Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded as a live joint webcast with NYRB/Poets and Equator Magazine, I sit down with Eleanor Goodman — poet, scholar, research associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center, and one of the most accomplished translators working between Chinese and English — to talk about the extraordinary Sichuan-born poet Zheng Xiaoqiong (郑小琼).
Born in 1980 in a mountain village, trained as a nurse, Zheng joined the great tide of internal migration in her early 20s, ending up on the assembly line of a hardware factory in Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta. She picked up a pen after a workplace injury — part of her finger taken off by a lathe — and what came out across poems, essays, and reportage has made her one of the most singular voices in contemporary Chinese literature. Her trajectory from the assembly line to the editorial desk of an official literary magazine is, as far as I know, essentially without parallel.
Eleanor has been translating Zheng since around 2013, and the partnership they've built has given Anglophone readers access to a body of work that defies easy categorization — at once intimate and historical, ethnographic and lyric, tender and unsparing. We talk about how they met, about Zheng's resistance to the "migrant worker poet" label, about the bodily feminism that runs through her verse, about her unmoralizing portraits of sex workers, about lost youth and the way the body keeps the ledger of factory time. Eleanor reads Zheng's poem "Woman Worker: Youth Pinned to a Workstation" (女工: 被固定在卡桌上的青春) in both Chinese and her English translation — and it is, every time, devastating.
Huge thanks to Abigail Dunn at NYRB Poets and Ratik Asokan at Equator for organizing this conversation and for inviting me to host it, to Eleanor for her generosity and her brilliance, and most of all to Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose voice — even when she cannot be with us in person — comes through with absolute clarity.
Eleanor's translation of Zheng Xiaoqiong's In the Roar of the Machine is available from NYRB Poets. The Equator selections, drawn from Zheng's long-form prose, are available at Equator Magazine.
05:07 — How Eleanor and Zheng met in 2013, and why a book had to happen
08:14 — Navigating the awkward proposition of China for the Western left
10:50 — Zheng's trajectory: from a Sichuan village to the assembly line to the editor's desk
16:29 — Resisting the "migrant worker poet" (打工诗人) label
20:47 — Conventions of the genre: exhaustion, iron, lost identity, the screw in the machine
24:58 — Who gets translated into English, and why
28:34 — The translator's ethics: how do you render a factory poem honestly?
32:42 — Eleanor reads "Woman Worker, Youth Pinned to a Workstation" (女工被固定在卡桌上的青春) in Chinese and English
37:14 — Zheng's bodily feminism: irregular periods, a different way of caring
40:37 — Lost youth and the passage of time
44:36 — Sex work and women's labor: portraits without moralizing
49:59 — Whose work actually counts in Chinese urban discourse?
52:45 — Why Zheng Xiaoqiong wasn't able to join us, and how censorship really works
54:44 — Rose Courtyard and what's next: classical allusions, ancestral homes, embroidering grandmothers
57:39 — Audience Q&A: American worker poets, the WeChat communities of migrant writers, and Zheng's standing in Chinese letters

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This week I'm sharing the third installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead." The first two episodes featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the panels on what China wants and what the United States wants. This week's panel — "Tech, Rivalry, and Competing Visions of the Future" — turns to the domain that, more than any other, has come to define how Washington thinks about the U.S.-China relationship: technology, and especially AI.
Once again, my deep thanks to Jessica Chen Weiss, ACF's inaugural faculty director, for organizing this terrific conference and for so generously letting me share this audio with Sinica listeners.
Moderator Kat Duffy of the Council on Foreign Relations opens by interrogating the very framing of the panel: is "rivalry" actually the right word for what's going on between the U.S. and China in tech? The panelists give a range of answers — from "yes, because both sides believe it is" to Samm Sacks's pithy rejoinder that "rivalry serves specific actors and specific interests." From there the conversation ranges across the FCC's recent move to bar most foreign-made routers, the pitfalls of framing AI competition as a sprint to AGI rather than what Jeff Ding calls a "diffusion marathon," the many internal Chinas that get flattened in DC discourse, the cybersecurity reciprocity problem (Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, and what President Trump tellingly admitted about all of it), and what it would actually mean for the U.S. to compete by being its best self — what one panelist memorably calls "Americamaxxing." There's a lot of substance packed into this hour, and a lot of generative pushback against received DC wisdom.
The audience Q&A at the end takes up the role of race and xenophobia in the discourse — a topic that, as one questioner pointedly notes, had been conspicuously absent from the day's earlier discussions.
