Sinica Live at Columbia University, with Yawei Liu and Yukon Huang

Welcome to this special live edition of the Cynical podcast coming to you from the 2025 Columbia China Summit at Columbia University. Hello, New York. Let's hear you make a little noise. Thank you so much to Aiden, to Jiang Yu, to Annie Xui for taking such good care of us, all of the good folks here at the Columbia Greater China Society for having me and my two esteemed guests here.

This summit is taking place at a pivotal moment, not only for Columbia University, but also for US-China relations. Both the university and the bilateral relationship, the most important in the world, find themselves, well, buffeted and embattled by the capricious whims of a certain U.S. president. And I worry a lot about the future of both of them and of students like Mahmoud Khalil.

When Annie Twei and her colleagues at the business school reached out to me to moderate this conversation, we were all living then, wasn't so long ago, in a very different world. And it was possible to title a session like this in the way that this one was actually framed, which is, as you can see, bridging the divide, how the US and China can find common ground. Uh, this week in the midst of this awful trade war, uh, the idea seems positively quaint. Fortunately, though, we have two guests who bring not only decades of experience, uh, deep insight and clear-eyed analysis to the topic at hand, but also quite original thinking about China's evolving role in the world and how we in the United States might better understand it.

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