Three of us sat down for our first conversation. I am in Singapore. Henryk is at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where he studies Polish — one of the languages the foreign ministry rarely recruits for, a fact that tells you something about the gap between the state’s rhetoric on global talent and the actual labor market. Logan is at China Foreign Affairs University, where half his cohort entered dreaming of becoming the next Wang Yi and most are now pivoting to consulting firms and master’s programs.

We grew up in three very different Chinas. I am from Xiangyang, a third-tier city in inland Hubei — no international exposure, no multinational presence, just SOEs and the gaokao factory. Henryk is from Xiamen, a special economic zone on the Taiwan Strait where generations of Hokkien-speaking families built transnational commercial networks to Southeast Asia long before “globalization” became a policy slogan. Logan is from Jiangsu, the Yangtze Delta, where the 2010 Shanghai Expo was the first time a global event felt like it had anything to do with his daily life.

Three cities. Three information environments. One shared promise: the great power is rising, work hard, and your life will be better than your parents’.

In this episode we trace what that promise actually looked like from the inside — from socialist core values memorized in primary school to wolf warrior diplomacy consumed on social media — and what happened when it collided with the reality of university life, a contracting job market, and the slow realization that the narrative and the country were not the same thing.

We talk about the information channels that shaped us. For me it was pirated games and a VPN — the accidental pathway through the Great Firewall that I suspect is more common than any official account of Chinese internet culture admits. For Henryk it was World Affairs Magazine, the Chinese-language counterpart to Foreign Affairs, vetted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — a curated window, but a window nonetheless. For Logan it was a former diplomat teaching political science at CFAU, who mentioned historical events that could not be found on the Chinese internet, sending Logan to a VPN for the first time not to play games but to understand his own country.

We talk about the gap between the vision — joining the foreign ministry, staffing the great power’s rise — and what actually waits on the other side of four years. Henryk discovered that Polish is a language the foreign service almost never recruits for. Logan sat for the MFA entrance exam and failed. Both are adjusting, as their entire generation is adjusting, from national ambition to individual survival — not out of apathy but out of a clear-eyed reckoning with what the system can and cannot deliver.

And we push back on the easy Western narrative that Chinese youth are simply becoming “more nationalistic.” What Logan and Henryk describe is more interesting than that: a generation that is not converging on a single ideological position but fragmenting into a diversity of pragmatic responses — some more confident, some more critical, most too busy navigating a brutal job market to care about grand narratives at all.

What this show is — and is not

This is a roundtable of three young Chinese-background analysts who occasionally disagree with each other and try to make sense of both worlds on the record. In English, with Chinese where it is the only word that works.

We are not China bears. We are not (all) dissidents. We are not the English-language arm of any official narrative. We are selling insight, not emotion. Each episode should leave you understanding something you did not before — not just feeling something.

New episodes every two weeks.

What would you want us to talk about? What questions about China do you feel only insiders can answer but rarely do? Drop it in the comments — we are building this with you.

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