Sinica Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Adam Tooze is Chinamaxxing! Apr 02, 2026

Show notes

Economic historian Adam Tooze returns to Sinica fresh from the China Development Forum and his second extended visit to Beijing in under a year. In this wide-ranging conversation, Adam and I cover the 15th Five-Year Plan — what it signals about Beijing’s development priorities and whether it represents a genuine shift away from investment-led growth — and the extraordinary scale of China’s renewable energy buildout, which Adam argues may be bringing us to the global peak of CO2 emissions right now.

They discuss the concept of the “big green state,” why Western analysts keep dancing around the role of the CPC in driving China’s environmental transformation, and what the “Chinamaxxing” phenomenon says about a slow but real reckoning in Western public consciousness. From Europe’s evolving posture toward China — caught between EV anxieties and transatlantic rupture — to China’s role in the Global South’s energy future, the conversation moves through coal transitions, Indonesian nickel zones, African microgrids, and the collapse of the flying geese model.

The episode closes with a frank exchange on the Iran war, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, the stunning political silence on American campuses, and what Beijing is most likely doing: sitting pretty and waiting it out. Adam also offers a preview of his forthcoming book on the energy transition — which turns out to be another massive one — and recommends Tim Sahay and Wang Hui as essential reading.

02:44 – Adam’s Chinese language study: HSK3, the Confucius Institute curriculum, and the joys of chasing characters

09:41 – The jìhuà/guīhuà distinction and what the shift in nomenclature from the 11th Five-Year Plan onward actually signals

12:01 – The 15th Five-Year Plan: green energy tinkering, sci-tech ambitions, and the human development dimension

18:10 – Does Beijing genuinely mean to shift from investment-led growth? Reading “high quality development” and “common prosperity”

22:38 – The Great Reckoning: has Western intellectual and policy consciousness actually moved on China?

29:45 – Environmental authoritarianism, the CPC as mobilizing institution, and why Xi’s “petty bourgeois environmentalism” deserves to be taken seriously

33:39 – Persistent misperceptions of China in Western discourse; the “jaundiced American” trench perspective

39:16 – European neuralgia: EV overcapacity, Ukraine, and whether transatlantic rupture opens a window for China

45:02 – China and the Global South: the end of the flying geese model, African microgrids, Indonesian nickel zones, and BRI record lending

59:32 – Mark Carney’s “age of rupture”: does the framing capture something real, or does it flatter the West?

01:05:18 – What Beijing sees from its windows: Iran, Venezuela, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, and a five-point plan for Chinese hegemony (that won’t happen)

01:14:55 – Preview of Adam’s forthcoming book on the energy transition and the “second world” thesis

Paying It Forward: Tim Sahay (PolyCrisis / Phenomenal World)

Recommendations:

Adam: Wang Hui’s The End of the Revolution

Kaiser: The Chinese series Shēng mìng shù (Born to Be Alive)

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Is China Trying to Sever Plato from NATO? Chang Che on Beijing's Embrace of the Greco-Roman Classics Mar 26, 2026

Show notes

This week on Sinica, I welcome journalist and former colleague Chang Che. His recent New Yorker piece "How China Learned to Love the Classics" generated enormous attention. We explore one of the more surprising cultural phenomena in contemporary China: a growing, state-backed enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman classics. We dig into what's actually driving this revival, from the genuine intellectual curiosity of scholars like He Yanxiao, who fell in love with the Odyssey as a Chinese high school student and went on to earn a Chicago PhD, to what might be the more deliberate strategic ambitions of figures like Politburo member Li Shulei and the shadow of philosopher Liu Xiaofeng's Straussianism. We also compare Chang's warmly enchanted 2022 China Project piece on Austrian classicist Leopold Lieb to the politically sharper New Yorker piece four years later — and ask what that shift in tone tells us about what's actually changed. This is an episode about civilizational discourse, soft power, and the strange fate of scholarship when the state decides it finds your obscure passion useful.

00:32 – Kaiser introduces the episode from Beijing and reflects on the asymmetry in how the West covers Chinese intellectual curiosity

04:08 – Civilizationist discourse: Spengler, Huntington, and The Civilization Trap

10:56 – Introducing Chang Che and the evolution from his 2022 China Project piece to the New Yorker

15:38 – How Chang first got drawn into the subject: Latin classes, Charlottesville, and young Chinese classicists returning from American PhDs

21:38 – What changed in four years: the state moves from background to foreground

25:28 – Inside the institutional push: what China's "classics departments" actually look like, and who controls the definition of "classics"

31:13 – Xi Jinping's letter to Greek scholars and the move, perhaps, to sever ancient Greece from the modern West

39:57 – Liu Xiaofeng, Leo Strauss, and why Strauss fever gripped Chinese intellectuals after 1989

47:03 – The Padilla Peralta "incident" and the strange porousness between American and Chinese discourse communities on the classics

52:13 – Chenchen Zhang's framework: civilizationist discourse claims difference internationally while enforcing homogeneity domestically

57:30 – He Yanxiao, K-pop, and the idea of "Chinatown classics"

01:07:13 – Where will China's classics revival be in ten years?

