Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I speak with Afra Wang, a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov.AI.
We're talking today about her recent WIRED piece on what might be China's most influential science fiction project you've never heard of: The Morning Star of Lingao (Língáo Qǐmíng 临高启明), a sprawling, crowdsourced novel about time travelers who bootstrap an industrial revolution in Ming Dynasty Hainan. More than a thought experiment in alternate history, it's the ur-text of China's "Industrial Party" (gōngyè dǎng 工业党) — the loose intellectual movement that sees engineering capability as the true source of national power. We discuss what the novel reveals about how China thinks about failure, modernity, and salvation, and why, just as Americans are waking up to China's industrial might, the worldview that helped produce it may already be losing its grip.
5:27 – Being a cultural in-betweener: code-switching across moral and epistemic registers
10:25 – Double consciousness and converging aesthetic standards
12:05 – "The greatest Chinese science fiction" — an ironic title for a poorly written cult classic
14:18 – Bridging STEM and humanities: the KPI-coded language of tech optimization
16:08 – China's post-Industrial Party moment: from "try hard" to "lie flat"
17:01 – How widely known is Lingao? A cult Bible for China's techno-elite
19:11 – From crypto bros to DAO experiments: how Afra discovered the novel
21:25 – The canonical timeline: compiling chaos into collaborative fiction
23:06 – Guancha.cn (guānchá zhě wǎng 观察者网) and the Industrial Party's media ecosystem
26:05 – The Sentimental Party (Qínghuái Dǎng 情怀党): China's lost civic space
29:01 – The Wenzhou high-speed rail crash: the debate that defined the Industrial Party
33:19 – Controlled spoilers: colonizing Australia, the Maid Revolution, and tech trees
41:06 – Competence as salvation: obsessive attention to getting the details right
44:18 – The Needham question and the joy of transformation: from Robinson Crusoe to Primitive Technology
47:25 – "Never again": inherited historical vulnerability and the memory of chaos
49:20 – Wang Xiaodong, "China Is Unhappy," and the crystallization of Industrial Party ideology
51:33 – Gender and Lingao: a pre-feminist artifact and the rational case for equality
56:16 – Dan Wang's Breakneck and the "engineering state" framework
59:25 – New Quality Productive Forces (xīn zhì shēngchǎnlì 新质生产力): Industrial Party logic in CCP policy
1:03:43 – The reckoning: why Industrial Party intellectuals are losing their innocence
1:07:49 – What Lingao tells us about China today: the invisible infrastructure beneath the hot shower
Paying it forward: The volunteer translators of The Morning Star of Lingao (English translation and GitHub resources)
Xīn Xīn Rén Lèi / Pixel Perfect podcast (https://pixelperfect.typlog.io/) and the Bǎihuā (百花) podcasting community
Recommendations:
Afra: China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter, edited by Kerry Brown; The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu
Kaiser: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin, coauthors of The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. We're talking about China's college entrance exam — dreaded and feared, with outsized ability to determine life outcomes, seen as deeply flawed yet also sacrosanct, something few Chinese want drastically altered or removed. Cards on table: I had very strong preconceptions about the gaokao. My wife and I planned our children's education to get them out of the Chinese system before it became increasingly oriented toward gaokao preparation. But this book really opened my eyes.
Ruixue is professor of economics at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy, researching how institutions like examination systems shape governance, elite selection, and state capacity. Hongbin is James Liang Chair at Stanford, focusing on education, labor markets, and institutional foundations of China's economic development.
We explore why the gaokao represents far more than just a difficult test, the concrete incentives families face, why there are limited alternative routes for social mobility, how both authors' own experiences shaped their thinking, why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China, what happened when the exam system was suspended during the Cultural Revolution, why inequality has increased despite internet access to materials, why meaningful reform is so politically difficult, how education translated into productivity and GDP growth, the gap between skill formation and economic returns, how the system shapes governance and everyday life, and the moral dimensions of exam culture when Chinese families migrate to very different education systems like the U.S.
