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For decades, the job of explaining China to the world belonged to a specific kind of person: the foreign correspondent, the visiting scholar, the expat adviser reading Chinese publication from the outside in. That model is aging out. What is replacing it is harder to name, and this episode is a portrait of it.
My guest is Siyao Chen, a graduate of China Foreign Affairs University and the London School of Economics and Political Science, now a policy consultant at a multinational public affairs firm in Beijing. Her job, at its core, is translation in the strategic sense: taking what Beijing says and turning it into what a client can act on.
Her path there runs through an unusual sequence of rooms. A foreign language school in Changchun, where Spanish and English arrived at the same time. A provincial foreign affairs office in her home province, where she first encountered diplomacy as something local and concrete rather than ministerial and abstract. The China Development Research Foundation, where supporting the China Development Forum gave her a network that later became her professional asset. A stint at the United Nations, then a master’s degree at the LSE. Each step widened the aperture: local, national, international, and now the space in between, where multinationals try to make sense of the Chinese state.
Three threads from the conversation stayed with me.
Tifa is a skill. Ask Siyao how she reads Chinese policy and she does not talk about leaked documents or insider whispers. She talks about compiling readouts across years and watching for the moment a phrase changes. The difference between two near-identical diplomatic formulations can carry more signal than an entire white paper. This is philology deployed as market intelligence, and it is a skill the Chinese education system produces almost by accident, through a thousand years of training in reading political texts closely.
There is no revolving door, and something else grew in its place. In Washington, the pipeline from government to consultancy is an institution. In Beijing, it barely exists, and what substitutes for it is personal network, accumulated early and carried across. Siyao’s junior-level internships turned out to be exactly the asset that a formal revolving door would have provided. Though she corrected one of my assumptions on air: people do resign from the ministries and enter the private sector. The system is less of a one-way door than I had imagined.
Judgment, not knowledge, is the scarce resource. Siyao opened the conversation with an observation about AI that most senior analysts are only now arriving at: finding information is no longer the hard part of policy work. Knowing what matters to this client, at this moment, against this decision, is. That is not something a curriculum teaches. It is formed in client work, and she is forming it right now, at the very start of a career, which is exactly why the conversation is worth your time. These habits are usually reconstructed in memoirs decades later. Here they are being described as they set.
Underneath all of it sits the larger claim of the episode: a generation of professionals trained inside the Chinese system, fluent in both political contexts, is becoming the connective tissue between China and the multinationals that operate in it. Not a replication of the Western model. Something new, still without a name.
What this show is — and is not
New China Literacy is a podcast by young Chinese-background analysts who move between China’s policy world and international environments, and try to make sense of both on the record. In English, with Chinese where it is the only word that works.
We are selling insight, not emotion. Each episode should leave you understanding something you did not before.
What would you want us to ask next? If you work in or around China-facing public affairs, what do you think outsiders most misunderstand about the field? Drop it in the comments.
A few years ago, the sociologist Yingyi Ma asked hundreds of Chinese undergraduates in the United States what they had crossed an ocean to find. The same phrase kept coming back: critical thinking. One student called it the crown jewel of an American education.
This episode approaches that question from the other end. Yuki Yu Wei, as currently a geopolitical analyst, spent two years inside a Chinese university before transferring to the University of Colorado Denver. Now, she has finished a degree in political science and communication, and open to collaborations, as well as analyst or journalist position, as next step of her intellectual journey.
In our conversation, Yuki has shared many of her own stories, along with insightful and thoughtful perception on them. Some of her experience align with Ma’s points, some sharply against them, which brought the image of Chinese student beyond statistic points in research report.
What Yuki offered was more than agreement or disagreement. Her central move is to take the mystique out of critical thinking. It is not, she argues, a teaching technique that American classrooms happen to have perfected and that travels neatly in a suitcase. Instead, it is a permission, a permission to hold a perspective, to not produce the one correct answer, to question the authority standing at the front of the room. And the part I keep returning to: Real critical thinking begins not in argument but in listening. The aim is not to win the other person over. It is to learn their reality.
