Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded at the Davos On Air booth at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, I sat down with Angela Huyue Zhang, professor of law at USC's Gould School of Law and author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, and S. Alex Yang, professor of management science and operations at London Business School. Angela and Alex — who are also married, and who arrived at this collaboration from opposite ends of the academy — have developed what I think is one of the most useful new mental models for understanding China's political economy: the platform state. Their argument is that we should think of the Chinese state less as a central planner or owner and more as a platform company like NVIDIA or Apple, one that builds architecture, sets standards, and governs an ecosystem within which fiercely competitive private firms fight it out. Value accrues at the system level rather than as firm profit, and the payoff may decide who wins the race to put AI to work across an entire economy.
5:37 – Three puzzles the framework is built to solve: profitless dominance in solar, EVs, and batteries; why the "grabbing hand" hasn't strangled Chinese innovation; and how China is attempting both zero-to-one invention and one-to-hundred scaling at once
7:57 – The platform state thesis: why the Chinese government behaves like a platform company, how nurturing an ecosystem of private firms solves the information deficit that cripples command-and-control, and why over-entry, involution, and consolidation are a repeated pattern — from EVs to the 140-plus humanoid robot companies operating today
16:13 – The aha moment: how a paper on the legal infrastructure of physical AI became the platform state idea over the Zhang-Yang dinner table, and whether this is a new species of political economy or the East Asian developmental state in new clothes
20:44 – State conditions: why state capacity and domestic scale are the two preconditions for the model, and why an ambitious Vietnam — which has the top-down capacity — may still find the Chinese playbook impossible to replicate
23:39 – Profitless dominance by design: harvesting versus extracting, the Uber analogy, overshooting as a control-theory strategy for nudging sectors, and how the anti-involution campaign and the 60-day supplier payment mandate show the state moderating the very competition it engineered
30:33 – Organized chaos: from the bike-sharing graveyards of the O2O wars to today's disciplined market, the exit of more than 400 EV makers since 2018, and why the survivors of China's "Premier League" of competition are now turning profitable
32:59 – The 3Gs playbook: growing markets by solving the cold-start problem, from Liuzhou's EV test drives to Beijing's green license plates, and how subsidy is only one lever among many
38:36 – Governing the ecosystem like Apple runs its App Store: why Beijing regulates generative AI with a light touch but physical AI is a different species entirely, law as the sixth layer of the AI stack, why robotaxis scale faster in China than in the U.S., and the state-convened standard-setting that's driving down humanoid robot costs
46:54 – Two flywheels: the familiar data-and-cost flywheel and the deeper state capacity flywheel, and how the National AI Fund's small but voting stake in DeepSeek aligns a complementor with the domestic stack — tilting the ecosystem toward Chinese chips
53:28 – Guarding the moat: automotive data rules and Tesla's stalled FSD ambitions, the unwound Manus sale, China's own small yard and high fence, and the closing provocation — that America could build the smartest frontier models and still lose the diffusion race to "artificial good-enough intelligence." Plus: the case for coopetition, and what policymakers should (and shouldn't) borrow from the platform state

Links from the episode
Angela's paper on law as the sixth layer of China's AI stack:
The Sixth Layer: The Legal Infrastructure for Physical Artificial Intelligence in China (SSRN)
Three Project Syndicate op-eds on the platform state idea:
The Rise of the Chinese Platform State by S. Alex Yang & Angela Huyue Zhang
Are Government Stakes the Key to AI Sovereignty? by Angela Huyue Zhang
Overcapacity Is China's Biggest AI Advantage by Angela Huyue Zhang
Two Management Science papers on commercial platforms:
Crowd-Judging on Two-Sided Platforms: An Analysis of In-Group Bias
Improving Dispute Resolution in Two-Sided Platforms: The Case of Review Blackmail

