is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, former U.S. Trade Representative, and a substacker. He joins ChinaTalk to discuss:

• Why his 1992 dissertation on détente is suddenly relevant again – and why “positive linkage” fails to change adversary behavior,

• How mutual assured destruction has shifted from nuclear weapons to rare earths, supply chains, and technology, and why the U.S. and China are stuck in a costly, uncomfortable stalemate,

• How think tanks work — salary levels, where the money comes from, and what to expect from Mike’s tenure.

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Détente Redux

Jordan Schneider: We’re going to take it all the way back to 1992. You did your dissertation about this idea of détente and how it evolved from the ’50s all the way through the end of the Reagan administration. Coming to your conclusion, the echoes of where we are today and that theme seem to be very striking. Why don’t you pick a quote and then kick it off from there?

Mike Froman: “To retain the support of the American public, U.S.-Soviet relations must be based on reciprocity. Détente suffered no greater liability than the public’s perception that the Soviets exploited it at the United States’ expense. To be reciprocal, however, U.S. policy must embody reasonable expectations.”

Mike Froman: I thought I was writing a historic piece. The end of the Cold War came. I put the book on the shelf, thought it would never be opened again. And yet, Jordan, there you found it and indeed have highlighted that there might be some relevance to the U.S.-China relationship today.

Jordan Schneider: I played this game with Kurt Campbell. He did his thesis on Soviet relations with South Africa and the tensions of how the U.S. navigated that dynamic. Everything’s coming back.

We’re sitting here in the fall of 2025. We have a president who is probably as far towards the “let’s do détente” mindset as you could have gotten in this political moment. What do you think are the bounds of what an American president today could domestically go towards if they were in a détente mindset?

Mike Froman: The issue of détente back in the old Soviet days was — was it a strategy to transform the Soviet Union by engaging with it, or was it a reflection that we had to engage with it because we had overwhelming common interests? Some of those are the same questions that come up today in the U.S.-China relationship. Do we think we can fundamentally change the trajectory of China, or do we just simply have to accept it and live with it, coexist with it, and create some rules of the road for managing potential conflicts?

Any president right now figuring out how to coexist with China will have to determine — where do we need to cooperate on issues of national security? Where do we have to compete around the economy and technology? And where do we have to be very careful to manage potential conflicts that could blow up and create a kinetic conflict between us — whether around Taiwan, the South China Sea, or otherwise? Balancing those different baskets of interests is the most challenging thing for any administration to deal with.

Jordan Schneider: You wrote, “The theory of using détente as a means of transformation was based largely on the misguided assumption that the U.S. could use cooperation on common interests as a source of leverage over conflicting ones. Positive linkage was not particularly effective, however, because success in areas of common interest did not easily translate into success in areas of divergent ones.”

You published this book in 1992, which is a key moment of translating that kind of — in your estimation — flawed thinking of how we went about this with the Soviet Union to the next 25 or 30 years of American policy towards China. Can you talk about those parallels?

Mike Froman: Yes. The U.S.-China relationship is quite a bit different than the U.S.-Soviet relationship, first and foremost because of our economic interdependence. Russia and the Soviet Union were never terribly significant economic players in the global economy, whereas China very much is. We have developed over the last several decades a great deal of interdependence with them.

The leverage question’s a little bit different. Could you use economic leverage — the fact that we have a common interest in maintaining strong trade relations — as positive linkage into other issues? Or could you cooperate in areas like climate change, which both sides thought at one point were of common interest, and translate that into broader cooperation in other issues?

Having said all that, you’re right to point out that it’s proved to be relatively limited. In China’s view, they in many respects separated areas of common interest from areas of potential conflict and from areas of competition, and were unwilling to allow cooperation in one area to really affect their interests and how they pursue them in the others.

Jordan Schneider: What is your sense of why the theory of the case was so directly ported over to China? The argument through the Clinton administration, Bush administration, first half of Obama was basically — we’re going to develop leverage, develop these common interests and they’ll see the light. We didn’t get that these are both two party-led systems. There are some commonalities, but there are pieces of learning that maybe folks overlooked from that experience. It felt like a brave new world. Given your view over the past 30 years of this arc, what do you think got lost in translation there?

Mike Froman: If the Cold War was defined at least in part by an ideological battle between Western liberal, capitalist, market-oriented, democratic-oriented principles and the communist totalitarian principles of the former Soviet Union, the view at the end of the Cold War was that it was much more of a unipolar moment. Not necessarily U.S. hegemony, but the hegemony of the open liberal democratic capitalist perspective.

That was embraced by China. If you go back to the days of Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji and the reform trajectory that they laid out, they were very much on the path towards market-oriented reforms, opening up — not necessarily democracy. Those who thought that opening up on the economic side would lead to political pluralism were probably being overly optimistic. But there was certainly a view that China was on a path towards greater integration in the global economy, which they have been, and greater market-oriented policies to help lead them there.

They were on that trajectory for quite a while. It didn’t go as far or as fast and it wasn’t as linear as people expected. The advent of President Xi, who was willing to either stop or reverse some of those reforms, was probably not as anticipated as proved to be necessary.

There was this dominance of a set of principles that we thought could bring China into the international system and bring the U.S. and China into a more cooperative relationship. What happened was that China changed course and didn’t go as far as we expected. Indeed, China reversed many of the gains that we thought we had seen.

Escalation Dominance and Stalemate

Jordan Schneider: Escalation dominance — a phrase we thought was dead and dusted in the bin of history — is now back. Is this the right mental framework folks should be using when thinking about these trade wars? What is and isn’t useful when trying to take the arms control frameworks and put them onto what you’re seeing with the U.S. and China with respect to economics and technology?

Mike Froman: There certainly is a rigorous competition between the two in technology, economics, and military. The Chinese buildup of both its conventional and nuclear forces is very much top of mind.

Where the analogy may play out — it does come from nuclear weapons, but it’s not necessarily the escalation issues. It’s really back to the notion of mutual assured destruction. What we’ve seen more recently in the U.S.-China relationship is we have leverage in terms of access to our markets and access to our technology, but China too has leverage in terms of their capacity to control critical choke points of key technologies — whether it’s critical minerals, rare earths, magnets, et cetera. That’s, in my view, probably just the tip of the iceberg of the kinds of technologies and products that they control and that they have now demonstrated a willingness to use their leverage with us.

If anything, we’ve reached a stalemate where both sides realize that neither can escalate in a costless way. Indeed, it may require them to sit down and come up with some rules of the road for managing the relationship going forward.

Jordan Schneider: There’s this misreading of the history of the Cold War that once you had mutually assured destruction, everything was cool by the 1970s, which, as you as well as anyone know, was not necessarily the case. You had both countries developing new weapons systems and wrestling for that nuclear primacy and escalation dominance.

If we are in a world now where the U.S. and China both understand that they can take big, painful chunks of GDP without going to war or doing incredibly aggressive cyber attacks, where does that lead us? Because the game doesn’t stop, right? We’re still having different moves that both sides can play.

Mike Froman: Exactly. The competition doesn’t stop. As you said, back in the Cold War, it wasn’t all sweetness and light once you hit mutual assured destruction, but it did prevent a direct nuclear exchange between the two largest nuclear powers. They had to find other ways of positioning vis-à-vis each other, whether through proxy wars or other elements that allowed them to try and gain some advantage over each other.

That’s probably true here in the China relationship as well. It’s likely to lead to a certain degree of selective decoupling, whether it’s on advanced technology issues where we’ll go our way and China will go its way. The question is for the rest of the relationship — to what degree can there be a normalization of trade and other interactions?

There is a lot of non-strategic trade. The Trump administration is evolving in its views towards — what can we actually grow or produce here in the United States and where do we actually need to import from other countries? Can we take T-shirts and sneakers and toys from China without compromising our national security? I would think so. Allowing them in at a decent rate is good for particularly low-income Americans who spend a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on the basics of supporting their family.

But there are likely to be some technologies that we’re going to want to keep out of China’s hands, and China is going to have some choke point technologies that they can control over us. Hopefully that again reaches some sort of balance.

Jordan Schneider: Say we’re in 2028 and both countries have had three years to do more economic securitization and the size and amount of the bites that each country can take out of the other one diminishes. America has a few more mines. China does a better job of making semiconductors. Is the world in a more or less safe place? Or does just the fact that each side is still going to have this leverage — if they are the world’s two largest economies and still do trade — is that still the salient thing? Does playing around the edges even mean all that much?

Mike Froman: It’s unclear at this point because it’s very much a work in progress. It’s only been in the last few months that we’ve seen China’s willingness not only to turn off access to a particular batch of technologies like the magnets back in April 2025, but demonstrate a willingness to put in place a whole export control licensing system which could disrupt global supply chains in fundamental ways. They’ve now demonstrated their capacity to do that. We’ll see how they actually go about implementing it.

This ultimately could be, ironically, a force for stability with each side recognizing that the other side has some significant leverage. But to me, the bigger issue is we’re not really dealing with the other very significant questions in the relationship. The summit that President Trump and President Xi had in Korea — the main issues were fentanyl, soybeans and TikTok. We’re not asking ourselves: how do we get to the fundamental relationship between the two economies around China’s strategy of export-led growth, excess capacity, high subsidization of critical areas? How do we deal with that and the potential ongoing tensions that’s likely to create going forward?

Whether we’re on a more stable or a less stable path, in my view, depends on whether we get to those underlying issues and try and resolve some of those. Those have not yet been put back on the table, let alone issues like Taiwan, South China Sea, North Korea, nonproliferation, et cetera.

Jordan Schneider: We just had a whole conversation about how using international diplomacy as a means of domestic transformation is a bit of a fool’s errand, right?

Mike Froman: It’s not about domestic transformation. If you remember back in the Soviet Union, the idea was if we engaged with them or took other actions vis-à-vis them, somehow their system would collapse. They would see the values of democracy, the values of market orientation and everything would fall apart. They would inevitably collapse.

This isn’t about making China collapse. It’s about seeing whether we can come up with rules of the road so that China and the rest of the global economy can coexist without undue tension. Right now we’re not really dealing with those issues.

Jordan Schneider: If we’re defining “dealing with those issues” — for my first job out of college, I covered trade policy for the Eurasia Group. I was listening to every single one of your speeches trying to figure out if this meant like the U.S.-China BIT was 7% more likely to happen.

With the second Trump administration, there are two disjunctures that we’ve seen from the past 20 years of American foreign policymaking. The biggest one is just the risk tolerance and the ability to take big swings that may end up being either illegal or backfiring horribly, which the presidents that you worked for were a little more reluctant to do, for better or for worse.

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If you’re sitting as USTR and you have the threat of putting 50% tariffs on the countries you’re negotiating with — be it China with a U.S.-China BIT or with all the allies that you were talking around with the TPP — to what extent do you think that unlocks new political economies and new negotiating paths that weren’t possible if at the end of the day you have a president who just wants to be nice to the countries that we have treaty allies with?

Mike Froman: The Trump administration’s threat and use of tariffs has created very significant negotiating leverage and has gotten countries to come to the table on a whole range of issues — whether it’s fentanyl, migration, or economic issues — and to agree to things that they previously would very likely not have agreed to. The administration in the short run has very much demonstrated that access to the U.S. market is a source of negotiating leverage and other countries have responded to it. They haven’t been happy about responding to it but that’s okay.

The question is what are the longer-term implications and whether it makes it more difficult to gain their cooperation on some other issue down the road. But only time will tell. In the meantime, if you had asked people a year ago whether we would have this raft of agreements that the administration has rolled out with anywhere between 10% and 25% or 30% tariffs on other countries — quite asymmetric agreements in many respects — most people would have said it was highly unlikely, but it has proven to be the case.

Purely from a negotiating point of view, if you have the capacity with credibility to put tariffs on regardless of your international obligations and regardless of the long-term implications, you can probably get a fair amount done in the short run.

By the way, the Trump administration’s skepticism about some of the mechanisms of engagement with China — like these big bilateral fora that we managed for years: the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the Security Economic Dialogue, et cetera — I share some of that skepticism. They involved thousands of person-hours of work and produced communiqués which I don’t think necessarily advanced the ball that far and show the limitations of that form of diplomatic engagement.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t other forms of engagement that make sense, including ones backed up by a series of potential actions. But certainly it’s healthy to look back and say, what did these things accomplish and where can we do better?

Jordan Schneider: Looking forward, if there is a Democratic president in 2028 — a president that you would want to work for, who was less scared to play hardball the way the Trump administration has when it comes to access to the American domestic market — a president that you would be more sympathetic to in terms of their ultimate aims, where would you want to see the new leverage that has clearly been brought to the fore when it comes to domestic market access? How would you want to use those cards?

Mike Froman: Ultimately, it’s in the U.S. interest not to go it alone in a lot of areas, but to bring allies and partners into the arena. Using whatever leverage we have to get allies and partners to work with us on difficult issues — including a common approach to competition, a common approach to adversaries, a common approach to national defense, whether it’s support for NATO or engagement vis-à-vis China — those are all very important.

We don’t have to have everything reshored to the United States. If we have coalitions of the willing, coalitions of the ambitious, trusted allies and partners who we can work with to make sure we’ve got adequate supply to critical inputs that we need for our national security and for our competitiveness more broadly — I would use whatever leverage the U.S. has to bring our allies and partners to the table with that goal in mind.

Jordan Schneider: This idea of economic security is very nebulous. The Fed has this clear thing they’re trying to do — 2% inflation, full employment. It feels like all these discussions about what economic security is very quickly go into here’s what we should do for this sector, here’s what we do for that sector, here’s what we should do for this technology. But there’s not an overarching framework of what the end state we’re trying to achieve or work towards is.

I want to run an essay contest around how to define it in more concrete ways with numbers attached. How would you frame that question? If you had an answer or an equation off the top of your head, I’d be curious for that as well.

Mike Froman: First of all, you should read our recently released CFR task force report on economic security. The task force was co-chaired by Gina Raimondo, former Commerce Secretary, Justin Muzinich, former Treasury Deputy Secretary in the Trump administration, and Jim Taiclet, who’s the CEO of Lockheed. We had a couple dozen CFR members with a wide range of backgrounds in technology and defense.

I flag that because one of the fundamental sets of questions that the task force was focused on is — what are the parameters? What are the guardrails? What are the limiting principles on economic security?

For decades, the focus of economic policy really had been on efficiency — the most efficient supply chains around the world. Companies put their factories and sited their suppliers where it made most economic sense to do so. A lot of that ultimately led to China, given not just the labor differential, but also its infrastructure, its management practices, and just how efficient it was as a manufacturing floor for the U.S. We found ourselves overly dependent on one country, or in the case of semiconductors, on Taiwan and China.

What economic security fundamentally means is really proper risk management. The number one principle of risk management is diversification. You want diversified supply chains, resilient supply chains. Particularly when it comes to national security core interests — such as the materials that go into a missile or into an F-16 — we can’t be dependent on our adversary for them. Figuring out where to draw that line is the goal.

It’s easy to say missile parts, F-16 parts — we should not be dependent on China for those. But what about active pharmaceutical ingredients? What about the supply chain for semiconductors? What about PPE that we saw during COVID? Where do you draw the line?

That’s the big challenge for policymakers going forward because each of these involves a trade-off. There’s a reason the manufacturing was sited in China — it was the economically most efficient thing to do. Any other approach is going to be, almost by definition, more expensive, less efficient. That may well be worth the cost. The question is, how much are we willing to pay additional for whatever product it is in order to have more resilience, more redundancy, more diversification, and better national security?

We ought to be willing to pay something. The question is how much. Maybe we’re willing to pay a fair amount to make sure our semiconductors, our missile parts, our F-16 parts are made in the United States or in a close ally’s jurisdiction. But we may not be willing to pay quite as much to make sure our sneakers and our T-shirts and our socks are made in the United States. That’s the kind of conversation we should be having — really about trade-offs.

Jordan Schneider: My question was an implicit critique of that report because I think it skipped the base question and then went pretty quickly to this sector, that sector, the other sector.

Mike Froman: Let me push back on you, Jordan. It decided, instead of focusing just on the theoretical, to say — here are three critical sectors. We could have picked a dozen. Here are three critical sectors. Let’s see what it looks like through the lens of a particular use case. Whether it was AI, quantum, or biotechnology, those each have particular needs that need to be addressed. Everybody would agree that at least in those three areas, we need to be a leader in those technologies. How do we maintain that leadership?

Jordan Schneider: The core issue here is escalation dominance — when can China inflict enough politically visible pain on American policymakers to force them to back down?

When we define it down to even the non-perishable consumables — I am the father of a young child and hit this weird crunch where the tariffs made it such that you couldn’t find car seats because every car seat in the world is made in China, apparently. It just seems to me that there’s just so much that is going to be dependent on the two countries.

Maybe there’s some 80/20 or 90/10 principle where we’re still going to rely on China for 90% of the screws that go into the F-16s, and if they take 10% away, we’ll still have this much of our military capacity back. But closing the loop for all the things like you did in the 1960s relative to the U.S. and Soviet Union is not feasible.

It seems like there are two relevant variables here. One is the long-term GDP cut that China can make from being dominant in something. The other is how much short-term political pain can an adversary use to squeeze American policymakers to do something that they wouldn’t otherwise want to do. Is there another aspect to it? Am I missing something here?

Mike Froman: That captures it. But what you’re pointing out is very much the importance of distinguishing between the strategic and the non-strategic. That points to the broader relationship as well.

In the Biden administration, it was the phrase “small yard, high fence.” What goes in the yard for control, and how small can you keep it? They were pretty selective and pretty targeted in terms of how they viewed that. Maybe some things would need to be added, maybe some things can come out of it. But the question is: what should be deemed as strategic either from the perspective of keeping key technologies out of China’s hands or ensuring that we have redundancy so we’re not overly dependent on China? And what can go anyway? What can be sold anyway?

Even in the height of the Cold War, we were buying wheat from the Soviet Union. Wheat was seen as non-strategic and we could buy wheat from them and still be at odds over various issues. With China, where are we willing to draw that line? To me, that’s really the question for the next phase. As the Trump administration engages now, there’s been a stabilization of escalation and de-escalation. The next phase should be: how are we going to define this relationship going forward?

Jordan Schneider: The ability to cause pain to the other side is always going to be there, but what tool you use to cause pain is the question. We’ve thankfully had some great norms develop around the use of nuclear weapons. We’ve had some norms around the use of conventional forces — TBD on those. All of the cyber stuff between the U.S. and China thus far has been of the snooping, not of the blowing up power plants variety.

But the fundamental question I have around economic security is — say that China wants to retain leverage on the U.S. and get politicians to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do in their druthers. It just seems like there are so many levers that you can pull as a peer competitor in the 2000s. It makes me worried that we’re working toward an end state of being resilient if the other side doesn’t want you to be resilient. It seems like a marathon where the end isn’t even something that’s realistic. You see what I’m getting at, Mike?

Mike Froman: I do. I sense that you’re feeling overwhelmed by the challenge. But that should be our opportunity to rise to the challenge. There’s a certain urgency, I believe, in one, assessing what the key dependencies are. And two, assessing what it takes to address them. Is it a combination of tariffs, industrial policy, investment, and regulatory changes? What is the toolbox that we need?

Thinking very strategically about that — including where allies and partners can play a role because they’ve got capacity in certain areas that we don’t, or because they can supplement our capacity and help us get to scale more quickly — and building a bipartisan, ongoing consensus around what it takes is an urgent need. That helps you get to that point of saying, yes, it may seem overwhelming, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

That’s what we’re doing right now. That’s what the CHIPS and Science Act did during the Biden administration. It said we cannot be 100% dependent on Taiwan and China for the packaging, etc., of chips. We’re going to begin to rebuild chip manufacturing capacity in the United States. The question is, what additional sectors do we need to do?

Take shipbuilding. Everybody believes we need more ships, whether it’s for the Navy or for merchants or otherwise. We don’t have a huge amount of shipbuilding capacity anymore. Can we work with Japan, Korea, and Finland on icebreakers? Who can we partner with to get there?

Mission, Money, and Talent at the CFR

Jordan Schneider: You gave me a little transition there — building a bipartisan consensus for decades of policymaking going forward. That seems to double as your vision for what the point of a think tank or CFR is, particularly now. What are the KPIs we’re going to give for Mike Froman’s reign as president of the CFR?

Mike Froman: Our mission is to inform U.S. engagement with the world. There are lots of different ways to engage. Our job is to flesh out what are the different mechanisms for engaging with these goals in mind that we’ve just been talking about. What are the trade-offs involved? What are the costs and benefits of going down one path or the other and helping policymakers in their decision of how to pursue that? Also helping opinion leaders and the broader American public understand and get their input on which of those trade-offs they’re comfortable with. That’s an important part of what the Council does.

We’re focused on policymakers like most think tanks, but we’re also focused on the broader American public through broad education efforts and media efforts, digital, etc., programs around the rest of the country with the goal of getting their input into how they view the role of the U.S. in the world and to help inform policymakers accordingly.

Jordan Schneider: How are you going to do things differently? What’s the Mike Froman twist on all this?

Mike Froman: We’re taking a step back and saying, just as the Council did — the Council was founded in 1921 after the end of the First World War, after the defeat of the League of Nations — to organize around trying to push back against trends of isolationism. In 1948, it was a place where the Marshall Plan and NATO were very much being worked on. In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, there was a lot of talk about geoeconomics and bringing economics into the national security sphere as well.

This is another one of those inflection points. As a Council, we’re going to take a step back and say, where do we go from here? We’re going through a major disruption right now. Fundamental questions about the nature of the global economy, of the trading system, of alliances, of how to manage adversaries, how to compete — these are all on the table. How can we help policymakers and the broader public understand different options for pursuing U.S. national interests and the trade-offs involved in each?

It’s a major studies effort, a major research and analysis effort, but also a major education effort — engaging with more audiences, non-traditional audiences, different kinds of media to engage with the rest of the country and get a sense of their input as well.

Jordan Schneider: From an internal organization structure perspective, what do you think of the model? What needs to change?

Mike Froman: The Council’s been around for a long time and is actually well-positioned for this moment in history because we’re not just a think tank focused on trying to influence the couple thousand people in Washington that are sitting in these meetings and trying to make decisions. We’re also focused — as a membership organization, a publisher of Foreign Affairs, an educational organization that provides material to high schools and colleges — on the broader American public. We do events all over the country. We’re relatively well hedged to both work with policymakers on one hand and work with the rest of the country on the other hand.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about money for a second. I assume you were on the other side of this in terms of large corporations funding various research efforts. What do you think about where funding comes from for think tanks in general, CFR in particular, and what makes sense and what doesn’t?

Mike Froman: Our funding’s obviously all public. It’s all on our website. It’s transparent. We don’t take any money from any government institution, including the U.S. government. We don’t take any money from corporations for research. Corporates can be members like other members and send their employees to our events, but they can’t involve themselves or set the agenda or influence our research agenda. That allows us to remain nonpartisan, allows us to remain independent. It’s one of the reasons that both our research and analysis and our publications are viewed highly as being independent and credible in that space.

What that means is we rely on — we’re a membership organization, so individuals pay dues. We’re blessed to have members who are philanthropic. We get money from foundations, some of the standard foundations that work in this area. That’s where our funding comes from. We have an endowment that’s been built up over the years as well, again, because of the generosity of our individual members.

Jordan Schneider: I’ve been on the other side of this, where you have a funder who is a corporation that wants you to write a certain thing. Do you think it’s unseemly? The dance is tricky, right? But without that, it would kind of only be CFR and Heritage left standing. There’s a lot of foreign government money as well.

Mike Froman: I’m not going to criticize my peers. I would just say that we’re lucky and we have a concerted strategy to make sure that we’re able to remain independent. That means no government money, no corporate money for research. That allows our fellows total freedom of speech. They can write whatever they like. As an institution, we take no institutional positions. We try to put our best research and analysis out there and make it available as broadly as possible.

Why are salaries so low

Jordan Schneider: Entry-level research associates come in with a $55K to $58K pay band at CFR. What are your thoughts on that, Mike?

Mike Froman: We would love to — we’re very lucky to have a great set of research assistants and entry-level people. There are a lot of people who want to go into the field of international relations. This is their first job. By the way, we view one of our core objectives of CFR as helping to identify, promote, and develop the next generation of diverse foreign policy expertise. We spend a lot of effort and time — whether it’s our interns, our research assistants, our junior staff, our term members — really focused on who the up-and-coming generation are, and what we can do to help them develop the skills and the expertise to succeed in that field.

As a nonprofit, obviously we’re subject to constraints, but we always look at what the market is and try our best to make sure we’re getting the very best quality people for the resources that we can expend.

Jordan Schneider: But it’s not a lot of money, right? These are really big, hard, important questions. It bums me out that we lose talent because folks who are coming out of school with debt or just see an opportunity to make 4x right out of college look at this field and say, “How can I go down this route?” It breaks my heart, really.

Mike Froman: Having been at the beginning of my career once upon a time, I can relate to that. Luckily, we have a lot of interest in the Council by people coming out of college, coming out of graduate school. There’s significant demand for the openings that we have. We have a great group of junior staff and research assistants. I’m really impressed with them, and we take a lot of effort to make sure we’re doing everything we can to develop them professionally.

But I also say, Jordan, we’d be delighted to take a major donation from you to the Council to help endow a new research assistance endowment program if you like.

Jordan Schneider: That was my next question. I am surprised that there isn’t some rich person out there who doesn’t want to have the next generation all be Mr. and Mrs. X fellows. Then they get to make $10 or $20 grand more. It’s not that much money in the grand scheme of things for all of the kudos and accolades you would get and all of these fresh young faces saying thank you so much, Mr. or Mrs. Whoever.

Mike Froman: We have been very fortunate to have some of those donors participate.

Jordan Schneider: How do you split your time? What’s the weekly daily pie chart? You’re now a take artist on Substack as well. How do you think about where your time should be spent?

Mike Froman: I live in Washington, and I spend about three days a week on average in New York and two days a week at our office here. Every week’s a little different. I travel around the rest of the country as well, doing events for CFR members and others.

I split my time between my own research and writing — as you say, I have a weekly column that I put out on Fridays that then gets posted on Substack. It’s part of our newsletter as well. I spend a lot of time working with our senior leadership team on our programming here, making sure that we are presenting a nonpartisan slate of participants here on our stage for events on all the major issues. I spend a certain amount of my time on internal management. We’ve got a great management team here, so I’ve been able to defer to a lot of them in terms of managing people and systems and things here, budgets, etc. Of course, a certain amount of time on fundraising. I do a bit with the press, a bit with the media to be helpful and out there. That fills a week.

Jordan Schneider: If you took a pill and could sleep 10 fewer hours a week, where do you think you would spend it? Doesn’t have to be on the job.

Mike Froman: On the job, I would probably spend it digging further into our research and analysis and doing more in that area. That’s the direction I’m heading in. I’ve been here for a couple years. I wanted to spend the first couple years really getting my arms around the place as an institution. Now I’m working more closely with the fellows on this big project of taking a step back — our Future of American Strategy initiative — and looking at some of these big questions going forward.

Jordan Schneider: It’s a weird time, right? Doing the work that I do in Trump one or Biden felt like the residence was much more direct to the sorts of wavelengths that the most important decision makers in the country were on. Now we’re in a brave new world. There are lots of strains of thinking in American policymaking.

Going back to the 1940s and the origin story of CFR — man, isolationism is back. We got Nazis going on the most popular right-wing podcasts. Doing things in the normal, mainstream way, trying to optimize for the solutions that you, me, George H.W. Bush would all see as reasonable goals for American policymaking is not shared by a significant chunk of one of the two parties in America.

In this new paradigm we’re in, to what extent do the bounds of thinking, the ways of working in a mainstream foreign policy think tank, have to change? On the other hand, in which ways should things stay the same?

Mike Froman: First of all, I don’t view President Trump or his administration as isolationist. You can’t be isolationist and talk about taking over the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland. That’s expansionist. This president has spent more of his first 10 months on foreign policy — whether it’s getting involved in particular conflicts, traveling abroad, hosting foreign leaders — probably more than just about any other president in recent memory. He is deeply engaged in the world.

As I said, our mission is to inform U.S. engagement in the world. There are lots of different ways to engage. He is engaging with it in a different way than several of his predecessors, but he is deeply engaged. For a think tank that’s focused on that, it is to say — this is the way this president is engaged. What are the costs and benefits? What are the trade-offs involved? What are the alternatives? What could be done to ensure ultimately that the U.S. meets its national interests? That’s what our role has always been. That’s what our role is now.

Jordan Schneider: What do you think are the unique challenges of this job relative to others you’ve had in your career?

Mike Froman: That’s a great question. I worked in the public sector. I’ve worked in the private sector. This is the first time I’m running a nonprofit organization, a think tank. The challenge is to maintain its position as a nonpartisan, independent source of research and analysis in what is a very partisan environment. Every day we think, how do we make sure, whether it’s our membership or the people who participate in our meetings and are put on stage or the engagement we have with the administration, how do we make sure that we are fulfilling our obligation as a nonpartisan institution going forward? That is a new and different level of challenge now probably than in the past, just because of the broader nature of the political environment.

Jordan Schneider: Do you spend much time with AI? Have you been using it to research or write at all?

Mike Froman: Not really.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe this is my pitch to you, Mike. The tools are enabling young talent to learn much faster and be much more prolific than they ever were in the past. My critique of the model that I grew up with — you have senior fellows and then you have RAs who hang out for two or three years and then go on their merry way, and most of their job is directly supporting or just serving as a research assistant to someone senior — what the research tools which now exist allow folks who are really sharp and motivated to do is just get up these knowledge hills much more quickly.

Obviously there are things that ChatGPT can’t teach you. A lot of this think tank game is one of relationships, be that with folks in Washington or in the media or what have you, or the subtleties of how to shape an idea so that it will resonate with different audiences. On the more contentful learning stuff, you can run a lot further as a 23-year-old than you could even 10 years ago. I would encourage — challenge, maybe — you and the organization to imagine raising the bar for what the top tier of young talent can aspire to do.

Mike Froman: To that point, Jordan, we started about a year ago opening the door for our RAs to publish on CFR.org in conjunction with their fellows or on their own as well, recognizing, as you say, first of all, we have a terrific group of people with or without AI tools and quite expert in their own way for their stage in their career. We wanted to give them an opportunity to develop their portfolios as well.

Jordan Schneider: Cool. Two thumbs up for that.

It’s clear that demand exceeds supply for policy analysis roles. I see this when I put job descriptions out. I’m sure you guys see it as well. There are people willing to not make a lot of money to do this work because they think it’s really interesting and really important. It seems like we, as a country, are leaving some money on the table from an idea generation perspective. The fact that we don’t just have 10 times as many people trying to understand what makes the Chinese rare earths ecosystem tick… where are we on the production curve of idea generation for think tanks?

Mike Froman: It’s probably always been more applicants than roles for these kinds of jobs. It’s probably particularly acute right now just because changes in the government mean that a lot of people who expected to go into the government or into the intelligence community are probably not seeing the same pathways that they saw before. Same thing for a lot of NGOs or nonprofits, particularly in the development field. People who are planning on going into that area are probably seeing the jobs disappear.

On the positive side, virtually every company is figuring out that they need geopolitical advice. They need to understand the impact of the changing geopolitical environment on their business. Many of them are setting up offices to bring in people with foreign policy interests and ideas into their ecosystem. That’s another avenue that didn’t fully exist five or 10 years ago and now is a much more vibrant part of the market for ideas. It’s think tanks, obviously, being one piece of it. Universities also. But then the private sector is now another place where people can go and develop careers if they have an interest in this area. Can I ask you a question Jordan? Who among the CFR fellows is your favorite.

Jordan Schneider: Oh man, I don’t know if I can choose…

It’s interesting, right, this whole think tank model, because on the one hand, you are these independent atoms, kind of like professors who can do their own thing. But I imagine also as a president, you want to see synergies develop in-house, as opposed to if one’s sitting here and the other is at Brookings.

Given that you have all these stallions who are going to want to run in their different directions, how do you think about to what extent you’re going to want to get them playing together and rowing in the same direction versus going off and optimizing their time how they want?

Mike Froman: What I hear from you, Jordan, is that we have so much great talent that you can’t possibly choose who is the best one. I appreciate that endorsement of CFR.

To answer your question, because it is timely and it is one of the things that I brought to the Council as a bit of an innovation — we’re doing a lot more collaboration among the fellows. runs our China Strategy Initiative and he pulls in a wide range of fellows from CFR, but also from other think tanks and universities into his project to answer questions — What is China thinking? What is China doing? How do we compete and how do we engage? Those are the four pillars of his initiative. It involves dozens of folks across the Council, including our cadre of China fellows.

We’ve done the same, for example, on economics. Our Real Econ initiative, which is Reimagining American Economic Leadership, now has about a dozen or so fellows who touch trade and economics in one form or another and are working together on a whole series of projects. That’s a little bit new for the Council — these clusters of fellows coming together, working on collective projects, as well as working on their own books and their other projects. As you said, it adds that synergy. It’s not about having them all pull in the same direction intellectually because we welcome the diversity of their perspectives, but adding them together and seeing what we can produce on China, on economics, on technology, on energy and climate in ways that are additional is very important.

Jordan Schneider: One person you didn’t name is Tanner Greer, in the Rush Doshi extended universe. The other failure mode, which you have thankfully avoided, is this deification of PhDs as the only way to have relevant credentials or insight that would allow you to play under the bright lights of a CFR fellowship. Tanner has had a classic China arc of living in the PRC, speaking, teaching grade school, being a tutor, and just having a blog on the side. He’s one of the most well-read and thoughtful people. He also provides a little bit of ideological diversity to the building, which is important in these trying times. I’m really excited to see what he does with those extra tools and leverage that you guys can bring to him.

Mike Froman: Thank you for raising him. He’s a great new asset for us. Of course, he’s running our Open Source Observatory, which is this effort to do mass translations of Chinese public documents and make them available to scholars and policymakers so you can read in their own words what they are actually saying, which oftentimes proves to be actually quite relevant to the policy direction they’re taking their country.

Anon contributor “Soon Kueh” occasionally writes about China and delights in bureaucracy.

Disclaimer: All the quotes and information are obtained directly from Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang’s A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China unless stated otherwise.

Under Xi’s regime, CCP purges have been exceptional in terms of quantity and quality. Xi has now purged more officials than Mao ever did, and he is not stopping. While purging is now a normalised feature of Xi’s rule, fresh rounds of purges always invite new political divinations, rumours of succession politics, and new speculations on the cabinet’s factional alignments.

While understanding realpolitik is fun, what about the fanfare, the drama, the campiness associated with purges? Unfortunately, because of the party’s opaque politics, we are rarely privy to the internal processes of a successful purge and can only debate about the outcomes once the dust settles. Alas, we can only imagine what it’s like being a fly on the wall in the recent PLA purge, but we can draw from memory to extrapolate. So far, the only crack that allowed us a rare glimpse into the party’s shrouded political intrigue occurred 13 years ago, during the purge of Bo Xilai. For longtime party watchers, it was a strangely serendipitous time to witness how the chips fell out of place — from Wang Lijun’s 王立军 botched defection at the American embassy, to Gu Kailai’s 谷开来 shoddy murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, and the resulting purge of Bo’s faction. Borrowing mainly from Pin Ho 何頻 and Wenguang Huang’s 黃聞光 A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China, this article takes a trip down memory lane to revisit Bo’s fantastical downfall and indulges in a campiness rarely associated with the CCP.

Act 1: The Hero’s Return to Greatness

Our tale begins as a wǔxiá 武侠 novel, with Bo Xilai as our main protagonist, attempting a return to greatness. The revenge trope of the fallen prince is a common theme in the wǔxiá genre and Chinese historical dramas. Forced into exile, the disgraced noble prince swears to bide his time in the shadows as he slowly accumulates resources(韬光养晦 and plans for his return to glory.

As the son of former high-ranking revolutionary Bo Yibo 薄一波, Bo Xilai’s life fundamentally embodies this trope (although he is obviously not a conventional hero). Princeling by birth, his playmates included Xi Jinping and Liu Yuan 刘源, son of Liu Shaoqi. However, Bo’s life soon took a downturn when his father was purged during the Cultural Revolution and languished in jail for twelve years. As a result, Bo and his brothers were detained in a youth delinquency center for 5 years from 1967-1972. Bo’s life improved in his thirties, when his father was finally reinstated as vice premier. His father’s return to power signaled that young Bo’s exile was over and that it was finally appropriate for him to enter politics.

Tired of quietly lurking in the shadows, Bo’s political ambitions were obvious from the start. In 1982, he joined the Party Central Committee Secretariat as a research assistant. Following the playbook of elite officials who forged their careers by conducting revitalization efforts in the rural countryside, Bo requested a transfer in 1984 and was ultimately posted to Jin county 金县 in Liaoning. His career progressed steadily afterwards, alongside his vanity and flamboyance. In 1987, Bo became district party chief in Dalian, where he sought to beautify the city through extensive greenification (which was a questionable priority given the region’s severe water shortage) and heavy redevelopment. He was both an ambitious princeling and a debauched ruler. He had an unabashed love for beautiful women. At one point, he used government money to host fashion shows with gorgeous young women to demonstrate Dalian’s immense beauty, and even ordered the police department to create a squad of policewomen who patrolled on horseback. He was also aptly nicknamed “Bo Qilai” 薄起来, which translates to “Get-it-Up Bo” because of his lustfulness.

During his ascent, his burgeoning political ambitions ruffled many feathers. In 1994, he built Xinghai Square 星海广场, the largest city square in the world, to celebrate the handover of Hong Kong.

It wasn’t just the size that caught people’s attention, but the huábiǎo 华表 that was erected there. As a huábiǎo is a ceremonial column traditionally placed in front of tombs or palaces that usually signified imperial authority, many observers thought that this artistic decision revealed Bo’s thirst for influence — especially since the huábiǎo in Dalian was much larger than the one in Beijing. Rumors even alleged that Jiang Zemin was shocked when he first saw the huábiǎo in Dalian during a visit.

Like a classic wǔxiá novel where the protagonist must undergo many trials and tribulations, Bo’s career was not all smooth sailing. In fact, his final posting, Chongqing, was initially viewed as a demotion. But to be fair, Bo is no hero. In fact, it was his domineering personality that led to his Chongqing reassignment.

Bo was initially promoted to deputy party secretary and interim governor of Liaoning in 2001 after he left Dalian. (He was given a huge sendoff by residents, although some eventually disclosed that they were promised free KFC by local officials if they attended). However, because his strong-headed personality did not gel with the Liaoning leadership, President Hu Jintao brought him to Beijing to succeed ailing Commerce Minister Lu Fuyan 吕福源 in 2002. His stint at the Commerce Ministry earned him the unpleasant nickname “Mao Zedong Jr. 小毛泽东” and he clashed with his superior, Vice Premier Wu Yi 吴仪, who oversaw the ministry. Bo sought to replace Wu Yi when she announced her imminent retirement in 2008, but was thwarted by Wu’s objections. Against his will, Bo was posted to Chongqing as party secretary — although he eventually looked at it as an opportunity to exercise more political autonomy to implement his own policies.

Act 2: Every Hero Needs a Sidekick

Bo’s narrative arc is fascinating because of its capacity for genre-shifting. While his story initially resembles the return arc of The Dark Knight Rises, where Batman painstakingly crawls out of the underground prison to defeat Bane, Bo’s stint in Chongqing embodies the spirit of a classic buddy cop film, with a twist of tragicomedy.

Bo Xilai’s stint in Chongqing was unforgettable. His year-long “Smashing Black, Singing Red” 打黑唱红 anti-corruption campaign was implemented by 10,000 police, divided into 329 investigation teams. Allegedly, nearly 5,000 arrests were made and 3,273 people were prosecuted; 520 of these cases resulted in a conviction, with 65 people executed or sentenced to life imprisonment. In the same time frame, the “police successfully captured 4,172 previously unsolved cases and broke up 128 crime rings.” While later reports claimed that the numbers were heavily exaggerated, the operation’s massive scale was enough for Beijing to become wary of Bo.

In comes Bo’s loyal sidekick and fellow buddy cop Wang Lijun, who was responsible for executing much of the campaign. Wang was the former Chongqing police chief and deputy mayor. Bo and Wang’s initial connection has been the subject of much speculation, which often veers towards the fantastical. Supposedly, Wang was an elite cop who cracked the mysterious attempted mercury poisoning of Bo’s wife Gu Kailai after he was enlisted by family friend and billionaire Xu Ming 徐明. Unfortunately, the most realistic story is also the most boring: Wang was introduced to Bo by former security czar, Zhou Yongkang 周永康, who owed Wang a favour.

In many ways, Wang was as narcissistic as Bo, if not more. He always “had an entourage of more than twenty camera-carrying assistants” who followed him everywhere and recorded his every word and action. Quotes and pictures deemed good enough were then either “compiled into a book which included lavish praise from subordinates,” or posted on the news. If the photos taken were too ugly, the photographer needed to Photoshop them until Wang was satisfied. Wang was also a terrible boss. He once jailed his secretary for “talking back to him over a trivial matter.” In just two years in Chongqing, he burned through fifty-one personal secretaries; one was even fired on his first day. And like Bo, Wang had a love for women — his bodyguard posse mainly consisted of women decked in red uniforms.

But Wang was no princeling, a fact which clearly haunted him. He started from scratch as a volunteer in a neighbourhood watch group before becoming a police officer in Tieling 铁岭, Liaoning. Thereafter, he was posted to Jinzhou 锦州, Liaoning, and finally Chongqing. Much of Wang’s career involved a dash of deceit and savviness that easily rivalled Anna Delvy and Elizabeth Holmes. To take advantage of the affirmative action policies that benefit ethnic minorities, Wang switched his ethnicity from Han to Mongolian to contest for a delegate spot at the 14^th Communist Party Congress in 1992. To make up for his lack of college credentials, Wang embarked on a retroactive crusade to collect them all:

“His official résumé indicates that he obtained an [MBA]…at something called “California University” … Wang also obtained an eMBA from the China Northeastern Finance University between 2004 and 2006, when he was deputy mayor of Jinzhou. A professor at Beijing University said Wang’s eMBA degree has no academic value because the program is a revenue-generating engine for the university.”

Despite his suspicious credentials, “more than ten of China’s prestigious universities have made Wang an adjunct professor and doctoral supervisor.” The president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications even claimed that Wang had a PhD in law. Chinese state media also reported that “Wang was an expert on forensics, criminal psychology, and law; had written five books on law; and had presided over eighteen legal-research projects.” Wang was supposedly also a genius inventor: he has filed more than 119 patents on China’s State Intellectual Property Office website, “from police equipment and alarm systems to police raincoats and policewomen’s boots.”

Wang’s inferiority complex found refuge in Bo’s princeling status. With Bo’s backing, Wang confidently unleashed Chongqing’s anti-corruption campaign that terrorized the city and made excessive surveillance and paranoia the new normal.

However, this camaraderie did not last long.

Act 3: The Slap that Ended it All

The genre shifts again. We are now regressing in time and now reside in the genre of the Chinese historical period drama, where political intrigue, murder, and petty catfights — alongside the occasional gender bender — unfold.

To say that a slap ended it all would be an exaggeration. But it is not entirely false to say that the slap did create the fissure that caused the cataclysmic fallout between Bo and Wang. But first, we must return to the catalyst: Neil Heywood’s murder.

Out of all the career switches an ESL tutor can make, Neil Heywood chose the riskiest option. He started working as an English tutor to affluent families in 1998. However, with the suave confidence of a white man in early reform China, Heywood reached out to Bo Xilai’s wife, Gu Kailai, and introduced himself as an alumnus of Harrow — an elite UK private school where Gu’s son Bo Guagua 薄瓜瓜 was studying. Gu agreed to meet Heywood in London thereafter, and the rest was history. Heywood successfully transitioned out of his teaching gig to become a part-time nanny and part-time money launderer — arguably the most successful ESL career switch in history.

Heywood and Gu’s relationship had always been intense, but their relationship became severely strained when Heywood ran out of money in 2011 and started harassing Bo Guagua. (Heywood even forcibly detained Bo Guagua in his apartment once.) Consequently, Gu viewed Heywood as a threat that needed to be neutralised. In choosing between framing Heywood for drug trafficking and poisoning him to death, Gu eventually preferred the latter for its simplicity. Throughout this process, Wang was actively assisting Gu and brainstorming ideas to get rid of Heywood. (Wang even suggested killing Heywood in a shootout and planting drugs on him, but this idea was eventually rejected as it would have caused a massive international scandal and risked damaging Chongqing’s reputation.)

However, Wang’s assistance eventually turned into blackmail. Around the same time, Wang feared that his career was coming to an end because his political opponents were zeroing in on him; many of his old friends in Tieling were investigated by the Central Disciplinary Inspection Commission and prosecuted. Wang feared that he would be next. When Wang realised that Bo remained unconcerned, he took things into his own hands. After Gu double-crossed Wang and tried to destroy evidence of Heywood’s murder behind his back, Wang reached out to Bo directly and informed him of Gu’s role in Heywood’s murder. However, this did not end well: when Gu falsely denied her role, Bo slapped Wang for his ungratefulness and betraying him.

This slap was the turning point that “shattered the last shreds of [Wang’s] illusions about dignity,” according to a police officer in Chongqing. Realising that he was “merely Bo Xilai’s hound dog,” Wang reopened the investigation into Heywood’s murder. Unfortunately, Wang was soon fired by Bo thereafter. Although Wang and Gu had a brief reconciliation — during which he “allegedly slapped his own face in repentance” — Bo still sought to “eliminate” him, prompting Wang to find new exit options.

Drawing on his talent for self-reinvention, Wang cosplayed twice — once as an old woman, and the other as an old man — and started embassy shopping. Unfortunately, his undercover trip to the Guangzhou British Embassy as an old woman was unsuccessful; visa officials ignored him when he probed the possibility of political asylum. His second expedition became an international scandal, except this time Wang cosplayed as an old man in the American embassy in Chengdu. Indeed, Wang’s strategy of causing massive political damage at his own expense 杀敌一千自损八百 ensured that Bo could not easily kill him, albeit at the cost of the party’s reputation.

There is a conspiracy theory that Wang’s brazenness in entering the US consulate was a result of working with the anti-Bo faction in Beijing, but this cannot be fully proven. Either way, it was a win-win situation for both parties: Bo got taken down, and Wang saved his skin.

Act 4: Schadenfreude and Old Debts

We are still in a historical period drama. The genre has not shifted, except that most of the drama now unfolds in the imperial court, where backstabbing and political intrigue are the norm. Occasionally, petty disputes arise and old debts are settled.

Initially, many of Bo’s political opponents delighted in the convenient opportunity to get rid of him. After all, his tremendous anti-corruption campaign implicated many in Beijing. It was rumoured that even former Premier Wen Jiabao secretly ordered “the deputy minister of state security to dig up dirt on Bo” in 2009 because he was against the latter’s anti-corruption crusade. Bo’s association with Heywood’s murder, alongside the international ruckus it caused, was thus a perfect opportunity to drag all the skeletons out of the closet. The family’s routine money laundering, close relationship with Heywood (who was a suspected British spy), chummy relationships with billionaires such as Xu Ming, the murder allegations, and other accusations of corruption became prime fodder to eliminate Bo from the party for good.

It was also a time to settle petty debts. Remember the time when Jiang Zemin visited Dalian and was shocked by the huábiǎo that rivalled Beijing’s? During that visit, Bo covered the city with life-size posters of Jiang, only to tear them down immediately after Jiang left. This apparently upset Jiang, who began to view Bo as a “mere sycophant,” “deceptive,” and overly politically ambitious. Unfortunately, for Bo, it was Jiang, his former mentor, who denounced him as morally unscrupulous and deserving of punishment. (We can only guess how many more petty incidents like these played a part in Bo’s fall from grace.)

Nonetheless, the attack against Bo became too much of a good thing as it brought increased scrutiny to other party members. On October 25th, 2012, the very same day Bo lost his position as a delegate to the National People’s Congress, a New York Times article divulged that Wen Jiabao’s 温家宝 family had a startling estimated net worth of $2.7 billion. Correspondent David Barboza reported that the wealth was “hidden behind layers of partnership and investment vehicles involving friends, work colleagues, and business partners.” Bloomberg also published an article on the sprawling elite fortunes of the descendants of former revolutionaries shortly after.

To avoid disrupting the leadership transition by kicking up more dirt, punishment was swiftly meted out. Gu was given a suspended death sentence on August 9th, 2012, while Bo was issued a life sentence the year after. Bo Guagua escaped unscathed and now resides in Canada, where he spends time writing long eulogies about his dead dog. He married a Taiwanese hospital heiress in 2024.

Conclusion: C is for Camp

CCP politics are inherently campy because of their strong affinity for theatrical excess. Campy politics are only a natural outcome when so much weight is placed on slogans, performativity, and backroom gestures. Add in the fact that many party members have feuds that trace back to the Cultural Revolution, and the opportunities for camp and petty drama are endless. While the dust is settled for now, nothing stays buried for long. Maybe in the next few decades, we’ll see a political comeback by Bo’s faction.

But for now, we wait.

President Trump announced that he will permit Nvidia’s H200 chips to be sold to China on Monday, December 8th. Beijing’s official response to this is extremely understated. This is the entirety of Spokesperson Guo Jiakun’s response to a question from Bloomberg on the H200 sale at the regular foreign ministry press conference on December 9th:

We have noticed the reports. China always advocates that China and the United States achieve mutual benefit through cooperation.

Since then, however, a range of commentary and opinions have come out of Chinese media, reflecting varied opinions. Some are excited, while others are deeply wary; most lie somewhere in between. We’ve selected four commentaries from the Chinese media landscape to excerpt, translate, and feature, as a way to encapsulate the debate happening inside China regarding GPU reliance. They include…

• How cloud providers helped Chinese AI labs access top-tier compute, even while restrictions were in place;

• Why transitioning from Hopper to Blackwell is labor-intensive, and how this shapes Chinese compute demand;

• How inference differs from training, and where Chinese chipmakers might shine in the market;

• And Taiwanese chip makers having a brief panic attack amid the crossfire.

Translations of the original Chinese were done by ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking, then verified manually by the ChinaTalk team for accuracy and fluency. Hyperlinks were added by Irene where context is useful.

Secrets of the Cloud

This first analysis is by Xinzhi Observatory 心智观察所, a media brand covering high-tech that’s owned by Shanghai-based news site Guancha 观察网. Guancha is on the nationalistic end of the Chinese media spectrum, with a penchant for virality. Xinzhi Observatory’s reporting on tech has a more nuanced style, but its assertions should still be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, the piece is a useful read because it reflects popular mainstream attitudes towards the H200s deal: that it is a temporary compromise that benefits Chinese development in the short run, but does not undercut China’s progress in indigenizing the chip supply chain. Its insights into how Chinese labs have managed to access advanced compute via cloud service providers is also revealing.

In Nvidia’s AI product lineup, the Hopper series (including the H100 and H200) represents the previous-generation “ace,” focused on data-center-class AI acceleration and already widely used in supercomputers and AI training clusters around the world. Although the H200 is not based on the latest Blackwell architecture (B100/B200, released in 2024 and more focused on multimodal AI and energy efficiency), its memory advantage makes it a “transitional trump card.” While it far exceeds the performance threshold of domestic Chinese chips, it does not reach the most sensitive cutting-edge technologies that the United States is trying to protect. It was precisely on the basis of the H200’s “moderate firepower” that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang persuaded Trump.

But for China, the introduction of this chip fills the performance gap between the H20 (the specially downgraded version for China) and Blackwell. We cannot look only at the talking points Jensen Huang used in his lobbying: the H200 is, after all, the pinnacle of Nvidia’s Hopper architecture. According to estimates by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), the H200’s total processing performance (TPP) is nearly ten times the previous export-control ceiling for sales to China. When training and serving large models with more than 175 billion parameters, the H200’s performance is more than six times that of the H20. It is a “previous-generation flagship,” not a “downgraded product.”

Over the past two years, 99% of Chinese AI companies have only been able to use the neutered H20 or domestic chips. Through CSP channels, however, frontier model makers have already been training at scale on clusters of original, advanced chips. Therefore, when Trump suddenly opened the door to the legal sale of the H200, the market reaction was not particularly dramatic, because China’s top players have been using the highest-end compute available via CSP for quite a while already.

CSP is currently an important business model in China’s AI chip ecosystem; it refers to AI chips sold specifically for Cloud Service Providers. Put simply, Nvidia (and to some extent AMD and Intel) sell their top-of-the-line, uncut AI chips exclusively to a handful of leading Chinese cloud providers through special channels, and these cloud providers then offer the compute power to domestic AI companies and research institutes in a “cloud rental” model. What the United States has banned is “direct sales to Chinese enterprises.” Under the CSP model, however, ownership of the chips resides with the cloud providers, so technically it does not violate the ban.

Former TSMC engineer and current Ronghe Semiconductor CEO Wu Zihao told Xinzhi Observatory: “Based on the current performance of various domestic AI chip manufacturers, none of them have yet broken through shipments of 100,000 cards, with the exception of Ascend. Ascend’s shipments are between 500,000 and 1 million cards, but they rely heavily on the ‘IT indigenization’ (xinchuang) market, and CSP purchases of Ascend are not large. In other words, shipments of domestic chips basically depend on xinchuang, with CSP accounting for a very small share. Nvidia’s H200 mainly targets the CSP market; Nvidia cannot enter the xinchuang market. The only point of overlap between the two is in CSP, and judging from the fact that each domestic GPU vendor has shipped only tens of thousands of cards, not a single Chinese CSP treats domestic chips as its mainstay.”

Wu Zihao believes: “Precisely because the base is low, even if the H200 comes in, domestic GPUs still have considerable room for growth. For example, Cambricon shipped 70,000–80,000 GPUs this year. Next year they are expected to reach 150,000 cards, nearly 100% growth, but a base of 150,000 is still very low, and for domestic CSPs’ total demand of at least 4 million cards, the share is not high. In the short term, this may not affect domestic cards, but Nvidia resuming sales of relatively high-performance high-end GPUs to China is not a good thing for Chinese AI chips in the long run; the dependence on the Nvidia ecosystem may prove impossible to reverse.”

Views like Wu Zihao’s—that Nvidia’s renewed sales are not a good thing for Chinese AI chips in the long term—are somewhat representative. But we need to look at the issue more comprehensively: potential gains always come hand in hand with risks. For AI startups like DeepSeek, being able to rapidly deploy H200 clusters can boost model-training efficiency and help overcome compute bottlenecks. The H200’s 141 GB of memory can easily handle RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and LoRA fine-tuning for models with more than 175 billion parameters. China has the world’s largest pool of AI researchers, and using more advanced technology allows them to translate research into commercial value more quickly.

After Trump announced that the H200 could be “legally sold directly,” the CSP model will not disappear in the short term; on the contrary, it might be upgraded. Previously, CSP arrangements existed with the United States turning a blind eye. Now that direct sales of the H200 have been legalized, the CSP channel may be further extended to more advanced lines like Blackwell, continuing to serve as a “valve” and “observation window” for the United States to monitor China’s AI development.

In the short term, China can temporarily rely on the H200 to train models, but in the long term it must feed back into domestic chip firms to accelerate their iteration. Chinese companies can use more advanced compute to “nurture” models and “accumulate” data, while at the same time feeding back into the domestic chip ecosystem. If China can substitute a narrative of diversified sourcing for a narrative of “decoupling” from the United States, then a “bad thing” can also be turned into a “good thing.”

This is what it truly means to “sustain war through war.” As a former Council on Foreign Relations official lamented in an interview with the FT, “Selling large numbers of H200s to China will give rocket fuel to the Chinese AI industry,” giving them enough compute to dramatically narrow the gap within two years. [Irene note: The expert quoted here is Chris Mcguire who joined ChinaTalk as a podcast guest to talk about Huawei in October!]

…

As things stand, Trump, for the sake of corporate interests and fiscal revenue, has had to compromise with China—and in doing so has made a crucial choice between the two camps. In terms of performance, the H200 is “the most dangerous yet also the safest compromise product” for the United States, while for China it is “just enough to be usable without forcing a rupture.”

Hopper vs. Blackwell, and what China actually wants

In this piece, Tencent Technology 腾讯科技 writer Su Yang 苏扬 explores why more advanced isn’t always better. Even though Blackwell chips are a generation ahead of Hoppers (including the H200), Su argues that Nvidia’s Chinese customers currently rely heavily on the Hopper architecture. Even in a world where Nvidia gains permission to sell Blackwells to China, it’s possible that demand for Hopper chips will remain much higher for quite a while still.

In November 2023, Nvidia officially launched the H200. Shipments to global customers and cloud service providers began in the second quarter of 2024, with mass production starting in the latter part of that quarter and large-scale deliveries rolling out after the third quarter. A single GPU sells for around $30,000–$40,000, and an 8-GPU server comes in at roughly $300,000.

The chip uses TSMC’s advanced 4N process, with a GH100 GPU at its core, integrating 80 billion transistors and a thermal design power (TDP) of 700W. It is also equipped with NVLink 4 interconnect technology, offering 18 links and 900GB/s of interconnect bandwidth. The GPU paired with HBM3e has 141GB of memory, with memory bandwidth as high as 4.8TB/s.

In 2024, the H200 was an unequivocally cutting-edge product, with FP16 performance reaching 1,979 teraFLOPS, compared to just 148 teraFLOPS for the H20 custom-made for the Chinese market. Its FP8 performance is an even more impressive 3,958 teraFLOPS, while the H20 has only 296 teraFLOPS. The H200’s interconnect bandwidth is also double that of the H20, reaching 900GB/s.

But by the end of 2025, products such as the B200 based on the Blackwell architecture had come online and become the new industry standard at the top end. The H200 was pushed into second place, turning into a product whose performance is “relatively behind the curve.”

“As expected,” an industry analyst said when talking about the lifting of export controls on the H200. “Letting Hopper chips out, but not Blackwell, still allows them to tell their domestic audience, ‘we’re still a generation and a half ahead,’ while Chinese customers can still buy what they want.”

Overall, Trump’s announcement on social media that he would allow H200 exports has basically dispelled most concerns. At its core, it just means that the H200 no longer represents truly cutting-edge computing power.

…

Previously, Jensen Huang had repeatedly stated in various settings that “our market share in mainland China is zero.” The approval of H200 exports will bring new opportunities for Nvidia, especially because its performance is far ahead of the downgraded H20, making it much more attractive to customers.

“Chinese customers’ models are all built to run on Hopper-architecture GPUs,” the aforementioned industry analyst emphasized.

In his view, at this stage Hopper has even more pull than the Blackwell architecture: “No one has adapted their models to the B-series yet. Otherwise you’d have to redo all the operators, the toolchain, and the underlying software from scratch—that’s an even bigger engineering effort.”

Put simply, for model developers, migrating from the Hopper architecture to any new architecture requires redeveloping computation modules, building dedicated tooling pipelines, and restructuring the low-level integration code—all of which demand large amounts of manpower, engineering work, and time.

From Nvidia’s standpoint, the profit margin on H200 sales is also much better than for the H20. The H20 is derived from a cut-down H100, which raises manufacturing costs, whereas the H200 does not need to be “neutered” in any way. As an older product, its average gross margin is expected to approach—or even exceed—80%.

Securitization Will Not Be Undone

This commentary was published by DeepTech 深科技, the China-specific media brand of MIT Technology Review. The writer is very bullish on economies of scale being favorable for Chinese domestic chipmakers. Most importantly, the piece argues that the impacts of the last two years of American export controls are lasting. China’s technology industry has internalized that it cannot rely on American giants for compute in the long run, and the state will not roll back extensive effects to support indigenization.

The back-and-forth swings of the past two years have already made Chinese companies acutely aware of how important supply chain security is. No one can guarantee that what is allowed today won’t be revoked tomorrow with a single tweet.

Morgan Stanley estimated that China’s AI chip self-sufficiency rate was 34% in 2024 and is expected to reach 82% by 2027. TrendForce data indicate that in China’s AI server market in 2025, domestic chips are likely to account for as much as 40%.

Mizuho Securities forecasts that shipments of Huawei’s Ascend 910 series will exceed 700,000 units this year. Huawei’s own roadmap already extends to 2028, with the Ascend 950, 960, and 970 lined up in sequence, and in-house HBM also on the agenda. Admittedly, domestic chips still have clear shortcomings in areas such as ecosystem maturity, development toolchains, and support for high-end training scenarios. But the industry has already hit its stride: large-scale training and the migration of large models onto domestic platforms are accelerating. The further the market moves forward, the more likely it is that the ecosystem will be backfilled and completed in turn. As a result, this path toward autonomy and control will not be brought to a halt just because a few foreign chips have been cleared for sale.

…

For Nvidia, returning to the Chinese market means a revenue opportunity worth several billion dollars; for the U.S. government, a 25% cut of sales is a sizable source of fiscal income; and for the Chinese market, the H200 provides a channel for obtaining advanced computing power in the short term.

But in the long run, this may be just a minor episode in the larger tech contest between China and the United States. China’s AI industry has already embarked on a path of autonomy and control, and that path will not be reversed by the approval of a few chip models.

On the battlefield of chips, genuine security can only come from one’s own capabilities, not from the grace of a rival. The green light for the H200 is merely the starting point for a new round of competition.

Inference vs. Training

This last take is a commentary from the editorial staff at the Wu Xiaobo Channel 吴晓波频道. Wu Xiaobo is a prominent finance and economics writer in China, having worked for Xinhua, Hangzhou Daily, and the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post. Wu Xiaobo Channel is his personal media venture.

The piece is most notable for its discussion of how China’s domestic chip supply is reshaping the inference landscape, providing needed granularity into where H200s fall within the market for compute demand. It echoes many points made by previous commentators about the long shadow of securitization as well, arguing that China will continue to aggressively pursue domesticization regardless of American policy.

Right now, China’s large models and domestic chips have already become deeply intertwined. During the “blockade” phase, the two grew side by side, with their level of mutual adaptation steadily improving.

This relationship has become even closer since DeepSeek burst onto the scene.

If, in the past, training on Nvidia chips was essentially a contest of raw compute, DeepSeek has changed the structure of compute demand: for some smaller companies, compute has shifted from training to inference.

And because inference has lower compute requirements, it has created real room for mid- and lower-end domestic AI chips to shine.

In terms of ecosystem compatibility, it’s difficult during the training phase to build a single resource pool mixing Nvidia and domestic chips, but inference workloads can run on domestic chips.

Data show that in 2024, 57.6% of accelerator cards in Chinese data centers were used for inference, surpassing the 33% used for training. Platforms like Tencent and Baidu integrating DeepSeek have also greatly boosted the growth of inference-oriented chips.

Industrial integration has also brought a shift in market preferences: as China’s large-model and domestic chip industries grow more deeply intertwined, more and more major tech firms and state-owned enterprises are leaning toward buying domestic chips. For example, ByteDance accounts for more than 50% of Cambricon’s total orders; similarly, in 2024, 42% of Moore Threads’ revenue came from government-led intelligent computing center projects, and Huawei’s Ascend chips captured 60% of the orders in such computing centers.

Although these domestic AI chips still lag behind Nvidia’s latest high-end products in absolute top-tier performance, they are sufficient to meet the needs of most inference scenarios. This also means that even if the H200 enters the Chinese market, it will be difficult for it to rapidly achieve “reverse substitution,” and the scale at which it can displace domestic chips will be limited.

Of course, the core advantage of domestic chips at this stage lies precisely in the word “domestic.” These “leading lights of domestic manufacturing” come with no backdoors, are secure and controllable, and leave the power of discourse firmly in Chinese hands—without any need to worry about supplies suddenly being cut off one day.

…

Although the narrative of “domestic substitution” is attractive, once news broke that the U.S. government would allow H200 exports, share prices of domestic chipmakers such as Cambricon and Hygon saw a clear pullback—the challenge is self-evident.

Overall, compared with domestic chips, Nvidia’s products still have advantages in raw compute, ecosystem maturity, and cluster scale—especially the CUDA ecosystem, whose level of development represents a chasm that domestic chips find hard to cross. The migration cost within the CUDA ecosystem is almost zero, whereas domestic chip ecosystems still need another two to three years to catch up.

From the product standpoint itself, the H200’s advantages are also very prominent: not only does its performance far exceed that of the H20, but more importantly, it is highly compatible with existing systems—most of China’s current AI models are already adapted to the Hopper architecture, so there is no need to rebuild operators, toolchains, or underlying software; it can be put to work directly. By contrast, moving straight to the most advanced Blackwell architecture could actually lead to acclimatization problems.

At the same time, from a market and capacity perspective, the current supply of domestic chips is still insufficient to meet the surging demand in the Chinese market. For example, SMIC’s 7 nm chips reportedly have a yield rate of only 20%, which further exacerbates this supply–demand imbalance. Nvidia’s chips, by contrast, are manufactured by TSMC, with a yield rate reaching 60%, providing much stronger assurance on production capacity.

The most direct impact may come from the release of pent-up demand: there were reports that in early 2025, several major companies placed orders worth 16 billion yuan with Nvidia to purchase H20 chips, but these ultimately could not be fulfilled. With the H200 now cleared for export, that demand may be converted into new orders and released in concentrated form in 2026.

But in any case, Nvidia has long since missed the best window to enter the Chinese market—especially China’s AI sector. This approval has come too late.

China is no longer the market that “can’t live without Nvidia.” It’s like a couple separated for a long time who have each grown on their own before meeting again: even if they get back together, it’s hard to recapture the original passion and dependence. Put more plainly, it’s now a relationship where “if it works, we can make it work; if it doesn’t, we can just walk away.”

The Taiwan Situation

Regarding how the US government’s 25% cut will be collected, per Reuters:

A White House official said that the 25% fee would be collected as an import tax from Taiwan, where the chips are made, to the United States, where the chips will undergo a security review by U.S. officials before being exported to China.

This vague description inspired some sudden panic among manufacturers in Taiwan, who worried that they would have to pay an additional fee to the US. Tzu-Hsien Tung 童子賢, chairman of Taiwanese electronics giant Pegatron and cofounder of Asus, told Taiwan’s Economic Daily News that this is most likely a confused misinterpretation: “If Taiwanese firms are paying anything at all, it’s only in a pass-through capacity—collecting and remitting on behalf of someone else, since contract manufacturers aren’t the owners of the product. … My instinct is it’s just pass-through payments; they’re not going to count that as ‘Taiwan paying.’”

The confusion is now mostly cleared up, but a lack of effective communication to Taiwan is probably not a positive indicator for US-Taiwan relations.

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A year for the history books for the Chinese AI beat. We began the year astonished by DeepSeek’s frontier model, and are ending in December with Chinese open models like Qwen powering Silicon Valley’s startup gold rush.

It’s a good time to stop and reflect on Chinese AI milestones throughout 2025. What really mattered, and what turned out to be nothingburgers?

This piece recaps:

• The biggest model drops of the year

• China’s evolving AGI discussion among Alibaba leadership and the Politburo

• The biggest swings in the US-China chip war

• Beijing’s answer to America’s AI Action plan and the MFA’s

• Robots

Models

The DeepSeek Moment

Liang Wenfeng lit the fire

DeepSeek-R1 came out on January 20, thwarting everyone’s Chinese New Year plans. The cost-efficient LLM, which uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, caused many in Silicon Valley to re-evaluate their bets on scaling — and on unfettered American dominance in frontier models. DeepSeek is powered by domestically trained Chinese engineering talent, an apparent belief in AGI, and no-strings-attached hedge fund money (it is owned by High-Flyer 幻方量化, a Hangzhou-based quantitative trading firm). There were initial concerns that such a recipe could not be replicated by more capital-constrained Chinese tech startups, but Kimi proved that wrong with K2 in July; Z.ai, Qwen, and MiniMax followed.

We translated Chinese tech media 36Kr’s interview with DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng back in November 2024, and spent much of January 2025 on the DeepSeek beat (see Jordan’s conversations on DeepSeek with Miles Brundage here and with Kevin Xu of Interconnected here). Over at the newsletter, we covered how China reacted to DeepSeek’s rise, its secret sauce, and concerns around open-source as a strategy.

DeepSeek continues to be a big deal. For one, it paved the way for an open-source race dominated by Chinese models. Nearly every notable model released by Chinese companies in 2025 has been open source. In public blog posts, social media discussions, and private conversations, Chinese engineers and tech executives repeatedly attribute their open-source orientation to the example set by DeepSeek.

On the technical end, despite some remaining mystery surrounding the exact cost of training R1, DeepSeek’s viability was a shot in the arm for Chinese labs working under compute constraints. Going into 2026, with restrictions on H200s loosened and reporting that DeepSeek is still training on smuggled Nvidia, easier access to TSMC-fabbed Nvidia chips may be just what DeepSeek needs to get their mojo back.

Manus

Big deal, but not because of the product

On March 6, an unknown Chinese startup named Butterfly Effect 蝴蝶效应 launched Manus, the world’s first general-purpose AI agent. Revisiting the “Introducing Manus” video that went viral nine months ago is a reminder of how quickly technology has developed: the capabilities Manus demonstrated — reviewing a folder of résumé PDFs, researching stocks, and comparing real estate options — are now so common that we barely think of them as new or even particularly agentic. But back then, some thought Manus was a second “China Shock” of sorts after DeepSeek. Jordan discussed Manus on the podcast with (Strange Loop Canon), Swyx from , and (Mercatus, Hyperdimensional) on the podcast here.

Soon after, Manus didn’t want to be Chinese anymore. In July, the company scrubbed its internet presence inside China, relocated to Singapore, and laid off most of its staff in Beijing and Wuhan. An April funding round led by the American venture capital firm Benchmark had been scrutinized by the US Treasury Department over restrictions on investments into Chinese AI development. Manus may have decided that its Chinese base is a worthy sacrifice if it means access to American capital and the global market.

Since then, its market strategy has been anything but understated: from exclusive parties in San Francisco to conference keynotes in Singapore, Manus is trying to reinvent itself as a global force spearheading agents. Whether or not this rebrand is successful remains to be seen; in the meantime, it is no longer the only agent in the game, as major AI companies like OpenAI and ByteDance launched agent products of their own.

Looking back, Manus was the start of a wave of Chinese AI companies aggressively pursuing international expansion in the second half of this year. With DeepSeek providing that the world was interested in open-source Chinese models, other companies became eager for a slice of the lucrative global market. Whether or not their Chinese roots limit their growth potential will be up to regulators in 2026 and beyond.

The Open Source Race

The defining paradigm

With DeepSeek shooting the first shot, this year saw a significant number of Chinese companies contributing excellent models to the open source race. In the process of promoting their models, Chinese labs have also become much less secretive.

We covered Kimi K2, a “thinking” model whose architecture is inspired by DeepSeek, in July, with much of the reportage based on blogs and comments Kimi engineers shared online. Since then, we were also able to interview Li Zixuan, director of product at Z.ai (formerly Zhipu), which makes the popular GLM models. 2026 will almost certainly see more Chinese AI companies leverage open source as a mean of expanding influence.

China and AGI

Does China believe in AGI, and is it working to pursue it? It’s a question hotly debated by observers of China’s tech scene, and this year we were fortunate to be able to feature some excellent writing that probes at this topic.

In April, an anonymous contributor staged a Platonic debate between a believe and a skeptic, laying out arguments for and against the question of Chinese AGI belief.

