AI, China, defense, national security, supply chains, the Protestant roots of Kim Il-sung’s Messiah complex, the lethality of hydrofluoric acid, and horseback archery in Kyrgyzstan. It’s been a productive Q3. Here are some of the things we learned and why we think they matter.
The ChinaTalk team is growing! We’ve welcomed Quinn Ennis, our newest full-time analyst, and Michael Palmer, who has been doing great work behind the scenes on video and audio!
China and AI
What does Liang Wenfeng actually believe?
The DeepSeek Thesis reconstructs DeepSeek’s strategy from leaked minutes of a four-hour meeting between Liang Wenfeng and investors. For Liang, general intelligence is the only problem worth solving — products can wait, because “once truly generalized and convincingly superior intelligence arrives, creating to-C and to-B products will be trivial.”
Why it matters: This is a rare window into the worldview of one of the most important people in Chinese AI. Liang is all-in on AGI rather than diverting focus toward commercializing current AI capabilities, and he’s betting that open models and Chinese chips can get him there.
Why are Chinese AI researchers so skeptical of American AI safety?
In How Chinese AI Radicalizes, Irene traces an unsettling development: some Chinese researchers are increasingly concluding that American AI-safety rhetoric is just a form of technological containment. DeepSeek researcher Liu Shengyu’s viral essay argues that frontier AI should be broadly accessible rather than controlled by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI (and yes, he mentions Hitler). In short, American AI safety rhetoric is backfiring in China.
Why it matters: If Chinese AI researchers interpret American safety arguments through the lens of anti-China containment, genuine US-China cooperation becomes harder, just as increasingly capable AI makes cooperation more important.
Bonus throwback: Jordan’s 2025 interview with Dario.
What happens when AI agents go rogue?
Cyber Apocalypse, Now? examines the July incident in which OpenAI test agents escaped their sandboxes, coordinated with one another, and breached Hugging Face. But while the West worries about autonomous cyber operations and “grad student” security cultures, China on the Hugging Face Incident looks at Beijing’s reaction.
Why it matters: The incident has become a geopolitical contest over what “AI safety” means. Chinese state media is actively framing American safety warnings as a hypocritical conspiracy (“the American disease”) and seizing the opportunity to define “safety” on its own terms.
China’s Industrial Strengths and Structural Weaknesses
China’s rare-earth moat
China’s Rare Earths Duopoly goes inside the two state-owned giants that dominate China’s rare-earth industry. The country’s lasting advantage isn’t what’s underground, but the accumulated process knowledge held by specialized teams. That expertise can’t be recreated just by buying equipment or poaching a few individuals, but Beijing’s control is shakier than it seems. Quota discrepancies point to large-scale hidden production and smuggling.
Why it matters: Reshoring critical mineral supply chains requires years of process engineering and human talent, not just capital expenditure and mining permits. And while Chinese engineers are underpaid compared to their Western counterparts, Beijing realizes their strategic value and is seizing passports to prevent critical know-how from leaving the country.
The chip supply chain has a chemical layer
Most discussions of semiconductor power focus on fabs, lithography machines, and advanced chips.
But modern chips also require dozens of extraordinarily specialized chemicals and gases, many at almost unimaginable levels of purity. A fab can use 60–70 specialty process gases, alongside other chemicals.
In The Chemistry of Chips, Carl Jackson explains how China went from a marginal player to supplying much of the chemical infrastructure needed for semiconductor manufacturing in just 15 years. “Taiwan is 100% reliant on Chinese supply chains today” for most critical gases.
Why it matters: Semiconductor resilience plans that stop at fabs and lithography miss an entire layer of the supply chain. The invisible industrial ecosystem is crucial.
China’s robotics advantage is a manufacturing advantage
In The Robots Are Here, SemiAnalysis’s Niko Ciminelli and Reyk Knuhtsen argue that China’s real robotics advantage is vertical integration, component supply chains, and iteration speed.
