Sinica Podcast21 Loka 2025

The View from Behind Xi Jinping's Desk, with Jonathan Czin

This week on the Sinica Podcast, I speak with Jonathan Czin, the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. His new essay in Foreign Affairs, “China Against China: Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success,” challenges the dominant Western narrative of Xi Jinping as either Mao reincarnate or a brittle autocrat presiding over imminent collapse. Instead, Czin argues that Xi’s most illiberal reforms can be understood as attempts to cure the pathologies of China’s own success. We discuss his framing of Xi’s “Counterreformation,” how it helps explain China’s current political direction, and what it reveals about our own analytical blind spots in the West.

7:15 – Xi’s “reformation” and Carl Minzner’s “end of reform and opening”

12:18 – Corruption, decentralization, and the “lost decade” under Hu and Wen

20:12 – Defining “resilience” and what Xi means by “eating bitterness”

29:45 – The “downsides of success”: property, corruption, and governance contradictions

45:30 – Counter-reformation vs. counterrevolution: what Xi wants to preserve and discard

54:20 – The myth of yes-men: triangulation and feedback in Xi’s leadership style

1:07:07 – Cognitive empathy and why most U.S. analysis of Xi falls short

1:15:35 – Systems that can’t course-correct: comparing the U.S. and China

1:22:05 – Cognitive empathy, ideology, and the problem of American exceptionalism

Paying it forward:

Jonathan: Allie Mathias and Dinny McMahon

Recommendations:

Jonathan: The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgewood; The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

Kaiser: Transplants by Daniel Tam-Claiborne

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China Shock 2.0: This Time It's Europe, with Adam Tooze

Last week in Brussels, EU leaders held their first sustained debate on China policy in three years, and were so wary of Beijing’s reaction they wouldn’t print the word “China” on the agenda. The trigg...

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"But China!": Robert Wright on the AI Race and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning

This week on Sinica I'm joined by Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and The Evolution of God, for a conversation that runs a little outside our usual beat, though China sits closer t...

17 Kesä 1h 53min

The Texas Paradox: How the Most Anti-China State Is Building America's China Capacity

The summit in Beijing produced a "constructive strategic stability" framework and a warming of tone between the two presidents. But heads of state can announce a multi-year horizon; somebody else has ...

3 Kesä 1h 41min

The View from Everywhere Else: Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summits

Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summitsThis week I'm joined again by Eric Olander, founder of the China Global South Project, which runs the most indispensable English-lang...

26 Touko 1h 20min

To Rule All Under Heaven: Andrew Meyer on His New Popular History of the Warring States

This week on Sinica, I speak with Andrew Seth Meyer, professor of history at CUNY Brooklyn College and the author of a remarkable new book from Oxford University Press, To Rule All Under Heaven: A His...

21 Touko 1h 20min

"Constructive Strategic Stability": Ali Wyne of the International Crisis Group on the Trump-Xi Summit

This week on Sinica, I chat with Ali Wyne, Senior Research and Advocacy Adviser for U.S.-China at the International Crisis Group, just hours after President Trump's plane left Chinese airspace at the ...

17 Touko 1h 6min

"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 4: The AI Race Reconsidered

This week I’m sharing the fourth and final installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April ...

17 Touko 36min

The Poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong: A Conversation with Translator Eleanor Goodman

This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded as a live joint webcast with NYRB/Poets and Equator Magazine, I sit down with Eleanor Goodman — poet, scholar, research associate at Harvard's Fairba...

6 Touko 1h 11min