In May, another anonymous writer covered the Politburo “study session” on AI. We learn from the invited guest list that “Xi’s hand-chosen experts on AI seem more like the Yoshua Bengios and Geoffrey Hintons of the Chinese AI world than the Yann LeCuns”:

Alibaba, whose family of Qwen models gained particular prominence in the latter half of this year, held its annual Yunqi Conference in September, and CEO Eddie Wu delivered a landmark speech sketching out his vision for transformative AI. Guest contributor Afra Wang argues that prophetic styles signal a “vibe shift” in Chinese tech, as the industry begins to see itself as pivotal for the nation’s destiny.

The Chip War

Just make up your mind already!

For most of the year, we waited with baited breath for the Trump administration to decide whether to export advanced AI chips to China — and for Beijing to make up its mind on whether it wants them after all. All this drama led to five emergency pods! A quick timeline to refresh our memory:

• Jan: Biden’s AI diffusion rule (emergency pod)

• April: BIS closed loopholes in Biden-era chip and manufacturing equipment export controls, further restricting Chinese access;

• May: Commerce Department kills the Biden Administration’s Diffusion Rule via Q&A but weirdly still hasn’t fully changed the reg…

• July: America’s AI Action Plan called for stricter enforcement of export controls and exploration of location verification mechanisms (our coverage)

• The Summer of Jensen (reported by ChinaTalk here and discussed with Lennart Haim and Chris Miller here):

  • July 15: Jensen Huang met Trump and secured permission to resume sales of H20s to China;

  • July 30: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) summoned Nvidia’s representatives over risks of Nvidia being able to control H20s remotely, accusing them of having a “kill switch”;

  • August 11: The Trump administration reached a deal with AMD and Nvidia to resume exports of H20s and MI308s to China, with the US government receiving 15% of the resulting revenue;

  • August 12: The CAC summoned top Chinese tech firms to pressure them to reduce H20s orders and supplant with domestic alternatives;

  • August 13: Reuters reported that US officials have been secretly putting tracking devices into some high-end chips in order to track diversion to China;

  • August 21: Reports emerge that Nvidia has asked some suppliers to halt production of H20s.

• September: BIS unveiled an Affiliates Rule, which would have hit many more Chinese companies with restrictions on chip access, including their ability to purchase legacy chips;

• October: the Trump-Xi Summit produced a deal, with China suspending its new, dramatic rare earths export restrictions for one year in exchange for a temporary suspension of the Affiliates Rule (emergency pod)

• November: The GAIN AI Act was introduced in the Senate, with the White House apparently lobbying against it;

• December: Trump announced that he will permit Nvidia to sell H200s to China (emergency pod).

Huawei is Beijing’s champion for creating an alternative ecosystem to Nvidia’s. Guest contributor Mary Clare McMahon explored how Huawei is working to bypass the CUDA moat in May, and in June Jordan sat down with veteran journalist Eva Dou to discuss her new book, The House of Huawei. In October, Jordan also interviewed Chris McGuire, former Deputy Senior Director for Technology and National Security at the NSC, about where Huawei’s capabilities might be going.

The rise of reasoning models and inference training has also brought attention towards high-bandwidth memory (HBM), where China still currently relies on the Big Three: the US’s Micron, and South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung. Contributors Ray Wang and Aqib Zakaria covered China’s pursuit of indigenous HBM this year, exploring CXMT’s capabilities in the face of lithography export controls.

Robots

Too soon to tell…

A wave of attention gathered around robotics and embodied AI in China this year. The Government Work Report this year explicitly mentioned embodied AI for the first time, placing it alongside longstanding tech aspirations like quantum and 6G. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) specifically named humanoid robots in its list of work priorities for 2025. And throughout the second half of 2025, the Chinese Institute of Electronics has been working on standards for the humanoid robots industry, responding to an apparently “urgent” need for standardization in an increasingly competitive field.

Inside China, buoyed by media attention and Unitree’s Spring Festival Gala appearance in January, competition in humanoid robots turned white-hot this year. At least ten companies released humanoid robot models. Some compete by offering increasingly low per-unit prices, while others are starting to pursue specialization in terms of capabilities.

Embodied AI sits at the intersection of China’s longstanding manufacturing advantage and recent advances in machine learning research like vision-language models (VLMs). Jordan sat down with Ryan Julian of Google DeepMind to discuss some of these advances in robotics research this September. Some industry observers in China are worried that humanoids, and embodied AI in general, will turn out to be a bubble, given the sudden rush of investment and a lack of obvious business models. In the meantime, American policymakers are beginning to fret about Chinese robotics firms’ impressive market shares and Western academia’s reliance on affordable Chinese hardware. It’s too early to tell if 2025 was the start of something seismic in robotics.

Policy

AI+ Plan

Big deal; results unknown

On August 28, the State Council released its “Opinion on In-Depth Implementation of the ‘Artificial Intelligence+’ Initiative” (关于深入实施“人工智能+”行动的意见, hereafter abbreviated to “AI+ Plan”). The Plan is a landmark document addressing the integration of AI into China’s economy and society and pushes for thorough AI diffusion across sectors, ministries, and regions. It does not address geopolitical competition much, but clearly portrays AI integration as a strategic priority for the country.

We dove deeply into the AI+ Plan after it was released. Its extraordinarily comprehensive scope, intense sense of urgency, and framing of open-source models as geostrategic assets were remarkable then and remain relevant now. Going into next year, however, knock-on effects will reach Beijing’s doorsteps. How far is “emotional consumption,” greenlit as an application by the AI+ Plan, allowed to go, as AI companions become more alluring and mental health issues potentially proliferate? Will the state be able to keep frustrations around unemployment at bay amid deflation? If AI capabilities are “jagged,” to quote Helen Toner, will Beijing need to adjust expectations for how different industries’ productivities will change with AI?

The Global AI Governance Action Plan

Mid-sized deal with MFA characteristics

A follow-up from the 2023 Global AI Governance Initiative, the Global AI Governance Action Plan was released on July 26 at the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai. China has long sought to create an overarching narrative for international AI governance. The Global AI Governance Action Plan should be understood as part of its campaign to win hearts and minds around the globe, particularly among unaligned nations in the developing world seeking technology partners.

In hindsight, there is a link between the third item of the Global AI Governance Action Plan, which discusses integration of AI into nearly every industry internationally, and the “AI+” plan for domestic AI diffusion that was released later in the year (to be discussed next). Sector-agnostic, large-scale adoption is a conceptualization of AI that is articulated consistently in Chinese tech policy.

Beyond this, however, most of the other items in the Global AI Governance Action Plan are yet to be realized. Without naming the US, the Plan stresses “global solidarity” and warns against fragmentation. China seeks an active role in international AI governance, whether in standards, environmental management, or data sharing. Diplomatic currents move slowly, and we will likely see more AI policy outreach from Beijing towards developing countries in the coming months and years.

Labelling Requirements, and How to Evade Them

Nothingburger, sadly

Just one day after Manus on March 7, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released a draft of its “Measures for Labeling of AI-Generated Synthetic Content” (人工智能生成合成内容标识办法), which later came into force in September. The Measures require internet service providers to explicitly label AI-generated content on users’ feeds and add implicit labels to the metadata of synthetic content files. Platforms, in theory, should make it known to users whenever the latter interact with potentially AI-generated content, as well as make sure that creators proactively label their uploaded content as AI-generated. This makes China one of the first jurisdictions, and certainly the largest, to implement labelling or watermarking rules for AI-generated internet content.

The CAC is ostensibly well-placed to roll out AI content labelling regulations, given its unparalleled regulatory reach and China’s competitive position in AI technology. However, after a rush of actions by companies to comply in September, momentum has fallen by the wayside. ChinaTalk will have more coverage on this soon, but in a nutshell, the landscape for AI content labelling enforcement is uneven at best. (Anecdotally, I see unlabelled, AI-generated content on Xiaohongshu and WeChat almost every day. Especially in the case of AI-generated text, labelling is next to nonexistent.)

AI-assisted and -generated content is now so much more pervasive online than nine months ago, whether on global platforms or on the Chinese internet. It’s time to ask: what was the point of labelling as policy? Is it to actually protect users from misinformation and engender trust, or is it just a stopgap measure that lets platforms evade responsibility? What kinds of AI usage merit which kinds of mandated disclosures?

A clearly AI-generated video on Rednote/Xiaohongshu. The user’s self-chosen name is “Mimi Loves AI,” but apart from that there is no other indication that the video is AI-generated.

Here to discuss is of the Silverado Policy Accelerator.

We get into:

• Why this is, in Dmitri’s words, “a disaster”

• There are military balance of power implications for selling chips to China

• Why the rest of the AI ecosystem is against selling chips to China, Why Trump made this call anyway, and why SME export liberalization might be next

• Where the GAIN Act goes from here

Listen now on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s first toast the unfortunate U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Nicholas Jon Ganjei. On Monday morning, he proudly issued a press release for his cool-sounding “Operation Gatekeeper,” which intercepted $160 million worth of Nvidia H100s and H200s.

That afternoon, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States would allow Nvidia to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China. Dmitri, please make sense of this for me.

Dmitri Alperovitch: There’s no way to sugarcoat this — it’s a disaster. This isn’t only about the Department of Justice. The U.S. Attorney General’s statement highlighted how critical AI is to military applications. The President’s own AI action plan discussed how the United States must aggressively adopt AI within its armed forces to maintain its global military preeminence, while ensuring that the use of AI is secure and reliable. This technology is essential to U.S. military dominance and the successes of the U.S. Intelligence community.

You have to give the administration credit — it is doing a lot to ensure all levels of the U.S. government are adopting AI. Why we would enable China to do the same is beyond me. Are we going to sell them aircraft carriers or Virginia-class submarines? Should we let them into AUKUS? This is effectively what we are doing.

It is outrageous that Jensen Huang has been able to pull the wool over the eyes of people in government and on Capitol Hill, convincing them that arming our primary adversary — the one we are unquestionably in a cold war with — is somehow good for America. I understand it’s good for Nvidia’s sales and for him personally, but it is a disaster for our national security.

Jordan Schneider: What I find baffling is the contradiction in Nvidia’s public messaging. Jensen Huang and his company argue that their technology will revolutionize every conceivable industry, all requiring massive amounts of GPU capacity. But when asked directly about the military implications of selling these chips, Huang downplays the risk. He suggests that China’s military will acquire the necessary chips regardless and claims they are too sophisticated to use American technology for sensitive, dual-use applications. It’s ludicrous that this technology is transformative for every field except for the military.

Dmitri Alperovitch: It doesn’t make sense. AI will transform everything. Even in civilian uses, do we want China to win in automotive, energy, and everything else? Because that’s what you’re enabling by selling chips to them. The primary concern is their military and intelligence services, but we are also in an economic competition. I would rather kneecap Chinese competitors to enable our own companies to succeed. Why would you do otherwise?

This is equivalent to selling supercomputers to the Soviet Union in the 1970s. No one even considered doing that. You could make the case that it would support Soviet agriculture and feed starving people, but no one said that because those same computers could be used for nuclear weapons testing and countless other military applications. There was no debate about it — it was understood to be a bad idea.

50 years later, we’re in a cold war. This is unbelievably shortsighted — putting profit above national security. Jensen Huang said if you’re a China hawk, you’re unpatriotic and un-American. I think selling supercomputing capabilities to the Chinese military is as unpatriotic and un-American as it gets.

Jordan Schneider: Jensen, if you’re listening, you’re invited to come on ChinaTalk anytime to make your case.

Dmitri, what’s telling is that the rest of the tech industry is finally pushing back. After months of staying quiet for fear of losing access to Nvidia chips, major players like Microsoft and AWS are supporting measures like the GAIN Act. The benefit of selling chips to China is mostly limited to Nvidia. U.S. hyperscalers and AI labs now face a powerful new competitor for limited chip manufacturing, driving up prices. The upside seems narrow, especially when Nvidia’s strongest argument — that the world, including China, will be locked into CUDA — seems far-fetched.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Nvidia’s argument is knowingly false. The GAIN Act is the ultimate ‘America First’ act. It stipulates that before chips are sold to countries of concern like China, we must ensure that U.S. demand is satisfied. American companies are first in line. How anyone could argue against this is beyond me.

The Act doesn’t say, “we’ll cut China off completely to ensure their military doesn’t get chips” — we’re saying, “let’s make sure American companies have priority.” It’s a no-brainer. I’ve talked to hyperscalers who are supportive of this act, and even other chip companies are saying they agree with the concept. The fight wasn’t about the details — the fight was a push for no restrictions on sales to China, which is unbelievable.

Jensen’s argument that the U.S. wants to make China addicted to the American tech stack is ridiculous. There is no addiction — chips aren’t cocaine. You can see this today with every single hyperscaler — Google, Amazon, Microsoft with its Maia chip, and now Meta with its own custom chips — all saying they are moving off CUDA. Many already are.

The top two frontier models, Claude and Gemini, were reportedly trained on Amazon’s Trainium and Google’s TPUs, respectively. There aren’t enough chips to go around, and for cost and strategic reasons, pretty much every frontier company is now using a multi-chip architecture — CUDA, Trainium, TPUs, and others. There is no addiction. Companies were able to make that switch in months, it’s easy — this is software and APIs. You can give AI one API and tell it to rewrite it in the form of another. It’s a trivial task.

Now we’re selling China H200s. This is probably the start of a broader concession on Blackwell, and then Rubin. Jensen won’t stop at the H200 — he will want to sell everything. The Chinese want to receive the latest and greatest chips, not only the Hopper generation. We’re going to sell them these chips, and they’re going to build competitive models. DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi are already good — they’re at most 12 months behind. They will quickly catch up and become leading models.

China will keep investing in Huawei because the Chinese are not stupid. Jensen says that if we don’t sell them chips, they’ll invest in their own, like Huawei’s Ascend chips. They’re doing that anyway. Xi Jinping is going to demand it, which is why you’re seeing China’s response that they will restrict the importation of H200s to ensure there is still domestic demand for Huawei chips.

Huawei’s Ascend chips will eventually catch up, and Chinese companies — supposedly “addicted” to the American AI stack — will switch over in days or weeks. What will we have achieved? We will have relinquished our lead in frontier AI models, and eventually, they’ll have chips that replace Nvidia’s. It is myopic and stupid for Nvidia’s own business model. They are focused on the next quarter and the next year versus a couple of years from now when China dominates both chips and frontier models.

Jordan Schneider: If this goes through, and tens of billions of dollars worth of chips are exported to China, and the future you portend comes true, will there will be a political price to pay? This was a major talking point for Trump on his campaign — “Winning the AI race” and “American AI dominance”. A year or 18 months from now, if China is releasing crazy new AI-powered technologies that were all trained on Nvidia chips, that will be a tricky political dance. Nice calls from Jensen won’t be enough to smooth that over.

Dmitri Alperovitch: We are already there. Almost a year ago, there was a brouhaha over the release of DeepSeek. The surprise was unwarranted: it shouldn’t have shocked anyone paying close attention. But people reacted with, “Oh my God, the Chinese are catching up.” Of course they are. Deepseek was built on H100 chips, which, until recently, were not restricted. There will be another DeepSeek moment, but worse. DeepSeek was good, but it was still behind frontier models. The next models will be better.

Sam Altman is in panic mode over Gemini 3 because its capabilities eclipse his models. This will happen to all American frontier models and to the country more broadly. The Chinese will crush us with cheaper power, tons of researchers, and massive state subsidies. The one thing they were missing — compute — will now flow into China.

Jordan Schneider: The Financial Times reported Chinese companies were training models in Malaysia or Singapore. That’s not ideal and not as efficient as AliCloud’s operations in China. There, they can rapidly deploy numerous H100s while benefiting from straightforward communication, a reliable power grid, and lower energy costs.

Dmitri Alperovitch: We should have been cracking down on H100 access in Malaysia and elsewhere. Chips shipped directly to China will be prioritized for high-side intelligence and military networks. Chinese agencies can’t use public clouds in Malaysia for their classified data. But now they can grab those chips from private companies in China and prioritize them for military purposes, as they do with everything else.

Jordan Schneider: That seems like the most salient reason China would want the chips inside the country. Training models in Malaysia is annoying, but only 10%-annoying. There are also data privacy restrictions, which they can get around if they’re serving domestic consumers in China. What do they want complete control of their chips for? The sensitive stuff that they would never trust a random Singaporean cutout to do for you.

Dmitri Alperovitch: The U.S. government cannot get enough chips. Agencies have told me they are compute-dependent for inference and cannot get enough chips. Now we’re shipping part of that limited supply to China. How does that make sense?

Jordan Schneider: Let’s flip this around.

Dmitri Alperovitch: One more point. The H200 is from the Hopper generation, not the latest Blackwell generation, but it has High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). We have a current ban on the export of HBM to China. The H200 decision calls HBM protections into question, as the technology is already being exported on Nvidia chips.

We may see a cascading failure of export controls. I am hearing of discussions about relaxing export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment, which would make it easier for Huawei to manufacture Ascend chips in China. I hope that doesn’t happen, but there are people in the administration pushing for it.

Jordan Schneider: A year ago, the administration was being pressured to restrict chip technology to China. First there was the H20 situation, then the Laura Loomer saga and teh “twilight of the China hawks.” Lawmakers Vasant, Greer, and Rubio even intervened right before the Xi Jinping meeting to urge against concessions. Now, only a month later, this policy has been enacted without any clear reciprocal action from China other than continued soybean purchases.

Dmitri Alperovitch: I don’t know.

Jordan Schneider: To be determined. The main thing they’ve done recently is bully Japan. That’s the only big new development. And now we’re deciding to throw this other carrot into the mix. It’s weird.

Dmitri Alperovitch: The crazy thing is that China isn’t even asking for this. It didn’t come up in the Trump-Xi meeting. This is a concession to Jensen Huang, enabling Nvidia to make money at the expense of U.S. national security. I could understand it if this were a trade to get something we desperately want from China, like rare earths or a commitment not to invade Taiwan — though they would never do that. But it’s not. We are getting nothing for it. It is a favor to Jensen, to China, and to the PLA.

Jordan Schneider: It’s not even a big favor to my 401(k) — it only went up by two and a half percent. Come on.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Nvidia is in trouble because its U.S. market is going to shrink. Its primary customers, all the major hyperscalers, are building their own chips and want to move off of Nvidia’s platform. It’s desperately looking for another market, in China and the Middle East. That is why the company is pushing so hard for these export controls to be lifted. Jensen probably sees this is an existential problem.

Jordan Schneider: Dmitri, I appreciate your energy. I am so tired of these guys. I have to give Jensen credit for his stamina in making those calls and fighting through this. He has delivered twice now.

Dmitri Alperovitch: And he killed the GAIN Act.

Jordan Schneider: The man’s on a roll — he’s scored a touchdown.

Dmitri Alperovitch: And by the way, he’s not only going after the China hawks. The entire industry — from the hyperscalers to other chip companies — is on the other side of the ledger. He’s single-handedly beating everyone in this town. It is astonishing.

King Jensen

Jordan Schneider: Last year I asked you why more rich people don’t invest their time and energy to shape political outcomes. The thesis was that if you put the time and work in, you can get results. This is Exhibit A for CEOs trying to push through initiatives that may not have polled well initially. If you put in enough legwork and time on the phones, you can make things happen.

Dmitri Alperovitch: You have to give him kudos — he’s done incredibly well at the influence game here in D.C. He is putting in the time, meeting with anyone. He even said he’ll meet with Elizabeth Warren, one of his chief critics on the Democratic side. He’s calling the President almost daily, it seems. He got this done by badgering the President, repeating, “Get me my chips, get me my chips, get me my chips.” Donald Trump finally said, “Fine, here you go.”

Jordan Schneider: This development suggests the administration dismisses both the national security and the economic arguments for restricting this technology. It ignores the reality that these chips are vital in a strategic military competition.

Economically, it also overlooks the fact that strengthening Chinese competitors will harm American industry for decades. We should be consolidating the technology that drives productivity, not ceding it to a rival.

Dmitri Alperovitch: I don’t agree. The majority of this administration is opposed to this decision and does believe we are in a strategic competition with China. Call it a cold war. I know people in the administration agree. The president was convinced that selling China American AI stack is good for American business, and that Chinese firms will be addicted to it. But it’s a nonsensical argument. Jensen lied, because there is no addiction to the stack — it’s easy to move off of it. Unfortunately, he has been able to carry the day for now.

Jordan Schneider: This isn’t selling the “stack.” Selling the stack would be Nvidia chips run by AWS or Google, running Western models. This is selling the lowest level of the stack. I guess if the semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) relaxations come true, we’ll be selling the two lowest levels.

Dmitri Alperovitch: This is the equivalent of selling Ford cars to China in the hope China will be “addicted” and not prefer any other car. It is stupid on its face.

Jordan Schneider: It’s not even selling the Ford car — it’s selling the axles.

Dmitri Alperovitch: That’s all it is. There are huge problems with this decision. First, this is enabling the Chinese military and intelligence services, which are adversaries we could one day be at war with. The DoD is planning for a fight with China and stressing the need to overmatch its capabilities. Second, it puts Chinese firms on equal footing with American firms. Why would we do that? It hurts American companies and the American economy.

Jensen’s argument against export controls is inconsistent with his own business practices. He claims controls only encourage strategic competitors to innovate. By that logic, he should open-source his proprietary CUDA framework to AMD, because God forbid they develop a superior alternative. He doesn’t practice what he preaches. He is protecting his technology with patents and trade secrets, like any other company. Yet, he insists the U.S. should use a different strategy at a national level. It’s insanity.

Demand for chips in the U.S. already outstrips supply. Diverting this limited resource to a strategic military and economic competitor is a self-defeating act — we are actively surrendering the Cold War. I’m not an “AI doomer” — this technology is profoundly important for economic and military power. That is why there is no valid argument for helping your main rival develop it.

Jordan Schneider: Hey, White House. Hey, Nvidia. If you want to come on ChinaTalk and make those arguments, we could hash it out here.

Maybe we’ll be saved by the Ministry of State Security, who convince themselves that this is a crazy CIA plot to backdoor hack the PLA. It’s a longshot.

An Institute for Progress chart shows the U.S. and its allies currently possess a large compute advantage over China, roughly a 13-to-1 ratio. Selling large volumes of chips to China could drastically change this balance.

The main question is how Huawei’s domestic production compares to Nvidia’s global output from its fabs. If we withhold advanced equipment and AI chips from China, we can confidently expect a continued U.S. advantage. If these sales go through, it’s unclear who will lead in compute power in next 5 to 15 years.

Dmitri Alperovitch: It will be China, because they’re going to subsidize the hell out of this and we won’t.

It’s not over. Capital Hill is upset about this. Don’t count out Congress, the GAIN Act isn’t dead yet. There will be a fight to prioritize chips for American companies and to see what restrictions are possible — maybe export control reviews by Congress. There are bills floating around.

Also, Donald Trump often changes his mind. Others may convince him to revert this decision. The good thing about Donald Trump is that you’re never done. Whatever happens today can be undone tomorrow, and we need to take advantage of that.

Jordan Schneider: That’s the great irony in all of this. Given the political hesitancy on both side of the aisle and the possibility of Trump changing his mind, Alibaba, Tencent, or ByteDance are unlikely to bet their firms’ futures on Nvidia chips. This is going to be a political football, and one Truth Social post won’t end it. The strategy of “addicting Chinese firms” over the long term — setting aside Beijing’s own goal to indigenize chip production— won’t work.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Beyond politics, this strategy fails for basic business reasons.

China won’t get enough chips. You have Jensen acting as king, allocating a scarce supply of Nvidia chips to hyperscalers and now Chinese customers. Since there isn’t enough to go around, that scarcity forces them to rely on other chips.

No one wants to pay the “Nvidia tax” or be completely dependent on a single monopolistic supplier. Everyone wants to diversify, which is why you see them all building their architectures on multi-chip designs. Committing 100% to CUDA, politics aside, makes no commercial sense.

The Magic of AI

Jordan Schneider: Let’s close on some vibe-coding. I can’t be too depressed going into the holidays. Dmitri, I hear you’ve been having some fun with Opus 4.5 recently. What’s it done for you?

Dmitri Alperovitch: It’s magic. Anyone with a bachelor’s degree, not even in a technical field, can be a software engineer within three years, if not sooner. It is so easy to develop applications. I’ve built two mobile apps in the last month and a web app for personal use. Opus 4.5 is magic. I built a mobile app yesterday in 15 minutes, and most of that time was spent on setup, authorizing it on the Apple Store, and configuring my device. The capability is incredible, and it’s improving everyday.

This is the innovation we have to look forward to, and we want to make sure our American companies, our government, and our citizens are the primary beneficiaries. We want American frontier companies to be the best, and then we can restrict these models from actors we don’t want to have access.

I’m on the board of a number of companies, and I’m telling them all to start measuring their engineers on their use of AI in development tasks. Anyone who isn’t using AI should be considered for a performance improvement plan (PIP). This is the next hammer. It’s like when hammers were discovered tens of thousands of years ago — whoever didn’t use them fell behind. This is an unbelievable productivity tool.

One of my companies has a software engineering team developing their products. They’re also pulling people from other departments, like security, to help build the next module in Claude or other models. These teams are creating prototypes, and even production-ready versions. It’s unbelievable how you’re able to raise the productivity of everyone, not just software engineers.

Jordan Schneider: I want to say the same for analysts, think tankers, Hill staffers, and folks in the executive branch. It is a superpower. We were having a debate about whether Huawei can backfill Nvidia and what the ratio of chips would be. It took me 45 minutes to build an entire data visualization with sliders for different assumptions. How much HBM will China get? How tight will the export controls be? How much will they improve using DUV? How far behind will Huawei’s chips be compared to Nvidia’s?

Beyond the fun personal applications, it’s the “bicycle for the mind” aspect that people should experience, especially for thinking through policy problems. If you’re wrestling with a knotty issue that has numbers, contingencies, or second-order effects that are hard to hold in your head, ask Claude to help you visualize it or see the other side of the argument.

The hallucination issue is almost gone. You still need to fact-check the details and trust your gut if something seems off, but the improvement has been dramatic.

Dmitri Alperovitch: It depends on what you’re using it for. At some level, it’s garbage in, garbage out. If you’re training a model on Reddit and asking about something very esoteric, you’re not going to get a good answer.

Jordan Schneider: You are doing yourself a disservice if you haven’t spent time with these models. Try to integrate them into your day job. You should be hanging out on Cursor and Claude, trying to build little tools and apps to make your workflow easier or allow you to do new things.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Building apps was nostalgic for me. It brought back the emotions I felt as a kid in the 1980s when I learned programming. It was an amazing feel coding your first “Hello, World!” program or, in my case, a simple game in QBasic. The magic of seeing it run was a special feeling, and you felt so proud and accomplished.

This took me back. It made me think, “Oh my God, this is magic.” In the ‘80s and ‘90s, you had to have technical expertise and learn a programming language. You still need some technical skills today, particularly when you’re debugging or if you don’t understand how Swift works or how to deploy iOS apps. But all of that is going away.

Jordan Schneider: It’s going away.

Dmitri Alperovitch: The accessibility of this technology changing everything. For years, we thought only nerds could access the magic of programming. Now, everyone can, and that is going to revolutionize everything. The interesting thing about AI is not that it’s going to make tasks easier and faster, but that it’s going to make other things that you would never, ever do before accessible.

The cost of software engineering iwill drop to zero. Everyone will be building dozens of apps — for their grocery list, for managing their kids’ schedules, whatever it may be — because it’s so easy. You can custom build something that would be useful only to you, with no commercial value. Even for coders, we wouldn’t spend our time building those apps it was a lot of effort. Now, that effort is gone.

Jordan Schneider: The activation energy for doing a side project has dropped to zero. What I’m excited to see created, Dmitri, is the “senior policy official simulator.” That’s a classic nerdy ChinaTalk idea.

Dmitri Alperovitch: So nerdy.

Jordan Schneider: But you read all these memoirs from government officials. Jake Sullivan said the one thing you can’t experience beforehand is being in a crisis. You can have a Tim Geithner level — all of a sudden it’s 2009, and it’s not like you’ve lived through a financial crisis before.

Having a visceral experience — a VR Situation Room meeting, a VR flight on the plane with the president trying to convince him not to sell chips to China — getting reps in those high-stakes political, personal, and commercial situations could be transformative. It doesn’t have to be for politics and national security. We haven’t had a nuclear crisis in a long time.

Having the deeper, emergent human capabilities that AI simulations of these events can provide seems like a big upside for human competence when dealing with crises in the future. I’m excited about it. Rockstar Games, if you’re out there, give me a call. We can do some cool stuff together.

Dmitri, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being a part of ChinaTalk.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Thanks for having me, Jordan.

Mood Music

Tony Stark and Justin Mc return for Second Breakfast. In Part I, we break down the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS).

Today, our conversation covers…

• What a National Security Strategy is, and why they matter,

• Controversial new inclusions in Trump’s NSS, including on Taiwan policy and the “reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,”

• How to reconcile the document’s ambitious vision for deterrence with the reality of Trump’s China policy,

• The mixed signals this NSS sends to U.S. allies,

• What Buffalo Wild Wings can teach us about competition with China.

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

Ends, Means, and One China

Jordan Schneider: Tony, give us the 101 on what a National Security Strategy is, and then we’re all going to go around and say one nice thing about it.

Tony Stark: There are three major U.S. government national security strategy documents. The first is the National Military Strategy, which applies to the uniformed services but is rarely noticed outside the Joint Staff.

Next is the National Defense Strategy (NDS), which is the Pentagon’s primary strategic document. It’s the one most people in the field care about because it’s a Cabinet-level document, even if it isn’t overtly political. Legally, a new NDS is required every four years, and developing a new NDS takes 6 to 18 months. New administrations are given a little extra time — about a year and a half — to publish their first one.

The NDS is written at the “action officer” level, which includes General Schedule (GS) employees, field-grade officers, contractors, and think tank experts. Then it is passed up to the Deputy Assistant Secretary level in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) — their equivalents are three-star generals — and then to the commands, the undersecretaries, and so on.

Finally, there’s the National Security Strategy (NSS), which is historically the most political of the documents because it comes out of the White House, not the Pentagon. The NSS is a guiding vision of the administration’s goals and incorporates all elements of national power. Historically, this is also the blandest document — its wide scope reads more as a political statement than a defense plan. The new Trump administration just released its first NSS. While the NDS has been ready for a while, they were likely waiting to publish the NSS first.

At 29 pages, the new NSS is the right length for a public national strategy document. There are usually non-public, classified annexes and other materials.

Justin McIntosh: The document correctly focuses on economic re-industrialization and re-energizing the defense industrial base — issues we’ve previously discussed. It puts those ideas forward in its “answers” section. But…

Jordan Schneider: No “buts.”

Justin McIntosh: Okay! Yes, that’s where the focus should be.

Jordan Schneider: The straightforward questions in the document are nice. The Q&A rhythm is interesting and provocative. It’s focused. There’s a section of questions like, “What should the U.S. want overall?” and “What does the U.S. want from the world?” There’s no artifice about how transactional it’s going to be — what you see is what you get.

Tony Stark: If I were framing a strategy document for the American people, this is how I would structure it. A clear layout saying, “This is what we want. This is why we have a strategy. What are the ends, ways, and means? What does that mean?” It’s written in a clear, accessible way, without many buzzwords. Although what replaced the buzzwords wasn’t great.

Jordan Schneider: Avoiding policy jargon in this document seems to have been a conscious choice.

Justin McIntosh: But it lacks nuanced, impartial language and contains statements that our adversaries will exploit. A comment on the necessity of securing borders said that any sovereign nation has the right to control them. The PRC and Russia can easily seize on a statement like that. This is a kind of language previous administrations have avoided, because they didn’t want a quote interpreted as agreeing with the Chinese or Russian position.

Tony Stark: The document does not change U.S. policy towards Taiwan. If anyone tells you it does, they are wrong. However, it does give the PRC political and legal ammunition. They can now say, “But you said you wouldn’t interfere in the internal affairs of others,” pointing to our supposed principles of non-interventionism.

The document also says we do have to intervene sometimes. This amounts to talking out of both sides of your mouth — we reserve the right to do whatever we want. The “flexible realism” section is a fancy way of saying we’ll do whatever is convenient. Historically, that has been U.S. foreign policy in practice, but that doesn’t mean it’s what we should aspire to.

Justin McIntosh: I don’t have a problem with them laying out the “ends, ways, and means” discussion up front, but it has limitations. That linear framework is well-suited to military decision-making, but a national strategy needs to be more pragmatic and flexible. At the national level, you control all the resources. You can marshal all those resources toward any goal that is deemed important. That makes the “ends, ways, and means” calculation irrelevant because you will find a way to make it happen.

Jordan Schneider: The Trump administration’s focus on “ends, ways, and means” raises the question — how weak do they think the U.S. really is?

Reducing the U.S.’s power to an “ends, ways, and means” calculation only works in military contexts — counting ships and battalions to see how many wars you can fight. The U.S.’s power to achieve economic and national security ends is elastic. The means to those ends can grow dramatically when the president builds a consensus around them — once the nation decides something must be done, it finds the capacity to do it.

It’s a mistake to define goals downward because those goals inevitably change. Consider the border — the Biden administration didn’t prioritize the issue and struggled to find the means. The Trump administration’s intense focus on the border unlocked congressional funding and operational capacity. The resources didn’t appear from nowhere — the will to use them did. This dynamic applies globally. To believe the U.S. cannot act because it lacks on-hand capabilities is a severely limited way of thinking about our power to shape events.

Mixed Signals

Tony Stark: The document’s focus on military and economic power isn’t unique, but its goals do not align with a realistic budget. It calls for both bolstering deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and shifting our entire global military posture to the Western Pacific, which would drain resources from Europe and Latin America. We have to assume this will happen.

This creates deep concern for our allies, but that matters for the U.S. too. The Germans will be wildly pissed about how they are described in the document. Asian allies are told to “do more,” a demand that ignores their significant recent efforts. Getting allies to increase defense contributions was an accomplishment of the first Trump administration that continued under Biden. The call to “do more” is now an outdated talking point — they are doing more. Japan is considering exporting weapons for the first time.

Justin McIntosh: Worse still, when allies make the kinds of statements the U.S. wants — like Sanae Takaichi declaring a PLA incursion into Taiwan a national security threat to Japan — the administration’s response is silence. Based on the reporting of Xi and Trump’s call, it appears the U.S. did not affirm that position. Instead of backing Japan’s strong stance, the message was to “calm it down.”

The Trump administration is sending mixed signals. Does it want allies to spend more on defense, develop a stronger defense mindset, and care more about their own security, or not?

Jordan Schneider: Let’s do some reading from the scripture here.

“A favorable conventional military balance remains an essential component of strategic competition. There is rightly much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the second island chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters. Hence, preventing a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority. We will also maintain our long-standing declaratory policy on Taiwan, meaning that the United States did not support any unilateral changes to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”

From that, it sounds like a good idea for Japan to make its role in deterrence transparent. How seriously should we take any of these documents?

Tony Stark: I wish Eric were here for another briefcase-carrier rant. In the 2010s, a gripe of mine was hearing mainstream national security people, the ones in the know, say strategy documents don’t matter. That is a clear indicator they either haven’t written a good strategy document or haven’t marshalled the resources and people to execute it. I’ve occasionally had to metaphorically beat somebody over the head with a strategy document.

One problem is that people don’t read strategy documents. I have been in meetings with theater-level commands who’ve asked me, “What are you quoting from?” And my response is, “The National Defense Strategy.” They’ll ask me to send it to them. It’s a public document.

Justin McIntosh: “No, no, we meant the classified annex, Tony. Obviously, we’ve read the public one.”

Tony Stark: “The super-secret one that wasn’t even fully distributed to your command.”

Justin McIntosh: The document doesn’t matter, and there isn’t a robust national security apparatus anymore — at least in this administration — it’s as if the President is the sole decision-maker. Trump has consolidated his counsel — it’s a smaller group than it was.

Another problem is that the strategy document’s promises are often the opposite of what the president himself has done. The strategy specifically addresses deterring propaganda aimed at Americans, clearly referencing China, and yet TikTok is still legal here.

When X turned on a filter showing where accounts came from, it revealed so-called Mongolian accounts weren’t Mongolian, and supposed Uyghur accounts were run from mainland China. Pro-MAGA accounts were operated from VPNs in India and China to target Americans. Where was the action on that propaganda? We kept TikTok, and no one has suggested the government force X to shut down foreign influence accounts. These goals are in the document, but the follow-through is missing.

Tony Stark: Every administration struggles with inconsistencies between its strategy and actions. That’s the nature of a democracy — it’s the nature of any government worldwide. This strategy document’s main issue is its unusual use of national security language. The strategy says the administration opposes disinformation, but what do they consider disinformation? There are direct quotes that frame concepts like “de-radicalization” and “protecting our democracy” as a fake guise — that inclusion is wild.

On foreign policy, the document critiques the U.S. for focusing too much on projecting “liberal ideology” into Africa — it’s unclear if that means big ‘L’ or small ‘l’ liberal. Let’s assume it’s both. The most stunning part is that the National Security Strategy of the United States explicitly frames the concept of “protecting our democracy” as a ruse. That is insane.

The parts of a strategy document that truly matter are the ones that diverge from the previous strategies. While I’ve critiqued previous strategies, this document is on another level.

Justin McIntosh: The large section on China is a good example. It would be great if the administration enacted many of the listed actions — I’d be all for it. The cognitive dissonance between the strategy document and the administration’s actions is troubling.

Jordan Schneider: Six months ago, the AI action plan included interesting language about new export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Those controls are paused because Stephen Miller’s current job is to avoid upsetting China. This directive came after a Chinese official was angered by a Financial Times article on Alibaba and the PLA. Stephen Miller’s Twitter banner is a picture of him shaking hands with Xi. This is hard to square with official strategy documents demanding military overmatch.

You can try to connect those dots and argue that the goal is to keep the economic relationship calm while we re-industrialize and build up our military. Okay, maybe. But that still doesn’t explain the U.S NSS includes sovereignty language seemingly copied and pasted from Putin’s playbook.

Traditional Values, Universal Wings

Tony Stark: The document is also very undergraduate. That is not a critique of the accessible language — I also try to write for a wider audience — but of the concepts themselves. If an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin were assigned the paper topic — what should a national security strategy be — this would be that paper.

Jordan Schneider: There are 14 bullet points where each sentence is about seven words long.

Tony Stark: What does this all mean? The language in the National Security Strategy should not shock anyone — it’s consistent with the administration’s usual rhetoric. What has changed is that this language is now the official guidance — it has leverage in bureaucratic fights. The influence may not be immediate, but it will be cumulative. The real test will be when the National Defense Strategy comes out. Someone who worked on it texted me last night and said, “Well, they set the bar low, so this is great for us.”

Justin McIntosh: They’re being pragmatic. What troubled me was the traditionalist language at the end.

“Finally, we want the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry—with no one sitting on the sidelines—who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”

Tony Stark: “We will use every means to protect our precious bodily fluids.”

Jordan Schneider: Wait, if you’re raising a disabled child, or if your child is sick with a fever, then you are not contributing to the restoration of American cultural and spiritual health? Wow.

Tony Stark: That is what RFK Jr. said — if your kid is sick, that’s not a good societal contribution.

Justin McIntosh: His miasmas are off, or whatever non-germ-theory medicine he peddles but doesn’t practice.

Tony Stark: The Midi-chlorians from Star Wars.

Justin McIntosh: That language is reminiscent of what you see from Putin and China’s family planning policies. It is the exact type of language that Xi and Putin use to justify pro-natalist policies and promote traditional families and traditional gender roles. Reading about the one-child policy in Dan Wang’s Breakneck is heartbreaking if you have children. It’s striking how similar the NSS’s language is to China’s early discussion of the one-child policy.

Tony Stark: In a reasonable time, there would be ten articles asking, “What does this mean? How is the government going to encourage people to have more kids?” Now, it’s something I don’t even want to read about.

After COVID-19, as the “China Rising” narrative was gaining prominence in 2021 and 2022, discussions began in national security circles about how the U.S. population is numerically outmatched. Although we are solving that problem with robotics, it was a talking point among traditionalists. They argued that the U.S. won the Cold War by embracing traditional values. That’s not how we won. We won thanks to Skunk Works and the Soviet Union’s economic mismanagement.

This argument has surfaced before in national security circles — it’s not a new phenomenon. The other common concern is protecting our food supply — I’m surprised it was not mentioned in the document. But, to quote a former coworker of mine, “We have Buffalo Wild Wings and the Chinese don’t. I think we’re okay.”

Jordan Schneider: That would be a great cultural export. Maybe that’s what the world needs.

Tony Stark: Are there Buffalo Wild Wings locations in Shanghai or Beijing?

Justin McIntosh: I’m sure there’s one in Taipei. [Note from Lily: Taiwan does not have a Buffalo Wild Wings, but it does have three Hooters locations.]

Tony Stark: Is the food different, or is it universal?

Justin McIntosh: It’s universal, but like McDonald’s in Japan, it’s better.

Tony Stark: Another American cultural victory. We don’t need to change anything.

Justin McIntosh: You can watch a baseball game while eating Buffalo Wild Wings in downtown Taipei.

Tony Stark: During COVID, my former American University professor, Justin Jacobs, uploaded all his lectures on Spotify — excellent lectures on the history of China and Japan. He has an episode about why baseball is played in Taiwan but not on the mainland. He discusses the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and the differences in Confucian culture and masculinity. Prof. Jacobs is an amazing resource for East Asian history.

Jordan Schneider: I asked Gemini what other regimes this resembles. It suggested Vichy France, Fascist Italy, and modern Hungary.

Justin McIntosh: I wonder what Grok would say…

This December, we’re teaming up with GiveDirectly to send cash to 800 impoverished families in the Bikara region of Rwanda. Studies show that direct cash transfers have a multiplier effect of 2.5x in local economies and reduce infant mortality rates by 48%. Your donation is also tax-deductible in the United States. The link to give is here, and the deadline for donations is midnight on December 31st. Please consider donating if you can!

is a researcher focused on semiconductors, AI, China, and Taiwan. He holds a Master’s degree in Regional Studies — East Asia from Harvard and was recently a summer fellow at the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI).

High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, remains the key bottleneck for China to catch up in manufacturing advanced AI chips. As Moore’s Law has more or less held steady, logic nodes have continuously progressed.

However, the rate of memory chip progression has been slow compared to logic chips. Thus, AI operations are often “memory constrained,” meaning that compute is sitting idle waiting for the memory chip to feed it data on which to perform operations. HBM was created to address this “memory wall” by stacking multiple memory chips on top of each other to boost memory bandwidth. As AI chips continue to get better, HBM remains a critical component for scaling. Simply put, if you care about the AI race and AI chips, then you must care about HBM.

Although China’s memory champion CXMT has been closing the HBM gap, the three memory giants of SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron continue to be more than two generations ahead of CXMT’s HBM2. Assuming export controls hold steady, China’s HBM advances will continue to be stymied by a lack of advanced equipment.

For perspective, achieving the industry’s current HBM3E and HBM4 would be a tremendous achievement for China. As of November 2025, the most advanced AI chips in use use HBM3E. H100s, B100s, and other leading GPUs tap into HBM3E for memory, while Nvidia’s upcoming Rubin GPUs will use HBM4. If CXMT can achieve HBM4 quickly, then they will be able to crack a key part of making advanced GPUs. However, even if they are able to make HBM4 several years down the line, competitive AI chips will likely have meteored beyond contemporary standards to handle workloads unimaginable today.

Ray Wang’s piece earlier this year in ChinaTalk mapping CXMT alongside other memory giants helps policymakers keep an eye on China in the rearview mirror. But past HBM2, when will CXMT hit a wall? Given the current state of export controls and Chinese technological development, what node of HBM can China be expected to reach?

The Three Ingredients: DRAM, Base Die, and Packaging

Making HBM is a difficult endeavor, and the product’s performance ultimately comes down to three factors: the DRAM dies that compose the HBM, the base die that routes the signals coming in and out of the memory stack, and the packaging that binds the DRAM dies together.

Different bottlenecks exist within each of these three HBM components that will hinder CXMT’s progress at different HBM generations. Each merits its own discussion.

DRAM

The memory industry uses a different terminology to mark node sizes compared to the logic industry. Instead of referring to a node by nanometer, the DRAM industry has begun to use letters for its advanced nodes. They started first with 1x, then 1y, and then 1z; afterward, they moved to the Greek alphabet, with 1α after 1z, and then 1β, and then 1γ. (Samsung and SK Hynix use the English 1a, 1b, and 1c instead, but this article uses Micron’s terminology.) Just to demonstrate the gap between each generation, between Micron’s 1β and 1γ nodes, the product speeds increased by 15% while reducing power usage by 20%.

As of 2025, CXMT is three generations behind the leading memory manufacturers, making the 1z node while the big three are shipping 1γ. With the 1z node, however, CXMT can produce DRAM for HBM up until HBM3.

But what must CXMT do to achieve beyond the 1z node? To get to 1α and beyond, CXMT must shrink DRAM cells even further, which requires advanced tools in lithography, etching, and deposition.

Lithography

Two of the most difficult steps in DRAM manufacturing are forming the bitline contact (BLC) and storage node contact (SNC). The BLC is the physical connection between periphery transistors that decide what memory needs to be fetched to amplify their signals and the capacitors that actually hold the memory.

As shown above, patterning and etching the BLC must thread the needle so as to contact the source/drain of the array transistors rather than the buried wordline (BWL) shown in teal.

The case is similar for the SNC, the physical connection between the bitline and capacitor. As shown below, the SNC must be etched through layers of different materials to again connect with the source/drain of the array transistors, instead of the BWL.

As DRAM nodes progress, the pattern density and critical dimensions of these processes get stricter, and greater precision is required. Eventually, EUV lithography is needed for these processes.

However, Micron has used techniques like self-aligned quadruple patterning (SAQP) to continue to use DUV up until its 1β node. Chinese manufacturer SMIC has used similar techniques to stretch DUV use for advanced nodes in the past, like its 7 nm Huawei chip. CXMT is likely even better at utilizing SAQP given the memory industry’s lengthier history with the process. Even for 1γ, Micron only uses EUV for one layer of the process, likely either the BLC or SNC step.

Thus, CXMT can likely also stretch its DUV use until 1β. After that, considering Micron has attempted to delay EUV use until the last possible moment, 1γ and beyond will become extremely difficult without access to the export-controlled EUV equipment. Without EUV, advanced nodes will either be impossible to make or of terrible yield; according to some estimates, using EUV, while more expensive, saves about 3-5% yield for advanced nodes while decreasing process steps by 20-30%. Without EUV, CXMT’s progress in DRAM will likely be stalled at the 1γ node, meaning HBM4E and beyond will be difficult for China to achieve from the DRAM standpoint alone.

Etching

For etching, the picture looks more favorable for CXMT. Advanced etching is required for the steps above, as well as for creating capacitor holes. These holes, which hold the memory charges, have small critical dimensions, high pattern density, and are very deep. Etching narrow yet deep holes like this can lead to a variety of defects, shown below, and thus require advanced tools with high aspect ratios (ratio of height to diameter). Aspect ratios reached 40:1 in the 1x era, with estimates for advanced nodes closer to 60:1.

The U.S. has imposed export controls on advanced etching equipment, including anisotropic etchers (the ones needed for capacitor etch), though China has been able to domestically produce equipment defying the controlled parameters.

For etching through silicon nitride for the capacitors, BLC, and SNC, Chinese products include Naura’s Accura NZ and Accura LX, as well as AMEC’s Primo nanova. Technical specifications about Chinese products are not widely available, though the Primo nanova is specifically advertised for the 1x node and beyond. Although this means the product probably cannot be stretched to cutting-edge nodes, Naura’s tools may work well enough.

Regardless, the existing Chinese offerings demonstrate that China is not too far behind on equipment for capacitor etch. These tools are susceptible to having exaggerated capabilities or scaling issues with manufacturing, but, especially compared to lithography, they’re not so far behind. China holds 10% of the global dry etch market and is self-reliant for about 15% of its advanced etching needs. The country’s rapid growth in the industry also demonstrates that etching obstacles may not be so solid. In short, China’s HBM progress will probably not be meaningfully hindered by DRAM etching bottlenecks.

Beyond etching, advanced deposition tools are required for DRAM manufacturing, but the story is very similar to etching: China can already produce the tools required, so it will likely not be a bottleneck. China is self-sufficient for 5-10% of its deposition needs and is also rapidly accelerating its indigenization efforts.

Through-Silicon Vias (TSVs)

Another step in DRAM manufacturing for HBM is the formation of through-silicon vias (TSVs), diagrammed below. This front-end-of-the-line process forms the vertical connections that allow stacked DRAM dies to communicate and function together. Without TSVs, the concept of HBM and of nearly all advanced packaging would be impossible.

For making TSVs, the most important process again is etching. TSVs require precise etching through DRAM dies to later deposit the material that serves as the vias connecting all the wafers together. The U.S. has imposed export controls on etching equipment specifically for TSV formation (EC 3B001.c.4), but again, China’s domestic manufacturers have been able to defy these parameters.

TSV critical dimensions currently range from 3-5 µm with depths of less than 100 µm. As nodes progress, DRAM dies are getting thinner, and both the depth and CD will decrease. Currently, China already offers equipment to satisfy these TSV requirements. AMEC’s TSV300E advertises a TSV CD of down to 1 µm and can achieve depths of several hundred microns. Naura’s PSE V300, though not publishing its specs, likely achieves a similar performance. Chinese product specs may be exaggerated or with lower throughput, but empirically, TSVs do not seem to pose an issue for CXMT given its capacity rivals other leading memory makers.

Having already achieved likely self-sufficient capabilities in TSV formation, CXMT will not be bottlenecked from this step in HBM manufacturing.

High-κ Metal Gate (HKMG)

Another process difficult in DRAM manufacturing is implementing the high-κ metal gate (HKMG). As shrinking DRAM cells for performance gains becomes increasingly difficult, HKMG has served as another means to increase device speeds.

As shown below, periphery transistors on a DRAM die are normally advanced by shrinking distances between the source and drain while also thinning the gate insulator. However, when insulator thinness reaches its limit, leakage issues emerge, and HKMG is used to solve them.

HKMG replaces traditional gate materials in periphery transistors to accelerate electron flow and prevent power leakage. Partially due to implementing HKMG, SK Hynix was able to achieve a 33% boost in speed with a 21% decrease in power usage.

The HKMG process has been adopted by memory makers since, and CXMT is now beginning its adoption process too; however, some reporting indicates that CXMT is struggling with its HKMG implementation, leading to reduced yield and slower manufacturing ramp-up. Other memory makers have adopted HKMG in their process flows around the 1z node, where CXMT is stuck now, so the company must hurdle the HKMG barrier to keep pace.

Incorporating HKMG in DRAM processes is difficult, partially because of the simultaneous processing of the periphery and array on a single wafer. The thermal budget of the array, or how much heat the structures are able to withstand, is relatively low; this means that the standard HKMG processes for logic nodes cannot be so replicable for DRAM. Although CXMT is currently struggling with HKMG, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable issue. The bottleneck seems to be the more amorphous challenges of experimenting and perfecting process flows rather than a concrete wall of equipment inaccessibility. The equipment required for HKMG generally relates to the deposition tools in which China seems more or less self-sufficient.

Because of the lack of “hard” barriers like lack of access to tools, HKMG adoption will likely not be a serious hindrance to China’s HBM advances.

Base Die

The HBM DRAM dies sit on top of the base die. Among other functions, the base die routes signals coming in and out (I/O) of the memory stack. Ultimately, regardless of how strong the memory dies are, the power of the base die determines the upper limit of memory bandwidth for HBM.

As HBM nodes have progressed, the number of pins on the base die has increased, along with the data transfer speed of those pins. As a result, memory makers have used more advanced DRAM nodes to function for the base die to satisfy the requirement. Around the HBM4 generation, though, memory makers are compelled to use more expensive logic nodes to handle the workload. As such, memory makers are now partnering with TSMC to manufacture their base nodes for advanced generations.

The advanced logic nodes used for base dies will pose a problem for CXMT in its HBM advancement. Without EUV lithography, SMIC has been struggling to advance beyond 7 nm without abysmal yield.

For HBM4, CXMT can retrace Micron’s steps and continue to use a 1β DRAM die for base die functions. However, this decision would have significant drawbacks. Not all HBM4 are created equal, and by using a memory-process base die, Micron has emerged with HBM4 worse than SK Hynix and Samsung. While Micron’s product meets the JEDEC minimum of 8 Gbps per pin and goes to 9 Gbps, SK Hynix and Samsung have been able to reach 10 Gbps per pin and beyond via logic node base dies. Micron claims that they have begun sampling HBM4 with 11 Gbps, but Irrational Analysis explains why this is probably misleading.

Regardless, Micron has conceded that memory nodes are not best suited for the base die after HBM4 and has partnered with TSMC to produce the base die for HBM4E on an advanced logic node. For CXMT, this likely means that using 1β DRAM dies for HBM4 will result in a subpar product, and that HBM4E will be difficult to make without SMIC making breakthroughs in logic nodes.

However, lower cost HBM4 and 4E may be possible for CXMT. Although memory makers are producing their most advanced base dies for HBM4 at 5 nm and below, they are also offering alternatives with cheaper 12 nm base dies. 12 nm base dies can get the job done, but the products with more advanced logic offer smaller interconnect pitches for memory performance and lower power consumption. These make the 5 nm base dies attractive for AI workloads desired by customers like Nvidia.

Although CXMT could theoretically partner with TSMC for its base dies, as they would likely not fall under export control restrictions, my conversations with experts suggest that TSMC may not accept such orders given geopolitical tensions. Essentially, without access to advanced logic nodes for the base die, CXMT will likely struggle to make competitive HBM4 and HBM4E. They will likely be able to make HBM4 with non-leading-edge 12 nm base dies. Perhaps they will even be able to secure orders from TSMC for advanced nodes, but the amount of question marks here makes CXMT’s success uncertain.

Packaging

Packaging is how the entire HBM stack comes together, and one element in particular is relevant. The “glue” that binds DRAM dies to each other, or bonding, is critically important. Stacking so many dies together creates thermal issues that bonding plays an important role in addressing; further, more efficient bonding with minimal gaps between dies is important to enable further stacking. As HBM has evolved from stacking only four dies to now up to sixteen, efficient bonding has been a key enabler.

Die Bonding

A possible struggle for CXMT will be succeeding in die bonding, but not because of export controls. Currently, export controls do not restrict the sale of bonding equipment used for HBM.

The two primary methods for die bonding in HBM are thermocompression bonding with non-conductive film (TC-NCF), used by Samsung and Micron, and mass reflow-molded underfill (MR-MUF), used by SK Hynix. SK Hynix adopted MR-MUF early on since HBM2E, and because of the decision, SK Hynix has been consistently lauded as creating superior HBM.

MR-MUF involves heating and connecting all the stacked dies at once, rather than one at a time like in TC-NCF. The real magic potion for MR-MUF, though, is the epoxy molding compound (EMC) used to fill the gap between dies.

MR-MUF has both better throughput and thermal dissipation than TCB. This is important both to scale production of HBM, but also to manage its heat requirements. By using MR-MUF, SK Hynix is able to stack more dies with fewer usage problems. HBM failures are the number one cause of AI chip failures, so MR-MUF to manage heat grants a real competitive edge.

Following SK Hynix’s footsteps, CXMT is reportedly adopting MR-MUF for its HBM3 and beyond; however, adoption is not like flicking a switch. To reap the benefits of MR-MUF, CXMT must solve several issues. First, MR-MUF is inferior to TC-NCF in managing die warpage. As DRAM dies become even thinner, CXMT will take time resolving this issue, just as SK Hynix has. SK Hynix solved this issue with a process it calls “advanced MR-MUF,” which adds a step of temporary bonding to the process — a step which CXMT may imitate.

Secondly, material acquisition may pose a problem. Competition, not export controls, may bar CXMT from acquiring the EMC for MR-MUF. SK Hynix has an exclusive deal with the Japanese materials company NAMICS for providing its EMC. SK Hynix’s material has been co-developed over years with NAMICS, and the material must be suited for each company’s process flow. Some Chinese sources suggest that CXMT’s EMC supplier is the domestic company Huahai Chengke (华海诚科), but this is still unconfirmed. Even if CXMT uses a domestic supplier, it will likely take years to work together to achieve a high yield.

Because of the extra steps from DRAM making to die bonding via MR-MUF, CXMT’s yield for its HBM3 in 2026 will likely take time to ramp up. Some experts claim that CXMT’s HBM3 yield likely won’t break 40% until the latter half of 2026, partially because of the MR-MUF adoption process.

In the end, though, CXMT’s early bet on MR-MUF will likely turn out to be a good idea in the long term, if not the short term. The advantages of the process are clear, and the bonding process only seems to be a short-term stumbling block. Though not a strict bottleneck, adopting MR-MUF will likely cause CXMT to slow production of HBM3 and beyond, but will not serve as a bottleneck for advanced generations.

Unanswered Questions

It is difficult to gauge CXMT’s capabilities or breakthroughs with 100% certainty. Unlike Chinese model developers, China’s chip manufacturers like to play their cards close to their chest. Because of the sensitive nature of their work, which is relevant for national security goals, or perhaps just because of the nature of the industry, CXMT rarely makes public statements. Perhaps this will change if CXMT undergoes its IPO as planned in 2026.

As such, certain details about China’s memory ecosystem are unanswerable without insider information. Some specific questions are listed below, and ChinaTalk invites anyone with color to reach out with answers or leads:

1. DRAM Node Sizes

   1. What are the critical dimensions of the latest DRAM nodes and their aspect ratios?

   2. What are the critical dimensions for TSVs in the latest HBM generations? How many TSVs are now included on a single DRAM die?

2. Chinese Equipment Ecosystem

   1. How good are AMEC and Naura’s etching equipment for mass production? How good is China’s deposition equipment in practice? How true are the advertised specs?

3. CXMT Struggles

   1. What part of HKMG adoption is CXMT struggling with?

   2. Who is CXMT’s EMC provider for MR-MUF?

If anyone has answers to any of these questions, or has information related to prior analysis, please respond to this email or reach out to jordan@chinatalk.media!

Conclusion

Overall, CXMT is progressing at a steady pace for making HBM, but this trend is likely not to hold forever. For each step of the HBM process — DRAM, base die, and packaging — different bottlenecks will appear to stall CXMT’s progress or compel them to make sub-par HBM. First, the lack of advanced logic for base dies will likely lead CXMT to make lagging-edge HBM4. Even if CXMT utilized a memory node for its base die for HBM4, this would result in an estimated 10% decrease in memory bandwidth. After HBM4, both the base die constraint and the lack of EUV for DRAM manufacturing will cause trouble.

Summary of Conclusions:

But CXMT should not be written off. The industry chose HBM as the best option for memory in AI chips because it was the path of least resistance. With export controls, that may not be true for CXMT and China. Other alternatives for alleviating the memory bottleneck have been discussed, including using hybrid bonding, high-bandwidth flash (HBF), a unified cache manager (UCM), compute in memory (CIM), ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM), and magnetic RAM (MRAM). All of these options have their own problems and are nowhere near adoption, but they present opportunities for China to move off the beaten path and achieve memory self-sufficiency in its own way. If any U.S. administration reverses export controls, though, China will be able to more quickly follow the path for HBM development and catch up in the AI chip race.

For now, though, with HBM remaining the preeminent option, CXMT will have its work cut out for itself.

, the new interim Executive Director of CSET who substacks at , makes her ChinaTalk debut. Present since the founding of CSET, Helen has had a front-row seat to the drama shaping today’s AI world — including a stint on OpenAI’s board.

Today our conversation covers…

• What it means to run CSET in 2025, and how to keep think tank work rigorous and relevant in the age of AI,

• The “good-faith” vs “dark arts” actors shaping Washington’s AI policy debate,

• What her recent trip to China revealed about how Beijing is thinking (and not thinking) about AI,

• Why AI progress might stay “jagged,” and what that means for AI policy,

• Plus: why Jordan can’t fall in love with AI.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

The 2026 Tarbell Fellowship is now open. You could come work with us at ChinaTalk! Apply here.

Don’t just take it from me. Take it from our current Tarbell Fellow, , on his experience so far:

“Tarbell placed me at ChinaTalk for a year, fully funded! It’s been a dream setup to report seriously on China, tech, and AI. The fellowship’s training covers both journalism and the fundamentals of AI, which makes it one of the best on-ramps for people who didn’t come up through traditional reporting or AI pathways.

I always thought about tech journalism but assumed I missed my chance after college. Tarbell gave me another shot. ChinaTalk gives me the freedom to chase questions I’m genuinely curious about in the China–AI space, paired with a team that constantly reads each other’s work, shares articles, and brainstorms ideas. You’ll be producing impactful work for a large audience, but you’ll also be learning every day.

At ChinaTalk, I spend my time digging into the semiconductor supply chain, Chinese AI models, U.S.–China relations, and whatever else I get excited by. If that sounds like your idea of fun, apply!”

Think Tanks in the Age of AI

Jordan Schneider: As the new interim Executive Director of CSET, are you excited to rip up everything they’ve created and remake it in the image of Helen Toner? What is your vision for the future of CSET?

Helen Toner: If there’s one thing that I have learned from the many friends and colleagues who’ve rotated in and out of government, it’s that your day-one mission should be reorganization. Step in, tear everything up, and change the org structure.

No, I’m kidding. It’s exciting and an honor to be in this position. After Jason and Dewey, I’m stepping into big shoes. I’ve been at CSET since its founding in 2019, so it’s exciting to shepherd the organization into a new phase.

CSET’s success is built on a foundation of excellent work, and I want to continue that. The core of our mission is to produce intellectually independent research that is driven by evidence and data.” Our data science team is unique in the think tank world — their data powers our analysis. On every project, we make sure our analysis is rigorous and driven by the best evidence we can find. We care that our work is technically informed.

One of our founding goals at CSET was to show a different way for think tanks to operate, and ideally, inspire others to follow us. I think we’ve been really successful there. You now see RAND with a huge emerging tech and national security effort, and CSIS doing more translations and data visualizations — things that were core to the CSET model and are now much more common in Washington.

That’s great, because it proves our model works. Of course, it also means we have competition, so we have to show what makes CSET unique and where we provide particular value. Our deep expertise on China is a perfect example. We have a whole range of China specialists woven throughout our team, covering everything from language to specific subject matter. I’m excited to lean into that and to keep evolving. Emerging tech never stands still, so we have to keep figuring out where we can add the most value.

Jordan Schneider: I agree that CSET has raised the bar for discourse in Washington — it’s why I gave CSET ChinaTalk’s only “Think Tank of the Year” award back in 2022. It’s been heartwarming to see your standard of using real evidence on thorny topics like chip controls, immigration policy, or the PLA’s use of AI resonate so strongly in the broader debate in Washington.

But at the same time, we’re seeing a paradox. Since 2019, it feels like facts matter less than ever. Arguments get reduced to tweet-shouting matches, and remarkably, those shouting matches are now becoming central to the actual policy debate on AI. What’s your take on these two trends happening in parallel? What’s the synthesis?

Helen Toner: I think there are multiple layers here. You have the headlines in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but there is also work happening beneath the surface. The U.S. government has millions of employees, and the subject matter experts doing the work are interested in details and evidence. There’s a steady demand from them for the kind of support we provide, and they are very responsive to facts.

Another example is the discourse around recent AI legislation. Take California, for example. Last year, the discourse around the SB 1047 bill was awful. Then this year, they convened a governor’s panel, published a report, adopted its recommendations, and passed a less controversial bill. It’s a crazy turnaround. We saw something similar with the EU Code of Practice — it looked like it was going to fall apart, but then it came together. I don’t want to sound too pollyannaish, there’s a lot to be concerned about. But it’s important to remember that sensible work is still getting done.

Jordan Schneider: I started ChinaTalk in 2017, and CSET started in 2019. Back then, the intersection of U.S.-China relations, emerging technology, and national security was not a front-page topic.

Helen Toner: When we said we wanted to have a whole organization focused on emerging tech and national security, and people were like, “A whole organization? Like, four people?”

Jordan Schneider: It’s been a wild adjustment for this space to go from an idea funders would laugh at to something presidents tweet about all the time. But that shift has also brought in layers of bad faith. Back when this community was smaller, there weren’t many people playing dirty.

I think CSET has its heart in the right place and is doing earnest, yeoman’s work. But there are snakes in the grass everywhere now. There’s so much money riding on this research, and that wasn’t true a few years ago. I admire your pollyannaishness — I think it’s good for your mental health. But is the most effective option to put out good research and facts? Or are “dark arts” needed to have that research shape policy?

Helen Toner: I don’t think the only options are “put a white paper on your website” or “go full political dark arts.” There’s a lot of space in between. From the beginning, we’ve done more than publish research — we actively seek out the relevant policymakers, brief them, and work with their teams on legislation. Now, we’re also thinking about how the internet has changed what that means for us. Should we be doing videos? I’m not sure, but we should at least consider it.

Another big shift, which I know you follow, is the trend toward individual brands over institutional ones. Some of our people are eager to give that a go, while others — especially those from the intelligence community — are like, “Oh God, shoot me before you make me go on Twitter.” We’re exploring that space — finding ways to keep doing good-faith, fact-based work while operating effectively in today’s ecosystem.

Jordan Schneider: I worry that an organization where good-faith, facts-focused people are comfortable is fundamentally different from one with “dark arts” specialists. The cultures and incentives don’t mix.

Helen Toner: Will there be a ChinaTalk “Dark Arts Think Tank Award”? Who would that go to?

Jordan Schneider: Wow, I don’t know. I can’t give any names here — this is for public consumption. But I agree that there will always be an audience for grounded data, and someone needs to provide the facts.

Helen Toner: When we talk about “the Facts,” it’s not about some ideas being more virtuous than others. But if you want to accomplish something and care about results, then you need to know what the world looks like.

We worked closely with the Biden administration when they were considering outbound investment controls — asking them, “How will you implement these controls? Do you have the necessary information to do it effectively?” This isn’t about taking a holier-than-thou position. It’s about the reality that if you don’t know what’s going on, you’re going to try things that backfire — and most people want to avoid that.

Jordan Schneider: A better framing might be that it’s better to have data in the discussion.

It’s remarkable what a single researcher can do in recent years with an “individual brand”. It’s wild to think that CSET was around before we could ask ChatGPT what The PLA Daily 解放军报 says. I can now code data visualizations in two hours, which I used to assume would require a CSET-level team and budget. How do you think these new tools change what a solo researcher or a small team can accomplish? Does this change how CSET operates?

Helen Toner: We’re looking at it from the opposite side — what unique things can our larger team do that an individual still can’t? Our data team is tackling a huge data science problem called “entity resolution”. That’s figuring out that “Google London” and “DeepMind” are both “Google” in a massive dataset of text. It’s a huge, messy problem, and using language models in a carefully designed and validated pipeline, we blew past previous results.

We also analyzed ~3,000 AI contracts the PLA is buying and used language models to parse that data. As a larger team, we can do things an individual researcher can’t. We can validate our results and test different models — like when to use an expensive, frontier model versus a lighter one that’s faster and can handle high volumes. We’re doing tons of experimentation there, and the team is coming up with some really cool stuff.

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Jordan Schneider: CSET was early on important AI topics, but has remained ideologically neutral — you were writing about semiconductor export controls in 2020, but have not published an “AI will arrive in 2027” style analysis. Is now the time? Are the odds of those radical changes high enough that you need to start spending your team’s time and budget exploring them?

Helen Toner: I have a unique perspective because I have my feet in two worlds. I’m from the AI safety community, which is in that mindset, but most of my team at CSET is not “AGI-pilled.” We’ve done a lot of work on scaling and red-teaming, but not the “OMG AGI” work. We are currently hiring someone to work on frontier AI issues, and I’m hoping to increase our work in that space.

Jordan Schneider: What are you excited for this person to do?

Helen Toner: I’m excited about the “Frontier AI” framing. I’m glad RAND is now researching AGI, but the concept of AGI is messy and contested — it’s not clear what, if anything, is there. There has been a giant gulf between the AI systems we have — those we can touch and test — and hypothetical concerns about future AGI. But in two years, that gulf has gotten smaller. Now we can look at current systems and extrapolate future ones — which makes this topic amenable to CSET’s evidence-based methods.

I’m psyched for this research. It won’t be “CSET predicts AGI in 2027,” but it’s important to consider the possibility of AGI or superintelligence on timescales soon enough to matter for policy. Watch this space.

The Jagged Frontier

Jordan Schneider: You’ve expressed the view that AI progress could stay jagged. Can you elaborate on that?

Helen Toner: The idea comes from Prof. Ethan Mollick, and possibly also Andrej Karpathy. I highly recommend following Mollick’s AI work on Substack, LinkedIn, or Twitter. His idea was a “jagged frontier” — that AI is good at some tasks and surprisingly bad at others.

I recently gave a talk on this, arguing we should take seriously the idea that AI’s progress might remain jagged. Right now, most people fall into one of two camps — either they think AI is all hype and a “nothing burger” — or they’re in the “AGI by 2027” camp. That group believes powerful AI will become a drop-in remote worker or an automated AI engineer. Both are non-jagged views of the future. The question of what persistent jaggedness would look like is underexplored.

Jordan Schneider: The “jagged frontier” idea is more nuanced than mainstream discourse on AI — the Twitter brain, swinging wildly between “it’s over” and “we’re so back.” Why do you think people resist the possibility of uneven AI development — that the next model won’t solve everything? Why does the jagged idea struggle to gain traction, even though it is our current reality?

Helen Toner: Most people agree today’s AI is jagged, but they believe the future will be different. I think that’s because we use humans as a reference point — we believe that what’s difficult for us must be universally difficult, instead of seeing it as a product of our own evolution. Since the 1950s, we’ve debated — are we recreating the human mind, or building useful machines?

We’re currently far down the “build useful machines” path, but the idea of recreating the human mind is built into the field. I think this is why people expect AI to be more human-like than it is.

Jordan Schneider: There’s money involved now — the AI hype is backed by enormous financial incentives.

Helen Toner: Jaggedness doesn’t only refer to the troughs where AI struggles — there are high peaks as well. In the next 5-10 years, I expect us to exploit the heck out of those peaks. But the way we do so must account for the troughs.

Jordan Schneider: Is jagged AI more tractable for policy research? Is CSET’s work more relevant in that scenario?

Helen Toner: If jaggedness persists, fast takeoff scenarios are less likely — scenarios like an automated AI researcher that makes ten years of progress in six months. That would be a hard world for policy to operate in — there isn’t time for the government to form a commission, write a nice report, and debate it in the next legislative session. Jaggedness leads to slower AI progression, which gives us time to reflect, experiment, and adapt.

I’m not certain jaggedness will persist, but the idea is underrated in the AI community. At the same time, we should consider the possibility of non-jagged, rapid AI progress. It could still happen, although it’s not my best guess.

Jordan Schneider: There’s a resource allocation problem in AI policy research. Should we focus on a tangible, near-term jagged frontier — like AI’s impact on cybersecurity — or on the sci-fi futures of self-improving AI? People are drawn to speculative, sci-fi scenarios — a cybersecurity paper won’t go viral like “AGI by 2027” did. But there is value in working on a more probable future.

Helen Toner: There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in research on jagged development, and a lot of possible futures. What will AI be good at? What tasks will it struggle with? What does that mean for adoption and integration?

