Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I sit down in Beijing with Tim Clissold. If you read one book about doing business in China in the 2000s, there’s a fair chance it was his Mr. China, the self-aware, admirably self-deprecating tragicomedy about standing between some $400 million of Wall Street money and twenty Chinese joint ventures that weren’t going to plan. He followed it with Chinese Rules, and for years since he’s worked mostly as a mediator between Chinese companies and the foreign investors who’ve fallen out with them. He’s a visiting fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has been living, working, and thinking in and about China for nearly forty years.
But that isn’t why he’s here. For twenty years Tim has been pursuing what I’ve taken to calling his Great Enterprise — his 大业 dàyè — a new A-level in Chinese Civilisation for British schools, modeled on the existing A-level in Classical Civilisation and taught entirely in English, no Mandarin required. He’s assembled a syllabus with a dozen of Britain’s leading sinologists, lined up ten vice chancellors, the chairs of some of the country’s biggest companies, and the money to pay for it. The Department for Education’s answer has so far been no. The campaign is the subject of his forthcoming, self-published book, Teach the People: How to Narrow the Knowledge Gap between China and the West, whose premise is that the Chinese know far more about us than we know about them, and that the gap is now a matter of national security. We test that premise, and then we talk about what closing it would actually look like. Along the way Tim is generous enough to cite my essay The Great Reckoning, which he says shaped the book’s historical frame.
03:44 – Evidence of the knowledge gap
09:18 – Is this more than the ordinary incuriosity of the bigger party? Late Qing parallels, and an energy transition the West willfully ceded
14:49 – What was the West’s Second Opium War?
19:35 – Feng Guifen, the Self-Strengthening Movement, and the reciprocal questions the West should be asking itself
23:12 – The A66 and the Romans: twenty years to widen eighteen miles, a generation that can’t build wealth by working, and Hobbes as a forgotten Western strand
26:41 – Inverting tǐ-yòng: Western values as essence, Chinese methods for use, and whether you can have the electro-state without the party-state
30:40 – Mínzú: nation or race? Nine dictionaries, eight professors, a running battle with the FT, and the Stalin-to-Hitler op-ed that followed
34:42 – The Woodward Scale: a tongue-in-cheek measure of China sentiment, and why knowing China ought to unite hawks and doves
38:34 – The Great Enterprise: why Mandarin alone is pushing water uphill, collapsing language A-levels, native speakers taking all the A’s, and the Classical Civilisation model
43:34 – Nick Gibb’s no, ten merry-go-round ministers, a chairman’s letter to the prime minister, a 272-page curriculum review that never mentions China, and “that’s in the particular”
48:38 – Mind-enhancing and useful: would the A-level matter if China were no threat?
55:55 – Who can say yes? Pockets in Whitehall, a British Tóngwénguǎn, Guan Zhong’s hundred-year horizon, and what a China-literate Britain would decide differently — from Mingyang to Huawei

Paying It Forward
Morrison Cleaver, Beijing-based policy analyst at the China-Britain Business Council — Cambridge Chinese Studies, Yenching Scholar, still in his twenties, and one of the very few Brits of his generation who actually studied Chinese at university. Tim calls him a trailblazer. He’s also the man who lent me his copy of Teach the People so I could read it ahead of this conversation.
Recommendations
Tim: Bleak House by Charles Dickens — the story of an interminable lawsuit that outlives its litigants and ruins plaintiff and defendant alike; deliberately hard to follow, Tim suspects, because the joke is on us. He’s also just read Middlemarch for the first time and loved it. (I’ll always put in a word for Middlemarch — it’s the second time Bleak House has been recommended on this show, so it goes to the top of my list.)
Kaiser: Two novels by Mohsin Hamid, who’s become a friend through the Georgetown Global Dialogues. The Reluctant Fundamentalist — a short, semi-autobiographical novel told entirely as one side of a conversation in a Lahore café, by a Princeton-educated Pakistani who once understood America intimately. And Exit West, a very different and perhaps braver book about a young couple fleeing a city coming apart, in a world where doors open onto Mykonos and north London and an unrecognizable Marin County. Mohsin, I owe you a Chinese novel.

