The ChinaTalk Podcast: Where to Start
ChinaTalk has a podcast with 400+ episodes you should really be listening to!
The ChinaTalk podcast features weekly interviews with experts covering the same mix of topics you see on this newsletter: modern China, US-China relations, and technology. The button below allows you to subscribe for free on your podcast app of choice.
I recently pressed publish on ChinaTalk’s 400th podcast episode. Below are some fan favorites to get you started, and here are some Spotify playlists: a best of 2024, best of 2023, and an all-time favorites list.
Yasheng Huang on China’s Imperial Examination System
Professor 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.
This episode comes in three parts on Substack (1, 2, 3) or two parts in podcast form.
Apple Podcasts: part 1, part 2
Spotify:
RAND’s Jason Matheny on Tech Competition and Organizational Design
As I was starting to wrap up at the top of our first hour, Jason cut me off. “Jordan, I actually blocked out two hours — it is really important to get into these issues!” The best shows tend to be those with guests who not only are engaged in the world today but also share perspectives informed by deep study of the past. Jason ranged with me through organizational design, cultivating a strong culture of research, x-risk, and even how art can illustrate aspects of national security. This show was my favorite of 2023.
How Corruption Works in China
How can China be so corrupt and yet grow so fast? What’s the relationship between corruption and competent governance? How does “access money” at the higher levels differ from the “profit sharing” you see lower down in the bureaucracy? How does China in the twenty-first century compare with America’s gilded age? And why won’t anyone give me dinosaur eggs?
To discuss, Professor Yuen Yuen Ang joins the show to talk about her fantastic new book, China’s Gilded Age.
Jake Sullivan in November, 2025
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former National Security Advisor, reflects on managing both long-term strategy and immediate crises during his tenure, including Ukraine, nuclear escalation risks, and US-China competition. He discusses the challenges of getting “ground down” by government work while attempting to engineer an industrial policy renaissance, explains why he thinks Pelosi’s Taiwan visit caused more harm than good, and shares the rationale behind the decisions he made when aiding Ukraine.
Peter Hessler, from Beijing to Cairo
Peter Hessler spent seven years in China as a correspondent for The New Yorker, followed by five years in Egypt. In this episode, Peter discusses his long and prolific career reporting on the society, politics, and culture of these two dynamic nations; he also considers the similarities and differences in the ways the Chinese and Egyptian people make sense of their respective places in the world based on their rich historical and cultural legacies. In addition, Peter reflects on the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and contrasts it with the 2013 mass protests and eventual coup d’état in Cairo.
How China Can Take Over Tech
Douglas Fuller and I discuss his fantastic book, Paper Tiger, Hidden Dragons: Firms and the Political Economy of China’s Technological Development. In his book, Fuller explores a question that has hounded heads of state around the world for decades: how can a developing country get ahead in the tech sector? Drawing on the results of 499 interviews with experts over the course of fifteen years, Fuller discusses China’s answer to this question in the context of its attempts to dominate the global semiconductor industry. We get into the weeds on why Huawei succeeded where ZTE failed, and explore the concept of technology transfer and implications for the future of the Chinese tech sector.
How Chinese Ink Painting Survived the CCP
Occasionally on the podcast we cover more culture-forward topics like “why is Chinese TV so terrible” and “the best of Chinese hip hop.” I particularly enjoyed this show with artist Arnold Chang and Joe Scheier-Dawlberg, who is the curator of Chinese Paintings at the MET in New York. We got into how Chinese painting — arguably the elitist of arts — fared during the Cultural Revolution, as well as ink paintings, socialist realism, oil paintings, and the political upheavals that formed their backdrop. We also got into:
Whether chaotic periods produce the best art;
The role of escapism in the creation of Chinese paintings;
Which university exhibited a twelve-by-twenty-foot oil painting of yours truly without prior permission.
Lastly, if you listen to your podcasts via YouTube, ChinaTalk has a growing YouTube channel where we’re running all of our shows, often with videos of the guests.