What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions, and maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, The Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now.

Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find Wyard's Uncanny Valley podcast.

A five-year plan from China sets an agenda for domestic tech manufacturing, but some priorities nod to geopolitics.

Decoupling from volatile markets, secure supply chains, making huge progress in advanced technology, so China isn't as dependent, for instance, on the United States.

I'm Carolyn Beeler. Also today, college students in France are going hungry.

When you don't eat, says this man, you don't have energy and you can't study.

Enter a volunteer grocery brigade. And a protest album turns 40. It's very hard to understand

what the consequences of an album are going to be in terms of effects, like real effects.

And in this particular case, it did work. Those stories and more ahead on the world.

This is The World. I'm Carolyn Beeler. Thank you so much for coming along this Friday.

We begin in China, where the government has announced its new five-year plan. It's a sort of roadmap for the country that lays out one clear ambition, strengthen domestic tech. The plan was announced

yesterday at a Chinese Communist Party press conference. And so we kick things off today with

Isabel Hilton, founder of China Dialogue to hear about what China's leader Xi Jinping is signaling

with his policy plans for the future. If there's a new factor, it's the stress on AI as I think a bit of a magic bullet trying to solve

some of the rather persistent economic problems that China has run into.

But I think that in terms of the kind of overall trends, there are a number of things that it

highlights, trying to raise

domestic consumption, trying to continue its creation of an advanced technological society,

and so on. Those are fairly well established. So it's kind of steadies as you go, no great

change of direction, I think. So this is a continuation of the policies that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been working

toward for a number of years.

Yes, I think that's fair.

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