Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I sit down with the writer Pallavi Aiyar — at her own dining table in Beijing, where in recent months I’ve been the lucky beneficiary of her and her husband Julio’s legendary hospitality. Pallavi first arrived in Beijing in 2002 to teach at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and went on to spend the better part of a decade as The Hindu’s China correspondent — for much of that time, the only Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent in the country. That period produced Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, still one of the very few sustained attempts to look at China through Indian eyes. After 16 years away — years spent in Brussels, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Madrid — she’s back in Beijing, and turning her gaze inward with her latest book, Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts. She writes the wonderful Substack The Global Jigsaw, which I recommend without reservation.
Our conversation is built around her recent essay for Noema Magazine, “The Real Problem Underlying India-China Tensions,” which argues that the deepest problem in the relationship isn’t the border or the trade imbalance but the distorting lenses through which each side reads the other: China reads India through the lens of colonial subordination, while India reads China through the lens of betrayal. We talk about the ugly etymology of an ethnic slur, the partial historical memories each country mistakes for the whole picture, her serialized interviews with the Chinese India-watcher Mao Keji, the aporia-inducing impossibility of explaining either country to outsiders — and how her answer to the question she first posed in 2008, “Would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?”, has changed, painfully, in the years since.
4:35 – Beijing, 2002: an ad in That’s Beijing, gandhi@hotmail.com, and becoming The Hindu’s correspondent
10:03 – “Beijing and I grew up together”: the aughts as a shared coming-of-age
12:16 – The asymmetry of obsession: why India watches China, but not the reverse
16:39 – The unacknowledged third vertex: Western discursive power in the India-China relationship
18:08 – Back after 16 years: the Liangma River, blue skies, and the panopticon
21:35 – Walks in the park and the “buddy system”: what access looks like now
25:43 – Where did all the foreigners go?
29:59 – The scene at CCG: candor, offense, and the register of truth
33:10 – “Asan”: the etymology of a slur, Sikh policemen, opium fortunes, and China’s colonial lens
40:10 – 1962 and India’s betrayal lens
42:15 – Aporia: the foolhardy task of explaining India or China
47:22 – Shame and indignation: explaining a place you love versus a place you merely know
52:29 – The big question, 2008: born Indian or Chinese?
55:44 – The 2026 answer: “It hurts”
1:00:08 – Kaiser pushes back: cherry-picked comparisons, and can this essay’s very existence complicate its conclusions?
1:04:43 – Twin nations of the exam
1:06:57 – Cognitive empathy: what it would take for ordinary Indians and Chinese to actually see each other

Paying It Forward
Yaqi Li, a young Chinese international relations scholar recently returned to China after a year in Singapore — Pallavi admires the rare self-reflectiveness of his memoir-inflected IR writing on his Substack, New China Literacy, and notes that he makes an interesting case for AI-assisted writing as a way for second- and third-language English speakers to find their voice.

Recommendations
Pallavi: Flashlight by Susan Choi — a novel spanning Japan, the U.S., and North Korea, built around the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s. Also This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin — the first novel from her favorite Pakistani writer, a sprawling, Chekhovian portrait of feudalism and politics in modern Pakistan.
Kaiser: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner — beautiful at the sentence level, painted on a small canvas: two couples who meet as young academics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and their friendship across the decades. Emotionally rich despite the absence of grand drama.

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This week on Sinica, I welcome back Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, whose marvelous new essay, “The Future, Made in China,” chronicles a tech-focused return trip to Beijing, where he lived from 2005 to 2013 — first for the Chicago Tribune, then as The New Yorker’s China correspondent. Evan is the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the National Book Award, as well as Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury and The Haves and Have-Yachts.
His essay is far more than another breathless account of China’s advances in robotics and electric vehicles. It’s a meditation on what China’s technological ascent means for the United States, for how both societies are organized, and for the rest of us, whose futures increasingly seem to be wagered by two small circles of powerful men in Beijing and Washington. We talk about the Xiaomi Hyperfactory, “Chinamaxxing,” the export control debate, and the deeper contest Evan identifies: not democracy versus authoritarianism, but humanism versus scientism.

3:04 – Walking Beijing’s streets again: quieter, richer, more surveilled
11:26 – The Xiaomi Hyperfactory: choreography, awe, and what’s actually real
18:10 – Doomed to coexist: Evan’s message for the American reader
24:15 – Schrödinger’s China: joke or juggernaut?
27:16 – The limits of knowability in an increasingly opaque system
31:56 – Threat narratives vs. “Chinamaxxing”: America’s two China conversations
43:20 – “Thank Trump”: America’s self-inflicted wounds
47:29 – Revisiting the Sullivan doctrine and export controls
53:10 – Mankind 2000: humanism, scientism, and rival oligarchies
1:02:48 – Convergence: arriving at dystopia from opposite directions
1:07:21 – Self-strengthening redux: Levenson and America’s meum-verum gap
1:17:53 – The other Sputnik moment: the backlash against tech oligarchy
Paying It Forward
Yi-Ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet — Evan admires how her work grapples with the competition between scientism and humanism across national borders.
Chang Che, who writes for The New Yorker and The Guardian — watching China’s technological developments up close, “creating history in real time.”
Recommendations
Evan: How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker — the youngest-ever Polk Award winner on how a rising generation at Silicon Valley’s feeder school perceives its opportunities and obligations. Also True Grit by Charles Portis — splendid, sentence-savoring dialogue.
Kaiser: Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams, author of Stoner — a Western with the same sentence-level craft; for fans of Melville and Cormac McCarthy.

