ChinaTalk

Matt Brennan, professional speaker and co-host of China Tech Talk, comes on the show to discuss the history and evolution of China's most popular app, WeChat, as well as threats on the horizon for the company that created it, Tencent. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Dollar is a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. He has previously served as the U.S. Treasury Department emissary to Beijing during the Obama Administration, and the World Bank's country director for China and Mongolia. He discusses his storied career and the recent history of U.S.-China financial relations, including the current trade war's origins in the 2008 financial crisis. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rhodes Scholar Jeff Ding breaks down how China stacks up to the rest of the world in the race to develop AI. He delves into the connections between Chinese tech companies and government AI targets, AI’s military implications, as well as the ethical considerations of AI applications in China’s police state. We discuss his recent paper “Deciphering China’s AI Dream” as well as recent articles on AI he has translated from Chinese media on his ChinAI newsletter. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chad Bown is a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC and cohost of the excellent Trade Talks, a weekly podcast on the economics of international trade policy. In this episode, we discuss the competing grand strategies of US and China as well as their different tactics for executing their trade war policies. We touch on potential internal inconsistencies in Trump's trade outlook, the implications for the USD and RMB, as well as potential endgames. Outtro music by VaVa Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guest Samm Sacks Senior Fellow, Technology Policy, Center for Strategic and International Studies @CSIS Samm Sacks | Center for Strategic and International Studies Samm Sacks (@SammSacks) | Twitter Samm Sacks, Senior Fellow at CSIS, is perhaps America's leading expert on Chinese data privacy policy. Yes, you heard that right, the world's most advanced surveillance state has a corporate data privacy policy even more stringent than what's currently on America's books. In this episode, we compare China's new law to the GDPR, what privacy policy means for Chinese tech firms with international ambitions, and the implications of the latest Facebook scandal involving Huawei. ChinaEconTalk is proud to announce that it has recently joined Sinica Podcast Network! For more information, visit SupChina.com Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ma Tianjie, founder of the long-running blog Chublicopinion is perhaps the leading English-language chronicler of Chinese public opinion. In this episode, he discusses the official and popular responses to the trade war, ranging from hard right nationalists calling for a return to Maoist autarchy to liberals thanking Trump for pushing China to open its markets. In his day job, he works for ChinaDialogue, a site that covers Chinese environmental issues. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

(The audio stops beeping after 1 minute I promise!) Chris Balding as a Bloomberg Views contributor and professor based in Shenzhen. In this interview, we discuss two recent posts on his blog Baldingsworld which both make the case for America's hard line stance toward China's economic policies as well as decry Trump's lack of skill in tactical execution. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lorand Laskai is a researcher at a prominent American think tank who recently wrote a piece on the Trump administration's animosity to Xi's Made in China 2025 program. In this episode, we discuss what exactly ticks American policymakers off about the initiative, why Chinese unicorn CEOs related to content have had to issue apologies, what moral calculations foreigners make when deciding to work for firms caught up in these sorts of issues, and the Chinese debate scene. Athena Cao, a Beijing-based industry analyst, also joined us to guest host. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guest henry gao henry gao (@henrysgao) | Twitter Prof. Henry Gao is Associate Professor of law (tenured) at Singapore Management University and Dongfang Scholar Chair Professor at Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade. And co-author alongside Gregory Schaffer of the recent paper China's Rise: How It Took on the U.S. at the WTO. As evidenced by China’s behavior in the recent trade scuffles with the US, it’s clear that Chinese lawyers are far from rubes when it comes to trade. In this interview, we discuss what it took for the PRC to learn to speak the language of international legal trade law and the implications this develompent had both domestically and internationally, particularly in the context of the current US-China trade war. