ChinaTalk

After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country credit expansion in at least a century.

Today investment is contracting, growth is less than a percent, and the financial system that fueled China's growth is now the thing holding it back.

Logan Wright, partner at Rhodium Group and my former boss, joins ChinaTalk to discuss his new book, Broken China: How the Economic Miracle Shattered and What It Means for the World.

Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations co-hosts.

We discuss…

The crisis that already happened: why the September 2021 protests in Evergrande's lobby were China's catharsis moment

Decay instead of collapse: why credit growth fell from 18% a year to 5%, why Beijing keeps rolling over loans to zombie state firms, and why in China "the path to crisis is reform"

Jordan and Brad discuss Xi's Perspective: Does supply-chain dominance matter more than GDP?

Twelve million graduates a year, the youth unemployment numbers that vanished in 2023, why all of China's new strategic industries add up to about 6% of GDP, and why a $10,000 BYD doesn't matter if your kid can't get a job

Who's paying for China's AI?

Plus: Logan's case that the US no longer has a systemic economic rivalry with China, and Brad's pushback that Chinese supply-chain controls have so far beaten Western demand-side leverage
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WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan.

We discuss…

The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to fight with, and how the Iran blockade became the status quo

The midterm budget squeeze — what a Democratic Senate means for the defense topline, why Anduril won’t keep working at risk, and how a shipbuilding binge could hollow out the force

Who replaces Hegseth — the two Mike Rogerses, and why the talent pool for a lame-duck Pentagon is drying up

The AI Force — why a SOCOM-style AI branch cuts against a technology meant to be everywhere, and what a benchmark-setting version could actually do

Manned-unmanned teaming — why putting sailors on robot ships is “asinine,” and what combined arms for robots should look like

Gifts for Beijing — the Anduril drone Iran fished out of the Gulf, dud PrSMs as intelligence windfalls, and why compute still can’t blow anything up on its own

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Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US getting in exchange for the symbolism and pageantry of a state visit?

We discuss:

Trump-Xi summit scenarios, Beijing’s management of uncertainty and protocol, and how the script of US-China diplomacy has flipped, with things once seen as American concessions to China now treated as concessions from Beijing;

Julian’s framework for a K-shaped US-China relationship, with leader-level diplomacy pulling upward while competition pulls downward;

What Xi’s visit says about the changing political salience of China in the US

Why Beijing’s public statements on AI risk don’t necessarily tell us how it will handle pacing and safety;

What the decline of Xi Jinping could mean for a political system and why China’s next succession could be especially difficult to predict;

China-maxxing from Kissinger to Trump

Plus: The Scholars (儒林外史) and why Qing-dynasty satire about corrupt scholars might make you feel better about America in 2026.
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Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services.

We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does its mission.

Our conversation covers:

Why the U-2 spy plane offers a surprisingly useful lesson for AI: The hardest part of adopting transformative technology isn’t building it, but redesigning the institutions, workflows, incentives, and decision-making systems around it.

The government’s need to manufacture its own “forcing functions”: How carrots, sticks, budget cuts, and a willingness to create winners and losers could help bureaucracies move faster.

Giving the troops the tools and getting out of the way: Why Berntsen thinks the U.S. military’s greatest AI advantage may come from empowering service members to experiment, improvise, and “figure it out.”

Will AI eventually negotiate with AI? We debate whether models can move beyond advising diplomats and executives to actually conducting negotiations.

Plus, cyber challenges, a chat app for government, and book recs.

Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.
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In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career.

Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and WarTalk's Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark.

We discuss…

Why 2027 is not a go date — the three "strategic capabilities" the PLA pulled forward from its 2035 goals, and why a capability milestone says nothing about intent

What the Iran war taught Beijing — day-one decapitation and the heaviest firepower campaign in decades still didn't deliver the political outcome, and PLA journals noticed

The purges are what they look like — Occam's razor on PLA corruption, "fake combat capabilities," and why joint fires fail when artillery support runs on connections

The nuclear shield — early-warning counterstrike, low-yield options, and why a thousand more US warheads would buy less deterrence than a thousand more boats

Beijing's Japan fixation — the Chinese nuclear strategy text with a chapter on every nuclear state, plus Japan

Inside vs. outside — what you can know about the PLA without a clearance, the mirror-imaging trap, and the pitch to undergrads who read Chinese

Plus: the PLA's corruption tip line, Polymarket odds on the next purge, and where an escaped POW should beg for food.
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