The Highest Exam: Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin on China's Gaokao and What It Reveals About Chinese Society

This week on Sinica, I’m joined again by Afra Wang, the Bay Area-based writer behind the AI newsletter Concurrent, who was last on the show in January to talk about her Wired piece on The Morning Star of Lingao and China’s “Industrial Party.” She’s back with two new pieces of on-the-ground reportage that get beneath the surface of China’s apparent AI techno-optimism: her New Yorker Lede piece on Liangzhu, the town outside Hangzhou where laid-off and burnt-out tech workers have gone to vibe code in each other’s living rooms (and where AI and BaZi fortune-telling have become strangely intimate), and a forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s sprawling, lucrative, and largely unregulated “learn AI, get rich” education industry. We talk about why 93% of Chinese respondents tell Gallup that AI will mostly help their country, what that number conceals, and whether what looks like optimism is sometimes closer to acceptance. Afra’s pieces discussed in this episode: What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom — The New Yorker, September 23, 2026 [Her forthcoming New York Magazine piece on China’s AI education industry — [LINK TK, expected after October 12]] You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel — Wired, January 2026, and our January 2026 Sinica conversation about it Subscribe to Afra’s newsletter, Concurrent Also mentioned: Optimism About AI Globally Widespread Despite Uneven Adoption — the Microsoft-Gallup survey China’s OpenClaw gold rush — MIT Technology Review Damien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade Evan Osnos, Crazy English — The New Yorker, April 2008 Lian Si 廉思, Journey Without a Map 无图之旅：一代青年的自我寻路 Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction — Sinica, 2016

This week on Sinica, I sit down with Dr. Ruby Wang, whose new book, China Cure: The Rise of a Biotech, AI Medicine and Global Health Superpower (Agenda Publishing, out October 31, with a foreword by Kerry Brown), is the explanation general readers have been missing for one of the most consequential and least understood transformations in China today. Ruby is a rare creature in this space: a practicing physician in Britain’s NHS, trained in surgery, who worked London’s hospital wards through the first wave of COVID; the former head of the UK government’s health engagement in China at the British Embassy in Beijing; a former health adviser within the UN system; a onetime medical adviser at AliHealth in Hangzhou; and a Schwarzman Scholar. She now runs the strategy consultancy Lintris Health and writes the excellent China Health Pulse newsletter and podcast, both of which I recommend to anyone trying to follow this space. Anyone who spent time in a Chinese hospital in the late ‘80s or ‘90s — the pre-dawn queues, the ticket scalpers, the cashier’s window at every step, the IV drips for a head cold — will find the arc of this book hard to believe. Within living memory, China sent barefoot doctors into the countryside with herbal remedies and antibiotics in army-green satchels; last year, Chinese companies signed something like 186 out-licensing deals worth a disclosed $137 billion, roughly half the global total and close to ten times the 2021 figure, with Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, GSK, and Eli Lilly all buying. Since Ruby gave a terrific interview to my friend Kyle Chan on his High Capacity podcast this spring on the apps, data flows, and clinical AI, I deliberately steered elsewhere: to her family — a deckhand grandfather, a father’s crooked splint, a grandmother’s transnational hunt for Gleevec — to the four reinforcing conditions she argues made the transformation possible, to the “China is fast because China is loose” shortcut and what’s actually behind the speed, to BIOSECURE and its successors, to the AI doctor avatars now fielding millions of inquiries a year, and to the burnout and violence that still bedevil the lives of Chinese clinicians. 10:31 – Two family stories from 1970s Zhejiang: a deckhand grandfather and a barefoot doctor’s crooked splint 15:57 – Four reinforcing conditions, part one: demographic pressure and crisis as catalyst (SARS, melamine, fake vaccines) 23:42 – The long view: Healthy China 2030 and why China’s health ministers are technocrats 27:54 – The cultural inheritance: who signs the consent form, and China’s health codes vs. Britain’s billion-pound app 35:26 – Grandma and Gleevec: a family’s transnational hunt for a drug in 2003 40:17 – The reversal: hǎiguī, copycats to first-in-class, and the tenfold surge in out-licensing 42:35 – Is China fast because China is loose? Where China leads (oncology, GLP-1s) and where it lags 50:22 – BIOSECURE, COINS, and BINSA: who loses when politics meets pharma 55:37 – Digital health in three systems, Ant Afu’s AI doctor avatars, and whether the silver generation can keep up 1:08:44 – “A lifetime of eating bitterness”: Dr. Wang of Guangzhou, burnout, and yī nào Paying It Forward Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor at Seton Hall — the go-to voice on the geopolitics of China and health, and Ruby’s first port of call. Afra Wang, writer of the Concurrent newsletter — Ruby admires how she reads the cultural currents beneath technology, and finds it endlessly useful to take those insights to the health-tech angle. Olivia Plotnick, Shanghai-based founder of Wai Social — on-the-ground work on branding and consumer behavior across some 30 lower-tier Chinese cities, including health and wellness. Recommendations Ruby: Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person, edited by Arthur Kleinman with Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, and others — what being sick reveals about society and culture in China: psyc

