Economic historian Adam Tooze returns to Sinica fresh from the China Development Forum and his second extended visit to Beijing in under a year. In this wide-ranging conversation, Adam and I cover the 15th Five-Year Plan — what it signals about Beijing’s development priorities and whether it represents a genuine shift away from investment-led growth — and the extraordinary scale of China’s renewable energy buildout, which Adam argues may be bringing us to the global peak of CO2 emissions right now.

They discuss the concept of the “big green state,” why Western analysts keep dancing around the role of the CPC in driving China’s environmental transformation, and what the “Chinamaxxing” phenomenon says about a slow but real reckoning in Western public consciousness. From Europe’s evolving posture toward China — caught between EV anxieties and transatlantic rupture — to China’s role in the Global South’s energy future, the conversation moves through coal transitions, Indonesian nickel zones, African microgrids, and the collapse of the flying geese model.

The episode closes with a frank exchange on the Iran war, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, the stunning political silence on American campuses, and what Beijing is most likely doing: sitting pretty and waiting it out. Adam also offers a preview of his forthcoming book on the energy transition — which turns out to be another massive one — and recommends Tim Sahay and Wang Hui as essential reading.

02:44 – Adam’s Chinese language study: HSK3, the Confucius Institute curriculum, and the joys of chasing characters

09:41 – The jìhuà/guīhuà distinction and what the shift in nomenclature from the 11th Five-Year Plan onward actually signals

12:01 – The 15th Five-Year Plan: green energy tinkering, sci-tech ambitions, and the human development dimension

18:10 – Does Beijing genuinely mean to shift from investment-led growth? Reading “high quality development” and “common prosperity”

22:38 – The Great Reckoning: has Western intellectual and policy consciousness actually moved on China?

29:45 – Environmental authoritarianism, the CPC as mobilizing institution, and why Xi’s “petty bourgeois environmentalism” deserves to be taken seriously

33:39 – Persistent misperceptions of China in Western discourse; the “jaundiced American” trench perspective

39:16 – European neuralgia: EV overcapacity, Ukraine, and whether transatlantic rupture opens a window for China

45:02 – China and the Global South: the end of the flying geese model, African microgrids, Indonesian nickel zones, and BRI record lending

59:32 – Mark Carney’s “age of rupture”: does the framing capture something real, or does it flatter the West?

01:05:18 – What Beijing sees from its windows: Iran, Venezuela, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, and a five-point plan for Chinese hegemony (that won’t happen)

01:14:55 – Preview of Adam’s forthcoming book on the energy transition and the “second world” thesis

Paying It Forward: Tim Sahay (PolyCrisis / Phenomenal World)

Recommendations:

Adam: Wang Hui’s The End of the Revolution

Kaiser: The Chinese series Shēng mìng shù (Born to Be Alive)

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This week on Sinica, I welcome journalist and former colleague Chang Che. His recent New Yorker piece "How China Learned to Love the Classics" generated enormous attention. We explore one of the more surprising cultural phenomena in contemporary China: a growing, state-backed enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman classics. We dig into what's actually driving this revival, from the genuine intellectual curiosity of scholars like He Yanxiao, who fell in love with the Odyssey as a Chinese high school student and went on to earn a Chicago PhD, to what might be the more deliberate strategic ambitions of figures like Politburo member Li Shulei and the shadow of philosopher Liu Xiaofeng's Straussianism. We also compare Chang's warmly enchanted 2022 China Project piece on Austrian classicist Leopold Lieb to the politically sharper New Yorker piece four years later — and ask what that shift in tone tells us about what's actually changed. This is an episode about civilizational discourse, soft power, and the strange fate of scholarship when the state decides it finds your obscure passion useful.

00:32 – Kaiser introduces the episode from Beijing and reflects on the asymmetry in how the West covers Chinese intellectual curiosity

04:08 – Civilizationist discourse: Spengler, Huntington, and The Civilization Trap

10:56 – Introducing Chang Che and the evolution from his 2022 China Project piece to the New Yorker

15:38 – How Chang first got drawn into the subject: Latin classes, Charlottesville, and young Chinese classicists returning from American PhDs

21:38 – What changed in four years: the state moves from background to foreground

25:28 – Inside the institutional push: what China's "classics departments" actually look like, and who controls the definition of "classics"

31:13 – Xi Jinping's letter to Greek scholars and the move, perhaps, to sever ancient Greece from the modern West

39:57 – Liu Xiaofeng, Leo Strauss, and why Strauss fever gripped Chinese intellectuals after 1989

47:03 – The Padilla Peralta "incident" and the strange porousness between American and Chinese discourse communities on the classics

52:13 – Chenchen Zhang's framework: civilizationist discourse claims difference internationally while enforcing homogeneity domestically

57:30 – He Yanxiao, K-pop, and the idea of "Chinatown classics"

01:07:13 – Where will China's classics revival be in ten years?

Paying It Forward: Dongxian Jiang (Fordham) and Simon Luo (Nanyang Technological University)

Recommendations: Chang recommends House of the Dragon; Kaiser recommends the Ah-Q Arkestra, led by trombonist Matt Roberts, whose latest album Méiyǒu yìjiàn is on Spotify.

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David M. Lampton—“Mike”—is one of America’s most distinguished scholars of U.S.–China relations, director of China Studies Emeritus at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and the author of landmark works on Chinese politics and foreign policy. He joins me this week to discuss a striking new Foreign Affairs essay he co-authored with the eminent Chinese international relations scholar Wang Jisi of Peking University: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back from the Brink.”

Written against the backdrop of President Trump’s planned visit to China (and before the outbreak of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran), the essay is less a routine policy paper than an urgent intervention — two veteran scholars, one American and one Chinese, throwing a rope across a widening chasm. They argue that strategic rivalry has become self-reinforcing, that the greatest danger is no longer deliberate conflict but accidental war driven by miscalculation and escalation dynamics neither side fully controls, and that a rare, narrow window for “a new normalization” may now be opening.

We range across the essay’s boldest claims — on Taiwan as the unlikely starting point for stabilization, the corrosive logic of securitization, the ghost of the first Cold War, and the looming talent crisis in serious China studies — in a meaty, substantive conversation.

3:39 How the Lampton–Wang Jisi collaboration came together

6:31 The division of labor and the essay’s unified voice

9:15 Wang Jisi’s cognitive empathy and his unusual depth of American understanding

13:57 The essay’s emotional register: veteran scholars and the specter of another Cold War

16:32 From reassurance to deterrence—and why deterrence keeps getting harder to maintain

25:02 Mirror-image threat narratives as self-fulfilling operating systems

32:08 Securitization, the “one-way ratchet,” and whether economic interdependence can be rebuilt

39:23 Accidental war: what has changed since Hainan 2001 and Belgrade 1999

44:16 Where the most damaging choices were made—China’s Ukraine pivot, U.S. arms-control withdrawals

51:29 The window of opportunity: Trump’s China visit, the 4th Plenum, and post-Iran recalculation

1:01:30 Taiwan as the counterintuitive starting point for stabilization

1:10:03 Collapse fantasies, hubris, and the Pearl Harbor danger of “act now or lose the window”

1:13:14 The looming China-talent crisis and the future of the field

Paying It Forward

Mike highlights Rosie Levine, executive director of the U.S.–China Education Trust, where she is leading a major new initiative to expand serious American scholarship in China and encourage Chinese institutions to open their doors wider to foreign researchers and students.

Recommendations

Mike: The Raider by Stephen R. Platt (Knopf, 2025) — a biography of Major Evans Carlson, the swashbuckling Marine officer who trained with Chinese Communist forces in the 1930s, befriended Zhu De, brought the word “gung-ho” into English, and died in 1947 just in time to miss both the PRC’s turn away from liberty and McCarthyism’s persecution at home.

Kaiser: “How China Learned to Love the Classics,” a New Yorker piece by Chang Che on the remarkable renaissance of interest in Greco-Roman philosophy and literature in contemporary China — and what it says about the world we now inhabit.

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