A jagged frontier means we are unlikely to fully automate complex jobs or goals. Instead, we will get powerful AI advisors and a “centaur” model of human-AI teaming, which you mentioned in the AI girlfriends podcast. Future human-AI collaboration scenarios are underexplored because predictions of super-powerful AI assume everything will be automated. They focus on abstract problems like alignment, not the messy, practical details of human-machine teaming that a jagged world would demand.

Jordan Schneider: After writing a paper on AI honeypot espionage, I decided to do some experimenting. Over the past few days, I’ve tried to fall in love with an AI, and it’s not lovable in the slightest.

When it comes to personal comfort and consolation, AI jaggedness is very apparent. There has been a lot of recent reporting about people who’ve developed close, intimate relationships with AI, but it’s not doing it for me. What should I make of that, Helen?

Helen Toner: Have you tried the Grok anime goth girl? You need to find the right one for you.

Jordan Schneider: It was bad — really repulsive. Even if I’m not the target audience for these AIs, if they were smart, they would have figured me out after 10 minutes of conversation — the way TikTok figured me out after 45 seconds of swiping. These models cannot do that — that’s an important detail.

The lack of personalized learning is a huge hurdle for AI in the workplace. Instead of learning from user input, models are trained and dropped into organizations, leaving people to figure them out. If the future of this technology depends on personalization that fits like a glove — professionally and personally — then we need to solve this.

Helen Toner: There’s a long way to go. We held a workshop in July about automating AI R&D and the potential for an “intelligence explosion” takeoff. We need to question underlying assumptions — what does progress look like? What are the gaps? How soon can we fill them? We’ll examine this in an upcoming CSET paper.

Jordan Schneider: There’s tension in our view of AI’s capabilities. It’s easy to overlook its limitations in work you do not do yourself, but in your own work, you can feel the jaggedness firsthand. You have an intuitive sense of where AI is exceptional and where it’s uneven.

Ironically, AI engineers are the most optimistic about AI’s capabilities — maybe a little high on their own supply. But the proof is in their paychecks — companies are hiring them in droves because AI cannot do their jobs.

Helen Toner: There are many sources of jaggedness.

A key source of AI’s jaggedness is the context window — how easy is it to input the organizational or practical context of a task? Some professions, like software engineering or marketing, are easily digestible for an AI because you can copy-paste the relevant code or creative brief. But most jobs can’t be reduced to a text file — their context is messy and organizational. We haven’t fully grasped how this single limitation will shape what AI can do and how quickly it can do it.

AI Debates in China

Jordan Schneider: Helen, you were in China recently. How was that trip?

Helen Toner: It was great to be back in China. In 2018, I was in Beijing for 9 months, studying Mandarin and learning about China’s AI ecosystem. But between my green card, the pandemic, and having kids, it had been ages since I was there. I went for a quick five-day trip to Shanghai for the World AI Conference, which was gigantic. You know what Chinese conferences are like — the huge stage, the flashing lights. Robots were walking around everywhere, something you couldn’t get away with in the U.S. Kids were petting little quadruped robots that were roaming the floor. It was a good time.

Jordan Schneider: Were you recognized?

Helen Toner: No, definitely not. Not that anyone told me.

Jordan Schneider: What’s your sense of the U.S.-China AI dialogue and opportunities for discourse or cooperation?

Helen Toner: People in the AI safety community often ask why there isn’t a U.S.-China dialogue on avoiding a race to superintelligence. The answer is that there is no agreement on what the problem is, or what the U.S. and China’s interests are. At a Chatham House discussion I recently attended, the Chinese organizers were divided on whether to focus only on superintelligence or broader development questions as well. Within their team, there was no consensus on the core issues. These conversations are a good start, but we still have a long way to go.

Jordan Schneider: A core AI policy question is how the U.S. and Chinese ecosystems will relate to each other. What are the other key questions that will define the field for years to come?

Helen Toner: On the national security side, the U.S.-China dynamic is a big one, covering both competition and the potential cooperation on AI. Military integration is another huge question. The focus is shifting from developing advanced AI to how it changes a military’s operational concepts and the way it fights. This is an adoption challenge.

There are also serious risks around cyber and biosecurity, but we might get lucky, and the threats are manageable. I’m personally more concerned about cyber, but I know well-informed people with access to classified information who are deeply worried about the bio risks.

Outside of national security, we’ll see more community-level issues, particularly around data centers. A narrative about their water use is gaining traction, and while the data may not show an unusual amount of consumption, the community perception is strong enough to create backlash. There are also social questions. We do not have a framework for dealing with AI companions, especially for children, and the impact of AI on labor and jobs is not going away.

AI Parenting Advice

Jordan Schneider: Do you have any AI parenting takes, Helen?

Helen Toner: I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old, so thankfully, we’re not there yet. But I worry the “engineer-brained” approach to parenting reduces child-rearing to a set of tasks. The idea that if an AI can entertain or teach a child “better” than a human, then it’s a net win, misses the point. The relationship between a parent or teacher and a child is a huge part of what it means to grow up and learn. AI should be a tool to enhance connection, not replace it. If an AI generates a story, read it to your child, but do not be too utilitarian. What are your thoughts?

Jordan Schneider: Abstracting love is a high bar for AI.

Kids are wired by billions of years of evolution to trust a warm, sweaty mammal. An AI can certainly teach them physics or math better than I can, and outsourcing that is one thing. But the biological need for connection is another. Primate studies show the same thing — the monkeys want to be held. Trying to engineer that need away is playing with fire. Maybe a robot will get there in 20 years, but you’re running hard against evolution. No offense to anyone using Midjourney for children’s books — I have that tab open right now.

Helen Toner: I think there are good ways to do it.

Jordan Schneider: Absolutely. But the sci-fi future where kids don’t need loving parents for connection or as models of how to relate to other humans seems a long way off.

Helen Toner: There is a This American Life story that sticks with me, about a single dad and his daughter. He was a physicist, and she would ask him astronomy questions like, “Why do stars...?” or “Where did the Earth come from?”. Kids love to ask “why” questions. He found answering them stressful, so one day, he asked her to write down all of her questions. He locked himself in his office and wrote up a gigantic set of answers for her. The interviewer on the show asked the girl what she thought, and she said, “I wanted to hang out with my dad.” It’s so tragic. Don’t do that with AI.

On Calling Timeout

Jordan Schneider: My theory is that CSET only exists because of Jason Matheny. The national security risks of China’s rapid AI growth were completely off the radar for these funders. It took an exceptional person they trusted, like Jason, to convince them to build a community around this idea.

Before CSET, there was no tech team with deep China expertise. I spent years trying to make the case that competition with China mattered, that AI was more than one small piece of a larger puzzle, but people were unconvinced — that idea was ’too spicy’ or too far out.

There was a brief moment during the 1st Trump administration when it became a mainstream concern. Many corporate blogs, including that famous OpenAI document, were suddenly about beating China. But that moment has passed, and it feels like the issue is becoming less relevant again.

Helen Toner: It’s an interesting time for China+AI policy. When I started in this space around 2017, people in AI would ask, “Why talk about an AI race with China?” and then give AI-specific reasons why it wasn’t a race. I had to explain that they were missing the bigger picture. The U.S. national security apparatus was orienting towards strategic competition with China. For them, AI was only one small manifestation of that competition, and the AI community’s arguments were seen as irrelevant noise.

Jordan Schneider: I remember people telling me, “Oh, but if we say this, will it accelerate the race?” Bro, come on.

Helen Toner: Is strategic competition with China still the main goal of the U.S. national security apparatus? People outside the tech world are not sure — the current U.S. policy toward China is unclear. That’s disconcerting in some ways, but it also creates potentially productive space.

Jordan Schneider: In the 1st Trump administration, U.S.-China competition was a central pillar — Jake Sullivan wanted “as large a lead as possible.” But in Trump 2.0, focus on China has waned, and now we’re mobilizing against Venezuela while ignoring Chinese boats in the Philippines.

For years, I’ve thought that the U.S.-China AI race was inevitable. In many ways, it has already happened — we now have bifurcated ecosystems for AI chips, models, and hyperscalers. These dynamics seem resilient to the day-to-day whims of policymakers. How durable is this rivalry? If the American president is not focused on this issue, do the competitive dynamics of the last decade have enough momentum to continue on their own?

Helen Toner: I don’t know how resilient the rivalry will be. The competition was never about AI — competition with China was the organizing principle of the U.S. national security apparatus, and AI was one part of that. The U.S. AI sector now uses that narrative as justification for everything from faster data center permits to avoiding AI regulation. If those arguments lose force, I’m not sure what will happen.

My own prediction has always been that China’s internal demographic and economic challenges would eventually cool the rivalry, though I thought it would take longer, maybe till the 2030s. With a president who is hard to predict and an increasingly isolationist MAGA base, and a new focus on the Western hemisphere, disengagement with China could be stickier.

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Jordan Schneider: The TikTok story is a…

Helen Toner: Hilarious episode in the sitcom that we live in.

Jordan Schneider: Exactly! This was a bill Congress passed almost unanimously, and then the president decided he was not concerned with an issue Congress had a bipartisan consensus on — that is an interesting detail. I’m not sure how illustrative that is.

Helen Toner: Another source of tension in the Trump coalition right now is between the “tech right” and MAGA. They have disagreements about whether to charge ahead with AI — whether AI is the best thing since sliced bread, or the devil, or the Antichrist. There is a lot of division, but both sides are less concerned about competition with China. The tech right wants to sell to China, and the MAGA world would prefer to slow the rate of development.

Jordan Schneider: Corporate self-interest could be a reinforcing driver. U.S. firms do not want to compete with Chinese companies on their home turf. Once Chinese EVs start taking market share, or Huawei chips threaten Nvidia, the game changes. The question will become, is access to China’s market worth giving up our own? The likely answer is no. U.S. companies will demand the same protected home base that Chinese firms have used to their advantage, which only accelerates the competition.

Helen Toner: Wait, they can operate here? I thought it was a one-way street.

Jordan Schneider: Bill Bishop often invokes a Xi Jinping quote that essentially says, “Our goal is to become more self-reliant at home and make the world more dependent on us.” This mindset was in the rare earths saga, where China’s escalation was a self-inflicted wound. It showed a willingness to compete in a way that alienates American elites. You can admire their ambition, but the U.S. will not accept Chinese competitors dominating key verticals — especially in the tech sector that underpins the U.S. stock market.

Helen Toner: We’ll see. I do not know how we can ban Chinese open-source models, which I think is one of the biggest threats to U.S. market share. Using open-source Chinese models presumably displaces API market share for OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.

Jordan Schneider: They are not un-bannable — stopping individual downloads of Chinese software is a fool’s errand, but that’s not the real game. The real game is preventing billion-dollar companies from being built on Chinese open-source models, and the government has plenty of ways to do that. They can block Chinese models from government contracts, tie it up in FCC compliance issues, or make it a mandatory risk disclosure. If the U.S. government really puts its back into it, it can find a way.

Helen Toner: The government procurement restriction is a good point. Public company disclosures — that’s interesting. I agree, these policies can make it harder.

Jordan Schneider: Or change the incentives. Switching tangents, can you pitch some of the best recent work from CSET — what do you admire and plan to build on?

Helen Toner: One of our most exciting new papers analyzes 2,800 PLA AI contracts. The initial piece focuses on who is buying, and the key finding is that while the largest contracts go to state-owned enterprises, the bulk are awarded to “non-traditional” private companies and universities. More research is coming on what they’re buying.

Our work on DoD AI integration has also been impactful. Interestingly, our research has been valuable to government officials because it is public. Internal reports are often classified and hard to share, so a URL they can circulate is a game-changer. Our paper “Building the Tech Coalition,” which analyzes their use of Project Maven and the internal talent required, is a great example of this.

Number three is our work on AI and biorisks. The debate has been narrowly focused on controlling AI models, so our “Toolkit for Managing Biorisks from AI” broadens the conversation by outlining a full range of policy options, which has been helpful for policymakers.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s do two more, oldies but goodies.

Helen Toner: For oldies but goodies, I’d point to our outbound investment work, where we asked the Biden administration, “If you want to control outgoing investment, do you know how to do that? What data do you have, and what data would you need?” That implementation was a classic example of our work.

Our explainers have been surprisingly impactful. We published one about the differences between generative AI, large language models, and foundational models. A government agency was trying to decide which terminology to use in an influential policy document, and told us the explainer directly influenced their policy. Straightforward research like that has a good track record.

Jordan Schneider: Would you like to recommend some mood music to end the episode?

Helen Toner: The great China and AI scholar, Matt Sheehan, told me instrumental playlists are the best way to focus, so I’ve been listening to a lot of instrumental music. There’s a great James Brown instrumental album. Why not some instrumental James Brown?

Mood Music:

In the wake of Salt Typhoon, what does the future of secure telecom look like?

To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed John Doyle, a former Green Beret who spent a decade building Palantir’s national security practice before founding Cape, which calls itself “America’s privacy-first mobile carrier”. Also joining the conversation is Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman and co-founder of Silverado Policy Accelerator, founder of CrowdStrike, and an angel investor into Cape.

We discuss…

• Why telecom data is so valuable to adversaries, and what China discovered in the Salt Typhoon campaign,

• Cape’s founding thesis, including what makes Cape’s cell network so much more secure than major providers like AT&T,

• How wars are run on commercial cell networks, and how Russia and Ukraine’s reliance on that has been exploited over the course of the war,

• Other instances of telecom data weaponization, including by Hezbollah, Israel, and Mexican drug cartels,

• Taiwan’s plan for dealing with undersea cable sabotage,

• What it takes to cultivate engineering talent in telecoms, and why Huawei has stayed innovative while US providers stagnated.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Thank you to Cape for sponsoring the episode.

Why War Runs on Commercial Cell Networks

Jordan Schneider: Dmitri, why don’t you kick us off — what was Salt Typhoon all about?

Dmitri Alperovitch: Salt Typhoon came to the fore in late 2024, maybe a little bit earlier, when the government discovered there was a huge compromise of major telcos — AT&T, Verizon, and others — by China. Specifically, a Chinese contractor in Sichuan that they ultimately sanctioned for this effort. They were breaking into telcos to get access to call records, sensitive information that telcos have to facilitate law enforcement operations, and voicemails of key political figures. There were revelations that they targeted the Trump campaign in particular during last year’s election.

At the time, I was serving on the Cyber Safety Review Board, which was tasked with investigating Salt Typhoon. The Cyber Safety Review Board is an executive order-created board within the government that combines private sector members with government members to investigate major national security-impacted cyber intrusions. I was actually shocked in the course of our work that the government was shocked. If you know anything about signals intelligence agencies, the first thing you would do is go after telcos. That’s where the crown jewels are. John knows this well from his military career — it’s an invaluable source of information and intelligence on your opponents or adversaries. The idea that no one had seemingly asked, “Would China do this to us?” was baffling. As we’ve seen in revelations from various leaks like Snowden’s, this is something the US intelligence community might be doing to our adversaries. Why would we be shocked that China would do this to us?

That was surprise number one. But in general, I’ve been concerned for many years — and that was one of the reasons I got so excited about investing in Cape — about the fact that our mobile devices are arguably the most valuable source of information about us. They contain really sensitive information: they track our location, have access to cameras and microphones, and contain text messages. People usually put things in text messages that they don’t even put in emails. The telcos have the location data, call records, voicemails, and they can do many things without our knowledge or control.

One of the things we investigated on the CSRB prior to the Salt Typhoon investigation was a cybercrime group called Lapsus$. It was a bunch of teenagers who broke into most of the major companies around the world — Microsoft, Nvidia, and others — with almost no technical skills, primarily leveraging a technique known as SIM swapping. They would bribe or, in some cases, threaten employees at telcos, or oftentimes resellers of telcos, to initiate a SIM swap. A SIM swap is essentially when your phone number gets cloned to another device. It’s a completely legitimate technique when you get a new phone, lose your phone, or upgrade your phone — you initiate a SIM swap where a new SIM card is activated in a new device for you.

But threat actors like Lapsus$ have been doing this surreptitiously to essentially clone your phone number and get SMS two-factor authentication on that device. This would allow them to VPN into companies if they were able to social engineer a password reset through the employee help desk, as these guys were doing. Many companies around the world are still relying on SMS-based authentication, and it seems like every financial institution, in my experience, is still using SMS and not even providing other forms of authentication that are more secure.

I was very concerned that telcos and phone makers have all this information about you and can do pretty much anything they want with it. The telcos in particular can resell it and violate your privacy. From a security perspective, threat actors can break in and tap into those sources of data, and there was nothing you could do about it. Then John came along with Cape and actually offered a solution.

John Doyle: Dmitri just gave basically the entire initial investment thesis of Cape. The Salt Typhoon story has been an enormous focus for us. Three and a half years ago, when I started the company — well first, I should give a little bit of background. Cape is a cellular network. If you’re an AT&T subscriber right now, you can switch and become a Cape subscriber. We’re a worldwide cell network focused on improving privacy, security, and resilience over commercial cellular above the industry baseline.

The Salt Typhoon story is interesting for many reasons. Three and a half years ago, when I was out trying to raise a seed round to start Cape, I would say in pitch meetings, “China has completely infiltrated the telecommunications networks. China has full visibility into what you’re doing with your phone.” People didn’t quite laugh you out of the room. We had been down the Huawei road, and people were aware of some of the vulnerabilities, but it didn’t quite hit home the way it has since the Salt Typhoon news broke. Now we’ve all learned unequivocally: China has completely infiltrated the cell phone networks and can watch everything you’re doing on your phone.

The other thing I would underscore from what Dmitri said is that in his very adroit two-minute introduction to the problem and to the company, we covered SIM swap attacks, carrier breaches, and insecure two-factor authentication over SMS. Your takeaway there is that this problem is really broad. There’s not one specific vulnerability we’re trying to patch. We’re not just trying to patch SolarWinds and then we’re done. This is a literal PhD field of study: what’s wrong with the protocols that run the global cell network, how can they be exploited by bad actors, and how do we remediate them? It’s endlessly interesting, and there’s no shortage of work for us here at the Cape team. But those are some really good examples of why this is a problem.

Dmitri Alperovitch: I should pat myself on the back by saying that I invested long before Salt Typhoon ever manifested on the scene.

John Doyle: That is true. Dmitri saw it also. Full credit.

Jordan Schneider: By way of more introduction, I want to shift the camera over to Ukraine. One of the really remarkable things about this war is the amount of commercial cell phone usage happening on both sides of the front. It has always struck me as a big puzzle because obviously, you turn a phone on and then people can find out where you are and can try to kill you. But at the same time, the utility of these phones is just so important over the course of this war that people are willing to take those risks and put themselves in situations where the cost-benefit ends up on the side of choosing to use your cell phone — and not just because you want to swipe TikTok in Bakhmut or whatever. John, why are soldiers in Ukraine using them as well? Clearly, Americans are not going to stop using cell phones, but why?

John Doyle: It’s a really important question, and there’s an important insight underneath it: wars really run on commercial cellular networks. When I was in the Army from 2003 to 2008, we were in Iraq, and I was a communications guy on a Special Forces team. I would jump out of airplanes with 160 pounds of radio equipment in a rucksack between my knees. Every single time, I also had a cell phone in my cargo pocket. Despite all that — probably hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of communications gear — the thing I knew would always work every time I turned it on was my cell phone. [A quick note from John from the future: In a minute, Dmitri is going to make a joke that made me feel like this rucksack story implied that I have jumped into combat. I want to be clear that I’ve never done a combat jump. I’ve only jumped in training. I’m being careful because I don’t want to claim more cool guy points than I’m entitled to. But I do stand by my broader point, which is that cell phones have been an informal part of the comms plan, at least since I was in the army.] That network’s only gotten better and better.

The telecommunications network is the best communications platform we’ve ever built. The iPhone is one of the best products ever built. It’s so ubiquitously adopted that you see things like Ukraine, where — as a quirk of history — Russia was invading Ukraine literally as I was checking into the WeWork to start Cape in 2022. Like everyone, we watched that unfold on TV. One of the really surprising early revelations was that the Russians were leaving physical cellular infrastructure intact as they advanced into the country. The reason we learned quickly was that they were relying on their cell phones at least as heavily as the Ukrainians were.

To this day, both sides are fighting the war primarily on commercial cell, despite the fact that they’re literally targeting missile strikes against each other based on cell phone location data. That’s how deep the adoption and — you could say — addiction to cellular devices as a communications platform runs.

We saw an interesting turn in the story in June of this year when the Spiderweb attacks happened. That’s when the Ukrainians snuck drones into Russia, woke them up, and piloted them remotely over Russia’s own commercial cellular network to hit strategic bombing targets in a really spectacular attack. When Salt Typhoon happened, everyone asked, “Why are we so surprised this happened?” Spiderweb is another moment where we thought, “Wait, of course this is a way to carry out a really spectacular attack.” It was a highly successful attack and it relied on the commercial cell networks.

Those are just proof points for the thesis we’ve had at Cape from the very beginning: even in times of conflict, even in the most acute of circumstances, people turn to the cell network first. That’s good because it’s amazing and performant, and we know how to use it — for all the reasons that we love cell phones. As long as you fix what’s broken, and that’s where we come in.

Dmitri Alperovitch: I can provide a few more anecdotes. As you know, Jordan, I’ve been pretty involved in analysis of this war and talking to folks in Ukraine on a daily basis. With Spiderweb, one of the things that’s actually been a trend line in Russia — not just with Spiderweb, but with these other long-range strike attacks on infrastructure from Ukraine — is that the Russians have been turning off cellular networks in particular regions whenever they detect a drone strike. Both cellular networks and the internet itself may get turned off regionally whenever they see a swarm of drones coming toward a particular set of infrastructure.

On the other side of the equation, the Ukrainians have been using cellular networks as part of their air defense missions. With these swarms of Shaheds coming every single night into Ukraine, they have mobile units all over the country that are chasing them, trying to track them, trying to shoot them down, often communicating via cellular networks. They have a huge network of acoustic sensors all over the country to detect the motor, which is pretty loud — it’s like a lawnmower in the sky. The Shahed drones are detected and tracked, oftentimes communicated over cell networks.

A couple of years ago, there was a major hack and disruptive attack against Kyivstar, the largest telco in Ukraine. There was speculation inside Ukraine that it was an attempt to impact that air defense network. At the same time, they were launching huge missile and drone attacks into Ukraine in a somewhat coordinated fashion. It’s very tightly linked on both sides to defensive measures against these drone attacks.

A couple more anecdotes for you. On my last visit to Ukraine, I went to visit senior officials in the Defense Ministry and the intelligence agencies. I was completely shocked that in nearly every single case, these officials — the first thing they do when they sit down — take their phones out of their pockets and put them in front of them. In every meeting, I was thinking, “Thank God you’re not fighting the United States of America, because we’d all be dead right now.” They’d identify us by geolocation, and missile strikes would go into these buildings. The lack of OPSEC at the highest levels and operational levels is just absolutely mind-boggling.

The SIGINT that’s active on both sides — on the Russian side, on the Ukrainian side, both against strategic and tactical use of cell phones at the front — is mind-boggling. The type of information they’re able to collect is absolutely insane. I’ve seen what the Ukrainians are collecting against the Russians. Hopefully, when the United States fights, there’s a little bit more OPSEC involved. I was actually surprised to hear that John was able to take his phone on missions because usually it’s prohibited in the US military, and people do get in trouble for it. But it’s hard to enforce, particularly when there are few other ways to communicate reliably, as John said.

One other anecdote I heard from folks in the intelligence services — during the initial invasion in 2022, the Russians left the cellular infrastructure intact so they could use it for communication, but they were bringing in Russian phones. Ukrainians identified Russian forces because new phones were activating on the Ukrainian networks. The Ukrainians immediately pulled every single new phone that was activated on February 24, 2022, inside Ukraine and started geolocating them. Lo and behold, they would find command posts and immediately target them with artillery strikes. A lot of Russian generals died because of that heuristic.

Jordan Schneider: Is this how they got the moms’ phone numbers to start texting them to tell their kids to come home?

Dmitri Alperovitch: I think that was done by capturing phones off the dead. By the way, the Russians quickly got wind of this tactic and instead started stealing phones from the Ukrainians to defeat it. But then the Ukrainians responded by building social media bots where you could easily submit a notification that your phone was just taken by the Russians, which would immediately flag that phone as suspect.

Jordan Schneider: I want to stay on why John brought his phone on missions.

John Doyle: Thank you, Jordan. I really like to defend myself on this point. Dmitri just low-key instigated an Article 15 investigation retroactively into my military career. The phone was switched off, first of all. Second of all, there’s a story I love to tell. When I left Palantir to start Cape in 2022, I talked to a teammate of mine, a guy who was an alumnus of what we call Tier One Special Operations Forces — the elite of the elite, the folks who really do this stuff at a high level. I told him in broad strokes what my idea was, what I was working on, and how I was thinking about the problem. He laughed out loud and said, “Man, we always had this rule — you’re not allowed to take your cell phone on the objective. And every single time we took our cell phones on the objective, because we knew if you really got in trouble and needed to get help, that’s the best way. You flip on your cell phone, you make a phone call.”

I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not going to argue that the policy wasn’t to leave your phones at home. But I wasn’t the only one toting a cell phone — and it was always off.

Dmitri Alperovitch: That’s a good point.

Jordan Schneider: Well, look, Al-Qaeda and Iraq’s SIGINT capabilities are not quite the same as the Russians or the Chinese.

John Doyle: Right. China’s capabilities were essentially the reason we were able to raise money to start this company. That was basically the market insight — the vulnerabilities in the cell phone network accrued to our benefit from a national security perspective for a long time when we were focused on counterterrorism. Everyone was happy to understand the network from that position, and it only ran in one direction because Al-Qaeda and ISIS were not technically sophisticated enough to turn the tables.

But when the Pentagon shifted focus to China and Russia as primary adversaries, all of a sudden, we were facing technically sophisticated foes. Those vulnerabilities were suddenly relevant in both directions. This problem that had been interesting for a long time suddenly became a DOD problem. Defense tech was a big booming industry, and you’re able to raise money if you’re working on important problems. There was nobody building in this space, and that’s basically how we were able to get the company off the ground.

Dmitri Alperovitch: John, good OPSEC is so hard to do. We saw this just this summer during the Iran-Israel war. Based on open-source reporting, the Iranian commanders were smart enough to know that they shouldn’t carry cell phones, but their drivers didn’t. Effectively, because their drivers were taking them everywhere, the Israelis knew exactly the locations of the meetings and were able to target them in real time. It’s just so hard to do because these things have become almost an extension of our arms. If you leave it behind — John and I know this from going to SCIFs for classified briefings where you can’t take a phone into a SCIF — you feel naked. You’re thinking, “Oh my God,” even though you’re only in there for a few hours.

John Doyle: Or the kids’ school needs to get in touch with me.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Right, exactly. It also takes you back to the Stone Ages. I remember I had a meeting inside a classified facility — you can’t bring your phone into the cafeteria — with someone once years back, and that person had an emergency and had to cancel. But I had no way of knowing. They couldn’t contact me. I didn’t have a cell phone. I couldn’t check my email. I was waiting for them until I finally gave up. It was like, “I remember this from the ’90s before cell phones” — it was really problematic. You don’t think of it anymore, how that problem got solved. Those are places where you can’t bring your cell phone, and it’s still a huge issue.

John Doyle: Yeah, it’s the classic seniority question — how long do you have to wait if someone’s not showing up? Do you give them 15 minutes? Do they get 20?

The point about the Iranian drivers is an important one, and it’s interesting to bring that home to the US. Our equivalent of that is the folks who maintain the hypersonic missile systems, or the people who go in advance to catch the bombers when they’re flying. It’s the same problem. The operational security of those folks is just as critical as the people on the pointy end.

When you realize that — as you rightfully have — and you see that the problem has gotten quite large, you need a solution. The solution is not to tell people not to use their cell phones. Even Sergeant John, who would go on to found a company dedicated to this problem, couldn’t be convinced to leave his phone at home. Not only that, but people won’t even endure a degraded user experience on their phones. If you hand them a work phone where they can only download six apps, people will just buy a burner and take it also.

The way we think about that problem is we hold as a design constraint that your phone has to work just like any premium cell service. Otherwise, people will have a shadow phone and you can’t solve the problem. That is hard. It means we have to do a lot of really technical work at the network layer in particular. But it’s also the only way to get at the root of the issue.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Education doesn’t really work on this thing — not just because of the huge value you get from a cell phone, obviously in war zones or otherwise, but also because so many people just don’t appreciate how much data is stored on them and what can be done with this data.

Another anecdote from Ukraine — an FBI agent told me that in the first six months of the war, they had all these exchanges where Ukrainian intelligence folks were coming over. They would go into the FBI headquarters building — the Hoover Building — and of course you have to leave your cell phone in the locker at the entrance of the Hoover Building. All the Ukrainian intelligence folks were asking, “What is this? Why do we have to do that?” These were intelligence community folks in Ukraine who did not appreciate that you have to do this. The agent told me that on his next visit to Ukraine, when he went into an agency building, they suddenly had lockers too.

Cartels, Hezbollah, and Call Data Records,

Jordan Schneider: John, you mentioned Russia and China. If we’re worried about them, how are the cartels with their surveillance capabilities?

John Doyle: Oh man, it’s a great question. There was a recent story out of the US Embassy in Mexico — cartels had used very technically sophisticated means and advanced tradecraft to identify who the counter-narcotics agents working in that embassy were. They went out and killed some of their sources.

To talk more specifically, the data they were getting was call data records, which are the records generated every time you use your phone. If I call you, it’s “this number called that number, the duration was such and such, and the location of the towers was such and such.” Or if you connect to the internet, you get your IP address and some of the high-level metadata. Those are called CDRs, or call data records.

The cartels were able to access them in Mexico. I don’t actually know how they did it, although I will say that data is available on the commercial market for just about anywhere in the world. If you go looking for it, you can just buy CDRs — and that’s consistent with the terms of service of your cell phone carrier, unless you’re a Cape subscriber. But anyway, they did this CDR analysis and were able to really easily figure out who the counter-narcotics agents were, and the identities of the Mexican folks who were working with them. Then they went out and killed them. The threat is certainly relevant on that front as well.

Dmitri Alperovitch: There was a similar story, I think 15-plus years ago, out of Lebanon where Hezbollah did the exact same thing with US and Israeli assets that were infiltrating Hezbollah. Through the use of tracking their locations — and where they were actually turning off the phone because they were about to go into a meeting and didn’t want to be tracked — that in itself was a signal for Hezbollah. In Lebanon, certainly at the time, they had full control of the telco network. They were able to see these weird patterns of turning on and turning off of cell phones on the network. That was an indication that it was likely an asset that was trying to penetrate them.

John Doyle: A version of that story comes up a lot, and it’s interesting both because it illustrates how ubiquitous and how always-on our phones are — that it’s an anomalous network event when you switch your phone off. It’s also interesting how frequently that turns out to be the answer: you just figure out where people are turning their phones off, drop a pin in the middle of that radius, and there’s something interesting happening right in the middle there.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Not to make John feel any worse, but when he was turning his phone off, the enemy would know he was going on a mission, right?

John Doyle: Probably. Well, I was a pioneer. We were still figuring out the rules of the road at that point. We’re talking about a Nokia flip phone. This is old school.

Jordan Schneider: On Lebanon and Hezbollah, the whole Israel using the beepers is another interesting case of, “Oh, you think you’re being cute by trying to get around this problem.” Presumably, the whole idea was they recognized that doing stuff over commercial telecommunications wasn’t going to work, so they tried to have some alternate solution.

Dmitri Alperovitch: I was talking to the Israelis about this after that operation came to light, and they said that Hezbollah did get pretty sophisticated about the use of cell phones because the Israelis had been so successful in penetrating them and using them for targeting. They consciously switched to beepers, which the Israelis were like, “Oh, great, we can now leverage that. By the way, we can put more explosives into a beeper or walkie-talkie because they’re bigger devices than cell phones.”

Part of the plan was also that the walkie-talkies in particular would be worn by Hezbollah commanders on their chests when they would go into battle. You can imagine what would happen if you rig an explosive and make it go off during a fight. The Israelis were upset that they had to trigger it early because Hezbollah was shipping those beepers to Iran for investigation — the battery drainage was too high, so they started to suspect something. But the plan was always to wait for the war to start and have these guys go into battle with the walkie-talkies on their chests and blow themselves up.

Building a Secure Cell Network

Jordan Schneider: On that smiley note, let’s come back to John with a little more of the commercial history. The dream is to build a parallel to a global functioning Verizon that anyone can use — 5G, 6G — and still be more secure than they would be otherwise. Where do you start when that’s what you’re aiming toward?

John Doyle: That’s a great question. It’s way harder than we thought it was going to be. You start like any good startup — you just start doing things and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. More concretely, you need to start in the US. Our goal from the beginning has been to build something that consumers can benefit from, that consumers value and use. But national security has been at the heart of the company from the very start — specifically US national security.

You start in the US because if your phone doesn’t work in the US, then it’s always going to be a niche “pull it off the shelf in times of emergency” solution. Frankly, the problem is just as much domestic as it is international. That was a little counterintuitive at the start, but then Salt Typhoon taught us — if you didn’t already believe it, which you should have — you knew for a fact after Salt Typhoon.

That’s a long way of saying that you start in the US. What we build at Cape is software. We build all the software it takes to run a cell network — call routing, messaging, authentication, billing. All those things are the platform we build. You have to rent towers. We were not then, and we’re still not rich enough as a company, to build brand new physical infrastructure all around the United States or own all that spectrum. We rent space on towers from major carriers. But we’re different from every other virtual operator like the Mint Mobiles of the world in that, past the tower, everything passes through our software. That’s how we have so much control over how much data we collect about you and how we protect that information. That’s where we can make all of our privacy and security guarantees.

We started in the US, and that’s been an odyssey. It’s been amazing. We have a really great network now that we’re very proud of. Consumers are signing up for it, and national security folks are using it. There’s still work to be done, but it really is becoming real.

Then you inevitably need to go international. The other half of this problem lives overseas. We’ve accomplished that expansion both broadly via aggregators that can get you access in 190 countries more or less overnight — although my engineering team would point out it’s 11 months of work to get overnight access to the global network. Then you also can go country by country. As an example, we went with the Navy to Guam in response to their being the canary in the coal mine on Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon. In response to that compromise, we went to Guam in partnership with the Navy and installed on top of the telcos there to test our remediation of those threats. We can do country-by-country expansion and make heightened security promises and privacy promises as we do that.

The summary is that it’s very hard. It’s regulatorily and technologically complex. But with a small but mighty team of engineers, you can get it done.

Jordan Schneider: I’m just old enough to remember when people talked about Apple as this small operating system that the hackers weren’t spending as much time focused on because there wasn’t enough value behind getting into that OS. I’m curious how you guys conceptualize the idea that everyone who is worth hacking is now going to be on the Cape network.

John Doyle: We think about that problem in a few ways. First, early on in the conversation here, Dmitri said that telcos are the crown jewels because they have so much information about you. That’s really true, except for Cape. One of the fundamental decisions we made early on was to collect as little information about our subscribers as possible to run a functioning telco and then retain it for as short a period as possible as the realities of a business allow.

In practice, what that means is we retain call data records for about three days because if we have a dispute with one of our carriers about how many gigabytes we have to pay them for, we have to be able to settle the dispute. But then after that, we just delete it. Those call data records are not linked to any detailed portrait of you as a person — your mother’s maiden name, your Social Security number, and all that data that your current carrier probably collects. We just don’t collect it. We have a really novel way of managing payment via a third-party processor, so we’re hands-off on all your payment data. Even in the event that we’re breached, there’s considerably less to steal. That’s our starting point.

Then we’ve done a lot of work around deploying in commercial cloud, which has significant security advantages. One of the stories that came out of Salt Typhoon was the cottage industry of vendors around the telcos that service and provide parts of their stack. I won’t go into a ton of detail because it’s not my information to share, but they help them accomplish some of the ancillary functions you need in order to be a compliant telco. At least some of the origin of that breach was via that cottage industry of vendors.

The Cape ethos from the beginning has been that we buy as little as we can. We build everything ourselves. There’s a little bit of hubris here, I guess, but we do a considerably better job of building it than most of the partners we evaluated in the space. We have a lot of confidence in our approach.

Dmitri Alperovitch: One of the things I didn’t fully appreciate when I was investing was — why wouldn’t Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile just do this? It seems like offering better security is something you could upsell to consumers. There’s value in that.

The reality is that selling customer data is part of the core business model for these carriers.

They make a ton of money by collecting call records and geolocation data, then selling it to various data brokers. They don’t want to give up that business because it’s a huge revenue stream for them.

What John is doing by focusing specifically on security and building robust security capabilities into the network — starting with the simplest principle of just not collecting data you never need — is a huge advantage over everyone else who are in the business of collecting that data to sell it.

John Doyle: That’s a really good point, and it also sets up one of my favorite topics, which is the other reason Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile can’t do this. Their business model, in addition to monetizing subscriber data, is centered around being big enough to own and administer spectrum.

These are enormous companies that own nationwide spectrum, which is a really expensive asset. They own this physical infrastructure, and they administer it. Then they act as systems integrators on top of that asset. They buy their mobile core software — the thing we build and deploy — from one of a couple of vendors, along with all the other pieces you need to bolt together to run a telco.

In and of itself, it’s an amazing feat and a really hard thing to accomplish, but very little of that, if any, is built in-house. Their core competency is not actually building the technology that powers the network — they just administer it. It would be a big shift for a carrier like that to start building the software internally. They don’t have that function.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s come back to the Verizon-AT&T comparison. There are many sexy things that software engineers can do nowadays. Telecom has not been one for a while. How are you thinking about recruiting and then getting up to speed on this ecosystem, which doesn’t have a lot of people tweeting about how cool it is?

John Doyle: We’re trying to change that. I would say getting from 10 to 35 on the engineering team was pretty hard. We had the hardcore early folks who were all in on the problem, and then we were trying to build a critical mass of engineering talent to come work on a telco.

A lot of attention is rightfully paid to the fact that through Huawei, China was able to take ground in the cellular network around the world via subsidized rollout — they sold the equipment as cheaply as possible to all these network operators. It’s a really effective strategy, and it’s not wrong to focus on that. Are they spying on us via Huawei equipment? Probably. Although it turns out they’re even spying on us via our own carriers.

The less appreciated part of that story is that over the last 20-plus years, via Huawei, China has built one of the most valuable companies in the world and accumulated all this capital and all this talent around 5G, which has turned out to be a critical technology area. The US just has not had an equivalent. We have not had that accumulation of talent, that accumulation of capital.

Our last great manufacturer of telecommunications equipment was Lucent, which was sold from the US to a French company in 2006 — right before the iPhone came along and really informed us that we’d all be using cell phones for the rest of our lives whether we wanted to or not. With that as background, it has turned out to be a strategic disadvantage for the United States. China has Huawei, therefore, they have people who understand the telco stack deeply. They have a huge core of really talented engineers who work on it. They have a capital base, so they can continually do R&D on this stuff. The US just hasn’t had that natively.

My long-term vision for Cape is to be that answer. Right now, we’re 85 to 87 people strong, and we’re focused on a really specific set of problems. But it’s a better engineering team than you’re going to find anywhere else in telco — I’m confident in saying that.

To the second part of your question about our talent strategy — from the very beginning, the plan was to attract really top-end software engineers and give them a little bit of room to learn telco and 5G. It’s hard on the front end, both from a recruiting perspective and from a time-to-value perspective, because people need to ramp up on what we’re building. But it’s really starting to pay off now. Literally outside my door, there’s a room full of people building really amazing stuff. They came from Palantir and Anduril and Coinbase and all these sexier companies that you’re alluding to. But now they’re building the next telco together. It’s quite cool.

Jordan Schneider: Well, let’s continue on the pitch then, John. What is fun about engineering these systems?

John Doyle: The network is deeply technical. It’s complicated. There are frustratingly legacy parts of the stack, where if you open the door, the whole thing falls apart. They can’t be touched, basically. But it’s deeply technical, really hard, and a little obscure.

Then the scale of things you build is automatic. We’re live in 190 countries, and when the engineering team builds a feature and deploys it, it goes live at that scale immediately. That’s really cool.

The other, maybe cuter example — from my perspective, when we finally got the network live and David Dunn, our head of network engineering, called me. He did the “Watson, come here, I need you” first phone call on Cape — the feeling was exactly like when you were 8 years old or however old you were and you got your first walkie-talkies. Everyone kind of remembers that sensation, the miracle of remote communication. It was like that, but it reaches all around the world and is definitely hard.

Not every single day feels like that, but there are a lot of those moments where you’re finally getting to build the walkie-talkie you wished you had when you were 8 years old.

Jordan Schneider: Cute. All right, beyond building a thing, you’ve got to sell it. What has that been like?

John Doyle: Selling to the government is famously hard. Selling to defense is famously hard. Some uniquely hard things about our business and our product include the fact that the government has been buying cell phone service for a long time. A lot happens on cell phones, but no credible alternatives to the major carriers have existed in our space until Cape.

What that means is there’s a big contract vehicle right now that the Department of Defense uses to buy all of its domestic cell phone service. If you’re a battalion commander in the 82nd Airborne and you want to buy 20 cell phones for your staff, you go to an office called Spiral 4 and say, “I need 20 cell phones” — last year’s iPhones or whatever. It’s the only place you can go to get domestic cell service.

The incumbents on that contract are the big three, and then a couple of resellers bid on it. The contract gets awarded strictly on lowest price. That’s fine. They are all roughly equivalent networks, and it makes sense from that perspective.

But Cape is a little bit premium. We’re a little more expensive because it’s expensive to build the things we build. We’ll never win a lowest-price bidding war against the big three. Plus, they have owners’ economics on their networks. The price is not the point anyway. The point is we’re solving problems that no one else has solved.

But bureaucratically, it’s legally impossible for the program office currently to buy that cell service any other way. One of the things we’ve been working on is saying, “Look, guys, if your criticism is Cape is too expensive and it’s not worth it, then that’s fine. Say that to us and we’ll go away.” But nobody’s saying that. They’re just saying we can’t technically pay for additional security and additional privacy.

We’re doing a lot of work to just try to get the rules changed. If the buyer would like not to give China full visibility into their communications and their troops’ whereabouts while they’re using their cell phones, and they’re willing to pay 10 bucks a month more for that, then they should have that option. It’s surprisingly hard to get that done, but we’re making progress.

Jordan Schneider: What was your read on the recent Hegseth speech?

John Doyle: He did a great job. The spirit is right. The intent is right. Acquisition reform has been an increasingly popular topic, and rightfully so. Commercial-first is such an important part of that. We think of what we’re doing as a commercial-first technology.

Now the hard part starts. Secretary Hegseth is not the first person to stand at a podium and announce acquisition reform is on its way. It’s famously hard to drive deep bureaucratic change at the Pentagon, but I’m hopeful. It’s a righteous mission, and I hope that he’s able to do it.

A Nightmare in Taiwan

Jordan Schneider: Commercial telecom in the Taiwan context — what’s your take, Dmitri?

Dmitri Alperovitch: Just like in all these conflicts we’ve talked about, there’s going to be huge dependence on the mobile communications network in Taiwan. There are going to be a lot of questions about resiliency.

The first thing the Chinese are likely going to do in the event of an invasion — or even a blockade — is cut the submarine cables that go to Taiwan. Those cables provide the vast majority of their communications with the outside world, but cutting them is going to have cascading effects on internal networks as well.

We know that the Internet is quite brittle. When one service fails, you can have these cascading effects that no one anticipates. We just witnessed that a few weeks ago with AWS. One service within one of their regions on the East Coast fails, and then it reverberates across the entire AWS network. Everyone using AWS experiences outages around the world as a result.

Take something like DNS — the Domain Name System for resolving domain names to IP addresses — which relies on connectivity to root servers. If you can’t connect to those root servers because the submarine cables are cut, then a bunch of things that operate even just internally within Taiwan will start to fail.

You want to have other ways of communication. The great thing about the cellular network is that you’re increasingly starting to build in capabilities to connect to Starlink and other satellites, at least for emergency messaging. iPhone and other phones are starting to offer that.

This is going to be a pretty vital way for Taiwanese forces and emergency responders to communicate with each other in the event of that contingency. Having something that’s reliable and that can’t be used for targeting purposes by the Chinese is absolutely essential. John, I don’t know how much you can talk about this, but there’s quite a bit of interest in the region generally in Cape for that very reason.

John Doyle: That’s spot on, both in terms of the enormity of the problem and the reality that backhaul off the island is really constrained and really hard.

Our opinion is that a terrestrial cellular network — whether a carrier or virtual carrier — is the perfect integration point to manage all the complexity you’re describing after the cables get cut. If you have limited backhaul off an island like Taiwan, the correct way — and the easiest way and the most robust way — to prioritize how you use that bandwidth, whether it be Starlink or other means, is over the cellular standards.

This works both because everyone already has the platform in their pocket — everyone already has their cell phone — and because if you’ve done the right things on the SIM card in advance, you can have a relatively graceful degradation of service. You can provide connectivity to an entire population with prioritization as needed for things like government officials and people doing the most important work.

We are working hard to offer support in that region. Hopefully, we’ll have some news coming out soon on that front. Certainly, if you built the company we’re building and started attacking this problem when we did — literally in the middle of the Russian invasion of Ukraine — then you inevitably wind up where we are: focused on Taiwan as a problem and thinking about what problems we would have liked to have solved in Ukraine in advance and how we can get that solution into Taiwan before we hit a crisis or conflict.

Jordan Schneider: I want to stay on the degraded Taiwan communication ecosystem. Where does the data come from in that context? Is it all from the sky then?

John Doyle: That’s a good question. Basically, yes. It doesn’t necessarily all have to be from the sky. There are other ways to get data off the island at medium range. Technology like microwaves and lasers can provide some amount of backhaul. But the real fat pipe that you want to have access to for moving large amounts of data is the sky.

Certainly, Starlink is the most famous example here and the best known. But there are other low Earth orbit constellations, and then there are other constellations — both government and commercial — at higher altitudes as well. All of those have different constraints and different qualities that make them advantageous in certain situations. But short answer: yes, you want to look to the sky, and that’s where you get most of your backhaul.

Jordan Schneider: Currently, when people think of satellite cell service, it’s SOS text messages when you’re on a mountain hiking or something. But presumably you can do more than just that now. Can you serve 30 million people? Maybe not live streaming, but phone calls and stuff? What’s the optimistic case?

John Doyle: An important constraint to have in mind: even when we finally fill up all of low Earth orbit with as many satellites as can fit, if we assume a couple of advances in antenna technology and dedicate all of those satellites to direct-to-cell service — that’s what you’re describing when you’re a hiker in the Grand Canyon and you want to get an SOS text message out; direct-to-cell is the tech that allows your cell phone to talk directly to a satellite — there’s still not enough bandwidth to meaningfully offload the traffic that passes over the terrestrial cellular network every day.

This is not to downplay how impressive and important that technology is, but it does underscore that it will always be supplementary to the terrestrial physical infrastructure. Now, to bring it back to Taiwan: assume the cables have been cut. There are still ways — and we have our own opinions on how — you can continue to operate intra-island and even maintain a highly performant cell phone carrier. People can talk to each other within the island in a relatively uninterrupted way. You need to manage your scarce resource, which is backhaul, and prioritize which traffic gets on and off the island.

Jordan Schneider: Okay. Cables that are running on Taiwan to various cell towers can still talk to each other relatively normally, but if I’m trying to stream something from Netflix, which is hosted in a data center in Malaysia, then I’m going to have a tough time.

John Doyle: That’s right.

Jordan Schneider: On the tactical and operational side of what a commercial cell network can do, we had some examples from Dmitri on triangulating where Shaheds are falling. What else makes this so addictive, even when it puts your life at risk? What logistical or operational things can you do in Ukraine because everyone has cell phones connected to commercial networks that would not have been possible in, say, 1987?

John Doyle: If Russia had invaded in 1987, if there were no cell phones or the network was taken down, the biggest difference would have been the lack of connectivity for the civilian population.

The way those folks benefited from the network remaining available was primarily in two ways. Number one is morale — just the ability to stay in touch with friends and family who have left or friends and family over distance. This turned into a really long conflict, and the political will of the population is a really critical factor in the resilience against the invasion. It’s an amazing way to keep morale high or to boost morale.

The other is crowdsourced intelligence, especially in the early days. But even now, you see civilians contributing to the intelligence picture. They’re able to do that because they’re connected to the network and connected to their friends and family who are also in the military and also prosecuting the war over the cellular network. It’s relatively seamless to pass along what they’re seeing.

Jordan Schneider: The other thing that has really struck me is these photos of Ukrainian command and control literally on Discord and Skype. Then you text the people who are out and about on Signal, right? The idea that this technology is so valuable that you are willing to be the intelligence official who walks around with a phone. What is the friction of not having that in 1987?

John Doyle: In 1987, you had to set up a radio. You had to set up a communications outpost. You had to do all this work to maintain a line of communication that you just don’t have to do now.

Signal and Discord, in a really important way, have been ahead of the networks in that Signal solved the problem of end-to-end encryption for consumer communications. You can now protect the content of your communications with a high degree of certainty using Signal. It’s an amazing messaging app and it’s a very frictionless experience.

Where Cape fits in — and what we like to say — is that Signal protects the messages and we protect the messenger. The part that’s been lagging is: while you’re out running around sending and receiving Signals, the metadata associated with your location and your activities is not protected until you have a carrier like Cape in place.

Jordan Schneider: Even in 2005, give us a little more color on those hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of things. Were they heavy? Did it take a long time to set up? People have this image of radio men in World War II, but presumably you were working with a little better stuff than that guy on Omaha Beach or whatever.

John Doyle: Maybe a little better. You organize your communications plan if you’re a comms guy in the military according to something called PACE. You have a Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency communications plan. If one system fails, you go to the next and the next.

Examples of stuff I had in that rucksack include radios for line-of-sight communications, and really, really good walkie-talkies with very heavy batteries that we could use to talk back to people who were a little farther away from the front lines than we were.

Further down the contingency list were things like satellite communications, which in those days meant these little foldable satellite dishes that you would unfurl and point at the sky and try to get just the right elevation. If you got a good connection, you could get pretty decent communications over satellite.

My favorite — and this is way down the PACE plan — was high-frequency communications, which is ham radio operator stuff. You measure out an antenna and you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to communicate on this frequency, so I need a 37-foot antenna,” and you roll it out on the ground. You can talk a really long way over high-frequency communications, but you’ve got to get it just right. I never had the opportunity to do that operationally, although we did a lot of training on it, and I was always fascinated by it.

But each one of those — line-of-sight communications, satcom, and high frequency — those are all different boxes. That’s a 30-pound brick that rides in your rucksack, and it’s got its own batteries associated with it and its own antennas and whatever. All that gear rides around in your rucksack, and if you need to make communications, then you just start working down the PACE list.

The cell phone is better. It’s a lot better. It’s much lighter. I love Signal, and it doesn’t work everywhere. We’re not fully replacing those boxes. Ninety-whatever percent of the world’s population is covered by cell coverage, but not that much of the terrestrial surface area is. There’s a time and place for other comms also.

Jordan Schneider: Our reported SEALs hanging out on North Korean beaches — I don’t think they’re connecting to the local telecom.

John Doyle: We haven’t tested our network in North Korea. I can’t say whether it works or not. I’ll come back for an update if we ever find out.

Zixuan Li is Director of Product and genAI Strategy at Z.ai (also known as Zhipu 智谱 AI). The release of their benchmark-topping flagship model, GLM 4.5, was akin to “another DeepSeek moment,” in the words of Nathan Lambert.

Our conversation today covers…

• What sets Z.ai apart from other Chinese models, including coding, role-playing capabilities, and translations of cryptic Chinese internet content,

• Why Chinese AI companies chase recognition from Silicon Valley thought leaders,

• The role of open source in the Chinese AI ecosystem,

• Fears of job loss and the prevalence of AI pessimism in China,

• How Z.ai trains its models, and what capabilities the company is targeting next.

Co-hosting today are , long-time ChinaTalk analyst, as well as of the Interconnects Substack.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

The Z.ai Model and Chinese Open Source

Jordan Schneider: Zixuan, could you introduce yourself?

Zixuan Li: Hi everyone, I’m Zixuan Li from Z.ai. I manage a lot of things, like global partnerships, Z.ai chat model evaluation, and our API services. If you’ve heard of the GLM Coding Plan, I’m actually in charge of that, too. I studied AI for science and AI safety at MIT, where I did research on AI applications and AI alignment.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s do a little bit of Zhipu AI’s backstory. When was it founded? How would you place it within the broader landscape of teams developing models in China?

Zixuan Li: Zhipu AI and Z.ai were founded in 2019, and we were chasing AGI at that time, but not with LLMs, but with some graphic network or graphic compute. We did something similar to Google Scholar called AMiner. We used that type of thing to connect all the data resources from journals and research papers into a database. People could easily search and map these scholars and their contributions. It was very popular at that time.

However, we shifted to the exploration of large language models in 2020. We launched our paper, GLM, in 2021. I believe that was about one year ahead of the launch of GPT-3.5, so it was a very, very early stage. We were one of the first companies to explore large language models. After that, we continuously improved the performance of our models and tried a new architecture. GLM is a new architecture, actually, but we’re going to explore more in the future.

I believe we became famous with the launch of GLM 4.5 and 4.6 because they are very capable in coding, reasoning, and agentic tool use. That’s more useful compared to the previous version. People may know us through Cloud Code, KiloCode, and other tools. We need to combine with these top products to gain fame.

Nathan Lambert: What does it take to transition from the models you were early to developing into things that get international recognition? I’ve known of Z.ai and your work for years, and then it’s like a snap of the fingers, and suddenly, this model is on everybody’s radar that’s paying attention. Did this feel like something that was going to happen overnight, or what does that feel like when you go through it? How do you get to that moment? There are a lot of people that want to do that at their companies.

Zixuan Li: That’s a very interesting point. In 2024, everyone was interested in the Chatbot Arena. We saw GPT-4 and Gemini performing very well there. That was our interest because we pay attention to end-users’ experience, such as deciding which answer they prefer when presented with two options. We did a lot of work on that and performed very well on the Chatbot Arena, ranking maybe sixth to ninth.

In 2025, with the launch of Manus and Claude Code, we realized that coding and agentic functions are more useful. They contribute more economically and significantly improve people’s efficiency. We are no longer putting simple chat at the top of our priorities. Instead, we are exploring more on the coding side and the agent side. We observe the trend and do many experiments on it. We need to follow the trend and also predict the future.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk a little bit about the talent and the internal culture that allowed you to put out GLM 4.5. What do you think is different about, or what distinguishes, Z.ai from other labs both in the US and China?

Zixuan Li: First of all, we are more collaborative inside the company. Everyone is working on a single target. We have the heads of separate teams — the pre-train team and the fine-tune team — but they are working very closely. They sit next to each other, working on the single goal of trying to build a unified reasoning, agentic, and coding model. As we illustrated in our tech report, we first built three separate models (teaching models). We then distilled those three into one single model, GLM 4.5. That was our goal, and I believe that is how we built GLM 4.5 more efficiently compared to other companies, which are very young.

Another point is the talent. I believe that nowadays, the head of the team needs to do the research and the training themselves. You cannot let others do this stuff for you. Why is that? Because things change so fast. Maybe during your training, Claude 4 or GPT-5 comes out; anything can happen. You need to feel the trend yourself. You need to combine the results from experiments and the trends — what’s going on within your competitors’ teams — to feel the move yourself. It’s super important. Even our founder does the experiments himself and looks at the papers. You need to do things simultaneously, not just set goals for people and let others do the work for you.

Nathan Lambert: It seems very fast-paced. Before we started recording, you also mentioned that there are a lot of PhD students involved. I was just wondering if these are people who are actively pursuing their PhDs, new graduates, or a mix of all of them. I work at a research institute, which is very open-source, and we have many full-time students who are part of it. When you look at other closed labs in the US, there isn’t nearly as much intermingling with academic institutions. That could be a really powerful thing if you have this, because there is extreme talent there. I’m just wondering if you feel like there’s an open door between some academic institutions and your work.

Zixuan Li: Definitely. There are a lot of ongoing PhD students here, and I believe they are simultaneously pursuing their academic goals and working on GLM, but they can combine them. If you are doing a truly innovative job, like training a unified agentic coding model, it’s one of your greatest achievements ever. People won’t say, “I need to do another research, let me finish this first, and then I’ll go back to GLM.” They will try to treat GLM as their single biggest achievement. Everyone is really devoted to this stuff. We hardly see anyone who isn’t devoted to training GLM.

Jordan Schneider: What does the talent market look like in China right now? What’s the hierarchy, what are employers looking for, and what is the talent looking for?

Zixuan Li: On the research and engineering side, companies are looking for papers, GitHub code, competition performance, and your experience using GPUs and training models. For the non-technical side, they’re looking for how you will grow the model’s performance and expand the brand. If you’re going to be a product manager, for example, your vision in this area and how you execute are very important. The requirements are pretty similar across the board.

You mentioned hierarchy. In terms of hierarchy, large companies choose people first because they have more money and can pay more, companies like ByteDance and Alibaba. For startups like ours, we need people to fight together. You need to fight against other competitors and drive yourself to finish goals because you don’t get paid as much. You need ambition. You must truly enjoy working with really young, talented people and trying to build something like GLM that seems to come from nowhere and beat other competitors’ models.

Nathan Lambert: How big would you say the number of people actually training the model is? In the US, it’s accepted that the core research and engineering staff normally doesn’t get to be more than one to two hundred people at places like OpenAI. There’s a lot of support around them in terms of product and distribution. Do you feel like this is similar?

Zixuan Li: The core small research team is similar, about 100 to 200 people. I think that’s enough because you need to be focused, right? There are other people preparing data and doing product work, but for the core team, you don’t need that many people. You need to stay focused, and these people need to be really talented; they cannot make many mistakes.

Irene Zhang: Is that different at bigger companies?

Zixuan Li: For bigger companies, there might be different groups. They have more GPUs and can do more exploration. For example, at ByteDance, they are chasing top performance not only in text generation but also in video generation, speech, and other areas. They can allocate resources to multiple teams. But inside these teams, I think the core members are still the same — maybe 10 to 20, and the other 80 or 100 people are doing the training or data preparation work.

Jordan Schneider: What’s the thought process behind so many Chinese models open sourcing in recent years?

Zixuan Li: First, I think we need to devote more to the research area. Llama’s doing this, Qwen is doing this, and Kimi’s doing this. We are also doing this. We want to contribute more to academia and the exploration of all possibilities. I think that’s our top priority.

But beyond that, as a Chinese company, we need to really be open to get accepted by some companies because people will not use your API to try your models. Maybe they deploy on Fireworks, maybe they use it on Groq, or maybe they download to their own chips. It’s not easy to get famous in the United States because people just don’t accept your API. They need to be stored in the US. I think it’s necessary to be open right now for people to use our models.

Nathan Lambert: This is what our company does. It’s like where I work — I wouldn’t be able to sign up for the API service at the enterprise level. But I distill from multiple Chinese models when I’m training. I’m using multiple models and might come across this, so it’s not surprising, but it’s good to articulate it.

Zixuan Li: We also learned from DeepSeek because our flagship model was closed source back in 2024. But when DeepSeek R1 launched, we realized that you can be really famous for open sourcing your model while getting some business return through API or other collaborations. You need to expand the cake first and then take a bite of it.

Source.

Jordan Schneider: Why is it so important for Chinese model makers to get famous in the US or achieve global adoption more broadly?

Zixuan Li: Because I think there’s a better ecosystem for developers and research still in the United States. You need to get accepted by the top researchers because if we don’t open source our models, we’ll never have an opportunity to join this conversation. It’s important because we learn from X, from YouTube, from Reddit every day, and all the Chinese tech media are also paying attention to US KOLs or influencers.

Jordan Schneider: This was very surprising, I think, to both Nathan and me — how recursive it was, where the Chinese media covers the Chinese models that the Americans are talking about. It’s a very curious trend.

Zixuan Li: Because you have people like Andrej Karpathy, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk. They not only talk about their own models but also what’s going on elsewhere. Everyone knows — if they post a tweet, everyone knows what’s going on, what models they’re picking, what preferences they have, their views on maybe Qwen versus Codex. All the social media will try to grasp their core ideas immediately. That’s very important. We also learned this from DeepSeek.

Frankly speaking, we used to neglect the importance of the global economy previously because we thought we needed to sell our products and APIs directly to Chinese enterprises. But nowadays, Chinese enterprises are still paying attention to the global brand and your global performance.

Irene Zhang: This reminded me of something I’ve been curious about. We know the conversation is recursive. We know that Chinese tech pays a lot of attention to what Silicon Valley is looking at. But is there anything about the AI debate or discourse in China that Western media tends to miss? In your opinion, are there any issues or debates or things that people are really interested in that people in the English-speaking discourse tend to not understand?

Zixuan Li: I just talked to a professor from Germany yesterday, and he mentioned some models that he knew people are talking about these days — Llama, Qwen, even Mistral — but not GLM. There are many people still unaware.

Nathan Lambert: This person’s a little out of date in the SF circles. More people are talking about GLM than Mistral and arguably Llama these days. You’ve made a lot of progress.

Zixuan Li: We’ve made a lot of progress, but we track the discussion on Reddit and other social media, and we still see a lot of people asking what GLM is. Is it a good model? Where does it come from? It comes from nowhere or similar stuff. We still need to do a lot of things because we only have 20,000 followers on X. People don’t have a very deep understanding of GLM compared to other models.

Nathan Lambert: I think DeepSeek has like a million. It’s remarkable.

Zixuan Li: Also, Mistral and Cohere get much more attention compared to Kimi and Z.ai. We still need to do better in our branding and our engagement in the technical community.

Jordan Schneider: You mentioned selling API access to Chinese companies. Tell us a little bit about adoption in China. What’s the sales process like? Do they all just have VPNs and use Claude? What’s it like trying to do enterprise sales in China?

Zixuan Li: You have two types of enterprises. One is companies that can’t use APIs because they need to deploy the model on their own chips. They cannot accept sending data to other companies — not even to Z.ai or even Alibaba. That’s a requirement for those companies. There are teams deploying DeepSeek for them — not from DeepSeek itself, but other companies can deploy DeepSeek for them. They usually build on top of the DeepSeek model with RAG, data storage, workflows, and other things.

The other type uses APIs — those are maybe tech companies and media companies. These companies accept APIs because they need to standardize their workflows. For API companies, they choose based on the balance between performance and price. ByteDance is doing great in that area. I believe ByteDance dominates the API services. Qwen is still trying to sell its APIs because Qwen 3 Max is a closed source version. If you’ve heard of it, they have open sourced some models but also keep some things closed source for selling.

For us, we have open sourced our flagship models, so we are frequently asked, “Why is your service different from the open source version? Because we can deploy the open source version ourselves.” We need a better engineering team, we need faster decoding speed. We need to do more on top of just having a good model. That might be our unique selling point. We need to do searches, we need to build our MCP. We’re trying to get a competitive advantage over other GLM providers.

Jordan Schneider: Is that annoying or fun?

Zixuan Li: It’s fun. It’s fun because I think it’s necessary to open source your models, so how you get a bite in that case is really important. We’ve been figuring it out for a long time, but recently we found that subscription is a good idea — a GLM coding plan. With subscription, your users become more sticky. They love this area because you don’t have to worry about how one prompt consumes tokens in your dialogue. Maybe inside Claude, a round of interaction will consume a million tokens, but you don’t have to worry about it. We’ll figure it out for our users.

Nathan Lambert: Do you think you have meaningful adoption there? Because in the US market, I could start using Claude, Codex, Gemini, and whatever all for free with some basic Cursor. I was wondering — are people in the US actively using this? Is this a growing market that you think you’re going to eat into? Qwen has one, and I might have tried it, but I’m always like, “Oh, I have my ChatGPT subscription.” I’m just wondering if, on the ground, it feels optimistic as something that is really shifting the needle.

Zixuan Li: It’s definitely very optimistic because we don’t have to persuade 50% of people to do this — maybe you only need 5%. But 5% is a huge market. If 5% of Claude users shift their model to GLM, it’s a huge market.

Nathan Lambert: It’s growing so fast, too.

Zixuan Li: But not just for Claude, because we’re trying new ideas like role-playing. Many people on Silly Tavern are using GLM and Janitor AI because we do very well in role-playing. We’re trying to have more markets — coding markets, chat markets. Maybe one day Meta will be using our model.

Jordan Schneider: All right, we’ve got to take a step back and explain role playing. What is it? How do you make a model that’s good at it? What are people using it for?

Zixuan Li: Before GLM-4.6, for models like GLM-4.5, we were relatively weak in role playing because we hadn’t trained on that kind of data. We needed to create some data and let the model follow the instructions. For role playing, if you have a very long system prompt and you don’t train on that kind of stuff, the model will forget who it is and forget all the instructions. It will just use its general performance to do the conversation. For a role-playing task, if given very long instructions, it must strictly follow those instructions and show more emotion or more specific behavior based on them.

Jordan Schneider: Just to be clear, this is people having a conversation, for example, saying, “I’m a Japanese pirate, I’m raiding the coast of Taiwan in 1570, and I want to plan an attack to defend the fort.” People write out like five pages of background.

Zixuan Li: We also tried something very interesting, like Family Guy. We have our own Stewie, and you just give a description of what the characher does and his history, and then you can create your own Stewie. We perform very well in text generation. If we had some speech model, we could recreate a Stewie there too.

Jordan Schneider: Was there a specific kind of pre-training data or RL that you needed to do to get this? How do you make a model that is really good at pretending to be cartoon characters?

Zixuan Li: It’s mainly post-training data.

On AI Optimism and Translating Chinese Memes

Jordan Schneider: There’s a big discussion of late in the US about people being worried that folks are falling in love with AI. There’s this whole discussion about AI psychosis, where ChatGPT, for example, convinces people who trust it too much to harm themselves. I’m curious about your broad sense of that type of discussion in China generally, and then internally in your firm, about the question of people using AI for emotional support.

Zixuan Li: I just read a post from OpenAI yesterday. They invited a lot of experts to try and train a model that is not addictive. They trained data to ask ChatGPT to say it’s an AI instead of saying it’s a human being, not letting people get attached to ChatGPT anymore.

But from a broader audience perspective, not many people at Z.ai are looking into this yet because our model’s capabilities are not there yet. If we had a model that could perform like GPT-5, then we could move on to removing the addiction.

Still, the performance is not on par with these top closed-source models, which we need to chase first. When we chase these models, we shift our focus to data collection and data preparation. Sometimes, the model behavior will change dramatically. If we do some similar things on our previous model, it will be outdated in the next version. Performance is still very relevant currently.

Nathan Lambert: I’m guessing this is somewhere in the rundown, but what is the balance of optimism versus fear of AI as a long-term trajectory in your lab versus China generally? I think there’s a very big concentration in the US of people who worry deeply about the long-term potential of AI, whether it’s a powerful entity or a concentration of power or other things. Then there are people who just think this is the most important technology ever invented, and we have to be really serious about it. I’m just wondering where on this spectrum you think the lab’s culture is, or if it’s not really something that’s debated, and you’re just focused on, “We’re building a useful thing, and we’re going to keep making it better.”

Zixuan Li: I think developers fear the most. When you use code, when you use Codex, you get that fear in a very concrete way. It can do all the tasks for you, especially for junior developers. For writers or other managers, though, I think it’s simpler because we already have SaaS and other technologies helping them. Large language models like ChatGPT are just another helper for them. So, I don’t feel fear coming from the general public, but specifically for developers and data analysts. They fear the most because they try out the new models and new products more frequently than the general public, so they can feel the power.

Many people use DeepSeek and other chatbots. DeepSeek can help you brainstorm ideas, polish your writing, or do translation for you, but they don’t believe that this work can replace them. But for developers, it’s a different story.

Jordan Schneider: What are the main fears? Is it just people’s jobs getting taken away? Or is it AI taking over the world? For the people who are worried, what exactly are they worried about?

Zixuan Li: Probably jobs being taken away.

Nathan Lambert: Those fears are pretty different than in the US. There’s definitely a huge culture — not a majority of the people, but a very vocal minority — that influences a lot of the thinking about the risks of AI well beyond just job loss. Job loss is almost an assumption for many people in the US, but there are added fears on top of this. I think that is a very different media ecosystem and thought ecosystem.

Zixuan Li: I definitely know about this because I lived there. Obviously, everyone at MIT was talking about how AI will change the world, not on the positive side, but on the negative side.

Irene Zhang: Why do you think this is? Is it that Chinese society is a little more practical, or is it just that job loss feels more imminent, or is it because it’s less of a market-driven economy?

Zixuan Li: I believe that people just know about DeepSeek. Maybe only 1 million people follow the latest trend, and a billion people do their work daily and are not impacted by AI. The more you learn about it, the more fear you have.

Irene Zhang: What is the vibe among these younger engineers you’re talking about? Specifically, the junior folks who are a little scared. I’m generally curious what gets them into this work in the first place and what makes them want to work at places like Z.ai?

Zixuan Li: At Z.ai, we lack people. There is no fear about losing jobs here because we have a lot of things to do. For other companies, especially large enterprises, they may have 10,000 people doing similar things, such as data analytics and back-end engineering work. They might think that if other people start using coding tools or agentic tools, maybe they only need 50% of their current staff.

They can do nothing, though. They need to wait for their bosses or the founders to make the decision, like what’s happening at Amazon. For layoffs, you can do nothing — you just wait for the results.

Irene Zhang: I’d like to ask about translation because Z.ai’s models are very strong in making very contextually rich translations from Chinese to English and deploying them onto social media. Could you talk a bit more about the process behind that, if you know? What is the secret sauce to translating memes?

Zixuan Li: We are doing very well in translation, especially the translation between Chinese and English. I think we are on par with Gemini 2.5 Pro. You mentioned memes — memes are one of our weapons because we prepared the data and understand the culture. We can even translate emojis. For example, if you enter a sentence talking about AI and you use a whale emoji to replace DeepSeek, we might translate this back to DeepSeek. However, if the sentence is actually about animals, we will translate the emoji into “whale.” We understand the context.

Irene Zhang: Is this because Chinese internet talk is just so cryptic?

Zixuan Li: Yes, Chinese netizens are very novel. They sometimes use emojis. People also use abbreviations, so all those things need to be translated correctly.

Jordan Schneider: I remember a few years ago there was all this discussion that it was going to be really hard to train Chinese models to speak colloquially because all the data is behind walled gardens. For example, Tencent has the Tencent data, Xiaohongshu has the Xiaohongshu data, and Alibaba has its own data. Was that a problem for you guys doing this more colloquial, internet-speak work? Or is there enough out there that you can just scrape stuff and figure it out?

Zixuan Li: We need synthetic data. We do not have the actual data — we cannot scrape WeChat, but we know what people are talking about, especially in the public area. In the open area, we can observe what’s going on on Xiaohongshu and on TikTok, for example. We especially pay attention to their comment area because people are very novel in their comments.

When the “TikTok refugees” situation happened, we actually benefited from it because more people and more software needed auto-translation. We are trying to conquer some large customers through our translation capabilities.

Jordan Schneider: Does anyone train on danmu 弹幕 data [Ed. the rolling comments that appear on top of Bilibili videos]?

Zixuan Li: Definitely. We are trying to collect memes from everywhere, especially for our vision model, because memes are always in image format. We are trying to understand them with our vision model. I think it’s very interesting and also very necessary because if you cannot translate the comment in a very accurate way, customers will not purchase your model.