This week I sat down with Gloria Xiong, Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College, and Jessica Chen Weiss, the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, to discuss their new Foreign Affairs essay, "How China Found Its Most Potent Weapon: The Real History of Beijing's Rare Earth Dominance." The story everyone tells is one of foresight — a master plan hatched by Deng Xiaoping and now coming to fruition. Gloria and Jessica argue the reality was far messier: reform-era export mania, environmental catastrophe, defiant local governments, scarcity anxiety, and a lesson in chokepoint weaponization that Beijing learned from Washington. Getting the story wrong, they argue, feeds an action-reaction spiral that neither side started and neither fully controls — and with the Busan truce expiring in November, the stakes could hardly be higher. 09:31 — "The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths": what Deng Xiaoping actually said, and how a quote got recruited for a story he wasn't telling 12:33 — Why the master plan narrative is so irresistible across the partisan spectrum in Washington 15:40 — The cheap and dirty origins: reform-era export mania, thousands of small mines, and rare earths sold "at the price of cabbage and dirt" 19:06 — The West as co-author of the chokepoint: offshoring the pollution, and the stockpile that was never built 21:53 — Beijing's struggle to control its own industry: quotas, "crime rings," and the partially failed 2002 consolidation 25:13 — September 2010: what really happened with the "embargo" against Japan, and why Beijing may have learned about it from Japanese customs 28:47 — Fans and fire hoses: how bottom-up nationalism can commit Beijing to coercive postures it didn't choose 32:13 — The debate inside China after 2010: protectionists versus Hong Feng's warning against using rare earths as "political chips" 35:44 — The 2015 WTO ruling: China complied — was it a rule-taker, or did it simply lack the tools to do anything else? 38:06 — Learning from Washington: Huawei, the Export Control Law, the China Rare Earth Group, and what distinguishes learning from planning 40:24 — The 2022–2024 ledger: what's the evidence for an action-reaction spiral beyond the timeline? 44:25 — April 2025: coercion or bureaucratic pileup? Thirty licensing officials and a 74% collapse in magnet exports 47:46 — October 2025: the extraterritorial rule that mirrored the Foreign Direct Product Rule, and the Busan truce 52:32 — The countdown to November: hawks in both capitals, "mutually assured disruption," and Xi's coming state visit 55:29 — The limits of leverage on both sides: yttrium, Japan's diversification, and China's own resource insecurity 58:32 — From crime rings to two national champions: has the Wild West been tamed, and are central-local relations "fractured"? 01:02:21 — Prescriptions: positive reciprocity, licensing Chinese technology, and managing interdependence rather than escaping it 01:05:51 — Everyone else: Myanmar, Congo, Australia, and how Beijing thinks about third countries that don't want to choose

