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CSIS | Center for Strategic and International Studies

A podcast unpacking critical issues underpinning China’s emergence as a global power.

ChinaPower

In this episode of the China Power Project, Chad Sbragia joins us to discuss the current state of U.S.-China mil-mil relations and the overall defense relationship between the two countries. He provides his insight into the continuities and changes in defense ties between the countries from the first Trump administration until now and the current opportunities that exist for greater engagement and increased understanding between the two sides. Sbragia also discusses his key takeaways from this year’s Xiangshan forum, Beijing’s premier defense and security forum, and what he is looking out for in the upcoming release of the U.S. National Defense Strategy and China Military Power Report.

Chad Sbragia is currently a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. Previously he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

U.S.-China Mil-Mil Ties: A Conversation with Chad Sbragia

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Dr. Elizabeth Economy examines the key outcomes of China’s Fourth Plenum and what they reveal about Beijing’s evolving economic priorities and push for technological self-reliance ahead of the release of the 15th Five-Year Plan. She discusses China’s strategy in the U.S.-China trade war, including its expanding retaliatory toolkit, rare-earth export controls, and the global pushback triggered by China’s industrial overcapacity. She concludes by assessing how domestic pressures and external frictions will shape China’s policy direction and its economic engagement with the United States over the next few years.

Dr. Elizabeth Economy is the Hargrove Senior Fellow and co-chair of the Program on the US, China, and the World at the Hoover Institution. From 2021 to 2023, she served as the senior advisor for China in the Department of Commerce. Dr. Economy was previously at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she served as the C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and director for Asia Studies for over a decade.

The Fourth Plenum and China’s Evolving Economic Strategy: A Conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Economy

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Henrietta Levin and Gregory Poling unpack the outcomes of the ASEAN Summit and the Trump–Xi meeting on the sidelines of APEC. They examine how Washington and Beijing are prioritizing economic stability over strategic confrontation, why topics like Taiwan and the South China Sea were not discussed, and how ASEAN is seeking balance through new trade and digital initiatives. The discussion concludes with what to watch next, particularly with China’s trade implementation and rising tensions in the South China Sea.

Henrietta Levin is a senior fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS in Washington, D.C. She previously held senior roles at the U.S. Department of State and the White House, spearheading U.S. strategy and diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific.

Greg Poling is the director of the Southeast Asia Program and the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at CSIS, focusing on maritime security and regional diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific.

APEC, ASEAN, and the Trump-Xi Meeting: A Conversation with Henrietta Levin and Gregory Poling

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, John Culver argues that two seemingly contradictory trends define China’s military this year: Xi Jinping’s sweeping purge of senior PLA leaders and the PLA’s rapid transformation into a far more lethal, joint-capable force. He notes unprecedented vacancies on the Central Military Commission and across theater commands—suggesting corruption is the excuse, not the cause—as Xi prioritizes loyalty and faster progress toward his ambitious reform goals. While 2027 isn’t an “invasion deadline,” Culver says the PLA is racing to meet its centennial benchmarks, with September’s parade showcasing a growing nuclear triad, serious investments in undersea warfare, and expanding unmanned aircraft. He cautions that any U.S.-created “hellscape” around Taiwan can be mirrored by China, which can produce equipment that is combat relevant in the Western Pacific at industrial scale. On gray-zone pressure, he casts China’s Coast Guard as a paramilitary tool and says its ability to run a sustained blockade would hinge on complex command-and-control that it hasn’t yet demonstrated in military exercises. Ultimately, Culver emphasizes that there is much about the PLA that remains unknown from the outside as Xi Jinping purposely keeps information opaque.

This episode was recorded on October 15, 2025.