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This week on Sinica, I’m joined again by Afra Wang, the Bay Area-based writer behind the AI newsletter Concurrent, who was last on the show in January to talk about her Wired piece on The Morning Star of Lingao and China’s “Industrial Party.” She’s back with two new pieces of on-the-ground reportage that get beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism: her New Yorker Lede piece on Liangzhu, the town outside Hangzhou where laid-off and burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe code in each other’s living rooms (and where AI and BaZi fortune-telling have become strangely intimate), and a forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s sprawling, lucrative, and largely unregulated “learn AI, get rich” education industry. We talk about why 93% of Chinese respondents tell Gallup that AI will mostly help their country, what that number conceals, and whether what looks like optimism is sometimes closer to acceptance.
Afra’s pieces discussed in this episode:
What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom — The New Yorker, September 23, 2026
[Her forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s AI education industry — [LINK TK, expected after October 12]]
You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel — Wired, January 2026, and our January 2026 Sinica conversation about it
Subscribe to Afra’s newsletter, Concurrent
Also mentioned:
Optimism About AI Globally Widespread Despite Uneven Adoption — the Microsoft-Gallup survey
China’s OpenClaw gold rush — MIT Technology Review
Damien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade
Evan Osnos, Crazy English — The New Yorker, April 2008
Lian Si 廉思, Journey Without a Map 无图之旅：一代青年的自我寻路
Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction — Sinica, 2016

06:51 – Walking into Liangzhu’s living rooms: the San Francisco déjà vu, and the grimness beneath the techno-optimist story the West wants to hear
10:14 – Setting the scene: a real-estate developer’s utopian village, Neolithic ruins, Xi Jinping’s intervention, and a “road-to-food ratio” low enough to build real community
17:30 – Child of the layoffs or child of DeepSeek? The post-COVID “ego death” of Chinese tech — and a quibble about the word “crackdown”
21:42 – Master Qi and the living room as a social form: what Liangzhu offers that a Beijing office or a WeChat group can’t
24:11 – What the 93% really tells us: optimism, acceptance, or FOMO when you can’t protest a data center
29:26 – “Westerners get restless when they can’t protest; Chinese people get restless when they haven’t found a teacher”: qiúzhī 求知, meritocracy as religion, and the company called Shēngcái Yǒudào 生财有道
32:48 – Inside Shengcai Youdao: the “prosperity evangelist” conference room, the ladder from ordinary member to CEO class, Mr. Tree’s Hilton seminars, and who’s actually paying 3,000 yuan a year
37:44 – Scam or ladder? The state’s war on the “paid knowledge” mess, Dragon Ball referral credits, and the security guard running Claude Code on his phone during his shift
41:03 – How it compares to the Valley’s course-sellers; selling hope and upward mobility, echoes of Crazy English, and “the prosperity gospel with Chinese characteristics”
45:30 – “Take us to Silicon Valley!”: what the West means to a room of one-person companies building apps for the U.S. App Store
47:18 – Xiao Kai, the 25-year-old AI filmmaker from Heilongjiang: murder mysteries as model-friendly plots, government commissions, WaytoAGI, and the local-government AIGC fever
55:28 – Lian Si’s Journey Without a Map: a Party insider tells young people to “make peace with the ordinary” while everyone else says learn AI or be left behind
59:59 – FateTell and the gray zone of AI fortune-telling: tarot slot machines in Shenzhen, crystal shops, and Liangzhu as “China’s Sedona”
1:04:13 – Levy, the BaZi cosmology, Sam Altman’s chart, and Kaiser plays the skeptic: the Yijing as “humanity’s first statistical decision model,” the Whole Earth Catalog, and New Age re-imported from the West
1:12:27 – Do they actually believe it? Speech fasting, BaZi compatibility in hiring, and Chinese syncretism at work
1:14:45 – When the local government falls in love with the scene: Crazy Thursday, incubators, “new quality productive forces,” and why Liangzhu’s peak may already be over
1:19:42 – Are Chinese people really cavalier about AI safety? Pragmatism, scarce compute, trust in state capacity, the blind spots of EA — and a preview of Afra’s third piece on China’s “industrial AI slop”
Paying It Forward:
Zilan Qian, a GovAI fellow researching AI governance in China who writes the Substack Until Zilan Finds a Better Name and is a must-read on how AI-safety concepts like “loss of control” translate (or don’t) into the Chinese context. Her most widely shared piece: Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends.
Recommendations:
Afra: Ken Liu’s new collection, The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, whose title borrows a metaphor from Ursula K. Le Guin.
Kaiser: Marilynne Robinson’s Home, the second of the four Gilead novels — set in the same few weeks of 1956 as Gilead but seen from inside the Boughton household, as Glory and her prodigal brother Jack circle a secret the book doesn’t name until nearly the end.
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This week on Sinica, I sit down with Dr. Ruby Wang, whose new book, China Cure: The Rise of a Biotech, AI Medicine and Global Health Superpower (Agenda Publishing, out October 31, with a foreword by Kerry Brown), is the explanation general readers have been missing for one of the most consequential and least understood transformations in China today. Ruby is a rare creature in this space: a practicing physician in Britain’s NHS, trained in surgery, who worked London’s hospital wards through the first wave of COVID; the former head of the UK government’s health engagement in China at the British Embassy in Beijing; a former health adviser within the UN system; a onetime medical adviser at AliHealth in Hangzhou; and a Schwarzman Scholar. She now runs the strategy consultancy Lintris Health and writes the excellent China Health Pulse newsletter and podcast, both of which I recommend to anyone trying to follow this space.
Anyone who spent time in a Chinese hospital in the late ‘80s or ‘90s — the pre-dawn queues, the ticket scalpers, the cashier’s window at every step, the IV drips for a head cold — will find the arc of this book hard to believe. Within living memory, China sent barefoot doctors into the countryside with herbal remedies and antibiotics in army-green satchels; last year, Chinese companies signed something like 186 out-licensing deals worth a disclosed $137 billion, roughly half the global total and close to ten times the 2021 figure, with Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, GSK, and Eli Lilly all buying. Since Ruby gave a terrific interview to my friend Kyle Chan on his High Capacity podcast this spring on the apps, data flows, and clinical AI, I deliberately steered elsewhere: to her family — a deckhand grandfather, a father’s crooked splint, a grandmother’s transnational hunt for Gleevec — to the four reinforcing conditions she argues made the transformation possible, to the “China is fast because China is loose” shortcut and what’s actually behind the speed, to BIOSECURE and its successors, to the AI doctor avatars now fielding millions of inquiries a year, and to the burnout and violence that still bedevil the lives of Chinese clinicians.
10:31 – Two family stories from 1970s Zhejiang: a deckhand grandfather and a barefoot doctor’s crooked splint
15:57 – Four reinforcing conditions, part one: demographic pressure and crisis as catalyst (SARS, melamine, fake vaccines)
23:42 – The long view: Healthy China 2030 and why China’s health ministers are technocrats
27:54 – The cultural inheritance: who signs the consent form, and China’s health codes vs. Britain’s billion-pound app
35:26 – Grandma and Gleevec: a family’s transnational hunt for a drug in 2003
40:17 – The reversal: hǎiguī, copycats to first-in-class, and the tenfold surge in out-licensing
42:35 – Is China fast because China is loose? Where China leads (oncology, GLP-1s) and where it lags
50:22 – BIOSECURE, COINS, and BINSA: who loses when politics meets pharma
55:37 – Digital health in three systems, Ant Afu’s AI doctor avatars, and whether the silver generation can keep up
1:08:44 – “A lifetime of eating bitterness”: Dr. Wang of Guangzhou, burnout, and yī nào
Paying It Forward
Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor at Seton Hall — the go-to voice on the geopolitics of China and health, and Ruby’s first port of call.
Afra Wang, writer of the Concurrent newsletter — Ruby admires how she reads the cultural currents beneath technology, and finds it endlessly useful to take those insights to the health-tech angle.
Olivia Plotnick, Shanghai-based founder of Wai Social — on-the-ground work on branding and consumer behavior across some 30 lower-tier Chinese cities, including health and wellness.
Recommendations
Ruby: Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person, edited by Arthur Kleinman with Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, and others — what being sick reveals about society and culture in China: psychiatry, caregiving, and how patients and families have changed as the country has. Kleinman’s The Soul of Care is also worth your time.
