Today’s episode features Dr. Yasheng Huang, the MIT economist and one of the world’s leading authorities on China’s political economy, innovation system, and long-term development model.
For more than two decades, Dr. Huang has studied how China’s political institutions shape economic outcomes — and why authoritarian centralisation ultimately restricts entrepreneurship, slows innovation, and weakens long-term growth. His research challenges the dominant Western narrative of China as an unstoppable rising superpower, arguing instead that demographic collapse, shrinking human capital, and information control are pushing the country toward structural stagnation.
In this conversation, we explore the deeper forces behind China’s slowdown, the myth of state-driven innovation, and how Xi Jinping’s tightening grip may be reversing decades of reform. We also discuss the global consequences of China’s declining growth trajectory, the strategic implications for US–China relations, and whether the world is entering a new and unstable geopolitical era.
We dive into China’s real technological capabilities, the limits of authoritarian innovation, the future of Taiwan, and the risk factors that could reshape markets, supply chains, and global security in the coming decade.
This episode examines one of the most important questions of our time: what happens when the world’s second-largest economy hits structural limits, and the political system refuses to adapt?
