YouSaid · the spoken record

Victor Shih

lines on the record: 100
first: 2025-05-29
most recent: 2025-05-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But the reason why that is the case is because there are a lot of things the Chinese government would like to do. They push it down to the local level. But the authorization of local debt issuance is authorized by the central government. So at the end of the day is really the central government telling local governments like, okay, you need to do this thing. I'm not going to give you money, but I will give you the authorization to issue even more debt. So the debt level keeps going higher and higher. The one thing that has alleviated the cash flow pressure late last year was the central government authorized again the issuance of close to 10 trillion reinbi in special local debt to repay some of the higher interest-bearing debt of local governments. But that's an accounting exercise. It doesn't literally decrease local debt. It just changes from higher yielding to lower yielding. Meanwhile, the overall size of local government”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just keeps growing in absolute size because basically China is trying to tell the world that they don't have a high debt level, which at the central level that is sort of the case. You know, it's still 60, 70 percent of GDP.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bushi Lai, okay. Bushilai. Yeah. Yeah. So he was one competitor with Xi Jinping. But because he was so high profile that he never had a chance to be the top leader of China. And then, of course, Xi Jinping made sure that he would fall.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But once he came to power, he knew they both knew what it took to control the party which they govern over. Basically, you form a whole series of coalitions to get rid of your most threatening enemy at a given time. So for Xi Jinping, it was like, oh, well, you know, this guy, Jo Yong Kong, who controlled the police forces and also the Ministry of State Security at the time, doing all this irregular things, being fabulously corrupt. He's a threat to the whole party. So he convinced Hu Jintao to join with him, to purge Zhou Yong Kang, which was successful. Stalin did the same thing to Trotsky. And then after the most threatening person is gone, you form another coalition to purge the next person and so on and so forth. So they both basically did that until they achieved absolute power within the party.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His father belonged to actually the liberal faction in the Chinese Communist Party. His father never offended that many people within the party. I mean, you know, everyone at a high level will have, you know, sort of screwed over somebody along the way, but his father was in the better category, let's say. And he himself was very low-key. While the other princlings were fighting for a very good jobs in the capital city of Beijing or in Shanghai, Xi Jinping said, oh no, it's okay. I'll go down to the villages. I'll work in Hebei in the rural area. Then Fujian, which was kind of a peripheral area. And then Zhejiang was slightly better, but still not Beijing or Shanghai. So he got out of the way of this political infighting. I think similar in a similar way that Stalin did. Early on, he did not confront people too much.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say early in the career, they're very similar. So outwardly, they're very low key. Stalin was the bureaucrat, very low key, not flamboyant, not making, you know, loud speeches like Trotsky did. But low-key getting things done, seen as a very reliable person. This was a reason why Stalin was chosen, as far as I know. I don't know that much about Stalin. Same thing with Xi Jinping.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As possible with the military because he knew he needed the support of somebody in the military when the time comes. And guess what? Sort of thirty years later when he was about to be elevated to be Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party, many of the people that he knew back in Fujian are now generals. They're in charge of important military units. And once he came to power, then he really promoted some of these people. But then lately, of course, he's purging some of these people, which is a really interesting yeah, he had a strategic vision about his own career trajectory, and he pursued that in a very determined fashion, I would say.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In any political struggle, make sure you're on the winning side because if you are on the winning side, then you can do terrible things to your enemies. So that apparently is the lesson that he learned. And he basically honed his skills and built his coalitions for the time that he would take over high-level positions in the party for decades. As it turns out, so if you look at the data, when he was in Fujian province, He spent an enormous amount of time hanging out with military officers in Fujian back in the 1980s, you know, late 1980s, early 1990s. And then you like, well, why did he bother to do that? You know, most local officials, they don't do that. I mean, you know, the military is there. You need to be nice to them and all this stuff. But like he built a dormitory for them. He even joined a unit of anti-aircraft regimen. He tried as much as possible to do as much.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the Cultural Revolution generation, I think a lot of people suffered horrendously, including Xi Jinping himself. But then basically you have two types of lessons that people drew from it. So the first lesson is like, oh, you know, the party is too dictatorial. China needs to liberalize and so on and so forth. So you have a lot of people from that generation who feel that way. Many of them now live in the United States. Basically, they try to leave China as soon as possible in the 1980s and succeeded. But for someone apparently, for Xi Jinping himself and others like him, the lesson was just don't be on the losing side.