Kyle Chan on the Future of US-China Competition — #94

Kyle Chan is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in Sociology at Princeton University. His research focuses on industrial policy, clean technology, and infrastructure with a regional focus on China and India. He is currently working on a book on Chinese industrial policy that aims to explain how China came to dominate certain industries today that had originally been led by the US, Japan, and other industrialized nations. These industries include electric vehicles, solar, high-speed rail, and consumer electronics. The book will describe the wide range of industrial policy tools used in China and their ongoing efforts in other industries, such as semiconductors and biotechnology.Kyle Chan writes a popular newsletter called High Capacity on industrial policy, clean technology, and infrastructure, particularly in China and India.Personal website: https://www.kyleichan.com/NYT op-ed: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/opinion/china-us-trade-tariffs.htmlLu Feng interview: https://www.high-capacity.com/p/chinese-industrial-maximalismChapter Markers:(00:00) - Introduction (00:50) - Kyle's Background and Research Interests (05:51) - China vs. India: A Comparative Study of Railway Development (12:38) - The Broader Implications of Industrial Policy (37:48) - Introduction to Industrial Maximalism (38:54) - China's Manufacturing Strategy (41:33) - US-China Technological Competition (59:45) - Global Collaboration and Future Outlook Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.–Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on X @hsu_steve. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.