From there the conversation widens. We talk about the Chinese classroom as a kind of theater, where bodies are present, but attention has quietly left the room, held together by an unspoken contract that lets teachers perform teaching and students perform listening. Most of time, this was read as the teacher’s laziness that renders a mundane classroom. In this podcast, we elevated this discussion into structural level. Instead of laziness, we believe it’s better to read as teacher’s insecurity. We have discussed how a test-fixed system, whose behavioral inertia, runs from the first grade all the way into the research-funded university, and finally causes the inefficiency in classroom. And we also discussed the self-censorship happens in classroom conversation in China, and how that extend to a cognitive habit frequently observed from Chinese public argument: the reflex to hand down a verdict where a derivation belongs, to reach for a moral judgment instead of reconstructing who and what actually produced an outcome.
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SP02: What an American Studies in China
Friday, May 22, 2026 • Duration 01:10:53
We held our own Gen-Z version of the US-China summit.
The week before this conversation was recorded, my guest, a 老外 (laowai) sat for an interview with a major Chinese outlet for a piece on US-China youth exchange. He told the reporter what he actually thinks about why American students hesitate to come to China — academic freedom, reciprocal field access, wrongful detention risk, broader uncertainty. None of it survived into print. What survived was hotel rules, payment apps, and the language barrier. He posted about it on WeChat Moments. That post is what got us onto the call.
Blake Kravitz has been studying Chinese since he was twelve. He grew up in Florida, took middle school Mandarin from a Chongqing teacher who gave him his first Chinese name, did six different programs in China across nearly a decade, studied at Penn and Wharton, worked at think tanks in Washington, and is now finishing his first year of a two-year master’s at Yenching Academy at Peking University. He just helped run Yenching Global Symposium 2026. He is, in other words, exactly the kind of American the field used to produce in much larger numbers and now barely produces at all.
This conversation is about what that pipeline actually looks like from inside it in 2026 — what Yenching teaches, what gets said in the seminar room versus the lunch table, what changes when you leave Beijing for Rongjiang or Qinghai, how Chinese classmates ask about Taiwan and Xinjiang over canteen meals, and what an American at this particular moment carries into and out of those conversations.
What we covered:
– The interview that got cut, and what was actually in his original conversation with the reporter
– Twelve years of Chinese language study, starting in middle school in Florida, and what changed about coming to China across six programs
– Why Yenching Academy specifically, and how the two-year structure with a fieldwork second year differs from Schwarzman, Hopkins-Nanjing, and Duke Kunshan
– What the seminar room is like with no cameras in it, and the professor who opened class by telling foreign students to challenge him on anything
– The “Yenching bubble inside the PKU bubble inside the Beijing bubble,” and what fieldwork in Guizhou and Qinghai looked like
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SP01: Inside the Beat: A Decade of Foreign-Affairs Reporting from a Chinese Newsroom
Monday, April 27, 2026 • Duration 01:00:28
A common assumption among English-language readers of China is that Chinese journalism is what the state allows it to be. The model is straightforward: instructions come down, journalists comply or work around the edges, and what survives is what the system permits. This model is not wrong. It is, however, incomplete in ways that matter for anyone trying to understand how Chinese audiences actually receive information about the world.
I spent the last week recording a conversation with Yichao Hou, who goes by Henry, on what a decade of foreign-affairs reporting from inside a major Chinese commercial newsroom actually looked like. Henry was a senior editor at Phoenix New Media (鳳凰新媒體) from 2015 to 2025, covering US elections on the ground, the Two Sessions, EU-China dialogues, and conducting more than thirty interviews with ministers, diplomats, and scholars. He left Phoenix last year and is now my classmate in the IPE master’s program at RSIS in Singapore. The conversation we had is one we could not have had five years ago, when both of us were still inside our respective parts of the Chinese knowledge-production system.
What struck me, listening back to the recording, is that the most interesting constraints Henry described were not the political ones. The political ones existed and he was direct about them. What dominated the structural picture of his career was something else.
The shape of the work
Henry’s working week did not follow a script. It followed the news cycle of countries other than his own. He described being woken at one in the morning when South Korea’s then-president declared martial law, conducting a follow-up interview with a Korea specialist by three, sleeping briefly, and resuming at eight. Other weeks, in the quiet between Western news events, the desk was as slow as any office. The texture of the job was one of asymmetric attention: a Beijing newsroom locked into the rhythm of Washington, Brussels, Seoul, Tehran.
