China and Vietnam, Best ‘Frenemies’ Forever

You know those boyfriend-girlfriend relationships that break up, get back together, and break up again? Maybe the two viscerally don’t get along but need each other for some indispensable reason. That pattern describes ties between China and Vietnam, neighbors with deep shared interests as well as deep mutual distrust.

How China’s Economy Is Poised to Win the Future

President Trump has plenty of work to do during his 10-day tour of Asia in November. In Japan and South Korea, he must reassure nervous allies that an “America first” foreign policy does not mean the U.S. has ceded regional dominance to China. In Vietnam and the Philippines, he has to communicate deep U.S. interest in balancing China’s influence in Southeast Asia.

Yangyang Cheng

Yangyang Cheng is an award-winning writer and interdisciplinary scholar, whose research focuses on the history of science in China and U.S.-China relations. She is a Senior Fellow at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED, and have received several honors from the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Asian American Journalists Association, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She is a co-host, writer, and producer of the acclaimed narrative podcast series Dissident at the Doorstep, from Crooked Media. She also hosts Made in China Journal’s Gateway to Global China podcast. Born and raised in China and trained as a particle physicist, Cheng received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago and worked on the Large Hadron Collider for more than a decade. From 2021 to 2026, she was a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.