It’s unlike YouTube. If you use YouTube’s auto-translation, it won’t grasp the exact meaning. People just need to understand, “Oh, this English version is about this, and I can read it in Chinese. 80% is enough for me.” But for apps like X, Reddit, Xiaohongshu, or WeChat, you need to understand 100% of the comment area.

Nathan Lambert: Is it a challenge to balance data across different cultures? Since you are marketing to Western users as well as having your domestic market, is that a technical challenge to feel like you have to do both excellently?

Zixuan Li: It is a challenge. We can do very well in Chinese and English, and we are trying to explore more in French and even Hindi. We can perform very well in, I believe, about 20 languages. Beyond that, we are still exploring the data and the software. We need to register on their software to see what people are doing out there. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out. We are trying to learn from Gemini and GPT-5 why they do so great in translation.

Domestic Training and Hitting the Data Wall

Jordan Schneider: Do you guys train outside of China as well, or only on domestic clouds?

Zixuan Li: We do the inference outside China, but all the training is going on here.

Jordan Schneider: How do you feel about Huawei chips and software? Are they going to make it?

Zixuan Li: We are going to use them because we have multiple models, like GLM-4.6 and the upcoming 4.6 Air, as well as our previous version. We need to find the best use case for all sorts of chips: domestic chips and Nvidia chips. We need to classify the use case. One customer may need 30 tokens per second, and another customer may need 80 tokens per second. For one customer or one use case, some chips are enough, and for others, we need better chips and better inference techniques.

Irene Zhang: Do you try to do any API sales or just enterprise sales in general outside the US or China?

Zixuan Li: We have two platforms. Inside China, our platform is called Big Model, which is a simple translation of “large language model.” It’s BigModel.cn. We also have Z.ai, which is our overseas platform. I’m actually in charge of API Z.ai. All of our services are hosted in Singapore. I’m an employee of a Singaporean company.

Irene Zhang: Do you see much demand for Z.ai coming from non-US countries, like other countries?

Zixuan Li: We see demand from a lot of countries — India, Indonesia, even Norway and Brazil. However, it depends on who’s using Reddit and X, because we basically grew our user base on X, Reddit, and some on YouTube. We are trying to expand to platforms like Telegram, which might shift the proportion of our users. India and Indonesia are huge markets. More revenue, however, comes from the US compared to other countries because they pay more. They buy the Pro plan or Max plan instead of the Light plan. In terms of users, India has the most, but the US market generates 50% of our overseas revenue.

Irene Zhang: Building off of what we were talking about earlier — that walled gardens didn’t matter — does Z.ai have any thoughts about doing AI search on the Chinese Internet, and what that will look like in China, where there increasingly is no unified, open internet?

Zixuan Li: That’s a challenge for us product builders. Google doesn’t have a search API, and Bing is trying to stop its search API. There are other third-party providers like SERP, which basically just scrape the data — they quickly send a request to Google and scrape the page. This is also very challenging for builders like Perplexity and even ChatGPT.

We need to rely on the technical side, nowadays using our own technology or trying to gather multiple resources from different platforms. That is very reasonable. There are other technologies, like manuscript, that just browse the Internet themselves without using an API. That’s more doable these days. When you want to see multiple resources and try to distinguish the best use case or the best resources, you need to really log into an account and see the data yourself, read the page yourself, instead of just using whatever API gives you.

Nathan Lambert: Where are you planning to take your models next?

Zixuan Li: Right now, we are exploring on-policy training and on-policy reinforcement learning. We are quite mature in off-policy reinforcement learning, but for on-policy learning, we still need to explore more. Also, multi-agents.

When you look at Z.ai chat, it actually acts like a single agent. One model does the search, comes back, does another round of search, then comes back, and it can generate slides, a presentation, or a poster, things like that. But it’s all performed by a single actor, the one GLM-4.6

Nathan Lambert: Do we think we have to change our models a lot in order to do this? So much of 2025 has been changing the training stack away from “we are a chatbot” to “we are an agent.” What do you think we should change the most about our models, given that the faster model, like the Air model, might be more useful because you can have more of them?

Zixuan Li: That’s the reason why we need to do a very solid evaluation because we have different product solutions. Currently, the single agent works very well on our platform. We need to do more to try out different ideas and see whether we can improve the speed and performance with a multi-agent architecture and other possibilities. For single agents, it has better context management because you have the best model that can see all the context ahead of the current conversation and follow the instructions up to that point. For multi-agents, however, you need to compress the context for each agent, and that might lose some context or information.

Nathan Lambert: Or the orchestration is hard. If you give four agents the same context, they might all try the same thing, and they might not work together well.

Zixuan Li: Yes. If even one agent has a hallucination, it will ruin all the research. We are also trying to make a longer context window and a longer effective context window. We all know that you can say your model can do a one-million context window, but it actually performs very well only inside 60k or maybe 100k.

Nathan Lambert: You can release whatever size of context model you want, but the question is whether or not it actually works.

Zixuan Li: Exactly.

Nathan Lambert: How much do you think it’s going to be scaling the kind of transformers that we have — making the long context better, just improving the data — versus if there are fundamental walls that this is approaching? It’s kind of the low-hanging fruit question. Do you just think there’s a ton to keep improving, or is it kind of easy to find the things to do, and you just don’t have time?

Zixuan Li: It’s not easy. We believe it’s the architecture thing. Data can improve performance, but it cannot cross the wall. There is a wall. We need a better architecture, better pre-training data, and better post-training data.

Nathan Lambert: Do you think you’re starting to hit this wall, or do you kind of see it coming already? Is this something you’re forecasting, or are you seeing, “Oh, this specific thing — data alone is not solving it for us”? People in the US who are training these models just don’t talk about it; they say, “I can’t say.” I’m curious. The models I train are smaller — I think our biggest model is about 30 billion scale. When you scale up, you start to see very different limits to what’s happening.

Zixuan Li: We need to do some experiments. GLM is a 355-billion-parameter model, but we cannot do experiments with this large model. We need to do experiments with some smaller models, maybe 9 billion or 30 billion parameters, and test our hypothesis. Ninety percent of the time, we just fail, because you cannot win every time with experiments. You need to do a lot of scientific work to finally get the right answer.

If you are talking about whether the GLM-4.6 architecture will hit the wall, there is actually a wall. We need to shift our focus and start from maybe a new architecture or a new framework for doing this stuff.

Nathan Lambert: It sounds like these bigger runs were not necessarily barely making it, but definitely stressful for you.

Zixuan Li: Yes, it’s stressful. We are going to use some engineering solutions to try to compress the text windows to make our users happy. You don’t normally need one million tokens yet. If it cannot perform very well, you can compress the context window to 60k or 30k to make it work.

Jordan Schneider: You mentioned earlier that all the inference is abroad, but training is at home. What’s the rationale behind that decision?

Zixuan Li: The rationale is very simple — we provide services to overseas customers. I think it’s a requirement to store the data overseas. That is a very strict policy for our Z.ai endpoint. We change that privacy policy every month to make it stricter and more coherent with people’s expectations.

For the training, I think it’s simpler because we don’t have many resources. We only have these resources, and we need to utilize them.

Jordan Schneider: But doing it on Azure or AWS in Malaysia or Singapore — is that too expensive, or too slow? Do you guys already have enough chips at home? What’s the thinking there?

Zixuan Li: I don’t think it’s very slow — it’s fast because we change the location of not only the GPU but also the CPU and the database. If they are all in Singapore, it is still very fast. If you have to go back from Singapore to mainland China and then go back to Singapore, it will be slow.

On the training side, I think it’s very simple. We’re not OpenAI or Anthropic; we don’t have to choose between Amazon and Google and their own infrastructure. They are doing very complicated things. For us, I think we are still in the initial stage. We don’t have many complicated structures with these large inference providers, so things are still simple here.

Jordan Schneider: For now.

Zixuan Li: For now, yes.

Jordan Schneider: Irene or Nathan, any more training questions before we wrap up?

Nathan Lambert: Only sensitive questions that I don’t expect to have an answer to: How big is your next model? How many GPUs do you have?

Zixuan Li: For our next generation, we are going to launch 4.6 Air. I don’t know whether it will be called Mini, but it is a 30-billion-parameter model. It becomes a lot smaller in a couple of weeks. That’s all for 2025.

For 2026, we are still doing experiments, like what I said, trying to explore more. We are doing these experiments on smaller models, so they will not be put into practice in 2026. However, it gives us a lot of ideas on how we are going to train the next generation. We will see. When this podcast launches, I believe we already have 4.6 Air, 4.6 Mini, and also the next 4.6 Vision model.

Nathan Lambert: A good question is: How long does it take from when the model is done training until you release it? What is your thought process on getting it out fast versus carefully validating it?

Zixuan Li: Get it out fast. We open source it within a few hours.

Nathan Lambert: I love it.

Zixuan Li: When we finish the training, we do some evaluation, and after the evaluation, we just release it. We don’t send the endpoint to LM Arena or to other analysis companies to let them evaluate it first and then release the model. We don’t have that. We also don’t have a “nano banana” thing to try and make it famous before it’s launched because we are very transparent. We believe that if you want to open source the model, the open source itself is the biggest event.

Irene Zhang: Do you try to time the release with a market event or anything?

Zixuan Li: We are trying to do some marketing from my side, and I want to make the rollout longer. I want a week for me to collaborate with inference providers, benchmark companies, and coding agents, and let everyone trial the model before it’s released.

From the company’s perspective, if open source is the most important thing, you only need to prepare the materials for the open source itself. You need the benchmarks and maybe a tech blog. It is very stressful for me because I need to negotiate with multiple partners within several hours. “We have a new model coming in two hours, maybe three hours. Maybe you are sleeping, but this is huge.” We don’t give enough time for people to connect to the model or do the integration, but we’re trying to post your tweet afterwards.

Jordan Schneider: Now, in America, we have our own thing, 002.

Zixuan Li: What is 002?

Nathan Lambert: Midnight to midnight with a two-hour break. It’s so dumb.

Zixuan Li: Hours vary a lot, even inside the company. Someone might leave the company at 7 p.m., while someone else will never leave the company. For me, I work 18 hours a day because I need to negotiate with US large firm CEOs or the founders of coding agents. I need to discuss with Fireworks, with LM Arena, and with Kilo Code CEOs. I have to follow their time and do meetings, sometimes at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. That’s all possible.

For our researchers or the engineering team, your brains can only work maybe eight hours a day. If you feel tired, you need to get some rest. It’s impossible to ask a top researcher to work 24 hours a day. That would mean you are either working inefficiently or you are just attending meetings. But if you want to read papers, do experiments, and write code, eight hours is enough.

Irene Zhang: That’s very sensible.

Nathan Lambert: My PhD advisor always said that you can completely change the world if you do four hours a day of top technical work. Just go walk in the sun after that — you did a good job.

Irene Zhang: How do you explain the value of your work to, let’s say, high school kids in Beijing? Or your grandmother?

Zixuan Li: It’s hard. I can only say I do something similar to DeepSeek. Everyone in high school, and even in kindergarten, knows about DeepSeek.

For developers, it’s simple: we are one of the best coding LLMs you can find, especially in China. But for high school students, they always ask, “We have DeepSeek, what are you doing? Why do we need you? Are you doing a similar thing, or are you better? Are you faster?” That’s very tough.

We still need to improve the model performance. That’s the top priority. Product experience is the second. Without a solid model, nobody will pay attention to you. If we are at the same level, only the most famous one gets all the attention.

Irene Zhang: So you think the salience of AI models, generalized across society, came straight out of DeepSeek and the kind of nationalism associated with that?

Zixuan Li: There is a hype. They got so famous, even in China, so we are unknown even here. I believe a lot of students in Tsinghua University haven’t tried GLM or haven’t even heard of this company. Everybody knows the famous names, but not everyone goes to this building to visit Z.ai, right? DeepSeek is all over the news and social media, so it’s really tough to explain our contribution and our value.

Irene Zhang: Do you think Chinese society is starting to find AI to be more valuable, or is it getting scarier than valuable?

Zixuan Li: We are not there yet. AI is not so strong as to make people fear it because there is still hallucination, and it’s still not always following instructions. There are still a lot of issues to solve before it becomes more fearful or terrifying for people.

Jordan Schneider: We end every episode with a song. Does Zhipu have a theme song, or what do people listen to when they code around the office?

Zixuan Li: Actually, no. Our founder loves running, but music not so much. He is a pro in the marathon. The founder of Moonshot really loves music, but our founder doesn’t have much interest in it. For our anniversary, we have a half-marathon to celebrate.

Nathan Lambert: I’ve got to go do this. I’m going to go run the Z.ai half-marathon next year.

Correction: A section of this transcription originally recorded Zixuan as saying, “In 2025, with the launch of Moonshot’s Kimi Chat (Kimi K2 model), we realized that coding and agentic functions are more useful.” It is, in fact, “In 2025, with the launch of Manus and Claude Code, we realized that coding and agentic functions are more useful.” The transcript has been updated

After five long years since his last ChinaTalk appearance, Jake Sullivan returns to the show.

We discuss…

• Sullivan’s experience managing crises, implementing grand strategy, and cultivating leadership skills during the Biden administration,

• The art of crafting aggressive industrial policy, from chips to rare earths to infrastructure,

• The risk of miscalculation in the Taiwan Strait, and whether Pelosi’s Taipei visit was a mistake,

• Russia’s nuclear brinkmanship and the development of Biden’s posture on Ukraine,

• Whether Trump can succeed at ratcheting down tensions with China.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube.

A reminder: this is the conversation I wanted to have with Jake, not the one you want me to have. For other recent interviews that get more into the Biden administration around the withdrawal of Afghanistan, the pace of arming Ukraine, and America’s handling of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, see all these other shows he’s done this year.

Playing to Win

Jordan Schneider: Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former National Security Advisor, currently a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and my near peer in podcasting. Jake, welcome to ChinaTalk.

Jake Sullivan: Thank you for having me. Now I have a whole different vantage point on being a guest on a podcast, so I’ll spend my time silently judging you.

Jordan Schneider: Great, we’ll have an impromptu masterclass.

You’re calling your new show The Long Game. What are your reflections on how crises interact with the goal of maximizing national power, or however you want to define the long game?

Jake Sullivan: Part of the reason we’re calling it The Long Game is that it’s incredibly important for us to lift our heads up and out of the smoke of immediate crises and ask, how do we put the US on the strongest strategic footing going forward? That really is the ultimate essence of the long game — how do we marshal and husband the sources of American power in service of our national security, our prosperity, and our values? That’s the ethos behind The Long Game.

Now, to your question about the interaction between crises and the long game — it takes an enormous amount of discipline, especially in my time in the seat when we were dealing with a lot of crises and a lot of different types of incoming, to say we’re going to set aside the time, the effort, the resources, and the top-level attention to actually focus on the long game. I’m actually quite proud that through Ukraine, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Chinese balloons, and lots of other stuff, we set aside the time to really invest in our alliances, invest in our industrial base, and invest in a set of technology policies that advanced America’s capabilities and helped protect those capabilities from being used against us.

That requires discipline — a huge amount of discipline — and I tried to bring that discipline with me to work every day. I was also lucky to have a lot of people who were assigned to the long-game things and not just the crises, who had no trouble banging on my door and saying, “Jake, don’t forget we have to be working on this issue,” whether it was chip controls or infrastructure projects in Africa or what have you. Having that kind of team around you — people who keep you honest and say we’re not going to let you just get swallowed by the inbox — that was very important as well.

Jordan Schneider: Is there a design fix around this? Should there be two NSAs — the firefighter and the long-term person? Why does this need to be one job?

Jake Sullivan: That’s a great question. Maybe it’s right that if you think about the close advisors to the President, there shouldn’t be any reason you couldn’t have two people essentially dividing the job. My overall reaction is that it’s probably a process fix better done with other senior people who are devoted to specific crises, not just someone who’s like, “I come in and handle all crises.”

A National Security Advisor should actually have both the dispensation and the instinct to say, “I’m just not going to spend a lot of time on this particular set of issues. I’m going to have the Principal Deputy do that, or an envoy do that, or someone else in government do that, because I need to be allocating more of my time to the longer-term things.” That’s probably a better way to do it than formally dividing the role into two.

One thing I reflect on from my time in government is, should I have just more consciously and systematically said, “This is something I’m putting on someone else’s plate, and I will check in on it every now and again, but it’s not going to be something I’m responsible for”?

Jordan Schneider: What were the things that you decided you needed to own and drive personally very aggressively, and why did you make those calls?

Jake Sullivan: First, I felt I was unusual as a National Security Advisor in that I thought I had to be at the table as an advocate, a designer, and to a certain extent an implementer of domestic industrial policy. I thought it was important that we have the national security perspective on that and that we’d be pushing that forward on chips, on clean energy, on infrastructure. That was one thing that I put a lot of effort into, particularly in the first two years.

Second, I thought the intersection of technology and national security was going to be defining. We created from whole cloth a new directorate on Technology and National Security, and I saw it as my responsibility to stay on top of that set of issues — yes, semiconductor export controls, but also other areas, such as biotech, quantum, and as I mentioned before, the clean energy transition.

Third, I believed from the beginning that a defining feature of modern geopolitics is the competition between the US and China. I thought it was my responsibility to play a central role in the design and execution of our China strategy and in the management of the US-China relationship.

Those were areas that I felt, regardless of what else was going on anywhere else in the world, I had to be focused on. Tied to all of those — industrial policy, technology policy, US-China — were allies. That meant husbanding and stewarding our relationships with core allies: the G7 plus India, Korea, and Australia. I put a lot of thought, energy, and effort into trying to elevate those relationships so that they were in the strongest possible state.

Jordan Schneider: That is a lot of stuff.

Jake Sullivan: Yes. I didn’t even mention the war in Ukraine. Or the multiple overlapping crises in the Middle East, or the drawdown from Afghanistan. There’s a lot going on. But the things I just named — they’re also interconnected. They’re not just different piles of work. At our best moments, they were a coherent strategy that we were trying to drive.

Jordan Schneider: You were one person both pushing the long-term stuff and being the crisis manager — what are the upsides to having that all be on your shoulders?

Jake Sullivan: First of all, if you just take it from the top, the President of the United States has to do everything. There is no division of that job into multiple different units. At some point as you go up any institution, any organization, you get to a CEO or a cabinet secretary or a President or a National Security Advisor. The question is, can you have a multi-headed monster at the top of the National Security Council enterprise? That’s difficult because you’re trying to execute and run a process that allocates time, energy, resources, priority, and then unity of vision and coherence of execution across everything. At the end of the day, you need a single point of accountability for that. That’s why it has to be basically in the job of the National Security Advisor.

But I also believe that theories of delegation and relative levels of personal engagement on different issues have to be an important part of how someone in that role thinks about what they’re doing day to day.

On Age, Experience, and Getting Ground Down

Jordan Schneider: What do you think the pluses and minuses were of being the second-youngest National Security Advisor when you started the job?

Jake Sullivan: It’s interesting — I’ve thought a fair amount about this, and it may strike some of your listeners as surprising. I was 44 years old when I took the job. That’s only a couple years younger than Kissinger was when he took the job.

Jordan Schneider: He was 45 and a half. ChatGPT made us a chart. Not sponsored, by the way. McGeorge Bundy was 41, which is insane. Condi was 46. You’re not an outlier on the young side. The mean is 53.

Jake Sullivan: There are a number of National Security Advisors around my age. When I took the job, I felt very young in a way because you tend to think of the black-and-white photographs of people with gray hair. But that’s a solid list of folks in their mid-to-late 40s entering this job — in some cases not with a lot of government experience at all coming before them, in other cases, like Condi, with quite a substantial amount of government experience.

Pluses of being on the younger side include energy, stamina, the capacity to really dig in and do the job full bore, full scale, 24/7. Being willing to push the envelope and be creative and dynamic and say we’re going to do things a different way, we’re going to have a theory of the case and try to execute against it — that youthful vision, energy, and creativity matters. That’s not just the single person acting as National Security Advisor — it’s also the team they build and the dynamic they build.

In my case, I felt I was able to build a very flat structure where everyone could come in, challenge, question, raise ideas, and feel like they had a voice. There wasn’t some oracle up top with hierarchy. That made for a much better — well, first of all, it was a better working environment, just more fun to work in that way. But I also think it allowed us to develop more interesting, more creative, more dynamic strategies in critical areas.

As for downsides… having done this job for four years. I understand deeply, to my bones, the value of experience — both positive experience and hard-won experience. There’s no substitute for it. There’s actually no substitute for experience as National Security Advisor. It is a truly unique type of seat to sit in that in some ways nothing can really actually prepare you for.

Jordan Schneider: More on that then. What was year-four Jake Sullivan able to do that year-one Jake Sullivan couldn’t?

Jake Sullivan: Actually, the most interesting part about experience is that to essentially metabolize experience, you need distance. Ask me in a year and I’ll give you an answer to the question. I’m being a bit glib, but what I mean is it’s less that in year two I was suddenly able to do things I couldn’t do in year one. It’s more the accumulation of that experience and then stepping away and being able to say, “Okay, I now have lessons learned — things that worked well, things that didn’t work well.” As this conversation goes on, I’ll point out some of those, I assume.

Sometimes I think that actually the right way for someone to do a job like this is to come in for two years, leave for six months, and then come back for 18 months — or in for 18, out for a year, back. I don’t know, whatever it adds up to. Leaving even for a little while just gives you an angle on what you were doing in the trenches that you just don’t have when you’re sitting in those trenches. That’s an interesting model for how to think about this going forward: you serve for a while, then you step away for a little while, then you come back and say, “Okay, now I’ve actually had the chance to metabolize that experience.” But anyway, that’s an idle thought for others to consider down the road.

Jordan Schneider: On what dimensions do you feel like experience gets accrued?

Jake Sullivan: The first dimension is living through a crisis, and actually having to stare square in the face the hard trade-offs and the imperfect choices, the lack of clear information, the need to form assumptions in the shadow of uncertainty. You can read all about that, but until you actually have to live through it, you’re not going to fully understand what both the opportunities and limitations are. That’s one.

Second is converting vision into action. How do you actually turn the idea of an industrial strategy into results? You’ve got to go through the thick and thin of that and make progress, but also come up short, to really be able to expose and understand what the obstacles are, what the modes of operating are, and how we could have done things differently — faster, more ambitiously, more creatively. Those are a couple of examples of where having to actually do something is what teaches you what works, what doesn’t, and how to be most effective.

Jordan Schneider: What about on the management side?

Jake Sullivan: On the management side, it comes down to a combination of how do you get the best out of people. Experience can come both ways, to be honest with you. One thing that I observed over the course of my time in government is that you get ground down. Your kindness, your patience, your sense of joie de vivre just get ground down. You become more impatient. Government is hard, so you become harder. I had to constantly fight against that. That’s an asterisk, a proviso — set that aside. That’s how too much experience, too much time in the trenches can actually degrade you rather than enhance you.

But how you actually get the most out of a team, how you run a process, what works and doesn’t work with respect to trying to surface and crystallize options for the President, how to make the government as a whole all pull in the same direction — these are things that require trial and error. It’s a very human exercise. Any particular group of people is going to have its own psychology, its own operating capacity. You can take experience from one administration and it won’t map neatly onto another. But there are some broader lessons that you can learn from it.

Jordan Schneider: In 20th-century American history, we have a bit of a pendulum. On one side, we have FDR and Trump — presidents just winging it. On the other side, we have the reactions to that — Truman being like, “Man, this FDR guy was crazy, we need to create the NSC,” or the Biden administration saying, “This Trump guy was crazy, we need to bring in a Yale Law School person to organize things.” After doing this job, how do you see the trade-offs of both models?

Jake Sullivan: This is going to maybe be true to brand, but I actually think that the right answer is to try to land in the middle of that pendulum. What I mean by that is — rigorous, fair, honest process is really important to the long-term strength of the United States and to the discipline of strategy on the big picture. But I also believe that a President and a National Security Advisor need a theory of what’s really important, and they need to get after it.

I had two people that I really looked at to try to approximate — not emulate, because I couldn’t live up to these two guys — but approximate. They were Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Scowcroft for process and for being an honest broker and for not coming in and just calling the shots, but rather teeing up the debates of principles to the President. Brzezinski, because he had a theory of geopolitics and a worldview that helped shape and drive decision-making, even as he dealt with a bunch of crises on the edges and margins of that. A blend of those two strategies is the best way to pursue statecraft.

Breakneck Industrial Policy

Jordan Schneider: Are there dimensions on which you wish you’d had more freedom of maneuver? What felt the most constraining?

Jake Sullivan: You’ve had Dan Wang on your podcast — I thought his book Breakneck was just incredibly thought-provoking and interesting. His overall thesis is that America is run by lawyers — of which I am one — while China is run by engineers. There’s a truth to that. Democratic administrations are even more run by lawyers.

It would have been great to have more freedom of maneuver to actually just build at speed and scale than we were able to accomplish, because we had every conceivable obstacle to being able to do that — from the defense industrial base to infrastructure to building a semiconductor fab in Arizona. That would be one area where more freedom of maneuver, more capacity to move fast, would have helped.

Two: The US is funny. We’re the richest country on the planet, with deep and liquid capital markets and a massive federal budget, and yet our ability to mobilize capital in an intentional way to serve national security ends, both domestically and globally, is wanting.

I would have loved more freedom of maneuver to be able to offer a value proposition to the countries of the Global South for building infrastructure and competing with the Belt and Road Initiative. It was hard to even get nickels and dimes to be able to do that.

That was maddening because for pennies on the dollar, we could have competed more effectively and can to this day compete more effectively. We’re not doing it because we can’t get that money.

Jordan Schneider: In that vein, what homework would you give researchers, future administrations, and anyone listening?

Jake Sullivan: We really need a deep and rigorous study of what the objectives of industrial policy are, what the limits of industrial policy should be, what tools work and don’t work, and then once it’s being applied, what are the obstacles to actually executing in a way that delivers results on a reasonable timeframe. To the extent those obstacles need to be adjusted, how do we adjust them?

That entire chain of questions — people are looking at some of it. Some of my former colleagues, like and , who were central to the CHIPS Act effort, are really doing a deep study of some of this today [now on substack at ]. But there is not a body of work on this, in part because industrial policy was basically considered unacceptable to work on. We’ve got to bring it front and center, and not just with the core economics profession — that’s got to be a dialogue between national security professionals and economists coming up with a range of answers to those questions that are rooted in empirics and evidence and rigorous study.

I would ask anyone out there who’s thinking about contributing to the national security literature of the future — this, to me, is a set of questions for which we need better answers than we have. Those answers will be in large measure defining of whether we’re able to pursue an effective strategy.

What If’s on Rare Earths and US-China Escalation

Jordan Schneider: The CHIPS Act is a long-game play, but there is a world in which you implemented the October 7th controls and China decided to play the rare earths card early. If you had woken up in that world, what would you have done?

Jake Sullivan: First of all, we wouldn’t wake up the next day and think about what to do, because we thought about that before we did the controls. We thought about retaliation risk. We thought about how to structure a strategy to protect our most advanced technology without getting on an escalation ladder that could end in harm to us or a downward spiral, or as we’ve just seen recently, the need for us to basically blink and back down.

We executed the controls in a way consistent with this theory of “small yard, high fence,” precisely to avoid the massive counterreaction that we have seen once President Trump decided to slap on 145% tariffs. That was a credible and sensible strategy.

Now, it’s totally fair to ask — and this gets to the point of hard-won experience — we knew that rare earths were a supply chain vulnerability for the United States. We knew that China was weaponizing it. We were explicit about that, open about that. We took steps on it. I could send you a note with a whole list of things that would all look like perfectly credible steps one would take to try to reduce that supply chain vulnerability. And yet it obviously didn’t end that vulnerability or even really, truly dramatically reduce it. Why?

I’ve reflected on this question, and there are a few reasons. One reason is that it is a new set of muscles for the government to intervene in markets where the markets have failed or where a competitor like China has taken advantage of those markets to dominate supply. We were trying to build that muscle.

Second, it’s a dynamic game. We made investments in US firms, we also made investments in allies, and China was counterreacting by cratering the price or driving a particular processing plant out of business. We hadn’t yet fully gotten up to speed in terms of that reaction-counterreaction.

The thing that concerns me right now is the Trump administration is taking good steps on this and they’re obviously motivated, but it’s still linear from where we were. We need to go really nonlinear. We need a much more aggressive strategy, in my view.

If I’d woken up the next day after the imposition of the semiconductor export controls and they’d played the massive rare earth card, I would have said drop everything — we need to solve this within the shortest possible span of time and essentially have Operation Warp Speed to get it done.

That is what the Trump administration should do. They’re moving in that direction, but now is the moment for more alacrity. I say that as someone recognizing — not enough alacrity in our administration, in the end, not enough alacrity. I’m worried that that remains the case today.

Jordan Schneider: Zooming back, we have two countries that are competing, which are deeply economically intertwined. Say you solve rare earths — it seems to me that insofar as the two countries have an enormous amount of economic interaction with each other, there will still be ways for either country to squeeze and cause the other one pain, even if it’s not commercial. We saw Volt Typhoon — “What the hell are you doing in our water treatment plants?” I’m sure you told them to knock it off and they didn’t.

It’s a game worth playing, but what does the incremental resiliency-building help the US when it comes to these negotiations? To use a wrestling metaphor — if you’re winning points in the round, but your opponent could still pin you if they really felt like they needed to.

Jake Sullivan: As far as homework — let’s fully map the vulnerabilities as far as we can see them. Let’s ask where they are. Let’s test this hypothesis you put forward that there is simply no end to interdependence and that there will be some fundamental vulnerability that can be exploited by China or, for that matter, by the United States. That is worth a deep dive, not just all of us talking back and forth about it.

I have three answers to this question.

1. There are different forms of vulnerability. Some act very fast, and the pain can be applied asymmetrically, powerfully, and swiftly. Some act much more slowly and give you time to adjust, or they act in a way that harms the country imposing that action, so there’s some degree of deterrence. That’s one answer — let’s not just have a list of all the interdependencies, but we need to isolate the examples that are like rare earths. How many of those are there actually?

2. I would prefer to have fewer vulnerabilities rather than more. If I can take some bullets out of your gun, could I still end up dead? Maybe. But if you gave me the choice between you having a full magazine and less than a full magazine, I would say let’s make investments to do that.

3. This is really important — the more a country shows it has the muscle to be able to adapt and adjust if another country tries to weaponize interdependence, the more of a broader-based deterrent effect it ends up having. Having the wherewithal to relatively rapidly identify and then close a gap, even if you know there are other gaps out there, has a knock-on effect on those other gaps too. For all those reasons, we should still have a resilience strategy, though I do acknowledge that this is a very legitimate question.

Part of the answer to it has to come down to a cost-benefit analysis of trying to deal with this resilience. In the rare earths case, the cost-benefit analysis seems to be pretty straightforward. This is not a massive market. It doesn’t require us to move heaven and earth to resolve the vulnerability. It requires some determined, concerted action, and we should take it.

On Yards and Fences 固若金汤

Jordan Schneider: The closest thing we got to a Sullivan Doctrine was given in September 2022 — “Given the foundational nature of certain technologies, we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.” There’s the maximalist version of that, where everything gets cut off, you’re Stuxnet-ing private companies. Then there’s the “small yard, high fence” version of Biden vintage, where every day you put out new export controls, and the next day we’re recording an emergency podcast talking about all the loopholes. I’m curious about your reflections on what the calculus was and what was constraining it. Was it domestic stuff? Was it political economy? Was it worries about retaliation? How did the level end up getting set?

Jake Sullivan: One element is retaliation risk. We talked that through, right? If you just say to China, “We’re essentially cutting you off altogether,” then you’re going to induce a really dramatic reaction. That’s what happened when we fired a bazooka of 145% tariffs — they fired a bazooka back.

A second element is trying to actually have some discipline about a threshold above which you have national security concerns and below which you’re just talking about broad-based commercial or consumer applications. We wanted to have the American idea that we’re not in favor of a total technology blockade. We are just in favor of focusing on those elements of technology that have genuine national security and strategic implications for us.

A third aspect is what you said about political economy — you’re trying to bring allies along, you’re trying to bring your private sector along, you’re trying to organize a government that has very different views on this.

If you and I sat down for an hour and went through ‘22, ‘23, and ‘24 — do I think we got all the calibrations right, all the levels? Of course not. First of all, in ‘22, they knocked out the interconnect and had the H100, and we had to update the controls in part because that interconnect speed criteria didn’t make sense. We were learning as we went — the stockpiling of some of the manufacturing equipment, those timelines we could walk through. But we were executing a novel strategy, trying to make sure that we were nurturing and sustaining our advantages, protecting our most advanced technologies, while at the same time dealing with this other set of considerations.

I had breakfast with a guy I respect a huge amount in the technology field who was basically like, “My only objection to ‘small yard, high fence’ is that it should be ‘big yard, high fence.’” He had an argument — we should control legacy chips, control it all. I actually think the experience of this year and how things have played out compared with the experience of the last three years is a good argument for “small yard, high fence” — for a particular style and strategy of a pretty aggressive policy that is conducted with a degree of care and precision. That was a more sustainable policy for the United States over the longer term than just letting it rip. Now, it’s hard to say for sure that that’s right. There’s no algorithm for this, but that was the judgment that we reached, and that’s why we proceeded the way that we did.

The last thing I would raise on this is, having watched President Trump do what he has done with our allies, was the right answer just FDPR — the Foreign Direct Product Rule — from the start? Basically, don’t negotiate with our allies over coordinated semiconductor manufacturing equipment controls. Just tell them they’ve got American content, you’re not selling, done. I think about that sometimes. That comes down to a question of what are the longer-term costs of treating your friends that way? I believe that there are genuine longer-term costs for that that are real and strategic and meaningful. But I can’t prove that. That’s something we’re going to have to watch over time because now we’re running a real lab experiment.

Jordan Schneider: All right, let’s talk about China. There was kind of a big yard with FDPR. Should we have been more aggressive with FDPR, for example, to really put maximal pressure on Huawei? Do you think China would have freaked out?

Jake Sullivan: The yard could have been smaller than it is, I guess. Here’s what I would say about some of these arguments — like, if only you do this extra thing on Huawei, then that happens. It reminds me of the “real socialism has never been tried” argument. Look, it’s possible you’re right — just one more crushing sanction or export control.

By the way, I’m being glib because you may be right. But the question that one has to grapple with is some of the assumptions that underpinned the Huawei controls that were put in place in the Trump administration and the statements about what would happen as a result of those controls — not the next, better version later down the line — didn’t quite bear out. We have to grapple with that, too. You may be right that just taking more steps in the Biden administration could have made all the difference.

Jordan Schneider: I identified the biggest “what if” is FDPR on equipment earlier, because the big chart is the one where SME exports double and double again and double again. It’s going to keep doubling. That seems to me to be the big fork in the road.

Jake Sullivan: It’s a big question, and I’m not sure what the right answer is. We had a thesis with respect to our allies — you work with them rather than coerce them. That obviously meant China got access to more manufacturing equipment than if we had just coerced them. But in a net assessment of the overall health, vitality, and strength of those relationships and how they would play out in — to coin a phrase — the long game, that’s a big question.

President Trump is testing that question because he’s basically saying, “I don’t buy it. I can go punish all these people as much as I like, and they’re just going to have to keep being friends because they have no other choice.” He seems to think that’ll just be how it is. I happen to think what’s more likely is you get a group of countries that were coming along with us to de-risk from China, who now are sitting there thinking, “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do today, but over time, I need to de-risk from the United States.” In the end, that is not going to be a winning strategy.

These are the kinds of calls that you have to make in the shadow of uncertainty. I will say we didn’t have knockdown, drag-out fights about FDPR. There was a general sense that we should try to negotiate this with our allies rather than just club them over the head. There are also other ways to get at this challenge than FDPR — like timelines on implementation and how companies went about allowing the stockpiling despite government agreements and so forth. That’s for another time, maybe over a drink.

Taiwan, Pelosi and the Risk of Accidental War

Jordan Schneider: You were present at the beginning of the Xi era. What do you believe about him that’s not the consensus?

Jake Sullivan: He is more improvisational than the theory that he’s just set out a coherent strategy that they are just going to execute. He’s basically like any other leader of any other big, unruly country, and he’s got to make a lot of stuff up as he goes along.

Jordan Schneider: Accidental conflict is something Americans worry about. I’m personally skeptical that if two countries really don’t want to fight, they can trip into a war neither side really wants. Am I wrong here? Is this something I should be more scared of?

Jake Sullivan: It’s such a fair question. It’s almost like a shibboleth — the risk of mistake, miscalculation, escalation. Ships bumping into each other in the South China Sea, and all of a sudden, you’re in World War III. I share a degree of your skepticism. There are restraining factors that can allow disengagement and de-escalation.

But let me give you a hypothetical scenario, and you tell me if it worries you. As you know, the PRC is pressing closer and closer to the island of Taiwan in the air and on the sea, bumping up against fewer and fewer nautical miles offshore, right? They’re doing that with manned aircraft, they’re doing it with ships, they’re doing it with drones. At some point, let’s just say Taiwan says, “We can’t tolerate this anymore. We’ve got to fire a warning shot, or we’ve got to do a fake dogfight with one of these planes to show them that we’re not tolerating the continued encroachment.” Then one thing leads to another and those two planes splash down. You think the next day it’s cool? Does that bother you? Does that worry you?

Because that scenario does worry me. Do I think automatically we’re off to the races? No. But that kind of scenario, in an already unstable operational environment — I don’t know that the risk of a tactical mistake leading to a change in the strategic situation — I’m not at one end of the spectrum on this that you’re pushing against, but I’m not quite where you are either.

Jordan Schneider: It wouldn’t be a nice thing. You’d lose some sleep over it.

Jake Sullivan: That’s the thought experiment to me. Why would you lose sleep over it? Because you’d be like, well, there is a possibility — maybe not that immediately the invasion force comes flowing over the horizon, but rather that it leads to a change in the national conversation on the mainland. It leads to arguments that we just can’t tolerate this, there has to be punishment and so on. Can that contribute to a shift in a negative direction that raises the risk of outright conflict? It can. I don’t want to overstate the case because I take your point, but that kind of scenario worries me more in a way than the US and China bumping up against each other.

India-Pakistan is another example where I think a mistake can lead to very rapid escalation. To me, it’s a little bit more condition-specific than just in the abstract.

Jordan Schneider: But isn’t the lesson of the most recent India-Pakistan crisis almost the other thing? It’s like, okay, we have a game now and we just play it every five years.

Actually, it probably doesn’t feel like that if you’re getting woken up at 4 o’clock in the morning.

Jake Sullivan: You know what? I’ll take that point. That’s fair because I basically agree with you that at the end of the day, the two sides don’t want to go to all-out war, so there are reasons for them to end up not doing so. I withdraw the India-Pakistan example.

Jordan Schneider: Was it a mistake for Pelosi to go to Taiwan?

Jake Sullivan: Look, I want to be fair to the Speaker. I’m going to answer your question, but I want to do it in a fair way. I spoke with her about going to Taipei, and she basically said to me, “All you White House Democrats and Republicans — you’re all too restrained. I should be able to do what I want to do, and nobody should tell us whether we can go to a city.” She was pretty clear and direct in her view.

I believe that the cost to Taiwan of that visit far exceeded the benefit to Taiwan of that visit. For me, it’s pretty simple calculus.

Jordan Schneider: How so?

Jake Sullivan: Well, it led to not just an immediate reaction by China that put a huge amount of pressure on Taiwan, but it led to a change in the operational environment around Taiwan that has not gone back to the way it was before — substantive, negative changes in Taiwan’s immediate environment. On the positive side, some symbolism, I guess.

Managing the Stress of Putin’s Nuke Threats

Jordan Schneider: On the accidental risk stuff, speaking of you getting stressed out — the Putin nuclear scenario is probably the scariest thing you had a 5-10% chance of seeing, I assume. You’ve already given some reflections on this, but maybe from — we had all these NSC management questions — this is the big one. What sticks with you?

Jake Sullivan: This is fall of ‘22. The Ukrainians are on this counteroffensive in Kherson and Kharkiv, and the intelligence community at the most senior levels comes to the President and says, “If there’s a catastrophic collapse of Russian lines and Putin feels that he’s in danger of potentially losing the war, there’s a 50% chance — a coin toss — that he will use tactical nuclear weapons to avert that defeat and shore up his lines.”

By the way, this is not just people guessing out of thin air. These are people who have studied this issue, are watching everything going on, who have amassed a fairly broad-based view across the intelligence community of this judgment. You’re the President of the United States, and you’re like, “All right, we’ve got to deal with that. Can’t be paralyzed by it. You’ve got to keep supporting Ukraine, but we’ve got to deal with that.”

We gathered in the Situation Room. We ran tabletop exercises. What would happen? What would we do in response? What would they do in response to our response? Not very pleasant scenarios, all told. We communicated directly with the Russians about the consequences of taking such an action. Of course, we reached out to, among others, China to get them to weigh in as well.

But this is the kind of thing where the difference between a commentator saying, “I don’t think it’s a very serious risk,” and actually being in the seat, having the responsibility to the American people of taking very seriously what sober, senior intelligence professionals are telling you while also continuing to support Ukraine — that was very real and very challenging.

I do not believe that this was all just BS. This was a risk. If it had happened — the first nuclear use since Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the United States would have had to take meaningful action in response. That action could easily have led to a totally different form of escalation between us and Russia. It’s good it did not happen. A lot of people look at the fact that it didn’t happen and say this was all overblown. I think we had some influence over it, and events on the battlefield had some influence over it as well.

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Jordan Schneider: We’ve talked about a few different escalatory ladders — the econ-tech fights, planes hitting each other in the sky. But this is different than what they were theorizing in the ’50s and ’60s. Thoughts? What’s my question here?

Jake Sullivan: I think your question is, how the hell do you deal with that?

It raises a question about risk tolerance, right? You’re walking on a narrow mountain path and there’s a steep cliff off to one side — one side’s the mountain, the other side’s a steep cliff. The path is, call it five feet wide. Do you walk right on the edge, saying, “I don’t think I’ll slip”? Or do you walk up against the mountain?

A lot of the debates over the nuclear escalation thing is, why weren’t you closer to the edge? Why were you closer to the mountain? The right answer on this is you have to keep moving forward. You’ve got to go from point A to point B. You can’t stop providing weapons to Ukraine, intelligence to Ukraine, capacity to Ukraine. But you also have a responsibility to the American people not to fall off the cliff.

Jordan Schneider: Can you talk about psychologically, yourself and your team? It’s one thing to be in the CIA for 30 years and be thinking about Russian nuclear posture. It’s another thing when it’s the week when it’s more risky than any time since the ’80s or even the ’60s.

Jake Sullivan: One thing that I’m playing around with in my head — I don’t want to say it wrong because it’s going to sound somehow like I didn’t take my job seriously enough, and I took my job deadly seriously — is that stress and stakes and consequences normalize. What I mean by that is the human capacity to just adjust to your circumstances.

I was an associate at a law firm in Minneapolis working on commercial litigation. We had these cases that kept me up at night. I stressed out over whether we got something right or wrong. I second-guessed and recriminated, the whole thing. Then I end up in this nuclear scenario. These are night and day. But somehow human beings don’t just have an infinite level of calibrating stress. They just have their bands, and then they’re presented with things. Some of them are life-or-death situations, and some of them are life-or-death decision-making situations. You get up in the morning and you go to work and you do your job and then you go home at night and you execute your responsibility to the best of your ability to do so.

I don’t have a better answer than that, but I don’t feel like, “Oh, I was some special person.” I was just a guy who had a job. This was the problem presented in that job, and I had to deal with it. A lot of it is just about being able to inhabit that mindset and say, “I’ve got to go to work. This is my job today.” But that didn’t mean I didn’t sweat through a lot of shirts.

Jordan Schneider: It’s a good point. The Marines fought on Peleliu and Iwo Jima. You’re going to an office.

Jake Sullivan: Exactly. This is such a good way of putting it. Somebody is walking into the teeth of gunfire at Omaha Beach who, a year before, was a schoolteacher in my hometown of Minneapolis.

The ability to normalize just your situation — this is my job today. That’s so much more real than anything I had to deal with. Yet we all have really stressful and complicated situations in our lives. Even when something is objectively not that high stakes, I don’t begrudge people that they feel super stressed in that situation because they’re just operating within the range we all operate of stress and stakes based on their lived experience.

Jordan Schneider: But there have been very few humans in human history who have stared down a non-zero risk of nuclear war and managed through it. Even then, it still is a unique experience.

Jake Sullivan: It’s a lot. It is a lot. It’s heavy. The other important thing is we’re all just human beings leading three-dimensional lives while dealing with all of this — dealing with family stuff or health stuff or whatever the case may be. I talked before about how you can get ground down in these jobs and lose a certain sense of who you are. There is a way in which the stress and the stakes harden you. You don’t even quite realize it at the time.

Being vigilant for that, to try to remember at the end of the day that it’s your job to be a good and decent person, is a really important thing. That requires more discipline than often in a given day you can bring to bear.

Jordan Schneider: You said on a podcast you still don’t sleep well. Did you sleep well before?

Jake Sullivan: In Trump one, there was a period where I had a really hard time sleeping post-2016. But yeah, I would say I slept pretty well. I don’t now, because in many ways, a lot of the things that we dealt with had no perfect outcomes achievable. The outcome was going to be painful in one way or another. There were some painful outcomes, and then they happen and you’re like, “Well, what if I’d done this? Or what if I’d done that? Or what if we had done this? What could we learn from that?” You turn it over in your head, and then you do all of that with perfect hindsight, which is a super problematic thing to do because you could only make those decisions in the moment.

But I don’t know — that’s just going to be what it is for me for a while. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In a way, the completion of discharging your responsibility in a job like I had is not to walk out the day you’re done and just go, “All right, someone else’s problem.” It’s to continue to wrestle with it indefinitely. That’s part of the service.

Jordan Schneider: You mentioned earlier that you think the thinking around AI and national policy is really poor. What are the hottest questions you wish there was better thought on?

Jake Sullivan: Let me be absolutely clear. If I said that, I don’t mean to say it’s really poor. I mean to say that we’re in the early innings. There are brilliant people thinking about this, and they’re thinking thoughts way beyond in complexity and sophistication that I could think. My concern is that we are designing strategy — and who’s the “we”? Because it’s a combination of this government plus these big private companies that are driving the frontier, without really fully unearthing the assumptions underlying those strategies.

A world in which we are rapidly approaching AGI and ASI versus a world in which it’s a boundary and jagged pathway towards greater capability — what you would do across a range of different inputs is different in those two worlds. Yet I don’t think we sit and work out what our relative confidence is in one world as opposed to the other. What are the can’t-fail or the must-dos, the no-regrets moves? Then what are the things we have to be able to adjust as we gain more information?

That’s just one example of many where getting technologists and strategists together to really go through the underlying assumptions of where all this is going is important. Most of this conversation floats above at a plane of abstraction. As a result, we pursue a policy with a lot of hidden assumptions that we haven’t fully validated or unearthed. That’s my main concern and something I’m turning over in my head and thinking about how to articulate better than I just did.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe more broadly, the process of gathering information, even though it’s under uncertainty and you’ll never get to much less 80% confidence with some of these things — how did you think about it and the sources, and how did that evolve over time for you?

Jake Sullivan: First of all, when you’re in government, access to information is amazing. My friend Kurt Campbell likes to say, “When you’re in government, the shit comes to you. When you’re out of government, you have to go find the shit.” There’s a simple, crude elegance to that. We could have senior people from the AI labs come in and actually present to us where they were and their capabilities and where they were going and what concerned them — literally in the flesh, just do it. We could also get all of the industry data and analysis synthesized by a team of people at any agency in the US government and supply it to you as well.

The biggest weakness on the US government side in terms of the consumption of information is that we tend to over-prioritize classified information over unclassified information because we somehow think it’s more special. Particularly in technology, it’s the unclassified information where you really find out what the hell is going on. But basically, all you can do is try to bring in as much as you can.

Then I believe in the debate method — basically having people on opposite sides or at different ends of the spectrum on a given question of what’s likely to happen actually debate it out, unearth it, and figure out where they agree and where they disagree and isolate the points of disagreement. That method gives you the best confidence that you’ve actually kicked the tires on all the potential perspectives. Then you just have to decide where you land, where you fall.

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Jordan Schneider: Trump two does not seem to see China as the threat that you guys and Trump one seemed to characterize it as. Two questions fall out of that — to what extent do you think, if he really tries, he can change the tenor of this relationship? How structural is the competition, basically? Second, given that this is what they’re seeing, if you had foresight into this, would the bias have been to push harder or push less hard?

Jake Sullivan: The second’s a good question. Increasingly, it’s going to be a salient question because we are going to see more swings in US foreign policy in the years ahead. Future National Security Advisors will have to contemplate dramatic departures one way or the other. We’re seeing that play out right now.

On the first question, here’s what I think — It’s structural. The United States and China are two big, ambitious, dynamic countries with proud people who want to succeed and frankly don’t want someone else calling the shots or having undue influence or having greater capacity than they have. We have two different political systems, two different value systems. Therefore, competition is a feature of the relationship.

What I don’t think is structural is that it has to be conflict. Where we have the ability to influence things is to manage that competition effectively. But the idea that you can just wish the competition away and go with win-win, peaceful coexistence and all these kinds of phrases — I don’t really buy that. Frankly, I don’t think China buys it deep down either.

President Trump can talk about the G2, and I completely agree he looks at this through an economic lens, a mercantilist lens, and not a lens of strategic competition. But at the end of the day, these structural factors will shine through. I have to think about whether it would have made us do something different. That’s a bit of a mind-bender, projecting back and then forward, but it’s a totally reasonable question.

Jordan Schneider: You talked earlier about the personal weight of all this, and you said somewhere that you almost envy the people who can have more confidence in their calls. The irony, of course, is this new book about McNamara at war. He’s the one who projected the most confidence out of any of these folks, and he had panic attacks. It was actually all a cover for all his insecurity.

Jake Sullivan: I was being a little wry when I said that. That’s understated Minnesota wryness. What I meant was I just find it so interesting that people can assert things like, “Yes, it’s this.” You’re like, “Congratulations, I’m so glad that you just know that.”

Going back to the point about hard-won experience — most of these issues do not have easy calls. They have trade-offs and they have puts and takes. I really admire the self-confidence because I could sleep at night super easily then. It’s just a hell of a lot less pain and suffering, but I don’t think it’s right.

Jordan Schneider: I have three book recommendations for you.

1. Feeding Ghosts — this one is best suited for midnight reading. It’s actually a graphic memoir. It just won the Pulitzer. It’s a personal history with the US-China arc in it that I can’t wait for you to read.

2. The Social History of the Machine Gun — it is probably the most stylishly written military history I’ve ever come across. It goes through the technology, the companies, the acquisition side, and then the human and strategic implications. Fantastic. Someone’s going to have to write the social history of the drone. We didn’t get to drones today. We’ll have you back maybe. But that book’s a real treat.

3. To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power. [Ed. Check out ChinaTalk’s interviews with the author here and here].

Final thing — what feedback do you have for ChinaTalk? What do you want to put on my plate or our team’s plate?

Jake Sullivan: Actually, bringing on some more people on the future of manufacturing, supply chains, industrial strategy — all the things that we were talking about a little bit ago that deserve so much more depth. Getting folks in to really unpack a lot of the kinds of questions Dan was posing that Chris Miller has been thinking a lot about. I know you do this, but doing a dedicated series on this subject with a specific emphasis on the particular challenge China poses and what the United States should be using government tools for to deal with it, and what we should not be, so that we don’t try to out-China China. That’d be a piece of advice I would give.

Why are Chinese moving to Tokyo? Takehiro Masutomo 舛友雄大, who worked for Nikkei in Tokyo and Beijing, has written a fascinating book about Japan’s new Chinese diaspora. Through interviews with Chinese immigrants who’ve moved to Japan, he explains what draws Chinese dissidents, intellectuals, billionaires, and middle-class families to Tokyo. The book is called Run Ri: 潤日 Following the Footsteps of Elite Chinese Escaping to Japan, and it’s only available in Japanese and Traditional Chinese for now.

Today’s conversation covers…

• How Chinese intellectuals are following in Sun Yat-sen’s footsteps by creating Chinese bookstores and community events in Japan,

• How underground banking networks help wealthy Chinese transfer money beyond Beijing’s $50,000 annual limit,

• Why some middle-class Chinese families prefer to send their children to Japanese schools,

• Backlash against Chinese immigrants,

• Why Chinese immigrants are more optimistic about Japan’s future than most Japanese.

Thanks to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this Q&A.

Tokyo’s New Dissidents

Jordan Schneider: Why’d you want to write this book?

Takehiro Masutomo: Back in 2022, I realized many of my Chinese friends that I had met in Beijing had moved to Tokyo. I thought this was an interesting new trend. Then, in November of 2022, there was a big protest in Tokyo echoing with the White Paper movement 白纸抗议 in mainland China. That was quite a departure from previous generations of Chinese residents in Japan.

I also witnessed the opening of some Chinese-language bookstores in Tokyo, such as One Way Street bookstore in Ginza. I thought Chinese immigration to Japan could be a new, emerging trend. That’s how I decided to look into this phenomenon.

Jordan Schneider: I remember seeing the former mainland journalist turned YouTuber Wang Zhi’an 王志安 saying he was doing YouTube from Tokyo. I wondered if he had dissident-adjacent friends there. There’s a second wave of Chinese who immigrate to Japan, who have money but are also unsatisfied with the life that mainland China can provide.

Your book walks through a number of different push and pull factors for wanting to leave China and being attracted by Japan. Since you mentioned the White Paper movement, it might make sense to start with the refuge for liberal intellectuals. Talk a little bit about what you uncovered in your reporting on this community.

Takehiro Masutomo: A good example is how we now have a lot of new Chinese-language bookstores in Tokyo. I don’t know if our listeners know how many Chinese bookstores there are now in Tokyo — as far as I know, there are five bookstores here. I heard there’s just one Chinese bookstore in Washington, D.C., which opened just last year, JF Books.

Jordan Schneider: Shout out to JF Books. I’ve been to a handful of talks there. I’m curious if it’s the same thing in Japan, where these bookstores double as community gathering spots. They hold lots of events and talks, and it’s a place for the liberal community to congregate and discuss ideas.

Takehiro Masutomo: The same here. They regularly host events — almost every weekend. Before, I don’t think there were any such activities, especially before the pandemic. But after the pandemic, I’m busy attending all these different events. There are too many nowadays.

They often have their own chat groups online or on WeChat. It functions as a community. There are five bookstores in Tokyo — the Chinese community is already dense enough to accommodate that many.

Jordan Schneider: When you talk to some folks in this scene, what do they appreciate about their lives in Japan versus in China?

Takehiro Masutomo: There’s much more space to discuss anything freely. I’m sure that’s a big plus. If it were a decade ago, I think people could have almost any kind of academic events or current affairs-themed activities in Beijing or Hong Kong, but it’s impossible these days. Tokyo provides them with this alternative space.

Jordan Schneider: How many Chinese in Japan do you think left for political reasons?

Takehiro Masutomo: Well, I don’t think it’s a huge number, but it’s somewhere in the hundreds.

Jordan Schneider: There is a fun historical parallel here with Sun Yat-sen, of course, who spent several years in Japan.

Takehiro Masutomo: I think some people started to see a parallel with the late Qing period. At that time, Japan accommodated a lot of Chinese revolutionaries, like Sun Yat-sen and others. Maybe something similar is about to happen in Tokyo.

The Retired Chinese Billionaires of Hokkaido

Jordan Schneider: Let’s maybe turn to another community — the folks who are coming there for a new lifestyle. Who are they and what are they looking for in Japan?

Takehiro Masutomo: There are different layers in terms of their asset size. I would say there are maybe three categories — super rich, upper middle class, and middle class. They have different kinds of lifestyles here. They live in different areas in central Tokyo. They really enjoy the lifestyle here, for example, going to nice restaurants. Tokyo has many world-class restaurants.

Jordan Schneider: But there’s good food in China, too.

How do the super-rich get their money to Japan? Ostensibly, you can only take $50,000 a year out of the mainland.

Takehiro Masutomo: For the case of Jack Ma and other billionaires, maybe the story is a bit different. They already had enough assets overseas for a long time. But I think the majority of those wealthy Chinese people who recently arrived in Tokyo have different options to transfer their money from the mainland to Japan.

I think a prime example is underground banking. I visited a few underground banks in Tokyo and learned that when they buy real estate properties here, they often pay in cash. They can get large amounts of cash through underground banks.

Jordan Schneider: Are we talking RMB — taking physical RMB out of China?

Takehiro Masutomo: To be precise, they first need to transfer money in RMB in mainland China from their own accounts to the seller’s account. After the bank operators confirm the money was actually transferred in mainland China, they give cash in Japanese yen.

Jordan Schneider: What do these underground banks do with that? How does it work?

Takehiro Masutomo: It’s a bit complicated. It involves not just Japan and China, but third countries. Simply put, I think it’s a parallel system together with ongoing goods trade. They need to balance their accounts, and that’s how this underground bank operation comes in.

Jordan Schneider: These underground banks are piggybacking off of other business activities that are going on. You just say, Oh, I sold a little less or had a little more revenue, and that’s how they transfer money out of China?

Takehiro Masutomo: That’s my understanding.

Jordan Schneider: What’s the motivation for super-rich people? They come to Japan for food. What else?

Takehiro Masutomo: Well, many of those super-wealthy Chinese people are semi-retired, including Jack Ma himself. They like the kind of retirement life here. Medical services in Japan are much better than those available in mainland China on average. They also enjoy traveling around Japan. I notice they like to have parties in their homes or at exclusive private membership clubs.

Jordan Schneider: What are these membership clubs? How do these membership clubs feel about all these nouveau riche Chinese people showing up?

Takehiro Masutomo: There are different kinds of private clubs operated by Chinese people nowadays in Tokyo. Some of them are restaurants, but they don’t take reservations, and it’s only for those members or the friends of those rich people. There’s another kind — for example, it’s attached to a resort office. These resorts, like the one in Hokkaido and so on, are not open to the public.

Jordan Schneider: Is there a lot of overlap and social interaction? I mean, I can’t imagine many Chinese immigrants speak Japanese, and I can’t imagine a lot of rich Japanese who are in these clubs in the first place speak Chinese.

Takehiro Masutomo: It’s not just about their own private clubs. For example, there are other Western-type clubs here, including the American Club. I think it’s getting filled with Chinese members these days. That’s also interesting.

Jordan Schneider: We’ll get world peace started at the American Club in Tokyo. By the way, if anyone wants to invite me to a secret Chinese club in Tokyo, I’ll fly out for that.

Snuffing out the Midnight Oil

Jordan Schneider: Let’s go one social stratum down. You talk a lot about families where the parents believe raising their children in Japan will set them up with different, better opportunities and less stress. For these families, Japan is a place they want to build their life and their future. First off, do the husbands come too, or is it just the wives with the children?

Takehiro Masutomo: At least for those I interviewed, they tend to come as families. The husbands also live here.

Jordan Schneider: It’s not like a place to park the family you don’t want to deal with.

Takehiro Masutomo: No, it’s having real life here. That’s maybe different. These people tend to live in the city center here in Tokyo, especially in the high-rise condominiums around Tokyo Bay. I went there for interviews many times, and the ratio of Chinese residents is going up fast.

Education is definitely a big motivator. More wealthy Chinese immigrants send their kids to top international schools here, including the American School in Japan.

Jordan Schneider: I had a Jack Ma sighting in New York City. I was walking on Central Park South one day, and he was outside the Essex House Hotel. He’s incredibly physically distinctive — he’s like 5’2”, you will not mistake this man and his face. He seemed like he was having a good time, even though it was rainy. I wish him all the best, but this is a real jet-set lifestyle that Jack’s been living. I guess he’s been back in China of late.

I think we should take a step back. Can you put some numbers around this? What has the broader trend of immigration looked like in Japan over the past few years?

Takehiro Masutomo: From the data I checked, the number of new Chinese immigrants I’m talking about today is roughly about maybe a bit less than 100,000. The number of Chinese residents in Japan now stands at 870,000. But the new immigrants I’m talking about are about up to 100,000.

Jordan Schneider: That’s post-COVID.

Takehiro Masutomo: Yes, something like that.

Jordan Schneider: From a school perspective, you wrote that Chinese immigrants believe that there are top schools in certain districts of Tokyo and that competition is less intense than it would be for the Gaokao and trying to get into Peking University, etc. Is that true? How much more relaxed is the Japanese education system?

Takehiro Masutomo: Good question. I’m always surprised when they talk about educational situations in mainland China. It’s far beyond my wildest imagination. Their kids normally study from early morning to midnight — that’s totally normal in China, according to those interviewees. It’s totally different from the situation in Japan. Kids here are more relaxed normally.

You mentioned this area in Tokyo — it’s called Bunkyo-ku 文京区. That’s where the University of Tokyo campus is located. I noticed a lot of new Chinese immigrants tend to move into Bunkyo-ku, a particular ward of Tokyo, because they believe the public elementary schools there are better than others. But it’s a myth because in Japan, the public school system is quite solid and there’s no difference among different public schools. It’s interesting.

Jordan Schneider: It’s a real estate marketing game then?

Takehiro Masutomo: Exactly.

Jordan Schneider: Is it cheaper to raise kids in Japan? Is there government daycare or other benefits?

Takehiro Masutomo: Tuition fees in Japan are cheaper than those in Shanghai or Beijing. I checked the data some time ago. If you compare the tuition fees for international schools in Tokyo, it’s half the fee in Beijing or Shanghai. Much cheaper. It’s reasonably priced in the eyes of Chinese parents. That’s partially why they want to come to Japan. Also, of course, the competition is not as fierce as in China.

Sichuanese Restaurants and Anti-Gaijin Politics

Jordan Schneider: Do the parents speak Japanese? Are there well-paying jobs open to Chinese nationals who don’t speak Japanese? What are they doing all day?

Takehiro Masutomo: One of the traits of these newcomers is that they don’t have a good command of the Japanese language, because they suddenly decided to come to Japan, and they are at least middle-aged or older. Acquiring a new language is challenging. Typically, they can only speak basic Japanese.

I don’t think there are many job opportunities for those people. But if you are a professional working in mainland China, maybe you can do something similar here. You set up your own company here, and you can open a consulting firm, a restaurant, or a real estate agency.

Jordan Schneider: There was a lot of news a few years ago of Chinese nationals trying to cross the border from Mexico to the U.S. These were lower-class immigrants coming for strictly economic reasons — not “I want my kid to have a more chill time in middle school.” I know there’s been a large influx of foreign workers to Japan over the past few years. I imagine that’s mostly from South Asian countries, but are there Chinese who fit in that bucket?

Takehiro Masutomo: The number of foreigners living in Japan has increased rapidly over the past several years, and now the ratio has reached about 3% of the total population. As you rightly pointed out, many of them are either from Southeast Asia or South Asia.

It’s a different category from those newly arrived Chinese immigrants here. The Chinese don’t do part-time jobs and so on. I would say it’s different categories. A lot of these newcomers choose Japan because Tokyo offers the best cost-effective quality of life. Inflation is mild here, and there’s this effect of the weakening Japanese yen. For them, many things are quite cheap.

Another key reason Japan is attractive to Chinese immigrants is that Japan has been relaxing its long-term visa over the past decade or so. Many recent Chinese immigrants had been to Japan as tourists in the 2010s, and then the Japanese government had been relaxing even long-term, residential-type visas. That’s why they could apply for those long-term visas and they could easily get one of those. It really makes a sharp contrast with many Western countries.

Jordan Schneider: How’s the Chinese food nowadays? Has it gotten a lot better to serve this audience?

Takehiro Masutomo: It’s more diverse these days. I sometimes go to Chinese restaurants because Chinese people want to have dinner with me there. It’s interesting — there are a lot of Sichuan restaurants and so on. It’s very authentic. Every time I go, I’m surrounded by Chinese diners. I don’t often see any Japanese customers in these Chinese restaurants. It’s completely a Chinese world.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about the sort of broader Japanese response to this trend. In the most recent election, there was some xenophobic pushback specifically oriented towards Chinese nationals. What’s your characterization of that?

Takehiro Masutomo: Ever since I started to cover these new Chinese immigrants, I thought that it deserves nationwide discussions — whether or not to accept these Chinese immigrants more proactively or not. That has been in my mind for a long time. But to my surprise, during the recent upper house election in July, these so-called “foreigner issues” suddenly became a big topic.

I think it’s an accumulation of people’s frustration — there has been a lot of sensational reporting about immigrants, specifically about Chinese immigrants. It’s not written by me, but by many other tabloids, magazines, and TV shows, highlighting how these wealthy Chinese people are buying up a lot of properties here, suggesting that recent hikes in property prices may be attributed to those Chinese buying sprees. That’s one thing.

I recall that several months ago, a magazine reported that the number of Chinese students at, for example, Tokyo University has increased significantly over the past few years. Now they are close to 20% of the graduate student cohort.

Jordan Schneider: Do they pay more for tuition?

Takehiro Masutomo: I don’t think there’s a difference in tuition between local Japanese students and international students. That’s different from Western countries. In the U.S., of course, you distinguish the tuition fees between home students and international students, but it’s not the case here. Maybe for those Chinese people, the tuition fee is quite reasonable here too.

A New Golden Age for Japan?

Jordan Schneider: Can you share some more stories from your interviews? What were some interesting perspectives you heard over the course of these interviews that surprised you about their motivations, reflections on China, or reflections on their experience in Japan?

Takehiro Masutomo: Many Japanese people are quite pessimistic about their future because we are facing a depopulation issue and we are all getting older. I was surprised by how optimistic these new Chinese immigrants are about Japan’s future. Some of them even said Japan is going to enter a new golden age. That’s an interesting perspective.

Jordan Schneider: That’s so funny. The most optimistic people in Japan are recent Chinese immigrants.

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Takehiro Masutomo: Another interesting phenomenon is Chinese intellectuals gathering in Tokyo. Many interesting things are going on — there’s now even a Chinese publisher based in Tokyo. I know him personally, and he started to run a Chinese language publisher. His business has become quite successful. He’s selling his Chinese books not just in Tokyo, but also in other countries. Not in mainland China, of course, but in Taiwan or other Western countries.

What’s more interesting is that some people say these intellectuals, combined with wealthy Chinese people, could eventually become a political force, potentially challenging the CCP in many years to come. There’s a small number of Japanese scholars and diplomats now discussing whether Japan could have the second Sun Yat-sen here. That’s definitely something we should watch out for in the future.

Jordan Schneider: That’s fascinating. Who from this community should I have on the show? Who are some of the most interesting figures?

Takehiro Masutomo: You mentioned Wang Zhi’an — he’s becoming quite popular here among those newcomers. There is also a lawyer from mainland China named Wu Lei 伍雷. He’s hosting a lot of events himself, and he’s quite big here. There are also other influential intellectuals I cannot name in public.

One example I can share is Liu Xia 刘霞, the wife of Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波, who now lives in the Kansai region. She used to live in Germany.

Jordan Schneider: Are there any other little hotspots outside of Tokyo?

Takehiro Masutomo: Resort areas are getting quite popular amongst Chinese people, including Niseko and Furano (both in Hokkaido), and other cities like Karuizawa or Hakuba around Mount Fuji. These areas are also getting hot. Some people want to live there, so they are building their own villas. Some of the newly built villas in those resort areas are now owned by wealthy Chinese people.

There are also Chinese developers building hotels and condominiums. There are a lot of real estate projects going on, some of which are really big. I know there is an ongoing project where the developer aims to build up to 10,000 units in one area alone. Well, that’s a really huge project. If they eventually realize that size, it’s unprecedented because if they could build 10,000 units, that would be by far the biggest real estate project in Japan. It’s getting a bit crazy.

Anonymous contributor “Masa Rick” returns to ChinaTalk. Last year, Masa Rick discussed China’s growing interest in the Middle East. Today’s report assesses how the UAE in particular has been responding China’s advances toward the region.

The United Arab Emirates has emerged as a formidable player in artificial intelligence, leveraging its immense financial resources, influence over the Global South, and a deliberate balance between the United States and China.

So when Emarati tech-investment firm MGX joined the likes of OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle in pledging $7 billion to Stargate, the move was perceived as the UAE pivoting away from Chinese partnerships and toward the United States. Has the swing vote officially been cast?

The reality is more complex. This report examines China’s strategic interests in the UAE, the UAE’s need for Chinese expertise, and whether Abu Dhabi is genuinely decoupling from Beijing or simply playing both sides to maximize its AI dominance. The evidence shows that the UAE is still probably playing both sides: leaning toward the US for access to chips, while hedging their bets with Chinese brains.

Current landscape: why is the UAE working with China?

The stereotype in China toward the Middle East goes something like this: “the deep-pocketed, oil-rich gulf countries will invest in anything that helps them diversify their economies away from oil.” But that stereotype obscures more than it reveals. The UAE, in particular, is not simply throwing money at Chinese firms. Rather, it demands the best technology, regulatory clarity, and alignment with its national priorities to boost its domestic growth (indigenization). Chinese PE/VC executives who go to Abu Dhabi to raise capital often lament the Western preference that Middle Eastern elites seem to have: after all, most Emirati elites were educated in the UK or other Western countries.

The UAE also prefers sustainability over quick results. As Hazem Ben-Gacem, former co-CEO of Investcorp (a global-investment firm backed by the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala), put it, Emirati investment patterns can be summed up in three concepts: “patience,” “strategically distributed,” and “long term.” That approach hardly aligns with the interests of Chinese investors, who have little interest in ending up “trapped” in the UAE.

Even so, the UAE’s pickiness does not imply that it will stop engaging with China in developing its AI capacity. The UAE’s sovereign wealth funds, for example, are still prime targets for Chinese firms seeking capital — especially as China’s AI sector faces mounting financial pressures due to US sanctions and chip export controls.

In February 2024, Emirati AI firm G42 was prompted by the US government to divest from China — but that $105 billion investment was simply transferred to another Emirati investment vehicle called Lunate, an arm of the Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s business empire. Given Lunate’s significant investments in Chinese firms, a CSIS team led by Greg Allen argued in a January report that this spinoff represents more of a reorganization than true divestment. So far, their argument has aged well: in the past few weeks, Lunate’s holding in Alibaba has increased to 30.48%.

The UAE government has also continued its engagement with China in the telecom sector — which doesn’t exactly scream divestment from China, either. According to the CSIS report,

Huawei and UAE’s state-owned telecommunications company e& launched a 5G cloud edge computing platform called 5G Edge Box. The announcement came just months after e& launched a similar 5G edge cloud computing platform with Microsoft.

The UAE and other nondemocratic gulf states are also prime targets for Chinese cooperation because of their shared disregard for environmental regulations and human rights (exemplified by recent China-UAE joint military exercises in Xinjiang of all places). Rather than navigating Western restrictions, China and the UAE can remain focused on “pragmatic cooperation” — as well as extending non-Western tech capacity (like building data centers) and norms (like setting data-security standards) to the Global South.

The UAE, in other words, is no bystander in the global AI race.

Is the next DeepSeek going to be Emirati?

Investment is only half the picture. China and the UAE show no signs of slowing down their academic and research cooperation — as evidenced by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), the only AI institution in the world where Chinese researchers dominate the academic roster.

The jury is still out on whether MBZUAI’s AI investments will ultimately boost the UAE’s tech capabilities. But in light of DeepSeek’s success with a small team of engineers from a very short list of Chinese universities, it’s not farfetched to imagine a major leap in AI innovation coming out of MBZUAI in the near future.

Since its founding in 2019, MBZUAI has been massively alluring to top-notch Chinese scholars for several reasons:

• Chinese researchers, especially in STEM, face growing US scrutiny over espionage and national-security concerns. MBZUAI lets US-trained Chinese researchers work without these constraints.

• MBZUAI has resources. A Chinese source claims MBZUAI “is equipped with top-tier GPU facilities, including over 800 NVIDIA GPUs, 400 A100 GPUs, and 400 V100 GPUs.”

• And MBZUAI has Eric Xing, the university’s president since 2021 and a leading voice in ML research. With someone of his stature at the helm, his position not only attracts significant talent from top-tier institutions, but also legitimizes UAE’s intentions. For example, Xing was recently spotted in Paris, meeting French officials and forging connections with French institutions to launch their AI initiatives in Europe.

MBZUAI has assembled a star roster of Chinese researchers, some of whom were Professor Xing’s advisees and others well-known within their respective fields. Of the 77 current faculty members on their directory, 25 are from mainland China, and three more are from Taiwan — including a Taiwanese-German “celebrity” scholar. The inclusion of Taiwanese professors seems to be highly intentional, too. Tei-Wei Kuo 郭大維, one of the Taiwanese professors, recently resigned from the board of Foxconn; now he can bring his insights on semiconductor supply chain management to Abu Dhabi. (A full list of all current Chinese and Taiwanese faculty at MBZUAI is produced at the end of this article.)

The composition of MBZUAI’s board of trustees also provides insights into UAE’s intentions on AI innovations: it’s a top-down initiative with immense financial resources and unlimited partnership possibilities (as seen by, for instance, Lisa Su’s entry and Li-Kai Fu’s exit).

Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak (chair)

• Corporate Positions:

  • Managing Director and Group Chief Executive Officer, Mubadala Investment Company (sovereign fund)

• Board Positions:

  • Vice Chairman, MGX

  • G42 (Board Director)

  • Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank 

  • Emirates Global Aluminium

  • Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)

  • Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation

  • New York University Board of Trustees (instrumental in establishing NYU Abu Dhabi Campus as well)

• Governmental:

  • Chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority ( Serving as an Advisor of MbZ, President of UAE)

  • Presidential Special Envoy to China

Jassem Mohamed Bu Ataba Al-Zaabi

• Board Positions:

  • Vice Chairman, e&

  • Chairman, Modon Holding PJSC

  • Vice Chairman, Abu Dhabi Holding Company (ADQ) (sovereign wealth fund) 

  • Board member, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) (sovereign wealth fund)

  • Board member, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)

  • Board member, First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB)

• Governmental:

  • Secretary General, Artificial Intelligence & Advanced Technology Council

  • Board member, Tawazun Economic Council (the defense and security acquisitions authority for the UAE Armed Forces and Abu Dhabi Police)

  • Chairman of the Department of Finance

  • Chairman, Abu Dhabi Pension Fund

  • Vice Chairman, UAE Central Bank

Saif Saeed Ghobash 

• Board Positions:

  • Board Member, Mubadala Investment Company (sovereign fund)

• Governmental:

  • Secretary General, the Abu Dhabi Executive Council

  • Under-Secretary, the Department of Culture and Tourism - Abu Dhabi

Rima Al Mokarrab Al Muhairi (aka the designated quasi-NGO/think tank person)

• NGO: 

  • President, Ideas Abu Dhabi (partnership with a US-based NGO Aspen Institute)

• Governmental:

  • Executive Director, the Executive Affairs Authority of Abu Dhabi (advisor to the President of UAE)

• Board Positions:

  • Chair, Tamkeen LLC

  • Board of Trustees, NYU

  • Board Member, the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research (think a think tank)

  • Vice Chair, Zayed University

Professor Daniela Rus (aka “the academic”)

• Director, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT

Dr. Lisa Su (aka “The Semiconductor Giant”) 

• Corporate Positions:

  • CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

Peng Xiao

• Corporate Positions:

  • CEO, G42

• Board Positions:

  • Board Member, MGX

Martin Edelman (aka “the lawyer”)

• Corporate Positions:

  • Senior of Counsel, Paul Hastings

  • Partner, Fisher Brothers

  • Advisor, Mubadala Investment Company

• Board Positions:

  • Board Member, MGX

  • Board Member, Lionheart Strategic Management

Professor Eric Xing (aka “the Academic” + face of the university)

• Corporate Positions:

  • CEO and Founder, Petuum Inc. 

What about MBZUAI’s students?

MBZUAI offers students free tuition and covers their living stipend. So who’s coming?

So far, it seems the only ones to jump on the bandwagon are US-educated Chinese students: the university’s current student body is about 30% mainland Chinese, according to an admissions officer based in China (private conversation with me). MBZUAI advertises to prospective students funding opportunities for ambitious research projects as well as work opportunities post-graduation: “80% of graduates decided to stay in the UAE, working for companies like ADNOC (UAE national oil company), G42 AIQ (subsidiary of G42) and TII (AI research institute).”

MBZUAI aims to be Abu Dhabi’s Stanford. Before you send in your application, however, it’s probably worth contemplating the following:

• Look to NYU Abu Dhabi as an example of an Emirati-led institution, and you might want to reconsider studying there if you value academic freedom at all;

• The US chip export restriction designation on the UAE is still not ideal for any organization that is not a Microsoft facility.

What next?

Stay on the lookout for MGX’s next moves on Stargate: Sam Altman is making the rounds to drum up more funding for the $500 billion project, stamping out any skepticism from Elon Musk on the way. And keep an eye out for the conferences that will take place in the AI and technology UAE from October to December — who will be attending and, more importantly, who will be sponsoring.

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Current Mainland Chinese Scholars on MBZUAI Faculty

Eric Xing

• Undergrad: Tsinghua University

• PhD: University of California, Berkeley; Rutgers University

• Department: Machine Learning

• Notes: President

Anqing Duan

• Undergrad: Harbin Institute of Technology

• PhD: Italian Institute of Technology and University of Genova, Italy

• Department: Robotics

Dezhen Song

• Undergrad: Zhejiang University

• PhD: University of California, Berkeley

• Department: Robotics

Gus Xia

• Undergrad: Peking University

• PhD: Carnegie Mellon University

• Department: Machine Learning

Jin Tian

• Undergrad: Tsinghua University

• PhD: University of California, Los Angeles

• Department: Machine Learning

Ke Wu

• Undergrad: Chongqing University

• PhD: National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, Lille, France

• Department: Robotics

Kun Zhang

• Undergrad: University of Science and Technology of China

• PhD: Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Department: Machine Learning

Le Song

• Undergrad: South China University of Technology

• PhD: University of Sydney and National ICT, Australia

  • Post doc: Carnegie Mellon University

• Department: Machine Learning

Min Xu

• Undergrad: Beihang University

• PhD: University of Southern California

• Department: Computer Vision

Mingming Gong

• Undergrad: Nanjing University

• PhD: University of Technology Sydney, Australia

  • Post doc: Carnegie Mellon University

• Department: Machine Learning

Pengtao Xie

• Undergrad: Tsinghua University

• PhD: Carnegie Mellon University

• Department: Machine Learning

• Notes: Eric Xing advisee

Qiang Sun

• Undergrad: University of Science and Technology of China

• PhD: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Department: Statistics and Data Science

Qirong Ho

• Undergrad: Carnegie Mellon University

• PhD: Carnegie Mellon University

• Department: Machine Learning

• Notes: Eric Xing advisee

Steve Liu

• Undergrad: Tsinghua University

• PhD: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Department: Machine Learning

• Notes: Associate Vice President of Research

Ting Yu

• Undergrad: Peking University

• PhD: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Department: Computer Science

Tongliang Liu

• Undergrad: University of Science and Technology of China

• PhD: University of Technology Sydney, Australia

• Department: Machine Learning

Xiaodan Liang

• Undergrad: Sun Yat-sen University

• PhD: Carnegie Mellon University

• Department: Computer Vision

• Notes: Eric Xing advisee

Xiaojun Chang

• Undergrad: Northwest University, China

• PhD: University of Technology Sydney, Australia

  • Post doc: Carnegie Mellon University

• Department: Computer Vision

• Notes: Published with Eric Xing

Xiaosong Ma

• Undergrad: Peking University

• PhD: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Department: Computer Science

• Notes: Department Chair of Computer Science

Xiuying Chen

• Undergrad: Wuhan University

• PhD: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

• Department: Natural Language Processing

Youcheng Sun

• Undergrad: Jilin University

• PhD: Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy

• Department: Computer Science

Yuanzhi Li

• Undergrad: Tsinghua University

• PhD: Princeton University

• Department: Machine Learning

Yutong Xie

• Undergrad: Northwestern Polytechnical University, China

• PhD: Northwestern Polytechnical University, China

  • Post doc: University of Adelaide, Australia

• Department: Computer Vision

Zhiqiang Shen

• Undergrad: Unknown

• PhD: joint program — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Fudan University

  • Post doc: Carnegie Mellon University

• Department: Machine Learning

• Notes: Eric Xing Lab; published with Eric Xing

Zhiqiang Xu

• Undergrad: Unknown

• PhD: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

• Department: Machine Learning

Current Taiwanese Scholars on MBZUAI Faculty

Chih-Jen Lin

• Undergrad: National Taiwan University

• PhD: University of Michigan

• Department: Machine Learning

Shih-Hao Hung

• Undergrad: National Taiwan University

• PhD: University of Michigan

• Department: Computer Science

Hao Li

• Undergrad: Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

• PhD: ETH Zurich

• Department: Computer Vision

• Notes: Director of the MBZUAI Metaverse Center

Zilan Qian is a program associate (research) at the Oxford China Policy Lab and holds a Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford.

Trigger warning: the second half of this article explores suicide.

“The US-China AI race is a race between Chinese — those in the US vs. those in China.”

This joke has real-world references. It is no secret that Chinese engineers and researchers make up a meaningful percentage of the AI workforce in the US. According to the Paulson Institute’s Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0, by 2022, US institutions relied more on Chinese AI researchers (38%) compared to US AI researchers (37%). Yet, this tracker still underestimates the Chinese AI talents in the US, because researchers are only counted as Chinese if their undergraduate degree is from a Chinese institution. That excludes a massive number of China-born AI researchers who did their undergraduate degrees in the US.

Meanwhile, China’s own AI progress, almost 100% powered by China-born Chinese, has grown at an unmatched pace. Besides the industry performance that can compete with the US, in 2024, China’s AI research publication output matched the combined output of the US, UK, and European Union, and now commands more than 40% of global citation attention.

People often cite China’s talent pipeline as one of its most valuable strategic resources — a system to admire or even emulate. Unfortunately, this view is fundamentally wrong. The system is highly inefficient, with a low cost-return rate: the top STEM genius everyone sees at the summit is built upon the bodies of massive numbers of talented students who failed to reach the top.

This piece is not about the life stories of successful Chinese AI or STEM talents. It is not about how the talent system works — but about how it does not. It explores the price paid to create this talent pool and the untold mental health stories behind it, as experienced and witnessed by me.

How to Build an “AI Talent Pipeline”

I grew up in Hangzhou, which is known today as one of China’s booming AI and robotics hubs. I went to some of the city’s top middle and high schools, the kinds of places that sit at the center of the country’s STEM pipeline. A middle school senior several years ahead of me became the co-founder of xAI, and another high school senior cofounded Pika AI.

My high school reliably produces at least one International Olympiad gold medalist in STEM subjects every two years, and a recent student just outperformed OpenAI in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). All except one of my high school classmates majored in STEM, and about half of them went on to Zhejiang University (ZJU) — the alma mater of DeepSeek’s CEO. A handful of my friends are doing PhDs in CS, EE, or ML at leading Chinese and Ivy League-level overseas universities, some supervised by professors listed on Times AI 100.

On paper, this is the kind of pipeline many places dream of building. In practice, living inside it felt far less enviable.

In elementary school, most parents enrolled their kids in Olympic math training. Some of my peers juggled six different math tutoring classes a week. Later, these math programs began to lose popularity, replaced by coding, Python, and machine learning courses. By the time I entered middle school, coding had become a standard path.

Before the first day of middle school, the school coding team held a 2-hour math exam to recruit new members. Out of 650 students in my cohort, more than 100 were selected for the first round. Over the next two years, that number shrank to about 15. At first, we trained for half a day a week, later a full day. This came on top of 7 am-to-5 pm schooldays (which would eventually stretch to 7 am-to-9 pm, 5.5 days a week) and weekends packed with supplemental classes.

The reward was clear: perform well in provincial programming competitions and you could secure a spot in a top high school. The risk was equally clear: most students could not balance this with preparing for the high school entrance exam, and eventually lost both the opportunity to enter a top high school through programming competitions and the regular path through the high school entrance exam (高中招生考试, which is usually known as 中考). In my city, 95,000 students sat for that test each year, and my high school (the top 1 in the city) recruited less than 300 through exams (and another 300 through other means).1

High school further raised the stakes. Prestigious schools ran Olympiad teams in math, informatics, chemistry, physics, and biology. At my school, at least 400 students entered these training streams, but fewer than 30 students in total might reach the national stage representing the province. There, fewer than 5 in total get selected into the national team and advance to international competitions. At the peak of the system, winners of international and occasionally national competitions were guaranteed admission to Peking or Tsinghua University, while reaching the national stage may get certain admission priority compared to others in the Gaokao. In 2022, the admission rate of Peking and Tsinghua combined in Zhejiang Province was 0.16%.

The training often began with one day per week and escalated to full weeks or even months devoted entirely to Olympiad preparation. Meanwhile, boarding school meant a 6 am-to-10 pm schedule, with Sundays spent back at school by noon and weekends set aside for extra classes. For those who fell behind, catching up to peers who had been preparing for the Gaokao full-time was almost impossible. The later you were eliminated from the Olympiad track, the more closing the gap and getting into a good university via the Gaokao became a hopeless endeavor.

If you do make it past the Gaokao, the grind continues in university. A friend at Zhejiang University once told me that during exam months, she slept only three hours a night. In her dorm, six students rotated sleep so that someone was always awake to wake up the others after their allotted three hours.

If one is to continue in academia in China, metrics for academic publications create mounting pressure. To obtain a CS-related PhD from Zhejiang University, students are required to publish at least two articles in SCI as the first author, and at least one needs to be in a CAS Zone 2 journal (at least the top 15% of the respective discipline). Other universities have similar publication requirements. And for those who stay in academia, the pressure only intensifies! China’s 非升即走 (“up or out”) tenure system sets strict timelines for publications and funding, with no second chances for those who fall short.2

Across all these stages, the structure looks less like a ladder of opportunity than a staircase with a trap door at every step. Each milestone comes with an award for the top STEM students–admissions priority — but also punishes those who fail.

And there is no cushion for failure. If you fail to get into a good middle school because you split your time between coding camp and the high school entrance exam, you have very little chance of getting into a good university. The scarcity of resources means that at a mediocre high school (meanwhile, around 50% of middle schoolers do not even get into academic high schools), you would have no chance of getting good STEM coaches and support to continue exploring your talents in high school.

The other door to good universities — taking the Gaokao — is also closed to most, if you cannot get into good high schools. The best two high schools in my city each sent more than 140 students to the best university in my province (Zhejiang University) in 2024 (and more than 40 each to Peking and Tsinghua Universities). The 10th high school (which is still considered good in academic performance) sent 19 students, whereas most schools ranking below that had single-digit or no admissions.

Meanwhile, an average university does not offer great resources for its STEM students. The 2021 Nature study shows that a Chinese STEM student’s university experience is a high-stakes filter. While only students in elite institutions achieved significant growth in critical thinking and academic skills over four years, the average STEM student at a non-elite university saw virtually no skill gains and often experienced a decline. This stagnation is particularly notable because these average Chinese students begin university with skills significantly surpassing those of even top students in peer countries like India and Russia. Their considerable initial talent is thus arguably wasted because the Chinese system reserves the resources necessary for continued skill development exclusively for the small cohort admitted to the most selective, “elite” institutions.

This is a system of ruthless natural selection: only the brightest continue, and the rest are quietly discarded.

(Original data)

The Human Cost of Building the STEM Talent Pipeline

Trigger warning starts here…

In the autumn of 2018, I was waiting at a psychiatry clinic to address my burnout problem after preparing for the Gaokao and the SAT at the same time. Suddenly, the machine voice called out a familiar name: a high school classmate from the Olympiad team. Teachers had described him as a future national champion, someone destined for Peking or Tsinghua and top national science labs. We saw each other in the waiting room but did not speak. The silence was an agreement to pretend we did not know each other.

Mental health was rarely spoken of openly, but the signs were widely available. I knew many classmates whose middle or high school experiences left visible or hidden scars. One had long marks on her arm from self-harm. Another took a gap year halfway through high school. A few transferred to middle/high schools abroad. Three more took gap years later, during their university studies overseas.

All of them were once the students that teachers and parents placed the highest hopes on — top of the class, members of math or informatics Olympiad teams. Yet few became the “talent” they were trained to be. Many ended up in very good places — Oxbridge, the China Academy of Art, consulting, or finance — but not in the elite Chinese labs or international research institutes that had once seemed their destiny. These alternative paths offered equally sustainable futures, often at a lower personal cost, particularly for those with the economic or social resources to pursue them. But they were not outcomes you could announce proudly among peers. Foreign degrees, artistic pursuits, and wealth were desirable — but they were secondary to being regarded as exceptionally gifted in STEM and proving yourself through your own intellect, specifically inside the traditional ivory tower.

However, not everyone is lucky enough to find a path and make it through. During the 2020 Gaokao year, with Covid-19 disruptions compounding the stress, there were at least three high school students rumored to have committed suicide in the city. None were publicly acknowledged. Local schools, authorities, and media downplayed the incidents.

When I returned for a middle school reunion last year, one teacher told me there are now “one or two cases [of students committing suicide] every semester” in the city. My friend, who is beginning a PhD in CS at the best provincial university, said his department had two student suicides in 2024.

Even public data confirms the trend. A 2023 study published in the China CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) Weekly 中国疾病预防控制中心周报 reported that while overall suicide rates in China have declined, the rate among children and adolescents has risen. Between 2010 and 2021, suicide deaths among urban and rural children aged 5-14 substantially increased, as did deaths among 15-24 year-olds from 2017 to 2021, surpassing three per 100,000.

However, the pressure is not limited to students. Young academics, especially those working in STEM, also struggle with mounting research pressures. A 2025 study compiled 130 verified suicide cases in China’s academic and scientific circles from the 1990s to 2024. It found that work and academic pressure were the leading factors, cited in 53 percent of cases. More than half of those who died worked in science and engineering fields. The most affected age group was 20-29, accounting for 53 percent of cases. And the numbers are rising: 38 cases were recorded from 2000 to 2009, 52 from 2010 to 2019, and already 38 between 2020 and 2024.

How to Hide the Cost

The figures above almost certainly underestimate the problem. They capture only the cases that slip through layers of silence. Suicide in China’s education and research system is managed through a multilayered regime of suppression.

At the first level, teachers (for student suicides) and school administrators downplay or conceal incidents. Their incentive is straightforward: avoid public criticism and protect their own careers. Local governments then step in to prevent negative publicity, leaning on media outlets and social platforms to delete or bury reports. If those measures fail, the central government becomes involved, concerned primarily with preserving social stability.

To be fair, investigations can be carried out at each stage. Teachers and schools usually notify local police; the education bureau may research the cause of suicide, and the central state would also mandate a more thorough investigation. There are many cases where public attention was enough to push for good investigations and the central state’s public acknowledgement. But many more cases do not survive until that stage, and investigations often leave room for more speculation.

For example, when a 17-year-old boy suddenly fell to his death in his high school in 2021, school administrators swiftly seized his body and drove to the funeral parlor, while notifying his mother only two hours later and banning her from entering the campus. Meanwhile, local police aggressively censored posts on social media and blamed the death on a “personal issue.” Although public dissent was large enough to force a central authority-mandated re-investigation, local police again ruled out foul play and claimed the family had “no objection.”

Some students make dark jokes that the only way to guarantee graduate school admission (保研) is if your roommate suffers something life-threatening. In cases of rape or suicide, some universities quietly offer guaranteed admission to those who report the incident, so the case doesn’t become public. The humor is bitter, but the logic is rooted in lived experience where tragedy is normalized, even instrumentalized, in a system that prefers silence to awareness and change.

This censorship compounds the stigma already surrounding mental health. Seeking help is seen as wasting precious study time. Shame still lingers around mental health despite some recent improvements in awareness.

The Collective “Dream”

What do I see as the secret of China’s AI talent? A “human sea attack 人海战术”: massive scale creates fierce competition that elevates top performers, while accepting enormous attrition as the system’s operating cost. Enough talented students enter the pipeline that losing most along the way still produces exceptional outliers at the top.

But scale and attrition alone don’t fully explain the system’s output. There was also an ideological component. After I left China to study abroad, I met many students from Oxbridge and the Ivy League. Many are very smart, but probably few of them could compete with my Chinese classmates within the Chinese system. The elite students in the UK and the US were brighter in another way — passionate and determined as individuals.

Meanwhile, we had been taught to be passionate and determined as a collective.

“Though hardships endure, never cease striving forward, with utmost loyalty in service to the nation; 忧患其久 不辍奋进 精忠报国. Only seeking great achievement, to pass on the torch, for future generations to rely upon. 唯求大成 薪火相继 后学所凭.”

These lines come from my high school’s school song. Back then, studying STEM carried an implicit patriotic mandate — the ideal was to become a pure scholar advancing the nation through knowledge. This was the greatness we were all supposed to be pursuing, the torch in our hands, and the shared future into which we were meant to channel our passion.

Of course, this patriotic mandate is different from the one China had decades ago. The years of pure scientism and old scientific nationalism in China have faded. Many students now consider practicality over ideology, choosing economics or finance over foundational sciences, to the extent that the state started to censor such narratives as negative emotions. Mental health awareness has grown. Overwork is no longer universally celebrated as dedication to the nation.

Yet the embedded ideology of techno-nationalism, or — in the parlance of modern propaganda — “science and education for the development of the nation” (科教兴国), remains powerful for individuals, especially when geopolitical pressures reinforce it. Regardless of whether ordinary Chinese think they are racing with the US, many of us have been trained to race, especially in STEM, from the very beginning of our lives.

The core question about China’s talent system is not whether China can continue producing top AI talent through this system. It can, at least until its population shrinks drastically. It is not whether other countries can have as many native talents as China has — they can, if they have enough people to lose. The question is whether we have paid enough for this race, and whether the next generation will be willing to pay more — both racing internally against each other, and externally against other countries.

Mandarin Peel is an International Relations graduate student based in Taiwan. His work focuses on U.S.–China tech competition, Indo-Pacific geopolitics, and Taiwan. You can find more of his writing on X and on Substack, where he also publishes work from fellow researchers.

The October 2025 KMT chairmanship election came at a time of reckoning for the party. The KMT faces a difficult challenge — being the party that regards Taiwan as Chinese — trying to get elected by a public whose own identity conceptions trend the opposite way.

At first, 73-year-old Hau Lung-pin 郝龍斌, a central figure of the deep blue wing of the KMT’s old guard, was the favored candidate for the position, having built a strong network within the party over his long career. Though he has historically leaned pro-China even for the KMT, he was running to help the KMT win elections. Toward that end, his vision for the party’s new core message would step more in line with the current trends in Taiwanese identity conception: “Pro-America, not kneeling to America; Peaceful with China, not sucking up to the CCP” “親美不跪美，和中不添共.”

His main competition, and the eventual victor, was Cheng Li-wun 鄭麗文, a 55-year-old candidate with fewer connections but not without charm or vision. A brash and charismatic campaigner, she instead sought to use growing mistrust of America, brewing since the beginning of Trump’s second term, and convince voters to be unapologetically pro-China and Chinese while refusing to be a “piece in the chess game of two great powers” — a favorite metaphor of Taiwanese America-skeptics (疑美論). “This is my promise, and it’s not just elected as party chair: in the future, all Taiwanese will proudly and confidently say ‘I am Chinese.’ This is what the KMT needs to do!”

Perhaps as controversial as Cheng’s remarks was a deepfake video that emerged of Hau Lung-pin and city councilmember Liu Caiwei 柳采葳 kissing at a press conference. Hau said that posts like this were coming from “overseas” accounts seeking to influence the election. His close ally Jaw Shaw-kong 趙少康 even directly accused China of election interference. This marked a turning point as officials of the party that had previously disputed such claims are now making them too. Hau cited a National Security Bureau report that found over 1,000 videos about the election on Chinese TikTok over 20 YouTube accounts — at least half of which were posting from outside of Taiwan.

“False flag” operations, in which an actor attempts to actually convince the public that a fake event is real, are a much smaller piece of the pie, however. Jerry Yu, senior analyst at Taiwan’s Doublethink Lab, told me in an interview that the main function of AI generation for propaganda has not been to increase quality or to convince viewers that the videos are real, but to increase scale by speeding up the creation process.

YouTube DeepFake channels

Disinformation sloperations are, however, using AI to boost their strategic sophistication, if not video quality. For example, most of the channels did not begin by posting propaganda. In the months prior to the KMT chair election, numerous accounts sprang up praising Taiwan’s natural beauty or culture. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the channels would suddenly switch to posting pro-Cheng propaganda via DeepFakes realistic enough to fool your grandparents (and maybe even your parents). These channels exemplify the speed-over-quality strategy of AI propaganda; if the makers of these videos are trying to convince people they’re real, they’re certainly not trying that hard.

The accounts build up viewership and favor with the algorithm before eventually posting content about Taiwanese politics. One such case is 萤火 (Firefly), whose earliest available post is a full-stack AI slop story about the kind-hearted Taiwanese strangers who volunteered to help an apparently homeless American. For three months, the channel pursued its niche of faceless voiceovers retelling heartwarming stories of the Taiwanese people’s magnanimity toward foreigners. Then, after months of buttering up Taiwan, it switched to the most common model for YouTube DeepFake channels: a woman who looks like a Chinese model sitting in front of a camera and praising Cheng Li-wun and Han Guoyu 韓國瑜 at the expense of DPP politicians and the KMT old guard. Other channels — whose niches include documentaries about wild animal species, post-travel reflections on the dark sides of Japanese culture, and erotic stories about wife swapping — all switched to videos of one of several deepfaked women sharing identical political views.

Yu noted that many of these channels write their subtitles in simplified characters, which is strong evidence that the accounts come from Mainland China. The uniformity of their style is also indicates that they are part of a coordinated effort.

I took a look at the database of Taiwan-facing, pro-Cheng Li-wun, AI-based videos created by a partner of DoubleThink to see when these channels started cropping up, when they first began posting videos about Cheng, and where the channels have gone since.

The timing of the video proliferation gives us information as to whether the accounts were astroturfing or simply riding an existing pro-Cheng wave. At least one account with the same essential style as all of the rest released its first deepfake model Cheng Li-wun video on September 17th, the day that Cheng Li-wun announced her candidacy. Just one channel mentioned her before she announced her candidacy, arguing in late August that Cheng would be a good candidate. The new mentions of Cheng reached their peak just the week after her announcement. That they came out in droves and copied the exact format of those that had already supported her suggests strongly that this is a coordinated campaign.

Before they began posting videos of Cheng Li-wun, most would have videos from the same deepfaked character that they used to talk about Cheng Li-wun, also talking about Taiwanese domestic politics — even if they started out as political, they’d typically not start by talking about Cheng. Or, they’d switch to apolitical slop, the vast majority of which now seems to focus on Chinese entertainment industry gossip.

Following the election, the majority of the channels have switched to posting apolitical slop — presumably to continue growing their audiences until the next election comes around and it’s time for them to go back to politics. We have an army of accounts that were once Cheng Li-wun keyboard warriors and will almost definitely return to influence an election when needed.

Though there are no methods to definitively measure the influence of these campaigns, Yu points to how much of an underdog Cheng was when she entered the race: “She was not popular in the KMT.” He claimed that if the videos were not making a “big difference,” then Cheng Li-wun would not have won. That’s a pretty strong statement, but altogether, the evidence shows a serious and impactful operation. Some of these channels got millions of views, and they started in earnest early on during Cheng Li-wun’s campaign, when Hao Lung-pin was considered the clear favorite.

One common topic for the video is essentially “why Cheng Li-wun is the best candidate.” One video speaks about her “four trump cards” 四張王牌: (1) her grasp of the KMT’s innerworkings combined with her campaigning experience; (2) her understanding of the DPP, being a former member; (3) her ability to promote “blue-white cooperation” 藍白合作 between the KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party; and (4) her tacit support from Lu Shiow-Yen 盧秀燕, the popular mayor of Taichung. Another appeared more neutral, respectfully critiquing each candidate’s debate performances while describing Cheng Li-wun as “steady, accurate, and decisive (穩，準，狠)” and saying that she showed the best prospects for attracting young people to the KMT.

On the other hand, Cheng ran an excellent campaign. Even if she was a dark horse, she had a lot going for her aside from just the campaigns — she gave strong speeches, won over important KMT figures like Ma Ying-Jeou 馬英九, and pushed a more inspiring vision for the party and won with a sizable 14.3-point margin. Her margin above a majority, however, was slim at only 0.15 percentage points.

Going above 50% of the vote has permitted pro-Cheng sources to call the election a strong mandate for Cheng to shape the party’s direction. Lu Xiaodan 陸小蛋, a Deepfake channel with nearly 1.5 million views and ~12 thousand subscribers, said: “More than half of the vote – that’s a key number. It’s not a close call; it’s overwhelming support. It represents the will of the grassroots” (超過半數的得票率，這個數字很關鍵。不是險勝，是壓倒性的支持。這代表基層的意志). That Cheng’s supporters have taken this small threshold and run with it as a mandate for change demonstrates the impact that a psyop can have, even if it only moves the result by a fraction of a percent.

TikTok

Also released in September, though having no clear connection to the KMT election, has been a remix of DPP legislator Wang Shijian 王世堅 on the Legislative Yuan’s floor slamming then-Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je 柯文哲 for his supposed failure to properly prepare the city to host the 2017 Summer Universiade. Of course, political remixes in the same vein as “Good For Nothing” 沒出息 have been around at least since Schmoyoho’s “Auto-Tune the News” — such songs have been popular for over 15 years, and voice-altering technology this good has existed since at least 2024.

But LLMs now let you make dopamine-inducing political content like never before — such as a music video where DPP legislator Wang Shijian 王世堅 impersonates Elvis and grooves out to “Good For Nothing”. The account that posted that video has posted multiple versions of the same song and also demonstrates how Sora 2 — which came out during the height of the race — may provide a leg up for election-influencing operations.

The account behind these videos, ‘gourmet.cookathome,’ seemed to switch from manual edits of the news to mostly posting AI-generated videos on October 3rd, shortly following the release of Sora 2. I compared the viewcounts from 16 days after its adoption of AI-generated videos with the equivalent period prior and found that while the average viewcount showed almost no change, the number of videos released increased by 60% — bringing the total viewcount from just over 600 thousand in the previous period to nearly one million.

As for the viral song “Good for Nothing,” Yu speculates that it at least has potential to be part of a longer-term operation. In addition to being memeable, Wang Shijian 王世堅 is known within the DPP to call out his party when he believes they have done wrong. So, if following Wang Shijian’s establishment in the Chinese and Taiwanese meme canons, we start to see a mass of Douyin and TikTok videos of Wang criticizing his own party, there will be a case that the song itself was part of a misinformation op. The video already seems to have reignited support for him, including renewed calls for him to run for mayor of Taipei City.

The Betting Website

Another piece of the AI-generated puzzle came in the form of a gambling website whose creation coincided closely with the lead-up to the election. Its X account is an apparent dummy come to life: created in January, it made a few posts about soccer and then went quiet before beginning to promote its AI-based prediction market platform in late September.

The website’s homepage was dedicated to the chair election during the final days of the race. The company is clearly run from Mainland China, with the announcement post as evidence: It specifies that Taiwan is part of China and then spells Cheng Li-wun’s name in mainland pinyin rather than the Wade-Giles romanization.

The website’s interface is pretty slick, but contains the hallmarks of being designed by an LLM: the rounded edges of the boxes, the emojis beside the text, and the text animations make it look like any standard 2025 AI startup website with a casually vibe-coded front end.

The timing of the website’s release coincides with the creation of most of the Deepfake accounts. The KMT chairmanship election was one of the first bets announced on the website, and some of the previous bets showed signs of being fake. For example, the only event under “Chess” was the “2025 World Championship”, a match that doesn’t exist (chess world championships only take place every other year). If the website was indeed vibe-coded just for this election, it’s a strong case study demonstrating the potential of the newfound ease of creating a professional-looking website for election manipulation.

Of course, it could have been a coincidence, and the fake posts of previous events exist to demonstrate their intentions to continue expanding their project, which has only just taken off. But that still begs the question: Why would a mainland Chinese prediction market startup pick a Taiwanese political party’s internal election as one of its first actual bets to run?

Professional political bettor Domer theorized on ChinaTalk about the possibility of prediction market numbers influencing a candidate’s chances to win an election: “[T]hey can say, ‘I have momentum. Here’s proof. Someone’s betting on me. My price is going up.’” What he didn’t predict was that one could accomplish the same ends by simply creating a betting website that can say, whether true or false, that a certain candidate is winning.

Conclusion

More striking than the quality or the persuasiveness of this wave of slopaganda is its rhythm. Deepfake accounts that oscillate between algorithm-friendly nothing-burgers and slews of videos from kind-of-obviously-fake beautiful women with AI-generated voices, scripts, and body motions. Innocuous remixes potentially intended as sleeper psyops making their way into your feed. An AI startup with an unusable product or a fake website with a scarily good interface. All done in broad daylight, with little attempt to hide the seams.

What a strange kind of invisibility: It’s easy to provide probabilistic evidence but impossible to provide conclusive proof. Even as those disseminating the information barely even seem to be trying to cover it up, they know that even if they’re found out, there will be no consequences, and they will still have garnered the positive feelings they needed. At least those behind the apparent campaign must have thought that their messaging would be influential, but no one can prove the sway definitively. The ambiguity feeds the machine and allows it to keep generating more of the same. Influence campaigns target social media users who keep eating the slop no matter what it’s filled with — like pigs to the slaughter.

Our first-ever Supreme Court-driven emergency pod! Oren Cass, the founder and chief economist of American Compass, and Peter Harrell, former Biden White House official, host of the Security Economics podcast and, as of a month ago, a Georgetown Law scholar, have joined to discuss:

• Why Trump’s most arbitrary tariff impositions might be the most easily defensible in the Supreme Court case,

• Why this Supreme Court case probably has no real bearing on negotiations with China,

• The USMCA as a template for negotiating with Asia,

• What tariff negotiations can tell us about Trump’s philosophy on decoupling from China,

• How the U.S. can compel allies to take defense seriously.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app or watch on YouTube:

Litigation Day

Jordan Schneider: Oren, why don’t you kick us off?

Oren Cass: I love the case as a legal matter. While partisans on both sides will tell you this is a clean-cut decision, I think there are actually many very close legal questions, which is fascinating.

The reality is that we are almost surely going to get a decision that attempts to put down some long-term markers for how the court thinks about these questions, while on the specifics of the tariffs, essentially trying to stall. The court will probably give a bunch of new guidelines and principles and then remand the case back to a lower court to figure out how to implement them. It’s a little bit like what you saw them do with the presidential immunity question.

The result will be that everyone will have a better sense of how the court would initially decide this, but there will be more time before anything is actually resolved. In the interim, the administration will have to figure out what it wants to move on through other authorities, what it wants to keep fighting on, and what, if anything, it wants to legislate. Anyone who’s looking for a clear-cut and decisive victory or devastating loss will almost surely be disappointed.

Peter Harrell: I might disagree a bit with you, Oren, on that. I heard a majority of the court was skeptical that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) authorizes at least all of the tariffs that Trump has imposed under IEEPA. While we could see a decision that holds that some IEEPA tariffs are authorized and then kicks the case to lower courts to sort out the exact parameters, I think we are more likely than not to find that at least the “universal and reciprocal” tariffs (the 20% on Vietnam, 15% on the European Union, 19% on Thailand, etc.) are not authorized under IEEPA.

I could be wrong, but I heard a fair amount of skepticism from the Chief Justice, Justice Barrett, and even Justice Gorsuch on the extent of the IEEPA’s authorization.

To your broader point, even if the court does strike down a decent chunk of the IEEPA tariffs, the administration has fallback options, as Ambassador Greer and other administration officials have said. I think we will see the administration work through other authorities to put some of the tariffs back together.

I agree with you that the decision may be narrow in some sense, as it will be about what this 1977 emergency power statute says. However, I also think we will get some broader discourse in the opinion about how the Supreme Court thinks about its major questions doctrine and about executive power versus congressional power generally. I think this is a decision that students and lawyers will be reading for some time to come because it will have broader ramifications beyond just a particular case on tariffs.

Jordan Schneider: The weird wrinkle of all this is that if the administration didn’t have “Liberation Day,” but just spent a few more months writing some Section 232 findings, or even had ChatGPT write the Section 232 findings, the standing for the Supreme Court to jump in and say, “You can’t do this,” would have been much smaller than the route the Trump administration ended up choosing. Am I wrong on that?

Peter Harrell: All of us who think about trade law are now unpacking these other statutes and thinking about what he could do under them and what their limits are. For your audience, Jordan, who may not be deep in the weeds here, the tariffs at issue in this case are the IEEPA tariffs — the universal and reciprocal tariffs, the so-called fentanyl tariffs on Mexico, China, and Canada, the tariffs on India over its oil import purchases, and the tariffs on Brazil over issues with former President Bolsonaro. It is not the product tariffs, so we are not talking about the steel and aluminum tariffs or the car tariffs here.

When I look at estimates from the Yale Budget Lab and others, roughly 70% of the tariffs Trump has imposed this term are at issue.

I think Trump has used this statute for two reasons. First, as you suggested, Jordan, the alternatives all require process. Trump has done a bunch of Section 232 investigations on cars, steel, and aluminum. But, as we are seeing with the fact that he has had a Section 232 on semiconductors for six or eight months that he has not yet completed, these things take time. Trump is not known as somebody who has a lot of patience when it comes to trade policy, and he does not want his administration to wait months and months before putting tariffs in place. IEEPA has let him avoid the time and fact-finding element that other statutes require.

The other thing is that if you really unpack these other statutes, I think he will find some substantive constraints on them. Now, a lot of these statutes haven’t been litigated much, so we will see what substantive constraints emerge. For example, Section 301, which he used to impose tariffs on China during his first term (something I very strongly agreed he was correct to do), arguably has some substantive limits. The quantity of tariffs must be tied to an unfair trade practice by the foreign country. With China, it is very easy to justify even much higher tariffs based on unfair trade practices. But if you wanted to maintain, say, a 10% tariff on Australia, a country we have a trade surplus with, it is difficult to identify an unfair Australian trade practice that merits a 10% tariff. You might be able to find something, maybe related to how they regulate our big tech companies, but I do think he would find some substantive constraint on some economies.

As I think about it, if he loses and decides not to go back to Congress, I think he can recreate more than 50% of the tariffs. But I do not think it is 100%, even after he jumps through all the hoops that these other statutes require.

Trump announcing his tariffs on “Liberation Day” (April 2, 2025). Source.

Oren Cass: I agree with Peter. I think the universal global tariff is the piece that is the hardest to justify under either IEEPA or through a Section 301 or Section 232, and it is probably the piece where you are most likely to need legislation if you actually want it to be a permanent part of policy.

The irony is that the stuff people are most frustrated with Trump over — the stuff that seems most unsubstantiated, like, “We don’t like the ad that Canada ran, so here’s another 10% on Canada” — is in a lot of respects the stuff that is most defensible under IEEPA or under an executive authority where the premise is, “Look, we’re negotiating here. We are using tariffs quite explicitly as a tool of foreign policy to try to strengthen our hand in negotiations.” You could not possibly do that through legislation. You couldn’t go back to Congress in the middle of a negotiation and say, “Hey, now we want you to do X instead of Y because that’s what we threatened at the table yesterday.”

This is where I agree very much with Peter that at the end of the day, within everything that has happened under IEEPA, there are actually just a lot of different rationales and different legal implications. That’s where maybe we disagree a little bit — I think it is very likely that the court’s take is going to be to try to draw out those strands and then send it back for somebody else to figure out. I think it is very unlikely that the Supreme Court would simultaneously try to distinguish all of these different things de novo. That would also at some point become new findings of fact that you would need to then implement. That is where I think you will see the Trump administration ultimately get some breathing room. But then, in terms of what U.S. Trade policy is going to be for the next decade, we probably and hopefully need to start laying down something more permanent than an emergency power before we look forward.

Jordan Schneider: Peter, I’m curious to what extent the specter of the fentanyl tariffs being taken off potentially impacted the negotiations between Xi and Trump at APEC.

Peter Harrell: I actually don’t think that the specter of Trump losing tariffs in court has that much of a meaningful impact on the China negotiations. I’m not even sure it has that much of a meaningful impact on any of the negotiations, but China in particular. Because there is an existing Section 301 on China and because there are other Section 301 investigations underway (an existing one from Trump’s first term and one on Chinese shipbuilding), China is the country he could most quickly and easily pivot to these other dials to re-impose the tariffs. I think it has almost no relevance to the China negotiations.

It has only limited relevance to some of the other negotiations. When I talk to European and Japanese officials, they are all watching this court case with great interest, but they also understand that Trump could recreate at least a portion of these tariffs under other authorities. They have a pragmatic view — “If Trump loses this, he can recreate some of it under other authorities, so why would we anger him by provocatively walking away from the trade deals we’ve just signed?” I do think that if he loses in court, you might see the European Union move more slowly to implement some of its commitments under the trade deal while Trump figures out his next steps, but I don’t think you would see a lot of walking away.

One final point — I do think we would have seen a pretty different case yesterday if a much narrower set of tariffs had been on the table. If the tariffs had just been on India for its purchases of Russian oil — something we’ve long used IEEPA sanctions to deal with — I think you would have seen a very different tone yesterday. But the Justices are looking at a whole panoply of tariffs, and that framed the skepticism we heard yesterday in many ways that we wouldn’t have heard if Trump had, in fact, used this more judiciously.

The question I wanted to ask Oren, sort of looking forward, is about Congress. The small-c constitutionalist in me thinks if we are going to have a reform in U.S. trade policy as big as the one we are currently undertaking, that is fundamentally a congressional prerogative. For this sort of thing, you should go to Congress and get legislative change. I’m also a realist, having dealt with Congress for many years, and I know all the challenges of getting Congress to do anything. I am interested in hearing your thoughts: Do you think there would be a path now in Congress, or over the next year and a half, to getting Congress on board with major changes in U.S. trade policy, or do you think, practically speaking, we are just not there?

Oren Cass: I think there is definitely a path forward. I divide the tariff policy question into three camps — the global tariff question, the reciprocal tariffs and negotiations with allies, and then China.

All of the reciprocal stuff going on, trying to strike new deals — do you ultimately get a USMCA that needs to go to Congress? Maybe. I don’t know what it would look like to legislate that piece of it. That’s why I’m most sympathetic to figuring out how the president has the authority to conduct what feels more like foreign relations to me.

When it comes to the global tariff, when it comes to China, I think there’s a path to move in Congress, and I think it is what we need. If you’re going to have a stable new expectation domestically and globally of what U.S. trade policy is, there is some — not a lot — bipartisan support for some sort of global tariff. If you didn’t have the incredible polarization of Trump on top of things, you could certainly see a world where Democrats would be at least as enthusiastic as Republicans about doing something here.

When it comes to China, I think there is definitely support. The main move would be to repeal Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR). That is where you have very substantive and promising legislation with many co-sponsors. If you made a political push on that, it is hard to envision who exactly these days would be fighting to maintain PNTR with China.

I think those are the two places the administration should focus, and there is some potential that they could or would. Ultimately, it comes down to — can anything move through Congress? You have to be sympathetic to some extent to an administration saying, “Well, if we can’t even fund the government, it is hard to envision getting a big bipartisan win for the president on elements of the trade stuff.”

Fortress North America

Jordan Schneider: Oren, we talked earlier about how Australia should be the most excited about this ruling, not really China. You have this vision of a grand strategy of reciprocity. I’m curious — to what extent could a Supreme Court ruling back the president into the type of global trade relations that you’d actually be more excited about?

Oren Cass: I don’t know that a Supreme Court ruling could have that direct effect. I think in a world where you get the kind of ruling I think is most likely — one that signals to the administration, “You have a little more time here, but you do need a different plan” — that is probably the best prospect to then see a focus on moving in Congress, which I think would be useful.

But in terms of what the overall strategy is, that is where we’re still waiting and really need the clarity from the administration, mostly from Trump himself, on where this is all going. Is the goal to get a big deal with China, or is there a recognition that there isn’t really a deal to be had?

We are right at the point now where what a renegotiated USMCA is going to look like is very much in focus. I see that as the linchpin of whatever we are building. USMCA, as it is structured and agreed to, will be the template. The administration needs to articulate very clearly what we actually want from USMCA if we are going to not just demolish the old system (which I think needed demolishing) but actually be building something better.

Peter Harrell: I very much agree with you, Oren, that USMCA is the linchpin. We are right now getting comments due to USTR on what stakeholders want out of USMCA, and I think this is going to be the central issue. If the Trump administration is going to succeed over the next three years in building a new order, as opposed to just putting the final nails in the coffin of the old order, this is absolutely the linchpin.

There are a couple of reasons for that, not least that these are the trading relationships where we have by far the most leverage. We import 80% of Mexico’s exports. These are wildly asymmetric trading relationships in terms of our leverage. Putting aside all the strategic interests we have in North America, this is the opportunity we have from a tactical negotiating perspective to really negotiate something very new and very interesting. I certainly hope the Trump administration takes advantage of it.

I was actually quite interested two weeks ago when we got the first actual deal text of what some of USTR might be thinking from the Cambodia and Malaysia trade deals. There are actually a lot of interesting provisions in there to unpack. I give the administration quite a bit of credit for some of the details they put in those deals. But we can make those much more real and deeper in the USMCA context. That is where we can really start the process of building a new order.

Jordan Schneider: You want to highlight some of them, Peter?

Peter Harrell: Yes, we can start with the China-focused provisions of the Cambodia and Malaysia deals. A lot of this will, of course, need to be implemented, but let’s start with the promising parts.

You saw both Cambodia and Malaysia agree that if the U.S. raises a tariff or non-tariff barrier — for example, a restriction on Chinese telecommunications equipment — we can notify them, and they have committed to taking comparable action under their domestic law. If that is followed through, that is a huge win for the United States.

It was also interesting in Malaysia. One of the things the Trump administration and others worry about is what Chinese companies are doing in third countries — are they setting up factories in Malaysia and then dumping products into the U.S. market? Malaysia and Cambodia committed that if we raise concerns with them about the actions of Chinese companies in their markets that impact our market, those countries would take action. Both countries also committed to setting up an investment screening law. These are commitments we have to see implemented, but there were some very promising signs coming out of those deals.

Oren Cass: I want to jump in on the USMCA point quickly. I agree exactly with what Peter was saying about these other deals — both that they are very interesting, and that how robustly you can implement those sorts of commitments with Cambodia remains to be seen.

Those kinds of commitments in a USMCA, however, become a total sea change in the way trade policy is conducted globally. In my mind, what is so important about USMCA is, firstly — it’s where we have the most leverage. We should treat Mexico and Canada well, respectfully, and as equal partners, but they do not really have other options, creating a unique opportunity for the U.S. to define what it wants.

Then, because of the history going all the way back to NAFTA, there is a capacity to robustly implement and enforce commitments in a way that will become a proof of concept for this stuff actually happening beyond just being on paper.

Finally, if we successfully structure USMCA in a way we want, it then becomes a fallback for us relative to all other negotiations — what some folks in Washington are now calling Fortress North America.

If the U.S. were truly going it alone, you could have real concerns. But if the U.S. is going forward with USMCA, with the size of that full market, the security commitments, and the diversification that Mexico and Canada bring, the U.S. can credibly say, even to Japan or the EU, “Here are the USMCA-like terms. We would love to have you in our trading bloc. If you’re not up for that — if you are insisting on remaining open to China, if you’re not willing to commit to bringing greater balance to trade — then good luck to you, because we actually have something better than continuing to work with you in the way you have been working.” If we can get this right, the U.S. then has the foundation to build from an improvement on what the prior system has been and a credible fallback for any other negotiations taking place.

Jordan Schneider: Peter, how credible is “Fortress North America” — the trade side of the Monroe Doctrine?

Peter Harrell: I think this could be pretty credible, and I do think it creates, as Oren says, this potential gravitational pull that then gives us more leverage in our trade negotiations elsewhere. I think this is pretty credible. It will require complicated, tough negotiations, and it will require a disciplined and sustained focus on this issue over six or nine months, which has not always been the President’s strong suit. I know that his trade team — Ambassador Greer and Secretary Lutnick — see this. I am optimistic that we are going to see a very interesting deal come out of this. We are going to see a bit of an attractive fortress that other folks will start wanting to join, starting in the back end of next year.

Oren, I really enjoyed your recent piece in Foreign Affairs where you argue for a grand strategy of reciprocity. The way I read your piece, you are arguing there should be three core elements to a trading bloc — commitments to take care of our own security, commitments to balanced trade, and commitments to getting China out of our operating system. I wonder if you could unpack how you are thinking about this and how feasible you think it is as a strategy.

Oren Cass: I think it is certainly feasible, given the steps we are already taking in this direction. We are seeing in these negotiations with countries that should be U.S. Allies on all three fronts an acknowledgment that this makes sense.

It is a starting point for other countries to acknowledge that the U.S. has a legitimate concern about balanced trade. Frankly, these other countries do as well. The funny thing about Germany or Japan, which have been the flip side of a lot of these imbalances once you set China aside, is that their economies are suffering from it as well. It has been a problem for Germany and Japan to be suppressing domestic consumption and relying so much on exporting. There is a potentially mutual benefit in moving to a more balanced model.

Likewise, when you think about China, everybody enjoys the short-term sugar high of the cheap stuff from China, but everybody also recognizes the long-term danger. One of the really interesting effects of the way the U.S. has started to confront China is that it heightens that pressure on everybody else. People ask why the U.S. didn’t just get together with allies and agree to confront China together. The answer is because no one else would have been willing to do that. The Biden administration tried that for four years, and asking nicely just doesn’t get you anywhere.

Peter Harrell: Yes, we certainly talked about it.

Oren Cass: It is not a novel concept that Western democracies should confront China, and obviously, that would have been great. The reality is that for many of the same reasons the U.S. political system refused to address it for so long, other market democracies have had a real problem doing anything about it, and cajoling just did not get us where we needed to go.

Credit to Trump: when you actually say, “Fine, watch this,” not only do you prove you can do it, and obviously, this is not free — there are costs — but it has not destroyed the U.S. economy to have very high tariffs on China and to be starting to drive a real decoupling. All those surpluses then start to backwash instead into the EU, and the EU now faces a much sharper choice than they were before. At least they are really put to the choice now in a way that they were trying to avoid.

You see these model agreements, even with Cambodia or Malaysia. You have certainly seen Mexico take the need to confront China more directly very seriously. Canada is busy on its quasi-liberal fainting couch about all of this, but at some point, they will get serious as well. That side of it is painful and costly, but it is in the mutual interest of all of these countries.

The third piece, security, is the same story. Cajoling and saying, “Hey, guys, wouldn’t it be great if you actually took your own security seriously?” is not a novel concept. We tried that for a very long time, and it simply did not work. What you are now seeing within the Trump framework is much more serious commitments in Europe and Japan to actually taking responsibility for security in their regions. It is a realization that that is good for them. It is expensive, but it would be much better if Japan, Korea, and Australia could credibly deter China over Taiwan. Plus, if Taiwan actually spent on its own defense, instead of everyone looking over their shoulder, wondering if they’ve done enough homework. The same applies to the EU — if they want to deter Russia and be secure in Europe, the way to do that would be to deter Russia and be secure in Europe. By putting them to these choices, it is understandable why they are sulking and frustrated, but if you step back and look at it from a neutral perspective, it all actually makes a lot of sense.

Jordan Schneider: I did a show last night with Jake Sullivan, and “How hard could you have pushed the Allies?” was, not surprisingly, a theme. The one hypothetical he did deeply entertain was the one where you just do the Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR) on the semiconductor export equipment and say, “Sorry, Korea, sorry, Japan, sorry, Netherlands, we’re the hegemon. Deal with it.” I’m curious about your reflections on this. My hypothesis was that Biden went into office with the central thesis being, “We need to repair our alliances.” If that is your core principle, then doing the thing that Oren highlighted — the United States saying, “Do this and stop that,” but rarely saying “or else” — your “or else” credibility just isn’t really there.

Peter Harrell: President Biden was very alliance-focused. Going back to his days in the Senate and as Vice President, he truly believes, going back to his memories of the Cold War, in cooperative games rather than confrontational games. A clear directive from the President was that we should focus on working things out and use inducement-oriented cooperation on China, as opposed to a threat-heavy approach with our allies.

I do think one of the lessons of the Trump era that we should be taking seriously as a country is that sometimes you need to be prepared to deliver a firmer “or else” message. That is a really important takeaway.

I actually think there is another, deeper critique of the Biden administration’s trade policy — although it had a clearly thought-through geopolitical logic (“Let’s get our allies and partners on board”), I actually think the Biden administration did not have a clearly thought-through economic logic of what it wanted out of trade policy. It was too internally torn — are we now in an era where, from our own economic self-interest, we actually want higher tariffs because we are trying to onshore manufacturing to the United States? Or are we still in some version of a neoliberal world order, at least among allies and partners, where there are very low barriers?

What you saw was an effort at a trade policy purely through the lens of geopolitics and not through the lens of economics. I posit that that was never going to work. Trade policy has to be about your economic vision — what do you want economically as a country out of this, not just geopolitically. That was the more foundational challenge, though I agree that when it comes to China, there is a clear lesson — we should have been prepared to be a little bit more stick-heavy.

Chip Bargaining + Trump’s China Philosophy

Oren Cass: Peter, I totally agree with your characterization of the Biden administration on the economic side. It seems to me less that they were unclear than that it was a house divided against itself. Ambassador Tai had a very clear economic perspective, but Secretary Yellen probably had a very clear opposite economic perspective, and I’m not sure that was ever resolved.

The China question is really interesting, though, because I look at Jake Sullivan’s “small yard, high fence” formulation, the first half of which is “small yard.” It seems to me that even toward China, the view was that the relationship was going to be viewed solely through a geopolitical lens, and there was this very small set of national security concerns to be narrowed as far as possible to ensure that a hypothetical broader, constructive relationship could still flourish. I’m curious if you think that’s fair to say that’s where the administration was or how you think “small yard, high fence” translates as a China policy.

Peter Harrell: I have two responses to that. First, Oren, I agree. When I say that the Biden administration did not have a coherent economic theory of the case on what it wanted out of trade policy, I very much agree that that was probably the result of many diverse views in the administration that were never reconciled. It was a problem of getting to coherence among divergent views.

On the question about China, it is interesting because I think, on one hand, many of the senior officials in the Biden administration, including the President himself, bought into this conceptual frame of a small yard of restrictions with a high fence, where most trade and most relations would be allowed to continue. I do think the administration was both internally divided and never got to a coherent perspective on how wide that yard is.

I remember once I was in Europe, and a friend showed me a meme going around about Jake Sullivan’s speech. It was a photo of a European chateau surrounded by acres and acres of lawn, with meme language saying, “This is Jake Sullivan’s yard.” There were certainly views about how wide the yard was.

Jake, to his credit, actually did have a view that it should be narrow. I think other people thought it should be wider. This is one of the fundamental questions we as a country need to coherently resolve — do we think we should have a 20% decoupling with China? Should we have a 50% decoupling? Or do we have an 80% or 90% decoupling? We need to start with what we think the end state should be and then build from that.

I personally am in favor of a fairly broad decoupling. I don’t worry too much about furniture, shoes, and garments from a national security perspective, but I do think we should have a pretty broad decoupling from China because I think it is in our strategic interest to do so. I also think, over time, it might actually provide some strategic stability to the U.S.-China relationship to be more decoupled, because we wouldn’t have these ongoing blow-ups and concerns about rare earths and things like that. We could have a less economically dependent relationship where we could then talk about strategic issues and maintaining geopolitical stability. That is not the view in my party (Democratic) or certainly not in the Biden administration. I think there was not a view that we should be 60% decoupled — I think it was sincerely something much narrower.

Oren Cass: I appreciate you making that point about this actually being a potentially more stable relationship because I think that’s super important. The thing that drives me most nuts in these conversations is this finite, descriptive term — I won’t use “midwit,” but it’s appropriate — for the idea that, “Well, countries that trade with each other don’t go to war, and if we disrupt our trade relationship, doesn’t that ensure World War III?”

I honestly don’t know where this idea came from. We had two world wars break out among countries that were literally bordering each other and closely economically intertwined. Then we had a 50-year Cold War where we agreed to have two systems that were mostly separate, and that was a far more stable arrangement that allowed for much less hot conflict. I don’t understand why we think that trying to manage the integration of these two completely different economic and political systems, two countries that are adversaries, is somehow a more stable world than one where we actually do decouple and concede each other spheres of influence. That strikes me as a much more stable arrangement.

All that being said, you see in the Trump administration almost an inversion of what you were describing for the Biden administration, Peter. In this case, you have much more consensus on the economic picture, but much less clarity on the geopolitical side. A lot of that comes from President Trump himself, who has been too consistent on China. You go back 30 or 40 years ago, his attitude was, “We’re getting screwed, we need a better deal.” When he ran for president in 2015, “China’s screwing us, we need a better deal,” was the almost out-of-the-Overton-window hawkish position. Everyone got locked in their heads that Trump is the China hawk. They spent his first term trying to get a deal, and he got the Phase One deal, which did not resolve a lot of the fundamental issues.

Since 2015, broader economic and political views in Washington have shifted so far that “We just need to get a better deal with China” is now the sort of dovish position, almost outside the window to the other side. As far as I can tell, that’s still exactly where he is. Trump still thinks we are getting screwed by China and need to get a better deal. You see him very focused on this idea of how to get a deal with China, which makes him the ultimate China dove within the Trump administration.

There is a very clear focus economically on this idea of reindustrialization, reshoring, and balanced trade that is consistently held and articulated by Trump, by Vance, by Bessent, by Lutnick, by Greer. That is terrific. On the question of what the actual goal or end-state status quo with China should be, I don’t think we are hearing as much clarity as we need to see.

Peter Harrell: That’s a really interesting point. It does look to me like former President Biden and a bunch of his senior staff saw China as a geopolitical threat — lots of focus on Taiwan, lots of focus on the military strategic issues. Economics were important but were probably less important overall than the strategic issues.

I look at Trump, and to your point, it is very interesting — it is not at all clear to me he sees China as a strategic threat or a military enemy. He clearly sees them as a trading threat and as a country that has been ripping us off for years. But he also thinks everyone else has been ripping us off for years. It looks like he may think, “If I can resolve the trade issues with China, I’m not as worried about these strategic issues.”

Oren Cass: The two best proof points of this are,

1. He is still very interested in Foreign Direct Investment from China. You have seen him out on the campaign stump saying, “Maybe we should get BYD to come build factories in the United States.” If this is just about the economics and there is no geopolitical or strategic concern, then yes, we like that Toyota is here, so we should get BYD here.

2. The other place you see this is on the advanced AI chips. There are people trying to do this “galaxy brain” argument where, “If we can get China hooked on the Nvidia chips, this will ensure that China adopts an American AI stack.” This sounds like things people were saying about moving production to China in 1999. The actual motivation seems to be, “The goal was to sell more stuff to China. One of the things we are really good at making is advanced AI chips, so we should sell them to China.”

That is wrong, but I have more respect for it because if you only care about the economic side and you do not think about the geopolitical side at all, then it kind of makes sense. On both these issues, you see very clear, ongoing, robust debate within the Trump administration. This debate is not from a bunch of people who are unsure, but from different people with very concrete perspectives. In a sense, Trump himself is the outlier on some of this at this point.

Jordan Schneider: The weird thing is that in the Biden administration, when there were disagreements, you just kind of didn’t really have any action or decisions. In Trump world, when there are disagreements, we just change our minds three times.

Oren Cass: You get them all at the same time. Exactly.

Peter Harrell: Yes, indeed. I’m curious about the chips issue, Oren, because you have obviously been writing quite a bit about this lately. From where I sit, having seen that Trump got through his meeting with Xi without seeming to put the high-end Nvidia chips on the table, I viewed that as a very important development for U.S. national security. Credit to the team around Trump and to Trump for seeing that we should not be putting our highest-end capabilities in the hands of the Chinese, given the intense competition and where we are in the state of the race. I am curious if you think this is going to stick. There is a piece of me that’s a little worried: It was great in Asia that you didn’t do that, but are we going to see Jensen in the Oval Office in another three weeks and some revisiting? How do you think we can make sure this sticks going forward?

Oren Cass: You described the dynamic exactly right, Peter, which is that there’s a live-to-fight-another-day element here. I don’t think this reflects a resolved, finalized, “not selling chips to China” policy. But look, at the battle-by-battle level, there was a meeting where that could have gone either way, and it went the right way, and that’s great. That’s certainly better than the alternative.

More broadly, this is ultimately best understood as one dimension of the larger China discussion. That’s part of the reason I’ve become so interested in it — we’ve been doing a lot of work on it at American Compass — it is very much the tip of the spear litmus test for how you think about China because it is so clear and discreet.

To your point, yes, there’s this much broader discussion — what exactly does decoupling mean? What share of trade are we talking about? How much is it trade versus investment? What does it mean for allies? All of that is super important, but it doesn’t lend itself as nicely to a clear pro/con debate in a lot of cases. It’s really important to have clear, distinct questions that you can anchor on, which make people put their underlying assumptions on the table and say, “Look, if you believe X, you come out this way on the question. If you believe Y, you come out this other way.” That’s where something like, “Does it make sense to sell advanced chips to China?” or “Does it make sense to have BYD investing in the U.S.?” are such useful places to focus the policy discussion.

On the chip debate, I think it’s very much moving in the right direction. It’s notably a place where you’re seeing Congress be somewhat active even in the face of the Trump administration. The GAIN AI Act, which is frankly a very narrow policy — all it says is you can’t sell advanced chips to China where there is literally an American company saying, “No, please let us buy the chip instead” — even that the Trump administration initially signaled its opposition to. That did not stop Republican senators, Senator Banks, and Senator Cotton, the co-sponsors, from saying, “Sorry, we think this is important.” It’s in the Senate version of the NDAA.

That is one very important political dimension to it. Another is looking at where the tech sector is aligning around this stuff. We all know Jensen at this point, and it is genuinely bizarre to me how far out he and Nvidia have gone in ways that have just ruined for a generation their credibility as at all interested in either good-faith political engagement or the American national interest. If I were a long-term shareholder, I would be very upset that that’s the way that they’ve gone.

Jensen is trying to talk his book on selling into China even as he increasingly goes into arguments that, to try to make his case, he now has to be out there saying he actually doesn’t even think it matters who wins on AI, or he thinks China’s going to win on AI, or he thinks China wants to be a market country where American companies succeed. The arguments just get increasingly ludicrous in a way that makes it harder and harder for the administration to say they’re siding there. You’re seeing the rest of the tech sector get pretty fed up with it too. It was really notable — you had Palantir’s chief technology officer write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal essentially calling Jensen Huang a useful idiot.

Jordan Schneider: In the Wall Street Journal, and then the next week signing a deal with them.

Oren Cass: Right, so this is then another really good example. Palantir signs a deal with Nvidia, and the way they celebrate it is to say, “We’re so proud to be working with Nvidia because Nvidia’s technology is so key to U.S. leadership in the geopolitical competition with China and re-industrialization.” It’s such an incredible passive-aggressive move.

Obviously, everybody is scared of Nvidia because they want Nvidia chips. You even had Microsoft come out publicly and say they supported the GAIN AI Act. I think everything has been moving in a good direction on this. We are winning in the present tense, the fight. But as Peter noted, and I would acknowledge, you are always one Oval Office meeting and tweet away from heading the other direction. So frankly, this is another argument for Congress to be involved, as we were talking about back in the broader trade context. The question of our export control policy toward China ultimately should be legislated, permanent, and stable. It is an issue where there is bipartisan agreement, where this is Congress’s role, and I think they should make a law.

Jordan Schneider: Two things. First, listeners of the show will have heard many guests who are in favor of strong export controls to China. What is remarkable to me is how hard it has been to find someone to talk the other side of this who isn’t directly financially compensated by firms that would make money if export controls were lifted. It’s not for lack of trying for me to get another side of the debate, but if you’re out there and you’re sharp on this stuff and you want to make the case, send me an email.

Peter Harrell: Jensen should come on the podcast.

Oren Cass: Jensen is eager to say foolish things on every podcast. I’m surprised he hasn’t called.

Jordan Schneider: I’ve sent the email.

On the second point, say you actually have legislation — does that change the sort of escalation/dominance dynamics around this stuff? If China is trying to undo something, then they can threaten X, and then Trump will have to tell his Commerce Secretary, “Don’t do Y.” But if it comes out of a bill, then it’s less easy to negotiate about. Then, trying to threaten the Senate Commerce Committee gets them even more angry and they say, “Go screw yourself.” I’m curious how you think this escalation stuff would play out if it was really Congress that took the front role here.

Oren Cass: Peter, I’m curious what you think about those dynamics generally these days.

Peter Harrell: Let me offer a couple of thoughts, first on the export controls front because we’re talking GAIN AI, and then maybe coming back to the trade front.

The way I see it, for national security reasons, we should not be in the business of offering our most advanced chips to China. I don’t think this is something we should be negotiating over as part of our trade deals. There are plenty of other things we can negotiate with China. The idea that Congress would take this particular issue off the negotiating table, I see that as being in the U.S. interest rather than against us. From a negotiating perspective, it cuts both ways. The administration can’t offer it, but again, I don’t think they should be in the business of offering it. The flip side is they can just tell the Chinese, “I wish we could talk about this issue, but I can’t. We’re going to have to work something else out.” It changes that negotiating dynamic, but it doesn’t necessarily make it an unfavorable negotiating dynamic.

On the trade front, and this was a little bit lost in the debate yesterday back to the Supreme Court case, I actually think from a negotiating escalation/dominance perspective, there is more flexibility in the other trade statutes than they get credit for. I look at Trump’s first-term trade actions on China, and he used Section 301 pretty effectively to counter-escalate when China escalated on the U.S. That use of Section 301 to counter-escalate was upheld through the intermediate appellate courts when that got litigated. So I actually think that these other tools, once an administration does its homework — certainly for more competitive and adversarial countries like China — to build the regulatory basis for these tariffs, I think they would still find these tools to be reasonably effective.

From a negotiating leverage perspective, it is certainly true that Trump couldn’t use a Section 301 to threaten 10% tariffs because he is angry about a TV ad. But, on the other hand, he shouldn’t be doing that anyway.

Oren Cass: The point about it being good to take things off the table when we don’t want them on the table is exactly right.

The one other thing I would just add about the escalation/dominance discourse is that there’s almost a “tell” in the phrase escalation dominance. It sounds super exciting and cool, and it’s what all the people who in the past would have been planning various wars are now really excited to game out. It’s not clear to me that either side here wants to do any of that. It’s a little bit like mutually assured destruction, where I think both sides accept that they can cause massive pain to the other side. Who can shoot the most nuclear weapons at the other side is at some point not an especially important determinant.

Especially because in this case, I think we’re actually moving toward a situation, you can call it a détente, but a situation where both sides actually do kind of want to decouple. If you believe the U.S. wants to decouple, then you have that side. President Xi’s policy for a long time now has been to essentially develop total self-sufficiency, to not be dependent on anybody, certainly not the United States, for anything. While China certainly enjoys being able to sell lots of stuff to the U.S., one thing we’re seeing is that insofar as China’s commitment is simply to grow manufacturing and export, they have other places they can do that. Longer run, they are much like Germany and Japan — they are going to have to address their domestic imbalances and domestic consumption.

It seems to me that both sides kind of want to be at a 40% or 50% tariff with a slow but steady and not too disruptive decoupling. The rest thus far has proven to be, and I think rationally should be understood as, a lot of theater.

Jordan Schneider: I don’t think that’s the right way to characterize the Chinese view. There are many Xi speeches about how he wants to get the world more dependent on China and have leverage. Decoupling to the tune of 20% where we are now to 50%, or 80% over the next five to 10 years is going to be uneconomical and cost billions of dollars on either side. How much near-term GDP growth are we willing to put on the table in order to have China have less leverage? Is the way you’re characterizing this, Oren, that it’s okay for the U.S. to have these economic nukes pointed at us, because I don’t know how you follow a lot of the reciprocity stuff that you were pushing without facing down the enemy getting a vote here?

Oren Cass: No, I don’t think so at all. Maybe I was a little bit unclear in what I was saying. A huge part of the decoupling is that you, in effect, disarm those nukes over time. Where you’re seeing the U.S. focus first is on, alongside the sort of just general shifting of supply chains, things like semiconductors, things like rare earths that are the immediate concerns. The point in my mind is that I don’t think the U.S. necessarily wants to or expects to preserve some sort of weapon pointed at China in this respect.

I agree with your point that obviously China would love to have leverage over countries, would love to have the U.S. dependent on it for some of these things. At the end of the day, though, that sort of isn’t up to China. China got to do that as long as everybody else was being really stupid. But if the U.S. actually takes seriously the need to rebuild a rare earths capacity, China can’t stop it from doing that. What would that even look like? It would be China saying, “We’re going to fire the gun now essentially and try to stop you from developing a rare earth’s capacity by threatening that if you try, we’re going to cut off rare earths now.” Yes, they could cause a lot of pain doing that. But as we’ve already seen over the last six months, even loading the gun just leads to more rapid commitment to building up the alternative capacity. And in firing the gun, the U.S. has a lot of guns it can fire back.

If you actually game it out, I just don’t see an end state. From either the U.S. or the China policy planning perspective, I don’t see how you could be expecting to plan for a world where you’re maintaining that kind of leverage long term. If you accept you’re not going to have it, then the question is, what’s the path from here to there? Is it worth blowing up a bunch of stuff on both sides in the meantime, or would you rather minimize the cost to your own side? I think both sides are rationally trying to do it in a way that minimizes the cost to their own side.

Peter Harrell: Jordan, my view is much less informed about Xi’s thinking than yours is, and I’m very well aware of that. It does seem to me that while Xi probably does want to keep the world broadly hooked on certain Chinese choke points, he has to be clear-eyed that if the U.S. continues to stay organized the way we have been over the last couple of years, and particularly frankly, on rare earths this year as the Trump administration has gotten very serious about it, he is going to lose that leverage at least vis-à-vis the U.S. Maybe the Europeans won’t get organized. He might be able to keep that leverage over other partners. I hope not, but he might. It just strikes me as a solvable problem from our perspective, and he strikes me as not stupid, so he has to be able to see that coming.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting what’s solvable and what’s not solvable. Is the world going to recreate the solar manufacturing ecosystem on the scale that China has, or the EV manufacturing ecosystem on the scale that China has? Perhaps. But rare earth seems like a much more manageable thing. We’ll see.

