Jordan here—happy to facilitate! i’m at jordan@chinatalk.media
Jordan_Schneider
Karma: 137
Another comment from a longtime China-focused CIA analyst:
“I read your pitch and very much enjoyed it, thanks for sending it! Here are some scattered thoughts and reactions:
My general view is that two things are true:
Lack of understanding is not a major contributor to the risk of Sino-US war, or indeed to the most important aspects of US policy toward China. BUT ALSO:
Improving public analysis and understanding of China is a good and very cheap thing that we should do! And yours are the best suggestions I have seen on how to do it.
I know little about the effective altruism approach, but I think I’m guided by a different set of criteria. The question for a philanthropist might be “where can I best spend my money amid the vast universe of worthy causes” and for me it’s more like, “should the US reallocate national resources from existing national security investments to this?” And I think the answer to the latter is unambiguously yes. Another CSET probably costs like 1 training sortie for a fighter jet...
I personally would ascribe drastically lower probabilities than you that philanthropic funding can influence PRC or US policy to materially reduce China-related risk. (Although again, I think it’s still absolutely worth bolstering our knowledge base and talent pipeline!) I’m skeptical because I think the primary drivers of policy decisions are other things like material factors, ideological dispositions (derived from an emotional base that is hard to move with fact-finding and analysis), and self-interest on the part of organizations and states.
I had a few other random specific comments, not really disagreeing with what you’ve written but just thoughts that your piece sparked:
I agree that on the kind of overarching strategic questions that guide major policy decisions, the intelligence community and outside observers are on an even playing field. Mostly that’s because those strategic questions are about “mysteries” that nobody knows the answer to (including Xi Jinping) rather than “secrets” that are knowable but hidden. I think there are many useful insights that can be gleaned from secrets to illuminate those broad questions and address them with more granularity, but this doesn’t yield dramatically different answers to many of the questions that policymakers care about.
This is sort of a side note, but I think sometimes people overlook the fact that some important datapoints are available to non-government observers because they have been first collected by intelligence sources and then publicized or leaked. For example, the fact that Iran is apparently supplying Moscow with drones seems like an important marker of Iran’s strategic calculus and the status of Russia’s war effort, and the reporting on that seems to be derived from intelligence collection. To be clear I think this kind of information transmission is a minor factor in strategic analysis, but it’s an interesting wrinkle that’s easy to overlook.
I do think there is a large difference between what the intelligence community knows about military capabilities and what is knowable outside—here the playing field is extremely uneven. I’m not talking about questions of intention like “does Xi intent to invade Taiwan by 2027” or whatever, I’m talking about more operational-level and tactical-level information about what the PLA is doing, where it’s doing it, how well it’s doing it, strengths and weaknesses of crucial military platforms, etc. Those questions are peripheral to many of the conversations in DC about China, but obviously they become absolutely essential in wartime, and the US devotes a massive amount of resources toward collecting information about these issues. So that’s the one area where I think your piece may underweight the knowledge that is present in the USG, although it may not be relevant from an EA catastrophic risk prevention point of view.
Your point about improving US procurement to reduce the risk of war was thought-provoking. You point out that enhanced US military capabilities will deter Beijing and therefore make catastrophic war less likely, which makes sense. But couldn’t enhanced US capabilities also make the US more likely to commit forces or escalate a war with China, because Washington was confident it could win it? I’m all for more effective US capabilities but I wonder if someone was approaching this from a pure EA framework if they’d have questions! (I’m aware that I’m kind of making a too-cute-by-half argument but oh well!)
Again I really enjoyed your pitch, it was very thought-provoking, and I hope your suggestions are getting audience and traction!”