John Culver is a nonresident senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings. Prior to retiring from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2020, he served since 1985 as an analyst and manager on China, with a particular focus on the People’s Liberation Army. From 2015 to 2018, Culver served as national intelligence officer for East Asia (NIO-EA). He was a founding member of the CIA’s Senior Analytic Service, was in the Senior Intelligence Service, and was a recipient of the CIA’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, and the William L. Langer Award for extraordinary achievement in the CIA’s analytic mission.

Inside the PLA’s Accelerating Modernization: A Conversation with John Culver

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi and Dr. Andrea Ghiselli join us to discuss their newly released book Narratives of Sino-Middle Eastern Futures. They challenge prevailing narratives that frame China’s engagement in the Middle East primarily through the lens of U.S.–China rivalry and offer alternative perspectives by drawing on extensive Arabic and Chinese-language sources to highlight how regional actors themselves interpret and shape their relationships with Beijing. Drawing on Saudi Arabia and Syria as the two core case studies in their book, they show how regional perceptions of China diverge sharply depending on various factors such as national capabilities and alignment with the United States. The conversation also examines China’s diplomacy toward Iran, its muted response to the Israel–Iran conflict, and why both Chinese and regional leaders prefer to limit Beijing’s security role. Dr. Alsudairi and Dr. Ghiselli conclude that the future of Sino–Middle Eastern relations will likely reflect cautious continuity—marked by pragmatic engagement and mutual restraint. 

Dr. Alsudairi is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations of the Arabic Speaking World, Center for Arab and Islamic Studies, at the Australian National University. Prior to his appointment, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, working on a project examining the intersections between religion and infrastructure in the context of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Since 2015, he oversaw the development of the Asian Studies Program at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. More recently in 2022, he was awarded a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to work on his upcoming book manuscript. 

Dr. Ghiselli is a Lecturer in International Politics in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology of the University of Exeter. He is also non-resident research fellow with the TOChina Hub and the Head of Research for its ChinaMed Project. He has previously worked in China at Fudan University for nine years.

You can find an open access version of their book here.

The Future of Sino-Middle Eastern Relations: A Conversation with Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi and Dr. Andrea Ghiselli

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Dr. Ching Kwan Lee joins us to discuss her newly released book Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle. She reframes the 2019 Hong Kong protests not merely as a fight for democracy, but as the culmination of a two-decade decolonization struggle that sought to redefine the city’s identity, economy, and society. Dr. Lee first explains how Hong Kong experienced double colonization - first under Britain, then under Beijing - each system of rule justified through race, from colonial difference to China’s coercive sameness. Dr. Lee also explores Beijing’s contradictory impulses toward Hong Kong—wanting the city open enough to serve as a global hub yet controlled enough to prevent it from inspiring resistance on the mainland. She explains how this tension led to the imposition of the National Security Law and draws parallels to China’s approaches in Tibet and Xinjiang, while reflecting on what Hong Kong’s experience means for Taiwan and the fading credibility of “One Country, Two Systems.” Her insights in the book challenge familiar narratives and place Hong Kong’s struggle within the wider global conversations about authoritarianism, resistance, and decolonization in the 21st century. 

Dr. Ching Kwan Lee is a professor in the department of Sociology at UCLA. She is a sociologist working at the intersection of global and comparative issues, including labor, political sociology, global development, decolonization, comparative ethnography, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Africa. She has published three multiple award-winning monographs on contemporary China, including Gender and the South China Miracle, Against the Law, and The Specter of Global China. The trilogy of Chinese capitalism was written through the lens of labor and working-class experiences. Her most recent publications include a short format book titled Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier, and two co-edited volumes — Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement and The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View. Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Struggle for Decolonization is her newest monograph.

