This week on Sinica, I speak with Kyle Chan, a fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, previously a postdoc at Princeton, and author of the outstanding High-Capacity Newsletter on Substack. Kyle has emerged as one of the sharpest and most empirically grounded voices on U.S.-China technology relations, and he holds the all-time record for the most namechecks on Sinica’s “Paying it forward” segment. We use his recent Financial Times op-ed on “The Great Reversal” in global technology flows and his longer High-Capacity essay on re-coupling as jumping-off points for a wide-ranging conversation about where China now sits at the global technological frontier, why the dominant decoupling narrative misses powerful structural forces pulling the two economies back together, and what all of this means for innovation, choke points, and the global tech ecosystem.
4:35 – How Kyle became Kyle Chan: from Chicago School economics to development, railways, and systems thinking
12:50 – The Great Reversal: China at the technological frontier, from megawatt EV charging to LFP batteries
17:59 – The electro-industrial tech stack and China’s overlapping, mutually reinforcing tech ecosystems
22:40 – Industrial strategy and time horizons: patience, persistence, and the long arc of China’s auto industry
33:45 – Re-coupling under pressure: Waymo and Zeekr, Unitree robots, and the structural forces binding the two economies
40:22 – The gravity model: can political distance overwhelm technological mass?
47:01 – What China still wants from the U.S.: Cursor, GitHub, talent, and the AI brain drain
51:52 – Weaponized interdependence and the danger of securitizing everything
57:30 – Firm-level adaptation: HeyGen, Manus, and the playbook for de-sinification
1:02:58 – The view from the middle: Gulf states, Southeast Asia, and India as geopolitical arbitrageurs
1:10:18 – Engineering resilience: what policymakers are getting wrong about the systems they’re building
Paying it forward: Katrina Northrop; Grace Shao and her AI Proem newsletter
Recommendations:
Kyle: Wired Magazine’s Made in China newsletter (by Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis); The Wire China
Kaiser: The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu
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