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

In this program, we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural

trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations

that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo

coming to you this week from Beijing. I'm going to be back and forth for the rest of this year,

but if

all goes well, I will be spending most of my time here in Beijing before the end of the year.

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. I'm going to keep the

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Today I am joined by two guests to unpack what happened this past weekend at

the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, W-AIC, held in Shanghai. It was a massive event with,

I think it was like over 1,500 Chinese AI models that were showcased. Some $2.3 billion in deals were supposedly inked.

There were just, you know, gazillions of robots, humanoid robots, dog robots.

...