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Recorded live from the Davos on Air booth at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, this special episode of Sinica tackles the "pacing problem": the widening gap between how fast AI moves and how slowly regulation can catch up. I sit down with Xue Lan, dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University and one of the architects of China's concept of "agile governance," to unpack what that term means in practice. He traces China's regulatory evolution from the 2017 AI plan through the generative AI rules and the 2021 tech crackdown, compare Chinese, American, and European approaches, and ask whether Beijing's adaptive style can travel to other political systems — including liberal democracies.
00:09 – Live from Dalian: the “pacing problem” and why AI has turned it into a chasm
03:18 – Introducing Xue Lan, dean of Schwarzman College and architect of “agile governance”
04:34 – Why AI’s pace makes it uniquely hard to regulate
06:01 – Defining agile governance: mindset, partnership over adversary, and light-touch tools
11:54 – From the 2017 AI plan to today: China’s two-track approach to tech and governance
20:07 – Balancing development and security amid the US-China AI race
23:24 – Revisiting the 2021 tech crackdown: failure of the model, or agility of a different kind?
26:14 – The “DeepSeek moment,” open-weight models, and regulatory uncertainty by design
37:10 – EU comprehensiveness vs. US patchwork vs. China’s modular, adaptive approach
46:59 – Can agile governance travel to liberal democracies? Finding common ground on global AI risk

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Last week in Brussels, EU leaders held their first sustained debate on China policy in three years, and were so wary of Beijing’s reaction they wouldn’t print the word “China” on the agenda. The trigger: a goods-trade deficit closing in on 360 billion euros, and, for the first time ever, all 27 member states in the red. Recorded at Summer Davos in Dalian, I sat down with economic historian Adam Tooze to ask why the panic, and why now. Polanyi, the Plaza Accord, “glut shaming,” a $1.2 trillion surplus, and what Europe and China each most need to understand about the other.
04:26 – Why the alarm now? Imbalances are decades old, so what changed—and the shift from China slotting into Western supply chains to climbing the value chain
07:04 – Karl Polanyi, the “double movement,” and how the European working-class question becomes the politics of right-wing populism
11:21 – Autos as the core of the fight—12 million jobs—and why the Ukraine alignment gives the whole thing its moral charge for von der Leyen
14:14 – “Glut shaming”: the accusation of illegitimacy baked into the Western framing, and how it lands on a Chinese ear
18:16 – Wěiqu (委屈)—the swallowed sense of being wronged and why the EU should exercise a bit of cognitive empathy
20:14 – Merz reaches for the 1985 Plaza Accord, and the empathy gap that lets a German politician miss what that signals in Beijing
22:00 – The currency-manipulation argument, Germany’s own history with the euro, and why Switzerland is the real manipulator
25:49 – The $1.2 trillion surplus—”nothing we’ve ever seen before”—and the consumption China refuses to do
26:12 – Sorting the sectors: solar, batteries, and EVs where resistance is futile, versus steel and shipbuilding as “Polanyi double-movement as cosplay”
32:04 – The Draghi report and the house of mirrors: is China the cause of Europe’s malaise or just the thing exposing a homegrown one?
36:27 – If Tooze had von der Leyen’s ear: investment-linked talks, phased protection with a clear exit, and “investment, investment, investment”
41:16 – The October clock on the U.S.–China truce, and why this autumn could get very ugly
43:09 – Closing advice: what Europe and Beijing each most need to understand if this ends in managed rebalancing rather than a trade war
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica I'm joined by Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and The Evolution of God, for a conversation that runs a little outside our usual beat, though China sits closer to its center than you'd expect.
The occasion is his new book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, which reads the AI revolution as the latest turn in a story going back billions of years. We get into the French Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin's "noosphere," Bob's argument that we evolved large language models rather than engineered them, the cognitive empathy we've both long preached, and the two-word talking point — "But China!" — that Bob thinks is most likely to lead us astray.
6:56 – Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere, and why a planetary "global brain" has become necessary
14:49 – Directionality without the mysticism: complexification, teleology, and the "cell's-eye view" worry
21:57 – The God Test: is moral progress really the price of governing AI, and is that hopeless on a short clock?
28:33 – Why Bob says we evolved large language models rather than built them, and the sycophancy problem that follows
35:19 – Open weights and open source: a real safety argument, or competitiveness in safety's clothing?
40:03 – Cognitive empathy as the master key, and the same capacity as an engine of deception
48:06 – Arms-race fatalism and its limits: cheetahs, gazelles, and the rival who can pick up the phone
53:40 – "But China": fear of Beijing, Anthropic and Amodei, Jeff Ding, and the chip-control backfire
