruled increasingly through explicit military force.

The problem was that as this progressed, the leadership became more dependent on the military. When Bonaparte took power, the coup wasn’t even his idea. It originated with Abbé Sieyès, a political leader who wanted to achieve personal political goals using the military — just as the political leadership had done many times before. This last time, however, it backfired.

What we see isn’t a single coup but many “mini-coups” where political leadership repeatedly corrected political outcomes through military means. In doing so, they gradually invited the military to take power. Examining history, we could find many more examples of this pattern.

Jordan Schneider: The Nazi analogy might be more appropriate than the 18th century Brumaire comparison. There was a war going poorly, with generals realizing their leader was unstable and deciding action was necessary. Many senior Nazi leaders supported the plan, but it failed simply because the bomb exploded on the wrong side of the table.

Kamil Galeev: That’s an interesting comparison with Wagner, noteworthy for both similarities and differences. One key distinction is that the officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler were pursuing what they perceived as a common interest, not personal gain. Many of these officers actually owed their careers to Hitler, so they weren’t motivated by professional setbacks.

The Wagner coup attempt, however, clearly pursued particularist interests. They were essentially protesting against being taken over and demonstrating their force. The first case involved belief in a common good — the second lacked this motivation.

Another obvious difference is that the Nazi coup plotters actively tried to eliminate Hitler and arrest Goebbels, attempting to seize political leadership directly. This wasn’t really Wagner’s approach. Their action resembled a negotiation more than a takeover. The officers who tried to kill Hitler weren’t seeking concessions or privileges, while Wagner was.

The third difference is that Nazi officers were part of the regular military structure, while Wagner operated as an irregular mercenary force. Many Wehrmacht officers could be seen as part of established elites predating Hitler, whereas Prigozhin and his organization were entirely Putin’s creation.

This last point is particularly important because, unlike the Nazi officers within the normal military hierarchy, the Wagner phenomenon only became possible through Yevgeny Prigozhin’s personal connections. Though a junior member, he belonged to the same network as Putin. The creation of this force didn’t happen overnight but through several iterations, succeeding because Prigozhin was integrated into the same contract network.

In Russia, there exists an informal personal network of Putin’s longstanding friends from St. Petersburg, including oligarchs who rose to prominence under his rule, such as the Rotenbergs. Prigozhin appears to have been a subordinate of the Rotenbergs, placing him just one step removed from Putin — a trusted man of Putin’s trusted man. This position gave him access to the sovereign’s ear and allowed him to be entrusted with matters outside normal processes.

One thesis I want to develop later is that power is often misunderstood. Power largely represents one’s social metric status within the contract network. In highly centralized systems, politics revolves around gaining the ruler’s ear at any cost. I believe we’ll increasingly see elements of this in the United States as well, where informal contact with the supreme ruler will matter more and cost more.

Infected by Victimhood

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, how did this experience change Putin and the regime’s calculus going forward?

Kamil Galeev: Somewhat paradoxically, the regime appears to have become relatively more relaxed about civilian threats. After the coup, there seems to have been a recalibration of what constitutes a threat. Dissident groups were effectively downgraded in threat assessment, while state security and intelligence services focused on dealing with Wagner’s aftermath and monitoring potential opposition from armed entities, including those within the regular military.

Essentially, following the coup, significantly greater emphasis was placed on monitoring potential threats from individuals with weapons, regardless of their agency affiliation.

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, what impressions do you have of what’s happening in America right now?

Kamil Galeev: One impression — and this is not so much an analysis as a genuine observation — is that it feels oddly familiar. I grew up in Russia, born in 1992, and much of the Russian atmosphere of the 1990s and 2000s was characterized by a pervasive feeling of resentment. There was a widespread belief that we had been screwed over, ripped off, and victimized. This mentality fueled a desire for revenge in some form.

This feeling of resentment and victimhood has been the major cause of what outsiders might perceive as irrationality in Russian foreign policy. When you feel like a victim, when you believe you’ve been abused and treated unfairly, you often declare a crusade against a cruel world that has mistreated you. This is a common occurrence both among individuals who feel victimized and start attacking everyone around them, and among nations.

The deep resentment and sense of defeat in Russia and post-Soviet countries made them behave in counterproductive ways. This was somewhat explainable because Russia lost the Cold War and consequently acted as a sore loser, which typically means acting irrationally.

Now I sense the same feeling of resentment and a similar atmosphere in America. There’s this notion that “we have been mistreated, we have been ripped off, and now we’ll take revenge.” This is much less comprehensible to me because America didn’t lose — it actually won. I can understand how this sentiment emerged in Russia, but it’s much more difficult for me to construct a functional model of how it developed in the United States.

Consider the trade war, for example. You could argue that decoupling from China serves American interests, which may indeed be the case. However, it doesn’t appear that America is simply decoupling from China — it seems to be attempting to decouple from the entire world simultaneously. This doesn’t resemble a reasonable or rational plan; it looks more like an emotional reaction, an attack against everyone at once.

The only explanation I have is that this behavior stems from a sense of victimhood, which leads to attacking indiscriminately. Within the American conservative movement particularly, I observe an incredible feeling of resentment. Yet it remains puzzling to me how this emerged as a mass phenomenon in the first place. America is the richest large country in the world, yet a big portion of the population sees themselves as victims, abused by everyone.

Jordan Schneider: That’s the world we get to live in now.

Kamil Galeev: Yes, but again, it’s a puzzle I don’t quite understand. In the UK, where I live now, there’s a sense of decline in the standard of living — not necessarily in absolute terms, but in relative terms. Not so long ago, the UK was much wealthier than almost any continental European country, particularly before World War I or even World War II. That’s no longer the case.

But the American situation feels especially puzzling. Perhaps one takeaway is that it’s very difficult to monitor the sense of victimhood within yourself, because once you become infected by it, you begin undermining yourself through your own actions.

Jordan Schneider: Are there any historical examples of victimhood mentality unwinding itself and a new conception or national purpose taking its place?

Kamil Galeev: I’ll avoid modern examples as they would generate too much controversy. Instead, I can offer some more distant historical ones.

We often discuss the problems and madness of Nazism and Nazi decisions, but it’s difficult to ignore that much of German foreign policy was established long before the Nazis rose to power. Consider how hostilities with the United States developed during World War I with the Zimmermann Telegram. Germany sent a telegram offering Mexico a portion of the United States. Even though the British intercepted and published it, few believed it because it seemed so absurd. Then the German ambassador confirmed it and repeated the threats, which led to hostilities with America and ultimately contributed to Germany’s defeat.

This may be the most illustrative example, but when examining German foreign policy before and during World War I, it appears they were actively collecting enemies worldwide. Finding a rational explanation for this behavior is challenging, but this pattern was evident in early 20th century Germany long before the Nazis came to power. This mentality certainly made their policies, particularly foreign policy, much less effective.

To condense it into one formula, if you perceive yourself as a victim, ripped off by a cruel world, then the entire world becomes your tormentor. Launching a crusade against the whole world might sound like a perfect plan, but it inevitably leads to conflicts you cannot possibly win.

Jordan Schneider: Kamil, would you like to share your reflections on China?

Kamil Galeev: If we were living in a conventional world, comparable to 100 or 200 years ago, I would say China appears to be the next world hegemon. This is partly because China has taken over much of global material production and is rapidly improving and expanding into other sectors. In almost every sphere of the material economy, and increasingly the digital economy, Chinese companies are outperforming nearly all competition. Typically, this is how a future global hegemon behaves.

However, we now live in a fundamentally different world from the past, most notably because it is aging and will soon be shrinking quantitatively. When the Netherlands became the economic hegemon of Western Europe, they were booming and expanding. It was a young, rapidly growing country. England during the Industrial Revolution and throughout its 19th-century hegemony was also young and quickly growing. The small manufacturing cities of England were booming with people, particularly young people. The same applies to America in the 20th century.

Now we’re entering an interesting phase where most industrial countries will be shrinking quantitatively and, more importantly, aging. How this will unfold in this new era is unclear. Perhaps the most serious problem facing China is that it appears to be aging faster than other nations.

The most logical solution for them would be to ease their stance on immigration, bringing in more people — and to be cynical and candid — particularly facilitating the inflow of women. The fact that they haven’t taken steps in this direction leads us into unknown territory. I don’t fully understand what will happen when the number of young people falls below a certain minimum threshold.

