Episode 1: Growing Up in a New China — Narrative and Reality

For decades, the job of explaining China to the world belonged to a specific kind of person: the foreign correspondent, the visiting scholar, the expat adviser reading Chinese publication from the outside in. That model is aging out. What is replacing it is harder to name, and this episode is a portrait of it. My guest is Siyao Chen, a graduate of China Foreign Affairs University and the London School of Economics and Political Science, now a policy consultant at a multinational public affairs firm in Beijing. Her job, at its core, is translation in the strategic sense: taking what Beijing says and turning it into what a client can act on. Her path there runs through an unusual sequence of rooms. A foreign language school in Changchun, where Spanish and English arrived at the same time. A provincial foreign affairs office in her home province, where she first encountered diplomacy as something local and concrete rather than ministerial and abstract. The China Development Research Foundation, where supporting the China Development Forum gave her a network that later became her professional asset. A stint at the United Nations, then a master’s degree at the LSE. Each step widened the aperture: local, national, international, and now the space in between, where multinationals try to make sense of the Chinese state. Three threads from the conversation stayed with me. Tifa is a skill. Ask Siyao how she reads Chinese policy and she does not talk about leaked documents or insider whispers. She talks about compiling readouts across years and watching for the moment a phrase changes. The difference between two near-identical diplomatic formulations can carry more signal than an entire white paper. This is philology deployed as market intelligence, and it is a skill the Chinese education system produces almost by accident, through a thousand years of training in reading political texts closely. There is no revolving door, and something else grew in its place. In Washington, the pipeline from government to consultancy is an institution. In Beijing, it barely exists, and what substitutes for it is personal network, accumulated early and carried across. Siyao’s junior-level internships turned out to be exactly the asset that a formal revolving door would have provided. Though she corrected one of my assumptions on air: people do resign from the ministries and enter the private sector. The system is less of a one-way door than I had imagined. Judgment, not knowledge, is the scarce resource. Siyao opened the conversation with an observation about AI that most senior analysts are only now arriving at: finding information is no longer the hard part of policy work. Knowing what matters to this client, at this moment, against this decision, is. That is not something a curriculum teaches. It is formed in client work, and she is forming it right now, at the very start of a career, which is exactly why the conversation is worth your time. These habits are usually reconstructed in memoirs decades later. Here they are being described as they set. Underneath all of it sits the larger claim of the episode: a generation of professionals trained inside the Chinese system, fluent in both political contexts, is becoming the connective tissue between China and the multinationals that operate in it. Not a replication of the Western model. Something new, still without a name. What this show is — and is not New China Literacy is a podcast by young Chinese-background analysts who move between China’s policy world and international environments, and try to make sense of both on the record. In English, with Chinese where it is the only word that works. We are selling insight, not emotion. Each episode should leave you understanding something you did not before. What would you want us to ask next? If you work in or around China-facing public affairs, what do you think outsiders most misunderstand about the field? Drop it in the comments.

