Sinica Podcast copertina

Sinica Podcast

Sinica Podcast

Di: Kaiser Kuo
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A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo.

 Economia Politica e governo Scienze politiche
Episodi
  • "But China!": Robert Wright on the AI Race and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning

    "But China!": Robert Wright on the AI Race and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning
    Jun 17 2026

    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.



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    1 ora e 54 min
  • The Texas Paradox: How the Most Anti-China State Is Building America's China Capacity

    The Texas Paradox: How the Most Anti-China State Is Building America's China Capacity
    Jun 3 2026
    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 program09:12 — David on when the Nixon-through-Obama engagement consensus broke (fall 2017) and how the lexicon shifted13:30 — Engagement honestly defined: what its architects actually believed vs. the Jeffersonian-democracy straw man18:30 — The Texas paradox: HB 128, sister cities, Confucius Institutes — and the country's biggest Mandarin program in the same state31:26 — Texas business, Tim Dunn, faith, and the gap between political rhetoric and where Texans actually are41:54 — The Defense Department safety/security story: when one Chinese word ate an entire bilateral agreement46:16 — 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 order52:28 — What real national-language capacity would actually look like: NSLI, WALARA, and why the pipeline still runs through one Marine major in Texas01:06:07 — Reading the Beijing summit: the warmth, the "constructive strategic stability" framing, and whether Trump's Taiwan call could blow it all up01:17:10 — 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 surfPaying it ForwardEddie: 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. ...
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    1 ora e 42 min
  • The View from Everywhere Else: Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summits

    The View from Everywhere Else: Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summits
    May 26 2026

    Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summits

    This week I'm joined again by Eric Olander, founder of the China Global South Project, which runs the most indispensable English-language operation going for understanding China's engagement with Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

    I came in with a plan: map, region by region, how the capitals of the Global South were reading the back-to-back Trump and Putin visits to Beijing — relief at a steadier U.S.-China modus vivendi, or foreboding at a G2 condominium squeezing shut their room to maneuver. Eric dismantled the premise within ten minutes. The honest answer, he warned me, is that most of the Global South simply isn't watching the way we are — and the disappointment turned out to be the most interesting thing in the room. What looked like the absence of a story was the story. I'd built my questions around one assumption about what mattered; Eric had built his answers around another, and I cop to being schooled.

    Once you set the summit framing aside, what Eric's contributors are actually seeing comes into focus: Japan racing to recenter an Asia-Pacific security architecture, a region quietly de-risking from an unreliable United States, fresh cracks in the BRICS, Justin Yifu Lin's “three moves” for Chinese manufacturing, Latin America's “find out” phase, and a Gulf where the Chinese setback so many in Washington insist must exist simply isn't there. We get into all of it — and close on the summit as a remarkable piece of theater, the first since 1945 at which no one quite knew who the most powerful person in the room was.

    04:27 — The dominant mood: pro forma coverage, exhaustion, and bigger problems at home

    08:15 — Breaking news: the paused $14B Taiwan arms package and the canceled Colby trip

    11:15 — The dog that caught the truck: China and the costs of a receding U.S. umbrella

    13:00 — "Constructive strategic stability" — new equilibrium or just choreography?

    28:23 — The snub: Beijing sends only an ambassador to the BRICS meeting in New Delhi

    37:56 — Africa: tariff-free access, the trade imbalance, and Kenya's "collapsed" exports

    44:34 — Justin Yifu Lin's "three moves": move up-market, localize, move south

    51:00 — Latin America's "find out" phase in Panama, and very low China literacy

    57:35 — The Gulf after the war on Iran: who really won?

    Paying it Forward:

    Boston University's Global Development Policy (GDP) Research Center

    Recommendations

    Eric: A “rabbit hole” of books on Xi Jinping, currently Party of One by Chun Han Wong (after Kevin Rudd's On Xi Jinping).

    Kaiser: Angine de Poitrine, a “microtonal math rock” duo from Quebec — think Frank Zappa meets King Crimson — possibly the thing to breathe new life into progressive rock.



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    1 ora e 21 min
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