Inside the US–China decoupling: What’s really at stake (AI, rare earths, Taiwan, trade)
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to this conversation. I'm Azim Azhar, the founder of Exponential View. Please do introduce yourselves and tell us where you're from in the chat. I'm in London. I'm delighted to be with a legend of Substack, Jordan Schneider. Jordan, where are you? I am in New York City, and I'm so glad to be here. We have just partnered up in a new publishing project as well, which I've been finding pretty exciting, right? To have all of these new business partners. Why don't you say something about it for a minute?
Sure. So if you care about AI, which if you are watching this right now, I think you make it into that set and you perhaps work at a firm or an organization that would be interested in buying The one AI content bundle to rule them all. You should head down to ReadSale.com, which sells group AI subscriptions for teams. We got an incredible lineup, including myself, Azeem, Nathan Lambert, Jasmine, Kevin Hsu, and I think that there's like eight in total of us. Substack. Doesn't let you bundle for whatever God forsaken reason. So we have taken it upon ourselves to save you the time and allow you to make yourself and your team smarter about what's coming down the pipe with artificial intelligence.
It's a great initiative. I'm super happy it started. We will, of course, talk about AI today, but you are best known for China talk. And there is so much going on between the US and China. And I just want to make sense of it. And hopefully you'll be able to help us do that. It seemed to me that We're watching the US and China do more than traditional trade wars. And we've moved from a phase where the US was trying to contain China, perhaps into something more, a decoupling. And what I want to argue that that decoupling is actually more interesting and perhaps more dangerous than things we've seen in the past. It's not so much separation, but the emergence of these two parallel tech universes, but they remain deeply entangled.
And the rub of all of this is that the tools we use to manage it, export controls, tariffs, sanctions, well, they're 200 years old. We're dealing with a 21st century problem, a 21st century economy, and a 21st century technology. So are those traditional containment tools helping or harming? Or was I overstating the case in the first place?
Oh, man, where to even start with that? I'll do a little personal history, I guess, because I'm introducing myself to you and the audience as well. So I moved to China in 2017. And I was like, You know, played video games, like built PCs at like middle school. But my, I was a history major. My profession wasn't in, in working in our understanding technology. It was a policy analyst. And the reason I reoriented my professional life around technology was because I hit the thing that you just mentioned, Azeem, this idea or this reality that living in China, you live in a similar but different technological ecosystem where the apps that you interact with on your phone are just different than the ones that the rest of the world uses.
And that kind of trickles down into like literal, like UI changes of how WeChat works versus how Facebook works at the time means you relate to your friends in a different way. And just kind of understanding like how fundamental these products are to our lives nowadays. And, um, It didn't sink into me until I lived in that separate ecosystem and everything that I kind of assumed was like baked in or took for granted actually surfaced to me as like actual product managers or decisions that policymakers made to create a sort of like different world. way of being almost in mainland China versus the rest of the world. So that's like step one. Zooming way out from where did this decoupling come from and where is it going?
It is really messy, man, because there are not easy takeaways. Um, and there are not clean lines that I think either country really wants to draw. So from 1949 to 1973, there was basically no technological or commercial contact between the U S and. China. The U.S.
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