Kaiser: Augustus by John Williams — the third of his novels I’ve recommended on the show, and the National Book Award winner: an epistolary novel of imperial Rome told through a crazy quilt of letters and fragments from family, friends like Agrippa, and poets like Virgil and Horace, each given a completely distinct voice. Quiet campus novel, anti-Western, imperial Rome — the range, and the restraint, are astonishing.
Also: Ezra Klein’s conversation with Carnegie’s Matt Sheehan — a masterclass in clarity on AI safety and the U.S.-China relationship, and the best thing to listen to in the wake of Dario Amodei’s “Pacing the Frontier” essay.

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This week I sat down with Gloria Xiong, Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College, and Jessica Chen Weiss, the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, to discuss their new Foreign Affairs essay, "How China Found Its Most Potent Weapon: The Real History of Beijing's Rare Earth Dominance."
The story everyone tells is one of foresight — a master plan hatched by Deng Xiaoping and now coming to fruition. Gloria and Jessica argue the reality was far messier: reform-era export mania, environmental catastrophe, defiant local governments, scarcity anxiety, and a lesson in chokepoint weaponization that Beijing learned from Washington. Getting the story wrong, they argue, feeds an action-reaction spiral that neither side started and neither fully controls — and with the Busan truce expiring in November, the stakes could hardly be higher.
09:31 — "The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths": what Deng Xiaoping actually said, and how a quote got recruited for a story he wasn't telling
12:33 — Why the master plan narrative is so irresistible across the partisan spectrum in Washington
15:40 — The cheap and dirty origins: reform-era export mania, thousands of small mines, and rare earths sold "at the price of cabbage and dirt"
19:06 — The West as co-author of the chokepoint: offshoring the pollution, and the stockpile that was never built
21:53 — Beijing's struggle to control its own industry: quotas, "crime rings," and the partially failed 2002 consolidation
25:13 — September 2010: what really happened with the "embargo" against Japan, and why Beijing may have learned about it from Japanese customs
28:47 — Fans and fire hoses: how bottom-up nationalism can commit Beijing to coercive postures it didn't choose
32:13 — The debate inside China after 2010: protectionists versus Hong Feng's warning against using rare earths as "political chips"
35:44 — The 2015 WTO ruling: China complied — was it a rule-taker, or did it simply lack the tools to do anything else?
38:06 — Learning from Washington: Huawei, the Export Control Law, the China Rare Earth Group, and what distinguishes learning from planning
40:24 — The 2022–2024 ledger: what's the evidence for an action-reaction spiral beyond the timeline?
44:25 — April 2025: coercion or bureaucratic pileup? Thirty licensing officials and a 74% collapse in magnet exports
47:46 — October 2025: the extraterritorial rule that mirrored the Foreign Direct Product Rule, and the Busan truce
52:32 — The countdown to November: hawks in both capitals, "mutually assured disruption," and Xi's coming state visit
55:29 — The limits of leverage on both sides: yttrium, Japan's diversification, and China's own resource insecurity
58:32 — From crime rings to two national champions: has the Wild West been tamed, and are central-local relations "fractured"?
01:02:21 — Prescriptions: positive reciprocity, licensing Chinese technology, and managing interdependence rather than escaping it
01:05:51 — Everyone else: Myanmar, Congo, Australia, and how Beijing thinks about third countries that don't want to choose

Paying It Forward
Gloria name-checked Wendy Leutert of Indiana University, who works on the reform and global expansion of China's state-owned enterprises and, with Isaac Kardon, on Chinese investment in global ports; Ning Leng of Georgetown University, author of the award-winning Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party State in China; and Ketian Zhang, who has written extensively on Chinese coercion and maritime disputes.
Jessica first acknowledged the scholars whose research the essay drew on but couldn't cite in Foreign Affairs: Cory Combs of Trivium China, Arthur Kroeber, Henry Farrell, Duleep Singh, and Julie Klinger. She also flagged Jack Zhang, who runs the Trade War Lab at the University of Kansas, and Kyle Jaros and Sara Newland, who are writing a book on subnational economic statecraft — work that has shaped her thinking on disaggregating what the United States wants, not just what China wants.