Hong Kong’s Struggle of Decolonization and Democracy: A Conversation with Ching Kwan Lee

In this joint episode of Pekingology and the ChinaPower Podcast, CSIS Freeman Chair Senior Fellow Henrietta Levin and co-host CSIS China Power Project Deputy Director and Fellow Brian Hart are joined by Dan Wang to discuss his new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. The conversation unpacks China’s monumentalism in its grand engineering projects, the advantages and consequences of building at such scale, China’s push to lead in key technologies, Beijing’s social engineering efforts, and much more.
Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. Previously, he was a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and a lecturer at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. From 2017 to 2023, he worked in China as the technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, based in Hong Kong, Beijing, and then Shanghai.
For more from Dan Wang, please read his latest piece in Foreign Affairs - The Real China Model: Beijing’s Enduring Formula for Wealth and Power.

China’s Quest to Engineer the Future: A Conversation with Dan Wang

In this special episode, listen to one of CSIS’s newest podcasts, Echonomics, that investigates how past economic events in Asia continue to impact U.S. policy today. 

In the 1980s, Japanese companies were snapping up prime New York real estate and Japanese cars lined both Main Street and Wall Street, spiking economic anxiety in the U.S. As a result, Americans and politicians targeted the country, through the destruction of Japanese-made products and heavy tariffs. 

Today, China finds itself in a similar situation. 

Ambassador Carla Hills, Bill Reinsch, Craig Allen, Kim Menke, and Don Morrissey discuss the similarities and differences between the anti-Japanese sentiment of the 1980s and the anti-Chinese sentiment of today. 

Check out other episodes here.

Echonomics - U.S. Faces Economic Competition with Asia

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Dr. Yanzhong Huang joins us to examine China’s growing influence over the global pharmaceutical industry and the risks it poses for the United States. Dr. Huang explains how China evolved from a low-cost manufacturer of chemical inputs to a comprehensive pharmaceutical power producing advanced drugs and playing an important role in global pharmaceutical innovation. He highlights areas of acute U.S. dependence, from antibiotics and vitamins to critical precursor chemicals, and recounts how the Covid-19 pandemic underscored the vulnerability of U.S. supply chains. Dr. Huang explains the highly interdependent nature of global drug supply chains and notes that even if countries attempt to build alternative production capacity outside of China, they would still rely on Chinese suppliers at certain stages of the supply chain and would need years to replicate China’s integrated industrial ecosystems. He concludes with an assessment of U.S. policy options for building resilience, including targeted de-risking of key medicines and diversifying suppliers among trusted partners. 

Dr. Yanzhong Huang is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he directs the Global Health Governance roundtable series. He is also a professor and director of global health studies at Seton Hall University's School of Diplomacy and International Relations, where he developed the first academic concentration among U.S. professional international affairs schools that explicitly addresses the security and foreign policy aspects of health issues. He is the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm. Dr. Huang is the author of multiple books and reports, including most recently The COVID-19 Pandemic and China’s Global Health Leadership, published in 2022.

China’s Influence in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains: A Conversation with Dr. Yanzhong Huang

In this special episode, listen to one of CSIS’s newest podcasts, Echonomics, that investigates how past economic events in Asia continue to impact U.S. policy today. 

After decades of negotiations, promises to open its markets, and convincing the Chinese people of the country’s next step, China officially joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Wendy Cutler, Ambassador Xiangchen Zhang, and Bill Reinsch discuss why China and the world wanted the country to join the WTO and why many have come to regret it. 

Check out other episodes here.

Echonomics - China Enters the Global Trade System

This episode explores current developments in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the lead-up to the second Belt and Road Forum. Our guest, Mr. Jonathan Hillman, discusses the BRI’s current projects and financing, including recent backlash and scrutiny from partner countries. Mr. Hillman also details the approach the U.S. is taking toward the initiative in the face of recent agreements on the BRI between other democratic nations and China. Jonathan Hillman is a senior fellow with the Simon Chair in Political Economy and director of the Reconnecting Asia Project at CSIS. His research focuses on the intersection of economics and foreign policy, including trade, globalization, economic statecraft, and China’s BRI. Prior to joining CSIS, he served as a policy adviser at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Charting Progress in China’s Belt and Road Initiative: A Conversation with Jonathan Hillman

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