E1 · 7 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 9 min
Most commentary on China operates at a surface level. Xi Jinping is authoritarian, the economy is state-directed, and the Communist Party controls everything. That's all true, but it doesn't actually help you understand why specific things happen the way they do. Manoj Kewalramani is one of the few Indian analysts who can go deeper than that. He's a China Studies research fellow at the Takshashila Institution, speaks Mandarin, and spent years living in China. In this conversation, we try to understand the country as it actually is, not as the headlines describe it. We get into some genuinely…