ChinaTalk

Why is North Korea so weird? Is it Stalinism? Maoism? Japan-style emperor worship? Ancient Korean hermit kingdom energy? No, argues Jonathan Cheng, Beijing bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Korean Messiah: The Failed Dynasty That Shaped the Hermit Kingdom. You’ve all been sleeping on the influence of 19th-century American revival Protestantism.

To discuss why Kim Il-sung kind of thought he was Jesus — or at least wanted to convince everyone else he was — we have the honor of Jonathan joining ChinaTalk today, with Alex Boyd.

Our conversation covers:

Billy Graham meets Kim Il-sung — how America’s pastor visited Pyongyang in 1992 and bonded with the dictator over their shared Presbyterian childhoods, while touring a birthplace resembling the nativity story.

From “Jerusalem of the East” to totalitarian theocracy — how 22-year-old missionary Samuel Moffett brought eschatological founder energy to the wickedest city in Korea, and transformed Pyongyang into the most Protestant city in Asia, complete with jazz clubs and a Chevrolet dealership.

The Manchurian cauldron — how the lawless frontier of 1920s Manchuria blended Christianity, Korean nationalism, and Marxism to forge Kim Il-sung’s messiah complex — and why the 33-year-old decided to let peasants believe he could walk on water.

Jim Jones, superfan — how the Jonestown cult leader became obsessed with Kim Il-sung, adopted Korean children, and traded tips with North Korean diplomats on running a closed religious society.

Christianity as political technology — how Kim weaponized Protestant doctrine and ritual to build a state religion that has outlasted the Soviet Union by three decades.

Plus, why North Korea is best understood not as a nation-state but as a religious society, and what Hong Xiuquan and Xi Jinping have to do with any of this.
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How did China grow its EV industry? Hint: it wasn’t really central planning from Beijing. It was a magical concoction of entrepreneurs and local officials using their guanxi to dance around giant SOEs and central-government regulation, leverage private and foreign capital, and just be really excellent business people. That’s led to our situation in 2026 — world-beating companies that have a ton of overcapacity and are set to take over the planet.

To discuss, we have ANU Professor Fengming Lu, who recently wrote a fantastic paper in The China Journal, titled The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry: Strategic Alliances Between Local Governments and Private Capital, alongside Irene Zhang, contributor and analyst at China Talk. We also get into the lessons this story holds for other strategic industries like robotics and AI — plus a little detour into the Chinese podcasting ecosystem.

Our conversation covers:

China’s automotive transformation from 130 small carmakers in the 1990s to the world’s most competitive EV industry.

The rise of Chery, Geely, and other Chinese auto champions — how local connections, foreign technology, and creative financing helped them break into an industry dominated by state-owned enterprises.

The downside of success — how China’s EV boom created an overcapacity problem.

The role of guanxi and elite politics in deciding who gets to build cars.

When Chinese EVs go global — record exports, overseas factories, trade tensions, and whether the same local-government playbook will shape the next wave of industries, from robotics to AI.

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Jake Newby is the author of the Concrete Avalanche Substack, which covers the best music coming out of China. If you enjoy this playlist, check out Jake’s sets from 2025, 2024, and 2023, as well as his Chinese shoegaze feature.

Tracklist:

1. ‘Undercurrent’ — Pu Poo Platter — from Undercurrent

2. ‘忧郁干杯乐园’ — the three mice — from where is my mice?

3. ‘错过的提醒’ — Lygort Quartet — from Through Voodoo Light to Shore of Tomorrow

4. ‘B1’ — gogoj aka Sheng Jie + Deng Boyu — from HEH

5. ‘心的傾訴 Jürêk tolƣawe (Unbosom Myself)’ —Mamer — from Bar xatteƣem, Bar ⱪayƣem (All the Joys, All the Pains)

6. ‘没东西可掏 The Well Is Dry’ — Zhang 'NoNo' Xingchan 张醒婵 — from Catch My Boomerang

7. ‘Gaia’s Breath’ — Wu Zhuoling 吴卓玲 — from Uncharted II

8. ‘the one sounds like sweet trip’ — Cassette Player Romance — from Meaning of Home

9. ‘黑天鵝(feat. LukeDaPlaya)’ — Guo Yinan 鍋一楠 and Yuan 猿 — from The Vortex Reconstruction Experiment

10. ‘Extinguished City’ — DEADTREES — from New World

11. ‘让我飞吧’ — Lie 劣 — from Landfill

For more information on each of these artists, check out the full write-up on Substack.
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Contest links: General $50k https://www.chinatalk.media/p/50k-chinatalk-submission-hiring-contest we're looking at submissions on a rolling basis!

AI evals: Due

Over the past few years, we’ve seen hints of policymakers and national leaders using AI models in their actual policy decision-making. The Prime Minister of Sweden said he uses it for second opinions on policy; the German Chancellor is testing it to draft legislation; even Trump said he had it re-write a speech at some point. It’s fair to assume that senior leadership across the world, and in Washington as well, have started using AI not just for tactical or operational tasks, but increasingly for broad strategic decision-making.

While that’s exciting — there’s the promise of uplift and smarter calls on some of the most consequential decisions leaders face in foreign policy and national security — we’re also flying blind. Enormous effort and energy goes into benchmarking and evaluation for things like coding. The experiments you can run to make models better at software development are much easier to execute and much lower-stakes than running a real experiment when you’re deciding whether to invade a country or sign a treaty.

That’s why we at ChinaTalk are trying to kickstart a field aimed at helping researchers and policymakers understand exactly what they’re working with when they ask these models to support some of the most consequential decisions they may make in their lifetimes. We’re launching an evals/essay project contest to explore this theme.

I’ve brought on two expert AI eval creators to discuss why the field is important, what interesting work has already been done on how models approach broad national-security and strategic questions, and how you — as an eval professional, semi-professional, or just a concerned person — can contribute new ways to poke and prod at these models and see what they can really do.

Joining us today: Florian Brand, research engineer at Prime Intellect, and John Chen, professor at the University of Arizona, who’s done some pretty wild things getting models to start nuclear wars with each other in Civ V.

Our conversation covers:

How frontier labs are hitting eval-building limits — they’ve gone from undergrads to PhDs to field experts, and the models are now catching the experts’ mistakes.

How Civilization V exposes AI’s strategic blind spots (terrible second-order reasoning) and models’ distinct strategic personalities (Claude’s really into science!).

Why ethical prompting in Civilization V still doesn’t stop models from launching nukes.

Jordan's PresidentBench eval, where a Chinese model was nonchalant about a Taiwan invasion, while Claude wanted to keep Taiwan free and independent.

Advice for designing better AI evals and ChinaTalk’s new essay/evals contest!

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Six months into the war with Iran, the United States has fired 850 Tomahawks, emptied its LRASM and JASSM-ER inventories, expended essentially every ATACMS and PrSM in the arsenal, and burned through the SM-6 and PAC-3 interceptors it had been stockpiling for a fight with China. The administration's position is that the munitions are fine and the people saying otherwise are committing treason.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a former submarine officer who runs war games for the Navy and its allies. Justin McIntosh is a retired Army Special Forces soldier — twenty years in, sixteen of them as a Green Beret — who now writes Mind of Things on defense, technology, and foreign policy.

We discuss…

Why 850 Tomahawks in two months emptied the stockpile that was meant for China

The leak hunt at Camp David, and why it should be a very short list

How "lethality" became a testosterone prescription instead of an ammunition line item

Japan's new defense strategy, which finally names China out loud — and bets on one-way attack drones

Whether AUKUS Pillar 1 is quietly consuming the rest of the Australian military

Why manned-unmanned teaming keeps failing in the war games, and what the CCA program got wrong

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