Our Year in Review
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Rare-earth element
14 min read
The article discusses China's rare earth controls as a turning point in US-China relations. Understanding what rare earth elements are, why they're strategically critical, and how China dominates their production provides essential context for why these export controls matter geopolitically.
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People's Liberation Army
2 min read
The article highlights PLA purges as 'the most interesting domestic elite political development in years.' Understanding the structure, history, and role of China's military provides crucial context for why these purges matter for Chinese politics and US-China relations.
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Think tank
13 min read
The article extensively compares ChinaTalk to traditional think tanks like CFR, Atlantic Council, Brookings, and CSIS. Understanding what think tanks are, how they operate, their funding models, and their influence on policy would help readers appreciate the significance of ChinaTalk's positioning in this ecosystem.
In 2025, ChinaTalk’s eighth year of existence and my third doing it full time, we did the thing. We put out on the newsletter over 150 editions that centered on China AI lab, policy, and application coverage.
On the podcast we published a hundred shows about:
Chinese elite politics and US-China policy
US-China chips and AI
Economic statecraft around export controls and tariffs, which made up the majority of our ten emergency pods this year (double 2024’s emergencies!)
A growing focus on defense, with the launch of our weekly Second Breakfast show, a good bit of military history and our AI and the Future of War series
ChinaTalk’s substack grew 60% this year to 65k subscribers. This is a really big number. The second largest think tank substack is SCSP, which has 35k. Recent CFR, the Atlantic Council, and Brookings annual reports say that, after two decades of building lists, they each have around 200k total email subscribers. Not a bad showing for ChinaTalk’s much smaller budget only three years in the game.
The show gets 10-15k listens per show across the podcast and YouTube, and was downloaded a million times last year. These are also really big numbers. Across all of foreign policy think tank-dom, only one show (CFR’s The President’s Inbox) is bigger. And it’s not like Mass Ave isn’t trying. CSIS has 40 shows alone.
Why do so many people engage with our work?
US-China tech is an covering important, underserved niche. A year after DeepSeek, to my endless surprise there are still only a handful of analysts working in English in public on tech and China. While there is more out there on the defense side, most coverage tends toward SpecOps bro, Zeihan geopolitics bro, or lifeless industry coverage.
We make substantive, engaging content that resonates in today’s media landscape. In traditional think tanks, podcasts, newsletters and responses to news developments are afterthoughts to the long reports and small in-person events funders expect as outputs. Since podcasts and research with outputs under 10,000 words often aren’t directly funded and so happen on fellows’ personal time, talent in these areas isn’t hired for or developed. By only accepting unrestricted funding, we’ve had to limit our headcount growth, but it ensures we’re covering what matters today, not getting stuck writing long reports that won’t matter by the time they’re finished in the extremely fast-moving field
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