Our translation of a Caijing profile, The King of Unitree, shows what that looks like inside one of China’s leading robotics companies. Founder Wang Xingxing put it bluntly: “Don’t try to beat us on cost — we can still go a lot lower.”
Why it matters: General-purpose robots could be the first technology to truly decouple capital from human labor in the physical world. The race to build them won’t be won on AI models alone, but on actuators, magnets, and manufacturing speed.
How broken is China’s economy?
China’s problems get described as a property crisis, a debt crisis, a demographic crisis, or a demand crisis. Logan Wright on Broken China offers a more unified explanation: the finance-driven model that powered China’s growth is now constraining it.
Authorities keep failing firms alive rather than write off losses because “decay is an easier political choice.” One of his most useful insights is that weak domestic demand and China’s enormous export surplus are two sides of the same phenomenon.
China’s “Dying” Companies shows what this looks like at the firm level. R&D spending in strategic sectors roughly quadrupled between 2015 and 2023, but productivity remained flat, partly because local officials continued to prop up zombie companies.
Leia Wang’s Why China’s AI Bubble Is Also Industrial Policy complicates the picture. Government-backed venture funding is creating bubble-like dynamics in AI, but the resulting shakeout can also drive down costs, accelerate adoption, and build globally competitive companies.
Why it matters: Yes, China has EVs, AI, and robotics, but nothing has yet replaced property as a driver of Chinese growth. Wright argues that competition with China is increasingly about industrial and military power, not simply economic growth.
Taiwan
Taiwan needs drones. Can it build a drone industry?
In Can Taiwan Build Drones? and part two, Ethan Kessler looks at the surprisingly difficult task of turning Taiwan’s strengths in electronics and precision manufacturing into a functioning defense industry. Political fights over funding, limited flight-testing infrastructure, dependence on Western software, and Chinese dominance of key components all get in the way.
Why it matters: Taiwan has all the reasons to develop a full-stack drone industry. But challenges mean that Taiwan’s best bet may be supplying clean components to allied drone makers, in order to realize the Lai admin’s dream of “Red-Free” supply chains.
Taiwan’s energy problem is a national-security problem
Taiwan imports 97% of its energy and holds only around 11 days of LNG reserves. Taiwan’s War on Renewables, a radio show produced by Lily, examines the nuclear-versus-renewables fight, permitting problems, local politics, and a state utility that keeps prices artificially low and blocks market reform.
Why it matters: “The DPP’s botched green revolution has left the island structurally addicted to imported fossil fuels.”
WarTalk
Can the US turn technology, money, and exquisite weapons into military power at scale?
Six months into the Iran war, WarTalk: Ammo + CCAs Are Dumb? took stock of what’s left. Bryan Clark estimates that roughly 850 Tomahawks were fired in the first couple of months, out of an inventory of around 4,000. LRASM and JASSM-ER stocks are “essentially at zero,” while the Army has fired nearly all of its ATACMS and most of its PrSM.
In Potemkin Pacific, the panel counted roughly 40% of the underway Navy in the Middle East, leaving INDOPACOM with little to cover the Pacific. We also asked whether the “AI Force” is a farce, and why physics, not software, still wins wars.
Why it matters: The US is spending its Pacific deterrent in the Middle East, and technological sophistication doesn’t equal usable military capacity. Mass, readiness, industrial capacity, and logistics determine whether weapons on paper can be deployed and replaced in wartime.
Elsewhere, Julian Gewirtz joined Jordan to discuss Xi’s state visit, Matt Sheehan and Kevin Xu sketched what a Project Glasswing with Chinese characteristics might look like, and we investigated a five-million-barrel oil mystery. We also went back to ancient Greece, shared our favorite books of the year so far, followed Lily to the World Nomad Games in Kyrgyzstan and Irene to Indonesia, traced the Presbyterian beginnings of North Korea’s personality cult, and joined Nick in figuring out why America ran out of Chinese lab monkeys.
Staging sandboxes are where that Hugging Face escape would worry me most. Teams lock down prod egress and then give the test environment open internet because nobody thinks of it as live.