Jordan Schneider: To close, what are you researching right now?

Kamil Galeev: Currently, I’m primarily interested in coups and power dynamics — how political power is gained and lost. My main topics of interest are the October Revolution and its consequences, as well as the French Revolution and its aftermath. In the coming months, I’ll be writing about Lenin, Stalin, and the Bolshevik rise to power, as well as revolutionary Napoleonic France. Both these historical periods significantly shaped the world we live in today.

Patrick McGee is the author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. Our discussion led us through a detailed history of Apple’s relationship with China, where iPhone manufacturing became a project of nation-building.

Cohosting today is Kyle Chan of the High Capacity Substack.

Today, our conversation covers:

• Why Apple moved production to China in the 1990s, and why it struggles to leave,

• How Apple’s obsession with perfection catalyzed China’s industrial upgrading and why it bought every CNC machine in the world

• The political side of production in China, including how Apple’s relationship with the Chinese authorities has evolved over time,

• The rise of Foxconn and other partners in Apple’s network,

• A peer into Apple’s management style, including the “Divorce Avoidance Program.”

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

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“Real Men Own Fabs”

Jordan Schneider: I want to start with the near-bankruptcy moment and the challenges of manufacturing in America in the 1990s.

As you write, Patrick, there was very much a “real men own fabs” energy to hardware manufacturing, where most companies, Apple included, decided that if they wanted to compete, they had to build all the stuff themselves. But as you write in your book, that line of thinking reached its limits in the mid to late 1990s. Why don’t you start our narrative there and tell us that story?

Patrick McGee: I talked to the earliest employees at Apple, and it was part of the ethos that you built your own computers. This is how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met at the Homebrew Computer Club. They’d be taking apart computers, presenting to other people, and Steve Wozniak’s genius was to take apart a computer, improve some of the circuitry himself, and then put it back together in a faster way.

Apple wasn’t doing anything different by assembling computers themselves. That’s what you had to do. I don’t think the electronics manufacturing supply chain existed, certainly not in a globalized sense of taking things from Taiwan or elsewhere. That’s all later.

The computer I give credit to for changing everything was the IBM PC in 1981. Steve Jobs largely misunderstood it because when he disassembled it, he looked inside and said, “There’s nothing special here.” He’s not wrong about that. But what he missed was that IBM had launched a whole new battleground that Apple wasn’t prepared to fight against.

The IBM PC wasn’t about the graphical user interface. It wasn’t about user design or UX. It was about making these things and building them at a massive scale. To do that, they relied on third-party assembly giants. One that I highlight is called SCI Systems, which you could think of as the Foxconn of its day. It was founded in Alabama and played a role in satellites and rockets — it played a role in the Saturn V rocket that went to the moon.

Once they had that military precision, IBM scouted them out and they ended up doing the circuit board for the first PC and then assembling computers writ large. Then they played this massive role, doing that for HP and Dell and all these other companies, along with the rise of a whole new industry of Solectron, Celestica, and Jabil— all these North American companies who outsourced on behalf of the PC giants.

They gave birth to electronics globalization because once you have standardized parts in this booming industry, then the likes of Taiwan can outmaneuver everybody else and start building them in great quality and at great scale. Then they vertically integrated. They went back upstream and did more of the computer until by the mid-1990s, you had Taiwanese companies that were putting together everything and badging it with different names, and then they were even badging it with their own names.

There’s this fascinating 20-year history where Steve Jobs in particular has this DNA that he leaves to the company, which is something like, “We will build it ourselves because we’re going to design it ourselves. That’s how we distinguish ourselves, even as the PC companies go to this outsourcing boom.” When he goes to NeXT Computer — the other company he founded after he’s ousted from Apple in 1985 — he says of the computer, “My favorite thing about it is that it wasn’t built in Osaka.” Obviously Japan was playing the role that China plays now.

There’s something fascinating about that. Even when the narrative after 1997, when he came back, was that Apple had to outsource, it took Tim Cook years to convince Steve Jobs to give up manufacturing. I write about how in 2000, he handed out t-shirts to everybody that said “Mac-tories” on them. He wanted these Mac factories to play a role.

Without the dot-com crisis, you would have had Apple trying to make a push in building things themselves, which would have included building in America. But Apple stock, as people sometimes forget, lost 50% in a single day in September 2000.

They’re almost purchased — well, maybe I shouldn’t say they’re almost purchased, but Gateway thought they were such a contender that they could purchase them. That’s how bad things were at Apple — that Gateway of all companies was going to acquire them.

Anyway, my point is I have this manufacturing-focused history of Apple, that’s a new angle to report on the company, and yet I think it shouldn’t be a new angle. This is a company that manufactures — now they orchestrate the manufacturing — but their DNA was doing it all themselves. This shouldn’t be an obscure angle to have brought a new lens to, but somehow it is. I’m uncovering more than I should have been able to because I think we should have been reporting on this the last 25 years.

Jordan Schneider: It’s fascinating, Patrick, because when people think of Apple’s moat and what distinguishes them from the competition, a lot of folks first go to iOS. We have this America arc, and then we have this “go abroad to lots of different countries and try to find one or more that works” arc. What were some of the starts and stops in that arc in the 1990s and early 2000s before they ended up going to China?

Patrick McGee: This will sound less strange if the listener understands that Apple had a tri-continental strategy for building locally but at the continental level. Apple built its own computers in California and Colorado — that’s obviously for North America. For Europe, they built them out of Ireland and for Asia, they built them out of Singapore.

When they get involved with contractors in the late 1990s, they have them replicate this strategy. LG makes the translucent computer — the Bondi blue color that then becomes Life Savers colors — and LG does it in Korea. But when they expand to meet demand, they do so in Wales and in Mexico.

When Foxconn comes on as a second supplier, this is the meeting of the minds of Foxconn founder Terry Gou and Tim Cook, who’s a pretty new person at the time but is running operations. Foxconn does it in China, which is significant because Foxconn’s Taiwanese and some of the other Taiwanese companies are not in China at that point. I’m thinking of Inventec, for instance, which made the iPod in 2001, and that’s out of Taiwan.

But then Foxconn expands, and they expand to the Czech Republic for Europe and California for America. Once you are comparing costs and efficiency between these three regions, China is winning out time and time again for multiple years, such that by 2003, Apple has effectively given up everywhere else and consolidated into China.

I suppose technically the Czech operations are in effect until 2010 or so, but everything is moving to China because China is tailor-making policies for someone like Apple. Industrial clusters are forming. They’re putting up factories, not in great quality, but at an amazing scale.

I have this funny anecdote with this engineer from Apple in the early 2000s, and he’s literally counting the stairs between floors because it’s so obvious to him that it’s not the same distance between each floor. He’s even measuring the stairs and he’s finding that this is so slap-dash — everything’s put together so quickly. This does, if we’re jumping ahead, have implications for us, because of course, we would never build something that quickly because we would emphasize the quality, the safety, and everything else that we should emphasize.

We would still be doing the environmental paperwork by the time an entire factory in Shenzhen would be built.

John Rubinstein’s anecdote for the iPod is that it’s steel girders when he goes there and sees the iPod factory actually up and running because you get to the second floor and it’s all finished, but the rest of the building is not, and yet they’re still churning out iPods.

There’s this amazing sense that when Apple went to China in the early 2000s, it was very early days. China was not known for quality at the time. They are known as a manufacturer, of course, but they’re not building quality electronics. That was something that Apple played an instrumental role in.

Kyle Chan: One reason I found this book so fascinating — it’s the story of global electronics manufacturing told through one company across a number of different countries. You chart the movement of Apple’s efforts to figure out the best place to manufacture — the one place, the company, the country — that might suit their quality needs. They’re extremely demanding with rapidly changing specifications.

The way I think of it, they’re dating a bunch of countries over time, and you know that they’re going to marry China in the end. They’re going to marry Foxconn. It’s like a rom-com — “When Harry Met Sally” — and you’re going to follow the dating along the way.

Could you tell the story of searching for the right partner? In the background I have in my head the whole “flying geese” model of development in East Asia, conceived by a Japanese theorist in the 1930s about how Japan would take the lead technologically. Then, over time, different sectors would move on to South Korea, Taiwan, and then eventually to China.

The Apple story, the Apple manufacturing story, matches that so well in terms of the search. By the time you go through the process, you’re like, “Okay, come on. I know you’re going to end up in China.” But what were some of the steps along the way? Why did they end up settling on China as the place to be?