A few years ago, the sociologist Yingyi Ma asked hundreds of Chinese undergraduates in the United States what they had crossed an ocean to find. The same phrase kept coming back: critical thinking. One student called it the crown jewel of an American education. This episode approaches that question from the other end. Yuki Yu Wei, as currently a geopolitical analyst, spent two years inside a Chinese university before transferring to the University of Colorado Denver. Now, she has finished a degree in political science and communication, and open to collaborations, as well as analyst or journalist position, as next step of her intellectual journey. In our conversation, Yuki has shared many of her own stories, along with insightful and thoughtful perception on them. Some of her experience align with Ma’s points, some sharply against them, which brought the image of Chinese student beyond statistic points in research report. What Yuki offered was more than agreement or disagreement. Her central move is to take the mystique out of critical thinking. It is not, she argues, a teaching technique that American classrooms happen to have perfected and that travels neatly in a suitcase. Instead, it is a permission, a permission to hold a perspective, to not produce the one correct answer, to question the authority standing at the front of the room. And the part I keep returning to: Real critical thinking begins not in argument but in listening. The aim is not to win the other person over. It is to learn their reality. From there the conversation widens. We talk about the Chinese classroom as a kind of theater, where bodies are present, but attention has quietly left the room, held together by an unspoken contract that lets teachers perform teaching and students perform listening. Most of time, this was read as the teacher’s laziness that renders a mundane classroom. In this podcast, we elevated this discussion into structural level. Instead of laziness, we believe it’s better to read as teacher’s insecurity. We have discussed how a test-fixed system, whose behavioral inertia, runs from the first grade all the way into the research-funded university, and finally causes the inefficiency in classroom. And we also discussed the self-censorship happens in classroom conversation in China, and how that extend to a cognitive habit frequently observed from Chinese public argument: the reflex to hand down a verdict where a derivation belongs, to reach for a moral judgment instead of reconstructing who and what actually produced an outcome. If there is a discipline running underneath all of this, it is the opposite of the easy verdict. Neither of us is interested in treating a system’s dysfunctions as proof of its repression, or in folding a complicated society into a single word. The harder and more useful task is to trace specific mechanisms —how a given structure forms, what it asks of the people living inside it, and why it yields the outcomes it does. That is criticism in the service of understanding, and of a transition that is still very much in motion. Below, you’ll find Yuki’s own site – Atlaspedia. Yuki has been dedicated in long form analysis articles covers topic in geo-economic, post-colonial study, and gender politics. She believes the importance on translating not just between language, but also frameworks. To achieve that, it’s necessary to think outside of right-or-wrong judgement. But to have ability to trace back to each component that contributed the current status. (non-biased) Two pieces of hers that put this method to work: Her essay on the Gen Z divination craze. Here, she discussed the Chinese Gen-Z’s over-dependency on psychic and fortune tellers. Her investigation reveals the collective dilemma causes by insufficient social support from government, job market, and education system. And such insufficiency, as Yuki defined, rooted from the compressed modernization process in China – where economic speed forward, but protect

We held our own Gen-Z version of the US-China summit. The week before this conversation was recorded, my guest, a 老外 (laowai) sat for an interview with a major Chinese outlet for a piece on US-China youth exchange. He told the reporter what he actually thinks about why American students hesitate to come to China — academic freedom, reciprocal field access, wrongful detention risk, broader uncertainty. None of it survived into print. What survived was hotel rules, payment apps, and the language barrier. He posted about it on WeChat Moments. That post is what got us onto the call. Blake Kravitz has been studying Chinese since he was twelve. He grew up in Florida, took middle school Mandarin from a Chongqing teacher who gave him his first Chinese name, did six different programs in China across nearly a decade, studied at Penn and Wharton, worked at think tanks in Washington, and is now finishing his first year of a two-year master’s at Yenching Academy at Peking University. He just helped run Yenching Global Symposium 2026. He is, in other words, exactly the kind of American the field used to produce in much larger numbers and now barely produces at all. This conversation is about what that pipeline actually looks like from inside it in 2026 — what Yenching teaches, what gets said in the seminar room versus the lunch table, what changes when you leave Beijing for Rongjiang or Qinghai, how Chinese classmates ask about Taiwan and Xinjiang over canteen meals, and what an American at this particular moment carries into and out of those conversations. What we covered: – The interview that got cut, and what was actually in his original conversation with the reporter – Twelve years of Chinese language study, starting in middle school in Florida, and what changed about coming to China across six programs – Why Yenching Academy specifically, and how the two-year structure with a fieldwork second year differs from Schwarzman, Hopkins-Nanjing, and Duke Kunshan – What the seminar