When he covered the 2024 US election on the ground, he visited seven states and more than ten cities in three weeks, a coverage radius that most American political reporters cannot replicate because they are tied to a city or a beat. He arrived with an explicit framework borrowed from Tocqueville, asking county-level Republican and Democratic officials about the actual mechanics of local democracy rather than the horse race. The Republican chair of an Erie County, Pennsylvania party committee told him, in his account, that the party had no quarrel with Chinese people in general, only with the asymmetry that allowed Chinese citizens to buy land in the United States while Americans could not buy land in China. That single grievance, narrowly defined, was the entire substance of the conversation.
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Episode 1: Growing Up in a New China — Narrative and Reality
Thursday, April 2, 2026 • Duration 55:48
For those who have been reading the “Studying IR in China” series, this is its natural extension — same project, different medium. What works on the page as analysis now gets the texture that only voice can carry: the hesitations, the disagreements, the moments where three people who grew up inside the same system realize their experiences diverge in ways that matter.
Three of us sat down for our first conversation. I am in Singapore. Henryk is at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where he studies Polish — one of the languages the foreign ministry rarely recruits for, a fact that tells you something about the gap between the state’s rhetoric on global talent and the actual labor market. Logan is at China Foreign Affairs University, where half his cohort entered dreaming of becoming the next Wang Yi and most are now pivoting to consulting firms and master’s programs.
We grew up in three very different Chinas. I am from Xiangyang, a third-tier city in inland Hubei — no international exposure, no multinational presence, just SOEs and the gaokao factory. Henryk is from Xiamen, a special economic zone on the Taiwan Strait where generations of Hokkien-speaking families built transnational commercial networks to Southeast Asia long before “globalization” became a policy slogan. Logan is from Jiangsu, the Yangtze Delta, where the 2010 Shanghai Expo was the first time a global event felt like it had anything to do with his daily life.
Three cities. Three information environments. One shared promise: the great power is rising, work hard, and your life will be better than your parents’.
In this episode we trace what that promise actually looked like from the inside — from socialist core values memorized in primary school to wolf warrior diplomacy consumed on social media — and what happened when it collided with the reality of university life, a contracting job market, and the slow realization that the narrative and the country were not the same thing.
We talk about the information channels that shaped us. For me it was pirated games and a VPN — the accidental pathway through the Great Firewall that I suspect is more common than any official account of Chinese internet culture admits. For Henryk it was World Affairs Magazine, the Chinese-language counterpart to Foreign Affairs, vetted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — a curated window, but a window nonetheless. For Logan it was a former diplomat teaching political science at CFAU, who mentioned historical events that could not be found on the Chinese internet, sending Logan to a VPN for the first time not to play games but to understand his own country.
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If there is a discipline running underneath all of this, it is the opposite of the easy verdict. Neither of us is interested in treating a system’s dysfunctions as proof of its repression, or in folding a complicated society into a single word. The harder and more useful task is to trace specific mechanisms —how a given structure forms, what it asks of the people living inside it, and why it yields the outcomes it does. That is criticism in the service of understanding, and of a transition that is still very much in motion.
Below, you’ll find Yuki’s own site – Atlaspedia.
Yuki has been dedicated in long form analysis articles covers topic in geo-economic, post-colonial study, and gender politics. She believes the importance on translating not just between language, but also frameworks. To achieve that, it’s necessary to think outside of right-or-wrong judgement. But to have ability to trace back to each component that contributed the current status. (non-biased)
The “Goose Leg Auntie” affair. With deep investigation on Chinese state and social governance, examines how Chinese school education extend to an insufficiency of social governance, and resulted a food-safety problem being left unreported for years. She proposed the concept “layered transition”. This concept helps to bring under-examined historical factors into discussion, allows analysis focus on real problems and cause within Chinese social structure, without fallout on bias. See: The Commodification of the Labor Heroism Narrative: Structural Fault Lines in Chinese Social Governance
*A note on the 夏美 (Xiamei) case
Xiamei is a Chinese short-video influencer who, over roughly 2014–2020, did risqué modeling in an online grey market — work she took up at seventeen after a Shanghai girl group she’d joined fell apart. She later remade herself on Douyin as a “self-made woman” figure, telling young women to invest in study and skills rather than trade on their looks. In late May 2026 her old photos resurfaced, colliding with that inspirational persona and igniting a nationwide argument. In her own response she didn’t deny the past, framed it as a survival choice made young, and again urged young women toward education over shortcuts.