Paying It Forward: Dongxian Jiang (Fordham) and Simon Luo (Nanyang Technological University)

Recommendations: Chang recommends House of the Dragon; Kaiser recommends the Ah-Q Arkestra, led by trombonist Matt Roberts, whose latest album Méiyǒu yìjiàn is on Spotify.

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Edge of Ruin: Mike Lampton and Wang Jisi’s Warning on U.S.-China Relations Mar 19, 2026

Show notes

David M. Lampton—“Mike”—is one of America’s most distinguished scholars of U.S.–China relations, director of China Studies Emeritus at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and the author of landmark works on Chinese politics and foreign policy. He joins me this week to discuss a striking new Foreign Affairs essay he co-authored with the eminent Chinese international relations scholar Wang Jisi of Peking University: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back from the Brink.”

Written against the backdrop of President Trump’s planned visit to China (and before the outbreak of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran), the essay is less a routine policy paper than an urgent intervention — two veteran scholars, one American and one Chinese, throwing a rope across a widening chasm. They argue that strategic rivalry has become self-reinforcing, that the greatest danger is no longer deliberate conflict but accidental war driven by miscalculation and escalation dynamics neither side fully controls, and that a rare, narrow window for “a new normalization” may now be opening.

We range across the essay’s boldest claims — on Taiwan as the unlikely starting point for stabilization, the corrosive logic of securitization, the ghost of the first Cold War, and the looming talent crisis in serious China studies — in a meaty, substantive conversation.

3:39 How the Lampton–Wang Jisi collaboration came together

6:31 The division of labor and the essay’s unified voice

9:15 Wang Jisi’s cognitive empathy and his unusual depth of American understanding

13:57 The essay’s emotional register: veteran scholars and the specter of another Cold War

16:32 From reassurance to deterrence—and why deterrence keeps getting harder to maintain

25:02 Mirror-image threat narratives as self-fulfilling operating systems

32:08 Securitization, the “one-way ratchet,” and whether economic interdependence can be rebuilt

39:23 Accidental war: what has changed since Hainan 2001 and Belgrade 1999

44:16 Where the most damaging choices were made—China’s Ukraine pivot, U.S. arms-control withdrawals

51:29 The window of opportunity: Trump’s China visit, the 4th Plenum, and post-Iran recalculation

1:01:30 Taiwan as the counterintuitive starting point for stabilization

1:10:03 Collapse fantasies, hubris, and the Pearl Harbor danger of “act now or lose the window”

1:13:14 The looming China-talent crisis and the future of the field

Paying It Forward

Mike highlights Rosie Levine, executive director of the U.S.–China Education Trust, where she is leading a major new initiative to expand serious American scholarship in China and encourage Chinese institutions to open their doors wider to foreign researchers and students.

Recommendations

Mike: The Raider by Stephen R. Platt (Knopf, 2025) — a biography of Major Evans Carlson, the swashbuckling Marine officer who trained with Chinese Communist forces in the 1930s, befriended Zhu De, brought the word “gung-ho” into English, and died in 1947 just in time to miss both the PRC’s turn away from liberty and McCarthyism’s persecution at home.

Kaiser: “How China Learned to Love the Classics,” a New Yorker piece by Chang Che on the remarkable renaissance of interest in Greco-Roman philosophy and literature in contemporary China — and what it says about the world we now inhabit.

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Governing Digital China, with Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo Mar 12, 2026

Show notes

This week on Sinica, I speak with Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo, co-authors of Governing Digital China, a new book that examines how an authoritarian state governs a digital ecosystem it doesn't fully own, can never fully control, and yet fundamentally depends on. Danie — a professor of digital governance at the Hertie School in Berlin and a returning Sinica guest, having joined us way back in 2014 to discuss her earlier book on media commercialization and authoritarian rule — and Ting, associate professor in government and artificial intelligence at the University of Birmingham, together offer a richly empirical account of the triangular relationship between the Chinese state, major platform companies, and ordinary internet users. Rather than treating firms as mere instruments of party control or citizens as passive subjects of surveillance, they develop a framework they call "popular corporatism," which captures how bargaining, incentives, and user preferences shape what is and isn't permissible in China's digital spaces — including the endlessly misunderstood social credit system.

4:32 — The digital dilemma: how digital platforms simultaneously empower economic development and create political risk for the party-state — a tension that isn't unique to authoritarian regimes

7:45 — Why the command-and-control model falls short: platforms require technical expertise and user engagement the state lacks, and firms like Tencent and Sina have real leverage as a result

11:41 — Popular corporatism explained: why users — including the "silent majority" of lurkers — must be foregrounded in any account of China's digital governance, and how firms become state "consultants" and "insiders"

21:09 — The survey: GPS-based nationally representative sampling, how to desensitize politically sensitive questions, and why this kind of research can no longer be conducted in China

27:22 — Lurkers vs. discussants: the 90-9-1 rule and the counterintuitive finding that users who perceive more openness on platforms like WeChat and Weibo report higher political trust in the central government

35:40 — Functional liberalization: why partial openness should be understood as governance strategy, not mere concession — and what the fandom-community doxing wars illustrate about that

39:23 — The social credit system: what it actually is, what it is not, and why the Black Mirror version is a myth

42:38 — Two subsystems, one misunderstood system: the financial/commercial credit infrastructure, the local-government behavioral programs, and how Sesame Credit and court blacklists actually fit together

46:20 — The privacy paradox and political trust: why convenience routinely overrides stated privacy preferences — and why where Alipay is most embedded, residents trust the state most

52:42 — Stability, exportability, and the Orwell-versus-Huxley question: what preconditions popular corporatism requires, which other developmental states it might apply to, and why China's digital governance is better understood as a coercion-cooption balancing act

Paying It Forward

Ting Luo recommends Ning Leng, assistant professor at Georgetown University and author of Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party State in China.

Daniela Stockmann recommends Felix Garten, postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School, whose work examines how Chinese tech companies behave when operating in regulatory environments outside China — including the EU, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Recommendations

Daniela: The Legend of the Female General 《锦月如歌》, a Chinese historical drama available on YouTube with English subtitles, especially for anyone interested in internal martial arts and martial heroines in Chinese popular culture.

Ting Luo：Bordeaux, France — specifically, just going there and drinking excellent wine.

Kaiser: Two Substack newsletters for following China's relationship with the Middle East, especially as the American-Israeli war against Iran continues to unfold: Jonathan Fulton's China-MENA Newsletter and Jesse Marks's Coffee in the Desert

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Yi-Ling Liu on The Wall Dancers: China's Internet, Its Creative Spirits, and the Art of the Possible Feb 25, 2026

Show notes

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 Sunnyby 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."

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Kyle Chan on the Great Reversal in Global Technology Flows Feb 18, 2026

Show notes

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

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Brookings' Patricia Kim Takes Stock of Trump's Second-Term China Policy Feb 11, 2026

Show notes

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

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Uneasy Calm: Ryan Hass on Three Pathways for U.S.-China Relations Under Trump Feb 04, 2026

Show notes

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.

Afra Wang on "The Morning Star of Lingao" (临高启明) and the Rise and Reckoning of China's "Industrial Party" Jan 28, 2026

Show notes

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.

The Highest Exam: Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin on China's Gaokao and What It Reveals About Chinese Society Jan 21, 2026

Show notes

This week on Sinica, I speak with Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin, coauthors of The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. We're talking about China's college entrance exam — dreaded and feared, with outsized ability to determine life outcomes, seen as deeply flawed yet also sacrosanct, something few Chinese want drastically altered or removed. Cards on table: I had very strong preconceptions about the gaokao. My wife and I planned our children's education to get them out of the Chinese system before it became increasingly oriented toward gaokao preparation. But this book really opened my eyes.

Ruixue is professor of economics at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy, researching how institutions like examination systems shape governance, elite selection, and state capacity. Hongbin is James Liang Chair at Stanford, focusing on education, labor markets, and institutional foundations of China's economic development.

We explore why the gaokao represents far more than just a difficult test, the concrete incentives families face, why there are limited alternative routes for social mobility, how both authors' own experiences shaped their thinking, why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China, what happened when the exam system was suspended during the Cultural Revolution, why inequality has increased despite internet access to materials, why meaningful reform is so politically difficult, how education translated into productivity and GDP growth, the gap between skill formation and economic returns, how the system shapes governance and everyday life, and the moral dimensions of exam culture when Chinese families migrate to very different education systems like the U.S.

6:18 – What the gaokao actually represents beyond just being a difficult exam

11:54 – Why there are limited alternative pathways for social mobility

14:23 – How their own experiences as students shaped their thinking

18:46 – Why the gaokao is a political institution, not just educational policy

22:21 – Why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China

28:30 – What happened in late Qing and Cultural Revolution when exams were suspended

33:26 – Has internet access to materials reduced inequality or has it persisted?

36:55 – Hongbin's direct experience trying to reform the gaokao—and why it failed

40:28 – How education improvement accounts for significant share of China's GDP growth

42:44 – The gap: college doesn't add measurable skills, but gaokao scores predict income

46:56 – How centralized approach affects talent allocation across fields

51:08 – The gaokao and GDP tournament for officials: similar tournament systems

54:26 – How ranking and evaluation systems shape workplace behavior and culture

58:12 – When exam culture meets U.S. education: understanding tensions around affirmative action

1:02:10 – Transparent rule-based evaluation vs. discretion and judgment: the fundamental tradeoff

Recommendations:

Ruixue: Piao Liang Peng You (film by Geng Jun); Stoner (a novel by John Williams)

Hongbin: The Dictator's Handbook

Kaiser: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field; Black Pill by Elle Reeve

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