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guest Charlie Moseley Washingtonian in Asia. Predisposed to wanderlust. Charlie Moseley's Personal Website charlie (@justcharlie) | Twitter China's over 600 million gamers contribute to a gaming market that generated $30 billion in 2017. ChinaEconTalk discusses this part of the Chinese economy and society with Charlie Moseley, an independent game developer and longtime resident of Chengdu, and Chang Jung-Erh (Polly), a past intern at Netease Games. Topics include the evolution of the Chinese gaming market, the impact of gaming giants Tencent and Netease, female gamers in China, and Chengdu hip hop. Mentioned in the episode: DJI university robot contest Robomasters and Chengdu-based rapper Kafe-Hu Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guest Martin Chorzempa Research Fellow, @PIIE. China Econ/Finance, FinTech, Financial Development Martin Chorzempa | PIIE Martin Chorzempa (@ChorzempaMartin) | Twitter Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute is over traditional finance. Instead, spends his time analyzing the wild west of innovative consumer finance in China, a space full of unicorns, ponzi schemes, and overworked regulators desperately trying to stay up with the times. We discuss the promise and peril of social credit scores like Alibaba's Sesame Credit and the boom of Chinese peer to peer lending. Martin also explains how a digital gaming currency created by Tencent in the 2000s that developed a secondary market set the pattern that you can today see with its handling of bitcoin. Outtro song: "We are all Bitcoins" Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guest Nick Consonery Director of China Macroeconomic & Policy research @rhodium_group Rhodium Group Nick Consonery (@nconsonery) | Twitter Nick Consonery of the Rhodium Group with support from the Asia Society recently published The China Dashboard. This piece of research provides a quarterly update on the key fields of economic policy reform, including topics like the environment, fiscal policy, and innovation. In this podcast, we review the dashboard's latest disappointing findings, and discuss why some policy aims may be at cross-purposes. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China's northeast, a region that in the 1970s comprised over 10% of national GDP, now only makes up 3%. In this interview, Song Houze walks listeners through the policy challenges facing the rustbest. He also provides some context behind two developments that recently made international news: a famous entrepeneur berating a local official for squeezing his ski resort and provincial-level GDP revisions.. For more research, see his recent series up on Macropolo on the province of Liaoning. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guests Oona Hathaway Professor @YaleLawSch, Director @YaleLawGLC, Editor @just_security, fmr Special Counsel @DeptofDefense, co-author of The Internationalists Oona A. Hathaway - Yale Law School Oona Hathaway (@oonahathaway) on Twitter Scott Shapiro Prof @YaleLawSch + Philosophy @Yale. Visiting Quain Prof @UCLLaws. Editor, Legal Theory and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. #Internationalists THE INTERNATIONALISTS Scott Shapiro (@scottjshapiro) on Twitter Given how Xi today struts on the world stage with ambitions to use today's "historic opportunity" to reshape the international order, its useful to look back in history to the last time the world faced a revolution in legal norms. Yale Law Professors Scott Shapiro and Oona Hathaway recently published The Internationalists, an intellectual history of how international legal norms have evolved since the days of Grotius. In particular, they focus on the movement to outlaw war peaking in the early 20th century with the Kellogg Briand Pact fundamentally reframed interstate relations and created many aspects of the modern international system China is navigating today. This discussion ranges from how Japan adopted to the western legal reality in the late 19th and early 20th century, to origins of sanctions, the South China Sea and even wars started by claims of wife-stealing. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science at Berkeley (not to mention one of my favorite authors of accessible yet profound global economics books) recently published his How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future. We talk about the rise of the US Dollar and how its transition to global leader was slower and more gradual than many have thought. We then turn to the Yuan and the challenges it faces as the government pushes the currency's internationalization. