Trivium China Podcast | How Xi Jinping Thinks about the Rule of Law

On this week’s Trivium China Podcast, your loyal Trivium team digs into China’s key domestic and regional developments from the past few days.

First, Trivium Co-founders Andrew Polk and Trey McArver discuss:

• The Party’s latest conference on law-based governance – and what it tells about how Xi Jinping views China’s legal and regulatory systems

• Xi’s motivations in refreshing and solidifying the various rules that govern Party and government behavior

• China’s related efforts to build out its foreign-facing legal toolkit

The gents then move on to examine the intensifying diplomatic row between China and Japan – and why both sides are unlikely to climb down.

Then, in the second half of the pod, Andrew is joined by Trivium’s lead macro-econ analyst Joe Peissel to discuss:

• The recent, and curious, drop-off in fixed asset investment (FAI) in China, why it’s happening, and what it means for the wider macro-economic growth trajectory heading into 2026

Fair warning: This one gets pretty wonky!

Transcript below:

Andrew Polk:

Hi everybody, and welcome to the latest Trivium China Podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m your host, Trivium Co-Founder, Andrew Polk, and I’m joined today by my business partner and Trivium Co-Founder, Trey McArver. Trey, how are you doing, man?

Trey McArver:

Yeah. Doing good.

Andrew:

Good to have you on, as usual. Good to have you in D.C. as well. We have all four of the Trivium partners in D.C. for our annual strategy session, so it’s been great hanging out. But I wanted to have you on specifically, Trey, to talk about a couple of things. It’s been a quieter week in China, which is good. So, we can actually focus on some key domestic things that have happened. So, we’re first going to talk about the Central Work Conference on Comprehensive Law-based Governance, which sounds like a snooze fest. And in many ways it was. But it really is an important thing in terms of understanding some of the governance goals China is trying to achieve.

So, we’re going to touch on that quickly. Then we’ll touch on the growing diplomatic spat between China and Japan that’s been happening over the past few weeks, and kind of get into what the details are of that, what we think the implications are. And then after my conversation with Trey, listeners should stick around because in the second half of the pod, ...