Best of ChinaTalk 2024
we put in the work
Up on the podcast feed today, , , , and I had way too much fun debating who holds the AI Mandate of Heaven and how Steve Jobs AGI will bring back Apple’s glory days. Check it out on Spotify, iTunes, or your favorite podcast app.
Beyond covering the living daylights out of DeepSeek, ChinaTalk had a very busy year. Here is a roundup of our top pieces.
Jordan: My biggest stories this year were a deep dive into the R&D section of the CHIPS Act co-authored with Arrian entitled How to Make the NSTC a Moonshot Success, an essay on 1950s RAND called When RAND Made Magic, and two travel posts from time I spent in Japan and Norway. I’m also very proud of helping organize an excellent essay contest around legacy chips with Noah Smith and the Federation of American Scientists.
In August I became a dad and spent the fall on leave. Despite barely working this past fall, I’ve been incredibly proud of how the ChinaTalk team put out some of our best-ever writing. This is not a one-man band anymore.
Nancy: Doing Chinese chatbot speed runs is basically a right of passage for ChinaTalk contributors as this point — and Nancy had a fantastic censorship analysis of China’s leading genAI models — but she was also covering some of the deepest-rooted Chinese intellectual debates.
Why do science and tech dominate China’s political culture? How do Party elites reconcile free-market-driven innovation with top-down, industrial-policy-driven economic coordination and risk mitigation? How did politicians at this year’s Two Sessions debate competing imperatives of AI innovation versus security and cultural erosion?
See also Nancy’s encomium to the late Chinese legal scholar Jiang Ping, and her translation (alongside Dylan) of Chinese think-tanker Zhang Yunchen’s take on China’s status as a “great nation.”
Bit Wise: Our pseudonymous contributor has been a huge addition to our team. Our best model deep dives — SenseChat V5 and the real story behind the deeply misreported ChatXiPT — were spearheaded by Bit Wise.
Bit Wise is also tapped into China’s elusive “algorithm registry,” and in particular, how the Cyberspace Administration of China is updating registration protocols for genAI models. It’s still an open question whether China’s AI governance reflects a light-touch approach, or if the CAC intends to robustly control (and limit) the development and deployment of genAI algorithms — so stay tuned for Bit Wise’s future installments on China’s AI policy!
See also Bit Wise’s fun piece on why Maotai is investing in chip startups.
Irene Zhang earns our “how was mainstream media so slow to something we covered” Scoop of the Year award, courtesy of her excellent investigative reporting on how easy it is to buy advanced chips on Xiaohongshu, China’s Instagram. No surprise when — a full year after Irene’s report — the WSJ covered the retail smuggling ecosystem, including one student in Singapore who smuggled six Nvidia semis back to China (for a whopping 0.4% commission). Irene also had an important translation of a fascinating “Nvidia vs. Huawei” article on Huawei’s GPU ambitions.
Angela Shen on Industry and AI: ChinaTalk’s first full-time analyst, Angela has already published on China’s biotech sector, robotics industrial policy, and humanoid robotic development.
Chinese biotech companies like XtalPi are using AI to accelerate drug discovery — but notwithstanding China’s huge strides, there’s growing tension between global collaboration (which drives innovation) and national-security concerns (particularly around biodata).
And on the robotics front, unlike the West, China sees robots as the solution to its demographic crisis, rather than a job-killing threat. And humanoid robots in particular are the ones to watch: China wants to dominate in humanoid robots by 2027, seeing them as the next frontier in automation.
Lily Ottinger, our lead editor, debuted predicting that the Sino-Russian friendship has a 75% of crashing by 2030.
Some of our best-performing pieces were Lily’s excellent, rapid-response roundups of Chinese social-media posts following notable events in American presidential politics: Trump’s New York criminal conviction, the Biden-Trump debate in late June, and the first assassination attempt of Trump. She was also basically the first person to cover Tim Walz’s China connections, publishing a rundown within hours of his nomination as Kamala’s VP running mate.
See also her analysis of China’s energy conundrum in powering data centers, the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Chinese netizens’ take on Netflix’s Three-Body Problem.
