ChinaTalk

ChinaTalk spends a lot of time on the leading lights of the Chinese economy... the MiniMaxes, ByteDances, Unitrees, and BYDs of the world.

But what about the rest of the system, the part growing at zero to two percent?

To talk about what's broken, not just what works, we talk with Meg Rithmire.

Meg is the James E. Robison Professor at Harvard Business School and author of Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia. With UC San Diego's Peter Cowhey, she recently wrote "The Cost of Keeping China Out" for Foreign Affairs, which argues that Washington should let some Chinese firms build in America... on strict terms.

We discuss…

Mafia firms: how Anbang, HNA, and Wanda raised money on stock exchanges, tunneled it into subsidiaries by the thousands, and bought the Waldorf Astoria without making anything at all

How China's zombie firms moved out of real estate and into industrial policy, why households put up with it when "the rest of the world seems awful," and what Japan teaches about living well with bad macro numbers

Why the Chinese Communist Party is more nervous about controlling its own champions than Western media assumes

A reverse Tesla: Meg's case for letting BYD and CATL build in the US with localized supply chains, split hardware and software, and continuous monitoring

US vs. China corruption

Plus: the Indonesian tycoon hiding behind the building on Meg's book cover, whether AI can do David Barboza's paper-trail reporting in five seconds
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Ukraine and Russia have rebuilt their armies around drones, deception, and long-range strike. What should the U.S. military take from it?

Michael Kofman joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark.

We discuss:

How much leverage the U.S. still has over the war, and why Europe can't replace America's role in NATO.

Why buying drones means nothing without drone platoons and companies to fight with them.

Why no one owns the night anymore, and why the U.S. military has no culture of decoys.

What counts as a lesson from Ukraine, and discussions on wet-gap crossings

Plus: getting rich as a military analyst, and how to tell real maneuver from sparkling mobility.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:03:28 U.S. leverage in Ukraine

00:30:02 Who will fight with the drones?

00:47:05 You don't own the night

01:04:32 Wet gap crossings

01:08:56 What to tell Congress
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Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges and opportunities facing the US. Nick was a physics major, spent a while as a software engineer in and around government, and had an arc as an aspiring concert violinist. But we’re here to talk about what is in pole position for my paper of the year: his master class on what would happen if the US cut off DUV exports to China: DUV Immersion Lithography: The Foundation of US AI Compute Advantage. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria.We discuss:

The case for banning DUV exports to China: Why lithography is the hardest part of the semiconductor manufacturing stack for China to replicate/indigenize and the strongest point of leverage the US and its allies have over China’s future AI compute.

The cannonball-sized hole in US export controls: China imported roughly 90 immersion lithography systems a year in 2024–25, nearly two-thirds of ASML’s immersion exports. If imports continue at this rate, China could approach or even reach parity with the US in AI chipmaking within a decade.

What the MATCH Act would do: How Congress could close this gap by restricting DUV immersion exports and servicing, and whether the US can get its allies on board.

Will Beijing retaliate? Why a gradual, long-term restriction may be less likely to provoke another rare-earths crisis

Buying time for AGI: How cutting off DUV imports could preserve America’s AI compute advantage into the 2030s, giving the US more time to navigate the technological, geopolitical, and societal implications of increasingly powerful AI.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:07:11 EUV vs. DUV

00:21:55 What the MATCH Act does

00:41:24 Would Beijing retaliate?

00:58:59 Japan, the Netherlands, and the light-source option
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He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a retired submariner, and Justin McIntosh, a twenty-year retired Green Beret who served in the 1st and 5th Groups, who now works in defense tech and writes a Substack called Mind of Things.

We discuss:

Why the Department of War isn’t going fast enough to procure, scale, and field drones, and how the DIU’s Gauntlet competition is using real orders, competition, and falling prices to build a drone industry capable of producing at scale.

What American drone makers can learn from Ukraine’s battlefield laboratory and how the Pentagon is trying to replicate the conditions of electronic warfare in its evaluations.

Why the US drone industry is “wide but not deep,” how the first orders banning Chinese motors and battery packs are testing the limits of supply-chain decoupling, and why Drone Dominance alone can’t solve dependencies in battery chemistry and rare-earth refining.

Why the future of drone warfare depends on systems that can operate autonomously under electronic attack, and how Metz thinks mass-produced, increasingly autonomous drones will reshape military procurement, training, and force structure.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:01:27 How Drone Dominance works

00:08:36 Ukraine, jamming, and the Gauntlets

00:32:41 Component supply chain

00:47:37 Doctrine and forcing functions

01:03:11 Bombers, pilots, and autonomy
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Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes your money and your world run when you’re in China and sometimes beyond. Richard is a former software engineer at Microsoft and Square, and he previously served as head of open source at Ant, where he scaled the open source initiative into a dedicated team. He’s lived and worked in Singapore, Canada, the US, and China, and he loves to build products.

Topics covered:

The Hugging Face hack as a sign of progress? Why Richard sees the incident involving OpenAI research agents as an inevitable discovery rather than simply a disaster, and why finding a solution now is a positive development.

AGI is coming, but nobody knows what it will look like. AGI is inevitable, and we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what these models can do. Rather than obsessing over leaderboards, we need better evaluations and a more open-minded approach to judging models.

Open source as a product strategy, not just a way to give things away. How open-weight models can harness global talent, accelerate development, and support a diverse ecosystem of products, and why the real business challenge is gross margins rather than capex.

Why the AI conversation needs more voices. Why we need to pay attention to diverse perspectives on where AI is going, and be more willing to explore rather than declare the endgame.

AI moves fast: since we recorded, Ant Ling has announced its latest LLM, Ling 3.1 Flash, which was open-sourced on October 14 with 560B parameters and up to a 1M-token context window.

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