This week on Sinica, I speak with Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings and one of the most clear-eyed analysts of the U.S.-China relationship working today. Ryan was director for China at the NSC during the Obama Administration.

As Donald Trump moves through his second year in office, the bilateral relationship has defied easy characterization. The once-dominant language of great power competition has receded, China hawks have been sidelined, and Trump’s personalistic approach—marked by praise for Xi Jinping and a willingness to bracket ideological disputes—represents a sharp departure from recent Washington orthodoxy.

Ryan has just published an essay laying out three plausible pathways for the relationship under Trump: a soft landing, a hard split, or what he considers most likely—a period of uneasy calm in which both sides seek stability not out of trust, but out of mutual constraint. We discuss Trump’s apparent strategy, the vibe shift in American attitudes, Beijing’s choice between managing Trump versus managing uncertainty, the critical importance of Xi’s planned April visit, and whether we’re headed toward genuine stabilization or just buying time before the next collision.

5:24 – Trump’s approach: respect for Xi, military deterrence, and the rare earths constraint

8:03 – The vibe shift and Trump’s “reptilian feel” for American exhaustion with confrontation

10:52 – Three scenarios: soft landing, hard split, or uneasy calm through mutual constraint

16:30 – Beijing’s bet: managing Trump versus managing whoever comes next

26:46 – Economic interdependence and why decoupling is like “separating egg whites from a scrambled egg”

37:12 – The April visit as a critical test: pageantry, protests, and what both sides are watching for

42:18 – Taiwan as the most dangerous variable and where theory meets practice

46:58 – Lack of institutional guardrails and the risks of Trump’s personalistic foreign policy

Paying it forward:

Audrye Wong (USC)

Recommendations:

Ryan: The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer by Robert Suettinger

Kaiser: The Last Cavalier (Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine) by Alexandre Dumas; Asia Society conversation with Lizzi Lee, Bert Hoffmann, and Gerard DiPippo on rebalancing China’s economy; Trivium China Podcast with Andrew Polk, Joe Peissel, Danny McMahon, and Cory Combs on capital expenditure headwinds

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This week on Sinica, I speak with Daniel Bessner, the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and co-host of the American Prestige Podcast. If you follow U.S.-China relations even casually, you can’t avoid hearing that we’re in a new Cold War — it’s become a rhetorical reflex in D.C., shaping budgets, foreign policy debates, media narratives, and how ordinary Americans think about China.

But what does it actually mean to call something a Cold War? To think clearly about the present, I find it helps to go to the past, not for simple analogies but to understand the intellectual and ideological machinery that produced and now sustains a Cold War mentality. Danny has written widely about the architecture of American power, the rise of the national security state, and the constellation of thinkers he calls Cold War liberals who helped define the ideological landscape of U.S. foreign policy. We explore how Cold War liberalism reshaped American political life, how the U.S. came to see its global dominance as natural and morally necessary, why the question of whose fault the Cold War was remains urgent in an age of renewed great power rivalry, the rise of China and anxiety of American decline, and what it would take to imagine a U.S.-China relationship that doesn’t fall back into old patterns of moral binaries, ideological panic, and militarized competition.

6:20 – Danny’s background: from Iraq War politicization to studying defense intellectuals

11:00 – Cold War liberalism: the constellation of ideas that shaped U.S. foreign policy

16:14 – How these ideas became structurally embedded in security institutions

22:02 – The Democratic Party’s destruction of the genuine left in the late 1940s

27:53 – Whose fault was the Cold War? Stalin’s sphere of influence logic vs. American universalism

31:07 – Are we facing a similar decision with China today?

34:23 – The anxiety of loss: how decline anxiety distorts interpretation of China’s rise

37:54 – The new Cold War narrative: material realities vs. psychological legacies

41:21 – Clearest parallels between the first Cold War and emerging U.S.-China confrontation

44:33 – What would a pluralistic order in Asia actually look like?

47:42 – Coexistence rather than zero-sum rivalry: what does it mean in practice?

50:57 – What genuine restraint requires: accepting limits of American power

54:14 – The moral imperative pushback: you can’t have good empire without bad empire

56:35 – Imperialist realism: Americans don’t think we’re good, but can’t imagine another world

Paying it forward: The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Responsible Statecraft publication; The Trillion Dollar War Machine by William Hartung and Ben Freeman

Recommendations:

Danny: Nirvana and the history of Seattle punk/indie music (forthcoming podcast project)

Kaiser: Hello China Tech Substack by Poe Zhao (hellotechchina.com)

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, in a joint episode with the China-Global South Podcast, I speak with Eric Olander, host of the China Global South Podcast and founder/editor-in-chief of the China-Global South Project.

In the early hours of January 3rd, U.S. forces carried out a coordinated operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, followed by their rendition to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. The operation unfolded quickly, with minimal kinetic escalation, but has raised far-reaching questions about international law, hemispheric security, and the Trump administration's willingness to use force in the Western Hemisphere. Just before the raid, China's Special Envoy for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, had met with Maduro in Caracas. Commentary linking Trump's action to China has ranged widely—claims about spheres of influence, arguments this was all about oil or rare earths, and pronouncements about what this means for Taiwan. Eric helps us think through China's actual stake in Venezuela, how deeply Beijing understands Latin America, what this episode does and does not change about China's role in the region and the global South more broadly, China's immediate reaction and concrete exposure on the ground, how it manages political risk when partner regimes collapse, and what Chinese military planners may be studying as they assess how this operation unfolded.