Supreme Court Improv

Peter Harrell: I listened to two and a half hours of the Supreme Court argument. I think this is the first one I’ve heard in maybe 10 years, and I just have some anthropological observations I’d be curious about both of your thoughts on. First off, it was refreshing to hear political discourse that is sharp and grounded, and they’re talking about facts. Second, I have this new hobby of listening to podcasts where these Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox rabbis give their interpretations about the week’s parsha, and every eighth word is in Yiddish or Hebrew. Also, when I listen to Chinese podcasts, I understand about 85% of it. That was kind of what I felt here, where they’re just jumping around between all these cases, and you can kind of get the gist, but there is this level of arcana that is pretty impenetrable.

It did feel odd that we’re referencing people from 250 years ago, like they really matter today. There are not many other venues in society where we’re going back. It is kind of rabbinical, right, where you care about Rashi or Rambam the same way you care about Jefferson or Madison and how they thought about tariffs in 1802, or what have you.

The last thing — those poor solicitors, man, this is really stressful. They just get interrupted all the time, and they’ve got to think quickly on their feet. There was one moment in there where some judge said, “This point doesn’t make sense anymore.” After four back and forths, the government lawyer said, “Yeah, I guess so. Okay, let’s just move on.” That must be a lot. It’s very much like theater, like improv. You’ve got to know your stuff incredibly well.

Peter Harrell: Hopefully, you want to watch some more, right? Is this your future entertainment here? Instead of podcasts, you can listen to Supreme Court oral arguments.

I have a couple of reactions to that, Jordan. First of all, I agree with you. It is refreshing to hear a lively debate where you have people who clearly have an open mind and are grappling with multiple sides of an issue. I actually think this is what we want our court system to be doing. It did not strike me as particularly partisan. That’s not to say you couldn’t see Justices’ views coming into the courtroom — of course, you could. But you saw Justices grappling in a serious way with the complicated issues in front of them.

I agree it’s got to be hard for the lawyers arguing these cases. They were all, I’m sure, mooted many, many times. I’m sure they did lots of rehearsals for this. This is not something you wing it going into, but you certainly do have to think on your feet.

History — that is kind of the way our law works. You’re trying to build off of precedent. You’re trying to think about what the precedents are. You’re trying to relate the precedents to the facts in front of you. On the thing that came up that is most historical in that case—and here I’ll go a little weedy—the challenge the government has in this case is that, as you heard the Solicitor General concede, there is no other part of American law where the phrase “regulate... importation” includes the power to tariff. There’s no other phrase in American law where “regulate” by itself includes the power to tariff. The government’s argument, and it’s certainly true, is that back in the 1790s to 1820s, everyone understood “importation” as including a power to tariff. They kind of have to rely on this early historical understanding of that phrase because of the absence of more contemporaneous precedents in support of their position.

Jordan Schneider: One more question for both of you guys. Do the arguments actually matter? There are hundreds of pages written on all of this. Is the quick quip you have in response, which was only going to be about 150 words anyway, actually going to persuade a judge one way or another?

Oren Cass: I agree that that oral argument seems majestic and open-minded and the kind of deliberation we want. If this case were being heard two years ago about a Biden administration use of IEEPA to try to force a global climate agreement, do you think those nine judges would have simply been asking exactly the reverse set of questions in preparation for voting exactly the opposite way, or do you think this is how the conversation would have gone?

Peter Harrell: You would have seen a different lens. I think you would have seen a shift in the window of the debate there for sure. I actually don’t think you would have seen a radical 180, though. I think you probably would have seen the Chief Justice, Justice Roberts, and Amy Coney Barrett being a little bit more skeptical, but they had some skepticism yesterday. I think you would have seen Kagan and Justice Jackson more sympathetic to the government. But I think you would have seen them worrying about some of the presidential concerns that we saw Justice Gorsuch asking about yesterday.

And how this might play out over time. I do think it would have been a shift, but I don’t think it would have been a 180.

To your question, Jordan, about whether the oral argument does matter — I think probably in many cases it doesn’t matter. As you say, there are literally thousands of pages with all the amicus briefings and everything else in front of the court. But I do think there may be a couple of moments that I could see mattering yesterday.

For example, the strongest intuitive argument that the government has going for it — not really legal, we can talk about the legal — the strongest intuitive argument that the government has going for it is that if IEEPA would let President Trump embargo the world (and IEEPA does form the basis of embargoes on Russia and embargoes on Iran), if IEEPA would let us embargo the world, why does it not allow a tariff as a lesser measure? If it would allow an embargo, why doesn’t it allow a tariff? You could see a couple of the Justices really trying to grapple with that sort of intuitively very appealing argument.

What you heard the Oregon lawyer say, which got a laugh in the courtroom, was, “Well, it’s not that the tariff is a donut hole — it’s that it’s a different kind of pastry.” I think that is the kind of thing that will matter. If the Justices are not going to read a tariff authority into IEEPA, they will have to be persuaded that the tariff is just different from these other kinds of powers that are in IEEPA. I don’t know where that will come down, but that debate strikes me as something that you could actually see the Justices grappling with. A couple of them seemed open on the question, so maybe it will matter.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, PolyMarket had it from 40% down to 20%.

Oren Cass: Wait, in which direction? What’s the contract for?

Jordan Schneider: There were two. I cannot believe PolyMarket hasn’t started sponsoring ChinaTalk yet I’m starting to get a little offended! The market was “Will the Supreme Court rule in favor of Trump’s tariffs?” It was at 40% when the debate started and is now sitting at 25%. Then there’s another market — “Will the court force Trump to refund the tariffs?” which started at about 8% and is now up to 16%.

Much of the coverage we do at ChinaTalk relies on WeChat, the Tencent super-app where most Chinese people send messages, consume content, and share updates with friends and family. WeChat is a huge information ecosystem and an arguably essential resource for following the latest news in China’s AI landscape.

Where should you go on WeChat (and on the broader Chinese internet) to learn about what’s happening in AI? The ChinaTalk Cinematic Universe brings you a comprehensive guide to following AI on WeChat, featuring:

• How to make your WeChat work like Substack;

• Various types of AI media outlets;

• And how to read beyond WeChat.

We’re also looking to run a weekly roundup of the most interesting Chinese developments around AI in the newsletter. If interested, submit a sample here. We pay!

How WeChat Works

Specifically relevant for our purposes is the “Official Accounts” tab. It’s a little like a Substack ecosystem inside WeChat: anyone can open an Official Account on WeChat and publish articles to their subscribers’ feeds — and reading and sharing Official Account articles is a daily occurrence for WeChat users. Government organs, public service authorities, news media (both state-run and independent), and corporations alike use Official Accounts to communicate with citizens.

Subscribing to relevant Official Accounts is the most streamlined way to read Chinese tech news directly from the source. WeChat makes it very easy for non-Chinese speakers to navigate by putting a “Translate Full Text” option at the top of every article, although the quality of translation remains mediocre relative to what ChatGPT can deliver.

Our Favorites

For headlines:

新智元 AI Era

Founded in 2015 by Yang Jing 杨静, then a researcher at the Ministry of Civil Affairs-affiliated Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI Era is one of the earliest and most successful media-entrepreneurship ventures to focus on AI in China. AI Era hosted the inaugural World AI Conference (WAIC) back in 2016. Its feed is a blend of repackaged stories from Western tech media, accessible explanations of new ML/AI research, and content for aficionados. While AI Era doesn’t produce a lot of original reporting, it is a solid one-stop shop for keeping up with the Chinese AI Joneses.

Where to start:

• The AI Era team tests GPT-5-Codex;

• A breakdown of the DeepSeek-R1 Nature paper.

量子位 QbitAI

QbitAI is an AI-focused media startup whose Official Account similarly reaches many in China’s AI community. Its coverage is relatively accessible and includes popular trends.

Where to start:

• How vibe-coding is changing Haidian 海淀, the Silicon Valley of Beijing;

• The AI technology stack behind Xiaohongshu/Rednote, China’s trendiest social app.

机器之心 Synced

Founded in 2015, Synced is a leading source of information on emerging tech in China. They cover machine learning research much more closely than more generalist tech publications, and they host their own directory of models.

Where to start:

• Amazon Bedrock now supports Qwen3 and DeepSeek-V3.1;

• Launch of Tongyi DeepResearch Agent.

机器人大讲堂 RoboSpeak (suggested by Zilan Qian)

RoboSpeak is a joint media venture between Zhongguancun Rongzhi Specialized Robotics Alliance (ZSRA), a Beijing-based robotics industry organization, and the startup incubator TusStar, earning financial support from a variety of public and private partners. Its work lies between journalism and think-tank research, and is well-known in the Chinese robotics community.

Where to start:

• An interview with Professor Wang Hesheng 王贺升 of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, who will serve as general chair of the 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Hangzhou;

• Observations from the 2025 China International Industry Fair.

For business-savvy reportage:

36氪 36Kr

36Kr calls itself a platform for “participants of China’s new economy.” It’s a business media outlet with a heavy dose of tech reporting — the TechCrunch of China, if you will — and consequently produces some of the best original Chinese-language reporting on technology as a business. Their deep understanding of the relationships between technology, Chinese society, and the economy makes reading their work particularly informative for analysts.

Where to start:

• Graphing vertically integrated supply chains to understand the success of Chinese hardware startups;

• How entrepreneur Wang Laichun 王来春, whose company Luxshare will build OpenAI’s first consumer device, went from Foxconn factory girl to “the richest Teochew businesswoman”.

• A highly abridged translation of ’s article she wrote for us on ‘Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends’ article! See below for her commentary on what they took out.

  • Thanks to 36kr’s translation, my relatives in China can finally read my work—and thanks to its selective censorship, they don’t have to worry about me running into political trouble! Here are the things that the translation removed, which I guess partly because it is politically sensitive and partly because the translator thought my article was too long:

    • The Regulatory Comparison: The original introductory analysis comparing U.S. regulatory concerns (FTC inquiry on child use) with Chinese concerns (AI Safety Framework 2.0 on social order and childbirth) was entirely removed. This seemed an editorial choice, as the translators began the translation with their own introduction of my article.

    • The Core Political Analysis: The entire section linking the Chinese government’s motivation for regulating AI boyfriends to the demographic crisis, low birth rates, and the government’s historical use of the “leftover women” label was omitted. I still credit them for mentioning the stigma of “leftover women,” even though they erased who created it.

    • The Geopolitical Risk: The discussion detailing the rise and disappearance of the Chinese app Talkie from the U.S. App Store—and its analysis as a potential “more powerful TikTok” national security threat due to intimate persuasion and data risks—was also removed.

    • Sexual Content Details: The detailed explanation of monetizing sexuality via “freemium” models, including specific mentions of “unblurred explicit images” and ‘NSFW’ features, was heavily condensed. Only the thesis statement “both models seek to capitalize on sexuality to attract and retain users” remained.

    • Finally, the translator replaced “inside the Great Firewall” (防火墙) with “inside the Great Wall” (长城) when the article shifted to describe the AI companion market in China, suggesting an artistry in how some master the subtleties of translation under censorship.

钛媒体 TMTPost

Another tech-focussed media outlet with a solid journalistic track record, the “TMT” in TMTPost stands for technology, media, and telecommunications. Its coverage of entrepreneurs and Big Tech firms in China is particularly strong. We previously translated TMTPost’s 2024 interview with Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing 王兴兴.

Where to start:

• A conversation with Xu Zhijun 徐直军, a rotating chairman at Huawei, about AI compute;

• What’s happening with AI in Hong Kong.

For human-centered stories:

AI故事计划 AIstory

AIstory is a new media brand under Beijing Zhen’gu Media Group (北京真故传媒有限公司), best known for the nonfiction publishing platform TrumanStory 真实故事计划 . The company was founded by Lei Lei 雷磊, a former Southern Weekly and GQ reporter in China, and has excelled at long-form, human-centered reporting despite China’s brutal journalistic landscape. AIstory focuses on humanizing the impact of AI on Chinese society and unearths particularly unique angles beyond labs, policymakers, or investors.

Where to start:

• Manus’ sudden move to Singapore, as told by an intern;

• How fangirls are leading the charge to resist AI-generated media content in China;

• Why DeepSeek created even more busywork for Chinese low-level bureaucrats.

硅星人Pro

By Afra:

A Chinese-language WeChat publication at the intersection of AI, technology, and culture. Its core reporting covers the fast-moving world of large models—DeepSeek, R1, and every new version that emerges—alongside architecture strategies, compute efficiency, cost dynamics, and the competitive landscape shaping the global AI race.

But 硅星人Pro’s regular features dive into tech culture and labor issues, exploring how AI and automation collide with the realities of work, inequality, and the everyday life of engineers, gig workers, and startup employees.

Sometimes you find sarcastic, sometimes salty voice. Readers can expect sharp takes on the AI bubble, founder dramas, job replacement anxieties, ageism in the tech industry, and the broader involution of both Silicon Valley and China’s own innovation scene.

GeekPark (极客公园)

By Afra:

GeekPark (极客公园) is one of the few Chinese tech media outlets that consistently produces in-depth, long-form original reporting on China’s technology industry.

Among domestic outlets, it’s often seen as the closest equivalent to Western tech media: blending narrative reporting, analysis, and insider access in a way that feels more like The Verge and Wired than a typical WeChat information feed.

For wonky analysis (suggested by Bitwise):

中国信息通信研究院 China Academy of Information and Communications Technology

CAICT is a research institute directly under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, specializing in research on the digital economy and technology policy. Their Official Account publishes helpful executive summaries of their reports and official readouts from various Chinese conferences related to AI. Its feed is certainly less exciting than many of the other Official Accounts mentioned above, but it is a very helpful resource to understand where technocrats in Beijing are placing their attention.

Where to start:

• Ten keywords for the AI industry in 2025;

• A list of example cases for digitalizing the manufacturing industry in China.

阿里研究院 Alibaba Research Institute

Alibaba’s in-house industry research think tank produces many interesting reports about AI applications, safety, and governance. You should take their findings with a grain of salt on account of their corporate ownership, but their work is nevertheless interesting.

Where to start:

• Official transcript of CEO Eddie Wu’s September 2025 speech on the path to AGI;

• Analyzing business models for incorporating AI into consumer products in China.

腾讯研究院 Tencent Research Institute

In contrast to the ARI above, Tencent’s in-house think tank works more broadly across social science and humanistic topics. Their work, influenced by the thorough penetration of Chinese citizens’ private lives by Tencent products, has a stronger focus on how AI is shaping Chinese society.

Where to start:

• Annual survey on the Chinese public’s views on generative AI;

• TRI series on AI and education.

Influencers:

By :

Cyber Zen Heart (赛博禅心)

Cyber Zen Heart (赛博禅心) is one of the growing AI influencers on WeChat. He updates at breakneck speed, often catching the pulse of a new model, tool, or meme before the mainstream discourse picks it up. Beyond commentary, he has quietly shaped the scene: helping many early AI consumer apps think through their go-to-market strategy, coaching founders on how to generate buzz, and amplifying their launches to wider audiences.

The account is run by the owner, nicknamed”Big Smart”, of Beijing Haidian’s AGI Bar, a late-night hangout where AI founders, hackers, and artists cross paths. His posts swing between news update, “omg this is awesome”-bait articles, and deliberately confusing memes—half koan, half hype cycle. That mix makes him feel like “China’s Lenny” (as in Lenny Rachitsky): a guide and amplifier for a new generation of builders. I wrote about my experience in the AGI bar here.

半导体行业观察

半导体行业观察 is one of China’s most dedicated WeChat publications tracking the chip world. It dives deep into the nitty-gritty technical details of semiconductor design, fabrication, and packaging—so deep that, to a casual reader, it can sometimes feel painfully dry and even boring for someone like me. Where the account shines is in its close tracking of China’s domestic chip research and development. Like many chip-focused outlets, the tone occasionally reflects the geopolitical tensions surrounding semiconductors.

LatePost 晚点

LatePost (晚点) is often described as “China’s version of The Information”: known for high-quality, deeply sourced reporting on business and technology. Its editorial strength lies in exclusive founder interviews, inside scoops, and longform articles that cut through hype to reveal how China’s leading companies. The LatePost podcast—published under the same name—has become a must-listen for anyone trying to understand China’s AI ecosystem.

Luo Yonghao’s Crossing Road 罗永浩的十字路口

Luo Yonghao’s Crossing Road 罗永浩的十字路口 is a new longform podcast hosted by Luo Yonghao—once a smartphone entrepreneur, now one of China’s most recognizable internet personalities. Think of him as a mix between Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman in a Chinese context: curious, blunt, and willing to let conversations stretch out for hours

Each episode runs about 3 hours, giving founders, cultural figures, and celebrities the space to share deeply personal stories and unfiltered thoughts. Among the standout episodes is Luo’s marathon conversation with He Xiaopeng, founder of XPeng Motors—widely regarded as a must-listen for anyone who wants to understand the ambitions, struggles, and psychology behind China’s EV wave.

Beyond WeChat

The downside to WeChat’s Official Account ecosystem is that its comment function is often restricted, and it can be hard to go beyond the article if you are looking for more context. Other parts of the Chinese internet can offer more community-based insights on technology and provide direct access to insiders’ views.

CSDN

CSDN, China’s first open-source community, is a web forum for developers that dates back to 1999. Discussions on there feel like a mix of Stack Overflow and Hacker News, and contain many useful technical resources. ChinaUnix is another similar forum.

Zhihu

Imagine if Quora still had loyal users — that’s basically Zhihu. Though it has deteriorated from its heyday as a bastion of liberal debate on the Chinese internet in the 2010s, Zhihu remains a platform where scholars, thinkers, and technologists are quite active. Our story on Kimi relied heavily on Moonshot AI engineers’ commentary on Zhihu, and so did this guest post by Mary Clare McMahon on Huawei’s attempts at bypassing Nvidia CUDA.

Xiaohongshu…?

Yes, that Xiaohongshu/Rednote. If you know what you’re doing, it can be a uniquely valuable resource. Xiaohongshu has an especially strong network effect for academic and tech-focused communities. Searching for ML/AI-related keywords on Xiaohongshu eventually leads you to professors, entrepreneurs, and investors influential in the space, as well as many, many anonymous insiders posting offhand observations and rumours in comment sections. It’s arguably the closest thing to getting those elusive-but-unreliable “vibes on the ground.”

Between language barriers and the Great Firewall, it can seem difficult to get reliable information about the world of technology in China. We hope that by highlighting these great Chinese-language resources, we can encourage more people to conduct their own open-source research and enrich debates in the English-speaking world.

Have other Official Account recommendations? Reply to this email or drop your suggestion in the comments!

We’re also looking to run a weekly roundup of the most interesting Chinese writing on AI in the newsletter. If you’re interested, submit a sample here. We pay!

Why do leaders with vast expert bureaucracies at their fingertips make devastating foreign policy decisions? Tyler Jost, professor at Brown, joins ChinaTalk to discuss his first book, Bureaucracies at War, a fascinating analysis of miscalculation in international conflicts.

As we travel from Mao’s role in border conflicts, to Deng’s blunder in Vietnam, to LBJ’s own Vietnam error, a tragic pattern emerges — leaders gradually isolating themselves from their own information gathering systems with catastrophic consequences.

Today our conversation covers…

• How Mao’s early success undermined his long-term decision-making,

• The role of succession pressures in both Deng’s and LBJ’s actions in Vietnam,

• The bureaucratic mechanisms that lead to echo chambers, and how China’s siloed institutions affect Xi’s governance,

• The lingering question of succession in China,

• What we can learn from the institutional failures behind Vietnam and Iraq.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Mao, Hitler, and “Hot Hand” Leadership

Jordan Schneider: Let’s kick it off with Mao Zedong. You start the clock after independence. I’m curious, when you think about leaders like Mao who followed their instincts to achieve a remarkable place in world history — Mao bet on himself again and again and won. When Stalin pressured him to make a deal with the Nationalists, Mao said, “No, we’re going to fight and we’re going to win in the end.” Then the Japanese invaded and shifted the balance of power, and in the end, history worked in Mao’s favor.

Most leaders experience a series of successes and luck over the decades it takes them to reach power, which can build psychological confidence in their own instincts. As we think about the interaction between bureaucracies and leaders — when leaders trust their gut over other advice — how does that confidence in their instincts shape their later decision-making? When their instincts conflict with expert advice, do they trust themselves over the system?

Tyler Jost: That’s a great question. You could probably break it down into three categories of explanation.

First, some psychologists think human beings are hardwired to be overconfident. There’s a baseline tendency across the human population that when presented with gambles, people make riskier choices than they probably should, given a dispassionate look at the data.

Second, there’s a category which I think Mao probably fits into — certain personalities tend to be more risk-accepting than others. This could be because some people are comfortable with risks and taking gambles. It could also be because the way we perceive risk can vary among people. Some people might perceive the gamble of war as less risky than others. Mao probably falls into that category.

The third category has to do with the political phenomenon you’re talking about. In foreign policy decision-making, we often study the decisions of presidents, prime ministers, and dictators — leaders who have climbed up the political ladder. They’re already in office. That could trigger a “hot hands” phenomenon — “Look, I was able to get here, this must mean my views are good, and as such, I should trust those instincts as opposed to the data around me.”

Jordan Schneider: I’ve been going back to Ian Kershaw’s histories of Hitler. There are just so many calls in the 1930s where Hitler’s gut was right and the Allies folded. Invading Poland kind of worked out, and invading France went better than anyone could have imagined. There was a point when Hitler’s generals were about to kill him because they thought the calls he made in the late 1930s were too risky.

Then he made some epochal blunders — declaring war on the US, invading the Soviet Union — it’s understandable that someone who went from jail for a failed coup to nearly dominating Europe 20 years later could become overconfident and make terrible calls.

Tyler Jost: This is a book about miscalculation. Both historians and political scientists often try to evaluate individual decisions based on outcomes — if things turned out well, it must not have been a miscalculation, whereas if things didn’t, it must have been. That’s actually a problematic approach to history.

You can make a decision that ends up working out even though it was based on horribly inaccurate views of the world, and vice versa. If we really want to study the quality of decision-making, we have to start with temporal analysis. We have to look over time rather than examining any single decision.

If you had a 5% chance of things going your way according to the data, then that’s still a 5% chance. But if you keep making that bet over and over again, eventually it will catch up with you. For methodology— and this applies equally when doing historical analysis — you want to take a bird’s-eye view. What is the pattern of success and failure over time as opposed to specific instances in isolation? The book tries to go deep in particular cases to illustrate the mechanisms, but it’s important to start with base rates.

When Mao Stopped Listening to Bureaucrats

Jordan Schneider: You can tell a story of the 1930s where the international world is weak and ripe for toppling, but suddenly the most Jewry-Bolshevik infested one happens to be the one still fighting even after losing millions of people in the summer and fall of 1940. You can draw terrible extrapolations based on a limited set of data points.

Let’s return to Mao. From an epistemological perspective, you have a ton of material from the Nianpu 年谱 of what the daily leaders are discussing and the documentation of their decision-making. Were you surprised that all of this was out there for you to sink your teeth into once you started investigating?

Tyler Jost: The Chronicle of Mao Zedong or Mao Zedong Nianpu 毛泽东年谱 was released just before I started graduate school. I don’t think I realized then how lucky I was in my timing. The party archives publishes compendia of daily activities of senior revolutionary-era leaders, such as Mao’s meetings with his advisors and Mao’s meetings with the Politburo. Not just the ones that were released or publicized in The People’s Daily 人民日报, but the private ones as well, where the real action happened.

I stumbled into this, knowing I was interested in writing a dissertation about decision-making. It so happened that the most detailed records pertaining to Mao’s decision-making had just been released by the party.

Jordan Schneider: Give us an overview. You periodize Mao’s administration from 1949 to 1962 and from 1963 to 1976. Let’s start in that early era. What was the national security decision-making apparatus that he was working around?

Tyler Jost: Through all of these frameworks, start with the leader. I’m interested in miscalculations about questions of war and peace. The assumption at the starting point — this is a theoretical assumption you could question, but I try to show empirically that it’s sound — is that you have to get the leader on board. Leaders make the final call on big decisions in foreign policy. There could be other subsidiary decisions that low-level bureaucrats get to make on their own, but the starting point for any analysis has to be the leader.

This is an easy assumption that aligns with the historical understanding of Mao’s era. Mao was a dominant force in decision-making. The reason I say that the period between 1949 and 1962 was different from roughly 1963 to the end of Mao’s life is that the system Mao created when they founded the government in 1949 was, comparatively speaking, quite integrated.

What do I mean by integrated? There were many mechanisms by which the leader was able to reach down into the Chinese party-state and extract information needed to make decisions. There was an unusually high status of the Foreign Ministry, which was a function of the fact that many individuals who went into the Foreign Ministry early on had been part of the military and had revolutionary credentials. This included Zhou Enlai 周恩来, who was the first foreign minister and concomitantly the Premier 总理 of the country at the outset. His replacement, Chen Yi 陈毅, was similar — one of the Ten Marshals 元帅/大将.

So that’s a diplomatic core or critical mass of diplomatic information that Mao had access to. Then obviously there’s the military. The military already had a high standing and good access to get information up to Mao. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Chinese leaders’ ability to get the information they needed from the state system was pretty good.

Jordan Schneider: Okay, let’s take it to 1962. What was happening between the mainland and Taiwan?

Tyler Jost: 1962 is four years into the Great Leap Forward. The Chinese economy is doing incredibly poorly. There’s a suspicion that perhaps the regime is not fully stable. In the spring of 1962, Chiang Kai-shek, who had been monitoring the situation on the mainland very closely, got it in his head that this was his last favorable opportunity to take serious military action (“Project National Glory/國光計劃”) against the mainland to foment a revolt that would ultimately topple the communist regime.

He takes a series of actions, from writing in his diary about how serious he is about military action against the mainland to setting up internal Taiwan military bodies, convening military planning meetings, and reaching out to the Americans to see whether they would support something.

Unfortunately for Taiwan — and this is eventually what’s discovered by Mao — this is a year after the Bay of Pigs in the Kennedy administration. The US and Taipei had signed the Mutual Defense Pact a couple of years prior, which essentially gave veto authority to the US for any major military operations, including the one Chiang had in mind in 1962. Chiang essentially has to decide whether he’s going to go it alone, go back on the treaty commitment, or just back off. That’s the scene setter before we get to the mainland side of things.

Jordan Schneider: What did Mao know? When did he know it, and what was the decision space he was facing once he started hearing whispers of Chiang restarting the civil war?

Tyler Jost: Mao gets a pretty early wind that something serious is happening in the spring of 1962 through intelligence channels. He immediately engages with the bureaucratic establishment. There’s a series of Politburo, Central Military Commission, and Leading Small Group 领导小组 meetings, all of which are activated to determine what China should do.

What’s remarkable about this — because this is 1962, four years into the Great Leap Forward — is that the Foreign Ministry is at the table, military officers are at the table, and there’s pretty candid discussion, particularly given that Mao early on in the crisis seems to indicate he’s taking the chance of an invasion seriously.

Beijing eventually lands on a two-pronged strategy. One in which the PLA is going to mobilize, but do so publicly to showcase that it’s aware of what’s happening and prepared to defend itself militarily. But then critically — and this is where the Foreign Ministry and Zhou Enlai play a big role — they activate a diplomatic channel that the PRC has with the US.

Remember, this is the Cold War, so there’s no formal diplomatic recognition between the two countries, but there is an ambassador-level channel in Warsaw through which the two sides can communicate. The Foreign Ministry officials, including Foreign Minister Chen Yi, have this intuition that Chiang Kai-shek is probably going rogue, and it’s unlikely the US is behind it. If the US isn’t behind it, they’ll likely be able to rein Taipei in.

That’s exactly what they do. They reached out to the US in Warsaw in the summer of 1962, and received a message loud and clear that was personally approved by Kennedy. It’s fascinating — I trace that message from Kennedy to the US ambassador in Poland to Wang Bingnan 王炳南, the representative from the PRC side. We have both the US cable and now the Chinese cable. We know the distribution list for the cable on the Chinese side. It goes not just to Mao Zedong, but to all the senior Politburo members, members of the Diàochábù 调查部 (the domestic and foreign intelligence agency at the time), Foreign Ministry, CMC, and so forth.

Wang says in his memoir — and I think this is proven by Mao’s subsequent actions — that the information coming through the Foreign Ministry channel had a big impact on Mao’s thinking. You can imagine it breaking very differently. Think about the First Taiwan Strait Crisis or the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis — Mao had previously used violence to achieve his military goals. He doesn’t in ‘62 — he’s more circumspect, in part based upon the information the Foreign Ministry was able to gather for him.

Jordan Schneider: There were other times in the 50s where he saw the upside of escalating — in the Korean War and then in the Taiwan Straits, where he seemed to think, “We need to make sure our revolutionary fervor is still high.” It’s interesting that the Great Leap Forward, as you argue, has him calibrate down how aggressive he’s willing to be in running risks. So Mao, good job, you avoided World War III in 1962, but seven years later you’re back at it again. What was he thinking in the China-Soviet border disputes in ’69 that almost brought us to global thermonuclear war?

Tyler Jost: It’s probably an exaggeration to say either of those would have resulted in a world war. Things certainly were worse in ’69 compared to ’62.

Again, it’s important to provide some context. By 1969, the Sino-Soviet Split 中苏交恶 was well underway, and the two sides were increasingly confrontational, both vying for leadership in Africa and Southeast Asia, and also along their shared border. They had unresolved territorial disputes dating back to the founding of the PRC. A series of skirmishes, particularly on the northeastern part of China’s border, began to escalate in the late 1960s.

Alongside this is the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia under the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine in 1968. The combination creates real anxiety in Beijing about what might happen. Mao gets it in his head that some sort of Soviet military action needs to be countered, and the right strategy is through a clear demonstration of military force — hit first, demonstrate resolve, and the Soviets to back off.

Mao was wrong on two fronts. First, the Soviets would not back off. Second, he misjudged the severity with which the Soviets were contemplating military action prior to China initiating conflict in March of ’69.

From the behavioral indicators of the Soviet Union — what does the Soviet Union do in response to the ambush in March of ‘69? They escalate, both locally in the northeastern part of the border and by August, opening another front in the western part of China’s territory. By fall 1969, the Soviet Union was making veiled nuclear threats. How serious those threats actually were is debated quite fiercely among historians. But China took the threats seriously.

Based upon the Soviet records we have prior to March 1969, there’s no indication that military action was in the offing. In other words, Mao creates the type of military escalation he fears through his own actions. From that perspective, I argue that the Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969 was a miscalculation on Mao’s part.

There are many ways of trying to rescue rationality or good judgment from disaster. There are potential ways to say, “Well, maybe Mao was after this or that,” and in the book, I try to address each one. But the argument the book makes about why this miscalculation occurs has to do with how institutions linking the leader to the bureaucracy had changed.

Unlike ’62, the lead-up to and then the Cultural Revolution 文化大革命 itself had decimated the connective tissue between Mao and the foreign policy bureaucracy. This begins around 1962 as Mao starts contemplating his own death. The quote nominally ascribed to him is “What will happen after I die?” Mao increasingly feared that what he observed during the Great Leap Forward was a premonition of the lack of revolutionary zeal that would overtake the Party after he was gone. In that regard, he was absolutely right.

How do you prepare for that? You need to begin attacking key leaders within the bureaucratic establishment who you perceive to be not revolutionary enough. This happened as early as fall 1962 and continued. The way Mao made decisions in ’63, ’64, ’65 shifted. The forums he used became more insular and exclusionary. All of this built up to the atomic bomb that Mao unleashed upon the foreign policy bureaucracy in the Cultural Revolution.

Jordan Schneider: Is it fair to consider ideology versus cold calculation as a variable? In 1962, he was burned by a dumb series of ideologically driven decisions that starved tens of millions of people, and he was reconsidering. By 1969, he was at a very different point, and he was seeing ghosts — both in the Party and around the world — which led him to read the Soviet Union poorly.

Tyler Jost: There are several ways to think about ideology. I want to emphasize that it’s important as a driving force in foreign policy decision-making, not just in China but in other countries as well.

One way to think about ideology is as a baseline set of left and right limits about what is permissible to political debate.

In Beijing, the Cultural Revolution narrowed the range of politically permissible opinions one could potentially have. This is bound up in how the institutions I discuss in my book are expressed. These institutions are the rules governing how a leader and a bureaucrat are supposed to interact. There’s a literal sense in which those rules can shape information flows between actors.

If I eliminate the Politburo, that removes a mechanism by which information flows upward to the leader. The transaction costs associated with getting information to the leader might be higher, but there’s also a strategic element to how bureaucratic actors respond to rule changes.

The rupture of connective tissues between leaders and bureaucrats — fragmenting the system — signals to bureaucrats about the political and ideological environment. In environments where this connective tissue has been stripped away, bureaucrats become more cautious in their reporting.

They end up spending energy not on determining the true state of the world, but rather on figuring out what they think the boss believes.

In that type of environment where information flow between leaders and bureaucracies is poor, bureaucrats focus on three questions: “How can I find out what the boss thinks? How can I find information that confirms that prior belief? And if I can’t do either of those things, how can I make my report so vanilla that no matter what the leader actually thinks or what actually happens, I remain safe?”

The result is either ideologically charged information designed to confirm what the leader has deemed ideologically correct, or reports so stripped of meaningful content and filled with ideological dogma that they’re no longer useful to the leader.

Jordan Schneider: This reminds me of Hitler. There was someone who walked around with what they called a “Führer machine” with big fonts because Hitler’s eyesight had deteriorated by the time the war started. Whenever they saw Hitler feeling down, they would print out an article saying how awesome and amazing he was and how everything was great. When you reach the point where you need psychological boosters of feeding leaders information that makes them feel good, you’re probably not in the best state for good, hard-nosed national security, analytical decision-making.

Tyler Jost: Indeed. One argument I encountered early in this project was that once leaders destroy this connective tissue, they know they’ve done so. They know their subordinates, being rational and strategic players, have incentives to provide biased information. Shouldn’t a rational leader then discount everything supplied to them?

In that fragmented institutional arrangement, it might seem to revert to a single leader making decisions independently, without necessarily making the situation worse. The argument I make in the book is that while this might theoretically be true, if we accept that human beings are prone to bias and enjoy hearing good news about themselves without properly discounting information that confirms their priors, then this situation can lead to an echo chamber.

Jordan Schneider: Another interesting dynamic you explore is fears of a coup. This was obviously relevant in Hitler’s case and very relevant for Mao as well. They began to wonder, “Are my generals going to shoot me and throw me overboard?” With Mao, Stalin’s case hung over him as the disaster he wanted to avoid — losing revolutionary edge and having the founder of the nation thrown under the bus.

Tyler Jost: Precisely. The book argues that these institutions don’t arise deus ex machina — they don’t appear out of nothing. They’re political choices informed by leaders’ calculations about how much threat the bureaucracy poses to their political survival and agenda, and how much they need that bureaucracy to accomplish their goals while in office.

The most troubling combination, exemplified by the Cultural Revolution, occurs when leaders perceive the bureaucracy as threatening.

In Mao’s case, he was concerned about what the bureaucracy would do after he was gone and felt the need to rekindle revolutionary fervor in the party. The worst scenario is when leaders both fear the bureaucracy and are inwardly focused on domestic rather than international policy.

You can imagine a different world where you fear the bureaucracy but face a threatening international environment and have ambitious international goals. In that case, you would need to balance your fear with the demand for information that only the bureaucracy can provide. The worst combination occurs when you fear the bureaucracy, but you’re inwardly focused and have no need for their expertise. In that situation, why assume any risk? You simply cut them out.

The Other Vietnam War

Jordan Schneider: Let’s fast forward to Deng Xiaoping in 1979. What was Deng thinking in ’79 when he ended up invading Vietnam?

Tyler Jost: The 1979 case is a forgotten war, but it shouldn’t be because it’s really consequential, both in terms of the geopolitics of the Asia Pacific region for the last stretch of the Cold War and what it tells us about decision-making in China and its potential pathologies.

China decided to launch a punitive war against its southern neighbor, Vietnam, in 1979. The logic that Deng consistently articulated both internally and externally was that China needed to punish Vietnam for its invasion of Cambodia and its growing relationship with the Soviet Union through a demonstration of battlefield strength.

The PRC planned to invade for a short period of time to display the power of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). They frequently used the phrase that they were going to “teach a lesson” to their southern neighbors. The analogy at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds, particularly Deng’s, was the 1962 war with India, where this strategy worked reasonably well.

In 1962, the Indians underestimated Chinese military capabilities. The battlefield demonstration that fall showed that the PLA was a force to be reckoned with. They had the upper hand at the border, and India revised its policies accordingly.

That success wasn’t replicated in 1979. To be fair to Deng Xiaoping, China did eventually achieve its tactical military objectives. However, the strategic motive — the real reason why China invaded in the first place — was not met. There are these quotes from newly available Vietnamese archival evidence where they state, “It was not China who taught us a lesson; it was we who taught them a lesson.”

Even though the PLA eventually reached its tactical objectives, the high casualty rate and slow advance demonstrated how severely the Cultural Revolution had damaged the PLA. The military prowess that the war was supposed to highlight in the eyes of Vietnamese decision-makers failed to materialize. From that perspective, the strategic calculation failed.

Jordan Schneider: What were the analytical errors that Deng made in this decision?

Tyler Jost: Part of it stems from misunderstanding the state of the PLA. Most evidence suggests that Deng eventually realized this prior to the invasion, around January. Ironically, most good information Deng received right before the invasion came through informal channels because people were afraid to speak candidly in more formal settings.

By that point, Deng had already committed himself to pushing this forward as part of his political agenda, making it difficult for him to back down by January.

There was another set of geopolitical and diplomatic errors: a lack of consideration for how Vietnam would respond if the PLA didn’t perform as well as it had in 1962, and a failure to assess what that would do to Vietnamese perceptions of PRC capabilities and resolve. That question was never asked. The debate around the war was very shallow.

In December 1978, the months prior to the war, they also misread the US. This is interesting because it’s sometimes suggested — partly as a political strategy Deng employed after the war failed to achieve many of its strategic objectives — that the war was a way of demonstrating China would be a good ally to the US. The narrative implies the US was secretly encouraging China to take this action, and Deng was taking one for the team to establish good credentials and secure normalization and healthy relations against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

What we now know from US archives is that President Jimmy Carter actively discouraged the invasion. Deng Xiaoping took his famous trip to the US in January 1979, right before the invasion. Carter discouraged him both in small groups of advisors and in one-on-one meetings. Carter told Deng, “You have other options available to you. You could move your forces to the border and engage in a series of limited operations which might draw some Vietnamese forces north away from Cambodia without risking the international backlash this war will create.”

Jordan Schneider: The Vietnamese had defeated the Americans. Did the Chinese think the Vietnamese were unprepared? Regardless of the internal assessment of the PLA, the fact that Deng thought Vietnam wouldn’t be ready for a fight after spending 15 years battling the most advanced military in the world — and that they couldn’t stand up to China — is absurd.

Tyler Jost: It’s interesting. This dovetails with your first question about why people tend toward optimism in their assessments when they don’t examine data. This would be one potential data point supporting that first category of explanation.

Jordan Schneider: What do you think about Joseph Torigian’s argument that this was actually just a way for Deng to solidify power domestically? Hua Guofeng 华国锋 was leaving the scene, Deng was coming in, and almost everyone in the bureaucracy disliked the decision. But Deng said, “I’m going to show who’s boss. We’re going to do this anyway.” This was how he fully demonstrated to the system his control over the PLA — by forcing them into doing something they didn’t want to do, showing he was the new Mao.

Tyler Jost: There are two ways of thinking about this argument. Joseph’s book discusses it, but the most detailed articulation of this political motivation comes from Xiaoming Zhang’s excellent book Deng Xiaoping’s Long War.

The first interpretation, which Professor Zhang emphasizes, is that the PLA needed reform. Deng needed to demonstrate the military weakness of the PLA to drive organizational reforms within the military. The interesting thing is that the primary evidence for this logic comes from a speech given toward the end of the conflict.

There are two ways to read this. Deng was certainly aware of what he called “bloatedness” within the military in the 1970s. However, it’s very difficult to find anything in the historical record prior to the war where he states that the war would allow him to pursue this political agenda.

One interpretation of the fact that this document appears toward the end of the conflict is that perhaps he felt this way all along, which is certainly possible. We must be circumspect about asserting what leaders believed at certain points. But to me — and Joseph wrote this in his book as well — that speech reads quite defensive, as though Deng was trying to justify what he’d done. From that perspective, one could argue it was an ex post rationalization for what China gained from the war, rather than a belief Deng held throughout.

The second interpretation is as you articulated it — Deng knew the position would be unpopular, but pushing through an unpopular policy would demonstrate political strength, affirming his position vis-à-vis Hua Guofeng. That’s also possible.

The weakness in that argument is the intimate involvement Deng had in planning the war. If we accept that the war didn’t go as Beijing hoped and Deng was responsible for planning it, that’s an enormously risky move because he tied himself to the planning process. While possible, this explanation wouldn’t account for many other aspects of the overall decision-making process.

Jordan Schneider: More broadly, do you get more erratic decision-making when you have a leader who feels comfortable in power, or when they’re at the beginning or end of their reign, or when they perceive domestic threats?

Tyler Jost: Going back to our discussion about the Cultural Revolution, there’s an analogous argument here as well. The political contestation inside Beijing is important to the story I tell in my book.

Elite politics were quite contentious in the mid-to-late 1970s, making it beneficial to keep institutions fragmented.

The connective tissues ripped out from the Chinese system during the Cultural Revolution weren’t repaired. Most attempts to restore connections between leaders and the bureaucracy didn’t happen until after the Hua-Deng power struggle subsided in the 1980s.

Jordan Schneider: Fast-forwarding to 2025, much discussion revolves around whether Xi Jinping will stay in power. It’s important to internalize that China’s last major military action began right after a power transition. Xi will eventually die, leading to another power transition with volatility that might cause leaders to make terrible decisions. This insecurity appears in many of your case studies, causing people to narrow their information sources and make increasingly reckless decisions.

Tyler Jost: That’s exactly the right question to ask. While I don’t speculate about Xi Jinping and Taiwan, the succession problem and the institutional choices Xi must make to navigate those perilous waters deserve more attention. War could theoretically result from power balance shifts, perceived lack of American resolve, or miscalculations before that point. However, the succession problem remains the unnoticed elephant in the room that will become more obvious as time passes.

Jordan Schneider: Is there another case study of succession-driven decision-making?

Tyler Jost: Mao’s case is the primary succession example. You can view the 1969 conflict as rooted in institutional choices Mao needed to make to secure his legacy after his anticipated death in 1976.

The succession problem can also be viewed from the other side of the transition — whoever inherits power is likely in a politically precarious position because of the types of people that leaders, particularly personalist ones, bring into their inner circle toward the end of their tenure. These successors inherit foreign policy problems and dysfunctional institutions that make them prone to miscalculation. That’s what happened in the 1979 war.

Jordan Schneider: Toward the end of a leader’s tenure — whether democratically elected or autocratic — you argue, the quality of their advisors declines. Can you choose a case study to illustrate this?

Tyler Jost: One of the most fascinating aspects of foreign policy decision-making is how political selection institutions — what we typically describe as the difference between democracy and autocracy — both matter and don’t matter.

One benefit of democracy is that outgoing leaders don’t have to worry about what happens after they leave office and face constraints on how they can arrange the political landscape after their departure. In that sense, autocracy creates more opportunities for the pathological institutions my book discusses.

Nevertheless, democratically elected leaders can still fear what bureaucracies might do to them politically. Two cases examine this in depth. The first is the Indian side of the 1962 Sino-Indian border war and Nehru’s apprehensions about the foreign policy establishment, particularly the Defense Ministry and military and intelligence apparatus.

The second example occurred right here in the US — the reconfiguration of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson after he assumed office following JFK’s assassination in 1963.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s discuss Vietnam. After JFK was assassinated, LBJ was suddenly in charge of JFK’s people, who hated his guts and were about to kick him off the ticket before JFK died. Take it from there, Tyler.

Tyler Jost: The argument in my book is that these dynamics you described — this unusual path to power in 1963, coupled with LBJ’s psychological predispositions — led Johnson to be tremendously paranoid that the bureaucracy threatened his political agenda. His primary focus was passing two hugely consequential pieces of domestic legislation pertaining to civil rights and the Great Society. We have him on record, both during and after his presidency, saying that these were his priorities.

Jordan Schneider: You quote him saying that Great Society legislation was “the one woman I truly loved.” As a serial adulterer, that statement carries weight coming from LBJ.

Tyler Jost: Earlier, we discussed the worst possible political environment for institutional efficiency and effectiveness. It’s a situation where you deeply fear the bureaucracy while focusing on domestic agenda items. The irony is that while Johnson inherited a reasonably well-functioning foreign policy decision-making apparatus, he intentionally took steps to undermine it.

Johnson established a very insular forum for his decision-making process known as the “Tuesday Luncheon,” which excluded a vast swath of the national security bureaucracy from important discussions. His reasoning was clear. In a retrospective interview quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, Johnson stated he knew the bureaucracy would punish him through information leaks that would make him look bad. He believed that when he held National Security Council meetings, information would “leak out like a sieve.” In contrast, these Tuesday luncheons never leaked anything.

Johnson’s logic for reorganizing the decision-making institutions was entirely political — a careful calculation he made. However, he paid a big cost for this approach. While making the most consequential choices of the second half of the Cold War for the US, he committed perhaps the biggest blunder in American Cold War history. It cost him politically in 1968, and he decided not to run for reelection because he knew he would lose.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s dive deeper into 1965. What information didn’t Johnson receive that might have led him to avoid escalation in Vietnam?

Tyler Jost: You can trace this back even further to the summer and fall of 1964. Several key individuals expressed deep apprehension about escalation in Vietnam — George Ball, Chester Cooper in the National Security Council, and others in the State Department’s intelligence apparatus (INR), like Allen Whiting.

All these individuals were systematically sidelined. There’s a myth that George Ball was given a voice in the spring of 1965, but in my book, I demonstrate that his influence was minimal compared to what he tried to communicate to Johnson earlier in the summer and fall of 1964.

As a result, all key decisions regarding escalation occurred in a very insular setting. LBJ was advised principally by McGeorge Bundy (National Security Advisor) and Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense), with Dean Rusk present but clearly suffering from a degree of imposter syndrome. Johnson made the call for escalation based on a very narrow set of information and considerations, and the results speak for themselves.

The Making of Siloed Institutions

Jordan Schneider: Fast forward to 2016. Let’s discuss Trump’s national security decision-making in this context.

Tyler Jost: I should caveat this by saying that the study doesn’t consider the Trump administration’s decision-making institutions in any way, shape, or form, but it has a theoretical framework that we could apply. We can think about Trump’s position coming into office in 2017 and what happened within the decision-making structure.

Generally speaking, President Trump inherited a number of international problems in 2017, ranging from North Korea to Afghanistan to other parts of the Middle East. The demand for information and advice from political advisors or the national security establishment remained substantial. However, Trump came in with healthy skepticism and limited experience dealing with the foreign policy bureaucracy.

These two countervailing forces — the threatening aspect of his position and the demand for solutions to Afghanistan and North Korea — placed him in a middle ground that the book discusses.

I call it a “siloed institution” where you limit what any single bureaucracy can do independently while still depending on them.

It resembles a hub-and-spoke system with the leader at the center. Individual bureaucratic nodes gain access and relay information upward, but they don’t communicate effectively with one another or coordinate particularly well.

Some evidence suggests this might have occurred, at least at the margins. Journalistic accounts have revealed that lower-level components of the National Security Council system — which have existed for decades and serve as connective tissue at the deputies and sub-deputies levels for information sharing, policy coordination, and analysis — were perhaps less frequently utilized. This would be consistent with the arguments.

The outward-facing signaling or messaging strategy sometimes appeared confusing. While it’s possible Trump was orchestrating some strategic plan behind the scenes, from an outside observer’s perspective, it seems some foreign policy actions weren’t as well-coordinated as they could have been. That said, in the broader scheme, the first Trump administration doesn’t resemble anything like what we saw under LBJ, much less during the Cultural Revolution. It’s important to maintain this comparative reference point.

Jordan Schneider: What about in Trump’s second term?

Tyler Jost: It’s early days. Trump hasn’t revoked the National Security Council. He may have established some parallel structure behind the scenes that we’re unaware of, similar to the Tuesday luncheon, which would send signals to the bureaucracy with a chilling effect even at the highest levels. Within the framework of the book, which focuses on high-level institutional interactions between leaders and bureaucracy, it’s difficult to ascertain from the outside how much Trump has pushed things even in the direction of LBJ.

Warning signs exist, however. The reorganization of USAID is particularly informative to people within the bureaucratic establishment. To be fair, having a Foreign Ministry or Department of State oversee USAID’s responsibilities isn’t unheard of. Placing their personnel within the State Department isn’t outlandish. It’s entirely reasonable for a president to have a foreign policy agenda that curtails foreign aid distribution.

Whether we agree with that policy is separate from how it affects the decision-making process. The means, process, and scope of organizational change bound up in the USAID actions represent the biggest warning sign. We shall see what unfolds in the coming months and years.

Jordan Schneider: I take your point, Tyler, about it being early days on the bureaucratic reorganization front. However, you can also examine the personnel perspective regarding the types of senior advisers now in place, which presents a very different complexion than what we saw in Trump’s first term and feels more like late Mao than early Mao.

Tyler Jost: That’s a fascinating point. The book doesn’t focus centrally on appointing loyalists versus experts, but other areas of political science address that trade-off. They don’t necessarily conceptualize institutions as I did — they think more in terms of hiring criteria, whether it’s credentials for the job or absolute fealty to the leader. It’s an analogous political problem.

The book can’t speak as directly to this question, making it somewhat more difficult to apply the framework to the first versus the second Trump administration along this dimension. Nevertheless, it’s an important question we should continue to monitor.

The “red versus expert” debate is simply one way of articulating the standard expertise-versus-loyalty trade-off that many economists and political scientists have discussed. Some people think this debate is unique to China, but while the formulation may be uniquely Chinese, this represents a perennial political problem.

Jordan Schneider: It’s an LBJ issue, too — he didn’t want people leaking. What do you gain and lose by leaning “red” or leaning “expert”?

Tyler Jost: You can think about this issue in both functional and strategic terms. In the functional sense, imagine a stylized model where you have two candidates. One possesses all the indicators and benchmarks suggesting they’ll excel at the job. The other lacks those attributes but demonstrates complete loyalty — they’ll do exactly what you want once in office.

Often, these indicators aren’t so stark, and typically, you seek people with elements of both qualities. But keeping the model simplified — from a functional perspective, if you choose the candidate without expertise (defined by indicators of job performance), you’re reducing government capacity. You’ve screened candidates solely on loyalty rather than competence, limiting their ability to perform effectively.

The strategic dimension requires more nuanced thinking. Imagine both candidates secure positions and face choices about how to perform their duties and what risks they’ll take to advocate for what they believe is right. The candidate with strong performance credentials has something to fall back on when speaking truth to power. They can justify diverging from the leader’s view because they have experiences underpinning their judgment.

Contrast this with the candidate chosen solely for political loyalty. They have little foundation except the leader’s trust in their allegiance. This fundamentally shapes how they seek information. They’ll likely pursue data confirming what the leader wants to hear and demonstrate risk aversion in identifying new developments in the international environment. This leads to those bland, vanilla reports characteristic of fragmented institutions.

Jordan Schneider: It’s a leveraged bet on the leader’s gut instinct — if you go more “red,” you get more of the leader in whatever policy emerges, for better or worse.

Tyler Jost: Precisely. The book was inspired by a wave of political science literature examining how individual leaders shape foreign policy — something that captured my imagination in graduate school. Where my analysis intersects with this approach is recognizing that when institutions tear away the connective tissue between leaders and the bureaucracy, foreign policy increasingly shows the leader in absolute terms. This isn’t necessarily beneficial — that’s the twist my book offers. Only when institutions incorporating bureaucratic perspectives are established do outcomes begin to look substantially different.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s conclude with Xi. We discussed the post-Xi era, but let’s talk about Xi himself. How is he handling all this?

Tyler Jost: We should be even more cautious about drawing inferences regarding Xi than with Trump because the information environment is quite poor. I’ll make two points.

First, I’m reasonably convinced Xi Jinping inherited those middle-ground siloed institutions I described — the hub-and-spoke model where information reaches the leader but with limited horizontal sharing between bureaucratic actors. This conclusion stems partly from the system’s own statements justifying institutional changes they implemented, such as establishing the National Security Commission early in Xi’s first term.

Some argue that these institutional reforms solved all problems, but I’m skeptical for several reasons. The National Security Commission essentially renamed its predecessor, the National Security Leading Small Group, signaling Xi’s political power — similar to Joseph Torigian’s argument about Deng Xiaoping pushing for war with Vietnam as a power demonstration. But the composition of these groups didn’t change substantially. Additional staff may have been added, but public reporting indicates the National Security Commission has focused more on domestic issues than international security problems.

What made the system “siloed” when Xi took office was primarily the segregation of military decision-making via the Central Military Commission from the civilian bureaucracy. That division between these two systems remains the most prominent feature of what Xi inherited. His response hasn’t been to integrate the military with civilian bureaucracy at lower levels. Instead, he appears to have doubled down on direct, unilateral control of the military through the Central Military Commission. This gives him more control but at a cost — it allows the military to channel information directly upward without vetting by other bureaucratic elements.

Second, we might ask whether the system has deteriorated under Xi. Unlike the Cultural Revolution, where systemic changes were obvious to outside observers, the formal structures of decision-making haven’t undergone a dramatic transformation. However, the dismissal of minister-level positions in the Foreign Ministry and military apparatus operates at a different level — focusing on personnel rather than institutions. This likely creates a chilling effect. Lower-level bureaucrats report fear of speaking truth to power, which isn’t surprising.

We must be careful about these inferences, though. Most indications of the chilling effect from Xi’s anti-corruption campaign and personnel decisions come from very low levels. What remains unclear, at least publicly, is how the bureaucracy interacts with political leadership — the primary focus of my book, which argues this is the most important area to examine. We don’t know if the same fear of speaking truth to power shapes those higher-level interactions. It may be some time before we can conclusively characterize decision-making under Xi’s system.

Jordan Schneider: From a Western policymaker perspective, given these new uncertain variables about how information travels upward, what should officials be thinking or doing differently if they might be in this complicated situation rather than a clean information environment?

Tyler Jost: This is an important question with both assessment and strategy components — what we should think and what we should do.

On the assessment side, we should incorporate into our calculations the possibility that Beijing may develop a completely different perspective on the international environment. This could result from Xi Jinping’s independent judgment or from judgments based on the information presented to him, combined with his personal understanding of the situation.

Regarding strategy, the challenge is substantial. It requires a two-step approach: first, identifying early signs of misperception forming on the Chinese side; second, attempting to correct that misperception. However, if the institutional structures themselves are causing China to develop misperceptions, then direct interaction with the leader may be the only effective channel for shaping their worldview.

If the bureaucracy won’t transmit quality information for any of the reasons we’ve discussed — whether related to personnel, institutions, or other factors — then lower-level interactions won’t be effective. Military demonstrations, actions in the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait, export controls — all these signals get filtered through the bureaucracy in ways that may prevent belief changes at the top. This forces us to consider that altering beliefs on the Chinese side might require direct interaction with the Supreme Leader, making face-to-face diplomacy one of the few means available to meaningfully influence the situation.

“We Were Wrong, Terribly Wrong”

Jordan Schneider: Tyler, across all your case studies, is there one moment or meeting you wish you could have witnessed firsthand?

Tyler Jost: Probably all of them. There’s the meeting in fall 1961 with Nehru and his advisors, where foreign policy was pushed to its limit. There were meetings in January, February, and March in Beijing between Mao and his subordinates that led to the Sino-Soviet border clash.

There’s also January 29, 1965 — the date when the “Fork in the Road” memo was drafted primarily by Bundy and McNamara and delivered to LBJ. I believe they met that same day. While different theories exist about the true turning point of the Vietnam War, my personal assessment, as presented in the book, is that this was the decisive moment. It would have been fascinating to witness these meetings firsthand.

Jordan Schneider: Can we discuss how terrible that memo was? It was high school-level, B-minus work. It’s embarrassing.

Tyler Jost: What’s interesting is that, unlike the Iraq War generation of American leaders who maintained until their deaths that they did nothing wrong, the Vietnam era advisors were deeply troubled by what happened. McNamara states in his memoirs that, “We were wrong, terribly wrong.”

McGeorge Bundy, who didn’t publish memoirs but left a draft available in the Kennedy Library in Boston, makes two points. First, he acknowledges that communism in Asia could have been contained at much lower cost than the escalation in Vietnam — undermining the rationale that motivated him. Second, he identifies his greatest mistake as National Security Advisor as the shallowness of analysis he provided to LBJ, which is remarkable since that was his primary responsibility.

Bundy understood this was his job, particularly from his years with Kennedy. However, Johnson’s choices made it difficult for advisors like Bundy and McNamara to perceive the situation accurately. Bundy, in particular, was a hawk, so Johnson’s system allowed the analysis to excessively reflect Bundy’s personal perspective. This bias is evident in both the memo we mentioned and in several others Bundy wrote the following month, most notably after the attacks at Pleiku.

Jordan Schneider: It’s fascinating that these Vietnam era officials didn’t gaslight us, while the Iraq War ones maintained their positions until death. My assumption is that the independent variable is 58,000 versus 4,000 American military casualties. There’s an undeniable truth to that number and a shock to the societal fabric that might not have seemed as important when compared to Korean War, World War II, or World War I death tolls.

Vietnam crossed a threshold of public awareness in the US.

That factor, combined with the definitive way the war ended, made a difference. By the time Rumsfeld died, we had ISIS in Iraq, but the outcome remained somewhat unresolved, unlike in Vietnam where the Viet Cong clearly took over the country.

Tyler Jost: You should consult some of my colleagues who have studied the Iraq War in depth. This comparison between Vietnam and Iraq officials is an interesting point about the independent variable. I’ve used this comparison multiple times without explaining the difference. What strikes is how unusual it is for advisors to admit they made mistakes in the decisions they were most responsible for. This tells us something important was happening in the lead-up to Vietnam.

Of course, other explanations exist. There are more self-interested interpretations where they might have been trying to salvage their reputations. At certain points in his memoir, McNamara’s analyses about why they were wrong seem completely misguided. For example, he claims the US had extensive expertise regarding the Soviet Union but none regarding Southeast Asia. This is objectively false.

The problem wasn’t a lack of experts in the State Department or National Security Council. The problem was that when these experts wrote memos to be sent to the President, officials like McNamara blocked them, saying, “No, absolutely not. This isn’t going anywhere.” McNamara did this for specific reasons, and we can understand why he acted as he did.

Tragedy appears in the opening lines of my book. These events are tragic and with the benefit of hindsight, one wishes things had been different. The cold reality is that these outcomes are so firmly rooted in politics that even if we hope decision-makers would rise above such forces, politics remain powerful enough to ensure these patterns will continue perpetually as a result of contestation between political actors.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s close with your opening lines then:

“One of the tragedies of international conflict is that it often achieves so little. History is replete with examples of states charging headfirst into international confrontations that left them no better off and often much worse off than where they started.”

Here’s to hoping.

Mood Music:

Rob Lee, a former Marine and Russia expert at FPRI, has spent significant time on the frontline in Ukraine. He joins Shashank Joshi, defense editor of The Economist and of Breaking Beijing and our newly minted Second Breakfast podcast to discuss the war in Ukraine, technology on the battlefield, and the future of warfare.

Today, our conversation covers:

• Whether Ukraine represents a revolution in military affairs and what lessons the war holds for other theaters

• Why 80% of casualties in Ukraine are caused by UAVs,

• The limits of FPVs and UAVs, tactics to counter UAV attacks, and the role of unmanned ground vehicles,

• Institutional friction within the Ukrainian forces,

• How Chinese components and commercial drones from DJI are shaping the battlefield.

• Drone incidents over Europe, burden sharing, and what NATO is learning from the war,

• Plus: what music Ukrainian soldiers are listening to on the battlefield.

Thanks to the Hudson Institute Center for Defense Concepts and Technology for sponsoring this show.

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

A Transparent Battlefield

Jordan Schneider: A defense-tech talking point is that 70% of casualties on the battlefield today are caused by drones. Rob, what should we make of that?

Rob Lee: We should question statistics when they don’t have a clear source, because they anchor our views of modern warfare. Are the percentages authoritative? Are they replicable in other conflicts?

I visited the front line in Ukraine last summer and spoke with more than 15 battalion and brigade commanders, or their intelligence officers (S-2s). I asked each the same question, “What percentage of current casualties are from Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)?” 80% was the most common answer, with a range of 75-95%. This is the number cited by senior Ukrainian officials, like Pavlo Palisa.

Artillery and UAS are complementary, so it’s hard to distinguish between them. In many cases, artillery is important for destroying tree lines, which allows UAS to drop grenades on exposed troops. Artillery also helps to canalize Russian units — Russian infantry avoids open fields, sticking to tree lines. UAS can then drop mines to funnel them in a specific direction — there’s a profound psychological effect of having a 155mm or 152mm shell land near you. Artillery isn’t obsolete. Commanders of elite UAS units said that although UAS cause more than 50% of casualties, they do not operate in isolation, and artillery plays a key role.

I think 80% is a decent estimate for the majority of casualties on both sides. It’s impossible to know the exact number. I would caveat that brigade commanders do not see all casualties — some are outside their direct command. They also do not see all Russian casualties from HIMARS strikes, for example. This high percentage also shows Russia adapting to infiltration tactics — they often move only one or two soldiers at a time. Using artillery on a single soldier doesn’t make sense, it is more efficient to use a First Person View (FPV) drone or a Mavic to drop a grenade. 80% is a good estimate.

This number is dictated by the nature of the fighting in Ukraine — the infiltration tactics and the prevalence of dismounted, small-scale infantry assaults are why UAS play an outsized role. In large-scale dismounted infantry assaults, artillery is the main killer. I spoke to the Deputy S2 for a battalion fighting North Koreans in Kursk. He said that during the first days of the North Korean assault, so many Russian Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) UAVs flew overhead, the Ukrainians couldn’t use their own artillery effectively. Once that changed and they could use artillery again, they inflicted heavy casualties on the North Koreans, forcing them to shift from platoon-sized attacks to smaller, squad-sized units.

Keep in mind, in the next war NATO fights, UAS may not cause 80% of casualties. In a large-scale, conventional war, artillery would likely be the main killer, at least initially. Things have changed dramatically since the 2022 invasion. A brigade commander estimated that in the summer of 2023, artillery caused 90% of casualties. He now believes 80% are from UAS. That shift is important. It is important to ask how this will apply to future conflicts.

Shashank Joshi: We saw an essay a couple of months ago from General Zaluzhnyi, who was the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s forces. He’s now based in London, away from the front, so take his views with a pinch of salt. In his office, there are banks of video screens where he watches drone strikes from Ukraine. He’s still digitally plugged into the front.

In his essay, he supports the 80% figure and writes that traditional means of protection, like fortifications, armor plating, and even individual body armor, are negated by the scale, lethality, and accuracy of modern UAVs. Someone with a bird’s-eye view of the conflict reached that conclusion.

I agree it’s a mistake to cite that figure without considering the role UAVs play in other operations. Even with artillery strikes, the observation is going to be facilitated by UAVs. I see UAVs and artillery as symbiotic means of firepower, or nearly symbiotic. It would be a mistake to ignore that context.

Tony Stark: Are we talking about catastrophic kills or disability casualties? What is the modern FPV capable of in terms of disabling and disrupting enemy operations?

Rob Lee: Employing armor is very difficult, and UAVs are the main problem. Early in 2023, FPVs were overhyped — they were a new, immature technology. How to employ them wasn’t clear — there weren’t many available radio frequencies, so you couldn’t use many in proximity to each other without signal interference — and there were other issues. FPV capabilities have since matured, and crews are now experienced using this technology.

For vehicle losses, it depends. For units that fought at Kursk, repelling Russian assaults from both the Russian Airborne Forces and Naval Infantry, Javelins played a big role. This is surprising because Javelins have a greater risk at an accurate range. Armor assaults are uncommon now. We are seeing some in the eastern direction where overcast weather limits the ability of ISR UAVs to fly, and Russia is trying to take advantage of that before winter. But many vehicle losses are due to UAS — a combination of remote mining, FPVs, or night bomber UAS.

Social media can be distorting. One of the best night bomber UAV units in Ukraine is the Lasar Group of the National Guard. They have about 90 crews, are extremely well-led, and have a very efficient targeting cycle. According to their internal data, they’ve damaged or destroyed 2,000 tanks and more than 3,000 BMPs or BTRs, and a large number of artillery systems. They mainly operate at night because UAVs are easier to shoot down during the day. Their success has pushed Russia to keep its tanks further behind the front line at night. In June, they destroyed more artillery than the top four or five UAV units combined. But you do not see this because they aren’t posting footage.

For armored assaults, more than 50% of losses are from FPVs or mines dropped from UAVs. Anecdotes are important here. In May, the 20th Mechanized Brigade faced two turtle tanks — well-made by former Wagner fighters. The brigade told me it took more than 60 FPVs to stop those two tanks, and the first tank wasn’t even stopped by FPVs but by its own gearbox, which exploded. The UAV commander said if that hadn’t happened, the tank would have made it to their front line — it was that well-built. There’s a video of the tank afterward with a lot of FPVs stuck in the external wiring, none of which stopped it. The vast majority of vehicle and infantry casualties are from UAS.

Tony Stark: There is a discussion about battlefields becoming more transparent with modern technology. I’m not sure I agree. How do you conduct surprise at the tactical and operational level, given those circumstances?

Rob Lee: The last time there was an operational surprise was the Kursk offensive. The Kursk operation is interesting for a bunch of reasons, but the operational security was very tight. My understanding is that General Syrskyi led it himself, taking direct command. The brigade commanders had to sign non-disclosure agreements — they weren’t allowed to tell their superior command that they were moving to Kursk.

The reconnaissance was compartmentalized. There are a lot of lessons for us about how to conduct such an operation, but also what you can and can’t tell subordinates before an offensive. Most of the soldiers who were moved to Sumy thought they were defending, not preparing for an offensive operation. That was the last time we’ve seen a real breakthrough. At the time, Russia didn’t have strong UAS capabilities in the area. The Russian units there were not well-trained — they were conscripts. They had built good fortifications, but they weren’t tied into a coherent defensive system.

Since then, we’ve not seen an offensive breakthrough or much success on either side. Ukraine has made some attempts — in March, there was an operation in Belgorod to relieve pressure on Kursk. In April, they conducted an operation towards Kursk with some of their best assault units, including the 225th and 425th assault battalions, and ran into substantial issues there. Without the element of surprise, success is difficult.

Neither side can achieve air superiority or effectively leverage aviation to set the conditions for breaching well-fortified defenses. My view is that success depends on degrading, suppressing, and destroying UAS teams. The reconnaissance and fires aspects are also key. Both sides are prioritizing those, but neither has successfully set the conditions to take more than a village or launch a small-scale tactical assault.

Modern communication technology also complicates the situation. Everyone has a cell phone — you can’t really prevent people from having them, so you have to plan with that in mind. Both sides know their soldiers will call home — both sides have signals intelligence capabilities and listen in on those conversations.

Commanders sometimes lie to their soldiers, saying, “We’re getting rotated off the front line, we’re going this direction,” to misdirect their adversary. Both sides are using deception tactics.

Jordan Schneider: Why don’t they ban cell phones then? Are cell phones necessary for communication, or is it that in 2025, you can’t send someone anywhere without one?

Rob Lee: Cell phones are used for military communications — probably too often — and this is true on both sides. If you go to a command post, you’ll see Discord and Google Meet open. I know soldiers who use Google Meet to talk to a drone pilot during a firefight. On the Russian side, Telegram is often used to overcome their internal communication problems.

Both sides are scaling up their Signals Intelligence capabilities. I do not know enough to speak intelligently about it, but it’s clear they pull a lot of data. A big priority now is figuring out how to sift through all this data quickly and make it actionable. That will be a major focus of AI and machine learning development for the military — how to turn raw information into intelligence.

Shashank Joshi: The cardinal principle has always been that it is easier to persuade an adversary of what he already suspects than to introduce a new idea. We saw this in the planning for D-Day and the Normandy landing. A key element of the Kursk offensive was the ruse that Belgorod was the real target — that deception boosted Ukraine’s chances.

Deception is a fascinating topic now because it is difficult to pull off in the modern world. Creating false chatter on your comms is an age-old technique, but you have to maintain the deception across all channels of communication. You have to make the Belgorod operation appear real in every way.

On a tangent, Jordan, I know you read widely. R.V. Jones, the wartime British scientist, wrote a great book, The Wizard War.

Jordan Schneider: Oh, what a classic!

Shashank Joshi: He gave a lecture at CIA headquarters in 1993 called “Some Lessons in Intelligence.” It’s a fantastic reflection on the nature of modern deception, taking lessons from World War II and considering how to apply them to new conflicts. I encourage everyone to read it.

Where is the Frontline?

Jordan Schneider: Rob, Michael Kofman asked you where the drone swarms are? We’ve now seen soldiers using Xbox controllers to guide drones — it seems like many of these roles could be automated in 5, 10, 20 years. You and Shashank wrote that infantry stationed on the front line for 200 days were instructed not to shoot enemy soldiers crossing their positions. If that’s true, then why are they even there? So, why are humans still sent to the battlefield? From what you’ve seen, which roles will be automated first, and what tasks will still need a person on the ground?

Rob Lee: I’ve been hearing people say we’re going to have swarms “this year” for the last two years. There is a Ukrainian company called Swarmer working on this — the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about them a few months ago. I do not know the full extent of their success. There is often a lot of talk about AI in a swarm, but “AI” is often a misnomer. In many cases with FPVs, there’s a form of terminal guidance where, once the camera is on something, you can click a button and it will more or less follow the target. That will mitigate the loss of the video feed. I wouldn’t call it AI, but some people do.

I know there are attempts to improve a UAV’s ability to read terrain and target on its own, without a human in the loop. I think the goal is being able to send a UAV into a grid square and have it locate targets on its own. I do not know how soon that will be. In some ways, it’s less important for Ukraine right now because they are mostly targeting Russian infantry, one or two guys at a time. You do not need sophisticated AI for that.

I do not think we should assume infantry will be obsolete anytime soon. You still need someone on the ground to hold territory. It is an interesting point about Ukrainian infantry being told not to engage unless they have to. It calls into question what they actually hold — what is the front line? How real is it? Are these soldiers an observation force, even though they aren’t fighting all the time? I’m not sure how to describe their role.

One of the problems recently is that the maps we use for Open Source Intelligence are increasingly less accurate. This is not because the cartographers are worse, but because with infiltration tactics — where soldiers are walking 10 kilometers past the front line — it’s unclear what a geolocated reference point means. Does it mean they’re holding the point? Does it mean they just dropped a flag there? The Russians will drop a flag from a UAV and post it publicly so their commanders will think they have advanced further than they did.

One thing we’ve seen throughout this war, as in most wars, is a constant innovation, countermeasure, adaptation cycle. There is a lot of work on creating mesh networks and on creating UGVs and UAVs that can operate and bounce signals off each other. Some people are skeptical of that. Part of the issue in Ukraine is that only a few companies, like Silvus, make radio signals that are strong enough to create a mesh network, and they’re expensive and only available in low quantities, making it cost-prohibitive. There are other adaptations, like using cell towers near the front line to improve 3G connections.