Maybe there’s some backwards reasoning going on of philosophy grads and STEM majors defining priorities around their skill sets…
“the gender ratio of EA is iirc around 70⁄30. Quick googling tells me that this is the same ratio as in Philosophy graduates and STEM workers, backgrounds that are fairly naturally overrepresented in EA due to the nature of the EA project and the careers the movement is focussing on most strongly. So I wouldn’t agree that it’s ridiculous.”
esp depressing given the ridiculous overrepresentation of white guys at the event who don’t have 1/10th the cred/commitment you do
this is fantastic
Posting some anonymous feedback I received from someone who has spent a number of years in a Mass Ave think tank:
“First, one place where I think you can further reinforce the argument is doubling down that corporate support for think tanks is not going to solve this problem. In my experience, little of that funding trickles down to providing for early career staff—to the point where using expanded funding to grow the number of early career roles is highly unlikely. Think tanks would rather spend that money on senior scholars or research trips, not adding new RAs. That feeds into a second point on think tank culture...
Second, while it varies between institutions, I think it’s important to note that even with more unrestricted funding, multiple think tanks around town don’t see it as part of their mission/culture to foster the next generation of experts. There are think tanks in town, like Brookings, that have deep challenges in this space. On the other hand, CSET, among other strengths you mention, seems pretty good at this. CNAS remains the gold standard for me. But I think it’s worth grappling with the fact that there are places around town that—though they wouldn’t say it out loud in public—wouldn’t want a big infusion of money tightly tied to adding early career staff because senior scholars would see “dealing with” those people as impinging on their time. So there’s a toxic culture dimension here that more money alone won’t fix. But I do think that’s addressable in your model by calling out some places suck at professional development and avoiding funding them for this purpose; that public pressure might push them to do better!
Third, both in terms of great power conflict, but also even more so around competitiveness, it seems worth discussing why corporate won’t fill some of the gap in its own for-profit need rather than through non-profit philanthropy. You mention Eurasia Group and ASG in a line, but I could see some thinking as corporations need to manage their interactions with an increasingly fraught China market, won’t they have to hire knowledgeable China experts and won’t that be a demand signal? I think you and I would agree the answer is (a) possibly no; and (b) even if yes, it wouldn’t be a sufficient number or make sure good public policy is made by private-trained people (not that they can’t contribute, of course; we just benefit most from a healthy mix). So that just suggests 2-3 sentences defanging a counter-argument that would further strengthen yours.
Fourth, your highlighting early career bottlenecks make a lot of sense to me. Just one additional point you could make on that is those bottlenecks also spur a lot of early career drag. It’s not just that the limited numbers of opportunities box people out, even the people who make it through the eye of the needle are hampered in their productivity because they have to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting to get through the bottleneck and preparing for the next one. Early career opportunities are often time bound, so even when successful they immediately have to invest time in finding the next fellowship, job hunting, etc. Even the fortunate ones are not working/developing at anywhere near their capabilities because of this persistent time suck.
Finally, on scaling the CSET model, I think it’s right in substance. More CSETs are what the policy community needs to inform their work. My question about whether it works in practice comes from my read of the think tank world as a traditional biological ecosystem. To compete and survive, each organism finds its specific niche based on a combination of (a) the substance they focus on; (b) the types of products they produce; and (c) any political leanings. Having many of a single type doesn’t quite work because they crowd each other out for attention and struggle for funding. Will philanthropic funders be OK with their investments being one of several good think tanks doing work on this, or will there be pressure to focus on the best in a way that drives competitors out of the market? To put it another way, does the think tank market make sense to build several CSETs or to super-size the existing CSET to do more? I think from a good policy perspective, multiple CSETs providing different analytical inputs is better; what I don’t know is if funders will see that value as sufficient to long-term support something seen as “good but not the clear best.”
Just some thoughts as you continue on next steps. But none of it takes away from the fact that I think the piece stands extremely well as-is in terms of being correct in its analysis, making a necessary point, and doing it well. It’s just fingers crossed funders see the wisdom!”
;(
Adding some commentary from folks who aren’t on EA Forum but gave me their permission to post:
Dr. Lin Zhang (https://cola.unh.edu/person/lin-zhang)
“I agree with lots of the ideas you put forward in the proposal. From my perspective as a communication scholar working in a public university who has been studying and later working in the US since 2007, I see a drastic change since the latter years of 2010s in terms of interest in and funding for China studies in academia...though we hear more about China in the news. I am quite concerned by the representation of China in mainstream media.
