Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I speak with Andrew Seth Meyer, professor of history at CUNY Brooklyn College and the author of a remarkable new book from Oxford University Press, To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor. Sixteen years in the making, it’s the first proper one-volume narrative history of the Warring States in English aimed at a general reader — a gap in the field that Andy has now decisively filled. We talk about why this period — the roughly 260 years between Confucius’s death and Qin’s unification in 221 BCE — really is the deepest layer of Chinese political history that still genuinely matters, and we try together to find the line between responsible historical reasoning about modern China and the kind of lazy essentialism that reaches for Han Feizi every time Xi Jinping makes a speech. Along the way we get into the displacement of the hereditary aristocracy by the shi, the Lüshi Chunqiu as a piece of political genius, why the standard caricature of “Legalist” Qin is wrong, and what it means that the Chinese state is still, in some real sense, running on operating software written in the 4th century BCE.
8:14 – The 16-year gestation, why no general-reader Warring States book existed in English, and what made Andy think he could be the one to write it
11:06 – The romanization headaches: Wei vs. Wey, King Zhao of Qin vs. King Zhao of Yan, and the special agonies of writing about early China for an English audience
14:31 – Why he organized the book by state rather than strictly chronologically — and what that structure lets him do
18:14 – The relevance question: how to take the deep continuity of Chinese political life seriously without falling into the orientalist “eternal China” trap
25:52 – Why the Warring States is properly called a revolution: the destruction of Zhou-era hereditary aristocracy and the rise of the shi
33:15 – Fukuyama’s claim that Qin built the world’s first genuinely modern state — is “modern” the right word?
36:30 – Qin’s 38 commanderies, why the radical version lasted only 15 years, and the Han retreat: aristocracy or regional autonomy?
39:46 – Reading the Hundred Schools as embedded political actors rather than tidy textbook categories — and the Jixia Academy as ancient Brookings
44:06 – The Lüshi Chunqiu as a brilliant piece of political propaganda, and what its tripartite cosmological structure was actually arguing
52:31 – Why the cartoon-legalist version of the Qin is wrong: the 70 erudites, the Taishan stelae, and what the book-burning episode really was
57:05 – The axial age question: pattern-matching or something real?
1:00:40 – What the Warring States actually has to teach us about China in 2026: zhong guo as aspiration, not description
1:05:08 – How the Warring States is taught in China and Taiwan today, and what archaeology is doing to the field
1:08:36 – Constant self-reinvention as the real Chinese legacy, and why no plausible future China fully repudiates the CCP
Paying it forward:
Avital Rom (postdoc at Cambridge, early Chinese cultural history, editor of a forthcoming volume on disability and impairment in early China)
Liang Cai (Notre Dame, new book on Han-era jurisprudence and legal traditions)
Recommendations:
Andy: Hadestown on Broadway — and Anaïs Mitchell’s original concept album
Kaiser: To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis (audiobook especially recommended)
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This week on Sinica, I chat with Ali Wyne, Senior Research and Advocacy Adviser for U.S.-China at the International Crisis Group, just hours after President Trump's plane left Chinese airspace at the end of a three-day state visit to Beijing. We dig into the new framework Xi Jinping put on the table — what Beijing is calling 中美建设性战略稳定关系, a "constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability" — and ask whether it's a genuine doctrine of mutual restraint or a rhetorical tripwire that future American moves can be characterized as having violated. Ali and I work through Foreign Minister Wang Yi's morning-after media briefing, including his striking claim that the U.S. side now "does not accept" Taiwan independence — a notable shift from the standard American formulation. We talk about what Trump actually said on Taiwan in his Air Force One press gaggle and in his Fox News interview with Bret Baier, the gap between Trump's account of Xi's private remarks on Iran and what Beijing is willing to say publicly, and whether AI can serve as a durable basis for cooperation coming out of the summit. We also turn to the American domestic side: the bind Democrats find themselves in trying to critique Trump's China engagement without out-hawking him, the generational data showing a striking gap in American attitudes toward China that transcends partisan division, and the question of when that shift in mass opinion actually starts to bite on policy.

Timestamps
3:46 — Big-picture takeaways: Trump's stumble into a more sober appreciation of Chinese power
6:24 — The new Chinese framing: "constructive strategic stability" and what Beijing wants from it
10:21 — Unpacking the framework: Wu Xinbo, Sun Chenghao, and the nuclear-arms-control genealogy
14:52 — Doctrine of mutual restraint or rhetorical tripwire? The two readings circulating among China-watchers
18:04 — The Democrats' hawkish trap: what a non-out-hawking critique of Trump on China would actually sound like
23:50 — Who in the Democratic political class is modeling the right posture
28:38 — The generational gap in American attitudes toward China, and why it transcends partisan divisions
33:32 — When the public-opinion shift starts to bite on policy formation
37:16 — Taiwan: Xi's fire-and-water language, Rubio's "raise, note, move on," and what Trump said to Bret Baier
42:47 — Wang Yi's "does not accept" formulation and the marker Beijing is laying down
47:32 — Iran and Hormuz: the gap between what Trump says Xi told him privately and what Beijing will say publicly
51:57 — Closing: where Ali ends the week, and the case for Chinese strategic patience 55:18 — Recommended reading on the summit: Ryan Hass in The Atlantic and Jessica Chen Weiss in the FT

Paying It Forward
Afra Wang, author of the Concurrent newsletter — one of the most thoughtful writers on Chinese technological development and what it tells us about broader socioeconomic shifts in China
Allie Matthias, senior research assistant at Brookings, for her recent essay with Jonathan Czin in China Leadership Monitor on the inversion of the "peak China" thesis
Mackenzie Miller, program manager of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations
Kate Gross-Whitaker, research and editorial associate at the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF)

Recommendations
Ali:
No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain by Rebecca Solnit
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza

Kaiser:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad — a National Book Award–winning cri de coeur from a brilliant writer, in the same unflinching register as Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me

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This week I’m sharing the fourth and final 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 three episodes featured Jessica Chen Weiss’s opening remarks and the panels on what China wants, what the United States wants, and tech rivalry and competing visions of the future. This final installment is a fireside conversation between Henry Farrell and Alondra Nelson, followed by Jessica’s closing remarks.
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.
Henry Farrell, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at SAIS, sits down with Alondra Nelson — Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and former Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — for what turns out to be the day’s most generative reframing of the AI race. Henry begins by asking how it is that ideas once confined to 1980s science fiction — the singularity, AGI, brains-in-vats — have come to anchor mainstream American AI policy discourse. Alondra traces the genealogy back to the “Californian ideology” and the long history of outré thinking in Silicon Valley, but her real point is that something has shifted: U.S. negative sentiment around AI has been climbing and plateauing high since 2022, even as adoption has spread — the opposite of the usual technology-acceptance curve, and the opposite of what’s happening in China, Nigeria, or Brazil.
From there the conversation opens up into what I found to be its richest vein: the contrast between a Cartesian, disembodied American conception of AI — “we’re working on the brains,” as Sam Altman put it when OpenAI shut down its robotics team in 2022 — and a more embodied approach that integrates the cognitive and the physical, which is part of what’s powered China’s advances in advanced manufacturing and robotics. Alondra is sharp on the costs of the brain-in-a-vat framing: it treats AI as a state of exception in which existing laws and institutions somehow don’t apply, and it lets us float aspirational claims (”AI will cure cancer”) that elide all the clunky institutional stewardship actually required to get from aspiration to outcome.
She also offers an incisive reading of the Trump administration’s AI policy — which, she argues, is misleadingly described as “deregulatory.” Between export controls, the golden share in Intel, immigration restrictions on STEM talent, and the administration’s tight stewardship of who wins and who loses in the AI ecosystem, this is industrial policy by another name — and a narrowing of democratic input over decisions of enormous infrastructural consequence.
The conversation closes with Henry asking what a small-d democratic successor administration ought to do, and Alondra’s answer is bracingly practical: get rid of the state of exception, take the material supply chain of AI seriously (data centers, electricity, critical minerals, communities), let state-level policy generate evidence about what works, and aim for high-watermark aspirations — North Stars, in the spirit of the AI Bill of Rights — rather than pretending the technology itself will deliver our values.
Jessica then offers her closing remarks, thanking the panelists, previewing the ACF Insights Series, and putting out the call for new junior fellows at the Institute.
Participants:
Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study; former Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Henry Farrell, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins SAIS
Closing remarks: Jessica Chen Weiss, David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies and Inaugural Faculty Director, ACF
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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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