Patrick McGee: A saying I love about journalism is that you should always show, never tell. When I was submitting the book, my biggest black swan worry was that my editor would say, “I don’t understand why this book begins in 1996. China’s not in the book for the first 90 or 95 pages. Let’s get there.” But the whole point was, I needed to tell you without actually ever explicitly saying so that Apple had this totally obsessive, maniacal, perfection-oriented, no-tolerance-for-defects attitude.

You need to understand that when they were building something like the iMac G4 — the thing that people might remember because it’s anthropomorphic and looks a little bit like a Pixar lamp — I joke that it looks like it’s ready to break dance. That’s actually the first commercial that Apple used for it, grooving to the beat, nodding its head.

Nobody knew how to build that thing. Apple upended tools and machine makers all across Taiwan to get it done. Without me explicitly saying so, the reader begins to understand that Taiwan is too small to get this done. They’re literally having to get people from the Philippines to fill the factory lines, and they’re using a VCR machine maker in Malaysia. They’re relying on Singapore Airlines for a blade fabrication facility.

You realize that for them to have a meeting about various supply chain conundrums that they’re having, you’re having to get on flights and hand-carry things from one country to the next, which by the way is illegal. They’re doing so with five or six countries as far apart as Singapore and Japan.

When China begins to offer all of this in one industrial cluster around Shenzhen, it is mind-bogglingly good for anyone involved. One thing that I say in interviews — I don’t think I explicitly say so in the book — is that Tim Cook is often credited as the architect of the China strategy. He’s not the architect, and there is no architect. It was the suppliers themselves — and there are hundreds, if not thousands of them — are all choosing China because if they’re comparing Singapore versus China, the labor rates, the abundance of labor, the flexibility of that labor, the hardworking determination of that labor is all off the charts in China versus any other place.

The suppliers themselves are all moving there and Apple is able to take advantage of that movement more than anybody else. If you still want to give Tim Cook a title, I would say he was more like an admiral navigating the macroeconomic seas of supply chains. But he’s not the architect because he didn’t have to strategize anything. Terry Gou was strategizing. Tim Cook was following, but then doing more with what Terry Gou and others were coming up with than anybody else.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, you have this line: “Nobody architected the move to China, but in one opportunity after another, Apple operations were lured into the country.” I think having a tri-continental strategy sounds ridiculous sitting here in 2025. But it’s also the case that you were scaling hardware manufacturing at an exponential rate for 20 years. If you’re making 10,000, 50,000 computers, it’s not insane.

But as you write about in your book, the number of actual items you’re making is increasing by a factor of 10 or by 50 or even by 100 on a year-on-year basis. It is getting more difficult and complex and the labor required is also rising at an exponential curve. You’re not going to find that many people in Wales and Singapore to do all this stuff.

Patrick McGee: I would emphasize another thing, which is that Moore’s law is decreasing the size of the products. Apple was not a big volume player in anything until 2003. I think in 2003, they made more iPods in a year than they made iMacs in the prior five years.

If you’re shipping things either by air or by sea, the fact that it’s the size of an iPod rather than a desktop computer is a major distinction. When SCI was building stuff in Huntsville, Alabama, it wouldn’t have made sense for them to move over to China and be early on this trend. That would make no sense at all. The computers were too big and bulky. Especially if you went back 10 years when it was a mainframe computer the size of a garage.

Once you’re into laptops, which is where Taiwan first makes its mark, it begins to make a lot of sense. Especially when you get into iPods and then dumb phones and especially smartphones, which then scale — that becomes a dramatic increase in efficiency. The cost per item — the logistics becomes de minimis once you’re doing it in the millions and let alone the tens and hundreds of millions.

Kyle Chan: Speaking of the logistics, I love the parts about United Airlines and the Boeing 747 playing a role in both directions. You’re talking about the product getting smaller and smaller to the point where you can have a Boeing full of iPhones that’s totally worth a flight, more than worth a flight. They’re helping to export this product around the world. At the same time, they’re providing the inputs in terms of the Apple engineers and the managers flying in.

It’s ridiculous — entire flights, I think you had documented, were for Apple staff to go back and forth between Cupertino and Zhengzhou or Shenzhen or other parts of China. It was astounding.

Patrick McGee: You’re finding this poetic symmetry that I didn’t make myself. Well done, Kyle. But to give that anecdote, because that’s pretty funny. I forget which cities it was and in what order, but in 2014 it’s probably Zhengzhou and in 2016 it’s probably Hangzhou, where the same thing happens where Apple convinces United Airlines: “Look, we need you flying nonstop to this place three times a week. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the plane is empty, we will pre-purchase so many of the first-class tickets that you will still make money.”

I think that’s hilarious. People who went to Shanghai and then took the bullet train to Hangzhou beforehand said it wasn’t exactly a schlep — it was pretty easy. But if you were an American engineer who had to go there regularly and you didn’t want to have to deal with the Chinese signs and all this kind of stuff, it was a nice comfort.. Because Apple had so many people going, it was worth them doing it. That was amazing.

The thing that was already out, but maybe people don’t know it, is in 2019, United accidentally leaked that 50 engineers from Apple were flying first class from San Francisco every day. They were the largest corporate client on the planet. When you talk about Apple’s size, there are many things you can point to that show they upend entire industries. But who knew that the airline industry was one of them?

Manufacturing the “Un-manufacturable”

Jordan Schneider: I want to talk about the design of the items themselves. You have this refrain over and over again where people say the contractors who don’t see the future ask, “Are you crazy? We can’t do this.” Then Apple comes up with a new manufacturing methodology that’s both labor-intensive and requires a level of sophistication that they have to teach to their contract manufacturers in order to execute.

Let’s do a case study. Pick your favorite item — which one haven’t you talked about on the other podcast that you want to discuss?

Patrick McGee: The translucent iMac is the one where the chapter is called “Unmanufacturable,” and that’s where I devote most attention. It’s also a computer. Everybody knows there’s one thing I hadn’t banked on — people say there’s a sense of nostalgia when they’re reading the early chapters because they’re going through some of the products they loved as high school or university students.

Jordan Schneider: Totally. I felt the same way. It was very tangible. I remember being 12 years old, going to my uncle’s house, seeing his candy-colored iMac and thinking, “What the hell?” It’s this object from space — but it’s not from space, it’s from these crazy engineers who were battling with Steve Jobs and the manufacturing people. Thank you for that.

These things are in design museums now and in your older cousins’ closets if they were smart enough to keep them.

Anyway, please continue, Patrick.

Patrick McGee: The computer was considered un-manufacturable by the product design team at Apple. The tooling engineers at Apple looked at what Jony Ive had come up with and said, “This can’t be built. I’m not saying it can’t be built at scale — we can’t build one of these in the lab.”

It’s interesting because they had created this thing that’s impossible, yet this is where you get the Apple mentality of “even though it’s impossible, we’re going to figure it out.” In the end, they don’t figure it out and the design has to be changed. But nevertheless, in hindsight, it looks like Jony Ive had tasked them with something that was impossible just for the sake of seeing who would stay on the project to get it done.

I’m not saying that was actually intentional — Jony Ive had to go back to the drawing board and make major changes to the product. But by the time they have a product that can be built, the only people left on the team are those who are willing to try and experiment with all these new things.

If people remember the computer, it has these translucent pinstripes on the front. Those used to be horizontal. What the engineers told me is that they couldn’t be horizontal because of how plastic injection molding works — the mold has to be parallel with the lines. Jony Ive had done something where they were perpendicular to the lines, and that couldn’t work.

They experimented for months. They had specialists come in from the outside to work on the product. What’s fascinating is that Steve Jobs had just come back. This was the product that, in my telling — because I’ve got all these Steve Jobs notes from the summer of 1997 — this is an interesting period where he’s given the role of CEO if he wants it, but he won’t take it. What his notes reveal is that he thinks Apple’s about to die, and he doesn’t want to oversee its demise. He is trying to help and see if it’s possible.

It’s a meeting of the minds with Jony Ive. Steve Jobs goes to the meeting expecting to fire him. Jony Ive goes to the meeting with his resignation letter in his pocket. Instead, they hit it off. What they come up with is the translucent iMac.

If you’ve seen the eMate 300, this translucent product they’d already made — it was a Newton and laptop mixed together — that was the first translucent product they made. You can see how Steve Jobs would’ve gotten excited by that and began to envision what he thought at the time was a network computer. That was their big idea.