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This week on Sinica, a rare treat: an in-person recording from Beijing with two dear friends who happen to be two of the very best in the business on technology and China — Samm Sacks and Paul Triolo, fresh off the exhibition floor of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. We dig into Xi Jinping's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive statement on AI to date, the launch of the World AI Cooperation Organization, Moonshot's release of Kimi K3, the Trump administration's reported push to shut Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. market, the coming age of agents, the untranslatable problem of ānquán, and what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue in September.
8:51 – The view from the floor: heat, humidity, robot boxing grandmas, WeChat-gated free water, and the "AI+" vibe — why WAIC 2026 felt less like an AI conference than a sector-by-sector snapshot of China's entire economy being supercharged with AI, with attendance swelling to some 200,000 tickets
16:32 – Why Xi showed up: what the leader's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive AI statement to date signal, and why domestic drivers matter as much as geopolitics
18:01 – Chapter and verse: which phrases from the speech will be put to work in the system — "secure and orderly development" and the governance of agents, and Xi's strikingly extensive language on AI safety after China was frozen out of the Paris process
22:26 – The ānquán problem: one word meaning both "safety" and "security," the three buckets of AI risk, and how China's safety community has moved from bias and deepfakes toward CBRN and loss-of-control concerns — Black Mirror versus Star Trek
28:14 – Shanghai's baby: how WAIC's ownership structure differs from the CAC-run World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Chen Jining's very visible host duties, and whether the center of gravity in AI policy is shifting to the Yangtze River Delta
30:05 – WAICO: what the new World AI Cooperation Organization with its 29 founding members is actually for, Xi's concrete deliverables for the Global South — 5,000 AI training slots, regional cooperation centers, the MAZU early-warning system — and healthy skepticism about follow-through
34:39 – Kimi K3: what's technically significant in Moonshot's big new model, why it's the fourth arguably frontier-class Chinese release in a single month, the two-way traffic in distillation accusations, and what it all says about the state of the frontier gap four years into export controls
40:33 – Washington reacts: the reported menu of options for shutting Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. — entity listings, a draft executive order, supply-chain security authorities — and why none of the tools actually fit the problem
49:36 – Strange bedfellows: David Sacks versus the "closed lab duopoly," the FUD strategy, why some 80% of Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies reportedly run on Chinese open models, and how gating U.S. frontier models while Chinese weights flow freely supercharges the AI sovereignty argument worldwide
54:55 – The model is infrastructure, the agent is the product: the ByteDance–ZTE agentic phone, the CAC's new initiative on agent trust and interoperability, and why agents fused into operating systems upend both super-app walled gardens and China's data protection regime
1:02:27 – An exegesis of kěkòng: the many meanings of "controllable," the long history of ānquán kěkòng in Chinese tech policy, and the unanswered question of who — CAC, NDRC, or somebody new — actually owns AI safety in either system
1:08:54 – The road to September: what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue, why Mythos tops the Chinese grievance list, the securitization feedback loop that starves trust-and-safety advocates of resources on both sides, and why recursive self-improvement makes this feel like a last, best chance

Paying It Forward
Paul nominates Tony Peng, whose Substack RecodeChinaAI offers sharp, well-written analysis of the application side of China's AI industry — part of an impressive new generation of independent China tech writers.
Samm gives a shout-out to Professor Zhu Yue of Tongji University Law School, published in Science and doing pioneering work at the intersection of disability law and AI law.

Recommendations
Samm: The Land and Its People by David Sedaris — laugh-out-loud funny, especially the "Enough is Enough" chapter; Transcription by Ben Lerner, a perfect small novel about fathers, sons, memory, and technology as enabler or disabler of connection; and Didion and Babitz, on Joan Didion and Eve Babitz and the 1970s California rock scene.
Paul: The Party's Interests Come First by Joseph Torigian — dense but beautifully written, and essential for understanding the current Chinese leadership.
Kaiser: A fiction-only summer! Stoner by John Williams, a small life told most grandly in some of the most beautiful sentence-level writing anywhere; Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, an epistolary novel dense with distilled wisdom from a dying Iowa minister; and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age (黄金时代) in Yan Yan's excellent new translation — bawdy, hilarious, and super Beijing-y despite its Cultural Revolution setting.
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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

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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

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