China Tech Talk

This week, I welcomed back Dan Collins to talk about something that has come to the forefront since the start of the Iran conflict. We are really in a historically unprecedented disruption when it comes to supply chain and energy. What does it mean when this many “molecule” or “atom” get taken off the global market. What will that do to global prices of everything and shortages of things like food? That will cause huge disruptions everywhere. Near the end, Dan and I spent sometime just talking about where the Iran conflict is going at the moment. Always great to discuss something in traditional engineering and hard sciences with someone that have experience in this area like Dan.


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This week, I welcomed back my friend Snek onto the show to talk about what we are seeing so far in the Iran conflict.
We tried to look at it from the view of how the conflict started, how it’s progressing and where it is going. We covered what Iran is likely getting from Russia & China in the form of intelligence and supply chain. We looked at the possible land invasion plans that’s been rumored.
Since Snek is very familiar with both this conflict and the Russia/Ukraine conflict, we also talked about the parallels and similarities we saw in the two conflict. Finally, we went into the geopolitics a little bit based on what we think will play out in the region.


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I have joined a project called the China Research Collective to look into providing English language translations of how China thinks about different topics of modern economy. This week, I invited Qian Yu on the show to discuss it and to talk about the first topic we are looking at together: Embodied AI.
It is very good to have him on the show, because he is in Tsinghua University right now and have access to many of the people involved in China’s LLM and embodied AI industry. Of course, I have my own experience with China’s embodied AI industry which I’ve talked about before. So, I think this is a good thing to explore as I discussed Galbot investment, Xiaomi’s usage of robots in its factories, the entire supply chain, D-Robotics AI chips and services like Tuya (which help customers find suitable model, hardware module & ODM). It is amazing to have access to this supply chain, which allows prototyping in just 4-6 weeks. That’s something not possible if you are working on these projects in America.


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This week, I invited my discord friend “Sagar” on the show to talk about his experience in moving back to China from his finance sector job in America. It is always interesting to broach this topic, because many of us who grew up in the West now see living standard higher in major cities in China than where we live.
I thought it was important for someone who made the move to give everyone an idea of the experience of moving to a tier 1 city like Shanghai and settling down with your friend + looking for a job afterward.
Since we both work in finance, we had a discussion also about Shanghai’s finance sector and what it needs to do to create more service sector jobs to accommodate all the young college grads coming into the work force.
I apologize for audio this week. Due to the fact that Sagar had issue connecting to my usual recording site (vpn problems), the quality of recording was worse than usual.


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This is an emergency episode of my podcast and I invited Bora back to the show to talk about Type 09V submarine.
In my mind, this is possibly the most consequential PLA program of the next decade. Well, this program and the Type 09VI submarine that will likely come along also. This submarine by itself will change the balance of naval warfare globally once it enters service in large quantity in the early 2030s.
Think of a modern Chinese version of Seawolf. That’s what Type 09V is.
And Type 09VI will also be quite the strategic and geopolitical gamechanger because it will be the first non Western SSBN that can get close to CONUS without being tailed. That was never the case for Russian/Soviet SSBNs.
There will be more analysis of Type 09V by myself and others in the future, but I hope this is a good first technical overview online.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com