I agree with you that many academics are perhaps not policy-oriented with their research, but I believe academic research has its own merits. They often more historicized, contextualized, and take a long-term view. I think the key here is to establish more channels to translate academic research to serve policy goals. Yours and several other media outlets like Sinica Podcast does a good job giving academic research some more public exposure and get academics to become more policy-minded.
Also, from my own perspective as a China-born international scholar who has been studying Chinese international studies and more recently US-based ethnic Chinese scholars in STEM, I think there’s also a concern about how inclusive the US will be to ethnic Chinese scholars given the deteriorating US-CHina relations. Personally, I think these scholars play an important role of bridging the two societies. They could offer more policy support if given a better platform in the US.
Another big issue here is how to fill the vacuum left open by the Confucius society. For public universities like ours, Chinese language teaching used to be heavily reliant on funding from CI, now they are gone from most American campuses, who will fund Chinese language studies?
CI also used to organize a lot of cultural events and to bring in speakers for academic talks, now we no longer have that budget.”
Thanks for the comment! The TSMC bit at the beginning is more illustrative of how important Taiwan is than anything. Aside from the capacity and expertise that TSMC brings to the table, it’s equally if not more the case that all the dependencies up and down the global semiconductor supply chain which run through Taiwan. Samsung and Intel fabs, for instance, would not be able to produce chips without Taiwanese inputs, and replacing those inputs in another geography would take years.
There is intense geographic concentration of fabs and factories that make inputs to fabrication around Hsinchu. If someone starting planting bombs or doing missile strikes in this neighborhood, it would be incredibly disruptive to the global economy.
How easy is it for chip fabs to reconfigure their factories and start producing new kinds of chip? Not that easy, again you need specific machines to make different types of chips.
fwiw I think conventional political science literature or most historians would tell the idea is really out there
War in Taiwan and AI Timelines
still very excited to read your longer thoughts!!
lol sry that was buried deep on my personal site i had no idea anyone could find it!
also this might be a useful thing to throw into the relevant links section
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/china-policy-an-early-career-guide
Hey folks—I wrote a similar review/advice article particularly aimed at the Yenching Scholarship you might find interesting.
https://jorschneider.com/2020/11/16/thoughts-on-yenching-academy/
Yenching Academy and the Schwarzman Scholars program comprise China’s attempt to set up a Rhodes/Marshall-style master’s degree. Both programs are fully-funded masters degrees comprised mostly of non-Chinese students. I was a Yenching Scholar in its third cohort from 2017-2019. What follows are some of my reflections on the experience and advice for applicants considering these programs.
Application process (from 2016…there have been two deans since I applied)
There was a big emphasis on the essay on ‘why China,’ so be sure to explain what role you expect China to have in your future professional life and why Yenching will help you achieve those goals.
Of late I hear more emphasis has gone on demonstrated interest in China through language study and past academic work. That said, there are generally a few people from each cohort who haven’t studied Mandarin (though this is easier to pull off if you’re from a region where Chinese instruction is less accessible like South Asia or Africa).
Academics
My classes at Yenching were significantly less demanding than advanced undergrad courses at top schools in the US, with many not going much deeper than what you’d learn in a lecture or seminar aimed at Freshmen. Yenching suffers from a ‘principal contradiction’ of on the one hand wanting to have students that have diverse academic interests and having to teach in English at a Chinese university. There are only so many courses they can offer to a program with just 120 students (most of whom don’t have Chinese strong enough to take graduate school courses in PKU’s other schools), so the courses for any discipline have to remain accessible to students who didn’t take courses in that discipline in undergrad. For example, a Yenching class in economics needs to not assume enough background to leave a philosophy or international relations major overwhelmed. This means that while you’re unlikely to learn new methodologies in disciplines you’re familiar with outside of self-study. However, it was certainly a lot of fun as someone with a history and economics background to get to take courses in Chinese literature and art history.
