James Kynge

Veteran China journalist and Global China Editor at the Financial Times, based in Hong Kong. He co-hosts China Decode with Alice Han, supplying the political and reportorial read to her markets-and-macro one.

Kynge spent some 28 years at the Financial Times, serving as Beijing bureau chief and later as Global China Editor in London. His 2006 book China Shakes the World was translated into 19 languages and became a defining popular account of China’s rise. He is a repeat recipient of top journalism awards and is also affiliated with the Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics). His commentary draws on decades of on-the-ground reporting and a reporter’s instinct for the gap between official narrative and observed reality.

Core positions

Kynge reads the US–China relationship as one of hardening beneath a diplomatic surface. He argues the AI contest has crossed from commercial rivalry into a ‘Cold War’ phase — law-enforcement prosecutions, export-control investigations, and espionage accusations over model ‘distillation’ — even as heads of state prepare for summitry. His recurring theme is the disconnect between visible deal-making and a ‘deep state’ in both countries steadily tightening controls.

On finance he watches the offshore renminbi market as a genuine signal without over-reading it: Western institutions issuing ‘dim sum’ bonds is a nod to Beijing and a cheaper funding play, and the market will grow fast, but it remains tiny beside the US Treasury market and no near-term threat to the dollar. On Chinese society he brings historical analogy — likening ‘pretend-to-work’ offices to the shamed, unemployed salarymen of early-1990s Japan — to read youth joblessness as a structural, worsening strain.

In the wiki

• The U.S. vs China AI Battle Is Getting Ugly — China Decode, 28 April 2026: the US–China AI rivalry, offshore renminbi bonds, and ‘pretend-to-work’ offices