1. You have spent nearly three decades studying China’s language, politics, economics, and legal system. What initially sparked your interest in China, and what has kept you engaged with the subject over such a long period?
My interest in China really began at UCLA in the 1990s. I studied political science with a focus on Chinese politics and international affairs, minored in anthropology and Chinese studies, and spent a great deal of time studying Chinese language and culture. I eventually became fluent in Mandarin and also studied Cantonese.
What made the subject come alive for me, though, was spending time in East Asia. I worked in Taiwan and Hong Kong as an interpreter, editor and English teacher, traveled extensively in the region, and had the chance to study Chinese politics with the late Richard Baum at UCLA. That combination of language, politics and firsthand experience made China feel less like an academic subject and more like a lifelong puzzle.
Since then, China has threaded through almost every stage of my career — from working with Taiwan’s representative office in the United States, to legal research and Chinese-language document review, to international and European business law, and eventually to founding China Boss.
What has kept me engaged is that China sits at the intersection of so many things I care about: politics, law, economics, business, history and power. It is never a static subject. Every time you think you understand one part of the system, something changes that forces you to look again.
2. Your career combines legal practice with geopolitical analysis. How has your legal background influenced the way you investigate and interpret developments related to China?
My legal background shapes almost everything about the way I analyze China. I trained and practiced law in the United States, later earned an LL.M. in European and International Business Law at KU Leuven, and have worked on matters ranging from bankruptcy and commercial litigation to Chinese-language document review and China-related legal work.
Legal training teaches you to separate what you can prove from what you suspect, to go back to the underlying evidence, and to distinguish between what a rule says on paper and how it is actually being applied. Those habits are particularly useful when analyzing China, where formal law, regulatory practice, Communist Party authority and political priorities often overlap. I try to make those distinctions clear while still keeping the analysis accessible and entertaining
It also gives me a comparative perspective. I don’t look at China solely through a U.S.-China lens. I’m constantly thinking about how Chinese actions interact with American and European legal systems, particularly where trade, investment, technology and national security collide.
3. Through China Boss, you explain complicated issues such as supply chains, technology, sanctions, and geopolitical competition in a way that is accessible to a broad audience. What motivated you to launch this platform, and what gap did you hope it would fill?
China Boss really brought together parts of my career and interests that had previously existed separately: China, law, international business, politics and writing. By the time I launched it in 2021, I had spent years moving among those worlds, and I wanted a place where I could connect them.
I also saw a gap in how China was being explained. There was excellent specialist work, but much of it was written for people already immersed in the subject. At the other end, mainstream coverage could reduce complicated developments to a headline or a single geopolitical frame.
I wanted to make China understandable without making it simplistic. That means explaining not only what happened, but why it matters and how it connects to the bigger picture. A semiconductor restriction, a Chinese acquisition, a new regulation or a military exercise may look like separate stories, but very often they tell us something much larger about how China is changing and how the rest of the world is responding.
4. Your analyses often connect seemingly unrelated developments—whether in business, technology, security, or economics—to reveal broader strategic trends. Could you describe your research process and how you distinguish meaningful patterns from short-term headlines?
I keep a running list of what I call China’s “inescapable pressures,” a framework I first wrote about in March 2021. These are persistent problems that China’s leaders cannot simply make disappear: demographics, weak domestic consumption, local-government finances, food and energy security, technological self-reliance, Taiwan and territorial disputes, among others. I think these pressures explain a great deal of the increased geopolitical volatility we’re seeing today.
They also give me a framework for evaluating the daily news. Rather than looking at each development in isolation, I ask whether it connects to one of these longer-term pressures and whether I’m seeing evidence of the same response elsewhere.
My legal background adds another layer. Earlier in my career, I spent several years working in e-discovery on complex commercial and antitrust matters, including Chinese-language document review. That taught me that finding an interesting piece of evidence isn’t the same thing as proving a pattern. You need context and corroboration.
So when I think I see a larger trend, I test it. I ask: if my interpretation is right, what else should I expect to see? Then I go looking for it. Sometimes the evidence strengthens the argument; sometimes it tells me I was wrong. Both are useful.
5. You frequently write about U.S.-China technological competition, including semiconductor controls, critical supply chains, and companies such as Lenovo and YMTC. Which technology sectors do you believe will have the greatest strategic importance over the next decade, and why?
Semiconductors remain foundational, and AI will obviously be enormously important. But I’m reluctant to center the next decade entirely on either. What interests me more is what these technologies allow countries to do.
Look at space. The U.S.-China space race is no longer principally about prestige. Satellites underpin communications, navigation, intelligence and modern warfare, and both countries are competing for advantage in a domain increasingly critical to power on Earth.
Now food. This is one of the technology stories I find most fascinating. China has limited arable land and 1.4 billion people to feed, yet it is using AI, crop genetics, drones, robotics and smart greenhouses to produce more with less. Its greenhouse sector already produces 37% of the country’s vegetables on just 1.4% of its arable land.
China remains a huge net agricultural importer, so we’re nowhere near an agricultural version of the EV story yet. But Chinese agricultural exports reached a record $104.2 billion in 2025, its 2026–35 outlook anticipates declining import dependence alongside rising exports in some categories, and Chinese smart-agriculture technology is already moving overseas.
We’ve watched Chinese scale transform global markets for EVs, batteries and solar panels. Something similar in agriculture could affect food security, farmers and supply chains around the world.
So I’m watching AI and semiconductors, certainly. But I’m even more interested in where technology collides with the real-world constraints on national power—food, energy, manufacturing and space. That’s where I think some of the biggest geopolitical surprises may come from.
6. China continues to play a central role in global manufacturing while many countries pursue diversification and “de-risking.” In your view, how is the global supply chain changing, and what should businesses understand about the evolving geopolitical landscape?
I don’t think we’re seeing a simple decoupling from China. Production is moving to places like Vietnam, India and Mexico, but Chinese companies are moving there too. A product may be assembled outside China while Chinese capital, components or technology remain embedded in the supply chain.
For businesses, the bigger question is: where are you dependent, and who has leverage? Critical minerals are a perfect example. China’s dominance in processing gives Beijing enormous influence even over products manufactured elsewhere.
China is de-risking too, but mostly where it feels vulnerable. It wants less dependence on foreign technology, food and energy, while increasingly controlling what foreign companies can learn about Chinese businesses and industries.
But I don’t think Beijing wants a hard decoupling. Why would it? Deep engagement with the world gives China access to markets and technology while giving Beijing something extremely valuable in return: leverage.
7. Your work often examines the intersection of economics and national security. Where do you see the balance between maintaining open international trade and protecting strategic technologies and critical infrastructure?
Striking that balance is getting harder, and I think governments are going to fumble around with it quite a bit. Traditional notions of national security are expanding into a much broader and less clearly defined concept of national resilience—everything from semiconductors and energy to ports, supply chains and critical minerals.
In some ways, China got there first. Under Xi Jinping, Beijing has taken an increasingly holistic view of national security, treating economic, technological and industrial strength as part of the country’s security. Western governments are now moving in that direction too, particularly as strategic competition with China intensifies.
The danger is that if everything becomes a national security issue, we undermine many of the benefits of open trade. Governments need to identify the technologies and dependencies that create genuine vulnerabilities without trying to wall off entire economies.
And restrictions have consequences. Cutting China off from foreign technology may protect an advantage in the short term, but it also gives Beijing a powerful incentive to build its own alternatives.
There are no easy answers here. Governments are going to make mistakes as they try to find the right balance.
8. Recent discussions have highlighted China’s slowing economic growth, real estate challenges, local government debt, and pressures within manufacturing industries. Which structural challenges do you believe deserve greater international attention, and how might they influence China’s future trajectory?
I think one of the deeper problems is the relationship between political power and where money goes in China. We talk about the property crisis, local government debt and industrial overcapacity as separate problems, but they have some common roots.
Yuen Yuen Ang has written brilliantly about corruption and what she calls “access money”—the exchange of political influence and economic privilege that helped fuel China’s growth, but also produced inequality, risky investment and eye-watering distortions. The privileged position of state-owned enterprises and politically favored industries compounds the problem many times over.
I don’t think enough attention is paid to how this carries over into China’s technology ambitions. Take semiconductors. China’s “Big Fund” poured tens of billions of dollars into the industry, only to become engulfed in a major corruption investigation. Insiders described a system vulnerable to graft and wasteful spending. China’s ability to mobilize resources is extraordinary. How efficiently those resources are used is another question.
Overcapacity gets plenty of international attention, but we often lose sight of what produces it. China can produce far more than its own consumers buy, pushing the excess into world markets. This is one of the “inescapable pressures” I’ve written about before.
And this dynamic isn’t limited to traditional manufacturing. I’ve recently written about Chinese technology firms unleashing a new kind of China shock through open-weight AI.
Any policy response needs to start with why this is happening. Beijing is prioritizing industrial production and strategic industries even when domestic demand cannot absorb the output. This allows Beijing to postpone some painful adjustments at home while asking the rest of the world to carry some of the consequences.
That’s where an internal Chinese economic problem becomes a geopolitical one: pressure on industries and jobs elsewhere produces tariffs, trade barriers and political backlash.
But so far, there’s little sign that any of this is causing Xi Jinping to change course.
9. You have covered topics ranging from organized crime and fentanyl supply chains to sanctions, military modernization, and regional security in the Indo-Pacific. Which of these issues do you believe is currently underestimated by policymakers and the public?
I think we underestimate how deeply legitimate business, illicit finance, organized crime and political interests can overlap in the Chinese system.
Fentanyl is a fascinating example. What struck me when I wrote about it was how surprisingly ordinary some of the people and businesses involved can appear. Small chemical companies, brokers, exporters and legitimate businesses are part of the supply chain. “Brother Wang,” for example, was an elite Peking University graduate who went to Mexico to work for a Chinese mining company before allegedly becoming a major intermediary between Chinese fentanyl suppliers and Mexican cartels.
Vanda Felbab-Brown has documented a much broader history of overlap between Chinese criminal networks, legitimate businesses and the state. Chinese officials have sometimes extended informal protection to actors operating across legal and illegal businesses, although she stresses that this is not centrally organized or systematically endorsed by Beijing. Some criminal networks also provide services to legitimate Chinese businesses and politically connected actors.
So I think we make a mistake when we put organized crime, legitimate business, money laundering and geopolitics into separate boxes. The boundaries can be surprisingly blurry—and I think we underestimate what that means.
10. As artificial intelligence transforms research, media, and open-source intelligence, how do you see AI changing geopolitical analysis? What opportunities and risks should researchers and journalists be aware of?
AI is going to make geopolitical analysis faster and far more accessible. An individual researcher can now process enormous amounts of information, work across languages, compare developments and test ideas in ways that once required a much larger team.
That’s enormously useful, but it could also make analysis more homogeneous. If everyone is asking the same AI systems similar questions about the same information, we risk producing a great deal of polished analysis that essentially says the same thing.
There’s also a simpler risk: laziness. AI makes it very easy to produce something that looks finished before you’ve actually done the thinking. Professionals should care enough about their work—and their reputations—not to let that happen.
Develop your skills, then use AI to level them up. I use it for research and as an editor. I ask questions like: Does this sound too casual? Is this fair? What am I missing? But I still have to drive the research and know my subject well enough to recognize when AI is wrong, which it is surprisingly often.
I was discussing this with my husband recently because the EU AI Act is beginning to draw lines around human editorial responsibility.
My silly analogy is that AI is my car, but I’m driving it. If I run over someone, that’s my fault. AI can expand my thinking and take me much further, much faster. At the end of the day, I’m the one making the judgment calls. My name is on it.
11. Independent journalism and analytical newsletters have become increasingly influential in informing public debate. How do you see the future of independent geopolitical journalism, and what role do platforms like Substack play in that evolution?
I think independent geopolitical journalism has a very strong future because there’s a real appetite for analysis that isn’t filtered through governments, large institutions or corporate interests.
That was one of my goals when I started China Boss in 2021. I wanted the freedom to follow the evidence and context wherever they went, including when they cut against government narratives, corporate interests or the prevailing consensus.
Independent journalism can fill blind spots, challenge propaganda and disinformation, and pursue stories larger institutions may overlook. Independence doesn’t eliminate bias, of course, but it gives you greater freedom to ask uncomfortable questions.
Platforms like Substack have changed things dramatically. An analyst no longer necessarily needs a major newspaper or think tank between themselves and their audience. Reader subscriptions can support the work directly and create their own kind of accountability. If readers stop trusting you, they can stop paying.
There are trade-offs. I don’t have a large research team or professional editors behind me, so I have to be especially diligent about accuracy and transparency.
But that independence is what I value most. I can follow a story because I think it matters and question a consensus when the evidence—and even my gut instinct—points somewhere else. Then I let my readers decide whether I’m being authentic and whether the work is worth supporting.
12. Finally, what advice would you give to young researchers, journalists, and policy analysts who aspire to build expertise on geopolitics while maintaining analytical rigor, intellectual independence, and public trust?
Find the context, including the local struggles that reach the geopolitical level. That would probably be my first piece of advice.
I see analysis that takes such a bird’s-eye view of power that it misses what is actually happening inside governments. You need to understand the people making decisions, the incentives driving them and the limits on what they can do. Some of those limits are hard, like demographics or geography. Others can change. But power always has limits.
And don’t automatically follow the consensus. Sometimes the consensus is right. Sometimes it is very wrong. Intelligence agencies struggle to understand what is happening inside closed political systems, so we shouldn’t assume that open-source analysts always have it figured out. Look at who is producing the analysis you rely on, and don’t discount who funds them or what interests and biases might be involved.
Finally, identify where your own knowledge is weak and strengthen it. I’m a China specialist, but I read Putin’s People by Catherine Belton because I needed to understand how Putin’s security state works to gain more insight into Russia’s relationship with China. I read about Japan, Donald Trump, Brussels and the European Commission for the same reason. You cannot understand China by reading only about China.
So read outside your expertise. Learn how political systems actually work, and why they sometimes don’t. Keep looking for the incentives and constraints behind what governments do. If you understand what surrounds your subject, you’ll ask better questions and reach better conclusions.
About Shannon Brandao
Shannon Brandao is an American attorney, China analyst and founder of China Boss, where she writes about Chinese politics, business and geopolitics. She has studied China for more than three decades and has worked on China-related political, legal and business issues across the public and private sectors.
Based in Portugal, Shannon has written for the Hinrich Foundation, The Korea Herald, Foreign Policy, Banking Risk & Regulation (a Financial Times service), Arabian Business and the China Law Blog.
She holds a J.D. from the University of Miami School of Law and an LL.M., cum laude, in European and International Business Law from KU Leuven. She earned her undergraduate degree, cum laude, from UCLA, where she specialized in Chinese politics, international affairs and Chinese studies.
