Henrietta Levin

speaker

569 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Henrietta Levin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Pekingology · Inside China's Dual Economy · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

And maybe even a year or two ago, Chinese officials were very hesitant to acknowledge anything remotely reminiscent of overcapacity as a problem.

Whereas now, at least you do hear them talking about involution and price wars being problematic.

Do you see the government taking any meaningful steps to address the imbalances you're describing?

So I want to talk more about how AI affects these trends.

But first, just because you mentioned almost in passing the local government incentives and how that structures the involution challenge, like how much of this is about the party's personnel system?

Well, good question.

And I guess many of those local officials are hoping that they can get promoted on the basis of

And exacerbating some of these structural tensions before the point where the tensions hit a breaking point.

Correct.

Someone else has come in to take the blame by that point.

And so you've noted that involution has done incredible damage to wage growth for Chinese workers.

And can you just paint a picture of what has that really meant for quality of life for the Chinese middle class?

You wrote that China's incredible pace of AI adoption, while in some ways a testament to the success of this model when it comes to national power, will also play into a dangerous cycle of involution, of depressed wages, and low consumption.

So why...

Yeah.

And some people argue, though, that China's rapid AI adoption actually helps to solve certain difficult social challenges.

For example, China has a rapidly aging society, so maybe it's better to automate away certain labor for shortages.

Around four.

So you're predicting, I mean, a rather catastrophic collapse.

I saw an interesting court case recently in Hangzhou in which a Chinese company was required to retain a worker who would otherwise have been made redundant by AI-generated automation.

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