Today, nearly half of the top 100 apps in India's Google Play store are made by Chinese companies. After past failures to enter the Indian tech market, what's driving China tech's sudden success on the subcontinent? How have new Chinese companies like Bytedance and Xiaomi been able to localize more successfully than the likes of Tencent in the ...…

How did the U.S.-China economic relationship evolve during the Obama administration? Are the economic tensions we see today between the two countries a product of inevitable forces, or more contingent on the choices of the Trump and Xi administrations? To discuss these topics and more, we have on today’s show Caroline Atkinson, who served as Pr ...…

How does autocratic repression impact societies? Can the legacy of political repression ripple out across centuries, creating a vicious autocratic cycle? Today, on ChinaEconTalk, we're going back to the Qing dynasty — the time of the Qianlong Emperor, and before — to find out. Our guest is Melanie Meng Xue, a postdoctoral fellow at the Departme ...…

“The U.S.-China equilibrium of the past 20 years has gone,” declares Gordon Orr in his recent piece on what to expect in China in 2019. So what will replace it? What impact will the increasingly activist Chinese government have on the broader economy? And what broader reflections does a 30-year China veteran have about recent changes in China? ...…

China’s video game market is the world’s largest. Over 600 million people play video games in China, and collectively, they spend over $40 billion a year on games. This episode, featuring Abacus reporter Josh Ye and localization expert Frankie Huang, explores the market as well as gaming culture in China. Check out our newsletter exploring the ...…

Mister Softee, the famed northeastern American ice cream brand, in Suzhou, China? Yes, that was a thing. Turner Sparks, rising from humble beginnings as just another English teacher making his way in the world, achieved fame and fortune thanks to a catchy jingle and some tasty mango-flavored soft serve. Yet his vision of China-wide ice cream do ...…

Chinese politics is boring and confusing. Or is it? This week Jordan speaks with Andrew Polk and Trey McArver, economics and politics specialists at Trivium China. The three discuss the size of the Chinese bureaucracy, how policy is formed and implemented, and the Chinese economy. Check out the Trivium China's daily tip sheet for "a cheeky dose ...…

Foreign investors have lost billions expecting a Chinese financial crisis that hasn't come yet. So what gives? According to the Rhodium Group's Logan Wright, it's not China's domestic savings rate or RMB-denominated debt that’s keeping the economy afloat, but rather the government's credibility.

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, the executive editor of Foreign Affairs, is the author of the recent book The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945–1947. George Marshall, World War II hero and creator of the Marshall Plan, spent 1945-47 drinking baijiu with Mao and playing croquet with Chiang Kai-shek, fighting to stave off a civil war. Wa ...…

China's government aims to create a $500 billion sports industry by 2020. But how are those ambitions playing out on the ground in the Chinese basketball and soccer leagues? There's more to sports in China than the well-known problems of exorbitant transfer fees and match fixing, but with the government apparently unable to resist interfering i ...…

What is Bytedance and how does it make its money? How do politics and culture get in the way of Chinese firms' internationalization efforts? What can Chinese phones in Africa and electric buses in LA teach us about localization challenges? Elliott Zaagman, co-host of TechNode's China Tech Investor podcast, takes on these issues for the latest e ...…

Why is KFC so big in China? What is the “Toilet Revolution” and why does it matter? How does Chinese propaganda work? How have bicycles’ role in Chinese society evolved over time? Neil Thomas of MacroPolo takes on all this in ChinaEconTalk’s latest show.

What is the history of Google in China? Does the company have any hope of bringing its search engine back into the Chinese market? How does China’s development of artificial intelligence stack up against the rest of the world’s? To answer these questions, Matt Sheehan of MacroPolo makes his triumphant return to ChinaEconTalk.…

When it came to trade wars, the British didn't mess around. Four steam-powered battleships sent by the English to force China to change its trade policy in the mid-19th century changed the course of history. But how did they end up fighting the Chinese in the first place, and what are the contemporary echoes of this historical trade fight? Step ...…

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.

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 financ ...…

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 “Decipheri ...…

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 polici ...…

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 a ...…

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 ...…

(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 e ...…

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 ...…

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 Ch ...…

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 ga ...…

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 ...…

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, ...…

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 s ...…

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 Stan ...…

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 mor ...…

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 t ...…

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 a ...…

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? De ...…

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 ...…

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 poten ...…

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 ...…

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 gu ...…

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 pos ...…

Andrew Polk on the 19th Party Congress by Jordan Schneider

Scott Kennedy on Innovation in China by Jordan Schneider