Transcript | Adam Tooze is Chinamaxxing！
Transcript (courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts) further down the page. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!
Economic historian Adam Tooze returns to Sinica fresh from the China Development Forum and his second extended visit to Beijing in under a year. In this wide-ranging conversation, Adam and I cover the 15th Five-Year Plan — what it signals about Beijing’s development priorities and whether it represents a genuine shift away from investment-led growth — and the extraordinary scale of China’s renewable energy buildout, which Adam argues may be bringing us to the global peak of CO2 emissions right now.
They discuss the concept of the “big green state,” why Western analysts keep dancing around the role of the CPC in driving China’s environmental transformation, and what the “Chinamaxxing” phenomenon says about a slow but real reckoning in Western public consciousness. From Europe’s evolving posture toward China — caught between EV anxieties and transatlantic rupture — to China’s role in the Global South’s energy future, the conversation moves through coal transitions, Indonesian nickel zones, African microgrids, and the collapse of the flying geese model.
The episode closes with a frank exchange on the Iran war, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, the stunning political silence on American campuses, and what Beijing is most likely doing: sitting pretty and waiting it out. Adam also offers a preview of his forthcoming book on the energy transition — which turns out to be another massive one — and recommends Tim Sahay and Wang Hui as essential reading.
02:44 – Adam’s Chinese language study: HSK3, the Confucius Institute curriculum, and the joys of chasing characters
09:41 – The jìhuà/guīhuà distinction and what the shift in nomenclature from the 11th Five-Year Plan onward actually signals
12:01 – The 15th Five-Year Plan: green energy tinkering, sci-tech ambitions, and the human development dimension
18:10 – Does Beijing genuinely mean to shift from investment-led growth? Reading “high quality development” and “common prosperity”
22:38 – The Great Reckoning: has Western intellectual and policy consciousness actually moved on China?
29:45 – Environmental authoritarianism, the CPC as mobilizing institution, and why Xi’s “petty bourgeois environmentalism” deserves to be taken seriously
33:39 – Persistent misperceptions of China in Western discourse; the “jaundiced American” trench perspective
39:16 – European neuralgia: EV overcapacity, Ukraine, and whether transatlantic rupture opens a window for China
45:02 – China and the Global South: the end of the flying geese model, African microgrids, Indonesian nickel zones, and BRI record lending
59:32 – Mark Carney’s “age of rupture”: does the framing capture something real, or does it flatter the West?
01:05:18 – What Beijing sees from its windows: Iran, Venezuela, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, and a five-point plan for Chinese hegemony (that won’t happen)
01:14:55 – Preview of Adam’s forthcoming book on the energy transition and the “second world” thesis
Paying It Forward: Tim Sahay (PolyCrisis / Phenomenal World)
Recommendations:
Adam: Wang Hui’s The End of the Revolution
Kaiser: The Chinese series Shēng mìng shù (Born to Be Alive)
Transcript:
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we 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 Kuo, coming to you this week from my home in Beijing.
Sinica 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. The Sinica podcast is and will remain free. But if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the podcast and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. I’m still looking for new institutional support. The lines are open. You can reach me at sinicapod@gmail.com.
And listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. Seriously, help out. I know there are a lot of Substacks out there, and they start to add up, but I think this one delivers serious value for your hard-earned dollars, so please do subscribe. Help me to continue to bring you these conversations. Last summer, the last time I caught up with Adam Tooze, it was in the mountain idyll of Shaxi in Yunnan province, where he had dropped in after spending time in China for summer Davos and other meetings.
We talked then about the feel of China on the ground, the lingering aftershocks of the post-zero COVID period, the stubborn drag of the property downturn, the question of whether Beijing was really rethinking its macro playbook, and the way China’s extraordinary dominance in green tech was scrambling some of the West’s favorite categories, overcapacity chief among them. We also talked about Europe’s increasingly fraught relationship with China and about what it means to think seriously about China in a world defined less by any single crisis than by the collision of many.
Well, Adam is back in China and in Beijing for the recently concluded China Development Forum, and I am delighted to welcome him both back to Beijing and to Seneca. Adam Tooze, of course, is an economic historian at Columbia, where he directs the European Institute there. He’s the author of several indispensable books, the force behind the must-read Chartbook newsletter, and the co-host of the podcast Ones and Tooze. He has just finished the manuscript of a new book on the energy transition, in which, naturally, China figures very centrally, and, you know, unavoidably so, right? Adam, welcome back to Beijing. Welcome back to Sinica, man.
