Conversations exploring China, technology, and US-China relations. Guests include a wide range of analysts, policymakers, and academics. Hosted by Jordan Schneider.
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Données mises à jour le 30/09/2026
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After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country credit expansion in at least a century.
Today investment is contracting, growth is less than a percent, and the financial system that fueled China's growth is now the thing holding it back.
Logan Wright, partner at Rhodium Group and my former boss, joins ChinaTalk to discuss his new book, Broken China: How the Economic Miracle Shattered and What It Means for the World.
Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations co-hosts.
We discuss…
The crisis that already happened: why the September 2021 protests in Evergrande's lobby were China's catharsis moment
Decay instead of collapse: why credit growth fell from 18% a year to 5%, why Beijing keeps rolling over loans to zombie state firms, and why in China "the path to crisis is reform"
Jordan and Brad discuss Xi's Perspective: Does supply-chain dominance matter more than GDP?
Twelve million graduates a year, the youth unemployment numbers that vanished in 2023, why all of China's new strategic industries add up to about 6% of GDP, and why a $10,000 BYD doesn't matter if your kid can't get a job
Who's paying for China's AI?
Plus: Logan's case that the US no longer has a systemic economic rivalry with China, and Brad's pushback that Chinese supply-chain controls have so far beaten Western demand-side leverage
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WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes
vendredi 25 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:12:28
WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan.
We discuss…
The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to fight with, and how the Iran blockade became the status quo
The midterm budget squeeze — what a Democratic Senate means for the defense topline, why Anduril won’t keep working at risk, and how a shipbuilding binge could hollow out the force
Who replaces Hegseth — the two Mike Rogerses, and why the talent pool for a lame-duck Pentagon is drying up
The AI Force — why a SOCOM-style AI branch cuts against a technology meant to be everywhere, and what a benchmark-setting version could actually do
Manned-unmanned teaming — why putting sailors on robot ships is “asinine,” and what combined arms for robots should look like
Gifts for Beijing — the Anduril drone Iran fished out of the Gulf, dud PrSMs as intelligence windfalls, and why compute still can’t blow anything up on its own
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Julian Gewirtz on Trump-Xi Summit, AI, and Mao Dead Fifty Years Ago!
mardi 22 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:06:14
Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US getting in exchange for the symbolism and pageantry of a state visit?
We discuss:
Trump-Xi summit scenarios, Beijing’s management of uncertainty and protocol, and how the script of US-China diplomacy has flipped, with things once seen as American concessions to China now treated as concessions from Beijing;
Julian’s framework for a K-shaped US-China relationship, with leader-level diplomacy pulling upward while competition pulls downward;
What Xi’s visit says about the changing political salience of China in the US
Why Beijing’s public statements on AI risk don’t necessarily tell us how it will handle pacing and safety;
What the decline of Xi Jinping could mean for a political system and why China’s next succession could be especially difficult to predict;
China-maxxing from Kissinger to Trump
Plus: The Scholars (儒林外史) and why Qing-dynasty satire about corrupt scholars might make you feel better about America in 2026.
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Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?
mardi 22 septembre 2026 • Durée 49:33
Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services.
We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does its mission.
Our conversation covers:
Why the U-2 spy plane offers a surprisingly useful lesson for AI: The hardest part of adopting transformative technology isn’t building it, but redesigning the institutions, workflows, incentives, and decision-making systems around it.
The government’s need to manufacture its own “forcing functions”: How carrots, sticks, budget cuts, and a willingness to create winners and losers could help bureaucracies move faster.
Giving the troops the tools and getting out of the way: Why Berntsen thinks the U.S. military’s greatest AI advantage may come from empowering service members to experiment, improvise, and “figure it out.”
Will AI eventually negotiate with AI? We debate whether models can move beyond advising diplomats and executives to actually conducting negotiations.
Plus, cyber challenges, a chat app for government, and book recs.
Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.
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WarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette
samedi 19 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:17:24
In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career.
Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and WarTalk's Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark.
We discuss…
Why 2027 is not a go date — the three "strategic capabilities" the PLA pulled forward from its 2035 goals, and why a capability milestone says nothing about intent
What the Iran war taught Beijing — day-one decapitation and the heaviest firepower campaign in decades still didn't deliver the political outcome, and PLA journals noticed
The purges are what they look like — Occam's razor on PLA corruption, "fake combat capabilities," and why joint fires fail when artillery support runs on connections
The nuclear shield — early-warning counterstrike, low-yield options, and why a thousand more US warheads would buy less deterrence than a thousand more boats
Beijing's Japan fixation — the Chinese nuclear strategy text with a chapter on every nuclear state, plus Japan
Inside vs. outside — what you can know about the PLA without a clearance, the mirror-imaging trap, and the pitch to undergrads who read Chinese
Plus: the PLA's corruption tip line, Polymarket odds on the next purge, and where an escaped POW should beg for food.
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ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier
mardi 15 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:08:16
ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy.
Why the Hugging Face hack broke through where years of extinction talk didn’t, and how Bernie, Tucker, and Rogan ended up on the same side
What “pacing” even means: Nathan’s case that nobody can measure the frontier, and why it still beats “pause”
Who gets Slack access: METR’s monopoly on trust, CAISI’s $10 million, jury duty for AI researchers, and why nothing survives without legislation
Will China slow down too? Zhipu and Moonshot turning the crank, military secrets leaking into Claude through proxy routers, and the MSS waking up
The Sacks clap-back: whether product liability does the job, and what an eighteen-month pause costs in cancer cures and vibe-coding projects
Send in Demis! plus Lu Xun as the antidote to Chongqing TikToks, and what DeepSeek’s Chinese name owes to Qu Yuan
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WarTalk: 9.11, Death of the Army, So Long Dan Driscoll
vendredi 11 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:11:03
In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking, and quit. Days earlier his boss had fired the Chief of Staff, disbanded the Army's only drone battalion, and cashiered Chris Donahue — the last man out of Kabul.
Bryan Clark, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan for a hosts-only edition marking a quarter-century of the Global War on Terror.
We discuss…
Twenty-five years on the treadmill — how Rumsfeld's transformation agenda collided with GWOT budgets to produce LCS, FCS, and the F-35, and why a rotational, casualty-averse force forgot how to accept risk
Driscoll walks — the OSD meddling behind the exit, why Congress won't confirm anyone Hegseth nominates, and a Pentagon run by acting officials through 2029
The meritocracy of meritocracies — what firing Donahue tells every field-grade officer weighing the exit, the auto-promoted NCO corps nobody talks about, and why the Ranger tab discourse is real
Budget Steve takes the fall — Feinberg blamed for a munitions shortage created by fighting Iran with the stealthiest, priciest weapons in the inventory, plus NIH biodefense money quietly rerouted to the Pentagon
Lying to Putin with AI — ISW's report on Russian commanders faking battlefield progress, and what generative deception does to OSINT and soldiers' feeds
The Houthis have Claude Code — Anthropic's threat report, Yemeni drone guidance software, and DeepSeek routing PLA subcontractors' queries to Claude through a transfer station
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WarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan
samedi 5 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:21:11
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why.
Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 Colby Award. He first embedded in the Pech as a college student in 2010 and later covered the Pentagon for Politico.
We discuss…
How a timber dispute became the Korengal — one Green Beret team refused the bait, the next took it, and Big Taliban followed
The three tribes of the war in the east — conventional forces, Green Berets, and the JSOC task force, each fighting its own war in the same valleys
Ten thousand beanie babies and record artillery expenditure — how measures of performance swallowed measures of effectiveness
Black Hawk Down, Ghost Recon, and the making of multicam — how Crye sold the camouflage of the elite through video games because it couldn't advertise its Delta contract
The death of the embed — Rumsfeld overruling Colin Powell, the 2013 shutdown, and why influencers in the briefing r4om beat reporters in the field
Whether the Army learned anything at all — disbanding the Asymmetric Warfare Group, rebuilding short-range air defense from zero, and Ukraine as the excuse to never say "Afghanistan" again
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Cyber Apocalypse, Now? Hugging Face and the Future of Cyber Risk
mercredi 2 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:10:53
OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first headline-grade AI breakout, and one that safety researchers saw coming. Is the cyber apocalypse finally on the calendar, or does the industry just need to do its homework?
Joshua Saxe spent his formative years as a DARPA and NSA contractor before four years at Meta, where he founded the company’s frontier cyber capabilities evals team and finished as its AI security tech lead. He recently left to co-found Abundant Security.
We discuss…
What actually happened in the Hugging Face hack, and why AI safety insiders weren’t surprised,
The “grad student lab” security culture inside frontier labs racing sixty hours a week to ship,
Why the cyber Pearl Harbor predicted since the early 2000s never arrived — and whether swarms of hacking agents finally change that,
How nation states will post-train open-weight models like GLM and Kimi into billion-dollar cyber weapons,
Why AI has so far favored defenders, from mass bug-squashing to superhuman network monitoring,
The industrial economics of cybercrime — kill chains, ransomware divisions of labor, and whether AI gives criminals 100x returns.
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WarTalk: USN Readiness Reckoning, Steampunk Navy, and AI Cyberwar with Shashank of the Economist
samedi 29 août 2026 • Durée 01:04:05
The USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home after a deployment that stretched past 240 days, and the bill is about to come due: mechanical failures, rations down to the emergency stores, 20,000 unfilled billets at sea, and a maintenance backlog funneling into the one carrier repair yard on each coast. Meanwhile, the White House wants to tear the electromagnetic catapults out of the Ford class and put steam back in.
We're joined by Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, a former submariner and Navy strategist, and Shashank Joshi, who has just handed off the defense brief at The Economist and decamped to Washington, alongside regulars Justin McIntosh and Tony Stark.
We discuss…
Why the fleet breaks: extended deployments, generators failing in the South China Sea, Diego Garcia resupply chains, and 12-hour flight deck shifts that don't end
The reenlistment cliff — what happens when half a carrier's crew hits their decision point right after the worst deployment of their careers
Steam catapults and hydraulic elevators: 35,000 successful EMALS launches, a four-year delay to the next carrier, and 500 sailors added back to a ship designed to need fewer
Whether agentic AI finally gives cyber its strategic moment, or whether dropping a bomb on the power plant remains the cheaper option
The offense-defense balance, and why the drone debate should make us humble about predicting it
The PLA Rocket Force's new corruption tip line — a purge that fixes a force, or one that reveals how deep the rot goes
Chinese components in Ukrainian drones, the Rockchip inside a $400 hugging-face robot, and how much of the Internet of Things you can afford to worry about
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