Opinion split hard. Some defended her right to change and warned against pinning a person to their past forever; others held that packaging years of edge-content into an inspirational brand could mislead younger followers. The strand Yuki picks up is a third move: critics who treated her mentioning the grey industry as advocating for it, and demanded a performative self-condemnation. That slide — from naming a subject to endorsing it, and from individual choice to structural blame — is the same reflex she traces back to how sensitive topics get handled in the Chinese classroom.
– Being identifiably American outside the tier-one cities, the requests for photos, and the work of being an informal cultural ambassador
– Chinamaxxing and the “America kill line” (斩杀线): two mirror memes about each country running through the other’s social media in 2026
– The structural collapse of the American study-in-China pipeline, the US-China Education Trust’s recent report, and the policy case for restoring it
– Whether the next generation of analysts on both sides will inherit a relationship better or worse than this one
A few moments worth listening for:
Blake on the article that left out the deeper reasons: “What ended up being mentioned most was things like hotels not accepting foreigners, downloading Alipay and WeChat Pay. But I don’t think those are actually what’s preventing American students from coming to China in the first place.”
On the Yenching classroom: “The Yenching Academy mentions to students, and to teachers, that there’s no cameras in the classroom.”
On layered bubbles: “Yenching is a bubble inside Peking University, which is a bubble inside Beijing, which is a bubble inside China. There’s a lot of layers to getting out.”
On the optimist’s answer: “As long as there’s still Americans coming to China, the people that are eventually forming US policy towards China will be informed. I gave you the optimistic answer.”
Companion reading:
“The Quest for Knowing New China Hands” — the essay this episode runs alongside, on Beijing’s pathology of reading Washington as a list of named brokers.
If you have made a similar trip, in either direction across the Pacific, write to me with your version of the questions this episode keeps circling.
Subscribe to New China Literacy on Substack for the podcast and the writing both. Free tier gets you the episodes; paid tier gets you the longer essays and supports the work.
This is the kind of observation that does not travel through standard wire copy. It is not a quote that confirms a narrative, on either side. It is the texture of how a particular interlocutor in a particular county had organized his view of US-China relations down to one issue, and was willing to share that view with a foreign reporter precisely because the foreign reporter was Chinese rather than American.
Henry described being treated as more welcome by ordinary Americans during election coverage than during security forums. At Aspen-style security conferences in Washington, conversations with him would last one or two sentences before the American interlocutor remembered an appointment elsewhere. At a Democratic gala on voting night, volunteers actively sought him out, told him not to believe the negative coverage, invited him to stay. The same country, the same trip, two opposite social registers depending on which professional subculture he was reporting on.
The constraint that displaced the constraint
The more analytically interesting part of the conversation was Henry’s description of what shaped his work from outside the room.
There are political constraints in Chinese commercial journalism. He acknowledged them directly: certain topics are bounded, certain framings around the leadership are not available, the macroeconomic conversation has become increasingly sensitive because expectations affect markets and media shape expectations. He described the second category of political regulation, less remarked on in English coverage, as a kind of paternalistic expansion in which the Chinese state treats adult readers somewhat the way American regulation treats children. His example was the requirement that video games change the color of in-game blood from red to green, a request that would be absurd in any other regulatory framework but is structurally consistent with treating the audience as in need of protection.
What Henry argued, however, is that for the foreign-affairs desk specifically, the dominant constraint over the last decade has not been political. It has been the collapse of long-form text consumption.
He came back from three weeks of US election reporting with the material for several substantive feature articles. He wrote almost none of them. The reason was not censorship. The reason was that by 2024, a five-thousand-word feature on American local democracy from a Chinese reporter had no audience inside China. The mobile-first short-video transition, accelerated by Douyin and the broader 4G-then-5G rollout, had done to Chinese long-form journalism what it had also done to American long-form journalism, but on a faster timeline and from a smaller starting base. What survived was the one-minute clip of him standing at a Trump rally narrating who was on stage. The market disciplined the work more thoroughly than any propaganda department could.
This is not a story unique to China. The decline of long-form journalism is a global phenomenon with a more or less continuous timeline across most major media markets since roughly 2010. What is specific to Chinese commercial journalism is that the political constraint and the market constraint have moved in roughly the same direction at roughly the same time. A reporter at Phoenix who wanted to write a careful, contextual, county-by-county analysis of American electoral mechanics would have run into both constraints simultaneously. The market constraint would have hit first.
