How much can we really understand about Chinese politics from the outside, and how much has become genuinely unknowable?

A senior general, who is a close confidant of Xi Jinping; a family friend for whom retirement norms were reportedly bent. Present one day, gone the next, with no explanation that outsiders can independently verify. That is the puzzle at the heart of China-watching today. Some things remain remarkably legible: the direction of policy, the priorities of the leadership, a range of economic data…Others disappear behind a wall we simply cannot see through. In many ways, the craft of studying China lies in preventing the unknowable from quietly corrupting the knowable.

This episode is about how to read the Chinese political system—and, above all, how to read the man at its centre and the ideology that now bears his name. What can we genuinely learn about Xi Jinping from the immense body of literature the Party has produced? And what exactly is Xi Jinping Thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era? Is it a coherent doctrine handed down from the top, or, as my guest argues, something that is assembled from the bottom up—a rhizome of concepts that are continually interpreted, adapted, recombined and reassembled across China’s bureaucracy, where some ideas take root while others quietly fade away?

My guest today is Chris Mittelstaedt, Associate Professor of Sinology specialising in modern China at the University of Zurich. His recent work offers a compelling new way of thinking about Chinese ideology—not simply as a fixed body of doctrine, but as a living political language whose meaning is constantly negotiated within the Party-state itself.

Our conversation begins with the problem of knowledge: what we can know about elite politics in China, what we cannot, and how to avoid confusing one for the other. We then turn to Xi Jinping, his vision of national rejuvenation, and the mechanics of Xi Jinping Thought. Finally, we look ahead—to next year’s Party Congress, the growing influence of Cai Qi, and the longer-term implications of Xi’s rule. If Xi remains China’s leader through 2035, an entire generation of officials will have spent their careers thinking and governing in his political vocabulary. Do they internalise that worldview, or merely perform it? And either way, what kind of China will it leave behind?

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. If you do, please like, share, subscribe, and rate the episode. It really helps the show reach a wider audience. And please do consider supporting the show by reaching out to me.

When we talk about what makes a nation strong, we reach instinctively for the familiar levers armies, economies, semiconductors, ships. But running quietly beneath all of them is something older and more intimate, i.e., the mastery of life itself.

The ability to cure or to sicken, to feed a population or to starve one, to grow a crop that withstands a drought or a pathogen that crosses a border…Biology has always been an instrument of statecraft—from poisoned wells and court alchemists, to penicillin, which helped win a world war and vaccine diplomacy of a pandemic still fresh in our memory.

And today, biotechnology sits at the center of both extraordinary opportunity and profound vulnerability. Precision medicine and engineered crops on one side; supply-chain chokepoints in APIs, fermentation capacity, and genetic-sequencing equipment on the other. It is, increasingly, a domain of great-power competition, and, at its hard edge, of military capability.

My guest for this conversation is Shambhavi Naik, one of India’s premier scholars working at the intersection of biotechnology and public policy, and my colleague at the Takshashila Institution. Together, we map the life sciences as a vector of national power across their full arc. We begin with the deep history of how rulers harnessed, and weaponized, biology. We then trace the emergence of germ theory and the 20th century scientific breakthroughs that reshaped the global balance of power.

From there, we examine the architecture of regulation, offensive bioweapons programmes, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, and the verification gap at its heart. Finally, we turn to the present day, where we explore the strategic competition between the United States, China, the European Union, and India; the economic and security dimensions of biotechnology; its emerging military applications; and what the world’s most powerful leaders should be doing about it.

This is a conversation about the most fundamental technology of all…the one that operates on us.

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work that I do, please do reach out to me.

One of the enduring puzzles about China is how a country of its size is actually governed. We often talk about “Beijing” as though it were a single actor with a coherent strategy, but behind every policy announcement lies an immense bureaucracy, competing incentives, negotiations across different levels of government, and millions of officials whose decisions ultimately determine whether central directives succeed or fail.

Understanding China’s political economy therefore requires us to understand the people and institutions that make it work: how officials are recruited, what incentives shape their careers, and how local governments negotiate, adapt, and sometimes reshape national priorities.

These questions have become even more important under Xi Jinping, whose tenure has been marked by a drive toward greater Party discipline and centralisation, even as China's economic success continues to depend heavily on local initiative and experimentation.

My guest for this conversation is Xiao Ma, Associate Professor of Political Science at Peking University, and a faculty associate at Peking University Research Center for Contemporary China. Xiao’s work challenges some of the conventional ways we think about the Chinese state. Rather than viewing bureaucratic promotion simply through the lens of meritocracy or patronage, he argues that officials compete for political attention. And instead of seeing central-local relations as a straightforward hierarchy in which Beijing issues orders and local governments implement them, he offers a framework of localised bargaining.

In this conversation, we explore how China’s bureaucracy actually functions, what motivates officials, how local governments bargain with the center, and what these dynamics tell us about the strengths—and perhaps the limits—of China’s development model.

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work that I do, please feel free to reach out to me.