5:18 – How Beijing is reading this episode: official messaging versus elite thinking

7:40 – The Taiwan comparisons on Chinese social media and why they don't work

11:09 – How deep is China's actual expertise on Latin America?

14:56 – Comparing U.S. and Chinese benches of Latin America expertise

18:02 – Are we back to spheres of influence? Why that framing doesn't work

20:09 – Where is China most exposed in Venezuela: oil, loans, personnel?

23:41 – The resource-for-infrastructure model and why it failed

28:27 – The political assets: China as defender of sovereignty and multilateralism

36:25 – Will this push left-leaning governments closer to Beijing?

40:07 – The "China impotence" narrative and what doing something would actually mean

46:26 – What Chinese military planners are actually studying

51:46 – The Qiu Xiaoqi meeting: strategic failure or intelligence delivery?

58:40 – What actually changes and what doesn't: looking ahead

Paying it forward: Alonso Illueca, nonresident fellow for Latin America and the Caribbean at the China Global South Project

Recommendations:

Eric: "China's Long Economic War" by Zongyuan Zoe Liu (Foreign Affairs)

Kaiser: The Venetian Heretic by Christian Cameron

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This week on Sinica, recorded at Yale University, I speak with Michael Brenes and Van Jackson, coauthors of The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy. Their argument is that framing the U.S.-China relationship as geopolitical rivalry has become more than just a foreign policy orientation — it's a domestic political project that reshapes budgets, norms, and coalitions in ways that actively harm American democracy and the American people. Rivalry narrows political possibility, makes dissent suspect, encourages neo-McCarthyism (the China Initiative, profiling of Chinese Americans), produces anti-AAPI hate, and redirects public investment away from social welfare and into defense spending through what they call "national security Keynesianism."

Mike is interim director of the Brady Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, while Van is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington and host of the Un-Diplomatic Podcast. We discuss the genesis of their collaboration during the Biden administration, how they navigate China as a puzzle for the American left, canonical misrememberings of the Cold War that distort current China policy, the security dilemma feedback loop between Washington and Beijing, why defense-heavy stimulus is terrible at job creation, how rivalry politics weakens democracy, recent polling showing a shift toward engagement, and their vision for a "geopolitics of peace" anchored in Sino-U.S. détente 2.0.

5:47 – The genesis of the book: recognizing Biden's Cold War liberalism

11:26 – How they approached writing together from different disciplinary homes

13:20 – Navigating China as a puzzle for the American left

21:39 – How great power competition hardened from analytical framework into ideology

28:15 – Mike on two canonical misrememberings of the Cold War

33:18 – Van on the security dilemma and the nuclear feedback loop

39:55 – National security Keynesianism: why defense spending is bad at job creation

44:38 – How rivalry politics weakens democracy and securitizes dissent

48:09 – Building durable coalitions for restraint-oriented statecraft

51:27 – Has the post-COVID moral panic actually abated?

53:27 – The master narrative we need: a geopolitics of peace

55:29 – Associative balancing: achieving equilibrium through accommodation, not arms

Recommendations:

Van: The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi

Mike: The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 by Vladislav Zubok

Kaiser: Pluribus (Apple TV series by Vince Gilligan)

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I speak with Mark Sidel, the Doyle Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior fellow at the International Center for Not for Profit Law.

Mark has written extensively on law and philanthropy in China and across Asia, including widely cited analyses of how the Chinese security state came to play a central role in managing foreign civil society organizations. Since the Law on the Management of Domestic Activities of Overseas NGOs took effect on January 1, 2017, China has introduced a remarkably comprehensive, vertically integrated system of oversight for foreign NGOs, foundations, and nonprofits.

We discuss how this system combines securitization and political risk management with selective accommodation of service provision and technical expertise, Mark’s typology of organizational responses (survivors, hibernators, regionalizers, work-arounders, and leavers), the requirement that foreign NGOs secure professional supervisory units, the impact on China’s domestic nonprofit ecosystem, and what this tells us about the party-state’s long-term vision for controlled engagement with the outside world.

4:43 – The landscape of non-state organizations before the 2016 law

7:06 – What changed: color revolutions, Arab Spring, and domestic anxieties

9:08 – Public security intellectuals and their influence on the law

11:51 – How registration and temporary activity filing systems work in practice

13:48 – Why the Ministry of Public Security, not Civil Affairs, was put in charge

19:31 – The professional supervisory unit requirement and dependency relationships

22:48 – How the state shifted foreign NGO work away from advocacy without banning it

26:17 – Mark’s typology: survivors, hibernators, regionalizers, work-arounders, and leavers

35:19 – What correlates with success for those who have survived

40:41 – Impact on China’s domestic nonprofit ecosystem and professional intermediaries

45:54 – What makes China’s system distinctive compared to India, Egypt, Russia, and Vietnam

50:19 – The Article 53 problem and university partnerships

55:32 – Advice for mid-sized foundations or NGOs considering work in China today

Paying it Forward: Neysun Mahboubi and the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations

Recommendations:

Mark: Everyday Democracy: Civil Society, Youth, and the Struggle Against Authoritarian Culture in China by Anthony Spires

Kaiser: The music of Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs, The Dregs, Steve Morse Band)

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.