Through the 1990s and the 2000s, the West told itself a story: let China get rich, and it’ll become like us. But then China got rich – and it become less and less like the West.
Kaiser Kuo – host of the Sinica Podcast, former Baidu executive, and founding guitarist of China’s first heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty – thinks we need to reckon with this fact: that China has not only now caught up, but is making its own path in modernity.
China has replaced liberal democracy with a strange alloy of Confucianism, Leninism, technocracy, state capitalism and markets – and that combination is outperforming the West. What liberals assumed was the triumphant end of history might turn out to have been a historical cul-de-sac.
Kaiser and Richard Hames talk Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, Wang Huning and the late Qing Dynasty, solar panels and performance legitimacy, and discuss what happens when the future stops looking Western.
Explore the map of everything in the world that has ever mattered.
00:00 Intro
03:35 Is Chinese Tech The Best?
10:42 The Great Reckoning: Why the West Must Rethink China
21:56 Confucianism, Leninism and Technocracy
31:03 Confucianism and Modern China
41:44 Can China’s State Control Capitalism?
52:04 Many Kinds of Modernity: China as a Model and China Shock 2.0
1:02:53 Green Energy, Industrial Policy and US-China Convergence
1:16:20 Fukuyama, Huntington and Wang Huning: Visions of the Future
October 31, 2026