They came up with this design. Steve Jobs got all excited about the idea of Apple making a comeback and redefining the aesthetics of the computer. But the first thing that Jony Ive comes up with literally couldn’t be made. The product design team goes through multiple iterations of who the leader is because nobody can do this, but Steve Jobs had inherited this team. He honestly didn’t know if they’re any good.

When they told him it was unmanufacturable and he goes on this tirade where he threatens to sell his “one last fucking remaining share of Apple stock,” he goes to his favorite design consultancy called Lunar. These two guys had actually designed the NeXT computer — that black magnesium cube, if you’re familiar with it. They go through all the blueprints and they agree with Apple’s team: “This cannot be built. This is not a quality design.”

I found this interesting because when I’ve read biographies of Jony Ive, even in grade seven, 12-year-old Jony is all about minimalist designs and elegant sketches.

For me, this was a real turning point where Jony Ive realized, “I need to know more about manufacturing to actually be able to give something that can truly be built.” He does have to change the lines. They do have to make the computer foggier than they wanted it to be because the inside was kind of ugly — the circuit boards were sticking out. That’s something they eventually changed by 1999 or 2000.

He had idealized this computer that couldn’t be built. But the changes that they made — I quote somebody else saying — they’re not major changes. The essence of the idea still lived. It’s still this egg-shaped thing rather than this angular square.

But it is the product that absolutely saves Apple. If they couldn’t figure out how to build it and how to change the design so that it was manufacturable — the term is DFA, designed for manufacturing — Apple wouldn’t exist. It was absolutely clear — the company was going to be bankrupt if this product wasn’t a hit, and it became America’s bestselling computer. It’s quite the dramatic narrative.

Jordan Schneider: I want to tie this to Ren Zhengfei 任正非. We’re running this episode after our series on Huawei, and this story is another one of these “leadership matters” anecdotes. The other thing that struck me about that is how far Steve Jobs was willing to go with the gimmick of, “Okay, this impossible thing — figure it out, figure it out, figure it out.”

There’s a lot of human pressure when all these people are saying, “No, you can’t do this.” Kyle, is there a Ren Zhengfei angle here?

Kyle Chan: Yeah, I think there is. Ren Zhengfei is famous for pushing his team to the limit and then some. There are all sorts of issues related to the work culture — people being driven too hard — but then that culture is carried with those personnel later on when they leave Huawei and go out to other parts of the Chinese ecosystem.

I see this parallel with a maniacal focus on realizing this concept, whatever it is — whether it’s going to be a cutting-edge Ascend AI chip or whether it’s going to be this candy-colored, perfect device that everyone wants to buy immediately when they see it in the store. That kind of drive is very reminiscent.

Terry Gou also plays a huge role in this story, and I see a similar parallel with his personality, although complementary in some ways, he’s so cheap, for lack of a better term. He’s focused on efficiency — he eschews the glitzy corporate HQ of Apple. But they share ultimately the same goal of producing at scale with ruthless efficiency these goods that will make all of them together a lot of money.

Patrick McGee: I’ve got to throw in the DAP here — the Divorce Avoidance Program — because so many marriages are broken up in the first five years of Steve Jobs’s comeback that the engineers are given these different policies to save their marriages. One of them is an understanding that, for example, there might be days when Jordan and Kyle aren’t going to be in to work because their marriages are on the line, and we have to give them a break.

That works well for a time, but we need Jordan and Kyle on the factory line. Instead, it becomes, “If we need to send them to Korea on a random Sunday even though they only got back two days earlier and their spouse is going to be upset, let’s give her $10,000. We need to assuage her because we don’t want to be losing engineers through attrition.”

That was happening to such a degree that all these policies needed to come out. It’s funny — well, I say it’s funny, it’s tragic as well. I’m getting the stories 20 years after the fact. People talk about the dollars being called “Danny Bucks” or “Dan Bucks” in reference to VP of Product Design Dan Riccio, because he was the person who fought for these things.

Sometimes our narrative is overly emphasizing how difficult the Foxconn workers worked, and that’s necessary. Obviously it gets to the point of suicides and suicide nets to prevent that from happening. But the Apple engineers were doing a similar number of hours while also having to fly back and forth all the time. It was causing so much strain that Apple had to institute these policies that engineers talked about. If you talk to anyone on the iMac project in the late 1990s and you mention the DAP, they haven’t thought about it for 20 years, but they immediately know what you’re talking about. Then they start telling stories.

I should say that one guy said, “Never mind the divorces, you need to look at the deaths.” That shook me. I was finding the DAP funny at times, and this person was saying there was nothing funny about it. He could rattle off names of people who had died on the production line or come back and died. I didn’t want to overemphasize that because as a journalist, I can’t determine, when someone died 15 years ago or 20 years ago, that overwork was the cause of death.

Steve Jobs himself says that the reason he thinks he got cancer is he was working so hard as CEO of both Pixar and Apple in 1997 that his immune system was weak and it allowed cancer to creep into his system. Whether that’s the medical diagnosis, I don’t know, but Steve Jobs understood that about himself or believed that about himself.

Jordan Schneider: Another interesting parallel is that the exit opportunities for these people existed. The compensation they were getting was not so different from what they could find at other firms from the Apple side that they couldn’t find other jobs. But there was something to this work that, similar to early Huawei, was not just the money. There is an aspect of team and mission and excitement that was around in this era of Apple that drove the Apple employees to give themselves and give all they had and more to this company and these products.

Patrick McGee: Jordan, let me agree on one part. I do think there’s a band of brothers, bunker mentality that would happen among the Apple engineers putting in the 18-hour days.

On the other hand, Apple later gets sued for collusion because there was an agreement among Silicon Valley giants not to hire from each other’s firms. One of the engineers I spoke with is someone who sued Apple later on because he didn’t understand at the time how being such a high-profile product design engineer at Apple wasn’t getting him job offers. He said, “I’m doing such good work. Why aren’t I being hired by Motorola or Google or whoever?”

Much later, he found out that was taboo. Steve Jobs had yelled at people and the emails came out later. I forget exactly what happened — I’m pretty sure they settled. The evidence was pretty good that there was collusion among the tech giants.

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Kyle Chan: Let’s talk about the example of the CNC machines. One of the parts that struck me — I had heard a little bit of this before, but reading it in the book, I’ve got to read this short snippet:

“Apple dumbfounded the industry when it purchased more than 10,000 CNC machines in a single year, enabling a form of mass production that Steve Jobs called ‘a whole new way of building notebooks.’ Apple even made a deal with Fanuc Automation Group from Japan to purchase its entire pipeline of CNC machines for years to come, shutting out all of its competitors from access, and then scoured the globe for more. ‘There were not enough CNC machines in the world to do the machining that we needed to do,’ one person said.”

I was struck by the scale and also by the — again, this is reminiscent of Elon Musk — “We need this part now. Whatever it takes, fly it out personally, make it happen.” For this Apple story, for the aluminum single-body MacBooks, it’s what it’s going to be. If it takes 10,000 CNC machines, then so be it. We’ll fly them over. Those stories capture the “whatever it takes” mentality.

Patrick McGee: We’ve jumped ahead to 2008 here. This was an achievement of imagination. There’s nothing novel about a CNC machine — I forget how many decades they go back. But the thing is, they build prototypes. Apple had the wherewithal and the imagination to say, “Well, wait a minute. If these things are so good, why don’t we build all of our products using these things?”

My focus is on the MacBook — they got the unibody MacBook — but they’re used in all sorts of products, including the iPhone, and have been ever since. These are machines that individually cost between $500,000 and a million dollars. Who knows what Apple is paying when they’re able to buy them at scale and they have someone like Tony Blevins negotiating for them.

This is so successful that this is the first time that MD (manufacturing design) is put on the map. In other words, it’s the first time Steve Jobs, in a keynote presentation, talks about their manufacturing prowess. This is probably the time — I don’t know this for a fact — that MD becomes MD. Before then, they were a part of product design, and it’s called Supply Base Engineering. Now they’re a part of ops.

It’s interesting that MD doesn’t have their own senior vice president. I don’t know exactly why it’s a part of ops — they should be their own thing — but it’s possible that Apple doesn’t love the narrative of more people knowing about this division because they are the ones where, when my book talks about the geopolitical influence that Apple has, it’s because they’re flying MD engineers who are brilliant, usually based in California, over to Asia to train and audit and supervise and equip these third-party manufacturers with what becomes billions upon billions of dollars of machinery.

This is where I get into the argument that Apple’s influence is like that of a nation-building program.

iPhones and Nation Building

Jordan Schneider: I have a smaller question — more on the design stuff. As the design process is being incredibly creative with the CNC machines, one of the questions I have is to what extent they could have optimized for design features which would have given them more geographic flexibility?

The degrees of freedom that Jony Ive and company were able to operate under are unique in the industry. As we've discussed with the CNC Apple Unibody story and the translucent iMac, they were willing and excited to push the physical design features of their products to the point where the answer at the end of the equation had to be China and Chinese suppliers.

I'm curious whether there were other pathways where they could have introduced different constraints at the design phase. This approach might have allowed them to manufacture more products in different places around the world without losing as much capability. The alternative would be trying to manufacture something like the unibody MacBook—as it was designed to be constructed in 2008—somewhere else outside of China, which would result in significant compromises.

Patrick McGee: That’s a great question. One question that you get now is: why doesn’t Apple automate these processes so that it’s not dependent on China, where you’ve got 400,000 people building an iPhone? That sounds like a rational thing to do.

But what you would be doing is upending how Apple designs its products, which is to say that Jony Ive’s team — and I’m aware that Jony Ive has left, but we’re talking about the golden era here — they could operate with a “no constraints” mentality. In other words, other companies will say from the get-go, “This is going to be automated, so we’re going to design for automation.”

The degrees of freedom under which Jony Ive and company were able to operate is unique in the industry. As we’ve talked through with the CNC Apple unibody story, as we’ve talked through with the translucent iMac, they were willing and excited to push the physical design features of their products such that the answer at the end of the equation had to be China and Chinese suppliers.

But I’m curious if there were other pathways where they could have introduced more or different constraints at the design phase such that you could have at the end of the equation been able to manufacture more stuff in different places around the world without losing as much — without losing as much as you would if you were trying to manufacture the unibody MacBook as it was designed to be constructed in 2008 somewhere else outside of China.

I like to ask people what their favorite Dell computer from the early 2000s was. Of course, none of us has a favorite Dell computer from the early 2000s. It’s not only the money that Apple’s making and investing in China that distinguishes them from others, because they were a small player in the early 2000s.

What distinguishes Apple is what they are doing and the fact that nobody knows how to build it. It’s not a knock against China to say that Apple taught them a lot. When you think of Apple products — whether it’s multi-touch glass or the anthropomorphic metal tubing between the base and the computer for the Sunflower iMac — nobody knows how to build that stuff. I’m not saying the Chinese didn’t know how; nobody knew. The marriage of Apple and China is skill and scale coming together.

The line I use is that Jony Ive and Steve Jobs made Apple products unique. Terry Gou and Tim Cook made them ubiquitous.

Now, if you had a different mentality where you said, “Let’s make these things easier to manufacture, more automation-friendly, to give us geopolitical safety,” that absolutely could have happened. You could have had more boring products, fewer design changes year to year, and you would’ve been able to have a more resilient supply chain based on production in Mexico, for example.

In that world, the first iPhone, if it were built at all, absolutely would have a plastic screen rather than a glass screen. It was only by working with the Chinese factories at their scale and industriousness that Steve Jobs was able to make dramatic changes. Literally after he has presented the iPhone — when he famously announced the iPhone in January 2007 — he was holding a phone that has a plastic screen. It was in the period between him announcing it and it going on sale that Apple upended the entire thing.

They work with a Taiwanese supplier called TPK, which builds the invisible circuitry within the glass so that your finger actually causes an effect. You’ll notice that if you do that on your window, it doesn’t do anything. You need to have a bunch of technology in there. Then they worked with Lens Technology to shape and temper the Corning glass that everyone’s familiar with.

The glass is American-made, but then it has to be shaped, tempered and cut. There are tens of thousands of people working at Shenzhen Lens to do that. You have people like Steve Zadesky, who’s on a whole bunch of iPod and iPhone patents, literally sleeping on the factory floor to get that all done.

China offered something that nobody else has offered. The reason why the epigraph to the book is a “Made in China 2025” document from 2015 that says:

“Without manufacturing there is no country and there is no nation.” Find me another country that has that as their motto, their mantra. You don’t get that just anywhere.

Sometimes I find it amusing that I have a 90-second sound bite on X and someone will say, “This guy’s saying China couldn’t be anything without Apple.” It’s the total opposite. I’m saying Apple is screwed without China because nobody will offer the things that they offer. They were a once-in-a-century partner to respond to the demands of Jony Ive.

If I’m fast-forwarding a bit, the only thing I would say is that Apple thought they were wearing the pants in this relationship for the first two decades — from 2000 to 2020. It’s only afterwards that there’s this realization that, “Wait a minute, we were lured in by the siren call of an emerging superpower who had all their companies willing to do all these things so that they would learn all the technology transfer and put America in a position, and all other industrialized nations in a position, where none of them can compete.” Everything has gone into China.

Kyle Chan: Can we talk about learning and this process of learning and technology transfer? To me, this is such a big deal — not only for Apple, but Apple exemplifies a lot. All these foreign firms that China in many cases very deliberately tried to bring into the country, tried to attract — maybe it’s by the central government, maybe it’s by local government, maybe it’s certain incentives, maybe it’s a whole concerted effort.

The point was to bring in these foreign firms, have them manufacture in China, share know-how, and train a whole generation of not only workers, but engineers and managers. The story of Apple and China captures that fantastically.

To give you a contrast, I love the quote: When Apple was working with Sony in Japan, you had an operations executive from Apple leaving Tokyo saying, “I was in Japan about five minutes, and Apple can teach the Japanese nothing.” This was earlier in the story, and this was a difficult product, but not as difficult maybe as some of the later ones. That story was not one of technology transfer.

Whereas later on, especially for the case of China and Foxconn, there was a very deliberate effort to use Apple as a source of upgrading your entire industrial ecosystem — upgrading your suppliers, upgrading your machinery, your equipment, all of the tacit knowledge, not only the blueprints and stuff that you can license and patent. Some of this stuff was not anywhere in existence. It was pioneered — they were all operating at the forefront.

Can you say more about this process of learning? I read a lot and talk a lot about, from the Chinese side, their very active process of trying to get as much as possible from every kind of foreign firm in high-tech industries. This process of technology transfer and learning.

Patrick McGee: In the late 1990s, Apple actually struggled to find contract manufacturers for its products because they were not seen as worth the effort. We have to remember that Apple was creating things in pretty small volumes, and they were very demanding. The workers at these Chinese factories often did not like working with Apple because you’ve got these overbearing engineers who are dictating all these things. Usually they’re dictating it through translators because these are American engineers who don’t speak the language.

I have these funny anecdotes that aren’t in the book where some engineers have a free weekend, so they decide to go to this factory that they’ve been training up. They cause such hell that when they’re trying to leave the following day, there’s a problem with the car — the wheel is flat or something. As the car drove, it was causing sparks to fly. They’re thinking, “I guess we’ll have to stay here another day.” Then they get a call from the leader of the factory who demands that the taxi driver drive even with the sparks flying and everything, because God forbid these Apple engineers come back because they’re such a pain in the neck.

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This is the sort of level of training that Apple is providing — the sort of stuff that makes you go mad. Yet obviously they’re very, very effective.

My narrative about Terry Gou is that he is the first person to understand: “This is not about making big volumes necessarily, and this is certainly not about making margins, but we’re getting tuition-free, on-the-ground training from these overbearing engineers who are willing to teach our cohorts all sorts of stuff.”

Apple’s orderly meets its match in Terry Gou and vice versa. This on-the-record anecdote from Tony Fadell is that he and his team would come in to train the engineers they’ve been working with and find not a face that they recognize because Terry has taken these graduates and put them on the Dell line or whatever, where they can use their newfound skill sets to actual money-making effect. He’s, in a sense, without Apple’s permission, started a new semester for these other engineers.

I don’t think the Chinese understood that until 2016. That is a key reason why you’ve had Foxconn being squeezed out the last couple of years and they’re having to go to India because Apple’s essentially telling them, “If you want to keep your market share, you need to go to India for us.”

