a year in podcasts
best of the year of the dragon
a playlist
Best show of the year: Our epic series with Yasheng Huang (1, 2, 3).
Huang argues that China’s imperial examination system (科舉 kējǔ) was a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it spurred political mobility and human capital development — but simultaneously, it concentrated intellectual energy on serving the emperor rather than driving innovation. Huang’s stats show that China was actually most inventive during its fragmented “European moment,” between the Han and Sui dynasties (220-589 CE), before the exam system was institutionalized.
This pattern of trading dynamism for stability continues to shape China today. Looking ahead, Huang identifies two major challenges:
A succession crisis. By eliminating term limits, Xi has reintroduced the ancient problem of peaceful power transitions that the post-Mao system had largely solved.
Economic stagnation. China’s current emphasis on top-down industrial policy and tight control is producing declining productivity (much like the late Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev). The core tension Huang identifies is between “scale” (uniformity/control) and “scope” (diversity/dynamism). While China’s model has proven extremely effective at scale, its anxiety toward scope may undermine the very factors — entrepreneurship, openness to foreign ideas, and bottom-up innovation — that drove its rise in the first place.
Huang also argues that US engagement with China failed at least in part because Americans focused more on manufacturing and finance and less on media and academic exchange — areas more likely to enjoy reciprocity and promote pluralism. And he suggests that the West, rather than primarily engaging with ethnic minorities, should emphasize how the rule of law protects everyone, including CCP elites who often end up needing those protections themselves.
In 2025, we’re going to do more on ancient China — starting with Tonio Andrade’s The Gunpowder Age, a look at the great divergence from the perspective of military technology. Consider getting a copy and reading beforehand, the book is a ton of fun.
Regarding politics, evidence increasingly shows that commerce alone doesn’t change political structures. The Song dynasty had vibrant commerce but remained autocratic. In fact, it invented one of the most restrictive ideologies in Chinese philosophy — neo-Confucianism — while Buddhism declined.
Runner up: Shakespeare on Power
We brought on Elliot Cohen, dramaturg Kate Pitt of Shakespeare News, and my brother, professional actor Phil Schneider to act out some scenes and discuss how Shakespeare’s histories help illuminate court politics.
We’ve since learned that ChinaTalk doesn’t only get people promoted (see: Kurt Campbell, Devin DeBacker), it also gets them cast in movies! Phil spent this fall as one of Adam Sandler’s four sons in Happy Gilmore 2. He’s also the lead in an excellent play currently on in Denver now through March 9th and Atlanta March 29 to May 4th.
Ep 1: Shakespeare on Power
Towards the end of Henry IV Part Two, when the father of Henry V, the guy who gives the St. Crispian’s Day speech, is dying. Prince Hal, as he then is, comes in to pay his respects and sees the crown. He thinks his dad has croaked and he puts the crown on his own head, and his father wakes up and there’s a furious scene. They sort of reconcile at the end — but the thing that’s so striking about Henry IV’s exit, and particularly these rather harsh words that he addresses to Prince Hal, is that it’s clear that he doesn’t think anybody else can do the job that he’s done.
If you think about it, that’s Trump’s “I alone can do it” — but I think it’s also, alas, where President Biden is: “I’m the only guy who can really defeat Trump and run the country properly.” Which is nonsense, but I think it’s understandable for somebody who’s been in the Senate for half a century or something like that. It is a good example of how power messes with your sense of reality.
Ep 2: Shakespeare emergency pod after Biden’s presidential debate
I remember a conversation I had with a very senior government official, where I was asking why someone even more senior was still clinging to office. He said, “Well, remember, for these guys, the next big job is death.”
The truth is, Lear says that he’s crawling his way to death. Prospero also says, at the end, every third thought will be of the grave. These guys know that they’re coming to the end, but they’re not approaching it with the kind of tranquility that Cicero recommended.
Tech Policy
Technical heavyweights on national competitiveness
One of ChinaTalk's comparative strengths is examining technical challenges through a policy lens. Episodes like my conversations with Scale’s Alex Wang, Leonard Heim and Chris Miller on test-time compute, the Latent Space discussion, the US Biotech Commissioners, and Nathan Lambert's end-of-year AI review all feature guests far more technical than me. Making content that allows policy folks to engage with what leading technologists teaches me a ton and
I strive to help listeners who don't come from STEM backgrounds engage with cutting-edge technology developments. These episodes are particularly enjoyable for me - I learn a lot from them, and I plan to produce more like them in the future
Export Controls Emergency Pods
We’ve been on a long saga together covering Commerce’s chip export controls, from the first round in October 2022, through the updates in October 2023 and finally in December 2024.
Dylan Patel and Greg Allen blasted Raimondo’s latest round as ineffective half-measures — “if we can identify numerous billion-dollar loopholes within hours of release, imagine what lawyers will find in a month” — arguing that attempts for increasingly elusive “precision” have backfired. Instead, how about a simpler “shotgun approach” that would broadly restrict semiconductor equipment sales to China, rather than the current “Swiss cheese” regulations full of loopholes that actually incentivize Chinese domestic chip development.