Arrian Ebrahimi on chips: You know him as the brainchild of the excellent Chip Capitols Substack (and now survivor of the first semester of law school). On his way home from Peking University this summer, he spent a few months interning for TSMC in Hsinchu — and of course, he found Taiwan’s top tech journalist, Lin Hung-wen 林宏文.
In an epic Mandarin-language interview, Lin traces the history of Taiwan’s semiconductor success. It wasn’t master-planned — rather, it evolved step by step, starting from Christmas-light manufacturing in the 1950s, through ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute) and technology transfer from American tech company RCA, all the way to the present day, when TSMC’s CEO wakes up at 4:30 a.m. so he can get the latest from US and European customers.
“Taiwan used to be like the black-clad stagehands who move props unseen, working behind the scenes while companies like Apple and Nvidia took center stage. Now,” Lin says, “these ‘stagehands’ have become crucial players.”
See also Arrian’s breakdown of Taiwan’s modern-day chip policies (subsidies and tax credits) — which resembles a centrally administered national strategy committed to bolstering its existing strengths — and his WaPo op-ed (with Jordan and Chris Miller).
Will Chu, Video Editor: We have a podcast, we have a Substack — but the real ones know that we have a burgeoning YouTube channel, too! In July, we launched our first scripted YouTube video, and in the months since, Will and Lily have produced nearly a dozen bangers.
Were you ever wondering why Taiwan competes in the Olympics as “Chinese Taipei”? Or why Moutai — China’s most popular liquor — is investing in Chinese chip companies? When Halloween rolled around, were you actually more curious about the history behind the Ghost Festival? Is Tim Walz a Chinese sleeper agent? Is the United States going to lose the AI arms race? Is Taiwan going to be invaded?
In ten minutes or less, get the answers to all of the above! We’re really excited to experiment more with this type of content, bringing ChinaTalk to an ever-expanding audience.
Dylan Levi King on weird stuff: Dylan, ChinaTalk’s 黑马, brought the analysis you didn’t know you needed. His three best features this year:
How well does the United States intelligence community predict the future? Probably not well enough. So we should take a lesson from the CIA “heretics” — analysts in the Sino-Soviet Studies Group (SSSG), which functioned more like an area-studies department — who predicted the Sino-Soviet split years before it happened. “The futurological lessons are clear,” concludes Dylan: “intellectual sovereignty is a prerequisite for breaking with the popular narrative and calling the future.”
The PLA now issues Type 191 rifles, replacing the Type 95. Turns out, if you trace PLA rifle history — all the way back to the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War — the Type 191 “seems like further proof” that a Taiwan beach landing is not what the the PLA infantry is preparing for. (Phew!)
Ishiba Shigeru ascended to Japan’s PM post — “almost by default” — and Dylan soberingly explains why “Ishiba is destined to become another in a long line of interchangeable helmsmen, steering Japan into increasing geopolitical marginalization.”
Nicholas Welch, Republic of ChinaTalk Editor: January 2024 marked one of Taiwan’s most consequential elections, with Lai Ching-te winning the DPP an unprecedented third term in the executive branch. He had you covered before, during, and after the election results came in, bringing on the pod Taiwan NSC Deputy Secretary-General Lin Fei-fan, National Chengchi University Professor Lu Yeh-chung, and Stanford-based Taiwan expert Kharis Templeman.
He also had a blast interviewing US Army Lieutenant Colonel Kevin McKittrick on the WWII-era Operation Causeway, and why the United States aborted its plans to invade then-Japanese-controlled Taiwan — as well as going through the latest empirical research on how to best deter the PLA from launching an invasion in the first place.
See also some law-school chops coming to bear in an interview with DOJ attorneys on data-security regs, and a rundown of VP-elect JD Vance’s positions on China and AI.
Yiwen Lu: Yiwen’s top piece was a comprehensive take on OpenAI’s unceremonious exit from the Chinese market in June, plus a truly essential deep dive with Irene into China’s best AI boyfriends.
Mood Music
No inclusion of the music roundups?!
Great year and amazing to see how far ChinaTalk has come!