6:18 – What the gaokao actually represents beyond just being a difficult exam
11:54 – Why there are limited alternative pathways for social mobility
14:23 – How their own experiences as students shaped their thinking
18:46 – Why the gaokao is a political institution, not just educational policy
22:21 – Why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China
28:30 – What happened in late Qing and Cultural Revolution when exams were suspended
33:26 – Has internet access to materials reduced inequality or has it persisted?
36:55 – Hongbin's direct experience trying to reform the gaokao—and why it failed
40:28 – How education improvement accounts for significant share of China's GDP growth
42:44 – The gap: college doesn't add measurable skills, but gaokao scores predict income
46:56 – How centralized approach affects talent allocation across fields
51:08 – The gaokao and GDP tournament for officials: similar tournament systems
54:26 – How ranking and evaluation systems shape workplace behavior and culture
58:12 – When exam culture meets U.S. education: understanding tensions around affirmative action
1:02:10 – Transparent rule-based evaluation vs. discretion and judgment: the fundamental tradeoff

Recommendations:
Ruixue: Piao Liang Peng You (film by Geng Jun); Stoner (a novel by John Williams)
Hongbin: The Dictator's Handbook
Kaiser: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field; Black Pill by Elle Reeve
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Daniel Bessner, the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and co-host of the American Prestige Podcast. If you follow U.S.-China relations even casually, you can’t avoid hearing that we’re in a new Cold War — it’s become a rhetorical reflex in D.C., shaping budgets, foreign policy debates, media narratives, and how ordinary Americans think about China.
But what does it actually mean to call something a Cold War? To think clearly about the present, I find it helps to go to the past, not for simple analogies but to understand the intellectual and ideological machinery that produced and now sustains a Cold War mentality. Danny has written widely about the architecture of American power, the rise of the national security state, and the constellation of thinkers he calls Cold War liberals who helped define the ideological landscape of U.S. foreign policy. We explore how Cold War liberalism reshaped American political life, how the U.S. came to see its global dominance as natural and morally necessary, why the question of whose fault the Cold War was remains urgent in an age of renewed great power rivalry, the rise of China and anxiety of American decline, and what it would take to imagine a U.S.-China relationship that doesn’t fall back into old patterns of moral binaries, ideological panic, and militarized competition.
6:20 – Danny’s background: from Iraq War politicization to studying defense intellectuals
11:00 – Cold War liberalism: the constellation of ideas that shaped U.S. foreign policy
16:14 – How these ideas became structurally embedded in security institutions
22:02 – The Democratic Party’s destruction of the genuine left in the late 1940s
27:53 – Whose fault was the Cold War? Stalin’s sphere of influence logic vs. American universalism
31:07 – Are we facing a similar decision with China today?
34:23 – The anxiety of loss: how decline anxiety distorts interpretation of China’s rise
37:54 – The new Cold War narrative: material realities vs. psychological legacies
41:21 – Clearest parallels between the first Cold War and emerging U.S.-China confrontation
44:33 – What would a pluralistic order in Asia actually look like?
47:42 – Coexistence rather than zero-sum rivalry: what does it mean in practice?
50:57 – What genuine restraint requires: accepting limits of American power
54:14 – The moral imperative pushback: you can’t have good empire without bad empire
56:35 – Imperialist realism: Americans don’t think we’re good, but can’t imagine another world
Paying it forward: The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Responsible Statecraft publication; The Trillion Dollar War Machine by William Hartung and Ben Freeman
Recommendations:
Danny: Nirvana and the history of Seattle punk/indie music (forthcoming podcast project)
Kaiser: Hello China Tech Substack by Poe Zhao (hellotechchina.com)
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This week on Sinica, in a joint episode with the China-Global South Podcast, I speak with Eric Olander, host of the China Global South Podcast and founder/editor-in-chief of the China-Global South Project.