The implication for English-language readers of China is uncomfortable. If you read Chinese coverage of foreign affairs and conclude that the depth deficit comes from political control, you are getting the story partly right and partly wrong. The political control is real. But the immediate cause of why a Chinese journalist who has spent three weeks talking to American voters does not write the long article those weeks deserve is the same cause that explains why the equivalent American journalist does not get to write theirs. The audience moved.
The pivot
We spent the last third of the conversation on the question of why Henry left.
The answer was not dramatic. He described the decade at Phoenix as a tunnel where he could see the end. He could remain in the senior editor role, write commentary on the news cycle, attend the same dinners, hold the same position, and the life would be steady and recognizable. The phrase he used, which struck me, was that the work had become a form of burning yourself. Information accumulated faster than it could be processed. The brain came home overloaded each evening with material that had no outlet. Singapore, RSIS, the formal training in IPE, were not a credentialing exercise. They were a way to convert ten years of accumulated observation into something that could be analyzed rather than just experienced.
I pushed him on a view that circulates in English China-watching circles, that mid-career Chinese professionals leaving the system to study abroad are essentially performing exit, that the academic training is a credentialing layer on a path already chosen. He pushed back without performance. His answer was that he was trying to figure out how to remain useful as a journalist rather than how to stop being one. The question of where he writes next, what platform, what audience, in what language, is genuinely open. The decision to leave was a decision to delay that question, not to answer it.
He described his current identity as held in three pieces: an anthropologist by orientation, a researcher by current training, and a storyteller by underlying personality. He has been doing English-language stand-up comedy on the side. None of the three identities maps cleanly onto a Chinese journalism career, an academic career, or a policy-research career. All three orient him toward staying in the field, in actual contact with actual people, rather than retreating into a desk job.
The next decade, in his honest version: a book on the logic behind Chinese foreign and domestic policy, sustained engagement with the US-China relationship at the people-to-people level, and fieldwork in places like Indonesian nickel supply chains where Chinese workers from his home province of Hubei are working under conditions that need someone to actually go look. He used the word “tangible” several times. The work has to remain in contact with material reality.
What the conversation is for
If you are an English-language reader of China who spends most of your time on the analytical side of the field, this episode is an entry point into a layer of the system that does not surface in op-eds or think tank reports. The Chinese reporters who do the actual work of describing the world to Chinese audiences do not show up much in the English conversation about Chinese media. When they do, it is usually as illustrations of state control. Henry is an illustration of something else: how the work actually feels, what it actually constrains, and why someone who was good at it for ten years eventually decides to walk away from it without walking away from the underlying mission.
The full conversation runs about an hour. We covered the structure of the Phoenix beat, the texture of US election reporting from a Chinese vantage, the dual constraint of political and market pressure, the AI question, the comparison between Singapore and China at the community-governance level, and the personal and professional pivot. Listening order matters less than I expected, which is itself a signal that the texture of the conversation is what carries it.
You can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or directly through the Substack player above.
If you have made a similar pivot, in either direction between journalism, policy research, and academia, write to me. The next several episodes are going to lean into this set of questions, and the most useful versions of them are going to come from people who have lived through them.
We talk about the gap between the vision — joining the foreign ministry, staffing the great power’s rise — and what actually waits on the other side of four years. Henryk discovered that Polish is a language the foreign service almost never recruits for. Logan sat for the MFA entrance exam and failed. Both are adjusting, as their entire generation is adjusting, from national ambition to individual survival — not out of apathy but out of a clear-eyed reckoning with what the system can and cannot deliver.
And we push back on the easy Western narrative that Chinese youth are simply becoming “more nationalistic.” What Logan and Henryk describe is more interesting than that: a generation that is not converging on a single ideological position but fragmenting into a diversity of pragmatic responses — some more confident, some more critical, most too busy navigating a brutal job market to care about grand narratives at all.
What this show is — and is not
This is a roundtable of three young Chinese-background analysts who occasionally disagree with each other and try to make sense of both worlds on the record. In English, with Chinese where it is the only word that works.
We are not China bears. We are not (all) dissidents. We are not the English-language arm of any official narrative. We are selling insight, not emotion. Each episode should leave you understanding something you did not before — not just feeling something.
New episodes every two weeks.
What would you want us to talk about? What questions about China do you feel only insiders can answer but rarely do? Drop it in the comments — we are building this with you.