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Max Zhou 周喆吾 is an Uber alum who until November of 2017 was the head of Mobile at Mobike. He is currently working as the co-founder of Meta App. Max talks about his story coming to the US for an advanced degree, his experience at Uber, why Travis Kalanick is really a Chinese entrepreneur at heart, and his take on China's 'Uber Mafia.' He then turns to Mobike and Ofo, speaking to the potential monetization pathways for the firms, their global expansion plans, their strategic investors' competing goals and merger prospects. He even shares his own crackpot theory of how the initial investors in Ofo and Mobike may be the ones leaking negative stories about Ofo spending deposit money and senior leadership living lavish lifestyles. We close by talking about his new project, MetaApp, which aims to allow users access to an app's full feature-set without having to download it. Max also recently appeared on 非诚勿扰, China's leading dating show. His segment starts about twenty minutes in. Chinese words used: 道德=ethics, morality 线下流量=offline visits 阴谋=conspiracy Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Keller Easterling, architect and professor at Yale, discusses her research on free zones (aka Special Economic Zones). We start by discussing the history of free zones and whether the Chinese success stories of SEZs such as Shenzhen drove their proliferation around the world. We also discuss a few more next-generation free zone proposals such as the NEOM project in Saudi Arabia and Refugee Cities. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Lorentzen, professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, talks protests and provincial politics. We start by discussing 'Designing Contentious Politics in Post-1989 China,' which uses game theory to analyze and explain how the CCP responds to on-the-ground protests. Next, we take on his 'Racing to the Bottom or to the Top? Decentralization, Revenue Pressures, and Governance Reform in China' and explore what actually drives municipal responses to orders from on high. Music this week by 阴三儿, 北京晚报 and 没钱没朋友. Do note that after this episode was recorded, some protests against "low-end population" removal broke out. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matt Sheehan is a fellow at the Paulson Institute and writes his own newsletter, "Chinafornia". We discussed the evolving relationship between China and Silicon Valley, their cultural differences and commonalities and, of course, the state of Chinese rap music. Stay tuned until the end of the episode to hear Matt's favorite Chinese rap song in full. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Jonathan Woetzel, Mckinsey Global Institute Director and Senior Partner in the Shanghai office, recently co-authored a report entitled China's Digital Economy. In this podcast, he discusses the impact of BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) on the broader startup ecosystem, the role of the government in fostering these firms, and China's potential for continued economic creativity. He also astutely recommends that you read all of Jonathan Spence. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julian Gewirtz is currently a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China. In it, he argues that "western economists played a crucial role in shaping the ideas and strategies of key CCP economists and policymakers. Without their participation, China would not have reformed as quickly, innovatively, and successfully." In this discussion, we focus on the critical 1985 Bashan Conference and the echoes of the Unlikely Partners narrative you can see even today in Chinese policymaking. Julian's book recommendations included 9 Continents and Everything Under the Heavens. Follow Julian on twitter at @JulianGewirtz. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Zhang Yingyu’s work from the late Ming Dynasty, you’ll encounter swindling concubines, clever commoners, and even eunuch cannibals trying to regrow their members. “We live in an age of deception. Words and appearances mislead. Con artists prey on the unwary. In this world of swindlers, one must rely on one’s wits to survive. How, then, to guard against the duplicity that lurks behind every smiling face? Look to your kin, keep your possessions close, and trust no one. But first, read The Book of Swindles.” Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk, both associate professors of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, have recently published The Book of Swindles’ first English translation. In this interview, they discuss the work's historical and cultural context as well as walk through some of the most shocking, revealing, and prurient stories The Book of Swindles has to offer. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China’s massive labor surplus has been vital to its rapid economic development. For decades, China’s rural population has been migrating to take up low-wage jobs in the coastal regions, often in dire conditions. The exploitation of cheap labor has helped China become the world’s factory. However, as China’s labor surplus is running out, the position of workers is changing. In A New Deal for China’s Workers, New York University’s Cynthia Estlund examines the evolution of workers’ rights and protests in China. Drawing a comparison with the struggle of workers to attain more rights in the US, Estlund asks whether China’s workers will succeed in securing a New Deal with Chinese characteristics. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Polk on the 19th Party Congress by Jordan Schneider Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Kennedy on Innovation in China by Jordan Schneider Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices