This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with ex-venture capitalist Lillian Li, who moved to China from the U.K. last year and has been looking at China’s tech ecosystem from a unique perspective — combining an investor’s eye, an academic background studying development, a grounding in Chinese language and culture, and a comparative instinct. Lillian shares her views on how technology platforms have become institutions, how the U.S. and China have responded to this development in starkly different ways, and the major features that distinguish the technology ecosystems of the West and China.

10:19: Waiting on the next era of technology

25:06: The challenges faced by institutions

34:48: The future of the tech-government relationship

39:44: Two parallel worlds, China and the U.S.

47:10: Scale is no longer guaranteed

Recommendations:

Lillian: But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, by Chuck Klosterman.

Kaiser: Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

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The parallel world of Chinese tech, with Lillian Li