Americans are constantly told that China is a threat. But what happens when someone who has spent decades campaigning against her own government’s wars goes to see it for herself?

In this episode, CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin, in China for the first time in over 30 years since she campaigned against the Nike and Gap sweatshops in the south, sits down in Shanghai with Yin Zhiguang, a historian at Fudan University. She brings the questions Americans keep asking: how do people in China push for change without a multi-party system, do workers still go on strike, what does AI mean for young people’s jobs, and why do people say Chinese households spend too little.

Yin pushes back on how both sides think about politics. He argues that Western politics treats power as a finite resource to be fought over, while China treats it as something created through connecting people. From there the conversation moves from rural villages and young people leaving big cities, to whether the Chinese model can work in the Global South, why Belt and Road builds roads rather than sending aid, and what Marx actually meant by communism.