Foreign Relations & International Law

ChinaTalk: U.S.-China Science Relations and the PhDs Caught in the Middle

Jordan Schneider
Monday, December 20, 2021, 11:57 AM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

What's it like to live across the US-China scientific divide? Yale Law School postdoc, particle physicist and essayist Yangyang Cheng (@yangyang_cheng) joins me alongside undergrad Alex Liang to talk about understanding the other, how the personal can be lost in the noise of geopolitical tension and science across borders.

We also discuss:

  • Power hierarchies and identities
  • The “new red scare” and scrutiny on Chinese scientists
  • The Large Hadron Collider as aLanguage as an instrument of state power
  • "Brain drain" and other phrases Yangyang doesn't like

Click here to listen to ChinaTalk in your favorite podcast app.

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Links to Yangyang’s articles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-china-US.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/05/west-china-threat-real-place-domestic-agendas

https://thebulletin.org/premium/2020-12/the-edge-of-our-existence-a-particle-physicist-examines-the-architecture-of-society/

Outro music: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free by Nina Simone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inNBpizpZkE

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Jordan Schneider is the host of the ChinaTalk podcast and newsletter. He previously worked at Kwai, Bridgewater and the Eurasia Group. His Chinese landscape paintings "show promise."

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