Kaiser Kuo interviews China specialists on trade, Taiwan, and economic reform.
Sinica Podcast follows China through long-form conversations with guests. Its strength is patient context: trade, Taiwan risk, digital governance, classical learning, and China strategy are treated as problems to reason through, not slogans to win.
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Sinica Podcast is built primarily around one-on-one interviews, supplemented periodically by multi-guest panel episodes drawn from academic conferences. Kaiser Kuo hosts, usually recording from Beijing, opening episodes with framing on a current news hook before turning the conversation over to a specialist guest for sustained discussion. Guests are drawn heavily from U.S. think tanks and universities — Brookings, the Asia Society Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins SAIS, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs — as well as authors of recent books, reports, or Foreign Affairs essays on China. Recurring subject areas include U.S.-China strategic competition (tariffs, export controls, AI and chip policy, rare earths), Taiwan and Indo-Pacific security posture, and internal Chinese economic policy debates around overcapacity, local government finance, and consumption. A smaller share of episodes turn to Chinese domestic governance topics such as internet censorship, platform politics, and social credit research. The two-part 'China Debate We're Not Having' series illustrates an occasional format shift into recorded academic panels with a moderator and several guests speaking at once, rather than a single interview. Episodes typically run roughly an hour to ninety minutes and favor one sustained topic over news-roundup coverage of multiple stories. The show carries a sponsorship credit from the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Listeners are generally assumed to already follow foreign policy or China-specific news rather than come to the subject cold. The overall tone is analytical and policy-focused, built around unpacking a guest's research or argument rather than debate-for-its-own-sake commentary.
Made for: People who already follow U.S.-China relations, foreign policy, or China's economy — policy professionals, academics, and internationally focused news readers rather than general audiences.
What sets it apart: Focuses narrowly on China-specific policy expertise and periodically airs full academic conference panels rather than sticking to a single-guest interview format.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Kaiser Guo makes China's economic choices clearer by connecting policy claims to institutions, incentives, implementation, and their wider social consequences.
Sinica Podcast keeps returning to the machinery behind China's public arguments. Kaiser Guo uses extended guest conversations to examine economic policy, foreign relations, education, digital governance, and the assumptions shaping debate about China.
Kaiser Guo turns China's policy arguments into the conversation you wish headlines had bothered to finish.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A steady Sinica panel asks what America actually wants from China, beyond the loudest voices in the debate.
Sinica turns the familiar U.S.-China debate toward a more useful question: what does Washington actually want from the relationship? Kaiser Guo and the panel look for areas of overlap and collision between American and Chinese goals, touching on polling, Beijing's public message…
A sober panel reframes China's ambitions around power, coercion, and Beijing's limited appetite for building a rival global order.
Sinica treats China's ambitions as a policy argument, not a slogan. Kaiser Guo hosts a panel that circles the sphere-of-influence question: whether Beijing wants more freedom of action in East Asia, more insulation from U.S.
Adam Tooze brings Sinica a sharp, unsettled argument for taking China's scale and climate turn seriously.
Adam Tooze's visit to Sinica is a restless China conversation about scale, skepticism, and what it means to judge a system while it is still moving.
A sober U.S.-China warning about trade grievance, domestic choices, and the danger of accidental escalation.
Sinica takes a sober look at U.S.-China relations through Mike Lampton and Wang Jisi's warning that the relationship is closer to crisis than either side should tolerate.
A careful look at how silence, posting, and risk shape China's digital public sphere.
China's online public sphere is the focus, and the discussion stays on who speaks, who goes quiet, how platforms sort those groups, and why that matters for risk management.
A sober look at AI, export controls, and the limits of U.S.-China policy.
The discussion stays locked on the practical mechanics of U.S.-China AI policy: competition, export controls, chip dependence, and the risk that Washington could narrow the innovation space it wants to defend. Kim treats U.S. advantages as real, but not fixed.
A serious look at the Gaokao as a system of mobility, legitimacy, and state capacity in modern China.
Sinica uses the Gaokao to ask a larger question about Chinese politics: what happens when a state removes a credible path to advancement? Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin connect the modern exam to two moments of rupture: the 1905 abolition of the Qing examination system and the…
A sober China economy conversation about local debt, tax incentives, overcapacity, and why reform moves slowly.
Sinica frames China's overcapacity problem as a story about incentives inside the state, not just excess production. Kaiser Guo and Lizzi Lee focus on the hard machinery behind reform: local-government debt, the split between central revenue and local spending duties, possible…
Daily business news with Kai Ryssdal, tracking Fed policy, oil shocks, and private credit.
Dry arguments for an unruly public square.
The question is blunt.
Sinica Podcast repurposes a Johns Hopkins SAIS conference called “The China Debate We Are Not Having,” with Jessica Chen-Weiss introducing ACF on April 3 in Washington and framing the day around China, the United States, and technology.
Adam Tooze opens with surprise.
This episode explores China's embrace of Greco-Roman classics and its implications for foreign relations, particularly with NATO, through an intellectual and cultural lens.
Globalization is not the easy villain.
China's online public, in this conversation, is mostly watching rather than speaking.
This episode features an interview with Yi-Ling Liu discussing China's internet culture, creative spirits like the wall dancers, and the art of the possible in contemporary Chinese society.
This episode features a discussion with Kyle Chan about the Great Reversal in global technology flows and its implications for understanding China's politics, economics, and society.
Kaiser Guo and Patricia Kim assess Trump’s second-term China policy against four stated goals: reindustrialization, AI leadership, de-risking supply chains, and restoring U.S.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, covering politics, foreign relations, economics, and society through interviews with experts.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, and academics.
Exams carry political weight.
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This episode analyzes China's geopolitical exposure and interests in Venezuela following the U.S.-led capture operation against President Maduro.
A discussion of a book about how US-China rivalry threatens democracy and peace, with authors Van Jackson and Michael Brenes.
This episode features Paul Triolo discussing U.S.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, this episode examines the impact of China's 2017 law on overseas NGOs.
This episode examines the murder of a Chinese couple in Silicon Valley, exploring how the case reflects broader societal issues in China's meritocracy and captivated audiences.
This episode discusses the Nexperia dispute as a revealing moment in the global semiconductor supply chain contest, with a focus on China's role.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, covering politics, foreign relations, economics, and society through interviews with experts.
The awareness is there.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, featuring interviews with experts on politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, covering politics, foreign relations, economics, and society through interviews with experts.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, featuring interviews with experts on politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, featuring interviews with experts on politics, foreign relations, economics, and cultural trends.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, featuring an interview with tech policy analyst Kendra Schaefer about the AI startup DeepSeek.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, and business people.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, covering politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, covering politics, foreign relations, economics, and cultural trends.
A live episode from the Columbia China Summit discussing U.S.-China relations amid a trade war, featuring expert guests.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, covering politics, foreign relations, economics, and culture through interviews with experts.
A weekly podcast discussing current affairs in China with experts, covering politics, economics, society, and culture.
A lecture series on studying China's elite politics, featuring experts discussing methodology and access challenges.
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China, covering politics, foreign relations, economics, and society, with this episode focusing on the impact of Chinese AI company DeepSeek.
This episode explores the comparison between Trump's current stance on China and historical U.S.