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've used sort of Baidu's thing. And so I think the typical Chinese language models are more trained on social media content, which will come back with hits that are more social media. It's like, oh, ask about AI, we'll talk about how AI gets used and different things instead of this kind of policy documents and meetings and so on and so forth. So it seems just from an inductive observation that Deep Seek is trained on this kind of content.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Immediately, you get a sense of what are the latest policies, what are the latest statements by high level officials. It seems that DeepSeek puts some higher weighting, let's say, on this kind of content. So I don't dare to install it on my phone, but I certainly have Collaborators who have downloaded the open source model and installed into a hard drive, and I use the web interface for some of my research.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I've been using AI quite a bit, I mean, both to sort of code data. It used to be like texts, hand code stuff, and now a lot of it can be automated. But in terms of finding out what the Chinese government is doing, I think some of the American models are okay, like Rock is okay, but the most helpful has been deep seek. So to me, it's quite clear that DeepSeek, which of course was first developed by a hedge fund to trade in the Chinese market, part of what they really trained the model for was to detect important policy documents and meetings within the Chinese government. Because when you enter, you know, the right, or even not even especially sophisticated prompts, you know, just like, you know, what is Chinese government doing when it comes to AI, it comes out with a bunch of very high quality links, which is very useful for my research. So then, you know, it”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even if that were the case, even if you train something that you think is pretty good, they will still want a human being checking everything.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, one thing that I would say about AI is that content creation is going to be a big roadblock for China because China is so paranoid about the content that flows on the internet that they put human beings all over the place to slow things down, slow the transmission down. And now if you have AI creating tons of content, there will still be human beings algorithms and human beings double, triple checking the content. Because they're just so afraid of some subversive content getting out.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of donations. I don't think so. Yeah. So then it really depends who's in charge of AGI. Yeah, so Ding Xiaang really is a mystery. I think he has great political acumen. He must, you know, in order to gain Xi Jinping's trust, he has some technical background, but is metallurgical forging But he's worked in Shanghai for decades, so he knows how private corporations run. He knows a lot about international trade, FDI. So I think if you look at the sort of people in the Politburo, Paul Bureau Standing Committee, I would say he's definitely in the top quartile of people that you would want to be in charge of AI, if not the top two or three people.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually cool to visit, but you know, it's like, wow, this is great. Like, what are you going to do with the buildings?”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it does matter. Yeah. So you have some decision makers who have shown to be not very good. And even politically not very good. But nonetheless, for some reason, they're trusted. I mean, precisely precisely because they're not very good. They're very dependent on Xi Jinping that they get promoted. The chief negotiator with the United States, Halifeng Vice Premier in charge of finance. He is well known for starting and perpetuating the largest real estate bubble the world has ever seen in Tianjin. I don't know if you went to Tianjin. They're like just empty buildings everywhere. So there's the new Manhattan, you know, literally the size of Manhattan filled with empty office buildings. Ironically sounds like a great tour.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is potentially a foreign aspect of this, right? So it's like you build up all this cloud computing capacity in the Gulf states. Who's going to be the customer? You know, who's willing to pay billions of dollars to use it? China, right? So then the foreign policy apparatus will have to coordinate that and so on and so forth. Delta Road of ETS.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it could be. Yeah, so that's interesting. So the physical investment will have to share power with some other leading group. Yeah, so I guess that would be a justification. Building power center that falls under NDRC. It could be under Li Chang or Khalifeng, which is especially Halifeng, which is in charge of investment and financing. But if Xi Jinping doesn't want Halifeng to share that power, then we'll have to give it all to Ding Xiaang and then give him a lot of power. I mean, he can just do it by fiat or create a separate organization to make it happen. At this point, as you know, data centers are being built in China in a very fast clip, and I think they're just using its existing command structure.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if AGI sort of generating fallen gong related content and it proliferates very quickly beyond the capacity of the sensor to control it, then they'll have to stop the algorithm from generating new images and new videos and so on and so forth.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. I mean, they want to develop it, of course. They'll pour a lot of money. They'll try to give Deep Seek as much help as possible, you know, sourcing GPUs, whatever, all this kind of stuff. But I am all but certain that there is one, maybe a team of people in the headquarters of DeepSeek who can pull the plug.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But on sort of applying AGI or AI to governance, to even service sector, you know, generating video content for people doing even like travel agency stuff, the party is very, very paranoid that some hostile actor outside of China certainly believe that very strongly or inside of China is going to do something and the AGI is going to take off and it's going to undermine the party's authority. So what they, I think basically what we're going to see in terms of institutional development is not at the top end, but on the lower end. So they will want to designate human beings in all the government agencies, in all the commercial entities that are using AI or AGI to put their foot on the brake if it comes to it.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because for the party, it's a security aspect of it, that's the most important. I mean, there's one aspect where it's like, yeah, it'd be great to automate all industrial production. China is doing a good job doing that already. I don't think they need additional infrastructure sort of governing infrastructure to allow them to do that.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thus far as it seems like it's under cybersecurity leading group. So Deng Shu Xiang would charge you better. I don't think so.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's extremely revealing. So basically, it's very different from the American approach because in America it's all driven by private sector and of course all these, you know, except for one and two companies, everyone's just invest, invest, invest, and try to reach AGI as soon as possible for the Chinese government. They're very afraid that some actor outside, but even inside the party is going to use it as a tool to usurp the power of the party. So, they want to know that they have a way of stopping everything if it comes to it. So for them, developing the brakes is just as important as developing AI itself.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That governs Xi Jinping's day to day life back in 2017. Now he's a vice premier in charge of cybersecurity. So clearly this guy is trusted. His preference for AI, AGI, so I tweeted this DABO speech, which you also looked at, I think it's very revealing, right? So you look at you like, wow, so what he said was we need to invest in AI, but we need to do it. We can't go all out in investing in it without knowing what the breaks are. We have to develop the brakes also at the same time.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has he done for the big boss to earn his trust? I think he's a big mystery. But the manifested outcome is that she trusts him a great deal because in 2013 he was promoted to Beijing to be the second in command in his personal office handling all the flows of data in and out of the desk of Xi Jinping. So that's a very important position. He became the first in command a couple years later. He took control over the entire apparatus.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Xi Jinping for one year. For some reason, Xi Jinping just trusted him absolutely after that and is a mystery. And I've looked at all the open literature. I've asked people in Shanghai. Nobody knows why that's the case. I mean, almost certainly, I think one reason is that he was gathering a lot of information about the other leaders of Shanghai and sending all of that information to Xi Jinping to basically let him know because at that time, as you know, the previous leader of China, Jianzimin, had a very big stronghold in Shanghai. So basically Xi Jinping had to sort of break that apart before he could assert control over Shanghai. to Xi Jinping in order for him to do that. But beyond that, I mean, lots of people do that for Xi Jinping. Truth be told. So beyond that, what else?”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he took that position back in 2022. So he's been steeped in cybersecurity for a couple of years. I think by now he knows all the major players and some of the key policy issues. His relationship with Xi Jinping is a very interesting one. So he only directly worked under Xi Jinping for one year. When she was in Shanghai, he was basically the very senior level secretary who would support whoever the party secretary of Shanghai was, and he worked under three different”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, these are all very good questions. So I think in addition to the science, technology commission that you mentioned, another very important position that he holds is that he's the head of the office of the central commission on cybersecurity. The head of the Central Commission on Cybersecurity is Xi Jinping himself, but the head of the administrative office, which runs the day-to-day operation of that commission, which basically a leading group is Ding Shang.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some talking points, he talks through it. There's some sense of that. On technology issues, I think he cares a lot about it, but only from the perspective that competition with the United States is a very important objective the Chinese Communist Party is for him personally a very important objective. So he wants to win. But precisely the extent to which he understands all the intricacies, it's unclear to me. I don't think he necessarily does. But then compare it. Comparing him to American leaders, especially today, I think he is probably better prepared just because in China, the experts, they talk to the top leadership all the time.