Why the World Keeps Getting Shocked by China's Technological Progress

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, we talk a lot about the tech competition between the US and China, but I still think we talk about it in sort of broad strokes. We talk about some of the policies obviously made in 2025, but actually how the process of tech innovation in China still seems like important. There's more to learn about there.

Tracy Alloway (0:44)

I totally agree. Actually, we have a really good example recently in the form of DeepSeek. This thing that people acted like it came out of nowhere, but actually a lot of the papers had been published over the course of months. But it seemed to surprise everyone.

Joe Weisenthal (1:01)

I don't know if it's true. The story that, oh, it's just the side project of a quantitative hedge fund. That's such a good story. I'm not entirely sure if that's true. They made it so like, oh, yeah, while they were doing this quant fund, they built DeepSeek on the side. Like, it's such an alluring story.

Tracy Alloway (1:18)

Well, not just a quant hedge fund. Isn't the story supposedly that the founder decided to go into AI after Xi Jinping was kind of complaining about how much talent and resources is being wasted on finance in various ways? Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (1:34)

People like these are like great stories, right? And of course, there is a lot of truth to them in the particularly in the broad sense that we know that and we talked about this at the time several years ago, there was this sort of announced hard pivot away from the sort of like consumer Internet tech and they sort of had their legs cut out from under them towards these more like serious capital T tech hardware hardware, AI, things like that, things that have like more stakes than say social networking or something like that. So like, how do you actually do that though? How do you actually like direct talent in certain ways? You know, I think that if President Trump came out tomorrow and said, we want people to and he has actually talked about this, but we want to do more hard tech. I don't think there's like a real easy, straightforward mechanism. And how do you transmit certain ambitions into the actual landscape? I think there's more to be learned on that.

Tracy Alloway (2:28)

Well, I think also we in America are very used to thinking about technology as this like very creative process and the outcome of Jeff Bezos working in his garage, something like that. And it's hard to imagine often the same environment existing in China. I think that's just like a cultural difference perhaps between Americans and Chinese. So we should talk about it.

Joe Weisenthal (2:52)

Totally. Well, I'm really excited to say we are going to be talking to one of the best China watchers there is, who has a lot of interesting thoughts on this topic. Someone we've never had on the podcast. We're going to be speaking with Kaiser Kuo. He is the host of the Sinica podcast, which has been around since 2010 Wow. Yeah, we've been doing this for a little less than 10 years. So it's very impressive, this sort of longevity. Someone who spent a lot of time in China, splits his time between the US and China, lived there for several years. Kaiser, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Kaiser Kuo (3:24)

Hi Joe, and hey Tracy, this is a huge honor for me. Thanks so much for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (3:29)

Thank you for coming on. What is the Sinica Podcast? What has been your project in the last 15 years?

Kaiser Kuo (3:36)

Yeah, so Sinica is an hour long or sometimes much longer interview format show. We bring on academics and policy makers occasionally. I've had a number of the former Assistant Secretaries of State for East Asia Pacific on, have had ambassadors and so forth on, but it's changed the mission. It initially started off as being sort of more, here's what's in the news and here's a couple of people who can talk about it intelligently having to do with China. Since 2016, when I moved to the States, the focus has really been on US-China relations, and it's got more American guests on than previously were, but we tackle everything under the sun. I mean, US-China relations, China-India, China-Russia, China-India, what have you, and the Chinese macro economy, technology, lots on technology and culture. But the idea is that it's supposed to look at the way that we think and talk about China now. It's really evolved into something which I think has a longer shelf life.