Your teachers will all be full-time PKU professors from other schools, 85% of them mainland Chinese and many with western PhD (there were a few white guys who teach at PKU’s business school that also taught Yenching courses). They vary in quality (some are quite good) but are limited in what they can teach by the central contradiction.
Non-native English speakers who haven’t written long papers in English or had to manage 50+ page English reading assignments may find the coursework slightly more challenging, but squeezing out passing grades should not be challenging for anyone Yenching admits.
Chinese language courses are still hidebound by many of the issues that plague Mandarin instruction more broadly, including dated material and an undue emphasis on reading. I eventually convinced my teachers to let me opt out of learning how to handwrite characters after finally convincing them that I didn’t care even if they gave me Ds. If you come to Yenching speaking no Chinese, and don’t do anything outside of the Yenching language requirements, you will maaaybe pass HSK3 after a year of instruction.
You are required to write a thesis but you have an entire year of funding to do so. Any PKU professor can be your thesis advisor, and the level of attention
In terms of academic freedom, I had no problem saying whatever I wanted on my class papers, but theses are another story as your advisor’s name will be forever attached to your paper so they’ll be somewhat responsible for your work. I had to make significant revisions to some pretty non-controversial stuff about tech regulations, and another classmate was forbidden entirely from writing a thesis relating to Islam in China.
Student Body and Campus Life
Far and away the best part of Yenching was the diversity and quality of human being in the student body. For starters, it’s maybe 30% American, not a high enough percentage for the Yankees to set the rules of the road. Nearly every student went to undergrad in their country of origin. While Americans likely encountered international students in undergrad, the type of Russian who went to an international school in Moscow before studying in the US is very different than a kid who went to a public high school and studied at St Petersburg University. Then you’ve got 20% Chinese and that final 50% encompassed 50+ countries in a 120-person student body.
In my year, every mainlander went to school in a Chinese university, meaning almost none of them went to international feeder high schools that lead their students to take the SAT and study abroad. While some foreigners complained that the Chinese students were too insular, my sense is that if you as a non-Chinese weren’t able to make friends with the Chinese students in Yenching, then it was your fault not theirs. The cohort of Chinese students who sign up to Yenching have fluent English and have opted into spending two years at a weird program without much of a domestic reputation whose entire draw is the exposure it provides to international classmates. If you can’t get chummy with these people, you probably weren’t ever going to make any Chinese friends anyways…
I’ve worked at the UN and can say with confidence this was easily as diverse a pool as you see in NY. Everyone’s shared interest in China and English fluency gave folks a starting point to engage on
In my year there really wasn’t a lot of drinking and in particular binge drinking (it’s not part of campus culture in China and most students outside America just drink to excess a lot less) compared to what you’d see at an MBA program in the west.
Yenching’s structure makes it much more straightforward to integrate with the broader campus. Two years allows you time to really invest in regular PKU campus clubs. The most fun I had was playing with the badminton club, painting with the landscape painting club, and spending every weekend for six months rehearsing for a production of Hamilton with the musical club. Yenching has no dedicated cafeteria so you’ll eat all your meals mixing broadly with the student body.
Yenching vs Schwarzman (Dorms, Career Services)
Perhaps the important difference is the length of the program. Schwarzman is a one year program, which really only gives you nine months on campus, too short a period of time for many to make real progress on Mandarin or uncover a job offer required to stay in China after graduation.
Schwarzman has a higher percentage of Americans (40% in 2021) and far more internationals who have exposure to the US, making its social culture much more westernized. For example, of the mainland Chinese students in the class of 2021, only five of twenty-four Chinese nationals did their undergrad on the mainland, with most of the others having gone to school in the US or the UK. This led many Schwarzman scholars in my era to lament (/celebrate) that school is just like home.