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that is difficult. So I would say because of his upbringing as a princeling for internal party matters how to control the party, how to control the military From the speeches, some of these are not secret speeches, but they're like sort of more geared toward other members of the Chinese Communist Party. So some of these speeches, like if you go to China, you can read some of these speeches, which I have. He has a really good political nose. Like he knows what it takes to control the party apparatus, control the military. especially economic issues, yeah, it seems like some advisor gives him”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Yudong thing is anything specific or interesting, but if you have read thousands of these things, sometimes it's quite revealing, actually.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before all these meetings, there's a briefing. Someone gets out a briefing book and says, okay, this is what we're going to talk about. Here are the policy options. Which one do you want? He has to make up his mind. I mean, sometimes I'm sure he consults with other people and so on and so forth. So then he has to be really engaged with a large number of policy area on a day-to-day basis because the decisions that he make becomes the law, basically.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the problem is all the other members of the leading small group are lower rank than him. So then not all, but like whereas before when decisions were made in the Polar Bureau Standing Committee notionally, the party and also even the bureaucratic ranks of all the polar standing committee members are equivalent to each other. So there was debates, there were debates, and then even sometimes overturning of the position of the party secretary general sort of historically you have seen cases like that. Usually there's one other person who's similarly ranked as Xi Jinping, you know, the premier of China.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you ask about the leading small groups. So, this is where this ranking is very important, right? So the head of the leading small group always has to be the senior most ranked person. And of course, the good thing about having Xi Jinping as the head of a leading small group is that his authority is not going to be challenged by anyone else because everyone agrees he's the most powerful and most senior ranked person in all of China.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These meet Or departments Typical commun I've talked to some people who have lectured to the Pulitbure. I think there are somewhat real because they don't know Exante what questions will be asked. Like I'm talking about the speakers, right? So I think Xi Jinping and other leaders, they know what the speaker would say in the main remarks. But then there's a Q&A portion of it, which actually is real. Like it's not staged. So that's pretty scary. If you're some professor, Xi Jinping asked you to come and ask you a bunch of random questions. It's very scary. So, I think they are substantive. And then, well, but the thing is also, Xi Jinping will make remarks after such a lecture, and those remarks become policy.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if you look at what he does day to day, he spends a lot of time in meetings And it's astonishing. I mean, there's no. This is one thing it's like there's the Chinese leadership, they're not going to play golf, you know, three days out of a week. I mean, Xi Jinping and his colleagues are having meetings about policies almost every, you know, like 270 days out of the year.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The new reason is that we have one very, very powerful figure in Chinese Communist Party, such that even if your Politburo member, which used to give you some autonomy in the domain that you govern over, that is no longer the case. You know, if Xi Jinping expresses a preference over a policy direction, that is a direction you have to go toward no matter what. Because if he observes that you're dragging your feet or that you're pursuing a slightly different agenda, you will be perched. And we've seen cases of that”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up in recent years, so that now, because I look at all the applications of students from China and I look at what classes they've taken, now once a year they have to take a class call, situation and policy, which is basically just the Chinese government's perspective on all kinds of different issues. But that's not economics. It's not accounting. It's not basic skill. It's just telling people what the government prefers in a given topic. So that's a traditional reason. So you can have some very high-level officials, even if they have PhD in nuclear engineering. They may not know very much about how the market works, how society works, so on and so forth.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so there's a traditional reason, and then there's today's reason, which is on top of the traditional reason. The traditional reason is that education in China, you get tracked into a sciences STEM, or you get into social science or humanities. If you get tracked into STEM, you may never learn anything about supply and demand, which is just not required. You just learn a bunch of math. You learn a lot of engineering if you want to be an engineer. And then there's some art classes for you to select. You can select the art classes or maybe one econ class. For while learning economics was popular, so in the 1990s, all the engineering students would have taken an econ class, but people who were trained before that, they were not. The one class that is still required for everybody is government ideology, right? So in fact, the requirement for government ideology has been ratcheted.