Panelists:
— Samm Sacks, Senior Fellow, New America and Yale Law School
— Jeff Ding, Assistant Professor of Political Science, George Washington University
— Mieke Eoyang, Visiting Professor, Carnegie Mellon University; former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy
— Selina Xu, Lead for China and AI Policy, Office of Eric Schmidt
Moderator: Kat Duffy, Senior Fellow for Digital and Cyberspace Policy, Council on Foreign Relations

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This week on Sinica: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrapped up his fourth visit to China in as many years last week, and this one may be the most consequential yet. It comes at a moment when Spain has emerged, almost improbably, as the most outspoken voice in Europe challenging the direction of American foreign policy — closing its airspace to U.S. military aircraft involved in the war in Iran, denying Washington the use of the Rota and Morón bases, recognizing Palestine, and getting expelled from the U.S.-led Gaza Coordination Center for its "anti-Israel obsession." Against that backdrop, Sánchez delivered a remarkable speech at Tsinghua University — a speech I wrote about in detail on the Sinica Substack (PM Pedro Sánchez's Tsinghua Speech: A Masterclass in Diplomatic Rhetoric) — defending multilateralism, calling the EU-China trade deficit unsustainable, and naming China "a country rebuilding its greatness."
To help make sense of it, I'm joined by Mario Esteban Rodríguez, full professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, director of its Center for East Asian Studies, and senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute. Mario is the scholar most frequently quoted in Spanish and European media coverage of Spain-China relations, and the author most recently of China's Vertical Multilateralism and the Global South (Routledge, 2026). We discuss whether Sánchez is running an updated Merkel playbook or something qualitatively new, how much of the pivot is really about Trump, the sectoral politics of EVs and Iberian pork, the Chery plant in Barcelona, Spain's role as a gateway to Latin America, and whether Madrid is now a trailblazer for a broader European — and transatlantic — reorientation toward Beijing.
06:33 — Sánchez's China strategy: pragmatism, consistency, and political capital
08:35 — Domestic politics: the PSOE–PP consensus, Vox, and the regional contradiction
12:40 — Merkel's playbook vs. Sánchez's: COVID, Ukraine, and the macroeconomic imbalance
15:55 — The Tsinghua speech: Matteo Ricci, multipolarity, and the human rights omission
28:17 — The Trump factor: Iran, Gaza, and the limits of overestimating the American effect
35:48 — Trade, EV tariffs, pork, and Chinese investment in Spain (the Chery plant in Barcelona)
47:04 — Agricultural constituencies and the paradox of Vox voters who benefit from China trade
49:01 — Spain's influence in Brussels and the conditions for other member states to follow
53:09 — Spain as gateway to Latin America, and the wider European (and Canadian) turn to Beijing
Paying it Forward: The European Think-Tank Network on China (ETNC) — a network providing country-specific insights on EU member states' approaches to China, including the granular differences and nuances that non-European analysts often miss.
Recommendations
Mario Esteban: A trip, rather than a book — New Zealand, which he's visiting this summer with his family to mark the 25th anniversary of the release of The Fellowship of the Ring. A nod to his love of Tolkien and tabletop role-playing games (conducted, he is careful to note, in his own basement — not his parents').
Kaiser Kuo: CONG — a new large-format magazine published out of Hong Kong (the title is pronounced Kong, though its ambiguous Pinyin-like spelling invites a second reading), now preparing its third issue. Beautifully produced on glossy and textured paper, with broad coverage of the art, culture, and design scene across East and Southeast Asia. Check it out online here: https://www.serakai.studio/cong
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This week I'm sharing the next installment from the terrific day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead." Last week's episode featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the first panel, "What China Wants." This week, I've got the companion panel — "What Does the United States Want?" — which I think pairs beautifully with that first session, and which takes up a question that's arguably harder and more uncomfortable to answer.
The panel is moderated by SAIS Dean James Steinberg, who served as Deputy National Security Advisor in the Clinton administration and Deputy Secretary of State under Obama — and who keeps this moving with real sharpness. He's joined by Matt Duss, Executive Vice President at the Center for International Policy, who starts things off with a bracing observation: the United States does not know what it wants. The old foreign policy consensus has shattered, he argues, and neither the Trump administration nor the Democratic establishment has produced a coherent replacement. He locates the most interesting thinking in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, where he hopes the 2028 primary will force some of these hard questions into the open.
Katherine Thompson, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute who previously served in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, brings a military-strategic lens. She makes a sharp case that the new National Defense Strategy, for all its imperfections, at least opens the door to an honest conversation about trade-offs — something Washington has been allergic to. If you're going to prioritize deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, she argues, you have to actually give things up elsewhere, and the Iran situation is making that tension impossible to ignore.
Jonas Nahm, the Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor at SAIS who served in the Biden administration, reframes economic competition with China in refreshingly concrete terms. Rather than abstract great-power framing, he identifies three specific buckets — affordability and energy, technological catch-up, and manufacturing competitiveness — where Chinese capacity could actually help solve American problems, if we had the political imagination to let it.