In the early hours of January 3rd, U.S. forces carried out a coordinated operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, followed by their rendition to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. The operation unfolded quickly, with minimal kinetic escalation, but has raised far-reaching questions about international law, hemispheric security, and the Trump administration's willingness to use force in the Western Hemisphere. Just before the raid, China's Special Envoy for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, had met with Maduro in Caracas. Commentary linking Trump's action to China has ranged widely—claims about spheres of influence, arguments this was all about oil or rare earths, and pronouncements about what this means for Taiwan. Eric helps us think through China's actual stake in Venezuela, how deeply Beijing understands Latin America, what this episode does and does not change about China's role in the region and the global South more broadly, China's immediate reaction and concrete exposure on the ground, how it manages political risk when partner regimes collapse, and what Chinese military planners may be studying as they assess how this operation unfolded.
5:18 – How Beijing is reading this episode: official messaging versus elite thinking
7:40 – The Taiwan comparisons on Chinese social media and why they don't work
11:09 – How deep is China's actual expertise on Latin America?
14:56 – Comparing U.S. and Chinese benches of Latin America expertise
18:02 – Are we back to spheres of influence? Why that framing doesn't work
20:09 – Where is China most exposed in Venezuela: oil, loans, personnel?
23:41 – The resource-for-infrastructure model and why it failed
28:27 – The political assets: China as defender of sovereignty and multilateralism
36:25 – Will this push left-leaning governments closer to Beijing?
40:07 – The "China impotence" narrative and what doing something would actually mean
46:26 – What Chinese military planners are actually studying
51:46 – The Qiu Xiaoqi meeting: strategic failure or intelligence delivery?
58:40 – What actually changes and what doesn't: looking ahead
Paying it forward: Alonso Illueca, nonresident fellow for Latin America and the Caribbean at the China Global South Project
Recommendations:
Eric: "China's Long Economic War" by Zongyuan Zoe Liu (Foreign Affairs)
Kaiser: The Venetian Heretic by Christian Cameron
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This week on Sinica, recorded at Yale University, I speak with Michael Brenes and Van Jackson, coauthors of The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy. Their argument is that framing the U.S.-China relationship as geopolitical rivalry has become more than just a foreign policy orientation — it's a domestic political project that reshapes budgets, norms, and coalitions in ways that actively harm American democracy and the American people. Rivalry narrows political possibility, makes dissent suspect, encourages neo-McCarthyism (the China Initiative, profiling of Chinese Americans), produces anti-AAPI hate, and redirects public investment away from social welfare and into defense spending through what they call "national security Keynesianism."
Mike is interim director of the Brady Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, while Van is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington and host of the Un-Diplomatic Podcast. We discuss the genesis of their collaboration during the Biden administration, how they navigate China as a puzzle for the American left, canonical misrememberings of the Cold War that distort current China policy, the security dilemma feedback loop between Washington and Beijing, why defense-heavy stimulus is terrible at job creation, how rivalry politics weakens democracy, recent polling showing a shift toward engagement, and their vision for a "geopolitics of peace" anchored in Sino-U.S. détente 2.0.
5:47 – The genesis of the book: recognizing Biden's Cold War liberalism
11:26 – How they approached writing together from different disciplinary homes
13:20 – Navigating China as a puzzle for the American left
21:39 – How great power competition hardened from analytical framework into ideology
28:15 – Mike on two canonical misrememberings of the Cold War
33:18 – Van on the security dilemma and the nuclear feedback loop
39:55 – National security Keynesianism: why defense spending is bad at job creation
44:38 – How rivalry politics weakens democracy and securitizes dissent
48:09 – Building durable coalitions for restraint-oriented statecraft
51:27 – Has the post-COVID moral panic actually abated?
53:27 – The master narrative we need: a geopolitics of peace
55:29 – Associative balancing: achieving equilibrium through accommodation, not arms

Recommendations:
Van: The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi
Mike: The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 by Vladislav Zubok
Kaiser: Pluribus (Apple TV series by Vince Gilligan)

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