Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih

On this episode, I chat with Victor Shih about all things China. We discuss China’s massive local debt crisis, the CCP’s views on AI, what happens after Xi, and more. Victor Shih is an expert on the Chinese political system, as well as their banking and fiscal policies, and he has amassed more biographical data on the Chinese elite than anyone else in the world. He teaches at UC San Diego, where he also directs the 21st Century China Center. Watch on YouTube ; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . Sponsors * Scale is building the infrastructure for smarter, safer AI. In addition to their Data Foundry, they just released Scale Evaluation, a tool that diagnoses model limitations. Learn how Scale can help you push the frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh . * WorkOS is how top AI companies ship critical enterprise features without burning months of engineering time. If you need features like SSO, audit logs, or user provisioning, head to workos.com . To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise . Timestamps (00:00:00) – Is China more decentralized than the US? (00:03:16) – How the Politburo Standing Committee makes decisions (00:21:07) – Xi’s right hand man in charge of AGI (00:35:37) – DeepSeek was trained to track CCP policy (00:45:35) – Local government debt crisis (00:50:00) – BYD, CATL, & financial repression (00:58:12) – How corruption leads to overbuilding (01:10:46) – Probability of Taiwan invasion (01:18:56) – Succession after Xi (01:25:10) – Future growth forecasts Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe