ChinaTalk 九月精选：中国经济、DeepSeek 与 AI 能否撼动五角大楼官僚体系

Best of September!

Is China’s economy broken? Logan Wright, Jordan’s former boss (!) and a top expert on Chinese macroeconomics, says the financial system that powered China’s extraordinary growth is now constraining it, and that the old idea of US-China economic rivalry no longer fits. Brad Setser of CFR and Jordan push back (does Xi actually care? Can China's dominance of exports and supply chains keep the economy growing? Could AI and EVs provide a way out?), but Logan stands his ground. They also get into China's jobs crisis, what could pull China out of its economic funk, and what its slowdown means for the rest of the world.

Elsewhere, Lily Ottinger goes to Kyrgyzstan for the World Nomad Games, where she practices Russian and watches kök-börü — a Central Asian horse game played with a goat carcass — all the while weighing the gap between China’s hard power and soft power. Julian Gewirtz and Jordan size up Xi’s state visit, while Ethan Kessler asks whether Taiwan can actually build the drones it needs (part 1, part 2).

Garrett Berntsen takes on the Pentagon’s bureaucracy and explains why giving government AI isn’t enough if the institutions using it don’t change too. Irene Zhang goes inside Chinese AI discourse, where one DeepSeek researcher’s vision of an AI-powered future ranges from communist abundance to Cyberpunk 2077, and where Western rhetoric about AI safety and technological containment can sound like an attack on Chinese development, making cooperation harder just as the stakes rise. And on WarTalk, the team confronts the “Potemkin Pacific”: a US military trying to cover an enormous ocean with a rather less enormous number of ships.

Plus: China’s robotics boom, China’s answer to Starlink, and whatever exactly Jordan is doing with Ye.

Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?

How Chinese AI Radicalizes