"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 4: The AI Race Reconsidered

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Gua coming to you this week from my nearly empty, soon-to-be-on-the-market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.

Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at cinecapodcast.com. I know there are a lot of Substacks out there and they start to add up, but I think this one delivers serious value and I do need your help to keep doing this work, so please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations. This week I'm sharing the fourth and final installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China and the Future of Global Affairs, ACF, at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, or SICE, that was on April 3rd in Washington, and it was called The China Debate We're Not Having. Politics technology and the road ahead.

The first episode featured Jessica Chedweiss's opening remarks and the panel on what China wants. The second panel turned to the equally important question of what the United States wants from China, which is something Jessica has been particularly good at problematizing. I've often borrowed her language to express the idea that recent American administrations seem somehow unable to articulate an affirmative vision for what the US actually wants things to look like. Then you heard another excellent panel called Tech, Rivalry and Competing Visions of the Future, which was focused, unsurprisingly, on artificial intelligence.

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