The bar for ‘interest in China’ is much lower in Schwarzman (it’s more oriented to produce ‘leaders’ who ‘understand’ Asia), as a far higher percentage of students come into the program having never studied Chinese. Many of its faculty are flown in for a year or two from the west and don’t really have much of a China background (this may have changed by the looks of their faculty page it seems they now have more Tsinghua profs).
Schwarzman in general keeps you much busier than Yenching, with more mandatory lectures, career development sessions etc. They also import western profs to stay for a few years, many of whom have zero China background.
Schwarzman’s campus is the nicest building I ever visited in China, and even puts Yale’s residential colleges to shame. It has centrally filtered air and water, something even the nicest banks in China can’t boast of. Its gym is Equinox-level and their campus features its own cafeteria that’s mostly western food. It also is literally a castle, with some pretty professional security that checks everyone who enters. This whole setup leads Schwarzman students to spend a lot less time interacting with other Tsinghua students (at one point there was a contest for who could not leave campus for the longest period of time…) and breeds more low-level resentment in the broader campus that these westerners have way better amenities than their Chinese counterparts. Yenching’s dorm setup, in contrast, partially takes over some floors of a rough-around-the-edges campus hotel but we had to deal with random middle-aged Chinese folks who were often smoking in their rooms…
In terms of career services, Schwarzman is on par with top western grad schools. They hired a senior career services professional with decades of experience at Booth and Yale’s SOM to stand up the program and that investment has paid off for students looking, in particular, to go into traditional corporate routes in the west. Schwarzman has structured on-campus recruiting for the big banks and consulting firms. Big backers of the institution like Ray Dalio (Bridgewater) and of course Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone) wregularly hire out of the program.
Yenching’s career services, in contrast, is bare-bones. The only people in my year who ended up in bulge bracket banks or top consulting firms had offers going into the program. In general, Yenching’s student body has a more academic bent, with more students ending up in PhD programs or law school.
Neither program is particularly good at finding placements for students in Chinese firms. Bytedance is far and away the most common domestic firm that picks up internationals from Schwarzman and Yenching.
Why Go To Yenching?
If you want a way to get into China, not have to teach English, and have two years of funding where you can pretty much choose your own adventure
If you want to make an incredible group of friends who share your interest in China
Why Not Go To Yenching?
If you don’t really care about China (you’ll have to put up with a fair amount of BS that will be off-putting to anyone who doesn’t appreciate that it comes with the territory with anything official on the mainland)
If you want to be taught things in grad school (which isn’t to say you can’t learn things, you just need to be more proactive than at a western program)
Other Notes
From Wikipedia: “While Tsinghua Schwarzman expects to raise about US$550 million (originally 300 million) from mostly foreign donors for its endowment, it is understood that the Peking Yenching endowment is even better funded through significant donations from Chinese philanthropists and special grants from the Chinese Central Government.” Schwarzman College has lots of rooms named after westerners and a big plaque in front showcasing all of its major donors (a real who’s who of billionaires and multinationals). Aside from Robin Li (Baidu’s CEO), I don’t know of any other particular funders for Yenching and to be honest, would be pretty shocked if it had a larger endowment than Schwarzman. For both programs, the whole idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding mostly foreigners to spend a year or two in China when there’s so much that needs better funding in the broader Chinese educational system is more than a little off-putting…
haha Kayla, Scott promised me he’d introduce us two weeks ago! v excited to chat
Sure, but if there are 4 people out there with CS backgrounds who fit the bill there are probably a few without who do too.
The other thing is the idea that “policy” is this general thing seems a little off to me. Someone who knows a thing or two about Congress may not have context or network to evaluate something aimed at some corner of the executive branch, to say nothing of evaluating a policy proposal oriented towards another country.
just came across your series—should’ve just outsourced my estimating to you you did a good job in those posts
or funders could, you know, always hire more fund managers who have policy experience!
they have scihub and random pdfs in china just like we do...yes getting officially censored is annoying but I’d guess 90% of what he publishes get through