China Decode: The World Order Is Tilting Toward China (Series Finale)
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Why is this the final episode of China Decode and what does it mean for listeners?
It's going to create masses of uh friction and stress, both in trade and commerce and geopolitics. We are going to be, I think, amazed by China. And, you know, in the West, let's face it, we're going to be struggling to compete with this. This revolution is being led by China. That is the key difference. China is at the forefront. Of this cluster of new technologies that promise to fundamentally reshape the way industry, our commerce, and actually our daily lives around the world will change and evolve over time.
Welcome to China Decode. I'm Alice Hann.
And I'm James King.
Before we get started today, we come with a bittersweet announcement. This will be our final episode of the show. Unfortunately, that is the reality of the media landscape right now. Some topics are easier for advertisers to get behind than others, and we've ultimately hit a wall. when it comes to finding advertisers for this show. And that is a real shame. But we've had such a great time, James and I, over the past year decoding why China has become a superpower that the West simply cannot ignore, and exploring the ways Chinese business, politics and culture are shaping the world around us.
Oh, Alice, I'm wiping away a tear here. I must say uh it it really is sad to uh to be saying goodbye to uh to China Decode. And I want to say what a pleasure it's been to co-host this with you. Uh we've really had a lot of fun, we've covered a lot of topics, and I've learned uh a great deal from your insights. I also want to mention the team at China Decode. It's been an honest privilege. Uh what our listeners perhaps don't know or see is the team of guys in the US who debate the topics with us, who help with the research, who keep us sounding better than we should, or certainly in my case, better than I should, editing out my uh stumbles and repetitions these each week. I'm gonna miss you guys and all of this a great deal.
I'm I'm sure you will do too, Alice.
Yeah, I second everything you just said, James. And I r honestly couldn't have asked for a better uh ally, friend, and co host on this uh pod. And it's been a real um experience of a lifetime and I'm glad that we got to share that together. So thank you. For our final episode, we wanted to look ahead at how China will continue to shape the future. And we wanted to start off with one of the biggest stories we've covered on this show, and that is AI. When we talk about the US-China AI competition, we tend to focus on who was the best model. But China may be playing a bigger game, embedding AI into the physical economy: cars, factories, smartphones, appliances, toys, and increasingly Increasingly robots.
And as a quick sense of scale, the US spent about $285 billion on private AI investment in 2025, versus China, roughly $12.4 billion, about 23 times less than the US. But the capability gap between the two countries, despite the investment difference, is rapidly tightening. So, James, I think this has been the biggest topic for us over the the past year. And certainly in the time in which we've covered this topic, I think China has surprised to the upside on a number of levels, you know, starting from uh its ability to uh do cutting edge um models, largely open weight, open source. Uh in some instantiations, there are some people saying that China may be six months uh behind the leading closed models coming out of the US.
Uh China's also, I think, surprised to the upside uh when it comes to its ability to bypass the constraints on hardware, say chips, for instance, with homegrown talent, but also its ability to find uh workarounds in in the existing architecture. And it's surprised on robotics too, where I think it's had A real clear lead uh versus the West. What has surprised you the most, I think, this year on AI in China? And what are your high level thoughts and predictions for the next five, ten years?
Yeah, this really got me reflecting, Alice. I think one of the things we've really tried to do on China Decode is to put the right frame around the many, many different topics uh that we see coming out of China and involving China and the US and China and Europe and China and the rest of the world.
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