Using UAVs and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) is still a manpower-intensive activity. An FPV team is normally four soldiers, and you have to constantly rotate them out. UGV teams may be larger. When Ukraine conducts an assault, the task organization for a 4-8 man assault group will include an FPV team, a night bomber UAV team, and two Mavic teams in support. That’s four UAV teams supporting a 4-8 man infantry team. The ratio of UAV operators to infantrymen in those cases is 2-to-1 or 3-to-1. One of the big questions going forward is what that ratio should look like for us. It’s not clear what the perfect ratio is. It’s also difficult because Ukrainian brigades are mostly defending. They’ve been defending for two years, few units have recent offensive experience, and the technology keeps changing. Assault units are compensating by fielding more UAV operators than infantrymen in operations.

Jordan Schneider: Why does it take four people to run a drone team? And why can’t the pilots be a thousand miles away?

Rob Lee: The pilot can be a thousand miles away. That’s one of the unique things. Operation Spiderweb was conducted by pilots in Ukraine, hitting targets all across Russia. The Lazar group’s pilots operate from Kyiv to deploy the drones to the front line, hundreds of miles away. In reality, we could have pilots in America piloting UAVs in Ukraine right now if we wanted to, though there would be some interesting legal implications. We’re moving in a direction where pilots can operate far from the front lines.

For FPVs, it’s typically a team of four because they deploy relatively close to the front line. You have to have someone deploying the UAV somewhat near the front. One person will be an engineer in charge of the munitions — depending on the target, you want to use a different munition, and you have to know how to use the initiator properly. A lot of people have lost hands or been killed by improperly assembling FPVs, as many munitions are homemade. So, one person is an engineer. The pilot and co-pilot roles are interchangeable, but the co-pilot often navigates. You’ll often have a fourth team member flying a Mavic to spot the target and talk the FPV onto it. It could even be more than four people. You might have one person managing antennas, and another as a driver. They often have to walk the last two or three kilometers to their position without a vehicle, so you need enough people to carry all the equipment.

With UGVs, maintaining communications is difficult. You often have to have a UAV acting as a repeater for the signal to the UGV. You also need the UAV for the pilot to see, because looking from the UGV’s camera on the ground, you do not see very much. You also need a maintenance person and other support. Ukraine is looking at creating UAV battalions in all its brigades. They’re forming UGV companies that might become battalions. We’re talking about hundreds of people. The task organization and the table of organization for these units are changing, and it’s going to have to change for our military as well.

Shashank Joshi: When we talk about swarms, people often think a swarm is a lot of UAVs all at once. That’s not what it means in a technical sense. A swarm is when each UAV is communicating with the others — there’s a degree of coordination within the group. The technical case for this is clear — you can overwhelm an adversary and also minimize the amount of pilot involvement. Imagine a single pilot able to select a target and launch hundreds of UAVs that can then autonomously approach it.

We have missiles that can do this. The Brimstone missile, that the UK has provided to Ukraine, is an example. Ukraine fires them off trucks, which I’m not sure the UK is even capable of doing. Those Brimstone missiles, which were designed about two decades ago, can each observe what the other is doing. If one missile picks a tank, another missile in the swarm can pick a different tank, so you’re not wasting munitions on the same target. That’s the fundamental appeal, along with saving pilot capacity.

The problem is that physics is a thing. If there is intra-swarm communication, how is that message being sent from one airframe to another in flight? Typically, there will be some kind of radio signal. It may not be subject to the same jamming as the main control signal because it will have a different frequency and strength, but you still have to send these signals between drones that are close to one another. When you get to a large number of UAVs in flight, there is more interference, and you struggle to send signals. This is a problem with all uncrewed systems — theoretical capabilities are different from practice. The simple issue of getting messages to and from the drone is at the heart of the operational limitations.

Rob Lee: Weather also plays a bigger role for UAVs and UGVs than it does for artillery. It is a consistent problem, including for the Starlink systems used in many of these UAVs. As Shashank is saying, there are so many basic problems that come up that make this much more difficult than people imagine.

Tony Stark: Autonomy on the battlefield is an iron triangle between capabilities, cost, and survivability. Capabilities include both effectors and sensors, as well as computing power. Cost includes not only the price of a single system but also industrial scaling. Survivability isn’t just about surviving enemy fire, but also about resistance to dust and required maintenance. Trying to get that equation right in a swarm is really hard. You can have effective, jam-resistant means of communication, but that also makes the swarm cost more than you want at a tactical level. When you actually see a swarm on the battlefield, it will be because someone has solved that equation.

Jordan Schneider: Or solved it for a point in time until the adversary adapts. The underlying question is whether we’ve lived through a revolution in military affairs. Even if advanced AI can replace pilots, you still need someone nearby to set up the system — drones can’t fly that far without trade-offs.

Shashank Joshi: When you’ve made a system that has a long range, can operate in all weather, is jam-resistant, can communicate with other aircraft in a swarm, and has a large payload to cope with up-armored defenses — congratulations, you’ve invented a cruise missile. You can do it cheaper than existing cruise missiles, but at that stage, you have only invented a very decent cruise missile.

Tony Stark: I saw a video over the weekend of a Ukrainian soldier being evacuated by a UGV. I’ve heard reports of this for a while. As a former infantryman, the idea of an unaccompanied wounded soldier being evacuated by a UGV makes me uncomfortable, but I understand operational necessity. How common are UGV evacuations? Is that the best use for them right now? How does it compare to other applications?

Jordan Schneider: Is a UGV a ground robot that can walk like a dog, or is it a little truck?

Shashank Joshi: Normally, they trundle along on treads instead of ambulating.

Rob Lee: UGVs have become a significant focus for Ukraine this year, primarily to offset their shortage of infantry personnel and reduce casualties by taking over dangerous missions. Roughly 90% of UGV missions are logistics — last year, probably 70% or more of UGVs were procured for this purpose. Some units that invested in this technology early, such as the 3rd Assault Brigade and the Khartia Brigade, are more experienced in their use, but adoption is becoming common across all units.

UGVs excel at transporting heavy equipment — up to 300 lbs of ammunition, food, and water. They can carry items that are too heavy for UAVs, such as a .50-caliber machine gun. This ground-based logistical support complements the use of night bomber UAVs, like the Vampire drone, that were previously the main method for resupply. Now, it is common for the engineer sections within Ukrainian brigades to operate both UGVs and night bomber UAVs to support their battalions.

While UGVs have been tested as remote weapon systems, their use in direct combat is challenging. The camera often shakes, making it difficult to aim, and an observation drone is usually needed overhead to confirm where rounds are landing. More critically, signal loss is a frequent problem. UGVs are vulnerable targets — they’re smaller than a truck, but big enough to be easy targets, and Russian forces constantly hunt them with FPV drones. Both sides heavily target roads and supply routes, and any vehicle spotted — be it a truck, an infantry squad, or a UGV — will be attacked. UGVs are often hit.

UGV casualty evacuations are becoming more common, though I’m not sure of their scale. Many brigades reserve this function for extreme situations where the UGV is the only viable option, such as reaching a wound that cannot be treated at the front line or accessing positions that are nearly impossible to get to otherwise. There are reports of soldiers with catastrophic injuries, including lost legs, remaining at the front for days or weeks before evacuation is possible.

The main risk for these missions is signal loss. A disconnected UGV can leave a wounded soldier stranded, alone on the battlefield. There are videos of Russian FPVs striking UGVs during an evacuation and then dropping grenades on the wounded soldiers, highlighting the danger of these missions.

The fundamental challenge for all UGV operations is maintaining a stable signal. Unlike UAVs, which operate high in the sky with a clearer line of sight to their antenna, UGVs are on the ground where the Earth’s curvature, terrain, and obstacles consistently interfere with the signal. To overcome this, operators often need a UAV to fly overhead and act as a signal repeater. Some UGVs are equipped with Starlink for satellite communication, but Starlink doesn’t work under tree cover or in forests. These necessary redundancies make operating UGVs more complex and expensive.

Successful UGV deployment requires more meticulous route planning than for UAVs. The operator must balance the need for concealment from enemy drones with the need to maintain a clear signal, as the very features that hide the UGV can also block its connection. While some units deploy ground-based signal repeaters from elite manufacturers like Silvus, this is a costly solution limited to specific areas. Ultimately, a UGV’s effectiveness is limited not by its battery life, but by its signal range, which is shorter than that of a UAV.

There is a significant need for a terrain-mapping system that would allow UGVs to navigate autonomously, but this technology is underdeveloped. For now, their applications are mostly logistics, with some casualty evacuation and limited remote weapon use. Mine-clearing and demining are also valuable roles for UGVs. Additionally, they are used as “kamikaze” drones; some small units are used for this purpose, but in more extreme cases, UGVs have been loaded with 500-pound aviation bombs and driven into targets like bridges to destroy them.

Europe’s Homework from the Battlefield

Shashank Joshi: These systems are being used extensively elsewhere — the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have used them in Gaza. For them, it is an easier task, as Gaza is a much smaller piece of ground — the entire territory would represent a minuscule patch of the Ukrainian front line. That makes visibility and communications easier. The IDF has used UGVs for a variety of missions, patrolling, sentry duties, setting explosives to breach targets, and the long-standing UGV task of mine and bomb clearance. Ukraine isn’t the only testing ground where we are seeing these developments.

Tony Stark: How many of these lessons are European allies and the American military absorbing? The US seems willing to adopt only the convenient lessons. How much does this translate into budget and policy changes, rather than just a discussion in military schoolhouses?

Shashank Joshi: We need to ask two questions. First, whether we are living through a true revolution in military affairs or seeing incremental changes that, while tactically important, are not a transformation of warfare. Second, which lessons from Ukraine are relevant to other conflicts, and which lessons are unique to Ukraine? These debates are ongoing, partly because we do not know the context of the next war, but also because the answers themselves are unclear. Different observers reach different conclusions.

At the tactical level, the British are in an interesting position with regard to Ukraine. Like the US, they have supported Ukraine at the theater and strategic levels, helping train and advise Ukrainian forces from European headquarters and maintaining a close relationship with the Ukrainian high command. But British forces have been tactically involved inside Ukraine to an extent that the US hasn’t. When I look at British Army training and doctrine, I see an effort to absorb lessons from Ukraine on force organization, the structure of squads and companies, and how to build more effective “kill webs” in an environment of constant surveillance.

The UK is still reluctant to adopt the Ukrainian model of warfare. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the UK’s Chief of the Defense Staff, said, “We would not fight like Ukraine. The British way of warfare is rooted in an expeditionary and maneuverist mindset.” He has suggested the UK would prefer to fight like Israel, citing the Israeli attack on Iranian sites using long-range air-launched missiles.

Jordan Schneider: Everyone would like to fight that way.

Shashank Joshi: That’s the criticism. You may not be interested in positional warfare, but positional warfare is interested in you.

Last summer, the British Defense Review stated that ~10% of new spending should go toward innovative projects. A source involved in that review later regretted its vagueness, because it allowed existing systems like the F-35 fighter jet and attack submarines to be mislabeled as “innovative capabilities” — the exact interpretation the authors wanted to avoid. The lessons from the Ukraine war are part of an ongoing intellectual debate. There is no consensus on new ways of fighting, or different equipment and spending patterns.

Jordan Schneider: Describing it as an “intellectual debate” is generous. The real question is whether you are being serious about it. What would be your barometer for gauging if institutions are responding to this war with appropriate seriousness and first-principles thinking?

Shashank Joshi: If you look at what NATO does, you do see lessons being learned. For example, NATO has contracted Palantir to build the Maven Smart system, a digital targeting web that can fuse intelligence from different sources. It is a command and control system that brings us closer to the vision of “any sensor, any shooter” that we’ve discussed before.

General Chris Donahue, head of Allied Land Command, is developing the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line,” which invests in low-cost interceptors and firepower and merges them into a Ukraine-like system. But they’re concerned that current UAV systems may be obsolete in 18 months — should they buy today’s models or wait for tomorrow’s? NATO thinks it needs to invest in the command and control systems that allow it to deploy UAVs most effectively.

For me, the true test would be if armed forces are running exercises, simulations, and modeling that test a wide range of scenarios. If Ukrainian officers visit these exercises and recognize elements of their own fight, and see it as a serious effort, that would be a measure of success.

Jordan Schneider: The split screen in my head is that we need to have less DEI and more warrior culture and to start a war with Venezuela. Thoughts on all of this?

Rob Lee: According to my contacts in the US military, they are trying to learn from Ukraine. I’ve noticed younger service members often see developments in Ukraine on social media platforms like Twitter and Telegram. Older senior generals are less plugged into this open-source information and may be missing key developments, like the role of FPVs.

European countries are making this a priority. The UK is focused on it, and I hear Denmark is as well. The Baltic countries know this war is directly relevant to them. But there are legitimate questions about how these lessons apply to a different kind of war, such as one against China in the Asia-Pacific, which is the US Marine Corps’ focus.

For European defense, if Russia is the main threat, then Ukraine is the ultimate teacher. Ukraine demonstrates daily what is and isn’t effective against the Russian military. The sense of urgency in Ukraine, that exists nowhere else, drives adaptation. There is a lot we should be learning, including that FPVs are here to stay. Other low-cost adaptations, like using a small number of helicopter crews to shoot down thousands of Shahed drones with a significant success rate, are things we should at least be practicing. Ukraine is doing this for a reason.

Russia also keeps adapting and innovating — scaling up its UAV force and creating an unmanned systems force. Elite units at the Rubicon Center, a very effective organization, are responsible for all unmanned systems development — UAVs, UGVs, and naval drones. They have at least eight or nine combat detachments in Ukraine and are constantly spreading lessons and innovations, and using analytics to inform their research and development. This unit is a priority for funding and personnel. The Russian military we see in the future could look very different from 2023.

The innovation cycle in Ukraine is very quick, and both sides are learning. Anytime Ukraine develops an adaptation, Russia copies and learns from it faster than we do because the lessons are more painful for them. I guarantee you, Russia learned more from an embarrassing operation like “Spiderweb” than we did. They’re probably already thinking about how to conduct a similar operation against European countries. In some ways, any new Ukrainian innovation eventually becomes a threat to us, because Russia will learn from it and could apply it against NATO. There’s a tremendous amount to learn, but countries are learning.

Jordan Schneider: We’ve now seen drones fly over airports all over Europe, which is an alarming development. I remember shortly after it happened, you said on a podcast with Mike Kofman that everyone should be aware that this could happen anywhere in the world. It’s shocked me that there isn’t a sense of urgency, at least in America, to install drone defense systems around airports or elsewhere. Shashank, are you surprised Putin’s play hasn’t triggered more concern? Describe the response so far.

Shashank Joshi: There’s a genuine attribution problem here and an intelligence gap. When you speak frankly with officials, they suspect the drones in Europe were Russian activity, but for the drones on the US East Coast last year, they also believe an element of mass hysteria was involved. Distinguishing real threats from false alarms is difficult.

Two weeks ago, I interviewed Mark Rutte, the Secretary-General of NATO, and pressed him on why they could not confirm these drones were Russian. It became clear that they do not know. The official line is that the investigation is ongoing. This suggests one of two possibilities, either the intelligence is so highly classified that they can’t publicly attribute the drones to Russia — rendering the information useless because it can’t trigger a public response — or there is a genuine lack of intelligence.

Another factor is that even if you suspect the drones are Russian, you have to be very careful about shooting them down. As we speak, the British Defense Secretary is loosening the rules of engagement to allow more shoot-downs of drones over military bases. But, imagine if downed UAVs fell on a village or a vehicle, killing or injuring civilians, it would be a political scandal 10x worse for the minister in charge than the fact that a hostile state flew a surveillance drone over a base. The political incentives are a major constraint.

There’s also an economic problem — how do you develop cost-effective interceptors? How can you shoot down enough drones without depleting the stock of interceptors needed for wartime? This is less of a problem for a few quadcopter sightings over a base, but it is a critical concern for decoy drones flying into a country like Poland. You can shoot down one or two, but expending your entire stock of air-to-air missiles on these drones is a strategic win for the Russians. We desperately need an alternative solution.

I am seeing those solutions emerge in the form of low-cost interceptors designed by various companies, as well as other means of interception, including directed energy. Progress is being made. But this isn’t only a technical problem; it’s also a problem of political incentives.

Made in China Neutrality

Jordan Schneider: When you are talking to people on the front, does China come up? Is it a relevant variable in their calculations? Are they annoyed or confused about China’s role in the conflict?

Rob Lee: The UAVs — either as complete systems or components — are mostly coming from China. The DJI Mavic is arguably the most important UAV in this war, particularly the Mavic 3, the Mavic 3T, and now the new Mavic 4 line. Autel, another Chinese company, also produces common quadcopter-type UAVs. These drones are used for reconnaissance and for dropping grenades. They’re cheap, costing only a few thousand dollars, and the Mavic 3T, with its effective thermal camera, is the main reconnaissance system for nighttime operations.

A critical technical step for Ukraine is that they have to hack, or “jailbreak,” the firmware for every Mavic they use. The standard DJI software reveals the operator’s location — this feature needs to be disabled before use on the front line. The Ukrainians report that the Russians receive their Mavics pre-jailbroken from China, whereas Ukraine has to do it themselves for every Mavic. In March, Vadym Sukharevsky, commander of Ukraine’s unmanned forces, estimated Russia had a 6-to-1 advantage in the number of Mavics, which he considered significant. The supply of drones is a major issue. A Ukrainian brigade commander in the Pokrovsk area told me that the biggest problem for adjacent units was a lack of Mavics, even more so than ammunition shortages.

China is also the source for fiber optic cables, with supplies reportedly increasing significantly this year. These cables can be used to make FPV drones immune to electronic jamming, which is a key advantage. Russia is also operating several new UAVs, such as the Garpiya — a knockoff of the Shahed drone — and other modern kamikaze drones like the VTU, which are built with Chinese components.

While China isn’t providing direct military equipment like ammunition, its role in providing dual-use technology is a major advantage for Russia. Ukrainian commanders know they’re at a disadvantage because Russia can procure these systems from China so easily. Ukraine also sources engines and other components from China, but its procurement process is more difficult. While China hasn’t provided direct military aid, given the dominant role of UAVs in this war, its support is an important factor.

Jordan Schneider: China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, reportedly told some European diplomats, “If we were actually supporting Russia, this war would have been over years ago.” Shashank, what are your thoughts on that comment?

Shashank Joshi: He is being cocky — raw industrial capacity alone is not the recipe for victory. But there is a kernel of truth to his point. We spend a lot of time analyzing what China is giving Russia and how close it’s come to providing direct armed support. On certain systems, such as armed UAV designs, China has arguably crossed that line. Even if China isn’t transferring the explosive payload, it’s transferring UAVs designed to be armed. But it isn’t happening on a decisive, war-winning scale compared to what Russia is producing itself — it’s a niche capability.

There was a moment in this conflict where Russia could’ve been in a more difficult position. Had the Ukrainians been able to press their advantage in late 2022, or if the 2023 offensives had gone differently, Russia could’ve been in serious trouble. I think if the Russians had been facing a potential collapse, China would’ve been more likely to step in. They had the stockpiles and the industrial capacity to fill many of Russia’s needs for basic artillery and other systems.

The reason they didn’t is twofold. First, the threshold for engaging was very high because it would’ve meant blowing up their relationship with Europe, which the Chinese want to protect. If they were going to take such a drastic step, it would’ve to be out of necessity, and it was not necessary. We know the Russians gave wish lists to the Chinese early in the conflict, and the Chinese didn’t provide the bulk of what they wanted, even covertly.

Second, China’s motivation would have been to prevent a major Russian defeat, not to accelerate a Russian victory. If you look at the conflict now, while Ukraine’s forces face problems of corrosion and Russia faces long-term economic troubles, no one would seriously argue that the Russians are on the verge of collapse. As long as that’s true, China has other geopolitical interests to protect. The more uncertain US-China relations become, the more China will try to preserve some flexibility in its relationship with Europe, and that will restrain it from providing all-out military aid to Russia.

Jordan Schneider: Oh my god, the UK-China spy scandal.

Shashank Joshi: Crazy, crazy story. Total mess.

Jordan Schneider: Absolutely.

Shashank Joshi: I can’t tell you definitively why this case collapsed. Initially, my gut feeling was that the Crown Prosecution Service — which is independent from government leadership, unlike in the US, I’m sorry to say — dropped the case because government witnesses wouldn’t testify that China is a national security threat. This is a requirement under the arcane 1911 Official Secrets Act used to charge the two individuals. If the government wouldn’t provide a robust assertion that China is a national security threat to satisfy the Official Secrets Act, then I could see why prosecutors dropped the case.

But after seeing the government’s evidence — specifically the three witness statements by Matthew Collins, the Deputy National Security Advisor — that explanation doesn’t hold. Those statements lay out the full spectrum of Chinese espionage. They discuss China’s authoritarian status and the challenge it poses, its influence operations, and its willingness to co-opt people early in their careers to influence policy, not just steal secrets. Taken together, I do not know what more the prosecutors could have wanted. They claim they were only 5% short of what they needed for a potential conviction, but I can’t imagine what more they needed.

Jordan Schneider: It’s wild and ridiculous. I’m not a UK legal expert, but it seems like there was a political decision to pull this case. I do not see another explanation.

Shashank Joshi: No, I do not think that’s true. We should not underestimate the Crown Prosecutor’s (CPS) independence. Prime Minister Starmer is a former Director of Public Prosecutions and former head of the CPS. He is strictly by the book on these matters and wouldn’t quash the case behind the scenes. That’s not how the system works.

It’s possible they decided to withhold evidence to avoid declaring in open court that “we are petrified of China and China is a massive national security threat.” But the witness statements do not soft-pedal the threat from China, if they were trying to avoid a diplomatic row, these are not the statements they would have provided. I think the prosecution was overly risk-averse or incompetent.

As this was going on, the government was grappling with its broader position on China, including the major decision to approve the new Chinese Embassy in East London. The proposed site is the former Royal Mint, where the Opium Wars ransom was taken in the 1840s. Amazingly, this detail has not been picked up by the British press. I find it incredible that the Chinese want to build their gigantic, Bond-villain-style mega-embassy on that exact spot. That decision was delayed again, and we are back in limbo, with the Chinese threatening grave consequences if the project is not approved. The hot potato has been kicked down the road again, to mix metaphors.

Trump’s ADHD Peace Process

[note: this show was recorded before Trump announced sanctioned on Russian oil]

Jordan Schneider: We will have to check on this again in a month or two. It seems likely the Trump administration will be inconsistent on this issue — wanting a quick solution and being agnostic about the long-term consequences. How much of these high-level summits and political dramas ripple down to the people on the front lines?

Rob Lee: There is an element of this that affects the Ukrainians who are fighting. They want American support, and for some, there is an idealistic view of the US as the leading democratic country and a global supporter of freedom. They see themselves as fighting against authoritarianism and oligarchy, and for democracy. For Ukrainians who deeply American ideals, it’s hard to see the US come short of its values.

For most soldiers, they may be frustrated, but their day-to-day reality is unchanged. The Russians have not stopped attacking. They know that even if the US increased weapons deliveries, it wouldn’t immediately end the war or the threat from Russia. Most Ukrainians are realistic — they understand that Russia will be a long-term threat even after a ceasefire or a peace deal is reached.

Ukrainian soldiers do watch developments in the US. During the Trump-Zelensky meeting in February, I was on the front line and watched the video with a mortar battery commander in his apartment. It was a very awkward moment that no one was happy about. It’s always a strange feeling for me, as an American, to be there and wonder what they think of me and if these events change their trust. In the end, we all recognized that the meeting went poorly and hoped for things to get better. By contrast, I was at the front during the recent Trump-Zelensky meeting in July, and the mood was more positive.

While Donald Trump’s rhetoric changes constantly — sometimes favorable to Ukraine, sometimes very negative — what matters is what the US is actually doing. Since taking office, Trump has continued providing the aid and intelligence sharing that the Biden administration had established. It seems that intelligence sharing is as strong, if not stronger, than it was before. If the US is providing intelligence for deep strikes into Russian refineries, that’s notable. The big policy change was the creation of a system allowing European countries to buy US munitions for Ukraine, and that appears to be continuing. Other systems, like air-launched missiles, are expected to arrive in the next few months.

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The rhetoric will go up and down, but if the US continues to provide critical weapons that Europeans cannot produce themselves — like Patriot interceptors and Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRSs) — and Europe can buy these systems, it’s not the worst-case scenario. Some Ukrainians probably have a lower opinion of the US than they used to, but many still view the US favorably and don’t judge us for Trump’s rhetoric.

The key question is whether the Trump administration will coerce Ukraine to accept Russia’s proposal. If they threatened to cut off Patriot interceptors, GMLRS, or intelligence sharing, that would be significant. But if the US continues to assist Ukraine while stating a desire for a deal, there’s no real policy change.

Shashank Joshi: There are two fundamental points here. First, Donald Trump has not endorsed the Russian demand for land swaps — where Russia would cede claims in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in exchange for the unoccupied parts of the Donbas. Instead, he favors a freeze in the conflict. I think a freeze could benefit Ukraine, if it’s followed up properly, a view I might not have held 18 months ago.

Second, Trump is still selling the Europeans weapons to provide to Ukraine. I asked NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte if selling these weapons on commercial terms was less beneficial than the previous policy. He said no, the PURL scheme is at cost price, not commercial terms, and is relatively favorable. So long as those sales continue, and depending on whether you believe systems like Tomahawks were ever seriously on the table, US policy is fundamentally unchanged.

As the Europeans accept more financial burden for arming Ukraine, we need to consider what a European-led peace process might be. If the situation in the spring is unchanged — Ukraine’s position stabilizes after a brutal winter campaign against its energy grid, and Russia continues achieving minimal gains at a high cost — Russia may reconsider its position. Europe needs to have a vision for a peace process. For all his faults, Trump did initiate a peace process, albeit in a cack-handed and ludicrous fashion. Europeans need to accept that reality, but I don’t think the mentality in Europe is ready for that.

Rob Lee: The negotiation on Tomahawks at the last meeting was notable as a signal that Trump was less afraid of escalation than the Biden administration, not because the missiles themselves would be a game-changer. The number of Tomahawks provided would have been small, with minimal effect on the front line.

The important question is what other systems Trump might provide through the PURL system, such as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). If his stance is that he won’t offer aid, but will sell whatever Ukraine wants, then some of these systems could be quite useful. The ERA air-launched missile, if it works, is low-cost and well-stocked, and could make Russia’s position difficult.

We focus too much on Trump’s ever-changing, daily rhetoric instead of what the US is actually doing. Looking at 2026, the war will become more costly and risky for both sides. Both economies are strained, while deep-strike capabilities are improving and critical infrastructure is frequently targeted, and casualties are very high. Although Russia is incurring immense losses, it is not clear where its breaking point is — be it economic, political, or in casualties. Russia has an unusually high tolerance for cost. Can Ukraine, a smaller country, continue to bear similar costs?

Shashank Joshi: Key variables on both sides are obscure or finely balanced. Russia’s demands are so draconian, it’s easy for Ukraine to reject them. If Russia offered a reasonable deal and a secure future for Ukraine, the decision to keep fighting would be harder. For now, it is in Ukraine’s interest to run these risks. Victory isn’t guaranteed, but it has a good chance of frustrating Russian objectives and sowing doubt among Russian leadership.

But we should be humble and accept that the balance could tip. After a rough winter, a Russian reconstitution, or a change in European politics — which I do not see on the horizon — the prognosis for Ukraine could worsen. I’m not confident predicting the outcome.

Jordan Schneider: The day after the Trump-Zelensky meeting in the White House, Rob and I discussed this with Mike Horowitz. Rob’s interpretation was the “taco trade,” where nothing changes, Trump doesn’t move in one direction or the other. But in a year, who knows what he’ll think. There’s a chance he could swing wildly, either siding with the Ukrainians and sending the CIA to blow up oil refineries or siding with Russia.

Shashank Joshi: People have to remember it cuts both ways. Trump isn’t taking risks on behalf of Ukraine. But the reverse is also true — he won’t spend massive resources to please the Russians either. If Trump thinks Putin is dragging his feet, he will detach himself. His tendency to retreat from difficult situations cuts both ways. He won’t coerce Ukraine in a meaningful way, because Ukraine still has things to offer him. We need to detach from the swings of Trump’s pendulum and focus instead on the longer trajectory of his vision, which is limiting the US’s exposure.

Jordan Schneider: The likely scenario is that the US keeps selling weapons to Europe and providing intelligence. Maybe there is a 10% chance Trump swings towards Ukraine, and a 10% chance he swings towards Putin. What I count on most is his deep and abiding ADHD. If something is not working, his attention will be diverted before he goes too far in any direction. That doesn’t mean adopting a different strategy — if yelling at Zelensky in the Oval Office does not get him anywhere, sending ICE to New York City will become his new focus.

Ukranians Soldiers Listen to Lady Gaga

Jordan Schneider: What is popular in the bunkers in Ukraine? What playlists are people downloading on Spotify before they go into airplane mode?

Rob Lee: You hear Western music. There is a song called “Fortress Bakhmut” that became popular during the battle, and it’s still played. Some songs are made for the military or are about the war.

Jordan Schneider: What genres of music are common? Pop, rock?

Rob Lee: It is the military, so there are probably a lot of metal and a lot of rap, similar to music tastes in the US military. I am sure it varies a bit. There are also a lot of women fighting, and they may have different music preferences. There is a joke that a lot of soldiers, even in the tough branches, like “white girl music.” There is always a love for Lady Gaga or Katy Perry. “Bad Romance” came out right before my Afghanistan deployment, and that became the song of our deployment.

Jordan Schneider: From an entertainment perspective, if they are on these two-to three-month rotations, are soldiers downloading shows on an iPad on Netflix to watch? They can’t be busy all the time.

Rob Lee: For Ukrainians, it depends. The infantrymen who go to the “zero line” don’t have tablets. They probably have phones, but connectivity is limited by heavy jamming, so they’re probably not watching TV. For the soldiers at a command post a couple of kilometers from the front line, everything is available. They can play video games and watch Netflix. If you go into a battery command post, and the movie Delta Force may be on one screen and an Xbox on another. It is a mix of entertainment, similar to what US or UK military personnel do downrange.

Jordan Schneider: Well, if anyone wants to write a review of Battlefield 6 from the perspective of someone fighting in Ukraine, I would be happy to run that article.

Japanese politics have brought a lot of drama these past few months. To catch us up, we interviewed , author of the Observing Japan newsletter.

We break down how Takaichi triumphed and what her rise means:

• How LDP moderates fumbled their chances and handed victory to the right,

• Takaichi as Abe’s protégé and policy wonk — and her “Japan First” instincts,

• Why Takaichi is pushing for higher defense spending, a tough line on the foreign population, and a CIA-equivalent for Japan,

• The intricate political maneuvering that secured her power — rewarding allies, sidelining others, and turning Cabinet appointments into chess moves,

• The coalition challenges ahead and why Japanese politics feels like The Hunger Games,

• Japan’s hawkish international stance, the Trump visit, and the limits on the Japan-America love affair.

Thanks to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this episode.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube.

Japanese Electoral Drama

Jordan Schneider: Tobias, on the last show we did, Ishiba was on the ropes. Why don’t you pick the storyline up from late July 2025?

Tobias Harris: We last spoke during that weird interregnum. There had been some premature media reports saying Ishiba was going, which he then denied. After that, the pressure from within the LDP for him to leave just ratcheted up. He had lost two elections and lost the LDP’s control of the Diet — how could he not take responsibility? He managed to push that off for about a month.

Finally, in early September, the LDP released its Upper House election autopsy, analyzing what went wrong and how they got into this situation. The report’s overall conclusion was that the LDP had lost touch with too much of the electorate. There were sins of omission and sins of commission, but the bottom line was that Ishiba had not done enough to fix the situation. The subtext, of course, was that he was going to have to go. His situation became untenable, and within a few days, he was out.

This led into September and a relatively more subdued leadership campaign compared to last year. We had five candidates instead of nine, though in practice, it was really a race among three. The campaign was shorter and involved less crisscrossing the country. The ambitions of the candidates seemed scaled back. It was just a very different experience compared to last year — and last year was not that long ago. The comparisons were very fresh and made it apparent just how much the party had changed in a year’s time.

Jordan Schneider: Who were the contestants?

Tobias Harris: All five had run last year. That was the other thing — we had heard from all of them, so what were they going to say that they didn’t last year?

We had, of course, the now-new Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae (高市 早苗). Koizumi Shinjiro (小泉 純一郎), who was Ishiba’s second agricultural minister, also ran again. We had the now-former Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi Yoshimasa (林 芳正), and Motegi Toshimitsu (茂木 敏充), who had been a foreign minister and senior cabinet minister for much of the second Abe administration and into the Suga administration. Rounding out the group was Kobayashi Takayuki (小林 鷹之), the young, generational-change candidate of the right wing.

We had all these familiar names and very familiar dynamics. It really ended up being a race between Hayashi, Takaichi, and Koizumi for the job.

Jordan Schneider: Was this a case of Koizumi dropping the ball? Did Takaichi really blossom this time around? How do you want to apportion the blame and the credit for how this election turned out?

Tobias Harris: It’s a mix of all of the above, which may be a dodge.

As a quick refresher on LDP elections, they had the option to use emergency rules but didn’t. They held a full election, which means every dues-paying member who meets certain qualifications gets to vote. Those votes determine proportionally how votes are distributed among the candidates, equaling the number of votes cast by the party’s national lawmakers. That’s the first round. If no candidate gets a majority, it goes to a runoff.

What ended up happening was that Takaichi, who is pretty popular with a plurality of the LDP’s rank-and-file, was poised to do well. She actually ended up outperforming her polling by anywhere between five and 10 points.

That was a pretty sizable polling miss. Either that, or there wasn’t a lot of polling in the final days of the campaign, and it’s possible many late-breaking, undecided voters broke for her. That’s certainly possible.

Even so, when you really look at it, Koizumi only underperformed slightly. I don’t think that’s ultimately why he lost. He lost because he wasn’t quite strong enough with the rank-and-file, and Hayashi ended up being a little too strong with them. When you look at their combined vote, they got around 47% together, compared to Takaichi’s 40%. The moderate part of the party just did a bad job strategically. If they had decided, “You know what, one of us has to be the person to inherit the mantle of Ishiba and Kishida, carry it forward, and we’ll join forces,” I don’t think Takaichi wins in that circumstance.

Before the race, there was a lot of talk about how Kobayashi would hurt Takaichi’s vote. That didn’t happen — Kobayashi wasn’t really a factor. But Hayashi and Koizumi were both strong enough to hurt each other, yet not strong enough individually to overwhelm Takaichi. That really is the story.

In fact, I went and crunched the numbers. Things could have gone very differently if just two or three thousand votes across the country had swung. It didn’t just matter that Takaichi won overall. It mattered where her votes were distributed. In the runoff, what matters is the 47 prefectural chapters, each of which has one vote. According to party rules, those votes are awarded to the candidate who wins the most votes in each prefecture.

Takaichi won 36 of the 47 prefectures. But when you look at the margins, there were something like 11 prefectures where Koizumi was within 500 votes of winning. If he had flipped those, it would have given him more votes. More importantly, a lot of the Diet members were following the results in their home prefectures. You probably had enough on-the-fence lawmakers who looked and thought, “Well, okay, the voters in my prefecture voted for Takaichi. Therefore, I guess that’s how I’m voting.”

If Koizumi flips more of those prefectural chapters, the race maybe looks different. It might have been an even closer race than it ended up being. It didn’t end up being that close in the second round, partly because many of those swing voters just went to Takaichi because she won the popular vote. But it could have been a very different race if the votes had been distributed just a little differently.

Jordan Schneider: What are the meta takeaways from this? Given your argument that there wasn’t a big shift in the electorate towards the right, is there a structural problem with the LDP moderates that they can’t get their act together? Do we just have two big egos? Of course, we have two big egos — these are people who want to be prime minister. What brought us down this path, aside from a handful of coin tosses?

Tobias Harris: Look, Ishiba won last year, so clearly the reformist, moderate part of the party has strength. One of the reasons it was surprising that Takaichi won is that the LDP’s electoral defeats last year and this year were concentrated among the right wing. The parts of the party that suffered most, like the former Abe faction, lost 40 or 50 members over the last two elections. There was every reason to think it would be difficult for Takaichi to even match her performance from last year because the parts of the party she needed were smaller. It certainly looked as if she was coming in with a disadvantage.

What ended up happening was not a big swing to the right. As we’ve established, she won because she had a unified plurality while the other part of the party was divided.

In that context, she also had an argument that was perhaps clearer than what either Koizumi or Hayashi were making. Her argument was, “Look, the reason why we’re suffering is that the party has moved too far to the center. We’ve lost the voters who were excited about Abe, and they’ve gone to Sanseitō and the Democratic Party for the People. The answer to our problem is simple — we just need to shift back to the right. Those voters will return, we’ll get them excited, and everything will be fine.”

Were enough voters convinced of that logic? I suppose you could say that. Koizumi’s answer was somewhat vague. I don’t think he had a clear, one-line explanation for how to fix what ailed the party. Hayashi, even more so, as Chief Cabinet Secretary under both Kishida and Ishiba, wasn’t really in a position to say, “We need dramatic change.” He was somewhat handicapped by having to be the continuity candidate.

In some ways, it’s hard to beat something with nothing. It’s not that Koizumi was offering nothing — it just wasn’t a clear, strong signal that could match what Takaichi was saying. Now, whether it works remains to be seen. There are real questions about whether that strategy will prove to be a cure-all. We’ll see what happens.

Takaichi’s Background, Rise, and Style

Jordan Schneider: Takaichi. Who is this person? What should we know about her?

Tobias Harris: She’s been in politics for a long time. She was elected the same year Abe was first elected, 1993. The “class of 1993” has now produced Abe as Prime Minister and Kishida as Prime Minister. It’s been around for a while.

She actually spent some time in parties other than the LDP early in her career because the ’90s were tumultuous. You had parties breaking apart, new parties forming, and the LDP was out of power when she first entered the Diet. It was a confusing time.

In the ’90s, she quickly gravitated towards Abe as part of this emerging group of new, young, ideological conservatives. They saw the end of the Cold War, the LDP being out of power, and the breaking of the economic bubble as an opportunity to make a new kind of politics and introduce wide-ranging reforms. She was quickly part of this group, wound up in the LDP, and really rode Abe’s coattails in some ways in her career.

She was pulled along when he became Prime Minister for the first time, and she was around him when he was “in the wilderness.” When he came back, she ended up in important roles throughout his second administration. He really was her patron. He helped her along and sponsored her. When she ran for the leadership for the first time in 2021, he was basically her campaign manager. She very much sees herself as committed to the same project, as carrying his work forward, dedicated to the “unfinished task of Abe-ism.” That’s very much who she is as a politician.

I will say, personality-wise and just who she is, she’s very different from Abe in a few important ways.

Unlike Abe, she is not a dynastic politician. He was a political blue blood through and through — grandson of a prime minister, son of a long-serving foreign minister who should have become prime minister. Abe felt he had inherited a political legacy he was responsible for carrying forward, which helped him move to the top of the LDP quickly.

Takaichi was not that. She’s from a more middle-class or working-class family in Nara and had to rise on her own. The expectation was that a college education wasn’t even appropriate for her. Her parents discouraged her from going to Tokyo. She really had to pull herself up and into politics. She did not have a parent helping her along and pushing her into the family business.

That makes her different in important ways. It gives her a more approachable charm and probably explains the pretty fanatical following she has among some of the grassroots. People really respond to her in ways that I think are quite genuine. She’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but for parts of the party, they really respond to the fact that she is, I guess you could say, more “salt of the earth.” Some people find that very appealing.

The other thing about her is that she’s really a policy wonk. She really commands the details of many different issues, through and through. She likes talking about it. When she has these conferences, she’ll speak at length and really likes to get down into the details.

This is very different from Abe. The thing about Abe was that he was a big-picture visionary — “This is the way I want to take the country,” and “This is how I think about what Japan needs to be.” With Takaichi, I find her visionary image-spinning can be a little derivative of Abe’s. She is much more comfortable when she starts getting into the details of policy. She’s a very, very different kind of politician in those ways.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk a little bit about having the first female prime minister.

Japan has a relatively low percentage of female Diet members compared to other democratic countries. Is it surprising that Japan’s first female prime minister comes from the right wing? How do we put all this together?

Tobias Harris: Given that the number of non-LDP prime ministers since 1955 is very small, the odds obviously favored someone from the LDP. The LDP, in particular, has few women. I was looking at these numbers today — the LDP has 38 female lawmakers between the two houses of the Diet, which is less than 10% of its 395 lawmakers. Apparently, between cabinet and sub-cabinet posts, a little more than 25% of those female lawmakers are now in the government in some form. There just aren’t a lot of women.

There’s something a little sui generis about Takaichi’s path. Not many women have endured as long as she has or successfully navigated LDP politics to get to a position where she could actually contend for the leadership. There haven’t been many female candidates for the leadership in the first place.

Did she get there entirely on her own? Clearly, she needed Abe’s patronage. I don’t think she gets to where she is without Abe giving her positions when he was able to do that. That’s not to diminish her political talents or her capabilities. She is a capable retail politician and has a strong command of many different policy issues. She’s formidable. But with the LDP being what it is, I don’t think that alone was sufficient to get her to the top, unfortunately. That’s just the reality.

Subsequently, whoever the next female prime minister ends up being may be able to do it by being a power in their own right, not someone who needed an Abe to pull them along. Or maybe Takaichi ends up being that patron herself. One thing to look at is how she’s using her power. Not so much the cabinet posts — only two of her 18 cabinet members are women — but more of the sub-cabinet posts are going to the younger generation of women. Clearly, she sees herself as being in a position to cultivate the next generation of female talent in the party and give them opportunities to develop those skills. So they won’t be as dependent on a powerful man using his power to help them along. It’s a little different, and it just reflects the time she was coming of age in Japanese politics. That was her pathway.

Jordan Schneider: She’s married to a parliamentarian who brought three kids from a prior marriage. Are any of them in politics? Is there a dynasty in the making?

Tobias Harris: I don’t get the sense that that’s what she’s trying to do. But if your father and stepmother are both Diet members, the chances you might be drawn into politics are probably high. Sometimes, though, the opposite happens. Abe’s older brother, for example, was exposed to it, hated it, and wanted nothing to do with it. It’s possible they might just find the whole thing repellent and have no interest.

One more note about Takaichi herself — she is a thoroughly political being. She is just so steeped in it — it really is her life. Yes, there are lots of stories about her hobbies — how she’s a fan of the Hanshin Tigers, she likes cars, and she had been a heavy metal drummer — but ultimately, this is someone who is thoroughly in the arena, a lot like Abe was. Ishiba teased her for her work ethic, the fact that she is really tireless, keeps long hours, and is just devoted to doing the work. That really is who she is as a politician in a lot of ways.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about some of her policies. We’ll start with international relations and national defense. What’s remarkable about her agenda?

Tobias Harris: She is a hawk through and through. There’s really no question about that. She sees the world as dangerous, which is pretty much a consensus position in Japanese politics now, but she sees it with a greater urgency and has been sounding the alarm for longer. She sees the risks Japan faces being on the front lines, facing off against three nuclear-armed states right in its neighborhood that are working increasingly close together.

She sees a world of challenges. That includes traditional military threats, but it’s also food security, energy security, economic security, supply chains — it’s all of that. She sees many threats that Japan must essentially steel itself and harden itself against. Both last year and this year, when you look at how she has campaigned, that has been the essence of her message — we need a strong Japan because it’s a dangerous world, and I’m going to do what it takes to meet those threats.

Jordan Schneider: ChatGPT told me that one of the kids is a prefectural assembly member in Fukui.

Tobias Harris: The prefectural assembly is usually a stepping stone to national politics, so I wouldn’t be surprised.

Jordan Schneider: Yes, around 40 years old. ChatGPT can find basically nothing about the two daughters. Good for the Japanese press for keeping them under wraps. Will it stay like that?

Tobias Harris: I don’t know if that state of affairs will last. In general, the first ladies and the family aren’t in the spotlight nearly as much as they are in the United States. When family members of prime ministers in Japan wind up in the press, it’s usually because something has gone wrong.

Abe’s wife, Akie, was involved in the scandal with a school getting a sweetheart deal on some land. She was a patron of it, which resulted in a lot of unfavorable attention on her and her associations. That wasn’t great. There was also the scandal with Prime Minister Kishida’s son, who was working as one of his father’s aides and basically using government resources to go on shopping trips. Generally speaking, when the children of leaders are in the public eye, it means things aren’t going well. Something’s wrong.

Jordan Schneider: It’s just such a split screen from Kamala’s step-kids and how out there they were, or Biden’s grandkids as well.

Tobias Harris: Maybe it tells you that America doesn’t have a monarch and yet treats its presidents’ families and presidential candidates’ families as if they are royal families, more so than Japan, which actually has an imperial family. The imperial family, of course, gets lots of press coverage and their goings-on get lots of attention. The media focuses on them instead of the family of the head of government.

Defense and Dealmaking

Jordan Schneider: Referring back to her agenda, what is her vision, and how, if at all, does it contrast with our most recent two prime ministers?

Tobias Harris: When you look at what she wants to do, a lot of it is putting Japan’s strengthening of its capabilities first, before anything else. Before cooperation with the United States, before cooperation with other countries, Japan has to do a lot more to defend itself. That means more defense spending, efforts to strengthen the Self-Defense Forces, and acquiring new capabilities for them.

One theme she’s been pretty insistent on for some time is Japan’s need for a proper equivalent of the CIA. You need a true national intelligence director. Right now, Japan has disparate intelligence functions spread across different parts of the government. She wants an intelligence agency directly under the cabinet and the Prime Minister, basically at the same level as the National Security Secretariat created at the beginning of Abe’s second administration. You’d have the National Security Advisor and, I guess, Japan’s DNI, for lack of a better term. She feels Japan has a real deficiency in its intelligence-gathering and analysis capabilities and needs to do more.

There’s a whole range of steps that need to be taken to raise Japan’s capabilities to another level, to complete the work of giving Japan a full national security establishment. I’ve argued in my book and elsewhere that building that establishment was one of Abe’s goals and accomplishments, but clearly, there was more to do. It took Kishida to get defense spending raised to another level. The intelligence apparatus questions were not really addressed systematically during the Abe years. There’s more to do, and she seems poised to move that to another level.

Jordan Schneider: We also have Koizumi as Defense Minister.

Tobias Harris: Yes, which is not bad for him and his resume. He’s done agricultural policy, he’s been the Environment Minister, and he’s done a lot of work in a party capacity on Social Security reform. He has not really had the foreign and national security policy portfolios. He is not necessarily a defense policy expert.

What we have seen in the Defense Ministry over the last several years is that the ministers are generally drawn from what are called “policy tribes” (zoku) in the LDP — groups of specialists in different policy areas. For the most part, with a couple of exceptions, the Defense Minister has been drawn from those ranks. Koizumi is not one of them.

He would probably say that because he comes from Yokosuka, which has a large U.S. Naval base and a large Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force base, he has an innate understanding of defense issues from being in the constituency and working with military authorities. But he’s going to be doing a lot of work to get up to speed. He’s going to be in a position of dealing with big questions with the United States, signaling Japan’s ability to spend more on its own defense. We’re going to be coming up on host-nation support talks in the not-too-distant future. These are big issues, and he’s going to have to step it up.

Jordan Schneider: What was her calculus in putting him there?

Tobias Harris: Both Hayashi, Koizumi, and Motegi are in the cabinet, and Kobayashi is in a senior party post. In the interest of party unity, she wanted to keep all the rival candidates on her side to try to head off some sort of anti-Takaichi movement headed by one of them. It’s the Lyndon Johnson line about wanting your enemies inside the tent.

Ultimately, it’s about giving them work to do, keeping them on board, and forcing them to be part of making the Takaichi government a success. Abe did this as well. He was always trying to co-opt his would-be rivals. This is an old technique.

Jordan Schneider: Can we be serious on national defense if Koizumi is running the defense establishment?

Tobias Harris: Look, it’s a parliamentary system. Oftentimes, you get people doing different jobs and building up expertise on their way up. There are very few political appointees in any ministry, so there’s a lot of dependence on the bureaucracy and, of course, increasingly on uniformed Self-Defense Forces personnel. That’s all just part of it being a parliamentary system — you do the jobs, and then you acquire the expertise and experience.

If it goes well, he can end up in a position where he now has this expertise in addition to his other experiences. I don’t think it’s necessarily cause for alarm, any more than some other, perhaps more concerning, Cabinet appointments we could talk about, maybe less from a national security standpoint.

If you listen to some parts of the Japanese commentary, there’s this idea that Koizumi is somehow not smart, that he’s...

Jordan Schneider: A lightweight.

Tobias Harris: Yes. I frankly have never understood that line. If anything, from the moment he arrived in the Diet, he has been very reluctant to buy his own hype and has repeatedly shown a willingness to put in the work. He’s done not-particularly-glamorous jobs and taken on things that are not the most high-profile positions.

We saw this when he became Agricultural Minister earlier this year. Deployed correctly, his star power and his ability to command media attention can be useful. He took over while the government was dealing with a rice price crisis, and he immediately threw himself into high-profile measures — “I’m going to sit down and talk to retailers.” He used his ability to command media attention to actually move the government’s agenda.

Deployed correctly, he could be a real asset. There’s just a tendency to write him off as just a pretty face, but I don’t actually think that’s true. He has shown an ability to learn, to do the work, and to try to become a more well-rounded political leader.

Jordan Schneider I’ll give him six months to bone up, but we’ll be expecting a ChinaTalk appearance. Apparently, he does speak halfway decent English. The offer is outstanding. We won’t go straight for the PM. We can start with the Defense Minister.

Were there other remarkable aspects of her Cabinet announcement or her first few days on the throne?

Tobias Harris: We can talk overall about the Cabinet. This goes back to her including Hayashi and Koizumi in it. There are a lot of different philosophies about forming a cabinet. Ishiba’s cabinet, for example, relied heavily on friends and allies. In some ways, that might have done him in. He did not reach out to Takaichi to give her a high-profile job, nor did he reach out to the right wing of the party. His cabinet was very much, “I want to be in power with the people I trust most. I feel like I can’t trust anyone else.” It ended up being Ishiba surrounded by his lieutenants.

I don’t know if that ultimately did him any favors. It meant a lot of his most vociferous opponents were not in jobs that restricted their ability to speak out. He ultimately had this persistent bloc of the party that had nothing better to do than criticize how he was governing. That didn’t work well for him.

Takaichi, perhaps recognizing that her victory was not as overwhelming and preponderant as it seemed, reached out to Koizumi and Hayashi. There’s a pretty broad balance of distribution among members of various former factions, representing all different stripes. This is not just a bunch of right-wingers.

One thing I have flagged, though, is relevant to how Japanese governments work. The composition of the cabinet matters a lot for political reasons. But if you want to look at how the government is actually going to work, you have to look at the Prime Minister’s Office (the Kantei) and who is in the jobs most immediately around the prime minister. That tells you who the sounding board is, who’s sitting around the table making decisions and setting priorities, who’s delivering the prime minister’s will directly to the bureaucrats, and who’s deciding how the government communicates its messages.

That group is much more conservative. The people around her — her Chief Cabinet Secretary, her Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretaries, the aides and advisors — are much more uniformly from the right wing of the party. For the cabinet posts, she did the politically expedient thing. She brought in rivals and people who had to be rewarded. But when you look at who’s in the key decision-making roles, it’s a much more conservative group.

Jordan Schneider: How are you expecting her conservatism (and that of her team) to manifest?

Tobias Harris: The most obvious thing will be on a couple of issues. One is national security. To some extent, there’s a consensus here. Kishida was the one who got the deal done to get defense spending to 2% of GDP in the first place. He pushed through changes that allow Japan to acquire strike capabilities. There’s a pretty broad consensus in the party. This isn’t necessarily a conservatives-versus-moderates issue.

Will having this conservative team give it more of an edge, a little more stridency, a willingness to push harder and faster? Yes. She has already talked about how she wants to move up the timeline for revising the three strategy documents, which outline, among other things, the five-year plan for defense spending. On the normal schedule, that wouldn’t be until 2027. She said at her first press conference yesterday that she wants to do that sooner.

Had Koizumi or Hayashi won, I don’t think they would be talking like that. The tone is different on that score. In general, you can see what she is doing that Ishiba was not. Pressing on the gas pedal on defense is one thing.

The other thing: to be a conservative in the LDP now is to be a fiscal dove. She tried to tone back some of the rhetoric. Last year, she ran as practically a modern monetary theorist. This year, she tried to trim it back and at least gesture in the direction of fiscal responsibility. But fundamentally, she still thinks deficits don’t really matter — that there are urgent needs, and if it means running bigger deficits to spend more on defense and other things, then we’ll do that.

That is something that absolutely differentiates her from pretty much any other candidate who might have become prime minister. Everyone else was much more cautious about it. Ishiba was very cautious. The question is whether she’s going to be able to get away with that, given the condition of the bond market already. The bond vigilantes are keeping a watch out. That’s going to be one of the major questions that determines her durability. It’s a major difference and something that will color how she governs.

Other things that might make her different — clearly, even though the consensus within the LDP and across parties on foreign population issues has changed, she centered that in her campaign more than any other candidate. She talked about the need to get foreign tourists to “behave themselves” more and cracking down on lawbreaking by foreign residents. She took a much more strident stance on that, has already created a cabinet portfolio to deal with these issues, and will likely be setting up a headquarters to oversee them. She’s going to move in a more strident direction, partly because she’s trying to head off a threat from the LDP’s right, from Sanseitō as well. She has to have an answer to these issues. That’s another area where she’s going to lean into taking a more hawkish stance compared to others.

Coalition Challenges

Jordan Schneider: Let’s jump forward to her policy agenda. The LDP doesn’t have a majority on its own, so she’s in a coalition government. She swapped. We have a new partner. What is that dynamic? How stable is this all likely to be, Tobias?

Tobias Harris: We have to step back. This has been one of those months where a decade’s worth of events seem to have happened. From the moment she won on October 4, less than a week later, six days later, the LDP’s 26-year-old coalition with Komeito ended. Komeito is a centrist, nominally pacifist Buddhist party that supported the LDP both in government and during their three years in opposition. That coalition broke down.

To some extent, the writing had been on the wall for a while. Komeito’s electoral strength had been declining, and plenty of people on the LDP’s right had tired of relying on a party that consciously described itself as a “brake” on the LDP’s more right-wing tendencies. There was a sense that the coalition would break sooner or later.

This immediately created a problem for Takaichi. By not bringing Komeito into the government, instead of going into the prime ministerial vote with a minimum of 220 votes (13 shy of a majority in the lower house), she was 37 votes shy. This was a much trickier challenge. It created a window of opportunity for opposition parties to try to organize a campaign for someone else to become Prime Minister. The talks got started and looked like they were making progress in overcoming policy differences, but they ultimately failed.

They failed because the LDP managed to pry away one of those parties — Ishin no Kai (日本維新の会), the Japan Innovation Party. This is the Osaka-based party. You could describe it as neoliberal, quasi-populist, or conservative. Ishin had been in talks to possibly elect Tamaki Yuichiro (玉木 雄一郎) as Prime Minister. Then, they got a call from the LDP saying, “We’ll talk.” Within a couple of days, it became clear there would be an arrangement between Ishin no Kai and the LDP to ensure Takaichi would become Prime Minister.

Jordan Schneider: Are they just hanging out in bars? How is this actually going down in real time?

Tobias Harris: There’s a lot of that in Japanese politics. In the back alleys of Nagatacho and Akasaka, near the Diet members’ office buildings, a lot of business gets conducted in drinking establishments. Does it exclusively happen there? Not necessarily. Some of it is formal conferences, and some of it is text logs and surreptitious messages. My understanding is the dialogue between Takaichi and Ishin actually started with a text, which then led to more formal discussions. Politics is politics, right? Same anywhere.

The thing that was uncertain is that Ishin is a weird party. I’ll freely admit I struggle with them because I don’t know Osaka. I’ve spent loads of time in Tokyo. Every time I’ve lived in Japan, it’s been in the greater Tokyo area. I’ve been to Osaka, but never for long, so it’s a mystery to me. Ishin no Kai has had almost a monopoly on power in greater Osaka for 15 years now. I don’t entirely understand how they’ve made it work.

I wrote a review of a Japanese book I read on the first decade of Ishin no Kai. I was trying to understand their ups and downs. It seems they have these periods where they look like they’re booming, expanding nationally, and becoming a major third party to challenge the LDP from the right. Then, everything collapses, they retreat to Osaka, and they have to fight to hold on to it. A couple of years later, they have another boom. This has happened two or three times. It’s a very strange party, and I don’t understand how they’ve endured in Osaka as they have. But that’s who the LDP is now relying on.

It’s not a straightforward coalition. It wasn’t a one-for-one swap because Ishin decided they didn’t want any cabinet posts. They have an “external cooperation agreement.” As far as I know, looking at the text, all they promised to do was vote for Takaichi to become Prime Minister, which they did. Now they are in a position to say, “You’re not doing what you promised,” regarding a lengthy document listing all the policies the LDP has now promised to implement.

In most cases, the promises are vague — “We’ll study this,” or “We’ll set up a headquarters to study that.” But some promises are very specific and have specific timetables. If the LDP backs away, the barriers to exit for Ishin are very low.

I should note, it has been two days. They signed this on Monday — it’s Wednesday. One of the leaders of Ishin has already come out saying, “If we feel the LDP is not living up to its bargain, we will leave.” Takaichi has been Prime Minister for one day, and her partner is already threatening to quit.

Jordan Schneider: What happens if they do?

Tobias Harris: In practice, nothing. You just have a minority government. Technically, they are a minority government now. Unlike in other democracies with external partners, this is not a “confidence and supply” agreement, as far as I know. Ishin has not promised to side with the government on a no-confidence motion. It has not promised to vote for the government’s budget. All of its support is conditional. It is entirely conditional on Ishin feeling that the LDP is acting in good faith to implement the policies it wants.

In theory, they could leave, and Takaichi would still be Prime Minister and her government wouldn’t collapse. The question becomes, would they feel so bitter over the LDP’s breach of faith that they would support a no-confidence motion? That’s the real question.

If it happened before the budget passes, it would be a crisis. We can presume the assumption is that Ishin will vote for the budget next year. The government will ensure Ishin’s preferences are included when drafting it. But if Ishin is dissatisfied before then, all of that is up in the air. What does the budget look like? Where will the LDP get the votes? That becomes the most important question. But that’s only if Ishin leaves before late March.

Jordan Schneider: Okay, so the coalition splits off, it’s a minority government, and they can’t pass a budget. Do we get elections? What happens next?

Tobias Harris: If things are so bad they can’t pass a budget, yes, we’d likely get a no-confidence motion that passes, which would trigger an election. They would “fight it out” at the polls. That would be my presumption if the relationship with Ishin broke down that badly.

Passing a no-confidence motion is hard. There’s a reason Ishiba didn’t actually face one — only one party, the Constitutional Democrats (CDP), is big enough to submit one independently, and they were reluctant. No other party wanted to take the lead. Ishiba escaped without one. You still have to get all the opposition parties on the same page, agreeing, “Yes, this is the time.” It also depends on Takaichi’s popularity. Are things going her way? (Presumably, if the coalition falls apart, they aren’t.) There’s no guarantee, but that would be the mechanism.

The reason one of Ishin’s leaders is already threatening to quit is that they made compromises that are causing friction. The LDP and Komeito broke up, proximately, over political finance reform. This was the fallout of this slush fund scandal that destroyed the factions, at least nominally, and really dragged down the LDP support. The party was supposed to really commit to tightening up regulations on donations — basically who can donate, who can receive donations, how should they be reported.

Earlier, at the start of this year, there had been some pretty extensive debates between the government and the opposition parties about what that should look like. Those talks ultimately broke down because on the one hand you had parties like the CDP and Ishin no Kai calling for basically a total ban on corporate political donations. The LDP is saying, “No, we can’t do that, that’s too much, but we should have a bunch of rules to increase transparency, much more accessible reporting, lower thresholds for reporting and things like that.”

Then you had this middle solution that Komeito and the Democratic Party for the People came up with, which was, “Well, we don’t want an outright ban, but it’s not enough to just do more transparency. Let’s limit the organizations that can receive donations.” Instead of every politician having their little fundraising support group, if corporations want to give money, it has to be to either the national party or prefectural party. That was the compromise proposal.

In the coalition talks, Komeito said, “Hey, we have this proposal. We want you to sign on to it. We want to make this happen.” Takaichi generally has just thought the LDP didn’t have to reform anything — this was not a real issue, not a serious issue. It might also have to do with the fact that the right wing of the party is where the slush fund scandal originated from, and the people implicated in it tend to be her supporters. She was maybe constrained in taking a more aggressive approach to this issue. That ultimately is what led Komeito to say, “Okay, fine, we’re done. We can’t join the government because you won’t sign on to this.”

Enter Ishin no Kai, which has an even more hardline position on this. The LDP is like, “We just pushed away our longtime coalition partner, who was offering a more modest proposal. Sorry, your proposal for a total ban is a complete non-starter.” Ishin no Kai says, “Okay, fine.”

Jordan Schneider: Why do they want corporate money in politics? Why is it important to the LDP?

Tobias Harris: Elections are expensive, and the LDP is really good at raising corporate money. Those majorities don’t fund themselves. If you have an overwhelming advantage in fundraising, are you going to unilaterally disarm? It makes sense that smaller parties want restrictions — they are more dependent on public funding, while the LDP supplements public funding with private funding.

The LDP told Ishin the ban was a non-starter. Ishin then turned around and said, “Okay, if we can’t do that, we have another core political reform idea: there are too many Diet members. Let’s eliminate 10%.”

Jordan Schneider: I love this as an idea.

Tobias Harris: I actually hate it. When you do the math, the lawmaker-per-capita number in Japan is much better (fewer voters per representative) than in the United States, which has three times as many people. Having worked for a Diet member, I’ve seen the relative lack of distance between national lawmakers and voters, and I think that’s a good thing. When that ratio is lower, you have more opportunities to actually see your representatives, interact with them, and be listened to by them. Frankly, there’s no reason for Japan to cut the number of lawmakers.

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For Ishin, this is partly about the urban-rural split. There’s been some correction, but urban Japan (where Ishin is centered) is still relatively underrepresented. They see too many seats for rural Japan, and this is a blunt instrument for fixing that.

They came back with this counterproposal and said, “We’re not going to accept, ‘we’ll study it.’ It has to be done during the Diet session that started yesterday.” You have until the end of the year to draw up this legislation and get it done. Takaichi said, “Fine, we’ll do it.”

She didn’t run this by her party. Immediately, LDP members were saying, “Wait a second. What seats do you plan on cutting? Whose seats are on the chopping block?” You immediately got pushback. You have the Secretary-General of the LDP saying yesterday — one day after signing the agreement — that this is going to be difficult to do. You also have pushback from other parties saying you can’t make a change like this without all-party buy-in. This is too big of a reform to just be something that “we’re the government and therefore we can just at a stroke get rid of a bunch of seats.”

They are setting up a pretty brutal fight within the LDP, between the LDP and Ishin, and between the government and the opposition. Public opinion hasn’t weighed in yet because basically they had a week to process this. Some of those voters who may feel like they’re going to lose representation may have thoughts about this.

Jordan Schneider: How do they kick people off the island? That was why I was so excited about this — the Hunger Games nature of it.

Tobias Harris: It wouldn’t happen until the next election. It’s like redistricting between elections. They just eliminate a district and say, “Good luck finding another,” which does create these “Survivor” situations. In depopulating prefectures, they’ll say, “You had four constituencies, now you only have three.” That means…

Jordan Schneider: Whoever gets the most donations from Toshiba gets to…

Tobias Harris: You end up with these scrambles. It’s not just the incumbent — other parties had candidates in that constituency who also want to run. You get a musical chairs situation where they’re taking a chair away.

There’s talk that if they do it, they would mostly eliminate seats from the proportional representation (PR) lists, not the constituencies. The electoral systems are mixed. This has small parties really upset because they rely on PR seats. The LDP would probably stand to gain the most, even more than Ishin, because the LDP does best in the single-seat constituencies. Small parties have a hard time winning those.

The interests slice in many different directions. It is a big change to spring on everyone, and they only have two months to figure it out. We’ll see.

Jordan Schneider: Any other dynamics to watch? “Japan First”?

Tobias Harris: We haven’t really talked much about the United States. Trump will be in Japan in less than a week. A week from now, he’ll be on his way home. This is a test for Takaichi right out of the gate.

There has been a lot of fretting, particularly in articles over the last couple of weeks, when it was unclear whether Japan would even have a new prime minister. The Foreign Ministry was worried the new leader wouldn’t have enough time to be briefed properly. When Ishiba first met Trump earlier this year, he had about 36 hours of briefings, and the ministry wanted the new prime minister to have at least that much. They needed the new leader in place by a specific date to get that done. It’ll probably be fine.

There’s already talk that this will be an “Abe nostalgia tour” for Trump. They’re expected to go to many of the same stops he visited with Abe in 2019, and Trump is scheduled to meet with Abe’s widow, Akie. Takaichi, at least in the near term, will be able to play that “Abe card.” The fact that she was so close to him means they can bond over their shared affection, which will play a part in ensuring this initial meeting goes well.

This probably explains why she immediately said, “We’re going to move quickly to raise defense spending.” In practice, working out the details will still take time, but being able to tell Trump, “Hey, last week I became prime minister, and the first thing I announced was raising defense spending,” is not a bad opening line.

Her team is also positioned for this. She made Motegi foreign minister, and his calling card has been “I negotiated a trade deal with Trump during the first Trump administration and he called me a tough negotiator. I’m going to be able to really build a good relationship.” The relationship’s in good hands. Akazawa, who negotiated the trade deal for Ishiba, is still in the cabinet in a different role, but will still probably be a channel for communication. In the near term things will probably be okay.

The bigger questions remain — How interested is this administration in Asia in the first place? How durable is the commitment to defend Japan? How committed is Trump to a mutually beneficial trading relationship? There are real questions about the implementation of the trade deal that was signed.

All those questions are for after next week. Next week is about the immediate rapport. Will they get along? What relationship will they have off the bat? I suspect it will be fine.

Jordan Schneider: It’s helpful that she’s a politician through and through. She knows she just has to subsume herself to this. She presumably has plenty of experience subsuming herself to horrific male egos over the course of her career. Having to hold that for two days... I don’t know. We’re rooting for her. I feel like she’s got this.

Tobias Harris: Yes, it will be nerve-wracking, and everyone will be watching to see what the rapport is like. But just from what we’ve seen of Trump — to the extent we can understand his feelings — the way he talks about Abe suggests a real, genuine affection, to the extent he feels genuine affection for anyone. There does seem to be real sentiment there. The fact that Takaichi certainly shares that affection will go a long way.

Even if Abe were alive and somehow Prime Minister again, he wouldn’t have gotten a pass on the tough negotiations. He still would have had to negotiate and find a package that would make Trump happy. The result probably would have looked very similar to what Japan ended up getting under Ishiba. Ultimately, Japan’s interests are Japan’s interests, and any Japanese government would try to hold the line in much the same way Ishiba did.

Takaichi, to the extent that she does what this administration wants — raising defense spending, contributing more to host-nation support, signing up for economic security measures regarding China — can minimize friction.

The question is, will there be a point at which the Trump administration asks for things Japan doesn’t want to do? As Takaichi herself said during the LDP leadership campaign, is there a point — like this idea of Japan giving the U.S. $550 billion — where the actual mechanics are very unfair to Japan? Is there a point where it becomes very hard for Takaichi, or any Japanese leader, to say, “No, we can’t go along with this”? We don’t know yet because we’re still waiting for the details, but that’s a real question.

Takaichi is a nationalist. She wants to stand up for a strong Japan. That includes saying “no” if the United States does something that makes Japan look weak or harms its interests.

This is the duality of the Japanese right-wing. They are very committed to the U.S. alliance. There’s an appreciation that the alliance is the best pathway to bolster Japan’s strength and relevance, and practically, Japan needs the U.S. for regional security. On the other hand, in some corners, there is outright anti-Americanism. In other corners, it’s more “America-frustration” or skepticism, recognizing that the two countries are not aligned 100% on everything.

Sometimes, particularly (but not only) when Democrats are president, there’s a feeling that US values are not necessarily Japanese values. For the right wing, this often surfaces around historical issues. Republicans have criticized Japan over historical issues. The George W. Bush administration and Abe had a fight over the “comfort women” issue. Republicans in Congress were criticizing Abe for his statements about that issue. The bottom line is that the Japanese right has a complicated relationship with America.

Jordan Schneider: I started listening to this meta-podcast called The r/BillSimmons Podcast about The BS Report, about how Bill Simmons’s podcasting has changed and gotten worse over time. One of the main critiques is that basically he doesn’t watch the games anymore. His heart’s not in it. He doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. He’s just making dumb jokes.

Whenever I do a show with you about Japan, Tobias, I feel like I’m inhabiting that post-pandemic Bill Simmons energy. On the tech and China stuff, I actually know what I’m talking about, but not at all when it comes to the minutiae of intra-Japanese party drama.

I’d like to thank you, Tobias, for your patience, and thank the audience as well for their patience as I go on this long journey to understand this country better. Thank you to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this podcast.

Tobias, it’s always a pleasure. I learn a ton and I can’t wait to check in in a few months — once the government falls apart, or not. To be sure, there will be plenty more drama to come.

Zilan Qian is a fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab and an MSc student at the Oxford Internet Institute.

This “AGI Bar” recently opened in Shanghai, where people openly poke fun at the hype surrounding AGI by stating that this bar is “all about bubbles.”

Not many people would point to this bar and say that China is racing towards AGI. Otherwise, the U.S. has zero chance of winning, because AGI is diffused to even bars in China. AGI is a buzzword for business in this context, period.

This is the consideration needed for people who want to know whether China is taking AGI seriously. Before you ask anyone who works on China and AI how AGI-pilled China is, ask yourself two questions: what do you mean by AGI, and who do you mean by China?

This post provides one piece to the picture by looking into a giant AGI wiki made by an open-source community in China. As this piece will show that, for AI hobbyists in China, “AGI” stands for Western tech aura and a desire for quick money.

What is “Way to AGI”?

Created in April 2023, the “Way to AGI” wiki is a collaborative knowledge hub hosted on the Bytedance-developed platform Feishu 飞书 (known internationally as Lark). It functions much like a shared giant Notion workspace — users can upload documents,1 create events, and leave comments on each other’s posts.

Since its launch, the wiki has attracted over 2 million unique visitors and generated 4.5 million total views for its front page. For context, the actual Wikipedia page on “artificial general intelligence” received about 2.1 million views globally during the same period.

The wiki is maintained by the Way to AGI community, an open-source AI collective boasting 8 million members interested in AI and 200,000 active developers,2 according to data published on its community forum. While slightly smaller than the largest AI-focused subreddit, r/ChatGPT (11.2 million members), it far exceeds r/OpenAI (2.5 million members) and the r/agi subreddit (82,000 members)3. The community appears to receive implicit support from tech companies, notably ByteDance — which owns both the Feishu platform and Coze, an AI app frequently discussed on the wiki. It also claims to form collaborations with other tech organizations and AI startups like Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, Zhipu AI, and Moonshot AI.4

Driven by the belief that “AI will reshape the thinking and learning methods of everyone, and bring them unprecedented powers,” the group shares a wide range of AI-related resources on this wiki as part of its collective journey — the “way to AGI.”

