When we talk about US-China competition, we often tend to focus on the obvious: trade, technology and Taiwan. But there’s a deeper question that doesn’t get enough attention. How does China actually think about fighting a war against a far more powerful adversary?

PLA writings describe modern conflict not as something waged simply between militaries. Rather it is conceptualised as system against system—the whole national apparatus on one side against the whole national apparatus on the other. Financial infrastructure, space capabilities, information networks, industrial base, all of it is part of the fight. The PLA calls this systems confrontation. And it shapes everything about how Beijing is preparing.

My guest for this episode of The Great Power Show is Howard Wang, a political scientist at RAND, whose recent work examines a concept emerging from this strand of Chinese strategic thinking, total war.

Wang tells me that in 2021, China embedded total war into its national security strategy. He describes it as a mobilisational concept. The idea is that civilian capabilities need to be developed in peacetime so that Party leaders can translate them into war-fighting advantages during conflict. We also talk about escalation and coercion, what does the theory of victory look like, what lessons Beijing is drawing from conflicts in Ukraine and West Asia, and what the ongoing purges tell us about the gap between the PLA’s ambitions and reality.

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work that I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

There’s a quiet but unmistakable change taking place in Japan. For decades, Japanese politics was defined by caution. The country has a pacifist constitution. There has been managed ambiguity in its international engagements. Economic power existed without strategic assertion.

But something is shifting beneath the surface. A new generation of conservative leaders is emerging. Public attitudes toward security are hardening. And Tokyo is beginning to think of itself not merely as a status quo power, but as an active shaper of the international order.

At the center of this transformation stands Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Her rise reflects a deeper mood within Japanese society, one that is characterised by anxiety about China’s rise, uncertainty about America’s reliability, and a growing belief that Japan can no longer remain strategically passive.

So what exactly is happening inside Japan today? Why are younger voters increasingly drawn toward a more assertive conservative politics? How does Tokyo view the China-Russia partnership? Why did tensions with Beijing escalate so sharply over Taiwan? And how is Japan trying to navigate a world where the United States remains indispensable, but no longer entirely predictable?

To unpack all of this, in this episode of The Great Power Show, I speak to Kei Koga, Assistant Professor at the Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. We discuss the transformation of Japanese politics, the evolving Japan-China relationship, the strategic consequences of Trump 2.0, and how Tokyo is adapting to an increasingly turbulent world.

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe, and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

In international relations, we obsess over great powers. What Washington thinks, what Beijing wants, what New Delhi will do next. We map their strategies, track their rivalries, debate their ambitions. And somewhere along the way, we forget that most of the world doesn’t get to play that game.

For smaller states, great power competition isn’t theory. It is the quiet, constant reality that you must navigate a world that is being shaped by others.

So how do these countries navigate that? How do you make decisions when the parameters are set by others? When geography limits your options, economics ties you down, and security concerns pull you in different directions, what does strategy even look like?

In this episode of the Great Power Show, we’re looking at those questions through the lens of a country that sits right at the fault line of great power politics: Nepal. Sandwiched between India and China, courted by the United States, shaped by history and geography—and now by a restless younger generation that just threw out its entire political establishment—Nepal is a case study in what it means to survive and adapt in an age of competition.

Joining me to unpack all of this is Professor S.D. Muni, former diplomat and Professor Emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Prof. Muni is one of the sharpest observers of politics in the Indian subcontinent. We talk about how smaller states think about power, how Nepal balances between competing giants, what the recent political upheaval tells us, and why the old play-books may no longer work.

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe, and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

How does China think about the world?

We spend a lot of time trying to decode Beijing’s behaviour—its strategy, its ambitions, its moves on the global stage. But we rarely ask a more basic question: where does that thinking come from?

What does it actually mean to study international relations in China?

In this episode, I speak with Yaqi Li, an MSc candidate in International Relations at RSIS in Singapore. Yaqi, who grew up in China’s Hubei province, is someone who studied political science and IR in China; he offers a first-hand view of what the classroom environment is like.

On paper, much of it looks familiar. Students study realism, liberalism, international political economy. But the experience is also very different. There are limits to inquiry. Domestic politics is largely absent. And official ideology sits alongside political theory in ways that shape how students engage with the changing world around them.

So this is a conversation about classrooms. But it’s also about power.

How are ideas produced in China? How do they travel into the policy system? And what happens when a system tries to generate knowledge, but also constrain it?

We explore the gap between theory and practice. The role of think tanks and state institutions. And the internal logic that shapes Chinese statecraft—its strengths, its blind spots, and its limits.

Because if we want to understand what China does, we first need to understand how it thinks.

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe, and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

Do check out Yaqi’s Substack and podcast: New China Literacy

We are living through a moment of tremendous transformation. The post-Cold War order is over, and what replaces it is not yet clear. What is clear, however, is that the two countries with the most power to shape that answer are the United States and China. How they manage their competition— in fact, whether they can manage it at all—is a defining question of our era.

That question was tested last year, as the two sides skirmished over trade and technology. It will be tested again this year, as their leaders prepare to meet.