1:10:48 – Nonzero: game theory, common threats, and the takeoff scenarios that worry Bob most
1:23:22 – Attribution error and projection, Ed Fredkin's old warning, and the actual first move
Paying It Forward: Garrison Lovely, author of the forthcoming Obsolete (Nation Books) and the Substack of the same name on the AI race.
Recommendations:
Bob: Pantheon, the animated series on uploaded minds and emergent superintelligence; and the Crowded House song "Don't Dream It's Over."
Kaiser: Kyle Chan's High Capacity podcast, especially his episode with Carnegie's Matt Sheehan, "Is China Getting Worried About AI?"; and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The summit in Beijing produced a "constructive strategic stability" framework and a warming of tone between the two presidents. But heads of state can announce a multi-year horizon; somebody else has to operationalize it. Does the United States have the people — the linguists, the regional experts, the long-haul institution-builders — to do that work?
This week, I chatted with two Texans answering that question from very different directions. David Firestein is the inaugural president and CEO of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations in Houston. A career State Department officer who served four administrations and spent five years in Beijing, he's one of the few Americans concurrently affiliated with both a Republican and a Democratic presidential legacy institution. Eddie Conger is a retired Marine major and the founder and superintendent of International Leadership of Texas (IL Texas) — a public charter network of 26 campuses serving 26,000 K-12 students and now the largest K-12 Chinese language program in the country. In January, IL Texas became the first-ever K-12 recipient of the Bush China Foundation's George H.W. Bush Award for Educational Excellence in U.S.-China Relations, joining past honorees including Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger.
The conversation tackles what David calls the Texas paradox: the same state that just forced its cities to dissolve their sister-city ties with China, that pioneered the closure of Confucius Institutes, and that has restricted Chinese land purchases is also where the country's deepest K-12 Mandarin pipeline is taking root — and where the most institutionally Texan China foundation has chosen to plant its flag. David and Eddie talk through engagement honestly (no straw-man Jeffersonian-democracy fantasies), the erroneous strategic assumptions undergirding U.S. China policy, what real national-language capacity would look like operationally, what they each saw in the Trump–Xi summit, and what 5,000 IL Texas graduates are already doing in the world.
05:40 — Eddie's path: Marine infantryman to fifth-grade math teacher to the country's largest K-12 Mandarin program
09:12 — David on when the Nixon-through-Obama engagement consensus broke (fall 2017) and how the lexicon shifted
13:30 — Engagement honestly defined: what its architects actually believed vs. the Jeffersonian-democracy straw man
18:30 — The Texas paradox: HB 128, sister cities, Confucius Institutes — and the country's biggest Mandarin program in the same state
31:26 — Texas business, Tim Dunn, faith, and the gap between political rhetoric and where Texans actually are
41:54 — The Defense Department safety/security story: when one Chinese word ate an entire bilateral agreement
46:16 — David's six (or seven) erroneous strategic assumptions: China doesn't want to be us, and it has benefited more than anyone from the current order
52:28 — What real national-language capacity would actually look like: NSLI, WALARA, and why the pipeline still runs through one Marine major in Texas
01:06:07 — Reading the Beijing summit: the warmth, the "constructive strategic stability" framing, and whether Trump's Taiwan call could blow it all up
01:17:10 — Where 5,000 IL Texas graduates are now — White House interns, service academies, doctors, entrepreneurs, and one high-schooler who pulled a stranger out of the surf

Paying it Forward
Eddie:
Carlos Carrasco; Emily, who is heading to Taiwan this fall on a one-year high-school program; and another student bound for the University of Texas at Austin who will be sent to South Korea for a semester as a freshman — a rarity at UT. And he closes with Miles, a high-school senior and Marine scholarship recipient who, just weeks ago at a national competition in Florida, heard someone screaming for help in the ocean, called for a boogie board, and swam out to save a drowning swimmer while a crowd of adults stood on the beach. "Others before self," as Eddie puts it — the IL Texas mission statement made flesh.
David:
Frank Zhou, who just graduated from Harvard and chaired the Harvard College China Forum; Selina Gong, a recent graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School involved in its annual China conference; and Dean Dai, a recent graduate of Columbia's SIPA who has been deeply involved in many of the most significant student-run China conferences in the country — and who, as it turns out, was one of the organizers of the University of Chicago U.S.-China Economy and Business Summit where Kaiser spoke earlier this month.
Recommendations:
Eddie: John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present (Henry Holt, 2016)
David: Stephen Roach, Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale, 2022)
Kaiser: David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday, 2023)
Also mentioned: Stephen R. Platt, The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II (Knopf, 2024)

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.