Jon Czin, former CIA analyst and NSC staffer, returns to talk purges. We have far too much fun.

The disney take on PLA purges: https://suno.com/s/Wv1yQyxdUhWBzyA0

08:50 Deep read into the WSJ nuke traitor allegations

22:10 Xi getting paranoid?

26:13 Taiwan implications

32:38 Succession implications

45:55 It must really suck to work in Chinese politics

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Jasmine Sun of https://jasmi.news/ and Nathan Lambert of https://www.interconnects.ai/ report for duty. Athena makes a brief guest appearance before dipping for pilates.

Jordan's flower app: https://cut-from-the-masters.vercel.app/

Jordan's acting app: https://acting-trainer.vercel.app/

Jordan's mahjong trainer app: https://mazel-jong.vercel.app

Suno song: https://suno.com/s/BArMAm90qTxbupUz

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Bryan Clark (former submariner at Hudson), Eric Robinson, and Justin McIntosh report for duty.

Davos disco: https://suno.com/s/2SpR62beigk2JeDr

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Is there such a thing as MAD in economic warfare? How should we measure the effectiveness of our industrial policy tools, and what outcomes should we be aiming for anyway?

Our guest today is Dan Kim, who served at USITC with stints at Qualcomm and SK hynix before returning to government as the Chief Economist for the CHIPS Program Office. He recently joined TechInsights as Chief Strategy Officer. Also joining us is Chris Miller of Chip War fame. 

We discuss:

• What $39 billion can and can’t buy — why the CHIPS Act was never meant to de-risk the U.S. from China or Taiwan, and what “success” looks like when autarky is neither affordable nor desirable,
• Apple vs. Xiaomi + BYD — invention versus fast-following as competing models of national power, and which system performs better when the goal shifts from profit maximization to geopolitical resilience,
• What resilience actually means — capability vs. capacity, weakest links, and whether economic security should be measured as “time to recovery” rather than self-sufficiency,
• Managed dependence vs. overreliance, and whether dependence itself can be a form of power,
• Why the U.S. still lacks a clear theory, metrics, and institutional design for industrial strategy — and what you can do about it.

Subscribe to the ChinaTalk Substack to stay updated about the essay contest!

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Jon Czin spent years as a top China analyst at the CIA, served as China Director on Biden’s National Security Council, and now works at the Brookings Institution. We talk through:

• Xi, Trump, and what drove the roller coaster of US-China relations in 2025
• Why it feels too quiet right now and what could get this train off the rails in 2026

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Richard Danzig, national treasure, joins the podcast to discuss the national security implications of AI in the cyber context.

Do note we conducted this interview in July of 2025.

We discuss Richard's excellent paper on AI and cyber you can find here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA4079-1.html

Teddy Collins cohosts. Thanks to Hudson for sponsoring this episode.

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The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission late last year released its annual report to Congress. ChinaTalk welcomes two commissioners to the pod to discuss.

Before joining the Hoover Institution, Mike Kuiken spent two decades on the Hill including as the senior national security advisor for Senator Schumer and as a PSM on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was appointed to the commission by Leader Schumer. Leland Miller, the co-founder and CEO of China Beige Book, was appointed by Speaker Mike Johnson.

We get into…

• What the U.S.-China Commission does, and why “alligators closest to the boat” explains Congress’s blind spots,

• The case for an economic statecraft agency, and reorganization lessons from post-9/11 sanctions reform,

• The year supply chains became sexy — and the best-case scenario for responding to chokepoints like rare earths and pharmaceuticals,

• Xi’s unresponsiveness to consumer spending concerns, and the military-tech developments he’s targeting instead,

• The quantum software gap, synthetic biology in space, and Congress’s role in competing with China.

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Happy New Year! This is your reminder to fill out the ChinaTalk audience survey. The link is here. We’re here to give the people what they want, so please fill it out! ~Lily 🌸

Ben Buchanan, now a Professor at SAIS, served in the Biden White House in many guises, including as a special advisor on AI. He’s also the author of three books and an Oxford quarterback. He joins ChinaTalk to discuss how AI is reshaping U.S. national security.

We discuss:

• How AI quietly became a national security revolution — scaling laws, compute, and the small team in Biden’s White House that moved early on export controls before the rest of the world grasped what was coming,

• Why America could win the AI frontier and still lose the war if the Pentagon can’t integrate frontier models into real-world operations as fast as adversaries — the “tank analogy” of inventing the tech but failing at operational adoption,

• The need for a “Rickover of AI” and whether Washington’s bureaucracy can absorb private-sector innovation into defense and intelligence workflows,

• How AI is transforming cyber operations — from automating zero-day discovery to accelerating intrusions,

• Why technical understanding — not passion or lobbying — still moves policy in areas like chips and AI, and how bureaucratic process protects and constrains national security decision-making,

• How compute leadership buys the U.S. time, not safety, and why that advantage evaporates without building energy capacity, enforcement capacity, and world-class adoption inside the government.

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Bryan Clark joins.

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but in a nice way

happy new year!

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We check in on the state of the republic and allied scale with Peter Harrell, former Biden official and host of the excellent new Security Economics podcast, Kevin Xu, who writes the Interconnected newsletter, and Matt Klein, author of Trade Wars Are Class Wars and The Overshoot substack.

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