And Leslie Vinjamuri, president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, brings striking new polling data showing a 40-percentage-point swing in American favorability toward China since 2024 — now at 53 percent — driven largely by Democrats but with movement among Republicans too. She situates this in the fading of pandemic-era hostility and the absence of sustained anti-China rhetoric from the current administration, and adds an invaluable perspective on how utterly confused America's allies are about what Washington actually expects of them.
The conversation ranges across Taiwan and strategic ambiguity, whether allies arming up in the Indo-Pacific helps or hurts, the collapse of U.S. credibility on human rights, the future of dollar dominance, and whether the 2028 election will finally force a reckoning with these questions. It's a rich, candid discussion — and a reminder that the hardest debates in U.S.-China policy may not be about China at all.
Panelists:
— Matt Duss, Executive Vice President, Center for International Policy
— Katherine Thompson, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
— Jonas Nahm, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins SAIS
— Leslie Vinjamuri, President and CEO, Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Moderator: James Steinberg, Dean, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

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Opening Remarks & Session 1: What China Wants
Johns Hopkins SAIS ACF Conference, April 3, 2026
This week's episode features audio from a day-long conference hosted by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS, held on April 3rd in Washington, DC. The conference, titled "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead," brought together a wide range of scholars, former officials, and analysts to interrogate some of the foundational assumptions underlying US policy toward China — a conversation I found compelling enough to share directly with Sinica listeners, with the full blessing of the organizers.
You'll hear two segments in this episode.
Opening Remarks — Jessica Chen Weiss
ACF's inaugural faculty director Jessica Chen Weiss opens the conference by framing its central provocation: that much of the prevailing US policy discourse assumes an intrinsically zero-sum competition with China, and that this assumption has not been adequately examined. She argues for a more rigorous, evidence-based conversation — one that takes seriously the possibility that American and Chinese interests are competitive but not necessarily adversarial, and that may even leave room for complementarity in some domains. She previews the day's three thematic sessions — on what China wants, what the United States wants, and the stakes of technological and AI rivalry — and situates the whole enterprise in what she describes as a hinge moment in world history.
Session 1: What China Wants
Moderated by Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times, the first panel takes up the deceptively simple question of what China is actually trying to achieve on the world stage — and whether its ambitions are as expansive as much US policy discourse assumes.
Jessica Chen Weiss argues that China's core objectives remain relatively modest and sovereignty-focused: security, development, and legitimacy within an order long dominated by the United States. She pushes back on the idea that China is eager to assume the burdens of global leadership, noting that Chinese interlocutors are acutely aware of the domestic overextension that has constrained American power. Sevastopulo coins — with Weiss's amusement — the term "China-first" to describe Beijing's orientation.
Dan Taylor, drawing on his decades in the Defense Intelligence Agency, urges the audience to take Chinese leadership statements seriously rather than projecting worst-case intentions onto them. He notes that Beijing still sees itself as a developing nation with enormous domestic work ahead, and that its articulated goals leave considerable room for interpretation before one arrives at the conclusion that China seeks to displace the United States as global hegemon.
Arthur Kroeber adds an economic dimension, tracing how China's export-driven model has generated massive global surpluses — and why the resulting tensions with trading partners are, in his view, a structural problem rather than evidence of strategic malice. He argues that much of what looks like geopolitical aggression is better understood as the consequence of an economic model operating at enormous scale with insufficient domestic demand to absorb its own output.
Shao Yuqun, speaking from her perch at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, offers the most pointed challenge to the panel's relatively sanguine framing. She argues that the United States' own behavior — erratic policy, withdrawal from multilateral commitments, and the disruptions of the Trump era — has itself destabilized the order that American strategists claim to be defending. She is measured but direct, and her presence gives the conversation a texture that too many Washington panels lack.
The discussion ranges across China's Iran diplomacy, the prospects for a US-China summit, the question of whether Beijing is exploiting Trump-era tensions to deepen ties with traditional US allies, and — in a lively closing exchange — who the next generation of Chinese leadership looks like (with Kroeber's deadpan answer, "Xi Jinping," getting the biggest laugh of the session).
Guests:
Jessica Chen Weiss, David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies, Johns Hopkins SAIS; Inaugural Faculty Director, ACF
Dan Taylor, Adjunct Researcher, Institute for Defense Analyses; Senior Fellow, Johns Hopkins SAIS ACF
Arthur Kroeber, Founding Partner, Gavekal Dragonomics
Shao Yuqun, Director, Institute for Taiwan, Hong Kong & Macao Studies, Shanghai Institutes for International Studies

Moderator: Demetri Sevastopulo, US-China Correspondent, Financial Times
Remaining sessions from the conference — on what the United States wants, tech rivalry and competing visions of the future, and a fireside chat between Henry Farrell and Alondra Nelson on the AI race reconsidered — will be released over the coming weeks.
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