Adam Tooze on the U.S., China, the Energy Transition — and Saying the Unsayable
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 4 July 2024
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, in a show recorded on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions, historian Adam Tooze joins to chat about what the U.S. wants from China, China's vaulting green energy ambitions, and much more. Don't miss this episode: Tooze gets pretty darn spicy!
3:13 How Adam launched Chartbook in Chinese
5:37 How Dalian and Beijing have changed since Adam’s last visit in 2019
9:01 What the West wants from China, the Thucydides Trap,
15:11 The trajectory of China’s economic development and why it’s hard for the West to reconcile with]
25:11 “Overcapacity” and the politics of renewable energy
31:00 Russo-Chinese relations and the war in Ukraine
37:12 The Global South and China since February 24th and October 7th and the importance of Africa with regards to global development
41:39 Green energy as a driver of high-quality development in China
47:49 The “Red New Deal” and the combination punch metaphor
51:57 Adam’s cognitive style (an interrelated thinker averse to analogizing), climate as a touchstone topic, and China’s importance in global climate politics
Recommendations:
Adam: The work of Lauri Myllyvirta, including his analysis on Carbon Brief
Kaiser: Rewatching The Wire TV series (2002-2008)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. |
| 0:13.2 | In this program, we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends |
| 0:19.0 | that can help us better understand what's happening |
| 0:21.6 | in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth |
| 0:27.0 | conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm |
| 0:33.4 | Kaiser Guo coming to you from Dalian, where I'm working, as I've done for many years, |
| 0:38.6 | in one of my side hustles, writing for the World Economic Forum, |
| 0:41.7 | this time for their annual meeting of the new champions, |
| 0:44.8 | held in alternating years between Tianjin and Dalian. |
| 0:48.1 | Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, |
| 0:53.1 | a National Resource Center for the Study of East AsiaMadison, a national resource center for the |
| 0:54.9 | study of East Asia. The Cynica podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization |
| 1:00.2 | that believes in what I'm doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get me |
| 1:05.3 | at Cinecapod at gmail.com. And listeners, please support my work on Substack at Seneca.substack.com. There you will find, |
| 1:13.8 | in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, a weekly essay from me, |
| 1:18.5 | though not this week as I'm traveling, and now a wide range from some of your favorite |
| 1:23.0 | China-focused columnists and commentators. I was delighted to see on the roster of speakers here at the World Economic Forum meeting, |
| 1:30.4 | none other than Adam 2's, the Columbia historian who's been on the show a couple of times before. |
| 1:35.7 | Adam is the author of Crash and Shutdown about the two major global economic crises of our time, |
| 1:42.8 | the great financial crisis of 2008-9, and the COVID recession, |
| 1:47.2 | respectively. His other books include the wages of destruction about the economy of the Third Reich |
| 1:52.7 | and the great deluge about the Great War and the interwar years. Adam will modestly insist that |
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