Recommendations
Gloria: Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer — a book she first read in a college writing seminar and returned to as she heads back into the classroom.
Jessica: The Scientist and the Spy by Mara Hvistendahl, which she uses to close her SAIS seminar on Chinese foreign policy as a reminder about proportionality; and Ann Patchett's new novel Whistler.
Kaiser: Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, the 1972 Pulitzer winner — a novel about mining camps in the American West and one of the most fully realized characters in American fiction.
Also mentioned: Jessica's recent interview with Daniel Kurtz-Phelan on The Foreign Affairs Interview podcast, and her interview in The Monitor, the newsletter of the Carter Center's U.S.-China Perception Monitor.
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This week on Sinica, I’m joined once again by Ryan Hass, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, former NSC director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and co-host of the Beijing Brief podcast. Ryan has just published two pieces that couldn’t be better timed: a long essay in China Leadership Monitor, “China’s Great Power Vision Comes into Focus,” which argues that the 2020s may be remembered as the decade Beijing finally laid its cards on the table — and a shorter Brookings piece, “Why Beijing Isn’t Taking the Bait with Trump,” on why Xi Jinping has answered an unusually accommodating American president with a poker face, and what that means for Xi’s state visit to Washington later this month.
We start with the perennial question — what does China want? — and Ryan’s own two-decade journey with it, from chasing a supposed secret strategy in Zhongnanhai as a junior political officer to concluding that Beijing’s vision is now legible and consistent: an international political order stripped of its liberal core and rebuilt around sovereign equality and the “global majority.” We talk about “American decline” and “strategic stalemate” in Chinese discourse, the tension between China’s pitch to the developing world and its export juggernaut, the Middle East and Northeast Asia as test cases, and the central riddle of Ryan’s essay: why a country so willing to articulate its ambitions has been so unwilling to pay for them. Then we turn to the summit — constructive strategic stability, escalation dominance, and what will and won’t be on the table when Xi comes to Washington.
03:11 – The “What does China want?” genre — and why Ryan concluded there is no secret plan locked in a Zhongnanhai vault
06:10 – From participant to architect: what actually changed, and whether Beijing is revisionist or, as I cheekily put it, restorationist
09:12 – “American decline” (美国衰落) and “strategic stalemate” (战略相持): reading Beijing’s rhetorical restraint and the Maoist echo
14:34 – Champion of the global majority, or the world’s factory? The $6 toaster problem and the credibility gap on Ukraine and Japan
19:36 – The Middle East as a test case: economic enabler, not security patron — and the good-faith maximalist rebuttal
24:38 – Northeast Asia: why Beijing keeps generating the very encirclement it fears
26:59 – Rhetoric without resources: flat foreign aid, shrinking BRI lending, and the SCO as China’s proving ground
32:28 – The Pew swing that hasn’t materialized, and why Biden may have been America’s last restorationist president
36:01 – Why Beijing isn’t taking the bait: Xi’s poker face, “constructive strategic stability,” and the G2 refusal
41:55 – Confident abroad, anxious at home: the purges, the memory of 2020, economic escalation dominance, and a viewer’s guide to the September summit

Paying It Forward
Ryan flags two women doing important work in China studies, both with books out this fall: Emily Matson of Georgetown, whose China’s Date Debate: How Manchurian Scholars Rewrote World War II examines how the start date of China’s war with Japan was moved from 1937 back to 1931; and Shuxian Luo of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, whose Simmering Seas: Escalation and De-escalation in China’s Maritime Disputes is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in October. He also gives a shout-out to the engines of the Brookings China Center, research assistants Allie Matthias and Joyce Yang.
Recommendations
Ryan: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which he’s late to but found poignant for its eerie echoes of today’s battlefields — and Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change, an inside account of the second Trump administration that he calls harrowing but essential for anyone trying to anticipate the president’s behavior. (He also finally read The Three-Body Problem, and now knows his sophons from his Trisolarans.)
Kaiser: Robert Harris’s Agrippa, published September 1 — the memoir of Marcus Agrippa, the general who won Octavian’s battles and built half of Augustan Rome, and a story about the pivot from republic to empire that feels uncomfortably relevant. And if you’ve read Tuchman, do read Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Not my official recommendation, but astonishing.
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