ChinaPower

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Courtney Weatherby joins us to discuss the growing crisis of scam centers in Southeast Asia. She explains how these operations function, the role of Chinese criminal networks, and their impact on the United States. The conversation explores the rise of AI-enabled scams, recent enforcement actions in Cambodia, China's selective crackdowns on scam networks, and opportunities for greater international cooperation to combat transnational cybercrime. Courtney Weatherby is Deputy Director of the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia program.

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Henrietta Levin and Gregory Poling unpack the outcomes of the ASEAN Summit and the Trump–Xi meeting on the sidelines of APEC. They examine how Washington and Beijing are prioritizing economic stability over strategic confrontation, why topics like Taiwan and the South China Sea were not discussed, and how ASEAN is seeking balance through new trade and digital initiatives. The discussion concludes with what to watch next, particularly with China’s trade implementation and rising tensions in the South China Sea. Henrietta Levin is a senior fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS in Washington, D.C. She previously held senior roles at the U.S. Department of State and the White House, spearheading U.S. strategy and diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific. Greg Poling is the director of the Southeast Asia Program and the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at CSIS, focusing on maritime security and regional diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific.

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi and Dr. Andrea Ghiselli join us to discuss their newly released book Narratives of Sino-Middle Eastern Futures. They challenge prevailing narratives that frame China’s engagement in the Middle East primarily through the lens of U.S.–China rivalry and offer alternative perspectives by drawing on extensive Arabic and Chinese-language sources to highlight how regional actors themselves interpret and shape their relationships with Beijing. Drawing on Saudi Arabia and Syria as the two core case studies in their book, they show how regional perceptions of China diverge sharply depending on various factors such as national capabilities and alignment with the United States. The conversation also examines China’s diplomacy toward Iran, its muted response to the Israel–Iran conflict, and why both Chinese and regional leaders prefer to limit Beijing’s security role. Dr. Alsudairi and Dr. Ghiselli conclude that the future of Sino–Middle Eastern relations will likely reflect cautious continuity—marked by pragmatic engagement and mutual restraint. Dr. Alsudairi is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations of the Arabic Speaking World, Center for Arab and Islamic Studies, at the Australian National University. Prior to his appointment, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, working on a project examining the intersections between religion and infrastructure in the context of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Since 2015, he oversaw the development of the Asian Studies Program at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. More recently in 2022, he was awarded a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to work on his upcoming book manuscript. Dr. Ghiselli is a Lecturer in International Politics in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology of the University of Exeter. He is also non-resident research fellow with the TOChina Hub and the Head of Research for its ChinaMed Project. He has previously worked in China at Fudan University for nine years. You can find an open access version of their book here.

In this joint episode of Pekingology and the ChinaPower Podcast, CSIS Freeman Chair Senior Fellow Henrietta Levin and co-host CSIS China Power Project Deputy Director and Fellow Brian Hart are joined by Dan Wang to discuss his new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. The conversation unpacks China’s monumentalism in its grand engineering projects, the advantages and consequences of building at such scale, China’s push to lead in key technologies, Beijing’s social engineering efforts, and much more. Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. Previously, he was a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and a lecturer at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. From 2017 to 2023, he worked in China as the technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, based in Hong Kong, Beijing, and then Shanghai. For more from Dan Wang, please read his latest piece in Foreign Affairs - The Real China Model: Beijing’s Enduring Formula for Wealth and Power.

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Dr. Yanzhong Huang joins us to examine China’s growing influence over the global pharmaceutical industry and the risks it poses for the United States. Dr. Huang explains how China evolved from a low-cost manufacturer of chemical inputs to a comprehensive pharmaceutical power producing advanced drugs and playing an important role in global pharmaceutical innovation. He highlights areas of acute U.S. dependence, from antibiotics and vitamins to critical precursor chemicals, and recounts how the Covid-19 pandemic underscored the vulnerability of U.S. supply chains. Dr. Huang explains the highly interdependent nature of global drug supply chains and notes that even if countries attempt to build alternative production capacity outside of China, they would still rely on Chinese suppliers at certain stages of the supply chain and would need years to replicate China’s integrated industrial ecosystems. He concludes with an assessment of U.S. policy options for building resilience, including targeted de-risking of key medicines and diversifying suppliers among trusted partners. Dr. Yanzhong Huang is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he directs the Global Health Governance roundtable series. He is also a professor and director of global health studies at Seton Hall University's School of Diplomacy and International Relations, where he developed the first academic concentration among U.S. professional international affairs schools that explicitly addresses the security and foreign policy aspects of health issues. He is the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm. Dr. Huang is the author of multiple books and reports, including most recently The COVID-19 Pandemic and China’s Global Health Leadership, published in 2022.

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Ms. Mona Yacoubian and Mr. Tuvia Gering join us to unpack the latest escalation between Israel and Iran and explore how China is navigating this evolving conflict. They begin by situating the conflict in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, which triggered a series of strikes by Iranian-backed militias that eventually led to direct Israel-Iran military confrontations. Ms. Yacoubian outlines how Israeli strikes were timed around a perceived window of Iranian vulnerability and rising concerns over Iran’s nuclear enrichment levels. Mr. Gering describes a significant paradigm shift in Israeli security doctrine after October 7, and the belief that Iranian threats, both nuclear and conventional, have necessitated preemptive action, especially with the current Trump administration’s backing. Ms. Yacoubian highlights the limited material support to Iran from Russia, North Korea, and China, and noted China’s preference to prioritize regional economic ties over military entanglement. Mr. Gering delves into the mixed Chinese domestic debates on Iran and explores unconfirmed reports of potential Chinese arms transfers to Iran. Finally, they assess what these developments may mean for China’s long-term role in Middle East security, including the possibility of a new security architecture that could include both Israel and Iran, and how Iran’s strategic calculations may shift amid growing isolation. Mona Yacoubian is senior adviser and director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She has more than thirty years of experience working on the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on conflict analysis, governance and stabilization challenges, and conflict prevention. She was previously vice president of the Middle East and North Africa Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), where she managed field programming in Iraq, Libya, and Tunisia as well as Washington, D.C.–based staff. In 2019, she served as executive director of the congressionally appointed Syria Study Group. From 2014 to 2017, Yacoubian served as deputy assistant administrator in the Middle East Bureau at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where she had responsibility for programming across Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. Captain (Res.) Tuvia Gering is a China analyst at Planet Nine, a Tel-Aviv and East Asia-based tech company, a visiting researcher at the Diane & Guilford Glazer Foundation Israel-China Policy Center at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), and a nonresident fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) and the Israeli Chinese Media Center. Gering is the editor and author of Discourse Power on Substack, a newsletter covering leading Chinese perspectives on current affairs, and holds a BA in East Asian studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (summa cum laude) and an MPH in disaster and emergency management from Tel Aviv University (summa cum laude).