The intellectual- and execution-level challenges the Biden administration encountered with export controls exemplify broader Democratic Party challenges. There’s a tendency to believe they can devise the perfect algorithm that balances all competing interests. They think with solving enough integrals, extensive legal review, and track changes on docs, they’ll reach the optimal solution.
This pattern emerged with the Inflation Reduction Act’s lengthy development, the CHIPS Act’s extended negotiations, the periodic reassessment of Ukraine arms distribution, and these export controls. The problem is that, if you can’t make tough strategic decisions upfront and execute them — accepting that not everyone will be happy — you end up in limbo. You achieve worse results by trying to moderately satisfy five variables instead of maximizing the two most critical ones.
We also snuck in two final shows in the last week of the Biden administration, looking into the AI diffusion and foundry controls.
History
Makers of Modern Strategy
Few books have influenced me as much as the Makers of Modern Strategy series. The three volumes (published in 1942, 1986, and 2023) are indispensable to understanding statecraft, leadership, and the evolution of warfare across millennia.
The New Makers of Modern Strategy (2023) is a thousand pages long and analyzes strategy from ancient Greece to the Congo. Hal and I had a blast talking through how the three volumes evolved over time, Tecumseh’s strategic vision, and the impact of technological change across a few thousand years of warfare. Have a listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or check out the transcript below.
How the Navy Learned to Fight
Last year I blazed through an unhealthy amount of 20th century naval history. The capstone conversation to that reading was a great deep dive with Trent Hone, author of a new Nimitz biography and the classic Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898-1945. We explored classic ChinaTalk themes of technological disruptions to warfare and organizational evolution following the dizzying story how the US Navy went from underperforming against a decrepit Spanish Empire in 1898 to uncontested global hegemons in half a century.
Spotify and Apple Podcasts links here.
Is the NSC Unwell?
Who in the White House actually makes decisions? How does the organizational structure, personal incentives, and professional backgrounds of NSC staffers shape what America ends up doing around decisions of war and peace? John Gans and I had a really fun conversation on his book White House Warriors and how the NSC evolved over its post-WWII incarnations.
Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or a transcript.
It’s like NSC staffers are sitting in the back seat of the car, watching. The NSC staff has great judgment for when something’s going wrong because they can see things. But they have very poor judgment on what to do because they’re not doing the things. It’s the classic operator’s dilemma.
WWIII
“So Jordan, will China invade Taiwan?” is first question normies always ask me. We had some of our best discussions of the year taking a stab at answering it.
We hosted Jared McKinney of the Air War College and Peter Harris of Colorado State University, who recently co-authored a fantastic monograph, “Deterrence Gap: Avoiding War in the Taiwan Strait.” In June, we hosted Jared McKinney of the Air War College and Peter Harris of Colorado State University, who presented their findings on how to prevent an invasion of Taiwan. We also had on their student, US Army Lieutenant Colonel J. Kevin McKittrick, whose research paper — “Why America Didn’t Invade Taiwan” — dissected the ultimately aborted WWII-era plan to invade Taiwan as a launching base to then take Japan.
Then we brought on Dmitri Alperovitch who argued that deterring “Xi the gambler,” the United States needs to rationalize its defense spending away from exquisite but unaffordable weapons platforms, maintain its edge in key technologies like AI and semiconductors, and focus on building practical military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific rather than engaging in provocative symbolic gestures.
Pols
Rahm Emanuel
This one is a classic. Rahm didn’t mince words — he articulated the Biden administration’s view of China today with language that nobody in the Biden administration would use themselves.
China has quite an entrepreneurial culture, and [Xi] crushed their entrepreneurship — and in crushing their entrepreneurship and the tactics he adopted, he crushed the confidence of the world in China. … You can’t get anybody in Japan, Europe, or the United States to raise their hand and say, “I’d like to move my family to a city where I could get arrested any given day and be in lockdown.”
GOP Voices
Rolling off the momentum of last year’s excellent interview with then-Rep. Mike Gallagher, our top GOP interviewees this year included Senator Todd Young and former deputy national security advisor Matt Pottinger.
Sen Young:
Though the benefit-to-cost ratio of research investments is off the charts, we’ve seen we saw the percentage of research applications go down just because the resources to fund them were drying up. Those are lost economic opportunities, for our entire economy.
As our fiscal situation has deteriorated, there’s naturally been a desire to pull back from a number of investments, but I would remind a number of my fellow green eyeshade legislators out there that the real number we should be looking at as we think about our fiscal deterioration is the debt-to-GDP ratio.
It’s a fraction — debt/GDP. You can’t starve your economy of one of the components of your GDP, which is R&D investment, in order to deal with the debt.
Pottinger (back in February) predicted that, while a second Trump admin would likely escalate trade tensions with China, his “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan defense would deter Beijing — though Pottinger warns we shouldn’t reverse Biden's clearer defense commitments. He also sees continued tough China policy as a rare area of bipartisan agreement, shaped more by Xi Jinping’s aggressive moves than by who happens to occupy the Oval Office.
I think President Biden’s policy is closer to President Trump’s policy on China than it is to President Obama’s policy, when President Biden was the vice president. That’s interesting. That tells me that we must have gotten some things right, and some things that are now viewed as a consensus — we have the benefit of bipartisan consensus.
Great articles this year Jordan. Keep them coming thank you.