I'd recommend following academics affiliated with the FSI@Stanford or the Fairbanks Center@Harvard instead. They tend to be the ones most in touch with policymakers on both sides of the Pacific, and are often a conduit for Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues.
There has been a deluge of academics in the US entering "China studies" in the same way you saw "Mid East experts" proliferate in the 2000s and "Kremlinologists" in the 1980s-90s.
That was my take. I don't know that she calls herself that. She certainly seems very knowledgeable about China (and Japan and Russia).
From Wikipedia:
"She spent ten years on her doctoral research in Russian and Chinese history at Columbia University, which included five years of research and language study in China, Taiwan, Russia, Japan, and Australia.'
Most of her early research on China was with regards to Imperial Russia and Imperial China's rivalry in East and North Asia (ended up being published into a book back in the 1980s [0]), but was largely superficial and done in the context of US-China normalization in the 70s as a check against the USSR. Her limited Putonghua fluency is a major issue as well for someone who is a supposed China scholar.
Much of her work about that time period has been superseded by Yuhua Wang [1] and other younger and more quantitative scholars who took more of an institutionalist approach.
Even during my (limited) time, she was not viewed as a significant academic in the space - that remains to be students of John Fairbanks, Kenneth Lieberthal, Mary Gallagher, Rodrick MacFarquhar, and Yasheng Huang because a large portion of Chinese decisionmakers today either studied under them or under faculty who were advised by them in the 1980s-2000s period.
Furthermore, she has a history of media self promotion, and the loudest academics (especially on YouTube) tend to be the least regarded, because media engagements are such a time sink that it means you aren't really participating in policymaking adjacent work like Track Diplomacy.
This is why I take a dim view of her - she started off in the 70s as a Latin America researcher who pivoted to Russian history in the 80s, Japanese history in the 90s, Naval history in the 2000s when trying to get tenure, and China recently in the 2010s. These aren't the hallmarks of a domain expert and I say this as someone who studied under a couple of those. Instead, these are the hallmarks of a pop academic like Perun or Michio Kaku (if you want a STEM equivalent).
Heck, she's started trying to pivot/shoehorn India studies over the past 2 years the same way as the others becuase there is a vacuum in the field now that the most relevant contemporary India academics in the US (Raghuram Rajan, Aravind Subramanian, Karthik Subramanian, Ashutosh Varshney, Karthik Muralidharan, Nirupam Bajpai, and Milan Vaishav) have taken steps back from US academia because they are all either transitioning or transitioned into Indian policymaking roles, or like Ashley Tellis were caught in a Biden-era espionage investigation for leaking documents on behalf of China [2] around the same time his public advocacy suddenly shifted from being China-antagonistic and India-leaning to China-leaning and India-antagonistic [3] (2021-24 period). Now that "Indo-Pac Studies" is where academic funding in the policy space has started shifting towards, and the vacuum that has developed, grifters like Paine are trying to enter the field like they did China studies 15 years ago and MidEast studies 20 years ago.
[0] - https://www.routledge.com/Imperial-Rivals-China-Russia-and-T...
[1] - https://yuhuawang.scholars.harvard.edu/
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/16/indian-born-...
[3] - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/ashley-j-tellis
I've watched 2 or 3 hours of videos and that isn't what I took away. She does argue that a rules based international order, free trade, democracy and liberalism is a superior system to authoritarianism, but I don't think too many people (in the West, at least) would disagree with that.