A summit between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping is scheduled for April. This, however, is now being delayed by the war in West Asia. Nevertheless, after a year of tariff battles, technology frictions, and an uneasy truce struck in Busan, the two are set to soon meet again.

Both sides want something from this encounter. But do they want the same things? And what does success even look like when the ideological distance between Washington and Beijing may be greater than either side publicly admits?

To explore these questions, in this episode of The Great Power Show, I speak with Ryan Hass, Director of John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, and former Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. He is also the author of Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence.

We discuss the Trump administration’s real objectives on China. Who is driving US policy within the administration? And what Xi Jinping has taken away from a year of dealing with Trump. We also dig into the deeper structural questions: why Beijing treats American decline as an ideological conviction, not just wishful thinking, and why, on both sides of the Pacific, competition has moved beyond politics into something more enduring.

Because this isn’t just about a summit, or a trade truce, or even the bilateral relationship. It’s about whether two powers can build anything durable in the space between rivalry and rupture.

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe, and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

Over the weekend, renewed conflict in the Middle East was a stark reminder of how fragile the international order has become, and what happens when major powers begin to bend the very rules they helped create. For countries caught in between, the space for strategic comfort is shrinking.

Nowhere is this tension clearer than in Europe’s relationship with China. Beijing’s rise is no longer a projection; it is a structural reality. From advanced manufacturing and green technology to critical minerals and electric mobility, China is shaping the economic terrain on which Europe’s future competitiveness will be decided.

For Germany in particular, the challenge is acute. Its trade imbalance with China has widened, its companies remain deeply embedded in the Chinese market, and yet Berlin is trying to “de-risk” without rupturing ties. So how does Germany see China today? And what, if anything, did Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent visit to Beijing reveal about the direction of that relationship?

To unpack these questions, on this episode of The Great Power Show, I speak to Marina Rudyak, Assistant professor for Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University, and currently visiting scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. She’s also one of the founders of The Decoding China Project, a unique initiative to strengthen China literacy.

We discuss Germany’s evolving China strategy, the tensions between business and security thinking, and what managing interdependence really looks like. Because this isn’t just about Germany and China. It’s about how major economies adapt to a world where competition with Beijing is structural, but disengagement is not an option.

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe, and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

We often hear from Beijing that the world today is undergoing “changes unseen in a century,” and that opportunities and risks coexist. But what does the external environment actually look like from inside the Chinese system? If you were a policymaker or analyst in Beijing, how would you read the balance between threat and opportunity?

In addition, who are the people that influence the thinking about China’s foreign policy? Is it entirely top-down? Or is there room for policy engineers and entrepreneurs to make an impact?

To unpack these questions, in this episode of The Great Power Show, I speak to Sabine Mokry, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, and author of Chinese Scholars and Think Tanks’ Constructions of China’s National Interest.

The conversation focuses on how one can distinguish between signal and noise in terms of China’s external communication. We examine the institutional stakeholders within officialdom. What role does the Ministry of Foreign Affairs play today? How does it compare with the Party’s International Department? And how do different actors coordinate—or compete—in shaping China’s external posture?

Beyond the state, what about scholars, think tanks, and media? Is there a useful way to classify China’s foreign policy research ecosystem? How do debates take place, and how do we assess the influence of someone in a system that is so opaque?

And finally, we discuss how big ideas come to be—the Belt and Road Initiative and the various Global initiatives of the Xi era. Where do these concepts come from? Who helps package them? And what role does ideology actually play in Chinese foreign policy today?

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe, and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, please feel free to reach out to me.

In a world shaped by war in Europe, strategic rivalry with China, and growing uncertainty about the United States, the India–Europe relationship is quietly undergoing a major transformation. Once seen as slow-moving and largely transactional, ties between New Delhi and Brussels have accelerated dramatically over the past two years.

On India’s Republic Day this year, the government hosted European leaders, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, as special guests. The summit that followed the parade and pageantry delivered a major breakthrough: the signing of a long-negotiated free trade agreement, a deal von der Leyen described as the “mother of all deals.” Alongside it, India and the EU also inked a new Security and Defence Partnership, marking the beginning of a qualitatively new phase in their relationship.

This sudden momentum is striking. Both India and the European Union are known for sprawling bureaucracies and painstaking negotiations. The FTA itself had been discussed, often haltingly, for over two decades. So what explains this newfound urgency? And what has driven this rediscovery between New Delhi and Brussels, especially after several tense years marked by European frustrations over India’s relationship with Russia?

To unpack these questions, on this episode of The Great Power Show, I’m joined by Garima Mohan, Senior Fellow for India at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Garima lays out the three strategic shocks reshaping European thinking, explains why India’s importance has risen so sharply in Brussels, and shows how geopolitical churn is pushing both sides toward a new strategic dynamic.

From trade and defence cooperation to technology and the search for strategic autonomy, this conversation explores what India and Europe now expect from each other, and what this partnership could mean in an increasingly fragmented global order.

• Garima’s essay referenced in the show

• Indian Radius newsletter by Vanshika Saraf, which offers a breakdown of the India-EU summit

As always, I hope you enjoy the discussion. Please like, share, subscribe, and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.