room is like with no cameras in it, and the professor who opened class by telling foreign students to challenge him on anything – The “Yenching bubble inside the PKU bubble inside the Beijing bubble,” and what fieldwork in Guizhou and Qinghai looked like – Being identifiably American outside the tier-one cities, the requests for photos, and the work of being an informal cultural ambassador – Chinamaxxing and the “America kill line” (斩杀线): two mirror memes about each country running through the other’s social media in 2026 – The structural collapse of the American study-in-China pipeline, the US-China Education Trust’s recent report, and the policy case for restoring it – Whether the next generation of analysts on both sides will inherit a relationship better or worse than this one A few moments worth listening for: Blake on the article that left out the deeper reasons: “What ended up being mentioned most was things like hotels not accepting foreigners, downloading Alipay and WeChat Pay. But I don’t think those are actually what’s preventing American students from coming to China in the first place.” On the Yenching classroom: “The Yenching Academy mentions to students, and to teachers, that there’s no cameras in the classroom.” On layered bubbles: “Yenching is a bubble inside Peking University, which is a bubble inside Beijing, which is a bubble inside China. There’s a lot of layers to getting out.” On the optimist’s answer: “As long as there’s still Americans coming to China, the people that are eventually forming US policy towards China will be informed. I gave you the optimistic answer.” Companion reading: “The Quest for Knowing New China Hands” — the essay this episode runs alongside, on Beijing’s pathology of reading Washington as a list of named brokers. 中美关系的潜力、张力、角力｜中美青年需要比“小红书对账”更宽广的天地- the interview piece we mentioned at the start. Resource Hub for U.S. Academic Travel to China by The US–China Education Trust If you have made a similar trip, in either di

A common assumption among English-language readers of China is that Chinese journalism is what the state allows it to be. The model is straightforward: instructions come down, journalists comply or work around the edges, and what survives is what the system permits. This model is not wrong. It is, however, incomplete in ways that matter for anyone trying to understand how Chinese audiences actually receive information about the world. I spent the last week recording a conversation with Yichao Hou, who goes by Henry, on what a decade of foreign-affairs reporting from inside a major Chinese commercial newsroom actually looked like. Henry was a senior editor at Phoenix New Media (鳳凰新媒體) from 2015 to 2025, covering US elections on the ground, the Two Sessions, EU-China dialogues, and conducting more than thirty interviews with ministers, diplomats, and scholars. He left Phoenix last year and is now my classmate in the IPE master’s program at RSIS in Singapore. The conversation we had is one we could not have had five years ago, when both of us were still inside our respective parts of the Chinese knowledge-production system. What struck me, listening back to the recording, is that the most interesting constraints Henry described were not the political ones. The political ones existed and he was direct about them. What dominated the structural picture of his career was something else. The shape of the work Henry’s working week did not follow a script. It followed the news cycle of countries other than his own. He described being woken at one in the morning when South Korea’s then-president declared martial law, conducting a follow-up interview with a Korea specialist by three, sleeping briefly, and resuming at eight. Other weeks, in the quiet between Western news events, the desk was as slow as any office. The texture of the job was one of asymmetric attention: a Beijing newsroom locked into the rhythm of Washington, Brussels, Seoul, Tehran. When he covered the 2024 US election on the ground, he visited seven states and more than ten cities in three weeks, a coverage radius that most American political reporters cannot replicate because they are tied to a city or a beat. He arrived with an explicit framework borrowed from Tocqueville, asking county-level Republican and Democratic officials about the actual mechanics of local democracy rather than the horse race. The Republican chair of an Erie County, Pennsylvania party committee told him, in his account, that the party had no quarrel with Chinese people in general, only with the asymmetry that allowed Chinese citizens to buy land in the United States while Americans could not buy land in China. That single grievance, narrowly defined, was the entire substance of the conversation. This is the kind of observation that does not travel through standard wire copy. It is not a quote that confirms a narrative, on either side. It is the texture of how a particular interlocutor in a particular county had organized his view of US-China relations down to one issue, and was willing to share that view with a foreign reporter precisely because the foreign reporter was Chinese rather than American. Henry described being treated as more welcome by ordinary Americans during election coverage than during security forums. At Aspen-style security conferences in Washington, conversations with him would last one or two sentences before the American interlocutor remembered an appointment elsewhere. At a Democratic gala on voting night, volunteers actively sought him out, told him not to believe the negative coverage, invited him to stay. The same country, the same trip, two opposite social registers depending on which professional subculture he was reporting on. The constraint that displaced the constraint The more analytically interesting part of the conversation was Henry’s description of what shaped his work from outside the room. There are political constraints in Chinese commercial journalism. He a