"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 1: What China Wants

**Kaiser Kuo** (0:09)
Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you this week from Hong Kong. Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast is and will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the show and with my newsletter, please consider lending your support. I'm still looking for new institutional support and the lines are as always open. You can reach me at sinicapod at gmail.com.
And listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. Seriously, help me out. I know there are a lot of substacks out there and they start to add up. I subscribe to many of them myself, but I really think this one delivers serious value for your hard-earned dollar. So please do subscribe and help me to continue bringing you these conversations. I am on the road this week, as I said, down in Hong Kong, giving a couple of talks and attending a conference. So rather than put out a regular episode, I'm doing something a little different, and I think you're going to find it well worth your time. A few days ago, on April 3rd, the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs, ACF, at Johns Hopkins SAIS, hosted a day-long conference in Washington called The China Debate We're Not Having, Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead. The organizing premise was something that resonates deeply with me, that much of our prevailing policy conversation rests on under-examined assumptions, and that we need more rigor, humility, and intellectual honesty if we're going to navigate this moment well. With the generous blessing and active encouragement of the organizers, I'm sharing the audio from that conference with you over the next couple of days. Today, you'll hear two things. First, the opening welcome remarks from Jessica Chen Weiss, the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and the inaugural Faculty Director of ACF who organized the whole event. Jessica is, of course, a regular on this show and is genuinely among the people working on China policy today, whom I admire most. She'll lay out the intellectual stakes of the day beautifully and concisely. Then you'll hear the first panel, What China Wants, moderated by Demetri Sevastopulo, the US-China correspondent for the Financial Times and one of the sharpest journalists covering the beat. He's joined by a genuinely excellent group, Dan Taylor, a former Senior China Intelligence Analyst at DIA and a Senior Fellow at CICE ACF, Arthur Kroeber, founding partner of Gavekal Dragonomics and one of the most clear-eyed analysts of the Chinese economy anywhere, Shao Yuqun, who's Director of the Institute for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, who brings an indispensable mainland perspective that you don't get often in these settings, and Jessica herself. Over the coming weeks, I'll be putting out the remaining sessions from the conference, which include panels on What the United States Wants, on Tech Rivalry and AI Competition, and a fireside chat between Henry Farrell and Alondra Nelson on Where the AI Race Discourse Goes Wrong. Really strong material throughout. For now, enjoy the conversation.

**Jessica Chen Weiss** (3:57)
All right. Well, welcome, everybody. My name is Jessica Chen Weiss. I'm the inaugural faculty director of the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs, or ACF, here at SAIS. We're delighted to welcome you here today. It's a moment of great flux, which means a lot of risk, but also great opportunity. As the song by Buffalo Springfield put it, there's something happening here, but what it is, it ain't exactly clear. So I'm hoping that you emerge from today's conversation with a clearer picture of what exactly is happening here. I think at this critical juncture in world history, it's vital that we look afresh at key assumptions and principles, both about China, about the United States' own purpose here at home and abroad, as well as about the nature of the technological developments that are reshaping our economies and societies. These, we feel, are not the debates that we're having often enough. And so today we tackle these foundational questions head on, to add rigor and humility, civility and creativity, to advance a more sober, strategic and evidence-based conversation about US public and policy conversation about China.