This week on Sinica, I’m joined once again by Ryan Hass, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, former NSC director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and co-host of the Beijing Brief podcast. Ryan has just published two pieces that couldn’t be better timed: a long essay in China Leadership Monitor, “China’s Great Power Vision Comes into Focus,” which argues that the 2020s may be remembered as the decade Beijing finally laid its cards on the table — and a shorter Brookings piece, “Why Beijing Isn’t Taking the Bait with Trump,” on why Xi Jinping has answered an unusually accommodating American president with a poker face, and what that means for Xi’s state visit to Washington later this month. We start with the perennial question — what does China want? — and Ryan’s own two-decade journey with it, from chasing a supposed secret strategy in Zhongnanhai as a junior political officer to concluding that Beijing’s vision is now legible and consistent: an international political order stripped of its liberal core and rebuilt around sovereign equality and the “global majority.” We talk about “American decline” and “strategic stalemate” in Chinese discourse, the tension between China’s pitch to the developing world and its export juggernaut, the Middle East and Northeast Asia as test cases, and the central riddle of Ryan’s essay: why a country so willing to articulate its ambitions has been so unwilling to pay for them. Then we turn to the summit — constructive strategic stability, escalation dominance, and what will and won’t be on the table when Xi comes to Washington. 03:11 – The “What does China want?” genre — and why Ryan concluded there is no secret plan locked in a Zhongnanhai vault 06:10 – From participant to architect: what actually changed, and whether Beijing is revisionist or, as I cheekily put it, restorationist 09:12 – “American decline” (美国衰落) and “strategic stalemate” (战略相持): reading Beijing’s rhetorical restraint and the Maoist echo 14:34 – Champion of the global majority, or the world’s factory? The $6 toaster problem and the credibility gap on Ukraine and Japan 19:36 – The Middle East as a test case: economic enabler, not security patron — and the good-faith maximalist rebuttal 24:38 – Northeast Asia: why Beijing keeps generating the very encirclement it fears 26:59 – Rhetoric without resources: flat foreign aid, shrinking BRI lending, and the SCO as China’s proving ground 32:28 – The Pew swing that hasn’t materialized, and why Biden may have been America’s last restorationist president 36:01 – Why Beijing isn’t taking the bait: Xi’s poker face, “constructive strategic stability,” and the G2 refusal 41:55 – Confident abroad, anxious at home: the purges, the memory of 2020, economic escalation dominance, and a viewer’s guide to the September summit

This week on Sinica, I sit down with the writer Pallavi Aiyar — at her own dining table in Beijing, where in recent months I’ve been the lucky beneficiary of her and her husband Julio’s legendary hospitality. Pallavi first arrived in Beijing in 2002 to teach at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and went on to spend the better part of a decade as The Hindu’s China correspondent — for much of that time, the only Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent in the country. That period produced Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, still one of the very few sustained attempts to look at China through Indian eyes. After 16 years away — years spent in Brussels, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Madrid — she’s back in Beijing, and turning her gaze inward with her latest book, Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts. She writes the wonderful Substack The Global Jigsaw, which I recommend without reservation. Our conversation is built around her recent essay for Noema Magazine, “The Real Problem Underlying India-China Tensions,” which argues that the deepest problem in the relationship isn’t the border or the trade imbalance but the distorting lenses through which each side reads the other: China reads India through the lens of colonial subordination, while India reads China through the lens of betrayal. We talk about the ugly etymology of an ethnic slur, the partial historical memories each country mistakes for the whole picture, her serialized interviews with the Chinese India-watcher Mao Keji, the aporia-inducing impossibility of explaining either country to outsiders — and how her answer to the question she first posed in 2008, “Would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?”, has changed, painfully, in the years since. 4:35 – Beijing, 2002: an ad in That’s Beijing, [email protected], and becoming The Hindu’s correspondent 10:03 – “Beijing and I grew up together”: the aughts as a shared coming-of-age 12:16 – The asymmetry of obsession: why India watches China, but not the reverse 16:39 – The unacknowledged third vertex: Western discursive power in the India-China relationship 18:08 – Back after 16 years: the Liangma River, blue skies, and the panopticon 21:35 – Walks in the park and the “buddy system”: what access looks like now 25:43 – Where did all the foreigners go? 29:59 – The scene at CCG: candor, offense, and the register of truth 33:10 – “Asan”: the etymology of a slur, Sikh policemen, opium fortunes, and China’s colonial lens 40:10 – 1962 and India’s betrayal lens 42:15 – Aporia: the foolhardy task of explaining India or China 47:22 – Shame and indignation: explaining a place you love versus a place you merely know 52:29 – The big question, 2008: born Indian or Chinese? 55:44 – The 2026 answer: “It hurts” 1:00:08 – Kaiser pushes back: cherry-picked comparisons, and can this essay’s very existence complicate its conclusions? 1:04:43 – Twin nations of the exam 1:06:57 – Cognitive empathy: what it would take for ordinary Indians and Chinese to actually see each other