Could Claude Code Work for ChinaTalk?

Jordan, Jasmine Sun (of jasmi.news) and Nathan Lambert (of Interconnects) talk about their Claude Code adventures on the latest episode of Overfit. Check it out in your favorite podcast app or find it in the ChinaTalk feed!

Claude Code is a coding tool by Anthropic that uses natural-language prompts to create remarkably workable computer programs. In practice, just by opening your computer’s terminal and typing in “claude” and telling it what to do in plain English, it can code, organize and edit local files, build apps, and conduct internet-based research.

Anthropic’s focus on coding agents means that Claude Code is incredibly popular among software developers. It’s also let non-technical people vibecode our way into programming.

After a morning spent watching Claude write Python code for my graphs (in this article), I had an idea: would Claude Code be any good as a China analyst? In theory, the chatbot format is perfect for work that’s both qualitative and quantitative — the exact kind of mixed intellectual tasks a policy analyst or data-oriented journalist might perform.

Putting it through a “China test” of sorts was a fascinating experience, featuring:

• Claude has a thing for Falun Gong newspapers;

• Propaganda vigilantism;

• A discourse analysis breakthrough;

• And surprising fluency in Chinese internet slang!

We began with elite politics. Can Claude read Communist Party tea leaves?

Politburo member Ma Xingrui 马兴瑞 has been in the rumor mill lately. In July 2025, he was removed as Xinjiang Party Secretary. Since then, he has been absent from a slew of important meetings, igniting all sorts of speculation. I asked Claude Code to give me three plausible explanations for why Ma’s activities have been scrutinized and what this tells us about Chinese elite politics, using all the information it is able to access.

Claude told me that it conducted two searches of the internet: “Ma Xingrui CCP Standing Committee scrutiny 2025 2026”, and “Ma Xingrui Xinjiang Vice Premier news 2025”. I replicated these two searches in Google in an incognito browser window, and then cross-referenced Google’s top links with the sources Claude cited in its output. There was significant overlap; Claude mostly relied on Page 1 of Google.

The problem was what those links were. Claude’s top-2 sources for its Ma Xingrui report came from Vision Times, a Falun Gong-affiliated newspaper. Opinions about the religious movement aside, Vision Times is not an especially