Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, I speak with Yi-Ling Liu, journalist, former China editor at Rest of World, and author of the new book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Yi-Ling's book traces the arc of Chinese online life through five protagonists — a rapper, a gay rights entrepreneur, a feminist activist, a science fiction writer, and an internet censor — each navigating the creative and constrictive forces of the Chinese internet in their own way. The result is a deeply reported, novelistic account of what it felt like to live, create, and push back in one of the most surveilled and dynamic digital environments on earth. We discuss the book's central metaphor of "dancing in shackles," the early utopian glow of Chinese netizen culture, the parallel fates of hip hop and science fiction under the state's alternating embrace and constraint, and the eerie convergence between the Chinese internet and our own.
0:06 — "Wall dancers" as a metaphor: what it captures that "dissident" or "netizen" doesn't
0:09 — Why 网民 (wǎngmín) took root in China as a concept of digital citizenship
0:13 — The early Chinese internet: more open than we remember, but not as free as the myth suggests
0:15 — Ma Baoli: closeted cop to CEO of China's largest gay dating app, and the Gay Talese reporting strategy
0:20 — Lan Yu, Beijing Story, and the film that became a coming-out moment for a generation of queer men
0:22 — Pragmatism at the heart of the dance: how individuals and the state negotiated the internet together
0:28 — Lu Pin and Feminist Voices: from "playing boundary ball" to sudden exile
0:35 — Stanley Chen Qiufan and the state's attempt to co-opt science fiction for nationalist ends
0:43 — The generational split in Chinese sci-fi: Liu Cixin's cosmic scale vs. the near-future unease of Chen Qiufan and Hao Jingfang
0:46 — Hip hop's arc: from underground scenes in Chengdu and Beijing to The Rap of China and sudden constraint
0:51 — Eric Liu, the Weibo censor: humanizing the firewall from the inside
0:55 — Common prosperity, Wang Huning, and the moral panic behind the crackdown on "effeminate" culture
0:59 — Techno-utopianism in retrospect: was the emancipatory internet always a fantasy?
1:03 — The convergence of the Chinese and American internets: Weibo and Twitter, TikTok and Oracle
1:07 — What it means to be free: how the book expanded Yi-Ling's sense of what freedoms people actually want

Paying it forward:
Zeyi Yang, technology reporter at WIRED, and co-author (with Louise Matsakis) of the excellent tech x China newsletter Made in China

Recommendations:
Yi-Ling: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai; Machine Decision is Not Final, an anthology of essays on Chinese AI compiled by scholars affiliated with NYU Shanghai.
Kaiser: The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad (forthcoming);
Essays from Pallavi Aiyar's Substack The Global Jigsaw, particularly "How Has China Succeeded in Making People Mind their Manners" and "Why I Would Rather Be Born Chinese than Indian Today."
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 speak with Kyle Chan, a fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, previously a postdoc at Princeton, and author of the outstanding High-Capacity Newsletter on Substack. Kyle has emerged as one of the sharpest and most empirically grounded voices on U.S.-China technology relations, and he holds the all-time record for the most namechecks on Sinica’s “Paying it forward” segment. We use his recent Financial Times op-ed on “The Great Reversal” in global technology flows and his longer High-Capacity essay on re-coupling as jumping-off points for a wide-ranging conversation about where China now sits at the global technological frontier, why the dominant decoupling narrative misses powerful structural forces pulling the two economies back together, and what all of this means for innovation, choke points, and the global tech ecosystem.
4:35 – How Kyle became Kyle Chan: from Chicago School economics to development, railways, and systems thinking
12:50 – The Great Reversal: China at the technological frontier, from megawatt EV charging to LFP batteries
17:59 – The electro-industrial tech stack and China’s overlapping, mutually reinforcing tech ecosystems
22:40 – Industrial strategy and time horizons: patience, persistence, and the long arc of China’s auto industry
33:45 – Re-coupling under pressure: Waymo and Zeekr, Unitree robots, and the structural forces binding the two economies
40:22 – The gravity model: can political distance overwhelm technological mass?
47:01 – What China still wants from the U.S.: Cursor, GitHub, talent, and the AI brain drain
51:52 – Weaponized interdependence and the danger of securitizing everything
57:30 – Firm-level adaptation: HeyGen, Manus, and the playbook for de-sinification
1:02:58 – The view from the middle: Gulf states, Southeast Asia, and India as geopolitical arbitrageurs
1:10:18 – Engineering resilience: what policymakers are getting wrong about the systems they’re building
Paying it forward: Katrina Northrop; Grace Shao and her AI Proem newsletter
Recommendations:
Kyle: Wired Magazine’s Made in China newsletter (by Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis); The Wire China
Kaiser: The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu

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This week on Sinica, I speak with Patricia Kim, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center, where she focuses on U.S. policy toward China and the broader Asia Pacific. One year into Donald Trump's second term, Pattie and her colleague Joyce Yang have published a comprehensive Brookings assessment titled "Making America Great Again? Evaluating Trump's China strategy at the one-year mark," which examines whether the administration's stated objectives on reindustrialization, AI leadership, strategic dependence, and global standing are actually being met. We discuss the paradox of Trump's China policy (which is surprising consistency in goals despite the absence of a formal strategy document), with its mixed results on economic rebalancing and supply chain security, the troubling deterioration in U.S.-China diplomatic and military channels, and why the administration's approach to allies and partners may be undermining its own objectives. Pattie brings analytical discipline and empirical rigor to debates that are often long on rhetoric and short on evidence, cutting through a lot of noise to assess what's actually working, what isn't, and where the strategy is running up against reality.

4:45 – Does Trump have a China strategy? Consistency without a formal framework
8:15 – Assessing the economic rebalancing goals: reindustrialization and tariffs
15:30 – Technology competition: export controls and AI leadership
23:45 – Supply chain security and strategic dependence challenges
31:20 – The deterioration of diplomatic and military-to-military channels
39:50 – The ally and partner problem: how Trump's approach undermines his own goals
47:15 – Global standing and American credibility in the Trump era
52:30 – Paying it forward: The Lost in Translation series at Brookings

Paying it forward:
Lost in Translation Series (Brookings Global China Project)

Recommendations:
Pattie: To Dare Mighty Things by Michael O'Hanlon
Kaiser: Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman
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This week on Sinica, I speak with Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings and one of the most clear-eyed analysts of the U.S.-China relationship working today. Ryan was director for China at the NSC during the Obama Administration.
As Donald Trump moves through his second year in office, the bilateral relationship has defied easy characterization. The once-dominant language of great power competition has receded, China hawks have been sidelined, and Trump’s personalistic approach—marked by praise for Xi Jinping and a willingness to bracket ideological disputes—represents a sharp departure from recent Washington orthodoxy.
Ryan has just published an essay laying out three plausible pathways for the relationship under Trump: a soft landing, a hard split, or what he considers most likely—a period of uneasy calm in which both sides seek stability not out of trust, but out of mutual constraint. We discuss Trump’s apparent strategy, the vibe shift in American attitudes, Beijing’s choice between managing Trump versus managing uncertainty, the critical importance of Xi’s planned April visit, and whether we’re headed toward genuine stabilization or just buying time before the next collision.
5:24 – Trump’s approach: respect for Xi, military deterrence, and the rare earths constraint
8:03 – The vibe shift and Trump’s “reptilian feel” for American exhaustion with confrontation
10:52 – Three scenarios: soft landing, hard split, or uneasy calm through mutual constraint
16:30 – Beijing’s bet: managing Trump versus managing whoever comes next
26:46 – Economic interdependence and why decoupling is like “separating egg whites from a scrambled egg”
37:12 – The April visit as a critical test: pageantry, protests, and what both sides are watching for
42:18 – Taiwan as the most dangerous variable and where theory meets practice
46:58 – Lack of institutional guardrails and the risks of Trump’s personalistic foreign policy
Paying it forward:
Audrye Wong (USC)
Recommendations:
Ryan: The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer by Robert Suettinger
Kaiser: The Last Cavalier (Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine) by Alexandre Dumas; Asia Society conversation with Lizzi Lee, Bert Hoffmann, and Gerard DiPippo on rebalancing China’s economy; Trivium China Podcast with Andrew Polk, Joe Peissel, Danny McMahon, and Cory Combs on capital expenditure headwinds
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 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
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.