Welcome to the Cynica podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China.

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conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you today from Washington, D.C. Cynica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,

a National Resource Center for the Study of East Asia.

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I've spent the last couple of days here in Washington at the offices of the Carnegie Endowment

for International Peace, participating in a two-day workshop on U.S.-China strategic communications

around nuclear risk organized by rethink media. It's a topic that, frankly, gets surprisingly

little attention, but really there's no dimension of the U.S.-China relationship where genuine

strategic empathy is more critical.

It's not just about putting ourselves in the others' shoes, as it were, but really attempting real cognitive empathy,

...