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're not so dysfunctional on that score. But what time and again leads to You know, sort of instinct to preserve itself. But then in a way worse than that, to preserve its power, right? So it's not like, oh, well, you know, we do this kind of thing. You lead to a better sort of outcome, public health outcome, and we get to survive politically. But if they see, it's like, okay, even if we do survive politically, but it leads to a diminution of our power in one respect, we have less control of the banks or the scientists become more independent or something like that, then they would say, let's not do that. You know, because it's like, what's the cost? Some people die, you know, whatever. We have slower growth for a couple of years, but we get to preserve this power. We will go ahead and preserve power.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, what's the way to put it together in this picture? So there's a lot of expertise at sort of the lower level that can feed to the higher level. And there's some channels for doing that. I always say a lot of channels for doing that.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some people on top of their technical expertise, it turns out that they have some political acumen. But it's not something that you sort of know ex ante except for the princlings. So the principlings, the reason why they're special is not just because of their genes, their children of high-level officials, is that they grew up honing this political acumen because their parents could teach them about it. So then some people turn out to have political acumen. They're pretty smart. They don't necessarily have the best degree degrees from the best universities in China. And they end up being very successful. So it's not necessarily, oh, all the peeking and Tsinghua University graduates, you know, they all get to the very top. There are certainly disproportionate amount of people like that in the Politburo.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institute founded by one of the Soviet experts who wanted to teach China how to do metallurgy. But does that kind of very specialized technical knowledge make you a better leader? I think it depends on the person. And I think what happens in the Chinese Communist Party is that as people rise up, there's certainly, you have to have political acumen. If you don't have political acumen, you're not going to make it.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my Xing Roy, the party secretary of Xinjiang, for example, in the political bureau, graduated from Tsinghua University, Zhang Guo Qing also, who worked in a military industry for years. I don't know if it's Tsinghua, one of the other top science programs in China. So they know a lot about science. But does that mean that they know a lot about governing? I mean, I think it's somewhat different question. But then you also have other cases like Ding Shishang, right? So we can talk about him because he's in charge of cybersecurity in China He has a technical background, but in metallurgical forging, graduating at a, I wouldn't say it's not the MIT of China, maybe closer to the IIT of China, you know, just kind of like the second tier science.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sum up large, so the former premier of China Li Kuchang, his undergraduate degree, I think, was economics, and he studied under one of the best economists in China. Yeah. So I think he understood economics. So I would say in the Politburo today, there is this wing of the Politburo who are military industrialists Who are trained as engineers, and they indeed were trained in the best programs in China.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then they reimburse part of the money to the provinces. And then supposedly they say, okay, now you can spend the money as you wish, but in reality, that's not the case. So in reality, it's kind of like, well, if you do this thing, then I'll give you a little bit of money, but you have to do the thing that I want you to do to get this money, to get this grant, basically. So then the fiscal autonomy, I would say, has been falling since 1994. I mean, there are different periods. Sometimes, you know, there's a little bit more autonomy. So, you know, sort of from 2000 to until recently until 2020, the localities gain more autonomy vis- ⁇-vis land sales. So that's when the real estate market was going very well, even though they couldn't control the tax revenue. They could control the land revenue. But then the central government basically killed the land market in 2022. And now I think localities...”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think China had a very good period of mainly sort of private sector driven growth because of this fiscal decentralization. And that's the understanding of, I think, most economists. But then there was a tax centralization in 1994, basically where the central government basically said, okay, this is ridiculous. We don't want to end up like the Soviet Union and fall into different pieces. We need to control fiscal income. So then they grab the most lucrative source of taxation at that time. And it continues to be the case, which is the value-added tax. And so the collection of value added taxes, and then also in subsequent decades, pretty much all other tax categories are now collected by the central government.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for a while, China was quite decentralized. So this is kind of from the mid-1970s all the way until the mid-1990s. China was very decentralized, where local governments generated a lot of revenue, but they also spent a lot of money. And it incentivized them to do kind of basically good things such as trying to attract as much FDI as possible, trying to attract as much local investment as possible, give tax breaks and so on and so forth.”
2025-05-29 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source