Corbin Duncan
@DuncanCorbin
Global correspondent @TheEconomist. prev in China, @Harvard 🏊♂🚴♂️
Heady rumours about Xi Jinping's leadership shouldn't distract us from some of the very real changes we are observing in how he exercises authority within China's Communist Party. I wrote about them here: economist.com/china/2025/07/…
Important: “Chinese military suppliers prefer Nvidia chips and use A.I. systems trained on U.S. chips. The stakes are not hard to grasp: We should not allow American troops and intelligence officers to be targeted by Chinese A.I. trained on Nvidia chips.” nytimes.com/2025/07/24/opi…
Xi Jinping is growing more elusive Reports that he is in trouble are, nonetheless, overblown..... economist.com/china/2025/07/…
Chinese leader Xi Jinping isn’t quite the frequent flier he used to be. People are wondering why. wsj.com/world/china/ch…
"China’s elite politics remains a black box...But analysts now whisper that Mr Xi’s governing style may be changing in subtle ways." Great piece on Xi Jinping's evolving leadership by @DuncanCorbin in @TheEconomist Happy to whisper w/ @chrisbeddor @HollySnapeWang @vshih2 1/3
Sound intervention from @michaelsobolik: "Selling Nvidia chips to China won’t, as Mr. Huang argues, keep the country reliant on the U.S. It will supercharge the Chinese AI capabilities commercially and militarily." wsj.com/opinion/giving…
Leading a party of allies solves some problems, but Mr Xi appears wary that it can create new ones, too. Mr Xi told the 24-member Politburo on June 30th that “the string of self-revolution must be tightened even further.” economist.com/china/2025/07/…
I had a lot of fun researching and writing this piece: what if AI made the world’s economic growth explode? The macroeconomics of an extraordinary thought experiment: economist.com/briefing/2025/…
Glad this is finally out after months of old-school journalism. There’s so much more to the story - and it needs to be told. Reminds me why I returned to the newsroom. Nvidia AI chips worth $1bn smuggled to China after Trump export controls Free link: on.ft.com/46V1hBy
“America’s unique advantage in AI… is Donald Trump.” —Jensen
There ought to be more social stigma for minimising tax
Spoke with a business owner client recently who had a potential Inheritance Tax liability of £200,000. With Rachel Reeves proposed changes, that will increase to £3.4 million. He was OK with paying £200k, but will now take steps to reduce it to close to zero with sensible tax…
America invents the most important technology of this century and instantly offshores it
“There is a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100B or more. If we want to stay on the frontier, we gain a very large benefit from having access to this capital. Without it, it is substantially harder to stay on the frontier.” wired.com/story/anthropi…
Interesting, given recent investigations/disappearances in the PLA high command 𝘗𝘓𝘈 𝘋𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘺 – The Central Military Commission has recently issued the Regulations on Vigorously Promoting Fine Traditions, 𝗙𝘂𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗘𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗱𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗼𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗼𝘂𝘀…
This was so clearly telegraphed ahead of time that I wrote about it at the start of February
just pathetic they were surprised by getting hit on rare earths
6. I don’t think LLMs will replace mathematicians anytime soon. Math research is about solving problems *no one* yet knows how to solve (out-of-distribution), and this requires significant creativity, something notably absent from OpenAI’s IMO solutions. (6/10)
Kier Starmer needs to create leading small groups
I'm deeply sympathetic to the idea that No 10 is I'll suited to serve the PM But the solution to problems in Whitehall is very rarely "appoint more Senior Civil Servants"
Full context on how Beijing is trolling us: - Trump team gave away one of the most important inference chips to Beijing after Nvidia lobbied, easing Beijing’s path to AI dominance. - Trump team knows this is embarrassing, so they pretended it was part of trade talks to make it…
Beijing embarrasses the Trump team ➡️ Trump Admin: We gave up the H20 as part of trade talks. It’s not a unilateral concession for nothing. ➡️ Beijing (effectively): The H20 was not part of the trade talks. Thank you for your proactive unilateral concession.
Gen Z are a strange bunch (and, yes, I have a yeti) economist.com/culture/2025/0…
NEW: We’ve just published @CSIS analysis of China’s threats to gallium supply chains. Firms and governments are understandably focused on rare earths, but they’re ignoring and misunderstanding China’s chokehold on gallium, a critical mineral that is crucial to military tech.