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.

West Asia today finds itself in a deeply uncertain moment. A conditional ceasefire has held for months, but the war isn’t truly over. The Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted, even without large-scale fighting at sea. The United States and Iran still trade periodic strikes. Israel is still operating beyond its borders. Iran has suffered unprecedented losses. The Gulf states are increasingly divided. And Gaza, once the focus of the world’s attention, has slipped from the headlines.

In all this, much of the focus of the commentariat tends to be around present-day leaders and their decisions. Of course, those matter immensely. But it’s also true that how we got to this place today isn’t simply the product of recent events. It’s the culmination of structural tensions building for decades. These include unresolved questions about Iran’s place in the regional order, the limits of American power and changes in American interests, Israel’s security doctrine, competing Gulf visions of leadership, and the deepening involvement of powers like China.

So in this episode of the Great Power Show, what’ll we do is first zoom out to trace the fault lines that produced this crisis; and then zoom in on the interests, fears, and calculations of each key actor. But we’ll also ask the larger question that if the old order is broken, what replaces it?

To help us make sense of all this, I speak to Raja Karthikeya, who is an Adjunct Fellow with the Takshashila Institution, leading their work on West Asia there. Raja brings a tremendous mix of scholarly and practitioner’s perspective. His career has spanned the United Nations, leading think tanks, and frontline policy work across Asia and Africa. He has been part of UN peace mediation and crisis response efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and on the question of Palestine.

This conversation is also the first special live-recording of the Great Power Show, which was held during the Academic Conference of Takshashila’s Graduate Certificate in Public Policy course. This is a 12-week course conducted online, bringing together dynamic individuals who wish to enter the growing professional sphere of public policy, public affairs, governance, and leadership.

If you’d like to know more about Takshashila’s education offerings, log on to the Takshashila website. Raja is also going to be teaching a weekend course on West Asia, starting July.

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.

When we talk about US-China competition, we often tend to focus on the obvious: trade, technology and Taiwan. But there’s a deeper question that doesn’t get enough attention. How does China actually think about fighting a war against a far more powerful adversary?

PLA writings describe modern conflict not as something waged simply between militaries. Rather it is conceptualised as system against system—the whole national apparatus on one side against the whole national apparatus on the other. Financial infrastructure, space capabilities, information networks, industrial base, all of it is part of the fight. The PLA calls this systems confrontation. And it shapes everything about how Beijing is preparing.

My guest for this episode of The Great Power Show is Howard Wang, a political scientist at RAND, whose recent work examines a concept emerging from this strand of Chinese strategic thinking, total war.

Wang tells me that in 2021, China embedded total war into its national security strategy. He describes it as a mobilisational concept. The idea is that civilian capabilities need to be developed in peacetime so that Party leaders can translate them into war-fighting advantages during conflict. We also talk about escalation and coercion, what does the theory of victory look like, what lessons Beijing is drawing from conflicts in Ukraine and West Asia, and what the ongoing purges tell us about the gap between the PLA’s ambitions and reality.

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.

There’s a quiet but unmistakable change taking place in Japan. For decades, Japanese politics was defined by caution. The country has a pacifist constitution. There has been managed ambiguity in its international engagements. Economic power existed without strategic assertion.

But something is shifting beneath the surface. A new generation of conservative leaders is emerging. Public attitudes toward security are hardening. And Tokyo is beginning to think of itself not merely as a status quo power, but as an active shaper of the international order.

At the center of this transformation stands Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Her rise reflects a deeper mood within Japanese society, one that is characterised by anxiety about China’s rise, uncertainty about America’s reliability, and a growing belief that Japan can no longer remain strategically passive.

So what exactly is happening inside Japan today? Why are younger voters increasingly drawn toward a more assertive conservative politics? How does Tokyo view the China-Russia partnership? Why did tensions with Beijing escalate so sharply over Taiwan? And how is Japan trying to navigate a world where the United States remains indispensable, but no longer entirely predictable?

To unpack all of this, in this episode of The Great Power Show, I speak to Kei Koga, Assistant Professor at the Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. We discuss the transformation of Japanese politics, the evolving Japan-China relationship, the strategic consequences of Trump 2.0, and how Tokyo is adapting to an increasingly turbulent world.

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 I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

In international relations, we obsess over great powers. What Washington thinks, what Beijing wants, what New Delhi will do next. We map their strategies, track their rivalries, debate their ambitions. And somewhere along the way, we forget that most of the world doesn’t get to play that game.

For smaller states, great power competition isn’t theory. It is the quiet, constant reality that you must navigate a world that is being shaped by others.

So how do these countries navigate that? How do you make decisions when the parameters are set by others? When geography limits your options, economics ties you down, and security concerns pull you in different directions, what does strategy even look like?

In this episode of the Great Power Show, we’re looking at those questions through the lens of a country that sits right at the fault line of great power politics: Nepal. Sandwiched between India and China, courted by the United States, shaped by history and geography—and now by a restless younger generation that just threw out its entire political establishment—Nepal is a case study in what it means to survive and adapt in an age of competition.

Joining me to unpack all of this is Professor S.D. Muni, former diplomat and Professor Emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Prof. Muni is one of the sharpest observers of politics in the Indian subcontinent. We talk about how smaller states think about power, how Nepal balances between competing giants, what the recent political upheaval tells us, and why the old play-books may no longer work.

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 I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

How does China think about the world?

We spend a lot of time trying to decode Beijing’s behaviour—its strategy, its ambitions, its moves on the global stage. But we rarely ask a more basic question: where does that thinking come from?

What does it actually mean to study international relations in China?

In this episode, I speak with Yaqi Li, an MSc candidate in International Relations at RSIS in Singapore. Yaqi, who grew up in China’s Hubei province, is someone who studied political science and IR in China; he offers a first-hand view of what the classroom environment is like.

On paper, much of it looks familiar. Students study realism, liberalism, international political economy. But the experience is also very different. There are limits to inquiry. Domestic politics is largely absent. And official ideology sits alongside political theory in ways that shape how students engage with the changing world around them.

So this is a conversation about classrooms. But it’s also about power.

How are ideas produced in China? How do they travel into the policy system? And what happens when a system tries to generate knowledge, but also constrain it?

We explore the gap between theory and practice. The role of think tanks and state institutions. And the internal logic that shapes Chinese statecraft—its strengths, its blind spots, and its limits.

Because if we want to understand what China does, we first need to understand how it thinks.

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 I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

Do check out Yaqi’s Substack and podcast: New China Literacy