AI, Competition and China’s Next Era: Nick Leung

Nick Leung is the former Chairman of McKinsey's Greater China operation and Director of the McKinsey Global Institute in Hong Kong. With dual Swiss-Chinese heritage and three decades advising Chinese and multinational companies, he brings a rare inside-out perspective on the world's second-largest economy.

His new book, co-authored with Joe Ngai, is The Next China is Still China — and in this conversation, he explains exactly why the title is not simply a slogan.

Drawing on his experience at the centre of China's extraordinary economic transformation, Leung argues that the search for the "next China" fundamentally misunderstands the nature of China's role in the global system.

Nine out of ten things made in China stay in China: the country is not simply an export platform but the world's most dynamic consumer market, and its combination of scale, supply-chain depth and brutal domestic competition has forged genuinely world-class industries in electric vehicles, pharmaceuticals and robotics.

He argues that this competitive intensity — what he calls the Hunger Games model, where thousands of companies enter a sector and most are destroyed — is Schumpeter's creative destruction operating at a speed and scale the world has not previously seen.

The conversation explores the concept of involution and what it means for investors, why the US-China AI race is not a race at all but two distinct ecosystems pursuing fundamentally different objectives, the structural reasons multinationals are struggling in China and what the successful ones are doing differently, and the succession wave now bearing down on Chinese family businesses — a risk that, because the Chinese economic miracle happened all at once, is arriving across multiple major companies simultaneously.

For business leaders, the core message is clear: China is not a market you can read from the outside, and geopolitics cannot be treated as someone else's problem.

As Leung puts it — "You're not interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics is interested in you" — and that, he says, applies to every single decision-maker operating in the world today.

Host: Sam Gyimah, Founder and CEO of SG& Capital Partners

Producers: Clare Williamson and Duncan Williamson for TGOB Media Ltd in partnership with SG& Capital Partners Ltd.

Music composed by: Sophie Sirota

For listener questions or business inquiries please email info@thegeopoliticsofbusiness.com, and to contact SG& Capital Partners please email info@sgand.com.

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