Adam Tooze: Great to be here.
Kaiser: Adam, let me start with something a little lighter — since we last spoke in Shaxi, how’s your Chinese coming? I know you’re still diligently taking lessons, you were telling me-
Adam: Absolutely. Yeah, I’m grinding my way through the Confucius Institute HSK3 curriculum. So, don’t put me on the spot here, but yeah, most of the way through HSK3. So, the difference between being here last summer and this time around is palpable in terms of the number of Chinese characters I recognize, you know, individual phrases I’m being able to actually understand. I was really worried about it. I thought maybe you know it is such a steep and large mountain to climb. And, obviously, I’m one of very many who’ve made this trek. I’m very conscious of this, but it’s great when you do actually suddenly realize that you can read a street sign or have understood what somebody said.
So, that’s beginning to happen it’s in the nature of the language, you like piece it together. So, you recognize a character here, a character there, and all of a sudden the context opens up a bit. So, this time in the summer, I’m kind of looking forward to coming back and tracking the progress some more.
Kaiser: One of my favorite literary devices I’ve ever seen for the acquisition of Chinese is in Peter Hesler’s book River Town, where he jogs every day and he runs by this sign with, you know, quite a number, and sort of like Wheel of Fortune, where one character gets filled in each time he runs by.
Adam: Yeah, it’s that kind of experience.
Kaiser: Well, I ask partly out of sympathy and partly because I’m genuinely curious what trying to work your way through the Chinese language is actually, how it’s changed things for you. Has it opened anything up? What has it actually complicated? What kinds of misunderstandings it may have cured you of, if any? Or maybe it’s plunged you even more deeply into these misunderstandings. I mean, I guess that would lead to a broader question if you want to talk about language first. But then, you know, since last we spoke, how has your own understanding of China changed? What feels clearer now? And what have you had to revise? And what resists easy comprehension still?
Adam: So, on the language level, I mean, the business of learning Chinese, it’s fundamentally unlike learning another Western language because most fundamentally, you’re learning to read again. And so, I find that a really profoundly sort of regressing experience. I mean, it takes me back to the childhood memories of learning to read English. And I find it very soothing. I like to do it before bedtime. It’s a very deep experience of learning. And the fact that I’m going through this and putting myself through this just as AI is breaking on the scene and transforming everything we think about in terms of knowing things, I’ve really become to appreciate, the art of memory, the art of putting things, laying things down inside your body and your brain in a quite physical way.
It’s been a journey, and I really look forward to my lessons every week and to literally doing vocab. It is changing. I mean, people joke about this, and I’ve been taken to task for it apparently recently. Like, as a foreigner trying to engage with China, it’s easy to engage in kind of linguistic overdeterminism. Like, you know, you see some small character change and then you become all high on the fact that you’ve finally understood ranges of reference in certain characters.
And it’s easy to see. The most famous one is the crisis term that Kennedy made popular. But it’s genuinely the case now that when I’m reading Chinese history or Chinese political science, and they do that thing of putting the Chinese term generally bad pinyin without necessary emphasis markings in the text, I actually can begin to decipher what underlying characters that refers to. And once you can do that, you actually do have a deeper understanding of the term that’s being deployed. That is a really worthwhile thing for me now. I try to diligently go away and make myself a little Quizlet kind of packs of political terminology.
Because one of the things you don’t know about HSK3 and HSK, until you do it, is that the Confucius Institutes may have this fearsome reputation as like outposts of zealous CCP ideology. But in fact, it’s a curriculum that’s utterly deprived of any kind of politics. It’s totally depoliticized.
Kaiser: Yeah, it steers deliberately clear of anything. Yeah.
Adam: It’s all about health and relationships and work and women telling other women not to flirt with their husbands and complaining about the fact they don’t have enough time with their children. And, you know, people getting ill and scolding each other in rather direct, and I’m told quite Chinese terms about getting too fat and needing to take exercise. Anyway, so I crave the politics. To come to the bigger point, what have I felt, I’ve learned? Well, in finishing this climate book, which I really did, I sent before I came away. It was my promise to myself that I would not come to Hong Kong and China without finishing it.
I ended up really coming to grips with the scale of the Chinese renewable energy build-out in the last couple of years. Not as though I haven’t been digging that for a while now, but really looking into it deeply and appreciating the scale of the imbalance. So, I’m still a critic of the idea of oversupply when it comes to things like