The learning is absolutely fundamental to the relationship between Foxconn and Apple and to why all the Chinese factories are able to do so much. If you want, we can go into the wonky differences between ODM and OEM and why Foxconn does so much better than Quanta or Inventec or anybody else.

Jordan Schneider: Sure, let’s tell that story.

Patrick McGee: In the late 1990s, none of the Taiwanese wanted to be doing assembly. Assembly is how you get the orders, but it’s very low margin, it’s totally cutthroat. The likes of Inventec and Quanta and the predecessors to Pegatron are doing something called ODM work. “D” is for design, and design means more margin, and it also means more investment. It’s an investment that typically pays off.

What it means is that if you’re a Western manufacturer of a computer, you’re already offloading your manufacturing to a third party in Taiwan. But what this will allow you, if you work with an ODM, is that they’ll also do the research and development, and they’ll also do the design. You have less and less to do. It gets to the point where the Taiwanese can literally show a catalog of computer designs, and you choose one. Imagine how much that takes off your balance sheet.

It works very well. The problem, of course, is that the Taiwanese begin branding their own computers and competing against you. If there are times of scarcity of a certain product, they’re going to source it to their own companies rather than to you as the third party.

Apple never falls for this trap, in part because they’re wanting to do so much design themselves. It’s never appealing for someone to say, “We’ll do the design for you.” Foxconn maintains itself as an OEM, a manufacturer — the manufacturing-as-a-service model. They were condescended to because it’s not sexy, high-margin work. Yet Terry Gou has an understanding of Chinese politics that nobody else seems to have.

Kyle mentioned that this is what we get wrong about Chinese communism: it’s not only about the relationships with the federal officials, it’s the provincial officials because the cadres in various districts are incentivized for factory growth. They will offer tax exemptions and bonded zones and tailor-made policies and all sorts of stuff — getting in the labor from the hinterlands or whatever — so that your investment goes to that district and not some other cadre’s.

It’s worth knowing that that is one of the key distinctions between Soviet and Chinese communism. The Soviet system was top-down.

I don’t know that you’d call Chinese capitalism grassroots per se, but I compare it to federalism on steroids. It’s something that we miss all the time.

The reason why being an OEM is important is the labor intensity and the vertical integration that Foxconn introduces. Instead of doing design and R&D, they are just building. What makes them so good at building is having many clients and then allocating those resources. That allows Terry Gou to expand — literally in a real estate sense — building dormitories, building entertainment venues, and having these migrants set up shop in Shenzhen all the time. If you’re doing that, you are making the local cadres in Shenzhen look good.

He’s able to parlay his brilliant investment strategy, his labor intensity, into free machinery, free tools, more labor migrants, etc., in a way that nobody else is able to take advantage of. Apple didn’t understand Chinese politics until 2013 when they were made to, but Foxconn is their biggest partner and Foxconn understands it very, very well.

What’s tragic is Foxconn was never rewarded very much for this. Their margins fell the closer they get with Apple, but the political connections that Foxconn made were instrumental to Apple’s rise.

Made in China 2025

Jordan Schneider: I want to talk about that — the getting rewarded thing. I asked ChatGPT for the market cap of Apple and all of its near-ish competitors. We’ve got Apple at $3.25 trillion. We have Samsung at $300 billion, Xiaomi at $175 billion. Huawei, no one knows, but maybe $100-200 billion. Oppo and Vivo are rounding errors.

We have this big argument. The central thesis of your book is that this was a dangerous trade for America, but we did get a $3 trillion company out of it, even though there was all of this industrial upgrading that Apple helped China do. Setting aside the getting Chinese people out of poverty angle to this, there’s got to be something to be said for the fact that America is now home to one of the largest companies that the world has ever seen.

Patrick McGee: I’ve tried to answer this. If for whatever reason we were living in a simulation and the game ended now, then obviously Apple got more out of this relationship and it was a great deal for everybody, and we lived through a golden age of Silicon Valley focusing on software and China doing the hardware.

The problem is it’s probably not a simulation. The world continues and we’re now at a point where Apple has no Plan B. China for whatever reason has become more belligerent and wants to be self-sufficient. “Made in China 2025 中国制造2025” is a grand master plan to sever itself from the West in terms of automation, robotics, electronics, and other things including pharmaceuticals.

It seems pretty crazy to me that the world’s most valuable company doesn’t have any sort of Plan B. The Tim Cook doctrine, named in 2010, maybe 2011, was to own and control as much as possible and only enter markets where they could be number one or number two. As Ben Thompson from Stratechery constantly points out, the fact that everything’s manufactured in a fairly hostile country is the biggest violation of the Tim Cook strategy that could possibly exist.

Kyle Chan: Another parallel is the way that all of these U.S. chip designers depend on TSMC. I tweeted earlier — and it’s funny, the numbers still hold a year later — but Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have a combined market cap of $15 trillion, give or take some trillions. Yet they all rely on TSMC for advanced semiconductors, for AI chips, for smartphones.

It’s incredible that there’s this amount of value that’s created on the American side from these companies, purely from design. All those companies I’m talking about, maybe with the exception of Tesla, outsource all the manufacturing. For the high-end chips, that goes to TSMC. TSMC itself is probably one of the most valuable companies in Asia, but itself is an order of magnitude less.

There are two big questions. One is, how did we get to this point where we were allowing global risk to be concentrated so much on a single firm or a single country? Same thing with Apple and China. But then on the other side too, do you lose something from separating design and manufacturing?

Your stories about Apple engineers flying back and forth, deeply embedding themselves with Chinese suppliers, bringing the machinery, doing this — you have this phrase, “man-on-mirror” structure that I love. That was very interesting. That was actually for Korea, but a similar model later on for China, maybe 10x. How much can the two be separated and how much can you still be innovating at the cutting edge when you know your manufacturers are somewhere else, maybe in a different country altogether, maybe 6,000 miles away?

Jordan Schneider: I want to push back on that characterization. It’s a misnomer to say NVIDIA is a design firm. They’re constantly flying back and forth to TSMC. The innovation required to create not only the chips but these entire racks is incredibly manufacturing and hard tech intensive. It’s not only sitting with EDA tools and rearranging where circuits go. A similar story can be told from their perspective.

Patrick McGee: Andy Grove, Intel’s co-founder, gave a great interview to Bloomberg Businessweek in 2010, where he lamented that everything had left America’s shores. He said we’re going to miss out on shop floor innovation — that if you’re not in the factory working on the next product, you’re going to lose out. He was concerned about the shortsightedness of it, and that was quite a profound lesson.

I come back to this later in the book to highlight how any number of Western companies completely outsource without knowing how to build things anymore. It’s not clear to me that Facebook has any idea how to build the Portal. The Portal isn’t a device that’s out there anymore, but as I understand it, it was a product that was completely outsourced to Asian companies who knew how to do it.

Apple is in a different boat — they do know how to build things. They have the experiential know-how built on proprietary processes. We know about them doing iOS, but they also do software and operating systems for machines. We don’t know about that because we’re not on the factory lines.

The problem, as I quote from engineer Michael Hillman who has 16 years of experience, is that to execute any of those plans, they need China. The line I often use is that an iPhone has roughly 1,000 components. If you’re building a million iPhones a day, that means you’re managing the logistics, manufacturing, and production of one billion components daily. There’s one country on earth that’s able to execute that. Anyone else will take at least 10 to 15 years to reach that stage. Because China is an increasingly belligerent country, they won’t let that happen.

If you follow high-quality engineering on a map, America had total dominance at the end of World War II. They began teaching the Japanese to build radar and electronics industries. When they hit supply constraints and the yen rose in value, Japanese entrepreneurs went to their former colonies — Taiwan and South Korea — to do the same thing. When Taiwan hit its own constraints and had better relations with mainland China, the Taiwanese entrepreneurs 台商 went to China and built immense manufacturing capacity over the last four decades.

The next natural place to go would be India. Vietnam to some degree, but Vietnam doesn’t have the size. India is the next logical place if you play this game. But no one knows that better than Beijing, and they want technology transfer to be a one-way gate. The information comes in, but it certainly doesn’t go to Karnataka.

That’s where Apple has this big predicament right now. It makes perfect sense to set up production lines in India, but the machinery is now produced in India and blocked by Beijing. The experiential know-how is in the minds of Chinese engineers — from low-skilled workers to PhDs — and they can’t get visas to India. That’s why Apple is captured. I’m not using that as a line to sell books. I don’t know what strategic decision Apple can make that would untie the knot with China. The more plausible scenario is that they retie another knot and end up with a bifurcated supply chain. But that’s not in China’s interest, and if it’s not in China’s interest, then good luck to Cupertino — I don’t know how they’re going to execute that.