Or so they believe they are. This is a “Way to AGI” if and only if the following formula holds:

1. AGI = Silicon Valley

“When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.”

The AGI community may not be AGI-pilled, but they are definitely Silicon Valley-pilled. Discussions, learning paths, and citations overwhelmingly reference Western, especially Silicon Valley, sources. “AI leaders”, recommended podcasts, and must-listen talks come predominantly from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Proof 1: Silicon Valley > Nobel/Turing Prize > Chinese CEOs >> Musk: Ranking the AI leaders

The wiki has a “top AI leader” leaderboard, which is regularly updated to include the top voices of what are perceived as “AI leaders” worldwide.5 On this board, Silicon Valley dominates by a landslide. Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman lead the rankings, with Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li placed even higher than the three canonical AI “godfathers” — Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio.

The first China-based figure on the leaderboard is Robin Li 李彦宏, Baidu’s CEO, ranked ninth (Times AI 100 2023). His high position is somewhat surprising, given that ERNIE, Baidu’s flagship LLM, isn’t considered China’s strongest model. But Baidu has been an OG player in China’s AI ecosystem, investing in research long before the current LLM wave. It has also invested in full-stack AI development, including the recent open-source AI platforms PaddlePaddle 5.0 and Baige 4.0.

Other Chinese names on the list include:

• Liang Wenfeng 梁文峰— CEO of DeepSeek (Times AI 100 2025)

• Zeng Yi 曾毅— Professor on AI ethics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Times AI 100 2023)

• Wang Xingxing 王兴兴— CEO, Unitree Robotics (Times AI 100 2025)

• Chen Tianshi 陈天石— CEO, Cambricon Technologies (AI chips)

• Xu Li 徐立— CEO, SenseTime

• Liu Qingfeng 刘庆峰— CEO, iFlytek

• He Kaiming 何恺明— MIT Professor

In total, seven people from China made the top 26 list compiled by Chinese AGI watchers themselves, with mostly CEOs from private tech companies, and several do not explicitly focus on frontier AI research. The list is likely also heavily influenced by Western rankings, as at least 23 of the 26 have appeared in the Times 100 AI rankings during 2023-2025. (’s Metis list does not appear to be an influence…). Profile photos of Clem Delangue and Marc Raibert are also directly taken from Times 100 AI 2023. However, the latest updated date (July) is before the release of Times 100 AI 2025, so the ranking foresaw Liang Wenfeng and Wang Xingxing’s debut on the 100 AI list.

Despite many of these “leaders” being AGI-pilled, the ranking itself is not. With each leader having one selected quote to highlight their beliefs in AI, only two of the 26 selected quotes discuss AGI. Others focus on AI’s commercial promise, industry potential, and future trends. For instance, the selected quote from Liang Wenfeng, likely one of the most prominent voices in China advocating for AGI, is about open source as a strategy for both commercial value and brand reputation.

Proof 2: Commercial Success > Technical Depth >> AGI Research: Curating Western AI Voices

While hero-worshipping Silicon Valley leaders might be dismissed as superficial fandom, the community’s choice of information sources reveals deeper structural biases.

The section of “recommended foreign information outlets” has 129 sources, with 24 starred as must-read recommendations. Stratechery tops the list, while Lex edges out Dwarkesh. Most of the recommended sources have deep Silicon Valley associations, with one-third focusing on investment. The rest are C-suite executives or top researchers from big-name tech companies like OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia. Although some of the figures from big tech are AGI-focused, the list itself does not appear to be curated for AGI expertise. Rather, the even distribution of top profiles from big tech, mixed with prominent VC voices, reads more like a collection of Silicon Valley’s most commercially successful figures.

When we zoom out to the full list, the AGI flavor dissipates further. Among the remaining 105 sources, approximately 25-30% focus on investment, while 35-40% feature key figures from big tech companies and AI startups. About 15-20% come from U.S. universities, predominantly California institutions like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Caltech. Around 10% consists of journalism and media outlets covering Silicon Valley and venture capital culture, while only a handful represent more independent technical sources like Stephen Wolfram, Nathan Lambert, Lex Fridman, Sebastian Raschka, and SemiAnalysis.6

Out of 129 total sources in a wiki titled “Way to AGI,” only three are explicitly AGI-focused: Eliezer Yudkowsky (founder of MIRI and LessWrong), Ben Goertzel (who helped popularize the term AGI), and John Schulman (chief scientist at Thinking Machines Lab and co-founder of OpenAI), with perhaps two others (Demis Hassabis and Ilya Sutskever) operating in AGI-adjacent territory. Thus, if one wants to “study AGI” through these sources, they are probably learning how big names in Silicon Valley think about AI. And while Silicon Valley thinks about AI in many ways, the most appealing one to this community seems to be how AI can be used to make money.

2. AGI = Quick Money Knowledge:

But emulating Silicon Valley success requires significant time and capital investment. For users seeking faster returns, the wiki pivots from Western voices to Chinese practice: offering step-by-step guides for building and monetizing AI products domestically. Eager novices come here for quick profits, while the “AI pros” they aspire to become are simultaneously seeking to profit from them.

Step 1: Learn just enough

Following the “syllabus” of this wiki, the first step is an introduction to AI, where it uses “what is ChatGPT…and why does it work” as a basic guide. From there, you then learn how to install and subscribe to ChatGPT (step-by-step from how to register a Google account to how to add your credit card, and of course, using a VPN7). There are seven “must-read” entry-level documents, six of which are Chinese translations of English sources, from the book “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?” to articles explaining transformer, stable diffusion, and diffusion models for video generation. The only original content is the seventh section, “Easily Understand 20 AI concepts,” which uses only two or three sentences in Chinese metaphor to explain each concept related to AI, from the chain of thought to the chatbot arena.

Not every introductory content is that introductory, but they are definitely “quick to learn” and extremely “practical”. You can master “Python + AI Without Coding Experience in 20 Minutes,” or know how to “gather LLM Data” through a 400-word article. For some reason, knowing how to select the best GPUs for model reasoning through comparing 38 kinds of Nvidia’s chips, including the H100 and A100, is also categorized as “entry-level content.”

Step 2: Developing “skills”

After (supposedly) mastering these “introductory” concepts, you can then dive into area-specific learning: AI agents, AI drawing, AI video, AI music, AI character + audio combination, AI 3D, ComfyUI workflow, or AI coding. Let us take “AI agents”, which seems to be one of the trending focuses for developers on their way to AGI now. Here, you will start with a Chinese translation of Maarten Grootendorst’s A Visual Guide to LLM Agents.

Then you will read guides on how to create your own simple “AI agents” without any coding through ByteDance’s Coze platform by only prompting a few lines of description of the agent’s characteristics. The guide will not teach you to create the next autonomous system that can navigate complex real-world tasks. Instead, it mostly shows you how to build AI chatbots that act like a language teacher, or an AI workflow that generates outreach emails based on company profiles.

Interested in building, but have no idea what to build? There are loads of examples and analyses showing you the potential of integrating these “AI agents” into different real-life scenarios, as well as analyses of what’s trending in the AI agent market right now. Here, AI chatbots, workflows, and agents literally mean the same thing. Participation matters more than precision under the buzzing excitement of AGI.

Step 3: Practice in contests

After learning how to create your AI “agent”, you can participate in various “Agent co-learning pop-up contests (智能体共学快闪比赛)” to exchange with other people about how to build better bots/agents. Some smaller contests and workshops usually range from a few hours to a day online, with participants entering their own “agents” and experienced developers as judges to see who the winners are. Winners of these small skill contests receive a virtual certificate of “the coolest AI agent.”

Meatier contests also exist, such as the “AI Agent Olympics 2025.” This “global” contest was co-hosted by Rednote, Weibo, Z.ai (which builds the frontier LLM GLM-4.5), and flowith.ai, with “Way to AGI” as one of the guest collaborators. Branding itself as “the first AI agent creation contest in 2025 worldwide,” the contest offers winners monetary awards (15000 RMB, or about US$2100) as well as social media exposure (via Weibo and Rednote). Despite sponsorship from Z.ai — the only AI startup in China openly claiming to be interested in AGI besides DeepSeek — and “Way to AGI,” there is no single mention of “AGI” on the contest website. Instead, the contest’s organizers state that “the rights to intelligence (智能) should not belong to any corporation, but instead should belong to a community of mankind (人类共同体),” with the last phrase strikingly similar to the CCP’s diction “a community of shared future for mankind (人类命运共同体).”

Don’t expect to see some crazily AGI-pilled individuals or the next DeepSeek founder in this contest. According to the bios of group members published on the platform, your peers will likely have some professional background related to AI, perhaps as a prompt engineer, as a product manager at a big Chinese tech firm, or as a full-stack developer. But you will also likely see people who were previously working as graphic designers, visual editors, or real estate agents — jobs that are very susceptible to AI replacement and were hit hard by China’s economic crisis — asking to form groups for related competitions. The poster of the AI Agent Olympics 2025.

Step 4: Believe that you can monetize your agents, while actually being monetized yourself

The way to AGI may be important, but perhaps the way to money is more important. The final step tackles the question of how to quickly monetize your new knowledge. Massive materials on product management are available in this section: how to understand and create demand for agents, where AI agents integrate into companies’ workflows, and experiences shared by so-called “AI agent product managers.” However, even with this general knowledge, there is still a real gap between your immature “AI agents” and AI products that can actually earn money.

There are many “AI pros” who first offer some free learning materials claiming to fill that gap. They will share some introductory content that showcases the great potential of the AI agent market and how easy it is for people with no background to make a profit. Later, they introduce paid core lessons that they argue offer “systemic structure, professional guidance, personalized plans, and feedback” for more efficient learning. Effectively, this so-called “open-source AGI community” becomes the first step for some people to hook novices into their closed-source AI coaching business.

For example, in the AI Agent co-learning section, one member “shares” a piece of great paid content she “recently came across” (she is likely the person who runs the paid course). The screenshot below is how she justifies having paid for lessons (up to 5000 RMB/700 USD) in the open-source community: “It is like exercising in your home or going to the gym for guidance. Different people have different demands. The open-source community offers a wealth of resources suitable for disciplined self-learners. Recently, there have been many new entries to this community, and everyone is asking if there are suitable entry-level courses. Compared to learning from the text in the wiki, most people prefer the teachers to teach step-by-step.”

3. AGI ≠ Deep and Grand Knowledge: The Abandoned Projects

The emphasis on quick monetization comes at a cost. Buried beneath the layers of get-rich-quick content lie the remnants of more ambitious intellectual projects, which now serve as evidence of the roads not taken on the way to AGI.

AGI≠ AI Research

This community did attempt serious scholarship. Early projects included comprehensive translations of Google DeepMind research papers, philosophical explorations tracing the concept of “agent” back to ancient Greece, and an ambitious database cataloging AI agent papers from research groups worldwide, complete with translated Chinese abstracts.

But these initiatives couldn’t compete with monetized content for sustained attention. The AI agent paper database, launched in mid-2023, aimed to index AI agent research papers, provide reviews, and translate English abstracts into Chinese, but was abandoned by December 2023.

AGI ≠ AI Governance

Another abandoned project is the “Global AI Law Handbook (全球AI法规手册).” Originally conceived as an ambitious project to track, summarize, and translate AI-related legislation worldwide, it ceased updating Chinese regulations in mid-2024 and coverage of other jurisdictions by late 2023. Lost within its archived pages are translations of significant policy documents: the official EU AI Act interpretation from 2023, the UK Parliament’s pro-innovation AI regulation framework, Biden’s AI safety and security standards, and the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Some of these regulations remain active today; others, like the project itself, have been abandoned.

The handbook section has since pivoted toward narrower, more commercially oriented content — focusing on practical AI copyright guidance in China, including analysis of AI-generated artwork copyright disputes, while increasingly hinting at paid legal consultation services for users.

AGI ≠ AGI: the missing debate

Perhaps the most telling irony of this massive “AGI wiki” is what’s conspicuously absent: any serious discussion of AGI itself. Among hundreds of documents covering everything from GPU comparisons to monetization strategies, only two articles specifically address AGI as a concept — both written by the same author reviewing industry trends in 2023 and forecasting those in 2024.

The 2023 review reveals the community’s priorities starkly: the author spent literally zero percent of the text explaining what AGI actually is, and dedicated one brief section to “the Road to AGI (迈向AGI之路)”, mainly to forecasting GPT-5’s 2024 release and near-AGI capability (both did not happen), synthetic data training, and emergent behaviors. Then he dives into five detailed sections on development trends and business opportunities.

The 2024 forecast still devotes its main content to analyzing business and investment trends in AI products. After devoting 75% of the article to business trends and 20% to geopolitics, the author finally begins to discuss how actors might control and monopolize AGI technology. However, this discussion ends up going nowhere, with the author pointing out how individual voices are increasingly unheard under grand narratives put forward to celebrate the promise of AI. “I don’t want to talk more about the problems of AGI, because there is no point simply talking about this problem.”

This article captures the irony of “Way to AGI” well. Even though this wiki is titled “Way to AGI,” serious analyses of AGI are packaged in massive amounts of business buzzwords to attract attention. Only glittering investment bubbles and Western tech jargon can survive along the way to AGI, while more serious learning finds no way out.

Rather than leading to AGI, this wiki serves as a way for individuals to feel empowered and hopeful by engaging in AI discussions driven mostly by business interests. The motivation that drives many to this platform — the economic anxiety from AI disruption and China’s macroeconomic recession — gets buried beneath the promise that “AI will reshape the thinking and learning methods of everyone, and bring them unprecedented powers.”

The deeper paradox is: while “Way to AGI” promises to empower people through AI and make the path to AGI accessible to everyone, the only serious discussion of AGI feels profoundly disempowered. The community’s only AGI analysis retreats from complexity and laments powerlessness in the face of larger forces. To some extent, this AGI wiki is similar to the AGI bar, where people indulge in bubbles and avoid reality. Perhaps only by avoiding serious engagement with AGI itself can people maintain the promise and excitement that AGI represents. The moment AGI becomes real, with its implications for power, control, and human agency, the bubble begins to burst.

Last month, Irene and Lily went to South Korea to report on a twin set of robotics conferences. Here are a few notes from their travels.

On Korean Beauty

Irene:

Hallyu — the “Korean Wave” of pop culture that began spreading internationally in the 2000s — taught my generation of Asian Americans/Canadians how to style ourselves. We grew up with few relatable points of reference in mainstream Western culture, as our physical features rarely aligned with American beauty standards. K-pop built an alternative, affordable framework during our coming-of-age, and it was impossible to miss its influence even if you (like me) never consumed much of the music or TV dramas.

Goryeo (the royal dynasty that ruled the Korean Peninsula from 918 to 1392) began sending women by the hundreds as tributary gifts to the Chinese empire during the Tang dynasty. The Middle Kingdom, from then on, routinely scoured the Peninsula for beauties. The third Ming emperor, Yongle, was recorded to have favored a concubine surnamed Kwon from Joseon (the dynasty that followed Goryeo). After Kwon died at the age of 20 in 1410, the Yongle Emperor sentenced perhaps thousands of women from his harem to death on suspicion of poisoning Kwon, according to one Korean chronicle.

Japan’s colonial rule forced between 50,000 and 200,000 Korean girls and women into sexual slavery as “comfort women” for the army. After the Second World War, another vast sex trade sprang up around American-led army bases across South Korea, with girls and women trafficked by their own government to provide “morale” to UN troops and bring in millions of foreign money for the economy.

Beauty remains one of Korea’s most prominent exports. Multilingual advertisements for plastic surgery sprawl throughout Seoul’s affluent Gangnam neighborhood. There is seemingly an Olive Young on every street corner and endless high-end options in shining department stores. The industry works hard to conceal the dark historical context behind Korea’s coerced preoccupation with female beauty, while continuing to push what sociologist Rosalind Gill calls the “surveillant gaze”: symbolic images of measuring tapes, cameras, and microscopes that incite women to constantly monitor and regulate themselves. K-pop labels routinely debut girls as young as fourteen to appeal to teens, both locally and internationally. Appearance-based discrimination is endemic; journalist Elise Hu writes in Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital that for Korean women in the 21st century, looking pretty is “the price of entry in the labor market.”

Lily:

I’m a size small in America, a medium in Taiwan, and a large in South Korea.

For a country with such a famous beauty industry, the selection of lip colors and finishes is extremely limited. Nearly every Korean lip product is sheer, glossy, and pink, formulated to stain your lips for a longer-lasting effect. Eyeshadow palettes lack pigment and are similarly uninspired. While American makeup brands market their products as tools of self-expression, cosmetic advertisements in Korea use words like “perfection” 완벽 and “improvement” 개선 to draw consumers’ attention.

Korean sunscreen, however, is excellent, as are the face masks and jelly foundation cushions (provided you can find one in your shade). The products are very affordable compared to American cosmetics. I browsed many Olive Young stores that were packed with shoppers, yet the single aisle dedicated to American and European brands was always totally desolate.

Similarly, people seem to prefer beige or pink nail polish. I got a set of dark red gel nails done during my trip, and while the service was very fast with lots of attention paid to cuticle care, the final product was unfortunately lacking due to the technician’s lack of experience shaping stiletto (pointed) nails.

People don’t wear much color here either, and instead opt overwhelmingly for beige, white, black, brown, or muted shades of blue.

On Korean Food

Korea excels at making coffee taste good, and Korean people love coffee so much that we saw people sitting in cafes drinking coffee at 9 o’clock at night. In a similar vein, this country doesn’t rise particularly early — most businesses (including many coffee shops/cafes) don’t open until 10 or 11 am. Survey data indicates that South Koreans are highly sleep-deprived compared to other developed nations.

October is the peak month for gejang, raw crab seasoned with soy sauce. I was skeptical at first, but the crab we ate was incredibly fresh with a delicate and complex flavor.

One of my favorite dishes was North Korean-style cold noodles 물냉면, which are made of buckwheat and would fall apart if served hot. They come with julienned apples and a boiled egg, and are served in a refreshing broth with a bit of vinegar.

America supplied the ROK with food aid during the Korean War, and as a result, South Korea developed a serious taste for corn. Convenience stores carry cream-filled cornbread, corn-flavored ice cream, corn-flake-filled granola bars, corn chips, and rice balls full of corn and tuna. Teas made from roasted corn and corn silk are also popular beverages. Only 1% of this corn is actually grown in Korea — the vast majority is imported from the US.

Korea also consumes a truly staggering amount of fake sugar — ice cream proudly labeled “low sugar” is packed with stevia. The yogurt drinks and matcha lattes I ordered in cafes were sweetened with stevia by default, as were bottled teas and protein shakes in convenience stores.

Korean convenience stores have wonderful smoothie machines. For 3,000 KRW (US$2.10), you can pick out a cup of frozen fruit and have it blended in front of you. Be sure to purchase your fruit cup before you blend it to avoid violating smoothie procedure.

Chinese people have a joke that when you vacation in Korea, you get constipated due to the lack of green leafy vegetables. This joke ignores Kimchi and salads, of course — but it’s rare to find blanched greens of the sort that are ubiquitous in China and Taiwan.

Irene’s travelogue in Gwangju

I read Anton Hur 허정범’s 2022 short story “Escape from America” on the bus from Seoul to Gwangju. The great translator of contemporary Korean fiction writes his own dystopian tale: in a not-so-distant future, politics force him and his husband to flee America for South Korea, where democracy persists but their marriage is not recognized — a “reverse-Miss Saigon scenario,” the narrator notes sardonically. Fears of martial law, borders, gender wars — it all felt eerily prescient in the first months of new presidential administrations in both Korea and the US.

Korea’s Gwangju Uprising is often forgotten as an early chapter in the waves of pro-democracy movements that shaped postwar Asia. In part, that’s because the news simply didn’t get out. Only one Western reporter — Jürgen Hinzpeter for West Germany’s public broadcaster, whose experience was dramatized in 2017 by the film A Taxi Driver — was on site when troops began violently containing protesters on May 18th, 1980. Korean media was heavily censored at the time, and many outside South Jeolla Province, of which Gwangju was then the capital, did not learn of the killings until much later. The military dictatorship installed an effective blockade of the city for ten days, cutting off roads and phone lines, while local students and workers built a short-lived self-governance commune and organized themselves into citizens’ battalions.

Chun Doo-hwan 전두환, then-lieutenant general of the military and the main orchestrator of the massacre, officially became president three months later in 1980 and remained in power until 1988. For years after the massacre, Gwangju was a forbidden topic. The novelist Han Kang 한강, who became Gwangju’s most famous daughter with her Nobel Literature win in 2024, was in Seoul in 1980 and only found out about the atrocities from her father’s secret album of Hintzpeter’s photographs years later. The official death toll stands at 164 civilians, but many more disappeared or were not identified in time; the actual number of deaths may be in the thousands. An “unknown martyr” grave in the Gwangju May 18 National Cemetery contains the body of a 4-year-old child shot in the neck.

“That afternoon there was a rush of positive identifications, and there ended up being several different shrouding ceremonies going on at the same time, at various places along the corridor. The national anthem rang out like a circular refrain, one verse clashing with another against the constant background of weeping, and you listened with bated breath to the subtle dissonance this created. As though this, finally, might help you understand what the nation really was.”

— Human Acts, Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith)

The “gwang”/광 in Gwangju corresponds to the Chinese character 光, which means light; Gwangju, then, is the Land of Light. I’ve never been to a city with as many commemorative statues as Gwangju. There is an entire park dedicated to statues in the western part of the main city, the government having commissioned artists to explore and immortalize the city’s history. A walk through the park crescendos with a large metal depiction of three students, their arms reaching forward and their faces bearing solemn expressions in a surprisingly socialist-realist style. Under their bodies is an entrance to an underground chamber, in which the names of all known victims surround another statue, this one of a mother holding the body of an agonizingly young teen — a modern Korean Pietà.

Gwangju is not just expressive about its past; it is passionately, thoroughly meticulous. The Jeonil Building, one of the city’s most iconic structures, has been renamed Jeonil 245 after the 245 bullet traces found on its top floors. The directions and depths of each trace conclusively prove that paratroopers shot at people from helicopters, a fact often disputed by those seeking to minimize the extent of cruelty inflicted on Gwangju’s people. Jeonil 245 contains an entire exhibition dedicated to repudiating false claims about Gwangju, including the oft-repeated far-right conspiracy that North Korea instigated the uprising. The nearby 518 Archives is a ten-floor building that houses documents about the events of May 1980. The top floor allows visitors to watch traffic underneath from the exact same windows where Catholic clergymen watched the military brutalize young students marching from Chonnam University. Some of those clergymen would later stage hunger strikes for democracy and clemency for protestors throughout the 1980s. The Old South Jeolla Provincial Hall, where resistance forces staged their last desperate fight, is currently being restored. Every single exhibit I went to was free to enter and had decent-to-excellent English signage.

This is because Gwangju knows its memory can be inconvenient. In the South Korean narrative, Gwangju’s dead are now martyrs who gave their lives for today’s democracy, but that extraordinary achievement does not feel complete. President Yoon Suk-yeol 윤석열, who demanded the death penalty for Chun Doo-hwan while a law student in the 1980s, briefly imposed martial law of his own in December 2024. Korean politics today, haunted by the North-South division, still struggles to move past Red Scare paranoia. On the American side, Washington’s complicity in the Gwangju Massacre is a delicate topic for the US-ROK alliance. President Jimmy Carter’s administration, judging maintenance of the security status quo in the Peninsula to be more important than its people’s democratic aspirations, authorized the use of South Korean troops under the Combined Forces Command against protestors. Declassified documents show that US intelligence judged the protests to be “riots” caused in part by “deep-seated historical, provincial antagonisms” in Jeolla, and feared exploitation by Pyongyang even without any evidence of North Korean instigation. Gwangju became one of the darkest, yet most obscure, chapters of the Carter years; the legacy he left in Asia was barely acknowledged when he passed away at the end of 2024. And finally, across the East China Sea, Gwangju strikes too obvious a parallel with China’s own event that must not be named. Han Kang’s Human Acts has never been translated into Simplified Chinese by any mainland publishing house, so Chinese readers have to resort to pirating the Taiwanese translation.

Efforts by public history institutions and civil society have allowed the year 1980 to persist in Korean popular memory, even before Han Kang’s recent Nobel win. UNESCO officially listed documents of the Gwangju Uprising on the Memory of the World Register in 2011, prompting a wave of public commemoration. In 2013, the K-pop boy band SPEED released a two-part music video set in Gwangju for their song “That’s my fault” 슬픈약속, to popular acclaim. Note how, at the 11:30 timestamp mark, the second video directly quotes the last broadcast made by Gwangju’s citizen militia at the end of the Uprising:

Protest songs from the Gwangju era have also outlived the Uprising. March for Our Beloved (임을 위한 행진곡), the most well-known one, is now a social movement ritual across Asia, having been adapted by activists in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and mainland China for a variety of causes. Citizens in Seoul once again sung it while protesting Yoon Suk-yeol’s martial law declaration in December 2024:

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Gwangju today is known as Korea’s progressive hotspot, and there is indeed a Portlandia-esque energy coursing through the city. Hipster cafes, lush green parks, and private museums weave around statues of death and survival across the city’s main arteries. The central square, where protestors gathered again to call for the ousting of Park Geun-hye 박근혜 during the 2017 Candlelight Revolution, doubles as a futuristic plaza for the Asian Culture Center (ACC), which showcases experimental art from across the continent. I visited on a rain-drenched day, and there were still large crowds at the ACC enjoying a pan-Asian food festival and open-air dance film screening. The ACC’s ten-year anniversary exhibition, Manifesto of Spring, sports a headline piece with a brassy premise: in a not-too-distant future, democracy collapses in the West and a political refugee tries to immigrate to “Seoul Land” by participating in a population growth program.

The Land of Light, like the rest of us, is surrounded by the haunted fires of history. It insists on sifting through the ashes.

“Why are we walking in the dark, let’s go over there, where the flowers are blooming.”

Tourism in Seoul

Lily:

Seoul is an underrated tourist destination. The city is full of beautiful green spaces connected by excellent public transit, and the early October weather was perfect for long strolls through the sloping streets.

The Korean writing system is a joy to learn, and just a little bit of study can really enrich your experience in Korea. It’s phonetic, and the letters elegantly fit together to form syllable blocks. The shape of the letters is also roughly based on the shape of your mouth when pronouncing each sound (for example, “ㄱ” makes a hard “g” sound, “ㄴ” makes the “n” sound, and “ㅈ” makes the “ch” sound). Irene and I had a great time sounding out menu items, buttons on appliances, and public transport signs, discovering tons of cognates with Chinese in the process. If you add a Korean keyboard to your phone, you can use the letter “ㅗ” to give someone the middle finger over text, and represent crying faces with “ㅠㅠ” and “ㅜㅜ”.

I spent two weeks around the Bay Area in September. What follows are my reflections.

Dreamers encouraged. Writes Didion, California is “out in the golden land, where every day the world is born anew. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no-one remembers the past. Here is the last stop for those who came from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold, and the past, and the old ways.”

On the East Coast, if you start a conversation about the new thing you’re building, the first five questions you’ll get will be about how it won’t work. After experiencing the Bay Area energy, my wife decided that she could found a company and has spent the past month furiously vibecoding.

I’ve been bugging a prominent SF-based podcaster to do more political coverage with little success. I get it now. The weather is too nice, nature too inviting. I heard some light H-1B chatter, but we’re in the AI boom times, there’s too much tech to be excited about to get too worried about something as normie as the state of the Republic. And thanks to Lurie, homelessness is now tamed enough to make the poors someone else’s problem again.

DOGE energy is defensive to a level I haven’t come across in people politically involved before. The mantra that “DOGE is net positive and anyone who doesn’t agree can go fuck themselves” seems pervasive for anyone who’s stuck it out. Honestly, it’s understandable cope for the young SWEs who signed up to improve government services but ended up getting blamed for (/actually) taking vaccines away from babies. It’s striking that many people in the tech right I met say that good things are happening but that early DOGE really set back the one thing they have the most context on.

I was last in SF in 2023 and on that trip spent an afternoon at OpenAI’s office. Even six months after ChatGPT dropped, it still felt like a plucky research lab, albeit one with money for Tartine pastries and a lobby cueing off the Amazon Mr. and Mrs. Smith reboot aesthetic.

It’s now Meta, complete with the novel addition of door guards with American flag eyeglass straps and general SOF energy who will under no circumstances let you tailgate into the building.

The best neighborhood is the Presidio, a federal land run by a trust that keeps the park nice, new buildings out, and serves as a great landlord for hedge funds. One guy who worked there said a main draw was that “it’s federal land so none of that homeless shit flies here, baby!” It’s gorgeous but should probably be YIMBY’d out of existence. If Trump ever truly splits from the Elon/Thiel nexus, it would be a great troll move to throw some Trump Towers on top of their family offices.

Banyas, Berkeley, and South Bay

I went to a Slate Star Codex meetup at Lighthaven. There was an EUV lithography textbook lying around, so I read that, spotted Aella crocheting, and chatted with Pradyu about the Singaporean economy. A twenty year old told me he was founding DoorDash for Swaziland (“It’s pretty developed so it makes for a great beachhead”). Sam Kriss said something ahistorical about political violence and it started to rain so I went home.

The next day, I did not have the energy to make it to the banya, so deputized voice-of-a-generation JASMINE SUN to report:

The sauna visit is planned in an 87-person Signal chat with strict attendance enforcement. It’s inspired by the Jewish “schvitz”—a Yiddish word that can also mean “to sweat” or “to be nervous” or “to persevere”—but here describes the ritual of men gathering in steam rooms to gab about politics and business. Our host isn’t actually Jewish, but rather a garrulous New Yorker who self-identifies as spiritually so. He often invites acquaintances to schvitz within 15 minutes of talking. I find him very persuasive.

At 8:30pm on a Monday, I take a $24 Uber to Archimedes Banya in the far southeast of the city, then pay $67 to enter for up to three hours. If your last experience in a sauna was at a Korean-style luxury jjimjilbang, with unending plates of tiled dragonfruit and crab-in-the-shell, featuring nap pods and pool tables and rooms of pink Himalayan salt, the rawness of the SF Archimedes Russian banya experience will come as something of a shock.

It’s crowded on a weekday night. It has a clothing-optional policy, heavy on the optional; you’re guaranteed to see skin of all ages and genders and kinds. The staff are gruff and only speak in a yell. The hot room is extraordinarily hot. If you happen to be wearing jewelry, you’ll soon feel it burn. A steady stream of sweat pours down from my chin to my collar. Next to us, a hairy man lies face-down getting whipped by a prickly bundle of branches and leaves. He’s paying extra for this service. I try not to look.

I’m here with a troupe of nine 20-somethings. Seven are men and half work at a16z. The host is eager to share various snippets of banya lore: Did you know the Warriors come sometimes? Ilya used to play chess here. Have you read the n+1 piece about our New York schvitz? Apparently the New York chapter is more bond talk and less AI; another person says he’s “raising funds” for a DC venue. The host reminds me that he’s turned down several reporters’ requests to attend, but I’m just a lowly Substacker, which grants me a slot.

We discuss the NVIDIA lobby, the state of media, and the Chinese century. “You’ll never hear me say a bad word about China,” one says, waist deep in the pool. “[David] Shorism is Maoism,” another adds without elaboration. We then implore a visiting East Coast friend to move to SF. “This is the only place where anything happens,” we say with the confidence of people who really believe it. He says he’ll do it if he gets a job with the Lurie administration. “But he hasn’t texted me back.”

A friend apologized for the “off-road experience” after I pulled onto his Berkeley side street. “It’s scheduled for a 2027 repave!”

With Airbnb practically illegal, I used Kindred to book a place in Northern Oakland for what came out to $50 a day. I had a great experience on the platform and highly recommend it. Referral link here.

Berkeley Bowl is overhyped. I see the novelty of fresh pistachios and fourteen apple varietals, but if the cost is rotting fruit and $18 black lives matter bread loaves, I’m fine buying at Whole Foods, where grocery spend helps to underwrite AI chip demand! Also, Union Square Cafe blows Chez Panisse out of the water.

Berkeley is integrated into a city, while Stanford is a country club that keeps the plastic on its furniture. It’s set back from its town, which is oriented not at college kids but 50-something VCs. A state school with 10k undergrads per grade compared to Stanford’s 1,700 gives the Berkeley campus so much more life. The kids seemed to be having more fun, not stressed about software jobs disappearing before they graduate. And Stanford campus having a Rodin’s Gates of Hell sculpture creaking every few minutes is terrible energy.

Palo Alto’s library had a book sale of primarily Asian language titles. My favorite sighting was a textbook for national-level competitive high school chemistry in Chinese. At the playground, I heard mostly Beijing accents having anxious-brag conversations about their kids’ education.

The South Bay’s suburbs, bland food, and perfect weather felt as alienated from the rest of the country as the perfect suburb dug underground in Hulu’s Paradise. Marin, though, offers an endgame lifestyle.

Mill Valley houses nested in hills gave off Oahu suburb energy, accented by backyard redwoods. The town, one friend quipped, “boasts the highest ratio of black lives matter flags to black lives in the nation!”

We drove out to an elk reserve at the tip of Inverness. It felt like Altus Plateau from Elden Ring.

On the road back, we stopped at Point Reyes and had perfect pastries in the lavender garden of a bakery. Next to it was a small park that doubled as a NIMBY temple celebrating all the farmers that the Marin Agricultural Land Trust had subsidized to stay operating. One property they were particularly proud of saving from houses has “breathtaking reservoir views, easy access to major highways, and residential zoning.” Thanks to MALT, cows instead of humans will get to enjoy that view!

This trip was partially a test to see if we wanted to move to the Bay. Even with two weeks of perfect weather, I’m not sold. Hiking and utopian energy does not outweigh a real metropolis, community, and family.

My first day back, I had a meal at Cafe Mono (with a very friendly ML researcher who dropped in from SF), checked in on the Met’s China collection, and saw a superlative production of The Brothers Size. Better luck next time, California.

Bay Area food and ‘hiking with stroller’ recs behind the paywall. One includes a croissant that my wife said “tasted as good as the one I had immediately after giving birth.”

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On Sunday we dropped one of our best shows of the year featuring former top China analyst for the CIA talking through what’s really going on inside the PLA purges. Have a look at the transcript, listen in on your favorite podcast app or watch the video on YouTube.

Chinese tourism has returned to Kinmen and Matsu, but cross-strait tension is limiting its impact. Jordyn Haime flew from Taipei to Kinmen to investigate China’s aspirations for the ROC-governed island and to explore the role of tourism in geopolitics.

Finding the Chinese tourists in Taiwan-controlled Kinmen is easy: just follow the electric scooters. They accelerate no faster than 25 kilometers per hour, tutting leisurely along Kinmen’s cross-island roads. You can see them gathered in dense clusters outside Poya and Cosmed — favorite shopping destinations for cosmetics and skincare among Chinese tourists — or parked nearby popular spots for social media photoshoots (known on Chinese social media as “check-in points” or 打卡点). That’s where I met Mike, Jenny, and Juan-juan, three twenty-something Fujianese among a crowd of many lined up at the side of the road to snap a picture in front of an aesthetically pleasing bus stop.

They came here during China’s “golden week” — the 8-day national holiday in China encompassing National Day (国庆节) and Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) — to escape the masses of crowds traveling elsewhere in China.

“Since everyone is traveling throughout the mainland, hotels are more expensive. Coming here [to Kinmen], it’s still pretty close, but there’s still a feeling that you’ve left the region (出境),” Mike said. “Left the region, not the country — that part’s very important!”

What is there to do in Kinmen when, for the most part, Chinese tourists (referred to colloquially as 陆客) have little interest in visiting the leftover military infrastructure scattered throughout the island, now transformed into museums and memorials?

“Just take pictures, watch some movies, eat. You can have more of a relaxing trip here, a simple one,” Mike said. Later, they plan to see the new Conjuring movie, which never got a release in China. Other Chinese, too, took advantage of Kinmen’s proximity to catch cult films like Demon Slayer, released in Taiwan two months earlier than in China, and An Unfinished Film, which is banned.

Chinese tourists posing at a bus stop in Kinmen. Jordyn Haime for ChinaTalk.

It’s been about a year since Taiwan’s Kinmen and Matsu islands reopened to mainland Chinese tourists. Kinmen is located about 6 kilometers from the Chinese port city of Xiamen, a distance that takes just 30 minutes to cross by ferry. As such, mainland tourism has been one of Kinmen’s primary industries since 2008, when the cross-strait engagement mechanism known as the “mini three links” (小三通, meaning postal, transportation, and trade links), aimed at improving development in Taiwan’s offshore islands, was expanded. But all that was put on hold in 2020, when the mini three links were suspended due to COVID-19.

Tourism between Kinmen, Matsu (another group of outlying islands governed by Taiwan), and China’s Fujian Province gradually reopened in 2024. But travel remains extremely limited, and local tourism industries have yet to fully recover. Restrictions on the Chinese side stipulate that only residents of Fujian Province are allowed to travel to Kinmen and Matsu, and the number of flights and ferries made available remains limited, with ferry service about half as frequent compared to pre-pandemic frequency. In the year since reopening, only about 190,000 mainland tourists have entered Kinmen, compared to 800,000 in 2019. Chinese tourism also has yet to resume in the rest of Taiwan, with negotiations apparently stuck in a holding pattern. This has created a significant tourism deficit across the strait: Taiwanese people made more than 4 million total trips to China in 2024, according to the People’s Daily, while Taiwan’s tourism industry has failed to fill the gap left by Chinese tourists five years ago.

“Both sides won’t talk to each other, and it’s us working people who get left behind,” one Kinmenese shop owner said.

…

For China, the restoration of the “mini three links” has also meant resuming plans to integrate Kinmen into Xiamen via economic and political coercion, where people-to-people exchange and tourism play an important role. The new Xiamen-Zhangzhou-Quanzhou tourism corridor, established in 2024, aims to promote “comprehensive integrated development with Kinmen” as part of its “cross-strait integrated development” plan announced in 2023. The framework aims to more deeply integrate the two sides by improving communications, trade, and infrastructure development, and creating more opportunities for Taiwanese people in Fujian, including in employment, education, and cultural exchanges. The goal, in Beijing’s words, is to create a “Kinmen-Xiamen living circle” (金厦同城生活圈). In 2019, Xi Jinping proposed the “new four links” (新四通), connecting Kinmen, Matsu, and Fujian by linking their water, gas, and electricity systems, as well as new bridges to the mainland.

Left: “Cross-strait harmony, happy Kinmen” sign at the Kinmen Shuitou ferry port. Right: “The two sides of the strait are one family, working together toward a common dream,” seen at the Xiamen Wutong ferry port. Photos courtesy of Ari Fahimi.

Plans for the Xiamen-Kinmen bridge, to be connected via the new airport at Dadeng island, as seen at a war tourism park in Xiamen. Plans for connection with Kinmen, or Kinmen’s use of the airport, have not been finalized. Photo courtesy of Ari Fahimi.

One of those new links includes the proposed construction of a “peace bridge” that would physically connect Xiamen and Kinmen via Xiamen’s Dadeng Island, where a new international airport is being built in visible proximity to Kinmen’s northernmost points. The proposal remains stuck in the legislature in Taiwan. The DPP sees it as a threat to national security, but it has received considerable support among the KMT and in Kinmen. A 2021 survey found that Kinmenese are generally positive about the prospect of “integrated development in a broad sense,” with the hope that it could improve economic development and employment opportunities. Many I spoke with believe they’d be able to retain their democratic political system, even under deeper economic integration with China.

“If it will bring economic benefits to Kinmen, why wouldn’t I accept this? Politics doesn’t need to involve itself in the economy,” said Huang Yu-ru, who opened a Kaoliang shop at the Kinmen ferry port last year. She says she travels to Xiamen once or twice a month to pick up products she ordered from Douyin. “China is making rapid progress, and Taiwan has been stagnant for a long time. The economy should be the priority. If everyone is hungry, who will care about politics?”

Travelers arriving at Kinmen’s Shuitou ferry port. Jordyn Haime for ChinaTalk.

The identity of Kinmen and its residents is distinct from both sides of the Strait. Kinmen’s Hokkien dialect is closer to the one spoken in Quanzhou than it is to the ones spoken on Taiwan’s main island. Between the 17th and 20th centuries, huge numbers of Kinmenese emigrated to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Money, culture, and architectural tastes from across colonial Southeast Asia gave Kinmen’s identity a uniquely cosmopolitan side. It remained part of China while Taiwan proper was colonized by Japan (1895-1945) and was a holdout for Republic of China (ROC) forces after the CCP declared victory in the Civil War in 1949, experiencing intermittent shelling and bombing from China until the U.S. established relations with the PRC in 1979. As Taiwan democratized, Kinmen residents began visiting their families across the water in Fujian, a process made much easier by the opening of the “mini three links” in 2001. Once an economy that relied almost entirely on its soldiers, a demilitarizing Kinmen now increasingly leaned on Chinese tourism — and a sorghum-based clear liquor called Kaoliang 高粱 — for income.

A KMT stronghold, Kinmen’s residents say they get the best of both worlds: the economic benefits from China and the democratic political system from Taiwan. They want to keep it that way, and most of all, they don’t want a war, its memory far more recent than for most Taiwanese.

“Kinmen and Xiamen were originally connected by commerce and trade, and by our way of life. It was only because of the civil war and cross-strait political relations that they became separate,” said Li Chih-hung 李志鴻, who owns a local specialty shop in Jinhu and sits on the township’s representative council. “Look at us now. We go to Xiamen for shopping. We go to Xiamen for food. The atmosphere between the two sides of the strait is already quite okay. The economies are already integrated.”

Li Chih-hung at his shop in Jinhu. Jordyn Haime for ChinaTalk.

Today, Kinmen and Matsu both technically remain part of the administrative subdivision of Fuchien, Republic of China, a designation that no longer has functional power; after democratization, administrative power was transferred to the county governments of Kinmen and Lienchiang (Matsu).

“I am Fujianese, not Taiwanese,” Chen Yu-jen 陳玉珍, Kinmen’s representative to the Legislative Yuan, told me in her office in Taipei, shortly after she had returned from a 10-day visit to China.

She visits China more frequently than probably any other legislator, she told me, a fact that has sparked controversy in Taiwan proper. She’s supportive of deeper economic integration between Kinmen and Xiamen, and proposed the establishment of an “offshore free-trade demonstration zone” for Kinmen and Lienchiang in Taiwan’s legislature earlier this year.

“I try to study what they’re doing there,” she said. “China, in many aspects, is very advanced, more advanced than Taiwan.”

She says that China wants to use Kinmen “as a model to let Taiwanese know: if you are friends with us, we will help you integrate with Xiamen into a prosperous city. But the Chinese want to take all of the Republic of China. They will not take Kinmen only.”

…

The situation today remains far different from the pre-COVID era, with factors besides just politics complicating the idea of “integration.” The backslide in China’s economy has contributed to the decline in tourism numbers, local lawmakers and business owners said. Those who come are spending less money and less time here than before the pandemic. “They just come to take some pictures, buy bubble tea and fried chicken, and then go back home,” said Li. One retailer who sells tribute candy (貢唐), a Kinmenese specialty made from crushed peanuts, said she doesn’t service mainland tourists at all because she doesn’t have WeChat or Alipay, which requires a Chinese bank account. That’s been a big problem for the police in Kinmen, too, who are unable to collect ticket fees from Chinese tourists who only use those digital pay apps. (Taiwan bans the use of Chinese apps on government devices due to national security concerns.)

Wind Lion Plaza, a luxury shopping mall built for Chinese tourists in 2014, now sits nearly abandoned (apart from a coffee shop and a movie theater) in Kinmen. Jordyn Haime for ChinaTalk.

With the current state of China-Taiwan relations, it’s difficult to imagine things getting much friendlier anytime soon. The Chinese government refuses to cooperate with the DPP despite the Taiwan government’s expressed openness to Chinese tourists. It was the Chinese government that first suspended individual travel to Taiwan in 2019 and banned Chinese students from enrolling in Taiwanese universities in 2020. And it continues to escalate its military and gray zone coercion of Taiwan, putting the Lai administration on high alert for national security breaches. Actions by Lai’s government in the name of security — including deportations of pro-China influencers, new restrictions on Chinese immigrants, and a ban on Taiwanese group travel to China — have been controversial and have further aggravated the relationship.

Tung Sen-pao 董森堡, a local legislator representing Kinmen’s first voting district, says both sides are at fault. Flying to Kinmen and then taking the ferry to Xiamen through the mini three links has become cheaper than flying to any other Chinese city, he says, making Kinmen the most affordable entry point and leading to extreme congestion at airports, especially when flying from Kinmen back to Taiwan’s main island. “People often write to me saying that their parents need medical treatment [in Taiwan] and can’t book flights,” he said, adding that it’s a problem that could be solved through more communication.

“Both sides have an ‘ostrich mentality’ — pretending not to see the situation. There are normal channels for communication, and travel and exchanges can be normalized. Otherwise, I think it would severely harm the rights of the people of Kinmen.”

Jon Czin spent years as a top China analyst at the CIA, served as China Director on Biden’s National Security Council, and now works at the Brookings Institution. We discuss what Xi’s fourth-term means for China’s top leadership and military, Taiwan, and the US. We cover:

• How Xi’s mafioso-style “decapitation strategy” has kept the PLA in line and why he’s purged more generals than Mao.

• Cognitive decline and how end-of-life thinking might be shaping Xi’s succession plans and Taiwan strategy.

• Tariffs, rare earths, and China’s appetite for pain vs. America’s.

• Beijing’s parochialism and its limits in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

• What intelligence work on China actually looks like and whether or not Xi’s era is duller than previous generations.

Plus: who might succeed Xi, comparing the Politburo Standing Committee to a frat house, and why chips and TSMC matter much less in Xi’s Taiwan calculus than most think.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube.

Killing the Monkeys to Scare the Chickens (杀猴儆鸡)

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start with the PLA. You have this remarkable line in one of your pieces that Xi has now purged more members of the Central Military Commission than Mao ever did. What are we to make of this?

Jon Czin: Yeah, it’s a little bit of – to use George W. Bush’s term – fuzzy math. It depends on how you count, and we spent a lot of time looking at this. But he’s on pace right now to have numbers that are comparable. Half of the uniformed members of the PLA have been removed or are missing.

Every summer we get this germination of rumors about Xi’s health or the possibility of a coup, but it felt even more intense this summer, in part because there were so many purges in the PLA. Some people saw that as a potential sign of weakness. Some argued that Xi was somehow losing his grip on the military.

But as we make clear in the piece, I’m skeptical of that argument. From practically day one of Xi’s tenure in office, he has been laser-focused on ensuring that the PLA is under his thumb. The anti-corruption campaign has been an important tool – there are genuine reasons he wants to pursue anti-corruption, but there’s an important instrumental purpose. It’s the key lever of power, and it’s been very clear from the outset that he wants to subordinate them to himself.

The second aspect that I added in a separate piece is that it’s also a question of who’s been purged from the PLA so far. My very rough heuristic for understanding the people in Xi’s network is that it’s a two-tiered structure. If Xi is the center of his own political solar system, there are two echelons to it. There are the people who are inside the asteroid belt – most of the Politburo Standing Committee. On the military side, I’d include people like Zhang Youxia (张又侠), where it’s not just that they’ve crossed paths in their careers. There’s an affinity that goes all the way back to their fathers, who both served in the Fourth Field Army in China’s Civil War together. You see that in Joseph Torigian’s excellent biography of Xi Zhongxun.

For others who’ve been removed, like Li Shangfu (李尚福), the former Defense Minister, or He Weidong (何卫东)), there might be some personal nexus – maybe they crossed paths. There’s this school of thought that if you were in the 31st Group Army in what used to be the Nanjing Military Region and you crossed paths with Xi, that could accelerate your career. But from my perspective, these guys are disposable. Xi can make them and he can break them. His ability to do that only enhances his authority rather than diminishes it.

Jordan Schneider: Generals being disposable was not really a thing for most of Chinese history. Generals had a ton of staying power in Mao’s China. But fascinatingly, instead of doing the pussyfooting around with purges in the PLA that you saw post-Mao, as you very colorfully point out, he went after the monkeys instead of the chickens in his first few years. How does that reform push relate to his broader priorities? And why are we still seeing this 15 years later?

Jon Czin: There are several reasons. When Xi got back to Beijing– keep in mind, it was the first time he was back in Beijing since serving as mìshū (秘书) (secretary) for Minister of National Defense Geng Biao (耿飚) back in the early ’80s – he was frankly appalled by the extent of corruption inside the PLA. The Arab Spring only accentuated that anxiety that corruption was rife. The Xu Caihou (徐才厚) case was all about pay-for-promotion. You can’t build a competent organization if people are getting promoted because they’re greasing palms. That’s a very real concern for him.

Part of Xi’s heritage as a princeling is that he understands how important and central the PLA is to political power. It’s the opposite of the approach previous Chinese leaders took, especially in the post-Deng era, where the military, because of its insularity, was the last place they were able to shore up their political position. Xi said, “This is going to be the place that I start, because if I can figure this out – it’s high risk, but high reward – I will dominate the system because I will have subordinated the PLA to my will.”

Another reason that’s less instrumental and more about policy is that the PLA reforms we saw in that 2015-2016 period were really a centerpiece of Xi’s reform agenda. Especially in the post-Mao era, we tend to see economic reforms as the locus where senior leaders want to focus their political firepower. But for Xi, it was really those military reforms. The system was overdue for a correction. They had a very antiquated command structure and it only became more cumbersome over time. It’s about getting it under his thumb, but there’s also a real substantive policy reason why he wanted to do it. There’s also a compounding effect, because the fact he was able to shake up the high command and streamline it only further enhanced his authority and power over it.

Jordan Schneider: Once you’re the king, you can mess with these poor little nobles all you want, because at the end of the day, it’s your kingdom. Being able to establish that as early as he did seems more reflective of confidence than worry about an internal coup.

Jon Czin: Exactly. By going after Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong (郭伯雄), the guys who would have signed off on every general officer promotion – it’s very risky. To use the mafia analogy, it’s like going after made men and living to tell about it. It’s a decapitation move. You’re going to cut off the head of the network instead of the usual approach of nibbling around the edges and going after people’s pawns or protégés on this political chessboard. By doing that, you send a powerful signal to everybody else in the PLA to be on notice, because they all would have owed their promotions at some level to Xu Caihou, even if they didn’t have a direct nexus with him. Just by doing that and doing it with impunity, instantly people are terrified and Xi gets a lot of wasta inside the system.

Jordan Schneider: I want to come back to 2011-2013. Are you more scared of the Arab Spring – remembering that the PLA did not jump to attention in 1989? Or are you more scared of generals not liking the way you’re treating them and their subordinates and their bureaucracies, and being worried about an internal uprising or coup? It’s clear that Xi chose Route A instead of Route B. To what extent do you think that was a choice that was baked in or something from his personal background or just a sign of the times in that moment? Maybe it comes back to a broader question: to what extent was a centralizing leader in 2012 something that the Party was inevitably going to produce versus one who was going to continue to play by the Deng-era rules?

Jon Czin: Yeah, this is the theory – if Xi didn’t exist, he would have to be invented. I tend to think that Xi had an opportunity. There was a sense of malaise in the Party at the end of the Hu Jintao era. The leadership was adrift, and people, even inside the system, were calling this a lost decade and saying that Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao were basically living off borrowed time and the vigor and reform efforts of Zhu Rongji (朱镕基) and Jiang Zemin from the previous administration.

From my perspective, though, to pursue that line of thought is to deny Xi his unique agency. There was an opening. There was an appetite for greater central control. There was a sense of drift in the Party, but Xi took a crowbar to that opening. The people who backed him in the system didn’t necessarily think that they were going to be the ones who ended up getting hit in the head with the crowbar in some instances. That was always going to be his impulse.

Part of the impulse inside the system is that power in that system tends to be monistic anyway. There’s a tendency for it to centralize. Alice Miller, citing Aristotle, has a great line about this in a very old issue of China Leadership Monitor from 20 years ago, where she talks about how oligarchies are subject to both centripetal forces and centrifugal forces. The natural correction when you start to see this drift, like we saw in the Hu Jintao era, is for the centripetal forces to kick back in and try to say, “No, we need to get our act together. We need a leader who can pull us together.”

Xi was very adept in how he did this. This has always been my mental model of how he operates and the way he was able to centralize control. Because he’s a princeling and he has these networks throughout the system that he was born with, the way Xi approaches the political networks inside the CCP is like – if an electrician comes to my house and I took back the wall and started messing around with the wires, or if Hu Jintao started to do that, even though he’s an engineer, we’d probably get electrocuted. But Xi knows which wires he can touch and which ones he can cut safely and which ones are going to zap him.

Jordan Schneider: Were there ever any wires that could have zapped him at any point?

Jon Czin: Going after people like Zhou Yongkang (周永康), Xu Caihou, Guo Boxiong – that was dangerous. It looks obvious in retrospect, but at the time, if you’re Xi Jinping and you’re a brand new leader just getting up to speed, this is really dangerous. There could have been some meaningful backlash. Part of the art of what he did – maybe it made it a little bit easier by going after elders and people who had already retired from the system, and their links were somewhat attenuated at that point. It also made it more gratuitous. I remember some people saying at the time, “Well, why would he go after these people? They’re already retired. Why not just neutralize them and let them die a quiet death or live a quiet retirement?” But you’re going after the guys in the system with the guns. It’s as simple as that. That’s going to be challenging in that system.

Jordan Schneider: The other thing that he did so smartly was to do it right away. It’s like the idea of the President’s first hundred days. You can undermine or wait out a guy who’s got a year left, two years left, but eight or nine years? For everyone else in the system who’s seeing this battle – who are you going to side with? What’s the better bet? If you don’t have time on your side and you see this actor who’s moving with real agency, who’s young and vigorous, who just beat out other competitors. We already saw Bo get put aside. His ability to push rivals into jails is something that has been demonstrated once in a very spectacular way. For him not to allow anyone to start complaining or build up a rap sheet against him, for the first moves to be these anti-corruption moves – that probably really helped.

Jon Czin: That’s right. It was a blitzkrieg – speed was definitely one of his big advantages. By going after the retired guys, if you’re a mid-ranking officer or even a relatively senior officer, which horse are you going to back? The guy who just retired or the guy who’s going to be making all the decisions for the next 10 – now we’re going into 20 – years? That changes everybody else’s calculus throughout the system.

Red and Expert in the PLA

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about the dynamics of red versus expert in the PLA, what Xi saw, and how he’s tried to shape it over the past 10 years.

Jon Czin: He’s definitely put more emphasis explicitly on the red part of this. What’s really interesting is that there’s this casual notion that the PLA over the last 20 years has been professionalizing. I talk about this in the piece, but that’s not quite right. There was maybe an incipient tendency in that direction during the Hu Jintao era, that because they were becoming more proficient, they were modernizing. But from the Party’s perspective, they don’t want a professional PLA in the sense that Samuel Huntington would have called it – apolitical and politically neutral.

You can see that on the pages of Jiefangjun Bao (解放军报 PLA Daily) on a regular basis where Xi excoriates this idea and reminds them: “You are the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. That is mission number one, two, and three.” You could even see that earlier in his tenure. You would see signs of a backlash against the idea of having a state military. We wouldn’t see the debate or the advocates saying we need a state military, a national military rather than a Party one, but we would see the backlash – which suggests to me there was some debate percolating at that point that Xi very much wants to squash.

He wants them to be red. That is paramount to him. But he hasn’t gone light on the expertise necessarily. It’s not like the guys that he’s elevated to these positions lack the competence or the wherewithal, even if they’ve gotten helicopter promotions. One of the things that’s very much on Xi’s mind is the fact that the PLA hasn’t been to war since its war with Vietnam in the late ’70s and then maybe some skirmishes throughout the ’80s. It hasn’t seen blood, it hasn’t been shot at in anger. Given how small the pool is of people with that experience, there are people in the high command who were involved in that fighting, and Xi’s put a premium on that.

Jordan Schneider: Aren’t there two guys who were majors in 1979 and who’ve stuck around past age 67?

Jon Czin: Yeah, that’s right. Xi likes that. He wants somebody who’s been shot at, who has seen blood in the field. Now that I think about it, it comports with Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi’s father and what it means for Xi’s own mindset. Xi likes people who suffered a little bit, who’ve been hardened, who’ve been tempered. He doesn’t want somebody who’s only known ease and glory and prosperity.

Jordan Schneider: Talk about the idea of a political versus apolitical military.

Jon Czin: There is a real difference, and it can feel a little abstract sometimes. In our own system, for instance, we have a long tradition of having an apolitical military – one that doesn’t insert itself into politics. In addition to that long-standing culture, you also have various layers of mechanisms to ensure civilian control of the military. You have civilians who populate the Office of the Secretary of Defense who have to sign off on things. We obviously have a civilian Secretary of Defense. China has none of that. That’s a really stark difference. They don’t have the same kind of checks and acculturation to ensure political neutrality and to ensure that the Party doesn’t get involved in politics.

But it’s also not part of their self-conception. Part of the PLA’s conception in its own mind is that they are the ones that conquered China for the Chinese Communist Party. Especially for the ground forces, that is their history and that is their legacy. One pithier way to bring this home for listeners: imagine this would almost be like if there were an armed wing of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, and they come to power and that’s who becomes the armed forces. They are loyal to them and their job is to keep them in power. That is the PLA’s original raison d’être. That is an important facet that is core to its being.

Jordan Schneider: The argument you’re making, which is interesting, is that in the early years when Xi showed up to Beijing, he didn’t necessarily see that red energy, but saw an organization which was entirely a self-contained institution that was professionalizing. It was more like 1870s Germany than this bleeding red mechanism.

Jon Czin: That’s right. They were more preoccupied with operational proficiency, building out their navy, maybe even acquiring overseas military access – the big flashy stuff – rather than with long sessions of indoctrination in Marxist ideological tenets. It’s important to keep in mind that in any system, even in a highly professional one, by design the military is a relatively insular institution. There’s a reason people in Washington call the Pentagon the puzzle palace. It’s very technologically advanced, it’s got its own culture, its own intricate layers of bureaucracy and personal networks. That’s true of any military.

But if you’re talking about the PLA, the only real meaningful bridge from the civilian side of the Party to the military is Xi Jinping himself. You might have some contact or exposure as a provincial official – maybe there are mobilization exercises and you might have some contact – but really that nexus with the PLA, because it’s so politically salient, is so closely guarded. That’s why there are no other civilians on the Central Military Commission. Even when Xi is hanging out with the Central Military Commission or the PLA, he’s in a uniform, he’s not in civilian garb.

Jordan Schneider: I love this line where you say that Xi hauled the entire high command to historic revolutionary sites where Mao institutionalized the Party’s control of the military. You wrote this before the Quantico shenanigans over the past few weeks…

Jon Czin: I originally said “schlep,” but the editors took it out and made me say “hauled.”

Jordan Schneider: This is why you don’t write for Foreign Affairs and you write for ChinaTalk instead.

Xi’s Taiwan Playbook

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk Taiwan. You make this argument that Xi’s had a lot of success in power consolidation, corruption fighting, and PLA modernization. The economy? TBD. But also, does he really care all that much? It seems like second or third priority for him. But with Taiwan, which is clearly something he cares about deeply, we haven’t seen much momentum towards a solution that he would be proud to have written in the history books next to his time as party chairman. Let’s reflect on the past decade-plus of Xi Taiwan policy and how it could potentially evolve into a fourth term and a post-2028 election.

Jon Czin: That’s a great point. In my mind, what really stands out is that if you rewind to a decade ago, Xi’s Taiwan policy, following from the Hu Jintao policy, was actually bearing some fruit. The big culminating event would have been 10 years ago when Xi Jinping shook hands with then-Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore. That would have been the first time you had a meeting like that between the head of the CCP and the head of the ROC since the Marshall Mission in 1946 when Mao met with Chiang Kai-shek. For Xi, he loves that kind of historical precedent. But it also ended up being a high-water mark for his Taiwan policy. Of course, he’s had to deal with Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP ever since then, pretty much.

Going into the last election on Taiwan in early 2024, I was worried that Xi and those around him were going to realize, frankly, the intellectual bankruptcy that’s been at the core of their Taiwan policy. What you’ve had over a longer trajectory – initially going back to Hu Jintao – was a softer approach, a very Marxian approach. The line of thinking was that if we change the economic structure, the political superstructure will change. As China’s economic clout grows and economic ties with Taiwan become closer, Taiwan’s just eventually going to come into China’s orbit. It’s going to fall like an apple off a tree into their growing gravity.

After the election of Tsai, you see a clear pivot from Xi towards a more coercive approach. But that hasn’t really been working. What they’ve done in Hong Kong, as everyone knows, has only further alienated Taiwan. It seems like politically the island has actually only gotten further away from the mainland. Where does that leave Xi and his strategy?

During the election in 2024, there was probably a real alignment between China’s outside voice and inside voice in the sense that they were relieved that the KMT won in the LY (Legislative Yuan). They were saying publicly afterwards, “The fact that the KMT has won in the LY election shows that most people don’t support the DPP and its pro-independence policies, yada yada.” But that’s also how they soothed themselves that night, saying, “It’s okay, our policy is still viable, we don’t need to do a fundamental rethink yet at this point.” It keeps hope alive.

Frankly, the failure of the DPP’s recall campaign this summer probably gives Beijing a bit more consolation – maybe they don’t have to really think about this. But what if the DPP did have a full sweep in 2024? Where does that leave Xi? Does he start to get antsy? That’s part of what I worry about, and I argue this in the China Leadership Monitor piece: what happens when Xi gets to his fourth term and he’s staring down the barrel of 80? If the DPP is still in power, does he have to have a deeper rethink?

He’s shown a proclivity throughout his career that when he gets frustrated, he does something to try to shake up the dynamic. As we saw in Hong Kong, he’s not just content to let things stay on cruise control if he doesn’t think it’s going in the right direction. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to all of a sudden have an appetite for the million man swim after 2028. But you could see him giving a long and hard look at some of those more coercive options that people talk about in Washington.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah. The idea of him all of a sudden, overnight turning into Putin seems a little far-fetched with the track record that we have of over a decade of him not just straight up invading countries.

Jon Czin: That’s right. In some ways, Putin is obviously an important partner for him, but he’s also a useful foil for him. Xi has a much greater appetite for risk than others in the Chinese system, e.g., a Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin. But that’s, in the big scheme of things, that’s a low bar to clear. He doesn’t have that same penchant for outright violence and risk-taking that Putin has. He’s much cagier and much more methodical in how he goes about taking risks. It’s not that he doesn’t take them, but they’re much more calculated risks than gambling on the roulette table.

Jordan Schneider: Jon, often in conversations I have, people don’t start with domestic Taiwanese politics or Xi end-of-life thinking, but they start with this idea of the Silicon Shield. Where do you put the availability of access to Taiwanese chips or the broader economic fallout that an escalation could impose in the calculus?

Jon Czin: No pun intended, I would decouple the two. The chips and TSMC actually rank very low on Xi’s priorities when it comes to this. Even though he’s got this techno-industrial fetish, he has enough confidence that China will figure it out over time. If he made the decision to go for Taiwan, he’d scuttle it. He’d do what he needed to take the island, and it wouldn’t factor very high in his considerations.

That’s separate from the broader economic fallout. The kind of cataclysm that could produce is very much on his mind and really gives him real pause. The way I think about it is that if he were to go for some full-scale invasion, he’s basically gambling not just with his legacy, but with everything that the Party has achieved since the death of Mao – all the progress it’s made, all that it’s built up. It could really damage or undo the Party’s legitimacy. He feels like if he’s going to go in, he wants that level of surety because it’s really putting all the chips on the table. He’d rather not do that.

What he’d rather do in the meantime, with a coercive approach, is to demoralize Taiwan over time, keep up the drumbeat of pressure, and hope that it starts to cause the foundations of Taiwan’s polity to crumble over time. He doesn’t necessarily want to go for the blunt force trauma first. That’s the optional last resort, given the costs.

Jordan Schneider: The irony of all of this is that if China evolves in a different direction, this all of a sudden becomes a lot more appetizing. The carrots that have been placed in front of Taiwan since the death of Mao have not been that compelling. The early ’80s was the height of this discussion when we had the most liberal version of domestic China. For it to ever really happen in a happy way, that’s really the development we’re going to have to see. But coercion into this just does not seem like a viable strategy.

Jon Czin: It’s interesting because you make that point about in the early ’80s when this was really a real possibility. Again, Joseph’s biography has been on my mind all year after reading it this summer, because it’s so good. Who would have been the person in the central leadership secretariat with the most experience dealing with Taiwan and the KMT and doing united front work? It was Xi’s old man, Xi Zhongxun.

That gets to another important facet of this. If you poke around in the open source material, it’s not clear who has Xi Jinping’s ear on Taiwan policy. There’s not somebody like a Liu He (刘鹤) you can point to and say, “This guy’s very influential with him.” A lot of that is because, again, he’s a princeling and Xi Zhongxun’s son in particular. He thinks that he’s got his own best handle on this issue because he understands this idea almost genealogically. Who knows how much they ended up discussing it? But if you pair that with his own career trajectory as well...

Jordan Schneider: And Xiamen, right? He dealt with this stuff.

Jon Czin: He dealt with this stuff in Xiamen and Fujian and Zhejiang. He would have been vice governor during the Taiwan crisis in the ’90s. He would have had a front-row seat to this whole dynamic for the previous 30 years. My suspicion about this is that rightly or wrongly, he has a lot of self-assurance on this particular set of issues. That’s why we haven’t seen somebody as his obvious consigliere on this in particular.

Succession Without a Script

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk cognitive decline. The actuarial tables give us a 3% chance a year of a dramatic stroke or him dying, and that steadily creeps up to 3.2%, 3.5%.

But there’s also: “the guy gets old” and even if he’s still around and can be on for five, six hours a day – we’re already seeing him dialing it back with this Li Qiang dynamic where Xi’s doing less international travel, meeting with less of the Prime Minister of Swaziland, etc. Setting aside a stroke or some very dramatic thing where he’s out of commission, what are the different pathways to think of Chinese politics over the next five or ten years if he’s just slowly losing his edge over time?

Jon Czin: There are the actuarial tables, but as I note in the CLM piece, there’s also just common sense observation. This is a guy who’s now in his 70s. He’s obviously overweight and a smoker – maybe former smoker. He’s been doing this impossible job of governing the world’s largest country for the last dozen or so years. He’s got to be tired. That just takes a toll on him. He’s living in this highly fractious political environment where he’s doing things like purging people on a regular basis. He senses threats even when there might not be any. That is just emotionally exhausting. If you’re living in that environment your whole life, and then you’re the king and you’ve got to deal with this on a daily basis to make sure you’re on your A game, in and of itself…

Jordan Schneider: Maybe it works the other way too. Is this just what gets him out of bed every day? Mao always wanted to be a poet at some level, right? And that’s what he got to do during his repose as emperor starting in the ’60s and ’70s. I mean, Xi lives for this. This is what gets him out of bed every day, I’m sure.

Jon Czin: You’re probably right. It’s like a shark – he’s got to stay in motion. Without the game, he would wither. That’s probably a real possibility for a guy like him. You’re right about Mao too. Mao became a poet, but to everybody’s detriment, because now we’re left with this Delphic model of leadership where people go to him and they’re like, “Okay, I talked to the boss, but what does he really want us to do?”

That becomes one of the dangers as Xi ages. People talk about the succession question, but this is going to be one of the real conundrums. Number one, does he name a successor? I don’t think he will until he gets into his fourth term. But then the perennial challenge is always, you’ve got to build your successor up enough that he can stand on his own two feet once you’re gone, but not so much that you feel like they become a threat to you. Even if he does start that process of building up an heir, does that mean he in some ways moves to the second line and you end up with this more fractious political environment, like we saw in the Mao era, where he’s just giving oblique or unclear guidance, and then people are running with that until they run afoul of the line? That becomes a much more precarious political dynamic.

What does Xi think about it? But then what do people around him start to think? They can observe the boss even at a distance. They can do the math and realize that this guy is just getting older. At some point he’s going to have to deal with this question, especially since by the end of his fourth term in office, he’d be 79 pushing 80. It’ll shape the political jockeying that happens around him as people try to ingratiate themselves. “Maybe I could be the heir apparent, or maybe my protégé could become the heir apparent, and I could be some kind of party grandee.”

Big picture, there are two ways for this movie to play out. It’s either going to look like Death of Stalin where the military is going to be involved, where it’s potentially punctuated by violence or a nominal heir apparent being displaced. Or it’s going to be like the movie Conclave – where there is a lot of subterfuge and backstabbing, but it all happens quietly and much more subtly offstage. All anybody sees at the end is the black smoke emanating from the chimney.

Jordan Schneider: Speaking of Xi leaning into the late Deng model or the Mao model, unless health really puts him on his back foot – being Deng and having to fire Zhao Ziyang and having to fire Hu Yaobang – that’s not something that must excite him. The fact that he has two historical examples of this going really badly, plus the fact that we have this whole cult of personality. He likes a lot of this job. He surely thinks he is absolutely indispensable to the future of the Party. There’s so much of him which is going to just try to push off dealing with this whole succession thing. Him moving to the second line strikes me as a very low probability event absent real health issues.

Jon Czin: Yeah, that’s a very fair point. He would be disinclined to do that unless he really feels himself slowing down. Deng and Mao each had to run through three successors before they ultimately landed on somebody who stuck, but not really, even in the case of Hua Guofeng. As a princeling. Xi’s got to be cognizant of that at some level. He undid the old model that Deng put in place where China had figured out some peaceful way to transfer power, even if it was rocky or imperfect. He’s blown up that old system. But he’s got to figure this out at some point. As I say in the paper, he’s created a Henry VIII problem for himself. Whereas Henry VIII spent his whole life obsessed with who was going to succeed him, Xi has done the opposite. He’s tried to procrastinate as much as possible about this question and at the same time, destroy the old way of doing it.

Jordan Schneider: As you point out, the potential successors who don’t have real PLA connections, like Hua and Zhao and Hu – they don’t stick around because some other Party person is going to have that connection. The fact that he is just not letting that develop at all is going to make it really hard for whoever else shows up to stick.

Jon Czin: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Xi had a leg up even though he had relatively thin military credentials. What did he have? He had three years as a mishu to Geng Biao in the late ’70s, early ’80s, he had Peng Liyuan, his wife, and maybe some peripheral exposure during his time in the provinces. In the post-Deng leadership, his princeling connections put him head and shoulders above Li Keqiang or anybody else from his generation. It’s the old line: “ in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” That’s Xi Jinping. He may not have been Deng when he started, but his colleagues weren’t Chen Yun and Yang Shangkun and other guys who were powerful in their own right.

One other aspect of this that’s really interesting in terms of how the succession plays out: there’s a big difference between Xi getting one or two chances to orchestrate his own succession and dub his own heir versus him just dropping dead tomorrow. They’re both going to be fraught and pretty rocky. But in terms of who gets top billing, how this all plays out – that will be very consequential going forward.

Jordan Schneider: Please elaborate.