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Kyle Chan: This is a very big topic in the scholarly and development world about whether this whole “flying geese” model — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China’s moment — whether that ends with China. Apple is perhaps one of the best examples, but there are many other areas where maybe the auto industry will end up in China and there’s no next flying geese destination. Maybe a little bit to Vietnam and Thailand for transshipment to get around tariffs.

India is always the question. India wants to be next and has been waiting for a long time, watching China’s rise in anguish, thinking “that should be us.” They’re making a big push with manufacturing and have their own major industrial policy, especially targeting iPhone and consumer electronics manufacturing. To some extent, there seems to be success on paper — the oft-quoted statistic that 20% of iPhones are now assembled in India.

But there are big questions about how much of the real supply chain can be brought into the country the way China had done, whether that’s bringing in foreign firms to invest in manufacturing or cultivating domestic suppliers.

Jordan Schneider: The case study I’m looking forward to seeing play out over the next few years is wearables. Meta made all of the Oculus devices in China, and a few months ago, they said they’re going to try to get GoerTek, their Chinese contract manufacturer, to do half of it in Vietnam. Good luck with that.

Google’s now getting into the game. They had a big announcement a few months ago and did a big talent acquisition of HTC, which was a Taiwanese-based VR company, and are obviously trying to price all this in and diversify.

But you have six or seven Chinese manufacturers who are ahead of the game when it comes to what’s currently on the market in the West — when you look at Meta Ray-Bans as the main thing people have been exposed to. There’s that dynamic, but beyond creating redundancies around the world, it’s clear that doubling down on China will get you to the frontier of technology faster than trying to be cute in different countries.

The Apple Vision Pro — not a huge commercial success, but an incredible technical accomplishment — give me a break if you think you can try to make that at scale or with anywhere near the level of policy and precision that Chinese contract manufacturers were able to deliver.

Patrick McGee: It’s worth noting that’s Luxshare, not Foxconn — the rise of the red supply chain in action. The other example I’d point out is Sam Altman and Jony Ive coming up with their next device. Where’s that going to be built? If you’re Jony Ive, you might demand the best, and the easy thing would be to say, “Of course we’re going to work with the Chinese partners that he knows from three decades at Apple.”

On the other hand, he must be more awake to the issues I point to in the book than anybody. He might very well know the political agenda of Trump and all the ways that could be used in his favor to build out a nascent supply chain here.

It’s much easier to do when you’re beginning to build units literally in the tens because you’re doing prototypes, rather than in the quarter billion that Apple deals with — Apple’s scale is so big that sometimes you get off by an order of magnitude.

Apple in China, Future Edition 養虎為患

Kyle Chan: The phrase I kept thinking about was “training your replacement.” Apple is different, but there’s this pattern we notice repeatedly where China brings in foreign firms attracted by China’s efficient, nimble manufacturing base. They set up shop, and then — maybe it takes decades — you end up with a whole crop of Chinese competitors that first nibble away at your market share within China, then start expanding and going global.

You see this happening right now with the EV industry and Tesla. There’s a whole debate about how much Tesla turbocharged China’s EV industry or how much was already there, with Tesla playing a catfish role.

Reading your book, Apple had some of this problem. Samsung is the most famous long-term global competitor, but also Huawei and then a whole fleet of Chinese smartphone competitors — Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo. You talk about how Apple kept trying to innovate on both design and manufacturing to stay a step ahead of the competition, at least up until recently. They were able to maintain their position in the global market, even within China, even with all the pressures of domestic competitors, in the high-end smartphone market.

Could you talk about this problem and how Apple dealt with this feeling of potentially creating the very competitors that become existential threats in other industries?

Patrick McGee: This is a great segue into one of my favorite chapters, Chapter 36, called “Five Alarm Fire”, because this is what happens when Apple realizes the competitors in China have caught up with them.

What’s amazing about the chapter is that it’s exclusively based on court documents that were made public but were never found by another journalist. I found them 16 months ago, but I’m the only person who’s written about them, even since I published the book nobody has gone to do their own deep dive. We’re talking about more than a thousand pages — depositions of Tim Cook and others, internal emails between Tim Cook and the board of directors at Apple, between him and production staff and his underlings.

The entire issue is about how the iPhone XR (pronounced “ten R”) is a dud, and they know it’s a dud. It’s geared toward the Chinese market, yet the Chinese are all deciding to buy a competitor from Huawei. Apple knew this for several weeks and then told investors that everything was fine.

The chapter is called “Five Alarm Fire” because that’s what a VP of Sales or Finance described the situation as — fire department jargon for when at least a hundred people are needed on the scene. The quote from Tim Cook, at least a week before he talks to investors, is: “This is a disaster. We need all hands on deck now.” There are people within Apple who are panicking about this.

What happened is that the tenth-anniversary iPhone is the first one with that infinity pool design — you get rid of the thumbprint and have Face ID. That didn’t ship until November 2017. Then, by April 2018, four or five months later, all four of the major Chinese brands have an infinity pool-like rival. Cupertino was expecting to bask in the glow of this amazing device, and literally everybody caught up.

You realize the Chinese went from mimicry to — maybe they’re still in the stage of mimicry there — but they’re surprising Apple with how quickly they’re able to keep up. Now, fast-forwarding, they’re in a stage where they’re doing things that Apple isn’t doing. The example I always point to is the Mate XT from Huawei, which unfolds twice. There are also silicon carbide batteries in the latest Vivo phones that have better density, faster recharge time, and longer duration.

Apple is no longer the company to pay attention to if you’re looking for the most cutting-edge phone. There’s something disquieting about that, especially because not only are the Chinese manufacturing them, but they’re doing the industrial design and product design. They’ve taken that pyramid structure I described in the book, put it organically in their own companies, and are now outmaneuvering Apple on multiple levels of the pyramid.

Kyle Chan: Now we’re seeing this especially with AI features coming out. Huawei is doing a lot with its Harmony operating system, trying to have AI everywhere you want it — and maybe in many places where you don’t, like summaries where you don’t want summaries, maybe mimicking what iPhone users are getting used to now with Apple Intelligence.

There’s this big question mark about whether Apple will be able to catch up and be on the cutting edge in that space. There are recent issues with linking up with Alibaba, for example, for an AI partner in China. If you don’t have that kind of partnership, whether as Apple, you can still be competitive in the Chinese domestic market.

Patrick McGee: You brought this up because this is mostly post-manuscript for me — it’s not in the book, yet it’s current and dynamic as a discussion. First, Apple has done poorly with Siri. Siri might have been amazing 14 years ago, but it hasn’t kept up. It’s not even a large language model, so it’s not doing the most basic stuff.

Because of Siri’s failure, Apple has to work with a partner. Because ChatGPT or anyone else, such as Perplexity AI isn’t available in China, they have to work with a Chinese partner. In a sense, that’s the closest thing we’re going to see on the product side to Apple having a joint venture — maybe it’s not technically a joint venture, but my book is about how Apple consolidated all hardware engineering into China over the last 25 years.

Are you telling me that, over the next 25 years, they’re going to work hand-in-glove with Baidu or Alibaba and essentially do the same thing with AI?

This is already the stuff of movies regarding existential risk to humanity. We’re talking about the most complex, consequential thing in tech, if not in business or anything writ large. This is up there with fire and the computer. I don’t know how much sense it makes for Apple to be training one of these companies to make their product better, which they would inevitably have to do. They’re not going to use an off-the-shelf AI tool.

Jordan Schneider: I don’t know if they can train themselves to make their product better when it comes to AI.

Patrick McGee: That’s a great point. We are at the stage where you’ll buy your next phone based on the AI features it has, and Apple is very much failing there. We are recording this during WWDC, so who knows? Maybe we’re way wrong by the time this comes out, but I feel like that’s not going to be the case. They’re behind in AI in an embarrassing way.

Jordan Schneider: One more detailed question before we do a closing one or two. The $55 billion annual investment in China — can you deconstruct that number? Where did it come from and what is included?

Patrick McGee: Apple was on the back foot in 2013 when Xi Jinping 习近平 came to power. They’re worried that either their products are going to be blacklisted or they’re going to have to form joint ventures to continue operating in the country. This is total anathema to Cupertino — not what they want to happen.

This team of people that came into the company, either hired or appointed, called themselves “the gang of eight.” They’re the first people who are senior, living and working in the country. This is where you pass the baton from Foxconn to Apple. Apple realized: we can outsource our manufacturing to Foxconn, but we cannot outsource our political relationships.

They take ownership of this and do their own supply chain study effectively in tandem with the government affairs team. What they realized is that they’re investing $55 billion into Chinese factories — into factories operating in the country.

China has this concept called “registered capital.” Apple, in any given year, doesn’t make as much money as Walmart, and Walmart gets 60 to 70% of their products from China. But Walmart’s not making investments in the country. If you’re importing kitchenware and action toys from China, that doesn’t count as registered capital or investment — that’s just spend. You’re buying that stuff, putting it on a ship, and selling it in Arkansas.

If you were Volkswagen or GM, you’re training workers to run a production line. For a certain period — 18 to 24 months — it counts as an investment into the country. The training costs of setting up a production line count as fixed assets, the same way that putting machinery on the production line is counted.

Apple realizes their investment is more like Volkswagen or GM’s than Walmart’s. They’re not sitting in Hong Kong ordering parts from Shenzhen. They’re going into the factory and training them how to do all this stuff. Their training costs, which are effectively wages, should be counted as fixed assets, as registered capital.

But they go further. Unlike Volkswagen or GM, who set up a production line and have it running for seven years because the lifecycle of a car is about seven years, the iPhone never gets to that stage where it’s running. They’re always upending the design of every product in the portfolio. They’re able to count a whole lot of training costs and wages, in addition to billions in machinery that’s put on the production line, as registered capital.

Someone could debate whether all that spending should actually be counted as investment, but it’s not an argument with me — it’s an argument with Apple and with Beijing, which accepted the argument. That’s where the money comes from, why it’s counted as registered capital, and what distinguishes them from other companies that don’t do the training. Other companies are buying off-the-shelf parts, whereas Apple is working hand-in-glove with hundreds of factories.

That’s why they’re able to operate without a joint venture — because they can say, “You have no idea what influence we’re having on hundreds of factories across the country.”

Jordan Schneider: For Kyle and Patrick, the contract manufacturers that Apple shepherded — do you have a sense of how their relationship with Chinese handset manufacturers is similar or different?

Kyle Chan: There’s a lot of overlap. You can break it down — Lens Technology is a supplier not only to other Chinese smartphone manufacturers but to others as well. GoerTek and some of these suppliers supply across the board.

The order of operations depends, but some of them were brought up by Apple and then helped the rest of the Chinese supply chain. Some of them were already serving what were, for them, lower-tier customers like Oppo and Vivo before they got their Apple contract. It’s a mixed bag.

I also love the part where you mention Apple trying to navigate Chinese politics, because good luck to anyone trying to navigate that.

They tried to cozy up to Sun Zhengcai 孙政才, who was the party secretary of Chongqing. Apple tried to invest in data centers there, which at a local government politics level is great — you want to show that you’re bringing in investment, generating economic activity, especially when it comes to anything high-tech. That’s a bunch of gold stars.

That turned out to be a mistake because Sun didn’t end up becoming the successor to Xi — it turned out Xi was the successor to Xi. Sun didn’t even end up in the very top echelon of party leadership.

There are other ways where Apple has been incredibly adept, especially Tim Cook, at navigating Chinese politics and American politics at the same time. It’s not a job I would envy, although he’s probably pretty well compensated.

Mood Music:

I spent two weeks in May visiting family in Tel Aviv. What follows are some scattered impressions.

A week before my flight the Houthis hit Ben Gurion airport so all flights were cancelled except El Al’s. Half the gates were unused at the airport and there were no non-Jewish tourists.

Houthi missiles were better from a lifestyle perspective than Hezbollah or Hamas ones as you get five minutes’ warning instead of just 60 seconds. It surprised me how diligent most people still are in going into shelters. Waking up at 3am is no fun but at least the baby’s crib was in the shelter already.

I met up with an Israeli-American reporter who covers politics for western media. “When my mom in Maryland calls me up to complain about what she saw Trump doing on MSNBC, I pat her on the head and let her know how much worse it can get.”

The hostages occupy enormous mental headspace in every Israeli. Murals and bumper stickers drape the physical space of the city, parents and relatives are constantly on tv. The hostages and their stories seem like a shared language (like how this book review characterized the Marvel Universe today) where first names hold totemic value.

At a playground one day a helicopter flew over and everyone got concerned as they knew it was a military medical transport flying back from Gaza.

Vibes

Is there a city that does good weather better than TLV on a Thursday night? Restaurants and bars pour out into street after street, you see groups of 20+, often intergenerational, out together. Fridays are much quieter as many go home to see their families. Does Israel have the answer for the loneliness epidemic?

No international djs come anymore. Boiler Room memory holed the shows it put on in Israel, but they’re still getting protested because they got bought out by KKR who is apparently too pro-Israel for their audience.

Tel Aviv needs to get abundance-pilled. Rent and housing costs are both maybe 85% of new york city.

Cigarettes are everywhere. Ten percent of Israeli teens smoke, not France’s 15% but far higher than America’s 1.5%. Fancy restaurants have outdoor smoking and non-smoking sections.

Folks called up from reserve duty go out with their gun in flip flops because they have to report the next day and it’s more convenient to carry around.

Taxis charge a 25% surcharge on shabbat.

I ran into one Chinese guy, maybe 30, who’s in town to sell lightbulbs (“we’re midmarket, can’t compete with Philips in America but too fancy for Africa and LatAm!”). He had no idea about the missile warnings.

Food

I do not like salads in general but immensely enjoyed every one I had in TLV. Dishes were always just on the edge of being over-salted. The country has share plate-maxxed.

The burger culture is extremely strong. The most outlandish attention-getting twist on the formula I saw was one shop sprinkling sugar on the bun.

Many restaurants were short-staffed due to reservist call-ups.

Babies

Secular Israelis have more babies than any other comparably rich country. You feel it in the street with lots of families and young children everywhere with even upscale restaurants all welcome to kids. I wonder just how having such ultra-fertile religious sects pushes these numbers up.

People are far friendlier to my 9-month-old than in new york and they’re also more than happy to tell you how to parent. I got told off three times for having a Doona stroller as apparently it’s bad for babies’ backs?

Seeing my child play with other kids too young to know war when Gaza is a 90 minute drive away redefined cognitive dissonance for me. While I was there, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert published an oped saying that “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians…. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

And speaking of war crimes…

Books I Read

Arendt—Eichmann in Jerusalem

I would have read this years ago if anyone told me how funny it was! As she wrote to a friend, “You are the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted—namely that I wrote Eichimann in Jerusalem in a curious state of euphoria.” It shows and is so much better for it.

World-historically funny.

And now a little darker…

This is in dialogue with what Olmert said on Ezra recently.

You have to change the nature of the dialogue and the appeal to the Israeli people and start to talk in a different way. Instead of warning us all the time that we are on the verge of destruction, which is what this government is doing now for 15 years, not just in the last couple of years.

I remember the days when I was fighting Hezbollah. After my war against them, everyone said how we failed and so on and so forth. But a few years later, I started to hear that they are so powerful, that there is a danger to the very existence of Israel if Hezbollah attacks Israel. And we keep hearing all the time that Iran is threatening the very existence of the state of Israel. And we hear also about Hamas today — these days, when Netanyahu talks, why does he need to explain the war? Because Hamas can become a danger to the very existence of the state of Israel.

This has to change. You have to open a dialogue with Israeli society on a different basis, on the basis of hope — something which will change the lifestyle and the hopes of the younger generations. Then we will not have to fight all the time.

“Look, the guy keeps winning, he must be doing something right!”

On the moral hollowness of the generals who waited until 1944 to turn on Hitler.

Career myopia, Nazi-style

Can’t stop pulling quotes from this book it is just too perfect. Of course, literally no-one who made it to Nuremberg has enough guts to defend Nazi ideology—otherwise they would have stuck it out in the bunker.

She closes chapters better than anyone I’ve come across. “Totalitarian domination tried to establish holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil would disappear, but holes of oblivion do not exist. One man will always be left to tell the story.”

TLV Restaurant Recommendations and some more clown excerpts from Eichmann in Jerusalem

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